Western countries have spent billions of dollars to support their counter-terrorism war and development and reconstruction process in Afghanistan. They have been generous in that. Nonetheless, after eleven years, although noteworthy development is observable in all sectors, outcomes of the heaps of money spent here are neither satisfactory to Afghan people nor to the Western tax payers.

For the nearly $450 billion that Congress estimates the US alone has spent waging war in Afghanistan, every Afghan man, woman and child could have been handed $15,000. That sum is 10 years' earnings for an average Afghan, according to U.N. estimates. However, the benefit of international aid money that has reached to common people is little and in some cases nil. They remain trapped in poverty.

Whether one admits or denies, corruption has cracked Afghanistan from within. This is because there has been no consistent effort to curb it in the last eleven years. Those who are involved in embezzlement of billions of dollars roam freely inside and outside Afghanistan as their affiliation with certain strong political figures turns out to be heavier than Afghan laws.

President Hamid Karzia's July decree in which he ordered central ministries, prosecutors and judiciary to fight bribery, nepotism and cronyism is counted as the only step of its kind taken to curb corruption in the last ten years. In the decree, Mr. Karzai instructed certain key ministries and government bodies to take specific measures for elimination of corruption in them and report within a fixed deadline (in months) to the presidential palace. After four months, no considerable achievement has been achieved and there are margins for more to be done.

International community sees corruption a great obstacle to development in Afghanistan and has conditioned transfer of its fund to Afghanistan on the efforts that will be taken by Afghan government to tackle the corruption issue. In the Tokyo conference this year, the world pledged $16 billion of aid for Afghanistan. Nonetheless, Afghanistan would only able to receive those funds if its government takes effective measures to tackle the rampant corruption that has hampered all sorts of security, political, economic and social developments in this country.

What we are gifting to our coming generations is the bad trend of bribery and nepotism. The roots of such evils must be burnt out today or else it will burn us in the times to come.