Back in the day, when I ran an NGO in a country that will remain nameless, people came to me all the time to ask me to give them money to help them implement their ideas.
It was my job to sort through these proposals, looking for a few kernels of wheat amid bushels of chaff.
Most of the ideas were impractical, poorly thought out, pointless or a combination thereof. The appellants themselves were usually corrupt, sometimes earnest but more often incompetent and almost always incapable of doing the job they proposed to do. I often said to myself in these meetings "how stupid do they think I am?" Actually, sometimes I said that aloud. (Though in fairness, when you see some of the stupid ideas that do get funded, you can't blame people for asking).
As I read the news this morning, I thought of guys who give money to terrorists to help them carry out their ideas.
One law enforcement official played down Mr. Defreitas’s ability to carry out an attack, calling him “a sad sack” and “not a Grade A terrorist....”
But the official said that Mr. Defreitas’s efforts to enlist Jamaat al-Muslimeen’s aid could have had devastating consequences.
“They didn’t have the money and they didn’t have the bombs,” the official said of the suspects, “but if we let it go it could have gotten there; they could have gotten the J.A.M. fully involved, and we wouldn’t know where it could have gone.”
Anyone who controls the purse strings of a grant-giving organization can identify a "sad sack," whether he's planning a terror attack on JFK airport or a creating an election monitoring organization. Does the leader of J.A.M., Hezbollah or LeT or even OBL himself have to deal with the same problems? If I ever met someone from a terrorist funding organization, I think I would ask this question.
Most of the ideas were impractical, poorly thought out, pointless or a combination thereof. The appellants themselves were usually corrupt, sometimes earnest but more often incompetent and almost always incapable of doing the job they proposed to do.
It's not just NGOs. Imagine what I have just been hearing recently, going round a certain country asking government officials if they would like EU assistance money! Sometimes I actually have said Do you still believe in Father Christmas?
It's probably easier to get terrorist money though. They don't exactly expect you to write 15 pages of a business plan, with expected outputs, do they? (Twin tower collapse in 5 mins, 5000 + or -5000 casualties, we need more money to do a detailed feasibility study first, then build a model, and scale up).
Posted by: varske | 06 June 2007 at 05:48 PM
LOL! "If Al-Qaeda issued RFPs on the USAID model." Someone should write that - it would be heeee-larious. What are terrorist PMPs? How is sustainability defined? What efforts are made to increase participation among marginalized populations?
Posted by: carpetblogger | 06 June 2007 at 09:36 PM