For the first two years of the Afghan reconstruction program I worked and fought with Ashraf Ghani while he served as Minister of Finance in the Afghan government and I was Administrator of USAID. The book he has written with Clare Lockhart might better be titled Frustrations of a Finance Minister because in it he vents against the international aid system he had to deal with during his tenure. He re-argues the endless conceptual and programmatic debates we had on development issues and tries to suggest an improved, alternative system to the current one.

That alternative derives from a description of the essential functions of the state, as understood in classical Western political theory, and the reformulation of the relationship between the aid system and the state to speed the re-establishment of those functions. Ghani and Lockhart believe that a better aid system along these lines, which they claim has worked in other circumstances, can save Afghanistan and a range of other failed states as well.