Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan
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Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan<br>Finalist #3 in the Book Review Contest
Scott Alexander<br>Jul 24, 2026
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[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]<br>A couple of decades ago in Kabul, a fellow aid worker on his third beer came up with a vivid simile for what American money was doing to the Afghan organizations implementing USAID projects. “It’s like gluing a rabbit mouth-first to a fire hose. You blast its guts right out of its ass…but as long as the water keeps running, it looks like you’ve taught the rabbit to dance.”<br>Oxford politics professor Masooda Bano uses less lurid language, but Breakdown in Pakistan addresses the same basic phenomenon: how Western aid donors and INGOs unintentionally eviscerate so many of the local institutions they try to “capacity-build.” The problem goes beyond the obvious mismatch of huge funds with small-scale organizations. Even low-to-moderate external funding can leave an organization hollowed out, bereft of local participants and the power it once had to motivate change on the ground.<br>Anyone who cares about the global effectiveness of rich-country altruism needs to grasp the dynamic Bano analyzes. From the Western perspective, many of us want to put charitable money into a mechanism that delivers certain measurable outcomes (lives saved, morbidity reduced, income increased above poverty levels, etc.) as efficiently and reliably as possible. So we do our well-intentioned best to shape local institutions into a delivery vehicle for our projects.<br>Readers of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State will recall how mid-eighteenth-century German “scientific foresters” treated forests similarly, as a mechanism to reliably yield the highest volume of lumber. They planted spruce in vast uniform grids, ordered for easy counting and harvesting, while stripping out other non-timber species. The resulting monoculture plantations seemed ideal for both commercial exploitation and experimentation; it’s much easier to control variables when you’ve removed as much natural variability as possible.<br>Within a few decades, the downsides became evident. The first generation of trees grew strong, sucking up the accumulated benefits of the previous forest’s soil ecology; later generations were stunted, as the lack of biodiversity left the soils nutrient-poor. Plantations packed with trees of the same species and same height were far more vulnerable to pathogens, pests, and extreme weather. Large-scale forest die-offs, Waldsterben, eventually forced foresters to drastically modify their approach.<br>That metaphor fits Bano’s story even better than my friend’s gutted rabbit. Over the last four decades, we’ve been systematically replacing diverse old-growth institutions with more legible NGO plantations worldwide. While we’ve been enjoying our increased ability to control outcomes and test hypotheses, the rot has been spreading, the impoverished ecology stunting more and more of the forest. And now the wind through those uniform, hollowed-out aisles has built into a storm.
Bano’s ethnographic case studies, interviews, and surveys are mostly drawn from her homeland of Pakistan. The country is somewhat better off than it was a decade and a half ago when she was writing Breakdown, but the bottom quintile of its population can’t afford basic needs, and its middle class remains within shouting distance of the poverty line.<br>As Bano observes, this impoverishment largely results from the control of the Pakistani state by a small landholding elite and the military. With the interests of the powerful defended more robustly than the rights of everyone else, a stark income gap has opened up between the top quintile and the rest of the population. Spending on public services is minimal: only around 1% of GDP on health care and 2% on education (rates that have barely budged since Breakdown was published). Corruption is high, social safety nets meager.<br>Since Pakistan’s government is of limited use to much of its population, “a vibrant network of [non-state groups] emerged to meet the collective needs of the community and those of the poor.” They weren’t founded in response to availability of external funds, but as a response to disasters or a perceived need among some target population. Bano cites the example of Anjuman-Faizul-Islam, one of Pakistan’s oldest voluntary organizations (VOs), “set up in response to a famine in Bengal that left many children orphaned,” or the All Pakistan Women’s Association, created in 1948 to promote women’s rights, literacy, and economic opportunities.<br>With the dawn of the NGO era of aid in the 1980s, Western donors and charities began combing...