Dept. of perverse consequences: US Aid to Pakistan

Catching up on my reading, I'm getting through the New Yorker's excellent issue on the killing of Osama bin Laden. All the big guns are in the magazine -- an excellent lead essay by David Remnick, a piece about bin Laden as a social-media innovator by Steve Coll -- but what really brought me up short was Lawrence Wright's look at the perverse consequences of US aid to Pakistan. Check this part out:

In a country of a hundred and eighty million people, fewer than two million citizens pay taxes, and Pakistan’s leaders are doing little to change the situation. In Karachi, the financial capital, the government recently inaugurated a program to appoint eunuchs as tax collectors. Eunuchs are considered relentless scolds in South Asia, and the threat of being hounded by one is somehow supposed to take the place of audits.

Read the rest here.