Dan Drezner and Marc Lynch have been mixing it up over on Political Animal (Kevin Drum’s gig). Drezner opened with a salvo toward the NGOs and Kevin’s commenters went to work describing a world which bears little, if any, resemblance to the one I work in. And this is the left. Whatever.

I do, however, feel that I must bring up one little, niggling fact about the world whenever people start ranting about NGOs. When governments (and all the largest donors are governments) spend money on “democracy promotion” or “economic development” or “humanitarian action” or “post-war reconstruction”, a large part of your money, taxpayer, goes to private contractors.

Let me say, simply, that calls for greater NGO accountability ring rather hollow to my ears when Halliburton is let off the hook for $2 billion. Sure, different work (in this particular case, but Halliburton is doing some building too), but it comes out of the same kitty and it all gets lumped together in the rhetoric.