PRESIDENT Hamid Karzai will fly to Paris this week to appeal to the international community for £25 billion to rebuild Afghanistan’s battered economy and to promote food production.

The man who has enjoyed six years as the darling of the West will face tough questions about widespread corruption and his failure to rein in war-lords responsible for growing lawlessness across the country.

Karzai’s former finance minister has broken his silence to join those who blame the resurgence of the Taliban on the government’s ineptitude as well as the failures of the international community. Ashraf Ghani, who was Karzai’s de facto prime minister for three years, said that much of the £7.6 billion aid that had gone into Afghanistan since 2001 had been wasted.

“The approach of the past seven years has backfired,” he said. “Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into technical assistance, only to increase corruption and misgovernance.”

Ghani’s decision to speak out will increase speculation that he may oppose Karzai in next year’s presidential elections if his poor health allows.

The remarks by Ghani, a former World Bank executive, are extremely damaging on the eve of the Paris conference. The £25 billion Karzai will request is to fund a five-year programme to promote food production and diversify the economy away from its reliance on opium as well as to pay for next year’s elections.

Karzai’s western backers are not only balking at the enormous price tag but wanting more in return. “There’s a worrying sense of political drift and lawlessness,” said a western official. “The message in Paris has to be that aid to Afghanistan is not unconditional and that the Karzai government has to raise its game and start dealing with corruption.”

Although there is sympathy for a president who recently survived his third assassination attempt, there are fears he no longer exerts authority. One of his closest colleagues described him as being “scared of his own shadow”.

The World Bank added its voice last week to the chorus of complaints about how aid was being spent. After a meeting of the board, Alastair McKechnie, the bank’s director for conflict-affected countries, said that there was a “huge issue” of the effectiveness of aid in Afghanistan and that “little headway” had been made in the fight against corruption.

Karzai will say that donors have not delivered on their pledges. Since 2001 countries have pledged £12.7 billion in help but delivered only £7.6 billion, according to a report by the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR), an umbrella body of 94 international aid agencies.

Ghani, who drew no salary as finance minister, criticised the international community for what he described as their “incoherence and utter lack of understanding”. He complained: “It’s 62 countries each pushing and pulling in different directions. As finance minister, 60% of my time was spent just having meetings with all these agencies.” As an example he said there were 16 competing international programmes to reform the justice system.

He also blamed the UN and aid agencies for stripping Afghanistan of its most capable civil servants. “When we started in 2001 we had 240,000 civil servants willing to work for a government salary of £25 a month,” he said. “By 2004 all the talented ones had left to become drivers for the UN, the World Bank or charities.”

One of the main complaints of ordinary Afghans is the preponderance of checkpoints on roads at which police or local militias demand bribes.

“We’re now getting some of the same symptoms that led to the Taliban in the first place,” Ghani said. “The international community has invested hundreds of millions of dollars building roads on which Afghans fear to travel.”

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