On June 12, an important international conference will be held in Paris, France. The conference has been requested by Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai who wants to convince his country’s top donors to give more aid than they have already given. All in all, Mr. Karzai has requested $50 billion more in aid.

He will face a critical crowd: experts expect him to ask for more money which the central government can use to develop the country’s infrastructure and economy. However, this central government is infamous for its high degree of corruption. Most donor nations are wondering what happened to the billions they donated to Afghanistan years ago.

Not only that, the Karzai administration has serious management problems.

So, although he may request $50 billion in aid, it is unlikely that other countries will give Mr. Karzai what he wants. It is more likely that they will continue to do what they have done for the past several years; bypass Afghanistan’s central government and, instead, working with NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) and local authorities.

On top of that, there are more problems, as Don Duncan – a freelance journalist who traveled to Afghanistan with support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting – recently put it: “Today, in a sense, there are two Afghanistans and two kinds of aid that are propping the country up: military aid to the Afghanistan still at war, to the south and particularly along the porous border with Pakistan; and development aid to the Afghanistan at peace, where stability is taking hold.”

In other words, the central government has to fight the Taliban and develop the peaceful regions of Afghanistan at the same time; not an easy task for any administration, let alone for one as flawed as that of Mr. Karzai.

In the ‘peaceful’ regions, the infrastructure and, therefore, the local economies have been completely destroyed. Western countries have donated billions to Afghanistan in recent years for the purpose of rebuilding both. However, it seems that the central government has not done what it promised to do; it gladly accepted the money, but the infrastructure in the country’s northern part is still horrendous. Of course it has to be pointed out that Afghanistan had a long way to go; the country was completely destroyed after 30 years of war and horrific, stone age-like rule.

According to Amy Frumin, a former U.S. Agency for International Development representative in Afghanistan, who was interviewed by this reporter, this is precisely why the Paris Conference will have to be a turning point in the country’s stabilization efforts. As Frumin put it, if Afghanistan is ever going to be secure, now is the time to move from a mere reconstruction perspective toward a more determined development approach.

Another excuse for Mr. Karzai is that Western governments have made it virtually impossible for him to establish himself and his administration as the country’s main authority on all political affairs; they have bypassed the central government on purpose, instead working with NGO’s in an attempt to help the Afghan people. Although such an approach may make sense from a Western perspective (after all, the central government is incredibly corrupt), it does not from Mr. Karzai’s perspective; the more Western governments ignore the central government, the less likely it is that Afghans will consider the central government to be the true and only authority in their country.

As if that is not enough, donor countries also often ’set strict preconditions for their contributions, thereby making it harder for NGOs to reach an optimal allocation of funds.’ If those donor countries would understand Afghanistan and know what the country needs that would not be a problem, but sadly that is not the case.

One of the main mistakes of both Western countries and the Afghan central government is their ‘failure to address local sources of conflict such as land, water and family disputes, which rank remarkably high among the Afghan people’s numerous worries.’ This has created room for warlords to maneuver. They have gladly taken the opportunity given to them, and established themselves as authorities in their own right.

So, what does Afghanistan truly need?

Foxley sees two possibly compatible paths for the conference. One is that donor nations could “point to the contributions they have already made and the projects they are already running.” But the other, he says, is that, “they may [also] now prefer to ‘pay up’ in terms of cash, and do a bit less of deploying troops….”

In both cases, the international community will have to pick its choice between pursuing its current strategy of bypassing Karzai’s ministries –which has done little to boost his credibility as the country’s leader – and taking the risk of betting on a government known for its nepotism, which could mean flushing more cash down the drain of corruption.

This binary choice, however, may be somewhat short-sighted.

Indeed, there may be at least one other option for Afghanistan: helping its president help himself. As Foxley puts it: “Perhaps a ‘capacity building conference’ would be a more useful forum than simply a cash pledging exercise […].” And so, he adds, more valuable for the country would be to help the Afghans “grow the capacity to actually use the money [they already have] more efficiently and effectively.”

Sounds like a plan.