The conference – which will bring Afghanistan's leading donor nations together – is the third in a series of intergovernmental meetings aimed at coordinating the country's stabilization and reconstruction efforts since the fall of the Taliban regime in November 2001.

Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the country's minister of foreign affairs, has already announced Kabul will be requesting $50 billion more in aid from the international community at the conference.

It remains uncertain, however, whether such a new aid package will be delivered in full to Karzai who has been widely discredited for what has been perceived as poor management of some of the financial support his country has received to date.

Indeed, six years after the country's riddance of its Taliban leadership, Afghanistan's current economic and political conditions are still only considered tolerable at best, and as Tim Foxley, a leading Afghanistan expert at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute told this reporter earlier this week: "With every new donor conference comes the implication that the previous ones clearly didn't work or were misjudged […]."

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."

More generally, reports indicate that little has been achieved in terms of reducing poverty and rebuilding even the country's most basic infrastructure which is close to nonexistent after nearly 30 years of domestic and international conflicts.

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.

Despite having pledged some $25 billion in aid since 2002, however, foreign donors have been accused by local non-governmental organizations of failing to deliver on over one-third of their financial promises.

According to research conducted by Matt Waldman, Oxfam's Afghanistan head of policy, foreign assistance to the country appears bleak when compared to the support places such as Bosnia and East Timor have received over the years.

Even where help has been granted, it has been widely reported as unsatisfactory due to the fact that most donors have set strict preconditions for their contributions, thereby making it harder for NGOs to reach an optimal allocation of funds.

In addition, the country's North Atlantic Treaty Organization Provincial Reconstruction Teams – who have run many of the country's development projects to date – have largely been criticized for their lack of understanding of Afghanistan's true needs as well as for having created parallel institutional structures running outside the reach of Kabul's central government.

In a February 2008 report titled, "Community Peacebuilding in Afghanistan," Oxfam International denounced some of the international community's failures to comprehend the country's essential priorities since 2002.

From its first pages, the report states: "With sufficient resources and political will these initiatives [Afghanistan's current action plans] have the potential to improve security, but they only marginally, indirectly, or partially concern the people of Afghanistan."

The report adds: "The recent deterioration in security, particularly in the south and south-east of Afghanistan, is evidence that 'top-down' approaches are by themselves inadequate without parallel nationwide peace work at ground level."

One of Oxfam's main findings is that the country's lasting instability can be attributed, in part at least, to Kabul's and NATO's 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 shortfall, as Oxfam points out, has had truly troubling consequences as warlords and other criminals have stepped in to use such instability to their advantage. Indeed, as the report notes: "The Taliban are not the only threat [in Afghanistan], as is sometimes portrayed […]."

In the face of such a wide range of issues to solve, Karzai will undoubtedly ask the international community for more help in the coming years. The Afghan president will, in fact, be coming to next Thursday's Paris Conference with a brand new five-year plan coined the Afghanistan National Development Strategy.

The plan is to succeed the 2006 London Conference's Afghanistan Compact agreement.

According to Frumin, who has now become an international affairs fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, this new plan could well represent a milestone in Afghanistan's development, as it is the first to be based on local consultations with the country's people, rather than on mere governmental ambitions.

A key priority for Karzai next Thursday, however, will be to channel more of the foreign aid his country receives through the central government. This, Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Spanta has already said, will certainly be on Kabul's list of demands to the international community at the upcoming Paris meeting.

Indeed, until now just one-third of all the aid Afghanistan receives has gone through the country's official budget, thereby "eroding its legitimacy, planning capacity and authority," as Aunohita Mojumdar, a Kabul-based journalist, recently put it.

Karzai, however, will likely face a skeptical audience when presenting his requests to the panel of donors expected to line up in the French capital's International Conference Center.

This skepticism is grounded in the fact that Afghanistan's central government – its executive branch in particular – has been known for its widespread corruption over the past years.

According to Tim Foxley, "The Afghans probably do not help themselves by developing [or at least discussing] grandiose plans, for example, of massively increasing the size of the army […]. This doesn't give [donors] confidence that Afghan planning is rooted in reality…"

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."

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Andrew Bishop is a graduate student of European politics who currently lives in Paris.