It is now six years to the day since donor nations, meeting in Tokyo on January 26, 2002, pledged $ 4.5 billion in aid to Afghanistan. Nearly 60 nations, including Pakistan, attended the conference on rebuilding Afghanistan. The total aid package was less than half the five-year goal of $ 15 billion set by the United Nations. The first-year installment was $ 1.8 billion. The remaining $ 2.7 billion was to be distributed by the end of 2006. Yet, Afghanistan today, remains a country with virtually no infrastructure. What wasn’t destroyed by the Soviet Union during its 10-year occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89), and the civil war that followed, has been destroyed by the United States of America in the years since the Bush administration’s invasion of the country in November 2001.
The Afghan economy is in shambles; even the capital, Kabul, gets only a few hours of electricity per day; there is no industry worth the name, and no economic prospects to speak of – other than the heroin trade. The law and order situation is grim, and thousands of Afghan civilians continue to die each year due to US and NATO bombing and other attacks. The writ of the Karzai government does not extend beyond Kabul. And the countryside remains a series of killing fields ruled by warlords and an increasingly resurgent Taliban.
At the Tokyo donors’ conference back in January 2002, then-World Bank President James Wolfensohn called the $ 4.5 billion worth of aid pledges “a very good start,” but conference participants said the next task was ensuring that the aid was speedily and securely disbursed. “None of us thinks it’s a utopia, and we all know that it’s going to be tough to make sure that the money gets to the place that it should go,” Wolfensohn said. “But I think that with a proper transparent system, with a lot of auditing, with accounting, there’s a fair chance that we’ll get most of the money where it’s supposed to go,” he said.
In the event, however, very little of the money ended up where it was supposed to go. Much of it was siphoned off, disappearing into the chaos of a war-ravaged society, while a huge amount of the aid was spent on meeting expatriate administrative costs rather than being spent on reconstruction or economic development.
During a whistle-stop trip to Beijing on January 24, 2002, Karzai said his then-four-week old administration had an extensive list of projects on which to spend the newly pledged international aid. “Security, education, health and road building – a very, very visible activity,” he said. “On top of that should come the revitalisation of the administration, the government to become functional again,” said the Afghan leader, who had flown to Beijing a day earlier from the Tokyo conference for talks with then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell called the US pledge the “first installment in a long-term US commitment to help Afghanistan” – a somewhat ironic declaration, to say the least, given the fact that the Bush administration’s bombing of Afghanistan had reduced even more buildings and infrastructure to rubble.
Powell said that the promised money was in addition to $ 400 million in humanitarian assistance committed by the US in the autumn of 2001. Of the US total, $ 121.9 million was earmarked for food aid, $ 72 million for international disaster assistance and $ 52.6 million for refugee assistance. Powell also promised to help find and release hundreds of millions of dollars in Afghan assets that were frozen by the United States during the Taliban era. What became of that promise?
The new funds were meant to be targeted at a variety of areas, including agricultural development, health care, education and counter-narcotics programmes. According to US officials, Washington had based its estimates of Afghanistan’s overall needs on those from the United Nations and the World Bank: $ 1.7 billion in the first year, $ 10 billion over five years and $ 15 billion over 10 years.
Long-term prospects for aid are still unclear, however, mainly because most of the big donors did not make a pledge spanning more than three years. Congressional budgetary procedures prevented the United States from extending its pledge past fiscal 2002, which ended in September that year. In theory, countries could have pledged more aid later, but some aid organisations were worried that commitments would fade after Afghanistan gradually dropped from the headlines. That’s exactly what happened earlier, following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989.
It will take decades for Afghanistan to recover from the brutal wars that have debilitated the economy and the nation. After years of conflict, there are virtually no health care services in Afghanistan. The average life expectancy is 44 to 46 years, two-thirds of adults are illiterate, only 6 per cent of the population has electricity, and the government infrastructure is in ruins. In short, it is not an exaggeration to say that Afghanistan has no modern amenities.
“Were it not for the omnipresent Kalashnikov assault rifles and Toyota 4×4 pickups that the Karzai government inherited from the Taliban, the whole country would resemble a medieval landscape,” said one foreign observer in Kandahar. Mud dwellings are the standard home for most of Afghanistan’s population of 27 million. Seventy-five percent of Afghans are subsistence farmers, and few know the luxury of a tractor.
For four years running (1998-2001) a drought of epic proportions parched the country. Even before the US bombing, an estimated one million Afghans had fled their homes to escape the drought. International aid agencies, which quit Afghanistan during the US war against the country, were stretched to the limit then. At that time, over 1.5 million Afghans were estimated to be at risk of starvation and death owing to exposure to the harsh winter elements.
“There are so many problems in Afghanistan,” said Engineer Pashtoon, a spokesman for the Kandahar region’s then-governor, Gul Agha Shirzai. “We cannot rebuild a country on our own,” he added. Pakistan, which shares a long border with Afghanistan and is linked by road to most of its major cities, can play a leading role in this rebuilding effort.
On January 22, 2002 then-EU Commissioner for External Relations Chris Patten said in Tokyo that the donors’ conference was a step in the right direction, but added that the deals were far from done. “It’s extremely important that we work very quickly to translate promises made on paper to real cheques, real projects, real action on the ground,” Patten said.
But rebuilding the country is an uphill task because 30 years of war and strife, coupled with several years of drought, have reduced Afghanistan to a shell of a country. Reconstruction will have to begin nearly from scratch.
Afghanistan was one of the world’s poorest countries even before the US bombing campaign wreaked more destruction on whatever was left of the war-ravaged infrastructure. Food, shelter, health, education, mine removal, telecommunications, electricity and transportation are the key sectors that remain in need of immediate attention.
A four-year drought (1998-2001) led to the failure of crops in 18 of Afghanistan’s 29 provinces. Only 10 to 12 per cent of the land is arable, and up to 1.5 million Afghans faced starvation by winter’s end in April 2002. Another 5 million to 7 million people were relying on international relief for at least part of their food supply.
Decades of warfare compounded by drought and famine led to mass migrations of the Afghan population. By the close of 2000, more than 3.6 million Afghans were living as refugees in other countries, some 2 million of them in Pakistan. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said another 135,000 refugees had entered Pakistan since the US bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001. Another 375,000 Afghans are displaced within their own country.
Persuading all these millions of refugees to go back Afghanistan is a mammoth undertaking, requiring the construction of hundreds of thousands of houses, water supply schemes and other infrastructure. It also requires the revival of the war-shattered economy in order to ensure that the refugees have a means of earning a living after they return to their own country.
The health situation in Afghanistan is also dire. Lack of food, poor sanitation and a health infrastructure decimated by war translate into a current life expectancy of 46 years, one of the lowest in the world. The infant mortality rate is over 15 per cent, and 25 per cent of all children do not live past their fifth year. Just 23 per cent of the population has access to safe drinking water. There is a high incidence of communicable diseases – measles, cholera, tuberculosis and hepatitis, to name only a few.