BERLIN, 1 April 2004 — Donor nations have pledged $8.2 billion in aid for Afghanistan over the next three years, Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani announced yesterday at an international conference in Berlin.
Ghani said $4.4 billion had been promised for this year alone. “This is 100 percent of our target,” he told a press conference at the close of the first day of the conference.
He said that for US budgetary reasons, the figure of 8.2 billion — which falls short of the Kabul government’s three-year goal of $11.9 billion — did not count the expected US contributions for the final year.
The figures are set against Afghanistan’s stated aim of securing a total of $27.5 billion over the next seven years. It says the money is essential to help rebuild the war-ravaged nation.
Ghani said he was “delighted” that the donor community had “very generously” committed money to his country. The pledges raised so far are broadly in line with what officials had been predicting earlier.
The Berlin conference is aimed at assessing the progress of reconstruction so far in Afghanistan and determining what needs to be done to help secure the country’s future.
As well as raising aid pledges, it is also focusing on improving security, tackling drugs and shoring up the government of President Hamid Karzai.
The head of the UN Development Program, Mark Malloch Brown, said earlier yesterday that the conference was on course to raise eight billion dollars for the next two years.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Afghanistan conference, Brown said that if donors continued to pledge money for reconstruction at current rates, and Afghanistan sustained its present level of development, the ambitious aid target set by the government in Kabul of $27.5 billion over seven years was achievable.
Karzai warned that rampant illegal drugs production was undermining the existence of his fragile state and urged the international community to help tackle the scourge.
“Afghanistan’s agriculture, Afghanistan’s economy, Afghanistan’s way of life, Afghanistan’s tradition and culture is being threatened by drugs,” he told the conference.
With profits from the production of opiates generating more than half of national income, according to UN estimates, Karzai said that “drugs in Afghanistan are undermining the very existence of the Afghan state.”
“The problem for us is too huge to be able to face or challenge alone,” he told hundreds of ministers and officials from some 60 countries. “We require the international community to help us enforce the plan that we have.”
He spoke of seeing one farmer destroying his crop in order to be able to plant poppies, and urged the international community “to help us fight it, to help us create alternative livelihoods for our people.”