KABUL, 22 February 2005 — More than three years after US-led forces overthrew the Taleban, the United Nations has painted a gloomy picture of conditions in Afghanistan and warned it could fall back into chaos if popular grievances were not met. The first ever Afghanistan Human Development Report, released yesterday, said remarkable progress had been made since 2001 and there was room for “cautious optimism”.
But serious security problems remained and the country had some of the world’s worst rates of life expectancy, conditions for women and children, and literacy, the United Nations said.
Unless grievances such as a lack of jobs, health care, education and political participation were addressed, “the fragile nation could easily tumble back into chaos”, the United Nations said in a statement accompanying the report.
If that happened, “Afghanistan will collapse into an insecure state, a threat to its own people as well as the international community”, it said. The report, prepared by the UN Development Program with government participation, said the international backers of President Hamid Karzai’s government needed to take a broad and long-term view of Afghanistan’s development.
“The international community is committed to fighting terrorism and drugs inside Afghanistan, but human security cannot take a back seat to national and international security interests of other nations,” said editor in chief Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh.
Conditions for women and children were especially dire, with one in five children dying before the age of five and one woman dying of pregnancy-related illness every 30 minutes.
