Even as they pledged some $8.2 billion in reconstruction aid to Afghanistan over the next three years, donor countries at their Berlin meeting were briefing journalists that this was an immense sum. By inference they were rubbishing Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s call for $27 billion over the next seven years.
This is dangerous and cynical. Even if every cent of the latest promised aid actually arrives — and many past promises have still to be honored — $8.2 billion is actually small change. To put the pledge into perspective, in 2002 the US banking group Citicorp made profits of over $13 billion. According to IBM, the world’s oil and gas industry spent $14 billion last year merely on information technology.
When President Bush decided on the Afghan invasion, he said he would see the job through, beyond the ouster of the Taleban, beyond the destruction of Al-Qaeda’s local infrastructure, and right through to the rebuilding of the country and the funding of major infrastructure and social projects. It was a simple promise to make when the world was recoiling in revulsion from Sept. 11. But like so much else about Washington’s foreign policy it was not thought through, if indeed there was any thought at all beyond the desire to strike back at Bin Laden.
There was a time, when the US was lining up its allies among the Afghan warlords, when deals could have been struck that might have stopped the country falling back into its old ethnic divisions. Indeed that assumption was made by many observers as the anti-Taleban alliance was put in place. The government’s writ runs little further than the capital Kabul. Aid projects are apparently being hampered elsewhere because of security problems. Yet it is only in southeast Afghanistan, in part of the Pashtun tribal areas, that fighting still continues against Taleban supporters and surviving Al-Qaeda elements.
Money already promised elsewhere for schools, hospitals, power, sanitation, telecommunications, roads, bridges and housing has often not been spent because, we are told, the security position makes it impossible. Can this really be true? Or is the wealthy West only interested in spending money on one matter and one matter alone — the combating of the country’s reviving opium production? If that is the only concern, then it is doomed to failure. One of the world’s poorest but proudest countries cannot be turned from its ways with a stick. It needs carrots, in abundance.
Two years ago, the world promised the Afghan people that they would be helped to create a secure new future for themselves. Many of those promises have already been dishonored. If Afghan trust is further betrayed, the evils of the past will return.
