More than 600 people, many of them children, have died in a prolonged bout of bad winter weather in Afghanistan that has included unprecedented snowfall, heavy rain and below freezing temperatures.

In some eastern provinces ravenous wolves have been attacking equally hungry children.

The United Nations is just short of declaring "a humanitarian crisis" for Afghanistan.

Yet the deaths and suffering and last month's air crash near Kabul are as much to do with the still chronically slow progress in rebuilding the country's destroyed infrastructure as the weather.[...]
More than 400,000 people have received food and other aid from the Afghan government, US-led coalition forces, Nato peacekeeping forces, UN agencies and Afghan and Western non-governmental organisations.


But they face the problem of how to get to them when snowfall has blocked mountain passes, avalanches have cut off villages, the few dirt track roads are impassable and there are no telephones to warn of impending disasters.


Even in Kabul's premier Indira Gandhi hospital, children in incubators and on respirators live or die depending on whether there are power cuts to the hospital.

Heating is non-existent and at times the temperature in the hospital has dropped to minus 10 degrees Celsius.

Many of the districts have no functioning hospitals and local clinics are devoid of medicines.

The money is there but the projects are not, due to bureaucratic bottlenecks that paralyse major aid donors such as the European Union, the US and the World Bank.



The international community pledged $13.4bn at the Tokyo and Berlin reconstruction conferences for the five years starting December 2001.

This despite a needs assessment by the Afghan government of $27bn.

Yet, according to the Centre on International Cooperation at New York University, until last month only $3.9bn had been given out for reconstruction projects.

Of that only $900m worth of projects has actually been completed.

In comparison Iraq is receiving many times what Afghanistan is getting in funds for reconstruction.

The kind of effort the US-led coalition has put into rebuilding the power grid in Baghdad has never been seen in Kabul.

We went into Afghanistan to get rid of the fools who were running it into the ground (and foolishly helped Al Qaeda attack the US in the process).  We didn't go there to turn it into utopia.

Bush noted "a long road ahead" but pledged that the United States would stand with Afghanistan "as partners."

To seal those ties, Bush ticked off five new initiatives that include training newly elected officials, expanding assistance in the educational realm, working toward a bilateral trade agreement, expanding opportunities for women and increasing opportunities for cultural exchange with the United States.

"My government affirms its ironclad commitment to help Afghanistan succeed and prosper," he said.

"That journey to democracy and peace deserves the support and respect of every nation," he said at a Rose Garden news conference after a meeting with Karzai, "because free nations do not breed the ideology of terror."

"Coalition forces, including many brave Afghans, have brought America, Afghanistan and the world its first victory in the war on terror," the president said. "Afghanistan is no longer a terrorist factory sending thousands of killers into the world."

Thanks for opening a new opportunity for Bush-bashing, turnea thumbsup.gif (although I know that was not your intention).

The new pace and direction of American policy, announced in October, 2003, has been applied on the ground in Afghanistan only since spring of this year. More time must pass before a definitive evaluation is possible. However, on this basis of evidence presented here it appears that this mid-course correction is achieving what it was designed to do. Many early signs herald a shift from military to political conflict, the strengthening of national institutions at the expense of warlords, and a quickening pace and breadth of economic and social development. The success of the recent elections provides early evidence that participatory institutions are possible in this war-torn land. They also suggest that the age of winner-take-all politics may be passing in Afghanistan, bringing an end to the gross and destabilizing regional and ethnic imbalances that characterized the Kabul government between 2002 and 2004.

How did this apparently successful shift in US policy occur? The question is important, not only to an understanding of Afghanistan but also, by implication, in planning what the US should do in other situations, including Iraq. At least seven conclusions can be drawn from this history.

First, from an international perspective it is clear that the new pace and direction of policy in Afghanistan arose mainly as a unilateral move by the American government.  This is not to say that there were not UN and other officials, especially from Britain, who advanced approaches something like those actually adopted. But only the US both had the willingness to take such decisions and the capacity to implement them.  Unilateralism is not always a bad thing.

Second, though initially a solo initiative by the United States, American officials moved quickly to engage Coalition members and UN officials in the project. Thanks to this, international partners are closely coordinated as they implement the program, giving leverage to America’s input of personnel, equipment, and money.

Third, the mid-course correction that is changing the Afghan scene for the better would never have happened had key individuals not brought to the project their insights, decisiveness in taking decisions, and credibility. Specific analysts in several governmental offices and others working outside the government tenaciously promoted the key ideas for fully a year before they found champions at the top.  Among decision makers, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld deserves particular credit, and among administrators the skills of Ambassador Khalilzad and of Lieutenant General Barno have proven indispensable. 

Fourth, the new pace and direction was worked out not by the Pentagon, State Department, or National Security Council acting alone, but through a complex interagency process involving all three entities and others as well. Several participants who have lived through decades of inter-agency squabbles say that they have never before seen the degree of cooperation that was attained in this case by individually proud agencies working together. Needless to say, they all lived by the motto “Change has a hundred fathers (and mothers).”

Fifth, America’s new approach to Afghanistan is solidly based not on nation –building, for the Afghan nation already existed, but state-building. Perhaps it was necessary to go through the protracted period of single-minded focus on crushing al Qaeda and eliminating the Taliban before this new phase could be reached. But in the end, President Bush’s V.M.I. speech about a new Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and all Central Asia laid out a strategy to which the rest of the government eventually came around. This strategy is one of state-building.

Sixth, and arguably most important of all, every aspect of America’s new policy towards Afghanistan has been worked out and executed with the Afghans, rather than being done to them. President Karzai and leading figures of his administrations provided such significant input into the drafting process that it is fair to say that the final document is as much their policy as America’s. During the execution phase this fact casts the US in the role of backing and supporting Afghans rather than leading them.  On this important issue American policy in Afghanistan since 9-11 has been utterly consistent: at no point has the United States aspired or allowed itself to try to govern Afghanistan.

Finally, the successes achieved to date in the implementation of the new policy are due significantly to the fact that all those involved in this delicate process have wherever possible avoided turning temporary opponents into permanent enemies.  Thus, the Kabul government is welcoming former Taliban moderates and inviting them to take civil service jobs and enter the political system. In the same spirit, even as the government is putting warlords out of business, it is offering them face-saving positions, often at surprisingly high levels of status and pay. Thus, when Karzai pushed out the warlord and governor of Kandahar he immediately offered him the post of Minister of Urban Affairs in Kabul. And when he dumped the KGB-trained Mohammad Sawrari from the top post in the National Security Directorate, he invited him to become an advisor to the President without portfolio.

To some extent this marks the reemergence of adroit old Afghan skills that enabled the monarchy to survive for two centuries. It certainly attests to Hamid Karzai’s unique combination of political astuteness and simple decency. The fact that American officials on the ground and in Washington have come to support so subtle and culturally specific a process also says worlds about their ability to master new approaches when faced with the need to do so.

Terrorism existed not because the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, terrorism existed because of the conditions in the country.  The Taliban was a product of the poverty, not the cause of it.  The country had few natural resources (as you pointed out), little infrastructure, the people were poor with no opportunities.  When you have that situation, that creates a ripe breeding ground for terrorists to recruit people for their cause.

Bush and his neo-con cronies that cooked up his foreign policy think that simply installing democracies everywhere fixes the problem, they couldn't be more wrong and Afghanistan is proof.

WOW....CJ, the Taliban did not come to power because of natural resources, lack of infrastructure, etc. The Taliban came out of the Russian occupation. Their power came from popular support, as opposed to a lack of gov't intervention. Their origination had nothing to do with the United States at all.

Terrorism existed not because the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, terrorism existed because of the conditions in the country. The Taliban was a product of the poverty, not the cause of it. The country had few natural resources (as you pointed out), little infrastructure, the people were poor with no opportunities. When you have that situation, that creates a ripe breeding ground for terrorists to recruit people for their cause.

Bush and his neo-con cronies that cooked up his foreign policy think that simply installing democracies everywhere fixes the problem, they couldn't be more wrong and Afghanistan is proof.

Secondly, Afghanistan's prolonged war forced the country into economic shambles, and allowed groups such as the Taliban to stay in power. When Russia pulled out, the nation had little industry left and a lack of communist financial backing. This is where terrorism came in.

I deplore your attempt at blaming the Taliban on Bush... it's absurd, and as much as I hate this word, very ignorant.

The fact is that the 9/11 attacks were planned long before any "Neo-cons" took office... read a little more about the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Their hatred is fundamentally based and has nothing... nothing to do with Mr. Bush.

Again, where in my post did I suggest this?  I'd like a direct quote please.

I know you'd like a direct quote... but insinuation is as good or worse.

"Terrorism existed not because the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, terrorism existed because of the conditions in the country. The Taliban was a product of the poverty, not the cause of it. The country had few natural resources (as you pointed out), little infrastructure, the people were poor with no opportunities. When you have that situation, that creates a ripe breeding ground for terrorists to recruit people for their cause.
Bush and his neo-con cronies that cooked up his foreign policy think that simply installing democracies everywhere fixes the problem, they couldn't be more wrong and Afghanistan is proof."

This was all said in the same breath. It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that you neither understood where the Taliban came from, but that you were playing partisan-politics and bashing the administration (when they were the first to do anything since the Russians left).

Afghanistan is PROOF? Proof of what? The country was poor, still is. Nothing is worse by any means.

We went into Afghanistan to get rid of the fools who were running it into the ground (and foolishly helped Al Qaeda attack the US in the process). We didn't go there to turn it into utopia.