Counting chickens

Legions of aid and humanitarian workers are readying for the task of rebuilding Afghanistan. Nyier Abdou wonders if they are jumping the gun
During the thick of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan last month, I spoke to the resident representative of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in East Timor, Jim Della-Giacoma. The rumblings had already begun about loading off Afghanistan onto the UN for rebuilding efforts, and the UN transition administrations in East Timor and Kosovo were bubbling up as measuring sticks to go by. Della-Giacoma was adamant in his analysis, noting that it is foolish to compare a mission in Afghanistan to the two-year- old UN administration in East Timor. "Afghanistan is not East Timor," he said. "It may sound obvious, but many problems in East Timor were created in the early days by viewing East Timor through the prism of Kosovo."
These are wise words for United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator Mark Malloch Brown, recently appointed by UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan to lead recovery efforts in Afghanistan. Malloch Brown has been working a furious circuit of aid and development-related conferences and meetings, swinging from Islamabad to Kabul to Tokyo. On 5 and 6 December, he was in Berlin, Germany, for a meeting of the Afghanistan Support Group (ASG), established in 1996 and made up of the main donor countries and international agencies active in the country.
The routine six-month review of Afghanistan's humanitarian needs took on far greater meaning as it opened on the heels of the UN-sponsored talks among Afghan factions in Bonn. In a tele-press conference with reporters on the first day of the Berlin meeting, Malloch Brown was caught up in the auspicious spirit of the week's diplomatic efforts. "Everybody is feeling very buoyant," he said. But he added a potent caution into the mix, warning, "We've been here before" -- a reference to the doomed recovery effort that followed the pull-out of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in the late 1980s.
The depth of the devastation in Afghanistan encompasses decades of war, probably the world's largest refugee community, a crippling three-year drought and more than two months of heavy bombing. The country has one of the worst infant and child mortality rates in the world. And yet, there is hope. The UN is not starting from scratch in Afghanistan, as humanitarian efforts there stretch back as far as the former king. The UN Development Group alone has some 2,200 national Afghan staff. When NGOs are included, the number swells to 17,000.
As to efforts to build a strong economy in Afghanistan, Omar Zakhilwal, senior research economist at the Ottawa-based Statistics Canada and an Afghan expert at the Institute for Afghan Studies (IAS), told Al-Ahram Weekly, "Afghanistan has great potential should it fall into responsible hands." Speaking first of the country's market possibilities, Zakhilwal said that quality goods like fruit and vegetables and textiles can make up the bulk of export.
Perhaps one of Afghanistan's greatest assets (and, in so many cases, one of its burdens) is its key location. One source of revenue will be providing a trade transit route between the Central Asian republics and South Asian countries. Zakhilwal also noted that he expects the pending gas pipeline project that will pump gas and oil from Turkmenistan will soon resurface. "We will be getting between $150 million and $250 million per year from that," he said.
Zakhilwal also pointed out that Afghanistan is a largely unexplored country. With huge gas reserves across the border in Turkmenistan and gas in nearby Iran, "it would only make sense that we [Afghanistan] have just as much oil as any of these countries," he said. "I strongly believe that we will be the next Middle East -- not the next Africa." He also suggested that a thriving tourism industry could eventually rival Egypt's.
In Berlin last week, the UNDP's Malloch Brown was upbeat, but certainly cautious. "We shouldn't count our chickens before they're hatched," he said, noting that security is at the top of his list of concerns. He said that during his trip to Kabul, even seven-year-olds expressed a desperate need for security, adding that before the Taliban Kabul was "a dangerous place for the ordinary Afghan." The same seems to be true today.
Eight foreign journalists have been killed in Afghanistan since the war began on 7 October -- the same number as the total US military death toll. In the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, the traditionally stout aid agency Medecins sans Frontières (MSF) evacuated its foreign staff early this week due to strong anti-Western sentiment fuelled by numerous civilian deaths in the US bombardment of the nearby Tora Bora cave complex. MSF's response calls to mind other cases where UN and humanitarian workers have been targeted in conflict areas, notably the killing by Indonesian militias of three foreign staff working for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in West Timor in September of last year and the slaying and mutilation of 18 US soldiers in Somalia in October of 1993.
Asked by the Weekly if he was concerned about similar attacks in Afghanistan, Malloch Brown was careful to note that he was not more concerned about foreign staff than any other civilian in Afghanistan. Pressed as to whether targeting of UN staff would diminish support for development, Malloch Brown again emphasised that the UN was indeed concerned with the security situation as a whole.
Drawing on the experience of past UN development missions, Malloch Brown warned against comparisons to Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as East Timor, which he described as a "much smaller, simpler" mission. Instead, he pointed to successful development efforts in Mozambique, where the UN mission has faced issues similar to those it will need to address in Afghanistan, including poverty reduction, health education and gender equality. "You're talking to an agency [the UNDP] with a deep history in developing countries," Malloch Brown told reporters, adding that this rules out any "wide-eyed schemes" in Afghanistan. He stressed the need for a recruitment drive targeting expatriate Afghans and again underscored that this is going to be a "very Afghan-led operation."
Among the top issues for development outlined by Malloch Brown is rebuilding the agricultural sector -- although given the country's severe drought, this will be particularly difficult in the short run. Zakhilwal is quick to note that Afghanistan's agricultural sector was once responsible for more than half the country's gross domestic product and some 75 per cent of employment. He added that many things can be done to help prepare for when the drought eventually breaks, such as the repair and building of irrigation systems like canals and water dams. Refugee repatriation will also be one of the main projects in the coming years, and like the goal of agricultural expansion, it goes hand in hand with de-mining efforts. Some 750 square kilometres of land in Afghanistan is mined and there is every reason to believe these areas have grown in the course of the latest military campaign.
The Berlin conference is to be followed by a donors meeting next month in Tokyo. Malloch Brown has warned against so- called donor fatigue, saying that donors are very willing to pledge funds for Afghanistan now, when the country's relief needs are in the spotlight, but the "capital- intensive" phase of reconstruction efforts will come later on -- sadly, when donor countries have moved on. Malloch Brown is pressing for a concrete five-year plan, essentially cementing donor pledges now, when the spirit of giving is strong.
He has also stated that Afghanistan's economy will have to be based on free trade. Will Afghanistan end up mired in the mountainous debt that plagues other developing countries? Dave Timms, spokesman for the London-based World Development Movement, a group working for poverty eradication, told the Weekly that Afghanistan, like other very poor countries, would certainly benefit from reduced tariffs when exporting to developed countries. "If Malloch Brown is saying that Afghanistan is going to need access to rich countries' markets, we would agree," Timms said.
But Timms warned against "simplistic assumptions of links between free trade and poverty reduction," citing recent studies that show trade liberalisation alone does not cause growth. "It is a myth that developing countries need more foreign direct investment, and that this will only occur with greater trade liberalisation," he said.
Planning for ambitious economic development and future free trade schemes at this juncture seems almost ludicrous as the country is still being subjected to US-led bombing and no central authority even exists. But if aid groups were as defeatist as political pundits, it is hard to imagine how anything might happen at all. As Malloch Brown said at the outset of the ASG meeting on 5 December, it is "a good day for Afghanistan." Zakhilwal is equally sanguine: "I believe in 10 years time, we ourselves can be a donor country, if we exploit our resources smartly," he said. Such steadfast optimism, if not an overvaluation, is at least cheering.
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