Posted on 03/17/2003 9:35:37 PM PST by stilts
BRUSSELS -- Afghanistan called on international donors on Monday to maintain their commitment to rebuilding the war-shattered country or risk seeing it turn into a mafia drug state.
Afghan officials fear that a possible U.S.-led war against Iraq could make donors shift their focus from Afghanistan, with future aid for the country going instead toward helping rebuild Iraq.
"We will focus on reforms but we need your assistance in providing predictable finance," Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai told a meeting in Brussels of donors from 40 countries.
"The narco-mafia state will have the lowest indirect price tag ... but it will have the highest indirect costs," he added.
At the meeting, Afghan officials were seeking some $1 billion to help fill a gap in the country's development budget for this year.
Ahmadzai presented donors with Kabul's budget of $2.25 billion for the fiscal year that begins this Friday, including $1.7 billion to rebuild shattered infrastructure.
Afghanistan's budget for recurrent spending is $550 million, of which the government has said it would raise $200 million, double its revenue from last year. Donors have already pledged $116 million, leaving a gap of $234 million.
U.S. officials said Washington was committed to Afghanistan, where U.S. troops ousted the Taleban regime in late 2001 as part of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network, blamed for the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
"Today, the United States will be announcing our plan to provide $820 million for Afghanistan during our 2003 budget year," U.S. Under-Secretary of State Alan Larsson told Reuters.
He said the pledge went beyond what Washington had promised Kabul last year at an international donors conference. Afghan officials said the amount was two to three times higher than earlier pledges.
The government of President Hamid Karzai that took over after the Taleban needs the huge amount of aid because decades of war have left Afghanistan with almost no infrastructure.
Much of the country was destroyed or damaged during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, the civil war that followed and the subsequent hardline regime of the Taleban.
Money is also needed to rid the country of warlords whose private armies threaten the country's security and to fight increased poppy cultivation that has turned Afghanistan into the world's largest exporter of opium.
The World Bank has said Afghanistan received about $1.3 billion in international assistance over the past year but that less than half that money went to reconstruction, with the rest going to humanitarian relief.
So we spend billions making drugs expensive, then have to spend more billions countering the effects of high drug prices. Brilliant.
That must have been verbally, right? Otherwise you could show us where he said that. I understand.
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