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OPINION: Afghanistan Needs More Security Forces
Monday, February 18, 2002
By Beth Day Romulo
The Manila Bulletin Online

The International Donors meeting in Tokyo, January 22nd and 23rd, to raise funds to restore Afghanistan, was a resounding success. $4.5 billion was pledged by 60 countries.

United Nations estimates suggest that it will take $15 billion over the next 10 years to convert the "wasteland” into a viable country. 1.8 billion is to be released this year - and none too soon. The appointed interim government entered Kabul to find many government offices destroyed, and no money in the national coffers. As they retreated, the Taliban broke open the vaults of the Central Bank and looted it. They left nothing. No money. No food except for international aid packages that have arrived. No schools open. Sanitation facilities and infrastructure in ruins. There was not even desks or typewriters, let alone computers, in the government offices still standing, and the phone service is so limited, that officials sent "runners” between offices. The interim leader, Hamid Kazai, pledges donors funds will be tightly guarded and audited to make sure it will "get to the people.” After 23 years of war, the young, who make up half the population, and are largely illiterate, are a "lost generation.” Yet, despite the deprivation and lack of food, Karzai told his Tokyo friends, "they come to me, not to ask for food. They ask for education.”

The international community showed its sympathy and commitment to the restoration of a civil government in Afghanistan, by pledges that exceeded expectations. "Never before has so much been raised so quickly,” said UNDP director Mark Malloch Brown.
(More: The Manila Bulletin Online News Source)
2002 © The Manila Bulletin Online.

Dan