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.
With no roads or other communications it has taken more
than a month for aid workers or Western military units
to reach some snowbound villages in western and north-eastern
Afghanistan, where the majority of deaths have occurred.
Afghans are still paying with their lives for the failure
of the international community to fulfil its many promises
to help rebuild the country.
Flood warning
There has been no lack of response to the foul weather
affecting 14 of the country's 34 provinces.
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. Now, in the first week of March, the World
Food Programme has warned of unprecedented floods as the
snow melts in the spring.
Nearly three and half years after the war that defeated
the Taleban and despite the remarkable political progress
Afghanistan has made, the lack of infrastructure continues
to haunt this country.
New roads, power stations, water supplies and investment
in agriculture which the majoritOnly one section - Kabul
to Kandahar - of the national highway programme has been
completed.
No new power station has been built and only an estimated
6% of Afghans receive any regular electricity.
The lack of clean drinking water, especially after six
years of drought, causes disease and early death.
What else has been done to rebuild the infrastructure
has been patchwork at best - a generator here, a water
tap there or a bulldozer flattening a dirt track road.
The Kam Air crash last month that killed 104 passengers
and crew on a flight from Herat to Kabul was only partially
a result of bad weather. Kabul airport has no radar and
there is no up-to-standard modern airport in the country,
even though thousands of Western military aircraft safely
land at their military bases in Afghanistan every year.
Afghanistan needs new airports as much as it needs tarred
roads.
Pledges
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.
'Sense of pessimism'
In the meantime the lack of investment in Afghan agriculture
has led to farmers growing opium poppies, which has led
to drugs generating as much as $6.8bn in income between
2002 and 2004.
Drugs now account for 60% of the economy, but you cannot
blame the farmers when they have nothing else to turn
to in order to feed their families. ''Our team found the
overwhelming majority of people hold a sense of pessimism
and fear that reconstruction is bypassing them,'' says
Daud Saba, one of the authors of a new UN Development
Programme (UNDP) report on Afghanistan.
The report ranks the country 173 out of 178 countries
in development indices. There has been rapid progress
in many fields such as health and education and five million
children have gone back to school.
Yet the UNDP report states Afghanistan still has ''the
worst education system in the world'' and it is the world
leader in infant deaths, while one woman dies in pregnancy
every 30 minutes. Life expectancy for Afghans is still
only 44 years - that is 20 years less than any of its
neighbours.
Nothing can restore Afghanistan's political unity, social
viability and provide self-sustaining economic development
until it has acquired at least that minimum basic infrastructure
that was present in 1979 before the Soviet invasion. Foreign
donors need to take up whole projects like building new
power stations and roads, cutting through their own and
the Afghan government's red tape and building in a hurry.
They need to put their money where their mouth is, stop
promising reconstruction and actually start delivering
on it. Without this a rain or snowstorm - normal events
for a people who have lived with extremes of weather for
centuries - will continue to extract the lives of Afghan
children and feed hungry wolves.
