12 April 2002
Afghanistan Reconstruction On Target, U.S. Official Says
(Says government operating and payrolls being met) (7800)
Progress in the reconstruction of Afghanistan is "on schedule" with a
government installed and functioning with a budget, payrolls being
met, schools opened and an international security force deployed, says
the U.S. State Department's coordinator for Afghanistan.
In an April 11 press briefing Ambassador James Dobbins said that roads
are being opened, particularly the road from Islamabad in Pakistan to
Kabul -- "Kabul's main external lifeline" -- and the road from Kabul
to Kandahar. He added that refugees are returning "in record numbers."
In the same briefing, U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) Administrator Andrew Natsios said that contracts have been
signed for 60 percent of the amount the Bush administration pledged
for USAID to spend on Afghanistan.
Natsios said USAID's current priorities in Afghanistan are to provide
food security, improve the health care system, establish a functional
school system and strengthen the managerial and technical capacity of
the interim government.
He said the agency is concentrating on restoring Afghanistan's
agricultural system to where it was before 1978 "when this terrible
tragedy began" and the country was a food exporter. He added that the
agency will distribute 24,000 tons of wheat seed this year for both
spring and fall plantings and another 24,000 tons next year. Over two
years, he said, the wheat grown will provide one-third of the
country's food requirements. He added that early indications are there
is adequate soil moisture in the country's wheat growing regions.
Natsios said the agency is providing training to 4,000 teachers in the
country, 50 percent of them women. "It's a deliberate attempt to get
women back in a visible way, systematically across the country, in
front of Afghan society," he said.
He added that USAID grants to the United Nations Children's Fund
(UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) recently provided for
two million child immunizations against measles, "a principal problem
we face in food-insecure times."
USAID also is spending $7 million to repair bridges, houses, schools,
hospitals and water systems, Natsios said. He said the agency hopes to
expand Radio Kabul broadcasts to the entire country by May 1. "There
is extraordinarily high listenership in Afghanistan of radios, which
was suppressed during the Taliban time," he said, adding that the
agency will fund the training of 500 broadcast and print journalists.
Following is the transcript of the press briefing:
(begin transcript)
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
ANDREW S. NATSIOS, ADMINISTRATOR FOR THE U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL
DEVELOPMENT (USAID) AND AMBASSADOR JAMES F. DOBBINS, COORDINATOR FOR
AFGHANISTAN, ON THE PROGRESS OF RECONSTRUCTION IN AFGHANISTAN
April 11, 2002
Washington, D.C.
DOBBINS: Thank you. It is four months since the Bonn meeting
concluded, and the process that was set in train there is continuing
quite on schedule. A government has been installed and has begun to
function. Donors have begun -- have assembled, made pledges. A budget
for that government has been established and funded. An International
Security Assistance Force has been deployed. Payrolls are being met.
Police and other Afghan officials are being paid. Schools are opened.
Reconstruction has begun, to include the beginning of a new national
police and military. And Andrew will go into more detail on the
reconstruction in general. Roads are being opened. The UN, for
instance, recently declared that the road from Islamabad to Kabul,
Kabul's main external lifeline, and the road from Kabul to Kandahar,
were open to unaccompanied UN-employee traffic. In other words, UN
employees were free, and it was considered safe for them, to travel
unaccompanied on those roads.
Refugees are returning in record numbers. And indeed, the former King
of Afghanistan will return for the first time in 30 years to
Afghanistan next week.
Perhaps most importantly, the preparations for what's called the
emergency Loya Jirga -- what we would call a constituent assembly --
are going forward. The commission, which has the responsibility of
convening this meeting, has been formed. It has put in place a process
of indirect elections, which will yield the delegates to the Loya
Jirga, who will meet in Kabul in June. There's every reason to believe
that this meeting will take place on schedule, that it will agree to
put in place a new transitional administration which will succeed the
interim administration formed in Bonn, that it will set up a
constitutional commission, which will in turn begin drafting a full
constitution for Afghanistan.
So I think that one can say, by and large, so far so good. The
question, of course, is how long this can continue, and whether it
will continue. And there are threats to the continuation of the Bonn
process. One comes from Taliban and al-Qaida, and we have seen
evidence of that most recently, for instance, in the car bomb that
appears to have been targeted at the interim administration's defense
minister.
There is also the threat of ethnic and regional tensions. Now, the
U.S. and the coalition will certainly help the Afghans deal with the
first threat -- that is, the threat from the Taliban and al-Qaida --
and will continue to prosecute the war against terrorism. We will also
use our influence to help the Afghans deal with the second threat --
that is, to tamp down and discourage dissident centrifugal forces in
the country.
My own assessment, having now dealt with Afghanistan since November,
is that the dominant sentiment within the country is for
consolidation, not fragmentation. Indeed, I think given the diverse
nature of the coalition which is embodied in the interim
administration, it's working better -- they are working together
better than anyone would reasonably have expected when that coalition
was put together in Bonn.
Indeed, my personal sort of basis for comparison was the last several
years dealing with the Balkans, and I can recall that in Bosnia, five
years after the Dayton Accords, many of the central institutions were
still not functioning because of ethnic tensions and divisions. And in
Kosovo, six months after they had a very successful general election,
it took them six months to agree on the name for a prime minister.
So I think against the background of other fragmented societies, the
ability of the different factions that are represented in the interim
administration to work together, is put in some perspective.
Afghanistan has been torn apart, primarily by its neighbors, not by
inherent tensions. And if its neighbors continue to push the Afghans
together, as they have been by and large in the last six months, I
think that the process of consolidation in Afghanistan will continue.
And therefore, I believe the top priority for American diplomacy in
the region has to continue to be creating an international context in
which the various factions, regions, leaders, in Afghanistan are
getting compatible signals from their external partners -- and they
all have external partners to whom they have traditionally depended to
one degree or another, which continues to push them together rather
than apart. And this is a priority for US diplomacy, and it's one that
we are giving our attention.
I will put aside answering questions until Andrew has had a chance to
go over the reconstruction, and then we'll both be available to you.
NATSIOS: Thank you very much. I'm Andrew Natsios, the Administrator of
USAID. It's been ten weeks since the donors conference in Tokyo, and
we are here to report to you on the progress of the reconstruction of
the country. And I am handling the development side of it from a
technical perspective.
The pledge -- USAID's part of the pledge -- was $168 million. To date,
we have obligated 60 percent of that money. That's $107 million. What
does "obligate" mean? It means we have signed the contracts. The grant
and the money have moved.
We have also been tracking the spending rates of the NGOs
[nongovernmental organizations], the private contracting companies,
the UN agencies, the International Organization for Migration, the
other organizations through which we are doing our work, to see
whether they are spending at a normal rate, because most of these
grants or contracts are over a 12-month period. And they are spending,
in fact, at an accelerated rate. So from their own records, they are,
in fact, spending the money in the country to get this work done.
We have four objectives in the reconstruction program at this stage.
The first is to restore food security. There are two elements to food
security: one is to increase family income so people who do not grow
food can buy it on the markets; the second part of food security is to
increase the production of food so people can grow their own food, or
so they won't have to get relief food from us from a humanitarian
perspective, or to increase imports into those areas of the countries
where that's the most efficient way of feeding people.
In food security, you also need health, but the second focus of our
program is to get the schools open, kids back in school, the teachers
teaching, and the educational system functioning -- not just for
education purposes, because we want the kids off the streets.
Particularly, teenagers are more likely to be recruited into the
militias if they are not doing something constructive, not in school.
They also are much likelier to get blown up with land mines and that
sort of problem. Until the landmines are cleared, the more kids in
school, the less likely they are to be exposed to dangers. So the
healthiest thing for the kids is to be in the school.
We are also, as a third objective -- I'm sorry, second objective is to
improve the health conditions of the country. Third objective is to
stabilize the country through the integration of ex-combatants through
job creation and anti-narcotics and alternate development program, and
infrastructure repair.
And finally, we are working to strengthen the managerial and technical
capacity of the interim authority in key institutions within Afghan
society. Let me go through some of these areas.
First, the primary focus of the AID program, a large part of our
resources, are going to reconstruct the agricultural system. There are
four economies in Afghanistan that have been functioning the last 20
years. The first is the war economy. The war economy involves black
market activity, it involves the sale of weapons, and people working
for militias. It involves all those activities that are connected to
violence.
The second of the economies is the poppy economy, the opium economy,
which in the 1990s in particular dramatically increased in size by
deliberate policy of the Taliban. Seventy percent of the opium
production in the world is from Afghanistan.
The third economy is the NGO/UN agency/international organization
economy. It's an aid agency economy. We need it, but it is artificial
and it is temporary.
The only legitimate economy of Afghanistan is the agricultural
economy. It's what sustained the country before 1978, when this
terrible tragedy began. Our job is to get that economy back into its
former condition as soon as possible -- not only so they can feed
themselves, but also they were the breadbasket in terms of fruit and
vegetables, of nuts, of animals, in the whole region. It was a very
productive agricultural system at one point. They were easily feeding
themselves, and exporting a lot of dried fruit, for example. We need
to restore that system.
What we're doing to implement the agricultural program is first, over
two years we will distribute 48,000 tons of seed, mostly wheat seed --
an improved variety resistant to drought -- to new -- it's a variety
that has been grown in some parts of Afghanistan, but the seed is gone
in Afghanistan. We searched for this seed from Turkey all the way to
Bangladesh.
We've distributed 7,000 tons. We finished distributing the first
tranche of this 7,000 tons this past week. We will do another 17,000
for the fall planting in November. It will produce, when it's fully
functional -- when the entire 48,000 tons is distributed over a
two-year cycle -- 772,000 metric tons of food, which is a quarter --
I'm sorry, is a third of the food requirements of the country; it's an
enormous amount of food.
And this is the incremental increase. This is not the amount of food
you produce from that tonnage. It's the increase because of the
improved variety of the seed. The seed will produce between 80 and 100
percent more wheat than the seed that they're using now. Actually,
they're buying food on the markets and planting the wheat seed they
would normally -- the wheat seed they're using is the wheat they would
buy to make flour out of on the markets, which is not what you plant
in the ground normally.
And we do have a tape for just two minutes, if we could run this, of
the distribution of this wheat seed. We've got a B-roll that we're
passing out to people.
(A video was played.)
MR. NATSIOS: This is being distributed with the Ministry of
Agriculture through the NGO networks in the wheat-growing areas of the
country. The reason the seed is planted pink is we don't want people
confusing wheat to eat from wheat that you plant. And we always do
this in all famines.
The other thing that's happened is the normal wheat seed stocks of the
country have been entirely eaten from four years of drought. If people
don't think they'll make it to the next crop, they eat their seed, and
that's happened almost completely. All the improved varieties of seed
we put in in the '70s are gone now because of this terrible drought
that's lasted four years now.
The Minister of Agriculture actually planted some of the seed at a
press event last week in one of the farming regions, and we'll give
you that tape.
This will stimulate local markets. It will get people back to their
farms doing something constructive. It will draw employment out of the
militias and out of the poppy-growing areas to something that we think
is constructive. We're also using a very unique kind of technology
that we've used in the Sahel very successfully, and I'll show you a
picture of it here. We just had a lecture from NOAA [U.S. National
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration] in the federal
government that we work with on producing satellite photographs of the
agricultural regions of the country to determine whether there's
sufficient moisture in the soil so that we can focus the seed on the
areas with the most water, because there is a drought; we're not sure
there's going to be a great rain.
And so what we've done is by mapping the amount of moisture in the
ground, we've directed the seed, through the NGO consortiums as we get
more data in, to those areas. Now, we just got this data in, and
that's where the current tranches of seed are going. But by the fall,
we will know more clearly the best regions.
So you can see -- let me use this map here. This is rain-fed
agriculture, not the irrigated agriculture. The irrigated agriculture
systems are primarily for vineyards and orchards and what we call
truck farming. The rain-fed agriculture is used for wheat, and that's
what we're focusing our attention on here.
The second initiative that we are reporting on today is the education
initiatives. We printed approximately 10 million textbooks. Half of
them have already been printed now; the rest are being produced
literally as we speak. And the half that we produce, about 5 million
textbooks were distributed on March -- by March 23rd, and the rest
will be distributed to secondary schools as we speak, a little later.
There are 20 teams of five teacher-trainer groups conducting four-week
training sessions for 4,000 teachers across the country. Fifty percent
of the trainers are women, and 50 percent of the teachers receiving
the training are women. It's a deliberate attempt to get women back in
a visible way, systematically across the country, in front of Afghan
society, particularly Afghan children.
Nine months of food-for-work coupons have been passed out to the
30,000 teachers who are in the school systems of Afghanistan. So they
have a salary; that is, part of their salary is this food
distribution, which we are using U.S. Government food being
distributed through the World Food Program to provide.
There is also a six-month food-for-work project going on for the rest
of the bureaucracy, the other people who work for the Afghan interim
authority and the ministries -- and the regional ministries as well.
The next part of our program is the health program. We have just
signed a $5 million, six-month quick-impact initiative to rapidly
expand basic health services, working with the Ministry of Health to
reduce infant mortality, child mortality, and women's maternal
mortality. Women who are pregnant have among the highest rates in the
world, I think with Sierra Leone it's the highest death rate in the
world for women. All of this is being done through the Ministry of
Health, and we're going to train a very large work force of health
workers, supply them with the drugs, and help repair the clinics
across the country that the Ministry of Health will be running to help
us get these death rates down.
We have also made grants to UNICEF and WHO to conduct, which is now
complete, a 2 million child immunization program against measles,
which is a principal problem that we face in food-insecure times.
We are running a $7 million infrastructure project to repair 27
medium- and small-scale projects. They are roads, they are bridges,
there's housing repair, school repair, hospital repair, and water
system improvements.
We also gave a grant to open the Salang Tunnel, which is the principal
route between the southern part of the country through the Hazar jah,
very high mountains, into the northern part of the country. It's a
very important part of the commercial trading system. And we have got
grants out to repair the road system along the Afghan-Turkmenistan
border as well. And there will be other projects that will be signed.
These are the ones that have been done in the last ten weeks.
One last thing is -- I think it's very important for the people of
Afghanistan to hear what the interim authority is doing, what's going
on. It's a radio culture; there is extraordinarily high listenership
in Afghanistan of radios, which was suppressed during the Taliban
time. We hope by May 1st to have the Radio Kabul station up and
running to broadcast to the entire country. Now it broadcasts within
50 kilometers of Kabul; they cannot reach the whole country. By May
1st, we believe they will be able to reach the whole country under our
plan. We're repairing a college, a school for training Afghan
reporters; five hundred reporters will be trained in that institute to
provide reporters both for print and radio stations across the
country. And that will be completed during May at some point. We hope
to broadcast, in fact, the Loya Jirga, or parts of the conference.
QUESTION: Jim, not long ago there were lots of people, including some
in this building, who were talking about the need for 25,000 members
of the ISAF [UN International Security Assistance Force] force to be
deployed not only in Kabul but throughout the country. And I believe
Mr. Karzai was in favor of this. And I know there are plans afoot to
train the Afghan army, but why did the idea of having this expanded
force disappear so quickly? And are conditions secure enough so that
those additional troops are not necessary?
DOBBINS: The issue of security in the countryside, or in the other
metropolitan areas, was discussed at some length in the administration
and with allies and with the Afghans, and it was recognized there were
several types of threats. I mentioned a couple of them today. One is
the threat from Taliban and al-Qaida, and the other is the threat of
conflict among regional commanders who come into competition with each
other in carrying out their responsibilities for establishing security
in their respective regions.
The first of those, it was determined that there was a clear
responsibility for the United States and for the coalition to deal
with. In the second, the alternatives looked at were either bringing
in an international force and conducting a more or less traditional
peacekeeping type operation, which was a fairly manpower-intensive and
resource-intensive way of dealing with it, or using the US presence in
these regions, the special forces and the civil affairs teams, to
exercise influence with the regional commanders to ensure that they
conducted their security responsibilities in ways that didn't bring
them into conflict with each other.
It was determined that that was likely to be more productive, less
resource-intensive, and in the context in which U.S. war-conducting
military activities throughout much of the country would build on the
presence of small US teams in virtually all the metropolitan centers.
And so that was the option which was chosen.
Q: Ambassador Dobbins, you mentioned -- I seem to remember some weeks,
months ago, people in the Administration were complaining about
Iranian influence in parts of Afghanistan, yet I notice that you
specifically said that most of the neighbors seem to be working for
consolidation, rather than fragmentation. I wondered if you could give
us an update on the level of Iranian influence in particularly western
Afghanistan and its direction -- I mean, what Iran appears -- what its
objectives appear to be in those regions.
DOBBINS: Well, I think that there continues to be a certain
ambivalence in Iranian policy toward Afghanistan, as there is more
generally, and you can pick your strand. I think this can be explained
one of two ways, and again, you can pick either explanation you want.
One is that the Iranians are indeed internally divided and conducting
sort of two competing policies; the other is that they have a single
policy and that the policy is, on balance, support for the central
administration, but that they're also hedging their bets by
maintaining contacts and building support among factions and leaders
and personalities who would be important if the central administration
failed, if Afghanistan again disintegrated.
So whether it is a hedging their bet or indeed a function of a broader
conflict within their government over the course of action, I can't
answer. The Iranians do participate in most of the large international
discussions on Afghanistan. They continue in most forums to say and
behave very constructively, and to express their support for Karzai,
for the central administration. He visited Tehran. He met with the
leadership there, both the religious leadership and the civil
leadership; was very well received, was very pleased with his visit.
But there continue to be reports of contacts by elements of the
Iranian establishment with other dissident elements within
Afghanistan, and the possibility that some of them are working at
cross-purposes with the policies that are being espoused in these more
-- in these international forums.
Q: Can I just follow up on that? Can I deduce from what you say that
those concerns which were expressed so publicly some weeks, months,
ago have, to some extent, been diminished in the intervening period?
DOBBINS: I don't know that they've gone up or down, because I think
what I've described has been fairly continuous, at least since
September 11th, in terms of Iranian policy toward Afghanistan. The
core of America's unhappiness with Iranian policy is not Afghanistan;
it's the Middle East, an area which I'm not competent to speak on, and
won't try.
On Afghanistan, I think both the President and [National Security
Adviser] Condi Rice have said that the Iranians have made some
positive contributions, and they've also done some things that are
unhelpful. So there has been this ambivalence or two-track policy all
the way along.
So I think -- what I've said was not intended to suggest that the
situation has changed since, for instance, the Bonn meeting.
Q: Mr. Natsios, a few months ago you had expressed a lot of concern
that the child mortality rate in Afghanistan might spike if there was
continued violence in the country. Obviously things seem to be more
stable at this point. Have you passed the crisis point? Do you still
have that acute concern? Or do you think things are now heading the
right way, you're not as worried about that?
NATSIOS: Well, we have to first recognize that one of the highest
child mortality rates prior to last year was Afghanistan. Twenty-five
percent of the kids die before they're five, in one of the national
surveys that was done a year or two ago. So that's already very high,
and that was in normal times. When you add in famine conditions on top
of that, that's what the fear was, that there would be a dramatic
increase and maybe half the kids would die.
That has not happened. We have given a grant to the Centers for
Disease Control, that we work with on many of these emergencies, to
set up a tracking system to tell us what the rates are at sentinel
sites across the country, to make sure that there are no spikes. It
does appear from the reporting we're getting that while there are
pockets of malnutrition that we're finding in remote areas,
particularly in the Hazar jah way up in the mountains, that are
impassable by road -- there are two helicopters that we helped pay for
WFP [World Food Program] to search out these remote areas -- for the
most part, food is getting through, and the mortality rates have not
gone up.
Q: Mr. Natsios, can you say what the situation is with the drought?
You said it's too early to say for this year exactly what the
situation will be. But when do the rains normally come? When will you
have some idea about this?
NATSIOS: Well, the country is huge, and it's got a number of different
agro-climactic regions. For example, this area down here is almost all
desert. It's an overt desert, and this is basically nomadic herders
with camels and that kind of thing, the only animals that can survive
in that area.
The wheat-growing area of the country is this area up here. It's the
northern part of the country. We understand, just from these maps and
from the reports we've gotten from the satellite imagery, that there
were moderately good rains in that area. But that is only preliminary
estimates of that.
Sue Lautze, we sent from the Feinstein Famine Center. She's in
microclimate; she used to work for us in AID and for me in the first
administration. She's been there for -- I think she's in her third
month now of doing a national survey of conditions on the ground. Her
report was severe drought conditions in this area and this area, but
they are not the wheat-growing areas of the country.
This area is where she is right now, with a team of workers doing
interviews. She did 700 interviews in this other area to tell us what
was going on in terms of how people were surviving under these
conditions and what the coping capacity was, what the economy looked
like. She's the one that said, you know, you don't understand, there
are four economies. I just described to you, that's her description of
what they found, how the war all these years had distorted the country
from what it used to be before '78.
So the rains, we believe, are coming just in the area where the wheat
is growing. The rest of the country is facing severe drought. There
are two principal crops. One is planted in the fall, it's the winter
wheat crop. It's planted in October/November. And then there's another
crop planted in the spring.
But 90 percent, 80 percent of the wheat that grows in the country is
planted in the fall. That crop last fall was poor. But there has been
rain, we understand now, in these wheat-growing areas. But again, it's
preliminary information.
Q: And could you talk about the opium economy? Has that really come
back? Has growing in that really increased again?
NATSIOS: Yes, it has.
Q: And is that in the areas where the drought is more severe? Or have
they planted mainly in the north?
NATSIOS: We actually have another map of the poppy-growing areas. It's
very small areas, actually, and a lot of it is in this valley down
here, the Helmand Valley. That's one of the principal poppy-growing
areas. And there's another area, I think, up in here, in this area
here. The crop has come back. It has been planted.
The British have put money into a fund to pay farmers to destroy the
crop. Our job in AID, in the U.S. Government, is to, one, create
alternate employment to draw people who would normally be used to
harvest the opium away from that crop toward other work that's more
rewarding. I don't mean just morally more rewarding, but in terms of
being paid more money.
Poppies are very labor-intensive to harvest. You have to break open,
slice open, each of the stocks and open it up, and then there's a
white tarry mixture that comes out that they use, and then they
process. It's very time-consuming and very labor-intensive. They have
to have a lot of people to do it, and so one of our roles is to draw
people away from that in terms of the farm workers they would use
toward other projects. And we have those projects in place now.
We are also trying to find other ways for farmers to survive, because
the other reason they do this is because they can't grow wheat. Many
of them don't have wheat seed left, their animals have died, so we're
trying to get the legitimate agricultural economy functioning again so
they will not go to opium or poppies as an alternate crop.
Q: But would these areas be areas that would primarily be more of a --
you talked about fruit trees and orchards. Would this be -- and the
wheat being produced mainly in the northern part of the country --
NATSIOS: There's poppy-growing areas all along here, in the north too.
Q: But would the areas that you referred to, where the poppy planting
had increased, would they be areas where other kinds of crops, orchard
crops or fruits, be grown primarily in those areas?
NATSIOS: It's mixed. Okay? Opium, or poppies, do not require much
water, tragically. They are more drought-resistant than the other
crop, unfortunately. We wish it were the opposite. So one of the
reasons they plant it is because of the level of the drought.
The other problem we're having is that 50 percent of the irrigation
system of the country was destroyed during the Soviet period of the
civil war, and it was never restored. We have been doing a lot of
investing of our money into the restoration of the irrigation system
so that the vineyards -- huge vineyards, just miles and miles of them;
they were one of the biggest raisin exporters in the region -- and the
orchards can be restored.
When I was in the Shamali Plain, which is one of the richest areas,
north of Kabul, I went through these areas, and everything looked dead
to me. It hadn't rained in years, but it was irrelevant because the
entire area was irrigated from the runoff from the snows in the
mountains which are on either side of the valley. And the farmers told
me that the roots were still alive for the trees and for the
vineyards, and it would take several years for them to come back
sufficiently that they would produce a crop that they could market.
But this was high-value stuff. These were dried apricots. They were
pomegranate trees. They were apples. The best apples I've ever seen
outside the United States were from -- and I bought them in Kabul, and
I said, "Are these from California?" They said, no, this is an AID
project from 25 years ago that is actually still functioning. In one
area the irrigation system was still functioning, and these apple
orchards we had planted with American apples 25 years ago were still
functioning.
Q: Can I ask about the administration response to Mr. Karzai's
criticisms he made yesterday that the international aid effort is
uncoordinated and that it's being tied up too much bureaucracy and red
tape?
NATSIOS: I think Chairman Karzai, who I've come to know and respect,
was making a general comment because there was criticism of him, and
he was sort of responding in turn. We have been working very carefully
with all of the ministers in all of the projects. Jim Kunder, the
Mission Director, spends much of his day working with the ministers on
the plans. We don't do anything unless they've approved it. The
ministers have to work on it, and a new authority has been set up in
the government that is headed by Ashraf Ghani, who is the chief
reconstruction advisor to the Chairman. We work with him; he was at
the World Bank for 20 years, and an exceptionally able and gifted
administrator. So I think part of it is the natural frustration that
comes when these projects are started.
I might also just emphasize, ten weeks is a very short period of time.
AID has never moved this much money in this short a period of time in
a reconstruction effort in the last 40 years. It's very unusual. It
usually takes a long time to set up the infrastructure, to bring the
equipment in, to have the staff come in, to set up the housing units
and to staff people, to have places for people to live. And it usually
takes six months to a year to start up.
The President and the Secretary of State told me and told those of us
in the State Department working on this -- Gene Dewey and PRM [State
Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration] -- that they
wanted this thing set up now, they wanted it moved quickly. We've done
what the President and the Secretary told us to do. But it may not be
fast enough for Chairman Karzai.
I think there was sort of an increase in expectations as a result of
Tokyo. This normally happens in these reconstruction efforts, where
people come back and say we just got pledged $4.5 billion [$4,500
million] -- and some people who haven't been through this before
expect a check for that much money to all of a sudden appear in the
national treasury.
Of course, there is no national treasury. There's no banking system,
there's no place -- the ministries are bombed out. We're just now
beginning to repair some of the buildings. So there's a capacity
issue.
The other problem is it's difficult for the ministers to get out,
because only in the last few weeks has security improved enough in
some areas for us to get the ministers, help the ministers get out to
some of these areas to see what's going on. A lot of stuff that's
going on they physically cannot see; for example, when you do
training, I mean, where's the evidence of it?
Some people think, in the government, that reconstruction is only
buildings and roads. And those need to be done, but we need the
textbooks too, and we need the seed distributed, and you don't see the
seed. Once the seed is distributed, you don't see it anymore, it's in
the ground. It's planted.
So I think it's a matter of the visual impression of reconstruction
that affects people, and it's the sort of down that takes place
whenever there's a pledging conference in these circumstances. But
we're working at as rapid a rate as we possibly can.
Q: Is the United States, is AID, coordinating efforts with European,
Japanese donors? And how? And do all those donors share the same goals
in making the donations?
NATSIOS: There is an established plan that was put together by the
World Bank and UNDP. An assessment has been done in each sector. We
are working with the international system to do the assessments; we
have our people on those teams.
The Food and Agriculture Organization, for example, and Encarta, which
is a subsidiary of the World Bank, are the two groups that helped us
design the agriculture initiative. We are not doing this alone.
I met with my friend Mrs. Ogata, who is in charge of this effort for
the Japanese Government. They're one of our largest donors to this. We
went over the media part of this. And she said, well, we're doing the
television station, you're doing the radio station, and we're both
contributing, apparently, the reconstruction of this school for
journalists. They paid for the building materials -- I'm sorry, the
school materials: the blackboards, the chalk, the pencils, the paper
for the schools. We paid for the books. They're helping build some of
the schools, we're helping repair other schools.
So there is coordination going on between donors. And the agreement
has been that there's one group of coordination needed at the
international level, at my level and Jim Dobbins' level -- you know,
sort of at a senior level -- and then the operational decisions, those
are coordinated in Kabul with the donor coordination group, that is
working through a guy named Ian Fisher, who is the deputy -- Nigel
Fisher, excuse me. Nigel Fisher is the deputy to Brahimi, and he is in
charge of the reconstruction effort. He's a former UNICEF guy; in
fact, he used to be with -- I think it was Save the Children UK before
that. So he knows the NGO community, and he knows the UN system, and
he knows Afghanistan. And he's in charge of sort of the overall plan
that we're all fitting into.
Q: The earlier question referred to remarks by Karzai to a donors
meeting in Afghanistan that was taking place yesterday, which was a
follow-up meeting to Tokyo, to specifically what you were talking
about.
To go back to his criticisms of yesterday, he specifically complained
that -- he made what he called -- you mentioned buildings and roads,
but he talked about major reconstruction projects, and said nobody
takes any interest in these. Is that because you have a different
perception of what the priorities are? Or is it just that you haven't
yet got round to those kind of projects?
NATSIOS: Those projects typically take years to build. One bridge, for
example, we're doing a review -- I'm not sure we're going to do it. We
do not tend to do many infrastructure projects generally anywhere
anymore. We leave that to the banks, the international financial banks
-- the World Bank, the Asia Development Bank, the Islamic Bank -- will
fund most of these large projects.
One bridge might cost $50 [million] or $60 million. That's a lot of
money for an aid agency bilaterally to be spending on one bridge. So
the large projects -- big highways, big bridges, airports, ports --
are done by the development banks. They're a little slower in terms of
getting started on some of this stuff than some of the bilateral
agencies are.
So we tend to do the smaller roads, the roads that go into villages,
into markets, and the bigger stuff is done by the banks. And Ashraf
Ghani knows that, because he used to work at the World Bank. And that
is sort of a general agreement that's been made among the donors and
the international system.
We are working with them now on that. But he has told us, when I met
with him in January, I flew on the plane with him from Kabul back to
Washington, when he appeared with the President at the State of the
Union. We had long discussions on the plane. And he knows agriculture
is the base of the economy, you've got to restore the agricultural
system. So he didn't make any comments about that, because I think
he's happy with how that's working.
Q: You mentioned books, and the U.S. is helping to provide books.
Where do these books come from, and what happened to the books that
the Taliban used to use?
NATSIOS: We use a template that had been developed over the years by
the University of Nebraska. Now, there's controversy over that, and we
realize that. We had ten Afghan university professors, most of whom
were educated in the United States, and journalists -- four women and
six men. They read the 196 textbooks. Half of the textbooks are in
Dari, half of them are in Pashto. They go from grades one through 12.
And we had them read them independently four times, just to make sure
we weren't making any mistakes.
They took all diagrams or pictures of anything that was related to a
weapon -- Kalashnikovs were taken out and pomegranates were put in,
okay? You know, they count, to teach them counting? They had weapons
before. There are no weapons anywhere in this. In fact, the Ministry
of Education was quite adamant, so was Chairman Karzai: no weapons, no
violence, anywhere in any of those texts. So they went through and
took all that out.
Anything disrespectful of women, the women went through themselves,
Afghan women, and said this is what we want out. All women's pictures
had been taken out by Taliban or scratched out of the books. The
pictures have been put back in again, at the instruction of the
Minister of Education.
So it's all been scrubbed through, then all of that was inputted into
the texts and then printed in Peshawar at printing presses. These are
basic texts. When we have more time, we will do a thorough curriculum
review with UNICEF. We've already made the arrangements. The Japanese
and we are going to pay for it. Already made those arrangements. We're
working on the follow-on curriculum that will be used next year, the
year after. We wanted to get the schools open now for the public
safety reasons that I mentioned earlier, and to get employment going
with those teachers.
Q: You mentioned that you would be finding jobs for former opium
farmers at higher pay. I'm wondering what pays better than opium
collection.
And does any amount of the aid have strings attached to it as far as
government collaboration with the elimination of poppy plantations?
NATSIOS: We have not had to do that because the government has been
remarkably cooperative in this; in fact, so much so that there has
been demonstrations on it recently, as you may have seen in the
reporting. So the government is being very cooperative on this.
In terms of other employment, the farmers are not the ones that make
the huge profits in opium. Opium -- there's already an oversupply of
opium being stored in neighboring countries anyway, so the price is
not high right now -- because of the supply being high in the
neighboring countries.
Karzai told me that a lot of the micro-finance you would need to plant
the opium crop was not being provided by the dealers, the big dealers
who make all the profits, because they were not sure what the donor
governments were going to do. They were afraid it was a bad investment
of their money to loan money to farmers to do the inputs for the opium
crop. So it's not as big as it could have been if all those loans had
been made.
This is a matter of economics. The value of the dried fruit crops that
were exported, and vegetables, by Afghanistan to neighboring countries
is very valuable. It's not low-priced commodities. They're high-priced
commodities. And once we get those systems back online -- when I say
systems, I mean the vineyards and the orchards -- it will help supply
a very high level of income for those families.
The villages I visited in the Shamali Plain were not poor areas. They
were completely destroyed by the Taliban, because this was a Tajik
area, but these were prosperous villages because of the nature of the
agriculture there. So it's kind of sad to see what's been done. The
Helmand Valley, as an irrigated agricultural system, was very, very
productive before all this fighting took place, and we hope to restore
it there so people can go back and do what they did before, which is
to export these crops.
DOBBINS: Let me just clarify the distinction between what the British
are funding and what the U.S. is funding in terms of eradication. The
British are providing funds to the Afghan interim administration to
compensate farmers, or to pay them to eradicate their poppy. And they
are paying them at 500-and-some dollars a hectare, which is slightly
more than they would make if they had planted grain, but less than
they would make if they harvested the poppies. And the sum there is
something like $60 million potentially, if they were successful in
eradicating most of the areas.
The U.S. has provided $11.5 million, which is designed, as Andrew
said, not to compensate farmers but to soak up basically itinerant
labor that is necessary to help the farmers harvest, and to provide
alternate activities for that labor, so it will be more difficult for
them to surge their labor requirements at the peak moment.
Q: (Inaudible) any idea of the amount that has indeed been planted,
poppies? I don't know how you would measure that, I don't know whether
it would be in hectares or --
DOBBINS: I don't have the figure at my finger. I could probably get
the number of hectares that people estimate may be planted. I'll try
to get that for you.
Q: And whether that's a large amount? I mean, 50 percent of prewar, or
-- I mean, some way to be able to judge how much you think --
NATSIOS: There was a UN study that was done on this. I just don't
remember the data.
(end transcript)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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