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Black Market Currency

I could have told them this. The Financial Times reports, Afghan economy 'at risk of relying on drug trade'.

A United Nations body will warn this week that Afghanistan is in danger of reverting to an economy entirely dependent on the illegal drug trade and a "terrorist breeding ground" unless the international community significantly increases development funding to the war-torn country.

...Hamid Karzai, Afghan president, has announced that parliamentary and presidential elections, scheduled for June, will be postponed until September, a tacit acknowledgement that reconstruction efforts have stumbled.

The UNDP report notes Iraq is receiving "10 times as much development assistance with roughly the same size of population". Development inflows amount to $67 (?55, ?37) per person, compared with $248 in Bosnia Herzegovina and $256 in East Timor, according to the report.

The Afghanis will ask the western governments for 28 billion in aid at the upcoming conference in Berlin. They are likely to get 4 billion. However the west will pump in about 14 billion in "military costs". Where are the priorities here?

Sending guns instead of building bricks, will not help the Afghani people who are still living in the rubble without the basic infrastructures of civilized life.

Morer than half the population live in extreme poverty, and only Sierre Leone ranks below Afghanistan on the UNDP's human development index. Life expectancy is below 50.

In Badakshan, northern Afghanistan, a maternal mortality rate of 6,500 per 100,000 is the "highest ever recorded in any part of the world", the report says.

The reliance on poppy production for drugs has become part of ordinary people's "coping strategy", especially as only 37 per cent of poppy-producing households are poor, compared with 54 per cent of those not involved in poppy production.

Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld, insists that the Bush Team has not ignored the terrorist threat there.

"If one looks at what was done, we went to Afghanistan - we didn't go to Iraq," he told ABC News. "It certainly took away their training, their haven, and it certainly destroyed the Taliban and eliminated them from running the country."

I would feel more confident in that assessment if I didn't know our men are still dying there, fighting as late as this week at the Pakistan border trying to get Osama's top gun and that the Taliban and the Al Qaeda are regaining power and financing through the heroin trade.