Afghanistan's Lethal Squalor - $27B Needed, $13.4B Pledged, $3.9B On Hand

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"The winter weather death toll in Afghanistan has exposed the country's acute lack of infrastructure, writes journalist Ahmed Rashid in his latest guest column for the BBC News website.
In some eastern provinces ravenous wolves have been attacking equally hungry children.

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.

EDIT

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."

EDIT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4310863.stm