Big Bucks, Tough Talk at Afghan Aid Meeting
Jan. 18 -- After two decades of civil war and many years of drought, the words often used to describe Afghanistan are daunting.
Shattered, war-ravaged, heavily armed and mined, drought-prone, wretched and anarchic are just some of the terms used to describe the Central Asian nation.
And almost a month after an interim administration under the leadership of Hamid Karzai took office in the capital of Kabul, no one is mincing words about the state of the Afghan economy.
During a visit to the Afghan capital of Kabul on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called Afghanistan a "startup country" — a term experts understood to euphemistically mean it has to build itself from scratch.
In a recent report on the country's economy, the World Bank said Afghanistan "must now be considered the poorest, most miserable state in the world."
Estimates of the amount of money it would take to reconstruct the country vary, although they all run to billion dollar figures.
Afghanistan's interim administration has put the figure at $45 billion while the World Bank estimates it would take about $15-18 billion over the next decade to rebuild the nation.
But at immediate stake is a sum of about $5 billion to cover the first two years of Afghanistan's reconstruction projects. And it is with this goal in mind that representatives of about 60 countries are meeting in Tokyo From Jan. 21 to pledge aid to Afghanistan's interim government and set economic policy terms for the Karzai administration.
Big Bills, Big Donors, Big Mileage
The $5 billion figure was arrived at by the U.N. Development Program, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank over the past few months. Their estimate for the next five years rests at $10.2 billion and Karzai hopes the international community represented at the Tokyo conference will be generous in their aid disbursements.
All eyes are on Japan, the United States, the European Union and Saudi Arabia, countries that are jointly hosting the conference and are widely expected to shoulder the bulk of the bill.
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