A Dismal Report on Afghanistan.. Or Is It?!

New York Times paints dismal picture of Afghanistan, but there is far more to the story than the headline indicates. In fact, the headline is misleading in the extreme.

The 288-page report by the United Nations Development Program paints a mixed picture of the country's re-emergence since U.S. forces drove out the former ruling Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden in late 2001.

On the plus side, Afghanistan's economy is booming, growing at least 25 percent annually since then and expected to expand by at least 10 percent a year in the next decade. Some 4 million children have enrolled in school -- more than ever before -- and more than 3 million people forced from their homes have returned, most from Pakistan and Iran.

However, it still has the worst education system in the world, according to the U.N. calculations, which points out that nearly three-quarters of all adult Afghans are illiterate and few girls go to school at all in many provinces.

Moreover, most of the country's income is being mopped up by warlords with strong political and military connections, creating a dangerous gap between rich and poor and between the cities and the countryside. Half of all Afghans are poor, it said.

As a result, the average life expectancy for an Afghan is 44.5 years, 20 years less than in neighboring countries; one Afghan woman dies in pregnancy every 30 minutes and the country is the world leader in infant deaths caused by contaminated water.

``Our team found the overwhelming majority of people hold a sense of pessimism and fear that reconstruction is bypassing them,'' said Daud Saba, one of the report's authors.

The report was also critical of the U.S.-led military engagement in Afghanistan, saying it helped produce a climate of ``fear, intimidation, terror and lawlessness'' and neglected the longer-term threat to security posed by inequality and injustice.

It also described reconstruction projects sponsored by the U.S. military as ``inadequate and dangerous,'' echoing concern from some relief groups that they have blurred the lines between soldiers and civilians, and made aid workers into militant targets.

Still, it stressed the need for Afghanistan to develop its own national army and police -- two projects which the United States is trying to accelerate -- and proceed with a belated U.N. disarmament drive for factional militias.

The U.N. report also urged Karzai to back calls from human rights groups for a reconciliation process to address the crimes of the past.

Officials from Canada, which sponsored the new report, and the World Bank said donors needed to balance big-ticket infrastructure such as dams with projects providing jobs for the poorest.

Far from painting a dismal picture, things are actually far improved from where things were in 2001. The economy has grown faster than practically any other country on the planet during the same time period. Of course, the growth is coming from a dismal base level, but none of that growth and investment would have been possible had the US not acted.

The report almost reflexively takes potshots at the US reconstruction efforts as a way to find a job for the UN and other groups, but the fact is that some problems facing Afghanistan have existed for centuries (internecine violence and impoverished lawless areas).

Afghanistan was near or at the bottom in every category one can think of. Now, they've got a chance at something better. It is up to them to make the best of this opportunity.