Afghanistan Doomed?
Maybe not.

Read Ann Marlowe's piece in the the New York Post about how Afghanistan may be doing better than anybody in the media gives it credit for:

In a June 27 Daily Telegraph piece on the "Afghan crisis," Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote that "people are being killed at a rate not seen since the 2001 American-led invasion." The Taliban are returning, he continues, while riots in the capital show the failure of economic development.

And the "failure of economic development" is that . . . some people are getting rich. As Rashid himself reported in the Herald Tribune, he told a British soldier as they walked past some big new houses in Kabul, "These houses are why the riots took place . . . If you were a slum dweller living amid such ostentation, you would riot, too."

Almost all of this picture is misleading.

Take those "people" being killed. Of 1,100-some combat deaths so far in 2006, only 44 were coalition soldiers, about half of them American. Another 100 were Afghan civilians - some targeted by the terrorists, some in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most of the other 1,000 or so killed are insurgents - which is good news.

As for the Taliban, it's questionable whether there is an organized fundamentalist movement at all any more. The real problem (mainly in the south) is a heroin mafia whose vast fortunes depend on ensuring that the people of the poppy-growing provinces stay poor, uneducated, dependent and fearful.

The May 29 riot in the capital? Yes, 1,000 hooligans looted in Kabul - but the rest of the city's 3 million people didn't: They wanted to go to work, not destroy their neighbors' property. Unlike Rashid, they see that a country where some people get rich is a country where they can get rich, too - and a lot better than a country where everyone is poor.

Ordinary Afghans are doing better every year. Per-capita income has doubled in the last three years, the inflation rate is down from 48 percent in 2002 to 16 percent in 2005 to 91/2 percent today. Two million Afghans own mobile phones, and cars and other consumer goods are exponentially more plentiful.

- posted by Base10 @ 10:08 PM