FROM THE TELEGRAPH OF 26 JANUARY 2005
The Afghan story
There was a time, not too long ago, when
Afghanistan made front pages. Taliban, Bamian, Herat, and Mazar-i-Sharif had
become almost household words in India. Then a graduate of Himachal University
became Afghanistan’s President; and Afghanistan vanished from our newspapers.
What has been happening in this little friend of Hindostan?
Zahir Shah became Padshah of Afghanistan
in 1933 when he was a kid; his uncles ran the country. While he was enjoying
himself in Europe in 1973, Daoud Khan led the Afghan communist party in a coup,
abolished monarchy and made himself president. The party was divided into Khalq
(people) and Parcham (banner) factions. In 1978, Nur Mohammad Taraki and Babrak
Karmal killed Daoud Khan and seized power. Soon the Khalqis began to purge the
Parchamis. Karmal was sent off to Czechoslovakia, and Hafizullah Khan Amin of
Khalq took over. Taraki’s followers tried to kill Amin; but Taraki was killed
first. Land ceilings were imposed, and women were liberated. Such reforms were
found intolerable, and thousands migrated to Iran and Pakistan. Finding that
communists had got a bad name, Amin began to say that his was an Islamic
regime. There were several attempts to assassinate him. Keen to restore
communist rule, the Soviet army marched into Kabul on Christmas Day in 1979.
They brought in Babrak Karmal as president.
A guerrilla movement soon started against
the regime. The Afghan army dwindled with desertions from 105,000 in 1978 to
30,000 in 1987. The Soviets prevented its rout only by the use of tanks and
helicopter gun ships. Pakistan and the US combined in 1986 to launch an
operation; the Pakistan army trained and led Afghan recruits as well as Arab
volunteers, with arms and money coming from the US. They bled the Soviet Union
until it withdrew in 1989. The ensuing civil war ended in 1994 when the
Taliban, a subsidiary of Pakistani ISI, took over Afghanistan. The border with
Pakistan became more or less open.
In 1998 the 25 million people of
Afghanistan owned 40 million animals or 1.6 animals a head – 25 million sheep,
9 million goats, 4½ million cattle, 1 million donkeys and half a million camels
(we Indians own about a third of an animal per head). They also had 11 million
chicken. The 2.7 million hectares of cultivated land produced 3.9 million tons
of foodgrains – 2.7 million tons of wheat, 400,000 tons of rice, 300,000 tons
of maize and 250,000 tons of barley. Of the 2.7 million hectares, 1.2 million
was irrigated, and produced 2 million tons of wheat.
The country imported almost all its
industrial goods – petroleum products from Iran, and the rest from Pakistan.
Taliban had an Afghan Transit Trade (ATT) agreement with Pakistan under which
it imported goods duty-free through Karachi. As India has often done with
Nepal, Pakistan used to badger Afghanistan about goods that were imported
across Pakistan and then smuggled back into Pakistan. Of the $2.5 billion of
goods imported under the ATT in 1996, $2 billion was smuggled into Pakistan. In
1995 Pakistan removed 17 items from the ATT, including synthetic fibres and
clothing; in 1999 it asked the Afghan government to levy the same customs
duties as Pakistan. Indian tyres were particularly cheap, so their import was
taken out of the ATT in 1994. But still in 1999 Pakistan, to its horror, found
Modi tyres being smuggled in.
Taliban, a devoutly Sunni outfit, had
theological differences with Shia Iran, which affected trade. It became
difficult to import goods through Bandar Abbas and Islam Qala; and there were
obstacles in the import of the crucial petroleum products from Iran. Taliban
also quarreled with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. So in the last days it was
reduced to importing small quantities of petroleum products from Turkmenistan;
their cost was raised considerably by transport.
Taliban’s control over the country also
melted soon. It lived entirely on US and then Pakistani aid; its state revenue
in 1996-97 was only 2.6 per cent of its expenditure. By then, collection of
economic statistics had virtually ceased. Later observers looked back on
Taliban rule with nostalgia because of the law and order it imposed. But its
writ did not run far beyond Kabul.
Taliban lost the goodwill it had in
Washington by continuing to provide a safe haven to Osama bin Laden, whose Al
Qaida was associated with a series of terrorist acts starting with the
attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Manila in 1994. But it had good
friends in Pakistan. So it was left alone till the attacks of 9 September 2001
in the US. The US used the attacks to remove Taliban and install Hamid Karzai
as president of Afghanistan.
In 2003, Afghanistan had a population of
21 million. It produced 3.6 million tons of foodgrains from 2.2 million
hectares – about the same as in 1998. But in addition, 74,000 hectares of land
produced 3,422 tons of opium, which brought export revenue of $2.5 billion –
two-fifths of the gross national product. It gave 78,987 person-years of
employment; at harvest time it employed 822,722 people, according to a report
Manabu Fujimura did for the ADB. Re-exports – also known as smuggling into
Pakistan – brought $2.7 billion. Foreign aid brought another $1.8 billion. Thus
this country, which exported $150 million’s worth of its own produce, other
than opium – dry fruit, sheepskin and carpets – could afford imports of $4.7
billion.
It collected $132 million in government
revenue – 2 per cent of GNP. Half of it came from import duties – less than 3
per cent of imports. A third was collected by the provinces but little of it
was remitted to the central government. It spent $349 million; it received $184
million in grants, $25 million in loans, and $39 million in other financing.
Amongst the last were fees from overflights over Afghanistan that International
Air Transport Association had collected for years but not remitted since it did
not know to which government to send them to. The government employed 456,000
including an army of 100,000. But not more than 330,000 were actually being
paid.
All government employees got 1,200
Afghanis a month in food allowance, Af440 in a second food allowance, Af130 in
transport allowance and Af8 in professional allowance (the official exchange
rate of the Afghani was about the same as that of the Rupee). The salary itself
was Af210 at the top and Af40 at the bottom; gross pay including the allowances
varied from Af4,077 to Af1,818.
These are new Afghanis. Many variants of
Afghanis were in circulation including counterfeit ones. In 2003, the
government got 500 tons of new notes printed in Germany and Sweden, and flew
them in. Then they were flown to seven provinces – roads were considered too
hazardous – and then transported to 47 exchange points. When anyone came to
exchange his money, 10 per cent of it was examined; the proportion of
counterfeits in it was then applied to the entire amount he wanted to exchange,
and he was reimbursed for the rest. The old and phony Afghanis were burnt on
the spot. So Afghanistan finally has a single currency – except for the
dollars, which the government receives in millions and periodically auctions.
