May 27, 2003	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 24,1424

KABUL: Afghanistan’s interim President, Hamid Karzai, will issue an extraordinary call this week for an extra $15 billion cash from the West for the reconstruction of his war-shattered country.

Karzai will warn that the $5bn so far committed is hopelessly inadequate to meet the pledges given by Tony Blair and George Bush to rebuild Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion.

His wake-up call comes as his government plunges into financial crisis, with the capital Kabul facing its first popular street demonstrations since the fall of the Taliban 18 months ago.

The rising discontent follows the failure of central government to pay police and civil servant salaries. Last week Karzai threatened to resign unless regional warlords paid more revenue into central government coffers.

In a Channel-4 documentary on post-war Afghanistan next weekend Karzai acknowledges his gratitude for Western aid but declares that ‘we need more than has been promised.’ He says that the country needs ‘$15-20bn to reach the stage we were in 1979’.

He goes on to accuse international donors of undermining his authority by handing the cash to outside agencies rather than central government. This policy, says Karzai, ‘weakens the presence of the central government in the provinces of Afghanistan.’

In a further indication of the gravity of the country’s plight, Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Special Representative to Afghanistan, charged Western nations with sabotaging Karzai’s attempts to bring security. He disclosed that he had made repeated attempts to widen the international security force in Afghanistan beyond Kabul but that the attempts had been rebuffed.

He said that the ‘international community tells us that they can’t afford to respond to our request for the moment’.

A recent study by the Aid agency Care illustrates the scale of the West’s neglect. It showed that in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia, the international community provided one peacekeeper for approximately 60 people. In Afghanistan the ratio is one to every 5,380 people.

Figures for sums donated, when considered on a per head basis, tell an equally eloquent story. Bosnians received $326 per head during the aftermath of war. The comparable figure in Afghanistan over the next few years is $42 per head.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.