BANGKOK: Fazil Karim, the mayor of war-ravaged Kabul, has been getting his first taste of an inevitable reality: the bubble economy that balloons in a destroyed city awash with foreign money for reconstruction efforts.

Rents for few of the liveable buildings in the Afghan capital provide the clearest indicator that this phenomenon is emerging in Afghanistan, half a year after the Taliban was ousted amid US-led military attacks last year and just months after foreign funds and growing numbers of aid workers started to come in.

Rents have skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, says the soft-spoken Karim, interviewed on the sidelines of an Asian meeting here on urban poverty. Some of the buildings fetch “up to $5,000 or $10,000 a month,” he explains.

Karim adds that the takers range from embassies, foreign aid agencies and international development bodies that are competing to pay high rents to move into the few available buildings.

This is so because the scale of destruction after 23 years of war in Afghanistan has left over half the houses in Kabul — an estimated 200,000 — destroyed due to conflict.

On top of that, nearly 70 per cent of the remaining 200,000 houses are illegal structures, built on lands allocated for parks and other open public property, says Ghulam Bhawai, Kabul’s deputy mayor. “Most of these houses are fragile, mud structures.”

But that is not all Karim and Bhawai wanted to share at a United Nations-sponsored meeting of mayors from 50 Asian cities underway here.

The challenges they face set them apart from the rest of their Asian lack of basic urban utilities, such as clean water, proper solid waste disposal, electricity and useable roads.

Currently, only 20 per cent of Kabul’s more than 2 million people have access to safe drinking water from underground wells, says Bhawai. “These are deep underground wells.”

Others, out of desperation, are settling for water from shallow wells. “This is dangerous. The water is not clean, can be easily contaminated, and there are children suffering from diarrhoea,” he adds.

City officials are also up against the difficulty of disposing of Kabul’s solid waste. “Each day the city accumulates 1,600 cubic metres of solid waste that is not being disposed of properly,” Karim told a press conference on Tuesday.

The city has a fleet of only 40 trucks, each with a carrying capacity of three cubic metres, to take a crack at transporting the mountains of waste to assigned areas.

This burden on the city is expected to worsen, furthermore, given the scale of Afghans flooding back into the capital since the Taliban regime fell. “Everyday, 300 to 400 families are coming to Kabul,” Karim added.

These waves of returnees, including large numbers of Afghan refugees from Pakistan and Iran, have doubled Kabul’s population in six months from 1.2 million people to 2.3 million.

Kabul’s predicament can well be compared with that of East Timor, as it undertook reconstruction efforts as huge amounts of foreign funds came in after the 1999 independence ballot — and Cambodia, whose capital Phnom Penh faced similar challenges in the early nineties.

After the 1991 Paris peace accord ended two decades of conflict and a UN-sponsored election in 1993 gave way to reconstruction, Phnom Penh, too, had its bubble economy, the lack of housing for returnees, a city infrastructure in tatters, and problems with solid waste disposal and the supply of clean water.

The similarity also applies in a less visible but equally troubling area — the lack of skilled local people to run the affairs of the local government, such as urban planners, civil engineers, architects, and economists.

“Like in Cambodia, Afghanistan has a lack of human resources. This is a big problem in quantity and quality, not having your own professionals.”

The Afghans are hoping to draw lessons from their Cambodian counterparts and Asian local government officials familiar with rebuilding war-ravaged towns and cities.

Already, the Cambodian officials participating at this week’s ESCAP meeting have warmed up to the idea of sharing their triumphs and failures with the Afghans — be it on their quest to attract talent back, coping with the flood of refugees returning or dealing with the bubble economy that foreign aid presence helps create.—Dawn/The InterPress News Services.