PARIS, Nov 27: Afghanistan’s economy needs to be totally rebuilt after 20 years of war, starting with the education system, the road network and the airports, and persuading educated Afghans to return from exile.

“In the first phase, reconstruction does not require gigantic projects, but they must be well thought-out,” said Etienne Gille, president of Afrance, a Franco-Afghan friendship association.

Rebuilding the country was to be one of the main issues at the heart of discussions at the Afghan political conference in Bonn on Tuesday, in addition to ways of phasing out the opium industry.

The latter has replaced traditional agriculture during the years of war and has financed local warlords. Bernard Frahi, a UN anti-drug official, said that with the new conflict in Afghanistan, there was massive resowing of poppy throughout the country.

Afghanistan was a small opium producer before the Soviet invasion of 1979, but became the world’s top supplier under the Taliban regime at 70 per cent, although this was slashed by the Taliban under a decree from their leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, in July 2000.

Subsequently, there was a 95 per cent cut in the amount of land under poppy cultivation, although trafficking in opium and heroin continued.

Last Tuesday, Sadako Ogata, Japan’s special envoy, said that reconstruction would cost ten billion dollars over ten years. She was attending a conference of 22 countries in Washington and several multilateral organisations.

“Before reconstruction, the country will have to be pacified and most of all, the education system restored to life, ruined by 20 years of war,” said Gille, who was director for ten years of the French pedagogical office in Kabul.

“The literacy rate was 20 per cent before the Soviet invasion. Today, young people aged between 15-20 are illiterate. Another generation must be sacrificed before we can return to an educated population,” Gille said.

He said that it was, therefore, indispensable for exiled educated Afghans to return from Pakistan, Iran, India, Germany, the United States, Australia and elsewhere to reinvigorate an economy that was essentially founded on regular farming, home industries and gas production.

“Only financial incentives could persuade people to return,” Gille said.

The installations for natural gas must also be refurbished. Gas was exported exclusively to the former Soviet Union (three billion cubic metres in 1975), but since then output has halted.

Afghanistan is also rich in numerous other unexploited resources, in particular oil. In the mid-1990s, a petroleum extraction project was on the verge of realization with the US company Unocal, Argentina’s Bridas and Saudi Arabia’s Delta Oil, but the project was shelved in 1998 when Unocal withdrew, Gille said.—AFP