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Afghanistan: The road to
prosperity
By Antoine
Blua
PRAGUE - As repair work begins on
Afghanistan's devastated highway system, the focus is on
the restoration of the so-called "ring roads" connecting
major Afghan cities such as Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and
Mazar-i-Sharif. The reconstruction of the
2,400-kilometer ring roads is proceeding in tandem with
an additional 700 kilometers of roads linking
Afghanistan to Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
and Tajikistan.
Observers say that these
projects, if and when they are completed, are likely to
have a major economic, political and social impact on
Afghanistan and the wider regions of Central and South
Asia.
Frank Polman is Afghanistan program
director at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila.
He says that the ring-road project should be completed
in about two years. "Two sections of these roads'
implementation started just about [two weeks] ago. One
is from [Kandahar] to Spin Boldak, that is just at the
border of Pakistan - that is one of the international
link roads. And the other one is running from Kabul to
Kandahar; that is a major section of the ring road."
Most of the roads are already in place. But two
decades of conflict have left just 17 percent of the
country's 6,000 kilometers of roads in good condition.
The ADB says that it will cost some US$650 million to
reconstruct the ring roads and international links. The
primary backers so far are the ADB, the World Bank, the
United States, the EU and Saudi Arabia.
Polman
said that the international community's commitment had
allowed the road project to move quickly. "The time that
an institution like the ADB normally requires to get
road construction projects started is way, way longer
than what we do in Afghanistan. Normally speaking,
between a request for assistance and actual
implementation takes - for the ADB - about two years. In
Afghanistan, we have been able to start our first road
project within six months."
How fast projects
can move ahead, Polman stresses, is essentially
determined by a country's political stability and
security situation. Moreover, the ADB official says,
better roads will further contribute to Afghanistan's
stability by providing jobs, increasing trade and
reducing the distance between the central government and
the regions.
Beyond Afghanistan, Polman said
that the Central Asian governments had a keen interest
in seeing road links re-established. "Well, I think the
Central Asian republics would like to see an access
[route] through Afghanistan, Pakistan, to some port in
the Indian Ocean. They also would like to see goods
transported from the Central Asian republics into
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and also India and China.
Afghanistan constitutes historically a very strategic
location for the transfer of goods and trade in that
part of the world."
A spokesman from
Tajikistan's Transport Ministry, Muhammadyusuf Shodiev,
explains what the completion of road links with
Afghanistan means for his country. "Passing from
Tajikistan to Afghanistan, and from there to Iran, would
certainly be another move to break Tajikistan's
isolation. All the Central Asian countries are trying to
build as many international-standard highways as
possible between their nations."
Hasan-Askari
Rizvi, an independent political analyst based in
Pakistan, says that the rehabilitation of the Afghan
roads will lead to a "tremendous increase" of trade
between Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the Central
Asian states. "The trade will improve. For example,
agricultural goods will go to Afghanistan. In
Afghanistan, there is a shortage of agricultural goods
like wheat [and] rice. Similarly, Afghanistan can send
handicrafts and fruit - dry fruit - back to the
neighboring states. So I think if this project is
completed, this will benefit the people of all these
countries."
Furthermore, Rizvi says, the
development of trade across the region may have an
indirect positive impact on relations between Pakistan
and India. "If the trade between Pakistan, Afghanistan,
[and] Central Asia improves because of these roads, this
will be an incentive for India to improve India-Pakistan
relations, and benefit from the new opportunities these
roads would provide."
Aftab Kazi, a researcher
at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins
University, agreed. He said that he was enthusiastic
about the ring-road project. "Number one, it's a major
effort to reconstruct Afghanistan. Number two, it is an
attempt to break the isolation of the Central Asian
region. Three, it will revive all the trade and other
transportation networks. And then also it will add a new
process of regional political socialization."
Regionally, Kazi said, the ring roads and their
international links would help revitalize a major
portion of the historical Silk routes. Road links in the
north, he says, would connect Afghanistan with the
Soviet-era road network providing substantial trade and
development opportunities between Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Kazi added that an
effective new transport network was also likely to give
additional impetus for oil and gas pipeline
construction.
Indeed, an ambitious project to
build a gas pipeline linking Turkmenistan to Pakistan
through Afghanistan is expected to be launched next
month at a summit in Ashkhabad, the Turkmen capital,
Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov said on Tuesday,
according to state television.
Niyazov invited
his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai to attend a
three-way summit in Ashkhabad on December 26-27, the
television network reported. Pakistani President General
Pervez Musharraf also is expected to attend, it said.
The three presidents had been due to sign the agreement
in October, but the summit was delayed at the request of
Musharraf.
The project to build the
1,500-kilometer, $2 billion gas link from Turkmenistan's
Dauletabad fields across Afghanistan to Pakistan has
been on the table for 20 years and has a long and
checkered history. US energy company Unocal led efforts
to build the line, but its plans were scuppered in 1998
when US cruise missiles struck al-Qaeda training camps
in Afghanistan, leaving the project apparently aborted.
However, since the fall of the Taliban, the plan
has been pushed back onto the energy agenda by regional
leaders, who hope it will bring enormous wealth to their
impoverished region.
In Afghanistan, roads
alone, Kazi said, may not ensure prosperity and
stability in Afghanistan. With Afghanistan just
beginning the difficult process of building a
functioning multicultural nation, the construction of
roads should not be evaluated merely in economic terms.
New transportation networks, he explained, always had an
impact in social, psychological and political ways as
well. One particularly key issue that must be considered
alongside the road reconstruction, he added, was
migration.
Hooman Peimani, a Geneva-based
independent consultant, said that he was skeptical about
the short-term benefits of the Afghan road projects. He
said that the country's continued instability, combined
with Central Asia's lack of major trade activities, mean
that the roads would not be an immediate jackpot for
Afghanistan.
"What is interesting is that
[Central Asian] exports are mainly cotton. Countries
such as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan also
export oil and gas. And those exports [traveling] via
Afghanistan are out of the question because of the
instability of that country. And in terms of their
products, cotton is now being exported via Iran and I
don't think that they need an additional road for the
moment."
But in the long run, Peimani says, a
stable Afghanistan and stepped-up trade activities in
Central Asian states could change the situation for
Afghanistan, by using its new road network and transit
fees.
(Tohir Safarov of RFE/RL's Tajik
Service contributed to this report.)
Copyright (c) 2002, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted
with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC
20036
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