NewsMax Wires
Friday, April 12, 2002

Officials made these observations while discussing U.S. plans to help rebuild the war-ravaged country at a news briefing in Washington.

Andrew Natsios, the administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said poppy growing had increased in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime.

"The crop has come back. It has been planted," he said. "There are poppy-growing areas all along here, in the north, too."

Although initially benefiting from the profits brought in by heroin and other poppy derivatives, the Taliban imposed a countrywide ban last year, which was confirmed by U.N. monitors.

International aid agencies say that the fall of the Taliban regime and the absence of a powerful central authority encouraged the cultivators to grow poppy again.

Natsios said the Helmund valley in southern Afghanistan continues to be the principal poppy-growing area in the country.

He said while the British were offering money to farmers to destroy the crop, the United States was trying to create alternate employment "to draw people who would normally be used to harvest the opium away from that crop."

U.S. and other Western drug enforcement agencies believe that Afghanistan is the source of 70 percent of the heroin reaching world markets.

Natsios said that when the communists took over the country in 1978, Afghanistan had a rich agricultural economy, producing enough fruits to export to the entire region. More than 23 years of war and civil strife, he said, destroyed the irrigation system and the infrastructure needed for farming and selling the products.

The United States, he said, intends to help Afghanistan produce 772,000 metric tons of food within two years and enable it to resume its exports to neighboring countries. India and Pakistan were two of the major buyers of Afghan fruits in the region.

To achieve this target, U.S. experts are introducing high yield seeds that will produce between 80 to 100 percent more wheat than the seed now used.

"This will get people back to their farms ... it will draw employment out of the militias and the poppy growing areas," Natsios said.

He also outlined an education initiative that includes printing 10 million school textbooks, half of which were already distributed by the end of last month.

The new books replace the old ones prepared by the former Taliban regime, which the interim administration in Kabul rejected as too violent, among other issues. For example, the books used guns to teach the children how to count.

Weapons to Pomegranates

"In the new books, they have been replaced with apples and pomegranates," Natsios said, adding that he hoped this change will discourage warring tendencies.

The new books also have pictures of women. Taliban had removed all such pictures when they took over in 1995.

The United States is also helping to train 4,000 teachers across Afghanistan, 50 percent of them women.

To enable the interim administration to communicate with ordinary Afghans, Washington is helping expand the transmission of the official Radio Kabul. U.S. officials hope that by May 1, Radio Kabul will be able to reach the whole country.

The United States and its allies are also opening a college in Kabul to train 500 journalists to run newspapers and radio stations across the country.

All this, Natsios hoped, would help Afghanistan move ahead on the path of reconstruction and reconciliation.

His optimism, however, contrasted with the comments of Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, who complained Wednesday that the international assistance was poorly coordinated and that the donors were not giving enough for large projects.

Natsios described Karzai's remarks as "part of a natural frustration" associated with long-term development plans.

Copyright 2002 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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