This Week in Afghanistan:

• CARE warns against 'declaring success' on opium
  
• UN Human Rights Commission calls for change in Afghanistan
  
• Women entrepreneurs and the tourism trade

April 21, 2005

CARE Report on Counternarcotics: "Too Early to Declare Success"

In an excellent report released last week, CARE argues against over-optimism, noting that "possible factors for the current decline in poppy cultivation include the Afghan Government's renewed focus on counter-narcotics, a widespread public information campaign, and the relatively low price of opium in 2004."

CARE makes several general recommendations: bolster funding for alternative livelihoods, implement operations against drug lords before attempting widespread eradication, and manage expectations among farmers about the sorts of assistance they'll get as compensation for giving up poppies. This last point is particularly critical. If farmers are promised the moon and the international community doesn't deliver, short-term progress will be followed by a second wave of opium re-planting that will be more resistant to promises and inducements.

The report also notes that both Thailand and Pakistan achieved their long-term opium reductions by strengthening development conditions before embarking on eradication:

In Thailand, poppy cultivation decreased by 88 percent from 1980 to 1999, while poppy cultivation in Pakistan decreased by 67 percent from 1990 to 2003. Thailand started crop substitution programs in the mid-1970s, before instituting integrated rural development programs in the 1980s. Targeted eradication did not begin until 1984.

Finally, the report warns against making aid contingent on opium progress, arguing that "Conditionality typically undermines long-term, sustainable development by imposing an unrealistic, inflexible time frame for reducing opium cultivation, while making it more difficult to build trust and engage in long-term planning with affected communities." There is, in this case as in many, a fine line to be walked between accountability and unrealistic contingency requirements. In fact, tying aid to progress may eventually be useful, but that time has not yet arrived.

Other News

UN Commission on Human Rights makes recommendations for Afghanistan

KABUL, April 20 (SANA): The United Nations Commission on Human Rights… recommends that Afghan government should work with help of international community to establish rule of law, strengthen justice system and combat drug trafficking and warlords who are increasingly involved in this illicit business.

The government should also work with the international community to train public defenders in order to strengthen due legal process and thus avoid and combat inappropriate detentions and convictions, according to the UN Commission report.

Human Rights Watch: U.N. Rights Monitoring Still Needed in Afghanistan

According to Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan needs continued U.N. attention on human rights, as well as a greater human rights focus by the U.S. "There is still a human rights crisis in Afghanistan," said Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch. "Warlords and armed factions still dominate many parts of the country and routinely abuse human rights, especially the rights of women and girls."

Donor nations, and specifically the NATO countries, have been slow in meeting their commitments to Afghanistan. As a result, Afghans countrywide continue to complain about extortion and robberies by militias and political repression by local strongmen.
Increased human rights monitoring would be especially important with parliamentary elections planned for September, [which] are expected to be more fiercely contested and thus more vulnerable to political intimidation.

Human Rights Watch also urged the United States to help increase human rights monitoring. There are indications that the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva has opposed continued U.N. monitoring in Afghanistan by the U.N. independent expert on human rights in Afghanistan, Cherif Bassiouni. Bassiouni had criticized the United States last year for its policies of holding detainees in Afghanistan without legal protections.

"The U.S. should be helping Bassiouni and other U.N. monitors to do more in Afghanistan, not less," Adams said. "Otherwise, U.S. opposition to U.N. monitors in Afghanistan could be interpreted as motivated as a desire to silence critics."

Women go into business in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- …Barred from education and jobs during the five years of Taliban rule, women now have the right, at least on paper, to pursue careers of their choosing. But this is a male-dominated society where 86 percent of women are illiterate. U.N. figures say the per-capita income of Afghan women is only about one-third of men's. A survey of 360 rural households by a Kabul-based research group found that less than 2 percent of women owned land in their own right.

Mina Sherzoy, head of the government's department of Women's Entrepreneurship Development, said that women needing startup money typically must turn to a male relative. "There are barriers, and they will be lifted slowly," she said. "We are recovering from war and devastation and Taliban repression. ... But there's nothing in Shariah (Islamic law) that says women can't do business."

Rahmani started making clothes during years as a refugee in neighboring Pakistan. She returned to Afghanistan last year, and with a $35,000 loan from her brother in the United States, set up shop in a cramped, two-story terrace. Seven months later she employs 70 women, 10 doing machine stitching on site and 60 others doing embroidery by hand at home. She also employs two Afghan men -- a tailor to teach the workers and an English-speaker to help with marketing and shopping for fabric…Across town, another cottage industry makes quality leather balls for soccer, volleyball and handball -- hand-stitched by about 130 women working from home, many of them widowed during a quarter-century of war…The women earn 32 Afghanis (64 cents) for each ball they stitch. A novice can take two days to stitch a ball, but those with experience can make up to four a day. The balls sell for about $6 each.

"Before this we had no job," said 16-year old Morsal, a returned refugee, stitching a ball outside her simple house with plastic sheeting covering the windows. "I'm happy we got training and have this skill."

Afghans seek tourists

CITY OF SCREAMS, Afghanistan, April 16, 2005 (Reuters) - It is eerily quiet in the ruined hilltop fort as two Afghan soldiers, guarding against artifact thieves, look out on the valley and the towering cliff niches where colossal stone Buddhas once stood.

Welcome to Shahr-i-Gholghola or the City of Screams, site of the 13th century massacre of the city's 150,000 population by Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan to avenge the murder of a favorite grandson. Today the ruins, along with other historical sites in scenic Bamiyan, Afghanistan's cultural heart, may just provide a lifeline for this impoverished province.

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Afghanistan Watch is prepared by Carl Robichaud, a program officer at The Century Foundation.

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