Afghan Relief, Reconstruction and Refugee Repatriation

I would like to begin with some faces of Afghanistan and also faces of US assistance to Afghanistan. This photo, which I hope you can see -- is that visible? Okay? These are Afghan war widows who are lining up for distribution of wheat flour from North Dakota farmers. The United States is the largest contributor of humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people, giving more than a billion dollars in aid since 1979. And since October of 2001, the United States has provided more than $588 million for humanitarian assistance and reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.

More than 2 million refugees like this man and his family have returned to Afghanistan. It's the biggest repatriation in the last 30 years anywhere in the world. It's an incredible performance. The planned repatriation was for 800,000. The international system staffed and budgeted and prepared for this level, and it's more than double that. About 1.8 million have been assisted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Program to come back, and another 200,000 have come back on their own, so it's a huge vote of confidence in the future of Afghanistan.

This family lives in a shelter built with funds provided by the Department of State through my bureau, the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. This project, implemented by one of our NGO implementing partners, helps returning refugees repair and reconstruct schools and houses and dams and wells on the Shomali Plain. The Shomali Plain is that very fertile area north of Kabul which used to be the garden spot of South Asia, certainly of Afghanistan, with all manner of fruit, particularly grapes -- a tremendous grape industry, wine industry which the Italians brought in. And much of that has been devastated, but this is where the refugees from Pakistan, and some from Iran, are coming back. Under this project, 2,225 shelters and eight schools will be built before the winter sets in in earnest this year.

These two Afghan girls are among returning refugees to the village of Karabakh, north of Kabul, where the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration has several projects to promote the reintegration of refugees.

This is a picture of a refugee coordinator, at that time Andrew Wyllie, speaking to Afghan school administrators and teachers who are using textbooks provided by the US Agency for International Development to develop lessons plans in Istalif, north of Kabul. Istalif is a beautiful place. It's almost a resort town, except it's almost totally destroyed now. But it's perched up on a ledge overlooking the Shomali Plain. You can see forever from Istalif, and it has a wonderful stream running down below it, and this is another village that benefits from projects funded by our bureau to encourage refugee returns.

Since September 11th last year, the United States has provided more than 319,000 metric tons of food aid to the people of Afghanistan. This has been about 80 to 85 percent of all the food aid.  This is an important thing to remember, that we can't keep this up; we're maxed out on food aid. We need help from the rest of the donor community. They can no longer rely on the United States to pick up the slack when they don't come through. And so this is a telling picture of the need for burden sharing.

The United States is the largest contributor and we contribute multilaterally. Sometimes we're accused -- we're often accused by Europeans -- of being unilateralist. We are multilateralist. In the humanitarian area, we contribute and we take the lead in getting productivity out of the multilateral system, particularly the United Nations system.

And this is a photo of workers distributing food aid to returning refugees in Mazer-e-Sharif, a prominent town in the northern part of Afghanistan.

Another landmark event this year was the beginning of school, and here is a photo of that landmark occasion of 3 million children coming back to school. And this photo is from the opening ceremonies.

The United States, through USAID and my bureau, help the Afghan Government and the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, provide more than 10 million textbooks and school supplies to children throughout the country from grades one through 12.

Many girls now attend school, though most classes are segregated for cultural reasons. Of the 3 million children who are in school, 30 percent are girls. What a tremendous transformation that is from the Taliban period, when you had unbelievable oppression of women and girls, and none of them officially were allowed to attend classes.

During my trip in August, I visited a school being rebuilt through US funds in Mazer-e-Sharif. This was a remarkable project in the northern part of Afghanistan.

Another major event this year was the Loya Jerga political process. This shows the hand-counting of the ballots for president. This is one of the things that we have to take note of, and to realize it's been such a short time since Afghanistan was a hopeless, failed state, and now we have hope, including through the political process with the remarkable results of the Loya Jerga which brought into being the Afghan transitional administration and ultimately will lead to a government and a parliament and a constitution.

Some of the 1,600 delegates to the Loya Jerga, from left to right, representing Bamiyan, Jalalabad, Khost and Herat, for the first time since the Taliban took power, women were included in the political process. Then, at the close, Chairman Karzai was elected president.

The United States provided logistical support and transported delegates to Kabul for the nine-day meeting of the Loya Jerga. Here, the delegates applaud President Karzai's victory.

Since the defeat of the Taliban, Afghans have been enjoying newfound freedoms. Now, music and culture are representative of those newfound freedoms. There are other things that you see as you go around town. You don't see women outside not wearing the burkha. That's not one of the evidences you see, since just about everybody, all the women, are still in burkhas.

But you do see people flying kites and you hear music in the streets, and this is such a profound contrast to what it was just a few months ago. But it does dramatize for anyone who visits that country what has happened and what the product is of the US military effort to relieve this incredible oppression.

This 13-year-old learned to paint at a home for street children in Kabul. Maybe you recognize this painting. This was a very famous photograph at one time. This is a painting of that photograph. Remember this young woman was photographed some years ago and then was identified again and found and re-photographed, and the changes in her face are a dramatic testimony to what she had been through.

More than one hundred newspapers and magazines have been launched in Afghanistan, and here Afghan radio journalists interview the US Deputy Chief of Mission David Sedney. The United States supports a free press by training hundreds of Afghan print, TV and radio journalists like these, and by providing them with equipment to carry out their jobs.

While many problems remain in Afghanistan, what I have seen makes me hopeful that, with the strong commitment of the United States and other donors that progress that Afghanistan has experienced in one year can continue into the future.

The Afghan leaders are quite proud to note that regarding the speech that President Karzai gave in the Tokyo conference in January of this year, 90 percent of those commitments that he made in that speech have been realized. And these include things such as the start of cabinet government, if you can imagine that starting in so few months. This happened over a three- or four-month period. The start of cabinet government and the start of rather sophisticated processes in government, such as policy planning, programming and budgeting, if you can imagine that happening in such a short time.

The start of currency reform is another major accomplishment. There are also the beginnings of some receipt of revenues from the provinces, and this is still a great challenge from the warlords because the warlords don't willingly give up the revenues that they collect to the central government.

Also, an investment law has been passed which a lot of countries are interested in, and it's a very liberal investment law providing no taxation on funds exported from the country. And so this is another accomplishment which the Afghan Government is very proud of.

A lot of progress also is made in getting ready for the winter this year. You remember how hard the winter was last year, where 7 million people had to be fed by the international community, and without the adequate preparations it was hard to reach the more remote areas. That has changed for this winter. It's been an effort led by an Afghan ministry, the Ministry of Rural Development. An extraordinary minister heads it, formerly with the NGO International Rescue Committee; Hanif Atmar has taken the lead on setting priorities for the winter preparations, doing the planning, working with the United Nations Joint Logistics Cell, and with a winterization task force which includes the United Nations and NGOs and donors who are working to ensure that it is not as difficult getting through this winter.

We hope it will be a big winter in terms of snow because the snow runoff is needed to deal with a drought which has lasted now into its fourth year and is a hundred-year drought, the worst drought which has occurred in a hundred years.

The Salang Tunnel will be kept open. This is the vital linkage from Kabul to the north, so food trucks will be able to make their way through the tunnel.

The preparations in terms of food pre-positioning are pretty well in place. Still some work needs to be done. It is still not certain if everything has been done that is needed to deal with nearly 5 million people that will need some assistance during the winter; 1.2 million are particularly vulnerable because they're in such inaccessible locations that we haven't ruled out the possible need for airdrops to reach those.

But we hope that with the snow plows which have been put in place, the trucks for the plows, the maintenance sheds that have been set up to maintain the trucks, a lot of logistics preparations are in place to take care of this winter.

Also, the effort is pulled together in a way which surprised a lot of us.  One of the reasons for this is the effort that the United Nations has made to transfer priority setting and planning and budgeting to the Afghan ministries. It's been a remarkable structure. Now the structures don't excite too many people, particularly journalists, but it's exciting to me because this structure, called a program secretariat structure, started with a rather large United Nations with shiny, new vehicles which cost a lot of money, quite a big infrastructure for telecommunications and NGOs, who make a lot more -- even though their salaries are meager they make a lot more that any government minister, who makes $50 a month -- to start to transfer operations, policymaking and priority setting from, this large UN structure and NGO structure to the Afghan Government.

And that's starting to work. It's an engine for transition. It's a way both to hold the individual UN agencies accountable for their work, to put them on the spot for producing, and it's a way to get them engaged through liaison officers, through seconded officers from one agency to another, and to start transferring the instruments of planning and operations to the Afghan Government.

It's something I haven't seen in three decades of watching these kind of operations. I haven't seen anything quite as encouraging. And this is one reason -- I reported this on my first trip in August to the State Department, and Secretary Powell took a personal interest in this and sent me back for a longer period to show the United States' support for this effort and to continue to help it not only bring about the necessary transition in Afghanistan, but perhaps also to demonstrate a model that could be used in other places where it seems inevitable that  we will be required to operate.

So my general message is, I'm optimistic. I know how fragile all of this progress is in Afghanistan. Sometimes we're reminded soberly that one shot could have changed it all; one shot that had come a few inches closer to President Karzai in Khandahar would have changed everything.

And that's how fragile it is. And it's fragile in a lot of other ways. It's fragile in terms of donor support. We've had to work very hard to keep up the donor solidarity through the Afghan support group. Some of the donors were prepared to kill that and took some pride in getting rid of an international agency, and the United States had to say, listen, we're out of food, we're going to need your help; if we can't get through the winter, we're going to need your help. And since the food pipeline now runs out in March of 2003, and March of 2003 is the start of the hunger period in Afghanistan, before the harvest comes in in June or July, this is no time to be disestablishing some donor resource mobilizing mechanisms.

So this shows how we can be optimistic, but, at the same time, we have to hold it in our hands almost every day to deal with the fragility in Afghanistan.

So with that, I thank you very much and I welcome your questions.

MR. DENIG: Let me remind you to use the microphone, please, and introduce yourself and your institution.

QUESTION: Dmitry Kirsanov, Russian News Agency TASS. Sir, is the United States Government satisfied by the reconstruction and relief job being done in Afghanistan by the countries other than the United States itself? Obviously, I'm especially interested in Russia and other former Soviet republics -- and expect them to do something else.

And secondly, if I may, do you find your own reconstruction efforts successful and what are your criteria?

MR. DEWEY: On the satisfaction with other donors, we are working closely with other donors, including with the Russians, and with neighboring states, in terms of access. They are donors in providing access and not overly taxing the humanitarian efforts that come through their countries. With the Saudis and the Japanese, we're partnering on the Kabul-Khandahar-Herat Road that's just starting. The United States is starting the effort. Japan is coming in and we expect the Saudis to come in on that as well.

Some of the international financial institutions are also very serious about their planning and mobilizing resources for other roads. Roads are the key infrastructure needs. Psychologically they are important because they link the country together, and it's also important to show that the government is something more than just an administration for Kabul, that it's something reaching out to the countryside.

So I would say in general, yes, we're satisfied with the work of other donors. We keep urging them to fulfill their Tokyo Pledging Conference commitments. Those commitments total $1.8 billion for the first year and then some $4.5 billion for the five year period do need to be delivered. And then we have to look that the costs may be considerably higher than that, and we need help from the donors on that.

In terms of are we satisfied with the United States reconstruction efforts, we're just beginning because our effort so far has been on lifesaving, its been on humanitarian aid, and the road project just started a couple of weeks ago. And this is going to be a huge, huge benefit to the economy in terms of linking the country together, but also linking markets with people that need access to those markets.

So far I am satisfied and this is the measurement:  how we are doing in terms of showing that the priorities are being set by the Afghan Government and the projects are projects which do, indeed, contribute to the unity of the country.

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Julia Sable. I'm from Radio Free Asia. It's just a question about how to deliver the aid. There seems to be some difficulty because you want to deliver the aid to the central government so as to strengthen the central government, but it doesn't have the infrastructure to distribute it throughout the country. And if you give it to the provincial warlords, then you are supporting the provincial warlords, but I heard someone from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace saying that we had no choice but to give the aid to them because they are the only ones that can really deliver it immediately.

Can you just comment on how you are delivering the aid?

MR. DEWEY: Yes, that's true. In the early stages of any failed state or trying to build on the ashes of a failed state, which is what's happened in Afghanistan, the international community really has to do it and they have to do it with a fairly expensive infrastructure and salaries which are higher than the host country is able to pay. So that's the case at the outset.

This is gradually starting to transition, and the way it's transitioning to more ownership and operations by the Afghan Government is through seconding persons from NGOs to the government, but maybe more importantly, employees from the government ministries working with NGOs. Some of the big NGOs such as International Rescue Committee and CARE and Oxfam and Save the Children are working with ministries to help train them, to mentor them and to enable them to eventually take over the operation of these programs. This is what we all wanted to have happen because they can do it less expensively because their overhead is less when they are able to do that.

For the critical period, such as getting through this winter, however, you have to have that safety net of the international organizations ready to jump in to be able to cope with unforeseen circumstances that may come up this winter, and those would be things such as much heavier snowfall than had been expected or maybe much more ice in the Salang Tunnel so that the vital line of communications from Kabul north is cut off because of the blockage in the tunnel.

QUESTION: Hi. Steve Kaufman from the Washington File. Earlier today, the Senate passed Senator Hagel's bill that would appropriate more aid for Afghan reconstruction. I was wondering if you could comment on whether the administration has set any priorities or has earmarked any of those funds for particular purposes towards reconstruction or still with relief efforts. And, in particular, is there anything that will be used towards the refugees or the IDPs in the country? Thank you.

MR. DEWEY: Yes. Thank you for that. It's not either/or, relief or reconstruction. For now, both have to be done. That's a message which we continue to discuss with the Afghan Government. Many of them would like to go completely to reconstruction because they see that as the visible thing. It's hard to measure lifesaving. But increasingly, the priority is moving toward reconstruction, to the infrastructure projects such as roads for the reasons that I mentioned.

The agricultural sector is very big for the US Agency for International Development's priorities. Since 80 percent of the activity of the country is in agriculture, restoring the agriculture and the herds is absolutely essential. So this is a major effort.

A lot of effort has to be put on income-generating projects to put cash into the economy. If you look around the urban areas, you see the markets are full of food and other commodities, but the problem is cash to buy, to access these markets. So there's a lot of road repair, road building. We're looking in the not too distant future to see a nationwide project of income generation that will involve some environmental projects and conservation projects.

These are the priorities. These are the things that our government is focusing on, and we're seeing a lot of progress in each one of these areas. So it is welcome news when we hear of such developments as the Hagel bill.

QUESTION: Akram Gizabi, Voice of America. Sir, it's oftentimes said that the United States gives aid to warlords, as the lady said here, and also to NGOs and some sections of Pentagon. Why does the USAID, which is so experienced in helping develop these countries, take a backstage in delivering reconstruction as well as humanitarian aid to Afghanistan?

MR. DEWEY: If I understand the question right, you're saying why does USAID take a back seat to the Pentagon in delivering assistance?

There is a Pentagon Humanitarian Taskforce which, in the early stages, did a lot of useful work because they worked in areas that were insecure. There are still some areas that are insecure and where that work is performing a useful function.

It's going to be important, however, that for continued humanitarian work in areas that continue to be insecure, that in the training of the Afghan national army that a civil affairs capability be established so that they can carry on this humanitarian work and this interface with the people, which does a couple of things: It helps the people, but it also shows the reach of the central government through the military showing a kinder, gentler face of the military to the Afghan people.

Aside from that, it's not a matter of AID giving up to the Pentagon the delivery of humanitarian or reconstruction aid. The aid that is making the difference in that area is the aid delivered by the civilian part of the US Government. So it's not the Pentagon taking it over. And we see it as a transitional phase. What military work in the humanitarian dimension that continues should be done in the not too distant future by the Afghan army and not by the US military.

MR. DENIG: Any follow-up questions?

(No response.)

MR. DENIG: Thank you very much, Secretary Dewey.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY DEWEY: Thank you very much.