Dems ignore success in Afghanistan

Ann Marlowe:

Sen. Hillary Clinton has cynically charged that we are "losing the fight to al Qaeda and bin Laden" in Afghanistan. But on my eighth trip to Afghanistan (last month) I saw that the trend lines are up, not down.

The first encouraging sign came in Dubai as I boarded my flight for Kabul. Afghanistan's main private air carrier, Kam Air, has recently added a second daily round trip between Kabul and Dubai.

Once in Kabul I bought a new SIM card for my mobile phone and found that what would have cost me $40 a few years ago and $9 in September last year now cost only $3. Not surprisingly, mobile phones have spread to a broad section of Afghanistan's 24 million people, with the two major providers, AWCC and Roshan, claiming a total of three million subscribers, up from two million in September last year. Amin Ramin, managing director of AWCC, estimates that his company alone will count two million subscribers by the end of 2007 and three million by the end of 2008.

I spotted similarly hopeful trends in three heavily Pashtun provinces--Nangarhar, Laghman and Khost--in eastern Afghanistan.

But first, it's important to note that to talk about "reconstruction" is the biggest lie in Afghanistan. Before the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan was long one of the poorest countries in the world and has never had a lot of infrastructure. There are ruins in the country, of course, but 95% of them are in or near Kabul itself. Most of Afghanistan lives much as it always has, subsisting on small-scale farming and trading.

We can do nothing about many of Afghanistan's barriers to development. For starters, 86% of its land area is non-arable. It has also never had a broad distribution of income or land. According to Afghan-Australian historian Amin Saikal, up until the early 1920s when King Amanullah gave crown lands to the poor, only 20% of peasants worked their own properties.

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But I am more optimistic. Jalalabad, the largest city of eastern Afghanistan, with 400,000 people, is now just a three-hour drive to Kabul on a good road recently built by the European Union. Another hour's drive brings you to Mehtar Lam, capital of Afghanistan's Laghman province, on another good road funded by USAID.

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There is much more on the construction efforts in Afghanistan and she makes a good point about not calling them "reconstruction." It should also be noted that we and our allies have been kicking the taliban's butt all over Afghanistan to the extent they have had to change their tactics to kidnapping and extortion in hopes of survival and reconstituting their forces.

Afghanistan's greatest potential is as a transportation corridor and hub to the Indian sub continent and as opening to a land bridge to china that has been shut for centuries becasue of teh hostilities of Muslim countries to permitting transshipments. That hostility, ironically led to the discovery of America and the European bypassing of central Asia for centuries. If the Afghans can make make travel safe an easy they can make their country essential to world trade and an area of prosperity.

It should be noted that Hillary's attack on Afghanistan is part of a coordinated Democrat assault on our war effort there since they have discovered that we are winning in Iraq they are looking for another war front to politicize. They continue in their tradition of being the most disloyal opposition party in a time of war in the history of the US.