By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Jul 10 2002 (IPS)

Fazil Karim, the mayor of war-ravaged Kabul, has been getting his first taste of an inevitable reality: the bubble economy that balloons in a destroyed city awash with foreign money for reconstruction efforts.

Rents for few of the liveable buildings in the Afghan capital provide the clearest indicator that this phenomenon is emerging in Afghanistan, half a year after the Taliban was ousted amid U.S.-led military attacks last year and just months after foreign funds and growing numbers of aid workers started to come in.

Rents have skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, says the soft-spoken Karim, interviewed on the sidelines of an Asian meeting here on urban poverty. Some of the buildings fetch “up to 5,000 U.S. dollars or 10,000 a month”, he explains.

Karim adds that the takers range from embassies, foreign aid agencies and international development bodies that are competing to pay high rents to move into the few available buildings.

This is so because the scale of destruction after 23 years of war in Afghanistan has left over half the houses in Kabul, an estimated 200,000, destroyed due to conflict.

On top of that, nearly 70 percent of the remaining 200,000 houses are illegal structures, built on lands allocated for parks and other open public property, says Ghulam Bhawai, Kabul’s deputy mayor. “Most of these houses are fragile, mud structures.”

They were built when Afghanistan was under the Taliban government, he adds. “These houses were not approved, not part of the city’s plan. Some have been constructed on top of roads.”

But that is not all Karim and Bhawai wanted to share at a United Nations-sponsored meeting of mayors from 50 Asian cities underway here.

The challenges they face set them apart from the rest of their Asian peers, given the daunting task of rebuilding a city that suffers from the lack of basic urban utilities, such as clean water, proper solid waste disposal, electricity and useable roads.

Currently, only 20 percent of Kabul’s more than 2 million people have access to safe drinking water from underground wells, says Bhawai. “These are deep underground wells.”

Others, out of desperation, are settling for water from shallow wells. “‘This is dangerous. The water is not clean, can be easily contaminated, and there are children suffering from diarrhoea,” he adds.

City officials are also up against the difficulty of disposing of Kabul’s solid waste. “Each day the city accumulates 1,600 cubic metres of solid waste that is not being disposed of properly,” Karim told a press conference Tuesday.

The city has a fleet of only 40 trucks, each with a carrying capacity of three cubic metres, to take a crack at transporting the mountains of waste to assigned areas.

This burden on the city is expected to worsen, furthermore, given the scale of Afghans flooding back into the capital since the Taliban regime fell. “Everyday 300 to 400 families are coming to Kabul,” Karim added.

These waves of returnees, including large numbers of Afghan refugees from Pakistan and Iran, have doubled Kabul’s population in six months from 1.2 million people to 2.3 million.

Kabul’s predicament can well be compared with that of East Timor as it undertook reconstruction efforts as huge amounts of foreign funds came in after the 1999 independence ballot — and Cambodia, whose capital Phnom Penh faced similar challenges in the early nineties.

After the 1991 Paris peace accord ended two decades of conflict and a U.N.-sponsored election in 1993 gave way to reconstruction, Phnom Penh, too, had its bubble economy, the lack of housing for returnees, a city infrastructure in tatters, and problems with solid waste disposal and the supply of clean water.

The similarity also applies in a less visible but equally troubling area — the lack of skilled local people to run the affairs of the local government, such as urban planners, civil engineers, architects, and economists.

“Like in Cambodia, Afghanistan has a lack of human resources. This is a big problem in quantity and quality, not having your own professionals,” says Yap Kioe Sheng, head of the human settlements section at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

“This is not so in the Balkans, where the conflict destroyed cities physically, but there was no loss in terms of human resources, the skilled people,” he adds. “But Kabul, like Phnom Penh, has lost both, so there will be greater problems in rebuilding.”

This distinction is not lost on Bhawai, who is acutely aware that talented city officials have either been killed or fled Afghanistan during the years of war. He was Kabul’s deputy mayor from 1993 to 1997, while Karim served as mayor.

Both Karim and Bhawai, belonging to the Tajik community, were driven out after the Taliban, who belonged to the Pashtun ethnic group, took control of Kabul.

“The Taliban did not like educated people. They called the educated ‘kafirs’ (non-believers of Islam) and put some in jail,” says Bhawai. “Others were forced out of government jobs.”

“So now we have to attract these people back,” adds Bhawai. “We need city planners, civil engineers, finance and economics people.”

The Afghans are hoping to draw lessons from their Cambodian counterparts and Asian local government officials familiar with rebuilding war-ravaged towns and cities.

Already, the Cambodian officials participating at this week’s ESCAP meeting have warmed up to the idea of sharing their triumphs and failures with the Afghans — be it on their quest to attract talent back, coping with the flood of refugees returning or dealing with the bubble economy that foreign aid presence helps create.

“Kabul officials must be ready to manage the large amount of assistance that will come from outside,” says Mann Chhoeurn, chief of Phnom Penh’s municipal Cabinet. “We were not prepared. The government was not ready for the way all the foreign assistance created an artificial economy.”

According to U.N. expert Yap, the post-conflict situation and the rehabilitation that follows can be overwhelming.

“Suddenly, Kabul’s municipality with a small staff keen on reconstruction finds itself overwhelmed by so many countries and international agencies wanting to help,” he says. “Reconstruction can be a double-edged sword.”

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