What happened in 2003?
Back to School and to Rebuilding - Afghans have been working hard this last year, rebuilding their homes, starting businesses, and sending their children back to school, or, for many, to school for the first time. Officials say nearly 5 million children will be back at school by the New Year, a third of them girls, which is a huge achievement in a country emerging from the draconian rule of the Taliban. Refugees continued voting with their feet, and another half a million refugees returned home from neighbouring countries this year, bringing the overall return since the fall of the Taliban in December 2001 to 2.5 million people. Another striking change was the spread of the mobile telephone network and internet connections linking cities and families across the country and the world.
Reconstruction - The United States put up most of the funding for a big road project to repair and repave the Kabul to Kandahar highway, one of the main arteries in the country, which had deteriorated into a rutted, bumpy and dusty track. Temporary suspension bridges have gone up on the road north of Kabul and engineers have been repairing the Salang tunnel, one of the highest tunnels in the world, which was blocked by explosions for years. Yet for many Afghans the reconstruction was painfully slow and for those in remote rural areas it seemed non-existent. Afghan and World Bank officials, who won $4.5 billion of pledges from donor countries in 2002, now said $30 billion would be needed over the next five years to rebuild Afghanistan to any normal standard. What is clear is that the task of bringing basic infrastructure, (roads, bridges, hospitals, law and order and education) to Afghanistan is much more enormous than anyone realised at first.
Security - One serious setback has been a resurgence of the Taliban in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Although roundly defeated by the American campaign of 2001, the Taliban made a comeback in 2003, launching guerrilla attacks, often by groups of militants from across the border in Pakistan. They have attacked and killed government officials and police, as well as international and Afghan aid workers in an evident attempt to scare away international assistance and diminish support for the government of President Hamid Karzai. There have also been attacks on international peace-keeping troops in Kabul, the United Nations and other international organisations in what appears to be a calculated terrorist campaign. The scale of violence is nothing like what we are seeing in Iraq, and many parts of Afghanistan are completely peaceful, but as the world starts to forget this far-off, poverty stricken country and turn to other problems, never have the Afghans needed foreign support, in continued humanitarian and development assistance, than now.