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Rehabilitation and Reconstruction - ADB's Role in Afghanistan and the Region

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Afghanistan and ADB: a partnership renewed

ADB’s return to Afghanistan after an absence of 23 years started one cold, misty morning in February 2002. An ADB team arrived at Kabul airport for meetings that would mark ADB’s first formal contact in the country with the ruling Interim Administration of Afghanistan (IAA). It was a quiet beginning to a new era of partnership.

The revival of the relationship between ADB and Afghanistan was achieved through well-defined steps.

Afghanistan was a founding member of ADB, joining in 1966. Operations began in 1969, and in 1970, the first loan was approved. Nine loans to the country, totaling $95.1 million from the Asian Development Fund (ADF), were approved by 1979.¹¹ ADB focused on small- and medium-sized agriculture and irrigation projects, and did some work in transportation, hydropower, and vocational education. In 1979, following the Soviet occupation of the country, ADB suspended its operations in Afghanistan.¹²

In the more than 2 decades that passed before ADB returned to Afghanistan, the country was devastated by external aggression and civil war. Its economy and physical infrastructure were in ruins; its social, political, and ethnic fabric destroyed. The destructive impact of Soviet aggression, civil war, and the brutally repressive Taliban regime was aggravated in the late 1990s by 4 years of drought, which seriously affected agricultural, horticultural, and livestock production. For all practical purposes, the economy came to a standstill. Production, consumption, trade, savings, investment, and capital accumulation either collapsed or fell to very low levels. Between 1998 and 2002, per capita gross national product declined an estimated 35% to about $205.

In December 2001, with the signing of the Bonn Agreement, power in the country was vested in the IAA, which quickly proclaimed its desire to revive the nation’s economy and restore peace and stability. The Afghan people have shown a strong commitment to take control of their destiny and transform their land into a well-governed country focused on reconstruction and spreading prosperity to all Afghans.

They face three formidable challenges: They must answer the human costs of decades of fighting; they must establish a viable peace; and they must develop the administrative and political capacity needed to run a modern state. The reconstruction of Afghanistan will test its people and the will of the international community. It will also be a testing ground for the latest thinking and theory on the best way to establish a close and continuous connection between humanitarian assistance and reconstruction.

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