- The Observer, Sunday March 16 2003
And he stressed that the failure to rid the country of its drug lords and poverty could undermine the West's moral case for invading Iraq.
'We should not forget the experience of Afghanistan is a proving ground for whether the international community can stay the course beside a fragile country as it builds itself up from the aftermath of conflict,' he said.
Wolfensohn said his officials now reckoned that drugs were back up to within 10 per cent of their peak production under the Taliban, and that the price of opium had risen from $100 a kilo to $500. The $1.4 billion (£885 million) proceeds from this industry last year compared with the $1.2 billion international aid that flowed into the country.
Opium was banned by the Taliban in 1999. A mere 1,685 hectares were cultivated the following year, according to the US State Department. However, last year a total of 30,750 hectares were harvested, helping restore Afghanistan to its role as the world's number one exporter of heroin precursors. Three quarters of all European heroin comes from Afghanistan, added Wolfensohn.
The trouble lay with the West's preoccupation with affairs elsewhere. Afghanistan once dominiated our attention. But that has now shifted to Iraq.
'The pattern is a common one,' said Wolfensohn. 'While there is shooting it gets headlines, but when it gets to issues of reconstruction the television crews leave and go to the next spot. There's less publicity and it goes off the radar screen and so the second fundraising is always less good than the first one. In the case of Afghanistan we're in that decline period.'
Wolfensohn will attempt to raise a further $600 million at a meeting of Western donors in Brussels tomorrow. The Afghan government is concerned that existing aid money is bypassing its budget entirely, imperilling the nation-building process.
Wolfensohn added that he hoped war could be avoided in Iraq, but that the World Bank was ready to assist rebuilding, and that funding would be less problematic.
'My guess is that this would not happen with Iraq because of the interest in oil,' he said. 'There is an implicit assumption that reconstruction would be paid for out of its oil, but we have not looked into it yet.'
