Improvements in Afghanistan

Foreign aid is everything in Afghanistan.  Without it the country is incapable of performing as a country should, offering its citizens health care, education, security, justice, employment - in short any kind of future other than merely enduring existence.  Foreign aid accounts for over 80% of Afghanistan's annual state budget of approximately $5-billion.

As foreign intervention ceases, and the international community prepares to welcome its combat troops back home, the end of 2014 will also mean the end of much in the way of foreign aid.  Foreign investment will certainly be hugely curtailed, for who wants to invest in a country where it is acknowledged that the current, international-aided government is likely to fall to a violent, ignorant religious thugocracy?

Save the Children has announced that "More mothers are surviving and fewer children are dying and this is something we need to be celebrating".  Afghanistan, thanks to the blood, sweat and tears of foreign troops keeping the Taliban insurgency at bay, has advanced enormously in its ability to give medical aid where it is needed, and to educate the young of the country.   Not everywhere, to be sure, but in the urban centres.

Afghanistan has now surpassed Niger in Save the Children's Mothers' Index.  Niger has fallen back to bottom place, a dubious honour that Afghanistan has occupied for several years.  Afghanistan is no longer the very last place in the world supporting the health of women and children.  It is now able to boast that it is second-from-last.

There remains widespread malnutrition in the country with 60% of Afghan children stunted, as a result.  Every day in the country of 30 million, 275 children die of maladies, many related to malnutrition.  A reflection of what occurs elsewhere in the world where malnutrition is rampant, the underlying cause of 2.6-million deaths among children world-wide on an annual basis.

"Millions more children survive, but suffer lifelong physical and cognitive impairment because they did not get the nutrients they needed early in their lives when their growing bodies and minds were most vulnerable", according to Save the Children's latest report.

Which still describes an enormous improvement.  The number of births attended by trained professionals has risen from14% between 2004 and 2008, to 24%.  Girls receiving education through school attendance has soared from none in 2001 to 2.5 million at the present time.  Even despite horrendous episodes of threats, acid attacks, schoolhouses destroyed and attempted mass schoolgirl poisoning, and assassinations.

Afghan women may now vote and work and achieve a good education.  All of which were denied them under Taliban rule.  Which doesn't by any reckoning mean that all is well, since the successes are uneven across the country; in the far rural areas there have been few advances for women and girls.  The fly in the ointment of this success, is obvious.

With the final withdrawal of foreign troops, despite that the international community has pledged to continue funding the country's basic needs and humanitarian groups will continue to operate out of Afghanistan, the threat of a Taliban return looms on the horizon.