KABUL: As Afghanistan’s international donors meet in Brussels in a summit co-hosted by the European Union and the Kabul government on 4-5 October, Afghanistan’s rapidly deteriorating economy must be their central concern. Before this and an escalating humanitarian crisis merge to reach a dangerous critical mass, all must agree on several priorities – alongside renewed efforts to bring peace and political stability: realistic planning based on a thorough new socio-economic assessment, currently absent; adequate aid and support for state policy implementation, especially to help an alarming rise in numbers of displaced and shelterless people; halting repatriation of Afghan refugees, especially from Europe and Pakistan; and boosting investment and above all job creation in the country.
Afghanistan’s impressive average annual growth of nine per cent from 2002-2013 has declined rapidly since 2014. According to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, annual GDP growth fell from 14.4 per cent in 2012 to 2 percent in 2013, and 1.3 and 1.5 per cent in 2014 and 2015 respectively. This drastic economic decline is mainly the result of the post-2014 international military drawdown and the year of intensified political instability that followed the 2014 election. Foreign troops once brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the Afghan economy, and their departure from 800 bases, large and small, deprives the country of what was after 2002 its largest single source of revenue. By one estimate, more than 200,000 Afghans have now lost jobs in logistics, security, and other sectors of a war-driven economy.
Heightened security concerns, political uncertainty and the erosion of the rule of law since 2014 have added to a devastating loss of confidence by consumers, producers and investors. Pervasive fears of a political meltdown have led to a surge in capital flight, with both wealthy and middle-class Afghans moving assets to the Gulf States, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Central Asia. Afghanistan’s human capital shrank too, especially among the urban middle class that had emerged after 2001 to play a stabilising role in Afghan politics. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans, mostly young and educated, left the country in 2014 and 2015, often to seek refugee status in Europe.
This sudden economic reversal has considerable political, security and social implications. Rising unemployment and widespread poverty is already widening the legitimacy gap between the National Unity Government (NUG) and the Afghan public, and expanding the reservoir of grievances that insurgents as well as hardline ethnic and regional players could further exploit. Unfortunately, it is not the NUG’s only pressing problem.
