This was in the paper yesterday, so I did some digging.
I'm tired of lies!
"Child death rates decline, Karzai says"
KABUL - Six years after the Taliban's ouster, medical care in Afghanistan has improved such that nearly 90,000 children who would have died before age 5 in 2001 will survive this year, President Hamid Karzai said yesterday. Saddled for years with one of the world's worst records on child health, Afghanistan has seen access to healthcare rise dramatically since the US-led invasion. Thousands of clinics have been built across the country. Access to healthcare has jumped from 8 percent of the population in the 1990s to close to 85 percent, thanks in large part to efforts by USAID, the World Bank, and the European Commission (AP)."
Yeah, they did such a god job:
"Disease fueled by freezing weather has killed more than 120 Afghan children, and desperate parents are feeding their children opium in a bid to alleviate their suffering, the health minister reported yesterday.
A total of 128 children have died of ailments including pneumonia, measles, and whooping cough, Mohammed Amin Fatemi told reporters. He said he had no cold-related deaths amomg adults:
"Many parents are giving opium to the children in the belief it will stop the coughing. Maybe for two or three hours it will sedate them, but it is poison for their bodies and can turn them into addicts (Sunday Republican, February 20, 2005)."
"Kabul Journal; In Frigid Capital, Lack of Housing and Planning Is Fatal" by CARLOTTA GALL
ABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 3 - Coughing and wincing in pain, Akakhel, 35, crawled out from beneath a thick quilt in a tent in the snowbound Chaman-e-Babrak refugee camp here.
"My baby died on Friday night," she said. "He was three days old. I gave birth to him here in the tent. He died of the cold. If I am shivering, then he definitely felt the cold." A baby boy, he was her fourth child, the second one she had lost.
After eight years of drought, the heavy snows that have blanketed Afghanistan over the past two weeks might seem to be welcome. But for the 4,000 homeless families crammed into tents in several camps around the city, the snow and the cold are bitter reminders that despite billions of dollars in aid and the country's rapid development, thousands of Afghans are still without shelter and the means to survive.
At worst, for the most vulnerable, they are a death sentence.
Eighteen people have died since the extreme cold descended on the country two weeks ago, the minister of health, Sayeed Mohammad Amin Fatimie, said in an interview this week. Of the 18 people, 13 died in and around Kabul, including several babies, he said.
Three women interviewed in the tent camps scattered around the city said their newborns had died in the past 10 days, probably from the cold. Infant mortality is notoriously high in Afghanistan, but Dr. Fatimie said the deaths coincided with the sharp drop in temperature, down to as low as 5 degrees Fahrenheit at night.
While the cold will lose its grip eventually, the desperate poverty of many Afghans will not, a fact that has focused attention on the failure of the government and the aid agencies to find a long-term solution for the homeless. Refugees are still being encouraged to return to Afghanistan for political reasons even though the country cannot look after them, critics say.
An estimated 10,000 homeless people are in Kabul, about 4,000 of them in two squatter camps. In addition, groups of displaced people are living in public buildings and abandoned ruins in as many as 25 locations throughout the city. Most are refugees who have returned from camps in Pakistan in the three years since the fall of the Taliban. Some families have been living all that time in tents, with the men scraping up a little work as porters in nearby fruit markets.
Meanwhile, scores of expensive private villas are going up around Kabul, some of them built by commanders and government officials on former government land, a sign of growing inequities.
Dr. Fatimie was quick to organize assistance for the camps to combat the cold, bringing in mobile medical teams and getting everyone from the Italian ambassador and the Red Crescent to international peacekeepers to donate food, fuel, blankets and clothes. Yet the energetic emergency assistance only highlighted the neglect of the underlying issue: a drastic shortage of housing, thousands of destitute people and no plan.
"They assured me they are working on a plan," Dr. Fatimie said after meeting with the three men responsible, the ministers of urban development and housing, of rehabilitation and rural development and of refugees and repatriation. In three years nothing has moved further than that. The minister of urban development, who has the main responsibility for housing, declined to be interviewed.
The population of Kabul has swelled chaotically, to 3.4 million from 700,000 in just a few years, creating a dire need for housing, said Srinivasa B. Popuri, of the United Nations Habitat Human Settlements Program, which is advising the Ministry of Urban Development.
The United States Agency for International Development is looking at a site south of the city where it plans to provide housing for 2,000 homeless families. But that project, like so many others, remains in the "concept design" stage, a spokeswoman, Joan Ablett, said.
In any case, the plan is only for people from Kabul and not for those in the camps, many of whom are the landless poor from rural areas with no homes to go back to. The government fears that providing land or housing to squatters will only encourage more to come, officials said.
"It is a very sensitive issue," Mr. Popuri said. "The government is afraid it will set a precedent and more people will come to set up temporary camps in the city so as to get land."
Yet if there is no urban planning, Kabul will end up with the huge slums that have grown up in many cities in the developing world, he warned.
The squatters are weary and bitter. "Karzai announced to the refugees, 'Come back and we will help you,' " Akakhel said, referring to President Hamid Karzai.
Her family returned just six months ago when the Pakistani government closed down its refugee camp and the United Nations refugee agency stopped rations, said her husband, Janda Gul.
"We want the government to help us and give us some shelter," he said. "If we survive this winter, we will not survive the next."
Do you think they, or this little girl, made it, readers?
I never heard back!
"Afghan Living Standards Among the Lowest, U.N. Finds" By CARLOTTA GALL
ANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Feb. 21 - Three years after the United States drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan and vowed to rebuild, the war-shattered country ranked 173rd of 178 countries in the United Nations 2004 Human Development Index, according to a new report from the United Nations.
It was trailed only by a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Burundi, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone.
The survey, "National Human Development Report: Security With a Human Face," released Monday in Kabul, is the first comprehensive look at the state of development in Afghanistan in 30 years. In addition to ranking Afghanistan in the development index for the first time, the report warned that Afghanistan could revert to anarchy if its dire poverty, poor health and insecurity were not improved.
"The fragile nation could easily tumble back into chaos," concluded the authors of the study, led by Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, the report's editor in chief. "The basic human needs and genuine grievances of the people, lack of jobs, health, education, income, dignity and opportunities for participation must be met."
Despite the problems, Afghanistan has shown remarkable progress in the three years since the United States-led war in 2001, the report said.
More than 54 percent of school-age children are enrolled, including four million high school students. The economy is making great strides, with growth of 16 percent in nondrug gross domestic product in 2003 and predicted growth of 10 to 12 percent annually for the next decade.
While there has been rapid progress, said Zphirin Diabr, associate administrator of the United Nations Development Program, the country has a long way to go just to get back to where it was 20 years ago. The figures, as President Hamid Karzai says in the report's introduction, paint a gloomy picture.
Average life expectancy for Afghanistan's 28.5 million people is 44.5 years, at least 20 years lower than that of neighboring countries, the report said. Ambassador Christopher Alexander of Canada, whose government helped pay for the report, said that illustrated Afghanistan's post-conflict predicament and the prevalence of poverty.
One of two Afghans can be classified as poor, and 20.4 percent of the rural population does not have enough to eat, getting less than the benchmark of 2,070 calories a day. More than half of the population has suffered from the effects of a prolonged drought, the report said.
One-quarter of the population has at some time sought refuge outside the country, and 3.6 million remain refugees or displaced people.
Most glaring are the inequalities that affect women and children, still some of the worst social indicators in the world today, said Alistair McKechnie, country director of the World Bank, which financed the report along with the Canadians and the United Nations. One woman dies from pregnancy-related causes about every 30 minutes, and maternal mortality rates are 60 times higher than in industrialized countries, the report said.
One-fifth of the children die before the age of 5, 80 percent of them from preventable diseases, one of the worst rates in the world. Only 25 percent of the population has access to clean drinking water, and one in eight children die from lack of clean water.
Afghanistan now has the worst education system in the world, the report concluded, and one of the lowest adult literacy rates, 28.7 percent. Annual per capita income was $190 and the unemployment rate 25 percent, said Hanif Atmar, the minister of rehabilitation and rural development.
"Obviously this is a warning," the minister said of the report. "It shows why we are poor, how and in what way we can solve this."
The success of Afghanistan depends on improved security, political reform, broad-based economic development and gradual elimination of poppy production, Mr. McKechnie said, adding that failure in any of those areas would imperil the reconstruction of the state country and the living conditions of the people.
The report and its donors emphasized that attention must be paid to helping the nation's poorest people if Afghanistan is to be lifted out of its dire poverty and persistent instability."
But that was 2005, you are saying.
Yeah, you are right.
It is improving everyday, like today!
Suicide bomber kills at least 90 in Afghanistan
Yeah, never mind the U.S. military's 75 air raids a day, and the five-fold increase in air bombings.
And I still never heard back from the MSM on those Afghanis!
