By Larry Thompson And Michelle Brown
06/13/2002
Wednesday, June 12, 2002; Page A31

Every morning hundreds of overcrowded, battered, wildly painted buses and trucks gather on a dusty plain near the frontier city of Peshawar, Pakistan. Platoons of workers for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) register the new arrivals—Afghan refugees heading homeand send them on their way to Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass.

The refugees carry their meager worldly goods with them. Among their most valuable possessions are wooden poles, beams and window frames. The refugees have torn down their mud-brick houses in Pakistan to salvage the wood. Wood is expensive, and wooden poles to frame a new house are worth carrying home.

The return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan and Iran is one of the largest, fastest migrations in history. In less than three months, UNHCR has counted 920,000 returnees. Add to that hundreds of thousands of unrecorded returnees and displaced persons and the number of Afghans going home adds up to well over 1 million. Three million or more Afghan refugees are still living in Iran and Pakistan, so the mass migration may continue for many more months—provided that Afghanistan continues to enjoy relative peace and offer economic opportunity.

That's the rub. Refugee returnees crossing the border from both Pakistan and Iran are optimistic. But we visited villages full of returnees near Bamyan—famous for the huge standing Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban—with economic prospects amounting to near zero. They are living in tents, awaiting materials from the UNHCR and other aid agencies to build new homes from the ruins of their villages.

A surprisingly large number of the returnees—about 40 percent—are coming to the overcrowded and war-ravaged capital city of Kabul. We met many young Afghan men coming back from Iran. They are urbanized factory and construction workers, dressed in clothes that might have come from Wal-Mart, and they are going to Kabul. Will they find work? And what will be their social impact on Afghanistan?

The United Nations had planned for the return of 800,000 Afghans in 2002—a number already exceeded. The aid agencies are under extraordinary pressure to keep up with the needs of the returnees and their communities. The billions of dollars in aid pledges made in the euphoria of the fall of the Taliban government have not yet come through. UNHCR is $92 million short of its $271 million budget for Afghanistan in 2002. The World Food Programme has had to cut back on its food distributions. The U.N. Development Program, while providing policy advice to the new Afghan government, still does not have the okay of the government and the support of donors to become fully operational.

Politics, of course, plays its part. A loya jirga—the traditional Afghan version of a representative assembly—is meeting to set the future course of Afghan government. Whether its decisions will be perceived by the Afghan people as positive or negative will have an enormous impact on refugee returns, development programs and, indeed, the future of the country.

Afghanistan is perhaps the most difficult reconstruction of a country ever undertaken by the international aid community. The great fear is that it will slip back into ethnic-related civil war or will remain economically prostrate and the refugees now going home will remain wards of the international community—or become refugees again.

Moreover, the humanitarian crisis caused by drought in Afghanistan is not over yet. Although the prospects for increased agricultural production in much of the north are better this year than last, southern Afghanistan remains locked into a catastrophic drought. Large amounts of food aid will be necessary for at least another year.

The Bush administration sees the crisis in Afghanistan as fundamentally a political and military one in the context of the global war on terrorism. It is certainly that. But it is also a humanitarian crisis. To date, the international response to the political and military crisis has been swift, the response to the humanitarian crisis much less so.

Further delay in emergency and reconstruction assistance will put lives at risk and threaten the political stability of the country. The international community, led by the United States, must fulfill its promise to the Afghan people.

Larry Thompson and Michelle Brown are with Refugees International.