Building a New Afghanistan.

• Author: Klug, Jeffrey
• Position: FURTHER READING - Book review

BUILDING A NEW AFGHANISTAN

Robert Rotberg, ed.

(Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), 242 pages.

In late 2006, Afghanistan saw a Taliban resurgence and, consequently, a deteriorating security situation. At that time, Robert Rotberg assembled nine contributors from Afghanistan, the United States and the United Kingdom to offer broad policy diagnoses for the various problems plaguing the country.

In the first part of Building a New Afghanistan, the Afghan contributors, including Ali Jalali, Hekmat Karzai and Hedayat Amin-Arsala, consider the legacy of war in Afghanistan. According to Jalali, a former interior minister, both the Soviet intervention during the 1980s and the civil war in the 1990s involved internal armed factions and competing foreign states that crippled Afghan institutions. Jalali contends that, in order to rebuild and overcome this turbulent history, sustainable civil affairs assistance is needed in the rural areas of Afghanistan, such as building new schools or providing health services.

In the economic sphere, Alastair McKechnie of the World Bank argues that microfinance, telecommunications, horticulture and mineral deposits are some of the areas that hold favorable prospects for short- to medium-term development. S. Frederick Starr of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute emphasizes the role that regional integration can play in Afghanistan's economic development, such as new energy links from Central Asia or routes to warm water ports. Cindy Fazey, a criminologist...