Afghan destruction underestimated, adviser says

[maddezmom]

By Sonya Hepinstall

KABUL, April 23 (Reuters) - The level of destruction in Afghanistan was far underestimated from the beginning which fuelled unrealistic expectations about how fast the country could be rebuilt, one of the country's top economic officials said.

Ishaq Nadiri, senior economic adviser to President Hamid Karzai, pointed to a legacy of conflict and division that started almost 30 years ago with the Soviet invasion and continued into civil war and the rule of the strict Islamist Taliban.

"Afghanistan is not your ordinary post-conflict country ... the degree of the devastation of this country has been highly underestimated. So the expectation has been very high," he told Reuters in an interview late on Sunday.

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Donors and Afghans must be patient with the government formed after Karzai was elected in 2004 as it faced the huge task of building a society and economy basically from scratch, he said. "We have to build the institutions, we have to build democracy, we have to educate the kids, we have to feed the people and we have to bring the hundreds of thousands per month or whatever of immigrants back, refugees back ... which other society has done that?" Nadiri said.

more:http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SP7195.htm