World ignores Afghan development, urban forum told
By Allan DowdVANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - The world's focus on security in Afghanistan's cities has come at the expense of fixing its housing and other urban needs, the country's urban development minister said on Wednesday.
Mohammad Yusouf Pashtun said that while violence has been increasing in parts of the war-torn country, international donors need to recognize that repairing Kabul and other Afghan cities will also make them safer.
"Please grasp our hand and do not let us go," Pashtun told the World Urban Forum, a U.N-sponsored gathering on problems such as city slums that has brought more than 8,000 city planners, officials and social activists to Vancouver, on Canada's Pacific coast.
"Security and development have got direct links. One cannot wait for the other... A little bit of development brings more security. More security brings more opportunity for development," he told reporters.
Pashtun said the capital of Kabul has suffered the dual strains of war refugees returning from other countries since the fall of the Taliban and an influx of rural poor relocating in search of education and economic opportunities.
Afghanistan also needs help to deal with potential natural disasters such as earthquakes. "The danger is waiting to happen and for which we are ill prepared," he said.
International donors have left most of the rebuilding up to the private sector, but a lack of international planning support means it has focused on commercial construction, and the expansion of Kabul is now "haphazard", he said.
Pashtun said he understood the fears of development agencies to work in unsafe cities, but he criticized the international media and said they were making the country look more violent than was.
The Vancouver forum follows a new United Nations report that warned that countries must address growing urban poverty.
A majority of the world's population is expected to be urbanized by the end of 2007 with 80 percent of the people living in urban areas by 2030, according to the report.
Copyright © 2008 Reuters
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