Opening Remarks By President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani at the Senior Officials Meeting

Afghanistan is a conundrum. For not just centuries, but for millennia we were a central node for world trade, culture, entrepreneurship, and the exchange of ideas with the world at large. Our cities were the hubs where the caravans of Asia rested before continuing their journeys through Iran and Turkey on their way to Venice. Even as late as the 1960s, Afghanistan was the tail end of a young people’s discovery route that connected Europe to Asia.

But forty years of conflict have destroyed not just a vast amount of material and lives, but the sense of time and space that we need to rebuild the country on a foundation that will yield the prosperity and trade that is Afghanistan’s birthright. Rebuilding Afghanistan is going to be a long-term endeavor. The question for this meeting is, “what kinds of investments should the government and the people of Afghanistan be making and in what sort of sequence to rebuild a sustainable economy that can secure the welfare of its people?”

Afghanistan is a wounded country. Socially, we have 5 million refugees. Our poverty rates have not budged in ten years of development. Our capital city is a bedroom community that ballooned from 400,000 15 years go to 3.5 million today as people flocked to find jobs in the bubble economy and are now left with little more than unemployment.

We produce little that the world wants. Economically, we are a country that has $400 million in exports and $8-12 billion in imports. Even if there were no Taliban ravaging the countryside, our trade imbalances would condemn us to perpetual poverty.

Politically, our elite is still breathing the fumes of fourteen years of world class rents for their grandfather’s houses in Wazir Akbar Khan and salaries that were what they would have made had they been working in Mayfair or Manhattan. For fourteen years they collect rents, not profits or dividends. Political ambition and ethnic divisiveness replaced any notion of national interest or civic duty. Our state had become a rentier state, one that could host projects but had no strategic mind or capabilities of its own.

The transformation agenda that Dr. Abdullah and I laid out in London was not a one-off document, but the charter for how we plan to reinvent Afghanistan. But it is critical that our partners understand the inter-connections between our security, political, and economical transformation. Afghanistan’s reconstruction is not just a matter of repairing a bombed out airfield. Our government is seeking structural changes that will build an Afghanistan that will last long after the current leadership team is gone. But structural changes are difficult. And they are painful.

What is it that we must change? My first proposition was that productivity is very low because we do not use our assets well. What are those assets? They are land, water, human capital, and our location. Let us begin with land and water, the two backbones of agricultural productivity. We started 2015 with the amount of land under cultivation that is slightly more than half of what it was three decades ago. For this reason, the first priority of the government is to revitalize agriculture. We have put some of our very best talent in charge of revitalizing Afghanistan’s rural sector, with specific mandates to improve land management, develop sectoral strategies for irrigation, and remove the constraints that block farmers from selling their products.

Finally, Afghanistan is a country of rich mineral resources that can fuel growth if properly exploited. In the past, however, to the extent that mines were developed they were handed out as one-time concessions, without any sort of strategic framework that would manage the resources for the overall good of the country. Over the past year, our government temporarily slowed down and re-thought how we approach mining connection contracts in order to systematize and clarify the framework, including how we can use the mechanisms of the EITI to avoid the corruption and despoliation of the past. We’re now ready to move ahead. - Read More at Opening Remarks 

Opening Remarks By President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani at the Senior Officials Meeting - More
رئیس جمهور غنی نشست مقامات عالی رتبه را رسماً افتتاح کرد 
جمهور رئیس غني د لوړ پوړو چارواکو ناسته پرانیستله 

President Ghani: President Ghani: Afghanistan Doesn’t Want to Be Isolated  - More
رئیس جمهور غنی: افغانستان نمی خواهد که یک کشور در انزوا باشد
جمهور رئیس غني: افغانستان نه غواړي په انزوا کې و اوسي