As U.S. Pulls Back, Fears Abound Over Toll on Afghan Economy

 KABUL, Afghanistan — While President Obama’s announcement of troop reductions is not expected to change much here right away, American and Afghan officials are already worrying about the impact of the eventual withdrawal of international forces on Afghanistan’s struggling economy.

Very little will happen immediately. “What’s going to be different 24 hours after the president’s speech? Nothing,” said a senior American official in Kabul.

Over the next three years, however, as the American military and civilian presence — and spending — decrease, thousands of jobs will end for Afghans who work at or around bases and under grants and contracts financed by the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development.

Afghans and American civilian and military planners fear that the country will fall into an economic abyss, sending some Afghans back into the insurgency and deepening the poverty of people throughout the country.

“We’ve had remarkable achievements, but can they make up the gap with the hit from the withdrawal of the war economy? That would be a stretch,” said a senior United States official.

The number of American civilians working in the field and the amount of American spending are expected to plunge over the next three and a half years, with much of the shrinkage coming in 2013 and 2014, said American officials and diplomats in Kabul and the provinces.

The hope is that gradually the private sector will begin to create some jobs, but that possibility still seems to be years away.

The provincial reconstruction teams that set up projects and distribute grants in all 34 provinces will end their work by the end of 2014 and relocate to four urban centers: Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kandahar and Jalalabad.

 

Civilian teams in the districts, which operate in many rural of Afghanistan’s rural areas, will leave as well, said a senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to comment publicly on the delicate subject. At least two provincial reconstruction teams — in Panshir Province and Bamian Province — will end leave in the next six months.

Over the next three and a half years all programs and projects will be handled by teams based in the four urban areas, and their travel will be determined by the security situation, said United States officials in Kabul. While that is the expectation, the distances they would have to travel and the possibility that once NATO troops leave security will decline in some areas suggests that planners setting up development projects could be far more selective, officials said.

For instance, road building, which has been troubled by corruption and payoffs to security companies that often had links to insurgents, is winding down, but there will continue to be efforts to improve the supply of electricity.

Development spending, which was $4.2 billion in 2010 and was managed by the State Department and the Agency for International Development, has already declined to about $2.5 billion this year and is expected to stay at roughly that level in 2012, officials said this week in Kabul. But after that, spending is likely to decline further “as Afghanistan becomes a normal country,” a senior American official said.

Nearly 10 years after the NATO coalition entered the country, officials say that although there are hopeful signs among young Afghans who are working in areas like public health and education, only “a thin layer” of people have the potential to move the country forward.

Opium remains the most lucrative crop for Afghanistan’s farmers, meaning that despite enormous efforts and millions of dollars spent on alternative crop programs by both Britain and the United States to move farmers into other work, progress is “very slow,” said a senior United States official.

All future development plans are based on the assumption that Afghanistan will become more stable and that financing for U.S.A.I.D. projects and the State Department’s foreign aid programs will be “robust,” officials said. If that turns out to be wrong, all bets are off.        

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

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