International donors pledged USUS$4.4 billion for Afghanistan on Wednesday after Afghan President Hamid Karzai appealed for help to stop his country from becoming a haven for drugs and terrorism.
One of the world's poorest countries and the biggest opium supplier, Afghanistan remains a key Western security concern two years after US-led forces overthrew the Taliban, which had provided refuge for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda guerrillas.
"This is 100 percent of our target," Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai said at a meeting of over 50 donor nations in Berlin.
The pledge toward reconstruction and budget costs for the financial year 2004-2005 far outweighs the US$4.5 billion over a five-year period pledged at a 2002 donors' conference in Tokyo, but is also dwarfed by an estimated annual bill of US$12 billion for the West's military operations in Afghanistan.
Ghani, clearly delighted, stressed the aid would cut the West's military bill by contributing to Afghanistan's stability.
"We are not asking for charity, we are asking for investment," he said.
"When we are asking for assistance it is to actually save you money, not to make further claims on your constrained budgets," he said.
Karzai's government says it needs US$27.5 billion over seven years to build a state capable of supporting itself, although it had not expected this sum at the two-day Berlin conference.
Ghani said the international community had made a further promise of US$8.2 billion over the next three years, short of Kabul's hoped-for US$11.9 billion, but with the potential to rise.
He said the changing focus of aid pledges was testament to the progress made since the fall of the Taliban.
"When pledges were made in Tokyo at least half ... were for humanitarian purposes," Ghani said.
"The key focus of the current pledges is now on reconstruction, good governance and the political process. This marks a very important change," he said.
Karzai earlier urged donors to help his country recover from the destruction of decades of war. "What we have achieved is very promising, but let me be frank and say that the reconstruction has only begun," he said.
But aid agencies and think tanks say the West's commitment to Afghanistan has been lackluster, and much of the aid the country might have won has been diverted to postwar Iraq, which had received 10 times as much despite having roughly the same population.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a speech to the conference, expressed hope that Afghanistan would never again harbor groups such as al-Qaeda.
"Never again will tyrants and terrorists rule Afghanistan and never again will Afghanistan become a seedbed of instability," he said.
The US said on Wednesday that the first of 2,000 Marine reinforcements had arrived to intensify the hunt for fugitive militants and boost security ahead of elections delayed until September partly because of security concerns.
However, opium production in Afghanistan, almost eradicated under the Taliban in its last year in power, has since taken off and is reckoned to be worth about half the country's officially estimated gross domestic product of nearly US$4 billion.
The country is believed to supply three-quarters of the world's opium. "Nobody wants to be called a drug dealer, especially not a whole nation," Karzai said.
While a NATO-led peacekeeping force has succeeded in re-establishing security in and around the capital, Kabul, much of the country is controlled by warlords.
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