Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Just a quickie here. In this article from Deutsche Welle, and many other sites as usual, talking about the aid program slowly getting set up for Afghanistan since the Taliban’s removal in 2001.

The story itself is fairly standard - Afghanistan finally got a generous aid package pledged, although it remains to be seen whether it will be followed through on (the US has been slacking off on its obligations, as have other countries). There’s also the issue of whether the aid packages will be around as long as they should be to help out on a major way.

What struck me about the article (which I originally saw in the BBC’s pages, but they updated the URL with a revised one and I lost the old one - doh!) wasn’t the size of the aid or the fact of the pledges or the question of their continuance. What struck me was how Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani described what the goal is:

Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest country’s. Some four million of its 25 million population live on less than 50 U.S. cents a day, Ghani said during the conference.

“Our priority is precisely to ensure a move from abject poverty to poverty with dignity — at least a dollar a day,” he told reporters.

“From abject poverty to poverty with dignity,” followed by what they want to get it to that point. These are very modest expectations, and they’re expectations which need to be met on the way to any longer-term goals anyway. Anyway, it was the mix of fatalism, realism and modesty of that statement which struck me, and I felt I should pass it on to you guys.