Business booming in Afghanistan

Not only were the recent elections a success, but business is booming in Afghanistan. This isn't news that liberals want to hear, and since they control the old media, they're not going to report it either. Fox News does, however. Without them, we'd be completely dependent on foreign news sources for any sign of progress in Afghanistan. Even the recent elections were portrayed as a failure here.

Afghanis have to be very happy about the way things are progressing.

On its face, it’s not a boom most Westerners would recognize. Few streets in the capital are paved, and many are lined with garbage. Walls in western Kabul are still pocked with bullet holes, and the shells of bombed-out buildings stand testament to the post-Soviet civil war that nearly destroyed the city of half a million. Cars compete with livestock at some intersections, electricity is sporadic at best and the incoming rockets have not disappeared entirely.

But for a city that has known little but war and political chaos for a generation, the sight of men rebuilding homes and dealerships full of shiny new automobiles are a welcome change from the recent past. And it’s a dramatically different climate from that in the other front of America’s War on Terror.

“This is nothing like Iraq,” said Austrian-born Franz Zenz, who is making a mint selling fuel and air transport services to everyone from the local airline, Ariana, to the U.S. Agency for International Development (search). “Here you can walk the streets. You can go to dinner with friends. It is completely different.”

Such progress has attracted some 142 foreign companies to Afghanistan in the last 12 months alone, bringing nearly half a billion dollars in capital investment to the country.

Much of that money going into construction. A new $42-million Hyatt is being built, right next to a massive new American embassy. There are shopping centers going up, as well as office complexes and hundreds of private homes. Internet cafes with shiny glass fronts, features unimaginable during the war years, are everywhere, and cellular phones are becoming as common as psychedelic-colored jingle trucks and Chinese bicycles.

Could there just be some validity to President Bush's doctrine of pre-emption and spreading democracy throughout the world?

I believe that a significant component of the success of this effort is the Internet. Without the internet we wouldn't have positive news from Afghanistan. Without the internet, Afghanis would have news from the outside world. They wouldn't know how much support they have from "ordinary" citizens from around the world. They wouldn't know that there was a different way to live than the way they've lived for decades. They wouldn't have some of the business opportuntities that they now have.

It's a brave, new world. Some have failed to recognize it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.