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•  35 percent of Afghans are malnourished (World Bank, 2009)

• Three quarters of population has no access to safe drinking water, thousands of children get sick each day, and many die, of diarrhoea, dysentery or cholera. (RAWA Report, 2008)

• 40 percent to 50 percent of US aid to Afghanistan has been wasted on corporate priofits and inflated salaries of American and other foreign contractors. (OXFAM Report, 2008)

• Only 1/2 of promised aid since 2001 has been delivered. (OXFAM Report, 2008)

• Afghanistan has 40 percent unemployment. (CIA Fact Book, 2008)

• Taliban is unpopular but pays $10 a day wage.  (AP, 2009)

• The National Solidarity Program (NSP) run by the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development is a widely-hailed program which creates jobs and development which is owned and guided by local Afghans.  However, it is badly underfunded.  The National Solidarity Program works with 22,000 elected village councils to implement Afghan-owned, Afghan-directed infrastructure projects which create jobs. (Army Times, 2009; Washington Monthly, 2007)

• Projects implemented by the NSP tend to be left alone by the Taliban, and defended by villagers themselves.  This is because the Taliban understands that what is built by Afghan communites, rather than foreign contractors, is valued and would result in alienation of the population.  NSP schools are referred to as "the schools the Taliban won't torch."  (Army Times, 2009; Washington Monthly, 2007)

• The frequently heard recipe that "you can't have development before security" gets it backwards.  You cannot have security without a basic works program, because then young Afghan men have no choice but to join the Taliban, which pays $10 per day, a good wage. (Ann Jones, "Why it's not working in Afghanistan," 2006)

• The NSP has thousands of projects on the drawing board, which could generate millions of jobs, which it cannot fund, but which could decisively reverse the insurgency.  Most Taliban fighters are unemployed men who fight for the Taliban's $10 per day, enabled by control of the opium trade.  (“Few Choices for Helmand’s Troubled Youth,” Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 2007)

• An economic "shock and awe" program based on the National Solidarity Program model would very likely bring the stability which would allow most NATO military forces to withdraw within one year.  In any event, it would result in improvement of the lives of ordinary, poverty-stricken Afghans, which would result in America being viewed as a friend rather than an occupier.  This could be similar to the foreign policy success of the Marshall Plan, when post-war Germany came to prefer the West rather than communism. (Documentary film "Rethink Afghanistan," by Robert Greenwald)