Jobs for Afghans demands that our U.S. Congress earmark 5% the amount appropriated for military operations in Afghanistan, our tax dollars, to a fund which benefits ordinary Afghans with simple day labor jobs, paid in cash at the end of each day.    Such programs have already been implemented on a small scale in various provinces with great success, in Jawzjan Province, Uruzgan, and Balkh Province, to name a few.  They address a root cause of the insurgency: 40% unemployment and desperate poverty.  The goal of Jobs for Afghans is to help Afghans achieve a stable enough economic and political footing to allow U.S. forces to withdraw within one year. 

A cash-for-work program has the advantages of:

- Being tried and proven on a small scale.

- Accountability.  Cash-for-work projects are labor-intensive and easy to audit, since little machinery or building materials are required.  Most cash-for-work projects require only hand tools, involving projects such as clearing debris and rubble from canals, or digging miles of ditch for future water and electricity infrastructure. 

- Being inexpensive.  A competitive wage in Afghanistan for day labor is $10 per day.  $5  per day compares with pay on the Afghan National Police force. 

- Allowing the prioritization of projects which are useful to the community.  Afghanistan is currently in a pre-development stage of economic growth, in which basic infrastructure in water, sewage, and electricity are more important than state-of-the-art factories. Three-fourths of the population has no access to safe drinking water, and many die from preventable, water-borne disease.

- Easy to manage and supervise.  Most supervision is indigenous once the project is defined, so that many foreign engineers are not needed in the field, which is a security risk. 

- Economic sustainability.  Such a program will encourage small capital formation which is critical to the evolution of the small business sector, and will complement all other development initiatives.

As a consensus has emerged that most, up to 70%, of insurgent fighters are young men who are struggling to feed their families, and are drawn by the wage of roughly $8 per day which work as an insurgent pays, it is now up to the U.S. Congress to fund a program which will preclude the tremendous expense of a protracted, ever-widening war.  Unemployment is 40%-50%.  Afghans are weary of economic misery.   Eight full years after liberation from the unpopular and oppressive Taliban, the average Afghan remains in desperate poverty, with malnourishment widespread across the country, one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, the highest maternal mortality rate in the world, and a high incidence of death by easily preventable disease. 

Jobs for Afghans is committed to establishing the basis for enduring peace and friendship between the Afghan and the American peoples.

The Marshall Plan after World War II showed that economic strategy is as important as military strategy in securing peace and prosperity after conflict.  The benefits of peace over the narrow logic of war are on display in the long period of expansion and prosperity following the Marshall Plan in Europe.  The Afghan people have for 30 years been invaded, occupied, and treated as pawns by the international community.  The time has come to reach out and to offer what has never been offered before: help which allows Afghans to help themselves and to build their own country, with dignity and pride, through the sweat of their own brows.  The world will be rewarded with stabillity, prosperity, and a new start in relations with Muslim nations, so that humanity may face the pressing challenges of the new Millenia as one.