The United Nations on Wednesday used a regional conference on Afghanistan to urge its neighbours and regional powers to overcome distrust of the war-torn country and create a vibrant inter-dependent economy in the troubled region.
The event in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek gathered officials from Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and the former Soviet Central Asian republics to find ways of creating economic ties that could help wean Afghanistan off its crippling dependence on heroin production.
"Regional and economic co-operation is so critical to achieving broader growth and stability not just for Afghanistan but for all of its neighbours," said Mark Malloch Brown, head of the United Nations Development Programme.
Afghanistan "has the potential to be a land bridge to trade between Central and South Asia," Brown told the UN-sponsored conference entitled Afghanistan's Regional Economic Co-operation.
He said that growth in the region could only be achieved if a myriad of regional rivalries were put aside and the neighbours united in a close-knit economic community.
More than two years after the hard-line Taleban militia fell, Afghanistan is still struggling to stand on its feet as US-led forces pursue the regime's fighters and their al Qaeda allies and heroin production continues to boom.
Neighbouring countries such as Uzbekistan that have repeatedly sealed their land borders in response to terrorist infiltration from Afghanistan must learn more flexibility and openness, Brown cautioned.
"The reality is that Central Asia is still relatively stable - a short-term, close-down-the-borders, turn-inwards strategy offers you absolutely no prospects for tomorrow," Brown said in an interview with AFP.
After an international conference in April gathered pledges of aid for Afghanistan totalling some 8.2 billion dollars, Wednesday's conference focused on regional trade and transport barriers in this habitually fractious region.
Brown's calls for greater trust were welcomed by Afghan officials, who pointed to their country's recent slashing of import tariffs and the start of a 31-million-dollar (26-million-euro) World Bank programme to streamline border controls.
"We are in a position to turn our spatial proximity into relationships of mutual economic dependence that can bind us in a common strategy for improving the livelihoods of our people and enable us to have security, stability and prosperity," Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani told delegates.
"We need people to come to Afghanistan, to join us, to bring money and invest," said Ghulam Dawood Naseeb, a businessman eyeing new markets for his fledgling northern Afghanistan potato chip business, interviewed by AFP.
Almost all Afghanistan's neighbours are engaged in major road and rail building projects inside Afghanistan, but critics say that such efforts are rarely accompanied by much-needed slashing of tariffs, red tape and corruption.
Suspicions run deep, especially following a series of blasts in Uzbekistan last month that the country's hard-line President Islam Karimov blamed on Taleban infiltrators and resulted in a new clamp-down at the "friendship bridge" over the Amu-Darya River between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.
However Zia ul Haq, a senior Pakistan trade official, said that the main obstacle to co-operation was the continued grip of drug and arms-trading gangs on Afghanistan's trade routes.
"It needs a carrot and stick approach and so far the stick has not been strong enough," Haq said.
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