WORLD PLEDGES $10.5B FOR AFGHANISTAN AID

LONDON - Nearly 70 nations and international bodies pledged $10.5
billion to help Afghanistan fight poverty, improve security and crack
down on the drug trade, officials said Wednesday at the end of a
two-day conference on the nation's future.

The pledges were intended to fund the goals set out in a five-year
plan delegates signed Tuesday for redevelopment in Afghanistan, which
has been torn by decades of war.

"We've laid the foundation for change," British Foreign Office
minister Kim Howells said in announcing the funding promises. "This
money will provide the necessary basis for getting Afghanistan's work
under way."

Dubbed the "Afghanistan Compact," the five-year plan covers poverty
reduction, economic development, counternarcotics efforts and
security, and promises aid to help President Hamid Karzai's
government achieve the targets.

"I'm very thankful and I'm very confident that with this kind of
support ... we will eventually be able to establish a very democratic
society in Afghanistan," said Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi, the country's
finance minister.

Diplomats at the conference praised the progress Afghanistan has made
since a U.S.-led coalition toppled the hard-line Taliban regime in
2001. But after decades of war and the Taliban's brutal rule, the
country is still plagued by violence and extreme poverty, and they
acknowledged it has a long way to go.

Ameerah Haq, of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, said it
was crucial that those building the country's future return home and
put the new blueprint into action.

"The clock of the Afghanistan Compact is now ticking," she said.

The conference focused Wednesday on boosting human rights and
economic development.

Afghanistan pledged in the new plan to build a functioning justice
system in all its provinces by 2010 and reduce the number of people
living on less than $1 a day by 3 percent per year.

Howells said establishing the rule of law would be critical.

"Without this, reconstruction, economic growth, poverty reduction and
counternarcotics will continue to be hampered," he said. "It's very
important that the protection of human rights becomes part of the
mainstream of Afghan politics."

Howells said $77 million of the money pledged would go to fight drug
production and trafficking. Afghanistan produces nearly 90 percent of
the world's opium and heroin.

"We need to stop this evil trade which affects us all," he said.

Hedayat Amin Arsala, Afghanistan's commerce minister and a senior
government adviser, said changing the country's political culture
would be difficult.

"This is not a simple task," he said. "There is a whole generation of
Afghans who have grown up seeing political causes advanced" through
violence instead of democratic processes.

Delegates pledged to keep aid to Afghanistan flowing.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said that "at this moment when terrorism is
fighting back in Afghanistan and in Iraq," helping to stabilize both
countries was crucial to global security.

"Because when they were left in that failed state they were a threat
to the whole of the world," he told the House of Commons in his
weekly question session.

The five-year blueprint signed by the leaders at the conference is
intended as a successor to the deal reached at a December 2001
meeting in Bonn, Germany, that established a political process for
Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.

Afghanistan promised in the new compact to build a professional army
and police force, shut down all armed militias by the end of 2007 and
teach its officials about human rights.

It also vowed to provide electricity to 25 percent of rural homes and
65 percent of urban ones by 2010, repair roads and set up a system of
land registration. It also said it would reduce infant and maternal
mortality rates that are among the worst in the world by 20 percent
and 15 percent respectively by 2010.