There was a time that developing planners envied conditions whereby they could plan on a clean slate and when they did not have to work on old schemes and improve on them in order to make them viable and the efforts already rendered on them worthwhile. This time around in Afghanistan they have been provided an almost clean slate and they could begin planning in almost all fields from scratch.

They would need to plan for Afghanistan's agriculture, because Afghanistan's economy is presently based on agriculture and majority of its population engage in agriculture. They can plan for health, as the country is in dire need of health facilities (hospitals, health centers, laboratories, pharmaceutical and vaccine and serum production institutes, etc.) and health personnel of all categories and levels from generalists to specialists. They can plan for industries, light and heavy, as the country is in need and ready for taking up industrial development schemes that would start from scratch. They can start planning for the communication projects, road extension and building and telecommunication systems. Likewise, they can start planning in all fields including education, social development, media services, arts and crafts and other needs of the society.

But plans, in order to be implemented, require energy and on the clean slate there is even a need to plan for energy. In Afghanistan, sources of energy were either limited or exploited in a limited way. Great deforestation occurred in the past few decades mainly because people used trees for fuel and illegal exportation for construction purposes. Afghan natural gas was exported in quantities known only to the buyer on whose land were located measuring equipment. There was almost no domestic use of Afghanistan's natural gas from the northern gas fields in Shiberghan. The issue of petroleum itself made a long and difficult story of the country's need for foreign expertise and freedom from foreign political influences. The Soviet Union prolonged petroleum exploration for decades without revealing its technical team's findings. It further pressured Afghanistan to assign monopoly for the exploration only to the Soviet Union. A French involvement in exploration was made to be abandoned. Thus Afghanistan remained as energy thirsty as it had been throughout its recent history.

It was only a few Afghan rivers and a handful of thermal plants that produced the limited electricity used to barely light up some major cities' nights. The expansion of cities and increased urbanization such as the one experienced in the capital city Kabul served a great strain on the electricity, so much so, that a 100 watt bulb would barely glow as a 25 watt lamp. Even so the hydel projects on Kabul river and Helmand and the thermal plants in Balkh province, were considered the pride of the country as they showed the country's determination to harness its own natural resources.

Other sources of energy were only treated as fictional. While Herat was famous for its annual 120-day winds that also blew throughout the year, no one considered developing wind farms. And although Afghanistan on the average enjoys 300 sunny days per year, no one considered solar arrays to convert sunlight to electricity. Other feasible technology such as geothermal installations and biomass fuels remained in the mind of the few scholars who read about them only in passing.

It is now high time Afghan planners on this threshold of the 21st century utilize the many new technical discoveries for the production of energy needed for Afghanistan's construction. Although some may argue that importation of oil and gas from countries west and north of Afghanistan may provide easy resolution of her energy needs, it is to be understood that foreign products are only foreign and in control of foreign powers. Afghanistan's petroleum and gas reserves plus other renewable resources such as solar arrays, wind farms, geothermal installations and biomass fuels whereby plant, animal and industrial waste is changed into power must be considered by experts as alternatives. 11/22/02