ИСТИНА

The Islamic republic of Afghanistan has been developed in condition of permanent military and political insecurity since 1970s. The goal of the study is to investigate impact of military instability on economic and social performance of regions of the Afghanistan. We assessed all (34) provinces in relation to military instability measured by frequency of reported armed conflicts in the last years. The provinces with different degree of instability are analyzed in relation to their economic and social performance. We used official statistics on growth of population, dynamic of cultivated area, agricultural production, agricultural cooperatives, infrastructure development, amount of collected taxes, number of implemented international projects, non-governmental organizations, medical facilities and others. The study reveals a paradoxical situation when the most instable provinces are characterized by the highest rate of economic and social development. For instance, this group of provinces would get the highest growth of crop area and road construction with probability of 60%. They would also get the high level trade infrastructure, taxes collection, and realization of international projects of development with probability of 40%. In contrast, in the “calmest” provinces the very high growth of crop area is met with probability of 25% and the high level of trade development as well as taxes collections could be found only with 13% probability. We conclude that the most Afghan provinces managed to adapt to permanent military and political instability due to some specific ways of land use and resource management.