Infrastructural assets were sometimes targeted directly, and in other
cases decayed through lack of necessary maintenance. Mud-brick
housing readily fell victim to bombs and artillery shells: it was sim-
ply not reinforced sufficiently to survive even relatively small deto-
nations. By the early 1990s, approximately 60 per cent of Afghan
schools had no building (UNO, 1994: Vol. I: 16). The road system
was in a very poor condition, although – amazingly – buses con-
tinued to criss-cross the country (Maley, 1999b: 235).
Given the significance of agriculture, however, it was the deteri-
oration of the agricultural sector that posed some of the greatest
problems at the end of the 1980s. Before the communist coup,
Afghanistan, as André Brigot and Olivier Roy put it, was ‘a poor
country but not a country of hunger’ (Brigot and Roy, 1988: 10).
During the war, this fortunate situation changed. Evidence surfaced
of localised malnutrition (D’Souza, 1984), and a meticulous 1988
study (SCA, 1988: 29–31) confirmed earlier reports (Farr and Gul,
1984) of sharp falls in agricultural output. By 1987, output was only
a third of what it had been in 1978 – a result of the loss of land for
cultivation, 50 per cent falls in yields from land which couldbe cul-
tivated, and the deaths of draught oxen. Much of this damage was a
product of deliberate attacks designed to deny the resistance access
to food in sensitive areas. The damage caused to irrigation systems
was to have one unintended but shattering consequence, namely the
encouragement of narcotics production. While it is a myth that the
Afghan resistance flourished on opium revenues – according to
Barnett R. Rubin, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was ‘the only leader to
exploit opium profits systematically as a basis for a hierarchically
organized party and conventional army’ (Rubin, 1995a: 257) – many
Afghan farmers none the less found it profitable to switch to a crop
which could be easily irrigated from melting snows. In the Soviet
attacks on the traditional irrigation systems of rural Afghanistan,
notably the ingenious kareznetwork of interconnected tunnels, lay
the foundations of the illicit economy of the mid-to-late 1990s.
Given the fragmentation of markets as a result of war, to speak
of an Afghan ‘macro-economy’ in the 1980s is to stretch the
meaning of the term, except perhaps in the area of the money sup-
156 The Afghanistan Wars