Reading Abdul Salam Zaeef: My Life with the Taliban:

I was still upset when I returned to Kabul. I had no wish to return to government, but going to prison wasn’t a serious alternative and I had sworn in Sangisar to stand by Mullah Mohammad Omar no matter what. After two days in Kabul I was appointed the Deputy Minister of Mines and Industries. Amir ul-Mu’mineen had written a decree that was announced over the radio. A few days later I was officially introduced at the ministry by members of the Independent Administration of Affairs.

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While I was with the ministry we built industrial parks in Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif, Herat, Kandahar and approved a site in Jalalabad for more than four hundred small and large projects. One of the key problems that we had was the rocky relationship with Iran and Pakistan.

Afghanistan had few domestic markets and exported most of its produce to its neighbours. Even though we had managed to rebuild some factories and establish a few new industries, we were still heavily dependent on imported raw materials from Pakistan and Iran. When they started to introduce export taxes on raw materials they effectively rendered our emerging industries useless; it became more expensive to produce the goods in Afghanistan as opposed to simply importing them.

The situation was replicated with imported goods. As soon as we became ready to produce something ourselves, Pakistan would grant a tax exemption to its own companies that produced the same goods and would crush the emerging industries in Afghanistan. In other cases, Pakistan started to use cheaper materials to produce products of poorer quality that undercut ours. If we look at fertilizer, for example: Afghanistan managed to increase its productivity and started making agricultural fertiliser with the industry-standard 46 per cent nitrogen content. Pakistan and Iran were also producing fertiliser that claimed to be equal in quality but that sold for less. Most Afghan farmers chose to buy this cheaper Pakistani or Iranian fertiliser. We tested these foreign fertilisers in a laboratory for content and quality. The results clearly proved that instead of the advertised 46 per cent they only contained a meagre 20 per cent. This was in turn disastrous for many farmers in Afghanistan, and the poor quality led to disease and pestprone crops as well as lower production. This was the reason that the harvest decreased from a normal production level.

Soon many Afghans started to complain about the quality of the ghee, plastic and iron from neighbouring countries. Most of the material could have been produced in Afghanistan with the natural resources we had available, but this would have required a far greater investment from the ministry than we could afford. Only the coal, salt and marble mines were developed. The products were sold at low prices—often lower than international prices. Rukham marble was exported to Pakistan, however, where it was polished and resold with a significant profit. We later established our own factories to polish the marble in Kandahar, Herat, Kabul and Jalalabad.