(14 Mar 2005) SHOTLIST
1. Various of the beginning of the Panjshir road construction
2. Road under construction
3. Road repair ceremony, people sitting in tent
4. Afghanistan president, Hamid Karzai and other officials sitting in tent
5. Security guard outside the tent
6. Afghanistan president, Hamid Karzai approaching podium
7. SOUNDBITE (Dari) Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan president:
"It is a pleasure for me today to inaugurate our favourite road which we have been waiting for a long time to inaugurate, the Panjshir-Parwan road."
7. Audience clapping
8. US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmai Khalilzad going to the podium
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Zalmai Khalilzad, US ambassador to Afghanistan:
"This project will help the people of Panjshir, Kapisa and Parwan play their rightful role along with other Afghans in creating lasting peace and prosperity."
10. Close up of security guards' weapons
11. Karzai at ceremony with other officials
12. US military vehicle driving
13. US soldiers walking
14. Various shots of US military helicopter in the sky
STORYLINE
Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai initiated the repair on Monday of a road into a famed anti-Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, a belated gesture toward an impoverished region that voted massively against his US-backed government.
Karzai inaugurated the US-funded resurfacing of the 70-kilometre-long (45 mile-long) road into the Panjshir Valley, whose inhabitants defied Soviet occupiers in the 1980s as well as the Taliban and have recently been reluctant to disarm.
"I've been waiting for this for a long time," Karzai told more than 100 elders from the valley and neighbouring provinces at a ceremony in a wheat field next to the road.
Karzai urged the elders to make sure the work, which will cost 2.7 (m) million US dollars for the initial 20 kilometres (12 miles), was done properly.
Donors including the United States and the World Bank are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into road reconstruction in the region, in an effort to reopen historic trade lanes between South and Central Asia and bolster the devastated Afghan economy.
But progress has been slow and more than three years after Western leaders promised that the fall of the Taliban marked the beginning of Afghanistan's recovery, most of Afghanistan's secondary roads are still in an appalling condition.
Also present at the ceremony was the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmai Khalilzad who said the road will help the people of the region "play their rightful role along with other Afghans in creating lasting peace and prosperity."
The Panjshir and neighbouring provinces north of the capital, Kabul, were a stronghold of the Northern Alliance factions which helped American forces drive out the Taliban in late 2001.
Dozens of Karzai's American and Afghan bodyguards ringed the site to guard against any attack on the president, who flew from Kabul in a US military helicopter.
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