Karzai : Thanks for the US Money, but Soviet help to Afghanistan was efficient.

Karzai : Thanks for the US Money, but Soviet help to Afghanistan was efficient.(Taz).

Afghan President Hamid Karzai appreciates the economic help provided by the former Soviet Union to his country in the past, ITAR-TASS reported.

"The Soviet money went to the right place. They were efficient in spending their money and doing it through the Afghan government," Karzai said in an interview with The Washington Post this month.

The newspaper said that the Russian government had drawn up a list of 140 Soviet-era projects which it would like to renovate. One is the Kabul House-building Factory constructed in the early 1960s by Soviet specialists, which received a consignment of new equipment worth 25 million U.S. dollars from Russia last autumn.

The Washington Post quoted the head engineer of the house-building factory as saying that "what the Soviets did here was really fundamental. They were thinking about the long term."

It also noted that the number of students studying Russian at the Kabul University had doubled over the past two years, and Russia had doubled the number of grants to Afghan students.