Afghanistan now has a democratically elected government. After winning an election, President Hamid Karzai, who had previously served on an interim basis, was officially inaugurated on October 9, 2004. The members of the National Assembly were elected in September 2005 and took office in December 2005. In 2001, a U.S.-led coalition had defeated the previous Taliban government, which had provided sanctuary in Afghanistan for the terrorist group al-Qaeda. After more than two decades of war and chaos, and three years of drought in the late 1990s, Afghanistans primarily agricultural economy was in poor condition at the end of 2001, at the time the Taliban was removed from power. Since then, there has been marked improvement. For the Afghan fiscal year, which ran from March 21, 2004 to March 20, 2005, the GDP growth was 8 percent.
Foreign aid has been helpful to Afghanistan, and pledges of assistance now total almost $15 billion. In March 2004, President Karzai urged foreign donors at a conference in Berlin to renew their commitments to Afghanistan, while presenting the donors with a $28 billion, 7-year economic development program. Karzai also urged the 50 countries attending the Berlin conference to help him prevent Afghanistan from becoming a "haven for drugs and terrorists." In December 2003, the U.S. government reported that opium was growing in 28 of Afghanistans 32 provinces, with poppy cultivation rising from 30,700 hectares to 61,000 hectares in one year. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that 40 to 60 percent of Afghanistans gross domestic product (GDP) derives from trade in opium.