A UNICEF official said Afghanistan is the worst place to be a child.
BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

Afghan refugee from Marjah, Nangialai holds his baby as he stands with his other children in the courtyard of a relative's home in a poor neighbourhood of Lashkar Gah on March 9, 2010.

It's often said that a society, culture or nation should be judged by how it treats its children. If that's true, Afghanistan fares very poorly, according to a UNICEF official who called it the world's most difficult place to be a child. And that's saying something, considering how hard children have it in a number of other places, say Somalia or Haiti.

Reuters interviewed Daniel Toole, UNICEF's director for South Asia and got a fairly chilling assessment of the situation in Afghanistan almost nine years after U.S. first put troops on the ground there.

An excerpt:

HERAT, Afghanistan, March 18 (Reuters) - Afghanistan is the
hardest place in the world to be a child, the South Asia regional director for UNICEF said, with high child mortality rates, poor levels of nutrition and rampant sexual abuse.

"The situation in Afghanistan as a whole is one of the most dramatic in South Asia and also in the world. Afghanistan is the most difficult place to be born as a child," Daniel Toole
said on a visit to Afghanistan this week.

"If I could take one challenge, it's survival."

Three decades of war and a worsening insurgency have made it ever tougher for an Afghan child just to survive, Toole told Reuters during a visit aimed at highlighting what UNICEF calls
the worst conditions for children on earth.

One of the girls he had just met in a woman's shelter was only nine years old when she was forced to marry a total stranger. Another was just 11.

More than a quarter of Afghan children — 257 out of 1,000 — will die before they reach their fifth birthday and 165 out of every 1,000 will die in the first year of their lives, more than any place in the world, according to UNICEF data from 2008.

These are depressing statistics, to say the least. They also give some perspective on the magnitude of the problems facing the U.S. and Western nations as they try to place Afghanistan on a course that will allow NATO to leave that nation better off than they found it.