Afghanistan Accession to World Trade Organization  Afghanistan received membership to the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the 10th WTO Ministerial Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, December 17, 2015. Afghanistan is 164th in the world and 36th among the less-developed countries that have received WTO membership. Receiving WTO membership is a long process; Afghanistan was admitted after 11 years of negotiations. Afghanistan is among the least developed countries in the WTO and there are some expectations that their accession might impact newly emerged industries in the country. After World War II, the original intention was to create a third institution to handle the trade side of international economic cooperation, joining the two “Bretton Woods” institutions: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Over 50 countries participated in negotiations to create an International Trade Organization (ITO) as a specialized agency of the United Nations. However, these negotiations failed as the draft ITO Charter extended beyond world trade disciplines. Meanwhile, 15 countries had begun talks in December 1945 to reduce and bind customs tariffs. With the Second World War having only recently ended, they wanted to give an early boost to trade liberalization and begin to correct the legacy of protectionist measures which remained in place from the early 1930s. As a result of these negotiations, the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was born, with 23 founding members (officially “contracting parties”), in Geneva in 1947. For almost half a century (until 1994), the GATT’s basic legal principles remained much as they were in 1948, and several other meetings were held on further decreasing tariffs, among other relevant issues. For example, the Kennedy Round in the mid-sixties brought about a GATT Anti-Dumping Agreement. The Tokyo Round during the seventies was the first major attempt to tackle trade barriers that do not take the form of tariffs and to improve the system. The eighth meeting, the Uruguay Round of 1986-94, was the last and most extensive. It led to the creation of the WTO and a new set of agreements. Essentially, the WTO is a mediator among member states facing trade problems with other member states. The GATT focuses on trade in goods, while the WTO deals with trade in services and intellectual property. The WTO was established in 1994, during which time Afghanistan was involved in a civil war and did not have a strong central government capable of joining the organization. With the emergence of the Taliban, Afghanistan's Mujahedeen government was not recognized and its representatives to the UN were not accepted.