Author: Pratap Chatterjee
Publication: Vijayvaani.com
Date: March 25, 2009
URL: http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=462
Want a billion dollars in development aid? If you happen to live in Afghanistan,
the two quickest ways to attract attention and so aid from the U.S. authorities
are: Taliban attacks or a flourishing opium trade. For those with neither,
the future could be bleak.
In November 2008, during the U.S. presidential
elections, I travelled around Afghanistan asking people what they wanted from
the United States. From Mazar in the north to Bamiyan in central Afghanistan
to the capital city of Kabul, I came away with three very different pictures
of the country.
Dragon Valley is a hauntingly beautiful place
nestled high up in the heart of the Hindukush mountains. To get there from
Kabul involves a bumpy, nine-hour drive on unpaved roads through Taliban country.
In the last couple of years, a small community of ethnic Hazara people has
resettled in this arid valley, as well as on other sparse adjoining lands,
all near the legendary remains of a fire-breathing dragon reputedly slain
by Hazrat Ali, the son-in-law of Prophet Mohammed.
A few miles away, hewn from the soaring sandstone
cliffs of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan are the still spectacular ruins of
what used to be the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world.
Two hollow but vast arched, man-made alcoves, which rise higher than most
cathedrals, still dominate the view for miles around.
For much of the world, the iconic image of
Taliban rule in Afghanistan remains the shaky video footage from March 2001
of the dynamiting of those giant Buddhas that had rested in these alcoves
for almost 1,500 years. Months after they were blown up, the Taliban bombed
neighbouring Hazara towns and villages from the air, burning many to the ground.
Tens of thousands of their inhabitants were forced to flee the country, most
seeking shelter in Iran.
In the seven years since the Taliban were
ousted by the United States, the Hazara villagers of Bamiyan have started
to trickle back into places like Dragon Valley in hopes of resuming their
former lives. Today, ironically enough, they find themselves in one of the
safest, as well as most spectacularly beautiful regions, in the country. Its
stark mountains and valleys, turquoise lakes and tranquil vistas might remind
Americans of the Grand Canyon region.
Yet the million-dollar views and centuries
of history are cold comfort to villagers who have no electricity, running
water, or public sanitation systems -- and little in the way of jobs in this
hardscrabble area. While some of them live in simple mud homes in places like
Dragon Valley, others have, for lack of other housing, moved into the ancient
caves below the ruined Buddhas.
Just outside one of the many single-room mud
houses that line the floor of Dragon Valley, I met Abdul Karim, an unskilled
labourer who has been looking daily for work in the fields or on construction
sites since he returned from Iran a year ago. Most days, he comes home empty-handed.
"We have nothing, no work, no electricity, no help from the government
or aid organizations. Right now our situation is terrible, so of course I
have no hope for the future. I'm not happy with my life here, I'm ready to
die because we have nothing." His only source of income is a modest carpet-weaving
business he's set up inside his tiny house at which his two children, a boy
aged about 10 and a girl of about 15, work. It generates about a dollar a
day.
As I went door to door in the small Hazara
settlement, I heard the same story over and over. In the mud house next to
Karim's, I met "Najiba" (not her real name), a woman of perhaps
70 years, who said that her family had received virtually nothing in aid.
"The government hasn't done anything for us. They just say they will.
They just came by once, gave us some water, some clothes, but that's it."
Travelling in Bamiyan province, I repeatedly
heard the same story with slight variations. In the wheat fields outside the
village of Samarra, I met Shawali, a peasant who told us that he and his son
had fled south to Ghazni, a neighbouring province, to escape the Taliban.
"My son and I laboured hard pulling big carts full of timber and heavy
loads until we could raise enough money to return to Bamiyan." Here he
remains a day labourer, eking out a living, and no better off than when he
was in internal exile in Ghazni.
The situation has so disintegrated that many
say they wish they could simply return to the refugee camps in Iran. In Dragon
Valley, for example, I met "Khadija." As the middle-aged woman fanned
a small fire fed by wood gathered from nearby, she said, "We were happy
in Iran. It was good. The weather was warm. We had a good life there, but
it was still someone else's country. When the [Iranian] government told us
we had to go back home, we wanted to return to start a new life. But [the
Afghan government] hasn't helped us at all. They told us they were going to
give us wood, supplies, and doors but they've given us nothing... no help
whatsoever."
A recent report from the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) offers some context for the kind of desperate poverty
I encountered in Bamiyan. The agency's analysts estimate that about 42% of
the country's estimated 27 million people now live on less than $1 a day.
Mazar-i-Sharif
Unlike Bamiyan which has almost no paved roads
and no electricity, the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif stands out as a relative
success story. Mazar was the first place the U.S. and its Afghan allies from
the Northern Alliance captured in the 2001 invasion. Some 40 miles from the
border of Uzbekistan, it is home to the Blue Mosque, the holiest shrine for
Muslims in all of Afghanistan, where Hazrat Ali is said to be buried.
When I first travelled to Mazar in January
2002, only the mosque was lit at night, a comforting beacon of hope in the
post-invasion darkness of a shattered city. The sole other source of luminosity:
the headlights of the roaming Northern Alliance gunmen who policed the city
in Toyota pick-ups packed with men armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers.
During the day, however, the city was brimming
with hope and activity, just weeks after the Taliban fled. I met folk musicians
like Agha Malang Kohistani performing songs on the street to mock the Taliban
and classical musicians like Rahim Takhari playing in public for the first
time in years, while weddings were graced with singers like Hassebullah Takdeer
who sang classics like Beya Ka Borem Ba Mazar ("Let's Go to Mazar").
The Fatima Balkhi Girls School was among those
that were opening their doors to students for the first time in years. Amid
the rubble of bombed-out buildings at the Sultan Razya School, for instance,
little girls flocked to classrooms with earthen floors and no chairs. They
squeezed by the hundreds into tiny rooms, where lessons were sometimes chalked
onto the backs of doors.
At Sultan Razya, I spoke to 14-year-old Alina,
who bubbled with teenage excitement as she described her adventures studying
secretly in teachers' houses during the Taliban era. "One day we went
to class at eight o'clock, another day at ten o'clock, and another day four
o'clock," she recalled.
Seven years later, I returned to find Mazar
now well supplied with electricity (by the Uzbek government) and connected
to the capital city of Kabul by a smooth, new, well-paved two-lane highway.
Although there had been a couple of suicide bombings in the city, Mazar was
almost as safe as Bamiyan. Residents who fled during Taliban rule to places
like Tashkent had returned with hard currency to invest in local businesses.
While it would be an overstatement to say that Mazar was flourishing, it's
certainly decades ahead of Bamiyan in development terms.
I tracked down Alina -- one of very few in
her class to have continued her education -- at Balkh University, where she
was studying Islamic law. Now a little shy about talking to foreign journalists,
she was still happy. "Things have completely changed in every part. All
of the women and girl students are studying their lessons in computers and
English, and they are happy," she told us.
I also revisited the Fatima Balkhi School,
where the principal took us to meet a new generation of 14-year-olds who told
us about their plans for the future. One wanted to be a banker, another dreamed
of being a doctor, a third spoke of becoming an engineer. Earthen floors and
makeshift chalk boards were a thing of the past. The Sultan Razya School had
been completely rebuilt and the girls wore neat school uniforms, although
teachers still complained of a lack of proper supplies.
Opportunities for girls were also expanding.
Maramar, a 14-year-old Balkhi student, invited us to visit the local TV station
where she hosted her own show. Astonished, I took her up on her offer and
went to the RZU studios on the outskirts of town where I filmed her reading
headlines -- about the U.S. elections! -- on the afternoon news.
Indeed girls' education is one of the real
success stories in Afghanistan, where one-third of the six million students
in elementary and high schools are now female, probably the highest percentage
in Afghan history. The education system, however, starts to skew ever more
away from girls the higher you get. By the time high school ends, just a quarter
of the students are girls. Only one in 20 Afghan girls makes it to high school
in the first place and even fewer make it through.
Neither rural Bamiyan in central Afghanistan
nor urban Mazar in the north has had to worry greatly about the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism in the last few years. For one thing, as Hazaras, an ethnic
minority descended from the army of Genghis Khan, most residents of Bamiyan
are from Islam's Shia sect, while the Taliban, largely from southern Afghanistan,
are Pashtun and Sunni. Indeed, when they ruled most of the country, the Taliban
went so far as to brand the Hazara as non-Muslim.
Similarly, Mazar, which has a large Tajik
and Uzbek population as well as some Hazara, but relatively few Pashtuns,
has also been spared the influence of the Taliban. Unlike rugged and remote
Bamiyan, it is situated in a well connected part of the country, close to
Russia and the Central Asian republics. (The former Soviet Union used the
city as a strategic military base in the early 1980s.)
Yet when one heads south to Kabul and toward
the Pakistani border, a third Afghanistan is revealed. Twenty minutes from
the center of Kabul, the Taliban control large swathes of the provinces of
Logar and Wardak.
In the Pashtun-dominated southern city of
Kandahar, the stories of attacks on girls' schools are already legend. In
November 2008, while I was visiting Bamiyan and Mazar, three men on a motorcycle
attacked a group of girls at the Mirwais School, built with funds from the
Japanese government. Each carried containers of acid which they used to horrific
effect, scarring 11 girls and 4 teachers. The Taliban have denied involvement,
but most local residents assume the attackers were inspired by Taliban posters
in local mosques that simply say: "Don't Let Your Daughters Go to School."
Last March, Taliban followers raided the Miyan
Abdul Hakim School in Kandahar, which serves both boys and girls, making bonfires
out of desks to burn the students' books. At another local school, a caretaker
had his ears and nose cut off, and this was but one of dozens of attacks on
such schools.
"Yes, there have been improvements in
girls' education in Afghanistan. You can see it on the streets when the girls
walk home from school in their uniforms, laughing with books in their hands.
You can see it in the schools that have been built all over the country, in
villages where they have never had schools before," Fariba Nawa, author
of Afghanistan, Inc., told us.
"However, in the south there's a different
story to be told," she added. "That's the story of girls being afraid
to go to school, even the story of newly built schools being burned down,
or teachers being beheaded for teaching in them. So it depends on what part
of Afghanistan you go to, which story you want to tell."
Seeking Answers in Kabul
Green laser beams darted from the fast-moving
military convoy scanning the pedestrians and parked cars along the road from
Kabul airport. As I bent over our taxi's stalled engine, the sharp, pencil-thin
beams raked across us menacingly, causing me to stumble back in surprise.
Unlike in Bamiyan or Mazar, Kabul teems with
vehicles: military convoys from a dozen nations, Ford Ranger pick-ups (supplied
by DynCorp, a U.S. contractor), Toyota land cruisers used by United Nations
personnel, and thousands of used Toyota Corollas driven by Afghans.
Our first stop was at the home of Mir Ahmed
Joyenda, a member of the Afghan parliament. I wondered, I told him, why, all
these years after the fall of the Taliban, entire provinces like Bamiyan had
no electricity or potable water supply to speak of. As (bad) luck would have
it, Joyenda could discuss the problem on a personal basis -- and by the light
of a kerosene lamp. "You see," he responded, "we are in the
city of Kabul. As a member of the parliament of Afghanistan I'm sitting in
front of you, but I don't have any electricity in my house. What do you think
of the rural areas? What about the poor areas of the Kabul city and other
parts of the country?" He suggested I ask the ministry of electricity
why he had none.
So I arranged to meet Wali Shairzay, the deputy
minister for electricity and water. After enduring an hour-long lecture on
all the new projects supposedly in the pipeline, I asked him why there was
Uzbek-supplied electricity in Mazar, but no Afghan-supplied sources in most
of rural Afghanistan. I noted that many countries had emerged from decades
of war to successfully provide basic services to their citizens.
Who knows why a man in his position wouldn't
have expected such a question, but he looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
"Most people call Afghanistan a post-conflict nation," he began
hesitantly. "My terminology is a bit different, I call it post-devastation."
As a result, he suggested, battle-weary Afghans
weren't able to articulate what they needed. "Like a patient speaking
of the problems, where it is hurting, when it started, how bad is the pain,
etcetera. Unfortunately, this patient here -- Afghanistan -- could not speak
and you have to find out what the problem is, what is the prior diagnosis
and medication."
Shairzay claimed that, over the previous seven
years, his ministry had focused on the big electricity projects like the importation
of power from Uzbekistan, and then he, in essence, passed the buck. When it
came to provinces like Bamiyan, he said, his ministry wasn't really in charge
at all. That fell under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation
and Development, where he was going that very afternoon to discuss matters
with his counterparts.
Yet, the deputy minister's words ran counter
to what I had heard from the dozens of villagers around Bamiyan who knew exactly
what they wanted: electricity, water, health care, a steady food supply, and
jobs.
I even found very articulate and well educated
Afghans in Bamiyan who were more than happy to describe simple but effective
projects that might have gone a long way toward serving the population's desperate
needs. For example, Dr Gulam Mohammad Nadir, the chief medical officer of
Bamiyan's only hospital, told us that the needs of small rural communities
were already well known. For example, he assured me, he could dramatically
reduce health problems and save lives with a small grant that would allow
him to demonstrate basic sanitation principles in local villages.
"I believe having clean water is the
most essential aspect to human health and to prevent diseases. At the very
least, we need to educate the people about how important it is to have proper
sanitation, a clean water supply, and [knowledge about] how they can protect
themselves from water-borne diseases."
Why, in fact, were such simple projects never
implemented? The answer proved to be surprising, and it helps, in part, to
explain the dismal fate of the Bush administration's version of Afghan "reconstruction."
Virtually none of the $5.4 billion in taxpayer money that USAID has disbursed
in this country since late 2001 has been invested in Bamiyan Province, where
the total aid budget, 2002-2006, was just over $13 million.
While the Japanese government and UNESCO have
dedicated some money to Bamiyan province, most of it has been spent on restoring
the giant Buddhas, not on basic services for residents.
The bulk of the foreign aid has gone to big
cities like Kabul and Mazar, but much has also gone into the coffers of foreign
contractors and consultants like the Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point, and
DynCorp International in Afghanistan. The rest of the aid money has been poured
into "rural development" projects in southern provinces like Kandahar
where Canadian and U.S. troops are fighting the Taliban, and into provinces
like Helmand where British soldiers, alongside U.S. troops, are struggling
against the opium trade.
Most American taxpayer money is actually spent
on the troops, not, of course, on poor Afghans. In fact, with Pentagon expenditures
in Afghanistan running at about $36 billion a year, the annual aid allocation
for the 387,000 people who live in Bamiyan Province is outstripped every single
hour by the money spent on 30,000-plus American troops and their weaponry.
It turns out the villagers of Dragon Valley
have two problems that can't be overcome. They have neither the Taliban to
fight, nor opium crops to eradicate.
Pratap Chatterjee is author of Halliburton's
Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America
Makes War, and managing editor of CorpWatch. He went to Afghanistan with cameraman
Ronald Nobu Sakamoto. Copyright 2009 Pratap Chatterjee. Courtesy TomDispatch.com
[http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175047/pratap_chatterjee_unknown_afghanistan]
The Return of the Taliban
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