Page 2 of 2 The Afghanistan seldom seen
By Pratap Chatterjee
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.
The return of the Taliban
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 past 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 Shi'ite 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
four 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 US 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 George
W 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 the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization 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 US troops are fighting the
Taliban, and into provinces like Helmand where British soldiers, alongside US
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 the author of Halliburton's Army: How a
Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. He is
the managing editor of CorpWatch.
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