Poverty hobbles new Afghanistan
Harry Sterling
For The Calgary Herald
February 28, 2005
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
Although Charles Dickens' words didn't refer to Afghanistan, his sentiments unwittingly describe its situation, as outlined in a new United Nations report.
The National Human Development Report: Security With a Human Face states that, while the U.S. invasion toppled the Taliban zealots and their allies, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, poverty is widespread and the country's stability remains fragile.
The report says Afghan living standards are among the lowest, ranking 173 out of 178 countries in the UN's Human Development Index.
The UN's frank report is a timely warning, not just for the U.S. as it continues its military operations against the Taliban remnants, but for other countries providing peacekeepers in Afghanistan, including Canada.
Afghanistan is now the largest recipient of Canadian development aid in history, with more than $600 million committed so far.
According to the UN survey, "human security" and "human development" rather than military force and diplomacy alone, are key to resolving the complex problems.
The report says sustained peace is not guaranteed despite the early successes in state building that led to the first democratic presidential election last October in which Hamid Karzai was elected with 55 per cent of the total vote.
Warlords and other power brokers continue to play dominant roles in the country's 34 provinces, despite the NATO-backed government program of disarming militias and taking their weapons.
The illicit drug trade, banned by the Taliban, has again become a destabilizing factor. Afghanistan is the world's leading supplier of opium-derivative drugs.
Although Karzai has had some success in persuading local leaders to prohibit poppy growing, it's likely to continue until government provides alternative sources of income and assistance to grow other crops, such as wheat. The British government recently announced it would aid farmers to switch to other crops.
The UN report concludes that, to improve the political and socio-economic situation, government and donor nation policies should be more people-centred and take into account Afghanistan's historical realities and its ethnic, religious and regional differences. The road ahead will be challenging, given the country's immense problems.
Although the gross domestic product increased in 2003 by 16 per cent and is expected to increase by 10 to 12 per cent over the next decade, much of that growth has been unevenly distributed.
Half the population is poor and 20 per cent of rural Afghans do not get enough to eat. Thirty per cent of the poorest receive only nine per cent of the national income, while the more privileged upper third receives 55 per cent. Average annual income is only $190 US. The jobless rate is a staggering 25 per cent.
As of last year, 54.4 per cent of primary school-age children were enrolled in school. However, many areas still have no schools and adult literacy is only 28.7 per cent. In some provinces, more than 80 per cent of girls do not attend school.
Health care remains a serious problem. One out of every 15 women dies giving birth. Twenty per cent of children never see their fifth birthday, 80 per cent dying from preventable diseases. Some 39 per cent of the urban population and 69 per cent of the rural do not have safe water, with one in eight children dying from contaminated water. On the positive side, vaccination programs against measles, whooping cough and other childhood diseases have improved the situation.
Of continuing concern is lack of housing, especially for the 3.5 million refugees who've returned to Afghanistan, countless numbers of whom survive in squalid hovels without water or heating; many are jobless and deeply embittered.
"Our team found the overwhelming majority of people hold a sense of pessimism and fear that reconstruction is bypassing them," said one of the authors of the report, Daud Saba. Afghan Refugee Minister Mohammed Azam Dadfar admits: "Things could get worse."
The UN report concludes that, unless the pressing needs of ordinary Afghans are given greater priority, Afghanistan risks slipping into chaos and anarchy.
Canada and other countries have compelling reasons to help ensure those needs are met. As Canada's ambassador in Afghanistan, Christopher Alexander says: "The report is a critical new roadmap for us all."
Harry Sterling, a former diplomat, is an Ottawa-based commentator.
© The Calgary Herald 2005
Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Last edited by kmaherali on Sat Apr 28, 2012 9:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
MacKay trumpets Afghan successes
Rejects claims wartorn country sliding into chaos
Bill Graveland
The Canadian Press
Monday, January 08, 2007
Afghanistan is not sliding back into chaos despite an ongoing insurgency and escalating drug trade, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said Sunday at the start of his two-day visit to the wartorn country.
"We're here to talk about a lot of the good work that's being done," MacKay said after arriving at Kandahar Airfield, home to most of the 2,500 Canadian troops in Afghanistan, after a brief visit to Kabul.
"We're going out to the provincial reconstruction team (today) and see some of the work that they're going."
While in Kabul, MacKay met with President Hamid Karzai to discuss, among other things, the contentious Pakistani border security issue as well the training of the Afghan army and police.
"We did have discussions on the necessity to continue this work," he said. "We're working with all the NATO allies to profile the importance of helping the Afghan people build this country."
Earlier in the day, MacKay spoke with reporters via a teleconference hookup, in which he disputed claims that the West's mission in Afghanistan is failing.
One recent critique appears in the widely read U.S. journal Foreign Affairs, which suggests Afghanistan is sliding into chaos, with rebel attacks increasing and the opium trade exploding. The journal is published by the non-profit Council on Foreign Relations, which includes nearly all past and current U.S. presidents, secretaries of state, defence and treasury, and other top U.S. officials.
MacKay said that while he respected the opinion of critics, "I don't see a factual basis for a commentary suggesting that this country is sliding into chaos."
MacKay said there was a lot of "tangible proof" of improvements that have been made in Afghanistan, citing new schools, hospitals and roads along with vocational training and microcredit programs to help develop the Afghan economy.
After Afghanistan, MacKay is travelling to Pakistan where he will use "blunt talk" to press President Pervez Musharraf to take stronger measures to stop Taliban fighters from crossing the border into Afghanistan.
He underscored the need for Pakistan "to do a better job of stopping the movement of Taliban," who have been able to mount attacks on Canadian and other NATO forces in the south, often by moving combatants and supplies unchallenged across the Pakistani border.
MacKay was accompanied to Kandahar by his Afghan counterpart, Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, who said he wanted to thank Canada "for their peace building in Afghanistan and . . . building of our common goals against terrorist activities."
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Rejects claims wartorn country sliding into chaos
Bill Graveland
The Canadian Press
Monday, January 08, 2007
Afghanistan is not sliding back into chaos despite an ongoing insurgency and escalating drug trade, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said Sunday at the start of his two-day visit to the wartorn country.
"We're here to talk about a lot of the good work that's being done," MacKay said after arriving at Kandahar Airfield, home to most of the 2,500 Canadian troops in Afghanistan, after a brief visit to Kabul.
"We're going out to the provincial reconstruction team (today) and see some of the work that they're going."
While in Kabul, MacKay met with President Hamid Karzai to discuss, among other things, the contentious Pakistani border security issue as well the training of the Afghan army and police.
"We did have discussions on the necessity to continue this work," he said. "We're working with all the NATO allies to profile the importance of helping the Afghan people build this country."
Earlier in the day, MacKay spoke with reporters via a teleconference hookup, in which he disputed claims that the West's mission in Afghanistan is failing.
One recent critique appears in the widely read U.S. journal Foreign Affairs, which suggests Afghanistan is sliding into chaos, with rebel attacks increasing and the opium trade exploding. The journal is published by the non-profit Council on Foreign Relations, which includes nearly all past and current U.S. presidents, secretaries of state, defence and treasury, and other top U.S. officials.
MacKay said that while he respected the opinion of critics, "I don't see a factual basis for a commentary suggesting that this country is sliding into chaos."
MacKay said there was a lot of "tangible proof" of improvements that have been made in Afghanistan, citing new schools, hospitals and roads along with vocational training and microcredit programs to help develop the Afghan economy.
After Afghanistan, MacKay is travelling to Pakistan where he will use "blunt talk" to press President Pervez Musharraf to take stronger measures to stop Taliban fighters from crossing the border into Afghanistan.
He underscored the need for Pakistan "to do a better job of stopping the movement of Taliban," who have been able to mount attacks on Canadian and other NATO forces in the south, often by moving combatants and supplies unchallenged across the Pakistani border.
MacKay was accompanied to Kandahar by his Afghan counterpart, Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, who said he wanted to thank Canada "for their peace building in Afghanistan and . . . building of our common goals against terrorist activities."
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Afghanistan falters without civic institutions
Afghanistan falters without civic institutions
COMMENTARY
Life of the Parties
By ANN MARLOWE
January 29, 2007; Page A17
In Afghanistan, many of the problems coming home to roost now are the result of too little American intervention rather than too much. That does not mean too little American aid. In any case, private enterprise is doing very well, thank you: Afghans are a practical people with good capitalist instincts. They can pull themselves out of poverty given the right laws and the rule of law -- as well as the institutions that go to make up a functional civil society.
Of these institutions, one that is most crucial is political parties. Even one-party states have them, and with reason. They bring people together across ethnic and class lines, and often serve as a counterweight to clan ties and religious affiliation. Moreover, they lead citizens to think in national terms, rather than to vote reflexively along ethnic lines. Finally, political parties could be an essential weapon in our counterinsurgency in the border provinces.
But Afghanistan -- thanks to some dubious decisions by the Afghan government, and our acquiescence -- is the land parties forgot. This is even more of a pity because of the dearth of other institutions. Afghanistan is poor not just in per capita income -- about $350 a year, double what it was three years earlier -- but in structures that link unrelated people. All sorts of organizations Americans take for granted simply don't exist. There are no groups like PTAs, children's sport leagues, alumni associations and country clubs. Nor are there those that constitute "special interest politics," such as trade unions, manufacturers' associations, or lobbyists for economic or ethical concerns. Afghanistan is kept poor by the lack of trust among unrelated citizens and the absence of a sense of common interest. All it has are family and ethnic loyalties -- wonderful in many ways for those nurtured within strong families, but not so wonderful for economic growth and civil society.
With very little pulling Afghans together, greed and extremism are more potent forces than in more densely networked societies. The absence of norms of good civic behavior allows some of the Afghan elite to take advantage of their inherited positions to loot their homeland. The corruption of many of Hamid Karzai's associates is undermining efforts to build the Afghan state. How can anyone expect ordinary Afghans to work for the national interest when their country is being robbed blind?
The U.N. feared that strong political parties could revive the civil war, but it is more accurate to say that the absence of overt party politics has allowed the worst covert organizations to flourish. Some 34 former or current members of Hezb-e-Islami, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's violent fundamentalist party, won seats in Afghanistan's parliamentary elections last September. Perhaps half of parliament's lower house are fundamentalists. And in an environment where legitimate businesses lack an open voice in the legislative process through trade organizations and lobbyists, guess which illegal business is rumored to be financing many MPs? (U.S. and NATO experts are discussing previously unthinkable ideas like buying and destroying the opium crop, since the feeble interdiction programs are not working and the opium money is financing, indeed in some places creating, the insurgency.)
Without competing, coherent ideologies, the Taliban can eat away at the elected government. If it's a choice between Mr. Karzai and associates -- people, not a party -- and a group that claims to fight corruption, who is the average villager going to trust?
There is another factor involved in the seeming revival of the Taliban, and it's not ideology. Afghans are not particularly ideological. The Taliban are popular only within a narrow geographic and ethnic band which mirrors their Hotak Ghilzai tribal membership. As two innovative scholars of Pashtun society, Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason, argue, the districts where the Taliban has gained support are exactly those which are Ghilzai, a powerful tribe that lost out to the Durrani tribe 300 years ago and has tried to bounce back ever since. This is about power, not ideology: The Ghilzai provided the leaders both to Afghanistan's communist movement and the jihadis who opposed them. Now they are attacking NATO troops because we support a Durrani-dominated government. (Mr. Karzai and the royal family are Durranis, and so are most of his Pashtun associates and Afghanistan's power elite.)
Most Afghans can at least see the benefit of civil society and the rule of law. Anyone who is not a member of the largest ethnic bloc, the Pashtuns -- 40% of the population -- has more to gain from strengthening the central government and the concept of Afghan nationhood. (Not incidentally, the relatively prosperous north and west are Tajik, Hazara, Turkmen and Uzbek, with few Pashtuns.) That's 60% of the population, plus progressive Pashtuns and Pashtuns from marginalized tribes. The Ghilzais must be co-opted, too, in order to weaken the insurgency. This must be done cautiously, of course, as they are no more interested in sharing power than are the Durranis.
There are no insuperable barriers to pushing and pulling Afghans toward a functioning democracy and civil society. The problem is that the U.S. and the U.N. have saddled Afghanistan with a voting and parliamentary system that does exactly the opposite, offering no alternative to voting by ethnicity and failing to make it worthwhile for ethnic groups to form coalitions. Elections were set up by the U.N. using a voting system ("Single Non-Transferable Vote," or SNTV) where each citizen chooses just one candidate from a long list of contenders to represent his district. (In Kabul, for instance, 387 candidates were on the ballot, but each voter chose one.)
Under these circumstances, Afghans have voted ethnically. In the October 2004 presidential election, "no candidate received significant support outside of their particular ethno-linguistic group," as Thomas Johnson of the Naval Postgraduate School has pointed out. Worse yet, Pashtuns and Tajiks -- the two most numerous ethnic groups -- are not only overwhelmingly likely to vote for candidates from their own groups, but against candidates from a perceived rival group. The Pashtun Mr. Karzai did not receive a majority of the vote of any ethnic group save his own. He still won 55.4% of the vote, with the other major candidates gaining 16.3%, 11.7% and 10%.
When the September 2005 parliamentary elections were set up, no political party affiliations were allowed on the ballots; instead, candidates had a randomly picked symbol next to their names and photos (helpful to the many illiterate voters). The prohibition of party politics was largely at Mr. Karzai's urging. As the best-known politician in Afghanistan, it was to his advantage to avoid giving potential opponents the buoying effect of a party affiliation, and to have a rubber-stamp parliament of unknowns. However, while parliament is often ineffectual, it has neither expedited the policies of his cabinet nor been able to present alternatives. Instead, it has been a vibrant but disorganized forum in which neophyte politicians struggle to understand the way legislation is enacted and religious fundamentalists try to block anything that smacks of secularism.
"Parliament came five years too soon," an American advisor to a cabinet minister told me. "It's slowing down approval processes and creating a forum for debate that has yet to prove useful." Given low levels of education and business experience in Afghanistan, even among elites, it's not surprising many MPs have difficulty understanding a budget, much less proposing improvements to it. But having parties in place would have allowed the more capable members to instruct the less prepared.
The absence of political parties was also shortsighted for Mr. Karzai himself, making his effectiveness depend on personal popularity. He was at his zenith when the system was designed; now he is grudgingly accepted as the least of the possible evils by a resigned electorate. Mr. Karzai would be better off with a party organization behind him: In the U.S. even an unpopular president can get things done because party discipline supports him. And a successor to an unpopular president can be groomed within a party even as challengers from competing parties ready their bids. Instead, the Afghan situation is that of a barely competent president with no more competent successor.
Prof. Johnson also points out that most Afghan voters are not represented by a candidate they voted for. Due to a combination of SNTV voting and a 50% turnout, only about 18% of eligible voters in Afghanistan are represented by a candidate they voted for; 64% chose a candidate who lost. Prof. Johnson notes that "many candidates won virtually by chance," with the top finishers in some provinces gathering only a few percent of the votes cast. This might be tolerable in a mature democracy, but is not what one wants in a country with scant trust in the electoral system and little sense of national identity. The next parliamentary elections aren't until 2010, so there is time to set up a better voting system. SNTV should be replaced, requirements stiffened for obtaining a place on the ballot to avoid such farces as choosing among 387 candidates, and runoffs considered.
An Afghan-American member of parliament, Daoud Sultanzoy, has advanced another good idea: take representation down to the district level. Currently, the people of each of Afghanistan's 34 provinces vote for members of parliament from their province, and the highest vote-getters become representatives of that province according to its population. But representatives are not linked with particular districts as they are in the U.S, though some provinces are the size of whole European countries and differ widely in population, terrain and economy. Nor are there mayoral elections for small towns in Afghanistan, so there is no one to represent the national government on a local level.
Afghanistan's biggest problem is not the Taliban, but underdeveloped institutions and a lack of rule of law. It is emphatically not "another Iraq." Most of Afghanistan is relatively peaceful. Just 192 American troops have been killed in action since fall 2001, and in 2006, 206 Afghan civilians were murdered in suicide bombings. Tragic, yes, but in 2003, the last year for which statistics are available, 16,000 Afghan women died in childbirth -- 44 a day.
As this comparison suggests, we need to foster civil society and robust institutions in order to assure a decent life for Afghanistan's citizens. An essential part of this is nurturing political parties.
Ms. Marlowe is the author of "The Book of Trouble" (Harcourt, 2006), a memoir.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117003020043190656.html
COMMENTARY
Life of the Parties
By ANN MARLOWE
January 29, 2007; Page A17
In Afghanistan, many of the problems coming home to roost now are the result of too little American intervention rather than too much. That does not mean too little American aid. In any case, private enterprise is doing very well, thank you: Afghans are a practical people with good capitalist instincts. They can pull themselves out of poverty given the right laws and the rule of law -- as well as the institutions that go to make up a functional civil society.
Of these institutions, one that is most crucial is political parties. Even one-party states have them, and with reason. They bring people together across ethnic and class lines, and often serve as a counterweight to clan ties and religious affiliation. Moreover, they lead citizens to think in national terms, rather than to vote reflexively along ethnic lines. Finally, political parties could be an essential weapon in our counterinsurgency in the border provinces.
But Afghanistan -- thanks to some dubious decisions by the Afghan government, and our acquiescence -- is the land parties forgot. This is even more of a pity because of the dearth of other institutions. Afghanistan is poor not just in per capita income -- about $350 a year, double what it was three years earlier -- but in structures that link unrelated people. All sorts of organizations Americans take for granted simply don't exist. There are no groups like PTAs, children's sport leagues, alumni associations and country clubs. Nor are there those that constitute "special interest politics," such as trade unions, manufacturers' associations, or lobbyists for economic or ethical concerns. Afghanistan is kept poor by the lack of trust among unrelated citizens and the absence of a sense of common interest. All it has are family and ethnic loyalties -- wonderful in many ways for those nurtured within strong families, but not so wonderful for economic growth and civil society.
With very little pulling Afghans together, greed and extremism are more potent forces than in more densely networked societies. The absence of norms of good civic behavior allows some of the Afghan elite to take advantage of their inherited positions to loot their homeland. The corruption of many of Hamid Karzai's associates is undermining efforts to build the Afghan state. How can anyone expect ordinary Afghans to work for the national interest when their country is being robbed blind?
The U.N. feared that strong political parties could revive the civil war, but it is more accurate to say that the absence of overt party politics has allowed the worst covert organizations to flourish. Some 34 former or current members of Hezb-e-Islami, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's violent fundamentalist party, won seats in Afghanistan's parliamentary elections last September. Perhaps half of parliament's lower house are fundamentalists. And in an environment where legitimate businesses lack an open voice in the legislative process through trade organizations and lobbyists, guess which illegal business is rumored to be financing many MPs? (U.S. and NATO experts are discussing previously unthinkable ideas like buying and destroying the opium crop, since the feeble interdiction programs are not working and the opium money is financing, indeed in some places creating, the insurgency.)
Without competing, coherent ideologies, the Taliban can eat away at the elected government. If it's a choice between Mr. Karzai and associates -- people, not a party -- and a group that claims to fight corruption, who is the average villager going to trust?
There is another factor involved in the seeming revival of the Taliban, and it's not ideology. Afghans are not particularly ideological. The Taliban are popular only within a narrow geographic and ethnic band which mirrors their Hotak Ghilzai tribal membership. As two innovative scholars of Pashtun society, Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason, argue, the districts where the Taliban has gained support are exactly those which are Ghilzai, a powerful tribe that lost out to the Durrani tribe 300 years ago and has tried to bounce back ever since. This is about power, not ideology: The Ghilzai provided the leaders both to Afghanistan's communist movement and the jihadis who opposed them. Now they are attacking NATO troops because we support a Durrani-dominated government. (Mr. Karzai and the royal family are Durranis, and so are most of his Pashtun associates and Afghanistan's power elite.)
Most Afghans can at least see the benefit of civil society and the rule of law. Anyone who is not a member of the largest ethnic bloc, the Pashtuns -- 40% of the population -- has more to gain from strengthening the central government and the concept of Afghan nationhood. (Not incidentally, the relatively prosperous north and west are Tajik, Hazara, Turkmen and Uzbek, with few Pashtuns.) That's 60% of the population, plus progressive Pashtuns and Pashtuns from marginalized tribes. The Ghilzais must be co-opted, too, in order to weaken the insurgency. This must be done cautiously, of course, as they are no more interested in sharing power than are the Durranis.
There are no insuperable barriers to pushing and pulling Afghans toward a functioning democracy and civil society. The problem is that the U.S. and the U.N. have saddled Afghanistan with a voting and parliamentary system that does exactly the opposite, offering no alternative to voting by ethnicity and failing to make it worthwhile for ethnic groups to form coalitions. Elections were set up by the U.N. using a voting system ("Single Non-Transferable Vote," or SNTV) where each citizen chooses just one candidate from a long list of contenders to represent his district. (In Kabul, for instance, 387 candidates were on the ballot, but each voter chose one.)
Under these circumstances, Afghans have voted ethnically. In the October 2004 presidential election, "no candidate received significant support outside of their particular ethno-linguistic group," as Thomas Johnson of the Naval Postgraduate School has pointed out. Worse yet, Pashtuns and Tajiks -- the two most numerous ethnic groups -- are not only overwhelmingly likely to vote for candidates from their own groups, but against candidates from a perceived rival group. The Pashtun Mr. Karzai did not receive a majority of the vote of any ethnic group save his own. He still won 55.4% of the vote, with the other major candidates gaining 16.3%, 11.7% and 10%.
When the September 2005 parliamentary elections were set up, no political party affiliations were allowed on the ballots; instead, candidates had a randomly picked symbol next to their names and photos (helpful to the many illiterate voters). The prohibition of party politics was largely at Mr. Karzai's urging. As the best-known politician in Afghanistan, it was to his advantage to avoid giving potential opponents the buoying effect of a party affiliation, and to have a rubber-stamp parliament of unknowns. However, while parliament is often ineffectual, it has neither expedited the policies of his cabinet nor been able to present alternatives. Instead, it has been a vibrant but disorganized forum in which neophyte politicians struggle to understand the way legislation is enacted and religious fundamentalists try to block anything that smacks of secularism.
"Parliament came five years too soon," an American advisor to a cabinet minister told me. "It's slowing down approval processes and creating a forum for debate that has yet to prove useful." Given low levels of education and business experience in Afghanistan, even among elites, it's not surprising many MPs have difficulty understanding a budget, much less proposing improvements to it. But having parties in place would have allowed the more capable members to instruct the less prepared.
The absence of political parties was also shortsighted for Mr. Karzai himself, making his effectiveness depend on personal popularity. He was at his zenith when the system was designed; now he is grudgingly accepted as the least of the possible evils by a resigned electorate. Mr. Karzai would be better off with a party organization behind him: In the U.S. even an unpopular president can get things done because party discipline supports him. And a successor to an unpopular president can be groomed within a party even as challengers from competing parties ready their bids. Instead, the Afghan situation is that of a barely competent president with no more competent successor.
Prof. Johnson also points out that most Afghan voters are not represented by a candidate they voted for. Due to a combination of SNTV voting and a 50% turnout, only about 18% of eligible voters in Afghanistan are represented by a candidate they voted for; 64% chose a candidate who lost. Prof. Johnson notes that "many candidates won virtually by chance," with the top finishers in some provinces gathering only a few percent of the votes cast. This might be tolerable in a mature democracy, but is not what one wants in a country with scant trust in the electoral system and little sense of national identity. The next parliamentary elections aren't until 2010, so there is time to set up a better voting system. SNTV should be replaced, requirements stiffened for obtaining a place on the ballot to avoid such farces as choosing among 387 candidates, and runoffs considered.
An Afghan-American member of parliament, Daoud Sultanzoy, has advanced another good idea: take representation down to the district level. Currently, the people of each of Afghanistan's 34 provinces vote for members of parliament from their province, and the highest vote-getters become representatives of that province according to its population. But representatives are not linked with particular districts as they are in the U.S, though some provinces are the size of whole European countries and differ widely in population, terrain and economy. Nor are there mayoral elections for small towns in Afghanistan, so there is no one to represent the national government on a local level.
Afghanistan's biggest problem is not the Taliban, but underdeveloped institutions and a lack of rule of law. It is emphatically not "another Iraq." Most of Afghanistan is relatively peaceful. Just 192 American troops have been killed in action since fall 2001, and in 2006, 206 Afghan civilians were murdered in suicide bombings. Tragic, yes, but in 2003, the last year for which statistics are available, 16,000 Afghan women died in childbirth -- 44 a day.
As this comparison suggests, we need to foster civil society and robust institutions in order to assure a decent life for Afghanistan's citizens. An essential part of this is nurturing political parties.
Ms. Marlowe is the author of "The Book of Trouble" (Harcourt, 2006), a memoir.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117003020043190656.html
Wrong Model for Afghanistan
There is no question that Afghanistan needs to wage a far more effective fight against opium trafficking if it ever hopes to achieve a stable peace. But Colombia — another United States ally whose narcotics trade is helping finance a lethal insurgency — is not the model to follow.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what America's top-ranking military officer, Gen. Peter Pace, recently called for, after the nomination of Washington's current ambassador in Bogotá, William Wood, to be the new American ambassador in Kabul.
The limited gains Colombia has achieved in recent years have been offset by an overly generous amnesty program for right-wing paramilitary leaders and drug traffickers, which has seriously compromised the rule of law. And American aid has been disproportionately directed into military and police programs, leaving far too little to promote alternative livelihoods for Colombia's farmers. Despite all the money spent, the amount of land planted with coca crops has risen and the net harvest has been reduced only slightly. Afghanistan's problems will not be solved by copying these mistakes.
Last year Afghanistan produced 90 percent of the world's opium — a rise of almost 50 percent from the year before. The exploding drug trade is not just a problem for Europe, where most of the heroin produced from that opium ends up. It is a major destabilizing force inside Afghanistan.
Drug money, which represents roughly 35 percent of the country's gross domestic product, is fueling government corruption, financing warlords — some pro-government and some pro-Taliban — and adding to a dangerous disillusionment with President Hamid Karzai's government.
Most of the American aid sent to Kabul since 2001 has gone into security programs and short-term relief and reconstruction, not the long-term development on which lasting security depends. This has left Afghan farmers prey to drug traffickers who often supply the only credit available, with repayment expected in opium poppies.
And with no visible help coming from Kabul or Washington toward alleviating crushing poverty, people in Afghanistan's southern provinces are beginning to look favorably toward a resurgent Taliban. The significantly increased American aid package for Afghanistan announced last month needs to focus more on development. Mr. Wood needs to bring a different set of priorities to Afghanistan, not simply repeat the mistakes Washington has made in Colombia.
There is no question that Afghanistan needs to wage a far more effective fight against opium trafficking if it ever hopes to achieve a stable peace. But Colombia — another United States ally whose narcotics trade is helping finance a lethal insurgency — is not the model to follow.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what America's top-ranking military officer, Gen. Peter Pace, recently called for, after the nomination of Washington's current ambassador in Bogotá, William Wood, to be the new American ambassador in Kabul.
The limited gains Colombia has achieved in recent years have been offset by an overly generous amnesty program for right-wing paramilitary leaders and drug traffickers, which has seriously compromised the rule of law. And American aid has been disproportionately directed into military and police programs, leaving far too little to promote alternative livelihoods for Colombia's farmers. Despite all the money spent, the amount of land planted with coca crops has risen and the net harvest has been reduced only slightly. Afghanistan's problems will not be solved by copying these mistakes.
Last year Afghanistan produced 90 percent of the world's opium — a rise of almost 50 percent from the year before. The exploding drug trade is not just a problem for Europe, where most of the heroin produced from that opium ends up. It is a major destabilizing force inside Afghanistan.
Drug money, which represents roughly 35 percent of the country's gross domestic product, is fueling government corruption, financing warlords — some pro-government and some pro-Taliban — and adding to a dangerous disillusionment with President Hamid Karzai's government.
Most of the American aid sent to Kabul since 2001 has gone into security programs and short-term relief and reconstruction, not the long-term development on which lasting security depends. This has left Afghan farmers prey to drug traffickers who often supply the only credit available, with repayment expected in opium poppies.
And with no visible help coming from Kabul or Washington toward alleviating crushing poverty, people in Afghanistan's southern provinces are beginning to look favorably toward a resurgent Taliban. The significantly increased American aid package for Afghanistan announced last month needs to focus more on development. Mr. Wood needs to bring a different set of priorities to Afghanistan, not simply repeat the mistakes Washington has made in Colombia.
Afghan hospitals 'filthy, decaying'
B.C. paramedic says Canada failing to boost medical care
Richard Foot
CanWest News Service
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Edward McCormick had heard the official claims about Canada's bold mission to reconstruct the war-torn province of Kandahar and bring help to its people.
Then last month, the Vancouver paramedic went to see for himself, travelling to Afghanistan with the Senlis Council, an international think-tank, to investigate the state of the civilian hospital in Kandahar city that serves a population of three million.
Five years after the fall of the Taliban, and one year after Canada took charge of aid and development in Afghanistan's second-largest city, McCormick says Mirwais Hospital remains in "complete decay . . . a glaring symbol of the international community's lack of concern for the Afghan people."
His study, issued this week as part of a larger report on the war by the Senlis Council, is titled War Zone Hospitals in Afghanistan: A Symbol of Wilful Neglect.
Although the Canadian army runs a state-of-the-art field hospital for military personnel just outside town at Kandahar Airfield, plus a smaller medical facility at its satellite base inside the city, McCormick says none of the Afghan doctors and nurses he interviewed in Kandahar had ever seen a Canadian physician come into their hospital to help or even inquire about their needs.
The Canadian International Development Agency, the federal agency responsible for spending $100 million a year in Afghanistan, has admitted its money has been slow in reaching the people of Kandahar, and none has been spent on the hospital.
McCormick, who has a master's degree in epidemiology from the University of British Columbia and worked as an advanced life-support paramedic in Vancouver, says the hospital needs so much more.
"When I walked into the hospital, it was so cold inside I could see my breath," he said in an interview from London, where the Senlis Council is based. "The place is filthy, and there is absolutely no medical equipment to be found anywhere, except a couple of blood-pressure cuffs."
McCormick spent a month in southern Afghanistan documenting the state of both Mirwais Hospital and Bost Hospital in neighbouring Helmand province, where Britain is running the reconstruction mission. Both hospitals, he says, lack heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer.
Despite the new Afghan constitution, which guarantees basic health care to all citizens, McCormick says neither hospital has any diagnostic equipment, oxygen, war-zone trauma treatment services or even a reliable supply of medicine.
He says patients, including children, are dying needlessly from treatable ailments ranging from dehydration to war-related wounds.
Defence Department officials in Ottawa declined to respond to the Senlis Council study. The department's website says Canada organizes temporary medical visits to villages and towns in the area, in which Afghan doctors and nurses are hired to hold daylong clinics.
Meanwhile, Canadian military doctors at Kandahar Airfield have said their job is to treat wounded coalition and Afghan soldiers, not provide care to local civilians.
But McCormick said if Canada is serious about defeating the Taliban, its counter-
insurgency strategy should include aid to Kandahar's hospital -- as well as medical help to civilians hurt by Taliban bombs and NATO air strikes.
"It cost over $4 million to install the Tim Hortons on the military base in Kandahar," he said. "I have nothing but respect for Canadian soldiers. I think they should have doughnuts. But if we as a country can put $4 million into installing that Tims there, we can surely put some money into the local hospital.
"Hygiene is at the heart of modern health care, so lets just hire some people to clean the place. That's something that wouldn't cost a lot of money."
McCormick said the failure to improve medical care in Kandahar is bolstering the Taliban and endangering Canadian troops.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
B.C. paramedic says Canada failing to boost medical care
Richard Foot
CanWest News Service
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Edward McCormick had heard the official claims about Canada's bold mission to reconstruct the war-torn province of Kandahar and bring help to its people.
Then last month, the Vancouver paramedic went to see for himself, travelling to Afghanistan with the Senlis Council, an international think-tank, to investigate the state of the civilian hospital in Kandahar city that serves a population of three million.
Five years after the fall of the Taliban, and one year after Canada took charge of aid and development in Afghanistan's second-largest city, McCormick says Mirwais Hospital remains in "complete decay . . . a glaring symbol of the international community's lack of concern for the Afghan people."
His study, issued this week as part of a larger report on the war by the Senlis Council, is titled War Zone Hospitals in Afghanistan: A Symbol of Wilful Neglect.
Although the Canadian army runs a state-of-the-art field hospital for military personnel just outside town at Kandahar Airfield, plus a smaller medical facility at its satellite base inside the city, McCormick says none of the Afghan doctors and nurses he interviewed in Kandahar had ever seen a Canadian physician come into their hospital to help or even inquire about their needs.
The Canadian International Development Agency, the federal agency responsible for spending $100 million a year in Afghanistan, has admitted its money has been slow in reaching the people of Kandahar, and none has been spent on the hospital.
McCormick, who has a master's degree in epidemiology from the University of British Columbia and worked as an advanced life-support paramedic in Vancouver, says the hospital needs so much more.
"When I walked into the hospital, it was so cold inside I could see my breath," he said in an interview from London, where the Senlis Council is based. "The place is filthy, and there is absolutely no medical equipment to be found anywhere, except a couple of blood-pressure cuffs."
McCormick spent a month in southern Afghanistan documenting the state of both Mirwais Hospital and Bost Hospital in neighbouring Helmand province, where Britain is running the reconstruction mission. Both hospitals, he says, lack heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer.
Despite the new Afghan constitution, which guarantees basic health care to all citizens, McCormick says neither hospital has any diagnostic equipment, oxygen, war-zone trauma treatment services or even a reliable supply of medicine.
He says patients, including children, are dying needlessly from treatable ailments ranging from dehydration to war-related wounds.
Defence Department officials in Ottawa declined to respond to the Senlis Council study. The department's website says Canada organizes temporary medical visits to villages and towns in the area, in which Afghan doctors and nurses are hired to hold daylong clinics.
Meanwhile, Canadian military doctors at Kandahar Airfield have said their job is to treat wounded coalition and Afghan soldiers, not provide care to local civilians.
But McCormick said if Canada is serious about defeating the Taliban, its counter-
insurgency strategy should include aid to Kandahar's hospital -- as well as medical help to civilians hurt by Taliban bombs and NATO air strikes.
"It cost over $4 million to install the Tim Hortons on the military base in Kandahar," he said. "I have nothing but respect for Canadian soldiers. I think they should have doughnuts. But if we as a country can put $4 million into installing that Tims there, we can surely put some money into the local hospital.
"Hygiene is at the heart of modern health care, so lets just hire some people to clean the place. That's something that wouldn't cost a lot of money."
McCormick said the failure to improve medical care in Kandahar is bolstering the Taliban and endangering Canadian troops.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
March 7, 2007
Guest Columnist
The Value of Their Values
By RORY STEWART
I began my career as a Foreign Service officer in Indonesia. There, journalists, diplomats and aid workers emphasized that local government was "incompetent, inefficient and corrupt." I heard the same when working in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. My colleagues often seemed contemptuous of the nations where they served. They overlooked the cultures' virtues and strengths, which are the keys to rebuilding nations, particularly after insurgency and civil war.
Foreign policy experts will tell you that poor states lack the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, free media, a transparent civil service, political participation and a great deal more. Employees of major international agencies commonly complain that Afghans or Iraqis or Kenyans "can't plan" or "can't implement."
At its worst, this attitude is racist, bullying and ignorant. But there are less sinister explanations. As a diplomat, I was praised for "realism" if I sent home critical telegrams. Now, working for a nonprofit, I find that donor proposals encourage us to emphasize the negative aspects of local society. Many of our criticisms reflect our deep assumptions about citizenship, management and the state.
Afghans and Iraqis are often genuinely courageous, charming, generous, inventive and honorable. Their social structures have survived centuries of poverty and foreign mischief and decades of war and oppression, and have enabled them to overcome almost unimaginable trauma. But to acknowledge this seems embarrassingly romantic or even patronizing.
Yet the only chance of rebuilding a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan in the face of insurgency or civil war is to identify, develop and use some of these traditional values. Many international reformers overexaggerate the power of technical assistance and formal processes. In fact, in these contexts, charisma can be more potent than bureaucracy. Politicians have to demonstrate an intuitive understanding of local power structures and an empathy for the unexpected things people value about themselves.
This may be uncomfortable for the international community. A leader who can restore security, reconcile warring parties and shape the aspirations of a people may resemble an Ataturk more than a U.S. president. This is not a call for dictatorship. True progress must be sustained by the unconstrained wishes of the people. These should include, in Afghanistan, people with strong liberal values as much as conservative rural communities. These various desires must be protected from both the contorted control of an authoritarian state and the muffling effect of foreign aid.
The international community often attempts to avoid imposing foreign systems. Donors try hard to emphasize grass-roots consultation in designing a political system. But it is much easier for us in theory than in practice to admire and empower an unfamiliar society.
Our approach to nation building in Afghanistan has failed to accommodate the splits between Hazara and Pusthu land arrangements, gender attitudes and codes, or their different approaches to literacy, the dignity of the individual or economic progress. We do not embrace the many unexpected ways in which Afghans might overcome trauma, invest, trade and learn. Such diversity should not be imprisoned by the current centralized government, but empowered by a devolved and flexible federal system.
Western management jargon is of little help to Afghan entrepreneurs, who use tricks, trust, community and crises in a powerful way. The strong Afghan sense of justice, community and religious belief can support a counternarcotics program, the rule of law, democracy or security. But the real drivers of change are opaque.
Ultimately, we must respect countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, and trust in their ability to find their own solutions. This does not mean we need to withdraw entirely. A Harvard M.B.A. will be better at building a hydroelectric plant than a local tribal process. Foreign troops can sometimes, as in Bosnia, end a war. Our rigid values, critiques and methodologies can, even in Iraq, set up a central bank and stabilize a currency.
But the central problems are national and political. Our invective about state failure and our dissatisfaction have become part of the problem. Real solutions will emerge, often improbably, from local individual virtues, and from the cultures we struggle to describe and tend to ignore.
Rory Stewart's latest book is "The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq." He runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul and is a guest columnist this month.
****
Poppy trade article fails the road test
Stephen Appleton
For The Calgary Herald
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Re: "War against poppies is futile," Garth Pritchard, Opinion, March 2.
Having just returned last Friday from two years of working in Afghanistan, I was most interested to read Garth Pritchard's article. I respect the work Pritchard does and his understanding that one needs to be in a country to tell the real story.
Unfortunately, Pritchard's article bore testimony that his 12 months in Afghanistan over the past two years have not served him as well as he may think.
Albeit ostensibly focused on the poppy trade, Pritchard made comments on the lack of infrastructure in the country that are simply untrue.
I served in the private sector as project manager of the Kabul International Airport initiative as implemented by the ATCO Group of Companies from Calgary, and as the program manager of the USAID-UNOPS Secondary and District Roads Program that over the past two-and-a-half years has built more than 750 km of sealed roads throughout Afghanistan within a mandate of 900 km and at a cost of $377 million US.
Pritchard's off-handed remark about Afghanistan's one paved road is simply irresponsible reporting. Aside from the program over which I had stewardship and which improved the living conditions of five million Afghans, paved road construction was at approximately 1,000 km when I left last week. More is to follow.
Outside of Kandahar, we planned and are now building 235 km of road as part of the U.S. southern strategy. This effort is the most dangerous reconstruction project underway in Afghanistan and the UNOPS task force we assembled to implement this ambitious task, which must be completed before the end of December 2007, has already achieved paved road conditions since we started in November 2006.
There are segments of this road that are so dangerous that not even U.S. and Canadian soldiers will venture inside the corridor.
What is more bothersome about Pritchard's comments is the ignorance associated with the cost to human lives connected to this road reconstruction effort since 2002.
Within the USAID-UNOPS effort alone, we have suffered approximately 100 fatalities and more than 200 wounded to build roads in Afghanistan. This toll, tragically, exceeds all but the U.S. military for human sacrifice in this country and puts in better perspective the Canadian military cost, which receives daily news coverage from our media.
As a retired army colonel, I am acutely aware of the army's losses, but to be killed or wounded while building roads in Afghanistan redefines the reconstruction effort as understood by most Canadians and western countries.
Unfortunately, this incredible story remains untold, and as Pritchard's article demonstrates, will remain so.
Stephen Brent Appleton, Colonel (Ret'd), is outgoing program manager, USAID-UNOPS Secondary and District Roads, Afghanistan.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Guest Columnist
The Value of Their Values
By RORY STEWART
I began my career as a Foreign Service officer in Indonesia. There, journalists, diplomats and aid workers emphasized that local government was "incompetent, inefficient and corrupt." I heard the same when working in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. My colleagues often seemed contemptuous of the nations where they served. They overlooked the cultures' virtues and strengths, which are the keys to rebuilding nations, particularly after insurgency and civil war.
Foreign policy experts will tell you that poor states lack the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, free media, a transparent civil service, political participation and a great deal more. Employees of major international agencies commonly complain that Afghans or Iraqis or Kenyans "can't plan" or "can't implement."
At its worst, this attitude is racist, bullying and ignorant. But there are less sinister explanations. As a diplomat, I was praised for "realism" if I sent home critical telegrams. Now, working for a nonprofit, I find that donor proposals encourage us to emphasize the negative aspects of local society. Many of our criticisms reflect our deep assumptions about citizenship, management and the state.
Afghans and Iraqis are often genuinely courageous, charming, generous, inventive and honorable. Their social structures have survived centuries of poverty and foreign mischief and decades of war and oppression, and have enabled them to overcome almost unimaginable trauma. But to acknowledge this seems embarrassingly romantic or even patronizing.
Yet the only chance of rebuilding a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan in the face of insurgency or civil war is to identify, develop and use some of these traditional values. Many international reformers overexaggerate the power of technical assistance and formal processes. In fact, in these contexts, charisma can be more potent than bureaucracy. Politicians have to demonstrate an intuitive understanding of local power structures and an empathy for the unexpected things people value about themselves.
This may be uncomfortable for the international community. A leader who can restore security, reconcile warring parties and shape the aspirations of a people may resemble an Ataturk more than a U.S. president. This is not a call for dictatorship. True progress must be sustained by the unconstrained wishes of the people. These should include, in Afghanistan, people with strong liberal values as much as conservative rural communities. These various desires must be protected from both the contorted control of an authoritarian state and the muffling effect of foreign aid.
The international community often attempts to avoid imposing foreign systems. Donors try hard to emphasize grass-roots consultation in designing a political system. But it is much easier for us in theory than in practice to admire and empower an unfamiliar society.
Our approach to nation building in Afghanistan has failed to accommodate the splits between Hazara and Pusthu land arrangements, gender attitudes and codes, or their different approaches to literacy, the dignity of the individual or economic progress. We do not embrace the many unexpected ways in which Afghans might overcome trauma, invest, trade and learn. Such diversity should not be imprisoned by the current centralized government, but empowered by a devolved and flexible federal system.
Western management jargon is of little help to Afghan entrepreneurs, who use tricks, trust, community and crises in a powerful way. The strong Afghan sense of justice, community and religious belief can support a counternarcotics program, the rule of law, democracy or security. But the real drivers of change are opaque.
Ultimately, we must respect countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, and trust in their ability to find their own solutions. This does not mean we need to withdraw entirely. A Harvard M.B.A. will be better at building a hydroelectric plant than a local tribal process. Foreign troops can sometimes, as in Bosnia, end a war. Our rigid values, critiques and methodologies can, even in Iraq, set up a central bank and stabilize a currency.
But the central problems are national and political. Our invective about state failure and our dissatisfaction have become part of the problem. Real solutions will emerge, often improbably, from local individual virtues, and from the cultures we struggle to describe and tend to ignore.
Rory Stewart's latest book is "The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq." He runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul and is a guest columnist this month.
****
Poppy trade article fails the road test
Stephen Appleton
For The Calgary Herald
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Re: "War against poppies is futile," Garth Pritchard, Opinion, March 2.
Having just returned last Friday from two years of working in Afghanistan, I was most interested to read Garth Pritchard's article. I respect the work Pritchard does and his understanding that one needs to be in a country to tell the real story.
Unfortunately, Pritchard's article bore testimony that his 12 months in Afghanistan over the past two years have not served him as well as he may think.
Albeit ostensibly focused on the poppy trade, Pritchard made comments on the lack of infrastructure in the country that are simply untrue.
I served in the private sector as project manager of the Kabul International Airport initiative as implemented by the ATCO Group of Companies from Calgary, and as the program manager of the USAID-UNOPS Secondary and District Roads Program that over the past two-and-a-half years has built more than 750 km of sealed roads throughout Afghanistan within a mandate of 900 km and at a cost of $377 million US.
Pritchard's off-handed remark about Afghanistan's one paved road is simply irresponsible reporting. Aside from the program over which I had stewardship and which improved the living conditions of five million Afghans, paved road construction was at approximately 1,000 km when I left last week. More is to follow.
Outside of Kandahar, we planned and are now building 235 km of road as part of the U.S. southern strategy. This effort is the most dangerous reconstruction project underway in Afghanistan and the UNOPS task force we assembled to implement this ambitious task, which must be completed before the end of December 2007, has already achieved paved road conditions since we started in November 2006.
There are segments of this road that are so dangerous that not even U.S. and Canadian soldiers will venture inside the corridor.
What is more bothersome about Pritchard's comments is the ignorance associated with the cost to human lives connected to this road reconstruction effort since 2002.
Within the USAID-UNOPS effort alone, we have suffered approximately 100 fatalities and more than 200 wounded to build roads in Afghanistan. This toll, tragically, exceeds all but the U.S. military for human sacrifice in this country and puts in better perspective the Canadian military cost, which receives daily news coverage from our media.
As a retired army colonel, I am acutely aware of the army's losses, but to be killed or wounded while building roads in Afghanistan redefines the reconstruction effort as understood by most Canadians and western countries.
Unfortunately, this incredible story remains untold, and as Pritchard's article demonstrates, will remain so.
Stephen Brent Appleton, Colonel (Ret'd), is outgoing program manager, USAID-UNOPS Secondary and District Roads, Afghanistan.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
March 24, 2007
Guest Columnist
Our Echoes Come From You - 800th anniversary of the poet Rumi
By RORY STEWART
Afghanistan is now both more and less than a nation. Dialects of its official language are spoken from Iran to India. Its greetings and rituals are recognizable in Chechnya. Kabuli woodwork incorporates motifs from Syria, the Mughal Empire and pre-Islamic Uzbekistan. On Tuesday, I heard a song from a mystical order, founded in Afghanistan, which was played by musicians from the borders of Nepal.
But Afghanistan is internally fragmented. It contains diverse Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik and Baluch people, who dominate the neighboring 'stans.' The Pashtun majority was split with Pakistan in the 19th century. The recent civil war has eroded nationhood further.
Government policy must respond to this fragmented pluralism. The myriad social organizations, histories and experiences of isolated Afghan communities should be liberated, and the state should become less centralized. This is because Afghans do not want to be ruled by an overbearing, alien government, and the civil service does not have the capacity to govern effectively across the country.
Devolution, however, should be counterbalanced by a new idea of a nation. President Hamid Karzai has embraced ethnic diversity in his elaborate Uzbek robes and Pashtun prayer beads. He must rebuild Kabul as a national symbol. He needs a new unifying definition of Afghanistan to replace the old and still powerful myth of jihad against foreign occupation.
Afghanistan is defined by its organic relationship to wider Muslim Asia. It is a barren country that first flourished as a trading station, connecting Central Asia, Iran and Pakistan, taking silk to Rome and cotton to China. It is historically entrepreneurial, adept at exploiting foreign financial support and finding varied irregular incomes. It is now supported by the cash of four million recently returned refugees and many remittances. Afghan carpets, tiles and calligraphy are attractive to neighboring markets because they draw on a regional tradition. Afghanistan should benefit from the overland trade between its resource-rich or rapidly growing neighbors.
This trade can be developed by increasing the United States investment in building roads. A year ago, it took nearly a day to get from Kabul to Peshawar, Pakistan — which was the time it took in 1933. Now the journey can be done in half the time.
But Kabul airport, which could easily make money, is pathetic; imports are taxed 15 times as they move from the borders to the capital; exports are crippled by cumbersome regulations and transportation costs.
Karzai's largest problem lies with his Muslim neighbors, Pakistan and Iran. He must use everything that Afghanistan shares with these countries: linguistically, historically, culturally and religiously to charm, outwit and influence them. He should do the same throughout the Islamic world. The Middle East has never been so wealthy or so generous. Yet Afghanistan has failed to win its financial support.
The United States must, like Karzai, approach Afghanistan consistently as part of a wider region. There are identical tribal and political groups on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, separated only by colonial line. We emphasize democracy and human rights and pursue an aggressive counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, but we support Pervez Musharraf, a military ruler, who takes a political, negotiated approach to the same groups in Pakistan. As a result of this schizophrenia, Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders base themselves in Pakistan and attack our interests from there.
Actions in one country spread quickly to neighbors. The invasion of Iraq disturbed Iran, then the election of a Shiite government emboldened it to finance other Shiite groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Concessions to India frighten Pakistan into financing the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Our response to the Taliban angers Muslims in Europe and Indonesia. Yet Afghanistan's influence can also be positive. Shiite-Sunni violence has spread from Pakistan to Iraq. But the Murad Khane district in central Kabul, which contains five Shiite and Sunni ethnic groups, has, like the rest of Afghanistan, recently avoided sectarian violence.
This year is the 800th anniversary of the poet Rumi, who was born in Afghanistan, traveled through Central Asia, Persia and Arabia and died in Turkey, without being aware of leaving a single country. Tens of millions can recite his poetry. His line applies well to Afghanistan:
"Ma chu kuhim o sada dar ma ze tust."
"We are mountains, our echoes are from you."
Rory Stewart's latest book is "The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq." He runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul and is a guest columnist this month.
******
Afghan mission needs refocusing, UN official warns
Taliban resurgence blamed on failure to rebuild services
Richard Foot
CanWest News Service
Friday, March 23, 2007
Canada and its allies in Afghanistan have "completely underestimated" the importance of building strong and effective local government institutions, and will not defeat the Taliban until they do so, said Tom Koenigs, the United Nations' most senior official in Afghanistan.
"We have made mistakes, and we shouldn't repeat them," Koenigs said this week in Washington. "We have completely underestimated the challenge of governance in the southern provinces. The resurgence of the Taliban there was only possible because there was a power vacuum."
Koenigs, a longtime UN official and former deputy mayor of Frankfurt, Germany, was speaking Wednesday during a symposium on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace, an independent think-tank founded by the U.S. Congress.
He has completed his first year in Afghanistan, where after more than 14 months of hard military action by Canada, the United States, Britain and other allies, he said, "the Taliban have not been defeated."
More importantly, he adds: "The victory over Afghans' hearts and minds, which at the moment is everybody's language, hasn't been seen."
Koenigs said at least "50 per cent" of the problems in Afghanistan are a result of inadequate, corrupt or nonexistent government services, particularly in the rural parts of southern provinces such as Kandahar, where the Taliban draws much of its power.
When the central government in Kabul and its coalition allies fail to provide local courts, or a system of civilian justice, for example, "the Taliban comes along and said, 'We will provide justice. We will adjudicate disputes between farmers,' " Koenigs said.
Where some form of government order does exist, it's often so corrupt that the Taliban appear a better option to many Afghans.
Koenigs said one of the great failures of the NATO coalition in southern Afghanistan has been to focus on a military rather than a "governance" solution to the insurgency.
Even more recent attempts to defeat the insurgency by winning over civilian Afghans -- by building roads, holding health clinics in local villages and focusing on economic aid -- won't solve the problem, he said.
"A focus on governance is even more necessary than on other kinds of development. Hearts and minds will not be won in Afghanistan by development aid, but by governance.
"The brand-mark of the Taliban is not economic development and Afghan farmers don't ask for development. They ask for security, for decent government services, they ask to be taken seriously by district governors. They ask for law and order and justice. We have to be better at these things than the Taliban.
"It's wrong to say that if we build a road and invest in schools, the people will be on our side. . . . If we don't get the governance right in the south, we will not defeat the insurgency."
Thirty-seven Canadian soldiers have died, and dozens more have been injured, in Afghanistan since Canada took responsibility for security and development in Kandahar province in 2006.
Koenigs said no matter how hard NATO forces work to help Afghan civilians, they will always be seen as an occupation force.
The Taliban feeds off that mindset to foster among the population a sense of legitimacy for the insurgency.
Koenigs said NATO must refocus its military campaign from one of fighting battles and manning distant garrisons to one of training and supporting Afghan government forces to do the fighting and patrolling instead.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Guest Columnist
Our Echoes Come From You - 800th anniversary of the poet Rumi
By RORY STEWART
Afghanistan is now both more and less than a nation. Dialects of its official language are spoken from Iran to India. Its greetings and rituals are recognizable in Chechnya. Kabuli woodwork incorporates motifs from Syria, the Mughal Empire and pre-Islamic Uzbekistan. On Tuesday, I heard a song from a mystical order, founded in Afghanistan, which was played by musicians from the borders of Nepal.
But Afghanistan is internally fragmented. It contains diverse Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik and Baluch people, who dominate the neighboring 'stans.' The Pashtun majority was split with Pakistan in the 19th century. The recent civil war has eroded nationhood further.
Government policy must respond to this fragmented pluralism. The myriad social organizations, histories and experiences of isolated Afghan communities should be liberated, and the state should become less centralized. This is because Afghans do not want to be ruled by an overbearing, alien government, and the civil service does not have the capacity to govern effectively across the country.
Devolution, however, should be counterbalanced by a new idea of a nation. President Hamid Karzai has embraced ethnic diversity in his elaborate Uzbek robes and Pashtun prayer beads. He must rebuild Kabul as a national symbol. He needs a new unifying definition of Afghanistan to replace the old and still powerful myth of jihad against foreign occupation.
Afghanistan is defined by its organic relationship to wider Muslim Asia. It is a barren country that first flourished as a trading station, connecting Central Asia, Iran and Pakistan, taking silk to Rome and cotton to China. It is historically entrepreneurial, adept at exploiting foreign financial support and finding varied irregular incomes. It is now supported by the cash of four million recently returned refugees and many remittances. Afghan carpets, tiles and calligraphy are attractive to neighboring markets because they draw on a regional tradition. Afghanistan should benefit from the overland trade between its resource-rich or rapidly growing neighbors.
This trade can be developed by increasing the United States investment in building roads. A year ago, it took nearly a day to get from Kabul to Peshawar, Pakistan — which was the time it took in 1933. Now the journey can be done in half the time.
But Kabul airport, which could easily make money, is pathetic; imports are taxed 15 times as they move from the borders to the capital; exports are crippled by cumbersome regulations and transportation costs.
Karzai's largest problem lies with his Muslim neighbors, Pakistan and Iran. He must use everything that Afghanistan shares with these countries: linguistically, historically, culturally and religiously to charm, outwit and influence them. He should do the same throughout the Islamic world. The Middle East has never been so wealthy or so generous. Yet Afghanistan has failed to win its financial support.
The United States must, like Karzai, approach Afghanistan consistently as part of a wider region. There are identical tribal and political groups on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, separated only by colonial line. We emphasize democracy and human rights and pursue an aggressive counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, but we support Pervez Musharraf, a military ruler, who takes a political, negotiated approach to the same groups in Pakistan. As a result of this schizophrenia, Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders base themselves in Pakistan and attack our interests from there.
Actions in one country spread quickly to neighbors. The invasion of Iraq disturbed Iran, then the election of a Shiite government emboldened it to finance other Shiite groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Concessions to India frighten Pakistan into financing the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Our response to the Taliban angers Muslims in Europe and Indonesia. Yet Afghanistan's influence can also be positive. Shiite-Sunni violence has spread from Pakistan to Iraq. But the Murad Khane district in central Kabul, which contains five Shiite and Sunni ethnic groups, has, like the rest of Afghanistan, recently avoided sectarian violence.
This year is the 800th anniversary of the poet Rumi, who was born in Afghanistan, traveled through Central Asia, Persia and Arabia and died in Turkey, without being aware of leaving a single country. Tens of millions can recite his poetry. His line applies well to Afghanistan:
"Ma chu kuhim o sada dar ma ze tust."
"We are mountains, our echoes are from you."
Rory Stewart's latest book is "The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq." He runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul and is a guest columnist this month.
******
Afghan mission needs refocusing, UN official warns
Taliban resurgence blamed on failure to rebuild services
Richard Foot
CanWest News Service
Friday, March 23, 2007
Canada and its allies in Afghanistan have "completely underestimated" the importance of building strong and effective local government institutions, and will not defeat the Taliban until they do so, said Tom Koenigs, the United Nations' most senior official in Afghanistan.
"We have made mistakes, and we shouldn't repeat them," Koenigs said this week in Washington. "We have completely underestimated the challenge of governance in the southern provinces. The resurgence of the Taliban there was only possible because there was a power vacuum."
Koenigs, a longtime UN official and former deputy mayor of Frankfurt, Germany, was speaking Wednesday during a symposium on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace, an independent think-tank founded by the U.S. Congress.
He has completed his first year in Afghanistan, where after more than 14 months of hard military action by Canada, the United States, Britain and other allies, he said, "the Taliban have not been defeated."
More importantly, he adds: "The victory over Afghans' hearts and minds, which at the moment is everybody's language, hasn't been seen."
Koenigs said at least "50 per cent" of the problems in Afghanistan are a result of inadequate, corrupt or nonexistent government services, particularly in the rural parts of southern provinces such as Kandahar, where the Taliban draws much of its power.
When the central government in Kabul and its coalition allies fail to provide local courts, or a system of civilian justice, for example, "the Taliban comes along and said, 'We will provide justice. We will adjudicate disputes between farmers,' " Koenigs said.
Where some form of government order does exist, it's often so corrupt that the Taliban appear a better option to many Afghans.
Koenigs said one of the great failures of the NATO coalition in southern Afghanistan has been to focus on a military rather than a "governance" solution to the insurgency.
Even more recent attempts to defeat the insurgency by winning over civilian Afghans -- by building roads, holding health clinics in local villages and focusing on economic aid -- won't solve the problem, he said.
"A focus on governance is even more necessary than on other kinds of development. Hearts and minds will not be won in Afghanistan by development aid, but by governance.
"The brand-mark of the Taliban is not economic development and Afghan farmers don't ask for development. They ask for security, for decent government services, they ask to be taken seriously by district governors. They ask for law and order and justice. We have to be better at these things than the Taliban.
"It's wrong to say that if we build a road and invest in schools, the people will be on our side. . . . If we don't get the governance right in the south, we will not defeat the insurgency."
Thirty-seven Canadian soldiers have died, and dozens more have been injured, in Afghanistan since Canada took responsibility for security and development in Kandahar province in 2006.
Koenigs said no matter how hard NATO forces work to help Afghan civilians, they will always be seen as an occupation force.
The Taliban feeds off that mindset to foster among the population a sense of legitimacy for the insurgency.
Koenigs said NATO must refocus its military campaign from one of fighting battles and manning distant garrisons to one of training and supporting Afghan government forces to do the fighting and patrolling instead.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Kabul's war and gore tourism
Ruins and rubble everywhere in battered and blown-up capital
Don Martin
Calgary Herald
Saturday, June 23, 2007
KABUL - For war and gore tourists, welcome to the pleasuredome.
Ruins and rubble are everywhere here, missile strikes and bullet holes are as common as peeled roof shingles in Canada, and grisly historic sites are usually only a few street corners away.
Believe it or not, there are tourist guides for visitors to the battered and blown-up Afghan capital, but they were published in the 1970s, missing the civil war attractions and events from the Taliban's ruthlessly fascinating 1996-2002 reign.
Kabul today is a dust-covered city of walls topped with barbed wire, driveways blocked by rifle-bearing security guards, chaotic traffic jams, noisy markets, nightly blackouts, and curfews on residents still struggling to recover from their city's violent past. Not that this city, with a population of three million at last count, lacks for a certain unique charm. People are friendly, industrious, full of civic pride and don't seem to live in perpetual fear that the glassy-eyed man boarding the bus is about to blow the entire passenger list into the afterlife.
Here, then, is a day in Kabul, tourist-style, from the viewpoint of a Canadian newspaper columnist.
10 a.m. Kabul Zoo:
A massive pile of rubble marks the entrance of what used to be the most infamous zoo in the world. That's the sort of claim to fame you get when your prized 25-year-old elephant is killed by a rocket landing in her cage during a civil war. Then again, the zoo's real claim to fame was Marjan, a lion who devoured a Taliban fighter who strayed inside his enclosure in 1997, before suffering a retaliatory grenade blast from the day-before dinner's outraged brother. Half blind, lame and toothless, Marjan went on to outlive Taliban rule before dying in 2002 of old age.
His former enclosure is weed-infested and empty now. Somewhere in there is the burial plot of the beast, but darned if I could see it. I'm not sure what happened to the two lions China had sent as replacement gifts and the gatekeeper just shrugged at the query.
It's a zoo crying out for animal-rights activists to campaign for its closure. The lone wolf is thin enough to pass for a fox. The one unhappy brown bear swims in a tiny algae-filled pool. The four black bears paw the dry concrete floor looking for food. The best collection in the zoo seems to be, ironically, the vultures.
11 a.m. The King's Tomb:
There's a certain Afghan symmetry to having the Father of the Nation's remains locked in marble under a domed mausoleum, shredded by gunfire and rocket grenades fired from civil war opponents on an opposing hillside. Overlooking a sprawling swath of Kabul's ramshackle housing, the final resting place of Mohammed Nadir Shah, who was assassinated in 1933, is officially closed to the public. A $5 US bribe to the caretaker got us inside. There, in the basement, we saw the king's tomb, surrounded by 14 royal relatives and the gravel patch in the floor where the current title-only king, Zahir Shah, now 92 and ailing, is soon expected to rest.
12:15 p.m. Babur Gardens:
This 11-hectare "garden" dating back to the 16th century is the burial site of the Babur Shah, former king of Afghanistan. Foreigners are charged 20 times the entrance fee for locals, but it's still only an American buck so there's no complaining here. It's filled with struggling rose gardens and patchy grass but there are signs a restoration project is proceeding slowly. Still, this mostly empty retreat from the chaos outside its walls would qualify as a third-class getaway in North America. My guides can't wait to leave.
2:30 p.m. Kabul Stadium:
Nobody's quite sure if the weekly crowds of 25,000 who came out during the Taliban reign were attracted by the soccer game or the amputations and executions of harsh Islamic justice. But just outside the home team's goal line, hundreds of men and women were routinely killed or maimed, having been convicted, rightly or wrongly, of murder, adultery or thievery. As soon as the blood was soaked up with white powder and the severed appendages thrown into the crowd, teams took the field for soccer.
The field remains in good shape by Afghan standards and soccer is still played here. But, given its history, one can only imagine the International Olympic Committee cringing at the sight of Olympic rings hanging on the stadium's nameplate.
4 p.m. Ariana Square:
We drive by the heavily protected patch of grass near the presidential palace where former president Dr. Najibullah and his brother met their unfortunate demise. Taliban fighters knocked down the door of the United Nations building where they were hiding in 1996, dragged them across the road and hanged them from a pole. No sign of the pole now. Just another patch of ground, beside streets filled with people engaged in a struggling existence, oblivious to the bloody events of their past.
In Kabul, after all, reliving history always takes a distant second to staying alive today.
[email protected]
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Ruins and rubble everywhere in battered and blown-up capital
Don Martin
Calgary Herald
Saturday, June 23, 2007
KABUL - For war and gore tourists, welcome to the pleasuredome.
Ruins and rubble are everywhere here, missile strikes and bullet holes are as common as peeled roof shingles in Canada, and grisly historic sites are usually only a few street corners away.
Believe it or not, there are tourist guides for visitors to the battered and blown-up Afghan capital, but they were published in the 1970s, missing the civil war attractions and events from the Taliban's ruthlessly fascinating 1996-2002 reign.
Kabul today is a dust-covered city of walls topped with barbed wire, driveways blocked by rifle-bearing security guards, chaotic traffic jams, noisy markets, nightly blackouts, and curfews on residents still struggling to recover from their city's violent past. Not that this city, with a population of three million at last count, lacks for a certain unique charm. People are friendly, industrious, full of civic pride and don't seem to live in perpetual fear that the glassy-eyed man boarding the bus is about to blow the entire passenger list into the afterlife.
Here, then, is a day in Kabul, tourist-style, from the viewpoint of a Canadian newspaper columnist.
10 a.m. Kabul Zoo:
A massive pile of rubble marks the entrance of what used to be the most infamous zoo in the world. That's the sort of claim to fame you get when your prized 25-year-old elephant is killed by a rocket landing in her cage during a civil war. Then again, the zoo's real claim to fame was Marjan, a lion who devoured a Taliban fighter who strayed inside his enclosure in 1997, before suffering a retaliatory grenade blast from the day-before dinner's outraged brother. Half blind, lame and toothless, Marjan went on to outlive Taliban rule before dying in 2002 of old age.
His former enclosure is weed-infested and empty now. Somewhere in there is the burial plot of the beast, but darned if I could see it. I'm not sure what happened to the two lions China had sent as replacement gifts and the gatekeeper just shrugged at the query.
It's a zoo crying out for animal-rights activists to campaign for its closure. The lone wolf is thin enough to pass for a fox. The one unhappy brown bear swims in a tiny algae-filled pool. The four black bears paw the dry concrete floor looking for food. The best collection in the zoo seems to be, ironically, the vultures.
11 a.m. The King's Tomb:
There's a certain Afghan symmetry to having the Father of the Nation's remains locked in marble under a domed mausoleum, shredded by gunfire and rocket grenades fired from civil war opponents on an opposing hillside. Overlooking a sprawling swath of Kabul's ramshackle housing, the final resting place of Mohammed Nadir Shah, who was assassinated in 1933, is officially closed to the public. A $5 US bribe to the caretaker got us inside. There, in the basement, we saw the king's tomb, surrounded by 14 royal relatives and the gravel patch in the floor where the current title-only king, Zahir Shah, now 92 and ailing, is soon expected to rest.
12:15 p.m. Babur Gardens:
This 11-hectare "garden" dating back to the 16th century is the burial site of the Babur Shah, former king of Afghanistan. Foreigners are charged 20 times the entrance fee for locals, but it's still only an American buck so there's no complaining here. It's filled with struggling rose gardens and patchy grass but there are signs a restoration project is proceeding slowly. Still, this mostly empty retreat from the chaos outside its walls would qualify as a third-class getaway in North America. My guides can't wait to leave.
2:30 p.m. Kabul Stadium:
Nobody's quite sure if the weekly crowds of 25,000 who came out during the Taliban reign were attracted by the soccer game or the amputations and executions of harsh Islamic justice. But just outside the home team's goal line, hundreds of men and women were routinely killed or maimed, having been convicted, rightly or wrongly, of murder, adultery or thievery. As soon as the blood was soaked up with white powder and the severed appendages thrown into the crowd, teams took the field for soccer.
The field remains in good shape by Afghan standards and soccer is still played here. But, given its history, one can only imagine the International Olympic Committee cringing at the sight of Olympic rings hanging on the stadium's nameplate.
4 p.m. Ariana Square:
We drive by the heavily protected patch of grass near the presidential palace where former president Dr. Najibullah and his brother met their unfortunate demise. Taliban fighters knocked down the door of the United Nations building where they were hiding in 1996, dragged them across the road and hanged them from a pole. No sign of the pole now. Just another patch of ground, beside streets filled with people engaged in a struggling existence, oblivious to the bloody events of their past.
In Kabul, after all, reliving history always takes a distant second to staying alive today.
[email protected]
© The Calgary Herald 2007
There is a multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world ... ?th&emc=th
August 26, 2007
Taliban Raise Poppy Production to a Record Again
By DAVID ROHDE
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan , Aug. 25 — Afghanistan produced record levels of opium in 2007 for the second straight year, led by a staggering 45 percent increase in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand Province, according to a new United Nations survey to be released Monday.
The report is likely to touch off renewed debate about the United States' $600 million counternarcotics program in Afghanistan, which has been hampered by security challenges and endemic corruption within the Afghan government.
"I think it is safe to say that we should be looking for a new strategy," said William B. Wood, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, commenting on the report's overall findings. "And I think that we are finding one."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world ... ?th&emc=th
August 26, 2007
Taliban Raise Poppy Production to a Record Again
By DAVID ROHDE
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan , Aug. 25 — Afghanistan produced record levels of opium in 2007 for the second straight year, led by a staggering 45 percent increase in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand Province, according to a new United Nations survey to be released Monday.
The report is likely to touch off renewed debate about the United States' $600 million counternarcotics program in Afghanistan, which has been hampered by security challenges and endemic corruption within the Afghan government.
"I think it is safe to say that we should be looking for a new strategy," said William B. Wood, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, commenting on the report's overall findings. "And I think that we are finding one."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/world ... ref=slogin
October 8, 2007
U.S. Renews Bid to Destroy Opium Poppies in Afghanistan
By KIRK SEMPLE and TIM GOLDEN
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 7 — After the biggest opium harvest in Afghanistan’s history, American officials have renewed efforts to persuade the government here to begin spraying herbicide on opium poppies, and they have found some supporters within President Hamid Karzai’s administration, officials of both countries said.
Since early this year, Mr. Karzai has repeatedly declared his opposition to spraying the poppy fields, whether by crop-dusting airplanes or by eradication teams on the ground.
But Afghan officials said the Karzai administration is now re-evaluating that stance. Some proponents within the government are pushing a trial program of ground spraying that could begin before the harvest next spring.
The issue has created sharp divisions within the Afghan government, among its Western allies and even American officials of different agencies. The matter is fraught with political danger for Mr. Karzai, whose hold on power is weak.
Many spraying advocates, including officials at the White House and the State Department, view herbicides as critical to curbing Afghanistan’s poppy crop, officials said. That crop and the opium and heroin it produces have become a major source of revenue for the Taliban insurgency.
But officials said the skeptics — who include American military and intelligence officials and European diplomats in Afghanistan — fear that any spraying of American-made chemicals over Afghan farms would be a boon to Taliban propagandists. Some of those officials say that the political cost could be especially high if the herbicide destroys food crops that farmers often plant alongside their poppies.
“There has always been a need to balance the obvious greater effectiveness of spray against the potential for losing hearts and minds,” Thomas A. Schweich, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics issues, said in an interview last week in Washington. “The question is whether that’s manageable. I think that it is.”
Bush administration officials say they will respect whatever decision the Afghan government makes. Crop-eradication efforts, they insist, are only part of a new counternarcotics strategy that will include increased efforts against traffickers, more aid for legal agriculture and development, and greater military support for the drug fight.
Behind the scenes, however, Bush administration officials have been pressing the Afghan government to at least allow the trial spray of glyphosate, a commonly used weed-killer, current and former American officials said. Ground spraying would likely bring only a modest improvement over the manual destruction of poppy plants, but officials who support the strategy hope it would reassure Afghans about the safety of the herbicide and make eradication possible.
Aerial spraying, they add, may be the only way to make a serious impact on opium production while the Taliban continues to dominate parts of southern Afghanistan.
On Sunday, officials said, a State Department crop-eradication expert briefed key members of Mr. Karzai’s cabinet about the effectiveness and safety of glyphosate. The expert, Charles S. Helling, a senior scientific adviser to the department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, met with, among others, the ministers of public health and agriculture, both of whom have opposed the use of herbicides, an Afghan official said.
For all the controversy over herbicide use, there is no debate that Afghanistan’s drug problem is out of control. The country now produces 93 percent of the world’s opiates, according to United Nations estimates. Its traffickers are also processing more opium into heroin base there, a shift that has helped to increase Afghanistan’s drug revenues exponentially since the American-led invasion in 2001.
A United Nations report in August documented a 17 percent rise in poppy cultivation from 2006 to 2007, and a 34 percent rise in opium production. Perhaps more important for the effort to stabilize Afghanistan, officials said, the Taliban has been reaping a windfall from taxes on the growers and traffickers.
The problem is most acute in the southern province of Helmand, a Taliban stronghold. It produced nearly 4,400 metric tons of opium this year, almost half the country’s total output, United Nations statistics show.
Moreover, as Afghanistan’s opium production has soared, the government’s eradication efforts have faltered. Federal and provincial eradication teams — using sticks, sickles and animal-drawn plows — cut down about 47,000 acres of poppy fields this year, 24 percent more than last year but still less than 9 percent of the country’s total poppy crop.
And even that effort had to be negotiated plot by plot with growers. Powerful and politically connected landowners were able to protect their crops while smaller, weaker farmers were made the targets. The eradication program was so spotty that it did little to discourage farmers from cultivating the crop, American and European officials said.
“The eradication process over the past five years has not worked,” Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. “This year, it was a farce.”
The Americans have been pushing the Afghan government to eradicate with glyphosate for at least two years. According to current and former American officials, the subject has been raised with President Karzai by President Bush; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser; and John P. Walters, the director of national drug-control policy.
American officials thought they had the Karzai administration’s support late last year to begin a small-scale pilot program for ground spraying in several provinces. But that plan was derailed in January after an American-educated deputy minister of public health presented health and environmental concerns about glyphosate at a meeting of the Karzai cabinet, Afghan and American officials said.
Since then, Mr. Karzai has said he opposes spraying of any kind.
“President Karzai has categorically rejected that spraying will happen,” Farooq Wardak, Afghanistan’s minister of state for parliamentary affairs, said in a recent interview. “The collateral damage of that will be huge.”
Yet in the weeks since the latest United Nations drug report, the Bush administration’s lobbying appears to have made new headway. It has already won the backing of several members of Mr. Karzai’s government and the spray advocates here are now trying to swing other key Afghan officials and Mr. Karzai himself, one high-level Afghan official said
“We are working to convince the key ministers and President Karzai to accept this strategy,” said the official, who supports spraying but asked not to be identified because of the issue’s political delicacy. “We want to convince them to show some power. The government has to show its power in the remote provinces.”
General Khodaidad, Afghanistan’s acting minister of counternarcotics (who, like many Afghans, goes by only one name), said in an interview last week that ground spraying is under careful consideration by the Afghan government. A high-level official of the Karzai administration said he believed some spraying might take place during this growing season, which begins in several weeks.
The American government contends that glyphosate is one of the world’s safest herbicides — “less toxic than common salt, aspirin, caffeine, nicotine and even vitamin A,” according to a State Department fact sheet.
One well known supporter of glyphosate as a counternarcotics tool is the American ambassador in Kabul, William B. Wood, who arrived in April after a four-year posting as ambassador to Colombia. There, Mr. Wood oversaw the American-financed counternarcotics program, Plan Colombia, which relies heavily on the aerial spraying of coca, the raw material for cocaine.
Mr. Wood has even offered to have himself sprayed with glyphosate, as one of his predecessors in Colombia once did, to prove its safety, a United States Embassy official in Kabul said.
But among European diplomats here, a far greater concern than any environmental or health dangers of chemical eradication is the potential for political fallout that could lead to more violence and instability.
Those diplomats worry particularly that aerial spraying would kill food crops that some farmers plant with their poppies. European officials add that any form of spraying could be cast by the Taliban as American chemical warfare against the Afghan peasantry.
The British have been so concerned that on the eve of Mr. Karzai’s trip to Camp David in August, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called President Bush and asked him not to pressure the Afghan premier to use herbicides, according to several diplomats here.
In something of a reversal of traditional roles, officials at the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency have also challenged the White House and State Department support for spraying, raising concerns about its potential to destabilize the Karzai government, current and former American officials said.
American officials who support herbicide use do not dismiss such concerns. They say an extensive public-information campaign would have to be carried out in conjunction with any spraying effort to dispel fears about the chemical’s impacts.
Mr. Schweich, the assistant secretary of state, emphasized that a new American counter-narcotics strategy for Afghanistan, introduced in August, went far beyond eradication. He noted that it would increase punishments and rewards, including large amounts of development aid, to move farmers away from poppy cultivation. It also calls for more forceful eradication, interdiction and law enforcement efforts, and closer coordination of counternarcotics and counterinsurgency efforts, which until now have been pursued separately.
“We will do what the Afghan government wants to do,” Mr. Schweich said, referring to the use of herbicides. The Bush administration, he added, simply wants to ensure that the Afghans “have all the facts on the table.”
Kirk Semple reported from Kabul, and Tim Golden from Washington.
October 8, 2007
U.S. Renews Bid to Destroy Opium Poppies in Afghanistan
By KIRK SEMPLE and TIM GOLDEN
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 7 — After the biggest opium harvest in Afghanistan’s history, American officials have renewed efforts to persuade the government here to begin spraying herbicide on opium poppies, and they have found some supporters within President Hamid Karzai’s administration, officials of both countries said.
Since early this year, Mr. Karzai has repeatedly declared his opposition to spraying the poppy fields, whether by crop-dusting airplanes or by eradication teams on the ground.
But Afghan officials said the Karzai administration is now re-evaluating that stance. Some proponents within the government are pushing a trial program of ground spraying that could begin before the harvest next spring.
The issue has created sharp divisions within the Afghan government, among its Western allies and even American officials of different agencies. The matter is fraught with political danger for Mr. Karzai, whose hold on power is weak.
Many spraying advocates, including officials at the White House and the State Department, view herbicides as critical to curbing Afghanistan’s poppy crop, officials said. That crop and the opium and heroin it produces have become a major source of revenue for the Taliban insurgency.
But officials said the skeptics — who include American military and intelligence officials and European diplomats in Afghanistan — fear that any spraying of American-made chemicals over Afghan farms would be a boon to Taliban propagandists. Some of those officials say that the political cost could be especially high if the herbicide destroys food crops that farmers often plant alongside their poppies.
“There has always been a need to balance the obvious greater effectiveness of spray against the potential for losing hearts and minds,” Thomas A. Schweich, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics issues, said in an interview last week in Washington. “The question is whether that’s manageable. I think that it is.”
Bush administration officials say they will respect whatever decision the Afghan government makes. Crop-eradication efforts, they insist, are only part of a new counternarcotics strategy that will include increased efforts against traffickers, more aid for legal agriculture and development, and greater military support for the drug fight.
Behind the scenes, however, Bush administration officials have been pressing the Afghan government to at least allow the trial spray of glyphosate, a commonly used weed-killer, current and former American officials said. Ground spraying would likely bring only a modest improvement over the manual destruction of poppy plants, but officials who support the strategy hope it would reassure Afghans about the safety of the herbicide and make eradication possible.
Aerial spraying, they add, may be the only way to make a serious impact on opium production while the Taliban continues to dominate parts of southern Afghanistan.
On Sunday, officials said, a State Department crop-eradication expert briefed key members of Mr. Karzai’s cabinet about the effectiveness and safety of glyphosate. The expert, Charles S. Helling, a senior scientific adviser to the department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, met with, among others, the ministers of public health and agriculture, both of whom have opposed the use of herbicides, an Afghan official said.
For all the controversy over herbicide use, there is no debate that Afghanistan’s drug problem is out of control. The country now produces 93 percent of the world’s opiates, according to United Nations estimates. Its traffickers are also processing more opium into heroin base there, a shift that has helped to increase Afghanistan’s drug revenues exponentially since the American-led invasion in 2001.
A United Nations report in August documented a 17 percent rise in poppy cultivation from 2006 to 2007, and a 34 percent rise in opium production. Perhaps more important for the effort to stabilize Afghanistan, officials said, the Taliban has been reaping a windfall from taxes on the growers and traffickers.
The problem is most acute in the southern province of Helmand, a Taliban stronghold. It produced nearly 4,400 metric tons of opium this year, almost half the country’s total output, United Nations statistics show.
Moreover, as Afghanistan’s opium production has soared, the government’s eradication efforts have faltered. Federal and provincial eradication teams — using sticks, sickles and animal-drawn plows — cut down about 47,000 acres of poppy fields this year, 24 percent more than last year but still less than 9 percent of the country’s total poppy crop.
And even that effort had to be negotiated plot by plot with growers. Powerful and politically connected landowners were able to protect their crops while smaller, weaker farmers were made the targets. The eradication program was so spotty that it did little to discourage farmers from cultivating the crop, American and European officials said.
“The eradication process over the past five years has not worked,” Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. “This year, it was a farce.”
The Americans have been pushing the Afghan government to eradicate with glyphosate for at least two years. According to current and former American officials, the subject has been raised with President Karzai by President Bush; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser; and John P. Walters, the director of national drug-control policy.
American officials thought they had the Karzai administration’s support late last year to begin a small-scale pilot program for ground spraying in several provinces. But that plan was derailed in January after an American-educated deputy minister of public health presented health and environmental concerns about glyphosate at a meeting of the Karzai cabinet, Afghan and American officials said.
Since then, Mr. Karzai has said he opposes spraying of any kind.
“President Karzai has categorically rejected that spraying will happen,” Farooq Wardak, Afghanistan’s minister of state for parliamentary affairs, said in a recent interview. “The collateral damage of that will be huge.”
Yet in the weeks since the latest United Nations drug report, the Bush administration’s lobbying appears to have made new headway. It has already won the backing of several members of Mr. Karzai’s government and the spray advocates here are now trying to swing other key Afghan officials and Mr. Karzai himself, one high-level Afghan official said
“We are working to convince the key ministers and President Karzai to accept this strategy,” said the official, who supports spraying but asked not to be identified because of the issue’s political delicacy. “We want to convince them to show some power. The government has to show its power in the remote provinces.”
General Khodaidad, Afghanistan’s acting minister of counternarcotics (who, like many Afghans, goes by only one name), said in an interview last week that ground spraying is under careful consideration by the Afghan government. A high-level official of the Karzai administration said he believed some spraying might take place during this growing season, which begins in several weeks.
The American government contends that glyphosate is one of the world’s safest herbicides — “less toxic than common salt, aspirin, caffeine, nicotine and even vitamin A,” according to a State Department fact sheet.
One well known supporter of glyphosate as a counternarcotics tool is the American ambassador in Kabul, William B. Wood, who arrived in April after a four-year posting as ambassador to Colombia. There, Mr. Wood oversaw the American-financed counternarcotics program, Plan Colombia, which relies heavily on the aerial spraying of coca, the raw material for cocaine.
Mr. Wood has even offered to have himself sprayed with glyphosate, as one of his predecessors in Colombia once did, to prove its safety, a United States Embassy official in Kabul said.
But among European diplomats here, a far greater concern than any environmental or health dangers of chemical eradication is the potential for political fallout that could lead to more violence and instability.
Those diplomats worry particularly that aerial spraying would kill food crops that some farmers plant with their poppies. European officials add that any form of spraying could be cast by the Taliban as American chemical warfare against the Afghan peasantry.
The British have been so concerned that on the eve of Mr. Karzai’s trip to Camp David in August, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called President Bush and asked him not to pressure the Afghan premier to use herbicides, according to several diplomats here.
In something of a reversal of traditional roles, officials at the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency have also challenged the White House and State Department support for spraying, raising concerns about its potential to destabilize the Karzai government, current and former American officials said.
American officials who support herbicide use do not dismiss such concerns. They say an extensive public-information campaign would have to be carried out in conjunction with any spraying effort to dispel fears about the chemical’s impacts.
Mr. Schweich, the assistant secretary of state, emphasized that a new American counter-narcotics strategy for Afghanistan, introduced in August, went far beyond eradication. He noted that it would increase punishments and rewards, including large amounts of development aid, to move farmers away from poppy cultivation. It also calls for more forceful eradication, interdiction and law enforcement efforts, and closer coordination of counternarcotics and counterinsurgency efforts, which until now have been pursued separately.
“We will do what the Afghan government wants to do,” Mr. Schweich said, referring to the use of herbicides. The Bush administration, he added, simply wants to ensure that the Afghans “have all the facts on the table.”
Kirk Semple reported from Kabul, and Tim Golden from Washington.
A illustration of what destruction of a work of art can do to the spirit of the place.
October 29, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Return to Bamiyan
By ROGER COHEN
Bamiyan, Afghanistan
People still speak of the Buddhas as if they were there. The Buddhas are visited and debated. A “Buddha road” just opened. It boasts the first paved surface in Afghanistan’s majestic central highlands and stretches all of a half-mile.
But the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan are gone, of course, replaced by two gashes in the reddish-brown cliff. They were destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban in their quest to rid the country of the “gods of the infidels.” The fanatical soldiers of Islam blasted the ancient treasures to fragments.
“It is easier to destroy than to build,” Mawlawi Qudratullah Jamal, then the Taliban information minister, noted on March 3, 2001. True enough, but few in New York or elsewhere listened.
Memory, however, is another matter. It is stubborn and volatile and hard to eradicate. The keyhole-like niches in the rock face are charged. Absence is presence. The visitor is drawn into the void as if summoned, not by vacancy, but by the towering Buddhas themselves.
Yet they are in pieces. Nasir Mudabir, 29, a director of the site, ushered me into a makeshift shelter where boxes with sandstone and plaster fragments from the two Buddhas are kept. Metal remnants of the bombs that destroyed them are preserved separately: they are jagged where the stones are smooth to the touch.
Why keep evidence of the barbarians’ arsenal? “It’s part of the story,” Mudabir said. “It’s history, bad or good. Instead of going forward, we went backward.”
Bamiyan, an island of peace in an uneasy land, lies half-forgotten in its sacred valley. Oxen plow potato fields. Pale poplars trace golden lines. A war-blasted bazaar lies in dusty ruin. Mud-colored mountains, their geometric folds and pleats as intricate as robes by Vermeer, rise to snowy peaks.
Hazara refugees, who have returned from Iran after Afghanistan’s decades of conflict, eke out an existence in Taliban-despoiled caves once covered with bright murals.
That this is a holy place, sought out by Buddhist pilgrims over the centuries, is written in light, form and stone.
The smaller, eastern Buddha, known locally as “Shamama,” stood 125 feet tall and has now been dated to the year 507. The larger, called “Salsal,” rose to 180 feet. It was constructed in 554. One theory holds that the builders were dissatisfied with the first and erected its neighbor in the pursuit of perfection.
I climbed the steep staircase in the rocks beside Shamama’s absence, reaching a rickety platform at the level of the vanished Buddha’s head. “The head was comfortable,” said Mohammed Qassim, my guide. “Ten people could sit and sip tea.”
They could. I sat on the Buddha’s head myself in 1973, gazing in wonder. The Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, had just been ousted after a 40-year reign. The coup would soon usher in the turmoil that has taken Afghanistan backward.
We knew nothing of that. We were travelers without a map. The “hippie trail” had taken us, at the wheel of a Volkswagen Kombi called Pigpen (named for the Grateful Dead drummer who died that year), from London across Iran to this noble, generous country.
Looking again, after 34 years, at this beautiful place, first from the top of the smaller niche and then from the larger, (“20 people could sit on this head,” said Qassim), I wondered: Was it my own innocence that was gone or the world’s?
Nobody could make that journey now. Nobody could even drive from Kabul to Kandahar in safety. The unknown shrinks. Fear spreads. Experience gets diluted.
The cold war ended, only to be replaced by the explosive conflict of secular and theocratic worlds. What began here in March 2001 has spread. The Taliban is back, sort of, seeping across the Pakistani border in a campaign fed by an Internet-borne jihadist message. The Web is a force multiplier for any guerrilla movement.
This was the Afghan burning of the books. The Nazis burned Brecht. The Taliban, then sheltering Osama bin Laden, bombarded the “un-Islamic” Buddhas. The burning presaged war. The destruction presaged 9/11: two Buddhas, two towers.
Heinrich Heine noted that “When they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings.” When Buddhas buckle, people will be crushed.
There is talk of reassembling the Buddhas, or of using solar power to beam laser holograms of their forms onto the cliff. I say, reassemble one, for hope, but not both. Absence speaks, shames, reminds.
Peace and love were our mantra back in 1973. So what I take from Bamiyan revisited are children in the early morning, the girls in white hijabs, walking toward a newly built primary school, dust dancing behind them. I fear for their world, and ours, but fear is not the answer.
•
October 29, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Return to Bamiyan
By ROGER COHEN
Bamiyan, Afghanistan
People still speak of the Buddhas as if they were there. The Buddhas are visited and debated. A “Buddha road” just opened. It boasts the first paved surface in Afghanistan’s majestic central highlands and stretches all of a half-mile.
But the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan are gone, of course, replaced by two gashes in the reddish-brown cliff. They were destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban in their quest to rid the country of the “gods of the infidels.” The fanatical soldiers of Islam blasted the ancient treasures to fragments.
“It is easier to destroy than to build,” Mawlawi Qudratullah Jamal, then the Taliban information minister, noted on March 3, 2001. True enough, but few in New York or elsewhere listened.
Memory, however, is another matter. It is stubborn and volatile and hard to eradicate. The keyhole-like niches in the rock face are charged. Absence is presence. The visitor is drawn into the void as if summoned, not by vacancy, but by the towering Buddhas themselves.
Yet they are in pieces. Nasir Mudabir, 29, a director of the site, ushered me into a makeshift shelter where boxes with sandstone and plaster fragments from the two Buddhas are kept. Metal remnants of the bombs that destroyed them are preserved separately: they are jagged where the stones are smooth to the touch.
Why keep evidence of the barbarians’ arsenal? “It’s part of the story,” Mudabir said. “It’s history, bad or good. Instead of going forward, we went backward.”
Bamiyan, an island of peace in an uneasy land, lies half-forgotten in its sacred valley. Oxen plow potato fields. Pale poplars trace golden lines. A war-blasted bazaar lies in dusty ruin. Mud-colored mountains, their geometric folds and pleats as intricate as robes by Vermeer, rise to snowy peaks.
Hazara refugees, who have returned from Iran after Afghanistan’s decades of conflict, eke out an existence in Taliban-despoiled caves once covered with bright murals.
That this is a holy place, sought out by Buddhist pilgrims over the centuries, is written in light, form and stone.
The smaller, eastern Buddha, known locally as “Shamama,” stood 125 feet tall and has now been dated to the year 507. The larger, called “Salsal,” rose to 180 feet. It was constructed in 554. One theory holds that the builders were dissatisfied with the first and erected its neighbor in the pursuit of perfection.
I climbed the steep staircase in the rocks beside Shamama’s absence, reaching a rickety platform at the level of the vanished Buddha’s head. “The head was comfortable,” said Mohammed Qassim, my guide. “Ten people could sit and sip tea.”
They could. I sat on the Buddha’s head myself in 1973, gazing in wonder. The Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, had just been ousted after a 40-year reign. The coup would soon usher in the turmoil that has taken Afghanistan backward.
We knew nothing of that. We were travelers without a map. The “hippie trail” had taken us, at the wheel of a Volkswagen Kombi called Pigpen (named for the Grateful Dead drummer who died that year), from London across Iran to this noble, generous country.
Looking again, after 34 years, at this beautiful place, first from the top of the smaller niche and then from the larger, (“20 people could sit on this head,” said Qassim), I wondered: Was it my own innocence that was gone or the world’s?
Nobody could make that journey now. Nobody could even drive from Kabul to Kandahar in safety. The unknown shrinks. Fear spreads. Experience gets diluted.
The cold war ended, only to be replaced by the explosive conflict of secular and theocratic worlds. What began here in March 2001 has spread. The Taliban is back, sort of, seeping across the Pakistani border in a campaign fed by an Internet-borne jihadist message. The Web is a force multiplier for any guerrilla movement.
This was the Afghan burning of the books. The Nazis burned Brecht. The Taliban, then sheltering Osama bin Laden, bombarded the “un-Islamic” Buddhas. The burning presaged war. The destruction presaged 9/11: two Buddhas, two towers.
Heinrich Heine noted that “When they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings.” When Buddhas buckle, people will be crushed.
There is talk of reassembling the Buddhas, or of using solar power to beam laser holograms of their forms onto the cliff. I say, reassemble one, for hope, but not both. Absence speaks, shames, reminds.
Peace and love were our mantra back in 1973. So what I take from Bamiyan revisited are children in the early morning, the girls in white hijabs, walking toward a newly built primary school, dust dancing behind them. I fear for their world, and ours, but fear is not the answer.
•
Poppies key to Taliban defeat
Disable rebels with opium crackdown: military boss
Sarah McGinnis
Calgary Herald; With files from the Ottawa Citizen
Friday, November 30, 2007
CREDIT: Finbarr O'Reilly, Reuters
While Canada is slowly winning the war in Afghanistan, the battle against the opium trade in the country has just begun.
Taliban forces are weakening, but the way to ultimately eradicate insurgents in Afghanistan is by robbing them of their chief source of income: drug money.
That's the opinion of Maj-Gen. Tim Grant, former leader of Canada's military operations in the wartorn country.
Afghanistan is the world's largest heroin producing country, growing at least 90 per cent of the world's opium poppy supply in 2006.
Permanently dismantling Afghanistan's opium industry requires more than just destroying the poppies, Grant told the Herald on Thursday.
"I think there needs to be some form of eradication, but that can't be the only thing we're doing. . . . We have to have something for the farmers that is an acceptable alternative to growing poppies," said Grant, who was in Calgary to attend the Military Museums awards banquet Thursday night.
Grant led the Canadian Forces operations in Afghanistan from November of 2006 until last August.
The Taliban are seen by the Afghan people as a brutal regime that is increasingly unable to recruit locals.
Instead, they are drawing on foreign mercenaries to continue fighting. Cash -- mostly drug money -- is needed to fund these pay-for-hire soldiers.
While most experts agree cutting the Taliban off of its cash crop would go a long way to creating lasting security in the region, how to do so is increasingly debated.
There is no magic bullet to solving Afghanistan's poppy dependency, which represents between 80 and 90 per cent of their entire economy, said George Melnyk, co-chair of the consortium for peace studies at the University of Calgary.
American and British anti-drug armed forces remain committed to destroying crops and debate the virtues of plowing through poppy fields or spraying chemicals from the air.
"For the last five to six years, the per cent of opium being produced (in Afghanistan) for the world market has been increasing. . . ," said Melnyk.
"They've had an eradication program for the last five years. It isn't working."
A report prepared for the Calgary-based Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute in March calls for the formation of an international marketing board to buy opium crops to produce popular pharmaceuticals such as morphine, codeine and Oxycontin.
But there are no systems in place to allow for the mass purchase of poppies, and Grant worries such a plan could increase the drug trade.
Any permanent solution must give local farmers alternatives to poppies before planting season begins in January and address any obstacles to marketing a new crop, Grant said.
At least then farmers have a choice. Those who decide to continue producing poppies know they risk authorities coming in and destroying their livelihood, he said.
While the battle against poppies has just begun, Canada is winning the war in Afghanistan especially in the south, said the current commander of Canada's military in Kandahar, Lt.-Gen. Michel Gauthier.
Because Afghan insurgents are losing ground, they likely will resort to increasing the number of roadside bombs and suicide attacks in an attempt to inflict more casualties on troops, he said.
The state of the security situation in Afghanistan has been a hotly debated topic over the past several months. A recent United Nations report warned that security in Afghanistan has deteriorated. In early November, Taliban forces captured three districts in western Afghanistan.
[email protected]
© The Calgary Herald 2007
****
Turning off the drug taps will help defeat Taliban
Calgary Herald
Friday, November 30, 2007
If success in Afghanistan depended only on defeating the Taliban on the battlefield, it could be thought well on the way to done.
But, the struggle has an economic dimension. Victory in the marketplace is as much
the prerequisite for a new Afghanistan as military control and perversely, it will take more troops to win that battle, too. Its challenges are as formidable, in their way, as those this country's young men and women have confronted with such elan in Kandahar province.
Maj. General Tim Grant, until August commander of Canadian forces in Afghanistan, told the Herald editorial board Thursday the Taliban runs on drug money, and it is unrealistic to expect poor Afghan farmers to resist the temptation of easy money, or the very real threat of Taliban brutality, by declining to grow opium poppies.
Only with an alternative income, and a personal-safety guarantee for people hitherto pressed by the Taliban into growing poppies, can the West cut the Taliban's money supply.
There are no easy solutions. Simply blitzing the crops leaves destitute a people who don't have much to begin with, (and would be widely resented.)
Buying the poppy resin, an idea popular in the European Union, would encourage production of something for which there is already a glut on the legitimate market.
As usual, what's most likely to work, takes the most work. There are other high-value crops Afghanistan's poppy-producing areas could grow; Grant describes Afghan grapes as of superior quality, for example, and speaks of a growing trade in pomegranate juice, which commands a premium locally.
Even assuming security could be guaranteed, however, the growing areas are far from markets, infrastructure has been damaged in the fighting, and remaining dirt tracks are vulnerable to roadside bombs.
There's nothing here beyond fixing; paving roads, for example, reduces the risk from improvised explosive devices, and repairing the vast baked-mud grape-drying kilns often used as cover by the Taliban needs labour, something Afghanistan has in abundance.
But it all takes money, and more troops to ride shotgun for ordinary Afghans.
This is not Canada's problem to solve alone. It has become, though, the problem du jour.
In Grant's view, success in Afghanistan, while not around the corner, is possible.
In time, the increasingly useful Afghan National Army must be part of the security solution. But, how quickly the Taliban's drug trade can be cut off turns out to have an aid-and-development component only the rich nations of the West can supply.
Winning battles has created the conditions where aid can be of use.
It's time to make the investment.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Disable rebels with opium crackdown: military boss
Sarah McGinnis
Calgary Herald; With files from the Ottawa Citizen
Friday, November 30, 2007
CREDIT: Finbarr O'Reilly, Reuters
While Canada is slowly winning the war in Afghanistan, the battle against the opium trade in the country has just begun.
Taliban forces are weakening, but the way to ultimately eradicate insurgents in Afghanistan is by robbing them of their chief source of income: drug money.
That's the opinion of Maj-Gen. Tim Grant, former leader of Canada's military operations in the wartorn country.
Afghanistan is the world's largest heroin producing country, growing at least 90 per cent of the world's opium poppy supply in 2006.
Permanently dismantling Afghanistan's opium industry requires more than just destroying the poppies, Grant told the Herald on Thursday.
"I think there needs to be some form of eradication, but that can't be the only thing we're doing. . . . We have to have something for the farmers that is an acceptable alternative to growing poppies," said Grant, who was in Calgary to attend the Military Museums awards banquet Thursday night.
Grant led the Canadian Forces operations in Afghanistan from November of 2006 until last August.
The Taliban are seen by the Afghan people as a brutal regime that is increasingly unable to recruit locals.
Instead, they are drawing on foreign mercenaries to continue fighting. Cash -- mostly drug money -- is needed to fund these pay-for-hire soldiers.
While most experts agree cutting the Taliban off of its cash crop would go a long way to creating lasting security in the region, how to do so is increasingly debated.
There is no magic bullet to solving Afghanistan's poppy dependency, which represents between 80 and 90 per cent of their entire economy, said George Melnyk, co-chair of the consortium for peace studies at the University of Calgary.
American and British anti-drug armed forces remain committed to destroying crops and debate the virtues of plowing through poppy fields or spraying chemicals from the air.
"For the last five to six years, the per cent of opium being produced (in Afghanistan) for the world market has been increasing. . . ," said Melnyk.
"They've had an eradication program for the last five years. It isn't working."
A report prepared for the Calgary-based Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute in March calls for the formation of an international marketing board to buy opium crops to produce popular pharmaceuticals such as morphine, codeine and Oxycontin.
But there are no systems in place to allow for the mass purchase of poppies, and Grant worries such a plan could increase the drug trade.
Any permanent solution must give local farmers alternatives to poppies before planting season begins in January and address any obstacles to marketing a new crop, Grant said.
At least then farmers have a choice. Those who decide to continue producing poppies know they risk authorities coming in and destroying their livelihood, he said.
While the battle against poppies has just begun, Canada is winning the war in Afghanistan especially in the south, said the current commander of Canada's military in Kandahar, Lt.-Gen. Michel Gauthier.
Because Afghan insurgents are losing ground, they likely will resort to increasing the number of roadside bombs and suicide attacks in an attempt to inflict more casualties on troops, he said.
The state of the security situation in Afghanistan has been a hotly debated topic over the past several months. A recent United Nations report warned that security in Afghanistan has deteriorated. In early November, Taliban forces captured three districts in western Afghanistan.
[email protected]
© The Calgary Herald 2007
****
Turning off the drug taps will help defeat Taliban
Calgary Herald
Friday, November 30, 2007
If success in Afghanistan depended only on defeating the Taliban on the battlefield, it could be thought well on the way to done.
But, the struggle has an economic dimension. Victory in the marketplace is as much
the prerequisite for a new Afghanistan as military control and perversely, it will take more troops to win that battle, too. Its challenges are as formidable, in their way, as those this country's young men and women have confronted with such elan in Kandahar province.
Maj. General Tim Grant, until August commander of Canadian forces in Afghanistan, told the Herald editorial board Thursday the Taliban runs on drug money, and it is unrealistic to expect poor Afghan farmers to resist the temptation of easy money, or the very real threat of Taliban brutality, by declining to grow opium poppies.
Only with an alternative income, and a personal-safety guarantee for people hitherto pressed by the Taliban into growing poppies, can the West cut the Taliban's money supply.
There are no easy solutions. Simply blitzing the crops leaves destitute a people who don't have much to begin with, (and would be widely resented.)
Buying the poppy resin, an idea popular in the European Union, would encourage production of something for which there is already a glut on the legitimate market.
As usual, what's most likely to work, takes the most work. There are other high-value crops Afghanistan's poppy-producing areas could grow; Grant describes Afghan grapes as of superior quality, for example, and speaks of a growing trade in pomegranate juice, which commands a premium locally.
Even assuming security could be guaranteed, however, the growing areas are far from markets, infrastructure has been damaged in the fighting, and remaining dirt tracks are vulnerable to roadside bombs.
There's nothing here beyond fixing; paving roads, for example, reduces the risk from improvised explosive devices, and repairing the vast baked-mud grape-drying kilns often used as cover by the Taliban needs labour, something Afghanistan has in abundance.
But it all takes money, and more troops to ride shotgun for ordinary Afghans.
This is not Canada's problem to solve alone. It has become, though, the problem du jour.
In Grant's view, success in Afghanistan, while not around the corner, is possible.
In time, the increasingly useful Afghan National Army must be part of the security solution. But, how quickly the Taliban's drug trade can be cut off turns out to have an aid-and-development component only the rich nations of the West can supply.
Winning battles has created the conditions where aid can be of use.
It's time to make the investment.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
There are interesting video and multimedia shows linked at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/world ... kites.html
December 15, 2007
With Color and Panache, Afghans Fight a Different Kind of War
By KIRK SEMPLE
KABUL, Afghanistan — The kites appear suddenly, whimsical flashes of color that kick above the beige landscape here of relentless dust and desperation.
They reveal themselves, like dragonflies, at the most unexpected moments: through the window of a grim government office, beyond the smoke curling from the debris left by a suicide bomber, above the demoralizing gridlock of traffic and poverty. To a new arrival in this chaotic city of three million, they are unexpected and wonderfully incongruous.
Banned during the Taliban's rule, kite flying is once again the main recreational escape for Afghan boys and some men. (It still remains largely off limits to girls and women.) And with the American release Friday of the film "The Kite Runner," based on the best-selling novel of the same name, a much wider audience will be introduced to Afghan kite culture.
Follow a kite's string to its source and you will most likely find an Afghan boy standing on top of his roof or in an empty lot, playing the line in deep concentration.
But this is not the stuff of idle afternoons or, as in American culture, carefree picnics in the park. This is war. The sole reason for kites, Afghans will tell you, is to fight them, and a single kite aloft is nothing but an unspoken challenge to a neighbor.
The objective of the kite fight is to slice the other flier's string with your own, sending the vanquished aircraft to the ground. Kite-fighting string is coated with a resin made of glue and finely crushed glass, which turns it into a blade.
The big kite-fighting day is Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, when thousands of boys and men flock to their rooftops and to the summits of the craggy hills that ring the city, carrying stacks of kites fashioned from bamboo and brightly colored tissue paper, and miles of sharp string on wooden spools.
On a recent Friday afternoon, there were scores of kites locked in duels above Tapeii-i-Maranjan, a high bluff in a southeastern neighborhood of the capital and the city's most popular kite-flying venue. All strata of Kabuli life — male Kabuli life, that is — were well represented: schoolchildren were fighting ministerial officials, doctors were battling day laborers. They fought in teams of two, with one person tweaking the string and the other handling the spool.
Packs of boys too poor to buy their own equipment were sprinting after defeated kites as they fell to earth. They were the kite runners.
"We don't have, like, soccer, baseball or basketball," said Ahmad Roshazai, a translator at a medical clinic near Bagram who was flying kites on the hill with two of his brothers. He had cuts on his fingers from handling the bladelike fighting string. "We don't have any good places for that," he said. "No green places."
He added: "This is the only game we have every Friday. That's it."
The inveterate kite fighters speak of their craft as part science and part art. The key to excellence depends on a combination of factors, both empirical and ineffable: the flexibility and balance of the kites' bamboo frames, the strength of the glue binding the tissue paper skin, the quality of the string, the evenness of the spool and, of course, the skill of the fliers and their ability to adjust to the vicissitudes of the wind.
Rashid Abedi, 25, a business administration student, described the satisfaction of killing another kite. "It has a taste," he said, and he likened it to the thrill of horse riding or driving a car. "These things all the time have a special taste."
Kite-fighting string in Afghanistan was traditionally homemade by a laborious process that involved coating cotton string with a concoction of crushed glass and glue. But factories in other more-developed kite-flying nations like Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaysia and China now churn out tens of thousands of spools of machine-made nylon fighting string that swamp the Afghan market.
Unlike in other Asian countries, like Pakistan and India, where kite flying is wildly popular, Afghanistan's kite industry is still homespun and humble. There is still no Afghan kite federation, no national competitions, no marketing. While nearly all the string sold in Afghanistan is now factory-made and imported from other countries, most of the kites are still made by local artisans.
By consensus in Shor Bazaar, a blocklong market of tiny kite shops in Kabul, the best kite maker in the capital is Noor Agha, a slender and vain 53-year-old man who lives in a squalid mud-and-stone hovel in a cemetery and is missing most of his teeth.
"Nobody can beat me, nobody can do what I'm doing," he said one recent afternoon as he sat barefooted on the carpeted floor of his workshop making a kite. "Even computers can't beat me."
His tools were arrayed before him: long stalks of bamboo and sheets of tissue paper; pliers and blades to cut and whittle the bamboo into long, flexible dowels for the frames; scissors to shape the tissue paper; and a bowl of glue.
"My prestige is higher than the interior minister," he said.
Noor Agha, like most Afghan kite makers, inherited the craft from his father, who made kites until he was too old to grip the tools.
Alone, he can make about 40 kites a day, he said. But his business has become so large that he has enlisted the help of his two wives and several of his 11 children.
While most kites in Shor Bazaar sell for less than 30 cents, Noor Agha's kites can fetch upward of $1. He sells custom-ordered kites to Afghan and foreign corporations and clients for much more, he said.
His local fame attracted the attention of the producers of "The Kite Runner," who hired him to train the film's child stars in the art of kite fighting and to make hundreds of kites used in the film.
For the kite fliers of Kabul, the release of "The Kite Runner" will help to draw the culture of Afghan kite flying out of the shadows of the much larger and more prosperous kite-flying nations in Asia.
It might also go some way toward explaining a particular Afghan kite ambush of an unsuspecting American kite flier in Maryland in 2004.
That spring, Shoab Sharifi, a Columbia University student recently arrived from Kabul, was visiting Ocean City when he spotted several people flying kites on the beach. He bought a kite from a vendor and did what for him was the natural thing: He started to kite fight. "I thought people were doing it here, too," he said in a telephone interview from New York.
Mr. Sharifi went on: "There was a little girl and I did the maneuvers and cut her string from below." As the wind carried the girl's kite into the ocean, and Shoab celebrated his first kite-fighting victory on American soil, the little girl broke down in tears. When the lifeguards descended on him and accused him of "disturbing the peace," it dawned on Mr. Sharifi that he had stepped into a cultural rut between Afghanistan and the United States.
"In the United States, I think people try to avoid conflict," he concluded. "In Afghan culture, everything is about fighting." He added: "It was a very educational experience."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/world ... kites.html
December 15, 2007
With Color and Panache, Afghans Fight a Different Kind of War
By KIRK SEMPLE
KABUL, Afghanistan — The kites appear suddenly, whimsical flashes of color that kick above the beige landscape here of relentless dust and desperation.
They reveal themselves, like dragonflies, at the most unexpected moments: through the window of a grim government office, beyond the smoke curling from the debris left by a suicide bomber, above the demoralizing gridlock of traffic and poverty. To a new arrival in this chaotic city of three million, they are unexpected and wonderfully incongruous.
Banned during the Taliban's rule, kite flying is once again the main recreational escape for Afghan boys and some men. (It still remains largely off limits to girls and women.) And with the American release Friday of the film "The Kite Runner," based on the best-selling novel of the same name, a much wider audience will be introduced to Afghan kite culture.
Follow a kite's string to its source and you will most likely find an Afghan boy standing on top of his roof or in an empty lot, playing the line in deep concentration.
But this is not the stuff of idle afternoons or, as in American culture, carefree picnics in the park. This is war. The sole reason for kites, Afghans will tell you, is to fight them, and a single kite aloft is nothing but an unspoken challenge to a neighbor.
The objective of the kite fight is to slice the other flier's string with your own, sending the vanquished aircraft to the ground. Kite-fighting string is coated with a resin made of glue and finely crushed glass, which turns it into a blade.
The big kite-fighting day is Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, when thousands of boys and men flock to their rooftops and to the summits of the craggy hills that ring the city, carrying stacks of kites fashioned from bamboo and brightly colored tissue paper, and miles of sharp string on wooden spools.
On a recent Friday afternoon, there were scores of kites locked in duels above Tapeii-i-Maranjan, a high bluff in a southeastern neighborhood of the capital and the city's most popular kite-flying venue. All strata of Kabuli life — male Kabuli life, that is — were well represented: schoolchildren were fighting ministerial officials, doctors were battling day laborers. They fought in teams of two, with one person tweaking the string and the other handling the spool.
Packs of boys too poor to buy their own equipment were sprinting after defeated kites as they fell to earth. They were the kite runners.
"We don't have, like, soccer, baseball or basketball," said Ahmad Roshazai, a translator at a medical clinic near Bagram who was flying kites on the hill with two of his brothers. He had cuts on his fingers from handling the bladelike fighting string. "We don't have any good places for that," he said. "No green places."
He added: "This is the only game we have every Friday. That's it."
The inveterate kite fighters speak of their craft as part science and part art. The key to excellence depends on a combination of factors, both empirical and ineffable: the flexibility and balance of the kites' bamboo frames, the strength of the glue binding the tissue paper skin, the quality of the string, the evenness of the spool and, of course, the skill of the fliers and their ability to adjust to the vicissitudes of the wind.
Rashid Abedi, 25, a business administration student, described the satisfaction of killing another kite. "It has a taste," he said, and he likened it to the thrill of horse riding or driving a car. "These things all the time have a special taste."
Kite-fighting string in Afghanistan was traditionally homemade by a laborious process that involved coating cotton string with a concoction of crushed glass and glue. But factories in other more-developed kite-flying nations like Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaysia and China now churn out tens of thousands of spools of machine-made nylon fighting string that swamp the Afghan market.
Unlike in other Asian countries, like Pakistan and India, where kite flying is wildly popular, Afghanistan's kite industry is still homespun and humble. There is still no Afghan kite federation, no national competitions, no marketing. While nearly all the string sold in Afghanistan is now factory-made and imported from other countries, most of the kites are still made by local artisans.
By consensus in Shor Bazaar, a blocklong market of tiny kite shops in Kabul, the best kite maker in the capital is Noor Agha, a slender and vain 53-year-old man who lives in a squalid mud-and-stone hovel in a cemetery and is missing most of his teeth.
"Nobody can beat me, nobody can do what I'm doing," he said one recent afternoon as he sat barefooted on the carpeted floor of his workshop making a kite. "Even computers can't beat me."
His tools were arrayed before him: long stalks of bamboo and sheets of tissue paper; pliers and blades to cut and whittle the bamboo into long, flexible dowels for the frames; scissors to shape the tissue paper; and a bowl of glue.
"My prestige is higher than the interior minister," he said.
Noor Agha, like most Afghan kite makers, inherited the craft from his father, who made kites until he was too old to grip the tools.
Alone, he can make about 40 kites a day, he said. But his business has become so large that he has enlisted the help of his two wives and several of his 11 children.
While most kites in Shor Bazaar sell for less than 30 cents, Noor Agha's kites can fetch upward of $1. He sells custom-ordered kites to Afghan and foreign corporations and clients for much more, he said.
His local fame attracted the attention of the producers of "The Kite Runner," who hired him to train the film's child stars in the art of kite fighting and to make hundreds of kites used in the film.
For the kite fliers of Kabul, the release of "The Kite Runner" will help to draw the culture of Afghan kite flying out of the shadows of the much larger and more prosperous kite-flying nations in Asia.
It might also go some way toward explaining a particular Afghan kite ambush of an unsuspecting American kite flier in Maryland in 2004.
That spring, Shoab Sharifi, a Columbia University student recently arrived from Kabul, was visiting Ocean City when he spotted several people flying kites on the beach. He bought a kite from a vendor and did what for him was the natural thing: He started to kite fight. "I thought people were doing it here, too," he said in a telephone interview from New York.
Mr. Sharifi went on: "There was a little girl and I did the maneuvers and cut her string from below." As the wind carried the girl's kite into the ocean, and Shoab celebrated his first kite-fighting victory on American soil, the little girl broke down in tears. When the lifeguards descended on him and accused him of "disturbing the peace," it dawned on Mr. Sharifi that he had stepped into a cultural rut between Afghanistan and the United States.
"In the United States, I think people try to avoid conflict," he concluded. "In Afghan culture, everything is about fighting." He added: "It was a very educational experience."
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 14, 2008
Kabul Journal
Big Weddings Bring Afghans Joy, and Debt
By KIRK SEMPLE
KABUL, Afghanistan — On the afternoon before his wedding day this fall, Hamid was sitting in an empty teahouse worrying a glass of green tea between his fingers, his brow furrowed in concern.
He confessed to feeling a certain anxiety at seeing his bachelor’s independence slipping away. But something else was troubling him, as well: the cost of his wedding.
In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride’s family, a kind of reverse dowry.
Hamid, a midlevel bureaucrat in the Afghan government who supports his six-member family on a salary of $7,200 per year, said his bill was going to top $12,000. And by Afghan standards, that would be considered normal, or even a bargain.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to think about it,” said Hamid, 30, who requested that his full name not be published because his employer forbids him to speak to the news media. “It’s a lot of responsibility.”
Extravagant weddings, a mainstay of modern Afghan life and an important measure of social status, were banned by the Taliban, which also outlawed beauty parlors and the instrumental music that is traditional at wedding parties.
But since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, the Afghan wedding industry has rebounded and is now bigger than ever. The growth is reflected in the proliferation of wedding halls, garish palaces of mirrored blue glass and blinking neon lights that glow incongruously among the country’s dusty streets and mud-and-cinder-block homes. The number in Kabul alone has risen to more than 80 today from four in 2001.
This freedom has been a mixed blessing. While bridegrooms and their families are free to have the huge weddings that tradition demands, they are once again left with bills that plunge them into crushing debt.
Moderate guest lists can top 600 people; the biggest exceed 2,000.
The bridegroom is also responsible for jewelry, flowers, two gowns for the bride, two suits for himself, a visit to the beauty salon for the bride and her closest female relatives, as well as a sound system for the wedding, a photographer and a videography team with a pair of cameramen.
All that, plus the dowry, known as the bride price, can run a middle-class Afghan man on average $20,000, dozens of Afghans said in interviews .
Even the poor do not scrimp. A laborer, for instance, making about the average per capita income of $350 per year, may well spend more than $2,000 for his wedding, Afghans say.
Atta Mohammad Noor, the governor of Balkh Province in the north, became so concerned about the spiraling cost of weddings that early last year he issued a nonbinding decree recommending that the province’s wedding halls be used only for the wedding ceremony. All the other wedding-related parties should be held in private homes, he said.
Afghan bridegrooms say tradition and societal pressure leave them with no alternative but expensive weddings in spite of their poverty. Marriage is arguably the most important rite of passage for a young Afghan man, and the luxuriousness of the ceremony reaffirms his family’s status.
“It’s a way to solidify your position in the tribal network,” explained Nasrullah Stanikzai, a lecturer of law and political science at Kabul University.
The growth of the wedding industry has been enabled in part by the fact that more money than ever is in circulation in Afghanistan.
Lavish weddings have even made a comeback in the south, where security concerns are greatest, though in areas where the Taliban have returned, the weddings have been moved back into private homes and have been toned down.
For Hamid, like most Afghans, a small wedding at home was not an option. Afghan custom dictates that all relatives, even distant cousins, be invited, and his house would not have been big enough. Furthermore, Hamid said, his fiancée and her family had expectations.
As with all Afghan weddings, the style and size of Hamid’s wedding was established in consultation between the families. But also following custom, the consultation was mostly a one-way declaration, with the bride’s family setting the terms.
Fortunately, Hamid said, his fiancée’s family has known his family for many years and had a sense of its finances, so her family did not push for everything to be top-of-the-line.
Still, like most Afghan bridegrooms, Hamid had to empty his savings, borrow money and rely on the largess of an uncle. They had all saved in anticipation of the event, much like an American family might prepare years in advance for college tuitions.
“It’s a joint effort,” Hamid said.
After the wedding, he was going to be left with $2,000 in debt, which he expected to pay off within five months.
But it is not so easy for many other young Afghan men.
Said Sharif, a 27-year-old taxi driver who makes about $200 per month, had to borrow $4,000 from relatives to help cover the $15,000 bill for his wedding last fall, as well as for four related parties. He does not expect to pay off his debt for at least two years.
Ask any Afghan man, and he will say that competition among brides is driving wedding expenditures up. Women who were interviewed did not disagree.
“The unfair thing that is going on in Afghanistan is the competition,” said Haidia Paiman, 20, an engineering student at Balkh University in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. “In 70 percent of the cases, the woman’s family puts pressure on the boy to pay a lot of money.” A result, she said, can often be paralyzing debt — and an early, unwelcome visit by the debt collectors to the newlyweds’ new home.
Even some people who are directly profiting from the soaring costs of weddings say enough is enough.
“All these expenses are unnecessary,” bristled Muhammad Haroon Mustafa, owner of the Mustafa Store, which opened 40 years ago and is one of Kabul’s oldest bridal shops. “If I was in the government, I would close all the wedding halls.”
When a visitor to his store pointed out that such a prohibition would probably cut deeply into his business, he quickly retorted, “Yes, but I’m also part of this society.”
In Balkh Province, Governor Atta’s nonbinding decree on the use of wedding halls was greeted with unbridled joy by the young men there.
“It’s a good thing that the governor is trying to bring down the costs because the economic situation is really bad and the people are very poor,” said Ali Sina Hashemi Muhammad, 21, an agriculture student at Balkh University. “A wife is very expensive!”
But according to Mohammad Zaher Khoram, 62, manager of the Kefayat Wedding Club, one of the most grandiose halls in Mazar-i-Sharif, Governor Atta’s order has not been strictly obeyed. “It’s not compulsory,” he said, shrugging.
Hamid’s wedding unfolded at the East Diamond Wedding Hall in Kabul, in two vast banquet rooms, one for the men and the other for the women. Islamic custom dictates that the sexes be separated.
About 600 people attended, in suits and evening dresses, and a five-piece band played loud, rollicking Eastern music. Dinner included sumptuous amounts of beef, rice, vegetables and bread — much more than even the enormous crowd could possibly eat — served on big platters atop the hall’s banquet tables.
Hamid was mostly absent from the men’s side, choosing to spend his time with the women as is the Afghan bridegroom’s right. “I feel very light,” he said, slipping out of the room briefly about halfway through the long night. Dressed in a white suit, he was smiling and seemed happy. “In our country, the wedding is a big problem — until you’re done with it.”
Hamid’s father, a lifetime civil servant who makes $100 a month, also seemed relieved. Minutes earlier he had reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and handed over a stack of well-worn Afghan bills — worth about $3,000 — to the general manager, Hashmat Ullah.
Neither man smiled. Few words were exchanged. It was pure business.
After the transaction, Hamid’s father was joyful, and a little dazed. He was grinning, and his tie was slightly askew.
Asked how it felt to hand over the equivalent of 30 times his monthly salary, he replied: “It was good! I’m extremely happy!” The payment, he explained, allowed the marriage to happen.
“Only a memory is left,” he said. “A memory of happiness.”
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 14, 2008
Kabul Journal
Big Weddings Bring Afghans Joy, and Debt
By KIRK SEMPLE
KABUL, Afghanistan — On the afternoon before his wedding day this fall, Hamid was sitting in an empty teahouse worrying a glass of green tea between his fingers, his brow furrowed in concern.
He confessed to feeling a certain anxiety at seeing his bachelor’s independence slipping away. But something else was troubling him, as well: the cost of his wedding.
In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride’s family, a kind of reverse dowry.
Hamid, a midlevel bureaucrat in the Afghan government who supports his six-member family on a salary of $7,200 per year, said his bill was going to top $12,000. And by Afghan standards, that would be considered normal, or even a bargain.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to think about it,” said Hamid, 30, who requested that his full name not be published because his employer forbids him to speak to the news media. “It’s a lot of responsibility.”
Extravagant weddings, a mainstay of modern Afghan life and an important measure of social status, were banned by the Taliban, which also outlawed beauty parlors and the instrumental music that is traditional at wedding parties.
But since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, the Afghan wedding industry has rebounded and is now bigger than ever. The growth is reflected in the proliferation of wedding halls, garish palaces of mirrored blue glass and blinking neon lights that glow incongruously among the country’s dusty streets and mud-and-cinder-block homes. The number in Kabul alone has risen to more than 80 today from four in 2001.
This freedom has been a mixed blessing. While bridegrooms and their families are free to have the huge weddings that tradition demands, they are once again left with bills that plunge them into crushing debt.
Moderate guest lists can top 600 people; the biggest exceed 2,000.
The bridegroom is also responsible for jewelry, flowers, two gowns for the bride, two suits for himself, a visit to the beauty salon for the bride and her closest female relatives, as well as a sound system for the wedding, a photographer and a videography team with a pair of cameramen.
All that, plus the dowry, known as the bride price, can run a middle-class Afghan man on average $20,000, dozens of Afghans said in interviews .
Even the poor do not scrimp. A laborer, for instance, making about the average per capita income of $350 per year, may well spend more than $2,000 for his wedding, Afghans say.
Atta Mohammad Noor, the governor of Balkh Province in the north, became so concerned about the spiraling cost of weddings that early last year he issued a nonbinding decree recommending that the province’s wedding halls be used only for the wedding ceremony. All the other wedding-related parties should be held in private homes, he said.
Afghan bridegrooms say tradition and societal pressure leave them with no alternative but expensive weddings in spite of their poverty. Marriage is arguably the most important rite of passage for a young Afghan man, and the luxuriousness of the ceremony reaffirms his family’s status.
“It’s a way to solidify your position in the tribal network,” explained Nasrullah Stanikzai, a lecturer of law and political science at Kabul University.
The growth of the wedding industry has been enabled in part by the fact that more money than ever is in circulation in Afghanistan.
Lavish weddings have even made a comeback in the south, where security concerns are greatest, though in areas where the Taliban have returned, the weddings have been moved back into private homes and have been toned down.
For Hamid, like most Afghans, a small wedding at home was not an option. Afghan custom dictates that all relatives, even distant cousins, be invited, and his house would not have been big enough. Furthermore, Hamid said, his fiancée and her family had expectations.
As with all Afghan weddings, the style and size of Hamid’s wedding was established in consultation between the families. But also following custom, the consultation was mostly a one-way declaration, with the bride’s family setting the terms.
Fortunately, Hamid said, his fiancée’s family has known his family for many years and had a sense of its finances, so her family did not push for everything to be top-of-the-line.
Still, like most Afghan bridegrooms, Hamid had to empty his savings, borrow money and rely on the largess of an uncle. They had all saved in anticipation of the event, much like an American family might prepare years in advance for college tuitions.
“It’s a joint effort,” Hamid said.
After the wedding, he was going to be left with $2,000 in debt, which he expected to pay off within five months.
But it is not so easy for many other young Afghan men.
Said Sharif, a 27-year-old taxi driver who makes about $200 per month, had to borrow $4,000 from relatives to help cover the $15,000 bill for his wedding last fall, as well as for four related parties. He does not expect to pay off his debt for at least two years.
Ask any Afghan man, and he will say that competition among brides is driving wedding expenditures up. Women who were interviewed did not disagree.
“The unfair thing that is going on in Afghanistan is the competition,” said Haidia Paiman, 20, an engineering student at Balkh University in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. “In 70 percent of the cases, the woman’s family puts pressure on the boy to pay a lot of money.” A result, she said, can often be paralyzing debt — and an early, unwelcome visit by the debt collectors to the newlyweds’ new home.
Even some people who are directly profiting from the soaring costs of weddings say enough is enough.
“All these expenses are unnecessary,” bristled Muhammad Haroon Mustafa, owner of the Mustafa Store, which opened 40 years ago and is one of Kabul’s oldest bridal shops. “If I was in the government, I would close all the wedding halls.”
When a visitor to his store pointed out that such a prohibition would probably cut deeply into his business, he quickly retorted, “Yes, but I’m also part of this society.”
In Balkh Province, Governor Atta’s nonbinding decree on the use of wedding halls was greeted with unbridled joy by the young men there.
“It’s a good thing that the governor is trying to bring down the costs because the economic situation is really bad and the people are very poor,” said Ali Sina Hashemi Muhammad, 21, an agriculture student at Balkh University. “A wife is very expensive!”
But according to Mohammad Zaher Khoram, 62, manager of the Kefayat Wedding Club, one of the most grandiose halls in Mazar-i-Sharif, Governor Atta’s order has not been strictly obeyed. “It’s not compulsory,” he said, shrugging.
Hamid’s wedding unfolded at the East Diamond Wedding Hall in Kabul, in two vast banquet rooms, one for the men and the other for the women. Islamic custom dictates that the sexes be separated.
About 600 people attended, in suits and evening dresses, and a five-piece band played loud, rollicking Eastern music. Dinner included sumptuous amounts of beef, rice, vegetables and bread — much more than even the enormous crowd could possibly eat — served on big platters atop the hall’s banquet tables.
Hamid was mostly absent from the men’s side, choosing to spend his time with the women as is the Afghan bridegroom’s right. “I feel very light,” he said, slipping out of the room briefly about halfway through the long night. Dressed in a white suit, he was smiling and seemed happy. “In our country, the wedding is a big problem — until you’re done with it.”
Hamid’s father, a lifetime civil servant who makes $100 a month, also seemed relieved. Minutes earlier he had reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and handed over a stack of well-worn Afghan bills — worth about $3,000 — to the general manager, Hashmat Ullah.
Neither man smiled. Few words were exchanged. It was pure business.
After the transaction, Hamid’s father was joyful, and a little dazed. He was grinning, and his tie was slightly askew.
Asked how it felt to hand over the equivalent of 30 times his monthly salary, he replied: “It was good! I’m extremely happy!” The payment, he explained, allowed the marriage to happen.
“Only a memory is left,” he said. “A memory of happiness.”
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.
Afghan children get opium as cure-all
TheStar.com - World - Afghan children get opium as cure-all
ROSIE DIMANNO/TORONTO STAR
Saliha, a 4-year-old opium addict, sits on a hospital bed in Afghanistan's northern Balkh province May 26, 2008 with his sister Hamida, 10, and their addicted mother Malika, 35. Country is becoming internally ubsumed by drugs
May 27, 2008
Rosie DiManno
Columnist
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, AFGHANISTAN–Saliha is a recovering opium addict.
He's 4 years old.
His 10-year-old sister is an addict. His mother is an addict.
Scratch Saliha's tummy and the wide-eyed child giggles. Press just a little harder and he bursts into tears. "It hurts," he wails.
This is the soreness that occurs with opium addiction, along with the nausea, the cramping, the diarrhea, the listlessness.
Somehow, the youngster has retained his baby fat, not yet taken on the skeletal appearance of a chronic opium user. But his growth has been stunted and Saliha looks more like a child half his age, lying on his mother's bed in the drug-recovery section of a local hospital.
In Afghanistan, rehab – for the very lucky, the very few – can start as young as this.
One patient on the ward, now gone back to his village, was a 6-month- old infant. They are only children. They never made a choice to use opium.
It was put in their mouths – usually by their mothers – to still them, keep them quiet and docile.
This is what parents had been instructed to do, by their families, by tribal elders, by well-intentioned but uneducated quacks who believed opium to be the benign cure-all, or at least helpful therapeutic intervention, for everything that ails a person, and so very handy.
They just didn't know any better.
Opium for colic. Opium for labour pains. Opium for women's troubles. And, routinely, opium as pacifier to soothe a baby fussing, as babies do.
"They use it as a medicine for all kinds of illnesses," explains Dr. Mobien Sultani, 31, who runs the Counter-Narcotics Drug Recovery program at this 20-bed unit in northern Balkh province, one of only two such specialized hospital wards in the country.
"The mothers of these children work very hard. Most of them are Turkmen carpet-weavers. In order to work, in their homes, they need the children to be relaxed, to sleep for a long time. So they put opium on their tongues."
The problem, Sultani continues, is particularly rampant in northern Turkmen villages, where casual opium use has been common for decades. It was simply part of their culture. In one particular rural town, social workers from this hospital documented 3,500 opium addicts – nearly the entire population. It was their normal.
"They were addicted. They just didn't know they were addicted," Sultani sighs. "We're seeing now more and more teenagers turning to heroin. They do this for the same reason that young people use drugs everywhere in the world – for the pleasant sensation it gives them, at first; because they're idle, they don't go to school, they can't find jobs. But this is killing our communities. With few people working, because everyone is sitting around smoking opium or heroin, the bottom falls out of the local economy. Families either hide their addicts in the home – especially the females – or sometimes throw them out on the street. Then these people become garbage. Men, teenage boys, have to steal, they will even kill, to support their addiction."
Once a nation that merely produced and exported narcotics – cranking out some 93 per cent of the world's heroin last year – Afghanistan is now becoming internally subsumed by drugs: 920,000 users, according to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, out of which 120,000 are women. According to a 2005 study, Balkh alone has 110,000 opium addicts – and this is a province that cultivated zero poppies last year, as concluded by a UN survey.
In fact, says Sultani, cannabis use – hashish, primarily – is the top addiction in Balkh, followed by opium, alcohol (despite the fact Afghanistan is a formally dry Muslim country) and heroin, the chemically refined version of opium.
"The communities tend to accept hashish use," says Sultani. "But heroin makes young people depressed, as well as useless. Heroin addiction is a big stigma for Afghans."
Saliha's mother, Malika, 35, says she began taking opium following the birth of her first child 14 years ago. "This is the medicine that was given to me. I didn't know there would be side-effects for me and for my children."
She entered the hospital with her two youngest kids a few weeks ago and, together, they have coped with the dreadful withdrawal symptoms. For most female addicts, however, there is tremendous shame attached to admitting addiction. So they hide in their homes, growing increasingly detached and isolated. There are only six female beds in this facility.
Sultani has pleaded with the Ministry of Public Health to establish more such hospitals and increase his bed capacity to at least 50.
In another bed by the window, Khurma tells the familiar story – addiction born from delivery of her five children. The youngest, 12- year-old Khudi Bardi, is also a patient. They share this narrow cot.
"I was spending ($2) a day on opium," recalls Khurma, 45. That would buy about two grams of opium every 24 hours. Doesn't seem like much, in the way of cost, but the average yearly income in Afghanistan is only about $400. "My family could not afford it any more. I had to stop."
Her son makes a ball with his fist, to express the agony of opium stomach pains. By age 10, he was stealing rice from the village to purchase the drug and also trafficking in narcotics – selling mostly to local women.
"I can remember when opium made me feel happy. I liked that feeling. But then it made me feel sicker and sicker. I was sick when I took it; I was sick when I stopped.
"But I'll never start again."
The in-patient detox program lasts for up to 40 days. Before qualifying for the treatment, applicants must attend three times a week, on an out-patient basis, while tapering off their drugs. Follow-up supervision – the hospital employs five social workers – extends for a year. Sultani admits there is a 40 per cent relapse among those who complete the program.
The Ministry of Counter-Narcotics operates 11 drug-education clinics in the province but this is the only facility with patient beds and detox capacity. Since it opened in December 2006, 376 patients have gone through the program.
"It's not much but we do the best we can," says Sultani. "The most important thing, though, is education, getting into the communities and making people understand about the dangers of opium, about harm reduction. We go into the schools, talk to the elders, at the shuras and in the mosques.
"It is a very big job, a major challenge. But on our side, we also have Islam, which forbids the use of narcotics. Our faith is our strongest weapon
TheStar.com - World - Afghan children get opium as cure-all
ROSIE DIMANNO/TORONTO STAR
Saliha, a 4-year-old opium addict, sits on a hospital bed in Afghanistan's northern Balkh province May 26, 2008 with his sister Hamida, 10, and their addicted mother Malika, 35. Country is becoming internally ubsumed by drugs
May 27, 2008
Rosie DiManno
Columnist
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, AFGHANISTAN–Saliha is a recovering opium addict.
He's 4 years old.
His 10-year-old sister is an addict. His mother is an addict.
Scratch Saliha's tummy and the wide-eyed child giggles. Press just a little harder and he bursts into tears. "It hurts," he wails.
This is the soreness that occurs with opium addiction, along with the nausea, the cramping, the diarrhea, the listlessness.
Somehow, the youngster has retained his baby fat, not yet taken on the skeletal appearance of a chronic opium user. But his growth has been stunted and Saliha looks more like a child half his age, lying on his mother's bed in the drug-recovery section of a local hospital.
In Afghanistan, rehab – for the very lucky, the very few – can start as young as this.
One patient on the ward, now gone back to his village, was a 6-month- old infant. They are only children. They never made a choice to use opium.
It was put in their mouths – usually by their mothers – to still them, keep them quiet and docile.
This is what parents had been instructed to do, by their families, by tribal elders, by well-intentioned but uneducated quacks who believed opium to be the benign cure-all, or at least helpful therapeutic intervention, for everything that ails a person, and so very handy.
They just didn't know any better.
Opium for colic. Opium for labour pains. Opium for women's troubles. And, routinely, opium as pacifier to soothe a baby fussing, as babies do.
"They use it as a medicine for all kinds of illnesses," explains Dr. Mobien Sultani, 31, who runs the Counter-Narcotics Drug Recovery program at this 20-bed unit in northern Balkh province, one of only two such specialized hospital wards in the country.
"The mothers of these children work very hard. Most of them are Turkmen carpet-weavers. In order to work, in their homes, they need the children to be relaxed, to sleep for a long time. So they put opium on their tongues."
The problem, Sultani continues, is particularly rampant in northern Turkmen villages, where casual opium use has been common for decades. It was simply part of their culture. In one particular rural town, social workers from this hospital documented 3,500 opium addicts – nearly the entire population. It was their normal.
"They were addicted. They just didn't know they were addicted," Sultani sighs. "We're seeing now more and more teenagers turning to heroin. They do this for the same reason that young people use drugs everywhere in the world – for the pleasant sensation it gives them, at first; because they're idle, they don't go to school, they can't find jobs. But this is killing our communities. With few people working, because everyone is sitting around smoking opium or heroin, the bottom falls out of the local economy. Families either hide their addicts in the home – especially the females – or sometimes throw them out on the street. Then these people become garbage. Men, teenage boys, have to steal, they will even kill, to support their addiction."
Once a nation that merely produced and exported narcotics – cranking out some 93 per cent of the world's heroin last year – Afghanistan is now becoming internally subsumed by drugs: 920,000 users, according to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, out of which 120,000 are women. According to a 2005 study, Balkh alone has 110,000 opium addicts – and this is a province that cultivated zero poppies last year, as concluded by a UN survey.
In fact, says Sultani, cannabis use – hashish, primarily – is the top addiction in Balkh, followed by opium, alcohol (despite the fact Afghanistan is a formally dry Muslim country) and heroin, the chemically refined version of opium.
"The communities tend to accept hashish use," says Sultani. "But heroin makes young people depressed, as well as useless. Heroin addiction is a big stigma for Afghans."
Saliha's mother, Malika, 35, says she began taking opium following the birth of her first child 14 years ago. "This is the medicine that was given to me. I didn't know there would be side-effects for me and for my children."
She entered the hospital with her two youngest kids a few weeks ago and, together, they have coped with the dreadful withdrawal symptoms. For most female addicts, however, there is tremendous shame attached to admitting addiction. So they hide in their homes, growing increasingly detached and isolated. There are only six female beds in this facility.
Sultani has pleaded with the Ministry of Public Health to establish more such hospitals and increase his bed capacity to at least 50.
In another bed by the window, Khurma tells the familiar story – addiction born from delivery of her five children. The youngest, 12- year-old Khudi Bardi, is also a patient. They share this narrow cot.
"I was spending ($2) a day on opium," recalls Khurma, 45. That would buy about two grams of opium every 24 hours. Doesn't seem like much, in the way of cost, but the average yearly income in Afghanistan is only about $400. "My family could not afford it any more. I had to stop."
Her son makes a ball with his fist, to express the agony of opium stomach pains. By age 10, he was stealing rice from the village to purchase the drug and also trafficking in narcotics – selling mostly to local women.
"I can remember when opium made me feel happy. I liked that feeling. But then it made me feel sicker and sicker. I was sick when I took it; I was sick when I stopped.
"But I'll never start again."
The in-patient detox program lasts for up to 40 days. Before qualifying for the treatment, applicants must attend three times a week, on an out-patient basis, while tapering off their drugs. Follow-up supervision – the hospital employs five social workers – extends for a year. Sultani admits there is a 40 per cent relapse among those who complete the program.
The Ministry of Counter-Narcotics operates 11 drug-education clinics in the province but this is the only facility with patient beds and detox capacity. Since it opened in December 2006, 376 patients have gone through the program.
"It's not much but we do the best we can," says Sultani. "The most important thing, though, is education, getting into the communities and making people understand about the dangers of opium, about harm reduction. We go into the schools, talk to the elders, at the shuras and in the mosques.
"It is a very big job, a major challenge. But on our side, we also have Islam, which forbids the use of narcotics. Our faith is our strongest weapon
July 19, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Rebuilding Afghanistan, One Book at a Time
By NANCY HATCH DUPREE
Kabul, Afghanistan
SINCE 2001, when the Taliban were dislodged from power in Afghanistan, the international community has spent many billions of dollars toward the nation’s reconstruction. Yet not much progress can be seen. Poor management and lack of coordination among aid agencies are the major reasons for this dismal record, but another very simple problem has been a failure to make sure that the Afghan people have access to books and other printed materials with the information they need to move forward.
This is a serious flaw that affects health care, education and government itself. Now, as fighting intensifies in eastern and southwestern Afghanistan, it is especially important that we address the problem.
Afghanistan’s high mortality rates among infants, children and mothers have fallen in recent years, thanks in part to the deployment of trained community health workers to remote provinces. It is unrealistic, however, to expect these workers to remain for extended periods. Because most deaths are caused by preventable illnesses, it is important that written materials are left behind to remind patients of health workers’ oral instructions. Only then can health messages be strengthened and improvements sustained.
Afghanistan’s enrollment of four to six million children in primary school is also something to be proud of. And much money and effort is spent on adult literacy programs.
But these achievements obscure a quality problem: the lack of basic reading materials needed to make education effective. Rural students have little or no access to books for supplementary reading on farming, household management and other subjects germane to their lives. And graduates soon lose their newly won literacy because they have nothing to read.
The introduction of democracy in post-Taliban Afghanistan is also considered to be a major success story. For the elections in 2004 and 2005, thousands of newly trained election workers, both men and women, traveled the countryside, sometimes by horse or donkey. Posters urging citizens to vote appeared in almost every bazaar. There were daily radio messages. And voter turnout was unprecedented.
Yet most voters were, and still are, unaware that for democracy to work, they must go beyond simply voting and participate in the decision-making of provincial councils and community groups. The Afghan people need basic information about how democracy works, and especially about their own nascent democratic institutions, to transform their budding political structure into a system for good governance. This is especially urgent because national elections are scheduled for 2009.
Afghanistan’s radio network is growing, and an estimated 70 percent of the population listens at least three days a week, but radio messages are ephemeral. Some people scoff at the idea of distributing books to a population that is barely 28 percent literate. But 28 percent amounts to nearly 9 million people out of a population of 32 million, and that is certainly a worthy beginning.
It is important that a high government body like the Ministry of Education endorse the concept of distributing books to the population. Money is needed, too, ideally from both foreign governments and the Afghan government. And experts are needed to write the simple, accurate texts that Afghans need — on subjects from health care and household management to science, culture, history and the environment.
A pilot project called the Box Library Extension, which we operate at the Afghanistan Center, has placed more than 100,000 books in 160 libraries in 32 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. The communities have welcomed the books with enthusiasm.
Afghans possess a remarkable inner strength that has carried them through two decades of war and displacement. If they are given the knowledge they need to fully participate in reconstruction efforts, their country will move forward steadily, to the benefit of all.
Nancy Hatch Dupree is the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.
Op-Ed Contributor
Rebuilding Afghanistan, One Book at a Time
By NANCY HATCH DUPREE
Kabul, Afghanistan
SINCE 2001, when the Taliban were dislodged from power in Afghanistan, the international community has spent many billions of dollars toward the nation’s reconstruction. Yet not much progress can be seen. Poor management and lack of coordination among aid agencies are the major reasons for this dismal record, but another very simple problem has been a failure to make sure that the Afghan people have access to books and other printed materials with the information they need to move forward.
This is a serious flaw that affects health care, education and government itself. Now, as fighting intensifies in eastern and southwestern Afghanistan, it is especially important that we address the problem.
Afghanistan’s high mortality rates among infants, children and mothers have fallen in recent years, thanks in part to the deployment of trained community health workers to remote provinces. It is unrealistic, however, to expect these workers to remain for extended periods. Because most deaths are caused by preventable illnesses, it is important that written materials are left behind to remind patients of health workers’ oral instructions. Only then can health messages be strengthened and improvements sustained.
Afghanistan’s enrollment of four to six million children in primary school is also something to be proud of. And much money and effort is spent on adult literacy programs.
But these achievements obscure a quality problem: the lack of basic reading materials needed to make education effective. Rural students have little or no access to books for supplementary reading on farming, household management and other subjects germane to their lives. And graduates soon lose their newly won literacy because they have nothing to read.
The introduction of democracy in post-Taliban Afghanistan is also considered to be a major success story. For the elections in 2004 and 2005, thousands of newly trained election workers, both men and women, traveled the countryside, sometimes by horse or donkey. Posters urging citizens to vote appeared in almost every bazaar. There were daily radio messages. And voter turnout was unprecedented.
Yet most voters were, and still are, unaware that for democracy to work, they must go beyond simply voting and participate in the decision-making of provincial councils and community groups. The Afghan people need basic information about how democracy works, and especially about their own nascent democratic institutions, to transform their budding political structure into a system for good governance. This is especially urgent because national elections are scheduled for 2009.
Afghanistan’s radio network is growing, and an estimated 70 percent of the population listens at least three days a week, but radio messages are ephemeral. Some people scoff at the idea of distributing books to a population that is barely 28 percent literate. But 28 percent amounts to nearly 9 million people out of a population of 32 million, and that is certainly a worthy beginning.
It is important that a high government body like the Ministry of Education endorse the concept of distributing books to the population. Money is needed, too, ideally from both foreign governments and the Afghan government. And experts are needed to write the simple, accurate texts that Afghans need — on subjects from health care and household management to science, culture, history and the environment.
A pilot project called the Box Library Extension, which we operate at the Afghanistan Center, has placed more than 100,000 books in 160 libraries in 32 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. The communities have welcomed the books with enthusiasm.
Afghans possess a remarkable inner strength that has carried them through two decades of war and displacement. If they are given the knowledge they need to fully participate in reconstruction efforts, their country will move forward steadily, to the benefit of all.
Nancy Hatch Dupree is the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.
Aid agencies reconsider role in Afghanistan
IRC suspends operations after deadly attack
Scott Deveau
Canwest News Service
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Those benefiting from development work in Afghanistan are urging foreign aid agencies to stay the course in the war-torn region despite a rash of targeted killings against Western aid workers in recent months.
Earlier this week four aid workers, including two Canadians -- Jacqueline Kirk and Shirley Case -- were gunned down in a brazen midday attack on a dangerous stretch of road outside Kabul.
The aid workers were in the country with the New York-based International Rescue Committee, which has been doing development work in Afghanistan since 1979, just weeks after the Soviet-led invasion of the country.
It was the second time in a little more than a year IRC workers were targeted in such an attack. The aid group said it would cease its operations in the country temporarily in order to assess the Afghan security situation.
That move has some in Afghanistan worried other aid agencies will pull out of the country as well.
The escalating violence has already forced the closure of a number of schools and hospitals in the south and has hindered the development of projects in other regions.
Local aid officials said it would be a mistake to let the Taliban's intimidation tactics gain the upper hand.
"The enemy is always trying to stop aid projects by targeting aid worker(s), either through killings or intimidation," said a spokesman for the Afghan-Canadian Community Center in Kandahar. "If the donor countries decrease or stop aid projects it means the enemy has succeeded."
Most NGOs operating in the country refuse to hire protection for their workers because they want to remain neutral in the conflict and feel travelling with armoured guards might invite attacks.
The Taliban, however, has begun targeting these unarmed aid workers in its ongoing effort to undermine development work in the country and, in turn, the Karzai government's ability to bring stability to the region.
The murders this week add to the 19 other NGO workers who have already been killed by insurgents this year -- more than were killed in all of 2007.
"Most people believe these are terrible things carried out by Taliban," said Ghulam Haider, a teacher in Kandahar whose school receives Canadian foreign aid. "It's a big loss for ordinary Afghans, people who benefit from those aid projects."
Mohammad Hashim Mayar, deputy director of Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief, said there is concern security in the country is rapidly deteriorating. "Areas that were secure last year are no longer secure," he said.
ACBAR represents more than 100 NGOs operating in Afghanistan and Mayar noted insurgent attacks against civilians and foreign workers hit their highest point in July since the major offensive began in 2001.
Mayar said it is no longer safe for aid workers to travel further than 35 kilometres outside Kabul, which poses a serious challenge to the much-needed work they are doing in rural areas.
A Taliban spokesman was quick to take credit for Wednesday's attack, saying they "don't value" aid projects in the country and accusing Western aid workers of training spies.
While the attacks have forced some agencies, such as IRC, to scale back or move their operations, Mayar said it is unlikely most agencies operating in the country will abandon their efforts.
"This is not the first time they have been attacked. All NGOs have been making sacrifices," he said. "This year has been worse, but aid agencies will continue their work in Afghanistan."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
IRC suspends operations after deadly attack
Scott Deveau
Canwest News Service
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Those benefiting from development work in Afghanistan are urging foreign aid agencies to stay the course in the war-torn region despite a rash of targeted killings against Western aid workers in recent months.
Earlier this week four aid workers, including two Canadians -- Jacqueline Kirk and Shirley Case -- were gunned down in a brazen midday attack on a dangerous stretch of road outside Kabul.
The aid workers were in the country with the New York-based International Rescue Committee, which has been doing development work in Afghanistan since 1979, just weeks after the Soviet-led invasion of the country.
It was the second time in a little more than a year IRC workers were targeted in such an attack. The aid group said it would cease its operations in the country temporarily in order to assess the Afghan security situation.
That move has some in Afghanistan worried other aid agencies will pull out of the country as well.
The escalating violence has already forced the closure of a number of schools and hospitals in the south and has hindered the development of projects in other regions.
Local aid officials said it would be a mistake to let the Taliban's intimidation tactics gain the upper hand.
"The enemy is always trying to stop aid projects by targeting aid worker(s), either through killings or intimidation," said a spokesman for the Afghan-Canadian Community Center in Kandahar. "If the donor countries decrease or stop aid projects it means the enemy has succeeded."
Most NGOs operating in the country refuse to hire protection for their workers because they want to remain neutral in the conflict and feel travelling with armoured guards might invite attacks.
The Taliban, however, has begun targeting these unarmed aid workers in its ongoing effort to undermine development work in the country and, in turn, the Karzai government's ability to bring stability to the region.
The murders this week add to the 19 other NGO workers who have already been killed by insurgents this year -- more than were killed in all of 2007.
"Most people believe these are terrible things carried out by Taliban," said Ghulam Haider, a teacher in Kandahar whose school receives Canadian foreign aid. "It's a big loss for ordinary Afghans, people who benefit from those aid projects."
Mohammad Hashim Mayar, deputy director of Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief, said there is concern security in the country is rapidly deteriorating. "Areas that were secure last year are no longer secure," he said.
ACBAR represents more than 100 NGOs operating in Afghanistan and Mayar noted insurgent attacks against civilians and foreign workers hit their highest point in July since the major offensive began in 2001.
Mayar said it is no longer safe for aid workers to travel further than 35 kilometres outside Kabul, which poses a serious challenge to the much-needed work they are doing in rural areas.
A Taliban spokesman was quick to take credit for Wednesday's attack, saying they "don't value" aid projects in the country and accusing Western aid workers of training spies.
While the attacks have forced some agencies, such as IRC, to scale back or move their operations, Mayar said it is unlikely most agencies operating in the country will abandon their efforts.
"This is not the first time they have been attacked. All NGOs have been making sacrifices," he said. "This year has been worse, but aid agencies will continue their work in Afghanistan."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Stay the course in Afghanistan
Calgary Herald
Sunday, August 17, 2008
The murder of three aid workers and their driver in Afghanistan this past week is a tragedy and one that should make all decent people the world over both melancholic and angry. The aid workers and escort -- including Canadians Jackie Kirk of Outremont, Que., and Shirley Case of Williams Lake, B.C. -- died when Taliban terrorists attacked their convoy southeast of Kabul.
Kirk was in Afghanistan to help with teacher-training programs; Case was in the country to help manage education programs for children with disabilities. The killings bring to 23 the number of aid workers killed in Afghanistan this year in addition to the 15 employees of non-governmental organizations who died last year at the hands of the Taliban. But such facts should not be used as an excuse by some in this country to ramp up their rhetoric about a need to withdraw from Afghanistan. Nor should the murder deter Canada or other nations from keeping firm in their commitments to Afghanistan. Absent our soldiers and those from other countries, Afghanistan would fall back into the abyss.
Recall the repression under Taliban rule, including the desecration of other religions -- such as when Taliban militants used rocket launchers to blast two sandstone Buddha statues into the historical oblivion. Those statues, at 36.5 metres high and 53.3 metres high, were the remnants of a thriving Buddhist community in Afghanistan at the time of the statues' carving in about the third to fifth centuries.
Beyond cultural terror, there were other attacks upon the dignity of the Afghan people. In 1992, eight thousand undergraduates -- all women -- were dismissed from Kabul University; a similar number of female teachers in Afghanistan were fired and all female civil servants were dismissed from their government jobs. In addition to such misogyny, any Canadian who advocates an end to the Afghan mission should remember the Taliban's many murders. Recall the infamous scene in November 1999, of a woman in a pale blue burqa kneeling in the centre of the Kabul soccer stadium with a Kalashnikov rifle to her head. The woman, identified only as Zarmeena, was a mother of seven and was executed in front of cameras and a chanting crowd.
In addition to the mayhem and murder in Afghanistan as a result of Taliban rule, the rest of the world also paid a price. The Taliban's sheltering of al-Qaeda allowed the terrorist organization to prepare for 9/11, with the resulting deaths of 2,974 people from more than 90 countries, including 24 Canadians.
Since the U.S. ousted the Taliban, and since Canadian troops and others are striving to provide a modicum of security for the majority of Afghans who have no wish to see the Taliban return, Canada has helped feed more than 6.7 million Afghans.
Then there is the future: by the end of 2009, Canada's goal in Afghanistan is to eradicate polio by immunizing seven million children under the age of five.
In June, Ottawa announced a $550 million commitment to Afghanistan, including more aid for women's and girls' initiatives. Jackie Kirk and Shirley Case were part of such efforts. Their deaths would be in vain if their murders lead to our withdrawal. Canada must stay the course in Afghanistan.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Calgary Herald
Sunday, August 17, 2008
The murder of three aid workers and their driver in Afghanistan this past week is a tragedy and one that should make all decent people the world over both melancholic and angry. The aid workers and escort -- including Canadians Jackie Kirk of Outremont, Que., and Shirley Case of Williams Lake, B.C. -- died when Taliban terrorists attacked their convoy southeast of Kabul.
Kirk was in Afghanistan to help with teacher-training programs; Case was in the country to help manage education programs for children with disabilities. The killings bring to 23 the number of aid workers killed in Afghanistan this year in addition to the 15 employees of non-governmental organizations who died last year at the hands of the Taliban. But such facts should not be used as an excuse by some in this country to ramp up their rhetoric about a need to withdraw from Afghanistan. Nor should the murder deter Canada or other nations from keeping firm in their commitments to Afghanistan. Absent our soldiers and those from other countries, Afghanistan would fall back into the abyss.
Recall the repression under Taliban rule, including the desecration of other religions -- such as when Taliban militants used rocket launchers to blast two sandstone Buddha statues into the historical oblivion. Those statues, at 36.5 metres high and 53.3 metres high, were the remnants of a thriving Buddhist community in Afghanistan at the time of the statues' carving in about the third to fifth centuries.
Beyond cultural terror, there were other attacks upon the dignity of the Afghan people. In 1992, eight thousand undergraduates -- all women -- were dismissed from Kabul University; a similar number of female teachers in Afghanistan were fired and all female civil servants were dismissed from their government jobs. In addition to such misogyny, any Canadian who advocates an end to the Afghan mission should remember the Taliban's many murders. Recall the infamous scene in November 1999, of a woman in a pale blue burqa kneeling in the centre of the Kabul soccer stadium with a Kalashnikov rifle to her head. The woman, identified only as Zarmeena, was a mother of seven and was executed in front of cameras and a chanting crowd.
In addition to the mayhem and murder in Afghanistan as a result of Taliban rule, the rest of the world also paid a price. The Taliban's sheltering of al-Qaeda allowed the terrorist organization to prepare for 9/11, with the resulting deaths of 2,974 people from more than 90 countries, including 24 Canadians.
Since the U.S. ousted the Taliban, and since Canadian troops and others are striving to provide a modicum of security for the majority of Afghans who have no wish to see the Taliban return, Canada has helped feed more than 6.7 million Afghans.
Then there is the future: by the end of 2009, Canada's goal in Afghanistan is to eradicate polio by immunizing seven million children under the age of five.
In June, Ottawa announced a $550 million commitment to Afghanistan, including more aid for women's and girls' initiatives. Jackie Kirk and Shirley Case were part of such efforts. Their deaths would be in vain if their murders lead to our withdrawal. Canada must stay the course in Afghanistan.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
October 4, 2008
Governor of Afghan Opium Capital Pushes for Crop Replacement
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan — As the new planting season for opium poppy draws near, the governor of Helmand, Afghanistan’s largest poppy-producing province, says that this year he is determined to beat the illicit crop that is a major source of money for drug lords and insurgents alike.
To do that, the governor, Gulab Mangal, says he plans to try something that has worked in more peaceful parts of Afghanistan, but which remains untested in lawless Helmand. He hopes to persuade farmers not to plant poppy at all, rather than eradicating the crop once it has already been planted, a policy he blames for sowing greater strife in Helmand.
Mr. Mangal’s solution may seem easy enough, but the task before him is formidable. He says it will take new seeds for farmers, new roads to get their legal crops to the market, reconstruction money, strict enforcement of laws against poppy growing and, perhaps most difficult of all, the elimination of the official corruption that has fueled the drug trade.
So far, Mr. Mangal has secured more than $8 million from the United States and Britain for seeds and fertilizer for 26,000 farmers, as well as for a public information campaign to let farmers know of his plans. But just weeks before the planting season, he was still fretting that they would not arrive in time.
“Four months ago I raised my voice, but we have been delayed by bureaucracy,” he said. “We have to get to the farmers within one month.”
Helmand is the most extreme example of Afghanistan’s embattled state, in which the drug trade has become a major part of how the Taliban keep their insurgency running. The director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, estimated this year that the Taliban earned some $100 million from the opium trade in 2007.
In Helmand, the Taliban insurgency is strongest and the poppy crop is the largest, and the insurgents and powerful drug smugglers feed off and protect one another.
The drug business has developed from poppy growing to include the much more lucrative refining and smuggling of heroin. One of the most fertile regions of Afghanistan, Helmand produces some 50 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy crop. If it were a country, it would lead the world in opium poppy production all by itself.
The population, caught among the insurgents, drug lords and foreign forces, is deeply suspicious and often openly hostile to foreign forces.
Five districts of 13 are outside government hands and controlled by the insurgents, and three more districts have only a token government presence and foreign troops in the district centers.
Some 8,000 British troops are stationed in Helmand as part of the NATO force, along with hundreds of Afghan Army soldiers, police officers and border forces. Yet this year they have not managed to extend their hold on territory.
Just five months into a job he accepted reluctantly on President Hamid Karzai’s orders, Mr. Mangal, 51, a former army officer, says he is well aware of the challenges of tackling drugs, corruption and militancy all at once.
A wealthy businessman, he has already served under Mr. Karzai as governor of two other provinces, Paktika and Laghman. In two recent interviews in the Afghan capital, Kabul, he laid out his plan for Helmand.
“I expect to reduce the rate of poppy cultivation by as much as it increased recently,” he said hopefully. Helmand’s production has nearly doubled since 2006, when the Taliban staged their resurgence. “But whatever the case, to decrease it,” he said.
He said he was determined to eliminate what he called “endemic internal corruption” and to accelerate the delivery of reconstruction money.
“In my view it is better to provide everything before the planting season — public awareness that growing poppy is punishable under the Constitution, and that with the seeds, there comes an obligation not to grow poppy,” he said.
“We should also let them know that if they grow poppy, they will face serious enforcement of the law,” he said.
If all that can be done, he believes that people will cooperate. Many were growing poppy often under duress from landlords and the Taliban, he said, and this year many found themselves short of flour as wheat prices skyrocketed.
The farmers remain poor, while the smugglers make most of the profit. Meanwhile local addiction rates are soaring, he added.
“People are not happy with this, and they don’t want to grow poppy anymore,” he said. “But we should reassure the people. On the military side, we should carry out strong operations against the big leaders, to weaken all those powerful smugglers and reduce the risk for the ordinary farmers.”
The government has to be seen to be fighting high-level corruption and the powerful landlords and drug smugglers, he said. Mr. Mangal is particularly proud of the arrests of several high-level drug smugglers, made soon after he took up his post.
One was that of Hajji Yakub, who was living in a government house near the main police station in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.
An Iranian suspected of smuggling was detained with him. The police found more than 40 pounds of heroin, 44 pounds of morphine, opium and other drugs, and weapons, one of Mr. Mangal’s aides said, asking not to be identified.
According to the governor’s aides, two other high-level smugglers were caught with large hauls of drugs, and a third was narrowly missed, but his cache of drugs was seized.
They also exposed a case of high-level government corruption, which involved selling off sacks of flour that had been donated to the poor. Stricter rules for the police are reducing petty crime and putting an end to many off-duty police officers’ moonlighting as criminals, the governor said.
“All these activities made people involved in corruption and drug smuggling angry,” he said. “They got angry and they accelerated their plotting,” he said, referring to controversies that have since dogged him.
The trouble began in mid-August when the market town of Marja, in Nadali District, fell to the Taliban. Marja was equally valuable to the drug smugglers and the Taliban, both of whom had been looking for a new base of operation since American marines uprooted them in May from a base farther south, in Garmser.
It remains unclear exactly why Marja fell. The governor blamed British troops for maneuvers that panicked the police, who abandoned their posts.
His aides have blamed political rivals, in particular the former provincial police chief Abdul Rahman Jan and his patron, the former governor Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, for encouraging the police to leave. Mr. Akhundzada had been forced out after American and Afghan drug agents found nine tons of opium in his office.
Both men have adamantly denied interfering, but they have been vociferous in their complaints that Mr. Mangal was incapable of running the province and should be removed.
As rumors spread that Mr. Karzai would dismiss him, the governor traveled to Kabul at the end of August, but had to wait 10 days for an audience with the president.
Finally, the crisis has seemed to pass, and Mr. Mangal has kept his job.
Despite the attacks, the governor says he remains undeterred, and still hopes his seeds and fertilizer will arrive on time. “As far as I go forward, I will face more and more problems,” he said. “I will show some flexibility in tactics, but generally I will go forward.”
Governor of Afghan Opium Capital Pushes for Crop Replacement
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan — As the new planting season for opium poppy draws near, the governor of Helmand, Afghanistan’s largest poppy-producing province, says that this year he is determined to beat the illicit crop that is a major source of money for drug lords and insurgents alike.
To do that, the governor, Gulab Mangal, says he plans to try something that has worked in more peaceful parts of Afghanistan, but which remains untested in lawless Helmand. He hopes to persuade farmers not to plant poppy at all, rather than eradicating the crop once it has already been planted, a policy he blames for sowing greater strife in Helmand.
Mr. Mangal’s solution may seem easy enough, but the task before him is formidable. He says it will take new seeds for farmers, new roads to get their legal crops to the market, reconstruction money, strict enforcement of laws against poppy growing and, perhaps most difficult of all, the elimination of the official corruption that has fueled the drug trade.
So far, Mr. Mangal has secured more than $8 million from the United States and Britain for seeds and fertilizer for 26,000 farmers, as well as for a public information campaign to let farmers know of his plans. But just weeks before the planting season, he was still fretting that they would not arrive in time.
“Four months ago I raised my voice, but we have been delayed by bureaucracy,” he said. “We have to get to the farmers within one month.”
Helmand is the most extreme example of Afghanistan’s embattled state, in which the drug trade has become a major part of how the Taliban keep their insurgency running. The director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, estimated this year that the Taliban earned some $100 million from the opium trade in 2007.
In Helmand, the Taliban insurgency is strongest and the poppy crop is the largest, and the insurgents and powerful drug smugglers feed off and protect one another.
The drug business has developed from poppy growing to include the much more lucrative refining and smuggling of heroin. One of the most fertile regions of Afghanistan, Helmand produces some 50 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy crop. If it were a country, it would lead the world in opium poppy production all by itself.
The population, caught among the insurgents, drug lords and foreign forces, is deeply suspicious and often openly hostile to foreign forces.
Five districts of 13 are outside government hands and controlled by the insurgents, and three more districts have only a token government presence and foreign troops in the district centers.
Some 8,000 British troops are stationed in Helmand as part of the NATO force, along with hundreds of Afghan Army soldiers, police officers and border forces. Yet this year they have not managed to extend their hold on territory.
Just five months into a job he accepted reluctantly on President Hamid Karzai’s orders, Mr. Mangal, 51, a former army officer, says he is well aware of the challenges of tackling drugs, corruption and militancy all at once.
A wealthy businessman, he has already served under Mr. Karzai as governor of two other provinces, Paktika and Laghman. In two recent interviews in the Afghan capital, Kabul, he laid out his plan for Helmand.
“I expect to reduce the rate of poppy cultivation by as much as it increased recently,” he said hopefully. Helmand’s production has nearly doubled since 2006, when the Taliban staged their resurgence. “But whatever the case, to decrease it,” he said.
He said he was determined to eliminate what he called “endemic internal corruption” and to accelerate the delivery of reconstruction money.
“In my view it is better to provide everything before the planting season — public awareness that growing poppy is punishable under the Constitution, and that with the seeds, there comes an obligation not to grow poppy,” he said.
“We should also let them know that if they grow poppy, they will face serious enforcement of the law,” he said.
If all that can be done, he believes that people will cooperate. Many were growing poppy often under duress from landlords and the Taliban, he said, and this year many found themselves short of flour as wheat prices skyrocketed.
The farmers remain poor, while the smugglers make most of the profit. Meanwhile local addiction rates are soaring, he added.
“People are not happy with this, and they don’t want to grow poppy anymore,” he said. “But we should reassure the people. On the military side, we should carry out strong operations against the big leaders, to weaken all those powerful smugglers and reduce the risk for the ordinary farmers.”
The government has to be seen to be fighting high-level corruption and the powerful landlords and drug smugglers, he said. Mr. Mangal is particularly proud of the arrests of several high-level drug smugglers, made soon after he took up his post.
One was that of Hajji Yakub, who was living in a government house near the main police station in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.
An Iranian suspected of smuggling was detained with him. The police found more than 40 pounds of heroin, 44 pounds of morphine, opium and other drugs, and weapons, one of Mr. Mangal’s aides said, asking not to be identified.
According to the governor’s aides, two other high-level smugglers were caught with large hauls of drugs, and a third was narrowly missed, but his cache of drugs was seized.
They also exposed a case of high-level government corruption, which involved selling off sacks of flour that had been donated to the poor. Stricter rules for the police are reducing petty crime and putting an end to many off-duty police officers’ moonlighting as criminals, the governor said.
“All these activities made people involved in corruption and drug smuggling angry,” he said. “They got angry and they accelerated their plotting,” he said, referring to controversies that have since dogged him.
The trouble began in mid-August when the market town of Marja, in Nadali District, fell to the Taliban. Marja was equally valuable to the drug smugglers and the Taliban, both of whom had been looking for a new base of operation since American marines uprooted them in May from a base farther south, in Garmser.
It remains unclear exactly why Marja fell. The governor blamed British troops for maneuvers that panicked the police, who abandoned their posts.
His aides have blamed political rivals, in particular the former provincial police chief Abdul Rahman Jan and his patron, the former governor Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, for encouraging the police to leave. Mr. Akhundzada had been forced out after American and Afghan drug agents found nine tons of opium in his office.
Both men have adamantly denied interfering, but they have been vociferous in their complaints that Mr. Mangal was incapable of running the province and should be removed.
As rumors spread that Mr. Karzai would dismiss him, the governor traveled to Kabul at the end of August, but had to wait 10 days for an audience with the president.
Finally, the crisis has seemed to pass, and Mr. Mangal has kept his job.
Despite the attacks, the governor says he remains undeterred, and still hopes his seeds and fertilizer will arrive on time. “As far as I go forward, I will face more and more problems,” he said. “I will show some flexibility in tactics, but generally I will go forward.”
Canada funds wheat seed as Afghan poppy alternative
Ethan Baron
Canwest News Service
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Canada is providing $1.2 million to buy wheat seeds and fertilizer for thousands of Afghan farmers, but the Taliban warn they may attack any foreigners who attempt to distribute the seeds.
The money will pay for 293 tonnes of wheat seed, to supply more than 5,000 farmers with 50 kilograms each, and plant a total of 2,000 hectares of land.
"We look forward to working with the governor of Kandahar to sow these seeds of peace," said Elissa Golberg, head of Canadian development operations in Kandahar province.
The project is intended to raise farm yields and give growers an alternative to the lucrative poppy trade, said Kandahar Gov. Rahmatullah Raoufi.
Farmers have good reasons to switch from growing poppies to growing wheat, said Abdul Hai Niamati, director of agriculture for Kandahar province.
Pressure from other nations concerned about opium production, and from the Afghan government, provides a disincentive, Niamati said.
Also, wheat prices are increasing and "that is why people are wanting to grow wheat," Niamati said.
Poppy cultivation also takes more time, labour and water than growing wheat, Niamati said.
The Taliban won't target farmers who switch from poppies to wheat, but may take violent action if it's done by the wrong people, said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
"We are not against wheat growing. There will be no threat or concern for farmers who are sowing wheat in their lands," Mujahid said. "However if the government authority or foreigners come down to the districts for the purpose of distributing wheat seeds, we might attack them.
"If the seeds are being distributed by local community people or tribal elders or through ordinary people, it doesn't matter, there will be no problem."
Seeds will go to farmers who meet the minimum farm-size requirement, have the ability to irrigate, and are in need.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Ethan Baron
Canwest News Service
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Canada is providing $1.2 million to buy wheat seeds and fertilizer for thousands of Afghan farmers, but the Taliban warn they may attack any foreigners who attempt to distribute the seeds.
The money will pay for 293 tonnes of wheat seed, to supply more than 5,000 farmers with 50 kilograms each, and plant a total of 2,000 hectares of land.
"We look forward to working with the governor of Kandahar to sow these seeds of peace," said Elissa Golberg, head of Canadian development operations in Kandahar province.
The project is intended to raise farm yields and give growers an alternative to the lucrative poppy trade, said Kandahar Gov. Rahmatullah Raoufi.
Farmers have good reasons to switch from growing poppies to growing wheat, said Abdul Hai Niamati, director of agriculture for Kandahar province.
Pressure from other nations concerned about opium production, and from the Afghan government, provides a disincentive, Niamati said.
Also, wheat prices are increasing and "that is why people are wanting to grow wheat," Niamati said.
Poppy cultivation also takes more time, labour and water than growing wheat, Niamati said.
The Taliban won't target farmers who switch from poppies to wheat, but may take violent action if it's done by the wrong people, said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
"We are not against wheat growing. There will be no threat or concern for farmers who are sowing wheat in their lands," Mujahid said. "However if the government authority or foreigners come down to the districts for the purpose of distributing wheat seeds, we might attack them.
"If the seeds are being distributed by local community people or tribal elders or through ordinary people, it doesn't matter, there will be no problem."
Seeds will go to farmers who meet the minimum farm-size requirement, have the ability to irrigate, and are in need.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
February 8, 2009
Afghan Leader Finds Himself Hero No More
By DEXTER FILKINS
KABUL, Afghanistan — A foretaste of what would be in store for President Hamid Karzai after the election of a new American administration came last February, when Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator, sat down to a formal dinner at the palace during a visit here.
Between platters of lamb and rice, Mr. Biden and two other American senators questioned Mr. Karzai about corruption in his government, which, by many estimates, is among the worst in the world. Mr. Karzai assured Mr. Biden and the other senators that there was no corruption at all and that, in any case, it was not his fault.
The senators gaped in astonishment. After 45 minutes, Mr. Biden threw down his napkin and stood up.
“This dinner is over,” Mr. Biden announced, according to one of the people in the room at the time. And the three senators walked out, long before the appointed time.
Today, of course, Mr. Biden is the vice president.
The world has changed for Mr. Karzai, and for Afghanistan, too. A White House favorite — a celebrity in flowing cape and dark gray fez — in each of the seven years that he has led this country since the fall of the Taliban, Mr. Karzai now finds himself not so favored at all. Not by Washington, and not by his own.
In the White House, President Obama said he regarded Mr. Karzai as unreliable and ineffective. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said he presided over a “narco-state.” The Americans making Afghan policy, worried that the war is being lost, are vowing to bypass Mr. Karzai and deal directly with the governors in the countryside.
At home, Mr. Karzai faces a widening insurgency and a population that blames him for the manifest lack of economic progress and the corrupt officials that seem to stand at every doorway of his government. His face, which once adorned the walls of tea shops across the country, is today much less visible.
Now, perhaps crucially, an election looms. Mr. Karzai says he will ask the voters to return him to the palace for another five-year term. The election is set for Aug. 20, after what promises to be a violent and eventful summer. In a poll commissioned by a group of private Afghans, 85 percent of those surveyed said they intended to vote for someone other than Mr. Karzai.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration will have to decide what it wants from Mr. Karzai as it tries to make good on its promise to reverse the course of the war. Or whether it wants him at all.
With the insurgency rising, corruption soaring and opium blooming across the land, it perhaps is not surprising that so many Afghans, and so many in Washington, see President Karzai’s removal as a precondition for reversing the country’s downward surge.
“Under President Karzai, we have gone from a better situation to a good situation to a not-so-bad situation to a bad situation — and now are going to worse,” said Abdullah, a former foreign minister in Mr. Karzai’s government who may now challenge him for the presidency (and who, like many Afghans, has only one name). “That is the trend.
“So let us say Karzai stays in power through the summer and that nothing serious happens and then he wins re-election,” Dr. Abdullah said. “Then there will be two scenarios, and only two scenarios — a rapid collapse or a slow unraveling.”
People close to Mr. Karzai say the man is exhausted, wary of his enemies and worried for his physical safety. He feels embattled and underappreciated, they say, but is utterly determined, in spite of it all, to run again and win. In recent weeks, the growing American dissatisfaction with Mr. Karzai, coupled with a simmering frustration among Afghans over what they regard as the reckless killing of civilians by American forces, has prompted extraordinary reactions from Mr. Karzai.
At a news conference on Tuesday at his marble-floored palace, Mr. Karzai appeared side-by-side with Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. Mr. Karzai wore his signature outfit of fez and cape, but his visage was wan and slack. Asked by an Afghan reporter about his relations with American leaders, Mr. Karzai sprang to life, accusing unnamed people in the American government of trying to “pressure” him to stay silent over the deaths of Afghan civilians in attacks by Americans.
“Our demands are clear — to stop the civilian casualties, the searching of Afghan homes and the arresting Afghans,” Mr. Karzai said of the Americans. “And of course, the Americans pressured us to be quiet and to make us retreat from our demands. But that is impossible. Afghanistan and its president are not going to retreat from their demands.”
Mr. Karzai did not touch on larger frustrations, which Afghan and Western officials here say he harbors, about the overall American effort, namely, the relegation of Afghanistan to second-tier status after the invasion of Iraq. Many Afghans and Western officials here believe that it was the Iraq war, more than any other factor, that deprived Mr. Karzai of the resources he needed to help the Afghan state stand on its own, and to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban that Mr. Obama is now vowing to contain.
Yet for all the doubts about Mr. Karzai — and for all the strains he labors under — he remains by far the strongest politician in the country. He commands the resources of the Afghan state, including the army and the police, and billions of dollars in American and other aid that flows into the treasury.
In his seven years in office, Mr. Karzai has successfully presided over the transition of the Afghan state from the devastated, pre-modern institution it was under the Taliban to the deeply troubled but largely democratic one it is today. Perhaps most important for his future, Mr. Karzai has assembled a team of senior administrators whose competence and experience would be difficult for any challenger to match.
Perhaps for that reason, of the many prominent Afghans who have hinted that they may run against him, including Dr. Abdullah and a former finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, only a handful of Afghans have so far declared their intentions. Some Afghan leaders say they will announce their candidacies soon, but it seems just as likely that they are waiting to see if Mr. Karzai stumbles.
As for the members of Mr. Obama’s team, they may yet discover that Mr. Karzai is the man they will be forced to deal with, whether they like him or not.
At the palace news conference, Mr. Karzai acknowledged his own unpopularity, and then offered a vigorous defense of his record. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
“Well, I have been in government for seven years. It’s natural that I would not be as popular now as I was seven years ago,” Mr. Karzai said.
“The institutions of Afghanistan have worked very well,” he added. “The Afghan people participated in the election for president. They participated in elections for Parliament. The parliamentary system has been functioning a lot better than some established parliaments in the world. They have been making laws, approving laws. The government institutions are increasingly in progress — the economy, the national army, the growth of education. We went from almost two or three universities in 2002 to 17 universities, to the freedom of the press, hundreds of newspapers and radios and all that. I and the Afghan people are proud of our achievements.”
And, he might also have said, six million Afghan children attending school, a quarter of whom are girls, whose education was prohibited by the Taliban.
One of the people with the most generous words for Mr. Karzai is William Wood, the American ambassador. Under the ambassador’s former boss, President Bush, Mr. Karzai enjoyed a favored personal status, even if his state did not. That special relationship was symbolized by the videoconferences in which the two men participated regularly.
“The guy works very hard,” Mr. Wood said of Mr. Karzai. “He faces a problem set every day that would daunt anyone. He’s got an insurgency based outside the country, and a level of poverty and criminality inside the country that feeds the insurgency. He’s got an army that had to be built from zero following the ouster of the Taliban. He’s got a police force that had to be reformed.
Speaking in an interview at his office in Kabul, Mr. Wood added: “Yeah, I think he’s tired. And I think frankly that everyone — the international community, the United States, the United Nations, Western Europe, the international press — were unrealistically optimistic about the problem of Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban.”
Mr. Wood will soon be replaced by Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a former commander of American forces here.
In his last tour, which ended in 2007, General Eikenberry enjoyed good relations with Mr. Karzai. Given Mr. Karzai’s mood these days, that is probably a good thing.
At a ceremony last month for the first graduates of Afghanistan’s National Military Academy, Mr. Karzai stood and addressed the assembled 84 cadets as well as a group of diplomats, including Mr. Wood. Mr. Karzai turned the occasion into a populist barnburner.
“I told America and the world to give us aircraft — otherwise we will get them from the other place!” Mr. Karzai roared, prompting applause. “I told them to give us the planes soon, that we have no more patience, and that we cannot get along without military aircraft!
“Give us the aircraft sooner or we will get them from the others!” Mr. Karzai roared again. “We told them to bring us tanks, too — otherwise we will get them from other place!”
Mr. Karzai never said what the “other place” was.
Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and Peter Baker from Washington.
Afghan Leader Finds Himself Hero No More
By DEXTER FILKINS
KABUL, Afghanistan — A foretaste of what would be in store for President Hamid Karzai after the election of a new American administration came last February, when Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator, sat down to a formal dinner at the palace during a visit here.
Between platters of lamb and rice, Mr. Biden and two other American senators questioned Mr. Karzai about corruption in his government, which, by many estimates, is among the worst in the world. Mr. Karzai assured Mr. Biden and the other senators that there was no corruption at all and that, in any case, it was not his fault.
The senators gaped in astonishment. After 45 minutes, Mr. Biden threw down his napkin and stood up.
“This dinner is over,” Mr. Biden announced, according to one of the people in the room at the time. And the three senators walked out, long before the appointed time.
Today, of course, Mr. Biden is the vice president.
The world has changed for Mr. Karzai, and for Afghanistan, too. A White House favorite — a celebrity in flowing cape and dark gray fez — in each of the seven years that he has led this country since the fall of the Taliban, Mr. Karzai now finds himself not so favored at all. Not by Washington, and not by his own.
In the White House, President Obama said he regarded Mr. Karzai as unreliable and ineffective. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said he presided over a “narco-state.” The Americans making Afghan policy, worried that the war is being lost, are vowing to bypass Mr. Karzai and deal directly with the governors in the countryside.
At home, Mr. Karzai faces a widening insurgency and a population that blames him for the manifest lack of economic progress and the corrupt officials that seem to stand at every doorway of his government. His face, which once adorned the walls of tea shops across the country, is today much less visible.
Now, perhaps crucially, an election looms. Mr. Karzai says he will ask the voters to return him to the palace for another five-year term. The election is set for Aug. 20, after what promises to be a violent and eventful summer. In a poll commissioned by a group of private Afghans, 85 percent of those surveyed said they intended to vote for someone other than Mr. Karzai.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration will have to decide what it wants from Mr. Karzai as it tries to make good on its promise to reverse the course of the war. Or whether it wants him at all.
With the insurgency rising, corruption soaring and opium blooming across the land, it perhaps is not surprising that so many Afghans, and so many in Washington, see President Karzai’s removal as a precondition for reversing the country’s downward surge.
“Under President Karzai, we have gone from a better situation to a good situation to a not-so-bad situation to a bad situation — and now are going to worse,” said Abdullah, a former foreign minister in Mr. Karzai’s government who may now challenge him for the presidency (and who, like many Afghans, has only one name). “That is the trend.
“So let us say Karzai stays in power through the summer and that nothing serious happens and then he wins re-election,” Dr. Abdullah said. “Then there will be two scenarios, and only two scenarios — a rapid collapse or a slow unraveling.”
People close to Mr. Karzai say the man is exhausted, wary of his enemies and worried for his physical safety. He feels embattled and underappreciated, they say, but is utterly determined, in spite of it all, to run again and win. In recent weeks, the growing American dissatisfaction with Mr. Karzai, coupled with a simmering frustration among Afghans over what they regard as the reckless killing of civilians by American forces, has prompted extraordinary reactions from Mr. Karzai.
At a news conference on Tuesday at his marble-floored palace, Mr. Karzai appeared side-by-side with Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. Mr. Karzai wore his signature outfit of fez and cape, but his visage was wan and slack. Asked by an Afghan reporter about his relations with American leaders, Mr. Karzai sprang to life, accusing unnamed people in the American government of trying to “pressure” him to stay silent over the deaths of Afghan civilians in attacks by Americans.
“Our demands are clear — to stop the civilian casualties, the searching of Afghan homes and the arresting Afghans,” Mr. Karzai said of the Americans. “And of course, the Americans pressured us to be quiet and to make us retreat from our demands. But that is impossible. Afghanistan and its president are not going to retreat from their demands.”
Mr. Karzai did not touch on larger frustrations, which Afghan and Western officials here say he harbors, about the overall American effort, namely, the relegation of Afghanistan to second-tier status after the invasion of Iraq. Many Afghans and Western officials here believe that it was the Iraq war, more than any other factor, that deprived Mr. Karzai of the resources he needed to help the Afghan state stand on its own, and to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban that Mr. Obama is now vowing to contain.
Yet for all the doubts about Mr. Karzai — and for all the strains he labors under — he remains by far the strongest politician in the country. He commands the resources of the Afghan state, including the army and the police, and billions of dollars in American and other aid that flows into the treasury.
In his seven years in office, Mr. Karzai has successfully presided over the transition of the Afghan state from the devastated, pre-modern institution it was under the Taliban to the deeply troubled but largely democratic one it is today. Perhaps most important for his future, Mr. Karzai has assembled a team of senior administrators whose competence and experience would be difficult for any challenger to match.
Perhaps for that reason, of the many prominent Afghans who have hinted that they may run against him, including Dr. Abdullah and a former finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, only a handful of Afghans have so far declared their intentions. Some Afghan leaders say they will announce their candidacies soon, but it seems just as likely that they are waiting to see if Mr. Karzai stumbles.
As for the members of Mr. Obama’s team, they may yet discover that Mr. Karzai is the man they will be forced to deal with, whether they like him or not.
At the palace news conference, Mr. Karzai acknowledged his own unpopularity, and then offered a vigorous defense of his record. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
“Well, I have been in government for seven years. It’s natural that I would not be as popular now as I was seven years ago,” Mr. Karzai said.
“The institutions of Afghanistan have worked very well,” he added. “The Afghan people participated in the election for president. They participated in elections for Parliament. The parliamentary system has been functioning a lot better than some established parliaments in the world. They have been making laws, approving laws. The government institutions are increasingly in progress — the economy, the national army, the growth of education. We went from almost two or three universities in 2002 to 17 universities, to the freedom of the press, hundreds of newspapers and radios and all that. I and the Afghan people are proud of our achievements.”
And, he might also have said, six million Afghan children attending school, a quarter of whom are girls, whose education was prohibited by the Taliban.
One of the people with the most generous words for Mr. Karzai is William Wood, the American ambassador. Under the ambassador’s former boss, President Bush, Mr. Karzai enjoyed a favored personal status, even if his state did not. That special relationship was symbolized by the videoconferences in which the two men participated regularly.
“The guy works very hard,” Mr. Wood said of Mr. Karzai. “He faces a problem set every day that would daunt anyone. He’s got an insurgency based outside the country, and a level of poverty and criminality inside the country that feeds the insurgency. He’s got an army that had to be built from zero following the ouster of the Taliban. He’s got a police force that had to be reformed.
Speaking in an interview at his office in Kabul, Mr. Wood added: “Yeah, I think he’s tired. And I think frankly that everyone — the international community, the United States, the United Nations, Western Europe, the international press — were unrealistically optimistic about the problem of Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban.”
Mr. Wood will soon be replaced by Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a former commander of American forces here.
In his last tour, which ended in 2007, General Eikenberry enjoyed good relations with Mr. Karzai. Given Mr. Karzai’s mood these days, that is probably a good thing.
At a ceremony last month for the first graduates of Afghanistan’s National Military Academy, Mr. Karzai stood and addressed the assembled 84 cadets as well as a group of diplomats, including Mr. Wood. Mr. Karzai turned the occasion into a populist barnburner.
“I told America and the world to give us aircraft — otherwise we will get them from the other place!” Mr. Karzai roared, prompting applause. “I told them to give us the planes soon, that we have no more patience, and that we cannot get along without military aircraft!
“Give us the aircraft sooner or we will get them from the others!” Mr. Karzai roared again. “We told them to bring us tanks, too — otherwise we will get them from other place!”
Mr. Karzai never said what the “other place” was.
Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and Peter Baker from Washington.
Deputy calls Karzai a stooge
Canwest News ServiceFebruary 22, 2009
Afghanistan's president and vice-president accused each other of being American stooges during angry exchanges at a cabinet meeting.
In a clash which showed how fragile the Western-backed government has become, President Hamid Karzai was labelled a corrupt incompetent by his own understudy, Ahmad Zia Massoud. Karzai responded by saying Massoud was part of a U.S. conspiracy to oust him.
The infighting reflects a collapse in support for Karzai, both within the Afghan coalitions that have supported him since his election in 2004 and among his backers in NATO and the European Union. In Kabul last week, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Karzai's government had to raise its game to secure continued British financial and military support.
Tempers flared after Massoud made a speech blaming greed and corruption in the Karzai administration for hunger and poverty in the country. The subsequent row lasted for 10 minutes and had to be broken up by cabinet colleagues.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Canwest News ServiceFebruary 22, 2009
Afghanistan's president and vice-president accused each other of being American stooges during angry exchanges at a cabinet meeting.
In a clash which showed how fragile the Western-backed government has become, President Hamid Karzai was labelled a corrupt incompetent by his own understudy, Ahmad Zia Massoud. Karzai responded by saying Massoud was part of a U.S. conspiracy to oust him.
The infighting reflects a collapse in support for Karzai, both within the Afghan coalitions that have supported him since his election in 2004 and among his backers in NATO and the European Union. In Kabul last week, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Karzai's government had to raise its game to secure continued British financial and military support.
Tempers flared after Massoud made a speech blaming greed and corruption in the Karzai administration for hunger and poverty in the country. The subsequent row lasted for 10 minutes and had to be broken up by cabinet colleagues.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
March 27, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Winnable War
By DAVID BROOKS
Khyber Pass, Afghanistan
I came to Afghanistan skeptical of American efforts to transform this country. Afghanistan is one of the poorest, least-educated and most-corrupt nations on earth. It is an infinitely complex and fractured society. It has powerful enemies in Pakistan, Iran and the drug networks working hard to foment chaos. The ground is littered with the ruins of great powers that tried to change this place.
Moreover, we simply do not know how to modernize nations. Western aid workers seem to spend most of their time drawing up flow charts for each other. They’re so worried about their inspectors general that they can’t really immerse themselves in the messy world of local reality. They insist on making most of the spending decisions themselves so the “recipients” of their largess end up passive, dependent and resentful.
Every element of my skepticism was reinforced during a six-day tour of the country. Yet the people who work here make an overwhelming case that Afghanistan can become a functional, terror-fighting society and that it is worth sending our sons and daughters into danger to achieve this.
In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want. They are, as Lord Byron put it, one of the few people in the region without an inferiority complex. They think they did us a big favor by destroying the Soviet Union and we repaid them with abandonment. They think we owe them all this.
That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming. They detest the insurgents and root for American success. “The Afghans have treated you as friends, allies and liberators from the very beginning,” says Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak.
Second, we’re already well through the screwing-up phase of our operation. At first, the Western nations underestimated the insurgency. They tried to centralize power in Kabul. They tried to fight a hodgepodge, multilateral war.
Those and other errors have been exposed, and coalition forces are learning. When you interview impressive leaders here, like Brig. Gen. John Nicholson of Regional Command South, Col. John Agoglia of the Counterinsurgency Training Center and Chris Alexander of the U.N., you see how relentless they are at criticizing their own operations. Thanks to people like that, the coalition will stumble toward success, having tried the alternatives.
Third, we’ve got our priorities right. Armies love killing bad guys. Aid agencies love building schools. But the most important part of any aid effort is governance and law and order. It’s reforming the police, improving the courts, training local civil servants and building prisons.
In Afghanistan, every Western agency is finally focused on this issue, from a Canadian reconstruction camp in Kandahar to the top U.S. general, David McKiernan.
Fourth, the quality of Afghan leadership is improving. This is a relative thing. President Hamid Karzai is detested by much of the U.S. military. Some provincial governors are drug dealers on the side. But as the U.N.’s Kai Eide told the Security Council, “The Afghan government is today better and more competent than ever before.” Reformers now lead the most important ministries and competent governors run key provinces.
Fifth, the U.S. is finally taking this war seriously. Up until now, insurgents have had free rein in vast areas of southern Afghanistan. The infusion of 17,000 more U.S. troops will change that. The Obama administration also promises a civilian surge to balance the military push.
Sixth, Pakistan is finally on the agenda. For the past few years, the U.S. has let Pakistan get away with murder. The insurgents train, organize and get support from there. “It’s very hard to deal with a cross-border insurgency on only one side of the border,” says Mr. Alexander of the U.N. The Obama strategic review recognizes this.
Finally, it is simply wrong to say that Afghanistan is a hopeless 14th-century basket case. This country had decent institutions before the Communist takeover. It hasn’t fallen into chaos, the way Iraq did, because it has a culture of communal discussion and a respect for village elders. The Afghans have embraced the democratic process with enthusiasm.
I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:
After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.
Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Winnable War
By DAVID BROOKS
Khyber Pass, Afghanistan
I came to Afghanistan skeptical of American efforts to transform this country. Afghanistan is one of the poorest, least-educated and most-corrupt nations on earth. It is an infinitely complex and fractured society. It has powerful enemies in Pakistan, Iran and the drug networks working hard to foment chaos. The ground is littered with the ruins of great powers that tried to change this place.
Moreover, we simply do not know how to modernize nations. Western aid workers seem to spend most of their time drawing up flow charts for each other. They’re so worried about their inspectors general that they can’t really immerse themselves in the messy world of local reality. They insist on making most of the spending decisions themselves so the “recipients” of their largess end up passive, dependent and resentful.
Every element of my skepticism was reinforced during a six-day tour of the country. Yet the people who work here make an overwhelming case that Afghanistan can become a functional, terror-fighting society and that it is worth sending our sons and daughters into danger to achieve this.
In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want. They are, as Lord Byron put it, one of the few people in the region without an inferiority complex. They think they did us a big favor by destroying the Soviet Union and we repaid them with abandonment. They think we owe them all this.
That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming. They detest the insurgents and root for American success. “The Afghans have treated you as friends, allies and liberators from the very beginning,” says Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak.
Second, we’re already well through the screwing-up phase of our operation. At first, the Western nations underestimated the insurgency. They tried to centralize power in Kabul. They tried to fight a hodgepodge, multilateral war.
Those and other errors have been exposed, and coalition forces are learning. When you interview impressive leaders here, like Brig. Gen. John Nicholson of Regional Command South, Col. John Agoglia of the Counterinsurgency Training Center and Chris Alexander of the U.N., you see how relentless they are at criticizing their own operations. Thanks to people like that, the coalition will stumble toward success, having tried the alternatives.
Third, we’ve got our priorities right. Armies love killing bad guys. Aid agencies love building schools. But the most important part of any aid effort is governance and law and order. It’s reforming the police, improving the courts, training local civil servants and building prisons.
In Afghanistan, every Western agency is finally focused on this issue, from a Canadian reconstruction camp in Kandahar to the top U.S. general, David McKiernan.
Fourth, the quality of Afghan leadership is improving. This is a relative thing. President Hamid Karzai is detested by much of the U.S. military. Some provincial governors are drug dealers on the side. But as the U.N.’s Kai Eide told the Security Council, “The Afghan government is today better and more competent than ever before.” Reformers now lead the most important ministries and competent governors run key provinces.
Fifth, the U.S. is finally taking this war seriously. Up until now, insurgents have had free rein in vast areas of southern Afghanistan. The infusion of 17,000 more U.S. troops will change that. The Obama administration also promises a civilian surge to balance the military push.
Sixth, Pakistan is finally on the agenda. For the past few years, the U.S. has let Pakistan get away with murder. The insurgents train, organize and get support from there. “It’s very hard to deal with a cross-border insurgency on only one side of the border,” says Mr. Alexander of the U.N. The Obama strategic review recognizes this.
Finally, it is simply wrong to say that Afghanistan is a hopeless 14th-century basket case. This country had decent institutions before the Communist takeover. It hasn’t fallen into chaos, the way Iraq did, because it has a culture of communal discussion and a respect for village elders. The Afghans have embraced the democratic process with enthusiasm.
I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:
After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.
Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/opini ... nted=print
This is what you get when you negotiate with taliban
By Susan Martinuk, Calgary HeraldApril 3, 2009 9:55 AM
Interesting. Just as western leaders are publicly mulling a strategy of reconciling with moderate Taliban leaders to draw them over to the side of good, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reminded us of why that can never happen.
In an effort to secure political support for upcoming elections, Karzai approved a law that will strip away hard-won gains for the rights of Afghan women and return them to a sub-human existence as chattel, just as they were under the Taliban. A Shia minority woman won't be able to leave home without her husband's permission, decline his sexual advances or gain custody of any children.
Canadians and other members of the 42-country NATO group that is fighting to bring security and freedom to all Afghans are rightly outraged. We have collectively paid the financial and human cost for their freedom (Canadians more than most) and, in response, Karzai has thumbed his nose at western values in favour of his own political expediency. The law will win Karzai the support of the religious Shia group that may hold the balance of power in this summer's election. No doubt, it will also secure the support of pro-Taliban extremists and anyone else who seeks power by oppressing others.
In theory, the West has installed a democratic government. But most similarities to our governments end there. In Afghanistan, female members of government routinely face death threats and cries of "kill her"when they address parliament. No male parliamentarian-- including Karzai--has dared to defend or protect them. Other high-ranking women have been intimidated or even assassinated.
In practice, it's obvious that religious traditions still have considerable power over the decisions the government makes and how it acts. For centuries, Afghanistan had no central government. Its regions were governed by leaders of tribal factions (warlords), religious extremists, drug lords and basically anyone with enough money and/or fire power to gain local influence. Their factional fighting is associated with atrocities such as mass rape, torture and murder, and it's estimated that they still exploit and oppress about 75 per cent of the population-- mostly through the opium drug trade.
According to one Afghan, there is nothing to differentiate any of these leaders from the Taliban or al-Qaeda-- they are one and the same. They use corruption and intimidation to manipulate government action and they want it to govern with Islamic--not democratic-- traditions. In short, Karzai's government (which is composed of many former warlords and religious leaders) will never be free to govern democratically as long as these corrupt influences are at hand.
Perhaps that's why there's a growing consensus that the only way a central Afghan government can assert its control is to eliminate the opium trade--the very thing that gives warlords/ Taliban/terrorists their power over the Afghan people and government. Afghanistan supplies more than 90 per cent of the world's opium, producing enough cash to account for over onethird of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. These profits are then used to support terrorism and anti-government activities.
In October 2008, NATO's top commander in Afghanistan asked for a mandate to go after the opium trade, saying it was the only way to defeat the Taliban. Several months later, in February 2009, President Barack Obama announced that he would send additional troops to Afghanistan and a majority of them will be charged with eradicating the poppy trade that supports the insurgents.
Destroying the fuel that feeds the monster is the only way to victory. But it will be a difficult task, since many of the drug kingpins are members of government or have close friends in government. It's a commonly reported fact that government officials accept bribes to allow opium to be moved around--and out of--the country. Farmers also rely on opium crops to sustain them, even if it keeps them under the heavy foot of drug lords. Targeting them (at the lowest level of the opium chain) will destroy their livelihood and generate more discontent for the Taliban to feed upon.
There are no easy answers, but this week's events have shown us who pulls the political strings in Afghanistan. Beyond that, it's been made abundantly clear that abandoning this fight will result in terrible repercussions for Afghan women.
Martinuk's column appears every Friday
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Susan Martinuk, Calgary HeraldApril 3, 2009 9:55 AM
Interesting. Just as western leaders are publicly mulling a strategy of reconciling with moderate Taliban leaders to draw them over to the side of good, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reminded us of why that can never happen.
In an effort to secure political support for upcoming elections, Karzai approved a law that will strip away hard-won gains for the rights of Afghan women and return them to a sub-human existence as chattel, just as they were under the Taliban. A Shia minority woman won't be able to leave home without her husband's permission, decline his sexual advances or gain custody of any children.
Canadians and other members of the 42-country NATO group that is fighting to bring security and freedom to all Afghans are rightly outraged. We have collectively paid the financial and human cost for their freedom (Canadians more than most) and, in response, Karzai has thumbed his nose at western values in favour of his own political expediency. The law will win Karzai the support of the religious Shia group that may hold the balance of power in this summer's election. No doubt, it will also secure the support of pro-Taliban extremists and anyone else who seeks power by oppressing others.
In theory, the West has installed a democratic government. But most similarities to our governments end there. In Afghanistan, female members of government routinely face death threats and cries of "kill her"when they address parliament. No male parliamentarian-- including Karzai--has dared to defend or protect them. Other high-ranking women have been intimidated or even assassinated.
In practice, it's obvious that religious traditions still have considerable power over the decisions the government makes and how it acts. For centuries, Afghanistan had no central government. Its regions were governed by leaders of tribal factions (warlords), religious extremists, drug lords and basically anyone with enough money and/or fire power to gain local influence. Their factional fighting is associated with atrocities such as mass rape, torture and murder, and it's estimated that they still exploit and oppress about 75 per cent of the population-- mostly through the opium drug trade.
According to one Afghan, there is nothing to differentiate any of these leaders from the Taliban or al-Qaeda-- they are one and the same. They use corruption and intimidation to manipulate government action and they want it to govern with Islamic--not democratic-- traditions. In short, Karzai's government (which is composed of many former warlords and religious leaders) will never be free to govern democratically as long as these corrupt influences are at hand.
Perhaps that's why there's a growing consensus that the only way a central Afghan government can assert its control is to eliminate the opium trade--the very thing that gives warlords/ Taliban/terrorists their power over the Afghan people and government. Afghanistan supplies more than 90 per cent of the world's opium, producing enough cash to account for over onethird of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. These profits are then used to support terrorism and anti-government activities.
In October 2008, NATO's top commander in Afghanistan asked for a mandate to go after the opium trade, saying it was the only way to defeat the Taliban. Several months later, in February 2009, President Barack Obama announced that he would send additional troops to Afghanistan and a majority of them will be charged with eradicating the poppy trade that supports the insurgents.
Destroying the fuel that feeds the monster is the only way to victory. But it will be a difficult task, since many of the drug kingpins are members of government or have close friends in government. It's a commonly reported fact that government officials accept bribes to allow opium to be moved around--and out of--the country. Farmers also rely on opium crops to sustain them, even if it keeps them under the heavy foot of drug lords. Targeting them (at the lowest level of the opium chain) will destroy their livelihood and generate more discontent for the Taliban to feed upon.
There are no easy answers, but this week's events have shown us who pulls the political strings in Afghanistan. Beyond that, it's been made abundantly clear that abandoning this fight will result in terrible repercussions for Afghan women.
Martinuk's column appears every Friday
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Here's why the fight in afghanistan is worth it
By Licia Corbella, Calgary HeraldApril 4, 2009
Every day when I come in to work and hang my coat on the hook behind the door of my office, I'm reminded of why Canada has troops in Afghanistan.
Hanging on that same hook is a burka. The sky-blue rayon fabric with its elaborate pleating, machine embroidery and mesh that covers the eyes, is a reminder to me of the suffocating oppression the women of Afghanistan suffered through under Taliban rule, but also of the amazing women and girls I met when I spent two weeks there in December 2003.
Earlier this week, news broke that Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has betrayed the Shi'a women of his country by signing a law that will force the women of this minority to seek permission from their husbands before leaving their home. The law would also mean that only fathers and grandfathers could gain custody of children and that women could never deny sex to their husbands. As a result of this atrocious news, Canadians are rightly asking, what are we fighting for?Why are we there?
The best way I know to answer that question is by changing it to WHO are we fighting for.
Let me introduce you to Sabria Boostani and her daughter Tahmina, who was 14 when I met her but would be 20 now.
In the courtyard of the small Kabul orphanage she ran with little resources but a lot of love and patience, Sabria told me a hair-raising story of the Taliban's murderous ways.
On Aug. 29, 1999, Sabria was in her comfortable house in a good neighbourhood of Kabul along with her husband, their 24-year-old son and Tahmina, who was then 10 years old.
The Taliban, which means religious students, were in control of most of the country, which meant Sabria, an active, educated teacher, was essentially under house arrest for years, venturing out only with a male relative, and only under the cover of the tent-like burka that is still the predominant form of covering for women throughout Afghanistan.
Her daughter, like all girls, was no longer allowed to go to school, so Sabria secretly taught her all she could. Life was not pleasant, but it was soon to get much worse.
"At about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, two Taliban kicked in our front door," said the then 44-year-old woman, who looked more like she was 64. "They started to beat us and curse us and they locked us all in a room, and then they just shot my husband and my son in front of me and my daughter."
Sabria said she and her daughter sat clutching one another, scarcely breathing until morning, unable to move.
"The next morning, my hair was white and my daughter couldn't speak for many, many days--more than one week," she explained of the extreme trauma they suffered.
Why did the Taliban murder her husband and son? Sabria can only speculate.
"My husband and son were physicians and helped anyone who needed help, even women, which the Taliban did not allow. Maybe that's why.
"But really, the Taliban hate any educated people. They wanted to keep people as ignorant as possible. It was the only way for them to keep power."
When I met her, Sabria was teaching school to 21 girls at the Mirmum Orphanage in Kabul, which our Canadian soldiers stumbled upon and then took under their wing.
"I live my life only for my daughter now, to support her," explained Sabria, "but I am dead, though I walk and talk."
If Afghanistan is not a country entirely filled with dead men and women walking, then it certainly is a country of the walking wounded.
Virtually every Afghan who didn't flee this landlocked country during the Taliban's rule, which ran from September 1996 to November 2001, has lived through trauma few of us can comprehend. And, of course, before the Taliban, there was war--altogether, 23 years of it.
So, while Sabria barely could find the will to live, she said the kindness in the form of smiles, food, fuel, bedding, school supplies and repairs shown to her and the children by Canadian troops, as well as the lifting of Taliban rule from many parts of the country, gave her and the dozens of other women I met in Afghanistan much hope.
The reason why our brave soldiers "believe" in the mission they're on and why grieving families of the 116 Canadian soldiers who have given their lives in that brutal country say so too, is because our soldiers have all met people like Sabria and Tahmina--millions of them--who have suffered so much and deserve so much more. That's who and what we're fighting for. They're worth it. They really are.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Licia Corbella, Calgary HeraldApril 4, 2009
Every day when I come in to work and hang my coat on the hook behind the door of my office, I'm reminded of why Canada has troops in Afghanistan.
Hanging on that same hook is a burka. The sky-blue rayon fabric with its elaborate pleating, machine embroidery and mesh that covers the eyes, is a reminder to me of the suffocating oppression the women of Afghanistan suffered through under Taliban rule, but also of the amazing women and girls I met when I spent two weeks there in December 2003.
Earlier this week, news broke that Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has betrayed the Shi'a women of his country by signing a law that will force the women of this minority to seek permission from their husbands before leaving their home. The law would also mean that only fathers and grandfathers could gain custody of children and that women could never deny sex to their husbands. As a result of this atrocious news, Canadians are rightly asking, what are we fighting for?Why are we there?
The best way I know to answer that question is by changing it to WHO are we fighting for.
Let me introduce you to Sabria Boostani and her daughter Tahmina, who was 14 when I met her but would be 20 now.
In the courtyard of the small Kabul orphanage she ran with little resources but a lot of love and patience, Sabria told me a hair-raising story of the Taliban's murderous ways.
On Aug. 29, 1999, Sabria was in her comfortable house in a good neighbourhood of Kabul along with her husband, their 24-year-old son and Tahmina, who was then 10 years old.
The Taliban, which means religious students, were in control of most of the country, which meant Sabria, an active, educated teacher, was essentially under house arrest for years, venturing out only with a male relative, and only under the cover of the tent-like burka that is still the predominant form of covering for women throughout Afghanistan.
Her daughter, like all girls, was no longer allowed to go to school, so Sabria secretly taught her all she could. Life was not pleasant, but it was soon to get much worse.
"At about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, two Taliban kicked in our front door," said the then 44-year-old woman, who looked more like she was 64. "They started to beat us and curse us and they locked us all in a room, and then they just shot my husband and my son in front of me and my daughter."
Sabria said she and her daughter sat clutching one another, scarcely breathing until morning, unable to move.
"The next morning, my hair was white and my daughter couldn't speak for many, many days--more than one week," she explained of the extreme trauma they suffered.
Why did the Taliban murder her husband and son? Sabria can only speculate.
"My husband and son were physicians and helped anyone who needed help, even women, which the Taliban did not allow. Maybe that's why.
"But really, the Taliban hate any educated people. They wanted to keep people as ignorant as possible. It was the only way for them to keep power."
When I met her, Sabria was teaching school to 21 girls at the Mirmum Orphanage in Kabul, which our Canadian soldiers stumbled upon and then took under their wing.
"I live my life only for my daughter now, to support her," explained Sabria, "but I am dead, though I walk and talk."
If Afghanistan is not a country entirely filled with dead men and women walking, then it certainly is a country of the walking wounded.
Virtually every Afghan who didn't flee this landlocked country during the Taliban's rule, which ran from September 1996 to November 2001, has lived through trauma few of us can comprehend. And, of course, before the Taliban, there was war--altogether, 23 years of it.
So, while Sabria barely could find the will to live, she said the kindness in the form of smiles, food, fuel, bedding, school supplies and repairs shown to her and the children by Canadian troops, as well as the lifting of Taliban rule from many parts of the country, gave her and the dozens of other women I met in Afghanistan much hope.
The reason why our brave soldiers "believe" in the mission they're on and why grieving families of the 116 Canadian soldiers who have given their lives in that brutal country say so too, is because our soldiers have all met people like Sabria and Tahmina--millions of them--who have suffered so much and deserve so much more. That's who and what we're fighting for. They're worth it. They really are.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Shiite cleric defends restrictions on women
By Sharif Khoram, Agence France-PresseApril 12, 2009 7:50 AM
Afghanistan's top Shiite cleric on Saturday defended legislation said to oppress women and accused western critics of"cultural invasion" and violating the very democracy they are promoting.
Mohammad Asif Mohseni also rejected a Ministry of Justice review ordered by President Hamid Karzai, saying any changes would violate a constitutional provision for Shiites to have their own legal system.
Karzai last week ordered a review of Shiite Personal Status Law, which he signed in March, after a storm of criticism that it imposes Taliban-style harsh restrictions on women.
"This political pressure is a cultural invasion, thinking one's culture better than others," Mohseni told a gathering of more than 200 followers and journalists at the Khatemi Nabien University, which he heads.
Mohseni accused critics --which include the United States, United Nations and Canada--of not respecting the democracy they were helping Afghanistan to install after the 2001 removal of the extremist Taliban regime.
The law was reached on the basis of "the same democracy that the West is emphasizing" in Afghanistan, he said.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Sharif Khoram, Agence France-PresseApril 12, 2009 7:50 AM
Afghanistan's top Shiite cleric on Saturday defended legislation said to oppress women and accused western critics of"cultural invasion" and violating the very democracy they are promoting.
Mohammad Asif Mohseni also rejected a Ministry of Justice review ordered by President Hamid Karzai, saying any changes would violate a constitutional provision for Shiites to have their own legal system.
Karzai last week ordered a review of Shiite Personal Status Law, which he signed in March, after a storm of criticism that it imposes Taliban-style harsh restrictions on women.
"This political pressure is a cultural invasion, thinking one's culture better than others," Mohseni told a gathering of more than 200 followers and journalists at the Khatemi Nabien University, which he heads.
Mohseni accused critics --which include the United States, United Nations and Canada--of not respecting the democracy they were helping Afghanistan to install after the 2001 removal of the extremist Taliban regime.
The law was reached on the basis of "the same democracy that the West is emphasizing" in Afghanistan, he said.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
What democracy isn't
Calgary HeraldApril 14, 2009
Mohammad Asif Mohseni needs a crash course in the meaning of democracy. Mohseni, the leading Shiite cleric in Afghanistan, says when the West expresses its firm disapproval of a new law that would, among other things, allow husbands to rape their wives, it constitutes a "cultural invasion" and violates the democratic principles the West promulgates. Mohseni said the West's disapprobation is a reflection of its belief that western culture is "better than others."
A culture that promotes and defends human rights for women is decidedly "better" than one that doesn't. Nor is democracy about allowing a culture to enact autocratic laws to oppress half that culture's citizens. Democracy is about choosing freedom for all. Oppression chosen"democratically" is not democracy. Mohseni's comments, coming with news of the shocking assassination of Sitara Achakzai, a women's rights advocate, as she rode in a rickshaw through the Kandahar streets, sadly show how far Afghanistan has to go before it can rightly call itself democratic. As long as the status of women in that country remains so precarious, and women are second-class citizens whose daily activities are legally controlled by males --and as long as those advocating for women's rights risk losing their lives--Afghanistan is not a democracy.
Democratization is not an overnight development. Ingrained attitudes take years to metamorphose into some-thing more progressive. And hyperbole uttered by fanatics is still just that--hyperbole. When it masquerades under the cloak of "democracy," it is simply obscene.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Calgary HeraldApril 14, 2009
Mohammad Asif Mohseni needs a crash course in the meaning of democracy. Mohseni, the leading Shiite cleric in Afghanistan, says when the West expresses its firm disapproval of a new law that would, among other things, allow husbands to rape their wives, it constitutes a "cultural invasion" and violates the democratic principles the West promulgates. Mohseni said the West's disapprobation is a reflection of its belief that western culture is "better than others."
A culture that promotes and defends human rights for women is decidedly "better" than one that doesn't. Nor is democracy about allowing a culture to enact autocratic laws to oppress half that culture's citizens. Democracy is about choosing freedom for all. Oppression chosen"democratically" is not democracy. Mohseni's comments, coming with news of the shocking assassination of Sitara Achakzai, a women's rights advocate, as she rode in a rickshaw through the Kandahar streets, sadly show how far Afghanistan has to go before it can rightly call itself democratic. As long as the status of women in that country remains so precarious, and women are second-class citizens whose daily activities are legally controlled by males --and as long as those advocating for women's rights risk losing their lives--Afghanistan is not a democracy.
Democratization is not an overnight development. Ingrained attitudes take years to metamorphose into some-thing more progressive. And hyperbole uttered by fanatics is still just that--hyperbole. When it masquerades under the cloak of "democracy," it is simply obscene.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
There is a related multimedia at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/world ... &th&emc=th
April 29, 2009
U.S. Sets Fight in the Poppies to Halt Taliban Cash Flow
By DEXTER FILKINS
ZANGABAD, Afghanistan — American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.
The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency. The additional troops, the centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to reverse the course of the seven-year war, will roughly double the number already in southern Afghanistan. The troops already fighting there are universally seen as overwhelmed. In many cases, the Americans will be pushing into areas where few or no troops have been before.
Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.
“Opium is their financial engine,” said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the deputy commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. “That is why we think he will fight for these areas.”
The Americans say that their main goal this summer will be to provide security for the Afghan population, and thereby isolate the insurgents.
But because the opium is tilled in heavily populated areas, and because the Taliban are spread among the people, the Americans say they will have to break the group’s hold on poppy cultivation to be successful.
No one here thinks that is going to be easy.
Only 10 minutes inside the tiny village of Zangabad, 20 miles southwest of Kandahar, a platoon of American soldiers stepped into a poppy field in full bloom on Monday. Taliban fighters opened fire from three sides.
“From the north!” one of the soldiers yelled, spinning and firing.
“West!” another screamed, turning and firing, too.
An hour passed and a thousand bullets whipped through the air. Ammunition was running low. The Taliban were circling.
Then the gunships arrived, swooping in, their bullet casings showering the ground beneath them, their rockets streaking and destroying. Behind a barrage of artillery, the soldiers shot their way out of Zangabad and moved into the cover of the vineyards.
“When are you going drop the bomb?” Capt. Chris Brawley said into his radio over the clatter of machine-gun fire. “I’m in a grape field.”
The bomb came, and after a time the shooting stopped.
The firefight offered a preview of the Americans’ summer in southern Afghanistan. By all accounts, it is going to be bloody.
Like the guerrillas they are, Taliban fighters often fade away when confronted by a conventional army. But in Afghanistan, as they did in Zangabad, the Taliban will probably stand and fight.
Among the ways the Taliban are believed to make money from the opium trade is by charging farmers for protection; if the Americans and British attack, the Taliban will be expected to make good on their side of that bargain.
Indeed, Taliban fighters have begun to fight any efforts by the Americans or the British to move into areas where poppy grows and opium is produced. Last month, a force of British marines moved into a district called Nad Ali in Helmand Province, the center of the country’s poppy cultivation. The Taliban were waiting. In a five-day battle, the British killed 120 Taliban fighters and wounded 150. Only one British soldier was wounded.
Many of the new American soldiers will fan out along southern Afghanistan’s largely unguarded 550-mile-long border with Pakistan. Among them will be soldiers deployed in the Stryker, a relatively quick, nimble armored vehicle that can roam across the vast areas that span the frontier.
All of the new troops are supposed to be in place by Aug. 20, in order to provide security for Afghanistan’s presidential election.
The presence of poppy and opium here has injected a huge measure of uncertainly into the war. Under NATO rules of engagement, American or other forces are prohibited from attacking targets or people related only to narcotics production. Those people are not considered combatants.
But American and other forces are allowed to attack drug smugglers or facilities that are assisting the Taliban. In an interview, General Nicholson said that opium production and the Taliban are so often intertwined that the rules do not usually inhibit American operations.
“We often come across a compound that has opium and I.E.D. materials side by side, and opium and explosive materials and weapons,” General Nicholson said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “It’s very common — more common than not.”
But the prospect of heavy fighting in populated areas could further alienate the Afghan population. In the firefight in Zangabad, the Americans covered their exit with a barrage of 20 155 millimeter high-explosive artillery shells — necessary to shield them from the Taliban, but also enough to inflict serious damage on people and property. A local Afghan interviewed by telephone after the firefight said that four homes had been damaged by the artillery strikes.
Then there is the problem of weaning poppy farmers from poppy farming — a task that has proved intractable in many countries, like Colombia, where the American government has tried to curtail poppy production. It is by far the most lucrative crop an Afghan can farm. The opium trade now makes up nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, American officials say. The country’s opium traffickers typically offer incentives that no Afghan government official can: they can guarantee a farmer a minimum price for the crop as well as taking it to market, despite the horrendous condition of most of Afghanistan’s roads.
“The people don’t like to cultivate poppy, but they are desperate,” Mohammed Ashraf Naseri, the governor of Zabul Province, told a group of visitors this month.
To offer an alternative to poppy farming, the American military is setting aside $250 million for agriculture projects like irrigation improvements and wheat cultivation. General Nicholson said that a $200 million plan for infrastructure improvements, much of it for roads to help get crops to market, was also being prepared. The vision, General Nicholson said, is to try to restore the agricultural economy that flourished in Afghanistan in the 1970s. That, more than military force, will defeat the Taliban, he said.
“There is a significant portion of the enemy that we believe we can peel off with incentives,” the general said. “We can hire away many of these young men.”
Even if the Americans are able to cut production, shortages could drive up prices and not make a significant dent in the Taliban’s profits.
The foray into Zangabad suggested the difficulties that lie ahead. The terrain is a guerrilla’s dream. In addition to acres of shoulder-high poppy plants, rows and rows of hard-packed mud walls, used to stand up grape vines, offer ideal places for ambushes and defense.
But the trickiest thing will be winning over the Afghans themselves. The Taliban are entrenched in the villages and river valleys of southern Afghanistan. The locals, caught between the foes, seem, at best, to be waiting to see who prevails.
On their way to Zangabad, the soldiers stopped in a wheat field to talk to a local farmer. His name was Ahmetullah. The Americans spoke through a Pashto interpreter.
“I’m very happy to see you,” the farmer told the Americans.
“Really?” one of the soldiers asked.
“Yes,” the farmer said.
The interpreter sighed, and spoke in English.
“He’s a liar.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/world ... &th&emc=th
April 29, 2009
U.S. Sets Fight in the Poppies to Halt Taliban Cash Flow
By DEXTER FILKINS
ZANGABAD, Afghanistan — American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.
The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency. The additional troops, the centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to reverse the course of the seven-year war, will roughly double the number already in southern Afghanistan. The troops already fighting there are universally seen as overwhelmed. In many cases, the Americans will be pushing into areas where few or no troops have been before.
Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.
“Opium is their financial engine,” said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the deputy commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. “That is why we think he will fight for these areas.”
The Americans say that their main goal this summer will be to provide security for the Afghan population, and thereby isolate the insurgents.
But because the opium is tilled in heavily populated areas, and because the Taliban are spread among the people, the Americans say they will have to break the group’s hold on poppy cultivation to be successful.
No one here thinks that is going to be easy.
Only 10 minutes inside the tiny village of Zangabad, 20 miles southwest of Kandahar, a platoon of American soldiers stepped into a poppy field in full bloom on Monday. Taliban fighters opened fire from three sides.
“From the north!” one of the soldiers yelled, spinning and firing.
“West!” another screamed, turning and firing, too.
An hour passed and a thousand bullets whipped through the air. Ammunition was running low. The Taliban were circling.
Then the gunships arrived, swooping in, their bullet casings showering the ground beneath them, their rockets streaking and destroying. Behind a barrage of artillery, the soldiers shot their way out of Zangabad and moved into the cover of the vineyards.
“When are you going drop the bomb?” Capt. Chris Brawley said into his radio over the clatter of machine-gun fire. “I’m in a grape field.”
The bomb came, and after a time the shooting stopped.
The firefight offered a preview of the Americans’ summer in southern Afghanistan. By all accounts, it is going to be bloody.
Like the guerrillas they are, Taliban fighters often fade away when confronted by a conventional army. But in Afghanistan, as they did in Zangabad, the Taliban will probably stand and fight.
Among the ways the Taliban are believed to make money from the opium trade is by charging farmers for protection; if the Americans and British attack, the Taliban will be expected to make good on their side of that bargain.
Indeed, Taliban fighters have begun to fight any efforts by the Americans or the British to move into areas where poppy grows and opium is produced. Last month, a force of British marines moved into a district called Nad Ali in Helmand Province, the center of the country’s poppy cultivation. The Taliban were waiting. In a five-day battle, the British killed 120 Taliban fighters and wounded 150. Only one British soldier was wounded.
Many of the new American soldiers will fan out along southern Afghanistan’s largely unguarded 550-mile-long border with Pakistan. Among them will be soldiers deployed in the Stryker, a relatively quick, nimble armored vehicle that can roam across the vast areas that span the frontier.
All of the new troops are supposed to be in place by Aug. 20, in order to provide security for Afghanistan’s presidential election.
The presence of poppy and opium here has injected a huge measure of uncertainly into the war. Under NATO rules of engagement, American or other forces are prohibited from attacking targets or people related only to narcotics production. Those people are not considered combatants.
But American and other forces are allowed to attack drug smugglers or facilities that are assisting the Taliban. In an interview, General Nicholson said that opium production and the Taliban are so often intertwined that the rules do not usually inhibit American operations.
“We often come across a compound that has opium and I.E.D. materials side by side, and opium and explosive materials and weapons,” General Nicholson said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “It’s very common — more common than not.”
But the prospect of heavy fighting in populated areas could further alienate the Afghan population. In the firefight in Zangabad, the Americans covered their exit with a barrage of 20 155 millimeter high-explosive artillery shells — necessary to shield them from the Taliban, but also enough to inflict serious damage on people and property. A local Afghan interviewed by telephone after the firefight said that four homes had been damaged by the artillery strikes.
Then there is the problem of weaning poppy farmers from poppy farming — a task that has proved intractable in many countries, like Colombia, where the American government has tried to curtail poppy production. It is by far the most lucrative crop an Afghan can farm. The opium trade now makes up nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, American officials say. The country’s opium traffickers typically offer incentives that no Afghan government official can: they can guarantee a farmer a minimum price for the crop as well as taking it to market, despite the horrendous condition of most of Afghanistan’s roads.
“The people don’t like to cultivate poppy, but they are desperate,” Mohammed Ashraf Naseri, the governor of Zabul Province, told a group of visitors this month.
To offer an alternative to poppy farming, the American military is setting aside $250 million for agriculture projects like irrigation improvements and wheat cultivation. General Nicholson said that a $200 million plan for infrastructure improvements, much of it for roads to help get crops to market, was also being prepared. The vision, General Nicholson said, is to try to restore the agricultural economy that flourished in Afghanistan in the 1970s. That, more than military force, will defeat the Taliban, he said.
“There is a significant portion of the enemy that we believe we can peel off with incentives,” the general said. “We can hire away many of these young men.”
Even if the Americans are able to cut production, shortages could drive up prices and not make a significant dent in the Taliban’s profits.
The foray into Zangabad suggested the difficulties that lie ahead. The terrain is a guerrilla’s dream. In addition to acres of shoulder-high poppy plants, rows and rows of hard-packed mud walls, used to stand up grape vines, offer ideal places for ambushes and defense.
But the trickiest thing will be winning over the Afghans themselves. The Taliban are entrenched in the villages and river valleys of southern Afghanistan. The locals, caught between the foes, seem, at best, to be waiting to see who prevails.
On their way to Zangabad, the soldiers stopped in a wheat field to talk to a local farmer. His name was Ahmetullah. The Americans spoke through a Pashto interpreter.
“I’m very happy to see you,” the farmer told the Americans.
“Really?” one of the soldiers asked.
“Yes,” the farmer said.
The interpreter sighed, and spoke in English.
“He’s a liar.”
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/world ... kabul.html
May 6, 2009
Kabul Journal
Drugs Hollow Out Afghan Lives in Cultural Center
By DEXTER FILKINS
KABUL, Afghanistan — The men, hollow-eyed and matted, start coming at dawn, shuffling into the remains of the old Soviet Cultural Center, which in its day staged films celebrating the glories of a new era.
These days, the shell of the abandoned building serves as perhaps the world’s largest gathering spot for men looking to satisfy their lust for heroin and opium. Stooping in the darkened caverns of the place, amid the waste and exhalations of hundreds of others, the men partake of the drug that has begun to wreak its deathly magic in the very country where it is produced.
One such man, who called himself Mohammed Ofzal, struck a match beneath a piece of foil and sucked in the blue smoke that rose from the liquefying little mass. Then he sat back in a crouch, legs shaking a little. His eyes, glazed and half-shut, stared blankly at the floor.
“My parents are fed up with me; they are telling me to quit,” Mr. Ofzal said. He said he was 18. His clothes, unlike nearly everyone else’s in the gathering post, were pressed and clean. He said he would go home soon; he would not be spending the night. “If you don’t take care of yourself, you could die here.”
Around him were a hundred other men, some crouching, some collapsed, some unconscious; some, perhaps, were dead. The visitors, though not the denizens, covered their faces from the smell. Mr. Ofzal lit another match and bent down to drink in the smoke.
Afghanistan, the world’s largest producer of opium, is drowning in a sea of its own making. While the country’s narco-traffickers ship vast quantities of the stuff to Europe and the United States, enough of it stays behind to offer a cheap and easy temptation to the people at home. A United Nations survey taken four years ago revealed 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in a population of about 35 million; a new study, to be completed in the summer, is expected to show even more.
Addiction in Afghanistan is rising along with the country’s opium production, which is cranking at something close to fever pitch. With much of its society and many of its institutions ruined by 30 years of fighting, Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s opium. The money earned from narcotics accounts for more than half of the country’s gross domestic product. It feeds the Taliban insurgency.
The Soviet Culture Center is the most public of arenas in which to view the trade’s depredations on ordinary people. (For the men, that is; the center, like virtually every other public place in Afghanistan, is strictly segregated by sex.) The building sits in the Dehamatzang neighborhood of western Kabul, the scene of ferocious and prolonged fighting during the civil war that engulfed the country in the 1990s. The exterior walls are crumbled and pockmarked with bullet holes.
Inside is a landscape of extraordinary human wreckage. The rooms resemble catacombs; lightless and fetid and crammed with dozens, even hundreds, of bodies, each one clinging to his bit of space, his bit of elixir. Clouds of blue smoke rise, linger and dissolve. Almost no one speaks. In a corner, a man, seated on the floor, offers candy and cigarettes. In an ordinary day, 2,000 men pass through here. That’s on top of the nearly 600 who never leave. “Did you bring any money?” one of the men asked, as hunched and withered as a gargoyle.
“No,” said another, slipping his friend a tiny packet.
Next to them a body slumped in an improbable pose — curled, stiff, yet balanced, delicately, as if on the head of a pin. After a time the body fell over, as frozen as before. No one looked up.
Men and boys are not the only people who have fallen prey to the drug; women and girls are merely harder to find. Typically, females, prohibited from wandering the streets, stay indoors, which mitigates their helplessness but shields them from help.
A woman named Aziza, for instance, lives at home with her six children, who range in age from 18 months to 21. Aziza, who like many Afghans has only one name, is a gaunt and reduced figure, possibly beautiful once, but now a woman of papery skin and sunken cheeks and eyes sunk deep in her skull. For Aziza, as for many here, smoking opium is a way to escape a life without hope.
Two years ago, Aziza’s husband died in a car accident, and with no way of supporting her family on her own — women in this deeply conservative society do not generally work outside the home — she fell into despair. One day, a friend offered her a pipe and opium. She took it. Since then, Aziza has been smoking two or three times a day, sometimes in front of her children.
“Opium has been a good friend to me; it has taken away my sorrows,” Aziza said, seated in the corner of her one-room house, with her children looking on.
Kabul contains a tiny handful of clinics that treat drug abuse, but they have nowhere near the capacity to treat the number of people in need. About six months ago, the counselors from one clinic, alerted by the neighbors, found Aziza in her home and invited her to the clinic. Aziza stayed for 24 hours.
“When I need it, it is a kind of an attack,” she said afterward. “I can’t resist the opium; it is stronger than I am.”
With her children standing by, Aziza reached into a cloth bag and produced a filthy spoon, a bit of powder and a straw. Her 6-year-old son, Mirwais, stood to his mother’s left, 10-year-old Sonia stood to her right. Aziza, eyes glazed, struck a match but could produce no spark. She tried again and failed. Finally, Sonia took the box from her mother’s hands, struck a flame and handed the match to her mother.
Aziza bent over and breathed in the blue smoke.
*****
Afghanistan seeks to revive tourism industry
By Arno Maierbrugger, Staff Reporter
Published: May 04, 2009, 22:44
Dubai: After decades of war, Afghanistan makes another step towards normality and looks to revive its tourism industry.
With the help of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Afghanistan's first national park Band-e-Amir was opened in Bamyan province last week.
According to the USAID office in Kabul, the agency spent about $1 million (Dh3.67 million) to establish the park which is situated on a vast plateau in the Hindu Kush mountains, comprising six deep-blue lakes and a picturesque landscape dotted by snow-covered peaks.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The national park will draw visitors not only from all across Afghanistan, but all across the region and the world," US deputy ambassador Frank Ricciardone told the press after the opening ceremony, which was attended by the heads of Afghanistan's National Environmental Protection Agency and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
"It is a park created for the new Afghanistan," WCS president Steven Sanderson said. Besides improving Afghanistan's international image, the new national park is aimed to encourage economic development in the poverty-stricken region.
A local institution was founded to manage the area which covers 56.000 hectares. With the help of the WCS as well as the global environmental consultancy Ecodit and the Aga Khan Development Network, local small businesses are beginning to emerge in the 13 villages that are located within the park and small shops, restaurants, hotels and a campground are being built to serve the expected growing number of visitors.
Band-e-Amir, a former trading hub on the ancient Silk Road, has been a well-known destination for travellers since the late 1950s. It peaked in the 1960s and 1970s when the region was part of the so-called hippie trail, a term describing the route of the flower power kids hitchhiking from Europe to Central and East Asia at that time.
During the war years between 1979 and 2001, tourism was totally absent in the region and it won notoriety when the Taliban dynamited the 1,500-year-old Buddha statues in nearby Bamyan valley in 2001.
On the other hand, Bamyan had been relatively insulated from the violence that plagued other parts of the country during the war. At the moment, Band-e-Amir is visited by a few thousand Afghan tourists every year, but Western travel agencies are slowly rediscovering the exotic destination. Polish travel agency Logos Travel in Poznan is offering its first trip to Afghanistan this month, French travel book publisher Petit Futé recently released a new guide book for the country, and Afghanistan's private carrier Safi Airways is launching direct flights between Kabul and Frankfurt, Germany, on June 15.
However, the biggest problem the tourism entrepreneurs are facing is the generally poor security situation throughout the country. The foreign ministries of most western nations are still advising their citizens against travelling to Afghanistan, a move kept in perspective by Afghanistan's tourism minister Ghulam Farhai. "At the moment, security is our biggest challenge. When we get security, when we get good roads and hotels, Afghanistan will be a perfect travel destination," Farhai said.
http://www.gulfnews.com/business/Touris ... 10644.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/world ... kabul.html
May 6, 2009
Kabul Journal
Drugs Hollow Out Afghan Lives in Cultural Center
By DEXTER FILKINS
KABUL, Afghanistan — The men, hollow-eyed and matted, start coming at dawn, shuffling into the remains of the old Soviet Cultural Center, which in its day staged films celebrating the glories of a new era.
These days, the shell of the abandoned building serves as perhaps the world’s largest gathering spot for men looking to satisfy their lust for heroin and opium. Stooping in the darkened caverns of the place, amid the waste and exhalations of hundreds of others, the men partake of the drug that has begun to wreak its deathly magic in the very country where it is produced.
One such man, who called himself Mohammed Ofzal, struck a match beneath a piece of foil and sucked in the blue smoke that rose from the liquefying little mass. Then he sat back in a crouch, legs shaking a little. His eyes, glazed and half-shut, stared blankly at the floor.
“My parents are fed up with me; they are telling me to quit,” Mr. Ofzal said. He said he was 18. His clothes, unlike nearly everyone else’s in the gathering post, were pressed and clean. He said he would go home soon; he would not be spending the night. “If you don’t take care of yourself, you could die here.”
Around him were a hundred other men, some crouching, some collapsed, some unconscious; some, perhaps, were dead. The visitors, though not the denizens, covered their faces from the smell. Mr. Ofzal lit another match and bent down to drink in the smoke.
Afghanistan, the world’s largest producer of opium, is drowning in a sea of its own making. While the country’s narco-traffickers ship vast quantities of the stuff to Europe and the United States, enough of it stays behind to offer a cheap and easy temptation to the people at home. A United Nations survey taken four years ago revealed 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in a population of about 35 million; a new study, to be completed in the summer, is expected to show even more.
Addiction in Afghanistan is rising along with the country’s opium production, which is cranking at something close to fever pitch. With much of its society and many of its institutions ruined by 30 years of fighting, Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s opium. The money earned from narcotics accounts for more than half of the country’s gross domestic product. It feeds the Taliban insurgency.
The Soviet Culture Center is the most public of arenas in which to view the trade’s depredations on ordinary people. (For the men, that is; the center, like virtually every other public place in Afghanistan, is strictly segregated by sex.) The building sits in the Dehamatzang neighborhood of western Kabul, the scene of ferocious and prolonged fighting during the civil war that engulfed the country in the 1990s. The exterior walls are crumbled and pockmarked with bullet holes.
Inside is a landscape of extraordinary human wreckage. The rooms resemble catacombs; lightless and fetid and crammed with dozens, even hundreds, of bodies, each one clinging to his bit of space, his bit of elixir. Clouds of blue smoke rise, linger and dissolve. Almost no one speaks. In a corner, a man, seated on the floor, offers candy and cigarettes. In an ordinary day, 2,000 men pass through here. That’s on top of the nearly 600 who never leave. “Did you bring any money?” one of the men asked, as hunched and withered as a gargoyle.
“No,” said another, slipping his friend a tiny packet.
Next to them a body slumped in an improbable pose — curled, stiff, yet balanced, delicately, as if on the head of a pin. After a time the body fell over, as frozen as before. No one looked up.
Men and boys are not the only people who have fallen prey to the drug; women and girls are merely harder to find. Typically, females, prohibited from wandering the streets, stay indoors, which mitigates their helplessness but shields them from help.
A woman named Aziza, for instance, lives at home with her six children, who range in age from 18 months to 21. Aziza, who like many Afghans has only one name, is a gaunt and reduced figure, possibly beautiful once, but now a woman of papery skin and sunken cheeks and eyes sunk deep in her skull. For Aziza, as for many here, smoking opium is a way to escape a life without hope.
Two years ago, Aziza’s husband died in a car accident, and with no way of supporting her family on her own — women in this deeply conservative society do not generally work outside the home — she fell into despair. One day, a friend offered her a pipe and opium. She took it. Since then, Aziza has been smoking two or three times a day, sometimes in front of her children.
“Opium has been a good friend to me; it has taken away my sorrows,” Aziza said, seated in the corner of her one-room house, with her children looking on.
Kabul contains a tiny handful of clinics that treat drug abuse, but they have nowhere near the capacity to treat the number of people in need. About six months ago, the counselors from one clinic, alerted by the neighbors, found Aziza in her home and invited her to the clinic. Aziza stayed for 24 hours.
“When I need it, it is a kind of an attack,” she said afterward. “I can’t resist the opium; it is stronger than I am.”
With her children standing by, Aziza reached into a cloth bag and produced a filthy spoon, a bit of powder and a straw. Her 6-year-old son, Mirwais, stood to his mother’s left, 10-year-old Sonia stood to her right. Aziza, eyes glazed, struck a match but could produce no spark. She tried again and failed. Finally, Sonia took the box from her mother’s hands, struck a flame and handed the match to her mother.
Aziza bent over and breathed in the blue smoke.
*****
Afghanistan seeks to revive tourism industry
By Arno Maierbrugger, Staff Reporter
Published: May 04, 2009, 22:44
Dubai: After decades of war, Afghanistan makes another step towards normality and looks to revive its tourism industry.
With the help of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Afghanistan's first national park Band-e-Amir was opened in Bamyan province last week.
According to the USAID office in Kabul, the agency spent about $1 million (Dh3.67 million) to establish the park which is situated on a vast plateau in the Hindu Kush mountains, comprising six deep-blue lakes and a picturesque landscape dotted by snow-covered peaks.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The national park will draw visitors not only from all across Afghanistan, but all across the region and the world," US deputy ambassador Frank Ricciardone told the press after the opening ceremony, which was attended by the heads of Afghanistan's National Environmental Protection Agency and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
"It is a park created for the new Afghanistan," WCS president Steven Sanderson said. Besides improving Afghanistan's international image, the new national park is aimed to encourage economic development in the poverty-stricken region.
A local institution was founded to manage the area which covers 56.000 hectares. With the help of the WCS as well as the global environmental consultancy Ecodit and the Aga Khan Development Network, local small businesses are beginning to emerge in the 13 villages that are located within the park and small shops, restaurants, hotels and a campground are being built to serve the expected growing number of visitors.
Band-e-Amir, a former trading hub on the ancient Silk Road, has been a well-known destination for travellers since the late 1950s. It peaked in the 1960s and 1970s when the region was part of the so-called hippie trail, a term describing the route of the flower power kids hitchhiking from Europe to Central and East Asia at that time.
During the war years between 1979 and 2001, tourism was totally absent in the region and it won notoriety when the Taliban dynamited the 1,500-year-old Buddha statues in nearby Bamyan valley in 2001.
On the other hand, Bamyan had been relatively insulated from the violence that plagued other parts of the country during the war. At the moment, Band-e-Amir is visited by a few thousand Afghan tourists every year, but Western travel agencies are slowly rediscovering the exotic destination. Polish travel agency Logos Travel in Poznan is offering its first trip to Afghanistan this month, French travel book publisher Petit Futé recently released a new guide book for the country, and Afghanistan's private carrier Safi Airways is launching direct flights between Kabul and Frankfurt, Germany, on June 15.
However, the biggest problem the tourism entrepreneurs are facing is the generally poor security situation throughout the country. The foreign ministries of most western nations are still advising their citizens against travelling to Afghanistan, a move kept in perspective by Afghanistan's tourism minister Ghulam Farhai. "At the moment, security is our biggest challenge. When we get security, when we get good roads and hotels, Afghanistan will be a perfect travel destination," Farhai said.
http://www.gulfnews.com/business/Touris ... 10644.html
May 8, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Talked to Death
By HASSINA SHERJAN
Kabul, Afghanistan
FOR several years, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has been trying to negotiate and reconcile with supposedly moderate elements of the Taliban to end the insurgency. This approach has failed every time. Thus it is puzzling to many Afghans that President Obama has also been talking about negotiating with “moderates.” Let’s hope that when the two men met in Washington this week, along with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, the idea of reaching out to the Islamic extremists was shelved once and for all.
After all, President Karzai’s efforts have simply revealed the weakness of the Afghan government and its international allies. Taliban spokesman have repeatedly demanded unacceptable conditions for talks, including the departure of all foreign forces from Afghanistan and the establishment of Shariah law.
Indeed, shortly after Mr. Obama raised the subject of reconciliation, the Taliban rejected his proposal, stating there were no extremists or moderate groups within their ranks. On this point at least, the Taliban are right. Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, put it very clearly: “The Taliban were united under the leadership of Mullah Muhammad Omar. All the fighters follow and obey orders of one central command. The existence of moderates and extremist elements within the rank and file of Taliban is wishful thinking of the West and the Afghan government.”
What can be the purpose of talks with the Taliban? These men deprive women of their rights, throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, reject religious freedom and oppose constitutional democracy. They also threaten to kill any Afghans who have worked with Western militaries and nongovernmental groups or had other contact with foreigners.
Is it possible, as some have said, that the Taliban have mellowed since being toppled in 2001? Muhammad Ibrahim Hanafi, a top Taliban commander, answered that question in an interview in March with CNN: “Our law is still the same old law which was in place during our rule in Afghanistan.”
The more President Karzai and his Western allies talk about reconciliation, the farther their public support will plummet. I returned to Afghanistan in 2001 after more than two decades in America and founded a manufacturing company with the intention of using part of its profits to help young women get an education. In the early days, the discussions at our organization’s meetings were dominated by talk of building schools and other big plans. Lately, however, the main topic has been the future of us women in Afghanistan under another Taliban regime. We know that there is not, and will never be, any “moderate Taliban.” Extremists and ideologues do not compromise.
The atmosphere has been made worse by the president’s signing of a family law affecting Shiite Muslims that places restrictions on when a woman can leave her house and states the circumstances in which she is obliged to have sex with her husband. I was part of a group of civil-society representatives who recently met with President Karzai to express our concerns about the law; he replied that he hadn’t known the full details when he signed it and promised to “fight for us” to have it amended. We’ll see. But his later statement that “there are no reconciliation processes” going on with the Taliban, which seems at odds with the facts, did not inspire much hope.
The family law and other governmental efforts to appease religious extremists are having one effect that reminds me of the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of 1979: Afghanistan is being drained of the people who would be most effective at putting it back together. It seems as if every group of Afghans that attends training programs in the West now returns just a bit smaller. Last year, the accountant and the top administrator of my factory left for the Netherlands with their families. My new accountant recently went to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with German Embassy officials about a possible visa.
This is a far cry from the 1960s and ’70s, when many Afghans, including my father and five of my uncles, studied abroad on scholarships but returned to work in the government or to start businesses and create jobs. That sense of nationalism has disappeared; unless we rediscover it, Afghanistan will become a failed state.
The only “reconciliation” strategy that is going to work is one between the Kabul government and the Afghan people. The key is making changes at the community level. Many local mullahs and citizens who have tolerated the Taliban in the past are open to working with a government that can protect them and help them find livelihoods. The government and its allies can best weaken the insurgency by better protecting the population, organizing local citizens’ groups to cooperate on economic development, and hiring more people from every part of the country into the growing Afghan Army and police force.
This is the only way that the reconcilables will be separated from the irreconcilables. We need to understand where Afghanistan’s true moderates are to be found, and not look for them in leadership positions of one of the most repressive organizations on earth.
Hassina Sherjan is the president of Boumi, a manufacturer of decorative products for the home, and the director of Aid Afghanistan for Education, a nonprofit group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Talked to Death
By HASSINA SHERJAN
Kabul, Afghanistan
FOR several years, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has been trying to negotiate and reconcile with supposedly moderate elements of the Taliban to end the insurgency. This approach has failed every time. Thus it is puzzling to many Afghans that President Obama has also been talking about negotiating with “moderates.” Let’s hope that when the two men met in Washington this week, along with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, the idea of reaching out to the Islamic extremists was shelved once and for all.
After all, President Karzai’s efforts have simply revealed the weakness of the Afghan government and its international allies. Taliban spokesman have repeatedly demanded unacceptable conditions for talks, including the departure of all foreign forces from Afghanistan and the establishment of Shariah law.
Indeed, shortly after Mr. Obama raised the subject of reconciliation, the Taliban rejected his proposal, stating there were no extremists or moderate groups within their ranks. On this point at least, the Taliban are right. Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, put it very clearly: “The Taliban were united under the leadership of Mullah Muhammad Omar. All the fighters follow and obey orders of one central command. The existence of moderates and extremist elements within the rank and file of Taliban is wishful thinking of the West and the Afghan government.”
What can be the purpose of talks with the Taliban? These men deprive women of their rights, throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, reject religious freedom and oppose constitutional democracy. They also threaten to kill any Afghans who have worked with Western militaries and nongovernmental groups or had other contact with foreigners.
Is it possible, as some have said, that the Taliban have mellowed since being toppled in 2001? Muhammad Ibrahim Hanafi, a top Taliban commander, answered that question in an interview in March with CNN: “Our law is still the same old law which was in place during our rule in Afghanistan.”
The more President Karzai and his Western allies talk about reconciliation, the farther their public support will plummet. I returned to Afghanistan in 2001 after more than two decades in America and founded a manufacturing company with the intention of using part of its profits to help young women get an education. In the early days, the discussions at our organization’s meetings were dominated by talk of building schools and other big plans. Lately, however, the main topic has been the future of us women in Afghanistan under another Taliban regime. We know that there is not, and will never be, any “moderate Taliban.” Extremists and ideologues do not compromise.
The atmosphere has been made worse by the president’s signing of a family law affecting Shiite Muslims that places restrictions on when a woman can leave her house and states the circumstances in which she is obliged to have sex with her husband. I was part of a group of civil-society representatives who recently met with President Karzai to express our concerns about the law; he replied that he hadn’t known the full details when he signed it and promised to “fight for us” to have it amended. We’ll see. But his later statement that “there are no reconciliation processes” going on with the Taliban, which seems at odds with the facts, did not inspire much hope.
The family law and other governmental efforts to appease religious extremists are having one effect that reminds me of the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of 1979: Afghanistan is being drained of the people who would be most effective at putting it back together. It seems as if every group of Afghans that attends training programs in the West now returns just a bit smaller. Last year, the accountant and the top administrator of my factory left for the Netherlands with their families. My new accountant recently went to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with German Embassy officials about a possible visa.
This is a far cry from the 1960s and ’70s, when many Afghans, including my father and five of my uncles, studied abroad on scholarships but returned to work in the government or to start businesses and create jobs. That sense of nationalism has disappeared; unless we rediscover it, Afghanistan will become a failed state.
The only “reconciliation” strategy that is going to work is one between the Kabul government and the Afghan people. The key is making changes at the community level. Many local mullahs and citizens who have tolerated the Taliban in the past are open to working with a government that can protect them and help them find livelihoods. The government and its allies can best weaken the insurgency by better protecting the population, organizing local citizens’ groups to cooperate on economic development, and hiring more people from every part of the country into the growing Afghan Army and police force.
This is the only way that the reconcilables will be separated from the irreconcilables. We need to understand where Afghanistan’s true moderates are to be found, and not look for them in leadership positions of one of the most repressive organizations on earth.
Hassina Sherjan is the president of Boumi, a manufacturer of decorative products for the home, and the director of Aid Afghanistan for Education, a nonprofit group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opini ... nted=print