Cover
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Rebuilding Afghanistan
By CHRIS HERLINGER
Kabul, Afghanistan
The breeze that chilled Wahida Sadat’s home would normally
have been welcome as Kabul’s warm weather extended into October. But on
this particular day, Sadat was nursing a child with the flu, and the chilly air
was just another distraction as she sat down on a cool floor to make a quilt.
Her family’s sole income comes from a quilt-making project administered by
a local Afghan relief organization.
Motioning toward the open windows (glass is too expensive and hard
to come by in Kabul), Sadat said she could only imagine what it would be like
during the coming winter.
Sadat, her husband and five children, ages 1 to 15, are among the
1.5 million refugees who returned this year to Afghanistan; Sadat’s family
spent nearly six years in exile in Pakistan. The family’s original home in
Kabul was destroyed during the 1996 Taliban takeover. Now the family lives with
relatives in one of the poor hillside communities that jut through the center
of the city.
Sadat, 35, a soft-spoken and dignified woman, said she is grateful
for the temporary work but remains unsure about the future, saying she is
particularly anxious that her husband start receiving his salary. He is a
police officer who has yet to be paid. “Right now, we have no other
income,” she said.
No single experience or life could encapsulate Afghan-istan’s
reality at the end of 2002, little more than a year after the Northern Alliance
seized Kabul and other major Afghan cities, forcing the Taliban into retreat.
Still, Sadat’s story -- return from exile, uncertainty about work,
unwelcome pressures -- would resonate with thousands of other Afghans doing
their best to keep their families intact, even alive.
“Ordinary people are tired,” said Sima Samar, who heads
the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and is director of the Shuhada
Organization, an Afghan relief and development group with ties to a number of
U.S. churches and relief agencies.
Surveying what has been, charitably, a challenging and difficult
year, Samar -- Afghanistan’s former minister of women’s affairs and a
participant in the June loya jirga (grand tribal council) -- said
Afghanistan’s infrastructure remains depleted and in serious disrepair.
The country’s civil society and central government remain fragile, she
added, threatened by both a lack of strong international support and the
continued strength of local warlords and religious fundamentalists.
“We are not in a position to sustain ourselves,” Samar
said in an interview just weeks before the one-year anniversary of the November
downfall of the Taliban. “We could go a week [without outside
assistance].”
Police kill protesting students
This debilitating sense of uncertainty erupted into full public
view in November, when students at Kabul University protested living conditions
at the school. In an ensuing incident, police killed three students. Many of
the officers were poorly trained and responded with guns rather than tear
gas.
The shootings outraged students, who said the incident called into
question the credibility of President Hamid Karzai’s government. Their
public anger mirrored both private and public doubts by human rights activists
and others about the long-term durability and strength of the new government,
particularly since warlords remain such a potent force in Afghanistan.
“[Karzai] is in a very precarious situation,” said Paul
Butler, who up until October served as country director in Afghanistan for
Catholic Relief Services and was in Kandahar when Karzai narrowly escaped a
September assassination attempt. “Unless the reliance on the warlord
system is addressed and until [the warlords] are disarmed, Karzai’s hold
on power will remain tenuous.”
Last month, Karzai took something of an initiative against the
warlords when he announced the creation of a national army that his government
hopes will supersede the warlords’ authority. Given the warlords’
continued power, it is anyone’s guess whether Karzai’s government
will have the strength to enforce the ban against local militia forces.
For its part, the United States has denied that its ongoing
military efforts in Afghanistan include resolving disputes between warring
factions. B-52 bombings in western Afghanistan in early December, U.S.
officials said, were due to attacks on U.S. special forces in the region and
had nothing to do with fighting between forces loyal to Ismail Khan, the
governor of Herat province and an ethnic Tajik, and Amanullah Khan, a rival
warlord who is Pashtun.
But in November, New York-based Human Rights Watch charged that
the U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan support Khan and that he commands
forces responsible for numerous human rights abuses. At the very least, Butler
said, a number of Afghans are likely to view the U.S. bombing
“cynically” as a show of support for Khan.
Given these and the other developments during 2002 -- the Karzai
assassination attempt, a depleted economy, the ongoing U.S.-led war against al
Qaeda and Taliban supporters, the return of refugees -- it is something of a
miracle that, at year’s end, a kind of stubborn hope persists in
Afghanistan: a belief that a country that survived 20 years of foreign
domination, a brutal civil war and the rule of the Taliban may yet find its
bearings.
Simple pleasures
“You can’t change everything overnight,” said
Sarwar Hussaini, 40, who heads the Cooperation Center for Afghanistan, an
Afghan human rights organization. In assessing the last year, Hussaini praised
signs of a burgeoning media he said in some cities was more progressive than
that found in neighboring Pakistan or Iran, as well as the hope and simple
daily pleasures many enjoy now that the Taliban’s pernicious rule has
ended.
However, Hussaini is not blind to the continued struggles faced by
so many in society, perhaps most glaringly by women. Like Samar, an outspoken
advocate for women who believes passionately that Afghanistan will never
develop fully “until there is recognition of the rights of women.”
Hussaini is concerned that “the many barriers” women continue to
face, including barriers to education, will continue hobbling the country.
Take the issue of education. Girls may be more eager to learn.
During my October visit to the central region of Hazarajat, girls seemed far
more attentive than boys and several spoke about the need to catch up in the
studies denied them by the Taliban. But many are studying in crowded
classrooms, a legacy both of conservative social mores and the fact that in
some areas determined girls are returning to classrooms in such large
numbers.
Unfortunately, Afghan girls have been greeted with a backlash. In
recent weeks, more than a dozen schools for women and girls have been
firebombed or set ablaze, the result of anger over the Karzai government’s
support of equal education. It is not surprising that “the girls feel the
need to take advantage of what they have now,” said Habibullah Habib, a
human rights activist with the Cooperation Center. “Who knows what the
future may bring?”
That phrase is repeated with some dread about a host of issues,
particularly as Afghans contemplate a US-led war against Iraq. Samar and
Hussaini are not alone in saying that a war in Iraq could drive Afghanistan,
once again, to the abyss it experienced in the 1990s when international
neglect, they argue, was a major cause of the brutal civil war that ultimately
led to the Taliban’s ascension.
Their fear stems from worry that a war in Iraq, as well as the
subsequent reconstruction Iraq will require, will divert attention away from
Afghanistan’s needs, which remain considerable and have not received the
attention Afghans feel is the country’s due. Afghanistan has yet to see
the full $2 billion in assistance that international donors had pledged earlier
this year. Afghan representatives attending an international aid conference in
Bonn, Germany, earlier this month said Afghanistan would require a minimum of
$23 billion in reconstruction assistance during the next five years.
Long-term commitment needed
“The international community has to be serious about a
long-term commitment,” Butler said. “The minute we forget about
Afghanistan, we’ll be back to the 1990s.”
“Emergencies are event-driven, and determine how much a
country is on the radar screen of the donor community and the U.S. government.
There’s a real concern that there wouldn’t be many resources left
(for Afghanistan),” he said.
It is almost a mantra, this worry about the world forgetting about
the needs of Afghanistan -- Hussaini calls it the “the fear of being left
alone again” --and it is spoken with a sense of almost raw urgency by
those who have seen firsthand what happens when governments and international
institutions desert a war-ruined country.
“Afghans have been abandoned several times,” said Marvin
Parvez, director of the Afghanistan program for Church World Service, the New
York-based Protestant relief and development agency that is sponsoring the
Kabul quilt-making project. “They are justifiably afraid that if a war in
Iraq takes place, the West will once again abandon Afghanistan.” (Prior to
the recent Bonn meeting, the Bush administration said a war in Iraq would not
alter the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan’s reconstruction.)
Even with these worries, however, there has been at least one
bright development, relief officials say: the recent congressional approval of
a $2.3 billion U.S. reconstruction assistance package, which includes funding
for an expansion of the international security forces.
Surveying the last year and looking ahead to 2003, Butler said
that aside from strengthening the central government, the most important
challenge for Afghanistan is developing a “workable rehabilitation
strategy.”
As it is now, most refugees returning from Pakistan, many of them
without work or means of support, are congregating in Kabul, taxing a city
already burdened with a host of social problems. The city’s population has
doubled in the last year to nearly 3 million; traffic is worsening; and the
city’s brittle, even shattered, infrastructure is not up to the task of
new pressures. Electricity is still rationed, and power outages are common.
The strain on Kabul will continue, Parvez said, as the drought now
in its sixth year continues to cause migrations across Afghanistan, with many
arriving in Kabul with hopes of finding work.
And while signs of day-to-day pleasures denied during the Taliban
era -- flying a kite, listening to music, watching a movie, attending a loud,
boisterous Afghan wedding -- are now evident on the streets, a cold, stubborn
reality undergirds life in Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan: Most people still
have little, if any, sustainable income.
“There may be more in the bazaar, but people still can’t
buy food,” said Parvez of Church World Service.
Even with these daunting problems, however, those committed to
rebuilding say they are not giving up on Afghanistan. “The government and
the process [of nation-building] have survived,” Butler said. “Those
are considerable achievements. There was a fear that the country wouldn’t
even get through the loya jirga phase. We’ve passed that
point.”
Another signpost? A little more than a year ago, Afghan human
rights activists like Sarwar Hussaini and Habibullah Habib felt the Taliban
might stay in power indefinitely. “We felt trapped, as if there was no
solution,” Hussaini said.
“I didn’t feel like a human being,” Habib recalled.
“The price of human blood was very cheap. It was the cheapest thing in
Afghanistan.”
Chris Herlinger, a free-lance journalist in New York and a
communications officer for Church World Service, was recently on assignment in
Afghanistan, reporting on the humanitarian situation there.
National Catholic Reporter, January 10,
2003
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