On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 11:12:29PM -0600, Julia Thompson wrote: > > Print version? On the newsstand right now?
Yes. No. *** The rebirth of a nation Jan 9th 2003 | KABUL, BAGRAM AND BEDAK >From The Economist print edition Now the country's fragile peace must be made to stick IN LATE afternoon on December 21st, a German Sikorsky CH-53 helicopter swept in low over the edge of Kabul airport. As it passed the roof of a British army base where your correspondent stood with a group of Scottish soldiers, it appeared to flip before dropping like a stone to a dusty alley and exploding. International peacekeepers, Czechs, Turks, Danes and others, jostled at the crash site to pull out bodies. A dilapidated engine of the Kabul fire brigade appeared later, when the flames were already doused. Seven German soldiers were killed in what investigators think was an accident, not sabotage. Their remains were flown home on Christmas Day. Christmas week also saw two Afghans killed and two French aid workers injured in a grenade attack in Kabul, two American soldiers injured when a grenade was lobbed into their jeep also in Kabul, another American shot dead in the east of the country in a fire fight with Afghans opposed to the transitional government of Hamid Karzai, as well as several explosions in Jalalabad and Kandahar. All a sad reminder, as if any were needed, of the cost of supporting regime change in Afghanistan. Has it been worth it? So far, yes. Afghanistan is better off than it was a year ago. The country is at peace, by its own standards. Mr Karzai's government has been confirmed by a loyajirga (grand council) until elections in June 2004; it is extending and consolidating its powers. The World Bank broadly applauds its reconstruction strategy and efforts to stimulate the private sector. A new national currency, the afghani, has been successfully introduced. Several cities have a mobile phone system. Major infrastructure projects have started; some, such as the reconstruction of the Salang tunnel linking the north of the country with the south, will be completed in 2003. In public at least, Afghanistan has the support of neighbouring countries; none of them wants to dismember it. Iran and Pakistan, long at loggerheads over what sort of government Afghanistan should have, agreed to let Afghans decide. Pakistan has signed a deal with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan to build a $3.2 billion gas pipeline through Afghanistan. A recent donors' conference in Oslo pledged $1.2 billion in aid to Afghanistan for 2003; Norwegian diplomats hope the realised sum may be closer to $2 billion. Some 3m Afghan children are back in school, double the number the United Nations predicted. The remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban hiding in tribal areas along the Pakistani border have fewer friends than they did a year ago. They are scattered and on the run; shipments of weapons destined for them have been regularly intercepted. Most impressive has been the flood of Afghans returning to the country. Afghans formed by far the largest caseload for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2002, nearly 2m of them decided to head home, the largest movement of people anywhere since the formation of Bangladesh. Despite these achievements, Afghanistan remains in critical condition. Things have not got better so much as less bad. Physically surviving 2003 will be a success for Mr Karzai. He narrowly escaped an attempt on his life in his hometown of Kandahar last year; another attack claimed the life of his vice-president. He has still not visited most of the country he was elected to represent. He is guarded not by his own people but by American mercenaries, who are shadowed by American special forces, who in turn are ringed by peacekeepers. His government needs to gain more credibility with ordinary Afghans this year if it is not to collapse, perhaps bloodily. That means delivering real improvements in the quality of life and making government more representative. Mr Karzai aside, the government is dominated by ethnic Tajiks of the former Northern Alliance whose loyalty, if to anyone, is to the memory of Ahmed Shah Masoud, the charismatic Northern Alliance leader killed by al-Qaeda just before the September 11th attacks on the United States. The Masoud image, part Bob Marley, part Che Guevara, is everywhere in Kabul: at the airport, splashed across the interior ministry, in stickers on the barrels of the Kalashnikovs carried by the guards at the foreign ministry. A massive colour poster of him, expensively made in Iran, dominates Kabul's football stadium. .A nation needs a hero,. Mr Karzai says defensively of this cult. Maybe, but it is dead Masoud not living Mr Karzai who takes pride of place in ministerial offices. That is a dangerous reflection of the fact there was no viable peace settlement with the fall of the Taliban, only winners: Hazara, Uzbek, and Tajik minorities organised and armed at the expense of the previously ascendant Pushtun majority. There are still 2m Afghan refugees in Iran and another 1.5m or so in Pakistan. Returnees have descended only on a narrow corridor of the country stretching from Nangarhar and Kabul (a province as well as a city) up to Kunduz in the north. The bombed-out shell of Kabul city itself cannot cope with the influx. Some reckon the capital could quadruple in size to 5m in the next decade. But its sewers are already overflowing, its slender streets gridlocked and choked with a smog laden with wood smoke and dried excrement. Bandit country Those returning to villages are scarcely better off. Some coming home to Bedak, a village in the Shomali plain north of Kabul, had their meagre possessions plundered by bandits along the way. The land they came back to was parched, the ancient irrigation systems blown apart during the fighting. The subtleties of harvesting the mulberries, grapes, apricots, plums, apples and walnuts on which Bedak traditionally depends have been forgotten after years in Pakistani refugee camps. That is, if the orchards can be attended at all: the margins of the village are pocked with landmines which continue to maim and kill with an alarming regularity in Bedak as in the rest of Afghanistan. To take one example, a kilometre from the Bagram airbase, and just off the main road, a crowd gathered recently as the bodies of three Afghan soldiers were carefully dragged clear. Two of the men were already dead, shredded from ankle to pelvis by a landmine or buried munitions. The third, blood-soaked and limp, was taken to the field hospital at Bagram for emergency surgery. Doctors there say they receive landmine victims daily. Most are children, like a young boy wrapped like a football with his arms and legs blown off. NGOs employing several thousand Afghans have for a decade been tracing and destroying the 7m landmines planted by the Russians and by factions in the ensuing civil wars, but they say it will take them another 12 years and $500m before most of them are removed. The humanitarian effort has been hampered by the three-year drought which, quite apart from war, has devastated much of the country, particularly the south. Rivers and reservoirs have run dry. Three-quarters of the country's livestock has died. Deciding which part of Afghanistan is most in need of attention is difficult at all times.most of the country remains inaccessible by road.but larger projects must deal with the fact that no one knows how many people actually live in Afghanistan. Estimates vary from 16m to 28m. A census this year aims to give a reliable picture, but it will take no account of ethnicity; the composition of the country is a powder keg no one wants to touch just yet. The Afghan government wants more aid but even if it were forthcoming, say experienced aid workers, it might not necessarily be absorbed. Think of Marjan, a lion in Kabul zoo, which survived malnutrition and bomb shrapnel only to die of indigestion from the first real meal it received after the fall of the Taliban. Relations between ministers and the UN are strained. Ministers complain that the UN, in particular, is wasting money on fancy cars and accommodation. .They could at least be a little grateful,. snaps back one UN official. Afghanistan has no economy to speak of. There is no effective banking system. The central government raises almost no revenue. Attempts by the government to kickstart small business are foiled by Soviet-educated bureaucrats who set up new obstacles to gain bribes. Warlords such as Ismail Khan, operating out of the western province of Herat, siphon off customs revenue at source, sending only a fraction of the receipts to Kabul. The proposed gas pipeline will not find any investors for some time. The country's valuable exports are either smuggled out (lapis, emeralds, artefacts) or illegal (opium). Some reckon opium poppies contribute $1.2 billion. Over 2,000 tonnes were thought to be harvested in 2002, a 15-fold increase on the Taliban years. A return to the 1970s, when Afghanistan grew enough staple crops to feed itself, is unlikely while high-yield poppies hold sway. Then there is the question of employment: jobs need to be created to keep men from their Kalashnikovs. A short-term solution is labour-intensive road and irrigation projects, a kind of New Deal for Afghanistan. The government hopes to rebuild 6,000km (3,750 miles) of roads over the next three years, employing tens of thousands of workers at $2 day. Underpinning everything is the question of security. Nothing can progress, all agree, unless the peace sticks. There are three partners to that: the kernel of a planned 70,000-strong Afghan national army whose regional commands will seek to disarm private militias; an international peacekeeping force of 5,000 watching over Kabul and its surroundings; and an American-led force of 9,000 operating out of air bases at Kandahar and Bagram and charged with eradicating terrorists. The Afghan army, the first step in a possible cantonal system with strong central institutions, is making slow progress. It will take years for it to counterbalance the commander culture that holds valleys hostage to the local gunslinger. The international peacekeepers, at present under Turkish command, have been a success but there are no plans to extend their reach to other cities. American forces are less popular. Confusion between their humanitarian and military work together with the swagger of their casually dressed so-called special forces.a seemingly sweeping term in Afghanistan.has alienated many aid workers and peacekeepers, whose role is more clearly mandated. Return of the Taliban Diplomats worry that the United States is wasting its time trying to counteract Iranian influence in Afghanistan's western provinces. Still, European intelligence sources in Kabul agree with their American counterparts that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are regrouping in camps on both sides of the border with Pakistan and are allied now with the battle-hardened fighters of a brutal former mujahaddin commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. All the more reason then to step up the reconstruction effort in parts of the country still sympathetic to the Taliban. Afghanistan was among the poorest and most tribal countries in the world in 1978. Twenty-three years of war and three of drought have left it in an even worse position. Infant mortality is higher, access to clean water, electricity, schooling, and health care all more limited than in 1978. The measure of success is modest but no less urgent. The collision of religious conservatism and limited education has been particularly disastrous for women. Not much has improved for them outside larger towns. Girls in villages are still discriminated against in almost every respect. Attempts to write a new Islamic law code which respects women could yet be thwarted by conservatives. A war in Iraq would distract western media from such injustices. But it will take the full attention and commitment of the international community, even without media interest, to make the peace in Afghanistan stick. *** -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
