Afghanistan, one year on, David Loyn

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

I caught up with a warlord in Kabul this week, exactly a year since he had been part of the victorious Northern Alliance forces who retook the city after the Americans had bombed the Taliban into dust. Haji Bari was only a mini-warlord really. He had been responsible for a section of the front line near the airbase at Bagram, and he was the BBC’s landlord in a bombed-out office building in Charikar, on the once-fertile Shomali plain north of Kabul, where I stayed for a while last year.

He is now General Haji Bari. He continues to make money out of visiting foreigners with construction contracts at the American airbase at Bagram, and rents out houses in Kabul. But he has remained in the army too, as the source of his continuing power and influence, hedging his bets like many Afghans – building for peace, while always ready for war. Amid the rubble of an army barracks in Kabul, with a ludicrous tin rocket sculpture the only object still standing amid the dust, he spoke with the fluency of a politician about the need for reconciliation and the building of a national army, ‘since the tribes and nations of Afghanistan should live together as brothers.’

All around us, his soldiers kept a watchful eye. Every week there is a car bomb or killing in Kabul. Despite the talk of forgiveness, if anything the atmosphere at this meeting in post-war Kabul was more tense than a year ago. Then, we had sat in canvas chairs on a front-line position for a rather bizarre TV interview, drinking tea, with the smoke from a recent Taliban rocket attack drifting over the abandoned vineyard on the narrow stretch between the two front lines. He told me then how he had wanted to be an engineer, but the war had intervened just before he could go to university. He had been fighting ever since. Now in his early 40s, Haji Bari is of that Afghan generation whose whole adult life has been spent at war.

‘When the aid comes…’

The most striking thing he said, amid the ruins of the barracks, which must have been occupied by a dozen armies in the last quarter of a century, was how he hoped to rebuild a new Afghanistan, ‘once the aid comes’.

I heard the same phrase from people in the bazaar, farmers, and taxi drivers. ‘When the aid comes…’ everything will be all right. Considering the amounts promised at the Afghan donors’ conference in Tokyo in January, and the grandiose scale of plans for Afghanistan, there is a wide gulf between international ambitions and perceptions on the ground. This was the first regime change of President Bush’s ‘war on terror’, the place where he would ‘work in the best traditions of George Marshall’, whose spending renewed the economies of Europe after the Second World War. It does not feel like that to Afghans a year on.

The mismatch between the promise and the visible reality on the ground was graphically illustrated in Wendell Steavenson’s reflections from Kabul in openDemocracy. As she found, there is a crisis of governance in Afghanistan; that is, there is none. It is easy to see where some of the money has gone. Just an hour’s drive north of Kabul lies the dried-out waterbed of an irrigation system which once brought the abundant waters from the high peaks of the Hindu Kush down to the Shomali plain. Years of neglect and wilful destruction by the Taliban have left it useless. International surveyors have made their money deciding what needs to be done, but the US$1.6 million needed to do the work has not yet emerged. The Chinese government, who built it in the first place, are said to be interested. But still the largest fertile agricultural area in Afghanistan remains dry and barren.

In such a large country, which never had a railway, the replacement of war-damaged roads has to be the most urgent development priority. But a year after the Taliban fell, the only worthwhile road building in the country is being done by gangs who came across the border in the west in the first days after the Taliban fell. That is, from Iran – one of the countries condemned by President Bush in his childish world view as being part of an ‘axis of evil’. The Iranians did not need major surveys done by people with laptops who had flown to the region by executive class to make their expert judgements. They needed trucks and tar and steamrollers.

In many places the infrastructure is much worse now than it was before the regime change. The Taliban had been improving the road between Kandahar in the south and Herat in the west before they were pushed out. The road-repair trucks were all destroyed in the American bombardment.

It would be wrong to say that international development is making no difference. The sight of just one girls’ school open would make it all worthwhile. The thousands of girls now getting their first formal education will create a social revolution in time. And the drastic decision to issue a new Afghan currency – exchanging it at 1000 to one for the discredited, and much counterfeited, old Afghani – is working too.

Concentrating on building institutions such as the Central Bank is a key part of development strategy put forward by Britain, now the dominant player in development thinking in Europe, partly through a near doubling of spending under New Labour, and partly through the personal interventions of the International Development Secretary, Clare Short. On a trip to Afghanistan earlier this month she heard a consistent message from every Afghan government minister she met that more money needs to go through the government, rather than through the usual international acronym soup – WFP, FAO, UNICEF, UNAMA – who have taken over all the best buildings in town, as usual after a peace deal.

The centre of Kabul is now awash with gleaming white Toyotas, and the only visible reconstruction in the city has involved the refurbishment of their offices. This contrast is more glaring if you take into account power and water supplies for Afghans, which are worse than they were under the Taliban. All these international agencies do fine work of course, and many are employing Afghans to head up key departments. But a year on, the government looks stillborn, and will remain so without more funding.

Aid, friends, refugees: the wrong kind of everything

The big donors ask how much more funding the government can absorb, and the picture is not a clear one. President Hamid Karzai has done little to shake off the widespread view that he is just a convenient figurehead, a Pashtun puppet imposed by the Americans to placate Afghanistan’s biggest tribe, the tribe that backed the Taliban. Beneath him is an administration where Tajiks from the north-east hold all the key positions. Some were directly involved in the murderous tussle for power in Kabul in the early 1990s, which destroyed more of the city than the Russians before them, or the Taliban after them.

There is some evidence backing up a rumour that the Defence Minister, General Fahim, has now been given a specific warning by the Americans, after widespread suspicion that he was involved in the assassination of a prominent rival politician. I suggested to a western diplomat that Fahim was just biding his time, strengthening his forces with international training before going to war again to take it all for himself. The icy response was ‘I think you are out of date on that’. The implication was that the international community now believes that General Fahim does not now represent a threat to the established order, and has accepted American instructions.

But what’s to be done about the huge expectations raised in the minds of large numbers of civil servants, one estimate is 340,000, who expect to remain in their posts? Some have stayed in their jobs throughout, shaving or growing their beards, and wearing western or Afghan dress depending on who was in power. But many are not being paid at all, and more worryingly, many soldiers are not being paid either. Is it any wonder that roadblocks extorting money from travellers, which were all stopped under the Taliban, are returning again?

The main problem is that Afghanistan has not received enough cash. It languishes at the bottom of the pile of four other recent post-conflict countries – Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Rwanda – receiving just $75 per person per year, against an average of $250 for the other four.

It gets worse. According to Care Afghanistan, who researched these figures, only 40% of the aid is going to long-term development, while the rest is for short-term feeding programmes; although in demanding reconstruction funds at the Tokyo conference, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan specifically said that the new money pledged should be ‘separate from and additional to’ immediate humanitarian assistance. Put simply, Afghanistan is getting too little of the right kind of aid.

This matters because, without appropriate aid, Afghanistan will not get the right kind of refugees to return. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have returned in hope, but many have gone back across the border to Pakistan again, disillusioned by the pace of progress. Thousands have made the trip several times, just to pick up the small pack of goodies, a bucket, plastic sheeting and so on, inflating the UN official total of 1.7 million people. But each of these refugees who have come to have a look, and then gone back again, represents a failure of international policy.

There is one crossroads in Kabul where you can see more women’s faces than elsewhere, in a country where most still prefer the all-enveloping burqa. The unlikely meeting-place is the centre of a street where there are many shops selling bathroom fittings. The women who gather there, the first pioneers of the new Afghanistan, will only remain in the country if the schools and roads and hospitals improve, attracting back the next and most prized returners, the Afghans who have been educated in the west and now want to rebuild their country. But change is too slow for now.

As always, there is no problem in funding military priorities. Near Kandahar, the American airbase has a busy atmosphere. There’s a barbed-wire prison area to hold suspects on their way to Guantanamo Bay. Heavy-lift Chinook helicopters chunter into the air, dropping men and supplies on their endless hunt for Arabs in the mountains. Smaller war-fighting Apaches dart between them as huge transport planes come and go all the time. There is no expense spared here.

But in town, off limits to American soldiers, I visited the hole in the ground where the Taliban’s religious police once dictated their black-and-white morality. The regime may have gone, but it still has a lot of supporters. Whisper it quietly, because no regime in history had so few foreign friends, but even now a surprising number still support the Taliban. The battle for hearts and minds is being fought among schools, and factories and bathroom-fitting shops.

The international community is not fighting it with any urgency.

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Afghanistan, one year on, David Loyn