From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Dec 08 2002 - 13:59:25 MST
>From the New York Times, Sunday December 8, 2002
Old Fears in the New Afghanistan
By CHRISTINA LAMB
> ABUL, Afghanistan. These days in Kabul there is a buzz in the air: new
> magazines and newspapers launching almost daily; film directors making
> movies; artists returning from exile; women clicking through the streets
> on high heels, flashing polished nails and made-up faces on their way to
> work; men sitting cross-legged on the floors of teahouses watching
> television and discussing the news. Some are even calling it the Paris of
> Central Asia. This is how life after the Taliban was supposed to be. As
> President Bush keeps pointing out to the people of Iraq, the new
> Afghanistan is a model for what their lives will look like after Saddam
> Hussein has been removed.
>
> Yet a year after the overthrow of the Taliban and imposition of a
> Western-backed government, there has been little improvement in the lives
> of most Afghans, few of whom possess televisions or fine clothes or care
> about the luxury of free speech. These people spend their days struggling
> to feed their children on an average annual income of $75.
It escapes those with the ideological perspective of the
New York Times that the rich always get the goodies first,
e.g., VCRs, big-screen TVs, and so on, and that the revenue
thus generated prepares the way for lower prices and mass
production. Entrepreneurs need more reassurance than vague
promises or threats from the Central Committee.
> Western promises that Afghanistan would never again be forgotten collide
> with reality.
Of course, to a liberal "promises" can mean nothing less than
perfection, and an implicit need for socialist control that
guarantees come hell or high water that everyone will be
"taken care of", if it takes violence or not.
Now comes the usual appeal to our heart strings:
> In the general ward of Kabul's main children's hospital
> sick children lie three to a bed, one oxygen tank passed among them.
> According to the hospital administrator, children have died on the
> operating table because the oxygen failed when the power went out, as it
> frequently does. The hospital has no backup generator.
>
> Of course, $1.8 billion in foreign aid has poured into Afghanistan this
> year, but there is little evidence of it. Much of the money seems to have
> gone toward gleaming new offices and air-conditioned jeeps for the 1,025
> United Nations agencies and international aid groups that have taken over
> many of the villas in the Wazir Akbar Khan suburb where Osama bin Laden's
> Arab acolytes used to dwell.
All the usual corruption especially prevalent where
the press can't do a proper job (too few subscribers
and too little representative government) can always
be laid at the feet of the western imperialists and
their lackies.
> Some Afghans have gotten jobs as translators and drivers and some are
> getting rich by charging outrageous rents,
a.k.a. known as "obscene profits", the way that healthy
vibrant economies usually signal enterprising individuals
to get moving and get rich by supplying more of the same
> but for most people the "U.N.
> Effect" has been an overload of an at best sporadic electricity supply
> and a rise in living costs. In fact, the Aschiana school, a highly
> regarded program for street children, is likely to lose its building. The
> landlord can earn far more in rent from a foreign aid organization that
> wants to convert it into a staff guesthouse.
Signal: create more opportunities to rent to rich foreigners
(or, when you run out of them, the nouveau rich among the locals)
> The Taliban may no longer be running the state but Mullah Omar, their
> enigmatic one-eyed leader, is believed to wander the mountains, and many
> of the mullahs who inspired the movement were recently elected to
> Parliament in neighboring Pakistan. The moral police no longer stalk the
> streets but the fear remains, which is why so few women have cast off
> their burkas.
Again, perfection has not been obtained yet, and it can be
only the fault of the western imperialists, as usual.
> In Wardak province, only an hour outside the capital,
> several schools for girls have been burned to the ground in the last two
> months. In Kabul last week, I spent a morning at the new beauty school in
> the Ministry for Women, chatting to giggling women trying out hairstyles
> on one another, creating ringlets with rollers fashioned from mulberry
> twigs. Yet when they opened the door for me to leave, the ministry's male
> guards shouted abuse, calling them whores and worse.
All repressive cultural traditions would be liquidated if
this society were being run by the right sort of leftist.
Annotations to the remainder of the article are left to
those who have a modicum of understanding of free market
economics or who appreciate how many generations it
invariably takes to turn around atavistic traditions.
> Any sense of political stability is tenuous at best. Afghanistan's
> president, Hamid Karzai, wields so little power outside the capital that
> he is spoken of as the mayor of Kabul. Inside the palace he now has
> round-the-clock protection from Western bodyguards. They drip with
> machine guns and machine pistols, both to protect Mr. Karzai and to
> impress the Afghans, who carry rifles as casually as the English carry
> umbrellas.
>
> President Karzai's chief concern and the one that prompts him at nearly
> every opportunity to appeal for more foreign peacekeeping troops to range
> outside the capital is the threat to his authority posed by warlords.
> Principal among these are Ismail Khan, from Herat in the west, and Abdul
> Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek general from the north, who control vast
> stretches of the countryside, not to mention the lucrative customs posts
> at the borders. In an interview last week, Mr. Karzai told me that while
> Mr. Khan is earning more than $1 million a day in customs revenues, the
> Afghan government does not have money to pay the salaries of teachers
> (just $16 a month).
>
> Such a plea does not spring easily from Mr. Karzai, the fiercely
> independent Afghan leader, but it comes from the certain belief that if
> foreign troops leave, the country will plunge back into the chaos it
> faced in 1992. In those days, the mujahedeen who had fought together to
> oust the Russians and then formed a government, split into groups and
> turned their guns on one another.
>
> Anyone wanting a glimpse of what a lawless Afghanistan might look like
> need only take a drive along Dar-ul-Aman. Nearly 80 years ago, Robert
> Byron, the writer, described the avenue with its rows of tall,
> white-stemmed poplars as one of the most beautiful in the world. In the
> early 1990's, fighting among many of the factions now represented in Mr.
> Karzai's government left the road in ruins. Today, there's not a tree in
> sight.
>
> On a wintry afternoon last week, I sat in the destroyed gardens of the
> tomb of Babur, the Muslim emperor, and watched the pale sun disappear
> behind the Hindu Kush. Young boys were flying kites from the flat roofs
> of the mud houses that cling like swallows' nests to the hillsides; young
> girls, who a year ago had not been able to go to school, were returning
> from classes in their new red and black uniforms, their heads held high.
>
> Suddenly the quiet of a day winding down was disturbed by a loud rumble.
> One of the caretakers of the bullet-ridden tomb pointed up at two B-52's.
> As I watched the planes tracing vapor trails across the sky, I wondered
> if the people of Iraq might soon be witnessing a similar scene above some
> desert town. The caretaker seemed to be having similar thoughts. Funny,
> he said. Throughout history we Afghans have always fought outsiders. Now
> we are frightened they will leave us.
>
>
> Christina Lamb, world affairs correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph of
> London, is author of "The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage
> Through Afghanistan."
Lee
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