Sat, Nov 15, 2003 page5

• Afghans feel let down, but still have hope

  FORGOTTEN PROMISES Britain promised to rebuild Afghanistan once the Taliban were ousted but outside of Kabul, the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda shows no sign of ending anytime soon

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  So after the dust had settled following the attacks on the World Trade Center, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a pledge to the people of Afghanistan -- a country that was about to be attacked by US-led forces.

  "To the Afghan people, we make this commitment. We will not walk away as the West has so often done before. If the Taliban regime changes, we will work with you to make sure its successor is one that is broad-based, that unites all ethnic groups and offers some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence," he said.

  Two years after the Taliban were chased from the streets of Kabul, the capital bustles. Roads are packed with cars and carts. In the city's dusty bazaars, trade is fierce. Around half of the women walking along the streets are still draped in burkas. But there are also street skaters, sliding swiftly through the traffic jams.

  

  An elderly Afghan women sits in the main graveyard of Kabul while praying at the grave of her husband on Thursday, the second anniversary of ousting of the Taliban regime.

  PHOTO: AFP

  In a broom-cupboard music shop, crammed with cassettes of winking Bollywood starlets, Forshgha Bazena laughed when asked if his life had improved.

  The Taliban banned music, forcing Bazena to sell tapes of Muslim prayers and Taliban chants: "Which are like songs," he explained, "only without the music."

  On a good day, he sold 100 cassettes; now he sells 3,000.

  "There's no one who isn't glad the Taliban are gone," Bazena said.

  "Even those who aren't making money have peace," he said.

  For those in the capital that may be true. But outside the city there is a different story to tell, a story that leads some British soldiers to dub their mission here "Operation Forgotten."

  While the capital is protected by a 5,700-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), under NATO's control, much of the rest of the country is in turmoil.

  Observers say regime change has no more brought an end to conflict in Afghanistan than in Iraq. Indeed in Afghanistan there are now two conflicts -- a continuing war pitting the US-led coalition against the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and a flickering civil war, which the coalition's invasion interrupted.

  In recent months Afghanistan has seen its worst violence, on both fronts, for nearly two years. Hitting-and-running into the south from their safe havens in Pakistan, the black-turbaned Taliban are rallying. American officials report more attacks on the 11,500 coalition troops in the past three months than the previous 12.

  A recent battle in southern Zabol province featured 200 Taliban fighters. On the mosque doors of Kandahar, the Taliban's former stronghold, edicts forbidding "moments of happiness and other occasions containing music" appear overnight. The Taliban's white flag flutters in outlying villages.

  The Taliban have reason to celebrate. When they ambush coalition troops, they invariably come away bloodied. But with a new and repellent tactic, they appear to be scoring a major hit. In March, Taliban fighters shot dead an El Salvadorean Red Cross worker in southern Oruzgan province. In the past three months, 12 local aid workers have been murdered, causing most agencies to withdraw from southern Afghanistan.

  "It's a brilliant guerrilla tactic," said Gorm Pederson, whose Danish non-governmental organization, Dakaar, lost four aid workers to a Taliban attack in September.

  "How will we know when it's safe to return?" he said.

  On Tuesday a UN office in Kandahar was gutted by a car bomb, raising fears of a bombing spree, as recently predicted by the UN.

  Northern Afghanistan is more secure, but only just. From Herat to Jalalabad, west to east, the warlords again hold sway. The central government of President Hamid Karzai appears powerless against them.

  Last week, Karzai ordered two of the hardest warlords, including his former deputy defense minister, General Abdurrashid Dostum, to Kabul, after a recent tank battle between their militias cost 100 lives. They refused to come. Their grip on northern Afghanistan is largely the result of the US policy of paying the warlords to fight its battles.

  When they drove the Taliban out, the US had no idea who to replace them with. As in Iraq, the US refused to countenance UN peacekeepers until chaos was upon it: the UN Security Council mandated ISAF only two months ago.

  But besides the US' leading role, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have little in common. Almost all the international community supported the bombing of Afghanistan and promised to support its reconstruction. Yet those promises appear to be forgotten.

  Though mandated to expand out of Kabul, ISAF cannot maintain the complement it needs to patrol the city.

  "The status quo will lead to failure ... The government's remit extends across the whole country, but its writ extends only as far as we go -- Kabul," said the force's Canadian deputy commander, Major General Andrew Lesley.

  "We need 12,000 to 15,000 soldiers, and there are a million soldiers in NATO. What the hell are these countries doing? It's a question of international will," he said.

  Excluding Canada, ISAF's remaining 30 contributors do not muster 4,000 men. And manpower is not the only problem -- money is also short.

  Even allowing for an underestimate of the cost of reconstruction, the donor response has been pitiful. Around US$4.5 billion in grants -- the original estimate -- has been soaked up by emergency humanitarian needs. There has been almost no reconstruction.

  US President George W. Bush recently vowed to complete the single exception, a US-funded road from Kabul to Kandahar, by Christmas. But local progress is slowing after a Turkish road worker was kidnapped by the Taliban last week.

  Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, one of a handful of Afghan politicians of international standing, estimates the cost of reconstruction at US$30 billion. So far, around US$2 billion has been pledged.

  Meanwhile Afghanistan's life expectancy remains at 43 years and only 13 percent of its 26 million people have access to clean water. By contrast US$33 billion has so far been pledged to rebuilding Iraq, where life expectancy is 61 years, and where 85 percent of its 24 million people can access clean water.

  Yet, however small the new government's writ, and however huge its obstacles, Afghans have one frail reason for hope. Exhausted by war, and led, however nominally, by an Afghan government, unlike Iraqis, they believe in their new state.

  Though few teachers are paid regularly, and none well, 4.2 million children are now in school, almost half of them girls. Even among the 2 million, mostly destitute, refugees who have returned from Iran and Pakistan there is belief.

  On a rocky slope, high above Kabul, Fudama Mohammed, a refugee newly returned from Pakistan, ticked off his worries. He had no food, no water, no house, no job, and the police had stolen the stakes he had bought to make a roof for his lean-to shelter.

  "You go and tell the president that, and you tell him to come here and sort things out," he said.

  "We're a resilient people, we have never been dominated," Ghani said. "And that makes us strong."
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