“When I first got there,” explains Taman, “money had been allocated, projects decided on, and a lot of people just said go. But go back to first principles. Do they know how to build a road? I went out to the small districts and sat around with very sincere Afghans and asked whether anyone had ever built an asphalt road, and no one had, including the person in charge of the project. They will tell you they can do it and sincerely believe they can, but they are building an asphalt road in a mountain community that is under snow half the year, without any real equipment.
“I can show you pictures of tin boxes in huts, and the people stirring asphalt,” she continues. “The politicians want to know you’ve built at some incredible rate, and no one is standing up and saying this is impossible.”
Some deep thinkers who’d made a few too many visits to their local living-history village suggested stone roads as an option—after all, there is a lot of stone in Afghanistan, and it would mean employment for the locals. But the governor of Badakhshan province, where one such road was to be built, found this scheme humiliating. “Is this the economic future you brought us, having our women and children cutting stone all day?” he asked. “This is not what you would do in your country, so why are you asking us?”
The road-building experiment proved to be a fiasco. In Bamiyan province, the wrong kind of stone was used—and even if it had been suitable, stone roads require true skill to build. The drainage ditches overflowed, and the base washed away in the first rainfall. By winter’s end, it was impossible to bicycle, walk, or take a donkey along the road. “I took a real bruising trying to represent the interests of the governor of Bamiyan against some very powerful donors who romanticize things,” Taman says. “I was shown a pretty documentary of women cutting stone, but would you ask that of your daughter?” After a similar project in Badakhshan failed, Taman was summoned before the governor and local mayor, both six feet five inches tall and very angry. She was told, in no uncertain terms, to dismantle the road.
Eight billion dollars over four years is not a huge amount of money in a land of 30 million inhabitants that has been laid to waste by decades of war and the ravages of drought. (With only a slightly larger population, Canada spends the same amount annually on the federal child tax credit alone.) The 4,500,000 refugees who returned after the Soviet occupation ended in 1989 found their property destroyed, their livelihoods gone. These people are still waiting to resume their lives. They want hospitals and schools, farm equip-ment and electric power. And they want these things quickly.
But the fledgling government, enveloped in a miasma of clan and ethnic interests, egos and rivalries, is unable to serve the entire country. The populace doesn’t have the expertise and the ngos don’t have enough skilled engineers or administrators to run large-scale programs. A Washington Post investigation last year found corruption and inefficiency in US reconstruction programs that resulted in millions of wasted dollars. Roofs of schools and clinics in remote areas were designed using trusses too heavy to lift without a crane, then redesigned with materials too light to bear Afghan snows. The Post also noted that usaid is required under the Americans With Disabilities Act to build wheelchair-accessible structures, no matter how mountainous and remote the location. But every accusation in the Washington Post report was deflected from one party to the next until it rested on the shoulders of “inexperienced workmen.”
At the London Conference on Afghanistan, held early in 2006, sixty-one nations and international bodies pledged another $10.5 billion (US) over the next five years. “We made the mistake once before of leaving Afghanistan, and not only did Afghans pay for it, Americans paid for it on September 11,” said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “We’re not going to make that mistake again.” But the dollars donated are only half those requested by the Afghan government, whose five-year goals include a functioning justice system in all provinces, 40 percent of villages connected to the road system, and an annual 3-percent reduction in the number of people living on less than $1 a day. (Canada offered no funds beyond those already pledged.) An annex to the agreement acknowledges the problems of aid disbursement, speaking of “transparency and accountability” and the rationalization of donor activities “to maximise cost-effectiveness.” But with few specifics on how to purge the problems bedevilling aid efforts, and a planning horizon of five years in a region where a generation-long commitment is needed, will the latest push for results fare any better?
More likely, many donors will throw up their hands and declare the situation untenable when they hear reports of rampant corruption, feigning shock and horror, and ignoring the plethora of examples of Western graft, such as Jack Abramoff and the sponsorship scandal. Larry Taman suggests that an Afghan judge presiding over an important case could be bought for $5,000, a hundred times his monthly salary—the equivalent of offering a North American judge $1.5 million—with little chance of being caught. And setting up a strict and fair bidding system, wherein a contractor is not allowed to factor in the percentage he must render to the local commander, means one less base layer under a road or an unsafe foundation for a school. Permission to bribe is not the answer, but prohibition won’t make problems disappear, either.
Foreign powers are attempting to fashion a modern democracy in a land without basic institutions. Human rights require the rule of law, the rule of law requires judges, judges require security, security requires roads, roads require demining. And Afghanistan, in a race against time and against forces bent on upsetting Western-inspired reconstruction efforts, does not have the luxury of following a blueprint, a rational sequence. It must, in a very real sense, do things all at once. Yet the many international chiefs and agendas, groups and subgroups have precious few clear mechanisms for making decisions, and no one presumes that Afghanistan can count on them over the long haul. Vaccination programs are improving, children are returning to school, and sixty-eight women sit in the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of parliament. But major donors, unlike those who send in radios, computers, and vehicles without operating budgets to maintain them, need to make a long-term commitment.
The most obvious scars of the West’s disregard are the ubiquitous rag-wrapped cripples. Throughout the 1980s, the Russians ringed each of Afghanistan’s main cities and most major towns with land mines. They placed them along the main supply line from Kabul to the Soviet border and around military “hard points” throughout the country. Power plants, irrigation channels, grazing areas, farmlands, and footpaths—nothing was exempt. Rival militia factions buried anti-tank mines, booby traps, and yet more land mines during the civil war, and later, the US contributed unexploded ordnance in the form of cluster bombs scattered in air raids. Anti-personnel mines, manufactured all over the world and no bigger than hockey pucks, litter the countryside and come in more than fifty different varieties. The “bounding frag,” for example, jumps almost a metre before it explodes, spraying hot, jagged shrapnel into the stomach of an adult or the face of a child.
