Might is Wrong

The trees are almost all gone, cut for fuel long ago, and Kabul, once described by the Mughal Emperor Babur as a city of gardens and promenades, is, like its occupants, the dull, dun colour of dust. Christopher Alexander watches as men in shalwar kameez jostle through the crowds or drink sweet tea sold from roadside stands as they chatter with friends, adding their voices to the endless din. Street vendors hawk fried pastries, cellphone plans, and Pringles chips, while limbless children and destitute women in sky-blue burkas beg for coins.

At the airport, the only brightness had been in the vivid red stones demarcating an area still to be cleared of mines. Now, as he crosses the ancient city in an armoured car, Alexander gapes at bodies crammed so tightly into dilapidated vans that it seems the doors might burst, spilling the passengers out into the mayhem. Every second car is a 1960s Toyota Corolla taxi, and the cabbies, frustrated by the constant holdups, veer into oncoming traffic as a stream of cyclists weaves recklessly through the lines. Hummers and horse carts vie for space. White Land Cruisers carrying UN officials and the black 4Runners favoured by the military attempt to bluster their way past the chaos. At each intersection the aggressor claims the right of way. An occasional policeman waves his hands in an attempt at order and, every so often, stops a car to demand baksheesh. “Traffic jams,” says President Hamid Karzai, dubbed “the chicest man on the planet” by Gucci’s creative director, “are a sign of prosperity, and this is what my government has managed to achieve.”

More than three million people live in this capital city. To its north lie the breathtaking mountains of the Hindu Kush. From this valley Alexander the Great staged his conquest of India, Genghis Khan decimated the land on his way west, and the Scythians, the Parthians, the Mughals, the British, and the Russians all descended from the mountains or the skies to colour and conquer Kabul and its troubled locale. It is well to remember that while most were accommodated, many were eventually betrayed. Today, as Canadian soldiers, diplomats, and development-assistance personnel move ever deeper into Afghanistan with the new strategy of delivering aid, at gunpoint when necessary, the lesson remains relevant: any would-be occupier, no matter how benevolent, must quickly prove itself or be violently deposed.

It is August 2003, and Christopher Alexander is about to take up the position of ambassador to Afghanistan in Canada’s first permanent embassy there. Though thirty-four years old and six feet three inches tall, Alexander retains a certain boyish quality. His fair skin and the lock of blond hair falling perfectly across his brow conjure up a determined Christopher Robin about to don his Big Boots and explore the Hundred Acre Wood. But this Christopher Robin has more than fresh-faced charm to work with. He brings with him 1,900 Canadian troops, constituting almost 40 percent of the International Security Assistance Force (isaf), and a $150-million development program for the coming year alone.

Ottawa’s 3d mantra is tattooed on Alexander’s brain: Diplomacy, Defence, and Development, a long-term approach intended to see Afghanistan stand on its own as a stable and, it is hoped, friendly nation, no longer a refuge for those who would harm the West. In following that approach, he must coordinate the representatives of three policy strands. Like a magician manipulating his linking rings, he must keep the elements together yet apart, never compromising their integrity. Mired exclusively in their own concerns, security experts may never speak to development specialists, while diplomats can allow political expectations to soar to heights the military command can never fulfill. Constant consultation, on the other hand, can lead to blurred objectives and gridlock.

An estimated $8 billion (US) in aid has poured into Afghanistan in the last four years. In addition to embassy staff, 3,000 Western workers and thousands more from surrounding countries now inhabit the land. Among them are 300 or so Canadians who are salted through the UN family of organizations, the Red Cross, the imf, and a host of ngos. Donor countries have promised the riches of the modern world, but reconstruction barely crawls forward. Instead of the promised ninety-six American-financed clinics and schools scheduled for completion by September 2004, only nine clinics and two schools had passed inspection by November 2005. Foreigners may bring free speech and democratic elections, but such things come with flat-screen TVs and Parisian perfumes displayed in the storefronts of a land where malnutrition runs rampant. Today’s inhabitants see open sewers and luxury hotels, mud houses and satellite phones. At the Kabul Golf Club, the water hazard is bone dry, the caddies are armed, and the club pro was once tortured by the Taliban. Life expectancy in Afghanistan remains fixed at forty-four years.

The salaries of the foreign elite and their employees have caused stampeding inflation, and the new upper and middle classes enjoy a bubble economy light years from the realities faced by the general population. Resentment is the result. In 2004, Planning Minister Ramazan Bashardost claimed that of the 2,355 non-governmental organizations registered in the country, 1,935 were incapable of carrying out their work. “All our people know that the ngos are spending money on themselves. They have top-model cars and rent expensive houses.” President Karzai distanced himself from these remarks and Bashardost subsequently resigned, but his words echoed the frustrations of many Afghans, and the September elections returned him to the National Assembly. His campaign strategy was to pitch a tent in Kabul’s Shar-i-Nau Park and megaphone his thoughts on foreign corruption and the lack of accountability to the populace. “There is an occupation, not a liberation,” Bashardost told a Reuters reporter. “There is not change in a good way, there is not a change in our lives.”

Wages for government employees sit at about $50 (US) a month, much higher than for other occupations. And it is quite typical for a single breadwinner to be supporting a large extended family. There is a strong obligation to look after one’s own, and no welfare system exists to catch those who stumble. Consequently, many drivers employed by the UN or foreign governments are doctors or academics earning many times their former salaries—people now lost to the reconstruction effort.

Such perverse economics of labour are compounded by the attitude of those foreigners who are oblivious to culture and tradition. In a recent issue of Afghan Scene, a magazine aimed exclusively at the foreign contingent, a young aid worker writes of this “fecal paradise” in her relationships column: “There I was at 3 a.m. atop a mine-infested mountain in mid-winter Kabul with a bottle of [Moët], getting friendly with a delightfully cute French doctor under the stars. There’s something deliciously dangerous about that, mostly because if the mines hadn’t blown us up, the locals would have stoned us for getting jiggy-with-it in public.”

In 2005, the United Nations Development Programme (undp) released a chilling report on Afghanistan. It described the worst education system in the world, maternal mortality rates sixty times higher than in industrialized countries, and one out of five children dying before the age of five from diseases that are 80 percent preventable. Afghan women, held back by “traditional mentalities,” are caught in a web of “poverty, malnutrition, exclusion from public life, rape, violence, poor health care, illiteracy, and forced marriage.”