What's the matter with Afghanistan?

this nyt article about afghanistan president hamid karzai's speech yesterday gives me the opportunity to say something i've been wanting to say for the past several weeks...

read the excerpt first...

President Hamid Karzai strongly criticized the British and American conduct of the war here on Friday, insisting in an interview that his government be given the lead in policy decisions.

Mr. Karzai said that he wanted American forces to stop arresting suspected Taliban and their sympathizers, and that the continued threat of arrest and past mistreatment were discouraging Taliban from coming forward to lay down their arms.

He criticized the American-led coalition as prosecuting the war on terrorism in Afghan villages, saying the real terrorist threat lay in sanctuaries of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

The president said that civilian casualties, which have dropped substantially since last year, needed to cease completely. For nearly two years the American-led coalition has refused to recognize the need to create a trained police force, he said, leading to a critical lack of law and order.

The comments came as Mr. Karzai is starting to point toward re-election next year, after six years in office, and may be part of a political calculus to appear more assertive in his dealings with foreign powers as opponents line up to challenge him.

But they also follow a serious dip in his relations with some of the countries contributing to the NATO-led security force and the reconstruction of Afghanistan, and indicate that as the insurgency has escalated, so, too, has the chafing among allies.

Complaints have been rising for months among diplomats and visiting foreign officials about what is seen as Mr. Karzai’s weak leadership, in particular his inability to curb narcotics trafficking and to remove ineffective or corrupt officials. Some diplomats have even expressed dismay that, for lack of an alternative, the country and its donors may face another five years of poor management by Mr. Karzai.

it's interesting that the writer points out that karzai is looking toward next year's elections but she fails to mention that his speech was given yesterday, two days before afghanistan national independence day... i wouldn't have known about it if i didn't happen to be here, but, then again, i'm not a "journalist" for the nyt either...

ever since i arrived here in kabul a month ago, i've been soaking up sights, conversations and observations just as fast as i can... whenever i'm in a new place, i immediately become a sponge and my learning curve goes up exponentially... then, when i've got enough raw material, i begin processing what i'm experiencing...

this is the first serious conflict/war zone i've been in since i arrived in vietnam forty years ago this coming july... before i got here, i was intensely curious to see what had changed about the dynamics of being in a hostile area in the intervening time and what remained the same... interestingly enough, my curiosity in that waned immediately upon my arrival and was replaced by something altogether different...

from the time i emerged from immigration and customs at kabul international airport and was driven in to town, i've been struck by just how virtually nonexistent the basic infrastructure is in the city... (i haven't been outside of kabul, so, right now, that's my only point of reference...) roads are shit... water and sewer is shit... the kabul river that flows through town is nothing but a sewage canal cum garbage dump with stone wall embankments... municipally-supplied electric power is spotty at best, most everybody has a back-up diesel electric power generator and most of the compounds housing internationals are powered exclusively by generators...

landline telephone service is a joke... there are 4-5 cellphone providers and they have done a relatively decent job of blanketing the country with service... thank god, because, without them, telephone communication wouldn't exist... internet service is provided by satellite downlink providers who beam service via microwave to those who can afford their usurious rates... needless to say, international organizations are paying through the nose... i know internet cafes are relatively plentiful but, because i'm not allowed to get out and about without an armed escort, i can't speak to that first-hand...

the pollution is ghastly, combining the exhaust of dense traffic with dust from mostly unpaved roads, the exhaust of the generators, the smoke and fumes of the wood and kerosene that's used for heating and cooking, and the general dust of a very dry climate... the city infrastructure might have been adequate at one time, pre-war, 35 years ago, for a population of 250,000 max., but now there's 5 million people trying to survive here...

food, fuel and basic supplies are mostly brought in over one highway from pakistan... afghanistan produces maybe 30% of its own food and much of that is seasonal... now that the taliban and pakistani militants are attacking that route in order to disrupt supply distribution and now that pakistan is restricting food exports (as are so many other countries), afghanistan is in a world of hurt...

i've found myself thinking (never a safe thing for me to do) over the past few weeks that, one, the u.s. has been here in afghanistan since almost immediately post-9/11, late 2001/early 2002... it's now 2008... question - WTF have we been doing here...?!?!?!? the additional question that springs to mind is, "ok, mr. smart guy, so what would YOU have done if YOU had been the BIG DECIDER in 2001/2002 and YOU got to tell everybody what to do now that the U.S. conquered itself another country...?" i came up with my own answers, but i've been asking some of my afghan counterparts the same question just to see what they think about it... interestingly enough, they agree with me (or i agree with them, whatever)...

i don't think any of this is necessarily rocket science... what i would have done immediately following the fall of the taliban, just as soon as the city was reasonably secured, is to set to work on these things, in priority order...

• restoring and extending full electric service throughout the city

• reconstructing and/or restoring clean water supplies and sewer service

• setting up and/or restoring basic health care services

• repairing and paving the roads and insuring adequate public transportation

• insuring adequate food supply and distribution

• restoring and/or setting up public education

once the above was taken care of for kabul, the focus could then move to the secondary cities and towns, moving down the main highways in concentric rings, eventually covering the major populations centers of the entire country...

what's so hard about that...? surely, the billions we've dumped into afghanistan and iraq would have covered all of that many times over... now it's six years later and very little of it has been done... i've talked to a number of folks here and they all say the same thing... if people were getting their basic needs met, nobody would be giving the time of day to the taliban or any other insurgents or drug lords, period...

what's not to understand...?

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