How about jobs...? In Afghanistan as in the U.S...

several colleagues and i have been working on a project that could potentially create thousands of jobs and bring much-needed security and stabilization to an area in the west of the country but the bureaucracy and a seemingly insurmountable wall of red tape have prevented us from getting things sprung loose and moving... it's this kind of crap that has been largely at fault for why afghanistan, heading into the 9th year of u.s. occupation, is still a pathetic mess... infrastructure is a joke and the people, rightly so, are growing more frustrated and desperate by the day... the fact that they are able to retain a sense of humor and can still be friends with us americans is a testament to their strength of character despite the untold horrors that have been visited them over the years at the hands of one foreign power after another and, most sadly of all, even from their own countrymen...

here's a shopkeeper from qarabagh, a small town near the u.s. bagram airbase north of kabul...

"If you look around, you see nothing but jobless people," said Qari Imam, 30, who sells children's clothing in the market here. "A lot of people who join the Taliban are jobless, too. If you want to stop the fighting, don't send us more troops; build us more factories."

it's the same wherever i go... people just want to be able to live with a little peace and quiet and have enough of a livelihood to be able to put food on the table and clothes on the backs of their children... not too much to ask, now is it...?

Submit To Propeller
Tweet