If the U.S. Can’t Help Afghanistan, Who Can?

DO AB, AFGHANISTAN–Afghanistan has more infrastructure than it did in 2001. But Afghans also have less soul.

In many ways, Afghanistan was a more dangerous country nine years ago. There were more mines, more random acts of violence, warlordism everywhere. U.S. warplanes were bombing everything that moved. But, particularly in the Tajik-dominated north, there was also boundless optimism, a feeling that anything was possible. Good times might not be right around the corner–not exactly. But soon.

If anyone could fix Afghanistan, people thought, the United States could. The superpower colossus! A nation so rich that Afghans couldn’t begin to measure, much less really understand it. Rebuilding Afghanistan from the ground up would be chump change for mighty America.

The U.S. media did nothing to temper Afghan optimism. An October 2001 piece for Slate was typical: “Terrorism, the most ardent proponents of intervention argue, can’t be defeated without a complete reconstruction of Afghanistan’s government, infrastructure and society,” wrote Damien Cave. “In effect, what is needed is a 21st century version of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.” (Cave’s piece now reads like Cassandra. If only we’d followed the advice of a certain Joe Biden back then.) Nation building? We were all for it. Everyone–especially right-wing media types–promoted the “Marshall Plan for Afghanistan” meme.

Back then, Afghans were brave. When I needed a driver to take me to the front–the front! where bombs were falling by the thousands! where the Taliban were shooting at us from a hundred yards away!–I’d have a dozen guys vying for the job.

Now, alas, Afghans are utterly demoralized. The Taliban, in bands from 40 to 400 each, terrorize whole provinces. No one–not even the cops–dare travel outside the major cities. Where the suburbs begin, so does fear. Whenever I go somewhere, Afghan officials ask me: Where are my bodyguards? Where is my body armor? Why am I outside Kabul? “If you were a real journalist,” a police official told me, typically, “you’d be traveling in a truck full of U.S. soldiers with big guns.” (Funny me, I thought it was the other way around.)

I’m not afraid. But Afghans, those bad-ass Afghans, are. I looked for drivers everywhere–at taxi stands, through personal contacts, the UN and even the military. No one would take me outside a city. Price didn’t matter. In a country where a civil servant earns $30 a month, I offered drivers $500 a day–and got turned down. “It’s just too dangerous,” people kept saying–too dangerous to be seen with foreigners, and too dangerous without them too. (Messing with Westerners can cause trouble. In Afghanistan in 2010, everything causes trouble.)

Even allowing for the risk of Taliban attacks, Afghan highways are safer than they were in 2001. Thanks to paved roads, you can go faster and evade ambushes if need be. There are government gun nests every few kilometers. Unlike ’01, you don’t have American jets bombing everything that moves on Afghan highways. Yet Afghans are far less willing to take chances now than they were then. What happened?

The Afghan sense of what was possible has narrowed. When it came to bombs and high-tech gadgets for killing Afghans, the U.S. spent like there was no tomorrow. Meanwhile, the construction budget was less than one-half of one percent. Of which most was never spent. And what actually did get spent got stolen. For a while, Afghans concocted elaborate conspiracy theories to explain this insane set of misplaced priorities. They couldn’t believe that America the Superpower was so stupid, incompetent and/or corrupt.

They believe it now. And the effect has been devastating. “If America, with its unchallenged military power and massive material wealth, cannot or will not help Afghanistan,” a college student named Mohammed told me at the Friday Mosque in Herat, “who can? If they can’t build houses, who can? Why can’t they catch the Taliban?”

I have been hearing this a lot: from NGO workers who have been here for years, Western journalists, and Afghan citizens. We were Afghanistan’s last hope, and we blew it.

Now that political support for the war is waning in the U.S., the Obama Administration is looking to start pulling out next year. Actually, that isn’t adding to Afghans’ sense of hopelessness. They gave up on the U.S. years ago. Even if we were to stick around, people here say, they don’t believe that we’d suddenly start helping ordinary Afghans or lift a finger to provide basic security.

They’re screwed and they know it.

Killing Afghans’ hope for a better future may be an even more vile crime than the hundreds of thousands of Afghans the U.S. has murdered with bombs and bullets. As the U.S. stands by and watches, the security and economic situations continue to deteriorate. So Afghan psychology is reverting to survival skills learned during the Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban period. People are keeping their heads down, not taking chances.

Without optimism, after all, courage is illogical.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

Nine Years Later, Afghanistan Looks Much the Same: A Mess

HERAT, AFGHANISTAN–OK. The roads are impressive. Specifically, the fact that they exist. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, more than two decades of civil conflict had left the country bereft of basic infrastructure. Roads, bridges and tunnels had been bombed and mined. What didn’t blow up got ground down by tanks. Maintenance? Don’t be funny.

It took them too long to get started, but U.S. occupation forces deserve credit for slapping down asphalt. Brutal, bone-crushing ordeals that used to take four days can be measured in smooth, endless-grey-ribboned hours. Bridges have been replaced. Tunnels have been shored up. Most major highways and major city streets have been paved.

But that’s about it.

As of 2008 the U.S. claimed to have spent $1.3 billion on construction projects in Afghanistan. Where’d it all go? Roads don’t cost that much.

That’s the Big Question here. As far as anyone can tell, the only sign of economic improvement is a building boomlet: green and pink Arab-style glass-and-marble McMansions, guarded by AK-47-toting guards and owned by politically connected goons, are going up on the outskirts of every Afghan city. Most Afghans still live in squalor that compares unfavorably to places like Mumbai and Karachi. Beggars are everywhere. Most people haven’t gotten any help.

“Assistance is coming to Afghanistan, but we don’t know how it is spent, where it is spent,” Amin Farhang, the Afghan minister of economy, said at the time.

Afghan officials tell a similar story now. “When the Americans came after the 11th of September, we thought ‘good, they will rebuild our country,'” Ghulam Naider Nekpor, commander of Torgundi, a dusty town near the Turkmen border, told me. “Instead of help, they send soldiers. And not only that, they send weapons and money to the other side–Pakistan.” (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency finances and arms the Taliban.)

“We thought Americans were to help. Now we see they came to take, and take, and take from us.”

There are three big problems.

First: Instead of construction, money was wasted on troops. As of 2009–before the Obama surge–the Defense Department had blown through $227 billion in Afghanistan. Bear in mind, the World Bank estimated back in 2002 that the country could have been put on solid economic footing for about $18 billion.

“Please stop sending soldiers” is a standard plea here. “Can’t you send help instead of soldiers?”

The money we wasted on blowing up wedding parties and killing Al Qaeda Number Twos could have rebuilt Afghanistan 12 times over–or transformed it into a First World country.

As for those soldiers, they aren’t doing much. The Taliban range freely over the countryside, raiding and kidnapping at will. The Afghan National Police have ceded most of the country–everything outside the big cities–to the Taliban.

Ninety-nine percent of U.S. troops are either sitting on their butts on military bases surrounded by blast walls and concertina wire or fighting in remote areas along the sparsely populated border with Pakistan. There are supposedly 140,000 U.S. troops here. But most of the country never sees one.

Why aren’t Predator drones being used to take out the Taliban bike gangs that rule the countryside and attack motorists? Why don’t U.S. troops attack Taliban strongholds in the north, west and center of Afghanistan? If we’re going to spend a quarter of a trillion bucks on troops here, they ought to provide security.

Afghan cops say they know where the bad guys are. But they don’t even have the basic tools, like helicopters, needed to go after them. The U.S. military does–but they ignore Afghan requests for help.

Second problem: Corruption and American stupidity. They go together; stupid American organizations like US AID pick U.S. contractors or fly-by-night outfits connected to the Karzai regime and fail to audit their expenses. Bills are padded to spectacular extents. Work, when it gets done, is shoddy. Highways paved three years ago are already warped due to inferior roadbeds.

Moreover, work often takes place without consultation with, or the benefit of, locals. No one asks villagers what they want. Outsiders do the work; locals sit and watch. Areas that need a hospital get a road. Those that want a road get a school.

The Frontier Post, a Pakistani newspaper based in the Afghan border towns of Quetta and Peshawar, editorialized: “Afghans have little to be grateful to America for. It may have pumped in billions of dollars in aid–but only theoretically. Practically, much of that has been siphoned off and ploughed back by American contractors, making them rich while Afghans get only lollipops.”

Third: The Afghan people are last priority.

In a war for hearts and minds, there’s no place for the trickle-down approach. But that’s what the U.S.–when it makes a serious effort, which is rare–does. I wouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan in the first place, but if I were put in charge here I would deploy the “trickle up” approach: direct financial assistance to the people who need it most. Help subsistence farmers buy their own plots of land. Build new houses and apartment blocs for the homeless. Invite bright children to attend colleges and universities tuition-free. Above all, don’t let people starve.

We have spent $229 billion here. Meals cost less than a dollar. No Afghan should be starving–yet millions are.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)