Development News from Afghanistan

Lalit K. Jha

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 26 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Former US president Jimmy Carter said on Thursday the Bush administration’s abandoning Afghanistan for an unnecessary attack on Iran was unfortunate.

Speaking to reporters at the UN headquarters here before meeting Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Carter said: After the 9/11 tragedy, I have supported one of the rare times in my life a military operation in Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaeda and to capture Osama bin Laden.”

Known as a man of peace, Carter said: Unfortunately though that was abandoned unnecessarily, tragically by the United States as we shifted our attention to Iraq, which I believe was unfounded and not necessary.”

Thus the role of the international forces, he said, was very critical to peace and stability of the country, he felt and urged other states to remain in Afghanistan.

“Now the primary role in Afghanistan is still very important — one just to maintain peace, with the hope that we can have a free and democratic society there. It is pretty much a holding game. It is important that Canada and others participate.”

Responding to a question on Iran, the former president said: Any military attack on Iran would be a horrible mistake and a tragedy. What we should be doing is full negotiations, consultations with Iranian leaders to make sure they know that we do not intend to attack them militarily.

“I think the US and others should insist upon the total absence in Iran of any move towards developing any nuclear weapons,” Carter observed, concluding: I hope all those rumours are ill-founded and false.”

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SHINDAND, 25 October 2007 (IRIN) – More than 1,500 female students have not attended classes for several days after unidentified assailants attacked their school in Shindand district in the western Afghan province of Herat, education officials told IRIN.

On 19 October, at around midnight local time, several grenades were thrown inside Naswan High School, breaking windows and causing minor damage to several classrooms, said Ghulam Hazrat Tanha, director of the Herat education department.

Officials say some students are gradually returning to school but locals are concerned about their children’s education, particularly for girls.

“Recent attacks on schools have frightened many parents and students,” said Tanha, adding that local residents had demanded the authorities ensure students’ security at schools.

Since 8 October, four attacks on schools have been reported in the restive district, none of which harmed students or school staffers, according to Haji Shah Alaam, Shindand district governor.

Two of the schools belonged to girls, Alaam said.

In Afghanistan, high schools are segregated, while universities do not follow this rule.

Shindand – with a majority of its population ethnically Pashtun – has been a hotbed of Taliban insurgency in the relatively calm Herat province.

Schools elsewhere in Herat, where the Taliban have a strong influence, have also experienced assaults.

Backtracking in Helmand

Meanwhile, education authorities in southern Helmand province gave warning about the shrinking numbers of functioning schools there.

In early October the director of Helmand’s education department told IRIN that more than 90 schools were functioning across the insurgency-torn province, while about 100 others, mainly in rural areas, were out of commission due to insecurity.

Three weeks later, officials say only 64 schools are open in Helmand – Afghanistan’s top opium-producing and most conflict-ridden province.

About 400 schools remain dysfunctional in southern Afghanistan, with tens of thousands of students deprived of education, concede officials in the Ministry of Education (MoE).

“Community schools and other local education facilities are closing down because of growing insecurity, Taliban attacks and lack of resources,” said Saeed Ibrar Agha, head of the provincial education department.

Immediately after the Taliban were ousted from power in late 2001, Afghanistan took significant strides in education and has increasingly admitted millions of students to formal schooling.

There are now more than six million students, 35 percent of them female, in over 11,000 schools and education facilities around the war-ravaged country, the MoE reported in 2007.

By 2020, boys and girls alike should be able to complete a full course of primary schooling, according to target number two of Afghanistan’s revised Millennium Development Goal.

Dormitories needed

As more and more students from insecure rural areas flock to schools in the provincial city, education officials complain about the lack of capacity to absorb all newcomers in Lashkargah, capital of Helmand.

Almost all the rural students coming to schools in Lashkargah are boys, local officials say. Students who commute daily between the provincial capital and their homes in rural districts are also exposed to the risk of being targeted by elements that oppose education.

Moreover, travel is an extra financial burden for already impoverished parents.

“We need to open a dormitory for students coming from rural areas to schools in Lashkargah,” said Ibrar Agha. “We look forward to donors to help us build one.”

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Pajhwok / October 27, 2007

Asphalting of a 101 kilometres Indian-funded road was completed in the southwestern Nimroz province on Saturday. Similarly, construction of a 17- kilometre road was launched in the southern Ghazni province.

India had provided 70 million dollars assistance for the scheme, a provincial official told Pajhwok Afghan News. The road linking provincial capital Zaranj with the Khashrud district has a width of 7.3meters and passes over 68 bridges – big and small.

Public Works Director Habibullah Obaidi claimed work on asphalting the road was carried out to international standards. It would facilitate residents of the province in general and the two districts in particular.

Governor Dr Ghulam Dastgir Azad acknowledged the project that got under way in September 2004 had provided employment opportunities to more than a thousand people. Another 113km road between Khashrod to Dil Aram district is also being built with financial support from India.

Meanwhile, a 17-kilometer road linking Ghazni City with Khwaja Omari district is being built at the cost of $3.2 million provided by the US-led Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). Engineer Zia, head of the Alfa Construction Company, promised the projected would be executed in a year.

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Tom Hyland
The Age (Australia)
October 28, 2007

THE opium poppy symbolises the complexities and dilemmas confronting Afghanistan and its allies.

There are no easy answers in dealing with the crop that has made Afghanistan the world’s largest opium producer, supplying 93 per cent of the illegal opium trade.

Opium cultivation accounts for 60 per cent of the Afghan economy and 90 per cent of its exports. More than three million people, 14 per cent of the population of 23 million, depend on it for their income.

The bulk of the cultivation is centred in the southern provinces — and it’s no coincidence that this is where the Taliban insurgency has erupted over the past two years.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported in August that “opium cultivation is now closely linked to insurgency,” with the Taliban using drug money to arm, supply and pay its guerilla fighters.

Australia has direct interests in this. It’s not just that law enforcement agencies are warning that heroin made from Afghan poppies could soon flood our streets.

The opium trade also has a direct bearing on the security of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.

Oruzgan province, where Australia’s troops are based, is one of the country’s biggest opium producers, with 9204 hectares under poppies this year, according to the UNODC report. That figure is slightly down on last year, but it’s still double what it was four years ago.

The Afghan Government’s half-hearted poppy eradication program is compromised by official corruption. But the major obstacle is a lack of security in growing areas and resistance from farmers.

The UNODC argues that foreign military forces in Afghanistan have a vested interest in supporting counter-narcotics operations. But it says foreign forces instead tacitly accept opium trafficking along the border with Pakistan as a way to extract intelligence information.

Australian troops don’t take part in poppy eradication; they have their hands full with reconstruction, trying to restore stability, and fighting the Taliban. They regard dealing with the drugs as essentially a police function.

But there’s another reason, recently spelled out by Lieutenant-Colonel Mick Ryan, former head of Australian reconstruction troops in Oruzgan. The drug trade plays a key role in the province, adding to a complex environment that presents Australian troops with “constant and multifaceted challenges”, he wrote in The Army Journal.

Opium is the largest component of the local economy, involving a large proportion of farmers and others. “As a consequence,” Lieutenant-Colonel Ryan wrote, “any effort to disrupt the drug trade incurs hostility from the local people and active and violent resistance from drug traffickers and major dealers”.

So here’s the Catch 22: opium provides the cash that funds the insurgency, but forcibly eradicating the drug trade fuels the resentment that is the seedbed of the insurgency.

Heroin, the facts

Where it comes from:

(Drugs seizures in Australia, 2006-2007):
- South-East Asia (Golden Triangle): 61.9 per cent
- Afghanistan: 23.6 per cent

What it’s worth:

Afghan farmers can earn $US5200 ($A5700) per hectare of opium or $US546 per hectare cultivated with wheat

What it costs:

About $50 for a 0.1 gram hit

SOURCES: AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE, UN

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By Roger Cohen
The International Herald Tribune

Sunday, October 28, 2007

BAMIYAN, Afghanistan: People still speak of the Buddhas as if they were there. The Buddhas are visited and debated. A “Buddha road” just opened. It boasts the first paved surface in Afghanistan’s majestic central highlands and stretches all of a half-mile.

But the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan are gone, of course, replaced by two gashes in the reddish-brown cliff. They were destroyed in March 2001, by the Taliban in their quest to rid the country of the “gods of the infidels.” The fanatical soldiers of Islam blasted the ancient treasures to fragments.

“It is easier to destroy than to build,” Mawlawi Qudratullah Jamal, then the Taliban information minister, noted on March 3, 2001. True enough, but few in the United States or elsewhere listened.

Memory, however, is another matter. It is stubborn and volatile and hard to eradicate. The keyhole-like niches in the rock face are charged. Absence is presence. The visitor is drawn into the void as if summoned, not by vacancy, but by the towering Buddhas themselves.

Yet they are in pieces. Nasir Mudabir, 29, a director of the site, ushered me into a makeshift shelter where boxes filed with sandstone and plaster fragments from the two Buddhas are kept. Metal remnants of the bombs that destroyed them are preserved separately: They are jagged where the stones are smooth to the touch.

Why keep evidence of the barbarians’ arsenal? “It’s part of the story,” Mudabir said. “It’s history, bad or good. Instead of going forward, we went backward.”

Bamiyan, an island of peace in an uneasy land, lies half-forgotten in its sacred valley. Oxen plow potato fields. Pale poplars trace golden lines. A war-blasted bazaar lies in dusty ruin. Mud-colored mountains, their geometric folds and pleats as intricate as robes by Vermeer, rise to snowy peaks.

Hazara refugees, who have returned from Iran after Afghanistan’s decades of conflict, eke out an existence in Taliban-despoiled caves once covered with bright murals.

That this is a holy place, sought out by Buddhist pilgrims over the centuries, is written in light, form and stone.

The smaller, eastern Buddha, known locally as “Shamama,” stood 125 feet tall and has now been dated to the year 507. The larger, called “Salsal,” rose to 180 feet. It was constructed in 554. One theory holds the builders were dissatisfied with the first and erected its neighbor in the pursuit of perfection.

I climbed the steep staircase in the rocks beside Shamama’s absence, reaching a rickety platform at the level of the vanished Buddha’s head. “The head was comfortable,” said Mohammed Qassim, my guide. “Ten people could sit and sip tea.”

They could. I sat on the Buddha’s head myself in 1973, gazing in wonder. The Afghan king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, had just been ousted after a 40-year reign. The coup would soon usher in the turmoil that has taken Afghanistan backward.

We knew nothing of that. We were travelers without a map. The “hippie trail” had taken us, at the wheel of a Volkswagen kombi called “Pigpen” (named for the Grateful Dead drummer who died that year), from London across Iran to this noble, generous country.

Looking again, after 34 years, at this beautiful place, first from the top of the smaller niche and then from the larger, (“Twenty people could sit on this head,” said Qassim), I wondered: Was it my own innocence that was gone or the world’s?

Nobody could make that journey now. Nobody could even drive from Kabul to Kandahar in safety. The unknown shrinks. Fear spreads. Experience gets diluted.

The Cold War ended, only to be replaced by the explosive conflict of secular and theocratic worlds. What began here in March, 2001, has spread. The Taliban are back, sort of, seeping across the Pakistani border in a campaign fed by an Internet-borne jihadist message. The Web is a force multiplier for any guerrilla movement.

This was the Afghan burning of the books. The Nazis burned Brecht. The Taliban, then sheltering Osama bin Laden, bombarded the “un-Islamic” Buddhas. The burning presaged war. The destruction presaged 9/11: two Buddhas, two towers.

Heinrich Heine noted that “When they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings.” When Buddhas buckle, people will be crushed.

There is talk of reassembling the Buddhas, or of using solar power to beam laser holograms of their forms onto the cliff. I say, reassemble one, for hope, but not both. Absence speaks, shames, reminds.

Peace and love was our mantra back in 1973. So what I take from Bamiyan revisited are children in the early morning, the girls in white hijabs, walking toward a newly-built primary school, dust dancing behind them. I fear for their world, and ours, but fear is not the answer.

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October 28,  2007 (IRIN) – LASHKARGAH, Abdul Bari, 13, and his two brothers have had to leave their home in Nad Ali District and rent a room in Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, in order to go to school. Taliban insurgents have attacked and closed down over 100 schools in different parts of Helmand Province, including one in Abdul Bari’s village that he used to go to. Abdul Bari told IRIN about the problems he faces in his quest for education.

“My father is a doctor and wants us to be educated and become doctors and engineers. After the Taliban burnt a school in our village and told villagers to send their children to Madrasas in Pakistan for their education, my father sent us to Lashkargah to continue our studies.

“We have rented a room in a market [in Lashkargah]. It’s so noisy here that I can’t concentrate on my studies. I’m also scared because I see people from my village that come here to buy things and I’m afraid that when they see us going to school they will tell other villagers and that will endanger our parents.

“My family can’t move to Lashkargah and live with us because our home, our land and our cows are in our village and they can’t abandon everything.

“I miss my parents. I haven’t seen them for over three months now. We wanted to go to our village for the recent Eid holiday but we changed our plans after a dreadful incident occurred.

“One of our classmates, who was coming from Musa Qala District, was identified by the Taliban on his way to Lashkargah by bus. The Taliban cut his neck and wanted to kill him but passengers on the bus begged them not to and so saved his life. He’s now in a hospital in Lashkargah. When I visited him there he cried and said he missed his classmates and school. But he said he couldn’t come back to school because the Taliban made him swear that he wouldn’t go to school again.

“The Taliban have also told people in rural areas not to send their children to schools in Lashkargah or they will kill them. The Taliban say schools drive Muslims to profanity and Christianity. I know this is untrue… but people are frightened by their threats. Some people have stopped their children from going to school.

“My father says we should continue our education even if the Taliban kill him. My father says gaining knowledge is good and will secure our future. He says it’s better to die while gaining knowledge than die illiterate.

“I want the Americans and other foreigners to defeat the Taliban and restore peace and security in our village and in all our country so that we can go to school freely and without fear.“

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Sun Oct 28, 3:52 AM ET

SYDNEY (AFP) – Australian soldiers did not fight in a heavily-criticised Dutch-led assault on Taliban fighters in Afghanistan because of concerns about differing rules of engagement, the military said Sunday.

Some 52 civilians were reported to have died in the battle in the Chora Valley in southern Uruzgan province in June, prompting Afghan President Hamid Karzai to slam the “indiscriminate and unprecise operations” of the foreign forces.

A spokesman for the Australian Defence Force (ADF) said that Australian officers were involved in the planning of the operation and in manning vehicle checkpoints but did not take part in the June 16-17 combat.

“As the situation in the Chora Valley deteriorated… ADF personnel in Afghanistan became aware that Dutch procedures for this operation differed from Australian targeting procedures and expressed their concerns, including at senior levels,” Brigadier Andrew Nikolic said.

Nikolic said Australian troops shared the same concerns as NATO soldiers about civilian lives being placed at risk by Taliban fighters who were choosing to attack from inside heavily populated areas.

“Australian forces operate under rules of engagement that aim to avoid and minimise civilian casualties,” he said.

While unable to discuss the rules of engagement for Australian forces, Nikolic said they were consistent with the objectives of NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

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By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
Published: October 28, 2007

KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 27 — Many former militia commanders and residents in northern Afghanistan have been hoarding illegal weapons in violation of the country’s disarmament laws, giving the excuse that they face a spreading Taliban insurgency from the south that government forces alone are too frail to stop, Afghan and Western officials say.

After years of moderate success for government disarmament programs, rumors of widespread defiance in the north have arisen recently among government officials and intelligence agencies in Kabul and elsewhere. Although there is little hard evidence that commanders are greatly enlarging their arsenals, officials say, some have been thwarting government programs, refusing to disarm and possibly even remobilizing militias.

The talk of rearming underscores a deepening north-south ethnic divide that some diplomats and Afghan officials privately worry could lead the way toward a shift of power back to warlords — and toward a countrywide armed conflict — if left unchecked. And the situation poses a major challenge for President Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from the south, whose administration has failed to win the confidence of many non-Pashtun leaders and northerners.

Prices on the weapons black market in the north have skyrocketed as residents, governed by suspicion and foreboding, have kept their firearms, driving down the supply.

“There is an environment of mistrust” in the government, Brig. Gen. Abdulmanan Abed, a Defense Ministry official who works with the government’s demilitarization program, said in an interview this month in Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province. “There is a fear of the return of the Taliban.”

A prominent political leader from the north, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it this way: “The Taliban are coming toward us. What should we do? Who will defend us? Who will protect us? This is in the minds of the people in the north.”

Col. Mats Danielsson, the Swedish commander of a 450-man military unit helping to provide security in four northern provinces, said the Karzai administration and its international allies must find a way to roll back the Taliban threat and reassure northerners.

“We have to keep the window of opportunity open, but I feel that the window is closing,” he said.

The Taliban insurgency is strongest in southern and eastern Afghanistan. And while it has been able to bedevil Afghan and international troops in some other regions of the country, before this year its reach rarely stretched into the northern provinces.

But government officials report an increase in Taliban activity in the north this year, particularly in the northwest. The number of Taliban attacks on Afghan and international security forces in Balkh and the other relatively peaceful provinces of north-central Afghanistan has risen from last year, the authorities say.

Residents here in Balkh Province and elsewhere in north-central Afghanistan say they are beginning to feel encircled.

“The Taliban is trying to start up its old networks here,” Colonel Danielsson said in an interview in early October at his headquarters in Mazar-i-Sharif. “We have to figure out how to stop this influence.”

Afghan and Western officials also say that in addition to an increase in Taliban activity, there has been an escalation in crime and, in some areas, tensions among rival northern political factions. These officials say it is often difficult to determine who is to blame for specific violent acts.

The most apparent signs of rearming, officials say, are in Faryab Province, in the northwest, where commanders have organized an armed militia to fend off a growing Taliban presence in neighboring Badghis Province that has gone largely unchecked by Afghan and international security forces.

Gen. Dan K. McNeill, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in a recent interview in Kabul that he had received unconfirmed intelligence reports that small shipments of weapons had been smuggled across the border “from one or two countries to the north” and delivered “to receivers in some of the northern provinces.” But he declined to provide further details.

Afghan government officials also say that in certain northern districts, militia commanders have evaded government weapons inspectors by breaking down their stockpiles of illegal firearms and redistributing them throughout their communities, making them harder to find.

Afghan and Western officials say that weapons are hidden everywhere: in grain silos and closets, in mountain caves and in holes in the ground.

And though the government’s demobilization programs have gone some way toward dismantling many of the hundreds of illegal militias, and have removed nearly all the heavy weapons from those factions, former warlords still hold considerable sway.

“They have the power of a phone call to put hundreds, or thousands, in arms,” Colonel Danielsson said. “There are a lot of weapons up here.”

All the weapons in Afghanistan were supposed to be in the government’s hands by now, all the private militias were to be a thing of the past.

After the Taliban fell in 2001 and fighting erupted among rival warlords, the Afghan government began the first of two disarmament and demobilization programs that were principally intended to dismantle warlords’ militias and other illegal armed groups. In three decades of war, weapons had poured across the borders and authority was often established by the rule of the gun.

The programs, which are voluntary, have dismantled at least 274 paramilitary organizations, reintegrated about 62,000 militia members into civilian life and recovered more than 84,000 weapons, including thousands of heavy arms that had fallen under the control of regional warlords. Afghan and NATO forces have confiscated and destroyed many other weapons, officials said. But Afghan and international officials acknowledge that hundreds of illegal armed groups still operate in Afghanistan. And hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — of weapons remain in private hands, although they are mostly small arms rather than heavy weapons, the officials say.

Of the weapons that have been collected, they say, at least 40 percent were not functional.

“There is at least one weapon in each house,” said General Abed, who was an officer in the anti-Taliban mujahedeen. Government officials note that the demilitarization programs were not intended to collect arms and were instead focused on disbanding armed groups.

“I think it will take many, many years” to disarm the population, said Hameed Quraishi, manager of the government’s demilitarization program in the north. “It doesn’t matter how hard you try. It’s the level of confidence the people have in the government.”

But the talk about rearming is not entirely military. It also appears to be a means of pressing the Karzai government, which many northern leaders have accused of favoring the south, a region mostly populated by members of his Pashtun ethnicity.

“We selected Karzai to unify the country,” said a prominent politician from the north and former member of the Northern Alliance, which fought the Taliban. “But people who joined him have pushed him to being a Pashtun leader, not a national leader.”

Disproportionate amounts of aid money and weapons have flowed to the south to prop up the regional leadership and battle the Taliban. As part of this effort, the government has been trying to build an auxiliary police force among southern Pashtun tribes to confront the insurgency.

Many northern leaders say that they have been shortchanged in the distribution of development aid and worry about the militarization of the south as they are being asked to disarm.

“Northern commanders are saying: ‘We can’t disarm. This guy is trying to unite all Pashtuns. We have to defend ourselves!’ ” a European diplomat said in Kabul.

General McNeill doubts some of the northern claims. “There’s no question that there’s a hell of a lot of political posturing in the northern sectors,” he said. “Where they think they’re ignored in the reconstruction process, there often is a report: ‘They’re here! The Taliban! They got us surrounded!’ ”

In interviews, northern Afghan leaders said that in spite of their concerns about the central government, they were standing by Mr. Karzai. And most of them denied that any stockpiling of weapons was occurring.

“If we take up arms, it means the democratic process is defeated,” said Sayed Mustafa Kazemi, spokesman for the National Front, a political coalition mainly composed of non-Pashtun leaders from the north. “We want this government to survive its entire term because we don’t want the process to be defeated.”

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The province’s residents blame their region’s relative serenity for their lack of aid money and large development projects.

By Mark Sappenfield | The Christian Science Monitor
from the October 24, 2007 edition – http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1024/p06s01-wosc.html

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

The situation in Bamiyan is simple enough for Mohammed Arif Arifie to distill it into two sentences spoken between sips of tea.

First, Bamiyan is so safe that the New Zealand troops posted here have not fired a shot in four years. Second, there is not a foot of paved road anywhere in a province the size of Connecticut.

The two points are connected, says Mr. Arifie, who sits beside the pitted, earthen market road here in a restaurant made of old United Nations emergency food sacks stitched together. Money follows the fighting, with millions being spent in the restive south while other, calmer parts of the country go ignored, he says. “We are punished for our peace.”

Available data is often conflicting and incomplete, but it does suggest that a disproportionate share of aid money has gone to the south. Yet experts see signs of a shift as countries realize that their development dollars can achieve more in places of relative peace.

“I can sense an increasing hunger for this,” says Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat now working to preserve art and architecture in Afghanistan. “The high ideological days of 2002 are ebbing away, and now officials are listening to grass-roots operations that say, ‘We can’t work in [the south].’ “

The shift is both practical and ideological. In addition to the mounting frustration at having newly built schools and facilities destroyed in the south, there is also a dwindling number of aid workers willing to go there as security deteriorates.

The result could benefit areas like Bamiyan, where the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will spend $17 million this year – one-third more than it spent in the previous four years combined.

Much to the delight of the shopkeepers in town, the outlay will bring the first feet of pavement to the province – nearly two miles, actually – beginning with the market road that runs through the center of Bamiyan City.

“Compared to other parts of Afghanistan in terms of security, we are very good,” says Ramazan, a bearded, one-named shopkeeper who leans back in his plastic chair as shoppers bustle by his store. “Compared with the other parts of Afghanistan in terms of development, we have zero.”

Such a perception is understandable in a place with no paved roads and only sporadic electricity, which comes from a local diesel-powered generator that shuts down every afternoon at 4 p.m. The reality, however, appears to be more nuanced.

USAID figures suggest that the south has been favored. Some 35 percent of the $1.3 billion it has spent on regional development since 2002 has been spent in the five southernmost provinces, where the insurgency is most active. These five provinces account for 11 percent of the national population.

By contrast, USAID has spent 15 percent of its regional budget on the nine northernmost provinces, which are relatively peaceful. Yet they account for 29 percent of the population. The south is the only region of the country where USAID has spent disproportionately more by population.

Yet in other respects, the unrest in the south has prevented development projects from going forward. One of the Afghan government’s key regional-development schemes, the National Solidarity Project (NSP), has been suspended because of safety concerns in about 30 of the country’s 396 districts, mostly in the south.

“In the areas where there is security and access, it is easier for the aid workers to go,” says Susanne Holste, who monitors the program for the World Bank. “In the south, the start-up time is much longer.”

That has benefited the north, she says, and particularly Bamiyan. NSP spending in Bamiyan has been $29.80 per person, placing it fourth among Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. On Bamiyan’s market street, however, these smaller-scale projects are not the highways and power stations dearly wanted by Ramazan and others.

The result is a perception – both in the north and south – that no one is benefiting from billions of dollars of international aid. Yet in Bamiyan, at least, there are signs that these complaints are beginning to bear fruit.

In a graphic example of democracy in action, Gov. Habiba Sorabi has taken these market-street complaints to the media and anyone who would listen during the past year. Her appeals have brought a surge in international commitments to the province from New Zealand, Japan, and the US. “Other provinces get more money and still there is not stability,” she says, noting that Bamiyan has eliminated poppy cultivation virtually on its own.

She has bemoaned the fact NATO has assigned secure provinces Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) from small countries like New Zealand. Less-secure provinces have PRTs from America and Britain, who have far more money to spend.

For instance, the entire 2006 budget for the Lithuanian PRT in relatively peaceful Ghor was less than $400,000. The British PRT in Helmand, at the center of Taliban resistance, is building a single city park for $700,000.

There might be some truth in the claims, says Col. Roger McIlwaine, commander of Kiwi Base, which sits on an arid plateau above the green potato fields of Bamiyan. In general, though, more spending does not necessarily mean more development.

“When you look at the dollars,” he says, “you have to bear in mind that security operations cost a lot of money.

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By Alastair Leithead
BBC News, Kabul
Wednesday, 24 October 2007

Two by two the women walked down the impromptu catwalk in the hotel gardens, showing off their well ironed, shiny-buttoned uniforms.

The fashion show featured policewomen from across the Muslim world, in Kabul to give advice and a morale boost to the Afghan women outnumbered by the men in their force by 250 to one.

Getting policewomen out on the beat is a long way off in this traditional and conservative society, but there is a lot more they could be doing.

“It’s a chance for all the women to see each other’s uniforms, to be able to compare notes and to see what is appropriate for women doing policing in an Islamic society,” said Tonita Murray, the senior police and gender advisor for the Afghan Ministry of Interior.

She is leading the policewomen’s conference which is designed to help Afghan women gain confidence through sharing experiences with those from places like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Some of the uniforms have head covers built into their peaked caps or are long and baggy – to be acceptable in a place where just a few years ago women were beaten in the streets by the Taleban for being unaccompanied or not totally covered from head to toe.

Even today many women in Afghanistan still wear burkas, or are almost completely covered.

Society’s rules make it difficult for women to be independent, but Khadeja Shojai is a young policewoman who is determined to do her job well.

She trains recruits at the Police Academy, teaching them the basics, and even leads Kung Fu classes.

“Sometimes wearing the uniform is hard for us,” she says. “If we wear it, some people may attack or kill us, but I like to wear my uniform to go to the office because our society needs to understand we have female police officers.

“If they want to kill me they can.”

There are around 62,000 policemen in Afghanistan and just 240 women.

The Afghan force does not have a good reputation outside the capital.

Corruption is a huge problem within the poorly paid ranks, and despite the billions being spent by the international community, there has been little progress.

Encouraging more female officers is part of that remit, and Tonita Murray acknowledges it has to be a gradual process in such a conservative country.

“Afghan policewomen are beginning to have an impact but at the moment they are still not being utilised to the degree they could be,” she said.

“They could be in intelligence, criminal investigation, forensic science or most importantly doing community policing and working with women and children, but still they don’t have the independence.”

It will be a long time before there are women out on the beat in Kabul, and there are only a handful in senior roles, but after decades of war and repression suffered under the Taleban it was always going to be a slow process.

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