may 5-05

Kandahar, May 5, 2005

Dear friends, old and new:

As threatened, I am back at it... Back in Afghanistan after a seven-month break.

I always find Kabul unsettling, somehow. It's an odd loose-ends feeling, as though no matter what you are doing it is not accomplishing anything. The place feels utterly unchanged, if slightly more battened-down. Traffic as impossibly dense as ever, internationals excessively interested in the latest restaurant.

It took me two days to get ahold of my friend Zabit Akrem. For those of you who haven't been introduced to this personage, he used to be chief of police in Kandahar. I have found him to be the most consistently constructive and sophisticated thinker among Afghan officials. In that regard, he strikes an interesting figure, in sharp contrast to the slick Western-educated crowd back from the diaspora among whom one normally searches for sensible thought. Akrem speaks no English, and his flair for the subtleties of his people, as well as his flawless manners, are very much of the old, traditional tribal sort.

It seems his loyalty and competence have been recognized, for he was recently transferred from Mazari-i Sherif to Kabul, a cabinet-level post.

He berated me for not letting him come pick me up at the airport. In Afghan protocol, it would be preposterous. But such is the quality of his friendship. His thumbnail sketch: the situation in Kandahar is deteriorating, though very slowly and patiently. The "insurgents," for lack of a better word, are "working to separate the Afghan population from the Americans and members of the government." Once the latter are isolated, he predicted, Kandahar could become a duck-shoot like Iraq. I have sometimes found him overly alarmist, but if scaled down in intensity, his predictions have proven utterly accurate. In Kabul, he said, he faces two main difficulties. On the Afghan side, too many different parties and factions are each trying to put wrenches in the wheels of the others (a sadly familiar story). And, "there are lots of embassies." Meaning, Afghanistan's neighbors are up to their old tricks of stirring up trouble, with their embassy officials acting as operatives and often exploiting the rivalry among the various Afghan factions to their ends.

It wasn't long before I discovered a third problem, not in terms of security so much as Afghanistan's hope for a constructive future: the consistently poor quality of political appointments. I had heard favorable reviews of the new cabinet named after the recent presidential elections. At the time I withheld judgment. And with good reason. What I have heard since I arrived from friends close to the center is that not only are people whose catastrophic administrative style has been amply demonstrated appointed and re-appointed to high positions, but truly qualified candidates are pushed aside or removed. (I had always thought that the appointment of disasters was due in part to a dearth of decent alternatives.) It is as though someone were deliberately trying to maintain Afghanistan as a failed state. The main evils are corruption -- bribe-taking as well as misuse of public funds -- rampant nepotism, use of government position for inappropriate politicking both internal and foreign, and total inattention to very basic management principles. I admit I am quite disappointed in Pres. Karzai. It's as though he still thinks he can buy off his enemies with jobs, while assuming that the friends he snubs will remain loyal. But I fear that US policy is at least half to blame for this distressing and terribly frustrating state of affairs, since US officials have steadily insisted on providing material support to the worst of the regional strongmen, and have proved to be oddly reticent about demanding accounts from the people they are showering with cash.

At night I thought I heard the metallic "ping" of raindrops on the trim of the house. Not possible, I thought. I have seen a maximum of 10 days of rain in Afghanistan in 3 years. But rain it was. And the drive down to Kandahar took me through a magical new landscape. Mountains of cloud in the sky matched the mountains flanking the valley the road slices through; those flesh and blood mountains had an entirely new bulk and depth to my eyes, as well-watered soil threw off hues I had never seen before. The crags were no longer flat, dun-colored stage props, but had taken on a proper weight and dignity. The green on either side of the road was uncanny -- limited to the valley, of course, but sparkling, glowing with the mischievous illumination provided by a sun not unfettered and punishing, but lancing in and out of clouds. Grape vines had put out their new leaves; fruit trees were in bloom; and, biggest change, even non-irrigated land was alive, tufts of green speckling the normally arid hills.

We stopped in Zabul, of ill-fame. A friend of mine is the US Agency for International Development representative there. Zabul is one of the most dangerous provinces...it is through Zabul that "insurgents" based in Pakistan have been consistently trying to open a kind of highway into the Afghan interior. My friend there said that the attacks they have registered seem to be improving in "quality," as though some foreign trainers are beginning to trickle back from their hunting grounds in Iraq.

What I am hearing from everyone indicates that the fashionable perception that Afghanistan is working (in contrast to Iraq) is simply erroneous. The number of insurgent attacks against central government targets is increasing, and the chaotic violence the bulk of the Afghan public suffers at the hands of this same government shows no signs of going away either. So, as I predicted almost two years ago, the people are opening a space for the "insurgents" (who, themselves, are mostly manufactured outside this country's borders) ...either from faint nostalgia, or wise effort to guard against an uncertain future. One young guard asked me last night: "Does your government WANT Afghanistan to improve?" The meaning of the query being, the current situation is such a mess that it could only have been arrived at by design.

As for the project -- to begin converting local fruit crops into higher value-added items, eg. skin-care products -- it got lots of support in principle in Kabul. But what I found is that there is little sympathy for a gradual approach, while the feasibility requirements are extraordinarily demanding. More in terms of return is being required of such a project than would ever be required of a similar start-up in the West, although the obstacles here are indescribably more difficult to overcome. So I am going to spend the next couple of weeks collecting the necessary data re costs and sales prices, market and production potential, etc., and developing a fairly serious business plan. I am glad that the lax attitude of the early days, when throwing money at projects seemed to be the rule of the day, is being replaced with a more rigorous approach. That rigor, however, always seems to be deployed disproportionately at projects on the ground level, where the rubber hits the road. Meanwhile, the Chemonicses and Louis Bergers of this world, and their Afghan-American imitators, are reaping multi-million dollar contracts with apparent ease.

I send all of you my very best wishes, from this other world.

S.