seems like a repeating story
Slow pace of change in Afghanistan prompts questions
The World Today - Monday, 25 September , 2006 12:28:00
Reporter: Peter Lloyd
ELEANOR HALL: Where did all the money go?
Five years after they were promised a new Afghanistan, many locals see only broken promises from the West, which pledged billions of dollars in foreign aid to help reconstruct the country after the fall of the Taliban.
Public dissatisfaction at the slow pace of change has now hurt the standing of the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.
And some people in the country are even expressing nostalgia for the security, law and order provided by the brutal regime that gave safe haven to the likes of Osama bin Laden.
South Asia Correspondent Peter Lloyd sent this report from Afghanistan.
PETER LLOYD: If you think that's the sound of construction in a city bursting with aid dollars, you'd be sadly mistaken. It's a diesel-driven generator, and it's the soundtrack of daily life on the shabby streets of Kabul.
Five years on from the fall of the Taliban, a city with a population on par with Sydney, has no power station.
(sound of child speaking)
At one of the many refugee-occupied ruins in the Kabuli suburbs, children who ought to be in school drag around water containers half their body size to collect their daily supply. And they're lucky. Drinkable water is still not available to 80 per cent of Afghanistan's people.
Joanna Nathan from the International Crisis Group in Kabul says much was promised, little has been delivered so far, and it's creating mass disillusionment at both the rule of Hamid Karzai and the presence of foreigners.
JOANNA NATHAN: In many ways it's about expectations, and in many ways they were oversold the benefits of what democracy would bring them and how quickly.
(sound of baby crying)
PETER LLOYD: In a bombed-out building, I met Ghullam Saki. He lives with his wife and eight children in a single room. But soon they won't even have that accommodation. They've been evicted to make way for a government ministry and told to build a new home on an uncleared minefield. No one has suggested how a man with no job and no money will do that.
(Ghullam Saki speaking)
"Karzai was the father of all refugee families," he told me, "but he ignored us and turned into a feudal boss. In this block people get food by begging".
Civil and military talking points provided to journalists point to genuine successes in post-Taliban Afghanistan; people are free to vote, a parliament has been elected, and millions of children do go to school.
What's not said is that for girls it's still not a widely available option, especially the further you get from Kabul. There are still too few teachers, chairs and textbooks to go around.
American Ann Jones spent five years in Afghanistan working for a women's aid group. She's written the book Kabul in Winter, which is harshly critical of her government's habits in spending aid money.
ANN JONES: We've gone with military forces, but we have not followed through on the promise to reconstruct and develop the country. And that's what makes the Afghans lose face in the possibility of that ever happening. And when development doesn't take place, the Afghans look upon these forces as simply occupation or invading forces, and the war can only escalate.
But the United States, which is supposed to be one of the chief donors, has a very peculiar system of aid, which results in almost all of every dollar of aid supposedly given to the Afghan people actually going into the pockets of already rich, private American contractors.
PETER LLOYD: Jones is especially critical of a project to build a highway from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar. Funding was set aside by the US Government. International companies bid for the contact, but the winner was an American company with close ties to the Bush administration. That company then subcontracted the labour to Indians, overlooking Afghan workers altogether.
At times, says Jones, education spending by the US has also gone strangely wrong.
ANN JONES: In the education projects that were done by US private contractors, they went in and reprinted books that had originally been devised by Islamist extremists in the midst of the American proxy war against the Soviets. So these textbooks give their lessons in terms of fighting against the infidels and fighting against Satan and all of that. They are, as one Afghan education expert told me, appropriate for the madrassas, but certainly not for the schools, and yet the United States paid for reproducing millions of these books and handing them out to schoolchildren who were going back to school.PETER LLOYD: The Head of Afghanistan's independent Human Rights Commission, Sima Samar, wants tighter rules on aid spending, but she's not holding her breath.
SIMA SAMAR: The international community should say, for example, which country providing how many million of dollars, to whom they give and for what they give, at least a list, if not in detail.
PETER LLOYD: So there is no list? There's no master list?
SIMA SAMAR: Ah, I don't think there is. I haven't seen it. If I haven't seen it, I doubt who would have seen it in this country.
PETER LLOYD: To many Afghans, foreign aid means money that only foreigners enjoy.
In Kabul, this is Peter Lloyd reporting for The World Today.
ELEANOR HALL: And Peter Lloyd did request interviews to answer those criticisms that were made to President Hamid Karzai, but his senior officials, the President himself and ministers, were not available.
Peter Lloyd with that report from Afghanistan.
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1748069.htm
It's the same foreign aid money story I've heard again and again in differing countries and times, even down to the roads being contructed...allows foreign companies(usually US multinationals) to penetrate and dominant whatever remains IMHO anyway...
