Putting Together the Pieces of a Shattered Afghanistan

The Shomali Plain north of the Afghan capital, a 40-mile-wide plateau crisscrossed by ancient irrigation channels carrying water from glaciered peaks above, is a land fabled for lush vineyards and opulent orchards.

But during the Taliban years, the region was systematically destroyed -- its villages burned, its orchards chopped down, the irrigation systems dynamited -- in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in which the mainly Pushtun religious extremists of the Taliban regime targeted the half-million Tajik and Hazara inhabitants of the plain.

When the Taliban was driven away in December 2001, only ghost villages were left. The road to Kabul was a tableau of destroyed tanks, broken bridges and ruined houses, the plain a uniform dusty brown littered with the stumps of trees.

What a contrast, then, to visit the Shomali Plain today. The villages have sprung back to life. Refugees who fled the Taliban have returned from Pakistan and Iran to rebuild homes, wells and reservoir tanks are being dug, the markets are full of sheep and goats and piles of fruit, and children are going to school.

Afghanistan still faces severe problems, and in some respects -- notably drug production and the reemergence of anti-U.S. forces along the southern border belt -- the country is getting worse. But in three years of relative stability, reconstruction and development have acquired some momentum, as exemplified by the renewal and improvement of life in places such as the Shomali Plain.

Very often these days, perceptions of Afghanistan can be mixed up with the dire news coming out of Iraq, the other country invaded by the United States in the administration’s declared war on terrorism. But they are not the same.

Exhausted and impoverished by decades of civil war, the people of Afghanistan in general have been far more willing than Iraqis to accept foreign intervention in their country, seeing it as a broad-based international rescue mission rather than an occupation and an oil grab.

As Iraq has sunk into a bloody chaos, with car and suicide bombings almost a daily occurrence and nearly 1,100 U.S. military personnel and an estimated 20,000 Iraqis killed since March 2003, Afghanistan has been spared upheaval on a similar scale. Since October 2001, about 140 U.S. personnel have died in Afghanistan, and about 1,000 people are believed to have been killed this year in military operations.

Granted, Afghanistan has a long way to go. The writ of the central government of interim President Hamid Karzai runs only so far. Opium growing -- banned by the Taliban -- has resurged, sending vast quantities of heroin to Europe by way of Iran and Central Asia and making an estimated profit of $2.3 billion last year for the country’s warlords. The Taliban, in loose alliance with a militia loyal to warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has reestablished itself and is harassing the U.S. military and Western aid groups working in the south and east of the country.

Throughout the nation, a land where life expectancy is a mere 43 years, the absence of infrastructure and of access to clean water and medical facilities takes a terrible toll in lives of infants and mothers. And a drought has devastated agriculture.

Yet, partly because of the $1.3 billion in assistance provided by the United States and other international donors, partly because of the commitment of aid workers who brave attacks and sometimes death in their dedication to save the country, and mostly through the work of Afghans themselves, a rebirth is taking place in much of the nation.

The national road system is being renewed, with the first link of almost 300 miles between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar completed, reducing a three-day journey to six or seven hours. The next link in a ring of highways around the rugged, Texas-sized nation is being built with U.S. funding from Kandahar to Herat in the west. European and Asian donors, meanwhile, are renovating roads to the north.

Two cellular telephone networks have gone up, making calling possible within and among the main cities. Local government is beginning to function. Even though the child mortality rates are still among the highest in the world, according to the United Nations, they have begun to fall.

Most recently, the country has managed to hold its first democratic election for president. Counting has just begun, but it is expected to result in a popular mandate for Karzai and strengthen the central government’s hand in dealing with national problems.

“If this peace continues, we will one day be a prosperous nation,” said Khan Jan, 50, an Afghan war amputee seated on a mat in a simple mud brick house here built for him by Care International, a relief agency active all over the country and especially in the Shomali Plain, where it has provided housing for 87,000 people in the last two years.

“We will do it ourselves,” Jan said. “I look forward to the day when Afghanistan will be able to provide aid to other countries, and not just be an aid recipient.”

That kind of optimism is hard to come by in Iraq. Foreign workers in Baghdad and many other areas of that country cannot move freely for fear of attack or kidnapping, and rarely venture to walk on the streets of the capital or travel in Sunni and Shiite Muslim areas without armed escorts. The likelihood of attack has paralyzed reconstruction projects, making it impossible to disburse the billions of dollars in aid allocated by Congress.

Afghanistan is a different story. Insecurity is a concern for foreigners in many areas as well, and attacks have been on the rise, but it is far less pervasive than in Iraq.

In central Kabul, for instance, it is common to see unescorted foreigners shopping or dining, while military patrols by the NATO-backed International Security Assistance Force move freely and rarely with any incident. Although there is much less foreign aid money earmarked for Afghanistan than for Iraq, spending it is far easier through the network of nongovernmental aid organizations that have long been active throughout most of the country, even during the days of the Taliban and the civil war that followed Soviet occupation.

There have been setbacks in the aid community. The group Doctors Without Borders pulled out of Afghanistan in July -- after five of its staff were killed in June in the country’s northwest -- accusing authorities of being unwilling to arrest the perpetrators. (The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killings.)

Paul Barker, the U.S. director for Care International in Afghanistan, said that in the past 1 1/2 years, there have been 400 attacks on foreign aid groups and their staff, with only one successful prosecution. Despite this “culture of impunity,” he said, most aid groups so far are refusing to leave.

“The general feeling is that this is the best chance for Afghanistan in nearly three decades, and if we can avoid it, we don’t want to abandon the country now,” Barker said.

Patrick Fine, the newly arrived head of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kabul, said he is astonished at the progress made in the country. He pointed out that large-scale foreign assistance did not get rolling until the latter half of 2002, so that most of the improvement has taken place in just two years.

Most remarkable, he said, was the advance in education, with the school population rising from 450,000 to 4.8 million, about 40% of them girls who were forbidden access to schooling under the Taliban. It is, he said, “probably the fastest growth of a national education system in the history of the world.”

On a recent visit to Logari, a village in the district of Karabaq, about a 45-minute drive north of Kabul, residents were excitedly watching as workers were finishing a swimming-pool-sized reservoir and lining it with crushed boulders that had been hauled down from the mountains on both sides of the plain.

A village elder explained that water pumped from a deep well recently dug in the village would be stored there. It would prevent waste and provide enough water for the village for about three days between refills. Any runoff would be used to irrigate, he said.

It was a relatively small project, but an important improvement for the people of Logari, all recently returned refugees. Dozens of two-room mud brick homes, built with funding and materials from Care International at a cost to the organization of about $500 for each structure, had also gone up.

“We are happy,” said the elder, Aji Mohammed Qalan, 63. “When we came back after the Taliban, there was no one here and nothing for us. Now life returns.”

A less fortunate area was District 5 of Istalif, about 15 miles from Logari. There, residents said they were still waiting for assistance, that most of their children were sick from contaminated water, that the grapes wouldn’t grow without pesticides and irrigation, and that they needed their road repaired so that the men could get to jobs in Kabul more easily.

“The warlords and commanders take everything,” complained one man, Aghrdash Sayed Akram, as he sat in a room decorated with carpets and an old hunting rifle on the wall. “There is nothing for us poor people.”

But even he refused to give up hope. “It is a little disappointing and discouraging that they have not given anything to us -- but we cannot say the past three years were not good,” Akram said. “We are happy that we came back again and got freed from the Taliban and the terrorists.”