YOUR VOICE
In this section:
Afghans Work, Build, Study After Decades of War
Afghans Work, Build, Study After Decades of War
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Rick Marshall, right, with the local wakil (district
chief) in Herat Province, prior to groundbreaking for
Herat-to-Kandahar portion of the Ring Road.
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By Rick Marshall
Your Voice, a continuing FrontLines feature, offers personal
observations from USAID employees. Rick Marshall worked as
the public affairs officer at USAID/Afghanistan from March
15 to June 21.
Afghans say the rain began last fall, the very night when
Hamid Karzai was elected president. That would be fitting,
for after seven straight years of drought, this land of stark
and haunting beauty needs an honest, functioning government
as much as it needs rain.
Kabul sits in a broad, flat plain, ringed by mountains still
snowcapped in late June. Once famed for its gardens, the city
is nearly treeless now, the Kabul River a brown torrent of
sludge and runoff. The city has no sewage system. The buildings
and the streets are the same dusty brown. Along the highways
one still sees shops set up in freight containers.
Between 1979 and 2001, three waves of war—first launched
by the Soviet Union, then the mujahadin commanders, and finally
the Taliban—ravaged the country in merciless succession.
But the Afghans are a resilient people, and today people
everywhere are going about their work, stocking up their stores,
carrying schoolbags, and filling the streets with cars and
people.
Those who would abandon Afghanistan might do well to visit
West Kabul and see the blasted-out rubble, block after block,
and organize, like I did, an event at Ghazi High School. Though
it has no walls or windows—a legacy of the commanders’
war—some 2,700 students attend this famous school, and
in their eager faces you can see why the country is making
progress.
Some 85 percent of Kabul’s children go to school these
days. Girls’ attendance is way up, and the Education
Ministry and universities are functioning again. All over
the country, USAID is refurbishing classrooms and rebuilding
schools like Ghazi.
The Afghan capital has nearly 4 million residents now. Perhaps
a million have come since the Taliban was toppled, part of
the 3.5 million refugees who have returned to the country
since then.
Like most places on this earth, Afghanistan has been fought
over and occupied many times, and the people have a well-earned
reputation for ousting invaders. So it might be logical to
think the United States will suffer the same fate. And so
it may one day. But for now, one thing is certain. No country
ever brought so much to Afghanistan as the United States is
now doing.
Although the long and difficult Pakistani border is still
violent, most of the country is at peace. Many countries might
have tried to halt the factional fighting, reestablish order,
stand up a government, and rebuild the country’s human
and physical infrastructure, but only one made the effort.
It is a mystery to me why the U.S. newspapers don’t
believe reconstruction is news. They see progress, but they
don’t report it. Fortunately, the Afghan media know better;
they report extensively on USAID’s work.
So, as a public affairs guy, I worry—not about the
Afghans, but about the Americans. I worry that that Congress
and the American people, not knowing what their tax dollars
are doing or not understanding the conditions that inevitably
make progress slow, will tire of the effort and abandon our
efforts.
It was a mistake in 1989, and it would be a mistake again
today.
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