October 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Letter from Afghanistan

Doug Hostetter, a Mennonite who woked in Vietnam in the 1970s, has been on staff at AFSC and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

As the Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 circled the Kabul airport I got the first real look at what the American bombing last October and November, and the previous 23 years of war, had done to this ancient, formerly beautiful city. From the air it is clearly visible, whole sections of the city lie in rubble. The large military bases with barracks surrounded by walls and the airport with its detritus of destroyed planes and tanks are understandable targets in a war, but enormous sections of Kabul, with no visible military objective, are also in ruins. In this 2000-year-old city of a million people, 60 percent of the housing stock is now rubble.

The Mennonite Central Committee is helping Afghan families in the Shomali Valley, Parwan Province to rebuild homes destroyed by American bombs and previous wars. The MCC provides the supplies, and the Afghan families supply the mud, bricks and labor! Photo: Doug Hostetter

Last fall, about a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center, days after the beginning of the US bombing of Afghanistan, I traveled with Suraya Sadeed, the Afghan-American director of Help the Afghan Children (HTAC), to Tajikistan and Afghanistan. We had carried $130,000 from HTAC, AFSC, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), and the Muslim Peace Fellowship (MPF) that we used to purchase 239 tons food and blankets in Tajikistan. There we hired 23 10-ton trucks that we accompanied across the Amu Darya River to deliver the lifesaving supplies to refugees living in camps in Takhar Province in northern Afghanistan. I remember how pleased I was to be a part of an interfaith relief effort organized and funded by US citizens to help the citizens of Afghanistan, even while my government was raining destruction on Taliban front lines just four miles south and on Afghan cities throughout the country. As the plumes of smoke rose, and the ground shuddered, I had wondered what was happening to the Afghans living on the other side of the Taliban lines.

When the AFSC National Office Program Coordinator for East Asia asked if I would accompany her to visit AFSC programs in Kabul and the surrounding provinces, I realized that I would have an opportunity to see what had happened to the civilians living behind Taliban lines. Help the Afghan Children and the Mennonite Central Committee, two of the other partners from last fall's relief delegation, have also asked me to meet their staff and visit their projects. This has given me a wonderful opportunity to get a grass-roots look at Afghanistan, one year later.

After a week of visiting grassroots development and reconstruction projects in three provinces and talking with scores of people in the Kabul Government, Afghan NGOs, international NGO staff, and rural and urban Afghans, here are a few observations:

The US War:

I was not able to visit the entire country, but according to international NGO staff, the American war with its high-tech "precision" bombing destroyed 5000 civilian homes and killed 2500 Afghan civilians in Kabul and the three surrounding provinces. Note that this information covers only 4 out of 26 Afghan provinces. A UN official estimated that 1.1 million Afghans fled their homes after September 11 because of the American war or the food crisis caused by the bombing. One of the projects of the Mennonite Central Committee in the Shomali Valley is to rebuild homes that were destroyed by American bombing or previous wars. A housing kit costing $935 will supply windows, doors, wooden beams and planks, pipe and cement for the reconstruction of one home; the Afghan homeowner and his neighbors will supply the mud bricks and labor.

The Karzai government:

The central government of Afghanistan is the city of Kabul. Any check point more than 10 miles outside of Kabul is not operated by the Karzai government, but by a local military commander or warlord. The US military strategy in this war was to use the Northern Alliance commanders, as well as any Pashtun warlord that they could buy, to fight against the Taliban. Militarily, the strategy was a short-term success; the Taliban, whose religious fanaticism by this time had proven unpopular with most Afghans, were quickly routed. The warlords and commanders are now the government in most of Afghanistan. Dr. Sima Samar, Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, stated, "Security for people is very bad in this city, and it is much less safe in rural areas. Every commander has his own militia, and his own jails." Another Afghan told me, "There is less peace and security today than there was a year ago, under the Taliban. At least under the Taliban you knew you would not be robbed or killed when you traveled between cities."

Almost everyone I met expressed profound disappointment in the Loya Jirga, and the way the US had manipulated the situation to put the US-backed warlords in the cabinet. I spent one afternoon on the back of a motorcycle touring the destroyed sections of Kabul. In each section, I would ask my driver Al Geiser, a Mennonite working for the Renewable Energy Sources Afghanistan Project, who destroyed that part of town. I was astounded to see how much of Kabul had been destroyed by Northern Alliance warlords. Al commented, "Now you can understand how the people of Kabul feel. They see the same commanders who destroyed their city are now ministers in the US-backed Karzai government."

Schools:

Children from the Karte-Parwan Middle School in Kabul catch a quick drink before class. This school which serves 3000 students (in three shifts) was just rebuilt by Help the Afghan Children. Photo: Doug Hostetter

Afghanistan has the lowest educational level of any country in Asia. Only 10 % of the women can read and write, while 25% of the men are literate. The educational system in Afghanistan has suffered a double blow--war and fundamentalism. Taliban fundamentalism discouraged education beyond religious instruction for boys, and actually forbade the education of girls and women, while the wars destroyed most of the existing schools. UNICEF sponsored a big "Back to School" advertising campaign. It has been very successful in attracting students; now there is a huge shortage of schools. Zabihullah Asmatey, Deputy Minister of Education, stated, "This school year we planned for 1.5 million students, but by now we already have two million students, and next year, with the return of refugees, we expect four million students. We have textbooks this year for only 500,000 students." Dr. Sima Samar spoke of another difficulty, "There is a special problem now with girls, since for the past five years the Taliban prohibited their education. We are trying to figure out what to do with girls age 7 - 12 who have never been to school, and now want to attend school for the first time." The American Friends Service Committee and Help the Afghan Children are both actively rebuilding schools in Kabul and in other provinces [for more information www.afsc.org/asia/afghan/afghan.htm or www.helptheafghanchildren.org]

Humanitarian Crisis:

Afghanistan, a country of 22.5 million people in a land area the size of Texas, has been at war for 24 years. In 2000, the last year for mine statistics, mine accidents claimed an average of 88 casualties/month, half of them children. Half of those injured died before reaching a medical facility. During the wars, four million Afghan citizens fled the country as refugees, and another two million are internally displaced persons. With the ending of the major hostilities this summer, 1.7 million refugees have returned from abroad, double the number that international agencies had expected, and another 900 thousand of the internally displaced persons have returned to their destroyed communities. There is an enormous crisis looming for the refugees who have returned home only to discover that the expected assistance from the international community is not there.

The US Government spent $1 billion/month to wage this war, and has committed only a few hundred million in reconstruction over the next five years. At the January Donors Conference on Afghanistan, the world community (including the US) pledged $4.5 billion over the next 2.5 years. Most of those pledges have not even begun to flow, and Afghans worry that they may never be honored. An Afghan development worker spoke for many when she said, "My biggest worry is that the US will soon move on to bomb some other country, and the American people and the rest of the world will completely forget about the enormous remaining needs in Afghanistan.

Previous Article    Next Article