Trials and Tribulations in Tribal Afghanistan
There is no end to it.The good news is that the situation has improved enormously. UN-sponsored and NATO troops have succeeded in routing the Taliban, and they are now busy turning their attention to reconstruction, to ensuring that the new government will eventually, as planned, be more than capable of taking on its internal affairs on its own. So foreign troops are training the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police.
These same troops and NGOs have been busy helping to build needed health clinics, rudimentary schools where previously there were none. But food shortages in the war-torn country are a problem. Farmers, understandably, have turned from growing good staples which have a low return on the internal market, to high-profit poppies which local war lords (including some sitting in the national assembly) and Taliban encourage and profit handsomely by.
The good news was yesterday. Today's news differs slightly. Doesn't it all depend upon whom you speak with? Well, according to international aid agencies the security situation in Afghanistan, particularly in those areas where food aid is most needed is deteriorating rapidly. With the result that the environment is dangerous to the safety of aid workers.
And when they do manage to get through with their food convoys without attack, they discover that those for whom the food is meant are often fearful of accepting it. For if these villagers are discovered with identifiable international food aid they become reprisal targets. Which is it to be, starvation or retaliatory attacks for accepting foreign food?
One-third of the country has become too dangerous as a result of attacks by insurgents or criminals for the aid groups to operate within. The aids groups spokespeople claim that in this past year alone there has been a notable erosion of security in greater parts of the country. So much for winning the war against terror. The people in rural Afghanistan live with terror.
Yet the World Food Program of the UN is feeding 3.5 million people in Afghanistan despite the dangers inherent in the delivery of that food. WFP send their convoys into all 34 provinces of the country, containing shipments of wheat, beans, fortified biscuits and cooking oil. They've had to resort to hiring local drivers whose vehicles are not identifiable as being part of the UN-sponsored convoy.
Almost a million and a half Afghan school children are provided with fortified biscuits each day of school attendance. Girls are given a one-litre can of cooking oil for their families at the end of each month of classroom attendance as an encouragement for their families to send their daughters to school. Girls attending school in the urban areas are a given; in the provincial tribal areas parents are loathe to send their daughters to school; it is not part of the tradition.
The Taliban have their agenda and their supporters, having in many instances suborned the inadequately armed and paid Afghan Police Force. Foreign businessmen accompanied by Afghan counterparts trying to invest in the country and repair infrastructure are kidnapped by Taliban raiders with the active collusion of the police.
Afghan police, tasked with accompanying and protecting a convoy of Afghans and foreigners establish telephone contact with the Taliban, informing them of arrival time at signal points, then give up the group to the Taliban for payment. Much to the dismay of the anguished Afghan civilians and foreigners then held prisoner. Occasionally set free, more often murdered.
"When my own country's police sells me to someone else, when another Afghan wants to put a knife to my throat, why? What can I expect from this? The plaintive lament of an Afghan civilian, a Kabul urbanite rescued from the reality of capture at the hands of the Taliban.
Why indeed. What can we all expect from this inchoate situation.
Labels: Religion, Terrorism, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Friday, October 12, 2007
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