World

Our ignorance in Afghanistan

November 23, 2009
article header image

So there I was, in the graveyard at dusk, the little girl screaming. I couldn’t deny it, it was all my fault. Umm? Maybe I should start again.

December’s issue of Prospect features a perceptive article by Alex de Waal on the west’s failures in Afghanistan. De Waal suggests that western officials, comfortable with academic concepts like “nation building,” “civil society” and “rule of law” have a hard time understanding the nitty gritty of politics in places like Afghanistan. I think he is right. We in the west are so much richer—often so much better educated than the Afghans we meet—that it sometimes blinds us to our ignorance about their lives and country.

Back in the very early days of the “war on terror,” back when the Taliban still ruled Kabul, back when it was still all good fun, I was based in a compound deep in rural Afghanistan, near the Northern Alliance foreign ministry in Takhar province. We westerners, well trained as to the proper disposal of garbage, would always neatly put our trash in the little pails we had brought with us from Tajikistan.

Our Afghan houseboy, of course, was not so pernickety. He would take our overloaded garbage pails, walk to the wall surrounding the compound, and dump them over, into what happened to be a cemetery for Northern Alliance soldiers killed in combat. Litter though, is not really a problem in rural Afghanistan. In a place that poor, recycling isn’t PC—it is simple economics. Every day the children of the village would journey to the Heroes Cemetery, dig through our garbage and take almost all of it home. Even the empty apple sauce sachets from our military ready-meals, with tiny bits of sweet fruit still stuck to the tinfoil, were seen as valuable.

Afghanistan is stunningly beautiful, as are its people. One afternoon, as the sun was setting, I saw through my window two little girls sifting through our trash. I grabbed my camera, loaded a roll of film and raced over to the cemetery. Click, click, click. The girls happily posed for my camera, their arms around each other. I was pleased with the shots: great light, colourful clothes, stunning kids. And then I had a moment of guilt. I thought to myself, “These children are so much poorer than I and yet I am taking from them. I have these pictures of them and have given nothing in return.”

Of course the only thing I had of value was money. I reached into my wallet. The smallest bill I found was $5, a considerable amount in rural Afghanistan, where the per capita annual income is around $250. It is often pernicious for westerners to massively overpay when we visit poorer societies; our money can distort the native economy and I realised that giving a ten year old a man’s weekly wage was perhaps a bad idea, but what could I do? The girls had seen me look into my wallet.

I took the $5 bill and gave it to the prettier of the two girls. The affection between the two of them was clear. I figured they must be sisters. I figured they would share. I was wrong. Instantly, before I could react, the smaller girl smashed the pretty one in the face with her fist, snatched the money from her hand, and raced out of the cemetery, leaving the other girl howling in tears.

“Oh shit,” I thought. “What do I do now?” I reacted again with the only tool at my disposal. I reached into my pocket. This time the smallest bill was a $20. I handed it to her. She stopped crying instantly, and took off for home.

Is there any relevance in my bumbling ineptitude and ignorance to the general failures of the west in Afghanistan? Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Its needs are straightforward. Building roads, digging wells, and providing irrigation would make peoples’ lives much better at minimal cost. Hiring Afghans to do the labour would put money in their pockets, stimulate their economy, and improve their infrastructure. And yet, despite huge western expenditures, the average rural Afghan is probably no better off today than he or she was five years ago.

Our NGO and government officials are responsible not to the people of Afghanistan, but to their masters in Washington or Brussels or London. So they pepper their policy papers with clichés that will play well at home and remember not to mention that they really don’t know what is going on. What they provide our governments is the illusion of understanding and so the illusion of control.

The beginning of wisdom is the recognition of our own ignorance. Bringing “the rule of law” to Afghanistan may well be beyond our capabilities. Hiring Afghans to dig wells probably isn’t.