KAPISA PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN — I took this picture last week, on the drive from Bagram Air Base out to FOB Morales-Frazier. What’s remarkable about it is that it’s not remarkable: the countryside is scarred by those deformed trees, which look for all the world like they’re parasite-ridden but which are probably just stunted trees trying to recover from being hacked to pieces for firewood and charcoal. You can see a lot of UNHCR tents if you look for them; and even when you see actual villages the poverty there is really difficult to understand. It is something even I, a professional analyst of Afghan issues, cannot really grok, because no matter how much time I spend in any community I still get paid an American salary and have fairly quick access to all the ludicrous amenities of an American military base. It is something Geography PhD student Jennifer McCarthy is trying to understand, but even she had to admit on more than one occasion that she simply cannot calculate some of her expenses, like gas for cooking.
Those little holes in the top? those are from stoves for cooking, almost certainly charcoal-fired. The UNHCR tents, while a welcome respite from the absolute worst of the elements, seem ill-designed to support a family for the long term: quite obviously, there is no chimney for the stoves used for both cooking and heating. In the process of saving themselves, some of these families must literally burn down their own houses, to say nothing of how much it must degrade the quality of the air inside (all of the villages I’ve visited, driven past, or been near have this lingering malodorous haze of old burning charcoal). Just for survival. Even as I bitch and moan about how pampered and spoiled most of the militaries deployed here behave, there is a larger purpose behind it: in a very real way, our obvious prosperity right next to such obvious despairing poverty can only be called offensive. It’s not that we have no right to be prosperous; rather, that when we have it easily within our means to help them become more prosperous, we choose not to. THAT is truly offensive.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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{ 6 comments }
Economic disparity between countries isn’t a problem of unequal distribution of wealth, it’s a problem of unequal distribution of progress. Two hundred years ago, Americans would not have looked at the economic situation in Afghanistan as it is today and called it poverty. Two hundred years ago, lots of Americans lived in those conditions.
You are not doing the locals any favors by perpetuating the idea of their victimhood. When we in the developed world keep telling them that rich countries “owe them a better life”, that they are mere victims of wealthy people refusing to give them what’s due to them, we sabotage their ability to help themselves. You’re saying to them, “Hey, little brown people, your efforts don’t count for anything. Only the superior white foreigners can lift you out of poverty. If they decide to do it.” The Afghans need to believe in their own ability to solve their problems.
The obvious prosperity of the foreigners working in Afghanistan is a problem because it creates unrealistic expectations. Locals can’t see the enormous economic infrastructure, social/political structures, and societal attitudes that went into producing that prosperity. It took the US two hundred years of economic development to achieve the sort of prosperity we see today. It’s ridiculous to think ANYONE could compress that into a few short years of foreign aid in Afghanistan. Even if Afghanistan had avoided the violence of the last couple of decades, its economic development would have been hampered by the fact that it’s small, landlocked, mountainous, and surrounded by poor countries.
Those trees remind me of the lines of mulberry stumps along many of the main avenues in Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan. If they are what they look like, then they are hacked every summer for the new growth, which is then fed to silkworms at local silk factories. But, I could be way off here.
Tictoc, I think my over-sentimentality here is clouding the point I wanted to make. Your last paragraph gets at the set up — I find it offensive that we flaunt our obvious wealth in such an incredibly poor place. Even in Afghanistan, the supply chains needed to maintain our ludicrous amenities (I will maintain that until I leave) are bafflingly expensive — shrimp flown in from Dubai weekly, massage parlors, tax attorneys, and so on.
Something as simply as sequenced traffic lights in a city are many years away.
But being prosperous also isn’t the same as being American-style prosperous. I am convinced that if we had made even a weak attempt to”live off the land” (a terrible phrase, but I think you know what I mean) then we would have been using our wealth to help them out. Rather than living in hermetically sealed mega-bases, we’d be using our presence to spur local economic development, and turn the areas surrounding American bases into beacons of prosperity.
Again, it’s obviously not a cure-all. The local workers who come work at Bagram do very well for themselves. But Afghans are among the most resourceful people I’ve ever seen: give a local fixer 24 hours and he can get you almost anything you can imagine. It’s remarkable. But instead of putting that to use, we instead ship things to Karachi, push hundreds of trucks through hundreds of miles of active insurgency, then wring our hands when bridges and millions of gallons of fuel get destroyed.
It is just off right now. This isn’t about bringing people American prosperity… frankly, I don’t think that’s healthy. But prosperity in the sense of having enough food and a chimney for your stove. That is easily achievable, and it is achievable through market means not handouts.
No reason for you to be ashamed of your relative well being against the poverty of the barbarians – these societies asked for their troubles and trouble is what they got – now the US and its allies are doing nothing less than amazing work in changing or atleast making an attempt to change this primitive society. Ideally Afghanistan and Pakistan should be hermetically sealed and left to rot – then once the roaches have ruined and destroyed these lands, we can allow fresh air to come in and let nature grow back in again – alas for the ruin of the glorious hindu and buddhist cultures of my murdered ancestors – look what happened to Gandhar Naresh..he is now that mullah with a beard who hacks people to death…alas for that sculptor who created the bamiyan buddha…his ancestors were butchered and the marauding hajaras themselves are being butchered by the converted sunnis…I hope these wars end…and I hope this horrible curse on humanity ie Islam is finally subsumed and destroyed.
SR, if you ever write such things on this blog again, I will ban you. I shouldn’t have to explain why. You will not refer to my friends as barbarians ever again.
Yes, SR, I’m not a big fan of the “R” word myself- “racist”- but that was pretty fracking racist. I’m not going anywhere beyond that, because a little voice in my head is whispering “Don’t feed the trolls! Don’t feed the trolls!”. Smart voice, that.