I don't travel in the same circle as yours as far as conversations go, but on this list and in print, whom do you have in mind? -- Yoshie --
>From Berube's Boston Globe piece which Doug put up:
"As Z Magazine contributor Cynthia Peters wrote last October, the operation that wrested control of
Afghanistan from Al Qaeda and the Taliban was a 'calculated crime against humanity that differs from
September 11th only in scale; that is: it
is many times larger.'"
This seems to be a more common sentiment. Erroneous in my view. Although the aid going to Afghanistan is insufficient. What happened to Bush's Marshall Plan? They have to deal with Iraq first?
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/17/international/asia/17AFGH.html
The Refugees Food and Hope Are Scarce for Returning Afghans By CARLOTTA GALL
SHOGHLI, Afghanistan, Sept. 14 — The farmer bent to pluck at the dry grass. "Tell them that we don't have anything to eat, we have no money to buy food, we have nothing," he said today, holding out a few dried stalks in his hand. "We do not know what to do. We don't even have winter clothes."
Like every other farmer around here, Shah Wali, 29, father of five, is worried that he will not be able to feed his family this winter. Buoyed by the promise of foreign aid, he and thousands of others returned home from their refugee camps to their drought-ravaged lands, only to find that they cannot manage.
"All the villages are in a bad way," he said. "There is only one person in a hundred who has anything, and everyone is trying to get something from that person."
Conditions in Afghan villages like this one in northern Afghanistan are so poor, and international assistance so starkly insufficient, that villagers may abandon their homes once again and return to refugee camps that have only just emptied, Afghan and international aid officials in northern Afghanistan say. Only an estimated 20 to 30 percent of the land was cultivated this year and most villagers, who are subsistence farmers, have not been able to grow enough to feed themselves and their families.
Three major factors contributed to the crisis here. The first is four years of drought, the worst in living memory. The second is the flood of returning refugees throughout Afghanistan — 1.7 million have returned from outside the country, double the number expected, aid agencies say, and another 900,000 have returned home from refugee camps in Afghanistan. The third factor is that donor countries have failed to come through with the large-scale assistance needed to get the rural population back on their feet.
Officials at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Program expressed deep concern in recent interviews that the shortage of food assistance is hitting vulnerable Afghan communities at the most crucial time — when they are trying to establish themselves ahead of the winter.
Abdul Rashid, 30, led a delegation to seek aid for 420 families from Shoghli and surrounding villages who lived for three years in refugee camps in northern Afghanistan. They returned too late to plant for the harvest, and anyway had no seeds, tools or farm animals to work the land, like thousands of other farmers across the north.
Some of the men in Shoghli have worked for other farmers during the harvest but the payment in grain will not see them through the winter, they said. None have been able to rebuild their houses because there is not enough water and the organization planning a shelter project has postponed the plan until next year. They returned discouraged.
"It is a huge concern, how people are going to survive this winter," said Cecile Fradot, protection officer at the United Nations refugee agency. "We are already aware of communities that are already talking of moving again. They have only been back two or three months and if they leave it will not be a failure, but partly a failure," she added, flushing with frustration.
"To prevent another disaster, we have to get assistance to them urgently," she said.
But the aid agencies themselves are short of supplies. The World Food Program says it will only be able to meet 45 percent of its aid commitments in northern Afghanistan with the grain it has received from donor countries, and officials said they were now urgently drafting contingency plans for another crisis this winter.
Steve Loegering, the deputy chief of the World Food Program's mission in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, who is responsible for seven northern provinces, said that in the last few weeks his supplies have been so short that he has suspended nine food aid projects.
That will cut supplies to several thousand people, said Saikouba Ahmed, the agency's program officer here.
Another 17 proposed projects will not even be considered, so drastic is the shortfall in grain supplies, Mr. Ahmed said.
Even before the aid cuts could be felt, villagers in Shoghli, a small collection of mud-walled houses scattered on the steep sides of dust-brown hills a nearly six-hour drive from Mazar-i-Sharif, sounded the alarm.
They sent out a plea for help two weeks ago, dispatching the ablest among them, by donkey and bus, to appeal to the aid agencies in the city. Two hundred families, who only returned home three months ago from a miserable life in the refugee camps, will not survive the winter without outside assistance, they warned, and some families were already planning to move.
"We love it here because it is our home, but when we do not have food or water, how can we live here?" said Mr. Rashid, who was selected to make the plea for help.
"More than 50 percent of the village will leave if there is no help," said Ruzi Qul, 55, a weathered man in a black turban. "What to do if there is no harvest?"
The villagers' most immediate problem is water, because of the drought. Shoghli lies in a group of 86 villages known collectively as Sheram, where the only source of water is rain and winter snow. Rainwater is traditionally collected during the winter in deep reservoirs carved out of the rock. Because the reservoirs are in poor repair and were already so low this year despite a reasonable rainfall, there is still not enough to go around.
Virtually the entire population of Sheram — nearly 2,000 families — left their villages over the last few years, exhausted and impoverished by the drought. As the harvests failed, they lost or sold their livestock and many of their belongings and eventually moved to the cities in search of work and food. They returned this summer, on the wave of optimism after the fall of the Taliban and as international agencies began a huge assistance program in Afghanistan.
"We thought we could manage; we thought the rains were enough," said Ghulam Nabi, a father of eight, who abandoned his home in a neighboring village last year.
Now their return seems almost foolhardy in the absence of the assistance they were hoping for.
Mr. Rashid said he had not gone begging for handouts, but had asked for a project that would bring work to the area. He had in mind the sort of project — like road building or construction of dams, in which workers are paid in grain — that the World Food Program is having to suspend.
Large, labor-intensive construction projects employing hundreds of thousands could have saved northern Afghanistan from widespread hunger had they been carried out this year, one United Nations official said.
"I am pretty disappointed that the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have not started with labor-intensive road construction, hydro-electric dams and so on," he said. That was another plan this year that did not materialize, he said.
Ms. Fradot, of the refugee agency, is monitoring the warning signals with a sense of doom. "It is so sad," she said. "This year we had so many happy stories of people returning, but we will still see people displaced again." -- Peter