Clearly I'm failing to get my thought across -- which is that the Taliban have not been as thoroughly defeated as many seem to think and unless the lot of the average Afghan improves in the years to come, we'll witness a resurgence -- US/Nato, ISI or Afghan security forces notwithstanding.
The development of the mining sector by an Indian firm is nice, but not the sort of reconstruction I'm referring to: health, education, roads, communications, general security, the entire infrastructure of a functioning, modern state.
These are the sorts of things that aren't being robustly created. It's the lack of progress in these areas that will create future problems.
And now it's my turn to submit an article that illustrates my meaning:
A bitter lesson in capitalism by JAMES RUPERT Source: Newsday, NY
For Kabul street urchins, an overcrowded school is their only hope. Now, that is disappearing too.
KABUL, Afghanistan - Early each morning, hundreds of street kids -- the trash-pickers, beggars, water-carriers and taxi touts -- pile through the gates of a slightly rundown school. They arrive like children: shouting, shy, curious, nervous. And like survivors of war: thin, ill-dressed, wary and often hungry.
An estimated 40,000 to 60,000 children survive in Kabul these days by hustling on streets made dangerous by aggressive drivers, thieves and even kidnappers. But in the downtown school called Aschiana ("nest" in Persian), more than 800 of them find a miracle in every room.
In one class, 62 girls squeeze into 17 desks, practicing writing and math. Next door, music students talk quietly in a corner, prevented from playing their traditional instruments just now because another class is at the computer, shouting greetings down a video link to schoolkids in Japan. In other rooms, instructors and social workers teach tailoring, carpentry, land-mine awareness and a dozen other subjects.
But the miracles will end soon. A wealthy Afghan businessman and members of the former royal family say they plan to build a five-star InterContinental Hotel on the site, and they have told Aschiana to leave. The school has no place to go; its director says that, within days, he will have to turn his students back to full-time destitution.
Across war-ruined Afghanistan, essential roads, schools and irrigation systems are being rebuilt at a creeping pace. In Kabul, though, the money of the wealthy is pouring in. High-salaried foreign aid workers, rich expatriate entrepreneurs, corrupt government officials and drug-smuggling warlords are competing for comfortable homes and offices. Amid the fever to build villas, shopping centers and hotels for this elite, obstacles such as street children, slum-dwellers -- and laws -- get shoved aside.
It happened last year on a government-owned tract in Kabul where hundreds of refugee families from the provinces had lived for years in mud-brick hovels they built themselves. Unfortunately, the land adjoined Wazir Akbar Khan, the neighborhood where Kabul's wealthiest residents live in spacious, walled villas. When the need for more villas became urgent, the government bulldozed the squatters' homes and sold mansion-sized lots to top officials and their cronies.
[...]
full at --
<http://www.sabawoon.com/news/miniheadlines.asp?dismode=article&artid=23719>
Do you see the point here? Yes, some Afghans will do well, will benefit from whatever reconstruction occurs, whatever investment rolls in. But the real question, the question everyone concerned about the strength of the Talib movement should ask themselves is what happens to MOST people?
The ability of the US/Nato to maintain troops in Afghanistan for even 5,000 years won't matter a hill of microbes if there's a critical mass of discontent in the country keeping the Talib flame (or some variant) alive.
I think I've written this 80 times and, in the process, have grown bored with myself so now I'm done.
.d.
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