One of my coworkers went to Afghanistan for a month to teach English for an NGO. She just returned and we spent lunch "debriefing" her. She had some interesting observations----I'll try to share what I can remember in the extended copy. After all, there's nothing like an eyewitness.
My coworker was teaching English to engineering students (all male of course) at a college in Kabul. She said that they mostly already knew some English, but they were trying to improve their pronunciation and conversational skills.
#1 complaint--unemployment. The unemployment rate, as you might imagine, was quite high. People prefer to take jobs, even menial ones, with foreign groups and NGOs because they pay better. Her students were expecting to be unemployed after they finished school.
#2 things looked pretty bombed out, but there was also a great deal of construction going on. Traffic was crazy (the students puzzled over the idea of traffic laws)
#3 see #1, the type of aid the students wanted from foreign countries was investment that would lead to jobs, not handouts or even "education" or agricultural education ("we've been farming for centuries--don't tell us how to farm").
#4 They were cool toward Karzai ("puppet of the west") although some had been out of the country altogether under the Taliban and had returned only after the Taliban was removed.
#5 Everyone, especially the women of course, was behind in education. However there were some female professors at the college--many educated in Moscow. (We may not realize that although Afghans resisted the Soviet occupation, they were also under Soviet influence for a long time. Thus books in the library were in Russian, etc.)
#6 As a woman and a foreigner, my coworker was confined between her house and the school. No trips to the city or the markets, which disappointed her. When she did go out in public she wore a head scarf and local clothes (from a used clothing store, she said), but she said she got looks that a local woman dressed the same way wouldn't have. On the other hand, since she's Korean, she also had people mistaking her for one of the ethnic groups (Hasara?) in Afghanistan.
#7 The UN guys were most resented because they tootled around in SUVs and were sort of jerks
#8 Her students were great. And speaking of the discussion of inner city schools and education, they would begin the day asking about her health, and they would ask permission to enter or leave the classroom.