A short diary, as I'm tired of waiting for a new opne thread.
I heard this on Market Place tonight, carried by my local NPR station(s), a story about daily life in Kabul, and how inflation has increased due to new folks with money. Everything now is more expensive: food, apartments, etc.
Then there was this, seeomingly inncuous bit:
Shansab left Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded 30 years ago, and moved to northern Virginia. He ran a real estate business and raised a family. But the vision of a new, peaceful and democratic Afghanistan inspired him to leave it all and come back to Kabul.
He got contracts with the U.S. government here to build power plants. Four years on, he's made money, but he's lost hope in the vision.
NASIR SHANSAB: There are things that have happened that didn't exist four years ago. We have a phone. There are about 2,000 kilometers of new roads. Beside that? Nothing has happened. Kabul is destroyed as it was.
I had heard that things were bad, that much of the new road follows the path of a future gas pipeline, and so on. Make the jump:
But then my brain started to work, like the reporter's and editor's should have: Mr. Shansab has government contracts, paid for with MY tax dollars, and he' been there for four years...
Shansab says the buildings are still rubble, the country is still caught in the grip of corruption, and education and jobs elude most Afghans. The sum of all this is desperation and frustration, which Shansab says are the stepping stones to the insurgency.
SHANSAB: They read the papers and hear of billions of dollars coming to Afghanistan, but they don't see in their own lives any changes. You know, for an Afghan to take a gun and go to the mountains is very easy, because he has nothing. He has no running water, he has no electricity, his children don't go to school. That is something that the United States, Washington, has to take into account.
And I thought, why doesn't she ask him if he's built a fucking power plant yet? He's made money?? What's up with that?