Condoleeza Rice sets off on her most recent tour tomorrow, and it includes a stop in Afghanistan. I'm sure that we will hear lots of words about how Afghanistan is a success story in our NeverendingWaronTerror, that we are bringing freedom the Afghanis, and that everything is just hunkey-dorey.
What will likely be missing from her pronouncements is any mention of the impending crisis that confronts many Afghanis.
According to
Ahmed Rashid via yesterday's BBC page (UK edition):
"The United Nations is just short of declaring "a humanitarian crisis" for Afghanistan."
Some quotes from his article:
"The winter weather death toll in Afghanistan has exposed the country's acute lack of infrastructure, writes journalist Ahmed Rashid in his latest guest column for the BBC News website.
More than 600 people, many of them children, have died in a prolonged bout of bad winter weather in Afghanistan that has included unprecedented snowfall, heavy rain and below freezing temperatures.
In some eastern provinces ravenous wolves have been attacking equally hungry children."
...
"Afghans are still paying with their lives for the failure of the international community to fulfil its many promises to help rebuild the country."
...
"Even in Kabul's premier Indira Gandhi hospital, children in incubators and on respirators live or die depending on whether there are power cuts to the hospital.
Heating is non-existent and at times the temperature in the hospital has dropped to minus 10 degrees Celsius.
Many of the districts have no functioning hospitals and local clinics are devoid of medicines.
Now, in the first week of March, the World Food Programme has warned of unprecedented floods as the snow melts in the spring.
Nearly three and half years after the war that defeated the Taleban and despite the remarkable political progress Afghanistan has made, the lack of infrastructure continues to haunt this country."
Rashid makes the case that the terrible problems confronting Afghanistan now are in part due to a failure on the part of the international community to follow through on their pledges to help re-build Afghanistan, but it also seems that the real reason for this failure is the lack of political will on the part of the US to truly commit enough resources to get the job done.
"The international community pledged $13.4bn at the Tokyo and Berlin reconstruction conferences for the five years starting December 2001.
This despite a needs assessment by the Afghan government of $27bn.
Yet, according to the Centre on International Cooperation at New York University, until last month only $3.9bn had been given out for reconstruction projects.
Of that only $900m worth of projects has actually been completed.
In comparison Iraq is receiving many times what Afghanistan is getting in funds for reconstruction.
The kind of effort the US-led coalition has put into rebuilding the power grid in Baghdad has never been seen in Kabul."
Some tragic benchmarks from the article:
"In the meantime the lack of investment in Afghan agriculture has led to farmers growing opium poppies, which has led to drugs generating as much as $6.8bn in income between 2002 and 2004."
..
"The report (UN Development Programme (UNDP) report on Afghanistan) ranks the country 173 out of 178 countries in development indices.
" Yet the UNDP report states Afghanistan still has ''the worst education system in the world'' and it is the world leader in infant deaths, while one woman dies in pregnancy every 30 minutes.
Life expectancy for Afghans is still only 44 years - that is 20 years less than any of its neighbours."
But wait, there's more. Afghani women are still being sold into marriages against their will. From an article titled:
Forced Marriage Still Rife in Afghanistan :
"Fourteen year-old Bibi has never seen the father who wants to sell her into marriage with a stranger. She hid when he sent police to her village home in northern Afghanistan a month ago. Her elder brother Kareem refused to hand her over and was dragged off to jail. But Bibi found sanctuary with a sympathetic relative in Kabul, where she now lives in fear her father will one day catch up with her."
...
""She's like a check," said Shahnoz, whose husband is a first cousin of Bibi's mother. "She's beautiful and he wants to sell the girl for marriage."
Bibi's story is far from unique. Despite the re-emergence of democracy and women's rights in Afghanistan, human rights officials say between 60 percent and 80 percent of marriages in the country are forced on women."
And the tragic result of this 'tradition' is an all too frequent act of self-immolation on the part of the 'brides'. From and
ABC News International story from December:
"In the western Afghan city of Herat, there have been reports of an alarming rise in the number of women dousing themselves with fuel and setting themselves on fire in order to avoid unwanted marriages.
In July, Herat TV interviewed a 19-year-old Afghan woman called Shakiba from a hospital bed. She told reporters she burned herself because her family had sold her to a 28-year-old man for $10,000 as a second wife.
"My family was selling me and I didn't know what else to do," a severely burned Shakiba told a television reporter at the Herat Public Hospital.
In the absence of any state or nongovernmental services that she was aware of, Shakiba decided her only recourse was to commit suicide by an age-old method -- she chose an incendiary death over the prospect of living with her new husband's first wife."
Now, I'm not saying that there haven't been some incremental improvements in some small, selected parts of the country. But, it is clearly a different story for most of the nation, and there is no doubt in my mind that Condi will somehow fail to mention "the rest of the story" as she mouths her usual vacuous platitudes about peace, progress and prosperity in our glorious campaign of liberation and enlightenment.