Page 1 of 2 The Afghanistan seldom seen
By Pratap Chatterjee
VIDEO:Cameraman Ronald Nobu Sakamoto put together three videos
from footage taken in Afghanistan while traveling with Pratap Chatterjee just
after the American invasion in 2002 and again in November 2008. Click
here.
Want a billion dollars in development aid? If you happen to live in
Afghanistan, the two quickest ways to attract attention and aid from the United
States authorities are: Taliban attacks or a flourishing opium trade. For those
with neither, the future could be bleak.
In November 2008, during the US presidential elections, I traveled around
Afghanistan asking people what they wanted from the United States. From
Mazar-i-Sharif in the north to Bamiyan in
central Afghanistan to the capital city of Kabul, I came away with three very
different pictures of the country.
Dragon Valley is a hauntingly beautiful place nestled high up in the heart of
the Hindu Kush mountains. To get there from Kabul involves a bumpy, nine-hour
drive on unpaved roads through Taliban country. In the last couple of years, a
small community of ethnic Hazara people has resettled in this arid valley, as
well as on other sparse adjoining lands, all near the legendary remains of a
fire-breathing dragon reputedly slain by Hazrat Ali, the son-in-law of the
Prophet Mohammed.
A few kilometers away, hewn from the soaring sandstone cliffs of Bamiyan in
central Afghanistan are the still spectacular ruins of what used to be the
largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world. Two hollow but vast
arched, man-made alcoves, which rise higher than most cathedrals, still
dominate the view for kilometers around.
For much of the world, the iconic image of Taliban rule in Afghanistan remains
the shaky video footage from March 2001 of the dynamiting of those giant
Buddhas that had rested in these alcoves for almost 1,500 years. Months after
they were blown up, the Taliban bombed neighboring Hazara towns and villages
from the air, burning many to the ground. Tens of thousands of their
inhabitants were forced to flee the country, most seeking shelter in Iran.
In the seven years since the Taliban were ousted by the United States, the
Hazara villagers of Bamiyan have started to trickle back into places like
Dragon Valley in hopes of resuming their former lives. Today, ironically
enough, they find themselves in one of the safest, as well as most
spectacularly beautiful regions, in the country. Its stark mountains and
valleys, turquoise lakes and tranquil vistas might remind Americans of the
Grand Canyon region.
Yet the million-dollar views and centuries of history are cold comfort to
villagers who have no electricity, running water or public sanitation systems -
and little in the way of jobs in this hardscrabble area. While some of them
live in simple mud homes in places like Dragon Valley, others have, for lack of
other housing, moved into the ancient caves below the ruined Buddhas.
No help whatsover
Just outside one of the many single-room mud houses that line the floor of
Dragon Valley, I met Abdul Karim, an unskilled laborer who has been looking
daily for work in the fields or on construction sites since he returned from
Iran a year ago. Most days, he comes home empty-handed. "We have nothing, no
work, no electricity, no help from the government or aid organizations. Right
now our situation is terrible, so of course I have no hope for the future. I'm
not happy with my life here, I'm ready to die because we have nothing."
His only source of income is a modest carpet-weaving business he's set up
inside his tiny house at which his two children, a boy aged about 10 and a girl
of about 15, work. It generates about a dollar a day.
As I went door to door in the small Hazara settlement, I heard the same story
over and over. In the mud house next to Karim's, I met Najiba (not her real
name), a woman of perhaps 70 years, who said that her family had received
virtually nothing in aid. "The government hasn't done anything for us. They
just say they will. They just came by once, gave us some water, some clothes,
but that's it."
Traveling in Bamiyan province, I repeatedly heard the same story with slight
variations. In the wheat fields outside the village of Samarra, I met Shawali,
a peasant who told us that he and his son had fled south to Ghazni, a
neighboring province, to escape the Taliban. "My son and I labored hard pulling
big carts full of timber and heavy loads until we could raise enough money to
return to Bamiyan." Here he remains a day laborer, eking out a living, and no
better off than when he was in internal exile in Ghazni.
The situation has so disintegrated that many say they wish they could simply
return to the refugee camps in Iran. In Dragon Valley, for example, I met
Khadija. As the middle-aged woman fanned a small fire fed by wood gathered from
nearby, she said, "We were happy in Iran. It was good. The weather was warm. We
had a good life there, but it was still someone else's country. When the
[Iranian] government told us we had to go back home, we wanted to return to
start a new life. But [the Afghan government] hasn't helped us at all. They
told us they were going to give us wood, supplies and doors, but they've given
us nothing ... no help whatsoever."
A recent report from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) offers
some context for the kind of desperate poverty I encountered in Bamiyan. The
agency's analysts estimate that about 42% of the country's estimated 27 million
people now live on less than $1 a day.
Mazar-i-Sharif
Unlike Bamiyan, which has almost no paved roads and no electricity, the
northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif stands out as a relative success story. Mazar
was the first place the US and its Afghan allies from the Northern Alliance
captured in the 2001 invasion. Some 64 kilometers from the border of
Uzbekistan, it is home to the Blue Mosque, the holiest shrine for Muslims in
all of Afghanistan, where Hazrat Ali is said to be buried.
When I first traveled to Mazar in January 2002, only the mosque was lit at
night, a comforting beacon of hope in the post-invasion darkness of a shattered
city. The sole other source of luminosity: the headlights of the roaming
Northern Alliance gunmen who policed the city in Toyota pick-ups packed with
men armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers.
During the day, however, the city was brimming with hope and activity, just
weeks after the Taliban fled. I met folk musicians like Agha Malang Kohistani
performing songs on the street to mock the Taliban and classical musicians like
Rahim Takhari playing in public for the first time in years, while weddings
were graced with singers like Hassebullah Takdeer who sang classics like Beya Ka
Borem Ba Mazar (Let's Go to Mazar).
The Fatima Balkhi Girls School was among those that were opening their doors to
students for the first time in years. Amid the rubble of bombed-out buildings
at the Sultan Razya School, for instance, little girls flocked to classrooms
with earthen floors and no chairs. They squeezed by the hundreds into tiny
rooms, where lessons were sometimes chalked onto the backs of doors.
At Sultan Razya, I spoke to 14-year-old Alina, who bubbled with teenage
excitement as she described her adventures studying secretly in teachers'
houses during the Taliban era. "One day we went to class at eight o'clock,
another day at 10 o'clock, and another day four o'clock," she recalled.
Seven years later, I returned to find Mazar now well supplied with electricity
(by the Uzbek government) and connected to the capital city of Kabul by a
smooth, new, well-paved two-lane highway. Although there had been a couple of
suicide bombings in the city, Mazar was almost as safe as Bamiyan. Residents
who fled during Taliban rule to places like Tashkent had returned with hard
currency to invest in local businesses. While it would be an overstatement to
say that Mazar was flourishing, it's certainly decades ahead of Bamiyan in
development terms.
I tracked down Alina - one of very few in her class to have continued her
education - at Balkh University, where she was studying Islamic law. Now a
little shy about talking to foreign journalists, she was still happy. "Things
have completely changed in every part. All of the women and girl students are
studying their lessons in computers and English, and they are happy," she told
us.
I also revisited the Fatima Balkhi School, where the principal took us to meet
a new generation of 14-year-olds who told us about their plans for the future.
One wanted to be a banker, another dreamed of being a doctor, a third spoke of
becoming an engineer. Earthen floors and makeshift chalkboards were a thing of
the past. The Sultan Razya School had been completely rebuilt and the girls
wore neat school uniforms, although teachers still complained of a lack of
proper supplies.
Opportunities for girls were also expanding. Maramar, a 14-year-old Balkhi
student, invited us to visit the local TV station where she hosted her own
show. Astonished, I took her up on her offer and went to the RZU studios on the
outskirts of town where I filmed her reading headlines - about the US
elections! - on the afternoon news.
Indeed, girls' education is one of the real success stories in Afghanistan,
where one-third of the six million students in elementary and high schools are
now female, probably the
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