Afghan projects slow to reach villages

BARA KALA, Afghanistan -- The rickety diesel drill digging a new well at the edge of a parched field represents the sum total of reconstruction so far in this village in eastern Afghanistan.

Fifteen new wells, built under an Afghan government program that gives villages cash for projects of their choosing, mean that villagers no longer have to steal clean water from the one neighbor wealthy enough to have drilled his own well.

But three years after the United States ousted the Taliban government, Bara Kala's 1,200 residents still have no school for girls older than 12, no irrigation system that would allow them to profitably grow crops other than opium poppies, and no local authorities to protect them from militia gunmen who demand protection money from shopkeepers and rob motorists on the isolated, rocky track that connects the village to the main road.

The only other visible action the government of the US-backed interim president, Hamid Karzai, has taken in the village, residents say, is to spray chemicals from airplanes to devastate the poppy harvest, an attempt to curb the opium trade without a parallel effort to help villagers find other income.

''We will accept Karzai as our president if he helps us," said Mohammad Hassan, 78, a respected elder surveying the well drilling, dressed in a turban, dishdasha robe, and plaid vest.

''But he's only talking in theory, not in practice," Hassan said. ''Poppies are the only way we can make a living."

While the Bush campaign talks about Afghanistan as a country transformed, the reality is more complex. Reconstruction has only barely begun to touch the rural villages where most Afghans live. Most international aid has been focused on large cities. And as Afghanistan's fledgling central government struggles to win its people's allegiance against a growing drug trade, recalcitrant warlords, and Taliban militants, many in rural areas, are beginning to express disappointment that they haven't seen more change.

Aid falls short
In Kabul, hundreds of Afghans have been hired to clean trash piles with shovels, but many more labor-intensive sanitation projects are needed throughout the country, said Paul Barker, director of Care International in Afghanistan.

Across Afghanistan, more than 200 new schools have been built. But with millions of Afghans returning to school after years without studies, many existing school buildings cannot hold all their students and lack heat, furniture, and skilled teachers, said Vikram Parekh, an analyst in Kabul for the International Crisis Group.

The largest single US-funded project was the rebuilding of the highway from the capital, Kabul, to the southern city of Kandahar. But the country's other major cities remain isolated from one another and from the smaller towns in their regions by roads that are so bone-jarring that analysts say they contribute to the opium economy, making it impossible to get more delicate kinds of produce, such as melons and pomegranates, to larger markets. The lack of decent roads also slows the country's political integration and reinforces the power of local strongmen, Parekh said.

The total flow of US and international aid to Afghanistan is far less per capita, $57, than in other recent nation-building efforts. Bosnia received $678 per capita, and Iraq was pledged $225, according to an analysis by the Rand Corporation.

''The Bush administration made pretty clear that Afghanistan was just the opening campaign in a broader war on terrorism and didn't want to get bogged down," James Dobbins, who was special envoy to Afghanistan for the administration during and immediately after the 2001 invasion, said in a recent interview.

''They were critical of the nation-building efforts in the 1990s," he said. ''They felt we'd made these people too dependent on international assistance. They wanted to try what they called a low footprint approach."

Ambassador Francesc Vendrell, the European Union's envoy to Afghanistan, said that the $8.2 billion pledged at a donors' conference in Berlin in April is respectable and that it's unclear whether the Afghan economy could absorb reconstruction aid any faster.

But of the first $1 billion spent, he said, about 40 percent went to food assistance and refugee resettlement, and 20 percent paid the salaries of government officials, leaving just 40 percent for reconstruction spending; some of that went to set up infrastructure for international organizations.

The most crucial area where reconstruction is lagging, say diplomats, aid groups, and think tanks here, is in creating the central government institutions, such as security forces and a functional justice system, that are needed to shift the country away from what Parekh's group calls ''an economy based on drugs and power."

Not enough has been spent, they say, to foster economic opportunities as an alternative to the drug trade, which generated more money for the country in 2003 and 2004, $4.8 billion, than all international aid combined.

Afghanistan now has 13,000 national army troops and 19,000 police officers, still outnumbered by an estimated 50,000 militia members. A law calls for the arrest of anyone who commands an illegal militia, but that means little, Parekh said, when courts are overloaded and judges are undertrained and easily bribed.

These problems are on display in rural villages where the Karzai government, like the United States, has a small footprint.

In many villages, the lone reconstruction project is funded through the National Solidarity Program. Funded by the World Bank and administered by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation, the NSP hands out grants based on population, about $200 per family in selected villages.

Each village must elect men's and women's councils to decide how to spend the money.

''It's the first time this has happened in Afghanistan . . . that the government came and asked us what we need," said Farhat, a poppy farmer who like many Afghans goes by one name and is doubling as project supervisor for the wells. But it's not nearly enough.

''We need more construction, clinics, schools, irrigation canals," said Farhat, 32, looking across the fields that descend gradually from the village, a few growing radishes and corn, but most bare, dried mud. ''We have 2,000 schoolchildren just sitting in the field with no school building."

Battling drugs, violence
Despite their popularity, National Solidarity Program efforts often run afoul of the larger problems of drugs, lack of security, and warlords.

Gunmen stole about $1,000 of Bara Kala's program money in a holdup on the only road to the village from Jalalabad. Villagers blame frequent roadside robberies on gunmen following local militia leaders, warlords who provide most of the village's income through the drug trade, but who also extort money.

In Sandurwa, a village in neighboring Laghman Province, mortars and rockets rained down for half an hour Sept. 18 on the office of a nonprofit group helping carry out an NSP irrigation project. Government police were too far away to respond, so villagers grabbed their Kalashnikovs to repel the attack, NSP officials said.

The officials blame drug smugglers opposed to any economic development that would offer villagers an alternative to working with them. ''They think it will disrupt their business," said Oref Sahak, an engineer who supervises NSP projects in Laghman, a province of steep mountain chains split by dry river valleys that are carpeted in summer with yellow, red, and white poppies.

The violence drove project staff members from the area, so Sandurwa's project, lining an irrigation canal with cement to keep precious water from sinking into the ground, is now on hold for the second time. The first time, the villagers postponed it so that men, women, and children could work full time to harvest poppies.

The NSP canceled its project in Hassanzai, a village of mud houses in western Laghman, after it nearly veered into violence. Followers of a local militia commander brandished guns and threatened to attack villagers if the commander's son was not elected head of the project's planning council.

In the village of Samaram, militia commander Akram Khan is the police chief, and his in-laws head the men's and women's councils.

Samaram, a maze of mud walls, is set among hay fields. There are no cars; the only electricity comes from a privately owned water-powered dynamo. One recent afternoon, the streets, dirt paths barely wide enough for two people, were soupy from rare rainfall that sent torrents of water down the open sewers.

''The government has done no good works here," Khan's sister-in-law, Sharafa, 50, who heads the women's council, said as she sat proudly upright and received guests. She said villagers had been told that the projects that they want -- a girls' school and a bridge to allow them quicker access to a clinic across the river -- won't both fit in the NSP budget.

For now, girls stay home, while boys ride an hour on bicycles to attend a high school. But there is no teacher and no books, said Sharafa's brother, Said Wali, 19. ''We just sit and talk."

On paper, the village of Bara Kala has a women's council, but the women there seemed to know little about it; NSP workers say men have been known to hijack women's councils' agendas.

Rayana, one of a dozen women who were allowed to meet only female reporters and then only with a male relative listening in, said that after years of drought, villagers cannot grow enough vegetables and must buy them in the market, where the drug trade has inflated prices.

''Three years ago, our life was a forced life," Rayana said as she breast-fed the youngest of her eight daughters. ''Now . . . we are free to sit at home or work or whatever we like." But in the most important respect that change has been theoretical, she said, since there is no female teacher in town. ''Our men are very religious and they won't let girls [over 12] go to a male teacher."

The women were unanimous on what would give them more options: education.

''I have a relative who is educated who wants to teach the other girls," said Basnahar, an elderly woman. ''If someone would pay her, she is ready."

Farah Stockman of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.