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Community News Archives
Return to the Captain's Quarters

1. The road from Antarctica to Azerbaijan (10/13/05)
2. Observations, vignettes and first impressions (10/20/05)
3. Traveling travails and dangerous driving (10/27/05)
4. The Maiden Tower (11/10/05)
5. No degrees of separation in the field (12/1/05)
6. Arriving in Afghanistan (12/8/05)
7. Getting settled in Gardez (12/15/05)
8. The Pashtuns of southeast Afghanistan (12/22&29/05)
9. Saved by Prima (1/12/06)
10. A Gardez barber (1/26/06)
11. Selling fruit in Gardez (2/2/06)
12. The Booksellers of Gardez (2/23/06)
13. The Women of Afghanistan (6/28/06)
14. Leaving Afghanistan (8/17/06)
15. NEW! Personal reflections on life in Afghanistan (11/9/06)

Contact the writer
If you have any question for Ben, are interested in learning more about something you have seen in this series of articles, or wish to correspond with the author, please feel free to e-mail him at bbarrowsafghandispatch@gmail.com.

Compass, 10/13/05, page 1
World Travels
Part I: The road from Antarctica to Azerbaijan
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by Ben Barrows
Editor’s note: The following is the transition piece from the previously published Odyssey on Ice columns written by Barrows from the South Pole and the start of a series of columns on his latest travels.

The year spent in Antarctica and New Zealand brought into sharper relief an interest in the world and the desire for intercultural interaction. In the fall of 2002, the International Relations degree offered by The American University, a small, private school in Washington, D.C., drew me stateside to complete school with a renewed sense of purpose.

Once resettled into academia, a Washington, D.C. internship came up as an excellent way to fulfill graduation requirements and gain hands-on experience; a litmus test for the desirability of a chosen discipline or career path. It was while I was casting about for the right internship that the richness and variety of human experience of Penobscot Bay area residents came to my aid. Ron Stegall, a resident of Deer Isle, invited me to a sit-down where he inspired me with stories of Peace Corps adventures and versed me on non-government organizations (NGOs) in the Washington area.

Armed with new knowledge, I researched a few NGOs and ended up applying for and securing an internship at Community Habitat Finance International. During the three consecutive internships there while finishing school, it was profoundly gratifying to have an outlet for new cognition gained in school. Being able to apply classroom lessons to various internship tasks gave substance and meaning to my university courses and enriched my experience at CHF.

Upon graduation in December 2004, I was offered a full-time position as an associate program officer at CHF. The United States Agency for International Development is the source of most of CHF’s funding, which is used to support a wide variety of development projects in more than 30 countries worldwide. The geographic focus of my department was Eurasia, where CHF manages programs ranging from small business micro-finance to large-scale infrastructure to flood relief. My job was mostly administrative, but I learned a lot from my mentors and team members, and the workload was heavy which kept me (over-) stimulated as I built up experience towards a field assignment.

The first opportunity for fieldwork came in July of 2005. Over the course of several years of work in Azerbaijan, CHF fostered the growth of an Azeri NGO, UMID, eventually forming a partnership which was awarded funding from British Petroleum. Under the BP grant, UMID targeted a destitute community on the outskirts of the capital city, Baku. The community consists of clusters of Soviet-era apartment buildings clustered around a derelict textile factory. When the factory shut down more than a decade ago unemployment in the community rose to over 90 percent. An influx of refugees from the war with Armenia further exacerbated the situation, creating a stagnation that has persisted ever since. The UMID-implemented program attempts to revitalize the community by approaching its development from several angles. Rapid-start infrastructure projects such as road construction and building repairs help raise community awareness and involvement as does the formation of neighborhood committees to prioritize local needs. Offering apprenticeships gives economic incentive to youth involvement and micro-loan programs cultivate small business growth and encourage entrepreneurship. The central role of CHF in this program is to assess whether these goals are actually being met. During the life of the program there is a constant process of progress-reporting, but the first real programmatic shakedown is the mid-term evaluation, which is why I found myself leaving D.C. on a plane bound for Baku.

Compass, 10/20/05, page 8
World Travels
Part II: Observations, vignettes and first impressions
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by Ben Barrows
I arrived in Azerbaijan’s capitol, Baku, benumbed from the long flight and spent half an hour gazing mindlessly at the empty luggage carousel before I gave my baggage up as lost. I ended up wearing the same clothes from Sunday morning to Wednesday evening—just before my personal hygiene level turned from uncomfortable into a biohazard.

The apartment waiting for me was spacious and well appointed. However, the three flights of stairs leading up to the apartment reeked of urine, burnt food and one morning there was even a dead cat in the entryway. The stone steps are worn smooth from decades of foot traffic, the wall mortar is crumbling, and during power-outages the stairwell is a danger to life and limb, but still preferable to the Soviet-era elevator, which is a claustrophobe’s nightmare.

Automobile safety seems to be non-existent in Azerbaijan; various reports I read on the plane all described driving in the country as extremely hazardous. The first morning that the driver picked me up for work, and when I reached for the seatbelt I was stopped by him tapping me on the leg and waggling his finger in my face. Although I didn’t understand his Russian it was clear that he did not want me to put it on; apparently that would be some sort of a personal affront. He then proceeded to drive through the narrow city streets like a crazed maniac. Although he was a very skilled driver, the proper method for passing through intersections seemed to be to slow down by 1.5 mph and beep the horn furiously. The roads aren’t very well paved, and there are lots of large, unexpected holes. The ride was extremely bumpy, and I remember thinking that a seatbelt should be worn just to keep the passenger from bouncing up and out of the seat and landing in the back or being impaled on the gearshift.

On the first morning of work I met my grinning translator who informed me he would be my “geed.” My response: “I’m looking forward to being geeded.” Later, when we were piled into the tiny backseat of a car he saw me looking out the window at a woman. He gave a little laugh and in his heavily accented English told me “it’s naychural.” I replied, “and I love nature.” Most of the jokes I made to him were really for my own benefit, or for telling friends at a later date because most are outside his linguistic acumen. Although I did get a laugh from him when I launched into a lusty falsetto verse of “you make me feel like a naychural woman.”

Even with the sea breeze at night, the temperature is 90 degrees outside, and without air conditioning, about 89.5 inside. One evening I went to the office to finish up some work, and as I was fiddling with the lock (the key is about the size of a ‘key to the city’ a mayor might give an honoree), the door was suddenly thrown open, and there, standing in his boxers, shirt, and high black socks was an Azerbaijani colleague. There was an awkward moment as he stood in the doorframe before he haltingly explained the temperature and previous expectations of solitude. As the temperature makes removal of clothing tempting, I understood. However, I would have perhaps understood a little better if he had decided to turn on either of the powerful oscillating fans instead of going straight to the pants option.

by Ben Barrows
On the second morning in Baku I was walking down the sidewalk and heard a car honking. This in itself was not unusual, but this beeping was extremely loud and incredibly close. I instinctively turned just in time to leap out of the way of a speeding car, which missed clipping me by inches—on the sidewalk. None of the other pedestrians around me seemed to think this was at all unusual.

While stepping out of a restaurant a few nights later, I narrowly avoided colliding with a man sprinting with a package under his arm. There were shouts in the street and a second later another man rushed by, opening a rather long knife as he ran. The second man was gaining as they turned a corner, but I didn’t wait around to see how it turned out.

I found another apartment closer to the office, which has lovely high ceilings, but for unfathomable reasons, 6-foot door frames. I groggily rose from bed for a late-night bathroom trip and knocked myself nearly senseless on the frame. After days of regularly bashing my head in the same place, I came close to just weeping.

Items of interest in the new apartment include: a sledgehammer head, cleaned and oiled; an iron left on when I arrived (frame-up for insurance/lawsuit?); no toilet paper, but there is a small hose that is apparently meant to fulfill the same function; two large satellite dishes blocking three of the kitchen windows, but no cable channels on the TV; number of spiders in my bed—unknown; number of quarter-sized spider bites received in two days—12; an ashtray containing two cigarette butts (this is only notable because they weren’t there for the first two days I was in the apartment).

Later in the week I piled in the car with my boss and an Azeri colleague on a trip to the Imishli region. Imishli borders with Iran, and is an impoverished, hardscrabble area. Once away from Baku the road condition deteriorates precipitously, but that doesn’t seem to deter everybody from driving at a minimum of 80 miles an hour.

We were riding in an old Russian sedan which was built in the 1980s, apparently before they put seatbelts in the backseat. There was regular traffic on the road, and there are lots of large oil and overloaded hay trucks to pass, preferably on blind corners. Since I survived the trip, I defer to the driver’s judgment, but there were a handful of occasions when he would swing out to pass when there was a car approaching and there clearly wasn’t enough time to get by. Perhaps he didn’t want to lose momentum, but there were times when we would literally pass a hair’s breadth from the oncoming car at combined speeds of 160 miles an hour. What was really remarkable about this was that I seemed to be the only one in the car who made special note of our near-death experiences. My companions would continue conversing casually as the oncoming car would scream by us in a blur, fishtailing on the shoulder while on the other side of the car our mirror nearly brushed the spinning tires of a 10-ton truck.

Strangest sight on the road: ten miles from nowhere, in a sun that made the dusty horizon shimmer, I saw a young boy standing on top of a donkey. He was gazing intently into the distance, and neither he nor the animal seemed to register our fleeting presence as we blew by.

After arriving in Imishli we secured accommodations at a “guesthouse” that shared a wall with a barn. The barn smelled poopy. It was hot. The air was still. The next morning I stepped out on the porch in time to see my Azeri colleague run across the gravel yard, naked, waving his towel in one hand and frantically slapping at himself with the other. He is a hairy man. Later at the breakfast table he told me, with downcast eyes, that wasps had attacked him while he was showering.

We spent that afternoon visiting people that had been Community Habitat Finance International development program recipients, the most interesting of whom was a doctor who had spent part of the war with Armenia performing surgery by candlelight in a barn after his clinic was burned down and half the inhabitants of a nearby village were killed or driven away.

Leaving Imishli, bound for a “town” less than 2 miles from the Iranian border, we were once again bouncing along at high speed when we topped a small rise to see in the distance a police car and two policemen. As we rapidly approached I could see that they were in the process of lowering a striped steel bar across the road, but the driver didn’t slow down. If anything he sped up. I was filled with a sense of unreality and watched with near amusement as everyone in the car, including the driver, started yelling and threw themselves down in their seats and the policemen stared, open-mouthed, as we passed under the bar by one millionth of an inch.

Compass, 11/10/05, page 1
World Travels
Part IV: The Maiden Tower
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by Ben Barrows
Cranes and skeletal high-rise construction dominate the skyline of Baku, but down by the waterfront the ancient Kyz Galasy (Maiden Tower) is still a commanding presence. The tower is shrouded in mystery. Its original purpose, its history, and even its age is unknown. Features of the unusual design include eight discrete internal chambers, walls that are 5 meters thick at the base but taper to four at the top, a lockable exterior door on the fourth level and a large trapezoidal appendage with an unexplained function.

For millennia, the Absheron peninsula, upon which Baku stands, was a holy land sacred to fire worshippers. The city sits on one of the largest oilfields in the region and the earth is saturated with black naptha and natural gas. In ancient times, before gas was harvested on a large scale, it would have oozed from the earth and occasionally ignited into dramatic fountains of flame. Temples and fire-worshipping shrines were built over gas vents that lit Baku with innumerable natural fires. It is theorized that ceramic pipes were used to channel gas fires to the chambers of the tower, each one honoring a Zoroastrian deity.

It has also been suggested that the building may have been a Zoroastrian observatory, with each of the tower’s nine south-facing windows angled to a particular heavenly body. Other schools of thought hold that the tower was a mausoleum. According to Zoroastrian custom, corpses must be exposed to the elements on circular dakhmas (towers of silence), as burial in the ground dishonored the earth. The trapezoidal projection was used for the bones of priests and rich or noble Zoroastrians, while the lower-status dead were put in the tower’s central well.

Many myths about the Maiden tower exist today; one tells of a king who fell in love with his young daughter. Against her will she promised to marry him, but requested he first build the tower to delay his advances. When the tower was complete and his love had not waned the girl threw herself from the tower into the sea below. Although the tower is now about a block from the Caspian, it is entirely probable that at one point the sea reached the base of the structure. In another version of the legend the girl’s lover kills the king to avenge her death and later makes the happy discovery that mermaids have saved her, and they marry and live happily ever after.

That the story depicts an incestuous marriage indicates that the tower probably pre-dates Islam, which arrived in Azerbaijan in the 7th and 8th centuries. Prior to Islamic rule, power was transferred via female lineage, which often resulted in ritualistic marriages between siblings and even parents and children.

The legend of the Maiden Tower has become a popular theme for Azerbaijani poets and authors. Afrasiyab Badalbeyli, the composer of the first Azerbaijani National Ballet (1940) used the tale, but thickened the plot with a case of mistaken identity. The king returns from war and is enraged to discover that his wife has borne him a girl instead of a boy. He orders the child be killed, but a kindly wet nurse spirits the baby away to be raised in a village. Seventeen years later the father has a chance encounter with the girl and is smitten, not knowing she is his daughter. She is already engaged, but he forces her to marry him. On the morning of the wedding, her young fiancé kills the king and rushes up the tower to rescue his betrothed, but she mistakes his footfalls for those of her father and flings herself into the sea.

Standing on the tower and looking down the shore to the west, miles of rusting derricks and stagnant pools of oil-soaked garbage tell of Azerbaijan’s recent past. The concrete and glass buildings springing up along Baku’s promontory and the BTC (Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan) pipeline are visions of the future, but love, suicide, bones and fire have given the tower a life of its own, and long after the oil has dried-up, the Caspian may once again lap against the thick walls of the Maiden Tower.

Compass, 12/1/05, page 1
World Travels
Part V: No degrees of separation in the field
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by Ben Barrows
The broad field of international development can be simplistically divided into two general categories: headquarters and the field. After a few weeks in Azerbaijan I realized that I found fieldwork significantly more interesting. Not to cast aspersions on working at headquarters in Washington; there was a tangible sense that work done in the office there had a direct effect on the persons being assisted by my employer, CHF International. However, in the field there are no degrees of separation between one’s daily efforts and the program recipients. Standing with a group of refugees in a crumbling Soviet-era apartment building in an impoverished Baku neighborhood was a visceral experience that made me feel as though I was having an immediate and positive effect on the people around me.

I returned to Washington with the intention of finding a field posting, and after casting a wide net, a friend directed me to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The International Migration Conference, convened in Brussels in 1951 at the initiative of Belgium and the United States, resulted in the creation of the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movements of Migrants from Europe. This name was soon changed to the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM). During the 1950s, ICEM arranged the emigration of more than 400,000 war refugees, displaced persons, and economic migrants from European nations to countries overseas. In the subsequent 50 years, the organization expanded its acumen to encompass a diverse portfolio of disciplines, including health and migration policy, assistance to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and Humanitarian and Social Programs (HSPs) in Central and Eastern Europe. By 2004, more than 12 million migrants had been directly assisted, and ICEM was changed to ICM and finally to IOM. In 2005, IOM has an estimated operational budget of almost $1 billion, 1,300 projects in 260 field locations, an operational staff of 5,000 people and 116 countries as member states.

I discovered that IOM was looking to fill a junior program officer position in an Afghanistan field office. The prospect of moving to Afghanistan was food for some serious thought, and I was reluctant to leave my friends and mentors in Washington, but I ultimately decided to send in my CV and see what happened. Then, in a sequence of events whose rapidity made my head spin, I had a phone interview, was offered the job, submitted my resignation to CHF, and found myself back in Stonington for vacation in the last two weeks of August before a September 3rd departure date.

Family and friends barraged me with questions, most of which I couldn’t answer. All I could do was repeat what I had learned during the job interview, which outlined what my duties as a JPO would be, but did little to satisfy curiosity about what life in Afghanistan would really be like. As it turns out, living and working in Afghanistan is so alien to the life we know in and around Penobscot Bay that I have found even the smallest elements of day-to-day life fascinating and educational. The coming series of articles will relate a variety of experiences in an attempt to sketch some aspects of tribal issues, politics, violence, the daily lives of Afghans, the evolution of the nascent national government and the ups and downs of international development in Afghanistan.

For more information about the International Organization for Migration, visit website, www.iom.int.

by Benjamin Barrows
Getting to Afghanistan is time-consuming, but easier than one might think. After reducing an entire apartment full of belongings to one large backpack and a carry-on, I excitedly boarded my flight in Washington. Following a layover in Heathrow, I flew to Dubai, where the commercial airlines trail ends. In the Dubai airport there is a small, hidden terminal from which the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service operates flights to Kabul.

I eyed the collection of people waiting in bleary-eyed resignation or nervous excitement for the flight, still hours away. Most were men; some were grizzled and athletic with ex-military airs and, I guessed, were in the employ of private security companies or field officers for any of the myriad NGOs or international contracting firms working in Afghanistan. While these men had well-worn boots and rugged shirts, others in the waiting crowd wore shiny loafers and pressed khakis (now wrinkled from sitting for hours in a plane) and folded their blazers over their laps as they talked earnestly in hushed tones.

The flight to Kabul is only a couple of hours, and as the plane descended from the clouds and banked over the airport, the entirety of the city became visible. Reaching impossibly far to the horizon were countless mud brick homes, densely packed in areas, and made to seem even smaller by the dramatic mountains ringing the region.

The shuttle from the plane to the terminal traversed a maze of razor wire, concrete machine-gun posts, and derelict airplanes and military equipment. The single arrival terminal was a dark, bustling, smelly couple of rooms with men leaning against the dingy chipped-concrete walls smoking cigarettes and examining the arriving passengers. I found my luggage and made my way out of the “concourse” to the waiting International Organization for Migration Land Cruiser. The road from the airport is a popular spot for violent attacks, but I didn’t know that at the time, and stared out the window, fascinated at the new sights and thrilled at the beginning of an adventure in Afghanistan.

My first lesson in Afghan social etiquette came the next morning. Males greet each other by saying assalam u alaikum and touching their right hand to their heart. This was not a too-difficult phrase, and learning the gesture was easy, but greeting a female turned out to be significantly more complex. The first time I was introduced to an Afghan woman I cheerfully stuck out my hand for a hearty shake. The woman looked at my hand as if it were a poisonous snake, and visibly shrunk away from it, which in the intense awkwardness of the moment seemed, even to me, to be a distasteful and dangerous appendage. In an assiduous effort to avoid another faux pas, I’ve since adopted a fairly lame custom of dipping my head and saying a quick greeting when introduced to Afghan women.

IOM internationals in Kabul live and work in walled compounds. For security purposes, walking on the street is forbidden, so there is a fleet of white vehicles that ferry us between locations. The center of Kabul is a dizzying dusty morass of vehicle, bicycle, tractor, handcart and pedestrian traffic. There are no traffic lights, and only the busiest roundabouts get traffic policemen, so traveling by car through the city during business hours is a process of white-knuckled acceleration through intersections and stupefying minutes spent baking under the sun in stopped traffic.

Kabul is dotted with compounds fortified with concrete barriers, razor wire, guard-posts and AK-toting men. The high mortar walls are fortified by rows of HESCO barriers—cylindrical prefabricated containers made with galvanized steel weld mesh that looks like lobster trap wire, and lined with non-woven polypropylene geotextile. The container is filled with dirt and gives protection from small-arms fire, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, improvised explosive devices and other larger explosives.

I spent only one day in Kabul, meeting my colleagues in the IOM offices and frantically trying to absorb as much job-related information as possible. The duty station to which I was assigned is the Gardez sub-office, located in Gardez City, Paktia province. Paktia is located in the southeast of Afghanistan and has been a major flashpoint in the conflict in the country. The morning of my departure from Kabul I loaded my gear into an armored car, and we drove away from the office, flanked by four escort trucks and an armed guard. As we sped away from the city I compulsively readjusted the Velcro straps on my steel-plated flak jacket, looked out the tinted bulletproof window and wondered what waited in Gardez.

Compass, 12/15/05, page 1
World Travels
Part VII: Getting settled in Gardez
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by Benjamin Barrows
Gardez City, in Paktia Province, is about a two and a half-hour scenic drive south of Kabul. Climbing through the dramatic Tera Pass into Paktia, drivers very casually rip around the hairpin turns, seemingly unaware there is no guardrail between the edge of the road and vertigo-inducing precipices. Much of the roadside is lined with countless painted rocks. White painted rocks are placed over spots where mines have been cleared, and red rocks or flags mark live minefields. Some of these painted rocks stretch in neatly spaced rows for hundreds of yards, others seem to be scattered randomly, and these are just the mines that have been identified. Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, with unexploded ordinance and an estimated 5 to 7 million mines contaminating more than 800 million square yards of the country.

The rural southeast is the most underdeveloped area of Afghanistan, and is still recovering from decades of destructive warfare. Security has improved significantly in the last four years, but international agencies and the Coalition Forces are still striving to support provincial and district officials and bolster functional connections to the central government.

The UN compound in Gardez City, where the International Organization for Migration has its regional office and staff accommodations, houses a number of international non-government organizations—Care International among them— and UN agencies: the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, United Nations Office for Project Services, and others. It took me a few weeks to learn all of the acronyms. The “compound” is actually made up of several adjoining compounds dotted with a hodgepodge of offices, living quarters, guard posts, and parking lots.

After dropping off my bags, I reported to the office and was assigned to the Quick Impact Program. The central goal of the USAID-funded QIP projects is to nurture the capacity of the government to foster an environment of greater freedom and enhanced economic activity. Projects in the QIP include roads, bridges, water supply, irrigation, schools, clinics, government buildings, gender training courses and power generation.

Once the local USAID Field Program Officer nominates a project, IOM invites Afghan construction companies to participate in a public competitive bidding process. After the contract is awarded, IOM’s Afghan engineers monitor project progress and provide technical input and direction to the contractor as needed. As a junior program officer, I provide administrative and logistical support, which entails a wide variety of activities, including meeting with contractors, government officials, and local elders, liaising with Coalition Forces and reporting to the main office in Kabul. The structure and process of the projects is actually fairly simple, but as I soon discovered, a multitude of confounding aspects of life and work in the southeast bring challenges to each project.

A few weeks after arriving in Gardez I had occasion to visit the city hospital. There is no electricity in Gardez, so those who can afford it use gasoline generators for a few hours a day. The hospital was not powered on the day of my visit, so when I arrived I stepped from the blazing sun of the dusty courtyard into what seemed like pitch darkness. Even before my eyes were able to adjust to the light, I was assailed by the smell. I’ve always disliked hospitals for, among other reasons, the antiseptic smell, but this odor was a mixture of the metallic taste of blood and the dank redolence of corrupted flesh. As I moved up the stairwell I nearly treaded on a man squatting in a dark corner. The only light in the space came from a dust-sparkling sunbeam striking the opposite wall, but I noticed that his arms were swathed in bandages and his clothes were splattered with blood. He didn’t even look up at me, and I stammered an apology and continued hastily up the stairs.

Lack of adequate medical care and facilities is a serious problem in Paktia. Since many laborers work in unsafe conditions, job-related injuries such as crushed digits and broken limbs are common. Many people live and work in areas so remote that even by car the nearest clinic is nearly a day’s travel, meaning that even a relatively minor injury or illness can be quite serious. Afghanistan’s infant mortality rate is more than 160 deaths per 1000 births, the second-worst in the world. Prenatal and neonatal care is so poor that those in the southeast who can afford it send their wives to hospitals in Pakistan to give birth.

After climbing the stairs, I discovered the hospital director was not in his office and, in search of him, I ended up wandering the dark, dusty hallways that echoed with patient’s cries and moans punctuated with chilling silences. Drifting by open doorways I glimpsed horrible sights of suffering, but I was struck most by the form of a young patient propped up in bed. The person’s gender was impossible to determine in that quick glance, because what flesh I could see was burned into a terrible glistening papier-mâché. The long walk in those corridors, surrounded by such misery, was a distressing combination of horror and helplessness.

Later that week, I spoke to an international, and he told me that he might have heard about the burn victim. Apparently, a 16-year-old local girl had been attacked and raped by unknown assailants. This man told me that, according to tribal law, the honor of the family is irrevocably besmirched by their daughter’s violation. The only face- and honor-saving recourse is to kill the daughter, so they poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. She was burned over 90 percent of her body and died from the trauma a few days later.

I think often of that day at the hospital, and bear in mind that, to be even a moderately effective humanitarian intent on rehabilitating Afghanistan, there is much to learn about the people amongst whom I live and work.

Compass, 12/22&29/05, page 1
World Travels
Part VIII: The Pashtuns of southeast Afghanistan
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by Ben Barrows
Paktia province, of which Gardez is the capital, is part of a three-province area called Loya Paktia and a large part of the heartland of the Pashtun tribe. Some assert that the ancestors of the Pashtuns were mentioned in writings of Herodotus and that they are descended from the ancient Bactrian civilization. Pashtun roots reach deep into the past, but the tribe, which is currently 42 percent of the country’s population, is also intimately linked with Afghanistan’s modern history.

The Pashtun are the largest segmentary lineage (patriarchal) tribal group in existence today, and consist of about 60 different sub-tribes. The founder of Afghanistan as it is defined today, Ahmed Shah Durrani, was a Pashtun of the Durrani sub-tribe. Since his rule in the 18th century, subsequent kings of Afghanistan have been of Durrani extraction. Afghanistan’s geographic location has bred a rich history of trade, warfare and conquest resulting in a multitude of complex tribal strata. The Durrani Pashtuns are the most Persianized of the Pashtun tribes, and their dialect of the Pashto language is thought to be the most genteel and is held above the numerous other dialects. A young Pashtun man told me recently that the Pashtun language has been described as the sound made when a handful of pebbles are put in a tin can and shaken. We both laughed at the self-deprecation, but the fact remains that Pashtun is a difficult language that the untrained Western ear struggles to assimilate.

Until the Arab Muslim invaders brought Islam in the 8th century C.E., most Pashtun were Buddhists, but most are now Sunni Muslims and are strongly influenced by the ancient tribal code, Pashtunwali. Literally meaning “way of the Pashtun,” Pashtunwali is applied to every facet of Pashtun life, including family feuds, trade, hospitality, marriage, crime and inter-tribal relations. Some examples:

Badal—loosely meaning “an eye for an eye.” Self-respect and intolerance of insults is a trait demonstrated by even the poorest and most downtrodden Pashtun. A strong sense of dignity and honor is combined with the feeling that every Pashtun is his tribesman’s equal, and any slight on one’s character is taken extremely seriously. Badal ensures that murder is likely to lead to murder to restore the honor of the originally offended party.
Malmastia—hospitality is a point of great Pashtun honor. Under Pashtunwali, Pashtuns must welcome any stranger to their homes and offer food and lodging without asking remuneration. A host will slaughter a goat, sheep or chicken, according to his means, and a guest of one Pashtun is considered a guest of all and can be jointly entertained by an entire village.

The hospitality of the Pashtuns was one of the first things I noticed when exploring in Gardez. Just entering a small produce stall during a browse in the bazaar made me a guest of the proprietor who hastened to pour a glass of steaming chai. Although I could not stay for the drink, he eagerly pressed two oranges into my hand as a parting gift and implored me to come back soon or visit him at his home. I was overwhelmed by his sincerity, and have since experienced similar kindness on many occasions.

I am instinctually leery of such zealous shows of affection and altruism but try not to be too cynical. Although there are occasionally people that seek the attention or company of international workers solely in hopes of money or gifts, the vast majority act out of the goodness of their hearts.

Since many Pashtun hold Pashtunwali above the law of the land, the tenet of hospitality, among others, has come into conflict with the law. Fugitives fleeing British justice in Kabul in the 19th century found refuge with hill-dwelling Pashtuns. The complicated web of allegiances and constantly shifting familial and tribal loyalties governed by Pashtunwali has bewildered invading and occupying forces from the British to the Soviets. Simultaneously, the comprehensive and strict tribal code has been a major factor in the Pashtuns’ survival of the terrible violence and upheaval of Afghanistan’s recent past.

During extended periods of time when there was little or no control from the central government, the rural southeast was strongly under the influence of powerful tribal figures and Pashtunwali, elements of solidarity that helped bring commerce to the area in the form of prosperous international trucking, both licit and illicit, and fostered the meteoric rise of the Taliban.

Ultimately, tribal factionalism and infighting has made today’s Pashtun southeast the most dangerous and under-developed region of Afghanistan. However, in this year’s September elections, many Pashtun candidates were elected to office. If Pashtun culture and ideals are to be successfully carried into the 21st century, it is incumbent upon these officials, together with Afghanistain’s president, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, to bring the Pashtun people into this new chapter in the history of Afghanistan.

Compass, 1/12/06, page 1
World Travels
Part IX: Saved by Prima
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By Ben Barrows
The UN security rules that govern our lives in Gardez prohibit leaving the compound on foot or wandering around the town center on errands. The living quarters are only a few meters from the office, so without making a conscious effort to break the routine, quality of life can quickly devolve into a mindless circle of working, eating and sleeping.

In an effort to get some physical activity, I began running laps around the inside of the compound. Each lap takes about one minute, and after a week of jogging I began to feel an uncomfortable familiarity with the compulsive repetitive behavior of a zoo animal pacing its cage.

Fortunately, the local Coalition Forces base offers the possibility for exercise outside the confines of the compound walls. The CF base sits on the outskirts of town and is overlooked by a mesa that slopes up to the foothills and mountain range in the southwest part of the valley in which Gardez is situated. Over the course of the four months I’ve been here, walking and jogging on the mesa has been a sanity-saving energy outlet.

On a recent morning, my colleague Stephen and I headed to the base with the intention of exploring as far into the hills as daylight would allow. In a previous walk we had followed an irrigation channel and animal paths to a small waterfall, but the waning afternoon sun had forced us to run back the distance it had cost us three hours to walk in order to make it back to the base before dark. Wandering around at night here is a very bad idea. One local Afghan explained why nobody drives, works or walks at night by saying “night is for sleeping only.” Plus, approaching the CF base at night invites the danger of being shot by sentries.

Bearing our previous lesson in mind, we arrived at the base for an early start. We were joined by a semi-feral dog, which Stephen has named Prima. She looks like a cross between a greyhound and a hyena and appears at our side without fail every time we show up at the base. If we’re walking, she’ll amble a respectful few feet behind, occasionally dashing off to chase rodents; if I’m running, she’ll trot along, occasionally stopping to heave the most racking, terminal-sounding coughs I’ve ever heard. We’ve developed a friendship, a bond that was to become stronger by her saving my life.

After a pleasantly brisk climb over the hills and through the streambeds at the foot of the mountains, Stephen and I were walking back down the mesa when I noticed a pack of wild dogs a few hundred meters away. Presumably the pack was hanging around to feed off the PRT garbage dump a few dozen yards from the track we were following. Prima had bolted off a few minutes before to chase a mouse, and I didn’t think much of the pack until I noticed that the dogs were in the middle of tearing one of their own to pieces. This was not a friendly wrestling match, this was mandibles of death: teeth at throats, blood splattered on fur and ferocious snarls. We stopped to observe this arresting site.

Suddenly, the fight stopped, and in one motion, all 10 of the dogs turned their heads and stared at us. A long second passed, and in another single motion, the entire pack started loping towards us, spreading out in a sinister attack formation that struck me with terror. I gaped, frozen, not wanting to believe what was happening. I looked around despairingly at the surrounding country. The nearest tree was miles away, the CF base was at least a half-hour run in the distance, and anyway the dogs were between the base and us. I remember thinking that there is no way it’s possible that I’m going to end up torn to pieces by wild dogs on some forsaken garbage-strewn dust track in Afghanistan.

In what felt like slow motion, I bent down and picked up a grapefruit-sized rock and, as the pack closed to within 30 yards, I threw it. Stephen followed suit with a rock he had found, but like a school of fish avoiding a predator, the pack flowed laterally to avoid the falling objects and continued purposefully, picking up speed as they neared. As the animals approached I saw just how dire the situation was. The dogs were all very bizarre-looking mongrels, some of which were clearly diseased with patches of hair missing. Others had nasty battle scars and they all had teeth bared in their spit and dirt-caked mouths as they charged.

As we quickly cast about for more stones, Prima came out of nowhere, charging by us with a roaring snarl and promptly leapt at and bit the lead attacker. The two dogs fought for a few vicious seconds before Prima got the upper hand. The dog retreated, and the pack halted in a semicircle around us, but Prima charged at them again, barking aggressively. The pack broke and ran with Prima in hot pursuit, biting at the hamstrings of the dogs in the rear.

The pack tried again, without nearly as much spirit, but was easily driven away by a vigilant Prima. Their last attempt was positively half-hearted, and was dissuaded by a hail of rocks including one very good toss by Stephen.

In the weeks since our narrow escape, the weather has turned bitter cold, and there is layer of snow on the ground. During trips to various job sites around town I've encountered the corpses of several street dogs that have succumbed to hunger, disease and the elements. I haven't seen Prima since the snow started falling, but I still look for her each time I'm at the base.

Compass, 1/26/06, page 1
World Travels
Part X: A Gardez barber
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By Ben Barrows
Nazir Jan was only a young child when his family fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Their hometown, Gardez, in the rural southeast of the country, was the scene of bombing campaigns and heavy fighting between the Afghan Mujahedeen and Soviet forces. Nazir and his brothers were raised in a refugee camp in northern Pakistan where poverty and the daily struggle for food and other essentials prevented them from receiving an education or even becoming literate. Their father scraped out meager earnings as a barber, a skill he passed on to his sons when they were still small.

After nearly 20 years in the refugee camp, and after the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan, Nazir and his family felt the country was safe enough for them to return. Nazir has been back in Gardez for over 10 years, and I spoke to him and his brothers in the modest barbershop they operate near the Gardez city center.

Two barberâs chairs face a worn wooden desk over which is hung a large cracked mirror. A wide bench covers the far wall and several young men sit cross-legged enjoying the warmth from the wood-burning bukhari stove in the middle of the room.

There is an adjoining chamber with running water where a bath can be had for 50 Afghanis (about $1.15). For another 50 AFA, Nazir will cut your hair and throw in a decent scalp massage. There are no women in the shop÷women in Gardez usually cut each otherâs hair in the privacy of their homes.

Nazir was in Gardez during the rise and eventual fall of the Taliban, and when asked how life as a barber is different for him now, the first answer comes easily. Under the Taliban, men were not allowed to shave or trim their beards, and half of an Afghan barberâs business is beard maintenance. After the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they issued a series of decrees. As recounted in Taliban by Ahmed Rashid, an edict issued by the Taliban in December 1996 prevented beard shaving and cutting: "After one and a half months if anyone observed who has shaved and/or cut his beard, they should be arrested and imprisoned until their beard gets bushy."

On the other hand, another Taliban decree outlawed long hair. Anybody with long hair found on the street was arrested and brought to the Religious Police department (not a good place to end up) and had their head shaved. What is more, the person was then required to pay the police for the haircut. So, when presented with the choice of a haircut and a scalp massage at a barbershop or a shaved head in a police station, most people opted for the former. However, as Nazir explained, high unemployment and a severely depressed economy kept business very slow.

There were a number of other decrees inspired by the Taliban interpretation of Islamic sharia law, including the banning of kite-flying, keeping of pigeons, or having tailors measure women for clothes, but as Nazir gestured to the stereo cabinet, the one he felt the most in his shop was the banning of music.

When asked if business has improved since the Taliban were defeated, Nazir gestures expansively, and his brothers sitting nearby contribute volubly. He is quick to explain that the rent he must pay for the space is onerous, and that he cannot afford to hire any other employees, but the money he and his brothers earn in the barbershop is enough to be the main source of income for a family of 30.

There are no banks or other formal financial institutions in Gardez, so to start the shop, Nazir and his brothers had to borrow money from friends and relatives. During the late 1990s, revenues were not enough to pay back even these modest, no-interest loans. Nazir still cannot afford to buy space for his own shop, but in the years since the fall of the Taliban, he has been able to pay off his debts and make the monthly rent.

When asked what he dreams of for the future, Nazir gestures at the peeling paint on the walls and the threadbare carpet which needs replacing. But when pressed he says quietly that his goal is to send his young sons and nieces and nephews to school.

Compass, 2/2/06, page 1
World Travels
Part XI: Selling fruit in Gardez
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by Ben Barrows
Nur Ali has been selling fruits and vegetables from his shop in Gardez city for over 22 years. His family has been farming in the area for generations, and it was easy to use the farming experience to follow his five brothers in the transition to selling produce.

Nur Ali, who is illiterate, reports that he’s 35 years old, which would mean that he began running the shop when he was 13.

Asking Afghans in Gardez how old they are, or the age of local historical sites, reveals an understanding of time skewed by years of warfare and a knowledge gap created by the destruction of their traditional tribal society. On several occasions I’ve asked local men about the age of a crumbling hilltop fort on the southeast edge of town. The answers have ranged from 70 to several thousand years, and most don’t know the name or historical purpose of the site.

Most of the produce sold in Nur Ali’s store is not locally grown. The capacity of Gardez to feed itself has been reduced by years of violence in the area, so much of the food, consumer products and building materials sold in town are imported by truck from Pakistan. Some saleable goods come from Kabul, but since Gardez is along a main trucking route, it has easy access to goods coming from Pakistan.

The trucking route makes business simpler for Nur Ali, but it also means that truckloads of guns, drugs, and smuggled goods pass through Paktia, the province in which Gardez is situated. While the Taliban were in power, illegal trans-national trade flourished, and Nur Ali was able to buy fruits and vegetables very cheaply from trucks that passed through Paktia. Now that the Taliban has been ousted and the national police, army, and Coalition Forces are cracking down on illegal trade, Nur Ali is paying more for the products he sells.

Even in the winter months, Nur Ali’s shop displays fresh oranges, apples, bananas, and various tubers. An orange costs about 2 cents, so one can pick up a week’s worth of fresh produce for less than a dollar.

However, he gestures with a smile at his shop and explains that business is good and getting better. He has no trouble making his monthly rent of 2000 AFA (about $20) and finds the shop space adequate for his needs. He and his brothers are supporting a family of 21, including five children, but business has been good enough to enroll the one school-age child in class.

When asked of his dreams and aspirations, Nur Ali pauses briefly for thought and then shakes his head. After exchanging a few words, the translator turns to me, smiles, and says, “He is happy man.”

Compass, 2/23/06, page 1
World Travels
Part XII: The Booksellers of Gardez
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by Ben Barrows
On a main street in Gardez, in the shadow of the stone fortress, Abdul Fatah runs a bookshop. Abdul started working in the shop eight years ago, sweeping the floor and neatening the shelves at the age of twelve, when it still belonged to his brother. During the Taliban time only religious texts could be sold, and sales were bad as many educated people fled the country. Those who remained generally could not spare the expense of luxury items like books.

Now Abdul’s tidy shop does a good business selling popular English-language learning materials and school textbooks. Browsing the shelves I encounter a good selection of grammar primers and English-Dari dictionaries, all of which are imported from Pakistan or Iran before Abdul purchases them in Kabul.

Apart from a small section selling pens and stationery, much of the shop space is dedicated to religious material. Works of fiction or other leisure materials are conspicuously absent. Abdul explains that novels would not sell, even though the shop is patronized by males of all ages.

Gardez women don’t generally leave their homes without being accompanied by a male relative, and according to Abdul they never enter his shop. Afghanistan has an average literacy rate of about 36 percent, but according to a 1999 estimate, only about 21 percent of women are literate. This figure is thought to have decreased in the last seven years, particularly during the days of Taliban control when girls’ schools were closed. Moreover, literacy rates in rural areas such as Paktia province, in which Gardez is situated, are significantly less than those of urban centers, such as Kabul.

I wander around the small shop, examining different volumes before I ask Abdul what his favorite book is. Without a trace of irony in his expression, Abdul reveals that he is illiterate! A silence follows this revelation while I try to think of something appropriate to say, but Abdul quickly volunteers that he would like to learn to read and intends to start lessons in the future.

Directly across the muddy street I found another, even smaller, bookshop. The shop is an open-faced shed with dusty volumes stacked on the shelves and a book-strewn tea bench taking up most of the floor space. I peered into the dim elevated shop and struck up a conversation with its elderly keeper, Fazal Mohammad.

Fazal has been a holy teacher for more than 35 years, and until recently, taught full-time at a local boys’ high school. The southeast is a very religious area, and Fazal says that the same number of boys attend his classes now as did during the Taliban time, an era defined in part by its religiosity.

After the recent death of his father, Fazal began teaching in the mornings and keeping the shop in the afternoons. The shop sells only Korans and Koran-related materials. Although a Koran is only 100 Afghanis (2 dollars), the layers of undisturbed dust on the books confirm Fazal’s claim that business is not good.

A crowd gathered as we spoke, and Fazal, enjoying the attention, told jokes to the general amusement of all while some young boys stared at my clothes and others watched over my shoulder as I wrote in a notebook. I wanted to share in the jokes being shouted back and forth, but was frustrated by the language barrier. It was only after thanking Fazal and taking my leave that I managed to get a laugh by accidentally falling knee-deep into the nearby open sewage ditch. In a context where cultural differences are so great it was a small measure of gratification to find a common ground in humor, even if it was at my expense.

Compass, 6/30/06, page 1
World Travels
The women of Afghanistan

by Ben Barrows
Article Twenty-two of Afghanistan’s new constitution states that the “citizens of Afghanistan—whether man or woman—have equal rights and duties before the law.” But how closely is this reflected in the everyday lives of women, particularly in the southern and southeastern regions of the country?

Under the Taliban, women were forbidden to work, they could not leave their houses without being escorted by a male relative, could not receive medical attention from a male doctor, and had to cover themselves from head to toe, hiding even their eyes behind the screen of the burkha.

The Taliban also created the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, also known as the “Religious Police.” This infamous organization beat men in the street for having trimmed beards or “British-style” haircuts. They also humiliated women through public beatings for offenses such as wearing not-opaque-enough socks, exposing ankles, wrists or hands in public, not being accompanied by a close male relative, educating girls at home, working, or listening to music.

Since the fall of the Taliban and the presence of the international humanitarian community in Afghanistan, there have been many initiatives to improve the lot of Afghan women. Anne Falher, Relief, Recovery and Reconstruction Officer for the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in the southeast region believes that the quality of life for women in Kabul and its environs has improved dramatically in the last five years. Burkhas are still a common sight in the streets of Kabul, but many remove them when entering their place of work. Women are seen traveling without male escorts, and outside the city limits they sometimes even drive cars. Middle- and upper-class Afghan women in Kabul are taking a more active role in society, and their participation and rights are slowly finding greater acceptance in the central region.

Unfortunately, the situation in the Pashtun tribal belt in the southeast region is vastly different. Traditions are so deeply entrenched that only the most elite and wealthy denizens, who have typically spent time outside the country and represent a tiny sliver of the population, foster progressive values. Falher predicts that it will take “generations” for appreciable change in the role of women in the southeast.

According to Falher, even if women resent the injustice of their role in society, the mores of Pashtun culture are heavy enough to stifle most dissent. Moreover, wearing the burkha and taking a subservient role in public may be a survival mechanism from the “extreme poverty and hardship that they’ve had to endure in the last decades.” Also, even if an independent-minded woman decides to walk in public without a burkha or accompanied by a male relative, she risks severe social consequences for herself and her family. Comporting herself in such a manner runs her the risk of being considered ‘impure’ or ‘loose’ and besmirches the honor of her family and puts in jeopardy her prospects of marriage.

Men and women, especially those who are single, are not supposed to interact with each other. Even a woman smiling at a man can be considered a disgraceful come-on. The age for marriage of a girl can be twelve or younger, but it is rare for a girl older than twenty-two to be considered suitable. Moreover, a girl does not have the power to refuse a proposal, that is the right of her father, or in lieu of a father, the head of the family.

The number of “love marriages” may be increasing, but the majority of unions are still arranged by parents. Typically, the parents of the male go to visit the parents of the female, where they discuss the possibilities for the marriage of their children. According to tradition, the family of the male gives a dowry of ten to fifteen thousand dollars. In the impoverished southeast region, this is a very large sum of money, but the family of the female usually does not immediately agree to the match, and will draw out negotiations over several meetings so as not to appear too eager.

As a male, the complete inability to interact with Afghan women makes the nearly unbelievable aspects of their station in Afghan culture in the southeast all the more alien and incomprehensible. Moreover, asking Afghan men about their wives or female members is strictly taboo, but Falher relates that even as a woman, she is not granted extraordinary insight into the lives of Afghan women. Falher, who has been in Afghanistan for three years, says that she can be “friendly with [Afghan] women, but Afghan society is so hierarchical that [Falher] cannot ever be really ‘close.’”

Falher says that as an international woman, she is considered a member of the “third gender”—not male and not female. For example, when invited to formal dinners or village council meetings, she sits with the men, a privilege not enjoyed by Afghan women. Her status as an expat overrides her gender and the fact that she’s not Muslim. But, as it is a given that she leads a different life, Falher feels a barrier between herself and Afghan women. Although they are pleased that she covers her hair and wears loose clothing when in public, Afghan women, especially the rural poor, do not easily open up to Western women, especially since the huge disparity in their backgrounds and daily lives makes establishing a rapport around commonality very difficult.

Falher doesn’t consider herself an inspiration to Afghan women to strive for greater rights or freedoms, but knows that under their scarves and burkhas there are women that are not content with their place. And although many do not have the will or the means to fight for equality and face the social consequences, Falher says that some harbor the hope that “maybe their daughters or their granddaughters can see some change.” In the meantime, Afghan women in the southern and southeastern regions of the country will have to endure insecurity, discrimination and some of the worst gender inequality in the world.

Compass, 8/17/06, page 1
World Travels
Leaving Afghanistan
by Ben Barrows
In early May, a friend of mine from Washington, D.C., asked me to join his newly-started business in Amman, Jordan. After some thought, I decided to take the offer, and I’ve now been in Amman for over a month, consulting to a non-profit organization that provides loans to Iraqi businesses to secure a source of reasonable financing, stimulate employment and contribute to the reconstruction of Iraq.

Time and distance from Afghanistan has given perspective for reflection on the almost 11 months that I spent there. People often ask about the security situation in Afghanistan and how work is accomplished there.

It is first important to understand that Afghanistan is not a culturally or racially homogenous country. The central and northern parts of the country are inhabited primarily by a mix of the minority Hazara people, who are descendents of the Mongols and are Shia Muslim, and Tajiks, both of whom speak Dari.

The Pashtuns, who are Sunni, live in the southern and southeastern parts of the country, in a belt along the border with Pakistan. The key figures of the Taliban came from remote tribal areas in the Pashtun belt, which is still where most of the ideologically motivated operatives perpetrate many attacks and other activities to undermine the central government and drive out the internationals.

Since the fall of the Taliban, and up until the last few months, much of the violence described in the daily security “sitreps” sent out to internationals working under the U.N. security structure has been Afghans attacking Afghans. Political, tribal or familial conflict or money or drug-related vendettas were some of the main causes for the intra-Afghans violence. Attacks against internationals were almost entirely directed at the Coalition Forces and occasionally against private security companies, especially around the time of elections last fall. Humanitarians were rarely targeted.

Many of the attacks were not perpetrated by hard-core extremists, but by poor rural inhabitants that took part for a cash reward. For example, a poor rural farmer’s crop fails, or maybe he is addicted to drugs, and he cannot support his family. A Taliban-sympathizer would provide cash and weapons, usually an improvised explosive device that could be placed in a culvert, an anti-vehicle mine to be placed in a roadbed, or perhaps a rocket with crude timing and aiming devices that could be aimed at Coalition Forces compounds or other large, stationary targets.

This common style of attack allows the explosives to be detonated remotely, thereby avoiding personal engagement with Coalition Forces, and significantly reduces the risk in committing such an act. However, starting largely in 2005, attacks, most notably suicide-bombing incidents, began to increase markedly, and the U.N. and other humanitarian missions started to become targets. The low-point in overall security in the country was the May riots in Kabul. Following a road accident involving Coalition Forces vehicles in which several Afghans were killed, thousands of Afghan men rampaged across the city, burning and looting.

The Kabulis rioted, in part, because they are poor, under- or unemployed, and have not benefited sufficiently, if at all, from foreign humanitarian aid and investment. This problem shoots to the heart of the disaffection of the Afghans with whom I worked in the southeast.

Many international NGOs clamor to win contracts in Afghanistan—there is lots of work to do and it looks great on the corporate profile. However, nearly all of the NGOs working in Afghanistan are doing so in the central and northern regions where the population is generally friendlier and security is relatively stable.

The central and northern regions have a desperate need for all the humanitarian aid that can be mustered, but the south and southeast are not seeing a fraction of the development benefiting other regions. The southeastern and southern provinces are massive and sparsely populated, with extremely rough terrain that severely limits accessibility.

In addition to the risk of violence, the costly logistical and security requirements for an NGO to operate in the region are prohibitive for most. International Organization for Migration operates in the region under the aegis of several different USAID-sponsored programs. The program with which I was exclusively involved is the Quick Impacts Projects, which is focused on the construction of infrastructure—roads, schools, government buildings, clinics, electrical grids and irrigation systems.

People of the remote villages in which these projects were implemented were generally very happy to be receiving assistance. When meeting with village elders in the shura meetings or talking to passers-by at job sites, I was regarded with curiosity, but usually invited to tea where there were lots of complaints and requests, but also a shower of thanks for projects underway in the area. Even when a situation felt dangerous, or the Afghans in the village were noticeably hostile, they were not aggressive. Partly because I had a dozen armed men with me at all times, but also because they knew that an international person in their village could mean economic opportunity for them and their family and more development projects in their area.

So it seems that half the battle is just getting to the remote villages. Judging from the frequency and length of stares that I got when in these far-flung areas, foreign faces and dress were not a very common sight. However, I suppose if a convoy of 2 tinted and armored SUVs and 4 pickup trucks with uniformed and balaclava-clad army men toting machine guns rolled through downtown Castine, it’d probably draw some long looks as well.

However, the other half of the equation is less easily addressed. Although there are a great number of very smart and dedicated people working on helping Afghanistan, there are a number of (recognized) flaws in the approach. Some of these flaws arise because information gathered in the field is sent to Kabul, where it passes through a series of political filters as it makes its way across several desks, and is later sent to Geneva or New York or Washington or wherever. By the time a directive comes all the way back down to the field sub-office for implementation, it has gone through so many obfuscating metamorphoses that its relationship to operational reality can be compromised, along with much of its usefulness.

There are several international organizations doing grassroots work in the south and southeast, but most of the development money spent in those regions is for large, expensive projects. Because the modus operandi to date has been to build as much infrastructure as quickly as possible, most projects with which I was involved were “top-down,” and did not have a community development component. Some schools of thought in international development methodology call for “bottom-up” development, whereby there is a dialogue between the development agency and the target community or communities before ground is actually broken on construction or renovation projects.

Asking communities what they want or need—helping them understand how a school, for example, could help them—makes them feel like they are a part of the process. Rather than deciding for them, this helps create a sense of ownership of the project. The goal is for the community to “buy in[to]” the project and care about the maintenance of the building and, in the case of Afghanistan, be less likely to accept local complicity if an individual or group wants to use violence to damage or destroy the facility.

There was a growing recognition in the international community in Afghanistan that physical infrastructure and other projects need to be preceded by, or at least coupled with, a process of meeting with villagers and establishing a common vision and priority list of projects in their area, signing protocols, etc. The United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan political officers with whom I worked in Gardez spent lots of time, at great personal risk, traveling to remote areas to mediate tribal conflicts, advocate for the central government and pave the way for internationally funded development projects. USAID is also moving towards more of an emphasis on grassroots, community development through the new second phase of QIP, which is encouraging.

As the remote villages of the south and southeast were the wellsprings of the Taliban and part of the Al-Qaeda support network, it is critical for the international humanitarian presence to be felt there. Perhaps the Taliban is resurgent recently in part because the inhabitants of Taliban-dominated areas have not yet felt the positive effects of the international presence and have no reason to switch their allegiances. Whatever the case may be, a significant Taliban presence, festering and spreading anti-U.S. and anti-government sentiment, particularly in the south, cannot continue. If it does, fewer attacks will be motivated by money or drugs, and more will happen because poor rural Afghans in the south and southeast have not seen an alternative to violence through an improvement of their lives by the international community, and have pledged their allegiance to the Taliban or other anti-government elements.

Compass, 11/9/06, page 1
World Travels
Personal reflections on life in Afghanistan
by Ben Barrows

Life blended almost seamlessly with work in Gardez, Afghanistan. I was in a small, walled, compound with 10 to 12 other internationals, and we all worked, ate and recreated together in our little world. Because we existed in such close quarters, it is difficult, when reflecting, to differentiate the work experience from the personal experience.

The most frustrating aspect of life was the sense of being cloistered—insulated from the country and the people that we were all there to help. In an article published in this newspaper in December of last year I wrote about field work having no ‘degrees of separation’ between the humanitarian and the Afghans targeted by redevelopment projects. Unfortunately, the poor security situation and the resulting security measures created an often insurmountable barrier between me and the people and culture of Afghanistan. Many of the projects administered from the IOM Gardez office were in far flung, remote districts of the three provinces in our area of responsibility. Traveling to these project sites, some of which were several days’ drive from our office, required extensive security measures that were often prohibitively, logistically, complicated and expensive. Because of this, I infrequently got the chance to see projects, let alone the villages and people that were supposed to be benefiting from my efforts.

According to the United Nations security regulations that governed many aspects of life in the compound, the only way that I was permitted to venture into the outside world was in a car with a driver. Walking out of the compound into Gardez city was strictly prohibited. Nevertheless, after a few months in Gardez I became comfortable enough to make illicit trips beyond the walls. During one trip to the bazaar to pick up various household items, I turned a corner in a dark hallway in the warren of shops in the center market and came face to face with three teenage Afghan girls. They took one look at me and then nearly flung themselves against the wall, pulling wraps over their faces and cowering in my presence. I was so shocked that I stood still, but continued walking when I realized that standing next to them was causing distress. Their reaction to the mere sight of me made me feel like some sort of dangerous leper. Of course, if it was somehow reported that they were consorting with a Westerner it would be an unimaginable blemish of shame upon them and their family.

I eventually grew a beard that Grizzly Adams might be proud of, and after dressing in a shalwar kamis, a waistcoat, and donning the popular pakool hat, I thought I looked the part. Rolling out of the compound on a borrowed motorcycle, the guards at the series of checkpoints laughed with amused approval at my getup, and told me that I could pass as a Kabuli. Cruising around the dusty streets, rattling over potholes and splashing through streams of sewage in the narrow tracks between mud-walled compounds was exhilarating.

Apart from the infrequent trips to town and the occasional trip to Kabul, the only other freedom enjoyed was during long walks on the mesa and in the mountains behind the Coalition Forces base outside of town. My colleague, Stephen, and I would wander for hours, always accompanied by the faithful feral dog, Prima. During the harsh winter, several months passed without our customary walks, and we didn’t catch site of Prima during any of the weekly trips to the base for meetings. When spring came without any sign of her, we guessed that she had succumbed to the elements, been shot for sport, or maybe even picked up by a passing caravan of nomads. It was on one of my last trips to the base that she finally showed up with the explanation of her absence in tow. Apparently she had bunkered down with an equally scruffy mate and become too cool for pointless wanderings in the hills with bearded bipeds. Despite feeling a bit like I’d lost a daughter without gaining a son, I’m pleased that Prima survived the winter, has found a companion, and will probably live to whatever constitutes a ripe old age for a wild dog in Afghanistan.

The mandate of the infrastructure projects in which I was involved required close cooperation with local and provincial officials, so I spent many hours with Hakeem Taniwal, the governor of Paktia province. Along with other intellectuals, Taniwal went to Pakistan in the 1980s, fleeing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After radical Islamists murdered a well-known Afghan poet in Peshawar, Taniwal took his family to Australia where he worked as a professor of sociology. After the fall of the Taliban, Taniwal’s friend, the new president, Hamid Karzai, invited him to work in the Afghan government and Taniwal left his family behind to become part of the effort to rebuild his country. In our countless meetings, Taniwal was a soft-spoken leader as well as the kindly host of many lunch and dinner gatherings at his home in Gardez.

On September 10, several months after I left Afghanistan, I was chatting via the Internet with Stephen, who reported that at lunchtime he’d heard the biggest explosion in months, and black smoke was rising over the town. He hadn’t heard word of what happened, but I read in the news later that evening that a suicide bomber had thrown himself at Taniwal’s car, killing the governor and two of his aides.

After seeing the filth, the violence, the suffering and the appalling living conditions endured by most Afghans in the southeast, I thought that I had a fairly developed understanding of the environment. Taniwal’s murder, which was claimed by the Taliban, seemed shockingly immediate and personal. What is more, Taniwal was the highest ranking government official killed in Afghanistan, and his death has potentially serious repercussions for the stability of the southeast. The fact that a suicide bomber was later sent to his funeral makes even more disgusting an already heinous crime.

Many of my friends and colleagues are still working and living in Afghanistan, struggling to make progress as poppy cultivation soars and instability increases. Despite the months of bitter cold, the regular food poisoning, the risk of violence, and the vagaries and frustrations of work, my Afghanistan experience was a good one. The intensity and intimacy of my time spent in such an alien land has left an indelible impression. In my memories the beautiful and terrible grandeur of the Afghan landscape seems to be reflected in the history of the Afghan tribes and in the faces of those living today. But while I have moved on to a new job in Jordan, the future of the Afghans who don’t have such luxuries remains disturbingly uncertain.

Editor’s note: This is the final Dispatch from Afghanistan from Ben Barrows. He continues to work in community development projects, many in Iraq, and will file occasional columns from his new home base in Amman, Jordan.

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