Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure
Gandalf Grey
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?ei=5094&en=1e70e663189b6fb9&hp=&ex=1157515200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure
By DAVID ROHDE
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan - It began last summer.
On a July morning, Taliban gunmen shot dead the province's most powerful
cleric as he walked to the main city mosque to lead morning prayers. Five
months later, they executed a teacher at a nearby village school as students
watched. The following month, they walked into another mosque and gunned
down an Afghan engineer working for a foreign aid group, shooting him in the
back as he pressed his forehead to the ground and supplicated to God.
This spring and summer, the slow and methodical siege of this southern
provincial capital intensified. The Taliban and their allies set up road
checkpoints, burned 20 trucks and slowed the flow of supplies to
reconstruction projects. All told, in surrounding Helmand Province, five
teachers, one judge and scores of police officers have been killed. Dozens
of schools and courts have been shuttered, according to Afghan officials.
"Our government is weak," said Fowzea Olomi, a local women's rights advocate
whose driver was shot dead in May and who fears she is next. "Anarchy has
come."
When the Taliban fell nearly five years ago, Lashkar Gah seemed like fertile
ground for the United States-led effort to stabilize the country. For 30
years during the cold war, Americans carried out the largest development
project in Afghanistan's history here, building a modern capital with
suburban-style tract homes, a giant hydroelectric dam and 300 miles of
canals that made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. Afghans called this city
"Little America."
Today, Little America is the epicenter of a Taliban resurgence and an
explosion in drug cultivation that has claimed the lives of 106 American and
NATO soldiers this year and doubled American casualty rates countrywide.
Across Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks are up by 30 percent; suicide
bombings have doubled. Statistically it is now nearly as dangerous to serve
as an American soldier in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq.
Helmand's descent symbolizes how Afghanistan has evolved since the initial
victory over the Taliban into one of the most troubled fronts in the fight
against terrorism.
The problems began in early 2002, former Bush administration, United Nations
and Afghan officials said, when the United States and its allies failed to
take advantage of a sweeping desire among Afghans for help from foreign
countries.
The Defense Department initially opposed a request by Colin L. Powell, then
secretary of state, and Afghanistan's new leaders for a sizable peacekeeping
force and deployed only 8,000 American troops, but purely in a combat role,
officials said.
During the first 18 months after the invasion, the United States-led
coalition deployed no peacekeepers outside Kabul, leaving the security of
provinces like Helmand to local Afghans.
"Where the world, including the United States, came up short was on the
security side," said Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning
at the State Department. "That was the mistake which I believe is coming
back to haunt the United States now."
The lack of security was just one element of a volatile mix. Twenty years of
conflict had shattered government and social structures in Afghanistan, the
world's fifth poorest country, where the average life expectancy is 43.
American officials said the country was more destitute than they had
envisioned, yet the $909 million they provided in assistance in 2002
amounted to one-twentieth of the $20 billion allocated for postwar Iraq.
Officials quintupled assistance to $4.8 billion by 2005, but then reduced it
by 30 percent this year.
The Taliban leadership, meanwhile, found safe haven in neighboring Pakistan.
And Robert Grenier, the C.I.A.'s former top counterterrorism official and
Islamabad station chief, said Pakistani officials largely turned a blind eye
to Taliban commanders, who later seeped back across the border.
The government of President Hamid Karzai, hailed as Afghanistan's eloquent
new leader in 2001, has increasingly been criticized for indecisiveness,
corruption and inaction.
In Helmand, the absence of security and government control enabled the
province to become the largest heroin-producing area in Afghanistan.
By 2005, local Taliban fighters and drug traffickers had formed an alliance
against the government. Today, the province's educated elite accuses local
officials of engaging in drug trafficking, and impoverished farmers say they
grow poppy to survive.
[Led by a 160 percent increase in Helmand's opium crop this year,
Afghanistan's overall production grew by 50 percent to a record 6,100 metric
tons, United Nations officials said Saturday. Afghanistan now produces 92
percent of the world's supply of opium poppy, the basis for heroin.]
Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia,
defended the pace of progress, saying expectations among Afghans and others
that the war-ravaged country could be quickly rebuilt were unrealistic.
"Afghan development is a long-term project, even without the security
problem," said Mr. Boucher. "Over all, I think it's pretty incredible what
we've accomplished."
Despite an active insurgency, he said, 1.6 million Afghan girls are
attending school, 730 miles of roads and 1,000 schools, clinics and
government buildings have been reconstructed, and the country has its first
democratically elected president and Parliament.
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the recent surge in violence
was the result of the Afghan central government and NATO exerting their
authority in remote areas, prompting retaliatory attacks from the Taliban,
drug traffickers and warlords.
The return of more than three million Afghan refugees and the arrival of
some foreign aid turned the country's main cities into boom towns. But over
time, the lack of construction in rural provinces fueled Taliban propaganda
claims that Americans were enriching themselves and bringing only corruption
to Afghanistan.
In impoverished southern rural areas, small numbers of Afghans are openly
collaborating with the Taliban. Other Afghans, who say they are unsure of
the American commitment and disillusioned with Mr. Karzai, sit by and dare
not resist them.
Rauzia Baloch, a 33-year-old teacher, was one of a half dozen women elected
to Helmand's provincial council last year. In December, the American
government sent her on a study tour of the United States that included
visits to Congress and a domestic violence shelter in Phoenix, and
Thanksgiving dinner with a family in Indiana.
When Ms. Baloch returned to Helmand, she found the Taliban assassinating
government officials.
"I learned a lot, but unfortunately the situation is not the same as in
America," she said. "We cannot do anything."
Countering the Soviets
During the cold war years in the Helmand Valley, amid a flat, barren
landscape of reddish soil and black boulders, dozens of American engineers
and their families carried out a sweeping project designed to develop
impoverished southern Afghanistan and wean locals from Soviet influence.
For more than three decades, the American government and Morrison-Knudsen,
the firm that built the Hoover Dam, restored and expanded an ancient
irrigation system. Its source of life, then and now, was the surging Helmand
River, a finger of green that emerges from the mountains of central
Afghanistan and snakes for hundreds of miles through the country's vast
southern desert.
The project never irrigated as many acres as was hoped, but its training
programs produced hundreds of American-minded Afghan engineers and
technicians.
"Most of them have lived and worked and studied in the United States; some
have married American wives," the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee wrote
after visiting the area in 1960. "The new world that they are conjuring up
out of the desert at the Helmand River's expense is to be an
America-in-Asia."
Among the young Afghans who were transformed in the process was Ms. Olomi,
the women's rights advocate. One of the first girls to attend the city's new
co-educational school, she also went on to become one of Helmand's first
woman to graduate from college.
In a recent interview, Ms. Olomi, now 49, remembered only a handful of words
in English. But she could still tick off the names of her American teachers
and recite verses of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "Puff the Magic
Dragon." After school, she recalled, she played a game called basketball
with American children.
"It was a very good time," she said, eulogizing the functioning schools,
clean streets and tranquillity of Lashkar Gah in the 1960's and 1970's. "I
was very happy."
But her good fortune, like that of Lashkar Gah's, would be short-lived.
Americans abandoned the city just before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Twenty
years of guerrilla and civil war ensued.
By the early 1990's, soldiers-turned-thieves roamed Lashkar Gah's streets
and warlords encouraged local farmers to grow opium poppies, the raw form of
heroin.
In 1994, residents welcomed the rise of the Taliban in Helmand's remote
villages and applauded when thieves had their hands chopped off on a local
soccer field. Crime plummeted.
For Ms. Olomi and other women, life fell apart. Her husband, who had gone to
Russia to study medicine, never returned. Taliban religious police closed a
girls' school she had opened to support herself. Ms. Olomi, who had chosen
her husband at the age of 25, watched helplessly as her daughter was forced
by her husband's brothers to marry a cousin at 13.
Hopes rose again in 2001, when American bombs drove the Taliban from power
in Afghanistan. Residents like Ms. Olomi said they dreamed of another
American-backed renaissance.
"At that time, we really felt so happy," she said. "We felt that we were
free now."
Roads and Roadblocks
As expectations soared in Lashkar Gah and across Afghanistan, division
emerged in Washington over what role the United States should play in
rebuilding and securing the country.
During meetings in January and February 2002, Robert Finn, the first
American ambassador to post-Taliban Afghanistan, proposed that the United
States undertake ambitious construction projects as a way to cement the
loyalty of Afghans. Top among them was rebuilding a pulverized ring road
linking Afghanistan's major cities - a road Americans helped build during
the cold war.
"I argued for them to build the road and all I got was 'no,' " Mr. Finn
recalled. "It was just across the board in Washington: 'We don't do those
kinds of projects anymore.' "
Andrew Natsios, then the administrator of the United States Agency for
International Development, the government's main foreign development arm
that had spearheaded the Lashkar Gah project years back, confirmed in an
interview that he had opposed road building and other large construction
projects.
He said he feared they would consume too much of his agency's limited budget
and staff. Criticism of failed foreign projects and a drive to privatize aid
work had shrunk the agency from 3,000 Americans posted abroad in the 1980's
to 1,000 today.
In the end, the United States pledged $297 million in reconstruction money
to Afghanistan in 2002. The European Union pledged $495 million. Japan gave
$200 million and Saudi Arabia $73 million, but both were slow to deliver.
When aid officials arrived in Kabul in late 2001, they were shocked by the
country's decrepit state. They had to build headquarters from scratch, they
said, and contend with the lack of skilled Afghan workers. For remote areas
like Helmand, it meant what assistance was available flowed in slowly.
At the same time, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary
Powell clashed over security issues, according to their aides.
In a response to written questions, Mr. Powell said that in early 2002 he
called for American troops to participate in the expansion of a
4,000-soldier international peacekeeping force designed to bolster Mr.
Karzai's fledgling government. Mr. Haass, the former State Department
official, said informal conversations with European officials led him to
believe the United States could recruit a force of 30,000 peacekeepers, half
European, half American.
Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides were skeptical. They feared European countries
would not provide enough troops, according to Mr. Whitman, the Pentagon
spokesman. Defense Department officials believed it was better to train
local security forces.
Over all, Pentagon officials hoped to minimize the number of American troops
in the country to avoid stoking Afghans' historic resistance to foreign
occupation, said Douglas J. Feith, the former under secretary for policy.
Ali Ahmed Jalali, the country's interior minister from 2002 to 2005, said
Afghan resentment of foreign peacekeepers was "a myth." After 10 years of
internecine civil war, he said, Afghans yearned for someone to step in.
"They could not help themselves," he said, referring to Afghans. "They were
at war with themselves."
James Dobbins, then the administration's special envoy to Afghanistan, said
Mr. Powell was ultimately unable to win support from Mr. Rumsfeld and other
senior administration officials.
The 4,000-soldier international peacekeeping force would not venture outside
Kabul. The United States deployed its 8,000 soldiers separately, but they
focused on capturing or killing Taliban and Qaeda members, not on
peacekeeping or reconstruction.
As an alternative, officials came up with a loosely organized system
designed to empower Afghans to secure the country. The United States would
train a 70,000-soldier army. Japan would demobilize some 100,000 militia
fighters. Britain would mount an antinarcotics program. Italy would carry
out judicial reform. And Germany would train a 62,000-member police force.
In April 2002, President Bush outlined his vision for rebuilding Afghanistan
in a speech honoring George C. Marshall, the American general who led the
rebuilding of postwar Europe.
Mr. Bush said the history of military conflict in Afghanistan had been
marked by "initial success, followed by long years of floundering and
ultimate failure." He vowed: "We're not going to repeat that mistake."
On the ground in Afghanistan, problems arose immediately.
When Mr. Finn, the ambassador, reviewed the first Afghan National Army
troops trained by the Americans in the summer of 2002, he was dismayed.
"They were illiterate," he said. "They didn't know how to keep themselves
clean. They were at a much lower level than people expected."
American military officials told him that local Afghan commanders sent them
their worst conscripts.
Mr. Dobbins, the former special envoy to Afghanistan, said Defense
Department hopes that Afghans could quickly take responsibility for their
own security proved unrealistic.
"The reason we are there is that these are failed states," said Mr. Dobbins,
who has also served as special envoy to Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. "The
thought that this can be quickly remedied has proved unjustified in most
cases."
The police were even more challenging. Seventy percent of the existing
80,000 officers were illiterate. Eighty percent lacked proper equipment and
corruption was endemic. Afghan police did not patrol; they set up
checkpoints and waited for residents to report crimes, with bribes often
needed to do so.
Yet in 2002 and 2003, Germany, the country responsible for police training,
dispatched only 40 advisers. They reopened the Kabul police academy and
began a program designed to graduate 3,500 senior officers in three years.
German officials said developing a core of skilled commanders was the key to
reform, frustrating American officials who backed a large, countrywide
training effort. Some American and European military units conducted ad hoc
training around the country, but no comprehensive instruction occurred
outside Kabul.
Shattered Judicial System
In Lashkar Gah, veteran policemen and judges who returned from living in
exile during the reign of the Taliban were aghast at what they found. Only
one-third of the province's 3,000 policemen were, in fact, trained. The
rest, including the provincial police chief, were former guerrilla fighters
who punished members of other tribes and turned a blind eye toward rogues
from their own.
"They did not know about the law," said Abdul Shakoor, a veteran police
lieutenant. "They had their tribal ideas."
Abdul Waheed Afghani, then a 67-year-old retired judge who had been in exile
in Saudi Arabia, said the judicial system was no better. When he looked for
judges to send to each of the province's 13 districts, he found only three
people with judicial training. He asked for help from Kabul, but received no
response.
"I have given reports to many branches of the government," he said. "But no
one has helped me."
The only foreign troops to deploy in Helmand, a province twice the size of
Maryland with a population of one million, were several dozen American
Special Forces soldiers. They built a base in the center of the province in
2002, hired several hundred Afghan gunmen to protect them, and focused
solely on hunting Taliban and Qaeda remnants, according to Afghan officials.
Helmand Province's voluble young governor, Sher Muhammad Akhund, was largely
left to do as he pleased. The son of a famed local commander who fought the
Soviets, Mr. Akhund entered Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2001 at Mr.
Karzai's request and won control of Helmand with the help of the Special
Forces. Rumors abounded about the governor. In interviews with journalists,
Mr. Akhund said he was in his early 30's and a high school graduate. Afghan
aid workers said he was in his late 20's and illiterate.
Whatever he may have lacked in administrative skills, he made up for in
muscle. As the head of Helmand's largest and most influential tribe, the
Alizai, he commanded several hundred gunmen.
As time passed, community leaders grew frustrated with Mr. Akhund. Haji
Ahmad Shah, a wealthy local farmer, said Mr. Akhund initially refused to
meet with him to discuss farmers' problems. When he finally did, he ignored
the complaints.
"When I was sharing these problems with the governor, he didn't do
anything," said Mr. Shah. "He was just working for his own benefit."
In 2003, Mr. Akhund confiscated 200 shops owned by a local minority group,
according to a State Department report. Outside the city, the governor doled
out parcels of land to his relatives and tribe, according to residents. Mr.
Akhund denied the accusations.
At the same time, reports began to reach Kabul that Mr. Akhund was promoting
the growth of poppy, according to an American official who spoke on
condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the drug issue.
After the fall of the Taliban, poppy growth had exploded in eastern and
southern Afghanistan, fed by poverty, weak law enforcement and an epic,
five-year drought.
Mr. Akhund vehemently denied rumors that he took a cut of the poppy trade,
but foreign officials remained skeptical. [On Saturday, Antonio Maria Costa,
the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime,
blamed Mr. Akhund specifically for Helmand's soaring poppy crop, saying
there was evidence he encouraged farmers to grow opium poppies.]
While corruption grew in Afghanistan, the Taliban regrouped in Pakistan and
changed tactics, according to American officials. After being decimated in
open battles with American troops through 2002, the Taliban began ambushing
small groups of American soldiers and unarmed aid workers in 2003. Over
time, aid groups scaled back or suspended reconstruction projects in the
rural south and east.
In March, a group of gunmen in Oruzgan Province pulled a foreign engineer
out of a vehicle belonging to the International Red Cross, shot him in the
head and back, and left his body in the dirt.
Two days later, in a remote riverbed in northern Helmand, gunmen ambushed
American Special Forces as they drove past in a small convoy, killing two
soldiers. When their comrades stopped to return fire, the gunmen vanished
down a maze of gullies.
U.S. Shifts Course
In the summer of 2003, officials in Washington unveiled an overhaul of
American policy in Afghanistan.
Until then, Americans had rebuilt the main highway linking Kabul and
Kandahar, after initially rejecting the road proposal by Mr. Finn, the
ambassador. Otherwise, Washington had shied away from large-scale projects
like power plants.
Between 2003 and 2004, American assistance to Afghanistan increased from
$962 million to $2.4 billion; the Afghanistan staff of the United States aid
agency doubled; and Washington dispatched an aggressive new ambassador,
Zalmay Khalilzad.
At the same time, the American military, expanding its role beyond combat,
deployed eight new Provincial Reconstruction Teams, mostly to volatile
southern and eastern Afghanistan. The units tried to win the loyalty of
Afghans by equipping local government offices and mounting small
reconstruction projects.
Mr. Feith, the former Defense Department official, said progress was made in
Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, but that the disappointing results of the
allies' plan for training the police required an increased American effort.
Former United Nations and State Department officials said the weakness in
the Afghanistan policy should have been apparent to the administration much
earlier. "It was possible in early 2002 and late 2001 to have calculated
more accurately the manpower and money needs," said Mr. Dobbins.
In Helmand, a field commander in the new development effort was Charles
Grader. The 72-year-old Massachusetts native was the last American to head
the Afghanistan program before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Twenty-five years
later, he was back, managing a $130 million United States government
contract to revitalize agriculture and slow the growth of poppy.
Mr. Grader was a marker of how the American approach to development had
changed since the 1970's. No longer a government worker, he was now a
private contractor paid $130,000 a year by Chemonics International, a
for-profit consulting firm based in Washington. Instead of directing
projects, the United States aid agency hired companies like Chemonics, which
farmed out work to subcontractors.
In June 2004, Mr. Grader drove into Lashkar Gah with eight security guards
and found a burgeoning city of 100,000 people that was a maze of new
construction, shops and bustling open-air markets. But the prosperity was
illusory. The boom was largely fueled by Helmand's opium trade, which by
then had been spreading across the province for two and a half years since
the Taliban was defeated.
On his first stop, Mr. Grader toured a demonstration farm bursting with
cotton, pomegranates and other crops designed to show farmers they could
make a legal living. Mr. Grader asked the Afghans who ran the farm what
would persuade others to stop growing poppy.
Their responses had little to do with agriculture. They said the biggest
problem was poverty and corruption. Farmers, they said, no longer believed
the government would punish them for growing poppy.
"There is an inverse relationship between security and poppy growing," said
Abdul Ghani Ayubi, an engineer trained by the Americans in the 1970's.
A local farmer was more blunt. "We don't have law. This is a warlord
kingdom."
Mr. Grader promised to create public works projects that would repair the
province's irrigation system and employ large numbers of farmers. Four
months later he resigned after clashing with aid agency officials over the
direction of the program. High turnover rates among both aid agency
officials and contractors slowed the American effort, according to Afghan
and American officials.
Some work did get under way, including repairs to the hydroelectric dam
built by Americans during the cold war and an alternative-livelihoods
program that put 37,000 Afghans to work cleaning hundreds of irrigation
canals.
A dozen new or refurbished health clinics were opened and over 100 wells
were dug or deepened. The aid agency reported spending about $180 million in
Helmand since 2001. In addition, the reconstruction of Afghanistan's major
highway included 90 miles in the province.
But local officials said these projects did not provide enough jobs to
counter the lure of growing opium poppies for Helmand's 100,000 farmers.
In addition, a popular perception took hold that after foreign contractors
and subcontractors took their cut of aid money, little cash was left for
average Afghans. And local residents grew suspicious of the foreigners who
lived in heavily guarded compounds with electric generators and satellite
televisions while they lacked regular running water and electricity.
Aid agency officials defended their spending in Helmand, saying that foreign
workers were needed to properly carry out the projects, train Afghans and
prevent corruption.
In October 2004, one of the eight new American military Provincial
Reconstruction Teams arrived in Helmand. Over the next two years, the team
spent $9.5 million to build, refurbish or equip 28 schools, two police
stations, two orphanages, a prison, a hospital ward and 20 miles of roads.
Just outside the American base, the United States built a women's
job-training center for Ms. Olomi to run. The Americans provided dozens of
computers and sewing machines and even set up a mock beauty salon so women
could learn marketable skills. On one wall are pictures of Laura Bush
visiting Afghanistan and meeting with the country's newly liberated women.
Brazen Attacks Increase
By the spring of 2005, the stepped-up American effort in Helmand was showing
signs of being overmatched by the rising violence. On a May morning, gunmen
stopped a vehicle carrying five Afghans working on the program to clean
irrigation canals. In broad daylight a few miles outside Lashkar Gah, they
shot the workers dead.
The following day, gunmen followed six relatives of one of the victims as
they drove his body back to Kabul. Just off the main highway, they executed
all six.
Days later, the canal cleaning project - perhaps the Americans' most
successful undertaking in Helmand - was shut down over lack of security.
Thousands of farmers were immediately out of work. Attacks also slowed
repairs to the Kajaki dam.
Security had emerged as the largest single impediment to developing Helmand,
but the country's nascent army and police force were unable to deliver it.
The first units from the new, American-trained Afghan National Army arrived
in Helmand in 2005, but they comprised only several hundred soldiers and
carried out few operations, according to local Afghan officials. A new
provincial antinarcotics force was created that year, but it consisted of
just 30 officers.
The long-delayed Japanese-led program to disarm militia fighters began in
Helmand in 2005, but only several hundred assault rifles and machine guns
were collected, according to the local police. Officials said vast numbers
of weapons remain in Helmand and are being used by the Taliban and drug
traffickers.
Police training also continued to lag behind. After Germany failed to mount
any training outside Kabul, the State Department hired DynCorp
International, an Irving, Tex., firm, to recruit, train and deploy dozens of
American police advisers in Afghanistan and build seven regional training
centers.
By mid-2004, the centers were operating two- to four-week training classes
across Afghanistan. European officials said the training should be at least
three months long, and one derided the classes as "conveyor-belt courses."
"I had 15 days' training in Kandahar," said Mr. Shakoor, the police
lieutenant. "The things that they were teaching me I already knew."
Corruption was also undermining progress. A 28-year-old police recruit who
asked not to be identified because he feared retaliation said he was
disappointed when he returned from training to his district in Helmand. His
commander continued to take 50 percent of his salary, he said, and work with
drug traffickers.
The United States, meanwhile, expanded DynCorp's police training contract,
increasing basic courses from two to eight weeks, and sent two DynCorp
contractors to important provinces to serve as advisers. Two retired
American sheriff's deputies were sent to Lashkar Gah, to cover all of
Helmand.
Jesse Valdez, 55, from Santa Cruz, Calif., had trained police officers in
Bosnia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Steve Rubcic, 58, from Wyoming, had
never been east of Wisconsin.
When they arrived in October, security was so bad they could not visit any
of the province's 13 districts. In interviews, both said the Afghan police
were eager for help and that they were making progress removing corrupt
officials. Six weeks after they arrived, a small car bomb detonated outside
the governor's office several minutes before they arrived for a meeting.
In March, two more DynCorp advisers joined them in Lashkar Gah. A month
later, a suicide car bomb attack flipped their armored vehicle, but they
survived. Both refused to leave.
In June, American officials dispatched an eight-man DynCorp "saturation"
training team to Lashkar Gah. Brent Thompson, a 33-year-old former police
officer from Dallas who heads the team, said American officials calculated
that six Afghan policemen were dying for every soldier in the National Army
who was killed.
Half of the saturation team's two-week training course is devoted to
teaching Afghan police military skills, like how to launch or survive an
ambush. Mr. Thompson, who trained the police in Iraq for DynCorp, said the
Afghan police were more poorly equipped than their Iraqi counterparts. In
one recent Afghan class, he said, 40 police officers shared 15 rifles.
As of early July, the training segment that involved police firing their
rifles was on hold. Security problems had delayed the delivery of ammunition
to Lashkar Gah, according to Mr. Thompson.
During the training, Afghan officers pull the triggers on their rifles and
pretend to fire.
Scorn From Locals
On July 10, Helmand's senior government officials, tribal elders and
community leaders gathered for a public forum in Lashkar Gah entitled
"Security, Reconstruction and Official Corruption." For the next hour, the
locals heaped scorn on the Afghan government. Speaker after speaker talked
of dashed hopes.
The leader of the newly elected provincial assembly said that "in a country
where there is no security, there is nothing." A teacher who had received
death threats from the Taliban warned that Mr. Karzai's government could
collapse. An enraged tribal leader in a white turban said the police
released the murderers of his sons and brothers after receiving bribes.
"Is this a government?" he thundered. "Anyone other than me would join the
Taliban."
This spring, American forces handed over responsibility for Helmand to the
British military. More than 3,600 British troops, 10 times the troops the
United States deployed in Helmand, now patrol the increasingly violent
province. This year, 15 British and 4 American soldiers have been killed
there.
The violence has continued to hamper reconstruction. The canal cleaning
project has resumed, but on a much smaller scale - and with many fewer local
workers - than originally planned. Some road work is proceeding. But all
repairs on the hydroelectric dam were suspended in July amid rising attacks.
Nationwide, 90 percent of Afghans still lack regular electricity.
Since early 2005, both Afghan and foreign officials had urged Mr. Karzai to
remove Mr. Akhund as Helmand's governor. Last December, Mr. Karzai finally
did. The Afghan leader's supporters argue that he was never provided with
the resources needed to take on warlords.
The new governor, an engineer and former United Nations employee, accepted
the assignment on condition he have his own 150-man security force. This
spring, Mr. Karzai fired the province's police chief, but his replacement
said he will make little headway stabilizing the province as long as the
Taliban continues to have bases in neighboring Pakistan.
Mr. Afghani, the province's chief judge, said Taliban attacks this spring
have shut down courts in 11 of the province's 13 districts. In June, he
found an unexploded bomb in his car. In July, a suicide bomber killed four
people in a Lashkar Gah court office.
"Nowadays, no one is taking care of judges in our government," he said. "We
are helpless people. We don't have any power. We don't have any police."
Mr. Shah, the farmer, said he has given up on Mr. Karzai's government. After
growing little opium since 2001, he grew large amounts this spring after his
workers demanded higher pay. He and other farmers simply pooled their money
and bribed a local official so that eradication teams drove past their
village.
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Olomi gave a reporter a tour of her women's
center, which was closed for security reasons after the killing of her
driver in May. False rumors had been spread that the center's female
students were being taken to the local American military base and forced to
have sex with soldiers.
After the tour of the center, which had the feel of a museum, Ms. Olomi
announced she was heading home and pulled out a burqa, the head-to-toe veil
that became a symbol of Taliban oppression. Ms. Olomi shed her burqa after
the group's fall in 2001, but began wearing it again after her driver's
death to hide her identity from potential assassins.
As her car rolled out the center's front gate, Ms. Olomi pulled the burqa
over her head and her face disappeared. In Little America in 2006, the
former instrument of her oppression was her means of survival.
Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul for this article.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson