Bamiyan. Wired photo.

by UNA MOORE

My first morning in Yakawlang I oversleep, eat a hasty breakfast of bread and tea with the AHRDO employees, and go to wash my face before venturing out. There is no more water in the water tank in the bathroom, so Bisharat tells me we’ll use the public bath in Nayak, the biggest village in the valley below.

From the porch of the guesthouse, I can see for at least 20 miles, past the green farmlands, rivers and woods, to the large, modern Nayak schoolhouse, the clusters of adobe homes, the sand-colored hills and the blue mountains beyond.

The descent from the mountain proves more difficult than the hike up the night before. “If I go down, I’m taking you down with me!” I yell to Bisharat ahead of me.

On our walk into town, we pass villagers washing clothing in the river and children casting fishing nets. Through the muddy lanes, we make it to a short wood and cement building.

Inside, a young man hands me packets of shampoo from a large basket and directs me to a free room. I thank him, shut the door and undress in the steam. Mushrooms are growing from the slick walls. The taps produce wonderfully hot water, and I use buckets to wash myself.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Bamiyan.

by UNA MOORE

Leaving Bamiyan city, we drive through what amounts to a slum. The sights are jarring. This is where some of the poorest people in the world scrape out a ragged existence on the edges of a society with little to spare. Destitute families crowd into caves cut out from the rocky cliffs.  There is no running water, no electricity, and just a few rudimentary outdoor latrines. The six month Bamiyan winter is often deadly for children and pregnant women living in these caves.

Along the road that leads through the caves area, I see children with thin limbs carrying cans of fuel. Their hair so dry and dirty it sticks out at all angles, and they have badly sunburned, prematurely wrinkled skin. Their clothing is tattered and they don’t smile. It is impossible for me to tell how old they are.

Bisharat shakes his head. “They waited for aid, but it didn’t come. The people feel they are being punished for peace.”

Since 2002, the Afghan government has broken most of its promises to the people of Bamiyan. Pledged infrastructure has been delivered slowly, when delivered at all. The Provincial Reconstruction Team, led by New Zealand, is under-resourced and too small to cover an area as large and rugged as Bamiyan province.

Half-way between Bamiyan city and Yakawlang, we stop at a place called Qarghana To, a collection of single-room shops that sell gasoline and expired snack cakes.

I need to pee, so I ask where the latrine is. Bisharat grins and tells me to pick a spot.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Bamiyan. Via Markhumphreys.com.

by UNA MOORE

Bamiyan city is not a city in the developed world sense. It has one commercial street with a rambling bazaar of small shops that sell local silver, carpets, medicine, food and bicycle repair supplies. The tallest buildings in sight are two stories.

My party’s guesthouse is located at the very top of a hill overlooking the city. It belongs to the Shohada Organization, which was founded by Dr. Sima Samar, current chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and long-time defender of the rights of Afghanistan’s women.

The guesthouse is surrounded by high fences, and satellite antennas stick up from its roof. Only the first floor belongs to the Shohada Organization; the second is occupied by the Bamiyan provincial office of the AIHRC. From the hill, I can see the cliffs where the Bamiyan Buddha statues once stood, before they were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Bamiyan. Via Virtualtourist.com.

by UNA MOORE

Around 8:00 in the morning, we stop in a small village in a mountainous area of Parwan. It’s breakfast time, and we are half-way to Bamiyan City.

The restaurant is the kind most often found along the roads of rural Afghanistan: a few rooms with tiny windows in a mud-walled building. A lanky teenage waiter escorts us to the family section, where men and women can dine together. We sit on the floor and the waiter rolls out a long strip of leather in front of us. Tea and bread are brought. The rest of my party orders kebabs. Being a vegetarian, I stick with the bread and tea. After tsk-tsking me for not eating enough, Aziza produces sweet cakes from her backpack and I happily accept them.

A family sits down next to my party. An elderly woman eyes me curiously. She asks Bisharat if I am Afghan. Bisharat tells her I am a foreigner. The woman looks incredulous and asks what I am doing in the village, and where I am going. When Bisharat answers, the woman squints at me through cataracts and shakes her head.

Foreigners rarely travel to Bamiyan by road. I was warned not to. “There is only one safe way to travel to Bamiyan,” one fellow expat told me seriously days before I left. “That is to fly.”

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Bamiyan. National Geographic photo.

by UNA MOORE

Day one.

At 3:oo in the morning, Bisharat, AHRDO’s 28-year-old managing director, calls me to say he is close to my house and to be ready when he arrives. The Toyota minibus pulls up outside and I bundle my duvet and duffle bag in the back. Bisharat slams the door shut. “Okay,” he says, “let’s go to Bamiyan!”

Inside, Bisharat introduces me to Aziza, an Afghan actress and filmmaker who spent many years in Iran and is now considering working for AHRDO. The other passengers include the long-haul driver, Rohullah, and AHRDO’s usual driver, Amin.

We begin the easiest phase of our eight-and-a-half hour journey from Kabul to Bamiyan City. The streets of Afghanistan’s capital are quiet and still. Few people move about in the pre-dawn hours.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Civil society. Via 1 Woman's Vu.

by UNA MOORE

Afghanistan is more than a war, and though violence is spreading, much of the country remains peaceful.  Events in Afghanistan seldom make headlines abroad unless they involve violence, fanaticism or government malfeasance. Regrettably little attention is paid to civilian life, which goes on — because it must — in spite of deteriorating security.

One of the great untold stories of Afghanistan since 2001 is the emergence of a civil society that has begun to assert itself as a force for progressive change at the grassroots level, with the poorest and least empowered segments of Afghan society: ethnic minorities, poor women, residents of slums and internal displacement camps, orphans, civilian victims of war and persons with disabilities.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Asylum-seekers in Australia. AP photo.

by UNA MOORE

The Australian Government temporarily suspended processing of asylum claims from Afghan and Sri Lankan nationals in early April, claiming the situations in those countries had sufficiently improved.

In Kabul, where I am writing from, this news was met with dismay. Afghans I spoke to were surprised and disheartened. The Australian government’s announcement seemed completely out of touch with reality on the ground, where conflict is spreading, women and minorities still face systematic discrimination, and threatened individuals are rarely able to seek protection from the authorities.

The people of Afghanistan contend with some of the worst human rights violations imaginable, yet the Australian government believes that because Afghanistan in 2010 is not as bad as Afghanistan nine years earlier under the Taliban regime, Afghans as a group should be shut out from the asylum process.

Human Rights Watch has called on the Australian government to reverse its decision, and promptly process all refugee claims.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

David Axe photo.

by UNA MOORE

Does humanitarian aid prolong wars? Yes, argues Dutch journalist Linda Polman in her new book War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, which was just reviewed by The Guardian.

War Games is just the latest addition to the booming cottage industry of criticizing aid, aid workers, and international activism related to humanitarian crises. It joins NYU economist Bill Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,  veteran war correspondent Rob Crilly’s Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War,  Zambian economist and former banker Dambisa Moyo’s widely misunderstood, but even more influential for it, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa, and an expanding anti-aid blogosphere.

If Polman’s Guardian interview is any indication, her book will be a huge hit for taking extreme positions and providing a wealth of quotable quotes. At one point, she is asked how she would describe the aid agencies that provided relief to Rwandan Hutus, many of them genocidaires but plenty also ordinary civilians, who fled into the now Democratic Republic of Congo in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. Polman’s response? “Perhaps war criminals.”

International lawyers would probably disagree, but aid critics will no doubt seize statements like that and turn them into rallying cries.

Unfortunately, like many aid critics, Polman doesn’t seem quite sure of what her argument is. She thinks aid neutrality is among the causes of tragedies like the prolonged conflict in Africa’s Great Lakes region. “Without humanitarian aid,” she says, “the Hutus’ war would almost certainly have ground to a halt fairly quickly.”

But she thinks a lack of aid neutrality is also a cause of conflict. In Afghanistan, aid agencies have worked too closely with coalition militaries, and this has tied their access to populations in need to the successes of one side in a complex war and emboldened the Taliban to directly target aid workers, she argues.

When Guardian journalist Andrew Anthony confronts Polman with the glaring contradiction in her arguments, she responds by saying, “Whether you’re being manipulated by the Sudanese regime or coalition forces in Afghanistan, you are always an instrument of war.

“The system as it is now, the humanitarian ground rules say that aid agencies are neutral and therefore not responsible for what other people do to their aid. I think that’s too easy. They should stop claiming neutrality, stop claiming that they’re above the law.”

That argument will be a hard sell to organizations like Medecins San Frontieres and other relief agencies, especially those specializing in medical relief, that insist on serving all those in need, including combatants from all sides in a particular conflict.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

RFERL photo.

by UNA MOORE

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) announced April 27 that it has temporarily moved some of its international staff in Kandahar to Kabul and instructed its national staff in Kandahar to stay at home. The announcement came after a spate of suicide bombings, attacks on supply convoys, and the fatal shooting of a young employee of a U.S.-based development firm. A major NATO offensive to drive the Taliban from Kandahar is expected early this summer, and friends who recently visited the city have described a place blanketed by dread.

UNAMA’s decision in Kandahar got me thinking about evacuations, what they say about organizations, and how they are conducted.

Years ago, I interned for a multilateral organization that was not the U.N. and prided itself on a “leave no staff behind” policy. If a threat materialized and it was serious enough to prompt even a temporary evacuation, national and international staff alike were moved to a safe location. This happened once while I was at the organization in question. Rioting broke out near a field office and all staff from that particular field office, including national staff who were actually from the town where the rioting was happening, were whisked away and placed in a hotel several hundred miles away until the danger passed. To me, that seemed the obvious ethical thing to do.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Related:
U.N. Dispatch: Mass Sickness of Afghan Schoolgirls Raises Poisoning Fears
U.N. Dispatch: Detained Italian Aid Workers Freed in Afghanistan
U.N. Dispatch: 5 U.N. Employees Believed Kidnapped in Afghanistan
Unastan: Buzkashi, Rougher than Politics
Unastan: Kabul Nightlife, Not All Bombs and Illegal Booze
Unastan: People Died Here
Unastan: Waking to Bombs in Kabul
Unastan: Afghanistan’s Amnesty Law
Unastan: Taliban Blocks Civilian Flight
Unastan: The Situation (in Afghanistan)
Unastan: The Roads of Kabul

Afghanistan. David Axe photo.

by UNA MOORE

Since April 21, at least eighty Afghan schoolgirls at three schools in the increasingly violent northern city of Kunduz have mysteriously fallen ill after reporting a strange smell in their classrooms. Most of the affected girls have been hospitalized briefly and released, but the sudden, mysterious epidemic of fainting and nausea is raising fears of poisoning by opponents of girls’ education.

“I was in class when a smell like a flower reached my nose,” Sumaila, 12, told Reuters. “I saw my classmates and my teacher collapse and when I opened my eyes I was in hospital.”

The Afghan government has blamed “enemies of Afghanistan,” code for the Taliban and affiliated militant groups. One Taliban faction released a statement denying responsibility for the suspected chemical attack.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Related:
U.N. Dispatch: Detained Italian Aid Workers Freed in Afghanistan
U.N. Dispatch: 5 U.N. Employees Believed Kidnapped in Afghanistan
Unastan: Buzkashi, Rougher than Politics
Unastan: Kabul Nightlife, Not All Bombs and Illegal Booze
Unastan: People Died Here
Unastan: Waking to Bombs in Kabul
Unastan: Afghanistan’s Amnesty Law
Unastan: Taliban Blocks Civilian Flight
Unastan: The Situation (in Afghanistan)
Unastan: The Roads of Kabul

Buzkashi. Una Moore photo.

by UNA MOORE

The only peaceful activity in Afghan society rougher than politics is buzkashi, Afghanistan’s national sport. Buzkashi is vaguely reminiscent of polo, but instead of a ball, players on horseback vie for a headless calf or goat carcass.

I had the opportunity to see part of a buzkashi match earlier this month when my housemate H needed to deliver computers to a village school in Panjshir, one of Afghanistan’s northern provinces, for the NGO he works for. Having been confined to Kabul for two months, I jumped at the chance to see more of the country. On the way back to Kabul, H and I spotted a buzkashi match in progress in a dirt field across a river from Panjshir’s main paved road.

We climbed down a steep incline to a small footbridge and gingerly made our way across. Afghan women don’t typically attend buzkashi matches, and few expats are permitted to venture beyond their offices and guesthouse nowadays, so the spectators stared at me.

I took my camera out and started photographing the riders and their horses. H coaxed a shy pre-teen player into posing for me. As I crouched to get a shot of hooves kicking dust into the blue sky, a horse rode up in my blind spot and side-swiped me. I slid against the dusty hill and my camera flew out of my hands. The spectators roared with laughter.

Luckily, no damage was done — to me or my camera. I laughed too, and left Panjshir a little while later with a few bruises and some great shots of my trip.

Buzkashi. Una Moore photo.

Buzkashi. Una Moore photo.

Related:
Unastan: Kabul Nightlife, Not All Bombs and Illegal Booze
Unastan: People Died Here
Unastan: Waking to Bombs in Kabul
Unastan: Afghanistan’s Amnesty Law
Unastan: Taliban Blocks Civilian Flight
Unastan: The Situation (in Afghanistan)
Unastan: The Roads of Kabul

Una Moore photo.

by UNA MOORE

War-zone nightlife stories have long been staples of foreign correspondence, and every wartime capital city produces them.  Like their subject, they are a guilty pleasure of wartime journalism.  They’re usually also a little — or a lot — sensational.

Time’s John Moore (no relation) just published one such piece titled “Kabul Nightlife: Thriving Between Suicide Bombs.” Tellingly, it opens with the most extreme aspects of expatriate life in Kabul.

Nightlife may seem like a luxury no one can afford in Kabul. The Afghan capital is hit by suicide bombers with depressing regularity, and on some nights expatriates receive word from their embassies that a suicide team is plotting to attack a “foreign guest house” — and these are the truly chilling words — “in your neighborhood.” On those occasions, you sleep with your clothes on and shoes beside the bed, after having mapped out an escape route over the wall into your (hopefully friendly) neighbor’s garden.

All of that is true, but bombings typically happen every few months. They aren’t weekly events.  And Kabul long-termers goof on their daily security warnings. Still, the city isn’t safe, attacks on guesthouses and foreign civilians are becoming more frequent and lethal, and this summer promises to be brutal.

Moore’s description of the expat community itself is a gross caricature, though.

But on most nights, Kabul’s expatriates go out and partake in the manic craziness of the city’s bar and restaurant scene in houses reminiscent of America’s Prohibition-era speakeasies, behind 20-foot-tall blast walls and an outer perimeter of armed Afghan security guards. “It’s like dancing at the edge of a volcano,” explains Anne Seidel, a German architect working for the U.N. in Kabul.

Not all of us live like this, and I don’t know where Moore gets away with claiming most expats make six figures. How did he come to that figure? An informal salary poll of Thursday night bar patrons? I know only one person who makes that kind of money. Most of the expats I know make slightly more than they would in Washington or London, but not by much. Moreover, the average foreign aid worker earns a salary closer to that of her or his Afghan colleagues than to a DynCorp employee.

The expatriates are a boisterous crowd of young and usually single diplomats, aid workers, journalists, spies and mercenaries — or, as they like to call themselves, “contractors.” Most of them earn $100,000 salaries and have money to burn. They tend to be adventurous, but the security constraints of their jobs often leave them cloistered in claustrophobic boredom — following suicide attacks, most foreigners are confined to their fort-like compounds.

In my experience, one is at least as likely to find Kabul expats cooking dinner at home with their housemates or organizing a scary movie night than schmoozing mercenaries (a widely disdained subset of the expat community) and spending wads of cash in garrisoned speakeasies. As with most aspects of aid worker life, the reality just isn’t that glamorous.

Moore touches on one of the more uncomfortable aspects of expat nightlife in Kabul — the exclusivity.

The trouble with most of these places is that, because they serve liquor, which is illegal, the armed Afghan guards at the gate won’t allow the patrons’ Afghan compatriots to come inside, since good Muslims aren’t supposed to drink.

It’s not entirely true that Afghans aren’t allowed into these bars. Some alcohol-serving restaurants are actually owned by Afghans.  That said, Afghans do have a more difficult time getting in, and they often need a foreigner to vouch for them at the door.  It’s an ugly scene, but “foreign passport-holders only” policies are unevenly enforced and appear to be used to discourage raids more than anything else.

Unfortunately, the reputation of Kabul’s expats won’t be helped by the fact that Afghanistan’s national intelligence agency raided several bars and nightclubs over the past few nights and arrested at least one foreigner for bootlegging.

That story isn’t out in the international press yet, but it soon will be. Get ready for more stories of foreigners misbehaving behind Hesco barriers.

Related:
Unastan: People Died Here
Unastan: Waking to Bombs in Kabul
Unastan: Afghanistan’s Amnesty Law
Unastan: Taliban Blocks Civilian Flight
Unastan: The Situation (in Afghanistan)
Unastan: The Roads of Kabul