Posted: 07/06/2012 5:44 pm
The World Bank forecast approximately US $7.8 billion will be required annually to finance the non-security aid gap in Afghanistan for the decade post-2014. Last year, I was involved in collecting some of the data that eventually filtered into this projection. My colleague and I drove around the Bamiyan valley, back and forth past the hollowed Buddhas, pressing local government officials to produce tallies of their operation budgets and assets. I left disillusioned. The Bamiyan Department of Justice was whittled down to two rooms in an entire complex of un-plastered pillars. We were told construction was paused years ago. Their function appeared equally paused. The local Department of Interior was frustrated by the lack of water to supply their offices. Apparently, inside deals had led to a line of administrative offices being perched upon a barren plateau. Yet, as I think back in the midst of the stampede to rush out of Afghanistan, I am reminded of children pacing the lush fields putting lessons to memory, farmers tending to crops, the bustling single-street bazzar. Suddenly, beneath the encumbrance of cynicism, the task in Afghanistan has begun to seem monumental but not Sisyphean. It is our abandonment that will make it the latter...Continue Reading...
The World Bank forecast approximately US $7.8 billion will be required annually to finance the non-security aid gap in Afghanistan for the decade post-2014. Last year, I was involved in collecting some of the data that eventually filtered into this projection. My colleague and I drove around the Bamiyan valley, back and forth past the hollowed Buddhas, pressing local government officials to produce tallies of their operation budgets and assets. I left disillusioned. The Bamiyan Department of Justice was whittled down to two rooms in an entire complex of un-plastered pillars. We were told construction was paused years ago. Their function appeared equally paused. The local Department of Interior was frustrated by the lack of water to supply their offices. Apparently, inside deals had led to a line of administrative offices being perched upon a barren plateau. Yet, as I think back in the midst of the stampede to rush out of Afghanistan, I am reminded of children pacing the lush fields putting lessons to memory, farmers tending to crops, the bustling single-street bazzar. Suddenly, beneath the encumbrance of cynicism, the task in Afghanistan has begun to seem monumental but not Sisyphean. It is our abandonment that will make it the latter...Continue Reading...
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