Rebuilding Afghanistan

High in the mountains above the Crystal Lake of Qargha, where a few months ago the reservoirs below were bone dry, people flock by foot and car and truck on Fridays to enjoy a picnic. It is for them as much a celebration of their freedom as it is a family outing.

The difficulty required to reach this place serves as a reminder that though devastated by 25 years of war, these people are unconquered because they are unconquerable.

The gathering also provides an opportunity to spend time with hundreds of Afghans to discuss the future and the lessons that should have been learned about the perils of nation building.

The model used by foreigners to control or pacify the countryside and the villages that once ringed Kabul, a city now in ruins, does not work, they say. And as immigrants daily pour into the utterly devastated land, not only parched but rubbled and alive only with spent ordnance, the Afghans become more deeply aware of their worsening plight, and of their resentment of bizarre Western interference.

Unrest is beginning to re-emerge; soldiers are being killed as well as civilians, and armed gangs (called militias) roam the highways in deadly numbers. Demonstrations, fomented by extremists, are on the rise and foreign-aid workers are less safe here than even a few months ago. This means work stoppages on projects such as school construction and interruptions of badly needed relief services that must move through rural areas into the villages.

Afghans are appreciative of the hundreds of millions of dollars in international relief that has been poured into their war-ravaged country, not to mention the cost of the U.S.-led coalition of military personnel who provide what security there is and much-needed relief and reconstruction assistance.

During the course of nearly three weeks in the country, it is evident that people here at all levels of society are grateful to the United States. But as one of only a handful of Westerners ever to venture so far up into these mountains to spend time with Afghans and then visit with them in their homes, mosques, hospitals and bazaars, one does not miss the hazards as innocent questions are put directly.

Nagging questions

“Who will protect our people” once the Americans leave, asks an old man as he watches beggar children traversing the dangerous towpaths along the rushing waters above Qargha. “Where is the aid that has been promised?” he asks.

There are questions about America’s intentions from youths of military age, as well as from the tea merchants who have set up tents and booths from which to sell their goods to the picnicking crowds, to families wearing their finest clothes.

“It reminds us of what it was like before the wars,” the old man says, looking over the sea of people, many too young to remember such gatherings in the past in the Pagham Mountains.

A small party of Afghans, with a foreign reporter, traveled into the countryside recently to observe the delivery of medical supplies and books to rural clinics, where, for lack of antibiotics, patients face mortality rates upward of 30 percent. The group also sought answers to three questions:

• Where’s the much-publicized international aid?

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