Year After War Began, Afghans Still Suffering

Richard Read
October 2002

Sarah Chayes, who covered the fall of the Taliban for National Public Radio, found Afghanistan's plight so disturbing that she left journalism to start an aid organization in Kandahar.

Now, a year after the U.S. war began, Chayes regularly encounters obstacles that plague the nation as it teeters between recovery and civil war: Traumatized survivors, anemic foreign aid, rampant corruption, widespread insecurity and most of all, greedy warlords consolidating power.

Denied foundation stones to rebuild bomb-damaged homes recently, she found that Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai had cornered the market by seizing the local quarry. Chayes talked her way past armed guards to see the U.S.-backed kingpin, a bear of a man who announced she was in luck: He was opening a cement factory.

" 'Let me give you some advice,' " Chayes recalls Shirzai saying, smiling broadly. " 'Make your foundations from brick, with cement mortar.' "

On this day a year ago, U.S. and British bombers pounded Afghanistan as the Bush administration targeted al-Qaida and the Taliban less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. Controversy over aid erupted from Day 1, as some relief managers complained that simultaneous U.S. air drops of food and medicine blurred the line between humanitarians and combatants.

Afghanistan maintains an unstable peace for the first time in 23 years. More than 1.7 million refugees have returned to the shattered and heavily mined nation, doubling United Nations projections. Girls, banned from schools by the Taliban, are returning to classrooms supplied with books and other help from abroad.

But the influx of refugees has overwhelmed the United Nations and relief agencies. Developed countries, which pledged $4.5 billion in aid, have delivered only one-third of that.

Once again, U.N. officials aren't sure whether they will have enough food to get struggling Afghans through the winter. The relief agency CARE says Afghanistan needs $10 billion for reconstruction in the next five years to avoid a "downward cycle of despair."

Assassination attempts and car bombings continue as President Hamid Karzai's administration struggles to govern. International security forces still patrol only in Kabul, although the Bush administration is weakening opposition to expanding their reach.

Chayes, who covered conflicts ranging from Kosovo to Algeria, is worried by what she calls a state of collective post-traumatic stress that makes it impossible for people to grapple with the future. And she worries especially about the warlords' rise, which breeds corruption and blocks reconstruction.

Shirzai, for example, jailed Kandahar's quarry manager after the manager relented and gave Chayes stone to rebuild 13 pulverized houses in a nearby village.

"In Kosovo the first thing you saw after the conflict was houses going up," said Chayes, speaking by satellite phone from Kandahar last week. "A society needs to rebuild for both material reasons and symbolic reasons. By blocking people from building stone foundations, you're blocking that sense of hope."

Chayes, 40, arrived in Quetta, Pakistan, near Afghanistan's southern border, almost a year ago from her reporting base in Paris. She rode to Kandahar with a soldier loyal to Shirzai as the Taliban fell last December. There she learned that Shirzai, a pre-Taliban warlord, wrested back his position with U.S. help by threatening civil war.

In a public ceremony last April, Shirzai said that the United States gave him so much money that if it were water, it would end the drought. Shirzai is consolidating power as America's main ally in southern Afghanistan.

"There wasn't a lot of thought by the folks who wanted to oust the Taliban about what would come afterwards," Chayes says, "and there still isn't a lot of thought. So long as there's a skin-deep layer of stability, that's all basically we're caring about."

For Chayes, a Harvard-educated Middle Eastern history scholar who speaks Arabic honed during a Peace Corps stint in Morocco, covering the Taliban's fall was the story of a lifetime. Unlike hotel-bound reporters, Chayes moved in with a Kandahar family, forming close friendships. If it hadn't been already, her name became a household word for NPR listeners, who heard vivid descriptions of Kandahar's squealing school children, struggling war widows and hard-bargaining opium dealers.

But in such dire circumstances, Chayes harbored growing misgivings about her role as an observer instead of an actor. Earlier she had considered becoming a relief worker, but she grew cynical in Kosovo after watching humanitarians grandstand to publicize their work.

"I didn't want to go back to Paris and do bourgeois reporting," Chayes says, "entertaining well-to-do Americans with the foibles of well-to-do Europeans."

Last January, as she prepared to leave Kandahar, Chayes shared her quandary with Karzai's uncle over dinner. Aziz Karzai told her that corrupt locals were poised to profit from the influx of aid money, just as they did after the 1979 Soviet invasion.

"As I got up to leave, he said, 'Wouldn't you come back and help us—not as a journalist?' " Chayes says. "It was like the signal from heaven. I just said, 'Yes. Yeah.' "

Working with President Karzai's older brother, Qayum, Chayes founded Afghans for Civil Society, a cross between a policy center and a humanitarian organization. "We are trying to have an impact on a policy level as well as on a concrete level," Chayes says. "That's what makes us totally unconventional."

Chayes quit NPR and raced around the East Coast, raising money and laying groundwork. She returned to Kandahar last March, mostly on her own dime, and saw Kabul for the first time.

"The devastation that stared sullenly out at our passing car for blocks and blocks surpassed anything I had imagined," Chayes wrote in one of her frequent, highly descriptive letters home. "How can this city ever be rebuilt?"

The fledgling organization is conducting focus-group interviews to gauge attitudes of ordinary people and of political representatives. It's helping women develop a leadership program and an embroidery cooperative. It's operating sister-school programs and starting a vocational school. It's launching the country's first independent radio station. And with the support of townspeople in Concord, Mass., it's rebuilding a village, Akokolacha, destroyed by U.S.-led bombing.

Chayes, who has molded mud bricks and cajoled local workers, sees signs of hope. "Kandahar's an industrious place," she says. "And there's a passionate desire for education. I've never seen a people who, before they ask for water, they ask for schools."

She's impressed by U.S. Army civil-affairs troops, who doggedly rebuild schools and drill wells in full combat gear. In contrast, she says, most international relief workers in southern Afghanistan are too frightened to work where help is most needed, outside Kandahar.

"The only organization that's really going out," Chayes says, "is Mercy Corps," the Portland-based relief and development organization.

Mercy Corps, which has 12 international staff members in southern Afghanistan, employs more than 400 Afghans in the countryside. It hires thousands of day laborers to work on community projects ranging from road building to irrigation repair. But long-term financial support for such programs now appears "questionable at best," says Lynn Renken, a senior Mercy Corps program officer.

As a novice relief worker, Chayes has encountered the sort of challenges and setbacks that plague larger players. Documentary-makers, who captured the saga of the foundation stones, filmed townspeople in Akokolacha accusing her of being callous and imposing Western ideas.

Ever the journalist despite herself, Chayes responded to the villagers' points and then turned the camera on the film-makers, interviewing them on the way their presence had not distorted but amplified the villagers' expectations and behavior. "We had a wonderful conversation," she says.

Chayes has become a Kandahar curiosity of sorts. She drives herself around town, in contrast to most Westerners, who hire drivers. "Certainly the first female to drive through Kandahar in 30 years," she commented in an e-mail last June.

Chayes has moved into a compound that contains offices, living quarters and a yard with animals, including a black cow that belonged to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader.

Omar's movement would never have gained power, Chayes says, if not for the warlords, whose excesses led Afghans initially to welcome the fundamentalists. Warlords are digging in across Afghanistan, she says, threatening Karzai's government as much as al-Qaida and the Taliban.

"The warlords are the bad guys, and the Americans don't seem to take that on," Chayes says. "There is no lack of religious extremists hanging around in the woodwork waiting for this experiment to fail."