Subscribe to Outside Magazine
advertisement
Survival Guru

Today's Question
What is the best way to get water if I'm lost in the desert? answer

What's the most reliable tool for starting fires? answer

Greasy Rider

Today's Question
What one equipment change can I make in my home to reduce my water usage most? answer

Why do you drive a grease-powered car, and should I do it too? answer

Videos Ask Dave
  • What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
  • Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
  • How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries
share this article del.icio.us DIGG Facebook StumbleUpon

Outside Magazine December 2003
Page:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 

The Kabul Express (cont.)

THANK GOD THERE ARE some adults in charge. Back in Kabul, I started tracking down the people who can improve things. Soldiers can only draw a line in the sand; it is the humanitarians who must create development and hope. And these people are found in one place at one time: the UNICA guest house on Thursday night.

Because the Islamic weekend consists only of Friday, Thursday night is Kabul's big party scene. And the bar at the UNICA guest house, really a block-long residential compound for UN staff, is where the bright caravan gathers. Peter Jouvenal had warned us that UNICA parties were closed to journalists. Security looked high and tight when we arrived—steel walls, sandbags, razor wire, rock walls to keep suicidal cars out—but we blew through with shameful ease, signing false names and mystifying the guards with Seamus's suddenly exaggerated Irish accent. ("We're from UNFIT. That's correct—excellent, you're a darling little man.") We trailed a gaggle of Euroblonds past dozens of parked white SUVs and then down a pitch-black path toward a lot of noise.

I fumbled my way through a bamboo curtain and—who let the dogs out! Beneath a row of palm trees, a hundred people were spilling over a lawn around two swimming pools, wiping out a free bar of Johnnie Walker Black, Australian Shiraz, and Chilean merlot. Thirty people were on the dance floor between the pools. The sound system was run by a slim Afghan who said his "DJ name" was "DJ Music."

He boosted some Gloria Gaynor, but as more people crowded in, he was replaced by a new mix master, a UN staffer who identified herself as Juliana from Guyana. She plugged in a laptop and ran a remix of "Like the Deserts Miss the Rain" off her hard drive, packing the lawn with a whirling crowd of grooving Afro-elites and Italians spinning with Colombian hotties. Juliana segued into ABBA, and then "Rivers of Babylon," with its desperately inappropriate lyrics: "How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" Was it really a good idea to get drunk on whiskey and send biblical reggae booming into Kabul's wary nocturnal psychosphere? To treat Afghanistan like it was any other place? Was that the price of our help—a blank check to do as we liked, to stay unchanged by the place we were assisting? Kabul had a rockin' party scene back in the seventies, too, but when the world came to Afghanistan last time, Afghanistan eventually bit back, hard.

Most UN folks hardly seemed aware of life outside the safety of Wazir Akbar Khan. The bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad made it plain that security concerns are real, although, of course, common sense argued that the UNICA guest house itself, a liquor-swilling target writ large, was probably one of the most dangerous places in the country. Though some UN and NGO workers push out to provincial capitals like Herat or Mazar-i-Sharif, where there are far fewer aid workers, too many seem content to stay in Kabul and pass paper around in a circle.

An Afghan with ten years' experience in aid work told me that USAID, a State Department agency, is the most efficient foreign program; next best was the European Union; the worst was the UN, where urgent requests for development assistance were met with the meticulous scheduling of meetings, usually in Paris. One high-ranking diplomat insisted that more than 75 cents of every UN dollar targeted for Afghanistan was being spent outside the country.

Of the $5.2 billion in promised aid—including a pledged U.S. increase from $928 million in 2002 to $1.2 billion in 2004—as little as 20 to 30 percent of it reaches villages, observers say. The rest is absorbed by administration and personnel. Rory Stewart—now serving for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as deputy governor of Maysan province—returned to Kabul this year and was shocked to find that friends of his were earning $800 a day working for the UN. "The cost of keeping a single expat on the ground is between 300,000 and half a million U.S. dollars a year," he says of the UN staff, "if you take into account the cost of salary, all the allowances, the per diems, the white Land Cruisers they ride around in, the equipment in their offices."

"The idea that we only know Wazir Akbar Khan is just not true," the UN's David Haeri told me. He agreed that international staffs are expensive but said the UN's goal is to "work ourselves out of a job." He cited the organization's Mine Action Program, a mine-clearing operation that employs some 7,000 Afghans and only a few dozen foreigners.

"It is no secret that the UN has a huge overhead problem," notes David Rieff, author of the 2002 book A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. Still, he defends the UN's work in Afghanistan, despite a few problems ("incredibly inflated staffing and overhead structure," "double bureaucracy," "incompetence," and "mismanagement"). More fault lies with the U.S., he says, citing an American refusal to extend international peacekeepers beyond Kabul.

"Incorrect," counters ambassador Bill Taylor, the U.S. Special Coordinator on Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. "We are actively exploring the expansion of international peacekeepers." Taylor, who spent nine months as U.S. reconstruction coordinator in Afghanistan, lists some successes: improved roads, a stable currency, and an infant army "loyal to Hamid Karzai, not the warlords." Nonetheless, he agrees that the security situation is getting worse.

The real risk for America, preoccupied as it is with Iraq, will be failing to sustain our efforts in the long run—a decade or more. So far, on balance, achievements do outweigh failures, most notably from NGOs in the field: Doctors Without Borders, Solidarité, ACTED, Action Against Hunger, and the Agha Khan Foundation, among others. A Kabul staffer for the Catholic charity Caritas told me that aid projects seem slow but are making real-world progress, fixing irrigation works, clearing roads, and building schools. "A year ago, yes, there really was a shortage of money and people," she said, with the innate caution of a bureaucratic infighter. But now the aid taps are open, the staffs up and running. "It's amazing how the NGOs have been able to reach every corner of the country, rebuilding houses and so on, in the last year," the Caritas staffer added. "People are a bit impatient."

I'm one of them. I left the UNICA party for a while, wandering the compound, pushing open doors. There were bungalows, dormitories, and a lodge with dark beams, where suspiciously earnest people were poring over paperwork as the party raged. Down past the gym were a few pool tables, where Photo sent Edit down to a narrow defeat. And outside again, the Afro-Swedo-Deutsche-funk vibe was in full swing. It looked like an episode of The Real World: Kabul shot in a British officer's mess during the Great Game.

Juliana from Guyana finally got me. Unwilling to miss the last-night, last-chance-forever, goodbye-farewell party to this brief Kabul between unknowns, I hit the dance floor, the only place in Afghanistan with a huge crowd of unveiled women, and set about embarrassing myself.

We dance. We wave our hands in the air like we just don't care.
Page:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8