CHAPTER 2

AFTER THE TALIBAN

Afghanistan can’t move ahead without the women.

—Christopher Alexander, Interview with author, June 2006

AFGHANISTAN IS A COUNTRY THAT most Canadians would not have been able to find on a map seven years ago. Now we can’t get it out of the news, off our minds, away from our tax dollars. It is creating controversy, challenging patriotism, and putting military men and women at risk. Many Canadians are asking what we think we are doing in quite a primitive country half a world away that seems to be bent on self-destruction.

The simple answer is this: We are helping them to rebuild, as we promised we would in the Bonn Agreement, signed in December 2001. And we are protecting ourselves as we discovered we must in the traumatized aftermath of 9/11.

The rhetoric in the debate needs to address the facts. Firstly, Canada did not invade Afghanistan. The military was invited by the Afghan government to help them establish security. Secondly, Canada is not occupying Afghanistan. The mandate is to secure a village and turn it over to the chiefs and elders. Thirdly, in my experience, you would be hard-pressed to find a single Afghan, apart from the extremists, who wants Canada to leave. Most are terrified they will be abandoned again, as they were at the end of the Cold War. Everyone I have spoken to believes that if the international community pulls out, the fighting will start within twenty-four hours, and Afghanistan will resume its pariah-state status within a week.

Beating the Taliban is not the issue. That would be like saying you can defeat the Mafia. What NATO can do is drive them back into their caves and keep them there until the Afghan government gets on its feet and its national army can be trained to contain them. These are not overnight tasks.

The international community’s intervention has produced some excellent results, including an elected government and an independent human rights commission, but six years of combined effort from forty-four countries has not significantly altered the lives of Afghans. This is likely because the investment in Afghanistan has been relatively modest. The number of foreign troops in the country is only one-twenty-fifth the number sent into Kosovo and Bosnia. The aid to Afghanistan is just one-fiftieth the amount invested in the Balkans.

The Taliban insurgency is mostly confined to the four southern provinces of the country. While the other thirty provinces have confounding challenges to overcome—out-of-control warlords and drug barons, brutal tribal customs, and a dysfunctional justice system—it is fair to say, that apart from the insurgency in the south, the rest of the country is marginally better off now that it has an elected government and an infrastructure that is starting to improve. The scale of the problems Afghanistan faces is immense, but they are being addressed.

There is no doubt that the Taliban and al Qaeda are yoked together through their fanaticism and the financial support they receive from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, among others, but they are not bound to the same ideology. The Taliban, a mostly illiterate band of thugs, want to impose a medieval theocracy on Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, an international network of extremists seeking power, wants to take jihad to the rest of the world. Both groups have hijacked their religion for political opportunism. Both claim to act in the name of God and use misconstrued religious dogma to distort the facts and feed fanaticism. What’s more, both confuse modernity with Westernization, so that everything that is seen as modern is denounced as Western. This includes human rights, particularly the rights of women. But human rights aren’t Western or Eastern—they’re human.

This campaign to make politics sacred isn’t new. Historian Charles Allen examines the jihadist movement in his book, God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad. He traces its beginnings to 1827 in British-controlled India and what the British referred to as the Hindustani or fanatic camp, a secret organization bent on getting rid of the British and restoring the glory days of Islam that had been in decline since about 1200.

That movement remained in precarious existence until 1989, when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and world events brought players from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Jordan together to foment revolution. With the Cold War over, the international community that had made its presence felt along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan for ten years took off like a school of minnows, suddenly and altogether, and left a vacuum that was filled by seven rival mujahedeen factions, each seeking control. By 1994, Allen says, three leaders had emerged: Mullah Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban; Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi who sees violence, oppression, and fear as the path to worldwide jihad and Muslim domination; and Ayman al-Zawahri, a disgraced Egyptian doctor and radical Islamist, who founded al Qaeda. Allen explains how their jihad was bolstered by thirty years of madrassa (Islamic religious school) mania in Pakistan, through which boys were trained to become the foot soldiers of the movement.

By the time the Taliban defeated the six other mujahedeen leaders in a fratricidal bloodbath in a post–Soviet Afghanistan, the country had become an outcast among nations, ruled by fanatics and drug barons, and financed by people whose goal was to punish the West for every perceived insult since 1200.

While al Qaeda was well organized and highly financed before 9/11, the same cannot be said of the Taliban, which relied on the ravings of uneducated zealots and used the tried-and-true Afghan method of denouncing the opposition by accusing their opponents of heresy. By the winter of 2001, inadequate finances and internal dissension were taking their toll. There was infighting within the Taliban. Rumours were spreading that Mullah Omar did not have control of his troops and that it was only a matter of time before the Taliban fell.

Then September 11 dawned, and the world was forced to pay attention to a country that had become a terrorist training ground. The invasion of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, and the Taliban government was toppled in a matter of weeks. The former U.N. eminence grise, Lakhdar Brahimi, admits it was a mistake to assume the Taliban would acknowledge defeat and disappear. Now, he says, the United Nations should have gone after the Taliban when they were disorganized, disillusioned, scattered, and small. But the United Nations ignored them. The Taliban regrouped with al Qaeda and, by 2005, were posing a major threat not only to the people of Afghanistan, but also to any country that has Western values (such as democracy) and a secular government.

According to Charles Allen, the Afghan people hold one ace with which to beat the Taliban. “History teaches that fundamentalist theocracy does not work because people will simply not put up with it,” he writes. By the fall of 2007, NATO, the United Nations, and humanitarian organizations such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) were coming to the realization that the initial plan simply had not worked well enough. They came to the conclusion—five years after the fact—that this is not a post-conflict country; it is war-devastated in ways the international community hasn’t seen for sixty years. Today, change is the operative word, and revised policies are now at work.

NATO

The answer to two questions will decide the outcome of the insurgency. Firstly, will Afghan villagers put up with the fanatics? And secondly, will the Afghan government build a functioning democracy in time? The task of the Canadian military is to rid Kandahar province of Taliban forces and ease the people into democratic rule. Best known as peacekeepers, the Canadians have been assigned the task of turning around the Titanic that Afghanistan has become. But the cost is mighty. Ninety-three Canadian soldiers dead at the time of writing (in the summer of 2008), $2 billion spent in military operations, and $100 million per year pledged until 2011. As a result, hard questions were asked about whether Canadian troops ought to be in Afghanistan in the first place or whether NATO should just let the Afghans fight it out among themselves. The hue and cry was spurred partly by compassion for the men and women who serve in Canada’s armed forces and partly by the bizarre silence surrounding the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Put another way, there was an extraordinary reluctance on the part of the government to share information with the citizens of Canada, a fact that was highlighted by the report of the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan, best known as the Manley report after its chairman, former Liberal cabinet minister, John Manley. Manley wrote:

The panel learned early that we must be careful to define our expectations for success. Afghanistan is a deeply divided tribal society. It has been wracked by decades of war and is one of the poorest countries on earth. There should be no thought that after five or even ten years of western military presence and aid, Afghanistan will resemble Europe or North America. But we came to the conviction that with patience, commitment, financial and other forms of assistance, there is a reasonable prospect that its people will be able to live together in relative peace and security, while living standards slowly improve.

In his conclusion, he added: “We like to talk about Canada’s role in the world. Well, we have a meaningful one in Afghanistan. As our report states, it should not be faint-hearted, nor should it be open-ended. Above all, we must not abandon it prematurely.”

Canada has roughly twenty-three hundred soldiers working under NATO’s command in the Kandahar region. One of those killed while serving in 2006 was Captain Nichola Goddard, a courageous woman who was eulogized by her father, Tim Goddard, a professor who teaches post-conflict studies at the University of Calgary. To a hushed congregation and an equally rapt television audience, Professor Goddard recounted a conversation he had had with Nichola. He had told her that education was the only solution for Afghanistan. Nichola agreed but explained that without security, education was impossible. During the four months she had served in Afghanistan, dozens of girls’ schools were fire-bombed, teachers were murdered, and parents were warned in night letters not to send their girls to school. Goddard quoted his daughter as saying, “I do what I do so you can do what you do.”

THE UNITED NATIONS

The mood in Afghanistan today is tense, the equivalent of waiting for a summer storm. Threatening clouds are building on the horizon; rumblings of discontent can be heard above the clamour of everyday life. Canadian wunderkind Christopher Alexander, the deputy special representative of the United Nations, is at the centre of the brewing tempest. Named one of Canada’s Top Forty Under Forty (an award that recognizes business and community leadership) in 2006, the thirty-nine-year-old Alexander is the articulate mandarin charged with the military, governance, and human rights files in Afghanistan. His job is to stay in touch with the principal players and set an agenda everyone can live with. It is a tricky assignment given the characters he has to contend with: President Hamid Karzai in his Persian lamb cap and tribal cape; the macho NATO generals; the Canadian soldiers who have the toughest job and the most dangerous assignment; and the swaggering Americans who are the biggest donors with the most powerful military forces. While one general boasts that they’re winning the war against the insurgency, Alexander puts it another way: “We aren’t losing.” The key paradox of this new-millennium conflict is that the Taliban won’t quit, and yet they can’t possibly win. On one topic, Alexander is adamant: “Without the success of women, there’s no success for Afghanistan.”

In June 2006, his assessment was ominous. The Taliban insurgency in the south was growing increasingly bold. The poppy harvest had racked up a record U.S.$8 billion. The United Nations program to disband the warlords’ illegally armed militias had stalled. “Failure is definitely an option,” Alexander said at the time. “This is a fragile state.” But he scoffed at the notion that recent events have made Afghanistan comparable to Iraq. “Those who say that simply haven’t read enough history.” And the usually affable diplomat was affronted by the suggestion that nation building is beyond Afghans. “That is, quite frankly, not the case. We need to dispense with these insulting assumptions.” He was confident that if the international community stays the course, and does what is necessary to set conditions for peace, “it will emerge, and economic growth will be spectacular by the standards of the last half century.”

Stickhandling his way through the rogues, citizens, and representatives of the international community is Alexander’s forte. “Despite what you see on TV, things are happening here, there is an appetite for change, and change is possible. Afghans have come to that conclusion after trying so many other options, most of them violent.”

In 2008, when I asked him why it was taking so long to knock off a ragtag collection of twenty-something thugs who had dragged the country into the dark ages in the mid-nineties, he said, “We need a much bigger footprint in Afghanistan than we thought we needed at the beginning.” He admits that two of the critical assessments made at the beginning turned out to be wrong. “It was thought that development and reconstruction would be automatic, and that small investments would have big payoffs and put the country back on its feet. But we began to realize that the country was war-devastated by thirty years of continuous conflict to an extent we had not considered. The infrastructure, the irrigation systems, power lines, agriculture, human capital—everything was degraded to a shocking degree.” The second challenge was state building— literally bringing Afghans together in one set of institutions that had legitimacy. “The Bonn process was successful in restoring legitimacy, but didn’t guarantee the systems would work.” For the most part, they didn’t work. While Alexander won’t name names, everyone else invariably points to the corruption in the Ministry of the Interior, as well as the ministries dealing with transportation, power, and water.

At the outset, the ministries were controlled by various mujahedeen leaders who refused to give them up. The charges of corruption started flowing as early as 2002. It was said that jihadi figures were running the ministries and the police department because of who they knew or what they did during the conflict. Literally hundreds of men were said to be getting non-merit-based appointments. Everyone knew there were police officers who were engaged in criminal activity or drug trading, or who were under the influence of those who controlled organized crime and opium production. For example, the Ministry of the Interior (meaning the police) was made up essentially of factional militias; most posts were given to Northern Alliance soldiers who switched their army gear for police uniforms and reported to Minister Qanooni, a warlord. The same was true of the Ministry of Defence until reforms were begun in 2003. Alexander confirms the allegations and says, “If they were told to reform at that stage, they would simply have said ‘no.’ Now the old commanders don’t have the same access to heavy weapons. The National Security Force has about one hundred and forty thousand on the payroll. They weren’t there as recently as 2004.”

But the Taliban weren’t ready in 2004 either. Now they are better organized, have access to technology, and easily make contact anywhere in the world via conference calls. Alexander says he can name one hundred Taliban commanders who strut around the streets of Quetta, Pakistan, with impunity and float in and out of Afghanistan at will. “Part of this story is about suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices, but part of it is a story of safe havens and training camps across the border,” he says.

It is also about the way the story is told. He recounts a report about twenty Afghan children who were killed by NATO forces when a village in Kandahar province was bombed. The story made headlines around the world. A NATO investigation conducted in the subsequent days discovered that no children had been killed. The Taliban had written the report within an hour of the bombing and sent it by email to the Middle East–based news agency Al Jazeera, which had no way of verifying the facts but broadcast the report anyway. It took another ten days before the NATO investigation was checked, rechecked, authorized, and finally released to the media. It played on the back pages of newspapers, where it would be seen by only a fraction of the public that read the original story. The point is that the Taliban were winning the public relations war because NATO did not have the means, or the rapid-response capability, to get its own story out. After that incident, NATO decided to employ the necessary resources to get their version of the incidents to the media as quickly as the reports sent by the insurgents.

The confounding reality is that Afghans have a history of staring down their enemies, including the Russians and the British before them (not to mention Alexander the Great, Darius the First, and Genghis Khan). They all entered Afghanistan anticipating an easy conquest and left with their tails barely intact. There is an expression people here still use when they’re putting their kids to bed: “Stay under your covers or the British will get you.” The historical baggage remains even though there are eight thousand British troops in Helmand province today who are fighting on the side of the government. Although the Taliban command is operating from outside the border, they are Pashtun brothers who have considerable, maybe even increasing, support inside the country. This is one reason why some critics claim the efforts of the international community are doomed to failure.

Alexander begs to differ. “This chapter in the brutal, colourful history of this country is different.” And he knows what he is talking about. He spent six years in Russia, the last three in the number-two post at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. He is fluent in Russian (as well as French and German) and fascinated by the former Soviet Union. He became interested in Afghanistan when he was studying the conflicts in the Caucuses and Central Asia. “The defining showdown of the twentieth century was the confrontation between the Warsaw Pact and those who favour free markets and democracy,” he says. “The conflict here in Afghanistan was the final and most violent instalment in that whole story. You can only understand why the Soviet Union is no longer, and Russia has arisen from its ruins, by understanding the history of Afghanistan.”

He points out that the population gave a massive vote of confidence to the government in the presidential election. “People who really know the ebb and flow here say confidence has not been withdrawn from the government. People want peace and know they can only get it through these institutions.”

That said, if you were to stop one hundred people at the bazaar in Kabul and ask them how they think the country is faring, 80 percent would say, “It’s getting worse, the police are corrupt, I don’t trust the government, and my life is not getting better despite the promises made to me.” Alexander blames this kind of response on fear of the Taliban agenda; even though it was the losing side of the civil war, there is widespread anxiety that the Taliban will return. “The Taliban are about revenge. They never accepted defeat. They’re about drugs; their operations are financed by drug barons. What’s more, their values have been rejected by Afghans and the international community at every turn. Isolationism—Afghanistan for Afghans—and the reductionist interpretation of Islam is an exclusivist vision of how this country should live. People don’t want it, but it’s sold to them down the barrel of a gun.”

The fragility of the state was tested on May 29, 2006, when Kabul erupted in violence after an American military vehicle careened out of control, killing several bystanders. Rumours swept through the city that U.S. forces were killing Afghans. People took to the streets, among them opportunists and criminals who looted stores, trashed the offices of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and burned buildings. The police were cowed into paralysis.

The postscript of the Kabul riot is that Karzai is not in control. He is jokingly referred to in some circles as the president of Kabul. Alexander bristles at the suggestion that the United States is running the show. “If you’re implying that this is a puppet state run by Americans, that’s just not true. Karzai gets a lot of advice, and extreme lobbying that’s not always wholesome, from groups within the country as well as the international community, but when the cabinet meets or the parliament is in session, the U.S. is not there. It simply can’t work that way in Afghanistan.”

There is still discontent and civil unrest in Kabul today. Crime is a bigger problem than terrorism, due to the corrupt, poorly equipped police, the drug trade, and poverty. The situation is compounded by a population that has exploded from seven hundred and fifty thousand to three million. The power supply can cope with only a third of that number, so the electricity is an on-again, off-again nuisance that won’t be repaired until 2009. Housing stock is totally unequal to the load. There is high unemployment and there are not enough spaces in the universities. Alexander isolates a single factor that adds up to more than the sum of all the other parts. “Half the population now is under the age of fifteen,” he says. “Their hopes and expectations are high, but their disappointment and alienation are acute. They perceive the country to be poorly run by the government or by the international partners.”

This is not just a military campaign; the fate of a country is at stake, he says. “Our objective isn’t to simply invest well-equipped forces under strong leadership into the eye of the storm that is Kandahar. It’s to support a transition from war to long-lasting peace. It’s not there yet, but it’s within reach if countries like Canada remain. The consequences of leaving the job unfinished would be catastrophic.”

He has high praise for Canada. “One thing Canada has done particularly well is to make interventions that are time-sensitive.” For example, the electoral process: when people weren’t even talking about when elections would happen, Canada launched voter registration projects. It was the first country to put money into the containment of heavy weapons and to start thinking about how ammunition should be dealt with. “These were very early investments that paid off. The micro-finance projects in villages across the country are hugely successful. Canada was the one to say, ‘we’ll take Kandahar,’ when our key allies were focused in Iraq.” He says, “Those are leadership positions that help intrinsically to make a difference, but also to set the stage for what others might do.”

His third mandate—human rights—is the one that makes him pause and take a deep breath. “This is a tough one,” he says. “Human rights abuses were catastrophic during the Taliban [period], particularly for women. There’s a huge legacy of repression and disenfranchisement that has to be overcome. This is a country that is in desperate need of reform.” Alexander says the single biggest achievement in Afghanistan has been the human rights commission. Under the leadership of Dr. Samar, the AIHRC took on the most intractable file in the country: the rights of women and girls. That meant tackling civil, tribal, and sharia law and a country-wide and millennium-old conviction that women are second class and not part of civil society. Says Samar: “It was Christopher Alexander, when he was Canadian Ambassador, who helped push the government to make our work happen.” She makes it clear that she wants nothing less than reform. Alexander supports her, but adds, “We may never in our lifetime see Afghans meeting international standards of human rights for women.”

While the road is tortuous, women are playing a growing role in civil society, and even Karzai recognizes their demands for change. On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2008, his message to Afghans was a positive one for women: “I call on all religious leaders, tribal elders, and particularly men: Stop forcing your underaged girls to marry, stop marrying them to old men.” There are indications that men, mullahs, and elders are starting to listen.

But listening and acting on change aren’t always compatible in a country that is still extremely traumatized. The majority of people here have grown up with war. Many have lost family members to rocket attacks or as “collateral damage” in military engagements. Two million people died in the last thirty years of conflict. That is one in ten Afghans. There is anxiety at every level of society and the legacy of that trauma can’t be underestimated. Overcoming it and healing it is a long process. Afghans are suspicious of one another and everyone else. They criticize one another in a way that is practically ritualistic, as if it were a national sport. You could be excused for believing the country is about to tear itself apart.

“There are fault lines and disconnects and different versions of the country,” says Alexander, “but they watch the same media, complain about the same government, meet together in the same parliament—sometimes for better or for worse. There are ways that Afghans are coming together that are unprecedented. I don’t see the country pulling itself apart. There’s a sense of stubborn resilience now—people think there is a chance.”

Despite the rising insecurity, there is a feeling that the centre is holding and taking on weight—institutional weight. “I’m not guaranteeing success, but there is an asset base that Afghans want to protect. The alternative is the Taliban, a compromise that is really unacceptable to Afghans. While no one is negotiating with Omar, who is only as good as his welcome in Pakistan—there would be huge political issues and barriers to that—but there are contacts with lower-level [Taliban] people— even with us at the U.N. from people saying, ‘Help us get out of this cycle of violence, we don’t want to fight any more.’ If they’re willing to live under the constitution, within the laws, and don’t have blood on their hands, they’re welcome. Some have come, but the trickle needs to turn into a larger flow.”

The insurgency is now fighting on two fronts, in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. Although that doesn’t aid the peace process, it does create a space for Afghanistan to pull itself together because the Taliban now have to split their efforts between the two countries and the institutions they face in Afghanistan are stronger. “I feel more confident now because there’s a conceptual clarity—it’s exposed. People see where the groups are, who they are, what their agenda is, and how they are operating. Two years ago we didn’t know this,” says Alexander.

The strongest new kid on the institutional block is the Directorate of Local Governance. Created on August 30, 2007, and led by reformist Jalali Popal, it is tasked with the management of the provincial governors and district managers, and it reports directly to the president. This is seen as a sea change in Afghanistan, as the Ministry of the Interior (a.k.a. the police) has historically been in charge of governance. The new institutional arrangement bypasses the notorious corruption of several ministries.

The year 2007 was so volatile that it shocked the players at the United Nations, as well as the Afghan government, into action. More than seven thousand people were killed in terrorist attacks, and 140 suicide bombers blew up themselves and their surroundings. The new year was hardly started when, on January 14, the terrorists struck the Serena Hotel with stunning efficiency. The swanky hotel had been celebrated as a sign of a prosperous new beginning for Afghanistan. It was to have been a modern and safe haven to show off to visitors. But the double suicide bombing and subsequent murder of foreigners sent the population into a paroxysm of fear. Many felt that if it can happen at the Serena, it can happen anywhere. “This attack had a huge impact,” said Alexander. “But these are terrorists. If they put their minds to it, they can make any place unsafe.”

The good news is that the International Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) doubled its numbers in 2007, and the amount of aid delivered through the budget almost tripled. Afghan revenues from national businesses met their targets and are growing at a rate of 30 to 40 percent a year. But there still aren’t enough troops or enough money to get the job done.

CIDA

In April 2007, the Canadian International Development Agency created an Afghanistan task force, a mini-CIDA, even taking the trouble to house the eighty-member team in a separate building. Like other aid organizations, CIDA realized that insecurity in Afghanistan means insecurity at home—in Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto. “Afghanistan is a globalized platform for terrorism, an opium economy with trans-border and cross-border trafficking,” says Stephen Wallace, vice-president of the new task force.

Gender is one of the three pillars in CIDA’s unprecedented new approach. (The other two are governance and growth). The underlying motivation for it rests on recognition of Afghanistan’s dire position on a number of international rankings. The country is second lowest on the world development index (Niger is at the bottom). Eighty-seven percent of women and 80 percent of men are illiterate. Maternal mortality is astronomically high, even higher than it was two hundred years ago. Infant mortality is similarly high. The new thinking is that the country is so fragile, it requires a specific initiative.

CIDA now is spending close to $300 million a year on Afghanistan alone, which makes Canada one of the country’s top five donors. The task force also calls for measurable results.

While the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan demanded this kind of innovative thinking, it may also have been sparked by criticism of CIDA’s work. The Senlis Council, a think tank that monitors the failures in Afghanistan, has singled out CIDA for especially stinging rebukes. The council charged, for example, that CIDA was not delivering aid in the southern provinces. In its defence, Ellen Wright, senior adviser to the vice-president of the task force, argues that there’s a reason their work is not high-profile, saying, “You can’t wave a Canadian flag over the work we’re doing or the project will be targeted by terrorists.” This is a fair point, but why is it that families caught in the insurgency don’t have enough food? Surely the aid organization can find a way to deliver it, even if they have to drop it in bundles from planes? Aly-Khan Rajani, senior adviser to the task force, explains, “You can’t drop food out of the sky or you’ll have a situation like we had in Somalia, when food distribution was controlled by warlords and wound up on the black market.” What is working, brilliantly some say, is a work-for-food or food-for-literacy program. Local men are hired to repair village infrastructure and are paid with food. Women who have been denied education by their husbands are encouraged to attend literacy classes and are rewarded with food.

CIDA has also been criticized for the conditions at the Miwais Hospital in Kandahar, even though that mandate is in the hands of the Red Crescent (the Muslim version of the Red Cross). A spokesperson for CIDA replies that there is much that is right about the hospital. An independent study confirmed that medications are being administered correctly, intravenous tubes are functioning properly, prescriptions are monitored suitably, and pharmaceuticals are stored adequately. But anyone who has been in the hospital would agree that the place could use more beds, a coat of paint, some clean linen, and a thorough scrubbing. CIDA argues that if these improvements were made by a Canadian agency, the hospital would be targeted for attack. Not everyone agrees. Norine MacDonald, president and founder of the Senlis Council, accuses CIDA of bad management: “They’ve never been able to point me to a location I can check—a food distribution project or evidence of medical equipment they’ve delivered.” Her criticism is often echoed by journalists who claim they can’t get access to CIDA programs because the Harper government keeps tight control over information. Requests for interviews go unanswered; field visits often are denied.

In the rest of the country, CIDA has received high praise for its micro-credit programs—more than seven hundred thousand of them. Sixty percent of the loans go to households headed by women. The loans are being repaid on time, and the initiative is considered a runaway success. CIDA also runs a program that trains women to be police officers. In the last year, Afghanistan has seen a 22 percent decline in mortality rates in children under five. The number of women giving birth in the presence of midwives or trained attendants has quadrupled. CIDA is also the biggest donor ($80 million a year) in land-mine clearance. They claim the casualty rate for people stepping on land mines has dropped from four to two a day, and they plan to see it drop to one a day by 2010.

But the most innovative of CIDA’s programs is the establishment of community development councils: men and women sitting together to decide the direction the village will take. This is unheard of in Afghanistan and, by all accounts, it is changing local reality. The program is time-intensive and requires enormous patience on the part of advisers to bring people around to a new way of thinking, but even the president of Afghanistan is presenting these councils as the way forward.

“In Afghanistan, it’s about taking the best Canada has to offer, mobilizing it, and focusing it on a problem,” says Wallace. “There have been some hard-won lessons: You can’t do development without security and you can’t do security without development.”

IT WOULD BE EASY TO DISMISS the criticism of the treatment of women in Afghanistan as the product of Western cultural assumptions. But it wouldn’t be correct. The problem isn’t Westernization, it is modernization, according to Nasrine Gross, founder of the Roqia Center for Rights, Studies, and Education in Kabul. “Afghanistan has to come up to speed with modernity or it will die of obsolescence,” she says. Her focus is on women’s rights because “it is the ingredient for success in Afghanistan. For a very long time, the situation of women has been used to hold us back. It is all because of a lack of understanding and [a lack of] acceptance of modernity.”

Gross is not afraid of change. “Change leads to development, literacy, and a mobile society. In Afghanistan this is invariably referred to as the ‘demon Westernization’ when in fact it’s modernization.” She feels that women have been the primary victims of this thinking. She says that three hundred years ago the most advanced and powerful countries in the world— England, France, and the states that made up the Ottoman Empire—did not have women in parliament, in business, in careers, or anyplace in the public sphere. Now they do. “No society can move forward, let alone advance, without the full participation of women. In Afghanistan the treatment of women is used as a barrier against modernity.” She cites clothing as an example. “Look at history: At the end of the nineteenth century, men and women were wearing what Afghans wear today—baggy body-covering clothing. As other countries moved from an agrarian society to an industrial society, from working in fields to sitting behind a desk, from horse-and-buggy to railways and planes, the people adjusted. Some people here say that if Afghans change [their habits or their dress], they’re contributing to a loss of identity and are Westernizing. They aren’t; they’re modernizing. It’s not about the West wanting Afghanistan to Westernize; it’s about wanting Afghans to modernize.”

Her comments remind me of a conversation I had with a Taliban commander a decade ago. He was telling me not to take photos because they are un-Islamic. He also said, “Your yellow hair must be fully covered, and you’re not to smile, and don’t say hello with your hand [shake hands],” all while he was surfing the internet.

Gross remembers that when she was a child in Afghanistan fifty years ago, a group of men was assigned to go through the village in the morning calling, “Naqara!” This was the village wake-up call, meaning, “Wake up, everyone!” “Now that we use alarm clocks,” she says, “it doesn’t mean we are less Afghan or less Muslim. There is only one Quran, but it is so deep, it can be interpreted for today.”

This anti-modern attitude was attacked during the Soviet era when the secular Russians denounced, and poked fun at, the pious and primitive ways of Afghans. The mujahedeen forces seized on this threat to their culture and religion, accusing the invaders of stripping Afghans of their identity. When the Soviets withdrew, leaving the mujahedeen factions engaged in an internecine battle, they vied with one another to proclaim their greater devotion to Afghan religion and culture in order to gain the support of the people. When the Taliban, with their suffocating interpretation of both religion and culture triumphed, they also inherited the destroyed infrastructure of the country. President Karzai, left with the ruins, treads a fine line between the need to modernize and accusations of being un-Islamic.

Nasrine Gross explains that every society has two states: One is the state of being, the other the state of becoming. “Afghanistan is in a constant state of being, never becoming.” Her reasoning is that nobody dares to apply the definition of modernity to the country today. Given the bustling airport, the computers on every government desk, the cellphones and iPods carried by both urban and rural dwellers, the duplicity of leaders who condemn Westernization for Afghanistan’s problems approaches the ridiculous.

While many observers claim the anti-Western rhetoric is about controlling the population and diverting attention from the root causes of their troubles, Gross blames it on the lack of education and experience. “Most adult Afghans have never been to school. They don’t have electricity. Many have never watched television or gone to a movie. When I was growing up, women were kept inside. I couldn’t go to my friend’s house after school or during holidays. It just wasn’t done. When you are raised with so much restriction, you don’t learn decision-making, you aren’t confronted with choice. It will take a least a generation—twenty-five years—to change this thinking.”

IN THE WINTER OF 2008, when I left Canada to return to Afghanistan, I had mixed messages on my mind. There were the grumbling echoes of protestors who felt Canada ought to leave immediately; the heartfelt concerns of women’s organizations that worried about setbacks; and my own optimistic thoughts about finding girls such as Lima, and women such as Sharifa, who had shaped my view of the women of Afghanistan on my previous journeys.

The first thing I noticed when I was driving into the city from the Kabul airport was that the usually chaotic traffic was slightly tamed. The garbage that had been piling up, sometimes in heaps that were several metres high, had mostly been collected. The stinking, overflowing latrines on the streets of Kabul were being cleared out by teams of men dressed in bright orange overalls, which made me ask if they were prisoners. (I was assured they worked for the government—and were glad to have a paying job.) The houses on the mountainsides that border Kabul had been reduced to rubble in the civil war, and had remained that way for year after frustrating year. Now they had been rebuilt, and when the power was on—which is still hit and miss—the warm glow of lights shone from their newly installed windows. What’s more, the street lights were working. It was the first time I had seen street lights in Kabul. A woman who runs an NGO reminded me that the last time I saw her she had to carry the organization’s entire payroll in her purse, and was terrified that it would be stolen. Now she puts the money in an account in the newly opened bank and writes cheques for the staff.

Change has also come to some of the villages in far-flung districts of Panjshir, the Shomali Plains, Bamiyan, the central highlands, Herat, and Mazar-e Sharif, although not to the same degree.

But there’s also a miasma of fear that permeates every corner of this land. People are scared to death—that they will be caught in the next suicide bomb, that an IED will be detonated as they drive by, that their girls will be harmed on the way to school, that their teachers will be beheaded for teaching children to read and write, that the international community will abandon them again.

The problems throughout the country are immense. In the absence of a clear win over the Taliban, warlords who have enjoyed immunity from prosecution, and have even occupied cabinet posts in President Karzai’s government, are bolstering their militias, as though standing by for a power grab in case the government collapses. Communiqués are regularly issued from the office of one member of parliament or another proposing stupefying new laws, such as banning the hugely popular Indian soap operas Afghans watch on television or forbidding women from speaking to men outside their homes. Never mind that they can catch the soaps on their computers or that conversation between men and women is required at the workplace. So fear and foolishness both feature in Afghan life. In addition, there is widespread discontent among people who were promised a better life with the arrival of the international community.

Says Sima Samar of the AIHRC: “Human security is a basic requirement for everything else.” She wants war crimes—many of them committed by warlords—prosecuted. In 2002, President Karzai suggested that a future government should establish a truth commission to “ensure that the people will have justice.” Two years later, the AIHRC filed their report, “A Call for Justice,” and a five-step action plan that would address the wrongs of the past. It collected dust on the president’s desk for two years. Now, Samar acknowledges that it won’t be released mostly because the judiciary in the country is dysfunctional and could not begin to act on war crimes. Furthermore, President Karzai has declared an amnesty. Samar is irked by the suppression of the report, which she sees as another delay on the journey to full accountability. She also resents the slow pace of change, the continued corruption at every level of government, and admits that the rights of women and girls are only marginally better than they were in the past. “Accountability, justice, and security must work together for peace,” she says. Acutely aware of the difficult and dangerous role Canada is playing, she says, “Stability here will help security throughout the world. Security here means law enforcement and a decrease in training camps for terrorists, maybe even a decrease in poppy growing. These are problems for everyone in the world, not specifically Afghans.” She also sees Canada as the country that can pull off this confounding mission. “Canada doesn’t have ambition to control, or rule, or occupy another country. The international community knows that. So do Afghans.” And she adds in an ominous warning: “If Afghanistan is not safe, Canada is not safe.”

Afghanistan is at a very delicate place in its history. Much has been accomplished, but much more is still to be done. The terrorists are determined to grab the country back. The international community needs to be equally determined to thwart them.

For me, success can be measured by the lives of women and girls: their opportunities for education, their participation in civil society, their treatment by the judiciary. They are the canaries in the mine that is Afghanistan.