The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is moving over 3,000 families from a refugee camp outside the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, back to their villages in the Alborz Mountains. The timing of this substantial operation is crucial. The worst of the winter snows are past and as the snows melt, fields need to be plowed and sowed for the summer crops, not least wheat. Families which have spent up to three years in camps both inside and outside Afghanistan face a massive task rebuilding their shattered lives.
It is not simply a case of putting seed crops into the ground. Many homes will have been destroyed completely or need major maintenance to make them livable again. The menfolk of every family will face a major task re-establishing their communities. Matters will be made more hazardous by the presence of anti-personnel mines in the fields from the years of conflict.
The aid community appears to have acted wisely with the refugees from the Alborz Mountains. Beside seeds for their farms, each family is being given a three-month supply of food, as well as blankets, clothing and some essential tools and building materials. It is, however, easy to see how this program could go wrong. The Alborz villagers are just a tiny part of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been driven from their homes by war and drought. Ideally in the coming weeks, the same operation needs to be mounted for all abandoned farming communities all over the country, because the planting season is short and Afghan weather fickle. There is no guarantee that the rains will not fail, yet again.
This mass movement of hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families will place an impossible strain on the transport and logistical resources of the aid agencies at work in the country. Indeed, diplomats in Kabul already doubt if even half of the refugees will make it back to their homes at any time this year, let alone during the crucial crop sowing period.
And this is not the only trouble. The central government in Kabul has only a tentative hold on the regions. Traditional warlords are starting to reassert their authority. The only factor that seems to be keeping them in check is the need to persuade the international community to pour in the promised billions of aid. Agencies like the IOM are nervous that some refugees will abuse the system of handouts and, having been sent back to their villages, will trickle back to the refugee camps on which they have been dependent. There is also the tough fact that many of Afghanistan’s brightest and best citizens have fled abroad in recent years, and are reluctant to return to play their part in rebuilding their homeland. The only way to handle those who seek to cheat the aid system and so deprive the truly needy is to provide so much well-targeted assistance that no one will go without. If Afghanistan is made a land of plenty, the profiteers will fail. But that is a tall order.
International agencies, by themselves, do not have enough transport and logistical organization to distribute aid in any substantial quantity, to precisely where it is needed. The sort of heavy lift ability they need, using helicopters and big transport planes for parachute drops, can only be provided by the likes of the US, Russian and European armed forces.
