A US business consultant says Afghanistan is improving but the US Embassy there is so isolated it would be just as effective if the staff worked out of Washington.
Janet McElligottt, a DC-based international business consultant, just returned from Afghanistan this week where she was working on a feasibility study for Afghan women’s community needs.
McElligottt said she was “grateful” not to be associated with a US organization, which would have confined her to a barracks for the entire trip in Afghanistan. She says she would have seen nothing “except the road from the airport to the barracks.”
McElligottt said there is an equivalent to Iraq’s “Green Zone,” or security zone in Afghanistan, which she calls a “ridiculous compound” because it cuts the “heart out of the middle of Kabul,” in Wazai Akdar Khan, due to surrounding streets blocked off around the US Embassy compound.
Painted white shipping containers filled with sand surround the compound. “They’ve reverted to a feudalistic means of creating a moat with modern technology,” said McElligottt.
“My favorite part about the American compound is that once you get past the initial guards and you walk down to the main gate, on what now is a dead deserted Afghan street — you pass an enormous sign that is one big long compound sentence, and is written in five or six languages. There’s no way in hell anyone can read the sign without having already cleared the security guards.
“The sign, within the restricted zone basically says: “If you have any information about any terrorist activities, please report to this gate between 10 and 2, Tuesday through Friday.”
McElligottt laughs, and suggests adding another sentence: “Then the Taleban, which undoubtedly have a lookout posted across the street, will kill you.”
Such are the surreal absurdities she says she confronted on the ground.
The sign was not only “ridiculous” for obvious reasons, she said, but also showed the embassy’s total lack of understanding of Muslim culture.
“Because you don’t put an ad in the newspaper and expect to get real results on intelligence gathering. In this region, to get real results and accurate information, you have to go out and have a cup of tea - and not just one. And the first 15 times you have tea with this person, you don’t talk business. You learn about their families, and what’s important to them. This is how you build trust and a relationship.”
McElligottt said it’s only through these kinds of relationships “that local people gauge whether you care enough about their country and values to really help them.”
Patience is another essential element, and not something many Americans are good at, she said.
“You have to have a great deal of patience to have 15 cups of tea, and its then and only then, that someone in the Muslim world will open up, because they feel comfortable with them and they realize that you are not going to abandon them, because you have now invested time and energy, and you have a personal stake and personal relationship. To an Afghan, as it is to many Arabs, it’s all about a personal relationship, and it’s all about wanting the best for your friend, not just the best for yourself.”
McElligottt said she was a guest of the Afghan Center, an NGO that teaches illiterate Afghan women how to read and write, cares for war widows, and the forgotten Afghans — the ‘leftovers’ from the war.
“I stayed at the Afghan Center, in Kabul, and met women still living in their burkas. We went out into the community, in a way that no one at the embassy does, because of their bunker mentality. They won’t go outside their fortress, for fear something will happen to them.”
McElligottt said the US Embassy staff are being paid “very well, with additional hardship pay, and yet for all this they don’t’ get out in the community... They could be doing the same work in Washington, and save the American taxpayers a boatload of money and probably be more efficient.”
“Many of these embassy staff are working in converted shipping containers to be office cubbyholes. They’re packed in like sardines without oil. But they’re sardines who are making $200,000 a year.”
McElligottt said whenever security measures there are ineffective. “Whenever something happens in Kabul, the US government calls in security companies, like Global Security, who recommend putting out more signs asking for informants, or add another shipping container to make the impregnable wall even higher, or put serpentine barbed wire on the top of yet another container. It’s ludicrous because these measures only further isolate them from the problem, and will never help you find a solution to the problem.”
But she praised the efforts of returning Afghans: “One of the fantastic things about Afghanistan is their diaspora, many brilliant people who had the monetary means fled Afghanistan during their troubled period with the Russians, and then the Taleban.
“They are now returning home, and are bringing with them the best of the West, the best of the Middle East. They are using what they learned abroad and are integrating it with Afghan society in a beautiful fashion. They don’t have to be taught what their culture will accept, they already know. Many of the ministers lived overseas, and they have high hopes and ideas in rebuilding the country. They’re really wonderful people, and they’re Afghanistan’s best hope.”
The country’s ministers are realists, she said. “They know American money isn’t going to be there forever, so they know that in order to replace the poppy growers, they need to be pragmatic and teach them to farm something that will be successful even after the Americans go.”
McElligottt is considering returning to work with the local staff — to help get them visibility to do liaison work with local staff and Americans and help promote women’s causes.
She said she believes things are “going well” in Afghanistan “because I saw large building cranes putting the pieces of the city back together. I was able to talk to Afghan construction firms, who had more work than they could handle and were looking for outside partners to bring in Western technology and Western standards.”
Pakistan is flooding their market with substandard building material, she said, which the Afghan firms don’t want.
The country is desperate for modern construction equipment, said McElligottt. “There is one shovel to every five workers, and they use their hands to handle concrete. They have contracts and they have money, but they don’t have enough trained people to do the work, or use even simple equipment.”
After 25 years of inner city fighting in Kabul, said McElligottt, “these walls are now being knocked down and rebuilt with brick and mortar.”
Schools are starting to fill up, she said. “Boys go to school in the mornings, girls go in the afternoon. And at night, watchmen sleep in the hallways and in each classroom at any facility where the girls are going to school, to ensure the building is not destroyed by radicals — because it has happened in the past.”
“There are deals being cut with all the mullas and mosques to allow girls to be schooled to the age of at least 12,” said McElligottt. “Local leaders are saying its okay to send them to religious school, but are also insisting they all learn geography.”
Portraits outside these schools have paintings of religious and political leaders, said McElligottt, “so that radicals would think twice before burning down the school.”
Despite the progress, McElligottt admitted despite the fact that returning Afghans are bring solutions to many of the problems that have plagued their country for decades, “rebuilding the country will be very difficult because they are stuck in the back of the 20th century and the government is not providing for the needs of its citizens, and hasn’t for a long time.
There’s great hope for Hamid Karzai, said McElligottt, despite “common knowledge” that Karzai is “a puppet of the American government and they’ve accepted Karzai as president because that’s what the Americans want.”
“The Afghans feel that what Americans do in Afghanistan will benefit them. The Americans want a vibrant Afghan economy, sans poppies.
“ But most of the Afghans still want to short-circuit the vibrant economy and continue planting poppies in their backyard.”
As for the Afghan women, McElligottt said: “Many feel that — for the first time in their lifetime — they have a chance for a better life. For some of them, that means an education and a job; for others it just means a table with food on it and hope for their children.”
“Afghanistan has lived without hope for the majority of the 20th century,” said McElligottt. “It was held up as the ugly stepchild of the region for many years, and many Afghans now feel they have to take advantage of Americans’ interest and money, and for rebuilding the country.”
McElligottt said she feels that if the American Embassy “would allow its diplomats and staff to go out into the provinces in Afghanistan, our perception and understanding of the country and its people, would be profound.”
“Right now the US is like a blind man in a perfume shop, he can smell a lot of things around him, but can’t see a bottle and if he moves the wrong way he will topple over a lot of things and destroy a lot.
“But if we work hand in hand with those who have come back to rebuild their county, Afghanistan will become an example for the rest of the area, and Kabul will once again be a Paris in the East, which is how it was viewed by many before the Soviet invasion.”
“The American government has to allow our people to do their work; and if not, then they should send them back to Washington,” said McElligottt.
She said making these American government employees prisoners within Kabul makes no sense at all. She questioned the security situation — “Who’s telling them it’s so horrible? Several ministers told me that it was a disgruntled former warlord who lost the elections that captured the aide workers during elections.”
“Karzai has to figure out a way to cut out these cancers, to stomp down on the war-lordism — and with help from the US government, I think he can do it.”
Asked about Osama Bin Laden, McElligottt said: “Everyone in Kabul knows where he is — and the name of the region in Pakistan where he is.
They say the reason why we haven’t caught Bin Laden is because the Pakistanis don’t want him caught, because they fear the minute they catch Bin Laden, their importance to the US in the war on terrorism will evaporate.”
