Beyond Kandahar, an oasis

Montreal Gazette
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Column: Allison Lampert
Dateline: BAMIYAN PROVINCE, Afghanistan
Source: The Gazette

Adeela lifts the blue burka over her head and rushes into her frigid, one-room home.

She kneels to embrace her five seated children. They are leaning against a pile of blankets in the corner of the room, bare feet tucked under knees, huddling together to keep warm.

"Where were you?" asks Adeela's eldest daughter, Zamirah, 12, the light from a single lantern illuminating her look of consternation. "We were so worried." Adeela, who like many Afghans goes by one name, was late returning from a literacy and vocational training program run by the non-profit Aga Khan Foundation. After a life of poverty, ignorance and turmoil during Afghanistan's decades of fighting, Adeela is desperate for an education. She leaves her children - including her two-year-old son - alone for hours each day to attend the classes that are given in a building an hour's walk away.

"When I was young, I never knew about education," said Adeela through an interpreter. "Now it's good. Now there is peace. I am so happy that I have this opportunity to learn." One of four provinces visited by the Manley commission - which issued its report this week on Canada's future in Afghanistan - Bamiyan has emerged as an oasis of peace in this war-torn country.

Despite extreme poverty, there is virtually no poppy cultivation or guns; it's said that Bamiyan's provincial reconstruction team, a staff of about 100 from New Zealand, hasn't fired a shot in years.

About 45 per cent of Bamiyan's girls now attend school, up from almost none in 2001, Governor Habiba Sarabi said. That's a far cry from the situation in the south of Afghanistan where 590 schools have been shut and 300,000 children left without classes since March, compared with 350 schools shut during the previous 12 months, the Associated Press reported this week.

Demand for education in Bamiyan is so great that the only school torched there was destroyed during a feud between two villages - each wanted the building constructed closer to its community, said Abdullah Barat, director of Future Generations Canada's Afghan development group.

While some critics have urged Canada to shift development efforts to more peaceful provinces like Bamiyan, this week's report tabled by former Liberal deputy prime minister John Manley urged the government to stay the course in Kandahar, where the fighting is among the heaviest in the country.

"To jettison these assets, and relocate a Canadian presence to some other area of Afghanistan, would inevitably waste a large part of Canada's human and financial investment in Kandahar," the report said.

It's a disappointment for Bamiyan development workers, who argue the province suffers from being too peaceful to attract the headlines and international attention that translate into serious aid money. Some question the utility of investing heavily in Kandahar schools and clinics that could be destroyed by insurgents, or closed the next week for security reasons.

"I still don't think they (the Manley commissioners) understand the idea of long-term development," charged Flora MacDonald, founder of the non-profit development group, Future Generations Canada, and a former Canadian MP. "Do you think right now you can do long-term development (in Kandahar)? "The fact is that the military are there for a purpose. They're trying to contain the Taliban and I agree with that. But there are other provinces in Afghanistan. Not just the two that most people know in the country. So why not look at those provinces where you can set up proper governance?" While none of Afghanistan, with its 34 provinces and 23 million people, is fully safe, Taliban activity tends to surround the drug trade, which is almost entirely concentrated in seven provinces - including Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan - in the south and southwest of Afghanistan.

According to the 2007 Afghanistan Opium Survey, annual opium production grew to 4,399 tonnes in Helmand, a province of 2.5 million people. That's more opium than the entire country produced in 2005. During the same year, the number of provinces considered poppy-free - including Bamiyan, Nuristan and Paktya - doubled from six to 13.

"Canadians are getting a very unbalanced view of Afghanistan," MacDonald said of the media's focus on the insurgency in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

Although the Canadian International Development Agency couldn't provide exact figures for its investments in Bamiyan, the province received a fraction of the $39 million CIDA poured into war-torn Kandahar during the 2006 fiscal year. CIDA devotes about $100 million a year to Afghanistan's development, making the country the largest single recipient of Canadian aid.

Stymied mainly by harsh winter conditions, sporadic electricity and unpaved roads - as opposed to security concerns - Bamiyan would have been an ideal place for increased Canadian investment, Governor Sarabi told Canwest News Service in a recent interview.

"Our message is that Canada should think more about development in areas outside of Kandahar," said Sarabi, Afghanistan's only female governor. "A place like Bamiyan could be a role model for other provinces." A mountainous, agrarian province in central Afghanistan, Bamiyan captured world attention in 2001, when its ancient Buddha statues were destroyed by the Taliban. Bamiyan's Hazara population, victimized in the late 1990s by the Taliban because of their mongol features and Shiite Muslim faith, today despise the mostly ethnic Pashtun insurgents and their extremist Sunni ideology.

The difficulties insurgents face hiding and operating in a Hazara region, along with its relatively tolerant clerics, gives Bamiyan the stability to host several non-governmental organizations and even the occasional tourist. By Afghan standards, the province is advancing in terms of gender equality: As well as having Sarabi as governor, two women have opened shops at the local bazaar, one of whom was recently elected president of her community council.

"There are so many opportunities because Bamiyan is a peaceful place and the people want their girls to be educated," said Robina Bangash, community and gender development advisor for the Afghanistan chapter of the Aga Khan Foundation, a development agency set up by the leader of the Ismaili branch of Islam.

In 2001, Bamiyan education department statistics show there were 115 schools registered in the province, which educated about 20,000 mostly male students. Most of these "schools" didn't have dedicated buildings.

Today, about 58,000 boys and 38,000 girls are students at 301 schools; 157 of them have dedicated buildings.

For Adeela, a widow whose husband was killed by the Taliban, the new schools mean hope. Adeela recalled her joy at writing her name, a few months ago, for the first time.

She now regularly signs the woolen vests she's learning to tailor. The combined literacy and training course she takes pays her $1 a day to feed her children.

Adeela used to earn the same amount washing clothes and cleaning homes - labour that weathered her face and her hands, with their orange henna-painted nails, that appear far older than her 35 years. "I lost my husband, I lost my opportunity to learn as a child, so I want my children to go to school so they can do better." Her four daughters, age four to 12, attend school each morning from 7 to 11 a.m., walking 30 minutes each way to get to class. While they are in school, her two-year-old son, Assib, waits at home alone, with only the family's dog outside standing guard.

But Adeela's eldest daughter, Zamirah already has the ambition to escape their one-room home with its threadbare carpets and outdoor toilet. When asked about a career, Zamirah smooths her red head scarf with its beaded tassels and smiles a brilliant, white-toothed grin.

"I want to be something in the future," she said. "I want to be a doctor to serve my country." While children like Zamirah might now be going to school in record numbers, Governor Sarabi acknowledges the province's crippling poverty will make it hard for them to find jobs without leaving their home province.

"If they can get skill training, it should help them," she said. "But as things stand now, will education lead to employment? Unfortunately, I can't say yes." To improve their students' job prospects, groups like the Aga Khan Foundation mix literacy classes with vocational and entrepreneurship training, or teaching local families how to raise healthy farm animals. As well, Aga Khan runs 125 literacy classes for women in Bamiyan, about half of which are funded by CIDA.

"If you just provide literacy without the vocational skill, they won't be as confident," said Sanjeev Kumar Gupta, regional program manager for the Aga Khan Foundation in Afghanistan.

But the main obstacle to Bamiyan's success, aid groups and residents say, is the lack of proper roads. While Canadians have paved several kilometres of roads in Kandahar province - paving makes it harder for insurgents to plant deadly improvised explosive devices - motorists in Bamiyan still navigate dusty, bumpy and winding trails.

The 120-kilometre trip between Bamiyan and Kabul takes about 30 minutes in a small plane, yet at least 10 hours to drive.

Farmers who grow potatoes and other vegetables during the warm weather can't bring their crops to market, said Abdullah Barat of Future Generations.

"The big problem is getting goods from Kabul and taking their crops to Kabul," he said. And Bamiyan's ethnic Hazara minority, who make up about 20 per cent of Afghanistan's population, lack the political clout to secure development projects from the Afghan government, Barat said. It took about a year to pave about a kilometre of road in the centre of Bamiyan City, a project that might have never been completed without the governor's intervention, he said.

Barat recalled meeting with a former Afghan finance minister who assured him years ago that Bamiyan would get better roads.

"He told me years ago, that there will be paved roads because it's peaceful in Bamiyan. But then the government forgot," he said. "We have been screaming about this for years. We just don't have the people to go and ask for us." Since the province only has a tiny airstrip, improved roads are needed to bring in supplies for development, including building a tourist industry. There is some talk of rebuilding at least one of the historic Buddha statues and Barat has been trying to convince the Afghan government to name Bamiyan's Lake Band-i-Mir as the country's first national park, "I have no doubt that there's a lot of potential," said Future Generations Canada founder MacDonald. "When you talk about adventure tours, this would be an ideal place." Building an industry like tourism, or financing entrepreneurship in Bamiyan is the only way to answer the ambitions of the province's growing number of educated children. And it's the only way for girls like Zamirah to avoid becoming young, uneducated and over-worked housewives like their mothers.

Adeela can't quite recall when she got married to her older husband. She knows she was only a little older than Zamirah.

As she discusses her arranged marriage with a reporter, the normally outspoken Zamirah grows quiet. Sometimes Adeela jokes about marrying Zamirah off - a prospect that terrifies the ambitious girl. She'll ask Adeela about the suggestion, questioning whether her mother needs to give her away because there's not enough food for her at home.

In fact, the family has little food; dinner that night is bread plus the box of cookies they received as a gift from a visitor. But if it's a choice between going hungry, or forcing Zamirah to live her mother's fate, the decision is simple.

"The life that I had, the one that I've told you about," Adeela says. "I don't want her to have it."

---

Back to News