Eating an elephant

KABUL – How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

A US coalition official here likens eating an elephant to the challenge posed by Afghanistan to the forces that are here on a mission to stabilize the country and deny sanctuary to terrorists.

Break down the elephant into small pieces, the coalition official says, and deal with each part of the problem in manageable portions.

Afghanistan is one mammoth elephant. After bringing down the Taliban in 2001, the Americans and their allies have rushed to prevent Afghanistan from turning into a failed state that could once again draw Islamic extremists.

The fall of the Taliban emboldened the Bush administration to pursue its preemptive anti-terrorist policy and attack Iraq. That elephant is double the size of the Afghan pachyderm, and the continuing violence in Iraq has pushed Afghanistan out of the headlines. No news is good news, and this is an indication of the many positive developments in this country.

"There has been an enormous amount of progress in the past three years," US Ambassador Ronald Neumann told us here, but he knows so much remains to be done.

Even if the first post-Taliban elections for the legislature and provincial councils are a success, the whole exercise would be useless without a credible justice system that will enforce laws passed by parliament.

"This cannot be only an issue of voting," said Neumann.

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Imagine problems in our country, magnified 50 times. The streets of Kabul, the capital, are dotted with generators because the city has no steady supply of electricity. This means no air conditioning in 40-degree heat in most buildings.

There is no central water filtration system; no one knows where all the water from septic tanks ends up in this city. Communal artesian wells are common sights; all drinking water is bottled and imported from countries such as Pakistan.

Naturally water-borne diseases are a problem, as well as skin rashes and allergies from the brown dust that blankets everything. You don’t want to get sick here because even in the capital, health care is woefully inadequate. This is especially true if you are a woman, since only female medical workers – and there are too few of them – are allowed to attend to female patients.

The illiteracy rate is so high multinational forces that are training Afghan soldiers and police can’t even find enough cops who are literate enough to issue traffic citation tickets.

The country is plagued by the opium trade, tribal warfare, massive corruption, and of course the continuing Islamist threat.

Can this country ever be ready for democracy?

Neumann said that for Americans, "it’s a statement of faith... we believe that potentially other countries can get there."

He admitted that this type of democratic development could bring "a lot of pain."

"It’s not a natural process. It’s not natural in Iraq now," said Neumann, who was assigned in Baghdad before coming here. "(But) you can’t do it out of a book. You do it by getting on and falling off and getting on again."

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A coalition official says multinational forces are not trying to develop an American or British-type democracy in Afghanistan. But multinational forces are helping the Afghans so that the country can stand on its own feet ASAP.

The Afghans, Neumann emphasized, "are not kids, they’re not our kids at all."

Multinational forces are hoping that good governance and capacity-building will deny terrorists sanctuary.

Thomas Johnson of the US Agency for International Development here likens the American program for Afghanistan to the Marshall Plan in Europe, not in terms of scale but in complexity.

"To me, this is the most interesting program of aid that we currently have in the world," Johnson told us.

It is also the biggest in terms of utilized development aid, with a total of nearly $1.9 billion appropriated this fiscal year by USAID.

The aid package includes not only support for education and alternative livelihoods for opium growers, but also the distribution of tens of thousands of chickens for women’s poultry-raising projects, and the distribution or sale of over 4 1.48 million condoms and 200,000 oral and injectible contraceptives.

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Multinational forces have also set up so-called provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) to develop an enduring security structure that will pave the way for long-term stability in the country.

Each PRT is supervised by foreign troops assisted by civilian officials to support Afghan provinces in everything from the development of infrastructure to capacity-building in all fields of governance and in almost all sectors of society.

Of the 22 PRTs set up so far, 13 are run by the US-led coalition and nine by the International Security Assistance Force, which includes NATO countries. Unlike the coalition, ISAF does not engage in combat or direct counter-terrorism operations.

Shah Mahmood Safi, the governor of Laghman province northwest of Kabul, is satisfied with the PRT under US coalition forces headed by Navy Cdr. Frank Gutierrez.

"The terrorists cannot act in this province," Safi told visiting journalists at a joint press briefing with Gutierrez at the coalition camp in Mehtar Lam earlier this week.

Safi had fled the conflict in his country and stayed with his family in Australia for 15 years. Shortly after the fall of the Taliban, he left Australia for Afghanistan, with his flight stopping over for three hours in Manila, he told me over lunch at Mehtar Lam.

He marched into Kabul together with Hamid Karzai, now the president, and was subsequently appointed governor of Laghman.

It is a measure of the continuing instability in this country that despite Safi’s praise for the progress in Laghman, his six children remain in Australia.

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Still, much progress has been made in the past three years. NATO’s senior civilian representative here, Hikmet Cetin, remembers that everything was destroyed – buildings, roads and other infrastructure – in the US bombardment that drove out the Taliban. The country was left with no currency, courts, revenue collection, army or police force.

Today Afghans are preparing for their second free elections in two years. Kabul is bustling with commerce despite all the problems, and the Afghan currency is even valued just slightly lower than the peso, at about 60 to the dollar.

The 59-year-old Safi said he expected to see the day when a peaceful Afghanistan could stand on its own without the need for foreign supervision. For now, he knows his country can be there only "by the grace of God, with international help."