The Punishment of Virtue (18 page)

The significance of such a rapid changeover was that the United States had, in effect, no policy in Afghanistan. During that crucial window of time that could make or break the future of the country, America's sails were luffing. There was no strategy for targeting reconstruction dollars so as to produce the greatest positive domino effect. Worse, there was not even a clear notion of what the desired “end state” in Afghanistan was. The embassy lacked seasoned political officers with regional experience or a coherent vision. And no guidance was coming from Washington. It was as though it had never occurred to anyone to think about what would happen once the Taliban were defeated. As a result, U.S. action was slip-shod and haphazard, just when Afghanistan needed legibility, direction, and consistency.

In this void, decisions that most affected ordinary Afghans were made by U.S. infantry or Special Forces units conducting mop-up combat operations around the countryside. It was the military who decided not only which villages would be searched or which suspects captured or killed but, more significant, which local strongmen—like Gul Agha Shirzai—would reap the extraordinary benefits of an alliance with U.S. forces. These decisions were made in the heat of battle, based on the immediate usefulness in tactical military terms of the gun-lord in question. The longer-term impact of empowering him did not enter the calculus of the combat officer making the choice; politics wasn't his job.

And in the void—in the absence of a policy to guide the allocation of reconstruction funds—the big public donors like USAID resorted to an acronym: the QUIP, or quick impact project. QUIPs were school buildings or clinics, culverts by the side of a road, village wells. The notion was that it was important to get money out on the ground, quickly and visibly. To be funded, a project had to be a physical object and cost less than $30,000. Those were the operative criteria, across the board. The idea seemed to me to be to spread the money around, like whitewash slapped on a broken fence.

I believe that this was the big donors'way of hedging their bets on post-Taliban Afghanistan. Fear of failure, ironically, meant that money was not concentrated in ways that might have helped avert it. The alternative—a major project that could make a real difference, both symbolically and practically—snaked its way past Kandahar as it had for millennia. The road.

I had thought the route from Quetta, Pakistan, across the Afghan border and into Kandahar was the worst experience on four wheels I would ever inflict on myself. That was until I drove to Kabul. On my maiden voyage there, the Toyota station wagon I was riding in with my Achekzai host-brothers simply went to pieces. First we got a flat tire. Then the muffler fell off. Though I was accompanied by two auto mechanics, I ended up wedged under the car tying the thing back on with scavenged bits of wire and a strip of tire rubber. Finally, we suffered a compound fracture of the left front wheel. That forced us to overnight in one of the derelict roadside “hotels” that cater to the truck traffic. The ceiling of our mud-brick room was about six feet off the dirt floor, held up by a massive wooden pillar of unknown age. The furnishings consisted of a metal barrel with a cockeyed pipe for a wood stove and a plastic mat.

I came to know that four-hundred-mile, fifteen-hour nightmare quite well. My favorite part was where the deeply grooved dirt track resolved itself into a series of sine waves. If you got your timing right, gunning your motor just as you reached the crest of each rise, you could turn it into a rhythmic roller-coaster ride. I confess a certain joy, too, in the frequent games of chicken with oncoming trucks, tilting rakishly under their loads. A tacit rule prevailed, of course, encouraging drivers to stay to their right. But each encounter was in fact governed by the conditions of the road at that juncture, by which vehicle was bigger (size usually determining who got to choose the path he wanted), by which driver hit his brights first, claiming right of way, by which would dare to ignore the claim and face the other down, and, finally, by an ineffable intuition that instructed you where to go to avoid collision. Much of the time, in fact, was spent
off
the so-called road, driving on the smoother desert floor on either side. No matter how tightly windows and air vents were sealed, the pervasive talcum-powder dust was staple sustenance the whole way, its dried-clay smell sharp in your nostrils, its grit between your teeth. The wind would raise it in boiling pillars, spinning and writhing toward the sky, like Lot's wife after her fatal glance at Gomorra. Sometimes, engulfed, cars would have to halt, visibility zero. When the ocher cloud had passed them by, they could start up again.

It invariably took me two days to recover from the drive to Kabul. For me, it was a bruising inconvenience. For Kandahar merchants, it was crippling.

I attended a meeting on the topic between tribal elders and a U.S. embassy official more than a year after the fall of the Taliban. “We sell grapes,” the graybeards opened. By late July, the crates start appearing beside the walled lanes in Arghandab, and bales of straw for lining them. The clusters of tiny oblong grapes, a translucent greenish gold and indescribably fragrant, are bedded in the straw like jewels.

“Before,” the elders patiently explained to the U.S. official, “the run to Kabul took six hours. Our trucks could make a delivery to Kandahar shops in the evening, then leave for Kabul and get there before the bazaar opened at 4:00
A
.
M
. Kabul was our main market, and we couldn't fill demand. Now cargo trucks spend seventy-two hours on the road. Who can send grapes? Our only outlet now is Pakistan, and we have to beg for buyers there.”

No program would have had a more positive impact on the Afghan south, and indeed on the country as a whole, than rebuilding that road. Back in the sixteenth century, the Safavi shahs in Persia understood the critical importance of road maintenance to their nation-building project. Safe, well-kept roads, equipped with amenities for travelers, bound their disparate empire together, enhanced its wealth by stimulating trade, and served as a constant, visible demonstration of the government's power and ability to care for its people. The fortunes of the Safavi dynasty were gauged by conditions on the road through Kandahar.

But five centuries later, that lesson was lost on the international proponents of nation building in Afghanistan. Once I asked a USAID official what was holding up the project. She said, “If we financed that road, it would use up all our money. We could hardly be doing any other work in Afghanistan.”

It would have been a better investment, I believe. That road was worth a thousand QUIPs.

If it had been tackled in a timely fashion, the road would have energized the new Afghanistan. It would have helped ignite the economy of a whole region, as canny entrepreneurs like those tribal elders with their grapes spontaneously renewed their activity, reviving old patterns of trade and inventing new ones. It would have tapped into the immediate post-Taliban enthusiasm for the new order, vivid but fragile, and converted its potential before it soured into disappointment. A fast road would have eased the isolation of the Afghan south—an isolation bound up with reactionary Taliban ideology. Encouraging travel and communication among estranged provinces, the road would have helped cauterize the wounds left by two decades of war and mutual grudges. It would have enhanced security by increasing traffic and speed of access. It could have served as part of a program to disarm the gunmen who had reinfested Afghanistan. Platoons of young men, organized into a kind of Afghan Civilian Conservation Corps, could have taken pride in their new role reconstructing their homeland. Such an undertaking would have redounded to the credit of the fledgling Afghan government. And it would have redounded to the credit of the United States. Only a project of this magnitude, in Afghan eyes, was worthy of such a superpower. Village schools, while needed, seemed beneath American dignity.

Work on the road finally did begin in the summer of 2003, a year and a half after the Taliban demise. Though welcome, it was very late. By then, enthusiasm for the new regime had died down; the people were disillusioned by yet another exercise in rhetoric. Resurgent Taliban had already regrouped. They turned the long, lonely construction site into a duck shoot, killing and kidnapping workers. Rather than serving as a means of demilitarizing gunmen, the construction work necessitated the arming of new ones. A private security firm, staffed by Afghan fighters, was set up to patrol the road.

I was at a loss to understand what it was that had kept this manifestly vital project in abeyance for so long.

Years later, a State Department official suggested an explanation. “Craig Buck,” he emphatically replied to my still-unanswered question. Dour Buck was head of USAID Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003. “Craig said, ‘We don't do roads, the World Bank does roads,'” recalled the State Department official. This sounded just like Buck, as I had experienced him at a meeting that verged on the insulting at the U.S. embassy.

According to normal decision-making procedures, the main lines of U.S. policy in a context like postwar Afghanistan should be defined on a political level, at the State Department, for example. Subordinate agencies like USAID would be expected to carry out their activities in support and furtherance of the policy goals set above their level. But in the case of the road, according to this State Department official and others I asked, the policy vacuum allowed the local USAID representative to make the effective policy decision himself—with dramatic consequences. It took the direct intervention of President George W. Bush, a year on, to reverse it.

There was another reason, as we discovered later, why the great machine that was supposed to deploy on all fronts churning out reconstruction for Afghanistan failed to gear up. The war in Iraq.

Many people asked me what impact the opening of hostilities in the spring of 2003 had on the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. Was there a visible difference? Did the money gushing into Afghanistan suddenly dry up? The truth, as usual, proved to be unsimple. In terms of manpower, the Iraq effect was dramatic. Overnight, in early 2003, every one of our interlocutors at USAID was abruptly reassigned to Iraq. And yet that phenomenon does not fully explain the conditions we encountered. Off the cuff, my answer to the questions was different, challenging the assumption that underlay them: “What gush of money?” I wondered aloud, bemused. We never saw it on the ground in Afghanistan. It simply never materialized. Throughout that summer of 2002, we kept wondering what all the big players were waiting for. We would come up with different postulates. Later, information from officials on the ground as well as reporting in the United States indicated that resources were sucked away from Afghanistan before they even made it there. “As early as February 2002,” the same State Department official recalled to me, “assets were being pulled off of Afghanistan in preparation for the war in Iraq.”
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Eventually, USAID did get back to us about our well. The project we were proposing seemed to fit all the QUIP criteria. And given Akokolacha's specific plight, we believed, it would send a strong signal as to U.S. intentions in Afghanistan; it enjoyed unique backing from a local community in the United States. It was exactly the kind of hearts-and-minds project that USAID should fall all over itself to support. We were sure of it.

The answer was no. The big public donors had jointly decided not to finance any more wells. An overall water strategy was needed first for drought-stricken Afghanistan.

That smacked of planning, and we approved, in theory. We had seen how wells drilled at random—without reference to the water table, local water-use patterns, or the needs of neighbors—could upset the economies of entire villages. The future of the Afghan south would clearly depend on how it allocated its water.

There were just two difficulties with USAID's argument. One was that the urgently needed strategy was not on anyone's drawing board. We had just approached the same Craig Buck at USAID with a plan to conduct a thorough interdisciplinary study of the Kandahar-area aquifer. We offered to develop a detailed map of the region's water inputs and outputs, geological projections as to where untapped resources might lie, and recommendations on how to enhance existing sources of water, as well as draft regulations governing water prospecting and use, and materials for a public information campaign on water conservation. “I'm not funding any studies,” Buck had snapped at us. “I want to feed hungry children.” Where was the water strategy USAID was waiting for to come from?

The second difficulty with the major donors' well moratorium was that it was undifferentiated. No one thought about examining the specific circumstances of different villages and giving exemptions to those that might fail without water and expel their residents into the tide of returning refugees and other displaced people already surging into Afghan-istan's towns.

At a get-together with resourceful U.S. Army hydrologist Ben Houston and his Civil Affairs team, we poured out our woes. Houston repeated the stories of their experience with irrigation wells: generators breaking down, rich families who paid for the fuel monopolizing the water, children throwing stones down them for laughs and breaking the submersible pumps. He suggested we drill a hand-pump well. It wouldn't water crops, but it would keep people alive. He thought it would cost about a thousand dollars.

A thousand dollars, we thought; that's cheap. We could get a thousand out of our Concord money. We wouldn't have to ask for outside help.