More on Aghanistan

Excerpts from Bill Moyers interviewing Sarah Chayes:

BILL MOYERS: Why is Afghanistan so important?

SARAH CHAYES: You know, there's a title of a book that's come into parlance now. Clash of Civilizations. There are a lot of people, I think, both in the West and in the Muslim world, who believe in clash of civilizations. Who want to see the world as a place dominated by two irrevocably hostile blocs. I don't want to live in that kind of world. I think that we live in an interconnected world full of rich, flawed, varied civilizations that are inextricably intertwined. And, so what I'm doing in Afghanistan, is working for that intertwined world.

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SARAH CHAYES: yeah. I mean, you know, these are districts that are in the hands of the Taliban. There's a district I used to go to frequently. We would gather herbs for our essential oil distilling up there. And now there was a deal between the district chief, the government and the Taliban saying, "so long as you don't kill the police, we'll let you go wherever you want." Now what has started to happen, couple of things have happened. One is people are just so disaffected with the government that we put in power.

BILL MOYERS: Ordinary people.

SARAH CHAYES: Ordinary people.

BILL MOYERS: Disaffected?

SARAH CHAYES: Yeah. Their government is shaking them down. I have people telling me, "We get shaking down by the government in the daytime, and shaken down by the Taliban at night. What are we supposed to do?"

BILL MOYERS: This is the Karzai government.

SARAH CHAYES: That's correct.

BILL MOYERS: This is the government the United States put in power.

SARAH CHAYES: That's correct. It's basically a criminal enterprise. And we haven't really asked it for any accounts in any serious way. And that's where the average person in Kandahar is totally perplexed. They assume that this degree of corruption, which is everywhere. You hear about it in the police department. It's not just the police department, it's in customs. It's in any adminis--You have-- you want to get a driver's license. You have to fork over money. Teachers. Yeah, kids are in schools. Teachers aren't in schools. Because their salary is $50 a month. And so they can't afford to teach. They need to do something else. In order to make enough money, they'll teach in a private school. Or they'll raid the international development assistance that's provided to students through the schools. For example, you'll have-- let's say each student is supposed to get five kilos of rice. The principal of the school is going to skim off one of those kilos and then sell. So that's 2,000 kilos he gets, if there's 2,000 kids in school. Then he sells that on the market.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

SARAH CHAYES: And then he distributes, you know, some of it to teachers.

BILL MOYERS: Does the government look the other way? Or is the government participating in it?

SARAH CHAYES: Well, every government official that I know is participating. So, with the exception of President Karzai himself, personally. How can he possibly not know? If I know. But it's not just them, what about us? We put-- us, the international community, we put these people into power. They wouldn't last a day if we weren't backing them up and propping them up in a way. So my question is, why is it that we don't begin putting some pressure on them to treat their citizens with common decency?

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SARAH CHAYES: In my co-op. We're getting three, four hours of electricity every three days. It'll come on any time. You don't know when it's going come on. So it'll come on at 1:30 in the morning, and the guys stay the night on rotation. So whoever the poor fellow is who had to spend the night that night, it's like, I'm knocking on the door, and it's like, we have to get up because there's electricity. So then we'll run the machine until 6:00 in the morning when the electricity ends. Now, okay, they're working on it, but it's six years after the fall of the Taliban. These are the things that people are wondering. If we're not there to provide reliable infrastructure, there's another real issue which is employment. And this is a kind of economic ideological problem. That when we talk about development aid, we talk about public facilities. And it's sort of against our religion to think about building a factory that would actually employ people. But Afghans don't understand that. They say, "Why aren't you people building any factories?" That's why I made my little soap factories. Because so many people were saying, "what are you foreigners doing here, if you're not employing people? Getting people off the streets."

BILL MOYERS: So what

SARAH CHAYES: So, we're not doing those things. And we're not providing a government that they can you know, feel any pride in. So that's where you go starting to hear people say, "what are you people doing for us."

BILL MOYERS: So, put on your old reporters hat.

SARAH CHAYES: Right.

BILL MOYERS: Follow the money. Where has that billion dollars gone that we have been providing?

SARAH CHAYES: You know, you can drive around the streets of Kandahar. You can drive around the streets of Kabul, and you see some massive buildings. Massive buildings. You see the price of property in Kandahar is probably close to the price of property in New York City.

BILL MOYERS: So who's living in those buildings? Who's using those buildings?

SARAH CHAYES: Government officials and drug traffickers. So it's either the opium money, or it's the development money. And we're not following that money trail. The same problem in Iraq. I mean, there's just millions of dollars that are kind of leaking out of the system.

BILL MOYERS: So, has this become an opium economy?

SARAH CHAYES: Definitely, it's an opium economy. And it's totally integrated into the economy. It's a normal aspect of the economy. And you can feel it. For example, in opium harvesting season, we needed one of our herbs. We needed somebody to -- basically wild crafting to harvest herbs up in the hills. We couldn't get anybody because there were you know, buses at the Helmand, is the province right next door to us where most of the opium is growing. And there would be, you know, from the Helmand bus depot, they would just drive people straight out into the fields. Because, and the price of labor was going up. Normally, labor is unskilled labor is $4 a day. It was $20 to $25 a day in opium harvesting season. It totally absorbs all of the available manpower. Now, the cliché that I don't subscribe to is that the Taliban are running the opium business.

BILL MOYERS: Because that's what we hear.

SARAH CHAYES: Yes. They're not.

BILL MOYERS: That's what's said official.

SARAH CHAYES: No.

BILL MOYERS: You don't think they are?

SARAH CHAYES: No, no, of course not. It's a business. It's businessmen.

BILL MOYERS: Criminal gains.

SARAH CHAYES: They're just businessmen. They happen to traffic opium rather than trafficking, you know, cars, or trafficking televisions. They're businessmen who buy and sell opium. And it's a slightly complicated buying and selling. But, in fact, they've got some really excellent business practices. Like they provide credit to farmers. So, for example, one of the reasons that so many people grow opium is, there is no available access to credit. Ordinary credit. Not just business credit. But like, I mean, I suspect most of the people listening to us, have a credit card in their pocket. Afghans need credit, just as much as we do. They can't get it. And so, they borrow money. They need to marry off their sons, for example. It's going cost them $5,000 or $10,000. They have to pay a bride price. They have to have a feast for the entire village. They have to-- you know, where are they going get that money? So they turn to the opium trafficker, who lends them money. And he demands repayment in opium.

BILL MOYERS: So what happens if the American ambassador there, who's a big advocate of aerial spraying to destroy the poppy fields. What happens if he succeeds? What happens if the United States government sprays all the poppy plants and kills them, as happened in Colombia. What do the farmers do?

SARAH CHAYES: They join the Taliban. I mean, it's the biggest gift we could possibly do for the insurgency. What else would they do? They're furious. Their livelihood is taken away. Their children might be poisoned. Or they might think their children are poisoned. They join the Taliban. They take revenge.

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SARAH CHAYES: Has anybody done very strict accounting on where that money is going? I suspect that if you start looking at some of the receipts, you'll find that there's money missing. I mean, I find it really amazing that, for example, recently, there was a cross border raid, that killed an Al Qaeda commander named Al-Libi in Beluchistan province of Pakistan. Now, the entire Taliban top command, or at least the top command of the part that's operating in the south, is based on Beluchistan provide. People know exactly where they are. Why has we never required those guys heads from Islamabad? Or why have we not considered taking them out ourselves? It's been very clear to me, watching since 2002, that Pakistan has been buying us off, by a well-timed delivery of an Al Qaeda operative, which has then caused us to look the other way about the Taliban.

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SARAH CHAYES: In this particular metaphor, we're the sheriff, right? We're going go out after the outlaw, Osama bin Laden. We gather this posse of Afghan criminals to gallop off with us. And then we put them in positions of the governor. We make them into the governor, the mayor, the, you know. And we don't ask them anything about how they're governing. We don't demand-- all we say is, we have to support the Afghan government. We have to support the Afghan government. And so we've fed them money, we've fed them arms, and then we say to the people, "okay, you're supposed to hold your government accountable." they're looking at these thugs with the whole power of the entire world, is what it looks like to them, behind them. And the Afghan people say, "you want us to hold them accountable?" So this, I think, is really the root of the problem.

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SARAH CHAYES: I think there are two binds. One is our relationship with Pakistan, which is a contradictory one. And the other is our unwillingness to hold Afghan public officials to any standard of decency in government. We keep hearing in the west, about the democratically-elected Afghan government. And, oh, no, we can't get in there and interfere with any of these people, because they're the government of a sovereign country. Well, you could have fooled the Afghans. The Afghans-- the only person who's really elected, who has any power, is president Karzai. But every other government official that Afghans interact with on a daily basis, they didn't elect. And they don't have any recourse. They've got no way of lodging a complaint against this person. Or nobody who can put any leverage on them. And that's the other bind. We're only fooling ourselves when we talk about this democratically-elected Afghan government.

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SARAH CHAYES: No. But, I did ask one of them--one of my guys has an orchard. His sharecroppers were killed in one of these drive-by incidents. There was an improvised bomb that hit a Canadian armed vehicle. The scared Canadian soldiers fired. Killed a sharecropper and his 7-year old son. The 12-year old son survived. We started talking about this in the cooperative. And I asked my other guys, "you know, well, if that happened to you, if your brother, for example, got killed in one of these things, what would you do?" One of them said, "I would resign on-the-spot, and I'd pick up my gun and start shooting Canadians." Then I said, "what if it was the Taliban who killed your brother?" And he said the same thing. So this is another way that I can see this whole thing coming apart. It's a kind of privatization. You know. You've got people now with blood feud against NATO troops because of things like, you know, civilian casualties. These are people who need-- it's blood debt. They need to recoup that debt. And they're not going to be persuaded out of that.

(emphasis added)