MITIGATING FACTORS IN AFGHANISTAN
turns into a feast of boiled meat with all the trimmings: bread, rice and / or potatoes, broth, and yogurt. Depending on the time of year, there may also be fruit or dried fruit, nuts, sausage, salad, pickles, slices of fat and liver served with saltwater for dipping, and candy.
“ You must eat,” Abibullo Isaullu, head of the Jamiat( council) in Kona Kurgan, one of four Pamir villages where CAI has built a school, told guests at a lunchtime feast last May.
Bottles of vodka, too, appear out of nowhere, a throwback to Tajikistan’ s 70 years under Soviet rule and in stark contrast to the tee-totalling Muslims in neighboring countries.
Yet the abundant spread laid out for guests belies reality. The Pamir region, also known as Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast( GBAO), is the poorest part of the poorest country in the former Soviet Union. CAI began working in this vast and sparsely populated region in 2010.
GBAO is spectacularly beautiful, from the snow-capped mountain peaks— the highest is Ismoil Somoni Peak, once known as Stalin Peak and then Communism Peak, at 24,590 feet— to the clear-running streams and rivers to the stark beauty of the Eastern Pamir. But, as the saying goes,“ You can’ t eat scenery.”
“ During the Soviet time we had good education and jobs and everything,” said Boymamad Alibakhshov, chairman of Milal-Inter, a GBAO-based business development group.“ But that is the past. Now we face many problems.”
GBAO shares a border with Afghanistan to the south and east, marked by the Panj River, and the ethnic and linguistic ties between the people here and in Afghanistan’ s northeast Badakhshan province are centuries old. And for a long time, the Tajik Pamiris were considerably better off than their Afghan neighbors.
Because the Soviet military considered Pamir a“ strategic buffer zone with Afghanistan and China,” according to United Nations University( UNU), a global think tank in Japan,“ they brought in troops, and with them came the roads, telephone lines and electrification needed to support a military presence. Military and road construction camps meant opportunities for paid labor and sales of local produce. Combined with a state policy inducing settlements in the region, this led to a big jump in the population.”
But when the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, the Pamiri“ economic structure crumbled with it,” UNU reported.“ Within a few
MITIGATING FACTORS IN AFGHANISTAN
CORRUPTION: Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.“ According to most Afghans, corruption seeps into every facet of their life,” the Associated Press reported in April.“ Errands as simple as paying bills often require bribes.”
The government is not in complete denial: The High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption says half of all Afghans reported paying a bribe in 2012 when requesting a public service. And even though most Afghans consider corruption one of the top challenges facing their country, more and more also see it as acceptable given civil servants’ low wages and the practice of securing jobs via family ties and networks, Inter Press Service reported in September.
The corruption, however, extends far beyond petty bribes. For example, the United Nations( UN) special inspector general is looking into allegations that the Afghan Interior Ministry may have pocketed more than $ 200 million from a UN Development Program fund that pays Afghan national police and other officials, Foreign Policy magazine reported in October. Ministry officials allegedly inflated salaries and paid“ ghost employees” who never worked.
The U. S. Pentagon also“ uncovered irregularities” in the same program, including allegations that the ministry“ could not account for $ 17.4 million in pension withholdings and nearly $ 10 million in additional payroll deductions during 2013,” according to the magazine.“ But when the Defense Department auditors pressed officials … to explain the irregularities,‘ they were warned that if they continued’ the inquiry,‘ their lives may be in jeopardy.’”
ETHNIC DIVIDE: Ethnic tensions remain a serious threat to future peace in Afghanistan, experts warn. Many of the battles during the 1990s were fought along ethnic lines and those divisions persist. Author and historian William Dalrymple wrote in the New Statesman:“ It need not take much to rip the country apart again an exacerbate tribal, ethnic and linguistic fissures in Afghan society: the old rivalry between the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Hazaras and the Durrani and Ghilzai Pashtuns; the schism between Sunni and Shia; the endemic factionalism within clans and tribes and the blood feuds within lineages.”
ECONOMY: Foreign aid contributes upward of 90 percent of the government ' s overall budget. Yet the persistent lack of jobs and widespread poverty has most Afghans wondering where exactly all that aid went. Just after the elections were settled in September, the government warned it did not have enough money to cover its October payroll.
OPIUM: Afghan poppy cultivation reached an all time high in 2013, according to the Office of the Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Rising opium prices, deteriorating security, an increase in cheap labor, and affordable deep-well technology have thus far outweighed counternarcotics efforts by the international community, according to news reports.
“ Afghanistan produces more than 80 percent of the world ' s illicit opium, and profits from the illegal trade help fund the Taliban insurgency,” Reuters News Agency reported.“ U. S. government officials blame poppy production for fueling corruption and instability, undermining good government and subverting the legal economy.”
But it’ s not just insurgents and black-market dealers who are in on the game, Cornelius Graubner, a Central Asia policy expert wrote on eurasianet. org.“ Few seriously contest that the biggest drug traffickers in Central Asia are government officials, or at least individuals or groups closely connected with governments in the region.”
Just a few months ago, in August 2014 a Badakhshan Provincial Council candidate was arrested when police allegedly found him toting 648 pounds of opium, Khaama Press reported.
Afghanistan also has a high rate of drug usage, about 5.1 percent, or 1 in 20 people, according to a study of urban drug use in the 11 provinces by The Lancet Global Health. Opioids and cannabis were the most popular. In some cases, whole families are addicted.“ When someone does something bad, he or she wants others to do it with them,” CAI’ s Wakhan manager Pariwash Gouhari said.— Karin Ronnow
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