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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
YOUR VOICE
In this section:
Rebuilding Afghanistan
Rebuilding Afghanistan
By Alonzo Fulgham
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Alonzo Fulgham
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Your Voice, a continuing FrontLines feature, offers personal
observations from USAID employees. The following op-ed appeared
in the Dec. 19, 2005, edition of the Washington Times. Alonzo
Fulgham is USAID/Afghanistan mission director.
Kabul, Afghanistan—Today, the new Afghan National
Assembly meets, fulfilling the third and final step of the
Bonn process and giving Afghans their first elected assembly
since 1973.
The majority of Afghans are too young to remember the former
legislature and virtually no current members have legislative
experience. In many ways, the Afghans are starting from scratch,
much as our own Congress did in 1789, or the French did later
that same year.
Already there have been some pleasant surprises, however.
With 87 women members—68 in the lower house and 19 in
the upper—the Afghan Assembly has a far higher female-to-male
ratio than the U.S. Congress, and many of the women appear
exceptionally talented and well prepared.
Further, special parliamentary training funded by the U.S.
Agency for International Development through the State University
of New York has been well attended by members from all walks
of life and political orientations.
Still, Americans should know better than anyone that democracy
can be difficult. Ours took generations before slavery was
abolished and women won the vote. The French took even longer
to find a system that fulfilled the promise of liberty, fraternity,
and equality.
The United States is doing much of the heavy lifting on
democracy and governance here, as in public health, education,
agriculture, economic growth, women’s rights, and many
other sectors. We have not been perfect: The challenges here
are enormous and the learning curve is steep. But after 22
years of war, the American-led coalition is giving the Afghans
their first real chance to rise above a feudal and violent
past.
Sad to say, you won’t learn much about that from reading
most of our newspapers these days.
Let’s look back to December 2001. Imagine a land of
stark and stunning beauty, dominated by some of the most forbidding
mountains in the world. Three-quarters of the people are farmers,
working the country’s streams and floodplains in 20,000
isolated villages. Few have roads or electricity or sanitation
systems. Drought and war have devastated the country’s
agriculture. Where it existed, much of the infrastructure
is ruined. There is no government and thus no services.
Most schools are closed and girls are forbidden to attend.
Women cannot work. The literacy rate has dropped below 20
percent. A woman dies in childbirth every 30 minutes. Only
1 in 20 babies are delivered by a trained attendant. Twenty
percent will die before age 5.
Imagine trying to address all these problems at once, in
the midst of an active insurgency fueled by a terrorist network
with a pre-medieval philosophy and 21st century weapons.
Yet this is what the United States is trying to do.
In just four years, the United States and our coalition
partners have brought a sense of normalcy to Afghan life.
Yes, there are dangerous areas, but contrary to what is generally
portrayed in the media, large parts of the country are safe
and stable. That is why more than 3.5 million refugees have
returned home from 20 years of exile in Pakistan and Iran.
Over the past four years, USAID has trained 100,000 teachers,
built or refurbished hundreds of schools, and printed some
50 million textbooks. Five million children are in school—up
from 900,000 in 2001—and girls’ attendance is soaring:
in Herat, for example, there are more girls in school now
than boys.
USAID has also helped the Afghans double their agricultural
output in just four years. We’re training nurses and
midwives and built hundreds of new health clinics. We’ve
rebuilt bridges, paved new roads, opened computer centers,
and helped almost every ministry in President Karzai’s
Cabinet begin providing Afghans the services they deserve
but have long lacked.
Not bad in just four years. At least that’s what Afghans
seem to think. A recent ABC poll showed three-quarters of
the Afghan people believe their country is headed in the right
direction. So should the American people.
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