As Afghans go to the polls today, are they headed toward democracy or poised to be a failed narco-state, asks Kathy Sheridan in Kabul
The media coverage might suggest that all Afghanistan is a war zone. But the fact is that anyone in the know can pull up by a Kabuli street vendor and buy a can of Foster's beer. Foreigners can knock on the hatch of a corrugated steel facade and be admitted to a sunny restaurant garden with comfortable furniture and western-style menus. In fact, in Kabul, up to yesterday morning, the odds were shorter on being mowed down by one of the ubiquitous, bafflingly clean, white UN SUVs, or on plunging into an open sewer (merely a leg in this reporter's case), than on being dispatched by a Taliban rocket.
Then again the recent relative calm in the capital might just mean that insurgents were hoarding their resources for the big one. Enough explosives for 10 car bombs similar to the one that killed 10 people at DynCorp, the private security company, have been intercepted around the city in recent weeks. No doubt there is more where they came from.
As election day dawns, no-one is taking any chances. The privileged foreigners who can retreat behind 30-foot walls are scurrying inside and staying there. Those in sensitive election-related positions travel with at least two bodyguards. The UN's curfew on its bewilderingly numerous staff (those still in the country, that is) was brought back to 8 p.m. this week. Most of the non- governmental organisations (NGOs) have moved their foreign workers out of the country or pared their presence to "essential staff". Domestic flights have been suspended since Tuesday.
The impression is of a vast barracks under siege. Entrances are concealed behind enormous sheets of corrugated steel, flanked by 30-foot-high walls of sandbags and concrete, topped by massive coils of barbed wire and snipers' nests, and fronted by regiments of nervy, heavily armed security guards. Visitors are viewed with heavy suspicion, closely frisked and bags searched.
The many vehicles and motorbikes without registration plates are now treated as suspect bomb-carriers and denied entry to city-centre streets.
The outgoing president, Hamid Karzai, rarely seen outside the heavily fortified presidential palace since an attempted assassination in Kandahar two years ago, was finally forced to break cover for the campaign. Suddenly, he was pulling strokes, western-style, by opening a road a week, inaugurating the still unfinished National Museum and a gleaming women's dormitory at Kabul University - almost all of which happen to be US-funded. With the boon of American helicopters and bodyguards, he could visit 10 provinces in a day while candidates such as Massouda Jalal don't even own a car. Karzai's constant companion is the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalidzad.
But that all comes at a PR price. Karzai cannot venture out without a protective wall of American steel and technology. This includes his dozen-strong, gimlet-eyed DynCorp security guard, an escort of helicopters flying shotgun and a couple of high-tech A10 planes streaking above him with their high-pitched whine. For all that, insurgents still managed to land a rocket within a few hundred metres of his helicopter near Kabul three weeks ago.
To lose Karzai, its prize foreign policy asset, would be a catastrophe for the White House at this stage. An Afghan electoral triumph today is vital to Bush's re-election, suggesting a powerful vindication of White House policy. US plans for the region are plain to see in the breathtaking expanse of its new embassy under construction in Kabul. Occupying an area of about one square kilometre and rising to at least six storeys in places, the best analogy is with an almighty US aircraft-carrier permanently located in the heart of Asia.
Do the people care? Journalists arriving here armed with figures showing the enormous disparity in US financial and military aid to Afghanistan and Iraq, or fulminating about the Americans' less than robust mandate for its presence here are doomed to disappointment.
Certainly there are busy pockets of resistance to the US occupation and tales of threats against Afghan translators and drivers "collaborating" with the Americans. Fawad, a 24-year-old student, reckons that some 40 per cent of his friends and family want the Americans out. Seema Azad, a 29-year-old female surgeon at a city hospital, badly wants the US and Pakistan to stop "interfering" in her country, although, significantly, she has only praise for the 38-nation International Security Assistance Force, including a seven-strong Irish contingent, without which, she believes, there would be no security here.
But it's a rare Afghan who will not say that the American invasion has improved their lives and that they are prepared to tolerate the US presence "for as long as our country needs it".
Yar Mohammad Bahrami, a 30-year-old university teacher, takes the long view: "When the Russians came, they built many blocks at their embassy and many families lived there. But look at it now. They are gone and the building is empty. It will be the same with the Americans - and that great building will be for Afghanistan."
But meanwhile, in almost every facet of life, the trends indicate progress - maddeningly slow progress, but progress. Girls are back at school. Universities from which the Taliban ousted women for five years now boast a 30 to 35 per cent female population.
"I was like an animal in a cage before," says one happy female student. "Now I can study."
There is a woman candidate for the presidency. Men no longer have to wear a beard or turban. The most mined country in the world is slowly being de-mined (at a cost of around $70 million a year) and casualties are falling due to better awareness education. The heavy weapons cantonment programme is a success.
But there is a pitifully long way to go. Teachers, the backbone of a nation, are so poorly paid that many of the best have left the sector, taking their language proficiency to more lucrative jobs with the numerous NGOs. Bahrami, the university teacher, earns about $70 a month. He survives by living with his two brothers, the three of them sharing their joint $220- a-month income with 14 dependants.
Many women are savagely oppressed, to the point where self-immolation is often the only escape route from forced or under-age marriage. In some areas, no woman is to be seen out of doors.
Local "commanders" behave with impunity. The Irish Times talked to a young girl who was kidnapped by one last year and brutally raped over several months. After escaping to the city she was locked up for two months in Kabul's stinking prison, merely for being a woman alone in the dark and therefore, in male eyes, probably a prostitute.
A man can still "divorce" a woman by repeating it to her three times, and then have her jailed for five years for adultery if she remarries, because, of course, she cannot produce written proof that he ever "divorced" her. The elderly chief justice, Shinwari, who is close to Karzai, almost succeeded in disqualifying one of the presidential candidates for blasphemy for even raising this issue.
On Thursday, in a BBC interview, Karzai announced his intention of inviting Ismail Khan, the warlord from Herat, back into the cabinet after the election. Khan, an undoubted whizz at reconstruction, is the same man, however, who pronounced that any Afghan girl seen in a car with a foreigner would be punished.
Boys too, can be hog-tied by tradition. Fardeen, a fiercely bright 18-year-old from the Kabul outskirts, the first in his family to learn English and aspire to university, has been engaged to his mother's niece (his cousin) since he was born.
"My mother made the choice. I have no say," he says, resigned to his fate.
Meanwhile, children play around open sewers and girls aged no more than five haul babies around in their arms. Electricity is still a moveable feast, available only at night, if at all, to those who can't afford a generator. Water is only available from a common pump in many areas, and desperate women in burqas and old war victims in wheelchairs weave through murderous traffic to beg from drivers. On the city's outskirts, returned refugees live in squalor, eking out miserable lives in a labyrinth of tents.
Meanwhile, the source of Afghanistan's terrifyingly lucrative black economy, the poppy, from which 90 per cent of Europe's heroin supply is derived, is finally rebounding on its own people. Kabul now has an estimated 60,000 drug addicts, including several thousand females, much of the addition arising from war trauma and bereavement. The spectre of HIV is already present.
But the problem is that the hardy, drought-resistant poppy brought in a minimum of $2.3 billion last year to Afghanistan, with many warlords-cum-government ministers implicated in the trade.
This year, production is expected to soar by 50 to 100 per cent. Local "commanders" speed around in $45,000 jeeps, living high on the hog. One warlord lecturing western agencies about the need for water for his people turned out to have six swimming pools. All the evidence is that the men most feared by Afghans now are the militia commanders, not the Taliban or al-Qaeda.
Afghanistan is on a cusp. It could move, slowly but surely, towards the sunlit uplands of democracy and social justice - or plunge into the nightmare of a failed narco-state.
The fear is that while the US may have routed the Taliban, its failure to plan for the peace may have allowed time for the vast opium money stream to infect every level of the poorly paid civil service and government. A 'Foreign Policy in Focus' report last year showed that the US was spending $1 billion a month on military operations compared to $25 million in aid. Already, state institutions may be irreversibly corrupted.
But just for today, Afghanistan can dream. There is no denying the glory of this election day for many Afghans. They registered to vote, often under the foulest intimidation. Women election workers were murdered. Reports are rife of village leaders and mullahs telling their people how to vote and of commanders confiscating thousands of voting cards to use as they wish. The enormous numbers registered to vote are not credible. The international community bottled it and could only muster a few hundred election monitors. Even Karzai concedes that this election can only be "fairly" free. But when is a right time in such a country?
"Take all the roads out of France, remove the phone network and the plumbing, add in 80 per cent illiteracy, and you get a picture of what we are dealing with," says David Avery, chief of operations for the Joint Election Management Body.
Fawad, a student who had watched the Bush-Kerry debate, marvelled at how powerful men could argue without their supporters rushing in with weapons. "Now maybe our people will argue with words and votes instead of guns," he says.
For Fakir, it is the simple pleasure of seeing the politicians' photographs on the posters. Human images were banned under the Taliban.
"Less than three years ago I was not even allowed to have my mother's photograph in my house," he says emotionally.
Today, the Afghan people will put their marks on ballot papers in a move filled with more symbolic meaning than any westerner can imagine. Maybe, this time, a new era will truly dawn. Inshallah.