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voiceofreason's comments:
on The Plan for Afghanistan
Again, the reality on the ground is that it looks like you are siding with the Northern Afghans when all your efforts are in those areas. To think that you can involve the "community" without understanding the tribes and the ethnical dynamics is naive. We are pushing the Pashtun away from us when we decide to build the "safe" communities in the North first and wait for things to get stable before we attack the destruction going on in the Pashtun areas.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on The Plan for Afghanistan
My question for NGOs and Mercy Corp is, what are you doing to involve the biggest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, in your reconstruction efforts?
Again, having spent the last five years in the Pashtun parts of Afghanistan, I have not seen many signs of reconstruction going on in those areas.
I do want to comment that Mercy Corp has a couple of schools in Helmand, or used to have them, but if there is no security and the kids are afraid to leave their homes, the schools are empty and a lot of the times used by insurgents for training their soldiers.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on The Plan for Afghanistan
I respectfully disagree that it is reasonable to finish something that we started 8 years ago and now finish it in three years. We are assuming that we have made progress in those 8 years, when the reality on the ground is that we have lost ground to the taliban. We were ahead in local support and the desire to support construction efforts 8 years ago then we are today. How can we expect our soldiers to achieve the original goal (does anyone remember what that was?) and to gain back the ground we have lost to taliban in the last couple of years.
Things are very different in the villages than in Kabul city. Our NGOs go to Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat, Helmand and some of the Northern Afghanistan, and we all think that we are benefiting Afghans. That is not correct as far as the perceptions of Afghans are concerned.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on The Plan for Afghanistan
I am an Afghan American who has spent the last five years in Afghanistan, working with Afghans in remote villages who get ignored by all our efforts in that war torn country. US efforts are concentrated in Kabul city, including the efforts of Zaher Wahab, who has never gone into any of the villages where more than 80% of Afghans live. Our presence does not benefit the villagers. Why would they support us so those in the city can get their university set up, while the kids in the village can't even leave their homes to go to the mosque to read the Koran?
Another thing we need to remember, the insurgents go around the villages telling people that the Americans are only there temporarily and when the US leaves, the taliban will come around and punish all those who sided with the US. Now, imagine how what we just did by announcing that we will be leaving by 2011 will do to the support that our soldier will get on the ground??? We just made our soldiers' lives so much harder and we might even have endangered them by leaving them all alone in the remote villages, where the villagers are too scared, with good reasons, to provide protection.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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