Planting the Seeds

Nur Agha Akbari and his family live in Kabul, on an unpaved, pitted
street lined by mud brick homes. When we visited him this week, his
oldest son, age 13, led us to a sitting room inside their rented
two-story apartment, furnished with simple mats and pillows. The
youngster smiled shyly as he served us tea. Then his father entered
the room.

Mr. Akbari is a robust, energetic, well educated man from a respected,
academic Afghan family. In the late 1970s, Nur had gone to study
agriculture in the UK and remained there, becoming an organic farmer.
His four brothers had instead remained in Afghanistan, or else
returned there after studies abroad. His two eldest brothers had
trained in the Soviet Union - one as an engineer, one as a nuclear
scientist - and had received early warning of the likelihood of what
came to be the 1979 Soviet invasion. They spoke out publicly about
their fears as the invasion grew more and more imminent.

On December 27 of that year, Soviet troops occupied major government,
media and military buildings in Kabul, initiating a nine-year war
between a nationalist/fundamentalist resistance (the "Mujahideen") and
the Soviet occupiers. Soviet officials fired Nur's oldest brother
from his cancer research work at Kabul University and blacklisted him.
He found himself unable to work, and soon joined the resistance. Nur
doesn't know much about what happened to him then, but he was among
thousands of people bulldozed into mass graves after capture and
execution by the Soviets. All told Nur knows very little about the
fates of his three older brothers, all killed in the war. But their
tragedy would largely shape his life.

Nur had arranged for his surviving, younger, brother to join him in
the UK. But Nur would lie awake at night, thinking about the children
and the wives of his slain brothers. Concerned that his nephews and
nieces were now fending for themselves in Afghanistan's war zones,
fatherless and penniless, he resolved to return home.

When he learned of a job with an Austrian relief agency which would
have him living in Pakistan but taking three trips per year into
Afghanistan, he immediately applied. A representative of the
"Austrian Relief Group" recognized Nur's family name and told him it
would be exceedingly dangerous for him to enter Afghanistan, but Nur
persisted, realizing this was perhaps his only chance to rescue his
widowed and orphaned family there. He got the job and swiftly set up
residence in the Pakistani city of Peshawar where, eventually, he
managed to gather all of his brothers' children and wives in a large
house he had rented. At last he could be sure that they had health
care, adequate food, and access to education. He worked tirelessly to
make this possible.

Now, at family reunions, they remember those hard times. The
youngsters who were saved by their young uncle are themselves parents
now, and the family history includes great gratitude for the
sacrifices Nur made, as a young man, to provide for and encourage his
large extended family.

His is among thousands of stories of hardship and tragedy, many worse
than his own, as he made sure repeatedly to remind us several times in
the course of relating it. Stories of death and dislocation from the
superpower invasion of 1979, and now from the American occupation,
entering its tenth year.

Now Nur works as an engineer for the Afghan government's Department of
Agriculture, with many more people to try to help rescue. He talked
to us about the problems besetting Afghanistan as it attempts to
rebuild from an ongoing war.

Nur is a visionary. He imagines communities learning to provide for
themselves and solving problems using local decision-making and
initiative at a grass roots level. He is passionately committed to a
model of community development which he had begun to implement in the
Panjshir Province. "We need to sow seeds," he says. "Germination
takes time. It's not like building a wall which you can just slap
up." But he has hit impasse after impasse in his efforts to foster
grassroots community development, with many different forms of
corruption everywhere springing up to commandeer the funds the
occupation has made available for development work.

Our delegation has heard a lot about rising and pervasive corruption
over the past two weeks traveling in Afghanistan. Following the
election of Mr. Karzai, people we've spoken with were stung by the
congratulatory calls from heads of state around the world, including
that of President Obama. Already outraged over what they (and
international observers) consider an extremely fraudulent election,
they feel bewildered by other world governments' legitimization of
corruption in their capital. By supporting the current government,
the U.S. exacerbates the life-choking corruption here. Afghan Member
of Parliament, Ramazan Bashar Dost, urged us to ask the U.S.
government to realize this, and desist. A young woman running her own
company in Kandahar province spoke to us with contempt about corrupt
officials. And others - an Afghan human rights lawyer, the co-founder
of a large media company, three fellows working for a smaller news
agency, along with almost every Bamiyan villager we met during a week
there - all spoke of how the corruption had negatively, in cases
disastrously, impacted their efforts to make a living and contribute
toward their country's resurrection from its current, dreadful state.

One of the most egregious examples has been set by the United States.
According to a McClatchy report released on October 27, 2010, the U.S.
government knows it has awarded nearly $18 billion in contracts for
rebuilding Afghanistan over the past three years, but it can't account
for any of the billions spent before 2007. What's more, a crucial
agency of government investigators and auditors - those responsible
for the SIGAR, the "Special Inspector General in Afghanistan Report,"
on waste, fraud, and abuse of American taxpayer dollars - has now
received a failing grade in a new government investigation of
corruption in their own activities.

Nur wonders where all the money has gone. "If we spent one quarter of
one quarter of one quarter of the billions that they've spent, we
could fund this process of community development," he assures us.
"Billions have been spent and we have nothing for it. If we had
followed a process marked by transparency, fairness and involvement of
local communities, we could have turned this country around in five
years."

Beyond lamenting lost opportunities and lost lives in the dangerously
impoverished Afghan economy, he mainly fears that ordinary Afghans
will increasingly adjust to a welfare culture which relies on handouts
rather than hard work to achieve progress.

As we spoke with Nur, his son returned to the room with a rich, creamy
soup prepared by his mother and then left and returned again with
platters, one per guest, each heaped with walnuts, glazed dried
apricots and luscious pomegranate seeds. When we praised the quality
of this truly delicious fare, Nur (with a wry smile) replied, "We
spend many days trying to export these good fruits. By the time we
finish crossing bureaucratic hurdles and filling out many sets of
papers, arranging transportation, getting approval, and negotiating
prices, the fruit often rots. But, if you have a truckload of opium,
you can send it to the other side of the world in one day."

Nevertheless, Nur continues working toward a better future for
Afghanistan. He holds on to a deep faith in the ability of the
simplest people to generate solutions to their problems if they are
liberated from the oppressive effects of war and corruption. This is
no time for a loss of nerve. Nur Agha Akbari, a survivor and a
creative thinker, may not reap the harvest in his lifetime, but he
won't stop planting the seeds.