DATE=10/10/00
TYPE=BACKGROUND REPORT
TITLE=The Taleban's Afghanistan (3 of 3)
NUMBER=5-47146
BYLINE=Ed Warner
DATELINE=Kabul
CONTENT=
VOICED AT:
INTRO: The Afghanistan that the Taleban now rule is one of the poorest nations on earth, and there is no sign that things will get better any time soon. The Taleban's policies do not point in that direction. They concentrate on dress and behavior, while other problems fester and the country's economic slide continues. /// OPT /// In the last of three reports /// END OPT /// From Kabul, V-O-A's Ed Warner describes the poverty and disease that afflict a once prosperous country.
TEXT: Taleban rule is harsh, especially for women. But harsher still is the condition of the economy. Once-prosperous Afghanistan is now among the poorest nations on earth, with one of the highest rates of infant mortality and one of the lowest life expectancies.
First the war with the Soviets, then the in-fighting among Afghans have laid waste much of the country. More than half of Kabul is in ruins, and desperate Afghans have set up stalls amid the rubble, where they sell all manner of items, including their household possessions.
The poverty is compounded by a severe drought and by U-N and U-S economic sanctions, imposed because the Taleban ostensibly will not surrender Osama bin Laden, the terrorist accused of bombing two American embassies in Africa and a variety of other acts.
The main concern of most Afghans is where their next meal is coming from, or the next drink of water in a parched land where rivers have dried up.
Peter Goosens, deputy country director of the U-N World Food Program, says his agency is busier than ever trying to relieve the hunger and avert starvation:
/// GOOSENS ACT ///
In a normal year, the shortfall of wheat in
Afghanistan is approximately 700-thousand tons.
This year it is two-point-three-million [tons],
more than three times as bad as in a normal
year. We hope that we can avoid at least some
of the more blatant cases of food shortage by
trying to get as much food out there in the
hardest hit areas before the winter stops us.
/// END ACT ///
Many Afghans cannot afford to live even in poverty in central Kabul. So their rude homes climb the hills above the city, hardly distinguishable from the earth beneath. They have no electricity or water, which they must lug up twice a day. The trails are rather treacherous, hardly navigable by the old and the lame, although children scamper about them as nimbly as goats.
Out from Kabul, on the sun-baked land, nomads live in tents, waiting for help that never arrives. The deeply-bronzed leader of a community of 160 families spreads out rugs, offers bread to his guests and says they are the first in years to come to talk:
/// NOMAD ACT, PASHTO FADING TO ENGLISH ///
I'm a nomad. I have been living in this Paghman
district for four years. The whole district has
been destroyed by the drought. We can grow
nothing. All our cattle have died from the
drought. Nobody has given us a thing. Water is
five kilometers away and is not fit for farming,
only drinking.
/// END ACT ///
Health has deteriorated in Afghanistan, with rising incidence of tuberculosis and polio. Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, the earnest, intense deputy minister of public health, says there is a worrying increase in cancer in areas of prolonged warfare.
At best, he says, Afghans are receiving 65 percent of the health care they need. There are shortages of everything, including surgical equipment. Since economic sanctions prevent Afghanistan's three airplanes from leaving the country, medical supplies must come from land. But the roads are so bad that the medicine may have lost its potency by the time it arrives. Nor can Afghan doctors fly to other countries for information and training.
Minister Stanikzai says the greatest health menace is the debris of war: namely, the land mines all over the country:
/// STANIKZAI ACT ///
There are millions of mines still left in
Afghanistan. Those people returning from
Pakistan and Iran because they are new, they do
not know what happened in this area. They are
victims of those mines. More than 700-thousand
people have lost their hands, their legs or
their eyes. We receive them in this hospital.
Every day they come here for treatment and for
artificial legs.
/// END ACT ///
Gradually, the mines are being removed, but it is a slow, tedious process that will take years.
Can the Taleban, as fervently religious as they are politically untried, cope with this massive burden of poverty and destruction? They say, "Wait until the war is finally over, and we can turn our attention to pressing domestic needs." Others say, unless they change their style of governing and welcome back all the educated Afghans -- men and women -- who have fled the country, they will not succeed.
The Taleban say much of the opposition to them stems from hostility to Islam. Anis Ahmad, director of Da'wah Academy at the Islamic International University in Islamabad, agrees there is some truth to this, but adds that other versions of Islam do not arouse such opposition:
/// ANIS ACT ///
It is from day one a faith which has been
interpreted differently by different people. And
that liberty is given by the Koran, not by the
people. The Koran desires that you should use your
brain, intellect, analysis, rationalism and, based
on that, come up with what you understand and follow
it as you understand --not that you impose on others
what you understand. So it provides within the
Islamic framework enormous liberty and freedom of
interpretation.
/// END ACT ///
The Taleban have enjoyed that liberty in establishing their version of the Koran. Critics say they should respect other versions, and even learn from them, in a shared effort to attain the ideal Muslim life. (Signed)
NEB/EW/WTW
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