Tyranny, a tempting choice

Across the street from the Evening in Paris wedding hall, a monument to opulence surrounded by neon-lighted fountains and a five-storey replica of the Eiffel Tower, is a little colony of tents where 65 families, mostly returnees from Pakistan, huddle against the winter cold and wish they had never come home.

Similar startling contrasts abound across Kabul, the Afghan capital. Children with pinched faces beg near the mansions of a tiny elite enriched by foreign aid and official corruption.

Hundreds of tattered men gather at dawn outside a glittering new office building to compete for 50-cent jobs hauling construction debris.

“I am a farmer with 11 children. Our crops dried up, so I came to the city to find work, but all day I stand here in the cold and no one hires me,'' said Abdul Gani, 47.

“All the jobs and money go to those who have relatives in power and corruption is everywhere. How else could they build these big houses? Nobody cares about the poor,'' he added bitterly. “They just make fun of us.''

Seven years after the fall of the Taliban and the establishment of a civilian-led, internationally backed government, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with rates of unemployment, illiteracy, infant mortality and malnutrition on a par with the most impoverished nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

Most homes lack light, heat and running water; most babies are born at home and without medical help.

According to United Nations figures, the populace is getting even poorer.

Drought, soaring food prices, scarce jobs and meagre wages have meant that about 5 million Afghans — far more than in any recent year — are slated to receive emergency food aid.

Many families spend up to 80 per cent of their income on food. Yet against this backdrop, pockets of wealth have sprung up in Kabul and other cities.

Officials who earn modest salaries on paper have built fantasy mansions, and former militia commanders with no visible means of support roar around the muddy streets in convoys of sport-utility vehicles, spattering the burqa-covered widows who squat at intersections with their hands held out.

It is difficult to prove, but universally believed here, that much of this new wealth is ill-gotten.

There are endless tales of official corruption, illegal drug trafficking, cargo smuggling and personal pocketing of international aid funds that have created boom industries in construction, luxury imports, security and high-tech communications.

“The entire economy has become criminalised,'' said Ashraf Gani, a former World Bank official who quit his post as Afghan finance minister several years ago and is expected to challenge President Hamid Karzai in elections this year.

“There is a crisis of governance. Corruption is way up and poverty is massive. People are disheartened and confused.''

Much of the corruption takes the form of penny-ante bureaucratic palm-greasing, with clerks demanding small bribes to stamp forms or police officers at checkpoints requiring truck drivers to pay to enter cities.

But some is more audacious, such as municipal authorities selling government land for luxury housing projects or security officials colluding with the drug traffickers they are supposed to be catching.

Afghanistan has always been poor. But it is the widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots that has increasingly embittered the public, turning it against the Karzai government and its foreign backers.

“People are really feeling the gap between rich and poor now,'' said Ebadullah Ebadi, a spokesperson for the World Food Programme here.

“Once there were three classes in Afghanistan: the rich, the middle and the poor. Now those in the middle are joining the poor and prices are rising so high that people can't feed their families on salaries that once allowed them to educate their children and even save a little.''

Karzai has publicly acknowledged that corruption plagues all levels of his government, yet critics say he is either unable or unwilling to stop it.

The public mood of frustration, desperation and disgust has played into the hands of Taliban insurgents, who present themselves as an alternative source of justice and carry out swift physical punishments of thieves or other miscreants in rural areas under their control.

Most Afghans do not favour a return of the Taliban, especially in cities where their extreme version of Islam clashed with the lifestyles of the country's educated classes.

But more and more, people recall the Taliban rule as a time of brutal but honest government, when officials lived modestly and citizens were safe from criminals.

“Nobody loved the Taliban but what we see now is outrageous. The leaders are not rebuilding Afghanistan, they are only lining their pockets,'' said Abdul Nabi, 40, a high-school teacher.

“I haven't been paid in three months. The other day, a colleague came to me weeping and asked to borrow money to buy bread. Who can we blame for this?'' he demanded. “Where can we turn to change things?''