Ambitious project promised a new way of life

Kabul: When Darwish looked out of his new living room window 40 years ago, he felt as if he’d left Afghanistan.

Then, as now, it was one of the world’s poorest countries, but in Shahrak, paved roads curved between lawns and flower beds past an Olympic-standard swimming pool towards two cinemas, a clinic and low-rise apartment blocks.

It was a dream conjured up in the offices of Soviet bureaucrats who had dispatched engineers to build the country’s largest hydroelectric plant nearby.

In a social engineering project as ambitious as the 100-metre dam, they also created a model village for its Soviet and Afghan workers.

“When we came here it felt like a foreign country, with the grass and the beautiful flowers,” said Darwish, 72, a mechanic who started at the plant even before its giant turbines began spinning out electricity in 1967.

Fringes of Taliban territory

Today, Shahrak is on the fringes of Taliban territory. Women rarely go out without burqas, the cinema is makeshift housing and the wrecked remains of diving boards are the only suggestion that the pool was once anything more than a rubbish pit browsed by muddy goats.

The vision of a new type of Afghan life, embraced by the Afghan engineers who came to live there then watched powerless as the village was torn apart by years of war, was abandoned long ago.

“I used to walk to the cinema every week with my family,” said Darwish. “If it opened now, suicide bombers would probably blow it up in a couple of days.”

The collapse of Shahrak from Soviet paradigm to modern-day parable raises the question: could the same thing happen again as the US pullout accelerates through 2014?

Campaigning kicked off last week for a presidential election that will bring the country its first new ruler in more than a decade, and determine the future of both American aid spending in Afghanistan and the projects it has supported.

Incumbent Hamid Karzai, whose relationship with Washington soured years ago and who recently accused the US and Nato of “badly undermin[ing] the growth of the Afghan government”, is barred from standing again.

When American soldiers and civilians poured into Afghanistan after the Taliban’s fall they were undaunted by Soviet failures or setbacks in their early efforts to develop southern Afghanistan that left fields barren and speckled with salt.

Instead, they too lavished money on the country, apparently convinced they could buy a path into modernity for a place battered by war, hobbled by poverty and illiteracy and where only one in five women could read or write her name and barely half of the country’s men.

The US has spent more than $90 billion (Dh330.5 billion) on reconstruction and relief in Afghanistan since then, which, adjusted for inflation, is still far more than any country received under the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, according to the American government’s special inspector general for Afghanistan.

That money has bought dramatic achievements, including a leap of millions in the number of children enrolled for school (though it is less clear how many actually attend), and a significant fall in the number of women who die in childbirth and in children who die easily preventable deaths, along with a steady growth in the country’s economy, albeit from a tiny base.

Durable changes

But it is unclear if the changes are any more durable than many Soviet efforts undone by civil war.

The Soviets too spent heavily on Afghanistan and at the peak of their influence in the 1980s, Soviet projects produced well over half the country’s power, three-quarters of its factory output and almost all the government’s tax income, according to Aiding Afghanistan, a history of spending by the west’s old enemy as it struggled to transform the country.

When Moscow stopped funding the security forces in 1992, the collapse of the Afghan government and bitter fighting followed soon after.

Shahrak was dismantled so thoroughly by bombs and fighters that the settlement is now almost indistinguishable from any other Afghan village, with clusters of traditional adobe homes dotted with the concrete blocks of more prosperous neighbours.

The villagers fled their homes at the peak of fighting, forced to pack into grubby corners of the sprawling dam. “We lived in a tunnel for three months,” Darwish said, of the peak of the bombardment during the civil war of the early 1990s.

He has watched several governments come and go but reserves his most bitter words for the mujahideen fighters who battled each other for control of the area and looted methodically and ruthlessly.

“They dug up the plumbing system, tied it to the back of cars and pulled it out. They didn’t leave any metal, even the toilet taps from the wall went,” said Darwish.

Fear for the future

As Nato troops head home this year, many Afghans in their bleaker moments fear that what happened to Shahrak might befall other parts of the country again. Violence has risen, with the number of civilians seeking treatment for weapon wounds up more than half in the first 10 months of 2013 and deaths 14 per cent up on a year earlier.

“You see a lot of insecurity, even just a few kilometres from Kabul,” said one former mujahideen commander who fought near the dam in east Afghanistan two decades ago. “Before we had seasonal fighting, with the men in winter going to Pakistan. Now they have fixed bases and even though the weather gets cold we are still dealing with suicide bombers and IEDs [roadside bombs],” added the commander, who asked not to be named as his home is now Taliban-dominated.

As fighting spreads, the government’s reach appears to be shrinking, taking expensive and hard-won gains in fundamental quality of life with it at an alarming pace.

“The number of people without access to health services has increased from 3.3 million to 5.4 million, indicating a decline in the government’s basic service delivery,” the United Nations said in a humanitarian newsletter for Afghanistan published this month that also noted more than half a million people have fled their homes because of the conflict. With Afghanistan now the most dangerous place in the world to be an aid worker, the outlook is bleak.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd