Where the road ends in Afghanistan

A harrowing visit to Chavosh, a village so remote its people have never seen a Westerner, and so poor a farmer is forced to marry his 11-year-old daughter to a 55-year-old man.

By Mitchell Prothero

Sep 23, 2005 | When I tell an Afghan friend about my plans to travel to the Ghowr province, he laughs and says he'd once seen the provincial capital, Chaghcharan, from a plane. "There is nothing there," he says with a smirk. "It is nowhere."

For a province to be laughably remote to an Afghan says quite a bit, as the entire landlocked country, with its lack of paved roads or rail service, is nothing but isolated. It took an explanation of why I was going -- to take a look at rural poverty and whether it had improved since the advent of the new American-backed regime -- to wipe the incredulous look off his face. "You will see the poorest people who know nothing of the outside world there," he says.

Four years after the American invasion and the fall of the Taliban, and one year after the presidential election of Hamid Karzai, the massive international effort in Afghanistan has done little to improve the lives of ordinary people. While estimates of foreign aid run from $12 billion to $15 billion, the U.S. government ties all money for Afghanistan into the larger "global war on terrorism," which also covers operations in Iraq. What's clear in Kabul is that a lot of the money has ended up with commandos who can be seen driving around in expensive SUVs and living inside walled luxury compounds. Initial results from last Sunday's parliamentary election also suggest a disillusionment with reconstruction, as just over half of the country turned out to vote.

But cynicism toward international aid and relief efforts -- a favorite Afghan posture -- misses some major accomplishments. Many new schools, hospitals and clinics dot medium-size towns and cities. The security in large cities like Kabul and Kandahar is stable enough to spur significant economic development, and anyone who wants to start a local paper or radio station has a slew of NGOs to ask for assistance.

Outside the cities, with their educated citizens, Afghanistan poses massive problems for rebuilding. The single biggest hurdle -- well beyond the reach of the relief agencies -- is the basic lack of infrastructure: electricity, roads and clean water. Throw in stagnant education, widespread war damage, and a huge population of refugees fleeing decades of fighting in Pakistan and Iran, and it's clear reconstruction is beyond anyone's capability to achieve quickly.

With the end of a seven-year drought, some improvement has been seen in the lives of the rural farmers and animal herders. But one year of water cannot come close to repairing the damage of war and drought, and refugees are returning with levels of drug addiction never before seen in the country. Simply put, huge segments of the Afghan population receive almost no aid and face impoverished living conditions with few signs of improvement.

Short of scamming a ride on a U.N., NGO or military flight, the options for getting to Chaghcharan are limited to a 30-hour ride over brutal roads from Kabul, or an hour flight to Herat, followed by a 14-hour drive by 4x4. I take the latter.

Road construction is the most important political debate in the new democracy of Afghanistan. Mullah Abdel Khader Emami is running for a parliamentary seat in Ghowr based on his demand for a $35 million road that runs from Kabul to Herat, a key hub for trade with Iran, through Ghowr. The new road would allow drivers to bypass the current "ring road" that circles from Kabul to Kandahar, a critical commerce town. But Emami insists his plan has been derailed by politics. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, he says, "is a Pashtun and his people are from Kandahar, so the government will not build a road through here because Kandahar controls all the trade in Afghanistan."

For a political newcomer, Emami grasps that all politics are local and such a road might not transform Chaghcharan into a thriving metropolis but would bring a whiff of hope to an otherwise forlorn place. If 14 hours of driving over big rocks doesn't make this point, drive another 50 miles outside Chaghcharan -- four and half hours by car -- to the heartbreakingly poor village of Chavosh.

Next Page: "I need money," he says. "Do you think I want to marry my daughter so young?"

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