Nov. 9, 2010
COMMENTARY: What Laila Sees
By David Smith-Ferri
Kabul, Afghanistan – “We live in constant fear of suicide attacks,”
said Laila, an Afghan woman who lives in Kandahar city and who visited
with us yesterday. “When will the next one strike and where?”
“Twelve days ago,” she continued, “a good friend was walking home from
the mosque. A four-minute walk. An IED was detonated, and my friend
lost half his face. Another man lost his leg, and his son lost his
leg, too. We live with that kind of uncertainty, when you don’t know
what is going to happen from one moment to the next.”
Laila’s descriptions of living with fear and violence in Kandahar
contradict the mild U.S. descriptions of the “security situation”
there. “The Taliban do not control the city,” said Army General
Stanley McChrystal, in a May 13, 2010 briefing concerning a
“much-anticipated” military operation in Kandahar. “You can walk
around the streets of Kandahar, and there is business going on. It is
a functioning city.”
Compare McChrystal’s blithe comments with Laila’s experience. “In
Kandahar city, you don’t know what’s going to happen, minute to
minute. Every single minute that we live – if you can call it living –
every single second there is the thought that this is going to be my
last second.”
Laila went on to illustrate this graphically. “A good friend of mine
had a ticket to travel to Canada to visit her mom for a family
wedding. She dressed in a burqa, and went to say goodbye to some
colleagues. When she returned home, traveling by rickshaw, she saw a
neighbor outside. So she stood for two minutes to talk to her. In
those two minutes, two men on a motorcycle drove up. One man shot her
in the head and killed her, and the other man drove them away.”
Laila states that this style of killing – where two men ride a
motorcycle and one is responsible for driving, the other for shooting
– has become common in Kandahar. “At least 300 – 500 people have been
killed in front of their homes, offices, shopping areas. The guys who
killed my friend are still roaming around the city. No effort was made
to find and question them.”
In late September, after months of “careful and quiet preparation” in
Kandahar Province, U.S./NATO forces officially launched what they are
calling “Operation Dragon Strike,” currently their largest military
operation in the country.
The New York Times reported that winning over Kandahar is crucial to
shifting the balance of power in Afghanistan, and Brigadier General
Joseph Blotz with the ISAF in Kabul called it the “most significant
military operation” in the country. Last week, an AP news report from
a journalist embedded in another province declared that “the Kandahar
operation has so far produced stunning results.” And on November 6, an
NPR correspondent confidently stated his expectation that General
Petraeus will declare the Kandahar operation a “big success” when he
reports to President Obama prior to the December “review” of U.S.
military efforts in Afghanistan.
But Laila and her friends and colleagues haven’t seen any ‘stunning
results’ or ‘big success.’
“Now we hear bombardment every night, but no communication about it.
Is it really Talibs who are being killed or ordinary citizens? Women?
Children?”
Laila, who operates a business in Kandahar, used to travel back and
forth everyday from her rented home to her office. “It’s only a
three-minute ride,” but because even that is too risky, “I’ve moved
into my office.”
In Kandahar, in August and September, the Mirwais Hospital received
nearly 1,000 patients wounded by war. These were record high numbers
and double the figures from a year before (International Committee for
the Red Cross).
Some people have considered the management of “Operation Dragon
Strike” a failure because in response to advance publicity many
insurgents left the area ahead of time, and international forces have
met with so little resistance. For people in Kandahar, however, this
hasn’t meant a reprieve. While there has been less combat on the front
lines, U.S. Special Forces are conducting frequent night raids in the
area, breaking into homes, terrorizing families, violating people’s
sense of privacy and honor, and generating deep anger and resentment.
Further, there are assassinations every day related to politics,
business disputes, and the practices of vigilante justice, all of
which frightens people and reminds them of the terrible period of
civil war between 1992 and 1994.
In addition to undiminished violence, people in Kandahar live with the
sour taste and gnawing frustration of unfulfilled promises of
development made by the U.S. and the international community.
Residents in much of Kandahar, we are told by NGO representatives,
have electricity only every third day. Development organizations made
a huge investment in hydroelectric turbines for the Kajaki dam only to
walk away and leave the project unfinished because insecurity has made
the challenge of bringing in materials so daunting and death threats
have driven subcontractors to abandon their efforts – six years of
work with as yet nothing to show for it. Failed projects cause more
than disappointment. Factories in a U.S.-funded industrial park in
Kandahar city sit empty for lack of electricity, the employment
possibilities they hold yet another undelivered promise. Local people
see clearly that development organizations and their staff profit,
while leaving little behind. This, too, builds resentment.
In Kandahar, home to the airfield from which U.S. drones operating in
Afghanistan are launched, local Afghans refer to the pilotless
warplanes as “computer tayarri,” or computer planes. The drones fly
overhead daily, but they don’t see what Laila sees.
* * *
David Smith-Ferri, Kathy Kelly, and Jerica Arents are Co-Coordinators
of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org), traveling in
Afghanistan. This commentary was distributed by PeaceVoice,
a program of the Oregon Peace Institute, Portland, OR.
http://www.peacevoice.info/