From: Susan Serpa <sue4thebillofrights@yahoo.com>
To: neimpeach@gmail.com
Sent: Friday, 5 June, 2009 23:56:08
Subject: [Impeach Bush] Blogging from Afghanistan IV
http://www.dailykos .com/story/ 2009/6/5/ 739208/-Blogging -from-Afghanista n-IV Blogging from Afghanistan IV by Ralph Lopez Fri Jun 05, 2009 at 02:04:27 PM EDT "No speaking English for a moment" my friend and colleague Najim tells me as we comply with the soldier pointing at our hood and giving a soft whistle which means stop. I roll down my passenger side window to the cool night breeze. I watch the shadows of other Afghan National Army soldiers cast by the floodlights on the traffic circle ahead. Najim in the driver's seat and the soldier talk across me through my window in Dari. The soldier sweeps has hand toward my feet and asks something about my large green satchel on the floor. It's the bag I always carry with my laptop and everything else. I hear Najim say "computer." I turn my head slowly and meet the young soldier's eye, since I know he is talking about me, and he knows I know, and to not look at him now could be read as fear, loss of face. Which is not good in these places. I do not speak, but there are men driven around in cars here who deign not to speak, who have others speak for them until they feel like speaking. My looks could be Afghan, and perhaps the grey at my temples suggests possible rank, which works in my favor. I could be anyone. The soldier nods and waves and we drive on. It is nearly midnight and it is not a good time to be an American in Kabul... All Americans are rich. And all people here are poor. If word passes down the line that one is traveling at night, without armed escort, it could be bad. But soon I am deposited at the gate of my hotel compound, where my own man brandishing an AK-47 opens the steel door and greets me. I put my hand over my heart in the traditional gesture, as he does, and we say "Salaam," "Peace," and then I am within the walls of the compound. In a country where a dollar often represents a full day's wage for the hardest kind of labor and many men's children beg in the streets, the digital camera I have by itself represents an enormous amount of money. Flashing a twenty dollar bill on the street could put you in real danger, if you don't speak the language and have no Afghan friend to signal "warlord's son" or something like that. This is the vital center of the war on terror, where we cannot afford to fail. But failing we are. We have occupied this country for going on 9 years now and still many people are living as if the bombing had stopped yesterday. Most Afghans do not have enough to eat, and in the remote provinces there is slow starvation. One out of five infants dies before the age of five of malnutrition or lack of access to clean drinking water. Losing here would be tragic. In Iraq we were not wanted, period. In Kabul when the Taliban fell there were crowds, real crowds, celebrating the fall. Now economic desperation and civilian casualties are driving young Afghan men into armed banditry, or the insurgency, the latter of which pays $8 a day. The difference is sometimes difficult to distinguish, when the AK-47s all look the same. We interviewed a work crew in a cash-for-work project in a dusty, hot, part of Kabul. What looked like a seventy year-old man was digging drainage ditch for the side of a dirt road, one of a crew of about forty men, using a pick to break the soil. With every stroke the heavy pick went high over his head, and came down hard on the ground, for eight hours under the broiling Kabul sun. Everyone was putting their backs into it. Afghans work hard. My God they work hard. And that old man was happy. He was making four dollars a day.. With that four dollars a day he was feeding nearly a dozen mouths. Thousands of projects like this across the country is the answer to stability, and all the policy analysis about standing up the Afghan Army and the National Police before we leave is nonsense if it does not recognize this reality. Any number of Afghan Army and police will make no headway until the tinder of the insurgency, the failed reconstruction, is addressed. And if security is a precursor for larger reconstruction projects, like water systems and dams for electricity, then smaller reconstruction projects which create immediate, right-now, shovel-and-pick jobs is the precursor to security. Keep the calls coming to Sen. Daniel Inouye, Ph: 202-224-3934 Fax: 202-224-6747 and Rep. David Obey. Ph:(202) 225-3365 Fax: (715-842-4488) who are hammering out in a conference committee the War Supplemental Appropriations bill. Please fax them this diary and ask them add a 10% of military operations budget earmark for the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund administered by the World Bank, specifically directed to create cash-for-day- labor jobs for the poorest of Afghans, then call and email this diary to your own congressman to ask him or her to call them with the same message, as your representative. Also please send a copy to President Obama. Ralph will be blogging from Afghanistan this week. You can follow it at JobsForAfghans. org To join the email list for future congressional actions please shoot an email to ralphlopez AT hotmail DOT com. U.S. Soldiers
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