US, Afghans are at odds

Opinion: August 9, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By Hafizullah Gardesh

Institute on War and Peace Reporting

MARJAH, Afghanistan

Roughly six months after a major NATO-led offensive intended to rid this key district of Helmand province of the Taliban, military officials and local residents offer very different assessments of the mission’s success.

While international forces still have the occasional clash with insurgents, a spokesman for the U.S. Army described Marjah as stable and claimed that numerous economic development programs were under way.

Local residents, on the other hand, insist that the Taliban continue to pose a major threat, that they are too frightened to go to work and are concerned that reconstruction projects are failing.

Mir Wali, a shopkeeper in the Loya Chareh bazaar, complained that he had never seen Marjah so insecure. He said he believed the Taliban will take over the area if things don’t improve.

“I saw with my own eyes sometime back that the Taliban attacked the governor and Americans on this intersection,” he said, referring to a triple suicide bombing in the center of Marjah in June, which targeted Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Local businessmen say they are too frightened to open their shops because of Taliban threats.

“The Taliban number has increased and they have worsened the conditions for the people,” said Gul Ahmad. “They warn us to shut the shops. They are very cruel and if I do not shut the shop, they will beat me to death.”

A U.S. army spokesman said that the vast majority of the shops in Marjah were now open and functioning normally.

“Two weeks after we initially entered Marjah, there were few, if any, shops open in the bazaars,” he said.

But now, he said, “The bazaars normally see several hundred locals shopping there daily, showing significant trust in the security situation.”

Schools, roads

The spokesman also emphasized that coalition forces had numerous projects under way, including the construction of schools and roads.

“We also conduct daily Quick Impact Projects where locals clean the bazaars, dredge canals, and numerous other small daily projects,” he added.

Asadullah, a local resident, said, however, he worked as day laborer on one U.S-financed project but quit because of the threat of violence.

“I worked in a project for one month,” he said. “We were cleaning the streams and drains and they paid $5 a day,” he said. “But the number of Taliban fighters increased so much that every day they were conducting attacks. The attacks increased and I left the work.”

A worker with International Relief and Development described the difficulties his organization had encountered when trying to distribute water pumps to farmers in the district.

“The people are afraid,” said the worker, who declined to give his name out of security concerns. “The Taliban burn the water pumps and threaten to kill any farmer who accepts them.”

IRD spokeswoman Melissa Price said that irrigation pump distribution in the district has been “impeded by a persistent intimidation campaign from the Taliban and concerns from the district government that the distribution would not be adequately monitored due to security conditions.”

Helmand officials concede that there are problems, but contend that the situation is not as grave as some Marjah residents say.

“No doubt there are problems in Marjah, we face Taliban attacks, but people support us and there are improvements in Marjah,” district chief Mohammad Zaher said in a telephone interview. “The situation is not so bad.”

Hafizullah Gardesh is the local editor in Afghanistan for IWPR, a nonprofit organization that trains journalists in areas of conflict. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.