Rather than attempt to counter reports of poor living conditions and accusations of corruption with statistics, we should look at the measured steps of individuals and promote individual triumphs. We should look, for example, to Roshan Thomas, a Vancouver teacher and optometrist with a long history of working in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, who set up the sparks Academy in Kabul with two ethnically and religiously mixed kindergarten classes (one of boys and one of girls); to Jane McElhone, Afghanistan project director for Canada’s Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society (impacs), who helped establish women-run radio stations in Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Kunduz, and Maimana; and to diplomats such as Eileen Olexiuk.
The new Canadian embassy sits on Street No. 15 in Wazir Akbar Khan, a neighbourhood of large, upscale homes that escaped the destruction of the civil war. These were bought up by high-ranking Karzai government officials or have been redeemed as embassies and ngo headquarters. Canada’s HQ is in a 1970s house vacated in early 2003 by the Canadian International Develop-ment Agency (cida). Consular program manager Peter Marshall spent weeks bringing it up to par. But rather than finding mahogany desks and ergo-nomic chairs, this meant hiring local contractors to erect high perimeter walls, install security grills, and build a guard hut.
Two streets away, the seven military police officers and four program staff assigned to the embassy live together, as security dictates. When Eileen Olexiuk, Canada’s deputy head of mission, first surveyed her empty, uncurtained room, she exhorted the soldiers to rustle up a cot and foam mattress. She used one of the sheets to drape the window. The pleasant and generous sixty-two-year-old might have expected a little more comfort. “We shared a shower, which didn’t have a curtain; the stuff from the toilet came up and flooded the room. It was gross.” But Olexiuk wasn’t too bothered; a previous posting in Colombia came complete with mule rides to remote villages. Witty, self-possessed, and slightly eccentric, she brought along her two Rottweilers, Tommy and Bronx, and her sixteen-year-old cat, Kits. Her first order of business was to ship in 500 pounds of the pet food Science Diet.
Olexiuk arrived here in September 2002, a year before Alexander. As the embassy’s opening approached, her job was to make contacts with Afghan and international officials. Initially, she travelled alone, stumbling in darkness along unpaved, unnamed streets in search of unmarked houses, without the slightest worry about security. In April 2003, the Canadian High Commission in Islamabad arranged four Afghan guards and two cars for her use. By the fall, she was crisscrossing the country, meeting with warlords, convincing them that the world had changed, preparing them to negotiate with other international officials. (Of course, we only recently started calling them “warlords.” Before that they were freedom fighters, heroes. They played their part in ousting the Soviets, they fought the Taliban, or at least some of them did. They didn’t perhaps proceed according to the Geneva Convention, but they were fighting for their country.) Then Olexiuk, in her tailored pantsuit and pashmina, went to tea and suggested they give back the rocket launchers, tanks, and machine guns, which they surely no longer needed, and instead take part in the rebuilding of the land. Power trumped sexism. The tall, fierce men recognized her importance, knew she was paving the way for Canada’s defence minister to meet Afghanistan’s. Her talks with the country’s future leaders set in motion Canada’s largest bilateral development program, with objectives of promoting stability, strengthening governance, and improving living standards.
Larry Taman, a former Toronto law professor who served as deputy attorney general of Ontario in the late 1990s, began working in Kabul in June 2004 as a senior adviser to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Justice. He understands that, as part of the sinewy fabric of norms that governs this society, the legal culture in Afghanistan will not change overnight. “The law is like a language,” he explains, “and it embodies a people’s deepest sense of what is right and wrong. You might as easily change the language as change the laws. We might declare Chinese as the new official language of Canada, but even if we take guns to people it won’t do any good—the roots of language are too deep. The law is like that. If I am a man in a setting where I think I must give my daughter in satisfaction of a debt, that is as deeply rooted in me as is the repugnance it generates in you. To take ideas out of one framework and expect them to work in Afghanistan is going to be very difficult.”
Taman stayed in the country for fourteen months, researching and co-authoring “Justice for All,” a plan for building a justice sector that was recently approved by the Afghan cabinet. “Afghanistan has few resources in terms of an educated judiciary,” he says. “People get all bent out of shape as to where do we start. Do we train the police or build prisons? I think the important thing is just to start, and things will come together in the next generation. Fifty years down the road, no one will care which came first.”
In June of last year, Taman and members of the undp Justice Programme inspected a prison at Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province. Built to house 50 prisoners, it contained 260 adults and 15 children in appalling, unsanitary conditions. In conflict with all of society’s mores, men and women were living in the same area, causing humiliation and the potential for sexual violence. But prisons are a low priority for the international community—giving money to such enterprises is not a popular choice. In Mazar-e-Sharif, Taman declared the team would cooperate with any organization, governmental or not, in order to improve the condition of jails. The undp advised the government that the situation was unacceptable. Soon the women and children were moved to a separate building, meals improved, the training of prison staff was addressed, and efforts were made to speed the progress of cases through the system. Incremental steps, perhaps, but concrete progress toward Taman’s goal of showing “that human dignity and worth are recognized.”
Goodwill and skilled diplomacy can go a long way toward changing attitudes, but can’t substitute for technical skill, as Roberta Taman learned when she joined her husband in Kabul in September 2004. She presented her resumé—full of senior program-administration work in the corridors of the Ontario public service—to UN headquarters and was immediately hired as project manager for the country’s road-building effort. Proper roads are a development priority because building a modern economy is contingent on them—a kilo of heroin can be transported on a donkey, but a ton of potatoes cannot. Eight provincial roads and forty-nine village main streets, a $217-million (US) undertaking funded by the United States Agency for International Development (usaid), came under her supervision. Taman’s job was to work out the details and ensure work was proceeding.
Taman’s gender and the gentleness of her demeanour seem at odds with such work in a country like Afghanistan. But like Olexiuk, she is adamant her sex was barely a concern. “They [Afghan men] would first walk by and greet the men in my group as if I was truly invisible. It was very disconcerting—they would simply go around me. But once they saw the Western folk were waiting for me to nod or comment, it was an instant ‘Oh, she is in charge,’ and there was no further problem. I think I was just a ‘funny foreigner.’”
Success in development work involves putting aside one’s ego, discount-ing one’s own concerns. Some would-be do-gooders show up with no comprehension of differences, using Dorval or Des Moines as a model for how things should be. The UN’s challenge on road-building was to forge a compromise between foreign engineers, donor agencies, and Afghans. The international community mandated Western-style roads built using Western experience and resources, and told the Afghans that was what they would receive.
