KABUL, Afghanistan — Asadullah Ramin has lost all hope in his homeland. He’s so worried about what will happen when U.S. and international troops leave that he’s ready to pay a smuggler to whisk his family out of Afghanistan.
It would cost the 50-year-old, self-employed electronics engineer tens of thousands of dollars to leave his middle-class life in the Afghan capital and start a new chapter with his wife and their three daughters. He has done OK in recent years, even getting contracts from the foreign forces, and he has warm memories of Kabul from his teens – before Soviet forces invaded the nation.
But he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. He already paid to have his two sons smuggled to a European county he won’t disclose.
“If I could go in the next hour, I would leave everything — the house, my shop,” Ramin said.
“I have no hope, no hope,” he said, opening his palms as if pleading to be understood.
The United States and its allies have tried to reassure Afghans that they are not abandoning the country when international combat troops leave by the end of 2014. Donor nations have pledged billions to bankroll Afghan security forces and billions more in development aid. Country after country has signed a long-term partnership pact with Kabul.But the promises have done little to buoy the hopes of Afghans who are in despair about the future of their nation.
Among Afghans around the country interviewed by The Associated Press, the worry is pervasive. Many are deeply skeptical that Afghan police and security forces, which the U.S.-led coalition has spent years trying to build, will be able to fight insurgents and militants without American and NATO fighting alongside.
Worse-case scenarios that some fear: The Afghan forces could splinter along ethnic line and prompt civil war, the nation could plunge into a deep recession or the Kabul government — plagued with corruption and still fragile despite efforts to establish its authority — would remain too weak to hold off a Tali-ban takeover.
Hanging over the fears is a sense that history could repeat itself. Afghans felt abandoned by the U.S. after 1989, when the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan. U.S. support to mujahedeen fighters battling the Soviets dried up quickly and Afghanistan sank into civil war as militias and warlords battled for power, devastating Kabul. That was followed by the rise of the Taliban and years of rule under their repressive regime.
In one sign of the lack of confidence, the number of Afghan asylum seekers in 44 industrialized countries went up 34 percent in 2011 over the year before, according to the latest figures issued by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Another sign: the real estate market in Kabul.
Broker Mir Ahmad Shah says this is the worst of his seven years selling properties in the capital. No one wants to buy. A piece of land that went for $100,000 last year now is priced as low as $60,000, but even at that cut-rate price buyers aren’t tempted. It’s in part because of increased security worries the past year, but it’s “especially because of the announcement about the coalition leaving,” he said.
“I’m not hopeful for the future and it’s not just me,” he said, waving his hand toward small shops across the street where a vendor was selling live chickens. “The shopkeepers, the businessmen — they are all hopeless.” One of his listings is the home of a man selling to move to Canada, he added.
Miami Herald
August 3, 2012
Pg. 15
Asian Defence News
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