A Contrast of Two Villages

Canada's commitment to Afghanistan has involved a huge amount of aid to local projects promoting education, health and basic infrastructure. Is this aid making a long-term difference?

As Ethan Baron reports for Canwest News, that depends on whether the villagers truly support the national project or are essentially Taliban supporters taking advantage of Canada's generosity. The locals who truly support real development for their own people with Canada's help, rather than short term gains from a welfare bureaucracy, are naturally doing better.

First, the village that is on board with the rest of the Afghan nation, the international mission and against the Taliban:

Across the road in Angurian, the gutters are clear of sludge, the paths largely free of garbage. Even the children are cleaner. Through the middle of the village runs a 550-metre stone canal wall, built by the CMO...

In Angurian's medical clinic, built with $13,000 in Provincial Reconstruction Team funding, women are treated by a male doctor, a rarity in southern Afghanistan.

The soldiers leave the village and to visit Muhammad at a CMO irrigation project half a kilometre away. The project employs 120 people, who receive $300 to $400 a week, excavating more than 300 metres of canal. 

In Angurian, our aid seems to be doing exactly what it was designed to do: help Afghans with a hand up so the village can prosper and the children will have an opportunity for a better life. In contrast, there is the village of West Teymurian, where support for the national project is grudging and locals' loyalty to the Afghan national project and to international donors who have given so generously may be fleeting. The quality of local leadership combined with the sense of community can make all the difference in the world, for better or worse:

Inside the village, a toddler sits on a dirt road, her feet in a Canadian- built concrete gutter clotted with sewage, mud and trash. She looks at the soldiers and starts to cry...

He looks down at a clogged gutter, a Construction Management Organization project from late last year. ``They expect us to do everything for them.''

Near the village's centre, Denninger had a community well repaired three days earlier. Now, beneath the spout, an Afghan man is scraping hair off a charred sheep carcass while a boy works the still-intact pump. Usually, impoverished villagers quickly steal the new parts for their own wells, Denninger says.