Afghanistan, Past, Present, Future

"When I first came to this country, Kabul was a city in ruins. It looked very similar to the cities of World War II, those photos of Dresden and Hamburg. They had at that time been through 30-plus consecutive years of unrelenting warfare. There were no schools, very little electricity, and very little potable water. Roads were in very, very poor repair. No health care to speak of. Then you flash forward 12 years."
"Television, radio, the Internet, cellular phones, Twitter, Facebook -- all those vehicles of communication have literally exploded in this country in the last ten years. And when you get a proliferation of information, then you no longer have to rely on a single source of information for how you view the world or the community."
Army Lieutenant General Mark A. Milley

Hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. and international investment and thousands of international military deaths have all contributed to turning Afghanistan into some semblance of modernity from its past state of medieval social chaos. It has become a somewhat more stable, safer place, with schools, public works, new opportunities for women. It's a start toward the future.

 But it may very well stall just where it is, and then return to the backward, parochial, theocratic stifle it so recently was.

Ordinary Afghans envision how it might be in the near future. Those old enough to recall what life in Afghanistan was like under the Taliban, the struggles and the violence during their reign, before it with the civil war raging, and before that as well, when Soviet troops had invaded and conflict and deprivation reigned -- as it has throughout the history of the country -- supreme.

"What we need to do is ensure that all our sacrifice actually has meaning well into the future. I am absolutely sure that if we don't stay here past 2014, that those networks that we have been suppressing here over the past decade will return", commented Marine General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., commander of allied forces in Afghanistan. "There's no doubt in my mind that we can move to train, advise, and assist in 2015. They will be successful. I'm very confident of that", he said of the internationally-trained Afghan troops and police.

Progress in the country, however, has its skeptics. Half of the children who enrolled in the new schools built in the country didn't show up for classes in 2012, according to UNICEF. And while four-fifths of Afghans live close to hospitals, that is explained by the fact that they already live in cities. As for the Afghan army, touted as such a success under international tutelage, according to the Pentagon, 2% to 2.9% of its soldiers desert every month.

A total of 54,000 Afghans have chosen to leave or simply desert their posts between September 2011 and September 2012. Quite the expression of commitment to the advancement of a civilized country by its very own citizens. 

According to Stephen Biddle, a professor at George Washington University who advised coalition forces commanders in the past, the goals of the war; Afghanistan not to be a base to attack the West or to destabilize its neighbours could be undermined.

"The war is going to be going on after 2014 And as long as the war is going on, you can't say you've achieved either of those two objectives", he said.

"I used to work with the British army, but I have abandoned my job as an interpreter", 24-year-old Mohammad Nassool from Kabul explained. "I left my village for my safety. The Taliban are aware of each interpreter in Afghanistan."