But the fact is they have waited now five years for the government and the international community to do what they promised to do back in 2001, which was to provide jobs and health care and education, and roads and infrastructure, and electricity and water, and all the rest of it. And, really, they haven’t seen it. For many, many people in Afghanistan, their lives have not changed very much.
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/perfect-evil-part-two.htm
Ahmed Rashid may not know how the internal combustion engine works, how an AK-74 functions, or how to build a dam, but he has got one thing one hundred percent pegged- how the socialist state works. You sit home until the government build a factory next to your shack, plumbs you into the sewage and water systems, hooks you up to the mains, builds a school and carts your children off to it. Your input= 0%. Their input= 100%. Because as we all know, thats how America and Britain and Germany became rich countries, and shitholes like Liberia and Haiti avoided becoming rich. Nothing to do with the constant and persistent activity of their people!
Do you want a country like Afghanistan? Its easy! Sit around the house praying, while everybody else in your street, village, region, nation does the same thing. If you don't have a culture which promotes meaningful, worthwhile activity, you won't see any. The first thing that has happened in Afghanistan to hundreds and hundreds of brand new EU and US funded schools is they have been burned down by Taliban or Taliban-sympathisers or people who just have exactly the same attitude to schools as the Taliban. A large part of me thinks that you will be able to go back to Afghanistan in five hundred years time, and it will be the same shitty dismal backwater it is now.
And not because the government failed to shower a cornucopeia on their poor ickle people- but because each individual Afghan sat home and didn't bother to build a new Afghanistan, one with running water and educated women and roads.
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