Thursday, July 29, 2010
Mind your P's & Q's
And your Baghlan Province, too. The NY Times has a sad tale of what happens in Afghanistan when the only contact with the central government is the brother of the president and his rich buddies buying the local cement plant, firing half the workers and cutting wages for the rest. The rest of the time the Taliban takes care of business.
Since then, the Taliban have blocked most roads to the district and attacked any government or development workers who have tried to pass, local elders said. The police have returned but are all but confined to a 500-yard area around the district center, said Obidullah Khan, an Uzbek tribal elder in Dahana-i-Ghori.So after years of no one paying any mind to this part of Afghanistan, 3000 troops of the 10th Mountain are there to play Whack-A-Mole, until they pop up somewhere else.
A corrupt judiciary and the lack of government services have made it easy for the Taliban to gain a foothold in rural areas. At least the Taliban judicial system is swift and free of bribes, said Nuria Hamidi, a provincial council member. “They are solving issues quicker than the government, and people in the bazaar say, ‘I had this problem or that problem and the Taliban solved it,’ ” she said.
The Taliban have also been able to exploit ethnic differences, suggesting that the Tajik-dominated local government does not care for the Pashtuns here.
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