On Wasata and Bad Roads

In the first installment of his Afghanistan diary, NEWSWEEK’S Dan Ephron discovers that the country’s post-Taliban problems are shaped by whether they are inside or outside the capital.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Dan Ephron
Newsweek
Updated: 4:25 p.m. ET July 4, 2007

July 4, 2007 - "Oh, it's not the Taliban you have to worry about here," Fawad tells me on the road north from Kabul International Airport. He's driving a borrowed Toyota Corolla like it's a getaway car, weaving into the oncoming traffic lane and swerving back before—just before—we smash into a passenger bus. "It's the crazy drivers in Afghanistan," he says. No kidding; they all drive like Fawad.

I've been in the country less than an hour and already some geographic distinctions are asserting themselves. The war, which has surged in its sixth year, is felt most strongly outside the capital, where Afghans live under the threat of Taliban suicide bombers and allied reprisals (which have lately killed civilians). In Kabul, the strain has more to do with the shortcomings of the reconstruction: projects that inch along, the corruption that now taints Hamid Karzai's government and the tense juxtaposition of poverty and urban development.

This stretch of road is freshly paved. Leading north from Kabul to the Bagram air base, it winds first through the city, where a few glittering commercial buildings have sprung among rows of mud shanties. Years ago, the road was a patchwork of dirt lanes and concrete slabs—smashed in decades of war. Rebuilt by foreign contractors and U.S. money, it is now a multilane highway that eases access to and from the city. Afghans travel on it with remarkable confidence: no one seems to worry that the upturned jerry can by the side of the road might be an improvised explosive device.

But it’s not without its own form of chaos. Beaten cars and motorcycles fight for lane space with Land Cruisers—the vehicle of choice for … take your pick: contractors, aid-agency workers and Afghan VIPs. Outside the city, the road cuts along a desert valley, flanked by twin mountain ranges. In this area, where homes have no electricity, Indian contractors have built electric towers straight through to Bagram. But they stand idle; the contract for bringing in power lines and draping them from tower to tower is still under negotiation.

Fawad, whom I've hired as my driver for the day, says the problem is wasata—figuratively the "pull" some companies and individuals have in government circles. Contracts are awarded not to the most competent but the most well-connected, he says. Standard in countries across the Middle East, the phenomenon might be particularly problematic in Afghanistan, which has seen billions in aid money flow in. On a smaller scale, the 28-year-old Kabul native says wasata is the reason he can't get married. Fawad works at a guesthouse and moonlights as a driver for visitors, using his boss's car. Even with his combined income, he's unable to set aside money for a dowry and wedding expenses. Fawad blames the government for not devising a public-sector employment system based on merit. "When you know the right people, you get the good jobs," he says, as a thick desert wind blows through the car. "I don't know the right people." On the way to Bagram, he stops twice at roadside junk vendors to inspect the used hubcaps dangling from wires. "It's for my boss," he says sheepishly.

Other Afghans aren't as hard on the government. On the plane from New Delhi to Kabul, Abdul Jawhary told me about a yearlong Fulbright scholarship he'd just completed in the U.S., awarded by the State Department. Jawhary, 32, spent a decade working for the United Nations in Afghanistan and is now applying to be the education minister's policy adviser. "It takes time to get over all those years of war," he says of Afghanistan's uneven progress. And he doesn't see the United States as a model for his country to emulate. During his studies in the U.S., Jawhary was impressed with America's founding principles, among them the commitment to keeping religion separate from government. But other things disturbed him, including the fact that tens of millions of Americans have no health insurance. He was also put off by what he saw as a cultural uniformity across the United States, in contrast to his own country's diversity. "All the towns look the same. All the restaurants look the same," he says. About the security situation in Kabul and the rest of the country, Jawhary says: "The young people have a saying: If an Afghan likes you he will give you everything he has. If he doesn't, he'll shoot you." Or maybe run you off the road.

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