In a small Afghan town of mud huts with just two paved roads, a nine-person provincial council recently took a very progressive step forward—its members elected three women to their highest official positions. For Karen Chandler (SFS ‘02), the State Department’s representative on the Provincial Reconstruction Team in the Afghan province of Farah, this egalitarian move symbolizes some of the positive changes that this undeveloped country has seen in recent years. Chandler has worked in Afghanistan since May 2007, helping to strengthen and rebuild the local government.
But while Chandler and others on the ground are succeeding at the micro level to bring about the most basic steps toward instilling democracy in the nation, the large-scale efforts of the United States government and military in Afghanistan over the last five years have not produced nearly the results Americans hoped for in 2002.
Although Chandler cites success within the communities she works with, the threat of the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists is still ever-present in the country. And with the troop insurgency from 2007 remaining in Iraq each day longer, there is diminishing hope that the problems in Afghanistan will be addressed with the urgency they deserve.
“You see progress all over, but then we also heard yesterday of a 16-year-old girl who ran away from home with a young man,” Chandler said. “The Taliban found her and, along with 400 other people, stoned her to death.”
Constantly downplayed by the media and the administration in favor of the ongoing war in Iraq, Afghanistan has not received the attention, military energy or administrative focus that it deserves since the war began on its soil in 2002. The tenuous situation on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the continued presence of the al-Qaeda terrorist network create a more volatile environment than the attention the country is receiving would presume.
“The gains we’ve made in Afghanistan have to be consolidated and secured rather than sliding backwards, as they are now,” Dr. Bruce Hoffman, a School of Foreign Service professor and previously an adviser on counterterrorism to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2004, said.
Chandler feels welcome in the foreign country and believes that the villagers she lives with would be extremely pleased if they could have twice the number of volunteers such as her helping them.
“I sent a couple of local Afghanis to the U.S. embassy for three weeks, and when they came back, they told me how wonderful America is and they couldn’t believe I would leave for a year just to help them,” Chandler said. Her own experiences seem to reflect the progress that individual citizens can make in the country, but these strides aren’t being mirrored by the efforts of the administration.
