How Far Money Has Brought US - Notebook
During the 1990s civil war in Kabul, there was a story - or a legend - of a widowed woman that floated in our dusty neighborhood in the north of the city. Even before the complete anarchy of faction fighting, a famine had taken over the capital. Food had already dried up in the last years of the Soviet-propped government as the CIA-backed Mujahideen targeted the regime’s supply routes. There were stories of people freezing to death in the cold, waiting in line for a loaf of bread. The widowed mother, the story went, had nothing at home to feed her children. Every night, she put them to sleep with the promise of food in the morning. One desperate night, after putting the children to bed, she tossed a couple rocks into the pressure-cooker, poured some water and whatever spices she had left, and sat there praying. Until she also fell asleep.
Years later, when the hundreds of billions of US money had flooded Afghanistan, I heard another story involving pots and fire and cooking that made me wonder how far money had brought us. As the 2010 parliamentary election heated up, two candidates in the north - both of them remnants of an anti-Taliban resistance that often ran on bread and dried mulberries for a diet - challenged each other to settle the issue in a remarkable way. Lets put up two huge pots and cook two meals over a fire of dollar bills, the story - or legend - went. Whomever’s pot cooked first would be declared winner.
As the US forces wrap up in Afghanistan, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: more than the US military presence, it is the US dollar - “carpet-bombing” the country, as one journalist described it - that has shaped today’s Afghanistan socially as well as politically in lasting ways remarkable for a time-span of just 13 years. In my latest for Businessweek magazine, I look at what this money has done to Afghanistan, where it leaves us:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-12-18/afghanistans-new-rich-navigate-u-dot-s-dot-pullout