Back to Afghanistan: What Do We Really Know?

As America celebrates or deplores the appointment of a new president-elect, some of us are looking ahead to the potential shift of foreign attentions in the first few months of 2009. President-elect Barack Obama has emphasized a sense of urgency in addressing issues in countries other than Iraq, but he has specifically mentioned a need for U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. To avoid repeating our past mistakes, it seems pertinent to answer two questions: What do we really know about Afghanistan? How can we understand this place better as a country full of diverse human beings and a unique cultural atmosphere rather than as a country rife with war and the perpetrators thereof?

First, let's start with Afghanistan's location. Afghanistan is a landlocked country in South Asia, east of Iran, another country that receives quite a lot of attention in the media. Location is important because in 2002, as the youth of America prepared to lay down their lives in the foreign country of Iraq, only a depressing 13% of youth surveyed could even point to that country on a map. If these were the people in our country recently emerging from high school geography classes and taking world history in college, I shudder to think of how few older adults would have been able to identify Iraq's location had they been surveyed.

Next, let's take a look at how big Afghanistan is and how many people live there. Afghanistan is 647,500 sq km wide and has a population of 31,056,997 (CIA, 2007). For an American comparison, Afghanistan is slightly smaller than Texas, but the population of Texas is only 22,859,968 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007). That's an additional eight million plus people, so to continue our Texan comparison, that's the equivalent of moving the entire of population of Virginia into the Lone Star State. Comparing Afghanistan to our own country helps bring home the reality of this country's troubles.

We know a lot about how the United States fought for its independence from Britian and we're proud beyond measure that we have become the country we are today. What many people don't think about is that we aren't the only ones who broke free from British rule, and that we managed to flourish while other countries suffered. Afghanistan was one of the less fortunate countries. It was founded by Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1747 and was functionally a cushion between the British and Russian empires until it won its independence from the British in 1919 (CIA, 2007). This break into freedom, however, did not lead it to become the flourishing country the U.S.A. is today.

Economically, Afghanistan suffered for decades, struggling with war, disease, and illicit drug trade, all in astronomical amounts. Fortunately, official reports anticipate many improvements in store for the Afghanistan economy and largely attribute the growing success to the intervention of foreign countries as well as the revival of agricultural development. However, the GDP (gross domestic product) of Afghanistan remains at $21.5 billion, a trifling amount compared to the United States' $12.98 trillion GDP (CIA, 2007). Of the 21.5 billion dollars that the country manages to generate, one-third of that value originates with the illegal opium trade. Afghanistan exports approximately $135.4 million in goods and services, but imports nearly three times as much. For that matter, the $425 million Afghanistan receives in foreign aid hardly begins to repair the country's $1.4 billion external debt, roughly 6% of the country's income. Debt is not the chief problem faced by Afghanistan and her people today, but it certainly does not help. Ninety percent of the country's population work in agriculture, and much of that is growing opium. More importantly, nearly 40% of the population isn't employed at all, a staggering ten times the unemployment rate in the United States. It's food for thought in a country where we are facing an “economic crisis” and yet most people talking about it are more busy wondering about how to pay for that 40 inch LCD TV than they are about whether their opium business will get busted and they'll have to live on the streets.

And it's not just the economy. It's the despairingly low quality of life that most Afghans endure. In the typical seven member household found in Afghanistan, every person able to work is expected to do so, even children. Legally, the minimum age an Afghan child may work is fifteen, but many children even below the age of nine work to support their families, since the government lacks the ability to enforce their child labor laws. Infant mortality rates are high, and people aren't expected to live much past the age of 40, thanks to the prevalence of hepatitis A, typhoid fever and malaria which the country does not have the proper medical services to combat. Oh, and you know that safe, clean water running from the faucets in every home and public building in the United States? Only thirty-five percent of urban Afghans and nineteen percent of rural Afghans have access to that particular resource.

As we fought in Iraq for eight years and beyond, it was too easy for a United States population uneducated in Iraq's culture and economy to say, “What does it matter? They're all terrorists anyway.” That's the point of this discussion; to avoid that deadly mistake if our new president and government representatives turn their heads toward Afghanistan. We must maintain a sense of compassion for the people of Afghanistan, who have managed to not only survive against great odds but also develop a deeply diverse and imaginative culture steeped in poetry, art, and music. So by educating ourselves about Afghanistan and the many cultures within it, we can take a more proactive approach to helping our government make the right choices within Afghanistan's borders. We do have to fight the poison of organizations like the Taliban in Afghanistan, but we also must recognize the humanity of the people in the South Asian country and work to give them the quality of life that all humans deserve. Our duty doesn't stop at making war and trying to bring their country democracy or peace. We must use our knowledge of their country and their suffering to help them obtain a better quality of life. That's the real meaning of peace.