Half the population is reported to be in need of humanitarian assistance, and a human catastrophe is unfolding. The return to power of the Taliban could yet lead to civil war
My last visit to Afghanistan was in May 2018. I had flown in a World Food Programme helicopter to Lal in Ghor province in the central highlands of Afghanistan, one of the remotest and poorest parts of the country. The winters are long and the district is often cut off for months at a time. We spent several days visiting villages where Afghanaid, the British aid and development agency I was representing, has been managing community-based rural development projects for some years, when necessary providing humanitarian aid. Several days later, we left at dawn to drive over the high pass and down to the district centre of Yakaolang and from there, via the Band-e Amir lakes, to Bamyan to catch the plane to Kabul. It was a beautiful spring morning and all along the way girls and boys from the villages were tripping off to the schools that have been built in recent years. All were dressed in spotless shalwar kemeez, with smiling shining faces, as happy as the larks that were singing in the sky overhead.
What a contrast to that dark day in January 2001 when the Taliban arrived in Yakaolang. They set about brutally murdering all the men and boys over the age of 12 that they could lay their hands on, piling the mutilated corpses outside the building that had been the Oxfam office. The victims were Hazaras, the minority Shia group that had long been a target of persecution by the Taliban. In the last twenty years, the Hazarajat region recovered. Bamyan itself prospered greatly, not only from its potato crop, for which it is famous, but as a popular tourist centre for members of the international community shut up in their bases in Kabul. There was a very effective woman governor, Habiba Sarabi. Hazara grabbed education with both hands. A fine university in Bamyan, for women as well as men, was re-opened in 2004, and schools have flourished. Adult Hazara women were encouraged to take literacy classes. Even before schools had been built, education for children as well as adults was being conducted in imambarrah, village religious assembly halls.
