Say it with me...DE-VEL-OP-MENT

Graeme Smith of the Globe & Mail writes a much-needed article on the economic situation in Afghanistan. While this is a military blog, pretty much every Canadian soldier who has served over there understands that they can't win the long battle to make Afghanistan safe without significant improvements to the lives of individual Afghans. That tie between economics and security is a strong one - not to the hard-core ideologues who fight for some sort of fanatical Islamic theocracy, but to the the millions of ordinary Afghans who will support whichever political movement helps them put bread on their own table.

For my money, the bolded section of this excerpt is the key line in the piece:

The roads of southern Afghanistan are still too dangerous to transport the heavy turbines needed to upgrade the hydroelectric dam at Kajaki, in neighbouring Helmand province, so Kandahar city goes without electricity for hours every day. The power often gets switched on at night, however, so Mr. Sahil's machines go quiet in the daytime and start up after dark. During peak operations he has 110 employees making bottles of water, cola and other beverages.

The factory belongs to Haji Ahmedy Atiqullah, a wealthy businessman.

As a former military translator, Mr. Sahil says he understands the influence of Mr. Atiqullah's investment on the battlefields around the city.

"Mr. Atiqullah's friends always ask him why he invested in Kandahar, because he gets little profit," he said. "But it's a great thing for the city. All these people working now had no job before. If they stayed unemployed maybe they would go to the other side." [Babbler's bold]

Canadians interested in knowing about both the progress and the challenges in Afghanistan should read the piece. But somebody should also be reading it to the village elders in Kandahar, Uruzgan, and Helmand: "Your villages will prosper if the fighting stops. The more you tolerate the insurgency, the longer you offer it your support, the more your people will fall behind those in the north."

I'd suggest that that's reasoning they would understand quite clearly.