Soap Box

Oh Five Hundred and watching the jets depart and getting more confident and anxious all the time that I'll soon be gone.

And the clock ticks - tick tick tick tick tick tick.


Mom writes (in part): "late last night I finished "Three Cups of Tea", where Greg Mortenson just agreed to bring his schools plus projects into Afghanastan. I urge you all to read this book if you haven't already. Next to Michner's "Caravan", this is probably one of the best books to describe this area of the world.

And continues: "How truly awful it is that governments reneg on promises to the people for such basics as schools, pencils and paper and most of all, developing a trust and yet spend willy nilly on constructions of agrandizement. This is not to say that housing, mess halls and aid stations are not critical if we have troops in place. But all the US promises of aid for the citizens have never materialized -- nor have the local governments' promises.

That is truly the largest difference I've seen here in my comparatively brief stay. My work here is completely military in nature, improvements to either support the mission or to support the troops. I haven't seen any of the more humanitarian projects that I'd seen in Southwest Asia. Perhaps they're there. What is somewhat likely is that there is no organized national infrastructure to reconstruct here, so the people projects are smaller in nature and located in the thousands of tiny villages scattered throughout the country.

Or perhaps all of our funding is going to support the war machine - a fine example of our government reneging on promises to us. Even in Iraq, where we spent $50 Billion on Reconstruction, we still spent a Trillion on the war. With that money, we could have moved every Iraqi into a nice foreclosure somewhere in Southern California. We could do the same thing here - place every Afghani on the U.S. Government dole and call it a day.

Then go home.