JALALABAD: Amid shattered hopes, dilapidated roads and destroyed homes that still have no sanitation services, everything seems to be out of order in the life of many Afghanis.
This war-devastated country enters 2004 with the prospect of its first democratic elections expected in June next year, after the draft of a new constitution is in place. But to many, lasting peace looks a distant, if not impossible, dream.
"It will be a miracle if our cherished dream to see peace comes true. But the ground realities suggest something else, maybe something worse in the days to come," said trader Mohammad Rehman.
Sitting in his tiny mud-made shop in suburbs of Jalalabad, the capital of eastern Nangarhar province, he looks and sounds hopeless about peace more than two years after the Taliban's ouster in November 2001.
Our Watan - the term he used for his country - came out of the Soviet occupation in the late eighties only to go under the occupation of another world power, Rehman said, without naming the United States, whose troops have just finished a massive operation going after Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.
"It seems our commanders and 'maliks' or village leaders are used to war. They don't know what peace is and what its fruits are," he said while selling peppermints, a kind of locally manufactured low-cost sweet tablets, to children wearing muddy thick clothes to ward off the cold.
The psyche of the Afghan people might also have changed drastically during years of conflict, mused the thickly bearded Rehman, a portable radio set in one hand.
The thought of peace has become alien to a people used to hearing gunshots and tanks rolling in the streets and over their mud-made habitats, he says. "Now are we falling prey to the aerial bombardment of cluster bombs by the fighter jets of the coalition forces stationed in Afghanistan," Rehman said.
There has been no change in the situation but just a change in the technology of warfare, he said, listening to a Pashto-language news bulletin. Ghonde, a labourer, says that people continue to feel alienated from the affairs of the state even under the government of President Hamid Karzai.
"Yes, we do admit that Taliban policies had also somehow kept the public at bay from the affairs of the state. But what is the actual position today?" he asked, sitting in a bazaar without work for the day he needs to feed his eight-member family.
"It will be too hard for peace to find its way here, at least, in a short span of a year or two," piped in Muhammad Jalali, a farmer who disclosed that he had sown poppy in the whole of his agricultural land to make ends meet.
These feelings of uncertainty are not helped by the fact that in the post-Taliban era, most parts of the country, including the capital Kabul, have witnessed an upsurge in lawlessness as well as the re- emergence of ethnic divisions sown by years of conflict.
Aid workers have come under attack. Opium production accounts for nearly half the Gross Domestic Product, and the country needs $30 billion in aid and investment over the next five years.
Karzai has little authority outside the capital. It remains heavily dependent for security on foreign, including US troops, while warlords outside Kabul have been refusing to turn over revenues to the government.
Some believe that the holding of 'loya jirga' or grand assembly to discuss a new constitution will be futile if it does not address tensions among different ethnic and political groups. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.