More than £26bn in aid — but the people of Bamiyan still live in caves

Published on Monday 19 July 2010 16:08

THIRTEEN-year-old Sabri spends three and a half hours a day in a small village school for girls and more than five hours a day lugging water from a nearby river, up a steep mud track, to the caves in a cliff face where she lives with her family of ten.

Nine years after the US-led invasion - and despite more than 26 billion in international aid - Afghanistan is still languishing as one of the poorest countries in the world.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people live in caves in Bami-yan and elsewhere. Few ordinary Afghans have any reason to think their poverty will change, even as more than 40 foreign ministers gather in Kabul today for the ninth international conference, in almost as many years, on the future of their war torn land. Each meeting since 2001 has "been replete with pledges and prises," a report by the UK charity Oxfam said, "but (they] were followed up with little concrete action".

Sabri and her four sisters are among the 95 per cent of Afghans without access to running water. She lives in a cave, hewn from the same rocks that once held Afghanistan's ancient Buddhas, without electricity. Yet she is by no means the poorest or the most deprived. A survey by the World Bank found nine million people, or 36 per cent of the population, live below the poverty line.

There is a cave close to where Sabri sleeps which her family use like a barn. It is still charred from the time when the Taleban doused their homes with petrol and burnt them out — shortly before the fanatics used artillery to destroy the 6th century Buddhas nearby.

When she isn't hauling water up the hill, Sabri collects animal dung to burn as fuel. Her father, Ghullam Hussein, uses the water she brings to mix mud into bricks which he bakes in the sun — so that other people can build houses — and he sells the bricks for around tuppence each.

It was in the peaceful hills of Bamiyan province that the Afghan cabinet met a few weeks ago to discuss how to address an increasingly sceptical donor community at today's summit in Kabul.

The finance minister, Dr Omar Zakhilwal, wants more donor money spent through the government to stem the hotchpotch approach of countries who bankroll short-term, expensive and unsustainable projects designed to buy their soldiers time. While troop numbers have soared since 2001, the money spent on humanitarian aid has plummeted from 356 million in 2002 to just 52m in 2009, according to the Oxfam report. Meanwhile, the cash doled out through the military's "quick fix" emergency response programme, which Dr Zakhil-wal claims has almost all been wasted, jumped from nothing in 2002 to 654m in 2010.

Irrespective of Afghanistan's overall development needs, much of that money will be spent in Helmand — a province home to about 800,000 people and some of Afghanistan's best agricultural land, that was once known as the breadbasket of Afghanistan.

Bamiyan, by contrast, has been neglected — it is one of the safest areas, Taleban-free because of its largely Shia population of ethnic Hazaras.

"The poorest people live not in insecure areas, but in the most secure areas in the north," said World Bank managing director Ngozi Okonjo Iweala. The former Nigerian finance minister, in Kabul for today's conference, said Afghanistan's prosperity might still be locked up in its mineral wealth. The world's largest copper deposit, south of Kabul, was recently sold to a Chinese company, while the govermment is accepting tenders for an iron mine in Bamiyan.

The ferrous mountain at Hajigak is just a few miles from Sabri's home, but her father doubts it will make any difference. "The money goes in a the top and everyone takes their cut," he said.

"By the time it trickles down to us, there's nothing left."