🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Between February 2004 and December 2013, I spent six and a half years in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor. One of the initiatives I worked on was at Camp Julien, a Canadian Forces base in Kabul that was open from 2003 to 2005. There was a well on the base and the military set up a water purification and bottling plant. We hired local Afghan citizens to work at the plant, and they were trained to run the plant with supervision from contractors. Together we produced enough water for the Canadian military with enough left over to sell to other NATO militaries in Afghanistan, and we gave water to the local population, too.
This could have been a big success story. But in November 2005, NATO mothballed the plant. For bureaucratic reasons involving insurance, they couldn't hand over the plant to the local population, so they just abandoned it instead. And to me, the water plant has always been an object lesson in why the military should not be involved in nation-building. Because it was obvious that this water plant represented a crucial improvement to Afghan life—and it was equally obvious that the military should not have been the ones in charge of administering it.
One of the biggest drawbacks of using the military for nation-building is the continual change of leadership and troops, both cause and effect of the lack of a cohesive mission in Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2011. When I was there as a contractor, NATO bases would have soldiers from many different countries, each following a different rotation and with a different mission. Canadian soldiers could be in the middle of a six-month rotation when a French commander would take over the base. The soldiers would then have to adjust their way of accomplishing their objectives to fit with the new command. "Rigid flexibility" was how they thought about it: You had to be rigid in your aim but flexible in approach, and adapt quickly to a fluid situation.
With each change of command, the view of how to accomplish the mission changed, too. It's one of the reasons NATO and other militaries hire civilian contractors like myself: to have institutional memory. Each commander will put their stamp on a base, but we contractors for the most part will have been on the ground longer than service members. NGOs and private businesses can also provide similar consistency in nation building.
In my time in Afghanistan, I travelled the whole country and saw good work being done in the cities. On my first contract, I saw Kabul go from having no electricity to having a functioning grid. Other city centers had similar improvements to infrastructure, though the countryside did not receive as much attention, and most of the population lives in rural areas.
But it was already clear to me on my first contract that for any nation-building to succeed, NATO and the U.S. would have to be prepared to be in Afghanistan for a generation. It was not as simple as getting rid of the Taliban, setting up a government and withdrawing. I thought that it would take a generation because Afghanistan had been at war since 1979. Even after the Soviets left in 1989, there was civil war and a power struggle to fill the vacuum left by their withdrawal. The Taliban took control in 1996 and remained in power until 2001. The population was young and needed education and training.
Women bore the brunt of Taliban rule. The Taliban implemented a strict, literal interpretation of Sharia. Women were denied the most basic rights and had no way to voice any complaints. Forced into marriage, young girls would go from being de facto slaves in their fathers' homes to being slaves in their husbands' homes.
When I was there on my first contract, most women I saw in the streets wore the blue burqua with mesh eye holes. But over time, especially in cities, women started to get opportunities for professional training, learning how to start a business or getting an education. Every time I went back, I would see more women on the streets and without the burqua.
The betterment of women's lives was an incredible achievement made possible by NATO intervention and the work of foreign NGOs and local women. NGOs and NATO did a lot to bring about women's rights and empower women in Afghanistan. But even under NATO, women in small communities lived with strict Islamic codes and had little freedom. Moreover, the extent of this education has been overstated. By the time I left in 2013, most children still did not have access to education. By 2020, 9.5 million children were in school, 39 percent of whom were girls. But 46 percent of the population is under 15, roughly 18 million children. And kids in rural villages were more likely to go without or receive a rudimentary education.
With support in more remote areas, private companies and NGOs could have had more consistent success in helping the local population. There weren't really any roads, for example, and private companies from NATO countries could have provided support and training to the local populations in how to build them. Many things could have been done to help the people in outlying areas, and with that aid, education and support for women could have followed.
Of course, now everything has changed.
I don't know what's going to happen now. There is resistance in some small parts of the country, and some women's groups are talking about continuing their work. I don't know how they will be able to, and I'm afraid that the country will break out into tribal warfare. The U.S. has lost a lot of trust in Afghanistan, and even if they were to come back now, I'm not sure what reception they could expect outside of the major cities.
One thing I do know, though: The nation building that Afghanistan so desperately needs was never going to succeed under the aegis of the military. What was necessary was military background support for private businesses and NGOs training people and giving them an option outside of war and zealotry.
Without that, the people of Afghanistan—especially the women—will be living in misery.
Obaid Omer is a podcaster and free speech advocate. He was born in India and lives in Canada. He spent six years in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
