cityscapes
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by Malcolm Garcia
November 18, 2009 |
A world away, war easy to forget
I had recently returned from Afghanistan reporting on the August presidential election and was only dimly aware of the hoopla over which city would host the 2016 Olympics when I sat down for a beer at Karen’s Kozy Cabin on St. John Avenue.
As the bartender filled a glass from the tap, a newscaster suddenly announced on a TV behind the bar that Chicago would not host the Olympics. I watched disbelief spread across the stunned faces I saw on screen in Daly Plaza. Like them, I too was feeling disappointed, but for other reasons.
This had been my seventh trip to Afghanistan as a reporter. I watched a country I have worked in regularly since 2001 slowly unraveling as the Taliban insurgency not only controlled most of the south, but also made significant inroads in the once secure north — significant enough that it was all but impossible for a westerner to travel outside Kabul alone without risk of death or kidnapping or both.
The Afghani presidential election was dismissed by most Afghans I interviewed as a farce. They saw as well as I did brazen corruption. Among countless irregularities, children were able to obtain voter registration cards and cast ballots. They followed the dictates of their tribal elders, whom candidates bribed to turn out their villagers on their behalf, including those too young to vote.
Afghanistan has always been a tribal culture. When the international community abandoned its pledges of billions of dollars of aid, President Hamid Karzai, the likely winner of the election, resorted to the age-old dictum of creating alliances among tribal and ethnic factions. His allies receive what aid trickles in to distribute as they see fit based on their own loyalties or just keep for themselves. People at the highest levels of the Karzai administration, including Karzai’s own brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is accused of cooperating in the country’s opium trade.
When I returned to the states, I was not at all confident about Afghanistan’s prospects. I’m more doubtful now. President Obama must decide whether or not to send more troops and support a government no longer trusted by its own people. If I were a U.S. soldier deployed to Afghanistan, I would not want to fight and possibly die under those circumstances.
Afghanistan feels worlds away now. Here, in place of desperate Afghani street beggars, I see families arguing about which $80 sneakers to buy in malls. Instead of mud huts snuggled against barren foothills, skyscrapers blot out the sun. In place of rogue militia roadblocks and American military patrols roaring past with .50 calibers swinging left and right, community police officers wander byways issuing parking tickets. In place of women still forced to cover their bodies in body length veils, billboards of nearly nude models leer at passing drivers.
“I gotta admit,” the bartender said about the decision to deny Chicago the Olympics, “I’m a little disappointed.”
“Like being the first thrown off the island,” the guy next to me said. “We didn’t even make the first cut.”
Neither did Afghanistan. Somewhere along the way, it was brushed aside, dismissed like an annoying gnat buzzing in our ears that we could never quite swat away. For years it was dubbed the forgotten war until we recognized that the insurgents had not forgotten it. Now that the war has our full attention, I worry that it is too little to late, no matter what Obama decides.
“Twenty-twenty,” a woman behind me says. “We’ll get the Olympics then.”
“Yeah, right,” the bartender said.
She laughed. Then the conversation moved on to more immediate matters — friends who had lost their jobs, what to do about the fast approaching holidays with money so tight and the changing, colder weather and the need to tune up their cars before winter set in.
These concerns were far from the still lingering crowd in Daly Plaza and much farther from Afghanistan. The 2016 Olympics and a distant, 8-year-long war were just that. Very distant. Even when you’ve been there.
2009 Archives:
May Immigrants face recession at restaurant
July A family's plan for prosperity
