Afghan Daily Life Offers New Opportunities, Old Problems

DAY LABORER (through translator): I have no job. If someone gave me $1,000, I would blow myself up, commit suicide.

ASHRAF GHANI, former finance minister, Afghanistan: Suicide, criminality has become a business. Arms have a price; legs have a price; the body has a price.

MARGARET WARNER: What do you mean by that?

ASHRAF GHANI: Literally, people are hired to blow themselves up.

MARGARET WARNER: Former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani says President Hamid Karzai's government and the U.S.-led coalition should take heed that the new Afghanistan is offering prosperity to only a select few.

ASHRAF GHANI: Eighty percent of us are living below $1.25 a day. Poverty knows no ethnicity; it does not know gender.

MARGARET WARNER: Despite billions spent on reconstruction by the international community, the country is heaving under the weight of a failing infrastructure: unpaved roads, lack of running water, and open sewers.

Most disturbing is the lack of security. Sunday afternoon, two died when a suicide bomber hit a southwest neighborhood. And this morning, there was another attack in the same area.

The pervasive insecurity is deeply demoralizing to ordinary Afghans, says Sima Samar, chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

SIMA SAMAR, chair, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission: The people want to have change and see some changes on their life, on a basic daily life, that when their children goes to school, they come back safely, not kidnapped by a gun or a group of people.

MARGARET WARNER: Some of those kidnappings happen on the main Kabul-to-Kandahar road. Westerners and wealthy Afghans don't take it anymore, but many Afghans must, despite bandits and police shakedowns. Ashraf Ghani says they never ran that risk under Taliban rule.

ASHRAF GHANI: Freedom of movement was guaranteed under the Taliban. Nobody liked their gender policy or, you know, their brutality or their ethnic attitudes, but the same people in Kandahar had freedom of movement. Nobody could shake them down.

ALI SAFI: It happens a lot. It's something routine in Afghanistan, especially in the traffic department. You can't get your work done without paying, you know, some amount of money either to the police, to the employees there. You can't get your work done.

MARGARET WARNER: That's what three young, educated men told us one night at dinner. Ahmed Javid was trained as a doctor, but can't get a job in Kabul.

AHMED JAVID: The most important thing is the corruption.

MARGARET WARNER: So you have to pay to get a job?

AHMED JAVID: Yes.

MARGARET WARNER: The police, who should be the first line of defense against this graft, are often its perpetrators.

HANIF ATMAR, interior minister, Afghanistan: Well, the first thing is that you need to understand how deep the corruption problem is in the system.

MARGARET WARNER: Hanif Atmar is the new interior minister, appointed by President Karzai last October to clean up the Afghan national police. Atmar is blunt about the huge task he faces.

HANIF ATMAR: Category one, criminality was tolerated because they paid, and that also included the drug lords. Type two, corruption with regards to police salaries, procurement, goods, and assets. Type three, extortion and taking briberies.

At the heart of this corruption is Afghanistan's leading export, drugs, the source of 93 percent of the world's heroin. This law enforcement video was provided by General Aminullah Amarkhel, the former commander of Kabul International Airport. During his 22 months on the job, he arrested some 100 drug couriers. He says that's why he's the former commander.

GEN. AMINULLAH AMARKHEL, former commander, Kabul International Airport (through translator): I was arresting all kinds of carriers, the small fish, the big fish of the whole mafia. They tried their best then to suspend me, to kill me, or to get rid of me. And the government did not support me. That's why I lost my job. Unfortunately, the law is only for poor people, not for big fish or big government officials.

ASHRAF GHANI: Narcotics, it's eating like a cancer through all aspects of our lives. It used to be roughly a network of 400,000 individuals; now it's a hierarchy, like the Colombian one, with 35 individuals sitting on top of it.

MARGARET WARNER: We traveled to the opium cartel's ground zero, Helmand province. Our pilot dove into a corkscrew descent to evade possible ground fire as we landed at the capital, Lashkar Gah.

We had planned a visit to the poppy fields. But despite the armed guards provided us and the local State Department anti-drug team, we weren't allowed to even cross the bridge leading there.

We did see Helmand Gov. Muhammad Gulab Mangal at an anti-narcotics strategy session with local elders and British military officials. Mangal, one of the new breed of governors supported by the U.S., has launched a public campaign to persuade local farmers not to grow poppy.

GOV. MUHAMMAD GULAB MANGAL, Helmand Province, Afghanistan (through translator): We tell them that's against Islam, against the constitution of Afghanistan, that poppy is illegal work, that's an illegal plant, and not good to grow.

MARGARET WARNER: He's also started giving free seed and fertilizer to farmers who agree to plant wheat or other legal crops. For some who persist in growing poppy, tractors are sent to plow their crop under.

Those tractor teams are targets. On Monday, 11 Afghan police assigned to protect a Helmand eradication convoy were killed by a suicide bomber. The survivor of several assassination attempts himself, Governor Mangal says the drug lords have lots of help.