... Most of the aid was not delivered by UN agencies. It was delivered by an army of foreign contractors, consultants, and NGOs working for bilateral donors (that's aid-speak for "countries," like the US). And all those foreigners need security that NATO, the Coalition, and the Afghan government cannot provide: hence the proliferation of foreign owned-private security contractors -- and the Afghan private security contractors that they have spawned as their subcontractors, many of which are composed of supposedly demobilized militias.
I'm not attacking all those aid workers. I'm one of them. The point is not about our individual merits -- there are saints and sinners among us. God knows, I am probably a more legitimate target for the Taliban than that Filippina woman they killed in the gym. But collectively we have generated an infrastructure serving only our needs that dwarfs the infrastructure provided for Afghans. This infrastructure -- of which the Serena Hotel is the flagship -- is the most visible part of the aid system to Afghans. Projects may mature in a few (or many) years, but right now Afghans see the guest houses, bars, restaurants, armored cars, checkpoints, hotels, hostile unaccountable gunmen, brothels, videos, CDs, cable television, Internet cafes with access to pornography, ethnic Russian waitresses from Kyrgyzstan in Italian restaurants owned by members of the former royal family and patronized by U.S. private security guards with their Chinese girlfriends and Afghan TV moguls, and skyrocketing prices for real estate, food, and fuel, traffic jams caused by the proliferation of vehicles and exacerbated by "security measures" every time a foreign or Afghan official leaves the office -- I could go on, but the Serena is a symbol of all that ...
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