Indeed

This goes out to Amanda and Kate at Wronging Rights, who love anything that pokes fun at the personal eccentricities of human rights abusers.

4th of July

Yesterday, my friends and I built a fire on the beach to drive away the bugs as we watched the 4th of July fireworks. Building and maintaining said fire proved much more difficult than we anticipated, and we collectively concluded that we would not survive as refugees.

In case you hadn’t noticed

Today’s theme on Transitionland is revenge of the wronged employee.

The national staffer’s revenge

Sanjar Qiam wallops his former employer, IRD. Qiam was fired by his hot-headed American boss after he sent a pointed but generally innocuous email objecting to the segregation of expat and national employees during the lunch hour.

It is great that you are celebrating 4th of July; it is a great cultural exchange for Afghans and third country nationals. I had a suggestion on a separate issue – lunch. I have been in IRD but I have rarely been to lunch; the quality of food, service and environment is poor and in some ways degrading. The food is served in basement packed with hundreds of IRD staff, white plastic chairs and tables and flies. The food is poorly cooked; most often super greasy. It is only one course and one item.
Segregation of Afghans is unpleasant. Working for Afghans and segregation – a system based on phobia – doesn’t go hand in hand; this raises questions about motives of IRD management.

My suggestion is to mix Afghans and foreigners lunch. Obviously, that would mean foreigners would lose some privileges but that is for a good cause – improvement of afghans lunch. It won’t be possible to have lunch in one location so staff has to be divided between several buildings and food should be cooked in each building with different menu so people can have a choice.
Looking forward to changes,
Best,
Sanjar

Qiam’s description of how American managers treat their Afghan employees at IRD is  upsetting. For a while I’ve heard rumors of stuff like this, but nothing as explicit as what Sanjar described until today. I’m not sure how much of what Qiam describes in the rest of his post (which I probably shouldn’t excerpt) actually happened, or was said, but even if Qiam stretched the truth a little, the overall impression is still nasty. Stuff like this makes my American cheeks burn with embarrassment. Again, there’s probably more here than meets the eye, but Qiam’s summary dismissal speaks to a lack of respect for national staff in the organizational culture of IRD.

Anyone out there have more information? Perhaps a different version of events?

The intern’s revenge

There is something deliciously satisfying about this.

Why cash-strapped aid agencies should hire rookies: A rant

One dreads a civilian surge of highly paid westerners, spending all their time behind barricades in meetings with other westerners, drawing up work plans and draping themselves in red tape while dirt-poor Afghans look on in dismay.

Sigh.

I hear this same story, over and over: Western aid workers go to Afghanistan, ostensibly to do good, but then expect to have en suite bathrooms, receive high per diems,  not have to travel outside Kabul, and to get plenty of time off to sun themselves on the beaches in Southeast Asia and go sightseeing in Europe.

Hey, aid agencies! Here’s an idea: start hiring more first-timers.

I’m totally serious. Let me explain.

Newbie aid workers right out of school or with limited field experience are willing to work longer and with far fewer perks than many of those who’ve been in the game for years and years. I know this because I am an aspiring aid worker, and I would gladly work in a conflict zone for the equivalent of an entry-level NGO salary here in the US, as would numerous others in my position. [Disclosure: yes, this rant post is partly self-serving. Surprise!]

Conventional wisdom holds that the more difficult the environment, the more important it is that aid workers be tough-as-nails lifers who preface their sentences with things like “When I was in Goma…,” but I seriously question that conventional wisdom. I don’t doubt that experience is important, but is it really as important as it’s made out to be?

I would argue that there is also something to be said for the clarity of fresh minds, unclouded by years of toil and painful ethical compromises. Ditto for how poorly-connected rookies are.  Most people view this as a deficiency, but I see a silver lining. Relatively ignorant of the petty rivalries, nepotism, grudges, and cliques within the aid world, we are less likely to base important decisions on these things. Moreover, younger aid workers –at least the ones I know– have been schooled in the latest theory from the get-go, are  aware of and extremely sensitive to the dominant aid/development critiques and controversies, and don’t look at these through scratched lenses of organizational loyalty.

Again, I’m not arguing that field experience isn’t important –that would be myopic, offensive, and unfair to the many, many awesome pros out there– but merely that aid agencies should rethink how they weight previous field experience relative to a job candidate’s other assets.

Conventional wisdom holds that all newbies with no conflict zone experience will disembark at the airport and promptly wet their pants at the sight of bombed out buildings or gun-toting teenagers or the absence of Dunkin Donuts –or whatever.

This is absurd.

I personally know someone who had her first field experience was Darfur in 2008 and adjusted quickly, and another person who freaked the hell out in Bosnia –in 2007! (Ok, our mine awareness and unexploded ordinances training was a bit over the top in terms of gory videos –I mean, really, who “takes mines lightly”?– but I digress.)

Some personality types are better suited to high stress environments than others, some even thrive on certain kinds of stress.* Is it really that difficult for recruitment officers to figure out what kind of person they are dealing with during the interview phase?

There is no way to be certain how someone will react when plopped down in a war zone or somewhere without any modern conveniences for the very first time, but couldn’t selection mistakes be reduced through more rigorous and blunt questioning?

Obvious? I thought so, until I began my job search.

When I was doing interviews this spring, never once was I asked, “How are you under stress?” or, even more to the point, “How do you think you would handle worms in your gut? How about armed men stopping your car? Crapping in coarse shrubbery by the side of a lonely road?  Do you get upset if you can’t shower for days on end and start to stink?”

It’s always fashionable to trash idealism, and to conflate it with naivete, but couldn’t the aid world use more idealism –so long as it is well-informed and cautious?

Some pro’s to hiring us tender young things:

- You can pay us a lot less (great for the recession!)

- We’re idealists, but also highly self-critical and willing to question aid orthodoxy.

- We’re generally single and without dependents, making hardship deployments less tricky.

- We’re accustomed to crappy living conditions and don’t expect to be pampered. For some people I know, a creaky guesthouse with a broken shower would be an upgrade from sharing a one-bedroom with two other people and sleeping a couch that smells of old beer.

- We seek out innovation and we’re tech savvy.

- We’ll work ourselves into the ground to prove our worth.

- We’re young and strong, and thus less likely to give out physically.

Maddeningly, the trend I have observed recently is cash-strapped aid agencies firing their entry-level employees and retaining those at the top with large salaries while critical programs go understaffed.

I sincerely hope this changes, but I won’t count on it.

*:::Waves hand in the air:::

My weekend

- Holy moley, Kurds are shiny, happy, party-lovin’ people.

- In Kurdistan, you can buy high heels for toddlers.

- Add to the You Know You Work with Refugees…list: when someone responds to “How did you two meet?” with “Oh, at a massacre survivors’ support meeting,” and that seems very normal to you. 

- Burmese tribal people love stuffing themselves with junk food.

- Nothing says world peace like a Burmese-American-Iraqi-Afghan badminton match.

- Nothing says multiculturalism! like a group of Mennonites also joining in said badminton match.

Bosnia

This worries me, just as it worries my colleagues, who see some disturbing parallels with the early 1990’s.

However, there are a few very significant differences between then and now, and in those differences, I take comfort.

1 – European (EU) engagement in the region is vastly more significant politically, militarily (peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo) and economically. Furthermore, the EU is much closer. Any destabilization in Bosnia today would literally take place on the EU’s doorstep.

2 – The RS doesn’t have access to one of Europe’s largest military arsenals anymore. That’s kind of significant.

3 – The leadership in Belgrade may voice support for Dodik and even travel to Banja Luka to show solidarity with Bosnian Serb leaders in their campaign of obstructionism, but Tadic and his people are smart enough to know when to step back. Moreover, the RS joining Serbia following secession from BiH is highly unlikely. Serbia as it is will have a difficult enough time meeting the preconditions for EU membership, it could kiss membership within the next decade goodbye if it absorbed the RS.

4 – Croatia is eying EU membership in the very near future, possibly before 2012, and won’t do anything to jeopardize that.

5 – The Obama Administration has made clear that it will be engaged in the Balkans. Biden’s speech in Bosnia was appropriately blunt, signaling to Bosnia’s rotted political class that they have to make Bosnia and Herzegovina work as a state, or there will be consequences. The international community will not permit a return to 1992. (Some outside commentators called Biden’s speech condescending and disrespectful — many Bosnians loved it, and say far worse things about their own leaders.)

All of that said, I’m still worried.

Why shutting up is the best course of action

My friend and colleague (and former TA!)  Steve makes an excellent point about why the Obama Administration is taking the right approach in its response to the ongoing uprising in Iran:

We can think of the international response to the Iranian revolts in terms of sovereignty and intervention, and in particular, pay attention to how other states recognize the external sovereignty of Iran (following the principle of non-intervention) in relation to the popular legitimacy of the state among the people. Because political actors can construct sovereignty and intervention for their own purposes, both the regime and the opposition justify their actions with relation to the regime and other interaction actors, societies, networks, etc. In doing so, they discursively borrow and reinvent old narrative themes to mobilize enough support to overwhelm their opponents. How Iranian actors and interactional actors construct the socially understood meanings of sovereignty and intervention impacts their mobilization. This is why Obama refrains from forcefully supporting the Iranian opposition because it reinforces the narrative of foreign intervention in Iranian politics, one that specifically refers to United States and its support of the Shah. The expression of overt support to one side from a historically hostile hegemonic state might simply shift the focus of the crisis to new social relationships. Mossavi would be altercast as a collaborator and the regime would ride a nationalist backlash.

The problem is really how we recognize the boundaries of the Iranian nation, and discursively act on that definition to contribute to a desired outcome without our fingerprints on it. Hence, Obama says “If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.” Implicit here is consent of the people, which obligates the government to recognize popular discontent in the form of protest. The inability to do so puts the moral onus on the regime, as it fails to recognize the sovereignty of its own people. We play up our soft stance in the name of non-intervention and sovereignty, but of course made sure Twitter kept running, thereby aiding popular mobilization against the regime. Thus, we define boundaries and take actions across them in reference to a popular sovereignty that has yet to fully materialize. Paradoxically, we can only support the Iranian resistance by not directly aiding it, but only by constituting the conditions in which it can fully emerge.

I would add that we might even want to be a little more quiet about constituting the aforementioned conditions in the future — not that US involvement in things like the Twitter maintenance delay should be denied by the administration, but rather the utmost importance of tact  in this very risky area of public diplomacy.

Our indirect assistance to demonstrators should be quiet and humble (and, in this case, very, very geeky). To paraphrase Jon Stewart’s mocking of Congressional Republicans’ criticism of how Obama has addressed the uprising in Iran — it’s (not) all about us! No prominent Iranian dissident has called for the US to take a stronger approach at this time, and several, including Akbar Ganji, have long argued that any support the US government tries to lend dissidents will only undermine pro-democracy forces in Iran. Even the family members of prominent dissidents arrested during the demonstrations of the past two weeks have emphasized this point.

Bottom line: I’m not braving the batons and bullets of the Basij, and neither are John McCain and the astoundingly hypocritical chorus of right-wing bloggers and pundits  — Iranians are. If we can help them organize by keeping informal channels of communication open as the regime struggles to monopolize information, great, but let’s not publicly pat ourselves on the backs for doing that.

Writing this, I’m chuckling, because Steve would use a cruder term than back-patting.

Blogging blahs

I’m busy busy busy, and writing long-ish blog posts here isn’t something I can commit to right now –especially without internet at home.

However, I’m tweeting like a fiend these days, as I’ve found Twitter entirely too easy to use in between writing this and that for my employer’s new website and putting together the same damn social media for development presentation I’ve done a million times now.

***

World Refugee Day went well. Thanks to the free champagne, I didn’t resist when former colleagues pulled me on stage to dance with a Congolese dance troupe.

***

I’ve become so emotionally invested in the events unfolding in Iran that I actually request text message updates from friends when I’m at home and unable to connect to the internet.

***

I applied for a job at the IRC. It’s a position I’ve totally qualified for and wouldn’t even need to be trained in, because I basically ran the same program elsewhere under a different name.  If my employment history is any indication, my application will be rejected. Somehow, I always end up hired for things I’m not (yet or entirely) qualified for and rejected for work I could do blindfolded.

Azadi!

Not much I can add. Follow @TehranBureau on Twitter for real-time updates. And check out these stunning photos from The Big Picture.

A supporter of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi shouts slogans during riots in Tehran on June 13, 2009. Hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared winner by a landslide in Iran's hotly-disputed presidential vote, triggering riots by opposition supporters and furious complaints of cheating from his defeated rivals. (OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images)

An injured backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi covers his bloodied face during riots in Tehran on June 13, 2009. (OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images) #

Seeing old friends

Light blogging for a few days. I’m back in the town I went to high school in, visiting some old friends who are back for a little while.

Totally unrelated –sexist online gaming advertisements get me riled perhaps more than they should, but this is pretty damn obnoxious:

You stay classy, Huffpost.

Oh nevermind

UPDATE: Maybe I’ll re-post that rant. I have to think about it. Thanks for the comments on “oh nevermind” and the actual rant post. It’s reassuring to know how many other people are just as frustrated as I am.

Uh…

Reading my daily press roundup of Afghan Parliament-related news, this jumped out at me:

“Afghanistan’s constitution recognizes equal rights for men and women, but Sobharang questioned the reliability of the country’s courts, which are composed entirely of men who have been accused of favouring husbands in divorce cases.” -Canadian Press

According to UNIFEM, there are around 60-70 female judges in Afghanistan (less than 10%of the total), mostly in local, family and juvenile courts, and they are represented by a UNIFEM-supported NGO, the Afghan Women Judges Association.

I think Canadian Press is at fault for the error here, not Soraya Sobhrang, whose statement above was likely taken out of context or fused with a Canadian Press journalist’s assumption or misinformation about the gender composition of Afghan courts. It doesn’t help Afghan women to deny their achievements –for example, denying the existence of women judges– even with so much more progress to be achieved.

Tough questions from Alanna Shaikh

Alanna recently wrote a disquieting post about the worst story someone ever trusted her with in the field until now, implying that she just encountered something worse in the course of her work. It’s a disturbing read. At the end, Alanna asked a few questions, including the following.

Alanna: I want to know whether it’s useful to have the EU pull its funding from the country whose name I won’t mention or if it’s more effective to keep pushing small changes and hope they add up.

It’s probably not useful, unless the regime in power relied very, very heavily on foreign aid. And even then, if the regime can support itself through some combination of oil and gas exports, drugs, private sector corruption and organized crime, then it’s still probably not helpful.

Of course, if we’re talking about sanctions, that’s a bit different. Some quick thoughts on sanctions.

When Serbia under Milosevic was placed under sanctions, its crime networks benefited mightily while ordinary people suffered. That legacy continues to hinder development and democratization today. Much of Serbian civil society, people who opposed Milosevic, were also against the sanctions, because international isolation made their work more difficult as well. Eventually, Milosevic was overthrown  and turned over to the ICTY to stand trial, but only after running Serbia into the ground economically, shredding its social fabric, bloodying much of the region and drawing the wrath of NATO in the form of seventy-eight days of airstrikes. And Serbia in the nineties and early 2000s was a vastly more developed country with a stronger civil society than any of the Central Asian states have now. Sanctions are like aggressive chemotherapy in the international body politic. Even if they work, the collateral damage is staggering. I’m not categorically opposed to sanctions, but I think that they are more often than not poorly designed and enforced unethically. Iraq after the First Gulf War is a horrible example of this.

Alanna: I want to know if supporting democratic institutions actually leads to democracy.

Working in a governance development organization, I should have a better answer to this than, sometimes, when conditions are right, and when we’re lucky. Some quick and hopefully not entirely incoherent thoughts on democracy assistance.

What we know is that the impetus for democratic reform has to come from within if it’s going to lead to anything approaching liberal democracy. Democracy support is most effective in regimes that have just undergone a paradigm, whether it’s a full-blown people power revolution, the end of an armed conflict, or just a slightly less un-free election. In these instances, the new government is often full of people who didn’t plan beyond getting into office. They can be swayed in one direction or another, but the window of opportunity is small. If they can’t meet rising expectations and the citizenry starts getting restless, the new boss will start looking and acting a lot like the old boss. Democracy assistance to institutions can, in this case, help a new and tentatively pro-democracy government meet the expectations of the people, or at least not fail utterly. Where there is no indigenous pro-democracy movement and the democratic impulse is weak, where the regime in power has no qualms about using violence to destroy its opponents, or where current regime leaders have made it clear they won’t leave until they die or someone kills them, external assistance to institutions alone will not start the engine of democratization. However, that doesn’t mean that external assistance for things that improve the everyday lives of people, like the reform of social welfare and education ministries (generally seen as more technocratic than political) isn’t worthwhile.

I might come back to this in a few days. Right now, I have to finish packing. Tomorrow, I move to a new apartment.

From an undated diary entry

Nothing is so life affirming as spending an entire night in joyous, rowdy conversation with complete strangers.

BiH coast memories

Bosnia is back in the news, and it’s gotten me reminiscing about my time there. Today, I thought about the country’s one and only coastal town, scruffy little Neum –which isn’t half bad as a destination for your department’s annual retreat.

Neum, BiH coast, 2007. This is a silly picture, but the coast is really nice and that water is warm from April to October. When I was there last time, my colleagues asked by the resort next to ours had never been repaired. No one seemed to know. It's become a weird kind of tourist attraction anyway.

I have forgotten the name of this village in the south. The kids there sold us fruit in paper cones by the roadside.

More coast.

Transitional justice folks after hours in a very blue bar.

Energizer Bosnians kept going late into the night, after many more drinks and many more wacky dances.

Looking through this album, I’m sad that the best photos are the ones I can’t put here for fear of embarrassing people with Very Important Jobs. Such is life.

Bosnian farmer loved Biden’s speech, offered him farmland

BalkanInsight reports:

Touched by the heartfelt address by the US Vice President to Bosnians, a local farmer from the northern Bosnian village of Bakici, has offered a piece of his land as a gift to Joseph Biden, local media reported on Wednesday.

“He (Biden) is simply a good man, who has done a lot for Bosnia and Herzegovina,” media quoted the farmer, Hazim Imamovic, as saying.

Like most of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Imamovic watched Biden’s address to the Bosnian parliament, which was carried out live by radio and television stations across the country on Tuesday afternoon.

“He should have a piece of land in Bosnia,” Imamovic said after watching the highly-emotional speech.

US embassy in Sarajevo did not comment the offer.

Oh man, I miss the Balkans. Some day, I’m going to buy my first apartment in Sarajevo (pictured in my header) and keep it as a holiday place. I don’t know when, or how, but I’m going to do it.

Think Again: Calling Child Soldiers “Young Killers”

Foreign Policy’s latest contrarian piece is Think Again: Child Soliders – What human rights activists never tell you about young killers.

You’re being provocative, FP. Fine. I get it. Normally I even like it, but in this case it comes across as callous and offensive.

“What human rights activist never tell you about young killers” implies that human rights activists are hiding some kind of shocking, dirty secret about “young killers,” when there isn’t actually anything shocking or revelatory or even that interesting in the article (except, for me, the mention of post-conflict beauty schools). Well-informed human rights activists have, in fact, been making the author’s points for years.

And about that “young killers” line — yes, in a literal sense, many child soldiers (though far from all –as the author himself  points out in his third paragraph) have killed. But “killers” is a term we usually preface with “cold-blooded” or “serial,” and it carries a connotation of evil, rather than exploitation or tragedy.

While acknowledging the agency of child soldiers, we nonetheless have to recognize that they are still children, as international law rightly does. Child soldiers may do terrible, horrifying things, but there is a reason the international community treats them differently than adult combatants during DDR and prioritizes rehabilitation for even child soldiers who have committed serious crimes. Children aren’t evil. Ever.

Calling child soldiers “young killers” plays into the framing that has been used to keep child soldier Omar Khadr, who was  just fifteen when he was captured during a battle in Afghanistan, locked away in Guantanamo for the past seven years as an “enemy combatant.”

I sincerely doubt FP would use this title: Think Again: Sex Trafficking – What human rights activists don’t want you to know about transnational tramps.*

The headline FP used for its child soldiers article is in just as poor taste.

*Oh god, they didn’t publish that article already did they?

No, this doesn’t mean I think we should bomb Iran

…I just think this is a hysterical and clever poster:

Buzzwords

Here’s something I’ve wondered about for a while: is it better to use buzzwords (”capacity-building,” “leadership development,” “procurement,” “partnership-strengthening,” “good governance,” “rights-based approach,” etc, etc) or to just come out and say exactly what you mean?

Your project trained MPs to give radio and TV interviews so they’d stop embarrassing themselves. You got your lawyer ex-boyfriend to threaten legal action to stop a landlord from illegally evicting asylees from his building. You bought something at a low price, had it shipped fast, and saved your organization a bunch of money. Your boss stood in front of a bulldozer and shouted down a municipal official and his developer buddy who wanted to raze the local shantytown.

I once joked with a colleague that I needed to figure out what buzzword to use to obfuscate unclogging the plumbing in the home of a Burmese refugee family.

In all seriousness, when are buzzwords appropriate?

When are they helpful?

Are they ever appropriate or helpful

Do they make you sound like  a professional, or a pompous loser with something to hide?

Dept. of inappropriate facebook conduct

I checked my account and was amused to see in my news feed that someone posted one of those bizarre wall poll things –in this case “Do you think [person's name] smells good?”– on the profile wall of an Afghan MP.

No, I’m not making that up, and I won’t mention the MP by name. I am sure she’ll be weirded out enough when she logs in next time.

Facepalm.

and…facepalm.

The post-conflict beauty schools

via the New York Times

Recently, I have noticed a curious trend: the proliferation of post-conflict beauty schools.

I first heard about it from my boss, who described how the UNDP ran a program that trained hundreds and hundreds of Kosovar Albanian women –that is, way too many– to be hairdressers in the early and mid 2000’s.

And then I heard about the IRC  training beauticians in Chechnya.

And then the Kabul Beauty School (pictured above).

And just today, reading ‘Child Soldiers: Think Again,’ I stopped on this line and chuckled:

In Liberia, for example, too many ex-combatants were educated as carpenters and hairdressers.

How many post-conflict beauty schools are there? And why is hairdressing/cosmetology picked as a profession to train vulnerable populations in? I wonder how the decision-making works here, be it with the UN or NGOs, and how much local input there is.

Everything you need to know about DC

A friend’s former professor writes:

Washington, D.C. is a great place for people who really loved high school — the Post is the school paper; the Washingtonian the yearbook; Congress is the SGA by any other name; the White House is for anyone who got elected to something in high school and never got over it; the bureaucracies are the nerds’ revenge . . . maybe they weren’t cool enough to get elected to the homecoming court in high school or invited to join a fraternity in college, but they are smart enough to extract their revenge on the cool kids; and the Supreme Court? That is for National Honor Society members, the kind of kids who aced every class in high school, but couldn’t make through a sleepover or summer camp without coming home early. I have lived in Washington almost eighteen years. People still ask me why I don’t get involved in politics or try to latch on to someone’s candidacy so that I can “use my skills.” Leaving aside for the moment that I don’t have any skills that could possibly benefit anyone in politics, the question for me is not why I am not involved, but why would anybody want to do this?

I am smug to say I figured all of that out by my sophomore year of undergrad.  Of course, I figured it all out while hopped up on caffeine pills and sitting in the freezing rain trying to feel something, ANYTHING!

..but, uh, that is another story.

No good options, lots of greys

A few days ago, Hamesha wrote about the ordinary people of Uruzgan:

[..] by looking at these ordinary people, i know deep down that they have reasons, and maybe good reasons, and that all that they think and do is not simply because of wanton rage and indiscriminate and blind passion -they are simple farmers and loving fathers and confused brothers and not always sociopaths and talibs and ideologically hardened insurgents. we have failed to reach out to them and to connect to them. we have foisted the most corrupt and dastardly upon them to represent us and somehow expect that they behave well while they do not even have a say in their own destiny. and we have come to see them as the enemy -and in doing so, have turned them into the enemy. and all along we have resorted to the power of violence and money to change their minds. we have commoditized development and fetishized security. we have come to perceive these people, otherwise ordinary humans, as either ‘elements’, or statistics, or swathes of public opinion, or insurgents, or supporters of insurgents, or a faceless mass of tools that know no reason and logic.

I thought of that passage when I read the following IWPR story today:

The Occasional Taleban

Impoverished young men struggling to find work hired by insurgents as part-time fighters.

By Fetrat Zerak in Farah (ARR No. 319, 23-Apr-09)

Abdullah Jan and Abdul Khaleq are both from the Pushtrod district of Farah province in western Afghanistan. Both are young, unemployed, and seek work as day laborers, for which they get about 200 afghani (4 US dollars) per job.

There is one big difference between them though: while Abdul Khaleq earns his money by digging ditches, painting houses, and other manual labour, Abdullah Jan, not his real name, does so by attacking police checkpoints. He is a Taleban part-timer.

“I am the only breadwinner in our family of eight,” said Abdullah Jan, a 22-year-old from a small village. “I went to Iran three times to try to find work, but I was expelled. I was in debt, and my father told me to go to the city. I looked for a job for three weeks, but then my brother got sick and needed medical treatment. He later died. Two of my friends then suggested that I go to the local Taleban.”

His mother was against it, said Abdullah Jan, and tried repeatedly to dissuade him. His father, however, kept silent.

“My first assignment was to attack the police checkpoint in Guakhan district,” recalled Abdullah Jan. “We killed four policemen, and we lost two of our own. Another one was injured. The fight lasted for two hours, with the real Taleban encouraging us from behind the lines, saying ‘go on, further, move, move, move.’

“When it ended, I was paid 400 afghani by the local commander. He said that if I performed better in the future, I would get more money. Since then, I have participated in five more attacks, and I make about 1,000 afghani per week.”

Under this ad hoc arrangement, Abdullah Jan is a Taleban for only a few hours per week. Other than that, he goes about his business like any other citizen. He has no gun or any other equipment that marks him as an insurgent, and he does not consider himself to be one.

“I am just fighting for the money,” he said. “If I find another job, I’ll leave this one as soon as possible.”

By some estimates, up to 70 per cent of the Taleban are unemployed young men just looking for a way to make a living. In Farah, Helmand, Uruzgan, Zabul, and other southern provinces, the majority of insurgents are fighting for money, not ideology.

But they are caught in a vicious circle: as long as their provinces are unstable, there is little investment that could generate employment opportunities. However, in the absence of jobs, they join the insurgents, prolonging the violence and guaranteeing that security and development, remain but a distant dream.

Too often, the Taliban are portrayed as a uniform group of ideologues who cannot be reasoned with and can only be stopped with bombs and bullets. There are, surely, some Taliban like that. Though, I am inclined to believe Fetrat Zerak and Hamesha, who tell a more complex story, one that speaks more to universal human desires and frailties than to unadulterated evil.

What would I do in the place of someone like Abdullah Jan? From my place of privilege, it is hard for me to put myself in his shoes.  I do not know his poverty or his obligations. What would I do if I alone was responsible for filling eight empty bellies? How heavy would that weigh on me, and madly gnaw at me? What might it drive me to do?

Then again, undoubtedly the civil servants Abdullah Jan and others like him kill are also ordinary people doing what they can to make it from one to the next and to provide for those in their care.

Perhaps that is the greatest tragedy and irony of all; those holding power  have pitted the poor and desperate against each other and by doing so have ensured that they remain poor and desperate and easy to manipulate to cynical ends.