A fight to feed hungry Afghanistan

Lt. Mark Fulmer, his flank protected by a burly, bandanna-clad cop from Tennessee, wants to know why US bombs turned the Afghan schoolhouse into a mound of scattered brick and bent metal beams. "Were there Al Qaeda and Taliban here?" he asks.

"No, never!" shout several villagers.

But the story changes. Haji Sher Mohammed, a soft-spoken Afghan elder, steps up to explain that Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters did – for a short time – occupy their village. He says that after the first US airstrike last November, the entire village fled. Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters arrived shortly after, and stayed until US and Afghan forces liberated Kandahar in December.

If the villagers get their story straight, they may receive several new wells and a new schoolhouse from the 49th Civil Affairs Battalion, out of Knoxville, Tenn.

For the small number of US Army reservists working here in the field of drought relief, the stakes couldn't be higher. Senior US officers in Afghanistan's volatile Pashtun tribal region say they are fighting both a war against terror and one on poverty. And while there are some small signs of success in the war against terror, there are few signs that the war on poverty is going well.

Yesterday, US-led coalition forces launched another hunt for Islamic militants based in the rugged eastern Afghanistan frontier after Pakistan said it would remove troops from the border. Hundreds of coalition forces have deployed along the border to prevent Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from crossing.

But Afghan officials warn that if the US military – or the international community as a whole – does not pay more attention to this war on poverty, the gains made in the war against terror could soon slip away.

Indeed, Afghan administrators – from doctors to warlords – here in the country's drought belt, agree on one thing: The country's unchecked poverty is feeding the angry tirades of Islamic fundamentalists who charge that the West does not really care about the Afghan people.

A new report commissioned by the US Agency for International Development and based on interviews with 1,100 households across Afghanistan has found that the level of "diet security," a measurement of vulnerability to famine, has plummeted from nearly 60 percent in 2000 to just 9 percent now.

Outside the big cities that team with Western aid workers and well-meaning diplomats, the effects of drought and neglect are severe and getting worse.

In neighboring Zabul Province, Qayam Uddin tries to understand how his 10-year-old son, Shafi Ullah, became so ill.

He says the doctors at the only hospital here told him that his son's meager diet probably opened the door to disease. "We have bread, but only bread. My son eats bread and water and sometimes our neighbor gives us a bit of yogurt."

The indirect effects of drought are everywhere in the parched villages of southeastern Afghanistan. Ghullam Rabbani, the head of a UNICEF vaccination team working in the province north of Kandahar, says he visited three districts last week and "didn't see one completely healthy child."

Afghanistan has been one of the world's poorest countries for decades. The average life expectancy, which hovers at 46, is the clearest indication of how far it is behind the rest of the world.

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