Kansas in Middle East? How US has – and hasn’t – changed Afghanistan
On a crisp early winter day in late 2003, Afghan President Hamid Karzai took a pair of scissors from a tray offered by a schoolgirl – she was dressed for the ceremonial occasion in a purple velvet brocade dress with a reddish orange headscarf – and cut a ribbon to officially inaugurate the resurfaced Kabul-Kandahar highway.
On hand was then-U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, who recalled in his speech how President George W. Bush had phoned him every other day to push for the first layer of asphalt to be laid on this flagship nation-building enterprise before winter snows set in. Even today, local Afghans call this vital 300-mile stretch of highway the “Mr. Bush Project.”
“There were some problems that we pointed out, but they were ignored, because President Bush would say, ‘Before the snow falls, the black line should be connected to Kandahar,’” recalls an Afghan engineer who worked on the project for an American company. “The black line was the first priority; the second actually was quality,” the engineer says, noting how U.S. politics had driven the rebuilding timeline. “But in the next year, too many problems came out ... because of the speed. They pushed too fast.”
The highway was portrayed as the symbol of the American commitment to rebuild Afghanistan after decades of war and after U.S. forces orchestrated the ousting of the archconservative Taliban and Al Qaeda in November 2001, following the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush promised
