End The Occupation of Afghanistan ...

- The federal government has failed to show Canadians a single photo of Canadian-built schools, hospitals, training centers, or any physical infrastructure improvement.

- The government in Kabul is by all accounts corrupt, and run by warlords who carry on the world's largest illicit heroin trade.

- Since the US invasion seven years ago, no political peace process has been devised to resolve the conflict.

- Almost 100 Canadians have now died in this war. An estimated 50,000 Afghanis have also died, most of them non-combatants (women, children, the elderly and disabled).

- Studies indicate that of every $9 being given to Afghanistan in aid, only $1 is devoted to “reconstruction.” Elaborate networks of state corruption ensure that this $1 is largely diverted into elaborate networks of corruption. Kabul now has obvious city monuments to demonstrate where much of this money has gone.

- Kabul has become the most expensive city in Asia. The impoverished capital of 4 million people now sports a five star hotel (where regular rooms cost $250 USD per night), a new shopping mall, and a string of mansions in the posh central neighbourhood of Sherpur.

- Evidence also suggests foreign contractors soak up much “development” money themselves. An aide to President Hamid Karzai recently told a Quebec reporter that “...the international community has injected $19 billion into Afghanistan. About 95% of that leaves the country.”
- According to the same source, non-governmental organizations employ 540 foreigners who earn from $5,000 to $35,000 per month. The last elections cost $395 million. It was the foreigners who organized them, and kept the money for themselves.”

- The editor of Kabul Weekly, Mohammed Dashty, is harsher. “The UN is a government within a government…Look at their expenditures, the salaries they pay to their employees, their 4 x 4 vehicles that cross the city, their travel abroad. I call that legal corruption.”

- Jean Mazurelle, the World Bank director in Kabul, explained in 2007 that “...the wastage of aid is sky-high. There is real looting going on, mainly by private enterprises. It is a scandal. In 30 years of my career, I've never seen anything like it.”

- 1 doctor per 7066 Afghans. 1 soldier per 742 Afghans.

- Military spending outpaces development and reconstruction spending by 900%
Uranium isotopes in bombs have caused cancers, deformities, spontaneous death

- A useful corruption story (CIDA and Kabul's garbage removal):

- On October 31, a Quebec reporter (Ouimet) looked at a couple of projects in Kabul that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) says it is funding. One was an $85,000 project to clean up garbage and debris in the city. The project was contracted to a local Afghan businessman. CIDA says he hired 200 people and successfully completed it. CIDA also says it funded a project to install 340 pre-fabricated cement roadside drainage surfaces.

“Not true,” says the mayor of Kabul, Ghulam Hadidi. He says no one told him of the projects. “I have never seen anyone picking up garbage, and the city is as dirty as ever,” he told Ouimet. “So I ask the question, what happened to the money?”

His officials looked into the cement claim and found the number installed was less than claimed, only 138. The mayor says the city needs 3,800. It found that the cement used did meet the minimum structural standard. But it cost $20 per piece. The mayor says it could have purchased them for $4 each.

“It’s not easy to work with the Canadians,” the mayor told Ouimet. “Their personnel changes all the time.” The mayor’s daughter, Rangina, was blunter. “Where are they (the Canadians)? What do they do? We never see them; they sit in their fortified camp.”

Ouimet talked to the governor of Kandahar province, and he added his views on foreign aid programs. “Their bureaucracy is so heavy,” he said. “The international community does not listen to us. We never succeed in resolving problems.”

- CIDA says it spent $39 million in Kandahar last year and another $100 million in the rest of Afghanistan. The Senlis Council conducted an extensive investigation into these claims. “We were not able to see any substantial impact of CIDA’s work in Kandahar and, as a matter of fact, we saw many instances of the extreme suffering of the Afghan people,” reported Nadine MacDonald, president and lead field researcher of the Council at a news conference on August 29, 2007.

- $90billion has been splurged in military spending by NATO forces in Afghanistan to date. Canada has spent $9 billion so far, most of which in “search and destroy” missions in Southern Afghanistan.

- Nato forces' own figures show that attacks on western and Afghan troops were up by almost a third last year, to more than 9,000 "significant actions". And while Nato claims that 70% of incidents took place in the southern Taliban heartlands, the independent Senlis Council thinktank recently estimated that the Taliban now has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan, arguing that "the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when".

- Meanwhile, US-led coalition air attacks reached 3,572 last year, 20 times the level two years earlier, as more civilians are killed by Nato forces than by the Taliban and suicide bombings climbed to a record 140. The Kabul press last week predicted a major Taliban offensive in the spring.

- A recent New York Times article (Feb 24, 2007) confirmed a million pounds of bombs were dropped in Afghanistan from January to September 2007.

- To accommodate this appetite for militarism, the budget at Canada's Department of National Defense (DND) will balloon to $25 billion by 2010 (almost double its level two years ago).

- Afghanistan is indisputably worse off after seven years of foreign military occupation, and currently holds the lowest GDP per capita in the world.

- The UN notes that 70% have no access to safe drinking water, 88% have no access to reasonably sanitary living conditions, and 25% of children don't live beyond the age of 5. Women and children, given the presence of US-armed warlords, are at extreme risk.

- Meanwhile, Afghanistan is once again the world's biggest producer of opium, 93 percent of the world supply. President Karzai's brother is a famous druglord in Kandahar province.

- Malalai Joya recently wrote that:

" ...Under the nose of NATO troops and Canadian troops, the situation of women is getting worse day by day. More women than ever are committing suicide by self-immolation.

Recently, in Laghman province, a woman burned herself in front of the courthouse because she could not get justice.

The case of Parwez Kambakhsh, who remains in prison, shows that there is no freedom of speech in my country, even though it is guaranteed in our constitution.

Just this winter, more than 1000 people died from the cold, because of poverty. Some women have been forced to sell their babies for only ten dollars just to get enough money to survive. Many of their houses had been bombed and their husbands and families dead.

- Seamus Milne, a reporter for the UK Guardian newspaper, recently offered this judgement:

“For the majority of Afghans, occupation has meant the exchange of obscurantist theocrats for brutal and corrupt warlordism, along with rampant torture and insecurity; while even the early limited gains for women and girls in some urban areas, offset by an explosion of rape and other violence against women, are now being reversed. The meaning of "liberation" under foreign occupation can be measured by the death sentence passed last month on a 23-year-old student for blasphemy after he downloaded a report on women's rights from the Internet.”