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Eminent Afghan and international figures had encouraged citizens to defy the Taliban and vote in the elections. Yet, as a casualty in the process, Mr Mohammed and his friends say he has received no official support (On his way to the polling station he was held by Taliban fighters, beaten brutally, and then had his nose and ears slashed off.).

Mr Mohammed said his family had borrowed 20,000 Afghanis (around £250) from a local money lender to tide them over and buy medicine for him in the capital, Kabul.

"We have to pay back 40,000 Afghanis in three months," he said. "I do not know how we are going to do that, I think we will have to sell things. I do not know when I'll work again.

"Poor people suffer in this country, I do not know whether the elections will change that. I do not think I will try to vote again, I am now very frightened."

Tirado daqui.

Afeganistao: em perdimento

The Taliban have regained control over the southern half of Afghanistan and their front line is advancing daily, a group closely monitoring the Afghan situation said in a report this week. [...]

"We are seeing a humanitarian disaster," said Emmanuel Reinert, executive director of the Senlis Council [an international policy think-tank with offices in Kabul, London, Paris and Brussels.]. "There are around Kandahar now camps with people starving, kids dying almost every day, and this is obviously used by the Taliban to regain the confidence of the people, and to regain control of the country."

The poppy-eradication program has been a disaster, he said. "It is a direct attack on the livelihood of the farmers, so there is a clear connection between the eradication and this humanitarian crisis. All this is being used by the Taliban to say ... 'When we were there we were maybe hard and cruel, but you could feed the family; now look what's going on.' They are more and more providing support [and] social services to the local population." [...]

Hunger is leading to anger, the report says, adding that lack of funding from the international community means the Afghan government and the United Nations World Food Program are unable to address Afghanistan's hunger crisis. "Despite appeals for aid funds, the US-led international community has continued to direct the majority of aid funds towards military and security operations." [...]

The rise of the Taliban is rapid, he said. "You cannot make peace with the real command of the Taliban. We have to attack the root cause of the growing power of the Taliban, which is poverty [and] the counter-narcotics policy. We have to cut the Taliban from their base so that they will become what they were five years ago, a very small group of isolated terrorists. That's not the case anymore. Now they are a large part of the population because of the failure of the development policy."

Reinert said: "In a year we will have a situation where the legitimacy of the Kabul government will be weakened to a point where [it] will not be able to [keep] the country together."


Sanjay Suri, Asia Times Online, 8 de Setembro