Kapisa Road Gets Taleban Blessing

Dozens of men are hard at work on an unmade road in Kapisa province, north of the Afghan capital Kabul, spreading gravel brought in by trucks in preparation for the final asphalting.

“This is a very happy occasion, to see the young people of Tagab district working so devotedly on this road,” truck driver Mohammad Qais said, parking by the roadside after dumping his load of gravel. “Soon we will have a paved road. In the past, we had to put a sick person on the back of a donkey or on a stretcher and walk for hours to reach hospital, always uncertain whether the patient would get there in time.”

Laughing, Mohammad Qais said, “God bless the Taleban for giving us permission to work on this road. Otherwise who would have dared work here?”

A “malik” or tribal leader called Amirullah pointed out the relaxed mood among the road-builders.

“The reason there’s no fear is that the Taliban authorised the work – if they’d opposed it you wouldn’t find a soul here right now,” he said. “This is a very good thing the Taliban have done, because winter is coming and people in Tagab are illiterate and unemployed. This project means the area will see construction and people can earn a living.”

Progress on the road is the result of a deal which communities in Kapisa province have struck with the insurgents, who granted permission for the work to go ahead in safety.

In the past, anyone doing development work was vulnerable to attack here, as is still the case in other parts of Afghanistan.

But locals say a show of strength in the autumn made it possible for them extract a promise from insurgents not to obstruct road-building.

The Taleban, meanwhile, say they granted permission out of goodwill.

Whatever the truth, the fact that it is the Taleban who decide whether public works can go ahead is a measure of their growing power even in provinces like Kapisa, far from the battlefields of southern Afghanistan.

Residents of Kapisa’s Nejrab district drove the insurgents out after two engineers from roadbuilding project were kidnapped at the end of August. When the Taleban failed to free their captives, the local community took up arms and secured their release in a brief pitched battle. 

Local community leaders from Tagab as well as Nejrab district then began talking to the Taleban to persuade them to stop blocking projects that benefited the area.

Haji Mohammad Khan, a tribal leader from the Dadazai area of Tagab, said the negotiations were difficult and were conducted both by delegations of influential figures, and by individuals holding one-to-one meetings with Taleban commanders.

“The discussions focused on the construction of schools, clinics, bridges, canals, sewers, dams, and floodwater restraining – all of which are for the public good,” he said. “They told us they would discuss it among themselves and let us know. After that, they allowed us to carry out welfare projects.”

The acting governor of Kapisa province, Mohammad Sharif, expressed satisfaction with the outcome – the removal of security threats to ongoing work in the Alasay, Tagab and Nejrab districts, and the prospect that more development projects can take place in the region without fear of attack.

“The Taleban realise that these projects benefit them, too, so they are no longer interfering in and obstructing public welfare projects. The engineers, labourers and drivers can work with peace of mind and without fear,” he said.

One of the roadworkers, a young man called Sharifullah, stopped digging a rainwater drainage channel long enough to tell IWPR, “It’s a great thing a paved road is being built in Tagab, and it’s also a good opportunity for us to earn a living.”

“When roads were being built in the past, there was always the fear of Taleban bomb and rocket attacks, but now they’ve given this project the nod.”

For their part, the insurgents admit to a change of heart, but insist this was an internal policy decision rather than a concession forced by angry local residents.

A Taleban commander in Kapisa, who declined to be named, acknowledged that talks had taken place with local leaders, but said the decision was taken completely independently by the leadership.

But he did acknowledge that past attacks on development projects had alienated people.

“The real problem was because we opposed public welfare projects, some people in Tagab turned against us. The Taleban don’t want people to be unhappy with them,” he said.

The Taleban movement were not opposed to public construction projects, he continued, and only ever attacked schools, clinics and other sites because Afghan government troops had placed defensive checkpoints there.

Now, he said, “we have a plan under which permission has been granted to public welfare projects. We only oppose projects that are connected to the military – those we will never allow to materialise.”

It has not always been like that. Kapisa has experienced its fair share of insurgent attacks on projects associated with the government or its international allies, and locally-hired workers have often been the victims.

The province was so overrun by Taleban that anyone working on development projects or paid by an aid group was likely to be intimidated, abducted or murdered.

The district government head in Nejrab, Soltan Mohammad Sapai, said a young man involved in a road-laying project was abducted by insurgents last year. His body was later found hanging from a tree, full of gunshot wounds.

Professor Haysari, who lectures in literature and linguistics at Kapisa’s Al-Biruni University, recalled how he was abducted by the Taleban after running a training course with NGO funding.

During several days of captivity, he was threatened with being shot, hanged, or thrown down a well. His captors eventually made a 20,000 US dollar ransom demand, which relatives were able to scrape together to secure his release.

Ajmal, a young man from Kapisa, realises that people are happy with the new deal, but said it would never have happened without the insurgents being forced into it.

“There were a lot of problems with reconstruction projects in the past because the anti-government forces opposed them, but since the Taliban have allowed such projects to go ahead, people are really happy,” he said.

Ajmal is sceptical about Taleban goodwill, since he witnessed the killing last year of two men working on a small bridge paid for by an NGO.

Wadir Safi, who lectures in law and political science at Kabul university, says the fact that people are having to deal direct with the Taleban in the first place shows how little control the Afghan government exercises on the ground.

He warns that more direct negotiations to solve local problems are likely. “This is a reflection of the government’s weakness,” he concluded.

Abdul Alim Ayar, spokesman for Kapisa’s governor, insists the deal is a “success for government”, which can “implement a project without paying bribes to the opposition and without them derailing the project.”

“It’s true that it does appear to indicate Taleban success, but it isn’t a failure of government, either. I mean, the government has a policy of letting local people implement development projects,” he said.

Social affairs analyst Habibullah Rafi believes events in Kapisa demonstrate why government should place its trust in local people’s ability to hammer out sensible deals. Repeated in other regions, it could even lead to a grassroots peace process.

“With the same kind of approach and unity in other parts of the country, it would be hard for the Taleban to oppose the reconstruction process,” he said.

Three stretches of road are currently being built in Kapisa, and local officials hope the route will provide a viable bypass for goods vehicles travelling between the north and south Afghanistan which would normally get caught up in traffic around Kabul.

Sayed Ahmad, owner of one of the construction companies working on the new roads, says now that security threats have been eliminated, the road-building is going well. Every time the construction team arrives at another village, it provides employment to a squad of local men.

“If the Taleban hadn’t given permission to implement this project, we wouldn’t be here,” he said. It looks like the Taleban are keeping their promise.”

Another resident, Azizullah, said the insurgents had even taken charge of the road planning process.

“They’re now saying that houses, orchards and fields that lie in the path of the road as shown on the map will have to be sacrificed, and that people will just have to accept it without objecting. If anyone has anything to say about it, they’ll have a chat with them,” he said.

Maiwand Safi is an IWPR-trained journalist in Afghanistan.