(Oct. 7th)
Last month’s elections in Afghanistan, intended to codify democracy’s arrival only laid bare the corruption and venality of the Karzai regime. New U.S. commander for Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, just finished an exhaustive military assessment that essentially recapitulated the “surge” strategy of Iraq in a land that is nothing like Iraq.
President Obama, who has only spoken with his top commander once since he took office, is looking for any option other than further escalation, but faces pressure from the military, the punditry and the Democrats’ own long-running insistence that this war is a “war of necessity.”
Last month, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen offered his own blunt assessment:
“The problem isn’t that we are bad at communicating or being outdone by men in caves. Most of them aren’t even in caves. The Taliban and al Qaeda live largely among the people… I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”
Mullen’s missive about America‘s lack of credibility among the common people is unlikely to generate any immediate changes. And so, as the most powerful men in the world haggle over military strategy, the real needs of people in the region — those whose poverty, desperation and lack of infrastructure enables the militants’ ferocious success — continue to go unmet.
But far away from the war rooms and think tanks, there are those who are trying. Faizan Ahmad is one of them.
Ahmad, who was born in the congested city of Karachi, Pakistan, graduated from the University of Dayton with degrees in physics and mechanical engineering this year. He teamed up with an expert in solar energy, Dr. Richard Komp (pictured right), to embark on an ambitious program to cultivate the groundwork for solar power by training young men and setting up grassroots assembly industries in Pakistan.
Last July, with little more than $3,000, he helped supervise a small photovoltaic pilot project that employed young Pakistanis to bring solar power to areas with poor infrastructure, with the support of Pakistani NGOs and the government’s Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB).
Ahmad says it was a no-brainer to make the project happen: “All that was needed was some organization and channeling of energies in the right direction.”
And, one might add, helpful connections: Ahmad’s grandmother runs an NGO called Galaxy of Youth, which operates a girls’ school that served as the solar cell workshop; his father is a member of a key association of Pakistani engineers, the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Pakistan (IEEEP).
Ahmad headed to Karachi a month early to help make preparations for Dr. Komp. When Komp arrived, Faizan said, “He was enthusiastically received everywhere. I was surprised that hardly anyone asked where he was from while we were roaming the busy markets downtown.”
Ahmad explains that local Pakistani organizations recruited 22 poor and unemployed participants for the project, most of whom were in their twenties. Reflecting some of the difficulties and realities of Pakistan, two participants were recent refugees from the Swat Valley.
The trainees approached the task of constructing solar power modules (to be sold to local residents) with enthusiasm. “There were no issues of disputes or disagreements,” Ahmad says. “It was quite interesting in a way. Given the well-defined class relations in Pakistan, everything was quite egalitarian.”
The point of such solar power projects, Ahmad noted in his grant proposal, is to help close the gap confronting poor countries with overwhelming energy needs and decrepit infrastructure. For instance, in Karachi — a teeming city of 15 million people — the government frequently cuts power during predetermined hours, sometimes for more than 12 hours a day. Solar panels provide clean electricity with little need for maintenance; they operate silently and the sunny climate of most of Pakistan makes it a particularly suitable choice.
Ahmad hopes that the success of the workshop in Karachi can be replicated in more rural parts of the country, where the need is even greater. Even though it was just a pilot, he says that the relative ease with which people can be trained to make the modules can spur small businesses and help provide basic lighting for homes.
He believes that such small-scale projects, nurtured locally and at the grassroots level, offer an alternative to the foreign corporate investment that leads to a smattering of KFC and McDonald’s restaurants but nothing that addresses poverty. “We don’t need foreign development experts who are overpaid and prefer to crunch numbers in offices rather than spend any time in the field,” Ahmad adds.
Given the scant resources and manpower, it requires no great insight to observe that projects like this one are not going to single-handedly erase poverty or illiteracy among unemployed youth — the known breeding grounds of militancy. Such small steps, however, are closer to the solution than the deadly footprints left by massive weaponry, or the endless string of meaningless apologies for civilian losses caused by such weapons.
As Adm. Mullen wrote, “To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate.”
