PRT/KUNDUZ - PRT/KUNDUZ: VISITING THE

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 05 KABUL 003683 SIPDIS SIPDIS, SENSITIVE STATE FOR SCA/FO (DAS GASTRIGHT),SCA/A, S/CRS, SCA/PB, S/CT, EUR/RPM STATE PASS TO USAID FOR AID/ANE, AID/CDHA/DG NSC FOR AHARRIMAN, KAMEND OSD FOR BREZINSKI CENTCOM FOR CG CFC-A, CG CJTF-76, POLAD REL NATO/AU/NZ/ISAF E.O. 12958 N/A TAGS: PREL PGOV PTER AF SUBJECT: PRT/KUNDUZ - PRT/KUNDUZ: VISITING THE REMOTE DISTRICTS OF NORTHERN BADAKHSHAN BY WAY OF TAJIKISTAN KABUL 00003683 001.2 OF 005 (SBU) SUMMARY: : PRToff and political assistant made an unprecedented trip to the Nusai district of Badakhshan province August 5, becoming the first members of any PRT to set foot in what is one of the most remote and isolated districts in Afghanistan. Nusai, located at the northern tip of Badakhshan province, cannot be reached by vehicle from Afghanistan, but thanks to a two-year-old bridge built by the Aga Khan foundation over the river Pyanj, the district is accessible from Tajikistan. While appreciative of the bridge and the economic opportunities it offers (including a weekly joint bazaar),officials in Nusai are desperate for a road that will connect them to the rest of Afghanistan. PRToff and political assistant also visited Shighnan district, located in northeast Badakhshan, August 6 via another Aga Khan-built bridge from Tajikistan. Unlike Nusai, Shighnan is already connected by a road to the provincial capital of Feyzabad, but because of winter snowfall, the road is only open three months per year. Shighnan officials boast that their district, dominated by Ismaili Shias, is one of best educated in Afghanistan. Burqas are unknown in this district, where women dress much like their counterparts across the river in Tajikistan. END SUMMARY. HARD TO GET THERE FROM HERE -------------- --- ¶2. (SBU) Nusai, a district of 24,000 located at the northern tip of Badakhshan province bordering Tajikistan, is completely inaccessible by vehicle from Afghanistan. The only way to reach Nusai by vehicle is from Tajikistan (near the town of Kalaykhum) via a one-lane suspension bridge over the Pyanj River built by the Aga Khan foundation two years ago. As a result, no member of PRT Kunduz or Feyzabad had ever visited this district before. When Afghan officials visit (as Badakhshan Governor Majid did a few months ago),they come by helicopter. The neighboring northern districts of Maimai (also known as Darwaz Bala) and Shukai are even more isolated, as there is still no road connecting them to Nusai or any other part of Afghanistan. The only way to get to and from these mountainous districts is by walking or riding a donkey. The locals report that it is a 10-day walk south overland from Nusai to the provincial capital of Feyzabad along a trail that is impassable several months a year due to heavy snowfall. The only way to get to Feyzabad during those months is to follow a rougher and longer path that runs along the Pyanj River. ¶3. (U) Shighnan, a district of 34,000 located along the northeast border of Badakhshan province, has a road connection to Feyzabad, but this road is open only three months a year. PRT Feyzabad visits the district regularly during this time, but the district is effectively cut off from vehicular traffic from Afghanistan the rest of the year. As in the case of Nusai, the only year-round vehicular access to Shighnan is from Tajikistan (near the city of Khorog) via a one-lane suspension bridge over the Pyanj River built by the Aga Khan foundation five KABUL 00003683 002.2 OF 005 years ago. ¶4. (U) The district centers of both Nusai and Shighnan -- where the district manager and chief of police have their offices -- are located along the Pyanj River, within just a few kilometers of the bridge crossing points. This made visiting each of the two districts from Tajikistan a relatively easy day trip. JOINT BAZAARS AT THE BRIDGES -------------- --- ¶5. (SBU) The bridges built by Aga Khan to connect these remote Afghan districts to Tajikistan have certainly reduced their isolation and opened up new possibilities for trade and commerce. There are, for example, joint bazaars on the Tajik side of both bridges at least once a week. Afghans can cross the bridges and buy and sell items at the bazaar without a passport or visa, although they are restricted to the bazaar area. According to officials in Nusai, Afghans must pay a small fee to cross the bridge there. The fee is supposed to be a fifth of a Tajiki Somoni per person (about 6 U.S. cents),but Nusai officials told PRToff that the Tajiki border guards usually charged a full Somoni (30 U.S. cents). ¶6. (SBU) PRToff arrived at the bridge to Nusai on a Saturday morning, the day of the weekly bazaar, and found a lively market with a significant number of Afghan shoppers, including Nusai District Manager Abdul Raqib Nawid and Police Chief Marza Kareem. Nawid opened his wallet, revealing that most of the money he carried these days was Somonis rather than Afghanis. Kareem said about 200 to 250 Afghans cross the bridge each week to shop at or sell goods at the bazaar. Both complained, however, that many staples are not available at the bazaar, including diesel, cotton and flour. Therefore, they must be bought in from Feyzabad by donkey. Not surprisingly, prices are extremely high in Nusai and Shighnan, even during the summer, when access to Feyzabad is relatively good. PRToff found, for example, that melons in the Shighnan market cost 90 Afghani each (about $1.80),or more than three times as much as they cost in Kunduz. ¶7. (SBU) While offering great potential, the joint bazaars are still largely one-way affairs: the Tajiks are selling and the Afghans are buying, but not vice versa. The Afghans simply do not produce much of anything that can be sold at the bazaars. Most residents of these districts are subsistence farmers, literally living on the side of a mountain with very little arable land on which to grow crops. They cannot grow enough food to feed themselves, much less produce excess for selling at the bazaar. Aga Khan agricultural specialists are encouraging local farmers to grow fruit and nut trees, which are more suited for the arid and mountainous terrain than traditional crops like wheat, but such orchards are still not widespread. Unfortunately, there is no rug or other handicraft production in these two districts. Officials in Shighnan said that most of KABUL 00003683 003.2 OF 005 the goods that Afghans sell at their joint bazaar are Pakistani products brought from Feyzabad -- teapots, fabrics, TVs, videotape players. Because there are generally no custom duties on the items Afghan sell at the bazaar (as long as they do not bring large quantities of goods),the Afghans can apparently sell these goods at a lower price than it costs Tajiks to import them directly from Pakistan. ¶8. (U) Officials from both districts complain there are no joint bazaars on the Afghan side of the bridges, but until the Afghans have something substantive to sell, there seems to be little point in actively pursuing that. Nonetheless, the German development agency GTZ plans to build a small market on the Afghan side of the bridge at Shighnan so that the weekly Saturday bazaar can be alternated between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. At the Ishkeshem border crossing, which lies about 100 kilometers south of Khorog/Shighnan, the dilemma about where to locate the bi-weekly bazaar has been resolved by holding it on an island in the middle of Pyanj river, a no- man's land which belongs neither to Afghanistan nor Tajikistan. DESPERATE FOR JOBS AND ROADS -------------- -------------- ¶9. (SBU) Due to the lack of jobs and economic opportunities in their district, officials in both districts said that many men leave their families for months at a time to work as unskilled laborers in nearby provinces, or even as far away as Iran. In Nusai, officials estimated unemployment at 90%. While officials appreciate the bridge link to Tajikistan as a short-term way to relieve the isolation of their districts, they desperately want to be linked to the rest of Afghanistan via roads that are open year-round. They believe that this is the key to helping solve many of their economic difficulties. They also believe that they have not received their fair share of attention from the international community or from donors because they do not grow poppy or present any serious security problems. Nonetheless, they acknowledge that they have received significant assistance from the Aga Khan foundation (i.e., a clinic, professional training, reforestation, irrigation canals, etc.), much of which is funded by GTZ. PRToff did not have an opportunity to venture very far by vehicle into either district, but found that the main road in each district center was little more than a deeply pitted jeep track that mostly ran along the Pyanj river, with steep grades in some places exceeding 25%. In other places, the road was completely inundated by the river, making passage by anything less than a high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle impossible. SHIGHNAN'S ISMAILI CULTURE -------------- ¶10. (U) The population of Shighnan consists mainly of Ismaili Shias, who have a reputation for religious tolerance and for putting a high value on education. The most obvious manifestation of the KABUL 00003683 004.2 OF 005 Ismaili culture is that women in the district generally do not wear burqas. Women seen walking on the streets of the district center of Shighnan wore long, brightly colored dresses, very similar to those of their Tajik counterparts just across the Pyanj river. Unlike in most other parts of Badakhshan, they made little or no attempt to hide their faces from passers-by. ¶11. (U) But what Shighnan District Manager Zainullabudin was most proud of was the level of education in the district, which has 12 high schools and a teaching training center. He claimed that 85% of the adult population was "educated," i.e., that they could read and write. If true, that would put Shighnan far above the average literacy rate for Afghanistan. Unfortunately, many of the schools in Shighnan, which were built by the local community decades ago, are in a bad state of disrepair due to old age. The district manager took PRToff to one high school, originally built 58 years ago, in which the roof has collapsed in several places due to rotted support beams. Tents have been erected over the building to protect students from the elements. The school has no desks or chairs, so students must sit on the floor. (Comment: While it is not unusual for primary school children in Afghanistan to sit on the floor, many Afghan high schools have desks and chairs for older students.) While acknowledging some emergency financial help from PRT Feyzabad for fixing this and other schools, Zainullabudin said far more assistance is required. GETTING TO THE BRIDGES -------------- ¶12. (U) It took several weeks and the generous help of Embassy Dushanbe to organize this trip, given various Tajik requirements. Not only does one need a multiple-entry Tajik visa, but also a special permit to enter the Gorno-Badakhshan region, where the border crossings are located. The so-called GBAO permit is a hold-over requirement from the Soviet period when this was an autonomous region. Both the multiple-entry visa and GBAO visa are only issued by the MFA in Dushanbe and they must be applied for weeks in advance of departure. The first crossing point (into Nusai) is some 420 kilometers east from Dushanbe, an all-day drive. The last part of this drive runs directly along the Pyanj river, which forms the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan for several hundred kilometers. The second crossing point (into Shighnan) is a further 240 kilometers along this same road. At the narrowest parts of the Pyanj river, Afghanistan is literally only a stone's throw away. One can plainly see the low-slung, flat- roofed mud houses so characteristic of rural Afghanistan and can wave to people on the other side. ¶13. (U) The border along the Pyanj offers a striking juxtaposition between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. On the Tajik side of the river is a paved road (albeit in very bad condition in many parts) with omnipresent electrical poles and wires KABUL 00003683 005.2 OF 005 along its entire length. On the Afghan side of the river, there is no road or electrical lines, but rather only a thin, but distinctive dirt trail that winds along the cliffside. ¶14. (U) Typically, we crossed the border into Afghanistan in the morning and returned to Tajikistan in the afternoon before the border post closed at 4 or 5 p.m. One of the biggest and unexpected challenges each morning was obtaining diesel for the two vehicles. Gas stations were few and far between in this area of Tajikistan, and most did not sell diesel. At Kalaykhum's single gas station, the attendant told us he had only 50 liters of diesel to sell, which he dumped into the tank from an assortment of different containers including a two-liter plastic soda bottle. In a typical scene in Khorog, we came across a fuel truck parked along the side road, selling gas directly to motorists. While the truck had no diesel (only regular gasolene),we were directed to a nearby house where we could buy what we needed. In Ishkeshem, we found out that quality of diesel sold in the bazaar was very poor, so we ended up buying 70 liters from the private stock of the local Aga Khan foundation office. As it turned out, we need not have been so worried about buying gas before the crossing into Afghanistan at Ishkeshem. The Afghan town of the same name just on the other side of the border had two brand-new filling stations within 200 meters of each other, both with plenty of diesel to sell. COMMENT -------------- ¶15. (SBU) The military component of PRT Feyzabad is very active in doing long-range patrolling throughout Badakhshan and it regularly visits most districts in the province. However, the extreme remoteness and terrain of the northern districts and the lack of a road severely limit the ability of the military to access this part of the province. This August 5-6 trip to the northern districts via Tajikistan is an excellent example of how the civilian component can complement the military effort and provide value-added to the PRT's mission. End Comment. NEUMANN