Several weeks of worse than usual attacks against targets inside the Afghan capital city of Kabul have several major aid agencies announcing that they are planning temporary withdrawals from the country.
How temporary remains to be seen, but most believe they’ll be back at some point, when the latest surge in violence moves back out of the capital, where most of them are based.
Afghanistan has seen nearly as many aid workers killed this year as the whole rest of the world combined, and the perception of these groups working hand-in-hand with the NATO occupation has made them a target in a way they wouldn’t be in most warzones.
The problem of suspicion toward aid workers is compounded in Afghanistan by the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011, as it was revealed that his death was the result of a CIA plot in which they pretended to be vaccination workers in neighboring Pakistan to collect the DNA of locals and test them for potential terrorists.
Good. Afghanistan's new President should, but probably won't, refuse to let any NGO back unless they can guarantee they are no longer riddled with wolves among the sheep.
USAID seems to be one that always stays til the bitter end. To many of those bureaucrats are empire builders and don't give a rats butt for the Afghans they claim to help. It's only been a few years back that a local Agriculture specialist from Arkansas went there with the idea of improvingthe nut production of their Persian Walnuts/AKA English Walnuts. He always had two choppers full of Blackwater gunfighters withhim or he would have been dead very fast. There are dozens of scams like this and now we find that the US will continue to fight on the side of a corrupt government in their civil war against the Taliban. t