Many thanks Kathy for a reminding us of the realities of life at the 'coal face' where the Afghan poor majority live.
The spending on war for the 'national interest' of the rich is obscene.
Perhaps there is a safe channel for Obama to divert some of his war funds to the poor? Why should this be so difficult?

I have seen similar situations in the now peaceful East Timor, where there are supposed to be 300 NGO's working for the poor. The UN and foreign embassy staff (and we volunteers for that matter) live as well or better than they would in the West, their vehicles clogging the inadequate roads. And yet an agricultural college at the old Australian INTERFET base had only 2 working taps for 400 students, who had to perform their ablutions in the bush and wash in the river several hundred metres way. The problem - money. The 'budget' was barely enough for 2 meals per day per student (rice and water spinach).

It gave me small satisfaction to work with a few others to divert a few hundred dollars to buy taps, some poly pipe and cement and provide 8 stock water-style taps on concrete slabs so they could wash and collect fresh drinking water. It would cost only a hundred thousand dollars or so to reconstruct an entire sustainable plumbing and sewerage system. There's plenty of money there but somehow it just doesn't get on the ground where it's needed. A US NGO had provided 20 computers and the students were computer literate.....

The voice of the poor and disadvantaged in Afghanistan is increasingly being herd through NGO's like Afghan Peace Volunteers and through progressive media like On Line Opinion and TV programs like SBS TV Dateline and ABC Lateline .

Australians are increasing becoming aware of the plight of the poor and the very miserable return on investment they receive from the un-winnable war in Afghanistan. Even PM Gillard recognised this when she recently cut the defence budget and promised to increase Australian aid for Afghanistan at the NATO summit in Chicago.

At the end of the day, the Afghan people must be given the power to decide who runs their country and how it is governed without meddling from outside.

Given the level of poverty in the world, it is obscene the amount of money spent on wars. There is always money to kill people but little to feed them or attend to their medical needs.

Afghanistan will end up a replica of Iraq: poverty-stricken and destroyed. What ever the warmongering American touch they defile, despoil, contaminate.

Intelligent, informed people can see that the U.S. is the problem, not the solution. A country whose industries are based upon the manufacture of armaments and munitions and drones is not interested in peace or the world's poor or human rights.

When are the people of the world going to see what America truly is: a racist, rogue nation that is trying to control the world using military force!

http://dangerouscreation.com

Good article, the West spends Billion of dollars killing people and blowing their country to hell 'n back and then come in afterwards with a couple million to fix it back up, not even close to enough. Strange behaviour indeed, perhaps even repugnant.

"Roses1" also makes an excellent point about NGO's, we see it over here as we work as self funded volunteers in Cambodia. The difference ? We do it all of our own bat, pay for ALL our personal expenses out of our savings and the money we raise from our small community back home in Aus goes directly to the community here AND we have complete accountability by placing our accounts on line for anyone to read. We tried to get registered in Aus as a charity but the bureaucracy was mind boggling, so we do what we can and rather than paying a fortune in fees to the Aus. Government we use those funds directly to help out over here, where $100 can go a long way . It's interesting to see the millions wasted here by misdirected charity, the bug NGOs and the Aus. Government has comparatively lots of money, so they want to spend it, leading to incredible waste (the Aus Aid railway funding debacle here in Cambodia for example)and the local elite are enablers and complicit in that corruption.

We do little things, with good results and oddly we don't want large donations because it would be wasted, of course we would like to be 3 to 5 times the funds we have but no bigger (we have a few projects like solar power on remote village school rooves we can't fund due to a lack of donations), any bigger than that and we would become like the other wasteful organisations we see, eg UNICEF staff driving around in new Landcruisers and us on a 5 year old, worn out scooter or pushbike.

If people want to help or comment, here's us:
http://help-cambodia.blogspot.com/