Civil Society and Infrastructure (to be edited)

The presenter clicked through pictures shown on the screen. We were sitting at Columbia University, it was 2004. The pictures were of Baghdad from 2002-2003. I had been somewhat bored by the presentation up until then but once the pictures came up, my stomach turned into a complete knot. My face dropped. The guy across the room who had smiled at me when I came in, looked back and in his face I could see the impact of my own countenance. I felt pale.

One of the pictures was of the palace. It transported me to view from the Ministry of Irrigation, Water Resources and Environment in Afghanistan where I worked the year before. The view was of the two palaces nestled at the bottom of the mountains in Kabul. The palaces were skeletons and though only their form remained, it was apparent that they were once beautiful, magnificent, royal places. They were teasers almost, letting you know of the type of peace that once existed that allowed sufficient time for such palaces to be built and lived in. And then you came closer to the buildings and all you saw was bullets, bombed in walls, and all of this from a bit of distance because there were still mines throughout the building. It was a sobering image of the past and present, of failures, of war and peace.

Adding to my utter sickness, was the pictures of streets, street lamps, exit ramps. I had spent my year in Afghanistan obsessed with infrastructure. Good old fashioned infrastructure. Roads and dams. I thought about dams practically every day. How to build them, how to get money for them, who to build them, how to get money for them, who to build them, who to build them. This task was impossible not just because the development aid agencies were on 2-3 project cycles, not just because they couldn’t imagine giving 20 million to one project in one province only, not just because every project was politically motivated. This task was impossible because of security, because of the brain drain, because of the lack of local investment. Seeing the fancy and clean roads in the pictures of Baghdad made me sad because I knew they would be gone in an instant and never be built with the same amount of resources for a long time.

In America we haven't thought about dams since the Hoover Dam, (actually Hoover was finished in 1935, the last big dam built in the US was finished in 1979) we don't do long term projects like that anymore. We do three year projects. But you can't build a dam in Afghanistan in 3 years, you need 10 years and you need 10 years worth of security, 10 years worth of money, 10 years worth of steady and skilled workers and managers. These things don't exist. Well, as far as I am concerned they don't.

And the bureaucracies in the US/West don't care so much anymore because we don't really remember what it is like not to have a dam or a road that leads to a market, to a city, to a port. And to be honest, why would the West care, it isn’t their country, it isn’t their people they are accountable to. They answer to their own voters. And we don't remember that without roads we wouldn't have an economy. Or we don't have the timeline or attention span for it. This is not to disparage the US, it seems like it is just the way of the world now, our timelines and resources are shorter. Our vision is limited because we have electricity, dams, and roads.

During my time in Afghanistan I visited Tajikistan with a handful of engineers and managers from the Ministry. We were attending a conference and took a day trip to the Nurek Dam which is a legendary peice of infrastructure. It is 300 metres/984 feet high, which is the highest dam in the world. It beats the Hoover dam which sits at 223 metres.

The Hoover took 4 years to build, apparently the Nurek dam took 19 years. Hoover provides 2,074 megawatts of electricty, Nurek provides 2.7 gigawatts. Nurek cover 99% of the whole country's electricity. When they gave us the tour, we walked straight into the dam into an operation room that resembled all too closely the front deck of the seventies version of Star Trek. There were flashing lights, lots of buttons, and everything looked retro. But it was an impressive set-up. Talking to a friend who works on World Bank loans for dams, she said nobody would ever fund a project like Nurek again, the net present value would never be positive in the cost benefit analysis of the project.

I meander. The point here is that these projects take a long time, a lot of investment and have a huge benefit to these countries. In Afghanistan several of these dam projects were started in the 50's and 60's and some of them were even finished. Electricity was going to become a reality. But the war happened. Now the dams are all half finished or bombed through. Convincing any donor to pay for them, even back in 2003, was impossible.

But lets say dams are bad, bad for the environment, hard to do, not worth it. How about roads? Roads are ridiculously important and good ones are hard to build. These countries don't take taxes to pay for them and sometimes they don't have the technology. I remember what my friend said one day as we were riding in my car in Nashvile. He develops real estate in Nicaragua, and as we were about to get off an exit ramp he noted that it cost at least $500,000 just to build the exit ramp we speeded off of. These things were on his mind because he had been trying to get some built in Nicaragua so that people would have access to his properties.

So when I see the infrastructure in Iraq ripped apart, I get ill. Because I know its close to impossible to rebuild. Which leads me to Iran...

Bombing Iran.

There are million reasons not to bomb Iran. But I have two: infrastructure and civil society. Without roads people can't go to school, without electricity, an isolated country like Iran can't turn on their computers to see what is going on in the rest of the world, without roads people can't run their businesses, without water people can't grow food. Without electricity, roads, and water people can't worry about democracy. Bombing Iran kills democracy. In the 80s Iran was in an 8 year war with Iraq. The war injured or killed close to a million people and ruined a lot of the country's infrastructure. During the war the country was in a state of shock and survival. People couldn't worry about democracy or freedom. In the 90s people started to feel safe again, though depleted. In the 2000s we have a country with a civil society that is bubbling, growing, changing, evolving despite the harsh restrictions.

An example of this civil society is the recent story of the girl in Zanjan. She is in university. A teacher threatens her that if she doesn't satisfy his sexual demands of her, he will fail her. She tells her male friends. They come up with a plan to film him making these moves on her. And they do, they catch him undoing her chador. And suddenly the whole university knows and there is a protest of 3000 people according to AFP.

Though organizing is hard in Iran because it gives the government a target to dismantle, the Islamic Student Organization of the university, which had been recently banned, seems to be leading the protests. They have asked for an apology from the Ministry of Education and the removal of the harrasser who is also the vice-chancellor of the university.

This week the government puts the girl in jail and blames her. The protests continue. The youth, the society is aware, is growing, is doing its bit of civic action in whatever way it can despite the ridiculous restrictions on people's general freedoms. Another great example is Earth day. Several local environmental organizations ran a campaign to get as many bloggers as possible to post the environmental day emblem on their blogs. In a country with 75,000 bloggers, that can be a decent campaign.

This civil society did not exist before. It has never been so grass roots, so spread out through the country, so dynamic. Its new, and its crucial for political development in the country. If Iran gets bombed, the government has an excuse to quiet everyone in the interest of self preservation. So while the government can be down right scary at times, the people are finally getting to a point to determine the trajectory of their country. Give them time (like 30 years) and a home grown democracy will result. But they need stability to deliver that.