Scientific Expedition to study glaciers on Mir Samir Afghanistan - 1965

Yesterday I got this message from Howard Horsely about going to Afghanistan as a young man.

"I was the youngest member of a scientific expedition to study the glaciers on Mir Samir in 1965. Such glaciers provide almost all the water to sustain most of the agriculture in Afghanistan. We climbed a number of neighbouring peaks and while we were there a Japanese team mounted a successful ascent of Mir Samir."



Howard Horsley
 
I found this very interesting article about Howard in the New Statesman.
 
Aid to Africa: who's counting?


Rosie Waterhouse

Published 12 September 2005


Howard Horsley is an idealist, committed to overseas aid. Over the years he has worked as a volunteer, a paid teacher and a VSO field officer in Africa. Then, in 1999, at the age of 54 and with a successful career as a headteacher in England behind him, he applied for a job with the Department for International Development (DfID). "I was thrilled by the expansion of the overseas aid programme under the newly elected Labour government and keen to make my expertise available," he recalls.

In May that year he took up a post managing the education field office (EFO) in Ghana, administering a British aid programme worth £50m over five years. He liked Accra, the capital, and made plans for his wife to join him, but within a few weeks he began to notice things at work that he didn't like. As months passed, he grew more and more concerned about what he describes as "lax financial controls, unchecked powers of patronage and the potential for mismanagement and corruption". He reported these concerns to DfID in London in e-mails, memos and telephone conversations. Yet, instead of seeing them investigated, Horsley was summarily sacked and denied a reference.

It was a personal calamity. For the past five years, this former head of a tough Grimsby comprehensive, who has a glowing Ofsted report on his record, has been unable to find work. With the vigorous support of the MP Austin Mitchell, who describes his treatment as "monstrous", Horsley has fought to have his case reviewed and his complaints investigated. Now he has decided to tell his story.

It is a story that raises important questions about DfID's control over aid spending - at a time when the G8 summit has just agreed to double aid to Africa by 2010, and when our government is assuring us that our aid money is not seeping away through corruption and poor management. And, while the government insists it has done nothing wrong, uncertainty remains about its past procedures and about the fate of no less than £18m in aid. More worrying still, it is now clear that Horsley was not the first British aid official in Accra to raise doubts about financial control.

At the time he went to Accra, Britain's policy for distributing aid had shifted from big projects to local programmes administered through the Ghana Education Service, with staff at the British education field office working alongside officials in the Ghanaian education ministry. Horsley soon heard complaints from other aid agencies, and from the Ghanaian minister and his officials, about the way money was spent and contracts awarded without adequate accounting or monitoring by DfID. Incidents included a request to authorise spending of £32,000 on office furniture, when the furniture had already been bought; the failure of DfID to provide the Ghanaian education minister with a full statement of how education aid was being spent, and the potential use of aid as, in Horsley's words, "a means of dispensing personal favours".

The most mysterious incident came after Horsley was told by the Ghanaian deputy education minister in August 1999 that Clare Short, the then secretary of state for international development, had pledged an extra £18m in aid. When none of this money turned up, Horsley made inquiries with the Ghanaian accountant general - who, he says, confirmed in September 1999 that it had been received by the government.

The money, however, did not find its way into the usual education aid channels, so Horsley, alarmed about the fate of such a sum and about the other problems he had found, wrote to London requesting a formal, independent investigation of the conduct of DfID affairs in Ghana.


Soon afterwards, on a working trip to northern Ghana, he caught typhoid and returned to Britain to recuperate. On his recovery he was called to a meeting at DfID headquarters on 6 January 2000. He thought this was to discuss the investigation he had requested and also to complete his midterm performance review, but he arrived to find that it was a disciplinary hearing. It didn't last long. Blamed for a breakdown in communication and a lack of coherence in the presentation of policy, he was sacked with immediate effect.

Horsley strenuously denied the charges and received strong support from international colleagues, but, when he returned to Ghana to assemble evidence for his appeal, he found that his filing cabinets had been emptied and his computer files professionally wiped. DfID then withdrew his formal right of appeal and threatened him with the Official Secrets Act if he spoke out.

Claiming protection as a whistle-blower under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, Horsley sought to have his dismissal investigated first by DfID itself and then at an employment tribunal. The tribunal said it had no jurisdiction because he had not been employed for long enough and had not lodged his Public Interest Disclosure Act claim soon enough. The civil service commissioners brushed him off, too, saying they could not investigate as DfID claimed he was employed on contract, not as a civil servant.

The case has outraged Austin Mitchell, who raised it in the House of Commons and has written to Hilary Benn, the current Secretary of State of International Development, asking for an independent inquiry. Mitchell told the New Statesman: "As a result of his attempt to blow the whistle on financial inadequacies and possible maladministration, this man has been out of a job for nearly six years and that's a monstrous way for DfID to behave. They made Howard a sacrificial victim. He was an embarrassment in raising these concerns. The proper procedure should have been to investigate complaints and tighten up procedures. They didn't do that."


One body that has investigated DfID aid to Ghana is the National Audit Office (NAO), which reported in a letter to Mitchell: "At no point . . . has any evidence emerged to suggest that financial impropriety or mismanagement occurred within DfID." But the letter added that "investigations revealed areas where the department might usefully tighten up its procedures and controls, which they are doing".


As for the mysterious £18m, the audit office initially said that DfID claimed no such amount had been paid to Ghana in 1999. Then, in May 2003, the NAO admitted that £18m had been paid, in 2000, as "budgetary support". It explained: "It follows that for payments of budgetary support it is not possible directly to answer the questions 'What was it for?' or 'How was it spent?', except to say that it added to the resources available to the government of Ghana." This is a remarkable admission: put bluntly, it means that neither DfID nor the NAO could say what became of £18m of British taxpayers' money.

Since that investigation, the NAO has tightened up accounting procedures for aid spending in general and for "budgetary support" in particular. Howard Horsley is entitled to some credit for this, though he has had no thanks for his efforts.

DfID maintains that any weaknesses in its financial procedures have been addressed and that Horsley's dismissal was "wholly related to his performance, which did not meet the requirements of the job". It says: "All parties across Whitehall have been satisfied that DfID acted correctly in relation to Mr Horsley's dismissal and found no evidence of financial impropriety."

Horsley authorised DfID to release documents to the New Statesman to clarify the grounds for dismissal. He says they prove that DfID never carried out the investigation he requested weeks before his dismissal and also that it ignored its own disciplinary procedures in sacking him.

But the story does not end there, for, in the course of his campaign, Horsley discovered he was not alone in raising concerns about aid to Ghana. His predecessor there had raised similar doubts about an "absence of checks and balances". Howard Tyers, who now works at Westminster University, has confirmed to the New Statesman that in his time at the Accra EFO he made "a number of complaints" about payments for an expensive office and also for Land Cruisers of an unnecessarily high specification, purchased without the usual tendering process.

Worryingly, after these complaints Tyers's tenure in Ghana also ended strangely. His contract ended in March 1999, but he asked for a three-month extension because he had to remain resident in Ghana, as his daughter was completing her A-levels. This request was rejected in London, and it was only after an appeal by the Ghanaian education ministry that he was allowed to stay. However, he was sidelined to a research project and denied access to the EFO. And, like Horsley, he found his computer files wiped.

The experiences of Horsley and his predecessor raise questions that should worry anyone who cares about aid. Does DfID respond properly to concerns about financial management? Does it ensure that new aid is spent wisely, with transparency and adequate financial controls? DfID says yes, but unless whistle-blowers are encouraged and protected, how can we be sure?

How does Horsley feel? "Angry that DfID has still held no one accountable for what was going on in Ghana; that no one has been held accountable for my entirely unjustified dismissal; that there has been no hearing, anywhere, on the merits of my case. And appalled that DfID can demand good governance in other countries and still fail to meet the most basic standards of good governance in its own internal practices." He is angry, too, at the waste of years of his career. Despite the emotional and financial costs, he remains determined not to let the matter drop.

Transparency International, which campaigns against corruption in aid and trade, would not comment on the case, but its executive director, Chandrashekhar Krishnan, was clear about one thing: "Any development organisation should have a policy of encouraging whistle-blowers and of ensuring that, if someone has suspicions to report, there is a mechanism to allow that person to express those concerns in a way which will not attract recriminations." The Horsley case does not seem to match that standard and it will deter, not encourage, future whistle-blowers.

Meaningless Language and Lessons Learned.

There are many disaster practicioners out there who have been through thick and thin, and are totally committed to Lesson's Learned. But who is charged with following through on Lessons Learned? Do we have Ministers of Lessons Learned?  Do we have Permanent Secretaries of Lessons Learned? Do international organistions have people in charge of Lessons Learned?

My former colleague Michael Stone, an authority on Afghanistan, Cantral Asia and,  a man who knows disaster relief and recovery. Here is a lecture he gave recently.

IMPROVING EMERGENCY RESPONSE

1. What I am about to say comes from directing emergency operations with the United Nations, Red Cross and NGOs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, former Yugoslavia, Georgia and Iraq. Also, I have chaired a number of coordination bodies, and reviewed emergency programmes in many parts of the world.

2. In this brief presentation, I want to introduce 5 areas of serious common error in needs assessments. Remember, if we get it wrong, people can die – in extreme cases, we may even kill them. I will then provide solutions for these errors, developed from my own experience, and conclude with something I am working on now which needs to be incorporated in all needs assessments.

3. The most serious errors:

A. Meaningless Language.

B. Failure to Distinguish Means from Ends.

C. Observation Altering Reality.

D. Lessons Not Learned.

E. Coordination Failure.

LANGUAGE.

a. If I could receive a euro for every report I’ve read, every appeal document, and especially every evaluation, I would be rich. English is my first language, and I’m good at it, but document after document contains phrases, indeed whole paragraphs, which are meaningless. Oh yes, there is great pressure on me to pretend I understand, otherwise I may give the impression I am thick. But no, so often the phrases and paragraphs are meaningless.

COLUMN 1       COLUMN 2                   COLUMN 3
STRATEGIC        COST-BASED              CAPACITY BUILDING
INTERACTIVE    LOGISTICAL                ALLIANCE
RESPONSIVE     DISCRETIONARY        RE-ENGINEERING
RECIPROCAL      EMPOWERING           VALUES
BENEFICIARY    VISIONARY                 BENCHMARK
FUNCTIONAL    PARTICIPATORY        PARADIGM

The above words are taken from recent reports. Moving right to left, in any combination, they give the appearance of sense, but are meaningless e.g. “responsive logistical alliance”, “functional empowering capacity building”, “strategic visionary benchmark”. They can even be reversed e.g. “benchmark empowering functional”

Meaningless language itself encourages illogical or impractical thinking. The following chart, informally called the Mother of All Charts, relates to the new US surge in Afghanistan. The chart was prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a leading international firm of management consultants.

The chart is mind-bogglingly awesome in its complexity and utter uselessness, and demonstrates admirably the problem of meaningless language encouraging illogical and impractical thinking.

 a. The problem, it seems to me, is that some of us don’t
Know what we are talking about. We think we do, but we don’t. The consequence can be formidable for the vulnerable in emergencies e.g. the failure of internationals to provide enough helicopters for the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir is partly the result of unintelligible needs assessments.

b. Language is important. For example, in recent years we have tended to talk of beneficiaries, rather than the most vulnerable. The two are not necessarily the same. A food distribution in an emergency, reported as reaching all beneficiaries, may have targeted millionaires!

ENDS AND MEANS.

a. In our world, we are here for one thing, to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, often in an emergency. That is the end. The means are the funds from donors, the structured organisation we may be part of, the tents, the medicines, the food and the vehicles for their delivery. But how often are the two confused! Some reports, some evaluations, and more seriously TORs, make no mention whatsoever of the most vulnerable.

b. This happens in development too. Recently I reviewed a counter narcotics programme for which $800m had been pledged. Initially, people said they were too busy to see us, but they had to, we reported directly to the donors. Yes, they were busy. About 300 were involved in various ways, working six days a week, firing
endless e mails at each other, meeting all hours of the day. But after two years, only $2m had been spent,
and most of this wasted. The mushroom project, for example, most unsuitable anyway, yielded a crop costing $27,000 a kilo! The end – to encourage farmers to turn away from the poppy – had been forgotten. The means dominated everything.

OBSERVATION ALTERING REALITY.

A. Here I would like to introduce my own adaptation of the Heisenberg Principle. Heisenberg, a father of Quantum Mechanics, made a disturbing discovery in the 1920s. That by looking at something, you alter its behaviour. His analogy was an atom under a microscope, the objective being to see the path of electrons around the nucleus. When you turn light on the slide to see the atom, the photons from the light knock the electrons into different orbits. Hence, his law that the act of observation alters what is seen.

B. We see this in so many ways in relation to needs assessments:

1. The Questionnaire, with the leading questions, encouraging one answer more than another.

2. The interviewer arriving at a destroyed village in a chauffer driven land cruiser, so obviously rich, powerful, foreign – it is all too likely the vulnerable people will provide the answer they think you want to hear.

3. The fact Finding Mission, so often a mix of relevant and irrelevant organisations for the situation, who strive for a consensus which signifies nothing. A UN response to an emergency I reviewed took three months to assemble 23 senior people from 10 different agencies. The recommendations came far too late for action, and were wrong anyway – they were based on a distorted timetable arranged by a Minister.

You know the sort of thing – with most funds going to a particular organisation for orphans, which just so happens to be run by the Minister’s brother.

In all these instances, and many others, the observer is altering reality, indeed creating a false reality. So many needs assessments are based on false realities as the act of observation altered what was seen.

LESSONS LEARNED.

A. No, they are not. I have seen this time and time again as a Consultant reviewing programmes, in particular on behalf of donors. The reasons are threefold.

1. Most organisations have no mechanism at an appropriate level for considering Report recommendations.

2. On the rare occasions when they do exist, there is no system for implementation of recommendations agreed. Some people don’t even make the distinction between agreement and implementation. To paraphrase Cervantes “It is a far cry from agreement to implementation”.

A third problem, arises from the meaningless language

I have already mentioned. Most recommendations are meaningless themselves. Like a bar of wet soap which
slips out of your hand. You know the sort of thing: “It is recommended steps are taken towards increasing
advocacy, enhancing synergy, promoting empowerment…” The list goes on. You can do absolutely nothing at all, and no one can prove you haven’t implemented such recommendations.

3. The general failure to learn and implement lessons results in the humanitarian and development world being littered by a repetition of mistakes. The wrong food in an emergency, the wrong medicines, clothes for the wrong season – or projects which destroy livelihoods e.g over supply of boats and nylon fishing nets. In a review I did on the tsunami, the mantra from so many beneficiaries was“First tsunami, then the foreigners”.

For those like me with some grey hair it is so frustrating to see the wheel continuously being reinvented, with the same mistakes being made that we made twenty years ago. A common definition of insanity is repeating the same, and expecting a different result.

COORDINATION.

1. We talk about it a lot. To outsiders, it looks as if it is happening. Generally, it is not. For two years I chaired the UN NGO coordination body for Afghanistan. So it seems to me, I know what I am talking about!

2. There are 2 key realities preventing real coordination:
a. Factually, the term itself implies some authority external to the organisation. From UN Agencies to the smallest of NGOs, each has its own constitution, its own sovereignty, an independent board to which most ultimately report. They cannot be told what to do by others.

b. Egos. Often, they are enormous. We have all met directors of operations, large and small, who are in love with power, and seek only their own glory. Shakespeare called this “the insolence of office”. They have to be the first into some emergency, they dominate coordination meetings if they attend them at all - often it is some junior. They claim in their reports to provide everything that is needed to all those in need e.g. I once led a major evaluation into the international response to the Kosovo crisis. Kosovo has a population of 2m. Adding reports of key players together, who mostly claimed comprehensive support to all beneficiaries, there had to be a population of about 22 million.

c. Real coordination, and the synergy which follows for the most vulnerable, is far more rare than is presented. Where it does happen, it usually comes down to the sociability, the friendliness and the hearts of key individuals.

SOLUTIONS.

1. I have spent some time on the problems of needs evaluation for two reasons:

a. It’s no use coordinating and integrating emergency assessments of different organisations if they are wrong.

b. The solutions are contained within the problems I have outlined.

2. Briefly:

a. With regard to unclear language: Let us be simple and clear. I know this is more difficult than being complex and long winded, but let us never speak or write an unclear sentence again, especially if we don’t understand it ourselves. Remember the old Chinese saying: “The less matter there is, the more substance there will be”.

b. With regard to means becoming more important than ends. Let us always keep in mind that we are here to identify and help the most vulnerable. So often, organisations work from their head offices to the most
vulnerable. They should work backwards, from the most vulnerable to the head office. Begin with the end
in mind. I always try to remember, that the most senior person in any humanitarian organisation is employed by the poorest, the most vulnerable people on earth. In a perfect world, their jobs would not exist. No one is
more important than the most vulnerable.

In an emergency, the whole point of our work is to meet a vulnerable person’s request. This may be
typified as “I need X goods in this quantity now” and “I will need X + Y + possibly z in this quantity for this
period”. Remember the words of the philosopher Diderot: “It is not enough to do good. Good must be
done well”.

c. In relation to our observation altering reality. Be conscious of the Heisenberg Principle in all we do. Watch those questionnaires to ensure each question is entirely objective, culturally sensitive and retains human dignity. Park your land cruisers on the edge of the village, walk in, be informal, go individually, listen – they know what they need far better than we do.

d. With regard to lessons not being learned. Let us not continue the mistake identified by the writer G.B. Shaw “Man learns from history that he learns nothing from history” For emergency needs assessments, appoint staff who have experience of running operations themselves, and who are capable of producing, with speed, clear and practical recommendations. Appoint consultants for evaluations with the same qualities. In relation to evaluations, take them seriously.

Establish a standing committee at director level for consideration of all evaluation recommendations. Clearly accept, perhaps with modification, or reject specific recommendations. Task mangers to implement recommendations with instructions to report to the standing committee on specific progress in three month’s time.

e. With regard to coordination, appreciate that agencies, organisations, NGOS have their own sovereignties. Get rid of the word coordination. Use cooperation instead. You will find this word emphasises the voluntary nature of working together, and works so much better.

In relation to egos. Remember Dostoyevsky’s immortal words: “Everybody is responsible to everyone for everything”. Appoint directors and mangers who are friendly, open, intelligent and with hearts. Those who realise they are there to help the most vulnerable and not themselves – who understand the enormous synergy, increasing significantly the impact of all we do, which arises from cooperation.

COMPOUND CRISIS.

1. I would like to conclude with a few words on something I am currently working on. It attempts to correct a serious failure in emergency needs assessments. I call it the Compound Crisis.

2. We respond usually to emergencies on an individual basis, as if they are one off. We are mistaken. Very often one disaster causes another, the second and third disasters often being more devastating than the first. Mathematics best illustrates the power of compounding.

THE POWER OF COMPOUNDING

 If offered a million Euros now, or one Euro which doubles every day for only a month, most of us would choose the former. We are wrong. One Euro doubling for a month is worth far, far more than Euro one million. The figure amounts to over one billion!

3. I saw the impact of compounding most recently in Tajikistan where I was UN Emergency Coordinator. An unprecedented cold winter with record snow falls caused a food and heating emergency. This was followed, in the spring, by a second emergency, sizeable floods and landslides. By the time summer came, agricultural output was at its lowest because of substantial seed destruction and high livestock mortality in winter. Unprecedented low rainfalls then encouraged an explosion of locusts. Record high locust storms destroyed record low agricultural production.

4. It is the poor who are hit by disaster, not the rich. With the compound effect of one disaster leading to another, the same people are being hit each time. It is like being a boxer, winning one fight, and then another opponent enters the ring – you survive, but then another and another enters the ring. The ability to survive each disaster diminishes. In the end, many will die.

5. As donations for humanitarian assistance are nearly always linked to newsworthy visibility, a Compound Crisis will be unnoticed internationally, and receive little or no funding. Yet, it may be compared to a silent tsunami. In the context of global warming, the Compound Crisis will need to receive significant attention.

Thank you.

Michael Stone

Abbottabad, where Osama bin Laden was killed

I met Osama bin Laden in early 1996 in Laghman province in Afghanistan.

This tall, and quite handsome man seemed a serious and likeable man. As is the Afghan tradition, when a foreigner is in an area, he called me over to his table in a small, dirty tea shop to join him and his group for tea. He asked me what I had been doing and I told him that I had been into the mountains of Nuristan with my Afghan Red Crescent colleagues where we were building a clinic, two days walk from the road. I said women die in child birth because they don't even have basic facilities and now we have a trained doctor and nurse who run the recently-opened clinic.. He congratulated us. I didn't know much about this man, but he left an impression on me. Little was I to know his future doings.

But some years later I got to know more about this man.


11 September 2001, Ferney Voltaire, France (Quote from my diary)

I've just come back from a walk past soft yellow corn fields with the the Jura mountains as a backdrop and Mont Blanc on the other side of the path.

I'm hurting today because it seems Ahmed Shah Massoud is either dead or dying. Some say it could be the work of Osama bin Laden. I think of the times I met Massoud during my stay in Afghanistan between 93 and 96, and the hour interview I had with him before I left in August 1996. My friend Azem was killed too and Massood Khalili badly injured, the Ambassador to India and son of the great Afghan poet.


Meeting with Ahmed Shah Massoud in Kabul, in 1996.


My heart bleeds for you Afghanistan; the pain and hurt you've been through. Penalised by your geographic location and the pawn of superpowers.

During the day in the workshop in Ferney-Voltaire. my mind kept going back to Ahmed Shah Massoud and his senseless killing by hired killers posing as cameramen. Just before 4 pm, we broke for afternoon tea. As I picked up a cup of tea, the ,manager came running and shouting in French, something about a disaster in America. A group formed at the TV in the bar and watched an interviewer talking about a plane hitting the World Trade Tower, then seconds later we saw the most spine-chilling metal and human bomb plough into the second tower.

In my diary that night I wrote in capitals A DAY WHICH MAY CHANGE THE FACE OF THE EARTH AND THE NATURE OF TERRORISM.

Massoud gone, many thousands of lives lost in the four plane hijacks......

The scenarios began tio build up in my mind; retaliations on Afghanistan yet again. Alexander the Great, The Arabs, The Turks, Chengis Khan, Timur, Persians, The British x 3, Soviet Union and now a US led western coalition.  FINISH QUOTE FROM MY DIARY ON 9/11


Today Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, which I recall after many visits to this beautiful town beween 1994 and 2006, as a peaceful place. I visited there in May 2006 to run a disaster preparedness workshop with Irja Sandberg and Ilyas Khan, and then when the tragic earthquake struck in this region in October 2005, Abbottabad was badly affected. but the worse damage was to the north. I spent over a month in this region after the earthquak in 2005 which killed over 75,000 people.



Villagers carry relief supplies during the 2005 earthquake near Abbottabad:



Abbottabad is home to at least one regiment of the Pakistani army, is dotted with military buildings and home to thousands of army personnel and many Universities and institutes. Surrounded by hills and with mountains in the distance, it is less than half a day's drive from the border region with Afghanistan.





On the outskirts of Abbottabad, en route to the high Karakoram ranges


Where did the name Abbottabad come from?


Although, Abbottabad today is a thriving business and tourism city, it is traditionally a military city. Besides the prestigious Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) in a nearby village of Kakul, Abbottabad is home to three regimental centres of Pakistan Army and Army School of Music. The PMA provided fame to Abbottabad for many years, prior to the recent development of the city, from a non-industrial backward area, to a busy modern business, economic and academic centre. The city takes it roots from the British India, when Major James Abbott came this way in 1853 after the annexation of Punjab into the British dominion and laid the foundation of a military cantonment. He also became the first Deputy Commissioner of Hazara Division. By 1901 the population of the town and cantonment had grown to around 7,764, which today stands at 300,000. Abbottabad remained the dominating district till 1976, when one of its tehsils Mansehra was given the status of district, which now consist of Mansehra and Batagram Tehsils. Subsequently in July 1991, Haripur Tehsil was separated from Abbottabad and made district. Thus only the Tehsil Abbottabad remained, which was declared as district. Major Abbott was so mesmerized by the beauty of the area that when leaving Abbottabad with a nostalgia a, he wrote a poem expressing his love and affection for the place he founded.

What a quirk of fate.

If you want to read a more complete story on my meeting with Osama bin Laden check this link: http://bobmckerrow.blogspot.com/2008/05/late-morning-tea-with-osama-bin-laden.html






Pakistan Red Crescent medical team walking into remote earthquake villages  carrying medical supplies to treat people affected by the earthquake in October 2005, which killed over 75,000. This photo is taken in the hills north of Abbottabad.

KIWI BRINGS LIGHT TO AFGHANISTAN

 

A New Zealander is winning big play on American media this week for the way he has taken solar and wind power to the people of Afghanistan.


Tony Woods, originally of Wellington, has featured on CNN and Public Broadcasting in the US, as well as in leading magazines.

Owner and director of Sustainable Energy Services Afghanistan (SESA), he has used US$4.8 million to bring electricity to remote villages and create a model of local development.

"What our clients purchase is not solar power or wind power - they actually don't give a shit about solar," he told the latest issue of Fast Company magazine in the US.

''It's a means to an end - to stability, to employment, to growth."

The Wellington man was biking through Pakistan, en route to South Africa and China, when he noticed failed micro hydropower generators.

He asked New Zealand Aid for help and they hired him to fix the generators.

In 1999 he visited Afghanistan and realised it was perfect for renewable energy.

The northeast region had abundant water, the west has steady wind, and the south strong sunshine.

So in 2007 he moved to Kabul and started SESA and with US funding began developing solar panels and windmills.

Woods team does the installation, which doesn't require much wiring since everything stays local, and the training.

Skiing in Afghanistan

In 1976 when I first worked in Afghanistan, and again from 1993-96 when I l,ived permanently for three years, I got to trek, climb and ski extensively in the Hindu Kush. In 1997 I tried to persuade my good friends Murray and Pat Reedy, to run trips to Afghanistan as I said it contained some of the best skiing, trekking and climbing in the world. Murray and Pat run trips to the Silk Route region: http://www.silkroad.co.nz/. Today, commercial skiing in Afghanistan may soon be a possibility. Let me tell you the story.

Mette-Sophie, a Norwegian aid worker accompanied me on one trip in January 1996 into the Hindu Kush. She was on cross country skiis and I used traditional skii's with touring bindings. Photo: Bob McKerrow

No foreigners had climbed in Afghanistan since the Soviets arrived in late 1978. I had heard about the passes and valleys strewn with land mines so it was with some trepidation I embarked from Kabul in October 1994 on what was probably the first expedition into the Hindu Kush for at least 17 years. I travelled with two British climbers, Ian Clarke and John Tinker, to the Chamar valley for an attempt on Mir Samir, a peak made famous by Eric Newby in his book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

John Tinker (right) and I at on one of our camps in the Chamar valley on the way to Mir Samir. Photo: Ian Clarke

Tinker was fresh off an ascent of Everest by a new route on the north side and Clarke was head of a British Mine clearance organisation (Halo trust) in Afghanistan and was a necessary companion as the area had received large amounts of small scatterable mines, dropped from Soviet aircrafts to prevent the freedom fighters crossing the mountain passes. Our safety was dependent on his knowledge of mines and where battles had taken place. Tinker and Clarke attempted an unclimbed face on Mir Samir and got surprising high considering the unseasonably soft snow that had fallen. While the others were attempting Mir Samir, I climbed an unnamed peak around 5000 metres and looked over to the enticing mountains of Nuristan, formerly Kafirstan. As I sat on this probably unclimbed, and unnamed peak, I thought to myself " this is skiing country and what huge ptential."

. It was this trip with Clarke and Tinker that gave me the confidence to venture out on further climbing and skiing trips.



On skiis in the Hindu Kush, near the Salang Pass. Photo: Bob McKerrow

From 1993-96 when I lived in Kabul, on Friday, the only day off during the week, it was possible to climb among the various 4000 metres peaks in the Paghman range from where you get spectacular views of the Hindu Kush and Hazarajat area. Climbing 4000 metre peaks in a day made living in Kabul a joy. Also for the enthusiastic skier, a two hour drive takes you to the Salang Pass at 3,878 metres an excellent ski-mountaineering area. My good friend Ian Clarke the mine clearance expert gave  the opinion that when the area is likely to have land-mines, if it is covered with snow, and you are on skis, it is almost impossible to trigger of a mine as the body-weight is evenly distributed. Clarke did a lot of telemark skiing in the area between 1993 and 1995 in the Salang Pass are before taking up a ski-instructors job at Cadrona, near Wanaka, for the New Zealand winter of 1995.


So in 1995, I started skiiing in the Hindu Kush, not far from the Salang Pass, which was an hour and a half from Kabul. Above on skiis with the mighty Hindu Kush behind me. Photo: Bob McKerrow



Mette-Sphie on her cross country skiis in the Hindu Kush. Photo: Bob McKerrow



Good snow conditions and a wonderful mountain backdrop, the mighty Hindu Kush: Photo: Bob McKerrow



Mette Sophie skiing down from the Salang Pass. January 1996. Photo: Bob McKerrow


The author, Bob McKerrow, skiing near the Salang Pass. Photo: Bob McKerrow

Last week I came across this article in the Guardian written by Jon Boone guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 April 2010 and I was delighted that commercial skiing may soon become possible in the Hindu Kush at Bamiyan.



The Bamiyan valley offers 'challenging skiing' reckons its first ski tourist after some hairy moments involving avalanches. Photograph: Chad Dear



In a classroom just a few hundred metres from the towering niche that once housed a giant Buddha statue, someone has pinned up a poster detailing the attributes of a good ski guide: optimistic, articulate, patient, reliable, active, cheerful, punctual and extroverted.

Sitting around a table in the middle of the room, the 10 young men who hope to become Afghanistan's first ski guides are being taught how to avoid avalanches, and the importance of taking enough food and water on trips up the snow-capped mountains that loom over the town of Bamiyan.

They have all the poster's key attributes in spades. Indeed, it's hard to think of a more agreeable bunch of enthusiastic young men, who chatter in excellent English. The only problem is the one characteristic they all lack: the ability to ski.

Last week, they had their first taste of the rapidly melting spring snow, out on the slopes of the stunning Koh-e-Baba mountain range. Their motley collection of borrowed and secondhand skis had been carted up the lush valley on the back of a donkey. The rookie skiers had ignored the classroom guidance to layer up, and hit the slopes wearing jeans and fake designer tops. Soon they were shivering.

They had just half a dozen pairs of skis, two pairs of which were borrowed from an American couple, Chad Dear and Laurie Ashley, ski consultants who believe central Afghanistan has some of the best "outback skiing" in the world. The shortage of equipment is a problem, and the mix of Telemark and alpine skis had been partly supplemented by a few pairs of "bazaar skis", lethal wooden planks knocked up by enthusiastic local carpenters. With the bindings little more than a few leather straps and the undersurface wrapped with metal, the overall effect is terrifying, as I discovered when I tried them.

"Jon, you've never done this either!" was the crushing verdict of Abdullah Mahmood, a 25-year-old novice skier, after he had watched me flounder around for a traumatic 10 minutes during which I wondered whether, despite decades of skiing experience, the sport was finally about to claim a broken leg from me.

These are the deeply humble beginnings out of which Bamiyan, an overished but heart-stoppingly beautiful province, hopes to develop a robust ski industry. There is serious weight behind the plan to encourage winter "ecotourism" here, including the province's governor, the Aga Khan Development Network and the New Zealand government (the country has troops in the province).

Dear, a development worker from Montana, says that in a few years' time Bamiyan could boast ski-rental businesses (which will probably rely, at least to start with, on the charity of the big ski manufacturers), a nursery slope with a simple tow-lift to drag beginners to the top, and maybe even some heliskiing. To start with, it is hoped that a mix of Afghans and foreigners working in Kabul will help pump-prime a ski industry, after which Bamiyan will be ready for the world. "We hope that people in Europe and the US will put it on their five-year wish list," Dear says.

He and Ashley are currently spending several days a week exploring Bamiyan's unskied peaks, with the aim of publishing a guidebook later in the year giving adventure skiers some basic information on what the Koh-e-Baba range has to offer. And while it would be easy to be cynical about trying to establish skiing in a war zone, after spending a few days with Dear, Ashley and the would-be ski guides, I am soon swept up in their enthusiasm.

For a particular type of tourist, Bamiyan is quite a draw. But it will never appeal to those who like the chairlifts, restaurants and creature comforts of a European or American mega-resort. In Bamiyan, if you want to get to the top of slope you have to propel yourself, using Telemark skis where the ankle is free to move up and down and synthetic skins are attached to the bottom. It's the sort of old-school skiing that would have been familiar to skiers in the Alps in the 1950s: a day of gruelling ascent for perhaps just one or two runs back down to the bottom. But it's worth it, says Dear: "The terrain here is just fantastic in so many ways, and we have only been exploring the eight valleys that are closest to Bamiyan centre. There are literally thousands of opportunities for beginners and experts."

Dear thinks many tourists will elect to stay above the snowline for days, skiing over huge areas, overnighting in shelters used by farmers in the summer that could be converted into winter refuges. And it's a fair bet that Bamiyan's apres-ski scene will never boast beery Brits, downing glühwein at the bottom of the chairlifts as the sun sets over the mountains. Instead it's chai, and maybe some rice, naan and greasy meat on the roof of a farmer's house.

What Dear calls the "apres-tea" experience would be worth a holiday in itself. First of all, the scenery is extraordinary. Below the snowy peaks, farmers living in mud houses busily plough their fields with ox teams. The sense of time travel is only broken with the occasional sighting of a satellite dish, a sign that, after years of neglect, things are starting to pick up here. And that is the other benefit of skiing in Bamiyan – contributing much-needed cash to subsistence farmers in the high, isolated valleys of a poor and neglected province that could use all the help it can get. Not only were the famous giant Buddhas blown up by the Taliban in 2001; the fundamentalist militia was also responsible for massacres of the largely Hazara population (Afghanistan's most put-upon ethnic group).

Today Bamiyan is an island of security in a country where insurgency has spread like a virus, and the valley is Afghanistan's main (or rather, only) tourist attraction. Visitors don't come simply for the World Heritage site where the Buddhas used to stand, but also the lakes and extraordinary natural dams of Band-e-Amir. The young men who aspire to be ski guides already try to make ends meet by showing tourists the main sites in the summer.

But despite Bamiyan's considerable charms, the summer tourism market does not add up to much: last year its historic sites were visited by 1,560 Afghans and 756 foreigners (slightly down on 2008, probably because of disruption caused by last year's presidential election). Even those low numbers generates around $250,000 a year in the three hotels the tourist authorities have information on.

But Amir Foladi, manager of the Bamiyan ecotourism programme, wants to see that increase. He hopes that by 2015 the 116 hotel beds currently available will have increased to 1,000, creating at least 1,000 jobs. He expects 10,000 foreign visitors and 100,000 Afghans to come each year, generating around $5m for the valley, excluding income from drivers, restaurants and handicraft shops.

That's big money for Bamiyan, and it would make tourism its third major source of income, behind agriculture and mining. "It's all about getting Bamiyan ready, helping hotel owners improve their facilities, so that when we are ready to receive more tourists it will be the people of Bamiyan who benefit and not outsiders," says Foladi.

And the wind is in Bamiyan's sails, with various plans to make the valley more accessible. Currently there are two main land routes from Kabul: the slow but safe road via the Sibher Pass, which despite being only 200km [124 miles] takes a gruelling eight hours, or the relatively fast but potentially lethal four-hour road trip through Taliban territory to the south.

The Sibher Pass route, which takes travellers through some unforgettable landscapes, is currently being flattened and widened by hundreds of workers, most of whom were last week inexplicably wearing fluorescent orange Royal Mail jackets. When the road is finished and covered with asphalt, the whole journey should take less than four hours – a much more attractive proposition for weekenders from Kabul who want a few days' skiing.

The country's airlines are being lobbied to start commercial flights, which may one day land at a new airport out of town. That will replace the current dirt airstrip – among the hazards of flying into Bamiyan is livestock wandering on to the runway.

And it's just possible that Bamiyan may get its Buddhas back – although this is currently the subject of a debate among conservationists, over whether the statues should be pieced back together from recovered fragments, or rebuilt afresh. Foladi says he favours the reconstruction of one Buddha, leaving one empty niche as a permanent reminder of unhappier times.

But will Bamiyan ever become more than a summer destination, even with these improvements? Ken Adams, Bamiyan's first ever ski tourist, thinks so. A former ski industry worker in the French Alps, he is now a project manager for an NGO in Kabul. Paying just $30 a night for a hotel room, he skied for seven days in Bamiyan this spring. Despite some hairy moments involving avalanches, he reckons Bamiyan is the place for anyone who wants "some pretty challenging skiing".

"For everyone else, there is just the sheer amount of snow and a season that in a normal year should continue until late May or early June," he says.

The big unknown is whether Afghans will take up skiing in any numbers. Dear and Ashley say the locals, who are already fond of sledding on homemade yakhmolaks and other winter games, have been enthusiastic. With everything under snow for five months of the year, they could certainly do with more winter distractions, says Foladi.

And skiing is not totally unknown in Afghanistan. Afghans got involved in the sport back in the 1960s and 70s, when it was last popularised by foreigners. In those days Kabul's diplomatic classes headed for the slopes at weekends at a mini-resort close to the capital. The piste even had its own basic rope-tow and was serviced by restaurants, tea shops and even a sunbathing area for the foreigners. Various ski clubs, including one run by the ministry of education and another by Kabul University, raced against each other. With the Soviet invasion of 1979, and the national resistance that rose up to fight it, the area was soon seeded with landmines and became unusable.

Mohammad Yousuf Kargar first encountered skiing as a young boy when he saw a German employee of Siemens throwing himself down a hill in Kabul. He has kept the sport going, at least within his own family. Now the national football team coach, Kargar tested the slopes of Bamiyan for the first time this winter. But he believes Bamiyan is still too far away from Kabul to be the focus of a skiing rebirth. Instead he takes his family to the Salang, a mountain pass north of Kabul. "The government really needs to take a strong decision to redevelop the old piste outside Kabul," he says. "In the meantime I am taking my family in the Salang because I don't want this sport to die in Afghanistan."

Even though Bamiyan is so untouched by violence that it feels like another country, Dear's hope that it might be ready for foreign visitors in five years seems optimistic at a time when the Taliban insurgency continues to strengthen.

Around the time I was embarrassing myself on the wooden skis, Kandahar city was rocked by a massive vehicle bomb parked outside a hotel. I was blissfully unaware of another terrible day in Afghanistan's second city as we trudged down muddy fields towards our apres-ski lunch. Later that day, a compound housing foreign contractors was attacked by an even bigger bomb.

Adams wonders whether it might be possible to fly into Kabul airport and then transfer directly on to a Bamiyan flight – essentially isolating the province from the rest of the country as far as foreign tourists are concerned. But, as Dear says, Bamiyan can only remain a bubble for so long. "You've just got to have hope that things are going to get better in Afghanistan. If the country goes down, Bamiyan will go with it.

To the President of the United States: An Open Letter on Afghanistan

Mr. President,

We have been engaged and working inside Afghanistan, some of us for decades, as academics, experts and members of non-governmental organizations. Today we are deeply worried about the current course of the war and the lack of credible scenarios for the future. The cost of the war is now over $120 billion per year for the United States alone. This is unsustainable in the long run. In addition, human losses are increasing. Over 680 soldiers from the international coalition – along with hundreds of Afghans – have died this year in Afghanistan, and the year is not yet over. We appeal to you to use the unparalleled resources and influence which the United States now brings to bear in Afghanistan to achieve that longed-for peace.

Despite these huge costs, the situation on the ground is much worse than a year ago because the Taliban insurgency has made progress across the country. It is now very difficult to work outside the cities or even move around Afghanistan by road. The insurgents have built momentum, exploiting the shortcomings of the Afghan government and the mistakes of the coalition. The Taliban today are now a national movement with a serious presence in the north and the west of the country. Foreign bases are completely isolated from their local environment and unable to protect the population. Foreign forces have by now been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Red Army.

Politically, the settlement resulting from the 2001 intervention is unsustainable because the constituencies of whom the Taliban are the most violent expression are not represented, and because the highly centralized constitution goes against the grain of Afghan tradition, for example in specifying national elections in fourteen of the next twenty years.

The operations in the south of Afghanistan, in Kandahar and in Helmand provinces are not going well. What was supposed to be a population-centred strategy is now a full-scale military campaign causing civilian casualties and destruction of property. Night raids have become the main weapon to eliminate suspected Taliban, but much of the Afghan population sees these methods as illegitimate. Due to the violence of the military operations, we are losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Pashtun countryside, with a direct effect on the sustainability of the war. These measures, beyond their debatable military results, foster grievance. With Pakistan’s active support for the Taliban, it is not realistic to bet on a military solution. Drone strikes in Pakistan have a marginal effect on the insurgency but are destabilizing Pakistan. The losses of the insurgency are compensated by new recruits who are often more radical than their predecessors.

The military campaign is suppressing, locally and temporarily, the symptoms of the disease, but fails to offer a cure. Military action may produce local and temporary improvements in security, but those improvements are neither going to last nor be replicable in the vast areas not garrisoned by Western forces without a political settlement.

The 2014 deadline to put the Afghan National Army in command of security is not realistic. Considering the quick disappearance of the state structure at a district level, it is difficult to envision a strong army standing alone without any other state institutions around. Like it or not, the Taliban are a long-term part of the Afghan political landscape, and we need to try and negotiate with them in order to reach a diplomatic settlement. The Taliban’s leadership has indicated its willingness to negotiate, and it is in our interests to talk to them. In fact, the Taliban are primarily concerned about the future of Afghanistan and not – contrary to what some may think -- a broader global Islamic jihad. Their links with Al-Qaeda – which is not, in any case, in Afghanistan any more -- are weak. We need to at least try to seriously explore the possibility of a political settlement in which the Taliban are part of the Afghan political system. The negotiations with the insurgents could be extended to all groups in Afghanistan and regional powers.

The current contacts between the Karzai government and the Taliban are not enough. The United States must take the initiative to start negotiations with the insurgents and frame the discussion in such a way that American security interests are taken into account. In addition, from the point of view of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable populations – women and ethnic minorities, for instance – as well as with respect to the limited but real gains made since 2001, it is better to negotiate now rather than later, since the Taliban will likely be stronger next year. This is why we ask you to sanction and support a direct dialogue and negotiation with the Afghan Taliban leadership residing in Pakistan. A ceasefire and the return of the insurgency leadership in Afghanistan could be part of a de-escalation process leading to a coalition government. Without any chance for a military victory, the current policy will put the United States in a very difficult position.

For a process of political negotiation to have a chance of addressing the significant core grievances and political inequalities it must occur on multiple levels – among the countries that neighbour Afghanistan as well as down to the provincial and sub-district. These various tables around which negotiations need to be held are important to reinforce the message -- and the reality -- that discussions about Afghanistan’s political future must include all parties and not just be a quick-fix deal with members of the insurgency.

We believe that mediation can help achieve a settlement which brings peace to Afghanistan, enables the Taliban to become a responsible actor in the Afghan political order, ensures that Afghanistan cannot be used as a base for international terrorism, protects the Afghan people’s hard-won freedoms, helps stabilize the region, renders the large scale presence of international troops in Afghanistan unnecessary and provides the basis of an enduring relationship between Afghanistan and the international community. All the political and diplomatic ingenuity that the United States can muster will be required to achieve this positive outcome. It is time to implement an alternative strategy that would allow the United States to exit Afghanistan while safeguarding its legitimate security interests.

Respectfully,

Matthieu Aikins
Journalist

Scott Atran
Anthropologist (University of Michigan) and author of Talking to the Enemy

Rupert Talbot Chetwynd
Author of Yesterday’s Enemy - Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?

Robert Abdul Hayy Darr
Author of The Spy of the Heart and humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Gilles Dorronsoro
Visiting Scholar (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) and author of Revolution Unending

David B. Edwards
Anthropologist (Williams College) and author of Before Taliban

Jason Elliot
Author of An Unexpected Light

Antonio Giustozzi
Author of Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop and editor of Decoding the New Taliban

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi
Associate Professor, James Madison University

Daniel Korski
Senior Policy Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations

Felix Kuehn
Kandahar-based writer/researcher, co-editor of My Life With the Taliban

Minna Jarvenpaa
Former Head of Analysis and Policy Planning, UNAMA

Anatol Lieven
Professor, War Studies Department of King’s College London and author of Pakistan: A Hard Country

Bob McKerrow
Author of Mountains of our Minds – Afghanistan

Alessandro Monsutti
Research Director, Transnational Studies/Development Studies at The Graduate Institute, Geneva

Ahmed Rashid
Journalist and author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos

Nir Rosen
Fellow, New York University Center on Law and Security

Gerard Russell
Research Fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University

Alex Strick van Linschoten
Kandahar-based writer/researcher, co-editor of My Life With the Taliban


Astri Surkhe
Senior Researcher, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway

Yama Torabi
Co-Director, Integrity Watch Afghanistan

Jere van Dyk
Author of In Afghanistan and Captive

Matt Waldman
Afghanistan Analyst
--------

Alex Strick van Linschoten
Writer/Researcher
UK Mobile --- +44-7794-263019
Afghan mobile --- +93-799-667356
USA Mobile --- +1-646-338-1275

http://www.alexstrick.com/

http://www.mylifewiththetaliban.com/

skype: strickvl

twitter: http://www.twitter.com/strickvl

From Kabul with love - the remarkable story of Afghan, Howard Harper

The last thing he would want is publicity, but former New Zealander Howard Harper, is at last getting some publicity for being one of the most committed humanitarians I have evry known. From Kabul with Love is an utterly unique book – it follows the adventures of New Zealander Howard Harper, as he embarks as a medical worker into Pakistan and Afghanistan.


The story is told through letters sent between Howard and Monika Harper, and Howard’s father, Auckland Pharmacist, Stan Harper.

Howard sets off as a young man in the 1950s first of all to Pakistan, and then to study medicine in England. In England he meets and marries a young nurse, Monika, before heading back to Pakistan – driving overland from England with a caravan in tow. Their adventures eventually take them to Afghanistan in the 1960s to work with the blind and provide relief aid.

What is remarkable about this book is the honesty of the letters. They reveal the human face of life in extremely challenging environments and of those at home in 1950s and 60s New Zealand.

Publication of this book coincides with Howard Harper being awarded the prestigious 2010 Augusta Award from Auckland Grammar School. Past winners have included many well-known New Zealanders, including Sir Ed Hillary.

For Castle Books, the other thing that has made this project unique is that it has been a truly international effort. Howard and Monika currently live in the UK. The compiler of the book, Howard and Monika’s daughter, Dr Faith Goldberg, lives in Israel. Meanwhile, the book is being published here in New Zealand and is printing in both NZ and the UK.

With an article about Howard appearing in The Listener this week, and other coverage surrounding his award, we’re looking forward to more people finding out about about this remarkable New Zealander and reading From Kabul with Love.

Parwan, an hour's drive from Kabul where Howard, Monika and children would have spent some family outings. Photo: Bob McKerrow

Here is David Lomas' article which is running cover story this week (October 23 to 29 October 2010) in the New Zealand Listener. 

Why would a New Zealander want to have an Afghani passport? Clare de Lore profiles a remarkable eye surgeon who has dedicated his life to helping people


in one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

When Howard Harper filled out papers for his Afghani citizenship, the locals were astounded. Some laughed, others shook their heads. Whereas most Afghans he knew dreamed of leaving, the New Zealand eye surgeon and humanitarian was fighting to stay in the country he calls home.

The year was 2002. After decades of living and working in Afghanistan and surrounding countries, Harper had been offered a medal for his services to Afghanistan. During an audience with the Father of the Nation – previously the King – Harper pressed his case for citizenship and the passport he now proudly carries.

“I told the King, ‘I don’t want a medal, I want an Afghani passport,’” says Harper. “Because otherwise it is difficult to get in and out, and I don’t know when I might next be slung out. I did not want to be dependent on one person’s goodwill.

“After a long to-do, my name was published in the paper and finally there was an announcement in the newspaper and on the radio that Dr Harper had been given the passport and citizenship. I can vote, buy property, and I try to faithfully fulfil the obligations of a citizen.” He is one of only two foreigners granted this status.

Harper is one of New Zealand’s least-known but most impressive sons. Immaculately dressed at all times, this tall, silver-haired, modest son of Te Kuiti and Auckland displays all the grit, integrity and selflessness so admired in our better-known heroes.

During his time in central Asia, he’s seen the Russians invade and then retreat, the rise, demise and resurgence of the Taleban and the arrival of the American-led forces; he has funded and built eye hospitals, seen one of them destroyed and rebuilt it, built two schools, trained dozens of eye doctors and restored sight to many thousands of people.

Along the way, he married Monika, a Polish nurse who shares his passion for the poor. They’ve raised three daughters, in often primitive conditions. He has witnessed cruelty and kindness in equal measure and remains steadfast in his faith in God and human nature. He is loved by, and loves, the Afghan people.

Harper is currently in the UK where he has been, successfully to date, undergoing treatment for cancer. At nearly 80, he knows time is running out to complete his life’s work – his reaction is to simply work harder and faster. His sights are firmly set, health willing, on a return to Kabul.

His life has taken him a long way from Te Kuiti, where he was born in 1930 to Blyth and Esther Harper, his father a pharmacist and mother a teacher. The family moved to Auckland when Harper was a young boy, his father ­relocating his business to Karangahape Rd.

A bright but restless Harper left Auckland Grammar School after just two years’ secondary education. He found work in a large joinery factory where he “learnt quite a lot about bare-knuckle fighting with the other boys working there”. A building apprenticeship followed, and to this day Harper uses the experience acquired there alongside his surgical skills. After that came a stint in retail, including at two Auckland menswear stores. All the while, the young Harper was reading voraciously.

Dad gave me a book about a man called George Hunter, a Scotsman who lived all his adult life in China. That was fascinating for me. He spent his life helping people, especially in the Xinjiang province, and that inspired me.”

Harper persuaded a friend to accompany him on what was to become the trip of a lifetime. “I felt called to go to central Asia. At this point there were few openings, as the Russians had occupied most of central Asia, and the Chinese had taken over Xinjiang. The only open part was Afghanistan and northern Pakistan.”

In 1953, the two young Kiwis left Auckland on the Wanganella for Sydney, changed to a P&O liner headed for Bombay, and eventually made it to Karachi.

They headed to a language school in Muree, a hill station near Islamabad and set about learning Urdu. (Harper and his wife were later to learn Persian, Pashto, Russian and some Mongolian.)

An old Farsi man was persuaded to part with his trusty Sunbeam motorbike, giving the Kiwis the freedom to explore. “We headed up toward Gilgit on the north-western frontier and had a wonderful time sleeping in the old dak bunga­lows, like the old British India resting places. One night we ended up in Balakot. The next day we came across an old tribesman leading his horse, both of them lame. He pleaded with me to help him and his horse. I could do nothing for either of them.

“Then, across the river, the next thing that stirred me was a large hospital. I went in and found it full of leprosy patients, many of them with terrible deformities. There was a man trying to run the place and he told me it was an old British Empire Leprosy Relief Association hospital, abandoned by the British for several years. No one had come to help them since, apart from a small amount of money from the Government for food. There was no treatment, and I determined then that I would come back and help.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At 23, Harper headed to England, where he knew he had a better chance of being able to train as a doctor than he had of making the cut for New Zealand’s only medical school at the University of Otago. He says his decision to leave Auckland Grammar early was a mistake, as he lost valuable time coming up to speed to meet admission standards.


In addition to his medical studies in London, he studied Urdu at the School of Oriental and African Studies, as well as Islamic law. “I was always the odd one out during my student days, slightly older, and I had something the other students did not: a clear and detailed ambition.”

It was at this time he also found Monika – the love of his life and his closest medical partner. When Monika was six and her sister four, they lost their mother during World War II. They were on the run from the advancing Russians, packed tightly into a train, when Monika’s mother suffered a panic attack and was thrown off onto a platform. The little girls never saw her again and fended for themselves for a while, with some kindness from strangers, until reunited with their father after the war. Monika determined to help children throughout her life. She was in London, improving her English so she could work among the poor, when she and Harper met. Monika had already gained specialist nursing qualifications at London’s famed Moorfields Eye Hospital and persuaded Harper to specialise in eye surgery.

The following years were to be an adventure in some of the least explored parts of the world. Harper and his bride set off from England for Afghanistan in a second-hand diesel Land-Rover towing an old caravan.

“We moved slowly through the rich European panorama until we finally ran out of roads in eastern Greece. As we entered the unmade roads of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, we discovered Monika was pregnant with Naomi. I thought this was too much to ask of her, to bump along dusty miles with poor food and restless sleep, but she stuck it out.” Not so the caravan, which literally fell apart on the rocky trails. It was abandoned just before Christmas 1962, last seen in the desert outside Baghdad with camels gazing curiously into it.

Naomi was born soon after in New Zealand and was just six weeks old when Harper took up a position at Taxila Hospital in Iran with Norval Christy, a Harvard Medical School graduate who had set up a clinic to treat anyone needing help.

“We would start operating at three in the morning. It was too hot in the daytime – the temperature would be well over 100°F. There would sometimes be more than a hundred people who turned up, and that dictated our day. We stopped for breakfast at nine, having done 100 operations, and then saw about 400 more before lunch and a nap. It was hard work but also a joy to see a patient who has been blind for years suddenly see loved ones again.”

Cataracts affect more than half the people 50 and over living in central Asia. Harper says no one knows why they are so prevalent, but cataract operations have always dominated his work.

“We would do the operation, and then after two or three days we would send them away with thick spectacles so they could see again. Each operation took just five minutes, but that was before lenses – we were just removing cataracts. Later, inserting a lens, it took about 15 minutes.” At the end of his first full year working with Christy, Harper had notched up more than 1000 cataract operations, as well as other types of eye surgery.

The Noor Eye Hospital at Darulaman in Kabul was one of Harper’s biggest and earliest projects. Built in 1966, it was badly damaged in the 1990s and Harper has since rebuilt it. In 1973, while working at his shiny new hospital, Harper was accused of “anti-State activities”. There were to be major repercussions, and not just for Harper.

Kuchi nomads in Afghanistan in the Central Highlands.


“Over the years they realised we would not participate in bribery and corruption – we did not live up to the ideals of the country. The King’s Government of the time had a particularly difficult Prime Minister and he ordered us to leave the country. So we did, and just as we were leaving, we looked up and there was a plane lumbering along overhead. We found out this was taking the King to see an eye doctor I knew in London, a retinal specialist. The King had been playing ball with his grandson and been hit in the eye and it had haemorrhaged. Normally he would have come to me, but I was being slung out so he had to lumber along in an old Russian plane to see the doctor in London. He never got back to Afghanistan as King. There was a rebellion by his cousin Daoud, who took over the ­country as dictator.”

Within months Harper slipped back into Afghanistan, working with some Americans at a small university in Jellalabad. Most of the people he was working among were Muslim – a relationship that worked well, despite cultural and religious differences. Women and children were seen first, a practice unheard of in Afghanistan, but it paid off. He was respected within the community.


“At the time [the 60s and 70s] people were scared stiff of going out at night, but I said I never felt more safe in any country than travelling in Afghanistan at night. People asked me how that could be, and it was that everyone knew when I was travelling and where I was going. They have an amazing bush telegraph in which people pass information to one another alone the lines of ‘this Harper, he is going here and there’, and when you got to your final destination, there would be a crowd waiting to greet you.”

He thought he’d escaped Daoud’s attention but after about a year was discovered and thrown out again. He and his family went to Iran, where he worked as professor of ophthalmology at the Mashhad University medical school before moving to the UK in 1977. They spent 15 or so years there so their three daughters (Naomi, Joy and Faith) could attend secondary schools and experience Western culture.

Monika Harper has nothing but praise for the New Zealand Correspondence School, which saw the girls through their early schooling in central Asia. They would sometimes be set tasks, such as an essay about a day at the beach – none of the girls had seen a beach, so they would write instead about a night in the desert.

Monika says her husband always saw the UK move as temporary and continued his work in central Asia. “We would go to various regions of Pakistan during those years in England. Howard built a clinic in Gilgit, which is still operating today. He had six weeks’ annual holiday – we worked for four weeks and took a break in the other two.”

Harper took up a post as consultant ophthalmologist at the Kent and Sussex Hospital in Tunbridge Wells, established the first cataract day-surgery clinic there, and wrote texts in English and Urdu on ophthalmology still in use today.

Harper’s big break – the chance of a permanent return to central Asia – came when he saw, on television, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife being shot. It was Christmas Day 1989.

“After that, I knew it was all over for the communists in central Asia. I knew if you could shoot a dictator like that and get away with it, the whole system would come down. I immediately formed what is Vision International [his registered charity]. I knew medical services would drop once they pushed the Russians out, and in many places there were none.”

He negotiated agreements – effectively permission to stay and work – in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. More were to follow covering Mongolia and Tashkent. Each agreement was worth about $1 million to the country concerned if Harper was allowed to get on with his fund-­raising, building and training.

After leaving the UK’s National Health Service in 1995, Harper was given surplus NHS equipment, which he transported to Mongolia through Russia. In the end, it was more trouble than it was worth, he says, laughing.

“Going via Russia was like being in a den of thieves. The truck, with all this wonderful equipment, would be stopped and effectively arrested. They would claim it was overloaded, and then unload things and just steal what they wanted. By the time this happened three or four times, the load was certainly lighter. I made a big fuss, wrote letters about this and so they had a record of who I was. Next time I arrived at the border, they took me away and I ended up in prison for the night. Eventually, I gave up going through Russia.”

In more recent times, Harper says, there have always been ways of getting in and out of Afghanistan and getting around the country, and he has come to accept the risks of doing so.


Abdul is an Afghani friend of the Harpers. He agreed to comment on their work but his name has been changed to protect his identity.
“Howard’s deep love and passion for the Afghan people has led him to fluency in the language, and a deep understanding of the mindset and culture. He is trusted and Afghans have opened their lives to him. Despite his Western appearance, his attitude was always different from other foreigners in that he felt at home with Afghans and shared freely with us.”

Abdul says the Harpers took on a mammoth task in providing services to the sight-impaired.

“Their work has affected thousands of people over the decades. Howard’s name and face are familiar to many Afghans living in even the rural areas of the country as he has serviced them with his mobile eye clinics despite great hardship and danger.”


All the while, Howard and Monika lived in circumstances most New Zealanders would find intolerable. This is Harper’s own description of their house in Kabul: “A simple two-storey brick and mortar house, in one of the better districts of Kabul, close to the Parliament. We have no running water, but a pump and a polluted shallow well for water. We have to boil and filter our drinking water, as attacks of dysentery are common.

“There are scorpions of all shapes and sizes, and it is important not to run outside in bare feet! We have electricity sometimes every third day, so we don’t have a refrigerator but a small electric generator for light in the evening. Apart from a few drawbacks, we find it a good place to live.”

The couple have been sensible about personal security but argue that having security guards attracts more attention than it’s worth. Besides, they just didn’t have the money. Harper usually moves around Kabul in a car with two Afghan friends but sometimes ventures out alone.

There have been close calls. In 2009, he was alone, driving the car, after dropping a friend at Kabul Airport. “It was at the time that they changed the guard protecting the airport. I noticed an old guy going along in a shaky way in a car and I knew there would shortly be a busload of troops leaving.

“I thought, ‘I bet he is going to blow that up’, and I knew I should just keep going. I’ve learnt to think and act like an Afghan. Sure enough, there was a huge explosion and people were killed.

“If we were people trying to make money or connected to the military, the Afghans would attack us. But if they feel you are on their side and not political or military, they will be friendly in many ways you would not get in New Zealand.

“I have a friend, for example, a Pathan with a long woolly beard, and he knows every Taleban leader there is. He and I have worked together for a number of years. When I ran short of money on one of my projects, he said, ‘Don’t worry, I will borrow it for you.’ He went around his relatives, some of them high up in the Government and got 5000 here, 5000 there, and ‘here it is, use it’.

“They did want it back again – they could not afford to give it outright. This is the astonishing thing about Afghans – they will kill you if they mistrust you or think you are their enemy, but in other ways they will support you in ways you would not easily find in New Zealand or in England.”

The Harpers live on an NHS pension. Harper sold a house he owned in Algies Bay, north of Auckland, to fund one of his hospitals, his family help when they can, and he has a network of committed supporters in New Zealand and abroad who contribute from time to time. He has received large one-off donations from funding organisations in the US, Japan, Germany and the UK, but says he really relies on private donations of sums as little as $20.

Harper’s legacy includes the Noor Eye Hospital, a newly completed day eye clinic alongside it and at least a dozen self-sustaining eye clinics throughout central Asia, many of them now operating for 30 or more years, and two schools. He says there is much more to be done.

“The eye clinic we recently completed cost us about US$200,000. Our aim is to build up a team of Afghan nurses and doctors, as well as foreigners, and gradually get it self-sustaining. That means literally getting a very small fee from each patient, perhaps $50, with free treatment for the very poorest, about a quarter of them. We will take them on our own shoulders.”


Hamish McMaster heads New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Middle East and Africa Division. In early 2009, while he was our man in Iran and accredited to Kabul, he heard of Harper’s work and visited his clinic as it was being built. A long-time diplomat, McMaster describes his arrival at the dusty building site in one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

“Imagine cement bags lying on the ground, piles of bricks and Afghan workers doing their thing. In the middle of this a beautifully laid table, vinyl cloth, with china teacups and saucers, and some bread to eat. I recall Dr Harper was wearing a bow tie. And my abiding memory is of a little New Zealand flag sitting right in the middle of the table.”

McMaster says he has met other New Zealanders working in Afghanistan, but Harper stands out. And he says there’s a very good reason Harper has kept a low profile both in Afghanistan and in New Zealand.

“I would say it has been essential for him to keep under the radar in order to stay and survive so long. It is uncommon for someone to live there for that length of time, and he has survived the vagaries of Afghanistan through his humility and determination.”


McMaster rates Harper’s work in improving the lot of Afghanis on a par with efforts to improve security via construction of schools and repairing roads and other infrastructure. A New Zealand Government grant of $50,000 was personally authorised by Foreign Minister Murray McCully after he visited Afghanistan and met Harper.


“When Dr Harper’s work was brought to my attention, I took the chance, during a visit to Afghanistan last year, to include him in an official dinner. I was struck by his remarkable determination. He’s made a huge humanitarian contribution in very difficult circumstances. It’s a tough place to visit, let alone live,” says McCully.

Abdul, the Harpers’ Kabul-based friend, vouches for Harper’s standing in the community.


“He is highly respected by all Afghan people regardless of ethnic persuasion. He is honourable, someone to be trusted at all times. On one occasion the King was reported to have said we need more foreigners of his calibre to serve Afghanistan.”

While he and Monika were living in unaccustomed comfort in the UK, the Taleban gained control in Afghanistan. Harper made a week-long visit in 1997, and says he was sad to see how miserable life had become. The Noor Eye Hospital had been severely damaged, and human rights were under daily attack.

“You would talk to respectable young girls and women who were whipped for even showing a tiny bit of skin on their foot.


“I went to visit the then Minister of Health to talk about resuming work there. When I met him, I was surprised – he was an uneducated man, which was very odd for the Afghans. He looked like a cross between a mullah and a butcher. He got down on his knees, though, and begged me to start work again. I said I would only do so once things settled down a bit and he accepted that.”

In 2002, the Harpers returned “home” to Kabul.

“It was vital to get back into Afghanistan after the Taleban were defeated. They had been particularly destructive. I had never seen a country brought down to such a level. They had destroyed the infrastructure, education, the freedom of women, and there was a very narrow version of Islam that even banned music.”

Harper says the arrival of the US-led forces brought about some improvements, but they are unlikely to last. “I am always optimistic as far as the people are concerned, but once the Americans and Brits pull out, who knows what will happen? The Afghans are wonderful, but once they start fighting they are quite ruthless.

“Elections have never worked for them. They need strong leadership, almost autocratic. There is little love lost between the various tribal elements. My impression is that Afghanistan is naturally two countries, one Persian-speaking, including Kabul, and the other a Pashto-speaking country – the south-east including the north-western frontier of Pakistan, ­centred on Peshawar.

“Corruption is endemic in Afghanistan. Most people think if they are given a position of power, it is for them and their family’s benefit. That will never change. There are, however, some people, like the late King, who besides looking after themselves, will also consider the good of their people and look after them. That’s the best we can hope for – find these good but usually flawed men and work with them.”

Despite the poverty, corruption and danger, Harper says there is a very simple explanation for spending a lifetime in the service of strangers in some of the most hostile places on earth.

“I spent a lot of time getting a very sophisticated education in New Zealand and England. I somehow owe something back, so therefore while other people may want to stop at age 60 or 65, I feel as long as you’re in good nick and your mind is working, your hands are able and you can think straight, there is no reason not to go on longer. I take this a year at a time.

“I might not have much money, but I’ve had a very rich life.”

Howard Harper will be honoured by his alma mater, Auckland Grammar School, at a dinner in Auckland in November.





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