I finally get to ask my question of the man who says he knows every statistic in a notoriously data-less country. ‘OK, mister-chief-statistics-officer-for-the-province,’ I say in my best Pashtu, with a little help from my ever-smiling interpreter. ‘Do you know how many businesses there are in Helmand?’ He gives a multi-syllabic answer. I wait keenly for the translation. ‘Yes. None.’
It’s not the best news for Afghanistan’s most conservative and dangerous province. But it might help form part of the answer to why it’s proving so tough to dislodge the Taleban. There’s little other than poppy-growing and gun-slinging in the way of ‘alternative livelihoods’ — the phrase favoured by aid agencies when they mean jobs — in the province that this year produced 54 per cent of the world’s opium supply and has so far killed 95 British troops.
Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s capital, is a riverside town whose name means ‘army barracks’, and is appropriately home to the British brigade headquarters, banked by sand-filled blast walls the same colour as the dust that fills the city. It’s a place used to fighting. A thousand years ago, Persia’s Ghaznavids built a fort here: it is still slowly crumbling down towards the Helmand River, close to the spot where today’s residents wash their cars, bonnets up, wheel-hubs deep in the waters. Nearby, a huge Ferris wheel strikes an incongruously playful silhouette against a sky more often filled with the whirring blades of choppers scanning the compounds for threats close beneath.
Trading comes little and lazily: beyond the base, young men sell bananas on wooden carts that wheel about wide streets; elderly turbaned men sit on street corners drinking tea, smoking and selling phone credit outside the bank. Tradesmen perch on high stools at entrances to spare-parts stalls whose floors are strewn with metal bolts. Life in the bazaar is far from carefree, however. Plumes of black smoke from the latest explosion expand upwards just as I am ferried, strapped up in body armour and flanked by close protection teams, past Peace Roundabout — a statue of a couple of doves clutching the globe in their white wings.
As the battling continues, and as Taleban smuggle bombs into bazaars the British try to make safe, business may still prove more powerful at winning the argument. General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander of Nato forces here, thinks 70 per cent of Taleban are swayable — the $10-a-day fighters who pick up weapons merely to bring in some cash. That means getting business going is likely to become a more central task in the effort to win popular support.
There is money to be made. Afghanistan’s economy will grow by 16 per cent this year, according to the IMF. At a recent contractors’ conference held in the town by US Marines in an effort to bring more cash to the local economy — of the $2 billion in foreign assistance pouring into the country, almost two thirds leaves again through foreign contractors and consultants — 30 new local construction companies came forward alongside 60 they already knew about.
‘Some can barely write their name; others have shiny laser-printed portfolios,’ said Lt Col Zachary Bennett, who organised the conference. ‘But we want to give all the local population options to do big business, so instead of shooting bullets at us we want them working for us. We need to be able to give people viable economic alternatives to supporting the Taleban.’
Donor-funded microfinance has already brought clutches of ex-Taleban fighters into the fold. And while it’s certainly not the easiest of operating environments — there’s not much in the way of electricity or roads, and there is the small matter of the fighting as well as the intimidation — it turns out Helmand’s statistician is wrong. The province’s old finance director, who just got the boot, looked after 60 registered businesses, among them ambitious factories producing plastic bags but keen to make shoes, others ginning cotton but keen to make clothes. And there’s a marble factory its director says can outclass Italy.
‘We used to make everything by hand but this year we bought in big machines,’ says Mirikalam Zahidy, sitting behind a big green marble desk in the upstairs office of his factory, which he says is worth $1.5 million and makes about 800 pieces a month, from tissue boxes to tabletops. ‘Of course we would like to expand internationally.’
That’s good news for the new provincial director of finance, Azim Khan, who is determined to register more businesses and boost local tax collection from the equivalent of £240,000 a year to £1.9 million in the country that has the world’s lowest tax collection rates, at 6 per cent of economic output.
‘Business in Helmand is going to work well but the government needs to provide a good example by providing electricity, lowering taxes, finding international markets and helping businesses to find land,’ says Khan.
That good example is slow in coming. Several returning Afghans have abandoned investment plans after they’ve been unable to secure land from government officials asking too much in bribes. Haji Khabs, 42, who runs one of Lashkar Gah’s four ice factories, employing ten men and pumping out big blocks of ice almost as tall as me in the heat of the summer, has had quite enough of fake taxes.
‘I’m not having any problems with the Taleban, but the police get money by force,’ says Khabs, sitting quietly in his factory compound with his toddlers and elders about him. He says he was recently beaten by police at a checkpoint. ‘They hit you, they curse you and then they force you to give them money. If we give them too little money, they make sure they get more, and they take our ice blocks as well. They make 100 different reasons to take money from us.’
It’s a long way from the vision of the 1950s, when Americans irrigated the province at the behest of the king, building a land of plenty filled with dams and canals, and giving the town its suburban grid layout, lined with so many broad streets and lawns it was known as Little America.
‘All about is life and an air of hopeful expectancy,’ wrote Paul Jones, a US construction worker who was in Lashkar Gah at the time, employed by the same company that built San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
In an effort to scale down anything approaching such heady expectancy today, British officers are fond of saying that they’re not trying to turn Afghanistan into Surrey. But the irony is the Americans really did once turn Helmand into Tennessee. Today British troops know the place by a new name that reveals just how much of a gamble all involved, including plucky businesses, are taking: ‘Lash Vegas’.
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