Law School Blog
Kabul, Afghanistan
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Flying to Kabul from Dubai is always an adventure. The national carrier, Ariana, uses rehabilitated Air India airbuses that feature a lot of duct tape as part of the interior design. Their first new Boeing aircraft – and importantly, the service agreement to go with it – was in production at Everett over the summer, but not in evidence this trip. Ariana passengers are nearly all men: Afghan merchants, foreign mercenaries, aid workers and the odd Afghan diaspora family visiting relatives. The check-in line features a poster of items prohibited in luggage, including firearms and propane stoves. The Afghan man ahead of me in line was cheerfully stuffing aerosol cans of room freshener into his carry-on luggage. They could explode in flight, I thought, but in the scheme of things we had bigger things to worry about. It could be worse - the flight at the adjacent gate was going to Baghdad.
As I navigated Kabul airport for the first time since May 2005, I was struck by how orderly things have become. The freelance baggage handlers are still relentless in their demands for baksheesh [tips], but the mood is courteous and friendly. You do, however, need your own transport and a cell phone. I was happy to meet my driver, Saif, and leave my self-appointed team of advisors in the airport carpark. Kidnappings are not frequent but they are not unknown. Security concerns mean that it is unwise to be out after 10 p.m.
The Intercontinental Hotel sits on a hill to the north of the city, on the road to Kabul University. This is a government-run hotel made famous in countless war correspondent stories about Afghanistan. The Intercon was proudly completed in 1967 and then frozen in time. In the last 18 months, however, competition has arrived. Two new hotels have opened downtown and have siphoned away the foreign aid consultants and VIPs. One pleasant outcome is that the Intercon now has hot water and toilet paper and actually served me a cup of coffee at check-in. Some of the more ancient staff have been retired, and renovations are in progress. Paying guests are few, however, and the mood is a little forlorn.
The beginning of winter in Afghanistan is not peak season for visitors. Driving through Kabul you can see countless trucks piled with split logs and roots and men unloading them into garages and gateways in preparation for what will be a long, bitterly cold winter. The temperature is close to freezing. The clay at the unmade edges of the roads has already turned to slick mud. This is the season where people huddle over radiators if they are lucky enough to have electricity, drink scalding cups of green tea, and wonder about the country’s future and the commitment of foreign friends.
My first visits were to Dean Wasel at Faculty of Law and Politics and Dean Aziz of the Sharia faculty at Kabul University. As with most of our Asian Law Center development projects, we earn high grades for showing up regularly and delivering what we have promised.
The University of Washington Afghan Legal Educators’ Project is highly regarded at the university and within the U.S. donor circuit because it is one of few justice sector reform projects that is running on schedule and showing results. Dean Wasel expressed his warmest thanks for the work that we are doing with his colleagues.
“In the faculty who have returned to Kabul,” he said “I can already see some changes in the way that they think about teaching and in the way that they interact with students.”
Dean Wasel will visit the UW School of Law this winter for some intensive English training and discussions about law school and academic program management.
Dean Aziz in the Sharia faculty was also happy with our update and keen to send as many of his faculty as possible to Seattle.
“Most of them have never been in a developed country,” he said. “So, even visits of three to four months would be important for them. It will open up their minds in a way that this country desperately needs.”
Eighteen months is a long time in development. Since I was last in Kabul there have been significant changes and almost a complete turnover in the cast of foreign law reform advisors. Some things, however, are not changing fast enough.
Construction has now begun on the long-awaited National Legal Training Center, funded by the Italian government. The center is located inside the main gate of the Kabul University campus and, when operational, is intended to provide one year’s training for law graduates who plan to become judges and prosecutors, as well as training for serving judges. Unfortunately, the center and an LL.M. program have yet to be set up at Kabul University.
There are other fundamental challenges. Renovation of the Sharia faculty building at Kabul University has not happened, and the building remains a concrete shell with no electricity. In its previous life, it was the morgue for the medical faculty; today it just feels that way. The wood stove and wood supply that UW purchased for the faculty to make one of the teaching rooms functional for English classes provide the only heating in the building.
The current state of the judiciary is also fragile. Livingston Armytage, Director of the Centre for Judicial Studies, is in Kabul conducting judicial training for USAID. He specializes in working with judges in the developing world and Islamic countries. He was previously Special Counsel to the U.N. in Cambodia charged with coordinating justice sector reform there.
“Compared to Cambodia, Afghanistan is 10 to 15 years behind the curve,” he said. “What makes Afghanistan interesting, however, is that it is poised in the balance.”
His recent assessment of the Afghan judiciary found that up to 40% of judges have no formal educational credentials and over 60% have no formal induction as judges – stark, but not surprising figures. This is a whole generation of legal actors who are missing the basic grounding in law and professional mindset, but at least in comparison to Cambodia, some of the older generation survived and there is some shared memory of functioning legal institutions in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 70s. For him, what makes the work worthwhile are his Afghan legal colleagues.
Says Armytage: “There is such a lot of nonsense written about the modern West and the backwardness of Islam. When I work with the judges here, they say ‘Don’t patronize us – just give us the information that we need’. These are people who are open and hungry to learn and make up for decades of isolation.”
- Professor Veronica Taylor