In The Street
With Bush In London

During his "state visit" to the United Kingdom, the president was welcomed by the prime minister, the queen, and hundreds of thousands of very angry protesters making their voices heard all across the nation. The fact that the weekend marked the 40th anniversary of JFK's assassination - a fact that the Brits are not unaware of - gave an added resonance to this protest, confirming Britain's solidarity with the American people against an evasive, dishonest government.

I first attended the rally in the university town of Oxford, which saw a respectable turnout of about 1,000 protesters and was every bit as noisy as the one I attended in London the next day. The London protest marked the largest weekday demonstration ever for the city; as the marchers arrived from Parliament Square, Downing Street, and Whitehall (the seat of the British Government), organizers jubilantly announced a turnout of 200,000. (Scotland Yard only conceded 100,000.)

At both protests, I was immediately struck by the diversity of the crowd. In addition to the expected turnout of dreadlocked hippies, a sizable number of students, blue-collar workers, office workers, the elderly and even children all made their presence known.

Numerous groups set up tables, including the Socialist Equality Party (Communist Manifesto only a quid!) and the Muslim Association of Britain, from which cries of "Allahu akbar" could be heard amidst the cries of defiant protest.

The marchers arrived in Trafalgar Square, where along with monuments to Britain's great war dead - Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Henry Havelock - stood a new statue of another aspiring war hero. Even before the marchers arrived, the Square was reaching its full capacity with thousands of protesters already there. This new statue bore an oversized, metallic, Sgt. Pepper-style uniform, lovingly petted a toy missile and had a rather ridiculous, confused grin on his face. Guess who? Draped by a "Stop Bu$h" banner, Nelson's Column had been converted into a giant upraised middle finger for Britain's most unwelcome guest since William the Conqueror in 1066.

The wide diversity of the crowd, while quite comforting to see, also seemed to me quite problematic: did the diversity serve to magnify or dilute the aims of the protest? Of course no one can agree on everything. By choosing a common target, the many can accomplish what the few could not. Yet I can't help but think that including several groups under the same banner could possibly hinder the accomplishment of a specific course of action. After all, what common ground can really be sought among the goals of Communists and Muslims?

And after all, is anyone really going to be swayed by what they likely see as the drum-pounding of a few fringe elements? Far from being inspired, many were likely annoyed by the disruption of central London traffic.

Perhaps the rally was not just about making a lot of noise and embarrassing Bush and Blair; rather, it was about putting aside major differences in order to make progress in an immediate and grave problem. At the very least, it emboldened potential opposition by letting people know that there remains formidable antagonism to the Bush-Blair program of war. Each one of the protesters there - atheist and God-fearing, young and old, academic and blue-collar worker - was there to get the message out that they were dissatisfied with the warmongering of their leaders.

Despite scattered flag-burnings and the occasional "Fuck America" graffiti, the organizers and protesters made sure it was quite clear that they stand together with us Americans who oppose our president. They're not happy with Blair's attempts to surrender their country as the "51st state," as one speaker put it. There is a definite feeling across the world, as one Kuwaiti student told me, that the Americans are willfully ignorant of the atrocities committed in its quest to reshape the world in its own vision. One French girl decked out as the Statue of Liberty served as a timely reminder of the country that actually gave us that monument.

Even so, I felt some important questions were not being asked. Much of the speakers' sentiment seemed directed towards the fact that "We didn't want there to be a war in the first place." No one really seemed to concentrate on the fact that the war has already happened, and a situation infinitely more complex than a simple withdrawal would solve now exists.

A major theme of the rally was "regime change" in the upcoming elections to oust Bush and Blair. But would this "regime change" result in the same brand traditionally practiced by the CIA - namely, with someone just as bad or even worse than before? I shudder to remember Bush's 2000 campaign theme song: The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," which declares, "Meet the new boss - same as the old boss."

At least it could be said that Bush took notice. Fox News reported that in response to the protests, the president remarked, "All I know is that people in Baghdad weren't allowed to do this until recent history."

Indeed, Bush exhausted his entire rhetorical repertoire over the course of his visit, reminding us once more of his personal zest for freedom and his most emphatic distaste for "turrur." Yet the UK's protest showed him the sizable opposition to his evasive speechifying to justify the horrors of war.

David Matthew Smith
David Matthew Smith attends Oxford University in the UGA study abroad program.

Animal Control

Last Week's Scorecard

Athens-Clarke County Animal Control responded to 48 calls.

4 complaints of animal cruelty
1 bite case
4 complaints of barking dogs
7 ordinance violations
22 animals impounded:
20 dogs
1 cat
1 skunk
17 dogs placed:
6 adopted
9 reclaimed
2 turned over to other agencies

ACC Animal Control press release for the week of Nov. 20 to Nov. 25.

Road To Ruin
Too Much For Too Little

It only takes an hour to develop a profound understanding of why one of Afghanistan's top priorities is road-building. My November 2001 trip from the border with Tajikistan to the capital of Takhar province, a little over a hundred miles long, would take about an hour and a half in the United States. But most of this back-breaking, bone-crushing ordeal is spent pounding tire ruts and rocks across a liberally-mined desert that shows no sign of ever having been paved. The bridges have been blown up by Soviet, mujahedeen, Taliban, Northern Alliance or American armies. Motorists are forced to ford a full-fledged, five-feet deep river, two large creeks and an uncountable number of axle-shattering gaps in the road. For a few hundred thousand crisp afghanis, local entrepreneurs improvise bridges out of dead tree limbs to support each vehicle for the few seconds needed to cross these abysses.

Some 15 hours after we set out from the Pyanj River border outpost, my convoy rolled into Taloqan. We'd ducked bandits, U.S. warplanes and rampaging militiamen to get there, but the road itself had been the worst obstacle. It took four days to shake the ringing in my ears, the result of syncopated whiplash and hundreds of serial concussions as my skull smacked into the roof of my rented truck. No wonder you hardly ever saw other people moving between isolated villages.

With an average per capita annual income of $200, Afghanistan's economy is in ruins. Even if exports of products like hand-woven carpets, jewelry, rubies, pomegranates and modest oil reserves were to return to prewar levels of the 1960s, it would be impossible to generate the $45 billion Karzai estimates will be needed to build modern-quality infrastructure. Afghanistan's future was sealed by two factors: its paucity of natural resources and its role as a mountainous buffer state between czarist Russia and British India. People, goods and services traveling overland between Central and South Asia have always had to pass through Afghanistan - and they've paid for the privilege. If Afghanistan is to become economically viable without exporting heroin or remaining in a state of permanent war, it must reprise its role as Asia's most ferocious collectors of tolls and tariffs.

The Asian Development Bank's $3 billion Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP) project, which would carry Caspian Sea natural gas from fields in Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to a Pakistani port on the Indian Ocean, is one attempt to revive the fabled Silk Road. According to Turkmen officials, Afghans would receive eight percent of revenues in the form of transit fees. But pipelines need service roads. TAP would run alongside the Herat-to-Kandahar highway, so the American and Saudi governments have committed $180 million of the estimated $250 million needed to pave it.

Afghans will tell you that, along with the need for security, running water and electricity, roads are on top of their wish list. Well-maintained roads would allow Afghans to make money the old-fashioned way - by taking a cut on the stuff they move around. Roads would also mitigate the security problem, reducing the power of regional warlords by making outlying provinces more accessible to the central government forces currently trapped in Kabul. Divided by religious, political and tribal fissures, Afghanistan doesn't stand a chance of becoming a unified or centralized nation-state without a high-quality lattice of asphalt linking and pulling together its disparate nether regions.

At present, Afghanistan, a Texas-sized nation of 17 million people, has only five marginally paved highways totaling 1,675 miles. (Texas has 79,185.) The Wakhan Corridor, the finger-shaped province that connects northeastern Afghanistan to China, doesn't even have a single dirt road to its name. In most areas, a road like the one I took to Taloqan is as good as it gets. But only one road in Afghanistan will host a multi-billion energy pipeline - and it looks like that's the only one we're going to pave.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage recently asked Congress for $1.14 billion for Afghan aid - just 10 to 20 percent of the $5-to-$10 billion most conservative experts believe is to be needed. But, according to CARE Afghanistan, only 40 percent of the money is slated for long-term development. $420 million would "bolster efforts at training national Afghan police and armed forces while demobilizing local militias" - in other words, bribing warlords to swear fealty to the central government in Kabul. $104 million would finance elections, $140 million would pay for border patrols, $60 million would rehab the U.S. embassy, and $35 million would go to "the presidential protective detail" - Karzai's equivalent of the Secret Service.

It's a lot of money. But, reports the BBC, "The only real reconstruction has involved the refurbishment of the best buildings in [Kabul] for the usual international acronym soup which follows a peace deal, WFP, FAO, UNICEF, UNAMA, and so on. Afghanistan is getting too little of the right kind of aid."

Meanwhile, ordinary Afghans have seen no meaningful improvement in their lives. Reshad, a 19-year-old whose father works for the Afghan Finance Ministry, told The Washington Post that his family hadn't gotten a paycheck in months. "We sold the carpets and the refrigerator," he said. "Now we'll borrow money to live. Finally, we'll have to start stealing something to eat. We'll join the Taliban just to support our family. If they give us money, we'll join them."

He may want to rethink that plan. Taliban-held provinces, after all, are at least a hundred miles away from Kabul. Who wants to deal with those atrocious roads?

Ted Rall
Syndicated columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue To Afghanistan and Back.