I WAS very excited to read, last week, about the \u201cghost money\u201d that the C.I.A. is paying to the president of my country, Hamid Karzai. I\u2019d like to know: would it be possible for the C.I.A. to give me some, too?<\/p>\n
We do not know what President Karzai has done with this cash that arrives each month in suitcases and plastic shopping bags. Not even the C.I.A. \u2014 which every Afghan believes knows everything \u2014 can say.<\/p>\n
But I will tell you exactly what I will do with mine: I will do the things we thought the Americans were going to help us do when they came to Afghanistan nearly 12 years ago.<\/p>\n
First, I will use some of it to dig deep wells in all our villages and create modern water systems in all our cities. Fewer than a third of Afghans living in rural areas have access to clean drinking water. In one village I know in Balkh Province in the north, the people must walk more than a mile to reach the nearest well, and its water is salty. They rely on infrequent rain for drinking water and use it sparingly. They asked me to help them get a new well that is nearer and deeper. Now, with my ghost money, I can.<\/p>\n
Even in Kabul \u2014 where I lived until nine months ago when I came to study in the United States \u2014 most people still get their water from wells. Afghan children must carry heavy buckets of water from the wells to their homes several times each day. I did this for years. On the bright side, in Afghanistan, we do not have the problem of childhood obesity.<\/p>\n
I will use another part of my ghost money to build sewers. Afghans, like Americans, use toilets every day. But what we leave in our toilets either stays in an open pit or is flushed into open drains in the streets. The mosquitoes are happy with this situation, but the children they bite are not.<\/p>\n
When the Americans first came, building sewer systems in every community would have been a good way to put millions of Afghans to work and to help us get back on our feet after three decades of war. Afghans helped destroy the Soviet Union and free Eastern Europe, but in the process many of us lost everything. A few months\u2019 work digging trenches and laying pipes would have helped everybody. <\/p>\n