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• May 14, 2004

Two years after the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghanistan is a bombed-out shell of a country. The warlords have taken back power, violence is rife, girls' schools have been burned down, women still live in fear, the country is riddled with landmines, and opium production is booming.

All true. But this is true also: there is music on the streets and in the taxis of Kabul; there are new shops and restaurants and supermarkets; an immensely popular radio station is broadcasting music and chat programs; girls and boys are going to school together, learning art and music and maths; more women than men are now running businesses; the country has a moderate constitution; and it is developing good trade relations with its neighbours.

I know these things because a friend, an Afghan-Australian woman who goes to Afghanistan every couple of months to oversee projects she has helped set up, tells me, and shows me videos of happy children in schools and former street beggars now making art and learning computer skills. And because I have spoken to Australians running businesses in Afghanistan, and to people at the Afghan embassy.

In whose interest is it to say things are better in Afghanistan? The embassy's of course, because it wants to encourage investment there. Business people too, because a restored economy will mean higher profits. The Australian Government, partly because it wants to be able to send Afghan asylum-seekers back.

Who wants to say things are as bad as ever? Refugee activists, because they want Afghan asylum-seekers to be allowed to stay in Australia (I agree they should be). Various groups opposed to the Karzai Government. And anti-Americans.

And of course, most of the Western media. This is not a judgement. It is the nature of media that "news" is bad news. If there is a building in flames in one part of a city and children going quietly to school in another part, there is no contest about where the story is.

In Iraq the story is the vile abuse by American soldiers of prisoners in Abu Ghraib jail. And it is the unbelievably cruel, videotaped beheading of the US businessman Nicholas Berg. And it is the seemingly endless violence, the lack of security, the growing hatred of ordinary Iraqis for the occupying forces.

All this is horribly true. But there are other stories in Iraq too: money on a scale not seen since the Marshall Plan is being spent on water, sanitation, training, public health; 3 million children are being vaccinated; more than 80 new women's groups have been formed and last week Baghdad's first women's refuge was set up.

On Wednesday full authority of the ministries of foreign affairs and of water resources was handed back to the Iraqi people. Iraq has been reinstated into the UN and the Arab League. The supervisor of 17 recent town council elections reported that nearly all the successful candidates were educated moderates. "Enthusiasm for these elections was enormous," the supervisor said.

It is undeniable that the atrocities carried out by some US soldiers have done immeasurable harm, not only to their victims but to the cause of a better and safer world. It is little use to say that this and worse torture is carried out routinely in many of the countries whose state-controlled media are now whipping up outrage. The fact is that as liberators, the coalition held itself up to a higher standard.

All that can be done is to repeat that in democracies such behaviour is punished. That a free media will usually uncover gross wrongdoing, that these images will be shown ad nauseam, that the weight of public opinion will demand people in high places are held accountable and will force changes in military training.

This is the system the coalition forces are trying to "impose" on Iraq. It is a better system and most Iraqis know it is. Though it has now almost certainly dissipated, support for the Americans was still high even a few weeks ago, according to a reputable opinion poll.

In Afghanistan too, many things are wrong; for a start only 4 million out of the population of 26 million have access to schooling. Even so, things are vastly better than they were two years ago. As my friend says, Afghanistan needs aid and investment in large measure, but it also needs the world to believe it is capable of becoming a normal country.

Iraq desperately needs the world to believe this of it too.

The atrocities carried out by US soldiers are a reminder that a minority of people in all societies are capable of great cruelty. But most people in all societies are decent. And it is a kind of racism to think that Iraqis, or Afghans, do not want the same freedoms we have or are somehow not capable of handling democracy.

In whose interest is it to portray the intervention in Iraq as a failure for all time? Certainly it is in the interests of the dictatorial leaders of many of its neighbours, for whom a free, democratic Iraq poses a threat.

But it almost seems as though some in the West, who always "knew" the US intervention would end in disaster, would prefer Iraq - and Afghanistan - to fail rather than admit America is capable of doing anything right.

If this is so, with friends like these, the people of these countries scarcely need enemies.

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Pamela Bone is an associate editor of The Age

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