Afghan Reconstruction Report No. 316 (18-Mar-09).

Insurgents allow development projects to go ahead on condition they get a cut of the funds.

By Fetrat Zerak in Farah.

Mirahmad has a very important job to do: he is the mirab, or water regulator, in his native Pushtrod district of Farah province. It is Mirahmad who ensures that the villages under his control receive adequate water for their fields.

When the state-sponsored National Solidarity Programme, NSP, gave Pushtrod 200,000 afghani (40,000 US dollars) to clean out the Nawbahar canal irrigation canal, he was overjoyed.

“But then the Taleban asked for 40 per cent of the money,” he told IWPR. “Otherwise they were not going to let us do the work. So we had to buy them a four-by-four.”

While the Taleban drive around in their new vehicle, Mirahmad is trying desperately to stretch the remaining funds to complete the project.

“We are worried about the budget,” he said. “It may not be enough to do the job. We will have a lot of problems with water.”

In district after district of remote and volatile Farah province, the Taleban are taking control. But rather than chasing out the remnants of government authority, they are seeking to profit from them, by demanding a healthy portion of donor-funded assistance projects.

Read the full report…

Institute for War and Peace Reporting

Congratulations are in order for CTlab Senior Editor and Co-Director, John Matthew Barlow, who successfully defended his PhD dissertation, entitled “‘The House of the Irish’: Irishness, History, and Memory in Griffintown, Montréal, 1868-2009,” this past Friday the 13th (of all days). Hats off to Matt for surviving the torture that academics inflict on those who aspire to the secret club achieving this significant milestone.

The first of CTlab’s urban conflict themed 2009 symposia kicks off next week, on Tuesday, 10 March, focusing on Martin Coward’s recent book, Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction (Routledge: 2008). Routledge has kindly agreed to provide participants with softcopy of the text, and we’ve got a great line up of participants:  Martin Coward (Sussex University), Bryan Finoki (Subtopia), Stephen Graham (University of Durham), Tony Waters (Chico State), Marc Tyrrell (Carleton University), John Matthew Barlow (Concordia University), and Antoine Bousquet (Birkbeck College, London). Stay tuned; first posts, from Urbicide author Martin Coward, will appear late on Tuesday.

We’re heading into a bit of a slump for regular blog posts. Matt’s defending his PhD dissertation this coming Friday, and has, strangely, decided to prioritize that over blogging. Go figure. Anyway, he’ll be laying low until that beast has been slain. Meanwhile, I’m getting ready for a couple of months of field work starting next week, during which time my internet access will be intermittent and bandwidth challenged, at best. The weekly Spatial Forces Index will be one casualty of our schedules, at least for the next couple of weeks. I’ve tried to be religious about getting it out every Monday for the last three months, but for now, it’s got to fall by the wayside while we take care of other committments.