And not only of the MSM variety.
I thought things were getting better?
"Power cuts still leave Kabul in the dark" by Jason Straziuso/Associated Press | January 13, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan --Gul Hussein was standing under a pale street lamp in a poor section of east Kabul when the entire neighborhood suddenly went black.
The 62-year-old man, adding that his family would light a costly kerosene lamp for dinner that evening, said:
"As you can see, it is dark everywhere. Some of our neighbors are using candles, but candles are expensive, too."
More than five years after the fall of the Taliban -- and despite hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid -- dinner by candlelight remains common in the Afghan capital of Kabul. Nationwide, only 6 percent of Afghans have electricity, the Asian Development Bank says.
The electricity shortage underscores the slow progress in rebuilding the war-torn country. It also feeds other problems. Old factories sit idle, and new ones are not built. Produce withers without refrigeration. Dark, cold homes foster resentment against the government.
In Kabul, power dwindles after the region's hydroelectric dams dry up by midsummer. This past fall, residents averaged only three hours of municipal electricity a day, typically from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., according to USAID, the American government aid agency. Some neighborhoods got none.
That's IN KABUL, folks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Robin Phillips, the USAID director in Afghanistan:
"That's a scary sounding figure because it's pretty tiny. So we're talking about the relatively poorer people in Kabul who have no access to electricity at this time of year."
Which means they are FREEZING!!!!!!!!
Electricity was meager under the Taliban too, when Kabul residents had perhaps two hours of it a day in fall and winter. The supply has since increased, but not as fast as Kabul's population -- from fewer than 1 million people in the late 1990s to more than 4 million today.
Yeah, Taliban was worse.
One imagines how worse it could be, and if it even was (remember, this is a Zionist-controlled "news" source).
Ummmmmm, to quote a piece:
"Rawa is the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which since 1977 has alerted the world to the suffering of women and girls in that country. There is no organisation on earth like it. It is the high bar of feminism, home of the bravest of the brave. Year after year, Rawa agents have travelled secretly through Afghanistan, teaching at clandestine girls’ schools, ministering to isolated and brutalised women, recording outrages on cameras concealed beneath their burqas. They were the Taliban regime’s implacable foes when the word Taliban was barely heard in the west: when the Clinton administration was secretly courting the mullahs so that the oil company Unocal could build a pipeline across Afghanistan from the Caspian.
Indeed, Rawa’s understanding of the designs and hypocrisy of western governments informs a truth about Afghanistan excluded from news, now reduced to a drama of British squaddies besieged by a demonic enemy in a “good war”. When we met, Marina was veiled to conceal her identity. Marina is her nom de guerre. She said: “We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America. Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorise, yet they hold seats in [Hamid] Karzai’s government. In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands.”"
Does that dispel the damn Zionist lies, readers?
If not, try this, too: Memory Hole: Must Read For Women
O.K, back to the darkness of Afghanistan:
Meanwhile, souring U.S. relations with Uzbekistan have delayed plans to import electricity from that country. Power is not expected to arrive in a significant way until late 2008 or mid-2009.
Jan Agha, a 60-year-old handyman from west Kabul who recalled how the city had plentiful power during the 1980s Soviet occupation:
"Life takes power. If you have electricity life is good, but if there's no electricity you go around like a blind man."
Some in Kabul do have electricity: the rich, powerful and well-connected.
Municipal workers -- under direction from the Ministry of Water and Energy -- funnel what power there is to politicians, warlords and foreign embassies.
Yeah, FUCK those people we "liberated" from the Taliban!
Special lines run from substations to their homes, circumventing the power grid. International businesses pay local switch operators bribes of $200 to $1,000 a month for near-constant power, an electrical worker said anonymously for fear of losing his job.
If high-ranking government officials visit the substations, workers race to cut off the illegal connections. Large diesel generators, which businesses and wealthy homeowners own as a backup, rumble to life.
Ismail Khan, the country's water and energy minister, dismisses allegations of corruption as a "small problem," in an optimistic prediction that relies on heavy rains next spring and quick work on the Uzbekistan line:
"The important thing to talk about is that in six months all of these power problems will be solved, and everyone will have electricity 24 hours a day."
What are they supposed to do in the meantime?
Freeze and starve? WTF?
Colorful maps on the walls of Khan's office show existing and future power lines. There's a wall-mounted air conditioner -- a luxury in Afghanistan. India, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new power lines -- including transmission towers installed this summer at 15,000 feet over the Hindu Kush mountains -- to import electricity from Uzbekistan.
Though the line from Kabul to the Uzbek border is in place, a 25-mile section in Uzbekistan has not yet been built. And the U.S. has little leverage to speed it up, said Rakesh Sood, the Indian ambassador here.
Initially, Uzbekistan supported the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, opening an air base to U.S. planes. But the Uzbek government no longer views America as a friend, ever since U.S. leaders loudly criticized the country's human rights record when government-backed forces massacred peaceful demonstrators in 2005.
Uh-oh!
Even when the Uzbek line is completed, Afghanistan can no longer expect the 300 megawatts originally envisioned, Sood said. That would have been more than the 190 megawatts Kabul has today and a significant boost to the 770 megawatts Afghanistan has nationwide.
Sood said: "We know we'll get significantly less. I wouldn't hazard a guess as to what it will be. At that time the U.S.-Uzbek relationship was very high and it has deteriorated substantially."
President Hamid Karzai, during a radio address to the nation last fall, said he discussed with President Bush the country's need to produce its own electricity.
But some efforts have run afoul of the continuing Taliban insurgency. A new U.S.-financed turbine for a hydroelectric dam in Helmand province is a few months away from being installed because of the "lack of permissiveness in the environment," USAID's Phillips said, using a euphemism for the spiraling violence there.
Also, more than $100 million is needed to upgrade Kabul's antiquated distribution system, and it remains unclear who will pay.
Phillips said: "One doesn't like to see the kinds of numbers that we've been talking about, but I wouldn't call it a failure. To put a little more positive spin on it we all wish things could happen more rapidly."
The lack of power has hamstrung U.S. efforts to boost agriculture production, too.
Loren Owen Stoddard, USAID director in Kabul for alternative development and agriculture:
"The No. 1 challenge to agribusiness is electricity. You can't keep things cold and you can't bottle them without power."
The U.S. is purchasing fuel-powered generators that will provide 100 megawatts of power for Kabul by late next year. The power will not come cheap at 15 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with just 3.5 cents for electricity from Uzbekistan.
But until the Uzbek power comes in, Afghanistan has no choice.
Sean O'Sullivan, regional director with the Asian Development Bank;
"It's going to be more oil-fired power and praying for rain to get the hydropower going."
On a smaller scale, India has spent $2.2 million to outfit 100 villages with $450 solar cells. They dot the flat rooftops in Mullah Khatir Khel, a mud-brick village an hour's drive north of Kabul. Each cell can power a couple of light bulbs.
Villager Abdul Gayoom: "I am very happy, why should I not be happy? I am using these bulbs and lanterns provided by India. Before we used to burn oil lamps, now it's a big saving."
Yup, INDIA is helping the Afghans with power, Iran is helping the Afghans with power, and the U.S.?
Nope!
We only good for DESTROYING THINGS!!
Thanks, Bush-o!
