Word: kajaki
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...Taliban took the school-books away. It also took the flour and cooking oil. It warned the farmers of Kajaki Olya, a village on the banks of the Helmand River in southern Afghanistan, not to accept any other gifts from the British troops struggling to bring order to this corner of the country's most problematic province. Ghulam Madin, an opium-poppy farmer, begs the soldiers to stop coming through his village. He doesn't want any more food or cash, even though his gaunt face and bare feet indicate that he needs both. "Last time you brought us shoes...
...Pashtun population that has historically resisted centralized rule. It is, says Chris Alexander, the U.N.'s deputy special representative in Afghanistan, "the place where the challenges that used to be nationwide have been swept like dead leaves into a pile." And at the top of that heap is Kajaki, where the struggle to secure and repair one of the nation's most important infrastructure projects has become a symbol of the wider effort to rebuild Afghanistan...
...base. At the time, the dam provided enough power to light up the country's southern provinces, but they left room for a third turbine in the powerhouse and laid the groundwork for an even larger power station nearby that could bring the total energy capacity of the Kajaki Dam project up to 150 MW--nearly 20% of Afghanistan's current energy demand...
...Agency for International Development (USAID) returned to Kajaki in 2002 to pick up where it had left off. The power station needed to be overhauled, the existing turbines repaired, and the third one put in place. In addition, some 150 miles (240 km) of power lines still need to be strung. It's an overwhelming task, but one that is essential for bringing development and thus security to the country. The dam, says Mark Ward of USAID, "is a critical element in our support for Afghanistan, because it will provide the electricity to drive private-sector growth in Helmand...
...depressed," says Shervington, who is dedicated to Afghanistan and believes NATO can succeed, although not as quickly as he'd like. "What can you do? The easy thing would be to listen to the Taliban, and not go to Kajaki Olya anymore. The villagers are caught between us and the Taliban." He spreads his hands apart and smacks them together. "But we can't not go in. And we can't fight the Taliban, either. So we are caught...