SIRAQULA, AFGHANISTAN — The local Afghan leader’s community meeting was off to an unpromising start.
Hours after the meeting, called a shura, was supposed to begin, only seven old men waited at the gate of U.S. Marine Patrol Base Salaam Bazaar in the northern part of Helmand province.
Frustrated, Now Zad District Gov. Said Murad Sadtak chastised an Afghan army commander.
“Why did you not invite more people?” he demanded. “It was your task to tell the people and make sure that they come to see us so we can discuss their problems. It’s kind of a waste that I am here.”
The army commander had invited locals to the small fortified camp, but sometimes those invitations were extended during gunfights when soldiers and U.S. Marines were using private Afghan homes and farmers’ poppy fields for cover.
Mr. Sadtak continued to complain, and his American mentor, Marine Maj. Aniela Szymanski, moved to the man’s side.
“Maybe we should welcome those who have come to see you,” she said gently.
In Helmand province, unpracticed local leaders are wielding the levers of a fragile government for the first time. They urge local communities to support the government and reject the Taliban, often in places where the insurgency is more conspicuous than the new Afghan state.
But many local Afghan leaders lack skills and resources to address severe problems facing Helmand communities, including drought, joblessness and the chaos of living between two determined combat forces. Some are cut off from their constituents by insecurity. Others are corrupt.
This is the challenge for the international coalition: create a cadre of Afghan leaders and institutions robust enough to resist the Taliban’s advances after NATO withdraws combat forces by the end of 2014.
Filling government positions remains difficult because of illiteracy and insecurity. Provincial officials are under constant threat of assassination, so they live within Western military installations and must be escorted outside by U.S. military convoys and helicopters.
The week Mr. Sadtak met with tribal elders in Siraqula, the mayor of Kandahar’s provincial seat was assassinated by a suicide attacker who detonated a bomb hidden in his turban. A few days later, a dozen policemen were killed by a suicide bomber in Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.
Lashkar Gah was one of five provincial capitals and two provinces chosen to start the transition from NATO to Afghan control.
The coalition hopes to use the security zone around the provincial capital and the central Helmand River Valley as a foothold to push Afghan governance into outlying areas such as Kajaki.
“My son was blown up,” a village elder told Kajaki District Chief Mohammad Salim Khan Rodi during a recent meeting at his compound inside a Marine camp. “Can you compensate me? I am just a poor man. My oldest son was my right hand. Without him, we have nothing.”
Mr. Rodi offered his condolences but no funds.
Twenty local elders were at the meeting in Kajaki, a good showing at a small, mine-encircled Marine camp. Mr. Rodi has hosted four other shuras in the past six months; none of them drew more than 24 men.
The men told him that drought is withering their crops and that they need more electricity from the Kajaki Hydroelectric Power Station to run irrigation pumps on their wells. They also demanded that the Marines stop night raids in nearby villages.
Mr. Rodi offered his visitors no promises. Electrical power is low because the Taliban illegally taps the power lines, he said, and insurgent checkpoints and bomb threats are delaying a long-overdue upgrade to the power plant.
“You yell at me to turn the power on,” Mr. Rodi told them. “But go tell the Taliban to let you have more electricity and see what they say.”
Night raids would cease when residents stand up to the Taliban, the district chief said.
“The government is here to serve the people, but you have to tell the Taliban to stop planting [roadside bombs],” Mr. Rodi said. “The other day, two policemen who protect me - they are as close to me as my own sons - were hurt because they stepped on [a roadside bomb].”
Kajaki district has no functioning government schools or medical clinics. Marines in Kajaki are in a defensive position around the dam. In the area, the insurgency prevents Afghan governance from taking hold, Mr. Rodi said.
“I’m so isolated from the people,” Mr. Rodi said in an interview after the shura. “And I’m not able to offer them my help the way I’d like to.”
In many of Afghanistan’s most insecure areas, Western diplomats and military commanders provide key links between local Afghan officials and provincial and national institutions.
Western advisers organize travel and payment transfers for Afghan officials. Advisers also hold daily meetings with their Afghan counterparts to impart their best political counsel.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.