Julie L. Kessler
lawyer traveler writer

News

Our man in Afghanistan

Last week in the very center of Kabul, just a few blocks from both the British and American embassies, in an area known to be heavily frequented by foreigners — aid workers, diplomats, and journalists — a Taliban suicide bomber and some gunmen attacked a popular restaurant, killing 21 people. Of those murdered, 13 were expatriates, two were American academics from the American University of Afghanistan, and four were women. One of the expatriate victims was the country chief for the International Monetary Fund.

 

With seemingly never-ending strife in the region, the public has, over the years, become somewhat inured to news of suicide bombers in general and Taliban suicide bombers in particular. However, this attack was especially shocking, not just because it brazenly targeted a restaurant known to be popular among foreigners during the busy dinner hour (and when the initial blast didn’t do enough damage, gunmen entered and simply gunned down patrons at their tables), but because those foreigners were in Afghanistan specifically to aid it or bring the world news about it. President Hamid Karzai, in a statement issued almost a day later, condemned the attack, but also made a clear reference to a NATO airstrike a week earlier in a province north of Kabul, saying that foreign troops must “know the difference between victims and terrorists.”

 

It is, from my vantage point, very, very difficult to comprehend either the attack or Karzai’s comments.

In the mid-2000’s, I sought out some pro bono work to add an emotional counterweight to the dizzying profits being made by clients on the commercial real estate financing deals I worked on by day. In early 2005, I came across the Afghan Dental Relief Project, a 501(c)(3) organization whose mission it was to provide dentists, dental care, dental supplies, and education to a war-torn country that did not have a single dental school. The ADRP was the brain child of Santa Barbara dentist James G. Rolfe, a singularly dedicated man with an undeniable soft spot for the less-fortunate.

 

After a few telephone conversations with Dr. Rolfe, I drove up to Santa Barbara one afternoon and met with him, his long-time girlfriend, and a handful of other ADRP volunteers. The meeting took place off a dirt road just north of the city on a spit of barren land, where I found Dr. Rolfe and his volunteers all working together on various aspects of renovationsof donated shipping containers. This was hard-core manual labor in which both the skilled and unskilled helped in the process of converting the shipping containers into a multi-room dental clinic, including laboratory areas and x-ray machines. The goal was for the containers to be shipped to Kabul along with several thousand pounds of dental supplies and sit on land to be donated by the Afghan government. The plan was that it would be staffed by a roving roster of ADRP volunteer dentists and staff. These were goals that were far loftier than anyone could then have imagined. After this meeting (as well as a few blisters and an impromptu beer-laden barbeque on the dirt road), I became counsel for the ADRP.

 

For the next eighteen months, I went to a host of meetings in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara attended by various volunteers, fundraisers, American Afghanis, and traveling Afghani diplomats. I worked on a variety of contracts whose end game was the establishment of the ADRP’s clinic and dental school in Kabul. One of the contracts was a land use agreement for vacant land in central Kabul, land which, ostensibly anyway, was to be donated by the Afghanistan Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, in concert with the Afghanistan Ministry of Health and the Afghanistan Ministry of Education.

 

Starting in 2003, Dr. Rolfe made several trips to Kabul at his own expense, and donated countless hours of his time. He was, and remains, an utterly tireless man who has stayed the course true to his convictions, often in the face of odds that would have stopped most mere mortals cold.

 

Once the land use agreement was signed, finishing touches were put on the outfitted containers. Inside these old containers was now a state-of-the-art dental clinic. With tens of thousands of dollars of supplies amassed, and with dentists, dental assistants, and hygienists lined up to volunteer on a rotating basis, the containers and supplies were shipped to Kabul. Once there, construction of the surrounding structures could be commenced and the real work could begin — providing dental care and dental education to Afghanis at no or nominal charge.

 

It was, in three words, an unmitigated disaster. As it turned out, the Afghani officials Dr. Rolfe had negotiated with were more interested in baksheesh (bribery money) and expensive trinkets than in establishing a Western-style clinic, even one that would not have cost them a cent to build and would have provided free, quality dental care to Afghanis. Once the Afghani officials reneged on the land provision, there was nowhere to house the containers and supplies while Dr. Rolfe attempted to secure an alternative site for the clinic. As security was, and remains, a major issue in Afghanistan, Dr. Rolfe then made the heartbreaking and costly decision to have the containers and all of the supplies shipped back to the U.S. It was around this time, in late 2006, that I left the ADRP. Not because I no longer believed in its mission — I will always believe that the provision of healthcare is the cornerstone of any just society — but because trying to do this in Afghanistan at the time, it seemed to me anyway, was utterly futile. If we couldn’t trust the government officials who signed the negotiated agreements, I believed it was hopeless to try to go forward.

 

Fortunately for the Afghani people, in the face of nearly insurmountable odds and having spent nearly all of the ADRP funds and his own personal savings on this endeavor, Dr. Rolfe’s personal ideals and professional goals never waivered. In November 2007, the container clinic and 120,000 pounds of dental supplies arrived once again in Kabul. And in May 2008, the new Dental Clinic of Kabul opened its doors on land next to the Kabul volunteer center, and included a dental training school. However, about a year ago, the ADRP was summarily evicted from this land and at the same time, coincidentally, most of its equipment was stolen. The ADRP then leased temporary space when, six months ago, the municipality of Kabul finally gave the ADRP an acre of land in central Kabul. The new clinic is now ready, except for electricity; the necessary ditches are currently being dug through the brutal Afghan winter, and electricity should be available in the next couple of months. One hopes.

 

What the future holds for the Dental Clinic of Kabul and the volunteer expatriates who serve there on a rotating basis remains to be seen. Of course, I wholeheartedly applaud Dr. Rolfe and the other ADRP volunteers. They are a selfless, completely apolitical group whose sole goal is to make life better and healthier for those far less fortunate than they are. But they and other expatriates need to be guaranteed a reasonable degree of safety while they work and live in the host country in which they choose to serve.

 

This is perhaps what makes this most recent Taliban terrorist act so awful and so disheartening. Becoming yet another casualty of jihad, any jihad, anywhere, serves no humanitarian purpose whatsoever. What is does, though, is to remind us of the most base evil of which humans are capable: indiscriminate killing.

 

Without a doubt, there are far too few men like Dr. Rolfe, and indeed, he shows no sign of slowing down his efforts to bring quality dental care to Afghanistan. In the end, however, expatriates generous of spirit may understandably decide that the personal risks far outweigh any potential good they may accomplish, no matter how desperately they are needed by an impoverished, grateful and war-weary people. And that may be the biggest humanitarian tragedy of all.

Date Posted:  Jan. 22 2014