BAQI TANAH, AFGHANISTAN—The Pakistan border is a short walk through the desert from this village, and the rutted road that winds past it is a main thoroughfare for smugglers, Taliban insurgents and corrupt Afghan border police.

They all compete for the villagers’ loyalties, which shift as easily as the sand beneath their dusty feet, depending on who presents the biggest threat, or holds out the most alluring promises.

Canada hoped to win them over by building a new school just two years ago. Village elder Haji Abdul Raziq, an overbearing greybeard, named the school after himself.

He also took full credit for the gift from Canadians, at least until it quickly began to fall apart. Now, he tells his people that Canadians bungled the project because they didn’t give enough money.

The concrete walls are cracked and crumbling around the flimsy wooden door frames.

The paint, actually a thin splash of whitewash, is rubbing off where it isn’t covered with grime and graffiti.

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There isn’t a stick of furniture in any of the classrooms, and a single, metal-framed blackboard sits propped against the front wall, the rough concrete floor covered in a layer of dirt that blows in through cracked windows.

The best-equipped side of the school is actually a health clinic.

A classroom in what was one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “signature projects” in the Taliban’s birthplace has been turned into a curtained maternity ward.

Across the hall, another classroom is a well-stocked pharmacy where a man in a white lab coat dispenses medicine to women enshrouded in burqas, balancing infants on their laps.

Women sitting on rough-hewn benches in the dark hallway, the hoods of their heavy burqa veils draped over their shoulders, tittered and grumbled at the first glimpse of a foreign male.

“Oh, here comes another infidel taking pictures of our women,” muttered an older matron. “They are after us and our people.”

She turned to the others and scolded: “Please, cover your faces!”

In Kandahar’s badlands, the Taliban don’t have to force people to live under repressive rules with the barrel of a gun.

They comply as a matter of habit, deeply rooted in ancient, often severe, Pashtun culture that thrives in the deprivation of desert villages.

Building schools and training thousands of teachers was one way Harper hoped to help modernize Kandahar province, and wean its people off extremism.

It looks like he lost an enormous bet, perhaps by walking away too soon from the table.

Afghanistan was Canada’s largest single recipient of development aid until Ottawa sharply cut back funding and withdrew Canadian combat troops last year.

Canadians have spent some $1.65 billion on reconstruction and development in Afghanistan since the Taliban regime was toppled in 2001, and will give the country at least $300 million in development and humanitarian aid from last year to 2014.

At a recent international donors’ conference, the government pledged to spend another $227 million from 2014 to 2017, with the main goal of empowering women and girls in areas such as education.

Nipa Banerjee, who headed the Canadian International Development Agency in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2006, said her research at the University of Ottawa confirms widespread problems with the Harper government’s Afghan aid.

Afghan officials have complained to her of poor quality in the construction of Canadian-built schools, she said.

She acknowledged that it’s difficult to do aid work in a war zone and to properly monitor projects without security.

But the government knew Kandahar was Afghanistan’s most dangerous province, and shouldn’t have pulled out of national projects with foreign partners to take on high-risk efforts intended to give Canada a high profile.

A example of Canadian failures is the Dahla Dam and irrigation system, which still doesn’t supply enough water to desert farms crucial to Kandahar’s economy despite $50 million in aid, Banerjee said.

Ottawa “had no business investing 50 per cent to 60 per cent of our development funds in signature projects in Kandahar,” she said, adding: “In Kandahar, Canadian signature projects were the sole responsibility of Canada and we failed.”

Sharply cutting funds to the central government’s National Solidarity Program, which Banerjee called “the best and most successful ever program in Afghanistan,” was one of many mistakes, she said.

“The program is tailor-made to earn legitimacy by a fragile state through delivery of services to the people in rural areas,” such as schools, she added.

“My visit to the NSP sites and discussions with the community members told me that the NSP, in fact, is one of the best security projects as it helped the government to earn the confidence and loyalty of the people and develop resistance against the Taliban.”

Harper’s final report to Parliament on the Afghan mission calls education “a central aspect of Canada’s development work in Kandahar.

A key accomplishment, often cited by his government as a major success, was the training of 3,100 teachers “in core teaching skills,” 100 more than planned. But raw numbers don’t say anything about quality, and complaints about poor teachers are common among Kandahar’s students and their parents. In some classes, pupils fill in for teachers. Otherwise, the kids could only give up and go home.

“CIDA completed a range of teacher training activities across Afghanistan,” which varied in length, but focused on teachers who were already in classrooms, agency spokesperson Katherine Heath-Eves said from Ottawa.

“Some of the projects have offered training anywhere from one week to a month,” she added.

With Afghan government schools failing, thousands of students have studied at a private school in Kandahar City’s Afghan-Canadian Community Centre to learn English, computers and business and other skills.

Many connect with Canadian teachers over the centre’s broadband Internet connection.

It is one of the most widely praised schools in Kandahar, with a name that keeps Canada’s legacy alive.

More than 1,600 students, half of them girls and women, study there now, but that number is expected to fall sharply because CIDA is cutting off the school’s funding this year, said director Ehsan Ehsanullah.

CIDA has provided a total of more than $500,000, or around 89 per cent of the centre’s budget, since 2008, and wants to wean the centre off the agency’s aid, he said.

Private donors, many of them Canadians, have covered most of the remaining costs.

“There are many concerns among the staff, students and parents as to what will happen after CIDA funding has run out,” Ehsanullah said.

“I am working day and night, begging, writing proposals and letters, reaching out to donors, increasing the male classes and fees. But as yet I have not had a big success. We have always lived on a shoestring.”

Unless he finds new funding, and fast, Ehsanullah said he will have to close the classes for girls and women, many of whom are destitute and don’t pay school fees, which most male students do.

The director’s best hope for keeping the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre open is American aid. The U.S. embassy is considering his request, Ehsanullah said.

The education signature project built, expanded and repaired 52 schools in Kandahar province, two more than the target, Heath-Eves said.

The construction added “361 classes that will provide learning spaces for up to 9,000 students per year,” she added. “Actual enrolment at these schools, however, will be determined by a number of factors, principally security.”

The development agency “takes the safety and quality of schools seriously and in every way possible attempts to ensure that all school construction is completed in a quality manner,” Heath-Eves said.

But CIDA directly contracted the construction of only two schools in Kandahar, “for which we relied on the expertise of the Canadian Forces Specialized Engineering Team,” Heath-Eves added.

“They provided direct oversight on all components of the construction.”

The remaining 50 schools were built with Canadian “funding provided to experienced and trusted organizations, such as the World Bank, under its Education Quality Improvement Program (EQUIP),” Heath-Eves said.

While the World Bank provided overall management of Canadian education aid, Afghanistan’s education ministry was “responsible for the overall execution of the project, including school construction,” she added.

The ministry’s “hands-on involvement allows for its systems and capacity to be strengthened to ensure the longer-term sustainability of our investments,” she maintained.

Ottawa refuses to identify any of the schools that Canadian taxpayers’ money built.

“CIDA conducts its operations in a transparent manner,” Heath-Eves said. “However, disclosing information regarding Afghan schools may endanger the safety of the schoolchildren, teachers and, to a larger extent, the local communities in which schools are located.”

Taliban guerrillas and their allies are not holed up in caves. They live, and move, among ordinary people, across Kandahar province and large swaths of the rest of Afghanistan.

They keep close tabs on who does what for whom. And Canadian aid projects are not well-kept secrets, especially in Kandahar’s villages, where the Taliban’s network of spies and supporters is strongest.

Noor Ahmad, head of engineering for Kandahar’s provincial education department, has a list of schools, who built them, and their state of repair. He maintains it on his laptop, updating it with any details he can get.

He provided the names and locations of several Canadian-built schools, including the school in Baqi Tanah, as a representative sample of the shoddy construction that he said spoiled most of Canada’s schools.

Ahmad worked closely with Canadian officials for several years, and while he praised their efforts, he said he frequently objected that schools were declared finished when they were incomplete by local standards.

“I told them many times that if you only build the building, without a boundary wall, during the night people can steal the schools’ doors and windows, and other things like chalkboards or chairs,” Ahmad recalled.

“And they said, ‘It’s okay, let’s make the building first. We will see about constructing those things, like boundary walls, toilets and water pumps, later.”

That day hasn’t come. And since the last CIDA official left Kandahar in March and Canadian troops pulled out last fall, Ahmad would be wise not to hold his breath.

Afghanistan’s ministry of education “has already conducted a review of the information received and a follow-up needs assessment, and will be putting a plan in place to rectify any identified deficiencies,” Heath-Eves said.

If CIDA continues to rely on a weak and dysfunctional Afghan government, which is hamstrung by corruption, compounded by insurgent threats, to manage school projects, improvements aren’t likely.

The war, which is expected to get worse as the last foreign combat troops pull out by the end of 2014, prevents education officials from visiting many schools to see how many, if any, are actually places of learning, for girls and boys.

Kandahar’s provincial education director and his deputy, both in office three years until April, were alleged to be so corrupt that the central government in Kabul ordered them replaced by two senior department officials from neighbouring Zabul province.

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Corruption has infected every corner of Kandahar’s education department, said Ghamkor, who laid some of the blame at Canada’s feet.

“Canadians do not have any group to follow up and see what is happening with its aid,” he said. “Maybe the Canadians did a lot to help, and made significant aid contributions, but who knows?

“And nothing happened according to our agreements. Agreements written on paper were one thing but in practice they were something else.”

Six schools were built near Canadian military bases in remote areas that are now so dangerous Ahmad can’t find out if the classrooms still exist.

Canadian officials “did not give us any reports on those schools,” he said.

“We don’t know what is happening there in those schools at all,” Ahmad admitted. “Well, maybe there are students studying in those districts, but from here it is difficult to go there.”

The village of Baqi Tanah, in the desert just outside the border city of Spin Boldak, is one of the places officials from Kandahar are loath to visit.

They fear running afoul of the Afghan border police as much as they do the Taliban.

While the border cops are supposed to be under the control of the central government in Kabul, the units operating in and around Spin Boldak are more of a personal militia loyal to their boyish, U.S.-backed commander Brig.-Gen. Abdul Raziq.

Raziq is a fierce enemy of the Taliban, and therefore a close friend of Western militaries, even though his forces have been accused of corruption, drug running, and silencing opponents with torture and execution.

The bumpy desert tracks that crisscross the Afghan-Pakistan border near Spin Boldak are lucrative revenue streams in Raziq’s personal fiefdom, reportedly pouring millions of dollars from smuggling rights into his accounts each month.

With a local high-school principal and a teenaged student as guides, I followed one of those routes to Baqih Tanah, passing creeping trucks piled high with new tires. The trucks swayed and teetered near to toppling as they eased over the ruts.

The border police checkpoints in desert villages along the way ignored the steady freight traffic. Yet the border cops lounging in the shade of a sun-baked mud wall refused to let our car pass. They weren’t happy about something, but refused to say what.

The principal begged and a cop finally came to the car window, probably to open negotiations on a bribe. Then he spotted me, a blue-eyed foreigner, in the back seat.

“It’s better that he wears sunglasses,” the border cop barked. “And be careful with him. If anybody sees him with you, then it would be trouble for all of you. He is like gold, or smuggled goods, to people round here. So you take good care of him.”

And with a snarly smile, like a hyena shoved off a carcass, the cop finally waved us through.

There were no students at Baqih Tanah’s school when we arrived in the middle of the day. A battered metal sign in front identified it as “Haji Abdull Raziq Mobil Clinic,” funded by the World Health Organization.

But Wali Mohammad, an earnest young man, insisted it is a school. And he is its headmaster, and one of the teachers.

The pupils were on vacation and the busy medical clinic that takes up half the small building is only temporary, he said.

Mohammad walked me through the two-year-old building, pointing to its dried mud roof and gaping holes in walls that are crumbling like sand blocks around the wooden frames of flimsy doors and shattered windows.

“We do not have furniture, no desks, chairs and blackboards, for the students,” he said as a group of curious kids rushed into a dusty room the size of a classroom.

Raziq, the village elder, suddenly arrived and pushed Mohammad aside, scolding the headmaster to hush up and let him do the talking.

Villagers, using their own equipment, built the school with $32,000 in Canadian funding, a budget that didn’t include a pump for fresh water or a perimeter wall to protect the building and the 60 girls and 100 boys who learn there, he said.

“They did not give us enough money, so that’s why we could not build it properly,” the elder complained.

Eager to end my visit before insurgents or kidnappers got wind of it, he hurried me into a room with a few UNICEF schoolbook bags scattered on the floor and stacks of paper piled against the walls.

“This is the administration room,” Raziq said. “You can see there’s nothing here, no chairs and furniture. Of course, we badly need some.

“Our important documents are on the floor and can be ruined if there’s no cupboard,” the headmaster said.

The village added a high security wall on its own last year, and the three rooms now used to treat patients will become classrooms again when a proper clinic opens in a new building this summer, Raziq explained.

Then he suggested I leave for my own safety.

Back in Kandahar, Ahmad said he had sent staff engineers to keep an eye on Afghan contractors or village councils called shuras that directly supervised the school construction projects.

But they didn’t take criticism well, he said.

“Most of the time, the local companies were drawing a line that, ‘You should not interrupt our work’ and sometimes they even made death threats,” Ahmad added. “So, it is not easy to work here.”

Kandahar City’s Mohmood Tarzee High School was built with Canadian money from the ground up, and when the first, fresh-faced students rushed through its classroom doors a little more than two years ago, it seemed a new era of great promise had dawned.

Nobody knew, apart from the shady contractors, that the brand-new building was doomed. The weak foundations quickly began to shift. The walls were cleaved by deep cracks. The roof leaked.

So much water poured through the ceiling during winter rains that the top floor is closed. The plywood barricades blocking the stairwells are grey with huge water stains.

The 6,000 students who go to class in morning and afternoon shifts walk along floors with large holes cratered so deep in the crumbling concrete that it looks like someone tossed grenades.

Headmaster Haji Abdullah Nazary fears his school is going to collapse on his students some day.

Nazary taught at the school for five years before taking over as headmaster five months ago and had never seen a Canadian visitor before I arrived.

The project design didn’t include plumbing, or an administration office. Nazary turned a classroom into office space, with a black sheet covering the blackboard.

The decay eats away at morale, and makes it tougher for students to succeed, just as enjoying a picnic in a graveyard is harder than in a lovely green park, he said.

Nazary has been an educator for 35 years, almost as long as Afghanistan has been at war, more than long enough to know that foreigners who spent billions of dollars in aid had only one shot to get things right.

Every day he goes to work, trying to teach thousands of Kandahari children that their future can be better than their country’s painful past, Nazary knows that one chance was missed.

“If you are going to do something,” he said wisely, “do it right.”

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