Herat, Afghanistan 2002
Herat, Afghanistan. ©Stewart Weir 2002
Its been nearly 10 years since I did an assignment for Warchild and Oxfam in North East Afghanistan. I was mostly working in Herat producing images shortly after the fall of the Taliban. I remember the high hopes of the Afghan people. The West made promises of investment that were never kept.
The Taliban had been ‘defeated’ back then by the Northern Alliance and the US/UK armed forces but the locals knew they would not disappear. A translator I met there spoke of his hopes that Afghanistan “would settle into peace and there would be no more war” but he said even though that was his hope the reality would be that “if the West stayed there could never be a real lasting peace anywhere in the country”.
The boy in the image above is younger than his look’s suggest. He was then 12 years old and now he is 22. In 10 years his country has not moved 1 inch forward to peace.
