A Well-Boring Physician in Afghanistan

When President Obama in his State of the Union Address on 25 January announced the withdrawal of the American forces from Afghanistan beginning in July, Dr.Nakamura Tetsu must have been among those who welcomed the news.
He was born in Japan in 1946, and was a practising physician. He started serving at a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984, as the doctor in charge of a leprosy ward. From 1991 he opened his practise in some of the doctor-less hilly villages in war-torn Afghanistan, which was later extended to some poor residential districts in Kabul itself.
His focus in more recent years was on the area west of Jalalabad. He and his group planted trees to harness the rapid stream originating from the melting snow in the mountains, built waterways, and succeeded in irrigating fourteen thousand hectares of farmland by 2008, providing constant supply of water to 200,000 people all the year round. When a famine struck the region, threatening to turn it into desert, around the turn of the century, they sank wells numbering 1,600, providing the villagers water first for drinking and then for irrigation. Dr.Nakamura says that as far as the water is available the villagers need not become refugees. He adds that the villagers have their own knowledge on the distribution of water.
Interestingly, during his childhood his cherished dream was to own a forest and live there with insects, as he said in a recently completed serialized interview in a newspaper, but right now his happiest moment is when he is moving a bulldozer in a river-bed.
What is his view of the ongoing struggle in Afghanistan? He thinks that things are being justified in the name of anti-terrorism. The unmanned bomber tends to attack wherever there is a gathering of people, a marriage ceremony, for example. There are more disparities in the bigger cities, with a handful of the rich and the freedom to starve for many. It is obvious to every one that the war has come up to a deadlock. He also says that once there was the news of the possible Japanese SDF(Self-Defense Forces) joining the war on the US side, people like him began to feel the threat to their lives.
He concluded a lecture by saying that what is important is not what to do, but what not to do, like not to kill or not to steal, which are universal values. It was a fully packed lecture at Tokyo in September 2009. I sensed that many people were eager to know the reality at first hand, and what is within their reach to do(or not to do!).