The resultant complications of land grabbing are slowly coming to the surface and are adding to the miseries of the middle and lower classes that spent the saving of their lives to buy a small piece of land. Although much has been written in these lines against land grabbing but nothing useful and productive has been done to solve this problem and if the trend persisted, the resultant complications will keep tormenting us from time to time. There are reports of some land grabbers who first grabbed the land of government and then sold it to others. This chain reaction continued until the land was divided into small pieces and a member of lower or middle class combined all his savings and purchased the one piece of this land. Now that government wants to take action, the poor owner of the land becomes the victim and government comes under criticism.

Land grabbing is not a new story for Afghanistan. In the last three decades, those influential who controlled an area also owned all the land and took it as granted to divide the land among his relatives or friends. After the restoration of democracy, when the value of property skyrocketed, bazaar of land grabbing also heated up. Strong and influential ministers, top brasses of military, tribal chiefs, top government officials and their relatives had all the power and opportunity to grab the land of government and weak public. The trend continues as the government is also in their hand and they cannot be stopped by anyone. Trend will stop only if there remains no more land to be grabbed. Majority of this grabbed land was later on sold to others and it changed many hands before it reached to the final customer. In Kabul, there are many housing schemes established on a grabbed land. On grabbed land, blocks of apartments have been built and are sold to people on reasonable conditions. These small apartments are reasonable enough to be purchased by members of lower and middle class as well. But for making this happen, they must bring together all their savings.

Land grabbing also gave birth to many complications in the society. Due to this, large number of people accumulated unbelievable treasures of money in a short period. This illegal money then became a reason for many other social evils. This money gave them unlimited powers to grab more land, carry out illegal activities, have their own thugs and in some cases, their own private army and even challenge the writ of the government. Socially, it brought much differences between the upper and middle classes of the society. The rich class got very rich while the middle and lower class remained the same, resulting in the frustration among the members of middle and lower classes. It also gave rise to increased desire of money in the society and made people more materialistic. This mentality gave a good reason for the existence and promotion of corruption in the society. It is unfortunate that corruption is not considered wrong in our society and there is a saying that, ‘If you have the opportunity, you should try to eat because if you do not do so, others will eat it.’ This mindset has shaken the basis of our society and we can no more claim to be an honest nation. We only keep away from corruption when we are afraid of police or when we do not have any chance of doing any corruption.

It also gave rise to a general mindset that laws can be broken and the guardians of law have a price tag on them. It is the reason that we are in habit of giving and accepting bribe and corruption and trend of bribing has penetrated deep into our social and political roots. This is such a dangerous problem that all the efforts of government to stop corruption failed and we wasted billions of dollars of international community that came to country after the restoration of democracy. This money was meant for the improvement of the country but instead, it brought surprising improvement in the conditions of a few.

The difference between different groups of society also gave rise to differences in their thoughts. The lower and middle class consider the upper class responsible for all their miseries. In a sense, these two groups hate each other and we can say that the country is already divided on the ideological grounds.

Let us not forget to mention here another unique form of land grabbing. Governor of a province is well reputed for his unique tactics of land grabbing. In his province, if a person wants to start a business or owns a big property, he has to accept any one of the two conditions presented to him by the said governor. He has to make the governor his partner in his business or property or he has to pay a considerable share in his profit. If a person refuses to accept either of them, he becomes a victim of harassment, torture, legal cases and complications and other illegal tactics that make him either accept the conditions or leave the province. There are also reports that the said governor has grabbed property of large number of people in the province. If he ever likes any property in any part of the province, the property owner is forced to sell this property on the terms suitable for the governor.

In the whole story of land grabbing, the role of concerned government authorities has been really poor and unsatisfactory. A land cannot be grabbed until the local government authorities do not have their own share in the whole process.

Issuing fake documents, disappearances of old and genuine land papers and other illegal practices cannot be carried out without the cooperation and support of concerned officials. It simply means, government needs to tackle the government officials first if it has to end this problem.

In a number of countries of the world, this issue has been resolved in a unique manner. When government tries to catch and try the land grabbers, they try their best to keep out of court and prison and save their so-called social status and reputation. In return, they offer government large sums of money to bargain and finish the case out of the court and in an indirect way, government earns billions of dollars by threatening the land-grabbers. But for this to happen, government needs to take a firm stance. Without any discrimination of strong or weak, government must take action against all of them and bring them to justice. The work may be difficult in the beginning, but if the government took a firm stance and gave a message to criminals, hardly any would dare to get into a conflict with the government. In the same way, actual and original criminals should be caught instead of those who also became the victims of land-grabbers.