Afghanistan: Lack of Orderly Means to Distribute Aid Is Latest Setback for Afghan Village --- ABI BARAK, Afghanistan — An outpouring of aid has come to the remote village of Abi Barak, where a devastating landslide is likely to have claimed 2,100 lives and instantly left thousands homeless. Tents, water, food and blankets have streamed in from all quarters, including community donations and international contributions. -- But on Monday, it was clear that the effort to get that assistance to the hardest-hit was being hampered by a host of problems: competing interests among local leaders and politicians, a lack of infrastructure and effective management at the site, and an onslaught of villagers coming from nearby areas who were unaffected by the landslide but were needy nonetheless. -- The scene was on full display in a makeshift camp set atop a plateau overlooking Abi Barak, where a mass of earth torn loose from a neighboring mountain on Friday buried roughly 300 homes. Thousands of villagers argued in the open air, with much-needed aid sitting in tidy piles just out of reach, while elders tried to sort out what has been perhaps the most crucial challenge in the aftermath of the landslide — confirming the names and details of those who most needed help. -- “The biggest problem that we have here is that we do not have a clear and genuine list of the actual affected people,” said Abdullah Faiz, the head of the Afghan Red Crescent in Badakhshan Province, where the village is. “We do not know the villagers.” -- While the scene in Abi Barak was relatively orderly, it underscored a challenge fundamental to helping the survivors here, and to the broader aid effort in Afghanistan. Given the massive footprint of the international community in the country over the past decade, there is plenty of aid to go around, officials said. But there is often limited capacity to sort out how to distribute it, given that rural administration, far removed from the Kabul ministries where technocrats work, is almost nonexistent. -- Villagers in Abi Barak live without electricity, going about their lives as sheepherders and farmers nestled between two hulking mud mountains. There is no census, no family records, no government offices. Whatever records did exist before the landslide were obliterated.