Candace Rondeaux from Kabul in The Washington Post:
The road that rings the old city district of Murad Khane is thick with smoke from the hearths of a row of blacksmiths. Until recently, few people in the Afghan capital had much reason to venture beyond the plumes of black smoke into the district.
For decades, Murad Khane has been crushed beneath tons of garbage, a monumental wasteland to the conflict that has gripped Afghanistan for 30 years. The trash heaps made the homes there so inaccessible in places that residents had to burrow through the refuse to enter their front doors.
These days, however, many of those who walk the warren of residences and tumbledown Silk Road inns that make up Murad Khane are there to rebuild the district in what some have billed one the most ambitious efforts yet to pump new life into the long-ailing city.
[Photo: Work to restore the Peacock House, a once-grand building in a rundown, trash-strewn district of Kabul, was begun in 2006 by the Turquoise Foundation, a development organization born of a meeting of minds between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Britain's Prince Charles. / The Washington Post]
Photographer Tyler Hicks navigates the Afghan capital with his camera. From the New York Times:
My first trip to Kabul was in 2001. I arrived as Northern Alliance soldiers were fighting Taliban gunmen in and around the Afghan capital. Those who resisted were killed, and those captured were more likely to be executed than taken prisoner. There was a power vacuum in Kabul, a brief moment when one set of rulers fled and the next had not yet taken over. This can be a liberating time for a photographer. There were no clear rules, no central authority that might restrict you from taking pictures. I’ve returned to Afghanistan nearly every year since then.
[Photo: Refugees have streamed into Kabul, and many become beggars, like this woman caring for her sick son.Tyler Hicks / NYTimes]
An attack has revealed the way former mujahedeen leaders, like Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, combine forces with foreign terrorist groups. From International Herald Tribune:
Kabul: The attack was little reported at the time. A suicide bombing on March 3 killed two NATO soldiers and two Afghan civilians and wounded 19 others in an American military base.
It was only weeks later, when Taliban militants put out a propaganda DVD, that the implications of the attack became clear. The DVD shows a huge explosion, with shock waves rippling out far beyond the base. As a thick cloud of dust rises, the face of Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Taliban commander who presents one of the biggest threats to NATO and United States forces, appears. He taunts his opponents and derides rumors of his demise.
“Now as you see I am still alive,” he says.
The deadly attack was also devastating for what it showed about the persistence of the Afghan insurgency and the way former mujahedeen leaders, like Maulavi Haqqani, combined tactics and forces with Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups.
A teenager caught on a lethal mission reveals how he was groomed to kill British troops. In The Independent, Kim Sengupta reports from Kabul:
The surroundings were grim and forbidding, a notorious jail run by Afghanistan’s feared security service for those taken prisoner in the bloody war with the Taliban.
Among the inmates: Shakirullah Yasin Ali; a small, frail boy, just 14 years old, arrested as he prepared to carry out a suicide bombing against British and American targets. “If I had succeeded, I would be dead now, I realise that,” he said in a soft, nervous voice.
“But those who were instructing me said that if I believed in serving God it was my duty to fight against the foreigners. They said God would protect me when the time came.”
There is something oddly soothing about going to sleep to the sound of gunfire in Kandahar airbase. The shots are fired by British troops, honing the night combat skills which achieved such success over the Taleban last winter. The fighting season was due to start four weeks ago, when the poppy harvest ended - but so far, nothing. British commanders are quietly optimistic that the Taleban has counted its 6,000 dead, learned it cannot win firefights and switched to guerrilla tactics instead.
Only in Afghanistan could the rockets being fired into the Kandahar airbase be seen as a sign of progress. Much as the prospect may terrify visitors, the soldiers themselves are sanguine. For those who were in the Iraqi bases being shelled 60 times a night, using body armour for pyjamas, the four-a-week rate of Kandahar is nothing. The main complaint of the servicemen and women is that the Taleban may well have gone underground and sporadic missile alerts could be all the action they see.
A child of 10 was one of three civilians who died during a botched Taliban attack on the Afghan President. Peter Beaumont reports from Kabul in The Observor, UK:
Syed Ali was playing on the roof of his mud-brick house when the killers came for Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai last week. Karzai survived the attack on Kabul’s broad parade ground. Ten-year-old Syed Ali, a kilometre away watching his mother cleaning almond shells to supplement the family’s winter fuel, died, with two others, when he was hit by a stray bullet.
Amid the furore of how a plot - apparently known of in advance - could have come so close to killing Karzai, the death of Syed Ali has all but been forgotten. An official from the President’s office came to see the family and said he would come again. When I met the family, they were still waiting for his return.
His mother can barely speak; two days of crying has reduced her voice to a croak.
How the Afghan heroin trade is fuelling the Taliban insurgency. In The Independent, UK, Jerome Starkey reports from Kunduz:
The heroin flooding Britain’s streets is threatening the lives of UK troops in Afghanistan, an Independent investigation can reveal.
Russian gangsters who smuggle drugs into Britain are buying cheap heroin from Afghanistan and paying for it with guns. Smugglers told The Independent how Russian arms dealers meet Taliban drug lords at a bazaar near the old Afghan-Soviet border, deep in Tajikistan’s desert. The bazaar exists solely to trade Afghan drugs for Russian guns - and sometimes a bit of sex on the side.
The drugs are destined for Britain’s streets. The guns go straight to the Taliban front line.
The conflict in Afghanistan may become more like the one in Iraq, says The Economist
THE Mujahideen Day parade in Kabul, at the weekend, was supposed to show Afghanistan’s new, Western-trained, armed forces coming of age. President Hamid Karzai, other Afghan politicians and a jumble of diplomats packed a podium to review the troops. Then, just as a 21-gun salute began, what sounded like celebratory firecrackers crackled from a shabby hotel some 400m away. As six lightly armed Taliban fighters took pot shots the dignitaries and military men panicked, shedding bits of ceremonial uniform as they scrambled for safety.
Casualties were not as serious as they might have been: the gunmen managed to kill three and wound 11 but failed to touch their main target, Mr Karzai. Even so, they scored a significant propaganda victory. Television pictures of the furore broadcast at home and abroad confirmed that Afghanistan’s capital is within reach of the Islamist fighters. “We can attack anywhere we want to”, boasted a Taliban spokesman after the attacks. This was the second big strike in Kabul this year. In January a three-man Taliban suicide squad blasted its way into the lobby and spa of a luxury hotel in the city, killing eight staff and guests.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American envoy to the United Nations and an influential figure in the Bush administration, may run against Hamid Karzai for the Afghan presidency after resigning from his post.
Mr Khalilzad, who is Afghan-born, fuelled recurring reports of his political ambitions by appearing on television in Kabul to announce that he is to leave his job and wants to be “at the service of the Afghan people”.
Although Mr Khalilzad, who holds US citizenship, added: “I have said earlier that I am not a candidate for any position in Afghanistan,” his decision to step down from the prestigious UN job has been widely regarded as clearing the way for a run at the Afghan leadership, with President Karzai facing serious and mounting internal and international criticism.
The growing prominence of Abu Yahya al-Libi tracks Al Qaeda’s emphasis on information in its war with the West. In The New York Times:
On the night of July 10, 2005, an obscure militant preacher named Abu Yahya al-Libi escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan and rocketed to fame in the world of jihadists.
The breakout from the Bagram Air Base by Mr. Libi and three cellmates - they picked a lock, dodged their guards and traversed the base’s vast acreage to freedom - embarrassed American officials as deeply as it delighted the jihadist movement. In the nearly three years since then, Mr. Libi’s meteoric ascent within the leadership of Al Qaeda has proved to be even more troublesome for the authorities.
Mr. Libi, a Libyan believed to be in his late 30s, is now considered to be a top strategist for Al Qaeda.
If Al Qaeda strikes the West in the coming months, it’s likely the mastermind will be a stocky Egyptian explosives expert with two missing fingers.
His alias is Abu Ubaida al Masri. Hardly anyone has heard of him outside a select circle of anti-terrorism officials and Islamic militants. But as chief of external operations for Al Qaeda, investigators say, he has one of the most dangerous — and endangered — jobs in international terrorism.
He has overseen the major plots that the network needs to stay viable, investigators say: the London transportation bombings in 2005, a foiled transatlantic “spectacular” aimed at U.S.-bound planes in 2006, and an aborted plot in this serene Scandinavian capital last fall.
Kandahar, Afghanistan: Noor Ahmad has one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. For 18 years, he’s prodded the earth centimetre by centimetre to rid his country of land mines, a scourge that has become more numerous in the time he’s been working. He’s seen an anti-personnel mine blow up in front of him and still bears the scars where his body wasn’t shielded by protective gear.
He presses on in spite of the dangers, working in the hot sun on the weekend to help clear the perimeter of a bombed-out weapons factory east of Kandahar, because he considers it “a kind of jihad.”
“If you protect the life of one person, then you will be rewarded as if you have protected all the world,” Mr. Ahmed said, citing a verse from the Koran.
In the country’s poppy-growing provinces, farmers are being forced to sell their daughters to pay loans. From Newsweek:
Khalida’s father says she’s 9-or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can’t keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can’t keep her much longer. Khalida’s father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It’s the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he’s losing far more than money. “I never imagined I’d have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter,” says Shah.
Foreign Policylooks at whose militaries are doing what in Afghanistan.
The Top Five:
United States
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 29,000
Fatalities: 419 (includes deaths in Pakistan and Uzbekistan)
Britain
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 7,800
Fatalities: 89 (includes civilians from the Ministry of Defense)
Germany
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 3,210
Fatalities: 26
Italy
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 2,880
Fatalities: 12
Canada
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 2,500
Fatalities: 81
The Bottom Five:
Singapore
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 2
Fatalities: 0
Austria
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 2, sometimes 3
Fatalities: 0
Ireland
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 7
Fatalities: 0
Luxembourg
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 9
Fatalities: 0
Iceland
Troops currently in Afghanistan: 13 (Iceland has no military, so these are actually civilians that report to the Icelandic Crisis Response Unit)
Fatalities: 0
For details on what each country’s troops are doing in Afghanistan, click here:
Many of the athletes at Beijing will have had to overcome obstacles to get there but only one Olympian is likely to have had her training schedule dogged by a sexist hate campaign.
As if the Olympic team of Afghanistan does not have enough trouble with run-down facilities and a woeful shortage of funds, its sole woman competitor has had to prepare herself mentally for the biggest challenge of her life while dealing with sinister midnight telephone calls, the open derision of her neighbours and even police harassment.
The attitude of the officers who tried to arrest her this week was nothing new for Mehboba Andyar, 19, who lives in a slum in Kabul.
Jason Straziuso from Kabul in The Independent, UK:
In a first for post-Taliban Afghanistan, a woman from the conservative Pashtun belt is one of the top three contenders in the country’s version of Pop Idol. Conservatives decry the fact that an Afghan woman has found success singing on television, but Lima Sahar brushes off her critics, saying there can be no progress without upsetting the status quo. “No pain, no gain,” she said yesterday.
Afghanistan’s cleric’s council has protested to President Hamid Karzai over Afghan Star and Indian dramas shown on Tolo TV, the country’s most popular station. Ali Ahmad Jebra-ali, a council member, said: “In the situation we have in Afghanistan right now, we don’t need a woman singer. We don’t need Afghan Star. We are in need of a good economy, good education. If Lima Sahar wins Afghan Star, how can she help the poor? This is not the way to help the Afghan people.”
The Council on Foreign Relations website has the full statement of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Afghanistan:
Hillary Clinton announced her plans to address the forgotten front line in Afghanistan as she met with a group of respected retired admirals, generals, and other senior officials to discuss current foreign policy and national security challenges.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban have largely recovered from the blows inflicted after 9/11. Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan have now merged into one of the most dangerous regions of the world, and one of the most strategically important to the United States. Today, Hillary pledged to make Afghanistan her highest security priority after Iraq, and outlined her agenda for winning the war in Afghanistan.
Wazhma Frogh, an Afghan, uses her religion to press for women’s rights - and development agencies take note. Jill Carroll in The Christian Science Monitor:
Just hours after Wazhma Frogh arrived in an isolated, conservative district in northeastern Afghanistan in 2002, the local mullah was preaching to his congregation to kill her. Ms. Frogh was meddling with their women with her plan to start a literacy program, he told the assembly.
As she walked past the mosque during noon prayers, his words caught her ear. Shocked, she marched straight into the mosque. In a flowing black chador that left her face uncovered, she strode past the male worshipers and faced the mullah. Trembling inside, she challenged him.
“Mullah, give me five minutes,” she recalls saying. “I will tell you something, and after that if you want to say I am an infidel and I am a threat to you, just kill me.”
Now that his younger brother, Prince Harry is safely back home, is it Prince Williams’ turn to do his bit for God, granny and country and head off to Afghanistan? The Sunclaims that the second in line to the British throne is, in fact, off to serve, at his own request, in a frontline position aboard a Royal Navy warship. The paper claims to know the exact details of where and when Prince William will be sent, but is withholding this information in the interest ‘to protect him and his fellow comrades’.
Meanwhile, Sami Yousafzai and Stryker McGuire in Newsweek report that the Taliban in Afghanistan knew all along that they had English royalty in their midst.
Despite the british government’s concerted effort to preserve the secret, a veteran Taliban field officer claims he was scarcely surprised by the disclosure that Prince Harry was serving with Britain’s troops in southern Afghanistan. Fearing that insurgents would specifically target Cornet Wales (the prince’s military title) and his fellow soldiers if his presence in the battle zone were publicly revealed, the top British brass did everything possible to prevent leaks about his deployment on Dec. 14 to Helmand province. But talking to newsweek via satellite phone from that region last week, deputy commander Mullah Abdul Karim recalled getting an urgent message from Taliban intelligence in late December or early January that “an important chicken” had joined British troops in his area of operations. Karim promptly sent his men hunting for the prince. “He is our special enemy,” says Karim. “Our first option was to capture him as a prisoner, and the second, to kill him.”
And, finally, not everybody’s impressed with Prince Harry’s ’stunt’ to serve in Afghanistan which proves that royal lives are worth more than ordinary ones, writes Marina Hyde in The Guardian
On the one hand, it was nice to see Prince Harry in a British army uniform, as opposed to one of Hitler’s. It’s a little bit like Pokemon, really. I’m hoping he’ll give us a highly collectible Hutu warrior snap soon. Gotta catch ‘em all! On the other, is there anyone over Pokemon-playing age who believes it was really worth it? The sheer number of man-hours and money lavished on allowing one young man to experience job satisfaction is mind-boggling. It has to be the most fatuous use of Ministry of Defence resources since Geoff Hoon.
Afghans play Buzkashi during a weekly game February 29, 2008 in Kabul, Afghanistan. Buzkashi, or ‘goat dragging’, is played with two teams of horsemen competing to throw a beheaded 30 kg calf, goat or sheep into a scoring circle. The Afghan national sport which was outlawed during the Taliban regime is played from late October to March every year. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
I was greeted by a high school graduate dressed in men’s salwar-kameez and vest when I arrived at the school in Afghanistan’s Northern province of Faryab last July.
“You thought I was boy, didn’t you? Because I dress like boy and walk like boy - yes?” The short hair and men’s clothing contradicted a girlish voice. “I always dress like boy. People think I am boy, but I am girl. But I don’t like to be girl.”
This was my introduction to Azaada Khan, the girl who grew up as a boy under the omniscient eye of the Taliban.
Kim Sengupta of The Independent, UK, interviews Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death, in a prison in Mazar-I-Sharif, Afghanistan:
‘What they call my trial lasted just four minutes in a closed court. I was told that I was guilty and the decision was that I was going to die’
Clutching the bars at his prison, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh recalls how his life unravelled. “There was no question of me getting a lawyer to represent me in the case; in fact I was not even able to speak on my own defence.”
The 23-year-old student, whose death sentence for downloading a report on women’s rights from the internet has become an international cause célèbre, was speaking to The Independent at his jail in Mazar-i-Sharif - the first time the outside world has heard his own account of his shattering experience. In a voice soft, somewhat hesitant, he said: “The judges had made up their mind about the case without me. The way they talked to me, looked at me, was the way they look at a condemned man. I wanted to say ‘this is wrong, please listen to me’, but I was given no chance to explain.”
We tumbled out of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the Americans’ small mountain outposts, but the area’s reputation among the soldiers was mythic. It was a known safe haven for insurgents. American troops have tended to avoid the place since a nasty fight a year or so earlier. And as Halloween approached, the soldiers I was with, under the command of 26-year-old Capt. Dan Kearney, were predicting their own Yaka China doom. [Photo: Specialist Carl Vandenberge, right, and Staff Sgt. Kevin Rice, left, are assisted as they walk to a medevac helicopter after being shot by insurgents in the ambush.]
For the Taliban in Afghanistan, ransom is easy money writes Carol Grisanti in NBC’s World Blog
Ishaqzai was anxious to tell her story.
“The Taliban kidnapped my 21-year-old son Mustafa,” she said. “They demanded a ransom of $200,000 or else they said they would kill him,” she told NBC News. “Then they ordered me to give up my job.”
Ishaqzai, 36, is the mother of seven and, as a member of the Afghan parliament, one of the few female politicians in this male-dominated society. She is a prominent figure and well-known in the Afghan capital.
News of the kidnapping recently surfaced and had become a hot conversation topic in Kabul.
NBC News went to visit Ishaqzai at her home in an upscale Kabul neighborhood. The family lives well, at least by Afghan standards. An antique red Bokhara carpet covered the entire length of the living room in their fourth-floor apartment. It was bitter cold outside, but it had finally stopped snowing, and it was warm inside thanks to a gas heater.
A houseboy brought tea and Ishaqzai began to tell her story.
KABUL: Five young Afghan women slipped out to lunch in an upmarket Kabul eatery on Valentine’s Day, each wearing a red scarf in a wink to the day of love — a difficult pursuit in Afghanistan.
“It was fun. We also bought a cake,” said one of them, a 26-year-old employee of an international nongovernment organisation who asked to be called Jamila to hide her identity. The red scarves were a sign known only to this group of friends whose brush with foreigners introduced them to Valentine’s Day — an event largely unknown in Afghanistan, where love outside of marriage is taboo.
In The Christian Science Monitor, Gayle Tzemach reports from Kabul on woman entrepreneur Kamela Sediqi who teaches Afghans around the country the skills they need to start ventures.
In a small office hidden behind a gate in Kabul, Kamela Sediqi sits at her laptop and builds her business. The unlikely entrepreneur is the architect of Kaweyan Business Development Services, a consulting firm she started in 2004 with only her computer and her determination.
Barely 30 and on her third startup, Ms. Sediqi employs 25 men and women, more than half of them full time. She started her first venture, a tailoring business, to support her mother and brother during Taliban rule. In the end, it provided work for more than 100 women. And it gave Sediqi the entrepreneurial bug that eventually led her to Kaweyan - a service firm that had few capital needs at the outset.
Afghanistan will be judged by the way it treats one man this time there’s no Taliban to blame. The death sentence handed out to 23-year-old Afghan journalist Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh on January 22 in a primary court in the province of Balkh has the support of Himachal Pradesh University alumnus, champion of liberalism and enemy of the Taliban, President Hamid Karzai himself. On October 22, 2007, Kambakhsh was arrested for downloading and keeping an article from the internet that spoke about what the Koran has to say about women. Picked up by the authorities in Mazar-e-Sharif, the student of journalism and contributor to Jahan-e-Naw was tried behind closed doors, without a lawyer to defend him and was found guilty of blasphemy and “disseminating defamatory comments about Islam”.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - For centuries, fighting and lawlessness have been part of the fabric of this frontier city. But in the past year, Pakistan’s war with Islamic militants has spilled right into its alleys and bazaars, its forts and armories, killing policemen and soldiers and scaring its famously tough citizens.
There is a sense of siege here, as the Islamic insurgency pours out of the adjacent tribal region into this city, one of Pakistan’s largest, and its surrounding districts.
The Taliban and their militant sympathizers now hold strategic pockets on the city’s outskirts, the police say, from where they strike at the military and the police, order schoolgirls to wear the burqa and blow up stores selling DVDs, among other acts of violence.
Kabul — On the afternoon before his wedding day this fall, Hamid was sitting in an empty teahouse worrying a glass of green tea between his fingers, his brow furrowed in concern.
He confessed to feeling a certain anxiety at seeing his bachelor’s independence slipping away. But something else was troubling him, as well: the cost of his wedding.
In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride’s family, a kind of reverse dowry.
The road that rings the old city district of Murad Khane is thick with smoke from the hearths of a row of blacksmiths. Until recently, few people in the Afghan capital had much reason to venture beyond the plumes of black smoke into the district.
No Comments » | 
Afghanistan | Tagged: Heritage, Kabu's old buildings, Murad Khane, Restoration, Turquoise Mountain Foundation | 
Permalink
Posted by asianwindow
