Naheed Farid | A Portrait of Afghanistan’s Youngest MP

“Young people represent the new identity for Afghanistan. They can show that we are not only the country of violence and blood, but a country of peace. They have big dreams for this country. I am calling on the youth of Afghanistan to be more engaged in politics, to debate and campaign so that they too can help make the change.”

“My name is Naheed Farid.

I am the youngest MP in Parliament. I am a representative of Herat province. I also consider myself a representative of youth and women.

I was the first girl from our family or tribe to leave Afghanistan and go to Europe to study.

After I got married I did my Masters in America. My education in America, as an Afghan woman, was really interesting to me. I had entered a society with a completely different system. I had entered the land of opportunities, something that never existed in Afghanistan.

I found opportunity in the path of politics, and I stepped in that path. There’s a lack of healthy leadership and politics in Afghanistan, and I thought even with small steps, I could make a difference. My steps were not steady in the beginning. I was afraid to be in this field. I was afraid for my family, my husband and my child to become victims of this path of politics.

My campaign holds both sweet and bitter memories for me.

I felt like I was giving hope to women and youth. It was like I was opening a path for them. Particularly women and girls – they were asking me to be their representative – to open up a way for them to step into politics. I really hope I can live up to this responsibility.

I saw some shocking things when I was traveling for my campaign – graveyards full of women who had died in childbirth, villages with children who had never bathed. It made me more determined to win and give these people a voice.

The people who really campaigned for me were young children. Some I had met and others I hadn’t. They persuaded their parents to vote for me. I was receiving so many phone calls from parents saying they had heard about me from their children and that they would support me.

During my campaign I couldn’t really be a mother to my child. It really saddened me to know that I wasn’t looking after her the way she needed me to.

I received so many threats that I had to stop the campaign towards the end. I got messages saying that Taliban were waiting to attack me. I was restricted to just one district in Herat. I had to ask for military protection. My family was also affected by the security problems. I had to take my daughter out of kindergarten because of the threat. This is still an issue now, my friends ask me to be careful; to employ a bodyguard and keep a gun in the car. But I hate such things.

I work in Parliament from 9am until 4pm but that is only one part of the work. Since MPs are representatives of people, we have meetings with many different groups. Often we’re home only 3 or 4 nights a week. Sometimes we have meetings until 11pm. I cannot say yes to every invitation or request, otherwise I would never be at home. I don’t like disappointing my supporters this way.

The image I had for a government of nation building, transparency, and anti-corruption is pale now because there are people inside parliament who work against these things.

Many of the women MPs come from insecure areas and they cannot work for their people the way they want to. Security is still a big issue. These women are those who 10 years ago did not have the right to go to school, to work, to the bazaar, even to hospital. We try to be united to push women’s issues to the front.

But it’s really hard for a commander, who is now an MP, a person that has never cared about women’s values and has always talked with guns. Now he must sit next to me; he gets 3 minutes to talk and I get 3 minutes. I have the right to speak, and he has to hear my voice. This is a different vision towards women.

Young people represent the new identity for Afghanistan. They can show that we are not only the country of violence and blood, but a country of peace. They have big dreams for this country. I am calling on the youth of Afghanistan to be more engaged in politics, to debate and campaign so that they too can help make the change.”

Re-posted from the web site Kabul: A City at Work.
"A portrait of a city through its working people"

Afghanistan's 'Little America' and For-Profit War

First with an ill-fated Cold War-era project and now with the war today, Helmand province has been the source of enormously lucrative private contracting that has done little to improve peoples' lives.

Visit Afghanistan's 'Little America,' and See the Folly of For-Profit War
David Rohde | Jun 1 2012

“Eight years ago, a 72-year-old American aid worker named Charles Grader told me a seemingly fantastical story. In a bleak stretch of Afghan desert that resembled the surface of Mars, several dozen families from states like Montana, Wisconsin and California had lived in suburban tract homes with backyard barbecues. For 30 years during the Cold War, the settlement served as the headquarters of a massive American project designed to wean Afghans from Soviet influence.

American engineers oversaw the largest development program in Afghanistan’s history, constructing two huge earthen dams, 300 miles of irrigation canals and 1,200 miles of gravel roads. All told, the project made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. The town, officially known as “Lashkar Gah,” was the new capital of Helmand province and an ultra-modern world of workshops and offices. Afghans called it “Little America.”

Intrigued, I hitched a ride to the town with Grader a few weeks later. A weathered New England blue blood, Grader was the last American to head the Kabul office of the U.S. Agency for International Development before the 1979 Soviet invasion. In 2004, he was back in Afghanistan working as a contractor, refusing to retire just yet and trying, it seemed, to do good.

From the moment we arrived in Lashkar Gah, I was transfixed by Little America, its history and its meaning. At enormous cost, a sweeping American Cold War effort had temporarily eased the destitution of one corner of Afghanistan but failed to achieve its lofty goals. Surveying the town, I desperately hoped America could do better.”

Click here to read the full article

Additional Resources:

Kajaki Dam and the Helmand Valley Authority

BBC Radio | How Little America was Built

NATO to Move War Supplies Through Central Asia

On Monday the NATO Secretary-General reported that Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have signed agreements to allow NATO war supplies through their countries.

"These agreements will give us a range of new options and the robust and flexible transport network we need," Rasmussen said Monday at a news conference. "I thank all three partner countries for their support. And NATO will continue to actively engage with Afghanistan's neighbors to build wider support for the country's stability."

In November of last year, transit routes through Pakistan were stopped after US forces killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in a cross border raid.

Before the November attack, one-third of American war supplies moved through Pakistan, costing about $17 million a month. Since then, coalition forces have relied on the Northern Distribution Network, a system of supply lines in countries such as Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, inflating supply costs by $87 million more per month, according to the Associated Press.

Additional Resources:

Talks Resume on Transit of War Supplies through Pakistan

Pakistan and the War

Afghan Broadcaster Defies Expectations | Sanga Jabarkhil

Hijratullah Ekhtyar has a nice profile of TV journalist Sanga Jabarkhil for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting*. At 21, Sanga is the head of Radio Television of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar office.

“By the age of 15, she had begun working for the state-owned Radio Television of Afghanistan, RTA, in Nangarhar, balancing this against her school studies. She told her family she was working on a magazine rather than in broadcasting.

When her first report – on arranged marriages – was aired, her relatives were mortified rather than proud.

“After hearing me on the radio, all my family members stopped talking to me. I stayed in my room, apart from them, and this lasted for a whole year,” Jabarkhil recalled.

Her relatives believed she was working alongside male colleagues, which they viewed as quite unacceptable.

For many conservative Afghans, simply working in a mixed-sex environment is immoral behaviour for a woman, and makes her an unattractive marriage prospect.

It took a long time to win the family over, although Jabarkhil’s mother Nuria was always quietly supportive.

Ultimately, only an elder brother remained opposed to her career choice.

“My brother didn’t talk to me, he didn’t look at me and even avoided coming face-to-face with me,” she said. “He told me, ‘Whenever I am sitting with friends and you appear on the TV screen, everyone looks at me and asks whether you are my sister. I feel ashamed; it’s like dying.’”

Jabarkhil even took her brother to work to assure him that women at RTA Nangarhar worked in a separate office from the men.

Today, aged just 21, Jabarkhil heads the women’s section of RTA’s Nangarhar office.”

Article link here.

Goal of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting

"Journalism in areas of crisis is itself invariably in crisis, suffering repression, lack of financing and independence, and an absence of professional skills and ethics. IWPR's core mission is rooting professional journalism skills deeply within individuals and within societies. From the Balkans to Iraq and beyond, IWPR has played a leading role in establishing a leadership cadre across local media and across regions. Capacity-building initiatives strengthen media institutionally, from management training to establishing local radios and news agencies. IWPR is especially known for intensive, one-on-one, apprentice-style training from basic journalism to human rights and elections reporting."

No One Hears the Poor | Kathy Kelly in Kabul

Mostly men from an extended family that fled to a Kabul displacement camp after a bombardment. They are originally from Helmand.

No One Hears the Poor

"One hospital in Kabul, the Emergency Surgical Center for Civilian War Victims, serves people free of charge. Emanuele Nannini, the chief logistician for the hospital, reminded us, the previous day, that the U.S. spends one million dollars, per year, for each soldier it deploys in Afghanistan. “Just let six of them go home,” he said, “and with that six million we could meet our total annual operating budget for the 33 existing clinics and hospitals we have in Afghanistan. With 60 less soldiers, the money saved could mean running 330 clinics.”

Just before leaving Chicago, while the NATO summit was convening, Amnesty International announced its intention to campaign for NATO to protect the rights of Afghan women and children. Amnesty International should talk with the Afghan Peace Volunteers and the Emergency hospital network about caring, practically and wisely, for women and children in Afghanistan.

Surrounded by fierce warlords, cunning war profiteers, and foreign armies with menacing arsenals and wild spending habits, it’s hard for the mothers who visited us today to imagine that the situation can ever change. And yet, before leaving us, they smiled broadly. “For us,” said Nuria, “the possibility of a bright future is over, but at least for our children there is a chance.”"

- Kathy Kelly writing from Kabul

Drone Strikes and Kill Lists | NYT Investigation

With remarkable access to participants, reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane document the increasing use of drone warfare and targeted killings. This is the third in a series of article about President Obama called the shadow war.

It's a revealing look into the bureaucracy that sustains the drone policy and the decision by President Obama to sign off on targeted strikes outside of Pakistan where the CIA is in charge.

“In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”"

How the kill list is developed

“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.”

New guidelines for strikes in Yemen.

“Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter than those for signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the United States, and they have even given them a new name — TADS, for Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closely guarded secret — part of a pattern for a president who came into office promising transparency.”

Article link here.

What the Taliban Want

Former Taliban fighters hand over their weapons to Afghan police as part of a reconciliation process in Herat, Afghanistan, Sunday, May 13, 2012. Taliban leaders including one of the most senior members of the organization, Agha Jan Motasim told The AP that most Taliban supported a negotiated end to the protracted war in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Hoshang Hashimi)(Credit: AP)

Kathy Gannon has a revealing article on what the Taliban want.

“One of the most powerful men on the Taliban council, Agha Jan Motasim, nearly lost his life in a hail of bullets for advocating a negotiated settlement that would bring a broad-based government to his beleaguered homeland of Afghanistan.

In an exclusive and rare interview by a member of the so-called Quetta Shura, Motasim told The Associated Press Sunday that a majority of Taliban wants a peace settlement and that there are only "a few" hard-liners in the movement.”

***

“Looking ahead to next week's NATO summit in Chicago, Motasim said he had a message for participants.

"The decisions of NATO should be for the good of Afghanistan and should not call for more violence. It should call for an end to the fighting, an end to the raids and killings," he said. "Afghanistan is destroyed, the people are displaced, refugees, poor people are dying in their homes and also foreigners are dying here. It should end."”

M K Bhadrakumar, a former Indian diplomat, adds this.

“Kathy Gannon of Associated Press goes back a long way to almost where it all began in the 1980s in the Afghan civil war, and she began reporting from the rim of the volcano. Trust her to have got through to the Taliban’s Quetta Shura to someone who is “one of the most powerful men” within that council — Agha Jan Motasim. The AP interview with Motasim gives a rare insight into the wheels within wheels of what passes for the Taliban movement — or rather, what it has become through the tumult of these 2 decades behind us.

The Taliban have 3 demands: release of all Afghan prisoners languishing for years in Guantanamo Bay and Bagram; removal of their names from the United Nations “blacklist”; and, recognition as a political party. Pray, is it too much to ask for in a lifetime?

Of course, there are “hardliners” within the Taliban family. But then, they are there everywhere — be it in our life at home, or away from home. It’s a human trait. Why be obsessive about it and give it a centrality it doesn’t deserve? Isolate it; we could tell the Haqqanis some day, as Dante wrote, “Consume within thyself with thine own rage.”

The overpowering sense of Motasim’s remarks is a sense of exhaustion, like in the Uncle Tupelo song “Looking For A Way Out” — when you find you can’t somehow / make it like all the rest / you won’t need to scrounge around for someone else / torn between the unknown / and the place that you call home / and the life that you want but have never known…”

Read the Gannon article here.