War on the Rocks, 11 December 2017 This blog entry by Deedee Derksen analysing Afghan militias has some interesting findings on Jombesh commanders having joined the Taleban in five districts of Faryab. It also quotes from (and links to) two AAN dispatches by Obaid Ali about the character of self-proclaimed Daeash groups in neighbouring Jowzjan: […]
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International Crisis Group, 11 December 2017 Ex-AAN colleague Borhan Osman’s analysis of the ‘new’ US strategy of bombing drug labs in Afghanistan and its futility: … a coercive counter-narcotics campaign will solve neither the country’s poppy boom nor the Taliban’s profiting from it, which has long depended to an extraordinary extent on very local dynamics. […]
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AFP, 9 December 2017 The heartbreaking-story of the Afghan girl that was crushed by a train at the Serbian-Croatian border when her family desperately tried to enter Europa that is more-and-more self-insulating against refugees.
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Washington Post, 4 December 2017 A self-explanatory title.
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ECRE, 1 December 2017 This links to a policy note by ECRE (the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, a NGO umbrella organisation) analysing EU return policies and a Case Study on returns to Afghanistan identifying the risks, and the ethical, legal and political implications of a narrow focus on increasing the number of returns in general and […]
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Los Angeles Times, 10 November 2017 Some inside in what the new US troops’ task is in Helmand and what they are doing there. Includes the interesting remark by an Afghan military instructor: “If they leave again, things will 100% be reversed.”
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The Guardian, 2 November 2017 The Afghan ‘Weinstein’ affair: a graphic video apparently showing a military officer sexually exploiting a woman who had asked for a promotion triggers several women to speak out: that it has not been the first time the accused had do so; that government institutions in general do little to fight harassment […]
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Politico, 30 October 2017 (Nov/Dec. issue) A portrait of “Ghani’s Ghani” – senior advisor Scott Guggenheim – by great May Jeong, with some (given his position) interesting insights: “A decade and a half of American occupation, Guggenheim continued, produced “democratic institutions with the outward appearance of a democracy, but all about patronage,” he told me. […]
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Quartz India, 30 October 2017 A history piece: How India did not save former President Najibullah – new stuff.
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Ajam Media Collective, 23 October 2017 (article originally appeared on 9 September 2017) Alex Shams, an Iranian-American writer and a PhD student of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, takes a look at the report that US national security adviser McMaster showed Donald Trump 1970s-era photos of Afghan women wearing miniskirts in order to convince him […]
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BBC, 22 September 2017 This time recommended watching: a lovely BBC documentary by our friend Lalage Snow about the gardeners of Kabul. Watch on Youtube. Please also read the author’s piece on the same topic for AAN, here.
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London Review of Books, 31 August 2017 May Jeong’s alternative look at assassinations of women in Kandahar: (…) millions (…) were spent on gender initiatives. (…) The money encouraged some women, mostly the daughters of already enlightened families, to go out into the world. A fifth of parliamentary seats were reserved for women. The police and the […]
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