Afghan Cabinet Raises Concern About Mining Legislation, to West’s Unease New York Times, 23 July 2012 A group of Afghan cabinet ministers and senior officials last week objected to the draft legislation as kowtowing to foreign mining interests, reports the Times. And Ashraf Ghani is quoted on a crucial point: ‘Will the advisers [who helped […]
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New York Review of Books, 12 February 2004 very rightly so, Ahmed Rashid is upset about The New York Times that wrote up a report on human rights abuses in Afghanistan based on a document that it has suddenly discovered or noticed billing it as an exclusive. He has sent an earlier article of him […]
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Wall Street Journal, 22 July 2012 ‘The U.S.’s effort to wield economic pressure to influence Iranian leaders is having the unintended consequence of hurting Afghanistan, which relies on remittances from millions of migrants living in the country to its west’, writes the Journal. ‘On the Iranian side of the border, authorities have been forcing Afghan […]
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Spiegel online, 22 July 2012 Now in English: The online version of Germany’s leading political weekly says that President Karzai has approached Germany at the margins of the Tokyo conference to help restarting talks with the Taleban. The report also says that former German special envoy Michael Steiner, now ambassador to India who had a […]
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The Guardian, 17 July 2012 Read the reaction of Afghan women’s rights activist Orzala Ashraf Nemat in the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ section: The Afghan government’s rhetoric on women’s rights and condolences when yet another woman is killed are not enough.
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Registan, 10 July 2012 Joshua Foust on a high-profile columnist who still hasn’t got it: It is not the US who should chose the next Afghan president.
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RFE, 9 July 2012 An interesting look at the context of the stoning of a young Afghan woman in Parwan province which indicates that the picture of this crime is much more blurred then hitherto reported.
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Newsweek/The Daily Beast, 7 July 2012 Matt Aikins about the latest wave of poisoning of schoolgirls – or is it a phenomenon of mass hysteria. Whatever, the Afghan authorities have already made arrests.
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Bamdad, 4 July 2012 An election expert looks at the finance side of the draft new electoral law — a good addition to our blog on the issue.
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USIP, 2 July 2012 Bill Byrd gives the international Afghanistan conferences held so far a critical glance. He writes that they ‘have helped keep attention focused on Afghanistan, elicit financial support, give a “seat at the table” to all partners, generate good strategic documents, and provide a forum for the Afghan government. However, the meetings […]
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Washington Post, 1 July 2012 The United States is spending $92 million to build a new defence ministry for Afghanistan, ‘a massive five-story military headquarters with domed roofs and a high-tech basement command center that will link Afghan generals with their troops fighting the Taliban across the country’. The MoI gets a ‘$54 million Kabul […]
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AP, 1 July 2012 The news agency reports that ‘the Taliban and Hezb-e-Islami, despite reports of infighting in Afghanistan, found common ground at the Kyoto conference in their demand that all foreign troops, including trainers, leave Afghanistan after 2014. Civil society activists represented at the conference also said that it was proposed ‘to set up […]
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