Pajhwok News Agency (Kabul), 12 June 2012 The Kabul-based agency reports that the Karzai family has nominated Qayyum Karzai, a brother of the incumbent president, to run for the country’s top office in 2014. It says it has been told so in an ‘exclusive interview’ with another Karzai brother, Mahmud. Referring to a recent report […]
Recommended Reads
Telegraph, 8 June 2012 How German development minister Niebel forgot to pay customs for an Afghan carpet.
Recommended Reads
New York Times, 1 June 2012 A young Kuchi women from Kunduz, in an extremely rare case, has gone public after having been raped as a result of an inter-family dispute, with possible involvement of a local ALP unit, and demanded that the perpetrators be punished.
Recommended Reads
The Atlantic, 1 June 2012 Read David Rohde’s long piece about USAID’s work in Helmand province, as it is forced to hire more and more contractors, even to oversee other contractors. With some reminiscences to the 1950-70s USAID project in the same province.
Recommended Reads
RFE/RL, 1 June 2012 The website of the US-financed radio reports that young Afghans had protested in Kabul against the commemoration of the anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, some of them defacing and tearing down posters of the late Iranian supreme leader.
Recommended Reads
Wall Street Journal, 29 May 2012 A report about a local militia that successfully keeps the Taleban out of Qala-ye Zal district in Kunduz. The only problem: officially, these Critical Infrastructure Protection program (CIPP) militia, created last spring by the German military, ‘using American-provided funds’, should have been disbanded: President Karzai had told a reported […]
Recommended Reads
Washington Post, 26 May 2012 A report about the problem of NATO troops’ ‘unfenced and poorly marked’ firing ranges and training grounds in Afghanistan, here near Bagram where hundreds of unexploded explosives litter the area and ‘farmers, scrap-metal collectors and sheep herders have been crippled, blinded and burned by U.S. military ammunition’. It is not […]
Recommended Reads
al-Jazeera, 25 May 2012 Our recent guest blogger Mujib Mashal has an interesting article about Kandahar province’s dire state of education. Students numbers, both male and female, are well below national average, as are high school graduates.Three district ‘never’ had a school.
Recommended Reads
IWPR, 23 May 2012 A very gripping reportage about bonded child labour in the brick kilns of Nangrahar’s Sorkhrud district by Afghan journalist By Sayed Samiullah Sayidi, and a good follow up to the IRI report about the same issue some days ago in our ‘recommended reading’ list.
Recommended Reads
Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, 22 May 2012 Scott Smith and Andrew Wilder discuss Afghan election scenarios, argue (very rightly so) that ‘the international community has inherited a partial responsibility for ensuring that the next elections play the role of consensus-building and state legitimation that would be the most likely way to save the country from […]
Recommended Reads
Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, 17 May 2012 Read ex-AIHRC commissioner Nader Nadery’s article pleading for a human rights priority in NATO’s Afghanistan strategy, criticising that the West, since the end of the Bonn process in 2004, has ‘refrained from exerting real political pressure on the government to comply with its international obligations and the Afghan […]
Recommended Reads
Wall Street Journal, 16 May 2012 Taleban attacks are jumping in southern Afghan areas like the districts of Zhari, Panjwai and Maiwand that were the focus of the 2010 US troop surge, writes Yaroslv Trofimov, ‘posing a renewed challenge to the American-led coalition that hoped to pacify the crucial region before withdrawing from the country’. […]
Recommended Reads
