Le Monde diplomatique (German), Febr. 2011 Herald Tribune author William Pfaff asks ‘the fundamental question’ whether it ‘has it been a terrible error for the United States to have built an all but irreversible worldwide system of a thousand or more military bases, stations and outposts’ and whether it has not, as planned, enhanced American […]
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Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2011 ‘Prices of many staples and basic supplies have surged in Afghanistan, where public discontent is a security liability for the government in Kabul’ and ‘Where Afghans are paying more, it is often foreign nations footing the bill’, the author points out. He also gives interesting data on prices and […]
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The New Yorker, 14 February 2011 Keywords: Afghanistan;Kabul Bank;(Pres.) Hamid Karzai;Khalil Ferozi;Corruption;Sherkhan Farnood;Mahmoud Karzai.
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New York Times, 6 February 2011 A very detailed rendering of how the Taleban’s shadow government works in Ghazni’s Andar district, including tax collection and intelligence gathering.
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IWPR, 30 January 2011 Journalists in Herat province insist local and foreign officials, both security and civilian, are refusing to cooperate with them, have been ordered by their superiors not to respond to requests for information and comment, hampering their ability to produce balanced reports and restricting freedom of speech.
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Guardian, 23 January 2011 Declan Walsh’s ‘obituary’ for the infamous ‘Colonel Imam’ who was kidnapped in Waziristan in March 2010 by a previously unknown group, the ‘Asian Tigers’, maybe a splinter-group of the Pakistani Taleban and now killed by them.
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New York Times, 22 January 2011 Hair-raising story about a former CIA officer who runs his own spy network in Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Eclipse Group, sent agents to collect shaved-off beard-hair on President Karzai in order to prove, through DNA sampling, his drug addiction, feeds the military, Fox News and similar right-wing channels,
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BBC World Service, 21 January 2011 Remind yourself of the lost voices of Afghanistan: Afghans read and discuss war poetry. Beautiful, harrowing and very human.
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Guardian, 21 January 2011 The Afghan government is trying to whitewash the Taliban’s image by claiming it no longer opposes education for girls, argues Rachel Reid from Human Rights Watch.
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IRIN, 20 January 2011 Pro-government militias in parts of Afghanistan are believed to be recruiting underage boys and sometimes sexually abusing them in an environment of criminal impunity, local people and human rights organizations say, among them AIHRC and UNICEF.
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al-Jazeera, 12 January 2011 Villagers and regional leaders accuse semi-official Arbakai of extortion and violence as country forms new local force in Afghanistan’s northeastern provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan. ‘They are supposed to protect us from the Taliban,’ a fermale employee in an international organisation in Kunduz told the authors, ‘But it is difficult to […]
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Registan blog, 12 January 2011 Joshua Foust comments on the US military’s ‘vllage razing’ tactics – but the most striking in it are the photos of one Afghan village ‘efore’ and ‘after’.
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