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.
Recommended Reads
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.
Recommended Reads
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.
Recommended Reads
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,
Recommended Reads
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.
Recommended Reads
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.
Recommended Reads
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.
Recommended Reads
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 […]
Recommended Reads
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’.
Recommended Reads
Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 7 January 2011 Afghan journalist Shahpoor Saber reports from Herat where young educated Afghans are leaving to make better lives for themselves abroad as they see no future for people like them in a deteriorating security climate.
Recommended Reads
Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2011 Excellent article by Vanessa Gezari on arrested journalists in Kandahar; the confusing mix of counter-insurgency, journalism, intelligence, story-telling and the “shifting layers of half- and quarter-truth” (“I was used to it. Afghanistan had schooled me in the limits of certainty”).
Recommended Reads
Danger Room (blog), 3 January 2011 Good overview of the peace and reconciliation achievement so far: 800
Recommended Reads
