Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Posts tagged: Wikileaks

Wikileaks

The Myth of ‘Afghan Black’ (2): The cultural history of hashish consumption in Afghanistan

Fabrizio Foschini • Jelena Bjelica • Obaid Ali •

Hashish or chars is a fairly common substance in Afghanistan. Its use, without ever attaining the levels of mass consumption that characterise other lightly-intoxicating substances in other war-torn countries, like the chewing of qat in Yemen or Somalia, for example, has remained relatively widespread. This does not mean that it is condoned by society: hashish-users, known as […]

Context and Culture Read more

Pour WikiLeaks, la NSA sait tout des conversations téléphoniques en Afghanistan

Thomas Ruttig •

France24, 23 May 2014 Asked whether he is surprised about Wikileaks’ disclosure that Afghanistan is onw of the two countries where all phone calls have been recorded by the NSA, AAN’s Thomas Ruttig is not surprised and says that everyone in Afghanistan has been conviced of that for a long time and that mobile phones are […]

AAN in the Media Read more

Kill or Capture 3: When the International Military Says ‘Sorry’

Kate Clark •

President Karzai has said he will no longer allow NATO airstrikes on houses because they are causing too many civilian casualties. The president’s ultimatum follows the pictures shown on Afghan TV on 29 May of distraught villagers in Helmand carrying the bruised and dusty corpses of their small children who had been killed in an […]

War and Peace Read more

Wikileaks and the Paktia governor

Kate Clark •

One of the US embassy cables published by Wikileaks relates to the Governor of Paktia, Juma Khan Hamdard. It contains detailed allegations that the governor is not only illegally amassing a personal fortune from US government-funded contracts, but is also fuelling money to active members of his tanzim, Hezb-e Islami, who are currently fighting the […]

Political Landscape Read more

A Wikileaks Leak and Human Rights Matters

Thomas Ruttig •

A series of emails sent to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by human rights groups from or based in Afghanistan has been leaked to the media. The groups ‘called on the whistleblower website to expunge the names of Afghans mentioned in the war logs because of fears that they could be targeted by insurgents’. AAN’s co-director […]

Rights and Freedoms Read more

Pakistani Anger with WikiLeaks

Ulrike Schulz • Karl Fischer •

Pakistan has remarkably free media. However, this freedom has been limited on a few subjects. Journalists would not touch the Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan during the ‘jihad’ against the Soviet occupation in a critical way, for example. It looked as if the ISI often was dictating the leaders on this subject in at least some […]

Regional Relations Read more

Wikileaks, Strategic Communications and (Im-)Plausible Denials

Thomas Ruttig •

Wikileaks, with its publication of some 75,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan on Sunday, has brilliantly made use of the summer slump. Instead of escaped crocodiles at lakes popular with swimmers (a favourite of the German media in former years) or silly ideas of backbenchers, we have been given the chance […]

International Engagement Read more

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