The Taliban insurgency is historically a predominantly Pashtun movement, still have very little influence among other Afghanistan minority ethnic groups like the Tajiks, Uzbek and Hazaras. It’s hard to keep others from one who believes that gun is jewel of men. If nobody ends the culture of Pashtun warlordism, in 50 years the entire country will become Taliban…

Now the new democratic constitution gives an equal right to women and men but Pashtun rulers avoid that and trying to keep women toward the back and make them think that they just belong to kitchen and inside home. Banning female voice from public data lines means they are no longer part of our society.

He also complains about U.S. Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad meddling in the country's politics.

یونس انتظار, on the other hand, notes a different struggle the country faces:

The 20th anniversary of the World AIDS Day in Afghanistan was celebrated in a situation that the National AIDS Control Program (NACP) has recorded 505 HIV positive cases of which 7 patients were died because of this disease while last year there were only around 250 positive cases.

Afghan health officials must deal with what is sometimes called a “closet culture,” which in risky behavior, such as unprotected sex or the sharing of heroin needles, is rarely if ever discussed. Silence leads to people not disclosing their status if they're even diagnosed, which leads to an environment ripe for rapid HIV infection.

But how can any of this be related to Talibanization? Sanjar explains that the problem is really one of institutions… more accurately, the lack of any:

I don’t believe Taliban are a social force with an agenda and connected with locality, instead I think Taliban are the harshest form of a resistance movement which is created when the country is in a political vacuum. Their arbitrary and cruel methods of compelling order is imposed when the society fails to find any workable agenda. Taliban are not a unique creation, political history is full of movements which emerged after the ascribed socio-political systems constantly failed, these movements such as Wahabis in early twenty century Arabia are cruel and despotic. Taliban emerged in 1994 after Mujahideen tyranny and failure of half a dozen governments before them. Taliban offered no better life than Mujaheeden, but they were more arbitrary and cruel while Mujahideen were simply corrupt and this is why I think Taliban managed to rule. Taliban are returning again; this time people know what they are expecting, there is no dream and no hope, nobody expect Taliban to be anything else than Taliban.

That is a bleak statement, but he argues it well. There are, however, always signs of hope: Tim Foxley sees great promise in the new Minister of the Interior.

The Afghan cabinet reshuffle last month saw the move of the efficient and corruption-free Hanif Atmar from the Education Ministry to the Ministry of Interior. His efforts will be resisted but this could prove a crucial boost to police reform efforts and attempts to tackle government corruption generally.

It can be expected there will be more discussions of Afghanistan's institutional challenges as a new wave of voter registration is opened up for the 2009 and 2010 elections.

He seemed disappointed and desperately waved at me. Only for a few seconds I got closer to him, closer to hear him, which was difficult because of the noise. Suddenly my left shoulder was pulled back roughly and I saw two policemen who asked me what I was telling to Kambakhsh.

The police men didn't allow me to get closer to him anymore. But I had a chance to tell Mr.Kambakhsh about the prize, that he become a winner by the Information Safety and Freedom award (ISF) in Italy. He expressed his feeling to be happy to hear that, but the final words I heard from him were: “I need help to get out of the prison.”

The police men didn't give me another chance to talk with him anymore, so I waved to him and promised to spread his message outside.

Global Voices has covered Kambakhsh's continuing legal troubles here, here, and here.

Not your typical embed: Andrew Klavan spent a few days with Forward Operating Base (FOB) Kalagush and wrote his account in the U.S. magazine City Journal. It's quite well-written: despite the requisite Kipling shout outs (though they make much more sense here, this being the literal setting of a famous Kipling novel and actual biography), he explains well the challenges the U.S. faces:

This so-called provincial capital was largely a figment of the Afghan government’s imagination. As we carried our packs along the lone mud road, we came upon the “town”: a collection of half-finished ramshackle buildings and wooden huts with idling native workers staring balefully from the porches. Rory, who had a habit of echoing my unspoken showbiz thoughts aloud, muttered to me, “Deadwood,” just as I was thinking, “Tombstone.” …

The main mission was to break ground on a new FOB site. Moving the PRT close to the provincial government would make overseeing new projects much easier. The trouble was, the chosen site was owned by a little nearby village called Pashki. Four months ago, the Pashki elders had agreed to sell the land to the Afghan Ministry of Defense. Now, though, they were worried that the U.S. presence would attract attacks from the Taliban.

It's worth reading in full, even if you have to skip past all the references to how he wants to make it into a screenplay just to give it to those America-hating Hollywood liberals. The point about moving the PRT makes sense in one way: PRT Kalagush is practically in Laghman province (see, for example, this BABEAA post), and many of the locals there view themselves as in Laghman. The PRT has to airlift itself to Parun to do business with the provincial government, or else suffer through an agonizingly slow two-day trip hundreds of miles out of the way thanks to the steep valleys.

But in another way, moving the PRT doesn't make a jot of sense.

FOB Kalagush, courtesy flickr user Hayat Nooristani.

As Klavan so ably put it, calling Parun the capital of anything is more of a wish than a statement of fact. Aside from the basic fact that provinces in Afghanistan don't have capitals the way states in the U.S. do, Parun in Nuristan is a particularly ineffective one. In his lecture at Boston University, David Katz, a senior foreign service office attached to FOB Kalagush, mentioned that Parun is not only basically inaccessible from Kalagush, it is for all intents and purposes inaccessible to the rest of Nuristan as well. Moving FOB Kalagush from an accessible, if possibly disputed, area to one that is basically inaccessible doesn't seem to make much sense.

Regardless, Klavan's article is a wonderful snapshot of the sorts of challenges the U.S. faces as it pushes into isolated communities in Afghanistan. And of the many policy challenges facing the government—well, both governments—as they try to build lasting institutions that can eventually contribute to peace.

The Americans’ mission is to disrupt the Taliban and foreign fighters on supply paths from Pakistan’s tribal areas. Col. John Spiszer, the commanding officer for the larger task force in the region, distilled how the mission often worked. The American presence, he said, is a Taliban magnet, drawing insurgents from more populated areas and enhancing security elsewhere.

First Lt. Daniel Wright, the executive officer of the American cavalry unit — Apache Troop of the Sixth Battalion, Fourth Cavalry — put things in foxhole terms.

“Basically,” he said, “we’re the bullet sponge.” …

The unvarnished consensus among soldiers here, many of them veterans of the war in Iraq, is that the Pentagon’s efforts in Iraq undermined its efforts in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda plotted attacks on the United States. The military has been reviewing its Afghan strategy. …

For now, the soldiers of Apache Troop absorb and repel attack after attack. Sgt. Michael S. Ayres, a squad leader, summarized the practical mentality: standing watch behind heavy machine guns, the soldiers are waiting for reinforcements so they can change the nature of their fight.

“We need all the help we can get out here, so we can push out patrols and get out of the defensive,” he said.

Photojournalist-blogger John McHugh, being treated for a gunshot wound at the Outpost formerly known as Kamu in 2007. 17 ANA and 7 U.S. troops died in that battle. McHugh's embed diary for the Guardian offers a great deal of insight into the challenges the U.S. faces along the Pakistani border.

They're stationed at King Zahir Shah's old hunting lodge/castle along the Landai Sin River. Combat Outpost Lowell used to be called Combat Outpost Kamu, which means it is in the far east of Nuristan, right along the border with Chitral. As one might guess from these place names, there are a lot of violent men roaming the hills, and their constant potshots have started to annoy (to say the least) the troops standing in their way. Chivers' article is riveting reading, though like some other stories coming out of the Korengal or Nuristan it isn't exactly representative of the rest of the country. (Earlier this month, Chivers also wrote of this outpost, chronicling the desperate fight to save one of the Afghans working for them on the base; a disquieting slide show is here.)

A Chinook lifts off from Camp Keating in 2005 to ferry supplies to the newly-built Combat Outpost Kamu (now Lowell). From Soldier's Media Center.

Further south, just across the border from Kunar, Jane Perlez writes of Pakistan's brutal fight against its own insurgency:

Behind mud-walled family compounds in the Bajaur area, a vital corridor to Afghanistan through Pakistan’s tribal belt, Taliban insurgents created a network of tunnels to store arms and move about undetected…

After three months of sometimes fierce fighting, the Pakistani Army controls a small slice of Bajaur. But what was initially portrayed as a paramilitary action to restore order in the area has become the most sustained military campaign by the Pakistani Army against the Taliban and its backers in Al Qaeda since Pakistan allied itself with the United States in 2001.

Ms. Perlez kindly tells us that the trip to Loe Sam, in Bajaur, was arranged by the Pakistani military. So what she reports and sees is not the result of independent investigation. It is, nevertheless, really interesting to see how the militants there have adapted to, say, the use of UAVs and the occasional helicopter attack. The Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps, two independent forces (the FC works for the Ministry of the Interior), have lost 83 men during three months of fighting. They've lost well over 700 since 2004—more than doubling American losses in Afghanistan.

Standing watch in Bajaur. Courtesy Mirror4.

Indirectly, this helps to show why it is so inappropriate to write off Pakistan as not caring, or doing nothing, about the militants in the NWFP and FATA. It's not that it's doing nothing, it's that the Pakistani government can't do much—especially if it wants to maintain a popular mandate and not throw it away by killing off hundreds more troops on a somewhat unpopular campaign.

In either case, both pieces are worth reading in full, on the off chance anyone thought things will improve dramatically now that the U.S. has a new President.

This image comes courtesy Panoramino user JoelPac, who happens to have a lot of really beautiful photographs of Kunar and Nuristan.

Unfortunately, this being Afghanistan, it is impossible to mention an area in Afghanistan (especially, it seems, in Nuristan) without mentioning some recent tragedy. And there in Aranas, they have a particularly nasty one that was handed down by U.S. Apache attack helicopters. As RAWA retells it, in their inimitable fashion:

They were killed or wounded on Friday, July 4, 2008, on a road near Aranas village on the Waygal River in the district of Waigal (Waygal), Nuristan Province. The Province’s Governor himself, Tamim Nuristani, told various media including the AFP that 16 civilians were killed in an air strike as they were leaving an area after being told by security forces a military operation was about to occur. District governor Zia-ul-Rehman said that 22 civilians had died in the strike.

As usual, the US/NATO militaries proclaimed that the dead were “militants.” An issued statement announced that “militants had fired on the U.S. base in Bella”, then “the insurgents…entered two vehicles and began traveling away from the firing position. Ground forces called coalition (sic) attack helicopters for support….which then destroyed the two vehicles killing more than a dozen militants.” U.S. First Lt. Nathan Perry said, “These were combatants. These were people firing on us. We have no reports of noncombatant injuries.”

Where's Bella? It's just north of Aranas along the Waygal River. Panoramino user FoxTrotCharlie (who also has an incredible collection of photos) took a picture of it in 2006, when the American FOBs in Nuristan were brand new.

All of this matters because Bella and Aranas were intimately involved in the July 16, 2008 assault on the U.S. firebase at Want, in southern Waygal (but still in Nuristan!). David Tate, the “Battle Field Tourist,” has a picture of that base:

That event was, of course, something of a watershed: it was not only the deadliest insurgent attack on a U.S. base up to that point (I think the subsequent two-day assault on Salerno might have been bigger), it forced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the base—effective ceding the entire district to the insurgency. We've discussed the issues surrounding this—the attack itself, and, more worrying, the possibility that the bombing at Aranas may have played a role in the attack—but it isn't constructive to rehash those arguments.

Rather, I just wanted to take a big step back and ponder: Nuristan is, to me at least, unquestionably one of the most beautiful and alluring places on the planet. It is also one of the deadliest for a short chubby white guy (i.e. me) to go visit. The juxtaposition between the two—stunning, almost unspoiled mountain wilderness and grinding insurgency—just leaves me quiet every once in a while.

Previously:
Ghosts of Alexander on Nuristan here and here.

An Afghan appeals court overturned a death sentence Tuesday for a journalism student accused of blasphemy for asking questions in class about women's rights under Islam. But the judges still sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

The case against 24-year-old Parwez Kambakhsh, whose brother has angered Afghan warlords with his own writing, has come to symbolize Afghanistan's slide toward an ultraconservative view on religious and individual freedoms.

At least one witness claimed he was intimidated into falsely testifying against Kambakhsh at his first trial in January. Right now, Kambakhsh, 24, is slated to spend 20 years in the infamous Pul-i Charkhi prison for the crime of “questioning Islam.”

The Pul-i Charkhi prison, just east of Kabul. Google Map here

Kambakhsh's case was covered previously by both Global Voices and Global Voices Advocacy.

It is nevertheless worth considering. The bombing at Shindand is but one problem facing the often neglected west of Afghanistan. Typically thought to be more stable, and more secure, and more prosperous than the rest of the country (it is), Herat nevertheless faces some enormous challenges, starting with the so-called “Tajik Taliban.” As Tim Foxely explains,

The idea that now other ethnic groups are starting to emulate, if not actually join, the Taliban and conduct resistance against the Kabul regime lies somewhere between “a very real cause for concern” and “everybody's worst nightmare”. It evokes the “tipping point” concerns of ISAF commanders past and present that the population might eventually get fed up with tens of thousands of international soldiers charging around dropping bombs on them and a corrupt government that fails to deliver and shift their allegiances elsewhere. The other angle is the very high likelihood that Akbari was sacked from his position for being corrupt or incompetent or both and is therefore having nothing more than a big sulk, Afghan warlord style. As such, it would be a localised and exceptional situation and probably nothing to worry about.

This is an excellent summary of just how difficult it is to determine which problems in Afghanistan require serious consideration and near-panic, and which ones are, for lack of a better term, cyclical variations in a standard conflict pattern.

Kandahar bazaar during Ramadan, courtesy Flickr user Chooyutshing.

This can manifest itself in a couple of ways. Alex Strick van Linschoten, for example, just returned to Kandahar from a few weeks abroad. What has he noticed upon his return?

If there’s one thing two weeks abroad (California and London) does it gives a certain perspective on the things you quickly accept as ‘normal’ when living in Kandahar. If someone would unholster his pistol and place it on the table at Café Nero in London I think they’d have a problem or two, but in Kandahar I don’t blink twice when interviewees or friends come in off the street and lay their AK-47 or even once an RPG next to the wall.

Otherwise the city’s pretty quiet.

Indeed. Further north, Harry Rud wanders through the trash-filled streets of Kabul, and remarks on just how disconnected foreigners can fell when locked inside their armored compounds:

Many foreigners here are not allowed to step foot outside their compounds, have lists of places they can and (more often) cannot go to, and strict rules about how high the walls, how thick the barbed wire, how many armed guards surround them. It is not a situation most want or enjoy. It drives many to distraction. I am lucky to be able to walk a little further, though it gives me no greater feel for the place when I’m too nervous to stop and look around me.

It’s hard to describe the causes of that nervousness. There’s the obvious but unlikely risk of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then there’s that disconnect; the sense of us and them it breeds, of being so very out of place and watched by an unknown crowd. A bird-like suspicion, to stretch the point.

But this raises the question: just what, exactly, is the West doing in Afghanistan after seven years of occupation? Azar Balkhi notes that in the West, there seems to be mindless panic but no real sense of urgency:

Pakistani Taliban fighters openly flogged two butchers for selling the flesh of animals in the northwestern Swat valley today September 25, and in the same day the Pakistani soldiers fired at American reconnaissance helicopters that were escorting U.S. ground troops along the volatile border Thursday, sparking a five-minute ground battle between the countries.

This is all happening as President Asif Ali Zardari and Hamid Karzai are promising
Washington help in the war on terror and meeting with the top American leaders in New York…

Heavily armed Taliban fighters brought the blindfolded butchers to a crowded market in Kabal sub-district and flogged them in front of a throng of about 200 people. The media was also called by the Taliban to cover the event but there is no any government to stop them.

Which brings us back to where we started: Afghanistan's extreme complexity. The latest meme to be making the rounds of policy offices in London, Washington DC, and Brussels, is negotiating with the Taliban. Christian Bleuer wonders:

* what “Taliban” (Quetta Shura? Local semi-autonomous commanders? Hizb? Haqqanis? Others? all at the same time?)
* and if answer is “Moderate Taliban” then please define who exactly they are.
* don’t you already consider the Afghan government’s reconciliation program to be a form of negotiation?
* do you really not know about the Afghan government communicating/negotiating with insurgents?

All that being said, there remain bright points of life within Afghanistan. Andrea shares just such a moment, and it really cannot be done proper justice through excerpting. It will have to stand on its own.

The most recent news to come from Afghanistan involved the violent incursion of Kuchi nomads into Hazara farming communities in the Behsud district of Wardak province, just west and south of Kabul. Many Hazara were killed in the attack, and several thousand fled as their homes were destroyed. After a hunger strike by a prominent member of Parliament, and a large protest rally in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai ordered the Kuchi to evacuate the district.

The Hazaristan Times covered those protests, and now posts on yet another protest rally in Mazar-i Sharif and Bamiyan:

Thousands of Hazaras came out on roads on Thursday in Mazar city protesting Government’s inaction against Kuchi barbarism in Behsud killing more than 15 vulnerable villagers.

The protectors marching from Shrine towards the office of United Nation’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan chanted slogans and displayed placards demanding of Karzai to resign. They handed over an 8-Points demand resolution to UNAMA official criticizing it for keeping mum on Kuchi invasion of Behsud and Daimirdad Districts.

The Demand Resolution included intervention of United Nation into Behsud Massacare demanding an inquiry into the incident and action against the responsible circles in the Government backing Kuchis with arms for thier devilish political and ethnic aims. The protestors later dispersed peacefully.

It may be mentioned a huge protest rally was organized in Bamiyan on Monday 22nd July in harmony with Kabul protestors against Kuchi invasion in Behsud. Thousands of protestors marched down from Rah-Bar e Shahid Masjid towards UNAMA office. A similar protest rally was organized in Yakawlang.

Of a different topic of justice, The Rumi noted the vicious gang rape of a 13-year old girl by five policeman, and wondered why the government seemed to be doing nothing:

Her relative said she was at six grade of high school and when they claimed to police department, they had received death threat to not report it again. ‘’ If the government dose not take the responsibility, we are going to committee suicide’’ her family told the local media. This is the fourth times that children are abusing in the same city, according to Afghan Paper News Bulletin.

Back in Kabul, The Rumi noted how President Karzai seems to fear political competition, after Abdul Jabar Sabit, the Afghanistan Attorney General, was fired on July 16 after announcing his candidacy for President:

Mr. Sabit a former member of Islamist group of Afghan warlord Gulboddin Hekmatyar, was appointed as Attorney General on May 2006. Sabit who also served as a member of Karzai team now became a full-size rival. He accused Karzai for taking an illegal action firing him and called it a huge conspiracy in a media conference in Kabul.

A few days’ later former lawyers organized a seminar in Kabul Star Hotel to discuses about Sabit’s work history. General Omarkhel, former Chief of Kabul Airport Police, was one of a speaker in the seminar said Sabit himself was shipwrecked in corruption while providing documents as evidence for the audience.

Sabit previously threatened with arrest the Uzbek strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum after Dostum was accused of abducting an official. But he had to back down after he had no support for the arrest.

Meanwhile, Sanjar mediates on why suicide bombings have come to Afghanistan:

There is no solidarity in Afghan society. People have to struggle to live via other means, while it’s Russians, or mujahdeen or Americans or Taliban or someone else trying to control their lives. The norms in society are old and rotten it does not provide a good framework for individual to act. As a result most individuals are corrupt and their moral structure does not lead them. the society has not lost the morality or it has not been loosen. The only answer afghans think will work is to strengthen norms this is supported by the so called leaders because this serves their purposes. Afghanistan has become corrupt and hypocritical. Life for many has become hard especially for women.

There is a conflict in Afghan society, we as Afghans failed to respond constructively and fix this failure that is why first Russians and now the rest of the world came to fix it. not because they care about Afghanistan but because Afghanistan have caused some serious problems to the rest of the world. The demands of the self proclaimed leaders have conflict with each other and as a result they are in constant conflict and because they have no political intelligence the only way they settle conflict is through bloodshed, and that has turned them into criminals.

This makes for a good segue into some first person accounts of suicide bombings. First, Safrang offers an account of a halted attempt:

She took another cab and it was while describing the bizzare episode to the second cabbie that the driver said that she might have just been the passenger of an intihaari or a suicide bomber, and that she should probably report the kamikaze-cabbie to the police. The driver described how vehicle-borne suicide bombers have taken to camouflaging their operations with passengers that would make them seem innocuous and get them through many a police checkpoints because of the presence of a woman passenger.

Dagarwaal’s daughter in law did call the police, and two days later the cab driver was caught with the cab’s trunk containing an IED and a large amount of shrapnels, nails, and explosives. Just goes to show how far these people are willing to go -to the limit of knowingly sacrificing innocent people’s lives (besides that which is normally lost in collateral casualties -which is again heavily skewed in numbers towards civilians.)

And The Rumi has an account of a relative finding out about the suicide attack on the Indian embassy:

Speaking to the BBC in Kabul, Khan Mohammad breaks down as he recalls those bitter moments.

On the morning of Monday 7 July, eight members of his family stood outside the Indian embassy in Kabul when a massive suicide bombing killed five of them, including his daughter, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. They were among more than 50 people killed.

His three other grandchildren escaped with injuries.

Maybe one day, these Afghans will at last find the justice they so desperately need.

Because this situation is not new, it sometimes gets ignored in the face of the Taliban insurgency. But sometimes ethnic rivalries boil over into outright disputes. In Wardak province, just west and south of Kabul, the Hazara have a long-standing feud with the nomadic Kuchi over land rights. On Tuesday, July 8—the day after the horrific bombing at the Indian embassy in Kabul—a band of Kuchis moved into the Behsud district of Wardak and killed several Hazaras, taking at least four hostage and claiming the “right” to use their land. The Rumi reports:

In April, Human rights workers expressed fears that Hazaras were planning to take up arms against Kuchis who settled on their land.

“Given that both parties lack confidence in the government's ability to solve their disputes they may try to defeat each other by violent means,” Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission said.

Kuchis, who are predominantly Pashtuns, traditionally move all over the country in search of green pastures for their livestock and, at the start of each spring, many travel to the central provinces, where most of Afghanistan’s Hazaras live.

Kuchi elders complain that Hazaras have enjoyed strong international support since the Taliban’s fall, while Kuchis have been perceived as collaborators of the mainly Pashtun Taliban.

In July 2007, after several people were reportedly killed in clashes between Kuchi herders and Hazara settlers in Behsud district, President Karzai set up a commission to come up with a solution. Then commission has yet to report its finding.

Very quickly, a blog to help the victims of the attack was set up. A relatively recent blog-based clearing house for Hazara issues, Hazarajat Times, picked up a story that would grow in significance: Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq, a Hazara Member of Parliament, first warned that the Kuchi incursion would lead to civil war if it was not resolved, then began a hunger strike on July 16 to end the conflict. He drew some rather surprising supporters, such as Abdulrashid Dostum, and within days hundreds had pledged to join in the strike.

Since the current conflict was eerily similar to the exact same clash that happened in July of 2007, many Hazara were deeply frustrated at the perceived inaction of Kabul. So they planned a protest.

By July 21, Mohaqiq was trying desperately to spread the word about the clashes (which were almost entirely unreported in the West). The Rumi captured most of what he said:

He said “over 15 villagers including children and women have been gunned down while 20,000 persons have been displaced fleeing the barbarism of Al-Qaeda and Taliban supporters”.

Mohaqiq expressed disappointment towards human rights organizations, media and UN for not taking any serious notice of the invasion and strongly appealed the international community, human rights organizations and United Nations to intervene and avoid Kuchi nomads massacring the people of Behsud District…

Last year on June 23, 2007 there was a giant peaceful public demonstration in Kabul against the Government to resolve the “Kuchi Headache” for ever “The international community, NATO led coalition forces, United Nations and Human Rights’ organizations are needed to look into the matter and get rid of the “headache” meeting the human rights of the downtrodden people of central highlands” he added.

About this time, some Farsi/Dari-language media began to cover the incursion. Quqnoos has a disturbing video of some Hazara victims of the attack.

In posting the above video, The Rumi angrily wondered why President Karzai seemed to be doing nothing:

Kabul government sent police forces to stop the Kuchis but in this video you can see the kuchi-armed groups dressed in Taliban style are walking in front of National Police. Why the police forces cannot take their weapons? What is so special for the kuchies to be armed while the rest of the ethnicities are disarmed?

About this time, Mohaqiq was reportedly weakening. Registan.net noted that the ethnic issues surrounding the conflict had much more complex roots, and warns against assuming it is all about the Taliban:

Many Hazara claim the Kuchi are “Taliban,” or at least Taliban-loving, because during the 90s they worked with the Taliban, who granted them access to Hazara (and Tajik) land. Naturally the Hazara are angry over this imbalance.

Here’s the rub. As a predominantly Pashtun force, the Taliban were rather notorious for their appalling treatment of all other minorities within Afghanistan, including (or perhaps especially) the Hazara. In fact, the imposed famine on the Hazarajat was particularly brutal and generally unreported in the media in the West.

Wardak is about half Pashtun, with most of the rest (somewhere around 40%, according to unreliable official statistics) Hazara…It seems, in brief, a fairly standard nomad/settler conflict, with the consequent disputes over land used both for agriculture and grazing. These types of conflicts become especially acute during times of drought or shortage, and the current squeeze over food prices, and a looming drought in the south, have probably exacerbated the conflict.

The next day, July 22, Safrang noted that thousands of people took to the streets of Kabul, demanding the government put a stop to the depredation.

The march started around 7:00 a.m. Tuesday morning in Dasht-e-Barchi area of West of Kabul and proceeded towards the city center and the offices of the UN’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan -UNAMA. Several news agencies have put the number of demonstrators at “thousands”. By mid-day, Farda TV reported that the demonstrations were over and no incidents had taken place. Farda TV also aired footage of the demonstrations showing people in thousands marching in large thoroughfares of the city, advancing towards the center of the city.

Footage also showed police in riot gear standing around, and in some cases lining up on the main streets at a distance from the demonstrators, blocking their advance. Faced with the riot police, some among the demonstrators encouraged those at the head of the demonstrations to sit down and not advance any further, avoiding contact with the riot police and keeping a distance of 15 meters or so.

It was hard to read many of the placards and banners held up by demonstrators on TV screen. Those that I could read included:
“We oppose ethnic conflict and those who support/encourage it”
“The government should stand with defenseless civilians of Behsud”
“We want Justice”

The protests seem to have worked. Amidst a crowd Hazaristan Times estimated at 300,000, Mohaqiq ended his hunger strike, having met with both Karzai and UNAMA officials about the incursion. They posted some beautiful pictures. And President Karzai ordered an evacuation of the Kuchi, who by all accounts are slowly leaving the embattled district.

At what cost, however? The Hazaristan Times started a donation drive to financially assist Hazara who had their homes razed or family members killed. The images they post are gruesome, but help to highlight just how severe this sadly ignored problem really was.

At his most recent appeals hearing, according to Jean MacKenzie at IWPR, Kambakhsh was berated by his own judge:

Presiding judge Abdul Salam Qazizada has weathered several Afghan administrations. He is a holdover from the Taleban regime, and his antagonism to the defendant was visible…

During the session, Qazizada appeared to take on the role of prosecutor rather than impartial judge, engaging in a legal duel with defence attorney Mohammad Afzal Nooristani. Lacking a gavel, he repeatedly banged his pen against his microphone in an effort to halt Nooristani’s defence of his client.

Time and again the judge attacked Kambakhsh, who sat pale but composed in the defendant’s chair.

“Just tell me why you did these things,” insisted Qazizada. “What were your motives?”

“I cannot give you reasons, since I did not do anything,” responded Kambakhsh.

Kambakhsh is alleged to have been beaten since his initial imprisonment last December, however given the length of time it took for an examination to be scheduled, most of the physical markings have healed over. Though he plead guilty, he claims to have done so under duress.

Kambakhsh also stands accused of moral character flaws such as asking too many questions in class, seeking attention and popularity, being impolite, and swapping dirty jokes over his cellphone.

Kambakhsh faces many obstacles: his defense lawyers hadn't examined his case file even a week before his first appeals hearing, and the Upper House of Parliament has voiced its support for his execution, along with conservative clerics and some tribal elders.

In 2006, Abdul Rahman was sentenced to death for converting to Christianity. His life was spared when, under intense international pressure, he was declared legally insane and deported to Italy. Similar international pressure is not as readily apparent in Kambakhsh's case: a story on his case in the international media has not appeared for months, despite worrying indications this is a revenge case for his brother's work with IWPR.

See heartbreaking images of Afghan policemen escorting Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh after a court hearing in Kabul on May 18, 2008 at the dailylife website.

Sanjar starts things off by noting the slow degradation in Afghan-Western relations:

No doubt that there are numerous foreigners who lets say deserve to be in Afghanistan, in a sense that they are professional, culturally sensitive/receptive and above all respect afghans; but only one devious westerner *only a single one* is enough to be cynical and question them in a categorical term. its up to the rest of good westerners to criticise the conduct of the tricky single or group and do not side with them merely because they are fellow westerner. As a member of a group it’s the duty of the individual to bear some responsibility for the action of his groupmates. This sense of shared responsibility forms the basis of any constructive criticism of the group from within.

He is especially angry at the Western arrogance in writing about Afghanistan from the so-called “Kabul Bubble,” in which Westerners rarely interact with the local population. It forms a neat subcontext to his thoughts on how women's rights have evolved over the past three decades:

Women in Afghanistan were not suddenly plunged into brutal un-freedom when the Taliban came to power in 1996. Nor have they always been subject to repressive rule. In a documentary that is both intimate and broadly political, Meena Nanji offers a view of the past thirty years of Afghanistan's history through the lives of three women…

Via interviews, narration, and written and archival footage, Nanji compellingly argues that the loss of women's rights in Afghanistan is not a simple story that revolves around the Taliban. It is a much larger-and continuing-story of a nation that has suffered through near-constant war and mass displacement over several decades.

Of a similar note, The Rumi—who recently noted First Lady Laura Bush promoting girls' schools—sees a looming problem in the northern part of the country:

Thousands of families have been forced to leave their homes due to food and drinking water scarcity in Balkh, northern province of Afghanistan. Families ended up in a desert of Sholgara district where started to live in camping in the two side of a tiny river.

Balkh an agricultural province did not received enough rain and snow this year. Local farmers lost their fields and left them without any food in whole summer. Water and food shortages have forced some families to eat grass.

Drought is not the only problem facing northern Afghanistan: Tim Foxely thinks hard about recent press reporting that Germany is to send another 1,000 troops to the country.

To be fair, this may imply a future potential to get involved in combat operations and/or in other parts of Afghanistan, but it doesn't seem a particularly strong statement. The current German parliamentary mandate for no more than 3,500 soldiers expires in October. Interestingly, it appears that at the same time, the German troop ceiling for its separate Operation Enduring Freedom mandate has been reduced from 1,400 down to 800. In terms of pure troop numbers, a cynic might note that not much has actually changed…

On a much more upbeat note: Nasim Fekrat has hosted his second blogging workshop in Bamyan. He writes:

After some theoretical discussions, the rest of the second day was dedicated to practical issues. According to directors, main goal of such workshops is to turn this new phenomenon into a public one so as to ensure that everybody practices the right of free speech with no censorship. Since increasing pressures of Information and Culture Ministry has led to more censorship by e-media and private TV channels, weblog may be a better choice to experience free speech as well as institutionalizing this principle in the Afghan society.

Along with the return of Alex Strick van Linschoten—fresh from travels to Beirut and Mogadishu—this bodes well for the future of Afghan voices online.

Sanjar notes that the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, and posts some disturbing pictures of the aftermath. He even makes the importance point that it is not just the Taliban who kills scores of civilians in bombing attacks—the U.S. and NATO do as well, sometimes with far greater frequency:

However I have been to the other side of the argument too. After 9/11 I did not feel sorry at all I thought it was an incident which had some collateral damage which compared to my experience was nothing. In my life time over two million of my compatriots have died and half of the country have fled. I believed 9/11 is good for Afghanistan. the world would be so pissed off that they won’t tolerate Taliban and Afghanistan is going to be a better place without Taliban. I have no sympathy and connection with people who died on 9/11 what so ever, while I am deeply connected with two million people who died in my country in my life time.

My response right now to this incident is; if my little brother comes home safe and he is not among dead and wounded children, this is a nice attack with horrific collateral damage. This is an unfair world and everybody pursues an agenda and collateral damage happen it was just yesterday that Americans bombed a village and killed 25 people in wedding when they suspected it of a Taliban gathering in Nangarhar province; it was the day before yesterday that Americans bombed a village in nuristan and killed 15 people in a mistaken attack.

Andrea suggests that this sort of comparison, however, might not be helpful:

Comparing deaths and pain is never particularly helpful, and is definitely not my point. But these horrible tragedies do make me wonder that we need to think more creatively about peace in Afghanistan. These issues are difficult and it is easy to point fingers and declare “right and wrong” and proclaim “evil” versus “good.” In Afghanistan, the lines are not clear. When talking about peace, a favorite writer of mine Thomas Merton requests the individual first to discover our own tendencies toward evil and destruction and recognize the confusion in that process before racing out to blame and chose evil around us.

When an Afghan friend of mine Cobra heard the news she ran out to me, eyes welled with tears and cried, “This is not my Afghanistan. No, this is not good.” My guess is she has been searching for her Afghanistan for a long time. I hope to search for this for her as well, in the small small ways I can.

Nitin Pai, on the other hand, takes a different track and suggests that this was a deliberate attack on Indian officials, aimed at disrupting India's growing presence in the country:

Attacking construction crews in the Afghan countryside is one thing. Attacking top diplomats at the Indian embassy in Kabul is another. Why the Taliban sought to escalate their violence against India remains the question. Not least when they are engaged in a two-front war—against the US & NATO forces in Afghanistan, and, to some extent, against Pakistani forces in Pakistan’s tribal areas and NWFP. The embassy might have offered a target of opportunity and the attack might have been a tactical success, but its strategic utility is suspect.

That’s because India is quite unlikely to be deterred by this attack. It is unlikely to scale down its reconstruction initiatives. If the attacks were intended to provoke and suck India deeper into Afghanistan, then that too is unlikely to happen. In all likelihood, the Indian response would be to harden the targets and move on.

That opens up the other possibility: is this the handiwork of Pakistani interests?

Barnett Rubin sees this as a bit far-fetched, and offers a warning:

[I]n my (admittedly limited) contact with Taliban and in examining Taliban texts from Afghan sources, I see a focus on foreign troops in Afghanistan, not the Karzai government or India.

I heard on the radio that “Taliban” have claimed responsibility for this act. (Also reported by Reuters.) Let's see which “Taliban.” Did it come from the former Taliban leadership in Quetta, or did it come from the Haqqani group in North Waziristan? (Note that both command and control centers of the Taliban are in Pakistan.)…

Let me stick my neck out here: I don't believe that the Kandahari Taliban leadership would mount an attack like this against the Indian embassy. The idea of such an attack came from some combination of all or some of the following: the Haqqani group (as part of a campaign for Pakistani support), Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaida, and the Pakistani security agencies, or private entities under their supervision.

It is obviously too early to tell why the attack actually happened. But for now, let us just pray for the safety of those who are alive in Kabul, and for the victims who are not.

Mohammed Khairy laments,

In my country, Afghanistan, women are always marching and protesting for their rights. Unfortunately, the politicians never listen to them nor give them any benefit…
The few Afghanistani women who got the opportunity to serve in a high position of the new Government soon became involved in oppositional political games rather than working for women.
The Afghanistan government failed to stop the crimes against women, instead there are many criminals who have been hired in different positions.
Afghanistani women are again left to the injustice of cruel husbands, child-marriage and women trafficking. Men still have the power to do anything to their wives such as torturing and killings. There are hundreds of women being shot to death, sold out to other men, having parts of their bodies cut off, such as ears, noses and fingers, according to the Afghanistan Human Right commission.

M. Ashraf Haidari, on the other hand, sees much to celebrate:

Afghan women have much to celebrate on International Women's Day. Yet their precarious situation still warrants international attention and support. Although Afghan women have now regained most of the freedoms that they lost under the Taliban's gender apartheid, they still constitute one of the most vulnerable groups in Afghanistan…
Afghan women have made notable progress since the end of the Taliban's unforgiving gender apartheid seven years ago.

Nasim Fekrat notices that Afghan women are actually facing more violence today than they were several years ago:

Many times, children at the age of 7, 8, and 9 are forced to marry. The conditions are severe and often they are raped. After marriage they can't go to school anymore and are faced with lots of difficulties from the family and husbands. Many of them can't bear this harsh position, and they burn or otherwise kill themselves…
About 87% of woman complain about the domestics violence, half of them are sexually abused and more than 60% of the marriages are by force.
On the other hand, decades of war left the country with thousands of widows and orphans. Today, most of them are begging in the streets. A few of them have been taken to orphanages and protective shelters.

Hadi1121 offers a similar testimony.

But women’s day isn’t all there is to think about. Sanjar relates the story of a protest in Mazar-i-Sharif over the Danish Prophet Cartoons:

Afghan clerics and the government not only got the crisis wrong, as they usually do with crisis but they are also full of hypocrisy. The government budget and effectively Afghanistan is funded by countries that have published the cartoon. Why do you receive their charity while strongly oppose their values. Cartoon is another pretext for mullahs, as its for the right wing in the west, to strengthen their grip on society. Protests like today is solely the initiative of few mullahs and its primarily aimed at suppressing moderate elements of Afghan society, if such a thing exist.

Hadi1121 notes that the many questions over ethnic minorities is in a way being answered by the Afghan version of “American Idol” show:

We can go on all day talking about how different ethnicities are now represented in the parliament and the government, what each has achieved and/or lost, what is factual is that different groups simply don’t trust and in certain cases don’t like one another. They still view the other as a stalker ready to rid the other of their rights and existence. Be it the presidential, parliamentary or local counsel elections or the one for the Afghan Star, candidates in most cases are viewed as representatives of their respective groups and tribes rather than individual artists contesting based on talent.

And lastly, Kabulistan writes of an art project that is gaining some attention in Holland over the plight of the growing number of drug addicts.

[There are] overworked and grossly underpaid and under-equipped policemen on the verge of mutinying, in charge of enormous swaths of land.

He also notices a report about returning refugees from Iran and Pakistan:

It finds that these young men and women find a degree of strength from the fact that they are now in their watan (homeland) even though they know very little about Afghanistan. But they are open to leaving Afghanistan if they face severe material or emotional misery – i.e. they don’t have a strong sense of attachment to Afghanistan.

Péter Marton focuses on some specific provinces and finds the following:

It seems to me that the media is reinforcing a perception that pouring resources into an institution like the ANP is a waste, given how it will never function normally. It's not going to, in their culture, some suggest, at times explicitly, at times implicitly. But this may be a self-fulfilling view of the situation.

Of course, concerns of justice stretch beyond the problems of police. Mohammed Fahim relates the tale of Commander Kaftar:

Police of Baghlan province ordered Commander Kaftar arrestment for murdering of a local commander. Kafter is the only Afghanistani woman who has fought the Taliban, the Russians and many a local rival in the mountains of Narin district, which is dotted with the wrecks of old Soviet and Taliban tanks.

Commander Kafter presently 50 years old woman was one of the powerful members of Jamiyat-i-Islami later known as Northern Alliance with 150 men under her command.

Baghlan city police announced that Kafter had killed a Jihads commander moreover her men wanted for robberies.

But it's not just wayward warlords. Sanjar reports on the looming case of Parvez Kambaskhsh:

Parviz a 23 years old journalist was detained three months ago. The allegations are downloading an article written by an Iranian scholar that allegedly contains Anti Islamic sentiments. the accused was sentenced to death by hanging by primary court of Balkh. Neither the accused have been given the chance nor has the advocate been appointed to exercise his/her rights to defence…

Parviz is a victim of the politics game. Media has a voice in the Afghan society, media feeds values into the power system. This game is about whose voices are heard and whose voices are marginalised. media has made a lot of noise after the Taliban, far more than mullahs and Karzai government don’t want the power to go out of the classical circles into the hands of ordinary people. Mullahs and religion is a good tool to sanction unwanted groups which are perceived banal and dangerous.

Safrang met a young boy, Farshid, at a fish stall in Kabul. The tale he relates is as depressing as it is revealing:

This boy tells me: “Farshid has been told to come home tonight with a hundred ‎Afghanis” –two dollars. How much has Farshid worked so far? “30 Afghanis.” It is ‎‎6:00pm now –already dark. And did I say it was cold? ‎

Indeed. And what of security? Bipasha Ray relates one more story about changes the European Council on Foreign Relations suggest:

The report urges European governments to send more troops to Afghanistan, eliminate or reduce the national caveats on their troops, and reverse their “underperformance” by increasing reconstruction aid. On the flip side, the report pushes the U.S. to shift its combat strategy to a more political one and abandon its counter-narcotics plans of aerial spraying or buying up opium crops. It recommends the U.S. shift the onus of the problem onto traffickers and concentrate on arresting and prosecuting drug lords and their governmental supporters.

For starters, the vicious murder of Benazir Bhutto looms large for Afghanistan, for the prospects in Pakistan will impact the prospects in Afghanistan. Hassan Abbas, a former Pakistani official and now a scholar at Harvard's Belfer Center, wrote a fascinating analysis of who her possible murderers may be:

But few here believe LeJ could have managed to carry out the attack without assistance from sections in the establishment. Analysts believe Al Qaeda has become a convenient smokescreen to explain motivated attacks on political rivals. The question people are asking is: What motive could the establishment have in killing Benazir?

Top political sources told Outlook that hours before Benazir was assassinated, she was on the verge of exposing an ISI operation to rig the January 8 general election. They say she had been collecting incontrovertible proof about a rigging cell allegedly established at an ISI safe house in Islamabad.

I hate to be the one to point this out, but would it be very hard to discover a rigged election in Pakistan? The last few have been rigged by Musharraf himself; how would a rigged election this time prove any different? Indeed, I remain deeply skeptical that Musharraf would be behind her murder, if only because suicide bombers are not his style. A rogue element with ISI, in at least tacit collusion with al-Qaeda? That is certainly possible, though at that point I fail to see the usefulness of distinguishing the two.

There is also the distinct possibility, amidst the weeping and gnashing of teeth, that Ms. Bhutto's murder may not really mean anything at all. Regardless, the theories of Musharraf's involvement will continue apace, and in the end Bhutto's real killers will probably not matter in the slightest: perception is what counts, and if everyone thinks Musharraf did it, then he did it.

Of a wholly different stripe is the continued deplorable treatment of women. Atash Parcha recounts one horrific account:

Doctors at a hospital in Qalat, capital of Zabul Province in southern Afghanistan, are treating a brutally tortured woman whose husband cut off both her ears and nose, broke her teeth and shaved her head only three months after their marriage. The victim, 16-year-old Nazia, is also suffering from psychiatric distress due to her experience, according to a doctor in Qalat hospital.

It's like a Hosseini novel come to life. Mohammed Fahim Khairy has a picture of the poor girl, who must now live the rest of her life mutilated because her husband was an monster. He also relates a terrible statistic:

Most of the opium farmers and warlords are marrying children by force or given good money to the needy parents…

About 16 per cent of children are married under the age of 15, according to recent data from UNICEF. And there is evidence that the poverty of recent years is pushing down the marriage age further in some areas

It's not just girls. Back in November I noted the resurgence of bacha bazi, or boy-play:

Later into the night, once the dancing is over, the boys are frequently shared with close friends, for sexual favors. And by the end of the evening it is not at all uncommon for the boy to have a new owner, as the parties often provide the opportunity for buying and selling.

An enlightened sense of multicultural tolerance surely draws the line here. It is not controversial to call this sex slavery—the worst sort, involving children. In stark contrast to the West, where there is a very real dichotomy between what we consider to be homosexuality and what we consider to be pederasty, in Baghlan it seems the distinction is meaningless.

As I noted there, a society that sells impoverished boys and girls like property is not a healthy society. And the growing prevalence of both practices—child-marriage for girls and bacha bazi for boys—can be traced back to the endless grinding poverty in the countryside. It is a pattern sadly repeated everywhere there is endemic poverty.

It makes for a strange contrast with Nassim Fekrat's best Christmas wishes. Nevertheless, I agree with him wholeheartedly:

I wish you all a great Christmas. Let 2008 be the year of peace and security. The year 2007 was bloody year for Afghan people, suicide attacks and several explosions in central of the cities. Lots of people died. Don't forget Afghanistan, don't forget its children, women and homeless people.