K, a recently returned Marine Embedded Tactical Trainer (he worked with the Afghan National Army), noted that the attack itself didn't have to happen.

It's very disheartening for everyone to see us lose that many guys in one battle, but I stand by the assertion that with decent terrain selection and unit-tactics this type of thing will not happen. When you build a small outpost in an area where insurgents can shoot down upon you, with few to no supporting positions to help you, then the position is asking for trouble. In Kunar, we had observations posts up further on the hills, or even at the very top in some cases, and other mutually supporting positions, just to prevent something like insurgents being able to surround us and shoot down upon us.

Tim Lynch thinks there might be something fishy afoot in the U.S. response:

If my information is correct this story contains a “untruth” told by a Colonel – and that is the kind of thing which really gets me worried. I get worried because I know what happened to our military post Vietnam and would be crushed to see them held in such low esteem and outright contempt by the American public again in my lifetime.

At the end of this engagement Pedros flew in and extracted all the Americans and Afghans from Keating which had been completely destroyed in the fighting. But an Army Colonel quoted in the NYT article said “American forces still controlled the compound, which they share with Afghan security forces.”

Registan.net notes that the Battle of Kamdesh has a broad social context.

Kamdesh is so dangerous and difficult to work in [because] the furthest-flung outposts can only be resupplied by helicopter—and even those face small arms fire during supply runs. The challenge with managing the violence in the area is that, while much of it is performed by outsiders like al Qaeda, most of the HiG fighters are actually locals—a dynamic very similar to southern Kapisa province, where many of the HiG militants in the area are locals either paid to attack U.S. forces or do so simply out of pride for HiG’s role in defeating the Soviet Union.

Lastly, the Canada-Afghanistan blog notes that the purpose behind the attack might have been psychological:

A thought that had occurred to me is that the Taliban are probably orchestrating these attacks as part of a propaganda and psy-ops effort. The Americans have already announced they're withdrawing from those exposed outposts in Nuristan; with attacks like this, the Taliban will claim the withdrawal as a military and moral victory.

There is undoubtedly more reaction to come.

“The problem with the current guard force is that they are on a sh** contract. Ignore the money value published in the papers – that number is for five years executed at full value which is impossible to do . Armor Group North America is losing big money on that job and they are about to lose a lot more. I was asked by a few companies to consult on their bids for it back in 2006 and my answer was always the same – don’t bid because if you win you’ll lose money. There were requirements in the contract that could not be filled”.

Even if western contracts for the Embassy seem daunting, there remains a curious sense of excess in much of Kabul. Hameesha writes of her organization trying to find a new office building outside the gaudy, rich districts of the capital, and how incredible some of the buildings are:

Another [house] came with furnishings that featured some of the best buzkashi and persian miniature artwork and nooristani woodwork, but the owner had an aversion to renting it out for office space. he preferred for it to be an ambassador’s residence. all houses came with standard issue manicured lawns, rich garden of roses and patonias, double-glass panelled vacuummed windows (ideal insulation for kabul winters), complete internet installations or at the very least lan wiring to all rooms, plenty of parking, and the ubiquitous fences over the walls complete with concertina wiring. one had an automated fire alarm and sprinkler system (unheard of in Kabul) and central heating and climate control mechanisms.

The relative decadence of Kabul makes for a sharp contrast with the goings-on in other areas of the country. Kabul Perspective notes that in the south of Afghanistan, the counter-narcotics campaign is failing:

Most poppy crops are cultivated in five southern militancy-hit provinces where Taliban have been challenging the writ of the Afghan Government making a strong comeback after they were ousted by the US-led forces. Over 50% of the total production is just cultivated in Helmand province, the heartland of Taliban militancy stronghold.

Similarly, Danger Room notes that in Kandahar, a drug raid netted a bit more than some drugs and maybe a smuggler or two:

The operation, which took place on July 18 in the Argestan District of Kandahar Province, resulted in the arrest of Border Police Commander Shar Shahin. The operation kicked off after Shahin was lured to Kandahar Airfield, where he was placed under arrest, along with five bodyguards. Once the mission was triggered, a task force that included a DEA Foreign-deployed Advisory and Support Team and members of Afghanistan’s National Interdiction Unit, set out for its objective, a compound suspected of being used as a drug storage point.

Things in Kandahar remain tense. Alex Strick van Linschoten, one of the only independent writers living full-time in Kandahar, writes on his Twitter feed that, weeks after the election's violence in the city, there are still shoot-outs between western forces and local militants. He even posted video:

Trouble is not limited to the south of the country. Just east of Kabul, the second-highest intelligence official for the country, Dr. Abdullah, was killed by a suicide bomber in Laghman province. Tim Lynch has posted some pictures of the aftermath in Mehtar Lam.

There is a confusion among media, both local and foreign, that candidates Nazaraliev and Atambaev have withdrawn their candidacies. However, both Nazaraliev and Atambaev have several times stated that according to the law on elections, they cant withdraw their candidacies during the election day. They are just considering this election corrupt, and want it to be reheld.

There's video, too:

That's Omurbek Tekebaev, calling the Kyrgyz government criminal and declaring “war” on current president Kurmabnek Bakiev. He has good reason to think so—in 2006 he was basically framed at the Bishkek airport.

There is a lot of internet chatter about supposed fraud.

Blive.kg, one of the video servers in Kyrgyz internet domain, has several videos showing the violations of election norms, including opening of polling stations before arrival of observers, ballot stuffingand carousel voting. As Blive is not accessible outside of Kyrgyzstan, I downloaded ‘norms violations videos’ from there and uploaded in YouTube. But the problem is that one cannot really prove that all these movies were taken during the 2009 presidential elections.

There are also videos of so-called “carousel-voting,” where groups go to different polling stations using different sets of IDs, and election observers arriving on site to find ballots already in the ballot box.

Topchubek Turgunaliev, an opposition politician who has spent a lot of time fighting electoral fraud, has alleged that there are large numbers of dead people on the voter rolls. Even though he no longer wants to be considered for President, former Prime Minister Almazbek Atambaev has lead much of the charge against the elections. A former Prime Minister, he accused officials of election fraud and announced he was quitting the race shortly after learning that one of his local campaign managers had been detained. He's also alleged that an additional 20-30 “opposition members” have been arrested in Issyk-Kul.

Kurmanbek Bakiev, however, seems to have squeaked through, though maybe not with the reported 67% margin. The New York Times ran a depressing story today about how the U.S. goal is to look the other way, as they're too excited about getting Manas back to rock to boat too much on those pesky human rights abuses.

Obviously we don't know for certain that there was specifically voter fraud, in part because most of the observers seemed to have given up and left early (their report will be interesting). We do know, however, there was widespread intimidation beforehand, and there are certainly indications that some forms of voter fraud were widespread and not just limited to somewhere like Bishkek. It's still early, and it's just turning morning in Kyrgyzstan, so there will probably be a lot more news today. A good place to keep up is the #kyrgyzelections tag on Twitter. It doesn't garner the same amount of attention as Iran or Michael Jackson, but it's a good source for news.

This is now the second post-Soviet ally whose abuses the U.S. has remained officially silent about in the last few months (the other, obviously, is Georgia). I'm no bleeding heart, but it is interesting that, as much as the U.S. makes hay about human rights and vote fraud when it suits a simplistic good versus evil narrative, it also prefers to look away when its friends behave even kind of similarly. The U.S. doesn't have to walk on egg shells, it just needs to point out that it's not comfortable or happy with these kinds of things. Baby steps.

Update: The OSCE has officially said the Kyrgyz election “failed to meet key OSCE commitments, despite some positive elements.” Before the elections, OSCE observers saw “instances of obstruction of opposition campaign events as well as pressure and intimidation of opposition supporters.” Then, on election day, there were “many problems and irregularities, including ballot box stuffing, inaccuracies in the voter lists, and multiple voting.” But hey, at least they had multiple candidates!

It is not a charge to be taken lightly, as the Danger Room blog notes:

The Human Terrain System, Army’s social science program, recently investigated this question and found that, in one part of Afghanistan, Iran’s influence is largely limited to “soft power.”

A recent open-source research report prepared by HTS researchers in the United States and obtained by Danger Room probes the history of Iranian activities in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, from humanitarian assistance to direct military aid. As the report puts it, oh-so-blandly: “Iranian influence in Afghanistan, both positive and negative aspects, is a current topic of interest.”

But that's just Bamiyan, a solitary province of Afghanistan already inclined to side with Iran, as Iran helped its inhabitants resist the Taliban during the 1990s. DCRepublican, on the other hand, noticed something a bit more sinister in a report on the rising violence in Afghanistan:

The Army Times article details the recent revelation that certain Farsi speaking insurgent groups have suddenly become equipped with body armor and kevlar helmets as well as vastly improved battlefield tactics and, shockingly, improved marksmanship. Coupled with the huge increase in IED attacks since the fighting season began in the spring, particularly the sharply growing presence of the state-of-the-art EFPs, leads me to believe that the war is about to take an ugly turn for the worse. I think we have a new villain entering the fray in the form of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG) who, with or without the consent of the Iranian leadership, have taken it upon themselves to institute a major policy shift with regard to Afghanistan.

And Christopher Holton, Vice President with the Center for Security Policy, writing at Terror Trends Bulletin, feels it's incontrovertible proof of Iran's perfidy:

ran has also aided the Taliban’s greatest ally, Al Qaeda, another Salafi Sunni terrorist organization. Many continue to dispute that Iran sponsors Al Qaeda, but the facts are out there for analysis, as yours truly wrote in National Review back in March 2008.

Registan.net argues otherwise, however:

The big question: is this a deliberate government policy, as Iranian support to the insurgents in Iraq was? Or is this coincidental or rogue activity within southeastern Iran?

Couple things to keep in mind here: the Taliban fighting in Farah and Nimroz are not the same who are fighting in Khost, Kapisa, or Kunar. There is a significantly stronger presence of drug smuggling in the area, and Iran does not act in a single unified manner…

We’re pushing two straight years now of accusations that Iran is funding and arming the Taliban, yet precious little evidence ever makes it into the public. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening, but right now there is evidence of Iranian-made weapons in Farah, Herat, and Nimroz, and the assumption that they have been deliberately supplied by Iran.

I don’t mean to defend Iran, but that’s not really evidence of interference. There might be more in classified sources that we just don’t hear in the newspapers. Either way, arming the Taliban would be such an incredible risk for Iran… that there should be some sort of evidence to bolster the claim that Iran is exacerbating the Taliban. But in either case the continuing accusations against Iran, without evidence any government is willing to disclose, cannot be helpful.

Juan Cole also casts doubt on the charge against Iran:

The US military report that it intercepted a cache of Iranian arms intended for the Taliban was analyzed on the Pakistani television station, GEO, by regional experts. They found the idea that the Iranian government is sending arms to the Taliban implausible, but suggested other reasons for which the Taliban might get hold of Iranian weaponry.

Scott Horton similarly disbelieves the story that Iran is supplying arms to the Taliban:

Easy as it is these days to impute all sorts of dastardly motives to the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the various Iranian rogue elements, this doesn’t quite make sense. Iran has no love lost for the United States, to be sure, but neither has it ever had decent relations with the Taliban, who made a point of persecuting Shiia Muslims in Afghanistan when they ran the country. If Iran has had objectives in Afghanistan, then, it’s been to hold the Taliban in check and to protect the Shiia minority. And for the moment at least that aligns pretty well with American policy.

Indeed, there is an interesting partisan angle to the whole debate: the right-wing blogs seem willing to believe in Iran's evil with little evidence, but the left-wing blogs seem to feel it is unclear exactly why Iran would do such a thing (and it's unclear if there is sufficient evidence to convince them). It is a debate that spills out into other things beyond just weapons shipments. Bill Roggio, who founded the Long War Journal, a blog-cum-news service, argued recently that a Taliban commander in a Shia-majority province of Afghanistan was directly funded by Iran:

US strike kills Iranian-backed Taliban commander in western Afghanistan

The US military killed a senior Taliban commander with links to Iran's Qods Forces during an airstrike in western Afghanistan… The US military said Mustafa had connections to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - Qods Force, the external special operations division that is tasked with supporting the Khomeinist Islamist revolution.

Registan.net, however, cast doubt on that charge:

It's interesting to explore the allegations that there might be elements within Iran who might support portions of the insurgency in Afghanistan. As Iran watchers have observed, there is often precious little aside from assertions that the link exists, with nothing concrete any official is willing to say publicly.

What a delicious Catch-22: the U.S. government might have all this evidence that Iran is “backing” the Taliban… but won't actually tell anyone what it is. It's too sensitive to explain, but not too sensitive to allege. Right.

Indeed, Registan.net continues, the U.S. military has been careful to say that it's probably not official Iranian policy:

It’s also interesting that other news sources stress that Afghan officials don’t know whether Mustafa is directly supported by Iran, and even U.S. officials say they only suspect involvement with individuals and aren’t describing an official relationship.

Interesting, indeed. There remains no resolution, no consensus or settled narrative in American blogs about Iran's involvement in Afghanistan—the issue is, perhaps, too partisan. What is curiously absent is a discussion about this issue in any English language blogs written from Afghanistan. They have been virtually silent about it, which raises the question of what the Persian blogs might be talking about (when they are not discussing the election, that is).

Registan.net already highlighted some of those problems—namely, that the law restricting women's rights is targeted at a religious minority, the Shia—but the problem is serious enough, according to Hazaristan Times, to warrant a high level conference with Hazara Members of Parliament. The Hazara are the most numerous Shia minority in Afghanistan. Their comments were directed at Sheikh Asif Mohsini Kandhari, a cleric they accuse of having ties to Iran:

A group of Hazara MPs criticizing Sheikh Asif Mohsini Kandhari , said the Family Law can and must be amended. Addressing a press conference in Kabul on Friday, some Hazara MPs said a Mullah can not decided on how should a law be.

That isn't the only issue facing Afghanistan's political scene, however. As the August elections approach, there is rampant speculation on who might pose a realistic challenge to President Hamid Karzai. The consensus amongst American analysts seems to be that the opposition is too fractured to pose a threat to Karzai's reelection, but Jengnameh argues this is by design: the West has, he argues, chosen a Pashtun-centric model.

Since 2001, Karzai and the Pashtun ethno-nationalists surrounding him, have used labels like “radical”, “extremist” or “warlord”, to exclude non-Pashtuns from government…

That is why news of a possible alliance between Hizb-e Wahdat and Junbish-e Milli is so significant: it might represent a large enough bloc to out-vote Karzai's mostly Pashtun supporters.

In a press conference in Kabul on Saturday, 18 leaders of both the parties said they would announce their joint support for any candidate by the next week. Head of the Hizb e Wahdat, Haji Muhammad Muhaqiq told “based on broad mutual understanding and cooperation, both the parties have decided to go all along.” Neither of the parties will have presidential candidate from their own party members, but would jointly support any candidate. It may be mentioned, leader of Junbish, General Dostum is in Turkey since last couple of months. He is said to be in self-exile.

To relate to the above, Wahdat is a mostly Shia Hazara party, and during the civil war was a mujahideen group resisting both the Soviets and later the Taliban.

The political issues facing Afghanistan look poised to intensify as the election draws near: even government officials, who before were hesitant to question American policies, have begun publicly voicing their discontent with the new plans to “fix” the military campaign. How this might play itself on the national and local stage is unclear. But it is a safe bet that the arguments will become increasingly impassioned as August 20th draws near.

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.