Afghanistan

Nine Dead Immunization Workers in Nigeria at the Hands of Islamist Militants

February 10th, 2013

Militant Islamists abhor anything associated with modernity, with health and welfare, and with social progress.More >>

Soldier's Lens: Humans of Afghanistan

December 12th, 2012

Karim Delgado is a former military journalist with the Marine Corps, where he deployed in support of various humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations throughout Southeast Asia. He is currently majoring in philosophy at Columbia University, but took a break from school the first half of this year to work as a civilian videographer for the U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. During this time, he documented the work of special forces teams throughout the country and their efforts to empower Afghans through the improved security, governance and development of their own villages.

Here is a link to Karim's short film using footage from his time in Afghanistan, Humans of Afghanistan, and an excerpt from the artist's statement (available in full at the link):

When I arrived back in the States, everybody wanted to talk with me about Afghanistan. It was very difficult for me, even to hear the name; I just wanted to hide somewhere private and cry. I couldn't really understand why that was for a while. But I think I've come to realize that here in the West, people's opinions about the region, its people and the war have really congealed into this sickening sort of knee-jerk
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The Amateur Terrorists and The Pacifist Dilettantes

August 7th, 2012

New data from Pakistan published in the American Journal of Political Science suggests that the middle class there is more likely to support violent extremism than those who are less well off. The factor proposed for this difference is interesting:

the contextual factor that matters appears to be exposure to the externalities of militant violence. Leveraging a new dataset of violent incidents, we find first that violence is heavily concentrated in urban areas and second that dislike of militant groups is nearly three times stronger among the urban poor living in districts that have experienced violence than among the poor living in nonviolent districts. It is not that people are vulnerable to militants' appeals because they are poor and dissatisfied. Instead, it appears that the urban poor suffer most from militants' violent activities and so most intensely dislike them.

In other words, the people who have to deal with the consequences are those who don't like the violent extremism. It's not a surprising causal relationship, but it is emblematic of the habit among the better-off classes the world over to casually form hardened opinions over matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with them.

You can find parallels...More >>

More Pacifist Fiction on Afghanistan

June 13th, 2012

Pat Kennelly, Associate Director of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking, writes an astounding load of fiction posing as non-fiction on CommonDreams.org on June 6, claiming that NATO and US Forces in Afghanistan are the cause of all of the problems of Afghan women. For instance, Kennelly claims:

NATO operations have caused greater insecurity for women. They create countless widows, destroy homes, and foster a psychological terror that women are not safe and secure, even in their own homes.

He offers no evidence whatsoever to back this claim, and goes on to imply that the "occupation" is responsible for everything from self-immolation cases among women to maternal mortality.

It's also remarkable that in an article on the theme of what most plagues Afghan women, the word "Taliban" is not mentioned even once. Yet it's indisputably the Taliban who pose the greatest threat to the rights of women and the evidence I would offer is their well-established track record from 1994-2001 as the greatest misgynists the world has ever known.

Kennelly vaguely alludes to evidence from interviews in Afghanistan that would support his claims:

In recent visits to schools, orphanages, and Afghan NGOs, ordinary Afghans did not identify specific
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Vancouver Event: OUT OF THE ASHES Film Screening with Talk by Filmmaker

May 21st, 2012

The Vancouver Chapter of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan) will host a Breaking Bread event Friday, 1 June 2012 at Shaughnessy United Church, 1550 West 33rd Avenue, Vancouver to present the acclaimed documentary film, "Out of the Ashes," which traces the rise of the Afghan Men's Cricket Team from refugees to the world stage, followed by a talk from photographer and filmmaker Leslie Knott, the co-producer and director of the film.

About the Film

Against a backdrop of war and poverty, Out of the Ashes traces the extraordinary journey of a team of young Afghan men as they chase a seemingly impossible dream - shedding new light on a nation beyond burqas, bombs, drugs and devastation. This feature-length documentary film follows the Afghan cricket team in their quest against the odds to qualify for the World Cup. Watch a trailer here.

The event starts at 6:15PM with a reception and marketplace; 7:00PM will be a buffet dinner provided by Margarita Trifonova.

See ticket information below.

About the Speaker

Leslie Knott is a filmmaker and photographer who has worked in Afghanistan for the past eight years. In 2004...More >>

The Anti-War Academic's Manipulation of Women's Rights

May 17th, 2012

It's long been fashionable to claim that the US Government used Afghan women as a justification for waging war in Afghanistan. It's not a particularly orginal, well-supported or sophisticated argument, but it's become a meme. It's slightly less fashionable, but still barely frowned upon in the post-modernist classrooms of western arts faculties, to write off the whole enterprise of women's rights (and indeed, human rights writ large) as an imperialist adventure perpetrated by patronizing western feminists, being forced upon the dominated, resistant masses of developing countries. It's these two trends, and the fact I've seen them surface more than once among UBC political science students, that prompts me to publish a detailed response to one particular undergraduate student's article regurgitating these tired claims.

The following is a response to "Feminist Ethics and the Rhetoric Surrounding Women and the War in Afghanistan," by Allison Rounding, which was published in the 2012 journal of the Political Science Students' Association of the University of British Columbia. I delivered a keynote address at the journal launch, also published here.

This homogenization of Afghan women, coupled with a homogenization of American women as all emancipated, is an
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Feminist Ethics and the Duty of Honesty

May 17th, 2012

On April 2, 2012, I delivered the keynote address at the launch of the journal of the Political Science Students' Association of the University of British Columbia. It was a well organized, brief event with a good Q&A session, and I'm grateful to the Association for the opportunity to respond to one of the articles featured in this year's journal, "Feminist Ethics and the Rhetoric Surrounding Women and the War in Afghanistan," by Allison Rounding. A detailed response to the content of that article can be found here, and you can read Rounding's article here. Meanwhile, here is the transcript of the keynote address.

Good afternoon and congratulations to the students who have worked so hard to produce UBC’s Journal of Political Studies.

I’m speaking to you today in my role as an aid worker in Afghanistan, but I’m also a student, at least for another couple of months, here at UBC, and a dozen or so years ago now when I started my university studies, I minored in Political Science at McGill University.

It’s been fascinating since then to go out in the field, and see how the theories of the classroom resonate, or don’t, in...More >>

Policy Disorientation. How the Taliban Get Away With Murder

April 25th, 2012

When an American soldier killed 16 civilians in Kandahar in March, condemnation was swift and it came from all sides of the war.

The US Government was quick to apologize, with US President Barack Obama stating, "The United States takes this as seriously as if it was our own citizens and our own children who were murdered." NATO immediately announced it was investigating the incident.

President Karzai, whose regime is financed in great part by US resources, slammed the US, saying to reporters a few days after the incident: "This has been going on for too long. You have heard me before. It is by all means the end of the rope here." Karzai, surrounded by media, paid visits to the victims' families and wore black for two days. He publicly participated in conspiracy theorizing that the soldier didn't really act alone, and the killings may have been planned and intentional, conspiracies that have otherwise been propagated by the likes of the Russian Government-owned RT.com and RAWA.org, and which helped add fuel to the flames in an already highly volatile situation.

The Taliban, for their part, immediately used the occasion to spurn out anti-American propaganda. They called US forces...More >>

How to Become a Global Affairs Expert

April 15th, 2012

Global News this evening reported on the multi-city attack perpetrated by the Taliban over the last 24 hours in Afghanistan. Midway through their segment, a professor from Simon Fraser University named Andre Gerolymatos is shown sittng in front of a shelf of books, making the following no-frills assessment of the attack:

It demonstrates that effectively the United States and NATO have lost the war in Afghanistan.

This is a bold statement about a single attack in a very long war. The attack, aimed against multiple foreign embassies, NATO bases and other targets, resulted in a grand total of 18 casualties: 17 of which were the attackers. It might be a spectacular attack, but this was by no means a strategic victory for the Taliban.

Dr. Gerolymatos' confident but simplistic statement, and the fact that I had never heard of him before, prompted me to further investigate his credibility to assess the complex and illusory conflict in Afghanistan from his office on campus.

As it turns out, Dr. Gerolymatos is chair of The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at SFU, which is "committed to the study and teaching of Greek history language and culture", part of the Hellenic...More >>

NDP Purports to Give a Crap About Afghans

April 10th, 2012

In it's continuing effort to make itself in any way relevant to the actual lived struggles of real democrats in faraway places, the NDP says they're concerned that Canada has made no commitment to Afghanistan after 2014, in a PostMedia article from March:

NDP foreign affairs critic Helene Laverdiere said the government doesn't seem to have a "game plan" for post-2014.

That's odd, since the NDP made Canada Out of Afghanistan their cause célèbre over the past decade, cashing in on a public maligned to the mission (but wrong in their misgivings). Shouldn't the NDP be pleased there is no plan, and no will left in the Harper Government to do anything, past 2014? Didn't the NDP only wish the abandonment of Afghanistan, and a perverse "peace with the Taliban", had come sooner?

As Terry Glavin has repeatedly pointed out, the NDP wanted Canada to be "neutral" towards Afghanistan. But this is not what Afghans wanted.

That Jack Layton’s trippy prescriptions for the ills that ail Afghanistan are less a persistence of noble left-wing internationalist traditions and more along the lines of black-leotard interpretive dance from a post-modern alternative universe will not be a surprise to
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