A typical fighting season in southern Afghanistan begins in spring and continues through fall. This photo essay by photojournalist Louie Palu in the summer issue of Geist documents last year’s fighting season. It finds the region’s Pashtun people, who know little of life without seasonal warfare, living day to day on the fringes of battle.

As the 2009 fighting season began this past May, Palu returned to Afghanistan to capture what could be the worst season the Pashtun have seen. He writes:

The longer I stay in Afghanistan and the more I see, the fewer answers I have about what is going on there and what the future holds. Back in Toronto I can’t even talk to anyone in a bar, because conversations with people who think they understand Afghanistan just end as heated arguments on the sidewalk.

Source: Geist 

 Image by Louie Palu.

Reporters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and other hostile places around the world face the daily threat of being kidnapped. Knowing how to be kidnapped can increase a person’s chances for survival—or at least that’s the theory behind the Centurion Risk Assessment Services’ Hostile Environment and First Aid Course. Trainers stage a mock abduction using “theatrical pyrotechnics to simulate such things as mortar fire, machine gun crossfire, mines and booby traps, etc. (all kept at a safe distance from the delegates) to simulate a hostile environment.”

The American Prospect’s reporter Tara McKelvey attended the course and picked up some useful tips: “Stay in hotels that do not have underground parking garages (where car bombs can be placed). Bring along a doorstop and jam it under the door in your room. And never argue with checkpoint guards.” Considering that at least 30 journalists were killed last year for doing their jobs, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the two, three, or five day course might be worth the time.

Source:  The American Prospect  (excerpt available online)

Image by  sindesign , licensed under  Creative Commons .

After risking their lives for American troops in Afghanistan, translators are often abandoned and mistreated. The largest suppliers of translators to the U.S. military, a company called Mission Essential Personnel (MEP), sees one of its translator die and two severely injured every month, on average. In an exposé by the investigative site CorpWatch, injured employees are speaking out against MEP, accusing the company of withholding compensation and care from injured or killed employees and their families.

One former MEP employee, Basir Ahmed, told CorpWatch that he was fired after a suicide bombing in the Khogyani district of northeastern Afghanistan severely injured him. Mission Essential Personnel fired Ahmed, accusing him of being frequently late and sometimes not showing up to work—charges that he insists are trumped up. Ahmed tells a story of being moved from hospital to hospital, being forced to wait in the dead of winter for medical visits, and of promised compensation arriving months late. CorpWatch reports:

Today, he lives in hiding in nearby Jalalabad for fear that his family will be targeted because he had worked with the U.S. military. The 29-year-old has no job and had to wait nine months for disability compensation to pay for medical treatment for the burns that still prevent him from lifting his hand to his mouth to feed himself.

You can watch a video from the report below:

Source:  CorpWatch  

Afghanistan's epic battle against Soviet occupation spawned an unusual genre of war story: the war rug. It's a tradition that continues to this day, with Afghan weavers telling the story of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent American invasion.

Max Allen is a curator of a war rug exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada. Here’s what he has to say about the rugs:

During the Afghan wars which have gone on from 1979 to the present the whole country is full of war equipment. You can hardly avoid seeing it. And just like television or newspapers these rugs report what’s going on in Afghanistan. Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan there was nothing anywhere in the world like this. It came out of the blue. Are the rugs pro-war or anti-war? I don’t know. You can read a message into them but whether the message was put there by the weaver, I don’t know.

Hear more from Allen and to see some of the work in this short audio slideshow:

(Thanks, Strange Maps.)

The Taliban have again taken up residency on the front pages of our newspapers. Bill Moyers asks historian (and one-time Pakistan resident) Juan Cole a question many of us might feel silly asking after all of these years of war in Afghanistan and worry over Pakistan: “Who are the Taliban and what do they want?”

Cole’s response (and the entire Moyers segment) provides a foothold on the mountain of nuance we’re missing in the coverage of what is now being called the “Afpak” war:

What we're calling the Taliban, it's actually a misnomer. There are, like, five different groups that we're swooping up and calling the Taliban. The Taliban, properly speaking, are seminary students. They were those refugee boys, many of them orphans, who went through the seminaries or Madrassas in northern Pakistan back in the nineties. And then who emerged as a fighting force. Then you have the old war lords who had fought with the Soviet Union, and were allied with the United States. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, they have formed insurgent groups to fight the Americans now. Because they had fought the Soviet occupation, they now see an American occupation, so they've turned on the United States. They were former allies.

So we're calling them Taliban. And then you have a lot of probably disorganized villagers whose poppy crops, for instance, were burned. And they're angry. So they'll hit a NATO or American checkpoint. So we're scooping all of this up. And then the groups in northern Pakistan who are yet another group. And we're calling it all Taliban.

Want more? The interview (which also includes Pakistani-American journalist Shahan Mufti) is a must read for anybody trying to make sense of our growing entanglement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  

Source: Bill Moyers Journal 

Image by DoD.

With President Obama in office, some of the Bush era’s most vociferous antiwar organizations have become peculiarly complacent, Justin Raimondo observes in the American Conservative. Raimondo singles out MoveOn.org, Americans United for Change, and VoteVets, among others for not calling the planned escalation of U.S. presence in Afghanistan what it is: no different than the war policy of the Bush era.

“Like the neoconized Republican cadre that hooted down Ron Paul as he rose to challenge the Bush foreign policy during the GOP presidential primary debates, a similarly brainwashed Democratic base is now cheerleading their leader and shouting down dissenters even as this White House repeats—and enlarges—the mistakes of the previous occupant,” Raimondo writes.

Source: American Conservative

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting has an interesting and hardly surprising report on poverty-stricken Afghan youth signing up with the Taliban for part-time work:

Abdullah Jan and Abdul Khaleq are both from the Pushtrod district of Farah province in western Afghanistan. Both are young, unemployed, and seek work as day laborers, for which they get about 200 afghani (4 US dollars) per job. There is one big difference between them though: while Abdul Khaleq earns his money by digging ditches, painting houses, and other manual labour, Abdullah Jan, not his real name, does so by attacking police checkpoints.

It seems the problem of the part-time Taliban is growing:

Afghan commentators say the Taliban’s recruitment of part-timer fighters is a worrying development, as it shows how easily they can draft ordinary Afghans into their ranks. “This tactic should be studied,” said one political analyst, who did not want to give his name. “They are provoking more and more people to violence, and extending their influence in the society.”

Source: Institute for War and Peace Reporting 

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, representations of human forms were banned—with one exception: men could sit for passport photos (women were represented in their travel documents by fingerprints only).

Young Taliban men flocked to Kabul’s photo studios—but not for passport photos. Instead they brushed their long hair, applied makeup to the flesh around their eyes, and posed affectionately with friends and sometimes guns.

Just weeks after the Taliban were driven from Kabul in 2001, photographer Thomas Dworzak wandered into a photo studio near his hotel and discovered piles of these photographs. As he scooped them up and paid for them, shop owners looked at him like “some stupid Westerner.”

He’s assembled the photographs in a book. His photo agency, the legendary Magnum Photos, has produced a short video and slideshow with commentary by Ahmed Rashid, a veteran correspondent in the region.

Rashid points out two things in an attempt to explain the photos, chief among them: Afghans love to have their picture taken.

He also speaks of a “very strong homosexual tradition” in Afghanistan, “in which an older man will kind of adopt a young man and become a lover and teach him whatever skills he may have.”

Though Taliban leader Mullah Omar banned homosexuality, Rashid explains, this tradition, particularly in Southern Afghanistan, “continued, but it was done surreptitiously.”

Dworzak’s found photographs are captivating evidence of a piece of Afghanistan’s history buried by the daily drumbeat of new violence.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

The White House’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, recently announced that he’s abandoning the term “war on drugs,” telling reporters: “We're not at war with people in this country.” The change in rhetoric seems to signal a move toward a more moderate, public-health approach on drugs, rather than the militarized stance the country currently takes. 

Kerlikowske may have the right idea, but a focus on policies inside the United States still neglects the far more globalized problem of the U.S. drug war abroad. According to Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím, “the United States today is both the world’s largest importer of illicit drugs and the world’s largest exporter of bad drug policy.” 

The global economic crisis has created a situation where the drug trade is one of the few economic engines in countries like Mexico, Bolivia, and Afghanistan. “In many places,” Naím writes, “narcotraffickers are the major source of jobs, economic opportunity, and money for elections.”

If policy makers want to move toward a more effective drug policy, Naím writes that a focus on the social consequences of drugs would be a good place to start. But should the United States simply replace the “war on drugs” with an “conflict against mind-altering substances” or a “battle to combat banned medications,” the drug czar’s change in tone won’t have much of an effect.

“Rhetoric matters,” writes Reason’s Radley Balko, who is encouraged by Kerlikowske’s recent decision. “War implies a threat so existential, so dire to our way of life, that we citizens should be ready to sign over some of our basic rights, be expected to make significant sacrifices, and endure collateral damage in order to defeat it. Preventing people from getting high has never represented that sort of threat.”

Though a step in the right direction, Balko admits that rhetoric alone won’t solve the drug war’s underlying problems, at home or abroad. For one thing, Kerlikowske won’t be able to create policy reforms on his own. He’ll have to work with congress and other agencies for that. Jacob Sullum, also on the Reason blog, cautions readers: “We should not be fooled by medicalized language into believing that drug prohibition is less brutal or less of an assault on our rights.”

Sources: Foreign Policy, Wall Street Journal, Reason 

David Levinthal's haunting photographic recreations of the tragedy and drama of war in Afghanistan and Iraq evoke the words of the novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien: "A true war story makes the stomach believe." Levinthal's soldiers and civilians are toys scuffed and posed for his camera. Still, they are photographs you believe—with your stomach.

For each photograph in I.E.D. there is a short burst of text—excerpts from the exceptional military blog The Sandbox, a collection of narratives and observations from service members deployed in Iraq.

"It's interesting to watch people trying to be normal in the aftermath of a fundamentally disturbing event," writes Owen Powell in 2006. "A few blocks away, corpses were littering the blackened asphalt of a city square, burning. Ambulance crews would be arriving and trying to find the wounded amongst the debris and the dead. But not us. It was someone else's job, and there really wasn't anything to do here but carry on with the mundane details of the still alive. So, we all walked around and fiddled with our gear or stood and tried to make small talk through clenched jaws."

Stories like this push Levinthal's photographs deeper into your stomach and don't fade easily from your mind. Here are some of the images:

Images courtesy of powerHouse Books.

"Almost like clockwork," writes Tom Engelhardt, "the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away, as if from another universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive from Afghan villages that few Americans will ever see without weapon in hand ... Unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers. They're so repetitive that, once you've started reading them, you could write them in your sleep from thousands of miles away."

In his latest TomDispatch post, Engelhardt counts the dead in Afghanistan and wonders why he is so utterly alone in doing so.

"We forget these killings easily—often we don't notice them in the first place—since they don't seem to impinge on our lives," he writes. "Perhaps that's one of the benefits of fighting a war on the periphery of empire, halfway across the planet in the backlands of some impoverished country. One problem, though: the forgetting doesn't work so well in those backlands. When your child, wife or husband, mother or father is killed, you don't forget."

It's numbing to think how many children, wives, husbands, mothers, or fathers Afghanistan has lost. I remember, way back in 2003, one of those reports “you could write in your sleep.” American forces fired on a building near the city of Gardez. They believed that a renegade Afghan commander, Mullah Jalani, was storing weapons in the compound. Jalani himself may even have been sleeping there. So the compound was shot up. There were explosions. And the next day when troops showed up to assess the damage, six children were found crushed under a collapsed wall. And there were two dead adults. Neither of them were Mullah Jalani.

Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty was the man tapped to explain this one to the press. "We do make mistakes," he said. "War is an inexact art."

To the people who loved each of those six children, of course, war is not an "inexact art," it is murderous folly.

"And how exactly do we explain this ever rising pile of civilian dead to ourselves?," Engelhardt asks, five years and countless tragic blunders later. "It's being done, so we've been told, for our safety and security ... What a bad bargain it's been—and all in the name of our safety, and ours alone."

Source: TomDispatch 

"Want a billion dollars in development aid?," writes Pratap Chaterjee in an excellent new piece on the future of Afghanistan. "If you happen to live in Afghanistan, the two quickest ways to attract attention and so aid from the U.S. authorities are: Taliban attacks or a flourishing opium trade. For those with neither, the future could be bleak."

Chaterjee writes of his recent travels in Afghanistan for TomDispatch and, focusing on a single province, illuminates a terrible imbalance: "With Pentagon expenditures in Afghanistan running at about $36 billion a year, the annual aid allocation for the 387,000 people who live in Bamiyan Province," he writes, "is outstripped every single hour by the money spent on 30,000-plus American troops and their weaponry.

Don't miss Chaterjee's excellent dispatch.

Source: TomDispatch

A trio of Aussies have been teaching kids in Kabul how to skateboard, the New Statesman reports, and by year’s end they hope to establish Afghanistan’s first coed skateboarding school.

"We want to create a positive image of Afghan youth," cofounder Travis Beard told the New Statesman, "to bridge east and west, and of course the guys will learn all sorts of life skills.... But above all, it's about sport and having fun."

They call themselves Skateistan. The group has had trouble finding skateboard-friendly spots in Kabul—potholes and dust are a problem, not to mention safety and security—and they’re still looking for a space for the school.

What’s not a problem, though, is getting young people in Kabul to pick up a skateboard. "They've got more balance than Western kids, mainly because they're not scared to fall and get up again," Skateistan cofounder Oliver Percovich told the Age.

Image courtesy of Sharna Nolan/Skateistan.

Messages conveyed through bathroom graffiti exist in a world of their own, somewhere between the bounds of taste and repugnance, lacking the privacy of a diary but too ephemeral and obscure to truly be part of the public domain. They are personal statements momentarily pushed into view, yet destined for erasure. In part, this transience is what makes Steve Featherstone’s visual essay in the Walrus about graffiti in the latrines of U.S. soldiers serving in Kuwait and Afghanistan such an appealing project. His pictures capture something that those of us living stateside could never otherwise have seen. The scrawlings are both foreign and familiar: macho anger, smack-talk between soldiers and, above all, homesickness. The messages don’t come together to form some cohesive, revelatory narrative, as much as we might wish them to. 

Featherstone doesn’t read too much into what’s written on the privy walls. As a whole, the messages serve as a window into one of the world’s shitholes, not a codex for understanding conflict in the Middle East or the meaning of warfare. They are what they are, “fleeting moment[s] in a six year-old war—nothing more. The words on these walls are snatches of an overheard and ongoing conversation that changes by the day, soldier’s talking to other soldiers at a time when soldiers are being asked to give more than they have been giving, which is already too much.”

—Morgan Winters

Image by  Russell Bernice , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

If 55 veterans gathered in the same place, at the same time, prepared to give disarmingly honest testimonies about their on-the-ground experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, would anybody listen?

Because that happened, just a few weeks ago. Vets convened in the Washington, DC area for IVAW’s Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan—and for the most part, mainstream media have either ignored the momentous gathering or relegated coverage to their metro sections, reports Extra!.

Winter Soldier has yet to be mentioned in the  New York Times itself. No major U.S. newspaper has covered the hearings except as a story of local interest; the few stories major U.S. newspapers have published on the event have focused on the participation of local vets (Boston Globe, 3/16/08; Boston Herald, 3/16/08; Newsday, 3/16/08, Buffalo News, 3/16/08).

And you probably didn’t see any Winter Soldier testimonies on television—the major broadcast TV networks (and PBS!) avoided the event altogether—but they’re all available at the IVAW website, organized into panels like “Racism and War: The Dehumanization of the Enemy” and “Divide to Conquer: Gender and Sexuality in the Military.”

—Danielle Maestretti

After 9/11, Al Jazeera immediately assumed a more significant role on the global media stage. The news station’s privileged access to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan—and its position as Osama bin Laden’s preferred videotape recipient—placed Al Jazeera leaps and bounds ahead of sources like CNN and BBC (both of which have relied on feed from Al Jazeera). The station quickly came to serve as America’s primary window to the Middle East.

In the most recent issue of Islamica, Silvia Gaiani dissects Al Jazeera’s rise to international prominence. Gaiani, a Bologna, Italy-based journalist and scholar, credits the station’s prolonged success to its coverage of issues with pan-Arab appeal. It’s also come to be considered an accurate source of local news in countries with highly censored media. If there was a riot or protest, Gaiani notes, the news used to spread by word of mouth. Now, it’s Al Jazeera.

The unexpected by-product of Al Jazeera’s success, Gaiani argues, is that “[f]or the first time in modern history, the flow of information is no longer just from West to East.” This is a point that cannot be understated, especially now that the network has branched out into English, effectively doubling its market from 40 million Arabic-speaking viewers to 70-80 million. And its influence should only rise as Al Jazeera eyes the Urdu-speaking market of South Asia.

Even though the network has yet to broadcast in the United States, its entry could be exactly what American news needs: a voice that forces the hand of top domestic networks to reshape their coverage of the Middle East.

—Eric Kelsey