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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
i haven't had the pleasure of traveling outside of kabul either by road or otherwise but i hope to have the experience one of these days soon and, yes, i would very much like to drive this road...
Kabul Gorge near Sarobi Kabul-Jalalabad Highway
Kabul Gorge near Sarobi Kabul-Jalalabad Highway
dexter filkins, the nyt correspondent who has spent years reporting from afghanistan, almost perfectly captures the essence of the country in this article...
The 40-mile stretch, a breathtaking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so many lives so regularly that most people stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.
The mayhem unfolds on one of the most bewitching stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in some places no more than a few hundred yards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 2,000 feet above the Kabul River below. Most people die, and most cars crash, while zooming around one of the impossible turns that offer impossible views of the crevasses and buttes.
[...]
One day last week, 13 accidents unfolded on the road in a mere two hours, all of them catastrophic, nearly all of them fatal. The daylong drizzle made the day slightly more calamitous than most. At one scene, a bloodied family grieved for their kin trapped in a flattened car. At another, a minibus lay crushed beneath the hulk of a jackknifed truck. At still another, the bottom of a ravine was filled with a car’s twisted remains.
And yet even as those accidents spread themselves across the roadway, the cars sailed heedlessly past. Taxis and buses weaved and passed one another at bone-chilling speeds, with only millimeters separating them from bloody catastrophe.
i learned to drive in the mountains of colorado, both on and off road, and there's nothing i like more than a good driving challenge... i've driven in many countries and dealt with extremely dangerous and truly insane driving habits but, i must admit, afghans are perhaps the most insane of the lot...
i was awakened around 2 a.m. by my bed shaking... i knew immediately it was an earthquake and remained awake for a few minutes before dropping back to sleep... around 4:30, i was awakened by another tremor and, again, stayed awake just long enough to satisfy myself it was over... i felt another one about three hours ago... i was reasonably sure that the epicenter wasn't too far away, so i'm not surprised to see this...
Villagers in eastern Afghanistan wailed in grief and scrambled through rubble on Friday to recover the bodies of dozens of people feared killed by a 5.5 magnitude earthquake.
Residents of the village of Mir Gadkhel said they thought dozens had been killed there. A Reuters cameraman also counted about 10 dead bodies in another nearby village, Sar Kot.
"Three of my family members were killed and seven are injured. I think about 40 people have died. Hundreds of houses have been destroyed," Gul Mohammad said in Mir Gadkhel, about 45 km (30 miles) west of the Afghan city of Jalalabad.
The U.S. Geological Survey said a 5.5 magnitude quake hit the area just before 2 a.m. on Friday (5:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday), followed by a 5.1 magnitude aftershock two hours later.
with all the misery that the afghan people face on a daily basis, they shouldn't have to deal with earthquakes too...
At least 13 Afghan police and civilians have died in two incidents involving international forces, officials say.
Four Afghan police and five civilians died in an apparently mistaken air strike by international coalition forces in Farah province.
Separately, the Nato-led Isaf said it had "accidentally" killed at least four civilians in Paktika province.
The incidents are the latest in a series of controversial clashes involving foreign troops.
seven and a half years AFTER the u.s. topples the taliban, no infrastructure...
Haji Baz Mohammad
What puzzles poorer Afghans is why so many basic problems haven't been solved, despite the billions of dollars of international aid.
A short walk from the affluent neighbourhoods of Wazir Akbar Khan and Shari Naw, in the streets of downtown Kabul, Afghanistan's unemployed are gathered in their hundreds.
Most say they have to wait for days, hoping to find one day's work to feed their entire family.
Kabul is considered the safest spot in the country, but basic services such as clean drinking water, electricity, and sewage systems remain unavailable to most people.
Waiting outside one of Kabul's main government hospitals is Haji Baz Mohammad. He has accompanied a patient from his home province in northern Afghanistan. He is busy praying and is visibly sad.
"We are not politicians or people who have the aid money," he says. "Where are the roads, clinics and reconstruction that were promised to us?"
i spent my first two weeks in kabul puzzling over those same questions... where's the infrastructure...? where has the money gone...? it seems that the afghan on the street can answer those questions...
Saqib Baghlani, 43, a high school teacher, sits on his old Chinese bicycle.
He welcomes the demise of the Taleban. "Afghanistan has made remarkable progress compared to its pre-war and Taleban days," declares the tall, confident, blue-eyed teacher.
But he says the failures of his government are unacceptable.
He insists that President Hamed Karzai should fire corrupt officials and provide people with basic services, such as health care and clean drinking water, as this could bring peace.
Afghan children at a refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan 12/06/08 There is growing international pressure to improve living standards
"Go and see who owns these expensive houses in (the suburb of) Wazir Akbar Khan and who is driving land cruisers," he says. "Karzai should ask these officials how they got so rich overnight, instead of making empty promises again and again."
karzai doesn't have to ask... he knows the answer... it is under his leadership and with his administration's tacit consent that those fat cats have gotten ever fatter... and, yes, some of that money left afghanistan in my pocket, but damn little i can assure you in comparison to the billions being raked in by dyncorp, louis berger, and kbr...
so what does our erstwhile presidential candidate, barack obama, propose...?
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged steadfast aid to Afghanistan in talks with its Western-backed leader Sunday and vowed to pursue the war on terror "with vigor" if he is elected, an Afghan official said.
[...]
Obama has made Afghanistan a centerpiece of his proposed strategy for dealing with terrorism threats.
The Illinois senator has said the war in Afghanistan, where Taliban and al-Qaida-linked militants are resurgent, deserves more troops and more attention as opposed to the conflict in Iraq.
and just what exactly do the AFGHANS think of more troops...?
The USG Open Source Center translates a report in Dari Persian on a parliamentarian and two close observers from Afghanistan who entertain the severest doubts about Barack Obama's plan to send more US troops to Afghanistan.
Afghan Observers Sceptical of Senator Obama's Plan To Send More Troops Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran External Service Saturday, July 19, 2008 Document Type: OSC Translated Text
An Afghan parliamentarian has criticized one of the US presidential candidates for his plan to deploy more troops in Afghanistan. Elaborating on his foreign policy this week, Barack Obama said that as president, he would send two more US combat brigades to the Afghan theatre.
According to a report (source indistinct) from Kabul, Afghan MP Kabir Ranjbar asserted on Friday that increasing the number of US and other foreign servicemen would not help Afghanistan at all.
Wahid Mozhda, another Afghan political observer, has also warned that the Obama's plan to deploy up to 10,000 additional troops will worsen the situation in Afghanistan. This Afghan observer states according to this plan, the US is trying to resolve the problem through military measures, which is obviously not an effective strategy.
In addition, Mr Fahim Dashti, a journalist and observer, has said that the US government officials have decided to increase troops in Afghanistan, at a time when they have failed to defeat remnants of the Taliban and Al-Qa'ida in this country. Fahim Dashti says sending additional US and other foreign troops to Afghanistan will cause more problems in the long term, because it may antagonize the people's anti-American feelings. The Afghan analyst accentuated that countries like the USA should organize and equip the Afghan native forces, including the national army and police, as soon as possible if they really want to put an end to insecurity in Afghanistan.
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