Winds Of Jihad By SheikYerMami » Afghanistan

Jihad in Marrakhesh

sheikyermami — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 02:28:59 +0000

Jihad bomb murders 14 in Marrakesh cafe

Allah guarantees Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for him (Qur’an 9:111).

2011.04.28 (Marrakesh, Morocco) – A Holy Warrior walks into a cafe and detonates. Five women are among fifteen massacred.

Our always vigilant Mullah wonders if our Moroccan snitch is still sitting comfortably sipping tea …

[A British national and two French people are among 14 killed in a suicide bomb attack in a popular tourist cafe in Marrakesh, according to reports by French newspaper Le Figaro. ]

“Blast kills 14 in Marrakesh cafe,” from AFP, April 28 (thanks to JW):

Related Jihad Offerings:

MARRAKESH, Morocco (AFP) – A powerful blast ripped through a cafe in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh on Thursday, killing 11 foreigners and three Moroccans in what authorities suspect was the work of a suicide bomber.”According to the information I have, it could have been perpetrated by a suicide bomber,” an official in the regional governor’s office told AFP.

“We found nails in one of the bodies,” added the official, who was in a hospital where some of the bodies were taken.

And an interior ministry official said that indications pointed to a terror attack on the Argana cafe in the main square of Marrakesh, a favourite haunt of foreign tourists.

But there were contradictory reports on exactly how the blast occurred.

One witness who was inside the cafe but escaped unscathed said: “An individual entered, ordered an orange juice and a few minutes later blew himself up.”

But another witness, quoted by several Moroccan radio stations, said the bomber dropped a suitcase and immediately walked out of the cafe….

Last January, Moroccan Interior Minister Taib Cherkaoui said 27 suspected terrorists recently arrested in the country’s south had ties to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an Al-Qaeda-linked regional offshoot, and to Europe-based. [sic] …

Cherkaoui then said the network had planned bank robberies in Casablanca and Rabat “to finance its terrorist actions.”

And his ministry said the network was led by “a Moroccan national who is a member of AQIM and who wanted to create a rear base in the country for terror attacks.”

WTF are we doing in Afghanistan?

sheikyermami — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 10:35:44 +0000

Infuriating.

We are sacrificing our best and bravest for an Islamic Narco-Jihad-Sharia fiefdom that will still be the same whether we stay there 10, 2o or a hundred years.

Every time I read this I wonder if the soldier involved held back fire for fear of being court martialed by a pathetic government hell bent on winning votes……

It is the ultimate ultimate perversion to sacrifice the best of our fighting men to help our implacable enemies in the folly of ”nation building”. We are insane.

Spr Larcombe, who was halfway through his first tour of Afghanistan, is survived by his parents, three younger sisters and girlfriend Rhiannon Penhall, all of whom were being supported by Defence staff. (source)

RIP Jamie…..

A fine and brave South Australian has been lost with the death of Sapper Jamie Ronald Larcombe in Afghanistan, the SA government says.

Sapper Jamie Ronald Larcombe and an Afghan interpreter were shot dead by insurgents while on patrol in the Mirabad Valley on Saturday night (AEDT). (9News)

Just yesterday we had 3 Germans killed and six wounded:

Afghan soldier opens fire on German troops, killing 3 and wounding 6 others…

And for what? For Islamic sharia?

The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates.

(And child marriage, stoning of women, cutting of hands and limbs, killing of homosexuals, polygamy, and all the rest)

Case closed.

The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.

Read the whole post below the fold or click on the link>>>>>

Today’s Religion of Peace Offerings:

ANDREW C. McCARTHY

Death to Apostates: Not a Perversion of Islam, but Islam
The case of Said Musa shows why we cannot graft democracy onto Islamic societies.

National Review

On NRO Friday, Paul Marshall lamented the Obama administration’s fecklessness, in particular the president’s appalling silence in the face of the death sentence Said Musa may suffer for the crime of converting to Christianity. This is in Afghanistan, the nation for which our troops are fighting and dying — not to defeat our enemies, but to prop up the Islamic “democracy” we have spent a decade trying to forge at a cost of billions.

This shameful episode (and the certain recurrence of it) perfectly illustrates the folly of Islamic nation-building. The stubborn fact is that we have asked for just these sorts of atrocious outcomes. Ever since 2003, when the thrust of the War On Terror stopped being the defeat of America’s enemies and decisively shifted to nation-building, we have insisted — against history, law, language, and logic — that Islamic culture is perfectly compatible with and hospitable to Western-style democracy. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.

This is not the first time an apostate in the new American-made Afghanistan has confronted the very real possibility of being put to death by the state. In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness — after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam? His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence.

They are right. Under the construction of sharia adopted by the Afghan constitution (namely Hanafi, one of Islam’s classical schools of jurisprudence), apostasy is the gravest offense a Muslim can commit. It is considered treason from the Muslim ummah. The penalty for that is death.

This is the dictate of Mohammed himself. One relevant hadith (from the authoritative Bukhari collection, No. 9.83.17) quotes the prophet as follows: “A Muslim . . . may not be killed except for three reasons: as punishment for murder, for adultery, or for apostasy.” It is true that the hadith says “may,” not “must,” and there is in fact some squabbling among sharia scholars about whether ostracism could be a sufficient sentence, at least if the apostasy is kept secret. Alas, the “may” hadith is not the prophet’s only directive on the matter. There is also No. 9.84.57: “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” That is fairly clear, wouldn’t you say? And as a result, mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that apostasy, certainly once it is publicly revealed, warrants the death penalty.

Having hailed the Afghan constitution as the start of a democratic tsunami, the startled Bush administration made all the predictable arguments against Abdul Rahman’s apostasy prosecution. Diplomats and nation-building enthusiasts pointed in panic at the vague, lofty language injected into the Afghan constitution to obscure Islamic law’s harsh reality — spoons full of sugar that had helped the sharia go down. The constitution assures religious freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained. It cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and even specifies that non-Muslims are free to perform their religious rites.

Read the fine print. It actually qualifies that all purported guarantees of personal and religious liberty are subject to Islamic law and Afghanistan’s commitment to being an Islamic state. We were supposed to celebrate this, just as the State Department did, because Islam is the “religion of peace” whose principles are just like ours — that’s why it was so ready for democracy.

It wasn’t so. Sharia is very different from Western law, and it couldn’t care less what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has to say on the matter of apostasy. Nor do the authoritative scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo give a hoot that their straightforward interpretation of sharia’s apostasy principles upsets would-be Muslim reformers like Zuhdi Jasser. We may look at Dr. Jasser as a hero — I do — but at al-Azhar, the sharia scholars would point out that he is merely a doctor of medicine, not of Islamic jurisprudence.

The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates. Case closed.

The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.

To grasp this, one need only read the first three articles of its constitution:

1. Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary, and indivisible state.

2. The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.

3. In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.

Need to hear more? The articles creating the Afghan judiciary make higher education in Islamic jurisprudence a sufficient qualification to sit on the Afghan Supreme Court. Judges are expressly required to take an oath, “In the name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate,” to “support justice and righteousness in accord with the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” When there is no provision of law that seems to control a controversy, Article 130 directs that decisions be in accordance with “the Hanafi jurisprudence” of sharia.

Moreover, consistent with the Muslim Brotherhood’s blueprint for society (highly influential in Sunni Islamic countries and consonant with the transnational-progressive bent of the State Department), the constitution obliges the Afghan government to “create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice” (which, naturally, includes free universal health care). It commands that the Afghan flag be inscribed, “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet, and Allah is Great [i.e., Allahu Akbar].” The state is instructed to “devise and implement a unified educational curriculum based on the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam” and to “develop the curriculum of religious subjects on the basis of the Islamic sects existing in Afghanistan.” In addition, the constitution requires the Afghan government to ensure that the family, “a fundamental unit of society,” is supported in the upbringing of children by “the elimination of traditions contrary to the principles of the sacred religion of Islam.” Those contrary traditions include Western Judeo-Christian principles.

Was that what you figured we were doing when you heard we were “promoting democracy”? Is that a mission you would have agreed to commit our armed forces to accomplish? Yet, that’s what we’re fighting for. The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. “This conflict and country are [theirs] to win,” he wrote, “not mine.”

It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. “We are not trying to win this militarily,” the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last fall. Indeed, the administration had concluded — upon what Ambassador Holbrooke described as consultation with our military commanders — that the war could not be won “militarily.” So the goal now is not to defeat the Taliban but to entice them into taking a seat at the table — in the vain hope that if they buy into the political process they will refrain from confederating with the likes of al-Qaeda.

Afghanistan is not an American war anymore. It’s a political experiment: Can we lay the foundation for Islamic social justice, hang a “democracy” label on it, and convince Americans that we’ve won, that all the blood and treasure have been worth it? The same thing, by the way, has been done in Iraq. Ever since the Iraqis adopted their American-brokered constitution, Christians have left the country in droves, and homosexuals, similarly, have been persecuted. And the Iraqis are so grateful for all the American lives and “investment” sacrificed on their behalf that, just this week, the capital city of Baghdad demanded that the U.S. apologize and fork up another $1 billion in reparations. For what? Why, for “the ugly and destructive way” the American army’s Humvees and fortifications have damaged the city’s aesthetics and infrastructure. Yes, a brief time-out from the usual serenity of life in a sharia state to chastise Americans for their “deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste.”

In 2006, promoters of Islamic democracy — having dreamed that this chimera was not merely plausible but a boon for U.S. security against terrorists — were stunned upon awakening to the reality of “democratic” Afghanistan’s intention to execute Abdul Rahman for apostasy. This was an “affront to civilization,” we at NR said at the time. As Samuel Huntington explained, however, there are two senses of “civilization.” One assumes that all human beings, all cultures, are essentially the same and share the same concept of the higher form of life — that there is only one real civilization. The other holds that different cultures have very different ways of looking at the world — that there are several different civilizations, and what is an affront to one may be a convention to another.

The underlying premise of the democracy project is the former sense of “civilization.” As I argued at the time, the real world is the latter. And now, five years removed from the Abdul Rahman case, five more years of intensive, costly American entanglement with Afghanistan, Paul Marshall gives us the harrowing plight of Said Musa. When he told the Afghan court he was a Christian man, no Afghan defense lawyer would have anything to do with him — except the one who spat on him. He was thrown in jail as an apostate among 400 Afghan Muslims, and he has since been beaten, mocked, deprived of sleep, derisively referred to as “Jesus Christ,” and sexually abused. And just as no Afghan lawyer was willing to aid an apostate, the Afghan sharia state declined to aid him — refusing him access to foreign counsel. We think of this as an affront to civilization. They, on the other hand, think they have their own civilization, and that our civilization and Said Musa are affronts to it.

The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Sodomy and Sufism in Afgaynistan

sheikyermami — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 08:32:41 +0000

By Spengler / Asia Times (thanks to all who sent this in)

Image thanks to TT

Yet another report on the culture of child rape in Afghanistan:

Social scientists attached to the Second Marine Battalion in Afghanistan last year circulated a startling report on Pashtun sociology, in the form of a human terrain report on male sexuality among America’s Afghan allies. The document, made available by military sources, is not classified, just disturbing. Don’t ask, don’t tell doesn’t begin to qualify the problem. These are things you didn’t want to know, and regret having heard. The marines got their money’s worth from their Human Terrain adjuncts, but the report might have considered whether male pedophilia in Afghanistan has a religious dimension as well as a cultural one. I will explain why below.

Most Pashtun men, Human Terrain Team AF-6 reports, engage in sex with men – boys – in fact, the vast majority of their sexual contacts are with males. “A culturally-contrived homosexuality [significantly not termed as such by its practitioners] appears to affect a far greater population base then some researchers would argue is attributable to natural inclination. Some of its root causes lie in the severe segregation of women, the prohibitive cost of marriage within Pashtun tribal codes, and the depressed economic situation into which young Pashtun men are placed.”

The human terrain team responded to scandalous interactions between Pashtun fighters and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops, some reported with hilarity by the media. An article in the Scotsman of May 24, 2002, reported, for example: “In Bagram, British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat – being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers. An Arbroath marine, James Fletcher, said: ‘They were more terrifying than the al-Qaeda. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village.’ While the marines failed to find any al-Qaeda during the seven-day Operation Condor, they were propositioned by dozens of men in villages the troops were ordered to search.”

Another interviewee in the article, a marine in his 20s, stated, “It was hell. Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing makeup coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises.”

The trouble, the researchers surmise, is “Pashtun society’s extremely limited access to women,” citing a Los Angeles Times interview with a young Pashtun identified as Daud. He only has sex with men, explaining: “I like boys, but I like girls better. It’s just that we can’t see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful.”

Many of the Pashtuns interviewed allow “that homosexuality is indeed prohibited within Islam, warranting great shame and condemnation. However, homosexuality is then narrowly and specifically defined as the love of another man. Loving a man would therefore be unacceptable and a major sin within this cultural interpretation of Islam, but using another man for sexual gratification would be regarded as a foible -undesirable but far preferable to sex with a ineligible woman, which in the context of Pashtun honor, would likely result in issues of revenge and honor killings.”

How prevalent are homosexual relations among Pashtuns? The researchers note that “medics treated an outbreak of gonorrhea among the local national interpreters on their camp. Approximately 12 of the nearly 20 young male interpreters present in the camp had contracted the disease, and most had done so anally. This is a merely anecdotal observation and far too small of a sample size to make any generalizations regarding the actual prevalence of homosexual activity region-wide. However, given the difficulty in procuring such data, it may serve as some indicator.”

Through Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel The Kite Runner, Western audiences caught a glimpse of what the military team calls “an openly celebrated cultural tradition. Kandahar’s long artistic and poetic tradition idolizes the pre-pubescent ‘beardless boy’ as the icon of physical beauty. Further, even the newly re-emerging musical nightlife of southern Afghan cities idolizes pre-pubescent boy performers, whose star status lasts only as long as their voices remain immature.”

“Kandahar’s Pashtuns have been notorious for their homosexuality for centuries, particularly their fondness for naive young boys. Before the Taliban arrived in 1994, the streets were filled with teenagers and their sugar daddies, flaunting their relationship. It is called the homosexual capital of South Asia. Such is the Pashtun obsession with sodomy – locals tell you that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posterior – that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilizing the Taliban,” the report adds.

Although the Taliban discouraged open display, it “should not be viewed as free of the culture and tradition of homosexuality of the Pashtun world of which it is a part” the authors add.

“Men who take on a halekon [young male lover] often attempt to integrate the boy into their families by marrying him to a daughter when the boy is no longer young enough to play the ‘beardless’ role. This maintains the love relationship between the father and son-in-law which inevitably makes difficult the establishment of a normal relationship with the wife,” the human terrain Team explains.

The team’s results are striking, but they place too much emphasis on the weirdness of Pashtun tradition and give too little attention to the broader role of homosexuality in Islamic (and especially Sufi) culture. What scholars now consider the Golden Age of Islamic love poetry, the Persian high middle ages, made homosexual pederasty the normative mode of love. While Petrarch wrote sonnets to Laura and Dante longed for Beatrice, their counterparts in the canon of Islamic poetry, Hafez and Rumi, wrote of their infatuation with young boys.

Afghanistan’s own Sufi poet was the 17th-century bard Abdul Rahman Baba, of whom little is known except that he is said to have eloped with a young boy named Mujnoon. He is generally portrayed as a premature flower-child dedicated to peace and love; that must be what the Taliban thought as well, for they placed a bomb in his tomb in March 2009. According to the limited available criticism of Rahman’s work, his Pashto poems are closely related to the Persian style of Rumi.

The prevalence of homosexual pedophilia in classical Islamic poetry, Persian as well as Pashto, suggests that the human terrain team may have missed an important dimension, namely the religious. In a study entitled Sufism, Sodomy and Satanpublished in this space August 12, 2008, I argued:

Sufi pedophilia cannot be dismissed as a remnant of the old tribal practices that Islam often incorporated, for example, female genital mutilation. Genital mutilation is a pre-Islamic practice unknown in the ancient and modern West. Even though some Muslim authorities defend it on the basis of Hadith, no one has ever claimed that it offered a path to enlightenment. Sadly, pedophiles are found almost everywhere. In its ascendancy, Sufism made a definitive spiritual experience out of a practice considered criminally aberrant in the West. But pederasty as a spiritual exercise is not essentially different in character from the furtive practices of Western perverts. As the psychiatrists explain, pederasty is an expression of narcissism, the love of an idealized youthful self-image.

All forms of contemplative mysticism involve the danger that the object of adoration into which one dissolves might turn out to be one’s self. It sounds well and good to seek God in the all, that is, no place in particular. The trouble is that if one tries to dissolve one’s self into the all, one’s self becomes part of the all. The lover cannot distinguish himself from the all. The self and the all are the same, and one loves one’s self. There is no other in Sufism, only your own ego staring back in the carnival mirror of mysticism. The adept does not worship a God who is wholly other – YHWH of the Hebrew Bible or Jesus of the Gospels – but a younger and prettier version of himself. In that respect, pedophilia in Afghanistan may have a distinctly religious motivation.

Texas Company Helped Pimp Little Boys To Stoned Afghan Cops

sheikyermami — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 03:39:16 +0000

Would You Just Rather Not Know This?

Doing bizniss in the bad old Mohammedan fashion:

The story details a Wikileaks released document from US diplomats confirming that American security contractor DynCorp, hired by the US Government at an annual cost of almost $2 Billion to train Afghan police officers, used some of that money to procure 8 – 15 year old boys as “gifts” for Afghan police officers who use them for anal sex.

Apparently DenCorp also uses some of their public funding to purchase drugs to get the same Afghan cops in a party mood.

Stunned?

Not even just a little?

You can read the full story here.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this tale. It’s been a hot topic for months with Alex Jones, an American talk show host who also runs the Prisonplanet.com website.

From the Legion of Decency/hat tip Blazing Cat Fur

Good News from AFP: “Afghanistan has not executed anyone for the crime (of Apostasy) in recent history”

sheikyermami — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:56:07 +0000

See, nothing to worry about, infidel. Go back to sleep, all’s well!

Herald Sun (thanks to Western Feminista)

TWO Afghans accused of converting to Christianity, including a Red Cross employee, could face the death penalty, a prosecuting lawyer has warned.

Musa Sayed, 45, and Ahmad Shah, 50, are being detained in the Afghan capital awaiting trial, the prosecutor in charge of western Kabul, Din Mohammad Quraishi, told AFP.

“They are accused of conversion to another religion, which is considered a crime under Islamic law. If proved, they face the death penalty or life imprisonment,” Mr Quraishi said.

He said Sayed, who works for the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) had already confessed and there was “proof” against Shah.

Related News:

The ICRC’s spokesman in Kabul, Bijan Frederic Farnoudi, confirmed Sayed’s arrest and said the detained man had worked for the organisation since 1995.

Farnoudi said ICRC representatives had visited Sayed in prison “in accordance with its mandate”.

“During such visits, the ICRC has met Mr Musa (Sayed) several times and intends to visit him in future,” Mr Farnoudi said.

Sayed and Shah were arrested in late May and early June, days after local television broadcast footage of men reciting Christian prayers in Farsi and being baptised, apparently in a house in Kabul.

The government launched its own investigation and suspended two aid groups, Norwegian Church Aid and Church World Service of the US, after the television program reported the two men were proselytising, which is illegal in the devoutly Islamic country.

Several Afghan MPs have expressed their anger over the case, with one from western Herat even calling for the men to be dragged from their homes and publicly executed.

The Afghan constitution, adopted after the fall of the hardline Islamic Taliban in late 2001, forbids conversion to another religion from Islam and in theory can sentence those found guilty to death.

But Afghanistan has not executed anyone for the crime in recent history.

The last conversion case to be tried in Afghanistan is believed to be that of Abdul Rahman, an Afghan man arrested in 2006 for converting to Christianity.

He was eventually released and granted refugee status in Italy, after a wave of international human-rights protests.

Copper load of this! Company digging mine in Afghanistan unearths 2,600-year-old Buddhist monastery

sheikyermami — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:54:24 +0000

Oh noes! Remants of the jahilya, pre-Islamic times! Can’t have that: Abdul, get the explosives, Rashid, gimme your lighter….

A Chinese company digging an unexploited copper mine in Afghanistan has unearthed ancient statues of Buddha in a sprawling 2,600-year-old Buddhist monastery.

Archaeologists are rushing to salvage what they can from a major 7th century B.C. religious site along the famed Silk Road connecting Asia and the Middle East.

The ruins, including the monastery and domed shrines known as ‘stupas,’ will likely be largely destroyed once work at the mine begins.

The ruins were discovered as labourers excavated the site on behalf of the Chinese government-backed China Metallurgical Group Corp, which wants to develop the world’s second largest copper mine, lying beneath the ruins.

Historic find: Ancient Buddha statues inside a temple in Mes Aynak, south of Kabul, Afghanistan. Chinese labourers digging a copper mine made the astonishing discovery

Hanging over the situation is the memory of the Buddhas of Bamiyan — statues towering up to 180 feet high in central Afghanistan that were dynamited to the ground in 2001 by the country’s then-rulers, the Taliban, who considered them symbols of paganism.
No one wants to be blamed for similarly razing history at Mes Aynak, in the eastern province of Logar. MCC wanted to start building the mine by the end of 2011 but under an informal understanding with the Kabul government, it has given archaeologists three years for a salvage excavation.
Archaeologists working on the site since May say that won’t be enough time for full preservation. (More from Daily Mail)

Afghanistan: “Foreign Aid Workers? They don’t do anything for us anyway. They’re merely weapons in the Taliban’s hands.’”

sheikyermami — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 07:05:52 +0000

Criticism Grows of Afghanistan’s Bloated NGO Industry

By Walter Mayr/Spiegel

Exotic Birds in a Cage

Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second city, is located in the southern part of the country. In the labyrinthine alleyways of the city’s bazaar, traders huddle in shacks barely wider than a cupboard. The faces of the men in turbans, caps and traditional round-topped pakul hats are as impenetrable as wax masks. Out of the corners of their eyes, they keep a lookout for people who don’t belong in the Taliban’s former and current stronghold. A sticker on a battered Jeep proclaims “Life is short — pray hard.” Foreigners no longer dare to show their faces on these streets.

Ramazan Bashardost is a former presidential candidate who is an outspoken critic of corruption in Afghanistan. “Whenever a foreign aid worker is killed nowadays,” he said, “many Afghans simply shrug their shoulders and think, ‘So what? That’s one less thief. They don’t do anything for us anyway. They’re merely weapons in the Taliban’s hands.’”

Outsiders who want to get anything done in Kandahar need to be very patient and have powerful supporters. Or they have to have unbridled optimism. On Aug. 31, US General David Petraeus, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, said that military progress was now clearly also being made in southern Afghanistan. The day before, an improvised explosive device made of fertilizer and nitric acid had killed five American soldiers in Kandahar as they drove past.

Things don’t look good for the Western peacekeepers and their few remaining friends in Kandahar. Any Afghans suspected of being on the Americans’ payroll risk losing their life. At the end of August, two provincial councilors, colleagues of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president, were killed in bombing attacks. On June 9, a suicide bomber killed himself and 40 other people at the wedding of a member of a US-trained village militia in the Arghandab valley. At police headquarters, they say up to 30 officers a week are being killed — shot, stabbed or poisoned — by the Taliban.

But if the security forces are falling victim to these Muslim radicals in droves, who will protect the last foreigners left in Kandahar?

‘We Don’t Do Fingers’

Beyond the ruins of what were once the offices of two American companies stands the cypress-filled courtyard of Mirwais hospital. This is one of the rare places in Kandahar where Afghan and Western civilians can still freely meet.

It’s 41 degrees Celsius (106 degrees Fahrenheit) in the shade as Markus Geisser starts his rounds. The Swiss doctor heads the mission of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Kandahar province. A total of 35 foreigners represent the organization in this war-torn region. Their main focus is Mirwais hospital and its trauma surgery center.

The floors are tiled in green-and-white, the rooms illuminated by neon strip-lights. There are 180 beds in all — eight in each room. It smells of bean soup, stale sweat and unbearable suffering.

“What do you want to see?” a male nurse asks. “Mine or bombing victims? Gunshot wounds?”

The people holding a silent vigil at the bedsides of their grandsons, sons or brothers are all men. Ezatullah, a whimpering 12-year-old, was brought to the hospital from the village of Zangawat by his grandfather. The man looks in mute grief at the boy, whose lower leg and the ends of five fingers were ripped off by a landmine. He watches as the doctors do their work. Ezatullah may get an artificial leg, but it’s not clear what will happen to his finger-tips. “We don’t do fingers, only whole hands,” the male nurse says matter-of-factly.

“The Americans fire from the sky in helicopters, and on the ground we step on Taliban mines,” Ezatullah’s grandfather complains. Pitched battles are being waged around Kandahar. Every second patient in the emergency room is a war victim.

No Taking Sides

In its role as “the grand old lady of humanitarian assistance”, the Red Cross tries hard to remain neutral in the conflict, says Geisser, a friendly 40-year-old with blond hair. “We have to be careful here because we’re being watched by all sides.”

Providing help without taking sides: That’s the motto of the ICRC. But doesn’t an organization that invests money and resources repairing the ravages of war risk becoming an accessory to this very conflict? Aren’t aid organizations automatically partisan if, like the Red Cross staff working near Kandahar, they also set up offices in Taliban-held areas?

“That’s a legitimate question,” says Geisser, who previously spent time between the fronts in Darfur, Burma, Congo and Iraq, and yet insists he is not a mobile “warhorse” in doctors’ scrubs. “I don’t think we’re prolonging the fighting here in Kandahar,” he says.

In early August, 10 members of a team of doctors belonging to a development organization called the International Assistance Mission were murdered in northeastern Afghanistan. It’s still unclear whether they were killed by the Taliban or simple criminals. The fact is that now even fewer foreigners venture out of the capital Kabul and into rural areas than before. Geisser says that no more than a few dozen foreigners have remained in Kandahar. “Some of them are basically hibernating,” he says. “They’ve gone completely into hiding.”

Geisser and his Red Cross colleagues have no intention of leaving in the foreseeable future, he says. Even though they know they are, as he puts it, “exotic birds in a cage.”

Representing European Taxpayers’ Interests in Afghanistan

“Whenever a foreign aid worker is killed nowadays,” says Ramazan Bashardost, “many Afghans simply shrug their shoulders and think, ‘So what? That’s one less thief. They don’t do anything for us anyway. They’re merely weapons in the Taliban’s hands.’”

Bashardost can by no means be described as a preacher of hate. On the contrary, some people call him “Afghanistan’s Gandhi.” He holds degrees from elite French universities and was his country’s planning minister. In the 2009 presidential elections, Bashardost, a member of the Hazara ethnic group, came third out of 32 candidates, beaten only by the incumbent — Hamid Karzai — and his rival, Abdullah Abdullah.

But sitting in his olive-green campaign tent at the edge of Kabul’s parliamentary district a few days before Saturday’s election, Bashardost rants about the wasteful spending of the various non-governmental organizations, his voice full of righteous contempt. He says Afghanistan can do without NGOs whose staff “can’t leave their $15,000-a-month rented houses or get out of their $40,000 armored vehicles because they have forgotten how to serve the people. Wasn’t that the original idea?”

‘Your Only Advocate’

Bashardost himself drives around Kabul in a small Suzuki. He spends a lot of time with average people. This morning, an old woman with crippled feet, a blind woman, and two widows in nylon burqas are sitting with him in his tent. Bashardost listens to their tales of woe, pulls out a little money, and writes down notes. In Saturday’s election, he once again stood for a seat in parliament. If he gets in, he will be representing more than just the interests of the Afghan people.

“I am your only advocate in Afghanistan,” he says with a rueful smile. “After all, I represent the interests of American and European taxpayers. Why don’t you ask what happened to your money? Why do German workers make do with a sandwich at lunchtime while our President Karzai holds receptions for 150 guests? Criminals are having a ball at the presidential palace at your expense.”

US special investigators are now trying to deal with corruption within the Afghan government apparatus, while the Afghan Economics Ministry is dealing with corruption in the NGO community. According to its initial findings, international NGOs are frittering away 60 percent of their available resources on their own expenses.

BINGOs and MANGOs

The international flow of capital divides and subdivides on its way to Afghanistan like a mighty river branching out in a delta. It splits into main tributaries (the military, government-related organizations and major relief organizations), minor tributaries and rivulets. There are currently 1,327 Afghan NGOs. Added to this, Afghanistan has 303 international NGOs, also known as INGOs — including sub-sets dubbed BINGOs (business-related NGOs) and MANGOs (suspected mafia-related NGOs). The NGOs build hospitals and irrigation channels, set up schools and organize rural administrations, clear mines and help women attain economic independence.

More than 2,000 organizations have already been disbanded for lack of evidence that they were doing anything, says Sayeed Hashim Bassirat, the head of the NGO department of the Economics Ministry in Kabul. To hear him speak, you wouldn’t suspect that he does not have a computer in his office or much in the way of power. He also only has fragmentary information about the multibillion-dollar business of the aid workers outside his door.

“The international relief organizations don’t speak to the government and pay too little attention to the real needs of the people,” Bassirat complains. According to a report published by the Afghan Finance Ministry in November, more than three-quarters of the money donated by foreign countries is distributed not by the relevant ministries but mainly through military channels.

‘Businesses Dressed Up like Mother Teresa’

Nearly $40 billion (€30 billion) in development aid has flowed into Afghanistan since the start of the war. It goes into an industry which is also concerned with securing its own posts and functions, with the hard-to-criticize justification that it is doing good. “Aid organizations are businesses dressed up like Mother Teresa,” writes the Dutch journalist Linda Polman in her no-holds-barred exposé “The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?” which has just been published in the US.

Working for a good cause feeds thousands of aid workers. Buzzwords such as “sustainable development,” “empowerment” and “gender-balanced approach” open the gates to donor money. Those within the aid convoy know the catchphrases because many of them were deployed in Rwanda, Bosnia or the Congo on behalf of the World Bank, UN or NGOs before coming to Afghanistan.

Occasionally, even some of the aid workers express their doubts when they get together in small groups or when they talk over a beer in one of the foreigners-only restaurants in the Kabul district of Qala-e-Fatullah. They describe their work as “donor-driven,” by which they mean that those who hand out the money don’t ask the recipients what they need.

One experienced German aid worker delivers a damning verdict on her fellow relief workers, who are mostly young graduates from around the world. “Of course some of them are really dedicated and have specialist skills,” she says. “But most could just as easily work somewhere else. Either that or they came to Afghanistan looking for the noble savage and are now disappointed because the people here also watch Hollywood movies and have cellphones.”

Using Citizen-Reporters to Fight Corruption

Lorenzo Delesgues is one of those who take their work seriously. He speaks Dari, the lingua franca in Kabul. In fact he’s so fluent that he was stopped and asked for his ID card when his friends dragged him over to the “Zadar” restaurant. The place sells beer for $7 and pizza for $18 — though only to non-Afghans. Selling alcohol is illegal — at least officially — in the Islamic republic.

Delesgues doesn’t employ bodyguards. He doesn’t have a four-wheel-drive Toyota or a well-stocked expenses account. He walks through the city at night, past the beggars, the street urchins and the hawkers. He says the budgets of thousands of foreign aid workers only exacerbate the social inequality.

As the head of Integrity Watch Afghanistan, Delesgues earns a net monthly salary of $3,800. American consultants in Kabul receive the same amount in just four days. But the smart Italian-Frenchman is not there for the money. He is there for Afghanistan. If you ask him why he has been in Afghanistan for the last five years, he boots up his computer and shows you a series of videos. The images show Afghan villagers inspecting development projects. They find brand-new school buildings with doors falling off their hinges, or stand aghast in washrooms in which the toilets themselves have been forgotten.

“Our employees in rural areas get $15 a month plus a camera and a video camera,” says Delesgues. “We have two people in every village. They are elected by the villagers, and the aid project they monitor is one that they — not we — have chosen.”

Digging Its Own Grave

The principle of using citizen-reporters is effective, even in Afghanistan. “Donors are shocked when we tell them what happened to their money,” Delesgues says. “Before construction even gets underway, four or five subcontractors have been involved on average, and each keeps 10-12 percent for himself. So when it’s time to start, there’s hardly anything left.”

The multibillion-dollar grave that the international community is digging for itself in Afghanistan might not have been quite so deep had more people like Delesgues been given a say. Delesgues knows enough of the locals to understand what life is like in the slums on the hillsides overlooking Kabul, where skyrocketing rents have driven the poor. He knows that a state cannot possibly function if its best civil servants quit their jobs because they can bring home 10 times as much working as drivers or interpreters for the international aid machine.

But Delesgues refuses to be disheartened, even if the aid convoy should soon decide to move on and leave Afghanistan. He is far from finished with his plans for the country. “My dream is to expand our system here,” he says. “To build larger networks and enable the people to also keep an eye on their own leaders — every day, in the judiciary, in environmental policy, everywhere.”

Thursday Nights at the Red Cross Bar

Most of the other foreigners in Kabul have very different dreams. These are lived out at the regular get-togethers in the basement bar of the Red Cross, over sundowners in the “L’Atmosphère” restaurant or at brainstorming sessions next to the swimming pool on the premises of the German Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ). Afghanis only play minor roles in these dreams, usually as waiters or guards.

When the sun goes down, the foreigners stream past those Afghans. There are “consultants” in their early 30s employed by the major aid organizations; so-called “experts,” mostly Americans, whose work at the various Afghan ministries earns them a 30 percent hardship bonus; and idealists who simply want a bit of fun in the evening.

On Thursdays, in the three rooms of the Red Cross’s basement bar, the women wear dresses with thigh-high slits and revealing tops — the kind of clothes that women can’t wear anywhere else in Kabul. Martini, Bacardi and Beck’s beer at $2.50 a can are on sale. If you don’t make the guest list, you don’t get in.

The aid organizations in Kabul don’t like outsiders prying into what they are doing, whether it’s their social activities or their finances. And the donors prefer to be the ones who provide the images and figures the world gets to see about the relief work being conducted in Afghanistan.

The Caravan Is Set in Motion Again

New natural disasters and new wars threaten to set the aid caravan in motion again. Aid workers ask themselves whether they should stay or go. “I’ve started making my decisions partly based on the time of year,” says a young Frenchwoman at the bar of the “L’Atmosphère.” “Haiti is OK from the fall onwards, maybe even Yemen. But I won’t go anywhere that gets above 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) or under minus 14 (7 degrees Fahrenheit) anymore.”

One old hand remarks sarcastically that his colleagues who are tired of Afghanistan should go to Haiti. “There’s no shortage of suffering there either,” he says. “And on top of that, the girls — unlike here — are willing.”

Somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 of the minor players in the Afghan war may be asked to leave at the end of the year. President Hamid Karzai has announced that all the private security contractors in his country must cease their work by late December. He said they waste “billions of dollars” and denounced private security company employees as “thieves during the day and terrorists during the night.”

Huge Sums Spent on Security

What Karzai envisages is no less than closing down an industry that has become one of the most profitable in Afghanistan — because the basis of its pricing structure is fear.

A security guard who previously worked in Iraq stands in the Hotel Serena in Kabul rolling a San Pellegrino bottle in his huge hand. “If a project has a $100,000 budget, 20 percent of that will be spent on security,” says the man, who wants to be referred to only as Steve. “An armored vehicle costs up to $8,000 a month, a foreign security guard $10,000.”

Often enough, protection for aid workers swallows up more of a budget than the whole of the rest of the project. Steve says that security for an average Kabul compound costs $600,000 a year. Afghan bodyguards earn about $220 a month. The customers are charged three times that amount.

‘It’s Crazy What the EU Is Willing to Fork Out for Us’

In the very near future, security in Afghanistan will be the responsibility of just over 170,000 soldiers and 134,000 police officers. Once the private armies of Western security personnel have disappeared, the job will mainly fall to the Afghan police.

Germany plays a key role in training Afghan policeman under the auspices of the European Union Police Mission (EUPOL) and the German Police Project Team, a bilateral project. In the year 2010 alone, this will cost German taxpayers €77 million.

It’s a great opportunity for policemen to boost their income. One of these is Holger Behrens, which is not his real name. He does not want to be identified by his real name because of his position as a police officer.

“In Germany I earn a monthly take-home pay of €3,000. Working in Afghanistan gives me an extra €5,000 a month, net,” Behrens says. “It’s crazy what the EU is willing to fork out for us.”

Bodyguards to Get to a Card Game

Unless he is out training Afghans, the policeman lives and works in the “Green Village,” also known to the foreigners in Kabul as “Pleasantville”. The site, which is guarded by Nepalese Gurkhas, has fountains and covered walkways, a courier service, a bank and even a souvenir shop.

But Behrens says his life in the luxury prison certainly isn’t enviable. “We can’t go anywhere. If ever I want to go into town or to (ISAF operations center) Camp Warehouse for a game of cards, I have to order security guards.” A policeman who hires bodyguards to get to a card game: That sums up in a nutshell the problem that lies at the heart of this immense operation.

The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) has drawn up figures for the expected total cost of the war. Given a phased withdrawal from 2013 onward, Germany will have spent a total of €36.5 billion on Afghanistan. That’s just over a tenth of what Washington is pumping into the country. Defense expert Amy Belasco estimates total US expenditure by 2011 to be $445 billion. To put that into perspective, that’s more than three times what all the OECD nations together spent on development aid around the globe in 2009. Estimates suggest that up to 80 percent of American money flows right back into the US through consultancy fees, corporate contracts and exported goods.

No Furniture or Toilets

The one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar recently announced that victory over the “infidels” was near, and that billions of tax dollars had been wasted in Afghanistan. Just a stone’s throw from the cleric’s former headquarters in Kandahar, two empty apartment blocks stand behind a bolted iron gate on the university campus. The university’s president, Professor Hazrat Mir Totakhil, calls for the keys, paces across the dusty inner courtyard, and squints through the windows.

“It’s been finished since 2006,” he says. “But it’s still empty: There’s no furniture, no toilets and no air-conditioning.” The buildings were intended as residences for 400 female students to live, sleep and study in — an ambitious project for a city like Kandahar, where many women aren’t even permitted to leave their own homes unless accompanied by a male.

The German Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) had the first apartment block erected with money from the German government. Before even a single bed had been delivered, USAID paid for a second dormitory. Since then, nothing has happened, because interior furnishings weren’t included in the grants — and the Afghans pretend not to have any money for that.

In recent weeks, quiet thudding sounds have often been heard coming from inside the nearby former Taliban stronghold. US trainers are conducting live-fire exercises there in preparation for an emergency. They know the Taliban are back at the gates of Kandahar.

Translated from the German by Jan Liebelt

Afghanistan: when I grow up, I will have my own boyz……

sheikyermami — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:36:40 +0000

Afghanistan’s dirty little secret

Joel Brinkley

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy’s father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to “touch and fondle them,” military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. “The soldiers didn’t understand.”

“Bacha Bereesh,” literally “beardless boys,” chosen for their height, size and beauty, trained to sing and dance for male audiences, are traded for sexual favors among former warlords and powerful businessmen.

All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, “Pashtun Sexuality,” startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked – and repulsed.

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns arebacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means “boy player.” The men like to boast about it.

“Having a boy has become a custom for us,” Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. “Whoever wants to show off should have a boy.”

Afghanistan: Who’s Training Who?

sheikyermami — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 03:58:10 +0000

To offer our enemies training and modern weapons in the hope that they will not fall in the hands of the Taliban, or that these trained soldiers will not turn against their infidel benefactors the moment a rabid mullah fantasizes about a torn Koran, is a monumental folly. One that totally disregards the psyche and the fanatical frenzy of the Muselmaniacs.

Diana West

Dawa, Uncle Sam Style?

“The Ramadan schedule is kicking us in the butt, but it’s also significant for the motivation and morale of the Afghan soldiers,” says Benchoff, who nightly joins his Afghan counterpart as he breaks fast with a meal of goat and rice. U.S. troops are told to minimize eating and drinking in front of the Afghans, who in turn have offered them instructions on Ramadan’s meaning and practices.

You could almost ask who’s training whom.

Hmm, but don’t they have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy?

Norwegian JournOlist Discovers the Humanity of the Taliban

sheikyermami — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 03:08:30 +0000

Finding humanity in all the old familiar places:

“Grant us freedom to kill homosexuals and Jews, stone adulterous women, rape 9 year old females and terrorize the unbelievers, amen”

Perhaps this deluded lefty believes that the Islamic ideology has a special place for useful idiots like him….

Useful Idiot Watch: Dateline, on air Sunday, 22nd August 2010

Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal risked his life to become the first Westerner to film behind Taliban lines inAfghanistan, and see the fight between the allied forces and the insurgency from the Taliban’s viewpoint.

Now Dateline brings you his remarkable story, as Paul witnesses several ambushes of US troops on the Khyber Pass, and films celebrations over the death of a US soldier.

But he also captures a human side of the Taliban, as insurgents relax, pray, eat together, and look after the children of Taliban commander, Dawran.

Paul comes under threat himself too, as a US gunship attacks and he’s kidnapped by one of the Taliban group which took him in.

WATCH – For a glimpse of the Afghan War you won’t see anywhere else, watch Dateline this Sunday at 8.30pm on SBS ONE.

LIVE CHAT – Put your questions to Paul Refsdal about his remarkable experience in our live online chat after the program.

BLOG – Executive Producer Peter Charley writes about getting such a rare insight into life with the Taliban.

Related News:

6 Policemen Poisoned, Killed in Kandahar
Marines Engage Taliban
Taliban big turban linked to US sailors’ deaths banged
Taliban torture prisoners. Oh my! Shocked! (Jawa Report)
Taliban lecture TIME on journalistic standards

Afghanistan: Clerics twist Karzai’s arm for return to “strict Islamic law”

Sharia, that is. And a disastrous precedent exists in the language of the U.S.-backed, post-Taliban constitution:

“No law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam” (Chapter 1, Article 3).

“Afghan clerics seek return to strict Islamic law,” by Syed Salahuddin for Reuters, (and we send our kids to kill and die for that s#*t!) “strict Islamic law- read more from JW”

Afghanistan: Taliban stone “adulterous” couple in marketplace

There are several hundred clerics dealing with Karzai who would find this quite alright. “Taliban ‘kill adulterous Afghan couple’ in marketplace,” from BBC News

Young couple killed by stoning in Afghanistan; Karzai objects to execution without trial — anything else?

Choosing his words very carefully, and revealingly so. It’s not just the story reproduced below, but other sources from Reuters to RTTNews, that show he condemns the fact that there was no trial, but stops short of condemning the idea of Sharia punishments (lashes or stoning) for “adultery,” and of condemning the cruel, unusual, and barbaric punishment that stoning is. There are, after all, influential clerics to please.

Iran: Final verdict on woman sentenced to stoning postponed; execution put off until after Ramadan

Oh, the humanity!

The delayed execution will likely be taken as a gesture of compassion in some circles, but the Iranian authorities are still toying with the defendant, who doesn’t know if her end will come the day after Ramadan ends, or at any arbitrary point after that, and at this point, whether she will be shot, stoned to death, or hung. And they are are playing a waiting game with the international community as well, biding their time to see the collective attention span wanes long enough to carry out the sentence.

Ultimately, they are attempting a balancing act between the imperative to carry out Sharia for the sake of the regime’s credibility as an Islamic government, and managing the global public relations quandary that cruel and unusual punishment necessarily entails.

More on this story. “Final verdict postponed for Iranian woman facing stoning,” fromCNN,