The Spine-Chilling Emptiness of Afghanistan's Voting Booths
On election day, a pack of bone-thin, restless dogs wandered into the main polling center in Sheikhabad, a town in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province. A pair of Afghan policemen tried to chase them away, but the determined bunch kept returning, looking for a shady redoubt from the morning sun. Eventually the police relented, and the dogs settled down for a nap. READ MORE >>
How the Wikileaks Are Changing Afghan Hearts and Minds
Within hours of the release of the Wikileaks trove, I received a call from a friend in Uruzgan province, an area here in Afghanistan’s south. “Look through the files,” he said excitedly. “Finally the world will know what we have been going through.” For years he had been claiming that foreign forces had killed two of his cousins during a firefight in a village in Uruzgan, something the NATO military authorities had denied. And for years he hadn’t been able to persuade local authorities. But buried in the mountain of U.S. READ MORE >>
The Paradox of Boots on the Ground
On a balmy summer’s day in the village of Hiratian in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, locals found the body of eight-year-old Dilawar hanging from a tree of a small fruit farm. Taliban fighters had accused the boy of spying for the American forces and had kidnapped him, strung him up and left his body to sway in the wind for hours for all to see. READ MORE >>
