| Kabul Dreams – Rock ‘n’ Rolling from Kabul |
| KABUL — Perhaps nothing best describes youth angst like a song entitled “I Wanna’ Run Away,” one of several original numbers performed by Kabul Dreams in a live concert held last week at the American University of Afghanistan. With no other lyrics except the title refrain, lead singer and guitarist Sulyman Qardash alternately sang and screamed into the mic a sentence that probably resonates even more so with Afghanistan’s youth.Read more at afghanmagazine.com |
h/t: Afghan Analyst Network
Great article on a very courageous woman. | An Afghan Politician Pushes for a Comeback |
| The people who want to silence Malalai Joya, the youngest elected politician in Afghanistan, are doing a pretty good job of it in her own country. |
| She has been expelled from Parliament. She has been barred from appearing in the Afghan media after denouncing the role of the warlords in politics. |
| “I’m risking my life to one day bring these criminals to court.” |
By law, 25 percent of seats in the Afghan Parliament are reserved for women. But Samira Hamidi, country director for the advocacy group Afghan Women’s Network, said she feared that security problems, and a lack of education and experience, would block the fulfillment of that promise. |
| Her banishment from Parliament in 2007 followed her renewed criticisms of its warlord members and their allies. Her microphone was routinely cut off whenever she tried to speak, and members of Parliament hurled water bottles and sandals at her when she denounced what she said were criminal mujahedeen in the house.Read more at www.nytimes.com |
Thought Update: I want to be able to stream my Amplify posts straight to my Blogger blog (not the side widget). I can do it indirectly through Google Reader, but I like the formatting of Amplify. Hmmm...
The Indian Army is one of the groups that will be testing this new technology on the battlefield. | By measuring the mechanical movement of individual air particles, as opposed to sound waves as a whole, the device can not only pinpoint the origin of sniper fire or approaching aircraft, but detail their make and model, as well. |
the mic uses platinum strips only 600 atoms wide. Two pairs of strips are arranged in different directions. Air molecules passing between the strips cool the strips at different speeds depending on the direction of flow, and a computer then interprets that cooling as an exact x, y, and z source for the sound.
The device can also determine the pitch and character of the noise to distinguish between distant explosions, human screams, and chopper blades. Plus, since each mic is only the size of a match head, each soldier can carry one individually, giving them personal autonomy, or turning a squad into one giant listening post. Read more at www.popsci.com |
| The next time some American official mentions they want to engage in negotiations with the Taliban, please: laugh really hard. |
| we stabbed our host government in the back and told the remaining senior Taliban that should they ever wish to negotiate or participate in peace talks, we will arrest and torture them. |
| he was one of the few willing to actually discuss an end to the war with the U.S. and Kabul. Even that hope is gone now—and the result is a Taliban with documented evidence that approaching the negotiation table earns one a place in an ISI prison. |
| his isn’t the first time American and Pakistani greed has undermined a peace process—as we’ve discussed previously, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas the U.S. has a very reliable habit ever since 2004 or so of trying to murder any Pakistani Taliban leader who sits down at the negotiation table.Read more at www.registan.net |
| An Op-ed article in yesterday’s WaPo by Michael O’Hanlon and Hassina Sherjan, “Five Myths About the War in Afghanistan” poorly argues the case for “toughing it out” in Afghanistan. Since my time is limited, let me just tackle the first myth they seek to refute (i.e. “Afghans Always Hate and Defeat their Invaders”). Even though I substantively agree with what they are arguing in this section, the way they argue is objectionable for the following reasons. |
| First, in seeking to dispute a crass Orientalist straw-man argument that Afghans “always hate and defeat their invaders,” the authors note, |
| Afghans are stronger natural fighters. |
| Fight for Kandahar won’t be like fight for Marjah |
The operation that American and coalition forces are planning for Kandahar in southern Afghanistan won’t look like D-Day, the top commander there said Tuesday. |
Fresh off a recent success, so far, in Helmand Province, American military planners are thinking ahead to the next phase of challenging the Taliban in southern Afghanistan: Kandahar. But the fight for Kandahar – described as the New York City of Afghanistan for its cultural, political, and economic significance – is expected to be more measured than the operation in Marjah in Helmand, which was a precision strike that began with the insertion of hundreds of US marines by helicopter. |
| Kandahar will require a more nuanced, measured approach in which forces will build up slowly, probably on the outskirts, before entering the city itself perhaps months later.Read more at www.csmonitor.com |
U.S. official set up unit to kill Afghan militants: report |
Michael D. Furlong, might have channeled money away from a program intended to give U.S. commanders information about Afghanistan’s social and tribal landscape, and toward secret efforts to hunt militants on both sides of Afghanistan’s porous border with Pakistan. Furlong, a retired Air Force officer who is now a senior civilian employee in the military, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former CIA and Special Forces operatives, the newspaper reported. The contractors gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps. That material was sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the unnamed officials told the paper. |
| “While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,”Read more at www.reuters.com |
Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s article in today’s Washington Post, “At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?” paints a picture of Marines guarding a no man’s land on the edge of the desert:
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“DELARAM, AFGHANISTAN — Home to a dozen truck stops and a few hundred family farms bounded by miles of foreboding desert, this hamlet in southwestern Afghanistan is far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters in Kabul. One calls Delaram, a day’s drive from the nearest city, “the end of the Earth.” Another deems the area “unrelated to our core mission” of defeating the Taliban by protecting Afghans in their cities and towns.”
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| Contrary to the way it is understood by the Marines on the ground, Delaram is probably one of the most significant towns in Afghanistan in the current war, after the major cities of course. In other words, their commanders are correct. Why?Read more at afghannotebook.blogspot.com |
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Rocking Kabul
