First Graduates of Shaheed Mirranay Education Center

Sha­heed Mir­ranay com­put­er and Eng­lish lan­guage cen­ter was built in April 2011. It’s locat­ed in South­west of Jalal­abad city- one hour dri­ve from Jalal­abad city. Togeth­er with my team I set up it’s solar pow­er sys­tem and the com­put­er lab. We installed five com­put­ers and a print­er, four solar pan­els with a pow­er invert­er, and four car bat­ter­ies. The solar pow­er sys­tem gen­er­at­ed enough pow­er to run the five ener­gy effi­cient lap­tops for six months sev­er­al hours every­day (After six months, two of the four bat­ter­ies stopped work­ing now and they are plan­ning to replace them soon).

The train­ing cen­ter recruit­ed many poten­tial stu­dents and select­ed 317 of them in 18 dif­fer­ent lev­el com­put­er and Eng­lish lan­guage class­es when it start­ed. With four Eng­lish lan­guage teach­ers and two com­put­er train­ers it is open 6 days a week for 8 hours each day. The cen­ter has a gen­er­al man­ag­er and two guards. Sev­en months after its start, Sha­heed Mir­ranay Eng­lish lan­guage and com­put­er cen­ter is award­ing cer­tifi­cates to its 300 grad­u­ates: 110 stu­dents will be award­ed cer­tifi­cates in basic com­put­er skills and 190 stu­dents will receive cer­tifi­cates in inter­me­di­ate Eng­lish lan­guage use. I was vis­it­ing the train­ing cen­ter last week and all the teach­ers were busy putting fin­ish­ing touch­es to their stu­dents’ cer­tifi­cates. They’ve already start­ed recruit­ing new stu­dents for their upcom­ing classes.

When I was vis­it­ing this cen­ter in Sep­tem­ber, all these lit­tle kids seemed very sad because they had been told that the cen­ter would close down that month because there were no more funds for it. How­ev­er, they were able to keep it run­ning and keep it fund­ed some­how. This time, the stu­dents looked way hap­pi­er. They did­n’t have to wor­ry about the closure.

Com­pared to the rest of Nan­garhar province, Khogyani has the most Tal­iban and insur­gents. Going there, I drove through sev­er­al bomb craters on the road that had tar­get­ed Inter­na­tion­al Secu­ri­ty Assis­tance Force (ISAF) and Afghan Nation­al Army (ANA). Tal­iban and oth­er insur­gents exploit teenagers and lit­tle chil­dren by giv­ing them a bomb to plant on the road. They give them $15 for each bomb they plant. The day before my vis­it, two US army tanks had been blown up by an Impro­vised Explo­sive Device (IED) on the road in the near­by area of Mim­la. Two teenagers that were plant­i­ng a bomb on the road were killed in an airstrike that day.These kids don’t know any­thing about bombs and ammu­ni­tion. Some­times, they get killed due to pre­ma­ture detonation.

Besides insur­gency, peo­ple also grow pop­py on a very large scale in this area. Under the Tal­iban, their num­ber one income was from grow­ing pop­py. It’s still grown here. When I was there, I saw that the dis­trict prison was full of detainees who had been cap­tured for grow­ing pop­py or for their involve­ment in oth­er insur­gent activ­i­ties. The dis­trict gov­ern­ment was redi­rect­ing detainees to oth­er pris­ons in the country.

Pho­to cred­it: Najib Bismil

In an area like this which is infest­ed with the Tal­iban and oth­er insur­gent groups, an edu­ca­tion­al insti­tute plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in edu­cat­ing the next gen­er­a­tion and pro­vid­ing them with the right tools and skills need­ed to serve their coun­try. They will have a brighter future than that of their ances­tors, a decent job and a more sus­tain­able income to sup­port their fam­i­lies. When I was vis­it­ing this edu­ca­tion cen­ter two months ago, one of the stu­dents told me, “I want to learn com­put­er and Eng­lish lan­guage to work with an inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion and help build my country.”

Basketball in Jalalabad

Be in Jail for 12 Years or Marry Your Rapist

Afghan woman jailed for being a rape vic­tim offered release if she MARRIES her attacker

Gul­naz was con­vict­ed of adul­tery because she had sex out­side of mar­riage by being raped. After falling preg­nant by her attack­er, she and the baby were jailed for 12 years. She has been giv­en the choice to mar­ry her rapist and be freed from jail

Read the full sto­ry here.

Proud to Be an Afghan

Za Afghan Yem and Mann Afghan Hastam.

What Cripples Afghanistan’s Economy?

A world bank report came out yes­ter­day that says depend­ing on secu­ri­ty the econ­o­my of Afghanistan could face a com­plete col­lapse beyond 2014. More than 90 per cent of our nation­al bud­get comes from for­eign dona­tions. The world bank report in PDF: Tran­si­tion in Afghanistan: Look­ing Beyond 2014. Income per per­son in Afghanistan is $528 a year. Josie Bassinette, the act­ing direc­tor of the World Bank says this fig­ure con­ceals pock­ets of worse pover­ty because aid mon­ey is not divid­ed even­ly across the coun­try. A lot of mon­ey goes into unsta­ble areas and bypass­ing the more peace­ful ones. That means a huge amount of that aid mon­ey goes into secu­ri­ty. About 10 per cent of the total bud­get of the coun­try comes from import export tax, etc. 

What hap­pens to our revenue?
I know some­one who works in Nan­garhar cus­toms office. He turned down a very good job offer from an inter­na­tion­al busi­ness com­pa­ny in Kab­ul to come and work in the cus­toms office. The com­pa­ny offered him $3000 US dol­lars of salary per month and some oth­er incen­tives. The cus­toms offi­cer makes $1600 every­day. The way he takes bribe is very mod­ern. He uses his bank to trans­fer mon­ey so that he does­n’t get caught. There is tax on the goods that are import­ed into Afghanistan. For exam­ple, if a busi­ness­man imports 200 trucks of Chi­nese tele­vi­sions and each truck con­tains 300, the cus­toms offi­cer will tax him for 150 tele­vi­sions per truck and then ask him to pay the tax for 100 tele­vi­sions per truck direct­ly to him (mean­ing trans­fer it to his bank account) and the busi­ness­man gets 50 tele­vi­sions (per truck) into the coun­try with no tax.

There is a price list that has prices of the dif­fer­ent gov­ern­ment posi­tions. For one to get a cus­toms office direc­tor’s posi­tion, espe­cial­ly in a fron­tier province like Nan­garhar where there is a lot of import and some export, they usu­al­ly pay mul­ti­ple hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars in the min­istry of com­merce (some­times there is bid­ding on this and who­ev­er offers the high­est bribe gets the position).
A while ago, the min­istry of com­merce hired and made spe­cial cus­toms offices con­trol com­mit­tees. These com­mit­tees are based in all those bor­der provinces that make big tran­sit ways. Their task is to mon­i­tor and report on cor­rup­tion in these provin­cial offices. They are well-equipped and well-paid so that they will be hon­est in their job. The spe­cial cor­rup­tion mon­i­tor­ing com­mit­tees, at least in Nan­garhar and Her­at provinces, when saw the “tempt­ing” mon­ey, teamed with the cus­toms offi­cers and they made a deal and start­ed get­ting their cut. Before, tax for 150 tele­vi­sions of each 300-tele­vi­sion-truck was going to the mid­dle men and the rest of the 150 was going to the gov­ern­ment. These offi­cers don’t want their orig­i­nal income to cut back. Instead, they tax even less goods per truck so that they can get the mon­i­tor­ing com­mit­tees’ cut (maybe the tax from 100 items in each 300-item-truck goes the gov­ern­ment, 100 to the cus­toms offi­cers, 50 to the com­mit­tee, and the rest of the 50 items will is “waived” for the busi­ness­man). In all these cus­toms offices are advanced com­put­er-oper­at­ed scan­ners that scan import­ed good for tax, etc. but again all of this is run by a human being who makes the final decision.
About a year ago, there was a train­ing sem­i­nar abroad that the min­istry want­ed its employ­ees from these key cus­toms offices to go and attend so that they can learn advanced meth­ods. Nobody want­ed to go because depend­ing on their posi­tion that meant $1600 loss every­day. When it’s the end of month, most of these offi­cers don’t even go to the bank to get their offi­cial salary from the gov­ern­ment (which is usu­al­ly a few hun­dred dollars).
A job in the cus­toms office is a big deal in our coun­try. It’s the same as work­ing in any oth­er min­istry of the gov­ern­ment but peo­ple here say they have a lot of “Aayid” mean­ing “indi­rect income”. These peo­ple with a lot of Aayid usu­al­ly have a very mis­er­able life. Their kids can­not go out or play freely. They have a con­stant fear that their kids would be kid­napped. These kid­nap­pers have marked them and are ready for any win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty to attack.

Getting a National Identity Card in Jalalabad

Wait­ing for the Offi­cers to Come
A cou­ple of cousins and my aunt asked me to help them get nation­al iden­ti­ty cards called Tazki­ra for them in Jalal­abad. I wrote an appli­ca­tion for them and went to Nan­garhar Gov­er­nor’s Office with them. Nor­mal­ly, most gov­ern­ment offices should open for clients at 8:00AM and close at 4:00PM. We were there by 8:10AM expect­ing that the work­ers would be set­tled. I thought that it’s the gov­er­nor’s office and it would be more orga­nized and punc­tu­al. My cousins live out­side Afghanistan and to their sur­prise, the gov­er­nor’s office was closed. We stood in a line and with­in 40 min­utes there were dozens of peo­ple in the line. It was past 9:00AM and still no work­er of the Tazki­ra depart­ment had come. There, I saw one of the big offi­cials of the gov­er­nor’s office whom I’d worked with on a project. I inched my way across the crowd and said hel­lo to him.

“Why are YOU wait­ing in the line?” He said. “Do you want to go first?” I am fine with the line but where are the work­ers? I said to him. Well, that’s some­thing that I can’t help with. “Every­one who works here is a mutu­al friend or rel­a­tive with the gov­er­nor or anoth­er high offi­cial. If we say any­thing to them then we receive dozens of calls and com­plaints that we are not “good” friends or relatives.”
Final­ly, it was 9:30AM and a fan­cy Land Cruis­er drove in. An armed guard opened the door of the car and Amir Saib, mean­ing the direc­tor, got out of the car and the guard closed the door back for him. The Amir Saib start­ed chat­ting with his friends in front of his office. I went to Amir Saib and nice­ly asked him if he could help us. “Go to my deputy to fin­ish the rest of the work and bring the final papers to me for my sig­na­ture.” We went to his deputy who’d come a few min­utes before him. I came back to Amir Saib with my paper to get it signed by him. He signed it while look­ing and talk­ing with his friend. One could’ve eas­i­ly got­ten a prop­er­ty or mon­ey claim let­ter signed that time.
Pop­u­la­tion Reg­is­tra­tion Office
After get­ting get­ting the paper work fin­ished from the gov­er­nor’s office, we had to go to our orig­i­nal dis­trict gov­er­nor’s office in order to ver­i­fy and approve whether or not we real­ly are from that area. The dis­trict gov­er­nor referred us to our local com­mu­ni­ty elder called the Malik. When I got out of the dis­trict gov­er­nor’s office there I saw a big dude. Legal­ly, he can­not ver­i­fy or approve where we come from because nei­ther he knows us nor is he our Malik. The sig­nal for say­ing give me bribe and I will fin­ish your work for you right here right now was, “kAr de band dey?”, mean­ing are you stuck and need help to fin­ish it? I asked him, “how much?” What­ev­er you want, he said. Then I had my cousin to go his Malik in his orig­i­nal town and get the ques­tions about them answered by him. He did so and when we came back to the dis­trict gov­er­nor’s office to give my cousins their nation­al ID cards as the Malik’s sig­na­ture and stamp was the last step, no offi­cer even talked to us because we did­n’t do it in their way (giv­ing them bribe and fin­ish­ing it right there right then), we did it the “long” way. We were wait­ing inside the dis­trict gov­er­nor’s office com­pound. For an hour, we had to put up with this police who was star­ing at my cousin non stop. Some­times, it’s so annoy­ing when I have a female friend/relative with me and we stop some­where for a bit. With­in min­utes it becomes what my Amer­i­can col­league calls “nation­al star­ing competition”.

They were telling us that we need to come back the fol­low­ing day, etc. etc. I knew that that was how they want­ed to tor­ture us for not hav­ing done what they want­ed. Final­ly, I had to call a friend who knew some­body at the dis­trict gov­er­nor’s office. He came and fin­ished our work in less than 20 min­utes. That’s how we got the nation­al iden­ti­ty cards and how the nation­al star­ing com­pe­ti­tion ended.

Ali, the Shopkeeper

I was in Dara-e-Noor dis­trict of Nan­garhar province with my map­ping team last month. I met Ali. He is about 4 years old boy with light skin, blue eyes, and blond hair. Ali’s father is a shop­keep­er run­ning a lit­tle con­ve­nience store in this very remote area in the mid­dle of moun­tains. Ali keeps the shop and sells some small items that he knows the prices of when his father goes to Jalal­abad for replen­ish­ing the store. That’s how Ali helps with their lit­tle fam­i­ly busi­ness. I asked Ali if he wants to go to school. “My father won’t buy me a back­pack”, he said. Ali’s father said that nobody had had any edu­ca­tion in their fam­i­ly but he will let him go to school. I gave Ali his first les­son to count to ten and I promised him to bring him a back­pack next time I come to their village.

Interesting Twitter Fight: Taliban vs ISAF

@ABalkhi is Tal­iban’s Twit­ter han­dle and @ISAFMedia is ISAF’s. I am fol­low­ing both. They some­times have Twit­ter fights. They are exchang­ing some seri­ous words right now as I am typ­ing and here is how the @ABalkhi start­ed and then the @ISAFMedia’s response fol­lows and I quote everything:

@ABalkhi: Arti­cle CSM:1000s Afghan mer­ce­nar­ies hired by CIA in Afghanstan.Commit out­right human rights abuses(rape,robery,extra judi­cial killing etc)
Sto­ry con­firmed by US diplo­mats, west­ern offi­cials, afghan author­i­ties. Hired to fight Tal­iban and others
Recruits ‘cher­ry picked’ from reg­u­lar ANA and trained by US Spe­cial forces at Camp Gecko
US tac­tic as with­draws is going “beyond tra­di­tion­al intel­li­gence, mil­i­tary, and law enforce­ment functions.”
These kinds of units who are trained by US mil­i­tary, fund­ed by CIA fits the bill perfectly
These units which are shad­owy and unac­count­able to any­one, only answer to CIA
Repeat­ed­ly com­mit extra judi­cial killing, rape, tor­ture, lar­ce­ny is being direct­ly bankrolled by CIA and US mil­i­tary via US taxpayers
Matt (Green Beret capt­ian) says: must work with these units to beat Tal­iban even though behav­ior insults ‘west­ern sensibilities’
Matt (Green Beret captian):No stan­dard to begin with. No rule of law. tal­iban not that bad and Afghan farmer not inno­cent civilian

So ISAF admits hir­ing mer­ce­nar­ies to com­mit mass mur­der, rape, tor­ture and does not con­sid­er farm­ers as inno­cent civil­ians. Great JOB!!!

i won­der why not many jour­nal­ists and even the UN talk much about such issues and the dire sit­u­a­tion it has cre­at­ed for the Afghans
link to full sto­ry http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2011/1116/After-the-US-pulls-out-will-CIA-rely-more-on-Afghan-mercenaries

ISAF Twit­ter handle(@ISAFMedia) then responds with: @abalkhi We don’t hire mercs to com­mit murder/rape/torture. OTOH … that seems to be a core com­pe­ten­cy among Taliban

@ABalkhi replies: @ISAFmedia your offi­cials admit­ted to it dumb dumb. and how can you talk about tal­iban when u cut fin­gers etc and use them as throphies

@ISAFMedia: @abalkhi Dumb dumb? How the dia­logue ele­vates. Look: Nobody takes you seri­ous­ly. Every­thing you type is wrong. Just. Stop.

@ABalkhi: @ISAFmedia Thats why they picked you for this job. If I was­nt here, you would­nt have a job

@ISAFMedia: @abalkhi You’re just a fun sideshow. How many tanks did you blow up today. (I have the actu­al num­ber if you lose count.)

Unite or Perish

Iron­i­cal­ly, on the bar­rel of this tank it say, “Unite or else we’ll per­ish.” Peo­ple say a lot of things. Our politi­cians spend hours when they are on the stage giv­ing talks but there is very lit­tle action. If we did 40% of what we say we would­n’t be in the bad con­di­tion that we are today. When I lis­ten to can­di­dates talk­ing to peo­ple dur­ing their elec­tion cam­paigns it almost makes one believe that Afghanistan will be like a Euro­pean coun­try in their four years period.

Difference between Wilf and a FATA Child

“The West must see the death of a FATA child the same way they see my 3‑year-old son Wilf.” Said Clive Stan­ford Smith, the legal direc­tor of the UK-based non-prof­it, Reprieve in Waziris­tan Grand Jir­ga Islam­abad, Pak­istan last month.