On the publication of her new book Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear, Paula Bronstein will join us in conversation with Christina Lamb to discuss her expansive work that intimately captures everyday life in Afghanistan against the backdrop of the 14-year US-led invasion and its enduring legacy.

Paula Bronstein is an American photojournalist and a multiple nominee and award-winner of international contests including The Pulitzer, Pictures of the Year International, and The National Press Photograher’s Association. Previously a senior staff photographer with Getty Images and for major US newspapers including The Hartford Courant and the Chicago Tribune, she is currently based in Bangkok, Thailand as a freelancer represented by Reportage by Getty Images.

Christina Lamb is the roving foreign affairs correspondent for The Sunday Times. She has been a foreign correspondent for more than twenty five years, living in Pakistan, Brazil and South Africa, first for the Financial Times then The Sunday Times. She is the author of The Africa House, House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-torn Zimbabwe, Waiting For Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy, The Sewing Circles of Herat, My Afghan Years and co-author of I Am Malala. Her new book Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World, is based on two decades of reporting from Afghanistan.

Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

For over two decades, Christina Lamb has reported from Afghanistan, with unparalleled access to all key decision makers. She has developed an extensive understanding of the country, its people and the ongoing conflict.

In her new book Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World, she offers her final analysis of the realities of Afghanistan. She tells the story of well-intentioned men and women going into a place they did not understand, thinking it was the right thing to do, and how it became a conflict that everyone wanted to exit.

Christina Lamb will be joining us in conversation with BBC Radio 4 Today programme presenter, Sarah Montague, to give her personal account of the longest war fought by the United States in its history, and by Britain since the Hundred Years War. She will offer her insight into the mistakes made, the lessons learned and the Afghanistan that is left behind.

Christina Lamb is the roving foreign affairs correspondent for The Sunday Times, she has been a foreign correspondent for more than twenty five years, living in Pakistan, Brazil and South Africa first for the Financial Times then The Sunday Times. She is the author of The Africa House, House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-torn Zimbabwe, Waiting For Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy, The Sewing Circles of Herat, My Afghan Years and co-author of I Am Malala.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Unique, uplifting and heartbreaking, The Network tells the story of Afghanistan’s first independent television network – TOLO TV – and the people behind it. TOLO TV has grown to be Afghanistan’s largest and most successful television network, employing over 800 Afghans producing news, current affairs, drama, comedy, music, and lifestyle programmes.

As the country faces the impending withdrawal of foreign troops, and with security rapidly deteriorating, the team behind TOLO TV are set to face their biggest challenge yet.

In The Network director Eva Orner gives an insight into the daily life at the tv-station and the learning process they face in these challenging circumstances. Through extensive interviews with managers, producers, on-air hosts and others involved with operations, Orner artfully portrays television as a form of entertainment, education and an agent of change.

Directed by Eva Orner
Duration: 97′
Year: 2013

This screening is in partnership with Dogwoof

“The life we had.  The flowers, the trees,” an elder Afghan recalls about the village in which he has lived, and where director Jawed Taiman grew up before his family fled the Soviet invasion in 1979.

“Just look at it now,” the man gestures. “It’s completely dry.”

This conversation opens Taiman’s latest film, Voice of a Nation: My Journey Through Afghanistan, which screened to a full house at the Frontline Club on Friday evening.

Taliban soldiers, radio DJs in Kabul, a potter and a farmer all feature among the documentary’s many voices.  By far, the greatest frustrations emerge around foreign intervention, corrupt warlord governance, and the threat of the Taliban’s return.

“Everything in life had no meaning,” a young man from Kabul reflects about the violence and rigidity of the Taliban era. A civil servant promoting women’s development says that teachers used to be killed as infidels; yet today, villages hungrily seek her advice on how to educate women.

However, foreign intervention, and its empowerment of corrupt and divisive warlords, spark just as much enmity.

“The biggest mistake that the West did,” Taiman told the audience, “they reinstated all those warlords who committed massive crimes during the civil war [of the 1990s]. They are millionaires, nowadays […] I don’t know if it was intentional by the West, [but the warlords] didn’t make a good infrastructure in Afghanistan, which is why we have all these problems in our country. If the infrastructure was good, probably we would have more, better educated people in Afghanistan than outside of Afghanistan. Many of them are in this room today […]  But no, they brought people…who can take Afghanistan back into the dark ages.”

Taiman was rankled by Western media’s portrayal of Afghanistan as a place perpetually on the verge of breakdown.

“The media tries to portray Afghanistan to be so unstable that Afghans do need this [foreign intervention]. It seems that everybody’s in it to make this country unstable, so there could be a longer presence of the foreign troops in Afghanistan, probably because Afghanistan is the best location, geographically, in the region. There’s Iran, there’s [North] Korea, China, India, Pakistan all around it. So it could be very beneficial for U.S. or U.K., for their allies, to be in Afghanistan.”

Finally, Taiman was asked about his next project.

“Last week I was at the international documentary festival in Amsterdam,” he said, “and there was an Afghan at the audience, from the back, [who] said, ‘you’re not allowed to make another sad movie.  You should make a happy movie.’”

Taiman laughed.  His previous film, the award-winning Addicted in Afghanistan, explored drug addiction among Afghan teens.  So for his next project?

“A happy film,” he smiled, sincerely. “More positive about Afghanistan.”

The trailer for Voice of a Nation can be seen here.

The decision to go into Afghanistan was necessary as a kind of “acting out” to restore American national confidence and pride in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, but it was done with little idea about what was to be achieved by it.

That was the claim of Jean MacKenzie, senior correspondent for GlobalPost and previously programme director for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in Kabul, about the decision of president George Bush to send troops into Afghanistan less than a month after the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.

"We had to go in, America had to kick ass because we had been attacked and we had to prove that we were big guys, and there was very little resistance to going in to Afghanistan, Afghanistan was a very convenient ass to kick, because it was not being really defended," said MacKenzie.

MacKenzie, who was taking part in a recent discussion titled: Counterinsurgency and the "War on Terror": Doomed to fail? agreed that America had to react to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. The problem was not the decision to intervene, but  the fact that it was done without a clear idea of what it would accomplish, she said:

"We didn’t need to go in with this open-ended brief of we’re going in there to get rid of al-Quaeda, now we’re going in there so that little girls can go to school and maybe we’re there so women don’t have to wear burqas and now we’re there, as Time magazine tells us, so that women’s noses are not cut off. Where does it stop? We needed to define our goals from the very beginning."

There was also a lack of clarity about who the enemy was, said MacKenzie, who claimed local groups could manipulate NATO or the International Security Assistance Force into fighting their battles by claiming their opponents were Taliban:

"We go into an area, like in Kunar, where two groups are fighting over logging rights – another gets close to us and says they are the Taliban. We start fighting them and they fight back and as soon as they do, they become an insurgency."

As a result of the lack of clarity the rhetoric about the US mission in Afghanistan had taken on a life of its own, MacKenzie argued:

"It’s a very broad statement but I think we are now fighting the Afghan people, the Afghan society. We say the Taliban stone women for adultery, the Taliban stone young couples, the Taliban throw acid in the faces of school children.

But in most of these cases, if you unravel it, it’s not the Taliban, it is the community that has done these things. So if we are fighting those manifestations of Afghan culture, we are not fighting the Taliban, we are fighting Afghan society, we are fighting a culture that we find noxious. That, I think, is quite a bit beyond our brief."

Ten years on, the mood in Afghanistan was one the “darkest despair”, said MacKenzie, adding that there is little trust on the ground in the ability of the Afghan forces to protect the people. In addition, things have gone "way beyond the point" when outside nations could impose anything on the country:

"There was a point at the beginning when there was a certain amount of hope and goodwill among Afghans, but I don’t feel it there any more," she said.

"The Afghans are more and more pessimistic, they have given up on their own government, how do you fight counterinsurgency when you have no legitimate government to partner with? How do we begin to do anything?

Yet the US is likely to leave Afghanistan with "honour and dignity in the strategic communications sense," said MacKenzie, who predicted that from now until the end of 2014 the US administration was going to be "busily engaged in painting a narrative of victory":

All that is required for us to have won is for the media to pack up and go home so there’s no focus on what’s actually happening and for us to redefine victory and to move the goalposts as it were."

Malte Roschinski, a security consultant, political analyst and author who reported from Afghanistan for AFP news agency, was also pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan and said he believed the best that the US could do was to "come up with a good PR strategy and hope for the next six months or so it’s going to stay fairly quiet".

"After that the media focus will have moved away from the country. There will be stories afterwards but the media works in cycles and public attention has just so much bandwidth anyway so it’s just going to be a PR exercise."

Watch event here.

If you want to take part in further discussion about the impact of the War on Terror on our world today and how it might shape our future, come along to our FIRST WEDNESDAY SPECIAL: Changing world – conflict, culture and terrorism in the 21st century on Wednesday, 7 September.

The purpose of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was ill-defined from the beginning, according to panelists taking part in a discussion last night that gave little grounds for optimism about the country’s future.

Asked by David Loyn, the BBC’s international development correspondent who was chairing the event when it was that the mistakes were made after the attacks on the Unites States of 11 September, 2001, the answer from Jean MacKenzie, senior correspondent for GlobalPost was: “September 12,”

The former programme director for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in Kabul, said the major problem with the operation in Afghanistan was a lack of definition about what it was setting out to achieve:

“I think when we went into Afghanistan, the major problem with our invasion, or intervention, was that it was ill-defined as to scope, ill-defined as to purpose and we really had no clue what we were trying to accomplish there. The people who carried out the attack on the United States were not the Taliban and those who did, namely al Quaeda and Osama bin Laden had left by November 2001, said MacKenzie.

“They’re gone, we’re still there and we’re fighting [without knowing] who the enemy is, we don’t know how to define the enemy and we don’t know what the enemy is fighting us about, and I think our central mistake is to get involved with a war with a country that we don’t understand, with a goal that we never bothered to define.”

Malte Roschinski, a security consultant, political analyst and author who is based in Germany, said the “players” who drew up the December 2001 Bonn Agreement on the future of Afghanistan were not representative of the country because the Taleban were left out.

“We might not have liked them but they were the decisive actors in Afghanistan at that time,” said Roschinski, who as a journalist with AFP news agency reported from post-Taliban Afghanistan in late 2001.

He was also critical of the way that different countries took responsibility for different areas and of the German approach of institution building at the cost of providing security for the people:

“The international community never got around to creating a unity of action, which is obviously very important if you want to be successful. If eventually 44 countries are playing single ball games then you will not really come to decisive conclusion because you have 44 different strategies, as well as the civilian players, the development agencies.”

Frank Ledwidge, author of Losing Small Wars said it was “a matter of record” that it was “right within the purview” of al-Quaeda operators and Osama bin Laden that western governments, and the United States in particular, be drawn into wars in the Islamic world that they could not win.

Discussing Britain’s presence in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, Ledwidge said a “very well informed” Helmand Plan put together by the SAS and well-placed Afghan civilians might have been successful, but had never been implemented:

“We went there looking to create a Belgium in Asia and right now, the truth is we’d be lucky to get a Bangladesh,” said Ledwidge, whose military record includes serving in the the Balkans conflict.

“Success and failure has to be measured against cost and the cost that we’ve sustained, the very least of which is national reputation, then military reputation, then the lives and limbs of our own soldiers and of Afghans and the money, I simply can’t draw a success from that.”

To come: What difference have counterinsurgency strategies made to the life of the Afghan people and in Iraq?

A chapter I wrote . . .

So-called “embedding”, the term for the practice by which journalists have been allowed to accompany allied troops in the Iraq and Afghan wars, is not just a way for the military to manage information but is an unspoken compact with the media that helps sustain the conflicts themselves.

It is easy to find British journalists like myself who criticise the practice of embedding but jump at every opportunity to accompany British troops at war. Space with the British army is at a premium and so if you can get there you won’t face too much competition. Compared with other foreign trips it is relatively easy to acquire strong stories supported by exceptional pictures. One can win awards.

Embedding costs very little money. The military provide food and tents. The press can often use military communications and the British army will fly you out and back for free. As an independent video journalist, I should make a profit on an embed. The army will also lend you a flak jacket and helmet. Even better, the soldiers will protect you from danger and deliver excellent first aid if they don’t. The risks are less than they appear. Easy pickings really.

It’s not just me being careful with the pennies. News budgets are at an all time low and foreign news acquisition is increasingly priced out of reach. Reporting foreign stories is much more expensive than covering domestic ones. As news organisations have tried to realise their duty of care the cost of covering foreign conflicts has further increased. Reducing risk is very expensive, often requiring extra insurance, equipment and the retention of bodyguards or other safety personnel.

Most now rely on cheaper wholesale agency material and whatever they can source from locals or other non-media sources. This includes material filmed or reported by army combat camera teams and blogs by military press officers. There are too few sources of information and even fewer reliable ones. But agency material, being shared with competitors, doesn’t promote the news brand nearly as well as the correspondent or television network reporter, so the opportunity for a newspaper or broadcaster to get people out on an action-packed foreign story on the cheap can be irresistible.

Army management of news output
While it is true that journalists have been accompanying armies and navies in wars for at least 150 years, in the past the military has been better at denying access rather than using the press to get their message out. Allied forces are now very sophisticated in managing news output. The effort is well funded and employs many ex-journalists. Lots of reporters have no difficulty crossing over from journalism to PR, leaving a trade that seems to lose its calling as quickly as it loses its funding.

The sign on top of the British media office tent in Camp Bastion in Helmand, Afghanistan, says “Media Operations’. As soon as you walk through the door as a journalist you understand that you are a sort of target, albeit treated much more gently than the Taliban. It is not about public accountability. News management has become an integrated part of the war effort, aiming to maintain public support for the conflict nationally, while winning the information war abroad.

Embedded journalists are normally accompanied by press officers during their visits. Servicemen or women trained in press management. The stakes are high for the press officer as getting it wrong can ruin their military career. With the British army, both sides are guided by a publication called the Green Book that lays out the rules of the press embed. It was put together by the Ministry of Defence, but in consultation with media organisations. It delivers editorial independence for embedded journalists subject to the needs of operational security. It also includes the reasonable provision in my view that the names of casualties should not be revealed until their next of kin have been informed. The conditions set out in the Green Book are progressive when compared with the restrictions that the press experienced, say, in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s or the Gulf War of 1991.

When soldiers and journalists bond
Press officers normally work hard to help journalists get stories on their embeds, organising transport and interviews. It would be hard for most of the media to find their way around these battlefields without them and a good working relationship normally develops. Journalists often develop strong relationships with their subjects. Those bonds can be strongest during a tough assignment when discomfort is shared and embedding often puts reporters with frontline troops under stress.

Certainly, having journalists embedded into units where they can get to know soldiers and share their experiences rewards the military with friendlier reporting. But the primary control exerted by the military is through determining who actually gets embedded. Unfavourable reporting is not often rewarded with further opportunity.

The military cannot reasonably be expected to take all the journalists that might want to accompany them. Thousands of journalists descended on Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001. The numbers are far too great. There have been instances when more journalists have applied to go to outposts in Afghanistan than there are soldiers stationed there. But numbers are kept very low, particularly when the military are feeling sensitive about what is happening. Whole operations can go unreported by independent journalists on the ground.

During the recent Operation Moshtarak, in Helmand in February 2010, there were only about 10 members of the press with the whole British force in Afghanistan. The Ministry of Defence will often favour popular commentators, like Ross Kemp, over critical journalists, or try to develop a relationship with tabloid newspapers when it thinks that favourable coverage can be widely achieved.

Valuable pool places to regional newspapers
Valuable places are given to regional newspaper reporters who are less likely to be critical, often there to do soft stories on a military unit local to the paper. Even regional newspapers can afford to send correspondents on embeds. But journalists are not allowed to bring their own vehicles, and being compelled to rely on the military for logistics makes it impossible to access the local population independently. If the military don’t want you somewhere, you are unlikely to get there.

Unfortunately, even if American and European journalists could have all the access they wanted to the military, these days they would deliver less than we need from them. The news industry does not look like it did in the 1960s during the Vietnam war. Most war reporters these days don’t really know much about war, in the way that say, sports journalists know about sport. War reporters are rarely students of conflict nor are they
normally ‘defence’ correspondents who might need to develop a broader knowledge of military affairs.

Over the last two decades the news industry, particularly television news, has developed a culture that rewards the more self-obsessed operators, pushing them to lead their reporting from a personal perspective to make it more accessible to the audience. Reporting becomes as much about promoting the correspondent, the brand representative, as telling the story. As the industry gets starved of funds the reports get weaker and the branding stronger.

The military and their political masters believe that images of dead or wounded allied soldiers, particularly, have the potential to sap public support for the war at home. The lesson from the conflict in Somalia in 1993, when pictures of dead US soldiers being paraded around Mogadishu were shown around the world, was that such images also risk delivering a propaganda victory to the insurgents abroad.

Casualties – the most sensitive issue
This makes allied casualties the most sensitive issue after operational security to the military. With the British army you are prevented from filming dead soldiers and will only be allowed to film or broadcast pictures of wounded soldiers if you have their permission. There are obvious practical difficulties getting this sort of permission from soldiers who suddenly find themselves in agony and struggling to stay alive. Most soldiers say no if they are fit enough to address the question, which is not easy to ask in the circumstances. Doing so invites a negative answer, which of course is why the requirement is there in the first place.

In theory a cameraman or photographer is allowed to film first and ask questions later. But attempting it will seriously raise the pulse of your military minder and soldiers you hadn’t noticed before suddenly become remarkably poor at keeping out of the way of your shot. As a consequence, embeds rarely show the suffering of war but instead offer up a dramatic but sanitised version of it. One that most journalists sex-up to present themselves as well as possible and in doing so normally treat the domestic audience to comforting messages of heroism and military strength.

Limiting the public’s real understanding of the cost of the war in human suffering actually betrays those unfortunate young men who become its casualties. Many are teenagers and some lose multiple limbs. A public that is poorly informed is unlikely to show these men the compassion and respect that they deserve. For all the proximity of the journalists and the cameras, the reporting has been contained, serving to distance the audience from the reality of war and any great feeling of ownership of it. The wars merge into the background and go on and on.

The current Afghan war has lasted for longer than the US military engagement in Vietnam in the 1960s and appears to a significant number of clued-up observers to have no greater prospect of success. But the US and the British public remain firm. British reporting is heavily informed by the tragedy of dead servicemen coming through Wootton Bassett. But it is not an image the soldiers who come home unscathed identify with. They are mystified when those they meet feel sorry for them. They do not see themselves as victims in the way that the press portrays them. They want public empathy; they get – to their dismay – public sympathy.

Presenting war to fit the grand, Hollywood-esque narrative
It is easier to ignore a war if it is soldiered by hero-victims. But the soldiers are us. They are our professional killers who sometimes enjoy it. But we want more distance from it than that. So we manufacture something else that doesn’t seem to require us to take any responsibility. An eroded and underfunded news industry compresses, simplifies and pasteurises, presenting war to conveniently fit into a grand narrative that owes more to Hollywood than the real experience.

Perhaps all parties – politicians and the military, the media, campaigners for forces support groups like Help for Heroes and even the public themselves – have an interest in sustaining this comforting way of seeing it. But news management is a risky business. Though it might maintain a level of support for the war that support becomes more brittle for the deception.

Every now and then a particularly disturbing story breaks through that becomes more shocking for being unexpected and is amplified for running contrary to the narrative the nation is being fed. Faith in our armed forces is imperiled. On the whole, generals, admirals and air marshals have enjoyed considerable public respect in Britain since the 1930s. There are signs that this is eroding.

News management, or spin, creates cumulative damage to us all by undermining our trust in the institutions that engage in it and subverting the quality of our conduct more widely in society. We are paying for these wars with more than blood and treasure.

Naqeebulla Sherzad is an Afghan fixer. He worked with Ajmal Naskhbandi, the fixer beheaded by the Taliban in 2007, and who inspired the formation of the Frontline Fixer’s Fund – 100% of funds raised are given to the families of fixers killed or injured while working with international media – After being told his name was on a Taliban "death list", Naqeebulla decided to leave Afghanistan. He finally wound up in Sweden where life has a different set of problems. He tells his story on the Committee to Protect Journalists site today,

Now I study the Swedish language and I’m trying to make my way back to journalism. I am not happy but I am safe. There are many things that make me unhappy. For example, losing my profession, which was dangerous, yes, but I wanted to improve and become a formal journalist. Leaving my family behind; they are still suffering because of my experience. And I am living alone in a different society, which sometimes makes me sick (Sweden can be dark and freezing cold).

There are some major problems too. I have not yet been issued an ID or a bank account, which are very necessary. I have applied for both, but the office that issue IDs refused to issue me one because I have no family members to certify that I am who I say I am. It is really hard to resettle in a new country, especially when you don’t speak the language and don’t come from a similar culture and traditions. I still have to find a part-time job to support my family.

For me, it is now impossible to return to my home country, since a documentary about Ajmal’s murder has been shown around the world (Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi)–I know they would find me and kill me. Because I am safe here, I will go through all these difficulties in exile and settle in at some point. But the loss of my friend and being lonely and worrying about my family’s security makes me depressed. link

You can donate to the Frontline Club Fixer’s Fund through our the Frontline Club Charity Giving account.

Even within Afghanistan, it doesn’t merit any attention from local journalists. This is undoubtedly on account of ethnic biases against the purported ‘victims’, the Hazaras.
Not that it’ll mean anything to most of the readers of this blog, but here’s one of the few videos made for local television (in this case Tolo’s Pashtu-language Lemar TV station) which shows images of Kuchi (/Taliban?) fighters in the district, as well as burned houses and those killed in the conflict:

The Hazara people who live in the three eastern districts of Wardak province – Behsud 1, Behsud 2 and Dai Mirdad – have been in some sort of conflict with the largely Pashtun Kuchi (or ‘nomad’) people for over 100 years. Hazaras claim that they are the original inhabitants of the land and that Kuchi groups are trying to force them off their land.

In recent decades there was some measure of balance in which the Hazara would allow some Kuchis grazing rights for their cattle and sheep. This became difficult to sustain in the past two or three years as the numbers of nomadic Kuchis who have arrived in the district has increased each year. Each summer Afghan media outlets report new deaths among the Hazara community in the district at the hands of Kuchis.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the Taliban, who are in de facto control of the western districts in Wardak province, have reportedly formed alliances with the Kuchis to force out Hazaras from the district. The Taliban hope that their support of the Kuchis – a majority of whom are Pashtuns – will buy loyalty and will allow them to take control of more of the province.
Some video from a trip I made last week to Wardak’s provincial capital, Maidan Shahr:

Recent research by the Senlis Council, an international think-tank, shows that over half of the province – just 45 minutes from Kabul by road – is under Taliban control. Behsud district so far has been relatively free of Taliban influence and as such remains out of their control.
The Hazaras – traditionally believed to be descendants of Genghis Khan’s hordes from the 13th century – are somewhat an anomaly in Afghanistan and are treated as such.

Kabul itself is now as much as 40% a Hazara city, and anywhere you go in the west of the city you find members of this massive underclass, ready to do the jobs nobody else wants. These neighborhoods are the closest thing Afghanistan has to a slum.
Casual racism dominates most passing discussion of the Hazara, and it is this that has in turn influenced the lack of local and foreign media interested in the issues of Behsud.

Afghan television and radio stations covered the big demonstration in Kabul on 23rd July (with over 50,000 demonstrators), but the root issues of the problem were never properly explored, and the stories of many went untold.
Last year, several journalists were able to visit Behsud on a day-trip with elders from the districts. Tom Coghlan, writing for the Telegraph newspaper (UK) reported:

With its lofty peaks, streams and carpet of wild flowers, Behsood ought to be a tourist’s delight. Instead, refugees are pouring out in clapped-out cars and minibuses; more than 4,000 are estimated to have fled so far. In the villages, week-old plates of half-eaten food sit on abandoned tables. link

This year, the conflict and displacement seems to have been bigger. I say ‘seems’ because I haven’t managed to visit the district myself to check. And listening to what’s going on through interlocutors here in Kabul just provokes confusion. Here’s a picture of some graffiti on the wall written by Kuchis last year.

A translation from the Pashtu reads:

Death to Karzai.
Death to the Hazara people. They have become American.
Death to the Americans. link

Tens of thousands of ethnic Hazaras closed down part of Kabul on Tuesday 22nd July in the afternoon in a demonstration calling for the Afghan President Hamid Karzai to resign over a land dispute in the eastern and neighbouring Wardak province.
At least 50,000 demonstrators crowded the streets near Kabul Zoo in southern Kabul and were preparing to progress on towards the city centre when one of the demonstration’s organizers, Hajji Mohammad Mohaqiq, called on the crowd to end the demonstration before it turned violent.

Hajji Muhaqiq (Photo: Philip Poupin) had been on a hunger strike for over a week in protest against what he said was the government’s inaction over the issue when we spoke to him on the day of the demonstrations. 51-years old, Muhaqiq previously served as planning minister under Karzai and is a senior leader of the Shi’a Hizb-e Wahdat (Unity Party).

The militia he commanded during the 1990s has often been accused by Afghan people, politicians and media outlets of committing atrocities against civilians.
Mr Muhaqiq said there was “no government to stop the Kuchis from traveling into the district with large amounts of weapons.” These Kuchis, who he claimed were coming from as far as North Waziristan (Pakistan) and the south-eastern Paktya province (Afghanistan), were in the hands of the Taliban now. These attacks and attempts to force Hazaras off their land showed that the Taliban were “trying to exert control over the province.”

Muhaqiq was keen to connect the problems in Behsud district with more general problems of Afghan governance. The President, he said, had set the country’s national unity back 10 years through his policies. Citing various ethnic slights in which Karzai – as a Pashtun – has been seen to ignore other groups, Mohaqiq said that only a new team and another president can bring Afghanistan back on the road to national unity.
Elders from Wardak told us that as many as 5000 families (with an average of 10 members per family) had been displaced to Kabul or to Bamyan on account of the fighting.

“Every family”, they said, had been affected in the conflict in the three districts. 80% of Behsud 1, 40% of Behsud 2 and 100% of the Hazaras in Dai Mirdad district had been forced out on account of the Kuchi incursions, we were told.
They saw the problems as a Pashtun government-led conspiracy against the Hazaras. “Why is Karzai doing this? We have no opium here? There is no insecurity. Why can’t he help us to develop the area instead of expelling us?” said Hajji Wakil Hani, head of the Wardak people’s shura or council.
Looking all the way back to Amir Sher Ali Khan, the elders said that it was the Amir Abdur Rahman who started the present wave of Hazara persecution.

62% of all Hazaras (they said) were either killed or displaced from their homes during this period.
But now, they reasoned, what was the point in disrupting the Hazarajat areas? “We just want our children to study. This year most of the schools are closed – last year as well – in these Behsud areas. In most of the Hazarajat there are no killings, no insecurity, but still Karzai threatens the people in the south. ‘You’ll get a Hazara government if you don’t sort things out…’ Karzai warns his fellow Pashtuns. What kind of a threat is that?” one of the speakers interjects.

The head of the Ulemaa’ (religious clerics) in Wardak, Agha Mobarez, asks, “What is Karzai doing? Why is he encouraging the destruction of the only place that is secure? And can we even talk about ‘Kuchis’ anymore? They live like everyone else.”
They pointed to the lack of electricity, medical clinics, and road-building in Kabul’s District 13, inhabited by around 1 million Hazaras, as evidence for the government’s lack of care.

The problems of the district have only increased with the influx of thousands of refugees – as many as 5,000 homes they estimate.
Mohammad Ali, 65, one of the refugees from the conflict who was now living in a friend’s house along with 46 others from his village, said he didn’t know what he could do now. “We are waiting until the winter when the Kuchi will leave.

Our wheat is burned, our livestock and our houses too. What can we do? We can’t return to our houses and we have nothing here.”
He had left from Qash village (in Behsud 1) in which there were 15 houses. All the families fled the village when they received news that Kuchis were coming. Walking 20 km to Jalrez district, they then took a car to Maidan Shahr, and from then to Kabul.
“Last year we thought it would stop, so we returned. But now it happened again.” They asked me to record their names for the record: Mohammad Ali, Hashim, Khodabakhsh and Zikria.

They had assembled two rows of women for us to talk to, all sitting on the porch outside the house. “They took our livestock. They are the black enemies, and they took our cows. Karzai should do something. They’re killing us, and we’re starving. Karzai did this to us. It’s not Kuchis, it’s Taliban. This is all a plan of Karzai’s making. No development has reached the area,” they all interject.
It was at this point I heard the first of the rumour that the Kuchis come in Afghan National Army (ANA) helicopters.

According to what they said – and what most of the other Hazaras we spoke to over a week-long period said – these helicopters are seen in the sky moments before Kuchis appear in the area.
Amir Mohammad, 47, had taken 3 days to come from Lataband area of Dai Mirdad district, and said that the Hazaras compliance with the Afghan government’s disarmament programme had meant they were unable to defend themselves against the Kuchi arrival. 2 cows stood in the courtyard of the Kabul house, the last remaining livestock of the village.

The woman in this video is explaining the exact way she was displaced out of her village. She spoke of ‘stages of displacement’, whereby every time the Kuchis came close to where you were staying, you’d move 3 or 4 villages backwards. Eventually, you’d read Bamyan or Kabul, she said, but each person that had reached these big cities would have therefore been displaced several times prior to arrival.

The men in this video explain how they left. “The Kuchis were in the village just up the road,” they say. “We didn’t have any people killed or injured from our villages.” It took them about 3 or 4 days to reach Kabul. Amir Mohammad explains how the Hazara had handed in all their weapons as part of the DIAG disarmament programme and so were unable to defend themselves.

They also complain that no assistance or houses has reached them from the billions of dollars pledged to Afghanistan. And the Kuchis, they said, were taking advantage of the knowledge that the Hazaras had handed over their weapons.
Then they added the story (/rumour) that helicopters and Afghan internal security forces were helping the Kuchis. They give estimates that 200 villages were burnt in the wider Behsud area, amounting to some 5000 houses. We were unable to verify this claim.

On Tuesday, a funeral was held outside Kabul for 3 further Hazara men killed by Kuchis. The funeral procession for Mohammad Musa, Mohammad Ali Naseri and Anwar Husseini started in Dasht-e Barchi (a Hazara-majority area) in a procession (see video below) and then the mourners were put on busses and taken outside Kabul for the burial.

A car with with the family of one of the victims passes by: one man driving, eyes red, and 6 women (2 in front, 4 in the back). It’s the one time I’ve regretted my beard – grown for southern Afghanistan, but immediately provoking suspicion and unease among the mourners. My bag is checked several times by Hazara security guards who must think that I am a Pashtun suicide bomber.

Over 2000 mourners are bussed to Koh-e Qogher, a remote hillside cemetery that overlooks the city. Once used by the Soviets for accomodation, the area surrounding the hill is now inhabited by Hazaras.
Those being buried were reportedly killed on 26th July in Dai Mirdad district after President Karzai had issued an edict demanding the withdrawal of all Kuchis from the area.

This, many of the mourners told me, was evidence of “institutional racism” and showed that Karzai was conducting a “personal war against the Hazara people.”
Again I heard stories of ANA helicopters arriving and giving weapons to the Kuchis/Taliban (the words were used interchangeably). By noon the sun was fierce, and men walked through the crowd distributing water brought up in a tanker for the mourners.

There were many speeches after the bodies were buried. One Shi’a mullah from Kabul compared the dead men to the martyrs of Karbala.
A man called Faissi, a representative of the Kabul Hazara community, gave a very political speech – although people didn’t seem all too moved by the sentiment.

Some quotes: “the government is not listening to the cries of our martyrs…the silence of the government on the Kuchi crimes is reprehensible…”
A Mullah from Dai Mirdad itself gave a religiously-intoned speech appealing to people’s better judgement. “Islam is a religion of peace,” he said. “Nobody said life should be free of war…BUT it should be conducted within a framework and within a clear set of rules.” ‘Adalat or justice was mentioned countless times by all who got up to speak.

If it isn’t already clear from the above, this story was pretty confusing to make sense of, and the more I talked to people, the more things were complicated. I went to visit someone at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) to make sense of what I’d heard. They are an official Afghan government organ, and last year during the clashes in Behsud they wrote a long report detailing exactly what was going on.

I wanted to see if they’d been to Behsud this year.
Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy Chair of the AIHRC, agreed that the issue was heavily politicised on both sides and that obtaining an accurate picture of what was going on in the area had been especially difficult. They had not, he said, released their assessment of the issue because they had not been able to talk to Kuchis involved in the dispute.
“Any small problem in Afghanistan has the potential to become a significant political and ethnic problem,” he said. By their assessment, 18 Hazaras and 19 Kuchis had been killed this year so far. His figure for the number of families displaced was much higher than the numbers the Hazara gave us – 6000-7000 families, the equivalent of about 55-65,000 people.

Mullah Tarakhel (Photo: Philip Poupin), a Kuchi MP and head of the Kuchi Affairs Commission, said that the problem was a result of the manipulations of politicians in Kabul. “Kuchis and Hazaras used to live peacefully together, but these problems now have been created out of nowhere,” he said. He named several prominent Hazara politicians – if you’re in Afghanistan, you’ll know who he named – who he said were exploiting the issue for their own benefit.

A question as to the extent and veracity of Hazara claims that Taliban are helping the Kuchis provoked smiles all round. No, he said, the Kuchis obey the government. His proof for this was the fact – he claimed – that the Kuchis had withdrawn from Behsud when Karzai recently ordered them to do so. He categorically denied Taliban help or involvement with the Kuchis.
His figures for Kuchi casualties of this year’s conflict were as follows: 27 killed, 99 injured, as well as 5 just over two weeks ago.

“Unless,” he said, “the problem is solved through the Afghan government, police and local organs, it naturally will lead to ethnic strife and will only continue to be exploited by others.”
The United Nations have committed themselves to supporting the efforts of the Afghan government as well as offering help to local initiatives and dialogue aimed at solving the problems in Behsud. Just this week they sent a team to Behsud to open a fourth round of negotiations.

Beyond this, though, the story remains opaque: simple to the passing observer, too small for the international community to involve itself, and yet also seemingly too intractable for it to be solved by the responsible Afghan government organs.

[First time I’m doing a longer piece like this that includes videos. If you have suggestions, comments etc on how I could make it more interesting etc, please email them or leave in the comments section…]

In a little-reported story from the north-west of Afghanistan – no doubt overshadowed by the car-bomb attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul – villagers in Qayser district used “a machine gun, sticks and stones” to chase away Taliban members, killing, in the process, the shadow-governor for Faryab province.

The militants had tried to abduct local aid workers who were building a well in the Qayar district of Faryab province, the police chief, Khalil Andarabi, said Thursday. link

I visited the district (see my photo above) in February this year, trying to travel as far away from the central provincial authorities in Maimana as possible to see how far the government’s authority extended. It took about 10 hours to drive into the district through what could hardly be called roads. As I wrote at the time:

Over 120,000 people live in the district, but with only 3 health centres, for example, Qaiser district has received relatively little developmental assistance.
Most of the support that the government – provincial or national – has been able to extend to the district has taken the form of security forces to man the border with the restive districts of Badghis province to the west.

Villagers that we spoke to knew a lot about the projects that the PRT had implemented around the district but said that there was still a lot to be done. Abdul Hamid, the deputy police chief of Qaiser district, said that the PRT visit the district “every so often” but that the most prominent development actor in the district was the Chinese company contracted to (re)build the section of the ringroad that passes through.

“We supplied them 70 or 80 police officers to help secure the areas in which they’re working,” he said. The police station in the district centre had itself benefited from the Chinese presence: they are able to use electrical appliances thanks to a generator given to the police by the Chinese.
He was confident, though, in the ability of Afghan security forces in the district. “If the PRT were to leave the province it would make no difference for us. We can secure the district by ourselves.” link (in Norwegian)

The Taliban website has an article from a few days back relating to an attack on Qayser district in which 2 police checkpoints were allegedly dismantled. Everything written in the English-language part of the site is usually overblown, exaggerated, and only mildly grounded in reality or fact. It is entirely possible, though, that Taliban are attempting to expand the northern insurgency from neighbouring Badghis province (where the Taliban have entrenched themselves in Bala Murghab and Ghormach districts) eastwards into Faryab.

This is how the Taliban went about taking control of the north last time round (during the 1990s), and most people – from the governor to members of the Norwegian PRT operating there – agree that attacks from the west remain the principal threat to security.
In a separate development, the latest edition of al-Somood (#25 and the 2-year anniversary edition) was released a couple of days ago. You can download it either on the website itself, or by clicking through the links here.
It includes an editorial commenting on Taliban media units’ operations over the past 2 years, an interview with Mullah Mohammad Rassoul – 44 years old and allegedly one of the founding members of the Taliban, although his name doesn’t come up in the source text that I’m currently co-editing for publication next spring – and another interview with Sheikh Mawlawi Mohammad Fayyaz concerning the Sarpoza prison break.

There’s a 4-page commentary piece on the Paris Conference (entitled “American Occupation and the Paris Conference”), as well as a piece on the use of depleted uranium munitions in Afghanistan (entitled “Where does the uranium go?”).
For a movement on the run, al-Somood is an increasingly sleek production. 56-pages produced monthly in Arabic (often used as a fund-raising prop for donors in the Gulf), and this is only one of several publications allied to the Taliban. ISAF’s own propaganda rag – Seda-ye Azadi (‘The Voice of Freedom’) – has nothing on this.