Category Archives: Afghanistan

The Burden of Memory — From Pakistan, the Story of One Story

04 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Afghanistan, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Pakistan, Regions

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

As told to BackChannels —

Tirah Valley, Khyber Agency, Pakistan, Around 2013-2015 — The operation had started against so-called militants in the valley. The army had only a little bit earlier ordered a general evacuation in advance of the fighting, so all who were not Taliban were still leaving their animals, businesses, and homes in a hurry.

The Taliban were there and would stay to fight the army.

I don’t know how many Taliban or army soldiers died in that fight, but there was an old man above 70, older than usual for the region, who told me that most were strong enough to cross the mountain but due to having less energy or power, he had thought he might be unable to cross the mountains with his daughter who could not walk. Still, he would try. He would carry her on his back.

The old man continued, “I took her on my back and started climbing the mountain, but after reaching some height, I had to stop.

“She knew what was happening — or what was going to happen — and she started to cry.

“– Baba, don’t you know what the army or Taliban will do to me?

“What do you want me to do?

“–Shoot me.”

The old man started crying.

“I buried her in the mountain.”

It was cold the day the old man told me his story. He had no jacket or socks.

Tirah Valley, Khyber Agency, Google Earth Screen Capture, August 3, 2019.

BackChannels would suggest that memories live in aural and visual and other sense-based impressions, i.e., what we most remember are moments, not the day and hour of their making or what we had for breakfast in proximity to them — and then what makes a “moment” a long-term memory may be its elevated emotional aspects, and that made so by ethical, moral, or sensual experience.

The Tirah Valley has seen more than its portion — however God may determine these things — of conflict violence. Because the day and hour were indefinite in the memory of the blog’s source, BackChannels may place it (as a suggestion) around March 25, 2015 in light of The New York Times headline, “Pakistani Army Begins Offensive to Drive Militants from Tirah Valley” (Ismail Khan). However, Pakistan Armed Forces fighting with the Taliban in association with the Tirah Valley predates the 2015 offensive.

Shinwari, Wali Khan. “In Pictures: Pakistan’s troubled Tirah Valley.” Al Jazeera, July 9, 2014.

The New Humanitarian. “Fighting in Pakistan’s Tirah Valley displaces 40,000 people.” April 1, 2013.

For those living with peace, security, and perhaps some prosperity, there may be “good war stories”, ever courageous, inspiring, and noble, but, really, there are no good war stories that are not also deeply tragic and frequently disturbing — but that’s why we read them and, perhaps, choose to evolve.

–33–

From Correspondence – Note – Killa Saifullah District, Pakistan

26 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by in Afghanistan, Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Islamic Small Wars, Pakistan, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

taliban with weapons roam there freely…….it seems that they are making another sawat or waziristan……no one can ask them about their activities even the tribal chief nawab is silent…..and just 100 away from killa saif ullah there comes loralai city ,a city of 5 lac population most people educated, the in loralai a young man was beheaded by taliban his video of slaughtering also came on scene…there was a letter with his body in which they had warned the people that whoever speaks against taliban would see the same fate

Posted verbatim as received 9/26/2014.

After more than a decade of effort, Taliban continue to promote and produce mayhem and murder in many districts of as yet unsecured frontiers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The miscreants remain “hard to see” until they show up, and Out There they continue to show up in force and continue demonstrating ability to choreograph their assaults.

Pakistani Dawn reported a decapitation in Loralai back in June of this year, and I cannot tell whether the correspondent had that to rely or something new.

Related Reference

Taliban have beheaded 12 civilians and torched some 60 homes in an assault on security forces in the eastern Ghazni province, an Afghan official said.

The province’s deputy police chief Asadullah Ensafi said the Taliban have attacked several villages over the past week in the Arjistan district.

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2014/09/26/foreign/taliban-behead-12-civilians-in-ghazni/ – 9/27/2014.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1112630 – ” Decapitated Body Found in Laralei” – 6/14/2014.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killa_Saifullah_District

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loralai

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loralai_District

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/Balochistan/index.html – “Balochistan Assessment – 2014”.

# # #

 

 

A Comment on Shooting Unarmed Journalists While Shouting “Allahu Akbar”

06 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by in Afghanistan, Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Journalism, Regions

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Fly any banner, service to others forms the bedrock of civil societies, and journalists, perhaps war journalists especially, serve others every hour afield.  Across the jagged puzzle pieces of the Islamic Small Wars, journalists have been doing more than “taking it on the chin” — they have been taking bullets and leaving behind children and spouses, colleagues and readers.

The end of last week saw the brutally cold blooded, cold hearted, and senseless murder of AP photojournalist Anja Neidringhaus and the attempted murder of AP veteran Kathy Gannon by a so-called “defender” of civil order, of the innocent, and of Islam, Afghan police platoon commander Naqibullah, a man one report cites as enraged by NATO air strikes on his village elsewhere in the country.

If that’s the way he felt, what was he doing heading up a state police unit in the first place?

Two women sitting in a car and along comes this nut with an AK-47 . . . .

Life’s not much better across the border in Pakistan — see, for example,  the Committee to Protect Journalist’s recent article, “What should happen following the Raza Rumi attack”.

While reading over the latest from the attack on Kathy Gannon and Anja Neidringhaus, I found news of still recent other murders of journalists in Afghanistan: Nils Horner, a Swedish broadcast journalist assassinated on the street; Sardar Ahmad, whose entire family was gunned down by teenage numbnuts shooting up the dinner hour at Kabul’s Serena Hotel restaurant — call the method “gangdum style”: after three hours of fighting, security managed to kill the baby killers (“Three Afghan children between 2 and 5 years old were shot point-blank in the head, the Reuters news agency reported”) after three hours of fighting, but not before nine people had died.

In the BackChannels way (until I get out of this place, if ever), excerpts follow.

______

She covered every major conflict, every massive world-changing event of the past 25 years. She was unflinchingly brave. Not in a cavalier way, but more like “This is very dangerous. But it’s important. It has to be done. It has to be covered. Who else is going to do it? I’m going.”

Chen, Pamela.  “Colleague and Friend Remembers Slain Photographer Anja Niedringhaus.”  National Geographic, April 5, 2014.

* * *

Two unidentified men approached Nils Horner, 51, in Kabul’s diplomatic district this morning, according to a New York Times report citing Col. Najibullah Samsour, a senior police official. One of the assailants shot Horner in the head at close range, and then both men fled the scene, the report said.

CPJ.  “British-Swedish journalist shot dead in Afghan capital.”  March 11, 2014.

Related: Graham-Harrison, Emma.  “Taliban splinter group says it killed British-Swedish reporter Nils Horner.”  The Guardian, March 12, 2014.

* * *

A gregarious 40-year-old star of Afghanistan’s booming media scene, Ahmad had an eye for both a story and a joke that helped him juggle two jobs as senior correspondent for Agence France-Press and head of media firm Pressistan, which he founded to support visiting foreign correspondents.

Graham-Harrison, Emma.  “Sardar Ahmad: a courageous journalist who delivered exceptional coverage: Colleagues pay tribute to a dedicated Afghan journalist killed along with his wife and two daughters by Taliban gunmen in Kabul.”  The Guardian, March 21, 2014.

Related: Kuruvilla, Carol.  “Afghan reporter’s toddler son miraculously survives Taliban attack that killed family.”  New York Daily News, April 4, 2014.

______

An enraged Afghan police commander on a “secure base”; Taliban assassins; four teenagers with guns — and gone: a courageous and talented AP photographer; an award-winning Swedish radio reporter; a brave Afghan journalists, husband, and father.

Whatever the motives of the killers, however they felt, whatever they were paid, they have been offing the best of the best, the most just, most merciful, and most free among mankind.

Additional Reference

Afghan Journalists Safety Committee

Geller, Pamela.  “AP Photographer Shot to Death, Journalist Wounded by Afghan Commander Who Walked Up to Their Car, yelled, “Allahu Akbar” and Opened Fire.”  Atlas Shrugs, April 4, 2014.

News.Com.AU “Afghan officer Naqibullah shot journalists Anja Niedringhaus and Kathy Gannon ‘in revenge’.  April 6, 2014.

Rosenberg, Matthew and Farooq Jan Mangal.  “Covering Afghan Vote, Until Shot by an Ally.”  The New York Times, April 4, 2014.

# # #

FTAC – A Note on the Death of a Migrating Soul Detained

09 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by in Afghanistan, Australia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

I’m all set up and am having real issues navigating next steps in one of the most modern societies in the world: I may only imagine what it’s like to be anonymous on the streets of a passive and teaming nation like Pakistan or a somewhat bureaucratized and Orwellian culture that erupts at the interface of person and government in the west. Without family or stable and helpful community-based networks, we have and sometimes number among a legion of nearly unaccounted and uncomfortably roaming persons. Some part of that may contribute to freedom and “rugged individualism” and some part, plainly, to horror.

The inspiration for the above thought: Eulogy for Ahmad Ali Jafari | Overland literary journal – 8/13/2013.

With a soul like Jafarai, the person may be less lost than the state of origin and so many unwittingly receiving and subsequent and temporarily hosting nations as compelled migration — especially migration compelled by famine or war — and illegal immigration are a matched pair.

There’s plenty of trending news for cyberchat and cybergossip, but as I do here and others do in the various communities and forums that comprise the still emerging “Facebook civilization”, people reach back to make or suggest points or draw parallels between discrete or separated but analogous circumstances.

Community detention centers, tent camps, semi-permanent refugee camps correspond to reactions to disasters.  We see so many of them each year — earthquakes and tsnunami, hurricanes and typhoons, sometimes volcanoes, sometimes, these days, damaged nuclear reactors, and then ever present conflict as well as community- or state-wide financial stress and disaster — that one wonders how far ahead of a bad circumstance the world less affected by a given emergency may make itself.

With the World Wide Web well established and robust, the suffering of distant people are no longer that distant in either common perception or space.

Ahmad Ali Jafari needed a place to land, or even if returned to Afghanistan, some program in which he was accounted and helpfully reoriented, integrated, and included.

# # #

 

FTAC – Paul Watson’s Passage – How Mullah Omar Got His Start

31 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Afghanistan, Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Pakistan, Regions

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

“Talib” means student.

I’ve gone to the trouble to look this up, so I’m going to share it with you:

“After U.S.-backed mujahideen forced Soviet troops to end their almost decade-long occupation in 1989, Washington turned its back on Afghanistan as it collapsed into a ferocious civil war. Five years later, as local legend has it, members of a warlord’s militia kidnapped and gang-raped two teenaged girls at a checkpoint in his home village of Singesar, in the dust-blown badlands an hour’s drive from the southern city of Kandahar. It was a common crime, one that normally would have faded into the brutal monotony of violence that was strangling Afghanistan in 1994. but this time the atrocity changed the destiny not only of a country, but the world.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, an obscure country cleric and mujahideen veteran who lost an eye to shrapnel during the war against the Soviets, decided he had had enough. He mustered a small group of fighters, attacked the checkpoint, and then hanged the militia commander from a tank barrel. He then fled across the Pakistan border to the province of Baluchistan, where with the help of military intelligence, he recruited fighters fired up for a new jihad by the puritanical Wahabi theology exported from Saudi Arabia and taught in hundreds of Pakistan’s madrassas, or Koranic schools.”

_Watson, Paul. _Where War Lives_. 167-168. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, 2007

Does that legend not fit with the assortment of bits and pieces everyone here knows?

While it would seem perfectly rational of me to have become computer literate — I was probably the last graduate student to run an 80-column card set through the Univac at the University of Maryland — to keep up with computers, to acquire broadband, to leave the virtual shore by exploring foreign news on English-language web sites (first stop: Somalia; second: Pakistan), to become involved with blogging (first), and to open a Facebook account (second), there is nothing rational about my sharing the curiosity of 2007 and a book purchased then with virtual friends on a growing forum in Islamabad.

Watson, Paul. _Where War Lives_. 167-168. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, 2007.

For years I have remembered the story but not whether it was written by Paul Watson, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning photojournalist, or Dexter Filkins, who most certainly ranks among the best war journalists ever.

What I wonder about today is not what motivated Mullah Omar, of course, of what the movement has led to in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the world itself, but rather what possessed the warlord and his crowd to rape two village girls: from whence came that evil?

The “heavy half” of readers seem most often to want to get their eyes on the latest first edition, but I cannot too highly recommend revisiting Paul Watson’s 2007 reflection and remembrance of the wars he had covered to that time — and God has blessed him: he is still out in the field.

# # #