JOBS is the need of the hour in Afghanistan

It is great to hear this from the US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, saying "Give jobs to rural young men, which will take them away from the Taliban" in an interview. Click here for original article.

This is what we have been saying for the last two years through our JobsForAfghans efforts and more firmly in our latest visit to Kabul where we were able to meet with key people and garner support for such employment generating activities, especially for fighting age men.

It is also interesting to notice that "according to an ABC News poll taken earlier this year, Afghans are twice as pessimistic about the future of their country as they were in 2004," which again points to failed promises and unsuccessful attempts at steering the country towards real improvement and reconstruction by the international community. Let's hope that change is on the way!

Was it because he was black?

Just read this article on BBC...

I wonder if this would have happened if the Harvard professor was not black, or maybe I should say if he was white, because most likely the same thing would have happened if he was anything, but white! Imagine if, in addition to being a person of color, he also had a beard or even worse if his name said "Ahmad" or "Mohammad" in it....I found the incident epsecially intriguing because even "After providing the officer with his university ID card and driver's licence, the African-American studies scholar was handcuffed on his front porch."

Have the British learned anything from the past 3 Anglo-Afghan wars?

An interesting BBC article outlining the three unsuccessful attempts by the British to subvert Afghanistan and similarities/differences between now and then. Click here to read the article. The author, a Kings College professor, differentiates today from previous three Anglo-Afghan wars stating that now there is much more focus on "understanding the culture, traditions and customs of the Afghan population."

I would love to see the reflections of such understanding in practice. Mounting civilian causalities is certainly not one of them. Nor is breaking open the doors of people's houses in remote villages. They have yet to learn the basic fact that in Afghanistan, a man does not enter his own house without knocking first and allowing the people inside, especially the women, to prepare themselves to receive someone at the door. Now imagine the kind of an image it leaves in people’s minds when armed foreign soldiers forcefully break into people’s homes just because they are “suspects” in their “fight against terror.”