Canada Afghanistan

The Canadian chairman of the Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission who blocked the fraud-plagued first round in last year's Afghan presidential elections will join the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee on a growing panel of hard-hitting speakers in Ottawa on March 9.

Grant Kippen was a UN appointee to the ECC when it forced a second round in last year's elections, heading off a possibly fatal political crisis in the country. Now, Afghan president Hamid Karzai has decreed that all ECC appointees will be made by the presidential palace.

Mr. Kippen brings vast experience and expertise to the “Canada and Afghanistan: Keeping Our Promises” event, hosted by the Free Thinking Film Society at the National Archives Hall in Ottawa. At the event, CASC will unveil its "Keeping Our Promises" vision for a renewed Canadian mission in Afghanistan post-2011.

His Excellency Jawed Ludin, Afghanistan's ambassador to Canada, also agreed to join the panel earlier this week. Ludin has outlined the systemic challenges facing the Karzai government in tackling corruption, the security challenge and economic obstacles, noting the solutions will come in partnership with the international community.

Other panelists and speakers at the event are Major-General (Ret’d) Lewis Mackenzie; Ehsanullah Ehsan, Director of the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre in Kandahar City; Nasrine Gross, Afghan-American writer and human rights activist; Dr. Nipa Banerjee, currently a professor of international development at the University of Ottawa and former head of CIDA in Afghanistan (2003-2006); Dr. Douglas Bland, Chair of the Defence Management Studies Program at the School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University; CASC co-founders Lauryn Oates, a human rights and gender equity activist, and Terry Glavin, author and journalist.

The event will also raise funds for the Canadian International Learning Foundation and its collaboration with the Afghan School Project in Kandahar.

Event Details

March 9, 2010, 7:00 pm
National Archives/Library of Canada, 395 Wellington St., Ottawa
Tickets: $30 regular admission, $15 students

* Purchase tickets online:
http://www.canilf.org/news/

* Purchase tickets in person:
Ottawa Folklore Centre (1111 Bank Street, Ottawa)
Compact Music (190 Bank; 7851 ½ Bank Street, Ottawa) 

Media Contacts

Jonathon Narvey, CASC Board Secretary
Phone (604) 230.2638 Email jnarvey@afghanistan-canada-solidarity.org

Brian Platt, CASC Outreach Coordinator
Phone (604) 754.2413 Email b.t.a.platt@afghanistan-canada-solidarity.org

Fred Litwin, CASC Ottawa Contact / Free Thinking Film Society of Ottawa Executive Director
Phone (613) 261.9060 Email fred.litwin@afghanistan-canada-solidarity.org 

An e-Conference Dialogue
March 11, 2010
8am-11pm EST

The CIC has embarked on a major foreign policy mapping initiative for 2010. The Global Positioning Strategy (GPS) Project will generate and disseminate fresh perspectives and ideas about Canada’s priorities in international affairs both in the short term, as we prepare to host the G8 and the G20 meetings next summer, and beyond.

The GPS e-Conference Series presents a unique opportunity for everyone concerned about Canada’s international roles, responsibilities and activities to get involved with the GPS Project by sharing their views and opinions with experts and each other online, providing a public feed-in mechanism for the GPS report. The CIC urges all CIC members and friends to participate.

Key discussion questions include:

• How should a successful mission in Afghanistan be defined?
• Should NATO continue to be the vehicle through which Canada makes contributions to international security missions?
• What have we learned from Canada's experience in dealing with deeply fractured societies?
• What has Afghanistan taught us about the role of development in conflict?

The GPS project is looking for the input of students, academics, professionals, and interested Canadians.

> Click here to register to engage with our network of experts and interested Canadians (www.canadianinternationalcouncil.org/gps <http://www.canadianinternationalcouncil.org/gps> ).

If you have any questions, please contact econference@canadianinternationalcouncil.org.

The Taliban are not merely a movement -- they are a mindset. They can be found not only along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, but in our own communities, universities and public spaces. An Afghan women explains in the Globe and Mail. An excerpt:

As an Afghan woman, I've known the Taliban since before I was born. My mother knew them, and my grandmother knew them. I've had Taliban encounters in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Canada, as well as other countries. I have known the Taliban a long time. Only now they have a name. And only now, the rest of the world also knows their name.

The Taliban are a state of mind. Taliban can be and are found anywhere in the world, anywhere where the ideology of misogyny spreads its seeds uninhibited. Being a Talib demands adherence to no particular faith, no ethnicity, no nationality.

When I was studying in a university outside of Afghanistan, I had a law professor who issued a statement decreeing that female students would not be allowed to join the Afghan Student's Council because they cause immorality among the male students. For me, this professor was a Taliban.

Talibanization can even cross gender lines. I know an Afghan émigré in Coquitlam, B.C. She has dyed hair and wears short skirts, interacting seemingly seamlessly in Canadian society, while she devotes her spare time to arranging her adult son's marriage to a teenage girl so that there might be a permanent servant in her home. Don't be fooled by those who are modernized, beautiful, and educated. Inside, you might still find a Talib.

Afghan women have lived amidst the Taliban mindset for generations. This mindset was responsible for telling my mother, growing up in Kabul in the late 1960s, that she shouldn't study because she was a woman. She was unable to continue her education because her aunt found it of less value than a woman who could clean a house and cook well, and believed schooling was a distraction – ultimately a waste of time, and worse, something that risked corrupting women's minds...

When I came to Canada, I found freedom, and perhaps more importantly, hope. I was free to pursue an education, free to plan and dream. I adjusted to my new home. But I still have not adjusted to the support I have found among Canadians for the Taliban state of mind. It made me sad to see that in a free and modern society, there remain those who excuse an ideology based on the hatred of women, by citing multiculturalism. And they are not Afghans, or even immigrants, but those born in Canada who somehow think that the abuse of women and a fundamentalist view of the world, are acceptable among Afghans, and so no intervention is required. But remember that among Afghans, women can also be found. Have you remembered to ask whether the Taliban represent their culture?

I have found that no matter how far away I go, I still live under the shadow of the Taliban. Not only has the ideology immigrated to Canada in parts of the Afghan communities here, it has also immigrated into the minds of Canadians in their tacit acceptance of a future for Afghanistan that includes the Taliban in power.

I have found little acknowledgment among Canadians of the damage that the Taliban did to the women of my country. There is little understanding of the legacy of the Taliban's five year regime in Afghanistan: a government premised on the systematic oppression of women.

It hurts further when I hear the Taliban as being equated with Afghans. That is a terrible mistake, and offensive to me as a Muslim and as a woman. The Taliban have never represented Afghans and to believe this is to succumb to the propaganda and the fear the Taliban seek to impose. The Taliban represent backwardness and ignorance.

Coming back to the question, how to Taliban-proof Afghanistan, my answer is that first we must acknowledge what they represent, then find the antidote. The antidote to backwardness and ignorance is education. But first Canadians will need to educate themselves, to truly learn about the enemy that Afghans, and now Canadians, face and to recognize it as the danger that it really is. Ask an Afghan woman, she can tell you.

Fereshta is an Afghan-Canadian who lives in Vancouver. She is writing under a pen name for the protection of her family. 

The Marefat School in the foothills of the Paghman Mountains is a place where young Hazaras, some of the poorest people in Afghanistan, are getting a chance at a future. As Terry Glavin reports from Afghanistan, this place has not always been so peaceful, even until recent times:

Last year, the school was attacked by a mob incited by Tehran's mullah in Kabul, Ayatollah Mohseni, from his gleaming, blue-domed madrassah down in Karte Se. The mob came screaming for Aziz Royesh, Marefat's short and stocky principal. The school is a dirty nest of Christians, communists and prostitutes, they shouted, there are boys and girls together, Royesh is an apostate, Royesh must die.

"I was right here," Royesh told me, standing in the rutted and muddy alley outside the school. "The boys quickly locked the doors to the school, and I ran into my house, right there."

Yet the students, teachers and administrators have struggled to keep this place going. But if Afghanistan is to have a future for its youth beyond the poppy plantations and battle-scarred villages, this effort must continue. The youngsters want a future:

"I will be a chemist. I will be a doctor. I will be a journalist. I will be a businessman."

They will be.

An incredible story showcasing what Afghans are really capable of when given a chance to create education and a better life for their communities, by Dr. Sakena Yacoobi:

By 2001, the Afghan Institute of Learning was supporting 80 underground home schools for 3,000 girls in four provinces of Afghanistan. Most students were in the first through third grade but some schools had students up to the eighth grade. With the fall of the Taliban and the lifting of the ban against education for girls, by the end of 2002 all of the home schools had closed because the students were either attending government public schools or studying in our newly opened Women’s Learning Centers, and their teachers were back teaching in public schools.

That is the courage of the girls, their families, their teachers and their communities. These girls were very bright. They wanted to learn so much, and their families and teachers wanted to learn, as well, so they found creative ways to make sure that the schools could continue and the girls could be safe. No school was ever discovered and closed. There were close calls, like the day that soldiers were positioned on every corner of one of the cities after the girls had gone to the home of their teacher. The brothers of the girls diverted the attention of the soldiers so that two by two the girls could slip out of the house and go safely home.

Fourteen years later, these educated girls, from the refugee camps and from the underground schools, are now in universities.

Read the full article at http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2010winter/2010winter_Yacoobi.php