Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee

Farhat Taj criticizes a ridiculous trend in commentary about Afghanistan, especially the sorts of caricatures of the great Pashtun people that Canadians are also routinely forced to read in their newspapers (sometimes, you'd think you were reading Rudyard Kipling). The Pashtun (Pakhtun) of the Northwest Frontier Province are not "highly-religious tribesmen" who sit around all day brooding about the offences to Islam attributed to King Richard II all those centuries ago.

'I had no idea women were treated like this'

December 22, 2008

Excellent editorial in the Washington Post by Sarah Chayes on how dissatisfaction with the Karzai government has made progress in Afghanistan a challenge that must be overcome.

The Other Front

By Sarah Chayes
Sunday, December 14, 2008; B01

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan

…the U.S. and the international community must stay the peacebuilding course in Afghanistan. But they must do it better. The potential costs of failing to increase resources, attention, priority and energy to Afghanistan would be unacceptably high:

-- a return to civil war, with factions divided along regional and ethnic lines
-- a narco-state with institutions controlled by organized criminal gangs and influenced by terrorists
-- a Pashtun-dominated south largely abandoned to extremist lawlessness
-- increased intervention by regional powers

(New York Times Editorial, Nov. 21, 2008)

"We fear that some NATO members may be so eager to withdraw their troops that they would be willing to trade away the Afghans’ future. Or that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, may be far too eager to compromise in hopes of increasing his re-election chances. He made aides to Mr. Obama (as well as us) nervous this week with an offer, since rejected, to draw the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar into negotiations."

All here.

We fear the same.