Real bravery

Just posted on the NYTimes:

One morning two months ago, Shamsia Husseini and her sister were walking through the muddy streets to the local girls school when a man pulled alongside Shamsia on a motorcycle and posed what seemed like an ordinary question.

“Are you going to school?”

Then the man pulled Shamsia’s burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia’s eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read.

But if the acid attack against Shamsia and 14 others — students and teachers — was meant to terrorize the girls into staying home, it appears to have completely failed.

Today, nearly all of the wounded girls are back at the Mirwais School for Girls, including even Shamsia, whose face was so badly burned that she had to be sent abroad for treatment. Perhaps even more remarkable, nearly every other female student in this deeply conservative community has returned as well — about 1,300 in all.

“My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed,” said Shamsia, 17, in a moment after class. Shamsia’s mother, like nearly all of the adult women in the area, is unable to read or write. “The people who did this to me don’t want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things.”

As the Times report continues:

Even as the Taliban tighten their noose around Kandahar, the girls flock to the school each morning. Many of them walk more than two miles from their mud-brick houses up in the hills.

The girls burst through the school’s walled compound, many of them flinging off head-to-toe garments, bounding, cheering and laughing in ways that are inconceivable outside — for girls and women of any age. Mirwais has no regular electricity, no running water, no paved streets. Women are rarely seen, and only then while clad in burqas that make their bodies shapeless and their faces invisible.

So, who has the - um, ah, er, would this be balls? - to attack defenseless school girls?

The Taliban denied any part in it. The police arrested eight men and, shortly after that, the Ministry of Interior released a video showing two men confessing. One of them said he had been paid by an officer with the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani intelligence agency, to carry out the attack.

But at a news conference last week, Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, said there was no such Pakistani involvement.

One thing is certain: in the months before the attack, the Taliban had moved into the Mirwais area and the rest of Kandahar’s outskirts. As they did, posters began appearing in local mosques.

“Don’t Let Your Daughters Go to School,” one of them said.

And who besides the girls has the, um cojones to fight these unarmed-small-girl attackers? Well, there is the headmaster, Mahmood Qadari; and according to the Times, most of the locals, once he gave them some small encouragement:

“I told them, if you don’t send your daughters to school, then the enemy wins,” Mr. Qadari said. “I told them not to give in to darkness. Education is the way to improve our society.”

The adults of Mirwais did not need much persuading. Neither the bus nor the police nor the bridge has materialized, but the girls started showing up anyway. Only a couple of dozen girls regularly miss school now; three of them are girls who had been injured in the attack.

And what became of the girl whose face was so badly burned in the attacks?

After class, Shamsia blended in with the other girls, standing around, laughing and joking. She seemed un-self-conscious about her disfigurement, until she began to recount her ordeal.

“The people who did this,” she said, “do not feel the pain of others."

Indeed - but that's no reason to stop learning or living. At least for the brave.

Pakistan contorts: Fire the truth teller

 

The NYTimes reports:

Pakistan's national security adviser, Mahmud Ali Durrani, confirmed Wednesday that the lone surviving gunman from the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, is a Pakistani citizen. Hours later Mr. Durrani, a respected retired army general and former ambassador to the United States, was fired by the Pakistani prime minister for “irresponsible behavior.”

As the report continued:

The bizarre turn of events — which came after repeated claims by Pakistani officials that they could find no proof of Mr. Kasab’s nationality — showed how deeply the aftermath of the Mumbai siege has riven the country’s fragile government as it struggles to come to grips with what American officials have said is clear evidence that Pakistani nationals plotted the attack.

But even Pakistan has to eventually accept the evidence:

Later in the day, the Pakistani government hastily acknowledged that Mr. Kasab was a citizen and announced that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani had fired Mr. Durrani for failing to take Mr. Gilani “and other stakeholders into confidence” and for a “lack of coordination on matters of national security.”...

“Supposedly, he’s unhappy that I made the statement without consulting him,” Mr. Durrani said of Mr. Gilani, noting that two government spokesmen confirmed Mr. Kasab’s citizenship.

Dream job: Letter writer

UNAMA Photo by Jawad Jalali

Called areza nawees in Dari, these letter writers pen epistles for a fee for their illiterate countrymen (and women, presumably).  How fun would that be?

Taliban exaggerate number of casualties they cause

 

 MSNBC reports:

The Taliban has long exaggerated its military successes, but its figures for 2008 may be the militia's most startling claims yet.

The Taliban claims its forces last year killed 5,220 foreign troops, downed 31 aircraft, destroyed 2,818 NATO and Afghan vehicles and killed 7,552 Afghan soldiers and police.

But, as the report continues

According to an Associated Press tally of those announcements, 286 foreign forces died last year in Afghanistan, including 151 American and 51 British troops.

The reason why they do this seems obvious enough not to even mention, but here you go anyway:

Vahid Mojdeh, the author of a book on the Taliban, said the exaggerated claims help the insurgents recruit new fighters.

"The Taliban needs volunteers to carry out suicide attacks, so they want to show they are killing a lot of people," Mojdeh said.

So what did the Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, have to say when confronted with the discrepancy in reporting?

Mojdeh said that some of the exaggerations likely come from false assumptions. For instance, he said, if a roadside bomb hits a U.S. Humvee, then the Taliban probably report four U.S. deaths, even if everyone inside the armored vehicle survives.

Images from Afghanistan

 

 

Uzbeks playing buzhashi or polo with a goat carcass.  Yes, they do eat the meat, reports the NYT, but only after it's nice and soft from all the pummeling.