TOWARDS the LIGHT

"It would be the luckiest days of the week, if we have our boiled potatoes, and each of us getting one of them" Amina, 9 year old living in Nilli, Centre of Daikundi. I have been following Daikundi since 2008 after the deployment of Afghanistan's first female mayor in Nilli. Many of us in civil society and women groups struggled hard to get her required resources to prove her as the right choice, but we failed to receive tangible international support in the form of concrete projects.I went to Daikundi for the first time in early March 2011. Though, the trip was for work purposes, the realities I witnessed there should be communicated to the society at large and especially to those who are engaged in the ‘community development' and ‘poverty reduction' projects in Afghanistan with millions of dollars.While planning for the trip, I was advised to take food from Kabul since there are no markets in Nili, nor there are any stocks of food so in case the chopper doesn&#…

Every time some of us Afghans become a bit hopeful about the plight of this country, a series of suicide attacks on civilian centers packed with people, change our hopes to despair. Around six suicide attacks in the past 5 weeks in Kabul, Khost, Jalalabad ,Kunduz and Faryab have taken around 200 lives of ordinary Afghans fighting for survival on daily basis. While these are the official numbers on the national television, the real death toll has risen much more. A number of Afghan journalists and activists had gathered one evening last week to share the growing tensions of the country, but our focus reversed abruptly as TOLOnews aired the video of the would be suicide bomber in Kabul Bank who shot people with so much joy. The conversation continued … “ As the Counter –Insurgency takes momentum, and the Taliban get weaker, we get more suicide attacks and that particularly on civilian targets …and its happening as the General in a hurry ( hinting towards Gen. Petraeus) is being applaude…

The recent study entitled ‘Separating The Taliban from Al-Qaida’ of the Center on International Cooperation, New York University, authored by the two editors of “My Life with the Taliban” a memoir of an ex-diplomat of the Taliban government, is apparently an ‘academic /field research’ project. But in essence, this study comes across as propaganda to influence international perceptions (mainly the American audience) about the Taliban to facilitate a quick and hasty withdrawal of the international community from Afghanistan. Quick withdrawals without a cohesive transition have been the root cause of the perpetual cycle of conflict in Afghanistan. The study comes with a message that “Actually, the Taliban are misunderstood, so we need to pack and leave, and let the Afghans deal with the mess that we have created for them since it’s none of our national security business”. Although, one would not find anything new in this study but this adds to the ongoing propaganda guised in the name of…