From Reuters - May 13, 2008
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - Taliban insurgents have ordered residents of a province near the capital Kabul to stop watching television, saying the networks were showing un-Islamic programmes, officials and local media said on Tuesday.
The order is the last in a wave of curbs that the resurgent militants have announced in areas they are active.
A senior Afghan information ministry official, Najib Manelai, said that dozens of masked men with weapons entered mosques in Logar province at the weekend and threatened residents against watching television
"They threatened the people that 'if you do not give up watching televisions, you will face violence'," Manelai told Reuters.
Media reports quoted residents as saying that the Taliban imposed the ban because TV networks were showing programmes that were "un-Islamic and anti-Afghan culture".
Removed from power in 2001, the al Qaeda-backed Taliban who lead a insurgency against the government and foreign forces, could not be reached for comment.
But while in power from 1996 until their ouster, the Taliban Islamists had banned television, music and cinema. More than a dozen private TV networks and scores of radio stations have been launched in Afghanistan since their fall.
The information ministry along with security forces was taking action against the Taliban move, minister Manelai said, without giving details.
The ban on television programmes in Logar follows demands in recent weeks by a group of religious scholars and the information minister that some private television stations must stop broadcasting several Indian soap operas on religious grounds.
But the demand has been largely ignored.
The Taliban have in recent months also ordered mobile phones operators to shut down the networks, saying foreign troops were using the phones to track them down. They have also warned girls in several parts of the south and east not to attend schools.
Showing posts with label afghanistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label afghanistan. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Afghan 'blasphemy' death sentence
From BBC - January 23, 2008
Afghan 'blasphemy' death sentence
An Afghan journalist has been sentenced to death by a provincial court for distributing "blasphemous" material.
Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, 23, was arrested in 2007 after downloading material from the internet relating to the role of women in Islamic societies.
A primary court in Balkh province said that Kambakhsh had confessed to blasphemy and had to be punished.
The court also threatened to arrest any reporters who protested against Kambakhsh's sentence.
Kambakhsh, a student at Balkh University and a journalist for Jahan-e Naw (New World), was arrested in October 2007 after material he downloaded was deemed to be offensive to Islam.
Shamsur Rahman, the head of the court, told Reuters news agency: "According to... the Islamic law, Sayed Perwiz is sentenced to death at the first court.
"However, he will go through three more courts to declare his last punishment," he said.
'Deeply shocked'
Balkh province's deputy attorney general, Hafizullah Khaliqyar, warned other journalists that they would be arrested if they attempted to support Kambakhsh.
But Agence France-Presse reported that journalists were gathering outside the home of the condemned reporter.
The sentence has been welcomed by conservative Islamic clerics in Afghanistan but criticised by international human rights groups.
Global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said it was "deeply shocked" by the trial and appealed to President Hamid Karzai to intervene "before it is too late".
In a statement, the group said the trial was "carried out in haste and without any concern for the law or for free expression, which is protected by the constitution".
"Kambakhsh did not do anything to justify his being detained or being given this sentence."
Kambakhsh's brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, said the verdict was "very unfair" and appealed for help from the international community, reported Reuters.
Afghan 'blasphemy' death sentence
An Afghan journalist has been sentenced to death by a provincial court for distributing "blasphemous" material.
Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, 23, was arrested in 2007 after downloading material from the internet relating to the role of women in Islamic societies.
A primary court in Balkh province said that Kambakhsh had confessed to blasphemy and had to be punished.
The court also threatened to arrest any reporters who protested against Kambakhsh's sentence.
Kambakhsh, a student at Balkh University and a journalist for Jahan-e Naw (New World), was arrested in October 2007 after material he downloaded was deemed to be offensive to Islam.
Shamsur Rahman, the head of the court, told Reuters news agency: "According to... the Islamic law, Sayed Perwiz is sentenced to death at the first court.
"However, he will go through three more courts to declare his last punishment," he said.
'Deeply shocked'
Balkh province's deputy attorney general, Hafizullah Khaliqyar, warned other journalists that they would be arrested if they attempted to support Kambakhsh.
But Agence France-Presse reported that journalists were gathering outside the home of the condemned reporter.
The sentence has been welcomed by conservative Islamic clerics in Afghanistan but criticised by international human rights groups.
Global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said it was "deeply shocked" by the trial and appealed to President Hamid Karzai to intervene "before it is too late".
In a statement, the group said the trial was "carried out in haste and without any concern for the law or for free expression, which is protected by the constitution".
"Kambakhsh did not do anything to justify his being detained or being given this sentence."
Kambakhsh's brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, said the verdict was "very unfair" and appealed for help from the international community, reported Reuters.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
US-Britain Gay-Bashed Afghanistan
From the Workers World
U.S.-Britain gay-bashed Afghanistan
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 18, 2007 11:51 PM
In the months after the autumn 2001 imperialist military invasion, a rash of gay-bashing and gay-baiting articles about Afghanistan appeared in the U.S. and British corporate media.
Many of these articles purported to analyze sexualities and genders and the organization of the sexes in Afghanistan.
In some of the coverage, "experts"—who are not Afghan—focused on sexual and social organization in Pashtun culture, the majority culture in Afghanistan, as though it was the only culture. Other non-Afghan "authorities" didn't differentiate between the diverse cultures in that ancient land, including the Durrani, Ghilzai, Wardak, Jaji, Tani, Jadran, Mangal, Khugiani, Kuchi, Safi, Mohmand and Shinwari; or Uzbek or Arab. Most reports did not differentiate between peoples of the lowlands and those in the mountain ranges. Or between peoples who lead nomadic lives, and those who dwell in crowded cities. And speculations only focused on same-sexuality between male-bodied individuals.
Colonialism and imperialism have always studied the cultures they sought to conquer and destroy. The job of embedded anthropologists is ultimately always to claim cultural superiority—the rotten plank on which white-supremacist ideologues stand.
Not a word coming from the imperialist occupiers about Afghan cultures has any validity. Some of the most bigoted theories these articles rehash and spew about same-sex love and gender expression, and their relation to women's oppression, do need to be exposed and combated.
Imperial anthropology
The organization of the sexes, socially accepted sexualities and gender expressions in Afghanistan are rooted in that country's ancient history, and are not the same as in the U.S. or Britain. The existence of other forms of social organization and sexual and gender expression challenges the biological determinists who argue that sexuality is genetically fixed in the human species.
Therefore, colonialists and imperialists have historically used racist characterizations like "obsessive sodomy," "promiscuity" and "unnatural sexuality, and gender-phobic baiting of oppressed males as "effeminate" or "hyper-masculine" to excuse the inexcusable: imperial domination and exploitation.
Brian James Baer, associate professor of Russian Literature and Translation at Kent State University, wrote about the bias in the spate of Western reporting about sexualities in Afghanistan in an article in the Gay and Lesbian Review, March-April 2003.
Baer noted, "Journalists repeatedly used Western concepts such as 'gay' and 'the closet' to characterize the Kandahar situation, thus imposing their notion of homosexuality as a minority identity." And, he added, "In their reporting Western journalists insisted on reducing relationships that are often long-term emotional bonds to a crude sexual bargain."
Baer pointed out: "Maura Reynolds of The LA Times noted that 'there is a strong streak of dandyism among Pashtun males. Many line their eyes with kohl, stain their fingernails with henna or walk about town in clumsy, high-heeled sandals.' But this equation makes sense only if we accept two Western assumptions: that homosexuality and effeminacy are automatically linked; and that the practices described are in fact 'effeminate.'"
Baer stressed: "Despite statistical evidence demonstrating that pedophilia in the West is more common among heterosexual men, the association of homosexuality and the sexual abuse of children remains prominent in Western anti-gay discourse, propelling 'save our children' campaigns to restrict their contact with gay adults. By constructing age-stratified homosexual activity in Kandahar as pedophilia, Western journalists provided themselves a link to the ever-popular issue of child abuse—especially hot, what with the unfolding scandal in the Catholic Church."
Baer took journalist Michael Griffin to task for writing in The Times of London that the Taliban hated women and that resulted in making sex with other males popular in Afghanistan. On the eve of invasion, articles in the imperialist media centered on the claim that the Taliban was repressing same-sexuality.
Baer also challenged Griffin for flipping the argument in the same article by claiming that woman-hating appears to be "the product of a repressed homosexuality." Readers were spared theories about what is at the root of women loving women.
The claim that same-sex love arises from hatred of women or that misogyny is rooted in unexpressed homosexual desire pits sexes and sexualities that are both oppressed under patriarchal class rule against each other.
Most of the imperialist war-time media reports claim that many males in Afghanistan have sex with each other because of "extreme segregation of the sexes." Some of the same journalists did not attempt to reconcile the contradiction to their theory when they quoted Afghan males who are married to women and have sex with other males.
The "prison" theory of homosexuality is an old one. It assumes that heterosexuality is hard-wired and "natural" and that sex between males or females only takes place when the sexes are segregated.
Even the term "segregation" is judgmental. Every society has its own organization of the sexes. However, in pre-class societies, in which women were not ruled over by men, same-sex organization in collective households or hunting or rituals was not oppressive. On the whole, such societies made room for more sexes, sexualities and gender expressions, and socially accepted sex reassignment than is allowed for in the patriarchal organization of modern imperialist societies.
Dubbing Afghanistan as a "prison culture" for oppressed sexes and sexualities allowed post-invasion articles in the U.S. and British media to make it seem as though "gay liberation" was a collateral benefit of imperialist massive bombing raids, invasion and military occupation.
But imperialism has tried to lock down Afghanistan like a prison. The "don't ask, don't tell" Pentagon command didn't bring liberation from the Taliban. It brought the Taliban. It was the CIA and "Defense" Department that armed and trained the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and other counter-revolutionary forces to crush the 1978 Revolution—which was taking action, with women in the lead, to liberate Afghanistan from semi-feudal rule.
After the Pentagon hammered the country with bombs, and Special Forces battered down the doors of homes, U.S. and British journalists in Kandahar followed behind, demanding that peoples under siege and under occupation talk publicly about sexualities in their cultures.
While admitting, "There appears to be no shame or furtiveness about them, although when approached, they refuse to talk to a western journalist," Reid turned around and charged the Pashtun with "lying" because they did not confess to his definition of their sexualities.
Maura Reynolds quotes Mohammed Daud, a motorbike repair person, in her Los Angeles Times article. "These are hard questions you are asking," he says. "We don't usually talk about such things." (Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2002) Rambo gay bashing
The Pentagon brass—which carry out a crusade of terror against gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans GIs in its own ranks—gay-bashed Afghanistan, too.
Just days after the Pentagon began dropping a torrent of high-tech ordnance from the sky over Afghanistan, the Associated Press released worldwide a photograph of a gay-bashing epithet, "High Jack This F—-,"scrawled on one of the bombs on a fighter jet parked on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise.
The widely circulated photo created uproar among lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) organizations in the United States. However, all but one of these groups debated it from the standpoint of a hate-speech issue; they did not denounce the aerial bombardment and post-9/11 Pentagon military aggression against Afghanistan.
AP spokesperson Jack Stokes used the weapon of xenophobia to deflect anger, saying that the photographer "is not American, and that [epithet] meant nothing to him." Stokes didn't bother taking a stab at explaining how the photo got past everyone else in the process of selection and production.
At the Pentagon, Navy Rear Adm. Stephen Pietropaoli said the ship's crew had been told to edit "the spontaneous acts of penmanship by our sailors." He concluded, "We want to keep the message positive." Pietropaoli is referring to messages written on bombs about to drop on the population below.
The release of the photograph was very much in keeping with the menacing psy-op messages of U.S. and British imperialism. Political pundits, late-night-television comics, newspaper and Internet cartoons gay-baited and transgender-baited the Taliban and Osama bin Laden—including threats of anal rape. The threat of rape and sexual and gender humiliation is a primary weapon of CIA and mercenary interrogators of Muslim men and women.
The following quotes, vicious and offensive, are repeated here solely to spotlight the threat of violence that smolders in these reports, which are broadcast around the world.
In an article in The Scotsman on May 24, 2002, journalist Chris Stephen wrote, "In Bagram British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat—being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers."
British Royal Marine James Fletcher said: "They were more terrifying than the al-Qaeda. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village."
"It was hell," said Corporal Paul Richard.
"They put some music on and ask us to dance. I told them where to go," said Cpl. Richard. "Some of the guys turned tail and fled. It was hideous."
These quotes from military aggressors are a "homosexual panic defense," by which gay-bashers later claim in court that they were justified to torture and murder because the victim made sexual advances.
Even after the U.S. and British invaded Afghanistan—dominating the country militarily and crafting a legislative and political façade of independent government and law—the imperialists did not remove the law which they had said in pro-war agitation made same-sex love a capital offense.
Next: Same-sex rights: Dec. 18 New York Times pits Iraq and Iran.
Read parts 116 and 117 on Afghanistan and the entire Lavender & Red series at www.workers.org. Look for the Lavender & Red logo.
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org.
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Dec 18, 2007 11:51 PM
In the months after the autumn 2001 imperialist military invasion, a rash of gay-bashing and gay-baiting articles about Afghanistan appeared in the U.S. and British corporate media.
Many of these articles purported to analyze sexualities and genders and the organization of the sexes in Afghanistan.
In some of the coverage, "experts"—who are not Afghan—focused on sexual and social organization in Pashtun culture, the majority culture in Afghanistan, as though it was the only culture. Other non-Afghan "authorities" didn't differentiate between the diverse cultures in that ancient land, including the Durrani, Ghilzai, Wardak, Jaji, Tani, Jadran, Mangal, Khugiani, Kuchi, Safi, Mohmand and Shinwari; or Uzbek or Arab. Most reports did not differentiate between peoples of the lowlands and those in the mountain ranges. Or between peoples who lead nomadic lives, and those who dwell in crowded cities. And speculations only focused on same-sexuality between male-bodied individuals.
Colonialism and imperialism have always studied the cultures they sought to conquer and destroy. The job of embedded anthropologists is ultimately always to claim cultural superiority—the rotten plank on which white-supremacist ideologues stand.
Not a word coming from the imperialist occupiers about Afghan cultures has any validity. Some of the most bigoted theories these articles rehash and spew about same-sex love and gender expression, and their relation to women's oppression, do need to be exposed and combated.
Imperial anthropology
The organization of the sexes, socially accepted sexualities and gender expressions in Afghanistan are rooted in that country's ancient history, and are not the same as in the U.S. or Britain. The existence of other forms of social organization and sexual and gender expression challenges the biological determinists who argue that sexuality is genetically fixed in the human species.
Therefore, colonialists and imperialists have historically used racist characterizations like "obsessive sodomy," "promiscuity" and "unnatural sexuality, and gender-phobic baiting of oppressed males as "effeminate" or "hyper-masculine" to excuse the inexcusable: imperial domination and exploitation.
Brian James Baer, associate professor of Russian Literature and Translation at Kent State University, wrote about the bias in the spate of Western reporting about sexualities in Afghanistan in an article in the Gay and Lesbian Review, March-April 2003.
Baer noted, "Journalists repeatedly used Western concepts such as 'gay' and 'the closet' to characterize the Kandahar situation, thus imposing their notion of homosexuality as a minority identity." And, he added, "In their reporting Western journalists insisted on reducing relationships that are often long-term emotional bonds to a crude sexual bargain."
Baer pointed out: "Maura Reynolds of The LA Times noted that 'there is a strong streak of dandyism among Pashtun males. Many line their eyes with kohl, stain their fingernails with henna or walk about town in clumsy, high-heeled sandals.' But this equation makes sense only if we accept two Western assumptions: that homosexuality and effeminacy are automatically linked; and that the practices described are in fact 'effeminate.'"
Baer stressed: "Despite statistical evidence demonstrating that pedophilia in the West is more common among heterosexual men, the association of homosexuality and the sexual abuse of children remains prominent in Western anti-gay discourse, propelling 'save our children' campaigns to restrict their contact with gay adults. By constructing age-stratified homosexual activity in Kandahar as pedophilia, Western journalists provided themselves a link to the ever-popular issue of child abuse—especially hot, what with the unfolding scandal in the Catholic Church."
Baer took journalist Michael Griffin to task for writing in The Times of London that the Taliban hated women and that resulted in making sex with other males popular in Afghanistan. On the eve of invasion, articles in the imperialist media centered on the claim that the Taliban was repressing same-sexuality.
Baer also challenged Griffin for flipping the argument in the same article by claiming that woman-hating appears to be "the product of a repressed homosexuality." Readers were spared theories about what is at the root of women loving women.
The claim that same-sex love arises from hatred of women or that misogyny is rooted in unexpressed homosexual desire pits sexes and sexualities that are both oppressed under patriarchal class rule against each other.
Most of the imperialist war-time media reports claim that many males in Afghanistan have sex with each other because of "extreme segregation of the sexes." Some of the same journalists did not attempt to reconcile the contradiction to their theory when they quoted Afghan males who are married to women and have sex with other males.
The "prison" theory of homosexuality is an old one. It assumes that heterosexuality is hard-wired and "natural" and that sex between males or females only takes place when the sexes are segregated.
Even the term "segregation" is judgmental. Every society has its own organization of the sexes. However, in pre-class societies, in which women were not ruled over by men, same-sex organization in collective households or hunting or rituals was not oppressive. On the whole, such societies made room for more sexes, sexualities and gender expressions, and socially accepted sex reassignment than is allowed for in the patriarchal organization of modern imperialist societies.
Dubbing Afghanistan as a "prison culture" for oppressed sexes and sexualities allowed post-invasion articles in the U.S. and British media to make it seem as though "gay liberation" was a collateral benefit of imperialist massive bombing raids, invasion and military occupation.
But imperialism has tried to lock down Afghanistan like a prison. The "don't ask, don't tell" Pentagon command didn't bring liberation from the Taliban. It brought the Taliban. It was the CIA and "Defense" Department that armed and trained the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and other counter-revolutionary forces to crush the 1978 Revolution—which was taking action, with women in the lead, to liberate Afghanistan from semi-feudal rule.
After the Pentagon hammered the country with bombs, and Special Forces battered down the doors of homes, U.S. and British journalists in Kandahar followed behind, demanding that peoples under siege and under occupation talk publicly about sexualities in their cultures.
While admitting, "There appears to be no shame or furtiveness about them, although when approached, they refuse to talk to a western journalist," Reid turned around and charged the Pashtun with "lying" because they did not confess to his definition of their sexualities.
Maura Reynolds quotes Mohammed Daud, a motorbike repair person, in her Los Angeles Times article. "These are hard questions you are asking," he says. "We don't usually talk about such things." (Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2002) Rambo gay bashing
The Pentagon brass—which carry out a crusade of terror against gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans GIs in its own ranks—gay-bashed Afghanistan, too.
Just days after the Pentagon began dropping a torrent of high-tech ordnance from the sky over Afghanistan, the Associated Press released worldwide a photograph of a gay-bashing epithet, "High Jack This F—-,"scrawled on one of the bombs on a fighter jet parked on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise.
The widely circulated photo created uproar among lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) organizations in the United States. However, all but one of these groups debated it from the standpoint of a hate-speech issue; they did not denounce the aerial bombardment and post-9/11 Pentagon military aggression against Afghanistan.
AP spokesperson Jack Stokes used the weapon of xenophobia to deflect anger, saying that the photographer "is not American, and that [epithet] meant nothing to him." Stokes didn't bother taking a stab at explaining how the photo got past everyone else in the process of selection and production.
At the Pentagon, Navy Rear Adm. Stephen Pietropaoli said the ship's crew had been told to edit "the spontaneous acts of penmanship by our sailors." He concluded, "We want to keep the message positive." Pietropaoli is referring to messages written on bombs about to drop on the population below.
The release of the photograph was very much in keeping with the menacing psy-op messages of U.S. and British imperialism. Political pundits, late-night-television comics, newspaper and Internet cartoons gay-baited and transgender-baited the Taliban and Osama bin Laden—including threats of anal rape. The threat of rape and sexual and gender humiliation is a primary weapon of CIA and mercenary interrogators of Muslim men and women.
The following quotes, vicious and offensive, are repeated here solely to spotlight the threat of violence that smolders in these reports, which are broadcast around the world.
In an article in The Scotsman on May 24, 2002, journalist Chris Stephen wrote, "In Bagram British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat—being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers."
British Royal Marine James Fletcher said: "They were more terrifying than the al-Qaeda. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village."
"It was hell," said Corporal Paul Richard.
"They put some music on and ask us to dance. I told them where to go," said Cpl. Richard. "Some of the guys turned tail and fled. It was hideous."
These quotes from military aggressors are a "homosexual panic defense," by which gay-bashers later claim in court that they were justified to torture and murder because the victim made sexual advances.
Even after the U.S. and British invaded Afghanistan—dominating the country militarily and crafting a legislative and political façade of independent government and law—the imperialists did not remove the law which they had said in pro-war agitation made same-sex love a capital offense.
Next: Same-sex rights: Dec. 18 New York Times pits Iraq and Iran.
Read parts 116 and 117 on Afghanistan and the entire Lavender & Red series at www.workers.org. Look for the Lavender & Red logo.
Email: lfeinberg@workers.org.
Friday, December 14, 2007
For Afghan boys and men, kite flying is a way of life
Kite flying on Nadir Khan hill, a setting made popular by "The Kite Runner." (Max Becherer for the NYT)
For Afghan boys and men, kite flying is a way of life
By Kirk Semple
Friday, December 14, 2007
KABUL: The kites appear suddenly, whimsical flashes of color that kick above this beige landscape of relentless dust and desperation.
They reveal themselves, like dragonflies, at the most unexpected moments: through the window of a grim government office, beyond the smoke curling from the debris left by a suicide bomb, above the demoralizing gridlock of traffic and poverty. To a new arrival in this chaotic city of three million, they are unexpected and wonderfully incongruous.
Banned during the Taliban regime, kite flying is once again the main recreational escape for Afghan boys and some men. (It still remains largely off-limits to girls and women.) And with the American release Friday of the film "The Kite Runner," based on the best-selling novel of the same name, a much wider audience will be introduced to Afghan kite culture.
Following a kite's string to its source will most likely lead to an Afghan boy standing on top of his roof or in an empty lot, playing the line in deep concentration.
But this is not the stuff of idle afternoons or, as in American culture, carefree picnics in the park. This is war. The sole reason for kites, Afghans will tell you, is to fight them, and a single kite aloft is nothing but an unspoken challenge to a neighbor: Bring it on!
The objective of the kite fight is to slice the other flier's string with your own, sending the vanquished aircraft to the ground. Kite-fighting string is coated with a resin made of glue and finely crushed glass, which turns it into a blade.
The big kite-fighting day is Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, when thousands of boys and men flock to their rooftops and to the summits of the craggy hills that ring the city, carrying stacks of kites fashioned from bamboo and brightly colored tissue paper, and miles of sharp string on wooden spools.
On a recent Friday afternoon, there were scores of kites locked in duels above Tapeii-i-Maranjan, a high bluff in a southeastern neighborhood of the capital and the city's most popular kite-flying venue. All strata of Kabuli life - male Kabuli life, that is - were well-represented: Schoolchildren were fighting ministerial officials, doctors were battling day laborers. They fought in teams of two, with one person tweaking the string and the other handling the spool.
Packs of boys too poor to buy their own equipment were sprinting after defeated kites as they fell to Earth. They were the kite runners.
"We don't have, like, soccer, baseball or basketball," said Ahmad Roshazai, a translator at a medical clinic near Bagram who was flying kites on the hill with two of his brothers. He had cuts on his fingers from handling the blade-like fighting string. "We don't have any good places for that," he said. "No green places."
He added: "This is the only game we have every Friday. That's it."
The inveterate kite fighters speak of their craft as part science and part art. The key to excellence depends on a combination of factors, both empirical and ineffable: the flexibility and balance of the kites' bamboo frames, the strength of the glue binding the tissue-paper skin, the quality of the string, the evenness of the spool and, of course, the skill of the fliers and their ability to adjust to the vicissitudes of the wind.
Rashid Abedi, 25, a business administration student, described the satisfaction of killing another kite.
"It has a taste," he said, and he likened it to the thrill of horse riding or driving a car. "These things all the time have a special taste."
"Even if I am cut 40 or 50 times," he continued, "I will fly again because I know how the taste is."
Kite-fighting string in Afghanistan was traditionally homemade by a laborious process that involved coating cotton string with a concoction of crushed glass and glue. But factories in other more-developed kite-flying nations like Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaysia and China now churn out tens of thousands of spools of machine-made nylon fighting string that swamp the Afghan market.
Unlike in other Asian countries, like Pakistan and India, where kite-flying is wildly popular, Afghanistan's kite industry is still homespun and humble. There is still no Afghan kite federation, no national competitions, no marketing. While nearly all the string sold in Afghanistan is now factory-made and imported from other countries, most of the kites are still made by local artisans.
By consensus in Shor Bazaar, a block-long market of tiny kite shops in Kabul, the best kite maker in the capital is Noor Agha, a slender and vain 53-year-old man who lives in a squalid mud-and-stone hovel in a cemetery and is missing most of his teeth.
"Nobody can beat me, nobody can do what I'm doing," he said one recent afternoon as he sat barefooted on the carpeted floor of his workshop making a kite. "Even computers can't beat me."
His tools were arrayed before him: long stalks of bamboo and sheets of tissue paper; pliers and blades to cut and whittle the bamboo into long, flexible dowels for the frames; scissors to shape the tissue paper; and a bowl of glue.
"My prestige is higher than the interior minister," he said.
Noor Agha, like most Afghan kite makers, inherited the craft from his father, who made kites until he was too old to grip the tools.
Alone he can make about 40 kites a day, he said. But his business has gotten so large that he has enlisted the help of his two wives and several of his 11 children.
While most kites in Shor Bazaar sell for less than the equivalent of 30 cents, Noor Agha's kites can fetch upwards of $1. He sells custom-ordered kites to Afghan and foreign corporations and clients for much more, he said.
His local fame attracted the attention of the producers of "The Kite Runner," who hired him to train the film's child stars in the art of kite fighting and to make hundreds of kites used in the film.
For the kite-fliers of Kabul, the release of "The Kite Runner" will help to draw the culture of Afghan kite-flying out of the shadows of the much larger and more prosperous kite-flying nations in Asia.
It might also go some way toward explaining a particular Afghan kite ambush of an unsuspecting American kite-flier in Maryland in 2004.
That spring, Shoab Sharifi, a Colombia University student recently arrived from Kabul, was visiting Ocean City when he spotted several people flying kites on the beach. He bought a kite from a vendor and did what for him was the natural thing: He started to kite-fight.
"I thought people were doing it here, too," he said in a telephone interview from New York.
Sharifi went on: "There was a little girl, and I did the maneuvers and cut her string from below." As the wind carried the girl's kite into the ocean, and Shoab celebrated his first kite-fighting victory on American soil, the little girl broke down in tears.
When the lifeguards descended on him and accused him of "disturbing the peace," it dawned on Sharifi that he had stepped into a cultural rut between Afghanistan and the United States.
"In the United States, I think people try to avoid conflict," he concluded. "In Afghan culture everything is about fighting."
He added: "It was a very educational experience."
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Elderly Man Brings Children to Medics in Afghanistan - Picture of the Day
- An elderly man brought children to see the medics in Zarinkhel. Until the villages help stand against the Taliban, an American captain says, it will be hard to build roads or clinics, or to provide electricity. "I am confident we can make a difference down here," he says. "But it is going to take time."
Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Article: Under Taliban, Child Illnesses Fester Unchecked
Monday, December 10, 2007
The Hidden Half: The Women of Afghanistan - Picture of the Day
From Mother Jones magazine
Malalai Kakar became a police officer before the rise of the Taliban. It helped, she says, that her father and brother were also police officers, and her grandfather a tribal elder. When the Taliban rose to power, she fled to Pakistan. When she returned to work after they were ousted, she received death threats. To "protect her honor" and her family, the mother of six patrolled with her brother and wore a burka in the field. But she goes uncovered now, so as to "tell women about their rights."
Malalai Kakar became a police officer before the rise of the Taliban. It helped, she says, that her father and brother were also police officers, and her grandfather a tribal elder. When the Taliban rose to power, she fled to Pakistan. When she returned to work after they were ousted, she received death threats. To "protect her honor" and her family, the mother of six patrolled with her brother and wore a burka in the field. But she goes uncovered now, so as to "tell women about their rights."
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Afghan Boy Receives Toy from US Soldiers - Picture of the Day
An Afghan boy was another beneficiary of the soldier's relief effort, holding a toy and other items he had received.
Photo: Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press
Photo: Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press
Monday, November 26, 2007
US Military Delivers Aid to Afghan Villagers - Picture of the Day
United States soldiers with the 413th Civil Affairs Battalion at Bermel in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, delivered aid, including blankets, shoes, radios and toys, like the one held by this girl, to villagers.
Photo: Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press
Photo: Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press
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