Afghan-American pianist Omar Akram has won the Best New Age Album Award at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards for Echoes of Love, his fourth studio album released on June 05, 2012.
Akram’s win comes as the Afghan National Orchestra performs at three iconic venues in the US, including the Kennedy Centre and Carnegie Hall.
All 7, and we’ll watch them fall, They stand in the way of [… ?], And we will smoke them all, With an intellect and a savior-faire, No one in the whole universe, Will ever compare … And in the distance an army’s marching feet (1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4), But behold, we will watch them fall … And we will see a plague and a river of blood
Seven short stories about drones.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
3. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
4. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
7. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
Before leaving Doha for Kabul I was stopped by someone.
“Ali. I read there is a thriving limousine business in Kabul, is that true?”
Knowing that in Doha “limousine” can mean almost any non-city taxi I asked for clarification.
“Yes, limousines. Is it true?”
“I don’t know, probably …” I said while fighting the voice in my head that wanted to scream out “OKay, and…?”
Instead, I said “possibly. But if it is, it’s for the overly-lavish weddings people in Kabul throw now”. I hoped the conversation would end at that.
“Oh yeah? The weddings”, the other person’s eyes lit up.
“Yes, people have these very expensive weddings. Kabul is surrounded by giant wedding halls with light-up signs.”
To avoid the inevitable, I quickly added that “there have been a lot of stories about them.”
I saw that it was of little help, so I went onThe thing is these weddings actually cause a lot of problems for the young men and their families, because they are huge financial burdens and can greatly lower their prospects”.
I was cut off. “Weddings? Really?”
“Yes, but there have been many stories about …” cut off again.
“Write about that!”
OKay, I say, in hopes of ending the conversation.
I had no interest in writing yet another article about the weddings in today’s Kabul as some sort of symbol of how lavish life in Kabul can be.
Especially, because I knew that much of that was on borrowed money and would become a huge financial burden for the couple, but especially the groom.
Infatuation
On my last day in Kabul, I stopped by a tailor in Qalai Musa where I had previously dropped off the cloth for a piran tomban.
Speaking to Abdol Samad, the tailor, he told me about the burden his eldest son’s wedding had placed upon him.
“He fell in love in the tenth grade, but she had three suitors in the West”.
The girl, of a different ethnicity than Samad’s family, had cousins in Germany, Canada and Australia all courting her.
“I tried to deter him. He has plenty of beautiful of cousins of his own that would have easily accepted him.” But Samad’s son “couldn’t move on from his infatuation.”
Two years had passed and Samad’s son’s crush had not faded, so he did what he could to insure his son’s success.
“I went, bought candy and convinced the daughter’s family of my son’s merits”.
The candies, given as part of the khastgari process, saw Samad follow the traditions of Afghan courting. But he knew he had to do more.
“I even paid for the engagement at an expensive hotel.”
I pointed out that per Afghan tradition the girl’s family should have paid for the engagement, but Samad said “what could I do? He was in love. I had to find a way.”
The party was a success and soon plans were being for the wedding.
Tradition was tradition, and though he paid for the engagement, Samad knew he was still bound by custom to pay for the wedding celebration.
It was another lavish party in “a hotel”, Samad said.
To finance that party, Samad, who had spent only a few months in the Pakistani city of Karachi as a refugee, had to go around borrowing money until he collected the $32,000 needed to pay for the nuptials.
“I don’t have land. I have lived in Afghanistan for over 50 years, no matter what happened, I left only once, yet I still don’t have a place to call my own”, he said.
Though, Kabul real estate has experienced several booms and busts in the course of the three-decade-long conflict, Samad said he has always lived between the Shahr-e-Naw and Qalai Faetuallah neighbourhoods of the Afghan capital.
It is the knowledge of the city Samad has gained throughout the years that he credits with what he says is the “low rent” he pays in Kabul. He credits that low rent as a reason for being able to pay for as much of his son’s wedding as he did.
Still, he knew he had to prove his son’s worth to his would-be in-laws.
“I had to show them my son’s wedding would be no less than any other in Kabul.”
To prove his son’s worth, Samad went into debt.
Now, several years later, he still owes $12,000 on the cost of the nuptials.
After years of trying, Samad said his son was able to find a job.
“He makes $500 a month. In Kabul it’s not a lot, but finally I told him, ‘I have gotten you this far. I told you I would get your wife, now please help alleviate the burden this money has placed on me”. His son agreed.
“Schoolgirl Shot to Death in Kapisa“, read the headline of a December 04 Tolo news story about Anisa, a volunteer for a polio vaccination campaign in the eastern province.
Since that report on Tuesday, the Afghan social media sphere has been in uproar over the shooting.
With an emphasis on the “schoolgirl” in the headline, some began to compare Anisa to Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl shot in the head by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.
There were even references to Anisa as a “girl” who was killed, in part, for going to school.
One female MP suggested naming a school after Anisa.
But, soon after that initial report, the story of a “girl” killed by the “Taliban” began to change.
There were reports that she may have been a 25-year-old health worker who was still in the tenth grade because she worked while studying.
Both a provincial council member and Kapisa’s head of women‘s affairs cited the Taliban as the culprits in the shooting.
However, a Guardian report later contradicted the head of women’s affairs account reported by Tolo.
On December 05, Saifoorah Kohistani was paraphrased by the British paper as saying there were no Taliban in Anisa’s area.
For their part, the group denied any involvement in the death of Anisa.
There were also several reports claiming Anisa was targeted for her work on polio eradication, which “the Taliban has opposed … in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan”, wrote Tolo.
The Daily Mail also referenced Anisa’s involvement with the polio programme as “one reason why she was targeted”.
Though the Taliban in Pakistan, a separate entity, has been opposed to polio vaccination programmes, the Afghan Taliban have in fact stated they are in support of polio campaigns as far back as 2007.
The vast majority of the 31 new polio cases reported in the Central Asian nation in 2009 were in Helmand and Kandahar, both provinces with high Taliban presence.
Local police go on to say that Anisa was caught in crossfire, an account which Aimal Faizi, spokesman to Hamid Karzai, referenced online.
Josh Shahryar, an Afghan journalist, lamented how much the circumstances seemed to have changed in the two days since the Tolo report.
“This is just a massive failure on the part of everyone involved: government – central and provincial – news organisations, human rights organisations … It’s been days and we still don’t know how old she was [or] how she was really killed”, he said.
In light of these conflicting reports, the government of Hamid Karzai will embark on a four-day investigation into the death.
However, in blogs and news reports, the narrative of the “schoolgirl” targeted by the “Taliban” prevails. Why?
Surely, Anisa’s story, even if she was yet another Afghan caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, would still be tragic.
If it does turn out to be Taliban, Anisa’s shooting would be seen as yet another example of the group going back on their statements that they would not target Afghan civilians or health workers.
If proven to truly be a Taliban attack, Anisa’s death would join the June attack on hotel guests in Lake Qargha as another example of the group blatantly going against their statements that they would only target foreigners and their Afghan collaborators.
Even if Anisa was caught in the crossfire her death would give a name to the thousands of Afghans whose deaths in a 33-year-long conflict go unnoticed.
For Afghans the deaths of family and friends caught in the line of fire are familiar occurrences, but for the media, giving even one of them a name would highlight the direct impacts of the violence on daily life in Afghanistan.
Anisa’s death also brought together activists to demand public attention to violence against women in Afghanistan.
Yet, the spectre of the media coverage surrounding the shooting of Malala Yousafzai – a girl who had for years publicly fought for girl’s education in neighbouring Pakistan and kept a blog for the BBC – still seemed to haunt some Afghans online.
After all, the shooting of a 15-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl made headlines the world over and even put her ahead of Barack Obama, US president, in Foreign Policy’s top 100 global thinkers of 2012 list.
So Afghans quickly began engaging the weak tit-for-tat comparisons between Afghanistan and Pakistan, née ‘Af-Pak‘ that the media has been lazily relying on since the phrase was first coined in 2009.
In truth, though, we don’t need an “Afghan Malala”, rather, what we need are clear facts to convey the true situation on-the-ground to the world at-large.
Trying to frame the unclear narrative surrounding the death of a female Afghan polio worker to bear a resemblance to the shooting of Malala does little to show the outside world the complex threats still facing Afghanistan.
In fact, even tenuous comparisons of Anisa and Malala without clear evidence to prove how the polio volunteer died, further invite lazy and inaccurate analogies between Afghanistan and Pakistan favoured by the West and do little to address the complex challenges facing the Afghan people.
As Afghans wanting to honour Anisa’s memory we should wait to tell her full, proper story.
For Afghanistan, like any other nation, a complete story that provides the proper context, is much more powerful than a sensational one that engages in half-formed analogies.
On September 09, 2001, Fahim Dashty reported to the northeast Afghanistan headquarters of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s United Front resistance movement. The young journalist hoped the lens of his camera would capture the thoughtful, charismatic Mujhaideen leader. Dashty and the man the Wall Street Journal called “the Afghan who won the Cold War” were separated by only a few feet in that Takhar province room, yet what neither could have known was that they were moments away from an event that would change the course and iconography of conflict in Afghanistan. As part of a media company that set out to document Massoud’s resistance to the Taliban, Dashty was in Khvajeh Baha od Din to “collect as many images of the chief” as he could. While Dashty was filming, two men claiming to be Moroccan journalists entered the room for a pre-arranged interview. Massoud, fluent in Persian and French, regularly gave interviews to foreign media. Dashty figured this would be just another interview. One of the Moroccan journalists asks Massoud questions in English. As Massood Khalili, an advisor in the United Front movement, began to translate, Dashty saw the cameraman push a button. Immediately there was a boom as smoke and flames rose from the spot where the “cameraman” stood. The Moroccan journalists were Tunisian assassins. For Dashty, everything that followed was a series of jump cuts – a plane headed to neighbouring Tajikistan, a hospital in Dushanbe, his brother’s house in the Tajik capital. National hero It was 12 days later that Dashty heard his long-time friend’s fate. “He didn’t survive the suicide bomb”. A couple of days after the assassination was September 11. A few weeks after that, fighters from Massoud’s army fought alongside US troops to oust the Taliban. The interim government of Hamid Karzai declared Massoud “national hero of Afghanistan.” Since then, the week of Massoud’s death has become a national holiday honouring all of the martyrs of Afghanistan’s decades-long conflict. For the last 11 years, images of the “Lion of Panjshir” have been posted around the Afghan capital – a billboard high atop a mountain overlooking the city, a square in one of Kabul’s busiest intersections, a giant portrait on the exterior of Kabul international’s arrivals terminal, and thousands of smaller pictures in the cars, homes and businesses of the city’s residents. To Omar Samad, Afghanistan expert at the US Institute of Peace, the pervasiveness of Massoud’s image is in contradiction to the humility exhibited in his life. “Ironically, as a modest person … he did not like to be called a ‘hero’ or, even, have his pictures displayed”, Samad said. For some though, Massoud’s government-sanctioned iconic status in general, is troubling, particularly in Kabul. Unlike other political and wartime figures, Massoud’s heroic status is as much a government orchestration as it is popular sentiment. Good Strategist “He was a good strategist,” Islamuddin, a Hezb-e-Islami deputy said. The victims of Massoud’s strategic competence were the people of Kabul and its surrounding areas, the deputy of the Gulbuddin Hemketyar-led faction seen as the chief rivals of Massoud’s Jamiat-e-Islami, said. In an interview, Islamuddin paints a very different picture of Massoud. Asserting dominance In place of a commander known to recite poetry and play football with his troops, Islamuddin saw a man of arrogance desperate to assert his dominance. He attributes these personality traits and political motivations to Kabul becoming a violent battleground in the 1990s. “If Massoud was a good person then who killed thousands of Pashtuns, Hazaras and Uzbeks”, Islamuddin asks of the Tajik leader’s legacy. Islamuddin accuses Massoud of taking over Kabul in the early 1990s but not affording people the “respect and roles they deserved”. But criticisms of Massoud are not limited to political enemies who fought his forces during the civil war between 1992 and 1995. “Haroon”, a lifelong resident of the western neighbourhood of Karteh Seh said that for those caught in the crossfire of the fight for the capital; images of Massoud can evoke memories of times under siege. “For five years, anything that moved would be shot at”, says the 32-year-old ethnic Pashtun. This forced residents in areas visible from TV Mountain, the one point from which Kabul’s west and east sides could be seen with relative ease, to temper their movements. Massoud, he said, was a man who “loved mountains”, both physically and strategically. “People would walk behind walls. Where there were no walls, openings would be built in houses and in the ground”, Haroon recounted. Anything to provide cover from the bullets and bombs of Massoud’s forces. All of this, says Islamuddin, can be traced back to Massoud himself. “We fought. We killed. But it was all because of Massoud”, he says. But in separate interviews, both Abdullah Abdullah, former foreign minister, and Dashty point to a 10-minute conversation between Massoud and Hezb-e-Islami leader Hekmetyar as the catalyst for the fighting in Kabul. In that conversation Massoud “begs Hekmetyar not to send troops into Kabul, to instead find a political solution”, recounts Abdullah. But, Hekmetyar “insisted on entering Kabul”, says Dashty. Forgotten martyrs For others though, what is officially known as martyr’s week is in fact a celebration and glorification of Massoud. To a former high ranking administration official who asked not to be identified because of his affiliation with mujahideen regimes, all of the images of Massoud belie the notion of a martyr’s week. “Did you see television today? It’s all about him”, the official said. “What he did do that we didn’t? It wasn’t just him. Who here isn’t a martyr in some way?” says the official who had previously spent many years fundraising for the Mujhaideen, including Ahmad Shah Massoud. In a nation where over a million people died in three decades of conflict what national martyr week fails to properly document are the names and images of ordinary families who constantly found themselves in the crossfire of various factions, Massoud’s included. To his supporters though, Massoud was a humble and astute leader who devoted 30 of his 48 years to defending Afghanistan. Selfless Abdullah says Massoud’s character was very different from other Mujhaideen leaders. Abdullah, a medical doctor by trade, often heard stories of Massoud while working at a refugee hospital in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar in 1983. Massoud quickly gained a reputation for selflessness among refugees and Mujhaideen alike. For Dashty, who suffered burns to two-thirds of his body in the suicide bombing that killed Massoud, the 30 years he “sacrificed” as a freedom fighter is the ultimate example of Massoud’s selflessness. In time, he says, people will recognise Massoud’s place in Afghan history. “Just like Che Guevarra. Just like Mahatma Gandhi”. Samad, the USIP Afghanistan expert, says those who criticise Massoud and accuse him of warlordism fail to realise that he “matured and changed over time from a young inexperienced Islamic revolutionary to a poised and thoughtful moderate patriot who believed in democratic values”. To Abdullah, Massoud worked tirelessly to defend not only the people’s lives, but also their ideals. “He is a hero who led a clear struggle for the values of the people” and little else, says Abdullah. For this selflessness and devotion to uniting the Afghan people despite two decades of conflict, Abdullah says “even more than billboards here and there, he is in the hearts of people”.
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