Afghan girls attend class at a camp for the displaced in Kabul in October 2011.
Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Afghan women have gained the rights to vote, work, and pursue an education. They’re running for president, they’ve claimed seats in parliament, and they’ve even competed in the Olympics. But international troops are due to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and the Taliban threatens to step into the vacuum they’ll leave behind. Already, writes Amie Ferris-Rotman in an FP dispatch from Kabul, many of the women who’ve come so far — journalists, politicians, and rights workers, among others — have begun to retreat from public life out of fear for their safety. “Once the Americans go we’ll have to sit at home again, bored,” First Lieutenant Zakiya Mohammadi tells Ferris-Rotman.
The “last decade produced a league of knowledgeable, determined young women for whom the Taliban’s return is anathema,” Ferris-Rotman writes. Here’s a look at women across post-Taliban Afghanistan — from the campaign trail to the basketball court to the operating room.
Harry, or Captain Wales as he is known has given a frank discussion of his time in Afghanistan:
Prince Harry should be commended rather than criticised for his unfiltered reflections on his 20-week tour of duty in Afghanistan as a co-pilot gunner on an Apache helicopter.
Rather than hide behind euphemisms or portray the mission as a high-minded, essentially humanitarian exercise, Harry (who goes by the nom de guerre Captain Wales) freely admitted he’d killed Taleban fighters and likened his battlefront experiences to playing video games.
While his comments have been predictably deplored, I’d suggest he performed a public service by reminding us of the brutal reality of war-time soldiering.
He’s a professional soldier, as opposed to what many monarchists would prefer: a pretend soldier acquiring gold braid and giveaway ribbons to go with his other entitlements, while leaving the nasty, dangerous job of engaging the enemy to commoners. And a soldier’s job is to kill or facilitate the killing of the enemy.
Correct…it is the job of soliders, or in this case combat helicopter operators to make sure as many bad bastards die hard as possible in order to keep our guys safe.
Notwithstanding the apparent desire of successive governments to transform our military into a sort of uniformed branch of Volunteer Service Abroad, Harry has reminded us that its core function is fighting.
Of course the enemy sees their job in a similar light, hence the saying “kill or be killed” or, as Harry put it, “take a life to save a life”.
Judging by the reaction to the deaths of five of our soldiers in Afghanistan last August, some Kiwis appear to believe that being killed while on active service in a war zone is like being flattened by a runaway hay bale while going for a walk in the countryside: a desperately unfortunate freak occurrence.
The other widely expressed view was that our soldiers shouldn’t have died because they shouldn’t have been in Afghanistan in the first place. That raises the question of what would constitute a just war, a cause worth sacrificing lives for. There are those who give the impression that they would object to lives being put on the line for anything short of resisting an invasion by P-crazed cannibals from outer space.
This mindset reduces the armed forces to a purely ornamental function.
I can’t believe I am reading this in the Herald..but there it is, a frank account of the panty-waist attitude of the hand-wringers…and the reality of war from Prince Harry.
It has to be said that Harry’s reference to video games included an unfortunate choice of words: “It’s a joy for me because I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think that I’m probably quite useful.”
Well, quite, your highness, although perhaps “joy” is ever so slightly unseemly in this context.
But again, in his gauche way, Harry has put his thumb on it: the further removed from the death scene the killer is, the more warfare becomes virtual combat.
There is joy in a job well done.
BONUS VIDEO: 2 Apaches Engage a Group of Taliban fighters setting up to ambush a U.S. special forces patrol.
Remind me again how we should be tolerant of Islam:
An influential Saudi cleric has called for the gang rape of Syrian women to give “warriors of Islam” fighting in the war-torn country some sexual relief.
Muhammed al-Arifi, described by news site AlterNet which carried the news as a “leading jihadist religious figure”, says militants should enter short-term “intercourse marriages” of only a few hours “in order to give each fighter a turn”.
Any females over the age of 14 are considered eligible “brides”, says al-Arifi, who claims it has “been two years since the jihadists were last with women”, according to a report. His fatwa would “boost the determination of the mujahideen in Syria and is considered a duty to enter paradise for those females who enter such marriages”.
PRINCE Harry has killed his first Taliban commander, The Sun can reveal.
The 28-year-old gunship co-pilot was called on to unleash a missile strike to eliminate a senior terror leader.
Harry has proved a massive hit with comrades in Helmand, Afghanistan, who have nicknamed him Big H.
A defence insider said: “Big H is a legend.
“We were on patrol and the Apache helicopters were called in. We heard this posh voice come over the radio and knew it was Big H. They were tracking a Taliban leader — he was commander level.
“The Apache then let off some Hellfire missiles and its 30mm cannon and ‘boom’. It was Big H all the way.”
The Sun understands the decisive strike occurred in late October during a partnered patrol with Afghan troops hunting the Taliban chief.
Gunship co-pilot Harry is on tour in Helmand and has been flying daily combat missions helping “troops in contact” — the code given when ground forces are engaged by enemy fighters.
There is nothing better than watching supposed allies tear each other apart publicly. Witness the green on green bitch fight happening in the US over one of Google’s solar plants. This is a case of the Green Taliban taking on the Green Illuminati:
Aerial view north of Ivanpah Solar showing all three solar fields with heliostat installation complete in Solar Field One in the foreground, 27 October 2012
One big problem with renewable energy projects is that they have to go somewhere. They have to occupy a part of the very environment that their proponents are often trying to save.
Photographer Jamey Stillings beautifully captures this tension in his images of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS). Located in Southern California’s Mojave Desert, the plant aims to eventually be the largest solar thermal power plant in the world – making enough electricity to run 140,000 homes all by focusing the sun’s energy to create steam.
Problem is, the system is located smack in the middle of the threatened desert tortoise habitat and the companies that built the system have already had to allocate $56 million to care for and relocate these ground dwellers. At least one major environmental group has argued the plant should have never been built on its current location.
If it isn’t tortoises it is bloody snails. Guess how many tortoises have been saved for $56 million?
To date Hunter says 144 tortoises (77 adults, 67 juveniles) have been found on site and all 77 adults have been relocated.
“Caring for the tortoise is something we take very seriously,” she says.
On a conservative analysis, they are proposing at least 20 new transport taxes, and more than 50 new taxes and charges across the board.
The next time the Greens try to get a cheap shot in the mainstream media by complaining about price rises, real journalists might like to consider this extensive (and sometimes frightening) list.
It used to be that we complained about evangelists and called then god botherers…they seem innocuous in comparison to the army of green evangelists, whom I call the Green Taliban, who are proselytising their message.
Charles Dickens must be turning in his grave. We have a government that tells struggling families here at home to buck up and shell out to build wind farms in the developing world. Here, there are mothers worrying about stretching a very limited budget to cover Christmas lunch, with turkey and trimmings, and presents that don’t all come from PoundLand; but the Coalition doesn’t worry about the hardships under its nose, concentrating instead on those who suffer in distant lands. Dickens would have recognised this instantly as Mrs Jellaby charity – the mother in Bleak House who is obsessed with charitable work for the missions, while her own brood is starving in her kitchen.
How did this tragicomic state of affairs come to pass? The Tories (some of them at least) got not God but Green.
Fanatical, self-righteous, and bent on evangelisation, the green religion stalks the land. Its priests preach apocalyptic visions of a future so bleak that ordinary mortals fear for our lives – even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Now, the green lobby want to spread the word to the Third World. Yes, let there be wind turbines across Africa, and low carbon farming across Colombia! And let it all happen with the British taxpayer footing the bill – to the tune of £2 billion!
Normally, North Korea‘s official state news agency is the place to go for reports ranging from the reclusive totalitarian state’s unparalleled scientific achievements to the limitless love which its inhabitants reserve for their successive leaders.
Or rather, the report says that they have “recently reconfirmed” the lair of one of the unicorns ridden by the ancient Korean King Tongmyong, founder of a kingdom which ruled parts of China and the Korean peninsula from the the 3rd century BC to 7th century AD.
The KCNA goes on to state that the location happens to be 200 metres from a temple in the North Korean capital, adding: “A rectangular rock carved with words “Unicorn Lair” stands in front of the lair.”
“The carved words are believed to date back to the period of Koryo Kingdom (918-1392),” says the report.
Somewhere out there, Mullah Omar must be shaking his head.
In a Dilbert-esque faux pax, a Taliban spokesperson sent out a routine email last week with one notable difference.He publicly CC’d the names of everyone on his mailing list.
The names were disclosed in an email by Qari Yousuf Ahmedi, an official Taliban spokesperson, on Saturday. The email was a press release he received from the account of Zabihullah Mujahid, another Taliban spokesperson. Ahmedi then forwarded Mujahid’s email to the full Taliban mailing list, but rather than using the BCC function, or blind carbon copy which keeps email addresses private, Ahmedi made the addresses public.
“Taliban have included all 4 of my email addresses on the leaked distribution list,” tweeted journalistMustafa Kazemi, a prolific Kabul-based tweeter with more than 9,500 followers. “Quite reassuring to my safety.”
The list, made up of more than 400 recipients, consists mostly of journalists, but also includes an address appearing to belong to a provincial governor, an Afghan legislator, several academics and activists, an l Afghan consultative committee, and a representative of Gulbuddein Hekmatar, an Afghan warlord whose outlawed group Hezb-i-Islami is believed to be behind several attacks against coalition troops.
The Taliban routinely send out press releases to their mailing list, often claiming responsibility for attacks against Afghan and coalition targets. They are known for exaggerating casualty figures.
In recent weeks, the Taliban have increased the number of emails they send out, growing from just a handful every week, to several per day. Most of the emails are sent from Ahmedi’s account. The increase coincides with the end of the annual Taliban fighting season, prompting one local journalist to joke, “I guess when fighting season ends, emailing season begins.”
The blog started Saturday by having a look at a number of Christchurch 
