Jerome Starkey

Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi, 36, at her home in Kabul

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:40:23 +0430

Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi, 36, at her home in Kabul

The woman who wants to rule Afghanistan

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:36:08 +0430

The woman who wants to rule Afghanistan:

Fawzia Koofi has survived ambushes and assassination attempt. Yet still she wants to become the first female president of Afghanistan

The Times Magazine
By Jerome Starkey in Kabul

There is a large, imposing picture of Fawzia Koofi hanging on her sitting room wall. Dressed in a leopard-print headscarf, she stands next to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai. Barely an inch apart, their hands clasped demurely in front of them, they stare straight out of the frame with a formality more reminiscent of Pilgrim Fathers than modern-day politicians.

“That was when we were friends,” says Koofi. “We’re not friends any more.”

Koofi is the 19th of her father’s 23 children. Her mother was the second of her father’s seven wives and they lived in one of the most remote backwaters of Afghanistan, where Koofi’s father used to beat her mother if the rice wasn’t cooked correctly. Koofi would grow up to be the first woman in her family to learn to read and become among the first women to be elected to Afghanistan’s parliament in 2005, where she was also appointed deputy speaker. Last year she helped pass a law that criminalised rape in Afghanistan’s penal code for the first time. In many ways she is the embodiment of women’s emancipation, and now, she wants to be president.

“I’m not running just for the sake of running,” Koofi says. “This country needs a change.”

Now 36, she is the heir of a pseudo-aristocratic political dynasty which, in just two generations, has served under the Shahs, the communists, the Mujahidin and now Karzai. Two of her brothers were police commanders. She had to cajole them to let her go to school, to permit her to stand for parliament, and it took her four years and $20,000 to persuade them to agree to her marriage to the man of her choice. One is retired and the other now lives in Denmark, but she is still dependent on their support to maintain her political power base.

“She’s a feminist, she would call herself that,” says a European friend. “But at the same time she is a conservative village girl from the wilds of one of the most conservative parts of the country.”

She bursts into her sitting room 20 minutes late for her interview, all smiles and apologies. “Traditional politics,” she says by way of explanation. “It’s exhausting. Mornings at home are always busy.” She usually wakes at 5am and works on her computer for a few hours, before the petitioners from her native Badakhshan province start knocking on her door. Around 11am she goes to parliament.

She is wearing a chunky grey cardigan and a plain blue headscarf, which slips to reveal dark, damp hair, because she has squeezed in a shower between the petitioners and our meeting. She is effortlessly pretty, without make-up, but many of her own countrymen would think her wet hair indecent. There is a fine balance to be struck in this oppressively patriarchal country.

Afghanistan’s leaders are, she says, “entirely selfish”, treating their country like a fiefdom, but she concedes that “clever politicians need to work within the framework” to effect lasting change. She admires outspoken women – one of her colleagues was thrown out of parliament for calling the warlords donkeys – but she does not want to join her in the political wilderness.

Koofi might have her sights on the presidency one day, but the 6ft square picture of President Karzai still hangs above the television at one end of the L-shaped room, like a feudal foghorn reminding her guests of their proximity to power. She is clearly playing the game.

Her two-storey house is on a main road opposite two barber’s shops and a small tailor, in a fairly affluent neighbourhood close to the parliament building. There are snowcapped mountains visible in the distance and a sea container on the pavement outside her gate, which houses a couple of armed policemen who protect her. This is normal in Afghanistan. In fact, compared with the private armies, bulletproof convoys and 30ft blast walls that some politicians seem to adopt for prestige as much as protection, Koofi’s security is modest. She has survived assassination attempts, including one ambush outside Kabul that killed two of her police escorts while she hid in the car with one of her daughters.

On a separate occasion, men wearing the uniforms of Afghanistan’s intelligence service forced her car off the road, dragged her driver into the dirt and started beating him, while she frantically dialled the Ministry of the Interior and screamed that she was being kidnapped. When she demanded to know who her attackers were, they just laughed before eventually letting her go.

“She is living under the constant strain and fear of death,” says Nadene Ghouri, a British journalist who collaborated with Koofi on her forthcoming autobiography, The Favored Daughter, and who was with her in the car at the time. “It’s not only the Taleban. There are elements within the Government that would like to see her shut up.”

Koofi’s sitting room is filled with throne-like sofas, all decorated in spray-painted gold. Matching coffee tables are adorned with lace-covered tissue boxes. It is a typical reception room for a dignitary in Kabul, designed to seat large numbers of guests for semi-formal audiences. There are no obvious feminine touches, which might be because Koofi likes to think of herself as “a politician first and a woman second”.

Her 18-year-old nephew, Najibullah, carries in a small electric bar-heater and plugs it in to relieve the winter chill. He is also from Badakhshan, from a small village in a remote district ten days’ walk from the provincial capital.

An ornamental horsewhip hangs on the wall, denoting Afghanistan’s national sport, buzkashi, in which horsemen wrestle at full gallop for the carcass of a headless goat, and a small pair of horns, from a rare Marco Polo sheep, sits on top of the television. “They were a gift,” Koofi explains. “I’m not sure how they got hold of them.”

The only other picture is at the far end of the room, on top of a large glass display cabinet which houses eight separate tea services, complete with pots, cups and matching saucers, edged, of course, in varying amounts of gold. The black-and-white photograph shows a handsome young man in a dark suit and tie. He has a neatly trimmed beard and his top lip is shaved in a traditional sign of Islamic devotion. He wears a lambskin hat, like President Karzai, and he too stares resolutely out of the frame.

It is Wakil Abdul Rahman, Koofi’s father, who was elected to Afghanistan’s parliament in 1965, under King Zahir Shah. He stayed on after a bloodless coup in 1973 installed the king’s cousin, Daoud Khan, and again after Daoud and most of his family were killed in 1978 and Hafizullah Amin seized power.

Koofi’s father was killed later that year trying to negotiate with members of a burgeoning Islamic insurgency in the hills of his native Badakhshan. According to Koofi family lore, Rahman was riding into the mountains unarmed, on a magnificent white steed, to negotiate a peace deal when they ambushed him. Three men blocked his path and one of them shouted, “So it is you, Wakil Abdul Rahman. I have waited a long time for this chance to kill you.” He wounded Rahman’s horse, more shots rang out from the mountain, and the government entourage fled. Rahman was captured and executed two days later, and the insurgents refused to return his body. It was only when Koofi’s aunt, her father’s sister, rallied a group of relatives to walk up into the wilderness that he was finally brought home.

Koofi was 3 when her father was killed. In all that time she remembers him speaking to her only once – and that was to tell her to go away. He is the man who beat Koofi’s mother so badly that she contemplated leaving him, but ultimately she decided to endure the violence because she couldn’t face the prospect of leaving her children behind.

“I am a mix of all of my mother’s strengths,” Koofi says. “With all of the problems she suffered, you would never see the smile leave her face.”

Their family home in Koof district, from which they get their name, was the only building with a lavatory. It was a simple long drop yet her father referred to his private rooms as “the Paris suite”, without any apparent irony, because a man from Kabul had decorated them with murals.

It is his legacy, and specifically his “empire of allies, networks and connections” that has proved so important for mobilising voters to keep Koofi in parliament. She was re-elected in 2010 and her sister, Qandigul, was also elected – further entrenching the family dynasty.

Koofi says her father used all but one of his seven marriages to cement political alliances with rival clans in neighbouring districts. Only his sixth wife was apolitical – and she was chosen for her carpet-weaving skills. Thus Rahman’s portrait on her sitting room wall reminds guests that their hostess is, in her own words, “high-born”.

In fact, Koofi was born in a field, in the mountains, where her mother had led their family’s livestock to graze on summer pastures. Her mother had lost her husband’s affections to a newer wife and, when she produced a daughter instead of a coveted son, she left the baby in the sun all day, expecting she would die.

This is just one of the anecdotes of everyday brutality recounted in Koofi’s autobiography. In the book, the conflict between the conservative village girl and reformist politician is even more apparent.

The fact that she is pictured barefaced on the cover of a book to be published around the world puts her at the vanguard of female emancipation and achievement in Afghanistan. Yet the story of her life – which spans Afghanistan’s descent into chaos over the past 30 years and includes personal tragedy at almost every turn – reads as if it has been censored by the invisible hand of Afghan custom.

There is no explanation of how her family, and particularly her brothers, who were police commanders, made their money. She writes adoringly of the father she barely knew, and explains that his violence was “normal” and suggests her mother interpreted it as a sign of love.

She describes one night when insurgents broke into their home and beat her sister-in-law until dawn. The implication is that to say anything more specific about the ordeal would further dishonour the family.

Nor is there any explanation as to why an unidentified assassin would creep into their house, on a night when an older brother had dismissed all the security guards, go straight to her brother Muqim’s room and empty 30 bullets from a Kalashnikov magazine into his sleeping body.

“It was a political killing,” she says, unconvincingly, when we meet. All that emerges subsequently is that Muqim was in love and writing hopeless love letters to a university girl, but Koofi says all the letters were returned unopened, because that was the only proper thing for the girl to do.

Soon after her father was killed, she recounts how one of his seven wives remarried a shepherd who had recently returned from Iran. In the book she describes how this man refused to feed and clothe his new wife’s children.

“When my mother visited a few weeks later, she found Ennayat, Nazi and Hedayat crying outside in the yard. They were not allowed into the warmth of the house and were hungry and dirty,” Koofi writes. Her mother, Bibi jan, immediately rescued the three eldest, “but the young woman refused to give up her baby, Safiullah, and my mother left without him. A few days later he became feverish and was left to die without food or comfort. We heard that he cried alone for hours, his little face covered with flies, while this man would not allow his mother even to pick him up. He died a lonely, horrible death.”

Amazingly, Koofi spares this man her scorn. Domestic violence, child abuse and in this instance, murder, are recorded but rarely condemned. “Of course I don’t condone my father for beating my mother,” she writes. “But in those days it was the norm.” He may have torn chunks out of her mother’s hair and bloodied her face with a ladle, but later in the book she describes him as a “man of peace”.

“I was a child,” she says when we meet, as if to explain this uncomfortable acceptance of his violence. “He was a tough man. He was tough with his wives. If I saw the same things now, I don’t know how I would react.”

There is more concern when she recounts how her 17-year-old older brother married a 12-year-old girl and began a “full sexual relationship immediately”.

“My sister-in-law was still such a child that my mother had to help bathe her and dress her in the mornings,” she writes, imagining her own young daughters, Shuhra, 12, and Shaharzad, 13, enduring a similar ordeal. “I wonder what my mother felt on seeing the injuries inflicted on this poor girl by her own son? Did she recoil in horror at the injustice of it all?”

But it is only later, when faced with the full depravities of a civil war – virgin daughters raped and shot in front of their mothers and women’s breasts hacked off – that she writes, “In a country where morality is everything, it was hard to believe we had descended into such evils.”

In this country of hers, “where morality is everything”, only the anonymity of war affords her the space to speak honestly, which is something she either cannot or will not do when it comes to her own family. Perhaps that is because she knows that both her life, and her political career, rest on the perception of her honour, and her honour is the same as that of her family.

Nonetheless, her political enemies circulate unfounded rumours of sexual impropriety to try to impugn her. Her husband, Hamid, succumbed to tuberculosis in 2003. Koofi first set eyes on him when her mother was dying in hospital, but her brothers disapproved of the match because they wanted her to marry someone more important. It was only four years later – in a brief pause during a retreat from Kabul, as the Taleban advanced – that they finally accepted his proposal on Koofi’s behalf, along with a $20,000 dowry.

Koofi has never remarried. But rumours have circulated that she has a boyfriend in Kabul and a rich backer in Dubai. There is no evidence, but in Afghanistan, sometimes hearsay is enough.

“She lives a nun-like existence,” says Ghouri, who has stayed in her house. “She is a bit like Elizabeth I in the sense that she always has to be beyond blame.”

She is still bombarded with marriage proposals from fellow power brokers. She says most are seeking a dynastic union, and she makes enemies of old allies every time she turns men away. She says she is unlikely to remarry because she doesn’t think she will ever find someone like her husband, who was so supportive of her work.

It would be truly revolutionary if a woman were elected president in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is no stranger to revolutions. But for all her extraordinary achievements, Koofi is not a revolutionary. She is a conservative reformist who has transformed her own family, and if fate had conspired differently, if her father had survived and she had never gone to school, she would probably be a 36-year-old grandmother, with eight children of her own, in a house without a lavatory, in a village without a road, ten days’ walk from the provincial capital, and her husband would beat her and refuse to sell his only goat to pay for life-saving medical treatment.

She still meets families in her province where women are valued less than livestock, and where babies are kept warm with fresh animal dung. It’s in communities like that where she is making the greatest change, even if those changes might be as simple as explaining basic hygiene and the benefits of modern medicine.

Yet she is just as comfortable shaking hands with world leaders. There are pictures – reprinted in her book, but not hanging on her wall – with George and Laura Bush; Tony Blair; Condoleezza Rice. In October, when she addressed the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, she urged David Cameron not to sacrifice women’s rights in the rush to cut a deal with the Taleban.

Perhaps one reason for her acclaim, internationally at least, is that Koofi embodies much of what the West hoped to achieve when it ousted the Taleban ten years ago.

“Change will come, and it will come through women like Fawzia, from within families and it will take generations,” Ghouri says. “There may be many Fawzias in the future, but at the moment she is the only one and she is blazing the trail.”

When it is time to be photographed she changes into a full-length, unfashionable, embroidered black smock. She pins on a purple ribbon, to mark International Day For The Elimination Of Violence Against Women and picks a matching lilac headscarf. This is the public face of Fawzia Koofi, modestly dressed, in accordance with Islamic custom, and like Karzai and her father, she stares straight into the camera. But there are two sides to Koofi, and it doesn’t take long before she breaks into a smile.

The Favored Daughter, published on February 16 by Palgrave Macmillan, is available from the Times Bookshop for £15.29 (RRP £16.99), free p&p, on 0845 2712134; thetimes.co.uk/bookshop

Herb-i-Islami, my 1969 Volkswagan Beetle, in Kabul.

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:31:19 +0430

Herb-i-Islami, my 1969 Volkswagan Beetle, in Kabul.

Old Volks in happy hippy home

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:25:00 +0430

Old Volks in happy hippy home:

The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kabul

It’s pure pleasure driving my Beetle around Kabul.

Originally painted in VW’s Toga White with a crank-operated sunroof and factory fitted with a then state-of-the-art Emden radio, she rolled off the production line in Germany on October 28, 1968 but exactly how she came to Afghanistan remains a mystery.

By the time we met, two years ago, the Gala red “permeable plastic” upholstery had long since gone and “toga white” had been locally translated to “shitouri,” which means camel-coloured, in Dari. I renamed her Herb-i-Islami.

Archivists in Wolfsburg said the record of who bought her is “unreadable,” but the Afghan papers have survived.

She was owned by an Afghan woman called Hassina Jan, during Kabul’s 1970s heyday. I like to think that she was driven here, via Iran, by hippies retracing the old silk road, before war and politics made these places impassable.

Then she was sold, or abandoned, in a haze of marijuana smoke when the lovers ran out of money. One day, I will drive her back.

I bought her for £450 in 2010, and it costs about £100 a month — in begrudging instalments to the mechanic Ahmad Zia Faqiri — to keep her running.

When I asked Mr Faqiri (who I have come to know almost better than the car) to fix the sunroof he welded it shut.

Yet I watch in awe as he taps and tinkers and sniffs and listens to diagnose her never-ending ailments, and he has taught me to blow dust out of the distributor cap and suck dirt (and fuel) out of the carburettor to keep her on the road.

Seven US troops die amid spike in Afghan violence

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 11:45:00 +0430

Seven US troops die amid spike in Afghan violence:

The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kabul

Eight Nato soldiers and seven Afghan civilians were killed in a spate of explosions across southern Afghanistan, as new Nato figures showed violence actually increased there last year — undermining earlier claims to have reversed the insurgents’ momentum.

In southern Afghanistan, the main Taleban heartland which absorbed most of Barack Obama’s surge, violence jumped 5 per cent between January and November, compared with the same period in the previous year, Nato said.

Commanders had hoped to obliterate the Taleban in southern Afghanistan so they could refocus their resources in the east, where attacks soared by 20 per cent in the same period.

However, the latest figures, which coincided with the start of the American withdrawal, suggest the Taleban has weathered the surge in one of the most heavily contested parts of the country.

In the most recent attacks, six children and an adult man were killed in Oruzgan province, Afghan officials said, when they accidentally triggered a bomb hidden in a rubbish heap.

Four American soldiers were killed in a separate explosion in southern Afghanistan, while three more died in a blast late Thursday. An eighth Nato soldier was also killed in a separate incident yesterday, also in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said in a statement.

Nato’s statistics have been consistently at odds with the United Nations, which claimed violence was up 21 per cent, countrywide in the first 11 months of last year, compared with 2010. Nato said “enemy-initiated attacks” dropped 8 per cent across the country in the same period last year.

The southwest, which includes Helmand province, witnessed the most dramatic drop in attacks. Nato said incidents last year were 29 per cent fewer than the year before.

Yet the insurgents’ resilience is likely to raise fresh concerns over whether the Afghan Security Forces will be strong enough to stay in control when foreign forces stop fighting, no later than 2014.

“Overall enemy-initiated attacks are still down,” said a Nato official. “But when you break it down to the regional commands the picture is much less clear.”

Three months ago Nato used a similar set of figures, which showed a 12 per cent decrease in attacks in the south, to suggest its strategy was working.

“Regional Command South is showing emerging success and some improvement in security,” Brigadier Carsten Jacobson, the spokesman for Nato’s International Security Assistance Force, said at the time.

“Enemy-initiated attacks reported during the period June through August 2011 were 12 per cent lower than the same period in 2010.”

A senior Western official said the latest figures were “concerning” but he said they showed the insurgents had been forced to withdraw from places such as Helmand to maintain the pressure in neighbouring Kandahar.

“We knew attacks were up in the east, that’s always been a problem, but the south was a surprise,” he said. “Attacks were considerably down in Helmand, slightly up in Kandahar. Those facts may well be linked.”

President Karzai called for Taleban office inside Afghanistan

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 07:46:55 +0430

President Karzai called for Taleban office inside Afghanistan:

President Hamid Karzai called for the Taleban to open a political office inside Afghanistan in a bid to retake control of secret US-led negotiations.

Huge loss for one family in ‘attack on all Muslims’

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:26:37 +0430

Huge loss for one family in ‘attack on all Muslims’:

Eight relatives from an extended family — three women and five children — were buried on a hillside overlooking Kabul yesterday after being killed in a single suicide attack.

Suicide attack and explosion kills 48 at Afghan shrines

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:20:21 +0430

Suicide attack and explosion kills 48 at Afghan shrines:

Twin explosions at Afghan shrines on the Shia holy day of Ashura left at least 48 people dead in Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, according to police and a news agency photographer.

An explosion ripped through a crowd of Shia worshippers outside...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:35:37 +0430

An explosion ripped through a crowd of Shia worshippers outside a shrine in Kabul, killing at least 55 people and wounding at least 134 more, Dec 6, 2011.

Carnage in the street as 55 Shia killed at shrine by suicide bomber

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:33:58 +0430

Carnage in the street as 55 Shia killed at shrine by suicide bomber:

The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kabul

The bodies lay mangled in a circle, twisted and torn. Some were caked in blood and dust, others clean. A few were heaped together and hard to tell apart, others lay alone.

All around them was the debris of violent death: limbs, viscera and fragments of bone; sandals, hats, and a yellow plastic bag spilling powdered milk towards a lifeless, punctured hand.

At least 55 people were killed at a Kabul shrine yesterday and more than 130 wounded in the deadliest single attack since 2008. It was the first to target Afghanistan’s Shia minority since the fall of the Taleban ten years ago.

Another blast in the north of the country was also aimed at Shias. Officials said that four people were killed and 21 wounded by a bicycle bomb, close to the Blue Mosque in Mazar-e Sharif. Police said the victims were part of a procession chanting slogans to mark Ashura, the holy festival which commemorates the death of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. A second device was defused.

The wounded in Kabul staggered dazed, sometimes tripping through the carnage. Others could not move. A woman lay trapped on her back after the blast broke her legs. She reached up, without words, beseeching help. Survivors wailed and first-aiders barked out orders amid corpses of young children. The mosque’s loudspeakers continued to blare out prayers.

In the centre of the circle there was a darkness on the road, a starburst of charred tarmac which marked the spot where the suicide bomber unleashed mayhem. Afghan officials blamed the Taleban, but the insurgents denied responsibility. In a statement, the Taleban said the attacks were “inhumane” and they blamed “foreign invaders”.

Shia leaders urged calm but the attacks have raised fears of a sectarian backlash and further inflamation of the ethnic fractures that fuelled a civil war in the 1990s. Mohammad Mohaqiq, a member of parliament and an influential Shia leader, said that whoever perpetrated the attack was trying to ignite a civil war. He urged his supporters to maintain “civil order”.

Sectarian attacks are unusual in Afghanistan, but similar atrocities have ravaged neighbouring Pakistan.

The Kabul bomber set off his explosives in a tightly packed crowd outside the Abul Fazl shrine on the banks of the river, where hundreds of people, including women and children, had gathered to mark Ashura.

Witnesses said the explosives were hidden in a backpack and the bomber was posing as a mourner among Shia devotees clamouring at the entrance to the shrine to pay their respects inside.

Moments after the blast, hundreds of people fled screaming.

Ambulances arrived from civilian hospitals and a nearby military base. As shock turned to rage, survivors began chanting anti-Pakistani and anti-US slogans. Pakistan is widely blamed for helping the Taleban-led insurgency while many believe the violence is the fault of American military intervention.

President Karzai said it was “the first time that on such an important religious day in Afghanistan, terrorism of that horrible nature is taking place”. The attacks came less than 24 hours after a major international conference in Bonn on the future of Afghanistan. Nato troops are planning to stop fighting by 2014 and hope to hand responsibility for security to Afghan forces.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said he was “shocked by the attacks”. The international community’s long-term commitment to Afghanistan “ will not be undermined by such acts of terrorism,” he said.

General John Allen, the commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan, described the bombs as an “an attack against Islam itself” and said: “We denounce and condemn these atrocities in the strongest of terms. Our prayers and deepest sympathies are with the families and loved ones of those innocent civilians killed or injured.”

The Shia minority are thought to make up 20 per cent of the country’s 30 million people. Most are ethnic Hazaras and thousands were massacred by the Taleban when they ruled the country. The Taleban are predominantly Sunni Muslims and ethnically Pashtun.

Herat’s refurbished citadel, bits of the Blue Mosque, a...

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:41:00 +0430

Herat’s refurbished citadel, bits of the Blue Mosque, a couple of shots of the city and a look inside the Burns Hospital which deals with horrific self-immolation cases. See more Afghan portraits here, images from a motorbike roadtrip to the Minaret of Jam here, and graphic pictures of an American Air Ambulance in Kandahar here.

Kazai overturns sentence of jailed rape victim

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:00:55 +0430

Kazai overturns sentence of jailed rape victim:

An Afghan woman who was jailed for being raped and then told to marry her attacker by a judge has had her sentence overturned by the country’s president.

FREE GULNAZ! Afghan woman jailed for adultery after being raped

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 21:53:00 +0430

FREE GULNAZ! Afghan woman jailed for adultery after being raped:

Please sign this petition to help free Gulnaz. She was jailed for being raped in Afghanistan, she gave birth to her baby daughter on the floor of her prison cell, and the judge told her the only way to reduce her sentence was to marry her attacker.

She tried to tell the world her story, but the European Union censored a film which they commissioned to raise awareness about women’s rights.

Please re-blog, re-post, tweet and circulate any way you can. The response so far has been overwhelming. Friends of mine visited her in prison today and said she was giddy at the thought of freedom and overjoyed by the international support for her cause.

Monty gives Afghans a slice of golf expertise

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:15:12 +0430

Monty gives Afghans a slice of golf expertise:

Firing ranges became driving ranges as soldiers in Afghanistan swapped their weapons for wedges to mark a morale-boosting visit by the Scottish golfer Colin Montgomerie.

Jailed rape victim told she is guilty of not reporting crime

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:26:39 +0430

Jailed rape victim told she is guilty of not reporting crime:

An Afghan woman who was jailed for being raped and then censored by the European Union when she tried to tell the world her story has had her sentence cut from twelve years to three after her ordeal…

The Times mini tour of Kabul, ten years after the Taleban fled,...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 01:21:06 +0430

The Times mini tour of Kabul, ten years after the Taleban fled, in Herb-i-Islami.

Crimes against Afghan women ‘ignored’: UN report

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 09:12:44 +0430

Crimes against Afghan women ‘ignored’: UN report:

Horrific crimes against Afghan women, including rape, murder and forced prostitution, are going unreported and unpunished because police and prosecutors either do not know or will not implement their…

More than 250 labourers are excavating Mes Aynak, 20 miles south...

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 13:25:46 +0430

More than 250 labourers are excavating Mes Aynak, 20 miles south of Kabul.

Gold rush: time running out to dig up Buddhist treasure

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 12:23:47 +0430

Gold rush: time running out to dig up Buddhist treasure:

The Times
Jerome Starkey in Mes Aynak

The gold still glistened after a more than a thousand years underground; the gemstones glinted at their first touch of sunlight, undimmed by a millennium in the dirt. “It’s a necklace,” said a Polish archaeologist, breathless with excitement. “They’ve found a gold necklace!”

As the fine grey sand of Afghanistan’s sun-bleached mountains was gently sieved away, there was treasure in the pan: tiny golden orbs adorned with even smaller gold beads, tulip-shaped pendants no bigger than a fingernail, red gemstones and swirling gold bowls, like acorn lids. Next to them were two spoons and a brooch made of copper, green from corrosion, and two copper hair pins embellished with gold.

Excavations at Mes Aynak have already unearthed three Buddhist monasteries and an ancient copper mine replete with statues, coins, reliefs and murals — more than enough to secure its place as one of the most significant archaeological digs in a generation.

Yet last week’s discovery was the first time since the archaeologists started work in 2009 that anyone has found jewellery in the mountains, 20 miles south of Kabul. With at least three more monasteries to be explored, Afghan officials hope the discoveries will elevate Mes Aynak into the archaeological pantheon, alongside Tillya Tepe, home of the Bactrian hoard.

The archaeological remains in Logar province date from the 1st to the 7th centuries; first settled by the Khushan dynasty and eventually abandoned by the Hephthalites, with the advent of Islam in Afghanistan. “The gold, the wall paintings, the statues all suggest that the inhabitants of the site were quite wealthy,” said Hans Curvers, the lead archaeologist on site. “Not a surprise when you live in the place were the Kushan empire mines its main financial resources.”

Philippe Marquis, director of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA), said that the discoveries were “very significant”. He added: “There was a small city here. Mes Aynak is going to bring significant changes to our understanding of Buddhism in Afghanistan.”

But the treasure is both a blessing and a burden for the Afghan Government, which is desperate to start exploiting its minerals. The archaeological sites sit directly on top of a world class copper deposit which a Chinese state mining company paid $3 billion (£1.9 billion) for in 2008. It was Afghanistan’s largest foreign investment, and allegedly came with a $30 million bribe to the then minister of mines.

The Afghan Government hopes to earn up to $350 million a year in royalties — equivalent to 20 per cent of Kabul’s total tax revenue — once the mine is fully operational, but they recently agreed a 12-month delay to give the archaeologists more time.

The Government has also spent $6.5 million clearing Soviet-era landmines from the site. “The original timelines didn’t take into account the realities on the ground,” said Nasir Ahmad Durrani, the deputy minister of mines. “But we believe that by 2014 we will be able to start commercial production.”

Western officials familiar with the deal are less sure. The Chinese have improved the road to the mine and built a camp to house their workers, but they are yet to start work on the railway or the power station, as per the terms of their contract.

Omar Sultan, the deputy minister of culture, hopes to relocate the monasteries in a purpose-built museum near the site of the mine, which will also exhibit the newly discovered gold. “This was a crossroads of civilisations,” he said. “We have a cultural heritage that doesn’t just belong to Afghanistan. It belongs to all of humanity.”

Afghan scholar Najib Afghan and Stowe headmaster Dr Anthony...

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 22:37:46 +0430

Afghan scholar Najib Afghan and Stowe headmaster Dr Anthony Wallersteiner