"Westerners say why do they wear a burkha or hijab?"

Afghanistan is infamous for the Burkha. The loose garment that completely covers the woman's body and face in a meshed veil.

How does a society that values this garment as proper dress view a woman's right to say an education, or even to go outside unaccompanied?

The following are some interviews conducted in Nuristan, a particularly rural and conservative province in the far Northeast of Afghanistan.

Trying to figure it out

(Soldiers help Qala Wona villagers inaugurate the digging of a coalition-funded well.)

"Hey Jim. Thanks for the B-day wishes. Not a bad day today. But last night we received a rocket attack that hit a barracks and killed one Soldier and injured 9. The Soldier who died had 6 children. And all this happened when I was in a CONEX getting hundreds of hand crank radios, scarfs, hats and prayer rugs to give out to some of the same people who fire these rockets at us. This is not at all like Iraq."

This message was sent by a soldier I knew in Iraq. He's in Afghanistan now.

I'm trying to figure out why this message grabbed me like it did. It starts with the rocket attack that killed the soldier. The fact that he had six children.

But it's the writer's observation that it happened while he was in the CONEX getting the goodies that Afghans prize as part of the war on "hearts and minds", that gets me most. "To give out to some of the same people who fire these rockets at us."

A lot of soldiers will tell you these kinds of things. These are...the same guys who fire at us, or in the case of Iraq, used to shoot at us and are now paid by us. Seeing as soldiers interact with locals daily, as both intelligence gatherers and ambassadors, it's hard to write off their statements to simple cynicism. They speak to deeper frustrations and survival instincts.

Of course they are the "same people who fire rockets at us", and they aren't. Given the language, cultural barriers, the fact that enemy information is traded and sold, it's kind of hard for the average guy to know who the bad guy is. Anyone who's done a little reading can tell you the Taliban is a loose coalition of fighters, ideologues and mercenaries with different beefs and goals for their violence.

But the last line struck me too. "This is not at all like Iraq." It seems Afghanistan is now exploding with insurgent attacks. They haven't reached the inventiveness of projectile IEDs in Iraq, but it's the Talib coordination of harassing fire, ambushes, IEDs, an array of increasing bloodletting across the country that is particularly disheartening.

Everyone has their own little view of this ugly war business depending on where they go and when they get there. This particular soldier and I were in Iraq in 2008. The tail end of the surge. The bases we were on got rocketed a couple of times a month, but they were so huge, a few stray mortars maybe hit the outer wire. IEDs still killed and maimed soldiers, but they were more infrequent and less effective. More Iraqi soldiers and police were getting killed than U.S. The MRAPs had come fully into force and were protecting from blasts like never before. American platoons could patrol through Tikrit and Samarra, formerly hard-core cities, and be greeted and thanked. It was like we were watching the U.S. command finally getting a handle on the beast.

This is not at all like Afghanistan. But it doesn't mean it's impossible. Iraq looked impossible from all angles in 2007. It doesn't mean the long-term investment, some say sinking, of blood and treasure shouldn't continue. Why? As one soldier told me in a village outside Balad, Iraq, "I lost a lot of friends over here. I want to see this place turn out alright."

Democracy and Action

(c) Simon Klingert)

Afghanistan's historic August election was marred by widespread voting inconsistencies, despite efforts by U.S. and Afghan soldiers -and warlords- to keep the peace.

read the article at In These Times or t r u t h o u t

Western reporter freed, Afghan fixer killed, a troubling pattern

(Sultan Munadi, an Afghan fixer killed in the raid to free a British journalist.)

A Western journalist escapes the Taliban. His Afghan fixer does not. The story involves a daring raid, the freeing of a top-notch reporter, but it leaves me uneasy.

"Fixers" are local nationals who speak good English and have good connections and work as interpreters and media facilitators.

A British national, Stephen Farrell working for the NYT and an Afghan, Sultan Munadi were kidnapped while reporting on the NATO air strike that killed dozens of Afghan civilians in Kunduz last week.

They were shuffled around by the Taliban for several days. The captors talked on their phones about moving the two to Pakistan. On Wednesday an early morning British commando raid caught the Taliban by surprise.

"We were all in a room, the Talibs all ran, it was obviously a raid," Farrell told a New York Times reporter in Kabul. "We thought they would kill us. We thought should we go out." He said they ran out and heard Afghan and British voices.

Farrell said Munadi went forward, shouting: "Journalist! Journalist!" but was shot multiple times, whether by friend or foe is unclear. "I dived in a ditch," said Farrell.

He praised Munadi and acknowledged his sacrifice. “He was trying to protect me up to the last minute.” As they left the room under commando siege, “he moved out in front of me.”

If the story is to be believed, and there's no specific reason it shouldn't be, it brings up several points. Farrell said he was hustled off into a waiting chopper and that he yelled for the commandos to check on Munadi, who wasn't moving. They said they had his picture, but we probably won't ever know if he was checked on. If Munadi had been a Westerner, he most certainly would have been Medevac-d by chopper.

The Afghans say his death shows that NATO didn't value his life as much as it did Farrell's. "It shows a double standard between a foreign life and an Afghan life," said Fazul Rahim, an Afghan producer for CBS News.

High level British officials acknowledged the policy of doing everything in their power to free a British citizen. A British defense official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive details of the mission, insisted Munadi wasn't treated any differently from Farrell in the commando raid. But there would have been no commando raid to free an Afghan journalist. That much is obvious.

A good fixer can literally give the journalist a story. But Mundai, 34, had four children. His job was one of the world's riskiest. It is well-documented that Iraqi and Afghan reporters and fixers have been murdered, kidnapped and forgotten at rates that would have sent Western reporters home long ago.

(This fixer told me that the beheading of Naqshbandi caused him to doubt whether news agencies he worked with would negotiate for his life were he ever taken hostage.)

Farrell said it was pretty clear from their first day in captivity, that the Talibs would eventually make a deal for him, but the way they treated Mundai and reminded him of the beheading of another fixer named Naqshbandi, it was clear they would most likely execute him.

And Afghan fixers are still deeply troubled by the 2007 kidnapping of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo and his Afghan fixer Ajmal Naqshbandi in Helmand Province.

"Mastrogiacomo was released two weeks later in exchange for five Taliban prisoners. Naqshbandi, 24, was beheaded.

Apparently the Afghan and Italian Government were willing to exchange prisoners for the Italian journalist, but not for the Afghan. Some say the Italian goverment was willing to deal for Naqshbandi, but the Afghan government was not.

"In some instances, foreign journalists are freed for all sorts of reasons, but the Afghan journalists are brutally killed and less attention is given to them," an Afghan journalist group said.

A young fixer who I met in Kabul first told me the Naqshbandi story. Unprompted, he told me how the Afghans had made a deal for the Italian, under pressure from the Italian government, but not for one of their own people. He was worried about what might happen to him in the same situation.

"I like America," says thrice-deployed soldier

(1-32nd Infantry soldier holding a shoulder filed missle used at their combat outpost.)

"When I go home, I'm going to stay home," the young sergeant said.

We were sitting in the dark on top of a hill. This was his third deployment to Eastern Afghanistan.

"What about another deployment?" I asked.

"Only if I have to."

"So you never want to visit another country again?"

"Nope."

"What about on a vacation? Cancun? Europe, the French Riveria?" I asked, what of the world beyond switchback roads and goat herders?

"I like America," he said.

There's something sad and poignant about a young guy who's only experience travelling abroad is deploying to a war zone. As if he sees the rest of the world as a disfunctional, semi-dangerous pile of stones, behind which hide men who are trying to kill him.

A recent poll showed a majority of Americans don't think the war in Afghanistan is worth it. (51 percent now say the war in not worth fighting, up six percentage points since last month and 10 since March.) It's no coincidence this sentiment comes at the end of the bloodiest month for U.S. soldiers in the seven year war. 45 U.S. soldiers died this month, one more than inrecord-breaking July.

The President and top generals have been saying it's going to get worse before it gets better. That's a hard pill to swallow. The war seems endless. Measures of improvement are murky. They've been saying- Hey, we're sending soldiers into places where we essentially let the Taliban take over for a few years. Yeah, more U.S. boys will die before it gets better, but it will ultimately be worth it.

But the truth is only deaths and dollars make us listen. The news on these fronts is not good.

There's something ironic about a group of soliders who want nothing better than to go home and stay home, but would never volunteer to leave early if it meant ditching their buddies or their mission, and a U.S. population that now wakes from its recession stupor and remembers them, a flicker across the screen that more are dying in Afghanistan than ever before, and decides it wants to bring them home, regardless of what their mission was.

(Afghan soldiers preparing to go set up mountain outposts to fend off Taliban before the elections.)

On election day in Kunar province, where Taliban attacks have risen 47 percent between '07 and '08, the one U.S. casualty was a soldier killed by a Taliban mortar that hit the base. The soldier had only been in country a few days. These kind of deaths make no sense.

But Gen. McChrystal's new strategy is not focused on bringing in more "trigger pullers" to kill more Taliban. As my buddy Simon brought to my attention, as commander of Special Ops in Iraq, McChrystal basically tried to kill himself out of Iraq, and it didn't work, and as many insurgents as are being killed in Barg Matal (Nuristan province) by U.S. snipers and 10th Mountain infantry, where no reporters are allowed, they still keep coming over the mountain passes from Pakistan.

The U.S. cannot kill it's way to victory, and there's evidence that such insurgent deaths actually recruit more insurgents. The Pashtuns are know for their warrior society. Vengeance for a family member's life might take years, but it becomes a male's sole purpose.

So the argument is to isolate the Taliban by helping the average Afghan. This falls in with the counter insurgency strategy that money is a weapon more sustainable than the bullet. That renting a warlord is cheaper in both blood and treasure than trying to kill him.

The recent discussion on Room for Debate "Is It Time to Negotiate With the Taliban?" brought a load of nuanced diplomatic and NGO perspectives who all basically agreed Yes. The majority of those who we call the Taliban, are a disparate bunch of warlords and fighters each with different greivances and price tags. Basically they will continue fighting as they have for decades unless U.S. and NATO forces engineer ways to bring them to the table, and hold them accountable for providing security. It worked with the Sheiks in Anbar.

In most areas of operation there's signs that U.S.-funded men with guns will increasingly be propped up to guard their own villages, as they were in Iraq.

Back to the soldier on the hill. What would this young sergeant think of breaking bread with the Taliban as the way to turn the war? Probably he'd be disgusted with the idea. Their outpost has been attacked 47 times. They still have five more months here. He'd probably tell me that the Afghan leaders are all crooked, crooks and liars. But that the average Afghan, like the kid who brought him some fresh bread from the market after days of packaged MRE's, is pretty cool.

But as his company commander so deftly said, "they (Afghans) won't accept moral judgement from us." We need to build some foundations for stability. Or risk building nothing.

"A Jeffersonian Democracy is not going to break out any time soon," the commander said.

Which is what we have, a Jeffersonian Democracy, compared to almost anywhere in the world. And we have electricity, and we don't have to worry about insurgents seeping in from Canada to shoot at us, and women don't have to be locked indoors.

Maybe the young sergeant was right.