Taliban Target: Scholars of Islam – The New York Times

2017/05/30 Leave a comment

Taliban mentality and reminder of one of the battles within Islam:

A lone grave, its dirt mound shaded under the drooping branches of a mulberry tree and kept adorned with flowers, has become a daily stop for seminary students and staff members near Togh-Bairdi, in northern Afghanistan.

It is the burial site of Mawlawi Shah Agha Hanafi, a revered religious scholar who founded the seminary about two decades ago and helped it grow into a thriving school for 1,300 students, including 160 girls. This month, the Taliban planted a bomb that killed him as he conducted a discussion about the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions, and his grave, at a corner of the seminary grounds, has become a gathering place for prayer and grief.

“When I come to work, the first thing I do is recite a verse of the Quran at his grave,” said Jan Agha, the headmaster of the seminary, in Parwan Province. “Then I weep, and then I go to my office.”

Mawlawi Hanafi joined a rapidly growing list of Islamic religious scholars who have become casualties of the Afghan war.

The scholars have long been targets, of one kind or another, in Afghanistan. Their words carry weight across many parts of society, and they are assiduously courted for their support — and frequently killed for their criticism.

Hundreds are believed to have been killed over the past 16 years of war, and not always by the Taliban. But there has been a definite uptick in the targeted killing of scholars — widely known as ulema — as the Taliban have intensified their offensives in the past two years, officials say.

It is being taken as a clear reminder of the weight the insurgents give not just to military victories but also to religious influence in their campaign to disrupt the government and seize territory.

“The reason the Taliban resort to such acts is that they want to make sure their legitimacy is not questioned by the sermons of these ulema,” said Mohammad Moheq, a noted Afghan scholar of religion who also serves as an adviser to President Ashraf Ghani.

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Canada: Please don’t stop empowering Afghan girls

2016/01/07 Leave a comment

Well-argued piece by Maryam Naquibullah:

But a woman with an education has a voice, and a woman with a job has influence. She supports her family – her uncles, her brothers, maybe even her father. And slowly, things start to change. The neighbours who think that educating a woman is about as valuable as educating a dog start to change their minds when they see a house with a car and a garden. All because a woman is working.

Since 2006, the ACCC and its sister organization, the Kandahar Institute of Modern Studies, have offered professional education to more than 4,000 women in Kandahar, and enabled more than 2,500 employed graduates to support more than 12,500 family members. All for a total investment of less than $600,000 from the Canadian government. These schools have been a beacon for the women in Kandahar for almost a decade, educating most of the women now working in professional jobs. But that beacon is about to go out.

I urge you, as Minister of International Development, and your fellow members of Parliament to please support our recent proposal – the Women’s Skills for Rights and Empowerment Program – submitted to Global Affairs Canada. This multiyear program would reach more than 4,500 women in Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul provinces, and create lasting partnerships between Afghan civil-society organizations and international non-profit organizations.

I understand that there are many important priorities for the Canadian government at the moment, and that there is a huge need to help the refugees who are fleeing conflict and extremism. And I also hope you will spare a thought for those organizations that are standing up against the roots of extremism, and that are preventing people from fleeing their homes in the first place.

Source: Canada: Please don’t stop empowering Afghan girls – The Globe and Mail

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David Mulroney warns Canada should apply Afghanistan’s lessons to Iraq

2015/03/25 Leave a comment

Sound advice:

A former top official on Canada’s work in Afghanistan is warning against getting too involved in Iraq without clear and realistic objectives.

David Mulroney, who served as the deputy minister in charge of the Afghanistan Task Force, said Canada hasn’t looked closely enough at its experience in Afghanistan.

“When I recently saw Foreign Minister [Rob] Nicholson musing that we’d apply some of the lessons of Afghanistan to our engagement, I kind of sat bolt upright because I think one of the problems is we haven’t spent much time learning the lessons of Afghanistan,” Mulroney said in an interview to air Saturday at 9 a.m. on CBC Radio’s The House.

Mulroney said a newly released audit shows “how hard it was to get that development assistance and humanitarian assistance right in a place where none of the officials were really clear about what Canada’s objectives were.”

Mulroney also served as secretary to the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan, which was led by former foreign affairs minister John Manley, and as foreign and defence policy adviser to the prime minister.

He said the lack of discussion about Afghanistan toward the end of the 10-year mission has kept Canadians from learning key lessons, which include being realistic about how much Canada doesn’t know about a region and setting “often very modest” goals.

Mulroney also said Canada needs an exit strategy.

“When does it happen for us and who’s around to pick up the pieces of what we’ve put in place. Until we’ve really talked honestly about that, I’d be very worried about our ability to pull something off in a place that’s as challenging as that nexus of Iraq and Syria.”

He also warned the government has to think about how the humanitarian, military and diplomatic pieces fit together.

“If it’s being done now, this is the time to tell Canadians that people have thought about that. Because if it hasn’t been done, we’ll get the same ultimately disappointing results that audit points to on Afghanistan.”

David Mulroney warns Canada should apply Afghanistan’s lessons to Iraq – Politics – CBC News.

And a good short interview with him in the Globe:

 How would you characterize the tension between diplomats and political staffers nowadays?

The truth is that public servants now serve a concierge function. They get difficult things done on the basis of careful instruction. So you focus on managing events, like visits, and then you report back to headquarters, but then you feel increasingly bullied. By the end of my career I’d written the same report on Sino-Canadian relations a dozen times. It was time to go.

In what specific way did Ottawa make you feel discouraged?

On the [Chinese social media site] Weibo we hosted a discussion about the case of Lai Changxing, [a fugitive to whom Canada gave refuge].

The other was about the official car I drove, which generated a real discussion about how what kind of accountability officials should be held to.

But there was complete silence from Ottawa, the kind that indicates disapproval. There was nothing they could hold against us because there were too many positives, including two editorials in The Globe. In the end though we turned the way embassies communicate on their head.

David Mulroney on pandas, the PM and Chinese-Canadian relations

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From Afghanistan to Iraq, the perils of overconfidence – Brian Stewart

2015/03/20 Leave a comment

Brian Stewart’s commentary on the recent audit on the aid program in Afghanistan and a reminder for the need for greater policy modesty:

My own view, shared by many others, is that central to Canada’s problem was an overconfident, relentless boosterism around this mission that was encouraged, even demanded, throughout by Ottawa.

“We went into a complex country without a proper strategy and this was a major problem. And there was over-optimism so we were not looking at the status of the insurgency,” Nipa Banerjee, who ran our aid there between 2003 and 2006, told Canadian Press this week.

In later years, the sunny Canadian outlook often astonished even NATO allies.

Chris Alexander, then our senior diplomat in Kabul and now the minister of citizenship and immigration, is remembered in one British memoir as “among the most persuasive of the optimists, and in many ways the golden boy of the effort in Afghanistan … a formidable operator who never let much check his unquenchable optimism.”

For many of Canada’s allies, our military and aid officials in Afghanistan simply ignored a trilogy of inconvenient facts: that the West didn’t have the military or civilian capacity necessary for the challenge at hand; that the Afghans were in no position to take over any time soon; and that the Taliban grew stronger thanks to sanctuaries in neighbouring Pakistan.

Some may be asking themselves if these elements, including overconfidence, apply to what looks to be our expanding war against ISIS in Iraq and possibly Syria.

One dark irony of this period was that the Conservative government and other ardent supporters of the war often criticized the media for being too pessimistic in its Afghan coverage.

The reality is most media were far too pliant and unquestioning of a military-civilian mission that, with rare exceptions, hid behind the false-confidence curtain dictated by Ottawa.

Understandably, many Canadians want to put that far-off war behind us and forget. But we simply can’t ignore the lessons learned about the cost of our simplistic over-optimism if we’re to avoid similar mistakes in Iraq or other campaigns to come.

From Afghanistan to Iraq, the perils of overconfidence – World – CBC News.

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Afghanistan Blasphemy Charge

2014/10/27 Leave a comment

A reminder that of the limits of all the efforts in Afghanistan, and how deeply a traditional country it remains in Afghan newspaper’s ‘blasphemy’ causes protests after rebuking Isis and Islam.

In Kabul, a crowd of approximately 500 people, including clerics and several members of parliament, gathered in front of the Eid Gah Mosque, the city’s second largest house of worship.

“The government must stop the people who insulted the prophet, the Qur’an and Islam, and prevent them from leaving the country,” said Fazl Hadi Wazin, an Islamic scholar at Salam University who spoke from the outdoor podium.

In an opinion piece published last week in the English-language daily the Afghanistan Express, a journalist named AJ Ahwar admonished Muslims for remaining silent in the face of Isis and the Taliban.

He also criticised Islam for not accepting other religions and minorities such as homosexuals and Hazaras, a Shia minority in Afghanistan.

The article ended by concluding that human beings are more important than God, which seemed to particularly incense protesters.

“The newspaper said God can’t control people and that God is unwise,” said Mangal Bader, 38, one of the protesters. He joined others in calling for the newspaper staff to suffer the same fate as five men who were recently convicted of rape and hanged, after great public furore.

“They need to be executed so humans know that you cannot insult the religion of Allah,” said Ahmad, 22, another protester.

In pauses between speakers, protesters chanted “death to America”. According to one demonstrator, the US instils ideas of freedom of expression in the minds of Afghan journalists, then grants them asylum once they anger their compatriots.

“The international community pretend to be heroes of freedom of expression,” said Wazin after his speech. “They have to come out and say they are not behind this. If they don’t, these protests will grow.”

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