Global News Journal

Western Afghanistan, a new worry ?

       By Golnar Motevalli

Herat province in west Afghanistan is seen as one of the country’s safest areas. It is one of the largest, most prosperous Afghan provinces — its capital’s wide, smooth and tree-lined boulevards are a far cry from Kabul’s crumbling skyline.

But the past few months have seen a sharp increase in violence.

Last month a cabinet minister and former militia leader, Ismail Khan, was the target of a bomb attack in Herat city. A day earlier, Herati traders took to the streets to protest against rising insecurity in the province.

Khan, who is seen by many Heratis as an icon of the anti-Taliban and anti-Soviet mujahedin, was unharmed, but three civilians were killed.

 The district of Guzara in Herat has seen a spate of Taliban attacks, including the shooting dead of three men and the hanging of another and an ambush on a policeman’s home in which his teenage son was killed.

Since July at least 29 civilians have been killed in insurgent-linked attacks in Herat. Foreign troops, mainly Italians and Americans, are hit by roadside bombs or ambushed on a weekly basis.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Afghanistan’s civilians caught in the middle

Reuters correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison has written a moving and disturbing story about an 8-year-old girl badly burned by white phosphorous after being caught in the middle of a firefight in Afghanistan.  Like everything else that happens in Afghanistan, the question of who fired the shell that exploded in her house is in dispute. Her family said the shell was fired by western troops; NATO said it was "very unlikely" the weapon was theirs; and a U.S. spokeswoman suggested the Taliban may have been responsible.

But beyond the dispute, what comes across powerfully in Emma's account is the story of the girl. 

"Life as 8-year-old Razia knew it ended one March morning when a shell her father says was fired by Western troops exploded into their house, enveloping her head and neck in a blazing chemical," she writes. "Now she spends her days in a U.S. hospital bed at the Bagram airbase, her small fingernails still covered with flaking red polish but her face an almost unrecognisable mess of burned tissue and half her scalp a bald scar."

Do read the whole story.

And now to the broader question of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

President Hamid Karzai has called on the United States to halt air strikes following attacks on two villages this week that Afghan officials said killed 147 people. Washington has acknowledged that some civilians died, but the U.S. military said it could not confirm with certainty which of the casualties from the fighting this week were Taliban fighters and which were non-combatants, because those killed had all been buried.

With ordinary people bearing the brunt of the fighting, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Taliban have been accused of deliberately using civilians as cover. Time magazine quotes Nader Nadery, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, as saying that the Taliban continue to use civilians as human shields "as an effective PR strategy" to turn public opinion against the government. The Daily Telegraph reports a similar pattern in Pakistan, where the military have launched an offensive to regain control of the Swat valley.

Hollywood props, deployed by the U.S. Army

There was no one there but us and the fake chickens.

I visited the U.S. Army’s training center at Fort Polk in Louisiana this month with some fellow foreign correspondents to see soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division training for a mission in Afghanistan. For 21 days, the soldiers are meant to live and operate as if they had already deployed to the war zone. (You can see the story here.)

The center goes to great lengths to recreate the experience that troops will face in Iraq and Afghanistan. That means fireworks to simulate bomb explosions, fake blood to make casualties look realistic, and Afghan or Iraqi role-players to act as civilians, security force members and interpreters.

The Army even allows “relaxed grooming standards” for the soldiers who play insurgents — they are allowed to grow beards and long hair to look the part.

The trainers produce a daily newspaper which reports on the previous day’s events in the fictional Afghanistan, along with an enemy propaganda sheet which can be filled with lies.

But perhaps the most striking symbols of this attention to detail are the mock villages created with the help of Hollywood set-dressers. We visited one that was close to completion with C.J. McCann, the Army official in charge of the villages. It was rather eerie, standing in the otherwise empty village on a windswept day. The place felt like a cross between a ghost town and a spaghetti western set.

The fake fruit and vegetables, the fake carcasses hanging outside the butcher’s shop, the washing hanging out to dry, and the uncannily lifelike fake chickens… they may seem over the top to some. But the Army says the more realistic the setting, the better the training for its soldiers.