Afghan Schoolgirls Undeterred by Attack

Education and Challenges in Afghanistan
Michael Yon - Online Magazine — ... you going to school?” Then the man pulled Shamsia’s burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia’s eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read. But if the acid attack against Shamsia and 14 others — students and teachers — was meant to terrorize the girls into staying home, it appears to have completely failed. Please Click here to read the entire article on the nytimes.com Despite ...

Kandahar Heroes
Shakesville — Shamsia Husseini, right, pictured here with a classmate, was one of 15 girls and women in Kandahar, Afghanistan, who were splashed with acid two months ago by men who presumably wanted to deter them from getting an education. This is just an astonishing and beautiful and heartbreaking story of survival: One morning two months ago, Shamsia Husseini and her sister were walking through the muddy streets to the local girls school when a man pulled alongside them on a motorcycle and posed what seemed like an ordinary ...

Unknown Afghanistan
Antiwar.com Original — ... Soviet Union used the city as a strategic military base in the early 1980s.) Yet when one heads south to Kabul and toward the Pakistani border, a third Afghanistan is revealed. Twenty minutes from the center of Kabul, the Taliban control large swathes of the provinces of Logar and Wardak. In the Pashtun-dominated southern city of Kandahar, the stories of attacks on girls' schools are already legend. In November 2008, while I was visiting Bamiyan and Mazar, three men on a motorcycle attacked a group of girls at the Mirwais School, built with funds from the Japanese ...

Our Values and Terrorist Incentives
American Thinker — ... : "whaddya got?" Abu Ghraib will do. So will a cartoon of Mohammed. So will girls attending school . Upholding Our Values Despite our history, and despite what it takes to recruit jihadis, did we stray from our values in recent years? Concerning Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and waterboarding: Abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo did not result from directives from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or any other high authority. They were investigated, the guilty punished, and reformed procedures installed. The "flushed Koran" story was not even true. Waterboarding was conducted on three men not long ...

The Failure of Phantom Victory in Afghanistan
Firedoglake — ... The COINs ecosystem description is confused, often mislabels groups, and in Afghanistan has driven people into the Taliban in search of "law and order." Much of that law and order, as my activist friends remind me when we speak of this, is dislocated males fearing the results of an educated female population, as well as engaging in terrorism, such as acid attacks on school girls. This is almost proof of the failure of COINs as a paradigm, in theory and in practice. In theory, because if there is pressure, it should be for an acceleration, not a retardation, of growth; ...