Boing Boing » afghanistan

Mine Kafon; a bamboo tumbleweed that clears landmines

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:13:59 +0000

The "Mine Kafon" is Massoud Hassani's artificial tumbleweed, made from lightweight materials like bamboo. It is designed to be blown across uncleared minefields, detonating forgotten mines. It was Hassani's grad design project for Design Academy Eindhoven. It continuously broadcasts its location, captured via GPS, plotting out safe, mine-free paths through the fields.

Mine Kafon (via Make)

Taliban uses CC instead of BCC, exposes identity of 400+ contacts

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 20:23:05 +0000

A Taliban spokesperson sent out a press-release and used CC instead of BCC, exposing a long list of Taliban press-contacts, as well as several parties friendly to Taliban communiques.

The list, made up of more than 400 recipients, consists mostly of journalists, but also includes an address appearing to belong to a provincial governor, an Afghan legislator, several academics and activists, an l Afghan consultative committee, and a representative of Gulbuddein Hekmatar, an Afghan warlord whose outlawed group Hezb-i-Islami is believed to be behind several attacks against coalition troops.

Taliban Oops Reveals Mailing List IDs [Muhammad Lila, ABC] (via Techdirt)

Junkbot insects from a metalworker in Afghanistan

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 20:20:51 +0000

Noah sez, "I thought you would appreciate these giant insects made from repurposed materials (including vehicle parts and bits of a blown up toolbox) by metalworker Ben Marcacci, who is currently at Camp Dwyer in Afghanistan."

Noah is correct.

I started making these types of piece's when I relocated to Camp dwyer (Aug 2011), I had the equipment and scrape material to do so, prior to Dwyer I traveled from base to base. Not being able to work with my first love (metal work) I found myself drawing more and more , but I like 3D, I like building things...so my skills for creating sculpture morphed into collecting "found objects" (soda tab, lock washers, o-rings, AFG coins) and I would build jewelry (mainly earrings) I gave a pair to my girlfriend and sisters, and the they wanted MORE... I continued to make them and I started cannibalizing items I would find in Local afghan bazaars. I'm currently working on a 3rd generation earring.

Giant (Upcycled) Metal Arachnids & Insects in Afghanistan (Thanks, Noah!)

Pentagon tried to prevent publication of Afghanistan corpse abuse photos

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 03:45:06 +0000

The Los Angeles Times this week published photographs of US soldiers in Afghanistan posing with the mangled bodies of Afghan men believed to be suicide bombers.

Government officials were quick to condemn the behavior. But today, news that the Pentagon sought to prevent the publication of these images, in a dispute that stretched on for weeks with LA Times editors.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today said, “The reason for that is those kinds of photos are used by the enemy to incite violence, and lives have been lost as the result of the publication of similar photos.”

Only 2 of of the images were published. 16 more were received by the war correspondent who wrote the piece; the paper will not release them.

“They are just awful,” he said, calling the two that were published “the least gruesome.”

Photo: A soldier from the Army’s 82nd Airborne with a dead insurgent’s hand on his shoulder. (Los Angeles Times / April 18, 2012)

TOM THE DANCING BUG - Hunger Games 2012

Ruben Bolling — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:49:50 +0000

Visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER.

After slaying of 16 Afghan civilians, American Army sergeant held for investigation

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:39:34 +0000

An elderly Afghan man sits next to the covered bodies of civilians killed by an American soldier in Kandahar province, March 11, 2012. REUTERS/ Ahmad Nadeem

An American soldier is reported to have "stalked from home to home" before dawn, then methodically killed at least 16 civilians including 9 children, and 3 women. One of the dead appears to be a girl of toddler age.

The incident took place in a rural community in southern Afghanistan on Sunday morning. Eleven of the victims were members of one family. Photographs of the bodies circulating online show bullet wounds to the head, execution-style. Five or more additional civilians are reported to have been seriously injured.

"It is not the first time US soldiers have intentionally killed Afghan civilians but the death toll is unprecedented for a single soldier."

Quentin Sommerville, BBC correspondent in Kabul, tweeted a series of observations this morning as news spread:

A tiny girl in a red and green dress, is she 2 or 3 years old? There's a single gunshot in the middle of her temple. She almost looks asleep.
The killer in Kandahar is described as a "conventional US soldier" by ISAF sources, i.e., not Special Forces. Reuters and locals saying more than one solider involved, but ISAF insisting that this was an "individual acting alone".
From ex-US diplomat,"If you're an Afghan, you've seen a Florida pastor try to burn a Koran, then Marines urinate on dead Taliban soldiers, then burning of the Koran, and now this... all within 10 months. We don't have the benefit of the doubt. Time for us to get out of there."
Is the international mission here in danger of losing its most important supporter... the Afghan people?

More: NYT, CSM, CNN, Reuters, AFP, AP, Guardian.

Your tax dollars at work: Afghan Air Force used as "flying drug mules"

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:57:42 +0000

Spencer Ackerman at Danger Room on reports (utterly shocking reports!) that Afghanistan’s military uses its US-bought aircraft to transport drugs throughout the country.

At a cost of nearly $2 billion for two years’ worth of building the Afghan Air Force, the U.S. inadvertently purchased a more convenient mechanism for trafficking opium and weapons than Afghanistan’s drug lords were previously using. But it actually gets worse than that. The aerial trade in guns and drugs through the Afghan Air Force appears to be financing the rearmament of private militias hedging against the country’s implosion after the U.S. leaves.

Related item at the Wall Street Journal, requires subscription.

Inside Kabul: landmine survivor aid activist live-blogs from lockdown in Afghanistan

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:44:48 +0000

I've known of James Hathaway and the NGO he co-founded, Clear Path International, for many years. They do great work to help civilian survivors of landmine blasts, people who now have disabling injuries, live better lives through medical care, education, improved mobility and access, and other forms of support. Clear Path originally focused their efforts in Vietnam, but have since expended into other conflict/post-conflict zones including Cambodia and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, James says, is “by far our largest project,” with work ongoing in 19 of the country's 34 provinces. James returned to Kabul to work with the CPI team there, just as the security situation abruptly escalated to a new level of crisis.

James and crew are spending a lot of time with bulletproof vests on, in safe rooms, and surrounded by very heavily armed security guys. James is blogging daily, and explains why he's there and what they're trying to accomplish in the following account, republished here in entirety with permission.

Why I Am Here in Kabul, Afghanistan
James Hathaway, Clear Path International

Seven years ago this month I was a guest blogger on my old friend Tom Peters’ blog. He had asked me to guest-post while I took a nearly two-month journey across southeast Asia to visit all of our existing project sites. CPI was just five years old and we had really started to hit our stride with projects having already aided, in ways both large and small, well over a thousand people in Vietnam, Cambodia and along the Thai-Burma border.

On this trip, as I re-enter Clear Path International after three years away, I have a lot to learn about what has become our biggest and most complicated project: Clear Path Afghanistan.

The Clear Path International office in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The CPI Kabul office, in partnership with the US Department of State’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement provides assistance to landmine survivors and other people with disabilities by providing physical accessibility ramps to clinics, schools, government buildings, and mosques, which are often the most important sites in communities across Afghanistan. CPI supports disability resource centers for developing vocational skills and accessing peer support and assistance from disability advocates, none of which would otherwise be available to the beneficiaries here. CPI has expanded access to physical therapy services and physical rehabilitation, too. One of the most requested kinds of project activities in this extremely deprived environment is livelihood training to promote economic reintegration of accident survivors. CPI has been supporting these as well, always with the inclusion of literacy and numeracy education as a component. We even sponsor a first-rate cricket team made up entirely of landmine survivors and young menwith other physical disabilities. They routinely play against, and beat, teams of all able-bodied competitors.

We do this with a number of Afghan partners located in 19 out of 34 provinces across the country. While I can’t name all of our projects and partners in this post, I want to highlight a few in the hopes that, as I post more, I will eventually touch on all of them.

Afghan SPARK

SPARK is an evolution of a project originally conceived in 2008 by Clear Path International, and employs disabled deminers and mine survivors to produce the equipment necessary for active deminers to carry out their essential work with increased safety.

Revenue generated from demining tool sales directly supports other victim assistance projects. SPARK products are locally available and often cost significantly less than other suppliers, which are generally sourced from outside Afghanistan.

Afghan Landmine Survivors Organization (ALSO)

CPI partners with ALSO in providing accessibility ramps, social reintegration services, and awareness raising projects for disabled persons.

Their mission statement: To promote living situation of persons with disabilities by providing peer support/psychosocial support, education, economic inclusion, and rehabilitation services.
To promote the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities by advocating the Afghan decision makers to implement the victim assistance provisions of the Mine Ban Treaty and domestic laws and policies, and to ratify and implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Afghan Disabled Vulnerable Society Cricket Team

The name is awkward, but these guys can play cricket!

From a previous post on the CPI blog:

“The team was created by CPI’s partner, Afghan Disabled Vulnerable Society (ADVS), to provide sports activities for youth with physical challenges, and to change public perceptions about the role of disabled persons in the community. Most of the players live in Jalalabad City, the bustling epicenter of the province near the Pakistan border. They are landmine survivors, young men who have contracted polio, or who’ve suffered in other ways from violence or disease related to war and the lack of medical care.

And yet they excel at competitive cricket. These men have played together for more than two years, having won several matches against teams without a single disabled player. In February, they won the overall trophy in a five-team tournament in Jalalabad. Over three days, they defeated each of the opposing teams. In September, they repeated their success against an entire board of teams without any disabled players, in northern Kunduz Province, by winning the four day tournament and taking home the overall first place trophy.”

Read the rest of the post here.

On the trip I took seven years ago, I met with three young children injured by ordnance left over from the Vietnam war. In my post I said that I believed they would all thrive someday thanks to CPI’s good work and the generosity of our donors. I am glad to report that they have. The CPI Vietnam office sent me pictures of two of them (Ha and Nghia) now with children of their own. I was moved to tears. I am proud that, also because of CPI’s good work and the generosity of its donors, the organization itself has grown up as well.

Much like our Vietnam team did over a decade ago, Clear Path Afghanistan is staffed by a team so good that they have changed the game.

I am both thrilled and humbled to be back on the team.

You can donate to our work, and I hope you will, at www.cpi.org.

Afghan goat giveaway “lacked accountability”

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:56:36 +0000

Government investigators suspected that goats may have been used to bribe locals in Afghanistan, but found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the goat-giving program. [Muckrock]

Sebastian Junger on Marine Afghan corpse urination incident

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:31:52 +0000

From the combat filmmaker's Washington Post op-ed: "There is a final context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one." (via @pourmecoffee)

Awlaki's 16-year-old son killed by US drone

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:07:19 +0000

Glenn Greenwald rounds up a number of reports related to the killing of al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son by an unmanned aerial drone from the US:

Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people.

Initial US reports stated he was 21, but a birth certificate obtained by The Washington Post shows that he was born 16 years ago in Denver. According to the boy's grandfather, he and his cousin were at a barbecue and preparing to eat when they were killed.

(thanks, @ioerror)

TOM THE DANCING BUG: On Re-Fighting The Wrong Wars

Ruben Bolling — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:00:32 +0000