December 2012 Vol 1 Issue 3

AFGHAN EXAMINERVOL-1 ISSUE-3 DECEMBER-2012 www.afghanexaminer.com PH. 510-396-0948FREE

Cont...on page 7

Captain Wahid Ka-zem was hired as a San-ta Clara Police Officer in 1997. As an Officer, Wahid worked as a Field Training Officer, SWAT Team member, Peer Support Team member, and assaults Detective. On November 9th Wahid

was promoted to Police Captain for the Santa Clara Police department.

He was promoted to the rank of Sergeant in September of 2002. He worked in the Field Operations Division as

patrol team supervisor before transferring back to the Investigative Ser-vices Division, where he initially worked as a property crimes investi-gator. He later became a lead person’s crimes

investigator working pri-marily homicide and as-sault cases.

In October of 2008, Wahid was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant. He returned to the Field Operations Division,

where he worked as a Watch Commander and supervised the depart-ment’s field training pro-gram. In March of 2011, Wahid was transferred to the Investigative Ser-vices Division, where

he was serving as the Acting Division Com-mander. Wahid has a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree from San Jose State University.

By Abuzar Royesh

“Hey, who are you?” The straightforward question came to me in my first day as a high school student in Amer-ica.

I was about to begin the biography-like chron-icle of my life, as I would when I was back in Af-ghanistan, when it hit me. Who was I, indeed?

It was then that I truly realized I no longer lived in Afghanistan, where I was Abuzar Royesh, a

moderately well-known student in one of the best high schools in Ka-bul. At that moment all the adjectives I would normally use to describe myself felt hollow and empty. Who cared what my name was or how popular I was back in Af-ghanistan?

I realized that the far-ther I got from Afghani-stan, the more pieces of my identity fell away. Here in the U.S. I no lon-ger was a Hazara, a tag that distinguished me

from the people of other ethnicities, a Ghaznichi (from Ghazni Province), as the inhabitants of oth-er provinces would

Afghan promoted to Police Captain

Who Are You?’ What it Means to be an Afghan Among AmericansThanksgiving

Cup Pictures pages 9-11

Photo by Azim Azimi

www.afghanexaminer.com DECEMBER-2012 AFGHAN EXAMINER2

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By Zarghona Fazli

Every year the Muslim Student Association at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Ca hosts a char-ity banquet in partner with a non-profit organiza-tion that they feel needs help. The purpose of the Muslim Student Associa-tion is to unite and serve the needs of Muslim and Non-Muslims in learning more about Islam. Charity is one of the five pillars of Islam and by doing a char-ity banquet, the MSA feels they are practicing Islam and providing for the bet-terment of humanity. On

November 10th, the MSA hosted the Afghanistan Charity Banquet at the University of the Pacific in partner with the organiza-tion Afghanistan Dental Relief Project. The Afghan-istan Dental Relief Project (ADRP) is a nonprofit or-ganization established by Dr. James Rolfe, to provide dental treatment facili-

ties in under served areas of Afghanistan, to staff these facilities with volun-teers, to train the Afghan people in dentistry and dental technology, to pro-vide dental treatment at no cost to the needy, and to provide instruction in methods of preventative dental care. The whole of Afghanistan is basically

without dental care. Al-most thirty years of war has destroyed the techni-cal infrastructure there, eliminating many of the essentials for basic living: reliable water, electricity, telephone service, sanita-tion, leaving the people to survive as best they can. ADRP goal is to help them by addressing the almost-

total lack of professional dental care in Afghanistan.

The land that ADRP is cur-rently located on in Kabul, Afghanistan is being sold by its owner who is in debt and the only way ADRP can keep it is if they buy the land off the owner. This is where the MSA at Pacific knew they had to do any-

thing to help. Dr.James Rolfe, founder of ADRP and Alumni from Univer-sity of the Pacific Dentistry School, this organization hit close to home for our MSA. The MSA organized a fundraising event in hopes to help our ADRP anyway possible. The program of the night included: Dr. James Rolfe speaking of the current situation of Afghanistan and ADRP, poetry by Pacific student Hamza Siddiqui, videos about dental care, Imam Dr.Mohammad ElFarra speaking about charity in Islam and the fundraiser for the night, and comedy

College and High School students you can earn volunteer credits by helping the Afghan Examiner. Share photos and stories on topics that relate to Afghan Americans.

• Writing articles about Afghan American events

• Writing articles about Afghan American issues

• Submitting event pictures

The Afghan Examiner can possibly publish your contributions. For more information or to submit events contact [email protected]

Student Association raises money for Afghanistan Dental Relief Project

Cont...on page 3

DECEMBER-2012 www.afghanexaminer.comAFGHAN EXAMINER 3

by YouTube sensation Qias Omar and his Crew. The night was filled with tears and laughter with about 200 people in attendance. At the end of the night the total count for money raised was over $12,000, which was all donated to Afghanistan Dental Relief Project. The MSA worked hard to provide every-thing it could to help raise money for just a beauti-ful organization and their hard work did pay off. Even though $12,000 was raised it is still not enough to cover the land cost back in Kabul, so you can still help by contributing to ADRP. Please go online to: www.adrpinc.org and help the people of Afghanistan in need today! Photogra-pher By Fahad AlMenai

Cont...from page 2

www.afghanexaminer.com DECEMBER-2012 AFGHAN EXAMINER4By Farid Younos

Much has been said about Afghanistan re-garding reconstruction and its political atmos-phere. There are some facts about Afghanistan that no one can deny. Af-ghanistan is a tribal soci-ety. Afghanistan has high illiteracy rate. Although Afghanistan is very much underdeveloped, Afghanistan is still the core of peace and sta-bility in the region. That means if Afghanistan is at peace, the whole re-gion is at peace.

After years of civil wars and the collapse of sev-eral oppressive regimes, such as the Communists and the Taliban, the coming of an imported democracy from Amer-ica made Afghans very hopeful. Hopeful to not only establish a demo-cratic system based on law and order, but also bring a new vision for equality, progress and truly a “government of the people, by the peo-ple, for the people.” Un-fortunately, that did not happen and Afghanistan did not learn from the imported American de-mocracy. As a matter of fact, no one has taught this devastated country any civic education, par-ticipation, equality or re-sponsibility in the last ten years. This is because the foundation of a new democracy for Afghani-stan was based by eth-nocracy not democracy, and Afghanistan missed the opportunity at the Bonn conference to es-

tablish a true democracy. The major advisers of the White House, namely Mr. Khalilzad, Mr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, Mr. An-war ul Haq Ahady, and Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, deliberately failed Afghanistan by introducing ethnocracy rather than democracy. Mr. Khalilzad, Mr. Ah-madzai, and Mr. Ahady are all American proté-gés. The protégés, es-pecially Mr. Ahmadzai (an anthropologist), made Afghan democracy fail by allowing to appoint a Pashtun to power, Mr. Hamid Karzai. Tribalism is the root of problems existing in Afghan poli-tics, democracy and re-construction.

In his second term victo-ry speech at McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago,(November 7, 2012), Mr. Obama mentioned a beautiful thing about the United States which was heard and echoed around the world that, “This country has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most power-ful military in history, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our univer-sity, our culture are all the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores. What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold to-

gether the most diverse nation on earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we ac-cept certain obligations to one another and to future generations. The freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for come with responsibilities as well as rights. And among those are char-ity, and duty and patriot-ism. That’s what makes America great.”

Although probably not as strong as the United States, Afghanistan has the same richness of diversity but in differ-ent tribes, two religious school of thoughts, Sunni and Shia, a small group of Hindus and Sikhs, and a variety of languages that make Afghanistan a mosaic of culture. As a matter of fact, no tribe is a major-ity in Afghanistan and are all below 51%, ac-cording to the World Fact book. The commonal-ity amongst Afghans lies in their shared belief in the religion of Islam that teaches oneness, broth-erhood, and unity. Unfor-tunately, Afghans have not learned or applied any of these principles from Islam nor America. Citizenship does not ex-ist in Afghanistan where-by everyone, regardless of their religious affilia-tion, tribal affiliation and/or language affiliation,

is equal before the law. Afghans are not trying to share responsibility nor share destiny at this moment of reconstruc-tion. Like Americans, Af-ghans fought and died for freedom against the British and the Russians. As Muslims, Afghans are people of charity and pat-riotism but unfortunately not duty to their country. Afghanistan is on the cliff of destruction and pos-sible partition because of divisive issues the country is facing, such as tribalism that results in Pashtuns want-ing an upper hand in political affairs, Sunnis imposing their brand of Is-lam in Afghanistan that varies from that of the Shias, and the clashes between the two most populous languages, Pashto and Dari, where Dari is suppressed by the Pashtuns. The Qur’an, ac-cording to a promi-nent scholar of Islam, Ibn Abaas, interprets itself according to time and space we live in. However, the fanatic mullahs do not see any equal-ity between sexes. It is difficult to ex-pect any progress when people of a nation do not pos-sess citizenship that is equal before

the law and there are in-equalities that exist be-tween tribes and sexes.

With all the money pour-ing in and efforts for re-construction for Afghani-stan, the country is still failing because Afghani-stan is not a united Af-ghanistan. What Afghan-istan needs is to unite as “one nation under God.” The only way is to teach civic education that no tribe has superiority over another and no re-ligious school of thought is superior than another, and no man is superior than woman. Afghani-stan should learn from its imported democracy, America. However,, one fact of life is certain in Afghanistan that Afghan imported democracy al-

beit not perfect, paved the way for a national pluralism that all must eventually be equal be-fore the law and all have the same opportunity as a nation. Tribalism, sec-tarianism and fanaticism is not the norm for the 21st century.

Afghans should learn from American pluralism


The administration of President Barack Obama aims to keep around

10,000 US troops in Af-ghanistan after formal combat operations in

that country end in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported late Sunday.

Citing un-named senior US officials, the newspaper said the plan was in line with recommenda-tions present-ed by General John Allen, commander of US and inter-national forces in Afghanistan, who has pro-posed a force between 6,000 and 15,000 US troops.

Gen. Allen has proposed m a i n t a i n i n g a force be-tween 6,000

and 15,000 U.S. troops

to conduct training and counterterrorism efforts when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization mis-sion formally concludes at the end of 2014, of-ficials said. In contrast, the U.S. maintains no residual force in Iraq, a situation that has been blamed for instability in that country.

About 67,000 US troops are currently de-ployed in Afghanistan alongside 37,000 coali-tion troops and 337,000 local soldiers and police that make up the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

This comes as the United States and Af-ghanistan launched crucial talks on Novem-

ber 15 on the status of US forces remaining in Afghanistan after the NATO withdrawal of combat troops in 2014.

The US has stressed that it is not seeking per-manent bases in Afghan-istan. It is also consid-ered likely to shy away from a security guaran-tee, which would require it to come to the nation’s assistance against ag-gressors.

By Mina Habib - Afghanistan

Afghan commentators interviewed greeted Barack Obama’s re-election as United States president with muted enthusiasm and a list of concerns about his record in his first term.

Afghanistan did not fig-ure large in Obama’s elec-tion campaign, and the per-ception in Kabul was that he was treating it as if it was done and dusted, even though huge challenges will remain beyond the projected 2014 withdrawal of NATO forces.

Fatana Gailani, director of the Afghan Women Soci-ety, reeled off what she saw as the many failings of re-cent US policy.

“Obama speaks of ma-jor positive changes in Af-ghanistan over the past four years, but there’s been no tangible change for the Af-ghan people,” Gailani said. “The war continues, narcot-ics production has risen, and more than a million Afghans have become addicts. Fur-thermore, no attention has been paid to reconstruction or to the Afghan economy. The situation of women is worse now than it was four years ago. I therefore be-lieve Obama’s policies have failed Afghanistan.”

Moin Marastial is deputy head of the Right and Jus-tice Party, an opposition force that emerged last year.

His main criticisms focused on the US strategy of ne-gotiating with the Taliban, as well as the failure to ad-equately train and equip the Afghan armed forces.

“The Democrats’ policies have generally been better than those the Republicans pursued in the region – but not with regard to Afghani-stan,” he told IWPR. “The US paid the Afghan gov-ernment vast amounts of money to talk to the Taliban by means of the High Peace Council. They insurgents will never want peace. Obama should have spotted that disconnect.”

Commenting on the Obama victory, Taliban spokesman , Zabihullah Mojahed said the American leader should pull out his troops from Afghanistan and focus instead on domestic concerns.

Nurollah, a student in Kabul, warned that the in-surgents had been embold-ened by news of the troop withdrawal.

“This announcement gave new life to the Taliban and countries that support them like Iran and Pakistan, at a point where they were on the verge of defeat and demoralization,” he said. “The security situation wors-ened, warlords… rearmed, and there was capital, in-vestment and intellectual flight from the country. In my view, all this stems from

Obama’s mistaken poli-cies.”

In mitigation, some commentators said the Obama administration had been hamstrung by an often-fraught relation-ship with President Hamid Karzai.

“Obama’s policies in Afghanistan have not been carried through suc-cessfully because his and Joe Biden’s vision differed from Karzai’s, the latter has opposed US policies in Afghanistan, and a difficult relationship has developed,” political analyst Ahmad Say-idi said.

Sayidi said it would be important for the new US administration to prevent that the Karzai team domi-nating and directing the next Afghan presidential election, due in 2014.

Ramazan Bashardost, a member of parliament known for his robust at-tacks on corruption and mal-administration, had harsh words for Obama, who he said had assisted only one microcosm of Afghan soci-ety, a tiny elite.

“Future generations of those Afghans will never forget the sweet memories – they became billionaires on the taxes paid by poor Americans. They own luxury palaces and their children drive 100,000-dollar cars, at a time when the US has 15 million unemployed and 50

million others short of food,” Bashardost said. “As for the other Afghanistan, with a population of 26 million, Obama has delivered noth-ing in the past four years other than poverty, war, civil-ian deaths, unemployment, lack of security and disaster. He failed there.”

Marastial and other inter-viewees were highly critical of the way former warlords had been brought into posi-tions of power since 2001 and allowed to act with ap-parent impunity.

“The Americans were ini-tially the guilty party as they granted privileges to these individuals at the 2001 Bonn Conference and gave them a share in power. When the Americans later stopped backing them, Karzai em-braced them and he’s been supporting them ever since,” Marastial said.

Karzai spokesman Sia-mak Herawi acknowledges

that the US-Afghan ties have experienced some turbulence in the Obama years. But he said none of the problems was really se-rious and many had been resolved.

On the plus side, Herawi noted that the two countries had signed a strategic pact, international troops were beginning their phased with-drawal, and international donor conferences had re-sulted in new aid pledges.

Faizollah Jalal, a law lec-turer at Kabul University, is among the minority offering praise for Obama’s handling of Afghanistan.

“He pursued liberal poli-cies; he dealt patiently with the sometimes harsh posi-tions taken by the Afghan president, and he passed over in silence the broken promises from Karzaito curb corruption, eradicate poppy cultivation and end traf-ficking all in order to avoid

creating tensions in the rela-tionship,” he said.

As for the future, Sayidi said the Obama administra-tion should move towards practical action, rather than empty promises, to tackle “nests of terrorism” in Paki-stan, and adopt new focus on building Afghanistan’s economy, infrastructure and education system.

“Obama’s team has four years’ experience of the is-sues facing the region, par-ticularly concerning Afghani-stan, Pakistan and Iran. I do not believe Iran will be attacked. Pakistan will come under more pressure, and Afghanistan will become more closely aligned with India. Such a policy will help improve the situation in Af-ghanistan,” he said.

Mina Habib is an IW-PR-trained reporter in Afghanistan

United States To Keep 10,000 troops in Afghanistan

One Cheer for ObamaMore complaints than congratula-tions from local commentators.


By Mohammad Hassan Hakimi

Ghor Province – Hayatollah said that he is supposed to be teaching history and geography for grades 6-9 at the Kahrezak Secondary School, located 60 kilometers from the provincial capital of Cheghcheran.

But when asked to iden-tify Ahmad Shah Durrani, who was the first king of Afghani-stan, the 22 year-old teacher replied with a smile that he did not know. When asked again to name the most famous riv-ers in Afghanistan, he said he did not know the name of any river in Afghanistan except the Ghor River.

Hayatollah said that when he was sent to Kahrezak School two years ago by the provincial education depart-ment, he found out in his very first days on the job that the other teachers at the school did not possess even basic literacy skills.

He went back to Chegh-cheran and never returned to the school. Even so, he said he has received his monthly teaching salary for the past two years. “The cashier brings my salary to my doorstep every month,” Hayatollah said.

At least 280 million af-ghanis (approximately $USD 5.8 million) from the budget of the Ministry of Education of Af-ghanistan have been distribut-ed either inefficiently or directly to powerful local individuals in Ghor Province, according to an investigation by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

Only 20 percent of the pro-vincial teaching budget is ac-tually being paid to educators who go to schools and teach. The other 80 percent goes to absentee teachers. As a result, many students are promoted from one grade to the next without studying anything, ac-cording to government officials and even teachers who say they have not stepped foot in a classroom in months, despite receiving a monthly wage.

Those involved in this widespread graft in the cen-tral Afghan province includes local security personnel and education officials who receive monthly salaries in the names of absentee teachers. To date, no government agency has investigated the reported em-bezzlement.

Approximately 4,000 teach-ers in Ghor province currently receive monthly salaries from the government. An IWPR re-view found that perhaps 3,200 of these individuals are not teachers and, in fact, many cannot read and write. The in-dividuals are mostly residents of the villages near the schools.

IWPR also compiled a list showing that 80 percent of the

740 schools in the province are closed and inactive, but the provincial education depart-ment still pays salaries to the teachers of these schools on a monthly basis.

A history of abuse

The government is aware of the problem of absentee teachers being paid. A report by the Pajhwok News Agency from October 26, 2010, quoted Mohammad Safdar Khodayar, a member of the audit team for the Ghor education depart-ment, as saying his staff’s work showed that 90 percent of the schools in the province capital of Cheghcheran were closed, but that teachers were being paid monthly. He called the practice a national treason, blaming corruption within the Ghor education department.

Documents and other evidence obtained during an IWPR investigation strongly in-dicate that education directors in Ghor play a key role in the corruption.

Ahmad Tawab, current di-rector of education in Ghor Province, was arrested in his room on the evening of Octo-ber 28 by National Director-ate of Security (NDS) officials, moments after he received 200,000 afghanis (approxi-mately $USD 4,140) from Sher-zai, director of the UNESCO of-fice in Ghor. Tawab is currently in detention.

Tawab asked for this mon-ey from Sherzai to pay three month’s salary to 100 teachers of a UNESCO literacy course, according to his court case. The education director told the UNESCO director he would sign no salary forms for teach-ers if he were not given the 200,000 afghanis.

In another example of graft, former Ghor director of educa-tion Mohammad Nayim Forogh was caught in July 2010 steal-ing 500 100-kilogram sacks of wheat provided by the World Food Program for Cheghch-eran school students.

Forogh had not yet sold all the wheat sacks when he was informed that the govern-ment had discovered the theft. He tried to escape from Ghor to Kabul, but was arrested by NDS officials on the way in Lal Sarjangal district. He later ad-mitted his crime and a Ghor court sentenced him to five years, a verdict that was con-firmed by an appeals court in October of 2010, court docu-ments show.

After a June 2010 investi-gation by the Ghor education department audit team,

Id Gol Azem and Kamalod-din Mawdudi, deputy directors for educational and adminis-trative affairs in the Ghor edu-cation department, were both

sacked amid accusations that they had embezzled 400,000 afghanis from the Ghor provin-cial education budget. The two men quickly repaid the money.

Bribery and embezzlement is not limited to the Ghor educa-tion system, and the corruption sometimes includes officials in Kabul, IWPR’s investigation has found.

In October of 2010, an IWPR reporter was in the Cheghcheran branch of Kabul Bank conducting private busi-ness when he noticed that Habiborahman Hakimi, an em-ployee of the Ghor municipal properties department, had a huge bundle of 1,000-afghani notes in his hands.

Upon questioning, Hakimi admitted he had come to the bank to put 400,000 afghanis into the bank account of a friend from Mazar-e-Sharif who was a member of an anti-cor-ruption commission delegation from Kabul that had recently arrived in Ghor.

Hakimi told the reporter the mayor of Ghor had asked him to secretly transfer the money to a specific bank account. Ha-kimi claimed that the money belonged to the mayor and that the auditors from Kabul had asked him for it as a bribe, promising in return that the del-egation would not bother the municipality during the investi-gation.

Hakimi also claimed that three days earlier, he received 500,000 afghanis from the Ghor director of education and deposited in the bank account of a relative of one of the com-mittee members.

A two-year investigation in Ghor by the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption, Afghanistan’s top anti-graft body that was established in 2008, uncovered three meth-ods by which education offi-cials collected salaries paid to employees who did not go to their schools.

Mohammad Ibrahim Khalil, director of monitoring for the education ministry, provided an IWPR reporter with documents and evidence showing embez-zlement of the salaries for 400 school night guards who had not been physically present in the schools at all.

Two or three male guards are assigned to each school, Khalil said, and Ghor education officials prepared a fake orga-nization chart for 400 people in schools in nine districts and then collected 3,500 afghanis per month for each of these positions from the government budget, for a total monthly pay-ment of 1.4 million afghanis.

Khalil said that money went into the pockets of the now-detained director of education Ahmad Tawab, administrative deputy director Abdol Hakim,

provincial finance officials and accountants, and some local military and police command-ers in the districts and villages.

According to Khalil, a sec-ond form of corruption con-ducted by the Ghor education department involved 1,900 teachers who signed one-year contracts. These teachers did not go to work, and the next year officials signed 1,900 new teachers, taking one-month’s salary as a bribe in the process.

Khalil showed an IWPR reporter documents indicating some of this money went to Ahmad Tawab, Abdol Hakim, and education department ac-countants Abdol Rawuf Hamidi, Gholam Faruq and Ghafuri. The rest of the money allegedly went to the Ghor finance de-partment and, again, to some local commanders.

Khalil told IWPR the third form of corruption involves non-working teachers who pay a small percentage of their salary to government of-ficials when they collect it every month. Khalil says that money also goes to the education de-partment, finance department and local commanders.

Khalil said he witnessed in his own office a teacher who had not been seen for months ask for 18,000 afghanis in back salary.

Accountant Gholam Fa-ruq asked the teacher for a 9,000-afghani bribe out of that payment. Khalil said that he asked Faruq not to take the bribe, but that Faruq ignored him and used some of the mon-ey two buy two mobile phone cash cards that he gave to an-other accountant in the office.

Ghor is a mountainous province in central Afghanistan and the people are poor. Most residents work in agriculture and livestock, while a small number get jobs as govern-ment workers. Most govern-ment employees in the provin-cial capital of Cheghcheran get paid between 5,000 and 8,000 afghanis per month.

A three-month IWPR inves-tigation found that Abdol Rawuf Hamidi, finance manager of the Ghor education department, has held that position for five years and collects a monthly salary of 7,500 afghanis. He owns a new Land Cruiser worth $20,000, a Toyota Co-rolla worth $7,000, and two mansions located behind the provincial hospital in Chegh-cheran, which one realtor esti-mated were worth a combined $200,000.

Abdol Hakim, the 35-year-old administrative deputy direc-tor of education in Ghor, started this job only two months ago after serving as the finance di-rector for the education depart-ment for three years. His new salary is 7,000 afghanis per

month.Yet, he owns a two-story

mansion that a realtor said is worth $200,000 in the center of Cheghcheran city next to the airport and close to the US mili-tary Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) camp. He owns a new black Toyota 4Runner truck worth $8,000 and recent-ly got married for the second time.

The IWPR reporter talked to many sources in the area. None of them had any knowl-edge of any inheritances the two officials might have re-ceived from their fathers.

Isolation, no oversight encourage graft

Lack of communication with the national Ministry of Educa-tion has allowed the Ghor edu-cation department to operate without transparency, violate laws and create a culture of impunity, officials like Moham-mad Ibrahim Khalil say. Their victims are 240,000 students at 740 schools.

Khalil said that he has sent more than 200 official letters to the Ghor department of educa-tion, complaining about closed schools and absent teachers receiving salaries. (IWPR has copies of 62 of these letters).

“I’m sure all those letters have been use in the winter to light the stove in the educa-tion minister’s office,” he joked grimly, noting, however, that his efforts did lead to the sacking of 10 teachers from schools in Shewich who had been absent for five months but were still re-ceived salaries.

But 20 days after they lost their jobs, education director Ahmad Tawab reappointed five of those teachers.

Pasawand district Gover-nor Mohammad Nasim Kohzad said all 52 schools in his district are closed. He said the desert-ed schools serve as a warning for the future of Pasawand, and that he has appealed unsuc-cessfully to Ghulam Farooq Wardak, the minister of educa-tion in Kabul, to get the schools opened.

“I have complained to the governor and the education director several times that the mullahs and Taliban who have guns on their shoulders receive salaries in the name of teach-ers from the schools in Pas-awand, but no one has ever cared about it,” Kohzad said.

The chairman of the provin-cial council in Ghor, Fazl Haq Ihsan, said that it is regretful that teacher salaries are dis-tributed among the people “like charity.” He said he has com-plained to the governor and the education director, with no results. Ghor government offi-cials who are part of the salary chain say it is not their job to keep track of how that money is distributed.

Mohammad Yusof Maslak Fahm, finance director for Ghor province, says his department pays about 350 million afghanis to 4,000 teachers annually.

“We are responsible for pay-ing the teachers’ salaries,” he said. “We are not responsible

for asking whether the teachers are present or absent.” He said the finance department does not pay a teacher unless their name is included in the Form M41 of salaries confirmed by the department of education and the local district governor.

No teachers, no studentsBefore his arrest in October

for allegedly seeking a bribe from UNESCO, Ghor educa-tion director Ahmad Tawab was interviewed by IWPR. He admitted the education depart-ment had serious problems but defended himself by pointing out that he was originally from Uruzghan province and was not familiar with the people of Ghor, although he has held his current position since 2002.

Tawab agreed that many teachers of schools in Ghor were local mullahs with ties to the Taliban, who had tribal influence in the districts and villages. He said many of them don’t go to the schools, but after bribes are paid, their names appear on the lists of active teachers to be paid. He admitted that he had very little oversight of what went on in the school administrations.

When he was interviewed, Tawab said: “The governor of Ghor asked me to go to the dis-tricts and monitor the schools, but I told him that it was not necessary now and that I will go there in a month.

No government official in Ghor denies that most of the schools are closed and that 280 million afghanis worth of teacher salaries are being dis-tributed illegally every month.

Ghor governor spokes-man Khatibi admitted, “there are no teachers, no students, no books and no education or studying in these schools.” He added that the governor is aware of this massive corrup-tion, bribery and embezzle-ment in the education depart-ment.

Khatibi said teachers are appointed based on an eth-nic quota. “When a teacher is appointed, it is not important to the education department whether he is literate or not, but it is important that the person should come from a specific ethnic group or village.”

Gholam Rabbani Hadaf-mand, an inspector with the teacher training department in Ghor, said he was asked last year to assess the education level of teachers in Shahrak, Saghar and Dolina districts. Of 300 teachers he interviewed, more than 200 of them were completely illiterate.

In the words of Ghor gov-ernment spokesman Khatibi: “We know that schools in Ghor are plenty in number, but have no quality.”

Ghost teachers in Ghor eat up millions of dollars


identify me. My most important piece of identity was not even “Abuzar Royesh,” the birth name my parents chose to for me.

Here in the U.S. I was first and foremost an Afghan a title that conjured up Taliban and al Qaeda, war, kill-ings, and explosions.

Cough. I cleared my throat, “I am Abuzar. I am an exchange student from Afghanistan…” Before I fin-ished my sentence I could already see the astonish-ment in his eyes.

“Wow! So cool. How did you make it here?”I started to explain my story. But just as I began

the entire monologue I had memorized in response to this question, he spurted out the next one.

“What is life like in Afghanistan?”I now attempted to answer this question. Again,

before I could get my words out, further questions started showering me incessantly. I couldn’t under-stand his thirst for interrogating me about Afghani-stan. Having lived all of my life in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to me Afghanistan was merely a country; a homeland, just like all others. I felt as ordinary in my country as any kid from the U.S. or France would feel in theirs.

But seemingly this wasn’t what he thought of my country. As I would learn later on, to him and many other Americans, Afghanistan was just a remote land where thousands of American soldiers sacrificed their lives in a doomed attempt to bring democracy and stability, and where billions of American dollars had vanished. They were apparently startled to meet someone actually from there; someone who had a different story from what they knew.

From that moment on, the identity I had previously forged for myself was overtaken by a new definition of me: “Afghan.” On the first day of my academic year in the U.S., when the emcee called out the six international students’ names and their respective

countries, I saw how all eyes fixed on me when my country’s name was called. Wherever I went or what-ever I did, I bore the Afghan tag. I had now become the avatar of my country, and I realized that whatever I said and whatever I did, I was helping create my classmates’ perception of what an Afghan person is.

I carried with me Afghanistan’s long history of civil wars, Afghans’ presumed hatred towards the Unit-ed States, and corrupt and despotic governments, though I was responsible for none of it.

But I could show them that Afghanistan is a normal country, just like the U.S. Youth in Afghanistan also have their hopes and ambitions, they also seek time for relaxation, they enjoy wearing the latest fash-ion, playing videogames, and having access to lat-est technologies. To create this new image, I had to choose each of my moves very vigilantly; a minor slip and I could annihilate this new depiction of “normal” Afghanistan I strived to sketch.

When I came to school in jeans, a t-shirt, and bas-ketball shoes, I realized, in my classmates’ minds all Afghans dressed in the same fashion. The food on my plate or the drink in my cup became recipes for how an Afghan would eat. Every “A” I acquired in my classes earned Afghanistan an “A,” and I felt that my failures and the things I didn’t know became testa-ments to Afghanistan’s ignorance.

This new role brought with it conflicting emotions. In many ways it deprived me of the prospect to be an ordinary kid, like all the other students I would regu-larly see in my classes. At times, I confess, I envied some of my classmates’ courage to blow off studying or doing homework, while I had to always appear dili-gent and motivated.

When my high school friends went to parties and theaters, or played videogames, I had to do commu-nity service or give presentations about my country as part of my exchange program. I still remember that my high school prom was at the same time as a

workshop by the exchange program about our return to Afghanistan.

And while other students could be callous about what happened in the world around them, I had to be able to analyze and discuss what was going on not only in Afghanistan, but also in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

I was a person their age sharing most of their urges, needs, and desires; why did I alone have to shoulder this extra responsibility?

Sometimes I would try to hide my Afghan identity by presenting my student ID instead of my passport in the airports or by struggling to adjust my accent when shopping or talking to strangers; all this to evade the questions I was sure would follow once someone learned I was from Afghanistan.

But on the other hand, I felt proud to have sub-stituted the predominant American images of Af-ghanistan with my own; I had found a voice to cry my generations’ aspirations, wants, and ideologies. I would introduce Afghanistan through the eyes of my generation, a generation tired of the animosity and ignorance that had ruled Afghanistan, endeavoring to make the country a better place.

This pride and joy counterbalanced all the exhaus-tion I would at times feel. I may have lost pieces of my identity that I had grown accustomed to back home, but I now felt there was more to me than I had previously aspired for.

A court in United Arab Emirate sued the state Airlines Ariana Airlines of Afghanistan $10 million. Officials in the ministry of transportation and aviation of Afghanistan said a court in Sharjah announced the verdict a month ago.

Meanwhile Afghan transportation minis-try officials said they do

not agree with the deci-sion of the Sharjah court despite the verdict has been announced where Ariana Airlines will have to pay $10 million fine to an airlines company based in United Arab Emirate.

Yalda Natiq chief of the external affairs at the ministry of transporta-tion of Afghanistan said

the ministry and Ariana Airlines are gathering information to deny the claims by UAE based Airlines Company.

She said, “They are claiming to gather all the required information re-lating the case and their legal advisor along with our legal advisor contact UAE officials and the Airlines Company based

in Dubai. The claims are not true by an Airlines Company in UAE since they are thinking that the case is still open and Ariana Airlines has been sued and is obliged to pay the fine.”

Ariana Airlines was sued by Sharjah Court to pay $10 million to one of the Airlines Company in UAE after Ariana Air-lines hired a number of aircrafts from Pamir Air-ways.

Pamir Airways is not operational currently but the Airlines had rented a number of aircrafts from an Airlines Company in UAE around eight years back.

In the meantime chief of the Ariana Airlines said, “The aircrafts hired by Pamir Airways was re-turned back to Sharajah Airport after the transfer of the Afghan pilgrims was completed but the UAE Company did not receive the aircrafts.”

Nasir Ahmad Hakimi Chief of the Ariana Air-lines said, “The contract was signed between Pamir Airways and with Amad Saba the owner of the UAE based airlines in 2004 for the transpor-tation of Afghan pilgrims where Ariana Airlines later signed a contract with the Pamir Airways to rent the aircrafts. The UAE based airlines com-pany is now suing the Af-ghan embassy and Ari-ana Airlines to pay $10.5 million since they know that Pamir Airways does not exist anymore and that the aircrafts were re-turned on time.”

In the meantime a number of economic observers believe that the Afghan government should take necessary steps to follow and re-solve the issue.

Afghan economic analyst Syed Massoud said, “We are obliged to start negotiations in this

regard considering the sensitive situation and Ariana Airlines which needs cooperation has been sued $10 million by UAE.”

Ariana Airlines is the only state aviation com-pany in Afghanistan and access to information regarding the contract of Pamir Airways with the UAE based Airlines Company seems to be difficult since Pamir Air-ways does not exist any-more.

There are also con-cerns that the private Airlines Companies are looking to end the op-erations of the only state aviation company in Af-ghanistan by purchasing its shares.

Ariana Airlines fined $10 million by UAE

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By Kamran Faizi

The 2nd Annual Afghan Thanksgiving Cup hosted by Afghan Premier took place from November 22 to 25 in Dublin, CA. A total of 6 Open teams, 4 Girls teams, 4 Over 35 teams and 3 Un-der 16 boys teams partici-pated in the tournament.

The open team brackets

consisted of Afghan Pre-mier (Dublin, CA), Brishna (New York, NY), Itifaq (Tra-cy, CA), Kabul Club (Con-cord, CA), Afghan Club (Fremont, CA) and Aria Club (Concord, CA).

Over 35 was contested

by 6th of Sowr (Dublin, CA), Aria Club (Concord, CA), Itifaq (Tracy, CA) and Bay Area United.

The Girls teams con-

sisted of Afghan Club (Fre-mont, CA), Aria Club (Con-

cord, CA), Itifaq (Tracy, CA) and Noor FC (Dublin, CA)

Lastly the U-16 Boys

teams were Afghan Club (Fremont, CA), Noor FC (Dublin, CA) and Itifaq (Tracy, CA).

Afghan Premier won the

Championship in the Open team Category in a penalty shoot-out over Brishna of New York. The Final was a competitive match with both teams squandering numerous scoring oppor-tunities in regulation, per-haps more on Brishna’s part. Afghan Premier took a 1-0 lead in the first ten minutes of the game and as the game progressed, Premier took a more defen-sive approach protecting the lead as Brishna applied consistent pressure look-ing for the equalizer which finally materialized via a penalty in the second half. The match had its share of quality moments and disappointing moments as three players were sent off with red cards for un-sportsmanship conduct. Over all the Final match up was to be expected as both Brishna and Premier rank high up there among the

top echelon of Afghan soc-cer teams, but the road to the Final was a major step back for the progress of Afghan soccer and the pro-motion of obtaining results on the pitch with sports, as opposed to off the field gamesmanship and chess play upon which we shall touch later in this report.

The Over 35 Final was

played between Aria Club and 6th of Sowr with the latter winning the Final also in a penalty shootout.

The Girls title was

awarded to Aria Club of Concord due to a forfeit on the part of Itifaq FC.

Lastly, Afghan Club won

the U-16 Boys Final over Noor FC in a come-from-behind 3-2 victory.

There is no doubt that

sporting events for the most part serve a bigger purpose that goes beyond the boundaries of a foot-ball pitch and tournaments like this promote the game of soccer within the com-munity and provide op-portunities for the players and fans to enjoy a fun weekend of soccer. Unfor-tunately we also run the

risk of alienating the very same players and fans if we take short cuts, think of benefiting our own teams only and don’t improve upon the previous tourna-ment or the previous year. The credo of winning at all costs goes against the idea of developing the game or uniting the community. We have to be consistent with our pretournament decla-rations, we have to not lose sight of our responsibilities during the competition and most importantly we have to think of tomorrow when the games do end and we have to plan the next tour-nament. We cannot go through a healing process after each tournament time and time again. Clubs, teams, players and coach-es get so caught up in the moment, in the now, and put winning ahead of ev-erything else that common sense and sound judgment get clouded or simply ab-sent from the equation and discussion.

There were a number

of rules violations, forfeit of games and a complete disregard of laws by cer-tain teams and or clubs that also marred the tour-nament and had a direct

affect on the outcome of matches, Championship pairings and overall con-clusion of the tournament. Games were being decid-ed on paper as opposed to the playing field.

There were also the unfortunate episodes of players being ejected from games all of whom repre-sent the National Team of Afghanistan from the Men’s and Women’s teams. Fair or not, these players must realize that they are held in high regard and better judgment and role-model-type sportsmanship is ex-pected of them.

As for this tournament

and future events, perhaps we can take a page from the game of soccer itself and do a reset. When at-tacking the opponent’s goal and the play or attack stalls, the best route is a pass back to your own de-fense, reset the play and try a new approach as op-posed to doing the same thing over and over.

Also we need to note

that too much of anything is not always good. Water-ing down the competition or quality of games and teams with tournaments

every two months is actu-ally counterproductive as opposed to being benefi-cial. We are at the heart of the largest Afghan com-munity outside Afghani-stan and are blessed with thousands of quality soc-cer players in various age groups. Focusing on qual-ity instead of quantity will help us achieve more with fewer games if done right.

This by no means is to

take anything away from the hard work of the tour-nament hosts, the quality of matches and the overall atmosphere of the four-day event. Congratulations are in order for all the winning teams and some of the players and coaches for their well deserved individ-ual honors.

Albert Einstein defines

insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different re-sults”. Let us hope that we gather our thoughts and collectively address the lessons from all the tourna-ments of 2012 and make the necessary changes in order to properly move ahead.

2012 AFGHAN THANKSGIVING SOCCER CUPFREEKICK SOCCER NEWSLETTER

Photos By Omid Mehdavi


Thanksgiving CupFREEKICK SOCCER NEWSLETTER

Photos By Kamran Faizi

DECEMBER-2012 www.afghanexaminer.comAFGHAN EXAMINER 11FREEKICK SOCCER NEWSLETTER


By Golab Shah Bawar -Afghanistan Kamaluddin shouts at his team to load up the trucks as quickly as possibly so that they get on the road. By the afternoon, they should have made the run down from the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif to the Afghan capital Kabul. From there, they will head south for Pakistan.The trucks are carrying lambskins and other animal hides, the product of one of Afghanistan’s most impor-tant industries. They have been temporarily cured with salt, but they cannot be tanned and readied for sale because most process-ing plants collapsed long ago during years of war and

disruption. Hence the long trip to Pakistan.As a merchant himself and head of the hide traders’ as-sociation in Mazar-e Sharif, Kamaluddin is unhappy that all the extra value add-ed by tanning Afghan hides goes to Pakistan. Traders in the latter country make ex-tra profits by re-exporting the finished product back to Afghanistan.“It’s better than being un-employed,” he said of his job. “I make a ten per cent profit by transporting the skins to Pakistan, but even that sometimes falls to five or six per cent because of fluctuations in the value of Afghanis and Pakistani ru-pees.”He added that much of the

profit is made by those traders who import the skins back to Afghani-stan after they are pro-

cessed.The plains of northern Afghanistan are ideal for raising livestock, and the region continues to lead production of wool for tra-ditional carpets, the tightly-curled lambskins known as karakul, and other animal hides.With 60 million skins – nearly the whole of the north’s production – ex-ported to Pakistan every year, traders say the coun-try is missing out on tens of millions of US dollars in export revenues and tax re-ceipts, all because the gov-ernment has failed to revive the tanning industry, which would also create many new jobs.

Before the cycle of conflict began with the Soviet inva-sion of 1979, there were so many Afghan tanning fac-tories that it was the Paki-stanis who exported their raw hides there.“Now it’s the other way round,” Kamaluddin said. “We send skins to Pakistan where they are processed, and 90 per cent of the profit is earned there,”In Balkh province, where Mazar-e Sharif is located, there are more than ten commercial firms involved in hide exports, as well as at least 200 traders operating independently. They deal in the skins of lambs, sheep, goats, cows and camels raised in the neighbouring Faryab, Jowzjan, Sar-e Pol and Samangan provinces as well as Balkh.The head of Balkh prov-ince’s economic depart-ment, Abdurrahman, says one of the obstacles to leather and tanning facto-ries taking off is the lack of effective barriers to low-quality imports.Obaidullah Khan’s shop in Mazar-e Sharif is packed with karakul pelts and piles of black and red leather. He agrees that reviving the lo-cal tanning industry would increase quality, reduce prices and create much-needed employment.With cowhide now selling at 20 dollars per kilogram, and processed sheepskin at ten dollars, he says, “The price of leather has in-creased by 30 per cent from last year.”Engineer Mohammad Hasan Ansari, director of industrial promotion

and development at Balkh province’s chamber of com-merce, says government has to take a lead on reviving the tanning industry. Pri-vate investors are just not prepared to take the risk on their own“Aside from other prob-lems, the lack of electricity and shortages of the raw materials needed for pro-cessing are among several reasons why investors have failed to take an interest in this sector,” he saidWhen Afghanistan’s min-ister of commerce and in-dustry, Anwarolhaq Ahadi, visited the north over the summer, he promised to kick-start the processing industry and offer support to potential investors.“We are looking at promot-ing the domestic leather in-dustry and curbing exports of the raw product in com-ing years, with some as-sistance from donor coun-tries. We are aligned with the skin traders on this matter, and we will help them,” he said.For the moment, skins are brought into Mazar-e-Sha-rif to be sorted, salted and dispatched to Pakistan. The traders share a 500-square-metre area in the city center for this purpose, and resi-dents complain that it is dirty, messy and smelly, and should be shifted well out-side the town.“We can’t enjoy food and drink because of the stink from the skins,” local shop-keeper Abdul Jabar. “Some people just give up working in this area over the sum-mer.”Abdul Jabar said residents

had made several unsuc-cessful complaints about the hide collection facility to municipality officials and to provincial council chair-man Mohammad Afzal Hadid.“We know there’s money flowing into the pockets of municipal officials on a monthly basis, and that’s why we are not heard,” he said.Council chairman Hadid said he had discussed resi-dents’ concerns with the municipality, but no solu-tion had yet been found.The skin traders’ associa-tion has proposed moving out of the city centre to an industrial zone, but its deputy head Fazel Ahmad says the land there is par-celled out to people with good connections in local government but no interest in business.Abdul Majid, the official in charge of industrial zones in Balkh, acknowledged that this was happening. “Certain powerful individ-uals are distributing land plots at the Gorimar indus-trial park to people who are not traders,” he said. “Re-solving this problem is go-ing to take some time.”Golab Shah Bawar is a freelance

reporter in Balkh province.

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Afghan Plastic Surgery

Shah Gul is not a rich woman, even by Afghan standards. She is a widow and borrowed the money for the nose re-duction from her brother, a vegetable vendor. The opera-tion is, she says, her chance to finally feel beautiful after a lifetime of shame and self-consciousness about her large, misshapen nose.

In the examination room, Dr Daud Nazari, 37, peels off the bandages to examine his work. There is still swell-ing and bruising but there is no doubt that the nose is far more dainty than in the “be-fore” photograph.“I am very happy,” says Gul, turning her head this way and that to examine her nose in the looking glass from all an-gles.

Over the past decade since the ousting of the Taliban, plastic surgeons - visiting foreigners and the Afghans learning from them - have performed hundreds of op-erations to correct cleft lips and club feet, to reduce scar-ring on women and girls who set themselves alight in pro-test about the misery of their

lives, and even to sew back on the ears of men who had been mutilated by the Taliban as a punishment for cooper-ating with the government or coalition forces.

Famously, the California-based Grossman Burn Foun-dation is one of many organi-zations that donate plastic surgery to female “honor victims” in Afghanistan. The foundation gave a new pros-thetic nose to Aisha, the girl featured on a controversial Time magazine cover last year who had her nose and ears cut off - with the approv-al of a Taliban commander - by her abusive husband as punishment for running away.Now, however, the emerging middle classes, who have been exposed to trends in Iran and India, have a dispos-able income and are willing to pay for plastic surgery purely for cosmetic reasons. The first two private plastic sur-geons in town, Drs Aminullah Hamkar, 52, and Nazari, are struggling to keep up with the demand for their services. Hamkar learnt plastic surgery in the Soviet Union two dec-ades ago. In 2002, after the

fall of the Taliban the year before, he returned to Kabul with to setup a private clinic. He offered to train his col-league, Nazari, who, as the one of the pair who speaks English, was interviewed for this piece.

On weekday afternoons, there is a steady flow of pa-tients. A mother arrives with her teenage daughter to ask if anything could be done about the daughter’s uneven breasts. The teenager had had an operation, years ago, to remove a cyst, and the pro-cedure had left her left breast half the size of the right one. She is engaged to be married and she is concerned about her future husband’s reaction to her deformity. After a brief examination, Nazari says yes, he could perform a mammoplasty, but the patient will need to find a way to acquire the implant. He himself would struggle to do so. If they can get the prosthesis into the country, he will be able to do the op-eration.

Next comes a TV actress

who wants a tummy tuck af-ter the birth of her first child.Then comes a young man, a student, seeking a nose en-largement. He came from a poor family. His parents had scraped together the money to send him to Kabul Uni-versity to become a teacher. He was planning to use the 6,000 Afghanis (Dh441) they had given him for living ex-penses for the first term on surgery.

Unfortunately, he is about 9,000 Afghanis short of the 15,000 Afghanis the clinic charges students and poor patients for surgery. (The full rate is 25,000 Afghanis.) Nazari tries to convince the boy the procedure is unnec-essary.

“If you give me the money, how will you live for the next term?” the surgeon asks.“I’ll find a way,” the boy say. “Can’t you do the operation today and I will get the rest of the money in the next few days?

“I am in so much pain,” he says of his disgust for his small, Asiatic nose.

Nazari refuses. The boy, crestfallen, gets up and leaves.

Nose jobs are a frequently sought-after operation at Hamkar’s clinic, as are eye-lid lifts. Patients often take their cultural cues from Iran, hence the social acceptabil-ity of plastic surgery among that population: Tehran, af-ter all, is often referred to as the “nose job capital of the world”.

The chadors - the full body cloaks - that Iranians wear draw attention to the face as the only part of the body on display. So it makes sense to want to make those features more attractive. But what about the Afghans who wear the burqa? It seems surpris-ing that there would be a demand for plastic surgery when their faces are covered up most of the time.

“In Afghanistan, women cover their faces,” says Ash Mosahebi, a consultant plas-tic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in London. “But be-hind the scenes, even if it’s only females together, they

still want to look better.”

At Hamkar Surgical Clinic, procedures are quick and dirty by western standards. In cases of nose augmenta-tions, the implant is acquired by cutting a piece of bone from a rib. Both surgeries - rib and nose - are done under a local, rather than a general, anesthetic. Recovery time af-ter surgery is one hour.

Using a piece of rib is stand-ard procedure, even in the West, according to Mosahe-bi, who was born in Iran and who moved to the UK when he was 15.

“For nose augmentations, the easiest way is to use a bone or rib,” Mosahebi says. “But it is very rare in the UK to do nose surgery under a local anesthetic. Sometimes it is done in Europe and the US under a local anesthetic but people are also very heavily sedated. People [in the West] would not tolerate a local an-esthetic for that kind of proce-dure. There is a higher toler-ance in Afghanistan.”A 23-year-old divorcée, Par-win, comes and sits in Ham-


kar’s waiting room dressed in a surgical cap and gown, ready to go under the knife. She is Hazara and has come in for a nose enlargement. She chats happily in good English about having the sur-

gery.“In Afghanistan, being beau-tiful means having big eyes and the right-size nose,” she says. “We don’t think about lips too much. Eyes and the nose - those are the two main

things. We don’t think too much about cheekbones, ei-ther.”She says she isn’t scared.“I am going to do this anyway, so I had to think positive. I’ve been waiting so long for this,”

she says. “I phoned my moth-er this morning and told her that I had a surprise for her - that I would look very differ-ent when I came home this evening,” she adds, giggling.A few days later, Parwin is

back at the clinic for her first post-operation check-up. She describes being oper-ated on.“I could see and hear eve-rything going on,” she says. “They put a local anesthetic in my nose but started before it began to work properly. When the knife went in, I was in terrific pain. I yelled and shouted because it hurt so much. When they cut the rib there was a big noise. But I felt I could trust the doctors.“I am very excited about see-ing my new nose. It’s been a hard wait. For two days after the operation I was really afraid. My eyes were black. I was really sick. I couldn’t walk at all for two or three days.”But already she noticed an improvement: “The operation pulled the skin around my eyes, and my eyes are bigger and more beautiful.”When the bandages come off she is pleased but then worries that her nose is not straight. “It’s really good. It’s better than before. It was nothing before. Now I have something here. It feels really good. But look at this, it’s not too straight. It should be like this.”She delicately pulls the nose

into line.“They just have to make it a bit straight. I am happy but it should be straight.” The cost of a nose job around the world

The price of a nose job can vary significantly depending on the severity of the recon-struction. The three main factors in the cost are the fees for the surgeon, the an-esthesia and the facility. The average figures by country: Afghanistan $300, Argen-tina $2,072, Austria $4.692, Australia $5,817, Belgium $2,882, Bolivia $1,337, Bra-zil $1,461, Croatia $2,415, Cuba $1,535, Cyprus $3,680, Czech Republic $3,20, France $4,534, Greece $4,872, Hungary $2,858, In-dia $2,074, Lebanon $4,500, Lithuania $2,520, Malaysia $2,083, Morocco $2,020, Norway $4,638, Poland $2,231, Slovakia $2,147, South Africa $3,883, Spain $4,491, Thailand $2,671, Tu-nisia $2,447, Turkey $3,418, UAE $5,445, UK $6,100, Venezuela $2,184


Afghan Children Ensnared in Heroin Trade With Iran

By Zalmay Barakzai - Afghanistan Two years ago, Mohammad Reza was a 17-year-old student in Ghoryan, a district in the Herat prov-ince of western Afghanistan, spending half his days at school and the other half playing football with friends.

Among those friends, he noticed, some were mak-ing huge amounts of money. Reza was fascinated to see them growing richer, igniting in him a desire to have what they had – to own a Shehab motorcycle, to have bracelets and rings and an iPhone.

And so he found himself at the home of a smuggler named Arbab Qoudus, listening closely as the man told him the secret to becoming rich: “The more capsules you swallow, the more money you earn.”

The capsules contained heroin bound for Iran.Reza agreed to try, and in doing so become one of a growing number of young men recruited by smug-glers in a dangerous, sometimes deadly, practice.

An investigation by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in four villages of Ghoryan district found a high number of children who have become entan-gled in smuggling rings. Some of them never return.

By midnight, Reza had swallowed ten capsules. In an interview with IWPR, he said he wasn’t sure if he could swallow more, but he knew if he could man-age another three capsules, he would earn Iranian cash worth 20,500 afghanis, or about 400 US dol-lars, twice the amount he’d be paid if he only swal-lowed ten. He swallowed the last three with the help of boiled milk. Thirteen plastic-coated capsules of Afghan heroin were now sitting in his stomach.

The next day, he set out with a group of children and a handler. With fake travel documents, they were waved through the border checkpoint into Iran. There, at a smuggler’s home, he was given laxatives to pass the plastic capsules. The smugglers were only able to retrieve six, however. They paid him for those and sent him back to Ghoryan with seven capsules still in his stomach.

Reza felt the pain in his stomach before he had a chance to shop for an iPhone. He called his family and told them what had happened. His parents took him to an illicit doctor to have the capsules removed by surgery. He survived. But other children have not been so lucky.

According to more than 50 interviews with smug-glers, parents and police officials, an estimated 60 children in four Ghoryan villages have died in the past decade after swallowing capsules of heroin, a refined substance that has increased in popular-ity since the ouster of the Taleban. According to these interviews, conducted over a period of several months, as many as 1,000 children have disappeared from Ghoryan province since 2002 after they were

persuaded to smuggle heroin across the Iranian bor-der.

In the villages of Mangwan, Kariz, Barnabad and Sab-ol-e Haft Chah, parents fear for their children as long as the smugglers remain active. Some children are killed, while others have been thrown in prison. In fact, children are attractive to the smugglers because they are not executed in Iran, where drug trafficking is a serious offence that carries capital punishment.Yaka Khan, who is now a butcher at the Ghoryan district center bazaar, said he was arrested two years ago in Iran, along with two other smugglers. One of them, a Ghoryan man named Azizullah, was hanged. The other remains in prison. Yaka Khan said he was returned to Afghanistan because he was only 16 when he was caught.

Cautionary stories like those of Yaka Khan and Mo-hammad Reza may do little to curb the practice of heroin smuggling. Crystallised heroin, often smoked by addicts through improvised water pipes, sells for 1,200 dollars per kilogram in Afghanistan, according to smugglers. Its value doubles in Iran.

In the four villages, there are at least eight major smuggling ringleaders. Two of them agreed to be in-terviewed by IWPR on condition of anonymity.

The first, a smuggler from Mangwan, said the hero-in originates in Helmand province. It is secreted in trucks coming into Herat, in loads of perhaps hun-dreds of kilograms hidden under other, legal goods.

Children are easy to recruit for smuggling operations, he said, adding that if they are jailed, they will eventu-ally be released.

A child can smuggle five, eight or ten grams of crys-tal heroin, depending on his size. He swallows the capsules and within a 24-hour period, he will be transported to Iran and will pass the capsules. “We pay them 300,000 tomans [about 260 dollars] for five capsules.”

The second smuggler, who is 53 and operates out of Mangwan as well, said he has used children to smug-gle heroin, but says they were all warned of the po-tential dangers.Sometimes, he said, parents will rent out their chil-dren to smugglers. Other times, children are paid di-rectly for capsules, as Reza was.

Contrary to these claims, child smugglers say they are seldom warned of the dangers.

“The smugglers exploit our poverty and obligations,” said one child, Aarash. He has trafficked crystal her-oin many times, he said, but was never told he could be killed.

Ghulam Haidar, a resident of Mangwan village, lost his son Sebghatullah to smuggling. Sebghatullah dis-appeared for days, Haidar said, and no one in the vil-

lage knew his whereabouts. A friend learned that Sebghatullah had been arrested in the Iranian bor-der town of Islam Qala. When the friend went to the border, Haider said, “The police handed over his corpse.”

Heroin smuggling has been on the rise in Ghoryan for the last decade. It has become systematised, with strong links and networks. The province is less than 50 kilometers from Herat city and shares more than 170 kilometers of border with Iran. Local smug-glers are armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, and they drive the latest-model Toyota HiLux trucks or Land Cruisers. They are not afraid of clashing with police.

Border police can do little to stop the trade. They are often outgunned, and some of them take bribes from smugglers to let them pass.

Last year, Mulhim Khan, the general in charge of the Herat border police, was arrested by the Iranian authorities in Islam Qala on charges related to drug smuggling. He has since been remanded to Pul-e Charkhi prison in Kabul, according to Nazir Haidar Zadah, a provincial councillor in Herat.

Khan had allegedly taken some 70,000 dollars from subordinate officers who abetted the drug smug-gling, Haidar Zadah said. The case was widely pub-licised in the Herat media. One colonel recorded a transaction with the general on his mobile phone. Khan did not fight the charges in court and was put in prison.

Still, counternarcotics police in Herat say they are making some headway. Over the last four years, the police have arrested nearly 500 smugglers in Ghoryan. Five of the suspects were children trying to traffic swallowed heroin capsules, said Ahmad Zia Hafezi, head of the provincial counter-narcotics police.

But there is much more to be done. There are still many parents in the province who are missing their children, and there is no shortage of children will-ing to take the risk.

These days, Mohammad Reza has given up his dreams of easy money, and is studying at the Yar Mohammad Alkozay School in Ghoryan. He can still feel the pain in his stomach, from surgery that cost his family 800 dollars – double what he earned on his smuggling adventure.

Zalmay Barakzai is an IWPR-trained reporter in Af-ghanistan.

Smuggling endemic in western district, and children used as mules despite risk of poisoning and arrest.


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Afghan Mosque Locations

December 2012 Vol 1 Issue 3

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Transcript of December 2012 Vol 1 Issue 3