…a new study on aid distribution undertaken by UNICEF showed aid agencies could save millions of lives by going first to the most disadvantaged mothers and children and their communities.
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Blog
U.S. to temper stance on Afghan corruption
“We have never had the granular understanding of local circumstances in Afghanistan that we achieved over time in Iraq,” Petraeus said this week. “One of the key elements in our ability to be fairly agile in our activities in Iraq during the surge was a pretty good understanding of who the power brokers were in local areas and how the systems were supposed to work and how they really worked. . . . That enabled us enormously.”
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Understanding the Taliban
Some analysts believe that US air strikes have been so effective in killing senior Taliban that the war is now being run by a new generation of men in their twenties and thirties, with no experience of the anti-Soviet struggle that schooled the mujahidin warlords as well as Mullah Omar and his Taliban colleagues. Whether this means they are more radical than the previous generation is unclear. Coghlan quotes a Taliban cleric near Lashkar Gah in Helmand in March 2008 as saying: ‘These new crazy guys are really emotional. They are war-addicted.’
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Somalia: the intervention dilemma
This Policy Brief examines the apparent urgency to increase AMISOM force levels. It interrogates the AU’s interventionist strategy in Somalia, including the planned troop surge, analyses the terrorist dimension of the bombings, drawing parallels with the Afghanistan case as a basis for suggestions for a clear and holistic approach to the conflict in Somalia.
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Lacking Money and Leadership, Push for Taliban Defectors Stalls
Ghulam Yahya Akbari, an insurgent commander in Herat Province, was killed last October and 200 of his fighters surrendered to the Afghan government. To date, Mr. Akram said, none of them have received benefits other than emergency food rations, and they cannot return to their homes for fear of reprisals from the Taliban.
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US Government Report Argues for Police Force for American Interventions Overseas
The report, conducted for the US Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) at the Army War College, examined the need for a “stability police force” (SPF), which it described as “a high-end police force that engages in a range of tasks such as crowd and riot control, special weapons and tactics (SWAT) and investigations of organized criminal groups.” Most soldiers do not possess the specialized skills an SPF officer needs to prevent violence, the report notes. “Most soldiers are trained to apply overwhelming force to secure victory, rather than minimal force to prevent escalation.” The SPF would also train indigenous police forces, much like what occurs today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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It’s all coming together! Applications for documentary training are piling up!
In less than one month our five-week intensive training in documentary filmmaking begins in Afghanistan. Production equipment, donated and...
Education aid – an apparent success story in Faryab Province
NATO-member states have troops in different parts of the country, where they are also engaged in aid activities through the so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Aid agencies have criticized the involvement of PRTs in humanitarian and development projects, labelling the process “aid militarization”. “Our military has no involvement in our civilian development projects,” said Aas, the outgoing Norwegian ambassador to Afghanistan, adding that his country’s aid was strongly “scrutinized and monitored” in order to prevent mismanagement and corruption.
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Afghan refugees forced to start over after floods
After fleeing the Soviet invasion of his country with nothing, Afghan refugee Ziarat Gul spent three decades building a new life in neighboring Pakistan. After the devastating floods that rolled across Pakistan last month, he is back to nothing.
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Armed Conflict Forces Increasing Numbers of Afghans to Flee
The latest estimates indicate that 240,000 persons are currently internally displaced due to armed conflict and insecurity.
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The Humanitarian’s Dilemma: collective action or inaction in international relief?
‘…highly competitive with each other. Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts. Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile. Perhaps worst of all, relief efforts in the field are sometimes competitive with little collaboration between agencies, including smaller, grass-roots charities that may have better networks in affected counties and so are well placed to immediately implement emergency relief…’
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A Community based peace-building approach
Cooperation for Peace and Unity has been working with nomadic and settled communities in Nangarhar, Laghman and Wardak towards the promotion of a community based approach to conflict resolution and conflict transformation. This program has involved training workshops for members of these communities and the gathering of 30 personal testimonies from members of the two different communities. The testimonies
have been gathered in-order to give voice to the people and bring out their perspective on this conflict which enable greater understanding of the conflict and of potential common ground were progress can be made towards stability.
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