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“Are 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 my own general misgivings about Afghanistan, there definitely are points of light. Dexter's story provides another glimpse. More girls are going to school, for instance.
In regard to long-term education goals, it would seem important that we help facilitate training in a major language such as English or French. If a kid is literate in Pashto, what difference does it make when it comes to entering and accessing the larger world? Literacy in Dari can be helpful because Dari readers can more easily access the world through the Farsi language highway (but the Farsi highway passes largely through the Iranian filter, which might not be particularly helpful to us). It seems that flooding Afghanistan with English learning materials would be in everyone's best interest.
The War in Afghanistan has truly begun. This will be a long, difficult fight that is set to eclipse anything we’ve seen in Iraq. As 2010 unfolds, my 6th year of war coverage will unfold with it. There is relatively little interest in Afghanistan by comparison to previous interest in Iraq, and so reader interest is low. Afghanistan is serious, very deadly business. Like Iraq, however, it gets pushed around as a political brawling pit while the people fighting the war are mostly forgotten. The arguments at home seem more likely to revolve around a few words from the President than the ground realities of combat here. I can bring the ground realities, but can sustain the coverage only by the graciousness of readers. Please keep that in mind. Please click…
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