Disembowelled, then torn apart: The price of daring to teach girls

[gsyh]

By Kim Sengupta in Ghazni, Afghanistan
Published: 29 November 2006

The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.

The Independent

Comments

[sun_tzu]

Uruzgan Province isn't Kandahar - but still, the Dutch are doing some great work and I have friends who think they're great to work with. It's them, the Brits, the Americans, and us doing 90% of the work there. Reasoning with the Taliban in the Canadian AOR has been all but impossible from everything I've heard, but the other things - the diplomatic efforts - are happening too. They just don't sell a lot of papers.

As for the 90% being spent on military operations as an indicator of balance, I don't think that's a particularly useful metric. Military operations are incredibly expensive, and given that the security situation on the ground isn't yet stable, that's where the focus has to be - I'm sure eventually the pendulum will swing toward development, but until there's some certainty of permanence of the effort, the focus has to be on consolidating the security picture. Don't forget that a good portion of that budget figure is the training and development of the Afghan National Army and Police - both of which are progressing slowly.

Afghanistan should end as a mission for all Canadians to be proud of, we just have to have the patience to see it through to that point rather than quitting before it's done.