Aziz Royash

Aziz Royash is the founder of an amazing school in Kabul that teaches students about civic values, the meaning of democracy, and the importance of supporting human rights in every culture.

The Marefat school, which goes from first to 12th grade, is located in an area of Kabul that is populated by members of the Hazara minority, a Turkic people that are descended from the Mongols and mainly live in  central Afghanistan. Nearly all of its students are Hazara. 

To reach the school one drives over roads with ruts so deep that I was certain we wouldn't make it. The school itself is two stories high, around a large inner courtyard with a balcony running along the second story, off which classrooms open. The construction is basic, the floors covered with the residue of small muddy boots.

But the students here - the boys dressed neatly in pants, shirts and ties, and the girls in light blue pants, tunics, and white headscarves, are serious and motivated. When you speak to these young people you can imagine a very different, and hopeful future for Afghanistan. 

I drove to the provincial capital of Maidan Shahr in Wardak province to try to get a sense of life outside Kabul.

Several months ago this trip would have been impossible. Taliban had cut the main road, Highway One, which is the northern gateway to Kabul. Fifteen hundred new US troops and additional Afghan army forces pushed back the Taliban (who basically melted away). Now the question is whether those gains can be held, and economic aid can be swiftly funneled into the province to convince local farmers that it is worthwhile to resist Taliban entreaties or threats.

These elders, members of the Provincial Council, say they have yet to see the development projects they were promised by Afghan and US officials. This does not bode well......

Shinkai Karokhail is a member of the Afghan parliament who has worked for Afghan women's education for two decades.

I visited her at home to talk about her fight to amend a recent draft marriage law for Shiite women that would have restricted a woman's right to leave the home and legitimized marital rape. Shinkai is fierce, dedicated and tireless, but the struggle takes a toll. She says that it is crucial that women worldwide continue to offer support for women's rights in Afghanistan. Otherwise the gains that have been made since the fall of the Taliban will slide back.

Learning rifle basics

One main reason I'm in Afghanistan is to better understand the U.S. strategy behind the dispatch of 21,000 new troops to Afghanistan.

I've talked to the Afghan Defense and Interior Ministers, and to top U.S. generals. And I made a trip to the Kabul Military Training Center, a facility established in the 1950's and used under the Afghan monarchy, the Soviet occupation, Taliban rule, and now by NATO forces to train a new Afghan army. The training center sits on 20,000 acres of scrubby desert-like terrain ringed by mountains, and the day I visit it is cold, overcast and rainy.

U.S. troops are meant to stabilize the southern part of the country where Taliban insurgents are making big inroads, but the Afghan grunts and officer candidates who are training here will determine how fast the Americans can leave. Right now there is a 40 % shortfull of NATO trainers, and a severe lack of equipment for the Afgan trainees. Officer candidates have high school educations, but 70 % of the grunts are illiterate.

Still, the trainees seem enthusiastic and certain of their mission: defeating Taliban whom, they say, are trying to destroy their country. 

Jafaar, my driver is a student at the American University of Kabul, who speaks good English and drives a battered Toyota.

His story is typical of many Afghanis. His parents fled the Soviets in the late '70s and wound up in neighboring Iran, thinking they would be there a few months. They stayed more than twenty years.

After the Taliban's fall they returned, because the Iranians didn't permit their children to have good jobs, or in Jafaar's case, to attend university. He is working several jobs to pay tuition and has taught himself excellent English. Like many young Afghan refugees, he is also trying to adjust to a country he never knew until he was twenty-three years old.

Finally, in Kabul.

Arriving in the airport waiting room (the size of a large living room) of the UN terminal, I look out at rows of men in turbans of many dark hues, with stunning bearded faces, all staring at me, not with hostility, but as if looking at a rare insect.

I figure these are all men with some exposure to the outside world, since they are at the UN terminal of an airport, and in addition, I can't look that strange, since I am wearing a Pakistani shalwar khameez, with tunic and baggy pants, and a large headscarf. And yet, I, an unacompanied woman lugging a computer and suitcase, obviously look like a Martian to them.

I meet my driver, and we head for my guesthouse, the Park Palace, an old house and extension with rooms with bath, sheltered from the street by a high wall and large metal gate and guardhouse, and bearing no sign or address from the outside that indicates foreigners might stay here. Inside are sandbags, and another guard post. The guests are a mix of aid workers, journalists, and odd travellers.

Yet despite all these precautions, Kabul seems amazingly relaxed to me, nothing like Baghdad with its sense that something awful could happen at any moment. The streets are full, although the city is incredibly poor and run down. 

Women in burka and headscarf

Coming in from the airport, my car is stopped by police who inquirer from my driver about what country I'm arriving from. When the driver says "Pakistan, they want to search the car. They say that Pakistan is "the suicide-bomber country." My driver quickly tells them I work for the United Nations and they let me pass. But I am reminded by this incident of how much Afghanis distrust their Pakistani neighbor - and vice-versa. Each blames the scourge of the Taliban on the policies of the other.

The last (and only) time I was previously in Kabul was ten years ago when the Taliban ruled. I was looking at secret girls schools. At the time, white Toyota pick-up trucks careened around the streets filled with Taliban in black turbans carrying Klashnikovs. I find myself looking for those trucks which mercifully, are no longer around.

The other big change is the presence of women on the streets, some still in blue burkas, but others in headscarfs, and baggy pants and tunics, long skirts, or occasionally, in pants and hip length jackets and scarfs.

Kabul's buildings, with scruffy storefront shops, somewhat spruced up with a few garish four and five story buildings. still reflect the incredible damage done to an already poor country by decades of war. The streets are full of incredible potholes, and traffic jams reflect the inability of these narrow roads to handle the influx of new cars. Mountains ring the city and illegally built houses line the inner hills around the city core; the hilldwellers have no running water or paved roads, and one can see donkwys and women and children carrying water cans up narrow paths or stairways carved in the rock.

Spent 8 hours in Islamabad's international airport (which has no restaurant and kiosks that sell no food other than mouldy candy bars and Pringles chips). I was waiting for a U.N. flight, which had been cancelled the two previous days.

Again, I was reminded of the lack of transportation between two countries that are bound together by geography and war. There was no other way to get to Kabul except to wait for this unreliable flight. Pakistan International Airways flies only twice a week to Kabul and Ariana, the Afghan airlines, only once. On my flight were diplomats, World Bank personnel, UN personnel, and they could not get to their assignments.

At one time one might have taken the day long drive to Peshawar, through the Khyber Pass, and over rutted roads to Kabul. But that is much too dangerous now. The chief of the Frontier Corps, the Pakistani paramilitary body responsible for security for the pass, offered to send me with military escorts to Torkham at the Afghan border, but I wasn't about to risk going on alone from there.

The flight finally arrived and I reached Kabul on Thursday night. 

Jama Ashrafiya

The building is nondescript, like a huge apartment block. in a field in east Karachi. But it contains a notorious religious school, or madrassa,  called Jama Ashrafiya, and when you drive around it you can see students and teachers in the rear courtyard. Young boys from poor families get meals and board and have their worldview shaped here.

Many of these radical madrassas are built without permits on government-owned land, yet the police never intervene (indeed the city mayor has no control over the police who respond to the provincial government). Repeated pressure by the United States and millions in education aid intended to bolster the underfunded public schools, have had little impact. Madrassa reform efforts undertaken by former President Musharraf, have come to little.

And so, hardline madrassas like this one continue to indoctrinate youths, a small portion of whom may become future suicide bombers.

And it was nearby this building, that the decapitated body of Danny Pearl was found.