07 Aug 2010 0
The inimitable and unrelenting moral voice of Dr. Judt is no longer with us. See TDC in the coming days for a collection of commentary and obituaries.
Dr. Judt fought a long war with motor neurone disease. Visit his last reflections on the power of words and language here.
06 Nov 2009 0
TDC has been quiet following some professional and personal upheavals. After consideration I am thinking about changing the focus of this blog. I expect to continue giving a lot of space to Afghanistan related issues, but will write on a wider range of topics. Notice given.
03 Sep 2009 0
A report from RFE/RL carries an interview with military operations expert Julian Lindley-French, and carries this quotation:
“The coalition has a right to expect better governance, better performance, and a willingness to be less factional in the way governance is applied across the country,” Lindley-French says. “If that does not change, then we are at a critical point. I cannot see how the coalition could sustain its effort if there is no chance of reasonable progress.”
I am all for the promotion of transparent, accountable government, but why on earth would anyone in the international community realistically expect this cast of characters in power would deliver it? The coalition should be a bit more circumspect in what they have “a right to expect”, given that they empowered a slew of power-hungry paramilitary leaders to run perhaps the poorest and most fragmented country in the world.
I do not accept the careless acceptance of mediocrity that passes for state-building in Afghanistan. The international community has as much to atone for in encouraging factionalism, poor governance and weak institutions as Afghan powerbrokers are.
21 Aug 2009 0
Two excellent pieces were published in the post-elections analysis from Afghanistan. The first is from Tom Coghlan in The Times. The second is from Jon Boone in the Guardian. Low turnout, indications of ballot box stuffing and inked fingers easily cleaned have all contributed to widespread concerns about fraud, and rightly so. Whether or not international monitors and the Independent Electoral Commission will have the political courage to address these concerns is not clear.
Predictably, President Karzai and his main challenger Abdullah Abdullah have declared the elections a resounding success, and each declared himself victor. I suspect a long and tedious challenge process, and cannot imagine that a run-off would be any better managed.
More to come, certainly.
20 Aug 2009 0
Elections are under way throughout Afghanistan. Sporadic violence is being reported nationwide. Two interesting developments to follow today and beyond:
The UK Guardian reports that the indelible ink being used to mark the fingers of those who have cast votes is in fact easily removed. This causes huge problems for credibility of the elections, and candidate Ramazan Bashardost has already called for polling to be halted. The issue will prove a huge embarrassment to the Afghan electoral institutions and to the UN, both of whom have claimed that a key problem that plagued elections in 2004 and 2005 has been resolved.
The BBC news feed linked above also reports that Wardak province is showing no polling activity. This confirms reports yesterday from IWPR of residents expressing deep-seated fears about polling security. Wardak was a province where the Afghan government and international community first piloted the Afghan Public Protection Force, an informal militia to help secure villages and districts ahead of elections. It begs the question whether there is any correlation between the two trends (more on the APPF later).
More elections news and updates to follow.
18 Aug 2009 0
Some personal and professional upheaval has kept me from returning to TDC. Punditry and analysis have reached a fever pitch in the run-up to the elections in two days time, and I wish I had been able to cover some of the more insightful material here. I intend to restart posting in the aftermath of the elections, and to post some of the best analysis from friends and colleagues.
08 Jun 2009 0
I don’t expect that many people are following this blog (and not many will if I don’t write more regularly!), but this is a genuine apology for the lapse. I have been caught up in a number of different writing projects over the last six weeks, and TDC has lapsed. I am returning for a stint in Afghanistan and I hope to use that time to post again more regularly.
In the meantime, please do check out my newest contribution to altmuslimah.com, a brilliant new site with commentary on all things Islam and gender.
18 Apr 2009 0
An update to the previous post about the Shi`a family law: Sheikh Mohseni, in perhaps history’s worst attempt at damage control, came out with this statement. I am certain something is being lost in translation, but the essence of the point–that a husband can refuse to feed the wife who denies him sex–is possibly more offensive than the original condition in the law that allowed men to have sex with their wives at least once every four days (barring a “reasonable excuse” from the wives).
02 Apr 2009 0
I was a little startled at this recent piece in the Guardian: ‘Worse than the Taliban’. Most of the fallout from this piece has seized on a single issue: that the law discussed in the piece legalizes what is tantamount to marital rape. While the piece has an alarming tone, I think the context is misrepresented.
19 Mar 2009 0
Anyone observing the Muslim world has encountered the word ‘jihadism’ or its derivatives. This Anglicized use of the word jihad came into more accepted use in the early 1990s, following New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s coverage of threats to the United States from Islamic terrorism after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. It is a heavily loaded term that is simultaneously remarkably empty, and sets my teeth on edge whenever I encounter it.