Skateboard Park Opens in Kabul - now that's cool

When I first heard about the skateboard park my first thought was - huh??? But the more I think about it, the more I think it's incredible. How cool is it that these kids will have an opportunity to try something so different from anything they have ever experienced before. I love the fact that the kids have access to literacy classes as well.

KABUL - Afghanistan's first skateboarding park and school opened in Kabul on Tuesday with a boarding showdown between dozens of youngsters — ranging from ministers' children to streetkids — that it aims to bring together.
"Skateistan" started two years ago in a dried-up fountain in the heart of the Afghan capital, when two Australians with three skateboards started teaching a small group of fascinated kids.
Now dozens of boys and girls from across all social classes can mix in a giant indoor park that looks like a cross between a military hangar and an urban hangout, festooned with the names of fashionable skating brands that have sponsored the park.

Classes are free, and at the back of the skating section are neat changing areas and classrooms where children can study everything from basic literacy to advanced computing when they put down their boards and take off their helmets.

"A year ago this was empty land, there were just dogs here," said Fraidoon Ilham, who helps write speeches for President Hamid Karzai as his day job but also helps Skateistan sort through the legal and government pitfalls of operating in Afghanistan.

One of the world's poorest and most conservative countries seems a strange place to set up a skateboarding school, but the founders say it has proved a remarkably successful way to reach out to marginalized children, particularly girls.

Sports such as football are seen as men's activities, but skateboarding is novel enough to be open to women.

"I want to be a professional skateboarder in future like my teacher, and help other children learn how to skate," said 10-year-old Mahro, a star student who seems undaunted by either traditional ideas about women or the steepest ramps in the park.

She has been skating for a year and would like to come every day, she says, shrugging off grazes on her hands from tumbles.

So far Skateistan have won donations of $650,000, around two thirds of which went towards the 1,800 sq m indoor arena.

The head of the Afghan Olympic Committee, which has donated the land for the park and is providing water, power and security, officially opened the indoor park and launched an enrolment drive. An outdoor area will follow.

"We managed to bring together about 200 street children, this sport is not only entertainment for them, it is also giving them hope for their future," said AOC head Mohammad Zahir Aghbar.
"I am working hard to expand this process, not only in the capital but further out, in the provinces also."

The children he hopes to help are those like 11-year-old Fazila, who used to sell chewing gum on the street, but was allowed to go to school and skate classes after Skateistan arranged to pay her parents the $1 a day she used to earn.

"I want to be able to jump like teacher Ollie. I can do a little little already," she said with a shy grin, before wheeling off to tackle the two quarter ramps that make up the "Afghan gap" in her traditional headscarf and shalwar kameez, beside the children of Afghanistan's elite.
© Copyright (c) Reuters

Afghan Parliament Rejects Most Cabinet Nominees

by The Associated Press

January 2, 2010

A chastened President Hamid Karzai must submit new Cabinet picks after defiant lawmakers rejected 17 of his 24 nominees Saturday, including a powerful warlord and the country's only woman minister.

The Afghan parliament rejected nominees viewed as Karzai's political cronies, those believed to be under the influence of warlords and others deemed unqualified.

"I think, unfortunately, that the criteria were either ethnicity or bribery or money," lawmaker Fawzia Kufi said of Karzai's picks.

The vote was a setback to Karzai, though one political analyst in Kabul speculated that it could free up the president to appoint qualified professionals rather than settle political debts.

"There were lots of demands on Karzai from people asking for Cabinet positions because they campaigned for him," Mohammad Qasim Akhgar said. "This was the only way he could reward them and if parliament didn't approve them, it wasn't his fault. Very soon, Karzai will come out with a new list with the names of people he really wants to have in his Cabinet."

The new Cabinet is a bellwether for the U.S. and other nations hoping a stronger government will keep disenchanted Afghans from siding with the Taliban after Karzai won a second five-year term last year in a disputed election rife with ballot-box stuffing.

The lawmakers approved a handful of incumbent ministers favored by the West and instrumental to the war effort.

Karzai has defended his choices, which he announced late last month after several delays. He said his proposed Cabinet represented a balance of the nation's ethnic factions.

But parliamentarians weren't happy. They complained the list looked too much like the existing Cabinet and spelled another five years of business as usual for the Karzai government, which has been criticized as being corrupt and ineffective.

Of the 12 incumbent ministers Karzai sought to retain, the parliament approved only five: Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak; Interior Minister Hanif Atmar; Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal; Agriculture Minister Muhammad Asif Rahimi; and Education Minister Ghulam Farooq Wardak.

Karzai had wanted to keep Water and Power Minister Ismail Khan, a warlord in Herat province during the civil war of the 1990s who retains considerable local power. Critics said keeping Khan proved Karzai remained beholden to regional power brokers at the expense of the country's national interests. Khan's nomination was narrowly defeated.

Had he been seated, Khan would not have been the only warlord in Karzai's government. The two vice presidents — Mohammad Qasim Fahim and Karim Khalili — are both former warlords widely believed to have looted Afghanistan for years. Karzai likely put them on his ticket to win votes from their minority ethnic communities.

The parliament's rejection of the only woman on Karzai's current team — Minister of Women's Affairs Husn Bano Ghazanfar — was an awkward blow to the president, who has pledged to place more women in high government posts in the traditionally male-dominated society.

Recently, Karzai said he would appoint women to sub-Cabinet-level positions and hinted he had a woman in mind as head of the new Ministry of Literacy, one of two new ministries he has asked the parliament to create.

Despite their demand for fresh blood in the Cabinet, the lawmakers approved only two of 12 new names Karzai submitted.

"I'm sure that Karzai used a trick here by introducing some unknown people — completely new faces — that nobody knew anything about," said Akhgar, the analyst.

Karzai did not propose a nominee for foreign minister. He has asked incumbent Rangin Dadfar Spanta to stay in the post until after the Jan. 28 international conference in London, which will focus on security and other issues as 37,000 more U.S. and NATO troops arrive in the country.

The Karzai administration had no immediate comment on the voting, which took more than 10 hours. Each of the 232 members of parliament present for the vote marked paper ballots for each Cabinet nominee. After the votes were cast, two secretariats of parliament took turns reading the more than 5,500 votes of confidence or no confidence.

Wahid Majzhda, an independent political analyst in Kabul, said he was happy to see that the lawmakers did not rubber-stamp Karzai's selections.

"I appreciated the work of the parliament today because they didn't just think about their region," he said. "They didn't just think about their language. They were voting for the nation today."

He too suggested that Karzai might have expected the rebuke.

"Maybe Karzai has already selected other people for these ministries, knowing these would not be approved," he said.

Karzai has said he will make new nominations for any unfilled posts, but it is unclear when he will submit new nominees or when a parliamentary vote will be held.

Also Saturday, the Afghan election commission chief said parliamentary elections would be held as scheduled on May 22 despite widespread international concern that the country's electoral system needs reform.

Ali Najafi told a news conference that Afghanistan needs about $50 million from the international community to meet the election's estimated budget of $120 million. It was not clear whether the vote would or could be held if donor countries do not provide the money.

In the wake of last August's disputed presidential election, many critics have pushed Karzai and his government to delay the parliamentary vote. Karzai has insisted the constitution, which specifies the elections be held by May, must be observed.

A visiting U.S. congressional delegation said it warned Karzai last week that holding the election without substantive electoral reform could undermine support for U.S. aid to the country.

Afghan women lead protest against government corruption - latimes.com

Afghan women lead protest against government corruption - latimes.com

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Afghan Enclave Seen as Model for Development

Written By: SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: November 12, 2009

JURM, Afghanistan — Small grants given directly to villagers have brought about modest but important changes in this corner of Afghanistan, offering a model in a country where official corruption and a Taliban insurgency have frustrated many large-scale development efforts.
Since arriving in Afghanistan in 2001, the United States and its Western allies have spent billions of dollars on development projects, but to less effect and popular support than many had hoped for.

Much of that money was funneled through the central government, which has been increasingly criticized as incompetent and corrupt. Even more has gone to private contractors hired by the United States who siphon off almost half of every dollar to pay the salaries of expatriate workers and other overhead costs.

Not so here in Jurm, a valley in the windswept mountainous province of Badakhshan, in the northeast. People here have taken charge for themselves — using village councils and direct grants as part of an initiative called the National Solidarity Program, introduced by an Afghan ministry in 2003.

Before then, this valley had no electricity or clean water, its main crop was poppy and nearly one in 10 women died in childbirth, one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
Today, many people have water taps, fields grow wheat and it is no longer considered shameful for a woman to go to a doctor.

If there are lessons to be drawn from the still tentative successes here, they are that small projects often work best, that the consent and participation of local people are essential and that even baby steps take years.

The issues are not academic. Bringing development to Afghans is an important part of a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at drawing people away from the Taliban and building popular support for the Western-backed government by showing that it can make a difference in people’s lives.

“We ignored the people in districts and villages,” said Jelani Popal, who runs a state agency that appoints governors. “This caused a lot of indifference. ‘Why should I side with the government if it doesn’t even exist in my life?’ ”

Jurm was tormented by warlords in the 1990s, and though it never fell to the Taliban, the presence of the central government, even today, is barely felt. The idea to change that was simple: people elected the most trusted villagers, and the government in Kabul, helped by foreign donors, gave them direct grants — money to build things like water systems and girls’ schools for themselves.

Local residents contend that the councils work because they take development down to its most basic level, with villagers directing the spending to improve their own lives, cutting out middle men, local and foreign, as well as much of the overhead costs and corruption.
“You don’t steal from yourself,” was how Ataullah, a farmer in Jurm who uses one name, described it.

The grants were small, often less than $100,000. The plan’s overall effectiveness is still being assessed by academics and American and Afghan officials, but the idea has already been replicated in thousands of villages across the country.

Anecdotal accounts point to some success. There have even been savings. When villages in the Jurm Valley wanted running water, for instance, they did much of the work themselves, with help from an engineer. A private contractor with links to a local politician had asked triple the price. (The villagers declined.)

Even such modest steps have not come easily. Jurm presented many obstacles, and it took a development group with determined local employees to jump-start the work here.
One basic problem was literacy, said Ghulam Dekan, a local worker with the Aga Khan Development Network, the nonprofit group that supports the councils here.
Unlike the situation in Iraq, which has a literacy rate of more than 70 percent, fewer than a third of Afghans can read, making the work of the councils painfully slow. Villagers were suspicious of projects, believing that the people in the groups that introduced them were Christian missionaries.

“They didn’t understand the importance of a road,” Mr. Dekan said.
Most projects, no matter how simple, took five years. Years of war had smashed Afghan society into rancorous bits, making it difficult to resist efforts by warlords to muscle in on projects.
“They said, ‘For God’s sake, we can’t do this, we don’t have the capability,’ ” Mr. Dekan said. “We taught them to have confidence.”

Muhamed Azghari, an Aga Khan employee, spent more than a year trying to persuade a mullah to allow a girls’ school. His tactic: sitting lower than the man, a sign of deference, and praising his leadership. He paid for the man to visit other villages to see what other councils had accomplished.

“Ten times we fought, two times we laughed,” Mr. Dekan said, using the Afghan equivalent of “two steps forward, one step back.”

When it came to women, villagers were adamant.

But forcing conditions would have violated a basic principle of the approach: never start a project that is not backed by all members of the community, or it will fail.

“People have to be mentally ready,” said Akhtar Iqbal, Aga Khan’s director in Badakhshan. If they are not, the school or clinic will languish unused, a frequent problem with large-scale development efforts.

Five years later, the village of Fargamanch has women’s literacy classes and a girls’ high school. Over all, girls’ enrollment in Badakhshan is up by 65 percent since 2004, according to the Ministry of Education. The number of trained midwives has quadrupled.
Health has also improved. Now, 3,270 families have taps for clean drinking water near their homes, reducing waterborne diseases.

The councils are also a check on corruption. When 200 bags of wheat mysteriously disappeared from the local government this year, council members demanded they be returned. (They were.) When a minister’s aide cashed a check meant for a transformer, Mr. Ataullah spent a week tracking down a copy. (The aide was fired.)

“The government doesn’t like us anymore,” Mr. Azghari said, laughing. “They want the old system back.”

While Badakhshan’s changes are fragile, the forces of modernization are growing. Televisions have begun to broadcast the outside world into villages. Phone networks cover more than 80 percent of the province, triple what the figure was in 2001.

Perhaps most important, Afghans are tired of war, and seeing the benefits of a decade of peace might be enough to encourage new kinds of decisions.

Ghulam Mohaiuddin, a farmer, seethes when he remembers the past.
“The jihad was useless,” he said, sitting cross-legged in his mud-walled house.
Suddenly, a loud blast went off, startling his guests. He laughed. It was the sound of canal construction, not a bomb.

“Now we’ve put down our weapons and started building,” he said, smiling.

Villanova University

Yesterday I had the pleasure of sharing the documentary, Beyond Belief, with a group of students and faculty at Villanova Univeristy. Stephanie Sena, a history Professor worked with other departments to bring a diverse group of students to the screening. The turn out was great and it was exciting to be a part of the University if only for an afternoon.

I am always energized after doing Questions and Answers around the film. Although I often get many of the same questions (it's only natural after seeing the film), there are always a few that suprise me. Oops the baby just woke up. I guess I will have to finish this post later...

Opinion by Malcolm Potts

The war for Afghanistan's women - It's not worth risking U.S. lives unless we raise the status of Afghan women.

By Malcolm Potts
August 23, 2009

There are two wars going on in Afghanistan. One is to defeat the Taliban, and that war is not going well. The other is to liberate women, and that war has hardly begun. If the first war is won but the second is lost, Afghanistan will turn into a failed state -- a caldron of violence and misery, home to extremism and totally outside the Western orbit of influence.

Last week's election, however imperfect, is welcome, but it means little as long as women remain enslaved in this patriarchal, tradition-bound culture. In most of the country, a woman needs her husband's permission to leave her home. Domestic violence is tragically common. Indeed, the government elected in 2004 passed, and President Hamid Karzai signed into law, legislation legalizing marital rape. Older men use their wealth and power to marry young women. In April, according to news reports, when a teenage Afghan girl called Gulsima eloped with a boy her own age instead of marrying an older man, she and the boyfriend were shot to death in front of the mosque in the southwest province of Nimrod.

Currently, Afghanistan is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman, and -- as is the case everywhere women's rights are nonexistent or in decline -- the birthrate is high. Afghan women have an average of about seven children, and the population has been doubling about every 20 years. Today it is 34 million. According to U.N. estimates, by 2050 it could reach a staggering 90 million. That rapid population growth and the demographics that go with it drive most of Afghanistan's worst problems.

All too often, demography is overlooked in developing countries, as I experienced in 2002 when I wrote the budgets for a U.N. agency working to rebuild Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Part of our job was to write a 10-year financial plan. As my colleague from the World Bank was closing his computer, I said, "You do realize in 10 years' time there will be almost 50% more people needing healthcare?" He hadn't. After an expletive and some more hitting of computer keys, the budget totals rose considerably.

I made my first visit to Afghanistan in 1969. Even then it was clear that slowing population growth was a prerequisite for feeding Afghanistan, for its socioeconomic progress and for any shred of hope for a stable democracy.

One result of rapid population growth is that two-thirds of the Afghan population is below the age of 25. The primary role models for the volatile, testosterone-filled young men in this group are local warlords. The reason Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (who, incidentally, is the 17th child of a man who had 54 children) have found a haven in Afghanistan is largely because of the mixture of loyalty and anger generated among males in such a society, in which there are no genuine economic opportunities for advancement. The word "taliban" means "student." The men who condemned Gulsima and her young boyfriend were probably 18 or 19 years old.

So in a country where women have had their fingers cut off because they painted their nails, where the Taliban threw acid on girls trying to go to school, is there any possibility of improving the status of women? Yes.

When Karzai signed the law demeaning and controlling women, he did so as an ugly deal to buy the support of the very traditional Shiite minority in the west of the country. But linguistically, culturally and religiously, this population is simply an extension of eastern Iran. And Iran happens to be a powerful example of how family planning can liberate women and change a society for the better.

In the 1980s, the typical Iranian woman had almost as many children as her counterpart in Afghanistan today. Even an oil-rich country could not support that rate of population growth. The Koran mentions contraception in a positive light, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the religious leader and founder of Iran's Islamic Republic, endorsed family planning. Iran began to offer a full range of contraceptive choices and even voluntary sterilization. Before young couples could marry, they were required to receive family-planning instruction.

The typical Iranian woman now has 2.1 children. The transition in Iran from high to low birthrates was as rapid as that in China, but without a one-child policy, and it has had similar social benefits. Maternal and infant mortality have fallen, and, despite repressive politics, the U.N. Human Development Index, using such measures as education and individual wealth, shows that the country is better off.

How would this translate to Afghanistan, which is far behind Iran in so many ways? From my experience, I know that teenage girls in Afghanistan want to be in school, despite the cultural obstacles. And having seen firsthand Afghan women suffering from botched abortions, I am sure some, at least, want fewer children. In addition, Westerners are training female health workers. Private pharmacies often dispense drugs smuggled from neighboring countries. It would be possible to introduce contraceptives, even in remote areas.

A stable, modern and functioning Afghanistan is the West's goal. But it is not worth risking the death of one more American or British soldier fighting there unless there is a bold, achievable plan to educate women, enhance their autonomy and meet their need for family planning.

This feudal, fundamentalist, warrior society will never join the 21st century -- or even the 16th century -- unless we win the war to liberate women. Unless women are given the freedom to choose whether or when to have a child, by 2050 there will be millions more angry men age 15 to 25 in Afghanistan. If only a tiny percentage are potential insurgents or suicide bombers, no Western army, however large and however strongly backed at home, has the slightest chance of prevailing.


Malcolm Potts is a UC Berkeley professor and the chairman of the university's Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability. His latest book is "Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safe World.

"Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

Beyond the 11th makes $50,000 grant to Arzu

I am so pleased to announce that Beyond the 11th just made a $50,000 grant to Arzu. To date, most of our grants have gone to income-generating programs that help widows learn a skill so that they can stand on their own two feet. This grant is a little different. This money was earmarked specifically for the construction of the Dragon Vally Women's Community Center. It feels great to have been able to help in the building of something concrete. Of course we hope to make grants in the future for programming for the center but for now, it feels great to be able to point to something very specific - an actualy building. Of course the building is so much more than bricks and mortar...


Few places in the world are less hospitable to women than Dragon Valley. With a climate dominated by a frigid winter, and no central heat, plumbing or electricity in homes, women rarely if ever manage a reprieve from grueling household chores and childrearing. Work for income is rarely an option. A life expectancy of 46 is far too easy to imagine for women in this village cradled by the northern mountains of Afghanistan.


For a growing number of area women, however, the nonprofit Arzu, which means “hope” in Dari, has delivered opportunity by revitalizing the ancient art of rug weaving. Many women had the skills but no looms or quality wool. Arzu delivered both, cultivated a market for the beautiful rugs in the United States and beyond, and in addition to a generous wage that could be earned from home, provided desperately needed health care and education opportunities for rug weavers and their families. Now, Arzu will increase work opportunities and address quality of life issues for local women through construction of the Dragon Valley Community Center.

Beginning in November, rug weavers, many of them widows, will have access to a warm, safe facility where they can take classes, do laundry, bathe, use a flush toilet, collaborate with other weavers in a bright, spacious loom room or just sit for a moment in a chair and sip a hot cup of tea. For the women of Dragon Valley, these are unimaginable luxuries. The Community Center will give women who are among the poorest in the world a sense of value and will provide the chance to improve their weaving skills or train for additional life-changing job opportunities.

I promise to share pictures as soon as they are available.