(Euronews: 0413 PT, May 2, 2011) World leaders have been reacting to the death of Osama bin Laden. In Kabul, Afghan president Hamid Karzai said that the al-Qaeda leader's killing showed the fight against terrorism should be focused in neighbouring Pakistan. Turkish President Abdullah Gul said Bin Laden's death proved that all terrorist group leaders would eventually face justice. British Prime Minister David Cameron struck a cautious tone, welcoming Bin Laden's death but warning that the threat of terrorism had not yet been defeated.

(Associated Press: 0606 PT, May 2, 2011) Leaders, experts and citizens around the world are reacting to news of the death of Osama bin Laden in a US military operation.

(Euronews: 0925 PT, May 2, 2011) Reaction in the Arab world has been mixed. In the Gaza strip, Hamas's leader Ismail Haniyeh was guarded, yet also clear he saw no change for the better coming from it: "If the news is correct, we regard this as a continuation of the American policy that is based on oppression and shedding the Muslim and Arab blood."

(ITN News: 0724 PT, May 2, 2011) Former UK prime minister Tony Blair responds to death of Osama bin Laden.

Interview with Hamid Karzai

(Channel 4 News: March 1, 2011) Jon Snow from the UK's Channel 4 News interviews Afghan President Hamid Karzai about the military surge in Afghanistan, talking to the Taliban, corruption, and WikiLeaks.

Lampedusa: The Gate to Europe?

(Euronews: March 3, 2011) The small Italian island of Lampedusa, closer to Africa than Italy, is facing an influx of illegal immigrants from Tunisia. As the situation in Libya deteriorates, there are fears of a fresh wave of refugees.

Democracy, Indonesian-Style

(Al Jazeera English: March 4, 2011) After freeing itself from the grip of dictatorship more than a decade ago, Indonesia offers an example of how Islam and democracy and go hand-in-hand.

Christchurch Quake Unearths Time Capsules

(ITN News: March 1, 2011) What appear to be two time capsules have been discovered in the base of a statue in the aftermath of the recent earthquake in New Zealand.

The story the New York Times published this week on Hamid Karzai's drug-dealing brother Ahmed Wali and his ties to the CIA is very revealing, considering it comes just few days before Afghanistan's run-off election; however, it is not the real news. It has been rumored for years that Wali has been involved in opium trafficking and has been receiving payments from the CIA. The big story is the United States' government plan to buy out the Taliban -- officially, so to speak.

On Wednesday, President Obama signed a $680 billion defense appropriations bill, which is supposed to cover military operations in the 2010 fiscal year. The bill includes a Taliban reintegration provision under the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Don't you love the terminologies used by government bureaucrats? Call it buyout, bribes, protection money, but please don't call it integration.

The idea, according to Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is to separate local Taliban from their leaders, replicating a program    used to neutralize the insurgency against Americans in Iraq. If you can't beat them, buy them!

Afghanistan though, is not Iraq. Unlike al-Sahwa in Iraq (the Sunni Awakening), when Iraqi tribe members took up arms against al-Qaeda and foreign insurgents, the Taliban are an integral part of Afghanistan, and they are not foreign fighters. They are the brothers, cousins and neighbors of ordinary Afghans. The US government might be able to temporarily buy out some Taliban members from attacking its troops but it will not be able to buy loyalties.

Meanwhile, pressure is mounting on President Obama to authorize the sending of more troops to Afghanistan. According to a recent Associated Press report:

"There are already more than 100,000 international troops in Afghanistan working with 200,000 Afghan security  forces and police. It adds up to a 12-to-1 numerical advantage over Taliban rebels, but it hasn't led to anything close to victory."

The Taliban rebels are estimated to number no more than 25,000 according to the same report. Yet, we have witnessed their devastating attacks in Kabul and other areas. The number of American deaths in Afghanistan has reached a record for the third time in four months. Some military experts say that an increase in US troops is no guarantee to reduce US fatalities and that it might only work in a negative way. The US army is not equipped to fight guerrilla warfare.

The new US strategies to be implemented in Afghanistan are nothing new; they are basically a redux of Iraqi ones. Their success rates are both short term, with the surge in Iraq only working temporarily, as the recent attacks in the country show. Paying for protection can only work against foreign insurgents and will only work as long as you keep paying.

In the meantime, on the news, I keep watching those who are gung-ho for sending more troops to Afghanistan insist that the U.S. has learned from the Soviets' mistakes. No one asks if it has learned anything from its mistakes in Iraq.

Original article published in the Huffington Post.
Watch Video

If someone is caught cheating in the Olympics or another sporting event, the athlete is immediately disqualified, and it is seen as a disgrace. In the case of the recent election in Afghanistan, however, cheating has been rewarded and even praised by no less than the President of the United States himself.

President Obama said that he contacted Hamid Karzai shortly after the Afghan president said he would abide by the results of a presidential election held in August.

"I wanted to congratulate him on accepting the certification of the recent election," Mr. Obama said.

How quickly have we forgotten how many Western leaders hailed the August 20th vote as an example of "democracy," a democracy mired with fraud. And we're not talking here about a few hundred "hanging chads," but rather more than one million ballots (cast on August 20) that were discounted due to the "coefficient of fraud," as the Electoral Complaints Commission refers to it. Mr. Hamid Karzai now says he wants a better and cleaner presidential election run-off in November to bring stability to Afghanistan at a time when Taliban violence is at its worst in eight years of war. The Afghan leader has played down fraud allegations but bowed to international pressure by ordering a run-off as a way to bolster the election's credibility at a time when Washington is weighing whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.

"Now that we are holding the second round in two weeks, I want it to be better than the first round," Karzai said.

Why isn't Mr. Karzai being held responsible for this blatant act of election fraud? And who can guarantee that a repeat of the fraud won't happen? Or that all hell won't break loose during the run-off? Since the August 20 vote, five suicide bombs alone have ripped through the capital Kabul.

Meanwhile, as President Obama ponders sending more troops to Afghanistan, and anxiety and anticipation are building up over the run-off, a recently released UN report says that Afghanistan produces 92% of the world's opium. The equivalent of 3,500 tons leave the country each year, fetching more than $65 billion to fund global terrorism. The Taliban's direct involvement in the opium trade allows them to fund a war machine that is becoming technologically more complex.

The report also says that every year, opium kills five times more people in NATO countries than all the NATO lives lost in eight years of fighting against the Taliban. So here is something to think about: according to the CIA's World FactBook, Afghanistan's entire GDP in 2008 was $22.27 billion. President Obama's decision to send 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to bolster security earlier this year has failed, and the country is just as unstable as ever. Would 40,000 additional troops help? Perhaps for a short while, but with the Taliban and Afghan warlords earning this kind of money from the opium trade, not only can they buy politicians, but they can also keep this war going for a hundred years. Afghanistan is not the "good" war.

Original article published in the Huffington Post.
Watch Video

Is misogyny an inherent part of Afghan culture? No, it's not. As far back as the 1920s, the Afghan government showed support for women. Mahmud Tarzi, Afghanistan's Foreign Minister and the King's father-in-law, was an "ardent supporter" of women’s education. In the late 1970s the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan gained power and expanded women’s rights substantially.

After the Soviet war, fundamentalist "Mujahideen" warlords gained power. "Serious wide-spread violations of 'women's rights' by Mujahideen soldiers included rape and torture," writes Sonali Kolhatkar in Change Links. Eventually, the Taliban seized power, further eroding human rights and basic freedoms, especially for women.

The situation of women in Afghanistan has improved since the Taliban rule, but even now remains desperate. Many are still routinely raped, abused and treated like second-class citizens. Then it was the Taliban, now President Karzai has passed a law backed by fundamentalist parliamentarians and clerics that legalizes abuse towards Shiite women.

When boys grows up seeing how their fathers, uncles or brothers mistreat women in the family, they cannot be expected to see that a women has rights or opinions. By passing laws that further instill abusive treatment of women, Afghan men find justification to continue mistreating them. Karzai himself is part of this mindset, as is indicated in this Times of London editorial: "[Karzai's] wife, Zinat Karzai, a medical doctor...has no voice, is rarely seen in public and is reported to have told an activist that she did not leave the house because her husband did not like it and did not give his permission."

Malalai Joya, an Afghan ex-MP and champion for justice and women’s rights who is featured in this week's Global Pulse episode, said in an interview with the Belfast Telegraph, "Karzai rules only with the permission of the warlords. He is 'a shameless puppet'...the only people who get to serve as president are those selected by the US government and the mafia that holds power in our country." She goes on to say that there is no difference between the Taliban and the warlords that are in power now, and that they were the ones that introduced the "laws oppressing women followed by the Taliban."

In a country where 85% of women have no formal education, where women are so desperate for justice that they set themselves ablaze and where women cannot even step outside of their house without their husband's permission, how can we in the West really believe that Afghanistan is really a democracy and that things are getting better for Afghan women?

In this week's Global Pulse episode, Afghan Women: Far From Equal, host Erin Coker asks whether the media should pay more attention to the struggle of women in Afghanistan. Share your thoughts below!