Search Results for: afghanistan

After seeing this photo of a military dad watching his twins’ birth via Skype all the way from Afghanistan, it’s easy to understand why it’s going viral. I mean, we hear about soldiers witnessing their children’s deliveries while stationed overseas all the time, but it’s not very often that the actual moment is captured on film.

But luckily, someone had a camera nearby when Colton Romney was watching his wife, Shannon, undergoing a C-section to welcome their twin daughters, Liberty and Lauren, into this world. This allowed Shannon to see his reaction even though he wasn’t physically there with her.

(The video interview is worth a watch.)

Great article about the Paralympics, which aren’t getting much, if any, coverage.

As recently as World War II, many of today’s Para-athletes wouldn’t have existed—not just as swimmers or tennis players, but as human beings. People with crippling birth defects or war wounds would have been left to die, partly because of the limits of medical science, but also because the world seemed to have no place for them. Today, “victims”—including Martine Wright, a sitting-volleyball player who lost her legs in London’s 7/7 transit bombings of 2005, and Joe Townsend, an Ironman triathlete who lost his legs fighting for Britain in Afghanistan—not only live, but excel.

This is true. And it’s a great reminder that killing babies in the womb because we think they won’t have a good quality of life is not a decision for us to make.

What kind of thing gets you on “The List”? Forced marriage, human trafficking, not providing your women with a hospital to give birth in, rape, female foeticide, and frighteningly, female infanticide. Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan are at the top. Read all about it, here.

We don’t exactly shy away from highlighting abuses of women and young girls in Afghanistan. (See a sample of stories here.) The more I learn about the socio-political culture of that country, the less I like it. And I wasn’t wild about the place to begin with. I blame the multiculturalists for trying to get the rest of us to ignore egregious abuse in the name of – oh, does it matter why they do it? I don’t think so.

Older, powerful men boosted their social status by keeping boys as sexual playthings and the practice was celebrated in song and dance, a military study claimed.

“To dismiss the existence of this dynamic out of desire to avoid western discomfort is to risk failing to comprehend an essential social force underlying Pashtun culture,” the report said.

British officers in Helmand requested the study to help them understand the sexual behaviour of locals and Afghan comrades after young soldiers became uneasy they were being propositioned.

American social scientists employed to help troops understand the local culture reported that homosexual sex was widespread among the Pashtun ethnic group in southern Afghanistan.

Strict separation of men and women, coupled with poverty and the significant expense of getting married, contributed to young men turning to each other for sexual companionship.

The study, called ‘Pashtun Sexuality’, said that as well as willing sex between young men, “boys are appreciated for physical beauty and apprenticed to older men for their sexual initiation”.

The practice of ‘bache bazi’ or boy play, is known throughout Afghanistan, but is particularly renowned in the city of Kandahar next to Helmand, where prepubescent boys are widely admired.

Western soldiers often report feeling unease at the attentions of their Afghan comrades, who are affectionate with each other and sometimes wear make-up.

British troops have also talked of their disgust at police or militias keeping young boys as hangers on.

Look. I don’t care what people who are over the age of sexual consent do willingly. But the business with the kids is not something Western troops (and Western citizens in whose names the troops do their work) should tolerate. Full stop.

And all smiles, too: (warning: contains graphic pictures without the prosthetic nose)

Couple executed over affair:

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan – A man and woman have been stoned to death in northern Afghanistan after being accused by the Taliban of having a love affair, a witness and an official said Monday.

The 23-year-old woman and 28-year-old man were killed because “they had an affair,” said Mohammad Ayob, the governor of Imam Sahib district in Kunduz province.

“Two people were stoned to death by Taliban in Mullah Quli village late yesterday,” he said. The village is under the control of the Taliban.

[…]

Under Islamic Sharia law, sex between unmarried people is punishable by public beatings, while punishment for those caught in extra-marital affairs is death by stoning.

Update: Well, actually, there’s worse… (warning: horrifyingly graphic image)

I hear on the radio today from a charitable group that one in four children in Afghanistan don’t make it to their fifth birthday… and I couldn’t help thinking–what’s the abortion rate in this country? The same statistic probably holds true here. Except kids here don’t make it to their first birthday.

I’m aware I’m not making any friends with that thought. Who wants to be the pro-life drone who takes every international catastrophe and compares it to abortion in Canada? Still, that’s what popped into my head and I thought I would share it here.

My goodness, how desperate are these young women?

Although Afghan women have attained greater freedoms since Western soldiers first arrived in their country in 2001, one imprint of the restrictions placed on women under Taliban rule remains: forced marriages. Now brides who find themselves in these hellish arrangements are resorting to a disturbing method of escape—they’re burning themselves to death. Earlier this month, it was reported that the Herat Regional Hospital burns unit in western Afghanistan had handled 51 cases of female self-immolation between January and July of this year. Of those cases, 38 patients succumbed to their wounds.

The doctor in charge of the burns unit, Mohamed Aref Jalali, said that the practice comes from Iran, which has one of the highest rates of self-immolation in the world, especially among Kurds living in rural areas along the border. Many Afghan refugees adopted the custom when they fled there during the decade-long war with the Soviet Union that ended in 1989, and continued it when they returned home in the 1990s. The popularity of burning oneself to death has since grown among poor, uneducated Afghan women who live in areas where young girls are traditionally forced into marriage.

Afghan laws stipulate that girls under the age of 16 should not be married, but an astonishing 60 per cent are forced into marriages when they are children anyway. Choosing death over marriage is a result of the stark daily routine of Afghan women: many are treated like slaves, kept inside and ordered to cook and clean, while others are repeatedly beaten or raped.

I have no idea what to do to help, but I’ll say this: As long as we continue to pretend that all cultures are equally valid, we will never get rid of that problem.