Articles found Oct 24, 2013
Despite billions in foreign aid, most Afghans can't find full-time jobs
By: Kathy Gannon, The Associated Press 10/24/2013
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KABUL - Hundreds of men, some on crutches, all wearing tattered clothing, gather shortly before dawn at major intersections throughout Kabul and other Afghan cities. Displaying primitive tools such as a level or a trowel, they seek labour that is often backbreaking, always temporary and will earn just a few dollars for a day's work.
Employers circle the intersections, eyeing the crowds. Usually they are looking for one or two workers for minor construction tasks. Before they even stop, dozens of men swarm their vehicle, fighting with each other to get one of perhaps five or six jobs available that morning.
Despite billions of dollars from abroad to develop this impoverished country since the U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime in 2001, roughly 12 million people, or eight out of every 10 working-age Afghan are unskilled day labourers, according to an International Labor Organization report. Most land only temporary jobs.
In rural areas, work is also temporary — but it's also seasonal and often illegal, the report said. Some of the biggest employers, opium-producing poppy farmers, provide tens of thousands of short-term jobs.
But almost everywhere, the pay is meagre. Afghans with jobs, whether part-time or full-time, earn on average $410 per year — or about $1 per day, according to the World Bank.
Mir Afghan, a day labourer standing on line one recent morning at a Kabul intersection, says he hasn't worked in 13 days and is $1,260 in debt. He said neighbours occasionally help him out and local stores give him food on credit. One neighbour recently loaned him $9 to buy medicine for one of his six children.
At Mir Afghan's home in a congested neighbourhood on the edge of Kabul, his wife, Sabar Gul, started crying when asked about the family's meals. Cradling her coughing and feverish infant son in her arms, she said she has enough food to cook only one meal each day and they rarely can afford to eat meat.
The International Labor Organization report, released last year, offered several grim statistics: nearly half of Afghans don't have enough to eat; 18 per cent of children under 15 years old are working; and 82 per cent of Afghans are illiterate.
Most businesses are not registered and thus do not pay taxes. That means the government, riddled with corrupt officials, is heavily dependent on international aid as well as on the black market — most often linked to the country's flourishing drug trade.
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Afghan fury as US seizes 'spy at top of Taliban’
American forces’ dramatic capture of Times Square bomb plot suspect prompts Karzai rebuke and raises fears over withdrawal deal
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By Damien McElroy, and Rob Crilly in Islamabad 12 Oct 2013
He is second-in-command of one of the world’s deadliest terror groups, wanted by America for masterminding the 2010 Times Square bomb plot.
Eight days ago, US special forces got their man, seizing Latif Mehsud, of Pakistan’s Tehrek-e-Taliban (TTP) while he was travelling in a convoy on a remote mountain highway in Afghanistan.
The dramatic raid however, the details of which have only emerged now, was all the more daring because Mehsud was forcibly abducted while heading to a secret rendezvous with America’s allies in Afghanistan’s top spy network, the National Intelligence Directorate.
If briefings from Kabul turn out to be true, Latif Mehsud was a prized asset for Afghanistan’s beleaguered spies.
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Graeme Smith: Amongst the Nomads
Graeme Smith, Special to National Post | 16/10/13
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Every night I rigged up my satellite, checked my newspaper’s website and discovered that my bulletins were appearing on the front page. Soldiers peered over my shoulder to read the stories about themselves. The media in Europe and North America were generally supportive of the war at the time, and my dispatches often ran alongside editorials or columns praising the troops and their actions. The headline across the top of my newspaper’s front page on September 4, 2006, announcing the death of four Canadian soldiers, was “Bloodied, but unbowed.”
I made friends with the soldiers, too, adopted into a platoon that called itself the Nomads. I felt proud when they gave me a “Nomads” patch for my flak jacket. The soldiers were brave, generous and devoted to their friends. I was basically an excited kid, recording what felt in some ways like a climactic battle between the forces of barbarism and civilization — but my notes include scraps of information that I should have investigated more carefully.
My translators called me with reports of civilian casualties, and I documented some of them, but forgot about many others. I wrote down the name of a man rumoured to have lost his entire family in an air strike (“perhaps five sons, two daughters, one wife killed”) but I never found him. Such professional failures would haunt me later when I ranted about the lack of media resources to track events in southern Afghanistan. Some of that anger would be secretly aimed at myself for allowing stories to slip away.
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