From Afghanistan to Cambodia

Today, I met with a spe­cial group of young cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists and blog­gers in Phnom Penh, Cam­bo­dia. At this 4 hours event we dis­cussed Online Free­dom of Expres­sion in Cam­bo­di­an. I shared my expe­ri­ences about blog­ging and the use of social media in Afghanistan and the prob­lems and obsta­cles that we are fac­ing in this area. Dig­i­tal media col­lec­tive forum fea­tures my talk. More details about the event here.

First Graduates of Shaheed Mirranay Education Center

Sha­heed Mir­ranay com­put­er and Eng­lish lan­guage cen­ter was built in April 2011. It’s locat­ed in South­west of Jalal­abad city- one hour dri­ve from Jalal­abad city. Togeth­er with my team I set up it’s solar pow­er sys­tem and the com­put­er lab. We installed five com­put­ers and a print­er, four solar pan­els with a pow­er invert­er, and four car bat­ter­ies. The solar pow­er sys­tem gen­er­at­ed enough pow­er to run the five ener­gy effi­cient lap­tops for six months sev­er­al hours every­day (After six…

Basketball in Jalalabad

Be in Jail for 12 Years or Marry Your Rapist

Afghan woman jailed for being a rape vic­tim offered release if she MARRIES her attack­er Gul­naz was con­vict­ed of adul­tery because she had sex out­side of mar­riage by being raped. After falling preg­nant by her attack­er, she and the baby were jailed for 12 years. She has been giv­en the choice to mar­ry her rapist and be freed from jail Read the full sto­ry here.

Proud to Be an Afghan

  Za Afghan Yem and Mann Afghan Hastam.

What Cripples Afghanistan’s Economy?

A world bank report came out yes­ter­day that says depend­ing on secu­ri­ty the econ­o­my of Afghanistan could face a com­plete col­lapse beyond 2014. More than 90 per cent of our nation­al bud­get comes from for­eign dona­tions. The world bank report in PDF: Tran­si­tion in Afghanistan: Look­ing Beyond 2014. Income per per­son in Afghanistan is $528 a year. Josie Bassinette, the act­ing direc­tor of the World Bank says this fig­ure con­ceals pock­ets of worse pover­ty because aid mon­ey is not divided…

Getting a National Identity Card in Jalalabad

Wait­ing for the Offi­cers to Come A cou­ple of cousins and my aunt asked me to help them get nation­al iden­ti­ty cards called Tazki­ra for them in Jalal­abad. I wrote an appli­ca­tion for them and went to Nan­garhar Gov­er­nor’s Office with them. Nor­mal­ly, most gov­ern­ment offices should open for clients at 8:00AM and close at 4:00PM. We were there by 8:10AM expect­ing that the work­ers would be set­tled. I thought that it’s the gov­er­nor’s office and it would be more organized…

Ali, the Shopkeeper

I was in Dara-e-Noor dis­trict of Nan­garhar province with my map­ping team last month. I met Ali. He is about 4 years old boy with light skin, blue eyes, and blond hair. Ali’s father is a shop­keep­er run­ning a lit­tle con­ve­nience store in this very remote area in the mid­dle of moun­tains. Ali keeps the shop and sells some small items that he knows the prices of when his father goes to Jalal­abad for replen­ish­ing the store. That’s how Ali…

Interesting Twitter Fight: Taliban vs ISAF

@ABalkhi is Tal­iban’s Twit­ter han­dle and @ISAFMedia is ISAF’s. I am fol­low­ing both. They some­times have Twit­ter fights. They are exchang­ing some seri­ous words right now as I am typ­ing and here is how the @ABalkhi start­ed and then the @ISAFMedia’s response fol­lows and I quote every­thing: @ABalkhi: Arti­cle CSM:1000s Afghan mer­ce­nar­ies hired by CIA in Afghanstan.Commit out­right human rights abuses(rape,robery,extra judi­cial killing etc) Sto­ry con­firmed by US diplo­mats, west­ern offi­cials, afghan author­i­ties. Hired to fight Tal­iban and oth­ers Recruits…

Unite or Perish

Iron­i­cal­ly, on the bar­rel of this tank it say, “Unite or else we’ll per­ish.” Peo­ple say a lot of things. Our politi­cians spend hours when they are on the stage giv­ing talks but there is very lit­tle action. If we did 40% of what we say we would­n’t be in the bad con­di­tion that we are today. When I lis­ten to can­di­dates talk­ing to peo­ple dur­ing their elec­tion cam­paigns it almost makes one believe that Afghanistan will be like a…