C.M. Sennott's Notebook:
August 20, 2009 15:57 ET
As the smoke clears on the Afghan election, President Hamid Karzai and and his U.S. allies wasted no time in setting out on a public relations offensive declaring the election a success.
They did this even before the ballots — and the dead and wounded from violence — are completely counted. At the end of the day, the violence was considerable but so was the courage of the Afghan people in resisting a campaign of fear and intimidation by the Taliban.
"The Afghan people dared rockets, bombs and intimidations," Karzai said at a press conference as polls closed.
"We'll see what the turnout was. But they came out to vote. That's great," he said.
GlobalPost's team of correspondents will be reporting on all corners of the country in the coming days as a more complete assessment is made.
GlobalPost Kabul correspondent Jean MacKenzie offered strong analysis through out the first day accompanied by strong photographs from Nicki Sobecki. Their coverage is augmented by GlobalPost correspondent Kimberly Johnson, who is on an embed in Helmand Province.
And all of the daily reporting form the field is framed by the multimedia "special report," Life, Death and the Taliban, which we launched earlier this month.
August 20, 2009 06:25 ET | Updated: August 22, 2009 09:13 ET
Violent attacks by the Taliban in Kabul early today has meant a low voter turnout in the first hours of voting in the Afghan elections.
There are reports of at least five bombings, a rocket attack and a gun battle between Afghan army and police and Taliban militants. At least a dozen polling booths in the capital are closed as a result, according to election monitors.
As GlobalPost correspondents Jean MacKenzie in Kabul and Kimberly Johnson in Helmand Province continue their reporting from the field, it is still too early to tell where these elections are headed.
But the early indications, according to our correspondents and coverage by the BBC and NPR, are that voter turnout is low in the capital and in the South and East, where the Taliban has its greatest influence.
In Kandahar, the Taliban controls 13 of the 17 districts, according to Sarah Chayes, an adviser to commander of US troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. Chayes has lived in Afghanistan for many years as a journalist and aid worker and has a lot of what we at GlobalPost call “groundtruth.”
She says that the Taliban’s campaign of intimidation and fear has had considerable affect.
People fear that the ink on their fingers from voting, which is meant to reduce voter fraud, is “a death warrant,” as she put it.
“People are afraid,” she added, speaking on a crackling phone line from Kandahar this morning when she joined me on PRI’s The Takeaway with host John Hockenberry.
The low voter turnout is widely seen to increase the chances of Abdullah Abdullah, the leading challenger to the incumbent President Hamid Karzai, succeeding in securing a run-off election.
Abdullah Abdullah, whose parents are a mix of Tajik and Pashtun ethnic backgrounds, was a loyal member of Commander Massoud’s Northern Alliance which has its roots and greatest following in the North and West, where voter turnout is reported to be strong and there are little reports of election violence.
The stress cracks in this election showed even before the polls opened.
The Afghan media, which has grown to be vibrant and done a good and fair job covering the colorful cast of characters who are in the race, has been restricted by a jittery central government in its coverage of violence leading up to the race.
Several Afghan journalists have been roughed up and arrested for doing their jobs in covering the spate of bombings and rocket attacks that have occurred in the days before the election and in recent hours as voters go to the polls.
The government of Karzai – and whoever emerges to serve as the next president -- needs to know that they can’t make the country safer by covering up the bad news, and cracking down on the media is not a sign of strength but of weakness in a nascent democracy.
July 11, 2009 00:49 ET | Updated: July 11, 2009 08:31 ET
I know that road just outside of Kabul in the Logar Province. I know the kids who walk to school on it every morning. I know their faces were full of hope and glee when I saw them two years ago at their beautiful new school and I can only imagine the fear that must be etched on their faces now.
On Thursday morning, Taliban terrorists packed a timber truck full of explosives and detonated it at a checkpoint between two schools in the Logar Province, they killed 25 people, including 13 elementary school students.
I was just in Afghanistan reporting on the girls’ school that is right where this bombing went off. On Wednesday I met with Sally and Don Goodrich. They are an amazing couple from Vermont who lost their son, Peter, in the September 11 attacks. They raised the money to build the girls’ school in his honor through the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation. Two years ago, I went on a trip with Sally to document the opening of the school. It was a joyous occasion. And we stayed in touch and have become friends.
We sat together Wednesday night and talked about the school and disturbing news that the village in which it lies is now apparently under control of the Taliban. The son and brother of Haji Malik, the village elder who has helped Don and Sally win community approval for the school, have been detained by US military for allegedly supporting the Taliban. A cache of weapons and explosives was found on their property, the military claims, and they have evidence photos to prove it. Sally and Don talked of wanting to close the school because they feared for the students’ safety.
Only hours later the truck bomb went off. Already Don and Sally have moved into action, raising more money to send to the families to help pay for burial of their children.
The girls school in the Mohammed Agha district of Logar is a microcosm of all that has gone wrong in Afghanistan. It is a sad illustration of the best of intentions and the worst of intentions.
Who, in God’s name, could kill children walking to school?
June 15, 2009 17:41 ET
KABUL — The city was in a full clampdown for the big gathering as heavily armed convoys shuttled the president, diplomats and military brass to the event.
Everyone who is anyone in Kabul was gathering for the ceremony at a heavily-guarded military base where Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a former top special operations commander, took charge of nearly 90,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
McChrystal told the gathering on Monday that the U.S. and coalition forces must protect Afghan civilians from all kinds of violence.
"The Afghan people are at the center of our mission. In reality, they are the mission. We must protect them from violence, whatever its nature," McChrystal said. "But while operating with care, we will not be timid."
McChrystal takes charge in Afghanistan at a fateful turn in the U.S. military presence here as an increase of some 21,000 troops gets underway and the U.S. braces for a full-on offensive against the Taliban in the south.
It’s going to be a long, hot summer in Afghanistan.
And President Hamid Karzai is turning up the heat on U.S. forces to prevent civilian deaths. It is a problem that has plagued the U.S. operation and caused widespread anger among Afghans.
The death of what the Afghan government claims was 140 civilians during May 4 air strikes in the Farah province is largely perceived as the tragedy that cost General David McKiernan his job and effectively ended his military career. A U.S. military inquiry stated that the number of civilian casualties in Farah was lower, and estimated that the attacks killed approximately 30 civilians and some 60 Taliban militants.
GlobalPost interviewed the governor of Farah Province, Roohul Amin, by phone Sunday night from inside the governor’s palace in Farah. He said U.S. forces were “working very hard” to be more careful about civilian deaths.
“The truth of this is the Taliban has intentionally put civilians in the middle of the fighting. They know what they are doing,” said Amin.
McChrystal is known as a bit of a wild man and is expected to take a more “unconventional” approach to taking on the Taliban. That may mean fewer airstrikes and more targeted assassinations, observers here say. It is an approach that grows out of his long experience with special forces and elite military units like the Navy SEALs and the Army's Delta Force.
And these “unconventional” approaches can come with risks of their own.
Like we said, it’s going to be a long, hot summer.
June 5, 2009 13:46 ET
AFPAK JOURNAL: GlobalPost executive editor Charles Sennott begins today to write “AfPak Journal,” a chronicle of his reporting trip through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
ISLAMABAD — As the Pakistan International Airlines flight touched down here, I noticed that the in-flight screen featured the lush landscape of the Swat Valley with a promotional message: “Pakistan, heaven on earth.”
Not exactly.
And definitely not these days with a spate of suicide bombings, one of which exploded outside a mosque where worshipers were lining up before the Friday prayer service in the northwest of the country.
The blast tore through the confidence Pakistan's military has been expressing about its all-out military offensive aimed at confronting a rising Taliban insurgency concentrated in the Swat Valley.
Pakistani television reports broadcast the aftermath of the bombing and reporters on the scene quoted military officials who put the death toll at 29 with at least 40 wounded.
The violence came just one day after the country's leaders urged President Barack Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, who is visiting the region, to provide more aid to stave off Taliban-led militancy in the northwest of the country.
The Pakistani military has dramatically stepped up its fight against the Taliban in the last month. One of Pakistan’s leading English language newspapers, Dawn, carried a front-page headline today proclaiming, “Tide has Turned Against Terrorists.”
Chief of the Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani said, “The tide in Swat has decisively turned and major population centers and roads leading to the valley have been largely cleared of organized resistance by the Taliban.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast at the Sunni Muslim mosque in the Haya Gai area of Upper Dir, a rugged and lawless province that straddles the Swat Valley.
