By REUTERS
Published: May 13, 2008

Filed at 6:01 a.m. ET

KABUL (Reuters) - Taliban insurgents have ordered residents of a province near the capital Kabul to stop watching television, saying the networks were showing un-Islamic programs, officials and local media said on Tuesday.

The order is the last in a wave of curbs that the resurgent militants have announced in areas they are active.

A senior Afghan information ministry official, Najib Manelai, said that dozens of masked men with weapons entered mosques in Logar province at the weekend and threatened residents against watching television

"They threatened the people that 'if you do not give up watching televisions, you will face violence'," Manelai told Reuters.

Media reports quoted residents as saying that the Taliban imposed the ban because TV networks were showing programs that were "un-Islamic and anti-Afghan culture."

Removed from power in 2001, the al Qaeda-backed Taliban who lead a insurgency against the government and foreign forces, could not be reached for comment.

But while in power from 1996 until their ouster, the Taliban Islamists had banned television, music and cinema. More than a dozen private TV networks and scores of radio stations have been launched in Afghanistan since their fall.

The information ministry along with security forces was taking action against the Taliban move, minister Manelai said, without giving details.

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By Richard Tomkins

BAGHDAD -- After nearly two months of clashes, the Iraqi government and representatives of radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced a cease-fire for Baghdad's Al-Sadr City, where residents are said to be suffering from shortages of food and fresh water.

The announcement was made on May 11, but gunfire and explosions could still be heard the following day in the volatile district as fighting continued around the 3-mile barrier that U.S. forces are erecting to block extremists from infiltrating the southern section of Al-Sadr City to fire rockets on the capital's International Zone, the seat of the Iraqi national government and headquarters for U.S. military and diplomatic offices.

"It doesn't look like a cease-fire to me," U.S. Army Major Kyle Ferger, executive officer of the 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, said. "Just last night there were more than a dozen [incidents] along the wall.

"The wall's a magnet for them. They just keep on attacking."

U.S. authorities said troops killed three gunmen in clashes late on May 11 and early the next day. Ferger said al-Sadr's Imam Al-Mahdi Army -- or Iranian-influenced "Special Group" linked to it -- fired on troops using rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. There were also a number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that went off.

The wall, made of 4-meter-high concrete slabs, stretches along Al-Quds Street along the northern edges of the Tharwa and Jamilla neighborhoods. It was begun in mid-April to block Shi'ite extremists from infiltrating the area through cross streets. Citizens can still travel between the southern and northern sections of Al-Sadr City but will have to use three main crossings where Iraqi soldiers search vehicles for weapons and munitions.

As of May 11, the wall was 75-percent complete and would be finished by the end of the week, according to Feger.

Al-Sadr City, located in the northeastern part of Baghdad, is the stronghold of al-Sadr, a political rival of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Last year, al-Sadr declared a cease-fire with the government that helped bring new security to the capital, but he rescinded it in late March when the Iraqi Army took on Shi'ite gunmen, including al-Sadr's forces, in the southern port city of Al-Basrah amid spiraling lawlessness.

Fighting spread to Al-Sadr City, from where 107-millimeter and 120-millimeter rockets were launched almost daily on the International Zone. Shi'ite gunmen in mid-April also overran a number of Iraqi Army posts in the southern portion of the district. Those posts were retaken with U.S. help after some Iraqi Army units deserted.

According to reports, the new cease-fire calls for al-Sadr's forces to surrender their medium and heavy weapons. The government agreed to open all roads into Al-Sadr City, which the United Nations said is suffering from shortages of food and water.

Iraqi troops would reportedly be allowed to enter the district to search for criminals, but additional details of the cease-fire were reportedly still being worked out in negotiations between the government and representatives of al-Sadr, who is believed living in Iran.

It was also unclear whether al-Sadr's representatives could bring about compliance by the Special Groups.

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BBC

Mr Bush: "Popularity is fleeting... principles are forever"

President George W Bush has said he was disappointed in "flawed intelligence" in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Mr Bush said analysis of the material by many intelligence agencies had led to the "wrong conclusion" on weapons of mass destruction.

In an interview with internet portal Yahoo and newspaper Politico, he also explained why he had given up golf.

"I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said.

Mr Bush said he did not feel he had been misled on the intelligence on Iraq.

"'Mislead' is a strong word... Do I think somebody lied to me? No, I don't. I think it was just, you know, they analysed the situation and came up with the wrong conclusion."

He said intelligence communities across the world had shared the same assessment.

"And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was," he said.

Mr Bush also said a US pullout of Iraq or not maintaining "a forward presence" in the Middle East would send "all kinds of signals".

"It would shake everybody's nerves, and it would embolden the very same people that we're trying to defeat."

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Asia Times
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The George W Bush administration's plan to create a new crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly smuggling arms to Shi'ite militias in Iraq has encountered not just one but two setbacks.

The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refused to endorse US charges of Iranian involvement in arms smuggling to Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, and a plan to show off a huge collection of Iranian arms captured in and around the central city of Karbala had to be called off after it was discovered that none of the arms was of Iranian origin.

The news media's failure to report that the arms captured from

Shi'ite militiamen in Karbala did not include a single Iranian weapon shielded the US military from a big blow to its anti-Iran strategy.

The Bush administration and top Iraq commander General David Petraeus had plotted a sequence of events that would build domestic US political support for a possible strike against Iran over its "meddling" in Iraq, and especially its alleged export of arms to Shi'ite militias.

The plan was keyed to a briefing document to be prepared by Petraeus on the alleged Iranian role in arming and training Shi'ite militias that would be revealed to the public after the Maliki government had endorsed it, and that would be used to accuse Iran publicly.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen told reporters on April 25 that Petraeus was preparing a briefing to be given "in the next couple of weeks" that would provide detailed evidence of "just how far Iran is reaching into Iraq to foment instability". The centerpiece of the Petraeus document, completed in late April, was the claim that arms captured in the southern city of Basra bore 2008 manufacture dates on them.

US officials also planned to display to reporters Iranian weapons captured in both Basra and Karbala. That sequence of media events would fill the airwaves for several days with spectacular news framing Iran as the culprit in Iraq, aimed at breaking down US congressional and public resistance to the idea that Iranian bases supporting the meddling would have to be attacked.

But events in Iraq did not follow the script. On May 4, after an Iraqi delegation had returned from meetings in Iran, Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said in a news conference that Maliki was forming his own cabinet committee to investigate the US claims. "We want to find tangible information and not information based on speculation," he said.

Another adviser to Maliki, Haider Abadi, told the Los Angeles Times' Alexandra Zavis that Iranian officials had given the delegation evidence disproving the charges. "For us to be impartial, we have to investigate," Abadi said.

Dabbagh made it clear the government considered the US evidence of Iranian government arms smuggling to be insufficient. "The proof we want is weapons which are shown to have been made in Iran," Dabbagh said in a separate interview with Reuters. "We want to trace back how they reached [Iraq], who is using them, where are they getting it."

Senior US military officials were clearly furious with Maliki for backtracking on the issue. "We were blindsided by this," one of them told Zavis.

Then the Bush administration's plot encountered another serious problem.

The Iraqi commander in Karbala had announced on May 3 that he had captured a large quantity of Iranian arms in and around the city. Earlier, the US military had said that it was up to the Iraqi government to display captured Iranian weapons, and now an Iraqi commander was eager to do just that. Petraeus' staff alerted US media to a major news event in which the captured Iranian arms in Karbala would be displayed and then destroyed.

But when US munitions experts went to Karbala to see the alleged cache of Iranian weapons, they found nothing they could credibly link to Iran.

The US command had to inform reporters that the event had been canceled, explaining that it had all been a "misunderstanding". In his press briefing on May 7, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner gave some details of the captured weapons in Karbala but refrained from charging any Iranian role.

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JE16Ak02.html

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 15, 2008; A11

The United States has detained approximately 2,500 people younger than 18 as illegal enemy combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since 2002, according to a report filed by the Bush administration with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Although 2,400 of the juveniles were captured in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, only 500 are still held in detention facilities in that country. The administration's report, which was made public yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union, says that most of the detained Iraqi youths were "engaging in anti-coalition activity."

As of last month, 10 juveniles were still being held in Bagram, Afghanistan, out of 90 that had been captured in that country since 2002, according to the report.

Eight juveniles were brought to Guantanamo Bay since 2002, having been captured at ages ranging from 13 to 17. Although there are no juveniles at the prison in Cuba now, two people being held -- 21-year-old Omar Khadr and 23-year-old Mohammed Jawad -- were under 18 when they arrived. Both are facing trial by a military commission on charges of attempted murder.

Three of the other six juveniles once held at Guantanamo were sent back to Afghanistan in 2004, where they were put into a UNICEF rehabilitation program for child soldiers, according to the report. The last three juveniles were transferred back to their home countries.

The ACLU decried what is described as a "lack of safeguards" for youths captured by the U.S. military and "no comprehensive policy in place" for dealing with juveniles.

"Juveniles and former child soldiers should be treated first and foremost as candidates for rehabilitation and reintegration into society, not subjected to further victimization," Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU's human rights program, said in a statement.

In Iraq, where the U.S. military holds more than 20,000 Iraqis in detention centers, the United States reported the average stay of a juvenile as less than a year and said a "majority of juvenile detainees are released within six months."

A "very small percentage," however, have been kept for more than a year because the juveniles were "assessed to be of a high enough threat level," the report said.

In August 2007, the U.S. military established a juvenile education center in Iraq. At that time, 820 juveniles were held in detention facilities in Iraq. In February, according to the U.S. report, a plan was approved to improve education programs available to juvenile detainees.

2 hours ago

BAGHDAD (AP) — Gunmen ambushed an Iranian Embassy convoy in Baghdad, wounding three Iranians, including two diplomats, and an Iraqi, a spokesman said Friday.

The convoy was en route to a revered Shiite shrine in the northern neighborhood of Kazimiyah when it came under fire, Iranian Embassy spokesman Manoucher Taslimi said.

The attack happened at about 5:30 p.m. Thursday as the convoy approached a bridge that links Kazimiyah with the predominantly Sunni area of Azamiyah, according to Taslimi.

He said those wounded, including two Iranian diplomats and an Iranian and an Iraqi administrative employee, were in stable condition.

Iran blamed the United States for the ambush, saying Washington's threats against Iran encourage terrorist attacks against Iranian interests in Iraq.

"Responsibility for providing security to diplomats as well as diplomatic and international bodies in Iraq rests with the occupiers. The suspicious behavior of U.S. forces in security issues has brought increasing insecurity in Iraq," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Friday in a statement, a copy of which was made available to The Associated Press.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq17-2008may17,0,6452526.story
From the Los Angeles Times

Prime Minister Maliki says those who turn in their heavy and mid-size arms will also receive financial compensation. In Fallouja, eight people, including an infant, are killed in a suicide attack.

By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

3:58 PM PDT, May 16, 2008

BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki on Friday offered amnesty to Sunni Arab militants in the northern city of Mosul who turn in their weapons in exchange for unspecified financial compensation

The offer comes as government troops press an offensive in the city, which the U.S. military has called the last urban stronghold of militants loyal to Al Qaeda in Iraq.

A statement issued by Maliki's office gave militants 10 days to hand over their heavy- and medium-grade weapons to Iraqi security forces or local tribal leaders.

"Gunmen who carried weapons against government forces but were not involved in crimes against civilians shall be granted amnesty and also the opportunity to participate in building the new Iraq," the statement said.

Maliki, who flew to Mosul on Wednesday to oversee the operation, promised monetary compensation for any weapons surrendered, but said the details would be released later.

U.S. and Iraqi officials believe insurgents driven out of Baghdad and Anbar province last year have regrouped around Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city and a gateway for fighters and weapons smuggled across the Syrian border. The number of attacks have increased there since, even as violence dropped in the rest of the country.

The Iraqi operation had been promised since January, but was delayed by the fierce backlash to a government crackdown on Shiite Muslim militiamen in the southern city of Basra and parts of Baghdad.

A statement was read out during Friday prayers at mosques affiliated to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, urging followers to respect an agreement reached with the government to end fighting in the Sadr City district of Baghdad, a Sadr stronghold. The statement was signed by the "general military command" of Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.

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WASHINGTON (AFP) — Matthis Chiroux is the kind of young American US military recruiters love.

"I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school," the now 24-year-old told AFP.

"I was 'filet mignon' for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade," or around 16 years old, he added.

Chiroux joined the army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant.

He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines before he was honorably discharged and placed in the reserves.

As a reservist, he was due to be deployed next month in Iraq.

On Thursday, he refused to go.

"I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq," Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.

"My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation... I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation," he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.

Minutes earlier, Chiroux had cried openly as he listened to former comrades-in-arms testify before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war.

The testimonies were the first before Congress by Iraq veterans who have turned against the five-year-old war.

Former army sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith told the landmark haering of "lawless murders, looting and the abuse of countless Iraqis."

He spoke of the psychologically fragile men and women who return from Iraq to find little help or treatment offered from official circles.

Goldsmith said he had "self-medicated" for several months to treat the wounds of the war.

Another soldier told AFP he had to boost his medication to treat anxiety and social agoraphobia -- two of many lingering mental wounds he carries since his deployments in Iraq -- before testifying.

Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.

A group of veterans in the packed hearing room gazed blankly as their comrades' testimonies shattered the official version that the US effort in Iraq is succeeding.

Almost to a man, the testifiers denounced serious flaws in the chain of command in Iraq.

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Sun May 18, 2008 4:26am EDT

.BAGHDAD, May 18 (Reuters) - An American soldier has been sent home from Iraq after a copy of the Koran was found pocked with bullet holes at a shooting range near Baghdad, the U.S. military said on Sunday.

Such an act of desecration of the Muslim holy book could inflame anger against the U.S. military presence in Iraq.

The U.S. military said Iraqi police found the Koran on May 11 at a firing range in Radwaniyah village near Baghdad.

Colonel Bill Buckner, a U.S. military spokesman, said the Koran was marked with bullet holes and also had graffiti scrawled inside the cover. It was not immediately clear if the Koran had been used for target practice.

"Coalition commanders have briefed local leaders on the results of the investigation and expressed their deep regret," Buckner said in a statement.

"They have also undertaken disciplinary action against the soldier who was involved and he has been removed from Iraq."

In his statement, Buckner stressed that the U.S. military respected Islam and the Koran.

we are destroying a generation :(

A victim of the war within
Suicides of Houston Army recruiter and his wife leave questions of struggle that endured after Iraq

By LINDSAY WISE

Army recruiter Nils Aron Andersson sat behind the wheel of his brand-new Ford F-150, firing round after round into the truck's CD player and radio with a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Spent cartridges littered the seats and floorboards, along with a paper pharmacy bag holding a prescription for the antidepressant Lexapro.

Andersson's wife, Cassy Walton, had been trying to reach the 25-year-old sergeant on his cell phone for hours. He finally picked up about 2 a.m. and told her he wanted to kill himself.

Walton begged him to keep talking to her. Andersson told her he was on the top floor of a downtown Houston parking garage and ended the call. Then he put the pistol to his head, just above his right ear.

Minutes later, Walton raced up the stairs of the garage to find her husband of less than 24 hours slumped on the driver's side of his truck, bleeding from a single bullet wound to his right temple.

Sobbing, she unlocked the truck with her own key, climbed onto his lap, and started CPR.

"Why did you do this?" she screamed.

When Andersson killed himself on March 6, 2007, he became one of at least 16 Army recruiters to commit suicide nationwide since 2000. Five of those suicides occurred in Texas, including three at the Houston Recruiting Battalion, where Andersson worked after serving two tours of duty in Iraq.

Roughly one in five U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan reports symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, but only slightly more than half have sought treatment, according to a recently published Rand Corp. study. Of those who did seek care, only about half received minimally adequate treatment, the study found.

Amid increasing concerns about failure to screen, diagnose and treat soldiers with mental health problems adequately, Andersson's story raises questions about the pressures faced by the growing number of veterans who return from multiple combat deployments to high-stress recruiting assignments back home.

Leaving for Iraq
A quiet, skinny kid who loved to fish, hunt and ride ATVs along the Oregon coast, where he was born, Andersson — who preferred his middle name Aron — joined the Army's 82nd Airborne Division in 2002, three years after graduating high school.

In 2003, he left to fight in the initial U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It was the first time he'd been abroad in his life.

"I probably prayed more in the first six months than I had in a long while," said his father, Bob Andersson, 53, who works for the city parks department in Eugene, Ore. "Every time the phone rings, you panic. I'm not kidding you there; for months, I'd come home and I'd stop at the end of the street and go, 'God, I hope there's not a car with military plates in front of my house.' "

Andersson earned a Bronze Star with valor for saving the lives of two other soldiers during a firefight. But when he came home, the soldier avoided his family's questions about the war.

Relieved to have him back, they didn't press him.

"When I asked him how he'd earned his Bronze Star, he just said, 'Doing my job, Dad,' " Bob Andersson said.

The father remembers looking at photographs taken during his son's service in Iraq and feeling helpless to understand what the young man had been through.

"You can't imagine what was going on," he said. "You can see the pictures, but you still weren't there to smell it, or feel the heat, or see the cars burning or what was left of someone after a bomb went off."

The only thing the father knew for sure was that his son had changed. He was more frustrated, less patient and harder to talk to.

"Did he come back different? Yeah," Bob Andersson said. "I don't think there's anybody who goes over there and fights on the front lines who ever comes back the same."

The soldier once told his father about working a barricade in Iraq when a white van barreled toward U.S. troops, ignoring warning shots and orders to stop.

"It was definitely a suicide mission, and he said this van full of people came in and they had to, quote, 'light it up,' " Bob Andersson said. "And he said there were children in there and everything. I could tell that really, really, bothered him."

Life as a recruiter

When Andersson transferred to the Houston Recruiting Battalion, his father hoped that he would be able to put the past behind him. Instead, he became more depressed.

"He had a heart of gold and that, I think, is what killed him. Because he got into something so outrageously different than his basic makeup, and he just couldn't get over it."

As a recruiter stationed in River Oaks and Rosenberg, Andersson often worked six days a week, routinely got home after 11 p.m., and would sometimes weep from despair and exhaustion, said his ex-girlfriend Marsha Maxey, a mortgage banker who dated the soldier before he met Cassy Walton.

Maxey met Andersson in August 2005 at an Irish pub in Columbia, S.C., where he was attending recruiter school at Fort Jackson.

"He was a good-looking man — tall, blue eyes, blond hair, smart, funny and kind. A sensitive guy and a man in uniform, that whole thing," Maxey said. "He swept me off my feet."

Their 14-year age difference was never a problem, said Maxey, who is 40. "It worked out very well because he was an old soul," she said. "He'd seen a lot of things for his young age."

Two months into a whirlwind romance, she moved to Texas to be with him when Andersson began his new job with the Houston Recruiting Battalion.

"It was instantly an incredibly stressful job," Maxey said. "From the beginning since I met him, he cried very easily and I thought, 'Oh, he's just sensitive,' but then it got worse."

Occasionally, Andersson talked to Maxey about his time in Iraq. The details slipped out in bits and pieces — like a story about surviving a deadly helicopter crash, or carrying a wounded buddy to safety after his unit was ambushed.

"He told me he kicked down over 1,000 doors," Maxey said. "He was the lead guy, the first one to go in, and most of the time it was the wrong place. There would be terrified old people and little kids sitting there."

Andersson suffered from dramatic mood swings. He got nervous in big crowds and would wake up in the middle of the night "just screaming," Maxey said.

Andersson also developed a low self-esteem and an extreme fear of abandonment, she said. A few months before he committed suicide, he sent Maxey a text message saying he was "going to get rid of himself because he was a monster like Saddam," she recalled.

"He would just get so distraught over his job and the things he'd seen," Maxey said. "It was more than he could take."

Mounting pressure

Making matters worse, Andersson felt uncomfortable in the role of salesman for the Army. He was painfully honest with prospective recruits, even if his candor turned them off, she said.

"He was morally opposed to putting more young men into that situation, where they could be injured or killed or see the things he'd seen," Maxey said.

His superiors repeatedly criticized him for failing to meet his goal of signing two new recruits a month and assigned him five-page essays or extra duty as punishment, she said. In February 2006, he was passed up for promotion to staff sergeant.

"It wasn't that he was lazy or not working. It's just that he was not getting recruits and being punished for it, constantly," she said. "It was just not the job for him."

Andersson was proud to be a soldier, but he wasn't cut out for recruiting, said his friend Chris Rodriguez.

Long hours, few days off and mounting pressure to deliver fresh volunteers made life "truly awful," Rodriguez said in a series of e-mails and a telephone interview with the Houston Chronicle from Anbar Province in Iraq, where he was serving a tour of duty at the time of Andersson's death.

''In the recruiting station I was at, a good third of the people went on antidepressants while working there," said Rodriguez, who met Andersson in Texas while assigned to the Houston Recruiting Battalion. "You could come to work as motivated as you wanted, but as soon as you passed the threshold of the doorway, it'd suck the life away from you. Looking around, you'd see miserable people."

If recruiters failed to sign up enough prospects, their commanders told them they were failures, Rodriguez said. "They tell you, 'That's why your buddy in Iraq doesn't have a full battalion, because you're letting him down,' "he said.

The stress took its toll. Back in Iraq, Rodriguez had nightmares about his time recruiting in Houston.

"The pressure recruiting puts on you wears you down so badly," he said. "We often said that we'd rather be in Iraq than recruiting. It's true."

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With insurgents throwing up obstacles at every opportunity, students are doing all they can to take advantage of the 50 new schools built in Afghanistan this year.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Despite Taliban intimidation, midnight arsons and a serious lack of teachers, education in Kandahar Province is edging forward.

Fifty new schools have opened this year, mostly in the capital of Kandahar City. It is a fact that Muhammad Anwar, provincial director of education, states with justifiable pride.

There have been many challenges.

Insurgents have recently burned down two city schools in the middle of the night. Books and other supplies were torched. Taliban members regularly intimidate students and faculty. Similar reports emerge from across the country.

Last weekend, Canadian soldiers defused a bomb near another city school.

In the nearby village of Hajji Mohammed, a school sits empty in an area where many children live. It was only built last year, but shiny padlocks on the doors are the newest thing about it. Canadian Forces have heard insurgent threats kept teachers away. However, Mr. Anwar said that closing a school in Kandahar Province -- where the majority of Canadian soldiers are based -- has now become rare.

"The enemy is always trying to intimidate students. Most people don't pay heed to them; they are quite brave and say they will not abandon their schools. Our people are strong enough to resist this," he said through a translator.

Mr. Anwar sees the aggression as propaganda, an insurgent tactic to spread the word that the act of learning is dangerous. The Taliban are distinctly anti-education, and created a dark ages-type period when they were in power.

"The previous times were so bad," he laments. "During the Taliban regime, everything had fallen down, nothing was right."

Now, Afghans are doing all they can to get back into classrooms.
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_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}