Mark Sedwill

By Sue Turton in Asia on March 21st, 2011
Photo by Reuters
Ask Afghan army and police commanders from Kandahar to Bamyan if they are ready to take charge of security in their own province and the answer is always the same: not without better equipment and the support of a proper Afghan airforce.
 
Bamyan is on the list of provinces first for transition that president Hamid Karzai will announce on Tuesday. The colonel in charge of recruitment in this, the country's most peaceful province, told me they had little to defend themselves with should fighters, well entrenched in neighbouring provinces, decide to cross the border.
 
Mark Sedwill, NATO's civilian representative here, had talked about concerns that those first for transition would get an instant bull's eye on the province.
By Sue Turton in Asia on November 23rd, 2010
Photo by Reuters

It's the kids that break your heart in Kabul.

Picking through rubbish dumps for something that might have a worth or scavenging for firewood to keep their family warm. There are ragged youths at every roundabout here tapping on the car window begging for Afghanis or proffering tin cans of burning charcoal that promise to rid your car of evil spirits.|

The daily violence does not discriminate between old and young and the numbers of children ripped apart by IEDs and suicide bombers gets ever higher.

If you're born in Afghanistan the odds are stacked against you from the day of your birth.

Mortality rates during child birth have improved but they're still amongst the highest in the world. One in every five don't make it to their fifth birthday.

If the conflict doesn't get you, the pneumonia, hypothermia, diarrhoea or tuberculosis just might. And that's just the physical side.

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