Archive for December, 2007

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The Road to Ruins

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

The Road to Ruins

There aren’t many blank spots left on the map that run half a degree of latitude wide, even in Afghanistan. Nimroz Province, a Tennessee-sized chunk of prairie and desert that’s home to 149,000 Afghans, is one such area.

I set out with a photographer friend, John Murphy, to satisfy a craving to see the massive centuries-old ruins of Shahr-i-Gholghola, a city that must once have covered the same area as Manhattan. An American traveling from Kandahar to Nimroz had seen them from his car and e-mailed me his photos; they bore out the description of Nancy Hatch Dupree, the dean of Afghan archaeology, as “the greatest assemblage of 15th-century A.D. architecture anywhere in the Middle East.” Abandoned around 1407 to the ravages of summer sandstorms and winter flash flooding from the nearby Helmand River, the site has not been explored since a Smithsonian Institution expedition left in 1976. (more…)

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Yemen: The Pioneer

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

IN A COUNTRY WHERE MODERN MEDICINE IS STILL CONSIDERED A CONSPIRATORIAL THREAT TO TRADITION, A QUIETLY HEROIC FEMALE DOCTOR RALLIES FOR WOMEN’S HEALTH—SAVING BABIES AND THEIR MOTHERS ONE CONVERT AT A TIME.

By Ann Marlowe
Photos by Newsha Tavakolian

The calm and cleanliness of Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Sana’a, Yemen, is a surprise when you walk in from the crowded, littered streets. In a country with such high rates of maternal and infant mortality, this might easily be a dreadful place. But a cheerful atmosphere prevails in the white corridors. Maybe it’s the continuity of life inside the hospital with life outside: visiting family members sit patiently on the hallway floors that serve as waiting rooms, while shy children in frayed but elaborate Western dress-up clothes scamper about. Young boys roam the hallways and patient rooms hawking chewing gum and Saudi religious tracts. (more…)

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Amid Real Progress, an Afghan Failure to Take Responsibility

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

Ann Marlowe is an independent journalist who was embedded in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army in November and December.

KABUL, Afghanistan–Air Force Lt. Col. Gordon Phillips of Albuquerque, New Mexico, is usually a very patient man. As the commander of Nangarhar Province’s Provincial Reconstruction Team or PRT, he has to be.

Like other Provincial Reconstruction Team commanders in Afghanistan, he spends most of his time in an endless series of meetings with provincial officials and elders, trying to gain the cooperation of the Afghan people in providing security, the rule of law, and economic development.

Largely, Phillips’ patience and that of his colleagues in the Nangarhar maneuver command is paying off. More IEDs are being called in by Afghan civilians to the Afghan National Police or Coalition forces. Ordinary Afghans are beginning to look to the law rather than tribal custom to address grievances. (more…)

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