At a center for disadvantaged children in Kabul, shy young girls step up to recite their duties as fasting Muslims for the visiting US ambassador.
Teachers look on with pride at young Afghans who were once left at the mercy of the street.
Yet the disturbing reality in this war-torn nation — where Western powers battle Islamist forces to maintain a friendly government in power — is that at least 600,000 street children have no safety net to catch them.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The problem, experts say, is getting worse because of the deepening war and the scourge of corruption, despite the inflow of more than US$35 billion from foreign donors since the Taliban were removed from power in 2001.
The dangers for children are many, they say: From drugs to the insurgency, from criminal gangs to sexual abuse.
“Poverty is getting worse in Afghanistan and children are forced to find work,” said Shafiqa Zaher, a social worker with Aschiana, the group receiving US aid for its work.
Zaher regularly trawls Kabul streets and parks where street children hang out and approaches them to see if they would be interested in an education.
“We take the children and show them what we do here and if they agree we go to the family and talk to them,” she said.
About 7,000 in the main cities of Afghanistan are attending Aschiana schools, where food and stationery costs are taken care of and some families are assigned sponsors.
Most have a home to go to, even if it is the shell of a building struck in the country’s unending wars, Zaher says, but their guardians are often disabled and cannot work.
A study by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) in 2008 found around 60,000 minors involved in child labor in Kabul alone.
Nader Nadery, a senior commissioner at the AIHRC, says it’s a consequence of Afghanistan’s decades of conflict.
“In the last three to four years an increasing number of displaced from the war affected areas — Helmand, Kandahar, Ghazni — have poured into Kabul city to seek refuge,” he said.
A community of refugees mainly from Sangin in Helmand, where US forces led an operation against insurgents last year, relies on Aschiana help in a Kabul slum quarter of plastic awnings.
In three decades of war, the country’s population has doubled to more than 30 million and the dusty mountain capital has swelled to a city of 4 million, much of it potholed and crumbling, with chronic traffic.
“Historically, Kabul and Afghanistan have never had this crisis of people not having a ceiling or a roof. They’re all poor but at least they had a home,” Nadery said.
He says corruption, the subject of an ongoing diplomatic scuffle between Karzai and Washington and a major issue in parliamentary elections this month, makes a bad situation worse.
A UN report said in March that entrenched corruption was leaving the poor at the mercy of the powerful while security-obsessed foreign forces turn a blind eye.
“The direct link between poverty and corruption is always there,” Nadery said. “Most development projects are halted or don’t reach areas where it would affect the life of the poor because of the corruption involved.”
Afghans have been given a rude awakening to the extent of social problems through Omid (Hope), a daring television show that has been running on Saba TV for the past two years.
Investigating dozens of cases around the country, producer and researcher Zainab Rahimy found children whose parents were addicted to opium, boy soldiers drafted into fighting for the Taliban and an alarming frequency of sexual abuse.
Deprivation and abuse pushes some teenagers to join the insurgents, she said.
“The worst was children who the Taliban were forcing to go with them for an amount of money. They were from seven to 18 years old, with guns and regular training,” Rahimy said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
Millions of dollars have poured into bets on who will win the US presidential election after a last-minute court ruling opened up gambling on the vote, upping the stakes on a too-close-to-call race between US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump that has already put voters on edge. Contracts for a Harris victory were trading between 48 and 50 percent in favor of the Democrat on Friday on Interactive Brokers, a firm that has taken advantage of a legal opening created earlier this month in the country’s long running regulatory battle over election markets. With just a month
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday as she challenged her rival, former US president Donald Trump, to publish his own health records. “Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Speaking to reporters ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Harris called Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
RSS