This video is called Part 1: Malalai Joya, “bravest woman in Afghanistan”, on HARDTalk, May 21, 2009.
This video is Part 2.
With Its Horrifying Cover Story, Time Gave the War a Boost. Did Its Reporter Profit?
By John Gorenfeld
August 12, 2010 | 1:09 p.m
The maimed face of 18-year-old Aisha, her nose and ears cut off as punishment by her Afghan husband for fleeing his home, made the cover of Time magazine last week and changed the debate over the country’s military involvement in Afghanistan. Hitting stands just as a growing chorus of pundits and lawmakers had begun to question the costs, the goals and the point of the country’s longest war ever, the gut-punch cover image, beneath a stunningly blunt coverline conspicuously missing a question mark — “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan” — and accompanying story by Aryn Baker, the magazine’s Afghan/Pakistan bureau chief, gave a boost to supporters of America’s continued military involvement in the country.
But there was more than a question mark missing from the Time story, which stressed potentially disastrous consequences if the U.S. pursues negotiations with the Taliban. The piece lacked a crucial personal disclosure on Baker’s part: Her husband, Tamim Samee, an Afghan-American IT entrepreneur, is a board member of an Afghan government minister’s $100 million project advocating foreign investment in Afghanistan, and has run two companies, Digistan and Ora-Tech, that have solicited and won development contracts with the assistance of the international military, including private sector infrastructure projects favored by U.S.-backed leader Hamid Karzai.
In other words, the Time reporter who wrote a story bolstering the case for war appears to have benefited materially from the NATO invasion. Reached by The Observer, a Time spokesperson revealed that the magazine has just reassigned Baker to a new country as part of a normal rotation, though he declined to say where.
While Baker, traveling in Italy, did not respond to Observer.com’s request for comment, Time defended its cover story as “neither in support of, nor in opposition to, the U.S. war effort” but rather a “straightforward reported piece.” Time added that “Aryn Baker’s husband has no connection to the U.S. military, has never solicited business from them and has no financial stake in the U.S. presence in Afghanistan whatsoever.”
But two years before his wedding to the Time bureau chief, Samee told Radio Free Europe in 2006 that Digistan — apparently the local arm of an international IT operation, run from a villa in Kabul — was discovering for itself that the “opportunities are definitely here” in the telecom field, thanks to “quite a bit of involvement from ISAF [NATO's International Security Assistance Force, commanded until recently by Stanley Gen. McChrystal] and coalition forces.” The same year, he told Entrepreneur: “You won’t find another place that offers so many opportunities” and the AP that profits “have been higher than I expected.” Three years later, Digistan was advertising for sales staff skilled in “Government and Military Procurement,” reflecting the company’s connection to the cloudy world of NATO-enabled civilian wartime contracts. …
When the war started, Samee, then working as a manager for a telecom firm in northern Virginia, had followed what investigative journalist Pratap Chatterjee, author of Halliburton’s Army, calls a typical pattern for Beltway-area members of the Afghan diaspora, whose involvement was encouraged by the Pentagon. Nothing nefarious about it, Chatterjee says, but “there was a lot of money to be made.”
A Time spokesman claims that Digistan has been defunct for 18 months and that Samee had entered the sandwich business. But online evidence suggests the company was in operation much longer and that Samee’s stake in NATO involvement in the country goes deeper.
For instance, Digistan’s sister company, Ora-Tech Systems, still lists an office in Kabul, and Digistan remains listed in the directory of the Peace Dividend Marketplace, an approved list of government contractors that an NGO founded in 2007 to identify trustworthy partners in a business environment where as much as $10 billion in the hands of Afghan officials has reportedly gone missing. Much of the work is for civilian agencies. According to the listing, Digistan’s clients have included the IMF and GTZ, a Frankfurt consulting group that advises the Afghan government’s Export Promotion Agency.
Business owners join the list in order to profit from an “Afghan First” policy issued by Gen. McChrystal a few months before his departure. According to the Peace Dividend’s Kabul director, former Canadian army Col. Mike Capstick, the Peace Dividend Marketplace list is where officials in the U.S. Department of Defense contracting system turn when deciding where to spend $1 billion a year on Afghan businesses.
Samee lists his chairmanship of Digistan on his LinkedIn profile and on a public Facebook profile, which cites his current place of business as Beruit and until this week showcased a photo of his wedding to Baker.
Before her marriage to Samee, Baker — who worked as a Paris pastry chef before entering journalism — was reporting for Time on “hardy strain of entrepreneurs” — including at least one Digistan client, bank founder Hayatullah Dayani. Though she never profiled Samee, she wrote about his acquaintances. One was Rory Stewart, a Scottish diplomat, author and former Iraq administrator for the Coalition Provisional Authority who had once crossed Afghanistan on foot. She dubbed him, in a glowing 2007 profile, “Stewart of Afghanistan.”
Stewart, a dashing figure who wears lamb fleece hats like Hamid Karzai’s and has inspired a Hollywood screenplay with Orlando Bloom attached to play him, is also founder of the $1.7 million arts charity Turquoise Mountain, of which Samee is a sponsor. The group hires engineers to restore Kabul’s historic districts. The charity’s activities have included an art contest that a U.N. press release issued in July claimed was “created through a brainchild of President Hamid Karzai and Britain’s Prince Charles” (whose sons Stewart tutored).
Stewart later wrote a July 2008 cover story for Time, “How To Save Afghanistan,” recommending, among other things, that the Karzai government be given the money it seeks for communications infrastructure.
Even if Baker’s husband has pulled up stakes in Kabul’s IT market, as Time asserts, he’s still listed as one of just six board members on a Karzai government minister’s $100 million project to create, according to its mission statement, a “flourishing investment environment” in Afghanistan.
Known as Harakat (or in English as AICF, the Afghanistan Investment Climate Facility), the group issues grants for lobbying projects to change laws and expand the availability of credit. It is run by U.K.-educated Suleman Fatimie, who has recently served in a number of Kabul government posts. Karzai’s Ministry of Commerce still lists Fatimie as chief of the Ministry of Commerce’s export promotion agency. Created with $50 million in British aid money, the group is actively seeking an extra $50 million in private funds.
While on the board of Harakat, Samee has been a featured guest at a number of business and aid forums in Kabul and beyond. One exclusive affair, highlighted by Foreign Policy as “the only [Afghanistan conference] you really want to go to…and sorry, you’re not invited,” was off-the-record and headed by Obama Afghanistan-Pakistan policy chief Richard Holbrooke.
Meanwhile, Digistan appears to have earned healthy profits. One of Samee’s former employees, tech salesman Shah Afghan, boasts on a LinkedIn resume of bringing in $1.2 million for Digistan between 2006 and 2008. An “elite” portfolio of customers, Afghan notes, include Kabul Bank — whose reputation for lawlessness has fueled demands by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Karzai clean up corruption, and which embodies, according to the Washington Post, “a crony capitalism that enriches politically connected insiders and dismays the Afghan populace.”
Put the Taliban back in charge, and many such contracts will likely begin to dry up.
The Aisha story marked a last hurrah for Baker’s time in Afghanistan. On July 10 she and her husband reportedly held a going-away party, though the reporter’s husband is still pursuing business opportunities in Afghanistan. Another bash, six days later, celebrated the launch of Samee’s organic-branded sandwich business, Tazza, “the new tasty, healthy and safe catering kitchen in Kabul.” A party invitation welcomed an elite guest list to their home in the city’s central district, promising a “secured residence.”
And what about Aisha, a new war emblem? While it’s long been evident that women have suffered unimaginable horrors under customs practiced in Afghanistan, Aisha’s brutal mutilation occurred in 2009, almost eight years into the American invasion.
Meanwhile, in a story light on specifics, there remains some question as to whether the unnamed Afghan judge who ordered Aisha’s mutilation qualifies as a “Taliban commander” in any formal sense. And if Aisha’s is the face of the notoriously cruel Taliban justice system, the Taliban aren’t taking credit. A Taliban press release on August 7 condemned the maiming as “unislamic” and denied that the case was handled by any of its roving judges — to whom many Afghans are now turning, distrustful of Karzai officials.
In the long run, the NATO-backed president, Hamid Karzai, may not be the friend Aisha and other persecuted Afghan women so desperately need. Last August he signed the Shia Personal Status Law, allowing men to starve wives who withhold sex and to punish those who walk outdoors without permission. Under this law — passed by a parliament that is 25 percent female as mandated by the new Afghan consitution — Aisha’s decision to leave home would have been considered a crime.
I know Bibi Aisha, the young Afghan woman pictured on the August 9 cover of Time, and I rejoice that her mutilated nose and ears are going to be surgically repaired. But the logic of those who use Aisha’s story to convince us that the US military must stay in Afghanistan escapes me: here.
Two extra RAF jets arrived in Afghanistan on Thursday in response to US general David Petraeus’s request for more occupation force air cover: here.
USA: Veterans Today piece argues “we lost Afghan War” and its time to start seeing reality: here.
Britain: Reality Radio: Hear Kate Hudson from CND interview; Stop the War’s Lindsey German on Afghanistan and Iraq: here.
