Creating Fear

"It is just not safe to be open. Even during the Taliban, the Mujahedeen crisis, bombardments, we never closed this long."
"If you go 20 miles out of Kabul you will not come back. Me as an intellectual, you as a foreigner. This has happened in the last 2-1/2 years. Before it was OK. Large areas of the city and towns were secured. But it's getting worse and worse."
Shah Muhammad Rais, Bookseller of Kabul

"It is a performance. They don't care what they do, who they kill, children, old people, women. They just want to create fear."
General Mohammad Ayub Salangi, deputy interior minister, Kabul

"President Karzai was an accidental president. There was no paradigm for the conditions he faced, because no one could have imagined 9/11. He had to improvise under very difficult conditions to hold this country together. We now have a platform for change and the country is ready for transformation."
Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzal, Afghan presidential hopeful

Afghan election workers counts ballots at a polling station in Jalalabad, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, April 5, 2014. Across Afghanistan, voters turned out in droves Saturday to cast ballots in a crucial presidential election. The vote will decide who will replace President Hamid Karzai, who is barred constitutionally from seeking a third term. Partial results are expected as soon as Sunday. RAHMAT GUL — AP Photo

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2014/04/05/3031549/ap-photos-afghans-vote-in-presidential.html#storylink=cpy

The Bookseller of Kabul shuttered his book shop, surrendering to the fear that has enveloped Kabul. His shop is located close by where a recent suicide bombing took place. His nephew, a reporter with the French news agency Agence France-Presse, was killed just recently, along with his wife and their two young children in a Taliban attack on a popular Lebanese restaurant. .

Candidate Asraf Ghani Ahmadzal is entirely too generous in his description of department President Hamid Karzai, and amazingly forgetful in remembering to credit NATO intervention and the work of international humanitarian groups all instrumental in bringing Afghanistan back from the brink of utter societal disintegration. President Karzai did little to offer security and government outreach beyond the capital, and appeared complicit with rampant corruption.

On Friday, a Canadian veteran reporter, Kathy Gannon, and her companion, German photographer Anja Niedringhaus, seated in the vehicle of a convoy protected by Afghan security police, were fired upon at close range with an AK-47 by the unit commander. This was his revenge, he later stated, for members of his family dying in a NATO bombing. Ms. Niedringhaus died immediately, Ms. Gannon will recover from her wounds.

An Afghan policeman stands guard while voters line up to enter a polling station and cast their ballots in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, April 5, 2014. Across Afghanistan, voters turned out in droves Saturday to cast ballots in a crucial presidential election. The Taliban threatened to target voters and polling places, but there were few instances of violence. Instead, those wanting to cast ballots joined long lines and expressed pride for security forces guarding the election and a willingness to stand up for their country. MUHAMMED MUHEISEN — AP Photo

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2014/04/05/3031549/ap-photos-afghans-vote-in-presidential.html#storylink=cpy

The day Afghans went to the polls to vote for their next president; a first for the country in a democratic process, was when that attack occurred. Despite the overwhelming fear of a terrorized society, voters came out in droves, unaware that the two reporters on assignment for Associated Press were in a convoy ferrying ballot boxes near Khost. Ashraf Ghani, the presidential election front-runner commented the Taliban need to be confronted: "If they are Afghans, we need to search for solutions, not killing."

But it wasn't the Taliban that killed one foreign reporter and wounded another. According to Sally Armstrong, a Canadian journalist who has reported from the country for decades through periodic visits, "If the people can elect themselves a leader who can pull the tribes together, cut the dysfunction in the government and establish a reasonable level of security, they might just have a shot at nationhood."

She repeats the often-cited fact that as a result of the NATO invasion to rout the Taliban and al-Qaeda a dozen years ago, eight million Afghan boys and girls now attend school, not Islamist madrassas. Maternal and infant mortality rates have dropped, business is outdistancing original hopes (tenuously, with investors prepared to depart should matters deteriorate). Post-Taliban there are 64 television and 30 radio stations.

The Taliban remain an enduring and durable presence in the country's four southern provinces; indeed, have them in their grip. It remains to be seen how stable the other 30 provinces will be once NATO troops leave entirely, as they are now scheduled to do, leaving Afghanistan to the Afghans, after having mentored and armed the Afghan national police and the military.

Over 75% of eligible-to-vote Afghans turned out; 35% of registered voters were women. The highest ever number of women are competing for seats on provincial councils. Extremist Islamists are not only represented by the Taliban, however. Kabul, reports one journalist of many, appeared like a city under siege. Checkpoints were manned by police officers frisking drivers and passengers.

Restaurants popular with foreigners were urged by government officials to close for fear of being targeted, while children were sent home from school for the week in anticipation of possible election-related violence. The capital's four main gates were sealed to traffic for part of the day on Friday, with additional police tasked to surround the city in a "ring of steel".

No violence did take place during election day. But the fear and trepidation, the security measures put in place, the forlorn look of the city, the pervasive environment of anxious anticipation, spell out starkly: terror. This is what terrorism is; laying down a breath-smothering blanket of dismal, dark thoughts of violence that could erupt at any moment. It has, it does constantly, and it will continue to do so.

Islam has a duty to cure itself of presenting as a menace to its own and to the international community that is long overdue.