And the shit MSM gets criticized for not reporting the "good" news?
With all the hell going on up there -- which Amurka's MSM press ignores -- I get this shit piece in my Globe today?
"Sparsely populated valley a haven of Afghan prosperity" by John Ward Anderson/Washington Post October 14, 2007
[Hey, they found the NEEDLE in the HAYSTACK! Good Post!]
PARAKH, Afghanistan - Slashed across the side of a rugged mountain like the sign of Zorro, the Z Road started as a simple $59,000 US project to put a radio tower atop a small peak in the Hindu Kush, so people in the remote Panjshir Valley could for the first time pick up commercial radio from Kabul, about 60 miles away.
After road crews conquered the mountain's 270-foot face last November, other forces took over. By the new year, private companies had extended the road to the next hilltop, two-thirds of a mile away and 640 feet higher, for a bank of cellphone towers.
Then came another half-mile extension to the next peak for a television tower, then plans for a wind farm, and, last month, a series of switchbacks down the far side of the range to give villages in the next valley their first road to the outside.
This is the way reconstruction in Afghanistan was supposed to be. A little bit of US pump priming, combined with profit motive and human need, would be harnessed by a grateful, liberated population to transform their lives and country. In the process, the people would become loyal allies in the fight against terror.
[As we drop air bombd coated with depleted uranium on them at the same time, right?
Pfffftttt!!!]
It hasn't always worked that way. Afghanistan is besieged by a growing insurgency that is shifting US money and manpower from reconstruction to security, undermining vital road, electricity, school, and other projects that are designed to extend the authority of the national government and win hearts and minds.
[Too late!]
But in Afghanistan's famed Panjshir Valley - a remote, sparsely populated mountain region that is almost entirely ethnic Tajik - an unprecedented synergy among the local government, the people, and US soldiers has helped spark a development boom that is modernizing and transforming the valley, which became Afghanistan's 34th province three years ago. Underpinning it all is an unusual sense of calm that has come with the people's success in keeping the Taliban at bay.
When a US reconstruction team recently returned to Forward Operating Base Lion about 10 miles inside the valley, troops parked their military vehicles for the duration of their stay and traveled throughout the province in regular sport utility vehicles, without body armor and helmets. They often eschewed convoys and went out on missions in single vehicles.
Ambassadors, politicians, and NATO and US military officials "all ask the same thing: Can we do this in other provinces?" said Governor Bahlol Bahij of Panjshir. He extols his zero tolerance for opium poppy cultivation and his systems for working with the US military and foreign aid workers, and for stopping the spread of the extremist Taliban into his province.
In addition to being mostly Tajik, Panjshir Province is almost entirely Sunni Muslim, so the region lacks many ethnic, religious, and cultural differences that have fueled the insurgency elsewhere in Afghanistan.
The province, about 1 1/2 times the size of Rhode Island, has 300,000 residents and is isolated. An indigenous intelligence network with a knowledge of the landscape enabled Panjshir fighters to repel repeated Soviet, mujahideen, and Taliban offenses in the 1980s and '90s and helped this region remain the only unconquered area of Afghanistan.
The fighters were led by national hero Ahmed Shah Massoud, the so-called Lion of Panjshir, who was killed in an Al Qaeda suicide bombing two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States. Today, nomad sheep herders graze their flocks on the valley floor among rusting Soviet tanks and decrepit armored vehicles. Terraced gardens line the lower slopes, which climb to slate gray mountaintops scarred by foxholes and trenches.
Pictures of Massoud peer out from the windows of mud-brick houses, car windshields, billboards, and storefronts. Women in all-encompassing sky blue burqas walk along roads with girls in black dresses and white shawls - the traditional school uniform in the valley. Irrigation canals feed groves of walnut, almond, and mulberry trees and fields of potatoes, beans, and grapes.
"This is the safest part of Afghanistan, because the people of Panjshir stick together," said Mansor Azimi Panjshir, 23, a construction worker."
Then I flip the page and get this (in a world brief, of course):
"Suicide bomber kills 7, wounds 30... SPIN BOLDAK - A suicide bomber yesterday killed one police officer and six civilians in southeastern Afghanistan close to the border with Pakistan. Thirty more people were wounded in the attack, for which the Taliban claimed responsibility (Reuters)."
No AFGHANS dead yesterday by NATO, huh?
No air raids or Taliban body counts, huh?
I guess there is NO FIGHTING -- despite the 75 air raids a day, huh, shit western media?
And, as usual, the Times is silent or derelict on the subject.
