Word: khans
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...Among the number of Afghan casualties inflicted by the U.S., the mistaken killing of 15 children stands out. "We are very angry," says Ghulab Khan, a local farmer observing the row of eight rocky graves in Paktia. The incidents are bound to inflame anger at American soldiers and the pro-U.S. President, Hamid Karzai. The deaths embarrassed U.S. military commanders struggling to bring security and normality to the country, and deepened worries among Afghan authorities and civilians about the accuracy and skill of U.S. counterinsurgency methods. "It shows the need for better coordination," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad...
...journalist ?sne Seierstad describes herself as bi-gendered: free to circulate among men but also able to enter the welcoming?and asphyxiating?world of Afghan women. After covering the fall of the Taliban, Seierstad joins the household of an erudite bookseller for four months. She is drawn to Sultan Khan (a pseudonym) because of his encyclopedic knowledge of Afghan culture?she calls him "a history book on two feet"?and his valiant role in protecting the country's literature from the Taliban by secreting ancient texts behind false shelves. But Seierstad quickly concludes that Khan's progressive views on Islam...
...That's about all the emancipation the women are permitted. To Seierstad, the middle-aged Khan has been conditioned to think of them as chattel, taking a second spouse, a comely adolescent, when he tires of his aging wife. He forces his educated youngest sister to sacrifice her dreams of becoming an English teacher for an arranged marriage with her unemployed cousin, a man who has never opened a book. "In his heart he wanted Afghanistan to be a modern country," writes Seierstad, "but when it came to ruling his family, Sultan had only one model: his father...
...they are pared down to a made-for-TV pathos that is too easy to shrug off. In contrast, Seierstad's women, victimized by a tyrannical system that has changed little since the fall of the Taliban, are complex and disturbingly unforgettable. Neither Seierstad's closed world of the Khan household nor Shah's war-rent Afghanistan make for comfortable reading, but both books offer a rare glimpse of life beneath the burqa in a land that is too often portrayed as little more than a dusty battlefield...
...Scar is pretty cool too.” Long ago, he decided that he would name his child after the villain in the Disney movie released the year in which he or she was born. As potentially foolish as this may seem (who wants a child named Shere Khan?), he and his wife were blessed with a baby girl in 1989 whom they proudly call “Ursula...