Terrible Crime, Faulty Narrative

By Steve Hynd

The big Afghanistan news today is the robbery and execution of 10 NGO medical workers in the Northern province of Badakhshan. By any account, it's a heinous crime against humanity.

The group � a medical team of six Americans, a Briton, a German and four Afghans � had just finished eating when they were accosted by gunmen with long red beards, the local police said.

The gunmen marched the aid workers into the forest, stood 10 of them in a straight line, 7 men and 3 women, and shot them. The police found their bodies on Friday, the Badakhshan Province police chief, Gen. Aqa Noor Kentoz, said Saturday.

The killings, the largest massacre of aid workers in Afghanistan in recent years, vividly demonstrated the growing insecurity in the northern part of the country, well outside the Taliban�s base, and was a measure of how much more vicious the insurgency has become in recent months.

The Guardian has a profile of the UK doctor killed, Karen Woo, that will make you weep for a bright life lost.

The CSM notes that the killings point to growing instability and Taliban encroachment in the North. 

Badakhshan is located in the far northeast of Afghanistan and is home to few ethnic Pashtuns, the group from which the Taliban draws its membership.

However, "dry tinder" for militancy remains: The province lies on a major opium smuggling route and some former commanders are searching for work. Meanwhile, the Taliban have recently overrun several bordering districts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, imperiling the stability of one of the country's calmest provinces.

"I believe we have this risk of losing some areas of Badakhshan, either through the criminal groups, former commanders who are allied with insurgents, and some who are part of the insurgency," says Waliullah Rahmani, head of the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies.

In the second quarter of this year, Badakhshan ranked 5th safest out of 34 provinces in terms of attacks initiated by armed opposition groups, according to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office.

I don't want to belittle these killings - they are awful extinguishing of lives by terribly evil people and show just how unstable the whole Afghan nation has become despite the ISAF happy talk.

Still, in the wider sense I can't help but wonder at the amount of media coverage they are being given. Lots of medical workers are killed every year in the world's trouble spots to far less fanfare. We didn't see this kind of coverage for medical workers killed by the IDF in Gaza last year, or those killed in Somalia in 2008, or the killing of aid workers in Sri Lanka in 2006...or countelss other incidents that hardly raised a blip on the media's radar.

Following hard on TIME's cover story it seems the Western media is developing a narrative for staying in Afghanistan based upon how nasty and brutish the Taliban are - exactly as the CIA might wish them to. Yet there's not a razorblade's width of difference between the Taliban and many of the warlords the West backs as part of Karzai's government. It's a red herring and we shouldn't be fooled by it.