The issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan is one I became personally acquainted with on September 18, 2010, Election Day. A 23 year old member of my election monitoring field team, newly married and soon to become a father, was struck by a U.S. military vehicle on a dark provincial road as he made his way home from his assigned polling center. He was airlifted to the hospital at Bagram Air Base for treatment but died from his injuries three days later.

A representative of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) visited my office the next morning with a detailed report on the incident, including a timeline of the events leading up to my colleague’s death. By then, the young election observer’s body had already been returned to his family and U.S. Army officers had visited his parents and wife to explain in detail what had happened, offer condolences, and make a solatia payment.  While understandably grief-stricken, the family accepted this response and said they bore no ill will toward international troops because their loved one’s death had been an accident, not an act of violence.

Had an Afghan soldier been driving the vehicle that hit my colleague that night two and a half years ago, his parents and widow might have received his body and nothing else –no explanation, no acknowledgement of their loss, no monetary assistance of any kind.

According to a new report by the Center for Civilians in Conflict:

[…] redress and accountability for civilian harm caused by the ANSF is rare in practice. The exception may be high profile incidents that rise to the attention of senior ANSF officials keen to promote the professionalism and accountability of the ANSF. Even then, investigations are ad hoc and often inhibited by limited ANSF access in territory controlled by armed groups. The problem of weak internal ANSF accountability is compounded by the lack of an external mechanism by which civilians may file complaints and receive redress.

With Afghanistan’s security transition well underway, and Afghan forces soon to be in control of the entire country, the civilian casualties issue is one that the Afghan government can’t afford to ignore.

To get a better sense of what can and is being done to improve the way the Afghan government responds to cases in which its own security forces harmed civilians, I contacted Michael Shaikh, Director for Country Operations for the Center, and he kindly answered my questions.

UN Dispatch: In the report, you recommend that the United States and other international backers of the Afghan Government fund an Afghan civilian casualty mitigation team for at least five years. Have you received any indication that recommendation will be implemented?

Shaikh: There is certainly some movement in toward implementing an Afghan civilian casualty mitigation team, but it is a matter of degree. The ANSF, in particular the Afghan national army and Ministry of Defense, have certainly showed interest and have taken some of the lessons learned from ISAF’s Civilian Casualty and Mitigation Team and mirrored them in their own structure. It is still at the very nascent stages, but we’re cautiously optimistic that the Afghans will do something similar.

It is, however, a much different process for Afghanistan to set up a CCMT than it was for ISAF, where ISAF’s CCMT it is ingrained in a stand-alone foreign mission. Getting a similar Afghan structure will mean actually embedding this into existing Afghan institutions and ministries, changing processes and linking this up with other sorts of investigations around criminal acts. Looking at inadvertent civilian casualties and responding to them is very different from investigating criminal acts, so naturally it is going to be a bit more complicated.

There is some progress in Afghanistan in setting this up but it is not as far along, from the Center’s point of view, as we’d like it to be. In terms of funding, it is pretty clear that some western countries, including the United States, are very supportive of having an institution like this. I haven’t heard anyone proposing to fund specifics, but it would sure be nice. But there is at least political support, and often translating that into financial support is not that hard. Also an Afghan CCMT won’t cost very much per year – we’re looking at $4.2 billion a year in assistance for the Afghan security forces and this will be a fraction of that cost, anywhere in the realm of $3.5-5 million dollars per year.

UN Dispatch: What forensic capabilities do the Afghan security forces currently possess that could be used to professionally investigate allegations of harm to civilian lives and property, and what is being done to build their ability to carry out investigations?

Shaikh: Both the ANP and the ANA have existing internal investigation processes, but they’re geared mostly towards responding to alleged criminal acts –violations of international law or domestic criminal law. They don’t respond very well, if at all, to inadvertent civilian harm, what is called “collateral” damage. So they don’t have a very good track record of proactively investigating instances where people are ‘legally’ harmed, and that’s what this report is trying to encourage them to do.

UN Dispatch: One of the major barriers to civilians receiving assistance for harm they suffered is severely limited access to government institutions in areas of ongoing violence.  Beyond working through informal institutions at the local level, which is already happening to some extent, are there other ways the government could reach out to harmed civilians in high-risk areas?

Shaikh: It’s all about information campaigns. One thing which could help get information to civilians in remote areas, is information sent by SMS, explaining what programs exist, explaining in general terms what they need to do, how to apply for these funds and this assistance, and where to go to receive it. I think that’s one creative, practical way in which a lot of information could get out to a lot of civilians.

We documented some of the problems associated with the existing processes, but that doesn’t mean that these programs don’t work, in fact, there are elements of these programs that work really well, they just need to be improved. One of the issues is that a lot of people don’t know that the programs exist, so just telling people about them and how they work will go a long way.

UN Dispatch: Devolving responsibility for approving monetary payments to harmed civilians from the national government to provincial governments is one recommendation you make with the aim of streamlining what is presently a daunting approval process. Do you think that the potential benefits of a more efficient payment system outweigh the risk of increased corruption?

Shaikh: Devolving the decision-making process to the provincial level will absolutely cut down the time it takes for applicants to get to the application centers and in theory it will cut down on the application process time overall. A family that’s already been burdened by some sort of civilian harm, a death in the family, the loss of a limb, property loss, etc., will hopefully spend less time waiting to receive assistance. I don’t think it actually impacts corruption that much, since there is always a risk of corruption, at the provincial and even central level. But I think the process of devolving it down to the provinces will get hasten the process of getting assistance to those who need it most.

UN Dispatch: The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission sends investigators to collect evidence when it receives allegations that civilians have been harmed. In practice how much cooperation is there between the ANSF, the AIHRC, and the Attorney General’s Office on civilian casualty issues?

Shaikh: It’s incredibly hard to tell, we just don’t know.

UN Dispatch: In the course of your research, did you come across any positive examples that could be used as models for reforming the way the Afghan Government and security forces handle civilian casualty incidents?

Shaikh: Actually, ISAF’s Civilian Casualty and Mitigation Team (CCMT) is one. The structures that ISAF has established for reviewing civilian casualties incidents during their operations, responding to them, conducting investigations, and when necessary, making amends to those they hurt, I think is a model. And they use that analysis and tracking process to build on lessons learned. It hasn’t been perfect and there still needs to be a lot of improvements – civilian casualties still happen – but it has certainly reduced the number of civilian casualties, and more importantly, forced ISAF to look at their operations and how they impact civilians. It’s not perfect, but it’s a positive example that can be mirrored within Afghan government institutions.

A similar CCMT type mechanism can be established within the Afghan government structures, perhaps within the President’s office, at the PICC level, the Presidential Information Coordination Center, which would theoretically and principally coordinate this kind of process with those involved in war fighting and that would primarily be the ANSF but also the ANP and the NDS as well, the intelligence services. That is a positive example of one warring party trying to cut down on its casualties and respond to them in a humane way – and also respond to false allegations of casualties. We have to remember that civilian casualties are highly politicized, a mechanism like this also gives the warring party not only the capability to respond, analyze and recognize civilian casualties and provide some sort of assistance to those they harm, but at the same time it also offers them the capability to refute wrongful allegations of civilian casualties.

The victims assistance programs that Afghanistan has in place, the president’s “Code 99” fund, and the older one, the Ministry of Martyrs, have a long history of helping those in need. The Afghan government has a pretty good track record and was very prescient about setting these things up during the Afghan Soviet War and then establishing a newer one during this phase of the conflict. It’s clear that the Afghans care about their own people, it’s just a matter of making those programs work better.

UN Dispatch: Given the ethical, cultural and strategic importance of making amends for harm done to civilians and civilian property, why hasn’t the creation of an efficient system for responding to these incidents been a bigger priority for the countries providing technical and financial assistance to the Afghan government?

Shaikh: There’s a bit of historical context that needs to be taken into consideration here, which is that this really isn’t done in a lot of conflicts. Making amends for harm done is in some ways a very new concept. It is tied very closely to reparations in war crimes, with the difference here being one of lawful obligation. States don’t have a legal obligation to help those they legally harm on the battlefield, because under international law you can legally harm somebody under certain conditions. So what we are saying is that while you may not have a legal obligation, you have a moral obligation. Helping those you have inadvertently harmed is the right thing to do.

This is all very new to militaries, and though we have seen this idea of making amends grow some roots over the past ten years, it is still not a universal norm. It has become a bit of a norm in Afghanistan, with certain ISAF countries doing it, but it is still a relatively new concept, which is why it’s been somewhat of an afterthought for the Afghan government’s international partners. The Afghan government itself has had similar assistance programs in place since the Afghan civil war to help those that have been harmed in violence, so we just need to be reminding them to do this. It is not perfect, but it’s getting there and it is an idea that is certainly taking roots amongst a variety of different nations’ different militaries. Hopefully one day it will be an international norm.

UN Dispatch: Do you foresee the Afghan government changing the way it responds to civilian harm over the next two years?

Shaikh: I’m optimistic. The Center’s report has certainly provided a practical roadmap for what the Afghan government can do. This is a very prescriptive report, which has offered some very practical solutions that can be reached with very little effort that would have a great impact on people who need this kind of help. And I think, from the conversations we’ve had, that the Afghan government seems open to this. Again, you have to put this in the context of the highly politicized climate in Kabul. It does take some time for reforms to be made and there may not be a wholesale revamping of how these processes work, but I am certain that there will be improvements in current structures. Afghanistan’s international partners seem to understand this as well and so our job is to work with Afghanistan and encourage them to improve their existing mechanisms. And I think the Afghans want to do this as well, we just have to give them a little time to figure out how to do it best.

You can follow the Center for Civilians in Conflict on Twitter

@CivCenter (the official account)

@SarahAtCivic (Executive Director Sarah Holewinski)

@TrevorKeck (the Center’s Afghanistan researcher)

Wall Street Journal Kabul bureau chief Yaroslav Trofimov noticed something strange when he loaded Apple’s map of Afghanistan’s capital city on his iPad today –the existence of a street named “Bad Monkey.” Amused, Trofimov tweeted his odd find, appending his tweet with a screenshot. Then he noticed a street near the upscale and heavily fortified Serena Hotel labeled “MoJo Way.”

Had the municipal government adopted an irreverent approach to naming its thoroughfares while no one was paying attention?

No, but the truth was just as goofy.

Apple had copied old open source maps of Afghanistan’s cities in their entirety from OpenStreetMap (OSM), the site sometimes described as the “Wikipedia of maps,” without checking the veracity of the information they contained. Essentially, it had lifted the earliest rough drafts of the maps.

The old maps were created by a small group of Afghan university students and mapping enthusiasts who assigned prankish fake names to streets that lacked official names or were subjects of naming disputes due to decades of overlapping conflicts. Eventually, these digital cartographers replaced most of the fake street names with the names most commonly used by locals, or simply removed them and left the streets nameless.

“The issue is that Apple took an old snapshot of the OpenStreetMap data and hasn’t updated it since, so things like ‘personal’ street names are in there, even if they have been fixed since,” explained Kate Chapman, Indonesia-based director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, OSM’s humanitarian mapping initiative. “The fact that they don’t update the data shows that the incentive for people to improve the map just isn’t going to be there.”

Thanks to the efforts of the Humanitarian OSM Team and the growing popularity of OSM mobile editing apps among smartphone-wielding aid workers, the maps of many cities in the developing world are more detailed in the open source platform than anywhere else, even if they do contain a few humorous (and sometimes intentional) inaccuracies.

So far, Apple hasn’t shown much interest in providing maps of areas where few people are likely to own iPads or iPhones.

“What I think is interesting is that Apple didn’t choose to use OSM for other areas,” Chapman wrote in her email to me. “Today I write to you from Kupang, [Indonesia] and if you look on Apple Maps there is only a dot for the city name, but in OSM there is a quite detailed map.”

Until Apple updates its Afghanistan maps to reflect more recent edits to their open source counterparts, uninformed users of Apple Maps will be left wondering why one of the main roads in eastern Afghanistan’s largest city is called “Hillbilly Hameed.”

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan released its mid-year report on the protection of civilians last week. Although the total number of civilian casualties in the first half of 2011 (3,099) was lower than the number in the same period of 2011 (3,654), the rest of the news wasn’t good.

A rundown:

1) Targeted killings are up. Way up. During the first half of this year, 255 civilians died in targeted killings by anti-government forces, compared to 190 in the first half of 2011. According to UNAMA, “Government employees, off duty police officers and civilian police, tribal elders, civilians accused of spying for Pro-Government Forces and government officials remained the primary focus of these anti-government attacks.” This is a worrisome trend to watch as the drawdown of foreign forces continues.

2) Internal displacement is climbing. According to the UNHCR, 17,079 Afghans were newly displaced by violence between January 1 and June 30 of this year, bringing the total number of IDPs in the country to 114,900.

3) Schools, students, and teachers are increasingly under fire.

In the first six months of 2012, UNAMA verified 34 cases of Anti-Government Elements launching attacks against education facilities, staff and students, and other incidents impacting education. These included the burning of schools, targeted killings of teachers and staff, armed attacks on education facilities, occupation of schools and intimidation and closure of schools, particularly girls’ schools. This represents a substantial increase in such incidents compared to the same period last year when UNAMA documented 10 similar instances. Six of these 34 cases confirmed by UNAMA involved targeted killings of teachers, school guards or department of education officials by Anti-Government Elements.

As part of its consultations with 99 conflict-affected communities across Afghanistan, UNAMA found that the Taliban’s influence on the education system in those areas is increasing. This has had consequences for children’s access to education, particularly for girls. Anti-Government Elements have asserted their influence in many communities not only to incorporate changes to school curricula based on their ideological beliefs, but also as a basis to negotiate politically with local communities.

4) Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) still kill the greatest number of civilians. Attacks involving IEDs accounted for 53 percent of civilian casualties documented by UNAMA in the first half of 2012, and victim-activated IEDs, the kind that detonate indiscriminately when touched or driven over, accounted for one third of all civilian injuries and deaths. In its mid-year report, UNAMA noted that because such devices do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, “many IED incidents that resulted in civilian casualties could amount to war crimes.”

5) Weather, not tactical changes, probably explains the relatively lower number of civilian casualties in the first half of this year. Experts believe that the decline in civilian deaths and injuries can largely be credited to this year’s unusually harsh winter, which cut into the ability of the Taliban and other groups to carry out attacks against civilian targets in the early spring. With the cold weather months now a distant memory, civilian casualties are again rising.

Proposed drastic cuts to refugee assistance funding, if approved by Congress, will imperil support for tens of thousands refugees due to be resettled in the United States during the coming fiscal year. That’s very bad news for people escaping persecution and war in countries such as Afghanistan, Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea and Iraq.

Refugee resettlement organizations are understandably alarmed. According to most recent online action appeal by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants:

The Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services (LHHS) introduced a bill that will provide $658 million for ORR, $112 million less than the current fiscal year and $147 million less than the funding requested in the President’s budget. Cuts to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which has been historically underfunded, will have a devastating effect on refugees, Afghan and Iraqi Special Immigrant Visa recipients, victims of torture and trafficking, unaccompanied immigrant children and other vulnerable populations, as well as communities across the country that welcome these populations.

Last year, the U.S. resettled more than 56,000 refugees from twenty different countries through the United States Refugee Resettlement Program. The actual work of assisting these newcomers is carried out by nine organizations contracted by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Resettlement field offices, largely located in America’s poorest cities, have endured years of crisis-level funding shortfalls and staffing shortages, with no relief in sight. These deficiencies mean that, as is, many refugees receive only the bare minimum of support following their arrival in the United States, leaving unmet pressing needs like mental health care and extended case management for refugees with disabilities.

And local non-profits simply aren’t able to fill all of the gaps, especially now, with many small organizations struggling to survive on dwindling donations and facing stiff competition for scarce foundation dollars. If the proposed 2013 cuts go through, refugees will face an even rougher start to life in America than they do now.

In October of 2010, I wrote about the perils of conflict mapping in Afghanistan. Back then, I hoped that the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission’s six-year research and documentation project would initiate a long overdue national discussion about transitional justice. For four years, dozens of Afghan researchers had traversed the country interviewing thousands of witnesses and survivors in isolated villages and big cities, documenting evidence, and identifying 180 mass graves. It was painstaking, emotionally and physically punishing work.

I had hoped that the commission’s final report, which several of my close friends worked on, would finally force the international community to re-examine its unwritten policy of ignoring the human rights records of its Afghan political and military counterparts. That approach had created an environment in which known human rights abusers were routinely praised and promoted, to the dismay of civil society. It dogged efforts to bolster the legitimacy of the fragile Afghan state and rendered attempts to reform the political system futile. Old powerbrokers entrenched themselves at every level of government and alienated the public by using the vast resources at their disposal to harass their rivals. The conflict mapping report couldn’t come soon enough.

Fast forward to the end of last year. The report, rumored to be massive and unsparing, was ready for publication. All too predictably, the Afghan Government blocked its release and refused to re-confirm the sitting commissioners most intimately involved in the conflict mapping project, effectively removing them from the country’s top human rights body. One friend of mine involved in the project received such serious threats at that time that he needed a private security detail to protect his family.

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article about the suppressed conflict mapping report. According to the piece, the report runs 800 pages and the list of 500 individuals it mentions as responsible mass atrocities reads like “a sort of who’s who of power players in Afghanistan: former and current warlords or officials, some now in very prominent positions in the national government, as well as in insurgent factions fighting it.” In other words, the same men who threaten to plunge Afghanistan into deeper, more factional violence after the departure of foreign troops at the end of 2014.

Disappointingly, American officials agree with the Afghan Government’s decision to suppress the report.

“I have to tell you frankly on the mapping thing, when I first learned about it, it scared me,” said a senior American official, speaking on condition of anonymity as a matter of embassy policy. “There will be a time for it, but I’m not persuaded this is the time.”

I disagree. Now is the time to release the report, while civil society organizations and progressive media outlets, many of which will fall victim to aid cuts over the next few years, are still strong enough to lead meaningful discussions about its contents.

Would the report have a destabilizing effect on Afghan politics? Potentially, in the short term, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Releasing the report would put pressure on the government and its international backers to marginalize the worst offenders and make room for new faces and ideas in the political arena. It could have a tangible, positive effect on preparations for upcoming national elections.

Moreover, instead of sowing hatred, the report could actually support grassroots reconciliation between ethnic groups in the country. Every adult Afghan can give horrific accounts of how his or her community suffered during Afghanistan’s decades of war, but understanding of the conflict is very localized. Afghans generally have no idea how others, in different parts of the country, fared during the worst periods of violence. Their leaders have used that to their advantage, exploiting public ignorance to fuel inter-ethnic and political resentment.

But there’s hope where there’s will to examine the past in a more humane manner. When I helped civil society organizations hold a national gathering of civilian war victim activists in 2010, I saw participants from every segment of Afghanistan’s diverse and fractured population weep as they realized just how much trauma and loss they shared. I watched as widows from Kandahar, and Herat, and Bamiyan, and Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif embraced, wiped each other’s tears with their scarves, and stroked each other’s trembling hands.That outpouring of emotion and the feeling of solidarity in the conference hall gave me a rare jolt of hope for Afghanistan’s future.

If handled properly, the conflict mapping report could achieve that effect on a much grander scale. The United States should support its release.

Today, for the second time this year, progressive Afghans took to Kabul’s streets to voice their outrage at a gruesome act of gender-based violence and demand justice for the victim. This time, the demonstration was prompted by the extrajudicial execution of a young woman named Najiba in a village less than two hours from the capital. Najiba, who was accused of adultery, was shot nine times in front of a cheering crowd of men.

Last week, shocking video of the crime emerged online, causing uproar among civil society activists and human rights advocates. The New York Times published this unsparing description of the footage, which quickly went viral and is still available on the Guardian’s website [caution: it's disturbing].

At the outset of the fuzzy video, which runs nearly four minutes and appears to have been taken by a Taliban member with a cellphone, Najiba is a peripheral figure, seen kneeling in the background. Her body is turned away from the camera, her head is shrouded by a gray scarf.

Taliban fighters mill about in the foreground. A few dozen villagers watch from a hill above the impromptu execution ground. The existence of the video was first reported by the Reuters news agency, and obtained on Monday by The New York Times.

One of the Taliban says the Koran prohibits adultery. Killing the woman is “God’s order and decree,” he says. “If the issue was avenging deaths, we would beg for her amnesty. But in this case, God says, ‘You should finish her.’ ”

He concludes by saying, “It’s the order of God, and now it is her husband’s work to punish her.”

Then someone else says, “Give him a Kalashnikov.”

Armed with the borrowed assault rifle, the man identified as her husband approaches Najiba from behind. Several Taliban fighters can he heard whispering, “Get closer to her.”

He shoots Najiba nine times. The third shot jolts her body backward, leaving it flat on the ground. He keeps shooting.

Someone then says, “Long live the hero of Islam!” The Taliban begin cheering, and the villagers join in. One of the Taliban says, “Take my video, too,” and can be seen smiling, with ammunition strapped to his vest.

The video ends with the executioner shooting Najiba’s body four more times.

Amid national and international outcry, the Taliban have denied ordering Najiba’s execution, pinning responsibility on villagers adhering to tribal customs. However, the village where the killing was carried out is part of a notorious patch of loosely Taliban-held territory along the road that connects Kabul to the more peaceful central provinces of the country. Similar crimes are committed against women with distressing frequency in areas where the Taliban aren’t present, but it’s extremely unlikely that Najiba’s murderers didn’t receive at least tacit approval from the group. That’s bad news for women, for progressive Afghans generally, and for already dim hopes of a just resolution to Afghanistan’s unending war.

Misconceptions about violence against women in Afghanistan abound in the media and the imaginations of publics outside of Afghanistan itself. Most of these promote the idea that most, even all, forms of violence against Afghan women stem directly from the thirty-four years of war Afghans have endured. The emotional appeal of this narrative is obvious. It offers an all-encompassing explanation for a gut-wrenching human rights problem, and therefore an all-encompassing solution –find a way to end the fighting, and violence against women will end too.

Unfortunately, that prescription isn’t backed up by much more than wishful thinking. Here are three of the most common misconceptions about violence against Afghan women.

1. Violence against women is increasing.

There’s no way to know if this is true. Until mid last decade, women who were victims of gender-based violence had nowhere to turn for help, no one was keeping count of incidents, and it was virtually unheard of for Afghan women to speak publicly about abuse they suffered behind closed doors.

In the past few years, that has begun to change. All we know for sure is that more cases of violence against women are now being reported to national authorities and human rights organizations. More reports should be seen as a good thing. Human rights activists have relentlessly chipped away at the taboo against discussing violence against women, and those efforts are now showing results.

A handful of courageous women have recently gone public with their stories and pressed charges against abusive husbands, in-laws, and even local militiamen. Grassroots movements have demanded justice for these women. Quietly and hesitantly, ordinary Afghans are starting to talk about these high-profile cases as symptoms of a larger national problem.

Violence against women is horrifically commonplace in Afghanistan, but there is no evidence to support claims that it’s getting worse. (There’s no evidence it’s getting any better, either.) Afghans are undergoing the uncomfortable process of reconciling their popular myths about women’s lives with a far bleaker flesh and blood reality. It will still be years before anyone has enough data to tell if the tide is turning. In the meantime, survivors urgently need more protection and better services to heal and rebuild their lives.

2. War is the biggest killer of Afghan women.

The single biggest killer of Afghan women is lack of basic medical care. More Afghan women die from complications in childbirth than from any other cause. Although maternal mortality is decreasing, a staggering 18,000 women still die giving birth each year, according to the UN Population Fund. For the sake of comparison, the UN puts the total number of all civilians –women, men, and children– killed in the armed conflict in 2011 at 3,021, with men comprising the majority of the war dead.

Women and girls do die because of the conflict, but they die in greater numbers from its indirect consequences than its direct acts of violence. When insecurity forces medical relief organizations to close clinics or suspend maternal health projects, and when roads connecting villages to cities are blocked with checkpoints or laced with mines, rural women are left with no access to life-saving care, and many die as a result.

Yet, the areas of the country with the worst maternal mortality ratios are not the war-wracked southern and southeastern provinces, but instead the more peaceful central and northern ones, where the mountainous terrain is unforgiving and aid is spread thinly.

3. War-related depression is driving women to self-immolate.

This common claim made by well-meaning Western peace activists and even some Afghans doesn’t sync with actual research findings and extensive reporting on the issue. Interviews with women in burn units, public health workers, and women’s rights advocates indicate that virtually all self-immolation suicide attempts have their origins in intolerable family circumstances.

Again and again, burned women and teenage girls on their death beds have told stories of forced marriages and torment at the hands of resentful in-laws. Appropriately, the Afghan government’s public awareness campaign on the issue of self-immolation addresses these problems.

Recorded numbers of self-immolation suicides have gone up in recent years, especially in Afghanistan’s western provinces bordering Iran. That much is clear. What’s unclear is whether this is because more women are actually choosing self-immolation as their method of suicide or simply because authorities are keeping more thorough records than they did previously.

It would be wonderful if violence against Afghan women would necessarily end if the war did, but the causes of that violence are rooted in beliefs and traditional practices which are older than the war itself. Changing the attitudes that underpin the abuse of women and girls will happen over decades of education and advocacy — in the span of generations, not projects. And addressing the consequences of violence against Afghan women will require long term political and financial investments by the international community, whether or not a settlement to the conflict is reached anytime soon.

Yesterday, our own Ahmad Shuja was a guest on Al Jazeera’s The Stream, where he discussed the violent persecution of the Hazaras, an ethnic and religious –Shia– minority group in Pakistan.

The Hazara people, who originate from Afghanistan and historically formed an ethnic underclass in that country, have lived peacefully in neighboring Pakistan for centuries. But over the past decade, at least 500 Hazara civilians have been killed and hundreds more have been injured in targeted ethno-sectarian attacks the city of Quetta. The violence has trapped one of South Asia’s most vulnerable populations between the conflict and uncertainty in Afghanistan and the growing anti-Shia movement in Pakistan, a country many Hazaras previously considered a safe haven.

Pakistani militant groups and extremist political parties have openly called for the expulsion of the Hazaras and other non-Sunni minorities from Pakistan, and have even set “deadlines” for Quetta’s half million Hazaras to leave or face extermination. Over the past year alone, dozens of Hazaras have been killed. Anti-Shia militants have targeted members of the group in suicide bombings, rocket attacks, assassination campaigns, and execution-style massacres of whole groups of laborers traveling on buses.

Since the violence began escalating, the Pakistani authorities have refused to take measures to protect the embattled minority and some officials have even suggested that the Hazaras are kicking up a fuss over nothing. After 47 Hazaras were killed in an attack on a bus last year, the Chief Minister of Baluchistan, where Quetta is located, told the local press that Quetta’s Hazaras were shedding “sorry tears” and joked that his response to the massacre would be to send a “truckload of tissues” to the victims’ families.

On The Stream, host Imran Garda spoke with Ahmad and two Hazara political leaders in Pakistan about the humanitarian toll the violence has taken on the Hazara community and what Pakistan’s Hazaras want from the government that has so far ignored their pleas for protection.

Watch the whole show here.

Today is A Day Without Dignity, the aid blogosphere’s answer to TOMS A Day Without Shoes. With so many discussions devoted to bad advocacy or “badvocacy” in aid and human rights activism recently, it’s important to highlight examples of good advocacy and NGO public relations productions. After all, it’s difficult to improve anything without positive examples.

The following videos from NGOs working in Afghanistan hit the right notes.

1. A video from the Aga Khan Development Network on social and economic progress made by women in northern Afghanistan.

The women in this video are agents of progress. They aren’t waiting to be saved; they’re saving themselves, and creating unprecedented opportunities for their daughters. (Note that interviews with foreigners are kept short and sweet, and the video is composed almost entirely of clips of Afghan women in action.)

The video’s message: With a little support, women can lift up whole communities, and poor women need decision-making power, not handouts.

2. The organizational profile video for Women for Afghan Women.

WAW serves survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and forced and underage marriages. Its introductory video could have been filled with horror stories and gruesome images of tortured and murdered women. Undoubtedly, that approach would have shocked consciences, but it wouldn’t have demonstrated respect for the dignity and resilience of Afghan women. So, instead on going for shock value, WAW focused on stories of Afghan women and men fighting against injustice, and used images of lives being rebuilt, protected, and defended.

The video’s message: To end violence against women and girls, invest in survivors and defenders.

3. A very simple video from the International Rescue Committee about the need to improve education in Afghanistan.

This video centers Afghan teachers and their students, not the IRC itself or its expat staff. The only IRC employees shown are Afghans. Images of Afghan teachers doing their best for their students in spite of severe resource shortages and insufficient training and pay are followed by quotes from the teachers about what they believe needs to change.

The video’s message: Afghans value education and we’re helping them create the education future they want for their children.

By the end of 2014, close to all of the foreign troops currently in Afghanistan will have left, and the Afghan security forces will have been built up to approximately 352,000 personnel. Starting in 2015, that number will be reduced to around 230,000 personnel, largely through attrition, according to the New York Times.

Does anyone else see why this might be a problem?

After creating a massive security sector and equipping it with hundreds of thousands (millions?) of weapons, donor countries will dramatically reduce funding and expect 120,000 military and police personnel to hand in their guns, go home, and live peacefully. In a country with chronically high unemployment and a looming recession. At a time when that country will be at high risk of descending into factional civil war. That’s a recipe for increasing violence within Afghanistan’s borders and spreading insecurity beyond them. There is real danger in the possibility that today’s army recruit could become 2015’s gun for hire.

“At the very least, a DDR [demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration] strategy needs to be discussed NOW,” Trevor Keck of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) tweeted in response to the planned downsizing of the Afghan security forces.

Keck is right –as 2014 approaches, NATO and its allies have a responsibility to create a plan for preventing young men who cycle through Afghanistan’s unwieldy security forces from becoming menaces to the civilian population.

As is, the Afghan security forces are ill-prepared to avoid harming civilians as they prepare to take the lead in military operations throughout the country. In a recent blog post for CIVIC, Keck warned:

Afghan security officials I meet with claim their forces do not and will not harm civilians because they understand local dynamics better than international forces. This is dangerously naïve. While Afghan forces are certainly better positioned to understand the situation around them, civilian casualties are an unfortunate—if not inevitable part of war—especially when militaries with less experience, training and equipment are waging battle. Without processes in place and a mindset that prioritizes civilian protection, Afghan troops will likely act with less concern for civilians.

Recently, representatives from ISAF and the Afghan government have stated their commitment to establishing an Afghan system for tracking civilian casualties. These are heartening words that must be met with action. It will take time to implement such a system and get buy-in from commanders. And for it to work, Afghans will need to own the process. As one insider told me, “it was hard enough to get NATO forces to be proactive about preventing and responding to civilian casualties.” Getting a less experienced military behind it may prove even more difficult.

And then there’s the issue of the surplus weapons the downsized security forces will no longer need. Will those weapons be destroyed? If not, how will they be kept out of the hands of militiamen, insurgents, and arms traffickers? Even with the current level of international support, the Afghan security forces have serious problems with infiltration and loose weapons. It’s hard to believe that won’t still be the case in January 2015.

While I have no doubt that the last thing NATO wants is for Afghanistan to collapse into civil war or turn into Central Asia’s bargain bazaar for small arms, the Alliance needs to consider how its current strategy might help bring about those outcomes.

Photo credit: Peretz Partensky