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What good group-work should look like...

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What good group-work should look like...

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(everyone collaborating and sharing the workload)

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(in your group)

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NY Times Article

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The objective of the kite fight is to slice the other flier's string with your own, sending the vanquished aircraft to the ground. Kite-fighting string is coated with a resin made of glue and finely crushed glass, which turns it into a blade.

The big kite-fighting day is Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, when thousands of boys and men flock to their rooftops and to the summits of the craggy hills that ring the city, carrying stacks of kites fashioned from bamboo and brightly colored tissue paper, and miles of sharp string on wooden spools.

On a recent Friday afternoon, there were scores of kites locked in duels above Tapeii-i-Maranjan, a high bluff in a southeastern neighborhood of the capital and the city's most popular kite-flying venue. All strata of Kabuli life - male Kabuli life, that is - were well-represented: Schoolchildren were fighting ministerial officials, doctors were battling day laborers. They fought in teams of two, with one person tweaking the string and the other handling the spool.

Packs of boys too poor to buy their own equipment were sprinting after defeated kites as they fell to Earth. They were the kite runners.

"We don't have, like, soccer, baseball or basketball," said Ahmad Roshazai, a translator at a medical clinic near Bagram who was flying kites on the hill with two of his brothers. He had cuts on his fingers from handling the blade-like fighting string. "We don't have any good places for that," he said. "No green places."

He added: "This is the only game we have every Friday. That's it."

The inveterate kite fighters speak of their craft as part science and part art. The key to excellence depends on a combination of factors, both empirical and ineffable: the flexibility and balance of the kites' bamboo frames, the strength of the glue binding the tissue-paper skin, the quality of the string, the evenness of the spool and, of course, the skill of the fliers and their ability to adjust to the vicissitudes of the wind.

Rashid Abedi, 25, a business administration student, described the satisfaction of killing another kite.

"It has a taste," he said, and he likened it to the thrill of horse riding or driving a car. "These things all the time have a special taste."

"Even if I am cut 40 or 50 times," he continued, "I will fly again because I know how the taste is."

Kite-fighting string in Afghanistan was traditionally homemade by a laborious process that involved coating cotton string with a concoction of crushed glass and glue. But factories in other more-developed kite-flying nations like Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaysia and China now churn out tens of thousands of spools of machine-made nylon fighting string that swamp the Afghan market.

Unlike in other Asian countries, like Pakistan and India, where kite-flying is wildly popular, Afghanistan's kite industry is still homespun and humble. There is still no Afghan kite federation, no national competitions, no marketing. While nearly all the string sold in Afghanistan is now factory-made and imported from other countries, most of the kites are still made by local artisans.

By consensus in Shor Bazaar, a block-long market of tiny kite shops in Kabul, the best kite maker in the capital is Noor Agha, a slender and vain 53-year-old man who lives in a squalid mud-and-stone hovel in a cemetery and is missing most of his teeth.

"Nobody can beat me, nobody can do what I'm doing," he said one recent afternoon as he sat barefooted on the carpeted floor of his workshop making a kite. "Even computers can't beat me."

His tools were arrayed before him: long stalks of bamboo and sheets of tissue paper; pliers and blades to cut and whittle the bamboo into long, flexible dowels for the frames; scissors to shape the tissue paper; and a bowl of glue.

"My prestige is higher than the interior minister," he said.

Noor Agha, like most Afghan kite makers, inherited the craft from his father, who made kites until he was too old to grip the tools.

Alone he can make about 40 kites a day, he said. But his business has gotten so large that he has enlisted the help of his two wives and several of his 11 children.

While most kites in Shor Bazaar sell for less than the equivalent of 30 cents, Noor Agha's kites can fetch upwards of $1. He sells custom-ordered kites to Afghan and foreign corporations and clients for much more, he said.

His local fame attracted the attention of the producers of "The Kite Runner," who hired him to train the film's child stars in the art of kite fighting and to make hundreds of kites used in the film.

For the kite-fliers of Kabul, the release of "The Kite Runner" will help to draw the culture of Afghan kite-flying out of the shadows of the much larger and more prosperous kite-flying nations in Asia.

It might also go some way toward explaining a particular Afghan kite ambush of an unsuspecting American kite-flier in Maryland in 2004.

That spring, Shoab Sharifi, a Colombia University student recently arrived from Kabul, was visiting Ocean City when he spotted several people flying kites on the beach. He bought a kite from a vendor and did what for him was the natural thing: He started to kite-fight.

"I thought people were doing it here, too," he said in a telephone interview from New York.

Sharifi went on: "There was a little girl, and I did the maneuvers and cut her string from below." As the wind carried the girl's kite into the ocean, and Shoab celebrated his first kite-fighting victory on American soil, the little girl broke down in tears.

When the lifeguards descended on him and accused him of "disturbing the peace," it dawned on Sharifi that he had stepped into a cultural rut between Afghanistan and the United States.

"In the United States, I think people try to avoid conflict," he concluded. "In Afghan culture everything is about fighting."

He added: "It was a very educational experience."

Ed Robbins contributed reporting.

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For Afghan boys and men, kite flying is a way of life

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The objective of the kite fight is to slice the other flier's string with your own, sending the vanquished aircraft to the ground. Kite-fighting string is coated with a resin made of glue and finely crushed glass, which turns it into a blade.

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We will make our own version of these kites!

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This vidoe teaches you how to make an Afghan kite out of plastic and bamboo sticks. Please visit http://blogs.transparent.com/?p=933&preview=true to read the related article about kite flying in Afghanistan.

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in timeline format

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World news about Afghanistan. Breaking news and archival information about its people, politics and economy from The New York Times.

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Remembering Afghanistan's Golden Age

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Mr. Khalilzad would be the first to acknowledge that Afghanistan was always fractious politically, and that there were assassinations and coups even during the era of relative peace. But the current downward spiral did not begin until 1978, when the president, Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan, was killed in a Communist coup, setting off three decades of conflict.

In 1979, the Soviets invaded, occupied Afghanistan for the next decade and were finally driven out by American-backed mujahedeen fighters, some of whom went on to form the Taliban, an Islamic student militia, which took control in Kabul in 1996. The Taliban in turn were toppled by the Americans in 2001, but fighting continued.

And by the end of the 1970s, many of the educated elite had fled and resettled across Europe, Asia and the United States. Gone with them was the promise of those earlier decades, when Kabul solicited foreign aid from both Washington and Moscow that brought in electricity, dams and irrigation, and when a young Parliament was trying out a fledgling democracy.

"There was definitely what was developing to be a newer tradition of a more open society and trained people" in those earlier years, said Paula Newberg, director of Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, who was an adviser to President Hamid Karzai's government in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2004.

J. Alexander Thier, an expert on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace who lived in the country during the takeover by the Taliban in the 1990s, said that some Afghans returned to the country after 2002, but that many still lived abroad. He said he was not "incredibly optimistic" about Afghanistan after eight years of the current war, but that he supported robust reconstruction aid and American help to bolster regional governments throughout the country. "I lived in Afghanistan in the absolute darkest days, when if Afghanistan was ever going to break apart into separate states, it would have happened," he said. Now, he said, "the alternatives are so much more bleak and dangerous for us that we do need to keep trying."

Frederick W. Kagan, a military expert at the American Enterprise Institute, made a related point: "Our enemies," he said, "believe that Afghanistan is governable in its current state, because that's what they're trying to do."

For now, administration officials say that much of the debate in the Situation Room is centered on whether the United States should focus less on the weak central Afghan government or put more money and effort into the provinces, where warlords have traditionally ruled. "We shouldn't worry so much about Karzai, we should worry about empowering the governors and getting better district chiefs and police chiefs," said a senior State Department official.

"I think Afghanistan is governable," the official said, "but the question is at what level?"

Correction: October 25, 2009

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Mr. Khalilzad would be the first to acknowledge that Afghanistan was always fractious politically, and that there were assassinations and coups even during the era of relative peace. But the current downward spiral did not begin until 1978, when the president, Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan, was killed in a Communist coup, setting off three decades of conflict.

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A street scene in downtown Kabul, 1977

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Afghanistan banned the film The Kite Runner because of its content.

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"A Jail Garden's Harvest: Hope"

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First, there is the peace of a garden, so still that one can hear the butterflies. Long before they discover the therapeutic value of weeding and planting, she said, the prisoners delight in being away from the clatter of jail.

The simple process of weeding is a good place to start re-examining a life gone wrong. The weeds are whatever got in the way: smoking crack or whoring or stealing. Once they are gone, no longer leaching water and nutrients from all that grows around them, the vegetables and fruits thrive.

And what could offer a clearer message than cutting away old leaves and flowers so there is room for fresh growth?

"I take these big, giant crack dealers and show them the roses we've cut back," Ms. Sneed said. "And they say, 'These ain't no roses; these are dead sticks.' " So I say: 'You watch these dead sticks. They're just like you; get rid of the dead stuff and the new stuff will grow.' " Helping Is Healing

Less metaphysical lessons await the harvest. Produce from the prison garden, where more than 150 male and female inmates work each day, is donated to soup kitchens and AIDS pantries.

"They're here because they hurt people," Ms. Sneed said of her jail-house gardeners. "Now they have a chance to help. That's part of the healing."

The city garden was the brainchild of Elliot Hoffman, the founder and president of the Just Desserts bakery chain, a $15-million-a-year business. The garden's produce is sold, thus introducing the newly-released inmates to the rewards of commerce.

Mr. Hoffman was the garden's first client, buying fruit for his tarts and muffins, and rosemary for the bread baked at Tassajara, an independent bakery that Just Deserts recently purchased. Chez Panisse, Berkeley's temple of California cuisine, was Ms. Sneed's second client. Between them, Just Desserts and Chez Panisse buy about $100 worth of produce a week from Ms. Sneed's garden. Inspiration in the Land

The city garden, a recent addition to Ms. Sneed's horticulture program, came into being serendipitously.

The jail farm began in 1983, after Ms. Sneed read "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's tale of itinerant California farm workers, while recuperating from a life-threatening kidney disease. She persuaded her boss, Sheriff Michael Hennessy, that inmates would find inspiration in the land.

The sheriff, her longtime mentor and friend, was an unconventional administrator. He also feared that Ms. Sneed was dying, and that if the garden was her last wish, he had no choice but to grant it.

As Ms. Sneed recovered, her horticulture program flourished. She saw mean, lazy inmates change before her eyes. Men and women who at first could not focus for more than a few minutes on weeding a strawberry patch soon lingered at the end of the day, unwilling to abandon a project that wasn't finished.

While learning about work, the inmates also learned about hope, but that lesson proved a cruel joke once they were released, with nowhere to go but the same streets that had already been their downfall.

"I could help get them some clothes, maybe a little job," Ms. Sneed said. "I could find out what the pimp had done with their babies. But I was not impacting their lives. When they went back to the world, they were squashed like bugs."

Enter Mr. Hoffman. Invited to tour the jail one day last year, he was impressed by the garden, but even more impressed by the intensity of the counselor who ran it.

Ms. Sneed was hoping to sweet-talk Mr. Hoffman out of some extra money for her jail garden, which operates on a shoestring of county funds and donations. But he started talking about this garbage-strewn lot behind his bakery. "Yeah, yeah," Ms. Sneed remembers muttering. "What I need is a check."

But she soon saw what he had in mind: sort of a halfway house for recently released jail-house gardeners. It took four months to clean the lot and find donated plants and tools. Then Ms. Sneed planted a garden and encouraged her graduates to come and work.

The garden's sales are barely enough to pay expenses, but by hounding foundations and local businesses for grant money, some months Ms. Sneed is able to pay the 40-odd gardeners as much as $60 for a 20-hour workweek. And even when the grant money runs out, as it did recently, they come around anyway, for the sunshine, the feel of dirt under their fingernails, the company of others who are struggling to stay sober, safe and out of jail.

Mr. Hoffman has made the ex-convicts welcome. They bring their children to play in the dirt or watch the bakers knead dough. They use the bathrooms and help themselves to day-old bread and cake, which is often the mainstay of their diets.

Some of the men and women at the garden have wound up employed at the bakery, although Ms. Sneed and Mr. Hoffman note that it is unrealistic to think that most of them are ready for mainstream work. Mr. Hoffman said that the first two ex-inmates he hired as bakers were chronically late or absent and had to be dismissed. But they continue to hang out at the garden, have not wound up back in jail and have not been destructive to others.

"We call them the strawberry men," Mr. Hoffman said. "They will never hold down a regular job, but they are productive in a special environment."

The very best of Ms. Sneed's gardeners are getting salaried jobs these days, thanks to a joint venture between the San Francisco County Sheriff's office and the city's Department of Public Works. For 10 weeks, as part of a demonstration project, eight of the former inmates were paid $8 an hour to plant 650 trees around the city. The city was happy with the work, and last month it agreed to hire 10 tree planters for three years.

Recently, as she drove from the city garden to the jail farm, Ms. Sneed detoured past a housing project here, its walls scarred with graffiti and its courtyards crowded with unemployed men and women, up to no good and about out of hope. This is one of the places Ms. Sneed had sent the members of her Tree Corps to plant saplings, and she wondered whether the young trees would survive the vandalism that is endemic here.

The trees looked fine this bright morning, and Ms. Sneed marveled that there seemed to be less litter than usual on the curb strips. That could be wishful thinking, she said, but what of it?

"I want them planting these trees not just because it's a job," Ms. Sneed said, "but because it is something that will last, that gives hope to other people. Instead of being a crack dealer, you can be a tree planter. That is the message my students have to communicate."

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A Jail Garden's Harvest: Hope and Redemption

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First, there is the peace of a garden, so still that one can hear the butterflies. Long before they discover the therapeutic value of weeding and planting, she said, the prisoners delight in being away from the clatter of jail. The simple process of weeding is a good place to start re-examining a life gone wrong.

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"On War & Redemption"

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Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

When I returned from Afghanistan this past spring, a civilian friend asked, "Is it good to be back?" It was the first time someone had asked, and I answered honestly. But I won't do that again. We weren't ready for that conversation. Instead, when people ask, I make it easy for everyone by responding, "It's fine." That's a lie, though. It's not fine.

It's not the sights, sounds, adrenaline and carnage of war that linger. It's the morality. We did evil things, maybe necessary evil, but evil nonetheless. It's not the Taliban we killed that bother me. They knew as well as I did what can happen when you pick up a gun and try to kill your enemies. But the enemy isn't the only one who dies in war.

I joined the military when we were already long into this conflict. Aside from driving to San Francisco to protest the Iraq invasion, I quickly embraced the inevitability of these wars and relinquished their execution to the government. That was a terrible mistake. In 2006, as both wars raged and the Iraq conflict seemed doomed, I felt obligated to do something. I had no idea what I was committing to when I raised my right hand and took the oath. I realize that my decision was extreme, but it's one I felt bound to. Only now do I understand the responsibility that military members bear, not only for the lives of others, but also for the consequences of their actions.

It was on a patrol early in our deployment in September of 2010 when the Afghan farmer dropped his shovel and ran for his life. Our squad of 10 dove for the ground. We looked toward the staccato crack of machine gun fire but saw nothing. A few anxious Marines fired anyway. We moved. Someone observed Taliban in a small building just ahead. We fired. It was the first time in an hour anyone had a clue where the enemy was. I saw two Afghans calmly building a wall despite the war erupting around them. Nothing made sense.

We cleared the building. As one team assaulted it, a Marine holding security spotted two armed men driving toward us on a motorcycle. Gunfire rang out from multiple directions. "Are you sure they have guns?" I asked. Nobody knew. We shot a smoke grenade as warning in case they were civilians. They paused, then resumed course. We yelled and waved for them to stop. They persisted. I thought: they might kill my Marines but if we kill them, we might be wrong. Cracks and flashes erupted from the motorcycle. The only hard fact about the rules of engagement is that you have the right to defend yourself. You decide for yourself to pull the trigger. The Marines returned fire for 10 long seconds. The motorcycle sparked where the rounds slapped the metal and drove into the bodies. The bike stopped. The men fell.

The building was empty. No bodies, no blood, no bullet casings. The fog of war lifted. I had been certain what was happening and I was wrong. The combination of confusion, chaos and adrenaline can't be explained unless you've also experienced it. We ran to the motorcycle. One Marine made a quiet plea, "Please let them have weapons. Something. Anything." They were dead. Their weapons were sticks and bindles. The muzzle flash was light glaring off the motorcycle's chrome. One man was no older than 16. It was late afternoon then and, in the Muslim tradition, their family quickly arrived to bury them in the last hour of sunlight.

Even now, I don't know what led them to drive toward a group of Marines firing machine guns, despite warnings, yells and waving. I know that our decision was right and, given the outcome, that it was also wrong. We trained to kill for years and given the opportunity, part of us jumped at the chance to finally be Marines. Despite the school construction and shuras, that's what it meant to make a difference in uniform; it meant killing our enemies. But these men weren't enemies. They were just trying to get to a home so close that their family was able to watch them die. After the shooting, the families encircled us in hysterics as they collected the bodies. It was the first and only time I saw an Afghan adult woman's face. The wailing continued in the distance as we continued on our mission.

The insanity of war means that incidents like this are accepted. By the standards of those who fight wars we actually did the right thing. The catastrophe is that these incidents occur on an industrial scale. Throughout Afghanistan, there are accidental civilian killings; it is war's nature. When we choose war, we are unleashing a force, much like a natural disaster, that can literally destroy everything and from which there's no going back. As 10 years of conflict have shown us, nobody knows how wars end.

With six months left on our deployment I had no choice but to move on. I told myself we did what we were trained to do and that it just ended badly. I stuck with that reasoning despite feeling terrible and soon, my emotions caught up to my logic. People say they can remember a traumatic incident like it was yesterday. I can't. Since my return, Afghanistan has melted into a feeling more than a memory. But I do remember the widows and orphans and wailing families and the faces of two men on a motorcycle. They understood they were being killed as it happened, yet they couldn't accept their fate. They died painfully. Their teeth clenched and grimacing.Their eyes open. Those eyes gave them a final pleading expression. Why did you kill us?

Back in the United States, I look at people and think: "You have no idea what right and wrong are." Much that I once held as matters of conscience is now just custom or culture. The challenging thing about ethics is you have to figure them out for yourself. What the war taught me is first: you should always strive to do the right thing even though you can't control the outcome. Second, wrong decisions have tragic, irreversible consequences. There is no return. Nothing changes it and no lesson justifies it.

When we wage war to defend the American way of life, there's an obligation to uphold that ideal. Can we honestly say we've done that?

I never pulled the trigger on my rifle but I ordered other men to kill. For an officer, there is little difference. In all militaries, individuals don't kill, groups do. We are each assigned small tasks in the orchestrated murder of our enemies and oftentimes, this decentralization creates its own momentum. We became excellent at engineering the enemy's death. After one incident, my commanding officer told me that he was ultimately responsible. Yes, by the letter of the law, that is true. But everything we did over there we did together. We're all responsible. I feel it, and I know that the other officers and N.C.O.'s share the same moments of pride and shame. I also know that that this sense of responsibility is shared all the way to the presidents I've served under who saw the consequences of our actions at the hospitals at Bethesda, Walter Reed and Dover Air Force Base.

Only the dead have seen the end of war. This is a maxim that has been used to illuminate humanity's propensity for war, but it is also an accurate reflection of many veterans' experiences. The war not only came back with us, it was here the entire time, experienced by orphans and widows. It was experienced by the widows from my unit who were unable to cook a single meal for their kids since their husband's death. During a memorial a few weeks after our return, families of the dead collapsed grief-stricken in front of their loved ones' pictures as a thousand Marines solemnly bore witness. When an officer went to the house to check on one family, the littlest one told him matter-of-factly, "My daddy is dead."

Civilians can't shoulder the responsibility for killing, but the social contract demands they care for those who do. And this is the great disconnect in our society right now, because that feeling of responsibility is still locked behind the fences of our military bases. My friends killed and died over there for America. And while many of my peers view that as sentimental, jingoistic, naive, or (behind closed doors) stupid, those men believed so deeply in something they were willing to give everything for it. When we wage war to defend the American way of life, there's an obligation to uphold that ideal. Can we honestly say we've done that?

The Marine Hymn states that we are "first to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean." Since the shooting, I've thought about what that means and decided that it was beyond good and evil. It was an accident. War doesn't distinguish between innocence or guilt, skill or incompetence, intelligence or idiocy. But we do. We see injustice in the deaths and can't accept their inevitability. But it was fated when we decided to go to war. In that sense, we're all responsible.

After coming home, our commanders told us we earned glory for our unit, but I know it's more complicated than that. War has little to do with glory and everything to do with hard work and survival. It's about keeping your goodness amid the evil. But no matter what happens, you never work hard enough, people die and evil touches everyone. Our lives will go on but the war will never go away. That's why it's not simply good to be back. I thought my war was over, but it followed me. It followed all of us. We returned only to find that it was waiting here the entire time and will always be with us.
Captain Timothy Kudo deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011 with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. He's currently a Senior Membership Associate with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Before joining the military he taught middle school math in the Bronx with Teach For America. He is a native of Santa Monica, Calif.

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united states defense and military forces

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Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military. When I returned from Afghanistan this past spring, a civilian friend asked, "Is it good to be back?" It was the first time someone had asked, and I answered honestly.

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Kite Fighting: A favorite activity in the ME

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Kite Fighting: A favorite activity in the ME

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Afghanistan - The Toughest Battle - Kite Running - 14 May 07

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Al Jazeera's David Foster learns first-hand about the Afghan obsession with kite fighting when he is taken to a Kabul graveyard to participate in the game.

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Watch a few parts (or all, if you feel intrigued!) of this video about the history of the Middle East.

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Watch a few parts (or all, if you feel intrigued!) of this video about the history of the Middle East.

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India Pakistan Partition Documentary BBC

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The Middle East (full documentary) HD documentaries,