An explosion in a hidden weapons cache cut short 28 lives in Afghanistan, a country still undergoing stabilization — and making progress on many fronts.
First, here’s the bad news from the AP via ABC News:
An arms cache hidden by an Afghan warlord exploded in a bunker beneath his home early Monday, killing 28 people, injuring at least 70 and devastating surrounding buildings, officials said.
The weapons were stored in Bashgah, a remote village in Baghlan province, 75 miles north of the capital, Kabul, Interior Ministry spokesman Latfullah Mashal said.
It was not known what triggered the blast, official said. Afghanistan is awash with old weapons, many of them stored during the resistance against occupying Soviet forces during the 1980s.
The explosion “damaged the whole village, including the mosque and six houses,” Mashal told The Associated Press.
Mashal said the cache was hidden in a bunker under the house of a warlord and former government militia commander named Jalal Bashgah, apparently to conceal the weapons from a U.N.-sponsored disarmament drive.
The cache included a large number of rockets and dated from “a long time ago,” Baghlan police chief Gen. Fazeluddin Ayar said, adding that the commander had given up only a portion of his weapons to the disarmament program, which has so far demobilized more than 50,000 former militiamen.
The irony: Bashgah’s house was destroyed and, it is believed, he was, too.
And now here’s the good news. There is, in fact, plenty of detailed news and Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff has it. In his latest huge month’s compilation of good news from Afghanistan carried by the Wall Street Journal Online he points to the soccer team practice on Kabul Athletic Stadium…the stadium the Taliban used to use as its horrific public killing field, and he makes this point:
Just as it reveals Afghanistan’s triumphs, the story also illustrates the challenges facing the Afghan people: lingering discrimination and the need to maintain the struggle against ingrained backward attitudes, lack of resources and an all-too-slow flow of foreign assistance. But positive developments should not be overshadowed by negativity; Afghanistan has had enough of it for the past quarter of a century. The difference now is the unparalleled range of opportunities opening to Afghans, and the fact that with some much needed and generous help they are starting to make a better tomorrow. Here are some of their stories from the past month.
And he gives them to you — a LONG list of stories, complete with excerpts and links. This is more akin to the kind of documentation a political scientist would make, with highly detailed research, than typical news (or blogger) reporting. And he makes the case quite well that there is a LOT of good news in Afghanistan — which doesn’t obscure the bumps along the way.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.