Afghanistan: "Stripping Mullah Omar"

Arthur Chrenkoff's monthly "good news" report on Afghanistan couldn't have come at a better time:

Over the last few weeks, Afghanistan has been in the news again--unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons. The media pack has made a brief reappearance in Afghanistan to report on carefully staged "spontaneous" riots, which briefly erupted around the country, ostensibly in protest over a report in Newsweek (later retracted) about desecration of Koran by the American military personnel at Guantanamo Bay.

[...]

Faced with this sort of media coverage, President Karzai expressed his exasperation during his recent visit in the United States: "Sometimes--rather often--neither our press, nor your press, nor the press in the rest of the world will pick up the miseries of the Afghans three years ago and what has been achieved since then, until today."

Below, then, the past five weeks' worth of stories that were yet again completely overshadowed by terrorism and violence.

Stripping Mullah Omar