KABUL, Afghanistan, July 28 — The international aid agency Médécins Sans Frontières announced today that it was withdrawing from Afghanistan and closing operations after 24 years, in protest of the government's failure to arrest the culprits in the killing of five of its staff members in June.
...
Médécins Sans Frontières has been one of the longest serving aid organizations in Afghanistan, sending in doctors and nurses and setting up health clinics in the rural areas during the Soviet occupation. It continued working throughout the heaviest war years of the 1980's and 1990's, often working on both sides of the front lines. It suspended operations for some time when a worker was killed in 1990, but continued working throughout the civil war and the Taliban era.
"We leave Afghanistan with a sense of mourning for the loss of our colleagues, but also with immense sadness for the Afghan people that we leave behind and to whom we are still committed," Ms. Buissonniere said.
Soon after the announcement, a bomb exploded in the town of Ghazni south of Kabul, leaving six dead, including two United Nations election workers.
More of the success in Afghanistan that Bush was talking about back in June:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush lauded Afghanistan on Tuesday as a model for Iraq as he tried to paint the U.S. involvement there as a success ahead of the November U.S. election.
With Afghan President Hamid Karzai at his side, Bush listed strides in children's health care, women's rights and education as signs Afghanistan has been lifted up "from the ashes of two decades of war and oppression."
"Out of, kind of, the desperate straits that the Afghan people found themselves is now a welcoming society beginning to grow," Bush told a joint news conference with Karzai in the White House Rose Garden.
"And the same thing's going to happen in Iraq. These aren't easy tasks," he said.
We, and the world, can hardly wait.
Comments