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02/06/2006:

"'The new Afghanistan is a myth. It's time to go and get a job abroad'"

...'I wish I hadn't come back home from Iran after the Taliban left. I had a better life there, I had occasional work at least, so I am going back.' Zahair Mohammad stands in the line trying, with hundreds of others, to get an Iranian visa. 'I was thinking positively for a long time about rebuilding a life here in Kabul, where I was born, but I was wrong, very wrong. It's time to go. I need to work abroad, like most, as a cheap labourer and send money home. What we're hearing on the radio about a new Afghanistan is nothing but a dream.' He gestures at the kilometre-long queue. 'I was a refugee before and now I'm choosing to become one again. I'm not alone.'

Five years after the Taliban were deposed by a US-led military alliance, Afghanistan remains entrenched in poverty. Intense frustration with the government, particularly among refugees who returned amid promises of change, is growing. The Observer has learnt that such is the demand among ordinary Afghans to leave that this weekend the Interior Ministry has run out of the basic materials to make passports.
guardian.co.uk


Afghanistan fighting spreads to Pakistan
MILITANTS attacked Afghan government offices and a police convoy, continuing a series of assaults that has left at least 41 people dead in the region over two days, government officials said.

About 250 Afghan forces fought more than 200 rebels in the area’s fiercest fighting in months. At least 19 people were killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan on Saturday.

Afghan officials said US forces joined the battle Friday and yesterday but a US military spokesman said he could only confirm involvement in the first day of fighting.

The violence spread across the border as a roadside bomb exploded near an army vehicle yesterday in Pakistan in a north-western tribal region near Afghanistan, killing three security personnel, an official said.