Today on The World:Hamid Karzai has been declared winner of Afghanistan’s elections – what that means for Afghanistan and U-S policy there; also, re-visiting what was once among the most deadly border crossings between East and West Germany; plus, we sample some of Alan Lomax’s recently restored recordings from Haiti in the 1930s.

• BBC coverage
• Afghan election

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World.  President Obama called to congratulate Hamid Karzai today on his re-election.  The White House said it recognized Karzai as the legitimate president of Afghanistan, despite a fraud-riddled election that dragged on for months.  It finally ended this weekend when Karzai’s main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, bowed out of the scheduled runoff.  The World’s Matthew Bell begins our coverage.

MATTHEW BELL:  President Obama said he got on the phone with Hamid Karzai today to tell the Afghan leader that he’s drifted off course on some key priorities, and it’s time for a change.  It seemed like a diplomatic way of Mr. Obama saying he wants the Afghan president to get his act together.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This has to be a point in time in which we begin to write a new chapter, based on improved governance, a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption, joint efforts to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces, so that the Afghan people can provide for their own security.

BELL: Administration officials have said President Obama’s decision on US troop levels for Afghanistan depends in part on whether there’s a credible Afghan government in place.  The White House said today that the President will make his decision on troops in the coming weeks.   Alex Thier of the US Institute of Peace says there’s some good news here for Washington, and that is, the flawed election process is finally over.

ALEX THIER: We will now move on from the turmoil of the last two months and move forward with the very important work that we have to do together with the Afghan government.

BELL:  Thier says the challenge for the US is to pressure Karzai’s government to be accountable.

THIER: What is most important to the Afghan people is results from the cooperation between the United States and the Afghan government.  What they will look to now is whether the Afghan government is going to perform, is going to live up to some of the promises that they and the international community together has been making for these last long eight years.

BELL: During that time, the international community has thought of its mission in Afghanistan as one of rebuilding democratic institutions.  But the election has changed that perception, says Michael Semple of Harvard University. Semple spent more than 20 years working on development projects in Afghanistan.

MICHAEL SEMPLE:  I don’t think that the international community is going to let go of Afghanistan.  I don’t think it’s going to stop supporting Afghanistan or stop supporting President Karzai.  But that support will be on different terms.  Now it is about propping up a friendly regime and avoiding it being toppled militarily by unfriendly forces. Now, that’s a totally different agenda which will be pursued in different means.

BELL: Semple says the international community is already lowering its expectations dramatically.

SEMPLE: The prospect of the Afghan government changing the way it does business in any radical sense, after eight years, seem to be frankly zero.

BELL: Others are holding out more hope for President Karzai.

TOM GOUTTIERRE: We may be just be able to put this all together.

BELL: Tom Gouttierre is an expert on Afghanistan at the University of Nebraska.  He says the message from President Obama to President Karzai right now should be, “Congratulations. Let’s get to work.”

GOUTTIERRE:  What else can we do?  We’ve got a lot invested. We’ve made a lot of promises which we have not yet met. You know, it’s now time for us to kind of gird up our loins, as they say, and get to work and do it correctly.  We have not been doing it correctly over the last eight years.  We had very poor leadership.  It was like the Keystone Kops.  Every year we’re coming in with another kind of policy, because there was never a real commitment.

BELL: Gouttierre concedes that the election was far from perfect and that Karzai’s government is corrupt, but he says most Afghans knew that Karzai would probably be re-elected in the end, and now is the time for the US and its Afghan partners to move on. Of course, the other side in the debate in Washington will point to the deeply flawed Afghan election and make precisely the opposite argument.  They will say the election proves the US lacks a credible Afghan partner, and that now’s the time to start cutting losses and looking for a way out.   For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Berlin, only a tiny stretch of the wall remains as a memorial. From 1961 to 1989, 89 people were killed trying to escape over it. Such attempts are well documented. But a less talked about Cold War border was even deadlier. We’re referring to the northernmost section of the border separating East Germany from West Germany. Twenty four years ago, our Europe Correspondent Gerry Hadden lived along that dividing line, in the tiny beach town of Travemunde, West Germany. He recently went back to see how things have changed, and to learn more about those who tried to escape there. Download MP3

Gerry also produced this slideshow:

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH, Boston.  You could say the Cold War ended when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989.  Organizers of next week’s 20th anniversary festivities hope to recapture the euphoria of the moment.  But there are also sober memories of the split between East and West Germany.  Eighty-nine people were killed trying to cross the wall.  Even more died trying to flee East Germany at the northernmost section of the border.  That’s where The World’s Gerry Hadden used to live, in the beach town of Travemunde.  He recently returned and sent us this report.

GERRY HADDEN: Travemunde literally means Mouth of the Trave River.  The Trave empties here into the Baltic Sea, and it once divided West from East.  I lived here, on the west side, as an exchange student in 1986.  The town is much the same today:  tidy, wealthy, built mostly around sailing and tourism.  During the summer months it really comes alive.  But during the Cold War, the warm months brought constant reminders of a divided country in the form of people trying to   escape over the sea.   I lived here in winter, so I never saw an escape attempt, but locals, like 45 year old Torsten Eichhof, did.  Fishing along the Trave’s bank recently, he recalls a night twenty years ago when he was bartending in a nearby beach hotel.

TORSTEN EICHHOF:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  He says, “I was working a night shift in the pub when suddenly the door swung open.  Standing outside were these four soaking wet people, a couple and two kids.  They said, ‘Can someone call the authorities?  We’ve just escaped from East Germany.’  They’d made it in a little dinghy.  We wrapped them up in warm blankets, then cooked them some big steaks.  Only after they’d had a good first meal did we call the police.”  According to researchers nearly 6,000 people

tried to cross this stretch of Baltic during the Cold War.  Nearly a thousand made it; 174 people died.  The rest were caught.  I remember what made the crossing here so dangerous.  Less than a mile from Travemunde’s beaches, East German military gunboats patrolled day and night.  On land a triple fence, covered in barbed wire and surrounded by mines, reached right to the water’s edge.  You never saw anyone just out walking on the East side.   It made you wonder what life was like over there.  Today a ferry plods across the mouth of the Trave.  It leaves us about a mile from the old East/ West checkpoint.  But just before going through that checkpoint, I stop in at the   house of Cristina Volkt-Mueller and her husband Bodo.   The Muellers are from the former East.   In the early 1980s they tried  to escape in a sailboat, but they were caught before clearing port.

CRISTINA MUELLER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  Cristina says, “It’s still hard to describe the feelings. You think, my god, what is going to happen now? There’s nothing you can do.  You’re trapped.  It’s a terrible feeling of powerlessness and fear.  We’d spent a lot of time working this escape out, anticipating freedom.  When that gets quashed you are just devastated.”  The Muellers, like tens of thousands of others, ended up in a Stasi jail.  After their release, they spent years under state surveillance.  Today Cristina and Bodo research Baltic escape attempts.  Bodo tells me of one man who invented a hand-held underwater jet that pulled him to freedom.  Another guy painted his sailboat sails black and tried at night.  He got nabbed.  A third man, a doctor, swam 30 miles to the West, fueled by methamphetamines.  But Bodo says most people tried to flee simply on whatever was at hand, on whatever floated.

BODO MUELLER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   Bodo says many people tried to paddle across on air mattresses because having a

boat was complicated, because you had to smuggle a boat to the beach in pieces and assemble it there.  But if you were staying in a legal campsite you could have an air mattress.   So many people tried to escape spontaneously.  But the sea is cold and often there are heavy waves.  Lots of people drowned.  On this day I make the crossing in the other direction on land in a car.  It’s the first time I visited this once off limits area.  In the nearby village of Poetenitz I meet Sabina Kieler.  While I was studying in Travemunde, Kieler was working on a farm I could literally see, right across the border.  She says only a select few were allowed so close to the enemy.

SABINA KIELER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “You had to finish your work by 8 PM.  If you were still in the fields after that or you didn’t have your passport they’d lock you up for three days.  It was very confined work.  You couldn’t go left or right.  There were no toilets so we would go into the bushes, but you had to be careful.  If you took one step too far the guards would descend on you.”  Kieler says one day in early November, 1989, someone came running across the fields yelling that the border had opened.  At first no one believed him, then the joy set in.  As the news spread, Kieler and other East Germans poured into Travemunde by the tens of thousands.   And West Germans came out to greet them with champagne and gifts.   But 20 years later Kieler says reunification has been a mixed bag.

KIELER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “Some things are better.  You can travel anywhere and buy whatever you want. But some things are worse, for example, childcare. Back in the old days there was guaranteed space for all kids in daycare.  Today hardly anyone gets in because there just too few spots.”  The other thing is the economy, she says, Lots of the old manufacturing here was destroyed with reunification.  And the West, she says, didn’t invest much in revitalizing the local economy.  But overall Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to help the East get backs on its feet.  And as time passes it’s clear that the differences between the two Germanys have lessened.  That’s good news for everyone, but for Ingrid Schatz it also presents a danger.    Schatz runs the Lubeck Border Museum.   It’s housed in a former East German passport inspection house just across the old line from Travemunde.

INGRID SCHATZ:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   On a recent morning, Schatz is showing the black and white photos of the massive border installations that once dominated the countryside.  She says, “Everything you see in the photo is gone.  The big border station, the fences, everything.  The only thing remaining is this one house.  That’s why we started this border museum.”  She says a German border like this, as deadly as it once was, should not just be forgotten. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, Travemunde, Germany.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• ‘What is the What’ book info
• The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation
• Sudan: a nation divided

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JEB SHARP:  Two men, one from the U-S and one from Sudan, crossed paths six years ago.

Their lives remain intertwined to this day.  The American is Dave Eggers.  He was already a successful writer, whose books included one called “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”  The Sudanese man is Valentino Achak Deng.  He had led a heartbreaking life of staggering sorrow.  Valentino had escaped his home village of Marial Bai in war-torn southern Sudan.  Eggers turned Valentino’s life-story into an only slightly fictionalized biography, called “What Is the What.”  Now, three years later, proceeds from the novel have gone back to Marial Bai to build a school.  It’s gratifying for both the author, Dave Eggers, and his subject, Valentino Achak Deng.  For all they’ve been through though, both men say they’ll never forget that first time they met.

VALENTINO ACHAK DENG:  Dave, you know, is this just cool guy, doesn’t talk too much, but we are just about a writer meeting a student and then they write a book, it would not have been possible.  We would have had to go through a lot of trust issues and we had trouble.  We took risks, actually.  Dave took risks, and went to Marial Bai with me when I reunited with my family.  And I was at Dave’s wedding, my first American wedding to attend.  You could imagine that.  Dave brought me to his life, and he also came to my life.

SHARP:  Dave Eggers?

DAVE EGGERS:  A lot of it has to do with Valentino, you know, and his bravery in sharing his story.  It wasn’t easy to get at some of the more difficult parts of the story and a lot of parts of it that weren’t easy to remember or to recount or to get published.  But his courage in revealing all of that was important, you know.

SHARP:  And now an awful lot has happened in Sudan in recent years.   I mean, there’s everything that happened in the years encompassed by the book, but even since then, the war that destroyed your village and caused your flight with the Lost Boys ended in 2005 with a peace agreement between north and south Sudan.  So southern Sudan where you’re from, Valentino, is supposed to be emerging from a crisis. You’ve used the proceeds from the book to start a foundation that’s built a school back in your home village.  Is this indeed a time of renewal and hope in southern Sudan?

DENG:  This is the time for me where people need to go back and help.  We went back to Marial Bai and realized that many multilateral organization and even the new autonomous government of southern Sudan was paying so much attention to primary education.  For example, in the area where we’ve built a second school now, this is going to be the only functioning secondary school the region has ever had.

SHARP: Dave Eggers, you’ve visited the new school in Marial Bai.  It opened this year.  What strikes you about it?

EGGERS:  The first thing that strikes me is that Valentino, with the help of one staff member here in the US, pretty much built this school on his own, with the help of the community there in Marial Bai. And it’s flabbergasting to a lot of organizations that have been trying to build similar facilities in southern Sudan, and Valentino did it in about a year, and it’s a 14 building complex with cafeteria and a library and ten classrooms and pretty soon, ideally, there’ll be a dormitory for girls and there’s about 100 students there right now, and a waiting list of almost 1,000 to go to this school.

SHARP:  What’s the secret? What’s different?

EGGERS:  It took a man that had lived in Ethiopia and Kenya and the US, but had grown up and knew the Marial Bai community and knew how to get things done there.  Besides just being an incredible scholar, he’s a guy that knows how to negotiate the price of bricks and mortar and things like that.

DENG:  The other idea is, I wanted to invest in the community, so we bought bricks from the local brick makers and hoping that that money will go to the local economy.  Now I could see shops in Marial Bai that came as a result of the bricks business.  Another thing is that we just inspire the youth. For example, when we started, it was just the rainy season and people had to carry bag of cements on their back.  People had to carry everything we needed to the construction site.

SHARP:  This all sounds so good and positive and the economy’s being rebuilt, even as the school project’s getting off the ground. Can you convey the feeling there after so many years of war, especially when there’s often a feeling that the peace isn’t that stable?

DENG:  There is still a concern that if the regions return to war, or if this pocket of insecurity in many parts of south Sudan spread all over, then it will be tough for us, because we have students who come from different part of the country.  But I have lived in Sudan for almost a year now, and I haven’t seen people advocating to go back to war.

SHARP:  Dave Eggers?

EGGERS:  It’s essential that we have to be optimistic and you have to give the young people the hope.  You know, there’s a generation or two that grew up without schools.

SHARP:  You’re both translators in a way.  You’re trying to bring continually the story of Sudan to people here in the United States.  And I’m curious how you’ve come to think about that, how you break through the sense of something being far away and out of sight and out of mind.  How do you get people to care about suffering far away?

DENG:  First I believe that all people have so much in common than they are able to realize. We are all the same.  It’s just about how do we get to hear about things?

SHARP:  Dave Eggers?

EGGERS:  Well, I think it was important, and it’s important for a lot of stories like this and in parts of the world that the US and Western world doesn’t know that much about.  I think most of the time, it’s best to tell that story through one person’s eyes and to be able to connect with their elemental humanity and our commonalities and say, “Well, that boy could have been me.”

SHARP:  Valentino, I can’t resist asking you one more question. I heard you got on an airplane recently and sat next to a woman who was reading the book, “What is the What.”

DENG:  We sat at the airport together and she was reading the book.  I could not resist the temptation after 30 minutes of seeing her reading and sometimes laughing.  And then I said, “Hey, that’s my story you’re reading.”  She said, “What?”  I said, “I am Valentino” and she could not accept that.  At that point, I had to show her my passport, and wow, it was a drama.

SHARP:  Valentino Achak Deng runs a foundation that builds schools in southern Sudan.  Dave Eggers is the author of several books, including “Zeitoun” and most recently “The Wild Things.”  Thank you both so much.

EGGERS:  Thank you.

DENG:  You’re welcome.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Toko Kyudojo
• More on zen archery

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: During the London Olympics, venues usually associated with one sport will be used for others.  For example, a famous cricket stadium will play host to Olympic archery.  It’ll be a peaceful place for a competitive sport.  Here’s the reverse.  That’s New York City, a noisy place to find a very peaceful pursuit, as The World’s Alex Gallafent discovers.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  The first clue comes in the elevator.  Ten of us are squished together inside, all headed six floors up, but only I seem to feel any discomfort.  Everyone else is calm, motionless, like they know some essential, secret truth.  Must be imagining it.  Anyway — this is the Shambhala Center in New York, a place for meditation and, this evening, archery practice.  Now not competitive archery, with colorful target rings and gold medals, but kyudo, Japanese Zen archery, the way of the bow.  Evening practice begins with ten minutes silence.  Zen archery is meditation in action.  Hitting the target isn’t the point.  Archery is simply the physical form that the meditation takes.  After years of practice, the archer learns to kind of remove himself from the act of shooting the arrow, thereby achieving, well, Zen.  It’s hard to get a handle on that kind of thing.  But in Japan, Zen archery is very much part of the culture.  Many schools offer after-school kyudo clubs, for instance.  In the west, it’s almost a secret.  There are only about 15 small kyudo groups here in the US.  One of the first Western attempts to describe kyudo came in 1953, in a book called “Zen in the Art of Archery.”  The author, a German philosophy professor named Eugen Herrigel, studied archery in Japan for six years.  Afterwards he wrote:

READER:  ”I gradually came to realize that only the truly detached can understand what is meant by ‘detachment.’”

GALLAFENT: In other words, he could talk about Zen and he could see other people practicing Zen archery.  But if really wanted to figure it out, he had to experience kyudo himself.  That’s a lesson a handful of Americans have taken on board.

CHARLES POTTER: This is a kyudo ibah, which means a practice place.

GALLAFENT: That’s Charles Potter.  He’s in his 50s.  He sports a silver ponytail and wears a Japanese archer’s tunic.  He’s been coming here for years.

POTTER:  And we are students of Kanjuro Shibata Sensei, who is the 20^th generation bow maker to the emperor of Japan.

GALLAFENT: No such luminaries here this evening, and the setting is not exactly imperial, just a room with white walls and a wooden floor.  A series of puffy cubes, the targets, are lined up along one wall, and opposite, only a few feet away– remember, accuracy’s not the point– there’s an array of bows, in three sizes.  None of them is kid-sized.

LEON: This is the smallest they have.

GALLAFENT: That’s Leon.  He’s eight, and this is his fifth time trying to work out the mysteries of Zen archery.

LEON: I did two times this year and one time the year before, and then once when I was at rites of passage.

GALLAFENT: What’s rites of passage?

LEON:  <laughs>

GALLAFENT: Leon confirms the feeling I had in the elevator, that these archers hold the secret and I’m not in on it.  Indeed, Japanese archery comes with the clichéd cautions, things like, “it takes a decade just how to learn to hold the bow.”  Charles Potter says there are stories of those who have struggled for ten years only to be told:

POTTER:  “Another ten.”

GALLAFENT: But it turns out that’s not the way of this ibah.  Everyone’s welcome, so long as they’ve completed a short introductory course.  That’s what one of the new students here in New York tonight, Jeff, in his late 20s, has come to do.

JEFF:  I actually was a competitive archer as a young person. I stopped when I was about 18, but prior to that, it was sort of part of my life in a big way.

GALLAFENT: So this will be a shift, non competitive archery.

JEFF:  Yes, it’s a very big shift, but I think that part of my movement away from it was that I was sort of overwhelmed by the competition. It got to the point where it just wasn’t meaningful for me.  And this is actually the first time that I’m ever really doing, so I’m very intrigued to see how this goes.

GALLAFENT: The experienced archers take their bows and fetch their arrows.  They line up opposite the targets, form the correct body shape, ready the bow, raise the bow, spread the arms, draw the bow full.  And then, release.  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent in New York.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Box set info
• The Haiti Box blog
• Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: All politics is local, and that’s especially true in Afghanistan.  The country is a patchwork of local interests, complicated by layers of historical, cultural, and religious differences.  For example, take the province of Balkh, in northern Afghanistan.  Hamid Karzai’s re-election is not sitting well with Balkh’s provincial governor and many of its people.  Jean Mackenzie is a reporter for the on-line news source Global Post News.  She’s been monitoring politics in the province.  She’s now in Kabul.  Jean, welcome.

JEAN MACKENZIE:  Thank you very much.

SHARP:  Let’s set the scene first.  Like all of Afghanistan’s provinces, the population of Balkh is mixed, but it’s predominantly Tajik.  So let’s start with that.  What is a Tajik?

MACKENZIE:  Tajik is an ethnic group here.  It’s the second largest ethnic group in the country, the first being the Pashtuns.  They do predominate in Balkh province, along with Uzbeks and very small pockets of Pashtuns.

SHARP:  And the Tajiks provided the backbone of the northern alliance that fought alongside the US to overthrow the Taliban, so these are not natural allies of the Taliban insurgency, right?

MACKENZIE:  The Tajiks were one of the main groups that formed the northern alliance.  Yes, it is true to say that Tajiks would not be natural allies of the Taliban.

SHARP:  And so as in every province in Afghanistan, Balkh has a governor appointed by Hamid Karzai, and in Balkh, his name is General Atta Mohammad Noor.  He’s now fallen out with Karzai, right?

MACKENZIE:  That is correct.  Many people thought he hoped to be picked as Karzai’s running mate, and when he was passed over, he reportedly became quite angry and decided to divert his support to Karzai’s major rival, Abdullah.

SHARP:  And how has General Atta responded to this whole election process?

MACKENZIE:  Well, things have been getting progressively tense.  Atta has a past as a warlord.  He has militias under his control and we’ve received several reports that he has been arming these militias and getting them ready to fight.

SHARP:  And can you help us understand how likely would it actually be that this could break out into fighting?

MACKENZIE:  The problem is that no matter how Karzai and Abdullah resolve their differences, their proxies in the north have been getting angrier and angrier at each other.  We have had several assassinations of Pashtun leaders in the past several months and this has made the Pashtun community quite angry.  The Tajik community is very upset over a growing insurgency that is spilling over from neighboring provinces.  So you’ve got two populations at each other’s throats with many too many arms for this to end peacefully if things go bad.  So what we are hearing from people in Balkh is that it feels like they’re on the brink of armed conflict.

SHARP:  And what about international forces?  Are there substantial numbers stationed up there in the north?

MACKENZIE:  Yes, there are.  The provincial reconstruction team in Mazar-e Sharif, which is the capital of Balkh province, is headed by Sweden, and there are significant numbers of soldiers, including American soldiers, up in Balkh.  The problem being that they normally support the provincial government, this being Atta.  If a conflict were to break out between the provincial government and their rivals, who are supporters of the president, supporters of Hamid Karzai, it would put the international forces in a very, very difficult position.

SHARP:  So the worst situation is, the West becomes embroiled in what amounts to a new civil war.

MACKENZIE:  Well, if conflict breaks out in Balkh, it is a civil war.  It’s going to be very difficult to cast this as any kind of Taliban or al Qaida or any other kind of antigovernment insurgency, since both sides represent different factions of the government.  We just have to hope that cooler heads will prevail and this situation will be defused.  Right at this point, it does not look good.

SHARP:  Dr. Abdullah is scheduled to speak again tomorrow publicly.  What do you think he needs to say to keep a lid on it?

MACKENZIE:  I think he needs to call for calm.  I think he needs to call for his supporters to respect the decision of the Independent Election Commission, and not to go out on the streets and protest.  I think the Kabul especially seems to be braced for that.  There are police on every corner.  There are security forces everywhere.  So I think he needs to put a little bit of pressure on his supporters not to go out onto the streets.

SHARP:  Jean Mackenzie is Kabul correspondent for Global Post dot com.  Thanks very much.

MACKENZIE:  You’re quite welcome.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: There was another deadly attack in Pakistan today.  An explosion killed at least 35 people in Rawalpindi, just south of the capital Islamabad.  It’s just the latest in a series of attacks across Pakistan in the past month.  The largest was last week’s bombing in Peshawar that left more than 100 people dead.   The BBC’s Aleem Maqbool spoke with some of the victims’ relatives in Peshawar, and he sent this report:

MAN:  [speaking Pashto]

ALEEM MAQBOOL:  Today, Adel was supposed to be getting married.  Instead, he takes us through the narrow streets of Peshawar to the home of his cousin to pay condolences.  The whole family had gathered from all over the country for the wedding.  Nine went shopping for bangles and clothes ahead of the festivities but none of them came back.  Fourteen year old Adnan, who now sits in his darkened room, lost his mother, father, two aunts and all five of his younger brothers and sisters.  They still haven’t found most of the bodies.

ADNAN:  [speaking Pashto]

MAQBOOL:  “I was supposed to go with them,” he says, “but I stayed at home. I heard the explosion but really didn’t imagine my family had been hurt.  What did they do wrong?” he says.  “I can’t understand why anyone would want to do this.”  Adnan’s family was caught up in the biggest bombing in the recent wave of militant attacks to hit Pakistan.  A suicide car bomber blew himself up in the heart of Peshawar’s busiest market.  Well over 100 people were killed, many more injured.  Well even days after the explosion here in the center of Pashawar, buildings are still collapsing. Right beside me is one that’s leaning and it’s about to be demolished because part of it collapsed this morning, injuring more people.  But the reminders of the horrors of the blast are not just in the buildings here in the center of Peshawar, but in the lives that have been ruined right across this city.

MAN:  [speaking Pashto]

MAQBOOL:  Schools remain Peshawar’s main hospital.

IFTAKA ALI:  This is a victim of bomb blast.

MAQBOOL: Dr. Iftaka Ali [PH] takes us around the orthopedic unit in the Lady Redding hospital.  He shows us many patients who lost limbs in the blast, including one shopkeeper.

ALI:  He was working normally.  He was doing his job there, but now he has suffered very sudden, which he was not expecting.  His family was not expecting that thing, so definitely there is a psychological trauma, mental trauma to these patients.

MAQBOOL:  The patients like these just join the victims of previous attacks in a city that’s been plagued with them.

ALI:  This is not a new thing for us, but now the frequency and intensity has increased, so we are prepared any time to receive these patients and take care of them.

MAQBOOL: That’s what it’s like in Peshawar.  People still trying to recover from the last attack wondering when the next one will be, and how this violence is ever to end.

SHARP: The BBC’s Aleem Maqbool reporting from Peshawar.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World.  It’s 998 days and counting till the 2012 London Olympics.  Construction is underway on the main stadium, the aquatics center, and the athletes’ village, and organizers say they’ve met all the targets so far.  Preparations for security are also necessary for the Olympics.  After all, the suicide bombings in London’s public transport system on July 7, 2005, are still fresh in people’s memories.  Mihir Bose is a former sports editor for the BBC.  He says authorities are devoting significant resources to security, but no amount of money can guarantee safety.

MIHIR BOSE: As far as the British are concerned, they have budgeted 600 million pounds.  There’s a lot of feeling that that may not be adequate.  There’s also a lot of feeling that given the fact that the day after London won the games, we had 7/7, the British equivalent of 9/11, that security is an issue that you cannot nail down.  You just do not know what may happen.

SHARP:  So 600 million pounds, so close to $1 billion for the security budget for the London 2012 Olympics and people are saying that might not be enough?

BOSE:  Yes, because security has created a lot of problems.  The original person looking after security, Tarique Ghaffur, has gone.  His security plans did not quite work out.  The Home Office is now in charge.  There have been a lot of administrative changes.  Remember, the Olympics is a very, very unique event, if you like, where people who are accredited to the games by the International Olympic Committee have the right to enter the country to which they are accredited.  That acts as a visa, so there’s a feeling that if that acts as a visa, how do you prevent somebody sneaking in, if you like, and torpedoing the games in some way?

SHARP:  Have the authorities announced any specific new measures over and above what’s already in place?  I mean, security in London’s quite tight anyway.

BOSE:  No, they haven’t announced any new measures, but I know security officials have talked about the problems, let’s say, of a sleeper organization coming in and renting accommodation near a team that is training in and around Britain, plan some outrage.  How are they going to cope with that?  These are some of the planning operations that have been discussed.

SHARP:  London has a lot of experience with terrorist attacks and it’s sort of known for being able to handle it and dealing with all the precautions in the IRA days and, as you say, there’s been the specter of 7/7 lingering.  There is a sense that life goes on as usual.  Do you really think it’s going to be that different?

BOSE:  I hope that life will not be that different, but these games will be the biggest event in London in all our lifetime and it will take place against a background of heightened security in Britain, maybe a country targeted by certain groups because of what they perceive to be British foreign policy, or things like that, and that is a great worry.

SHARP:  Thanks very much for the update.

BOSE:  Thank you very much.

SHARP:  That’s sports journalist Mihir Bose in London.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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