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QUEENSBURY Fifth-grade students at William H. Barton Intermediate School were shocked to hear what life is like for students in Afghanistan.

U.S. Army Sgt. David Mulcahy told them that students go to school in buildings that have no electricity or running water. There can be one teacher for 100 kids. The only book students have is the Koran and they take notes from the teachers presentations.

And most surprisingly, kids attend school only through age 11.

Once they turn 12, theyre technically a man and they go and work, he said through Facetime on Monday from where he is stationed in Afghanistan with the 101st Division.

The local students were even more surprised when they found out what happens with girls. Women can get married in their teens to a husband of their familys choosing. The legal age of marriage for women is 16 in Afghanistan.

This is the third time that Mulcahy has corresponded with the students. The connection came about because he is the son of school nurse Jackie Mulcahy. Back in December, the students sent out a care package of 25 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, treats and Queensbury clothing.

Jackie Mulcahy said the whole school chipped in to donate goodies and clothes.

In return, they got an American flag that was signed by everyone in the unit and photos of the soldiers wearing the Queenbury shirts that the school donated to them, she said.

Her son, who has been in the military six years, decided to correspond with students using the video conference application Facetime.

We ended up doing a Facetime with him so we could ask him some questions and really get the kids to have a face to the name that weve been sending packages to, said teacher Nicole Enny-Tully.

They are idolizing these men and I think its great, she added.

Lisa Higleys special education students also got to listen to the Facetime chat.

Mulcahy said he has helped establish schools during his time in Afghanistan. The soldiers helped secure the area, so engineers could come and build the school.

Mulcahy said he is looking forward to coming home in June.

Enny-Tully asked Mulcahy if there was anything else the soldiers might like. Baby wipes, he said.

Thats how we take showers out here, he said.

More laundry detergent also would be helpful, he said. The soldiers do their laundry by hand-washing their clothes in soapy water, rinsing them in water and hanging them out to dry.

The soldiers also need socks, he said.

These dudes lose socks more than anybody Ive ever seen, he said.

Mulcahy said the soldiers must change their socks three times a day to prevent blisters from all their marching around in boots.

The students also wanted to send board games to the soldiers.

Mulcahy thanked the students for their gifts and well wishes.

I really appreciate the support from you back home. We couldnt do what we do here without you, he said.

His unit was about to leave on a mission.

Some bad guys are doing some bad things, so were getting called out to stop them, he said.

Students were surprised how different life is in Afghanistan.

I think it was cool that they built schools for the kids, said 11-year-old Jacob Blaise.

Caleigh Johnson, 11, said she liked helping the soldiers.

We have been sending Girl Scout cookies and letters to give our thanks, she said.

Enny-Tully said students got to see life from a different perspective.

When youre 11 years old, you think your world is the world, she said.

You can read Michael Goots blog A Time to Learn at http://www.poststar.com or his updates on Twitter @ps_education.

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Students chat with soldier about Afghanistan - Glens Falls Post-Star

Afghans walk with camels on a road near the border with Pakistan. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Pakistan and Afghanistan plan to use Google Maps to help settle a border dispute that led to deadly clashes last week, officials from both sides have said.

At least eight civilians were killed on both sides in fighting that began when a Pakistani census team accompanied by soldiers visited disputed villages along the southern border on Friday.

Pakistan inherited its 1,500-mile border with its western neighbour when it gained independence from Britain in 1947, but Afghanistan has never formally recognised it.

Official Afghan maps reflect the so-called Durand Line, but many nationalists believe the true border lies at the river Indus that runs though Pakistan and gave India its name.

Officials from the geological survey departments of the two countries will conduct a survey, and they will also make use of Google Maps, said a senior Pakistani security source in Islamabad who requested anonymity.

Abdul Razeq, the police chief of Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan, said: After negotiations, both sides have agreed that a geological survey should be conducted. Technical teams of both countries will use GPS and Google Maps as well as other means to get the answer.

Google complies with certain countries requirements to show borders in line with national demands. For instance, its Indian site shows the entirety of disputed Kashmir as controlled by India. In Pakistan, however, the site shows the internationally recognised de facto border, the Line of Control, marked with a dotted line to denote it is disputed.

In 2010 Google was embroiled in a dispute that prompted Nicaragua and Costa Rica to dispatch troops and armed police to their joint border.

A Nicaraguan commander cited Googles version of the border map in an interview with the Costa Rican newspaper La Nacin to justify a raid on a disputed area of Costa Rica. Google later said it had made a mistake and corrected its map to reflect one sanctioned by the US state department.

Last year Pakistan began trying to harden the traditionally soft border with Afghanistan through trenching and fencing, but its efforts were met with hostility from Kabul.

Ethnic Pashtuns living in the region have traditionally paid little heed to the border. Villages straddling the frontier have mosques and houses with one door in Pakistan and another in Afghanistan.

On Sunday Pakistani forces elevated their rhetoric when they said they had killed more than 50 soldiers in last weeks border clashes a claim quickly rejected by Kabul, which said it lost two soldiers.

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Google Maps to help settle Afghanistan-Pakistan border dispute - The Guardian

In mid-November, International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that her office would make a decision in the very near future on whether to launch a full investigation in Afghanistan. That statement meshed with my own reporting that prosecutors office had finally chosen to move ahead.

For more than a decade, the ICC has maintained a preliminary examination of various alleged crimes in that country, mostly by the Taliban but also allegations of torture by U.S. personnel. In its latest update on the examination (published as Bensouda announced the imminency of a decision), the prosecutors office even expanded the enquiry into U.S. activities to cover potential torture at black sites in Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.

But we are now more than six months from Bensoudas declaration, and there are no signs that the prosecutor will pull the trigger any time soon. So what happened? I checked in recently with Bensoudas deputy, the Canadian lawyer James Stewart, and he communicated the following:

Our statement in last Novembers [preliminary examination] activities report that a final decision on whether to seek judicial authorisation to open an investigation was imminent was accurate at that time (para. 230 of the activities report), but we also said in the report that the issue of admissibility of potential cases would be subject to further information that could be provided by the relevant national authorities in the course of the PE [and, we added, or any subsequent investigation] (para. 214).

We also noted the failure up to that time of the Government of Afghanistan to provide us with any information on national proceedings (paras. 217 and 226).

We stated as well that we were seeking to obtain further clarification on the scope of relevant preliminary reviews and investigations in the US before finalising a determination of admissibility of potential cases (para. 222).

Reading between these lines, the prosecutors office has a relatively simple, complementarity-based explanation for the delay: Bensoudas signal that the court was ready to leap into Afghanistan prompted scurrying in Washington and Kabul to provide additional information on their domestic processes and (perhaps) convince the court that no investigation was needed, at least of their activities.

Assessing the validity of the decision to delay is hard without knowing what new information has been provided. From the U.S. side, its tough to imagine that the Trump administration has provided compelling evidence that it is examining U.S. torture policies at anything like the systemic level that the prosecutor seems to want. The Afghan side is murkier. There are indications that Afghanistan has draft legislation on ICC crimes and may be considering new moves, but an Afghan civil society delegation that visited the court in April (facilitated by the human rights group FIDH) saw little progress on accountability.

Its tempting (if entirely speculative) to wonder if Trumps ascendancy has prompted some rethinking in the prosecutors office about the suitability of this moment for picking a fight with Washingtonand a fight would certainly result from the prosecutors first ever investigation of American conduct. There may also be more mundane budget and logistical issues at work. Moving to a full investigation requires substantial new investments of personnel and resources.

Whatever the factors influencing the prosecutor, the ongoing dance on the Afghanistan examination is a reminder that complementarity analyses have become a vital source of flexibility for the court. The prosecutor has very ample discretion about whether and when to move from a preliminary examination to a full investigation, and complementarity has in many contexts become the focal point for that discretion.

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Will the ICC Launch a Full Investigation in Afghanistan? - Lawfare (blog)

A National Guard medic and a pilot have been honored for their actions on a daring medevac mission in Afghanistan, where they quickly extracted wounded warriors and a dog while nearby friendly forces engaged enemy in a firefight. Chief Warrant Officer 2 Bryan Herget and Staff Sgt. Derrick Perkins received the Dustoff Associations Rescue of the Year award on Friday, May 5,at a ceremony at the Army Aviation Support Facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming, according to a release from the Wyoming National Guard.

Both of them had been deployed for less than a month when they flew the mission.

On Dec. 4, 2015, Herget and Perkins loaded a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter fromCharlie Company, 5-159th Aviation Regiment,fortheir first medevac mission of the tour. The two were part of a four-man crew that would meet up with a second Black Hawk helicopter responding, according to the release.

Lifting off within minutes of hearing the medevac request, they learned eight casualties were on the ground, along with a wounded dog from the handler team, and three patients needed urgent care.

As the crew approached the landing zone, they got the news that near the landing zone enemies and friendly troops were engaged in a firefight.

The wounded had been hurt in an IED blast.

The crew decided it was too risky to do the typical fly-over at the site before landing. They decided to take a quick and direct approach to try to avoid the enemy, Herget said in the release.

After landing, Perkins directed those who could walk to his Black Hawk, and sent the more seriously wounded to the lead aircraft, We took on five, a dog, and an escort from the ground forces, Perkins said in the release.

Six minutes after landing, they lifted off, and "the lead aircraft pulled all the power it had," Herget said.

They headed towards Kandahar Airfield and the military combat hospital going directly over bad spots, Perkins said.

At the airfield, they helped unload and transfer the wounded. Medical personnel said later that the crew's quick actions saved lives that day, according to the release.

After the mission, Herget and Perkins got to work resupplying their helicopter, without thinking what they had just done. It was the last thing you think of when youre doing your job, Perkins said.

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National Guard pilot, medic honored for Afghanistan medevac mission - ArmyTimes.com

Sgt. Monesa Kashefi was once afraid of gunfire. Now the 25-year-old has taken part in more than 1,000 combat operations in six years.

Kashefi is one of several dozen women serving in an elite Afghan police force, the Crisis Response Unit, that increasingly finds itself at the center of the countrys long war with Taliban militants. But Kashefi doesnt just battle the Taliban. She is also up against Afghan traditions, which relegate women to domestic roles and near-invisibility in the body-length garment known as the burqa.

The U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan has long tried to increase the recruitment of women in Afghan security forces, but they have never made up more than 1% of forces. In 2016 alone, the United States budgeted $93.5 million to bolster the ranks of female soldiers and police in Afghanistan, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a watchdog agency.

But the office said in a report last year that female recruits leave the security forces because of opposition from male relatives, problems with male colleagues, low pay, family obligations, lack of promotion or meaningful assignment opportunities, and a lack of training and security.

The Crisis Response Unit is often the first to respond to major attacks, as it did last month when Taliban militants raided a northern base and killed more than 100 soldiers. The unit has come under pressure as Afghanistans conventional soldiers and police face increasing casualties from the Taliban and allied insurgents.

Officials would not disclose the total number of commandos in the Crisis Response Unit, but they are believed to number about 5,000, spread across all 34 Afghan provinces. The unit has filled only 83 of the 254 positions set aside for women.

Kashefi eschews the burqa while on duty, instead wearing fatigues and a black head scarf under her helmet, while carrying 33 pounds of equipment including an antiballistic vest, AK-47 assault weapon, radio and canteen. She marches through mud, water and forests the same as men do, she said during a recent interview in Kabul, on a break between missions.

While she misses her family deployments keep her away from her three children for months at a time she said she loves her job.

Id love to spend my entire life in my unit, she said.

Commanders say Kashefi and other women fill a crucial role by conducting body searches of women during raids on suspected insurgent houses. Under the strict Islamic laws observed in Afghanistan, male officers cannot search women.

Kashefi described a recent operation in Logar, the rugged eastern province where she is based along with about 450 commandos. At a house where two Taliban militants were believed to be hiding, a woman came to the door and it fell to Kashefi to speak with her.

When Kashefi asked to search her, the woman fell to the ground and feigned a stomachache, she said. Kashefi searched her anyway and found a pistol and two hand grenades on her body.

She and the two men were quickly arrested, Kashefi said. The woman started crying and said that Taliban fighters were forcing her to host and cook for them.

It is not common for Afghan women to spend weeks at a time away from home or work alongside men, although Kashefi said she enjoys the respect of the men in her unit, calling them brothers.

A senior Crisis Response Unit commander, Maj. Gen. Sayed Mohammad Roshandil, praised Kashefis courage. He said she once helped carry a male officer who was wounded in a combat operation an unusual thing for an Afghan woman to do, but a sign of her dedication.

The women in our units are really brave, Roshandil said.

But officials acknowledged that women in the security forces are not frequently promoted, and not all enjoy such support.

One female Afghan Interior Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, said women in the Afghan special forces often struggled to maintain their Islamic modesty and also faced sexual harassment from senior officers.

Some senior officials invite their female colleagues for night parties, the official said. If the ladies say no, they never get promoted. Unfortunately, some women surrender to their seniors demands.

Kashefi is the sole breadwinner in her family. Her monthly salary of about $640, along with a small bonus for each combat operation, supports her mother, brothers and three young children, who live with family members in Kabul. (She wont publicly discuss her marital status.)

She never thought of taking any other job, having joined the special forces after leaving school in ninth grade.

I chose to join the military because I want to fight, she said. I fight for peace.

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Faizy is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Shashank Bengali contributed to this report from Mumbai, India.

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In Afghanistan, an elite female police officer battles ...