Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Violence Increases in Afghanistan Five Years Later, 09/11/06
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec06/afghanistan_9-11.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Where is Afghanistan?

2. Why is the United States military fighting there?

3. What is the connection between Afghanistan and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Who was killed over the weekend in Afghanistan? Who killed this person?

Over the weekend, the governor of a province in Afghanistan became the highest-ranking official to be killed by the Taliban since the rebel fighters began a suicide bombing campaign last year.

2. How does the violence in Afghanistan now compare to the level of violence immediately following the fall of the Taliban in 2001?

Last week, at least 16 people, including two American soldiers, died in the suicide blast, 50 yards from the U.S. Embassy.

The death toll of American, NATO and coalition forces is 149, making 2006 the deadliest year yet in nearly five years of conflict.

Immediately after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the totals were about a third as high.

3. What is NATO and what role is it playing in Afghanistan?

Alarmed by the deteriorating situation, NATO commanders have called for an increase to the 20,000-member NATO force that has controlled 19 of the country's 34 provinces since the handover from U.S. and other coalition forces began in late 2004.

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was created in 1949 to contain the spread of Communism across Europe.

This was the group's first mission outside of the Euro-Atlantic region, although troops are now serving in Iraq and Africa.

4. Why is the majority of the fighting with the Taliban occurring in the south?

The surge in Taliban fighting is focused in the south of the country, near the border with Pakistan. U.S. forces are in this mountainous region searching for Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The area is home to many who support the Taliban and bin Laden. Local villages are said to shelter Taliban fighters who re-enter the country from Pakistan after resting there.

5. How is the Pakistan-Afghanistan border situation impacting U.S. troops?

Although Pakistan, a U.S. ally in the war on terror, and has said it will work to improve the border, those on the ground say the situation is dire.

"I have had a soldier tell me: 'You know what? The Pakistani border is just an imaginary line keeping us from doing our job,'" said Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter who moved to Afghanistan in 2002 to run a cooperative that sells locally made products.

6. How much opium comes from Afghanistan?

Afghanistan provides more than 90 percent of the world's opium harvest. This year's crop has increased by more than 60 percent, a new record, according to a United Nations report.

Although farmers may want to grow other crops, such as pomegranates, almonds or apricots, there is no system in place to get them to international markets where people will pay more for them, according to Chayes.

"Imagine a place where there's no banking system. So, no one can take out a loan from a -- from an institution. They take out a loan from a -- from a [drug] trafficker. And they have to pay it back in opium. So, that's some of the ways that it -- that it really disturbs, you know, regular economic transactions," Chayes said.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Research the Taliban. What is their goal? What was life in Afghanistan like during their rule? Compare that to life in Afghanistan now. What has gotten better? What has gotten worse?

2. Why might Pakistan have a difficult time controlling its borders with Afghanistan? What physical and political challenges exist there?

3. What were the U.S. goals in going into Afghanistan? Were we successful?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org]. Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.