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| India4u News | |
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National News
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by_emR3 SaVSaK.CoM
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Posted online: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 at 2:37:35 PM
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Afghanistan's meteorological office, ransacked during the Taliban regime because the militia believed weather forecasting was akin to sorcery, is back in business.
The Taliban, known for its strict code of Islamic conduct, did not even spare the Met, ransacking all its sophisticated equipment. Its 100-year-old weather records were set on fire.
The Met office is finally operational, partially though, and has resumed issuing weather forecasts.
"They were allergic to the word 'prediction' and of the view that only god can predict," said Abdul Qadeer, head of the Afghanistan Meteorological Authority.
"All our efforts to explain that meteorology is not prediction but is based on science met with scorn."
The weather office compound, located opposite the Kabul airport, is still littered with remnants of the Soviet era equipment. There are also plenty of shell castings, besides burnt out vehicles. A shelled radar unit occupies the building top.
The only functioning piece to survive from the Taliban days is a simple rain gauge, but with a bullet hole.
Ezad ullah Arefi, the director of the observatory, points to a mobile weather balloon launcher that lies burnt and sighs: "This was a very beautiful piece of equipment."
The disruption and deprivation of weather data to the aviators and farmers was a serious handicap and took a heavy toll.
An Ariana Afghan plane crashed in 1999 on a hilltop 15 km from Kabul airport, killing all 45 people on board, because it flew blindly from Kandahar to Kabul into an unexpected cloud, rain and snowstorm.
The Afghan farmers faced harrowing times due to the ban on weather forecasting as there were successive severe droughts in the 1990s.
Even before the Taliban's takeover in 1996, the weather office was severely battered in the violence among various warlords fighting for control over Kabul airport after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops in 1989.
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