New book, new ways to order

“I was around three or four years old when the Communists led the bloodiest coup in Afghanistan. KhAD personnel were arresting the faithful. One day, a few ugly moustached men knocked on our door. My father left with them and then he never came back. We never saw him again.

“After a year, I began to understand that this kind person was no longer with me. Poverty, a cold fireplace, and my old clothes made it evident – I was an orphan. Every man with a moustache looked like my father’s murderer. My uncle took us with him to another village, and we no longer had a home of our own.”

In this way Abdul Hai Mutma’in begins his memoir of time alongside the senior leadership of the Afghan Taliban movement. First published in Afghanistan a couple of years ago, Taliban: A Critical History from Within is now available for pre-order in an English translation.

Mutma’in served as a political advisor to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar and as spokesperson. He worked in the media section of Kandahar’s Culture and Information Ministry and from 2013 onwards served as a political and humanitarian affairs advisor to Mullah Akhtar Mansour from 2013. In short: he spent a good deal of time around the senior leadership and was privy to the internal workings and machinations of the Taliban movement at its highest levels.

At First Draft Publishing, the small publishing house I started five years ago together with Felix Kuehn, our explicit agenda is to publish books that will help “give researchers, professionals and the interested public access to primary and secondary sources”. This book falls firmly into this remit. The list of primary sources relating to the Taliban (or primary-source-adjacent) is exceedingly thin, even all these years since the movement first burst onto the national and international stage. From our perspective as researchers, the more such memoirs get written, the more we are able to attempt a critical unpicking of narratives and myths that have driven both conflict and efforts towards integration. Without these raw materials, it is impossible to begin the slow and methodical work of scholarship: triangulation, verification, context, synthesis and so on.

A bit of additional housekeeping: if you want to (pre-)order Mutma’in’s book, we have made some changes to how we’re producing and delivering books. We’re moving away from Amazon as the delivery system for our content and will simply process orders manually. For hardcopy purchases, we’ll be printing copies on demand. For ebooks, we’ll distribute DRM-free copies upon receipt of payment. If you’re interested in purchasing any of our books, please visit our website to learn more about our titles and email us to place an order.

In Afghanistan, watching someone learn to code for the first time

I recently had the opportunity to observe how a total newcomer to coding / computer programming starts their learning journey. She was embarking on this journey in Kabul, which brings some special considerations that I thought I’d outline here.

First off, coding in Afghanistan? I actually happen to think it’s not the worst thing someone could do with their time. Power outages and internet costs, while better than they were in previous years, still make the prospect of spending hundreds of hours learning skills a precarious proposition. (Outside Kabul, just to give some context, even big cities like Kandahar are starved of electricity. When I was down there recently we had a couple of hours per day at best.) But all that to one side, there’s a need for skilled professionals in the computer science / engineering world and there seems to be a decent amount of room for remote work. (Note that there’s some debate about the extent of the shortage but I don’t think it’s getting ahead of myself to suggest that proficiency in computer science will be a valuable skill in the years to come.)

If you are going through university in Afghanistan you’re teaching yourself anyway, to some extent. The quality of the tuition — even in some of the private universities — isn’t great and the job market doesn’t reward degree certificates; it rewards competency, something which you aren’t necessarily going to get from a degree / certificate. To use some of the free resources available online would seem like a smart option. Worst case, you make yourself a little more employable because you took some initiative and have skills to contribute to a new employer. Another scenario is that you have some skills you can market around the world, all from the convenience of your home.

All of this requires English. It’s an unfortunate fact that there really is no way round learning English if you want to teach yourself computer science skills. There are ways round it, especially at the beginning, but if you’re going to progress you’ll really have to have a decent level of competency at understanding technical documents / tutorials and the like. I wish it was otherwise, but that isn’t changing any time soon.

I wanted to recommend my friend learn via some resource that was at least partly in her native language, Dari / Persian. After all the fanfare of recent years about how young people are learning how to code around the world in a variety of languages, I was a bit disappointed at the options available. For Dari, there were basically no options. One site, code.org, had some initial courses that had been translated into Persian, but it was the Iranian version / dialect and this caused some problems in comprehending the instructions later on. Worse still, the courses were only half-translated. Videos in between units were in fast idiomatic English, with scenes and situations that seemed representative of some alien universe. Yes, it’s nice that Bill Gates was there to explain how variables work, but first let’s slow down and explain what a variable is, preferably without flashy graphics that don’t actually explain the topic.

There were various assumptions made about students’ experience and skills in mathematics. Early units in the code.org syllabus expect you to understand basic geometry and some algebra. I guess you have to start somewhere, but I wish there were ways of teaching this starting from an earlier baseline of understanding.

I had initially thought that a good way to get my friend thinking about some of the bigger issues would be to have her use a Raspberry Pi and handle some basic Linux administration but that ended up being too many new things at one time. Some of the much-vaunted tropes about learning to code really don’t make much sense.

One other practical problem turned out to be that code.org is a data-hog. My friend ended up having to spend a non-trivial amount of money recharging her 4G phone (from which to tether her laptop) because code.org used fancy javascript animations and who knows what else. I feel like this is a serious symptom of a blind spot in Silicon Valley’s efforts at some kind of cultural imperialism. They can’t imagine themselves into the shoes of a nascent coder, so they produce these bloated websites that mean that while someone can maybe code for an hour or two using fancy javascript animations, maybe they won’t be able to afford the hundreds of hours that it takes to become competent.

I feel like better skills to teach at this level are more fundamental: how do you figure out the answer to a problem? how do you solve problems in general? This is actually the real skill that you want someone to master, not whether they can get a turtle to draw a circle in 4 colours, and this skill is not taught at all in these courses. (A corollary: how do you find good / worthwhile problems? or how do you figure out what things are worth working on? None of this is taught at all).

The kind of education provided by sites like code.org gets it backward. In this way of seeing the world, you can get busy ‘learning to code’ but it won’t necessarily fit into your life and you can’t really make real progress without other external guidance and support. The dream of universal education for a young person in somewhere like Afghanistan, delivered by these kinds of programmes, seems more smoke and mirrors than a real ladder towards education and real skills.

Learn Pashto with Podcasts

It’s been several years since I’ve actively studied Pashto. I’m returning to a somewhat stale vocabulary base. In these cases, listening is one of the more useful ways to reactivate words I once knew, or to learn new words from scratch in context. Podcasts are usually a really useful way to get that active language practice. For most big languages you’re usually spoiled for choice (think French, Mandarin, or even Arabic) but Pashto has fewer options despite around 50 million people speaking it worldwide (source for estimates here and here).

Hardly any of these are directly available via a search on a good podcast client like Overcast so you’ll have to manually add whatever you like via the RSS feed.

There are a few options that I’ve managed to find so for the few souls who are also looking, perhaps this might be useful:

• CELCAR Pashto Language Learning Podcasts (RSS)

This is no longer updated but you can find a bunch of audio excerpts read out. They’re intended as language study materials so they’re a bit more user-friendly for the intermediate language learner.

• SBS Pashto

This is an Australian broadcaster that offers news and cultural reports regularly in podcast format. You can find it on Overcast by searching for ‘SBS Pashto’. Episodes are sometimes very local (i.e. tailored to Australian news) but it’s a regular source of input nonetheless.

• Voice of America Pashto Evening News

This podcast / broadcast is released in the evening (Afghan time) every day. Episodes last 30 minutes and are made up of various small news reports and sometimes interviews. It’s a good way to stay up to date with the news and also keep your formal media Pashto up to scratch. The reports and stories are usually pretty interesting and engagingly told.

• Da Pulay Poray Drama

This is a serialised drama produced by PACT Radio out of Jalalabad. Unfortunately they don’t offer episodes in RSS format so you are forced to either visit them at their Facebook page (ugh) or their own website and manually click to listen. The quality of the material and storytelling is excellent, however, so I usually try to listen in despite the shortcomings in the delivery method.

• RFE/RL Azadi Radio (RSS)

Radio Freedom - Radio Liberty offers a wide variety of their programmes for subscription as podcasts (via RSS). Some are more regularly updated than others but this is a useful and interesting set of materials to complement VOA’s more straightforward news broadcasts.

I will update this page as and when I discover more. One of the big missing pieces is BBC Pashto. I can’t seem to find any of their broadcasts / materials online in a subscribable format.

My new book: The Taliban Reader

My new book is out (finally). The Taliban Reader is somehow the culmination of years of work to drive studies of the Taliban back to primary sources. Some of this work was accidental; more recently it was more purposeful. The book I produced (together with Felix Kuehn) is long and detailed.

Comments and feedback prior to publication were extremely positive. It'll presumably take readers a while to start getting some real independent reviews in, but I look forward to feedback and whatever conversation is generated off the back of it all.

You can pick up a copy at any good bookshop or from Amazon here.

Fuzzy Searching and Foreign Name Recognition

Here's something that happens fairly often: I'll be reading something in a book and someone's name is mentioned. I'll think to myself that it'd be useful at this point to get a bit of extra information before I continue reading. I hop over to DevonThink to do a full-text search over all my databases. I let the search compute for a short while, but nothing comes up. I tweak the name slightly to see if a slightly different spelling brings more results. That works a bit better, but I have to tweak the spelling several times until I can really claim the search has been exhaustively performed.

Anyone who's done work in and on a place where a lot of material is generated without fixed spellings for transliteration. In Afghanistan, this ranges from people's names -- Muhammad, Mohammad, Muhammed, Mohammed etc -- to place and province names -- Kunduz, Konduz, Kondoz, Qonduz, Qhunduz etc.

DevonThink actually has a 'fuzzy search' option that you can toggle but it isn't clear to me how it works or whether it's reliable as a replacement for a more systematic approach.

As I'm currently doing more and more work using Python, I was considering what my options would be for making my own fuzzy search emulator.

My first thought was to be prescriptive about the various rules and transformations that happen when people make different spelling choices. The Kunduz example from above reveals that vowels are a key point of contention: the 'u' can also be spelt 'o'. The 'K' at the beginning could also, in certain circumstances, become 'Q' or 'Qh'. These various rules could then be coded in a system that would collect all the possible spelling variations of a particular string and then search the database for all the different variations.

Following a bit of duckduckgo-ing around, I've since learnt that there are quite extensive discussions of this problem as well as approaches to solution that have been proposed. One, commonly referenced, is a Python package called 'FuzzyWuzzy'; it uses a mathematical metric called the Levenshtein distance to measure how similar or not two strings are. I imagine that there are many other possible metrics that one could use to detect how much two strings resemble one another.

I imagine the most accurate solution is a mixture of both approaches. You want something that is agnostic about content in the case of situations where you don't have domain knowledge. (I happen to have read a lot of the materials relating to Afghanistan, so I know that these variations of names exist and that there is a single entity that unites the various spellings of Kunduz, for example). But you probably want to code in some common rules for things which come up often. (See this article, for example, on the confusion over spellings of Muslim names and how this leads to law enforcement mistakes).

I may end up coding up a version that has high accuracy on Afghan names because it's a scenario in which I often find myself, but I'll have to explore the other more mathematically-driven options to see if I can find a happy medium.

Tabula for extracting table data from PDFs

Have you ever come across a PDF filled with useful data, but wanted to play around with that data yourself? In the past if I had that problem, I'd type the table out manually. This has some disadvantages:

• it is extremely boring
• it's likely that mistakes will get made, especially if the table is long and extends over several pages
• it takes a long time

I recently discovered a tool that solves this problem: Tabula. It works on Windows and Mac and is very easy and intuitive to use. Simply take your page of data:

View fullsize

A page listing Kandahar's provincial council election polling stations from a few years back. Note the use of English and Dari scripts. Tabula handles all this without problems.

Then import the file into Tabula's web interface. It's surprisingly good at autodetecting where tables and table borders are, but you can do it manually if need be:

Then check that the data has been correctly scraped, select formats for export (from CSV to JSON etc):

And there you have it, all your data in a CSV file ready for use in R or Python or just a simple Excel spreadsheet:

Note that even though the interface runs through a browser, none of your data touches external servers. All the processing and stripping of data from PDFs is done on your computer, and isn't sent for processing to cloud servers. This is a really nice feature and I'm glad they wrote the software this way.

I haven't had any problems using Tabula so far. It's a great time saver. Highly recommended.

The Taliban on the Clintons (May 2000)

The US election is over; my work on materials deriving from the Taliban Sources Project continues. As I waded through the archives -- released in book form and online this coming spring -- I found this little gem. Published on May 22, 2000, in Shariat newspaper (the flagship publication that ran throughout the years of Taliban rule), this is a commentary piece on Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It ran with the headline, "Friend" in their op-ed section of the day:

According to reports Mrs Hillary Clinton is the candidate for US senate. 

Since long Hillary has been trying to fulfil this wish. But on one hand the accomplishment of her wish is a success for her, on the other hand it is a lethal blow to Mr. Clinton. As president of the country his days are numbered. After seven months he will no more be the president of the country. 

After the end of his tenure as president he must leave the Whitehouse. After his retirement from the post presidency the Whitehouse will no more be the place of entertainment for him and Monika. But Hillary is also not a weak lady who is totally dependent on Mr. Clinton. During his presidency she was continuously ignored because of Monika. 

Nowadays sometimes Mrs. Clinton is appears in very colourful poses beside vice president Al Gore in the media. One cannot blame her. She suffered a lot because of the Clinton and Monica affair. 

Our topic was her candidature for the senate. Now she spends considerable time in New York in order to increase the number of her voters and supporters. In her absence Mr. Clinton has to live totally alone. 

Their twenty year old daughter, Chelsea, is busy with her studies at the university. In front of the prosecutor he denied any relationship with Monika. That is why she is also no more interested to revive the old friendship with him. 

For a long time the American journalist were wondering how Mr. Clinton would manage to deal the days and nights of total loneliness. According to Reuter’s news agency finally these questions were also heard by Mr. Clinton himself. When he was departing in a helicopter from New York to Washington, Hillary demonstrated a very cold behaviour towards him. She left him alone. When the journalists asked Mr. Clinton about his loneliness, he replied that he would no more miss his wife Hilary, because he found a new very loyal friend who stays and sleeps all the time with him. He told that his new friend was his dog who was called Buddy. He further explained that he enjoys every moment of his life in the company of Buddy. 

The journalist fully believed what Mr. Clinton told them. However, for further validity he quoted the former US president Henry Truman who once said “if a person wants to have a loyal friend in Washington he must find a dog, which remains loyal in all circumstances and never leave his owner alone”. 

Mr. Clinton prefers his dog, Buddy, over his wife, Hilary. Because his dog is an animal which is free of all human characterises but always remain fully loyal to his owner. It does not matter for the dog whether his owner the US president or the Whitehouse gatekeeper. He fulfils his loyalty to the extreme end. This kind of loyalty is neither in the capacity of Hilary, Monica nor any other western lady.

This piece didn't make the cut for the print anthology / reader, so I am publishing the translation here in full.

Reading the Taliban: Himal Magazine article

An article I wrote for Himal Magazine back in 2014 has just been released on their website in a digital format. It’s a bit dated, and there have since been a number of significant developments in terms of the availability of primary sources, but I wouldn’t change the overall shape of the argument. The nub of what I tried to say was this:

“These sources allow for a far fuller and rounded portrayal of the Taliban, both as individuals and as a movement. It is only through understanding the viewpoints of those in senior leadership positions – as expressed in statements, poems or internal memos – that one can arrive at an understanding of why certain decisions were taken, and get more of a sense of the Taliban’s social identity. It is not enough to view the Taliban through an Islamist lens, or a Pashtun lens for that matter. From the 1980s onwards, the Taliban’s identity was subject to change, with different groups and individuals following different paths in the ever-changing environment the movement found itself in. These processes continued after 9/11, and a nuanced and detailed understanding of the evolution of the Taliban and their identity will prove to be a valuable and instructive exercise.”

This also happens to be the justification for my current work finishing up The Taliban Reader, a sourcebook and reference tool which will hit bookshelves in the spring. For the full Himal article, go here.

Kael Weston on Sources and Methods

Matt and I put out a new episode of Sources and Methods podcast today. We spoke to Kael Weston, discussing his time spent living in Fallujah, the importance of speaking the language of the place in which you work, as well as the political systems countries like the USA employ in far-off places like Iraq and Afghanistan. He also recently wrote a book, The Mirror Test, which is worth reading. You can find the episode over on iTunes or listen directly on the Sources and Methods website.

On the demise of afghanistannewscenter.com

Earlier this year, without any fanfare, a truly great resource and archive relating to Afghanistan's recent past went offline.

The AfghanistanNewsCenter wasn't very well known, and it doesn't seem to have done too much to publicise its activities. The founder -- Fawad Ahmad Muslim -- as far as I've been able to figure out, simply kept updating the site as more news came in. I subscribed to his Yahoo Groups newsletter since at least 2007. If I search through my database of reports published on Afghanistan, many (many) of them include links to stories made available through afghanistannewscenter.com so I'm sure it wasn't just me who used it.

At its core, its mission was very simple: gather together all the English-language reporting on Afghanistan (from wire services, magazines and also sometimes press releases) and store it in a database. This database was browseable by date, and the archive went back to 1992. With a bit of Google Kung Fu, you could even perform text searches on the full archive, getting year-by-year outputs of articles about a particular person or place.

As a researcher without the backing of a large institution, affording me access to resources like LexisNexis and the like, AfghanistanNewsCenter was an essential and valuable part of my resource quiver. I think I must have used it to research pretty much every project that I've produced since first arriving in Afghanistan in 2004, from the bigger books to research papers and my own newspaper articles.

A few months ago, I noticed that the site went down. I've been unable to contact the owner, even though there is a sort of ghost remnant (presumably automated) version on Facebook, which posts recent wire copy articles. Needless to say, Facebook being Facebook, there's no way to do anything useful with the articles on that page, and the more useful google-driven searches by year and by keyword are impossible. I am pretty sure that most of the archive wasn't even stored on Facebook in this way.

So this is just a paean to a resource that's now lost to us. All the articles still exist, thankfully, distributed across a thousand different news outlets and services, and you can still collate all these together, but the ability to search and index these articles is now lost to us. Its sudden and unexpected demise should, moreover, offer a lesson to others who hope to offer such services in the future.Please, PLEASE, find a way to ensure that these useful services are managed so as to be sustainable over the long-term. Even if this means finding an institutional home for the data, it'll be worth it over the long-term.

Coming Soon: The Taliban Reader

Hot off the press. Hurst Publishers (my publisher for My Life With the Taliban, An Enemy We Created and Poetry of the Taliban) just released their spring/summer catalogue. As always, some great titles in the works.

Felix and I have our own humble contribution to scholarship on the Afghan Taliban: The Taliban Reader: War, Islam and Politics In Their Own Words. I'll add a link here to somewhere online where you can pre-order, but the blurb runs as follows:

Who are the Taliban? Are they a militant movement? Are they religious scholars? The fact that these and other questions are still raised is testimony to the way the movement has been studied, often at arm’s length and with scant use of primary sources.

The Taliban Reader forges a new path, bringing together an extensive range of largely unseen sources in a guide to the Afghan Islamist movement from a unique insider perspective. Ideal for students, journalists and scholars alike, this book is the result of an unprecedented, decade-long effort to encourage the emergence of participant-centred accounts of Afghan history.

This ground-breaking collection, ranging from news articles and opinion pieces to online publications and poems transcribed by hand in the field, sets the stage for a recalibration of how we understand and study the Afghan Taliban. It challenges researchers to forge new norms in the documentation of conflict and provides insight into the future trajectory of political Islamism in South Asia and the Middle East.

I'm really excited to have this project (somewhat soon) available. As noted in the blurb, it's the product of years of work, not to mention collaboration with various friends and colleagues.

I'll be writing more about the book closer to the release date (and once it's actually finished and submitted to the publishers).

Starting the Spaced Repetition Foundation

When I first learned about the idea of spaced repetition, I felt like I'd discovered a magic trick or a secret of some kind. Here was a piece of research that could transform how quickly I learned new words (I was studying Pashto at the time) and how well I recalled them. On the other side of that elation, I felt a simultaneous frustration and sense of disappointment that this piece of pedagogy / educational science hadn't come up before in my schooling career. All those vocab cards I'd created for my BA degree in Arabic and Farsi! So much inefficiency! Not to mention all the things I had studied at primary and secondary school. Most of that specific knowledge remains but it is like the shadow of its original form. I've recently started studying Maths again and I'm painfully aware just how much I've forgotten.

Spaced repetition is a principle that advocates a specific series of intervals between reviews of a particular fact or 'thing' that you want to memorise. A German scholar called Herman Ebbinghaus discovered that there is a pattern to how most humans learn and forget materials, and he outlined a specific algorithm to ensure optimum recall and retention of whatever you are trying to learn. For that, we must be thankful for the (seemingly) boring experiments he had to go through to get to that piece of insight.

Anki is a piece of software that manages your study and recall of individual pieces of information. The spaced repetition algorithm or insight is at the core of how Anki works and helps you. I've used Anki to learn languages, to memorise smaller facts and useful pieces of information, to cement my understanding of broader concepts, among other things. It's pretty adaptable to whatever your specific learning needs are. This is why I've stuck with Anki over its competitors. (I've tried pretty much all of them, and continue to do so, but Anki remains the most customisable and useful IMHO).

Over the years, I've had the privilege to share Anki with others along my travels. Sometimes this has come in the context of language learning, other times like with the friend who wanted to learn all the names of all the bones in the human body.

In fact, Anki was the original bridge or glue that started my friendship with Matt Trevithick, Sources and Methods co-host and all-round busy person. I walked into his office in Kabul -- he was working at the American University of Afghanistan at the time -- and spied a huge stack of flashcards in a box in the corner. I pointed to them and he explained with great pride how he'd learnt them all. We talked through his process a bit and soon enough I was singing the praises of Anki and how much time he'd save and...and...

We've had many conversations over the years relating to language-learning, the different ways Anki can be used and our overwhelming and continuing sense of disbelief that the principles of spaced repetition aren't more widely adopted in the field of education. People who get deep into self-study eventually stumble on SRS, since you often try to find ways to get faster or better in the absence of a teacher telling you what to do. The Quantified Self movement has been instrumental in spreading the gospel of SRS, too, in their special sessions devoted to the topic in their yearly conference, or through the pride-of-place given to show-and-tell explanations of how SRS has allowed someone to learn Chinese, or hieroglyphics or so on. (Click here for the QS list of talks referencing SRS. I'd highly recommend dipping your toe into some of these talks. Most are extremely engaging.)

Bringing matters up to the present day, I have a bit more time and bandwidth for focus now that the PhD is finished and Matt and I had been talking about this sense that more people should be using SRS for a few years, so we have finally bitten the bullet and started something to try to make that happen.

The Spaced Repetition Foundation is our institutional first step to start to spread the lessons to a broader audience and to more varied contexts. Our mission statement reads:

"The Spaced Repetition Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit center, is dedicated to advancing the adoption of spaced repetition as a supplementary learning tool.

"Despite the scientifically proven ability of spaced repetition to vastly increase the retention of information in the brain as a supplemental learning tool, the use of this technique is, at present, largely restricted to select individuals and students for personal enhancement or academic achievement. To date, no single center exists to advocate for the increased adoption of this approach in educational settings at the macro level, to increase public awareness of this useful tool, and to serve as a focal point for interested individuals to come together and work on these issues. 

"Attempting to solve this problem, Natalie, Alex and Matt, long-time users of spaced-repetition applications, decided in the summer of 2016 to start the Spaced Repetition Foundation, which seeks to function as an independent advocate dedicated to increasing the adoption of spaced-repetition technology wherever learning is happening."

Note that we are not completely and exclusively technology-centric in our approach. At least part of the work involves outreach, involves testing use cases and scenarios, and if it really is to find a place in the broader world (away from electricity and flashy phones, perhaps) it must be adaptable to low-tech or no-tech approaches.

Going forward, we'll be spreading the word about the science behind spaced repetition (spoiler: it works), ways everyone can use some form of review-recall testing in their lives, and generally galvanising different communities to find ways to rethink their approaches to knowledge acquisition and long-term recall through spaced repetition. We have some specific first steps planned, but I'll hold off with those details until they are more pertinent.

I'm extremely glad, too, that we will get to work with Natalie McKnight, the other co-founder, who brings a wealth of institutional and practical educational experience beyond simply the solitary learner that Matt and I represent. Natalie is Professor of Humanities and Dean of the College of General Studies at Boston University. I'm excited to work together with her to expand the kinds of communities and settings we can reach.

If you have any interest in the work we're doing, please sign up for our newsletter here or if you are interested in learning more, please do get in touch. Full details are available on our website at http://www.spacedrepfoundation.org.

Learn all the districts of Afghanistan with Anki!

A friend was asking about using Anki to learn to recognise the districts of Afghanistan so I made her a deck that provides tests in the following way;

On the front of the card the question is presented along with a computer-generated audio pronunciation of the district name:

Then if you know it, you'll answer Badakhshan and then you'll click/tap through to the next screen to see if you got it right. You'll see this:

Then you can mark whether you got it right or not. There are around 400 districts to learn, so if you learn 13-15 new cards each day you'll finish the whole lot in a month.

Why learn all the districts of Afghanistan? Sometimes you'll hear someone talking about a particular place or part of the country, and without knowing which province they're talking about you might not understand the context or the conversation. Plus, a little bit of geography never hurt anyone.

Give it a try. And let me know if you manage to complete the deck. You can download the full Anki file here. Enjoy!