Afghanistan News October 31, 2003

October 31, 2003

Pakistan Struggles to Seal Porous Afghan Border By Amir Zia
CHAMAN (Reuters) - A Pakistani border guard peers through Soviet-era binoculars across a vast, dusty plain to mountains on the horizon, looking for signs of Taliban and al Qaeda guerrillas along the Afghan frontier. He and others like him are trying to do what has never been done before -- halt the free movement of people across the porous border.

As part of the U.S.-led war on terror, Pakistan has built new posts, dug trenches, put up fences and bulldozed buildings in a bid to stem illegal border crossings in both directions. But Pakistan still stands accused by Afghanistan of not doing enough to stop Islamic militants launching attacks from its soil, after a wave of violence in Afghanistan blamed on the ousted Taliban militia and al Qaeda network claimed hundreds of lives.

Officials in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province say they need more resources to do the job properly along the rugged 720-mile frontier that tribesmen have been crossing with impunity since it was first drawn across the desert and mountains in the 19th century.

"We want to make 100 percent sure that there is no illegal cross-border movement," Maj.-Gen. Shaukat Sultan, military spokesman, told Reuters. "We have done a lot to ensure this, but a lot more needs to be done as the border is vast, the terrain inhospitable and we have few resources."

The task is easier said than done. The unmarked Durand Line was drawn up in 1893 between British India and Afghanistan through Pashtun tribal lands. The Pashtuns and nomads were allowed to cross the border -- which to them was no more than a line on a map -- without documents.

This tradition was reinforced in the 1980s when Pakistan became a base for U.S.-sponsored Afghan fighters battling a Soviet army of occupation. Millions of Afghan refugees poured into Pakistan and the Islamic militants fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan crossed freely. But the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States changed all that.

U.S.-led forces drove the Taliban from power and many of them and their al Qaeda friends fled to Pakistani border regions. Now Pakistan has to try and curb their operations. Sadaqat Ali Shah, chief of the Frontier Constabulary, said despite the difficulties, the border had been effectively manned.

"There is a border post after almost every kilometer -- even in the remotest of regions and high mountain peaks," he told reporters on a recent trip to Baluchistan's border. "Large scale movement is impossible. But some undetected movement may occur, which we are trying to stop. "But the problem is that the deployment is only on our side. Afghans have very few men on their side."

Sultan said more than 90 percent of tribal areas had been brought under surveillance. "But we need a lot more communication equipment and aerial surveillance which would end the need to keep forces on the ground."

At Ghati China, a remote mountain area northwest of Chaman, posts have been set up well above 7,700 feet. "During winters, there is snow all around," Shah said. "It takes a lot of effort to keep men at such points."

At Chaman, a main border crossing where up to 6,000 people and hundreds of trucks cross daily, authorities have bulldozed hundreds of mud-walled buildings along the border to monitor it more effectively. Tribesmen have been issued with red passes they show to cross the border. Guards search them and their baggage for weapons, causing long queues and some grumbling.

Rozi Khan, 38, a resident of Chaman, said going to see relatives and friends in Afghanistan's Kandahar city had become difficult. "In the past we simply used to walk into Afghanistan," he said. "Now one has to waste time waiting in queues."

Shah said more than 60 foreigners were arrested recently for crossing illegally but he declined to give details. Conservative Pakistani Islamic groups also criticize the tighter border controls, saying the government is just trying to please the Americans.

"The majority of the people oppose this policy," said Maulvi Noor Mohammed, a member of parliament from the pro-Taliban Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, referring to Pakistani support for U.S.-led military operations.

"When the Taliban were in power our border was secure, but now troops have to be deployed there," he said. "In the name of al Qaeda they are conducting operations in tribal areas to please the Americans."

But military officials said such opposition posed little challenge to the anti-terror campaign. "The majority of people are opposed to extremism," Sultan said. "On the whole our society is moderate and efforts are being made to root out the small extremist elements."

Focus on bilateral border dispute
IRIN 10/30/2003
Senior Pakistani, Afghan and US diplomats and military officials jointly visited the Pakistan-Afghanistan border last Saturday to ascertain where the boundary should lie, according to a US army statement issued from the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan on Wednesday.

Mandated by a six-month-old tripartite commission tasked with resolving problems on the controversial border, the officials visited four border posts on the Afghan side in Nangarhar Province, having earlier visited the area in July to confirm locations, confirmed by satellite pictures, for three Pakistani posts, the statement said.
But the task of the tripartite commission formed by the US to resolve border disputes between Pakistan and Afghanistan, two key allies in the US-led war on terrorism, seemed to have become a "mapping exercise", according to one analyst.

"The commission seems to be arguing about local, technical disputes. What I've heard from sources seems to suggest that it's become a bit of a mapping exercise, more than anything else," Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and author of the best-selling book, Taliban, told IRIN from the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore.
Formed in June to resolve security issues between its member states, the commission has already held meetings in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the issue of a colonial-era border demarcation, already the cause of much public acrimony between the two countries, still, somehow controversially, unresolved.

Security was the top priority when the two sides talked about border issues, but, despite remaining concerns, as a member of the tripartite commission, he felt a balanced and positive attitude from the Pakistani side in their last meeting, Helaluddin Helal, the Afghan deputy interior minister, told IRIN in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

"I believe the international community's pressure has made the Pakistani government act responsibly: that is why they have received our factual criticism, or claim, and promised to look at it. This was not the case in the past," he maintained.

"This is an old issue that won't go away so soon. It is a controversy that will take some time before it is resolved. Perhaps, the involvement of the United States will facilitate a solution," the veteran journalist, Rahimullah Yusufzai, told IRIN from his village near Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) town of Mardan.
However, as the executive editor of the Peshawar bureau of The News, an English broadsheet, Yusufzai said he did not think that a proper solution could be worked out until Afghanistan elected its first post-conflict government in June 2004. "Until a proper government is elected next year, this commission can prepare maps, exchange views and prepare the ground for the new government," he noted, pointing to the fact that the Hamid Karzai-led, US-backed government was still only an "interim administration".

The issue at stake is a border delineation agreed to in 1893 between Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, then foreign secretary in British India, and the king of Afghanistan. The Afghan government says the agreement, separating British India from Afghanistan along what is known as the Durand Line, was valid only for 100 years and expired in 1993. The Pakistani government consistently maintains that there is no dispute and that the Pakistan-Afghanistan border stands as it always has, without doubt.

"These two countries are existing side by side since 1947. There is no Durand Line - it is finished. As far as we're concerned, it is a story of the past. There is just the Pakistan-Afghanistan border," Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan, the Pakistani presidential spokesman, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad.

Last week, after Pakistan announced it had begun fencing its border with Afghanistan, Sultan told a private television channel that the move had been considered necessary to block the infiltration of Islamic militants into Afghanistan. "It shall also clearly mark the border," he stated, but declined to reveal how long the fence was going to be.

The Durand Line is said not to have been in doubt when Pakistan was established in 1947. However, in later years, the legitimacy of Pakistan's 2,250-km border with Afghanistan came to be questioned periodically by successive Afghan governments, with Pakhtun tribes, which straddle both sides of the border, also chipping in with their demand for a provision allowing easier access to each other.

It was usual for countries sharing borders to have some disputes or misunderstandings, Abdul Hamid Mubarez, the Afghan deputy information and culture minister, told IRIN in the capital, Kabul. "But we live in the contemporary world and this is not a time of land occupations or intrusions; in fact, it is a time of coexistence, reconciliation and negotiation," Mubarez, a famous journalist active for 50 years, added, saying he believed the dispute could be solved through talks.

"Border problems erupt mainly when the people on both sides of a border are from the same tribes and they sometimes end up with tension and disputes among them," he said, pointing out that both Pakistan's and Afghanistan's closely linked economic interests should serve to facilitate the resolution of political issues through "comprehension and understanding".

"Actually, this controversy has existed for over 100 years. The people in the tribal areas were opposed to the Durand Line, because kin were separated from each other, most families were divided by it," Haji Adeel, a former Speaker of the NWFP provincial assembly, told IRIN from the province's capital, Peshawar. "The Pakhtuns want to be together, they want that there should be no geographical division among them."

"[The Durand Line] was not a natural border of Afghanistan, but an imposed border by Britain to protect its boundaries from Russia. History proves that the land beyond the Durand Line was a part of Afghanistan, but we are not raising - and have never raised - land claims," Mubarez stressed.

"We have always been asking that the destiny of the Pashtuns and the Baluchis on the other side of the border should be specified, and, if today, Pashtuns and Baluchis themselves want to live on the other side, we have no objection," he maintained.

A spokesman for the US-led coalition forces hunting for remnants of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network in Afghanistan said the tripartite commission's meetings had made useful achievements. "One of the achievements is good communication that did not exist in the past," Col Davis Rodney told IRIN in Kabul.

Better communication helped in facilitating operations being conducted along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan, he said. "We are being assisted by Pakistan in the east; that is certainly a positive development," Rodney stressed.

Thousands of Pakistani troops have been deployed in the rugged, mountainous hinterlands of the NWFP and the southwestern province of Balochistan, both of which border Afghanistan, to hunt for escaped Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders thought to have taken refuge in Pakistan's semi-autonomous Tribal Areas. The presence of the troops is also considered essential to efforts to thwart the suspected movement of militants across border terrain that is difficult to police, Pakistani authorities have said.

The tribal agencies of North Waziristan and South Waziristan, both of which lie just across the border from the three "flashpoint" Afghan provinces of Paktia, Paktika and Khowst, have been cited as likely sanctuaries for Al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives for over two years, Yousufzai wrote in an analysis for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in early October.

"Their Pashtun population is largely sympathetic to the mainly Pashtun Taliban," he wrote, pointing out that the three adjacent Afghan provinces, mainly inhabited by Pashtun tribes, were the most dangerous for coalition soldiers, with missile attacks on coalition bases and convoy ambushes almost a matter of daily routine.

"The only problem we have is the concern of cross-border terrorism by the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies, who are trained and given money in Pakistan," Asadullah Wafa, the governor of Afghanistan's Paktia Province, told IRIN.

With over 10 million Pashtun citizens of its own, Pakistan sought to offset Afghan territorial claims and rejections of the Durand Line as an international border by supporting Afghan Islamic parties, beginning in the early 1970s, an International Crisis Group (ICG) report said in August.

Many Afghans believed that Pakistan had exacerbated the ethnic component of the bilateral conflict by pursuing a lopsided policy of supporting Pashtun Islamic rule, the ICG report added, referring to Islamabad's perceived need for a stable western border, the acquisition of strategic depth against India and the prospect of using Afghanistan as a gateway to Central Asian markets sharpening its resolve to support the Taliban despite heavy political, diplomatic and economic costs.

"Pakistan cannot be connected to rich Central Asia without a friendly Afghanistan, and Afghanistan cannot send Central Asian products outside without having good relations with Pakistan," Mubarez said, noting that this was a critical issue for both countries. "We have no alternative but to seek solutions through discussions. We cannot be separated from each other. If there is a united Europe today, we should also work in the region to get closer," he added.

Moreover, the hunt for resurgent Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants provided a specific reason for Pakistani military presence on the border, Mubarez said. "We also want to get rid of [the Taliban]. So, in short, I should say that a special and complicated situation exists which requires patience and tolerance," he added.

However, the presence of over 60,000 troops in the lawless Tribal Areas has not been without negative incidents. Soon after Pakistan decided to send military forces into the Mohmand Agency in search of Al-Qaeda members in late June - prompting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to boast during a tour of the US, UK, Germany and France that this was the first time in over a century that such a force had entered that area - the Afghan government accused Pakistan of "intruding into Afghan territory" and setting up border posts inside Afghanistan.

One claim said Pakistani forces had moved as much as 40 km into Afghan territory, a charge that incited a large and incensed mob to attack the Pakistani embassy in Kabul in early July. Soon thereafter, sporadic firing by Afghan and Pakistani forces from their border outposts at each other increased in volume, and authorities on both sides moved swiftly to contain the damage before it snowballed into full-blown conflict.

"The recurring exchange of fire between Pakistani and Afghan troops along their common border comes as a powerful wake-up call, marking a considerable deterioration in the already half-frosty ties between the two countries," Farhan Bokhari, a leading Pakistani analyst, wrote in the popular Gulf News, soon after the first border skirmish in July.

Karzai apologised for the incident and offered compensation for the damage suffered by the mission, but reiterated his claim that Pakistani forces had intruded "about 600 metres into Afghan territory", backing down from Kabul's earlier assertion of forces having penetrated 40 km into Afghanistan, the Dawn daily, a leading English broadsheet, reported at the end of July.

Soon afterwards, the newspaper quoted a senior Pakistani official as saying Pakistani forces had not crossed the border. "In fact, we are minus one kilometre from the zero line," it quoted the official as saying.

"The initial claim was an alleged intrusion by Pakistani troops 500 to 600m into Afghanistan," Sultan said, adding that the tripartite commission was set up when the issue was raised, and following Pakistan's vehement denial.

"As far as we're concerned, nowhere and never have Pakistani troops intruded into Afghan territory," he asserted, adding that the commission had then set up a sub-committee which visited both sides of the border to ascertain for itself the state of affairs and then presented its findings at a recent meeting in Rawalpindi. The commission was scheduled to meet again in mid-November, in Kabul, he added.

"The committee is using all the instruments available, through satellites and on the ground, to establish the correct state of affairs," Sultan stated, referring to a satellite-based Global Positioning System introduced in late July to work out coordinates and match these to maps to resolve the problem.

Then, at a detailed briefing at the Pakistan army's corps headquarters in Peshawar, attended by Afghan representatives, US military officials and senior Pakistani civil servants, "the Afghans brought Russian maps of the [Pakistani-Afghan] border, the Americans had their own maps and we gave them ours," Dawn quoted one Pakistani senior official as saying.

"I think that's partly the reason the problem exists," Yusufzai said, referring to the British maps used by Pakistan and the Russian maps produced by Afghanistan. "They both have different delineations, so, obviously, there's going to be a difference of opinion," he noted.

Then, after a tripartite commission meeting held in Bagram in mid-August, the Afghan government requested US mediation in ensuring that a re-demarcation of the Durand Line was done - a request quickly shot down by Pakistan, which termed it "unacceptable" in a communiqué to the Kabul administration, another leading Pakistani English broadsheet, The Nation, reported.

"[Pakistan] had conveyed to Kabul that the present Afghan government was interim and, as such, had no authority to touch such a significant matter," the newspaper said, adding that the Afghan government wanted the mandate of the commission to be expanded to empower it to make decisions.

Ahmed Rashid agreed, pointing out that while the Commission is "certainly a high-powered crew, what is needed is a bigger mandate". "It should be one that has some political powers," he said, warning that, otherwise, the "sensitive issue" would just linger on.

"The Afghans don't see the issue as we do, and Pakistan can't take its position unilaterally. If it does, it would be ignoring the feelings of the Afghans," he said."That is the real problem: there is a lack of trust," agreed Yusufzai.

"The real question is: why didn't the Pakistan government get a pliant government - that's the Taliban - to do something about it when they were in power?" Rashid asked, adding that it was important to put into perspective the fact that there was a big power-play going on in Kabul. "The hardliners want him [Karzai] to take a tougher line and therefore, every time this issue crops up, they stand to see Karzai get embarrassed. They want to embarrass him politically into taking a stand he might not do otherwise," he said.

Afghan campaign trail barely trod by Karzai
The Christian Science Monitor. 10/30/03 Scott Baldauf
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – From his spacious but sparse home in Kabul, Homayoun Assefy is engineering the unimaginable: an Afghanistan without Hamid Karzai as president. Mr. Assefy's methods are democratic. Through his new royalist party, the National Unity Movement of Afghanistan, Assefy is gathering multiethnic support to restore some constitutional role for the monarchy of King Zahir Shah, who was deposed more than 30 years ago. Assefy is himself a first cousin of the king. Assefy says he worries that Karzai's credibility - and by extension, America's - is slipping because of the slow rate of reconstruction. Without change, he argues, Afghanistan could revert to chaos and war.

"This is a risky policy to put all the eggs in one basket. Mr. Karzai - he has lost his popularity, his credibility, his legitimacy," says the businessman and former fighter against the Soviets. "But even knowing this, the Americans are saying Karzai must be the next president. If this government fails, we could replace it. But if the Americans fail and leave Afghanistan, then it would be the end of all hope."

With most of the old powerbrokers preparing for next year's planned elections, it's curious that the only person who seems unprepared is Karzai. While the transitional president spent the past few months traveling the globe seeking aid, communists reformed their party, former anti-Soviet commanders met to create a common platform, and now the royalists have begun to enlist members. Even some of Karzai's supporters warn that time is running out to set up a campaign network.
"There is no question that the US will support Karzai," says Shahmahmood Miakhel, a senior official in the Interior Ministry and a friend of Karzai's. "But without a platform, without a network of supporters, without a political party, it is hard to reach the hearts and minds of people and very difficult to implement your programs." Another friend of Karzai's is more abrupt. "Either he hasn't thought about the election or he hasn't told people about it," says the high-level official. "Neither possibility is good."

While US officials say the White House supports the transitional government, rather than specifically its president, foreign diplomats here say that American policy depends heavily on the continued rule of the US-leaning Karzai. The incoming US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, has projected Karzai as the only man to bring continuity and stability in the face of Taliban and Al Qaeda attacks. But inside the 1,500-year-old walled city of Kabul, where whispered intrigues and secret plots are as common as loaves of flat Afghan bread, Afghan politicians themselves seem determined to talk about alternatives.

The most serious threat to Karzai's hold on power came last month with a series of meetings between top mujahideen, the Islamic resisters of Soviet rule. In the meetings held in the homes of commander Abdul Rasool Sayaaf, Defense Minister Mohammed Qasim Fahim, and former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the commanders shared their concerns over the growing American influence over the Karzai government, and the coming policy of disarmament that would disband the several hundred thousand militia soldiers under their private control.

At the final meeting, Marshal Fahim and his Northern Alliance commanders nominated Mr. Rabbani to be the mujahideen's presidential candidate, but other commanders reportedly withheld support.

The fact that the meeting took place during Karzai's September trip to the United Nations General Assembly meeting, gave rise to rumors of a possible coup d'état. While Fahim later denied any plans for a coup, peacekeepers of the International Security and Assistance Force rolled out in tanks to protect the presidential palace, nonetheless.

On his return, Karzai passed a new law that banned any acting military commander from participating in the coming elections. "The commanders want to ensure that the next government of Afghanistan should be based on Islam," one participating commander told the Monitor privately. "They don't want this country to be turned into a colony of the US."

As yet, there is no announced date for the coming national elections, where the UN hopes to register some 10.5 million voters, most of them casting votes for the first time ever. US and UN officials insist that elections will be held next year, as required by the 2001 Bonn conference. But some political observers speculate that the country may end up holding only presidential elections next year, postponing the selection of parliament to 2005.

In the meantime, other observers say Karzai desperately needs to turn to the business of setting up a party and spelling out his plans for the country. "He needs to come up with a platform and then make the Afghan people feel that this is their platform," says Luis Sobalvarro, area officer for the International Republican Institute, a branch of the US Republican Party that funds democracy projects. "If he doesn't reach out to the Afghans, then somebody else will."

"In some parts of the country, the Taliban are making inroads because they're in regions where there is no governmental presence," says Mr. Sobalvarro. "This lack of a government presence may have to do with security problems, but the Afghan villagers understand it as neglect."

For his part, the royalist politician Assefy says the problem lies in the fact that the Karzai government doesn't have the legitimacy to pull the country back from the brink of ruin. The only man who can do that, Assefy says, is the elderly king. "In Afghanistan, legitimacy is more important than legality," Assefy says. "If you don't have legitimacy, you won't have the cooperation of the people."

Afghan militias assisting U.S. accused of abuse
Los Angeles Times 10/30/2003 Paul Watson
DAI CHOPAN - Villagers with broken limbs, deep cuts and severe bruises say Afghan militia fighters working as guides for U.S. troops went on a spree of looting, beatings and torture during a military sweep last week. The militiamen, wearing U.S. military camouflage fatigues and carrying assault rifles, frequently guide U.S. troops on searches for Taliban and al-Qaida rebels.

None of about 50 villagers who described abuses in interviews, or who were questioned at an elders meeting, said U.S. forces witnessed the assaults or thefts. A U.S. military spokesman said he had no reports of unprofessional conduct by militias operating under U.S. control.

But villagers in Dai Chopan tell another story. Militiamen broke a woman's shoulder with a rifle butt and tortured her two adult sons until they blacked out, one son said in an interview Saturday. The other son had not regained consciousness.

Others described assaults and systematic looting during a weeklong operation. The militiamen, loyal to warlords in Kandahar, 70 miles to the southwest, complain that their commanders rarely pay them. They allegedly stole cash, jewelry, watches, radios, three motorcycles — even the mud-brick school's windows and doors — before leaving Saturday.

"These people are robbing us, torturing us and beating us," said Sultan Mohammed, a village elder. "They are also taking innocent people to jail." U.S. troops have conducted three search operations in the village over the past several months, said Mohammed, 50. Each time, he said, they brought the militia fighters, who followed Americans' orders during house-to-house searches and arrests and — each time — beat and robbed villagers.

"They stand with the Americans, and when Americans leave an area, then the militias go by another route and rob the houses," Mohammed said. The militia members are loyal to Kandahar warlords Haji Granai, Haji Habibullah Jan and Toar Jan, whose brutality during Afghanistan's civil war in the early 1990s was among factors that led Afghans to support the Taliban takeover.

Mohammed and others said the village had no quarrel with the new Afghan army's Central Corps force, dominated by ethnic Tajiks and other northern Afghans. But they see militia fighters, who like the villagers are Pashtun, as vicious criminals.

Afghan militiamen "are placed under the (U.S.-led) coalition's tactical control from time to time" but are released to their normal militia commanders "upon completion of a predetermined action or time period," said Col. Rodney Davis, the U.S. military's chief spokesman at Bagram air base, north of Kabul.

"The coalition enjoys a great relationship with the Afghan people," Davis added Monday in a brief e-mail reply to a request for a detailed interview on the allegations. "The coalition is reasonably sure — virtually certain Afghan militia forces conduct themselves in a professional manner while operating under coalition control and we've had no reports to the contrary."

John Sifton, Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, said U.S. commanders would be legally responsible if there was a pattern of abuse by the militias and Americans did nothing to stop it. "The question is: Should they have known about it?" Sifton said from New York. "If they were closing their eyes to it willfully, it's just as if they knew. If they honestly, and earnestly, did not know, that is a defense."

Washington help in Pukhtunistan issue sought
Dawn, Pakistan 10/30/2003
Pakistan is believed to have asked the Bush administration to prevent the Afghan government from reopening the Pukhtunistan issue, sources told Dawn on Wednesday. "Some Pakistanis see Washington's dark influence behind new agitation for the creation of Pukhtunistan " an attempt to unite the Pukhtun tribes divided by the Afghan-Pakistan frontier," writes Washington-based British journalist Martin Walker in a recent column published in several US newspapers.

The sources say that Pakistan's complaints began after a new map published in Kabul showed NWFP and Balochistan, including the cities of Peshawar and Quetta, incorporated into Afghanistan. Mr Walker's column also mentions "secret talks" with American blessing, between Afghan leader Hamid Karzai and Khan Abdul Wali Khan, whose father coined the term Pukhtunistan."

Diplomatic sources in Washington say that while the Americans deny any involvement in the Pukhtunistan issue, they are not averse to the re-emergence of Pukhtun nationalism in Pakistan's Pukhtun belt. "They believe that a secular, nationalist ideology can effectively counter the growing influence of religious parties in Pukhtun areas," said a senior Western diplomat based in Washington.

Freed From Taleban Rule, Afghans Savor Life But Worry About Future
VOA 10/30/03 Ed Warner
Kabul - Kites banned by the Taleban are now floating over rooftops in Kabul, a conspicuous sign of the return of freedom to harshly suppressed Afghans. And there are many other signs: women can show their faces and men can shave their beards without fear of lashing or imprisonment by the patrolling vice-virtue squad. Music can be heard around the city, movies viewed. Newspapers are abundant. There is a perpetual traffic jam on once deserted streets. And no more public executions or mutilations.

There is a palpable sense of relief that can be seen on countless faces. Opportunities beckon and Afghans are flocking home from abroad to seize them. Many foreigners are contributing to the new mood and the new economy of unfettered enterprise. Afghanistan is once again moving.

Still a cloud of uncertainty remains. How long can the good times last considering a fractious government whose writ does not extend much beyond Kabul and continued attacks from Taleban remnants and others who enjoy sanctuary across the border in Pakistan?

If the foreign forces, above all Americans, decide to leave, many Afghans say the feuding local commanders or warlords will once again start fighting and in the ensuing chaos, the Taleban or something much like them will return to power by promising security.

Horess Shansab is an Afghan-American film-maker in Kabul who is preparing a fictional movie of a family living through Taleban times. I am an optimist, he says, and so his film will have a happy ending with the departure of the Taleban.

He speaks for many Afghans about the future: "It looks to me promising, problematic, and full of challenge. It is not an easy place to categorize and say it's one way or the other. There is still some instability in the south, and everyone is aware of that and worried. We are hoping that the world will remain engaged in Afghanistan, and there will be increased help and assistance because without that kind of assistance, I do not see a very rosy picture."

Afghans must put down the gun and take up the shovel, says Safir Latifi, a Kabul businessman who has opened an Internet café aside his guesthouse and plans others around the country: "Within the time of six months we will cover all major provinces of Afghanistan, and we will be connecting them to the Internet. The Internet is bringing unity to this country, making people talk to each other and stay connected to each other, which is one of the ways we can encourage the refugees to come back to the country."

Nothing is more important, says Mr. Latifi, than to revive the country with projects that can be seen and admired and that will provide jobs - roads, bridges, schools and housing. He thinks that is the best way of countering the armed rebellion that feeds on weakness and despair. But Mr. Latifi, among many others, says reconstruction is going much too slowly. Above all, the crucial road linking Kabul to Kandahar in the unstable south is only now nearing completion and its surface is temporary and not expected to last.

Mr. Latifi says this is all too typical of the reconstruction effort: "Unfortunately, the world community and especially the United Nations have not been very helpful. The United Nations is a big bureaucracy in Afghanistan. This is a U.N.-sponsored government. Afghanistan is a test field for the future of the United Nations. So it has to be very successful in Afghanistan."

Extremism is gone, say Afghans, to be replaced by bureaucracy. The Taleban wasted no time punishing people who ignored, say, the nightly 10 o'clock curfew. Their successors can take hours to process by hand the simplest forms.

That is no recipe for progress, contends Mr. Latifi: "In Afghanistan we have to have rapid changes. We have to have decision making on a daily basis. We have to take a decision, execute a plan and then go and start it. We cannot wait for a project to be decided for one month, to be decided for three months, to be sent for approval to New York and then be started after two years. After two years, the need for that project will not be there."

But if officialdom is plodding, private help is on the move, says George Nez, an American city planner who has worked in 19 developing countries. He marvels at the number of people in non-governmental organizations who have come to help Afghanistan rebuild.

"There are over 200 N-G-O's from all quarters of the world who are really stitching together Afghanistan," says Mr. Nez. "The NGO's are like a big pyramid of smaller and larger units that contract with each other. The bigger ones contract with the smaller ones. That number astounded me when I got there. There are so many that are actually rebuilding in patches."

Mr. Nez says the NGO's are reinforcing the ill-equipped Afghan government ministries whose budgets do not compare with the funds coming from abroad. His own specialty is roofing, the casualty of war, earthquakes and old age. He worked for three months this past summer in Wardak province, where there are frequent armed clashes.

People close to him say he was undeterred, just the kind of committed, skilled foreigner Afghanistan needs. He made tools of the weaponry shells littering the area, and he says his Afghan hosts looked kept watch on him: "They took such care of me. I was practically locked in every night. They had a Kalashnikov in every corner. They had dogs that kept me awake barking all night. Too much protection, and a lot of hospitality. Those people are so appreciative of somebody helping them."

George Nez looks forward to seeing roofing on the large area of Kabul that was destroyed by the warlords' fighting in the 1990's. He says the work force is in place - Afghans who have returned from abroad and cannot afford Kabul's sky-rocketing housing prices. So they settle for the remains of houses. "They are swarming into the slums, into the devastated war-torn parts of Kabul, for instance. They are just putting some canvas on the broken walls, even several stories up on those devastated buildings. They are building shops on the first floors, and if there is an earthquake - too bad. That is where they are absorbing the population right now. Whoever can afford to start rebuilding is doing it."

Much, much more remains to be done in Kabul and elsewhere. There is no city water or sewage system. People must often walk a considerable distance to fill their buckets from wells perilously close to sewage dumps. In the case of Afghans living in the huts that barely emerge from the barren mountainsides, the trip is steep and tiring. More progress could be made, says Mr. Nez, if half the work force were not idle. The Taleban are gone, but women are treated much the same, especially in the countryside.

"Women are not educated, not working in the economy, not running the schools, not running the hospitals, not running the stores, the banks – nothing," says Mr. Nez. "It is a country without female brains or skills. This will come, though. The school we are building is essentially for girls and many of the other NGO's are heading the same way - trying to educate the women."

But as Jila Samee points out, the men will have to be educated first. Director of media relations at the Foreign Affairs ministry, she says the men must learn that bringing women into the work force is not just good for women but for Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries.

Former Mujahedin leader calls for holy war against "crusaders"
RFE/RL Amin Tarzi
Mawlawi Mohammad Yunos Khales, leader of Hizb-e Islami (Khales faction), on 29 October issued a declaration of jihad against "crusaders" in Afghanistan, Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported.

In his declaration, Khales urged Muslims to "wage jihad against America and its allies because their countries have been invaded by the crusaders and their homes are savagely bombed and hit by rockets. Muslims are held in steel cages and their children are martyred."

Khales, who led one of the seven Mujahedin parties based in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, has compared the U.S. presence in Afghanistan with the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979.

Early in the struggle against the Soviet Army, Khales and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar led one party, but later they split forming two Hizb-e Islami factions. Since the fall of the communist government in Kabul in 1992, Khales has mostly been outside of the political maneuverings and the civil war. His base of support was Nangarhar Province.

Afghan Peace Force Chief Warns of "Soft Target" Attacks
Reuters 10/30/03 John Chalmers
KABUL - The commander of NATO's peace keeping force in Kabul said on Thursday Taliban and al Qaeda guerrillas could launch attacks on "soft targets" akin to this week's suicide bombing of the Red Cross in Baghdad.

Increased activity by remnants of the radical Islamic Taliban militia has brought urgent calls from the United Nations for NATO to expand its force beyond Kabul to provinces already troubled by unruly warlords and a rampant opium drug trade. "The quality of the potential threat has intensified," General Goetz Glimeroth told reporters at one of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters.

"Threats are not only directed against the Afghan transitional authorities or an assistance force like ISAFbut what we call soft targets, and that means elements of the United Nations or even, as we unfortunately had to witness in Baghdad, against the International Red Cross."

A car bomb attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad on Monday killed 12 people, including two ICRC guards. U.N. aid workers have suspended their work in most of southern Afghanistan due to soaring Taliban attacks on civilians.

Their work was seen as crucial in shoring up a shaky central government as Afghanistan elects delegates to a December national assembly meeting that will vote on a new draft constitution. More than 350 people, including civilians, soldiers and aid workers, have been killed since August. Four German ISAF soldiers were killed and 29 injured last June by a suicide bomb attack.

The recent violence in the country is the worst since U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, which Washington holds responsible for the September 11 attacks.

Glimeroth was speaking after holding talks with NATO's top soldier, U.S. General James Jones, who traveled to Afghanistan to see for himself how ISAF -- some 5,700 troops from 31 nations -- could take control of so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).

There are eight PRTs, groups of aid workers under military protection, across the country though four of these are barely off the drawing board. These teams are currently linked to Operation Enduring Freedom, an 11,600-strong U.S.-led force hunting down die-hard elements of the Taliban and al Qaeda.

NATO has agreed in principle to extend ISAF's security wing beyond Kabul by taking command of PRTs, and it has won a new mandate from the United Nations to do so. Glimeroth said that by the end of this year momentum could build to increase the number of PRTs to 12 or 13.

Afghanistan 'at the mercy of narco-terrorists' Opium trade threatens to destroy infant democracy, warns UN
Ian Traynor in Zagreb Thursday October 30, 2003 The Guardian (UK)
Afghanistan risks degenerating into a state controlled by "narco-terrorists" and drug cartels unless the soaring level of opium and heroin production is curbed, the UN warned yesterday. Two years after US airpower and northern guerrillas drove the Taliban from power, the world's biggest source of heroin is cultivating opium poppies and processing the opium into heroin at near record rates despite the introduction of western programmes aimed at eliminating the drug .

The UN's annual survey of Afghanistan's opium poppy cultivation and production, released yesterday, paints a bleak picture of a drug culture spreading vigorously in defiance of intense efforts by the international community, humanitarian organisations and charities to wean Afghan farmers off the lucrative crop.

The Vienna-based UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC) has been surveying Afghan poppy production for the past decade and has concluded that this year's harvest is the second biggest recorded, surpassed only by the bumper production of 4,600 tonnes of opium in 1999, a year before Taliban hardliners banned its cultivation.

This year's production of 3,600 tonnes represents a 6% year-on-year increase, while poppy cultivation, at almost 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres), was up 8%. A further cause for concern is that opium poppies are now being grown in 28 of Afghanistan's 32 provinces, against 18 in 1999.

"The country is at a crossroads," said Antonio Maria Costa, director of UNODC. "There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists."

Afghanistan is by far the biggest source of the heroin trafficked in western Europe, supplying 90% of the market. The report found that Afghanistan produces 75% of the world's illicit opium and that two in three opiate users take drugs from Afghanistan. The poppy industry generates around half the official gross domestic product.
The industry is controlled by warlords and crime cartels who use two prime routes to ferry the contraband to western Europe. Raw opium is refined into heroin at illicit laboratories all over Afghanistan.

The heroin is taken north, through the former Soviet states of central Asia and up into the Russian Urals, before heading for western Europe via Moscow and St Petersburg. Alternatively, it is dispatched Turkey and then smuggled into western Europe via the Balkans.

"Out of this drug chest some provincial administrators and military commanders take a considerable share. The more they get used to this, the less likely it becomes that they will respect the law, be loyal to Kabul," Mr Costa said. "Terrorists take a cut as well. The longer this happens, the greater the threat to security within the country and on its borders."

In one of his first moves on taking office last year, President Hamid Karzai outlawed opium poppy cultivation, trafficking and consumption while charities and other outsiders sought to develop crop substitution projects and payments to farmers to eradicate poppy growing.

To judge by the figures released yesterday, there is scant evidence of success. The bumper harvest of 1999 was followed in 2000 by the Taliban prohibition, a gambit aimed partly at gaining international recognition of the regime.

The ploy failed but the ban went ahead, slashing that year's opium production. Last year, however, UNODC confirmed a "major resurgence" of poppy growing". Mr Costa called for stiff "interdiction measures", backed by the international community, "to destroy the terrorists' and warlords' stake in the opium economy".

Muttawakil gave CBI team some 'dirt' on Dawood
Ex-Taliban Minister washed hands of hijack, gave narco leads Indian Express Wednesday, October 29, 2003 RITU SARIN
NEW DELHI, OCTOBER 28: After a three-day-long interrogation of Afghanistan's former Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, sources say they have gleaned specifics of Dawood's business interests in Afghanistan and details of several Pak officials present at Kandahar airport during the hijack drama of IC-814.

It was during this crisis that Muttawakil acted as the Taliban's chief interlocutor. Sources say his testimony also has thrown light on the network of hawala routes used by Pakistani agencies and Indians recruited by them. Muttawakil, sources said, has indicated that Dawood invested in several properties and factories in Afghanistan and confirmed that Dawood has a stake in poppy cultivation -- then controlled by the Taliban.

The CBI was given access to Muttawakil on October 14 after the Ministry of External Affairs received reports that the former Taliban minister had been set free and was back in his own country. A CBI team questioned Muttawakil in a Government building near Kabul with the help of an interpreter.

After making an assessment of Muttawakil's testimony, the Government is likely to either make a request for Muttawakil to be questioned again or get him to come to India to face CBI interrogators.

With Afghanistan being war ravaged and with important evidence like airport communication tapes and telephone records (of calls made from Mumbai and Karachi to Afghanistan during the hijack) being destroyed, Muttawakil's account becomes crucial for the CBI. He has, however, claimed that he doesn't know how arms and ammunition were delivered to the hijackers in Kandahar or where did they go after they left Afghanistan. Although the CBI calls his 40-page interrogation report "actionable intelligence," there is a hitch. Since he is a foreign national and his questioning was not done after execution of a Letter Rogatory (LR) or before the Afghan police, the CBI cannot present the testimony in the Patiala court where the hijack case is on.

Our friends, the warlords
In northern Afghanistan the US backs all sides in a continuing civil war
Jonathan Steele in Mazar-i-Sharif Thursday October 30, 2003 Guardian (UK)
Karim Khan stands disconsolately outside the local government headquarters in the remote village of Tuksar. He used to run the neighbouring village, but was bundled out by a rival militia one night recently, leaving his wife and family behind as virtual prisoners. The incident is not isolated. It is being replicated throughout northern Afghanistan in what amounts to low-level civil war as militias use the autumn, the country's traditional fighting season, to change the map of power.

Casualties are fortunately few and front lines in this largely unreported struggle are invisible. All that is different when places change hands, usually by night and with one side running away, is the loyalty of the men who sit in the fort which commands the highest point in every Afghan village. To which warlord do the new local rulers owe their allegiance, and who will enjoy the "taxes" that the militias exact from ordinary people?

While fighting is growing in intensity in southern Afghanistan, as US forces engage resurgent Taliban forces in the Pashtun heartlands two years after they were supposed to have been defeated, the jockeying for power in the north is between three main groups, all of which are financed and supported by the Americans.
How is it possible that the Bush administration could launch its war on international terror while being so unwilling to clip the wings of warlords who inflict terror mainly on other Afghans? The cynics may say the question answers itself. But even a less negative view has to accept that, just as in Iraq, no planning was done for providing immediate security in Afghanistan once the Taliban lost power. Most of Afghanistan was too poor to have had electricity or piped water before the war, so Afghan complaints are different from those of Iraqis. For Afghans, the lack of security is the big issue.

It was not just that a vacuum developed. The Americans encouraged the leaders of the Northern Alliance to resume their old positions. Their forces played little role in defeating the Taliban and only managed to advance on the ground thanks to US carpet-bombing of Taliban positions. But in victory, the Americans behaved as though they were in the warlords' debt, rather than the other way round.

They ignored the persistent demands of virtually every Afghan, including President Hamid Karzai, to deploy an international peace-keeping force outside Kabul to disarm the warlords. A few weeks ago the US line changed and the UN security council was finally asked to mandate such a force. Implementation? Germany is sending 450 troops to Kunduz, one of the least problematic areas of the north, and no other foreign government has offered to put troops into the Mazar region or the western city of Herat, which is home to another US-supported warlord.

Earlier this year, before the decision to expand the peace-keepers, the Americans and British set up units of their own soldiers, special forces, and civilians who work as "provincial reconstruction teams". In Mazar, the 85-strong team is British. Its men try to prevent new land-grabs. They monitor local ceasefires and persuade militias to turn in their guns to the warlords' depots. Good as it is, there is still no plan to "decommission" or destroy weapons and the team was too small to prevent fighting earlier this month on the main road only 20 miles out of Mazar, between heavily armed men loyal to the Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his Tajik rival, Ustad Atta Mohammed.

The British and Americans regained the initiative later by sending Kabul's new interior ministry up to Mazar to get the warlords' permission for 300 Kabul police to come into the city. This week the central government appointed new governors for Mazar and the surrounding province, promising the incumbents good jobs elsewhere. The British and the Americans argue that this softly, softly approach to extending the Karzai government's influence is more productive in a heavily armed and naturally belligerent country than confronting the warlords directly. It is too early to know whether they are right. The ceasefire they brokered is tenuous, and what should have been done two years ago to rebuild the Afghan state after the Taliban is only starting now.

Like its American variants in the central highlands and the south, the British "provincial reconstruction team" in Mazar creates new problems while it tries to solve old ones. Scores of attacks on aid workers in southern Afghanistan, where a full-scale war appears to be resuming, are causing the big international organisations anxiety. Long before the bombing of the International Committee of the Red Cross building in Baghdad this week put the focus on the dangers aid workers face, an ICRC man was killed near Kandahar. Another dozen aid staff, mainly Afghans, have died since March this year.

Foreign forces in northern Afghanistan, unlike in the south, are popular for the moment, but the mood could change. To try to forestall the danger, the professional non-governmental organisations are warning that aid must not be allowed to be seen as an arm of a British or American "hearts and minds" campaign. In any case, they believe they have greater expertise.

It may seem innocuous and a positive benefit to have doctors and dentists in combat fatigues drop in to a village for a one-day "clinic". The army doctors no doubt feel good. But they are blurring a crucial line of principle which damages the image of impartiality of NGOs working in the same field. The bigger NGOs worked under the mujahedin and Taliban regimes and have earned long-term respect from Afghans. They do not want to be seen as part of the political plans of governments which may lose interest in a year's time or two. Nor do they welcome the risk of being seen by Afghans, however mistakenly, as agents of the military.

Why should civilians from the Department for International Development be attached to these provincial reconstruction teams and work with them to identify "quick impact projects" which Britain can fund? The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already distorted many western governments' spending priorities, making "reconstruction" a political exercise designed to satisfy Washington rather than an impartially assessed response to need. Choosing aid projects in collaboration with the military takes the distortion a dangerous stage further.

The choice should be left to national aid-receiving governments, the UN's specialised agencies, and the NGOs. Under pressure, UN officials in Afghanistan have accepted Washington's and London's demands for coalition forces to have an aid role, while urging them to stick to infrastructure issues such as road- and bridge- building or repairing local government offices. The compromise is confusing and a mistake. Hilary Benn, DfID's new boss, should have his people work with the Karzai government in Kabul and the UN, rather than with the British and American military.

Security belongs to the armed people in uniform. Aid is the task of civilians - who will still be in Afghanistan when the "war on terror" caravan moves on.

Pageant Flap Bares Depth Of Tradition For Afghans Rights Advocates Fear Conservative Backlash
By Pamela Constable Washington Post Thursday, October 30, 2003; Page A11
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 29 -- Bombay starlets pout in shop-window posters and shapely sequined gowns dangle in wedding boutique displays. But even in this fast-modernizing capital of 3 million, most women cover themselves with a billowing burqa when they step into the street, and the most risque fashion statement is a flash of netted ankle beneath a long, swishing black skirt.

Nearly two years after the defeat of the ruling Islamic Taliban militia, Afghanistan is still one of the most conservative Muslim societies in the world. Women have returned to work and girls are back in school, but feminist ideas remain highly suspect, and purdah -- the concept of keeping women shrouded from unrelated men -- remains the cultural and religious norm.

So when Vida Samadzai, 25, a leggy Afghan-born brunette who attends the University of California, suddenly appeared on international newscasts last Friday as a contestant in a Manila beauty pageant, striding confidently onstage in a fiery red bikini with a Miss Afghanistan banner draped across her chest, Afghan officialdom was aghast. The last time an Afghan woman competed in any international beauty contest was 1972.

In short order, the minister of women's affairs -- a woman -- denounced Samadzai's actions as "lascivious" and "not representing Afghan women." The Afghan Embassy in Washington issued a statement saying her participation had not been authorized by the Kabul government. And a senior official of the Supreme Court and the Kabul religious scholars' committee condemned her swimsuit appearance as "completely unacceptable and unlawful in Islam."

It was not only knee-jerk prudery that caused such an appalled response, but something more complex. The Afghan government, backed by the Bush administration and the United Nations, has been picking its way through a religious and cultural minefield as it seeks to promote women's rights and other modern, international values without alienating devout Muslims or provoking influential fundamentalist groups.

Several officials here said this week they feared that Samadzai's behavior, though perfectly acceptable in much of the world, could damage the cause of women's emancipation in Afghanistan -- and even the image of democracy itself, a Western notion that some Afghans identify with moral corruption and excessive freedoms.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a number of Afghan women's advocates expressed similar concerns, saying they feared such an incident could provide ammunition for Islamic conservatives who adamantly oppose women's rights and often warn that foreign aid and cultural influence will undermine men's control of the Afghan family.
"I think it was a mistake," said Jamila Mujahid, an editor of a progressive women's magazine and a newscaster on state TV. "We want freedom for Afghan women, but not freedom of this nature," she added. "When we give speeches, we tell women to defend their rights while wearing hejab [head scarves], or else it will give something to those who are against us, and they are very powerful."

Samadzai, who was traveling in the Philippines Wednesday and could not be reached for comment, told the BBC and news agencies in Manila several days ago that she wanted to challenge the international image of Afghan women as hidden and submissive. She said she would like to show that "we are talented, intelligent and beautiful. We are one of the people who can make a difference in this world."

But even if she is motivated by high ideals and has the technical right to "represent" Afghanistan, numerous women interviewed this week in Kabul said they disapproved of her semi-nude appearance and found it offensive to Afghan culture.

"If she had been more covered, we would have been proud of her participation in an international contest," said Hamdana, 26, a student of Islamic law at Kabul University, who was wearing a fashionable black ensemble of loose ankle-length skirt, long-sleeved jacket and head scarf. "In our culture, a girl's clothing must be modest."

Farishta, 27, a classmate, said her generation of Afghan Muslim women is struggling to achieve "freedom of speech, freedom to work and study, but not that kind of freedom." Shaking her head in disapproval of Samadzai's televised swimsuit appearance, she said firmly, "No Afghan girl wants that kind of freedom."

Modest or not, urban Afghan women today are anything but plain. For weddings, the dominant form of social event, they spend hours in beauty parlors being coiffed and made up and manicured. Often a shapeless form trundling down the street under a burqa will become, once safely indoors, a glamorous woman with heavy mascara and eyeliner, slinky beaded outfit and lots of gold jewelry.

"Women here really like fashion," said Ahmad Mateen, 24, who designs party gowns. "Sometimes they get ideas from Indian films, from European catalogues, or from their own imaginations. But whatever their taste, there has to be a certain sober quality to the clothes. After all, we are all Muslims."

Except for husbands, fathers, brothers and the occasional co-worker, Afghan men rarely have an opportunity to glimpse beneath the veil. Weddings are segregated by gender, as are most social occasions except intimate family gatherings. All schools above elementary level are single-sex, virtually all marriages are arranged, and outside major cities women are rarely seen in public.

A few mavericks among Kabul's English-speaking elite confess to a certain admiration for Samadzai. They suggest that the huffing about her "un-Islamic" action is extremely hypocritical, given the cruelty and violence that have dominated life here for the past 25 years of war, civil conflict and religious repression.

"This lady is trying to bring the image of Afghan women to international standards, and in a way she is struggling for their rights," said Sayeed Daud, the director of a U.S.-funded media center whose daily newspaper, Erada, published a partial photograph of Samadzai in her swimsuit. "If they say that's not in our culture, what about all the killing that has gone on here for years? That's not in our culture either."

Officials of the Miss Earth contest said in Manila that they were extremely pleased with Samadzai's participation and not at all concerned about the official controversy she had caused in her native country. The privately sponsored competition includes women from about 60 countries, including a few other Muslim-dominant states such as Lebanon and Malaysia; winners will be chosen Nov. 9.

"She's very friendly, and everyone here loves her," said Chris Cahilig, a spokesman for the Miss Earth competition, which was founded three years ago in part to promote environmental causes. "She has been giving a very good impression of Afghanistan and its people. She is representing her country positively, and she is a very intelligent and tough woman."

Cahilig said participants did not need official approval from their home country governments, but only needed to be sponsored by a local organization. Like many middle-class Afghans, Samadzai left Afghanistan for the United States in 1996 when the Taliban seized power, but she retained her Afghan citizenship. News reports this week said Samadzai had been working with Afghan-American groups to help Afghan women and refugees, and that she hoped to visit Kabul in coming months.