Afghanistan News December 13, 2005

December 13, 2005

Four wounded in Afghanistan quake
Tuesday December 13, 11:42 PM
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) - Four people were hurt, one of them badly, when an earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale struck mountainous northeastern Afghanistan, health officials said.

The massive tremor, which hit in the early hours of the morning, also destroyed a house in the eastern city of Jalalabad, a doctor in the city's hospital told AFP on Tuesday.

"So far we've received four wounded people, three of them slightly and only one woman was badly injured," doctor Ayoob Shinwari said.

The woman broke several bones when the ceiling of her home collapsed onto her, he said. The other three broke bones and hurt their heads when they fled their houses as the quake struck.

The epicentre was in Afghanistan's Badakshan province in the Hindu Kush mountains, a sparsely populated area of small, remote villages that has been jolted by several quakes in the past years.

Officials in Badakshan could not be reached for information about the effect of the quake although reports cited officials saying there had been no serious damage.

A government official in Kabul said earlier that preliminary reports indicated that no one had been hurt in any of Afghanistan's provinces.

"Preliminary reports taken from all the provinces were that there were no casualties. But we are asking them to check again," Afghanistan's interior ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai told AFP.

The tremor also shook northern Takhar province but caused no damage in the main city, Taluqan, although news had yet to filter in from the districts, the provincial governor Khwaja Kholam Abubakar told AFP.

"Inside of the city of Taluqan, we don't have any damage. We have not received any reports from the districts because they don't have phone lines and it takes time for the news to come to the city," he said.

The tremor also jolted northern Pakistan, where it triggered panic among residents who said it felt like the strongest tremor since a 7.6-magnitude earthquake on October 8 that killed more than 73,000 people in the area.

Government and United Nations humanitarian officials said they had received no reports about damage or casualties from any part of Pakistan.

"We have not received any reports about casualties or damage after last night's earthquake," a spokesman for Pakistan's Federal Relief Commission told AFP.

UN Humanitarian Coordinator Jan Vandemoortele told a news briefing in Islamabad that so far there were no reports about damage.

"We have not heard of any report of damage of casualty neither from the Afghan side nor from the (earthquake) affected areas," Vandemoortele said.

The Hindu Kush area where the quake hit is high in seismic activity, being near the collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.

An earthquake there in March 2002, which measured 6.1, killed around 1,000 people and destroyed several villages, according to the US Geological Survey.

M6.7 quake hits northeastern Afghanistan
Tuesday December 13, 1:13 PM
(Kyodo) _ An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.7 struck remote northeastern Afghanistan early Tuesday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
The earthquake, which hit shortly after 2:30 a.m., was centered in the remote Hindu Kush Mountains in northeastern Afghanistan.

It was felt in the Afghan capital of Kabul and neighboring Pakistan, which experienced a magnitude-7.6 earthquake Oct. 8.

In the Oct. 8 earthquake devastated the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir and northern Pakistan, killing more than 73,000 people.

Afghanistan's opium output likely to rise next year: UN
Mon Dec 12, 1:22 PM ET
KABUL (AFP) - Afghanistan's illicit opium production, nearly 90 percent of the world's total, is likely to creep upward again next year after slipping in 2005, the United Nations said.

First results from a survey showed that in many provinces "there will be an increase of poppy cultivation in 2006," UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) representative Doris Buddenberg told a media briefing.

This was despite a 21 percent drop in the area planted with opium poppies this year, the first drop since the extremist Taliban government was toppled in 2001, according to earlier UNODC figures.

The reduction only translated into a 2.4 percent fall in annual output, to about 4,100 tonnes, mainly because favourable weather boosted the harvest.

"No other country in the world has achieved what Afghanistan has done in drug reduction in 2005," Buddenberg said.

Nonetheless various factors, including economic pressure on farmers and the involvement of government officials in the drugs trade, were impediments to the aim of the government and its international backers to stop opium production, she said.

Kabul has tried to persuade the two million Afghans, nearly nine percent of the population, involved in opium cultivation to turn to other crops.

The UN has estimated however that per hectare (2.47 acres) income from opium was around 5,400 dollars this year, compared with about 550 dollars for wheat.

Full results of the survey of next year's expected crop were only due in February, Buddenberg said.

However the first findings showed "the usual suspects" were among provinces most likely to see an increase in opium output.

They included southern Helmand, which this year produced a quarter of the country's opium, and eastern Nangarhar, the second largest producer in 2004 before a 96 percent drop this year following a government eradication campaign.

There "were indications that there will be an increase again, but we're not sure of how much," Buddenberg said.

Output was, however, expected to drop in southern Kandahar, which produced the second highest amount of opium in Afghanistan this year at 12 percent of the country's total.

Opium poppies began to be raised on a large scale in Afghanistan the early 1980s after bans in neighbouring countries.

The destitute country now produces about 87 percent of the global crop, the base for nearly all the heroin consumed in Europe.

The UN and the government have estimated the total export value of Afghanistan's opium in 2005 at 2.7 billion dollars, equivalent to 52 percent of the country's official gross domestic product.

Besides the possibility of turning Afghanistan into a "narco-state", officials are worried about the impact of the country's massive opium crop on local drug use and, with the sharing of needles, on HIV/ AIDS.

The first nationwide study of drugs users in Afghanistan, released last month, showed there were 920,000 drug users, about 3.8 percent of the population, although most of them took hashish.

Health officials estimated in October there were only up to 1,500 HIV/AIDS cases in the country but this could be pushed upwards by the 7,000 people estimated to be injecting heroin, a drugs policy think-tank said this month.

"The situation in drug addiction is not a catastrophe yet," Buddenberg said. But "when you have drug production in a country, in the long run you also have drug addiction."

Mine blast wounds four foreign troops in Afghanistan
Mon Dec 12, 8:52 AM ET
KABUL (Reuters) - Four soldiers from the U.S.-led force in Afghanistan were wounded on Monday when their vehicle detonated a mine in the southern province of Kandahar, a U.S. military official said.

The soldiers were in stable condition, said U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant Mike Cody. He declined to reveal their nationalities or give the exact location of the incident.

It came a day after a suicide attacker failed in a bid to target a convoy of U.S.-led troops in the heart of Kandahar city but seriously wounded an Afghan passerby.

The United States leads an international force of about 20,000 in Afghanistan battling the Taliban and their militant allies, including Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda fighters.

Kandahar and neighboring provinces have been the scene of a spate of violence by the militants in the past 10 days.

The violence has included a series of incidents since NATO, which leads a separate peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, approved rules last week for an expanded force next year, which Washington hopes will allow a cut in U.S. troop levels.

NATO wants to boost its 9,000-strong International Security Assistance Force to about 15,000 from early next year. It will spread its bases in the north and west, and the capital, Kabul, to the more volatile south.

More than 1,100 people have been killed in violence in Afghanistan this year, including nearly 60 U.S. troops, making it the bloodiest period for them in Afghanistan since 2001.

U.S. Forces in Afghanistan Change Tactics
By STEVE GUTTERMAN, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 12, 9:45 PM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. and coalition forces in     Afghanistan are learning from tactics used in     Iraq to help avert the suicide bombings that are increasingly common among Taliban-led insurgents, a U.S. military official said Monday.

A day after the second suicide attack in eight days targeting U.S.-led forces in the southern city of Kandahar, spokesman Lt. Col. Laurent Fox said that "we will continue to look at other measures we can use to stop these bombings that they use to kill innocent civilians."

Fox cast a series of suicide attacks by militants in Afghanistan in recent months as a sign of weakness, but he said coalition forces are developing new measures to counter them — and turning to their colleagues in Iraq for tips.

"We are sharing information with our forces in Iraq, where there are many attacks, and will continue to use that information to fight the problem here," he said at a news conference.

Fox would not describe the measures, citing the need for secrecy.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosives near a coalition convoy in Kandahar on Sunday, killing himself and wounding a passer-by, police in the former Taliban stronghold said. Fox said the attack occurred after the convoy had passed and that no coalition troops were injured.

On Monday, four coalition soldiers were wounded when their vehicle struck a mine in Kandahar province, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Mike Cody said. He would not reveal their nationalities but said they were in stable condition.

A week earlier in Kandahar, a Canadian soldier in the U.S.-led coalition was slightly injured in a blast that killed the attacker and a civilian. A suicide car bombing in Kandahar in November, apparently targeting Westerners, killed three Afghan civilians.

Two days before that, militants used twin suicide car bombs to attack     NATO peacekeepers in the capital, Kabul. Authorities blamed al-Qaida for those blasts, which killed a German peacekeeper and eight Afghans.

Last month, Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak told The Associated Press that intelligence indicated a number of Arab members of al-Qaida and other foreigners had entered Afghanistan to launch suicide attacks, and cited similarities between attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The suicide bombings are part of the persistent insurgency that has produced the deadliest militant violence since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban from power in 2001, when they refused to hand over al-Qaida leader     Osama bin Laden following the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Afghanistan adopts plan to deal with rights abuses
Tue Dec 13, 3:42 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - War-scarred Afghanistan has adopted a plan to bring people to account for human rights abuses in almost 25 years of brutal conflict and to promote reconciliation, officials said.

The government adopted the plan for peace, reconciliation and justice on Monday, the president's office said.

The plan maps out "the way how Afghanistan may deal with its past human rights abuses," Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission spokesman Nader Nadery told AFP on Tuesday.

It provides for the development of a means to prosecute people found to be involved in past abuses, no matter what position they hold in the country today, he said. This could take about three years to finalise.

The issue has become particularly relevant with former warlords, including some accused by rights groups of war crimes, taking many seats in the new parliament elected in September -- the first in more than 30 years.

The new plan also provides for the establishment of mechanisms to promote reconciliation in the ethnically divided country and document past wars and atrocities, Nadery said.

A national day to remember the victims of human rights abuses would also be chosen, as would a strategy to vet government appointees for possible involvement in past violations.

The first step towards implementing the new plan was a two-day conference on reconciliation in Kabul Tuesday of government officials, UN representatives and rights groups.

Afghanistan has been involved in brutal conflict since the Soviets invaded in 1979.

Holy Islamic warriors called mujahedin launched an anti-Soviet movement that forced the Russians out in 1989. The mujahedin then turned on each other in a battle for power in which tens of thousands of civilians were killed.

That civil war was quelled when the extremist Taliban government took power of most of the country in 1996, to be forced out in late 2001 in a US-led invasion because they did not surrender Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks.

A warlord and newly elected MP accused of violations in Afghanistan's years of conflict, Abdul Qasim Fahim, rejected this month charges that mujahedin were involved in rights abuses.

"Actually no human rights violator, generally, exists in Afghanistan," the former defence minister said in a television interview.

Iran prepares to enter Afghanistan’s IT market
Monday December 12, 2005 (1201 PST) PakTribune.com, Pakistan
TEHRAN, December 12(Online): Chairman of the Association of Iran’s Informatics Companies Soheil Mazlum said here that his organization in collaboration with the Iranian Ministry of Mines and Industries was ready to give required assistance and supports to the Iranian companies willing to enter Afghanistan’s Information Technology (IT) market.

Association of Iran’s Informatics Companies has been considering Iranian companies’ presence in the IT markets of the neighboring country Afghanistan, noted the chairman of the association adding that, pertinent and fruitful studies have been made to that effect. He also added that the association had earlier dispatched a delegation to that country to negotiate the issue with the related officials there.

He stated that the Iranian delegation had succeeded in signing three memoranda of understanding (MOU) with officials from the Afghan ministries of justice, commerce and communications, the Persian service of Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) said on Saturday.

He further explained that following the holding of three seminars participated by over twenty large Iranian IT companies, a plan had been devised based on which the timetables, scheduling, plan implementation costs, the amount of capital returns, the nature of activities and measures to be taken as well as the ways of providing the required resources were all identified.

Pakistan Says Cement Exports to Afghanistan Decline
Tuesday December 13, 3:06 PM
ISLAMABAD, Dec 13 Asia Pulse - Pakistan's Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) has noted a fall in cement exports to Afghanistan over the last five months.

EPB official Ayaz Bashir said on Monday that Pakistan had supplied 664,365 tons of cement to the neighbouring country since August.

"About 129,958 tons of cement were sent to Afghanistan in July, 156,433 tons in August, 144,244 tons in September, 123,000 tons in October and 98,376 tons in November."

In the first week of December, he added, a mere 13,000 tons of cement were dispatched to Afghanistan, where the reconstruction process has slowed down due to the harsh winter.

However, Mustafa Khan of the Cherat Cement Factory also confirmed a decline in foreign sales, saying that construction work in both Afghanistan and Pakistan ground to a halt during winter.

Production levels at the biggest cement factory in the Northwest Frontier Province, and prices of the product remained steady despite the slump, said Khan.
(Pajhwok Afghan News)

U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan attempt new measures against suicide attacks
Pravda- Russia 14:38 2005-12-12
U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan are learning from tactics used in Iraq to improve their ability to avert suicide bombings as Taliban-led insurgents turn increasingly to those types of attacks, a U.S. military official said Monday. After the second suicide attack in eight days targeting U.S.-led forces in the southern city of Kandahar, spokesman Lt. Col. Laurent Fox said, "we will continue to look at other measures we can use to stop these bombings that they use to kill innocent civilians."

Fox cast a series of suicide attacks by militants in Afghanistan in recent months as a sign of weakness rather than strength, but he said the coalition forces are developing new measures to counter them, and turning to their colleagues in Iraq for tips.

"There are new measures that we will use and we continue to adapt. I will stress that we are sharing information with our forces in Iraq, where there are many attacks, and will continue to use that information to fight the problem here," he told a news conference. Fox would not describe any of the measures, citing the need for secrecy.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosives near a coalition convoy in Kandahar on Sunday, killing himself and wounding a passer-by, police in the former Taliban stronghold said. Fox said the attack occurred after the convoy had passed and that no coalition troops were injured.

A week earlier in Kandahar, a Canadian soldier in the U.S.-led coalition was slightly injured in a blast that killed the attacker and a civilian. A suicide car bombing in Kandahar in November, apparently targeting Westerners, killed three Afghan civilians.

Two days before that, militants used twin suicide car bombs to attack NATO peacekeepers in the capital, Kabul. Authorities blamed al-Qaida for those blasts, which killed a German peacekeeper and eight Afghans.

Last month, Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak told The Associated Press that intelligence indicated a number of Arab members of al-Qaida and other foreigners had entered Afghanistan to launch suicide attacks, and cited similarities between attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After Sunday's bombing, Kandahar province deputy police chief Haji Abdul Hakim said the attacker appeared to be a foreigner, but Interior Ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanezai said his origin had not been established.

Fox said that the exact nature of ties between the Taliban and al-Qaida is unclear but that they appear to be sharing information. He said the coalition has no "specific intelligence" indicating Taliban militants have been returning from Iraq.

The suicide bombings are part of the a persistent insurgency that has produced the deadliest militant violence since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban from power in 2001, when they refused to hand over al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden following the Sept. 11 attacks, reports the AP.