Afghanistan News February 21, 2005

February 21, 2005

Former Taliban say talks with government successful
KABUL, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Four former Taliban officials, led by a former U.N. envoy, said on Sunday they had had successful reconciliation talks with the U.S.-back Afghan government.

The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency said the former Taliban officials returned to Pakistan on Saturday after a two-week visit to Kabul during which they met President Hamid Karzai.

The agency quoted their leader, Abdul Hakim Mujahid, the former Taliban ambassador to the United Nations, as saying the talks aimed at "national unity, understanding and peace" had been successful. "We have reached an understanding," he said, without elaborating.

Khaliq Ahmad, a spokesman for Karzai, confirmed talks had taken place. "The reconciliation process is going on well and progress is being made," he said, but declined to give details.

Mujahid stressed his group had not represented the Taliban but Khudam-ul Furqan (Servants of the Koran), a group some moderate Taliban members joined after the overthrow of the fundamentalists by U.S.-led forces in late 2001.

Mujahid said talks with the Afghan government had been going on for the past two years and as well as meeting Karzai, the delegation met other Afghan leaders and elders.

The other members of the delegation were Arsullah Rahmani, a former deputy minister of higher education, Rahmatullah Wahidyar, former deputy minister for refugees, and Habibullah Fawzi, former charge d'affaires at the Afghan embassy in Saudi Arabia.

A year ago, Karzai said he was considering talks with a former Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, in a bid to woo moderate Taliban supporters, but no details have emerged of any such meeting.

Last week, U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said some senior Taliban members had taken up a government amnesty offer and Wednesday's Washington Post quoted a Western official as identifying them as the group led by Mujahid.

None of Mujahid's group is known as a senior figure in the Taliban guerrilla campaign waged since 2001 against the government and a now 18,000-strong U.S.-led foreign force.

The Post also said 22 low-level Taliban members had agreed to lay down their arms in response to the amnesty offer made last year to Taliban figures not among the up to 150 blamed for atrocities during the group's rule, or linked with al Qaeda.

Taliban guerrilla officials have dismissed talk of reconciliation and have vowed to continue their jihad, or holy war, again Karzai's government and foreign forces.
More than 1,000 people have died in Taliban-linked violence in the past 18 months, but attacks have tailed off since the guerrillas failed to make good their vow to disrupt the presidential election won by Karzai in October.

On Saturday, a Taliban spokesman said the harsh Afghan winter had limited guerrilla attacks but elusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had ordered that they be stepped up once snow thawed in the mountains, usually in April.

U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban for refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States in 2001. Bin Laden, like Omar, remains at large.

UN warns of new chaos if Afghan grievances not met
21 Feb 2005 11:00:32 GMT By David Brunnstrom
KABUL, Feb 21 (Reuters) - More than three years after U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban, the United Nations has painted a gloomy picture of conditions in Afghanistan and warned it could fall back into chaos if popular grievances were not met.

The first ever Afghanistan Human Development Report, released on Monday, said remarkable progress had been made since 2001 and there was room for "cautious optimism".

But serious security problems remained and the country had some of the world's worst rates of life expectancy, conditions for women and children, and literacy, the United Nations said.

Unless grievances such as a lack of jobs, health care, education and political participation were addressed, "the fragile nation could easily tumble back into chaos", the United Nations said in a statement accompanying the report.

If that happened, "Afghanistan will collapse into an insecure state, a threat to its own people as well as the international community", it said.

The report, prepared by the U.N. Development Programme with government participation, said the international backers of President Hamid Karzai's government needed to take a broad and long-term view of Afghanistan's development.

"The international community is committed to fighting terrorism and drugs inside Afghanistan, but human security cannot take a back seat to national and international security interests of other nations," said editor-in-chief Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh.

Decades of conflict had taken a devastating toll, leaving Afghanistan near the bottom of the 177 countries covered in the UNDP's human development index, just above Burundi, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone, it said.

Only 28.7 percent of Afghans over 15 could read and write and life expectancy at birth was just 44.5 years -- at least 20 years lower than that in neighbouring states, and six years lower than the global average for least-developed countries.

CONDITIONS DIRE
Conditions for women and children were especially dire, with one in five children dying before the age of five and one woman dying of pregnancy-related illness every 30 minutes.

And while the economy had recovered significantly since the Taliban's overthrow, this had done little to address inequality.

One in two Afghans could be classified as poor and the poorest 30 percent received only nine percent of national income.

While millions more Afghans were back at school, the report said the education system remained the "worst in the word", with 80 percent of schools destroyed or damaged in the years of conflict.

Afghanistan needed multi-year commitments of international aid to fund long-term development, but that needed to be carefully directed to avoid dependency and disparities and Afghans needed to be better consulted over strategies.

"The overwhelming majority of people expressed their sense of pessimism and fear that reconstruction had bypassed the ordinary Afghan," the United Nations said of those consulted in preparing the report.

The United States was spending $1 billion a month to fight the war on terrorism, far less that was being spent to curb the poverty that can breed militancy, it said.

"Sustained peace in Afghanistan is not guaranteed despite the early successes in state-building."

The government needed to design a comprehensive development strategy and to create an environment dominated by the rule of law, not the gun, the report said. A big test would be parliamentary elections expected this year.

The report also had a message for Afghanistan's neighbours, saying there had been only partial progress in converting their harmful interference to constructive engagement.

"The involvement of Afghanistan's neighbours seems to be aimed as much at maintaining options in case of renewed conflict as it does at contributing to peace-building and reconstruction."

Karzai, who wrote a foreword to the report, conceded it painted a "gloomy" and "dismal" picture and said Afghans had high expectations of his government to deliver on curbing corruption, on security and reconstruction, and in ensuring the rule of law.

"The government recognises the challenges ahead," he said.

Afghanistan to export gas to India, Pakistan: Karzai
Indo-Asian News Service
Kabul, Feb 21 (IANS) Afghanistan plans to export its abundant gas resources to India and Pakistan through the proposed gas pipeline project linking the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan with the Indian subcontinent, President Hamid Karzai has said.

Afghanistan also hoped to regain its predominant position as the largest supplier of fruits and dry fruits to the world, the official Bakhter News Agency quoted the president as saying in an address to an international economic conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Leaders from 25 countries attended the conference Sunday.

Afghanistan is also ready to play its "historic role" as a connecting bridge of all countries and world civilisations, Karzai said and noted that his country had been a key link in the ancient Silk Route that served as a conduit for knowledge, education and merchandise from Asia to the heart of Europe.

Karzai said besides natural gas, Afghanistan had large deposits of copper, iron and precious stones.

Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, who also addressed the meet, praised Karzai and said under his leadership ties between Islamabad and Kabul had expanded considerably.

"We are pleased to have a country like Afghanistan as our neighbour," he said.

Afghan army seen at full combat strength by end-06
21 Feb 2005 09:16:51 GMT By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Afghanistan's new army will reach full combat strength by the end of next year and training of the overall force of 70,000 should be complete by the end of 2008, the U.S. general overseeing the effort said on Monday.

Afghanistan's army disintegrated after the fall of a Communist regime in 1992 and had to be rebuilt from scratch after the overthrow of the Taliban by U.S.-led forces in late 2001.

The army currently has 17,000 combat soldiers, with another 5,000 undergoing training, and it would reach its full combat strength of 40,000 by the end of 2006, U.S. Brigadier-General Richard Moorhead told a news conference.

He said completion of training of the overall force of 70,000, including headquarters and other non-combat personnel, would take until the end of 2008.

"We still will have the mentors and trainers with them for approximately another two years so that takes us to December 08," he said.

Donations from Afghanistan's allies to equip the new national army were "pouring in", Moorhead said, but in response to a question, he said he had no knowledge of any plans to re-equip the devastated Afghan air force.

According to some news reports, the government has requested attack helicopters and jet fighters to rebuild the air force.

The U.S. military said on Sunday it had almost doubled to nearly 600 the number of its troops embedded as trainers with the new Afghan army as better facilities that had been built up meant formation of the new army was going faster than first expected.

It said from next month six battalions of up to 800 men would be trained simultaneously, compared with five currently.

"This allows the ANA to graduate 800 soldiers every two weeks," Moorhead said.

Units from the new army have already been deployed in the south and east of the country to assist an 18,000-strong U.S.-led force pursuing Taliban and allied militant guerrillas as well as in other parts of the country to deal with factional unrest.

It remains unclear how long foreign forces helping to provide security in Afghanistan, which includes a separate NATO-led force of about 8,500 troops, will remain.

President Hamid Karzai said in October foreign forces would be needed for "some years" until security forces, including the army and police, had been properly built up.

U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad said in December that some level of foreign troop presence could remain in Afghanistan indefinitely to guarantee its future security.

A commander of the NATO force said last year that NATO-led peacekeepers could remain in Afghanistan for 10 years, or as long as was necessary to ensure security.

Defense Ministry and Interior Ministry appointments
A. Khalid Mowahid
KABUL, Feb 17, (Pajhwok News Agency) – President Hamed Karzai has appointed two non-professionals in the Defense and Interior Ministries, departing from the growing trend of appointing professionals. The two deputy ministers were both introduced to their respective staff on Sunday.

Both the new appointees, Dr. Ahmad Yousuf Nooristani and Izrar Ahmad Moqbel do not have any academic education in the specific fields related to their respective posts. Dr. Nooristani, the Deputy Minister of Defense was earlier the Minister of Irrigation in the transitional government of Hamed Karzai. He has taken his doctorate in anthropology from United States and speaks Pashto, Dari, Urdu, English and Nooristani.

According to Lutfullah Mashal, speaker of Interior Ministry, the Deputy Minister in the Interior Ministry is a graduate from Kabul Polytechnic University. He worked earlier in the police department of Parwan province, was Governor of Parwan and an ambassador.

General Zahir Azemi, the spokesperson of the Defense Ministry said “the post of defense minister and his four deputies are civil posts. We want someone who can work with people.” He said the doctorate in anthropology would help the new minister deal with people.”

Cold kills 128 Afghan children, some given opium to ease pain: minister
AFP 02/19/2005
KABUL - At least 128 Afghan children have been killed by diseases caused by bitterly cold weather, with some parents feeding their ailing children opium to ease their pain, a minister said.

"One hundred and twenty-eight children have died in the last month and a half. That's the confirmed figure," Health Minister Amin Fatimie told AFP. "Some parents do not go to the doctors and they administer opium to the kids to stop the cough, and that stops the cough but can also kill them" he said.

Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium, and many parents mired in desperate poverty have few or no other pain killers available. The minister rejected estimates by the aid agency Catholic Relief Services that up to 1,000 children could have been killed by the freezing weather in the western province of Ghor alone.

"I strongly reject the evaluation made by an aid agency. This is unconfirmed and it only creates panic," he said. Members of the aid organisation drove and hiked through the snow to 16 villages in one district of the remote western province, and found 80 children had died in those villages alone in the last month, most in the last two weeks.

Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the world and almost a quarter of infants do not live past the age of five. According to the minister, lack of education was the cause of many deaths because parents did not know enough about sanitation and health. "Some parents do not take their children to hospital until their children are already in a coma," he said.

Cold continues to claim lives of children in North
By Parwin Faiz
MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Feb. 20, (Pajhwok Afghan News) -- Five-year-old Salahuddin, from Samangan province has caught pneumonia and is hovering between life and death in the civil hospital of Mazar-e-Sharif. He is one of many children who have caught pneumonia and whooping cough because of the cold weather.

Mohammad Shafiq Sahab, pediatrician in the Mazar-e-Sharif hospital said that 25 children who contracted pneumonia had lost their lives in the last one month in this hospital. He said most of the children were brought to the hospital several days after contracting the disease.

Salahuddin’s mother says the boy has not been able to open his eyes because he is so sick. “The doctors in Samangan province refused to hospitalize my son. I don’t know whether he will survive," she said as Salahuddin, on a drip, lay in bed drawing shallow breaths.

Dr Sahab told Pajhwok Afghan News "currently, there are 100 children admitted here even though the hospital has the capacity for admitting only 60 patients”. He said the big problem now was lack of sufficient space and they were forced to put more than one child in a single bed.

US to drop emergency supplies in Afghan province
19 Feb 2005
KABUL, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. military is planning to drop emergency supplies to a snow-bound Afghan province where aid workers fear hundreds of children may have died this month as a result of severe winter weather.

A U.S. C-130 transport aircraft will drop packaged humanitarian relief meals supplied by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Ghor province within the next two days, U.S. military spokesman Major Steve Wollman said on Saturday.

A WFP spokesman said the organisation had managed to deliver 18 tonnes of emergency food supplies and items such as blankets to the northern part of Ghor's Sharak district, one of those worst affected by the especially harsh weather.

An international aid group, Catholic Relief Services, said on Friday it feared more than 1,000 children could have died of cold-weather-related illnesses in the central province and more could die if emergency supplies were not sent quickly.

The CRS said survey teams sent to 16 villages in a single district of the province recorded an average of five deaths of children under five in each, most in the past two weeks.

Paul Hicks, director for Catholic Relief Services in western Afghanistan, said the CRS feared the toll could be far higher because most villages could not be reached. He said there was a "critical need" to fly in survey teams to other parts of the province. "We and other NGOs have been going to the U.S. military to request that this be made possible so we can determine the extent of the emergency," he said.

The Ghor provincial government says it has so far confirmed 136 deaths, mostly of children, in four districts -- Shahrak, Tulak, Sargar and Tuera -- but the real toll may be more than 300.

Officials around Afghanistan have reported hundreds of deaths due to cold-weather-related illnesses such as whooping cough and measles this winter, which has seen snowfall throughout the country after several years of drought. Many of the dead have been children.

Hicks said Ghor had been particularly badly hit by the drought and the winter conditions were the worst officials could remember for many years.

Expired medicines being sold on the streets of Herat
Pajhwok Afghan News 02/20/2005 By Sadiq Behanam
HERAT – Gulab Shah's daughter is in a hospital in Herat. She need not have been there since all she had was a headache. It was her father's efforts to cure her that landed her in the hospital with poisoning from the expired drugs sold openly on the streets of the Western city.

The fifty-year-old father told Pajhwok Afghan News, "my daughter had a headache and I bought her some medicine from these carts. Now she is in hospital because she was poisoned by that medicine". The medicine sellers, he said, were playing with the lives of people and needed to be stopped by the authorities.

Although Herat has almost 150 pharmacies, there are about 80 push-carts selling medicines, most of them expired. Even those which are not over their expiry date can be dangerous since they are not stored in the proper conditions and at required temperatures, being vended in the open bazaar under the sun. The drugs sold on the carts are sold without prescription and the vendors are not licensed pharmacists.

Muhammad Noor a thirty-year old man said,"I bought some medicine for my stomach ache from a child who was selling medicines on a cart. But when I took the medicine by pain increased. When I went to the doctor he told me the medicine had expired."

However, Dr. Raufa Niazi, director of the Health department of Herat, said that they had instituted teams to locate the expired medicine and burn them. She said, "during this week these teams collected 25 cartons of medicine and we burned them". Dr Niazi said that a plan had been prepared to stop cart sellers and that they had started implementing the plan, but did not provide any details.

Abdullah, a 15-year-old medicine seller said to Pajhwok, "I was selling foodstuff on my cart earlier but as selling medicines is more profitable I started selling medicine on my cart". He added he hadn't faced any problems with the authorities yet. Abdul Qayum another 18-year-old vendor selling medicines said," I have to feed six members of my family and I have to do this job. I am not literate and I know my work is not legal."

On the other hand, Dr, Muhammad Daud, one of the doctors in the health department, said," all the medicines should be kept in an average temperature. If it is exposed to cold or hot weather it will spoil and must not be used".

Abdul Tawab, one of the pharmacy owners, stated that he had invested 300,000 Afs in his pharmacy and studied a one-year course of pharmacy as well. However his investment was a waste because of medicine sellers vending medicines on push carts around him. He wanted the authorities to take action he said.

SAS destroys stockpiles and factories in war on Afghan drug barons
By Nick Meo in Kabul 20 February 2005 – The Guardian
The SAS is directing a secret war against Afghanistan's heroin barons along the dangerous border with Pakistan. Afghan special forces trained by the élite British soldiers have seized hundreds of tons of stockpiled opium and destroyed dozens of heroin factories in the past few months, the first significant blow to Afghanistan's narco-lords three years after Britain took a much criticised "lead role" against the opium trade.

Afghan anti-narcotics teams such as the crack 333 squad, backed by US aircraft, now promise a new offensive against drug dealers this spring in some of the most dangerous and difficult terrain in the country, including the Spin Ghar and Tora Bora mountains where Osama bin Laden made his stand in 2001.

British soldiers are "mentoring" their Afghan counterparts, helping them plan raids and feeding them information from Western intelligence about where the heroin factories and opium warehouses are. SAS soldiers are only occasionally venturing into risky areas, however, and have been forbidden from taking part in raids out of fear of sustaining casualties.

British officials in Kabul refused to discuss details of the secret operations, but expressed satisfaction at the results. During a visit to Kabul last week, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, announced a doubling of anti-drugs aid to $100m (£55m), half of which will go to subsidising alternative livelihoods for poppy farmers.

The strategy of hitting dealers through Afghan forces, backed by Western military power, represents a major shift in thinking. In response to a survey last year showing the biggest area ever under poppy cultivation, Washington hawks were seeking a massive, aerial spraying campaign against the poppy fields, to be carried out by private US contractors. The plan was resisted in Kabul, however, and Western military officers in Afghanistan feared that impoverishing hundreds of thousands of opium farmers could spark new insurgency.

Those who support tackling the problem on the ground argue that the alternative strategy is beginning to show results. "The Afghans have really started to get it together with their anti-narcotics teams," said a source in Kabul. "They are motivated, professional, and starting to have an impact. The Afghans want to take action against the drugs industry - President Hamid Karzai has said that the drugs industry is a national shame."

Karzai appeals to Afghans to return home
By Indo-Asian News Service
New Delhi, Feb 20 (IANS) Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, who arrives in India Wednesday on an official visit, has urged Afghans living in exile to return home to help in the reconstruction of their war-ravaged nation.

But Karzai, in an interview with Aaj Tak TV channel, warned that leaders of the Taliban militia seeking to re-enter Afghanistan in the guise of returning refugees would be tried as terrorists.

"(Taliban leader) Mullah Omar can come out of hiding if he wants to but he will be sent to court where he will be asked about all the crimes he committed against his countrymen," he said.

"We should put him behind bars. If he comes, we will try him as a terrorist," Karzai said, speaking at times in Hindi, a language he picked up during his days as a student of political science at the Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla.

But he said his government had no information about Omar's whereabouts.

Asked about fugitive Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, Karzai said there was no difference between Bin Laden and Omar. "They both have committed a lot of crimes."

Karzai urged Afghans to return home to help rebuild the nation's economy that was battered by Taliban rule since 1994. The Talibans were driven out of Kabul by the US-led military strike in 2001.

8 GIs from Afghan base disciplined
Los Angeles Times - February 19, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Army officials said Friday that eight soldiers were disciplined last year for threatening to kill detainees in Afghanistan and taking photographs of the abuse in a series of incidents with parallels to the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The soldiers, assigned to Ft. Drum, N.Y., were accused of dereliction of duty and were demoted, ordered to forfeit some pay and given other "non-judicial punishments" for their role in the events a year ago at Firebase Tycz near the small Afghan village of Deh Rawod. Authorities declined to name the soldiers, ranked sergeant and below, because they were not formally accused of a crime or court-martialed.

The episode was disclosed in military documents released this week and reported in the Los Angeles Times. But it was not clear at the time of the release whether the soldiers had been disciplined.

According to Army criminal investigators, the soldiers posed with rifles and pistols pointed at the heads of bound prisoners while other soldiers took their photographs. Other pictures appeared to show beatings of prisoners.

Afghans Face a Rocky Road to Next Vote
The Washington Post 02/20/2005 By N.C. Aizenman
KABUL - The party workers sat on metal folding chairs, taking notes as three instructors explained the simple principle behind Afghanistan's upcoming parliamentary elections.

"In a democratic society, the people vote for someone to represent them," said Hashmatullah Wahidi. "Then whenever people have problems, they can express it to their representative and he can solve it. . . . Any questions?"

A middle-aged woman wearing a gold head scarf rose from her seat, an agitated expression on her face. "But we all know that many of the governors in the provinces are warlords," said Pashtana Ahadi Wardak, an official of the Afghan Social Democratic Party. "They are going to intimidate people living under them to vote for their candidates. So how can you say we will have free and fair elections?"

There was an awkward silence as the instructors, sponsored by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute, exchanged nervous glances. Wardak had hit upon one of the more vexing obstacles along Afghanistan's rocky path to self-governance.

On Oct. 9 the nation reached an important milestone when Hamid Karzai won its first democratic presidential election. But analysts and some Afghan officials say there is little doubt that the next step -- elections for parliament, 34 provincial councils and nearly 400 district councils -- will need to be pushed back. Although slated for late April or May, the elections will more likely take place in summer or early fall.

The expected delay is partly due to continued debate over the nature of Afghanistan's emerging political system -- including not just whether the sway of local strongmen can be checked, but how much power political parties should be allowed in a nation that was ravaged by factional violence for more than two decades.
There are also logistical holdups. According to a law adopted last year, the president must announce the boundaries of Afghanistan's electoral districts at least 120 days before the election. After years of war, old land surveys and population figures are unreliable. A government team dispatched to update them has yet to deliver its findings, and even if the boundaries were published today, elections could not be held until June.

Once a date is set, the government will also have to raise an estimated $130 million from international donors to pay for the elections. The joint group of United Nations and Afghan officials charged with running the elections will then need time to print and deliver millions of ballots for more than 400 races.

They will also need to educate voters in hundreds of remote villages on how to participate, register hundreds of thousands of Afghans who have returned to the country or turned 18 since the presidential election, and vet up to 4,000 candidates to ensure that anyone with a criminal past is disqualified.

The challenge will be especially difficult since few of the people who ran the presidential election are still active. Most international election workers left Afghanistan soon after the vote, officials said. The Afghan election commission is also completely new, with members appointed by Karzai only last month.

The prospect of a delay has put Karzai in an ambiguous position. As long as Afghanistan lacks a parliament, he is effectively free to rule by decree. Yet this practice could also undermine the legitimacy Karzai gained through the presidential election -- which, despite some irregularities, was hailed for high voter turnout and almost no violence.

"Politically, from the president's point of view, I think it would be very desirable for the parliamentary elections to take place as scheduled," said Karzai's spokesman, Jawed Ludin.

Still, even members of Karzai's administration say they worry that races for the provincial and district councils could provoke bloodshed.

According to Afghanistan's constitution, the councils' only duty is to select two-thirds of the members of the Meshrano Jirga, or House of Elders, one of two houses of parliament.

However, it is widely expected that the councils will evolve into bodies that impose local taxes and provide local services, making them a prize worth fighting over for warlords.

Beginning in late 2001, Karzai appointed many former militia leaders to district posts to gain their support for his interim government. Now, despite an ambitious program to disarm warlords across the country, officials worry that their positions could give them added influence over the elections.

"The warlords still have power, weapons and ammunition. They can scare people into voting for whomever they choose," said A. Malek Sediqi, an official at the Interior Affairs Ministry. "If there is a delay and the government can appoint district chiefs who are professional and don't belong to any factions, then we could have much better elections."

Another issue is whether the voting system chosen by Karzai and his cabinet should be changed to make it easier for political parties to gain power. The current system requires voters to choose only one candidate even if their district is to be represented by several people. Since the most popular candidates tend to vacuum up votes, analysts said, the remaining winners may enter office with minimal support and mandate.

"You have to really discipline your voters to spread their votes among your candidates," noted Peter Dimitroff, Afghanistan country director for the National Democratic Institute. "If you field too many candidates, you risk diluting your vote and having all of them lose. If you run too few candidates, you lose out on potential seats that you could have won."

Most parliamentary democracies use some variation of a party list system, in which voters can cast their vote for a political party, which fields a list of candidates. The more votes a party receives, the more of its candidates win office. But Karzai, who ran as an independent, favored the single-vote system because of its inhibiting effect on political parties, Ludin said. He noted that Afghanistan has a bitter history of party skirmishing that from the 1970s to the 1990s led to a series of violent or irregular regime changes and a devastating civil war.

Karzai worried that using a party list system "would make it seem like political parties were again taking control and basically depriving people of the right to vote for the individuals they want," Ludin said.

However, Dimitroff warned that a parliament without strong parties could prove impossible for the president to work with. "For every legislative initiative he wants to pass, President Karzai would have to cut countless deals with any number of actors," he said. "Every piece of legislation will be a tough slog."

Last month, leaders of 35 political parties called on Karzai to change the voting system to party list. The factions that caused problems in the past "weren't parties," said Zulfiqar Khan Omid, head of the Labor and Development Party. "They were soldier groups, and they did awful things that made people afraid of parties. Now we need to explain to people that political parties are the backbone of democratic societies."

Ludin said Karzai would consider changing the voting system if Afghan members of the Joint Election Management Body, an Afghan-U.N. group, recommended it. In the meantime, the National Democratic Institute is trying to prepare political parties for the elections by offering seminars on basic democratic principles.

In Pashtana Ahadi Wardak's class, one of the instructors finally settled on a response to her contention that the warlords would prevent fair elections.

"It's true that we have such problems," Hamid Dost Zada said. "But after 25 years of war, step by step it's getting better. If citizens know their responsibilities, they will be active. And if they are active, we will all reach our goals." Wardak gave a dubious sigh and sat down.

Guards suspected of looting Kandahar bank
By Saeed Zabulai
Kandahar, Feb 20. (Pajhwok News Agency)—The Kandahar branch of the Pashtany Tejaraty bank was looted of 30 million Afs by robbers on Friday night. Police suspect the involvement of bank guards who are absconding, and have taken members of their family into custody.

Robbers broke open the number locks in the bank’s safe and after looting the bank left Kandahar in two cars which they abandoned in Dand district. From Dand they changed cars and their whereabouts are not known since then.

Officials of the Interior Ministry in Kabul confirmed that the robbery had taken place but told Pajhwok Afghan News that 17 million Afs had been looted from the bank as well as some Pakistani rupees. In Kandahar however officials said that 30 million Afs were missing from the bank.

The bank guards who are suspects in the robbery were under Commander Mohammed Ismail who was given the task of guarding the bank after the collapse of the Taliban.

Khalid Pashtoon the spokesman of the mayor of Kandahar confirmed that the robbery had taken place. He said “the robbers escaped but members of their families are under arrest". Salem Ihasas, a senior official of Kandahar police told Pajhwok "we are take steps to arrest the robbers".

Forced to flee, Afghan singer goes West to sing songs of home
By Marc Shulgold, Rocky Mountain News February 21, 2005
Nothing would bring greater joy to Ustad Farida Mahwash than to return to her Afghan homeland and sing for her legion of fans.

That day is not here yet, the vocalist lamented from her San Francisco Bay-area home. And it won't arrive soon.

"I would probably be killed if I sang in Kabul right now," said Mahwash, who performs tonight at Macky Auditorium with an ad-hoc ensemble called Radio Kabul.

The establishment of Najibullah Ahmadzai's Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan forced her to flee to Pakistan and then to the United States in 1990, after the Soviets began killing off the leading singers.

Tragically, things have only turned worse since then.

Once the Soviet army abandoned the country in 1989, Mojahidin forces began to take control, arresting and killing Najibullah in 1996. The rule of the Taliban then began.

As Mahwash explained: "The Taliban has been aggressive against the arts since they took power. They killed all the Ustads (those honored as maestros). Then they broke all of the instruments, and they broke everyone's spirit."

Speaking through a translator, the singer couldn't fight back the sorrow she feels for her homeland. She openly wept as she described the murder of Afghanistan's leading musicians, including a popular singer she described as "like Elvis over there."

Safely in the West, however, she's free to sing the music of home.

Tonight, she will appear with a quintet of players performing on rabab, sitar, harmonium, tabla and flute. The group will perform popular Afghan songs as well as the classical styles known as Ghazal and Pachtoun.

She had hoped to appear with the European-based Ensemble Kabul, but politics from another source intruded once again.

"They turned in their visa application to U.S. officials eight months ago," she said of the musicians. The request for entrance was denied. "I don't know why," Mahwash said. "Perhaps it's because they all have refugee passports, so it's difficult to obtain a visa. Maybe it's because of the Patriot Act."

Yes, she said, life in Afghanistan has improved, but only slightly. "The Taliban doesn't wear their traditional clothes anymore. Now they wear suits. But they are still in power."

During the Taliban's brutal rule, all music and musical instruments were strictly forbidden. It's different now, Mahwash noted. A prominent Afghan singer also living in California recently performed in Kabul. "But he is a man," she pointed out. "No woman would be allowed to perform there today."

This wasn't always the case. She became the first woman in her country honored with the title "Ustad" and was given a gold medal by the government. That was 30 years ago.

From the start, music was all she wanted to do. "I realized I was a good singer when I was 12," she said. "After that, I didn't have any interest in school. I only wanted to sing." She recalled whispering songs in class while other girls "played tabla on the desks."

As a woman, getting work as a singer was impossible, so she found secretarial work in various government ministries. Though her marriage was arranged, her husband proved sympathetic to her desire to sing. Through his help and the support of her boss at the ministry of information and culture, she was able to sing on the radio. Given the name Mahwash (meaning "the moon"), she immediately became a star. "People called (the radio station) in unprecedented numbers when they heard me," she said.

The oppression of women continues, the singer noted, but so does her hope of a bright future for Afghanistan.

"Artists are all ambassadors for peace," she said. "And I am an ambassador for all female voices in Afghanistan. There is no place in the religion of Islam where it says that women are unequal. I am a mother. I have white hair. But I still dream of a time when men and women will be equal in the world."