Afghanistan News November 22, 2006

November 22, 2006

Afghanistan female legislator attacked, husband killed
Wed Nov 22, 6:04 AM ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) - Suspected Taliban gunmen on motorbikes ambushed a female provincial councillor's car in southern Afghanistan, killing her husband, police said.

Separately, NATO forces said they killed 11 Taliban insurgents in air raids and artillery strikes in the east of the country Sunday.

The gunmen struck as legislator Zarghona Kakar and her husband stopped at a roadside bakery in Kandahar province late Tuesday, provincial police chief Esmatullah Alizai said.

Kakar was unhurt, but the gunmen mowed down her husband as he left the car to buy bread, Alizai told AFP.

"Police launched an investigation into the incident but had not arrested anyone so far. The men who carried out the attack covered their faces and were not recognized," he said.

Alizai blamed the "enemies of Afghanistan" for the attack. Afghan officials use the term to refer to the Islamist Taliban movement that has been leading an increasingly violent insurgency since being ousted in late 2001.

Kakar is one of three women in the male-dominated council for Kandahar province, which was the birthplace of the Taliban regime.

In September, the women's affairs director of the volatile province was killed in a similar attack. Safia Amajan died on September 25 when gunmen on a motorcycle sprayed her car with bullets as she went to work.

Police arrested a man who confessed to the assassination of Amajan. He was a former member of the radical Hezb-e-Islami militia led by wanted former premier Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and had been offered 4,000 dollars for the killing.

The attacks have highlighted the dangers still facing women in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, one Afghan soldier was killed and two were wounded when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb Monday night in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province, the southern corps commander General Rahmatullah Raufi told AFP.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said Wednesday it had killed 11 insurgents in air and artillery attacks in the Nari district of eastern Kunar province Sunday.

"In three successful engagements, ISAF forces disrupted the insurgents' attempts to attack ISAF forces," an ISAF statement said.

"Eleven enemy insurgents were assessed to have been killed in the operation."

Taliban vow fresh offensive after Afghan winter
Wednesday November 22, 11:18 AM
SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The Taliban are plotting a fresh offensive against foreign troops in Afghanistan when the bitter winter ends early next year, a top Taliban commander said on Wednesday.

The Taliban have this year unleashed the worst violence against the Afghan government and foreign troops since the hardline Islamists were ousted from power in late 2001.

But the violence has tailed off sharply in recent weeks.

Afghanistan's NATO force says that's because the Taliban suffered heavy losses, particularly in fighting in the south in September.

But Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah said their attacks had eased off because the harsh Afghan winter had started earlier than usual.

"The Taliban are drawing up our strategy for attacks on American and NATO occupation forces next summer ... The suicide and other attacks will intensify as the weather gets warmer," Dadullah told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Afghan fighting has ebbed and flowed with the seasons for decades, tailing off during the late November to March winter when mountain passes get snowed in.

The melting snow in the spring traditionally heralds a new round of violence.

"It's difficult to stay longer in the mountains in winter ... that's why, like previous years, Taliban attacks have lessened," Dadullah said.

Winter set in early this year with icy rain falling in valleys and snow on higher ground across much of the country in recent days.

The one-legged Dadullah said fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was in Afghanistan, personally leading the insurgency with other commanders.

Afghanistan says Omar and other top Taliban members are directing the insurgency from sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan. Pakistan says no Taliban leaders are there.

More than 3,700 people have been killed in Afghanistan this year, according to a recent report drawn up by Afghan and foreign officials.

Most of the casualties have been militants but more than a quarter of them were civilians. More than 150 foreign troops have also been killed, most of them American, British and Canadian.

Fighting was particularly heavy in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. NATO said hundreds of Taliban were killed in a two-week offensive in Kandahar in September.

More than 40,000 foreign troops are in Afghanistan, the most since U.S.-led troops routed the Taliban in the weeks after the September 11 attacks on the United States.

NATO struggling to plug Afghan force shortfalls
By Mark John
MONS, Belgium (Reuters) - NATO's top operational commander said on Wednesday its force in Afghanistan faced troop shortages and diplomats doubted whether an alliance summit next week would plug the gaps.

NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Jones said the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was battling Taliban insurgents at 85 percent of full strength despite his repeated calls for more troops and equipment.

"I continue to insist we need the additional 15 percent," Jones told a news briefing at NATO's military headquarters in southern Belgium, saying this equated to a shortfall of 2,500 troops, helicopters, transport and reconnaissance capabilities.

"It's not a huge quantity but it makes a difference. I would be much happier with 85-90 percent rather than 80-85 percent," Jones said, adding that this did not include Poland's offer of 800 additional troops due to arrive in Afghanistan in January.

"If we're properly organized and we bring all elements of our efforts together in cohesion, we will win," he said. "If we don't, it will be longer and it will be more difficult and it will be more costly."

NATO leaders meeting in the Latvian capital Riga next week are due to commit the alliance to remaining in Afghanistan for the long haul, but diplomats played down prospects of nations adding to the 32,000 troops it currently has on the ground.

"It's not a quick fix or a pledging conference. That is not what this is about," said a senior NATO diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"This is about the importance of staying the course and sending a very strong message to Afghans that we are with them for the long-term because their security is our security."

U.S. Marine Jones was the NATO commander who in September highlighted attention on ISAF's troop shortages with an admission that NATO had underestimated the fierceness of resistance as alliance troops pushed into the heartland of the Taliban, ousted from power in 2001 by a U.S.-led invasion.

Aside from Poland's pledge of troops, a number of countries have reinforced contingents in the south but military sources say ISAF continues to lack the agility it needs on the ground.

Jones nonetheless argued that, despite taking casualties on its side, NATO had convincingly won a series of head-on battles with Taliban fighters in the past two months and predicted that they would return to traditional guerrilla tactics.

A top Taliban commander interviewed by Reuters on Wednesday rejected that interpretation, saying the Islamist group would begin a fresh offensive against foreign troops after the winter.

"The Taliban are drawing up our strategy for attacks on American and NATO occupation forces next summer ... The suicide and other attacks will intensify as the weather gets warmer," Mullah Dadullah said by telephone from an undisclosed location.
(Additional reporting by Saeed Ali Achakzai in Spin Boldak)

US, Afghanistan Plan Acceleration for Afghan Forces
By Al Pessin 21 November 2006 Voice of America
Afghanistan's defense minister and the top U.S. general in the country say they are working on plans to accelerate the growth of Afghanistan's security forces. The two spoke after meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak says his government wants to reach the target of 70,000 troops by the end of 2008, three years ahead of schedule. And he wants the acceleration to be accompanied by an upgrade in training and equipment.

"We are discussing accelerating the development of the Afghan national security forces by accelerating the Afghan National Army's growth and providing it with enhanced protection, mobility, firepower and combat enablers," he said.

The commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, indicated that the United States is working on the request.

"The United States government is considering improving the capabilities and increasing the rate of development and size of the Afghan National Army and the police," he said.

General Eikenberry said increased insurgent activity in Afghanistan makes it necessary to move more quickly to develop the Afghan security forces.

"The Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police, they need a higher level of protection, they need more mobility, they need better logistics systems, they need increased firepower," he said.

The general says the Afghan forces also need more training for leadership development in order to help them sustain their progress over the long term.

Also at the news conference, Defense Minister Wardak disputed Pakistani statements that Afghanistan must solve its insurgency problem on its own.

"The key is actually international cooperation because of the nature of the threat," he said. "In most of the cases, the country where the sanctuary is located, they can act effectively."

The minister made clear he wants Pakistan to do more to help eliminate terrorist bases on its side of the border, and to make it more difficult for terrorist groups to recruit fighters and gain public support.

"The issue is that we have to delegitimize terrorism and counter the support for its ideology," he said. "And we shall not only try to deny the terrorists the means to operate, but to deny them the means to survive. In this case I hope that Pakistan should. We will work with them closely to fulfill all these requirements."

Minister Wardak said Pakistan's role should include military action, but also law enforcement, intelligence work and providing alternatives to schools that teach Islamic extremism.

The minister also took the opportunity to thank outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Minister Wardak said Rumsfeld played a "fundamental role in delivering Afghanistan from years of destruction, occupation and civil war." He said Afghanistan will work to build on the U.S.-Afghan security relationship Secretary Rumsfeld helped create.

Two weeks ago, after his party lost badly in congressional elections due in large part to the situation in Iraq, President Bush announced he had decided to change the leadership at the Defense Department. Rumsfeld, who has led the department for the last six years, is serving until his successor is confirmed by the Senate, which is expected next month.

Merkel has no plans to change German role in Afghanistan
BERLIN (AFP) - Chancellor Angela Merkel has ruled out changing the mandate of German troops in Afghanistan to allow them to be deployed in the violence-hit south of the country.

"We want to make the mission in Afghanistan a success," Merkel said in a speech to the Bundestag lower house of parliament on the first anniversary of her swearing-in as chancellor.

"But I see no military commitment beyond this mandate."

About 2,750 German peacekeepers are based in the relatively peaceful northern part of Afghanistan, where they hold the command of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Reports in Germany at the weekend said the United States was putting pressure on Germany to deploy combat troops in the south, where the Taliban are mounting their most severe attacks since they were ousted by a US-led force in 2001.

The German government on Monday denied reports that it was set to contribute troops for so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams to work in the violence-hit region.

Merkel defended the role of German troops and said a re-deployment could undo their work in the north.

"The German army is carrying out a difficult and important role in the north and we do not want to put the success of this mission in jeopardy," the chancellor said, stating that 40 percent of the Afghan population lives in the regions where German troops are stationed.

Merkel added: "The issue of Afghanistan is too important for us to let it be reduced to a military north-south debate."

A NATO summit in Riga next week is expected to review the mission in Afghanistan.

More Marines may be needed in terror war
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Marine Corps may need to increase in size in order to sustain continued deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan without sacrificing needed training or putting undue stress on the corps, the Marine commandant said Wednesday.

At a breakfast meeting with reporters, Gen. James Conway said the current pace of rotations to Iraq — seven months there and a bit more than seven months back home — is limiting other types of training and could eventually prompt Marines to leave the service.

The goal, he said, is to spend twice the amount of time at home that was spent on deployment — for example seven months deployed and 14 months at home.

Conway, who took on the Marines' top job just eight days ago, said there are two ways to deal with the ongoing stress on the Marines, and that "one is reducing the requirement, the other is potentially growing the force for what we call the long war."

His comments came as the Pentagon and the Bush administration are finalizing the budget for Fiscal 2008, starting next Oct. 1, in which the armed services are hoping to get increased funding to carry on the warfighting. Conway said he could not say how much money, or additional funding, the Marines would be seeking.

There are currently about 180,000 active duty Marines.

Conway said that recommendations coming out of the various reviews on Iraq policy will have an impact on whether more forces are needed. But if the decision is made to increase the size of the Marine presence in Iraq — currently about 141,000 with roughly 20,000 Marines — he has enough Marines around the globe to respond.

Explosion in gun shop kills 1, wounds 4 in S. Afghanistan
People's Daily
Explosion at a gun shop in Afghanistan's southern Kandahar province killed one person and injured four others on Wednesday, a local police officer Abdul Ali said.

All the victims are common civilians, police said.

"The incident took place at 12:30 p.m. local time in the old bazaar of Kandahar city," Abdul Ali told Xinhua.

Five gun shops were destroyed and a mosque was partially damaged, he added.

The reason for the explosion, the officer added, could be the gunpowder kept carelessly in a shop.

Hunting guns and knives are easily available in Afghan bazaars across the war-ravaged country.
Source: Xinhua

More Equipment Needed in Afghanistan, U.S. Commander Says
By Bill Brubaker Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, November 21, 2006; 4:30 PM
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan today declined to say whether more American troops will be needed to confront increasing insurgent and terrorist attacks in the country.

But Army Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry said the United States should provide more military equipment to beef up Afghanistan's security forces.

"Now is a very appropriate time to increase the level of equipment, the sophistication of equipment," Eikenberry said at a Pentagon news conference with Afghan Minister of Defense Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak.

Eikenberry said the United States should provide helicopters, Humvees, fixed-wing aircraft and protective helmets and body amour because the U.S.-trained Afghan Army has learned how to "operate this equipment effectively."

The United States has contributed about 20,000 of the 32,000 troops that support the 37-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization security mission in Afghanistan.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to overthrow the Taliban government, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. U.S. allies supported that effort and over time, NATO has played a greater role in the conflict. In early October, NATO extended its military role to the entire country when it took over eastern Afghanistan from U.S.-led forces.

The question of whether more U.S. troops may be needed comes as some NATO members have shown reluctance to deepen their commitment to the conflict.

Asked point-blank if more U.S. troops might be needed, Eikenberry said it is "best at this point to wait and see what NATO is able to provide."

The number of insurgent and terrorist attacks has quadrupled in Afghanistan during the past year, causing 3,700 deaths since January, according to a recent report by a commission of Afghan and foreign officials.

The Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board also reported that this violence threatens to reverse recent economic and political gains Afghanistan has made, and it has led to a partial or total withdrawal of foreign aid in some provinces.

Yesterday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair underscored Britain's military commitment to Afghanistan during a visit to a military camp in the country's southern Helmand province.

"Here in this extraordinary piece of desert is where the future in the early 21st century of the world community is ready to be played out, and you are the people that are doing the difficult work," Blair told British troops, according to a transcript of his remarks.

Later, at a news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Blair told reporters: "We have got to stay committed for as long as it takes for our own security, not just for the sake of the Afghan people."

In September, Eikenberry said the U.S. military planned no troop cuts in Afghanistan before March. He said Taliban fighters and extremists had grown more numerous and become better organized in some parts of the south and southeast, where foreign troops were limited and the Afghan government was weak.

Today, asked to describe efforts to capture Osama bin Laden, Eikenberry said: "The search for Osama bin Laden continues."

But bin Laden, he added, is only "one man in an international terrorist network."

"He has a significance of his own," Eikenberry said, "but still he is part of an international terrorist network that has to be attacked, as it is, in a very comprehensive manner."

Female Afghan minister pushes for rights
By ALISA TANG, Associated Press Writer Wed Nov 22, 4:40 AM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - Five years after the Taliban's fall, women aren't beaten if they leave home without a male relative. Girls can go to school, and a quarter of Afghan parliamentarians are women — as mandated by law. But life remains bleak: Many women and girls face domestic violence and forced marriage in this conservative, violence-plagued country. In many provinces where the government wields little power, life for women remains as it was during the rule of the Taliban.

"We've had three decades of war in Afghanistan, which have had very bad consequences for women," Minister for Women's Affairs Hussn Banu Ghazanfar said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It takes time to solve these problems."

Ghazanfar, the fourth female minister since the fall of the Taliban, was appointed by President Hamid Karzai in August. But like her predecessors, she is up against provincial warlords who continue to refuse women and girls the right to education and even to leave their homes.

While she enjoys the support of Karzai and was approved for her post in a parliamentary vote, her ministry is regarded as having "minimal influence on government policy," according to a recent report from the international rights organization Womankind.

Ghazanfar did not comment directly to the AP on her prospects for success, focusing instead on the ways she's working to strengthen her ministry.

She said the most pressing issues facing women are violence and their low education levels, particularly in the rural areas that are home to most of Afghanistan's 30 million people. Only about 15 percent of Afghan women are literate.

According to the report by Womankind, domestic violence affects "an overwhelming majority" of Afghan women and girls.

Ghazanfar said she's trying to draft laws making violence against women illegal, but the legislation must be approved by many former warlords who are now lawmakers in the Afghan parliament.

"The elimination of violence against women does not work if we just conduct seminars and workshops," Ghazanfar said. "If we create specific laws to protect women from violence, women will have more confidence."

Legislation is also in the works to eliminate forced marriages and to create safe shelters for homeless women.

And the ministry is working with international aid donors to provide vocational training for women in cooking, tailoring and handicraft making.

Unlike most Afghan women, Ghazanfar is not married and has no children. But she, too, was sequestered to her home during the reign of the Taliban, which came to power in the late 1990s and was forced out by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 for hosting Osama bin Laden.

The 49-year-old former linguistics and literature dean at Kabul University spent those years in her large library and translated four books from Russian into Dari, one of Afghanistan's main languages. Unlike many women here, she had the support of her family to pursue her endeavors.

Ghazanfar says she hopes that all Afghan women one day will have access to education.

"It's not important which position I have, but it's more important that I'm working for women — the most needy women of the world," Ghazanfar said. "I'm really happy here, working for the women of Afghanistan."

Analysis: NATO's Afghan caveats harmful
By PAMELA HESS UPI Pentagon Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- NATO members have come through with only 85 percent of the troops and capabilities to which they've committed, and some of the 36 countries who contribute a total of 33,000 troops to ISAF have also placed caveats limiting their use to peaceful missions, top U.S. military and diplomatic officials said Tuesday.

Germany is of particular concern, said Amb. Daniel Fried, secretary of state for European and Eurasion Affairs, at a breakfast with reporters Tuesday.

"Four allies are doing a disproportionate share of the fighting," Fried said.

"Germany is still working the issues of what it means to be a leader in the world," Fried said.

"I am not criticizing allies like Germany, which has a large and effective (provinciual reconstruction team) in the north. But caveats are not what we like to see in NATO operations," Fried said.

Exactly which nations have exactly what caveats is politically sensitive and the information was not immediately available, a State Department spokesman said.

Germany has 2,700 troops in Konduz, a relatively safe area in northern Afghanistan. They are limited by Germany's parliament to working with the PRT; they can not be moved to respond to contingencies. The country is still grappling with its role in World War II and the appropriate role for its military against that aggressive past.

However, Canadian and Dutch forces are in a pitched battled in southern Afghanistan against a resurgent Taliban, and cannot rely on German and other forces to back them up if they need reinforcing, Fried said.

"It is not a surprise the Taliban went after the Canadians and the Dutch," said Fried. "We knew they were going to do that ... because they believed they would be softer targets. The Taliban were wrong.

"Canada and the Netherlands have every right to expect their allies are at their back," Fried said. "They are saying, how come it's us? Why do we draw the short straw? Shouldn't allied countries at least be standing at our back?"

"The question is should the NATO commander in the field have the ability to move his resources in a country where they need to be moved?" Fried said.

"National caveats are a problem. That doesn't mean what the Germans and Italians are doing isn't worthy. But our view is that national caveats are not a good thing in general.

"We hope Germany understands removing caveats is a question of allied solidarity," he said.

Fried said similar caveats allowed riots in Kosovo in March 2004 to spin out of control -- churches were being burned and no troops could step in to stop them for 48 hours.

"We've since eliminated caveats in Kosovo," Fried said. "We should not be introducing these kinds of things in ISAF."

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Tuesday also called for the lifting of caveats.

"As a military commander on the ground ... I fully support (British) Gen. David Richards (NATO forces commander in Afghanistan), who has made calls for the requirements to be fulfilled in terms of capabilities, and secondly very much in terms of the restrictions or the caveats that are in place right now for the removal of those, to give the operational commander the absolute flexibility and the full set of capabilities that are required in order to fight the campaign," said Eikenberry at a Pentagon press briefing.

NATO's International Security and Assistance Force assumed control for the stabilization mission for the entire country in September. U.S. forces remain as a counter-terrorism force and as trainers for Afghan forces.

"There's been a steady evolution of that mission to where they went to the north, to the west, then the very significant step of going into southern Afghanistan, where there is this counterinsurgency fight that's ongoing, and then finally the move into the east," Eikenberry said.

The NATO alliance is having a summit next week in Riga, Latvia, and the Afghanistan war, including the question of caveats, is likely to be a chief focus.

"There's more meetings that are taking place on the military staff, and this is very high on their agenda, so better to wait and see what the results are," Eikenberry said.

Gen. Joseph Ralston, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said removing caveats should be high on the agenda.

"They should be bringing it to the table for political leadership," he said Tuesday, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "It's also important to work it behind the scenes."

"A military failure in Afghanistan would be catastrophic for the alliance," he said.

The Afghan war is the first time in NATO's nearly 60 year history that it has undertaken a combat mission outside of Europe.

"That's absolutely remarkable -- the first time that NATO in their history has deployed outside of the European sector and now is there," Eikenberry said.

FEATURE - Afghanistan's hated Sikhs yearn for India
Wednesday November 22, 04:15 PM By Terry Friel
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Forced to wear yellow patches in the days of the Taliban, the homesick Sikhs of Afghanistan still hide in back alleys and yearn for India.

In the Taliban's birthplace, the southern city of Kandahar, their children cannot go to school and locals stone or spit on the men in the streets, who mostly try to hide in the narrow alleys of the mud-brick older quarter of the city.

"We don't want to stay in Afghanistan," says 40-year-old Balwant Singh. "The locals tell us 'you are not from Afghanistan, go back to India'. Sometimes, they throw stones at us, the children. We feel we have to hide.

"I am even afraid to go to parts of the city."

Their temple, or gurdwara, in Kandahar is a simple traditional yellow pole capped by the orange Nishan Sahib flag.

It sits outside a stark prayer room in an obscure courtyard reachable only after knocking on two sets of unmarked heavy timber doors down a cramped mud-brick tunnel-way.

The pole does not rise above roof level, unlike the splendid gurdwaras across India where they tower above the temples and the countryside, visible for kilometres.

There are about 10 Sikh families in Kandahar -- fewer than 50 people. Another 22 lonely men, all their families back in India, live as traders in the neighbouring province of Uruzgan, another Taliban stronghold.

SCATTERED
Similar numbers are scattered across Afghanistan, a strictly Islamic nation where most people do not recognise Sikhism's close links with Islam. Founded about 600 years ago in the western plains of India, Sikhism combines elements of Hinduism and Islam.

In the late 1980s, there were about 500,000 Sikhs scattered across Afghanistan, many here for generations. The country's Islam was moderate, based on the Sunni Hanafi sect.

Sikhs, Hindus and Jews were prominent in the economy, mainly as moneylenders -- often underwriting the wars of various kings.

Most Sikhs, along with the country's handful of Hindus, came with the British from the Indian empire in the 19th century.

But after the mujahideen civil war and the 1994 rise of the Taliban, most had fled by 1998.

In 2001, the Taliban ordered Sikhs, Hindus and other religious minorities to wear yellow patches, ostensibly so they would not be arrested by the religious police for breaking Taliban laws on the length of beards and other issues.

It is not clear how widely the rule was enforced.

The Sikhs who have returned since, like those of Kandahar and Uruzgan, are mainly small-time traders who complain of the pittance they make here, but say it is more than India offers.

Most come from poor families who fled to Delhi when Britain arbitrarily divided its Indian empire into Muslim Pakistan and secular but mainly Hindu India in 1947, forever splitting the Sikh homeland, the fertile plains of the Punjab.

"We don't want to stay in Afghanistan. But we have no choice," says Santok Singh, 39, whose family is in New Delhi.

Almost all have no papers or visas and are at the mercy of authorities in a country where corruption is rife -- one of the biggest challenges to Afghanistan ever succeeding as a nation.

"They take our homes, they take our businesses," says Hem Singh, a 42-year-old trader from Uruzgan. "We can't do anything.

"We have no rights."

Most are general traders or pharmacists. Forced to sell their goods cheaper than their Afghan competition to win business, they are too ashamed to tell their families what life is really like.

"We keep it secret," says Hem Singh. "We don't tell our families how bad our life here really is."

SCARS OF WAR

They cannot travel to Afghanistan via the fastest route through Pakistan because of the decades of enmity between New Delhi and Islamabad so they use alternative routes which can be difficult and sometimes dangerous.

In a cramped room in Kandahar, a dozen turbaned Sikh men drink Afghanistan's ubiquitous sugary green tea.

Several show scars from bomb blasts suffered travelling the roads of the dangerous south to stock their shops or wholesale to Afghan traders too scared to travel themselves.

The resurgence of the Taliban is making their lives worse: the highways are more dangerous with a new spate of suicide bombings and a resurgence of fundamentalist Islam is making their differences from Afghans more pronounced.

The Taliban is the strongest it has been since U.S.-led forces ousted its hardline government in 2001. This has been the bloodiest year since then, with more than 3,700 people killed, almost a third of them civilians.

"We are always afraid someone will kill us or hurt us because we are Sikh," says Sabrat Subir Singh, a 62-year-old trader from Uruzgan. "But what can we do? We need the money.

"No one here is happy. We are angry and sad."

Insurgency falls down in Afghanistan over past month
KABUL, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) -- Militant activities have dropped down in Afghanistan over the past month, a spokesman of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said Wednesday.

The daily number of insurgent attacks countrywide has dropped below 10 in November, and that of roadside bombings has dropped to two, while suicide bombings to 0.2, Maj. Luke Knittig told a press conference.

He also said no ISAF soldiers have been killed in this country since Nov. 6.

ISAF has said militants launched 18 attacks in this country every day from mid-September to mid-October including a total of 18 suicide bombings, while it did not give the daily number of roadside bombings in the period.

According to a high-level report issued on Nov. 12, insurgent-related security incidents in Afghanistan, which include the attacks of government and foreign forces against rebels, have reached over 600 per month by end-September, compared to a 2005 average of approximately 130 per month.

At the end of the fasting month of Ramadan on Oct. 23, elusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar warned the Taliban would launch more attacks in the coming months, but the warning seemingly hasn't been turned into reality yet.

Over the past month, Afghan and NATO forces apparently have tightened security across the country especially in major cities like Kabul and captured quite a few terrorists.

Insurgence has killed 3,700 people in Afghanistan this year, a rate four times greater than in 2005.

Two Canadian soldiers injured in Afghanistan roadside explosion
Tue Nov 21, 2:19 PM ET
OTTAWA (AFP) - Two Canadian soldiers were wounded overnight in a roadside bomb blast along a new two-lane highway being constructed in southern Afghanistan, a military official told AFP.

"Two Canadian soldiers were injured as a result of an anti-personnel mine strike along route Summit in the Pashmul area at approximately midnight local time (2000 GMT Monday), about 25 kilometers west of Kandahar," army spokeswoman Karen Johnstone said.

One soldier suffered "serious but ... non-life-threatening" injuries. The other "appeared to have suffered light wounds and will soon return to duty."

Both were evacuated by helicopter to the Kandahar airfield for medical treatment, she said.

They were conducting "routine operations" between Zhari district and Bazaar-e-Panjawyi, where a new two-lane road is being constructed by Canadian Joint Task Force and others to assist the local population, the spokeswoman said.

Canada has about 2,500 soldiers hunting down former Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants in southern Afghanistan, and helping to rebuild the war-torn nation.

Afghanistan's neglected drought
Wednesday, 22 November 2006, 08:30 GMT BBC News
Increasing violence in Afghanistan has overshadowed hardship caused by drought. Christian Aid's Anjali Kwatra writes about the problem in the western province of Herat.

In a graveyard on a hill overlooking the village of Sya Kamarak in western Afghanistan, villagers gathered last week for the funerals of three young children who died of hunger.

They died on the same day from malnutrition caused by a devastating drought that has hit western, northern and southern Afghanistan.

There were no doctors' reports to confirm the cause of death - the parents were too poor to take them to the clinic which is one day's walk away.

Jan Bibi, 40, said she had been feeding her three-month-old daughter Nazia with just boiled water and sugar because she had nothing else.

"My baby died because of inadequate food. I wanted to breastfeed her but I was not producing enough milk."

Jan Bibi's surviving twin daughter Merzia is the size of a newborn rather than a three-month old and cries continually for food.

Dry spell
"I am worried about my baby," said Jan Bibi. "The future is dark because we don't have food or water or fuel for heating. We have to walk for four hours to get to the nearest fresh water - we don't know how we will survive."

The villagers say 50 children have died so far this year - a far higher number than usual - because of the drought.

Almost all the 300 families in remote Sya Kamarak, which is a day's drive along bumpy tracks from the capital of the province, Herat city, live off the land.. Most lost all their wheat harvest when the rains failed in April and May.

A Christian Aid assessment of the drought in five northern and western provinces showed that farmers lost 80-100% of their crops in the worst affected areas and water sources in many villages had dried up.

The UN says 1.9 million people are at risk. The World Food Programme says it has only received one third of the funds it needs to help the drought victims.

In the meantime people are surviving on limited supplies of flour from last year and eating just boiled potatoes, meagre supplies of bread and tea to fill their stomachs. As winter approaches many villages in more remote areas will get cut off by snow and aid will not be able to get through.

Displaced
Not only is food scarce, but each day children as young as six are sent to collect water from taps or wells up to three hours away.

Village elders say that droughts used to occur every 15 to 20 years, but the last drought finished just two years ago. They also say that winters are not as cold as they used to be and summers are hotter. Some experts attribute these changing weather patterns to climate change.

The drought has also hit hard in the south of the country where British troops are fighting an insurgency. The government has said that 20,000 families have been displaced in the south because of a combination of fighting and drought.

Poppies for food

Although the west of the country is not a Taleban stronghold, many of the poor farmers said they could understand why people would sign up to fight when they were desperately poor.

Attalullah, 40, was one of the fathers who buried their children. Sitting in his two-room mud hut, he explained their situation as his wife Rabia wept for their daughter Uzraa, who was two.

"We have just a few kilograms of flour left to make bread with and we spend all day collecting twigs to use for fuel for cooking and heating. If anyone will provide us with a means of livelihood then we would rather join them rather than starve to death. "

Many villagers said the international community was so focussed on the insurgency, that those suffering from the drought were being forgotten. "The world does not know that people in Afghanistan are only thinking about what they can find to eat, not about fighting," said Ramazan, 40, a farmer who also lost all his crop.

Others said they would consider growing poppies which grow well in dry climates just to earn enough to buy food.

Mullah Niaz, 80, appealed to the international community to help farmers affected by the drought.

"There are many families in this village who don't know where they will get their next meal from. They are eating just bread and relying on the charity of better off neighbours from day to day. We are expecting that more people will die unless we get help. We need food, water, medicines and fodder for our animals. We need help now."

Taliban drown our values in sea of blood, say political leaders from the Pashtun tribes.
By Ahmed Rashid in Peshawar Daily Telegraph (UK) 1:56am GMT 22/11/2006
Hundreds of political leaders and chiefs from the Pashtun tribes inhabiting Pakistan's border with Afghanistan have for the first time held a peace jirga, or tribal council, demanding an end to Taliban violence.

Clean-shaven tribal chiefs with large turbans, religious scholars with long beards and young political activists sat together in a large hall in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar to demand that the peaceful traditions of the Pashtun tribes which "are being drowned out in a sea of blood" be restored.

Many of the gathered throng also demanded an end to the alleged support of the Taliban by elements within the Islamabad government of President Pervez Musharraf, who insists that he is an ally in the war against terrorism and whose police arrested 39 suspected Taliban fighters in the city of Quetta yesterday. "The Taliban are not the creation of Pashtun society, but the creation of the Pakistan army," said Afsandyar Wali, head of the Awami National Party (ANP).

"Pashtuns stand united for peace but the fire of war is burning our land and we have to find the means to extinguish it."

The jirga was organised by the ANP, a secular Pashtun nationalist party that has been marginalised in the past decade due to its criticism of Pakistan's military regime and the wave of Islamic extremism that has flooded the tribal belt on both sides of the border.

However, the ANP and other democrats are regaining popularity because of fears within the tribes about growing "Talibanisation" among Pashtuns.

The Taliban are predominantly Pashtun and they are recruiting both Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns to fight the 5,500 British troops deployed in southern Afghanistan. Pakistani Taliban have also declared an Islamic state in North Waziristan on the Pakistani side.

Tribal chiefs alleged that the military's Inter Services Intelligence agency was helping the Taliban plan a new offensive next year, aimed at defeating Nato in southern Afghanistan and toppling the government of President Hamid Karzai.

The chiefs claimed the Taliban were being allowed to move large amounts of weapons and ammunition to the Afghan border. Government officials in Peshawar vehemently denied the claim.

The jirga also heard from Taliban supporters such as Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a cleric who heads a radical Islamic party that rules the border provinces of Balochistan and the North West Frontier.

"The Taliban are in the forefront of resistance against foreign occupation forces in Afghanistan," said Mr Rehman. "The UN has declared them terrorists so the only way left to defend themselves is by picking up the gun." However, his words were drowned out by dozens of speakers who said that the Taliban were a threat to peace and a negation of Pashtun values.

"Around the world we are accused of being terrorists, but tolerance is in our blood. We demand all the world respect our values, culture and the dignity of our people," said Mehmood Khan Achakzai, the leader of a moderate Pashtun party in Balochistan.

Pakistani foreign minister to visit Afghanistan next month
Pakistani Foreign Minister Khursheed Mahmood Kasuri would pay an official visit to Afghan capital Kabul early next month, Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta said Tuesday.

"His Excellency Mr. Kasuri is going to visit Kabul from 7th to 9th December," Spanta told newsmen here. The agenda of his talks with Afghan officials would cover holding the peace Jirga or grand assembly, and boosting bilateral cooperation in all fields including the war on terror, he added.

President Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart Pervez Musharaf reached an agreement in front of U.S. President Bush to hold a grand assembly of the elders and chieftains of the two neighboring countries in order to find a viable solution to militancy. Source: Xinhua

Afghanistan suicide bombers often kill only themselves; 'brainwashing' mullahs blamed
The Associated Press - 11/21/2006
KABUL - When an 18-year-old from Pakistan dismounted his bicycle a couple kilometers (miles) outside the eastern town of Khost last week, his clothes flapped up, revealing a suicide vest to an alert farmer nearby.

Police soon surrounded the teenager and ordered him to remove his vest. He refused, grew increasingly agitated and eventually blew himself up, said Yaqoub Khan, police criminal director for Khost province. No one else was hurt.

A suicide attacker on Monday waited on a roadside in eastern Paktika province, apparently biding his time for a target to appear. When an Afghan army convoy approached, the bomber blew himself up — several meters (yards) ahead of the vehicles, said Gov. Mohammad Akram Akhpelwak. He caused no injuries or damage.

The nature of the two would-be suicide bombers' deaths is strikingly common in Afghanistan. In sharp contrast to attacks in Iraq, scores of suicide strikes across Afghanistan have killed only the attacker, or a very few victims.

NATO said that as of last week, 97 suicide attacks this year have killed just 217 people — a casualty rate four times lower than in Iraq. "These suicide bombers are brainwashed in Pakistan. That's their only training. They don't know what they're doing," Khan said.

By comparison, 154 incidents involving suicide bombings in Iraq killed more than 1,330 people this year, according to numbers compiled by The Associated Press.

Maj. Luke Knittig, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force, said NATO commanders have noticed how often suicide attacks in Afghanistan fail.

"We have certainly noticed that there have been a fair number that are pretty poorly executed and bungled, and of course they're all ill-conceived," he said.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said suicide bombs allow attackers to get as close to their targets as possible and inflict the most damage. Bombers in Afghanistan apparently don't have a guide to route them to good targets, he said.

"It's a less sophisticated operation where the attraction of martyrdom is sufficient to recruit bombers," he said. "They have the bombers, they just don't have the ability or inclination to steer the bomber to the most lucrative target."

To be sure, suicide attacks have had deadly effect in Afghanistan. Suicide bombers in September killed 18 people outside the Helmand governor's compound, 16 people near the U.S. Embassy and 12 people outside the Interior Ministry. Two attacks in August and one in January killed 21 people each.

But the big, deadly attacks usually are organized by al-Qaida and involve Arab attackers or planners, said Gen. Abdul Manan Farahie, the chief of the Interior Ministry's anti-terrorism department.

Most Taliban suicide attacks kill few people because the men called on to detonate themselves have no experience or training — only a mullah in a Pakistani madrassa who orders him to do it, Farahie said. He said most suicide attacks are planned in Pakistan.

"These people are not very experienced," he said. "The Afghans doing the suicide attack, they were in the madrassas for five, six, seven months. They had no contact with their families, and they are under the psychological control of the mullahs. If they had contact with their families, they would say 'Don't do this.'"

Overall, NATO last week said that only 30 percent of all kinds of attacks — including rockets, mortars and small arms attacks — were "effective" from mid-October to mid-November. An effective attack is one that hurts or kills people or damages equipment, Knittig said.

A U.S. military spokesman, Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, said that commanders do see trained, planned maneuvers in the field, but that many Taliban attacks fail because of a lack of experience.

"Certainly there are a fair number of failed attempts, and that's OK," he said. "I hope they don't get better." There were two suicide attacks in 2003, six in 2004 and 21 in 2005, according to numbers compiled by the RAND Corp. think tank.

That number has shot up this year, as Taliban fighters have increased attacks across the country. But Knittig said that NATO and Afghan security forces are having increasing success moving against would-be bombers. He said joint NATO-Afghan operations have led to the dismantling of six suicide cells in the last three months.

Mohammad Ayoub, the provincial police chief of Khost, said police arrested a man two weeks ago after receiving a tip that he had bomb-making materials. Police found explosives and a remote control detonation device at his home, he said.

"Fortunately, people are giving us a lot of cooperation," Ayoub said. "The people know that the suicide attacks are coming from outside the country. These people are not Afghans."

Taliban drug trade: Echoes of Colombia
By Gretchen Peters | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor from the November 21, 2006 edition
As Afghanistan's narcotics trade explodes past $3 billion a year, there is concern that the Taliban is becoming another FARC, Colombia's notorious leftist insurgent group that draws much of its funding from the drug trade.

The Taliban and FARC - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - both got their start protecting peasants from corrupt governments. There's evidence both initially fought narcotics traffic but then levied taxes on the trade for much-needed cash.

Over time, the FARC began to use its soldiers to protect shipments, and took over coca factories. They forced farmers under their control to grow coca. Eventually, they became self-sufficient and set up a parallel government in their semiautonomous zone. They now earn an estimated $500 million a year from cocaine.

That all sounds eerily familiar to police and military officials in Afghanistan. "There is no question at all that the Taliban has been increasingly involved both directly and indirectly in narcotics," says Seth Jones, an analyst at the Rand Corp.

Evidence is growing that the Taliban and their allies are moving beyond taxing the trade to protecting opium shipments, running heroin labs, and even organizing farm output in areas they control. "It's reached the point where about half of the opium we seize in the provinces has some link to the Taliban," says Gen. Ali Shah Paktiawal, director of the anticriminal branch of the Kabul police.

Another senior Afghan security official says captured Taliban have confessed that most funding comes from drugs.

Afghan opium production, which mushroomed 59 percent in 2006, multiplied by 162 percent in southern Helmand Province, where Taliban ties to the trade are clearest. "People should be concerned about the FARCification of the Taliban," says a senior Western counternarcotics official, adding, "It does not take a lot of drug money to fund their terrorist operations."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited British troops in the province Monday and pledged to stay "as long as it takes" to prevent a return to power by the Taliban. British aid - $1.6 billion since 2001 - has included loans to farmers to start new businesses. But the country produced a bumper opium crop this past season, and is expected to do so again next year.

Many experts believe the Taliban has always been dependent on the poppy trade. Declassified US State Department records show that two major narcotraffickers now in US custody, Baz Mohammed and Bashir Noorzai, sat on the original five-member Taliban shura, or leadership council.

"The Taliban rose to power by co-opting Afghan heroin," says a US official.

Today there's raging debate among experts over how much the Taliban leadership depends on heroin for its financing. Some say that donations from wealthy Arabs and financial support from Pakistan make up a larger portion of the Taliban's financing than heroin. "I don't believe Mullah Omar and his top counsel are involved, but they have clearly allowed [trafficking] to happen," says the Western official.

Unraveling the truth is complicated by the fact that the Taliban is less of a unified movement today than it was at its start. Now, officials say, it's more a loose grouping of tribal leaders, businessmen, and regional warlords.

"There's a very small core of true believers still left in the Taliban," says a top US military official. "But our intel is that most of the guys are just in it to make a buck."

The evolution from holy warriors to heroin smugglers should come as little surprise, say experts. Terror groups from the IRA to the Tamil Tigers have raised funds through trafficking, along with other criminal activities. And the lure of the dollar often eventually warps original goals. That metamorphosis has already happened to one Afghan insurgent group, say experts. Hezb-Islami Gulbuddin, run by the fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, is now "a full-fledged smuggling organization," moving everything from heroin to people, says a US official.

There's fragmentary evidence that Osama bin Laden has instructed his people not to get wrapped up in narcotics, apparently fearing it would harm his movement. "Some say that Osama and his people have specifically stayed away from it," says the Western official.

The growth in smuggling complicates strategic response. "Strategic withdrawals," like the Pakistani retreat from troubled North Waziristan or the British pullback from Musa Qula in Helmand, for example, risk allowing criminal activity to flourish.

"This trade has strengthened the Taliban and greatly weakened the government's capacity," says Mr. Jones of Rand. "I'm not optimistic about where it's going."

Some US lawmakers say Washington must do more. Congressman Charles Schumer (D) of New York tagged a $700 million amendment to the defense appropriations bill to try and boost funding for Counter Narcotics in Afghanistan. It was later cut back to a total of $116 million.

Rising price of the war on terror
With the Iraq war and clashes in Afghanistan grinding on, the cost to the US budget is $500 billion and still mounting.
By Peter Grier | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the November 21, 2006 edition
Whether troop levels increase in coming months, or decrease, or stay the same, one aspect of the US military effort in Iraq is unlikely to change: It will be expensive.

The cost of combat in Iraq has now surpassed $300 billion, according to government estimates. Add in activities in Afghanistan, and the total price of the global war on terror is about $500 billion, making it one of the most monetarily costly conflicts in which the nation has ever engaged.

Now the Department of Defense is in the process of drawing up its follow-on request for the remainder of FY 2007. Reports indicate that the Pentagon could ask for $120 billion to $160 billion, which would be its largest funding request yet for the global war on terror.

After they take control of Congress next year, Democrats will almost certainly investigate both the rate of Iraq spending and the manner in which it has been appropriated. Much of the war has been funded through supplementals, so-called emergency bills whose use in this case has become increasingly controversial in Congress.

"We're now at $507 billion for the global war on terror and counting, and almost all of that has been pushed through a process that doesn't give proper scrutiny to the budget. Are we spending it wisely?" says Gordon Adams, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center who was the senior White House official for national security budgets under President Clinton.

Last month, Congress approved $70 billion in spending intended to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through the first six months of fiscal 2007, which began Oct. 1 for the US government.

The size of the request under discussion reflects both the continued nature of the mission and past wear-and-tear. Both the Army and the Air Force need billions to replace expensive hardware worn out by the pace of warfare in Iraq.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the White House estimated that combat operations there would cost about $50 billion. That forecast, however, was based on a quick end to the war and a rapid drawdown of US troops.

Three years later, Iraq alone is costing the US some $8 billion a month.

Estimates of total spending vary, due to the fact that Department of Defense records on obligations do not provide comprehensive specifics, and the supplemental bills voted by Congress do not have the line-item details of regular sending bills.

Congressional Research Service figures puts the cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war-on-terror activities at $507 billion. Of that, the Afghan campaign has cost at least $88 billion, according to CRS. Iraq accounts for the bulk of the rest.

The drain of continued fighting in Iraq has meant that the global war on terror has steadily moved up the list of the most costly conflicts in US history (in terms of money, not casualties). In 2005, it passed the Korean war's inflation-adjusted cost of $361 billion.

Next year it will almost certainly pass the Vietnam War's $531 billion, making it the second most expensive US war ever, behind World War II.

Given the uncertainty of troop levels, it is very difficult to estimate the US military's future costs in Iraq.

Overall, each individual soldier deployed in Iraq for a year costs about $275,000, according to CRS. The cost rises to $360,000 if required additional investments in equipment and facilities are added.

Using a scenario in which US troop levels fall to 73,000 by 2010, and then stay at that level, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cumulative cost of the global war on terror could reach $808 billion by 2016.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon and the Bush administration have continued the practice by which funding for the war on terror is requested in the form of supplemental appropriations. Supplementals are prepared much closer to the time when the money will actually be spent. The Vietnam War, for instance, was funded via supplementals at its outset. Later, Vietnam costs were folded into the regular budget process.

Supplementals provide much less detail as to where money will be spent than do regular budget documents, and receive less congressional oversight than do regular budget bills.

So far, the White House has shown little inclination to fund Iraq and Afghanistan via the regular budget, despite some pressure from Congress to do so. In addition, the nature of items paid for via these war spending bills may have begun to expand, to include items related to peacetime missions as well.

A Democratic-controlled Congress will almost certainly look for ways to increase pressure on the White House to abandon the flexibility and opaqueness of the emergency bill approach.

Dion says Canada should withdraw its troops from Afghanistan
Jack Aubry CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen Wednesday, November 22, 2006
OTTAWA - Liberal leadership contender Stephane Dion says Canada should withdraw its troops ''with honour'' from Afghanistan before 2009 because their current mission is ill-conceived and misguided.

In an interview with CanWest News Service, Dion said the current military mission is not making progress. But he quickly added any pull-out of troops would only occur after discussions with the other NATO countries involved in the military mission.

Highly critical of the mission, Dion's position seems to differentiate himself form the other three frontrunners Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae and Gerard Kennedy in the Liberal leadership race.

''Canada must say: 'Look, we are very willing to work with you, to design something that makes sense, because I don't want to risk the life of our soldiers if we are not making progress','' said Dion.

The former intergovernmental affairs minister in the Chretien government said Harper blackmailed the House of Commons when he extended the mission by threatening an election unless the MPs approved it in a vote. Dion refused to put a deadline on any withdrawal, saying that would be a mistake.

''We need to involve the other nations much more. It is really sad what happened because Mr. harper last spring played the macho the one who will be able to carry us out of Afghanistan. He copied the speeches of Mr. Bush, I think President Bush should request copyright from these speeches,'' said Dion.

He blames Harper's leading role in Afghanistan for making the other NATO countries feel less involved than they perhaps planned, adding that Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor's recent request for others to do more in the war-torn country is ''a contradiction'' for the Canadian government.

Dion said his position is different from that of New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton and the NDP because he would never act unilaterally.

''I would really try to work with the other countries. Canada does not act unilaterally and I will try, definitely, to work with them. Between a complete withdrawal and the mission the way it is designed, I want to think that there is something that makes sense,'' said Dion.

He warned if the current mission continues, there will not be progress in Afghanistan and the priority for Canadians will be to simply avoid casualties.

''That is to see all soldiers remain in a certain perimeter and become less and less involved with the population,'' he said.

Dion said the ''divisive'' prime minister had told Liberal Leader Bill Graham in the House that Canada would be able to intervene in other parts of the world, if necessary but that instead, Canadian peacekeepers posted on the West Bank were relocated to Afghanistan before hostilities broke out in the Middle East.

''So it doesn't seem that we have the capacity to intervene elsewhere. It is not certain we have the capacity to continue in this mission the way it is designed now, I understand from the last report I read,'' said Dion.

He said the situation in Afghanistan is more complex than presented by the Harper government, which views it as a battle with the Taliban.

''You have the Taliban, you have warlords, it is a complex situation. E and we need to work with the other nations to see if we can create a type of Marshall Plan like the one for Europe after the Second World War to be sure that the poppy can be used for licit activities. Otherwise I think it is very very difficult to make progress,'' said Dion.

During question period Tuesday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Layton was ''on the wrong track'' by opposing the United Nations mandate the Canadian mission received. Layton had cited reports more and more Canadian reservists were needed to ''backfill for the inadequate preparations'' for the country's obligations in Afghanistan and experts that reported ''we are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.''

O'Connor said his department has no problem recruiting people for the country's special forces, saying the Armed Forces had been dramatically reduced under the previous government. ''What we are doing now is we are being innovative. We are using community colleges, we are using training institutions, we are using retired military to help train in the skills of the military, but everybody who is trained by this means must be fully qualified before they are accepted in the classes,'' said O'Connor.
Ottawa Citizen

Roshan first Afghan telecom firm in UAE
Gulf News 11/21/2006
Dubai - Roshan, Afghanistan's cellular service provider, has become the first Afghan operator to introduce pre-paid roaming with the UAE.

This now means that Roshan customers can go anywhere in the UAE and use their Roshan SIMs to make and receive calls.

Roshan was the first operator in Afghanistan to introduce international roaming and now has agreements with more than 160 networks in over 60 countries worldwide. It is also the only operator in Afghanistan to soon offer pre-paid roaming with 12 networks in ten key countries, including neighbouring countries.

Over the last three years, more and more Afghans are traveling to neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, Russia and Tajikistan for work, or for personal and family reasons. In order to provide even better quality service, Roshan has also been working closely with operators in these countries to improve the ease of calling.

Roshan's Chief Marketing Officer Altaf Ladak said: "The vastly improved international dialing and international roaming services will contribute substantially to making businesses more efficient. They will put Afghanistan on the world map and facilitate its integration into the global village. This will be particularly beneficial for families divided across borders,traders and the business community, all of whom need to travel to neighbouring countries frequently. With the international roaming facility offered by Roshan, customers can now easily stay in touch with their families and businesses back at home."

Roshan enacts a comprehensive corporate social responsibility programme and is deeply committed to Afghanistan's reconstruction and socio-economic development.

How the Iraq Debate Could Help Afghanistan
As calls to withdraw from Iraq grow louder, the first front in the war on terror may get some much-needed attention
By MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON TIME Magazine Monday, Nov. 20, 2006
Washington may currently be consumed with the topic of whether and how to begin withdrawing from the chaos of Iraq, but the other (forgotten) front in the war on terror is likely to attract more attention in the months ahead. There has always been more support in Congress for bringing al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts to justice than for waging war in Iraq. And that tendency is sure to grow even stronger given the tide of anti-Iraq-war lawmakers elected to office earlier this month and the arrival of new leadership at the Pentagon.

While the U.S. military is stretched tight in both Afghanistan and Iraq, senior U.S. officials have been telling Congress that U.S. support for Hamid Karzai's beleaguered national government needs to continue for at least another decade; the U.S. has spent $12 billion so far trying to get the country on its feet for the first time in a generation, and the Taliban has been especially resurgent in the last several months. On Monday, Illinois Senator (and possible 2008 Presidential candidate) Barack Obama said the U.S. should begin drawing down its troops in Iraq over the next four to six months in part to redeploy more to Afghanistan. "The President's decision to go to war in Iraq has had disastrous consequences for Afghanistan," he said in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "We have seen a fierce Taliban offensive, a spike in terrorist attacks, and a narcotrafficking problem spiral out of control."

There are now about 42,000 Western troops (slightly more than half American) deployed in Afghanistan. They often summon the U.S. Air Force to bomb enemy positions, indicating just how resilient these mountain fighters can be. Nearly 300 Americans have been killed in and around Afghanistan, about 10% of the U.S. death toll in Iraq.

As in Iraq, the size of the U.S. force in Afghanistan is the bare minimum — not enough to guarantee victory, but sufficient to get bogged down for years. More than half of the country's gross domestic product comes from the burgeoning opium crop, and the national government exerts little power beyond greater Kabul. There is now an average of 20 insurgent attacks daily in Afghanistan, up from five a year ago. More importantly, some of those attacks are coming from Pakistan, where the U.S. military is formally barred from hunting down foes. That makes efforts to find bin Laden, believed to be holed up the region, even more difficult.

U.S. special forces, backed up by CIA agents and officers, have little information on bin Laden's whereabouts despite the $25 million bounty on his head. The last time they came close to him was in late 2001, when he apparently escaped a tightening noose as he fled his mountain redoubt at Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan.

"Bin Laden remains a very significant person," U.S. Army Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the top American officer in Afghanistan, said Tuesday at the Pentagon. "It's critical for, I think, all of the world that bin Laden — a man who has committed atrocities that have affected our nation at great loss of lives, at great loss of treasure — that this man is one day brought to justice and he is either captured or he's killed." Eikenberry said getting him — dead or alive — "remains as much of a priority as it has since the United States of America was struck on 9/11."

Unfortunately, even killing or capturing bin Laden isn't likely to break the Taliban's and al-Qaeda's grip in the remote region. "The loss of a series of al-Qaeda leaders since 9/11 has been substantial, but it's also been mitigated by what is frankly a pretty deep bench of low-ranking personnel capable of stepping up to assume leadership positions," General Michael Hayden, head of the CIA, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, on November 15. "Though a number of these people are new to the senior management, they're not new to jihad."

Beyond that, U.S. officials say, Afghanistan can't be viewed in isolation. Like the carnival game of Whack-a-Mole — where furry creatures keep popping up out of holes you're not hammering — success in Afghanistan will solve only half of Washington's terrorism challenge. Victory there, officials insist, will mean little in the war on terror if the U.S. fails in Iraq — and ends up providing al-Qaeda and its allies the kind of sanctuary in Iraq that they once enjoyed in Afghanistan. But that's a problem the military wouldn't mind having. For as long as the U.S. is bogged down trying to prevent Iraq from further degrading, the odds of achieving any kind of lasting success in Afghanistan are pretty slim.

Foundation stone of gilrs' school laid in Badakhshan
FAIZABAD, Nov 20 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Foundation stone of a girls high school was laid in the northern Badakhshan province, officials said on Monday. However, a couple of days back a school was set ablaze in the same province and another in Logar province by unidentified people.

The German Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) based in Faizabad, capital of the northern Badakhshan, granted $370,000 fund for the project that would be completed in next six months. Engineer Karim, director of Amu Construction Company, said the school would have two-storey building and 16 rooms.

Nafeesa Zaki, Principal of the school, said the school had 35 years old building that was destroyed due to long wars in the country. She said the new building would be constructed near the old one that would help in resolving problems of the students. She said 2500 girls students were studying in the school.

Some two days back a school was set alight by unidentified gunmen in Sooch village of Jeram district of the province. Sayed Abdul Rahman Anwari, deputy director of the Education Department, said that three classrooms and some scholastic materials were gutted in the fire.

Gen Imamuddin Mutmain, Badakhshan police chief, said perhaps conflict in the local people might had caused gutting the school. However, a resident of the area Abdul Rahman, 40, said militants might had torched the school.

According to officials at Badakhshan Education Department, this was the third school to be set alight in this year. By the same token, a primary boy school was set ablaze in Mohammad Agha district of Logar province.

Mohammad Amin Mangal, district police chief, told this news agency the school was destroyed through explosive device. According to Education Ministry, more than 60 schools were torched in Helmand, Urozgan and Kandahar provinces.
Jafar Tayar/Shah Pur Arab

200 houses electrified in Laghman
MEHTARLAM, Nov 20 (Pajhwok Afghan News): The US-led provincial reconstruction team (PRT) has provided free of cost electricity to 200 houses in the Alishang district of the eastern Laghman province.

Spokesman for the PRT Javid Hashmi told Pajhwok Afghan News the project was completed at the cost of $33,000. The electricity is being generated from the Alishang River.

Alishang district chief Mohammad Qasim said the project was approved by the PRT following a proposal from the rural rehabilitation and development department. He said beneficiary of the project were 200 families of the Rahim village.

Haji Khan Jan, an elder, told Pajhwok Afghan News they were happy to get the facility. He said the free of cost electricity had also reduced their domestic budget.
Mueed Hashmi