Afghanistan News November 8, 2006

November 8, 2006

Iran wants Afghan refugees to leave by 2010
by Stuart Williams
TEHRAN, Nov 8, 2006 (AFP) - Iran is stepping up efforts to encourage its two million-strong community of Afghan refugees to finally return home by 2010, the country's top immigration official has said.

Tehran's aim remains to repatriate all Afghan refugees who fled the wars that devastated their country, currently 950,000 registered refugees along with a similar estimated number of illegals, Ahmad Hosseini told AFP.

"We have not set a target date but we are hoping that by 2010 with the help of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) the Afghan dossier will be closed," he said.

Hosseini said the only Afghans who would be able to remain in Iran in the long term would be those with Iranian-born mothers who will qualify for Iranian citizenship under a new law passed by parliament earlier this year.

"A percentage of the registered Afghans will fall within this law and a percentage must return," said Hosseini, director general of the bureau of alien and foreign immigrant affairs.

Millions of Afghans, mostly Shiite Hazara or Sunni Persian-speaking Tajiks, fled to the relative security of Iran from the wars that devastated their country from the Soviet invasion to the Taliban.

At the peak, Iran was hosting around four million Afghans.

Since the fall of the Taliban, which persecuted Afghanistan's Shiite minority, Iran has been working with UNHCR and the new Kabul authorities on a voluntary repatriation programme.

Some 1.4 million have left over the past four years but there is growing impatience in Tehran that now only a relative trickle of Afghan refugees are going home each month.

"Since the beginning of this (Iranian) year around 10,000 people have left. Those remaining in Iran, for different reasons, have not shown enthusiasm for the voluntary repatriation programme."

Hosseini said Iran, along with Afghanistan and UNHCR, would now look at new methods to step up the repatriation of the registered Afghans, although he emphasised that coercion was not among them.

Upping incentives for Afghans to leave could include giving would-be returnees cash allowances, reconstruction ventures in the Afghans' home regions and providing reassurance over the security situation there.

But he said there could also be more restrictive measures -- as a host country Iran has the power to determine a refugee's place of residence, lower subsidies and start taxing them.

"We hope that if the Afghan situation improves and we can enforce restrictions on residence and cut subsidies and within three years we will finish the (repatriation) work," he said.

"But there is no force for the refugees who have been registered and identified," he emphasised.

Hosseini said there was no question of the Afghans remaining in Iran long-term as refugees. They would either qualify for citizenship under the new law or have to leave.

"The Afghans will not merge into society. This is utterly dismissed by the government."

The official complained that Afghans -- who mainly work in the construction and sanitation industries -- took work away from Iranians as they accepted lower wages and did not require insurance from employers.

"There is also a security problem with drug smuggling. The presence of Afghans harbours economic, security and social problems," he said.

Hosseini rejected suggestions the recent spike in violence in Afghanistan could deter refugees from going home, saying most came from relatively stable areas around the cities of Herat and Mazar-e Sharif and not from the insurgency-ridden south.

He called on the international community to help Iran by delivering more reconstruction aid to Afghanistan to attract refugees to return, saying current levels from unsatisfactory.

Hosseini added that Iran also wanted more help and recognition from Europe for its role in preventing Afghan, Bangladeshi and Pakistani would-be migrants crossing the Iranian border with Turkey.

"We are not the border guards for the Europeans ... We expect them to invest in the countries to cut the reasons for migrating and secondly they should help us through bilateral cooperation to improve the security of the borders," he said.

Afghanistan strikes back at Pakistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad Asia Times Online's
KARACHI - After a number of recent incidents, it is emerging that for the first time since the fall of the communist regime in Afghanistan 13 years ago, Afghan intelligence, likely with foreign assistance, is active in Pakistan.

At the same time, several attacks on Pakistani military bases - the most recent a suicide attack on Wednesday morning that killed at least 35 soldiers - add to the overall volatility of the country. And this comes at a time that the top brass are gathering at

General Headquarters in Rawalpindi to make a vital decision on Pakistan's role in the "war on terror".

Last week, a car bomb ripped through the office of the inspector general of police in Quetta, the capital of southwestern Pakistan's Balochistan province. One policeman and two other men were killed.

This followed a bomb attack in Peshawar, the provincial capital of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), in which nine people were killed and more than 30 injured.

And on Tuesday, NWFP Governor Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai escaped unhurt in a rocket attack while he was addressing a council in Wana, headquarters of the South Waziristan tribal agency.

Initial investigations into the Quetta attack pointed to suspects of Afghan-Uzbek origin. A subsequent massive raid netted more than 70 Afghans, a few of whom admitted connections with Afghan intelligence.

A joint investigation team comprising Military Intelligence, Inter-Services Intelligence and the Intelligence Bureau then grilled these suspects and concluded that the sophisticated and organizational nature of the operation was beyond the known capabilities of Afghan intelligence on its own.

"KHAD [Khadamat-e Etela'at-e Dawlati, Afghanistan's secret police] was the most active agency in the region throughout the 1980s, but most of its counter-intelligence missions were assisted by the [Soviet] KGB. KHAD's external wing carried out bomb attacks in cities such as Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi, as well as assassinations of mujahideen leaders," a senior security official told Asia Times Online on condition his identity not be revealed.

"Now, no KGB services are available to Afghan intelligence, and none of the old Soviet-trained Afghan officials remain. Thus it is a matter of surprise for Pakistan to see Afghan intelligence using methods which only a few intelligence agencies, considered the best in the world, are capable of applying," the security official said without giving names but clearly hinting at British, US and Indian intelligence.

Information acquired from the suspects rounded up in Quetta and other parts of the country revealed a network working through the Afghan consulates in Karachi and Quetta, where the Afghan Foreign Ministry had attached a number of staff who were not career diplomats but activists of the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance, a mostly non-Pashtun grouping, bitterly opposed the Taliban during their rule from 1996-2001.

According to Asia Times Online contacts, during interrogation some of the suspects talked of plans for death squads to launch attacks in Karachi and Islamabad. The facilitation was to be through the Afghan consulates in Quetta and Karachi.

The death squads were to target top religious leaders considered pro-Taliban. One of the names learned by this correspondent is Maulana Noor Mohammed (a member of parliament from Quetta), in addition to some non-political clerics in the tribal and border areas.

Certainly, such killings would anger the large pro-Taliban following in Pakistan; at the same time, they would likely fuel sectarian strife in the country as the blame would fall on Shi'ites.

More instability would be the obvious result.

Army in the firing line
On Wednesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at an army parade ground in the town of Dargai in NWFP, killing at least 35 soldiers and wounding 20. Dargai is mostly pro-Taliban.

The first reaction would be to assume that this attack had nothing to do with Afghan intelligence operatives - why should they attack the Pakistani army, which is ostensibly on their side?

But if it was Afghan intelligence, as a section of Pakistani intelligence is convinced, the argument is the same as it was for the Quetta attack. In that incident the attackers selected the office of the inspector general of police because insurgents in Afghanistan target Afghan police and the Afghan National Army (ANA), in what the Afghan government calls Pakistan-sponsored attacks. So these would be tit-for-tat responses.

Wednesday's attack could also have been undertaken by al-Qaeda-linked militants. Indeed, they would be the immediate suspects. This would be because they are seeking revenge for the air attacks on a madrassa (seminary) in Bajour agency last week in which 80 people died. US drones are believed to have been involved in the attack, which officials said targeted militants.

Further, the militants would want to sabotage peace deals between Islamabad and the tribal areas. North and South Waziristan recently concluded deals under which the army would withdraw in exchange for the tribals stemming the flow of militants across the border into Afghanistan. Bajour agency was on the brink of signing such a deal when the air attacks came.

Shifting tides
According to Asia Times Online contacts, the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, once the favorite of Pakistan's groups, has come out into the open in southwestern Afghanistan in a form of alliance with local Afghan governments. Gulbuddin has been considered an important player in the Taliban-led insurgency.

HIA commanders have taken control of many villages and towns. Here they have hoisted HIA flags alongside those of the local Afghan administrations, which are already filled with former HIA members. Hekmatyar has already signaled for a deal with the Afghan administration in Kabul.

Certainly Hekmatyar would not have changed his attitude toward foreign forces in Afghanistan and still demands that they announce a schedule for leaving. But Hekmatyar has always been against killing ANA or members of the police. The present arrangements in parts of the southwest between the HIA and Afghan administrations are purely local and not between North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces and the HIA.

Nevertheless, this is an important development and a positive one from Kabul's point of view.

At the same time, a number of Baloch insurgents, including top commanders of the Baloch Liberation Army, are in Kabul - again, for the first time since the fall of the communist regime in Afghanistan in 1992. The Pakistani government has been battling an insurgency in Balochistan province for many years. The last thing it would want is the insurgency to receive support - moral or any other form - from Afghanistan.

Pakistan's choices
Pakistan has been walking between the devil and the deep blue sea ever since it signed on to the "war on terror" in 2001 after ditching the Taliban.

It has constantly been criticized by Washington and Kabul for not doing enough to root out al-Qaeda militants and Taliban elements in its territory, while at the same time President General Pervez Musharraf has drawn open hostility (including assassination attempts) from militants, clerics and even sections of the armed forces.

As stated above, Pakistan recently tried to bring some security to the semi-autonomous tribal areas by signing agreements with the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan and South Waziristan, and was about to strike one with Bajour.

Pakistan tried to convince Washington that such deals would be beneficial to the "war on terror", but Washington thought just the opposite, with visions of a vast uncontrollable zone emerging in Pakistan as the strategic backyard of the anti-US movement in Afghanistan. Thus the widespread conviction that the US took matters into its own hands by launching the Bajour attack.

Apparently, Musharraf wanted to follow up this action with further attacks on suspected militants, but was dissuaded from doing so by his top brass, who argued for reconciliation with the Taliban at all costs.

As a result, Musharraf is back to square one with regard to Washington and the Taliban: he just doesn't know which way to turn. The reports of Afghan counter-intelligence activity in Pakistan make the decision all that much more difficult.

Boiled down, Pakistan has three choices, all of them tough:

Go head-to-head with Pakistan's militants and face intense instability in which Afghan intelligence would be ready to play its part;

Strike a Waziristan-like deal with militants and face Washington's wrath in the shape of more air strikes and other conspiracies, including even a coup;

Reassess its whole policy in the region and come up with something that would allow Islamabad once again to gain friends in Kabul as well as keep its Western allies happy.

According to reports from Waziristan, a new video by al-Qaeda leader Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri will be released soon in which he will call for a global jihad against the US and its ally, Pakistan.

Against this background, Pakistan's top brass will debate the options above. Whichever path they choose, it will have a defining influence on the "war on terror".

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.

Canada says has broken S. Afghan Taliban uprising
Tue Nov 7, 8:16 PM ET
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian troops have broken the back of an insurgency by Taliban militants near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the scene of fierce recent fighting, Defense Minister Gordon O'Connor said on Tuesday.

Canada has 2,300 soldiers based in Kandahar. Since 2002, 42 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan, most of them in battles in the south of the country over the past few months.

Although an opinion poll over the weekend showed most Canadians pessimistic about the future of the mission and want the troops to come home, O'Connor struck an upbeat tone.

"It is a critical time in the south. ... I believe that we are going to succeed," he said in a Parliamentary debate on the Canadian military.

"We have already broken the back of the insurgency in the Kandahar area in the sense that they (the Taliban) are not prone to attacking us directly. They are going to have to revert to suicide bombings and IEDs (improvised explosive devices)," he said.

Canadian troops were part of a major NATO operation that attacked the Taliban for two weeks in September. The clashes have since died down.

Canada's armed forces are tightly stretched but O'Connor said top military officials felt they had enough troops to ensure no units were forced to return to Kandahar for a second term of duty before the mission ends in February 2009.

He added some engineers as well as artillery and tank crews already in Afghanistan could be asked to fight as infantry if necessary.

"This, by the way, is historically quite traditional. ... Armored regiments from time to time abandoned their vehicles (and) and went into the line as infantry," he said.

O'Connor has frequently denied reports the military was so short of manpower it would force members of the navy and air force to fight as front-line infantry.

He said the mission to Afghanistan had cost C$2.1 billion ($1.9 billion) so far and would cost a further C$1.9 billion by the time it ended in 2009.

Can new Afghan police resist temptation?
Trainers hope cull has left a force capable of honesty amid rebellion, GRAEME SMITH says
GRAEME SMITH The Globe and Mail (Canada) November 8, 2006
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- Sweating in the desert sun, the first members of Kandahar's new auxiliary police lined up over the weekend to get their graduation papers. One by one, they trotted over to their commander and solemnly took their printed certificates. Holding the papers toward the cloudless sky, they shouted: "I serve the Afghan nation!"

Some of the newly minted officers seemed a little embarrassed about the ceremony, raising their papers half-heartedly and mumbling the pledge of loyalty. At the back of assembled ranks, one of the recruits collapsed in the heat of his new uniform and flak jacket. He stumbled away with the help of Canadian and U.S. military trainers.

It was a reminder of the two questions that hang over President Hamid Karzai's plan to hastily raise a new pro-government force here in the rebellious south: Will these young men honestly serve their country and resist the influence of tribes, warlords and drug money? Are their units strong enough, after less than 10 days' training?

Earlier this year, when Mr. Karzai introduced the idea of these new units, he pointed to the rising violence in Kandahar. One of the province's districts has only 45 police to protect a population of 65,000, he said; volunteers are needed quickly to reinforce the government's authority.

At the time, Mr. Karzai called them "community police," but foreign diplomats and advisers worried he was suggesting a return to the tribal militias that fought vicious civil wars in previous years.

Foreign donors have spent millions of dollars persuading Afghanistan's warlords to give up their weapons, and the advisers worried that Mr. Karzai's concept would rearm the same fighters.

Despite their initial reluctance, the foreign troops eventually agreed to help with the creation of the Afghan National Auxiliary Police.

Canadian and U.S. trainers accepted the first batch of recruits two weeks ago. Buses and trucks filled with young men started arriving at a fortified training centre in the dusty flatlands east of Kandahar city. Many of the volunteers already wore police uniforms when they arrived, suggesting links to armed groups, but the foreign trainers said they avoided asking too many questions about their origins.

"Most of them were militia guys," said U.S. Sergeant Felix Ayala, the lead trainer. "I don't really care. We didn't kick anyone out, unless they had drugs or weapons. We just stripped their old uniforms off and gave them new ones."

A total of 208 men poured through the gates on the first day. Four were expelled right away for carrying drugs. Almost a hundred of them left in the first three days of the training regime, Sgt. Ayala said, and only 77 men stayed until graduation.

The cull rate was high, compared with the nine-week basic training courses Sgt. Ayala is accustomed to leading for the U.S. military, where perhaps five are expelled among 100. But maybe the Afghans were unaccustomed to the foreign troops' standards of discipline, he said; one group of 44 recruits quit on the same day, when they realized their duties at the training centre would include cleaning barracks and latrines.

In fact, that group of recruits didn't drop out, said Canadian Colonel Gary Stafford; they were kicked out, for refusing to follow orders. He suggested that their reluctance to obey police commanders might be related to their loyalty to more powerful figures in Kandahar: Asadullah Khalid, the governor, and Ahmad Wali Karzai, the President's brother.

"Unfortunately, what's happening throughout the region is that the initial influx of candidates that we're receiving for this training, the majority of them are militias from governors," Col. Stafford said.

"The governors have the capability to pay them and they work for the governors.

"I actually witnessed, on the first ANAP training course, we expelled a number of students for inappropriate behaviour," the Canadian officer continued. "They refused to follow direction. The regional training commander wanted them expelled. Immediately, the phone calls started coming in from the governor, saying, 'Why are you doing this?' [and] from Wali Karzai, saying, 'You know, these are good people, don't expel them.' And the very next day the governor came to the regional training centre."

Still, the police trainers resisted the pressure. The disobedient recruits went home and the foreign mentors say the young men who remained are showing remarkable esprit de corps.

Holding them loyal to the government will be the main challenge as they're sent to fight in the country's most dangerous districts, military officials say, and it remains to be seen whether this policing experiment will work.

Loyalty to country was a central theme in each of the speeches the new officers heard at their graduation, but the speaker who got the most attention was a beautiful woman named Sakina. She recited a patriotic poem, which wouldn't have been understood by most of her listeners because she spoke in the northern language of Dari, while her audience was mostly Pashto-speaking. But the message was clear: Here was a woman in the conservative south, daring to uncover her face, put on a form-fitting police uniform and serve as an officer. She was declaring herself a citizen of Afghanistan, not Kandahar.

"I am the police," she recited. "I serve my society. I am a model for history. I am committed to serve my nation."

35 Pakistani soldiers die in suicide attack
PESHAWAR/KABUL, Nov 8 (Pajhwok Afghan News): As many as 35 Pakistani soldiers have been killed and several other sustained injuries in a suicide attack at a military barracks in Malakand Agency of the NWFP province Wednesday morning.

Residents said the attack was carried out around 8am when the soldiers were busy in physical exercise before resuming their routine duty.

Haji Ishaq, resident of the area, told Pajhwok's Islamabad correspondent over the telephone a motorcyclist forced his way into the military centre at Dargai area of Malakand Agency and detonated himself amidst the soldiers. He added the centre was housed by the Punjab Regiment of the Pakistan Army.

Pakistan's military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan confirmed that 'something' had happened, but would not say about the number of casualties or the nature of the incident.

Confirming the explosion, Minister for Information Mohammad Ali Durrani said 25 soldiers were killed. He said preliminary investigations revealed it was a suicide attack.

Bakhtiar Maani, member of Pakistan's lower house of parliament from Malakand, said the blast happened around 8am this morning. He added the bang was heard in areas miles away from the site of the explosion.

Hospital sources in Malakand said condition of majority of the injured was serious. Hawad Khan, a doctor at the hospital, said majority of the injured were shifted to Peshawar and other cities for proper treatment.

No individual or group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack but the general belief is that the blast is the repercussion of the October 30 air raid on a religious seminary in Bajaur Agency.

Angry protest demonstrations gripped several cities, especially the troubled tribal region of Pakistan, after the killing of 82 people in a pre-dawn air strike at the madressa run by a banned outfit Tehreek Nafaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi or TNSM.

Local militants and their supporters, during protest demonstrations in several parts of the tribal belt, warned of a tit-for-tat response of the Bajaur attack. Since then, security agencies were on red alert in several Pakistani cities, especially in Peshawar, the border town of Pakistan and capital of the northwestern frontier province (NWFP).
Pakhtun Sahar/Daud

Officials accuse Afghan consulates of sabotage plans
Daily Times 7 November 2006
KARACHI: Pakistani intelligence agencies — which accuse Afghanistan of sponsoring violence in Pakistann’s border provinces — have said that Thursdayy’s bomb attack in Quetta had “proven their accusations clearly”, reported Italian news agency AKI on Monday.

Security officials said that they had traced “rogue elements” in the Afghan consulate in Karachi who were “planning similar acts of sabotage in Karachi”, according to the report. Police have rounded up 70 Uzbek Afghan nationals in Quetta, including 10 members of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, in connection with the attack. An Italian news agency’s spokesman quoted a senior Pakistani official as saying that the Afghan Foreign Ministry, under the aegis of Rangeen Dadfar, had “appointed some elements” in Pakistani consulates that were previously leaders of the Northern Alliance.

“This specifically includes Tajik and Uzbek staff in the Karachi and Quetta consulates, which have been facilitating many acts of sabotage in the past, but the Quetta incident left us with clear evidence that Afghan intelligence, through its consulates, is involved in acts of sabotage in Pakistan,” said the official. Online

Pak hoodwinking Bush on Taliban pact: Report
Hindustan Times Indo-Asian News Service Washington, November 8, 2006|16:36 IST
Pakistan has been misleading the world on the agreement with the pro-Taliban tribals on its border with Afghanistan, "selling out" Washington's and Kabul's interests, Los Angeles Times said.

In a hard-hitting editorial this week, it asked President George W Bush's Administration and the new Congress to be on guard against President Pervez Musharraf's regime 'hedging' against President Hamid Karzai's government that Islamabad perceives as being "hostile and pro-India".

"If President Bush has any red lines left, he should be furious that Pakistan is legitimising the very Taliban it has pledged to eradicate.

It should come as no surprise, we should add that the Taliban has not kept its part of the bargain. Attacks have multiplied since the deal was signed," the newspaper said.

Karzai's fears about the September 5 agreement between the Pakistani authorities and the Taliban-friendly tribals in Northern Waziristan have proved right, judging from the increased attacks across the border, the LA Times says.

It quotes in support an expose by Jane's Intelligence Digest, published last week, about the continued, surreptitious role of Pakistan's powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) in fomenting trouble against the Karzai regime.

Jane's has said that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)-sponsored Taliban training camps and jihadist madrassas (seminaries) have multiplied along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

The LA Times editorial came a day before the Karzai government rejected Pakistan's proposal that the entire Pakistan-Afghanistan border be fenced to prevent illegal cross-border movement.

Analysts have said that a fence on the volatile border on a difficult terrain is unworkable and the proposal is just a ruse by Islamabad to display its earnestness in fighting the Taliban.

LA Times has alleged that Musharraf sought to mislead the Bush administration on the agreement, saying that it was signed with the tribals.

"Perhaps he didn't expect his Western friends to read the agreement in the original Urdu," it observed.

The Bush administration has now studied the text of the agreement in original Urdu, something Islamabad might have not expected, to find out that the signatories on the other side were representatives of the "Talaba", a plural for the Arabic word "Taliban", which means students.

The pact had "sold out" the American and Afghan interests to the Taliban, the editorial said.

Referring to last week's operations in Bajaur Agency, the newspaper says that Musharraf had "tried to make amends" by ordering air strikes on one Taliban-run madrassa that killed at least 82 people last week, triggering angry protests against the US.

"But it will take far more to persuade the American public and Congress of the wisdom of providing Pakistan with $3 billion in military and other aid each year while Pakistani territory, tribal or not, gives sanctuary to Taliban fighters who kill US and NATO soldiers and destabilise the Afghan government," the editorial said.

A day after the agreement was signed, Musharraf paid a high-profile visit to Kabul to 'sell' the agreement and asking Karzai to have similar agreements with tribals on the Afghan side.

Totally unconvinced, Karzai protested and complained to Bush, compelling the US president to get the two squabbling neighbours to meet over a dinner hosted.

Both agreed to cooperate, but did not shake hands for the media, reflecting mutual distrust and tension.

INTERVIEW-Hungary troops committed to 2-year Afghan mission
08 Nov 2006 11:09:51 GMT By Simon Cameron-Moore
ISLAMABAD, Nov 8 (Reuters) - Hungary has committed 200 troops to a peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan for the next two years, but it cannot increase its contribution to the NATO-led force, Foreign Minister Kinga Goncz said in Pakistan on Wednesday.

"I think some other countries are considering to raise the number of soldiers being there in Afghanistan. We are just not able to do it," Goncz told Reuters in Islamabad, just over a week after NATO's commander in Afghanistan complained that he had too few troops to beat Taliban insurgents.

Goncz, who had earlier visited India, said her talks with the Pakistan government had focused on the situation in Afghanistan.

Hungarian troops had already come under enemy fire since deploying in the northern province of Baghlan last month, having earlier been stationed in the Afghan capital of Kabul with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

"There were some attacks close to the troops, but there were no casualties," Goncz said.

The Hungarians have taken on a two-year mission as a provincial reconstruction team (PRT), supporting civil programmes to train Afghan police and help education projects in Baghlan.

Like the rest of the north, Baghlan is considered relatively safe, compared with the south and east, where the Taliban has intensified attacks since NATO forces took over responsibility for patrolling the regions bordering Pakistan.

But Goncz said foreign forces in Baghlan were still targets for suicide bombers and other kinds of attacks.

ISAF has troops from 34 nations, though like Hungary, most of them have only small contingents in a force of more than 31,000.

General David Richards, the British commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, said on Oct. 31 that he lacked troops to defeat the Taliban.

The United States, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands have sizable numbers deployed in the frontline southern and eastern provinces, while Romania has 750 troops in the south. Poland is sending 1,000 troops to Afghanistan in the new year.

Some 3,100 people have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year, the worst period of violence since U.S.-backed forces ousted a Taliban government in late 2001 for harbouring al Qaeda.

For its part, Pakistan has deployed troops on the border and has begun making peace deals with Pashtun tribal areas to cut off support for militants, but it is frequently criticised for not doing enough to catch Taliban leaders based on its territory. During talks, Goncz heard Pakistani officials suggest the possibility of fencing the border to stop insurgents moving back and forth, but the Afghan government opposes such a move because of the border's disputed status.

They also told her that the Afghan government would benefit from more ethnic Pashtun representation in positions of power.

"If there is stronger government control, In think it is the time that international forces might consider leaving the country. We know it is not this moment," said Goncz.

Afghanistan 'to spray poppy crop'
By Najiba Laima BBC Pashto/Persian service Tuesday, 7 November 2006, 23:11 GMT
The Afghan government has for the first time accepted that aerial chemical spraying could be considered to curb the cultivation of opium poppies.

Poppy production across Afghanistan has increased by 60% since 2005.

A spokesman for the anti-narcotics ministry told the BBC that spraying could be used to free Afghanistan from its "biggest enemy", opium.

The government has resisted aerial spraying, but the spokesman said it was now being considered as a last resort.

Local people in the southern Helmand province, which cultivates more than a quarter of Afghanistan's poppies, claim there has already been clandestine spraying which reduced the province's poppy yield by more that half last year.

They say the spraying also badly affected other crops and that some people complained of skin conditions.

New plans

President Hamid Karzai has declared jihad, or war, against drugs, arguing they are destroying his country and its future prospects.

However, a leading member of the Afghan parliament, Daud Sultanzoy, has told the BBC that he will fight the aerial spraying.

He said Afghanistan should not become a test ground for western chemicals companies.

The latest announcement is part of a new initiative to curb poppy cultivation to be implemented in the 11 provinces where it is most rife.

Critics of the new strategy say that if it leads to farmers destroying their poppy fields, the government must at the same time move more quickly to provide them with alternative crops and livelihoods.

Afghanistan: Karzai’s High-Risk Negotiating Plan
A traditional assembly planned as a way of achieving an Afghan-Pakistani consensus on peace, but critics say success depends on whether Islamabad attempts to manipulate the process.
Institute for War & Peace Reporting By Hafizullah Gardesh in Kabul (ARR No. 233, 6-Nov-06)
The stage is set for a cross-border “jirga” or assembly to bring Pashtuns living on either side of the Afghan-Pakistani border together to agree a path to peace.

The thinking is that communities in southern Afghanistan who have been left out of the political process because of the continued Taleban insurgency will have a chance to offer their own solutions, while those on the Pakistani side of the frontier – where the militants are believed to be based – will be drawn into constructive peacemaking.

But local analysts, and many of the potential participants, warn that convening a jirga under present circumstances is fraught with dangers. With complex national interests at play, there is a risk the wrong people will be sent to the assembly, and there are few incentives on offer to make local communities buy into any deal.

The decision to hold a bilateral jirga was finalised when Afghan president Hamed Karzai met his Pakistani counterpart Pervez Musharraf, together with United States president George Bush in Washington in mid-September.

The meeting was a difficult one, as officials on both sides were continuing their war of words over who is to blame for the Taleban and the deteriorating security situation across southern Afghanistan. Musharraf suggested that the militants were an Afghan phenomenon and were mostly operating in that country, while Kabul insists that the movement recruits, trains and conducts its cross-border attacks from bases in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

It is clear that in the midst of the violence and the propaganda war between the Taleban and the Kabul government, alternative Pashtun voices from the south of Afghanistan remain largely unheard.

The jirga, an Afghan mechanism for bringing together tribal leaders, Muslims clerics and other notables, should offer a chance for these voices to be heard, and perhaps agree on ways in which the conflict could be defused, including steps to address some of the local concerns that fuel Taleban support ranging from poverty and opium eradication programmes to the perceived cultural insensitivity of foreign troops operating in the south.

President Karzai’s spokesman, Karim Rahimi, said the agreement to convene such a meeting is a major step forward which he believes will produce a positive outcome. “We anticipate a positive response from this jirga, which will draw in tribal chiefs and [other] and influential leaders,” he said.

It is believed that the jirga - a date has yet to be set - will consist of two meetings, one in each country, but Rahimi said the details had not so far been nailed down, “This process needs more work. Mechanisms for how it will function will be decided later on. For now, there’s no more that can be said about the specifics.”

But it is precisely these details that worry political analysts in Afghanistan, who argue that the government in Islamabad is not an honest and impartial broker, and will attempt to stuff the talks with its own people rather than genuinely representative figures from Pakistan’s Pashtuns.

“Politicians have sometimes misused the name and meaning of jirgas. The components of this one are not clear yet. Will it be made up of ISI representatives, or define its own path?” warned Habibullah Rafi, a political analyst based in Kabul, referring to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency that helped shape the original Taleban movement - and still backs it, according to its detractors.

While he sees jirgas as an important tradition for the Pashtuns living on both sides of the border, Rafi fears Islamabad will try to direct the way the negotiations proceed. “Afghanistan must be prudent and avoid being cheated by false jirgas and decisions,” he said.

Kabul University professor Mohammad Esmail Yoon agrees that it is essential for future decision-making to involve the Pashtuns. But he too believes an ill-conceived jirga could result in the meeting being packed with unrepresentative people - and possibly hijacked by the Taleban.

“The Taleban are not to be identified with the Pashtun people; they are an ideological militant movement,” he said.

Political analyst Abdul Razaq Mamun expanded on the point, saying, “This jirga is designed to achieve formal recognition for the Taleban, as a crucial move by Pakistan to gain advantage in Afghanistan.”

Mamun recalled how President Musharraf signed a ceasefire with community leaders in North Waziristan in September, pulling out the Pakistani military from this tribal agency in return from a hard-to-police agreement that the Taleban would not use the territory to launch raids into Afghanistan.

“The winner [in the jirga] will be the Pakistani government, which has done a lot of work on its own Pashtuns and on those on our side of the border, and will enter the jirga from a position of strength, while the Afghan government will go in with a weaker hand,” he said.

These suspicions are shared by Maulawi Mohammad Sadeq, who heads the national council of the Gujjar tribe in Afghanistan, “I don’t trust the intentions of Pakistan… [which] has always sought the destruction of Afghanistan. The jirga will be pointless unless the international community demands a guarantee from Pakistan that it will not interfere in Afghan affairs.”

Similar concerns have been raised by leading Pashtun politicians in northwest Pakistan.

Akram Shah, who heads Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami, a nationalist party, believes the Pakistan-based tribal chieftains selected to attend the jirga will be under the sway of Islamabad.

“The jirga will be fruitless unless it is removed from the [Pakistan] government’s influence and real representatives of the people are invited,” Akram Shah told the Pajhwak news agency.

Mohammad Sadeq Zharak, a leading Pashto writer in Pakistan, said that as well as tribal chieftains, the Pakistani contingent must also include Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami leaders, who would be better placed to put pressure on their own government to curb the violence.

Sayed Naim Pacha, the official responsible for the jirga within Afghanistan’s ministry of tribal and border affairs, said the Kabul government recognised the dangers and would seek to ensure that the Pakistani delegates were genuine figures, not ISI plants.

He insisted the event was dependent on Islamabad’s goodwill, “The success and effectiveness of this jirga will depend on the Pakistani government’s intentions, because it is Pakistan that creates problems for Afghanistan, not the other way round.”

However, Mamun pointed out another reason why the event could fail - the deteriorating economic situation in southern Afghanistan where people have seen too little benefit from international aid and reconstruction to have a stake in peace. “Jirgas on an empty stomach will not feed people or give them jobs,” he said. “

“What have the people in the east, south and west [of Afghanistan] got to defend? They have nothing to lose in this battle. The economic foundations of these provinces need to be strengthened so that people will defend them. For the moment, people have become estranged from their government.”
Hafizullah Gardesh is an IWPR editor in Kabul.

Pricetag to send tanks to Afghanistan in the tens of millions: O'Connor
Wednesday, November 08, 2006 Canadian Press
OTTAWA (CP) - Canada's defence minister says it's costing taxpayers $189 million to send re-enforcements, including Leopard tanks, to Afghanistan to support Canadian troops.

Gordon O'Connor told a House of Commons committee Tuesday night that includes the cost of sending the tanks, a team of engineers and a counter-mortar unit. "That's transportation, plus what was necessary to get all the equipment up to standard for operations," said O'Connor in reply to questions from opposition MP's.

The military announced last summer that the 42-tonne Leopards would be deployed to Afghanistan.

Five of the 42-tonne monsters are already in operation with another 12 to be deployed in the next month.

Some military experts and others have expressed concern the Leopards could further alienate Afghans already suspicious of foreign troops.

During Tuesday's questioning, Opposition Leader Bill Graham questioned O'Connor on whether recent air strikes and the use of tanks against insurgents hiding in villages is interfering with the delivery of aid to the Afghan people.

"Are we concerned... that the use of tanks amongst the local population, and particularly the use of airpower, is such that it's destroying our capacity to reach out to the local population?" Graham asked.

But O'Connor was adamant that the tactics that NATO forces have used in Afghanistan are not out of line.

"It's quite appropriate for us to have tanks there," O'Connor said. "We're trying to reduce casualties."

"When these Taliban go into areas and fight from the equivalent of pill boxes that we don't have to send our infantry in to get them," he said. "We can use tank fire to take them out."

And the tactics of Canada's allies are also appropriate, O'Connor said, a reference to the air strikes that have accidentally killed dozens of Afghan civilians in recent weeks.

Drug money being used in promoting terrorism in Afghanistan: Kasuri
Wednesday November 08, 2006 (0354 PST) PakTribune.com, Pakistan -
ISLAMABAD: Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs said the drug money in Afghanistan is being used for crimes and terrorism.

He said this while speaking to UN Secretary General's Special Representative Thomas Koenigs on Tuesday at Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Foreign Minister informed the UN secretary General representative that he would be soon be visiting Afghanistan during early December 2006.

Mr Keonigs briefed Khurshid Kasuri on the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan's role and functions.

Kabul’s blame game threat to peace
Daily Times 7 November 2006
ISLAMABAD: Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri warned on Monday that Afghanistan’s engagement in a relentless and irrelevant blame game against Pakistan would complicate peace endeavours in the region.

In talks with United States Under Secretary for South and Central Asia Richard Boucher, Kasuri stressed the need for US-Afghan-Pak trilateral counter-terrorism efforts, adding that Islamabad had released all resources necessary to fight the global threat. The two also discussed, under the framework of the US-Pak strategic dialogue: bilateral ties, the war on terror, the prevailing crises in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the Iranian nuclear standoff and Pakistan’s geo-political climate and its request for civil nuclear assistance.

On Afghanistan, Kasuri said that while Pakistan wanted stability and peace to prevail in that country, the Afghan government’s engagement in an unrelenting and irrelevant blame game against Islamabad would only worsen the crisis. He also briefed the visiting US official on the Indo-Pak peace process and the foreign secretary-level talks scheduled for later this month, which would address all issues, including Kashmir. The US should also play an effective role in maintaining the ongoing dialogue on Kashmir, Kasuri added.

Kasuri noted that initiatives such as Reconstruction Opportunity Zones (ROZs) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Development Plan would reinforce efforts to address the challenges of terrorism and extremism. Boucher reiterated that the US would continue its engagement with Pakistan on regional issues as well as the war on terror. Both sides agreed that steady progress had been made since the implementation of the March 4, 2006 Joint Statement on the Pakistan-US Strategic Partnership, with ties having been strengthened and expanded to diverse fields. Agencies

UNICEF plea for Afghanistan drought aid
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- The U.N. Children's Fund has issued an urgent appeal for $3.8 million to help 2.5 million drought-stricken people in Afghanistan, half of them children.

The appeal comes after there was no response to UNICEF's initial plea this summer for $2.5 million.

Officials Tuesday warned the lack of water and food will exacerbate disease and malnutrition in the young.

"While Afghanistan is struggling to set up infrastructures and put systems in place in a sustained developmental approach to remedy the destruction caused by more than two decades of conflict, crucial areas requiring urgent humanitarian assistance still remain," UNICEF said in its latest donor update for the country.

The drought has affected the north, northeast, west and southern provinces, the U.N. children's agency said. In addition, conflict in the south has displaced more than 20,000 families from their villages.

In July, the Afghan government and the U.N. Country Team launched a Joint Drought Appeal covering up to December, in which UNICEF asked for $2.5 million.

Due to the deterioration of the situation both from the drought and renewed fighting, the appeal has been extended to April and UNICEF has requested an additional $3.8 million on top of the original request of $2.5 million.

"No commitment has been made in response to the last appeal," the agency said.

Afghanistan's infant mortality rate is already estimated at 165 per 1,000 live births; its maternal mortality ratio, at 1,600 per 100,000 live births, is one of the highest in the world.