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April 16, 2007 


Suicide attack kills 10 in Afghanistan
By AMIR SHAH, Associated Press Writer
KABUL, Afghanistan - A suicide bomber ran onto a police training field and blew himself up, killing up to 10 policemen and wounding dozens of others Monday in northern  Afghanistan, officials said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the deadly strike.

The suicide attack happened in the relatively quiet city of Kunduz, as police were carrying out their regular morning exercises, said Abdul Hadi, a security official. Hadi said that according to preliminary reports, 10 police were killed and 10 were wounded.

Azizullah Safar, chief of the Kunduz hospital, said nine of the victims brought to his hospital had died and 32 were wounded, including four in critical condition.

A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, told The Associated Press by telephone that the Taliban carried out the attack, but his claim could not be independently verified.

The north is one of the quietest places in war-torn Afghanistan, and militant violence there is rare.

In Ghazni province, southwest of Kabul, a clash Sunday between Afghan forces and insurgents left 15 militants dead and 15 wounded, Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary told reporters Monday.

Also Sunday, a suicide bomber targeted a private U.S. security firm in violence-wracked southern Kandahar province, killing up to four Afghans working for the company and wounding another, officials said.

The security firm U.S. Protection and Investigations said a suicide bomber riding a motorcycle blew himself up near a convoy, killing two employees and wounding another.

Mohammad Asif Khan, a police officer in Kandahar's Spin Boldak district, said three security guards and their driver were killed, Khan said. The differing death tolls could not immediately be reconciled.

Separately in the eastern Paktika province, police and U.S.-led coalition forces attacked suspected Taliban insurgents crossing from Pakistan into Afghanistan, killing 10 militants and wounding 15, the provincial governor said Sunday.

Afghan and western officials have stepped up pressure on Pakistan to crack down on militants who organize and train in Pakistan's tribal areas, and then cross the border to launch attacks and wreak havoc in Afghanistan.

The latest violence comes as more than 5,000  NATO and Afghan troops are engaged in Operation Achilles, launched last month to flush out militants entrenched in opium-producing Helmand province.
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NATO force says key Taliban killed
Mon Apr 16, 2:02 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) -  NATO-led troops said Monday they had killed several key Taliban militants in a series of airstrikes and raids in southern  Afghanistan during the past week.

The raids in the insurgency-hit southern province of Helmand were part of a major NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) offensive launched by some 5,000 Afghan and foreign troops early last month, it said.

"ISAF, in joint operations with Afghan forces, launched a series of attacks and precision strikes against Taliban extremists in Helmand this week resulting in the elimination of several key extremist leaders," it said in a statement.

It did not give any further details on the identities or ranks of the Taliban leaders, nor of the locations or dates of the attacks.

"Striking at the heart of the problem and removing these key leaders has paid off," the statement quoted ISAF Commander for southern Afghanistan Major General Ton van Loon as saying.

"We fully realise the influence these Taliban extremist leaders have on the population of southern Afghanistan, who have clearly told us they felt like they were hostages in their own communities," the general said.

The hardline Taliban regime was ousted from power in 2001 by US-led forces but has since regrouped to lead a bloody insurgency that has left nearly 1,000 people dead this year alone.

Around 37,000 NATO-led troops and a separate force of nearly 12,000 US-led coalition soliders are in Afghanistan to hunt down the rebels, who are trying to topple the US-backed government in Kabul.
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Report: Insurgents killed 669 Afghans
By ALISA TANG, Associated Press Writer
KABUL, Afghanistan - Insurgents committed war crimes by attacking ordinary Afghans and killing 669 civilians in 2006, the heaviest toll since the Taliban's ouster in 2001, according to a report released Monday.

Tallying records from non-governmental organizations and the media, Human Rights Watch counted 189 bombings in 2006 that killed 492 civilians. Another 177 civilians were killed in other attacks including ambushes and executions.

"The insurgents are increasingly committing war crimes, often by directly targeting civilians," said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at the New York-based rights group. Even when targeting security forces, "they generally kill many, many more civilians than they do military personnel."

Human Rights Watch noted that anti-government forces were not the only ones responsible for civilian deaths, and that at least 230 civilians were killed during coalition and  NATO operations last year.

Exact casualty figures from previous years are not available, but the increase in insurgent attacks last year indicate that "2006 was the deadliest year for civilians in  Afghanistan since 2001," the report said.

The data underlines the dangers facing Afghans more than five years after a U.S.-led invasion raised hopes that the country could emerge from decades of war.

Suicide bombings, once rare in Afghanistan, occurred on a regular basis in 2006. Two suicide attacks were reported in 2003, six in 2004, and 21 in 2005. Last year, the number of suicide attacks shot up to at least 136, killing 272 civilians and wounding 531, the 116-page report said.

Eighty of those suicide attacks were on military targets, but they killed nearly five times more civilians than security forces — 181 civilians compared to 37 Afghan or international security forces.

"The Taliban are starting to look like some of the insurgent groups in  Iraq," said Michael Shaikh, who conducted research for the report. "These guys are more about fighting the global jihad. ... It's a much more dangerous Taliban."

The Taliban have claimed responsibility for more than two-thirds of recorded bomb attacks, mostly in the most volatile south and southeast.

Hezb-i Islami, a faction of which follows renegade former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, appears to be involved in attacks in the east and north, the report said.

The report cited 190 attacks on teachers, school officials, students and schools, up from 91 such attacks in 2005.

Militants have increasingly targeted aid workers, journalists and government employees, condemning them as spies or collaborators. In 2006, the report stated, at least 177 civilians were assassinated.

The recent killing of an Afghan journalist who was captured along with an Italian journalist for whom he was working as a translator and their driver, underscored the situation.

"The Taliban's murders of Afghan journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi and driver Sayed Agha were war crimes," Mariner said.

The Italian journalist, Daniele Mastrogiacomo of the daily La Repubblica, was freed after a heavily criticized deal in which the Afghan government released five Taliban insurgents in exchange for him.

The report included comments from witnesses, victims and relatives and said anger over the civilian deaths was focused on the militants.

"I lost my son, brother and nephew because of the Taliban. They say that they are fighting for God and Islam, but they are not; they are killing good and innocent Muslims and Afghans who have done nothing wrong," said a man identified in the report by the pseudonym Abdullah whose shop was destroyed by a suicide car bomb last August in the south.

Human Rights Watch said it hoped its report could shame the increasingly radical Taliban into altering its tactics.

"We don't think that change is easy, but they're not entirely impervious to pressure," Mariner said.
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Afghan civilian "war crimes" soar: HRW
KABUL (AFP) - Civilian deaths from "war crimes" and other attacks by Taliban-led insurgents have soared in the past 15 months, global watchdog Human Rights Watch said in a report Monday.

The New York-based group condemned a wave of suicide bombings and other assaults by the Taliban and associated Islamist groups that it said had killed nearly 700 Afghan civilians since the beginning of 2006.

"The insurgents are increasingly committing war crimes, often by directly targeting civilians," HRW terrorism and counter-terrorism director Joanne Mariner said in the report, titled "The Human Cost".

"Even when theyre aiming at military targets, insurgent attacks are often so indiscriminate that Afghan civilians end up as the main victims," Mariner said.

Mariner said 2006 was the deadliest year for Afghan civilians since the 2001 toppling of the Taliban in a US-led invasion, with at least 669 civilians dying in more than 350 documented armed attacks.

Most of these "appear to have been intentionally launched at civilians or civilian objects."

Another 52 civilians were killed in insurgent attacks in the first two months of 2007, the report said.

The 116-page report was based on dozens of interviews with civilian victims of attacks and their families and a review of available documents and records, the group said.

The report said the Taliban had stepped up targeted attacks against groups such as doctors, journalists, aid workers, religious leaders and government employees, often after falsely accusing them of spying.

At least 177 civilians were killed in such assassinations last year, it said.

"A recent and horrific example was the Taliban's summary execution of Afghan journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi and his driver, Sayed Agha, in violation of the laws of war," the report said.

Naqshbandi and Agha were abducted along with Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo in March. The Italian was freed in exchange for the release of five Taliban prisoners, but the two Afghans were beheaded.

The report goes on to say that insurgents regularly attacked military targets in densely-populated areas.

"Many Afghans told Human Rights Watch they could not understand why insurgent forces would choose to carry out attacks in civilian areas," it said.

However HRW also pointed to civilian casualties caused by foreign and Afghan security forces, saying 230 civilians were killed in US-led coalition or  NATO operations in 2006, "some of which appear to have violated the laws of war."

"There is no evidence that coalition forces intentionally target civilians, but in a number of cases international forces have conducted indiscriminate attacks or failed to take adequate precautions to prevent harm to civilians," it said.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force has about 37,000 troops in  Afghanistan, while the US-led coalition has some 12,000 soldiers.

In the latest rebel attack a Taliban suicide bomber killed nine policemen as they did their morning exercises outside a police station in in the northeastern city of Kunduz on Monday.
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AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN: TURKEY TO HOST TALKS BETWEEN PRESIDENTS
Islamabad, 16 April (AKI/DAWN) - Turkey will host talks between the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan later this month in a bid to reduce the growing political tension between the two neighbouring countries, it is learnt. The Turkish initiative, which appears to have been encouraged by the US, will bring together President Gen Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Ankara for talks later this month, informed sources told the Pakistani daily Dawn.

Both the presidents will fly to the Turkish capital on April 29 and hold talks in the presence of top Turkish leadership, sources said, not ruling out the possibility of a separate one-on-one session between Musharraf and Karzai afterwards.

Hence Musharraf’s visit to Turkey on April 29-30 will not be in a bilateral context.
(Aki/DAWN)
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As snows melt, Afghan hopes rise for Buddha statue
By Raju Gopalakrishnan Sat Apr 14, 11:52 PM ET
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Snows are melting in central Afghanistan and roads to the town of Bamiyan have reopened after unseasonal rain -- and work on restoring the giant Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban can resume.

Piles of stone and rubble lie below two gaping niches in the red-brown cliff facing the town where the 6th-century statues had stood until the Taliban used dozens of explosive charges to bring them down in 2001, branding them un-Islamic.

The larger, identified chunks of stone from the standing Buddhas have been stored or tied down under white tarpaulin, but thousands of fragments and rubble lie in the open.

"It's impossible to work here for at least six months of the year," says Bamiyan Governor Habiba Sarabi. "We hope work will resume by June."

She says reconstruction of at least one of the statues, the larger one which stood 174 feet tall, will begin after a formal request from the federal government to UNESCO.

Reconstructed bits of the statue will be mixed with clay in a process called anastylosis and slowly pieced together and bonded back onto the cliff face.

It's an immense task -- some of the chunks of stone weigh tons, a lot of the statue has been reduced to unidentifiable rubble, and experts are divided on whether reconstruction is feasible or even necessary.

There are mines in the area, and a demining team has been clearing the site, but its work is still not complete, local officials say. Hundreds of poor people live in a honeycomb of caves on the cliffside, and preventing encroachment into the World Heritage Site is a key issue.

In the past two years, work has focused on recovering pieces of the statue and shoring up the face of the cliff to prevent more collapses.

Now, preliminary estimates of the cost to rebuild the larger statue are around $50 million, and it's debatable whether that sum can be better used elsewhere in the war-ravaged and impoverished nation.

And no plans have yet been made on what to do with the smaller of the demolished statues, which stood at 115 feet.

TIME
Whenever work starts, it will take years -- perhaps a decade -- to complete.

"It's a very delicate task," says Sarabi. "It won't happen very soon, there are at least 3,000 pieces of the larger Buddha and 1,500 from the smaller one."

Other plans are also proceeding apace to make the town a major tourist destination.

Work should begin this year to build an all-weather asphalt road from Kabul to Bamiyan -- now a bone-jolting eight-hour, 225-km (140-mile) drive mostly over a rough boulder-strewn track that snakes up the Gorband River valley, crosses the Shibar Pass at About 10,000 feet and then descends to Bamiyan.

The proposed new road will take another route into Bamiyan, through the Hajigak Pass, currently another stone track snowbound until June.

Excavation is also going on in the area behind the Bamiyan cliff, and some experts believe they can uncover a third, prone statue of the Buddha, which could be as long as 300 feet.

"Everything is a slow process, there are only a few months when work is possible and there don't seem to be enough experts for the amount of work to be done," says Abdul Wakeel Ahmadzai, the Bamiyan minister for culture and tourism.

But there is no doubt it needs to be done, he says, even if the statues are of Buddha and Afghanistan is now almost wholly Muslim.

And though Ahmadzai is a Sunni Pashtun, like most of the Taliban, he is at home in Bamiyan, peopled by the mostly Shi'ite Hazaras.

"What we have to do is clear to everyone," he said, standing on a hill opposite Bamiyan, as dusk fell. At night, the cliff-face is bathed in a dim reddish-orange glow, while surrounding hills are covered in darkness.

"The Taliban destroyed a golden symbol of Afghanistan."
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Tank purchase will last beyond Afghanistan, O'Connor says
By CP Toronto Sun, Canada
OTTAWA -- Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor says Canada is looking past the current war in Afghanistan with its purchase of 100 mothballed tanks from the Netherlands.

Speaking on CBC-TV's Sunday Morning, O'Connor said the federal government and the military made the decision after "looking into the future, 10 or 15 years."

Ottawa announced last week that it was getting 20 Leopard II tanks on loan from Germany and purchasing another 100 outright from the Dutch. The total price tag is $650 million.

They will replace Canada's small fleet of 1970s-era Leopards that broil soldiers in the Afghan heat with their old hydraulic systems and lack of air conditioning.

But O'Connor said if Canada decides down the road to deploy troops to other troublespots around the globe -- he used Somalia and Darfur as examples -- it will need "to send armoured troops to protect the lives of our soldiers."

As a result, he says not only does this week's decision solve the immediate problem of Afghanistan, but it solves the problem for the military for the next 10 or 15 years.
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Iran helps Afghanistan with statistics project Service: Social
04-16-2007 ISNA - Tehran
TEHRAN, Apr.16 (ISNA)-The Statistics Center of Iran (SCI) holds training workshops for Afghan statisticians dubbed as "Studying Statistic Maps". (Apr.14-18)

The event is in line with the joint statistics projects with Afghanistan and aims at increasing technical ability of Afghan statisticians in studying statistic maps. Transferring successful experiences of general census and other population related facts are also studied in the workshop.
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Holland pledges 2.4m euros
KABUL, Apr 14 (Pajhwok Afghan News): The government of Holland will provide 2.4 million euros for education projects in Uruzgan and Daikundi provinces.

In this connection, an agreement was signed by Dutch ambassador to Afghanistan Wilfred TH Mohr and the Minister for Education Mohammad Hanif Atmar here on Saturday.

Under the agreement, 70 new schools will be constructed besides spending a portion of the assistance to improve quality of education in the provinces. The projects will be completed in the coming six months.

Atmar thanked the Dutch government for the assistance. He said the country's education sector was in dire need of more help to improve the quality of education.

The Dutch ambassador said that the two provinces, Uruzgan and Daikundi, were backward and needed more assistance, especially in the education sector.  He said his country would provide another 4.5 million euros after the successful completion of the current projects.
Zarghona Salehi
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There are no good Taliban in Afghanistan
Gulf News 04/15/2007 By Neena Gopal
Should Afghan President Hamid Karzai even be talking to the Taliban? If he is negotiating with the hardline Islamist movement, why has he gone public at this juncture as Pakistan spirals towards greater Talibanisation, and a spring thaw could test a grievously weakened southern flank?

What exactly does the Afghan leader hope to achieve? Co-opt the Taliban into his government?

Buy peace with men who have blurred the moral frontiers in their quest to eject foreign powers and establish a Caliphate that alarmingly redraws the frontiers to include not just Afghanistan, but large tracts of Pakistan and a sizeable chunk of Central Asian states like Uzbekistan?

Karzai may have played no small part in helping Afghanistan make the perilous journey "from tyranny to democracy" these past five years.
But the continuing turmoil under his watch demonstrates more than ever that the tired mantra that Karzai failed because reconstruction has not gone hand in hand with the war on terror on Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan and Afghanistan's south, is hopelessly invalid.

This is not to say that the Karzai administration has not been inept. But surely there must be more than these two extremes - defusing the Taliban time bomb by talking to the terrorists or head to head confrontation.

In the weeks that followed the release of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo of La Repubblica in exchange for Taliban prisoners, and the decapitation of first, driver Saeed Agha and then, 21-year-old translator Ajmal Naqshabandi by the Taliban, Kabul has been convulsed - on the rights and wrongs of "negotiating with terrorists", on the double standards of justifying a prisoner swap for a foreigner but not for one of their own.

Backing for making overtures to the Taliban has come from unexpected quarters.

Tom Koenigs, UN envoy in Afghanistan says: "The idea you have to kill all of them to win the conflict is nonsense. The answer to the conflict cannot only be based on the military or development policy but must be comprehensively political."

Karzai alleges many of the suicide bombers are Pakistani drug addicts whose families are paid huge sums in compensation by their Pakistan intelligence agency recruiters. Whatever the truth, Koenigs makes eminent sense.

The prevailing wisdom on tackling the Taliban surge has always been - provide the rural backwater where communities are most susceptible to coercion by the Taliban with schools, roads, power, drinking water and an efficient administration and you can turn the country around.

But while that may have been true even in 2005 when Afghanistan was in the grip of the warlords, today, that route is necessary but it's also far too simplistic.
Undeniable nexus
Certainly, it's no longer sound strategy when dealing with the Taliban, their undeniable nexus with drug traffickers, their use of the fundamental distrust of the foreigner with the lure of filthy lucre to extend their writ. .

Younis Qanooni's loathing and distrust of the Taliban stems from his years as a mujahid fighting the Pakistan-backed menace alongside legendary Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Massood.

Last week, Qanooni together with former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, Northern Alliance's luminaries, several Khalqis (former communists) and Mustafa Zahir, the grandson of the former King Zahir Shah announced they had formed the Jabha-e-Milli, the United National Front, dedicated to hands-on governance by a more representative form of government.

The UNF's objections to Karzai's secret talks with former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Mulla Zaeef and former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil must therefore be put in context.

Karzai is talking to his country cousins in an intra-Pashtun dialogue that is more an attempt to consolidate his own support base and safeguard his own government by weaning the moderates to his side.

The UNF's shrewd tacticians understand all too clearly that attacks on international security forces by the Islamists are only helping to undermine Karzai; unfortunately forever associated with the west.

Instead of opening the doors to the re-entry of the self-styled "clean" Taliban, they are hoping it will pave the way for their own arrival on the political stage as an alternative third force.

Clearly, as Afghanistan stands at the cross-roads, it needs a strong grass-roots leader, a man with the stature of Ahmad Shah Massood perhaps, to emerge from the chaos to unite the disparate political streams and drive a wedge between one Taliban and the other.

The only question as Karzai and Musharraf play to their own galleries is this - is there really a distinction to be made between the Taliban on the Afghan side of the border and the Al Qaida on the other?
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Parliamentary system harmful for country: Analysts
KABUL, Apr 14 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Analysts believe that parliamentary system, as demanded by leaders of the newly-formed Afghanistan National Front, is not viable in the current situation and may drop the country into serious political crisis if implemented.

The Afghanistan National Front was established by former jihadi and senior officials of the then communist regime on April 3 in Kabul.

The manifesto of the party included points like change in the system of governance, and election for governors instead of the existing way of nominations.

The front leaders believe the changes will prove helpful for the country and the people, but parliamentarian and political expert Kabir Ranjbar said they were carrying forward their personal agenda.

In a chat with Pajhwok Afghan News, Ranjbar said: "I'm not opposing the system, but in current situation, where weapons have not been collected, implementation of such a system will empower the armed men and they will grab the posts of governors."

Ranjbar believes implementation of the system in the existing circumstance will bifurcate the country. He says it has also been hot issue in the past, but got cold with the ratification of the Constitution.

The existing discords between provinces, even districts, will lead them to tussle and they will seek independence, said Ranjbar.

Ranjbar believes that the National Front is a temporary alliance and leaders had come closer to save their interests. They would part their ways as soon as their interests get out of the way.

Qasim Akhgar, political annalist and expert, said the presidential system was the best system for the country in the current situation. Demand regarding changes in the existing system by leaders of the National Front was reflective of their personal ambitions.

He told Pajhwok the front leaders wanted to get amnesty for themselves by demanding the parliamentary system or election of governors.

He said that leaders of the National Front wanted to take the executive power in their hands and save themselves from standing trial on charges of human rights violations. 

According to Akhgar, foreign interference was still involved in the country and each player wanted to exploit the situation by pushing forward their agency and security their interests.

He said the main threat was that cold war had not yet finished in Afghanistan. Formation of the front will further accelerate the ongoing cold war in the country.

Partao Nadiri, writer and expert, says formation of parties or political alliances is the political right of all. But the demands of the National Front are justifiable in the current situation.

He described the presidential system as the best system for the country. At the same time, he stressed the need for creation of seat of the prime minister.

To a question about interference by neighbouring countries in case of any change in the system of governance, he said coming into power of a particular group would pave way for more interference by the neighbours.

He said the existing policies and the operations being carried out by foreign forces without consulting the government, meant that the government was depending on foreign countries.

At the same time, he said respectable people were leading the front and leveling allegations against them without any proof was not good.

He said the parliamentary system was not harmful for the country. He also rejected the notion that it would dismember the country and divide the society.

He was also not opposed to the election of governors. People should elect the head of their province so as to avoid sending governor of one province to another by the presidents, he argued.

Paghar Noorani, political annalist, was not hopeful about the future of the National Front and its leadership. He said leaders of the front were in government in the past and people had seen their rule. Now they can not get people's support on their side.

Noorani said they had come together because of their joint interest. And that they had no special agency for the government or the people.

Mustafa Kazimi, spokesman for the National Front, rejected the objections raised against the party and its leaders. He said the front was the single platform for several nationalities which showed that Afghans could stay together.

Kazimi added that a number of people were talking about the front but they would pay heed to genuine voices only. He said the parliamentary system could bring reforms in the country.

Kazimi said election of governors would help bring efficient people and would help improve the situation. He said the party had come into being with the support of the people of Afghanistan.
Farida Nekzad
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Corruption, insecurity keep investors at bay
KABUL, Apr 14 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Insecurity and administrative corruption were the main hassles stopping investors to come to Afghanistan and start their businesses here.

This was stated by head of the Afghanistan International Chamber of Commerce (AICC) Hamidullah Farooqi while addressing a conference organised to discuss ways and means how to end corruption and ensure peace and security.

He said lawlessness and administrative corruption were the major problems faced by businessmen here. More than 25 businessmen had been killed, abducted and robbed of their money during 2006, he said.

Minister for Commerce and Industries Mohammad Amin Farhang also expressed concern over insecurity and said it was harming private sector and investment in the country.

He said insecurity was keeping away investors from Afghanistan. This trend was affecting the society because it was increasing joblessness.

He suggested that the Interior Ministry should take more steps to ensure security to attract investors. He also advised entrepreneurs to report to the concerned organs when they were compelled for any underhand dealing by any official.
Zarghona Salehi
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