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August 5, 2007 

Bush, Karzai hold strategy talks on Afghan war
By Caren Bohan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The struggling, six-year effort to rebuild war-ravaged Afghanistan and the threat from Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan will dominate talks this weekend between U.S. President George W. Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The more immediate crisis of trying to free 21 Korean hostages seized by the Taliban last month will also be high on the agenda for the Camp David discussions, which will begin on Sunday.

Two of the original 23 hostages have been murdered and South Korea is pressing the United States and Afghanistan to do all they can to negotiate a release of the surviving captives.

U.S. officials have described the two-day meeting between Bush and Karzai as a strategy session on Afghanistan, where violence has surged over the last 18 months to its worst level since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

Karzai arrives on Sunday afternoon at the mountain-top presidential retreat. On Monday, the two leaders are to hold a news conference at 11:25 a.m. EDT.

The beleaguered Karzai, the target of three assassination attempts, is considered a crucial U.S. ally. Well-spoken and genial, he has strong support in the U.S. Congress as well as within the Bush administration.

But he has had difficulty building a robust central government in a country with a history of tribal rifts and of strong warlord control in many of the provinces.

Karzai is grappling with numerous challenges, including roadside and suicide bomb attacks by the Taliban, mounting casualties to civilians caught in the cross-fire of fighting, and a booming opium trade.

Afghanistan supplies more than 90 percent of the world's opium, and the crop has become a source of cash for the Taliban and a corrupting influence in the government.

AFGHANISTAN INITIATIVE
Lisa Curtis, South Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation, said a top U.S. aim of the talks will be "an opportunity for President Bush to highlight the importance of Afghanistan."

Bush's commitment to Afghanistan can be underscored by "some kind of initiative or talking about increases in the aid amounts," she said. The United States has allocated $10 billion for the Afghanistan effort this year and boosted troop levels.

Afghanistan's woes have helped to fuel criticism of Bush from those who say the Iraq war diverted the post-September 11, 2001, focus away from combating the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Further fueling such criticisms was a report from U.S. spy agencies in July that found Osama bin Laden's Qaeda militants and the Taliban were gaining strength and training new recruits in Pakistan's rugged Waziristan region near the Afghan border.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama stirred anxiety in Islamabad last week when he said if we were elected he would end the Iraq war and redouble efforts to fight al Qaeda, even if it meant attacking inside Pakistan.

Bush has sought to emphasize the role of al Qaeda in Iraq to push back against the argument that Iraq is a distraction.

"Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq are mutually exclusive battles in the war on terror," said White House National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

At a White House meeting last September with Bush and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Karzai raised concerns about Musharraf's truce with tribal leaders in the Waziristan border region. U.S. officials have acknowledged the truce was a failure.

Bush has remained supportive of Musharraf and has said he believes the Pakistani president is committed to tackling the problem of militants in the border region.
(Additional reporting by Paul Eckert)
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Pakistan, Afghanistan finalize arrangements for Peace Jirga
Associated Press of Pakistan  
ISLAMABAD, Aug 5 (APP): Pakistan and Afghanistan have finalized all arrangements for holding the first meeting of Pak-Afghan Peace Jirga on August 9 in Kabul.Rustam Shah Mohmand, the focal person for Pakistani side told APP on  Sunday that during the three-day proceedings,  350 members from each side would participate in the Jirga and discuss the problems being faced by the two countries.
Former Pakistani envoy in Afghanistan Rustam Shah said that the names of Pakistani participants have already been finalized and on Saturday they held a meeting at Governor House Peshawar and discussed joint strategy.

He said during the meeting of Peace Jirga the two sides would constitute seven working committees to submit recommendation after deliberating upon different issues.

In the light of their recommendations a Joint Declaration would be adopted by the Jirga, he added.

A permanent jirga commission would also be constituted to ensure the implementation of the decisions taken by the Peace Jirga, Rustam said.

According to Interior Ministry Spokesman Brig ® Javed Iqal Cheema the main point of Peace Jirga include:
  • Appraisal of factors and circumstances which contribute to the growth of terrorism and militancy.
  • Devising a bilateral mechanism to combat terrorism through cooperation and joint strategy.
  • Enhancing goodwill and creating further confidence building measures and mechanisms, including through interaction between political representatives, civil society, academicians, media, sports and cultural links.
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Tribal elders threaten to boycott Pak-Afghan jirga
By Iqbal Khattak Daily Times, Pakistan
PESHAWAR: Tribal elder Malik Mamoor Khan told Daily Times after meeting NWFP Governor Ali Jan Orakzai on Saturday that no elders would participate in the Pak-Afghan jirga starting from August 9 in Kabul if security forces were not withdrawn from all checkposts in North Waziristan.

The Ahmedzai Wazir tribes in South Waziristan have already boycotted the jirga, stating that it was useless to talk to Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the presence of “US occupational forces” in Afghanistan. “We cannot stop fighting in our own area, how can we do it for Afghanistan?” Malik argued. The government was told about the boycott, he said, but denied that the boycott was a result of “Taliban threats”. Around 50 delegates from North and South Waziristan were nominated for the 700-strong jirga. It will be inaugurated by President Pervez Musharraf and President Hamid Karzai and will take up a seven-point agenda, with decisions to be implemented by a permanent commission at the end.

Akhtar Amin adds: Participants at a national jirga organised by the Pakistan NGOs Forum said that the Pak-Afghan Jirga would fail without the participation of Taliban representatives, and unless Pakistan stopped “interfering in Afghanistan’s internal matters”. “The Pak-Afghan jirga is not independent, nor does it have sufficient representatives,” they said.
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Afghan doctors deliver medicine to Korean hostages
By Sayed Salahuddin
GHAZNI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghan doctors delivered medicines on Sunday for 21 South Koreans kidnapped by Taliban rebels in Afghanistan more than two weeks ago.

The head of a private Afghan clinic said his team had dropped more than $1,200 worth of antibiotics, pain killers, vitamin tablets and heart pills in an area of desert in the Qarabagh district of Ghazni province as instructed by the rebels.

"This is a big achievement. Among the Koreans are doctors who know how to use these medicines," Mohammad Hashim Wahaj told reporters in Ghazni, the main town of the province, where 23 South Korean church volunteers were snatched from a bus on July 20.

"It was a big risk, but we had to take the risk because it is a humanitarian issue," he said.

The Taliban have killed two of their captives and are threatening to kill the rest if the Afghan government fails to release rebel prisoners. Kabul has refused to free jailed Taliban, saying that would just encourage more kidnappings.

The hostage issue is likely to cast a shadow over two days of security talks between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. President George W. Bush due to begin at the U.S. presidential retreat, Camp David, later on Sunday.

Wahaj said he had been in contact with the kidnappers who told him two of the remaining hostages were seriously ill. The Taliban were willing to free those two hostages, he said, but only if two Taliban prisoners were also freed.

The insurgent demand for prisoners to be released has proved a sticking point in all negotiations so far.

NO DIRECT TALKS YET
The South Korean government is under intense domestic pressure to secure the release of the hostages, but Seoul has told the insurgents there is a limit to what it can do as it has no power to free prisoners in Afghan jails.

A South Korean delegation was in Ghazni seeking face-to-face talks with the kidnappers to try to break the deadlock.

But the Taliban said on Sunday there was no agreement on where to hold direct talks with the Korean diplomats.

The Taliban want negotiations in areas they control or with U.N. guarantees for their safety if held elsewhere.

"Talks and contacts are still going on to decide on a venue for talks, but there has been no agreement," Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf said by telephone from an unknown location.

"The Taliban haven't heard from the Korean side on where they want the face-to-face meeting to be held," he said. "The Korean team has told the Taliban that it will persuade Kabul to release Taliban prisoners."

An agreement on where to hold the talks was unlikely during the weekend, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said, citing an unnamed government source.

The governor of Ghazni accused Pakistani Taliban working with agents of Pakistan's state Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) of holding the captives.

"In the beginning it was the local Taliban, but after a few days, Pakistani Taliban and ISI officers disguised as Taliban arrived in the region and they took control," Merajuddin Pattan said on Saturday.

The ISI backed the Taliban movement as it rose to take over most of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, but dropped its support in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001.

Afghan officials often accuse the ISI of secretly supporting and harboring Taliban insurgents. Pakistan denies the charge.

The Taliban spokesman rejected Pattan's accusation.

He said Pattan made the comments because the Afghan government "wants to deflect attention from its own weakness."

A day before the Koreans were seized, Taliban rebels in Wardak province, north of Ghazni, kidnapped two German engineers and five Afghans.

One of the Germans suffered a heart attack and was shot dead and one of the Afghans managed to escape. The rest are being held by the Taliban who are demanding Berlin withdraw its 3,000 troops from Afghanistan. Germany refused to do so.

Yousuf said he was surprised that no one was actively seeking the German's release and said the man was suffering from diabetes and was unable to receive the right medication.
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Taliban, Koreans negotiate over meeting
By NOOR KHAN, Associated Press Writer Sun Aug 5, 7:00 AM ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Face-to-face talks between the Taliban and South Korean officials over the fate of 21 hostages will not happen unless the officials travel to Taliban territory or the U.N. guarantees the militants' safety elsewhere, a purported spokesman said Sunday.

The spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said the militants had talked to the Korean officials "many times" over the phone the last three days but that there had been "no results."

"We gave them two choices: either come to Taliban-controlled territory or meet us abroad," Ahmadi said from an unknown location. "They accepted these options and told us, 'We are trying to persuade the U.N. to give you a guarantee to meet us in another country.'"

"The Koreans also said if the U.N. did not agree to give the Taliban a guarantee we will come to your areas to meet. They have not done any of the above promises yet," he said.

A U.N. spokesman said the international body was "fully supporting" efforts by the South Korean and Afghan governments to resolve the crisis.

"We are obviously aware of the unconfirmed reports suggesting that those holding the aid workers have requested our assistance to meet with the South Korean delegation at a neutral venue, but we have not been approached directly on this issue," said Dan McNorton of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

Twenty-three South Koreans from a church group were kidnapped by the Taliban on July 19 while traveling from Kabul to Kandahar to work on medical and other aid projects. Two of the male hostages have been executed. Among the remaining 21 hostages, 16 are women.

The Taliban have demanded that 23 militant prisoners being held by Afghanistan and at the U.S. base at Bagram be freed in exchange for the Koreans' lives, but the Afghan government has all but ruled out that option, saying it would encourage more kidnappings.

An official at the Korean Embassy in Kabul said the location of a potential meeting between the Koreans and the Taliban was not important. Asked if paying a ransom is an option, he declined to comment. He spoke on condition he not be identified in line with embassy rules.

South Korea has appealed to the United States to get more involved in the negotiation process, and the Koreans are expected to be one of the topics on the agenda for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and President Bush when they meet at Camp David on Sunday and Monday.

Ahmadi said the Taliban have been waiting for negotiations to start and have extended many deadlines for the Koreans' lives.

If an agreement is not reached for in-person negotiations, then the Taliban will not be responsible for "anything bad" that happens to the hostages, Ahmadi said.
___

Associated Press writer Alisa Tang in Kabul contributed to this report.
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Taliban threaten SKoreans as Karzai, Bush set to meet
by Mohammad Yaqob
GHAZNI, Afghanistan (AFP) - Taliban militants again threatened Sunday to kill more of their 21 South Korean hostages, as Seoul said it hoped the Afghan and US presidents could help secure their release.

The fresh threat from the hardline Islamists -- the first since Wednesday, when their last deadline expired -- came as Afghan President Hamid Karzai prepared to meet his US counterpart George W. Bush at Camp David.

Earlier, a South Korean official said he hoped the two leaders could break the apparent deadlock in negotiations for the release of the 21 aid workers, who were abducted in volatile southern Ghazni province on July 19.

Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi, apparently frustrated with the lack of progress in the hostage talks, said more of the captives could be murdered at "any time."

"In the past two days there has not been any contact between us and the Koreans or the Kabul administration," he told AFP by telephone.

"So the killing of the hostages is inevitable and since we've not set a deadline for them they could be killed at any moment, any time," he said.

The militants have already killed two men belonging to the team of Korean aid workers, who were nabbed on the Kabul-Kandahar highway, considered a no-go area by many foreigners amid deteriorating security across the country.

"If they want the hostages to stay safe, they have to really hurry otherwise they could be killed at any second," Ahmadi warned.

But he also said the Taliban were ready to meet with South Korean negotiators in "areas under control of the Taliban" or in another country, so long as the Taliban representatives received a UN guarantee of safe return.

The Karzai-Bush talks have been seen as crucial to the ongoing hostage negotiations. Kabul, apparently backed by Washington, is refusing the Taliban's demand for the release of jailed militants in exchange for the hostages.

"We are hopeful of any positive outcome from the meeting," an official at the South Korean embassy in Kabul said of the meeting between the two leaders at Bush's presidential retreat.

"It is the decision of the Afghan government. We want to solve this in a peaceful and constructive way," the official said, requesting anonymity.

Afghan negotiators again Saturday ruled out a prisoner exchange and said any deal to free the group would have to involve a ransom payout.

The South Korean embassy official said: "We have contact but we cannot confirm the channel. We are using all possible means to mobilise help or support from all over the world."

The Afghan interior ministry said meanwhile officials were doing what they could.

"We will not spare any efforts for their safe release," ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said, while refusing to be drawn on whether the use of force was a possibility.

"We will try to solve this through talking. We cannot clearly say what we would do if the negotiations fail," he said.

The South Korean official and families of the captives in Seoul refused to comment on an emotional plea for help Saturday from a purported hostage whom a Taliban spokesman put into contact with AFP.

"I don't want to die. We want to go home," the woman said by telephone from an undisclosed location. "I don't know how long we can survive."

There was no way to verify whether the woman was in fact one of the aid workers.

The call appears to have been aimed at intensifying pressure on the Afghan government as talks on the fate of the hostages seem to be stalled.

The Taliban-led insurgency has grown stronger each year since it was launched soon after the hardliners were driven from power in a US-led invasion in late 2001 for sheltering the Al-Qaeda group behind the 9/11 attacks.

Washington, the main supplier of international troops now helping Kabul to fight back the rebels, was a leading critic of a prisoner exchange in March that freed an Italian hostage but put top Taliban back in the fray.

Karzai vowed then that such a deal would not be repeated and critics said it would likely increase kidnappings by militants and criminals alike.

Militants said to be allied to the Taliban are still holding a 62-year-old German engineer and four Afghans who were captured a day before the South Koreans. They have publicly demanded a prisoner swap for his freedom.
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INTERVIEW - Afghan governor: Pakistanis behind hostage crisis
Sun Aug 5, 2007 12:53AM IST By Sayed Salahuddin
GHAZNI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The governor of the Afghan province where Taliban militants took 23 South Koreans hostage accused Pakistani Taliban working with Pakistani intelligence agents of holding them captive.

"In the beginning it was the local Taliban, but after a few days, Pakistani Taliban and ISI officers disguised as Taliban arrived in the region and they took control of the situation," Ghazni Governor Merajuddin Pattan told Reuters in an interview on Saturday.

Afghan officials often accuse neighbouring Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) of secretly supporting and harbouring Taliban insurgents. Pakistan strongly denies the charge.

Pakistani officials were not immediately available for comment on Pattan's accusation, which could spark another downturn in relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, both frontline allies of the United States.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai was due in the United States on Sunday and Monday for talks with President George W. Bush.

Pakistan's ISI was one of the main backers of the Taliban movement as it rose to take over most of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, but dropped its support in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

"PUT PRESSURE ON PAKISTAN"
Taliban militants seized 23 Korean church volunteers from a bus in Ghazni province on the main road south from Kabul on July 20. The kidnappers have shot dead two male hostages after Kabul refused to give in to their demand and free Taliban prisoners.

Pattan, a soft-spoken U.S.-educated economist, has been closely involved in talks between the Taliban kidnappers and an Afghan negotiating team sent from Kabul.

He said that during one telephone conversation, he had heard one of the kidnappers translating from Pashto, the language used by ethnic Pashtun Taliban, to Urdu, Pakistan's national language.

He also noted that the kidnappers had stopped setting deadlines since South Korean presidential envoy Baek Jong-chun travelled to Islamabad on Thursday to ask Pakistan's government and Islamist political leaders such as Fazal-ur-Rehman to use their influence to obtain the hostages' release.

"I spoke to the Korean diplomats and I told them that if you want this problem to be ended very soon, please put pressure on Pakistan's Foreign Ministry, they will put pressure on the ISI," Pattan said.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf this week, asking for help to free the hostages. Ban "was told that Pakistan had no links with the Taliban, no contacts," a spokesman for Musharraf said.

Pattan accused Pakistan's ISI of trying to show Afghanistan was weak and use the hostage crisis to overshadow a peace meeting, or jirga, between Afghan and Pakistani tribal elders next week that aims to find common ways to combat the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Pakistan, itself struggling with a wave of pro-Taliban attacks, concedes some border infiltration is taking place, but says the core of the insurgency lies in Afghanistan.
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War widows calls for justice in Afghanistan
Sun Aug 5, 6:25 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - More than 100 people, many of them widows, called for international help in identifying remains found in the latest mass grave to be uncovered in Afghanistan.

The women, joined by a few children and men, gathered outside the UN mission in Kabul where they held up images of their loved ones as they called for those behind the atrocities to be brought to justice.

The latest grave was found last month three kilometres (two miles) outside Kabul at the site of weapons bunkers dating back to the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation.

Officials have said it could contain the bodies of hundreds of people who have gone missing during nearly three decades of war, but investigations have yet to confirm this.

Some of the demonstrators shouted slogans against former "warlords," many of whom now hold senior government posts or are members of Afghanistan's first democratically elected parliament.

One girl held up a placard reading: "I want the person who killed my father to come to court."

"They have killed our husbands and sons and they deserve nothing but trial," said one demonstrator, who gave her name only as Fazila.

She said 10 members of her family had been killed in the violence, including a bloody 1992-1996 civil war that followed the defeat of communism.

The United Nations said it was working with the government to ensure forensic investigations were conducted to identify the bodies in the grave.

Human rights officials have said there are at least 20 mass graves around Afghanistan, where wars since 1979 have left between four and five million people dead, and thousands more missing.
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British Make Initial Gains Against Taliban
By CARLOTTA GALL August 5, 2007 The New York Times
SANGIN, Afghanistan — The British Army compound here in a drug lord’s former villa, with its sandbagged windows and lookout posts and shrapnel-scarred walls, is a reminder that until just a few weeks ago Sangin was one of the most dangerous towns in Afghanistan’s most dangerous province, Helmand.

Since their arrival last spring in this lawless region of mountains and desert, British troops have lost 64 men in almost daily combat against a Taliban force second to none in size and ferocity in the country. The insurgents still control half the province, the most serious threat to Afghanistan’s stability.

Yet despite the presence of thousands of Taliban fighters, and some tough fighting still ahead, British military commanders here say they believe they have turned a significant corner. In recent months they have succeeded in pushing the Taliban back and keeping them out of a few strategic areas.

At the same time, they say, popular support for the insurgents is eroding.

“We see it now as a threat that can be countered,” Maj. Hamish Bell, second in command of the British battalion deployed in northern Helmand, said of the insurgency.

The progress in Helmand is perhaps the most important anywhere in the country, military commanders say, given that the province has the largest concentration of insurgents and produces 42 percent of Afghanistan’s opium crop, which has helped fuel the insurgency. If they can get Helmand right, they say, it could pave the way to broader progress against the Taliban.

But while Helmand shows what is possible in Afghanistan, commanders warn that a long, hard fight remains to win back territory from the Taliban, region by region, village by village. Nearly six years into the war, a third of Afghanistan’s provinces are in the grip of insurgents, a level far worse than it was from 2002 to 2005, the years immediately after the American-led invasion, when the Taliban were toppled and forced to retreat across the border into Pakistan.

Provinces like Helmand, remote from the capital and relatively calm, were only secured by a light American military presence, leaving them wide open when the Taliban chose to return.

In the other southern provinces, Kandahar and Oruzgan, the Taliban presence remains strong. Fighting the Taliban is like pressing mercury or squeezing a balloon, commanders say: as insurgents are suppressed in one area, they emerge in another.

And once pushed back in conventional fighting, the Taliban switch tactics to suicide attacks, roadside bombs and kidnappings. In one measure of the lingering dangers even here, in early July the 14-year-old son of Sangin’s police chief was kidnapped on a road outside town and killed.

But military commanders say the progress in Helmand is an indication that NATO forces have found their stride since last year, when the Taliban staged a spectacular resurgence, taking advantage of the transfer of southern provinces from American commanders to an expanding NATO force.

As NATO forces have become better established and more numerous in southern Afghanistan, American forces have been able to deploy more troops in the east. There, they are also reporting gains in some border areas. All of this has helped NATO forces take the offensive against the Taliban, rather than fighting from their back foot, as they were forced to do last year, and gain local confidence.

“I don’t think the Taliban will come back,” said Abdul Rahman, 45, a paramedic, the only qualified person working in a small private clinic here. “They have been weakened.” Also the people would not support the Taliban anymore, he said.

What has made the difference here, the British say, is a shift in their tactics and a doubling of force numbers, to nearly 6,000 today, with more troops on the way.

When the British paratroopers arrived in Helmand, President Hamid Karzai asked that they focus on preventing small district centers from falling to the Taliban, so grave was the insurgent threat. Surrounded and cut off, the British came under attack up to seven times a day. They used artillery fire to clear an area just for supply helicopters to land.

Over the winter they deployed mobile marine units to push the Taliban back from besieged district compounds and out of the town centers. In spring and summer, they staged sweeping operations, with help from American, Afghan and small Danish and Estonian units.

In May they pushed the Taliban out of the Sangin area. With three companies in the valley, they have since thwarted attempts by the insurgents to reinfiltrate.

“It’s not over but indications are that the uplift in forces and the more offensive mind-set has been successful,” said Maj. Dominic Biddick, 32, commander of Company A of the Royal Anglian Regiment, now based in Sangin. The British base, once virtually under siege, has not taken a single hit in a month, he said.

The British have now been able to focus on their original counterinsurgency plan, which was to create “inkblots,” or secure zones around the main towns, and gradually expand security outward. In this way they are starting reconstruction projects in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, the town of Gereshk on the main road, and now Sangin.

Strategically located, Sangin, a rich agricultural town on the banks of the Helmand River, commands access to the north, where most of the Taliban are concentrated, and to the hydroelectric dam at Kajaki, a major United States development project.

The Taliban threat remains even in these secure zones. But Lt. Col. Stuart Carver, who commands the Battle Group North, said, “There aren’t big groups of 50 Taliban roaming around town and taking over big parts of the town.”

The strong British and Afghan security presence in Sangin has for the first time encouraged local Afghans to come forward with information on Taliban movements.

This year, the Taliban have lost ground and men, including some high-level commanders, and are struggling to find recruits among the local population, Colonel Carver said.

NATO officials categorize the Taliban into two types of fighters. Tier one, as they are called, are hardened, ideologically driven men who have come back to fight from their rear base in Pakistan. Tier two fighters are local men who may join the war for a variety of reasons — economic, tribal or religious.

“The biggest change from last year to this year is there has been no tier two mobilization,” Colonel Carver said. “They have tried,” he said of the Taliban.

Still, military officers said, the Taliban never seem short of forces. They have filled out their ranks with foreign fighters, mainly Pakistanis, but also a handful of Arabs and Chechens, as well as Afghans from other provinces, like neighboring Oruzgan.

The military has found Pakistani identity cards on dead fighters, as well as papers and CDs with jihadi propaganda in Chechen and Arabic, one officer said. A large group of men from Pakistan’s tribal area of Waziristan were killed in one battle, Colonel Carver said.

But the weakening of the Taliban is apparent even to local people, like Hayatullah, 29, a farmer who fled northern Helmand last year and now lives near the main British camp, Bastian, in central Helmand.

“The Taliban are not stronger,” he said, “If they were strong, they would come down and fight the British here.”

Sangin, which was a ghost town three months ago, is struggling slowly back to life. Shops have reopened, while others lie in rubble, and the initial silent hostility toward the foreign troops is starting to thaw.

A few tribal elders have asked the military for help in clearing irrigation channels. Afghan, American and British military medics offered two days of free consultations in mid-July and were swamped by hundreds of people, including dozens of women and children. That was a step toward acceptance, Major Biddick said.

He and other commanders hope that momentum will build.

“I think the big battle was for local support,” Colonel Carver said. “A proportion of the locals now think we are actually going to stay, and therefore they are prepared to throw their cards in with us. Before, they thought we were going to come in, kill a few Taliban and then leave.”

“It has gone from people too scared to even look at you or wave in case someone was watching, now they will talk,” he added. “It’s a step forward that they will talk to you, and it’s a real step forward that they talk to you as if you can solve their problems.”

After a year and half of intense fighting, not all local people are persuaded, however. “We don’t expect good government, only bloodshed,” said Hajji Mullah Fida Muhammad, an elderly man with a white beard. He said he thought the Taliban were still strong enough to win the town again. Others expected them to try again.

“The Taliban is out there, so we expect more fighting,” said Hajji Mullah Salim, 55, a cloth merchant. He had returned to open his shop, but his family was still camping out in the desert for safety, he said.

There is still talk of a Taliban offensive, but NATO commanders are keeping the pressure on the insurgents, and say the danger now is the shift in Taliban tactics, toward roadside and suicide bombs. The guerrilla tactics are threatening enough and can erode local support, as the local police chief, Hajji Ghulam Wali, can attest.

It was his son who was pulled out of a taxi and kidnapped by insurgents on the road from Sangin to the provincial capital. The Taliban commander, Tor Jan, taunted Hajji Wali on the telephone, telling him to quit his job to save his son.

When he refused, they bound his son’s hands and feet with a chain and returned him dead, riddled with 20 bullets. Then, in mid-July, a bomb detonated in the pushcart of a boy as the police chief’s car passed the town bazaar, killing four people, including the boy.

“They committed a terrible crime,” Hajji Wali said of his son’s killing. “Islam does not permit such cruelty.”

Still, he said, the town was safer. The Taliban, he insisted, “have lost morale, they are weak now.”

“Before we could not go to the bazaar, but now they are hiding and cannot go to the bazaar,” he said.

He, like several Afghan officials interviewed in the province, urged the British to press their advantage and finish the Taliban while the insurgents are down.

Wary of the ease with which the Taliban can reinfiltrate areas, the British are moving with care. British commanders said the job now was now to consolidate control of Sangin and Gereshk, rather than pursue Taliban in their holdouts.

“We could deploy and clear the rest but the danger is if we clear the Taliban out we create a vacuum,” Major Biddick, the British commander in Sangin, said. The Afghan government also needs to catch up in deploying more army and police to fill the vacuum, he added.

“This is setting the conditions 12 months in, and Afghanistan will be measured in decades, not years,” the major said. “We realize it is just the tip of the iceberg.”
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Brown courts Ashdown to be Afghan overlord
Alan Schofield The Sunday Times August 5, 2007
Gordon Brown is lining up Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, for a role coordinating international efforts to stabilise Afghanistan.

It is the second attempt to bring Ashdown into a “government of all the talents” after an offer to give him a cabinet post as Northern Ireland secretary was rebuffed in June.

The move comes as many experts fear Afghanistan is sliding into chaos because the European Union, the United Nations and Nato are not working closely enough together.

Brown visited the country in March before taking over as prime minister and has been privately emphasising the need to “get a grip” on the many different agencies.

Ashdown, who has previously held a key coordinating role in Bosnia, is seen as the ideal man for the job and discussed the role with David Miliband, the foreign secretary, last month.

One senior Foreign Office official said: “We’re keen to get Paddy on board but we know he won’t do it unless he gets the right mandate. The international community needs to see sense and work together.”

Another official said American forces had until now concentrated on hunting for Osama Bin Laden and quelling violence while Nato forces had focused on winning hearts and minds. “We now need to find a common purpose for us to make any progress in that country,” he said.

Mandarins have already briefed Ashdown on the threat posed by a resurgent Taliban.

While not commenting directly on the proposed job Ashdown said: “My view, for what it is worth, is that there needs to be a single figure out there pulling all the strands together. At the moment there is little or no coordination and the country is starting to work against itself.”

It is understood that approval from the United States will be decisive in whether Ashdown accepts the role.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, today travels to Washington to meet President George W Bush to discuss how best to consolidate his leadership and confirm the support of international agencies.

Senior Lib Dems accused Brown of “dirty underhand politics” when he made the offer of a cabinet post to Ashdown. It came after Sir Menzies Campbell, the Lib Dem leader, had made it clear that no member of his party should take a job in Brown’s government.

However, it is understood Campbell has been kept informed about the Afghan discussions.

Ashdown was the international community’s high representative for Bosnia and the European Union’s special representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina between 2002 and 2006. He is credited by many at the Foreign Office with bringing together the factions in the country.
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New Afghan attacks leave 20 dead
Sun Aug 5, 6:20 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - At least 20 people, including six civilians and 10 police officers, were killed in a weekend of violence across insurgency-hit Afghanistan, police said.

In an attack blamed on Taliban insurgents, three policemen were killed when a remotely detonated mine tore through their vehicle in the eastern province of Kunar on Sunday, provincial police commander Abdul Jalal Jalal said.

They had been travelling to a Taliban-dominated district to reinforce police who had been under attack there since late Saturday, he said.

The gunfight, which lasted into Sunday, left two policemen dead and two others wounded, Jalal said, adding that at least four militants were killed.

Separately, a roadside bomb typical of those deployed by the Taliban killed two Afghan civilians in the southern province of Kandahar Sunday, provincial police chief Sayed Agha Saqeb said.

Four other civilians were killed in a similar blast Saturday on the same road in Zhari district, Saqeb said.

Also in Zhari, which has seen some of the worst of the insurgent violence this year, a policeman was killed in an overnight attack on his post by several Taliban rebels, he said.

Four police officers were killed in the southern province of Logar just south of the capital Kabul when they were ambushed on patrol overnight, the interior ministry told AFP.

Five Taliban insurgents were also believed to have been killed in the ensuing gunfight, but this was not confirmed, he said.

The Taliban, overthrown in a US-led invasion at the end of 2001, are waging an insurgency that sees regular attacks in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
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Two policemen, five guerrillas killed in Afghanistan 
By IANS Sunday August 5, 01:24 PM
Kabul, Aug 5 (Xinhua) Two policemen and five Taliban guerrillas were killed in a clash in Kunar province of eastern Afghanistan Sunday.

The encounter began after some militants attacked a police checkpoint in Chapa Dara district at 3 a.m. (2230 GMT Saturday), said Shah Hussein Mangal, spokesman of the provincial government.

Three policemen were also injured in the encounter, he added.

A roadside bombing killed four policemen in the district Friday.

The rising Taliban violence has left over 3,800 people dead in Afghanistan this year.
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100 Taliban believed killed in strike: Afghan government
Sat Aug 4, 6:25 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - The Afghan government said it believed more than 100 Taliban may have been killed in an air strike in the south of the country and did not rule out civilian casualties.

But General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a defence ministry spokesman, rejected some media reports that scores of civilians were killed or wounded in the US-led coalition strike Thursday in Helmand province.

Azimi said it was unclear how many people had been killed in the attack on a large gathering of Taliban.

"But the enemy casualty is very high," he told a press conference in the capital, Kabul. "There might be more than 100 killed."

Hospitals in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, and in the nearby city of Kandahar, said Friday that nearly 40 civilians had been brought in for treatment.

But Azimi questioned this figure, saying: "Even if there were civilians, there were very few of them. Their number would not reach 10."

He added: "How can you distinguish when someone is a civilian or not? When he has his gun laid on the ground, he's a civilian but when he has it on his shoulder, he is not?"

The area had been under aerial surveillance for more than 24 hours before the strike, Azimi said, and images showed there were no women or children in the group.

But hospital officials said Friday that at least two children had been treated for wounds sustained in the strike.
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Afghan heroin a threat to Canadian streets: RCMP
Sun. Aug. 5 2007 11:10 AM ET Canadian Press
TORONTO -- The Mounties have warned at least two federal agencies that Afghan heroin is "increasingly'' making its way to Canada and poses a direct threat to the public despite millions of dollars from Ottawa to fund the war-torn country's counter-narcotics efforts, newly released documents reveal.

"The RCMP informs us that Afghan heroin is increasingly ending up on, or is destined for Canadian streets,'' say Foreign Affairs and Defence Department briefings, obtained separately by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

The Afghan-produced heroin "directly threatens'' Canadians, say the identically worded briefings.

Paul Nadeau, the director of the RCMP's drug branch in Ottawa, said about 60 per cent of the heroin on Canadian streets comes from Afghanistan.

"Keep in mind, though, that when we seize it, it doesn't have a stamp on it that says where it came from,'' he said.

Rather, it's the investigative tracing of smuggling routes that reveals the drug's country of origin.

Until a few years ago, most heroin came from an opium-producing region in Southeast Asia called the "golden triangle,'' a mountainous area of around 350,000 square kilometres overlapping Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.

In recent years, organized crime groups from Southeast Asia have taken to trafficking synthetic drugs, such as ecstasy, which have more users -- and more profitability -- than heroin, Nadeau said.

New traffickers, who Nadeau said are often, but not always, of Indian origin, have stepped in, bringing with them new shipping methods.

The Southeast Asian traffickers were notorious for brazen heroin shipments, sometimes totalling up to 100 kilograms a haul. The new traffickers typically prefer smaller, but more frequent, shipments, Nadeau said. The strategy, it seems, is akin to throwing as much as possible against the wall to see what sticks.

"It seems to be involving the classic couriers, suitcases at the airport, smaller amounts, but no doubt, more shipments coming in,'' he said.

Roughly 92 per cent of the world's heroin comes from opium poppies grown in Afghanistan, according to the 2007 World Drug Report, released in June by the United Nations Office on Drugs.

Afghan heroin typically flows into Canada through two main trafficking arteries, Nadeau said: via the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then onto India and, finally, Canada; and, from Afghanistan to western Africa, then through the United States into Canada.

The Foreign Affairs and Defence Department briefings differ on the windfall opium production and trafficking yields in Afghanistan, estimating it is equivalent to between 25 and 60 per cent of the Afghan economy.

Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Ambra Dickie says Ottawa has pledged about $57 million to fund Afghan counter-narcotics efforts, including an $18.5-million program to promote alternate livelihoods in the country's volatile Kandahar province, where Canadian troops are stationed.

The Afghan counter-narcotics programs are co-ordinated by that country's national drug control strategy. But the drug control strategy is badly flawed, said Thomas Pietschmann, a researcher who authored the UN drug report.

"It's clear: there is a disaster there. Nobody can say that it's working. It's not working,'' Pietschmann said from his office in Vienna, Austria.

Afghanistan's counter-narcotics minister stepped down last month after the country's opium poppy crop ballooned under his watch. Habibullah Qaderi's resignation came as western embassies and the Afghan government hold closed door meetings about how to fight the country's growing drug problem.

Pietschmann said it's "extremely logical'' that there's more Afghan heroin on Canadian streets because of a spike in the central Asian nation's opium poppy production.

"It would be the most logical thing to expect, on the Canadian market, that you would see far more Afghan heroin landing on the shores of Canada,'' he said.

Afghanistan's swelling opium crop might lower heroin's street value in Canada, Nadeau said, adding he doubts more people will start using heroin because it's cheaper and there's more of it.

"Heroin is not what it used to be. There's a certain stigma attached to it from the user population,'' he said. "But it's definitely a problem in certain major centres.''

The Foreign Affairs briefing concedes there's no quick fix to Afghanistan's drug quandary: "There are no simple solutions to a problem that has taken decades to develop.''

At first glance, Canada doesn't seem to have a heroin problem. Less than one per cent of Canadians have used the drug at some point in their lives, according to the latest report from Health Canada and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.

But it's difficult to gauge the real prevalence of heroin use in Canada, since most users don't partake in national surveys, said a Centre on Substance Abuse spokeswoman.

The RCMP says it seized 60 kilograms of heroin in Canada in 2003, 77 kilograms in 2004, and 83 kilograms in 2005.
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MP: Majlis ready to form joint women commission with Afghanistan
Tehran, Aug 5, IRNA
An Iranian lawmaker said here Sunday that the Majlis, especially its Women Fraction, is ready to form a joint commission of Iranian-Afghan women's cultural and social relations.

Head of Majlis Women Fraction Fatemeh Alia told a group of Afghan female parliamentarians that Iran's strategic policies are based on all-out support for consolidation of peace, stability and security in Afghanistan.

She said restoration of stability in Afghanistan needs the contribution of all countries.

Elsewhere in her remarks, Alia said that the plan to give Taliban a share in Afghan power structure is in contrast with the spirit of global conventions.

She noted that continued hostage taking in Afghanistan indicates the failure of foreign forces to guarantee stability and peace in the country.

Meanwhile, Majlis deputy from Tehran Fatemeh Rahbar criticized the world for its inaction to check transit of illicit drugs as well as poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and said, "Poppy cultivation and drug smuggling are the result of wrong policies of the US and certain European states in the region."
Rahbar hoped that Afghan government and parliament would take effective measures to remove the crisis.

An Afghan parliamentarian Mrs. Balkhi for her part called for further expansion of Tehran-Kabul relations and hoped that formation of a joint women commission by Iran and Afghanistan and information sharing by Iranian and Afghan legislators would help the two sides take resolute measures to solve the problems facing Afghan women.
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Iran gives Taliban hi-tech weapons to fight British
Tim Albone, Islam Qala, Herat province The Sunday Times (UK)
British troops in Helmand province fighting the Taliban face a new danger as sophisticated Iranian weapons and explosives are being smuggled into Afghanistan.

In the dusty frontier town of Islam Qala, near Herat, on the Afghan side of the border with Iran, weapons and explosives such as armour-piercing roadside bombs are being trafficked to the insurgents.

The news that Taliban rebels are being armed with Iranian-supplied weapons poses an added threat to the 5,000 British troops battling insurgents in southern Afghanistan. “I have to tell the truth. It is clear to everyone that Iran is supporting the enemy of Afghanistan, the Taliban,” Colonel Rahmatullah Safi, head of border police for western Afghanistan, told The Sunday Times.

Afghan intelligence sources believe that many deals between the Taliban and the Iranians are conducted through a drug smuggler in southern Afghanistan who acts as a middle man. He is from the minority Baluch tribe; as well as smuggling heroin through Iran to Europe, he is also believed to have bought weapons off the Iranian government and sold them on to the Taliban.

The deadliest weapons known to cross the border are Iranian-made armour-piercing explosives. Colonel Thomas Kelly, an American under the command of Nato, said that the explosives that have been used to deadly effect in Iraq have been found recently in western Afghanistan.

“These are very sophisticated IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and they’re really not manufactured in any other place to our knowledge than Iran,” he said, adding that the explosives were factory made. He stopped short of saying they were supplied by the Iranian government.

Along with supplies of Kalashnikov assault rifles and mortars, Afghan military sources fear that the Iranians may also have supplied heat-seeking missiles. International forces rely heavily on helicopters to transport troops as the roads are too dangerous to drive along, but they are especially vulnerable to this kind of weaponry.

It was the introduction of western-supplied Stinger missiles that brought the Soviet army to its knees during its ill-fated 10-year campaign in Afghanistan. Many of these weapons are now dated, however, and the Stingers are no longer operational. What is of particular concern to British and US troops is that the Taliban could get their hands on the modern Manpad (man-portable air defence system), a highly mobile shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile.

The American government has accused Iran’s Quds force, an elite arm of the Revolutionary Guards, of arming and training Shi’ite extremist groups in Iraq. Afghan officials fear that Iran has overcome its theological differences with the largely Sunni Taliban to fight a bigger enemy.

“The Taliban are Sunni extremists and the Iranians definitely don’t want them to take control of Afghanistan again, but right now they support them as there is a bigger enemy, America. The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Haji Rafiq Shahir, a law professor at Herat University.

A western official in Kabul said he was aware that the Iranian government had offered weapons to the Taliban: “The Iranian government offered weapons for free but the Taliban refused as they didn’t want to be beholden to them.”

The official added that he was unaware of any specific arms sales, but added: “From an Iranian position it’s easy to feel encircled, particularly when you consider they are paranoid to begin with. They see the British as the manipulative Machiavellian characters and the Americans as our dim cousins who carry out the dirty work for us.”

Iranian paranoia is enhanced by the American bases springing up along Afghanistan’s western border in Herat and Shindand along with the British base, Camp Bastion, in Helmand.

Mohammad Reza Bahrami, the Iranian ambassador to Kabul, has strongly denied all accusations that his country is supplying weapons to insurgents. He claimed that Iran is one of the biggest donors to the troubled nation.

Hostage talks

Taliban rebels and South Korea are seeking a neutral meeting place to thrash out an agreement to release 21 hostages held for more than two weeks.

News that the Koreans are willing to meet the Taliban will come as a relief to the hostages, most of them women. Two male hostages have already been killed.

The Afghan government says it will not free Taliban prisoners.
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Afghan soaps open Pandora's box
BARRY BEARAK IN KABUL Scotsman, United Kingdom
SEVEN years ago, during a very different time in a very different Afghanistan, a medical student named Daoud Sediqi was cycling from campus when he was stopped by the Taliban's whip-wielding religious police. The young man immediately felt an avalanche of regret, for he was in violation of at least two laws.

One obvious offence was the length of his hair. While the ruling Taliban insisted that men sprout untrimmed beards, they were otherwise opposed to scruffiness and the student had allowed his locks to grow shaggy. His other transgression was more serious. If his captors searched his possessions, they would find a CD with anX-rated movie.

"Fortunately, they didn't look; my only punishment was to have my head shaved because of my long hair," recalled Sediqi, now, at 26, one of the country's best-known personalities - not a warlord or a mullah, but a television celebrity, the host of Afghan Star, this nation's American Idol.

Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, Afghanistan has been developing in fits and starts. According to the government's latest surveys, only 43% of all households have watertight windows and roofs, 31% have safe drinking water and 7% have sanitary toilets.

But television is off to a phenomenal start, with Afghans now engrossed, for better or worse, in much of the same escapist fare that seduces the rest of the world: soap operas, celebrity chef vehicles and salacious talk shows.

Even 24, the hit US anti-terror drama starring Kiefer Sutherland, is being lined up.

The latest national survey, which dates from 2005, shows that 19% of Afghan households own a television, a remarkable total considering that owning a TV was a crime under the Taliban and that a mere 14% of the population has access to public electricity. In a study this year of Afghanistan's five most urban provinces, two-thirds of all people said they watched TV every day or almost every day.

"Maybe Afghanistan is not so different from other places," said Muhammad Qaseem Akhgar, a newspaper editor. "People watch television because there is nothing else to do."

Reading is certainly less an option; only 28% of the population is literate.

Women, whose public outings are constrained by custom, most often watch their favourite shows at home. Men, on the other hand, are free to make TV a communal ritual. In one restaurant after another, with deft fingers dipping into mounds of steaming rice, patrons sit cross-legged on carpeted platforms, their eyes fixed on a television set perched near the ceiling.

Kabul has eight local television stations, including one feebly operated by the government. "The key time slots are from 6 to 9pm because that's when people switch on their generators for electrical power," said Saad Mohseni, who runs Tolo, the channel that dominates the market in most of the country. "People love the soap operas.

"We've just bought the rights to 24, the American show," he said. "We had some concerns. Most of the bad guys are Muslims, but we did focus groups and it turns out most people didn't care about that so long as the villains weren't Afghans."

Mohseni, a former investment banker, and his three siblings started Tolo TV (Tolo means 'dawn' in Dari) in 2004, assisted by a grant from the US Agency for International Development.

After living most of their adult lives in exile in Australia, the Mohsenis returned to post-Taliban Kabul looking for investment opportunities and discovered a nearly prehistoric television wilderness ready for settlement. People could buy a used colour TV for £40. But what did they want to watch? "We let ourselves be guided by what we liked," Mohseni said.

For the most part, that means that Tolo has harvested every cliché from television's vast international landscape. True-crime shows introduce Afghans to the sensationalism of their own serial killers. Reality shows pluck everyday people off the streets and transform them with snazzy wardrobes. Quiz shows reward the knowledgeable: how many pounds of mushrooms did Afghanistan export last year? A contestant who answers correctly wins a free gallon of cooking oil.

Sediqi is about to begin his third season with Afghan Star. He has never seen Pop Idol. Nevertheless, he ably manages to introduce the competing vocalists and coax the audience to vote for their favourites via mobile phone.

"I must tell you that I am having very good fun," Sediqi said, employing his limited English.

Tolo has drawn a huge audience while testing the bounds of certain taboos. Zaid Mohseni, Saad's younger brother, said: "When we first put a man and woman on the air together, we had complaints: this isn't legal, this isn't Islamic, blah, blah, blah. Then the criticism softened. It was OK as long as they don't talk to each other. Finally, it softened more: OK, they can talk as long as they don't laugh."

The bounds are pushed but not broken.

Music videos, primarily imports from India, are broadcast regularly. With a nod to Afghan tradition, the bare arms and midriffs of female dancers are obscured with a milky strip of electronic camouflage. And yet, sporting events are somehow deemed less erotic. Maria Sharapova was shown at Wimbledon with the full flesh of her limbs unconcealed.

Whatever the constraints, some observers consider TV a portal to promiscuity. "Forty million people are living with HIV-Aids, and television is finally helping Afghanistan contribute to those figures," the Ayatollah Asif Mohseni said with sarcasm.

"We have an economy that is in ruins," Mohseni added. "Do you think rubbish Indian serials with half-naked people are the answer?"

What's on in Kabul
PICK OF THE DAY
7.30pm, Prerna Tolo TV A plucky young woman struggles to look after herself, her family and her neighbours in this popular twice-weekly saga of everyday Kabul folk. Dubbed into Dari. Colour (India)

8pm, The Thief of Baghdad National Television Afghanistan Viewers are reminded that this is not a gritty reality TV show. It's a classic Mesopotamian swords and sandals swashbuckler featuring flying carpets, genies and sorcery. Subtitled. Film. (1940) B&W (UK/USA) (repeat)

9pm, Tulsi Tolo TV Will there be any resolution in this bitter fly-on-the-wall family feud? Tune it to find out if clear-the-air talks end in peace or a punch-up. Dubbed into Dari. Colour. (India)

10pm, Afghan Star Ariana TV (Afghanistan) Who is going to be crowned the nation's top entertainer? Your vote could decide whether the title goes to Elvis impersonator Qaseem "Afghan Hound Dog" Sediqi or one-legged juggler Saad Khisti. Dari. Colour.

11pm, Woman Tolo TV Psychiatrist, Dr Muhammad Yasin Babrak addresses topical female issues in front of a live studio audience. Dari. Colour.

Midnight National anthem and closedown.

Coming soon: 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland
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