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December 2, 2007 

40 Taliban killed in Afghan clashes
By NOOR KHAN, Associated Press Writer Sun Dec 2, 4:52 AM ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Afghan and NATO-led troops battled with Taliban militants and called in airstrikes in a series of clashes in the country's south that left 40 insurgents dead, an official said Sunday.

The joint force clashed with militants in the mountainous Shah Wali Kot district in Kandahar province during a three-day operation that ended Saturday and left 35 insurgents dead, said provincial police chief Sayed Agha Saqib.

Ten other insurgents were detained near the militants' hide-outs, which they used to launch attacks against Afghan and foreign troops in the area, Saqib said. Authorities recovered the militants' bodies along with their automatic weapons and ammunition, he said.

In Kandahar's Zhari district, Afghan and foreign troops clashed with another group of militants hiding in a compound Saturday night, killing five militants and detaining four others, Saqib said.

Among those killed was a regional militant commander, Mullah Faizullah, he said.

There were no casualties among Afghan or foreign troops during the operations, Saqib said.

The reports could not be independently verified because the areas are remote and inaccessible.

This year has been the most violent since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Insurgency-related violence has claimed nearly 6,200 lives, according to a tally of figures from Afghan and Western officials.
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Afghanistan army to reach targeted strength by March
By Hamid Shalizi Sun Dec 2, 6:11 AM ET
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan's army will reach a targeted strength of a trained force of 70,000 within four months, but that will be insufficient to stand against internal and external threats, a government spokesman said on Sunday.

Currently the Afghan National Army stands at around 57,000 out of the 70,000 target, set at an international conference after the Taliban's removal in 2001.

"We think we need a 200,000 (strong) Afghan National Army which is in the interest of both Afghanistan and the international community," defense ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi said at a news conference.

He said a force of that size was needed to deal with possible external threats and to tackle the insurgency led by the resurgent Taliban.

It will also be much cheaper than the military expenditures by the nearly 50,000 foreign troops under the command of NATO and the U.S. army in Afghanistan, Azimi said.

"If the 200,000 are capable of providing security to the entire country, it will cost international forces less than the

expenses of their forces in Afghanistan," he said.

Azimi said the expenses of one foreign soldier was equivalent of 70 to 100 Afghan troopers.

The United States, which provides the bulk of the foreign troops in Afghanistan, is also the lead country in funding, training and equipping the Afghan army, which disintegrated in 1992 after the collapse of Kabul's communist-backed regime.

Foreign military commanders in Afghanistan say they will keep their troops in the country until the domestic forces can stand on their own feet.

Azimi said the United States will soon start shipping NATO standard weapons and helicopters to the Afghan army to replace its Soviet-era arms.

Afghanistan in the past two years has been going through its worst spell of violence since Taliban's ouster. More than 10,000 people including over 300 foreign soldiers have been killed during that period.
(Editing by Sayed Salahuddin and Jerry Norton)
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Defense Official: Afghanistan In Its 'Bloodiest' Year - AFP
KABUL (AFP)--The past year has been the "bloodiest" for Afghanistan since the Taliban fell in 2001 with the rebels doing their utmost to deter international troops, the defense ministry said Sunday.

Taliban insurgents were using "all their resources" to try to persuade Afghanistan's international allies to withdraw their forces, senior defense ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi told reporters.

"I agree this year was the bloodiest Afghanistan (has) gone through," Azimi said in a response to a question, as police reported a new suicide attack near international soldiers and the killing of 40 Taliban in two days of clashes.

"In fact, the enemies' vision was if they use all their resources it would change the international community's vision towards Afghanistan. But The Netherlands' decision, in fact, proved their vision as wrong," he said.

The Dutch government announced this week it would keep its more than 1,600 troops here until December 2010, more than two years longer than the end of their original mandate in August 2008.

Azimi said the increase in Taliban attacks could also be a desperate attempt to avenge the killing of some key rebel leaders in military operations this year, including military mastermind Mullah Dadullah.

"We see a kind of revengeful reaction from Taliban as their key leaders... were killed," he said.

Azimi said the Islamic rebels had lost the capacity to face Afghan and international forces in significant numbers and were instead operating in small groups able to cover a larger area, often using suicide attacks.

A suicide bomber blew up a car bomb in the southern province of Kandahar on Sunday but he was the only casualty, police said.

The attack was in the Shah Wali Kot district, where police said 35 Taliban were killed in two days' fighting.

There were also new clashes in the province's volatile Zhari district late Saturday, in which five Taliban were killed, police said.

The Taliban have stepped up their insurgency every year since 2001, when they were driven from government in a U.S.-led invasion because they refused to surrender al-Qaida leaders behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

The violence has this year killed about 6,000 people, most of them Taliban fighters but also about 1,000 Afghan security forces and more than 200 foreign soldiers.
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On the frontline in Taliban 'blooding ground'
by Bronwen Roberts Sun Dec 2, 1:57 AM ET
GARMSER, Afghanistan (AFP) - "This land belongs to terrorists," says a district intelligence chief, referring to the compounds and trenches just south of the main road that leads into the small Afghan town of Garmser.
 
The Taliban, and the smugglers who supply them, also have the run of the stretch of desert 200 kilometres (120 miles) further south to the Pakistan border.

Authorities have control just north of this road -- a frontline that cuts through the town in the southern province of Helmand.

There is a bazaar deserted since the Taliban stormed in nearly 18 months ago, a base of the International Security Assistance Force that drove the rebels out, some empty mudbrick compounds and ruined buildings.

But it is south that the problem lies.

ISAF has called Garmser district the "Taliban gateway to Helmand," Afghanistan's largest province and biggest producer of the opium that gives the world heroin and the Taliban some income.

Taliban recruits from Pakistan cross over at Baram Shah, an ethnic Baluch-controlled drugs bazaar on the border, said the district intelligence chief, Mir Hamza.

Then they move up to Garmser for "blooding", as one British soldier put it.

"They are collected here into different regiments and then go to different places like Gereshk and Naw Zad," the intelligence chief said, naming other insurgency hotspots in Helmand.

The fighters are from Pakistan but the weapons and ammunition come up via Iran, sometimes originating in China, he said.

Garmser "weapons facilitators" were the target of raids mid-November that the US-led coalition force, which works alongside ISAF, said killed more than 40 rebels. Residents said civilians were among the dead.

"There are about 900 enemy around," Hamza said of area just south of the frontline. "Around 300 are local people and the rest are foreigners from Pakistan, Iran, Punjab, Waziristan, there are some Arabs."

He reckons these Taliban could take the rest of Garmser town in two hours if the British ISAF soldiers were not here. And after two days they would be in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital more than 50 kilometres away.

"If this area is lost, the whole of Helmand is in the hands of the Taliban," he said.

A few months ago there were several "contacts" every day but these have dropped off in recent weeks, commanding officer Major Mark Milford said at the base, which was an agricultural college before becoming a madrassa during the 1996-2001 Taliban regime.

"It could be something as simple as it is really cold at night," he said.

But there is still enough action to keep the soldiers busy.

Taliban usually start firing at a fort at one end of the frontline in the early morning, when the soldiers are looking into the rising sun.

Exchanges are more regular at another fortress atop a mound built above this flat land by British soldiers here during the three Anglo-Afghan wars fought between 1839 and 1919. It is known as one of the busiest forts in Helmand.

The rebels usually fire from trenches -- many of them irrigation canals built during a 1950s-1970s push by the United States to turn Helmand into an agriculture centre.

Milford sends patrols down to inspect the trenches -- a feature that has resulted in Garmser being compared to a World War I battlefield.

Sometimes they blow up the trenches but there is little point in trying to capture the ground, he said. "We can't hold it."

He wants border police down here to supplement the regular police force of a few dozen men: there is no Afghan army.

"This is effectively the border," Milford said.

The commander -- whose unit arrived only a few weeks ago to take over from another one -- also sends patrols into the more secured northern area to meet the few locals that have returned.

"We are the poor people of Garmser," 70-year-old Haji Abdullah told one patrol. "Everybody knows this is the frontline. All the rich guys have left."

The white-haired man pointed out broken water pumps -- from which military engineers take away parts for repair -- and a bare building that he said was once his restaurant and did a good trade when the bazaar was open.

Now the nearest functioning bazaar is on the other side of the frontline.

Another elderly man, Haji Bagram, rolled up to the heavily armed soldiers in a wheelchair. "The clinic is destroyed, there are no doctors. Up to now we haven't seen any help, we hope you can help," he said.

Other locals were less forthcoming.

A visibly nervous man in one of the several cars that passed by said he could not show the soldiers around because he was busy. Another said he had to get his motorbike fixed right away.

"When you come here, a lot of civilians pass by and some of them might say we are spies," one man said, urging the soldiers not to linger.

"If we go to the bazaar, the Taliban might arrest us because we allowed the foreign forces to come into the village," he said.
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Giving Afghan girls a first: opportunity
By Bella English  |  December 2, 2007 Boston Globe
From comfortable Duxbury to provincial Afghanistan comes a gift from the heart, and from the head: A girls' school is rising in a village outside Kabul where no girls have been educated in years. It's all thanks to the Duxbury Rotary Club, and a resourceful woman named Razia Jan of Marshfield.

Jan is an Afghan who came to the United States for her own education in 1970 and never left. She became a US citizen, had a son - now a film and theater director in Los Angeles - and opened her own business, a dry cleaning and seamstress shop in Duxbury.

She has also, over the past two years, been raising money to build the girls' school in a village outside Kabul. In August, she was in her native land to watch the first floor of the two-story school building go up. When it is complete this winter, the school will have eight classrooms. "We'll start from 4 or 5 years old but might get a 16-year-old who has never been in school," says Jan.

Girls' schools in the Afghan provinces are rare; under the Taliban, more than 700 schools were burned, and fear remains in the countryside. So aside from raising funds and the roof, Jan will be raising hopes as she goes door to door begging parents to send their girls to school.

"We'll assure them this is a safe place," says Jan. Already, the mayor of the province has promised that his daughters will be the first to enroll.

In January, Jan will return for two weeks and start moving furniture into the Zabuli School, named after an Afghan banking pioneer who died a few years ago at 102. His wife, a key donor to the cause, will attend a fund-raiser in Duxbury today for the school.

The keynoter at today's event is best-selling author Khaled Hosseini, who wrote "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns." Hosseini, who lives in Los Angeles, appeared in Duxbury two years ago and helped raise nearly $50,000 for the school. He was born in Kabul, where his mother taught at a girls' high school.

The Rotary Club hopes to raise $60,000 to $70,000 today to finish the school, which will open in March. "It's a beautiful school, all concrete, with electrical wiring, computers, six bathrooms, and filtered water," says Jan. Because villagers are helping build it, she says, "they would never let anyone destroy it." There's already a boys' school nearby.

"Most people support girls' being educated. They are so smart, I can't tell you. Just give them the opportunity, and they learn so quickly," she says.

The Zabuli School is only Jan's latest humanitarian effort. Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, she made two large quilts, each one bearing the imprinted photographs and a short biography of every person killed during the attack on the Pentagon, and presented them in the new chapel there. She made fleece blankets with the American flag pattern and organized Duxbury residents and schoolchildren to buy and cut fabric for hundreds more blankets, which she made. She drove down to New York, to the firehouses near ground zero, and delivered many herself.

She also made a huge quilt - 30 feet long and 12 feet wide - with 356 squares, each containing a photo and a bio of the dead firefighters; she had taken the images and biographies off the Internet, enlarged them, and scanned them onto a special canvas before sewing them together with batting and lining. Then she did the same for the Port Authority and New York City rescuers who died.

In the past couple of years, she has been sending boxes of shoes, toys, quilts, clothes and other goods through the US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. It's the best way she knows to help her people: Afghan citizens and American soliders. The items, she explains, are for the troops to distribute to the villagers: a good-will gesture.

Apparently, it works. "Before, the soldiers say, the people would run like ants going to their hole when they saw them. Now, they run to the soldiers and thank them. It benefits our soldiers," she says. She also makes sure the soldiers themselves have care packages.

A couple of years ago, Jan accompanied soldiers to a village the troops had adopted after US bombs had partially destroyed it. At a hospital, a man sobbed that he didn't have money to take his dead wife home and asked the soldiers for help. Jan told him the soldiers didn't have money to give him.

Outside, she handed a sergeant the equivalent of $100 in Afghan money and told him to give it to the man. "There were old and young people lying there without limbs, and this man tried to kiss the sergeant's feet, hands, face. The sergeant was crying," she recalls. She told him: "These 20 men lying there might like to kill you but now they'll never put their hands on you."

She concludes: "That's how you have to work. Our soldiers come first."

This isn't all this people's ambassador has done. Over the years, with the help of the Duxbury Rotary Club, she has provided more than 30,000 pairs of shoes to Afghan children. A month ago, she was honored as a Woman of Excellence by the Germaine Lawrence School, a residential school for at-risk girls in Arlington.

Her latest dream, about to become reality, is to help girls in wartorn Afghanistan, where by definition all are at risk.

Today's fund-raiser at the Duxbury Performing Arts Center, which starts at 1 p.m., will include a silent auction, remarks and book-signing by Hosseini, Afghan folk dancing, and food. For more information, go to duxburyrotary.com.

Bella English, of Milton, can be reached at english@globe.com.
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Suicide attacker exploded car near the NATO troops in S. Afghanistan 
www.chinaview.cn  2007-12-02 17:01:47
KABUL, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- A suicide attacker exploded his car close to a convoy of NATO troops Sunday morning in southern Afghan province of Kandahar, killing only himself, local police said.

Sayed Aqa Saqib, the provincial police chief, told Xinhua that the suicide attack occurred at local time 9:30 am (GMT 5:00) in the Shah Wali Kot district which left no causalities of the NATO forces.

However, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, the purported Taliban spokesman, told Xinhua from an unknown place via phone that the suicide attacker, who is a famous Taliban commander named Mullah Faizulah, has successfully killed 12 NATO soldiers and destroyed two vehicles in the incident.

Some 55,000 foreign troops are being deployed in this country for keeping security and fighting militants.

Conflicts and Taliban-related violence have claimed the lives of more than 5,800 people, mostly insurgents, over the past 11 months, according to officials of the war-torn Afghanistan.
Editor: Wang Yan 
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Renewed calls over military funding
Sunday December 2, 2007 10:38 AM Guardian Unlimited, UK
Prime Minister Gordon Brown faced renewed calls from a former defence chief to address the "huge imbalance" between military funding and fighting commitments.

Admiral Lord Boyce said Mr Brown should recognise that the armed forces are over-committed and that he should take steps to ensure they are properly resourced.

Lord Boyce was one of five former chiefs of defence staff who complained last month that the decision to make Des Browne Scotland Secretary as well as Defence Secretary was an "insult" to forces.

Speaking to the Kent on Sunday newspaper, Lord Boyce returned to the warpath and said the decision not to have a full-time Defence Secretary was viewed by troops as showing a "complete lack of judgment".

"That's felt very strongly in particular by the people who are fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.

"Their lives are in danger, they see some of their friends being killed or maimed and they look to the top and they see a person who's only part-time."

On funding, Lord Boyce said: "The defence slice of the country's budget has got smaller over the last years. As that's gone down, our levels of activity have gone up and there's clearly a huge imbalance."

Lord Boyce added: "What (Mr Brown) needs to do is recognise the fact that at the moment the forces are over-committed and he needs to make sure they're properly resourced. Somehow that message has got to be drilled in."

And he voiced concern that the war in Afghanistan would be lost unless other European countries sent reinforcements to support Britain's soldiers.

"Some of the big countries in Nato are failing to step up to the line and provide troops in the more dangerous areas, which I find to be extraordinary and actually somewhat unacceptable. The campaign will only be winnable providing there is commitment from the alliance to put sufficient manpower in."
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Hekmatyar calls for interim govt
Bureau Report Dawn (Pakistan)
PESHAWAR, Dec 1: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the chief of his own faction of Hizb-i-Islami, has called for the formation of a neutral caretaker government to hold elections in Afghanistan. The former Afghan prime minister has also proposed withdrawal of foreign forces in phases.

A statement issued by a close associate of Hekmatyar in Peshawar on Saturday welcomed the Japanese government’s decision to withdraw troops and asked Nato member states to follow suit.

The statement said in the first phase, foreign troops should leave major cities and shift to the garrisons. In the second phase, they should leave the country.

Mr Hekmatyar, who is wanted by the US government, said that his faction was ready for cooperation with other parties to initiate political process and restore peace to the country. He said that after the formation of the caretaker government, an independent commission should be constituted to hold free and fair elections.

“The Hizb-i-Islami can maintain peace in several provinces, including Noristan, Baghlan, Zabul, Kandoz etc.” The statement said if some groups insisted on the presence of foreign troops after the withdrawal of Nato, some Muslim countries’ troops could be deployed for a limited period.
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Canadian soldier in Afghanistan making a name for himself as a wood artist
Sat Dec 1, 3:52 PM By Bill Graveland, The Canadian Press
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - What started as a hobby several years ago has catapulted a reluctant Canadian soldier into the spotlight as a wood artist.

Sgt. Major Gary Crosby has a secret life at Kandahar Air Field.

"My friends call me Bing," said the 27-year member of the Canadian Forces who now calls Meaford, Ont. home when he is not serving in Afghanistan.

His secret life involves intricate wood carvings that have caught the eye of members of the coalition forces here in Afghanistan.

His most visible work is a huge totem pole sitting in the Canadian compound at the airfield. The eagle at the top symbolizes the flights that brought soldiers to Kandahar. A native Canadian is a symbol of the fighting spirit and the third character is a Viking in tribute to Canada's European allies serving in the mission in Afghanistan.

But Crosby is doing his best to avoid the spotlight and works his magic with a mallet and chisels away from the curious eyes of his co-workers.

"I try and keep a low profile. I do it as a hobby," said Crosby standing in front of his latest work in the RC (Regional Command)-South Compound late in the afternoon.

"I go out about 5:30 in the morning until 6:30 or quarter to seven and then sometimes at night in the dark with the lights so no one gets to see me do it."

His first major effort involved a carving for a warehouse in Kabul in 2002, his second was at the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) headquarters in 2003 and his last was the totem here at Kandahar Air Field earlier this year.

What started as a hobby four years ago after he viewed some wood carvings while on a mission to Africa has become almost a second job for the veteran soldier.

He credits his wife - sort of - for challenging him to become proficient at his craft.

"My wife started me in this. I went down in my basement and carved a rainbow trout for my fly-tying desk and brought it up and showed it to her and she laughed and said it looked like a piece of pipe with fins," he chuckled. "So like a typical man I went to the basement and did it all over again and three times after that I finally got it right. I realized it was actually quite easy to do."

Each one of the major carvings takes between 130 and 140 hours to do and is done totally with handtools, including a mallet and chisels. For the finer work he uses razor sharp Japanese and Chinese carving tools.

Crosby was just putting the finishing touches on a sign for Camp Roberts which will be taken back to England by British soldiers.

"It was done for a fallen comrade from another country and will be taken back to a camp in the U.K.," he said.

A four-metre long piece of pine is ready to be tackled for Crosby's next totem.

"This one here that is going to be done will be in the boardwalk probably and it's going to be multi-national so it's going to have the flags of all the countries that are serving and soldiers," Crosby said. "It will have a weapon on the bottom, the Canadian flag in the middle and also a helmet on it symbolizing soldiers lost."

"The last thing will be a weapon and it will be one of ours of course ...a C-7."
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Rice to discuss Afghanistan with NATO FMs
NEW YORK, Nov 30 (Pajhwok Afghan News): US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will discuss the current situation in Afghanistan with her counterparts at a December 7 meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers in Brussels.

The meeting assumes significance not only in the context of a recent increase in suicide attacks in Afghanistan, but also due to Thursdays call from Osama bin Laden urging Europeans to quit the war-hit country and cease military cooperation with the US.

Leading the war against terror in Afghanistan, the American administration has been urging key NATO partners with troops in Afghanistan to remove the restrictions placed on their soldiers - a great impediment to their performance.

I think our NATO allies understand quite clearly what is at stake in Afghanistan as well as elsewhere around the world in fighting the war on terror, State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said in Washington.

Afghanistan has made great strides since the era of the Taliban. Just one example is that there are tens of thousands of young Afghan children who are alive today just because of the kind of medical care and vaccination that has been provided by the international community. They wouldn't have been alive today otherwise. But it's going to require a lot more work, he added.

Observing that Afghanistan started from a pretty low place in terms of development, the State Department spokesman said a lot had been done and a lot more work needed to be done.

It is going to require a sustained commitment over a period of time. And we have seen that kind of commitment from our European allies. We've seen that -- we certainly have seen that commitment from the United States as well as others around the globe. And I've seen no diminution in that level of commitment, McCormack said.

Referring to the December 7 Brussels meeting, he said Rice would be discussing the situation prevailing in Afghanistan with her NATO allies.
Lalit K Jha
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