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February 25, 2007 


Afghans See Decline Since '05
Violence, Corruption, U.S. Role Add to Unease, Report Says
By Griff Witte Washington Post Saturday, February 24, 2007; A11
Conditions in Afghanistan have deteriorated markedly since 2005, with rising violence, government corruption and misguided U.S. efforts contributing to growing unease among the population, according to a report released yesterday based in part on 1,000 interviews with ordinary Afghans.

Although there were bright spots -- a better overall economy and more rights for women -- the report's authors found diminishing security as the Taliban steps up its attacks, a discredited justice system and a severe lack of basic services such as electricity. The report, produced by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies and funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, also found that Afghans tend to be more negative in their outlook than official statistics or media accounts would suggest.

"Public fear and frustration are on the rise in Afghanistan. As a result, Afghans are beginning to disengage from national governing processes and lose confidence in their leadership," according to the report. "Dramatic changes are required in the coming weeks, or 2007 will become the breaking point."

That statement echoed remarks made earlier this month by the departing U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, who told a congressional panel that "a point could be reached at which the government of Afghanistan becomes irrelevant to its people, and the goal of establishing a democratic, moderate, self-sustaining state could be lost forever."

A year ago, U.S. officials were speaking much more optimistically about Afghanistan. But an especially violent summer, fed by an increasingly aggressive insurgency, has convinced many policymakers that Afghanistan is at a precarious moment more than five years after a U.S.-led military campaign knocked the Taliban from power. Last week, President Bush pledged $11.8 billion in aid for Afghanistan over the next two years and said U.S. forces would be increased by 3,200 to 27,000, the highest level of the war.

Among the report's recommendations are to shift the focus away from eradicating poppy fields and toward interdiction, to give local communities more control over aid money, and to abandon major military sweeps that inflict damage on civilians in favor of rapid-response forces that can protect Afghans in emergencies. "NATO and the United States' 'big army' military operations and emphasis on foot soldier 'kills' are doing more damage than good," the report said.

Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a Pentagon spokesman, said he could not comment on the report's recommendations because he had not seen them, but he said part of the reason the United States is committing more troops to Afghanistan is to improve response times. Britain said yesterday it would also be sending additional troops.
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Foreign devils in the Iranian mountains
By M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times Online (Hong Kong) February 24, 2007
In a rare public criticism of Pakistan, the Tehran Times commented last week that an exclusive Islamabad-Washington nexus is at work manipulating the Afghan situation. The daily, which reflects official Iranian thinking, spelled out something that others perhaps knew already but were afraid to talk about publicly.

All the same, the commentary gave a candid Iranian insight into the state of play in Afghanistan. It estimated that without a comprehensive rethink of strategy aimed at addressing the problems of weak political institutions, misgovernance, corruption, warlordism, tardy reconstruction, drug trafficking and attendant mafia, and excesses by the coalition forces, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) couldn't possibly hope to get anywhere near on top of the crisis in Afghanistan.

The commentary pointed a finger at Pakistan's training the Taliban and providing them with "logistical and political support". It highlighted that US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who visited Islamabad recently, chose to sidestep the issue and instead bonded with President General Pervez Musharraf. This is because Washington's priority - that the "new cold war" objective of NATO is to establish a long-term presence in the region - can be realized only with Musharraf's cooperation.

The Iranian outburst was, conceivably, prompted by the spurt of trans-border terrorism inside Iran's Sistan-Balochistan province, which borders Pakistan. Ten days ago, a militant group called Jundallah killed 11 members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards in an attack in the city center of Zahedan. Iranian state media reported that the attack was part of US plans to provoke ethnic and religious violence in Iran. Balochs are Sunnis numbering about 1.5 million out of Iran's 70 million predominantly Shi'ite population.

Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi alleged that in the recent past, US intelligence operatives in Afghanistan had been meeting and coordinating with Iranian militants, apart from encouraging the smuggling of drugs into Iran from Afghanistan. He said the US operatives were working to create Shi'ite-Sunni strife within Iran.

American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has copiously written about recent US covert operations inside Iran. With reference to the incidents in Zahedan, Stratfor, a think-tank with close connections to the US military and security establishment, commented that the Jundallah militants are receiving a "boost" from Western intelligence agencies. Stratfor said, "The US-Iranian standoff has reached a high level of intensity ... a covert war [is] being played out ... the United States has likely ramped up support for Iran's oppressed minorities in an attempt to push the Iranian regime toward a negotiated settlement over Iraq."

Iran is fast joining ranks with India and Afghanistan as a victim of trans-border violence perpetrated by irredentist elements crossing over from Pakistan. Tehran, too, will probably face an existential dilemma as to whether or not such acts of terrorism are taking place with the knowledge of Musharraf and, more importantly, whether or not Musharraf is capable of doing anything about the situation.

Iran, perhaps, is somewhat better placed than India or Afghanistan to resolve this dilemma, since it is the US (and not Pakistan) that is sponsoring the trans-border terrorism. And what could Musharraf do about US activities on Pakistani soil even if he wanted to? The Iranians seem to have sized up Musharraf's predicament.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tehran, while announcing last Sunday that the Pakistani ambassador to Iran was being summoned to receive a demarche over the Zahedan incident, also qualified that it was Iran's belief that the Pakistani government as such couldn't be party to the creation of such "insecurities" on the Pakistan-Iran border region.

Indeed, Tehran is used to the US stratagem. Sponsoring terrorist activities inside Iran has been a consistent feature of US regional policy over the past quarter-century. Tehran seems to have anticipated the current wave. Last May, in a nationwide television address, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad accused Iran's "enemies" of stoking the fires of ethnic tensions within Iran. He vowed that the Iranian nation would "destroy the enemy plots".

A Washington conference last year brought together representatives of Iranian Kurdish, Balochi, Ahvazi, Turkmen and Azeri organizations with the aim of forming a united front against the Tehran regime. An influential US think-tank, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), went a step further and prepared a report from the neo-conservative perspective on what a Yugoslavia-like federated Iran would look like.

John Bradley, an author on the Persian Gulf, has written in the current issue of The Washington Quarterly magazine that Balochistan province is "particularly crucial for Iran's national security as it borders Sunni Pakistan and US-occupied Afghanistan ... In fact, the Sunni Balochi resistance could prove valuable to Western intelligence agencies with an interest in destabilizing the hardline regime in Tehran."

Bradley added, "The United States maintained close contacts with the Balochis till 2001, at which point it withdrew support when Tehran promised to repatriate any US airmen who had to land in Iran as a result of damage sustained in combat operations in Afghanistan. These contacts could be revived to sow turmoil in Iran's southeastern province and work against the ruling regime."

Bradley revealed that US policymakers are taking a great interest lately in Iran's internal ethnic politics, "focusing on their possible impact on the Iranian regime's long-term stability as well as impact on its short-term domestic and foreign policy choices". He specifically cited a classified research project sponsored by the US Department of Defense that is examining the depth and nature of ethnic grievances in Iran's plural society.

"The Pentagon is especially interested in whether Iran is prone to a violent fragmentation along the same kinds of faultlines that are splitting Iraq and that helped to tear apart the Soviet Union with the collapse of communism," Bradley wrote.

The US administration asked Congress for US$75 million last year for promoting "democratic change" within Iran. But the main drawback for US policy is that with the possible exception of the Kurds, none of Iran's ethnic minorities is seeking to secede from the Iranian state. Also, it is not a situation where ethnic minorities are subjected to persecution or discrimination in Iran. The majority Persian community and ethnic minorities alike feel the alienation endemic to the problem of poverty, economic deprivation, misgovernance, corruption and lawlessness.

Indeed, the US policy to light the fire of ethnic and sectarian strife could well end up creating an "arc of instability" stretching from Iraq to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Even right-wing Iranian exile Amir Taheri, who is usually a strong backer of the Bush administration's interventionist policy in the Middle East, has warned that although fanning the flames of ethnic unrest and resentment is not difficult and that a Yugoslavia-like breakup scenario might hasten the demise of the Iranian regime, it could also "unleash much darker forces of nationalism and religious zealotry that could plunge the entire region into years, even decades, of bloody crisis".

The irony is that Afghanistan is being put to use as a launch pad by the US for sponsoring terrorism directed against Iran, when the raison d'etre of the US occupation of Afghanistan during the past five years has been for the stated purpose of fighting a "war on terrorism". Besides, Iranian cooperation at a practical level went a long way in facilitating the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Even Iran's detractors would admit that during the past five years, Tehran has followed a policy of good-neighborliness toward the Kabul government, no matter Washington's dominance over President Hamid Karzai. In fact, Iran figures as a major donor country contributing to Afghanistan's reconstruction.

From this perspective, US President George W Bush's speech at an AEI function on February 15 outlining his new Afghan strategy assumes great importance. The fact that Bush chose a citadel of neo-conservatism to unveil the "top-to-bottom review" of his new Afghan strategy was symbolic. In essence, Bush underlined the imperative of a long-term Western military presence in Afghanistan. There was a triumphalism in Bush's tone that he brought NATO into Afghanistan - as if that was a strategy by itself. He couldn't hide his glee that NATO had been brought by the scruff of its neck into the Hindu Kush - where it was going to slouch along the soft underbelly of Russia and China for the foreseeable future.

Bush summed up his sense of achievement: "Isn't it interesting that NATO is now in Afghanistan? I suspect 20 years ago if a president stood in front of the AEI and said, 'I'll make a prediction to you that NATO will be a force for freedom and peace outside of Europe,' you probably never would have invited the person back. Today, NATO is in Afghanistan."

In his entire speech, Bush didn't refer even once to the role of the United Nations in Afghanistan. Also, Bush's speech completely sidestepped the urgent need to pressure Pakistan to clamp down on the Taliban. Actually, Bush ended up praising Musharraf's "frontier strategy" in the tribal agencies. To be sure, the Tehran Times was right in concluding that Washington, with the "cooperation of regional powers like Pakistan", is realizing the long-term NATO military presence in Afghanistan.

Soon after Bush spoke at the AEI, spin-doctors in Washington began spreading word in select media that al-Qaeda was back in business in the Pakistani tribal areas. Self-styled counter-terrorism officials in Washington who refused to be named will now have us believe that the al-Qaeda "leadership command and control is robust" and "the chain of command has been re-established".

As the New York Times put it, "Until recently, the Bush administration had described Osama bin Laden and [Ayman] al-Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of al-Qaeda." But all of a sudden the picture has changed. The daily said, "The United States has identified several new al-Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan [emphasis added].

"US analysts said recent intelligence showed that the compounds functioned under a loose command structure and were operated by groups of Arab, Pakistani and Afghan militants, allied with al-Qaeda."

In other words, the "war on terror" in Afghanistan has come full circle. A few things stand out. First, as Bush pithily summed up, Musharraf "is an ally in this war on terror and it's in our interest to support him in fighting the extremists". The restoration of democracy in Pakistan will have to wait. Second, the US and NATO military occupation of Afghanistan is for the long haul. The specter of al-Qaeda's resurgence is sufficient to justify it. Third, the US military presence in the Central Asian region will also continue for the foreseeable future, no matter what Russia or China feels about it.

Fourth, regional powers must appreciate that it is the United States that stands between them and the deluge of Islamic extremism. They must therefore cooperate with the US (and NATO) and trust Washington to represent their best interests in the devilishly obscure Pakistani tribal areas. Finally, this is a long-term ideological struggle - freedom and democracy versus extremism and obscurantism. And wherever there is "democracy deficit" - be it oil-rich Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan - the US has a right to intervene.

Meanwhile, what does Tehran do about the Zahedan incident? Does it retaliate against NATO in Afghanistan? Should it hold Musharraf accountable for the covert US operations staged from Pakistani soil? In chess, this is called a classic zugzwang - having to choose between two bad options.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
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Report: Britain faces worst terror threat since Sept. 11
The Associated Press February 24, 2007
LONDON: The threat of homegrown terrorists attacking Britain is greater now than any time since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, a British Sunday newspaper reported, citing a leaked intelligence document.

More than 2,000 British-based Islamic terrorists are believed to be plotting attacks, according to a government threat assessment prepared this month, which The Sunday Telegraph said it had seen.

"The scale of al-Qaida's ambitions towards attacking the U.K. and the number of U.K. extremists prepared to participate in attacks are even greater than we previously judged," the newspaper quoted the document as saying.

The newspaper said the document was being circulated between the Home Office, defense ministry, M15 intelligence agency and Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch.

The Home Office declined to comment on the report, but said in a statement that security arrangements are under constant review.

Today in Europe
 Prodi to seek vote of confidence Britain open to U.S. antimissile protection  Putin keeps them guessing on his successor"As (MI5 Director-General) Eliza Manningham-Buller has stated publicly, the threat of terrorism in the U.K. is very real and includes the intent to kill people and damage our economy," the statement said.

Manningham-Buller said in November that 1,600 people were suspected of involvement in terrorist plots against British targets.

Four suicide bombers killed 52 commuters in July 2005 transit attacks in London and security officials say they have foiled at least six other plots. Officials expect the number of plots to increase this year, newspaper said.

The report also said Afghanistan is expected to increasingly become a magnet for Islamic extremists seeking to fight Western military forces.

NATO is struggling to persuade its members to send more troops to southern Afghanistan where the alliance is fighting a growing Taliban insurgency that left 4,000 dead last year.

"With violence in Afghanistan intensifying, and therefore receiving greater media attention, the country may well become more attractive as a venue for foreigners wishing to fulfill their Jihad ambitions," the newspaper quoted the report as saying.
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Fort Riley engineer unit deploying to Afghanistan
Associated Press Sun, Feb. 25, 2007
FORT RILEY - Members of an Army engineering unit are headed for Afghanistan, where they will clear roads -- and build more.

Deployment ceremonies were Friday for the 70th Engineer Battalion, the third unit to depart from Fort Riley this month. About half of the battalion's more than 450 soldiers will be going overseas for the first time.

The battalion returned about a year ago from a deployment to Iraq, its second there since 2003.

In Afghanistan, the unit will also take part in building projects.

Capt. Kimberly Allen was among those who deployed to Iraq the last time. Afghanistan presents a different set of challenges, she said.

"There are not as many roads in Afghanistan," Allen said. "So we're excited and looking forward to it."

Roads must be cleared of explosives and other obstacles so military units can use them.

About 6,000 soldiers are currently deployed to international missions from Fort Riley. About 4,000 of them left this month. Besides the engineering battalion, units with the 4th Brigade Combat Team and the 977th Military Police Company left earlier this month.

Friday's deployment, like the others, was marked by good-byes for family members.

"My oldest daughter has a much better time than the other two," said Lt. Andrew Lowery, a father of three. "I can't say she likes it, but she understands it."

His wife, Susan, leads the family readiness group -- or FRG -- for the battalion's Charlie Company.

"I take myself and wrap myself up in the FRG and helping the other wives as well," she said. "We bond together."

Spc. Christopher Davis left several reminders behind for his two daughters, said his wife, Desiree -- including a daily message for the older one, 3-year-old Kayla.

"He wrote little sayings and put them in a jar so every day she can pull one out and read something from Dad in his handwriting," Desiree Davis said. "We also had him sit down in front of a camera and read books so the kids can hear his voice."
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Turkey did it. Can Afghanistan?
Analysis | Experts debate whether the Afghan poppy problem could be solved by following Ankara's strategy of diverting heroin production into legal medical products, writes Lynda Hurst
Feb 25, 2007 04:30 AM Toronto Star, Canada
Back in the 1960s, Marseilles was the conduit, but Turkey was the originating source of almost all the illegal heroin flowing into the West.

Today, it's Afghanistan. Ongoing attempts by the United States to obliterate the poppy fields of that embattled land have been a fiasco. Afghan fields now supply the opium for 92 per cent of the global heroin trade.

And Turkey? It's still growing opium poppies and selling the product – but not to the black market. It earns $60 million (all figures U.S.) a year exporting the raw materials that are turned into medical morphine and codeine.

The country's shift in 1974 from an out-of-control supplier of criminal narcotics into a licensed system of legal farming is a clear model for what could be done in Afghanistan. Or so a growing number of analysts are controversially arguing.

Chief among them is the Senlis Council, an international policy think-tank with offices in London, Paris, Kabul and, as of this month, Ottawa.

It says that legitimizing the poppy crop is the only feasible solution to Afghanistan's drug crisis. Licensing not only would cut out the drug-lord insurgents, but also correct the shortfall in painkilling medicines available to the developing world.

Faced last month with an opiates shortage in the United Kingdom, the British Medical Association surprised many by calling for an investigation into the idea: "We should be looking at this and saying how can we convert it (opium) from being an illicit crop to a legal crop that is medicinally useful?"

Even Liberal deputy leader Michael Ignatieff got in on the act. Last week, he told a military audience in Ottawa that he had "stress-tested" the Senlis proposal and thinks Canada should spearhead an international effort to license Afghan poppy fields.

Washington, however, remains implacably opposed, saying complete eradication, no matter how long it takes, is the only acceptable outcome.

But then, the U.S. once said that about Turkey.

It was Richard Nixon, of all people, who set the wheels in motion. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. had a major drug problem with its troops in Vietnam and a growing one at home as well. In 1968, Nixon was elected president in part because of his vow to wage a "war on drugs," heroin in particular.

Courtesy of orbiting satellites, the White House knew exactly where poppy fields were located around the world. When it identified Turkey as the source of 80 per cent of the illegal heroin flooding into the U.S., Nixon made eradication of those fields a top priority.

In 1969, Washington approached the Turkish government, demanding it cease growing the opium poppy then and in the future and offering an array of incentives, from buying up that year's entire harvest and compensating farmers to various foreign aid programs.

No dice.

In Turkey, opium poppies were a historically entrenched crop. On the plains of Anatolia, where towns have names like Afyon (which translates to "opium"), they were a source of seed, fodder, fuel – and of cash from drug traffickers.

Poppy farmers' interests were crucial for stability in a country with an 80 per cent rural population and more than 70,000 poppy-farming families. Turkey judged that the total eradication demanded by the Americans was both technically and socially undoable.

Turkish prime minister Suleyman Demirel told the U.S. embassy in Ankara it was "impossible to go to farmers and ask them to plow under their crops. We cannot control it. The poppies will just appear illegally."

The two governments were deadlocked. Washington upped the ante, threatening to halt an existing $60 million in foreign aid, even to impose economic and military sanctions. Again, it offered financial compensation for farmers in return for the crops' destruction.

Again Demirel refused, saying eradication would "bring down the government." Instead, he started to explore a poppy-licensing system for producing opium-based medicines.

In 1971, a military government took office in Ankara and the U.S. stepped up demands for poppy-growing to be criminalized. The new prime minister, Nihat Erim, echoing his predecessor's words, said the political fallout "might bring about the fall of my government."

That summer, Erim gave in to the pressure, agreeing to ban all poppy cultivation as of June 1972. Washington's reward was $35 million over three years. It also promised to use its clout at the World Bank and other international organizations to make loans and a variety of assistance available to Turkey.

The ban was hugely unpopular, however, and short-lived.

In 1974, when the Nixon administration was focused on the Watergate scandal, yet another new Turkish prime minister overturned the ban. He announced that, subject to United Nations' approval, licensed growing for medical uses would henceforth be permitted, whether the U.S. liked it or not.

Washington didn't but reluctantly agreed.

The UN helped Turkey build a poppy-processing factory and, over the next 15 years, would provide $8 million to set up strict monitoring and diversion controls.

Five years later, it asked countries that manufactured opium-based medicines to buy the raw materials from countries given "traditional producer" status. Among them were Turkey, India and Afghanistan.

In 1981, the U.S. decided to give it "special protected market status," agreeing to buy at least 80 per cent of its needs from Turkey (and later India), and to help support the Turkish industry – both of which it continues to do.

Today, 600,000 Turks work in the highly regulated system and diversion into the illegal market is negligible. Unlike India, where diversion is a serious problem, Turkey is considered a success story.

And it happened because "all parties understood that total eradication was impractical," says the Senlis Council, an international development and counter-narcotics think-tank. "Only pragmatic solutions would resolve Turkey's opium crisis."

The council argues that the same is true for Afghanistan, where opium production has hit record levels.

The UN says production rose 49 per cent to 6,000 tonnes last year, enough to make 600 tonnes of heroin. In 2002, there were 74,000 hectares under poppy cultivation; today there are 400,000 hectares. More than 2 million Afghans are economically dependent on the crop.

"Afghanistan has the same history and same problems that Turkey had," says Almas Zakhilwal, a Senlis spokesperson in Ottawa. "Turkey knew that forced eradication would lead to worse problems, to corruption and instability."

Critics say the two situations are not the same. Turkey was able to force farmers to sell their crop to legal buyers.

In Afghanistan, the lawless culture in the 11 provinces where opium cultivation is rife means farmers will sell to the highest bidder. And traffickers will always pay more, because they can still make a profit.

In a rebuttal last week to the Senlis proposals, the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics said licensing sounds good on the surface but doesn't withstand scrutiny.

The 12 countries that currently produce legal opium, the bureau said, all have strict controls and sophisticated law enforcement, neither of which exists in Afghanistan. "Without safeguards, licit and illicit opium would be indistinguishable. Opium really destined for the black market would be produced under the pretense of a legal system."

Advocates counter that some diversion into the illegal trade is better than 100 per cent diversion.

The U.S. bureau also disputes Senlis' claims that the world's legal opiate supply is inadequate. Although leery of oversupply, the International Narcotics Control Board, which regulates the legal trade, admits that seven or eight countries account for 79 per cent of the global consumption of morphine, while developing countries, with 80 per cent of the world's population, account for only 6 per cent.

"Shortages in the developing world are unfortunate," the U.S. bureau says, "but the issue is not supply. It is a lack of proper economies and systems of distribution."

World demand for opium-based drugs, it insists, is being fully met.

"Fully met for them," Zakhilwal says dryly of the Americans.

Ironically, when the idea of legal cultivation in Afghanistan first surfaced at a 2004 meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, it was Turkey and India that vehemently objected. They warned that if they lost their guaranteed market share, the chances of their harvest – or more of it, in India's case – ending up on the black market would rise.

There is no simple solution to the situation, "no shortcut or silver bullet," the U. S. narcotics bureau said last week.

On that, at least, all sides agree.
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World Bank provides 25 mln U.S. dollars to Afghanistan
People's Daily Online, China
The World Bank (WB) has approved a grant of 25 million U.S. dollars to Afghanistan, a state-run newspaper reported Sunday.

The grant will be used in improving infrastructure facilities, encouraging private sector, provision of land services and facilities like water and communications, Daily Anis writes.

A strong private sector would provide the foundation for economic growth, long-term prosperity and economic sustainability, daily Anis quoted a statement of the Washington-based lending agency as saying.

The World Bank has contributed 1.6 billion U.S. dollars with major part of it as soft loan to the post-Taliban Afghanistan over the past five years.
Source: Xinhua
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Seminar on mother tongue as medium of learning
KABUL, Feb 23 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Speakers at a seminar, organised in connection with the UNESCO's International Mother Language Day here on Friday, stressed the need for implementation of mother tongue as medium of learning. 

Addressing the seminar, organised by the Hindara Media and Culture Foundation, writer and expert Dr Mohammad Ibrahim Shinwari said provision of education to children in their mother tongue was their right.

It was unfortunate that little had been done in using mother tongue as medium of instructions, said Shinwari, who believed adoption of alien language after seven years usually faced children with problems.

Mohammad Seddiq Patman, Deputy Education Minister, told the seminar that the government was going to launch efforts to provide education to children in their mother tongue next (Afghan) year (commencing on March 21).

Patman said he was ready to stage peaceful protest demonstrations and hunger strikes if the demand regarding mother tongue as medium of instructions was not entertained.

He said the issue regarding mother tongue as medium of instructions had been resolved by the Constitution of the country and there was no question left.

He said the government and senior officials of the Education Ministry needed help from the people and schoolteachers to introduce teaching in mother tongue.

Under the plan, Patman said the government would start teaching in mother tongue in schools in Kabul first and the programme would be extended to other provinces, where separate schools would be established for this purpose. 

Participants of the seminar, through a joint declaration, demanded of the government to start education in mother languages.

A separate resolution, presented by Professor Nasim Gul Totakhail, said non-implementation of mother tongue as medium of instruction in schools was against the international standards.
Zubair Babakarkhail
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AEWG meeting to focus on strategic partnership
NEW YORK, Feb 23 (Pajhwok Afghan News): The fifth meeting of the Afghanistan Economic Working Group in Washington, among other things, will focus on preparation for the upcoming US-Afghan Strategic Partnership talks in Kabul from economic and development point of view.

The meeting scheduled for first week of March, would be attended by top Afghan officials and those from the US government, including Department of Commerce, State Department and White House.

Established last year, with the objective of brining in a sense of co-ordination in Washington DC between the Afghan and US governments in developing policies and programmes related to economic development of Afghanistan, the meeting is held normally every month.

Khaleda Atta, Commercial Attache at the Afghan Embassy, told Pajhwok Afghan News the crucial meeting of the group also known as AEWG would also discuss the outcomes of the US-Afghan Partnership working group meeting on "Prosperity" pillar of the agreement that concluded in Kabul early this week.

US-Afghan Strategic Partnership of May 2005 has three pillars - democracy and governance, security and prosperity.

Atta said: "The meeting would also discuss the upcoming USGS releases of feasibility studies on Afghanistan's natural resources to be held in conjunction in Washington."
Lalit K. Jha
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Female Afghan Burqa Band Breaks Barriers
Salem-News.com
“You give me all your love, you give me all your kisses, and then you touch my burqa, and don’t know who it is...” Blue Burqa Band

(KABUL, Afghanistan) - Music was banned in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. Lingering attitudes from that era keep life dangerous for women there, but some are rising out of silence with a song that makes fun of the burqa, a garment worn by women in Afghanistan that covers all of their body and face.

An all-girl underground rock band from Afghanistan gaining popularity in Europe is fast becoming known for a song called Blue Burqa.

The Burqa Band has even performed at a concert in Germany, but the members remain totally unknown, and exposure could have the harshest consequences for their brazen attempt to raise awareness about the burqa.

VideoOne article referred to the female trio as three blue ghosts. The video shows them in a makeshift studio in Kabul, and on the streets where all women appear virtually the same.

The lyrics poke fun at the oppressive society that still holds the upper hand in Afghanistan.

“You give me all your love, you give me all your kisses, and then you touch my burqa, and don’t know who it is...”

The lead singer's distinct accent is interesting, and authentic. It belongs to a 25-year old interpreter who again, remains anonymous for her own safety. Singing with the other two girls who comprise the group, their sound is like some remote cousin to an 80's Bananarama song.

The video shows women on the streets of Kabul. It is an area that I recently visited, and it is refreshing to see women there reaching out through this song and video to a worldwide audience.
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