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November 26, 2007 

Bombs kills 8 in Afghanistan
By RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press Writer
KABUL, Afghanistan - A roadside bomb struck an Afghan army vehicle in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, killing four soldiers and wounding two others, an official said. Four civilians were killed in another blast near the capital.

The soldiers were attacked with a remotely controlled bomb in Paktia province as they traveled toward their base, said Din Mohammad Darwish, the spokesman for the provincial governor.

Two of the wounded soldiers were in critical condition, he said.

Also Monday, a blast ripped through a civilian car south of the capital of Kabul, killing four civilians, police said.

The explosion occurred in the Musayi district of Kabul province, where a bomb had been freshly planted in the muddy, unpaved road, regional police commander Gen. Zalmai Oryakhail said.

Three men were killed in the blast and a fourth died en route to the hospital, he said.

Oryakhail said it was not clear why the men were targeted or if the bomb was detonated by a timer, remote control or the impact of the car.

Militants often plant roadside bombs, usually targeting Afghan or international security forces, though there are also many civilian casualties in such attacks.

More than 6,000 people — a record number — have died this year in insurgency-related violence in Afghanistan, according to figures from Afghan and Western officials. Most of those killed are militants.
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US strategic goals in Afghanistan not met, says report
Sun Nov 25, 12:36 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House concluded in a recent secret report that the war effort in Afghanistan has not met strategic goals set this year, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

The newspaper, citing unnamed US officials, said the report was prepared earlier this month by the National Security Council.

Its main conclusion was that while individual military battles against the Taliban have been successful, other areas remain wanting, report said.

"One can point to a lot of indicators that are positive," The Post quoted a senior US intelligence official as saying.

"We go out there and achieve our objectives and kill bad guys."

But the extremists, he added, seem to have little trouble finding replacements, according to the paper.

While many foreigners, mostly Pakistani, join the Taliban, several officials said the main source of new recruits remain unhappy Afghans, The Post said.

"There doesn't seem to be a lot of progress being made ... I would think that from (the Taliban) standpoint, things are looking decent," the paper quoted the intelligence official as saying.
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British troops facing failure in Afghanistan because of cash crisis, warns ex-army chief
By OLINKA KOSTER  25th November 2007
British troops are facing "operational" defeat in Afghanistan because of years of government underfunding, a former head of the armed forces warned last night.

Unless more money is injected into the military, hundreds more soldiers could end up dead in battle, said General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank.

Gen Lord Guthrie, 69, who served as Chief of the Defence Staff from 1997 to 2001, said: "Operational and tactical failure in Afghanistan is now not impossible to believe.

"The Prime Minister could be presiding over damaging one of the really great institutions of our state. It is about to break if he is not careful.

"No one will want to join the armed forces and the operational consequence of this is a failure in Afghanistan.

"It could well mean that the Taliban actually win a battle and kill a lot of our soldiers."

The warning came as it was revealed that the Army has suffered an unprecedented exodus of more than 1,300 officers in the past six months - more than double the rate in the previous 12 months.

Sources also claimed that Defence Secretary Des Browne had asked the Prime Minister for an extra £1 billion for his military budget, but was turned down.

Gordon Brown is said to have replied: "Don't give me any more bad news about defence spending."

A Ministry of Defence spokesman denied that Mr Browne had asked for more money from the Prime Minister, adding: "Recruitment remains robust and we are taking action."

But the reports follow a damaging week for the Government in which five former chiefs of the defence staff, including Gen Lord Guthrie, made a blistering attack on the Prime Minister and his Defence Secretary, accusing them of failing the armed forces.

Another of the five, Admiral Lord Michael Boyce, agreed that the persistent underfunding was "bound to have operational consequences".

"You have people leaving because of low morale and no Army infantry battalion is fully manned," he told the Sunday Telegraph. "The unintended consequence of all this could be some kind of operational failure."

A White House report on the war in Afghanistan has warned that the coalition is failing to meet its strategic goals despite military successes by US, British and Nato forces fighting the Taliban.

Senior Washington officials fear that the string of local victories against Taliban insurgents is being gravely undermined by the weakness of President Hamid Karzai's Afghan government and failures to improve the economy or achieve serious progress in reconstructing the war-ravaged country.

The US National Security Council evaluation says the military successes against the Taliban will not on their own be enough to achieve the strategic aim of turning Afghanistan into a stable country.
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Afghanistan: Kabul facing "unregulated" urbanisation
KABUL, 26 November 2007 (IRIN) - Gul Ahmad and his eight-member family live in a two-room shack in slums up on a hill in the north of Kabul city.

Ahmad does not own a house. His monthly government salary is about US$60, half of which goes on rent. There is no electricity, drainage, tap water, school, clinic or other facility in the area.

Kabul is the victim of a "rapid, unregulated and unequal" urbanisation, according to Yusuf Pashtun, the minister of urban development, and Pietro Calogero, a PhD researcher on urban development at the University of California.

From an estimated 500,000 people in early 2001 Kabul's population has soared to over three million in 2007, according to the Afghan Central Statistics Office.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says over one million Afghan returnees from Pakistan and Iran have settled in Kabul. Tens of thousands of people have also flocked to the capital from across the country for various reasons, the Ministry of Urban Development said.

However, the rapid population growth has not kept pace with service delivery. Only two percent of Kabul residents have regular access to electricity, while over half of them lack access to sanitation, said Mohammad Yasin Hellal, an official at the Kabul Municipality offices.

Overstretched health services

Kabul's limited health services are also stretched and cannot meet the overwhelming demands of poor patients.

"The number of patients is three times beyond our capacity," said Nasreen Oriakhel, head of Kabul's Malalai maternity hospital. "This hospital was built for 150 patients, but now around 600 patients seek treatment every day."

Officials at the Ministry of Urban Development estimate that at least 180,000 babies are born every year in Kabul, one of the highest birth rates in Asia.

Unregulated new buildings

The unprecedented rush into Kabul has lead to a massive increase in the construction of all kinds of dwellings - mainly in illegal slums.

"Almost 70 percent of houses and commercial buildings have been built irregularly and in contradiction to the Kabul city master plan," Pashtun told IRIN. "The rapid urbanisation process in Kabul. has been utterly unregulated and in many cases is against our plans for urban development."

Pashtun said his ministry needed adequate funding, professional staff and at least 15 years to solve the crisis.

"Land mafia"

"Urbanisation in Kabul has strikingly been unequal. It has made a small fraction of rich and powerful richer, and the majority of the poor poorer," said Calogero.

Wealthy commanders, senior government officials and other influential individuals have widely grabbed, redistributed, sold and used public land in Kabul and in many other parts of the country for their personal interest, said Pashtun.

Pashtun believes there is a powerful "land mafia" in Kabul operating with impunity.

"The mafia brazenly grabs public and state-owned land and builds irregular houses and commercial centres or sells land to other brokers," Pashtun said. The mafia is very powerful and has links everywhere, he added.

Slums vulnerable to natural disasters

Mushrooming slums in and around Kabul not only lack basic services and infrastructure, they are also highly vulnerable to floods, earthquakes, avalanches and other natural disasters common in Afghanistan, experts say.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of irregular houses were damaged and over 130 people died in several provinces, including Kabul, in flooding and avalanches in 2007, Afghanistan's disaster management authority said.

Urban or rural development?

While the population of Kabul is estimated to surpass seven million by 2015, Afghan officials are still struggling to implement a master plan devised for Kabul in 1970 according to which no more than two million people can be housed in the capital.

In the past six years, the government of Afghanistan has channelled the bulk of international aid into rural development programmes as a strategy to improve services outside the capital and indirectly ease the flow of people into the capital.

However, the emphasis on funding rural development over and above urban development has deprived Kabul and other urban centres of adequate development resources, Calogero's study found.

"Afghanistan will not overcome its widening urbanisation challenges by rural development alone," said Calogero. "There should be more funding for urban development and building urban infrastructure because people will choose to live in urban areas."

Minister Pashtun agrees, but says his main challenge is "the lack of professional capacity in the government" to effectively plan and implement different aspects of urbanisation.
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Gen.: Training is key to war in Afghanistan
Alliance’s top commander asks NATO nations to deploy more teams
By Charlie Coon, Stars and Stripes Mideast edition, Monday, November 26, 2007
KABUL, Afghanistan — NATO’s leaders have for years asked member nations to ante up more troops, aircraft and other military assets for its war in Afghanistan.

But six years into the war against the Taliban and other insurgents, what are most needed now are trainers, according to the alliance’s top military commander.

There is no shortage of Afghans asking to become soldiers and police officers, said Gen. Bantz J. Craddock. But there is a lack of training teams to embed with raw Afghan recruits and help turn them into stand-alone forces.

“We (NATO force) are short maneuver battalions, we’re short intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, we’re short enablers, helicopters, lift,” Craddock said.

“But the best investment we can make right now is to train the Afghan national security forces to get a face out and to take over their own security requirements.”

Craddock and NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Sheffer and their entourages visited Afghanistan Wednesday through Friday.

There are about 47,000 foreign forces deployed to Afghanistan, including approximately 22,000 U.S. troops.

The Afghan National Army currently numbers about 41,000 troops, with a goal of 78,000, according to Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Bartelle, the senior noncommissioned officer for NATO’s Command Allied Operations.

Those forces, he said, vary in ability from raw to ready.

Training of the Afghan police forces, which would handle local law enforcement, is going more slowly, Bartelle said. Training both the army and police, he said, takes a special talent.

“It’s an acquired skill,” Bartelle said. “And not necessarily based on an individual’s proficiency in their (military specialty).

“It takes an ability to relay information clearly and concisely, so that the individual receiving it translates it into action.”

A training team can consist of 10 to 20 people, sometimes more, and its makeup is the same as a military unit: one commander, several junior officers, and a variety of senior and junior sergeants and other enlisted troops.

The trainers pair off with their Afghan counterparts and train them in tasks ranging from commanding a military unit to firing a rifle straight.

Good training teams are not readily available, Craddock said, even from the U.S. military, and especially not from units based in Europe. Trainer-candidates would typically be removed from their units and assembled into a team, then deployed to Afghanistan.

“Those type of leaders by and large are not available in U.S. forces in Europe, because U.S. forces in Europe are either deployed, preparing to deploy, or are returning from deployment and in their dwell (non-deployable) time,” Craddock said.

Craddock proposed a simple-sounding solution to lessen the shortage of trainers.

“We need 26 more teams between now and this time next year, and there are 26 (NATO) nations,” Craddock said. “If each nation would give one more … then we would have filled up the need and we would, I think, be able to generate greater Afghan (security) participation.”
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Fans rise early to watch Grey Cup in Kandahar
The Globe and Mail BILL GRAVELAND Canadian Press November 25, 2007
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan
It wouldn't be correct to say that there was a case of football fever making the rounds among Canada's troops in Afghanistan. It would be more accurate to call it a simple case of the Grey Cup sniffles.

A half dozen football fans stumbled out of bed and into Canada House, the recreational facility for troops at Kandahar Airfield at 3 a.m. local time Monday to watch the Saskatchewan Roughriders take on the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

Despite being 11,000 kilometres away from home soldiers like Master Corporal Sandy Sanduliak, 45, of Winnipeg, turned out to take part in a Canadian tradition.

"I'm really happy they made it to the final. I missed a lot of games since I came here but it means a lot being here this morning," he said as he sat in front of a giant plasma screen TV with bags of chips, a box of Tim Hortons donuts and non-alcoholic beer on the table.

"It's a taste of home. There's a lot of things going on over here and you don't get much but what you do get you really appreciate and stuff like this. It's good that Winnipeg is in it this year — it's made it even better."

Sanduliak and another native Winnipegger from the Lord Strathcona's Light Horse Regiment, Lieut. Jack Nguyen, 23, were worried about what would happen if Winnipeg were to lose.

"It would kill us because it's against the Riders and we've got a big thing going in our squadron - it's an anti-Rider movement," Nguyen laughed. "Our second in command is a huge Rider's fan and we can't let that happen."

Bets may have been made but disclosing them would "breach operational security".

Those that did turn out were a bit disappointed at the turnout but understand the problems.

"It is 3 in the morning and people do have jobs to do and their jobs are very important," noted Nguyen.

The provincial flag of Saskatchewan was hanging over the door entering Canada House but inside only Cynthia Wagner of Macklin, Sask., was cheering for the Riders.

"I know everybody back home was really excited and I had about three Facebook invites to Rider parties so I thought I would at least get up ridiculously early and come out and see," said Wagner, sporting a green jersey with the number six and who had painted 'S's on each cheek. Wagner is married to a soldier serving in Kandahar and works in a civilian agency. She said her husband, who is from New Brunswick, unfortunately doesn't understand Rider pride.

"I have 1989 etched in my brain. I remember watching them last time. It's our province's only professional team so it's a really big deal and it's completely commonplace for people drive six hours to go to a Rider's game," she explained. "It's just sort of a cultural phenomenon that just isn't shared in a lot of places."

Wagner came close to gaining the support of at least one of the soldiers in cheering for Saskatchewan. But in the end, Master Corporal Sean Korponay decided to cheer for the Bombers.

"My parents live in Winnipeg, my wife is from Saskatchewan and I was born in Red Deer. I guess I'll cheer for the Bombers," he finally decided.

For Korponay and Pte. Stephen Ostash, 28, of Winnipeg, the Grey Cup also marked a bit of a going away party. Both men are finishing their tours in Afghanistan and head home Wednesday.

"Every weekend when the games are on I wake up and watch them," said Ostash. "I'm just glad we're in one spot where we can watch this game and not be getting ready to move equipment or anything."
For Ostash, watching the Grey Cup was a reminder of home.

"Being from the Prairies and Winnipeg, especially after the Jets left, there's not exactly a lot to do on the Prairies," he said. "Football and the Grey Cup most of the time would get the family together. We'd sit and watch in the basement and so I'm just happy to watch the game."
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Italy to remain in Afghanistan, but Prodi says long-term strategy needed
The Associated Press Sunday, November 25, 2007
ROME: Premier Romano Prodi repeated Sunday that Italy will not withdraw troops from Afghanistan following the death of an Italian soldier — but said officials must reflect on a long-term political strategy for Italy's future presence there, reports said.

Prodi faced fresh calls from radical leftists in his coalition to withdraw Italy's 2,000-strong contingent following the death Saturday of Marshall Daniele Paladini. A suicide bomber targeting Italian soldiers building a bridge killed Paladini and six Afghans and wounded three other Italian soldiers.

"We're staying, but all the countries that remain need to reflect on the long-term strategy for the country," the Apcom news agency quoted Prodi as saying during a visit to Abu Dhabi.

"It's not a problem that started yesterday, but a problem that we've been working on for some time," he said. "Regardless, our solidarity with the mission is not up for discussion."

The three wounded soldiers returned to Italy on Sunday morning; Paladini's remains were expected later Sunday or Monday, news reports said.
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Legal education in Afghanistan
26 Nov 2007, 0000 hrs IST,Pragya Kaushika,TNN Times of India, India
Quadir Amiryar, advisor, higher education, government of Afghanistan, and a senior professor at a law college, was recently in India for a conference on legal education of SAARC countries. Amiryar speaks to Pragya Kaushika on the status of legal education in his country

With teachers from Afghanistan coming to India for training in legal education, do you think the level of education has improved?

I believe Afghanistan needs to improve a lot in terms of specialised education like legal education, which requires that professors at the law faculty must interact with their counterparts in other countries, especially democracies like India. As such, future lawyers should have a broader perspective while dealing with a sensitive country like Afghanistan.

Do you feel that the changes taking place in the legal education system are revolutionary?

I think the changes are evolutionary. For the first time in the history of Afghanistan, we managed to publish a law journal of the law faculty called, 'Journal of Law in Political Science.' The law is still in the process of becoming free from government. India is the greatest democracy and both educationists and students of Afghanistan have a lot to learn from this country. It is encouraging that the government in Afghanistan is not interfering in the higher education system.

How many law faculties does Afghanistan have at present?

Presently, there are five main law faculties in Afghanistan - Law faculty of Kabul, Law faculty of Mazar, Law faculty of Herat, Law faculty of Nangarhar and Law faculty of Al Biruni. Also, we are keen to collaborate with other universities across the world to raise the standard of legal education.

After witnessing 35 years of civil war, where do you see Afghanistan, as an educational hub today?

The situation was a major setback for the country. Either the people abandoned it or were forced to leave certain parts of it. Even educational institutions were destroyed. So now we are starting from scratch and need all the support from democratic countries in making Afghanistan a prosperous and a free country.

What is the status of the legal system in Afghanistan?

We have a law association to take care of the judiciary. When a law is to be passed in Afghanistan, it is drafted by advocates, submitted to the Congress and then goes to the President. When legislation approves it, the law executive implements it. In all, it still needs a lot of improvement and freedom.

Any proposals to make the judiciary more independent?

We will soon be forming our own Bar Association like India, whose members will be elected in a democratic way. The ministry of justice in collaboration with the International Bar Association along with faculties of law in the country, is working on its by-laws. Lawyers will be expected to sit for the bar examinations which has never happened in Afghanistan. The bar shall come into existence by February. 
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Karzai denounces Paghman terrorist act
KABUL, Nov 24 (Pajhwok Afghan News): President Hamid Karzai Saturday condemned the suicide attack in Paghman district, where 10 people including children were killed and 15 others wounded.

The president expressed deep condolences and profound grief over the death of civilians and students in the suicide attack. "Those who commit such wild attacks are scared of the prosperity and reconstruction of Afghanistan"

Karzai said in a statement mailed to Pajhwok Afghan News the people of Afghanistan wanted reconstruction of their country and such attacks could not suppress their ambitions.

He condoled with families of the victims and prayed for speedy recovery of the wounded.
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AWCC to charge customers on basis of seconds
KABUL, Nov 24 (Pajhwok Afghan News): The Afghan Wireless Communication Company (AWCC), a leading private telecom operator, Saturday said it would charge customers for services based on seconds.

Amin Ramin, executive director of AWCC, told a press conference here the cost of services would be calculated in terms of seconds. Previously, the company exacted a minimum one-minute cost (around five afghanis) for anything less than 60 seconds.

Ramin added the company, having made a $450 investment in Afghanistan, had 1.6 million customers and covered 250 cities in 31 provinces. The AWCC would soon launch operations in Ghor, Daikundi and Nuristan, he promised.

Areeba, Roshan and Etisalat are the other three private-sector companies providing mobile-phone services in the conflict-torn country, where telephone rates remain relatively high despite widespread poverty.
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Militant arms smuggling operations disrupted
KABUL, Nov 24 (Pajhwok Afghan News): US-led forces Saturday claimed arresting five suspected militants during an operation in the troubled southern province of Zabul.

The troops conducted on Friday a search of several compounds where it was indicated Taliban weapons facilitators were conducting arms smuggling operations in the Shah Joi district of the province.

In a statement mailed to Pajhwok Afghan News, the Coalition said its forces detained five individuals - two of them armed - during the course of the operation. The detainees were indicated to be linked with Taliban weapons smuggling operations, it added.

"The individuals will be questioned as to their involvement in weapons facilitation operations as well as other extremist activities," the Coalition said, explaining the weapons and ammunition were destroyed on-site to prevent further use by militants.

"Coalition forces are continuing to disrupt the Taliban's supply of weapons in Afghanistan," said Maj. Chris Belcher, Combined Joint Task Force 82 spokesman. "We are eroding the Taliban's resources and their ability to bring harm on the Afghan people."
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