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October 14, 2007 

US military to investigate claims Koran burnt in Afghanistan
ASADABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) - The US military said it would investigate claims that its soldiers had burnt a copy of the Koran in Afghanistan, as angry locals demanded action and threatened retaliation.

Allegations that troops tore up and burnt the Muslim holy book during a raid in the eastern province of Kunar on Saturday led several hundred villagers to demonstrate the same day, blocking a main road for hours.

Locals repeated the charges at a heated meeting Sunday in the provincial capital Asadabad of representatives of the US military, Afghan officials and more than a dozen men from the area near the raid site in Narang district.

"You have desecrated our religion," resident Azim Khan told the US delegation.

"If the perpetrators do not apologise to Afghans and to all the Muslims of the world, and if they are not brought to justice and punished for what they have done, we will stand against you, you will see an uprising," he said.

US Captain Jason Coughenour said the allegations would be treated seriously.

"We respect your religion," he said. "We will launch an investigation and find out who has burnt the Koran. If it has been done by an American, we will punish him."

The US-led coalition on Saturday confirmed the raid in which four men were arrested but denied that any religious articles were desecrated.

Afghanistan is a deeply devout country and allegations of abuse of Islam have in the past touched off protests that have turned deadly.

There are about 55,000 foreign soldiers here, about half of them from the United States, helping Afghan security forces fight back an insurgency by the extremist Taliban movement that was in government between 1996 and 2001.
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9 killed, 29 wounded in suicide blast in southern Afghanistan
By The Associated Press
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Officials in Afghanistan have raised the death toll in a suicide bomb attack Saturday to nine.

A bomber on a motorbike detonated explosives in a crowded marketplace near Afghan police, killing nine people and wounding at least 29, officials said.

The blast Saturday killed two police officers and seven civilians in the city of Spin Boldak in the southern province of Kandahar near the border with Pakistan, a statement from NATO's International Security Assistance force said.

NATO evacuated 11 of the wounded victims by helicopter to Canada's base in Kandahar, while the rest were taken to the Spin Boldak hospital, it said.

Canadian soldiers in the area of Spin Boldak were sent to help local authorities with the evacuation, as were two doctors from Kandahar Airfield.

Such attacks against Afghan police have become a trademark of Taliban suicide bombers. More than 600 police have been killed in insurgency-related violence this year, the Interior Ministry has said.

Violence has killed more than 5,200 people this year, according to an Associated Press count based on official figures, the deadliest year since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
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Canadian troops recount suicide attack
By Dene Moore, THE CANADIAN PRESS
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - The suicide bomber who blew himself up at a crowded marketplace in the border town of Spin Boldak on Saturday stuffed ball bearings among the explosives packed into his vest.

It is a crude but effective weapon and an indiscriminating one when it comes to killing, spraying deadly shrapnel in all directions.

Of the eight people who died in the blast, five were civilians celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr at a community festival. Three of the dead were Afghan National Border Police officers who are so often targeted by insurgents.

"It's the end of Ramadan, so there are a lot of festivities taking place in Afghanistan," said Maj. Pierre Huet, commanding officer of the Canadian reconnaissance squadron, which set up an emergency triage at Canada's forward operating base in Spin Boldak to treat the victims.

"The market was full. There were lots of games for children, many people in the market. . . ."

Seven people were killed instantly when the bomber blew himself up around 7 p.m. One more victim died en route to the military hospital at Kandahar Airfield. 

Two children, ages 8 and 9, were among the survivors treated by Canadian soldiers at Spin Boldak.

"We received about 10 pick-up trucks loaded with injured people, about five to six injured in each truck," Huet told reporters Sunday.

Two doctors were dispatched from Kandahar Airfield but emergency medics with the reconnaissance squadron went immediately to work.

"Within two hours, everyone had been evaluated, treated and evacuated," Huet said.

Twenty-one of 36 survivors were evacuated by air to the multinational military hospital at Kandahar Airfield. Canadian soldiers in Spin Boldak took the rest to the local hospital by armoured vehicle.

The entire multinational medical staff at Kandahar Airfield, 120 people, was pressed into service. From just after 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. the victims arrived in waves.

The medical headquarters for the hospital was quickly turned into a temporary triage area as medical staff waited for the sound of helicopters to cut through the night sky.

"The injuries, most of them were shrapnel wounds," said Maj. Jocelyn Dodaro, the physician in charge of hospital services for the Canadian contingent and one of the two doctors dispatched to Spin Boldak to help treat the wounded.

The ball bearings had the desired effect. Body parts were brought to the hospital with the victims.

"The people closest to the suicide bomber received the most serious injuries," Dodaro said.

He lauded the reconnaissance squadron for their response.

"I don't have a number of lives that were saved but the Canadian Forces saved a number of lives, that's for sure," Dodaro told reporters.

Five patients remained at the military hospital at Kandahar on Sunday. The others were evacuated to military facilities at NATO bases in Terin Kot, Camp Bastion and Kabul.

"It's the largest incident of mass casualties we've had," said Lt.-Cmdr. Charles Gendron, deputy commander of the military hospital at Kandahar Airfield.

"At the moment, everyone is stable, everyone has received the appropriate care and everyone is basically out of danger. Most, if not all, will fully recover from their injuries."

It was the third incident in recent months in this bustling border town.

In August, a Taliban ambush killed five and injured 11 policemen and in September another suicide bomber injured 12. A second suicide bomber was arrested by Afghan security forces before carrying out his deadly plan.

Huet said Afghan national security forces, in particular border police chief Abdul Razik, was the target of these attacks.

Gen. Dan McNeill, commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, called it an "abominable violent act."

"Yet again, we see in such senseless acts that the victims have been largely civilians," McNeill said Sunday.

"Taliban extremists do not offer a hopeful future for this country, but one of violence and death."
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South Korean church asked to repay cost of hostage rescue
Sun Oct 14, 9:56 AM ET
SEOUL (AFP) - The South Korean church that sent a group of Christian aid workers to Afghanistan said it had been asked to pay more than 60,000 dollars towards the cost of rescuing them from the Taliban.

The 19 aid workers were taken hostage by the Taliban after undertaking the trip in defiance of foreign ministry warnings, and only freed after Seoul government negotiators reached a deal with the kidnappers.

Kwon Hyuk-Soo, a senior member at Saem-Mul church, said the bill of some 64,000 dollars was to cover air tickets, accommodation and other expenses.

"The church plans to pay it back after reviewing it because it already promised to do so. It will be covered by donations from church members," Kwon told Yonhap news agency, adding the request was made last week. He and other other church members refused to comment when contacted by AFP.

Seoul has insisted that either the church or the former hostages' families should foot the bill for their rescue.

The church has been heavily criticised for sending 23 of its members to the war-torn Islamic nation, where they were abducted and held for six weeks before their release. Two of the hostages were shot dead.

Under the deal with the kidnappers, Seoul agreed to withdraw its 210 non-combat troops from Afghanistan by year-end and to stop its missionaries from going there.

It has denied media reports that a ransom was paid to the Taliban.
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Colonel hails turnaround on Taliban
Sun Oct 14, 7:37 AM ET
LONDON (AFP) - A British battalion achieved an "astonishing" turnaround in the fight against the Taliban, their commanding officer said Saturday ahead of their return from Afghanistan.

Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Carver, in charge of the 1st Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment, said Taliban rebels had been "beaten back and dislodged from their comfort zones" over the past six months.

The 600-strong battalion recruited from eastern England, nicknamed "The Vikings", had helped Afghans in the troubled southern Helmand province "return to a more normal pattern of life," Carver said.

The soldiers return to Britain on Tuesday after a gruelling six-month tour of duty which saw them push Taliban militia out of traditional heartlands, allowing reconstruction and development to take place.

"We return with an extraordinary tale to tell," Carver wrote in a letter to the Eastern Daily Press regional newspaper.

"When we arrived in March many commentators were claiming the war was already lost -- but the change in the nature of operations over the six months has been astonishing.

"The Taliban have been beaten back and dislodged from their comfort zones in the Green Zone of the River Helmand because the Vikings have taken a determined fight to the enemy.

"In doing so, we have been involved in some of the most ferocious close quarter combat the British Army has experienced for decades in extremely challenging terrain and temperatures that exceeded 50 degrees (Celsius, 122 degrees Fahrenheit) at their peak.

"The real measurement of success, however, has not been the numeric destruction of our foe but the embryonic beginning of reconstruction projects and the return to a more normal pattern of life, particularly in the vital town of Sangin."

He added: "Our advances have not been without cost. Nine Vikings have died during the tour and a further 57 have been wounded in battle."

A total of 82 British soldiers have died in Afghanistan since the start of US-led military action in late 2001 to oust the Taliban, the country's hardline Islamist former rulers.

Most of Britain's soldiers are based in Helmand, where Taliban insurgents are said to be teamed up with foreign fighters from Al-Qaeda and opium producers helping to finance the insurgency.

Britain has around 7,000 troops in Afghanistan -- the second-highest after the United States to the United Nations-sanctioned, NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

The figure is set to rise to around 7,800 by the end of the year.
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The new Taliban
In a swath of territory across Afghanistan and Pakistan, a wild and lawless new state is being born. As warlords struggle for control and Islamic militants pour in, Jason Burke travels deep into the region to reveal hidden forces fuelling a growing conflict in the front line of the 'War on Terror'
Sunday October 14, 2007 The Observer (UK)
The bomb was far from the biggest seen on the North-West Frontier but it did its job well. Placed in a water cooler, it ripped through the Nishtar Abad music market, sending shards of glass and splintered CDs in all directions. 'Miraculously, no one was killed,' said Mohammed Azam, who was shopping for presents for the Muslim holiday of Eid this weekend. Twenty people were injured, three seriously, and a dozen shops gutted.

For the police chief of Peshawar, the dusty Pakistan city 40 miles from the Afghan border, it was clear who planted last Tuesday's bomb. 'We suspect the involvement of those people who in recent months had sent letters to the CD and video shops, warning them to shut their businesses, saying it is against Islam,' Abdul Majid Marwat said.

The 'Pakistan Taliban' - or one of the various groups claiming the name - had struck again. Within hours the debris was being cleared away and the blood wiped off the walls. 'This is the life we lead,' said Azam.' We have no choice but to continue.'

The Pakistan Taliban's campaigns go way beyond bombing music shops. Fifty miles south of Peshawar last week, a full-scale pitched battle, complete with air strikes and artillery barrages, raged between the Pakistani army and local and international militants dug into fortified positions in remote tribal villages. By the time a fragile calm had settled on the rocky hills, scattered palm trees and desiccated fields of Mir Ali, 50 soldiers, a 100 or so militants and around 100 civilians had died. Given the inaccessibility of the battlefield and the conflicting claims of the military and their opponents, accurate casualty figures are simply not available.

What is not in doubt is the scale of the fighting. It was a bloody week for everyone as half a dozen ragged conflicts raged across a stretch of land the size of Britain, from the Indus river to the central highlands of Pakistan.

The weekend before had seen an American soldier and a handful of Afghans killed in Kabul; last Monday saw the latest in a spate of suicide bombings attributed to the Taliban in Afghanistan when a bicycle bomber hit a convoy of Nato troops moving through the British-held town of Lashkar Gah, injuring two civilians. Towards the end of the week, around 100 Taliban stormed a remote police post close to Afghanistan's border with Iran, sparking lengthy exchanges that left 10 militants and a police officer dead. An Australian died when his armoured vehicle was hit by a massive remote-detonated mine, the 192nd coalition soldier killed this year in Afghanistan.

The death of David Pearce, 41, made this year the bloodiest for foreign soldiers deployed in Afghanistan since the days of the Soviet occupation. The number of Afghan civilians who have died in the fighting this year is already higher than that for any year since the vicious civil war that tore the country apart in the early Nineties.

In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, analysts talk of an explosion of violence. Tensions were so high last week that when a gas cylinder exploded in an affluent suburb of Islamabad, already hit by a bloody series of suicide bombings, it was initially thought to be yet another terrorist blast.

For some, the ongoing violence in south-west Asia is simple to explain: the Taliban, reconstituted after the defeat of 2001, and with the help of al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Yahya al-Libi, are battling their way back to power in Afghanistan and, perhaps worse, fast making progress towards seizing power in nuclear-capable Pakistan.

But the reality is far more complicated. It is hard to make sense of one of the most confusing conflicts of modern times, a war with no defined fronts, waged with tactics that range from those of the dynamite-throwing anarchists of the late 19th century to those of the Western Front trench stalemate in 1916, and sometimes to state-of-the-art 'fourth generation' 21st-century warfare.

Across an area that stretches through Pakistani cities such as Peshawar, Islamabad and Karachi, through Kabul and Kandahar, to remote villages and Nato bases in southern Afghanistan, it is possible to unpick the intricate detail of the battle for the strategic centre of the War on Terror. What emerges is a picture not of a single movement or insurgency called 'the Taliban', but of a new state without formal borders or even a name, a state that is currently nothing more than a chaotic confederation of warlords' fiefdoms spanning one of the most critical parts of the world and with the potential to escalate into a very real presence - with devastating consequences for global security.

And this weekend, the 'centre of the centre', as one western official called it, was the small, scruffy town of Mir Ali.

In the lulls between fighting last week, soldiers and militants retrieved their dead. Among the corpses buried within hours according to Islamic custom were a couple of Arabs and several Uzbeks. The find confirmed the worst fears of Western intelligence services. Over recent years it has become increasingly obvious that bin Laden's al-Qaeda group has been able to rebuild a version of the terrorist infrastructure that existed in Afghanistan in the late Nineties.

Volunteers, many of them British, have travelled in a steady stream to training camps. They have included key members of the 7/7 London bombing plot and those convicted in the recent Operation Crevice trial. A new 'high command', including a high proportion of Egyptians and Saudis, has taken on the task of directing strikes around the globe, and into Pakistan (where President Pervez Musharraf remains a key target), and providing technical and financial assistance to chosen allies in Afghanistan.

The training camps are 'rudimentary', according to Pakistani government and Western intelligence sources, but despite steady losses - a missile fired from a Predator drone killed Abu Hamza Rabia, the al-Qaeda number three, in a house in Mir Ali last November - there is no shortage of militants to fill the gaps. 'The number three position in al-Qaeda, "director of external operations", is one of the jobs with the shortest life expectancies in the world,' said a UK-based intelligence source. 'But that does not stop people volunteering for it.'

Equally troubling is the renewed activity of al-Qaeda-affiliated groups such as the Uzbeks under Tahir Yuldashev, brutal commander of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and Pakistani militant groups that have moved into the hills after losing Islamabad's backing. According to Brigadier Mehmud Shah, there are several hundred Uzbek fighters in and around Mir Ali, all set on killing as many Pakistani soldiers as possible. 'In 2003, there were around 600 Uzbek fighters, now there are more than three times that figure,' said Shah, a retired Pakistani officer who oversaw security on the frontier until last year. The influx has been fuelled by fierce repression in Uzbekistan itself, ruled by Stalinist dictator Islam Karimov.

Last month, a terrorist plot was uncovered in Germany after American intelligence intercepted emails from a breakaway faction of the IMU to German converts who had travelled to the North-West Frontier to be trained. The increasing internationalisation of the militant presence in the Pakistani tribal areas recalls the worst days of the late Nineties, when scores of different groups were based in Afghanistan, all plotting violence in the Middle East or the West. Already, British intelligence experts are describing the Pakistani tribal areas as 'the Grand Central Station' of modern Islamic militancy.

Again, however, the situation is complex. In many parts of the border country, the Uzbeks are far from welcome and have fought pitched battles with local tribes. An estimated 200 were killed in fighting between Pashtuns and 'foreigners' in the south Waziristan agency earlier this year. But few doubt that the Uzbeks - and al-Qaeda - have enough allies, enough respect and enough money to ensure a welcome in the hills around Miram Shah and Mir Ali for a long time yet.

The Torchi river snakes down from the high mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier to the Indus and eventually into the Arabian Sea. Mir Ali lies where the river hits the flatlands. It is a ragged settlement of half a dozen villages grouped around a scruffy bazaar on a crossroads and a concrete ramp that serves as a bridge over the river.

Last week, Pakistani soldiers took heavy casualties as they tried to battle their way in. Despite air strikes reducing dozens of the mud houses to dust and fierce fighting between the low walls and across the dried-out fields and sparse orchards, they had made little progress by this weekend despite talk of a 'major push' before the Eid festival. Refugees fleeing the area spoke of a 'rain' of missiles and shells.

'We don't have any place to live,' said Mohamed Anwar. 'We have sent our children to other areas because we are scared that the bombing could start again.' With the fragile truce barely holding, renewed fighting is almost certain in the days that come.

Few observers were surprised at the lack of progress. Pakistan now has 101,000 troops deployed in the semi-autonomous badlands along the frontier, but they face daunting obstacles. Mir Ali is in the North Waziristan tribal agency, one of seven agencies stretching along the strategically crucial frontier area where the authority of the Pakistani government is, under an agreement concluded by British imperial administrators anxious to pacify the warlike and truculent Pashtun tribes, constitutionally limited to the roads and a narrow strip either side just 10 yards wide. There is no tax collection, justice system or police force.

A second difficulty is the terrain. On both sides of the highly porous border, there are very few roads, high ridges provide vantage points and frequent gorges are perfect for ambushes. Those forests that have yet to be stripped of their valuable timber give excellent cover. Even the houses are fortified. With its high hills and populated plains, the terrain is similar to that where British troops are deployed in southern Afghanistan.

As in the restive south and east of Afghanistan, the agencies are populated by self-ruling Pashtun tribes for whom war has been a way of life for centuries. 'A Pashtun takes his Kalashnikov out with him like a westerner takes his mobile phone,' said Latif Afridi, a local tribal leader. 'They learn to shoot when they learn to walk.'

Inter-tribal violence is a continual backdrop to life on the frontier. Last week, tribes west of Peshawar battled over rights to grazing, water and other scarce resources with mortars and machine-guns, oblivious to the global conflict unfolding around them. And experience gained in the war against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan, when many Pashtuns in the region fought against the Red Army and its local auxiliaries, has forged a new style of warfare where combat is no longer seen as an extension of negotiation but as a bid to annihilate the opponent.

Finally, there is Islam. In recent years the radical new ideology of Middle Eastern militants such as bin Laden has spread among the Pashtun tribes in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, providing a new language and justification for age-old resentments against central authority, buttressed by new ideas about 'the global attack on Islam by the West' and a powerful call to 'jihad'.

One powerful factor has been the massive growth in recent decades of the hardline Deobandi traditionalist school of Islam. With tribal leaders losing their authority in the new radicalised environment, the clerics are more influential than ever. 'The traditional structure with tribal chiefs, big landowners or merchants and religious figures sharing power has broken down,' Professor Zia Ullah, of Peshawar University, told The Observer. 'At the moment it is the mullah and the talib [religious student] who are in charge. A system that has lasted centuries has been overturned.'

It is these mullahs, whose religious education is often minimal, who are forming the private militias labelled 'the Pakistan Taliban'. In fact, they are little more than a fractious confederation of mini-states run by warlords. Together they have succeeded in expelling almost all representatives of any government authority from their territory and in doing so, some analysts fear, have laid the foundations for a state without borders or flags, but which has a justice system and a common ethnicity, ideology, culture and religion. And it was this fragmented, chaotic, embryonic state's soldiers that were fighting so hard at Mir Ali last week.

Carry on up the road that slices through Mir Ali bazaar, heading west into the mountains, and you will soon come to Miram Shah. Lying in a hollow below a crucial pass over the mountains, the small town was a crucial support base for the mujahideen who fought the Soviets. One of their leaders, an Afghan tribal chief called Jalaluddin Haqqani, held Miram Shah as a personal fiefdom for decades, building a mosque and a huge religious school on its outskirts. Haqqani, a senior cleric, or maulvi, in the Deobandi school of Islam, is now old and ailing - some intelligence sources believe him to be dead - but his son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, has taken over and is as active as his father ever was. If anyone is going to be president of this new state it is he.

Little is known about Sirajuddin Haqqani. According to Brigadier Shah, the Pakistani army is 'currently fighting blindfold', and western intelligence agencies admit a 'lack of visibility' in the tribal areas. However, all believe that Haqqani is the dominant figure among the warlords hacking out their fiefdoms in the tribal areas.

'[Sirajuddin Haqqani] is at the top of the food chain,' said one western military official in Islamabad. 'He's one of the few people everyone listens to.' Sources told The Observer that it was Haqqani who, four weeks ago, brought three different warlords together to provide a big enough force to take on the Pakistani army around Mir Ali.

But Haqqani, who is believed to be in his forties, has another key role to play. He has inherited the influence his father built over 20 years well beyond the tribal zones of Pakistan. That influence stretches across eastern Afghanistan as far as Ghazni and even into Uruzgan, where the Australian soldier was killed last week.

As in Pakistan, the Afghan Pashtun tribes do not unconditionally obey one commander but Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son have been able to draw together a complex web of links of allegiance, some based on tribal loyalty, others inspired by religious devotion to the senior Deobandi cleric that Haqqani is (or was), still more by a quasi-national response to what is perceived to be a 'foreign' invasion and occupation that threatens to change Afghan society for ever.

'We respect Maulvi Haqqani,' one tribal leader told The Observer by telephone from the Pakistani town of Kohat. 'He has always been a true mujahed [freedom fighter], fighting the Russians and the Americans and the British. And he has built many schools and mosques.'

Another reason the Haqqani dynasty is so powerful is its wealth. This allows them to buy the loyalty that their religious and jihadi credentials do not win them. That money comes from smuggling opium, weapons and timber out of Afghanistan as well as from quasi-legitimate businesses. It also comes in direct donations from backers in Gulf Arab states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia - until 2001, Jalaluddin Haqqani was a frequent visitor to the Gulf and one of his wives is from a wealthy family in the United Arab Emirates - and from indirect donations via the scores of Islamic charities which gather the 10 per cent zakat levy that every devout Muslim gives to religious causes.

Cash is a critical commodity throughout the 'south-western Asian theatre'. Though not among the prime motivations for many Afghan fighters, money is necessary for weapons, equipment and for the tribal auxiliaries who will turn out to protect drug shipments and boost numbers for major one-off attacks. To bolster a recent, and rapidly broken, peace agreement in the tribal zones on their side of the frontier, Pakistani army commanders distributed sums ranging from £10,000 to £100,000 to five leaders of militant militias who promised to lay down their arms. The money, the men said, was needed to pay back advances given to them by 'al-Qaeda' to fight the Islamabad government's forces.

But the militias, like the Haqqanis, are not loyal to bin Laden, according to Peshawar-based analyst Ashraf Ali. 'Baitullah Mahsud [one of the key leaders of the militant militias on the Pakistan side of the border] recently said that neither bin Laden nor al-Qaeda was his leader,' Ali said. 'His leader was Mullah Omar [the ousted Afghan leader].'

In the sprawling multinational base in Kandahar there is one hangar riddled with rusty bullet holes and shrapnel marks. It stands in stark contrast to the pristine new constructions - including a Pizza Hut outlet, a Burger King and a full-sized chapel - elsewhere in the vast complex that the headquarters of Nato's Regional Command South in Afghanistan has become over the six years western forces have been fighting in Afghanistan. The hangar is known as the Taliban's Last Stand, and was left as a memento to the defeat of the hardline Islamic militia in 2001. It has since become something of an embarrassment.

The latest contingent of British troops to deploy in Afghanistan, 52 Brigade, arrived last week. Most will be based in Helmand, the province to the west of Kandahar. From their bases in places such as Lashkar Gah and Kajaki, the activities of the Haqqanis and the Pakistan Taliban will seem a long way away.

Analysts are split over the links between the two wings of the Taliban. According to Brigadier Shah, 'the Afghan Taliban have no extraterritorial operations or ambitions'. 'Communications among senior leaders we intercepted showed us that [the Afghan Taliban] considered the Pakistan Taliban as a burden and requested them to fight Pakistan but not come into Afghanistan,' Shah told The Observer.

But others are less convinced. 'The situation is so complex that you cannot draw a line between the Afghan and the Pakistan Taliban,' said Ashraf Ali, the analyst.

Certainly Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric who has led the Afghan Taliban since its creation in 1993, is respected by everyone on both sides of the border, including the Haqqanis. 'If there is one chief, it is him,' one official in Islamabad said. 'If Talibanistan suddenly came into being, he would be the president.'

But the links that tie the two halves of the Taliban together go way beyond shared allegiances. A United Nations report into the new phenomenon of suicide bombers in Afghanistan stated that 'much (but not all) of the recruiting and training happens' in Pakistan.

'While suicide attackers elsewhere in the world tend not to be poor and uneducated, Afghanistan's attackers appear to be young, uneducated and often drawn from religious schools in Pakistan,' the report stated. Government and military sources in Kabul told The Observer that many bombers came from the Haqqanis' madrassas [religious schools] around Miram Shah, others from the system of Deobandi madrassas around Quetta.

In Peshawar, The Observer found evidence that one bomber who killed himself in Kandahar last autumn was recruited in the small town of Charsadda north east of the Pakistani frontier city by a Pakistani group. The bomber, who had no previous involvement with radical Islam, had travelled nearly 500 miles, from one side of the border to the other, to attack western troops.

Equally, though substantial funding is generated within Afghanistan from taxes on the sale of opium and contributions from wealthy sympathisers, much of the funding of the Afghan Taliban comes from across the border. Weapons from stores in Pakistan or from gun factories such as that at Darra Adam Khel to the south of Peshawar - temporarily occupied in August by a group of Pakistan Taliban - cross the mountains to be used against Nato forces too.

And though much of the fighting in Helmand or in Kandahar is in part based on tribal rivalries, cross-border personal links, not least through the Deobandi religious network, play a key role. 'At the end of the day, it is all about who knows who,' said one Kabul-based intelligence official. Maulana Rahat Hussain, a senior cleric interviewed by The Observer in Peshawar last week, reeled off a list of his classmates at the massive Binoria madrassa in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and commercial centre, who had all become senior figures in the Taliban.

'They were and are and will forever be my brothers,' Hussain, the deputy secretary of the Deobandi-linked political party that has run Peshawar for the past five years, said. 'They are fighting an occupying force and inshallah they will be victorious.'

On the ground, differences disappear. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans displaced in the Eighties and early Nineties grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan or studied in religious schools there. 'Telling the two apart is impossible,' one British officer in Helmand told The Observer. 'We have found bodies with pockets full of Pakistani currency. But does that mean it's an Afghan or a Pakistani? Round here the distinction is meaningless. Nation states don't really exist in the way we imagine them to.'

And though British intelligence officers and diplomats who have served on both sides of the frontier stress that there are considerable differences between the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, cautioning that 'to conflate the two' would be a serious error, they admit that there are many links too. 'The short-term objectives may differ but if you are looking for shared long-term aims or a common world view, culture, language and so on, they are very close indeed,' one official, a veteran observer of the region, said last week.

Nato officers in Kabul dismiss the suicide bombings as 'not a strategic threat', but senior officers admit privately that there is a danger that the south and east of Afghanistan, already well beyond the authority of Kabul, will effectively translate 'de facto autonomy' into independence. That raises the spectre of the confederation of warlord states that is in the process of emerging on the Pakistani side of the border effectively trebling in size with the addition of the Taliban-controlled zones in Afghanistan.

'It would be the United Taliban Emirates and it would be a very nasty place indeed,' one said. 'It would be the biggest and most defensible terrorist safe haven the world has ever seen.'

Few are hopeful that a swift solution will be found to the problem posed by the emerging state without a state on the borders of Afghanistan. The Pakistani army, according to western defence officials in Islamabad, lacks the doctrine or the equipment or the will to take on the forces against them. 'They are demoralised. They are taking heavy casualties, having hundreds of guys captured. They are in real trouble up there,' said one.

Nor is the Pakistani army's will to fight unquestionable. 'The men and the officers are sick of fighting America's war,' said one recently retired general in Islamabad. 'Why should we kill other Pakistanis and other Muslims or sacrifice our lives for President Bush? It is not just the tribesmen who are anti-American. The whole country is.'

There are frequent allegations that the Pakistani intelligence services are helping the Taliban on both sides of the border. 'There is no institutional policy to provide support for the militants but it may well be happening at a low level with some individuals pursuing their own agendas,' said one Islamabad-based defence official. 'I have never seen a smoking gun though.'

There is general recognition that the Nato alliance and the Taliban, who are increasingly relying on amateurish suicide bombings, have fought each other to a standstill. Nato partners such as Germany, the Netherlands and France are tiring of a war that British commanders admit may take '30 years to win'. British ministers have suggested talking to the Taliban - something President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has offered to do. Earlier this month he made a personal plea to Mullah Omar to negotiate and stop 'the destruction of [his] country'.

But the confederation of warlords, Pakistan Taliban, Deobandi religious networks, businessmen and smugglers, the veterans such as Haqqani and the newcomers who have seized power in villages like Mir Ali will not give way easily.

'The loose, chaotic quasi-state which we are seeing emerging has been in the process of being built since the early days of the war against the Soviets 30 years ago,' said one western diplomat in Pakistan. 'It is going to take that long, if not longer, to dismantle.'

Rise of the radicals

Taliban literally means 'students'. Originally mainly ethnic Pashtuns, many footsoldiers came from radical seminaries in Pakistan, where two million Afghans sought refuge from two decades of war.

Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989. The pro-Soviet government fell in 1992; rebel factions took power but then began infighting. Thousands died in a vicious civil war. The Taliban emerged as a real force in 1994. In 1996 they captured Kabul. They were forced out in 2001 by a US-led invasion, but staged a comeback last year.

The Taliban believe in a strict interpretation of Islamic law and last month produced a constitution. Executions are carried out in public. Women are fully covered and are not permitted education. Men should wear beards, and light entertainment - music, television and film - is deemed to be anti-Islamic.

Poppy production in Afghanistan rose dramatically after the 2001 invasion destabilised a shaky economy, leading more and more farmers to turn to opium production to survive. The country provides 86 per cent of the world's supply of the drug.
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Fifteen arrested after man killed in Afghan gang fight
Sun Oct 14, 4:35 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - Police in the Afghan capital Kabul said they had arrested 15 men after another was stabbed to death in a brawl between gangs, which have reemerged since the fall of the hardline Taliban.

The men were arrested late Saturday after the street fight in a poor area of the capital Friday, the first day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan, police chief General Alishah Paktiawal told AFP.

"After Eid prayers two street gangs fought and one person was killed, stabbed with knives," he said. "We have arrested 15 people in relation to the incident."

The gangs were fighting over territory around a mosque in the area, he said.

The fundamentalist Taliban regime, in power from 1996 to 2001, crushed Kabul's street gangs.

But they have reemerged in the past six years alongside criminal gangs behind a spate of kidnappings, including that of a German woman snatched from a restaurant in August and rescued after 36 hours in a police swoop.
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Role of Pakistan's 'captain' shows enduring Taliban ties
Analysts fear intelligence agency figure actually plays double role
via Houston Chronicle (chron.com) October 14, 2007 By JAMES RUPERT  Newsday
SHEKHANANDEH, PAKISTAN — The stocky, bearded man they call the Subidar is an encyclopedia of the jagged mountains and insular tribes here along Pakistan's northwestern border. As a retired career officer now on contract to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, he would be just the man to enforce his government's declared policy: to stop Taliban and allied guerrillas from crossing into Afghanistan to attack U.S. troops.

But the Subidar's mission is just the opposite, say U.S., Afghan and Pakistani sources. Working from his home in this village, and reporting to the ISI, he recruits and organizes guerrillas to make those attacks, the sources say. In Afghan districts just over the border, guerrilla attacks have escalated this year, killing at least six U.S. soldiers since June.

Two roles

President Pervez Musharraf and senior Bush administration officials say Musharraf is America's best friend in the war against al-Qaida and its Islamic extremist allies in this region. But the case of the Subidar (the Urdu-language title means "captain") appears to illustrate assertions by many scholars that Pakistan is deeply divided and playing a double role. Its ruling army denied any knowledge of the Subidar, whose name is being withheld because he could not be reached directly to comment on this story.

While Musharraf is allied with Washington, many in his army and security services are wedded to the Taliban, say independent analysts including Boston University's Husain Haqqani. Parts of the ISI, the army and political and religious elites form a support network to help the Taliban and allied guerrillas recruit and train fighters, raise money and infiltrate Afghanistan, the analysts say.

In this shadowy war, the Taliban's main bases and support networks are hidden in rugged mountains of Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun tribal areas, along the border south of here. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate report said in July that the same tribal districts are "a safe haven" for al-Qaida. Those districts are closed to foreigners, except army-escorted trips.

Pakistan's support for jihadist guerrillas is an old cornerstone of its national security policy, Haqqani and other scholars say. Working largely through the ISI, Pakistan's army cultivated the Taliban and backed their fight for power in Afghanistan as a way to keep Pakistani influence there. The ISI sponsored groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (Army of the Pure) to battle India in the disputed territory of Kashmir, scholars say.

The Subidar was one of hundreds of men who served as "handlers" for the ISI's guerrilla clients. In the 1980s, he helped provide U.S.-supplied weapons and logistical support to Afghan, Pakistani, Arab and other mujahedeen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, according to residents. After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, he oversaw camps over the border in Afghanistan that trained Jaish-e-Muhammad guerrillas, they said.

Brewed hostility

After Sept. 11, 2001, the United States leaned on Musharraf to shut down the ISI's guerrilla clients, which also were allied with al-Qaida. The ISI retired dozens of its guerrilla handlers, most of them junior officers, said Hassan Abbas, a Harvard analyst of the Pakistani military and a former Pakistani police official. The Subidar was among them.

Musharraf's anti-jihadist purge of the ISI and army hasn't been effective, especially among lower-level officers, Abbas and other analysts say. For example, militants linked to al-Qaida used army connections twice to bomb Musharraf's highly secured motorcades in 2003, coming close to killing him.

Interviews with dozens of former and current army and intelligence officials make clear that many officers of Pakistan's covert security agencies remain emotionally committed to jihad and hostile to the U.S. role in the region.

This is especially true of officers such as the Subidar who worked clandestinely to arm and train Taliban and other jihadist guerrillas, said a Pakistani military analyst who asked not to be named.

Even if such officers were not religious militants at the outset, "they have been working for years with young men who go and die in Kashmir or Afghanistan, and they often come to believe in the cause," he said.
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Could Afghan Poppies Be Painkillers for the Poor?
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. The New York Times / October 14, 2007
AS opium harvests in Afghanistan have steadily increased, some think tanks and politicians — mostly in Britain — have raised a trenchant question: rather than trying to eradicate Afghanistan’s poppies, why not instead buy them and make morphine?

Given that the World Health Organization estimates that over 6.2 million of the world’s poor are dying of cancer, AIDS, burns and wounds without adequate pain relief, the argument goes, wouldn’t it make sense?

Most prominent among these proposals is an analysis by the Senlis Council, a drug-policy research group with offices in London, Brussels and Kabul. The council argues that the United States and Britain waste more than $800 million a year, as well as soldiers’ lives, trying futilely to eradicate poppies.

Instead, it calculated two years ago, Afghanistan’s whole crop could be purchased for about $600 million — the “farm gate” price, not the street value of the heroin into which it is refined, which is over $50 billion. (The “farm gate” estimate has gone up as the crop has increased, and may be $1 billion now.)

Whatever the price, “enforcement will not work,” said Romesh Bhattacharji, a former narcotics commissioner of India who has investigated the Afghan situation for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “The Afghan farmer will not switch to alternative crops as long as there is a market for his opium.”

Mr. Bhattacharji says he now endorses the idea of buying the crop.

The United States and British governments are vigorously opposed; instead they favor tough eradication tactics and more encouragement to farmers to grow wheat, cotton or fruit.

“They’re growing a poison, sir — one that kills Afghanistan’s neighbors and corrupts officials,” Thomas A. Schweich, chief of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, said in a telephone interview. “There needs to be better and more forceful eradication.”

There is an American precedent for buying. In the late 1960’s, the Nixon administration, fighting a heroin epidemic, pressured Turkey, then the world’s chief grower, to eradicate its poppy crops.

Unable to do that (both because of corruption and because peasant farmers vote) Turkey in 1974 started licensing farmers to grow for the morphine trade, and the United States in 1981 gave protected-market status to Turkey and India, obligating itself to buy 80 percent of the raw material for American painkillers from them. Why not, the Senlis Council and others argue, let Afghanistan join the legitimate supply chain? Mr. Schweich and others reply that it is simply impractical — Afghanistan grows 93 percent of the world’s poppies; its crop is 15 times the size of India’s.

Also, heroin smugglers pay better. For example, India officially paid its legal farmers only $20 to $50 per kilogram last year, while farmers interviewed in central India in May said illegal buyers were offering $100 to $190. Prices in Afghanistan, at roughly the same time, were about $125.

“Why would anybody switch to legal opium when they can get those prices?” Mr. Schweich asked. Making up the difference with price supports — another idea with American precedents — would cost as much as an extra $800 million.

“You can do the math,” he said. “If we did it, no one in Afghanistan would grow any other crop, we’d be paying billions for it, and it would become a narco-welfare state.”

The idea meets opposition from other quarters, too. Jagjit Pavadia, the current narcotics commissioner of India, said in an interview that if the world becomes ready to buy more morphine for the dying poor she would like Indian farmers to benefit first. Because of falling demand, India has slowly cut its licensed farmers from 150,000 to 62,000.

A third-generation opium farmer in Neemuch, India, was even more adamant. “We have 150 years’ experience in selling to government,” said Ramchandra Nagda, who also grows wheat, garlic and spices. “There is better control here than there ever will be in Afghanistan.”

The United Nations drugs office estimates that heroin rings buy about 30 percent of India’s crop, despite the efforts of 1,200 narcotics control bureau officers. Diversion in Afghanistan, a lawless warlord state, would presumably be far harder to control.

In the British press, there is some serious discussion of the Senlis proposal. But in the United States, the idea has attracted little attention. The council attributes this partially to the lobbying power of the religious right and law enforcement groups, both of which react with horror to any talk of legalization.

“It’s almost theological, their opposition to our idea,” said Norine MacDonald, the council’s founder.

Also, both she and Mr. Bhattacharji said, with a $600 million annual budget for eradication, the field attracts paramilitary contractors with deep connections to the Bush administration, including Blackwater USA and DynCorp International, both of whom train Afghan anti-narcotics police.

Mr. Schweich called such a view “cynical and inaccurate” and maintained that local Afghan governors were the leading force in eradication, though he agreed that their efforts were plagued with nepotism and corruption.

In any case, many experts — even those favoring the use of Afghanistan’s crop for morphine — say it does not change one looming reality: the heroin trade is so large and so lucrative that someone, somewhere, is going to grow the poppies for it.
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Our role in Afghanistan really about ties with U.S.
Thomas Walkom  Toronto Star - Oct 14 1:51 AM
By appointing his new advisory panel on Afghanistan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has inadvertently underlined what this war is about. It is not about Afghanistan. It is about the U.S.

How else to explain the membership of a body charged with determining Canada's future in Afghanistan?

None of the five on it is an expert on that country (although one, former Liberal deputy prime minister John Manley has twice visited there.) Yet four – Manley, former New York consul-general Pam Wallin, former Washington ambassador Derek Burney and former CN Rail chief Paul Tellier – have been intimately involved with the problems of Canada-U.S. relations, and in particular with the campaign to convince Americans that Canada is not soft on terror.

Of the five, only Jake Epp, a former federal Conservative cabinet minister who now chairs Ontario Power Generation, has never been directly involved in the Canada-U.S. file.

After the 9/11 attacks, it was Manley – then foreign affairs minister – who pushed his colleagues in government to meet U.S. security needs. His reason, as he explained later to authors Janice Stein and Eugene Lang, was his belief that prosperity depended on an open border.

And that, in turn, depended on Canada convincing Washington that it was serious about George W. Bush's war on terror.

In their book, The Unexpected War, Stein and Lang quote Manley recalling how he berated others in Jean Chrétien's cabinet.

"I was saying, `Excuse me ... have you been reading the papers lately?' while some other ministers were saying, `Let's not be sucked in by the Americans,' I thought these people were nuts and I still do."

Meanwhile, in New York, then consul-general Wallin was handling the thankless job of explaining to Fox News why Canada wasn't joining Bush's war on Iraq.

"Post-9/11 ideological differences between our governments got in the way," she told one reporter later.

"It wasn't that we said no to Iraq, but how we said no and the name-calling."

Like Manley, Wallin still focuses on the Canada-U.S. border. "This is fundamental to Canada's future," she said in the same interview. "The north-south axis is crucial. Canada exports more to Home Depot in the U.S. than to France."

So too Burney. Chief of staff to prime minister Brian Mulroney when the original Canada-U.S. free trade agreement was signed and, later, ambassador to Washington, Burney has kept his eyes fixed firmly south.

"Canada's place in the world is defined by our relationship with the U.S. and our ability to keep the U.S. engaged in multilateralism," he told one interviewer in 2003.

As for Tellier, he has had to deal with border issues head-on. In the aftermath of 9/11, the then CN head spent his time urging Canada and the U.S. to forge a security deal that would keep traffic moving across the border.

"The time has come for Canada and the United States to give serious consideration to new measures to improve confidence in both countries that the border is secure," he said then.

But how to improve that confidence?

In 2004, Paul Martin's Liberal government decided that the best way to keep Washington happy was to commit combat soldiers to Afghanistan.

In effect, he decided to risk Canadian lives in Kandahar to keep trucks rolling across the Detroit River.

As did Harper.

Now, as he tries to finesse the political unpopularity of the Afghan war, the Prime Minister is doing his best to ensure that official discussion remains tightly focused on what he sees as our real interest there – our relationship with Washington.
Thomas Walkom's column appears Thursday and Sunday.
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India beat Afghanistan 1-0, enter quarter-final in WMG football
via DeepikaGlobal.com
Hyderabad, Oct 14 (UNI) India broke their losing streak by beating Afghanistan 1-0 in their last group match to book a quarter-final berth in the men's football competition of the 4th Military World Games here today.

The hosts, who had earlier lost to Brazil 0-3 and to Qatar 0-1 in their earlier group ties scored through Ngurialal in the fifth minute and held on to the lead to come out victorious.

With the win, India collected three points from three outings and finished third in the four-team Group B of the competition, started four days before the formal opening of the mega event later this evening.

In other Group B match, Qatar beat Brazil 3-1 while in Group A, last Games' runners up Egypt thrashed Ireland 7-0 and Guinea Republic blanked Canada 4-0.

In Group C, defending champions North Korea defeated Germany 3-1 to send the European country packing from the tournament Egypt, Ireland and Guinea Republic moved into the quarter-finals from Group A, Brazil, Qatar and India did the same from Group B while North Korea and Cameroon made it to the last eight from Group C.
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Taliban use hostage cash to fund UK blitz
By Massoud Ansari in Kila Abdullah, Pakistan The Telegraph (UK) / October 14, 2007
Millions of dollars handed over to secure the release of South Korean hostages in Afghanistan have been used to buy weapons deployed against British and American forces in the country, the Taliban claims.

Major Alexis Roberts, 32, Prince William's former platoon commander at Sandhurst, was one of the victims of the Taliban offensive funded by the hostage money.

According to Taliban fighters interviewed by The Sunday Telegraph, the money has also been used to train recruits to carry out terrorist attacks in Britain and America.

South Korea has repeatedly denied claims by Afghan officials that it paid cash to secure the release in August of 21 Christian volunteers who were held for nearly six weeks. But in a recent meeting, three Taliban fighters involved in the conflict with the British in Helmand province said that $10 million cash handed over in two instalments had been used to boost operations in Afghanistan and abroad.

"It was a God-sent opportunity," said Mullah Hezbollah, 30. "It has helped us to multiply our stockpile of weapons and explosives to wage battle for at least a year or so."

He said the money had been paid in August, shortly before the Taliban's fugitive spiritual leader, Mullah Omar, ordered Operation Nusrat (victory), an offensive against coalition troops which ran throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which finished last week. During the operation, four British soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan, including Major Roberts.

"We were really concerned when we received orders to launch Operation Nusrat, because we had hardly any funds to buy weapons to carry out such a major offence," said Mullah Hezbollah. Thanks to the ransom payments, however, the operation proceeded with "full vigour".

Hezbollah and his two companions said they were emissaries of Mullah Mansoor, who took over as the Taliban military commander in southern Afghanistan after his one-legged brother, Mullah Dadullah Akhund, was killed by Special Boat Service troops in May.

Their decision to grant a rare interview came after several weeks of negotiations with Taliban intermediaries. The meeting took place in a mud-built Taliban safe house in the town of Kila Abdullah, near the border with Afghanistan in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt. After a 15-hour delay, the three bearded insurgents – all sporting pistols under their robes – arrived and talked about their movement over cups of green tea.

Their claims will fuel the controversy about the 23 South Koreans, who were seized as they travelled by bus from Kabul to Kandahar on July 19. Two of the male hostages were executed, but the rest were released after direct negotiations between the South Korean government and the Taliban. Seoul subsequently agreed to withdraw its small contingent of troops from Afghanistan and bar any more missionaries from working there, although it has denied widespread reports that a ransom was also paid.

Hezbollah, however, gave what appeared to be precise details of the transactions. "They gave us $7 million as a first instalment the day we released 12 hostages, and the remaining money was paid soon after we released the remaining hostages on August 31," he said.

He added that another main source of income was opium produced by poppy farmers in Helmand, thanks to a Taliban fatwa, or holy order. "Our scholars have given a religious decree saying that things which are usually abominable in Islam are permitted to wage jihad against the enemies of Islam," he said.

His comrade, Mullah Mohibullah, 32, disclosed that some of the ransom funds were being used to train volunteers from Britain and America to carry out attacks in their homelands. "We want to destroy them, the way they have destroyed our country," he said. "Most of these youths are suicide bombers."

The group said that suicide bombers, either in vehicles or wearing explosive-laden vests, were also becoming the Taliban's main weapon against occupying forces in Afghanistan. Up to 3,000 volunteers, they claimed, had signed up for the religious training necessary for martyrdom operations.

"We do not have gunship helicopters, nor do we have B-52s," said Mullah Hameedullah, 48. "We will carry out suicide attacks everywhere in the country, be it by waistcoats, cars or other ways."

The men said they had been engaged in operations against the British in Helmand province, but were presently on a mandatory break after four months of living mainly on bread and water. They claimed to have been involved in scores of operations in which British and other Nato troops had been killed.

Ruling out any negotiation with coalition forces, Hameedullah said: "We are ready to fight for a hundred years."

Asked to comment on the Taliban claims, the South Korean embassy in London described them as "lies" put out by the movement's propaganda wing.
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The treasures of Turquoise Mountain
Canadian-funded plan aims at breathing new life into ancient culture
The Toronto Star (Canada) October 14, 2007 Olivia Ward FOREIGN AFFAIRS REPORTER
In Afghanistan, ragged gashes cut through the cliffs of Bamiyan, where giant Buddha statues that symbolized an age of culture and tolerance once towered.

The Taliban's bombing of the 5th-century Buddhas outraged the world and became an image of the annihilation of Afghanistan's past, as though the claws of war had reached back in time to shred the very identity of its people.

But deliberate destruction accounts for only a fraction of the losses of Afghanistan's cultural treasures. Greed, opportunism and dire poverty have propelled armies of looters through the country's museums and archaeological sites, stripping away thousands of years of cultural history.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan's artists and artisans fled decades of warfare and repression, and most of those who remained were forced to abandon their work for the art of day-to-day survival.

Former British diplomat Rory Stewart saw the sacking of Afghanistan's culture first-hand, walking through the country shortly after the 2001 rout of the Taliban. Two years ago, he returned to set up a project aimed at replacing some of the losses and rebuilding a centuries-old culture.

Last week, Stewart's Turquoise Mountain Foundation was awarded a $3 million grant from the Canadian government to train new artists and restore Kabul's crumbling old market district of Murad Khane.

For Oxford-educated Stewart, a long love affair with Afghanistan's rich history culminated in a near-fatal odyssey through mountains and plains in the dead of winter, following a trail of destruction and dilapidation.

In west central Afghanistan, Stewart made one of his saddest discoveries: a site that may be that of the legendary Turquoise Mountain, a city built in the 12th century by the Persian-linked Ghorids, who presided over a Silk Road trading empire boasting exquisite Asian art and crafts.

In his book The Places in Between, Stewart lamented that it was too late to save the remains of the site, burned out by the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and plundered by modern villagers who sold its unique artifacts to antiquities dealers for a few dollars.

But on returning to Afghanistan in 2005, he says, "I realized that the skills so triumphantly displayed at Turquoise Mountain were not entirely lost."

The Aga Khan Trust for Culture was helping to restore historic neighbourhoods of Kabul, where Stewart witnessed an Afghan craftsman, 73-year-old Ustad Abdul Hadi, carving a "crisp Islamic screen" and viewed the painstaking work of traditional calligraphers and potters.

But other areas of Kabul were in danger, including Murad Khane, which flourished in the 18th century but now is without paved roads, water or sewers, its buildings slumping precariously.

Stewart was determined to save it from total ruin.

It helped that Britain's Prince Charles was an old acquaintance who once hired him to tutor sons William and Harry.

An architecture enthusiast who shared Stewart's passion for preserving traditional Afghan arts and architecture, Charles met with President Hamid Karzai to discuss the possibilities.

For expertise he turned to Stewart, who had a plan and the background to carry it out.

Already experienced in restoration projects as a coalition deputy governor in southern Iraq, he saw the restoration of the old marketplace in the town of Amara win applause from local merchants and a carpentry school in Nasiriyah take "200 unemployed and often radical men from the streets and trained them in basic joinery.

"Almost all of them subsequently found work."

It was a blueprint for Afghanistan – and the Turquoise Mountain Foundation.

"This means that this city will be ready to welcome the citizens and artists of Afghanistan with restored buildings, improved infrastructure and a refurbished cultural centre," said International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, as the grant was announced last week in Kabul.

The Murad Khane restoration is "a project that would honour local culture rather than attacking it," Stewart says, adding that it would be "quick, flexible and visible and would generate as much employment as possible."

When Afghans see no progress, he points out, they quickly place the blame on Western countries that present themselves as rescuers.

But Stewart's plan was also risky.

It could be dismissed as fanciful by embittered Afghans who've suffered years of trauma and destitution.

And the owners of the crumbling edifices could see more profit in "McBuildings" than in carefully restored heritage sites.

With Afghans' general loss of skills – not to mention basic literacy – rebuilding also means a large-scale crash re-education program.

The project has passed its first tests.

It is regenerating the old town, saving historical buildings and setting up galleries for traditional craft businesses that could be Kabul's future Yorkville.

For now, a school and a health clinic have opened, new sewage drains have been laid and local men can find construction and garbage-clearing jobs that need no training.

Meanwhile, the foundation has attracted some of Afghanistan's greatest craft masters to teach new students almost-lost arts of woodcarving, calligraphy and ceramics at a Centre for Traditional Afghan Arts and Architecture. And it is reviving the trade in high-end Afghan products to compete on the world design market.

For Canada, which is struggling to chart a course in Afghanistan through a thorny path of bad news, Turquoise Mountain may be a peak experience.

"This is a project which can have real symbolic and political significance for the international community," Stewart says.

"It is a project that will bring a better life to poor men and women. It is also a chance for Canada to demonstrate its respect for Afghan culture and leave something that hopefully Afghans and Canadians will be able to point to with pride in 50 years' time."
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Two militants killed in Pakistan clash: army
Sun Oct 14, 6:56 AM ET
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani troops killed two pro-Taliban militants, including an Uzbek, on Sunday after they fired on a paramilitary checkpoint near the Afghan border, an army spokesman said.

The militants were killed while fleeing in a car after the attack on the post near North Waziristan's main town of Mir Ali, where about 250 people died in clashes last week.

"One Uzbek and one local militant were killed in retaliation while two wounded militants escaped," army spokesman Major-General Waheed Arshad said.

Violence has escalated in Pakistan's volatile northwest since July, when militants scrapped a peace deal and army commandos raided a radical mosque in the capital, Islamabad.

Pro-Taliban militants in neighboring South Waziristan have been holding more than 225 Pakistani troops captive since late August. Arshsad said efforts were continuing to secure their safe release.
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Women issues not forgotten in Afghanistan
HERAT CITY, Oct 13 (Pajhwok Afghan News): As coalition forces assist in building a secure nation with the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), unique issues Afghan women face in this country are being addressed as well.

Ten US military women recently met with Afghan women at an elementary school and the Women Training Centre in Herat City to find out what issues they are facing, and how the ANSF can assist them in their concerns.

When the Taliban led the Afghan government, women were not allowed to pursue education or work outside home. Now women and girls are attending schools throughout the country. Unfortunately, sometimes the new-found freedom comes with fear and complications.

During the visit to the elementary school, teachers asked for Coalition forces to help teach Afghan men the country benefits when women work outside of their home and receive education.

Teachers also asked for more school supplies. Because of inadequate supplies, some women write in pencil so they can erase their work and re-use the paper, one teacher said. The ladies at the Herat Women Training Centre shared many similar concerns.

When Senior Chief Petty Officer Darlene M. Gonzales, contracting team leader for the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command-West at Camp Stone in Herat, asked how the ANSF can help address their concerns, the answer was clear, but not necessarily simple.

Bring security for girls who are going out of home, said Sima Shir Mohammadi, head of the Department of Women Affairs in Herat. She said many Afghans have fears, but women are a little more scared. It doesnt help, she said, recalling the Taliban, who are more prevalent in some villages, are completely against women education.

After years of being suppressed by the Taliban, women do have more rights now and several are working in various jobs. What many men consider acceptable work for women, however, is limited to teaching, tailoring, and jobs that are done in a half-day schedule or inside home, Shir Mohammadi said. Many men here still look at the women and girls as objects meaning they belong to the men.

Many men believe when women spend time being educated, they are not serving the men, which is expected of them, Shir Mohammadi said. This causes problems in Afghan households, which often leads to domestic violence against women.

Another issue Sher Mohammadi hopes to resolve is keeping the Ministry of Women Affairs open to continue the growth of womens rights. She expressed concern over word she had received from members of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistans Parliament, about six months ago, that the Ministry of Women Affairs would only be funded for a year.

Mohammed Noor Akbary, a current member of the IROA Parliament, acknowledged in a telephone conversation that the parliament recently discussed the need for the Ministry of Women Affairs.  He said that in late September, however, they voted to keep the ministry intact, for now.

Sher Mohammadi contended that the existence of the Ministry for Women Affairs, which operates and funds the Women Training Center in Herat, is the Afghan womens way of taking on these challenges, in some regards.

Sher Mohammadi also suggested that one way to pass new ways of thinking is by educating the ANSF men and other Afghan government employees on the significant contributions women can make. The American women agreed that it is important to seek assistance in educating Afghan men.

Army Capt. Megan S. Detweiler, information operations officer for Task Force Phoenix in Kabul, told Sher Mohammadi and other Afghan women present that American women also faced challenges and a struggle for suffrage in the past, and they had to stand up for their rights.

While Sher Mohammadi and others like her continue to work toward educating the women, Gonzales assured her the Coalition will help in any way they can. For now, this often means providing basic learning materials, supplying copies of pamphlets and providing other supplies.
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NATO lists six key priorities for Afghanistan
NEW YORK, Oct 12 (Pajhwok Afghan News): A top US Army general and head of NATO operations in Afghanistan has listed out six top priorities for NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Prominent among them are equipping Afghan National Army (ANA), sustaining NATOs commitment, reinforcing development efforts, engaging Pakistan, counter-narcotics effort and a comprehensive approach.

At a Pentagon press conference on Wednesday, General Bantz Craddack, commander of the European Command, said he remained convinced that NATO and the international community were going to continue to deliver significant improvements to the quality of life of the Afghan people.

We're going to do this through a comprehensive approach. Let me give you what I think are the six keys here, key elements, that we've got to focus on -- we, NATO, ISAF, in conjunction then with other organizations -- on this comprehensive approach, he said. 

The most important part of the NATO strategy, he said, is to train and equip the Afghan National Army and Police.

We've got to put an Afghan face on security, he said and referred to a survey by the Asia Foundation. The survey found that nearly 90 percent of the Afghan people interviewed trust the Afghan national army.

We believe that it is well on its way to reaching the strength of about 70,000 by 2010. And that means filled, trained, equipped, competent leadership, capable of operating on their own, Craddack said.   

According to the minister of defence, the retention rates now are over 50 percent, and that's a steady improvement from days past.

The greatest single contribution is the improvement in the Afghan National Army. We're going to do more, building OMLTs, Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams, to help work with those battalions.

"That's much like the US embedded training teams. And we think again that by doing this will be the fastest road to direct security by the Afghans, which is essential for this reconstruction and development work, he said.   

The general said sustaining NATO's commitment is very important for Afghanistan. We are militarily prevailing. We routinely defeat these opposition militant forces, the Taliban, in combat actions.

"And that's why they have turned and chosen to adopt alternative strategies and tactics, those tactics of indiscriminate roadside bombings and suicide attacks, terrorist tactics if you will, that are taking a heavy toll on the very population they claim to represent: the civilians, Craddack said.   

We've got to maintain our military effort and support because we know, at the end, they cannot win without the support of the people. And we've got to convince the Afghan people that the Taliban era of fear and intimidation is over," he added.

He insisted: "We've made progress in lifting the caveats and restrictions that some NATO countries come in with their forces. We've substantially increased our overall troop strength.

The ISAF now is just under 40,000 soldiers. Appreciating the continued support made by the 37 nations that make up the ISAF force, the General said: but we have yet to fully realize the complete filling of our agreed statement of requirements, the numbers of troops and organizations and units we need on the ground.

The American general felt the international community as a whole must increase the development efforts in Afghanistan. We continue to stress that success in Afghanistan will never be measured by military victory.

"Overall success depends on offering a better way of life for the Afghan people. This means providing them jobs, electricity, roads, schools and health care, all vital to success, hr continued.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams, the PRTs that we have there can accomplish quick-impact projects. They build, for example, water wells. Medical support is provided. They deliver humanitarian aid where needed in cases of flooding and other types of support.

"But at the end of the day, it's the long-term investment and development by the international community, the creation of jobs and long-term opportunity, that will make the real difference, he said.   

Engaging Pakistan, Craddack said, is one of the crucial elements of success in Afghanistan. NATO, for its part, already has quite extensive military-to-military cooperation with Pakistan. And it is improving every day. I recently saw some of these positive outcomes and this cooperation when I visited a forward operating base on the border with Pakistan two weeks ago."

He said some of the US soldiers there explained in detail how they had noticed a decrease in border crossings by militants due to their joint efforts with the Pakistani military forces across the border.   

However, he acknowledged, it was true in many parts of the Afghan-Pakistan border region, there continued to be an offering of sanctuary for the insurgents, and as long as that sanctuary existed, NATOs task would remain difficult.

Though counter-narcotics efforts were not a primary responsibility of NATO, the general said, the alliance must find ways to impact all of the pillars that spawned the narco-terrorism problem.

According to him, NATO can provide support to the Afghan counter-narcotic forces by sharing information and intelligence with them, by providing logistical support, and when needed, bail them out of tough situations. 

Lastly, he said: We've got to have -- continued to stress and focus on development and maturation of a comprehensive approach. By this he meant a coordinated application of military and civilian instruments, including the United Nations, the World Bank, nongovernmental organizations, and international organizations.

Like NATO, all these organizations are making great contributions, but I think we still haven't done enough to bring together and integrate all those efforts. And we must do more to enhance the effectiveness and the efficiency of those organizations.

The effective application of this comprehensive approach by the whole of the international community is the means to enable peace in Afghanistan country and a people, as you know, that has been in conflict for more than three decades, he concluded. 
Lalit K. Jha
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US, UK say stability in Afghanistan a common goal
LONDON, Oct. 12 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Washington and London Thursday identified stability in war-battered Afghanistan, where the security situation has sharply plummeted in recent months, as a long-term commitment for them.

"Its in both nations interest to help create a stable and secure environment there," British Defence Secretary Des Browne told reporters here following talks with his US counterpart Robert Gates.

Defeating Taliban insurgents and ensuring a meaningful reconstruction campaign held the key to peace and stability in that country, added Browne, who stressed: Ultimately, politics is the answer.

He continued Afghanistan must develop "the government to deal with culture and with their issues. Our job is to give them the space to do that.

For his part, Gates said they conferred on many issues concerning Afghanistan during their meeting that also covered the situation in Iraq. We reviewed the status of NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operations and focused on the situation in parts of the south."

The issued would be taken up at a NATO ministerial conference, due in two weeks, Gates said, acknowledging: The UK is making a substantial contribution in Afghanistan -- some 6,000 troops, the second-largest contingent.

He continued the British forces were working closely with the Afghan army, taking the fight directly to the enemy. "They are making a difference to the people of Afghanistan and also playing an important role in civic development.

Reminded of a New York Times report that the US Marine Corps commandant has sought a pullout from Iraq to strengthen the force in Afghanistan, Gates replied: "I too have heard they are beginning to think about that, and thats all I heard.

But he hastened to remark: Ive seen no plan. No one has come to me with any proposals about it. My understanding is that, at this point, its extremely preliminary thinking on the part of perhaps the staff people in the Marine Corps. But I dont think at this point it has any standing.
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Pak military making real effort against extremism: US
NEW YORK, Oct12 (Pajhwok Afghan News): The United States has said that the Pakistan military is making real effort against extremism and terrorist groups operating in the country.

State Department spokesperson Tom Casey said in Washington: "In terms of the operations of the Pakistani military, certainly we recognize and respect the fact that the Pakistani military is making real efforts against extremism."

Responding to a question at the daily State Department briefing, Casey said: "If you look at the number of Pakistani soldiers who have been killed or injured in some of this fighting it's clear that this is a real, live conflict and one that they're actively fighting and actively engaged in."

He said the US would be certainly going to do what it can to help support and encourage those efforts.

Emphasizing on Afghan-Pak cooperation, Casey said: "We also need to make sure as well that we continue to work not just with the government of Pakistan but also with the government of Afghanistan through our trilateral mechanism to make sure that on both sides of the border countries are doing everything they can to eliminate this threat and to respond to it appropriately."

Replying to a question, the State Department spokesperson reiterated that the US was in favour of a stable and democratic Pakistan.

Observing that the decisions on Pakistan's political future are going to made by people themselves, Casey said: "We certainly have a clear and consistent message in our conversations, whether it's with government officials or opposition officials, and that's that we share the vision for Pakistan's future that's been laid out by President Musharraf and others, which is Pakistan as a peaceful, democratic, moderate Islamic state and one that works with us to be able to fight extremism and terrorism."
Lalit K. Jha
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Projects worth millions of dollars on the boil in Khost
KHOST CITY, Oct 12 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Calling 2007 the reconstruction year for the underdeveloped Khost province, Governor Arsala Jamal says projects costing millions of dollars are on the boil.

Praising what he described a 10n-folded increase in uplift funds for the province, the governor claimed the US had pledged millions of dollars to the reconstruction of the province this year.

"We have constructed buildings for five district headquarters and 12 police headquarters this year," Jamal pointed out in an exclusive chat with Pajhwok Afghan New. In Khost, not even a single district is without a new headquarters building," he claimed.

Paving roads in all districts was the most important project for the current year, he observed, saying the ongoing development work in Khost was a model as all districts had got paved roads within a year.

Work has already got under way on a road linking Ghulam Khan with Khost, revealed the governor, who promised the construction of Khost-Babrak Khana and Zazai-Maidan roads would begin shortly.

Arsala said they would construct 47 schools at the cost of $4.7 million this year in addition to digging up 400 water wells in the province.

Provincial Education Director Aziz Ahmad Hashimi remarked the construction of 47 buildings in one year would be unprecedented in the history of Khost, which has 180 schools and seminaries. Only 40% of Khost schools have proper buildings.

Provincial Water Supply Department head Engineer Abdul Mar Khan Lemar said they had built 32 water dams in Khost at the cost of about two million US dollars this year. The US embassy has pledged them a good deal of assistance this year, the governor added.

The US PRT based in the province supports most of the projects in Khost, Sr. Capt Adams said. He added the Khost PRT had received a greater budget this year. The Khost governor has presented us with proposals while other provinces did not. The donors were impressed by his proposals and allocated Khost a greater development budget.
Saboor Mangal
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