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August 11, 2008 

Pakistan intelligence helping Taliban: NATO general
by Bronwen Roberts Sun Aug 10, 10:42 PM ET
KABUL (AFP) - Pakistan's intelligence agency is helping the Taliban to pursue an insurgency in Afghanistan that has seen a 50 percent hike in attacks in some areas this year, the NATO commander here told AFP.

Kabul bomb kills 3 Afghans, wounds NATO soldiers
By RAHIM FAIEZ Associated Press August 11, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan - Officials say a suicide car bomb attack in Kabul has wounded NATO soldiers and killed at least three civilians.

Afghan, U.S. forces kill 25 Taliban, 8 civilians
August 11, 2008
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces killed 25 Taliban insurgents and eight civilians after an ambush in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said on Monday.

Afghan forces to assume security in Kabul
Bakhtar News Agency / August 11, 200
Afghan government forces are soon to take over responsibility for the security of the capital, Kabul, officials said, in a move that reflects the growing strength of the Afghan army and police.

Taliban win skirmish with Pakistani forces
By Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah The International Herald Tribune Monday, August 11, 2008
PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Taliban fighters forced Pakistani soldiers to retreat from a militants' stronghold near the border with Afghanistan over the weekend after a three-day battle sent civilians fleeing from government airstrikes.

U.S. Troops Train Afghans To Take Their Place
by Jackie Northam NPR (National Public Radio)
The first of two reports from Jackie Northam, who is embedded with the Special Forces unit.

Bold Afghan cop inspires admiration, mistrust, fear
Chicago Tribune By Kim Barker08/10/2008
KABUL, Afghanistan-Bravery, bluster keep general on front lines in fight against terror

Road Opens Afghan Market to Indian Goods
Bakhtar News Agency / August 11, 2008
India has finally completed a section of road that will open up Afghanistan to Indian trade, allowing Afghans to wean themselves off their forced dependence on Pakistani goods and routes.

Violence, graft halve Afghan foreign investment
August 11, 2008
(Reuters) - KABUL - The Taleban insurgency, corruption and poor infrastructure have halved potential foreign investment in Afghanistan and rising food prices could further add to insecurity, the governor of the central bank said on Monday.

Pop star helping Kabul destitute
By Bilal Sarwary BBC News, Kabul Monday, 11 August 2008
Bibi Roagoal is busy preparing her children for school.

Right and left, right and wrong
Ottawa Citizen, Canada Janice Kennedy Sunday, August 10, 2008
With its endlessly elasticity, language is indeed a marvel. We use it to communicate life-and-death information, to while away the time, to capture the sweetness of the morning, to soften grief, to give wings to brilliant ideas

War in Progress
The New York Times By RAYMOND BONNER August 10, 2008
When Bill Clinton briefed President-elect George Bush at the White House in December 2000, he enumerated six major security threats facing the United States. Three were: Al Qaeda

AFGHANISTAN: Hike in fuel price inflates cost of food
KABUL, 11 August 2008 (IRIN) - A sharp increase in fuel prices has pushed up the already high cost of food in Afghanistan making daily survival even more difficult for millions of vulnerable people.

Pakistani forces bomb houses near Afghan border
Yahoo News - Home By HABIB KHAN Associated Press Writer Sun Aug 10, 2008
KHAR, Pakistan-Pakistani forces bombed dozens of houses in a tribal region near the Afghan border Sunday, officials and witnesses said, in a military offensive that comes amid U.S. pressure

AFGHANISTAN: Justice Is Hard to Import
By Tarjei Kidd Olsen
OSLO, Aug 11 (IPS) - Norway has announced a small but significant grant for reforms of Afghanistan's justice sector, which observers say is still severely underdeveloped seven years after the U.S. invasion.

Afghan empire's last symbols under threat
By Sayed Salahuddin Sun Aug 10, 9:06 PM ET
GHAZNI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - For more than eight centuries the "Towers of Victory" -- monuments to Afghanistan's greatest empire -- have survived wars and invasions

Interior Sindh facing Taliban threat: Altaf
Dawn - National (Pakistan) By Our Correspondent Aug 10, 2008
HYDERABAD-Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain, who has been issuing statements about threat of Talibanisation in Karachi in recent weeks, has now warned against Taliban’s activities in Badin and other areas of Sindh.

'Rapist' escapes police custody
www.quqnoos.com Written by Farhad Balkhi Sunday, 10 August 2008
Three policemen arrested after man accused of raping young boy escapes
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Pakistan intelligence helping Taliban: NATO general
by Bronwen Roberts Sun Aug 10, 10:42 PM ET
KABUL (AFP) - Pakistan's intelligence agency is helping the Taliban to pursue an insurgency in Afghanistan that has seen a 50 percent hike in attacks in some areas this year, the NATO commander here told AFP.

The number of foreign fighters, including Europeans, is also increasing here while NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) still lacks the soldiers it needs, US General David D. McKiernan said in a weekend interview.

"There certainly is a level of ISI complicity in the militant areas in Pakistan and organisations such as the Taliban," the four-star general said, echoing allegations by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and others.

"I can't say to what level of leadership that goes to but there are indications of complicity on the part of ISI... to the extent that they are facilitating these militant groups that come out of the tribal areas in Pakistan."

Karzai has directly accused the ISI of fuelling the unrest in Afghanistan, which sees near daily militant attacks, but Pakistan has rejected the claim.

McKiernan, who took command of the 53,000-strong ISAF force in June and who led US troops into Iraq in 2003, said the increase in unrest in Afghanistan is in part because Afghan and international troops have pushed into new areas.

Insurgents have also changed their tactics to operate in smaller groups carrying out more attacks while militant sanctuaries in Pakistan have been allowed to grow and are sending more fighters across the porous border.

These include men who are not from the Pashtun tribe that straddles the border and from which the Taliban, who were in government in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, are largely drawn.

"Unfortunately we see a higher number of non-Pashtun, non-Afghanistan fighters this year than this time last year," McKiernan said.

"They are really from a variety of ethnic groupings: some are from areas in Pakistan, some are from places like Uzbekistan, or Chechnya, some are from Europe and some are from other Arab countries," the general said.

If Afghanistan's borders were secured and it were up to the Afghan people, the insurgency could be dealt with "rather quickly," McKiernan said.

"But when you have a problem of porous borders and fighters and weapons and resources and command and control and logistics being brought in from outside of Afghanistan, that adds a complicating context to the insurgency," he said.

McKiernan said it was likely insurgents would try to disrupt presidential elections due in Afghanistan next year and he could ask for extra troops during this time.

ISAF needs more soldiers for its task of providing security and to train the Afghan security forces, he said. McKiernan refused to give a figure but German NATO general Egon Ramms said in June that ISAF needs up to 6,000 more soldiers.

The restrictions that some ISAF nations impose on their soldiers meanwhile has curbed the force's battle effectiveness, he said.

Countries operating in Afghanistan have their own caveats: Germany for example will not send its soldiers from the relatively calm north to the more volatile south.

"We come with militaries that have advantages in command and control, in speed, in lethality, in logistics, in intelligence, in all those things," McKiernan said.

"If nations provide forces with restrictions, what it does is it decreases those advantages."

The length of the ISAF mission depends on when war-torn Afghanistan can take charge of its own security, the US general said.

"How fast we can get there, I don't know, but it is important that the international community remain committed to Afghanistan," he said.

There are, however, some provinces and districts where Afghan forces should be able to take over within the next few years with the international forces still available as back-up, McKiernan added.
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Kabul bomb kills 3 Afghans, wounds NATO soldiers
By RAHIM FAIEZ Associated Press August 11, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan - Officials say a suicide car bomb attack in Kabul has wounded NATO soldiers and killed at least three civilians.

Kabul provincial police chief Ayub Salangi says the Monday attack killed three Afghan civilians and wounded a dozen more.

A NATO spokesman says there are "some" NATO injuries from the suicide car bomb attack. He had no other immediate details.
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Afghan, U.S. forces kill 25 Taliban, 8 civilians
August 11, 2008
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces killed 25 Taliban insurgents and eight civilians after an ambush in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said on Monday.

The issue of civilian casualties has led to a rift between Afghanistan and its Western allies with President Hamid Karzai saying on Sunday that foreign airstrikes had only succeeded in killing ordinary Afghans and would not defeat the insurgency.

The Taliban launched multiple ambushes on a patrol in the Khas Uruzgan district of Uruzgan province on Sunday, the U.S. military said in a statement.

The militants "then fled into a neighbouring compound where they held 11 non-combatants hostage, including several children and an infant," it said.

The insurgents then fired on the coalition forces from the compound and the troops called in an airstrike, but the statement said they did not know there were civilians in the building.

International forces are permitted to call in airstrikes when they are under attack even if they cannot be 100-percent sure there are no civilians in the area and this is where most mistakes are made, NATO officials say.

Foreign forces say they do their very best to avoid killing innocent bystanders, but the perception among many, if not most, Afghans is that the troops do not take enough care and support for the presence of international troops is waning.

"The Taliban uses innocent civilians' homes, taking them by force to attack Afghan and coalition forces," the U.S. military quoted Uruzgan Police Chief Juma Gul as saying.

"If civilians get killed during these attacks, the responsibility falls on the Taliban and their terrorist sponsors," he said.

SUICIDE BOMB

Afghan and foreign military officials point out that far more civilians are killed by Taliban suicide and roadside bombs, but in aftermath of such attacks many Afghans blame the government and security forces for failing to stop them.

About 80 percent of the victims of suicide bombs are civilians, security analysts say.

A suicide car bomber targeting foreign troops killed three Afghan civilians and wounded 12 more on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul, on Monday, a private television station said.

It was unclear if any foreign troops among the casualties.

British and Italian troops had cordoned off the scene of the blast and firefighters were hosing down the wreckage of a vehicle, a Reuters witness said. A police official said the blast was caused by a suicide bomber traveling in a small car.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, a blast targeted a convoy of NATO-led forces in the northern province of Faryab on Monday, the provincial police chief said.

General Abdul Khalil Andarabi said initial reports showed that 10 civilians and two soldiers from the alliance were wounded in the blast in the heart of provincial capital. NATO soldiers had cordonned off the site, he said.

Separately, a roadside bomb killed a police officer and wounded two others on the southern outskirts of Kabul on Monday, police said.

Taliban insurgents have launched increasing numbers of suicide and roadside bomb attacks this year in their campaign against Afghan and foreign forces.

(Reporting by Ahmad Elham, Sayed Salahuddin and Jon Hemming; Editing by David Fogarty)
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Afghan forces to assume security in Kabul
Bakhtar News Agency / August 11, 200
Afghan government forces are soon to take over responsibility for the security of the capital, Kabul, officials said, in a move that reflects the growing strength of the Afghan army and police.

While the Taliban insurgency has surged this year, with more suicide and roadside bombs and more people killed than at anytime since 2001, Afghan forces are steadily growing in size and Kabul has seen fewer attacks in 2008 than in the same period last year. “Afghan security forces will soon begin to gradually takeover security of Kabul from international forces,” Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zaher Azimi told a news conference.

Some 70,000 foreign troops under the command of NATO and the US-led coalition are based in Afghanistan, fighting a Taliban insurgency to overthrow the pro-Western Afghan government.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is currently in overall charge of the security in the capital.

Neither the Defense Ministry, nor ISAF gave any precise time for the handover of security.

Some 2,500 people, including about 1,000 civilians, have been killed already this year, aid agencies say, and each of the last three months has seen more violent incidents than any month since US-led and Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001. Kabul has suffered high-profile attacks this year, such as the January suicide bombing of a hotel, a bid to kill President Hamid Karzai in April and the bombing of the Indian Embassy last month, but the number of incidents in the capital is down.

While violence has increased in Afghanistan this year, it is not spreading, an ISAF spokesman said. Some 73 per cent of clashes took place in only 10 per cent of districts, he said; the same districts where 70 per cent of the violence occurred last year.
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Taliban win skirmish with Pakistani forces
By Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah The International Herald Tribune Monday, August 11, 2008
PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Taliban fighters forced Pakistani soldiers to retreat from a militants' stronghold near the border with Afghanistan over the weekend after a three-day battle sent civilians fleeing from government airstrikes.

The pullback from Bajaur, a district in Pakistan's tribal regions where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have forged particularly close ties, came after the military began an offensive there late last week.

Military spokesmen said six soldiers had been killed, though the Pakistani Taliban put the number at 22. It was unclear how many civilians had died.

The clash was the second in two weeks between government forces and the Taliban. The army has been trying to push the Taliban out of Swat, an area east of the tribal regions where a two-month-old peace agreement between the government of North-West Frontier Province and the Taliban is in shreds.

There was some speculation among Pakistanis that the sudden offensive in Bajaur was aimed at satisfying the Bush administration, which has increasingly criticized Pakistan for not doing enough to stop Taliban fighters from crossing the border into Afghanistan to attack U.S. soldiers.

The Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force commanded by the Pakistani Army, tried to take back a strategic military post in Bajaur that the Taliban had captured last winter.

The post, Loe Sam, is about 15 kilometers, or 10 miles, from Damadola, a Pakistani town on the border, which the United States bombed in January 2006 in the belief that it would hit Ayman al-Zawahri, deputy leader of Al Qaeda. The strike set off protests across Pakistan.

Loe Sam has strategic significance because it provides access to a pass that leads to Kunar Province in Afghanistan. The area is used as an operating base by Faqir Muhammad, a senior member of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, Tehrik-i-Taliban. Muhammad is second in command to the leader of the group, Baitullah Mehsud.

The military used airstrikes to protect the soldiers as they retreated to Khar, the capital of Bajaur, said Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier of the Pakistani Army who until 2006 was in charge of security in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Shah criticized the army for not using enough men. "This was an ambitious undertaking," he said. "Why did they have such feeble strength of 200 in the convoy? For the Frontier Corps, 200 is nothing."

Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, a former interior minister whose ancestral village is near Bajaur, criticized the use of airstrikes. "This is pathetic and gruesome," he said.

By Sunday evening, the Taliban had begun digging trenches around Khar, Sherpao said, apparently in an effort to further cut off the Frontier Corps.

The trouble began when the first Frontier Corps convoy reached Loe Sam, Shah said. There, the soldiers were encircled by the Taliban.

At one point, according to accounts from officials in Peshawar, the Taliban drove away with a tank, a particularly humiliating feat.

The insurgents then attacked a relief convoy of reinforcements sent from Khar, using rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine-gun fire, according to residents who arrived in the nearby town of Risalpur on Saturday.

The Taliban also laid bombs along the road the convoy traveled, said Mohammed Khan, a timber merchant from the village of Sadiq Abad whose house was on the route. The battle started when the convoy stopped because of the bombs on the road.

"Then the Taliban were everywhere, in every place - they came and attacked the Frontier Corps," Khan said in Risalpur. "After the convoy stopped, there was fighting for two days. The Taliban have the natural advantage because there is so much greenery."

The maize crop in the fields, a month from harvest, was taller than an adult and provided perfect hideouts for the insurgents, he said.

Khan said he had fled with four of his six children, and an extended family of 18. He opposes the Taliban, he said, and along the way asked for protection at a government compound but was told it was for government officials only.

"Today we are homeless, shelterless and without education for our children," he said.

8 Afghan civilians die in fight

An airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in southern Afghanistan killed eight civilians, The Associated Press reported Monday, citing a statement by the U.S.-led coalition force.

Militants ambushed coalition and Afghan troops along a road in Uruzgan Province on Sunday, triggering a series of battles, the statement said. The militants then entered a compound of buildings, and coalition troops called for the airstrike, the statement said.

"They did not have knowledge of noncombatants in the buildings at that time," the statement said.

The battles and airstrike killed 25 militants, the coalition said, while 3 of the 11 civilians in the compound survived.
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U.S. Troops Train Afghans To Take Their Place
by Jackie Northam NPR (National Public Radio)
The first of two reports from Jackie Northam, who is embedded with the Special Forces unit.

Morning Edition, August 11, 2008 · U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan are involved in an ambitious project to turn thousands of Afghan soldiers into commandos. The effort to create an elite fighting force is part of the broader counter-insurgency strategy that U.S. military officials say is key in helping stabilize Afghanistan.

U.S. Special Forces, which have been constantly rotating through Afghanistan since they helped overthrow the Taliban in 2001, launched the commando program in the early spring of 2007.

Special Forces have a long history of training indigenous soldiers. The Afghans also had an interest in creating a special force within the Afghanistan National Army, says Col. Sean Mulholland, the commander of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan, known by the acronym CJSOTF-A.

Developing A Flexible Force

"A couple of years ago the Afghan government wanted to develop a Ranger-like or a special operations-like structure in the military," Mulholland says. "The ANA were large and laborious. The ANA is a good army, it's a developing army, but they need a smaller, more agile, flexible force. And so the commandos [were] the solution."

The initial commando training takes place in a remote military base in eastern Afghanistan called Camp Morehead, named after Special Forces Master Sgt. Kevin Morehead, who was killed in Iraq in 2003. The base has been used by forces of the various regimes that have ruled Afghanistan in recent history, including the Russians and the Taliban.

Now American Humvees and Ford Ranger trucks are parked outside one-story plywood classrooms. Inside, commando recruits are trained in specialty platoons including reconnaissance, medics and signals.

"Signal is probably one of the most difficult things to teach [the Afghan recruits], and a lot of it goes back to previous education," says a trim 35-year-old Special Forces major who is the camp commander. Anyone of his rank or lower is not allowed to be identified to reporters for security reasons. "It's difficult to explain the background of how a radio works. So we try to cut a lot of theory out of it and just take it to practical application: This is how it works, and this is how you should make it work."

Nearly 40 percent of the soldiers entering the commando program are illiterate, but there are night school courses at the camp where future commandos can learn to read and write.

For the next few months, the commando training program in Afghanistan is being overseen by the 7th Special Forces Group out of Fort Bragg, along with help from commandos from France and the United Arab Emirates.

'Lumps Of Clay'

The U.S. primarily advises, guides, organizes and oversees the camp, but much of the training in military strategy, tactics and skills falls to Afghan instructors, many of whom were originally trained in Jordan two years ago.

The recruits at the camp eat, sleep and live alongside each other for the rigorous 12-week course based on the Army Ranger battalion school in the U.S.

"Guys come in, and you got lumps of clay — they really don't know a lot about training and light infantry tactics," Mulholland says. "By week six, they're starting — it's kind of you tear them down and build them up again, it's the same thing. There's a lot of similarities between what we experience in Ranger school in the United States and what they're experiencing here in commando school."

Many of the Afghan soldiers show up with little more than the uniforms on their backs.

"We issue them uniforms, boots, helmets, weapons, vehicles, radios — everything that they're going to need," Mulholland says. The camp commander says when the commandos have finished their training and are attached to one of five regional ANA corps around the country, they are ready to go.

"They're fully equipped," Mulholland says. "All of this stuff here will all redeploy with them when they go." That includes the Humvees and other vehicles.

The Special Forces major agrees that the program costs a lot of money but says "you can't expect them to do the job we want them to do without having the right tools."

That job will include accompanying U.S. Special Forces on missions in some of the most remote and dangerous corners of Afghanistan. The new Afghan commandos will be trained to ambush or attack militant hideouts and bomb-making facilities, to capture or kill insurgents and to try to build rapport with people in villages where Islamist militants are present.

Battle-Hardened Commandos

So far, five Afghan commando battalions, known as Kandacks, have successfully passed through the gates of Camp Morehead. Each Kandack has 650 to 685 Afghan commandos from every region of the country.

Many of the commandos are already battle-hardened by the time they join the training program.

Command Sgt. Maj. Faiz Mohammed is 27 and has been in the army for most of his adult life. He has been shot seven times in combat.

Mohammed is one of the commandos who has excelled in the program. Soon he will be sent to the U.S. — first for English classes, then to Army Ranger School. Mohammed says he looks forward to the extra training as a way to improve the situation in Afghanistan.

"I want to change the old policy. I'll go to America. I'll learn special training and come back here, where I will teach my junior officers in the future," Mohammed says. "It will help change my country, my army — everything will be better."

'The Jewel Of The Army'

Col. Mohammed Fadeed Achmadi, the deputy commander of the Afghan commando brigade, was one of the first to graduate from Camp Morehead last year.

"Commando forces are, like we say, the jewel of the army," Achmadi says. "It's precious forces for the Afghan National Army. We have the best training, we have the best equipment, and we can conduct dangerous missions."

Once the Afghan commandos finish their initial training, they are sent on a joint mission with U.S. and other allied Special Forces. Then they're assigned to a battalion of the national army. Soon after, they rotate back into U.S. training camps for another six weeks to help expand and sharpen their skills.

U.S. trainers hesitate to compare the Afghan commandos with indigenous forces they've trained in other parts of the world.

"You have different cultural values, different cultural norms," says a U.S. Special Forces major and commander of an advanced operations base in the eastern city of Jalalabad. "I'd say the best way to describe them is they're steadfast in their improvement. They're dedicated. We really do see them as Afghani patriots, and I think the way ahead is pretty bright. Their heart is in the right place."

The Afghans express pride in what they're doing.

"We are here as a QRF — quick reaction force," says Capt. Hazarmee, the commander of the 2nd commando company at the Jalalabad base. The base is being built up and will soon include dining and laundry facilities and more sleeping quarters.

"We are doing operations in four different provinces around here," Hazarmee says. "As soon as we get word that we're needed, we can get ready in 20 to 25 minutes and can stop any kind of bad activities."

Hazarmee indicates that he would like to see the Afghans build on their potential, such as building better local intelligence networks that could disrupt insurgent activity.

Invaluable Knowledge

Afghan commandos outnumber American and other Special Forces units on assault missions 4-to-1. A 29-year-old detachment commander at the Jalalabad base and a captain in the Green Berets says it's important to put an Afghan face on the missions. The Afghans have an inherent — and invaluable — knowledge of the terrain and the language.

"And I think that's why the commandos are so important," the captain says. "They are Afghans — they understand the country; they understand the history. They can interact with the population in a way that no outsider ever could."

The captain says the Afghans also understand local tactics.

If the Special Forces were looking for a weapons cache in a village, for example, "we may hide it in a wall or something, in our own home back in the United States," the captain says. "The Afghans know they wouldn't hide it in their house — they'd keep it away, because we'd find it in their house. So they understand the customs, the way people actually do things, and it assists us in our planning."

Lt. Col. Chris Karsner, a Special Forces commander, says it's important that the Afghans play a major role in the struggle for stability in their country.

"Insurgency and counter-insurgency is an intimate struggle in the nation and, ultimately, it has to be an Afghan fight," Karsner says. It's the Afghan commandos with their specialized training who will be critical in the national effort to secure Afghanistan, he says.

It will be awhile, however, before the Afghan commandos will be able to operate without help, especially from Americans, Mulholland says.

"You need to feed them, you need to re-supply them, you need to give them equipment, you need to give them mobility, cars, trucks, helicopters," Mulholland says. "There's a lot of pieces that we're missing there."

Somewhere down the line, it is hoped the Afghan commandos will be able to provide relief to U.S. Special Forces, which are feeling the strain from constant tours of duty in Afghanistan, but Mulholland predicts that the American elite fighting forces will be here for years to come, working side by side with the Afghan commandos.
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Bold Afghan cop inspires admiration, mistrust, fear
Chicago Tribune By Kim Barker08/10/2008
KABUL, Afghanistan-Bravery, bluster keep general on front lines in fight against terror

The general pushed through traffic jams like a wrecking ball. His driver, hands scarred by a suicide bomber, honked the horn incessantly and rammed the green police pickup within inches of other vehicles.

But most drivers moved only when they recognized the general in the passenger's seat: Ali Shah Paktiawal, his eyes bulging slightly, his loaded 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistol on the dashboard in front of him.

Paktiawal looked out the window at the people, wondering who might want to kill him. Some smiled and waved. Some looked scared. Both reactions are common for the city's head of criminal investigations, known for doing whatever it takes to get his man, including things that would never fly in Chicago.

"If I had an armored car, believe me, no one would be able to escape me," said Paktiawal, who did not wear a bulletproof vest, despite two sitting on the floor. "I would follow the Taliban into the provinces."

Paktiawal, 41, shows just what the Afghan police are up against. He has arrested a potential suicide bomber drinking tea at the Kabul zoo. He's been the victim of as many as a dozen assassination attempts. He's been poisoned, shot at and nearly blown up.

Like the rest of the nation's 82,000 police, Paktiawal is on the front lines of the country's war against terrorism. Throughout Afghanistan, 1,394 police were killed in 2007 and the first half of 2008—four times the number of slain Afghan soldiers.

But police have also been plagued with constant complaints of corruption, of demanding bribes even from drivers at traffic circles. Such corruption, analysts say, causes Afghans to dislike their government and in some cases prefer the swift justice of the Taliban, driven from power in late 2001. The U.S. has recently taken on more responsibility for training Afghan police, and American soldiers are now trying to reform the force, district by district.

'James Bond of Kabul' In some ways, Paktiawal, rough-edged and potty-mouthed, is the best that the Afghan police can offer. Many government employees are known for coming in late and leaving early. Not Paktiawal. He said he has not been home in 40 days, though his wife and three children live less than 2 miles away. Instead, he sleeps in a bed at the office and works late into the night.

A weekly Afghan magazine has dubbed Paktiawal "the James Bond of Kabul," because he seems to be everywhere at once.

Paktiawal likes to be first on the scene, busting in doors, charging into crime scenes in front of lower-ranked officers. During one hostage crisis in Kabul, he berated the police for not going inside. "Do I have to do everything myself?" he announced, before kicking in the front door, freeing the captive and arresting the hostage-taker.

The 20 police assigned to guard Paktiawal say they work long hours in dangerous conditions. Hamed Hodkhail, 23, whose nickname is Bulldozer, showed off three bullet scars. "Everyone wants to kill him," Hodkhail said. "I have to protect him."

But Paktiawal also shows just how far the Afghan police have to go. Sometimes, his zeal leads to problems. Paktiawal has occasionally jailed people simply because they were near a crime. When a mass grave was discovered near Kabul, he was the first person to leap inside, pulling out bones and arranging skulls in a neat row for Afghan journalists to film.

Human-rights observers were horrified at the destruction of evidence.

When journalist Masood Forogh Herawy showed up at a raid, a surprised Paktiawal pointed a gun at his head.

"He said, 'If you move, I will kill you,' " Herawy recalled. "I said, 'Sir, it's Masood.' He's very close with me, he's very friendly with me. He swore at me a bit and let me go."

A woman from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission recently visited Paktiawal at his office. After meeting her briefly, Paktiawal sat beneath the two largest photos of President Hamid Karzai that any Afghan official is known to have.

"I know your human rights is against killing," Paktiawal told the woman. "But if it's a thief, a murderer, a terrorist, a kidnapper, and they run, and I tell him to stop and he doesn't—shoot and kill. S and K. Finished." He clucked his tongue. The men sitting in the armchairs in his office laughed. This justice made sense in Afghanistan.

'Law is law' Victims also come—at this police station, Paktiawal's office is the front counter. A 15-year-old girl sobbed as she explained that she ran away from her 13-year-old husband because his family beat her. A man tried to persuade Paktiawal not to prosecute two police officers who had stolen his money and two cell phones, because they had returned them.

Paktiawal repeated his mantra—"law is law"—and insisted that the police be prosecuted and that the girl's family not be allowed to sort out her marriage outside of court.

Meanwhile, Paktiawal issued orders to arrest a parliament member accused of protecting his son, who was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. He received a call from the girl's father, who came to Kabul to meet with Karzai.

"Right is right, wrong is wrong," Paktiawal told the man, who was scared. "I don't care who he is. Don't be afraid, I will support you. Be a man."
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Road Opens Afghan Market to Indian Goods
Bakhtar News Agency / August 11, 2008
India has finally completed a section of road that will open up Afghanistan to Indian trade, allowing Afghans to wean themselves off their forced dependence on Pakistani goods and routes.

The 218km Zaranj-Delaram Highway in the south-west of Afghanistan will soon by handed over to the Afghan government, opening up a trade route between the Iranian sea port of Chabahar and Kabul. The new route will allow Afghanistan to bypass the often perilous, expensive and slow Pakistani trade route with Indian goods shipped to Iran. Islamabad refuses to allow Indian goods bound for Afghanistan to travel across Pakistani soil and the new route through the southern Iranian city of Chabahar will allow India to ship goods to Afghanistan far more efficiently. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, hailed the construction of the road as ’’a major test of our joint resolve.’’

The construction of the road has cost India more than money. Indian engineers have regularly been killed and kidnapped while completing the transport link. Prime Minister Singh described the road as a symbol of India-Afghanistan unity and a tribute to the Indian and Afghan lives lost in making this project a reality. ’’The road has brought our two peoples closer together,’’ Dr Singh said. The Indian embassy bombing in Kabul last month, which killed more than 50 people and wounded scores more, threatened to upset Indian-Afghan relations, but India has continually vowed to maintain its aid to Afghanistan. Kabul, New Dehli and the US have all blamed Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI, for the bombing.
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Violence, graft halve Afghan foreign investment
August 11, 2008
(Reuters) - KABUL - The Taleban insurgency, corruption and poor infrastructure have halved potential foreign investment in Afghanistan and rising food prices could further add to insecurity, the governor of the central bank said on Monday.

Afghanistan has seen annual average growth of 14 percent since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taleban in 2001, but expectations of 13 percent growth this year have been scaled back to 7.5 percent due to a harsh winter followed by drought.

"First of all we are losing foreign investment because of the security situation," Central Bank Governor Abdul Qadeer Fitrat told Reuters in an interview.

"We could have attracted on average between $2 billion a year and $3 billion a year in foreign investment both through the Afghan diaspora and foreign investors, but now ... it is less than 1 billion a year," he said.

Some Afghan businessmen who had returned to the country after 2001, were now moving their assets abroad and fewer foreign companies were bidding for infrastructure projects, Fitrat said.

Violence has surged this year with more clashes in each of the last three months than in any month since 2001.

The Taleban campaign to overthrow the pro-Western Afghan government and drive out foreign troops has made much of the south and east too dangerous to travel in and added security measures push up the costs of doing business.

Corruption also adds to costs, so there is no level playing field neither for foreign investors nor Afghans from abroad.

Afghanistan is placed 172nd out of 180 countries in Transparency International's corruption perception index.

"Those who pay bribes will be successful, will get land, will get access to electricity," said Fitrat. "Those who do not know how to bribe will fall behind."

Food Shortage

World Bank President Robert Zoellick last month called on the Afghan government to follow promises to crack down on corruption with action, and Fitrat, himself a former World Bank advisor, said President Hamid Karzai had begun to tackle the problem by appointing "clean" officials to high-level posts.

Despite the problems, Afghan gross domestic product has more than doubled from $4.5 billion in 2004 to more than $10 billion projected for the current Afghan year which ends in March 2009, the governor said.

The government, while still reliant on aid for around 90 percent of its budget, has increased revenue collection so that taxes on businesses in the formal sector and their employees now account for some 50 percent of domestic income compared to less than 20 percent in 2002.

Agricultural production has also increased significantly, but has gone from 70 percent of GDP in 2002, to 50 percent of GDP now due to the even larger growth in other sectors, especially construction, banking and telecommunications.

But the harsh winter which killed about 1,000 people and many times more livestock, coupled with poor rains at the time when crops were germinating threaten to cause food shortages in a country which is already among the poorest in the world.

High world food and fuel prices only add to the problem, contributing to inflation currently running at 35 percent.

"I don't expect famine, but I expect quite significant shortages of food unless the government purchases some significant amounts of food," Fitrat said.

The government plans to spend $50 million to stockpile wheat for emergencies, he said, but "donor countries must also address this more than anything else, because it will destabilise the government and it will destabilise the current status quo."

Unless the problem is addressed, Fitrat said, there was a danger that food shortages could add to insecurity and further damage the economy, sending Afghanistan into a vicious circle of violence.
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Pop star helping Kabul destitute
By Bilal Sarwary BBC News, Kabul Monday, 11 August 2008
Bibi Roagoal is busy preparing her children for school.

She is one of more than 50,000 Afghan widows struggling against the effects of war.

The mother-of-four, who is 28, lives in a house on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul.

She recently had a special visitor to extend a helping hand - and not just your average foreign aid worker.

He was Farhad Darya, one of Afghanistan's most popular singers and a household name.

Mr Darya, who had been living in exile, was one of the first singers to return to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taleban in 2001.

Now, the 46-year-old celebrity runs a charity named Kochah, meaning street in Dari, to supplement the incomes of Kabul widows and their children.

Change for better

Kochah provides widows with $50 a month to keep their children off the street and help them receive education.

"My daughter used to collect bread from other families and my son gathered rubbish from a nearby American base for firewood," says Bibi Roagoal, who lost her first husband to a suicide attack four years ago.

Her second marriage - to her late husband's brother - ended in tragedy when he died in a car crash.

But now the monthly donation from Kochah has changed Bibi Roagoal's life for the better. Her children attend school and the family has money for food.

"Only a few months ago, this would not have been possible," says the widow. Her smile and excitement refuse to leave her face. "My children go to school now so they won't be illiterate like me."

Thousands of widows and orphans are a legacy of Afghanistan's many wars which have claimed countless lives, among them many husbands and fathers.

Bread-winners

According to the United Nations, there are 37,000 street children in Afghanistan's capital. Nearly all are fatherless.

In an almost exclusively male-dominated society with little opportunity for women to find employment, many fatherless children are the main bread-winners for their families.

They work year-round - under burning sun or in freezing snow - instead of going to school.

And most of them are engaged in odd jobs.

Ajmal - a witty 13-year-old who enthusiastically sells gum on the outskirts of Kabul - says his biggest wish is that he could attend school.

"My family relies on my work," he says. "So I try to sell as much as I can. I wish I could focus more on my school, but I can't afford to."

There are also many who do not work and provide for their mothers and siblings by begging.

Like Hussain, 14, for whom begging is an accepted fact of life. He would attend school if he could, but instead spends 10 hours a day begging on the streets of Kabul.

"I tried to work," he says "so my family could live an honourable life, but my boss at the shop paid me very little. I tried a few other jobs, but finally I decided to beg.

"I have always wanted to be a teacher. I still have hopes that our government will help the poor like us.''

Problem of funding

The monetary help Kochah is able to provide comes from Darya's concerts and private donations.

Darya says Kochah is a non-profit organisation, and that he absorbs the administrative costs himself.

However, he says, funding is not easy to come by.

''There are thousands of Afghan traders around the world and they spend thousands of dollars everyday without thinking, but when we approach them about Kochah, they don't give," he says.

"A lot of Afghans in the West promise help, but few follow through.''

Kochah aims to assist 2,000 widows. So far, it has managed to help somewhere between 250 and 300.

Says Bibi Roagoal: "I pray for peace in my country all the time, because war took everything away from me.

"I don't want another mother to be widowed, or their kids orphaned."
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Right and left, right and wrong
Ottawa Citizen, Canada Janice Kennedy Sunday, August 10, 2008
With its endlessly elasticity, language is indeed a marvel. We use it to communicate life-and-death information, to while away the time, to capture the sweetness of the morning, to soften grief, to give wings to brilliant ideas -- to do all sorts of wondrous things.

Think of the poets and great novelists, think of the essayists who have given heft to the notion that the pen can indeed be mightier than the sword, and you understand immediately the awesome power of the word.

But there's a flip side, of course. Language can also be used to wound, to lie and, ironically, to silence.

(We could focus on the positive, but that wouldn't feel right. While the drizzling, drenching, relentlessly grey clouds hover over this summer that isn't, it suits the mood better somehow to focus on the negative.)

This summer, language has been playing the usual political games, of course, although that's hardly news. "Political language," as George Orwell noted more than 60 years ago, "is designed to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Listen to Stephen Harper and Stéphane Dion blustering their respective ways toward a possible fall election. Listen to Foreign Minister David Emerson, who recently announced that Canada would likely increase its already disproportionate troop presence in Afghanistan. He was only "disappointed" by the massive Kandahar jailbreak in June that saw the escape of hundreds of Taliban militants -- from a prison Corrections Canada warned about -- and all his briefings have indicated "that we're not going backwards."

Let the bells ring.

But language is also regularly twisted into service by conservative pundits (who now dominate the media, no matter how much they demur) to take their customary swipes at all the lost souls who happen not to share their views.

That would be fine if the swipes were genuine debate, but usually they're not. A July 26 National Post column by George Jonas, conservative curmudgeon extraordinaire, is a good example.

Writing about liberalism -- which he says has deteriorated into "loony-liberalism, a kind of ideological ménage a trois between Timothy Leary, Karl Marx and Al Gore" -- he laments its poisonous presence in Western societies, where "matriarchal, environmentalist, multicultural, anti-male, anti-family, anti-individual and public-hygiene shibboleths are enforced by Orwellian regulatory agencies, commissions and tribunals, better known as the smoke-, smut-, seat-belt-, thought-, language-and calorie-police."

See what I mean about the perversion of language? This is clever stuff, wry enough, even, to draw near-smiles from dour liberals. But you can see how its vast blanket of condemnation stifles all possibility of debate, and does so with nothing more than a casual sneer.

It damns those of us who believe humans should try to live, personally and collectively, according to principles of equality, compassion and justice -- in other words, live out a fundamentally liberal philosophy of helping the weak among us, correcting imbalances and righting old wrongs. Even if we sometimes seem a bit goofy in the process.

It suggests liberals are cretins -- scary ones, to boot -- who lack the virtuous smarts of those who seem to believe that all change should be vetted to ensure there's no weakening impact on the privileged and the comfortable.

Of course, Jonas is not alone in his conviction that only the truly right-thinking are worthy of intellectual respect, even if he's a pretty vocal exponent of it.

You have only to listen to conservative commentary from across the continent on this summer's news. Barack Obama and the notion of change? Bad. Female priests and bishops? Bad. Teenaged citizens being interrogated and imprisoned without trial in foreign jails? Not so bad.

Interestingly, many of those who think this way rely on the sly language of dismissive contempt for their high-minded crusade, trying with their scorn to isolate, marginalize and remove from the realm of credibility all those whose world views tend to clash with their own. An enabling little lexicon has even been developed to this effect, one that you routinely see in newspaper columns and hear on talk radio.

People who dare to believe in the possibility of progress and the potential for good that can lie in change -- such folks are mere "gliberals" at home in a post-modern, post-Christian, post-historical, post-good-old-days universe. Those concerned about gender equality are "feminazis."

And so on.

(One of the more curious phenomena in all this is the almost comic implication of original thought. When you hear these neologisms flung out, you can be sure that the thundering zealot uttering them will pronounce the words with a weightiness suggesting they are his own. The talk-radio hosts are the worst. Google "gliberal" and you get 7,000 hits, "feminazi," 157,000. So much for originality.)

Rush Limbaugh, that great keeper of the far-right flame in the United States, has observed that, these days, "we conservatives are the ones standing for free speech." (Never mind that Ann Coulter says a "baseball bat" is "the most effective way" to talk to liberals.)

As long as free speech is about marginalizing your opponents and engaging in delusions of proprietary intellectual grandeur.

For all its glory and mighty potential, language really does have an ugly flip side.

Especially when it turns the crank of a fed-up soul who is unashamedly liberal, unapologetically feminist, hopelessly post-modern and indisputably post-middle-aged.

And all of the above during this, the summer of our discontent.

Janice Kennedy's column appears here weekly.

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War in Progress
The New York Times By RAYMOND BONNER August 10, 2008
When Bill Clinton briefed President-elect George Bush at the White House in December 2000, he enumerated six major security threats facing the United States. Three were: Al Qaeda, nuclear tensions between Pakistan and India, and Pakistan’s links to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

In his appropriately titled “Descent Into Chaos,” Ahmed Rashid says the Clinton administration bears some responsibility for where we find ourselves today in South and Central Asia. It had blown “hot and cold when it came to Afghanistan and chasing Al Qaeda,” had “no coherent strategy for undermining the Taliban regime” and had tilted strongly toward India over Pakistan. C.I.A. officers had made only a handful of trips to Afghanistan during the Clinton years, according to Rashid, and no one in the agency spoke Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic group.

But the real target of Rashid’s blistering critique is the Bush administration, and particularly Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld insisted on bringing Afghanistan’s notorious warlords into the government. He blocked a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan. He opposed expanding the multinational International Security Assistance Force to work beyond Kabul because, he claimed, Europeans did not want to. “A lie,” says Rashid, a journalist who has also been a participant in some of the events he writes about. And the litany goes on throughout this timely book.

Pakistan, Rashid explains, supported the Taliban when they were in power, in order to keep Afghanistan in Pakistan’s corner against India. Since 9/11, the country’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, better known as I.S.I., has been duplicitous, at best. It continues to provide sanctuary and military support for the Taliban, even to this day, while arresting some Arabs among their fighters to appease Washington.

Rashid’s indictment of the Bush administration, and his scathing criticism of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, are persuasive. But in making his case, he sometimes reaches too far. He says, for instance, that the White House sought the extradition of Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the convicted murderer of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. “Pakistan refused,” Rashid writes, disapprovingly.

The United States did in fact make a request for his extradition, but it was largely pro forma, I was told later by a senior American official who had been involved in the negotiations. The Bush administration wanted Sheikh tried in Pakistan, the official said, so that he would not have the legal rights he would enjoy in the United States, and so that he could more easily be sentenced to death if convicted. (He was indeed tried and sentenced to death, though the sentence has not yet been carried out.)

Rashid’s earlier book, “Taliban” (2000), was an invaluable introduction to a group that most Americans were only vaguely aware of before 9/11. “Descent Into Chaos” does not measure up. It is a well-written, encyclopedic history of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it is much too long; any impact the book might have is diluted by an avalanche of details and names — and that’s a pity since the public needs to know more about Pakistan and Afghanistan.

John McCain and Barack Obama have both said they will send more troops to Afghanistan. Their agreement on this issue makes a real debate unlikely. Yet, if there is one thing we should have learned from Iraq, it is that we should have a serious debate before we go to war or, in this case, expand a war. Rashid supports a greater military commitment, as well as more money for development. The Taliban resurgency could have been avoided with more troops for security and with more money, better spent, for nation building, Rashid argues. But maybe the United States is just not capable of nation building. It is certainly hard to find a success since Germany and Japan. This book is likely to leave many readers with the feeling, “Whoa, do we want to send more Americans to fight and die there?”

Try this for a sobering thought. According to Rashid, “Afghanistan is not going to be able to pay for its own army for many years to come — perhaps never.” The country remains in the grip of warlords and drug traffickers. Rashid generally admires President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, whom he calls “my friend.” Ultimately, however, he acknowledges that Karzai has been unwilling to take on the drug traffickers. Many were “his political allies or close friends,” and, Rashid writes, Karzai’s brother Wali was said to be mixed up with the drug lords.

The problems in Pakistan may be worse. The country suffers from an “identity crisis,” Rashid says, and has removed from its schoolbooks references to the tolerance and secularism preached by its revered founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Pakistan’s elite have shown little concern for the poor. “Sixty years after independence, Pakistan’s literacy rate is an appalling 54 percent, with female literacy at less than 30 percent,” Rashid notes. Indentured labor is still pervasive; I personally saw women and children making bricks in the blazing sun for a few dollars a day.

The current political situation is unstable. The Bush administration considered Musharraf, who took power in a bloodless coup in 1999, indispensable, and so did not push for democratic reforms, Rashid observes. But given the record of civilian governments in Pakistan, might this have been a reasonable conclusion? For most of the decade before Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were the prime ministers. Their governments were marked by enormous corruption (Bhutto’s more so than Sharif’s) and ineffectiveness. Today, the most powerful civilian leaders in the country are Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and Sharif, whom Rashid describes as “right-wing, anti-American and close to the Islamic parties.”

Clearly, we need to have a debate about America’s strategic interests in the region. We want to keep Afghanistan and Pakistan from becoming havens for terrorist groups, and that may require limited military assistance. But as Rashid suggests, the next administration will have to make a major diplomatic effort as well.

One of the most valuable contributions of “Descent Into Chaos” is its discussion of Kashmir, the region that has been in dispute between India and Pakistan since independence in 1947. It is the linchpin of the tense relations between Pakistan and India, and Pakistan, as Rashid explains, basically views its Afghan policy through the prism of India. It seems evident that the United States will have to become more involved in achieving a settlement in Kashmir, perhaps through a special envoy like Christopher Hill, who, with patience and persistence, has achieved breakthroughs in negotiations with North Korea.

“Descent Into Chaos” can help the next administration understand the mistakes of the past, but it will have to do more than that to achieve stability in the future. For example, a President McCain or President Obama should consider negotiating with the Taliban, as repugnant as that sounds. Rashid notes that there are moderates among them who want no truck with Al Qaeda. Similarly, the next secretary of state should consider something equally radical: rotating the ranking diplomats among Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, with, say, two years in each capital. This will help ward off “clientitis,” an occupational disease that weakens the effectiveness of too many ambassadors.

Such bold, imaginative initiatives will be necessary, whoever becomes president. Otherwise, four or eight years from now, an outgoing McCain or Obama administration will probably be delivering the same briefing that Clinton gave Bush in 2000.

Raymond Bonner is a Times correspondent living in London.
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AFGHANISTAN: Hike in fuel price inflates cost of food
KABUL, 11 August 2008 (IRIN) - A sharp increase in fuel prices has pushed up the already high cost of food in Afghanistan making daily survival even more difficult for millions of vulnerable people.

Over the past several weeks, the price of a litre of diesel has risen by 10 percent and petrol by 11 percent, a government official said.

"Fuel prices have risen after Central Asian countries - particularly Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia -banned fuel exports to Afghanistan until September," Azizullah Rozi, director of the state petroleum and gas enterprise, told IRIN in Kabul on 10 August.

Landlocked by six neighbours, including oil-rich Iran to its west, the Afghan government imports all its fuel from Central Asian countries.

However, over 30 percent of the estimated 1.6 million tonnes of petroleum products – such as diesel, petrol and propane gas - used in the country every year is imported illegally and/or smuggled from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan, officials said.

"We don't have a formal contract with Iran on oil imports but merchants usually smuggle diesel and gas from Iran and petrol from Pakistan," said Rozi, adding that the fuel illegally imported was much more expensive than legal imports from Central Asia.

Afghanistan is also largely dependent on food imports from neighbouring nations, particularly Pakistan and Iran.

Impact on food prices

The rise in fuel prices has increased transportation costs and in turn inflated already high food prices in Afghan markets.

Traders at Kabul's main food bazaar said the price for 50kg of wheat flour had risen from 1,600 Afghanis (US$32) to 1,750 Afghanis ($35) in the past two weeks.

The rise in food prices bodes ill for millions of people in a country where, according to a National Human Development Report, almost half its estimated 26.6 million population live on less than $2 a day.

At least four million most vulnerable people have already been pushed into the "high-risk food-insecurity" category largely due to unprecedented increases in food prices, according to UN and government officials.

UN agencies and the Afghan government have appealed for over $400 million to mitigate the humanitarian impacts of high food prices and drought.

Aid delivery cost up

The increase in fuel prices had also affected food aid delivery to vulnerable communities across the country.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said it has increased by 10 percent the payment of commercial transporters carrying the organisation's food aid consignments around the country.

Earlier, WFP had sought extra funding to compensate for increased logistics costs.
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Pakistani forces bomb houses near Afghan border
Yahoo News - Home By HABIB KHAN Associated Press Writer Sun Aug 10, 2008
KHAR, Pakistan-Pakistani forces bombed dozens of houses in a tribal region near the Afghan border Sunday, officials and witnesses said, in a military offensive that comes amid U.S. pressure for Pakistan to crack down on militants.

Days of clashes have reportedly killed at least 100 insurgents and nine paramilitary troops in the area, an insurgent stronghold considered a possible hiding place for al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri.

Details have been scarce about the military offensive in Bajur.

Sardar Khan, a local police official, said two spells of aerial bombing destroyed about 40 houses in several villages. He said bombs also struck a school occupied by Taliban fighters in Loi Sam, a village that has been a key focus of the fighting.

Two area residents, Sher Zamin and Attaullah Khan, said army planes and helicopters dropped bombs and shells, apparently on suspected Taliban positions.

Meanwhile, an Associated Press reporter in Khar, the main town in Bajur, saw Taliban militants patrolling and staking out positions on roads with rocket launchers, heavy machine guns and, in some places, anti-aircraft guns.

There is increasing pressure from the West on Pakistan's government to act against Taliban and al-Qaida strongholds in its frontier region with Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials have sought peace agreements in the border region in hopes of curbing Islamic extremists who have been blamed for a wave of suicide attacks across the country in the past year.

NATO contends the cease-fire deals have allowed militants based in the frontier region to step up attacks in Afghanistan, while U.S. officials warn that al-Qaida leaders hiding along the border could be plotting another Sept. 11-style attack on the West.

The Bajur offensive came in the wake of a militant assault Wednesday on an outpost manned by security forces. Officials said those initial clashes killed 25 militants and two troops.

Conflicting casualty figures were reported Sunday.

A paramilitary Frontier Corps statement said nine troops and at least 100 militants were killed in the last four days. But a military intelligence official placed the number of troops dead at 13. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Maulvi Umar, a Pakistani Taliban spokesman, claimed the militants had handed over 22 bodies belonging to security forces in the last three days after pleas from tribal elders.

___
Associated Press Writer Riaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.

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AFGHANISTAN: Justice Is Hard to Import
By Tarjei Kidd Olsen
OSLO, Aug 11 (IPS) - Norway has announced a small but significant grant for reforms of Afghanistan's justice sector, which observers say is still severely underdeveloped seven years after the U.S. invasion.

Norway's contribution of six million dollars will go to Afghanistan's justice sector reform programme, with a total cost of 27 million dollars. It is intended for everything from legal reform and staff education to rehabilitating buildings, providing computers and other communication equipment, and creating legal assistance offices to aid the most vulnerable such as women, nomads and refugees.

"There are serious challenges as regards training, infrastructure and all these issues. After all, Afghanistan has faced constant conflict for the past three decades," police advisor Henning Høgseth at the Norwegian Foreign Policy Institute (NUPI) told IPS.

"The reform of the judiciary has gone really slowly. Norway's foreign department has sent judges and state lawyers and prison officials to train the Afghans, but few other countries have contributed trainers for any part of the judiciary at all. Then there is a challenge as regards international jurisprudence and the Afghan constitution, which are not completely compatible, as well as local traditions -- the elder councils and Sharia laws," he said.

On top of this the security situation in many parts of Afghanistan appears to be spiralling downhill due to a rise in banditry, as well as an increase in attacks by Taliban insurgents and their allies in the south and east. In a recent statement 100 aid agencies warned that increased instability was threatening to make it impossible to operate in some areas of the country.

"Justice sector reform is central to efforts by the Afghans and the international community to build a sustainable state founded upon the rule of law and a democratic system of governance, but progress is affected by the security situation," the foreign department said in a written statement to IPS, without elaborating.

"Increased violence will of course affect reform efforts," Høgseth said. "Last year almost a thousand policemen were killed in attacks by bandits and the Taliban, and if the mainly bandit attacks on help convoys across the country now begin to increase, it will have an enormous effect on the general situation," he said.

Justice reform is one of the so-called pillars of the Afghan government's U.N.-conceived Security Sector Reform framework (the others relate to rebuilding the police and army, battling the Afghan heroin trade, and the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of combatants).

"There has been some progress with police reform after the United States stepped in with a teaching course right before Christmas that is almost an exact copy of what they did with the Afghan army. The real delays relate to justice reform, by which I mean the criminal justice system, the courts, the prison service, and so on," Høgseth said.

"In general the approach simply hasn't worked. DDR was handed to Japan, and the police reform was meant to be Germany's responsibility; the U.S. took the army, Italy took justice reform and Britain took counter-narcotics, but the whole process has been inadequately coordinated."

Høgseth believes it will be necessary to relinquish more control over the reform process to the Afghans themselves.

"We can't just blame the Afghans for lack of progress with the reforms, as they were handed a system that had been decided almost before it hit the ground, to put it like that. What is needed is local institutional capacity building -- the handing over of responsibility to Afghans themselves -- we're not the ones that are going to run the country after all," he said.

If this does not happen, Høgseth fears that it will take a very long time to rebuild Afghanistan.

"If you pump too much money into a post-conflict area without having an administration and a bureaucracy capable of handling the funds, you just get more corruption and waste."

Norway's foreign department acknowledges that corruption is a problem.

"A precondition for the efforts at justice reform made by Norway and the international community is that the Afghan authorities actively combat the corruption that exists within the justice sector both centrally and out in the provinces," it said in its statement.

The six million dollar contribution will go into a multi-donor fund administered by the World Bank. A committee headed by Afghanistan's justice minister Sarwar Danish is supposed to implement the projects, but, Høgseth cautions, the Danish will not necessarily have much say.

"I can't be exactly sure what will take place on the ground between the justice minister and the World Bank, but I do have a feeling that everything is quite closely controlled internationally at the moment. There are a lot of funds going into Afghanistan, but the government is only allowed to control a small percentage. The rest is controlled by NGOs and international organisations."

According to Norway's foreign department, the committee headed by Danish will work "in close cooperation" with a board comprised of the different donors, including Norway.

"The establishment of the multi-donor fund as part of the justice reform efforts is a big step in efforts to speed up progress. The mechanisms for administering the funds that have been set up are expected to promote an effective execution of programme activities and cooperation between donors and the Afghan authorities, as well as between the donors," the department said. (END/2008)
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Afghan empire's last symbols under threat
By Sayed Salahuddin Sun Aug 10, 9:06 PM ET
GHAZNI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - For more than eight centuries the "Towers of Victory" -- monuments to Afghanistan's greatest empire -- have survived wars and invasions, but now weather and neglect could cause them to come crashing down.

From its base in the Afghan city of Ghazni, the dynasty of Sultan Mahmoud Ghaznavi extended its rule to stretch from the River Tigris in modern day Iraq to the River Ganges in India.

The two toffee-colored minarets, adorned with terra-cotta tiles were raised in the early 12th century as monuments to the victories of the Afghan armies that built the empire.

Since then, Afghanistan has more often been victim of invasion than the perpetrator of them.

The upper portions of the Towers of Victory have eroded away over time, so now only the bases remain -- though they still stand at around 7 meters (24 feet) tall.

"If attention is not paid, there is the possibility they will be destroyed," said Aqa Mohammad Khoshazada, a senior official with Ghazni's culture and information department. "Floods and rain in spring and snow in winter all end up around the minarets."

Ghazni is regarded as the cradle of Afghan culture and arts and during his rule Mahmoud had attracted 400 scholars and poets to his court. But the sultan was also an iconoclast who destroyed hundreds of Hindu statues during campaigns to introduce Islam into India.

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Mahmoud died in 1030. His son, Sultan Masud, built one of the minarets. The other was erected by another successor.

The Ghaznavis' rule lasted for more than two centuries.

The city was then razed to the ground by Allauddin Ghori from central Afghanistan, who earned the nickname of "World Burner" for the massacre of Ghazni's people in an orgy of destruction and looting.

The city flourished again, only to be destroyed again by a son of Ghenghiz Khan in 1221. But the minarets survived.

Ghazni changed hands between British and Afghan forces several times in the 19th century suffering more sieges and massacres. More fighting during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, followed by the civil war of the 1990s, also left their mark on Ghazni.

Ghazni's Towers of Victory stand several hundred meters away from each other and lie at the bottom of a hill.

Holes and ditches, made by illegal excavations for antiquities and buried treasure collect water and are now undermining the foundations of the minarets.

One has panels of bold Kufic lettering on the top. The tops of the towers are capped with corrugated iron, after the upper sections came down in an earthquake.

But despite repeated appeals and warnings, Afghanistan's impoverished central government, fighting a Taliban insurgency, has allocated just $100 dollars in six years to fill some of the holes around the towers, said Sayed Wali the head of the culture department in Ghazni.

"They are under threat and we have no resources to stop it," Wali said.
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Interior Sindh facing Taliban threat: Altaf
Dawn - National (Pakistan) By Our Correspondent Aug 10, 2008
HYDERABAD-Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain, who has been issuing statements about threat of Talibanisation in Karachi in recent weeks, has now warned against Taliban’s activities in Badin and other areas of Sindh.

Addressing a ceremony held to launch a book at the Circuit House here on Saturday night, he expressed the fear that if the port city and capital of Sindh fell to Taliban then who would think that the rest of Sindh would remain safe.

He praised Sajid Soomro for writing two books on MQM-PPP reconciliation and the future of Sindh and Sindh’s progressive process, and remarked that the rural-urban divide existed almost everywhere in the world but without parochial feelings unlike in Sindh where this divide was linked to some bitter realities.

He acknowledged the historical fact that the people of Sindh had embraced refugees from India with open arms but some elements on both sides were responsible for creating hatred.

He talked about efforts made by him and late G.M. Syed for bridging the divide, with G.M. Syed declaring that Sindh was a permanent abode of the people who had come from India.

Altaf said that because of lack of interaction among people, the Urdu-speaking people could not learn Sindhi.

He said that Sindh had never been a land of gun-toting extremists; it is a land of saints who preached love.

“People must unite to save this land from Talibanisation that was threatening its very integrity,” he warned.

“My party members report that Taliban activities are taking place in the interior of Sindh in areas like Badin,” he said.

He said that an unspecified number of people were coming daily from Fata and Northern Areas to Karachi and the interior of Sindh.

Altaf vowed he would not let anyone occupy Karachi. If Sindhi- and Urdu-speaking people united he would establish checkpoints to stop the influx of Taliban into Karachi and push them back.

Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (organizing committee) chief Abdul Wahid Areesar, adviser to Sindh Governor Yusuf Jamal, Sindhi intellectuals Dilshad Bhutto, Sajid Soomro and MQM coordination committee member Shoaib Bukhari also spoke at the ceremony.
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'Rapist' escapes police custody
www.quqnoos.com Written by Farhad Balkhi Sunday, 10 August 2008
Three policemen arrested after man accused of raping young boy escapes

A MAN arrested three days ago for raping a seven-year-old boy has escaped from police custody, police said.

Three police officers have been arrested after the man escaped from a holding cell in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif in Balkh province, the head of police security in Balkh, Abdul Raouf Taj, said.

The three policemen have been handed over to the attorney-general’s office in the province where they will be placed under investigation for their role in the escape, Taj said.

Police say they arrested the man in one of the city’s video game clubs three days ago.

The man, who has not been re-captured, was transferred to the city’s crime branch, which he escaped from.

Some residents in Mazar-e-Sharif told our reporter that prisoners in the north could bribe their way out of jail and custody if they had enough money.
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