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More than 90 insurgents killed in Afghanistan
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces have killed more than 90 militants during several days of fighting in the south of the country this week, the U.S. military and the Afghan Interior Ministry said on Saturday.
Two Iranians Believed Kidnapped In Afghanistan - Officials
HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP)--Two Iranian nationals missing in western Afghanistan for several days are believed to have been kidnapped, Afghan officials said Saturday.
Insurgency-hit Afghan province gets new governor
Sat Aug 16, 8:57 AM ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) - The controversial governor of Afghanistan's troubled southern province of Kandahar, a stronghold of Taliban militants, was on Saturday replaced by a former army general.
New governor vows to boost security in Kandahar
CBC News (Canada) / August 16, 2008
The new governor of Kandahar province says his top priority is to fight the insurgency in the volatile region of southern Afghanistan.
Bomb hits Afghan minister's convoy, one hurt: ministry
Sat Aug 16, 8:53 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - A bomb struck the convoy of Afghanistan's education minister and parliamentarians on the outskirts of the capital Kabul, wounding a driver, a ministry spokesman said Saturday.
Afghan army set to assume more duty in Kabul: German minister
Berlin, Aug 16, IRNA
The Afghan army is expected to assume more security responsibilities in Kabul over the next six to nine months, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung told the daily Rheinischen Post newspaper on Saturday.
Dozens of militants killed in Afghanistan
August 16, 2008
KABUL (AFP) - Afghan and international security forces have killed about 60 militants in days of fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the government and the US-led coalition said Saturday.
FACTBOX - Security developments in Afghanistan, Aug 16
Aug 16 (Reuters) - Following are security developments in Afghanistan at 1500 GMT on Saturday:
‘Angel’ helping Afghanistan fight Taliban bombings
By Sardar Ahmad Daily Times, Pakistan
Kaka Nijat is the ‘angel’ who is rallying youth against suicide bombers by teaching them how to detect and report suspicious looking men to police
Security fears paralyze Kabul
By Anand Gopal Asia Times Online August 16, 2008
KABUL - It used to take Esmazari 15 minutes to cross town in his faded mustard-colored Corolla. But the police shutdown of nearly half of Kabul's major roadways, in response to a spate of suicide bombings
Worsening security affecting Afghan aid groups
By JASON STRAZIUSO Associated Press Sat Aug 16, 9:25 AM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - Deteriorating security in Afghanistan is making it more difficult for aid organizations to carry out their work, the director of a group that lost four workers in a Taliban attack said Saturday.
West's strategy failing in Afghanistan
The country is more dangerous than in 2006, year Canada got into thick of fighting in Kandahar
August 16, 2008 Thomas Walkom National Affairs Columnist
This week's Canadian deaths in Afghanistan underscore the most troubling aspect of the West's strategy there.
Violence in NW Pakistan triggers exodus
By Sahibzada Bahauddin
KHAR, Pakistan, Aug 15 (Reuters) - About 100,000 Pakistani villagers have fled clashes between security forces and militants in a northwestern region raising the danger of a big humanitarian problem, a government official said on Friday.
Severe drought and food price increases cause malnutrition and disease
Source: Medical Emergency Relief International (Merlin) August 15, 2008
Afghanistan is experiencing its most severe drought in eight years, with farming communities in the northern provinces being the hardest hit. In these areas where crops and livestock are dependent on rainfall rather
Kabul-Jalalabad cycle race Starts
Bakhtar News Agency / August 16, 2008
The first-ever Ghazi Amanullah Khan Cycle Race from the capital Kabul to the eastern Jalalabad city began here on Friday, officials said. National Olympic Committee (NOC) official Arif Paiman
A-level results: Afghan exile gets into Oxford
By Graham Tibbetts The Telegraph (UK) / August 14, 2008
A student from Afghanistan who spoke little English three years ago scored four As in his A-levels today to secure a place at Oxford University.
Musharraf 'running out of time'
Saturday, 16 August 2008 BBC News
Pakistan's foreign minister has said President Pervez Musharraf must stand down in the next two days or face impeachment proceedings.
Flower power
The more the US and Britain spend on combating drugs in Afghanistan, the more the heroin flows out. What hope have they of winning the war while poppy profits fund the Taliban and taint every level of government? Declan Walsh investigates
Guardian Unlimited - Society Declan Walsh Saturday August 16 2008
Haji Juma Khan leads something of a charmed existence. A towering tribesman from Afghanistan's border badlands, Khan uses the title "Haji" because he has completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca
The Asian cockpit
Nato leaders must focus on drafting a vital new Euro-Atlantic policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan
Guardian Unlimited, UK Daniel Korski guardian.co.uk Friday August 15 2008
With the July terrorist attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul – which left 41 dead and the finger of suspicion pointing at the Pakistani intelligence services – the world was again reminded why the Indian subcontinent
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More than 90 insurgents killed in Afghanistan
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces have killed more than 90 militants during several days of fighting in the south of the country this week, the U.S. military and the Afghan Interior Ministry said on Saturday.
Violence has risen in Afghanistan this year with about 2,500 people, including 1,000 civilians, killed in fighting between Taliban insurgents and foreign and Afghan forces, aid agencies say.
Clashes erupted on Wednesday when several militants attacked a joint Afghan and coalition patrol with machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades, the U.S. military said in a statement.
"ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) and coalition forces returned fire with small arms and close air support. Multiple vehicles and enemy fighting positions were destroyed," it said.
More than three dozen insurgents were killed, it added.
No soldiers from the Afghan and U.S. forces or any civilians were killed in the fighting, which was continuing on Saturday, a spokesman for the U.S. military said.
The U.S. military gave no more details about the location of the battle, but said Afghan and coalition forces had also killed more than 30 insurgents during three days of fighting in separate clashes in the southern province of Kandahar this week.
On Friday Afghan police killed 23 insurgents after militants attacked two separate police checkpoints in Nad Ali district of the southern province of Helmand, the Interior Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
Four policemen were wounded in one of the attacks, it said.
In another incident, militants attacked U.S.-led coalition forces in Kapisa province to the northeast of the capital, Kabul, on Friday, the U.S. military said.
"Coalition forces responded with air strikes and small-arms fire, killing the militants," it said, without specifying how many insurgents were killed in that incident.
A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said Taliban fighters had taken control of the Marja district in the southern province of Helmand and the Nawa district in Ghazni province, south of Kabul.
Afghan district officials said their forces were pushing the Taliban back out of the districts.
(Reporting by Jonathon Burch; Additional reporting by Saeed Ali Achakzai; Editing by Paul Tait and Robert Hart)
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Two Iranians Believed Kidnapped In Afghanistan - Officials
HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP)--Two Iranian nationals missing in western Afghanistan for several days are believed to have been kidnapped, Afghan officials said Saturday.
The two, working for an Iranian construction company, went missing on Thursday while they were traveling from the western city of Herat to Islam Qala on the border with Iran, the officials said.
"They have been abducted," Herat city police spokesman Noor Khan Nikzad told AFP.
However there had been no word from any abductors, including demands for ransom, and it was unclear who had taken the men, he said.
Police would meet tribal elders from the area to try to identify who might have snatched them, Nikzad said.
But the foreign ministry cast doubt on the abduction theory.
"They have disappeared and we don't know if they have been abducted," ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen told AFP.
There has been a spike in kidnappings in Afghanistan this year, notably in Kabul and Herat. Some have been carried out by extremist Taliban insurgents but criminal gangs seeking ransom are also involved.
Authorities last week rescued a German-Afghan businessman kidnapped in Kabul two weeks earlier by captors who had been demanding millions of dollars in ransom.
Two Turks working for a road construction company were held in Herat for a week last month. Afghan police said they were freed after a ransom was paid, but this wasn't confirmed by Turkish officials.
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Insurgency-hit Afghan province gets new governor
Sat Aug 16, 8:57 AM ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) - The controversial governor of Afghanistan's troubled southern province of Kandahar, a stronghold of Taliban militants, was on Saturday replaced by a former army general.
President Hamid Karzai appointed Rahmatullah Raufi because of his experience in security and knowledge of the complex tribal system in the area, a presidential spokesman said.
The removal of the previous governor, Asadullah Khalid, was a routine move that had been planned for weeks, spokesman Homayun Hamidzada told AFP.
Four months ago the previous foreign minister of Canada, Maxime Bernier, caused a stir when he suggested to Canadian media that Khalid be replaced to address corruption.
Canada has about 2,500 troops in Kandahar, which sees some of the most Taliban attacks with some major clashes between insurgents and security forces this year.
Khalid, who assumed office in 2005, has been accused of engaging in torture of detainees, which he has denied, and dirty politics.
About 500 tribal elders and officials attended a ceremony in Kandahar to inaugurate 48-year-old Raufi, who served as commander of Afghan troops in the south for two years before resigning a year ago.
The extremist Taliban movement came to prominence in Kandahar in the 1990s and swept to power in Afghanistan in 1996. The province is the third-highest cultivator of illegal opium, according to the United Nations drugs office.
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New governor vows to boost security in Kandahar
CBC News (Canada) / August 16, 2008
The new governor of Kandahar province says his top priority is to fight the insurgency in the volatile region of southern Afghanistan.
"Our main challenge right now is the security situation," Rahmatullah Raufi said at his inauguration ceremony Saturday in Kandahar city.
"God willing, we will solve this problem, because the people of Kandahar wanted me to be appointed here as governor so I can deal with this and make this a safer place," he told elders and other officials, including Brig.-Gen. Denis Thompson, Canada's top military commander in Kandahar.
Raufi, a former general in the Afghan National Army, assumed the new post four months after a Canadian politician made a diplomatic gaffe by suggesting it was time for a change at the governor's palace in order to fight political corruption in the south.
His predecessor, Assadullah Khalid, was reported to have been slated for dismissal months ago, but the plan was put on hold after then foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier made his comments about Kandahar's leadership during a three-day visit in April.
At the ceremony Saturday, Khalid was praised for his work as governor, but he has faced criticism in the past for allegations of human rights abuses in Kandahar's prison system.
It is also generally accepted that violence in the poppy-growing south, where about 2,500 Canadian troops are stationed, worsened during his three years in office.
"I will banish corruption and poppy [cultivation] from here," he said. "It's easy to talk about but harder to enact. I can say I will do what I am promising."
Raufi said the presence of the Canadians and other NATO forces in the province is important and he will work with military leaders to improve the security situation on the ground.
He said boosting security in Kandahar will help bring stability to other regions of Afghanistan.
"If Kandahar is in trouble, it means the whole country is in trouble," he said.
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Bomb hits Afghan minister's convoy, one hurt: ministry
Sat Aug 16, 8:53 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - A bomb struck the convoy of Afghanistan's education minister and parliamentarians on the outskirts of the capital Kabul, wounding a driver, a ministry spokesman said Saturday.
Education Minister Mohamad Hanif Atmar was not hurt in the blast, which hit one of the last vehicles in a convoy that had just left an event to distribute books to nomad children, ministry spokesman Hamed Elmi told AFP.
"On the way back a mine exploded on one of the cars in the convoy following the minister," he said. The mine was planted in the road, witnesses said.
A driver of one of the MPs was wounded, Elmi said, adding the minister continued his programme.
Atmar had been distributing books to children from the Kuchi and Hazara communities following recent conflict over land, UN spokesman Aleem Siddique said.
There have been regular bomb blasts in Kabul, most claimed by the Taliban movement that is waging an insurgency against the government of President Hamid Karzai, but with other extremist outfits also said to be involved.
The Taliban were in government between 1996 and 2001 and are carrying out a bloody campaign to take back control which has included torching scores of schools over the past years and killing teachers.
Violence in Afghanistan is up by 50 percent this year in some parts of the country, according to various officials, but the capital sees fewer attacks than the southern and eastern border areas.
Two rockets were fired at Kabul airport on Thursday, wounding two civilians. It was not known who carried out the attack.
On August 11, a suicide car bomb struck a NATO-led military patrol in the city, killing a British soldier and around seven Afghans.
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Afghan army set to assume more duty in Kabul: German minister
Berlin, Aug 16, IRNA
The Afghan army is expected to assume more security responsibilities in Kabul over the next six to nine months, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung told the daily Rheinischen Post newspaper on Saturday.
"Afghan (security) forces have to ensure Kabul's security over the next six to nine months," Jung said.
The German army will also step up the training of the Afghan army to 7,500 soldiers, he added.
The annual cost of the Afghan deployment of the German military is estimated to increase from 466.9 to 500 million euros, according to Jung.
There are currently 50,000 Afghan troops who were instructed by western military advisers.
The German government is facing increased public pressure to pull out its forces from the war-stricken country.
Germany has deployed around 3,500 soldiers in northern Afghanistan and Kabul as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in addition to police instructors and civilian reconstruction workers.
Some 26 German soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since January 2002, according to official statistics.
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Dozens of militants killed in Afghanistan
August 16, 2008
KABUL (AFP) - Afghan and international security forces have killed about 60 militants in days of fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the government and the US-led coalition said Saturday.
More than 30 were killed in clashes from Wednesday to Friday in the southern province of Kandahar, the US-led coalition said in a statement.
Security forces called in close-air support during numerous engagements between militants and troops on patrol, it said.
"Afghan National Security Forces and coalition forces killed more than 30 militants during three days of fierce battles in Zamto Valley, Kandahar province, August 13-15," it said.
The Afghan interior ministry announced separately that 23 rebel fighters were killed in battles on Friday in the southern province of Helmand.
The fighting was in the Nad Ali district, where officials have already reported weeks of fighting with police abandoning some of their posts.
The defence ministry said meanwhile that seven militants were killed in fighting on Thursday in the eastern province of Paktia.
The battles were in remote parts of Afghanistan and the tolls were impossible to independently verify.
Fighting between insurgents and Afghan or international troops has picked up into the Afghan summer, with several battles and military operations said to be underway.
Militant attacks -- most of them claimed by the Taliban, who were in government between 1996 and 2001 -- have meanwhile increased by up to 50 percent in some areas, according to officials.
The US-led coalition invaded in 2001 and toppled the Taliban regime because they did not hand over Al-Qaeda leaders after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
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FACTBOX - Security developments in Afghanistan, Aug 16
Aug 16 (Reuters) - Following are security developments in Afghanistan at 1500 GMT on Saturday:
SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN - Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces killed more than 90 militants during several days of fighting in the south of the country this week, the U.S. military and the Afghan Interior Ministry said on Saturday.
KAPISA - U.S.-led coalition forcattack in Kapisa province northeast of Kabul on Friday, the U.S. military said on Saturday.
HELMAND - Afghan police killed 23 militants on Friday after they attacked two separate police checkpoints, both in Nad Ali district of southern Helmand province, the Interior Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
HERAT - Two Iranian nationals were abducted in the western province of Herat this week, a provincial police spokesman said on Saturday.
PAKTIA - Insurgents attacked and wounded two policemen guarding a remote police post in eastern Paktia province overnight, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday. Afghan and NATO-led forces arrived nine hours later and killed five of the insurgents, it said.
KABUL - An explosion hit a car carrying a Kuchi tribal leader on the outskirts of Kabul on Saturday, wounding the driver, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday.
PAKTIA - Afghan and coalition forces killed seven insurgents and wounded several more in eastern Paktia province on Thursday, the Defence Ministry said on Saturday.
HELMAND - Afghan soldiers killed seven insurgents including two Taliban commanders and wounded eight more in Musa Qala district of Helmand province on Thursday, the Defence Ministry said on Saturday.
URUZGAN - NATO-led forces killed a known Taliban leader and two other insurgents in a precision air strike on Tuesday in the southern province of Uruzgan, a spokeswoman for the NATO force said on Saturday. (Compiled by Jonathon Burch; Editing by Robert Hart)
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‘Angel’ helping Afghanistan fight Taliban bombings
By Sardar Ahmad Daily Times, Pakistan
Kaka Nijat is the ‘angel’ who is rallying youth against suicide bombers by teaching them how to detect and report suspicious looking men to police
KAKA Nijat, or Uncle Rescue, does not have a telephone but he does have a number: 119, a hotline to the police that he shares with everyone as part of his mission in Afghanistan.
Two young boys notice some men behaving suspiciously and they are unsure what to do: Kaka Nijat comes to the rescue. “Call the police - 119,” the silver-bearded “angel” says, appearing from a puff of sparkling lights. When it turns out the men are would-be Taliban suicide bombers, he praises the youngsters for turning to the authorities. “God bless you, my sons, you saved so many lives,” he says, from a cloud of fairy dust.
The holy man has been deployed on television to fight a growing number of suicide bombings and other attacks that have already killed hundreds of civilians and security forces in Afghanistan this year. In a series of short TV slots aired on over a dozen channels, he also challenges Taliban propaganda that suicide bombers earn entry into Paradise for sacrificing their lives for the Islamic cause.
“Stupid! By killing civilians, you will never go to Paradise,” the elderly man scolds a bomber about to blow himself up. The interior ministry says the adverts, paid for by NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), are encouraging people to be more involved in thwarting attacks. “We have seen a 75 percent increase in calls to our hotline since the start of advertising the number through Kaka Nijat this year,” spokesman Zemarai Bashary told AFP.
“People usually call to inform police about explosions and suicide bombings,” he added, although he was not able to say how many of the calls had actually prevented an attack. A holy character was chosen for the campaign to counter the insurgents’ use of religion in their own propaganda that claims they are good Muslims fighting a government corrupted by Western invaders.
“We are trying to encourage the people to help the security forces in the fight against terrorists who are using Islam as a tool for their purposes,” Bashary said. More TV adverts are planned showing Afghan security forces praying and mosques inside police bases, he said. Kaka Nijat seems to have done his job well. “He teaches us how to call police when we see bad people,” said schoolboy Samiullah, 14, who quickly trots out the hotline number.
“Since watching Kaka Nijat, now we know the police number, we know how the suicide bombers look, how they dress,” added shopkeeper Abdul Waheed. But bombers still get through: a suicide car bomb that killed more than 60 people near the Indian embassy in Kabul last month had passed undetected through heavy security outside the interior ministry in the city centre.
Various Western military and civilian officials put the number of suicide attacks so far this year at between 75 and 100. There were 160 successful suicide attacks last year and 123 the year before, according to UN figures. This year there have been more than 800 other explosions, most often caused by home-made bombs, NATO spokesman Mark Laity said. The blasts had killed 360 civilians and injured 720 others, according to NATO figures.
About 80 percent of the casualties suffered by international forces this year, including almost 160 deaths, were caused by bombs, as were most of the deaths of about 800 Afghan security forces, NATO and Afghan officials said. “It is the most effective weapon used by the insurgents in terms of inflicting casualties,” Laity said. The United Nations said in June that about 700 civilians had already been killed in rebel-linked violence this year. Most died in insurgent attacks but about 255 were killed in military action, largely air strikes. The international force rejects killing so many civilians, although it admits a number in the “double digits” had been killed in error.
Afghans find it difficult to understand that the military, with all its sophisticated equipment, can still be mistaking civilians for insurgents almost seven years after a US-led coalition arrived to oust the Taliban government. “It’s not only the Taliban who are killing civilians,” said 25-year-old Kabul University student Ahmad Sameer. “NATO - who have come here to help us - also kill us,” he said. “Kaka Nijat advises Taliban to stop killing innocent civilians... but no one has heard him advising the American army to stop bombing innocent Afghans.” afp
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Security fears paralyze Kabul
By Anand Gopal Asia Times Online August 16, 2008
KABUL - It used to take Esmazari 15 minutes to cross town in his faded mustard-colored Corolla. But the police shutdown of nearly half of Kabul's major roadways, in response to a spate of suicide bombings that ripped across the capital city in recent months, means that today Esmazari's taxi spends a full hour to make the same trip.
"My business has plummeted because of all these blocked roads," says the taxi driver, who like many Afghans goes by only one name. "The situation is very bad. The whole city center is clogged and full of checkpoints."
The state of high alert following a summer of rising insurgent activity is wearing on Kabul citizens, say observers and residents. Many blame the increased checkpoints and closed roads for slumping business, yet at the same time some residents say that the heightened security does not make them feel safe.
Authorities cordoned off the area around the Indian Embassy in central Kabul after a massive car bomb destroyed a chunk of its facade last month. Both the embassy and the Ministry of Interior lie on this road - one of Kabul's main arteries - and the cordon has been extended to make the whole road off-limits to most vehicles.
Similar checkpoints block other key roads in the city center, such as the area near the foreign ministry and the embassy neighborhood.
"After the police blocked the roads, we lost all of our business," says Ghulam Rasoul Shawary, who owns a stationary store near the Indian Embassy. "We've complained many times to the government and asked them to allow potential customers through [the checkpoints], but they don't care. The government doesn't care about this nation."
Government officials point out that only central Kabul and areas of political and strategic importance are protected by checkpoints, and the markets and other areas surrounding the city center remain as bustling as ever.
According to some of the shopkeepers in the affected areas, however, the government's efforts are misdirected. "What kind of strategy is this?" Shawary asks. "If terrorists bomb everywhere in the city, does that mean the government will close all of the roads, so that we can't go anywhere?"
Syed Nazeer, another merchant whose business is in a tailspin after the heightened security, adds, "The government is only blocking roads to protect themselves, not the people."
Despite the security precautions, many residents still do not feel safe. "I feel that I could die at any moment if I'm at the wrong place at the wrong time," says Shawary.
While there has been no comprehensive polling on the question since an October 2007 Environics poll that found that 51% of Afghans feel safer than they did four years before, analysts say that a series of high-profile attacks this year have dented optimism.
In January, gunmen stormed the luxury hotel Serena in downtown Kabul, shocking the city's foreign community.
In April, snipers nearly assassinated President Hamid Karzai during a military ceremony, prompting many observers to wonder how the insurgents managed to infiltrate such tight security. After the attack on the Indian Embassy in July, the largest such bombing the capital has seen in years, Afghan security forces went on high alert.
Hamed Asir, assistant director of the National Union of Journalists, says that the high-profile attacks have served to put fear in the back of everyone's minds. "Kabul is becoming a garrison city as it prepares for each attack."
However, Halim Kousary of the Afghanistan Center for Conflict and Peace Studies suggests that the increased security is actually working, despite residents' perceptions and the losses to businesses.
"There were far more suicide attacks in Kabul in 2007 than in 2008. This year the number has fallen dramatically, and the police presence might be a factor in this," he says.
Some NATO officials argue that the perception of security is different from actual security. "The majority of the violence is occurring in specific districts of the country," says one senior NATO official. "When Afghans read about violent incidents elsewhere, they tend to feel insecure about their own situation, even if they are not in danger."
Others, however, say that while the security presence in Kabul is making suicide attacks more difficult, insurgents are quickly adapting. Data released by the Pentagon reveal that roadside bomb incidents involving coalition troops hit a four-year high during the April-June period.
The data does not include attacks against Afghan security forces, which have also suffered heavy losses from such bombs.
Moreover, according to data from the Vigilant Strategic Services of Afghanistan, a security consultancy agency, attacks in Kabul have jumped 35% in 2008 compared to the first half of 2007.
"We have nowhere to run if things get worse," the merchant Nazeer says. "But staying here is getting increasingly difficult."
(Inter Press Service)
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Worsening security affecting Afghan aid groups
By JASON STRAZIUSO Associated Press Sat Aug 16, 9:25 AM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - Deteriorating security in Afghanistan is making it more difficult for aid organizations to carry out their work, the director of a group that lost four workers in a Taliban attack said Saturday.
Ciaran Donnelly, director of operations in Afghanistan for the International Rescue Committee, said the entire aid community has been affected by worsening security.
"We're not the only NGO (nongovernment organization) to have suffered an attack. Unfortunately we suffered the most egregious and most tragic of these attacks," he said.
Taliban fighters wielding Kalashnikov assault rifles killed four IRC workers, including three women, in an attack Wednesday in Logar province, just south of Kabul. A Trinidadian-American, a British-Canadian and a Canadian were killed along with their Afghan driver.
The ambush of two clearly marked aid vehicles on the main road south of Kabul was the latest in a record number of attacks on aid groups this year — a surge that has workers questioning if they can safely provide services in remote and dangerous areas where help is most needed.
The Taliban claimed responsibility and said the women were linked to a Western military.
Despite the increasing danger, no aid groups have yet pulled out of Afghanistan, though some groups might suspend projects or move personnel out of dangerous regions, said Mohammad Hashim Mayar, deputy director for the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an umbrella group for aid organizations in Afghanistan.
The president of the IRC, George Rupp, said Saturday that it was the worst tragedy in the group's 75-year history. The IRC has 10 international staff and 500 Afghan staff in Afghanistan. It has temporarily suspended operations.
"We are not only deeply saddened but also outraged at this unprovoked and wanton slaughter of four innocent victims who were committed to providing humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people on an impartial basis of only meeting the needs of the vulnerable," Rupp told a news conference in Kabul.
Donnelly said the IRC hadn't yet determined if their vehicle was targeted because militants knew it belonged to IRC or simply because it carried Westerners. He said the group hadn't received any threats or warnings before the attack.
The IRC, which has operated in Afghanistan since 1988, carries out educational programs and helps refugees.
The two IRC officials said they were concerned that international militaries are taking on humanitarian projects, potentially blurring the lines in the eyes of locals or militants between what humanitarian groups do and what the military does.
NATO militaries carry out reconstruction projects throughout the country.
"There are very real ethical and operational concerns that arise from the confusion between humanitarian and political and military objectives," Donnelly said.
Attacks against aid workers in Afghanistan have spiked this year. Wednesday's assault brings the number of aid workers killed in militant attacks to at least 23 compared with 15 killed in all of 2007, according to a recent report from ANSO, a security group that works for aid organizations in the country.
ANSO said 2008 was on track to be the deadliest year for aid workers in Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
___
On the Net:
The International Rescue Committee: http://www.theirc.org
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West's strategy failing in Afghanistan
The country is more dangerous than in 2006, year Canada got into thick of fighting in Kandahar
August 16, 2008 Thomas Walkom National Affairs Columnist
This week's Canadian deaths in Afghanistan underscore the most troubling aspect of the West's strategy there.
Put simply, it isn't working.
The strategy is based on what appears to be unassailable logic: If NATO and other Western countries provide physical security for the fledgling government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, then his pro-Western regime will be able to service the population, win its trust and undermine the political appeal of Taliban insurgents.
Which, in the end, will allow "our" side to win.
But this perfectly rational approach hinges on the ability of NATO to provide that security. As the events of the past few days illustrate, that just isn't happening.
United Nations figures show Afghanistan has become less safe since 2006, the year that Ottawa sent troops into the thick of the fighting in Kandahar province. Indeed, those familiar with the country say it is less safe than it was when the Taliban was in power.
The circumstances of the recent Canadian deaths are telling.
On Wednesday, insurgents ambushed four aid workers, including Canadians Jacqueline Kirk and Shirley Case, on a main highway less than 100 kilometres from Kabul.
Last Saturday, Master Cpl. Josh Roberts was killed west of Kandahar City. What was unusual about his death was that he may have been accidentally shot by one of the thousands of heavily armed private security guards who career through the Afghan countryside, acting as unofficial auxiliaries to NATO and government forces.
All of these deaths come at time when the country is reeling under stepped-up attacks from the Taliban and other insurgent groups.
In June, the UN reported that 698 Afghan non-combatant civilians were killed in the first six months of 2008, a 62 per cent rise from the same period last year.
Most were killed by insurgents. But the UN says that at least 255 of these deaths were caused by Afghan or foreign troops.
In 2007, the UN estimates that 8,000 people – including government soldiers, foreign troops, civilians and Taliban militants – were killed in the war. That number was up sharply from a year earlier.
Canada has already lost 90 soldiers and diplomat Glyn Berry in the war. The U.S. is now losing more troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
Meanwhile, and in spite of the efforts of U.S. and NATO-led troops, the Taliban has strengthened its hold on the countryside.
This week, the New York Times reported that the Kabul-Kandahar highway, the country's main artery and one of the showpieces of early Western development efforts, has become a literal minefield, where insurgents ambush military and civilian convoys with near impunity.
In December, The Times of London, citing what it said was a leaked UN document, reported almost half of the country is now deemed too dangerous for aid agencies.
Just two years earlier, aid workers had been able to operate freely in virtually all of Afghanistan, save for a small strip along the Pakistani border. But between 2005 and 2007, about 40 humanitarian workers were killed, either by the Taliban or bandits.
To former CARE Canada president John Watson, none of this comes as a surprise.
Watson, who retired from the humanitarian agency last year, says Afghanistan was far safer seven years ago, before the United States and its Western allies deposed the Taliban, than it is now.
"Of course, it's more dangerous now," the 20-year veteran aid worker said in an interview this week. "It was a pain in the ass working through the Taliban. But if you worked at it, you could get things done."
He said that during the Taliban era, CARE was careful to remain neutral in the low-level civil war between the Islamist government and its domestic enemies. The charity even persuaded the Taliban to let it fund schooling for 20,000 girls.
"It wasn't easy," he said. "But it worked."
But in the current struggle, aid agencies have become identified with foreign troops.
Ironically, that has occurred in part because NATO has made reconstruction one of its key war aims. While laudable in the broadest sense, that decision has also made it more difficult for private aid agencies to present themselves as neutral humanitarians.
To say that the Western alliance has accomplished nothing in Afghanistan would be inaccurate. The Canadian government points to a raft of statistics that bolster its case that progress has been made. The economy is thriving, schools are being built and more girls are being educated.
Yet, as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pointed out earlier this year, none of this is an unadulterated success. The size of the economy has doubled over the past four years. But much of this economic growth, the UN says, is linked to drug production.
Moreover, the rewards of growth have been unevenly distributed, with about 40 per cent of the country still living below the poverty line. As for the status of girls and women, the UN says, "Tangible improvement ... remains a major challenge." Last year, the international body received more than 2,000 formal complaints of violence against women.
For all Afghans, physical security remains the country's most fundamental problem. Efforts by Western nations like Canada to stabilize the country through military means have not demonstrably improved the situation. Indeed, in a perverse way, NATO's successes in head-to-head battles may have encouraged the Taliban to focus on so-called soft targets such as foreign aid workers.
Added to all of this is the problem of private militias. Since 2002, the Karzai government has been attempting to disarm powerful warlords. But some have avoided this by hiring out their armed retainers to private security firms, based mainly in the U.S. and Britain.
These firms, in turn, rent the militias to construction companies, aid agencies and foreign governments.
Even Canada uses private security contractors at bases in Afghanistan, according to Canadian Forces Brig.-Gen. Denis Thompson.
David Perry, an expert on military contracting at Dalhousie University, says Canada's foreign affairs department also hires private contractors to provide security for its diplomats in Afghanistan.
At one level, this is perfectly understandable: Afghanistan is a dangerous place; most NATO countries, including Canada, are reluctant to send too many of their own nationals there to fight.
But at the same time, the reliance on private contractors has given the country even more of a Wild West flavour. In press reports, NATO soldiers describe private security guards as hopped-up, trigger-happy brigands, more interested in enriching themselves at the expense of the local population than in anything else.
This may be an exaggeration. Nonetheless, Afghanistan remains a country where groups of armed men, many of whom are ostensibly on the same side, roam the country shooting at one another.
In April, for instance, Canadian troops guarding one of their own convoys shot and killed a guard working for Compass Security, one of the biggest operators in Afghanistan and a firm whose employees were allegedly involved in the death last Saturday of soldier Roberts.
Last October, Canadian troops shot up another Compass vehicle, injuring seven private security guards.
Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.
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Violence in NW Pakistan triggers exodus
By Sahibzada Bahauddin
KHAR, Pakistan, Aug 15 (Reuters) - About 100,000 Pakistani villagers have fled clashes between security forces and militants in a northwestern region raising the danger of a big humanitarian problem, a government official said on Friday.
Security forces and militants have been fighting in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border, a known sanctuary for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, since the militants attacked a security post last week.
About 170 people have been killed, including some civilians, officials have said. The fighting has included strikes on militants by fighter jets and helicopter gunships.
The violence has triggered an exodus, with people streaming out of the region on packed pick-up trucks and on foot, many heading for the safety of the main northwestern city of Peshawar.
The displaced people are creating one more problem for a new coalition government pre-occupied with political wrangling while economic and security problems mount.
"We are gathering figures from various areas and it is close to 100,000, it may be more than that," said Sitara Imran, Minister for Social Welfare in the North West Frontier Province.
"This will create a big humanitarian problem ... We are going to appeal to civil society and international donor agencies for help," Imran said.
Bajaur is the most northerly of seven semi-autonomous tribal regions. It is opposite Afghanistan's eastern province of Kunar, where U.S. troops are battling al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Villager Mohammad Maroof walked for many hours with his family to get out of Bajaur, where he said life had become intolerable.
"There is no such thing as life in Bajaur. We were like a prisoners in our own homes," said Maroof, who has taken refuge with friends in Peshawar.
Imran said the humanitarian situation was expected to deteriorate with people also leaving the northwestern valley of Swat where troops are also battling militants.
Nearly 150 people have been killed in two weeks of renewed clashes in the valley, which until last year was one of the country's main tourist destinations.
The election of a civilian government in February brought a lull in militant violence as new leaders sought to make peace deals in various trouble spots but trouble has flared again in recent weeks.
(Additional reporting and writing by Augustine Anthony; Editing by Robert Birsel and David Fox)
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Severe drought and food price increases cause malnutrition and disease
Source: Medical Emergency Relief International (Merlin) August 15, 2008
Afghanistan is experiencing its most severe drought in eight years, with farming communities in the northern provinces being the hardest hit. In these areas where crops and livestock are dependent on rainfall rather than irrigation, an Afghan minister reported that 1.5 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian relief.
Droughts are a long-term rather than new phenomenon in Afghanistan, but there has been a marked increase in their frequency over recent years that officials have blamed on global warming. The accumulative effect of these cyclical droughts coupled with abnormally high summer temperatures have made 2008 an exceptionally bad year. Food shortages have further been exacerbated by the global rise in food prices and ongoing conflict.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), prices of basic foods like meat, cereals and dairy products rose by an average of 53 per cent from 2007 to 2008.
"Families are now finding themselves increasingly vulnerable to chronic malnutrition as the struggle to find affordable food becomes harder," said Neva Khan, programme manager for Afghanistan.
Merlin is working alongside the Ministry of Health in the north eastern districts of Badakshan and Kunduz, in 58 health facilities. In these areas staff have witnessed a knock-on effect between poor diet and susceptibility to disease:
"We have seen cases of acute respiratory infections, diarrhoea and measles in our clinics - these cases are likely to increase as the impact of drought and food shortage is felt more and more in these localities", Neva Khan reported.
Lack of clean drinking water is also having direct implications on people's health. With temperatures reaching over 40ºC, many springs and wells have dried up. Some families are having to walk for hours to find water, or in some cases drink dirty water from rivers, making them vulnerable to water borne diarrhoeal diseases.
Merlin is currently training community health workers to recognise and manage diseases caused by malnutrition and the lack of safe drinking water. We are also planning to work with the Ministry of Health to improve community water supplies and provide clean water to 38 local health facilities which do not have a clean water supply.
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Kabul-Jalalabad cycle race Starts
Bakhtar News Agency / August 16, 2008
The first-ever Ghazi Amanullah Khan Cycle Race from the capital Kabul to the eastern Jalalabad city began here on Friday, officials said. National Olympic Committee (NOC) official Arif Paiman, said the cyclists would paddle a distance of 147 kilometers. Beginning from the Istiqlal monument in the Pul-i-Mahmud Khan area of Kabul at 9.00am, Paiman said the race would culminate in the capital of the Nangarhar province. Haji Abdul Sadeq, head of the Cycling Federation of the National Olympic Committee, said the private telecom operator Etisalat had sponsored the event, organized by NOC. Around 150 cyclists from different provinces of the country are taking part in the two-stage competition - from Kabul to Sarobi and Sarobi to Jalalabad. Sadeq added five participants would be chosen for awards during the first leg of the contest and another 15 in the second section. At the end of the race, 20 cyclists will be awarded cash prizes.
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A-level results: Afghan exile gets into Oxford
By Graham Tibbetts The Telegraph (UK) / August 14, 2008
A student from Afghanistan who spoke little English three years ago scored four As in his A-levels today to secure a place at Oxford University.
Waheed Safi, 18, arrived in England from Pakistan three years ago, after his family was forced to flee their home nation.
His father, Khearullah, had vanished some years previously after attracting the displeasure of the ruling regime with his political activities.
With his mother, Kubra, left to bring up their children alone in Kabul, Waheed and his four brothers and sisters were schooled at home and taught Arabic, maths and the sciences, and a little English by a university tutor.
The family were unaware whether Mr Safi, then a chemical engineer in the army, was dead or alive.
Waheed, who now lives in Southall, and is studying at The Academy, Uxbridge College, said: "When we were in Afghanistan my father always wished that we were educated.
"We used to start learning English in Year 5 in Afghanistan, but my father wanted us to learn English quickly so we had a home tutor we used to come and teach us the basics."
He added: "I wasn't in school for very long in Afghanistan. After the conditions got worse, all the schools closed and there was nowhere that you could go to every day. It wasn't safe, there were so many risks, you couldn't just go outside, you might get shot."
The family finally heard from Mr Safi in 2001, and after first moving to Pakistan they relocated to England in 2005.
Once in England, Waheed was encouraged to take a pre-GCSE course and learn English, but confident in his own abilities he asked to begin studying for GCSEs immediately.
"My English teacher helped me a lot, she asked me to read a lot of magazines and she gave me some books" , he said.
His perseverance has paid off and Waheed got A grades in maths, further maths, chemistry and physics.
He has been offered a place at Somerville College to study Engineering Science.
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Musharraf 'running out of time'
Saturday, 16 August 2008 BBC News
Pakistan's foreign minister has said President Pervez Musharraf must stand down in the next two days or face impeachment proceedings.
"Musharraf is running out of time", said Shah Mahmood Qureshi, of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) - a major partner in the governing coalition.
Draft charges against the president include violation of the constitution and gross misconduct, officials said.
Mr Musharraf's office has said he will not resign and will defend himself.
The impeachment campaign was launched last week by leaders of the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
A PML-N official said: "There is a long list of charges against him... we will file them, by the latest, by Tuesday."
If Mr Musharraf chooses not to quit, he would be the first president in Pakistan's history to be impeached.
Weighing up options
A spokesman for the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, a pro-Musharraf party, said that the president's advisers were considering his options.
Nawaz Sharif, who was toppled in the 1999 coup, said he was opposed to any deal which would give his old rival a "safe passage".
He has said the president should be tried for treason, which carries the maximum sentence of the death penalty.
But the PPP, the party of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, says the decision of whether to put the president on trial should be left to parliament.
Information Minister Sherry Rehman, said the PPP "never indulges in the politics of revenge as it wants a stable Pakistan and a sustainable democracy in the country".
The BBC's Mark Dummett in Islamabad says support for the president in a recent vote of confidence in the provincial assemblies has almost entirely collapsed.
Mr Musharraf's best way out would now seem to be a dignified exit before parliament meets to debate the impeachment, our correspondent says.
Talks are going on behind the scenes.
The ruling coalition parties will have to decide where the former army chief, a key ally in Washington's war on terror, is allowed to live and what protection he will receive, our correspondent says.
Mr Musharraf came to power in a bloodless coup in 1999.
He gave up control of the army last year and his allies were defeated in February's elections but he retains the power to dissolve parliament.
But his public standing suffered a huge setback in 2007 when he sacked Pakistan's chief justice and nearly 60 judges to prevent them from overturning his re-election as president.
But analysts say the president is still thought to have heavy influence over the military and its reaction will remain crucial.
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Flower power
The more the US and Britain spend on combating drugs in Afghanistan, the more the heroin flows out. What hope have they of winning the war while poppy profits fund the Taliban and taint every level of government? Declan Walsh investigates
Guardian Unlimited - Society Declan Walsh Saturday August 16 2008
Haji Juma Khan leads something of a charmed existence. A towering tribesman from Afghanistan's border badlands, Khan uses the title "Haji" because he has completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam's holiest shrine. But piety is not his sole concern: he is also one of about 20 men who run Afghanistan's £2bn heroin trade. Business is good. Last year the country's fields of pretty pink poppies produced a record harvest, sending drug production soaring to new heights, funding the Taliban and thrusting Afghanistan into ever greater chaos. And despite the best efforts of western counter-narcotics specialists - who have spent six years and more than £1.7bn in fighting the heroin trade - Khan is free as a bird.
His empire is centred on Baramcha, a scruffy town in the Chagai Hills on the Pakistani border. Khan, an ethnic Baluch, seized control of this parched area in the dying days of Taliban rule in late 2001 and turned it into a bustling hub of smuggling and gun running. It is dotted with heroin labs: rough shacks where turbaned men, tutored by imported chemists from Iran and elsewhere, use chemicals and vats of boiling water to refine bars of sticky brown opium into bags of powdery white or brown heroin. The drug departs on convoys of high-speed jeeps, bristling with weaponry, that dash across the desert towards the Iranian border. It is then sold to criminal gangs who push the heroin to its end customers: addicts in Europe and Russia.
The town is also a springboard for Taliban attacks. Insurgents pass through training camps and madrasas in the town on their way north into Helmand, where 8,000 British troops are based. Opium flows in the opposite direction. The vast, unruly province provides Khan with a bountiful supply of raw drugs. Last year Helmand produced 53% of the Afghan poppy crop, making it the world's single greatest source of illicit drugs, producing more than Colombia, Mexico and Burma combined. Impressive for a province with just 2.5 million people.
Khan makes the law in Baramcha and brooks no dissent. The last time the provincial government dispatched a team of border police to the town, three years ago, 11 officers were captured and reportedly beheaded. More recently, Khan's operations have been raided by Commando Force 333, an Afghan paramilitary unit trained by the (British) Special Boat Service. Afghan soldiers swoop in armoured helicopters, forcing their way into the drug labs and arresting whomever they find. Their British mentors usually come, too. The latest raid on Baramcha, in June, netted five tonnes of opium; 13 smugglers, including four Iranians, were arrested.
Commando Force 333, operating under great secrecy from a fort south of Kabul, is considered a success in the war on drugs. But it has never come close to Khan. He is more likely to be found in the port cities of the United Arab Emirates - Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah - where, money-laundering experts say, much of Afghanistan's dirty cash ultimately ends up. Khan has snapped up property and a small fleet of cargo ships, based in Sharjah, which according to reports he has used for smuggling heroin out of Pakistan. His wealth is conservatively estimated in the tens of millions of pounds - money that may also be funding bloodshed: counter-narcotics officials have evidence of a meeting between Khan and insurgents including senior Taliban figures and lieutenants of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an al-Qaida sympathiser fighting US forces in Afghanistan's mountainous east.
The Taliban appears to have lost its aversion to drugs since 2001, when the black-turbaned fighters banned the poppy crop at gunpoint. Now they tax farmers who grow poppies at a rate of 10% and, in some places, protect drug-smuggling convoys, also for a slice of the profits. This lucrative sideline earns the fighters at least £50m a year, according to the UN; others put the figure higher. Men such as Khan are key to their success.
The world's leading counter-narcotics agencies - America's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) - are trying to keep tabs on him from their Kabul embassies. Yet they cannot lay a glove on him. Instead Khan flits with ease between the UAE, Baramcha, Quetta in western Pakistan, and Kabul. "He's everywhere, just doing his thing," one official admits.
Ironically, the authorities once had him in their grasp. In late 2001 US soldiers picked up an elderly, pious-looking Baluch tribesman near the southern city of Kandahar. They identified him as Khan, Time magazine later reported, but their objective was Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Border rogues were low on their list of priorities. And so the soldiers let him go.
It was a costly error. In the years since, it has become clear that the fight to save Afghanistan - from the Taliban and from debilitating corruption - is unlikely to be won without getting the better of men such as Khan.
The project of rebuilding Afghanistan, so heartily promised by President Bush after his troops invaded in 2001, is in grave peril. The country is in terrible shape. A resurgent Taliban has swept the southern and eastern provinces, destabilising the countryside and knocking at the gates of Kabul. Britain has so far lost 114 soldiers; the past two months were the deadliest ever for American troops there. The other, less visible, threat is equally ominous. Drug-related corruption has infected every level of government, crippling governance programmes and dangerously undermining Afghan leaders in the eyes of their own people. Policemen, parliamentarians, governors and probably several ministers are on the drug networks' payroll. President Hamid Karzai has been forced repeatedly to deny allegations that members of his own family are involved. Among western allies, patience is fraying. Thomas Schweich, a former senior US official, launched a scathing attack on Karzai last month, accusing him of sheltering the drug
lords. "He was playing us like a fiddle," he wrote in the New York Times.
The war on drugs is about much more than money. In other countries drugs are a criminal activity driven by greed. In Afghanistan, battered by three decades of conflict, they are a tool of political power. "Afghanistan isn't like anything anyone has worked on before from a drug perspective," says Doug Wankel, a veteran counter-narcotics officer. "This is not Burma or Thailand or Mexico or Colombia. This is a fledgling nation that is just starting to stand up again after 30 years of disarray and destruction. It's so fragile, and corruption is such an issue, that this whole drug thing can play into the other ills of the country, destroying this government and pushing the nation into big-time civil disorder. Why? Because you have so many people who can get so many weapons. It's entirely different, I'm telling you."
Wankel, a 62-year-old American, has long experience of Afghanistan's drug wars. His career began in 1970 when, as a Missouri law student, he saw a TV ad for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, predecessor of the DEA. "I'm sitting there thinking James Bond and women and adventure. So I called the toll-free number," he recalls. They sent him to Detroit, then the murder capital of America, where his job was to buy drugs: cocaine and PCP (phencyclidine) in well-to-do white neighbourhoods and heroin in the run-down black areas. Wankel, skinny as a rake, passed for a junkie. The experience blew his mind. "You remember Shaft?" he says. "You actually had these guys on the streets, wearing their big-brimmed hats and fancy long coats, and driving those pimpmobiles with the white walls. It was amazing, just like you see on TV."
Eight years later, seeking a fresh adventure, the young DEA officer had himself transferred to Kabul. It was a pivotal moment. Three months on, the dictator Muhammad Daud was overthrown in a communist coup. At the end of the following year, in December 1979, 100,000 Soviet troops rolled in. The Red Army occupation triggered a bloody 10-year war between the Soviets and CIA-funded fighters known as the mujahideen. The jihad, as they called it, also marked the start of the heroin era. For 150 years Afghan farmers had grown small amounts of poppy, mostly in Badakhshan province in the north. After jihad erupted, the business got serious. Shinwari tribesmen in eastern Nangarhar and their tribal cousins, the Afridis in Pakistan's Khyber Agency, started to process opium into heroin (10kg of opium makes about 1kg of heroin). Profits multiplied, and by the mid 1980s Afghanistan was supplying one third of the world's heroin.
By then Wankel had left - the Soviets had accused him of spying - and moved on to operations in Pakistan, Colombia and Peru, rising to the number three position in the DEA. In 2004 he was called back to Afghanistan to coordinate counter-narcotics policy, and now works as a private consultant. He is frustrated at how the west has mishandled the drugs war. "From the beginning the military thought they could do security and leave narcotics and corruption for later. They were wrong," he says. "There's got to be a comprehensive strategy that also involves rule of law, corruption and drugs. Otherwise you can forget it."
The more the west has poured money into fighting drugs in Afghanistan, the more heroin has poured out of the country. Since 2002 the UK, which coordinates the international effort, has spent £262m on training soldiers, police, investigators and judges, and building a new drugs court. The US has given £1bn. In addition the two countries have blown a total of £420m on "alternative livelihoods" - rural development projects to persuade poppy farmers to switch crops. Over the same period the poppy crop has exploded, hitting a record high of 193,000 hectares last year - enough to carpet Greater London and the Isle of Wight. (This year's crop figures are due later this month.) Nor is all of this produce exported: driven by much misery and an abundance of cheap heroin, Afghanistan's own addict population is rising fast. The last survey, three years ago, recorded 920,000 users; the number is almost certainly higher now, a flood of drug-using refugees having since returned from Pakistan and Iran.
These failures have caused bewilderment and a bad-tempered debate about how to combat drug production in Afghanistan. None of those involved - Karzai, western diplomats, Nato generals, many self-styled counter-narcotics experts - seems able to agree on the answer. The Senlis Council, a pugnacious NGO, favours legalising the poppy crop. Others, chiefly in America, press for wholesale destruction. Last year the US spent £88m on an eradication programme run by DynCorp, a company that employs many retired American special forces soldiers. Over the harvesting season, DynCorp led hundreds of Afghan workers through the fields of Helmand and Uruzgan, thrashing down poppies with tractors and sticks. Fired at by angry farmers and opportunistic insurgents, and obstructed by bent local officials, the eradicators managed to destroy just 3,000 hectares. This seemed a bad deal. It would have been 10 times cheaper - and less bloody, since three eradicators were shot - to have simply bought the farmers' opium. But that soluti
on doesn't work, either, as the British discovered five years ago when a buy-back scheme collapsed after officials realised it simply encouraged farmers to grow more poppies the next year. They turned up at the Kabul embassy demanding payment from embarrassed British officials. In diplomatic circles, the episode has been politely forgotten.
The other big idea is aerial spraying. The US favours dispatching armoured crop-duster planes loaded with the weedkiller Roundup to spray the poppy fields; British and Afghan officials are opposed to the idea, saying it would enrage already hostile farmers. The US ambassador William Wood, who was formerly posted to Colombia, has tried to convince Afghan officials worried about the safety implications of the herbicide, saying he would even take a shower in it. A British official retorted: "It's Roundup. My dad puts it on his weeds. It doesn't mean he uses it for his tea or to bathe in."
But the focus on farmers, who are often poor and indebted, seems unfair. According to the UN, the average southern poppy farmer made £1,658 from last year's harvest. That's about one third more than he would have earned growing wheat, enough to clothe his children and send them to the local school - assuming the Taliban hadn't torched it. By contrast, the 20 top traffickers pulled in profits of £1.5bn. It's time to switch focus, says Christina Oguz, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Kabul. "We are looking too much at cultivation and not enough at the top of the drug networks," she says.
A 96-cell high security jail for high-level drug traffickers has been built, with £1.1m of British money; it was handed over to the Afghan justice ministry last June. As no drug lords have been captured, however, it is likely to be filled with Taliban commanders. The heads of the drug networks, meanwhile, live freely, openly flaunting their great wealth. A raid by DEA agents on the home of a major trafficker in Nangarhar last November gives a sense of the sums involved: meticulously kept account books detailed heroin shipments worth £81m over a nine-month period. In a broken, poverty-stricken country such as Afghanistan, these gangsters' main difficulty is spending the money. Status demands a few essentials. A fleet of Lexus Land Cruisers - hulking 4x4s with tinted windows, video entertainment systems and usually no licence plate - is de rigueur, as are gangly mansions in Sherpur, a new Kabul neighbourhood known for "narcotecture" - a gaudy style with sweeping balustrades, wedding-cake plasterwork and blue mi
rrored windows. The label may be unfair - some Sherpur residents surely earn their money honestly - but in a country in which drugs account for one third of gross domestic product, and the competing exports are carpets, fruit and nuts, many Afghans have a different idea. "The owners are the ones who killed our people and drank our blood," construction worker Hussain told me three years ago outside a mansion he was building. "But at least it is providing us with work."
Most of the drug loot goes abroad. "There are a lot of wealthy people in Afghanistan but the money is not here," says Nick Lockwood, a former drugs adviser at the British embassy. "It's in Dubai." Traffickers wire their profits to the UAE using hawala, the age-old informal money transfer system that is cheap, fast and, best of all, leaves no paper trail. When it lands there are few questions asked: along with the Russian mob and Colombian cartels, Afghan drug lords are among Dubai's big investors.
One "big fish", as Afghans call them, has been netted - in rare circumstances. In 2005, American agents lured Haji Bashir Noorzai, leader of a major smuggling clan in Kandahar, to New York. Noorzai thought he was there to curry favour with the Americans by providing intelligence on the Taliban. He was put up in a smart Manhattan hotel not far from the site of the destroyed Twin Towers, and interrogated, in a friendly way, for more than a week. But on the 13th day, the agents clapped him in handcuffs and brought him before a judge. The DEA later described him as the "Pablo Escobar of Afghanistan"; Noorzai's lawyer says he was a victim of entrapment. His trial is due to start shortly.
That ruse is unlikely to work a second time. So the latest western scheme is to improve - in fact, build from scratch - Afghanistan's own justice system. It is a gargantuan task. The necessary institutions are rotten: the police are poorly trained and corrupt; so are the judges. Most honest, educated officials have fled the country. In the rare instances when Afghan courts have sent major drug traffickers to jail, they have almost invariably been released within weeks - on the orders of senior government officials. Oguz of the UNODC calls this "telephone justice".
Undaunted, Britain and America are training the police. A dedicated counter-narcotics force has been set up; Soca and DEA agents are currently teaching a new "special investigations unit" the arts of phone-tapping, running informers and gathering evidence. Recruits to this force must pass lie detector and urine analysis tests, and not all make it: drug addiction levels among police are said to be extremely high.
In an effort to evade Afghanistan's flawed courts, these donors have set up a special drugs court on the edge of Kabul. Western lawyers train its prosecutors. Judges are paid 10 times more than the going rate in the hope of keeping them honest. This appears to be working: last year the court scored 278 convictions, up from 182 in 2006. Sentences are stiff, with a minimum jail term of 10 years. Yet this system is not perfect: prosecutors are markedly better funded and prepared than defence briefs. "It's very questionable," Oguz says. "Getting evidence is not just about putting the big guys in, it's about making sure innocent people are not in prison." And none of those big guys has appeared before this court.
The big problem, in almost every counter-narcotics scheme, is corruption. Allegations of covert drug trafficking swirl around many of the leading Afghan officials in the key ministries. Some may be explained as malicious gossip; others are based on hard evidence. One afternoon I visited General Kamal Sadat, who until last year headed the counter-narcotics police. Now, after failing a Soca lie detector test, he is unemployed. British officials asked if he had ever taken a bribe and, he told me angrily, "I told them the truth." But instead of blaming the British, Sadat attributed his downfall to the machinations of his rival - and former colleague - General Muhammad Daud, the deputy interior minister for counter-narcotics. "It was just a way for him to get me out," he spat.
Daud is certainly a controversial figure. A former militia leader under the warlord Ahmed Shah Masood, he is a personable man with a taste for dapper suits. Investigations by the Los Angeles Times and other papers have linked the minister and his family to narcotics. Last year one of his senior aides was sentenced to 12 years for trying to sell drugs confiscated by the police. Daud, who harbours ambitions for higher political office, brushes the charges off with a laugh. But two years ago the British took them so seriously, they tried to have him fired; he survived thanks to support from Karzai and the US embassy. Now the British have learned to live with him: in June, Daud visited London on a police training course.
Counter-narcotics officials acknowledge that they must work with people who are modestly - or "acceptably" - corrupt. After 30 years of war, few Afghan politicians have a clean slate, Wankel says. "None of us would be able to survive under the circumstances these people have been through in the past 30 years. They obviously did what they had to do. Americans want to think black and white. But you gotta throw that out the window when you come to Afghanistan. Everything here is a shade of grey."
There's less moral wiggle room for President Karzai. With an election looming next year, he stands accused of going slow on the drugs war to avoid annoying powerful supporters. How things change: in 2004 I attended a conference in the heavily-guarded presidential palace where Karzai declared a "jihad" on drugs. Foreign counter-narcotics officials now deride this as a bad joke. The president has not even made symbolic sacrifices: many point to the fact that his anti-corruption tsar, Izzatullah Wasifi, is a convicted drug dealer who served nearly four years in a US jail after being caught selling heroin in a Las Vegas hotel. "I was a youngster," Wasifi told me with a shrug. More troubling allegations centre on Karzai's younger half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar provincial council and reputed to be involved in the drugs trade. "This is really a lot of rubbish," Karzai told Der Spiegel in June. "I have thoroughly investigated all these accusations, and of course none of them are true." But the
rumours persist.
Karzai's relations with the British are strained. In early 2006, under pressure from Britain, Karzai dismissed Sher Muhammad Akhunzada, the long-standing governor of Helmand province and an alleged drug smuggler. The evidence was persuasive: in a raid on the governor's office a few months earlier, DEA officials had found nine tonnes of opium in the basement. (Akhunzada claimed he'd seized the consignment from a smuggler and was about to turn it over to the police.) The head of the DEA, Karen Tandy, later testified to America's Congress that this was the largest stash her agents had seized in Afghanistan. But Karzai, who has family ties with Akhunzada stretching back to the mujahideen war, did not punish him. Instead he rewarded the ex-governor with a seat in the upper house of Afghanistan's parliament.
In April I went to see Senator Akhunzada at his Kabul house. For an alleged druglord, it was disappointingly sparse. Sure, a black Land Cruiser was parked in the driveway, but the carpets were mangy and soiled, the ceiling was blotched with damp and the television was an old-fashioned cathode ray tube model - not even a plasma screen. Gently stroking his beard and puffing on a Marlboro Light, Akhunzada lamented the worsening insurgency in his home province. "Every day more killing and injuries," he said, shaking his head. "Another attack on a police station today. Seven dead." In his view, he alone could end the violence. "If only the British would listen, I could help," he sighed, "but we do not have good relations. If I was governor, the Taliban would not have captured even five inches of land. Now they have five districts." He may be right that he could bring change - British officials believe his powerful militia is still running drugs.
In a farewell act of chutzpah, Akhunzada handed me a sheaf of paper with his own prescriptions for the drug crisis. It was titled "Preventation [sic] of poppy cultivation". The fourth point read: "The government should make one exact list of smugglers."
For one such smuggler, Haji Juma Khan, these are interesting times. The Baluch from Baramcha is trying to go legit. According to several officials, Khan has made the government an offer: in return for an amnesty, he will quit the drugs business and invest his money in Afghanistan. "Think of The Godfather Part III," says one source, referring to the movie in which Al Pacino's Michael Corleone tries to go straight. In the film it all goes wrong for Corleone. He ends up a lonely and broken man, slouched on the balcony of a Sicilian villa. The final act of Khan's career, however, has yet to be written.
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The Asian cockpit
Nato leaders must focus on drafting a vital new Euro-Atlantic policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan
Guardian Unlimited, UK Daniel Korski guardian.co.uk Friday August 15 2008
With the July terrorist attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul – which left 41 dead and the finger of suspicion pointing at the Pakistani intelligence services – the world was again reminded why the Indian subcontinent has eclipsed the Middle East as the world's flash-point.
Both American presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, have made clear that they expect the Pakistani government to take action against militants, and that they would be willing to authorise strikes inside Pakistan. But a more comprehensive Euro-Atlantic approach will be required to deal with the region's problems.
The story of western failure in Afghanistan is now all too familiar, painfully illustrated, almost weekly, by the repatriation of fallen Nato soldiers. But the story is repeated across the border in Pakistan, with serious consequences for both countries.
The optimism that followed the recent Pakistani elections has turned to concern as the government's negotiations with militants appear to have made a terrorist safe-haven safer and attacks against Nato forces in Afghanistan more frequent. Pakistan's military and intelligence services are sympathetic to an Islamic fundamentalist creed, militant groups affiliated with al-Qaida operate freely on its territory, and government infighting has made it difficult to establish civilian control over the military.
In any case, the ability of the Pakistani military to deal with the current threat, let alone a widespread insurgency, is questionable, as is western leverage on Pakistan's security forces. As a result, loss of control of parts of Pakistan to an increasingly capable alliance of militant groups is a serious near-term threat.
If American policy has failed to deal with this growing problem, European policy has focused on technical assistance, with the European Union providing 125m in aid between 2002 and 2006. Moreover, Europe is Pakistan's largest trading partner, accounting for 27.4% of total exports and 17% of imports. In 2005 alone, EU imports from Pakistan totaled 3.4bn.
Yet, despite this, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the EU's role in Pakistan bears all the hallmarks of the pre-Maastricht polity that it no longer wants to be: technocratic, apolitical, and marginalised by the United States.
This needs to change. The US, even under a new president, cannot succeed in the region without a united front with Europe. And Europe cannot hope to achieve its aims with technical programs alone.
To create a framework for US-European cooperation, work needs to begin now. Several reports that will influence the McCain and Obama campaigns are already being written in Washington. But none of these will be able to chart a way forward for transatlantic cooperation. Moreover, they risk repeating the standard pattern of US-European cooperation: the US as the policy developer and Europe as the apolitical and hesitant money-spender.
Genuine transatlantic cooperation will require that solutions be developed jointly, and that European leaders "own" the policy options. Otherwise, European governments will find it difficult to explain the need to step up efforts in the region, and the European Commission's technical programmes will continue to define the EU's policy.
To build the necessary unity and a political strategy, a European Baker-Hamilton-style commission is necessary. Such a commission, with senior European members, could examine the key issues in the region, visit all countries and players and develop a set of recommendations for a new transatlantic approach to begin in early January 2009 when a new US president is in place.
And who better to launch this than Nicolas Sarkozy? The French president has already played a crucial role in bridging the US/European divide on the Afghan mission and – after a successful donor's conference – has taken the help of the EU's rotating, six-month presidency.
Ideally, such a commission should be independent, but endorsed by the French, German and British governments and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, as well as, however tacitly, Senators McCain and Obama.
Everyone knows of the dangers posed by instability on the Afghan-Pakistan border, in Pakistan and the region. In July, Pakistani and Indian soldiers waged a 12-hour gun battle across their disputed border. But so far, little has been done to develop the kind of Euro-Atlantic consensus about policy options necessary for a new US president and Europe to collaborate.
Worse still, the rejection by Ireland of the Lisbon treaty threatens to push the issue further back in the queue. But European leaders must not take their eyes off real-world problems and drafting a new Euro-Atlantic policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan is as real as it gets.
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