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Afghan president heads to India to cement ties
By Alistair Scrutton Sun Aug 3, 12:35 AM ET
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai is due to arrive in India on Sunday to cement ties with New Delhi, just weeks after a suicide bombing at the Indian embassy in Kabul underscored the security tensions in the region.
1 US-led coalition member killed in bomb attack
By AMIR SHAH, Associated Press Writer Sun Aug 3, 5:58 AM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - A roadside bomb struck a U.S.-led coalition vehicle on Sunday, killing one service member and wounding another on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, a coalition spokesman said.
Afghan mothers keep their kids with them in prison
By ALISA TANG, Associated Press Writer
KABUL, Afghanistan - Three-year-old Wahid nervously clutched a dirty blue stuffed bunny, as the other children in the prison huddled around.
UN: Afghan Drug Lords Being Helped
Friday, Aug. 01, 2008 By AP/NAHAL TOOSI times.com
(KABUL, Afghanistan) — Afghan drug lords are increasingly converting opium into heroin at home with outside technical help and chemicals smuggled from abroad, the U.N. said Monday, indicating greater
Thirteen Afghan polio cases, unrest hampering vaccinations
Sat Aug 2, 7:27 PM ET
KABUL (AFP) - Afghanistan has this year recorded 13 new cases of polio, which is only endemic in three other countries worldwide, the health minister said Saturday.
Briton's bid to stop Afghan poppy trade
Ex-drug dealer James Brett has beaten his own demons. He tells Mark Collings he now hopes to take on the opium growers - with pomegranates
The Observer, Sunday August 3 2008
'Pomegranates are the answer to all this,' said James Brett, as we drove past the colourless, mud-brick villages and makeshift graveyards that litter the parched landscape of Nangarhar province.
The Cosmopolitan
Washington Post, United States By George F. Will Sunday, August 3, 2008
As the presidential candidates enter the three-month sprint to November, Barack Obama must be wondering: If that did not do it, what will? The antecedent of the pronoun "that" is his Berlin speech.
As the Fighting Swells in Afghanistan, So Does a Refugee Camp in Its Capital
The New York Times - World By CARLOTTA GALL August 3, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan-On a piece of barren land on the western edge of this capital, a refugee camp is steadily swelling as families displaced by the heavy bombardment in southern Afghanistan arrive in batches.
Taliban burn MTN tower in Ghazni
Written by www.quqnoos.com & PAN Saturday, 02 August 2008
Telecom towers coming under new attacks
On Thursday night the Taliban was burnt an MTN mobile tower in Qala Baran in Qarabagh district in Ghazni province.
In Afghanistan even our successes are failures
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom By Sean Rayment 03/08/2008
The British Army is rightly proud of the new road that runs through Musa Qala's teeming bazaar. After all, they built it - or, more accurately, it was built by the Afghans and paid for with British taxpayers' money.
Indo-Pak policy contradictions
Daily Times, Pakistan Sunday, August 03, 2008
While the media is shouting against the US for “slandering Pakistan” after reports of President Bush’s complaint about “ISI complicity” in Taliban attacks inside Afghanistan, the information minister
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Afghan president heads to India to cement ties
By Alistair Scrutton Sun Aug 3, 12:35 AM ET
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai is due to arrive in India on Sunday to cement ties with New Delhi, just weeks after a suicide bombing at the Indian embassy in Kabul underscored the security tensions in the region.
Afghanistan, India and the U.S have accused Pakistan's spy agency of being involved in the July bombing that killed at least 58 people, including two Indian diplomats. Islamabad denies any involvement.
The attack was a blow to a tentative peace process between India and Pakistan that highlighted how Afghanistan could quickly become another source of diplomatic tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbors already divided over the Kashmir region.
Analysts say that Pakistan is worried about India's increasing influence in Afghanistan, the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars of Indian development aid in recent years.
"India is one of the biggest aid donors to Afghanistan," said C. Raja Mohan, an Indian foreign affairs analyst based in Singapore. "From a geopolitical and aid stand, the issue for India will be about how to improve security as ties grow closer."
Karzai will meet Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday.
Both Singh and Karzai share a common interest in stopping any Pakistan-sponsored violence and talks will probably centre on this issue, analysts say.
India said after the Kabul attack that its peace process with Pakistan was "under stress" because its traditional foe was "inciting terror" inside India and trying to hit its interests abroad.
India, which did not recognize the radical Taliban regime, lost its foothold in Afghanistan where arch rival Pakistan held diplomatic sway for years before the September 2001 attacks on the United States sparked a U.S-led invasion.
New Delhi was a key backer of Afghan forces led by the Northern Alliance which, along with the U.S. military, overthrew the Taliban, aided by Pakistan up to September 2001.
India is now involved in training Afghanistan's police and diplomats, building roads and hospitals, and supporting trade and services as Afghanistan tries to rebuild its war-ravaged economy, despite continuing attacks by the Taliban.
The Afghan intelligence agency has accused Pakistani agents of training thousands of militants to attack Indian road projects in Afghanistan. A number of Indian road workers have been killed in Afghanistan.
Singh and Karzai might use the meeting to show unity in their hardening of views to Pakistan.
"I am not expecting any dramatic shift in relations. Relations are as close as they can be," said Ajai Sahni, of the Institute for Conflict Management.
"But we may see a common hardening of their posture to Pakistan. And India may even announce more aid programs for Afghanistan," Sahni said.
(Editing by Jonathan Allen and David Fox)
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1 US-led coalition member killed in bomb attack
By AMIR SHAH, Associated Press Writer Sun Aug 3, 5:58 AM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - A roadside bomb struck a U.S.-led coalition vehicle on Sunday, killing one service member and wounding another on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, a coalition spokesman said.
The blast happened in Hussein Kheil village, in Kabul's eastern outskirts on the way toward a police training center, said Bariyalay Khan, a district police chief.
Coalition spokesman 1st Lt. Nathan Perry confirmed the casualties but did not specify their nationalities.
Khan said those traveling in the convoy were Americans.
Najib Rahman, another police official at the site of the blast, said an American helicopter landed to pick up the wounded while another hovered overhead.
Militants regularly use roadside bombs to attack Afghan and foreign troops in the country, which is facing a Taliban-led insurgency.
More than 2,700 people — mostly militants — have been killed so far this year in insurgency-related violence, according to an Associated Press tally of figures from Afghan and Western officials.
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Afghan mothers keep their kids with them in prison
By ALISA TANG, Associated Press Writer
KABUL, Afghanistan - Three-year-old Wahid nervously clutched a dirty blue stuffed bunny, as the other children in the prison huddled around.
"Are you taking us to an orphanage?" he wanted to know.
Asked by some visitors if he wanted to go, Wahid waffled between yes and no, unable to decide which was worse — moving to an orphanage or staying in prison with his mother.
Wahid is one of 226 young children who live in Afghanistan's prisons, with mothers who are among the country's 304 incarcerated women. These children have committed no crime. But their mothers have decided prison is the best option for them in a poor, war-torn country where a safe, comfortable home is a rarity.
In many European countries, babies and children up to 3 years old are allowed to stay in prison with their mothers to ease the pain of separation. And in the United States, a few jails also allow mothers to have their children with them, while others may end up in foster care or child welfare programs.
But in Afghanistan, the reasons for keeping children in prison are starkly different: Poverty and safety.
In the outside world, these children would be social outcasts because their mothers are prisoners and many of them were accused by their own families of adultery or murder. In prison, the children have access to some education, medical treatment and free items distributed by aid groups — which is more than the average Afghan child gets.
"I was living in a tent, and I don't have that much money. In prison, at least my children have something to eat," said 30-year-old Qandy, who was accused of stealing a mobile phone and is in jail with a 3-year-old son and year-old daughter. The women interviewed either had only one name, like many Afghans, or declined to have their last names published.
Some of these children were born behind bars. Others came because their mothers asked for them, said Karine Benyahia, protection coordinator for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan.
"It's not where children should spend their childhood," Benyahia said. "But when a mother is in prison for the murder of the father — the lives of these children outside, I'm not sure it's a good alternative either."
In some cases, there is nobody else to look after them. Many prisoners also fear their children would be beaten or even killed by vengeful enemies or relatives, or that greedy family members would marry off their daughters to reap a bride price that often amounts to hundreds of dollars — a fortune in Afghanistan.
"If I let my daughter go to live with her uncle, he may sell her to someone. I will never let him sell her," said Shaperai, who was jailed for 16 years for the murder of her husband. Her 14-year-old daughter is the oldest of about 65 children living in the new women's prison on the outskirts of Kabul.
Yet prison is hardly an ideal environment for the children, growing up among criminals and often severely ill.
Four-year-old Sohrab has sickly eyes with white rings around his irises. His mother, Maria, says she and her son both have hepatitis C. She has two other children with her in prison.
"To whom can I send the children if they go outside?" Maria asked, pointing out that her in-laws accused her of killing her husband. She has finished about half of her 10-year jail sentence. "I'm worried about them having to spend five more years here while they are sick."
Another child, Nazanin, was born in prison three years ago, but she still cannot walk and looks like an infant.
"I try to push her, but she can't even stand on her own feet," said her mother, Habiba, who has completed three years of a 10-year sentence for murder and has two other children in prison with her. "She eats a lot, but she's not gaining weight."
Habiba said her husband visited her in prison when Nazanin was only a month old. Claiming the baby was not his, he accused her of cheating and beat her so badly that she was in a coma for a month. The newborn was left in the care of her daughter, Gulabo, who was then only 4.
The children typically sleep with their mothers, sometimes crowding four to a tiny one-person cot. The mothers put the newborns in hammocks made of scarves tied to the frames of their bunk beds.
In the absence of playpens or cribs, toddlers with behavioral problems are tied by the arm or leg to bed posts to keep them out of trouble. The children quickly pick up back talk, and even some 2- or 3-year-old boys yell obscenities or pull down their pants, a female guard said.
The Kabul prison is in some ways an improvement over dank, smelly Pul-e Charkhi, where the women lived with their children until they were moved in April. At Pul-e Charkhi, some rooms were jammed with more than a dozen women and their children. But they were allowed to roam around the prison compound, and the children often walked outside to buy snacks and toiletries from a nearby shop.
The new prison is well-lit and much cleaner. It was built by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime with help from Italy, and handed over to the Afghan Justice Ministry in January 2008.
But even in the new prison, half a dozen women are crammed into each room with their children. The women get one hour a day of sunlight in the crude rock garden. Many of the children spend their time in an unruly kindergarten class, where one of the boys is tasked with keeping the door shut so that the little ones cannot run out into the hallways.
"There is no open place for them to play. There is no park. They are living with their mothers inside the prison, in the room," said Shaperai Anwary of the Afghan Women's Educational Center, which runs the kindergarten. "If a child is breastfeeding, it is necessary to be with the mother, but there are some children who are 10, 11, 13."
Some children say they miss their fathers. Malina, 7, wants to live outside and has modest dreams: "If I go outside, I can help my sister cook and wash the clothes. I can study, go to the mosque, study the Quran, and when I come home, I can help my sister wash the dishes."
Malina's mother, Shiringul, is serving 20 years for being part of a gang that robbed and murdered taxi drivers. Five people have been executed — Shiringul's husband, driver, cousin, brother-in-law and son. She has two children with her in prison, Malina and her 6-year-old son Hekmatullah.
Some of the women have sent their children to orphanages, but not Shiringul.
"I can't let my children be taken to an orphanage because I have many enemies who may kidnap them," Shiringul said, sitting on the floor of the crowded cell in a cloud of smoke as she puffed a cigarette. "Some of my enemies are even in prison, and they ask about me. If my children were in an orphanage, I would not feel that they were safe."
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UN: Afghan Drug Lords Being Helped
Friday, Aug. 01, 2008 By AP/NAHAL TOOSI times.com
(KABUL, Afghanistan) — Afghan drug lords are increasingly converting opium into heroin at home with outside technical help and chemicals smuggled from abroad, the U.N. said Monday, indicating greater sophistication for the country's already booming illegal drug trade.
Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world's opium, a business that has grown rapidly since the U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban regime in 2001. Both officials in the American-backed government and Taliban militants are believed to profit from the illicit trade.
According to U.N. figures, Afghanistan last year yielded about 9,000 tons of opium, enough to make over 900 tons of heroin.
Increasingly, the conversion of opium resin into heroin is being done inside Afghanistan, mostly at laboratories in the border regions, especially in the insurgency-plagued south and the east, said Christina Oguz, country representative for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
Countries on international narcotics smuggling routes, such as Iran, Pakistan and even Turkey, are also suspected locations for heroin production. But Oguz estimated that as much as 70 percent of the deadly drug was now processed in Afghanistan itself.
Evidence of higher quality Afghan heroin indicates that those running the labs also are getting assistance from outside "chemists" _ "foreign consultants" of sorts _ Oguz told reporters in Kabul.
She did not elaborate on where the expertise came from beyond saying it was from countries near the border, but said the chemicals needed to make the heroin were being smuggled from European countries including Russia, from China, South Korea and other parts of the world.
She urged the international community to share more information on known smugglers of the chemicals, many of whom were "long-established and based in neighboring countries."
"It's not correct to blame Afghanistan alone for the heroin problem in the world," Oguz said. "It's true that this country is producing the raw material for heroin, the opium. But it is not possible to make heroin without certain chemicals, and these chemicals are not produced inside Afghanistan, they are smuggled into the country."
The so-called precursor chemicals, such as acetic anhydride, also have legal uses, including in the paint and pharmaceutical industries. The chemicals often are legally exported but later diverted to Afghanistan for illicit goals, Oguz said, noting that Afghanistan has no major legal industries that would require such chemicals.
She said more than 200 tons of the chemicals have been seized by Afghan authorities since 2006, but based on last year's opium production figures, some 13,000 tons were needed _ suggesting the confiscated amount represented only a small fraction of the total smuggled in.
Oguz said most seizures of the precursor chemicals occur along the eastern border with Pakistan, but a good deal comes via the western border with Iran.
Western officials are increasingly concerned that Taliban militants are bankrolling their insurgency through the drugs trade. But the U.N. briefing also comes in the wake of allegations that Afghan President Hamid Karzai protected drug lords for political reasons.
A former senior U.S. State Department counter-narcotics official wrote in an article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine that "narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government."
The official alleged Karzai was reluctant to move against big drug lords in his political power base in the country's south, where most opium is produced.
Karzai has insisted that he is committed to eliminating corruption and battling the drug trade.
Oguz acknowledged Monday that there is corruption within the system but noted Afghanistan lacked a well-trained police force for many years and it was only now taking "baby steps" in fighting the problem.
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Thirteen Afghan polio cases, unrest hampering vaccinations
Sat Aug 2, 7:27 PM ET
KABUL (AFP) - Afghanistan has this year recorded 13 new cases of polio, which is only endemic in three other countries worldwide, the health minister said Saturday.
Almost all the new cases were in the southern provinces, which see the worst of a deadly Taliban rebel-linked insurgency, with the insecurity hampering efforts to wipe out the crippling disease.
"We have 13 cases since the beginning of this year," Health Minister Mohammad Amin Fatimie told an event to mark the start of a new round of polio vaccinations.
Most of the cases were in children aged under two years, he said. The number was down from 31 in 2006 and 17 in 2007.
"The first challenge is that the immunisation teams are not able to cover every single house and the enemies of Afghanistan are stopping the process," Fatimie said, referring to Taliban and other militants.
There are large parts of mainly southern Afghanistan that are considered dangerous, even for Afghans, with insurgents and other rebels kidnapping and sometimes killing people associated with the government.
Nineteen non-government organisation workers have been killed this year, according to an umbrella body of NGOs, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief.
In some cases Taliban were speaking out against the vaccination campaign and telling people not to participate, the health minister said.
"The second challenge is one of the four countries that have polio is a neighbouring country, Pakistan," he said.
Hundreds of people move every day between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where there have been 20 cases of polio this year, and this spreads infection.
"Our coverage is 90 percent in insecure areas and in the areas that there is active fighting or the area is battlefield or there is danger from mines -- they are necessarily out of coverage," ministry spokesman Abdullah Fahim said.
The ministry said the three-day immunisation drive starting Sunday would see more than 52,000 staff and volunteers deliver oral polio vaccinations to 7.5 million children across the country.
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Briton's bid to stop Afghan poppy trade
Ex-drug dealer James Brett has beaten his own demons. He tells Mark Collings he now hopes to take on the opium growers - with pomegranates
The Observer, Sunday August 3 2008
'Pomegranates are the answer to all this,' said James Brett, as we drove past the colourless, mud-brick villages and makeshift graveyards that litter the parched landscape of Nangarhar province. We were on our way to Markoh, a small village 40 minutes' drive inside the Afghan border with Pakistan. Brett first visited Markoh in April 2007. On his way to a seminar in Kabul, he had asked the driver to stop the car so that he could speak to a reed-thin figure extracting opium from the poppies.
'My translator told me not to do it. He said "you'll get shot", but I just felt like the first step had to be made that day.' That 'first step' was walking into the field to try to persuade the farmer to stop growing poppies and start growing pomegranates instead.
After the initial shock of seeing the large red-headed man striding through the field, the farmer agreed to stop cultivating poppies if Brett guaranteed to subsidise both him and his family until the pomegranate trees were grown and ready to harvest - a period of three to five years. Having launched his pomegranate juice on to the UK market four years previously, Brett was keen to find good fruit and plough the profits into increasing production. His argument to the farmer that the crop would return two-and-a-half times what he got for the poppy harvest proved a compelling one.
Nangarhar - with a population of nearly two million people - is one of the more stable provinces in Afghanistan. The tribal chiefs of Helmand province, the biggest producer of opium in the country, may be more difficult to convince. According to a United Nations survey, Afghanistan cultivated 193,000 hectares of opium in 2007 and now supplies 93 per cent of the world's opiates. The illegal trade is worth around £1.3bn a year to Afghanistan - one-third of the country's gross domestic product.
One year on, Brett was preparing to address a 'loyal jirga' (grand assembly) of tribal chiefs from the 22 districts of Nangarhar province to try to persuade them to follow the example of that first farmer.
As we reached Markoh, the car slowed in front of a dozen or so Afghan police armed with AK-47s. The police ushered us into a clearing at the end of a dirt road where more than 400 tribal chiefs and elders were sat cross-legged in an orchard under two brightly coloured marquees. No one from the outside world - English or otherwise - had spoken to a gathering of these people before. All eyes were on Brett as he walked to the podium to speak, wearing a traditional Pathan hat and a long white jacket embroidered with red pomegranates.
He promised that he would help to raise money for the project and find markets for the fruit if they pledged to stop growing poppies. After several hours of deliberation, the elders made a historic decision, agreeing to cease poppy cultivation in the province from 2009. Nangarhar would be poppy-free for the first time in 100 years.
Later that day Brett led a crowd back to the same field he had walked into a year earlier. The poppies had gone. The farmer was now standing under a sign that read 'POM354 - this site has been acquired as an initiative of alternative livelihood'. Brett shook hands with the farmer and planted the first pomegranate tree in the dry earth.
The tree-planting ceremony was only the latest chapter in Brett's extraordinary life. Born in Swindon in 1970, into a religious, working class family, from the age of 10 he was sexually abused by his grandfather, the head of a local church. When, at the age of 15, James finally plucked up the courage to tell his mother about the abuse, she committed suicide. Burdened with guilt, James turned to drink, drugs and petty crime, shoplifting and selling cannabis. But in 1997 he began to turn his life around. After marrying and having two daughters, he started looking into more legitimate ways to make a living.
On a trip to Pakistan in 1999 Brett had his first taste of fresh pomegranate juice at a street market stall. 'It was very odd. As soon as I drank it I thought, "Tesco's, Sainsbury's, Asda..." I knew I could turn it into something big in the UK.'
In 2003 he launched Pomegreat juice, which soon caught the attention of the major supermarkets. Last year it sold 2m litres a month and the company had a turnover of £33m. Having lost friends to heroin, there is a missionary zealotary about Brett's campaign. 'POM354 isn't about personal gain; it's about personal growth,' he said. 'I'm in it to help solve a problem that I care about.'
Last week Babrak Shinwari, member of parliament for Nangarhar, arrived in the UK to discuss the future of the POM354 initiative. Having proved that pomegranates can be a viable economic alternative for farmers in Nangarhar, Brett intends to duplicate the model throughout the country. Shinwari, who will run for the presidency of Afghanistan later this year, will stay with Brett at his remote farmhouse in Scotland to talk about how James can deliver on his promise at the jirga.
Since Brett planted the first tree, support for the project has gathered pace. Several food and drink companies have promised to help - they will carry the POM354 logo on their products and donate a percentage of each product to the cause. Britain's largest drug charity, Addaction, is also behind the campaign.
Shinwari has worked closely with President Hamed Karzai since the first democratic elections in 2004 and has been a key player in helping to build trust in the country's fragile government among tribal factions. He sees the replacement of the poppy with a viable alternative crop as a high priority and believes that for security to improve it is essential for the economy to prosper.
'There is a will in Afghanistan to cultivate alternative livelihoods and rebuild. POM354 is potentially the best alternative livelihood initiative to happen to Afghanistan. Brett is the first person to come from the international community who talked to the people for the benefit of the people,' said Shinwari.
According to UN and Afghan government figures, a typical poppy farmer can expect to make around $2,000 per acre. At a conservative estimate, Brett says he has worked out that pomegranates could produce $5,000 per acre.
POM354 aims to help raise the money to subsidise the farmers while they wait for their first pomegranate harvest. Using the original farm in Markoh as a template, it will cost £24,000 to subsidise the 16 families who live on the farm for the three years it will take for the trees to mature.
The scheme will also help to establish an export market for the region by signing up businesses. Funds will also be used to establish offices and factories to provide education and support for the farmers who are changing their crops.
It's a task that would daunt most people, but Brett has already achieved more than anyone dreamed possible through his unorthodox methods and bloody-mindedness. 'It's a big job, but if the international community get behind us it will happen - and who wouldn't want to get rid of the heroin problem?' he said. 'It's a great opportunity for us all.'
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The Cosmopolitan
Washington Post, United States By George F. Will Sunday, August 3, 2008
As the presidential candidates enter the three-month sprint to November, Barack Obama must be wondering: If that did not do it, what will? The antecedent of the pronoun "that" is his Berlin speech. The antecedent of the pronoun "it" is assuage anxieties about his understanding of the need to supplement soft power (diplomacy) with hard power (military force).
He spoke in Berlin at the bullet-scarred base -- it was in the crossfire 63 years ago as Russian troops neared Hitler's bunker about a mile away -- of an 1873 monument to German militarism. To be precise, the monument celebrates the Franco-Prussian War and lesser triumphs of the militarism that was to help ruin the next century.
Anyway, at that monument Obama exhorted Germans -- does the candidate of "change" appreciate how much beneficent change made this exhortation necessary? -- to be more willing to wage war, in Afghanistan. He was right to do so.
But polls taken since his trip abroad do not indicate that Obama succeeded in altering the oddest aspect of this presidential campaign: Measured against his party's surging strength in every region and at every level, he is dramatically underperforming. Surely this fact is related to anxieties about his thin résumé regarding national security matters, the thinnest of any major party nominee since Wendell Willkie in 1940. But the fact also might be related to fatigue from too much of Obama's eloquence, which is beginning to sound formulaic and perfunctory.
Even an eloquent politician can become, as Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone, "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." John Kennedy said in Berlin, "Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free." That half-baked and badly written thought was either trivial because it was tautological (when one man is enslaved, not every man is free) or it was absurd (when one man is not free, no man is free). That absurdity is dangerous because it makes a grandiose mission seem imperative, as in President George W. Bush's second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."
Does Obama have the sort of adviser a candidate most needs -- someone sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much? If so, Obama should be told: Enough, already, with the we-are-who-we-have-been-waiting-for rhetorical cotton candy that elevates narcissism to a political philosophy.
And no more locutions such as "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship." If they meant anything in Berlin, they meant that Obama wanted Berliners to know that he is proudly cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is not, however, a political asset for American presidential candidates. Least of all is it an asset for Obama, one of whose urgent needs is to seem comfortable with America's vibrant and very un-European patriotism, which is grounded in a sense of virtuous exceptionalism.
Otherwise, "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship" are, strictly speaking, nonsense. Citizenship is defined by legal and loyalty attachments to a particular political entity with a distinctive regime and culture. Neither the world nor the globe is such an entity.
In Berlin, Obama neared self-parody with a rhetoric of Leave No Metaphor Behind. "Walls"? Down with them. "Bridges"? Build new ones between this and that. "A new dawn"? The Middle East deserves one. And Berlin was the wrong place to vow to "remake the world once again." Modern Berlin rose from rubble that was the result of the last attempt at remaking "the world."
Of course, from Obama, such tropes, although silly, are not menacing, any more than they were from Ronald Reagan, who was incorrigibly fond of perhaps the least conservative, and therefore the most absurd, proposition ever penned by a political philosopher, Thomas Paine's "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." No. We. Don't.
The world is a fact, and facts are indeed stubborn things. After eight years, if such there are, of an Obama presidency, if such there is, the world will look much as it does today -- if we are lucky.
Swift and sweeping changes are almost always calamitous consequences of calamities -- often of wars, sometimes of people determined to "remake the world." Wise voters -- polls might be telling us that there are more of them than Obama imagines -- hanker for candidates whose principal promise is that they will do their best to muddle through without breaking too much crockery.
georgewill@washpost.com
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As the Fighting Swells in Afghanistan, So Does a Refugee Camp in Its Capital
The New York Times - World By CARLOTTA GALL August 3, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan-On a piece of barren land on the western edge of this capital, a refugee camp is steadily swelling as families displaced by the heavy bombardment in southern Afghanistan arrive in batches.
The growing numbers reaching Kabul are a sign of the deepening of the conflict between NATO and American forces and the Taliban in the south and of the feeling among the population that there will be no end soon. Families who fled the fighting around their homes in Helmand Province one or two years ago and sought temporary shelter around two southern provincial capitals, Lashkar Gah and Kandahar, said they had moved to Kabul because of growing insecurity across the south.
“If there was security in the south, why would we come here?” said Abdullah Khan, 50, who lost his father, uncle and a female relative in the bombing of their home last year. “We will stay here, even for 10 years, until the bombardment ends.”
Sixty-one families from just one southern district — Kajaki, in northern Helmand Province — arrived in Kabul in late July. A representative for those families, Khair Muhammad, 27, said that a major jailbreak last month that freed hundreds of Taliban prisoners was the latest sign of the deteriorating security. “Do you know, the Taliban entered Kandahar city and broke into the prison?” he said. “Do you think that is security?”
The United Nations refugee agency has registered 450 families from Helmand Province at the camp — approximately 3,000 people. But that is only a part of the overall refugee picture. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people have been displaced by the insurgency in the south, but the numbers fluctuate as some have been able to return home when the fighting moves elsewhere.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned that the displaced who have reached the cities represent only the tip of the iceberg, and many others are trapped by violence in remote areas without assistance.
Many of the families who have arrived in Kabul have suffered traumatic losses and injuries, and they say that they are pessimistic about the future.
“The Taliban are getting stronger,” said Muhammad Younus, a farm worker who abandoned his village after his father, brother and uncle were killed in an airstrike two years ago. “There were armored vehicles on the hill and they were firing. There was a heavy bombardment, and planes bombed, too,” he said. “They did not differentiate between the guilty and not guilty.”
He, like many of the displaced people, complained that villagers found themselves trapped between Taliban fighters, who used the villages for cover to attack foreign forces, and NATO and American forces, which would often call in airstrikes on village compounds where civilians were living.
“We left our houses because we had no power to resist the Taliban or the government,” said Mr. Muhammad, the representative who brought families to Kabul from villages in Kajaki.
“Anytime the Taliban fired a shot from our houses, then the coalition, the government and the police came to the area and hit us.”
“The government comes and arrests us, and then the Taliban come and arrest us as well,” he said. “We are under the feet of two powers.”
As a civilian plane circled above the city, Mr. Muhammad and the crowd of men around him all looked nervously upward. “We are in trouble with these things,” he said, pointing at the plane. “There was fighting in the village a hundred times, roadside bombs, bombardment, firing and shooting.”
His strongest complaints were against the Taliban who, he said, had accused a relative of being a spy for the coalition forces and executed him. “I absolutely know he was not,” he said vehemently.
“The Taliban are coming during the night, with heavy weapons, riding on vehicles, and we cannot even dare ask them to leave, because if they see someone at night outside they will slaughter them and accuse them of being spies,” he said.
But the heavy reprisals by NATO and American forces was what drove them from their homes in the end, he and others said.
Khan Muhammad, 35, came with 40 people from his extended family three months ago after their village, Tajoi, near Kajaki, was bombed and his 4-year-old son, Umar Khan, was killed. “His mother was cooking, and he was lying beside her,” he said. “The whole village was destroyed, and after that we left.”
He said the villagers did not even see the Taliban but heard them fire as foreign troops were driving along the road outside the village.
“We don’t know from which side they fired, but we heard that,” he said. “Half an hour or an hour later they bombed.”
His father, Sher Ali Aqa, 75, was trapped under the rubble and his leg was shattered. Still unable to walk, he sat on a mat beside a makeshift tent.
“I blame the foreigners,” Mr. Muhammad said. “If the Taliban fire from over there, do you come and bomb this village?”
He added, “We only want a stable country, whether with the Taliban or the foreigners.” But he said that the level of violence made him realize that the foreign forces could not bring security.
That sentiment was echoed by many of the villagers, who said that the civilian deaths were particularly galling given the sophisticated technology of the coalition’s warplanes.
“If they kill, if they wound innocent people, we don’t want them,” said Tauz Khan, a man from the Sangin district who said he lost five members of his family in bombings last year. “If they build and bring peace we will accept them.”
His father, brother and a daughter were among those killed. “You cannot take revenge against a plane,” he said. “But I will not forgive the foreigners for this crime.”
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Taliban burn MTN tower in Ghazni
Written by www.quqnoos.com & PAN Saturday, 02 August 2008
Telecom towers coming under new attacks
On Thursday night the Taliban was burnt an MTN mobile tower in Qala Baran in Qarabagh district in Ghazni province.
A Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that they destroyed this tower because it didn’t work by Taliban regulations. Five months ago Taliban asked mobile companies to switch off their towers between 6pm and 6am.
One of the local residents who goes by the name of Naser said that all mobile towers in this area were switched off from 6pm -6am but the MTN was working until 9pm.
Chief of the district of Qarabagh said that 3 armed men with motorcycles went to area and burnt the tower.
He said that the armed men didn’t harm the tower security guard. Police has been sent to the area to investigate.
The tower was located between Ghazni and Kandahar highway and was also the target of an arson attack 5 months ago.
This is the 6th tower in this district which has been destroyed during the year. Afghan security experts believe that the insecurity in Afghanistan is being fuelled by Pakistani ISI, which is increasingly targeting business and infrastructure in Afghanistan.
Mobile telephone companies have been arguably the most successful businesses in Afghanistan since 2001.
Recently the NDS announced that 3000 militants were being sent to Afghanistan to target infrastructure projects.
A suicide attack on Friday in Zaranj also seems to be targeting a city likely to become a key conduit for trade for Afghanistan as a result of the Chabahar Port project in Iran.
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In Afghanistan even our successes are failures
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom By Sean Rayment 03/08/2008
The British Army is rightly proud of the new road that runs through Musa Qala's teeming bazaar. After all, they built it - or, more accurately, it was built by the Afghans and paid for with British taxpayers' money.
Having just spent three weeks embedded with British troops in Helmand, I can report that, by Afghan standards, the road is pretty impressive. It is relatively straight and flat and, I was assured, has transformed the lives of many among the local population.
Quite what the bazaar's shopkeepers think of it, however, I do not know. On the occasion that I entered, flanked by soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment, it was simply too dangerous to stop and chat.
advertisementThe very real threat posed by suicide bombers put interacting with the locals off the agenda, even though the soldiers were supposed to be on a "reassurance" patrol. The tension was tangible, the atmosphere threatening and deeply unpleasant. As far as the soldiers were concerned, they were in enemy territory.
But Musa Qala is supposed to be secure. It is supposed to be the model town from which insurgents have been cleansed and where even the local governor, Mullah Saalam, is a reconciled former member of the Taliban.
Put simply, Musa Qala is sold to us as the future; it is supposed to offer hope. So what has gone wrong?
In effect, Musa Qala is Afghanistan in microcosm. As in the rest of the country, there are not enough troops in the town to secure it properly. Without enough troops there can be no security, and without security there can be no meaningful governance, development and reconstruction.
There is of course the Afghan National Army, but its capability is limited. Although it is growing daily (it numbers 70,000) it has no armour, air power or medical support, and limited command and control. It will be many years before it can function effectively on its own.
The truth is that Nato's entire strategy in Afghanistan is being undermined by its inability to generate the resources that would enable any real progress to be made. Rather than moving forward, Nato is treading water. In the meantime, the Taliban are regrouping.
On the frontline: British soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan Following two years of bitter fighting, during which the insurgents suffered unsustainable casualties, they have changed tactics. The Taliban have learned from their mistakes and are now showing that they can adapt.
Only last week, aid agencies in Afghanistan warned they may be unable to operate in parts of the country that were once seen as safe, because of the spiralling violence.
Last month, in the east of the country, an isolated US base was virtually overrun by the Taliban in an attack that left nine American soldiers dead. The base was later abandoned.
In May, more US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq for the first time since 2003. In Helmand in July, more than 20 vital supply convoys were ambushed by insurgents and in the past eight weeks 16 British soldiers have been killed on operations in the province.
Despite the increasing number of attacks and the ever-growing casualty lists, many senior officers believe that the British and US governments simply do not appreciate the scale of the task in Afghanistan.
The country is as big as France, and has an estimated population of 32 million, yet the Nato force stands at 52,700 and only a fraction of those are involved in combat.
Afghanistan has no functioning economy and corruption is rife - the brother of President Hamid Karzai is reportedly a notorious drug lord.
One evening during my embed, while chatting over coffee, a senior frontline commander painted a stark picture of the challenge ahead: "If the size of the force was increased to 200,000 troops, and the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan became the main foreign policy objective of every Nato country for the next three decades, and if the Taliban could be persuaded to give up their arms, then, in 30 years' time, Afghanistan might reach a level equivalent to that of Bangladesh - if we are lucky."
If he is right, then we might ask whether Afghanistan is worth the effort. But that's a question for another article.
There is also growing concern about Britain's ability to sustain its force in Afghanistan. Service in Helmand makes huge demands on soldiers. Fighting in 50C, in arduous conditions - the threat from improvised explosive devices has increased by 400 per cent since April - exacts a price.
Of those who return, too many are at their physical and mental limits. Some continue to serve but many, especially those with families, leave - and many more I spoke to on my trip plan to do so. Who can blame them? The average pay for a private soldier in Helmand is around £900 a month and his bonus, if he survives, is £2,300.
None of this should, however, be any surprise to the Government. In 2001, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, then chief of the defence staff, warned Tony Blair of the dangers of Britain getting its "hand caught in the mangle of Afghanistan". The "hand" of Britain and Nato is now well and truly trapped.
Does failure beckon? In recent weeks both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have promised to make Afghanistan the main focus of "the war on terror". But Afghanistan need more than words. It needs deeds, and it needs them now.
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Indo-Pak policy contradictions
Daily Times, Pakistan Sunday, August 03, 2008
While the media is shouting against the US for “slandering Pakistan” after reports of President Bush’s complaint about “ISI complicity” in Taliban attacks inside Afghanistan, the information minister, Sherry Rehman, is reported to have said in Islamabad the other day that some old elements of the ISI could be involved. But Pakistan is not sitting idle. After the Washington plaints, Islamabad has supplied “proof” of Indian involvement in terrorism inside Pakistan. This has prompted India to report that SMS messages received from Pakistan predict more blasts in Kerala after Karnataka and Gujarat.
Significantly, however, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, struck a different note when he said in Colombo on Friday that the only way to go for India and Pakistan is to increase trade and cultural contacts and thus “pull down the Berlin Wall that stands between the two”. But even as he said this, Pakistan was offering a defence pact to Sri Lanka, knowing full well that defence pacts in South Asia are a red rag inviting trouble. The question in the region will be: defence against whom? Predictably, much hostile writing will be undertaken in the India media now to reinforce the hawks who wish to keep the Indo-Pak rivalry on the boil.
We can’t help coming to the conclusion that the two states are communicating at the level of clandestine hostile acts at a time when the PPP government is trying to minimise its trouble spots inside and outside the country. Thus the world is gradually waking up to the possibility of another Indo-Pak war, this time transplanted into Afghanistan and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Indeed, it is actually unfolding behind the scenes as the NATO-ISAF forces take on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the foreground. Karl Inderfurth, former US assistant secretary of state for South Asia from 1997-2001, and Wendy Chamberlin, former US ambassador to Pakistan from 2001-2002, wrote jointly last month to express their concern over this development: “India will claim it has legitimate interests in Afghanistan and that it is a major donor in the international effort to rebuild that country. Pakistan will charge that India is running operations out of its many consulates in Afghanistan to stir trouble across the border, especially t
o fan the flames of the anti-Islamabad insurgency in Balochistan. Pakistan sees itself as potentially caught in a vice between its western and eastern neighbours. But these long-standing concerns are now being trumped by a new reality, the need for India and Pakistan to look beyond their traditional rivalries and agree on a joint strategy to confront the extremists operating along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border”.
The problem here is that we continue to look at the situation in military terms. If India has created a “pincers” situation against Pakistan by going into Afghanistan, we think we can answer the move by creating another pincers against India in Sri Lanka whose ethnic war involves the Indian state Tamilnadu and embarrasses India. But since New Delhi is quite paranoid about developments in its periphery it might go back to its doctrine of the Cold War when it saw its neighbours as collaborators of an “oceanic power” (read the US) trying to destabilise India. In the event, this would further complicate the security situation in the region with both India and Pakistan trying to prove that they can carry on with their “asymmetrical warfare” while holding on to nuclear weapons.
The media adds fuel to the fire and saps the confidence of those in Islamabad who favour the “normalisation” approach to India. The latest “badge of dishonour” is the final stage of the conclusion of a nuclear treaty between the US and India. Pakistani TV anchors and their discussants find that honour must precede state interest — which is always attached to the national economy — and that “sacrifice” should be made of the people of Pakistan by telling the US that Pakistan is not interested in playing the game of being “an ally” any more. But the truth is that most political observers in Pakistan have become knee-jerk and non-cerebral, giving Pakistan’s enemy a handle through what is called “compellance”: get the enemy to do what it wants to do for self-destruction.
The discourse between Pakistan and India must shift from the military to the civilian mode. The two prime ministers meeting in Colombo must forge a new way of looking at the current situation. Mr Manmohan Singh should not allow a policy of greater trade and cultural contacts to be derailed. Mr Yousaf Raza Gilani, despite all the criticism levelled at him after his US visit, must continue his reconciliation agenda and avoid using the language of challenge. We are standing on the threshold of a paradigm shift in Indo-Pak relations. We should realise that that the internal threat facing Pakistan is trying to take it in a direction from where there might be no return. *
SECOND EDITORIAL: Matriculation omens
The chief minister of Punjab, Mr Shehbaz Sharif, rose to the occasion on Friday when he announced that students who secured the top positions in the latest Matriculation results in the province would be given cash prizes along with their teachers; and that there will be a “guard of honour” for them. The Punjab Board passed over 52 percent of the candidates, thereby emptying half of the class 10 seats for new entrants. He told the private sector that it would be given special concessions if it opened schools in areas away from the big cities.
The two boys who topped come from schools located in Sheikhupura and Kasur, which shows the extent to which excellence has fled to the smaller cities. The eight top candidates interviewed by Daily Times contained two boys and six girls. Nearly all of them mentioned extremism as Pakistan’s problem number one. In all, the Board passed 112,782 candidates, which means they would be looking for entrance in colleges in the coming days. Unfortunately, the tendency to come to the big cities for intermediate level of classes has persisted. Over time, this should have subsided but has not. While it is general good news that the private sector has taken the slack, it is not so good to know that the state sector has failed to maintain its standards in the sector of school and college education.
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