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Afghanistan may turn to failed state as insurgency spreads: study
LONDON (AFP) - Afghanistan risks becoming a failed state if NATO troops do not defeat the Taliban, boosting Islamist extremism worldwide, a study said Tuesday, also warning that the West lacked resources.
Japan pledges fresh Afghan aid but warns on security
Wednesday • February 6, 2008 TODAYonline
Japan on Tuesday pledged 110 million dollars of fresh aid to Afghanistan but Tokyo and other donors warned that violence, drugs and corruption were hindering progress in the war-torn country.
Norway Increases Afghanistan Aid By 50% To NOK750 Million - AGF
OSLO (AFP)--Norway will increase its civilian aid to Afghanistan this year by 50% to contribute to the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said Tuesday.
Afghan gov't welcomes Norway decision to increase development assistance
KABUL, Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- The government of Afghanistan on Tuesday welcomed the decision of Norwegian government to increase financial aid to the war-torn nation, a statement released by Afghan Presidency said.
Rice heads to London to discuss Afghanistan
by Lachlan Carmichael
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to fly to London Tuesday to discuss the stakes in Afghanistan as the United States and Britain pressed their allies to do more to crush a resurgent Taliban.
Minister to deliver warning to NATO
Brendan Nicholson – The Age February 6, 2008
DEFENCE Minister Joel Fitzgibbon flew to Europe last night to warn nations fighting in Afghanistan that Australia would no longer risk its soldiers' lives capturing territory that was soon lost because of political incompetence
World Bank urges counter-opium measures
By JOSEPH COLEMAN, Associated Press Writer Tue Feb 5, 5:00 AM ET
TOKYO - The world needs to invest more than $2 billion in irrigation, roads and other rural development to wean Afghanistan off booming opium cultivation, a development bank report said Tuesday.
Afghanistan calls for more help to stamp out opium
By Isabel Reynolds Tue Feb 5, 3:42 AM ET
TOKYO (Reuters) - Afghanistan called on Tuesday for more help to stamp out opium production as donor nations gathered in Tokyo to try to coordinate policy on the struggling nation.
Roadside bombs kill seven in Afghanistan: police
Tue Feb 5, 4:05 AM ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) - Two roadside bombs killed seven people in Afghanistan, five of them civilians from the same family, police said Tuesday, in new attacks linked to a bloody Taliban insurgency.
Poland to help Canada fight in Afghanistan
Tue Feb 5, 1:26 AM ET
OTTAWA (AFP) - Poland will lend Canada two military helicopters for use in Afghanistan, the Polish foreign minister said here, answering his ally's call for more NATO troops and equipment to fight insurgents.
US, German officials wrangle over controversial Afghanistan letter
by P. Parameswaran
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US and German officials had a sharp exchange of words over a controversial letter by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates to his German counterpart demanding troops and helicopters for insurgency-wracked Afghanistan.
U.S. and allies at odds over Afghanistan
By Sue Pleming Mon Feb 4, 2:47 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. defense and foreign policy chiefs face an uphill fight this week trying to get its allies in Canada and Europe to boost NATO forces and coordinate efforts in Afghanistan in the face of rising Taliban attacks.
Karzai ponders journalist death sentence
By RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press Writer Tue Feb 5, 4:43 AM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai is concerned about a death sentence handed down to a journalist in Afghanistan accused of insulting Islam, but he will not intervene until the courts have their final say, his spokesman said Tuesday.
MPs denounce death sentence for Afghan journalist
By THE CANADIAN PRESS
OTTAWA - The House of Commons has unanimously condemned a death sentence handed to an Afghan journalist and appealed for a halt to all legal proceedings against him.
Germany balances voter, NATO demands on Afghanistan
Tue Feb 5, 2008 11:00am EST By Kerstin Gehmlich
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is trapped between demands from NATO partners to send more troops to Afghanistan and strong domestic opposition to such a move.
Time Runs Out for an Afghan Held by the U.S.
By CARLOTTA GALL and ANDY WORTHINGTON The New York Times February 5, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan — Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was regarded here as a war hero, famous for his resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980s and later for a daring prison break he organized for three opponents of the Taliban government in 1999.
Britain 'not engaged' with Taliban: PM spokesman
London (AFP) - said it was not "engaged" with the Taliban, after a report that relations between London and Kabul have soured due to a secret British plan to train former Taliban fighters.
Iran most successful state in acting on its pledges in Afghanistan: Official
Tokyo, Feb 4, IRNA - Iran has proven to be the most successful country over the past years in fulfilling its obligations in connection with Afghanistan development and reconstruction, said an Iranian official in charge of Afghanistan.
Taliban chief orders change in mode of executions
KABUL, 4 February 2008 (IRIN) - The fugitive leader of Afghan Taliban insurgents, Mullah Mohammad Omar Mujahid, has ordered his fighters to stop beheading people accused of spying for the government of President Karzai
Afghan civilian casualties rising, analysts report
February 5, 2008 Washington Times, DC
By Sharon Behn - The number of civilians inadvertently killed by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan doubled in 2007 from the previous year as coalition forces dropped about a million pounds of bombs on the country, military analysts said.
Afghan prison official was fired after complaint, MacKay says
BRIAN LAGHI From Tuesday's Globe and Mail February 5, 2008 at 4:43 AM EST
OTTAWA — An Afghan prison official has been removed from his job in the wake of torture allegations that prompted Canada to suspend the handover of detainees last fall, Canada's Defence Minister said yesterday.
We can't impose values on Afghans
Feb 04, 2008 04:30 AM Rosie DiManno Toronto Star
Afghanistan will not fast-forward from the 12th century to the 21st century in the blink of an eye and certainly not according to the agenda of Canadian sensibilities.
Western media in Karzai-bashing campaign
By Lalit K Jha - Apr 2, 2008 - 17:48
NEW YORK (PAN): Afghan President Hamid Karzai, regarded as a hero by the West for leading the war on terrorism in the conflict-devastated country, suddenly seems to have turned a villain.
Thousands of candidates taking entry test
By Moeed Hashmi & Matin Sarfaraz - Feb 2, 2008 - 17:54
JALALABAD/KUNDUZ CITY (PAN): Entry tests for intermediate graduates from Jawzjan, Kunduz, Kunar, Laghman and Nuristan provinces are in progress, officials said on Saturday.
Afghan rugs sell like hot cakes in Las Vegas
By Zainab Muhammadi - Feb 2, 2008 - 20:28
KABUL (PAN): Selling out all their rugs put for display, the Afghan businessmen in the Las Vegas state of the United States received more than one million US dollar demands for further quality handicraft mat.
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Afghanistan may turn to failed state as insurgency spreads: study
LONDON (AFP) - Afghanistan risks becoming a failed state if NATO troops do not defeat the Taliban, boosting Islamist extremism worldwide, a study said Tuesday, also warning that the West lacked resources.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) report lamented growing signs that the insurgency is expanding from the south of Afghanistan into northern provinces, with rebels learning lessons from Iraq.
Elsewhere the London-based think tank noted progress by the so-called surge in Iraq, but warned that US and other troops face being in the country for a generation.
On Afghanistan, the IISS annual study said there was a general acceptance that defeating the militants was of international importance and would require long-term, joined-up commitments from all countries involved.
But the NATO operation was most at risk where its technical advantage was reduced, particularly in eastern Afghanistan where troops have been engaged in intense fighting with militia, the IISS study "The Military Balance 2008" said.
"Failure in these actions would risk boosting Islamic extremism (not just in Afghanistan), would produce a failed state in an area of strategic importance, and would offer safe haven to terrorist organisations and the narcotics trade.
"It would also undermine the credibility of NATO in its first major out-of-area combat operation," the study said.
The IISS said that although NATO's 41,000-strong force was bolstering President Hamid Karzai's fledgling government, the administration "still lacks authority in much of the country".
The report echoed warnings last week from two US think-tanks -- the Atlantic Council of the United States and the Afghanistan Study Group -- which said troop levels had to be ramped up and major changes had to be implemented urgently.
Publication of the IISS report comes a day before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in Britain for talks on NATO and Afghanistan after calls from both countries for all members of the alliance to pull their weight.
Germany and France are among nations particularly criticised for failing to send forces to areas where fighting is the most intense. Military commanders in Afghanistan have estimated that an extra 7,500 troops are necessary.
On Iraq, where US President George W. Bush announced a "surge" of about 30,000 American troops to the 132,000 already in the country a year ago, the IISS said the security situation remains "highly volatile".
But although violence towards military and civilians was "dramatically" down, "criminality, intra-communal military violence and sectarian strife remain commonplace, and still undermine political and economic initiatives".
And it warned that "even if (troop) reductions can happen in 2008, it is estimated that President Bush's successor will inherit a situation whereby at least 100,000 troops are still stationed in Iraq."
According to the IISS, the Iraqi Army is "a generation away" from being able to operate free of US logistical support.
But the study's most pressing warning was on Afghanistan, where it said there was a "gradual proliferation of insurgency and terrorism into Afghanistan's northern provinces."
Noting an increase in suicide attacks, it warned of signs "not only that the insurgency was spreading geographically but also that tactical lessons and techniques had migrated from the insurgency in Iraq."
The insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Iraq risk remaining the West's main geopolitical challenge for some time to come.
"In both missions, multinational forces continue to grapple with the complexities of creating and maintaining security in order to allow reconstruction efforts to gain ground," said the IISS.
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Japan pledges fresh Afghan aid but warns on security
Wednesday • February 6, 2008 TODAYonline
Japan on Tuesday pledged 110 million dollars of fresh aid to Afghanistan but Tokyo and other donors warned that violence, drugs and corruption were hindering progress in the war-torn country.
Twenty-four nations and international organisations held talks in Tokyo of the Afghanistan Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, which looks at how reconstruction aid is spent.
The meeting also focused on drugs in Afghanistan, which grows 90 percent of the world's illicit opium with production hitting a new high last year.
Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura opened the two-day closed-door meeting by announcing a further 110 million dollars of help for Kabul.
Komura said, however, that lingering violence posed threats to lasting peace in Afghanistan.
"The security of Kabul has deteriorated with suicide bombings and kidnapping of foreigners, and the insurgent activities in the southern part of the country could intensify at any moment," he said.
"So as to overcome these challenges, further strengthening of the institutions of the government of Afghanistan and corresponding support from the international community are indispensable," he said.
Those concerns were also expressed in a joint communique by all meeting participants, who pointed to progress in Afghanistan but noted areas for improvement.
The participants "noted that Taliban, related armed groups, terrorism and narcotics continue to pose a challenge, inhibiting the peace process; and governance has been challenged by capacity constraints, weak rule of law and corruption," the communique said.
Afghan Foreign Minister Dadfar Spanta acknowledged problems but said the business environment, education and health care had improved significantly since a US-led coalition ousted the extremist Taliban regime in late 2001.
"Now the major challenge before us is to translate the benefits of this growth into employment opportunities for millions of unemployed citizens," he told the monitoring board, which was meeting for the seventh time.
"Let me assure you. We are fully committed to building a stable, peaceful and democratic and prosperous Afghanistan," he said, asking for continued help from the international community.
The participants -- mainly high-level diplomats -- agreed on the need for the Afghan government to strengthen its authority in a bid to bring social order and security, said a Japanese official who attended the talks.
"The participants agreed that the Afghan government and the international community must adopt holistic and comprehensive strategies," the diplomat said.
"The Afghan government expressed their wish for continued strategic, financial and other support," he said.
Japan has been a major donor to Afghanistan, already pledging some 1.2 billion dollars since the fall of the Taliban.
The newly pledged aid, which is subject to parliamentary approval, includes 13 million dollars to help literacy efforts and nine million dollars to enhance border security.
Some 90 million dollars would be sent to UN agencies for causes including assisting refugees and removing landmines.
Shortly before the meeting began, the World Bank and the British government issued a joint report calling for improved coordination among donors to increase the effectiveness of aid in Afghanistan.
"Assistance is fragmented, with 62 donors, many with their own distinct security, political and development interests," said Alastair McKechnie, World Bank country director for Afghanistan.
"Coordination requires strong leadership from governments," he said. — AFP
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Norway Increases Afghanistan Aid By 50% To NOK750 Million - AGF
OSLO (AFP)--Norway will increase its civilian aid to Afghanistan this year by 50% to contribute to the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said Tuesday.
The Scandinavian country will dedicate 750 million kroner ($137 million) to aid for Afghanistan this year, up from NOK500 million in 2007 and NOK415 million in 2006, Stoere said in an address to parliament.
"The answer to the challenges in Afghanistan must be political," he said. "We must contribute to the strengthening of Afghan institutions at a provincial and a local level and give the Afghan state the resources and the means needed to provide basic services to the population.
"We must help strengthen and legitimize the Afghan state and unify the country through a policy of reconciliation," he said.
Stoere also reiterated the Norwegian military's commitment to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
Norway currently has some 500 soldiers stationed in Kabul and northern Afghanistan and is planning to increase its presence there to 600 in the coming months.
"Without security there can be no development...and without development there can be no lasting security," said Stoere, who himself witnessed the violence in Afghanistan up close last month when the Kabul hotel he was staying at was targeted in an attack that killed seven people, including a Norwegian journalist.
Despite U.K., Canadian and U.S. appeals for reinforcements in southern Afghanistan, where they are locked in violent combat with Taliban forces, Norway has ruled out deploying troops in that part of the country.
A poll published Tuesday indicated 57% of Norwegians are in favor of their country's participation in the ISAF forces in Afghanistan, but only 45% of those questioned said they believed the operations could help restore peace in the country.
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Afghan gov't welcomes Norway decision to increase development assistance
KABUL, Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- The government of Afghanistan on Tuesday welcomed the decision of Norwegian government to increase financial aid to the war-torn nation, a statement released by Afghan Presidency said.
Norway, according to the statement, has decided to contribute 140 million U.S. dollars to Afghanistan in 2008, a 50% increase on2007 according to the Norwegian media report.
"President Hamid Karzai welcomes the decision of Norway to increase its financial assistance to Afghanistan in 2008 and terms it as a significant step towards reconstruction of the war-ravaged nation," the statement added.
Norway has more than 500 soldiers in Afghanistan serving under the command of NATO to stabilize security in the war-torn country.
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Rice heads to London to discuss Afghanistan
by Lachlan Carmichael
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to fly to London Tuesday to discuss the stakes in Afghanistan as the United States and Britain pressed their allies to do more to crush a resurgent Taliban.
In a campaign that has ruffled the feathers of some NATO allies, US officials are warning that the Taliban's defeat is not guaranteed -- more than six years after it was toppled by US-led forces at the end of 2001.
The stakes are all the greater as US officials acknowledge that the radical Islamist movement has turned its sights on an increasinly unstable Pakistan next door.
Rice was to meet Wednesday with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband of Britain, a staunch ally that has echoed US calls to deploy more troops to combat zones in southern Afghanistan.
The London talks -- which will also touch on Iraq, Iran and Kosovo -- come before NATO foreign and defense ministers hold separate talks in the runup to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Bucharest in April.
Rice -- who warned in September 2006 that Afghanistan will "come back to haunt us" if the world abandons its military support for the fragile government in Kabul -- struck a matter-of-fact tone when her trip was announced last week.
"NATO as an alliance has been looking at what it needs to do and what more needs to be done to fight the Taliban, to permit the Afghan people to have security so that reconstruction can take place," Rice said.
But Richard Boucher, the State Department's pointman for Afghanistan, told a Senate hearing last Thursday that "the greatest threat to Afghanistan's future is abandonment by the international community."
Calling for more equipment such as helicopters and more combat troops in the flash-point south, he added: "Success is possible but not assured."
His remarks came during a week in which US experts issued reports warning that Afghanistan will become a failed state unless urgent steps are taken to tackle worsening security.
Rice's spokesman Sean McCormack said Monday that there were "tactical differences" within NATO and "we respect those."
But he said Washington will also be frank about what it believes is essential to the mission's success.
"We will speak in a pretty forward way about the need for NATO as an alliance to add more troops and add more combat power," McCormack told reporters.
Washington has publicly praised Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Denmark as well as non-NATO member Australia for assuming the more dangerous missions in Afghanistan.
It has made no secret it would like European powers like France and Germany to do more to fight Taliban strongholds in the south, but has said the decision is up to them about how best to contribute.
Nevertheless, the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported exchanges of "direct and stern" letters beteen US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung over US calls for combat troops.
Last month Gates also tried to mend fences with NATO allies but did not change his view that the alliance overall remains under-trained to fight insurgents there.
Commanders in Afghanistan have been calling for around 7,500 extra troops. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) comprises some 42,000 troops from 39 countries.
The United States has about 27,000 troops in Afghanistan, around half of them in ISAF.
Gates has informed allies of US plans to deploy 3,200 Marines in Afghanistan for six months, and asked them if their forces could replace the Marines when they come out.
With 7,700 soldiers now in Afghanistan, most of them in the restive southern region, Britain has sharply increased its presence in the last year.
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Minister to deliver warning to NATO
Brendan Nicholson – The Age February 6, 2008
DEFENCE Minister Joel Fitzgibbon flew to Europe last night to warn nations fighting in Afghanistan that Australia would no longer risk its soldiers' lives capturing territory that was soon lost because of political incompetence. Australia has lost three soldiers killed and nearly 30 wounded in Afghanistan.
"I'm really concerned that Australian troops in Afghanistan are doing outstanding work, but they are being let down by the politicians," Mr Fitzgibbon said.
"Too often our people clear areas of insurgents only to have those areas taken again by insurgents due to the lack of capacity, particularly on the part of the Afghan National Army."
He said many issues needed to be addressed at a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Lithuania, and Australia would not send more troops until there was a significant change to the way the war was run.
"We won't countenance more people or resources in Afghanistan until, at least, we are convinced that a new, coherent plan has been embraced for the country and long-term success is assured," he said.
"We won't continue to put the lives of our people at risk and expend significant cost to the taxpayer if NATO and its partners aren't willing to firstly acknowledge that progress isn't good and then demonstrate a willingness to do more and embrace new strategies."
At a meeting in Edinburgh in December, countries with troops in Afghanistan agreed to draft a broader strategy for the campaign there. That draft will be studied at today's meeting.
More Afghan police and troops need to be trained and more aid and guidance in governance must be provided, along with civil infrastructure, Mr Fitzgibbon said.
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World Bank urges counter-opium measures
By JOSEPH COLEMAN, Associated Press Writer Tue Feb 5, 5:00 AM ET
TOKYO - The world needs to invest more than $2 billion in irrigation, roads and other rural development to wean Afghanistan off booming opium cultivation, a development bank report said Tuesday.
The report, by the World Bank and Britain-based Department for International Development, argued that opium cultivation — Afghanistan's leading business — can only be combatted if the country's impoverished farmers have other means of making a living.
"Without strong economic and development underpinnings, other counter-narcotics efforts cannot achieve sustained success," the 98-page report said.
Needed steps include boosting community-based development projects, expanding irrigation, increasing use of livestock, and helping rural businesses and entrepreneurs thrive, it said.
The proposals include investments of $1.2 billion to expand the land under irrigation, $550 million to boost rural enterprise development, and $400 million for rural road planning, construction and maintenance.
The money would be spent over up to 10 years.
The report's authors also called for greater coordination among Afghanistan's donors, who they said had failed to use their money in complementary ways.
"Assistance is fragmented with 62 donors, many with their own distinct security, political and development interests," said Alastair McKechnie, Afghanistan country director for the World Bank.
Afghan Foreign Minister Dadfar Spanta met Monday with Japanese officials to gain support for his country's reconstruction.
Spanta, along with a group of other Afghan ministers, is in Tokyo to attend an annual international conference on the country's reconstruction, held Tuesday and Wednesday.
The 24-member Joint Coordinating and Monitoring Board was established to monitor implementation of the Afghanistan Compact, adopted at a London conference in January 2006. It is a five-year blueprint between the international community and the Afghan government to promote security, good governance, the rule of law, human rights and economic and social development in Afghanistan as well as fight the drug trade.
The Tokyo meeting is the third to review the progress of ongoing projects over the previous year and discuss future support for Afghanistan.
Cultivation of opium, the raw material for heroin, has taken off in Afghanistan in recent years following the fall of the repressive Taliban regime. Production soared 34 percent in 2007, thanks in large part to increased rainfall.
Afghan officials said the opium trade was financing insurgent groups, contributing to the lawlessness besetting the country, and feeding a rise in drug addiction.
Drugs are "behind terrorism ... supporting terrorism," said Gen. Khodaidad, Afghanistan's acting counternarcotics minister. Like many Afghans, he uses one name.
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Afghanistan calls for more help to stamp out opium
By Isabel Reynolds Tue Feb 5, 3:42 AM ET
TOKYO (Reuters) - Afghanistan called on Tuesday for more help to stamp out opium production as donor nations gathered in Tokyo to try to coordinate policy on the struggling nation.
Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world's opium, used to make heroin, and the industry provides income for hundreds of thousands of Afghans, the World Bank and the British government said in a joint report issued the same day.
The narcotics issue is closely entwined with the growing insurgency, because revenue from the opium industry is believed to be used to fund the Taliban.
"We can only fight drugs in Afghanistan by the support of the international community," acting Minister of Counter Narcotics Khodaidad, a former army general, told a news conference.
"We need the international community's support, our neighbors' support, to put more money to improve our police, to improve our counter-narcotics police, to improve security resources and to block the border with our neighbors."
Japan, host of the two-day meeting of the Afghan Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, which brings together Afghan ministers and representatives of donor countries, responded by announcing new assistance.
Of the total $110 million, $10 million will be used to aid police reform and $9 million to enhance border management, the foreign ministry said.
"The security of Kabul has deteriorated with suicide bombings and kidnapping of foreigners, and the insurgent activities in the southern part of the country could intensify at any time," Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura told the gathering.
"So as to overcome these challenges, further strengthening of the institutions of the government of Afghanistan and corresponding support from the international community are indispensable."
FRAGMENTED SUPPORT
The Afghan government estimates the number of heroin addicts in the country has swelled to 1 million, out of a total population of 31 million.
But Afghanistan's plea for more assistance comes as the United States struggles to coordinate policy with its allies in the face of rising Taliban attacks.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is pushing for more troops in southern Afghanistan, but risks alienating allies. Canada has threatened to pull out unless other NATO countries contribute more.
Violence in Afghanistan worsened last year and more than 10,000 people, including some 300 foreign troops, have been killed in Afghanistan in the last two years, according to estimates by aid groups.
The aid community is also divided.
"Assistance is fragmented, with 62 donors, many with their own distinct security, political and development interests," Alastair Mckechnie, World Bank Country Director for Afghanistan, told the same news conference, calling for better coordination.
In its report, issued with Britain's Department for International Development (DfID), the World Bank said intensive, long-term support for Afghan farmers is key to battling opium.
Opium trade tends to flourish in remote or unstable areas, where there are few other economic opportunities, according to the report co-authored by DfID. Experts say the problem is concentrated in the south and west of the country.
Progress could be made with long-term investment in infrastructure, in irrigation of the mainly arid land and in livestock, the report said.
(Additional reporting by George Nishiyama; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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Roadside bombs kill seven in Afghanistan: police
Tue Feb 5, 4:05 AM ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) - Two roadside bombs killed seven people in Afghanistan, five of them civilians from the same family, police said Tuesday, in new attacks linked to a bloody Taliban insurgency.
A remote-controlled bomb struck an estate car (station wagon) in the southern province of Helmand on Monday, provincial police chief Mohammad Hussain Andiwal told AFP.
"Five people -- a woman, two children and two men, all members of the same family -- were killed in the roadside blast. One person was wounded," Andiwal said.
He blamed the "enemies of Afghanistan" for the attack, a term often used to refer to fighters for the extremist Taliban movement that was forced from power in late 2001 in a US-led invasion.
Another bomb, also remotely controlled, hit a police patrol in the neighbouring province of Kandahar late Tuesday and killed two police, provincial police chief Sayed Aqa Saqib said.
Another three policemen were wounded, he said.
A Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, told AFP by telephone that his organisation had carried out this attack. He made no mention of the Helmand blast.
The Taliban regularly use roadside and suicide blasts in their campaign against the government of President Hamid Karzai, who is leading the country on a troubled course to democracy after years of war and tyranny.
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Poland to help Canada fight in Afghanistan
Tue Feb 5, 1:26 AM ET
OTTAWA (AFP) - Poland will lend Canada two military helicopters for use in Afghanistan, the Polish foreign minister said here, answering his ally's call for more NATO troops and equipment to fight insurgents.
"We appreciate the sacrifices that Canada has made, and that's partly why we have increased our contribution to Afghanistan by 400 soldiers so that we will have 1,600 soldiers by the middle of this year (and) eight helicopters, two of which will be available for Canada's needs," Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told public broadcaster CBC during an official visit to Ottawa.
"We are also increasing our presence, concentrating our contingent and moving towards where the Canadians are," he said Monday. "Actually, our special forces (are) already in Kandahar with the Canadians."
A report by former deputy prime minister John Manley last month urged Ottawa to secure pledges from its allies for at least 1,000 more troops and equipment, including helicopters and drones, before considering extending its combat mission in Afghanistan beyond its current mandate of February 2009.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper heeded its findings, saying he would bring Canada's troops home next year unless its NATO allies stepped up their support for the mission.
Canada deployed 2,500 troops in Afghanistan's volatile southern Kandahar province as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), routing out Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters.
Since 2002, 78 Canadian soldiers and a senior diplomat have died in roadside bombings and in melees with insurgents.
Defense Minister Peter MacKay said Monday: "It's obviously very positive to have NATO allies, strong allies like Poland that have military capacity and capability sending those kind of positive signals."
"Hopefully there will be more to come," he said. "We'll have direct discussions with Poland and other countries about these very subjects."
Earlier, Sikorski met with Canada's Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier.
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US, German officials wrangle over controversial Afghanistan letter
by P. Parameswaran
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US and German officials had a sharp exchange of words over a controversial letter by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates to his German counterpart demanding troops and helicopters for insurgency-wracked Afghanistan.
Eckart von Klaeden, foreign policy spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said the note -- reported to be unusually stern -- was "not really helpful" in boosting US ties with Germany or Europe.
He said while Germany could do more to help beef up security in Afghanistan, the Americans should not expect too much from his country, citing what he called a Latin phrase, "You cannot commit something you are not able to do.
Listing helicopters as an example, Klaeden said, "Unfortunately, we don't have them.
"There (are) no used helicopter sellers around the corner where we can say, 'let's buy it,'" he said at a dinner discussion late Monday on "Afghanistan and NATO: Why they both matter" hosted by Germany's Konrad Adenaue Foundation in Washington.
Gates had sent the letter as part of a US diplomatic offensive to shore up support for the Afghanistan mission amid fears that allies are abandoning a cornerstone of the US-led "war on terror".
The US defense chief also reportedly sought combat German troops for duty in battle-ravaged southern Afghanistan and charged that some NATO states were not pulling their weight.
German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung responded with a similarly "direct and stern" letter to Gates, the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported last week.
Anthony Aldwell, principal director for European and NATO policy at the US Defense Department, said Gates' letter was "very direct because we value Germany's contributions" and "because Germany has professional, well trained and competent troops."
Acknowledging that the letter was drafted by his office, he said, "We would not write this same letter to some other countries.
"It is because of the way we appreciate and honor what your troops have done ... So, yes, Germany is pushed more than some of your neighbors."
Aldwell charged that coalition government "politics" in Berlin were preventing Germany from contributing more resources to Afghanistan.
But he asked, "Do you want to be the leader that many of your leaders have aspired to?"
Kurt Volker, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs, said Gates' letter was a "communication between two countries that are allies" and "you have to be honest about the challenges that we face."
Disputing US claims, Klaeden said Germans were largely supportive of the Afghan mission.
He said the main concern of leftists in Germany's ruling coalition was that Germans were "fighting for America's interest" or "dealing with the leftover of British colonialism" in Afghanistan, he said.
NATO formally asked Germany last month to deploy a rapid reaction force of 250 troops in northern Afghanistan to replace a Norwegian contingent.
"We are preparing to replace the Norwegian rapid reaction force that can be deployed also to the south, if necessary," Klaeden said.
"We are prepared to contribute special forces, also all over Afghanistan."
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U.S. and allies at odds over Afghanistan
By Sue Pleming Mon Feb 4, 2:47 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. defense and foreign policy chiefs face an uphill fight this week trying to get its allies in Canada and Europe to boost NATO forces and coordinate efforts in Afghanistan in the face of rising Taliban attacks.
Experts say their agenda could backfire if the United States is too strident in its criticism of allies and in pushing for more troops, especially in countries where the public opposes more involvement in Afghanistan.
European countries don't feel the same urgency over Afghanistan, said James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation thinktank.
"The political support is not there for it in European capitals," he said. "Unfortunately many of the Europeans see their contribution in Afghanistan in terms of an armed peace corps rather than as a real war-fighting coalition."
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heads for London for talks on Wednesday with British Foreign Minister David Miliband and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is set to meet NATO defense ministers on Thursday in Lithuania, where Afghanistan will be high on the agenda.
Rice's trip is aimed in part at soothing bruised egos after Gates last month criticized NATO forces in southern Afghanistan for their counter-insurgency efforts. British, Dutch and Canadian forces all operate in the south.
Gates has also written to NATO allies pressing them to send more soldiers to southern Afghanistan. Canada has threatened to pull out its 2,500 troops from Afghanistan early next year if NATO does not send in more troops.
COORDINATOR
One of Rice's priorities will be to discuss a new international coordinator for Afghanistan, U.S. officials said, after British politician Paddy Ashdown was rejected by Afghan President Hamid Karzai who saw him as having a viceroy role.
"The first step is to try and better organize the international effort," a senior Bush administration official said.
"None of us underestimates the challenges and the real problem in Afghanistan -- drugs, corruption, bombs by the Taliban. These are serious problems and it will take a major effort to get at them," said the official, who spoke on condition he not be identified.
The U.S. official said discussions at a conference in Tokyo this week focused on a new coordinator. New candidates had yet to emerge and there were concerns that Ashdown's rejection might make it harder.
There are about 29,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan, more than half of them under NATO command, and Gates has announced the deployment of an additional 3,200 U.S. Marines in the coming months.
MORE TROOPS
U.S. officials hope that allies will also provide more troops, at least to replace the Marines when they end their seven-month deployment, or drop some of the self-imposed restrictions on their forces doing dangerous work.
"We may not get more numbers, we may get more flexibility. That in itself would be welcome," the U.S. official said.
Two U.S. nongovernmental reports last week warned that Afghanistan could become a failed state and urged world leaders to turn the situation around quickly.
"Unfortunately, particularly in the last few years, there has been a lack of a clear, coherent and unified strategy of the key nations," said Alex Thier of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who worked on one of the reports.
There are strategic differences between allies on a range of areas. For example, the United States is pushing for greater counter-insurgency efforts while many Europeans want to train Afghan forces for more traditional policing.
The Europeans opposed aerial spraying of opium fields while the United States supported it but later backed away from the idea when the Afghans rejected it.
"My biggest concern, is that we have inadequate troop strength in Afghanistan. I cannot comprehend how we think we have enough troops given the reality on the ground. We can do clearing operations but we can't hold the territory," said Christine Fair, an Afghan expert at the RAND organization.
"The Afghans keep saying: 'When are the rest of you showing up?"' she said.
(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray; Editing by Howard Goller)
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Karzai ponders journalist death sentence
By RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press Writer Tue Feb 5, 4:43 AM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai is concerned about a death sentence handed down to a journalist in Afghanistan accused of insulting Islam, but he will not intervene until the courts have their final say, his spokesman said Tuesday.
Meanwhile, violence and cold weather were reported to have killed dozens in the impoverished country, where a Taliban insurgency still rages. Among the dead were five civilians killed when a roadside bomb struck a taxi in the south.
The journalist, 23-year-old Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh, was sentenced to death on Jan. 22 by a three-judge panel in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif for distributing a report he printed off the Internet to journalism students at Balkh University.
The article asked why under Islam men can have four wives but women cannot have multiple husbands.
The court in Mazar-i-Sharif found that the article humiliated Islam, the faith of the vast majority of people in this deeply conservative country. Members of a clerical council also pushed for Kaambakhsh to be punished.
But there has been an international outcry over Kaambakhsh case, with a number of organizations demanding the case be annulled and the reporter set free.
Kaambakhsh has appealed his conviction, and the case will now go to an appeals court.
"There is a judicial process ongoing," said Humayun Hamidzada, the spokesman for Karzai. "Of course the president is concerned. We are watching the situation very closely."
The government will act only after the courts make their final decision, Hamidzada told a news conference. Any action will be in line with the Afghan constitution, international obligations and respect for human rights, he said.
In southern Afghanistan, a roadside blast hit a police patrol, leaving two officers dead and three others wounded, an official said Tuesday. The patrol was attacked inside Kandahar city late Monday, said Kandahar provincial police chief Sayed Agha Saqib. He blamed Taliban militants for the attack.
A separate roadside bomb on Monday hit a taxi in southern Helmand province, killing five civilians, including a woman and two children, said provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal. Andiwal also accused the Taliban, and said police and NATO forces frequently patrol the road where the bombing took place.
In central Afghanistan, bitter cold and heavy snow left 37 people dead, authorities said. The victims, including 20 children, died in remote areas of Ghazni province in the last 24 hours, Gov. Faizullah Faizan said.
Faizan said air drops of food and other supplies were needed in the areas affected by snow and freezing weather after roads were blocked off and people were unable to reach health centers and food distribution points.
Afghans in remote villages are typically able to heat their mud-brick homes only by burning animal dung or wood, if the family can afford it.
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MPs denounce death sentence for Afghan journalist
By THE CANADIAN PRESS
OTTAWA - The House of Commons has unanimously condemned a death sentence handed to an Afghan journalist and appealed for a halt to all legal proceedings against him.
The rare show of all-party solidarity adds Canada's voice to a growing international outcry over the case of Sayad Parwez Kambaksh, convicted two weeks ago by a court in northern Afghanistan on a charge of insulting Islam.
"In the defence of journalists, in the defence of human rights, it was important that Canada speak up," said NDP Leader Jack Layton, who sponsored the motion.
"I'm pleased that the other patties accepted our proposal - and let's hope that it sends a very strong message."
Kambaksh, a reporter for New World newspaper and a student at Balkh University, was charged for downloading an article from the Internet and distributing it to fellow students.
The article, which originated in Iran, criticized fundamentalist theology and the role it assigns to women. It asked, among other things, why men should be permitted by the Koran to take more than one wife while women can't have more than one husband.
The death sentence handed down in response was an embarrassment for the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and for the western democracies that have sent troops to support him against Taliban insurgents.
Although the sentence is under appeal, Layton's motion on Monday proposed a more direct route to resolve the matter.
It called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government to lobby the Karzai administration "to have all criminal proceedings against Sayad Parwez Kambaksh immediately abandoned."
Canadian diplomats in Kabul have voiced concern about the case to Afghan authorities, but Harper and his key ministers have had little to say publicly. Layton expressed hope that a more vigorous effort will be forthcoming.
"We were very clear in the motion and there was no opposition from the (Harper) government," said the NDP leader. "We now expect the government to respect the will of Parliament."
Harper is facing a parliamentary vote this spring on whether to continue the Canadian military mission in Afghanistan. He has repeatedly invoked democratic values and equal rights for Afghan women among the reasons for intervening against the Taliban. Back to Top
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Germany balances voter, NATO demands on Afghanistan
Tue Feb 5, 2008 11:00am EST By Kerstin Gehmlich
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is trapped between demands from NATO partners to send more troops to Afghanistan and strong domestic opposition to such a move.
The Afghanistan mission is controversial in a country where images of Germans fighting abroad still stir unease among many voters mindful of the horrors of World War Two.
But NATO partners have made clear they will not ease the pressure on Germany in the face of rising Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. The issue is set to be high on the agenda at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Lithuania on Thursday.
"I think the German government has to give in at some point as the facts (on the Afghanistan situation) are overwhelming," said Gerd Langguth, political scientist at University of Bonn.
"But a large part of the German population is very pacifist. And the question is whether on such an important foreign policy issue, you can act against the population."
Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), partners in an uneasy "grand coalition", are both reluctant to defy public opinion ahead of a national election next year, analysts say.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has written to Berlin pressing it to send soldiers to dangerous parts of southern Afghanistan. Canada has threatened to pull out its 2,500 troops early next year if NATO does not send in more troops.
However, Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung has said he does not envisage changes to the parliamentary mandate which allows Germany to send 3,500 troops to northern Afghanistan as part of the 40,000-strong NATO International Security Assistance Force.
"We're not being choosy," government spokesman Thomas Steg said on Tuesday. "We carry responsibility in the north. That's where we want to act successfully."
PRESSURE GROWS
Some politicians have started to say Germany has to assume greater responsibilities inside NATO.
Hans-Ulrich Klose, a senior figure in the centre-left Social Democrats has voiced support for German troops' deployment to southern Afghanistan.
Several former army generals have echoed that call.
"There are no special roles. If one country shirks its duties, its influence will turn to zero," former NATO Military Committee chief Klaus Naumann told top-selling Bild newspaper.
However, the two main political parties will be wary of the political fall-out from sending troops to the south.
"If one of the parties in the grand coalition says 'We'll do this' then the other one will almost automatically say 'We won't' and know they'll get credit for it," said Simon Green, deputy director of the Institute for German Studies at the University of Birmingham in England.
"It's a very symbolic issue."
(Writing by Kerstin Gehmlich; editing by Keith Weir)
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Time Runs Out for an Afghan Held by the U.S.
By CARLOTTA GALL and ANDY WORTHINGTON The New York Times February 5, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan — Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was regarded here as a war hero, famous for his resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980s and later for a daring prison break he organized for three opponents of the Taliban government in 1999.
But in 2003, Mr. Hekmati was arrested by American forces in southern Afghanistan when, senior Afghan officials here contend, he was falsely accused by his enemies of being a Taliban commander himself. For the next five years he was held at the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he died of cancer on Dec. 30.
The fate of Mr. Hekmati, the first detainee to die of natural causes at Guantánamo, who fruitlessly recounted his story several times to American officials, demonstrates the enduring problems of the tribunals at Guantánamo, say Afghan officials and others who knew him.
Afghan officials, and some Americans, complain that detainees are effectively thwarted from calling witnesses in their defense, and that the Afghan government is never consulted on the detention cases, even when it may be able to help. Mr. Hekmati’s case, officials who knew him said, shows that sometimes the Americans do not seem to know whom they are holding. Meanwhile, detainees wait for years with no resolution to their cases.
In response to queries, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, Cynthia O. Smith, said the military tribunals at Guantánamo contained “significant process and protections,” including the right to call witnesses.
While Ms. Smith would not discuss specifics, she said that there was nothing to indicate that Mr. Hekmati’s case was handled improperly, and that detainees at Guantánamo were given a range of protections, including “the opportunity for a detainee to be heard in person, call witnesses and present additional information that might benefit him.”
Whether those protections are sufficient has been widely debated and is now being considered by the United States Supreme Court. In the tribunals, which consider only whether detainees have been properly classified as enemy combatants, detainees are not allowed to have lawyers or see the evidence against them. The Supreme Court case will decide whether they have the right to broadly appeal their detentions in federal court.
Of the 275 detainees at Guantánamo, at least 180 have sought to challenge their detentions.
Several high-ranking officials in President Hamid Karzai’s government say Mr. Hekmati’s detention at Guantánamo was a gross mistake. They were mentioned by Mr. Hekmati in his hearings and could have vouched for him. Records from the hearings show that only a cursory effort was made to reach them.
Two of those officials were men Mr. Hekmati had helped escape from the Taliban’s top security prison in Kandahar in 1999: Ismail Khan, now the minister of energy; and Hajji Zaher, a general in the Border Guards. Both men said they appealed to American officials about Mr. Hekmati’s case, but to no effect.
“What he did was very important for all Afghan people who were against the Taliban,” Hajji Zaher said of Mr. Hekmati’s role in organizing his prison break. “He was not a man to take to Guantánamo.”
Hajji Zaher, whose father served as vice president under Mr. Karzai for six months, warned that the case of Mr. Hekmati, who is widely known here by his nickname, Baraso, would discourage Afghans from backing the government against the Taliban. “No one is going to help the government,” he said.
Mr. Hekmati never had a lawyer, said Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve, a British charity that represents a number of Guantánamo detainees. At his October 2004 review hearing, Mr. Hekmati specifically asked that Hajji Zaher and Mr. Khan be contacted to act as supporting witnesses.
The military tribunal president said the Afghan government did not respond to requests to locate the men, and ruled that they were “not reasonably available.”
Although both men are well known to the American authorities in Afghanistan, both Hajji Zaher and Mr. Khan said the American authorities had never asked them to appear.
Unidentified Accusers
In Mr. Hekmati’s tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004 to assess his status as an enemy combatant, American officials accused Mr. Hekmati of a variety of charges made by unidentified sources, and referred to him only as Abdul Razzaq, his first names, which are common in Afghanistan.
According to transcripts released by the Pentagon, the United States military charged, among other things, that Mr. Hekmati was “high in the Al Qaeda hierarchy,” acted as a smuggler and facilitator for it, and was “part of the main security escort for Osama bin Laden.” He was also accused of attending a terrorist training camp near Kandahar and of involvement in assassination attempts against Afghan government officials.
He was also identified as a senior leader of a 40-man Taliban unit, and even as supreme commander in Helmand Province.
That last allegation was rebutted by another unidentified detainee, who explicitly stated that Mr. Hekmati looked nothing like the Taliban commander and that the commander was “not the same person as the detainee,” according to the transcript.
Mr. Hekmati denied the charges, too, saying he did not even live in Afghanistan after the 1999 prison break, when he ran afoul of the Taliban. He insisted that most of the allegations had been directed against him by two of his personal enemies.
The first was Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the post-Taliban governor of Helmand Province, who, Mr. Hekmati said, was directly responsible for his arrest after he reported the governor for corruption and for protecting a number of senior Taliban members in Helmand.
The second was Mohammed Jan, a distant cousin who had falsely denounced him as part of a long-running family feud. “It was one person who gave them wrong information and just because of this wrong person, I am here,” Mr. Hekmati pleaded at his October 2004 review hearing.
“They can’t prove anything against me because I never did anything wrong,” he went on. “The person that was giving you all that wrong information, this is the person that killed my two brothers, my sister, my father and two of my sons.”
Mr. Akhundzada denied any part in Mr. Hekmati’s arrest, attributing it to a mistake by American Special Forces. He said they were often fed false information.
But friends of Mr. Hekmati said he was arrested in 2003 by Afghan forces in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, during Mr. Akhundzada’s tenure and later turned over to American forces.
Mr. Hekmati maintained that he was opposed to the Taliban, whom he described as “dangerous and dirty people” who had deviated from Islam.
“Taliban and Al Qaeda are the same,” he said at his review board hearing in September 2005. “When I’m against Taliban I’m going against Al Qaeda. There’s an expression in Pashto that you cannot hold two watermelons in one hand at the same time.”
The only allegation that he accepted was that he had worked as a truck driver for the Taliban, but he said he had been forced to work for them three months a year, as every able-bodied man was during the Taliban’s rule.
Several people in Afghanistan, including Hajji Mir Wali, a member of Parliament, and Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who was held in a cell next to Mr. Hekmati in Guantánamo for three months in 2003, confirmed that he was a truck driver for the Taliban government in the 1990s.
But Mullah Zaeef said Mr. Hekmati could never have worked for the Taliban again after 1999, such was their fury over the prison break he organized.
Hajji Wali, who knew Mr. Hekmati well, said: “It was the Americans’ mistake. I know he had no relations with the Taliban.”
Yet the Americans on his tribunal and review boards seemed unaware of how significant the prison break was, or how important were the men he had helped escape and whom he had asked to be called as witnesses.
The Prison Break
The 1999 escape was a deep humiliation for the Taliban government, which blocked roads and searched houses across the country for days afterward and offered $1 million for the capture of the escapees. Two of Mr. Hekmati’s relatives were badly tortured by the Taliban after the prison break as the Taliban looked for information.
Two of the men Mr. Hekmati freed, Mr. Khan and Hajji Zaher, returned to the battlefield to lead forces against the Taliban. They both received significant American support in 2001 and worked with Special Forces units.
A third man who escaped with them was another commander of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Gen. Mohammed Qasim.
According to Mr. Hekmati’s account in his hearing in September 2005, he organized the escape because he opposed the Taliban’s “ruthlessness and injustice.”
Mr. Hekmati said he had written a letter outlining his escape plan, which his son, Hekmatullah, who worked as an intelligence officer at the Taliban’s high security prison, smuggled in to Mr. Khan. Mr. Khan then put Mr. Hekmati in touch with his own son, who gave him $20,000 to buy a Toyota Land Cruiser for a getaway vehicle.
Mr. Hekmati said that because his son was trusted by the Taliban, he was able to walk the three prisoners out one night to where he was waiting in the dark with the vehicle. Hekmatullah corroborated much of his father’s account in an interview in 2002.
The men escaped to Iran, where Mr. Khan provided Mr. Hekmati and his family with a house and financial support in return for his daring. Mr. Hekmati said he returned to Afghanistan only in 2002, after the Taliban were toppled and Mr. Karzai’s interim government was installed. Within a year, he was arrested.
The Military Tribunals
In a report in February 2006 based on an analysis of documents released by the Pentagon, researchers at Seton Hall University School of Law, in Newark, concluded that no outside witnesses had ever been called to appear at Guantánamo. Lt. Col. Stephen E. Abraham, a former United States intelligence officer who had worked on the tribunals, stepped forward last June to criticize the tribunals.
In a submission to the Supreme Court, he condemned them for relying on generalized evidence that would have been dismissed by any competent court, and as being devised to rubber-stamp the administration’s assertion that the detainees had been correctly designated “enemy combatants” when they were captured and that they could be held indefinitely.
In a second submission, to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in November, Colonel Abraham explained that he was “not aware of any realistic attempts” to “identify or even attempt to bring before the tribunal witnesses or their statements,” and concluded that the whole process “was designed to conduct tribunals without witnesses other than the accused detainee.”
That is one of the reasons Afghan officials have asked that Afghan detainees be transferred from Guantánamo to Afghanistan. “Of course a judicial process needs witnesses and documents and evidence,” Minister of Justice Mohammad Sarwar Danish said. “Most of these cases have not come to trial, and are not proceeding, and that is why we asked them to be moved here.”
After Mr. Hekmati was arrested, two of the men he broke out of prison, Mr. Khan and Hajji Zaher, said they appealed to American and Afghan officials for his release. “I asked President Karzai to help, but unfortunately it did not help,” Mr. Khan said. He said he also asked the American ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, with no result.
“We did try but it was not working,” Hajji Zaher said in a phone interview. “When they are sending someone to Guantánamo, they have their own rules.”
After Mr. Hekmati’s death at Guantánamo, his body was returned to Afghanistan and quietly buried in an unmarked grave in Kandahar on Jan. 8. His family did not dare attend the funeral, fearful of both the Taliban and the Americans, friends said.
As the Taliban has reasserted itself in much of southern Afghanistan, Mr. Hekmati’s son remains in hiding. Neither he nor any relative or elder of their tribe collected his father’s body.
“He is caught in the middle,” said Hajji Wali, a family friend. “He is scared of the Taliban and scared of the government and the Americans, because the Americans took his innocent father and they could take him, too.”
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Britain 'not engaged' with Taliban: PM spokesman
London (AFP) - said it was not "engaged" with the Taliban, after a report that relations between London and Kabul have soured due to a secret British plan to train former Taliban fighters.
In a report from the Afghan capital, the Financial Times said senior figures in President Hamid Karzai's government were furious at the proposal to set up a military training camp for 2,000 Taliban militants who wanted to switch sides.
Documents detailing the plan were allegedly unearthed when two diplomats, one from the United Nations and another from the European Union, were detained in southern Afghanistan in December last year and later expelled.
Asked about the report, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's spokesman Michael Ellam said only: "We are working very closely with the Afghan government in relation to the training of security forces in Afghanistan."
"I think we have always made clear that should anyone in Afghanistan want to join the mainstream Afghan security forces, then they will receive the same degree (and) level of training that is appropriate for the Afghan army."
"We are not engaged with the Taliban. We want to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan," added Ellam, repeating Brown's position that he set out to parliament in December.
"But if there are local militia who want to join the mainstream Afghan security forces then I think that's something that the Afghan government have said themselves that they welcome."
Most of Britain's 7,800-strong troops are based in southern Afghanistan, where they have faced fierce resistance from Taliban militants, leading to calls in some quarters that negotiations may be a way towards reconciliation.
The Financial Times said the fall-out from the discovery was behind Karzai's veto of British diplomat Paddy Ashdown's bid to become the United Nations' special envoy to Afghanistan.
"We have operational discussions about these security issues with the international community, so why did they keep this secret?" one senior Afghan official was quoted as saying. "What was their motive for not telling us?"
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Iran most successful state in acting on its pledges in Afghanistan: Official
Tokyo, Feb 4, IRNA - Iran has proven to be the most successful country over the past years in fulfilling its obligations in connection with Afghanistan development and reconstruction, said an Iranian official in charge of Afghanistan.
Head of the Afghanistan Affairs Headquarters at Foreign Ministry Mohammad-Ebrahim Taherian told IRNA that since 2002, when Iran pledged at the Tokyo Conference on Afghan Reconstruction to pay about dlrs 560 million both in loans and grants for Afghan development and reconstruction, the country has commissioned more than 330 small and big projects in Afghanistan.
Taherian said that politically too, Iran has over the past five years used all its present capacities for development and security of Afghanistan.
He said that during President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Afghanistan too, agreement was reached between the two sides for Iran's investment in the next two years in Afghanistan's remaining and new projects in power supply to Farah and the strategic project of connecting Khwaf-Sangan track to Herat.
He added that in the next Tokyo Conference on Afghan Development and Reconstruction too, which will be held from February 5-6, Iranian delegation will outline Iran's activities in the country, expecting the international community to present reports on outcome of their measures and pledges made in 2002.
The Iranian official said Iran, a country sharing long borders with Afghanistan, is not pleased with performance of the international community in connection with their pledges.
On the other hand, he added, since Afghan government has been lected democratically, Iran believes the government and nation of Afghanistan should be fully supported.
Head of the Afghan Headquarters in Foreign Ministry said Iranian delegation wants to tell the Conference that Iran has fulfilled its pledges completely and has acted even far beyond the obligations and is ready to undertake new commitments for development and reconstruction of the country.
"Iran expects the international community, especially the host country, Japan, to act on their commitments. Today, we are witnessing hat security and development have not progressed but have deteriorated in parts of Afghanistan, which is unaccepable," he said.
He added that Iran is today hosting millions of illegal Afghan refugees, which is a proof to existence of improper conditions in the country.
He noted that presently poppy cultivation is in its highest level in Afghanistan, which is not worthy of the Afghan nation and the neighboring states. That can entail dangerous messages for the international community even, he added.
Taherian hoped that an atmosphere will be available in the Tokyo meeting for careful examination of Afghan events.
He also hoped that international community will act on their ommitments and duties in Afghan reconstruction and development, thus helping restore stability and security there.
The official added that one of the reasons Afghanistan is not in the least favorable condition is failure of the international community to act on its commitments in connection with the country.
Twenty-four countries, including Iran, and international organizations are expected to be present in the Tokyo Conference on Afghanistan Development and Reconstruction on February 5-6.
The meeting is to focus on ways of helping Afghan reconstruction.
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Taliban chief orders change in mode of executions
KABUL, 4 February 2008 (IRIN) - The fugitive leader of Afghan Taliban insurgents, Mullah Mohammad Omar Mujahid, has ordered his fighters to stop beheading people accused of spying for the government of President Karzai and international forces - and kill them, instead, by gunshots and/or hanging, a purported Taliban spokesman has told the media. The move comes after strong condemnation of the Taliban at home and abroad for their beheadings.
Video clips showing horrific scenes of human decapitations and other forms of severe physical torture had been circulated by the insurgents, apparently in an effort to threaten people who support and/or work with the Afghan government and its international supporters. Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and other international rights watchdogs have repeatedly accused Taliban insurgents of deliberately attacking civilians and systematically violating international humanitarian law. "No more beheadings"
"Mullah Omar's order is effective immediately and there will be no more beheadings by the Taliban," Zabiullah Mujahid, who claims to be a spokesman for Taliban fighters, told IRIN on the phone from an unspecified location. About 100 people have been beheaded by Taliban insurgents on charges of espionage in the past 12 months, a leading Afghan news agency, Pajwhok, reported on 4 February. Four employees of a local construction company were reportedly kidnapped and then beheaded by gunmen associated with Taliban insurgents in Nooristan Province, eastern Afghanistan, in the last week of January, Afghanistan's Interior Ministry said in a press release on 30 January. Thousands of people, including many civilians, lost their lives in suicide attacks, roadside explosions and other insurgency-related violence in 2007, the government of Afghanistan and the UN reported. War crime The deliberate killing of noncombatants on charges of spying and/or disloyalty, without a fair and just trial, is a war crime and cannot be justified by a change in mode of execution, said Farid Hamidi, a member of the AIHRC in Kabul. "The right to life is enshrined in the constitution of Afghanistan and no one can deny that without a legitimate and lawful reason," said Hamidi. "Islamic Sharia also prohibits illegal and extra-judicial killings of civilians," he said.
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Afghan civilian casualties rising, analysts report
February 5, 2008 Washington Times, DC
By Sharon Behn - The number of civilians inadvertently killed by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan doubled in 2007 from the previous year as coalition forces dropped about a million pounds of bombs on the country, military analysts said.
There were no official military numbers readily available for Iraq. But based on official and unofficial U.S. and U.N. data, one analyst said that 400 to 500 Iraqis died last year at U.S. checkpoints and that 200 to 300 were killed in U.S. air operations in 2007.
Citing security rules, military officials declined to answer questions regarding U.S. rules of engagement on collateral damage and civilian casualties in military operations.
But the figures are clearly of concern to U.S. strategists, who understand that civilian casualties build resentment against the international forces and undermine attempts to win support for U.S.-backed governments in the two countries.
"Some of what you are asking for is very sensitive material. We never discuss rules of engagement, as doing so could seriously endanger both our own forces and civilians," one Pentagon official told The Washington Times.
The U.S. military apologized late Sunday for the deaths of nine civilians in an air strike against al Qaeda near the town of Iskandariyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad.
"Over the past two years, there has been a significant increase in the use of air power" in both countries, which in some cases has led to more civilian deaths, said Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives.
In an attempt to stem the rise of civilian casualties, Human Rights Watch has even lobbied for increased ground forces in Afghanistan to boost pro-government strength on the ground, allow for more humanitarian work and improve intelligence gathering.
In 2006, a total of 929 Afghan civilians were killed, of whom 116 died from air strikes and 114 were killed by ground fire. The other 699 were killed by the Taliban, said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official now working as a senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch.
Through September 2007, a total of 892 Afghans were killed — 438 by the Taliban, 272 by air strikes, 62 by ground fire, 16 by a combination of air and ground fire. In addition, 15 died in shooting incidents where it was not clear which side did the shooting, and 89 were killed by unknown assailants.
Mr. Garlasco, who traveled to Afghanistan and met with U.S. and other NATO commanders, and a number of nongovernmental organizations, said his numbers tended to be conservative, "but they show the general trends."
In July 2006, the U.S. and NATO began a heavy offensive against the Taliban.
"You see a jump from some 20,000 pounds of bombs dropped per month to some 80,000 to 100,000 pounds dropped," he said.
In Iraq, the number of air strikes was low in 2006, totaling about 62,000 pounds for the year. In early 2007, there was an uptick to 10,000 to 15,000 a month; as U.S. forces built up strength, the numbers jumped to 71,000 pounds a month in the last half of the year.
In 2003, Mr. Garlasco was the chief of high-value targeting in the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence task force.
He distinguished between planned air strikes and those called in by troops engaged in battle.
In the first instance, U.S. military planners will do an assessment of the area and seek ways to minimize civilian casualties — including what type of bomb should be used, at what time, and at what angle it is to be fired.
"In a pre-planned strike, when they do all these things, we find minimal civilian casualties," Mr. Garlasco said. But when soldiers are faced with an overwhelming enemy and they call in air strikes, not all those procedures can be followed, he said.
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Afghan prison official was fired after complaint, MacKay says
BRIAN LAGHI From Tuesday's Globe and Mail February 5, 2008 at 4:43 AM EST
OTTAWA — An Afghan prison official has been removed from his job in the wake of torture allegations that prompted Canada to suspend the handover of detainees last fall, Canada's Defence Minister said yesterday.
Peter MacKay told reporters that the individual was removed after Canada complained to Kandahar Governor Asadullah Khalid, as well as to Afghanistan's defence minister.
"What I can tell you is that the individual was removed from his position in the Afghan prison," Mr. MacKay said. "The investigation, as I understand it, continues and the final outcome of that investigation I expect will be known soon."
Mr. MacKay also expressed surprise yesterday that Mr. Khalid said he doesn't recall meeting with Mr. MacKay in Kandahar in November, when the minister said he raised the issue of prisoner treatment.
"This is something for the military, it doesn't involve me," Mr. Khalid said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
"I was surprised to hear of this denial and of the fact that he didn't recall the conversation," Mr. MacKay said. "I remember it very well."
Mr. MacKay said he met with Mr. Khalid within hours of what Canada considered a credible allegation of torture.
"I made it very clear to Governor Khalid that these allegations were very serious and that prisoner abuse would not be tolerated, should not be tolerated by this government."
He said he then delivered the same message to his defence ministry counterpart in the capital, Kabul.
Mr. Khalid was the subject of controversy last week when it emerged in a Canadian diplomatic report that he was alleged to have participated in an unrelated incident involving the torture of an Afghan prisoner.
Two Canadian diplomats were told of the allegations by a prisoner who said he had been interrogated, beaten and administered an electrical shock by an individual whose name was blacked out of their report. Sources have told The Globe and Mail that the individual was Mr. Khalid.
Mr. MacKay couldn't say whether the allegations were investigated by Canadian authorities.
Mr. MacKay ceased being the foreign affairs minister two months after the document was prepared.
"What I'm aware of was that there was a single allegation which did not emanate from a Taliban prisoner that was turned over by Canadian forces," he said.
Canada has said that the matter is the responsibility of the Afghan government because the prisoner had not been captured by the Canadians.
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We can't impose values on Afghans
Feb 04, 2008 04:30 AM Rosie DiManno Toronto Star
Afghanistan will not fast-forward from the 12th century to the 21st century in the blink of an eye and certainly not according to the agenda of Canadian sensibilities.
If you want to see an Afghan beaten by a stick – or otherwise abused, by our standards – just walk out into the street in Kandahar city.
Their long history is soaked in violence. They have barely emerged from three decades of civil war and are coping, as best they can, with a pitiless insurgency that targets the indigenous population even more than foreign troops, preying especially on women, children, teachers, aid workers and civil servants.
Growing up in this culture hardens a people. Living in Afghanistan is a daily challenge and that anxiety contributes to an environment of distrust, menace and cruelty. But we make a mistake if calibrating their wrongness against our sense of rightness and righteousness.
I have met Governor Asadullah Khalid many times, been in the palace where it is alleged that the young minister was directly involved in the torture of detainees held in private cells. Those allegations now dwindle down to one accuser, transferred last year to the National Directorate of Security prison, an agency far more suspect in the mistreatment of detainees.
Khalid is as thoughtful and soft-spoken an Afghan male as you will ever meet. Even in Kandahar province, where there is little love for the central government of President Hamid Karzai, citizens regard him with affection and respect, as a principled official, so vastly different from his monumentally corrupt predecessor.
I don't know if Khalid beat and electrically prodded this prisoner, as claimed. He forcefully denied those reports in a weekend interview with Stephanie Levitz of The Canadian Press. But Afghans lie as effortlessly as they breathe. In this culture, dramatic prevarication is considered an admirable skill. Survival often relies on scheming. Minus any tangible evidence, I would believe Khalid over the testament of a prisoner pouring bile into the ears of Canadian diplomats.
Still, Khalid is a man who, when a NATO operation resulted in the death of a top Taliban commander last May, gleefully put the corpse on display at his compound. This is reprehensible to us. It makes entire sense to Afghans.
Afghanistan is a sovereign nation. We cannot impose our values, our Charter of Rights and our international covenants on them. Canadians are there as a primary NATO element, in support of a United Nations mandate, at the invitation of a Kabul government struggling to assert its authority. If that government falls in the next election – Afghans infuriated by corruption and incompetence – that will be their choice. But it won't be because some suspected Taliban detainees have been maybe tortured.
That plays only to a Canadian audience and nowhere as much as the headlines would suggest. This is about pounding away at the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which has so dreadfully botched its duty to inform the public and explain the merits of the mission beyond platitudes, a failure underscored by John Manley's recent report.
It is profoundly naïve and inexcusably paternalistic, however, to pretend that Canada can reinvent Afghan culture by exporting our precious ethics when that country is still very much under siege.
This allegedly tortured prisoner never passed through Canadian hands. Further, the whole detainee scandal would never have arisen had not Ottawa winced at the optics of handing over prisoners to U.S. authorities. We picked Afghans over our greatest ally knowing full well what might happen.
That's domestic politics. It was foolhardy policy.
Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
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Western media in Karzai-bashing campaign
By Lalit K Jha - Apr 2, 2008 - 17:48
NEW YORK (PAN): Afghan President Hamid Karzai, regarded as a hero by the West for leading the war on terrorism in the conflict-devastated country, suddenly seems to have turned a villain.
News reports, columns and editorials appearing in the western media in the past one week assailed Karzai after he rejected a proposal to appoint high-profile British politician Paddy Ashdown as UN's super envoy to Afghanistan.
A reflection of the new thinking of western leaders, the media has been critical of the Afghan leader but stops short of declaring him a failure. This is a quite turnaround for the West's poster boy now portrayed as a burden.
Some writers are even musing about a post-Karzai Afghanistan, suggesting a replacement for him, while others caution the West should wait for a year until the presidential election to have a leader of their choice. The impression being cultivated is that as if they will decide who the next Afghan president would be.
The Western world - which finds it difficult digesting the rejection of its proposal by Karzai - is apparently moving on a road map that would strengthen the Taliban and al-Qaeda base by driving the people towards them by default.
"Karzai's rejection of Paddy Ashdown, who gained a reputation as a forceful and imaginative administrator for the United Nations in Bosnia, is at one level a story of diplomatic intrigue and betrayal, writes Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post Op-Ed columnist.
This episode points up Karzai's increasingly erratic style of governing as suicide bombings and Taliban attacks on civilians increase, he says. "His turnaround creates dangerous new delays in counterinsurgency efforts, which urgently need to be strengthened and clarified, according to an authoritative Atlantic Council report issued last week by Gen. James L. Jones, the retired NATO commander, Hoagland argues.
In an article appearing in The Sunday Times, published from London, Simon Jenkins compares today's Kabul with Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
"It swarms with refugees and corruption while an upper crust of well-heeled contractors, consultants and NGO groupies careers from party to party in bullet-proof Land Cruisers. Spin doctors fighting a daily battle with the truth have resorted to enemy kill-rates to imply victory, General Westmorelands ploy in Vietnam, Jenkins adds.
Foreign 'governance' pundits in Kabul may dream of Afghanistan as a latter-day Sweden, but they are never going to bring Pashtuns, Balochs, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks into a stable federation, he continues.
An article appearing in The Guardian says: It is hard to be hopeful about Afghanistan." Sliding away from progress, the country has begun a fretful, violent descent towards calamity that all the efforts of NATO, aid agencies and Afghans seem unable to stop, according to the prestigious newspaper.
To be pessimistic about Afghanistan's future is not to say that the world should walk away: it is to recognise that reality is very grim," maintains the commentator. The three pieces, indicative of increasing opposition to President Karzai, also point to the abrupt swing in pinion of the Western leadership.
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Thousands of candidates taking entry test
By Moeed Hashmi & Matin Sarfaraz - Feb 2, 2008 - 17:54
JALALABAD/KUNDUZ CITY (PAN): Entry tests for intermediate graduates from Jawzjan, Kunduz, Kunar, Laghman and Nuristan provinces are in progress, officials said on Saturday.
Nangarhar Education Director Amanullah Hamidzai told Pajhwok Afghan News the tests would last three days and students from Nangarhar, Kunar, Laghman and Nuristan would take part in it.
"As many as 4,246 students including 250 females from the eastern provinces will take the test. Of the qualifying candidates, 2030 will be admitted to the University of Nangarhar," he added
Muhammad Asif Ghori, heading a delegation of education officials from Kabul, revealed 90,000 students across Afghanistan would be appearing in the entry test this year. Around 50,000 seeking higher education would be granted admissions and 15,000 sent to the military academy, he explained.
Meanwhile, Kunduz Education Department head Qazi Abdul Qudus said 1900 candidates including 320 females from the northern province would sit the entry tests.
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Afghan rugs sell like hot cakes in Las Vegas
By Zainab Muhammadi - Feb 2, 2008 - 20:28
KABUL (PAN): Selling out all their rugs put for display, the Afghan businessmen in the Las Vegas state of the United States received more than one million US dollar demands for further quality handicraft mat.
Afghanistan's Export Promotion Agency (AEPA) officials said around 200 traders displayed carpets from different countries in the four-day exhibition
Afghan traders had exhibited 60 carpets in the show.
The purpose of the Afghan traders' participation in the exhibition was to attract further international markets to the Afghan handcrafts, Sayed Suliman Fatimi director of the AEPA said.
Last month the Afghan carpets were put for display in another international exhibition organized in Demotic city of Hanor in Germany, officials said, out of 1442 carpet producers from 80 countries across the globe Afghan carpet won the first position in the competition.
Challenges in processing and transit of the Afghan carpet in production and sending abroad had in the country had discouraged the producers, he said, 97% of the Afghan rugs were being transacted under other countries' names.
Afghan Commerce Minister Muhammad Amin Farhang told Pajhwok Afghan news that participation in such international exhibition by the Afghan producers and traders gave the Afghan product a global name and would help expand its market.
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