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Afghan officials: US missiles killed 27 civilians
By AMIR SHAH and JASON STRAZIUSO Associated Press / July 6, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan officials said fighter aircraft battling militants accidentally killed up to 27 Afghans walking to a wedding ceremony in eastern Afghanistan early Sunday, the second military attack in three days with reports of civilian deaths.
Claims of more Afghans killed in US-led strikes
July 6, 2008
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) - An Afghan district governor accused the US-led coalition of killing nearly two dozen civilians in an air strike on a wedding party on Sunday but the force insisted only militants died.
Suicide bomb wounds three Afghan schoolgirls
July 6, 2008
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber targeting German troops wounded three schoolgirls in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, the deputy provincial police chief said.
Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan to launch joint TV
Dushanbe, July 6, IRNA
Representatives of the Islamic Republic, Tajikistan and Afghanistan in their first working group session inked an agreement here Sunday to establish a joint Persian-language TV network in the near future.
Hold fast, we’re building a new Afghanistan
The Sunday Times Douglas Alexander July 6, 2008
On a dusty highway in open country outside Kabul, a class of young girls, heads covered with hijabs, are being put through their paces in a primary school. It is a scene replicated around the world. The difference is that in Afghanistan
The infighting that has hobbled Bin Laden hunt
Gulf Times, Qatar By Leonard Doyle Sunday, 6 July, 2008
WASHINGTON-Damaging details of infighting within the Bush administration and intelligence agencies are emerging only months before George Bush leaves the White House.
What Afghanistan needs is infrastructure
Telegraph.co.uk - Leaders By Christopher Booker 06/07/2008
What connects the row between France's President Sarkozy and the EU's trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, with the recent upsurge in the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan?
Afghan Escalation
Every year, the number of troops grows -- and so do enemy attacks.
The Washington Post Sunday, July 6, 2008
EACH YEAR since 2002, the number of U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan has grown. And each year, during the "fighting season" of spring and summer, the number of attacks by the Taliban has also increased, prompting commanders
Kabul's disgraced police chief replaced
Written by www.quqnoos.com Sunday, 06 July 2008
Officer suspended for failing to stop the Karzai assassination attempt is fired
THE GOVERNMENT has replaced the police chief of Kabul, who was suspended for his failure to prevent the attempted assassination of President Karzai in April.
Spokesman appointed Pakistan's envoy in Kabul
www.quqnoos.com Written by PAN Sunday, 06 July 2008
Pakistan selects new ambassador after ex-envoy's kidnap ordeal
PAKISTAN has appointed a government spokesman as the country’s new ambassador to Afghanistan months after the former envoy was kidnapped by militants while travelling to Kabul.
Restoring Past Glory in Old Kabul
Ambitious Project Pumps New Life Into Crumbling Historic District
Washington Post - World By Candace Rondeaux Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, July 6, 2008
KABUL-The road that rings the old city district of Murad Khane is thick with smoke from the hearths of a row of blacksmiths. Until recently, few people in the Afghan capital had much reason to venture beyond the plumes of black smoke into the district.
How America made a mess of Afghanistan
Shashi Tharoor The Times of India July 6, 2008
In the fall of 2002, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid could be seen and heard at every significant podium and office in New York and Washington. Ostensibly in the US to promote a book, Rashid spent most of his time making
Obama, McCain split over Afghan strategy
Debate shifting troops from Iraq By Bryan Bender Boston Globe July 6, 2008
WASHINGTON - Barack Obama and John McCain are proposing sharply different strategies to seize the initiative from a resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, positions that underscore the two leading presidential candidates'
UN to urge revamp of Afghan aid
July 6, 2008 BBC News
The United Nations' envoy to Afghanistan is to outline a new plan on spending foreign aid, amid fears that millions of dollars have been wasted.
Restoring Past Glory in Old Kabul
Ambitious Project Pumps New Life Into Crumbling Historic District
By Candace Rondeaux Washington Post Sunday, July 6, 2008
KABUL -- The road that rings the old city district of Murad Khane is thick with smoke from the hearths of a row of blacksmiths. Until recently, few people in the Afghan capital had much reason to venture beyond the plumes of black smoke into the district.
Knives, petrol bombs found in Afghan prison
KABUL, July 5 (Reuters) - Afghan security forces found more than 100 knives and swords, petrol bombs and dozens of mobile phones in a search of Kabul's main prison, the Defence Ministry said on Saturday.
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Afghan officials: US missiles killed 27 civilians
By AMIR SHAH and JASON STRAZIUSO Associated Press / July 6, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan officials said fighter aircraft battling militants accidentally killed up to 27 Afghans walking to a wedding ceremony in eastern Afghanistan early Sunday, the second military attack in three days with reports of civilian deaths.
The U.S. military blamed the claims on militant propaganda and said its missiles only struck insurgents.
President Hamid Karzai had already ordered an investigation into allegations that missiles from U.S. helicopters struck civilians on Friday in eastern Afghanistan, though the Defense Ministry said Sunday that attack on the Nuristan-Kunar border killed or wounded 20 militants.
U.S. Army Gen. David D. McKiernan, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the two incidents were being investigated. He noted that militants hide among and intimidate civilians.
U.S. spokesman 1st Lt. Nathan Perry said the military has repeatedly seen militants falsely claim civilian were killed.
"Whenever we do an airstrike the first thing they're going to cry is 'Airstrike killed civilians' when the missile actually struck militant extremists we were targeting in the first place," Perry said. "At this time we don't believe we've harmed anyone except for the combatants."
In a statement, Karzai cited allegations by Tamim Nuristani, the governor of Nuristan province, that 15 civilians were killed and seven wounded in the Friday attack. During a Cabinet meeting on Sunday, top Afghan officials prayed for any innocent lives lost, a presidential palace statement said.
"The killing and wounding of our countrymen as the result of airstrikes is news that always makes us sad," Karzai said.
In the second incident early Sunday, the chief government official in the Deh Bala district of Nangarhar province said villagers reported that as many as 27 people walking in a group toward a wedding were killed in a bombing. Up to 11 other people were wounded, Haji Amishah Gul said.
Nuristan provincial police chief spokesman Ghafor Khan said that fighter aircraft attacked a group of militants near the village of Kacu, but that one of the missiles went off course and hit the wedding party. Khan said many militants were killed in the attack as well.
Both officials relied on reports called in by telephone from villagers. The area was too remote for officials or reporters to reach.
Gul said the group killed included men, women and children. Six of those wounded were taken to the provincial hospital in Jalalabad. Lal Wazir, an Afghan who helped bring the wounded to the hospital, said the airstrike occurred at 6:30 a.m.
"The wedding participants were on their way to the groom's house," Wazir said outside the hospital, his tunic covered in blood after carrying some of those wounded.
"They stopped in a narrow location for rest. The plane came and bombed the area. There were between 80 to 90 people altogether. We have carried six of the injured to this hospital, and more might be coming. The exact number of casualties is not clear," he said.
A U.S.-led coalition statement said an airstrike killed several militants in Nangarhar.
The issue of civilian casualties has caused friction between the Afghan government and U.S. and NATO troops, and has weakened the standing of Western-backed Karzai in the eyes of the population.
Karzai has repeatedly called for better coordination between Afghan and foreign troops in pursuing militants through populated areas, and for international troops to cut down on civilian casualties. Deaths of ordinary Afghans caused a huge outcry last year, but there have been fewer accusations of such killings in recent months.
McKiernan said NATO uses a "very judicious and strict application of lethal force."
"Civilian casualties are very, very important in this campaign. One is one to many," he said. "I do think we have ... the right procedures in place to mitigate and minimize any collateral damage to people or material."
Perry said Sunday that military reports still indicated that the Friday airstrike by coalition helicopters in Nuristan hit two vehicles carrying militants who had attacked a NATO base with mortars.
Karzai suggested that Afghan civilians may have been fleeing at the time of the strike because of a warning from the U.S. coalition.
"Coalition forces are saying that this operation was against armed insurgents in the area, but Gov. Nuristani is insisting that three hours before this airstrike, people were informed by international forces that they should leave the area because of a possible airstrike against insurgents," Karzai said in a statement.
Elsewhere, in the southern province of Helmand — the country's other hotly contested region — a clash killed seven Taliban and two police, provincial police Chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal said. Five other officers were wounded during the Saturday fight in Nawa district, he said.
The coalition said several militants were also killed Friday during an operation in Ghazni province.
More than 2,100 people — mostly militants — have been killed in insurgency-related violence in Afghanistan this year. More than 8,000 people died in attacks last year, according to the U.N., the most since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
The number of militant attacks has been on the rise this summer compared with the same period last year, NATO officials say.
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Claims of more Afghans killed in US-led strikes
July 6, 2008
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) - An Afghan district governor accused the US-led coalition of killing nearly two dozen civilians in an air strike on a wedding party on Sunday but the force insisted only militants died.
Witnesses who brought people they said were wounded in the attack to hospital in Jalalabad also told an AFP reporter that several people were killed and wounded in the strikes in the eastern province of Nangarhar.
But senior Afghan officials could not immediately confirm the claims of civilian casualties and the US-led coalition denied civilians were hit, saying "several" militants were killed.
The allegations could not be independently verified as the area, the Deh Bala district on the border with Pakistan, is remote and difficult to access.
It was the second time in days the force faced charges of high civilian casualties in strikes on militants with Afghan officials saying more than a dozen died in Nuristan province Friday, a claim also rejected by the coalition.
Deh Bala governor Hamisha Gul said 22 people were killed Sunday and several more wounded when the air strikes hit people gathered for a wedding.
"I confirm that 22 people, three of them men and 19 of them women and children, were killed," he told AFP. Gul said his information came from police and other officials he had dispatched to the area to investigate.
About 70 people, mostly women, were escorting a bride to meet her groom in traditional Afghan fashion, said a man from the area who gave his name only as Kerate.
"We were bombed. I couldn't figure out what had happened and I went unconscious. When I woke up, I saw lots of people killed and injured," he told AFP at the hospital in Jalalabad, the provincial capital.
"After the bombing, I saw several people wounded and killed," said another man, who gave his name as Awrang.
"I picked up some of the wounded and brought them here. I learnt later that my wife, my daughter and my sisters were killed."
About five people with apparently minor injuries were admitted to the Jalalabad hospital. About four wounded women and children were treated at a clinic in the Deh Bala centre, said doctor Abdul Qader Shinwary.
The US-led coalition rejected the allegations.
"It was not a wedding party, there were no women or children present. We have no reports of civilian casualties," coalition media officer Captain Christian Patterson told AFP.
Between five and 10 militants were killed, said another spokesman Sergeant First Class Joel Peavy.
It was not clear if they were from the Taliban insurgent movement or the radical Al-Qaeda network also active in the area, he told AFP.
The seven-year internationally supported campaign to fight a bloody Taliban-led insurgency has seen several incidents in which civilians were killed, as well as claims of civilian casualties that have proven untrue.
In most cases the incidents involve air strikes on remote areas. The international forces employ several measures to confirm the identities of their targets.
In 2002 a US bombing raid on a wedding party in the southern province of Uruzgan killed 48 people and left scores more wounded, according to a UN investigation.
The coalition and a separate NATO-led force are helping the Afghan government fight a bloody campaign by Islamic extremists largely from the Taliban who were in government between 1996 and 2001.
In other violence, a suicide car bomb against a vehicle carrying EU police trainers in northern Afghanistan Sunday wounded seven people, officials said.
Three were German police and four were Afghans, including three children, they said.
In the central province of Ghazni, meanwhile, nine suspected militants including two Arabs and a Pakistani national were killed in a blast from explosives they were working on, a government official said.
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Suicide bomb wounds three Afghan schoolgirls
July 6, 2008
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber targeting German troops wounded three schoolgirls in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, the deputy provincial police chief said.
The bomber rammed a Toyota saloon car into a German military vehicle 15 km (10 miles) west of the city of Kunduz, destroying the vehicle and wounding the three passing schoolgirls, Kunduz Deputy Police Chief Abdurahman Abtash told Reuters.
A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said initial reports said there were no fatalities among the troops.
Taliban militants have vowed to step up their campaign of suicide bombings this year, but such attacks are still relatively rare in the north of the country. Most of the fighting is concentrated in the south and east of the country.
Germany has some 3,000 troops serving under ISAF in northern Afghanistan.
(Reporting by Qasem Nasrullahi; Writing by Jon Hemming; Editing by Jerry Norton)
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Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan to launch joint TV
Dushanbe, July 6, IRNA
Representatives of the Islamic Republic, Tajikistan and Afghanistan in their first working group session inked an agreement here Sunday to establish a joint Persian-language TV network in the near future.
The agreement envisages taking some steps into consideration to launch the TV.
The Tajikistan capital, Dushanbe, was chosen as the network's hub of activity and the legal address.
The second working group session will be held on August 7.
The joint Persian-language TV network will play a key role in promoting trilateral cultural relations.
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Hold fast, we’re building a new Afghanistan
The Sunday Times Douglas Alexander July 6, 2008
On a dusty highway in open country outside Kabul, a class of young girls, heads covered with hijabs, are being put through their paces in a primary school. It is a scene replicated around the world. The difference is that in Afghanistan a few years ago it would have been unthinkable. The Taliban refused to allow it. Now the feeling of hope is palpable. The girls, none of them older than seven, are already raising their sights beyond the wildest dreams of their mothers. I asked them if they wanted to work when they grew up. The answer, overwhelmingly, was yes. One wanted to be a doctor, another a teacher, a third hoped to break into the all-male ranks of the Afghan police.
I thought of my own mother and my grandmother, both pioneering female doctors. I thought, too, of my own daughter, due to start school in September, and our perhaps casual assumption that ahead lies secondary school, perhaps university and, if all goes to plan, a well paid job. The education system that we take for granted in Britain is still a distant dream here, where the government struggles to find teachers and classrooms. But the girls at the Qala-e-Baig school in Shakar Darra are among 2m attending schools across the country. They are a visible sign of real progress.
When the Taliban fell in 2001 there were only 900,000 children in school, all of them boys. That figure is now 6m and rising. Five million refugees have returned home and 82% of the population have access to healthcare, nine times the figure in 2002. But let me also admit that there is a very long way to go. Afghanistan is the fifth poorest country in the world. One in five children dies before their fifth birthday. Millions are malnourished.
The signs of conflict, new and old, are everywhere. A few hundred miles south of Kabul, I visited a very different school. Its empty shell stood forlorn and deserted, the walls pockmarked by bullets and a mortar shell hole in its roof. The school at Garmsir, in battle-ravaged Helmand, has not seen children or teachers for many months. The town was taken back from Taliban insurgents in May. Only now is life reverting to normality. A doctor is trying to operate in a clinic stripped of all its equipment and there are plans to refurbish the school.
Elsewhere in Afghanistan it is a more sombre story. The minister for education told me that another teacher had been beheaded by the Taliban in the past week. Schools are burnt down and the populace terrorised. That kind of brutality makes the British presence so necessary. The toll is high: 13 British soldiers have died in the past three weeks. Yet in the words of Des Browne, the defence secretary, the troops of the 38-nation coalition are here in a “noble cause”.
At the British base at Lashkar Gah I met soldiers from my Paisley constituency. Most were young, working-class lads barely out of their teens, 3,000 miles from home and a million miles beyond any familiar experience. Their morale and their sheer bloody resilience were remarkable. Through the summer they are patrolling in furnace-like heat routinely topping 50C. Garmsir, translated literally, means “too much heat”.
The front line is now just as likely to be a marketplace as an entrenched position in the countryside. Gone are the set-piece battles, to be replaced by the tactics often seen in Iraq: roadside explosions, suicide bombs and mines. Through it all, our servicemen and women endure. In the words of one soldier: “All we want is a bit of recognition. If you see a squaddie in desert fatigues walking through your local airport or train station, go up and say hello, tell them they’re doing a good job. It doesn’t cost you anything but it makes the world of difference to us.”
There is little doubt that British forces are making real strides but the message to me, again and again, was that without security there can be no return to normal life. Progress is being made in cutting the number of provinces that harvest the poppies which provide the heroin on our streets. And we are seeing signs that where farmers no longer feel intimidated, they are happy to switch from poppy to wheat or saffron. Narcotics dealing and bribery, however, remain rife – issues I raised personally with President Hamid Karzai – and moves to tackle them have proved inadequate. Put on top of that the poverty, the lack of basic local and central government structures and the tiny tax take and you have a set of challenges that individually would test many stronger states. That is why the development effort in Afghanistan will take decades.
Seventy-two hours before I left the UK, I met dozens of veterans of previous wars at an event in Paisley. For them, service and sacrifice were a mercifully distant memory. For a new generation they are a daily reality. Their courage is laying the foundations for a brighter future for the girls I met at Qala-e-Baig and children like them across Afghanistan.
Douglas Alexander is secretary of state for international development
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The infighting that has hobbled Bin Laden hunt
Gulf Times, Qatar By Leonard Doyle Sunday, 6 July, 2008
WASHINGTON-Damaging details of infighting within the Bush administration and intelligence agencies are emerging only months before George Bush leaves the White House.
A scathing assessment of US failures in its war with Al Qaeda was published by The New York Times, containing the charge that the infighting has hobbled efforts to capture Osama bin Laden or his senior lieutenants.
The report coincides with revelations in The New Yorker about deep unease among Congressional leaders over a secret directive issued by the Bush administration which significantly boosts the activities of Special Operations Forces inside Iran.
The magazine also detected further disarray by highlighting concern within the US military about White House support for possible military strikes on Iran, which would aim to set back Iranian nuclear ambitions.
Bush will now leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base of operations from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas.
According to the report in The New York Times, there may be more than 2000 foreign recruits to Al Qaeda. The newspaper describes how last year the Pentagon’s Special Operations Forces were authorised to launch missions in the mountains of Pakistan.
However, they are still awaiting the green light to launch attacks on Al Qaeda camps in the North West territories. There was “mounting frustration” at the delay, a senior defence source told the newspaper.
There have been numerous American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, but militants have continued to flock to Al Qaeda encampments it is reported.
The US failure to grapple with the Al Qaeda leadership comes at a time when Bush is increasingly focused on projecting the US military into Iran.
The operations in Iran have been expanded with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command joining forces, according to current US officials. The New Yorker reported that undercover US operations inside Iran are undergoing a major expansion aimed at destabilising the religious leadership.
Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, is to travel to Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a seven-nation tour later this year to overcome what is seen as a weakness on foreign policy compared to his veteran Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.
Obama has said he wants to send up to 10,000 soldiers to Afghanistan, where violence has climbed as the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouped. Obama has accused Bush of neglecting the fight in Afghanistan to pursue an unnecessary war in Iraq.
Most damaging of all for President Bush’s legacy may be a 700-page official history by the US Army. It points the finger of blame at US-based commanders who believed “in the euphoria of early 2003,” that the goals in Iraq had been accomplished and failed to send enough troops to handle the occupation.
The study specifically blames President Bush’s statement aboard an aircraft carrier off San Diego, on 1 May, 2003, that major combat operations were over for reinforcing that view.
The audacious conclusions of the official army history “On Point II” were defended in a foreword by General William Wallace, commanding general of US Army Training and Doctrine Command who wrote: “One of the great and least understood qualities of the United States Army is its culture of introspection and self-examination.” – The Independent
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What Afghanistan needs is infrastructure
Telegraph.co.uk - Leaders By Christopher Booker 06/07/2008
What connects the row between France's President Sarkozy and the EU's trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, with the recent upsurge in the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan?
Mr Mandelson, representing the EU in the Doha world trade talks, calls for an end to that EU and US protectionism which, through tariff barriers and the dumping of subsidised exports, is inflicting immense damage on the Third World.
Mr Sarkozy, representing French farmers, claims that this will cost European agriculture 20 per cent of its production and 100,000 jobs.
The problem with the outside world's intervention in Afghanistan, as informed observers point out, is not that Nato forces are unable to defeat militarily the various insurgents lumped together as the Taliban.
Rather, it is that almost nothing is done to encourage the Afghans to stand on their own feet economically, and to eliminate the poverty and hopelessness which the Taliban exploit to win support against both the foreigners and the corrupt and ineffectual Kabul regime.
Eighty five per cent of Afghans live by agriculture, in which their country has far more potential than much of its bleak terrain might suggest. The fertile parts are ideal for a wide range of crops, from apricots and pomegranates to almonds and tomatoes.
Read more by Christopher Booker
The trouble is that the infrastructure does not exist to make this profitable, which is why Afghanistan produces 90 per cent of the world's opium, as the only crop which can be profitably, if illegally, exported.
The only real hope for Afghanistan, as my colleague Richard North argues in a lengthy analysis on his Defence of the Realm website, would be to enable it to build up an export trade in the produce its climate fits it for.
If the vast majority of the Afghan people felt they had a stake in seeing their country peaceful and capable of making a good living in the world, the general despair and disaffection on which the insurgency thrives would melt away.
At the moment, however, virtually nothing is being done to unleash that potential. Of the $25 billion which has been poured into Afghanistan in aid, 70 per cent goes to the cities, most to be wasted in corruption or on luxuries such as a new terminal building for Kabul airport. S
candalously little is done for the infrastructure to transport and market crops other than opium. But above all the greatest obstacles to encouraging an export trade are those erected by the very people who pretend to be helping, the US and the EU.
Almonds from California are cheaper in Kabul than those grown locally, because they are subsidised. The US is not allowed by law to assist the Afghans to grow any crop, such as cotton, which might compete with US farmers. The barriers set up by the EU against imports, from tariffs to red tape, are so high that last year the EU exported more than three times as much agricultural produce to Afghanistan than it imported in return.
Peter Mandelson, for once, is entirely right in wanting to see a reduction in the distortions of trade created by EU and US protectionism. Nowhere is that damage more painfully obvious than in the way we refuse to give the Afghans the genuine help that could enable them to pull up their country by its bootstraps.
Mr Sarkozy's farmers may still be able to make a comfortable subsidised living - but the price for that is being paid not least by our own soldiers. They are asked to fight a war which, unless we identify the problem correctly, we can never hope to win.
A great day for tuberculosis
In a major victory for the animal rights lobby, so the BBC tells us, the Government will tomorrow announce its veto on a cull of the TB-infected badgers which are the chief cause of the bovine TB sweeping through our cattle herds.
Having covered this story for four years, here are a few of the basic facts about this disaster which the BBC has not been telling us.
Until the 1980s, the culling of infected badgers reduced TB in cattle virtually to zero. Since killing badgers was outlawed, our badger population has soared and TB in both badgers and cattle has reached epidemic proportions.
According to Government figures, the total bill to taxpayers of compensating farmers for the slaughter of their TB-infected cattle will, within six years, have risen to £2 billion (this year alone payments have risen by 40 per cent).
More than 400 of Britain's most experienced vets, including our leading veterinary scientists, have told the Government that the only way to halt this disaster is a systematic cull of infected badgers.
As was confirmed by the former chief scientist, Sir David King, the so-called Krebs trials, used by the Government to justify its policy, were so unscientific that they might have been designed only to show that culling doesn't work.
The Government is in breach of EU animal health rules obliging it to "eradicate" the wildlife reservoir of the disease. Animal rights groups opposed to culling have been major donors to the Labour Party. Britain is now in serious danger of losing its "TB-free" status which could lose us exports of dairy products worth £600 million a year.
The Government's decision to rely on a grotesquely unreliable "blood test" for diagnosing TB in cattle, rather than the long-proven "skin test", is resulting in so many faulty diagnoses that thousands of dairy cows are now being needlessly slaughtered.
The animal rights lobby raises no objection to this but is quite happy that thousands of infected badgers should continue to die a lingering and painful death (as we see from the corpses of TB-weakened badgers on our roadsides). It has indeed been a remarkable "victory".
EU membership: £40bn a year
A recent, almost wholly ignored, Government report - which deserved rather larger headlines than those given to its plans to build 7,000 useless wind turbines - charts the speed of the decline in our North Sea oil and gas reserves.
As late as 2005 we were still net exporters. By 2013, the report projects, we shall be running a net annual deficit on oil and gas of 80 million tons, costing us, at current prices, a staggering £40 billion.
Since 1998 our yearly balance of payments deficit has soared to some £40 billion. Within five years, thanks to oil and gas imports alone, this could double.
The latest Treasury figures incidentally show that our £20 billion deficit in the six months to March was entirely accounted for by our trade and other dealings with the EU. Our trade with the rest of the world was in balance. The "economic benefits" of our EU membership are not quite as self-evident as our Government and Opposition politicians like to insist.
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Afghan Escalation
Every year, the number of troops grows -- and so do enemy attacks.
The Washington Post Sunday, July 6, 2008
EACH YEAR since 2002, the number of U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan has grown. And each year, during the "fighting season" of spring and summer, the number of attacks by the Taliban has also increased, prompting commanders to conclude that still more troops are needed. This year is no exception. There are 66,000 foreign troops from 40 countries in Afghanistan, including 37,500 Americans; the force under NATO command has grown by 20,000 in 18 months. But Taliban attacks are up 40 percent in eastern provinces this year compared with 2007, and there has been another spike in coalition casualties. In May and June, more Western soldiers died in Afghanistan than in Iraq. Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that "at least" three additional brigades, or about 10,500 more troops, are needed for combat operations and training of the Afghan army.
Will the escalation never end? The war in Afghanistan sometimes appears to suffer from a syndrome that also plagued the United States in Vietnam: incremental increases in troops that are never enough to turn the situation around. Had former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld deployed 60,000 troops in 2002 -- rather than 5,000 -- Afghanistan might have been pacified. Now it seems that a "surge" of troops, like that successfully applied to Iraq last year, might be needed to turn the tide of the war.
The problem is that large numbers of fresh troops are unavailable. The U.S. military currently lacks the reserves, and NATO nations can't or won't provide them. Germany, Britain and France have recently pledged more soldiers, but the numbers are relatively small.
U.S. commanders point out that the increases in attacks and casualties this year result in part from the advance of coalition and Afghan army forces into areas that previously were ceded to the Taliban. Each attempt by the enemy forces to seize an area, such as a Taliban move into a cluster of villages near Kandahar last month, results in a lopsided military victory for NATO. But the Taliban gains by fomenting a sense of insecurity that prevents reconstruction -- its forces have attacked 43 schools in eastern Afghanistan since classes began in March -- and by inflicting casualties that prompt disillusionment and pressure for withdrawal in NATO capitals.
The Taliban can also afford to lose battle after battle because its main bases and top commanders are mostly across the border in Pakistan, where NATO and Afghan troops cannot follow them. Since the Pakistani army struck a de facto truce with several Pakistani Taliban leaders in February, those bases have grown stronger. So even another increase in U.S. troops -- which President Bush and both presidential candidates have promised for next year -- won't be effective unless the Taliban's own ability to escalate from Pakistan can be disrupted. If the cycle of incremental increases continues, Afghanistan within a year or two will have more Western soldiers and more casualties than Iraq. In that case, the divisive debate in Washington over whether the mission is worth the cost could migrate to that theater, as well.
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Kabul's disgraced police chief replaced
Written by www.quqnoos.com Sunday, 06 July 2008
Officer suspended for failing to stop the Karzai assassination attempt is fired
THE GOVERNMENT has replaced the police chief of Kabul, who was suspended for his failure to prevent the attempted assassination of President Karzai in April.
General Mohammed Ayub Salangi, who headed up Kunduz's police force, has been appointed as the police tsar of Kabul in place of the disgraced Muhammad Salem Ehsas, the Ministry of Interior said on Saturday.
The attorney-general suspended Ehsas along with seven other top-ranking security officials, including the head of anti-terrorism and intelligence in the Ministry of Interior, following a probe into the attempted assassination of President Karzai on April 27.
Ehsas is still waiting to be tried along with the other security officials.
Evidence against the men has already been submitted to the Supreme Court, but no date has been set for the start of the trial, Attorney-General Abdul Jabar Sabit said at the end of last month.
The assassination attempt on April 27 killed one Member of Parliament, a council leader and a young boy and wounded 10 others.
Salangi, who was also the former police chief in Kandahar in 2005, will take up his new position on Sunday.
He has his own website: www.salangi.com.
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Spokesman appointed Pakistan's envoy in Kabul
www.quqnoos.com Written by PAN Sunday, 06 July 2008
Pakistan selects new ambassador after ex-envoy's kidnap ordeal
PAKISTAN has appointed a government spokesman as the country’s new ambassador to Afghanistan months after the former envoy was kidnapped by militants while travelling to Kabul.
The current spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mohammad Sediq, will take up his new post as ambassador to Afghanistan very soon, unnamed officials in the ministry said.
The former ambassador, Tariq Azizuddin, disappeared on February 11 along with his driver and bodyguard as they drove from the Pakistani city of Peshawar towards the Afghan border.
On a video aired on April 19 on an Arab satellite channel, Azizuddin said Taliban militants had kidnapped him.
A Pakistani journalist told the Pahjwok news agency that Azizuddin had been appointed Pakistan’s ambassador to Turkey.
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Restoring Past Glory in Old Kabul
Ambitious Project Pumps New Life Into Crumbling Historic District
Washington Post - World By Candace Rondeaux Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, July 6, 2008
KABUL-The road that rings the old city district of Murad Khane is thick with smoke from the hearths of a row of blacksmiths. Until recently, few people in the Afghan capital had much reason to venture beyond the plumes of black smoke into the district.
For decades, Murad Khane has been crushed beneath tons of garbage, a monumental wasteland to the conflict that has gripped Afghanistan for 30 years. The trash heaps made the homes there so inaccessible in places that residents had to burrow through the refuse to enter their front doors.
These days, however, many of those who walk the warren of residences and tumbledown Silk Road inns that make up Murad Khane are there to rebuild the district in what some have billed one the most ambitious efforts yet to pump new life into the long-ailing city.
Work to restore Murad Khane began in 2006 under the auspices of the Kabul-based Turquoise Mountain Foundation. The development organization was born of a meeting of minds between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Britain's Prince Charles when they met during a state visit in Britain in 2004.
Turquoise Mountain is run out of an old fort a few miles from Murad Khane by Rory Stewart, an Oxford-pedigreed Scottish writer and diplomat. Seed money for the group came from Prince Charles and proceeds from Stewart's book, "The Places in Between," a chronicle of his 600-mile walk across Afghanistan in 2002, three months after the fall of the Taliban.
In a country where aid workers like to talk of "capacity building" and "local empowerment," Turquoise Mountain stands out as one of the few groups that is actually transforming trash into treasure. Since the project started in August 2006, workers have hauled away an estimated 10,500 cubic yards of garbage. About 50 homes that were awash in refuse have been restored or received emergency repairs.
Once a nest of seedy entertainment halls, Murad Khane was known for years as one of Kabul's most notorious red-light districts. Located in the center of the city near the Kabul River, it was developed in the 18th century by Afghanistan's founding ruler, Ahmad Shah Durrani. Durrani built several ornate structures to house members of his court from the Qizilbash tribe, an ethnic group that predominates in Murad Khane today. In the 1920s, dozens of buildings with elaborate wood carvings were erected in Murad Khane's 20-acre maze of stone-paved alleys and more modest mud-brick homes. Many of those buildings were demolished as part of a Soviet master plan to modernize Kabul; others were destroyed by decades of neglect and by the civil wars of the 1990s.
The hope is that using traditional Afghan techniques to rebuild the district in the heart of old Kabul will inspire other similar projects in the city and across Afghanistan, said John Elliott, a spokesman for Turquoise Mountain. "We believed that these things -- like culture, like traditional architecture, like history, like identity -- are really, really important for Afghanistan's future," Elliott said. "They're something that all Afghans can unite around, regardless of ethnicity."
Turquoise Mountain employs about 350 local people, many of them women, who work both at Murad Khane and at the organization's current headquarters. It operates three schools for woodwork, calligraphy and traditional pottery and will soon open another for jewelry making. The schools will eventually move from the headquarters to Murad Khane, where there is now also a literacy center and a women's clinic.
There is work yet to be done in Murad Khane, however, before the move. In the courtyard of the once-crumbling building called the Great Serai, a remnant of the neighborhood's status as a Silk Road stop for merchants and tradesmen, a dozen men use long cedar branches to stir mud for the building's new walls. There are sprinklings of straw in the heaping mud pit. The straw strengthens the mud, making it impervious to the ravages of Kabul's harsh environment for many more years than cheap Pakistani concrete, the false coin of postwar reconstruction that inevitably seems to crack within months or years of being laid.
Turquoise Mountain staff members sound almost evangelical when they talk about the organization's use of traditional methods in rebuilding the district. The approach represents in some ways the organization's philosophy: Take the raw elements of Afghan culture, and use them to rebuild what has been lost after years of violent conflict.
The buzzword for this is "sustainability," but Turquoise Mountain workers are wary of using the term. The rebuilding of Murad Khane is more like helping an amnesiac slowly regain his memory, Elliott said. Each newly carved panel of Himalayan cedar installed in an old building, each freshly cut flagstone laid along the narrow alleys recalls another Afghanistan. It is an Afghanistan of a grander era, before the Soviets, before the mujaheddin, before the Taliban, before U.S. soldiers came looking for Osama bin Laden.
A few hundred yards from the Great Serai, a dozen men are seated on the floor of a small courtyard chiseling mountain stone into neat, thin rectangles beneath the shade of a partially thatched roof. One of the men, Mohammed Maruf, 60, gives a clanging whack to a stone as he talks about the changes the restoration project has already wrought. "Before the wars, this handiwork had a lot of value. But during the mujaheddin time and Taliban time, it was lost," he said. "After Karzai came and this project started, the handiwork was valued again. This is why we're here."
But convincing skeptical Afghans of the value of the project is not an easy task in a city where an influx of international aid workers and contractors has fueled a highly speculative real estate market and fast-paced construction. Under the city's master rebuilding plan, Murad Khane is one of several historic districts that was supposed to be razed to make room for the boxy new buildings springing up like concrete mushrooms.
Yet even some of the early naysayers have become converts. At the outer edge of Murad Khane, some merchants who work in the neighborhood's dense cluster of blacksmith and tire shops say also benefited. Qari Mohammed, a 55-year-old blacksmith who has worked in Murad Khane for 20 years, said he's become a fan of the resurrected traditional architecture.
"We are happy about this restoration," Mohammed said. "As these houses are being built, our country is being rebuilt. I'm only unlucky that I don't live here in Murad Khane but in another neighborhood."
Reconstruction of Murad Khane is expected to be completed by late this year or early in 2009.
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How America made a mess of Afghanistan
Shashi Tharoor The Times of India July 6, 2008
In the fall of 2002, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid could be seen and heard at every significant podium and office in New York and Washington. Ostensibly in the US to promote a book, Rashid spent most of his time making an impassioned plea to every influential American who would listen: don't take your eye off the ball in Afghanistan. It was clear by then that the Bush administration was committed to building up its forces for an impending invasion of Iraq. The attitude to Afghanistan, in the hubristic arrogance of the Rumsfeldians, was "been there, done that". Kabul had fallen; Karzai had been installed as president; the war, as far as Washington was concerned, was over. Nobody paid Ahmed Rashid's arguments the slightest attention.
The irony was that almost everybody who had an opinion to express on Afghanistan, especially in the subcontinent, knew that the greatest danger from Islamic radicalism emanated from there and not from Saddam Hussein's secular autocracy in Iraq. The tragedy of 9/11, orchestrated from Osama bin Laden's command centre in the Taliban-ruled state, made it obvious that the most important strategic objective for the US had to be to ensure that Afghanistan never again became the kind of state that could provide a base for a future bin Laden. But the neo-conservatives around president Bush had long been obsessed with the "unfinished business" of Iraq, and many went around quite deliberately misleading the American public into thinking that Saddam was somehow behind 9/11 and in league with al-Qaida. Iraq's attractive oil reserves, its educated middle class and the potential for the country to become, under American rule, an alternative pro-American "model" for the Arab world, all weighed heavily in Washington's calculations. To the neo-cons, Afghanistan, a hard scrabble land of caves, deserts, poorly-developed infrastructure and warring tribals, looked like yesterday's problem.
Well, yesterday's problem has become tomorrow's threat, and many of us feel, like Ahmed Rashid, that America has only itself to blame. Distracted by its misadventure in Iraq, the US neglected Afghanistan for too long, failing to convert its stunning military success in 2001 into a larger developmental and political triumph. Osama has still not been captured, and he periodically releases mocking messages to the world to taunt his would-be captors and inspire his revived followers. Al-Qaida stays secure in its mountain redoubts, and the Taliban, which Washington thought had been scattered to the winds in 2001, is enjoying a resurgence, harassing the belatedly-augmented NATO forces and regularly killing Afghan civilians and government security personnel. Some reports suggest the insurgents now include some 2,000 local and foreign fighters, trained in the mountains and armed to the teeth. Last month (June 2008), for the first time, more American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
Saying "Afghanistan" is, however, shorthand. Much of the menace in the region comes from the other side of the Afghan borderlands — the lawless "federally administered tribal areas" (FATA) inside Pakistan. When they were routed in Afghanistan and hounded relentlessly by American air power in 2001 and early 2002, many of the Taliban fighters sought refuge in FATA, particularly in South Waziristan, where the Pakistani government's writ barely runs. At the same time, both the legitimate Afghan government of president Hamid Karzai and the US-led NATO forces were handicapped by not being able to pursue their tormentors across the border into Pakistan.
Islamabad is a key US ally, a fact that paradoxically appears to have hampered America's ability to act decisively against threats emerging from FATA. Washington was, after all, obliged to be sensitive to Pakistani claims of sovereignty over the area (a sovereignty Islamabad is ill-equipped to exercise in practice). The Bush administration, all too prone to personalise its foreign policy preferences, was also anxious not to undermine its friend president Musharraf by leaning too heavily on him. The increasingly beleaguered Musharraf, in turn, was concerned at all costs to avoid any military action that might provoke a tribal rebellion against his forces. He tried to buy himself more political space by cutting deals with the insurgent leaders in FATA, signing peace agreements with the very chiefs his Army should have been pursuing. The leaders gratefully used the ceasefires to shore up their defences, build up their weaponry and recruit more fighters. When the ceasefires inevitably collapsed, they were ready again. After a few futile skirmishes, all Musharraf could do was to sue for another peace agreement.
Another complication was, of course, the Iraq distraction. Current and former military and intelligence officials cited by the New York Times have stated that the war in Iraq "consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas." According to the paper, "When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq." US intelligence capabilities were similarly affected: the Iraq war, the Times reported, had "drained away" most of the CIA officers with field experience in the Islamic world. "You had a very finite number" of experienced officers, one former senior intelligence official told the newspaper. "Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq."
The result is that the threat from Afghanistan made graphically apparent on 9/11 still persists, except that it has moved from the environs of Kandahar to the Pakistani FATA. Some in India may feel that as long as Pakistan is tied up on its western border, we can breathe a little easier, since it keeps the Islamic radicals too busy to stir up trouble in the east. Such complacency is premature. As long as al-Qaida and the Taliban are at large and free to plan their next spectacular assault, there is no guarantee they will confine their targets to NATO or New York. After all, New Delhi is a lot closer to Waziristan.
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Obama, McCain split over Afghan strategy
Debate shifting troops from Iraq By Bryan Bender Boston Globe July 6, 2008
WASHINGTON - Barack Obama and John McCain are proposing sharply different strategies to seize the initiative from a resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, positions that underscore the two leading presidential candidates' competing visions of how to wage the war on terrorism.
In recent weeks, the violence in Afghanistan has eclipsed the war in Iraq, with record numbers of US casualties and a daring prison break that freed hundreds of captured insurgents. At the same time, a series of new assessments from top US military leaders have concluded that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are as strong as they have been since the United States invaded Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
That has returned Afghanistan to the center of the presidential campaign. Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and McCain, his Republican counterpart, both recently outlined their visions for solving the crisis.
If elected, Obama says, he would immediately withdraw thousands of ground troops from Iraq and send them to Afghanistan to help undermanned US forces defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
"It's time to refocus our attention on the war we have to win in Afghanistan," Obama said in a speech last week. "It is time to go after the Al Qaeda leadership where it actually exists."
The Illinois senator, whose opposition to the Iraq war is a campaign centerpiece, has concluded that the US presence there has fanned Islamic terrorism and diverted scarce military resources from taking on new terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Al Qaeda operatives trained for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Obama believes that the United States has relied too heavily on forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a Europe-based military alliance which has little experience in guerrilla warfare.
"Afghanistan should have been our fight," said retired Air Force General Merrill "Tony" McPeak, national cochairman of Obama's campaign. McPeak blamed the Iraq war, where the United States has about 140,000 troops, for diverting the Pentagon's focus on Afghanistan, where only 32,000 American troops are stationed.
However, McCain, a former fighter pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war, says Iraq, not Afghanistan, is the "central front" in the war on terrorism. He believes that NATO and Pakistan must do more in Afghanistan until the United States can draw down its commitment in Iraq - a position which tracks Bush administration strategy.
The Arizona senator and his foreign policy team warn that pulling US forces from Iraq would embolden Islamic extremists around the world and strengthen Al Qaeda as a national security threat.
"To somehow think that it's an either/or situation - either Afghanistan or Iraq - is a fundamental misreading of the situation in the Middle East," McCain said on June 30. "What happens in Iraq matters in Afghanistan. It matters in Iran. It matters in all the countries in the region."
"If we had pursued the policies vociferously advocated by Senator Obama, we would have risked a wider war."
Randy Scheunemann, a McCain senior foreign policy adviser, said Obama wants to "surrender to Al Qaeda in Iraq to fight them in Afghanistan," a position that "belies a lack of a strategic understanding of the enemy we face."
The gulf between Obama and McCain over Afghanistan and national security, "reflects two different theories about the war on terrorism," said Edward Luttwak, a former Pentagon strategist and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"Theory number one, which is the Obama theory, is that terrorism is caused by grievances and that the solution is to deal with those grievances," such as ending the American occupation of Iraq, Luttwak said.
"The second theory - McCain's - is that Islamic violence is about a fight over resources, morale and leadership," he added. "It holds that if you lose in Iraq it will be a tremendous boost for the extremists and you will bring the neighboring countries under the sway of Islamists."
But there is little question that the next president will have to deal with a growing crisis in Afghanistan.
Operating from a virtual haven in Pakistan's lawless western frontier - and fueled by a burgeoning heroin trade - the Taliban has launched suicide bombings and quick-strike raids against US and NATO forces, while its leaders seize authority over rural populations across several provinces in southern and eastern Afghanistan. That has further weakened the Afghan government's control over the country and imperiled reconstruction efforts.
According to the US military, there has been a 40 percent increase in Taliban and Al Qaeda attacks so far this year in the eastern provinces of Afghanistan adjoining the Pakistan frontier, while in June the 46 combined US and NATO combat deaths in Afghanistan - 28 American and 18 NATO - was the highest since the Taliban government was toppled after the Sept. 11 attacks. Since May the death toll in Afghanistan has outpaced military casualties in Iraq.
Fueling the presidential debate, the nation's top military officer acknowledged last week that US commanders need more troops in Afghanistan but there are none to spare.
"I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq," Admiral Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon last week. Mullen said the Afghanistan campaign has been running short of troops since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign," he said, "which by definition means we need more forces there."
Mullen's remarks were the most pointed yet from a military leader on the impact the Iraq war has had on Afghanistan, and Obama's advisers said Mullin essentially confirmed Obama's position.
"Iraq has distracted us from Al Qaeda," Susan Rice, former assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton and a top Obama adviser, said in a conference call with reporters on Thursday. "Because of Iraq we have fewer troops in Afghanistan, we have fewer intelligence assets, we have less of a diplomatic focus."
But McCain's advisers say that if he becomes president he would build on President Bush's decision to rely on NATO forces - which now have about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan - and would prod Pakistan to take on Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters camped inside its borders.
"There is no easy answer, but clearly Pakistan needs to do more to crack down there," said Scheunemann.
At the same time, McCain believes the Afghan government and its military commanders must expand its forces, and better coordinate the combat and civil reconstruction efforts now underway. Scheunemann said McCain also believes that the United States to should help train a larger Afghan National Army.
"We need to coordinate civil sides of the effort, which is critical in any counter insurgency effort," Scheunemann said.
Nevertheless, Obama's position, not McCain's, could gain traction if the violence in Afghanistan increases, said David Gergen, a former White House aide to four presidents who now teaches at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
"The deteriorating situation in Afghanistan helps Obama," Gergen said in an interview. "It provides him with useful arguments."
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UN to urge revamp of Afghan aid
July 6, 2008 BBC News
The United Nations' envoy to Afghanistan is to outline a new plan on spending foreign aid, amid fears that millions of dollars have been wasted.
Kai Eide told the BBC that too much aid money was spent on salaries and goods in the countries that provided it.
"I think... we spend too much of our money in our home countries instead of spending it in Afghanistan," he said.
Mr Eide advocates spending aid money through the Afghan government in return for a crackdown on corruption.
Last month, 80 countries pledged a further $22bn (£11bn) for Afghanistan.
Now the donors and the Afghan government are being told to deliver - to get schools, clinics, agriculture and electricity to the people who need it.
'Weak institutions'
Millions in development money have notoriously gone to waste in the seven years since the fall of the Taleban, the BBC's Alastair Leithead reports from Kabul.
Many countries spend a chunk of their aid through the government or on a trust fund set aside to fund National Solidarity Programmes in more than 22,000 districts of the country.
Mr Eide believes more should be spent this way.
In Kabul on Sunday, he will outline to the government and donors that they have got to be more co-ordinated and to deliver development more effectively and efficiently.
"We also have to see how we can spend our money in a way that builds Afghan capacity," he said.
"We see how weak the institutions are - that we have to make sure we correct."
Corruption is a major issue and the words auditing and accountability will be buzzing around the room at the first monitoring board meeting since the Paris conference, our correspondent says.
The UN head in Afghanistan is trying to take control of an aid effort that many think has been missing the mark, when winning people over to the government, and keeping the Taleban at bay, is so vital for the future, he adds.
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Restoring Past Glory in Old Kabul
Ambitious Project Pumps New Life Into Crumbling Historic District
By Candace Rondeaux Washington Post Sunday, July 6, 2008
KABUL -- The road that rings the old city district of Murad Khane is thick with smoke from the hearths of a row of blacksmiths. Until recently, few people in the Afghan capital had much reason to venture beyond the plumes of black smoke into the district.
For decades, Murad Khane has been crushed beneath tons of garbage, a monumental wasteland to the conflict that has gripped Afghanistan for 30 years. The trash heaps made the homes there so inaccessible in places that residents had to burrow through the refuse to enter their front doors.
These days, however, many of those who walk the warren of residences and tumbledown Silk Road inns that make up Murad Khane are there to rebuild the district in what some have billed one the most ambitious efforts yet to pump new life into the long-ailing city.
Work to restore Murad Khane began in 2006 under the auspices of the Kabul-based Turquoise Mountain Foundation. The development organization was born of a meeting of minds between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Britain's Prince Charles when they met during a state visit in Britain in 2004.
Turquoise Mountain is run out of an old fort a few miles from Murad Khane by Rory Stewart, an Oxford-pedigreed Scottish writer and diplomat. Seed money for the group came from Prince Charles and proceeds from Stewart's book, "The Places in Between," a chronicle of his 600-mile walk across Afghanistan in 2002, three months after the fall of the Taliban.
In a country where aid workers like to talk of "capacity building" and "local empowerment," Turquoise Mountain stands out as one of the few groups that is actually transforming trash into treasure. Since the project started in August 2006, workers have hauled away an estimated 10,500 cubic yards of garbage. About 50 homes that were awash in refuse have been restored or received emergency repairs.
Once a nest of seedy entertainment halls, Murad Khane was known for years as one of Kabul's most notorious red-light districts. Located in the center of the city near the Kabul River, it was developed in the 18th century by Afghanistan's founding ruler, Ahmad Shah Durrani. Durrani built several ornate structures to house members of his court from the Qizilbash tribe, an ethnic group that predominates in Murad Khane today. In the 1920s, dozens of buildings with elaborate wood carvings were erected in Murad Khane's 20-acre maze of stone-paved alleys and more modest mud-brick homes. Many of those buildings were demolished as part of a Soviet master plan to modernize Kabul; others were destroyed by decades of neglect and by the civil wars of the 1990s.
The hope is that using traditional Afghan techniques to rebuild the district in the heart of old Kabul will inspire other similar projects in the city and across Afghanistan, said John Elliott, a spokesman for Turquoise Mountain. "We believed that these things -- like culture, like traditional architecture, like history, like identity -- are really, really important for Afghanistan's future," Elliott said. "They're something that all Afghans can unite around, regardless of ethnicity."
Turquoise Mountain employs about 350 local people, many of them women, who work both at Murad Khane and at the organization's current headquarters. It operates three schools for woodwork, calligraphy and traditional pottery and will soon open another for jewelry making. The schools will eventually move from the headquarters to Murad Khane, where there is now also a literacy center and a women's clinic.
There is work yet to be done in Murad Khane, however, before the move. In the courtyard of the once-crumbling building called the Great Serai, a remnant of the neighborhood's status as a Silk Road stop for merchants and tradesmen, a dozen men use long cedar branches to stir mud for the building's new walls. There are sprinklings of straw in the heaping mud pit. The straw strengthens the mud, making it impervious to the ravages of Kabul's harsh environment for many more years than cheap Pakistani concrete, the false coin of postwar reconstruction that inevitably seems to crack within months or years of being laid.
Turquoise Mountain staff members sound almost evangelical when they talk about the organization's use of traditional methods in rebuilding the district. The approach represents in some ways the organization's philosophy: Take the raw elements of Afghan culture, and use them to rebuild what has been lost after years of violent conflict.
The buzzword for this is "sustainability," but Turquoise Mountain workers are wary of using the term. The rebuilding of Murad Khane is more like helping an amnesiac slowly regain his memory, Elliott said. Each newly carved panel of Himalayan cedar installed in an old building, each freshly cut flagstone laid along the narrow alleys recalls another Afghanistan. It is an Afghanistan of a grander era, before the Soviets, before the mujaheddin, before the Taliban, before U.S. soldiers came looking for Osama bin Laden.
A few hundred yards from the Great Serai, a dozen men are seated on the floor of a small courtyard chiseling mountain stone into neat, thin rectangles beneath the shade of a partially thatched roof. One of the men, Mohammed Maruf, 60, gives a clanging whack to a stone as he talks about the changes the restoration project has already wrought. "Before the wars, this handiwork had a lot of value. But during the mujaheddin time and Taliban time, it was lost," he said. "After Karzai came and this project started, the handiwork was valued again. This is why we're here."
But convincing skeptical Afghans of the value of the project is not an easy task in a city where an influx of international aid workers and contractors has fueled a highly speculative real estate market and fast-paced construction. Under the city's master rebuilding plan, Murad Khane is one of several historic districts that was supposed to be razed to make room for the boxy new buildings springing up like concrete mushrooms.
Yet even some of the early naysayers have become converts. At the outer edge of Murad Khane, some merchants who work in the neighborhood's dense cluster of blacksmith and tire shops say also benefited. Qari Mohammed, a 55-year-old blacksmith who has worked in Murad Khane for 20 years, said he's become a fan of the resurrected traditional architecture.
"We are happy about this restoration," Mohammed said. "As these houses are being built, our country is being rebuilt. I'm only unlucky that I don't live here in Murad Khane but in another neighborhood."
Reconstruction of Murad Khane is expected to be completed by late this year or early in 2009.
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Knives, petrol bombs found in Afghan prison
KABUL, July 5 (Reuters) - Afghan security forces found more than 100 knives and swords, petrol bombs and dozens of mobile phones in a search of Kabul's main prison, the Defence Ministry said on Saturday.
The search was launched after Taliban insurgents carried off one of the biggest jail-breaks in history last month, smashing a suicide truck bomb into the gate of Kandahar prison in the south and freeing 400 of their fighters and 700 other criminals.
"The joint programme by Afghan security forces and the Ministry of Justice was designed to separate, supervise and search the inmates in the central Pul-i-Charkhi prison and will improve the security of the prison," the Ministry said.
The Kandahar jail-break was a big propaganda win for the Taliban who have stepped up their insurgency to overthrow the Afghan government and drive out foreign forces in recent months.
Pul-i-Charkhi prison gained notoriety in the 1980s when Soviet authorities and Afghanistan's communist government executed thousands there.
(Writing by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
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