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19 insurgents killed in N Afghanistan
www.chinaview.cn 2008-10-18 13:23:15
KABUL, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) backed by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have killed 19 insurgents in an ongoing offensive against
Afghan Ex-Province Mayor Turns Taliban Leader
(RTTNews) - In what could be disturbing news for the government of President Hamid Karzai, the former mayor of Afghanistan's Herat province is now the most powerful local Taliban commander, media reports said.
Former Karzai bodyguard killed in Afghanistan
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban gunmen fatally shot a tribal elder and his son, a former presidential bodyguard, inside a mosque in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, officials said.
Suicide blast wounds NATO troops in Afghanistan
Sat Oct 18, 5:18 am ET
HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP) – A suicide car bomb exploded outside a base of the NATO-led military force in Afghanistan's western city of Herat Saturday, wounding several troops, the alliance said.
Winter hardship in Afghanistan
Saturday, 18 October 2008 12:27 UK BBC News
A harsh winter is in store for the people of Afghanistan where many are affected by poverty and drought, reports Damian Grammaticas from the Saighan Valley.
Former NATO chief to lead UK army
Fri Oct 17, 2008 1:40pm BST
LONDON (Reuters) - A general who is reported to favour a "surge" of troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan was named head of the British Army on Friday.
Chinese Taliban hostage escapes
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- One of two Chinese engineers held hostage for seven weeks by Taliban militants escaped Friday, Pakistan's military said.
War on Taliban losing support in Pakistan
The Sydney Morning Herald 10/17/2008
A DEEP rift over counter-terrorism policy has opened up within Pakistan's political class, as extremist violence and an economic crisis push the country to the verge of collapse.
Afghanistan: a test on the grandest scale
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia October 17, 2008
THE new head of US Central Command in the Middle East, General David Petraeus, has launched an extensive reassessment of US strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the surrounding region
Kabul police arrest 'mass murderers'
www.quqnoos.com Written by Noorullah Rahmani Thursday, 16 October 2008
Men accused of murdering 23 people arrested in capital, police chief says
POLICE have arrested two men for murdering 23 people in the capital Kabul, the head of the city’s crime branch, Ali Shah Paktiawal (pictured), said.
Hundreds march against Herat violence
www.quqnoos.com Written by M Reza Sher Mohammadi Thursday, 16 October 2008
Attack on money exchanger sparks mass riots in the city of Herat
HUNDREDS of people in the western province of Herat have taken to the streets of the provincial capital in protest at decreasing security in the region.
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19 insurgents killed in N Afghanistan
www.chinaview.cn 2008-10-18 13:23:15
KABUL, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) backed by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have killed 19 insurgents in an ongoing offensive against insurgents in northern Afghan province of Wardak, said an ISAF statement issued here on Saturday.
The joint troops engaged insurgents by small-arms fire, heavy weapons and helicopters in Jalrez district where the fighting continued through the night on Oct. 16, resulting in 19 militants killed, the statement said.
Caches comprised of various munitions also found in that area, it said.
Spiraling conflicts and Taliban-linked insurgency have left more than 4,500 people, mostly militants, so far this year in Afghanistan while Taliban insurgents recently vowed to intensified assaults against interests of Afghan government and international troops before the coming winter.
Editor: Lin Liyu
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Afghan Ex-Province Mayor Turns Taliban Leader
(RTTNews) - In what could be disturbing news for the government of President Hamid Karzai, the former mayor of Afghanistan's Herat province is now the most powerful local Taliban commander, media reports said.
Speaking from one of his 20 mountain bases hidden deep inside rugged terrain that were was also used to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, Ghullam Yahya Akbari said he will not negotiate with the Afghan government as long as foreign troops are on the country's soil.
The former mayor -- leading more than 60 well-armed Taliban fighters -- said he is not interested in peace talks, and said he would even turn his guns on Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, if he negotiated with the present Afghan government.
"People may wonder why we live up in the mountains. That's because we want to avoid civilian casualties and fight with guerrilla tactics," he said.
Akbari's steely resolve to fight foreign forces came amid reports of many soldiers defecting to the Taliban, unhappy with the "un-Islamic" ways of the foreign troops.
However, a spokesperson for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) dismissed suggestions of an increase in Taliban support.
"While they were in power this was the worst administration in the history of the country so why would the people of Afghanistan want the Taliban back?" Brigadier-General Richard Blanchette said.
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Former Karzai bodyguard killed in Afghanistan
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban gunmen fatally shot a tribal elder and his son, a former presidential bodyguard, inside a mosque in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, officials said.
The gunmen prayed alongside Ali Emat Khan Barakhzai, an influential tribal leader, and his son, Gul Emat Barakhzai, before shooting them, said Zulmay Ayubi, spokesman for Kandahar's governor.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack and said no Muslim would kill another person inside a mosque.
Gul Emat had been a bodyguard for Karzai, said Dastagir Khan, a tribal elder with the Barakhzai clan.
The Taliban frequently target high-ranking officials and influential tribesmen.
In other recent violence, in the country's west a suicide bomber attacked an Italian military convoy, said police spokesman Raouf Ahmadi. A spokeswoman with the NATO-led force said there were NATO casualties but she did not immediately have details.
Elsewhere, NATO said it killed 19 "terrorists" during an operation that began Thursday in Wardak province.
More than 5,100 people — mostly militants — have been killed in insurgency-related violence in Afghanistan this year, according to an Associated Press count of figures from Western and Afghan officials.
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Suicide blast wounds NATO troops in Afghanistan
Sat Oct 18, 5:18 am ET
HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP) – A suicide car bomb exploded outside a base of the NATO-led military force in Afghanistan's western city of Herat Saturday, wounding several troops, the alliance said.
The car bomb exploded at the gates of a base which is run by Italian troops in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) with some Spanish soldiers also stationed there.
"We did have casualties -- just wounded," an ISAF media official at the force's headquarters in Kabul told AFP.
There were several wounded, she said, without being able to give more details. ISAF does not release the nationalities of its casualties.
An AFP reporter at the scene said the bomb appeared to have struck a military vehicle which had overturned.
The area was sealed off and Afghan officials could not immediately say if any civilians had been struck by the explosion.
Many of the suicide bombings in Afghanistan are carried out by militants with the Taliban who were removed from government in a US-led invasion in late 2001 for sheltering Al-Qaeda.
There were about 84 suicide attacks to the end of September this year, down from the 119 for the same period last year, according to independent security monitoring group the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office.
About half were aimed at the international security forces but about three-quarters of the casualties were civilians, it said in a report released last week.
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Winter hardship in Afghanistan
Saturday, 18 October 2008 12:27 UK BBC News
A harsh winter is in store for the people of Afghanistan where many are affected by poverty and drought, reports Damian Grammaticas from the Saighan Valley.
Syed Shah is a man with a proud, striking profile: a thick, black turban perched above a long, high forehead; fierce, hooded eyes, a mouth drawn down slightly at the corners, and a thick white beard.
His face is almost as worn and weathered as the stark mountains that surround his fields.
At 80 years old, Syed Shah has lived through all Afghanistan's turmoil. He has seen foreign invaders come and a royal dynasty go, Afghan armies plunder and murder, his nation wrecked by wars.
"In all my life, I have never seen anything as bad as this," he told me, his arm sweeping round in a gesture that took in the high mountain valley that is his home.
We were standing in the middle of Syed's fields. The earth was rock solid, dry, riddled with deep cracks.
Just a few sad and withered stalks poked out of the ground, some sheep trying to chew on them.
Harvest decimated
Syed's younger brother Abdul stepped forward. "We should have harvested over a ton of wheat," he told me, "but we've only managed to get a tenth of that this year."
The brothers have 30 mouths in their family to feed.
Already they know that they only have enough grain to last two months of the coming winter, which could be six months long.
They will need food aid to survive. Afghanistan is in the grip of one of the worst droughts many can remember.
The Saighan Valley, high in the central highlands, has been hit particularly hard. All around it is like a moonscape, bare, brown fields, dry gullies, and jagged mountains stripped of vegetation.
Erosion means you can see clearly how the rocks have been formed in layers over millions of years, stripes of pinks, greys, browns and oranges running through the mountains.
Up here Afghans rely on the winter snows to recharge the ground water. But for six of the past seven years there has not been enough snow. This year was the worst of all.
Some villages do not even have drinking water. Since nine out of every 10 Afghans rely on farming for survival, the drought means a serious food crisis is looming for millions.
Of course, seven years is exactly the length of time US-led forces have been in Afghanistan, since they drove the Taleban from power.
Up in the Saighan Valley, they see the drought almost as a metaphor for the failure of the international community to bring change to Afghanistan.
Syed Shah told me that in seven years, his village has had almost no aid or assistance whatsoever.
The brothers warned us not to travel any further down the valley, as the Taleban have spread back into the next district. Just two days earlier, they had set off a sophisticated roadside bomb, in an attempt to blow up some Nato soldiers.
Like most people in Bamian Province, Syed and Abdul are ethnic Hazaras, no friends of the Taleban. But the Taleban are slowly encircling Bamian.
Taleban incursions
The two main roads linking the province to the capital have, in the last six months, become too unsafe to drive down.
Even Afghans get stopped at checkpoints, and questioned by fighters looking for anyone working with the foreigners.
It took us a bone-shaking, three-hour drive over a high mountain pass to reach the provincial capital.
There we met Habiba Saraby, the Governor of Bamian. She has a kind, smiling face, but her frustrations rise to the surface quickly.
She told me she has been asking the government to build a dam in Saighan for the past three years so the valley could have water.
Nothing was done even though there were millions of unused dollars in the ministry of water's budget.
The Taleban have now appointed their own rival governor of Bamian.
"I know," Ms Saraby said, smiling. "I've asked the Americans to put some troops in the area where he operates. They could finish this problem quickly, but nothing has been done."
Her biggest frustration of all is over food aid. She has asked for 10,000 tonnes of grain to feed people through the winter. She has been told the government can only spare half that amount.
One of Afghanistan's poorest regions, Bamian has also long been considered one of the safest too.
Governor Saraby said all the foreign attention goes to provinces with worse security problems, so areas like hers get no reward for their loyalty to the central government.
But it means that Syed Shah and his brother Abdul face a bitter winter.
When the snow comes and the mountain passes are blocked, their food will dwindle, but Bamian won't have enough aid stockpiled to feed them.
So the brothers and their family will probably question what good the foreign involvement in Afghanistan is really bringing.
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Former NATO chief to lead UK army
Fri Oct 17, 2008 1:40pm BST
LONDON (Reuters) - A general who is reported to favour a "surge" of troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan was named head of the British Army on Friday.
The appointment of General David Richards, a former commander of the NATO force in Afghanistan, is part of a sweeping shakeup of Britain's military top brass announced by the government on Friday.
Richards, currently commander-in-chief of land forces, will take over from General Richard Dannatt as chief of the general staff in August next year.
The Independent newspaper reported that Richards believes a build-up of 30,000 more troops is needed in Afghanistan, where there has been a resurgence of violence in the past year.
He is believed to favour sending up to 5,000 more British troops, in addition to the 8,000 already there, the report said. The other 25,000 would be made up of U.S. reinforcements and newly trained Afghan soldiers.
Military commanders are hoping that as British troops are withdrawn from Iraq, numbers will be boosted in Afghanistan, where the British force is over-stretched.
The Ministry of Defence also announced that Admiral Mark Stanhope would take over as chief of naval staff while Stephen Dalton would become chief of the air staff, both from July next year.
Richards was commander of NATO's ISAF force in Afghanistan between May 2006 and February 2007, when he was the first non-American to command U.S. forces since World War Two.
The outgoing head of the army, Dannatt, is widely reported to have irritated the government with his outspoken comments about the strains that military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are putting on the British army.
(Reporting by Adrian Croft; Editing by Steve Addison)
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Chinese Taliban hostage escapes
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- One of two Chinese engineers held hostage for seven weeks by Taliban militants escaped Friday, Pakistan's military said.
The two engineers, who were kidnapped in August in northern Pakistan, both attempted to escape early Friday but one was shot in the leg and remains in the hands of his abductors, said Muslim Khan, a spokesman for the Taliban.
Khan said the remaining captive had been moved to a new location.
It was not immediately clear what the group has been demanding in exchange for the hostages' release.
Khan also said that Maulana Fazlullah, the Taliban commander in the Swat district, has ordered an internal investigation into how the two Chinese hostages were able to attempt escape.
The Chinese engineer who escaped is in Peshawar under army protection, military sources said.
The names of engineers were not released.
China's official Xinhua news agency said the engineers, working with Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment Company, disappeared on August 29 after finishing their work in Lower Dir -- a district in the Northwest Frontier Province.
Their Pakistani driver and security guard also went missing, Xinhua said.
The Taliban in Swat Valley later claimed responsibility for the abduction, Xinhua said.
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War on Taliban losing support in Pakistan
The Sydney Morning Herald 10/17/2008
A DEEP rift over counter-terrorism policy has opened up within Pakistan's political class, as extremist violence and an economic crisis push the country to the verge of collapse.
A special session of parliament called by the Government to forge a political consensus on the "war on terror" has backfired spectacularly as parties, including some in the ruling coalition, denounced the alliance with Washington and NATO rather than backing the army to take on the Pakistani Taliban.
A party in the coalition Government, the religious Jamiat-Ulama-I-Islam party, has even demanded that, as parliamentarians had received a presentation from the army, Pakistan's Taliban movement should also be allowed to address them.
The political and economic situation is worsening, with intensified suicide bomb attacks and an alarming depletion in Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves. The country is seeking an emergency $10 billion bail-out from international institutions, while a severe shortage of electricity is crippling business and punishing households.
Critics of the Government, which is led by President Asif Ali Zardari, complain that there is a paralysis of decision-making and policy. A leaked US top-secret National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan concludes that the country is "on the edge".
On Thursday a US missile strike inside Pakistan's tribal border area with Afghanistan killed up to six suspected militants, and a suicide attack on a police station in the north-west killed three officers and wounded 15.
The economic nosedive will aid recruitment to extremist groups, experts say, and force more poor families to send their children to the free madrassa schools, which offer an exclusively Islamic curriculum.
Inflation is running at 25 per cent, and up to 100 per cent for many staple food items, while unemployment is growing, pushing millions more into poverty. The rupee has lost around 30 per cent of its value so far this year.
"The canvas of terrorism is expanding by the minute," said Faisal Saleh Hayat, a former interior minister. "It's not only ideological motivation. Put that together with economic deprivation and you have a ready-made force of Taliban, al-Qaeda, whatever you want to call them. You will see suicide bombers churned out by the hundred."
The army is engaged in a bloody operation against militants in Bajaur, part of the tribal border area, and in Swat, a valley in the north-west. The Pakistani Taliban is closely tied to al-Qaeda and is entrenched across the tribal belt with much of the north-west in its grip. Other militant networks span the country.
But there have been some positive security developments. An editorial in The News, a Pakistani daily, on Thursday asked readers to "stand against terror", pointing out that some groups of tribesmen in the north-west have raised their own militias to fight the Taliban. It also wrote about a meeting of Islamic scholars in the eastern city of Lahore this week that issued a fatwa against suicide bombings.
The Pakistan People's Party, which leads the coalition that came to power in March after more than eight years of army rule, had hoped to get parliamentarians behind the military action. But the biggest opposition party, led by the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, called for the Government to start talks instead with the extremists, without preconditions.
"The majority of the people of Pakistan do not see it as our war. We are fighting for somebody else and we are suffering because of that," said Tariq Azim, a former minister in the previous government of Pervez Musharraf, whose party now sits in the opposition.
MPs are angered by recent signs from Washington that it is prepared to talk to the Afghan Taliban, while telling Pakistan that it must fight its Taliban menace.
It seems that the best the People's Party can hope for is a mildly worded resolution in parliament, with a thin majority, far short of the consensus it sought at a time when the very existence of Pakistan is in peril from the threat of extremists.
Some parliamentarians, including the Awami National party, which is in the ruling coalition and based in the insurgency-plagued north-west, questioned whether the army was sincere in pursuing the extremists.
"There are still training camps, still [terrorist] sanctuaries, still cross-border movement in the tribal area," said Bushra Gohar, senior vice-president of the party. "There's duplicity, at some level, in our policies."
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Afghanistan: a test on the grandest scale
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia October 17, 2008
THE new head of US Central Command in the Middle East, General David Petraeus, has launched an extensive reassessment of US strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the surrounding region, while warning that the lack of development and the increasing violence in Afghanistan will probably make it "the longest campaign of the long war".
The 100-day assessment will result in a new campaign plan for the Middle East and Central Asia, a region in which General Petraeus will oversee the operations of more than 200,000 American troops, when he takes up his position on October 31. The review will formally begin next month but experts and military officials involved said General Petraeus is already focused on at least two main themes: government-led reconciliation of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the leveraging of diplomatic and economic initiatives with nearby countries that are influential in the war.
The review comes as General Petraeus, who led a counter-insurgency effort credited with drastically reducing attack levels in Iraq, faces widespread expectations that he will find a way to arrest intensifying violence and US troop casualties in Afghanistan, fuelled by growing militant havens in Pakistan.
It also coincides with the Bush Administration's own urgent reassessment of Afghanistan strategy amid pessimism that the situation there is rapidly deteriorating.
Indeed, some senior Administration officials have expressed concern that General Petraeus is casting his net too widely with a regional review at a time when Afghanistan and western Pakistan desperately need rescuing.
The US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has warned that he believes the international effort in Afghanistan is falling short and stressed the need for a better integrated approach to stabilising the country. "These efforts today, however well-intentioned and even heroic, add up to less than the sum of the parts," he said in a speech prepared for delivery to the US Institute of Peace.
His remarks came amid growing US fears that an upsurge of insurgent violence and corruption in Afghanistan is threatening the viability of an already weak central government. "To be successful, the entirety of the NATO alliance, the European Union, NGOs and other groups - the full panoply of military and civilian elements - must better integrate and co-ordinate with one another and also with the Afghan government," Mr Gates said.
"Afghanistan is the test, on the grandest scale, of what we are trying to achieve when it comes to integrating the military and civilian, the public and private, the national and international."
Mr Gates called for a concerted development strategy that persuades and inspires the public to counter Taliban influence through intimidation.
"As one USAID contractor who worked in Afghanistan put it, we need to show the citizenry that we are 'fully committed to making a difference, rather than working disconnectedly on one-off projects'."
His speech was the latest in a series advocating a more intelligent use of non-military instruments of power to deal with instability in poor and failing states.
After recent American-led airstrikes in Afghanistan resulted in more than 100 civilian deaths, NATO officials ordered commanders to try to reduce their reliance on air power. Brigadier General Richard Blanchette, NATO's chief spokesman in Afghanistan, said commanders were under orders to consider "tactical withdrawal" rather than calling in air support during clashes in areas where civilians were believed to be present.
The Washington Post, Agence France-Presse
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Kabul police arrest 'mass murderers'
www.quqnoos.com Written by Noorullah Rahmani Thursday, 16 October 2008
Men accused of murdering 23 people arrested in capital, police chief says
POLICE have arrested two men for murdering 23 people in the capital Kabul, the head of the city’s crime branch, Ali Shah Paktiawal (pictured), said.
The two men, Abdul Hameed and Qahaar, both residents of Kapisa province, were arrested on Wednesday evening in the city’s 15th district, Paktiawal said.
Police said the two men were also suspected of carrying out armed robberies and kidnappings, and of raping women.
They are alleged to have 100 armed men under their command.
In one case, they are supposed to have killed three children before burying them in a graveyard in Kabul.
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Hundreds march against Herat violence
www.quqnoos.com Written by M Reza Sher Mohammadi Thursday, 16 October 2008
Attack on money exchanger sparks mass riots in the city of Herat
HUNDREDS of people in the western province of Herat have taken to the streets of the provincial capital in protest at decreasing security in the region.
Thursday’s protest was triggered by an attack on a money exchanger’s car the previous day.
Gunmen killed the man’s bodyguard and abducted his brother.
Protestors urged the government to sack the province’s officials for failing to prevent the gunmen from carrying out the attack.
Shop-keepers closed their shops after the demonstration.
The head of the police department in Herat, Muhamamd Jooma Adel, said the money exchanger’s relatives took him to Iran for treatment after he was injured in the attack.
Police say they have launched an operation to catch the gunmen.
Abduction has become a major problem in Herat recently, with investors leaving the region for fear of being targeted by criminal gangs who operate with impunity in many parts of the province.
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