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Pakistan key to fixing Afghanistan: British military chief
Sun Feb 1, 1:04 am ET
LONDON (AFP) – Peace will only come to Afghanistan if Pakistan can sort out the militants on its side of the border, where US strikes are not helping, the head of Britain's armed forces told The Sunday Times newspaper.
French troops attacked in Kabul, three people hurt
Sun Feb 1, 5:40 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – A suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of French troops in the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, wounding three people, including one of the soldiers, the French military and the Afghan government said.
Canadian soldier killed Afghanistan
Sat Jan 31, 7:43 pm ET
OTTAWA (AFP) – A Canadian soldier was killed Saturday by an improvised explosive device in southern Afghanistan, bringing to 108 the number of Canadian military losses, the commander of the country's base in Kandahar said.
Afghanistan hits back at Western critics over aid
Sayed Salahuddin Reuters via Yahoo! UK & Ireland News
Afghanistan hit back at Western criticism of official corruption on Sunday, saying some 80 percent of international aid was outside government control so donors should be held to account. Skip related content
EU pledges fresh 610 mln euros to Afghanistan
February 01, 2009 People's Daily
The European Union has pledged additional 610 million euros to help rebuild the war-ravaged Afghanistan, Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta told reporters after returning home from a European tour on Sunday.
Obama considers grim options in dealing with Afghanistan, resurgent Taliban; economy is key
By ANNE GEARAN , Associated Press January 31, 2009 - 11:00 AM
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama, who pledged during his campaign to shift U.S. troops and resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, has done little since taking office to suggest he will significantly widen the grinding war against a resurgent Taliban.
Opening of secret grave recalls Afghanistan coup
By CARLOTTA GALL The New York Times
KHOJA GHAR, Afghanistan — Ordered to bury 16 bodies in the dead of night in 1978, a wary young army officer did his best to remember the location, quietly counting the paces from the unmarked mass grave to the roadside.
A Turnaround Strategy
We're better at creating enemies in Afghanistan than friends. Here's how to fix that—and the war, too.
Fareed Zakaria NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Feb 9, 2009
In May 2006 a unit of American soldiers in Afghanistan's Uruzgan valley were engulfed in a ferocious fire fight with the Taliban. Only after six hours, and supporting airstrikes, could they extricate themselves from the valley.
Could Afghanistan Be Obama's Vietnam?
The analogy isn't exact. But the war in Afghanistan is starting to look disturbingly familiar.
John Barry and Evan Thomas NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Feb 9, 2009
About a year ago, Charlie Rose, the nighttime talk-show host, was interviewing Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the military adviser at the White House coordinating efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
AFGHANISTAN: Little health care for women in Paktika Province
01 Feb 2009 10:22:32 GMT
SHARANA, 1 February 2009 (IRIN) - "I will not take my wife to a male doctor even if she dies," said Pir Gul from Paktika Province, southeastern Afghanistan, explaining that such a thing went against tradition.
FACTBOX-Security developments in Afghanistan, Feb 1
01 Feb 2009 07:27:35 GMT
Feb 1 (Reuters) - Following are security developments in Afghanistan at 0730 GMT on Sunday:
Looking for a new approach to Afghan development
01 Feb 2009 by Bronwen Roberts
HERAT, Afghanistan, Feb 1, 2009 (AFP) - Sitting around tables at an Italian military base, NATO commanders and other forces of development in Afghanistan discuss obstacles in their drive to build the country and undermine insurgents.
Kandahar schoolgirls triumph over terrorism
Sprayed with acid in November attack, victims return to school full time
JANE ARMSTRONG January 31, 2009 The Globe and Mail
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- It was an attack, vicious even by Afghanistan's violent standards, that shocked the world: A group of men on motorbikes surprised a group of school girls and teachers as they walked
A picture of misery: how corruption and failure destroyed the hope of democracy
The Times By Tom Coghlan 01/31/2009
Kabul - Afghans no longer trust their leader and believe the forthcoming election will be decided by the White House
Afghanistan's provincial reconstruction teams
KABUL, Feb 1, 2009 (AFP) - Provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) are small teams of civilian and military staff working in Afghanistan to provide security for aid workers and help with reconstruction.
Delay of Afghan Election Poses Constitutional Crisis
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 31 January 2009
President and Electoral Commission say timetable is legitimate
Education Ministry to Make the Educational System Better
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 31 January 2009
650 schools were closed and more than 140 teachers were killed or wounded last year
Young Drug Addicts Population Soaring in Kandahar
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 31 January 2009
Drugs Addict on the rise in Afghanistan
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Pakistan key to fixing Afghanistan: British military chief
Sun Feb 1, 1:04 am ET
LONDON (AFP) – Peace will only come to Afghanistan if Pakistan can sort out the militants on its side of the border, where US strikes are not helping, the head of Britain's armed forces told The Sunday Times newspaper.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup said only politics, long term, could bring peace on both sides of the frontier.
The chief of the defence staff said that weaknesses in Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government were causing difficulties for the 8,300 British troops battling Taliban insurgents in the troubled south of the country.
"The weakness of governance in Afghanistan worries me considerably," Stirrup told the weekly broadsheet.
"But governance is not just about what goes on in Kabul. We have to look at the wider picture.
"The Taliban movement -- and Taliban is now a catch-all phrase for ideologues, criminals, people with tribal grudges, people who are quite simply guns for hire to keep bread on the table -- is on both sides of the border.
"It makes no distinction between one side or the other. Some people move across. Some are based almost exclusively in Pakistan. Some are based exclusively in Afghanistan.
"It's impossible to distinguish between those two and actually, in my view, not necessary. The border is not relevant."
Stirrup sympathised with the difficulties faced by the Pakistani military, admitting that its success so far had been "limited".
"The Pakistan army has a series of very considerable problems," he said, adding it had realised that "the growing insurgency within its own borders is an existential problem for Pakistan."
General Ashfaq Kayani, the head of Pakistan's army, "is absolutely clear on the size of the challenge that he faces.
"The Pakistan army has become much more sophisticated and much more flexible and adaptable in terms of its approach.
"So we have to do all we can to support the military in that shift, but we have to recognise that they can't do it overnight.
"Just as in Afghanistan, that kind of insurgency cannot be defeated by conventional military means. It can only be dealt with, in the long term, through politics."
He said it was "very important" for the Islamabad government to start changing public sentiment that all would be well if western troops were not in Afghanistan.
"While they shouldn't be driven by public opinion, they can't operate in the face of it. The Predator strikes don't help in that regard," he said, referring to US air strikes on the Pakistani side of the border.
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French troops attacked in Kabul, three people hurt
Sun Feb 1, 5:40 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – A suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of French troops in the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, wounding three people, including one of the soldiers, the French military and the Afghan government said.
The extremist Islamic Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast on the busy southwestern outskirts of the city.
The bomb exploded near a convoy of French soldiers who are helping to train the fledgling Afghan National Army, French military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jerome Salle told AFP.
"One military vehicle has been damaged and one French soldier has been slightly wounded. He does not need hospital treatment," he said.
The Afghan interior ministry said two civilians were also wounded. Witnesses said they were an adult male and a child.
The car used to carry out the attack was destroyed, with only the engine block remaining, an AFP reporter at the scene said.
Parts of the vehicle and the attacker's body were flung across the road, which leads into the province of Wardak and then Logar -- both used in the past as staging grounds for attacks on Kabul.
There are about 2,800 French soldiers in Afghanistan as part of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) that is helping to fight a Taliban-led insurgency and build up Afghanistan's own forces.
About 300 of them are involved in training Afghan army soldiers, Salle said.
Many of the others are based in the province of Kapisa, northeast of Kabul.
Suicide attacks have become a regular occurrence in Afghanistan and are most often claimed by the Taliban, which is fighting to take back power after being removed from government in a US-led invasion in 2001.
The last attack in Kabul was two weeks ago on a road between the German embassy and a US military base. Four Afghans and a US soldier were killed in the attack, which was also claimed by the Taliban.
Afghan and international security forces afterwards arrested a man in Kabul suspected of involvement and two others in Logar, where a fourth suspect was shot dead, ISAF said.
About 3,000 US troops have deployed in recent weeks in Wardak and Logar. Up to 30,000 more US troops are expected in the coming months in southern Afghanistan, which sees some of the worst of the insurgency.
The French contribution to ISAF is the fourth largest after those of the United States, Britain and Canada.
It suffered the largest loss of life in battle from among all the 40 ISAF nations when 10 paratroopers were killed after being ambushed by insurgents in August last year.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner last week ruled out increasing the number of French troops deployed in Afghanistan even as NATO is pushing for more.
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Canadian soldier killed Afghanistan
Sat Jan 31, 7:43 pm ET
OTTAWA (AFP) – A Canadian soldier was killed Saturday by an improvised explosive device in southern Afghanistan, bringing to 108 the number of Canadian military losses, the commander of the country's base in Kandahar said.
Combat engineer Sean David Greenfield, 25, was killed when a roadside bomb exploded under his armored vehicle in Zhari district, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Kandahar, commander Denis Thompson told a press conference broadcast on Canadian television.
None of the other soldiers in the vehicle was hurt in the incident, Thompson said.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a statement offering his condolences over Greenfield's death.
"The Canadian mission in Afghanistan is a difficult one, but the Canadian forces are making a difference in the lives of the Afghan people by maintaining security and stability that will allow the country to rebuild and look to the future," Harper said.
Eleven Canadian soldiers have been killed since December by such explosive devices, which are the leading cause of casualties for the 2,700 Canadian troops that have been deployed in and around Kandahar since their country's mission in Afghanistan began in 2002.
A diplomat and two humanitarian workers have also been killed in Afghanistan.
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Afghanistan hits back at Western critics over aid
Sayed Salahuddin Reuters via Yahoo! UK & Ireland News
Afghanistan hit back at Western criticism of official corruption on Sunday, saying some 80 percent of international aid was outside government control so donors should be held to account. Skip related content
As U.S. President Barack Obama makes Afghanistan his foreign policy priority, President Hamid Karzai's government has come under increased Western criticism for corruption, poor governance and not arresting the king-pins behind the booming drugs trade.
Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said the criticism was "not fair" as the government had no say over how 80 percent of the billions of dollars of foreign aid was spent.
"Sometimes, we are accused of crimes we have not committed," Spanta told a news conference.
"When we have received 20 percent of the foreign aid, then it is better to be asked about that. The problem is that we are asked about the whole of the 100 percent, while we are unaware of the 80 percent," he said.
Spanta said there was a lack of coordination between international donors, more than a dozen United Nations agencies, the 100-plus non-governmental organisations, military units from more than 40 nations, and the government.
Many nations, especially the United States, implement development work in Afghanistan through a series of sub-contracts to international and finally Afghan firms leaving a lot of leeway for graft and meaning that much of the money is repatriated to the donor nation, aid experts say.
"What we need is better coordination, what we need is promoting the government's efficiency, what we need is good governance ... and a campaign against corruption on part of the government and the international community," said Spanta.
Drug production has decreased significantly in areas under government control, but large parts of the south, especially Helmand province where about half the world's opium is produced, are outside government control, Spanta said.
(Editing by Dominic Evans)
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EU pledges fresh 610 mln euros to Afghanistan
February 01, 2009 People's Daily
The European Union has pledged additional 610 million euros to help rebuild the war-ravaged Afghanistan, Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta told reporters after returning home from a European tour on Sunday.
"The European Union pledged a new contribution of 610 million euros to Afghanistan and this assistance would be disbursed until 2013," he added.
Spanta also said that the EU had agreed to channelize 60 percent of the donation through the government of Afghanistan.
Moreover, the foreign minister said that the EU would finance the key projects of agriculture, energy and railway to link Afghanistan with the regional countries.
Source: Xinhua
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Obama considers grim options in dealing with Afghanistan, resurgent Taliban; economy is key
By ANNE GEARAN , Associated Press January 31, 2009 - 11:00 AM
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama, who pledged during his campaign to shift U.S. troops and resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, has done little since taking office to suggest he will significantly widen the grinding war against a resurgent Taliban.
On the contrary, Obama appears likely to streamline the U.S. focus with an eye to the worsening economy and the cautionary example of the Iraq war that sapped political support for President George W. Bush.
"There's not simply a military solution to that problem," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said last week, adding that Obama believes "that only through long-term and sustainable development can we ever hope to turn around what's going on there."
Less than two weeks into the new administration, Obama has not said much in public about what his top military adviser says is the largest challenge facing the armed forces. The president did say Afghanistan and Pakistan are the central front in the struggle against terrorism, a clue to the likely shift toward a targeted counterterrorism strategy.
After Obama's first visit to the Pentagon as president, a senior defense official said the commander in chief surveyed top uniformed officers about the strain of fighting two wars and warned that the economic crisis will limit U.S. responses. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama's meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff was private.
Obama said he wants to add troops to turn back the Taliban, but he has not gone beyond the approximately 30,000 additional forces already under consideration by the previous administration. Those troops will nearly double the U.S. presence in Afghanistan this year. But they amount to a finger in the dike while Obama recalibrates a chaotic mishmash of military and development objectives.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week warned of grandiose goals in Afghanistan, prescribing a single-minded strategy to prevent Afghanistan from being a terrorism launching pad.
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Opening of secret grave recalls Afghanistan coup
By CARLOTTA GALL The New York Times
KHOJA GHAR, Afghanistan — Ordered to bury 16 bodies in the dead of night in 1978, a wary young army officer did his best to remember the location, quietly counting the paces from the unmarked mass grave to the roadside.
He gathered from his fellow soldiers that they had just buried Afghanistan's first president, Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan, and his family. His assassination, during a communist coup in those tumultuous days, precipitated three decades of war in Afghanistan, a succession of conflicts that are still not spent and that have since touched every Afghan family.
It took 30 years and the relative stability and freedom under President Hamid Karzai for the former officer, Pacha Mir, to reveal his secret. With his help, the government has at long last identified the remains of the former president and his family and announced preparations to re-inter the bodies with a state funeral in coming weeks.
Daoud was the founder of the Republic of Afghanistan. He overthrew his own cousin, the last king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah, in a coup in 1973, but it was his own assassination five years later that plunged the country into bloodshed and turmoil.
Eighteen members of the Daoud family were killed that night in the presidential palace, along with a number of officers and aides. They were buried under cover of darkness outside the city. But almost no one knew quite where.
The victims included the president's wife and her sister; his brother, Naim Khan; his three sons; three daughters; a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law; and four grandchildren, one of whom was only 18 months old.
The popular account of the massacre was that the family was slain between 4 and 5 a.m. on April 28, 1978. After a day of fierce fighting, an army captain named Emamuddin entered the palace with a unit of men to arrest Daoud. The president refused to go with him and fired a pistol at the men. The mutinous soldiers responded with a withering hail of gunfire.
Many victims were buried in unmarked graves on or near a military firing range at Pul-i-Charkhi, an area on the eastern side of Kabul, the capital.
That is where government investigators began searching last summer, with the help of Mir.
Two more relatives, Daoud's sister-in-law and a granddaughter, who were shot the day of the coup and died later in a hospital, remain missing.
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A Turnaround Strategy
We're better at creating enemies in Afghanistan than friends. Here's how to fix that—and the war, too.
Fareed Zakaria NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Feb 9, 2009
In May 2006 a unit of American soldiers in Afghanistan's Uruzgan valley were engulfed in a ferocious fire fight with the Taliban. Only after six hours, and supporting airstrikes, could they extricate themselves from the valley. But what was most revealing about the battle was the fact that many local farmers spontaneously joined in, rushing home to get their weapons. Asked later why they'd done so, the villagers claimed they didn't support the Taliban's ideological agenda, nor were they particularly hostile toward the Americans. But this battle was the most momentous thing that had happened in their valley for years. If as virile young men they had stood by and just watched, they would have been dishonored in their communities. And, of course, if they were going to fight, they could not fight alongside the foreigners.
In describing this battle, the Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen coins a term, "accidental guerilla," to describe the villagers. They had no grand transnational agenda, no dreams of global jihad. If anything, those young men were defending their local ways and customs from encroachment from outside. But a global terrorist group—with local ties—can find ways to turn these villagers into allies of a kind. And foreign forces, if they are not very careful, can easily turn them into enemies.
Reduced to its simplest level, the goal of American policy in Afghanistan should be to stop creating accidental guerrillas. It should make those villagers see U.S. forces as acting in their interests. That would mark a fundamental turnaround.
Let's be clear. The war in Afghanistan is not going well; almost all trends are moving in the wrong direction. But I don't believe it is a quagmire—yet. We still have time to focus our goals, improve our strategy, calibrate our means. The two men in charge now, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, are extraordinarily talented. But what should they do? We need to overhaul U.S. policy in four steps, each more complicated than the last.
Do counterinsurgency right. Despite Petraeus's demonstrable success in Iraq, U.S. forces have to this point largely relied on more old-fashioned tactics—raids, search-and-destroy missions, air attacks. Partly this is because the U.S. military has deployed too few troops to hold territory that's been cleared. "In Iraq we do what we can, in Afghanistan we do what we must," Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen explained in 2007. It is also because many American troops believe that they are chasing global terrorists who must be captured or killed urgently.
Instead of aggressive and punitive—in military parlance, "kinetic"—operations, Petraeus's counterinsurgency approach emphasizes the need to make local populations feel secure. Troops are meant to live among the people, use less force, gain trust, not overreact to every provocation and be seen as a positive force within the community. Above all, the priority is to get local forces—in this case, the Afghan National Army and the police—to do as much as possible, even when the job might not be done as well as by foreign troops.
The number of additional U.S. troops needed is not large. Afghanistan is predominantly rural, and the large population centers that truly need protection are limited. U.S. forces would also need to control the key roads and transit points. In fact, the commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, has begun to focus his efforts on this approach. Between the addition of two to four more American brigades and a ramp-up of the Afghan Army, there should be enough troops to execute the strategy.
Strengthen the Afghan government. The central government is widely seen as weak, dysfunctional and utterly corrupt. Disgust with its performance has reopened the door for the Taliban, who are unpopular almost everywhere but who promise justice—albeit very rough justice—rather than the chaos of the Karzai reign. The international community should have considerable influence on this matter because the Kabul government, unlike in Iraq, has virtually no revenue sources other than foreign aid. Unfortunately, so far many of the most corrupt elements in government are allies of the West and have gained a kind of immunity as a result.
The most immediate way to enhance the legitimacy of the Afghan government would be to ensure that both presidential and local elections take place this year without disruption, and that viable alternative candidates are free to campaign. But elections are only one form of political legitimacy in a country like Afghanistan. There should be a much more broad-based effort to reach out to tribal leaders, hold local councils and build a more-diverse base of support. The goal in Afghanistan should not be a strong central government—the country is decentralized in its DNA—but a legitimate government with credibility and local allies throughout the country. This is how Afghanistan was ruled before the wars that have consumed it since the 1980s.
Talk to the Taliban. The single most important consequence of the surge in Iraq was the fact that large parts of the Sunni community—including insurgents who had been attacking U.S. troops for years—reconciled with America and, provisionally, the Baghdad government. "The challenge in Afghanistan," Petraeus said in a recent interview with Foreign Policy, "is figuring out how to create conditions that enable reconciliation, recognizing that these will likely be different somewhat from those created in Iraq."
Timing is important. Petraeus argues that in Iraq, reconciliation became easier once the United States had regained a position of strength, having killed or captured many Sunni fighters. (And after many more were savagely killed by Shiite militias.) But the basic idea is obvious—to divide the enemy and thereby reduce the number of diehard opponents arrayed against you. The process of political bargaining goes on in every society during such conflicts. The goal in Afghanistan must be to separate, as often as possible, the global jihadist from the accidental guerrilla.
In America, this has turned into a somewhat ideological debate about "talking to the Taliban." Critics rage that this would be doing business with evil people. But in a country like Afghanistan—one of the poorest in the world—politics is often less about ideology and more about a share of the spoils. While some members of the Taliban are hard-core Islamic extremists, others are concerned with gaining a measure of local power—of access to money and clout.
The most important departure from current thinking would be to make a distinction between Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The United States is properly and unalterably opposed to Al Qaeda—on strategic, political and moral grounds—because its raison d'être is to inflict brutality on the civilized world. We have significant differences with the Taliban on many issues—democracy and the treatment of women being the most serious. But we do not wage war on other Islamist groups with which we similarly disagree (the Saudi monarchy, for example). Were elements of the Taliban to abandon Al Qaeda, we would not have a pressing national-security interest in waging war against them.
In fact, there is a powerful military advantage to moving in this direction. Al Qaeda is a stateless organization that controls no territory of its own. It can survive and thrive only with a host community. Our objective should be to cut off Al Qaeda, as far as possible, from its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Deprived of local support, Al Qaeda would be a much diminished threat. Now, it is certainly true that some elements of the Taliban might be closely wedded to Al Qaeda. But others are not. Even the most hard-line Taliban—the so-called Quetta Shura led by Mullah Omar—have at various points made overtures to the Afghan government, always asking that they be distinguished from Al Qaeda. In Guantánamo, for example, Afghans who had played minor roles as drivers and servants for Qaeda officials have been treated just the same as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Given that the United States is in its seventh year of war in Afghanistan, it might surprise many Americans to recognize that not one Afghan was involved at any significant level in the 9/11 attacks. Barnett Rubin, who has studied the region for decades and is chairing an Asia Society report on Afghanistan, makes the point more forcefully: "Afghans have played no significant role in any major terrorist attack before or after 9/11." This is true. All the plots that have been traced back to the region lead not to Afghanistan but to Pakistan, where U.S. officials acknowledge the top leadership of both the Taliban and Al Qaeda now reside.
Pressure Pakistan. When the United States invaded Afghanistan, it did not defeat Al Qaeda and its supporters among the Taliban. They simply fled to Pakistan, their original home. The story is by now familiar. During the 1980s, the Pakistani military—through its Inter-Services Intelligence agency—helped form militant Islamic groups to wage asymmetrical war against Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and against India in Kashmir. This strategy was financed by Saudi Arabia and the United States. It gave birth to the Taliban and helped provide Al Qaeda with a home when Osama bin Laden was expelled from Sudan.
It is crucial to recognize that the Pakistani military achieved substantial success with these militias. They bled India at very low cost, neutralizing New Delhi's much larger army, and chased the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. These represent the only two significant strategic successes for the Pakistani military in decades, perhaps in its history.
The American debate on the need to "press" Pakistan to dismantle these militias misses this point. Pakistan has long viewed its clients as having given the country "strategic depth"—keeping its historic foes, India and Afghanistan, off balance. For Islamabad to genuinely renounce these groups would require a fundamental strategic rethinking within the Pakistani military.
This is hard but not impossible. The civilian government in Pakistan, weak and ineffective though it may be, is allied with the international community on these issues. It too wants a Pakistani military that knows its boundaries, does not run militant groups and conceives of the country's national interests in less-confrontational terms. The United States has enormous influence with the Pakistani Army, though it has not always used it well. (When we cut off military-to-military relations in the 1990s, because of congressional sanctions against Pakistan's nuclear tests, we lost a generation of officers who felt betrayed by America.) If the military agrees to dismantle these jihadist networks—demonstrably—Afghanistan and India should respond with concessions to ease regional tensions. I don't want to make this sound easy. Of all the tasks that Petraeus and Holbrooke have, this one is the hardest. And yet, if the problem with Pakistan cannot be solved, the war in Afghanistan cannot be won.
Afghanistan is a complex problem, and progress will be slow and limited. But we need to stabilize the situation, not magically transform one of the poorest, most war-torn countries in the world in the next few years. It will help immeasurably if we keep in mind the basic objective of U.S. policy there. "My own personal view is that our primary goal is to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists to attack the United States and its allies," said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last week. That is an admirably clear statement.
It is not that we don't have other goals—education, female literacy, centralized control of government services, drug eradication, liberal democracy. But many of them are objectives that will be realized over very long stretches of time, and should not be measured as part of military campaigns or political cycles. They are also goals that are not best achieved by military force. The U.S. Army is being asked to do enough as it is in Afghanistan. Helping it stay focused on a core mission is neither cramped nor defeatist. It is a realistic plan for success.
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Could Afghanistan Be Obama's Vietnam?
The analogy isn't exact. But the war in Afghanistan is starting to look disturbingly familiar.
John Barry and Evan Thomas NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Feb 9, 2009
About a year ago, Charlie Rose, the nighttime talk-show host, was interviewing Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the military adviser at the White House coordinating efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. "We have never been beaten tactically in a fire fight in Afghanistan," Lute said. To even casual students of the Vietnam War, his statement has an eerie echo. One of the iconic exchanges of Vietnam came, some years after the war, between Col. Harry Summers, a military historian, and a counterpart in the North Vietnamese Army. As Summers recalled it, he said, "You never defeated us in the field." To which the NVA officer replied: "That may be true. It is also irrelevant."
Vietnam analogies can be tiresome. To critics, especially those on the left, all American interventions after Vietnam have been potential "quagmires." But sometimes clichés come true, and, especially lately, it seems that the war in Afghanistan is shaping up in all-too-familiar ways. The parallels are disturbing: the president, eager to show his toughness, vows to do what it takes to "win." The nation that we are supposedly rescuing is no nation at all but rather a deeply divided, semi-failed state with an incompetent, corrupt government held to be illegitimate by a large portion of its population. The enemy is well accustomed to resisting foreign invaders and can escape into convenient refuges across the border. There are constraints on America striking those sanctuaries. Meanwhile, neighboring countries may see a chance to bog America down in a costly war. Last, there is no easy way out.
True, there are important differences between Afghanistan and Vietnam. The Taliban is not as powerful or unified a foe as the Viet Cong. On the other hand, Vietnam did not pose a direct national-security threat; even believers in the "domino theory" did not expect to see the Viet Cong fighting in San Francisco. By contrast, while not Taliban themselves, terrorists who trained in Afghanistan did attack New York and Washington in 2001. Afghanistan has always been seen as the right and necessary war to fight—unlike, for many, Iraq. Conceivably, Gen. David Petraeus, the architect of the successful surge in Iraq and now, as the head of Central Command in charge of the fight in Afghanistan, could pull off another miraculous transformation.
Privately, Petraeus is said to reject comparisons with Vietnam; he distrusts "history by analogy" as an excuse not to come to grips with the intricacies of Afghanistan itself. But there is this stark similarity: in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, we may now be facing a situation where we can win every battle and still not win the war—at least not within a time frame and at a cost that is acceptable to the American people.
A wave of reports, official and unofficial, from American and foreign (including Afghan) diplomats and soldiers, present and former, all seem to agree: the situation in Afghanistan is bad and getting worse. Some four decades ago, American presidents became accustomed to hearing gloomy reports like that from Vietnam, although the public pronouncements were usually rosier. John F. Kennedy worried to his dying day about getting stuck in a land war in Asia; LBJ was haunted by nightmares about "Uncle Ho." In the military, now as then, there are a growing number of doubters. But the default switch for senior officers in the U.S. military is "can do, sir!" and that seems to be the light blinking now. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, when in doubt, escalate. There are now about 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration appear to agree that the number should be twice that a year or so from now.
To be sure, even 60,000 troops is a long way from the half million American soldiers sent to Vietnam at the war's peak; the 642 U.S. deaths sustained so far pale in comparison to the 58,000 lost in Vietnam. Still, consider this: that's a higher death toll than after the first nine years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And what is troubling is that no one in the outgoing or incoming administration has been able to say what the additional troops are for, except as a kind of tourniquet to staunch the bleeding while someone comes up with a strategy that has a chance of working. The most uncomfortable question is whether any strategy will work at this point.
It's still too early to say exactly what President Obama will do in Afghanistan. But there are some signs—difficult to read with certainty, yet nonetheless suggestive—that reality is sinking in, at least in some important corners of the new administration. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the one Bush cabinet holdover, worries that increasing the size of the U.S. military's footprint in Afghanistan will merely fan the locals' antipathy toward foreigners. "We need to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan," he told a congressional committee last week. "My worry is that the Afghans come to see us as part of the problem, rather than as part of the solution. And then we are lost."
Vietnam, half a world away, seemed alien to many Americans and to Westerners generally. Afghanistan might as well be the moon. At least Vietnam had been a French colony, albeit a troubled one. Afghanistan resisted colonization, dispatching 19th-century British and 20th-century Russian soldiers with equal efficiency. "Afghanistan is not a nation, it is a collection of tribes," according to a Saudi diplomat who did not wish to publicly disparage a Muslim neighbor. In Vietnam, the Ngo Dinh Diem government was seen as illegitimate because Diem was a Roman Catholic in a mostly Buddhist country and because it was propped up by the United States. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai's government was essentially created by the United States after local warlords, backed by American airpower, ousted the Taliban in 2001. (Karzai was elected in his own right in 2004, but at a time when he was clearly favored by America and faced no serious rivals.)
As in Diem's Vietnam, government corruption is epic; even Karzai says so. "The banks of the world are full of the money of our statesmen," he said last November. His former finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, rates his old government as "one of the five most corrupt in the world" and warns that Afghanistan is becoming a "failed, narco-mafia state." In a country where seven out of 10 citizens live on about a dollar a day, the average family each year must pay about $100 in baksheesh, or bribes (in Vietnam, this was known as "tea" or "coffee" money). Foreign aid is, after narcotics, the readiest source of income in Afghanistan. But it has been widely estimated that because of stealing and mismanagement in Kabul, the capital, less than half of the money actually finds its way into projects, and only a quarter of that makes it to the countryside, where 70 percent of the people live.
To Afghans now, as to Vietnamese then, the government is more often an arbitrary force to be feared than a benevolent protector. Ordinary Vietnamese lived with the fear of crossing someone more powerful, who could always turn them over to the Americans as an enemy sympathizer; a similar fear pervades Afghanistan now. When U.S. forces quickly crushed the Taliban after 9/11, many Afghans welcomed them, thinking the all-powerful Americans would transform their streets and schools and the economy. Now bitterness has set in. "What have the people of Afghanistan received from the Coalition?" asks Zamir Kabulov, the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan. "They lived very poorly before, and they still live poorly—but sometimes they also get bombed by mistake."
Nation-building in Afghanistan may be a hopeless cause. Periods of peace under centralized rule have been few and far between. Violence has been the norm: in the 18th century a Persian king, Nadir Shah, suppressed a revolt and beheaded 6,500 tribesmen (chosen by lot). He stacked their heads in a pyramid—with one of the instigators of the revolt entombed inside. And the Saudi diplomat is right in this sense: especially across the Pashtun belt in southern Afghanistan, local leaders have traditionally held more sway than whoever's in power in Kabul. The Taliban may not be fighting in a nationalist cause per se, as the Viet Cong were. But they certainly are more local, better rooted than the U.S.-led coalition.
The basic mantra of counterinsurgency is "clear, hold and build." Clear the area of insurgents. Hold it so the insurgents cannot return. Build the civic works and government structures so that the community decides to back the government. That's a coherent approach. But while foreign troops can clear better than the Taliban, they simply can't hold as well. In fact, the Taliban are getting pretty good at counterinsurgency themselves—"clear, hold and build" is what they're doing across southern Afghanistan. Their strict brand of justice is appealing to some Afghans, who crave order and security. In some areas Taliban commanders have even relaxed some of their more unpopular dictates, allowing girls to go to school, for instance. Last month, the sober and respected International Council on Security and Development reported that the Taliban "now holds a permanent presence in 72 percent of Afghanistan, up from 54 percent a year ago." They are moving in on Kabul; according to the ICOS report, "three of the four main highways in Kabul are now compromised by Taliban activity."
The Taliban also has one resource that the Viet Cong never enjoyed: a steady stream of income from Afghanistan's massive heroin trade. Afghan poppies produce roughly 93 percent of the world's opium. Although, nominally, eradication has been a high priority since 2004, poppy cultivation has more than doubled. Farmers can't be persuaded to switch to other crops unless they feel confident that the Taliban won't return to kill them as punishment. And besides, they'd need passable roads to move more legitimate crops to functioning markets. The Americans don't have anywhere near enough troops—their own or those of increasingly disillusioned NATO allies—to secure the roads and the farm areas. That's not only because of Afghanistan's size (similar to Texas), but also because of a failure of strategy reminiscent of Vietnam.
America has been trying to pacify Afghanistan essentially through a counterterrorist campaign. The consequence has been that some of the military's most valuable warriors—its Special Forces—have been largely misused. Most people think of Special Forces as jumping out of helicopters on secret and dangerous missions. Actually, until George W. Bush launched his Global War on Terror—and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave the Special Operations Command the lead role—their normal (and arguably more useful) mission was to train up the armies of developing countries. In Vietnam, the Green Berets were initially (and successfully) sent into the highlands to train indigenous tribesmen as guerrilla fighters.
After 1962, however, they were diverted to fruitless efforts to seal Vietnam's frontiers. Similarly, the Special Forces in Afghanistan have been used mostly as strike teams to go after Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders—or deployed along the 1,400-mile border in an effort to stop insurgents from Pakistan—rather than to train Afghanistan's own forces. "The development of Afghan security forces has been a badly managed, grossly understaffed and poorly funded mess," concluded Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Anthony Cordesman in a briefing to Democratic congressional leaders in January. The United States didn't even seriously fund the development of Afghanistan's own forces until 2007.
Even now, America and its NATO allies have provided fewer than half the trainers the Afghans need; and many of those are unskilled. As a result, the Afghan Army is too small and too poorly trained to take over the counterinsurgency missions that constitute the real battle in Afghanistan. The Afghan Army is getting better, but slowly. U.S. commanders privately think it may be five years before most units are able to operate on their own. The Afghan police remain a disaster—leaving U.S. forces to fill the vacuum.
As in Vietnam, efforts to seal the frontier have failed. The Taliban, like the North Vietnamese, has depended crucially on supply routes and sanctuaries just over the border. Just as NVA units were able to slip up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail running through Laos, the Taliban can fade away into the mountains and over the border into the lawless regions of Pakistan. These safe havens give them an invaluable space in which to train and resupply. Taliban fighters are much more willing to return to the fight knowing that their families are parked safely in Pakistan, and that they themselves can retreat there if wounded. One Taliban commander based in Pakistan even gave his men five cell-phone numbers to call for help if they got shot fighting U.S. troops across the border, promising they'd be evacuated and treated quickly.
The Americans have to be careful about chasing after the Taliban into their sanctuaries. In Vietnam, American strategists worried about bringing Russia or China into the war if they bombed too freely in and around Hanoi (by, say, sinking a Russian freighter in Haiphong Harbor). In Pakistan, the Americans worry that a heavy-handed intervention could destabilize the government, a risky move in a country with nuclear weapons. The Pakistanis have shared intelligence on Qaeda targets—and have from time to time launched offensives against Pakistani Taliban fighters along the border—but meanwhile, members of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, have formed covert alliances with some Afghan Taliban factions. The Pakistanis have a strategic interest in keeping Afghanistan—which has developed close ties to archenemy India—weak. Since many Pakistani leaders are convinced that America will eventually leave, they're covering their bets for the future.
In Vietnam, America worried about covert Russian and Chinese backing for the North Vietnamese (some would say too much). Here, Pakistan may not be the only country playing a double game. While neighboring Iran is predominantly Shiite, and has traditionally backed the Sunni Taliban's foes in the Northern Alliance, Tehran may also be the source of some of the more sophisticated IEDs turning up on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Certainly Iran has some interest in seeing the American forces on its border bleed a little. At times, though, the United States can seem like its own worst enemy in Afghanistan. Lacking enough troops, forced to cover vast areas, U.S. forces depend far too heavily on strikes by A-10s, F-15s, even B-1 bombers. In 2004, the U.S. Air Force flew 86 strike sorties against targets in Afghanistan. By 2007, the number was up to 2,926—and that doesn't count rocket or cannon fire from helicopters. U.S. commanders have become much more careful about collateral damage since Vietnam. There are no more "free fire zones" or Marines using Zippo lighters to torch villages. But innocents die in the most carefully planned raids, especially when the enemy cynically uses civilians as cover—as the Viet Cong did, and the Taliban does. Already, civilian casualties have climbed from 929 in 2006 to close to 2,000 in 2008, according to the United Nations. "When we kill innocents, especially women and children, you lose that village forever," says Thomas Johnson of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. In the dominant Pashtun tribe, revenge is a duty. Kill one Pashtun tribesman, sadly observes a U.S. Special Forces colonel who spoke anonymously to be more frank, and you make three more your sworn enemy.
This, then, is the mess that faces General Petraeus. He was a near–miracle worker in Iraq, and it may be that just as Lincoln eventually found Grant, Obama will have been lucky to inherit Petraeus. So far, Petraeus is not signaling a new grand strategy, instead letting various policy reviews go forward. A shrewd politician, he may be seeking to quietly educate the new president on the high cost and many years required to "win" in Afghanistan—if such a thing is even possible.
It is a sure bet that Petraeus will want to unify the different commands now muddling the situation in Afghanistan. (Divided command was a chronic problem in Vietnam, too.) Some soldiers report to the Special Operations Command, some to the regular military; some to the U.S. Central Command and some to NATO; and, within NATO, to their own national governments. There are some 37,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan but many are more concerned with "force protection"—not sustaining casualties—than seeking out and engaging the enemy.
Petraeus will work closely with Richard Holbrooke, a veteran diplomat who helped broker peace in the Balkans. Holbrooke is being sent by the State Department to coordinate the scattered and easily corrupted foreign-aid programs and to knock heads to make sure the diplomats, politicians and soldiers are on the same page. Holbrooke is a force of nature; still, he could wind up like Robert (Blowtorch Bob) Komer in Vietnam in the late 1960s —brilliant, capable and too late.
In some ways, there is no mystery to what must be done to fight a successful counterinsurgency. As Petraeus himself has said, the United States cannot kill its way to success. Foreign troops cannot defeat insurgents. Only local forces with popular support can do that. (A RAND study of 90 insurgencies since World War II showed that "governments defeated less than a third of the insurgencies when their competence was medium or low.") It is a good bet that Petraeus will want American soldiers to train local village militias to fight the Taliban. The catch is that the Soviets already tried this (nothing is really new in counterinsurgency) and failed. In Afghanistan, local warlords quickly turn to fighting each other. The local saying is that they can be rented, not bought. And who wants to kill a Taliban fighter if the result is a blood feud?
Americans are appropriately skeptical about the chances of success in Afghanistan. A recent NEWSWEEK Poll shows that while 71 percent of the people believe that Obama can turn around the cratering economy, only 48 percent think he can make progress in Afghanistan. Deploying a U.S. force of 60,000 will cost about $70 billion a year. Training and supporting the 130,000 to 200,000 troops required for a proper Afghan Army would take another decade and could cost at least $20 billion. Petraeus has consistently warned that Afghanistan will be "the longest campaign in the long war" against Islamic extremism. But it's far from clear that Americans have the appetite for such a commitment: after the economy, their top priority is health care (36 percent). Only 10 percent put Afghanistan at the top of their list, even fewer than nominate Iraq. If there is no real improvement on the ground, by the 2010 midterm elections, candidates for office may be decrying "Obama's war."
So why not just get out? As always, it's not so simple. If the Americans pull their troops out, the already shaky Afghan Army could collapse. (Once they lost U.S. air support, South Vietnamese troops sometimes refused to take the field and fight.) Afghanistan could well plunge into civil war, just as it did after the Soviets left in 1989. Already, the Pashtuns in the south regard the American-backed Tajiks who dominate Karzai's administration as the enemy. The winning side would likely be the one backed by Pakistan, which may end up being the Taliban—just as it was in the last civil war.
Some argue this wouldn't be such a bad outcome, if the Taliban could be bribed or persuaded to not let Al Qaeda set up terrorist training bases on Afghan territory. According to one senior Taliban leader, a former deputy minister in Mullah Mohammed Omar's government who would only speak anonymously, some Pakistani officials are urging the insurgents to do something like this now—in return for talks with the Americans. On the other hand, Islamabad could be playing with fire. Given the longstanding ties between the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, a jihadist state on its border is a threat to Pakistan, too. And here, U.S. national-security interests definitely do come into play.
Some problems do not have a solution, or any good solution. Two studies of the Afghanistan mess cochaired by retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, now President Obama's national-security adviser, asserted last year that America cannot afford to lose in Afghanistan. Who wants to be the American president who allows jihadists to claim that they defeated and drove out American forces? Daniel Ellsberg, the government contractor who leaked the Pentagon papers, used to say about Vietnam, "It was always a bad year to get out of Vietnam." The same is all too true for Afghanistan.
With Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai
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AFGHANISTAN: Little health care for women in Paktika Province
01 Feb 2009 10:22:32 GMT
SHARANA, 1 February 2009 (IRIN) - "I will not take my wife to a male doctor even if she dies," said Pir Gul from Paktika Province, southeastern Afghanistan, explaining that such a thing went against tradition.
Gul's mindset is common in Paktika Province where there is not a single female doctor, though the Central Statistics Office estimated Paktika's female population at over 180,000.
"This is a very serious problem," Nangyalai (he only uses one name), the deputy director of Paktika's health department, told IRIN, adding that there were only a few female nurses and midwives in the whole province.
With the help of aid organisations, the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) increased the number of midwives in the country from 400 in 2001, to about 2,500 in 2008, but that is still not enough.
"An estimated 4,546 midwives are needed to cover 90 percent of the country's pregnancies," the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in its State of the World Children's report 2009 [http://www.unicef.org/sowc09/].
After Niger, Afghanistan has the second highest maternal mortality rate (MMR) in the world, and each pregnant Afghan faces a 1:8 risk of dying from complications, according to UNICEF.
Challenges
Limited access to maternal health care, poor awareness about safe delivery practices and scarcity of professional health workers are three factors contributing to the high MMR in Afghanistan, UNICEF says.
Strong conservative traditions also hinder women's education and awareness in Paktika.
"Societal norms require many women to be escorted outside the home by a male relative, thus restricting their mobility to access health facilities," the UNICEF report said.
MoPH officials in Kabul said they were committed to expanding basic health services country-wide, but "insecurity is the biggest problem impeding the work of female health workers," Deputy Health Minister Faizullah Kakar told IRIN.
Amateur midwives
No one has reliable figures on maternal and infant mortality rates in Paktika where deaths mostly result from preventable and curable diseases, aid workers say.
In the absence of professional health personnel, women seek treatment and medical care from amateur midwives and herbal medicines. "Usually an elderly woman in a village attends during delivery," said Rozi Khan, a local resident.
Many women are feared to be suffering, and even dying, from post-delivery infections due to poor hygiene and lack of access to antibiotics, experts said.
Women and young girls with other diseases have little or no option but to endure pain and inconvenience until a natural recovery is achieved. Some use locally produced herbal medicines, while others seek advice and help from local drug sellers [See an IRIN video on Afghan women using opium as a substitute for medicine http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=77014].
In extreme cases and when an illness is prolonged, those who can afford to, take a sick female to Kabul or Pakistan for medical treatment.
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FACTBOX-Security developments in Afghanistan, Feb 1
01 Feb 2009 07:27:35 GMT
Feb 1 (Reuters) - Following are security developments in Afghanistan at 0730 GMT on Sunday:
KABUL - A suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of foreign troops on the outskirt of capital Kabul on Sunday, wounding two Afghan civilians and slightly hurting one French soldier, officials said.
PAKTIKA - A convoy of NATO-led troops killed a tribal elder and wounded one more when their vehicle ignored warnings in the Urgun district, some 180 km (112) miles south of Kabul on Saturday, a statement from NATO forces said.
HELMAND - Two children were killed and three adult civilians were wounded when NATO-led troops returned fire from insurgents in a compound in Nad Ali district, some 570 km (350) miles southwest Kabul on Saturday, NATO troops said. HERAT - Seven local employees of a mobile phone provider were kidnapped by Taliban insurgents in Pushton Zarghoon district, some 645 km (400) miles west of Kabul on Saturday, an official said. Three of the abducted people were released later in the day, he said.
GHAZNI/KHOST - U.S.-led coalition troops killed two militants and detained nine others during an operation targeting the Taliban and the allied Haqqani network to the south and southeast of Kabul on Saturday, the U.S. military said. (Compiled by Hamid Shalizi, Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
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Looking for a new approach to Afghan development
01 Feb 2009 by Bronwen Roberts
HERAT, Afghanistan, Feb 1, 2009 (AFP) - Sitting around tables at an Italian military base, NATO commanders and other forces of development in Afghanistan discuss obstacles in their drive to build the country and undermine insurgents.
The group includes the governor and mayor of the western city of Herat, UN officials and military officers from the provincial reconstruction team (PRT) run by NATO soldiers, who in this western province are mostly Italian.
In Herat as elsewhere, they are trying to install governance, improve security, and wrest back the initiative from Taliban insurgents whose net is widening across a country ranked fifth poorest in the world.
The conventional wisdom of counter-insurgency warfare is that improving the lives of locals is vital to cultivating lasting stability and depriving insurgents of breeding grounds to regroup.
But a UN representative at the meeting says that donor governments and agencies often work independently, unaware of what others are doing and uninterested in linking into national development priorities.
The short international troop rotations, sometimes only four to six months, means soldiers are constantly going back to basics and focusing on short-term projects, like building wells and schools, others say.
"It takes three months to understand the complications of this country (and then) your successor starts the exercise all over again," Herat governor Ahmad Yusef Nuristani explains to the Italian commanders.
But the overarching concern -- raised by all -- is insecurity, which in this relatively calm western-most province has as much to do with smugglers and kidnappers as Taliban and other Islamic insurgents.
Rear Admiral Matthieu Borsboom, who is in charge of the PRTs, has come from the Kabul headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to listen and motivate followers to a more comprehensive approach.
ISAF runs 26 PRTs, responsible for the multinational force development work that runs concurrent to its military campaign against insurgents.
The focus has been on "quick impact projects," such as handing out books or building a school, to win public support for foreign troops increasingly under fire over civilians killed and property damaged in battles against rebels.
Borsboom talks of a "revolutionary step" which abandons attempts to coordinate ISAF, government and UN development plans, but would draw up one district-level blueprint from the outset.
Pilot projects are expected to start in the coming months.
"The challenges are huge," says the Dutch commander. "All three partners themselves are not perfect and the outside world is too complex. We have to do it together."
The new US administration has shifted the focus in the "war on terror" to Afghanistan and called for a broad strategy combining diplomacy, development and defence to root out Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and extremists.
Hopes in 2001 of a fast-ticket to the 21st century have dissolved as the vast majority of Afghans have seen little tangible aid, with a resurgent Taliban exploiting the bitterness.
According to ISAF data, PRTs have completed 9,999 projects worth nearly 464 million dollars since 2002. Around another 4,740 projects costing 592 million dollars are ongoing or planned.
"You have to show (results) to the population, who have had war for 25 years," says Borsboom after a tour of projects -- furniture for a new burns clinic, a school for orphaned boys, art classes from an Italian master.
"If they don't see a change, for them it is hard to choose a side... they have to survive."
But there are many critics. The government, which the West accuses of rampant corruption, says it could carry out development work more cheaply, and wants international aid to feed through the national budget.
Aid workers say blurring the line with foreign troops comprises their neutrality and puts them in danger.
There are also long-term questions about creating a culture of dependency among locals, and over the military's understanding of good development practice.
These are some of the questions ISAF commanders grapple with back at Camp Arena, their main base in Herat.
For example, giving free medical assistance to more than 26,800 Afghans in the western provinces in 2008 was good for the image of the force, they say.
But there fears this could threaten Afghan doctors who depend on patient fees and cannot afford to provide free medicine.
"Is this helping to build the Afghan system or helping to break it down?" Borsboom asks.
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Kandahar schoolgirls triumph over terrorism
Sprayed with acid in November attack, victims return to school full time
JANE ARMSTRONG January 31, 2009 The Globe and Mail
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- It was an attack, vicious even by Afghanistan's violent standards, that shocked the world: A group of men on motorbikes surprised a group of school girls and teachers as they walked to school last November and sprayed their faces with acid.
Now, in what is being billed as a triumph over terrorism in this war-ravaged land, most of the 1,300 students - some with permanent scars on their cheeks and damaged vision - have returned to school full time.
Credit has been handed to headmaster Mahmood Qadri, 54, who moved quickly after the attacks, cajoling and begging the frightened families of the girls not to let the attackers win by giving up on their education.
"We told them not to lose this chance for your children," Mr. Qadri said.
And most listened. Classrooms at Mirwais School for Girls on the outskirts of Kandahar city were brimming earlier this month as the girls prepared for mid-year exams.
One girl told a U.S. reporter that her father urged her to return to school at all costs, even if she is attacked again.
Mr. Qadri's efforts were as much to prove a point to the attackers and would-be copycats: If the goal was to intimidate the girls into staying home, the effort was doomed.
Within days of the assault, Mr. Qadri called a series of meetings with parents and teachers.
Some of the parents were fed up with the threats and attacks from insurgents.
"They were telling us ... if we don't [stand up] to this event, the insurgents will kill us and our children [in the next attack]," Mr. Qadri said.
The headmaster also met with government officials, asking for better security and buses for the girls, many of whom walk for kilometres to and from school.
So far, those requests have not been met.
Many of the Mirwais students come from families whose parents are illiterate. Despite government efforts to reverse the previous Taliban regime's edict forbidding women and girls from attending school and working outside the home, many people in this conservative province still frown on educating girls.
According to government statistics, girls make up 35 per cent of the 5.7 million students enrolled in school in Afghanistan. By remaining open, the Mirwais school remains a symbol of progress and hope in Kandahar.
At first, Mr. Qadri feared the parents would not let their children return. The day after the attack, only a few girls appeared for class, but each day their numbers have increased.
But for some students, the wounds from that morning are still raw.
Susan Ibrahimi, 18, remembers walking to school with her mother, also a teacher, when she spotted the men on motorcycles.
"They stopped in front of us," Ms. Ibrahimi said. "They took a thing hidden in some clothes, like a long pistol."
Some of the men tried to lift the women's burkas. Using spray guns, they splashed acid on the fabric, disintegrating the material. Burned and temporarily blinded, the two women ran home.
Susan's sister, Mina, a teacher who had stayed at home that day, said the two women were crying in pain and clutching their faces, which were blotched and red from the attack. Ms. Ibrahimi was the more seriously injured.
"They were in a very bad situation," Mina said. "Susan's face was hidden by her burka but some of the acid reached her face. Her face was red. Some parts of her face were burnt."
Ms. Ibrahimi was treated at a Kandahar hospital and prescribed medication. When the weather turned colder, pieces of skin began to fall off her face. She has since moved to Kabul for more treatment.
Mina said her sister is still too traumatized to resume teaching in Kandahar.
The attack appeared to have the hallmarks of a Taliban assault.
Schools, especially those catering to girls, have been targets of insurgent attacks and threats.
Police later arrested eight men. One confessed on videotape, saying he was paid by Pakistan's intelligence service. But President Hamid Karzai later told a news conference that no foreign forces were behind the attack.
Mina said she believed the assault was ordered from Pakistan, by people "who don't want us to progress even in education. They want us to be their slaves."
In time, Mina said, her sister will be back at school.
"The main thing is knowledge, and knowledge is a beautiful thing for a person."
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A picture of misery: how corruption and failure destroyed the hope of democracy
The Times By Tom Coghlan 01/31/2009
Kabul - Afghans no longer trust their leader and believe the forthcoming election will be decided by the White House
There are few people in a better position than Mr Salim to gauge the popularity of Afghanistan's political elite. His family has made a steady living for more than 40 years selling portraits of politicians from a small shop-front in one of Kabul's better districts. Today he has a problem.
“Since 2002 every week we sold five or six portraits of Karzai,” says Mr Salim. “But about one year ago it just stopped. I can only remember selling one picture of Karzai these past 12 months.”
Piles of framed photographs of the benevolent-looking Afghan President gather dust in the back area of the shop. In a country where portraits of public figures are a popular home decoration, even portraits of the feared Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum are selling better than Mr Karzai, says a rueful Mr Salim.
On the streets of Kabul any mention of Mr Karzai – who will stand for reelection on August 20 after the poll was put back from May – is now likely to produce a scowl. “The main problem that we have is Karzai,” said Mohammad Anif, who makes $6 (£4.20) a day selling fruit juice at a roadside café in Kabul. “I voted for him last time and it was a big mistake. No one thinks well of him. He is a good man only for his own family.”
The President is blamed for a quartet of woes that blight the lives of ordinary people in one of the world's poorest countries: insecurity, chronic unemployment, crippling food prices and endemic corruption. While two years ago public criticism in Kabul was more broadly aimed, and often included the perceived failure of the international community to deliver money and change, it now appears to be focused sharply on Mr Karzai.
“We can't blame foreigners,” Abdul Samee, a businessman, said. “We hear on the radio that the money is coming from abroad but the problem is that the Government are not spending it on the people. Karzai looks a nice man but he works for himself.”
Mr Samee stood on the edge of Sherpur, a district of Kabul that has become a notorious symbol of the corruption with which the Karzai Administration is associated. The area was originally government-owned until it was parcelled out to chronies at well below market prices after 2001. Today it is lined with the gaudy marble and tinted-glass palaces of government workers whose official salaries are often as little as a few hundred dollars a month.
Even Mr Karzai acknowledged the scale of the problem in November when he told a conference in Kabul: “All the politicians in this country have acquired everything – money, lots of money. God knows, it is beyond the limit. The banks of the world are full of the money of our statesmen.”
This year Afghanistan was placed 176th out of 180 countries on the Transparency International index of corruption. Three years ago it was 117th. “I trusted Karzai and I voted for him,” said Mohammad Jafar, 43, a security guard with the weary demeanour of a man who has spent most of his life fighting wars. “Now Karzai is the corruption man. He says he is against narcotics but his own brother is a drugs trafficker.”
US government officials have cited the President's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as a key figure in the country's $3.4 billion drugs economy.
Mr Jafar said that he had lost faith in the forthcoming election making any significant change to the situation. “Democracy is just a symbolic name and it means nothing. Behind the curtain there are foreign hands working,” he said.
Many Afghans approached by The Times believe that the outcome of the forthcoming elections will be decided in the White House rather than in the ballot boxes. “There is no need to register ourselves to vote for the coming election because America has selected the coming president already and the whole process is just symbolic,” Sayed Jan, a university professor, said.
There remains no clear challenger to the President, although a number of former ministers, including Ali Jalali and Ashraf Ghani, the Interior Minister Hanif Atmar, the powerful provincial governor Gul Agha Sherzai and even the former Bush Government's Ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, are believed to be in the running.
An official working on the country's election told The Times: “We find in many postconflict countries there are very high levels of expectation ahead of the first round of elections and by the time of the second cycle there is a huge degree of scepticism.”
Private polling conducted by the US Government to gauge Mr Karzai's chances in the forthcoming elections has found support levels in the President's heartlands of the Afghan south to be as bleak as that on the streets of Kabul. Only 18 per cent of Kandaharis said that they would vote for him.
However, recent polling of Afghans has found that few expected to make their voting decision themselves.
Instead, 65 per cent of those polled by the Asia Foundation in October last year said that they would follow the ruling of local leaders and tribal elders. It will make the election far less easy to call than popular opinion might suggest. Western officials have said that the Afghan President has spent months negotiating with local power-brokers and positioning loyalists to bring in the Karzai vote. The President's spokesman denied that there was any plan eitherto buy votes or to rig the coming election. “Even the suggestion that there is any ulterior motive in the appointment of government officials is absolutely absurd,” Hamayun Hamidzada said.
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Afghanistan's provincial reconstruction teams
KABUL, Feb 1, 2009 (AFP) - Provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) are small teams of civilian and military staff working in Afghanistan to provide security for aid workers and help with reconstruction.
They fall under the UN-mandated and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which entered Afghanistan after the extremist Taliban government was removed by a US-led invasion in late 2001.
There are 26 PRTs across the country, although none in the capital, with the first set up in 2002, according to ISAF.
Twelve are headed by the United States and two by Germany. Other nations that have adopted a PRT are: Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Turkey.
The objectives of the PRTs include:
- supporting the government in the development of a more stable and secure environment
- assisting in extending the authority of the government
- facilitating reconstruction and development
Much of their work, including "quick impact projects," is intended to win over public support for the presence of international troops, which are helping the Afghan government fight a Taliban-led insurgency and lawlessness.
Development projects can range from distributing books and footballs, to building wells, bridges, libraries and schools.
Since 2002, PRTs countrywide have completed 9,999 projects costing about 464 million dollars, according to ISAF data.
Another 3,611 projects worth 795 million dollars are ongoing and 1,127 projects worth 513 million dollars are planned.
"It's a very peculiar asset, which was established for Afghanistan because that needed, because of the nature of the conflict, a very special approach," said Rear Admiral Matthieu Borsboom, ISAF commander in charge of "stability."
The aim is to "bring some of the reconstruction and development and governance building in those areas where it was too insecure for the other partners, the normal partners, who would be delivering those," he told AFP.
The plan is that the military component will give way to the civilian one as the situation becomes more stable, the Dutch commander said.
"The end state should be that it is all civilians and then... transferred into the standard all-out civilian development partner," he said.
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Delay of Afghan Election Poses Constitutional Crisis
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 31 January 2009
President and Electoral Commission say timetable is legitimate
The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, welcomes the recent decision taken by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) to delay the election.
Sibgatullah Sanjar, the head of the presidential policy making Department, said IEC has the complete authority to set a date for the election.
But legal experts said the IEC decision to postpone the election is a transparent violation of the Afghan Constitution.
Based on Article 61 of the Afghan Constitution, "The presidential term shall expire on the 20th of May of the 5th year after elections and elections for the new President shall be held within 30 to 60 days prior to the end of the presidential term."
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Education Ministry to Make the Educational System Better
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 31 January 2009
650 schools were closed and more than 140 teachers were killed or wounded last year
The ministry of education is planning to solve the problems in Afghanistan's educational system in the coming year.
The minister of education, Farooq Wardak, said in a six day seminar with the educational chiefs of all the provinces that the ministry will solve the educational problems by increasing the teachers' capacity, implementing the new salary laws and taking advices from the religious scholars and the tribal elders.
Bad security situation, lack of professional teachers, low salaries and lack of school buildings are among the basic problems before the educational system.
The ministry of education says it will increase the number of teachers' training centers to fulfill the need for more teachers.
He said the local shuras (councils) and the religious scholars will make their efforts to open the schools which were closed by the government's opposition forces next year.
Last year was the worst year for Afghanistan's educational conditions. 650 schools were destroyed and more than 140 teachers were killed or wounded the same year.
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Young Drug Addicts Population Soaring in Kandahar
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 31 January 2009
Drugs Addict on the rise in Afghanistan
The number of drug users is rising in Southern Kandahar province.
Currently, there are 21,000 drug users in Kandahar province.
The drug users deem the increase in the drug consumption as being the result of poppy cultivation and the lack of a single treatment center.
The only drug treatment center in Kandahar is overcrowded by patients from Helmand, Uruzgan, Farah and Nimroz provinces which makes it beyond the capacity of the center to provide the due treatment .
According to the hospital sources, daily 15 to 20 out-patients register with the center for treatment.
Currently there are 1200 drug users who are bedridden in the hospital.
800 of them are men and the remianing 400 are female.
The drug users in the hospital call on the Afghan government to build more treatment centers for the drug users in Kandahar.
The Head of Health Directorate of Kandahar said a new 20 bed hospital will be inaugurated in Kandahar by the Afghan New year.
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