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14 militants killed in southern Afghanistan
By Noor Khan, Associated Press Writer – Sun Feb 22, 6:08 am ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – A battle just outside southern Afghanistan's largest city has killed at least six Taliban fighters, while an airstrike against militants elsewhere in the south killed eight, officials said Sunday.
Image Problem in Afghanistan
Growing Public Hostility to Troops May Hurt U.S. Surge Plans
By Pamela Constable Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, February 22, 2009; A13
KABUL, Feb. 21 -- The additional 17,000 troops the Obama administration is preparing to send to Afghanistan will face both an aggressive, well-armed Taliban insurgency and an unarmed but equally daunting foe: public opinion.
13 civilians killed in Afghanistan: US military
Sat Feb 21, 4:42 pm ET
KABUL (AFP) – The US-led coalition in Afghanistan confirmed Saturday that 13 civilians were killed in an operation against insurgents, with such casualties a major source of tension between Kabul and its allies.
Karzai is US stooge says Afghan deputy president
Afghanistan's president and vice-president accused each other of being US stooges during a recent cabinet meeting which degenerated into a furious row, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
By Ben Farmer in Kabul and Dean Nelson The Telegraph (UK) February 21, 2009
In a clash which showed how fragile the Western-backed government has become, President Hamid Karzai was labelled a corrupt incompetent by his own understudy, Ahmad Zia Massoud.
Harper heads to US next week for talks on Afghanistan
Sat Feb 21, 3:24 pm ET
OTTAWA (AFP) – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is to head to the United States next week for talks expected to be dominated by Afghanistan, following US President Barack Obama's visit to Canada Thursday.
Obama's biggest challenges in Afghanistan
Just sending more troops can't solve such tough problems as getting militants to lay down arms and allies to send more soldiers, and eliminating extremist havens.
By Julian E. Barnes February 22, 2009 the Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Krakow, Poland — President Obama's war strategy began to take shape with his announcement last week that 17,000 additional U.S. troops are headed to Afghanistan. But the thorniest problems
AFGHANISTAN: "It's too risky to be an aid worker"
22 Feb 2009 09:40:15 GMT
KABUL, 22 February 2009 (IRIN) - Over the past year, aid workers have increasingly been attacked and harassed in Afghanistan, particularly in the volatile southern provinces. Dozens of people involved in relief work were kidnapped and/or killed in 2008 and large consignments of aid items were pillaged by insurgents and criminal groups, according to the UN.
Can militias contain the Taleban?
By Ian Pannell BBC News, Paktia province, south-east Afghanistan Saturday, 21 February 2009
A lone gunman comes into view as we drive across the frozen plateau of Ahmadabad district. We are eyed closely.
Obama sides with Bush on Bagram detainees
February 21, 2009
WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama's administration has sided with predecessor George W. Bush on the rights of detainees at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, saying they cannot challenge their detention in US courts.
The defender of Kabul
Financial Times By Jon Boone
In the 1960s, when the historian and writer Nancy Hatch Dupree first travelled from the US to Afghanistan during the country's brief flowering of social liberalism, Kabul was known as the Paris of the east and visitors could travel freely.
Where Being Our Friend Doesn’t Help
The Search for Votes: With civilian casualties mounting and corruption riddling the Afghan government, support for Karzai has evaporated.
By Dan Ephron | NEWSWEEK Feb 21, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Mar 2, 2009
When visitors stop by his office at the national Defense University in Washington, Ali Jalali enjoys showing off a mug stamped with the words I'M A ROCK STAR IN AFGHANISTAN. The country's former interior
Senior Taliban commander killed in Afghanistan
www.chinaview.cn 2009-02-22 14:51:45
KBUL, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- A senior Taliban insurgents commander was killed and five others were detained on Saturday during an operation in Logar province 60 km south of Afghan capital Kabul
10,000 British troops to be fighting Taliban in Afghanistan within 12 months
More than 10,000 British troops will be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan within 12 months.
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom By Sean Rayment 21 Feb 2009
Defence chiefs believe the 8,300 troops currently serving in the south of the country need to be bolstered by an extra battle group of between 1,500 and 1,800 men within a year.
Poker-Faced, Russia Flaunts Its Afghan Card
The New York Times By CLIFFORD J. LEVY February 21, 2009
MOSCOW - Russia last week marked the 20th anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan with avowals from its leaders that they really, truly do not want the American military mission there to suffer the same humiliating fate.
Taliban take Pakistan official despite peace talks
By Asif Shahzad, Associated Press Writer
ISLAMABAD – Taliban gunmen detained a senior official in Pakistan on Sunday, demonstrating their grip on a critical northwestern valley while pursuing a peace deal the United States fears will amount to a militant victory.
Protest Against International Troops in Logar
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 21 February 2009
International troops killed one and took five others away during their operation in Logar province
Kabul Electricity Directorate Complains Over Unpaid Electricity Bills
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 21 February 2009
If the governmental institutions pay the electricity bills on time; electricity will be distributed to other parts of Kabul city
Heavy Snows Killed 15 People in Afghanistan
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 21 February 2009
Ghor province suffered the most casualties of snow-falls today
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14 militants killed in southern Afghanistan
By Noor Khan, Associated Press Writer – Sun Feb 22, 6:08 am ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – A battle just outside southern Afghanistan's largest city has killed at least six Taliban fighters, while an airstrike against militants elsewhere in the south killed eight, officials said Sunday.
A battle in the Panjwayi district — 15 miles (25 kilometers) west of Kandahar city — began late Saturday after Taliban militants ambushed a police patrol, wounding two officers, said Abdullah Khan, the province's deputy police chief.
NATO and Afghan forces responded, unleashing bombs that could be heard by residents in Kandahar city. Khan said at least six militants have been killed in the fighting, which continued into Sunday.
In neighboring Helmand province, an airstrike on a minivan killed eight militants late Saturday, said Daud Ahmadi, the governor's spokesman. Ahmadi said an informant told the government that insurgents were riding in the vehicle and authorities told coalition military officials, which hit it with an airstrike.
Southern Afghanistan is the Taliban's spiritual homeland and the most violent region in Afghanistan.
The militants, which were driven from power in a 2001 U.S.-led invasion, have increased their attacks the last three years and now control wide swaths of the countryside.
President Barack Obama announced last week that the U.S. would send 17,000 additional forces to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 Americans already in the country.
Many of those forces are expected to deploy to the south to back up British troops fighting in Helmand and Canadian forces fighting in Kandahar.
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Image Problem in Afghanistan
Growing Public Hostility to Troops May Hurt U.S. Surge Plans
By Pamela Constable Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, February 22, 2009; A13
KABUL, Feb. 21 -- The additional 17,000 troops the Obama administration is preparing to send to Afghanistan will face both an aggressive, well-armed Taliban insurgency and an unarmed but equally daunting foe: public opinion.
In more than a dozen interviews across the capital this week, Afghans said that instead of helping to defeat the insurgents and quell the violence that has engulfed their country, more foreign troops will exacerbate the problem.
The comments echoed a recent survey by the BBC and ABC News that found that although 90 percent of Afghans oppose the Taliban, less than half view the United States favorably, a sharp drop from a year ago, and a quarter say attacks on U.S. troops can be justified.
In the interviews, most people said they did not like the Taliban and were terrified of the suicide attacks that often occur in public places. Yet they also spoke with anger and suspicion about the U.S.-led coalition forces -- questioning their motives and bitterly complaining about civilian casualties, home invasions and other alleged abuses they suffer at the hands of the once-welcomed American and NATO troops.
"Bringing in another foreign army is not going to help. They always come here for their own interests, and they always lose. Better to let everyone sit down with the elders and find a way for peace," said Ibrahim Khan, 40, a cargo truck driver from Paktia province. "People are feeling hopeless and afraid, but nobody knows who the enemy is anymore."
The comments came as American military officials here, in an effort to soften public criticism, acknowledged Saturday that U.S. airstrikes in the western province of Herat on Tuesday had killed 13 civilians and three insurgents. A U.S. general traveled to the site to investigate the incident, and the announcement of the results was highly unusual. The United States had initially reported that 15 insurgents were killed, but Afghan officials had disputed the assertion.
The growing negative perception of foreign forces is especially worrisome because U.S. military planners say they are counting on intensified interaction and cooperation with Afghan civilians as a vital complement to their expanded use of ground troops and firepower against the Islamist fighters.
Critics in diplomatic and human rights circles have warned of a conundrum facing the expanded military effort: How can officials protect ground troops from a sophisticated indigenous insurgency without employing more aggressive tactics that will further alienate and antagonize the local populace?
The public disillusionment has several causes, observers said. One is that people see the security situation worsening as the number of foreign troops increases and figure that there must be a connection. Another is that Afghan political leaders, especially President Hamid Karzai, have vehemently denounced coalition bombings that have killed civilians but have been far less outspoken in criticizing Taliban attacks; Karzai often refers to the Taliban as brothers.
"People are getting conflicting messages," said Ahmad Nader Nadery, a member of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. "They see video clips of Taliban abuses, but the government only talks about coalition bombings. They hear more U.S. troops are coming, but NATO doesn't want to send any. It is a time of great confusion and uncertainty."
After a telephone conversation with President Obama this week, Karzai backed off from his harsh rhetoric about coalition bombings, and the two governments agreed to work more closely on military coordination. A delegation of Afghan officials is traveling to Washington shortly to participate in the new administration's strategic review of its policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In addition to the widely publicized issue of civilian casualties in coalition air raids, Afghans complain about abuses that are less deadly but closer to home. Many this week recounted experiencing, or hearing from relatives, incidents in which foreign troops stormed at night into houses where women and children were present, arrested innocent farmers as suspected insurgents and forced trucks off highways.
"I was driving on the road from Jalalabad last month, and an American military convoy came from the other direction," recalled Mahmad Humayun, who has a small shop that sells women's garments.
"They started flashing their lights at us to slow down, and then they started firing their guns at the road in front of us. This is our country, and these are our roads," he said angrily. "Don't we have the right to drive in peace?"
Humayun's shop is across the street from the Afghan Justice Ministry, which was targeted Feb. 11 in a coordinated assault on three government buildings. He and his neighboring merchants were just unlocking their shops that morning when gunfire erupted. Afghan commandos battled the attackers for nearly four hours before restoring order in the panicked capital.
"We Afghans are used to fighting but not to these terrible suicide bombings," said a watchmaker in the market, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was afraid. "Our fear is that if more foreign troops come, there will be more suicide bombings and the violence will get worse. We appreciate the Americans' help, but they should send their soldiers to the borders near Pakistan, where the trouble is from. When they hurt civilians, it creates more hate."
Most of the Afghans interviewed said they would prefer a negotiated settlement with the insurgents to an intensified military campaign. Several pointed out that the Taliban fighters are fellow Afghans and Muslims, and that the country has traditionally settled conflicts through community and tribal meetings.
Afghans are closely following the progress of a peace agreement in Pakistan between the government and a group of Taliban fighters in the scenic northwest Swat Valley. Under the deal, which was announced Monday but has yet to be finalized, the fighters would curtail their campaign of violence in exchange for strict Islamic law being instituted in the region.
Critics in Pakistan and abroad say the agreement will provide radical Islamist groups with a steppingstone to imposing their religious ideology on the country, but others see it as a possible model for Afghanistan. The U.S. special envoy to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, has warned that the deal might be tantamount to a government "surrender," but Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said this week that under the right conditions, "we would be very open" to a Swat-like deal for Afghanistan.
Observers here also said that despite concerns, most Afghans still want foreign troops to stay, because they recognize that the troops' departure could usher in a new era of civil conflict, chaos and warlordism. They may not be happy with the troops' behavior, the argument goes, but they realize that the alternative would be worse.
"Nobody likes fighting, and there are terrible things happening in this fight between the Taliban and the government," said Mohammed Wardak, 45, a cart puller in Kabul, adding that U.S. forces raided his native village in Wardak province three months ago, rounded up all the men and killed several, including a poor potato farmer. "We just want to feel secure and to live in peace under the flag of Islam."
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13 civilians killed in Afghanistan: US military
Sat Feb 21, 4:42 pm ET
KABUL (AFP) – The US-led coalition in Afghanistan confirmed Saturday that 13 civilians were killed in an operation against insurgents, with such casualties a major source of tension between Kabul and its allies.
The US military at first said that 15 militants were killed in air strikes in the western province of Herat late Monday but local officials said six women and two children were among the dead.
An Afghan army and coalition forces team visited the area after the local allegations, it said.
"Coalition forces confirmed three militants and 13 non-combatants were killed during a coalition forces' operation near Gozara district, Herat province, February 17," the coalition said in a statement.
It did not say who the 13 were.
"We expressed our deepest condolences to the survivors of the non-combatants who were killed during this operation," said US Brigadier General Michael Ryan in the statement.
The number of civilian casualties in military operations is one of the main sources of tension between President Hamid Karzai's government and the United States, Kabul's main military backer.
The United Nations said this week that more than 2,000 civilians were killed in insurgency-linked violence last year, the highest civilian death toll since the 2001 ouster of the Taliban.
About 40 percent of them died in military action, it said.
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Karzai is US stooge says Afghan deputy president
Afghanistan's president and vice-president accused each other of being US stooges during a recent cabinet meeting which degenerated into a furious row, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
By Ben Farmer in Kabul and Dean Nelson The Telegraph (UK) February 21, 2009
In a clash which showed how fragile the Western-backed government has become, President Hamid Karzai was labelled a corrupt incompetent by his own understudy, Ahmad Zia Massoud. He responded in kind, saying Mr Massoud was part of an American conspiracy to oust him.
The ferocity of the infighting reflects a collapse in support for the Afghan president - both within the Afghan coalitions who have supported him since his election in 2004, and among his backers in Britain, the United States, the European Union and NATO. During a visit to Kabul last week, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said that British financial and military support for the Afghanistan would only continue if Mr Karzai's government raised its game.
Tensions erupted after Mr Massoud made a speech blaming greed and corruption in the Karzai administration for the hunger and poverty in the country. He also said that Mr Karzai's plan to delay the May election until August 20 and extend his term until then was unconstitutional.
The row lasted for ten minutes and had to be broken up by cabinet colleagues, who eventually moved the men onto the meeting's business agenda.
In launching such a public attack, Mr Massoud has joined a growing chorus of senior Afghan politicians questioning the legitimacy of President Karzai's intention to remain in power after his term formally ends in May. As the leader of the most powerful family in northern Afghanistan, and the brother of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a legendary Mujahideen general, Mr Massoud's comments are not to be lightly dismissed.
The Afghan constitution states elections should be held by late April, with the president's term finishing on May 21. However, the Karzai-appointed independent election commission has said preparations cannot be finalised in time for April and the poll must wait three months for US troop reinforcements to bring security.
Opposition MPs fear that if President Karzai remains in power during the three month delay, he will use the state apparatus to bolster his campaign. Instead they are calling for a caretaker government led by someone not running for president.
President Karzai has said he does not know whether his duty ends on May 21, or in December, five years after he was sworn in.
"I'm consulting on this issue and I will appear and announce my decision," he declared recently.
His opponents blame the international community for preparing to prop up an unconstitutional government. The National Front, the main opposition alliance, is expected to bring its supporters onto the streets in protest when the snows melt.
Senior Western diplomats confess they have been surprised by the strength of feeling in parliament and fear political upheaval could destabilise the country during the pending Taliban summer offensive. One official said the coming months will bring the "toughest test yet" of the country's Parliament and constitution.
"The biggest fear is what would be the legitimacy of this government after its term has finished," said Sayed Mahmoud Hussamudin Al-Gailani, a national assembly member from Ghazni province.
He said an illegitimate government would lend weight to Taliban propaganda and that the row with Mr Massoud was damaging to both the president and Afghanistan.
Mr Massoud made his comments during a speech to commemorate the Russian withdraw from Afghanistan. This week he also criticised the president for keeping a stranglehold on decision making and said the vice presidents were largely symbolic.
"Only the decisions and recommendations which are according to the president's desire are put into practice, otherwise, they are kept on hold," he said.
However Karzai supporters say removing the president prematurely would lead to a dangerous power vacuum that insurgents could exploit.
"In my opinion three months does not make a huge difference," said Safia Siddiqi, an MP for Nangahar province. "It's against the constitution, but the constitution is not the Holy Koran."
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Harper heads to US next week for talks on Afghanistan
Sat Feb 21, 3:24 pm ET
OTTAWA (AFP) – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is to head to the United States next week for talks expected to be dominated by Afghanistan, following US President Barack Obama's visit to Canada Thursday.
Harper is to arrive in New York Monday to meet with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and to discuss economic concerns with business leaders, his office said without providing further details.
A senior official said the two leaders would discuss the situation in Afghanistan, plagued by a resurgent Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
On Tuesday in Washington, Afghanistan is also expected to figure prominently in talks between Canadian diplomatic chief Lawrence Cannon and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The Obama administration has launched a comprehensive policy review of US war strategy in Afghanistan.
Obama said Thursday during his first visit to Canada since his election in November that he did not press Harper for an extension of the Canadian combat mission in Afghanistan past its current 2011 end date.
Canada has some 2,750 troops in southern Afghanistan as part of a NATO-led mission to rout insurgents. In all, 108 Canadian soldiers, a senior Canadian diplomat and two aid workers have been killed there.
Last year, Canada's parliament voted to bring Canadian troops home in 2011, but the Canadian government has not ruled out a continuing diplomatic or reconstruction role in Afghanistan.
Also expected on the agenda between Harper and Ban is the fate of Canadian diplomats kidnapped in Niger in December. Al-Qaeda's North African branch is said to hold Robert Fowler, the UN Secretary General's special envoy to Niger, and his colleague Louis Gay.
Canada has refused to comment on the development, for fear it would "endanger the individuals in question," a senior Canadian official said.
During Obama's visit on Thursday, Washington and Ottawa also agreed to establish a "clean energy dialogue" to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to combat climate change.
Canadian Governor General Michaelle Jean, a Haitian immigrant and Canada's first black governor general, has also been invited to the White House, her spokeswoman told AFP.
Obama told Jean "he would like to talk further with her on this issue" of Haiti, said Marthe Blouin.
"And he said to her that he would love to see her in Washington as well," although no date has yet been set, Blouin added. Jean represents Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in Canada.
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Obama's biggest challenges in Afghanistan
Just sending more troops can't solve such tough problems as getting militants to lay down arms and allies to send more soldiers, and eliminating extremist havens.
By Julian E. Barnes February 22, 2009 the Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Krakow, Poland — President Obama's war strategy began to take shape with his announcement last week that 17,000 additional U.S. troops are headed to Afghanistan. But the thorniest problems still await him: persuading militants to lay down their arms, coaxing help from allies and eliminating extremist havens on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Many officials believe Obama has one primary shot at remaking Washington's war strategy and overhauling its policy in the region. The administration said last week that it would open that review, which is due in April, to Afghans, Pakistanis and European allies.
Administration officials hope that a deliberative, and inclusive, look can turn up new ideas, even for seemingly intractable problems.
"We have learned that Obama is not going to make policy on the fly," said Karin von Hippel, a former United Nations and European Union conflict expert now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
But the administration already has confronted a pair of unsettling realizations: America's allies are unwilling to supply many additional troops, and a deal between Afghan authorities and militants, even the Taliban, is necessary for stability and peace.
The obstacles in Afghanistan are compounded by other well-known problems: a weak government, widespread public corruption and an economy that is bound to heroin. Meanwhile, U.S.-Afghan tensions have risen over civilian casualties.
Still, military commanders and strategy experts said the extra U.S. troops, used carefully, could help shift impressions in the country by making residents feel safer and militants more fearful.
"You can't look like the likely loser of the war," said Stephen Biddle, a Council on Foreign Relations scholar who has advised the military's Middle East headquarters on Afghanistan. "No warlord is going to change sides to join the loser."
In the wake of Obama's troop deployment announcement, military officials began to sketch out how extra units would be used.
Army Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said the additional troops would apply variations of counterinsurgency strategies that proved useful in areas in Iraq -- first studying an area, then clearing it of militants.
And Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, at NATO meetings in Poland last week, said troops then will establish a fixed presence in population centers. Previous military "clearing" operations have faltered after U.S. forces moved on to other areas.
As the U.S. learned in Iraq, such counterinsurgency campaigns are not painless. Violence in Iraq increased for months after the troop buildup began, as new units entered previously uncontested areas controlled by insurgents.
Laying down arms
But, as every review of Afghanistan has showed, there are major differences between that war and the one in Iraq. Crucial to the U.S. success in Iraq was the decision of the Sunni Arab minority to largely end its armed resistance, switch sides and aid the American war effort.
The U.S. hopes that it can also persuade some of Afghanistan's militants to lay down their arms. Gates said again last week that eventual peace will require accommodation with militant groups.
"Ultimately, some sort of political reconciliation has to be part of the long-term solution for Afghanistan," he said.
There is no civil war in Afghanistan. Opponents to the American presence include Pashtun dissidents, Taliban fighters and other extremists. The country does not face the sectarian rivalries that propelled Iraqi Sunnis toward accommodation.
That means the U.S. military will have to provide incentives for militant groups to stop fighting, Biddle said. That will require carrots -- such as promises of regional political power -- as well as sticks, including a threat of military action, he said.
More U.S. fighting
It also became clear last week that almost all of the new fighting will be done by American units.
There now are 38,000 U.S. troops in the country, along with 32,000 troops from other nations. At last week's NATO meeting, 20 countries pledged additional troops, fighter jets and cargo planes for the Afghanistan elections this year.
But the troop commitments were small. The largest boost, 600, came from Germany.
Gates has said that the administration will not seek specific forms of help until after completion of its review. But the Pentagon has largely given up on prospects for new military commitments. Instead, Gates said the U.S. would push allied governments to send civilian expertise.
Given opposition by Europeans to military deployments, Gates said they could provide a valuable long-term contribution in the form of non-military advisors to help train Afghan officials and police and develop counter-narcotics programs.
However, even those commitments have been modest, with five countries last week offering additional police trainers, reconstruction teams and development aid.
But U.S. officials hope that if allies have a say in the strategy development, they are more likely to make commitments.
"Frankly, I hope that it may be easier for our allies to do that than significant troop increases, especially for the longer term," Gates said last week before the NATO meeting.
Pakistani border
Perhaps the most difficult problem facing the administration strategy review is Pakistan's volatile border region. Obama has called militant havens in Pakistan's tribal areas his chief regional worry.
Under the Bush administration, U.S. strategy revolved around pressuring Pakistan to do more while striking suspected militants with missiles launched from Predator drones.
But the airstrikes, said Von Hippel, the former U.N. official, can be counterproductive, alienating residents.
"Even if they do kill some wanted terrorists, they are also used as a recruiting tool for a number of the militia-terrorist groups operating in the region," she said.
One alternative, though difficult, Von Hippel said, would be to quietly increase aid efforts, work with the Pakistanis to improve services in the tribal regions and take steps to integrate them into the government.
julian.barnes@latimes.com
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AFGHANISTAN: "It's too risky to be an aid worker"
22 Feb 2009 09:40:15 GMT
KABUL, 22 February 2009 (IRIN) - Over the past year, aid workers have increasingly been attacked and harassed in Afghanistan, particularly in the volatile southern provinces. Dozens of people involved in relief work were kidnapped and/or killed in 2008 and large consignments of aid items were pillaged by insurgents and criminal groups, according to the UN.
Consequently, humanitarian space has diminished considerably, aid workers say.
Ahmad Wali (not his real name) works for a local NGO in Logar Province, about 60 km south of Kabul and where four employees of the International Rescue Committee were killed by unidentified armed men in August 2008. Wali spoke to IRIN about the risks he faces.
"The situation has changed a lot since I started work as a relief worker in the 1990s. In the past we were somehow immune from attacks and could safely access communities controlled by different warring parties. People respected us and supported our work.
"But now I constantly fear being killed or kidnapped. I keep my work top secret and try my best not to show any affiliation with NGOs because this would jeopardise my life. I don't carry my employment identity card, never use an official vehicle and try to act as an ordinary local.
"I know it won't last this way forever and sooner or later the bad guys will know about me. I am currently looking into two options: A, to quit my job and open a shop here; and B, to ask my seniors for a transfer to Kabul.
"It's beyond my understanding why aid workers are being attacked and threatened to quit their jobs. We only try to ease human suffering and have nothing to do with politics, power and military activities.
"If the situation doesn't improve, no one will dare to work for foreign organisations. People like me may lose their jobs, but the real suffering will be endured by communities in need who will have nobody to assist them."
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Can militias contain the Taleban?
By Ian Pannell BBC News, Paktia province, south-east Afghanistan Saturday, 21 February 2009
A lone gunman comes into view as we drive across the frozen plateau of Ahmadabad district. We are eyed closely.
As we move along the road, more gunmen appear, standing guard at junctions, checking cars along the road, keeping watch outside buildings.
We are in the centre of Paktia province, in south-eastern Afghanistan. Winter has encrusted the highlands in snow and ice. It is cold, beautiful and dangerous.
The insurgency has raged and grown in this part of the country. Paktia borders Pakistan and is a route for insurgents coming into the country. The Taleban and al-Qaeda have a growing presence here and clashes between them and government and foreign forces have escalated.
But Ahmadabad district is an exception, thanks to the gunmen of the Arbakai, a tribal militia that has protected this area and its people for centuries, making it something of a safe-haven from the violence all around.
Elusive progress
Neither the Taleban nor foreign forces have a presence in this district. There are just 30 police officers for the entire area, so it is left to the Arbakai to defend the local population.
They are a volunteer force of men and boys, armed with old rifles and true grit. They are part of a traditional code of conduct and honour called Pashtunwali.
The tribal elder is Haji Gulam Khan. He tells us that the area is stable and that there is a good relationship between the people and the government.
He is in no doubt who to thank: "If it weren't for the Arbakai, this area would've been controlled by the Taleban or mafia groups."
And while he talks to us, development work gets under way. We watch a band of Pakistani engineers in bright-orange jackets work to install pylons which will bring electricity to the district for the very first time. It's the kind of progress that has been elusive elsewhere.
Haji Gulam Khan compares the work underway here to other unstable areas.
"We've been able to do reconstruction and development, unlike places like Kandahar and Helmand where there's been insecurity and fighting," he says.
Some think the Arbakai provide a role model for stemming the violence elsewhere in the country. A little more than a year ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke about "community defence initiatives" as a way of dismantling the insurgency.
It received a cold reception from Washington at the time but since then the US, together with the Afghan government, has been fine-tuning a variation on the theme of putting local people in charge of their own security.
They will be called a "Public Protection Force" (PPF) and come under the control of the ministry of the interior. Some 200 recruits from each district will be given weapons and uniforms.
The first trial run will start in Wardak, a province that saw a rise in Taleban and criminal activity last year.
'Ludicrous'
The government is adamant they will be different from the Arbakai and emphatically "not a militia".
"This is not provision of guns to the communities, this is not favouring one ethnic group over another," Interior Minister Hanif Atmar says.
That is certainly the fear of many critics who have been vociferous in their opposition. One Western official described the plan as "ludicrous". Others point to the failed attempt by the Soviet Union to introduce a similar idea during its occupation of the country.
The Taleban will not care what they are called. Its latest DVD specifically asks people not to join the new armed groups.
"The invading forces are trying to turn Afghans against each other, so the infidels can save their own skin," it says.
The insurgents warn people of the consequences if they do: "If you face us in the battlefield then your death and the death of Americans is the same."
The new protection force is just one part of a joint American-Afghan strategy to try to stop the spread of the insurgency. When the snows of Paktia melt, the battle will resume again and many are predicting this will be a particularly long and bloody summer.
Security remains by far the number one concern for Afghans and the time left for the government and its foreign-backers to make a difference is rapidly diminishing.
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Obama sides with Bush on Bagram detainees
February 21, 2009
WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama's administration has sided with predecessor George W. Bush on the rights of detainees at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, saying they cannot challenge their detention in US courts.
In a court filing on Friday, the US Justice Department said that detainees at Bagram cannot be granted habeas corpus rights, backing a similar decision by the Bush administration.
Four inmates at the Bagram prison, where the US has approximately 600 detainees, were given a hearing by US District Court in Washington last month, seeking the same rights accorded to prisoners at the US naval facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The two Yemenis, an Afghan and a Tunisian based their request on the Supreme Court's June ruling that granted Guantanamo detainees the right to know the charges against them and on what evidence they are being held.
That ruling led to a flood of appeals in the Washington courts from Guantanamo inmates challenging their detentions.
Bush administration lawyers had argued that Bagram could not be compared to Guantanamo because the first was located "on the battlefield," while the latter was in Cuba, and that Bagram detainees would pose a security threat if they were released.
US District Court judge had given the new administration a February 20 deadline to indicate whether it stood by the Bush administration's arguments on the detention facility.
Attorneys representing the detainees reacted with dismay.
"The decision by the Obama administration to adhere to a position that has contributed to making our country a pariah around the world for its flagrant disregard of people's human rights is deeply disappointing," said Barbara Olshansky, lead counsel for three of four detainees.
"We are trying to remain hopeful that the message being conveyed is that the new administration is still working on its position regarding the applicability of the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions and international human rights treaties that apply to everyone in detention there."
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The defender of Kabul
Financial Times By Jon Boone
In the 1960s, when the historian and writer Nancy Hatch Dupree first travelled from the US to Afghanistan during the country's brief flowering of social liberalism, Kabul was known as the Paris of the east and visitors could travel freely. Girls in miniskirts made their way to school, people left the city at the weekend to stay at ski lodges, and the equestrian set amused themselves with dressage competitions. Some 40 years later, Dupree and I meet on a gloomy autumn evening in a once-grand manse in central Kabul. The neighbourhood is smart, in spite of the broken roads and dilapidated buildings beginning to give way to a rash of garish concrete mansions, built on the spoils of the opium trade. The manse serves as a guesthouse for the young people who work for Acted, a French aid agency. Dupree, who at 82 is stooped but sprightly, says she spends time among the young aid workers because they remind her of how things used to be.
"Everyone says you can't move, you can't travel, it's too dangerous," she says. "But here it's like the old days. Acted people pop in and out and say, 'Well, I'm off to Pul-i-Khumri, see you in a few days.' " Despite the tense, watchful security guard at the front door, who double-checks my credentials when I knock, and despite the high walls and the razor wire that hem in Kabul's expats, there is at least a semblance of normality in the guesthouse. The sound of a drinks party and barbecue is just audible from the garden.
The party outside offers a faint, receding echo of the place Dupree found on her arrival, and where she discovered the two great loves of her life: a spectacular landscape, rich in the ruins of civilisations from Zoroaster to Alexander the Great, and her late husband Louis, an American paratrooper-turned-archaeologist and the greatest western expert on Afghanistan of his generation.
But there is no denying how far Afghanistan is from any sort of return to the "good old days". Ziggy Garewal, the country director of Acted, puts her head round the door of the lounge to check whether her famous house guest needs a cup of tea. Overhearing Dupree's remarks, she politely demurs. "We do travel," she says, "except it's more expensive now because we have to fly everywhere, rather than going by road."
"Do you?" Dupree says, in a tone of surprise bordering on wonderment.
"Since the IRC incident - no expats by road," says Garewal, referring to the murder in August 2008 of three foreign women working for the International Rescue Committee, a US charity, who were travelling by road close to the capital. "We can't fly to Pul-i-Khumri, so we just don't do it. Taloqan we can fly to, because there's an airstrip. It's fine for one or two of us to go but not for 20 of us to go up and down."
In the summer, insurgents twice launched roadside bomb attacks on NGO vehicles in the mountainous central province of Bamyan, a destination that was regarded until then as an oasis of calm and a good place for foreigners, cooped up most of the time in their embassies and compounds, to take weekend breaks. "They're coming after us, we're a soft target," continues Garewal. "We have 700 staff out in the field - the sheer number of people at risk, with so many moving around all the time."
Dupree looks momentarily crestfallen. But then she perks up, dismissing the present jitters as only someone who has seen Afghanistan in its very darkest days can. "This is new and it probably won't last," she declares.
The street children in Kabul still hawkoriginal, 1970 editions of Dupree's most famous book, An Historical Guide to Afghanistan , which she wrote for the Afghan Tourist Organisation. In his 2001 play Homebody/Kabul , US playwright Tony Kushner uses great chunks of Dupree's prose from an earlier work, An Historical Guide to Kabul , for the monologues of his main character, a woman dreaming of Afghanistan.
"Alexander the Great summoned to the Kabul valley a mighty army comprising tens of thousands of soldiers " Dupree writes and Kushner quotes, " from Egypt, Persia and Central Asia and went on to conquer India. When Alexander's own troops grew weary of battle, in 325BC, they forced their commander to desist from further conflict. Alexander died in 323BC, just as he was planning a return to the Hindu Kush to oversee the Grecianisation of this most remarkable land."
Although Dupree never got to see a live production of the play, on a cold winter's day in Kabul, she wears a Homebody T-shirt under her clothes. Her books all highlight how far and tragically the country has fallen. Most of An Historical Guide to Afghanistan is entirely irrelevant to the handful of modern travellers increasingly confined to the largely safe districts of the capital. Only the clinically insane would contemplate following her recommendation of a "leisurely walking tour of the bazaars" of Kandahar, the southern city whose prison used to hold hundreds of Taliban insurgents, until they were freed in a spectacular jail break last summer. Even Kabul is barely recognisable from her descriptions.
Not even the two giant Buddhas of Bamyan have escaped the ravages. Dupree first visited the magical mountain valley and the monumental statues soon after her arrival in the country with her first husband, a US diplomat. It was the sight of the buddhas - built in the sixth century AD, and blown to smithereens by the Taliban in March 2001 - that transformed her from diplomatic wife into one of the world's foremost scholars on Afghanistan. It also led to what she calls the "great scandal" of her divorce and remarriage to Louis Dupree.
She knew something of the dramatic valley from a handful of classes she had taken at Columbia University as part of a Chinese degree. She was enlisted as "trip historian" for the US ambassador's first visit to the Bamyan valley in the early 1960s. At a diplomatic cocktail party shortly after her return to Kabul, she berated the head of the Afghan Tourist Organisation for the lack of any guides to one of the wonders of the world. He replied that she should write a guide herself. A French diplomat who overheard the challenge taunted Dupree, saying she had better take the project on "unless you enjoy playing bridge and ladies' coffee mornings".
Already fearful of being underemployed in Kabul, her work on the book led to her first meeting with Louis, whom she approached for information about Bamyan's prehistory. But when she submitted her manuscript to "the great professor", his initial, scribbled verdict was that her work was "adequate but nothing original".
It was an unpromising start to what would turn into the great intellectual companionship they would ultimately share, which Louis would describe as his attempt to "understand Afghanistan one cell up, from prehistoric to modern". He was well placed to do that, running archaeological digs in the countryside for part of the year and spending the rest of the time writing reports on anything he chose, including contemporary politics, for the American Field Service.
Two years after that first meeting, Nancy Hatch divorced her diplomat husband who, in turn, went on to remarry Louis's first wife. Aware that this could cause embarrassment in the small world of Kabul expat society, she wrote to the US ambassador to inform him of their plans.
"His solution was to throw a huge party for us when we returned so that we could get it all out in the open," she says. Nancy and Louis married on a winter's day in 1966 in a shrine on the western outskirts of the city (which both had lobbied to save from demolition) with a top Islamic scholar officiating - "a maulana ", she explains, "much higher up than a mullah".
For almost 20 years, Afghanistan became the Duprees' adopted country, and they lived through all the successive tragedies that befell it: Soviet occupation, civil war and the brutal Taliban regime that would eventually declare war on the pre-Islamic antiquities of Afghanistan that the couple loved. Most recently, Dupree has watched at close quarters the spectacular failure of the post-2001 international effort to put Afghanistan back on its feet, with billions of dollars that she believes have been wasted on "massive projects with no follow-up".
Her unrivalled knowledge of Afghanistan has been sought by everyone from the United Nations, which commissioned her to investigate the cultural damage inflicted on the country, to Osama bin Laden, who once approached her for help in acquiring import certificates to bring heavy digging equipment from Pakistan. He was "very shy and polite", she recalls, but she was puzzled why he thought she could help with such "outlandish requests".
Louis's failing health eventually prompted the couple to return to the US, where Louis "had the bad grace to die" in March 1989. But after a few months as a lecturer at Duke University, where Dupree had taken over her husband's courses, she felt the pull of Afghanistan once again. "For the rest of the school year I was so busy preparing lectures that it wasn't until the classes finished that I realised what had happened. I went into a big depression. But then, Acbar [an NGO umbrella group, then based in Peshawar in Pakistan] called and said, 'We bought Louis's big idea but it's not working, so you come here and put yourself where his big mouth is.' "
Louis's "big idea" was to preserve the knowledge accumulated by the many anthropologists, aid workers and experts who have been coming to Afghanistan since the 1960s, generating huge numbers of surveys, reports and project proposals. The vast collection not only chronicles 40 years of development efforts but also stands as a memorial to Louis, the former soldier who took advantage of America's GI Bill to go to Harvard and turned himself into an expert in the prehistoric archaeology of central Asia.
For years, the Duprees housed their archive in Peshawar, which straddles one of the main routes into Afghanistan from the east. The couple had retreated there temporarily in 1978, when they were thrown out of Afghanistan after Louis was accused of spying. It's a charge Dupree totally denies, but following Louis's death, US Senator Gordon Humphrey is reported to have confirmed that Louis had indeed consulted for the CIA.
The Duprees' exile marked the end of a halcyon period during which the couple's home in Quola Pushta - a central Kabul neighbourhood which she says was a bit "fringe" compared to where the rest of the foreign community lived - became the centre of Kabul's social life. Its doors were permanently open to top Afghans and foreign diplomats for what became known as "the five o'clock follies" - a daily bar to which all were invited.
But disaster was looming. Fifty years of stable monarchy, during which Afghanistan had prospered by successfully navigating a path between rival cold war blocs, came to an end in 1973 when the king's brother-in-law seized power and declared himself president. The socialist government of Mohammed Daoud Khan pursued modernisation policies, including a push for women's rights, threatening the traditional lifestyle of the religiously conservative countryside. Meanwhile, Kabul University student politics laid the seeds for future disaster with clashes between communists and Islamists, who would later emerge as the mujahideen. Another coup in 1978 brought in a more hardline, communist regime and interference in Afghanistan's affairs by Moscow and Washington only increased.
Dupree recalls how modern ideas had seeped into Afghanistan, largely from a fast-rising and dissatisfied middle class that had been sent overseas to acquire the skills needed for the government's modernisation programmes but had also picked up ideas about democracy.
"Sure, in the 1960s and 1970s we had a great time here and we loved it and we thought that this was the Paris of the east," says Dupree. "But Louis wasn't connected with any official office here, so he was quite independent in making his acquaintances and he knew that [while] it was all beautiful on the surface, there was this terrible spy network underneath. When he was arrested they interrogated him all night and all day in three different languages, trying to trip him up. It was obvious that they had had a mole in those five o'clock follies."
The couple were finally kicked out of the country after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas eve, 1979, and sought sanctuary in Peshawar. Millions of Afghans were to follow suit, as their country descended into nearly three decades of war. Louis semi-seriously claimed "refugee status" and the couple took up residence in Dean's Hotel - the hang-out of spies and journalists during the city's cold war heyday. The colonial-era building has now been pulled down to make way for the sort of concrete-and-glass monstrosities popular on both sides of the border.
Before it was demolished, Peter Jouvenal, a legendary freelance cameraman who now runs a hotel in Kabul, rescued the bronze plaque on room 22 that marked it out as the "Dupree Suite". He says he liked spending time with the Duprees in the days of jihad because they were among the few people who cared about Afghanistan, rather than about "beating the Soviets without worrying what would happen afterwards".
"They were very peaceful people," recalls Jouvenal. "Louis was not interested in getting involved in mujahideen groups, despite being a former paratrooper." But although the Pakistani government asked Louis to keep a low profile during his exile in their country, he made several forays with the mujahideen into Afghanistan. His wife never accompanied him, worried that she would slow the resistance fighters and endanger them - "just so I could say, 'When I was with the mujahideen ' "
They continued their work among the world's largest refugee population. It was here that Louis had the idea of establishing a resource centre for all the different aid workers and Afghan experts who could no longer travel freely in Afghanistan, and creating an archive of their work. Louis died just after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989.
"Louis was in the hospital and he died soon after that and I said to him - he was still compos then - 'Well, you've always said the Soviets would leave and people made fun of you, but now they're gone and you should be pleased.' He looked at me and said, 'The trouble is just beginning.' " He was right; for Nancy, by far the bleakest period was after 1992, when the government of communist placeman Mohammad Najibullah finally fell and rival mujahideen factions fought for control of Kabul.
"Actually the Soviets didn't destroy this city very much," she says sadly. "The Afghans did it themselves, and that hurt."
As the struggle against the Soviet army turned into a war between rival Afghan factions, the country's cultural heritage sustained huge damage. Historic sites were pillaged and most of the collection in Kabul's museum (for which Dupree had written a guide) was stolen and sold on the black market. Dupree managed to buy back a tiny fraction under the auspices of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage, which she founded.
With so much lost and destroyed, Dupree's archive is not just a precious store of historical knowledge but also a personal memorial to the loves of her life. Tellingly, she refers to the collection of some 40,000 documents as part of herself, and says that it was this that kept her in Peshawar after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 evicted the Taliban regime, prompting many exiles to return. "There was this big exodus from Pakistan - all the NGOs, UN, everybody came to Kabul," she says. "But I didn't because I wasn't sure it was secure and I'm very vulnerable - it's all paper. At that point I had no scanning, no back-up. It would have only taken one daisy cutter from an American, or a match from a mullah, and I'd be finished."
Fearing Pakistani bureaucrats would find some way to keep her precious collection in Peshawar, the archive was finally moved piecemeal in 2003, smuggled out by Dupree's devoted staff in hidden sacks of documents amid the cargoes trundling through the Khyber Pass. A new $2m library is being built on Kabul University's leafy campus to house it, with the money and land provided by powerful friends, some of them dating back to the 1960s and the five o'clock follies.
She hopes her collection will do something to prevent the hordes of aid workers and development experts who descended on Afghanistan after 2001 repeating old mistakes and perpetually drawing up the same tired strategies. But in the past seven years there has been a flood of reports written on Afghanistan and, she concedes, "they just write the same thing over and over again - just regurgitating it. That's why their strategies are so humdrum. They are based on work that doesn't have much basis in fact, or in the realities of Afghan culture, because the people don't go out and talk to Afghans."
And then it becomes clear that there is more to Dupree's disappointment with today's travel restrictions for foreigners than a simple nostalgia for those prewar, halcyon days. "I saw with my own eyes a piece of paper from one of the embassies that said, 'If you must go out and do shopping, you go in your armoured car, with your escort, with your radio. You go in the shop and you pick out what you want. Don't talk to the shopkeeper' - it actually said that.
"So they don't interact with the Afghans and they sit there staring into their computers dreaming up fantasy strategies." Too often, she says, foreigners compound this mistake by believing they can fix Afghanistan's problems with cash. "For the US particularly, money is the remedy to everything. Throw money at it and have instant implementation of massive projects and then turn away and don't pay any attention to the follow-up. That is not sustainable and it won't work. But they are doing it in Pakistan now, in the Fata [Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the frontier where the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaderships are based] - and what are they doing? They are creating friction because everyone is trying to get hold of their money. But it's hard to dissuade these people."
Dupree has great confidence in the power of books to bring about change in Afghanistan, not just through her collection of documents, but also a village library scheme she has set up to help bolster literacy rates in a country where, like so much else, basic skills have been destroyed by three decades of war.
"I used to argue with the young men that they should finish school before they went off to fight, but they said, 'Oh no, I'm going to the jihad!' So now these young men, who should be at the peak of their productive abilities, don't have the mental skills or the emotional skills to deal with ordinary, day-to-day life."
However, she remains optimistic because of the attitude of young Afghans, who she says are determined to make something of their lives and their country: "I find their honesty very appealing. I don't like what's happening in the politics here but the young people give me hope. They don't have much money because there aren't many jobs but they will spend what little they have to go take an IT course, or go take a business course, or do something. They haven't given up."
Likewise Dupree. She says there is nothing to draw her back to the US, and every few weeks she visits Kabul from Peshawar, despite the fact that the frontier city is now extraordinarily dangerous. The Tribal Areas are in what looks like full-scale revolt against efforts by unmanned US drone aircraft and the Pakistani military to stem the rising tide of the Taliban. When I met Dupree again in January, amid the freezing book stacks of Kabul University, where staff are laboriously digitising part of the collection, she is not quite as cheerily optimistic about the region's future as she had been the previous autumn, noting how the Taliban have infested some of the provinces to the south of Kabul.
At 82, she has recently had to move from the house in Peshawar where she has lived with a large collection of cats for the past 15 years, after her landlady pushed up her rent. She rarely ventures out from her new abode after a rash of kidnappings and killings of foreigners in Peshawar, including an attempt to shoot the top US diplomat in the city. Absurdly, it would be safer for her to live full-time in Kabul but she says Peshawar is the only place where she is left alone for long enough to "get on with my writing".
But for all the difficulties and dangers, she isn't leaving. "I think there's a future for these people and I think maybe I can help. That's why I stay here. A lot of people call it the Afghan virus. You get it and it's like malaria: you think you are free of it and you go away, and suddenly you're back."
Jon Boone is the FT's Afghanistan correspondent.
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Where Being Our Friend Doesn’t Help
The Search for Votes: With civilian casualties mounting and corruption riddling the Afghan government, support for Karzai has evaporated.
By Dan Ephron | NEWSWEEK Feb 21, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Mar 2, 2009
When visitors stop by his office at the national Defense University in Washington, Ali Jalali enjoys showing off a mug stamped with the words I'M A ROCK STAR IN AFGHANISTAN. The country's former interior minister says he keeps it around for laughs, but his old boss in Kabul might not find it very funny. As Washington sours on Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Jalali is gaining currency in the media as his possible replacement—even though Jalali hasn't officially announced his candidacy. During an interview with NEWSWEEK, he said he'd make up his mind within weeks. But he was more definitive when asked if he'll quietly seek U.S. backing should he run in August's election. "If the perception is that a person who runs is supported by the United States," Jalali said, "I think he will have a problem with legitimacy." Take that as a no.
In the past, the favor of Washington was an electoral asset for Afghan politicians: it meant guaranteed money and military backing from the world's only superpower. But a resurgent Taliban, mounting civilian casualties from the ongoing war and vast corruption in Karzai's U.S.-backed government have altered the calculus; now it pays to keep some distance from American policymakers. Ashraf Ghani, who was the nation's widely respected finance minister from 2002 to 2004 and is also weighing a run for president, says Afghanistan still needs U.S. support—but what it needs more are homegrown solutions. "We have to mobilize ourselves, which means arriving at an Afghan-led strategy," said Ghani, speaking by phone from Kabul. Even Karzai has taken swipes at the U.S. in recent weeks, including a bizarre moment during a January public appearance when he suggested Afghanistan might switch its allegiance to Russia. (A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the election.)
It's unclear if talking tough about the U.S. will translate into votes. Afghan pollsters have yet to gauge public opinion on key issues and potential candidates. But results of a survey taken this month by the BBC and ABC showed rising anger among the Afghan population over U.S. air assaults directed at Taliban insurgents and Qaeda targets. Seventy-seven percent said the strikes were unacceptable because they endanger civilians; only 16 percent support them. Still, local politicians would be foolish to overreach: a large majority of Afghans—63 percent—support a continued American troop presence. It's a tricky tightrope for politicians to walk, but in Afghanistan, what isn't?
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Senior Taliban commander killed in Afghanistan
www.chinaview.cn 2009-02-22 14:51:45
KBUL, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- A senior Taliban insurgents commander was killed and five others were detained on Saturday during an operation in Logar province 60 km south of Afghan capital Kabul, a press release of NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said Sunday.
"Shriin Agha, an insurgent who was responsible for directing and facilitating replacement of Improvised Explosive Device (IEDs), was killed in this operation," the press released added.
It also said that Shriin Agha was involved in kidnapping and conducting subversive activities and terrorist attacks against Afghan and international troops stationed in Logar province.
Taliban outfit fighting Afghan and NATO forces has yet to make comment about the claim.
Editor: Fang Yang
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10,000 British troops to be fighting Taliban in Afghanistan within 12 months
More than 10,000 British troops will be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan within 12 months.
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom By Sean Rayment 21 Feb 2009
Defence chiefs believe the 8,300 troops currently serving in the south of the country need to be bolstered by an extra battle group of between 1,500 and 1,800 men within a year.
The deployment will push the Britain's Armed Forces to the very limit of its fighting capability and will raise fears that the entire operation has now fallen victim to "mission creep".
It is understood that the Army's top generals have given their support for the plan and are now awaiting approval from the Treasury and other areas of government.
The so-called "mini-surge" has been ordered in a direct response to a decision by President Barack Obama to send an extra 17,000 combat troops to counter the growing threat posed by the Taliban.
Although the figure was less than the 30,000 which had been called for by the US military, defence sources believe the move has sent a direct message to the US's and Britain's Nato partners that they must do more to help win the war in Afghanistan.
The new British battle group will consist of an infantry battalion, composed of around 700 troops, bolstered by at least one rifle company of 120 troops. The force will be supported by signallers, medics, engineers and elements of the Royal Artillery.
The Army has notched up a series of major successes against the Taliban, including the retaking of Musa Qala in northern Helmand, a former insurgent stronghold, as well as the operation to create a functioning hydro-electric power station at Kajaki.
But the much vaunted plans to bring reconstruction to the region have stalled, following the deterioration of security in the province.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has now increased troops numbers in Helmand every six months since 2006, when just 3,300 troops were sent to southern Afghanistan to secure the area and to allow reconstruction to begin.
John Hutton, the defence secretary, has persistently called on Britain's allies to do more of the "heavy lifting" in Afghanistan but, apart from France, virtually all have refused to do so.
There are around 56,400 Nato troops in Afghanistan and of those 24,900 are from the US. Britain has the second largest contingent with 8,300, followed by Germany which has 3,460, although most of these are based in the relatively peaceful north.
Canada, one of Britain's major allies in southern Afghanistan, has 2,830 troops based in Kandahar province and has lost 108 soldiers in battle. However, the Canadian government confirmed last week that it plans to withdraw all its troops from the country within two years, a move which will create a vacuum that can only really be filled by the US or Britain.
Mr Hutton said last week that he had not yet received any request from the US for extra troops but added that UK force levels were kept under constant review.
He said: "We haven't received any such request yet, and we obviously keep our force levels in Afghanistan under literally constant review, because we have an obligation a duty of care, if you like, to make sure that our operations are being conducted as safely as possible; and if there's a need, either for more troops or for more equipment, obviously we look very, very seriously at that."
The arrival of the extra battle group will follow the deployment of a special 300-strong force of bomb disposal troops, which is expected to arrive in Afghanistan in the next few weeks. Details of the deployment are to be announced by Mr Hutton in Parliament next month.
It is understood that extra ammunition technical officers (ATOs), who specialise in bomb disposal, will work closely with troops from the Intelligence Corps to try and discover supply routes of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) into Helmand and the location of bomb factories.
Taliban IED attacks now account for around 70 to 80 per cent of all casualties suffered by British troops, according to defence sources.
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Poker-Faced, Russia Flaunts Its Afghan Card
The New York Times By CLIFFORD J. LEVY February 21, 2009
MOSCOW - Russia last week marked the 20th anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan with avowals from its leaders that they really, truly do not want the American military mission there to suffer the same humiliating fate.
In practice, though, it often seems that Russia cannot decide whether it hopes that America's current venture in Afghanistan succeeds, collapses or just ends up in a lengthy slog that might be cause for furtive grins in the backrooms of the Kremlin.
These contradictory impulses were underscored this month when the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan announced that a crucial American military base that supplies forces in nearby Afghanistan would be closed — apparently at Moscow's urging. At the same time, the Russians said they would let nonlethal cargo for the American-led NATO mission be transported across Russia.
Russia's ambivalence stems in large part from its renewed effort to assert a zone of influence, flexing its power across the former Soviet Union and deepening tensions with the United States on a range of issues. Its unease over supposed Western encroachment spurred its August war with neighboring Georgia, which wants NATO membership; now it is coming to bear on Afghanistan.
The Kremlin under Vladimir V. Putin is essentially making clear that because the United States is maneuvering in Russia's neighborhood, the Kremlin must exert some control — even if it means hampering the ability to supply the Afghanistan mission.
“Russia wants to be the only master of the Central Asian domain,” said Andrei Serenko, a founder of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan, a Russian research group. “Russia is interested, to the maximum extent possible, in making things difficult for the U.S. — in making the transfer of American forces into Afghanistan be dependent on the will of the Kremlin.”
On its face, Russia has a lot to lose in Afghanistan. It fears the spread of Islamic extremism from Afghanistan into Central Asia and on to southern Russia, where for years it has battled an Islamic insurgency in Chechnya and nearby regions.
Confronting a serious heroin problem, Russia also urgently needs Afghanistan's authorities to curtail poppy production. And of course, given the history, Russia might be expected to empathize with NATO over the mission's difficulties.
Beyond its concerns about American soldiers nearby, the Kremlin also seems reluctant to offer significant help until it knows the Obama administration's stance toward Russia. Relations soured under George W. Bush after he called for Ukraine and Georgia to enter NATO, and proposed an anti-missile system for Eastern Europe. Mr. Obama has not yet said whether he will pursue those policies.
“This is a very delicate moment for Russia, because it is trying to understand the plans of the Obama administration,” said Vladimir Sotnikov, a South Asia expert at the Institute for Oriental Studies in Moscow. “In the Russian political elite, there is a struggle between pragmatists and conservatives. Pragmatists are standing for a new chapter in Russian-American relations, but conservatives are thinking in older terms — ‘Look, no major changes are going to take place, so let's close down the American base.' ”
The Russian position on Afghanistan would appear to loom increasingly large as President Obama presses his plan to quell the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and seek out leaders of Al Qaeda along the largely ungoverned Pakistani border. Last week, he announced that he would send an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan. Meanwhile, access to supply those troops through Pakistan has become more tenuous.
So, even as administration officials have called for a new era of relations with Russia — what Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. described recently as pressing “the reset button” — they have also begun expressing irritation over Afghanistan.
“The Russians are trying to have it both ways with respect to Afghanistan, in terms of Manas,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week, referring to the base in Kyrgyzstan. “And the question is, on one hand, you're making positive noises about working with us in Afghanistan, and on the other hand you're working against us in terms of that airfield, which is clearly important to us. So how do we go forward in that light?”
Mr. Gates said he hoped that the United States might be able to reach a new agreement with Kyrgyzstan to keep the base open. His statement suggested that the administration knows that to improve the situation in Central Asia, it most likely has to go through Moscow .
Igor V. Barinov, a Parliament member from Mr. Putin's party who is a prominent voice on defense matters, said the Kremlin realized that it shares many goals with Washington in Afghanistan. He said he would favor eventually even allowing military hardware to be transported across Russia to Afghanistan. (Like other senior Russian officials, he said there was no chance of the Kremlin sending troops to Afghanistan, for obvious reasons.)
But Mr. Barinov said that at least for now, the Russian leadership is having a hard time brushing aside its longstanding grievances.
“A lot of these things,” he said, “are the consequences of the attitude that NATO takes and has taken in recent years toward mutually important issues that touch upon the interests of Russia — beginning with the Balkans and Yugoslavia, Kosovo, NATO moving eastward, to Ukraine and Georgia, the Baltic states. And if more attention had been paid toward Russia's opinion, then the situation would now be much better.”
Dmitri O. Rogozin, Russia's outspoken ambassador to NATO, has often pointed out that the Kremlin considers stabilizing Afghanistan so vital that even during the strains with the West over the Georgia conflict, it did not rip up its agreement to allow nonmilitary cargo to travel across Russia.
Mr. Rogozin reiterated this month that Russia was deeply worried about the spread of Islamic extremism. But he also did not shy from expressing a little satisfaction that the mighty Americans were faring not much better than the Soviets.
“They have repeated all our mistakes, and they have made a mountain of their own,” he said.
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Taliban take Pakistan official despite peace talks
By Asif Shahzad, Associated Press Writer
ISLAMABAD – Taliban gunmen detained a senior official in Pakistan on Sunday, demonstrating their grip on a critical northwestern valley while pursuing a peace deal the United States fears will amount to a militant victory.
Police said armed men waylaid Khushal Khan and six bodyguards as they drove to Swat, where militants have defied an army offensive, beheaded opponents and burned girls' schools.
Hours later, Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan said the official had continued his journey after "having tea with our comrades," but officials could not immediately confirm his release.
The incident was the second to buffet a week-old cease-fire that has halted more than a year of fighting that has killed hundreds and driven thousands more from their homes. A Pakistani TV reporter was shot to death in the valley last week.
NATO and the U.S. have expressed concern that a peace deal could create a militant sanctuary in Swat, a former tourist haven less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
Pakistani leaders insist they remain dedicated to defeating the Taliban and al-Qaida and that peace in Swat could ease the violence threatening their nuclear-armed nation's stability.
Khan was driving to Swat to take up his new post as its top administrator, part of government efforts to reassert its authority, at least in the main city of Mingora.
Swat police chief Dilawar Bangash accused "elements" within the Taliban of trying to sabotage the peace process.
However, the Taliban spokesman claimed that the militants had unspecified "issues" with only one of the men accompanying the official and that he was treated as a guest.
Syed Mohammad Jawed, the top government administrator for the surrounding Malakand region, said Khan was held due to a "misunderstanding."
"Hopefully he will be with us in a short while," he said.
Security forces and militants are observing a cease-fire in Swat while a hard-line cleric tries to persuade the Swat Taliban to renounce violence in return for the introduction of elements of Islamic law.
Officials say the legal concessions meet long-standing demands for speedy justice in Swat and fall far short of the harsh version of Islamic law favored by Taliban militants.
The peace plan does not involve the nearby tribal area along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, where U.S. officials suspect al-Qaida leaders including Osama bin Laden have found refuge.
___
Associated Press writer Sherin Zada in Mingora contributed to this report.
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Protest Against International Troops in Logar
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 21 February 2009
International troops killed one and took five others away during their operation in Logar province
Angry protestors blocked the Kabul Logar Highway for six hours today.
Resident in Mohammad Agha district of Logar Province , protested against what they called irresponsible operations of international troops in the area.
According to protestors, the international troops, during search operation in Da now village, killed an innocent resident and took five others away with them.
The protestors were carrying death to America and foreign troop's slogans, and the dead body of the man who was shot dead by troops last night.
They warned of continuing the protest , unless their objectives wouldn't carry out.
They also called the international troops operations to end and asked the immediate release of arrested people.
This protest ended after a negotiation, and the release of arrested men by international troops this afternoon.
Meanwhile, the Logar governor said the operation was launched without coordination with local authorities.
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Kabul Electricity Directorate Complains Over Unpaid Electricity Bills
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 21 February 2009
If the governmental institutions pay the electricity bills on time; electricity will be distributed to other parts of Kabul city
The electricity directorate of Kabul warned that if the government institutions do not pay their electricity bills, the imported electricity from Uzbekistan will be cut off.
The directorate said that 97 governmental institutions, which include all the ministries and the governmental industrial parks, have not paid their electricity bills since 2006 which is about one billion Afghanis.
The ministry of finance claimed that it has not only paid the electricity bills, but it has also paid 150 million Afghanis extra budget to the power directorate.
Other government ministries promised that they will pay their electricity bills to the directorate soon.
The ministry of Energy and Water said if all the government institutions pay their electricity bills on time, the ministry will be able to distribute power to other parts of Kabul city.
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Heavy Snows Killed 15 People in Afghanistan
Written by www.quqnoos.com Saturday, 21 February 2009
Ghor province suffered the most casualties of snow-falls today
Eleven people have been killed by heavy snows in Ghor Province today.
The province's authorities said the roads in some of the province's districts were blocked due to the heavy snow, and thus food prices have risen.
Also some parliament members have blamed members of the Emergency Committee for “inefficiency”.
Three people have been killed due to heavy snow-fall in Bamyan and Badakhshan provinces and some of the roads are also blocked in some areas of the Provinces.
Other reports claim that the, heavy snow-fall has blocked the roads in some districts in Day Kundi province, causing one death.
In the meantime the Emergency relief committee claims that they have no problems to transport the needed aides and food to any area of the provinces facing the disaster, but the problem is the shortages of food and aids which they have not been able to afford it yet.
Some MPs warn of a humanitarian disaster in the Provinces, and they have requested an urgent delivery of aids to the victims and to the people who are suffering the disaster.
The same disaster caused heavy causalities last year.
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