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Source: Afghan election talks break down
October 30, 2009
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Talks between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his election opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, have broken down, a Western source close to the Afghan leadership told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Friday.
Kerry Signals Renewed Confidence in Afghan President Karzai
Viola Gienger – Fri Oct 30, 1:24 pm ET
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Senator John Kerry said Afghan President Hamid Karzai is willing to make Cabinet changes to bolster his government’s credibility, and expressed skepticism the beleaguered leader’s brother has links to the CIA.
Can Afghanistan Hold A Clean Runoff Election?
by Kevin Whitelaw NPR October 30, 2009
Afghanistan is scrambling to prepare for a Nov. 7 runoff vote to resolve the political stalemate following the blatant rigging of the August presidential election.
Afghan officials defend plan for more voting centres
By Golnar Motevalli – Fri Oct 30, 8:50 am ET
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan election officials on Friday defended plans to open more polling centres for next week's presidential run-off despite fears not enough is being done to prevent a repeat of the fraud which marred the first round.
Fraud Surrounds Women Voters in Afghan Election
Afghan runoff election likely to raise same issues of fraud surrounding women voters
By HEIDI VOGT The Associated Press
KABUL - One man cast 35 votes for female relatives. Others lugged in sacks full of voting cards they said were from women. And in a village of just 250 people, 200 women supposedly voted in three hours.
What we can achieve in Afghanistan
Washington Post By Robert B. Zoellick Friday, October 30, 2009
As governments reconsider strategies in Afghanistan, stories abound about why achieving progress in this "graveyard of empires" is so challenging: The country is racked by violence and opium production; confidence in the government is weak;
Rivals fiddle while Kabul burns
Asia Times By Abubakar Siddique 10/29/2009
Political tensions are on the rise in Afghanistan as the country braces for a challenging presidential runoff on November 7.
On October 26, incumbent President Hamid Karzai rejected demands from his election rival, former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, that key cabinet ministers be replaced and the country's top election official be removed if he was to participate in the electoral process.
Trade Could Be Key For Afghanistan And Entire Region
October 30, 2009 By S. Frederick Starr Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Both U.S. General Stanley McChrystal and President Barack Obama have affirmed the need for "economic" and "governance" measures in Afghanistan.
In fragile times, Karzai is best bet for U.S.
Reuters By Golnar Motevalli 10/29/2009
KABUL - With violence escalating ahead of Afghanistan's presidential election run-off, incumbent Hamid Karzai is probably the best hope both Afghans and the United States have of keeping the country stable in fragile times.
German government must investigate deadly Kunduz airstrikes
Amnesty International October 30, 2009
The German government should immediately launch a credible, transparent investigation into a 4 September airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed scores of people, many of them civilians, Amnesty International said on Thursday.
Obama, Joint Chiefs discuss Afghanistan
October 30, 2009
Washington (CNN) -- President Obama huddled with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top military advisers at the White House on Friday as the administration continued its sweeping review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
Obama holds crisis meeting on Afghanistan
October 30, 2009 Press TV
As the US mulls sending more troops to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama is set to hold a meeting with top army chiefs for talks on ongoing battles in the south Asian region.
Obama won't 'micromanage' generals in Afghanistan: Clinton
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama will lay out broad strategic guidelines for Afghanistan after November 7 runoff elections there but will not "micromanage" the generals fighting the war, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday.
Clinton says US can find way out of Afghanistan
AP via Yahoo! News - Oct 30 4:26 AM
WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the U.S. presence in wartorn Afghanistan "is not an open-ended, never-ending commitment."
Adding Afghanistan troops could cost $500,000 per person
By Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon Correspondent October 30, 2009
Washington (CNN) -- If President Obama decides to send the 40,000 additional forces to Afghanistan as requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a rough estimate by the Pentagon projects the cost could be an additional $20 billion a year, according to a senior Pentagon official.
Ban Seeks Protection, Funds After UN Workers Killed in Kabul
By Bill Varner and Paul Tighe
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed for more protection from U.S. and allied forces for UN personnel after an attack by the Taliban killed five workers at a guesthouse in the capital, Kabul.
U.N. Says Afghan Police, Troops Took Too Long to Respond to Attack
Friday, October 30, 2009 Associated Press via Fox News
KABUL — The United Nations demanded to know Friday why it took an hour for Afghan police and NATO troops to respond to a terrorist attack on a guest house filled with U.N. election workers in Kabul.
SKorea to send troops to Afghanistan to protect aid workers
SEOUL, Oct 30, 2009 (AFP) - South Korea will send troops and police to Afghanistan to protect an expanded aid mission there, the foreign ministry said Friday.
Outside View: The why and how of Afghanistan
WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- Matthew P. Hoh is a former U.S. Marine Corps captain and, until recently, the U.S. Department of State senior civilian representative in Zabul province, Afghanistan. His recent resignation was based not on "how we are pursuing this war" but "why and to what end."
NATO Supporting Insurgents? Not Exactly
Commentary by Killid Correspondents* IPS-Inter Press Service
KABUL, Oct 30 (IPS) - The U.S. and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) have spent billions of dollars, sacrificed hundreds of lives and worked for years to fight insurgents and foster democracy in Afghanistan.
U.S., NATO Forces Rely on Warlords for Security
By Gareth Porter* IPS-Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 (IPS) - The revelation by the New York Times Wednesday that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has long been on the payroll of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
UN guard killed in Afghanistan hailed as hero
By Tamara Lush, Associated Press Writer
MIAMI – A United Nations security guard from Miami who died fighting Taliban attackers at a hotel in Afghanistan is being hailed as a hero by top U.N. staff for the lives he and another guard helped save.
Afghan Scholars Call On People To Vote In Runoff
October 29, 2009 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
KABUL -- The Kabul-based Council of Scholars says its members will take part in the second round of the presidential election, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reports.
Clinton ends tough Pakistan trip
Friday, 30 October 2009 BBC News
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been meeting tribal leaders in north-west Pakistan on the last day of a testing visit to the country.
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Source: Afghan election talks break down
October 30, 2009
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Talks between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his election opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, have broken down, a Western source close to the Afghan leadership told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Friday.
According to the source, Abdullah will likely announce this weekend that he will boycott the runoff presidential election slated for November 7, a runoff that had been scheduled after intense diplomatic arm twisting by the United States.
In a Thursday interview with Amanpour, former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad had predicted that the country would soon be governed under a power-sharing deal.
"I think there will be power-sharing," Khalilzad said. "Both want power-sharing. The difference is that Karzai wanted to be first declared the winner or win the election and then offer something from a position of strength, while Abdullah Abdullah wanted to go to a second round but have a power-sharing agreement without the vote."
But Khalilzad also said Abdullah "may not stay in the race."
"First, he doesn't have much money left," he said. "Second, I think that he thinks that, given the situation, he's likely to lose, and maybe he'll get less votes than he did in the first round, so that would be embarrassing."
In the United States, President Obama is considering whether to send more troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban insurgency there, as requested by the commander of troops there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, or adopt some other strategy in the troubled nation.
Khalilzad said the outcome of the Afghan election negotiations is crucial to whatever decision the U.S. president takes.
"There are very few very capable Afghans, and they need to come together in a power-sharing arrangement," he said, "because whatever the decision is here in the United States, this will be one last chance to push for success in Afghanistan. And that cannot happen without the Afghan leaders doing their part."
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Kerry Signals Renewed Confidence in Afghan President Karzai
Viola Gienger – Fri Oct 30, 1:24 pm ET
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Senator John Kerry said Afghan President Hamid Karzai is willing to make Cabinet changes to bolster his government’s credibility, and expressed skepticism the beleaguered leader’s brother has links to the CIA.
Kerry, who spoke to Karzai by telephone this morning and had lunch with CIA Director Leon Panetta yesterday, said he doesn’t believe the president’s brother has a “direct relationship” with the CIA, as reported earlier this week in the New York Times.
Kerry expressed confidence in Karzai’s ability to recover from allegations that his government is corrupt and engaged in fraud in the first round of elections Aug. 20.
“I think he is prepared to embrace reforms,” Kerry, 65, said in an interview for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.
The Massachusetts Democrat also distanced himself from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s public questioning of whether some Pakistani officials know the whereabouts of al- Qaeda during her visit to the country this week.
The Obama administration has said a central question is whether the Afghan government can be a capable partner and take over the country’s security and manage its development after eight years of war. President Barack Obama is weighing strategy on Afghanistan and whether to send as many as 40,000 more troops that his top commander there, General Stanley McChrystal, has requested.
‘Too Far, Too Fast’
Kerry said he didn’t know what Obama would decide and couldn’t confirm whether the decision might veer close to the senator’s position. In addition to linking U.S. aid to the Afghan government’s performance, Kerry has left open the possibility of sending more U.S. troops while saying McChrystal’s approach “reaches too far, too fast.”
Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee for the U.S. presidency and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he doesn’t know when Obama will announce his decision on the strategy. Obama is scheduled to leave for a trip to Asia within days after Afghan voters go to the polls Nov. 7 for a presidential runoff election.
Kerry helped persuade Karzai to agree to the rematch during a visit to Afghanistan last week, and the president is favored to defeat his challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah.
Credibility Question
The timing of a decision on strategy depends in part on whether Obama feels he has enough information to judge the prospects for an Afghan government that can govern with credibility and handle civilian development efforts, Kerry said.
“I suspect he will make the decision sometime very soon,” Kerry said. “What’s important to us is that we get legitimacy out of this election at the highest level, and then we can work downwards and deal with the issues of individual governors or individual relationships.”
Kerry cited “serious questions” about links between Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, and the Central Intelligence Agency. The New York Times reported this week that he has received regular payments from the agency for much of the past eight years in exchange for services including helping recruit an Afghan paramilitary force.
Ahmed Wali Karzai said that, while he cooperated with American civilian and military officials, he didn’t receive payments from the CIA. He also denied allegations that he was involved in the drug trade.
Lunch With Panetta
“We’re asking questions,” Kerry said, citing his lunch with Panetta and a group of other senators. “I’m not at liberty to talk about it, but I don’t believe there is a direct relationship” with the CIA.
Hamid Karzai is prepared to confront “reasonable” issues where evidence indicates joint efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are at risk, Kerry said. Still, Karzai questioned whether the news reports related to his brother indicate an effort in Washington to undermine him, the senator said.
Repairing such rifts with leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be essential to a successful effort to defeat al- Qaeda, Kerry said. The war in Afghanistan can’t distract the U.S. from a simultaneous focus on Pakistan, he said.
“Pakistan is the center of the al-Qaeda presence,” Kerry said, citing the danger of rising extremism and the country’s nuclear weapons. “If we keep our eye on Pakistan, I believe Afghanistan will flow more easily out of that.”
He said he couldn’t judge Clinton’s timing for raising the question of Pakistani officials’ knowledge of the whereabouts of al-Qaeda militants, which U.S. officials believe are hiding near the Afghan border.
“How you raise those issues, where you raise those issues is obviously a matter of personal preference or I suppose diplomatic policy,” Kerry said. “I think that, at this particular moment, what we’re trying to do is build our relationship and trust with the Pakistanis.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Viola Gienger in Washington at vgienger@bloomberg.net .
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Can Afghanistan Hold A Clean Runoff Election?
by Kevin Whitelaw NPR October 30, 2009
Afghanistan is scrambling to prepare for a Nov. 7 runoff vote to resolve the political stalemate following the blatant rigging of the August presidential election.
But there are deep concerns among U.S. officials, international observers and many Afghans that the hastily arranged runoff will suffer from the same kind of outright cheating by supporters of the two candidates.
And there is even more alarm after an announcement by Afghan election officials on Thursday that they will boost the number of voting centers, rejecting United Nations recommendations to cut the number of sites to help prevent fraud.
Here's a look at what went wrong the first time, the challenges of cleaning up the process in such a short time period and why the United States is so eager for the runoff to work:
Was the August election really that flawed?
The short answer is, yes. The United Nations-supported Electoral Complaints Commission ended up throwing out nearly a third of the votes cast for Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the August election, citing "clear and convincing evidence of fraud."
Observers reported all kinds of shenanigans. In some areas, there were more ballots cast than the number of voters who were registered.
Perhaps the worst problem was the "ghost" balloting sites — polling stations that never officially opened, but still managed somehow to return large numbers of completed ballots.
Is this one going to be any better?
"It's going to be very difficult," says Thomas Garrett, the vice president for programs at the International Republican Institute, who has monitored several elections in Afghanistan, including the August vote. "Afghan elections are very complicated and tough to implement with months and months to plan."
The runoff will be simpler than the original election, which had 41 candidates on the ballot, in addition to provincial council races. This time, there will only be two — Karzai and his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister.
But the government is trying to organize the runoff in only 18 days. Karzai, after weeks of intense pressure from the United States and other countries, agreed to a runoff on Oct. 20 and set the vote for Nov. 7.
Why the rush?
The tight timetable was chosen because the Afghan winter, which is just beginning to set in, will make large swaths of the country nearly inaccessible by mid-November.
But Afghans and foreign officials alike are also anxious to resolve the outcome as soon as possible. The Obama administration has delayed a decision on whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan in part because of the uncertainty about the legitimacy of Karzai's rule.
Will the runoff change anything?
U.S. officials hope so. The scandal has cast doubt on the entire U.S. strategy of trying to build a credible Afghan government that can eventually take primary responsibility for security inside the country.
A cleaner election could be the first step toward rehabilitating an Afghan government tarnished by widespread corruption and incompetence.
"It is a question of perception," says one U.S. official. "If we can get to a more accurate result, the Afghan people could feel that the government is far more reflective of the views around the country. That will achieve the result we're looking for."
But given how flawed the first vote was, it won't be easy.
"You're certainly not going to have an outcome in Afghanistan that you can say represents the Afghan people," says Benjamin Barber, a senior fellow at Demos, a think tank based in New York. "You will get a rearranging of tribal and local interests that might or might not end up with the same victor."
So what are Afghan officials doing to fix the problems from last time?
The U.N. had advised Afghan officials to decrease the number of polling sites to help reduce the number of "ghost" stations. But Afghan officials have apparently rejected that recommendation, saying they will open slightly more polling centers.
The United Nations has also said that about 200 of the 2,950 district election coordinators will be replaced because of allegations of tampering or other misconduct, but election officials have not confirmed this.
Nonetheless, U.S. officials say the efforts so far to clean up the process seem serious.
"The sense is that they've stepped it up," says one U.S. official. "The capability of any institution in Afghanistan is always a question, but the will does seem to be there to make it a much better process than what happened last time."
Will they succeed?
Nobody is expecting the election to be perfectly clean. The best-case scenario is that the result will be clear enough for most Afghans to accept the winner.
U.S. officials also point out that the one positive from the August vote is that the post-election investigation of the rigging was very thorough and identified some of the worst trouble spots.
"On the positive side, we know what to look for," says one U.S. official. "We can go where we saw the infrastructure of corruption that existed to sway those results."
Of course, the cheating could simply become more sophisticated this time around as well.
"The rigging was done so poorly and clumsily that it was so detectable," says Alex Thier, who runs the Afghanistan and Pakistan program at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "If anything, you might see better rigging. It will be interesting to see whether the civil society monitors doing the training can train people faster than the ones trying to rig the election."
Maybe both sides will simply be too embarrassed to cheat the second time around?
It's hard to say. The fallout from the first election could possibly shame the two leading candidates into behaving better.
"Neither wins anything if the overall process is delegitimized," says Patrick Merloe, a senior associate at the National Democratic Institute, which sent a team of observers to the August election. "The two people competing for power here have the most to gain from instructing their people and signaling to the public that they won't tolerate fraudulent behavior."
Then again, initially Karzai was clearly reluctant to engage in the runoff, and the level of cheating suggests that his supporters were not confident he would necessarily win a free and fair election.
Also, with only two candidates on the ballot, the stakes are even higher this time.
"There is strong reason to believe that this runoff will be even more flawed than the original election, because the rules are gone and they've taken off the gloves," says Andrew Reynolds, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina who advised the United Nations on previous elections in Afghanistan. "I'm concerned the incentives for malfeasance are even higher today than they were for the original vote."
How many people will be watching for fraud this time?
There will be a lot fewer election observers for the runoff. International election monitoring groups will have a much smaller presence because they will not be able to bring in large missions from outside Afghanistan.
"There is not enough time to mount the logistical operation to put people across the country as we did last time," says IRI's Garrett. "We worked on that for a long time and we can't really assemble that in two weeks."
Garrett says that IRI is still trying to determine how many staffers it will have on the ground, but it will be many fewer than the 30 international observers and 70 Afghan partners they had in August.
Similarly, NDI, which deployed more than 100 observers for the August vote, will not be sending a mission in November.
What about local Afghan monitors? Surely many of those who observed the August vote would be available again.
There will still be a sizable presence of domestic Afghan monitors, but it will be significantly smaller than the team from August.
U.S. officials say they expect the number of Afghan monitors to top 4,000, which is just over half the number who participated last time, and perhaps approach 5,000.
Even if everything works more smoothly, are the Afghan people ready to participate in another election?
Observers will be watching the turnout levels very closely. Only 38 percent of eligible voters participated in the August vote, which is well below the levels from elections in 2004 and 2005.
Some Afghans stayed away from the poll because of threats by the Taliban to disrupt the election, and security concerns are likely to be a huge factor again.
Others chose not to vote because they distrust the government in Kabul and the entire election process. They are not likely to be any more reassured this time around.
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Afghan officials defend plan for more voting centres
By Golnar Motevalli – Fri Oct 30, 8:50 am ET
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan election officials on Friday defended plans to open more polling centres for next week's presidential run-off despite fears not enough is being done to prevent a repeat of the fraud which marred the first round.
Security is also a major concern ahead of the November 7 run-off, which the Taliban have vowed to disrupt, underlined by a suicide attack this week on a guest-house used by the United Nations in which five foreign U.N. staff were killed.
Western officials have already described as "disturbing" plans for the run-off, which both Kabul and Washington hope will end weeks of political uncertainty.
It also comes as U.S. President Barack Obama weighs whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, where violence this year has reached its worst levels since the Taliban were ousted by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in 2001.
The run-off between President Hamid Karzai and his main rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, was triggered by a U.N.-led fraud investigation into the first round of voting which found widespread fraud in favor of Karzai.
With little time to organize the run-off, security concerns keeping voter turn-out down in the first round and winter fast approaching, election officials last week said fewer polling centres would be open for the run-off than in August.
But the government-appointed Independent Election Commission (IEC) now says the number of polling centres would increase slightly, largely because of better security in former Taliban strongholds in the south where U.S., British and Afghan forces have been fighting major offensives.
"The number of polling stations is not too many ... it is because of better security in certain areas," Daoud Ali Najafi, Chief Electoral Officer for Afghanistan, told Reuters.
Western officials have expressed fears increasing the number of polling centres would raise rather than lessen the risk of fraud.
Najafi said 6,315 polling centres were set up in the first round, although many never opened because of poor security and Taliban threats. He said authorities were setting up 6,322 centres for the run-off, mainly reflecting better security in parts of southern Helmand province.
"In the first round ... we had more (polling centres) than we needed. But there are seven more centres in Helmand in districts that have been secured since then and they will open for the second round," Najafi said.
Whether the polling centres would actually open on November 7 would depend on security at the time, he said.
SECURITY FEARS
Karzai, who is expected to win the run-off, assured U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in a telephone call overnight that the United Nations would provide better security for U.N. staff after Wednesday's attack.
"President Karzai assured the U.N Secretary-General that Afghanistan ... will do everything to provide proper security to all U.N. staff in the country and better security measures for U.N installations," said a statement from the president's palace.
Ban said the United Nations, which has been operating in Afghanistan for almost 60 years, will beef up its security. U.N. officials in Kabul have said they will continue to support the run-off.
The Taliban have said the guest-house was targeted because of the U.N. role in helping organize the vote.
Sporadic attacks took place across Afghanistan during the first round but failed to disrupt the process entirely.
In a further sign of escalating violence, eight civilians were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in eastern Nangarhar province on Friday morning, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
Villagers said the target of the attack appeared to be a tribal elder who was a passenger in the car.
On Thursday four civilians were killed when their vehicle hit a roadside in southern Kandahar province, the Interior Ministry said.
(Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau in at the UNITED NATIONS, Hamid Shalizi in KABUL and Rafiq Sherzad in KHOGIANI; Writing by Golnar Motevalli; Editing by Paul Tait)
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Fraud Surrounds Women Voters in Afghan Election
Afghan runoff election likely to raise same issues of fraud surrounding women voters
By HEIDI VOGT The Associated Press
KABUL - One man cast 35 votes for female relatives. Others lugged in sacks full of voting cards they said were from women. And in a village of just 250 people, 200 women supposedly voted in three hours.
In Afghanistan's recent presidential election in August, one of the ripest areas for fraud was women's voting. And the same is likely to be true again in the Nov. 7 runoff between President Hamid Karzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah.
The stakes are high. The Obama administration, which pushed Karzai to accept the runoff vote, is hoping it will restore legitimacy to a government that has been undermined by blatant ballot-box stuffing and Karzai's long delay in accepting fraud rulings that forced the runoff.
Yet the problems of fraud related to women's voting cannot be changed in a few weeks. There's widespread acceptance of proxy voting by male relatives. Many women are reluctant to vote given threats of violence and polling centers swarming with men. And those who do cast ballots are usually uneducated and therefore more easily manipulated.
It's unclear how large an impact fraud involving women voters had on the results because Afghan election officials have not released the list of women's polling stations. But many observers have said that women's polling stations were more problematic than men's.
In August, men showed up with fistfuls of female voter cards and poll workers allowed them to cast multiple ballots without argument, according to a U.N. report. In some cases, men dragged in sacks full of cards supposedly for female relatives, Afghan monitors said.
Empty women's polling stations also provided reams of blank ballots to unscrupulous local officials.
"It allowed for women's votes to be manipulated. Block voting, proxy voting, or there were just no women at the polling stations and those ballots were used for fraudulent votes," said Theresa Delangis, part of a team working on election issues with the U.N. women's fund.
Afghanistan is no safer now than two months ago and there still aren't enough female poll workers. Election officials say they have plans to recruit more women, but the strategy does not appear any different from the one that failed this summer.
Afghanistan is still a deeply conservative Muslim society where a man might never see the face of his best friend's wife. Yet more than 3,500 of the country's female polling stations were staffed by men because they couldn't find enough women to fill the jobs, according to the Afghan Independent Election Commission.
Faced with male staff, many women just didn't show up to vote. Momina Yari, an election commissioner who has campaigned for better access for women at polling stations, said even if a woman wanted to vote, her family often wouldn't let her.
In cases where women staffers were available, the women's polling centers were often in the back of a building, meaning female voters had to walk past large groups of men to cast their ballots, Yari said.
Election officials say Taliban threats made it hard to attract female poll workers, and there also weren't enough women with the needed skills. The typical Afghan woman is illiterate, a handicap that makes it difficult for them to dependably staff a polling center, said Sharif Nasry, part of a team of gender specialists working with the election commission. On top of that, women's activists said Afghan officials didn't try hard enough to recruit women.
Because of the lack of staffing and insecurity in the south and east, at least 650 women's polling stations failed to open countrywide, according to Afghanistan's main independent monitoring group, the Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan. In central Uruzgan province alone, only six out of 36 women's polling stations opened.
It created a situation in which women were actually slightly less represented in 2009 than in the last presidential vote in 2004, when Afghans had only recently emerged from the Taliban regime that banned women from most jobs and forced them to wear an all-covering burqa whenever leaving the house. Women accounted for 39 percent of the votes in August, down from 40 percent five years ago, and most observers say this year's tally was probably inflated by fraudulent ballots.
No major changes have been implemented for the runoff because the election commission's gender unit is still working on a report with proposals, Nasry said.
Afghan monitors have a host of issues they want addressed.
Besides the problems with workers and polling stations, the head of the Afghan monitoring group said they want some way to deal with the problems inherent in burqa voting. Women were often able to vote twice because their ink-stained fingers were hidden under burqas and workers were reluctant to check under the covering, said Nader Nadery, the group's head.
Since women can choose not to have a photo on their voting card, it was also easy for underage or unregistered women to vote with another's card, he said.
Nasry, of the election commission, said poll workers now will ask a woman's name when she comes to vote to make sure that she is using her own voting card, but he offered no other concrete proposals.
One plan involves cutting female staff down to three from five and eliminating female body searchers, said Zia Amarkhil, director of field operations for the election commission. Men will still be searched, he said, but the plan raises questions about whether security will be compromised or if it will enable more multiple voting by people who are not closely inspected.
The number of voting locations is actually set to increase in the runoff from the first-round vote. The election commission announced Thursday that it will open 6,322 voting sites, well above the 6,167 sites that opened in the first round. The decision flouts a U.N. recommendation that only 5,817 open in order to lessen the chance that closed or near-empty stations will be used for ballot-box stuffing — a major problem in the first round.
The election commission has said that security forces can assure the safety of the larger number of sites, but has not said how it plans to find the extra staff.
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What we can achieve in Afghanistan
Washington Post By Robert B. Zoellick Friday, October 30, 2009
As governments reconsider strategies in Afghanistan, stories abound about why achieving progress in this "graveyard of empires" is so challenging: The country is racked by violence and opium production; confidence in the government is weak; its neighbors meddle; and fiercely independent tribes distrust any intruder -- whether from Britain, the Soviet Union, NATO or Kabul.
The World Bank Group's experience in Afghanistan reflects all these problems. This is one of the most difficult environments in which we work. Yet we have seen real, measurable progress: in the health sector, education, community development, microfinance and telecommunications. Since 2002, the World Bank has committed nearly $2 billion to these and other projects and manages, with partners, a $3.2 billion trust fund for 30 donor countries.
Here are some of the lessons we have learned:
First, we need to "secure development" -- that is, create a strong link between security and development. Each reinforces the other, especially when we focus on communities and on resolving local-level conflict. A dysfunctional police force, justice and prison system feeds a lawlessness that breeds disillusionment with the government and sympathy for its opponents.
Second, corruption can be fought better through design than through calls for virtue or even a slew of investigations. Afghanistan's drug trade risks the criminalization of the state. But there are steps one can take to make corruption harder and less likely. Afghanistan's reform-minded finance ministers have taken practical steps to simplify government processes and add transparency to reduce opportunities for corruption, already raising government revenue 75 percent in the first part of this year. Recently the government slashed the number of steps to register vehicles from some 55 to just a few, reducing opportunities for bribes and increasing revenue.
Third, locally led projects are the most effective. The National Solidarity Program, which the World Bank helped launch in 2003, empowers more than 22,000 elected, village-level councils to decide on their development priorities -- from building a school to irrigation to electrification. So far, the program has reached more than 19 million Afghans in 34 provinces, with grants averaging $33,000. Development owned by the community can survive amid conflict: When an NSP-funded school was attacked in August 2006, the villagers defended it. The community councils also help build cooperation among villages and with the government.
Fourth, while local progress matters, government responsibility and capacity must be built at the national level. Currently, two-thirds of aid to Afghanistan flows outside the government because donors lack confidence in its competence and transparency. But this undermines those trying to build legitimate Afghan institutions. It can also grossly distort resource allocation: Some relatively secure areas are starved of money when they could be producing results. We can work with Afghans to strengthen public financial management. That said, in the absence of strong institutions, and facing considerable corruption, good results have been dependent on one-by-one partnerships with honest, reformist ministers. The new cabinet must include more such individuals.
Fifth, Afghans need to see measurable improvements to their lives, or they will not feel they owe anything to Kabul or local governments. There are success stories: More than 12,000 miles of all-weather rural roads have been built, connecting communities to markets; today, 80 percent of Afghans have access to basic health services, compared with only 9 percent in 2003; 6 million children are enrolled in school, nearly 35 percent of whom are girls, compared with about 1 million students and no girls seven years ago; competitive telecommunications networks now serve about 10 million subscribers. But a lot remains to be done.
Stability in Afghanistan also depends on good leadership -- especially in critical areas that have lagged behind, such as agriculture, energy, mining and private-sector development. The challenges of securing development so that it is self-sustaining are formidable. But progress is possible if safety is strengthened, the Afghan government assumes ownership, its partners build development through the choices of the Afghan people, and Afghanistan's neighbors decide they are better off with a successful state than with a perilous buffer zone that could send trouble back across their borders.
The writer is president of the World Bank Group.
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Rivals fiddle while Kabul burns
Asia Times By Abubakar Siddique 10/29/2009
Political tensions are on the rise in Afghanistan as the country braces for a challenging presidential runoff on November 7.
On October 26, incumbent President Hamid Karzai rejected demands from his election rival, former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, that key cabinet ministers be replaced and the country's top election official be removed if he was to participate in the electoral process.
Abdullah claimed that Azizullah Ludin, head of the Afghan Election Commission, should be fired immediately because "he has left no credibility for the institution and, unfortunately, for himself".
"These are practical, very technical [conditions]," Abdullah said in explaining his demand. "It will only help the transparency of the elections, and these are the minimum conditions. And by meeting these conditions, I think we can [build] the right foundation for the future of this country. It will be a step forward, and the outcome of such an election - I will be the first one to welcome it [whatever] that outcome would be."
Mohammad Yunos Fakur, a Kabul-based independent Afghan analyst, questions Abdullah's true motives. Fakur suggests that Abdullah, who officially finished second to Karzai in the first round with 31.5% of the vote, sees the unlikelihood of a second-round victory and is trying to gain key concessions, including power-sharing, ahead of the vote.
Analysts widely expect Karzai to improve on his first-round tally, which gave him just under 50% of the vote. They expect Karzai to capitalize on his incumbency by wooing Afghans who voted in the first round for third candidates, such as populist lawmaker Ramazan Bashardost and reform-minded former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani.
'Moving toward a clash'
The notion that "politics is the art of the possible" is stretched to extreme limits in Afghanistan. Given the country's peculiar circumstances, Afghan analysts suggest that looking at mere poll numbers and predicting results based on past voting patterns might only serve as a diversion from the real issue of how to restore stability and deliver a credible and legitimate government.
Fakur says the two candidates are "moving toward a clash" and "are not agreeing on any framework" on how to move forward. This, he says, is because both are reluctant to concede to anything that might lessen their respective chances of winning and, in turn, put them at risk of losing their political standing.
"Everything that led to their agreement, reconciliation, and possible solution pleased people," Fakur says. "But when their disagreements lead to tension and paralysis, it increases the concerns of the people. One reason for popular optimism in Kabul is that they are grateful that in the presence of international forces the political crisis would not morph into fighting."
In a country where recent history has been shaped by foreign invasions and regional competition played out by armed proxies, the idea of a peaceful transfer of power through elections has not gained currency among Afghan politicians and factional leaders.
With the Western media's focus on the threats posed by extremists, little attention has been paid to the importance of understanding the complexities of Afghan politics.
Fakur suggests that though Karzai might eventually win enough votes to be re-elected, it won't necessarily mean that he can deliver a strong, credible government. Given Afghanistan's unique situation, in which insurgents control large swathes of territory, Fakur suggests that Karzai will need to reach a compromise with Abdullah and other figures who oppose him.
"The conditions in Afghanistan are such that North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Americans, and our neighbors have their interests here. And we need to tailor our interests to their strategies," Fakur says. "If we keep on stirring Afghan sentiments against the international community and work to bring about a government here that clashes with the international community, it won't help. Such a situation will move toward crisis, and this is the basic problem."
Fakur suggests that apart from the internal dynamics, the lead-up to the runoff is being shaped by the acts of the international community, and the Afghans' perceptions of those acts.
He says that Karzai wants to show Afghans that he stood up to international pressure to remove him from power. And Abdullah, Fakur says, saw opportunity in Karzai's differences with the West, resulting in the demands he made ahead of the runoff.
No compromise
Afghan parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai, who now supports Karzai in the runoff, rules out the possibility of a compromise between the two and wants Afghan voters to decide their future leader.
She suggests that despite Karzai's alliance with many notorious Afghan strongmen, the electorate is likely to re-elect him because he is not associated with the internecine conflict of the 1990s, when anti-Soviet factions destroyed Kabul and other cities in their rapacious civil war. Abdullah was a senior aide to late Afghan guerilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud in the 1990s when the Afghan capital was destroyed in factional fighting between Masoud and other factions of the anti-Soviet mujahideen.
"For the people of Afghanistan, I think, Dr Abdullah is a symbol of yesterday's Afghanistan and Karzai is a symbol of today's Afghanistan," Barakzai says. "And Afghans won't like to go back to the dark days of our recent past. It is because if we go back to the past, we will give away our present."
Hajji Sayed Daud, who heads the Afghan Media Resource Center in Kabul, is well-acquainted with public opinion and popular thinking. He tells RFE/RL that deal-making and the fact that Karzai controls the government machinery will ensure his victory on November 7.
But he sees the rival sides as pushing the Afghan electorate toward ethnic fragmentation. Karzai, a Pashtun, and Abdullah, a Tajik-Pashtun, each received support that crossed ethnic and regional boundaries. But the mutual accusations of fraud that followed the first round at times developed ethnic undertones, with hawks from Karzai's side portraying themselves as protectors of Pashtuns, and hawks from Abdullah's side as protectors of Tajiks.
Daud sees the growth of such sentiments in the run-up to the runoff as a bad omen for the future of democracy and stability in his country.
"In the regions where Pashtuns live, they are being motivated to vote for a Pashtun. And regions where other ethnicities - Tajik, Uzbek, and Turkmen, Hazara - live, they are being told that the Pashtuns want to cling to the leadership," Daud says.
"In my opinion, voting based on ethnicity moves Afghanistan toward destruction, civil war, and division. It is the duty of both candidates not to exploit such issues. But unfortunately, both Karzai and Dr Abdullah are engaging in this now."
Daud suggests that to solve the governance crisis, disillusioned Afghans might prefer a traditional loya jirga, or grand assembly of elders, who would form an interim government and prepare ground for holding free and fair elections.
In an interview with RFE/RL last week, former United Nations and European Union special envoy for Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell, suggested a similar solution.
Given its investment in the elections and the political process, the international community is solely focused on holding the November 7 runoff.
But if even a successful election process fails to deliver an efficient and credible administration, alternative solutions can be expected to gain currency among Afghan politicians and Western policy makers.
Note
This article was written before before gunmen wearing suicide vests on Wednesday stormed Bekhtar guesthouse in downtown Kabul, which is used by United Nations staff. At least 12 people reportedly died during fighting at the scene, including at least five UN staffers, three security guards and three Taliban gunmen. A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told the media the attack was meant to warn people not to help in the November 7 runoff presidential election. The guesthouse siege was preceded by a minor rocket attack on the presidential palace and followed two hours later by a rocket attack on the Serena Hotel, a luxury hotel that is popular among foreign diplomats and journalists and which has been attacked before.
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Trade Could Be Key For Afghanistan And Entire Region
October 30, 2009 By S. Frederick Starr Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Both U.S. General Stanley McChrystal and President Barack Obama have affirmed the need for "economic" and "governance" measures in Afghanistan.
They're right, of course. Without them Washington's stated goals -- to destroy Al-Qaeda and cripple the Taliban -- remain purely negative and not compelling to most Afghans, to the countries neighboring Afghanistan, or even to its NATO allies.
But what are these "economic" and "governance" measures? Neither McChrystal nor Obama has spelled them out. It's time to do so.
To succeed, any such measures must meet four criteria. First, they must directly and positively affect the lives of Afghans, Pakistanis, and people in those Central Asian states that have become key to this region-wide project. If ordinary people across the region are convinced that they will benefit from the U.S. effort, they will support it. If not, they will stand aside.
Second, economic measures must leave the Afghan government with an income stream. Today the United States is paying the salaries of all Afghan soldiers and civil servants. This can't go on forever.
Third, it must be possible to pursue the economic measures simultaneously with the military effort, and in a way that enhances the military campaign.
And, fourth, these initiatives must work fast and begin to show results within the next 18 to 24 months.
Since 2001, the United States and other countries have done much good in Afghanistan, far more than is generally known. Progress in major health indicators and education are only part of an impressive record. But late in 2009 these do not suffice. To meet our four criteria a more powerful engine is needed.
Send In The Trucks
Fortunately, such a force exists. The United States should immediately focus its energies on opening continental transport and trade across Afghanistan and the region.
This will immediately open large markets to Afghan and Pakistani producers in scores of legal areas. Ordinary Afghans will be able to get their goods to markets now closed to them. The yield on truck tariffs will provide a steady income for the government in Kabul. Such trade can start immediately, for it involves removing bureaucratic impediments at borders, not vast infrastructure projects.
Some argue that this cannot happen until the security situation improves. They may be confusing cause and effect. If only a few trucks traverse a road, it is easy for bandits to interdict them. If hundreds of trucks do so, some may still be hit. But most will bore their way through.
Soon locals will be providing the truckers with food, gas, storage, and repair services, as well as good for shipment. As this happens, the local population gains an interest in keeping the road open.
But can this really happen quickly? The Asian Development Bank has shown convincingly that the goods and truckers are there, waiting for a green flag. These are not just local haulers, but transcontinental shippers running from Hamburg to Hanoi, Damascus to Delhi, the Urals to Hyderabad.
Surveys show that the truckers themselves see the main impediments not as bad roads or the absence of physical security. These are tough guys, used to getting through under the worst conditions. But they are stopped dead by corrupt and inefficient practices at borders, especially in Afghanistan. Remove these and the dam will break, releasing a vast force of trade that existed across Eurasia for 2,500 years but which has been blocked in recent centuries.
The International Union of Roads and Transport in Geneva reports that large numbers of its members are poised to move, once the impediments are removed. And since the key to removing these impediments at borders is to improve governance and remove corruption at these points, the project provides a perfect laboratory for improving governance elsewhere in Afghanistan.
Connecting The Region
The U.S. Army's network for delivering supplies to our forces in Afghanistan provides a skeleton for the emerging network of routes crossing Afghanistan. Washington needs only to open the same routes to civilian traffic to get the ball rolling. Soon truckers will want to cross Pakistan as well, passing on into India and beyond. Is this a fantasy?
In spite of the Pakistan-India conflict over Kashmir, some $3 billion of goods cross the India-Pakistan land border each year legally, and another $15 billion illegally. We are talking about products like refrigerators and stoves, not narcotics. Given this enormous economic pressure, it is quite conceivable that Indians and Pakistani could choose to open selective routes, even as they continue to spar over Kashmir.
The biggest military surge in Afghanistan will fail if it is not intimately linked with an economic program, and one that pushes Kabul to improve governance. By releasing the engine of continental trade, the United States can achieve this. Such a project is not against anyone, and will enable Washington to engage constructively with every power in Eurasia, including China, India, Pakistan, Russia, Europe, the Middle East, and even Iran, for which participation in such trade could be an important carrot.
However, Washington has yet to embrace this as a top strategic priority, let alone to organize its mission in Afghanistan and the region in such a way as to achieve it. This last is particularly important, for it requires a degree of civil-military coordination that has not existed in the U.S.'s Afghan effort since 2005.
The good news is that it is not yet too late to do this. Once such a strategy and tactics are in place, the United States will have unleashed a force that generated wealth across Eurasia, and especially in Afghanistan and its neighbors, over several millennia. It's time to act.
S. Frederick Starr is a research professor at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University and chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. The views expressed in this commentary are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL
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In fragile times, Karzai is best bet for U.S.
Reuters By Golnar Motevalli 10/29/2009
KABUL - With violence escalating ahead of Afghanistan's presidential election run-off, incumbent Hamid Karzai is probably the best hope both Afghans and the United States have of keeping the country stable in fragile times.
U.S. President Barack Obama tried to distance himself from Karzai from the start of his administration -- a policy the White House has to rethink as political and military instability in Afghanistan add pressure to already-flagging U.S. support for a costly and deadly war which is in its eighth year.
"There is a reticence with Karzai certainly, but there are few choices on the table," a Western diplomat said.
Despite a reputation badly damaged by widespread fraud from the first round of the election, which triggered the run-off, and his ineffectiveness at tackling corruption, Karzai is still seen as a unifying figure.
As a Pashtun -- Afghanistan's largest ethnic group -- he has support from the crucial southern and eastern tribal areas, and having the Pashtun vote, diplomats acknowledge, is vital for an Afghan leader's credibility.
"Karzai presents the most viable way forward in terms of reconciling with those who continue to fight. He is by far the most viable candidate," the diplomat added.
LOSING KARZAI
The U.S. has much to lose from a Karzai defeat and while ensuring the second-round is as clean as possible is vital important for Washington, it does not want to give Afghans the impression that it wants to pull the strings in Kabul.
A victory for Karzai's rival Abdullah Abdullah, who despite being half Pashtun, has support mainly from Tajiks because of his closeness to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance General Ahmad Shah Masood, could spell disaster for the war.
"The most powerful warlords still feel Karzai is the man to support in terms of negotiations with the Taliban, I think Abdullah is even less likely to conduct negotiations and less palatable for the Taliban," Kamran Bokhari of U.S.-based intelligence company Stratfor said.
Furthermore, the election comes at a time of rising violence, with Wednesday's attack on the U.N. exposing the vulnerabilities of Kabul to Taliban militants.
A change of leadership for an impoverished, politically fragile and vulnerable country like Afghanistan will hardly be helpful at a time when both Kabul and Washington must focus on fighting the insurgency.
MUST REFORM
If Karzai does win the run-off, he must make changes and undertake reforms, something Washington insists on in order to build a "viable partner" in Afghanistan, one which can convince U.S. lawmakers that sending more troops is worthwhile.
Privately U.S. officials have made clear if Karzai emerges victorious there will be a strong emphasis on getting him to tackle corruption and taking a firmer line with ministers who have not performed.
"We (the United States) have not demanded the level of accountability of Karzai and of his government that is needed," Alex Thier of the Washington-based U.S. Institute for Peace said.
But Karzai is a powerful figure in Afghanistan. The Taliban are as much a threat to him as they are to the U.S. and if he needs to negotiate a deal with them for his own protection and political security, he can do so on his own terms, without necessarily Washington's consent or support.
"In the U.S. it's very difficult for any government to be seen cutting a deal with (Taliban leadership). Karzai on the other hand says 'that's not my problem, I have to protect my own interest and if that means cutting a deal, then so be it'," Bokhari said.
(Additional reporting by Sue Plemming in WASHINGTON; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
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German government must investigate deadly Kunduz airstrikes
Amnesty International October 30, 2009
The German government should immediately launch a credible, transparent investigation into a 4 September airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed scores of people, many of them civilians, Amnesty International said on Thursday.
The German military said on Thursday that NATO’s investigation suggested the airstrike, which targeted two fuel tanker trucks that had been hijacked by Taleban fighters five hours earlier, was appropriate even though it led to civilian casualties.
Amnesty international’s investigation into the Kunduz incident suggests that the laws of war may have been violated during the airstrike.
"An urgent and transparent investigation needs to be launched by the German government into what happened in Kunduz. NATO, and the German government, must show accountability for the loss of civilian life and prove that it has the will and mechanism in place to investigate civilian casualties," said Sam Zarifi, director of mnesty International’s Asia-Pacific programme.
According to the German military, NATO’s investigation could not verify the exact number of casualties. Village elders from the area told Amnesty International in Kunduz that 142 people had been killed in the attack, of which at least 83 were civilians. The Taleban killed one of the tanker drivers during the hijacking, according to Afghan security officials.
The German Ministry of Defence stated that it would analyze the NATO report and consider further action as necessary.
Amnesty International gathered eyewitness testimonies from survivors of the attack, as well as interviews with Mohammed Razaq Yaqoobi, the local chief of police, UN officials, and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.
"The Taleban again disregarded the lives of Afghan civilians by putting them in the line of fire," Sam Zarifi said. "But that doesn’t absolve NATO from taking the utmost feasible precautions to ensure that it minimizes harm to civilians."
The Taleban control many of the villages in the area surrounding the airstrike. Residents of nearby Taleban-controlled village, AmerKhiel, were invited to take away fuel from the tankers after the tankers were stuck while crossing the Kunduz river.
The organisation’s research shows that NATO did not provide civilians in the area with effective warning that they were going to launch an attack, endangering the lives of people in the area.
In some circumstances, NATO aircraft in Afghanistan fly close to targets or shoot warning rounds to get civilians away from a potential target. Eyewitnesses to the attack told Amnesty International that they did not see NATO aircraft engage in any warning action prior to the Kunduz airstrike.
A local villager Omera Khan told Amnesty International that "The Germans could have responded differently to the hijacking and prevented the civilian casualties. People were there to take the free fuel offered by the Taleban and at the time of the attack there was no warning."
"NATO has been trying to improve the protection of civilians with its recently issued Tactical Directive, and we welcome this, but it still has not provided a credible accountability mechanism for redress." said Sam Zarifi. "Immediately, NATO should publicize its report."
In 2009 Afghanistan has suffered the highest level of civilian casualties since the fall of the Taleban in 2002. "All sides to the conflict must take every possible precaution to spare civilian lives. Civilians must not be made to pay the price for unlawful conduct on either side. All violations of international human rights and humanitarian law must be promptly, thoroughly and independently investigated and those responsible for them must be bought to justice, " said Sam Zarifi.
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Obama, Joint Chiefs discuss Afghanistan
October 30, 2009
Washington (CNN) -- President Obama huddled with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top military advisers at the White House on Friday as the administration continued its sweeping review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
Each branch of the armed services was given a direct opportunity to tell Obama the effect on the military if a large number of additional forces are sent to Afghanistan, two military sources told CNN's Barbara Starr.
The meeting was the seventh in a series of high-level discussions being held in part to forge a consensus on how best to confront Taliban and al Qaeda militants threatening the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"The president wants to get input from different services," White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said earlier this week. "It's a chance to consult with uniformed military leadership as a part of his [Afghanistan-Pakistan] review."
The potential for a major expansion of the number of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan comes with some misgivings from the military chiefs. The Army and Marine Corps have expressed concerns that it could make it tougher to give troops promised time at home with their families between overseas tours.
The White House strategy review is being conducted against a backdrop of rising U.S. casualties in Afghanistan and increased Taliban violence.
October has already become the deadliest month for U.S. forces since the war began in late 2001, with the deaths of 56 American troops.
Taliban militants have become increasingly bold. This week, they attacked a U.N. guesthouse in central Kabul, killing five U.N. staff members.
There also is political turmoil surrounding a planned November 7 Afghan presidential election runoff. On Friday, a source close to the Afghan leadership told CNN that President Hamid Karzai's runoff opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, would withdraw from the race.
The presidential campaign has become increasingly contentious as Abdullah demanded the removal of the country's election chief and 200 other staffers of the election commission to ensure a fair runoff.
Abdullah and others have charged that massive fraud occurred in the first round of voting on August 20. The initial results gave Karzai the win, but a subsequent review by a U.N.-backed panel of election monitors threw out nearly one-third of Karzai's votes because of "clear and convincing evidence of fraud."
The result left Karzai short of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. After a flurry of meetings with U.S. and U.N. officials, the Afghan president agreed to the runoff.
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Obama holds crisis meeting on Afghanistan
October 30, 2009 Press TV
As the US mulls sending more troops to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama is set to hold a meeting with top army chiefs for talks on ongoing battles in the south Asian region.
The meeting will take place later on Friday, a day after the US President attended the return of more than a dozen caskets holding American troops killed in Afghanistan.
Obama has invited the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the White House' Situation Room to hear their input on his war plan. They are also expected to discuss troop numbers.
Obama has spent weeks deliberating over a request by his top war General in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, for 40000 more troops.
The developments come following a Taliban attack on a Kabul guesthouse, which killed UN staffers, including an American.
The insurgents have killed dozens of US-led troops in the troubled southern and eastern provinces, where insurgency has skyrocketed over past few months and opium trade is booming with devastating global consequences.
It has been widely reported that opium production in Afghanistan has grown steadily and significantly since the US-led invasion of the country eight years ago.
In addition, nearly 30,000 Pakistani soldiers have been deployed to fight against the insurgents based in the northwestern tribal area, which borders Afghanistan.
US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton during her visit to Pakistan recognized that the country's media and public have often been openly hostile towards the United States.
Clinton's visit coincided with a deadly attack in Peshawar, killing more than 105 people and sending shock waves across the nation.
Over 5,000 US soldiers have, thus far, died in action in Iraq and Afghanistan during the eight-year-old US 'war on terror' and thousands more have received injuries in the several-hundred-billion-dollar conflict.
The US began the costly war on terror in 2001 under former US president George w. Bush's doctrine to allegedly eradicate militancy in the region and to arrest main militant leaders including al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The first military power in the world which has been accompanied with a number of other powerful Western states says it has failed to kill or arrest any of the main militant leaders.
American public opinion is already fragile on the war over the mounting US death toll in the war-torn country.
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Obama won't 'micromanage' generals in Afghanistan: Clinton
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama will lay out broad strategic guidelines for Afghanistan after November 7 runoff elections there but will not "micromanage" the generals fighting the war, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday.
Clinton made the remarks when asked whether forces would be pulled back from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border under a new strategy that reportedly will refocus the US-led military effort on protecting Afghan population centers.
"The president is not going to micromanage what our generals do," she said in an interview with PBS television.
"The president is going to say, 'Here's our strategic objectives, here's what is needed for us to meet the mission we have, here are the troops that you're going to be given, here are the civilians and the political strategy that we are integrating.'"
"But he's not going to be looking at a map and saying, 'Do you have two people there and four people there?' That's not the way it's done," she said.
Clinton said she had discussed Afghanistan with Pakistani military and intelligence leaders during a visit this week to Pakistan, and mentioned a story circulating that the United States and its allies had removed a lot of troops from the border.
"But that's not the case, and they know that; that we have actually beefed up our border, but we're changing the way that we are taking on the border responsibilities," she said.
"These small isolated outposts that have been tried are not the best way, so there's going to be some consolidation, some more patrolling, but there are actually more troops, not fewer," she added.
Clinton also clarified a comment she made earlier that Obama would announce his decision on Afghan strategy, including his commander's request for more troops, after Afghanistan's presidential elections were "finally resolved."
She said she did not mean that he would wait until all election challenges were settled.
"So there'll be the run-off on November 7, and hopefully, the results will be in sooner than they were from the first round," she said.
"But since our strategy really does take into account what the Afghans themselves are willing to do -- not just in Kabul, but certainly Kabul is a big piece of this, and the president, his cabinet, however that turns out, governors, district leaders, all kinds of responsible parties -- we want to make sure that they know what we're expecting of them.
"And it's been a little difficult to present that until we know exactly how this is turning out,' she said.
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Clinton says US can find way out of Afghanistan
AP via Yahoo! News - Oct 30 4:26 AM
WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the U.S. presence in wartorn Afghanistan "is not an open-ended, never-ending commitment."
In an interview from Pakistan broadcast Friday on NBC's "Today" show, Clinton replied "absolutely" when asked whether there is a way out for America in the protracted conflict in South Asia.
In a separate interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," she was asked if the United States is losing the war in Afghanistan. The secretary said, "No, I don't think so." She also said the decision that President Barack Obama will soon make about how to proceed next will not "be just a repeat of the same old approach. ... I think that will be evident."
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Adding Afghanistan troops could cost $500,000 per person
By Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon Correspondent October 30, 2009
Washington (CNN) -- If President Obama decides to send the 40,000 additional forces to Afghanistan as requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a rough estimate by the Pentagon projects the cost could be an additional $20 billion a year, according to a senior Pentagon official.
The official said the Defense Department comptrollers office has told Congress that based on rough estimates, the total cost of keeping an individual service member in the war zone is now about $500,000 a year.
That includes the costs of personnel operations and maintenance costs, some equipment and hazardous duty pay.
The actual costs could be higher, because the estimate does not include the cost of constructing additional facilities, providing support forces such as military intelligence assets that may be based outside Afghanistan or replacing damaged weapons or equipment. The official emphasized that until there is a formal troop plan, the costs are just estimated.
The official would not be identified because the estimates are not official.
The ongoing review of the strategy for Afghanistan continued Friday, with Obama meeting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and the heads of the four military services.
The heads of the Army and Marines, who provide the bulk of troops for the war, have expressed concern that if they send a large number of additional troops, they will have to cut down on the time troops spend in between deployments, known as "dwell time."
Marines have only about 8,000 troops they can add without impinging on dwell time. The Army has about 12 brigades, or approximately 48,000 soldiers, that are not deployed or committed to deploy.
Regardless of the number of troops being sent, a deployment will be phased over time because of the lack of facilities in the country to house and support a large deployment, the official said.
McChrystal's plan calls for sending a majority of the forces he is requesting to the south, especially to reinforce Kandahar and Helmand provinces, and the region around Kabul, several military and Pentagon sources said. McChrystal also intends to reserve a number of forces for training Afghan forces, officials said.
But one official noted that if that plan is put into effect, additional forces would be needed to be sent to areas that the Taliban might then flee, such as the northern region.
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Ban Seeks Protection, Funds After UN Workers Killed in Kabul
By Bill Varner and Paul Tighe
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed for more protection from U.S. and allied forces for UN personnel after an attack by the Taliban killed five workers at a guesthouse in the capital, Kabul.
“We need the support of member states,” Ban said yesterday after the Security Council met at his request. “We must realistically assess the situation and put in place more effective protections for our staff.”
Ban said he will go to the General Assembly today to seek expedited approval of funds for security to “meet the dramatically escalated threat” to UN workers.
Three gunmen attacked a Kabul guesthouse at dawn two days ago, armed with assault rifles, grenades and wearing suicide vests. The militants targeted international workers as they tried to escape. The Taliban has stepped up attacks as the UN helps the country prepare for the Nov. 7 runoff presidential election.
Ban said he’s seeking approval for a $471 million two-year security budget that includes a $40 million annual increase. He will also ask for the creation of an emergency discretionary fund of as much as $50 million for security measures, according to the UN press office.
Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, in a telephone call yesterday, said security forces will increase support for the UN mission and its workers, Ban told reporters in New York.
“I urged him again that he should take immediate action to strengthen the security measures for the premises and staff for their safety,” he said.
Pakistan Bombing
The Oct. 28 attack and a bombing the same day in neighboring Pakistan that killed 107 people in Peshawar, increased pressure on President Barack Obama to find a strategy to contain the Taliban and its allies. Obama, who is weighing a request by General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, to send more troops, said earlier this week he wouldn’t rush a “solemn decision” on which lives may depend.
The UN confined most workers to their living quarters in Afghanistan and is continuing only critical operations in the country, spokesman Farhan Haq said. Ban said workers would be centered in Kabul and other main cities and that he would consider hiring private security companies and will ask the international forces to increase their support.
“This will be particularly important during the interim election period, with a special emphasis on areas outside Kabul where UN security is clearly insufficient,” Ban said.
Workers Escape
Gunfire and explosions echoed across Kabul during the two- hour raid carried out by gunmen wearing Afghan police uniforms, the Associated Press reported. As the guesthouse caught fire and filled with smoke, UN workers climbed over the roof or leapt from windows to escape, the news agency said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the assault and rocket attacks on the presidential palace and the luxury Serena Hotel, AP said. One rocket struck the outer limits of the palace, while two fell in the grounds of the hotel, forcing guests to flee to the basement. Nobody was injured, AP added.
The guesthouse is privately run and on a UN list of residences the world body deems secure enough to host its workers, spokesman Aleem Siddique said.
The slain UN employees are citizens of the U.S., Ethiopia, Liberia, Ghana and the Philippines, the UN said.
Kabul has been on alert for a militant assault as Afghans prepare to choose between incumbent President Hamid Karzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. The capital has been hit several times in recent weeks, including a suicide bombing outside the Indian Embassy on Oct. 8 that killed 17 people.
The runoff was triggered by a partial recount of the Aug. 20 vote that found more than 1 million ballots, most of them for Karzai, were suspect, putting his tally below the more than 50 percent needed to win in the first round.
To contact the reporters on this story: Bill Varner at the United Nations at wvarner@bloomberg.net; Paul Tighe in Sydney at ptighe@bloomberg.net.
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U.N. Says Afghan Police, Troops Took Too Long to Respond to Attack
Friday, October 30, 2009 Associated Press via Fox News
KABUL — The United Nations demanded to know Friday why it took an hour for Afghan police and NATO troops to respond to a terrorist attack on a guest house filled with U.N. election workers in Kabul.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said U.N. security officers held off the attackers for at least an hour with no outside help, fighting in the corridors and on the rooftops and saving many, many lives. He said two Afghan security guards outside the house appear to have been killed immediately by militants carrying grenades and automatic weapons and wearing suicide vests.
He spoke Friday at a town hall meeting at U.N. headquarters where hundreds of staff members stood in silent tribute to the five U.N. staff members killed in Wednesday's attack — including two U.N. security officers.
The deadly assault, which left 11 dead including three attackers, pointed to one of the deficiencies in plans for protecting sensitive targets in Kabul.
Afghan authorities are the designated first responders in attacks against civilians in the capital, and the better-equipped and better-trained NATO force is supposed to intervene only if asked by the Afghans.
Although the guest house was full of U.N. employees, the building itself was a privately owned Afghan business.
"Of course we make all efforts to support our international partners at all times," NATO spokesman James Appathurai said in Brussels. "But Afghan forces have the lead for security in Kabul and did not request support from ISAF."
In Kabul, Jamil Jumbish, a top Interior Ministry official who is chief of Afghanistan's criminal investigation police, denied that Afghan authorities were slow to respond.
He said Afghan police were stationed in the district and reached the site of the attack "very quickly." He said reinforcements were also sent in shortly after.
Jumbish, however, did not specify how long it took police to respond to the attack.
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SKorea to send troops to Afghanistan to protect aid workers
SEOUL, Oct 30, 2009 (AFP) - South Korea will send troops and police to Afghanistan to protect an expanded aid mission there, the foreign ministry said Friday.
"The government has decided to expand its provincial reconstruction team to more actively join in efforts to stabilise and rehabilitate Afghanistan," said spokesman Moon Tae-Young
A "proper" number of troops and police would be sent to protect them, he said, without giving figures.
Foreign Minister Yu Myung-Hwan told parliament Monday the government plans to raise the number of its aid workers to 130 from about 25 currently.
Moon stressed that police and troops would take part in combat only if necessary to protect the aid workers.
Ministry sources quoted by Yonhap news agency said the government plans to operate an independent team of about 130 civilians and 200-300 military personnel.
Currently the 25 South Korean medical staff and job training experts work inside the US base at Bagram, north of Kabul, to help a US-led team.
South Korea sent 210 engineering and medical troops to Afghanistan in 2002 but withdrew them in December 2007.
Taliban insurgents who took 23 South Korean church volunteers hostage in the summer of 2007 and murdered two of them had demanded the force be pulled out -- a move Seoul said was already scheduled.
South Korea, a close US ally, also sent non-combat troops to Iraq. It withdrew them last December after four years.
Troops could be deployed early next year if parliament approves the move.
The government will send a fact-finding team to Afghanistan next month before deciding where its team will be based and how many people will be sent.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week after annual security talks here that he made no specific request to Seoul for assistance.
But he said he welcomed international contributions towards the cost of expanding the Afghan army and civilian projects.
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Outside View: The why and how of Afghanistan
WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- Matthew P. Hoh is a former U.S. Marine Corps captain and, until recently, the U.S. Department of State senior civilian representative in Zabul province, Afghanistan. His recent resignation was based not on "how we are pursuing this war" but "why and to what end."
As resignation letters go, Hoh's was a masterpiece. In my opinion, many of his observations ring true, but one could offer alternative interpretations.
Terrorism directed against the United States and Western countries originates primarily from sanctuaries in failed, unstable or rogue states. That is, nations that either cannot constrain them or willingly tolerate them. In this respect, one needs to distinguish between potential bases of operations, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, and operational cells within target countries such as the United States, Spain and Britain. Groups like al-Qaida would not thrive very long in the latter unless we permitted them to do so.
Al-Qaida and the Taliban have provided a "rally point" for numerous other radical Islamic groups as well as Afghan or Pakistani tribal factions opposed to their central governments or the presence of foreign troops.
Hoh is correct in noting that many of the strategies the United States and NATO have attempted in Afghanistan have often produced the opposite of their intended effects. History and the cross-border tribal structure in Afghanistan and Pakistan should have taught us that a bottom-up strategy is probably more appropriate than a top-down approach based on Western views of governance and culture. In that regard, we might be better served using tribal rather than geographical maps.
We must also recognize that we are dealing with an evolving strategic and political situation. We should not base our judgments or plan future strategies using only past or present snapshots in time. We are not fighting the Taliban or al-Qaida of 2001. Both groups are now operating out of bases in western Pakistan precisely because the United States, coalition forces and indigenous Afghan factions such as the Northern Alliance pushed them out of Afghanistan. In the last eight years Western and Pakistani politico-military errors have contributed to a growth of the insurgency and instability in western Pakistan. One hastens to add, however, that the enemy gets a vote. Greater coordination among insurgent groups has varied based on their own self-interest and the operational environment.
According to his Washington Post interview, Hoh recommends that we "reduce our combat forces significantly with the ultimate aim of withdrawal in a year or two's time, reduce our development work, reverse the relationship of resources committed to Afghanistan and Pakistan, engage politically at the lowest level possible with Afghan leadership, to include Taliban and force Pakistan to remove the sanctuary offered to the Quetta shura in Pakistan."
It may be dangerous to assume that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan would return us to the status quo ante of 2001. We could be facing a Taliban with far greater aspirations and an already entrenched insurgency in western Pakistan. Would abandoning Afghanistan encourage either Pakistan or the Taliban to disband the Quetta shura? Would such a strategy simply shift the U.S. and NATO effort across the Durand Line from Afghanistan into western Pakistan? One wonders.
Hoh states that "the Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple seemingly infinite local groups … fights not for the white banner of the Taliban but against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul."
I have no reason to doubt his view, but it also sounds familiar. According to the U.S. Department of Defense's November 2006 report to Congress, "Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq," programs for national reconciliation and disarmament are difficult to design and implement due to the presence of numerous illegal armed groups, whose personal loyalties to sub-national groups, such as tribe, sect or political party, are often stronger than loyalty to Iraq as a nation-state and condone or maintain support for violent means as a source of political leverage.
Up until now the United States and NATO have largely fought the Taliban insurgency from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. That is, to become insurgents inside the insurgency, controlling events rather than reacting to them. We need to disconnect the dots, to disrupt the various insurgent networks, sow confusion and disorder among them and isolate them from the people. Sometimes doing nothing about locally generated animosities or even leveraging them may be part of that equation.
The Pashtuns remain the center of gravity in Afghanistan. The same cultural fault lines that have worked against us up until now could again work in our favor as they did 2001. We need to appreciate better the Pashtunwali or "the way of the Pashtun" and focus our efforts selectively and from the bottom up.
Nothing is possible, however, if we don't understand "why" we are in Afghanistan. The "how" of it is a different matter.
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NATO Supporting Insurgents? Not Exactly
Commentary by Killid Correspondents* IPS-Inter Press Service
KABUL, Oct 30 (IPS) - The U.S. and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) have spent billions of dollars, sacrificed hundreds of lives and worked for years to fight insurgents and foster democracy in Afghanistan.
Though it now appears that the western appetite for continuing this endeavor may be waning, some - in the U.S. at least - would like to increase their country's commitment to Afghanistan, by increasing the U.S. force size by as many as 40,000 more soldiers.
Despite this U.S. history of sacrifice for Afghanistan, there are some - perhaps many -here who are extremely mistrustful of the coalition's motives, and even go so far as to accuse the U.S. and its allies of materially supporting Taliban and other insurgent groups.
Two weeks ago, President Hamid Karzai claimed that insurgents were using helicopters to insert fighters into northern Afghanistan and Noor-Ul-Haq Ollumi, head of the Afghan House's National Security Committee, seconded the statement. The insinuation was that because insurgents are thought to not have helicopters, they must have been getting them from someone whom does.
U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry denied that such airborne insertions were taking place, saying that since U.S. soldiers were actively trying to secure Afghanistan, helping insurgents would be counterproductive.
Last week, a series of stories in The London Times alleged that the Italian intelligence service paid off insurgents in Sarobi district, near Kabul, and Herat province in western Afghanistan, not to attack their soldiers. The Times reported that Italian intelligence service paid "tens of thousands of dollars to Taliban commanders and local warlords to keep the area quiet."
An anonymous NATO commander was quoted in that story, saying, "It was payments of tens of thousands of dollars regularly to individual insurgent commanders. It was to stop Italian casualties that would cause political difficulties at home." Both the Italian and Afghan governments strenuously deny the allegations, though a Taliban commander as well as two Afghan military officials, in a follow up story by The Times, corroborated the account.
Given the rift created between NATO countries over the story, the possibility that this is a Taliban intelligence operation should not be disregarded either.
Hervé Morin, the French defense minister, said the idea that an army might pay Taliban insurgents not to attack them would breach established military doctrine. "I have no reason to question the word of the Italian Government," Morin says.
Canada has also been forced to deny similar reports. A foreign wire service quoted an Afghan Army source as saying that Canadian soldiers in Kandahar province had made payments to insurgents.
"With the number of casualties we've been getting, had we paid these guys they wouldn't be holding up their end of the bargain," said Lieutenant-Colonel Chris Lemay, a spokesman with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces Command.
Nevertheless, revelations such as these do not exactly endear the NATO coalition to the Afghan people. Double-dealing with insurgents while touting the success of the Italian military - as The Times also describes - strikes people as dishonest because that's exactly what it is.
Further, Afghans find it hard to believe that the U.S. and NATO cannot defeat insurgents despite having impressive arsenals, air-power, satellite technology and endless resources with which to fight. Rather than beating the insurgents and securing Afghanistan, the coalition has withdrawn from key areas such as eastern Nuristan, leaving them in the hands of insurgents, who will soon be reinforced by others from across the nearby Pakistan border.
The U.S. also knows very well - as does everybody - that Pakistan is a crucial and sizable haven for Afghan insurgents, yet the U.S. rewards Pakistan by handing them a multi-billion dollar aid package.
And though the U.S. talks the talk of democracy and human rights in Afghanistan, they have supported many governments in Pakistan that have subverted that country's rule of law and imprisoned journalists there.
To Afghans who cannot square the circle of these contradictions, the allegations and intimations, such as those made by President Karzai and The Times, are viewed at face value: A coalition country was assisting the insurgency, therefore the coalition has sympathies with the insurgents and does not want the best for Afghanistan. Any positive contributions that the coalition has made to this country are then viewed skeptically.
This puts NATO countries in the difficult position of having to be even better than the ideals they espouse and comport themselves with the utmost adherence to fair-play, transparency and respect for Afghan cultural traditions.
Afghan officials also have a role in this. It is not enough for them to merely finger-point at coalition missteps, but rather they must demonstrate that they have the resolve to deal firmly with governments in Islamabad and Tehran and insurgents here at home, while establishing a skilled, transparent and corruption-free government.
Until these challenges can be met, every half-baked theory - from the coalition helping insurgents, to Karzai conspiring with foreign governments against the Afghan people - will be met with nods of belief, rather than the sceptical derision they deserve.
*IPS and Killid, an independent Afghan group, are partners since 2004. (END/2009)
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U.S., NATO Forces Rely on Warlords for Security
By Gareth Porter* IPS-Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 (IPS) - The revelation by the New York Times Wednesday that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has long been on the payroll of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg of heavy dependence by U.S. and NATO counterinsurgency forces on Afghan warlords for security, according to a recently published report and investigations by Australian and Canadian journalists.
U.S. and other NATO military contingents operating in the provinces of Afghanistan's predominantly Pashtun south and east have been hiring private militias controlled by Afghan warlords, according to these sources, to provide security for their forward operating bases and other bases and to guard convoys.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has acknowledged that U.S. and NATO ties with warlords have been a cause of popular Afghan alienation from foreign military forces. But the policy is not likely to be reversed anytime soon, because U.S. and NATO officials still have no alternative to the security services the warlords provide.
A report published by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University in September notes that U.S. and NATO contingents have frequently hired security providers that are covertly owned by warlords who have "ready-made" private militias which compete with state institutions for power.
The report cites examples of major warlords or their relatives or allies who have been contracted for security services in four provinces.
In Uruzgan province, both U.S. and Australian Special Forces have contracted with a private army commanded by Col. Matiullah Khan, called Kandak Amniante Uruzgan, with 2,000 armed men, to provide security services on which their bases there depend. That case was reported in detail in April 2008 by two reporters for The Australian, Mark Dodd and Jeremy Kelly.
Col. Khan's security force protects NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoys on the main road from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt, where more than 1,000 Australian troops are based at Camp Holland, according to the The Australian in April 2008.
Col. Khan gets 340,000 dollars per month – nearly 4.1 million dollars annually - for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Khan, now police chief in Uruzgan province, evidently got his private army from his uncle Jan Mohammad Khan, a commander who helped defeat the Taliban in Kandahar in 2001 and was then rewarded by President Karzai by being named governor of Uruzgan in 2002.
The Australian Defence Force claimed to The Australian that Col. Khan is paid by the Afghan Ministry of Interior to provide security on the main highways of Uruzgan province. The Australian military had previously refused to confirm or deny Australian payments to Col. Khan.
CanWest News Service's Mike Blanchfield and Andrew Mayeda reported in November 2007 that the Canadian military had hired a "General Gulalai" to provide security for an undisclosed forward operating base. Gulalai is a warlord in southern Afghanistan who drove the Taliban out of Kandahar in 2001.
The same reporters revealed that Col. Haji Toorjan, a local warlord allied with Kandahar governor and major warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, was hired to provide security for Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City, where Canada's provincial construction team is located.
Blanchfeld and Mayeda found that the Canadian military had given 29 contracts worth 1.14 million dollars to a company identified as "Sherzai", suggesting strongly that the former governor of Kandahar, who had become governor of Nangarhar province, was the owner.
The Canadian military refused to confirm whether Gul Agha Sherzai is indeed the owner.
In Badakhshan province, Gen. Nazri Mahmed, a warlord who is said to "control a significant portion of the province's lucrative opium industry", has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team, according to the NYU report.
The report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan security providers, most of which are local power brokers guilty of human rights abuses.
In addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another brother of President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence Minister Rahim Wardak, as powerful figures who control private security firms that have gotten security contracts without registering with the government.
Two anonymous United Nations sources cited in the report estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 unregistered armed security groups have been "employed, trained, and armed by ISAF" and "Coalition Forces" for security services. As many as 120,000 armed individuals are estimated by the U.N. sources to belong to about 5,000 private militias in Afghanistan.
Most Afghan warlords are widely reviled, mainly because the private armies they continue to control carry out theft and violence against civilians without any accountability.
In his initial assessment last August, Gen. McChrystal referred to "public anger and alienation" toward ISAF, of which he is commander, as a result of the perception that ISAF is "complicit" in "widespread corruption and abuse of power".
That remark suggests that McChrystal, who had carried out the Special Forces' policy of relying on Afghan warlords for security in the past, was now expressing concern about its political consequences.
Jake Sherman, a co-author of the NYU report, was a United Nations political officer involved in the effort to disarm warlords from 2003 to 2005. He is sceptical that U.S. policy ties with the warlords will be ended.
"I don't see how U.S. and other contingents could sustain forward operating bases without paying these guys," said Sherman in an interview with IPS.
Beyond their continuing dependence on the warlords for security services, Sherman sees another reason for keeping them on the payroll. If the U.S. and NATO military commanders tried to cut their ties with the private militias, Sherman said the warlords "would actually become a security threat".
Sherman recalled that during his period working for the United Nations in northern Afghanistan, local police were hired to guard a World Food Programme warehouse in Badakhshan. After a rocket attack on the warehouse, an investigation quickly turned up the fact that the police themselves had carried out the attack to pressure the U.N. to hire more guards.
The present U.S. and NATO dependence on warlord armies is rooted in the policy of the George W. Bush administration in the early years after the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001.
The Central Intelligence Agency put the commanders of the forces who had defeated the Taliban on the payroll and gave them weapons and communications equipment to help U.S. counterterrorism squads locate any al Qaeda remnants in Afghanistan.
The commanders used the U.S. support to consolidate their political control over different provinces or sub-provincial areas. Human Rights Watch observed in a June 2002 report on the new relationships forged between the United States and the warlords, "While the U.S. government does not view this policy as actively supporting local warlords, the distinction is often lost on Afghan civilians who see coalition forces openly interacting with the warlords."
Larry Goodson of the National War College, who participated in the 2002 process called the Loya Jirga under which the first post-Taliban Afghan government was established, told IPS he had recommended from the beginning a "de-warlordisation" process, in which "we took nasty, sleazy characters and turn them into less nasty, sleazy bosses."
But the warlords were kept on the payroll, Goodson recalls, mainly because the troops controlled by the former commanders were seen as "force multipliers", in a situation where foreign troops were in short supply.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
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UN guard killed in Afghanistan hailed as hero
By Tamara Lush, Associated Press Writer
MIAMI – A United Nations security guard from Miami who died fighting Taliban attackers at a hotel in Afghanistan is being hailed as a hero by top U.N. staff for the lives he and another guard helped save.
Louis Maxwell, 27, and the other U.N. guard, Laurance Mefful of Ghana, held off the attackers for at least an hour, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday.
"They fought through the corridors of the building and from the rooftop," Ban told the U.N. General Assembly. "They held off the attackers long enough for their colleagues to escape, armed only with pistols against assailants carrying automatic weapons and grenades and wearing suicide vests."
Maxwell, a 2000 graduate of Miami Central High School, was the only American to die in the siege that left 11 people dead, including the attackers. Mefful was also killed.
On Friday afternoon, family and friends gathered at Maxwell's parents' home in South Florida. A bright white wreath was hung near the home's door.
Sandra Maxwell, Louis' mother, said her son was an outstanding trumpet player at Miami Central High School — so good that he was offered a full music scholarship to Florida A & M University. But he decided to enlist in the Navy after graduating and became a U.N. security guard in 2007.
"He had a heart, determination and was very conscientious in whatever he did," she said. "He just didn't give up."
That determination showed during his final hours, she said.
"I'm told from U.N. top officials that because of my son, 17 people are alive," she said, crying. "He was brave. He fought until he couldn't fight anymore.
"He paid the ultimate price. He was a hero."
The mother spoke with her son for the last time on Sunday.
"I said, 'I love you, be careful,'" she recalled.
"And he said, 'you know I will.' "
Funeral services in Miami have not been set.
___
Associated Press Writer Edith Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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Afghan Scholars Call On People To Vote In Runoff
October 29, 2009 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
KABUL -- The Kabul-based Council of Scholars says its members will take part in the second round of the presidential election, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reports.
The conservative religious council also called on all Afghans to take part in the second poll.
Council member Mawlawi Qyamuddin Kashaf told reporters on October 27 that Afghan citizens should not be afraid to participate in the elections, despite threats from Islamist insurgents.
Kashaf said it is up to Afghans to take the next step and elect a president who will be able to solve Afghanistan's major problem, insecurity.
He said that a president elected by the will of the people can do that.
The Council of Scholars also called for the new president-to-be to hold talks with the Taliban.
Incumbent Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah will compete in the runoff election on November 7.
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Clinton ends tough Pakistan trip
Friday, 30 October 2009 BBC News
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been meeting tribal leaders in north-west Pakistan on the last day of a testing visit to the country.
During her three-day trip Mrs Clinton hoped to strengthen ties between the US and Pakistan and tried to address a rising tide of anti-American feeling.
In an interview with the BBC she urged Pakistanis to "realise the connection" between al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
But her arrival was overshadowed by a deadly bombing in the city of Peshawar.
More than 100 people died when a car bomb exploded in a busy market on Wednesday.
The BBC's Jill McGivering says that a great deal of anger in Pakistan is focused on the Americans - widely seen as interfering and destabilising Pakistan for its own ends.
Mrs Clinton's tone has mainly been appeasing, our correspondent says, as she lavished praise on the army for its efforts to fight militancy.
Mrs Clinton also faced America's critics when she addressed a group of belligerent students in Lahore.
'Impressive resolve'
But speaking to Pakistani newspaper editors in Lahore on Thursday evening, she said she found it hard to believe that nobody in the Pakistani government knew where al-Qaeda was hiding in the country and "couldn't get them" if they wanted.
In an interview with the BBC, Mrs Clinton clarified her comments and the US view of the Pakistan government's commitment to combating militancy.
"Of course we are very encouraged to see what the government is doing. At the same time, it is just a fact that al-Qaeda had sought refuge in Pakistan after the US and our allies went after them because of the attack on 9/11," she said.
"And we want to encourage everyone, not just the Pakistan government or the military but Pakistani citizens to realise the connection between al-Qaeda and these Taliban extremists who are threatening Pakistan. They are part of a syndicate of terror."
Mrs Clinton said she was "very impressed by the resolve" of the Pakistani leadership in stamping out the militant threat.
But Mrs Clinton came face-to-face with many of the difficulties that have blighted Pakistan in recent weeks. On the day of her arrival, a massive car bomb obliterated a market in Peshawar.
It was just the latest in a series of attacks on civilian and military targets across the country - as Pakistan pursues an anti-Taliban offensive in the tribal region of South Waziristan.
Moreover resentment has been further stoked by a US bill which grants aid to Pakistan - but on certain conditions.
Our correspondent adds that it would be hard to imagine a more hostile and sceptical audience for a US secretary of state.
Mrs Clinton acknowledged there was what she called a trust deficit towards the United States in Pakistan because of past policies.
But she said she was working to change that by reaching out to ordinary Pakistanis.
Mrs Clinton is due in the Middle East at the weekend to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
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