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Fake Afghan Poll Sites Favored Karzai, Officials Assert
By DEXTER FILKINS and CARLOTTA GALL The New York Times September 7, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election
Observers: Neat vote totals show fraud in Afghan election
KABUL (AP) — At the Afghan polling station called Haji Nehmetullah House, every one of the 725 votes cast during the country's Aug. 20 election went to President Hamid Karzai. At another site, Haji Akhtar Mohammad House
Shadow of fraud lengthens over Afghan vote
by Waheedullah Massoud – Mon Sep 7, 7:15 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – The taint of fraud deepened in Afghanistan's election Monday after many thousands of votes were tossed out, as a planned international conference underlined mounting Western anxiety about the nation.
Karzai says United States wants to manipulate him
Mon Sep 7, 10:23 am ET
PARIS (Reuters) – Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai has accused the United States of denouncing his friends and family in an effort to undermine his own position and make him more malleable.
Karzai to talk with Taliban within 100 days: media
Mon Sep 7, 5:27 am ET
PARIS (AFP) – Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai hopes to hold peace talks with the Taliban within 100 days if he is re-elected, he told the French daily Le Figaro in an interview published on Monday.
Fictitious Afghan polling sites cited
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 7 (UPI) -- Loyalists established phantom polling sites to generate votes for Afghan President Hamid Karzai's re-election, sources told The New York Times.
Afghan officials cancel votes on fraud
Karzai remains in lead in latest partial tally
By Combined dispatches
KABUL, Afghanistan | Afghan electoral authorities Sunday announced the first cancellation of votes from last month's fraud-tainted elections as partial results showed President Hamid Karzai moving into a clear lead.
Italy backs calls for international Afghan meeting
Reuters via Yahoo! UK & Ireland News
Italy threw its weight on Monday behind calls for an international conference on Afghanistan to deal with security issues and to get political commitments from the new Afghan government on future plans. Skip related content
Secret pardon frees Afghan journalism student
By Heidi Vogt, Associated Press Writer – Mon Sep 7, 9:48 am ET
KABUL – An Afghan journalism student who was jailed for asking questions in class about women's rights under Islam has been freed after nearly two years, a media rights group said Monday.
Merkel to face critics on deadly Afghanistan air strike
by Deborah Cole Deborah Cole
BERLIN (AFP) – Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed Monday to address parliament over a deadly air strike in Afghanistan ordered by a German commander as her government came under fire 20 days before elections.
Rift widens between US and Germany over botched Afghanistan air strike
German foreign minister calls attack 'necessary' as US commanders criticise ordering mission that left 70 civilians dead
Ewen MacAskill in Washington Kate Connolly in Berlin guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 September 2009 19.09 BST
A rift between the US and Germany over the conduct of the war in Afghanistan widened today as both countries sought to shift blame over a botched bombing raid that led to scores of civilians being killed.
Germany urges caution on Afghan criticism
By Melissa Eddy, Associated Press Writer
BERLIN – Germany struggled Monday to defend the decision to call in a deadly airstrike in northern Afghanistan last week, deflecting international criticism of the attack that came just weeks after NATO ordered
Taliban demand air strike inquiry
Monday, 7 September 2009 BBC News
The Taliban have called for a UN and human rights investigation into an air strike in Afghanistan on Friday that killed dozens of people.
Taliban expands grip over northern Afghanistan
Maria Golovnina and Mohammad Hamed, Reuters September 7, 2009, 11:20 pm
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A road snaking through the lush green valleys of northern Afghanistan is festooned with cheerful billboards depicting Afghan soldiers guarding groups of smiling civilians.
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan 'a real problem': Gates
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged in an interview with Al Jazeera that civilian casualties have become "a real problem" for the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan.
Canada confirms two soldiers killed in Afghanistan
Mon Sep 7, 10:56 am ET
MONTREAL (AFP) – Canada on Monday confirmed that two of its soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan by a roadside bomb that struck their armored vehicle.
3 killed in Kabul rocket attack
KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Three people died when rockets slammed into northwestern Kabul late Sunday, a government official said.
Charity: US troops stormed through Afghan hospital
By Kay Johnson, Associated Press Writer
KABUL – A Swedish charity accused American troops Monday of storming through a hospital in central Afghanistan, breaking down doors and tying up staff in a search for militants. The U.S. military said it was investigating.
US soldier killed by IED in Afghanistan: ISAF
Mon Sep 7, 4:34 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Three NATO soldiers were killed in Afghanistan by roadside bombs, the weapon of choice for an invigorated Taliban insurgency, NATO announced, adding Monday that another had died in a firefight.
A Return Visit to Kabul: Is Time Running Out?
By Tim McGirk time.com Monday, Sep. 07, 2009
It was exhilarating flying back to Kabul after being gone for three years. The plane came in low from the east, in the coppery light of dawn, and I could make out the canyons of the Kabul Gorge where, in 1842,
Europe 'big three' call for Afghanistan conference
by Simon Sturdee – Mon Sep 7, 12:56 am ET
BERLIN (AFP) – Britain, France and Germany have unveiled proposals for an international conference on Afghanistan later this year in order to press Afghans to take more responsibility for their own country.
Military air transit to Afghanistan via Russia has not begun yet - FM
MOSCOW, September 7 (Itar-Tass) -- Air transit of military cargoes through Russia for the coalition forces in Afghanistan has not begun yet, Foreign Ministry deputy spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov said on Monday.
Should Obama go 'all in' on Afghanistan?
Los Angeles Times By Andrew J. Bacevich September 7, 2009
Before the president bets his chips on a military solution, he should figure out if there are other cards that can be played.
UN calls for improving access to literacy program in Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 7 (Xinhua) -- Shigeru Aoyagi, the Country Director of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Monday urged all stakeholders in Afghanistan to take serious
Armed men gun down working woman in S Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 7 (Xinhua) -- Unknown armed men shot dead a woman worked outside home in Kandahar province the birthplace of Taliban in south Afghanistan on Monday, police said.
Zardari Says Battle Against Taliban Saving Pakistan’s Integrity
Bloomberg By Paul Tighe Sept. 7, 2009
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said the army’s successful operation against the Taliban in the Swat Valley is preserving the country’s integrity.
Creating an audience from the void
Himal Southasian By: Aunohita Mojumdar September 2009
After decades of upheaval, Afghanistan today finds itself unable to remember its cultural past.
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Fake Afghan Poll Sites Favored Karzai, Officials Assert
By DEXTER FILKINS and CARLOTTA GALL The New York Times September 7, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here.
The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr. Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. That pattern was confirmed by another Western official based in Afghanistan.
“We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the senior Western diplomat said. “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”
Besides creating the fake sites, Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai, the officials said.
The result, the officials said, is that in some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10. “We are talking about orders of magnitude,” the senior Western diplomat said.
The widening accounts of fraud pose a stark problem for the Obama administration, which has 68,000 American troops deployed here to help reverse gains by Taliban insurgents. American officials hoped that the election would help turn Afghans away from the Taliban by giving them a greater voice in government. Instead, the Obama administration now faces the prospect of having to defend an Afghan administration for the next five years that is widely seen as illegitimate.
“This was fraud en masse,” the Western diplomat said.
Most of the fraud perpetrated on behalf of Mr. Karzai, officials said, took place in the Pashtun-dominated areas of the east and south where officials said that turnout on Aug. 20 was exceptionally low. That included Mr. Karzai’s home province, Kandahar, where preliminary results indicate that more than 350,000 ballots have been turned in to be counted. But Western officials estimated that only about 25,000 people actually voted there.
Waheed Omar, the main spokesman for Mr. Karzai’s campaign, acknowledged Sunday that there had been cases of fraud committed by different candidates. But he accused the president’s opponents of trying to score political points by making splashy accusations in the news media. “There have been cases — we have reported numerous cases — and our view is the only place where discussion can be held is in the Election Complaints Commission,” he said.
American officials have mostly kept a public silence about the fraud allegations. A senior American official said Sunday that they were looking into the allegations behind the scenes. “An absence of public statements does not mean an absence of concern and engagement on these issues,” the official said.
But a different Western official in Kabul said that there were divisions among the international community and Afghan political circles over how to proceed. This official said he believed the next four or five days would decide whether the entire electoral process would stand or fall. “This is crunch time,” he said.
Adding to the drumbeat, on Sunday the deputy director of the Afghan Independent Election Commission said that the group was disqualifying all the ballots cast in 447 polling sites because of fraud. The deputy director, Daoud Ali Najafi, said it was not clear how many votes had been affected, or what percentage they represented of the total. He gave no details of what fraud had been discovered.
With about three-quarters of the ballots counted in the Aug. 20 election, Mr. Karzai leads with nearly 49 percent of the vote, compared with 32 percent for his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent, the election goes to a runoff.
Officials in Kabul say it will probably take months before the Election Complaints Commission, which is dominated by Westerners appointed by the United Nations, will be able to declare a winner. Such an interregnum with no clear leader in office could prove destabilizing for a country that is already beset by ethnic division and an increasingly violent insurgency.
One opposition candidate for president, Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister, said that the scale of the fraud on Election Day had deeply damaged the political process that was being slowly built in Afghanistan.
“For five years Mr. Karzai was my president,” he said in an interview at his home in Kabul. “Now how many Afghans will consider him their president?”
Since ballots were cast last month, anecdotal evidence has emerged of widespread fraud across the Pashtun-dominated areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where Mr. Karzai has many allies. Many of the allegations come from Kandahar Province, where Mr. Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is the chairman of the provincial council and widely regarded as the most powerful man in the region. Last week, the governor of Shorabak District, which lies in Kandahar Province, claimed that Hamid Karzai’s allies shut down all the polling centers in the area and falsified 23,900 ballots for Mr. Karzai.
Two provincial council candidates in Kandahar, both close to the government, confirmed that widespread pro-Karzai fraud had occurred, in particular in places where poor security prevented observers and candidates’ representatives from watching.
“Now people will not trust the provincial council and the government system,” said Muhammad Ehsan, the deputy head of the provincial council, who was running for re-election. “Now people understand who has come to power and how.”
Hajji Abdul Majid, 75, the chief of the tribal elders council in Argestan District, in Kandahar Province, said that despite the fact that security forces opened the town’s polling place, no one voted, so any result from his district would be false.
“The people know that the government just took control of the district center for that day of the elections,” he said. “People are very frustrated. They don’t believe in the government.”
He added: “If Karzai is re-elected, people will leave the country or join the Taliban.”
More evidence of fraud has emerged in the past few days. In Zangabad, about 20 miles west of Kandahar, local residents say no voting took place on Aug. 20. The village’s single polling site, the Sulaiman Mako School, is used by Taliban guerrillas as their headquarters, the residents said. The area around Zangabad is one of the most contested in Afghanistan. Despite the nonexistent turnout, Afghan election records show that nearly 2,000 ballots were collected from the Sulaiman Mako School and sent to Kabul to be counted by election officials.
The allegations in Zangabad are being echoed throughout the Panjwai District. Official Afghan election records show that 16 polling centers were supposed to be open on Election Day. But according to at least one local leader, only a fraction of that number actually existed.
Haji Agha Lalai is a senior member of the provincial council in Kandahar, where Panjwai is located. As a candidate for re-election, he sent election observers across the area, including to Panjwai. In an interview, Mr. Lalai said that only “five or six” polling centers were open in Panjwai District that day — far fewer than the 16 claimed by the Afghan government.
So far, the Independent Election Commission has released results from seven of Panjwai District’s polling centers. The tally so far: 5,213 votes for Mr. Karzai, 328 for Mr. Abdullah.
Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul and Istanbul, and Carlotta Gall from Kandahar and Kabul.
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Observers: Neat vote totals show fraud in Afghan election
KABUL (AP) — At the Afghan polling station called Haji Nehmetullah House, every one of the 725 votes cast during the country's Aug. 20 election went to President Hamid Karzai. At another site, Haji Akhtar Mohammad House, the incumbent got each of the precisely 400 ballots cast.
Allegations of ballot box stuffing, voter intimidation and other fraud have been lodged from all corners of the country following last month's presidential contest. An Associated Press examination of returns shows what officials said Monday appear to be highly suspicious — and improbable — results.
Stations across Afghanistan's south gave Karzai 200, 250 or 500 votes, according to figures compiled by the Independent Election Commission. Observers say these neatly rounded numbers show patterns of fraud consistent with allegations that large-scale vote rigging took place in dangerous regions that observers couldn't reach.
A senior Western diplomat alleged Monday that a majority of the votes in three provinces —Kandahar, Paktika and Khost — are fraudulent. Partial returns from each of those provinces heavily favor Karzai. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his work.
At the Zoor District Center in Paktika province, Karzai got 300, 250, 200 and 200 votes at four of the center's six polling stations. As of Monday, the votes were still listed as part of the overall tally.
A Western elections expert in Kabul called such returns "illogical." He also spoke on condition he wasn't identified because of the nature of his work.
Afghan and international officials had predicted that vote fraud would occur, but hoped the election would be credible overall. Instead, the scale of the accusations and the questionable returns has thrown the ballot process in doubt.
The Western diplomat, one of Kabul's power brokers, said that several people had advised Karzai before the election "not to pull a Nixon. That is, don't steal an election you've already won."
The elections expert, meanwhile, said many of the suspicious results came from voting stations that didn't exist, supposedly located in remote parts of the country that Afghan tribal chiefs knew observers couldn't reach and where security forces would not be posted.
He said there were likely as many as 800 such fake polling sites.
Another expert here conceded the credibility of the election is in question.
"The amount of allegations indicate that there has been massive fraud, but we need to wait for the Election Complaints Commission to do its investigations," said Haroun Mir, the director of Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy Studies.
A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, said Monday that the U.S. is looking for election officials to count all votes and then "exclude all fraudulent votes."
"Anything less than rigorous vetting would call into question the credibility of the announced results," she said. "A legitimate electoral process is vital to the ability of the international community to partner with a newly elected Afghan government."
The Independent Election Commission on Monday took down results it had previously posted on its website that showed Karzai won 4,085 and 4,049 of votes cast at two polling stations in Kandahar province.
These were among about 12,000 votes once counted for Karzai that the IEC has withdrawn, according to an Associated Press review of voting data.
The country's election commission has slowly been releasing results from the Aug. 20 vote. With results from 74% of polling stations, Karzai has 48.6%, while top challenger Abdullah Abdullah has 31.7%.
The commission is expected to release its completed count Tuesday. Once it does, the separate U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission will investigate about 650 allegations of serious fraud.
Only after the complaints panel's investigations are over can the results be finalized.
If Karzai has less than 50% of ballots cast, a two-man run-off will be held with Abdullah.
Spokeswoman Nellika Little said the Electoral Complaints Commission has received complaints questioning the tallies at stations where Karzai won 100% of votes.
She said the panel is also studying allegations that election officials have received returns from polling stations that were never approved to open, or shut down by violence or closed for other reasons on election day.
Should Karzai win a second term, a tainted election could significantly affect his standing in the West.
The Western diplomat noted that U.S. and European support for the Afghan mission is already eroding because of growing troop casualties. After adding high levels of vote fraud, "you have to ask what are our sons and daughters dying for. It's hard to make the case it's for democracy."
Karzai says the allegations of electoral fraud are part of a U.S. campaign of intimidation.
In an interview published Monday in the French newspaper Le Figaro, Karzai said "the Americans" were attacking him secretly because they would like him to be more docile, but that "nobody has an interest in the Afghan president becoming an American puppet."
It is not unusual for candidates in Afghanistan to win by overwhelming margins in given districts, because voters tend to cast ballots for candidates endorsed by their tribal leadership.
But the senior Western diplomat likened appearances of fraud to a U.S. Supreme Court judge's definition of obscenity: You know it when you see it.
One government official, the diplomat said, told him tribal voting patterns explained the overwhelming margin of victory Karzai had in some voting centers. The diplomat responded: "Is it also true that you always organize yourself into groups of 500?"
Among the 12,000 Karzai votes withdrawn on Monday were 950 votes from the Hasti village mosque in Paktika province. Karzai had received 350, 350 and 250 votes at the mosque's three polling sites — 100% of votes cast.
Mir said Karzai's supporters in the south stuffed ballot boxes because they were afraid he might lose. Because the president appears to have gotten many votes in northern areas, he said, such cheating wasn't needed.
"It turned out to be a mistake by his supporters," Mir said. "It will have a negative effect on the legitimacy of Karzai's next five years."
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Shadow of fraud lengthens over Afghan vote
by Waheedullah Massoud – Mon Sep 7, 7:15 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – The taint of fraud deepened in Afghanistan's election Monday after many thousands of votes were tossed out, as a planned international conference underlined mounting Western anxiety about the nation.
President Hamid Karzai is edging towards the 50-percent mark needed to avoid a run-off ballot against former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, according to the latest batch of results from the August 20 election.
But allegations of rampant ballot-stuffing and intimidation by Karzai loyalists are threatening to undermine the victor's credibility, as the West battles to shore up his government against a reinvigorated Taliban insurgency.
Three NATO soldiers were killed at the weekend by roadside bombs, the Taliban militia's weapon of choice, and another died in a firefight, alliance officials said.
A rocket fired at a house in Kabul meanwhile killed three members of one family and wounded two others, Afghan officials said, underlining the insurgent threat.
In an interview with French daily Le Figaro published on Monday, Karzai said he hoped to hold peace talks with the Taliban within 100 days if he is confirmed in office for another five years.
But Karzai insisted he would not sit down with any faction that refuses to cut its links with Al-Qaeda or fails to respect the Afghan constitution.
In the latest partial results announced Sunday, Karzai had 48.6 percent of the vote against 31.7 percent for Abdullah.
But around 200,000 votes had been cancelled because of fraud, an official of the Independent Election Commission told AFP.
Zekria Barakzai, Afghanistan's deputy chief electoral officer, said Monday that IEC teams had discovered most of the fraudulent ballots in the southern provinces of Paktika, Ghazi and Kandahar -- Karzai's heartland.
Barakzai said many votes had been "marked with one pen in favour of the same candidate and entire ballot books dropped into boxes without the pages being torn off".
"In most democratic countries the punishment for election fraud is equal to that for terrorism and drugs, but unfortunately this is not the case under our law," the electoral official also told reporters.
"If we had such strong laws, we would willingly punish whoever is responsible for vote fraud," he said.
Abdullah has alleged much of the fraud is in Karzai's favour and threatened to shun a result that he believes is compromised.
The New York Times reported that Karzai loyalists had set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites, where nobody voted but hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president's re-election.
The final result is not due before September 17.
A Western official in Kabul said the fraud allegations were hurting public opinion in the West, with opinion polls in the United States and Europe already showing declining support for their increasingly bloody military intervention.
More than 300 foreign soldiers have died in Afghanistan so far this year, compared to 294 in all of 2008.
Britain, France and Germany -- faced with their own jittery public opinion and fears of new chaos in Afghanistan -- unveiled on Sunday their plans to hold the international conference later this year.
At a joint press briefing with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Afghans to take more responsibility for their own country.
With the help of an upcoming review by the new US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, the conference will clarify for all nations "what job they have to do and what our common aim is", Merkel said.
Another Western official, who also asked for anonymity, said the European powers should wait for McChrystal's strategic review.
"We need another talking shop like we need a hole in the head," he said.
While the election has drawn the Western public's attention to corruption in Afghanistan, civilian casualties are also intensifying Afghan public anger against the international troop presence.
Karzai's office said up to 90 people were killed in a NATO air strike Friday on Taliban-hijacked fuel trucks in the country's north. On Saturday McChrystal promised a full investigation into the strike.
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Karzai says United States wants to manipulate him
Mon Sep 7, 10:23 am ET
PARIS (Reuters) – Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai has accused the United States of denouncing his friends and family in an effort to undermine his own position and make him more malleable.
In a wide-ranging interview with Le Figaro daily, released on Monday, Karzai also condemned a NATO airstrike last week on hijacked fuel tankers, and said he supported a mooted shift in U.S. military tactics in Afghanistan.
Karzai, who is closing in on a first-round victory in last month's presidential election, revealed strained relations with the United States and said U.S. criticism of his running mate, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, was actually aimed at him.
"The Americans attack Karzai in an underhand fashion because they want him to be more tractable. They are wrong. It is in their interest ... that Afghanistan's people respect their president," he said, referring to himself in the third person.
"It is in no-one's interest to have an Afghan president who has become an American puppet," he added.
The New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch has called Fahim one of the most notorious warlords in the country, while Le Figaro said Washington had branded him a drug smuggler.
Karzai also said accusations that his own brother was corrupt were unfounded, adding that the United States embassy in Kabul had twice failed to answer his written requests for proof.
"That said, I am not going to deny that there is a serious problem of corruption in the heart of our administration. My priority is to fight that. But I am also going to ask for more transparency from our foreign partners," he said.
ELECTION FRAUD "INEVITABLE"
He also said there might have been fraud in last month's disputed presidential elections, but indicated he did not think it was important. His main challenger Abdullah Abdullah has said there was large scale cheating.
"As far as the elections are concerned, there was fraud in 2004, there is today, there will be tomorrow. Alas, it is inevitable in a nascent democracy," he said.
Karzai said that if his re-election was confirmed, he would seek national reconciliation talks with the Taliban within the first 100 days of his new administration.
He said the Taliban would first have to renounce any ties with al Qaeda and recognize the Afghan constitution.
Karzai told le Figaro that he welcomed a recent review of military strategy in Afghanistan, undertaken by U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, which has yet to be made public.
The Afghan president said McChrystal had showed him the proposals which emphasized protecting the Afghan population rather than killing Taliban.
"I approve of this 100 percent," he said, adding, however, that the general was wrong to confuse the Afghan insurrection with terrorism. "The insurrection is something that is totally different from terrorism. It's an internal Afghan affair."
Karzai also said that McChrystal had assured him that he had not personally ordered an airstrike last Friday on hijacked fuel tankers. Afghan officials said the attack killed many civilians.
"What an error of judgment! More than 90 dead all because of a simple lorry that was, moreover, immobilized in a river bed. Why didn't they send in ground troops to recover the fuel tank? By the by, General McChrystal telephoned me to apologize and to say that he himself hadn't given the order to attack."
(Reporting by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Louise Ireland)
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Karzai to talk with Taliban within 100 days: media
Mon Sep 7, 5:27 am ET
PARIS (AFP) – Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai hopes to hold peace talks with the Taliban within 100 days if he is re-elected, he told the French daily Le Figaro in an interview published on Monday.
But Karzai insisted he would not sit down with any faction that refuses to cut its links with Al-Qaeda or fails to respect the Afghan constitution.
He implicitly confirmed Saudi Arabia is involved in trying to broker talks between his government and the Islamist militia, who were driven from power in 2001 and are now fighting an insurgency against Afghan and NATO forces.
Karzai also said he thought that US President Barack Obama was more ready than his predecessor George W. Bush to countenance talks with the Taliban in order to find a way out of the eight-year-old conflict.
Asked whether he was ready to talk to the Taliban, Karzai replied: "It's something that I'll do in these first 100 days. I've noticed a change of attitude on the part of President Obama, compared to his predecessor.
"But be careful -- and it's something that Saudi Arabia should remember -- there's no question of a dialogue with Taliban who don't renounce their links with Al-Qaeda or who refuse to recognise the Afghan constitution."
Le Figaro conducted the interview in Kabul and Karzai's remarks were published in French.
Official results of the first round in Afghanistan's presidential election are due to be released on September 17, but partial results based on voting in three-quarters of polling stations have him in the lead on 48.6 percent.
Karzai needs more than 50 percent to avoid a second round run-off against his main rival,former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, who has complained of widespread vote-rigging in last month's first round.
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Fictitious Afghan polling sites cited
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 7 (UPI) -- Loyalists established phantom polling sites to generate votes for Afghan President Hamid Karzai's re-election, sources told The New York Times.
No one voted at the sites, as they existed only on paper, but Western and Afghan officials told the Times hundreds of thousands of ballots were recorded at the sites.
Afghan election officials have announced they had set aside ballots from about 450 polling places pending a fraud investigation, the Los Angeles Times reported.
A Western diplomat in Afghanistan told The New York Times as many as 800 fake sites may have been created for the Aug. 20 elections. Local workers, whose claims were confirmed by another Western official, told the newspaper hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Karzai came from each of those fake sites.
"We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day," the Western diplomat said. "But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai."
Officials said Karzai supporters also took over about 800 legitimate polling cites to report fraudulent votes. They told Te New York Times Karzai ballots may exceed the actual number of votes cast by a factor of 10 in some provinces.
"This was fraud en masse," the Western diplomat said.
The reports come as Karzai was reported to be moving closer to receiving 50 percent of votes cast, which would avert a runoff against his nearest rival, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the country's former foreign minister.
A spokesman for Karzai's campaign told The New York Times there had been cases of fraud by candidates, but accused Karzai's opponents of trying to score political points with accusations in the media.
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Afghan officials cancel votes on fraud
Karzai remains in lead in latest partial tally
By Combined dispatches
KABUL, Afghanistan | Afghan electoral authorities Sunday announced the first cancellation of votes from last month's fraud-tainted elections as partial results showed President Hamid Karzai moving into a clear lead.
Election officials had canceled the votes from 447 polling sites across the country, accounting for up to 200,000 votes, because of fraud, a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission (IEC) said.
Mr. Karzai held on to his lead, with 48.6 percent of the vote, according to partial results, well ahead of his nearest rival Abdullah Abdullah, with 31.7 percent.
The IEC announced results from 74.2 percent of the polling stations used in Afghanistan's second direct presidential election.
"Votes from 447 polling stations across the country have been nullified because of fraud," IEC spokesman Noor Mohammed Noor told Agence France-Presse.
He said each polling site had about 600-700 ballots, so the canceled ballots "could be around 200,000 votes."
The election held Aug. 20 has been overshadowed by allegations of widespread fraud and vote-rigging, with the Election Complaints Commission dealing with more than 2,000 complaints.
An IEC spokeswoman said Sunday she had "no idea" when the preliminary results would be released. Final results are due Sept. 17.
Mr. Abdullah has also reported widespread vote-rigging by Karzai's camp and threatened to reject any result he regards as compromised.
He warned on Saturday that "state-engineered vote" fraud could fuel instability and Taliban insurgency, and urged the international community to intervene.
"We have insecurity in this country. We have bad government. We have corruption. We have narcotics. We have a war. We have an insurgency," Mr. Abdullah told reporters.
NATO and Western allies have stressed in recent days their long-term commitment to keeping troops in Afghanistan to fight the resurgent Taliban, despite the fraud concerns.
In fighting Sunday, NATO said a U.S. service member has died as the result of a bomb blast in southern Afghanistan.
The death marked the sixth U.S. fatality in as many days in the widening war, according to an Associated Press count. No other details were released.
Violence has surged across much of the country since President Obama ordered an additional 21,000 U.S. troops to the country this year, shifting the focus of the U.S.-led war on Islamic extremism from Iraq.
Fifty-one U.S. troops died in Afghanistan in August, the deadliest month in the deadliest year for U.S. forces there since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.
A Dutch soldier from NATO's international force in Afghanistan died Sunday after being wounded in a firefight with suspected Taliban, the defense ministry said.
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Italy backs calls for international Afghan meeting
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Italy threw its weight on Monday behind calls for an international conference on Afghanistan to deal with security issues and to get political commitments from the new Afghan government on future plans. Skip related content
Germany and Britain called on Sunday for a U.N. meeting on Afghanistan this year. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, in a speech in Lithuania, said he proposed that a meeting be at foreign minister level and should look at security.
"Italy would like to see an international conference at foreign minister level, with our personal presence in Kabul, to set up a new compact between the new Afghan government and the international community," he said.
Such a meeting should take place at the end of this year or at the very beginning of 2010, he added.
The conference would aim at developing Afghan ownership of areas where there had been little progress, he said, citing governance, the fight against corruption and human rights.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, launching the initiative with France and having consulted with Washington and NATO, said their conference would set new targets for transferring security responsibilities to Afghan authorities ahead of reducing NATO troop levels.
(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; Writing by Patrick Lannin; Editing by Louise Ireland)
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Secret pardon frees Afghan journalism student
By Heidi Vogt, Associated Press Writer – Mon Sep 7, 9:48 am ET
KABUL – An Afghan journalism student who was jailed for asking questions in class about women's rights under Islam has been freed after nearly two years, a media rights group said Monday.
Activists have called Parwez Kambakhsh, who was convicted of blasphemy and originally sentenced to death, a victim of an Afghan justice system that panders to religious conservatives at the expense of individual freedoms.
He was released several weeks ago after President Hamid Karzai signed a pardon in secret, according to the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, which talked to his lawyer.
Kambakhsh has since fled Afghanistan out of fear that he will be the target of reprisal attacks, the group said. Afghan officials said they could not confirm his release.
Kambakhsh was studying journalism at Balkh University in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and writing for local newspapers when he was arrested in October 2007. He was 23.
Prosecutors said he showed contempt for Islam by asking questions about women's rights and for distributing an article he had taken off the Internet that asks why Islam does not modernize to give women equal rights. He also allegedly wrote his own comments on copies of the article.
The original death sentence in the Islamic state sparked an international uproar, and judges lightened the sentence to 20 years in a second trial. Rights groups sent thousands of petitions condemning the imprisonment and calling for Kambakhsh's release.
The case will be remembered as a "miscarriage of justice marked by religious intolerance, police mistreatment and incompetence on the part of certain judges," Jean-Francois Julliard, the secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement.
Some said Kambakhsh's arrest may have been a reprisal aimed at his brother, who angered Afghan warlords with writings about human rights violations and politics.
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Merkel to face critics on deadly Afghanistan air strike
by Deborah Cole Deborah Cole
BERLIN (AFP) – Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed Monday to address parliament over a deadly air strike in Afghanistan ordered by a German commander as her government came under fire 20 days before elections.
Friday's air strike in northern Kunduz province killed 54 people, according to local officials. Other sources, however, put the toll far higher.
Merkel's government has insisted those killed were Taliban militants but some witnesses spoke of scores of civilian victims, prompting searing criticism of the military action, even from NATO partners.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner described the strike as a "big mistake" while Afghan President Hamid Karzai blasted the commander's call in an interview with French daily Le Figaro: "What an error of judgement!"
A spokesman for Merkel said the chancellor would address the Bundestag lower house Tuesday, following calls by opposition parties for her to explain what had happened.
Earlier, a defence ministry spokesman said the strike had targeted two petrol trucks that had been kidnapped by the Taliban and which the German military feared would be used for a huge attack. He insisted the attacks had been "militarily necessary and correct".
Germany only began major military deployments abroad a decade ago, breaking a postwar taboo.
The anguished debate over Afghanistan comes less than three weeks before the country's general election and amid already meagre public support for the mission.
Although pollsters say Merkel's conservatives are virtually assured of victory, they hope to ditch their current partners, the Social Democrats (SPD), and link up with the smaller, liberal Free Democratic Party.
With a large part of the electorate still undecided and media coverage dominated by negative coverage of the Afghan strike, commentators said the issue could cost a few crucial points on election day September 27.
"The Afghan drama certainly deserves to play an important role in the campaign," the daily centre-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung said.
Merkel's SPD challenger, Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is unlikely to exploit the issue at the polls as his Afghanistan policy is virtually identical to the chancellor's.
Steinmeier explicitly rejected a call by former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, his own political mentor, at the weekend for Germany to pull its contingent of around 4,000 troops out of Afghanistan by 2015.
"Giving a specific year (for a withdrawal) would be taken as encouragement by the wrong people," he told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
However, opposition parties seized on the strikes as evidence of an aimless Afghanistan policy.
Much of the criticism centred on Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung of Merkel's Christian Democrats, who has insisted there were no civilian casualties despite accounts to the contrary.
"Jung is damaging Germany," the left-leaning daily Frankfurter Rundschau said. "He is reacting completely inappropriately to the air strike -- and to the criticism of it."
The liberal Free Democrats said Jung had misled parliament, the far-left Die Linke demanded his resignation and announced an anti-war rally in central Berlin Tuesday while the Greens party said Merkel must face parliament on the issue.
Die Linke is the only party of the five represented in parliament to call for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan.
On Sunday, Merkel said she would "deeply regret" if any civilian lives had been lost, calling for a "quick, complete and open" inquiry by NATO.
Jung's spokesman appeared to back-pedal slightly on the issue of collateral damage Monday, saying there was as yet "no evidence" that civilians had been among the dead. But he defended the German commander's call.
"We are standing our ground: this strike was militarily necessary and correct," said the spokesman, Thomas Raabe.
He added that Jung had spoken by telephone Sunday with the US commander of foreign troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, and that both had agreed it was crucial NATO forces avoid civilian casualties.
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Rift widens between US and Germany over botched Afghanistan air strike
German foreign minister calls attack 'necessary' as US commanders criticise ordering mission that left 70 civilians dead
Ewen MacAskill in Washington Kate Connolly in Berlin guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 September 2009 19.09 BST
A rift between the US and Germany over the conduct of the war in Afghanistan widened today as both countries sought to shift blame over a botched bombing raid that led to scores of civilians being killed.
Berlin defended the raid as "militarily necessary" to protect German troops, even though it went against the express orders of the new US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to safeguard civilians.
A human rights organisation, in the first independent assessment of the death toll, said 60-70 civilians had been killed.
The raid was carried out by the US air force but McChrystal distanced himself from it, apologising to the Afghan government and saying he had not ordered it.
The strike was called in by a senior German officer. The German government said the officer feared two hijacked oil tankers, stuck in a riverbed, were to be used for a suicide bombing of the German base at Kunduz, in the north of the country.
While the US has expressed most of its criticism in private, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, did not hold back today, siding with the US in condemning the German decision.
"What an error of judgment! More than 90 dead all because of a simple lorry that was, moreover, immobilised in a riverbed. Why didn't they send in ground troops to recover the fuel tank? ... General McChrystal telephoned me to apologise and to say that he himself hadn't given the order to attack," Karzai said, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro.
It was the deadliest military operation Germany has been involved since the second world war.
McChrystal's new strategy, aimed at winning hearts and minds, suffered a double blow today, the second at the hands of his own troops. It was disclosed that US troops had broken into a Swedish charity-run hospital in breach of international law to search for Taliban suspects.
The rift between the US and its European allies comes as the Taliban extends its influence in the country. The US and European countries involved are facing domestic pressure to withdraw, and Germany, Britain and France yesterday proposed a conference to discuss how to get the Afghan government to take more responsibility for its own security.
The US has expressed private criticism of the German commander in Kunduz for calling in an air strike based on the assessment of one Afghan informant on the ground that all those people around the tankers were Taliban and on grainy aerial photographs.
At the time of the attack, the two tankers were stationary in a riverbed, with the local populace apparently helping themselves to free oil.
Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a US spokesman in Afghanistan, said German troops had allowed too many hours to pass before visiting the site of the attack on Friday, saying it was important to reach the scene quickly to establish what had happened before the enemy got the chance to deliver its version.
The German defence minister, Franz Josef Jung, said civilian casualties could not be ruled out but defended the attack, calling it "militarily necessary and correct".
"If there were civilian casualties or injuries of course we deeply regret that," he said, adding that the attack was carried out on the basis of reconnaissance showing that the Taliban planned to launch an assault with the hijacked trucks on German troops.
"It was clear that our soldiers were in danger. Consequently I stand clearly behind our commander's decision to order the air strike. We had clear information that the Taliban had seized both fuel trucks about six kilometres away from our base in order to launch an attack against our soldiers in Kunduz," he said.
He called for an investigation to determine exactly what had happened.
The German Army Association, a veterans' organisation, accused the US of launching a "tit-for-tat" attack on Germany, which has been critical of the number of civilians killed in US operations.
"This is in retaliation for Germany always pointing the finger at other nations," said Ulrich Kirsch.
A human rights group, the Afghan Rights Monitor, which conducted 15 interviews with villagers in the Char Dara district, where the bombing took place, said only a dozen militants had died and about up to 79 villagers.
"Even if all the victims were supporters of the Taliban, the fact that most of them were unarmed and were not engaged in any combat activity does not warrant their mass killing," said Ajmal Samadi, the rights group's director.
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, which runs the hospital in Wardak province, south-west of Kabul, accused the US Army's 10th Mountain Division of forcing its way into its hospital without permission on Wednesday, kicking down doors, tying up four hospital guards and two people visiting relatives, and forcing patients out of beds.
A US military spokeswoman, Lieutenant Commander Christine Sidenstricker, confirmed that the hospital was searched last week and the incident was being investigated.
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Germany urges caution on Afghan criticism
By Melissa Eddy, Associated Press Writer
BERLIN – Germany struggled Monday to defend the decision to call in a deadly airstrike in northern Afghanistan last week, deflecting international criticism of the attack that came just weeks after NATO ordered a clampdown on the use of air power.
The government backed down from its previous insistence that only Taliban militants had been killed in Friday's pre-dawn attack, conceding some civilians likely were killed
But it supported its commander's decision to call a U.S. jet to target a pair of hijacked tanker trucks in Kunduz province amid fears they could have been used to mount a suicide attack on its troops in the region.
Weeks earlier, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, ordered commanders be sure any targets were clear of civilians before any airstrike, hoping to stem the ballooning number of Afghan civilian deaths that has damaged the credibility of international troops.
McChrystal went to great lengths to contain the fallout among Afghans over the weekend, visiting the site of the strike and criticizing the Germans' handling of the incident.
The Defense Ministry, however, downplayed suggestions the dispute was leading to a rift in German-U.S. relations, expressing understanding for McChrystal's reaction. German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung spoke by phone Sunday with the NATO commander, ministry spokesman Thomas Raabe said.
"I can understand that at the moment, McChrystal is in a position that for the first time since giving a new directive ... is confronted with a situation where the question is whether civilians have been affected or not," Raabe said.
Military experts viewed the U.S.-German split as unusual, but not incomprehensible.
"This was an incident that conspicuously undercut the new approach of protecting Afghans which Gen. McChrystal has set down," said Nick Witney, a senior policy fellow at the Paris-based European Council on Foreign Relations.
"He had to make it clear he wasn't happy about it."
Germany has long been criticized for being overly protective of its roughly 4,200 troops and refusing to send them into the more volatile south of Afghanistan. Under McChrystal's directive, international troops should move in on the ground, instead of calling in air support if civilians may be in harm's way.
Raabe insisted that Germany fully supports the directive, noting that it is "in keeping with that which we have always stressed, for a long time — that is the comprehensive approach and taking the civilian population into consideration."
He further noted that criticism over the weekend from European allies was to be expected given the Germans' readiness to condemn civilian deaths caused by other countries.
"I cannot rule out that there is an attempt from certain allies to say, 'Now the Germans have called in such an airstrike, and in the past in Germany there were always voices that were quick to criticize such airstrikes,'" Raabe said.
In the days immediately after the strike, Jung had insisted only 56 Taliban insurgents had been killed, a number that Raabe said stemmed from a letter written Sunday by officials in the Kunduz region — including its governor, intelligence chief and police chief — to President Hamid Karzai.
Jung later backed down from that, telling reporters in Hamburg that "I can no longer rule out that civilians were killed."
The Afghan Rights Monitor said interviews with 15 villagers indicated that only a dozen gunmen died and 60-70 villagers were killed. A spokesman for the provincial government, Ahmad Sami Yawar, said only five of the estimated 70 killed were civilians.
Prosecutors in Potsdam, where the German military has its command center, are examining whether they have grounds to open an investigation of the officer who called in the airstrike — standard procedure when the military is involved in incidents abroad.
The fallout comes weeks before elections Sept. 27. Conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel is being challenged by center-left Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Both are equally involved in Germany's Afghan mission and only two smaller opposition parities, the environmental-left Greens and the ex-communist Left, have called for a swift withdrawal.
Merkel and Steinmeier will address German lawmakers Tuesday about the incident in what is expected to be parliament's final meeting before the election.
___
Associated Press Writers Geir Moulson in Berlin and Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.
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Taliban demand air strike inquiry
Monday, 7 September 2009 BBC News
The Taliban have called for a UN and human rights investigation into an air strike in Afghanistan on Friday that killed dozens of people.
The independent Afghanistan Rights Monitor group says up to 70 civilians died in the Kunduz province raid.
The Nato air strike targeted fuel tankers hijacked by the insurgents.
The BBC's David Loyn in Kabul says the Taliban call is a change to its usual policy of opposing all foreign involvement in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, US forces are facing new criticism from a Swedish organisation which claims US soldiers forced their way into a hospital, searching for insurgents.
Unprecedented TV appeal
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, which runs the hospital in Wardak province, south-west of Kabul, says its employees were tied up by American troops who spent two hours scouring wards.
The aid group says this was a clear violation of international principles and made its humanitarian task more difficult.
The prevention of civilian casualties and protection of the Afghan population forms the centrepiece of a new military strategy for Afghanistan by the commander of US forces, General Stanley McChrystal.
After the raid in the far north of the country, Gen McChrystal made an unprecedented TV appeal to the Afghan people saying he took the loss of civilian life very seriously.
'Condemn this incident'
Our correspondent says no-one disputes that many Taliban fighters were killed when the two tankers were destroyed, but estimates of the number of civilian casualties have varied widely.
The Taliban statement said: "We urge the world human rights organisations, the United Nations authorities and other independent world bodies and governments to observe their humanitarian and ethical responsibility by condemning this incident and preventing such incidents in future."
The Taliban statement claims 150 civilians died, many of them children of families who had come to siphon fuel from the tankers.
The overnight bombing attack by an American jet was called in by a German commander, and has led to strains between the two Nato allies.
Rear Adm Gregory J Smith, the top US and Nato spokesman in Afghanistan, said German troops should have secured the site of the air strike in its immediate aftermath and established what happened, to prevent the Taliban coming out with its own version of events.
The German military said they had feared the hijackers would use the fuel trucks for a suicide attack against its base nearby.
Speaking in Berlin on Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said if any civilians died in the raid, she would "naturally deeply regret that".
Meanwhile, the latest results dribbling laboriously out from last month's Afghan presidential election showed incumbent Hamid Karzai close to the 50% threshold needed to avoid a run-off ballot.
With three-quarters of votes counted, he had 48.6%, followed by Abdullah Abdullah with 31.7%.
Final results are expected at the end of this month.
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Taliban expands grip over northern Afghanistan
Maria Golovnina and Mohammad Hamed, Reuters September 7, 2009, 11:20 pm
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A road snaking through the lush green valleys of northern Afghanistan is festooned with cheerful billboards depicting Afghan soldiers guarding groups of smiling civilians.
Yet, this idyllic region, patrolled mainly by NATO's 4,000-strong German force, has turned into a battlefield again.
"The Taliban have made a comeback in several northern provinces," said Mohammad Omar, governor of northern Kunduz province. "The local government here needs more foreign troops in order to root out the Taliban from Kunduz."
Tucked away in the alpine meadows north of the Hindu Kush, Kunduz has been quiet since U.S.-backed forces ousted the Taliban from pockets of Pashtun-led resistance in 2001. Attacks here have been rare even as violence surged in other parts of Afghanistan.
But since last year, the Taliban have pressed ahead to try to reclaim their former northern fiefdoms -- a setback for U.S.-led forces already struggling to contain an increasingly fierce insurgency in the south.
"There are certainly some areas, including Kunduz, where the insurgency has been strengthening," said U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Greg Smith, head of public affairs for U.S. and NATO troops.
"It's a serious situation if left unchecked. (We) are focussing on Kunduz and other areas to reverse that momentum."
In an incident that stoked tensions further, a U.S. fighter jet summoned by German troops fired on Taliban-hijacked fuel trucks near Kunduz last week in an attack the government said killed many civilians.
NATO has yet to finish its investigation into the incident, but has acknowledged that some civilians may have been killed.
The Taliban have vowed to seek revenge. Maolawi Ahmad, the Taliban's shadow governor for Kunduz, says he has 700 fighters in a region where Taliban support is the strongest in remote Pashtun villages over which NATO and local troops exert little control.
"We are strong enough to fight the Germans and government forces or whoever wishes to die," he told Reuters by telephone without elaborating.
SECURITY TIGHT
At a checkpoint outside Kunduz, police officers armed with Russian PK machine guns said they were ordered to boost security to prevent Taliban attacks in Kunduz, a noisy city of maze-like streets teeming with people, traffic and kite-flying children.
"We have to maintain security because the Taliban are trying to get into the city," said Faizullah, the check point commander. "We must intercept them."
The day he spoke to a visiting Reuters crew, a suicide bomber wounded four German soldiers in a strike on a convoy near Kunduz.
Local police say that parts of the main road linking Kunduz and the capital Kabul are now controlled by the Taliban who regularly set up road blocks and attack passing vehicles.
Late on Saturday, a group of Taliban fighters fired on a car travelling between Kabul and Kunduz, a policeman said. "They have come out on the road again," he said.
Omar said the Taliban in his region included fighters from Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Russia's rebel region of Chechnya, adding they were gaining strength across the entire northern belt where Afghanistan borders ex-Soviet Central Asia.
"The Taliban have infiltrated neighbouring provinces as well," he said. Just before the August 20 presidential election, a roadside bomb killed six Afghan police in Baghlan, a neighbouring province in the north that has seen increased insurgent activity.
Some residents say the Taliban levy a tax of 10 percent on businesses in a mafia-style network but go about doing regular daily chores such as farming, making them blend in with the population.
"There are insurgents everywhere," said one local journalist. "The Germans are afraid to enter any of these villages now."
With the Taliban gaining strength and tensions high after the air strike in which locals said dozens of civilians were burnt alive, Kunduz residents said they felt stuck in a crossfire.
"People are very unhappy around here," said Ibadullah, a man of about 50 who makes a living by driving a colourfully painted rickshaw. "The Taliban don't want to see any reconstruction here."
(Editing by Nick Macfie)
(Writing by Maria Golovnina; Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi in KABUL)
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Civilian casualties in Afghanistan 'a real problem': Gates
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged in an interview with Al Jazeera that civilian casualties have become "a real problem" for the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan.
Gates' remarks, in an interview to be aired Monday by the Qatar-based Arabic satellite news channel, came amid a raging controversy over an air strike that killed scores of people Friday in northern Afghanistan.
"I think it's a real problem, and General McChrystal thinks it's a real problem, too," Gates said, referring to Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
According to a transcript of the interview posted on Al Jazeera's website, Gates said the Taliban actively targeted civilians or put them at risk in other ways.
"But we are trying to figure out new tactics that minimize this. But it is a challenge," he added.
"Central to the success of the 42 nations that are trying to help the Afghan people and government at this point is that the Afghan people continue to believe that we are their friends, their partners and here to help them.
"So civilian casualties are a problem for us and we are doing everything conceivable to try and avoid that," he said.
At least 54 people were killed Friday when a German commander in Kunduz ordered an air strike on two fuel trucks that had been hijacked by Taliban insurgents.
Reports that civilians were among the dead set off a firestorm of criticism, which in turn raised the heat on the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has insisted the dead were Taliban fighters.
The anguished debate in Germany, which only began participating in international military missions a decade ago, comes 20 days before German goes to the polls and amid already meagre public support for the deployment.
It also has added fuel to a debate here over the size and scope of the US military commitment in Afghanistan, which has come under scrutiny in the US Congress at a time when commanders, worried about a deteriorating security situation, are expected to ask for more troops.
Gates said he had concerns about sending more troops to Afghanistan for fear that Afghans at some point would regard them as occupiers.
"General McChrystal's point, which I think has great validity, is: it's really how those forces are used and how they interact with the Afghan people that determines how they are seen by the Afghans.
"And I think that the approach that he has taken, in terms of partnering with the Afghans, and interacting with the Afghan people, and supporting them, mitigates the concerns that I had," he said.
Gates was asked about a recent comment by US envoy Richard Holbrook, who when asked to define success in Afghanistan said, "We will know it when we see it."
"I probably would have answered the question differently," he said.
"I would have answered it: I believe that success or progress will be when we see the Afghan national security forces, the army and the police, assuming a greater and greater role in security operations protecting Afghanistan and the Afghan people, so that we can recede, first into an advisory role and then leave altogether," he said.
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Canada confirms two soldiers killed in Afghanistan
Mon Sep 7, 10:56 am ET
MONTREAL (AFP) – Canada on Monday confirmed that two of its soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan by a roadside bomb that struck their armored vehicle.
Five other Canadian troops were injured in the same explosion Sunday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement.
"The sacrifices of these soldiers will not be forgotten and this tragic event will not deter us from continuing to help Afghans rebuild their country," Harper said.
Harper sent condolences to the families of corporal Jean-François Drouin and Major Yannick Pepin. They were from a brigade based in Valcartier near Quebec City.
Canada currently has some 2,800 soldiers deployed in Afghanistan, primarily in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the south, under a parliamentary mandate that expires in 2011.
Canada has lost 129 troops in Afghanistan since 2002. A Canadian diplomat and a humanitarian aid worker from Canada also have been killed there.
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3 killed in Kabul rocket attack
KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Three people died when rockets slammed into northwestern Kabul late Sunday, a government official said.
The attack killed a man, a woman and their daughter, according to Zamari Bashari, an Interior Ministry spokesman.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack and asked authorities to investigate, a statement from his office said.
There has been a general increase in violence across the country as a resurgent Taliban flexes its muscles. U.S. and British troops are waging an offensive against militant forces in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province.
The Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, and in recent months has staged an increasingly bloody insurgency.
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Charity: US troops stormed through Afghan hospital
By Kay Johnson, Associated Press Writer
KABUL – A Swedish charity accused American troops Monday of storming through a hospital in central Afghanistan, breaking down doors and tying up staff in a search for militants. The U.S. military said it was investigating.
The allegation that soldiers violated the neutrality of a medical facility follows the reported deaths of Afghan civilians in a U.S. airstrike in the country's north last week.
Nearly eight years after the U.S.-led coalition invaded to oust the Taliban, foreign forces are working to persuade the population to support the Afghan government. But civilian deaths and intrusive searches of homes have bred resentment.
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan said the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division entered the charity's hospital without permission to look for insurgents in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, according to the charity's country director, Anders Fange.
"This is simply not acceptable," he said.
The U.S. troops came to the hospital looking for Taliban insurgents late at night last Wednesday, Fange said. He said they kicked in doors, tied up four hospital employees and two family members of patients, and forced patients out of beds during their search.
When they left two hours later, the unit ordered hospital staff to inform coalition forces if any wounded militants were admitted, and the military would decide if they could be treated, Fange said.
The staff refused, he said. "That would put our staff at risk and make the hospital a target."
The charity said on its Web site that the troops actions were not only a violation of humanitarian principles but also went against an agreement between NATO forces and charities working in the area.
"We demand guarantees ... that such violations will not be repeated and that this is made clear to commanders in the field," a statement said.
Navy public affairs officer Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker confirmed that the hospital was searched last week but had no other details. She said the military was looking into the incident.
"We are investigating and we take allegations like this seriously," she said. "Complaints like this are rare."
Violence has surged across much of Afghanistan since President Barack Obama ordered 21,000 more U.S. troops to the country this year. Two foreign troops were killed Sunday when their patrol hit a roadside bomb in the country's south, NATO said without giving their nationalities. Three civilians also died in a militant rocket attack on the capital.
NATO was also investigating reported civilian deaths in a U.S. airstrike last week. Afghan officials said up to 70 people were killed in the early morning airstrike Friday in the northern province of Kunduz after the Taliban hijacked two fuel tanker. After the trucks became stuck in the mud on the banks of a river, villagers came to siphon off gas and some were reported killed when an American jet dropped two bombs on the stolen tankers.
The increasingly violent Taliban have killed more Afghan civilians in bombings and other attacks. On Monday, the government said three insurgent rockets landed in the capital, Kabul, killing three people when one of them hit a house.
A United Nations report in July said the number of civilians killed in conflict in Afghanistan has jumped 24 percent this year, with bombings by insurgent and airstrikes by international forces the biggest single killers. The report said that 1,013 civilians were killed in the first half of 2009, 59 percent in insurgent attacks and 30.5 percent by foreign and Afghan government forces. The rest were undetermined.
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US soldier killed by IED in Afghanistan: ISAF
Mon Sep 7, 4:34 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Three NATO soldiers were killed in Afghanistan by roadside bombs, the weapon of choice for an invigorated Taliban insurgency, NATO announced, adding Monday that another had died in a firefight.
The first death happened in the restive south of the country on Sunday, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) under NATO said.
US spokeswoman Air Force Captain Regina Gillis confirmed the dead soldier was a US service member, but gave no other details.
Another incident in the south on Sunday killed two foreign soldiers, ISAF said, but according to policy did not reveal their nationalities.
It said the pair were on patrol when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb.
Another foreign soldier, whose nationality was also not released, "died of wounds suffered in an exchange of fire with insurgents," also in the south on Sunday, ISAF said.
The deaths bring to 324 the number of foreign soldiers to die in Afghanistan so far this year, according to an AFP tally.
This year is the deadliest in the eight-year war in Afghanistan, as more troops have been deployed to take on Taliban in hotspot regions in the south and east.
In response the Taliban is adopting tactics more readily associated with terrorists and retreating from battleground fighting, military leaders say.
Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have become the scourge of foreign forces, now numbering more than 100,000 under US and NATO command, claiming the vast majority of deaths, both military and civilian.
ISAF spokesman General Eric Tremblay was quoted in the statement late Sunday saying "the protection of Afghan citizens remains our priority."
But public anger with the foreign forces in the country was reignited after a NATO air strike on Friday killed scores of people when it targeted Taliban who had stolen fuel trucks.
NATO, along with the Afghan government and various agencies, is investigating the incident in which differing claims have been made for the number of civilian dead.
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A Return Visit to Kabul: Is Time Running Out?
By Tim McGirk time.com Monday, Sep. 07, 2009
It was exhilarating flying back to Kabul after being gone for three years. The plane came in low from the east, in the coppery light of dawn, and I could make out the canyons of the Kabul Gorge where, in 1842, a retreating British army of 4,500 soldiers, accompanied by 12,000 family members and servants, vanished into the gorge and only one man, a surgeon's assistant on horseback, made it out alive. The rest were massacred or died in the snow.
Afghanistan is replete with grim reminders for those who would wish to rule it. The British were having a marvelous time in Kabul back in 1841: horse races, picnics, amateur theatrics (something British expats indulge in wherever they go) and lot of good grog and food. Meanwhile, the Afghans were seething over these madcap Victorians.
In fact, it reminds me a lot of how Kabul was when I was last here. The foreigners — diplomats, aid workers, journalists, assorted mercenaries and adventurers — disported themselves quite oblivious to the fact that this was a conservative Muslim country just emerging from the Taliban's medieval totalitarianism. You could find booze in shops. On weekends, you could go picnicking and horseback riding in the country. Many embassies moved into gaudy narco-mansions rented out by warlords loyal to President Hamid Karzai. For dining, you had a choice of Mexican, Balkan, Lebanese, Indian, Thai, American and Chinese restaurants. The Chinese places were often fronts for brothels, and off-limits to Afghans, but any Kabuli male would tell you feverishly which of these establishments were selling girls along with the noodles.
Three years on, Kabul has become a more sober, watchful city. The walls around embassies, aid offices and foreigners' guest houses have sprouted to around 15 feet high, and are often crowned with razor wire. After a few foreigners were kidnapped and shot by drive-by gunmen last year, it is now considered foolhardy to walk around the streets of Kabul. Booze is no longer sold openly. Many, but not all, of the brothels were shut down and the girls rounded up and flown back to China.
Car bombs now target NATO patrols, so you learn that it's a good idea to pull over and wait for the coalition convoy to rumble by to lessen the risk of becoming collateral damage. You try not to drive by the U.S. embassy or the Afghan ministries where the bombs also tend to go off. And so much for picnics and exploring the countryside: many of the roads out of Kabul are no longer safe for foreigners. That includes the one snaking down into the Kabul Gorge where the British were massacred. More surprising, it also includes the main Kabul-Kandahar highway, which was supposed to be a symbol to Afghans of the benefits of an American-backed government. If you're a foreigner or a rich Afghan, you can fly to Kandahar. Otherwise, ordinary Afghans have to take their chances with the Taliban and the bandits along the highway. "Three years ago" one foreign academic and longtime Kabul resident told me, "Afghans had hope for the future. Now they don't."
Hungry for Afghan pistachios, I stopped by a shop where the owner, a friend, assured me that everything was fine, thanks to Allah, for him and his family. Then, in a whisper, he told me that his brother was kidnapped and held for 20 days before the captors and the family could agree on a ransom. Now he and his brother, who survived the communists, a brutal civil war and the Taliban, are thinking about quitting the business and leaving Afghanistan. "It doesn't look good," he told me, and over the years I've come to trust his merchant's instincts above all the embassy pundits put together. He was worried by reports that President Karzai's supporters committed widescale fraud in the Aug. 20 elections, and this, the shop-keeper says, could re-open ancient ethnic grudges between the Pashtuns, most of whom back Karzai, and the non-Pashtuns who are rallying around his main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah.
Most Afghans in Kabul appreciate the international presence because of the relative stability it brings. Outside the capital, in the parts that haven't received the promised roads and schools and bridges, it is another matter. But all Afghans are furious over the high number of civilian casualties, especially the latest incident in which the Germans called in two NATO aircraft to bomb two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban — never mind that villagers were swarming the tankers for free fuel.
I sometimes wonder what provocation it would take to unleash the Afghans' latent xenophobia, as happened with the Brits in 1842. The bombing of the tankers can't help, nor did revelations a few days ago that U.S. embassy guards were caught behaving like lewd frat boys around a bonfire. Luckily, in both instances, American officials here moved swiftly to apologize and minimize the damage, but there's no doubt that Afghan resentment toward foreigners is rising fast.
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Europe 'big three' call for Afghanistan conference
by Simon Sturdee – Mon Sep 7, 12:56 am ET
BERLIN (AFP) – Britain, France and Germany have unveiled proposals for an international conference on Afghanistan later this year in order to press Afghans to take more responsibility for their own country.
"What is important, and this is our joint view, is to apply pressure in order to find a way to get the Afghans to appreciate that they have to take responsibility step by step," Chancellor Angela Merkel told a joint press briefing with Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Sunday.
The conference, the location of which is yet to be decided, "is to create some momentum and to say that we are now coming to a transitional phase following the second presidential election" in Afghanistan, she said.
With the help of an upcoming review by the new US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, it will make clear to countries involved in Afghanistan "what job they have to do and what our common aim is", Merkel said.
"The Afghan government will then know what growing responsibilities are going to be coming their way," she said, "and of course so that the international engagement ... can be reduced."
"We believe that with the presidential election, the time has come."
"It is right in my view," Brown said, "that eight years since September 11, and after many achievements in Afghanistan ... that we look at how we can get the Afghans themselves more involved in taking responsibililty for their own affairs."
The conference, which Merkel said had been "informally agreed upon" with the United States and which would include the United Nations, would be focused on three areas: security, government and development, Brown said.
The proposal comes as the international mission grows increasingly unpopular in many of the 42 countries that make up the 100,000-strong international force in Afghanistan, 65,000 of whom form the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
A CNN poll last week showed 57 percent of people in the United States, which provides around two-thirds of the foreign troops, now oppose the war in Afghanistan and 40 percent believe it cannot be won. In France, 64 percent are opposed to the mission, according to a survey last month.
The Taliban insurgency has proved to be tenacious, with militants seeking refuge and destabilising neighbouring Pakistan, and Western countries have grown frustrated about widespread corruption in President Hamid Karzai's government.
The presidential election held on August 20, likely to result in another term for the Western-backed Karzai, has been overshadowed by allegations of widespread fraud and vote-rigging.
As uncertainty continues to hang over the election outcome, the New York Times has reported that Afghans loyal to Karzai set up ahead of last month's elections hundreds of fictitious polling sites, where no one voted but hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president?s re-election.
Citing unnamed senior Western and Afghan officials, the newspaper said late Sunday there were as many as 800 such fake sites that existed only on paper.
Civilian casualties have also made international troops unpopular in Afghanistan.
An air strike on Friday in the north of the country ordered by a German commander after the Taliban hijacked fuel tankers killed scores.
On Saturday McChrystal promised a full investigation into the strike in which Karzai's office said 90 people were killed and wounded.
McChrystal submitted on August 31 his much-anticipated classified review of America's strategy there that is widely expected to lead to a request for more troops.
It has been forwarded to President Barack Obama and is being evaluated by senior military officials.
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Military air transit to Afghanistan via Russia has not begun yet - FM
MOSCOW, September 7 (Itar-Tass) -- Air transit of military cargoes through Russia for the coalition forces in Afghanistan has not begun yet, Foreign Ministry deputy spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov said on Monday.
“We have not received any requests from the American side. Air transit of military cargoes has not begun yet. We are waiting for appropriate requests from the American side,” he said.
Moscow considers the operation being carried out by the United States and other countries in Afghanistan from the point of view of the fight against terrorism, the deputy spokesman said.
“We confirm all of the obligations we have assumed under the agreement and are ready to work,” the diplomat said.
Russia and Washington signed the inter-governmental agreement on the transit of arms, military hardware, military property and personnel through Russia in early July in connection with the participation of the U.S. Armed Forces in the efforts to ensure security, stabilisation and reconstruction in Afghanistan.
"We are prepared for full-scale cooperation with our American and other partners, including in terms of transit. We are ready to help in different fields," President Dmitry Medvedev said.
He said he "appreciates the efforts the U.S. is taking together with other countries in order to prevent the terrorist threat that emanates and unfortunately still emanates to a large extent from Afghanistan".
The U.S. and Russia made an agreement on military transit to Afghanistan. It was signed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns.
The agreement calls for 4,500 flights a year and supplements the previous agreement on non-military transit.
The agreement will enable the U.S. to further diversify the crucial transportation routes and decrease the amount of time needed to move troops and critical equipment to resupply international forces in Afghanistan and to bring needed supplies to the government and people of Afghanistan. This will permit 4,500 flights per year. The new transit routes will save the United States government up to 133 million U.S. dollars annually in fuel, maintenance and other transportation costs, and this agreement is free of any air navigation charges. By providing access to these transit routes, the Russian Federation is enabling a substantial increase in the efficiency of our common effort to defeat the forces of violent extremism in Afghanistan and to ensure Afghanistan's and the broader region's security, the White House said.
Conflict and instability in Afghanistan are a threat to the region and the world. The growing flow of narcotics from Afghanistan threatens the well-being of Europe and Central Asia, and provides a source of lucrative funding for terrorists and criminals throughout the region, it said.
The Russian Federation's decision to open these valuable transit routes supplements its already robust airlift support and provision of commodities to Coalition efforts in Afghanistan, and further illustrates that Russia is a valuable member of the international coalition supporting the security, stability, and reconstruction of Afghanistan, the White House statement said.
"The topic of Russian-U.S. cooperation on the Afghan track is extremely important and this is why we gave so much attention top this issue at the talks. We have just signed the agreement on transit. This is an important topic and we will certainly continue cooperation with our American partners," he said.
"The current situation in Afghanistan is not simple. I do not want to say that it s deteriorating, but there is no progress in many respects or it is ephemeral," he added.
"I don't know how quickly the situation can be changed. It will depend to a large extent on how fast the political system in Afghanistan evolves and how much progress the Afghan government makes in the economy. Right now it's all very complicated there," Medvedev said.
The current situation in Afghanistan differs from the situation when the Soviet military contingent was deployed in that country, Medvedev said.
Russia is ready to "cooperate with the alliance's forces, but not in military terms -- we will not do that - but in terms of counter-terrorist cooperation," he said.
"We have allowed both civilian and military transit for a number of European countries. We will discuss transit to Afghanistan with [U.S.] President [Barack] Obama who will come here next week," the president said.
"I think that this is our contribution to the resolution of the problem of terrorism, including on the Afghan track," he added.
However he believes this would not be enough. "It is necessary to restore the political system in Afghanistan and build a modern society there, but taking into account Afghan specificities, create new jobs and fight drugs," Medvedev said.
"Only then can terrorism be defeated. This is why we would like to make some input, too," he said.
Russia is "at the forefront of repelling threats and the terrorist menace because a part of rebels simply penetrate our country from that territory through Central Asia, and the drug threat that goes into Russia the same way and seeks to reach Europe, of course," Medvedev said.
He pointed out the fact that "the military component alone won't bring any success".
A success "can accompany those who help Afghans to build their own state and their own modern society, taking into account, I emphasise, Afghan traditions, and a developed economy", he said.
The use of force "is a road to nowhere because the situation will become more complicated and will degrade every year."
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Should Obama go 'all in' on Afghanistan?
Los Angeles Times By Andrew J. Bacevich September 7, 2009
Before the president bets his chips on a military solution, he should figure out if there are other cards that can be played.
Back in January when he took office, Barack Obama had amassed a very considerable pile of chips. Events since then have appreciably reduced that stack. Should he wager what remains on Afghanistan? That's the issue the president now faces.
The first true foreign policy test of the Obama presidency has arrived, although not in the form of a crisis coming out of nowhere announced by a jangling telephone at 3 a.m. Instead, a steady drip-drip of accumulating evidence warns that Afghanistan is coming apart.
Unlike his predecessor, Obama has by no means consigned Afghanistan to the back burner. Since becoming president, he has declared the war there both necessary and winnable. He has ordered an increase to the U.S. troop commitment. He has installed a new commander. In effect, Afghanistan has displaced Iraq on the Pentagon's list of priorities. Yet all of this has amounted to little more than temporizing.
The really big decisions have yet to be made. The biggest of all is simply this: Is the president willing to go for broke? Is he committed to Afghanistan as Obama's war -- committed as George W. Bush was to his war in Iraq? Is he willing to pull out the stops, regardless of the obstacles ahead, despite evidence of eroding public support and disregarding the fact that many in his own party oppose the war outright?
Obama's advisors -- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen and Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander on the ground in Afghanistan -- have been quite candid in arguing that half-measures won't suffice. The war is going badly. The Taliban is gaining in strength. Seven-plus years of allied efforts in Afghanistan have accomplished very little.
Even if the military's recently rediscovered catechism of counterinsurgency provides the basis for a new strategy, turning things around will take a very long time -- five to 10 years at least. Achieving success (however vaguely defined) will entail the expenditure of vast resources: treasure (no one will say how much) and, of course, blood (again, no one offers an estimate).
So the president faces a real challenge if he intends to make the case for starting from scratch in Afghanistan. To persuade the American people to buy in, he will have to reassure them on five points:
* Afghanistan constitutes a vital national security interest -- victory in this primitive, impoverished, landlocked and distant country will contribute materially to driving a stake through the heart of violent jihadism.
* Armed nation-building -- securing the Afghan population, developing the economy, building legitimate institutions, eliminating corruption and drug trafficking -- provides the most realistic and effective way to satisfy those interests.
* The failure of past efforts by other great powers to impose their will on Afghanistan is beside the point -- history has no relevant lessons to teach.
* The United States possesses the money, troops, expertise and will to get the job done -- notwithstanding the recession, the mushrooming deficit, the diminishing enthusiasm of our allies, the stress and strain already endured by U.S. forces and the uneven performance of government agencies in the analogous U.S. effort to "fix" Iraq.
* No other priorities, foreign or domestic, exist that outrank Afghanistan and should have first call on the resources that years of additional war will consume -- several hundred billion dollars and several hundred additional American lives by a conservative estimate.
Driving home these five propositions will require Obama to deploy all of his formidable powers of persuasion. Even if he manages to do so, he will then spend the rest of his presidency -- as the bills mount and the body count climbs -- defending and reaffirming them. As was the case with Harry Truman in Korea, Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam and Bush in Iraq, war will hold his presidency hostage.
Obama does not act impulsively. Before betting his remaining chips on Afghanistan, he will no doubt deliberate carefully. He will consult. He will sift through all the evidence. Yet before hitting the "start over" button on Afghanistan, he would do well to consider the following: Sometimes the essence of leadership is not to render the right decision but to pose the right question.
As difficult as it is to do so at a time when war has become a seemingly perpetual condition, when it comes to Afghanistan, the really urgent need is to recast the debate. Official Washington obsesses over the question: How do we win? Yet perhaps a different question merits presidential consideration: What alternatives other than open-ended war might enable the United States to achieve its limited interests in Afghanistan?
At this pivotal moment in his presidency, if Obama is going to demonstrate his ability to lead, he will direct his subordinates to identify those alternatives.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.
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UN calls for improving access to literacy program in Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 7 (Xinhua) -- Shigeru Aoyagi, the Country Director of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Monday urged all stakeholders in Afghanistan to take serious action toward improving access to quality, relevant literacy programming in the country.
UNESCO, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Human Settlements Program (UN Habitat) once again urged all relevant stakeholders to take serious action toward improving access to literacy programming in the country, especially for those areas most underserved, most vulnerable to exclusion and with high numbers of persons living in extreme poverty, Aoyagi told a joint news briefing with the representative of UNICEF and UN Habitat here.
"UNICEF provides support to the ministry of education to implement women's literacy course which benefit to average of 80,000 women each year. And 386,000 women have been benefited from this assistance since 2006," said Catherine Mbengue, the representative of UNICEF.
Mbengue also said that their organization has faced many challenges. The main challenge is that many people in Afghanistan believe that education of girls are not so important.
Afghanistan remains one of the least literacy countries in the world, where only 34 percent of the population can read and write,the majority of whom live in urban areas.
Michael Slingsby, representative of UN Habitat, noted that the rural areas are more alarming, 74 percent of Afghans (90 percent of women and 63 percent of men) lack of literacy skills.
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Armed men gun down working woman in S Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 7 (Xinhua) -- Unknown armed men shot dead a woman worked outside home in Kandahar province the birthplace of Taliban in south Afghanistan on Monday, police said.
"Unidentified armed men opened fire on Ms. Latifa, 21, in Kandahar city this morning, killing her on the spot," police chief of southern region Ghulam Ali Wahdat told Xinhua.
Worked as in-charge of tailoring project in Women Affairs Department, the late Latifa, was on her way home when two armed men riding a motorbike opened fire and killed her.
No groups or individuals have claimed of responsibility.
However, the official put the attack on the enemies of peace a reference used against Taliban militants.
Kandahar has experienced a series of attacks against women over the past couple of years.
A lady police official and female member of provincial council have been killed by Taliban militants in Kandahar since last year.
Furthermore, unknown men doused acid on school girls in Kandahar last year and the government blamed Taliban insurgents for the gruesome incident.
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Zardari Says Battle Against Taliban Saving Pakistan’s Integrity
Bloomberg By Paul Tighe Sept. 7, 2009
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said the army’s successful operation against the Taliban in the Swat Valley is preserving the country’s integrity.
“We will eliminate the militants and those who have challenged the foundations of the state,” Zardari said in a message to mark the country’s Defense Day yesterday, according to the official Associated Press of Pakistan.
The 10-week military offensive that ended in July put the militants on the run in the northwestern region, Zardari said, according to APP. More than 1 million people who fled the fighting have returned to their homes, the United Nation says.
The fight against the Taliban has turned to the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan where the group’s leader in South Waziristan Baitullah Mehsud was killed last month. Soldiers have attacked militant bases in the Khyber region in the past week, prompting hundreds of civilians to flee, the daily Dawn newspaper reported.
Extremists threaten the foundation of the state in their attempt to impose their agenda, Zardari said.
“We will eliminate the militants,” the president said. “Let there be no doubt or mistake about it.”
As many as 43 militants were killed on the fifth day of the operation in the Khyber Agency, Dawn reported yesterday, citing unidentified military officials. Helicopters during the weekend attacked bases of the outlawed Lashkar-i-Islam, including a training center.
Hundreds of people in the Bara area defied a curfew to flee their homes, Dawn reported. The local administration is trying to set up relief camps, it said.
Taliban Leadership
The Taliban leadership in Pakistan is “almost finished” after the death of Mehsud, the leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said last month. Security forces are trying to ensure militants aren’t able to regroup, he said.
The U.S. is pressing Pakistan to continue its offensives against the Taliban and other militant groups. Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, made appeals when they visited the capital, Islamabad, last month.
President Barack Obama has said a U.S. non-military aid package to Pakistan worth $1.5 billion a year is conditional on the government cracking down on Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in regions bordering Afghanistan.
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Creating an audience from the void
Himal Southasian By: Aunohita Mojumdar September 2009
After decades of upheaval, Afghanistan today finds itself unable to remember its cultural past.
Bollywood songs blare from taxis and street corners. In wedding halls, guests sit glued to the next episode of “Kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi” dubbed into Dari, the main language in Afghanistan. In shops selling pirated CDs and DVDs in Kabul’s busy Flower Street, young Afghans walk in to ask for the latest Hollywood action movie, the music of a hot new Tajik singer or the most recent Iranian soap opera. The removal of the Taliban has been celebrated as the end of cultural censorship in Afghanistan, and the easy availability of imported pop culture touted as evidence of new freedoms. But the tragedy of the years of conflict in Afghanistan runs much deeper. What remains after years of violence and fighting, displacement and censorship, is a void. Built over years of absence of art and culture, what echoes today is the lack of an audience where once existed a deep appreciation of arts and music. This is an emptiness – as opposed to a simple tug of war between cultural freedoms and censorship, which could be resolved by lifting the arbitrary restrictions of the Taliban regime. It is also a void that is being filled too quickly and indiscriminately with whatever is at hand.
Contrary to the oft-repeated mantra that equates all censorship with the Taliban, the advent of cultural restrictions in Afghanistan goes back much farther. While the Soviet-sponsored regimes saw a chance for propaganda in art and music, the subsequent mujahideen government had senior leaders whose conservative interpretation of Islam did not encourage music and the arts. What space remained was squeezed in the last years of the Taliban, when its leaders turned more brutal and censorious, systematically destroying the art and culture that they had earlier permitted to exist. The purge culminated in the infamous destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, an act that turned the Taliban into pariahs. But Bamiyan residents still talk of how, in earlier years, the mujahideen soldiers would amuse themselves by taking pot shots at the Buddha statues.
Omara Khan Masoudi is the director of the national museum in Kabul, which he joined 30 years ago. He was forced to leave the country in 2000 because of the growing pressure of the Taliban, but remembers that the destruction of the national treasures did not begin and end with them. Masoudi says most of the losses of the artefacts in the museum took place during the civil war of the mid-1990s, before the Taliban came to power. “When power changed from communist to mujahideen hands [in 1992], there was a security vacuum,” he recalls. “The museum was looted.” The area where the national museum is situated became a frontline in the civil war, and could not be accessed by the staff. “For two years, this area was cut off and we could not reach the museum,” he says. “Rocket attacks set the museum building on fire, destroying a large part of it.” Today the museum is undergoing refurbishment, but the Darul Aman Palace, right opposite it, stands shattered and pockmarked with the brunt of many attacks, a mute testimony
to what took place in the area.
In the initial years after the Taliban took over power in Kabul, its members actually helped to rebuild the museum and to safeguard the remaining artefacts. Edicts were also issued by Taliban chief Mullah Omar calling for the safeguarding of the Bamiyan Buddhas. However, as the regime came under increasing pressure of al-Qaeda, it took an increasingly stronger stance against ‘un-Islamic’ activity, eventually desecrating the museum that it had until then worked to preserve. While al-Qaeda’s hardline ideology does not tolerate the more liberal arts, political analysts have said that its leadership pushed the Taliban to adopt a more intolerant attitude. The idea, some suggest, was to make the Taliban more isolated from the international community and, hence, more dependent on al-Qaeda.
Reflection and regeneration
With the Taliban completing the process of emaciating Afghan art and culture, a new generation of Afghans grew up under the shadow of conflict, completely oblivious to the world of art and music. What remained from earlier years was lost as families migrated and were torn apart, losing the thread of continuity that had helped generations to pass on their knowledge, including that of art appreciation. While the removal of the Taliban has allowed art to flourish, most of what was produced in the initial post-Taliban years has been reproductions of postcard kitsch – the burqa-clad woman, the Bactrian camel, the old man in a turban. At its worst, this art recreated the stereotypes of Afghans and Afghanistan; at best, it was well executed but simplistic real-life representations.
With no link to the organic growth of art and the movements in art and culture in other parts of the globe, it has been difficult to shake the Afghan art scene out of its static limitations. One man trying to do this so, and who can testify to the difficulties, is Rahraw Omarzad, a teacher in Kabul University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, a department that was set up in 1976, just three years before the country began to explode with violence. Though Omarzad continues to teach at the Faculty, his real initiative has been in setting up the Centre for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan, where he has been trying to teach young men and women artists interested in exploring contemporary and abstract art. (For samples of works from the Centre’s artists, see Himal commentary sections for July-December 2008.) “I found that by the time students reached the last semester, where they learn about contemporary art, they had already forgotten how to think out of the box,” Omarzad says. “When they come to the Centre, I do not teach them theory or any ‘ism’. I just ask them to create art from what is inside them. It is only when they themselves have started expressing themselves, and are confident, that we go to theory.”
The first-ever exhibition of contemporary women artists, held early last year, bore testimony to this confidence. The young women artists who displayed their works appeared to follow no set pattern of painting, and many of them produced works that varied greatly in technique, style and subject. Sheenkai Alam Stanikzai is a multimedia artist who works in paint, collage, video installations and photography. She says that for her, the conceptual clarity of her work is more important than the technique. “Some think that to paint they should possess innate skills,” she says. “But I believe that possessing good knowledge, open vision and awareness is of no less value than innate talents and skills.”
Many of the artists have been nurturing their talent for years, through trying circumstances. Another artist, 21-year-old Ommolbanin Shamsia, says she has been painting for as long as she can remember, as a child and refugee in Iran and, later, after her family returned home to Afghanistan. One of her paintings depicts a woman with a layer of gold jewellery covering her eyes. “I tried to show a woman who cannot see the way because of the gold,” Shamsia says. “She is in a golden cage.” Another of Shamsia’s paintings shows a woman standing at the edge of a pool of water. Instead of her own reflection, she looks at a young, green tree. “This represents woman as life, as regeneration,” she says.
This year, Stanikzai won the first prize in a contemporary-arts competition organised by the Turquoise Mountain, an organisation that is working to promote the revival of traditional arts and crafts of Afghanistan. In October 2008, Turquoise Mountain organised a first-of-its-kind three-nation contemporary-art exhibition, bringing together artists from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. The exhibition recently travelled to the Venice Biennale, where it received rave reviews. But perhaps its greatest contribution was in bringing this art to an audience never previously exposed to it. Explaining the rationale, the curator of the Living Traditions exhibition, Jemima Montagu, who formerly worked at the Tate Gallery in London, says, “The three countries share a strong bond, particularly in art and in the way Islamic calligraphy and painting evolved. These traditions can and need to be adapted if they are to survive.”
In order to organise the exhibition, Montagu had to insure the paintings against potential acts of war and violence, and face the doubts of painters who were too anxious to send their paintings into a conflict zone – as well as the scepticism of those who felt Afghanistan lacked the necessary audience for such a show. Eventually, the exhibition opened to a packed audience comprised of both Afghans and international workers in Afghanistan. But for Montagu, the real audience was in those who had never seen such art before. “This is not a project for expatriates,” she says. “There is no existing audience for arts and culture here. You have to create it.”
As a result, an important component of the exhibition was school visits. During these, schoolchildren were exposed to a specially prepared package of materials that not only explained the exhibition, but also challenged them to ask questions and express themselves. Eventually, 7000 Afghans visited the exhibition, a third of them schoolchildren. Visiting Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi gave a lecture at Kabul University, after which he expressed his excitement about the initiative. “This is historic; it is important,” he said. “Things may be primitive here after the impact of years of war, but they will not remain the same. We cannot control things, but we can make efforts to change it.”
Culture of nothingness
Meanwhile, at the national museum, Masoudi wants more visitors. “This country has an ancient civilisation,” he says. “We have to be proud of it, about the pre-Islamic history.” Masoudi feels that it was a lack of education that led to the past looting, and he is keen to ensure that exposure to the museum now starts at a young age. “I hope some donors can provide us with one or two buses, then we could arrange to bring schoolchildren here and show them around for free. We could do this every day – we can host as many as 300 to 400 children at one time!” he says, his eyes lighting up with enthusiasm. “We can show them our country’s rich past.”
Creating a receptive audience is also a challenge faced by Mirwaiss Sidiqi, the programme coordinator for the Aga Khan Music Initiative for Central Asia in Afghanistan. The programme teaches classical music to young Afghans, with classes conducted in vocal music and the traditional instruments of Afghanistan – the dilruba, rubab, tabla and sarinda. Initially, it was hard to find students to come and even harder to make them stay. As such, the classes remain free in order to encourage families to send their children, and students even get a small stipend as travel expenses so as to remove any disincentive.
The biggest challenge, however, has been creating a new appreciation for traditional music. Speaking painfully of the 5000-year-old cultural identity of Afghanistan, Sidiqi bemoans “the culture of nothingness” that has replaced it. What Afghanistan has now in the way of musical culture “does not belong to us,” he says. “It is imported in a nasty way to Afghanistan. It doesn’t have depth. It is a bad copy, a dark copy of Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, Tajik and European pop and rap music – a mixture of all these things trying to become a culture.” Sidiqi emphasises that he is not against pop culture, but says that it also should not be allowed to wipe out Afghanistan’s own traditions. “There is space for everyone, for everything,” he says. “But right now, we need to create a foundation, to build what we lost in the last thirty years. After that, it is their wish what they put on top of it.” Sidiqi is also concerned about the passage of time, and about what could be lost before the skills are transferred from one
generation to the other. The generation that possessed the traditional cultural skills is today old and dying. One of those who teaches at the music school is Ustad Amruddin, the only skilled exponent of the lute-like rubab. “If we lose his knowledge,” says Sidiqi, “we can bury the rubab.”
It is not just through students that the Aga Khan programme seeks to rebuild the musical tradition. It is also trying to create an audience that can appreciate such music through public concerts, radio and television broadcasts, by talking about these issues through the media and preserving the knowledge. Sidiqi had just returned from a visit to the remote northeastern corner of the country, in the province of Badakhshan, as part of a project to document and record the country’s myriad musical traditions. These first important steps, however, also emphasise the long distance that has yet to be travelled. Traditional Afghan music cannot be accessed quite as easily as the cheap copies of Bollywood and Hollywood. There is no funding for a recording studio, and no means of making or disseminating the music in easily accessible ways such as CDs.
More heart than money Still, the Aga Khan Foundation is one of the lucky ones, as others struggle just to keep their initiatives afloat. When Montagu organised the three-nation exhibition, she faced the timeless question of arts versus bread: Why, in a country of so many urgent and competing needs, should anyone spend money on art? Likewise, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Omarzad has had to reduce the time he can keep the Centre open to just two days a week. Though there is widespread appreciation for his work, the enthusiasm has not been matched by funding. While the notion of young women artists creating unusual art has caught on in some circles, funding has only come through project-specific grants. The Centre has been funded repeatedly for exhibitions abroad, since these are visible, popular and help the donor nation to ‘preen’ itself. However, there has been no funding for the institution that could actually help young local artists learn, grow and instil a wider culture of art appreciation. The in
ternational community’s constant complaint that ‘good’ news stories from Afghanistan are ignored appears to apply to itself – and the Centre and others like it end up suffering from neglect, despite the billions spent in Afghanistan.
The bazaars of Istalif are evidence of the challenge of sustaining traditional crafts. Istalif, famous for its pottery, had been bombed into smithereens during the war. Yet when the families returned, the main demand was for gaudy artefacts, copies of the cheap, mass-produced objects sold in the bazaars in Pakistan and China. In an attempt to regain and preserve the tradition, Turquoise Mountain established a pottery school that has worked with potters helping them regain traditional skills and use new techniques. A year later, however, funding for the project has run out.
Those involved in arts and music also know they are up against more than one challenge. Though they are all loath to talk about it, Afghanistan has recently seen a resurgence of conservative culture and power of the Taliban – both attempting to assert themselves by defining the boundaries of Afghan identity and culture. It is against these odds that the younger generation is seizing upon the small spaces available to it, pushing against the boundaries and questioning both the conservative ideology and the pop culture that has been imported to fill the void. One of young Stanikzai’s paintings, called “Introvert”, shows the figure of a man crouching with his head held in his hands, depicted on a background of an array of geometric shapes of different colours that end in the shimmer of reflective glass. “He is an Afghan trying to find himself in the mirror of history,” she says. “He has returned home and is searching for himself – and wondering why he can’t find himself.”
Aunohita Mojumdar is a contributing editor to Himal Southasian.
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