 |
||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serving you since 1998 | ||||||||||||
|
|
Mosque Bombing Injures 17 in Eastern Afghanistan
VOA News July 23, 2010
Afghan officials say a bombing at a mosque in eastern Afghanistan has wounded at least 17 people, including a parliamentary candidate.
Afghan leaders are cutting ties with Karzai
The Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Friday, Jul 23, 2010
PANJSHIR VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN - The man who served as President Hamid Karzai's top intelligence official for six years has launched an urgent campaign to warn Afghans that their leader has lost conviction in the fight against the Taliban and is recklessly pursuing a political deal with insurgents.
NATO troops arrest high ranking Taliban commander in S. Afghanistan
KABUL, July 23 (Xinhua) -- NATO troops Thursday night arrested six Taliban commanders, including a high ranking leader Mullah Abdul Hai Motmahen, during an operation in Ghazni province in south Afghanistan, a local official said Friday.
Taliban Violence Creating Social Revolution Among Afghanistan's Pashtuns
By Abubakar Siddique Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty July 23, 2010
Fifty-three-year-old Abdul Ahad Helmandwal is accustomed to being the go-to guy in one of southern Afghanistan's most violent areas.
Afghanistan copter crash kills 2 U.S. service members
The Taliban claims to have shot down the aircraft. It is the third fatal crash in the south of the country in less than two months.
Los Angeles Times By Laura King July 23, 2010
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - Two U.S. service members were killed Thursday in a helicopter crash in Helmand province, the third fatal chopper crash in the south of Afghanistan in less than two months.
Afghanistan war funding bill stalls in US Senate
July 23, 2010
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Senate has rejected emergency funding for military operations in Afghanistan, sending it back to the House of Representatives because it included billions in non-military spending.
"Mullah Radio" out of grave, releases video threatening suicide attacks in Pakistan
By Syed Moazzam Hashmi
ISLAMABAD, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Taliban leader Moulvi Fazlullah, infamous as "Mullah Radio", who had reportedly been killed in May is still alive and kicking, local media reported Friday.
Our Responsibility to Afghanistan
The Huffington Post.com By Dex Torricke-Barton 22/07/2010
The great Western retreat from Afghanistan has begun. Although the results of Tuesday's Kabul conference will be presented a roadmap for the country's future, it is probably not a future which many countries expect to play a major role in. Our men and women in uniform are coming home.
Canada encouraged by Afghanistan's progress: minister
By Ian Timberlake July 23, 2010
(AFP) – HANOI — Canada is encouraged by Afghanistan's progress towards self-reliance despite criticisms that Western nations are too eager to pull their forces from an unpopular war, Ottawa's foreign minister says.
Afghan MPs worry over race for exit
The National By Chris Sands 22/07/2010
KABUL - As the dust settles on the biggest international conference in Afghanistan for decades, politicians here are convinced that the ground is being prepared for foreign troops to make a quick and chaotic withdrawal from the country.
Afghan tourism: The long journey in
By Christopher Sleight BBC News, Tajikistan July 23, 2010
"There is Afghanistan." Our driver pointed across the valley to a line of steep, red cliffs that formed the bank of a wide river.
Gwyn: Victory in Afghanistan just means avoiding defeat
Toronto Star - Opinion By Richard Gwyn Columnist Fri Jul 23 2010
No more brilliant military strategy has ever been devised than that proposed by then Vermont senator George Aiken on how the U.S. could win the war in Vietnam.
U.S. money wasted on Afghanistan projects, auditor finds
A federal auditor says the problems are indicative of a pattern of building facilities that are too costly and complex for the Afghan government to maintain.
Los Angeles Times By Paul Richter July 22, 2010
Reporting from Washington - A federal watchdog criticized U.S. agencies on Thursday for squandering taxpayer money on facilities in Afghanistan that are too complex and costly for the Afghan government to maintain.
Back to Top
Mosque Bombing Injures 17 in Eastern Afghanistan
VOA News July 23, 2010
Afghan officials say a bombing at a mosque in eastern Afghanistan has wounded at least 17 people, including a parliamentary candidate.
Officials say the blast occurred Friday in Khost province, while the candidate, Syedullah Sayed was campaigning at the mosque. Security is a main challenge as Afghanistan prepares to hold parliamentary elections in September.
Separately, NATO said Friday a joint international and Afghan force detained several insurgents, including a senior Taliban commander, during overnight operations in Kandahar, Ghazni, Helmand and Nangarhar provinces.
The alliance also says Afghan forces discovered close to 2,000 kilograms of ammonium nitrate, 5,400 electronic fuses, 3,200 meters of detonation cord, and 275 kilograms of black powder in the Spin Boldak district of southern Kandahar province late Thursday.
NATO say the ammonium nitrate and black powder alone could be used to make more than 100 roadside bombs.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and AFP.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghan leaders are cutting ties with Karzai
The Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Friday, Jul 23, 2010
PANJSHIR VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN - The man who served as President Hamid Karzai's top intelligence official for six years has launched an urgent campaign to warn Afghans that their leader has lost conviction in the fight against the Taliban and is recklessly pursuing a political deal with insurgents.
In speeches to small groups in Kabul and across northern Afghanistan over the past month, Amarullah Saleh has repeated his belief that Karzai's push for negotiation with insurgents is a fatal mistake and a recipe for civil war. He says Karzai's chosen policy endangers the fitful progress of the past nine years in areas such as democracy and women's rights.
"If I don't raise my voice we are headed towards a crisis," he told a gathering of college students in Kabul.
That view is shared by a growing number of Afghan minority leaders who once participated fully in Karzai's government, but now feel alienated from it. Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek politicians have expressed increasing concern that they are being marginalized by Karzai and his efforts to strike a peace deal with his fellow Pashtuns in the insurgency.
Saleh's warnings come as the United States struggles to formulate its own position on reconciliation with the Taliban. While U.S. officials have supported Afghan government-led talks in theory, they have watched with apprehension as Karzai has pursued his own peace initiatives, seemingly without Western involvement.
NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, Ambassador Mark Sedwill, cautioned recently that "any political reconciliation process has to be genuinely national and genuinely inclusive. Otherwise we're simply storing up the next set of problems that will break out. And in this country when problems break out, they tend to lead to violence."
Still, with war costs and casualties rising, U.S. policymakers are increasingly looking for a way out, and a power-sharing deal between Karzai and the Taliban may be the best they can hope for. One senior NATO official in Kabul described Saleh as "brilliant." But the official said Saleh's hard-line stance against negotiations does not offer any path to ending the long-running U.S. war.
Saleh, 38 and a Tajik, began his intelligence career in this scenic valley north of Kabul working for the legendary guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. He said he is not motivated by ethnic rivalries with the majority Pashtuns or by a desire to undermine Karzai, whom he describes as a decent man and a patriot.
Rather, Saleh said he wants to use nonviolent, grass-roots organizing to pressure the government into a harder line against the Taliban by showing that Afghans who do not accept the return of the Taliban are a formidable force. Saleh resigned last month as director of the National Directorate of Security after he said he realized that Karzai no longer valued his advice.
"The Taliban have reached the gates of Kabul," Saleh said. "We will not stop this movement even if it costs our blood."
Proceeding carefully
Karzai spokesman Waheed Omar declined to comment on Saleh's analysis. Karzai's government has made reconciliation a top priority, and officials say they are proceeding carefully. Karzai has invited Taliban leaders to talk, but he has said insurgents must accept the constitution, renounce violence and sever their links to foreign terrorists before they can rejoin society.
Those conditions do little to mollify Afghan minority leaders, many of whom had backed Karzai in the past but are now breaking with the president. Some are concerned that a deal between Karzai and the Taliban could spawn the sort of civil war that existed in Afghanistan prior to the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.
"The new political path that Karzai has chosen will not only destroy him, it will destroy the country. It's a kind of suicide," said Mohammad Mohaqiq, a Hazara leader and former Karzai ally.
With the defection of Saleh and the transfer of another Tajik, Bismillah Khan, from his position as chief of army staff to interior minister, Karzai critics see an erosion of strong anti-Taliban views within the government. Khan, many argue, was more important to the war effort in his army post than at the interior ministry, which oversees the police.
"Now Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, they are not partners in Karzai's government, they are just employees," said Saleh Mohammad Registani, a Tajik parliament member from the Panjshir. "Karzai wants to use them as symbols."
To spread his message, Saleh has sought out young, educated students and university graduates. Through them he intends to form groups across the country to apply grass-roots political pressure. His aims are nonviolent, he said, and not intended to further ethnic divisions, but he has said they must prepare for the worst.
Saleh was born in the Panjshir Valley before the family moved to Kabul. He joined the armed opposition, or mujahideen, rather than be conscripted into the Afghan army and in 1997 started as an intelligence officer with Massoud's forces.
Saleh was appointed to run Afghanistan's fledgling intelligence service in 2004, and developed a reputation among U.S. officials as one of the most effective and honest cabinet ministers.
In Saleh's view, Karzai's shift from fighting to accommodating the Taliban began last August. The messy aftermath of the presidential election, in which Karzai prevailed but was widely accused of electoral fraud, was taken as a personal insult, Saleh said.
"It was very abrupt, it was not a process," Saleh said of Karzai's changing views. "He thought he was hurt by democracy and by the Americans. He felt he should have won with dignity."
Frayed relations
After the election, Afghan relations with the United States plunged to new lows, as Karzai railed against Western interference in his government and threatened to join the Taliban. Saleh said Karzai believes that the United States and NATO cannot prevail in Afghanistan and will soon depart. For that reason he has shifted his attention to Pakistan, which is thought to hold considerable sway over elements of the insurgency, in an attempt to broker a deal with the Taliban.
"We are heading toward settlement. Democracy is dying," Saleh said. He recalled Karzai saying, "'I've given everybody a chance to defeat the Taliban. It's been nine years. Where is the victory?'"
In his speeches, Saleh recounts Taliban brutalities: busloads of laborers lined up and executed, young men chopped in half with axes, women and children slain before their families. His rhetoric is harshly critical of Pakistan.
"All the goals you have will collapse if the Taliban comes back," he told a gathering of college students under a tent outside his house in Kabul. "I don't want your university to be closed just because of a political deal. It will be closed if we do not raise our voices."
Saleh believes the Taliban will not abide by a peaceful power-sharing deal because they want to regain total authority. Despite a significant U.S. troop buildup this year and major NATO offensives, he estimated that insurgents now control more than 30 percent of Afghanistan. He said the Taliban leadership -- about 200 people, many of them in the Pakistani city of Karachi -- are financed, armed and protected by Pakistan's intelligence agency. "The inner circle is totally under their control," Saleh said. Pakistan has long denied it supports the Taliban.
The second ring of Taliban leadership -- about 1,700 field commanders -- oversees a fighting force of 10,000 to 30,000 people, depending on the season, Saleh said. Under former NATO commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, 700 of these Taliban commanders were captured or killed, Saleh said, only to be replaced by a new crop.
"The factory is not shut," he said. "It keeps producing."
Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.
Back to Top
Back to Top
NATO troops arrest high ranking Taliban commander in S. Afghanistan
KABUL, July 23 (Xinhua) -- NATO troops Thursday night arrested six Taliban commanders, including a high ranking leader Mullah Abdul Hai Motmahen, during an operation in Ghazni province in south Afghanistan, a local official said Friday.
"Six Taliban commanders including Mullah Abdul Hai Motmahen were arrested in Andar district of Ghazni province last night," district governor Sher Khan Yusufzai told Xinhua on Friday.
NATO troops and Taliban militants have yet to make comment.
A well known Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Hai Motmahen, was a political and military leader during the Taliban regime, and remains in close relationship with Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar.
After the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001, he became the main commander of Taliban insurgents in Ghanzi province. His arrest is believed to be a major setback for Taliban militants.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Taliban Violence Creating Social Revolution Among Afghanistan's Pashtuns
By Abubakar Siddique Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty July 23, 2010
Fifty-three-year-old Abdul Ahad Helmandwal is accustomed to being the go-to guy in one of southern Afghanistan's most violent areas.
From his mud compound in Helmand Province's Nad-e Ali district, the turbaned ethnic Pashtun has for years looked after an extended family whose 110 members -- particularly the young -- were expected to obey him without question.
It had been that way since the day his father was killed by a Soviet Army mine 25 years ago, leaving Helmandwal to step into his shoes. Helmandwal's "mashartoob," the Pashto word for leadership, in his community was unchallenged.
It is evident that things have changed.
Whereas Helmandwal's ancestors built legitimacy by regularly holding jirgas, or local councils, to peacefully resolve local disputes, he is finding that consensus no longer garners respect even among his own Noorzai clan.
Elders Losing Control
Instead, Helmandwal finds himself in a competition for influence against a foe employing a much harsher method, and it's a competition he and his fellow Pashtun tribal leaders are not winning.
The Taliban, by use of a brutal assassination campaign that targets tribal leaders and other influential locals, has gained the upper hand in Pashtun-populated areas such as the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.
The strategy has weakened tribal solidarity among Pashtuns, effecting a societal breakdown that has both reduced their collective ability to resist extremists and made them wary of cooperating with government and coalition forces.
The traditional clan hierarchy has eroded, leaving elders vulnerable to reprisals from young clan members who have broken family ranks and joined with the Taliban. Whether in remote Pashtun villages or in bustling cities, Al-Qaeda and Taliban ideologues lure illiterate Pashtun youth to their side by way of propaganda, cash, or the promise of revenge for personal tragedies.
As head of the 45-member Nad-e Ali district shura, or council, Helmandwal is the closest thing to a bridge between his Noorzai clan and the Afghan government. But getting too close to the government over insurgents is fraught with hazard, as Helmandwal explains. "Our aim is to extract ourselves from the calamity we are caught in. We don't have the kind of government that can protect us," he says.
"If you side with the Taliban then you will face raining bombs and be prepared to die," Helmandwal adds. "When we tell the Taliban not to plant bombs in front of our houses [to kill Afghan and Western troops], they tell us: 'You are trying to prevent us from waging jihad. You have become an infidel.' And then they beat us."
Fashioning A New Order
It is a Catch-22 that has ravaged the social fabric in Pashtun communities. Drawing on Al-Qaeda's employment of "takfir," which justifies the killing of Muslims accused of apostasy, local extremists in areas straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan have killed hundreds of Pashtun politicians, tribal leaders, and clerics. Local leaders get little protection from their governments, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Few, if any, of the killings are resolved, and communities are often left deprived of the leaders most likely to resist the Taliban.
Saleem Afghan, a pseudonym for an Afghan researcher who declined to give his real name out of security concerns, has looked into 400 such killings that have taken place in Kandahar Province -- located between Helmand Province to the west and Pakistan to the east -- over the past nine years. He found that an overwhelming number of those assassinated were tribal leaders, with other respected locals, such as clerics, government officials, and former leaders of the resistance against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, also among those targeted.
As a local jirga member, Helmandwal is in a position to arbitrate anything from marriage disputes to complex clan relations, sometimes involving generations-old feuds. His authority, based on his lineage, has been cemented over the years due to his personal charisma and the respect he has gained from serving his clan.
This places Helmandwal in a very risky position in the current environment, according to Saleem Afghan. "The aim of these murders is to finish off everybody in this society who has the potential to lead the society in the future, and who can lead them toward peace and stability," he says. "Anybody who is identified as such has been eliminated."
The Taliban's use of targeted assassinations to systematically eliminate real or potential opponents, has clearly left its mark.
The assassinations in Kandahar for example, have weakened Durrani Pashtun leaders, preventing them from stabilizing southern Afghanistan -- a region of crucial strategic importance to the Taliban insurgency.
Across the border in Pakistan, Taliban assassination campaigns and suicide bombings dissuade Pashtun tribes from resisting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. On July 9, twin suicide bombings in Pakistan's northwestern Mohmand tribal district killed more that 100 people as anti-Taliban elders from the Mohmand tribe were negotiating measures against the insurgents with the local civilian administration.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Pashtun tribal leaders have perished in similar attacks across Pakistan's western border region with Afghanistan during the past five years.
Radicalized Youth
And sometimes, the Taliban effort receives a recruitment boost from the very enemy they are fighting, revealing itself in radicalized youth who join the fight against the international forces whether their family approves or not.
Mohammad Qasim, a tall bearded man in his mid-20s, and his younger brother Kareemullah provide just one example. As the two worked as day laborers in Kandahar, their parents and a younger brother tended the family fields and lived in a sprawling mud house in Babaji, a small farming village in neighboring Helmand Province.
But a NATO bombing raid that hit the family home two years ago changed everything. Kareemullah never recovered from losing his parents and younger brother. "He was deeply shocked and told me that he wanted to go to the Taliban to fight for them," Mohammad Qasim recalls. "He used to ask" 'Why were my parents killed? Tomorrow they are going to kill my uncle and others, too. I must take revenge for my parent's death.'
"I told him: 'Brother, we can't do this. Stay here, we are poor people and need to work to survive.' But he left to fight."
Today Kareemullah is known as Mullah Kareem and heads a 10-member Taliban squad in Helmand. Every few months, Mohammad Qasim makes an attempt to persuade his younger brother to return to Kandahar with him, but to no avail.
"I don't think he will ever return. He has changed so much that he doesn't even want to see me anymore," Mohammad Qasim says.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghanistan copter crash kills 2 U.S. service members
The Taliban claims to have shot down the aircraft. It is the third fatal crash in the south of the country in less than two months.
Los Angeles Times By Laura King July 23, 2010
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - Two U.S. service members were killed Thursday in a helicopter crash in Helmand province, the third fatal chopper crash in the south of Afghanistan in less than two months.
The Taliban claimed to have shot down the aircraft. The NATO force said an investigation was underway and that hostile fire could not be ruled out.
American military deaths in Afghanistan are running at the highest level of the nine-year war. A record 60 U.S. service members were killed last month, and the latest fatalities bring July's tally to at least 49.
Two NATO helicopters were lost in June; one was shot down and the other had mechanical problems. Both of those deadly crashes also took place in the Taliban heartland, where the majority of Western military casualties occur.
A coalition military offensive centered on Kandahar, the south's main city, is gathering momentum after months of delays, with fighting heating up in outlying districts where Taliban fighters have long been in control.
The NATO force is heavily dependent on helicopters for troop transport, resupply runs and combat missions, because many of the roads in Afghanistan are poorly maintained and the rough terrain makes ground travel extremely difficult.
But helicopters are vulnerable to malfunction in the harsh climate, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization says the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has ordered field commanders to try to procure more heavy weapons, some of which could be used to target aircraft.
Thursday's crash took place near Lashkar Gah, Helmand's provincial capital. Thousands of U.S. Marines and British troops are deployed in the area, which lies close to the town of Marja, the scene of a major offensive this year.
Afghan and Western officials, meanwhile, reported the arrest of an insurgent leader who they said had plotted to attack a major international conference this week. The man was captured Wednesday night near Kabul, the capital, in a raid by NATO and Afghan forces, the military announced Thursday.
Authorities had already reported the separate arrests or killings of several Taliban operatives intending to try to strike at the conference. Tuesday's gathering drew dozens of high-level diplomats, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The United Nations chief's plane was diverted to a nearby air base because of rocket fire aimed at the international airport, but insurgents did not manage to otherwise disrupt the meeting. The Taliban, though, called the gathering a "futile" exercise that proved the Western military effort was "doomed to failure."
laura.king@latimes.com
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghanistan war funding bill stalls in US Senate
July 23, 2010
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Senate has rejected emergency funding for military operations in Afghanistan, sending it back to the House of Representatives because it included billions in non-military spending.
The budget supplemental is intended to finance the 30,000 extra troops that US President Barack Obama ordered to Afghanistan in December.
The senators however rejected late Thursday the funding language approved by the House on July 1, which included some 20 billion dollars in spending on items including teaching positions, youth summer jobs, and scholarships.
The Pentagon says they need the money before Congress goes on its summer recess in August to properly fund war operations.
The Senate approved the supplementary funding in May, but the House added provisions for education, with lawmakers defending the additions as addressing urgent needs for education spending.
The current measure also includes 2.8 billion dollars for aid to Haiti, as well as money to pay for the US withdrawal from Iraq, aid to Pakistan, and funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), responsible for federal assistance when natural disasters strike.
Back to Top
Back to Top
"Mullah Radio" out of grave, releases video threatening suicide attacks in Pakistan
By Syed Moazzam Hashmi
ISLAMABAD, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Taliban leader Moulvi Fazlullah, infamous as "Mullah Radio", who had reportedly been killed in May is still alive and kicking, local media reported Friday.
A video released on Thursday night showed Fazlullah addressing a group of 300 suicide bombers preparing to launch a fresh wave of suicide attacks across the country. Mullah Radio was also seen threatening the Awami National Party (ANP), which is ruling the troubled northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, as prime target of its suicide bombers cadre.
Mullah Radio also reiterated to continue fighting against the " Crusade" launched by the United States and its allies against Muslims around the world. The insurgent militants have consistently been targeting Pakistani troops for assisting the U.S. -led war against terror.
A Pakistani Anti-Terrorist Court (ATC) has declared Moulvi Fazlullah and a group of 50 other absconding accomplices as most wanted proclaimed offenders, local media reported citing official sources.
Fazlullah, 31, leads Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM) chief in restive Swat area, an ally of Tehrik Taliban Pakistan ( TTP). He had reportedly been killed along with six other Taliban commanders in Nuristan province of Afghanistan on May 27. Afghan border police then made the claim which was denied by Pakistani Taliban leader Moulvi Fakir Muhammad, declaring it unfounded and baseless.
Fazlullah who is reported not to be an active fighter and handicapped with imputed legs is also son-in-law of Sufi Muhammad, chief of the national network of the disbanded TNSM in the troubled tribal areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.
In a latest development, official sources said the army have arrested Haji Muslim Khan, a Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan spokesman, while another important Taliban commander Moulvi Shah Dauran was killed in a clash with troops.
Local analysts cited three prominent developments coinciding news of Fazlullah still being alive. First was the extension in tenure of General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. He will continue as Pakistani military chief, which was mainly granted to keep him successfully continue fighting against insurgent militants in the northwest tribal areas.
Fazlullah's coming back to life challenges official claims of significant achievements in fighting against insurgency in the rugged tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
Secondly, the U.S. declared Haqqani group as terrorist, putting it onto a list of groups fomenting terrorism. It also ordered freezing of assets of Nasiruddin Haqqani, the leader of the group.
Thirdly, some 1,100 terrorists have reportedly infiltrated into Pakistan from Afghanistan. In a recent meeting with NATO officials, Pakistan threatened to seal its border with Afghanistan. However, previous ideas have never been worked out to permanently seal the 2,430-kilometer-long porous border between the two countries, longest border the landlocked Afghanistan has with its neighbors.
Earlier in May, the news of Taliban militant chief Hakimullah Mehsud coming back to life had surprise many, as it also coincided with many going events related with war against terrorism at that time. Mehsud was reported to have been killed in a U.S. drone attack in Pakistani tribal areas in January this year.
However, local analysts believed that whether Fazlullah or any other outlawed militant leaders were dead or alive would not make much difference in the continuing war against terrorism as the " terrorists mess" is widely spread. Hence the individuals would not affect the prevailing situation much.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Our Responsibility to Afghanistan
The Huffington Post.com By Dex Torricke-Barton 22/07/2010
The great Western retreat from Afghanistan has begun. Although the results of Tuesday's Kabul conference will be presented a roadmap for the country's future, it is probably not a future which many countries expect to play a major role in. Our men and women in uniform are coming home. But the international community must remain engaged in Afghanistan beyond 2014. We can't just wash the country off our hands.
Preparing for an era in which the Afghan government takes charge is a good thing. The Western commitment to direct Afghanistan's political, economic and security sectors could not obviously be open-ended, and establishing a clear series of targets and process for handing over the country to its rightful rulers is a long-overdue process.
But as countries head for the exit, they must avoid tripping at the door. At the Kabul conference, the international community agreed that Afghan forces will assume control of the provinces from NATO by 2014, and that a greater proportion of aid money will flow through the Afghan government's coffers. Yet Kabul is less a plan in itself than the start of a process of planning, and care must be taken over the coming months and years to further elaborate the way in which Afghanistan's government is expected to stand on its own feet.
One of the first challenges that must be resolved is how to deal with the Taliban. The final communiqué from Kabul called for a reconciliation and reintegration program to be opened to all members of the Taliban, on condition that they renounce violence, have no links to international terrorist movements such as al-Qaeda, and respect the Afghan constitution. Particular attention was paid to the need to respect the rights of Afghanistan's women in any future settlement with the Taliban, who spent years brutalizing women in the name of their ultra-conservative ideology.
Engaging the Taliban is likely to require compromises, and Western diplomats are under a great deal of pressure to produce results quickly. It is not unthinkable that they may attempt to fudge the human rights provisions of Afghanistan's constitution when the time comes to do a deal, throwing women and civil society under the bus in the name of security. This impulse must be resisted. It is not only a moral imperative, it is simply essential to Afghanistan's future peace and prosperity. As Hillary Clinton said this week: "if these groups are fully empowered to help build a just and lasting peace, they will help do so. If they are silenced and pushed to the margins of Afghan society, the prospects for peace and justice will be subverted."
Having said that, there must be no diversion from the focus on building security. In Kabul there was much talk of the need to tackle the economic and social conditions which lead to radicalization in Afghan society. This is critically important, and offers the only long-term solution to Afghanistan's three decades of woe.
But before talking about the long-term, we must deal with the immediate crisis. NATO casualties are at record highs, with more than 370 killed so far this year compared to 520 in 2009. The Taliban control much of southern Afghanistan, many of the highways linking major cities, and much of the provinces surrounding Kabul. As if reminder were needed of the scale of the resistance, rocket fire diverted the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as he arrived for the conference.
Ultimately, until a sound security framework is established within which the Afghan government can operate, infrastructural and social gains will come to naught. That's the lesson of a host of other conflicts, including Sudan, Ethiopia and Chechnya. The first priority of any government worth its name -- and the support of its people -- is to protect them. If the Taliban are not pushed back to a more manageable stretch of territory, then the government cannot consolidate its authority and carry out the kind of strategic, sustainable development the country needs. Its position will be deeply precarious come 2014, and if we want to avoid Hamid Karzai's administration befalling the same fate of Afghanistan's post-Soviet government in 1992, then a military surge must still take priority over a civilian one.
Lastly, most crucially, the international community must remain engaged beyond 2014. Allowing an orderly withdrawal of the bulk of combat forces should not allow policy-makers to detach themselves from the country's fate. Unreasonable public expectations of a new peace dividend should also be firmly dampened. The justifications for the Afghan mission have not changed, and the vital importance of this mission succeeding -- not just for the Afghan people, but for international security itself -- must be stated again and again. 2014 is not the end. It is a new chapter in Afghanistan's history, and we have our part to play.
Dex Torricke-Barton is an international security analyst and consultant for the United Nations. The views expressed in this article do not represent UN policy.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Canada encouraged by Afghanistan's progress: minister
By Ian Timberlake July 23, 2010
(AFP) – HANOI — Canada is encouraged by Afghanistan's progress towards self-reliance despite criticisms that Western nations are too eager to pull their forces from an unpopular war, Ottawa's foreign minister says.
"I've just gotten back from Kabul where, indeed, I am encouraged by the way the transition is going," Lawrence Cannon told AFP in an interview on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), Asia's biggest security dialogue.
Under a motion passed by Canadian legislators, Canada's more than 2,800 troops in Afghanistan are scheduled to return home next year.
Other Western nations are also planning to withdraw from the war against the Islamist Taliban, sparking criticism that Afghanistan will not have time to properly build its own army and police.
A conference in Kabul on Tuesday drew representatives from around 80 countries and organisations which endorsed a proposal by President Hamid Karzai that Afghan forces take over responsibility for national security by 2014.
"The benchmarks have been put out there, so that once this transition period is finished Afghanistan will have the capability to provide for its own protection and security", Cannon said.
The conference also endorsed the Afghan government's plan to forge peace to end nine years of war, and to take greater control of aid projects.
The minister said Canada helped bring Afghanistan and its neighbour Pakistan together for dialogue aimed at improving their border management on issues including drug trafficking.
Along with Canada and the US, Pakistan is a member of the ARF whose ministers held talks in Vietnam on Friday.
Canada has also played a significant role in an initiative trying to improve infrastructure on the impoverished border with Pakistan, Cannon added.
"Those are all things that reassure me", he said.
The death of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan on Tuesday brought to 151 the number of Canadians killed there since Ottawa deployed troops to NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in 2002.
Cannon said Canadian legislators have set a firm deadline for the pullout of Canadian soldiers, who operate in volatile Kandahar province.
"Post-2011 we will be continuing with development and aid as well as our diplomatic relations," he said.
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday said his country could start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan next year. Britain has the second-largest troop contingent after the United States.
US President Barack Obama has set a deadline of July 2011 as the start of a gradual drawdown of American troops, while Dutch soldiers are set to start leaving next month.
Cannon said the ISAF withdrawal and Afghan security takeover will be done "hamlet by hamlet, city by city, town by town", and backed by changes in the government structure.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghan MPs worry over race for exit
The National By Chris Sands 22/07/2010
KABUL - As the dust settles on the biggest international conference in Afghanistan for decades, politicians here are convinced that the ground is being prepared for foreign troops to make a quick and chaotic withdrawal from the country.
Officially, the message at Tuesday’s summit in Kabul was that the US and Nato remain committed to the war effort and will leave behind a relatively strong government capable of defending itself when they do eventually pull out.
Reading between the lines, however, members of parliament believe a plan to hand over control of the nation’s security by the end 2014 is in fact confirmation that a race for the exit is under way.
Shukria Barakzai said the international community had been trying to wash its hands off Afghanistan and the results of the conference were “like the last drop of the water just fell down”.
The MP for Kabul said: “Until a few months ago I was optimistic, maybe, maybe, maybe. But right now there is no hope.” She added, “In a year’s time it will be like a civil war”.
Delegates at Tuesday’s summit included Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, David Petraeus, the head of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan and Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general.
The final communiqué that was issued included the plan to gradually handover security until full control is passed on in 2014, an agreement to channel more development aid through the Afghan government and various pledges to tackle corruption.
Although the policy decisions were largely agreed well in advance, their formal announcement appears to have confirmed the worst fears of some people.
For Ms Barakzai, there was nothing that suggested her country could still be pulled back from the brink. Even a promise to safeguard women’s rights was, she said, hypocritical when foreign troops raid houses and terrify the female occupants.
But it is the 2014 handover that has her most worried. She thinks Afghan security forces will not be ready in time and believes the US and Nato understand this but want to leave anyway.
As evidence, she pointed to a controversial programme that was approved earlier this month, away from the conference. The brainchild of Gen Petraeus, it will establish what the Pentagon likes to describe as “local police units” across the country and has inevitably been compared to the Awakening Councils that were established against al Qa’eda in Iraq. To MPs, though, they are militias, pure and simple, and a recipe for disaster.
“We are tired of the previous warlordism. New warlordism in a modern American-style way will be unacceptable for Afghans,” said Ms Barakzai.
A former MP with first-hand experience of fighting the Taliban agreed. Saleh Mohammed Regestani was a close colleague of the former Northern Alliance commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud. He was voted to parliament in 2005, but quit his position before deciding to run again in this year’s election.
“It’s clear the countries that have soldiers in Afghanistan are under pressure from public opinion and they want to leave,” he said. “But how and when, these I think are the questions.”
Mr Regestani fears that the gradual withdrawal of foreign troops will create a vacuum that Gen Petraeus is trying to fill with the militias. He called it a “step backward” that could lead to the kind of fighting that devastated the country in the early and mid 1990s.
“It could happen; tribe against tribe, Pashtun and non-Pashtun. We have this kind of history in the past,” he said.
The conference also endorsed Afghan government plans to reach out to the insurgency, giving its support to a reintegration program aimed at winning over low level fighters. This comes at a time when momentum is shifting towards trying to broker some kind of political settlement with the Taliban.
In recent weeks, rebel prisoners have been freed here as part of the reconciliation drive. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, is also rumoured to have met Sirajuddin Haqqani, a leading militant commander.
Fawzia Koofi, an MP for the northern province of Badakhshan, said it was all indicative of a worrying trend towards international disengagement that threatened to ruin the progress made since 2001.
“The reconciliation and reintegration plan, which is paying money and bringing people through undemocratic means to power, is exactly what Pakistan wanted,” she said.
“So even in two years time I think Afghanistan will be Talibanised, not in terms of individuals but in terms of ideology. And then all these outspoken women, and media and the young generation of Afghanistan will have a much more tough, difficult life.
“We thought we were working in a longer-term partnership with the international community. We really wanted to have a joint partnership with them and now they are leaving. There are talks about leaving [but] I think the train has left the station.”
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, did try to address some of these concerns at the conference, when he described the war as “a mission of necessity” and said it would only end “when the Afghans are able to maintain security on their own”. Even then, international forces would have a “supporting role” in the country.
The problem is that these words are in danger of being overshadowed by the reality of what is happening on the ground.
“You think for yourself,” said Mohammad Naim Farahi, an MP for Farah province. “How can a liar president who is cheating you and his own nation bring peace and security in Afghanistan in four years?”
csands@thenational.ae
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghan tourism: The long journey in
By Christopher Sleight BBC News, Tajikistan July 23, 2010
"There is Afghanistan." Our driver pointed across the valley to a line of steep, red cliffs that formed the bank of a wide river.
It was 30 hours since we left Glasgow and would be another nine on rough roads following the River Pyanj, which marks much of Afghanistan's northern border, before we arrived at Khorog in southern Tajikistan.
We have passed through hundreds of miles of sandstone hills and plains since leaving the Tajik capital Dushanbe on Thursday, the horizon constantly blurred by the haze and dust.
Now at Khorog, another few hours remain before we reach our border crossing point at Ishkashim.
We are travelling the long - but secure - way into Afghanistan with two climbers from Scotland intent on spending their summer holiday there.
It is safe to say that the country would not top many people's lists of attractive destinations. For years it has been blighted by terror, poverty and violence.
The British Foreign Office does its best to put off would-be tourists, with thousands of words on its website warning against the suicide attacks, mines, kidnapping and terrorism.
But, quietly, tourists have been returning to an area of Afghanistan left mostly untouched by the ravages of the Soviet occupation and the Taliban.
The Wakhan Corridor - a spur of land jutting from the north east corner of the country - has remained peaceful, partly because of its sheer inaccessibility.
The corridor is guarded by mountain ranges with high, snowy passes and has only one road in.
To reach somewhere like Langar, in the eastern Wakhan, it can take 12 days of continuous travel from the UK by air, 4x4 and foot.
There are limited medical facilities and almost no hope of rescue should something go wrong.
But for a trickle of adventurers, this quality has made it the ultimate destination - wild, remote and with thousands of square miles of untrodden, unexplored mountains.
It is the draw of these unclimbed peaks that has brought Alan Halewood, a mountaineering instructor based near Fort William, and Neal Gwynne, a teacher in Glasgow, to the area.
Over the next two weeks, BBC Radio Scotland reporter Huw Williams and I will accompany Alan and Neal.
We will travel with them to the end of the road in the Wakhan Corridor and then at the beginning of their trek deep into the mountains.
In a series of reports for radio and online, we will attempt to find out what drives someone to choose Afghanistan as a place to go for a summer holiday.
We will look at the history of the region and why it has remained relatively peaceful during the last 30 years of occupation and violence that has so badly affected the rest of the country.
And we'll try to discover if tourism is an industry that will help the economy and people in this isolated mountainous area thrive.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Gwyn: Victory in Afghanistan just means avoiding defeat
Toronto Star - Opinion By Richard Gwyn Columnist Fri Jul 23 2010
No more brilliant military strategy has ever been devised than that proposed by then Vermont senator George Aiken on how the U.S. could win the war in Vietnam.
Declare victory and bring the troops home, was Aiken’s prescription.
A defter strategy has just been concocted. At this week’s international conference in Kabul, the U.S. got its allies, among them Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, to commit themselves to a strategy that involves declaring a victory by not bringing the troops home right after having promised to do this.
All kinds of events may bring this strategy to a shuddering halt. Yet it may — just — succeed.
Success won’t in any way resemble a victory in that term’s normal meaning. All that may be accomplished will be the avoidance of defeat.
The unannounced author of this strategy is, all but certainly, Gen. David Petraeus, President Barack Obama’s new commander in Afghanistan. Petraeus, who pulled off the successful (so far) “surge” strategy in Iraq, is America’s most highly regarded general since World War II commander Dwight Eisenhower.
Obama owes Petraeus an almost unrepayable political debt by agreeing to take command in Afghanistan after Obama’s first choice, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, ended his career by his indiscrete comments to a Rolling Stone magazine reporter.
While covering Obama’s political flank, Petraeus repeated — but in diplomatic language unlike McChrystal — his long-standing disagreement with Obama’s policy of starting troop withdrawals in July next year, a promise Obama had made to win Democrats’ support for sending another 30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan.
In a brilliant exercise in verbal fudging at this week’s conference in Kabul, the current 2011 date for the start of an American pullout has been transformed into one that now won’t apply until 2014.
This trick was accomplished by a combination of Karzai pledging to the conference that by 2014 the Afghan army and police would be responsible for security and by everyone else around the table pretending to believe that this would actually happen.
The omens are pretty bleak. A recent study by the U.S. army found that only one-quarter of Afghan soldiers are capable of “unsupervised” actions — or of functioning without U.S. soldiers leading them.
More disturbing is a survey, done in the key city of Kandahar by the International Council on Security, which found that almost two in three don’t want the long-planned offensive to rid the city of the Taliban to take place for fear the foreign troops can’t protect them.
Just two promising scraps of evidence exist. One is that only a small minority of Afghans appear to actually want to be governed by the Taliban.
The other is that there has been a significant decline in the number of Afghan civilians killed by foreign troops, principally as a result of a sharp cutback in the use of airstrikes. The Petraeus-McChrystal strategy of putting the protection of civilians ahead of the killing of Taliban fighters does seem to be working.
It’s all tenuous and fragile and iffy. However, a four-year U.S. commitment will change much of the psychology in Afghanistan. Ordinary Afghans will stop assuming the Americans are about to leave. And so will the Taliban.
So in 2014, after four more brutal years, the Americans should be able to go honourably and the Karzai government should have a decent chance of surviving for at least a respectable period of time, if mostly only in Kabul itself and the non-Pashtun north.
That’s not much. Afterward, the Afghans will probably resume their now 30-year-old civil war. And there will still be Taliban, and Al Qaeda, in the caves of Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan.
But it’s better — just — than Vietnam-style humiliation and chaos. Which is to say, and is about all that can be said, that it’s a better strategy than anyone else had been able to come up with.
So wish it well.
Richard Gwyn’s column will return in September. gwynr@sympatico.ca
Back to Top
Back to Top
U.S. money wasted on Afghanistan projects, auditor finds
A federal auditor says the problems are indicative of a pattern of building facilities that are too costly and complex for the Afghan government to maintain.
Los Angeles Times By Paul Richter July 22, 2010
Reporting from Washington - A federal watchdog criticized U.S. agencies on Thursday for squandering taxpayer money on facilities in Afghanistan that are too complex and costly for the Afghan government to maintain.
U.S. officials acknowledge that they plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to hire contractors to operate a complex of buildings in troubled Kandahar and other facilities in Afghanistan for the next 10 years.
A federal auditor complained in a report that the buildings constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the Afghan national police represent an "outrageous waste of taxpayer money." He said the problems are representative of a "regular negative pattern" in overly complex construction in the country.
"Why in the world are we continuing to construct facilities all over Afghanistan that we know, and the Afghans know, they will not be able to sustain once we hand the facilities over?" asked Arnold Fields, the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction.
His critique comes at a time when the Obama administration is funneling billions of dollars into projects as part of its efforts to strengthen the country's central government and security forces.
With support for the Afghan war declining and concerns about U.S. government spending rising, aid for Afghanistan is an increasingly sensitive political issue for the administration.
This is not the first time Washington has been accused of overbuilding projects for a frail allied government. During the George W. Bush administration, U.S. agencies were faulted for building power plants in Iraq that were never employed to capacity because they were too complex for Iraqi engineers to operate.
The project in Kandahar, called the Joint Regional Afghan Security Forces Compound, cost about $45 million. It includes administrative and training buildings, a vehicle maintenance shop, warehouses and barracks.
Although the southern city is the Taliban's spiritual home and coalition forces have long been planning an offensive to reassert government control, the project in question is in an area under coalition control.
Still, U.S. officials in Afghanistan acknowledged to the auditor that Afghans don't have the money or technical expertise to run the compound on their own. As a result, they are planning to have the complex and other buildings in the country operated over the next 10 years by independent contractors — under agreements they expect to be worth about $800 million.
The audit also found that the Army Corps of Engineers didn't prepare a master plan for the complex, with the result that money was wasted on redundant power, water, sewer, heating and air conditioning systems.
The project also was plagued by delays. Work on three buildings fell six to 12 months behind schedule, and a fourth was delayed by two years, the report said.
The auditor also faulted the agency for locating a barracks building next to the armory building. The report noted that the armory could become a target for attack, so the proximity "is inappropriate and puts the lives of the Afghan national police personnel living in the barracks at unnecessary risk."
paul.richter@latimes.com
Back to Top
Disclaimer:
This news site is mostly a compilation of publicly accessible articles
on the Web in the form of a link or saved news item. The news articles
and commentaries/editorials are protected under international copyright
laws. All credit goes to the original respective source(s).