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Violence Up Sharply in Afghanistan
By ROD NORDLAND The New York Times June 19, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — With an average of an assassination a day and a suicide bombing every second or third day, insurgents have greatly increased the level of violence in Afghanistan, and have become by far the biggest killers of civilians here, the United Nations said in a report released publicly on Saturday.
Fewer Afghan civilians hurt, even with surge - NATO
By Dan Williams
KABUL, June 19 (Reuters) - Despite their boosted deployment and increased losses, international forces have been inflicting relatively fewer Afghan civilian casualties due to more stringent rules of engagement, a top coalition spokesman said on Saturday.
Pakistan, Afghanistan begin talks about dealing with insurgents
By Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung Saturday, June 19, 2010; The Washington Post A01
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- Afghanistan and Pakistan are talking about how to make peace with insurgents fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, including one faction considered the coalition forces' most lethal foe, according to Pakistani and U.S. officials.
Defying the Taliban, one (bad) movie at a time
By Tim Sullivan, Associated Press Writer
JALALABAD, Afghanistan – In real life he's a pharmacist, a polite young man who dispenses antibiotics and advice in a tiny Jalalabad shop barely 40 miles (60 kilometers) from where Osama bin Laden disappeared into the mountains.
U.S. Anti-Corruption Group to Launch in Kandahar
By MARIA ABI-HABIB The Wall Street Journal
KABUL—The U.S. said it will roll out and test a new anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan's southern province of Kandahar, where coalition forces plan a surge in operations against the Taliban this summer.
Gunfire kills French soldier in Afghanistan
By the CNN Wire StaffJune 19, 2010
(CNN) -- Gunfire at a combat post in Afghanistan killed a French soldier and wounded an Afghan translator, French officials said Saturday.
Get tough with Pakistan’s army
June 19, 2010 The Boston Globe
THE UNITED States and NATO cannot endure an open-ended military commitment in Afghanistan. But they know — or should know — that there can be no hope of ending the war unless Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency stops arming, funding, and training Afghan insurgent groups.
38 militants killed in E. Afghanistan
KHOST, Afghanistan, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Afghan and NATO-led troops eliminated 38 anti-government militants in Khost province east of Afghanistan, provincial police chief Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai said Saturday.
U.S. military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps
By Craig Whitlock Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, June 19, 2010
The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.
Afghan informers play dangerous game in Taliban heartland
by Daphne Benoit – Fri Jun 18, 10:59 pm ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) – The news comes at noon: there is a cache of rockets right in the middle of Kandahar city, birthplace of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.
EXCLUSIVE: 10 of 17 Afghans Who Deserted U.S. Air Force Base Remain Missing
By Jana Winter June 18, 2010 FOXNews.com
Ten of 17 Afghan military deserters who walked away from a training program on a U.S. Air Force base in Texas remain at large, sources close to the situation told Fox News on Friday, and seven of the men have been accounted for.
Taliban want ransom for journalist
Afghanistan takes over talks to free Japanese missing since March; rebel denies abduction
June 18, 2010
KABUL, (Kyodo) Taliban rebels have demanded that the Afghan government pay a ransom for a Japanese journalist who was believed taken captive in late March in northern Afghanistan, it was learned Thursday from Afghan security authorities.
Afghanistan peace conundrum flummoxes mediators
By Lyse Doucet BBC News, Oslo June 19, 2010
A war that has dragged on for 31 years has many epithets.
Many a book has been titled "Afghanistan's tragedy". This month it became "America's longest war".
Afghanistan's future lies in trade partnerships
The Washington Post - Opinion By David Ignatius Sunday, June 20, 2010
The recent Washington debate over Af-Pak strategy has had it backward: This war is less about trying to defeat the Taliban militarily in Afghanistan than it is about reaching an understanding with Pakistan that closes Taliban havens there and allows a political reconciliation among the warring Afghan parties. It's a Pak-Af problem, not the other way around.
Anti-Taliban tribal militias come with baggage
Los Angeles Times By Alex Rodriguez 18/06/2010
Reporting from Jalalabad, Afghanistan-- The morning raid caught members of the tribal militia by surprise. By the end of the attack on the camp on a patch of desert scrub in eastern Afghanistan, 12 fighters of a group that had dared to take on the Taliban were dead.
In Afghanistan, High-Tech Tools Replace The Hammer
June 18, 2010 NPR
Geology surveys in Afghanistan don't just rely on the trusty map and hammer. John Brozena of the Naval Research Laboratory discusses how geologists there have mapped mineral deposits from planes carrying various sorts of cameras as well as gravity and magnetic sensors.
Shifting sands in Kabul
Saturday, June 19, 2010 The News International (Pakistan) By Arif Nizami
The Sunday Times made the sensational, albeit nebulous, claim based on a report ostensibly commissioned by the London School of Economics that "there is growing evidence that the government in Islamabad arms the (Taliban) insurgents, gives them targets and has seats on their war council.
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Violence Up Sharply in Afghanistan
By ROD NORDLAND The New York Times June 19, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — With an average of an assassination a day and a suicide bombing every second or third day, insurgents have greatly increased the level of violence in Afghanistan, and have become by far the biggest killers of civilians here, the United Nations said in a report released publicly on Saturday.
The report also confirms statistics from the NATO coalition, which claimed a continuing decrease in civilian deaths caused by the United States military and its allies. At the same time it blames stepped-up military operations for an overall increase in the violence.
Especially alarming were increases in suicide bombings and assassinations of government officials in a three-month period ending June 16, and a near-doubling of roadside bombings for the first four months of 2010 compared with the same period in 2009. “The number of security incidents increased significantly, compared to previous years and contrary to seasonal trends,” the report said, adding that most of this was a consequence of military operations in the southern part of the country, particularly Helmand and Kandahar Provinces, where increased NATO military operations have been under way since February.
Most victims of the increased violence continue to be civilians, and the proportion of those killed by insurgents, rather than the government or its NATO allies, rose to 70 percent from mid-March through mid-June. In the previous three months, the United Nations blamed insurgents for 67 percent of civilian deaths.
The most striking change has been in suicide bombings, which have tripled this year compared with 2009, with such attacks now taking place an average of three times a week compared with once a week before. In addition, two of three of those suicide attacks are considered “complex,” in which attackers use a suicide bomb as well as other weapons. Half the suicide attacks, the United Nations said, take place in southern Afghanistan.
“The shift to more complex suicide attacks demonstrates a growing capability of the local terrorist networks linked to Al Qaeda,” the report said.
It depicted a concerted effort by insurgents to deliberately single out civilians. “Insurgents followed up their threats against the civilian population with, on average, seven assassinations every week, the majority of which were conducted in the south and southeast regions,” it said.
This represented a 45 percent increase in assassinations over 2009.
A third of all violent episodes were from improvised explosive devices or roadside bombs placed by the insurgents. The number of such devices rose by 94 percent from January through April 2010 compared with the same period in 2009, which “constitutes an alarming trend,” the report said. The decline in civilian casualties attributed to NATO and government forces continued a trend seen since last year, despite the increased tempo of the conflict this year, particularly in the south.
Without providing statistics, the report singled out “escalation of force” episodes for casualties inflicted by the coalition. These are episodes in which civilians are killed at military checkpoints or near military convoys, often because they fail to understand or to heed orders. The report, which was released by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, cited the military’s efforts to minimize such casualties, including a public information campaign, nonlethal warning methods and “a reiteration of the July 2009 tactical directive by the commander of the International Security Assistance Force limiting the use of force.” The commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has emphasized the reduction of civilian casualties as a crucial goal of the war effort.
Previously, airstrikes had been the leading factor in civilian casualties caused by NATO’s military forces, but there was no mention of that in the current United Nations report. General McChrystal has also sharply limited the use of close air support where there is a risk to civilians.
In an unrelated news conference in Kabul on Saturday, a spokesman for NATO, Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, gave a similar assessment, although it was based on a different set of NATO statistics on civilian casualties. During the past three months, General Blotz said, civilian casualties caused by the coalition over all dropped by 44 percent compared with the same period in 2009, while those caused by the insurgents increased by 36 percent.
Perhaps more significant, the number of episodes involving civilian casualties caused by the coalition dropped 7.8 percent, General Blotz said. This suggested that fewer civilians were being killed in each encounter as well.
The United Nations report also noted that 332 children were killed or maimed from mid-March to mid-June as the result of the conflict, mainly in areas where military activity had increased, including Helmand Province as well as eastern and northeastern provinces. Sixty percent of the children were killed by insurgent attacks, it said; 24 children died in cross-fire between the sides.
In addition, attacks on schools increased throughout the country, most as a result of attacks by antigovernment elements, the report said, citing “intimidation of pupils and teachers; placement of improvised explosive devices in schools; abductions, beatings and killing of school staff; and arson and other violent targeted attacks on schools.”
The secretary general’s report, which was given to the Security Council last week, also noted the Afghan government’s efforts to hold a consultative peace jirga and to prepare for elections next September.
Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.
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Fewer Afghan civilians hurt, even with surge - NATO
By Dan Williams
KABUL, June 19 (Reuters) - Despite their boosted deployment and increased losses, international forces have been inflicting relatively fewer Afghan civilian casualties due to more stringent rules of engagement, a top coalition spokesman said on Saturday.
Winning over civilians while reinforcing and stepping up military sweeps of Taliban-held areas is a centrepiece of the strategy formed over the past year by General Stanley McChrystal, the overall commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. But with the clock ticking on planned troop pullouts, the United States and allies in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) worry at its daily death tolls as well as Afghan losses that can reach triple figures in any given month.
Presenting data from the last three months compared to the same period in 2009, ISAF spokesman Brigadier-General Josef Blotz said there were 7.8 percent fewer clashes involving civilians, with 44.4 percent fewer killed or wounded by coalition troops.
"There is more oversight. There is better training and education," Blotz said in explanation.
"And there are of course a couple of ongoing programmes, for example, in the area of escalation of force procedures, because these contacts in the past were one of the major sources, if I may say so, of civilian casualties."
Some 82 percent fewer civilians have been falling casualty to ISAF air strikes, and 52 percent fewer have been accidentally shot by coalition troops, Blotz told a press conference.
He did not give the total figures that the percentages were based on. A Kabul government official did not immediately respond to a request for civilian casualty numbers or data on the losses of Afghan security services. Since March 18, 128 ISAF troops have been killed in combat, a spokeswoman said, although the tabulating Web site ICasualties.org put the number at 139. Either tally marks a spiralling rate of carnage for the 9-year-old conflict.
Blotz, a German soldier, attributed the trend to the insertion of 39,000 new, mostly U.S. troops in Afghan hotspots.
"The higher number of forces leads to a higher number of confrontations and, unfortunately, to higher casualties," he said. "It has to be tougher before it gets easier, and that is the situation we are in."
He said there was no significant change to the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or small arms favoured by the Taliban, but accused insurgents of turning increasingly against innocents.
"In the same period of time, the number of civilian casualties caused by the insurgency increased by 36 percent," he said. "Their activities show more and more desperation."
The Taliban are responsible for most civilian deaths in Afghanistan, but the hardline group frequently disavows attacks against foreign or government targets that kill ordinary Afghans.
Blotz blamed the Taliban for a bombing that killed 40 people at a wedding in south Afghanistan last week, though the insurgent group denied responsibility.
(Editing by David Fox) (dan.williams@thomsonreuters.com; Kabul newsroom: +93 799 335 285
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Pakistan, Afghanistan begin talks about dealing with insurgents
By Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung Saturday, June 19, 2010; The Washington Post A01
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- Afghanistan and Pakistan are talking about how to make peace with insurgents fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, including one faction considered the coalition forces' most lethal foe, according to Pakistani and U.S. officials.
The discussions reflect the beginnings of a thaw in relations between Kabul and Islamabad, which are increasingly focused on shaping the aftermath of what they fear could be a more abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops than is now anticipated. But one element of the effort -- outreach by Pakistan to the militia headed by the young commander Sirajuddin Haqqani -- faces opposition from U.S. officials, who consider the al-Qaeda-linked group too brutal to be tolerated.
At Pakistan's suggestion, Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the chief of Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, made an unprecedented trip last month to Kabul to discuss with Afghan President Hamid Karzai a wide range of possible cooperation, including mediating with Pakistan-based insurgents.
Several weeks ago, Pasha and Pakistan's army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, returned to continue the discussion. There is no agreement between the two nations, but a Pakistani security official said the outreach to insurgents is "not a problem."
The previously undisclosed visits came as the United States, gradually warming to the idea of reconciliation with insurgents, encourages improved relations between the two governments, which have long viewed each other with suspicion. But Obama administration officials have cautioned Afghanistan and Pakistan that they will not support talks with Haqqani's militia.
"We think reconciliation has to have an Afghan face," a senior administration official said in Washington, adding that the United States "understands" the desire to talk. But the United States has made clear, the official said, that "we expect to be treated as full partners and not to be surprised." The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing frictions with allies.
The talks are a reminder that Afghanistan and Pakistan each has an agenda independent of its relationship with the United States and that they may draw different lines in deciding how and when to make peace.
Haqqani's adoption in recent years of suicide bombings and complex urban assaults has made his faction, based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area, a top threat to military gains and political stability in Afghanistan. The CIA and U.S. military think that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency retains links with, and possibly assists, Haqqani, and they have pressed Pakistan to target his sanctuaries.
In a recent meeting with Pakistan's army chief, U.S. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of Central Command; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen; and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, presented evidence that deadly attacks in Afghanistan last month on a NATO convoy and the main coalition air base were commanded and controlled by Haqqani from Miram Shah, the largest city in North Waziristan, where Pakistan maintains a military base.
National security adviser James L. Jones has carried the same message of caution on Haqqani in recent visits to Pakistan, essentially saying that the only outreach the Pakistani government directs toward him should be at the end of a gun.
Pakistan denies that it supports Haqqani, who they say spends much of his time in Afghanistan. But Pakistani security officials said they could reopen old ties to the network, which they think could be used to persuade other insurgent factions to pursue a political settlement.
Pakistan has long advocated that course, and it has been angling for a role in Kabul's potential negotiations. Some Pakistani officials viewed Karzai's firing this month of his intelligence chief and interior minister, both highly critical of Pakistan, as a "goodwill gesture," one security official here said.
Taliban's vanguard
As U.S. troops focus counterinsurgency efforts on the Taliban's southern hub, Haqqani, who is in his 30s, is expanding the southeastern front through attacks on American forces and through ruthless intimidation of locals, along with deep ties to other militant groups spanning the border. U.S. military officials and terrorism analysts say Haqqani's bold and brutal style embodies the Taliban's vanguard: younger commanders driven more by anti-Western zeal than by the nationalist aspirations of their elders.
"The suicide bombers come from this class," said Ali Ashraf, director of the FATA Research Center in Islamabad, which studies the tribal areas. "If the leadership comes into this class, it's going to be extremely dangerous."
Haqqani's fairly autonomous network is the single largest insurgent force, according to some estimates, and is an important bridge between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It has expressed no interest in peacemaking, Afghan and U.S. officials say.
The rising U.S. pressure on North Waziristan, including stepped-up attacks carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles, has caused Pakistan to step up its push for a negotiating role in dealing with the Taliban. Beyond the Haqqani group, Pakistan maintains ties with other Taliban factions, including the dominant Afghan Taliban, headed by Mohammad Omar, and an allied group headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
On the Afghan side, envoys representing Karzai have met with representatives of the Afghan Taliban's leadership council, or Quetta Shura, but regard the Haqqani group with greater suspicion.
Maintaining alliances
Haqqani's network was founded by his father, Jalaluddin, a legendary Afghan mujaheddin leader whose anti-Soviet campaign during the 1980s was backed by Pakistan and the CIA. After the elder Haqqani passed the reins to Sirajuddin in recent years, the organization has swelled in lethality and in size, to as many as 10,000 fighters.
Like his father, Haqqani has thrived in part by maintaining delicate alliances with the border region's militant factions. Haqqani holds a seat on al-Qaeda's leadership council, analysts say, and receives ample funding from Arab backers. In North Waziristan, where the Haqqanis run religious schools and militant training camps, he has mediated disputes among factions of the Pakistani Taliban, from which he plucks fighters, said Ashraf, the researcher.
Haqqani, who is described by those who know him as soft-spoken, said in an audio recording in April that his group's cooperation with the Taliban and al-Qaeda was "at its highest limits."
Unlike the farmers who make up much of the southern insurgency dominated by Omar's Taliban, Haqqani's forces include foreign fighters and are largely drawn from madrassas, or Islamic schools, and thus tend to be more extreme. They rely on assassinations, shakedowns and kidnappings-for-ransom but show little interest in politics, military officials said.
"The Haqqanis are not here offering their brand of governance or development. The Taliban are," a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan said. "They're not a popular organization, but they're a powerful one."
Two weeks ago, a band of Haqqani fighters rounded up all the men in one village of Afghanistan's Khost province, residents said. They marched 10 into a valley, then blindfolded, bound and fatally shot six -- among them a 16-year-old student and a tribal elder -- on suspicion of spying.
"The son doesn't care which tribe is the enemy or friend of another," Abdul Wali, a tribal elder in Paktia province, near where the killings took place, said of Sirajuddin Haqqani. "He and his fighters just want to do terrorist activities."
Some observers say Haqqani's brutal tactics and perceived closeness to Pakistan have strained his relations with Omar, the Afghan Taliban leader, who has repudiated tactics that kill civilians.
DeYoung reported from Washington. Staff writer Joby Warrick and special correspondents Shaiq Hussain and Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report.
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Defying the Taliban, one (bad) movie at a time
By Tim Sullivan, Associated Press Writer
JALALABAD, Afghanistan – In real life he's a pharmacist, a polite young man who dispenses antibiotics and advice in a tiny Jalalabad shop barely 40 miles (60 kilometers) from where Osama bin Laden disappeared into the mountains.
But when evening falls, when Zhaid Khan shuts the pharmacy's gates and sends his young assistant home, he becomes someone else. Then he's a lover (albeit a chaste one). He's a singer (or at least a lip-syncher). He's a fighter, a hero, a defender of the powerless.
You've never heard of him, but Zhaid Khan is a movie star.
The quiet pharmacist is the chiseled face, the rippling muscles, the romantic hero of the minuscule Pashto-language vision of Hollywood set amid the towns and mountains of eastern Afghanistan. It's a region where American drones regularly hover overhead, Taliban attacks come all too regularly and it takes more than a little courage to be an actor.
Khan is famous across Jalalabad, and fans sometimes come to the pharmacy to gawk at him and ask for autographs. Sometimes, though, the Taliban seek him out too. They leave him notes in the night, warning they'll burn down his shop and kill him. One day, he fears, they'll follow through on their threats.
But as Afghanistan struggles with an Islamist insurgency that has surged back since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, putting broad swaths of the country under Taliban control, a handful of actors are making a cinematic stand.
They do it with movies that are sold here only on DVD, will never make it to Western art house cinemas, and can withstand only the gentlest of criticism.
There are shaky camera angles, wildly awful hairpieces and dialogue with the cadence of a press conference ("To achieve our goal we must try to attain our objectives and what we have vowed to do," a hero intones in "Black Poison," an anti-opium morality tale).
Each film is a patchwork of themes — romance, thriller, weepy family drama — knitted together by martial arts battles and lots of squirting sheep's blood bought from local butchers. The bad guys all seem to have scars, limps or both. The good guys often wear white. They are made, very often, with little beyond a camcorder, a couple of workshop lights and some pirated editing software.
But, they'll tell you here, their battle is worth fighting.
"We are changing how people think," said Khan. "Young people see our movies and they know that Afghanistan is not just AK-47s and war. There's something else here too."
In a country where most people live in desperate poverty, the movies show fantasies of middle-class Afghan life alongside the action and adventure. There are people with steady jobs, helpful government officials, uncorrupted policemen.
But the films also reflect the world around them. Jalalabad is not in the Taliban heartland but it is a part of Afghanistan's deeply conservative Pashtun belt. Osama bin Laden once had a mansion just outside the city, and he escaped U.S. forces from his nearby mountain compound in Tora Bora.
So actresses tend to be rarities in Pashto-language films — few families allow their daughters to enter the movie business, and nearly all actresses must come from Pakistan. Sex is not even hinted at.
Song-and-dance scenes, which are at the heart of most South Asian movies, steer very clear of risque moves, with actors often lip-synching to music lifted from Pakistani movies.
The Taliban hardly exist in these movies. Religious extremism is sometimes hinted at, but most bad guys are generic gangsters or drug smugglers.
To the Taliban, though, the moviemakers are evil.
The Islamist fighters detest all forms of public entertainment, particularly any depiction of the human form, which they believe is forbidden by the Quran. When the Taliban ran the country, movies were forbidden, cinemas were closed and videotapes could only be watched in secret.
When they were forced from power, though, that quickly changed.
"One week after the Taliban were gone we were filming again," said Farooq Sabit, a one-time kung fu master who runs a small Kabul photography studio and has directed a half-dozen or so movies. He works in Dari, Afghanistan's most widely spoken language. The Dari film industry is better off than the Pashto movie world. The Taliban have far less influence in Dari-speaking regions, and filmmakers' hurdles are more financial than physical.
If the Pashto speakers have the pharmacist to thrill to, the Dari film world has Saleem Shaheen, the unlikely sex symbol who may be the country's biggest star.
He's a round, fleshy man in his mid-40s with dozens of movies behind him as an actor, writer, producer and director. He also has the ego of a Hollywood mogul.
"My interviews are very interesting," he said, sitting down with a visiting reporter. "More people will read your article because of me."
Through a small acting school, relentless self-promotion and even more self-confidence, he has been a force in Afghan moviemaking for decades.
"In most of my movies I'm the director and the star. All the weight is on me!" he proclaimed, as rain pattered on the metal roof of his small office compound. He derides his competitors as money-grubbing arrivistes. "They are nothing," he said, once again pointing out a European award he received a few years ago.
If nothing else, he makes a living at it.
That makes him a rarity in Afghanistan, where nearly everyone is a hyphenated professional: shopkeeper-actor; factory worker-actor; policewoman-director.
Many, particularly in the Pashto-language industry, don't get paid at all.
"We call them and say 'Come on, we're shooting,'" said Mohammad Shah Majroh, a Jalalabad bureaucrat who oversees film permits and acts as the local movie world's godfather. "If it's lunchtime, we feed them."
Stars like Khan are lucky if they make more than a few hundred dollars per film, which are shot for anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 and sold on DVDs in markets for about $1 apiece.
The handful of Afghan movie theaters that survive are reserved for Bollywood, the Indian song-and-dance films. They are easy-to-follow spectacles that include what Afghan movies do not: good production quality, heaving cleavage, and beautiful woman in skimpy saris.
Around here, Bollywood provokes a mixture of jealousy and bitterness: "The Indian women and those clothes," Majroh said, sneering.
And Bollywood moviemakers, he added, don't face the dangers of the homegrown industry.
Shafiqullah Shaiq knows about those dangers.
A wealthy Jalalabad businessman, he began making movies a couple years ago. First the Taliban left him notes, telling him to abandon the movie business. Then they attacked his office with grenades and sprayed it with machine-gun fire. Then they attacked it again.
No one has been injured yet, but he now rings his office compound with gunmen.
"I barely leave anymore," said Shaiq, who wrote, directed and starred in "Black Poison," the opium movie, and later made a sequel. He acknowledges their quality was far from ideal.
"I know these movies were not really good enough for the rest of the world," he said. Then he added, with more than a touch of cinematic noblesse oblige: "I made them for the poor Afghan people."
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U.S. Anti-Corruption Group to Launch in Kandahar
By MARIA ABI-HABIB The Wall Street Journal
KABUL—The U.S. said it will roll out and test a new anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan's southern province of Kandahar, where coalition forces plan a surge in operations against the Taliban this summer.
A top military official said Kandahar will be something of a proving ground for the anti-corruption group, dubbed Task Force 2010, whose creation was reported Friday in The Wall Street Journal.
The task force will use its experience in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold, to then "zoom out" to the rest of the country, he said.
The U.S military announced the creation of the task force as it comes under pressure from Congress to justify the billions of dollars being spent as part of the stepped-up war effort in Afghanistan.
The task force, like Congress, will be investigating allegations that some of the money being spent on private contractors to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for allied forces is ending up with Afghan power brokers.
Task Force 2010 will formally start operations in July. The task force's deployment in Kandahar highlights the importance the U.S. is placing on the operation's success: The bulk of new U.S. troops coming into the country this year will be deployed in and around Kandahar city and neighboring Helmand province in an effort to break the back of Taliban resistance.
Task Force 2010 cobbles together under one command many law-enforcement and financial-oversight staff already in Afghanistan. Military officials say there also will be an influx of forensic auditors to trace the path of money distributed to private contractors.
Investigators aim to trace how money is used as it is distributed to contractors who in turn distribute it to subcontractors. Investigators will try to clamp down on companies that overcharge for poor-quality materials, create ghost employees to pocket salaries or push for unnecessary projects in order to siphon off cash.
Coalition officials say they hope better coordination will mean that the money disbursed in Kandahar will go to better use than in previous years.
"We're looking to support in every way possible via contracting what NATO is planning to do to help the people of Kandahar," said a senior U.S. military official in Kabul.
Many Afghans say that past NATO development efforts using private companies simply lined the pockets of local warlords. Coalition officials also say they worry that aid and development money has fueled the insurgency, as private companies bribed Taliban insurgents to operate safely in particularly dangerous areas.
The U.S. spent $14 billion on contracts last year, including money from a common NATO fund. That figure doesn't include money spent on contracts by individual NATO countries, and coalition officials say they have only a vague idea how much has been spent since the beginning of the war effort.
"We realize we have a problem, we just don't know the extent of it," the military official said.
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Gunfire kills French soldier in Afghanistan
By the CNN Wire StaffJune 19, 2010
(CNN) -- Gunfire at a combat post in Afghanistan killed a French soldier and wounded an Afghan translator, French officials said Saturday.
The soldier died at a hospital in Kabul from injuries suffered in the gunfight Friday, a statement from the French president's office said.
The statement said President Nicolas Sarkozy sent his condolences to the soldier's family and hoped the injured translator would quickly recover.
"The head of state reaffirmed his support to the Afghan people and Afghan authorities," the statement said.
"He strongly condemned this blind violence and expressed France's determination to continue to work as part of the International Security Assistance Force."
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Get tough with Pakistan’s army
June 19, 2010 The Boston Globe
THE UNITED States and NATO cannot endure an open-ended military commitment in Afghanistan. But they know — or should know — that there can be no hope of ending the war unless Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency stops arming, funding, and training Afghan insurgent groups.
President Obama must recognize the necessity of persuading Pakistan’s military leaders, who control the ISI, to stop playing a double game with America. This can be done. Washington has valuable carrots to offer and credible threats to make. To succeed, however, Obama must be willing to play hardball.
There is no point applying pressure on Pakistan’s civilian government. Whatever its flaws, the government of President Asif Ali Zardari is aligned with the United States on fighting Islamist extremists. Zardari’s wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by Pakistani extremists. Rather, it is the army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, himself a former head of the ISI, who has the power to end the agency’s backing for the Taliban.
Pakistan originally sponsored the Taliban in the mid-90s as a proxy force that could ensure Afghanistan would be friendly to Pakistan and not be absorbed into an Indian sphere of influence. Anxiety about India’s role in Afghanistan remains the driving force behind the ISI’s support for the Taliban.
Recent attacks on India’s embassy and Indian nationals in Afghanistan point to the Pakistani military’s continuing obsession with Indian designs on Afghanistan. And when Kayani held high-level meetings in Washington this March, he reportedly objected to a plan for India to train Afghan soldiers under NATO auspices, offering instead to have Pakistan train them.
Obama’s leverage over Kayani is this same fixation on India. Obama should make a few things clear to the general: that America knows the extent of the ISI’s backing for the Taliban; that Pakistan’s army will not keep getting money and weapons from Washington if it goes on backing groups that kill American soldiers; and that if Pakistan does not end all support for its Taliban proxies, the US will seek India’s assistance in stabilizing Afghanistan.
Then, if Kayani makes the right choice, Obama can use America’s growing influence with India to help reduce tensions with Pakistan. This is the key to a stable future for that part of Asia. To extract American troops from Afghanistan without leaving behind a crucible for new calamities, Obama will have to master the craft of balancing power
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38 militants killed in E. Afghanistan
KHOST, Afghanistan, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Afghan and NATO-led troops eliminated 38 anti-government militants in Khost province east of Afghanistan, provincial police chief Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai said Saturday.
"The clash erupted in Musa Khil district Friday night and so far 38 Taliban rebels have been killed," Ishaqzai told Xinhua.
He said Afghan and NATO-led troops with the support of aircraft targeted Taliban hideouts.
Some 200 Taliban insurgents are involved in the battle and the troops are determined to kill and arrest the insurgents, said the official.
Meantime, locals say that five persons including three children were killed during the air strike in Musa Khil district. However, Ishaqzai rejected the claim saying neither troops nor civilians have been killed in the operation.
Taliban militants have yet to make comment.
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U.S. military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps
By Craig Whitlock Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, June 19, 2010
The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.
In a turnabout from the Cold War, when the CIA gave Stinger missiles to Afghan rebels to shoot down Soviet helicopters, the Pentagon has spent $648 million to buy or refurbish 31 Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters for the Afghan National Army Air Corps. The Defense Department is seeking to buy 10 more of the Mi-17s next year, and had planned to buy dozens more over the next decade.
The spectacle of using U.S. taxpayer dollars to buy Russian military products is proving a difficult sell in Congress. Some legislators say that the Pentagon never considered alternatives to the Mi-17, an aircraft it purchased for use in Iraq and Pakistan, and that a lack of competition has enabled Russian defense contractors to gouge on prices.
"The Mi-17 program either has uncoordinated oversight or simply none at all," said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who along with Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) has pushed the Pentagon to reconsider its purchase plans. "The results have led to massive waste, cost overruns, schedule delays, safety concerns and major delivery problems."
U.S. and Afghan military officials who favor the Mi-17, which was designed for use in Afghanistan, acknowledge that it might seem odd for the Pentagon to invest in Russian military products. But they said that changing helicopter models would throw a wrench into the effort to train Afghan pilots, none of whom can fly U.S.-built choppers.
"If people come and fly in Afghanistan with the Mi-17, they will understand why that aircraft is so important to the future for Afghanistan," said Brig. Gen. Michael R. Boera, the U.S. Air Force general in charge of rebuilding the Afghan air corps. "We've got to get beyond the fact that it's Russian. . . . It works well in Afghanistan."
U.S. military officials have estimated that the Afghan air force won't be able to operate independently until 2016, five years after President Obama has said he intends to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But Boera said that date could slip by at least two years if Congress forces the Afghans to fly U.S. choppers . "Is that what we really want to do?" he asked.
The U.S. military has been trying to resurrect the decimated Afghan National Army Air Corps since 2005, when it consisted of a few dozen furloughed pilots and a handful of decrepit Mi-17s.
Because Afghan airmen had historically trained on Russian choppers, the Pentagon decided to make the Mi-17s the backbone of Afghanistan's fleet. The Soviet Union specifically designed the Mi-17 for use in Afghanistan. U.S. officials say it is well-suited for navigating the altitudes of the Hindu Kush mountains, as well as Afghanistan's desert terrain.
With few reliable roads, helicopters are a primary mode of transport in Afghanistan. U.S. forces depend on them to deploy troops to isolated areas, provide them with supplies and airlift them out when they are wounded. Until recently, Afghan pilots have steered clear of combat but have used their Mi-17s to transport high-ranking Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai. U.S. officials hope the Afghan air corps eventually will be able to defend its own skies and serve the fast-growing Afghan National Army.
Afghans are also training on Mi-35 Russian-made attack helicopters and Italian-designed C-27s, a fixed-wing aircraft used to transport troops and supplies. The air corps has 48 aircraft and 3,300 personnel.
Boera said plans are to expand to 146 aircraft and 8,000 personnel by 2016. Pentagon officials said they had originally projected that Mi-17s would compose half the fleet, but they are considering scaling back.
About 450 U.S. service personnel are in Afghanistan to train and advise the Afghan airmen. Training the air corps has been a painstakingly slow process, much more so than U.S. efforts to train Afghanistan's national army and police.
Afghan pilot recruits, many of whom are illiterate in their native tongue, are required to learn English -- the official language of the cockpit -- before they can earn their wings. U.S. officials say it usually takes two to five years to train an entire flight crew.
So far, only one Afghan pilot has graduated from flight school in the United States, although dozens are in the pipeline. That has forced the air corps to rely on pilots who learned to fly Mi-17s during the days of Soviet and Taliban rule.
Gen. Mohammed Dawran, chief of the Afghan air corps, said most of those pilots are in their 40s and set in their ways. Requiring them to start fresh on U.S. copters would be an uphill battle.
"They learned the previous system and different ideas," he said in an interview. Most of the veterans also don't know how to fly at night or in poor visibility, when a pilot must rely on an aircraft's instrument panel to navigate.
The Russian choppers are far more basic birds than U.S. models such as the UH-60 Black Hawk or the CH-47 Chinook. The Mi-17 is steered with a stick and rudder and usually lacks such amenities as Global Positioning System navigation. Afghan maintenance crews, accustomed to making do with whatever materials are handy, are skilled in making repairs with used soda cans and other makeshift parts.
The U.S. government has bought Russian choppers for other allies as well. The Pentagon purchased eight Mi-17s for the Iraqi air force, although defense officials say they have no plans to acquire more. The Defense Department has also purchased or leased 14 Mi-17s for Pakistan, although Islamabad recently returned some after a crash raised questions about their safety. ad_icon
In addition, the U.S. Special Operations Command would like to buy a few Mi-17s of its own, so that special forces carrying out clandestine missions could cloak the fact that they are American.
"We would like to have some to blend in and do things," said a senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the clandestine program. "But the Russians know this. Russia has a small monopoly on Mi-17s. They are now exorbitantly priced."
Critics in Congress said the price per chopper has tripled since 2006, from $6 million to $18 million. Pentagon officials dispute this, saying that the lower prices were for used, less capable Mi-17s, and newer models retail for about $15 million.
Defense officials and analysts said that U.S. helicopter manufacturers, struggling to produce enough aircraft for U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, might not have the capacity to make more for the Afghan air corps right away.
Still, under pressure from Congress, U.S. defense officials have indicated that they are leaning away from their Russian buying binge.
"As a 'Buy American' kind of individual, I think it's totally appropriate as we go forward that we continue to assess the program," Army Secretary John McHugh, whose service oversees foreign helicopter purchases, told the Senate Appropriations Committee in March.
Staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report.
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Afghan informers play dangerous game in Taliban heartland
by Daphne Benoit – Fri Jun 18, 10:59 pm ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) – The news comes at noon: there is a cache of rockets right in the middle of Kandahar city, birthplace of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.
The informant holds a thick yellow sheet tightly around his face, lest it falls. We must act quickly, he has told US forces, or the weapons will be fired at Camp Nathan Smith that evening.
For cash, but risking his life, he has given valuable information to the 293rd US Military Police Battalion, who train Afghan forces in a densely populated northern district of Kandahar, a known staging area for insurgents.
"A lot of Taliban leaders live here," said US Sergeant Michael Crowley.
The population has good reason to be afraid to tip off or cooperate with Afghan and Western forces for fear of reprisals.
"There have been threats. (The Taliban) cut hands off construction workers building government-funded projects, after sending them threatening letters," Crowley said.
US forces depend on local intelligence as extra troops surge into Kandahar this summer, part of a mammoth build up designed to drive the Taliban out of the city in a critical campaign intended to help end nine years of war.
But the Taliban has executed a number of locals it has accused of spying for Western forces, and even civil servants who cooperate are also a prime target.
On Tuesday, the chief of Kandahar's Arghandab district was killed in a suicide car bomb. He was considered a traitor by the Taliban, his villagers being funded and supported by US special forces to protect against the insurgents.
Arriving at the location of the rocket cache, a field strewn with mounds of rubble, US soldiers struggle to find the weapons with a metal detector. The informant, hidden in a vehicle, refuses to expose himself to help look.
Finally, after the site is emptied of Afghan forces, the man is brought out from hiding.
"The informant was worried the ANP (Afghan national police) would see him," said American Sergeant Charles Smith.
Still covered with the sheet, the man quickly uses his hands to dig at a patch of earth in ground surrounded by high walls. He exposes the cache, then bounds back to the vehicle.
The bomb squad is brought in to dig up the relatively modest catch: five Chinese-made 62-millimetre recoilless rifle rounds, wrapped in a sack of rice.
"I carefully dug down with my hands, made sure it was not booby trapped and took them out," said a bomb squad member who gave his name as Toby.
"Originally, the intel was that there were rockets."
But for the Americans, it was still a small victory. And for the "mole", a significant amount of money.
A US military official based in Kandahar said informants are paid through a programme called "small rewards" if they help find mortars, rockets and other armaments.
"It's a means of compensating these people to put their life on the line," he said, refusing to disclose how much they were paid.
Nevertheless, a US intelligence officer says security needs to improve significantly before the population of Kandahar can be a dependable ally.
"They can't really support us, out of fear of any consequence. They're waiting to see what happens," he said.
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EXCLUSIVE: 10 of 17 Afghans Who Deserted U.S. Air Force Base Remain Missing
By Jana Winter June 18, 2010 FOXNews.com
Ten of 17 Afghan military deserters who walked away from a training program on a U.S. Air Force base in Texas remain at large, sources close to the situation told Fox News on Friday, and seven of the men have been accounted for.
The 17 deserters went AWOL from Lackland Air Force Base, where foreign military officers who are training to become pilots are taught English, according to a "Be-on-the-Lookout" (BOLO) bulletin issued on Wednesday.
Sources said that as of November 2009, one of the deserters was in Canada, one is now a lawful permanent resident in the U.S., one has left the country and another four are in federal custody and in removal proceedings. The other 10 remain unaccounted for.
On Wednesday night, the BOLO bulletin listing all 17 deserters was distributed to local and federal law enforcement officials and joint terrorism task force members across the country.
The Afghan officers and enlisted men have security badges that give them access to secure U.S. defense installations, according to the lookout bulletin, "Afghan Military Deserters in CONUS [Continental U.S.]," written by Naval Criminal Investigative Service in Dallas and obtained by FoxNews.com.
The Afghans were attending the Defense Language Institute at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. The DLI program teaches English to military pilot candidates and other air force prospects from foreign countries allied with the U.S.
"I can confirm that 17 have gone missing from the Defense Language Institute," said Gary Emery, Chief of Public Affairs, 37th Training Wing, at Lackland AFB. "They disappeared over the course of the last two years, and none in the last three months."
The most recent Afghan to disappear from Lackland was First Lt. Javed Aryan, who went AWOL in January 2010, Emery told FoxNews.com. The others listed in the NCIS report disappeared at various times last year.
Each of the missing Afghans was issued a Department of Defense Common Access Card, an identification card used to gain access to secure military installations, with which they "could attempt to enter DOD installations," according to the bulletin. Base security officers were encouraged to disseminate the bulletin to their personnel.
"The visas issued to these personnel have been revoked, or are in the process of being revoked. Lookouts have been placed in TECS," it reads.
Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS), which is shared by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, is a computer-based database used to identify people suspected of violating federal law.
Afghans are not the only foreign military who have gone AWOL from Lackland, Emery said.
"In 2009, the Defense Language Institute English Language Center reported two other students from countries other than Afghanistan went missing," he told FoxNews.com. "They include one Iraqi who requested asylum in Houston and one Djiboutian whose status is unknown. To date in 2010, one student from Tunisia and one from Guinea Bissau have gone AWOL in addition to the Afghani student [Aryan] who went AWOL in January.
"To put these numbers in perspective," Emery said, "more than 3,400 international students entered training at DLI in 2009, including 228 from Afghanistan."
A senior law enforcement official said Friday that the Afghans' disappearance was more of an immigration violation than a security threat, saying there are no "strong indications to any terrorism nexus or impending threat."
"A number of these guys have already been located or accounted for by now," the official said. "Some are in removal proceedings to be deported already. (Authorities) still need to locate the others, and that is why the bulletin went out."
The official said the information is "kind of old" -- up to two years -- but added, "It is important in the sense that some people look to come to the U.S. and will take advantage of invitations to train or attend a conference or to study, etc. But their real intention is to get to the U.S. and start a new life. It is not completely rare for this to happen....
"Although we are vigilant and need to work toward not allowing this to happen," the official said, this alert should "not necessarily" be described as "a national security threat, more of a 'hey these guys violated our laws and we need to find them.'"
Fox News has obtained an excerpt from internal emails within law enforcement community relating to the AWOL Afghan soldiers. One email says, in part:
"I just talked to [a special agent] who explained the list was created by him and [another agent]. Both agents compiled the list to identify to the intelligence community the small number of Afghans that have deserted after attending the Defense Language Institute, which is often known as DLI, in San Antonio. They hoped to ensure that anyone who encountered these individuals would be properly notified. The list was created from those who came to the U.S. as far back as 1999, so they did not come in one group. None of the people on this list was identified as having any derogatory information regarding being a national security threat. It is suspected that a small number of those who come to the [DLI] decide to try to make a better life for themselves here so they desert."
Included in the bulletin are photos of the 17 men, accompanied by their dates of birth and their TECS Lookout numbers.
The bulletin requests, "If any Afghan pictured herein is encountered, detain the subject and contact your local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, the FBI or NCIS."
On Friday, ICE released this statement:
“A routine bulletin was created to inform the U.S. law enforcement community about 17 Afghan soldiers who have deserted in recent years while attending language training at the Defense Language Institute facility in Texas. There is no information that any of these individuals pose a national security threat. Previous indications are that such foreign military deserters typically do so solely for prospects of a better life. This type of bulletin serves to identify foreign military deserters, request investigative leads, and enable ICE to take appropriate enforcement action.”
"When a DLI student goes missing," Emery said, "officials report the incident to the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as the sponsoring service branch. Invitational Travel Orders, passports, driver licenses, and airline tickets are revoked in order to hamper travel opportunities for the missing students."
On Friday, Texas Sen. John Cornyn sent a letter to the secretary of the Air Force demanding answers on the current status of the AWOL Afghans, which he called a breach of national security. Cornyn, a Republican, asked Air Force Secretary Michael B. Donley for an immediate report on the status of the missing men and an assessment of the potential threat to citizens of Texas. He demanded to know why he was not informed about the missing Afghans over the course of the last two years.
The FBI and NCIS did not respond to requests for comment. A Department of Homeland Security spokesman referred FoxNews.com to the FBI.
Mike Levine and Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.
The following 17 Afghan military members have gone AWOL from an Air Force base in Texas and are being sought in a nationwide alert in the U.S.
Abdul Ghani Barakzai, born 8/8/1977
Mohd Ali Karimi, born 9/3/1982
Mohammad Nasim Fateh Zada, born 12/4/1966
Aminullah Sangarwal, born 8/27/1982
Mohd Ahmadi, born 5/5/1978
Ahad Abdulahad, born 5/5/1984
Sayed Qadir Shah Habiby, born 5/7/1985
Javed Aryan a.k.a. Aryan Javed, born 1/1/1987
Mirwais Qassmi, born 4/24/1974
Barsat Noorani, born 6/3/1981
Atiqullah Habibi, two dates of birth are listed on the alert: 6/2/1982 and 7/2/1982
Ahmad Sameer Samar, born 5/2/1983
Mohamed Fahim Faqier, born 6/1/1987
Obaiddullah Abrahimy, born 8/1/1979
Sayed Nasir Hashimi, born 4/5/1972
Shawali Kakar, born 12/31/1979
Khan Padshah Amiri, born 4/1/1978
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Taliban want ransom for journalist
Afghanistan takes over talks to free Japanese missing since March; rebel denies abduction
June 18, 2010
KABUL, (Kyodo) Taliban rebels have demanded that the Afghan government pay a ransom for a Japanese journalist who was believed taken captive in late March in northern Afghanistan, it was learned Thursday from Afghan security authorities.
Negotiations are under way on a payment of several hundred thousand dollars for the release of Kosuke Tsuneoka, 40, according to the authorities, who believe he is being held by the militants.
However, Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, on Thursday denied reports that the Taliban are holding Tsuneoka.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who arrived in Japan on Wednesday for a five-day official visit, is said to have already instructed the authorities to speed up the release negotiations.
According to the authorities, based on the negotiations to date, Tsuneoka's life does not appear to be in danger.
The authorities said the Japanese government had been conducting the release negotiations through the Japanese Embassy in Kabul. However, after the negotiations stalled due to a Taliban demand that a Taliban militant being held in Pakistan be released, the Afghan government took over in negotiating with the militants.
The negotiations are being conducted by telephone, according to the authorities.
The Japanese Embassy said it could not comment.
In Tokyo, the government refused to make specific comments, including whether the journalist was kidnapped.
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Afghanistan peace conundrum flummoxes mediators
By Lyse Doucet BBC News, Oslo June 19, 2010
A war that has dragged on for 31 years has many epithets.
Many a book has been titled "Afghanistan's tragedy". This month it became "America's longest war".
"A master class of complexity" was the phrase that came to mind for mediator Martin Griffiths, who heads the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD Centre).
For the past eight years, the HD Centre and the Norwegian government have hosted the Oslo forum, an annual gathering which brings together mediators, special envoys and government officials to discuss conflict resolution around the world.
Relishing the challenge
Now that "no military solution" and "talking to the Taliban" have become new mantras in the long-running Afghan war, it is concentrating mediators' minds on how to bring warring sides to peace there.
"It has all the classic conundrums for mediators... in spades," reflected Mr Griffiths. "There's every challenge from who do you talk to, how do you involve neighbours, deal with spoilers, bring justice and establish a road map for a sustainable peace."
"There will have to be multi-track, multi-level talks," said one participant at a well-attended session on Afghanistan at the forum. All discussions were under the so-called Chatham House Rule, ie not for attribution.
Mediators big and small would clearly relish the challenge to "do Afghanistan".
The risks and dangers are also clear. And Taliban intentions are not.
There have been secret contacts and channels in recent years but no real progress.
'Conditions'
"Their message came to us in rockets," pointed out Fatima Gailani, who heads the Afghan Red Crescent Society.
Her remark alluded to Taliban attacks on a recent national "peace jirga" in Kabul which called for talks with all Afghan armed opposition groups.
The peace jirga also called on Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey to help.
Saudi Arabia, home of Islam's two holiest sites, has been involved for decades in frustrating efforts to help resolve the Afghan conflict.
There is a Saudi sense of "been there, done that, haven't succeeded", said one long-time observer.
The former ambassador and intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who attended the forum, was personally involved in unsuccessful efforts to unite intransigent Afghan factions in 1993.
"We are ready to help, but have set conditions," said Prince Turki, who says he no longer has an official role in the Gulf kingdom.
Neutral party
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who spoke at the opening session, was brimming with the confidence of a relative newcomer to the mediators' club.
In recent years, Ankara has been intervening in crises across the Middle East.
Speaking after the session, Mr Davutoglu said: "Sometimes you need countries who are far away from the conflict, and sometimes you need countries who are near."
Norway has long been an example of the "far-away" neutral mediator. Dialogue is ingrained in its diplomacy.
Its most famous intervention was the secret peace talks which led to the Oslo Accords between Israel's government and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1993.
Explaining the success of the Oslo process, Norway's Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr Store, said in an interview that "the right people, right place, and right time resulted in extraordinary diplomacy".
Mr Store takes a keen interest in the file on Afghanistan, where Norway has some 500 troops.
He was at the Serena Hotel in Kabul in January 2008 when it came under attack. Six people were killed, including a Norwegian journalist.
'Big vision'
With so many countries and so many interests involved in a conflict which affects the entire region and beyond, the United Nations is positioning itself to play some kind of role.
The new UN Special Representative for Iraq, Staffan de Mistura, said it was "time to talk". Asked what the first task must be, he replied: "Establish a big vision."
Even that is daunting - there is still little clarity on the road ahead and where it must lead.
Despite the resounding call from the Peace Jirga, Afghans remain divided about reaching out to armed opposition groups which left an indelible mark on their country's brutal history.
There are now signs that Pakistan, long regarded as a sanctuary for Taliban leaders and fighters, is also determined to play a leading role.
It is anxious to ensure its own strategic interests are met, most of all vis-a-vis its long-standing rivalry with India, which also plays out in Afghanistan.
And for any real process to start, it is widely recognised that the biggest player, the United States, must become more engaged on this front.
Even the Taliban, who repeatedly call for the withdrawal of foreign troops before any talking can start, has indicated it has to talk to the power that matters.
"It's absolutely essential that the Americans talk to the Taliban as soon as possible," insisted the Pakistani author and journalist, Ahmed Rashid.
"The longer you delay this, the greater the risk it will lead to some kind of panic decision and the results could be awful."
Like most outside parties, Washington emphasises this must be an Afghan-led, and Afghan-owned process.
Top US military commanders express scepticism that senior Taliban leaders still linked to al-Qaeda want to talk. Nato forces are instead focusing on stepping up the military pressure in the months ahead.
"Everyone understands there is no military solution," remarked one participant at the Oslo forum with long experience in Afghanistan, "but no-one understands what the non-military solution is."
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Afghanistan's future lies in trade partnerships
The Washington Post - Opinion By David Ignatius Sunday, June 20, 2010
The recent Washington debate over Af-Pak strategy has had it backward: This war is less about trying to defeat the Taliban militarily in Afghanistan than it is about reaching an understanding with Pakistan that closes Taliban havens there and allows a political reconciliation among the warring Afghan parties. It's a Pak-Af problem, not the other way around.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai seems to recognize this reality; that's why he's holding his peace jirga, meeting with Taliban contacts and sacking an intelligence chief whom Pakistan regards as an enemy. President Obama seems to appreciate the likely political endgame, but he spends too little time explaining this conflict to a skeptical American public.
One reason our Afghanistan strategy is so puzzling is that people don't have a clear picture of what the United States is trying to achieve through its mix of military and diplomatic action. We know from political science studies that when a strategy becomes fuzzy, political support vanishes. This was true in Vietnam and Iraq, and it's now happening with Afghanistan.
The most useful analysis I've seen recently is "The Key to Success in Afghanistan: A Modern Silk Road Strategy." It was prepared by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It also had major input from the U.S. Central Command, which oversees the war.
The Silk Road study tries to visualize the kind of Afghanistan that might exist after U.S. troops begin coming home in July 2011. Instead of being a lawless frontier, this post-conflict Afghanistan would be a transit route for Eurasia, providing trade corridors north and south, east and west.
To make this transport-led strategy work, Afghanistan would need to build more roads, railways and pipelines. A hypothetical railway map shows routes that connect Iran with India, Russia with Pakistan, China with the Arabian Sea. It knits together the rising powers of this region and makes Afghanistan a hub rather than a barrier.
I first heard discussion of this modern Silk Road idea from Ashraf Ghani, a former Afghan finance minister. He made a powerful analogy to America's own development: What secured our lawless Wild West frontier was the transcontinental railroad in 1869. With trade and economic growth came stability.
Asian nations understand the benefits they could gain from transit links across Afghanistan. Take the ring road that links Afghanistan's biggest cities; the United States has pumped $1.8 billion into this and other road projects since 2002, but neighboring Iran has also put up a hefty $220 million. China has built roads connecting its western Xinjiang province with Afghanistan, by way of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and the Chinese are building a $50 million roadway in Wardak province.
There was a buzz last week because of a U.S. estimate that Afghanistan could possess $1 trillion in mineral wealth. That's a pipe dream for now, but what's real is a Chinese project to invest $3 billion in the Aynak copper mine, south of Kabul. To transport the copper, China has pledged to build a new railway route north, through Tajikistan, and the Chinese want to extend this rail link to the Pakistani port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea.
Then there's the energy trade: The authors of the report, Frederick Starr and Andrew C. Kuchins, note that the Asian Development Bank is considering funding a $7.6 billion pipeline that would link natural gas reserves in Turkmenistan with energy-poor Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
Hold on! How can you think of building roads, railways and pipelines when there's a war going on? Doesn't security have to come first for Afghanistan, before economic development will be possible?
Yes, and that's why this Silk Road study is so valuable. It explains the longer-term mission that U.S. troops are serving in their battles in lawless areas of Afghanistan. More to the point, it explains why it would be in the interest of all the regional powers -- especially Pakistan -- to encourage a political settlement of the war that would open Afghanistan and other Central Asian markets to Pakistani merchants.
The American public is tiring of an Afghanistan war that lacks a clear strategic framework. I wish that President Obama hadn't announced his July 2011 timetable, because this could delay the Afghan political deal that will allow U.S. troops to leave. But if we think less about "clear and hold" and more about roads and railways, maybe people in America -- and Pakistan, India and China, too -- will understand better what's to be gained from a more stable Afghanistan.
davidignatius@washpost.com
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Anti-Taliban tribal militias come with baggage
Los Angeles Times By Alex Rodriguez 18/06/2010
Reporting from Jalalabad, Afghanistan-- The morning raid caught members of the tribal militia by surprise. By the end of the attack on the camp on a patch of desert scrub in eastern Afghanistan, 12 fighters of a group that had dared to take on the Taliban were dead.
But their attackers were not Taliban militants. They were fellow Shinwari tribesmen, incensed that the militia had commandeered a swath of their land.
The incident this year highlights the pitfalls of establishing militias in Afghanistan, a country marked by tribal rivalries, age-old feuds and warlords.
In principle, the concept makes sense. Even as the United States sends tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, its forces cannot police every patch of a country about the size of Texas. The Afghan army and police remain a work in progress.
Tribal militias represent a ready-made answer. In a society where firearms are prevalent, members are already well-armed. And they have an intimate knowledge of the lands they patrol.
But as anti-Taliban militias have surfaced here in Nangarhar province and several other areas of the country, they have been accompanied by a wide array of troubles, from armed robbery to an alleged gang-rape.
Some experts and Afghan lawmakers believe a reliance on tribal militias to help combat an insurgency is the wrong approach, especially if governmental monitoring is scant or nonexistent.
"These militias are becoming their own sources of insecurity in the country," said Ahmad Nader Nadery, deputy chairman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. "They're not bound by any law and are not following any clear guidelines."
The program is not quite the same as the U.S. effort in Iraq in which former insurgents and Sunni Arag tribal leaders were paid to form paramilitary forces against Al Qaeda-linked militants, an initiative widely regarded as key to the success of the troop buildup that helped calm the civil war.
In Afghanistan, the tribes targeted by the initiative are not former Taliban. And, unlike the so-called Awakening program in Iraq, cash payments are not being made directly to militia groups. Instead, the incentive comes in the form of indirect assistance to their communities, funding the construction of roads, schools and other development projects.
Although the U.S. military is promoting the militias, it is trying to coordinate its efforts with the Afghan government and wants oversight of the initiative to ultimately be in Afghan hands. So far, the government has expressed wariness, preferring to see tribal militias folded into the police force. The militias are not armed by the U.S. and rely on their own weapons.
U.S. Army Col. Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for international forces in Afghanistan, called the initiative "more of a Neighborhood Watch situation. It's beneficial for them, and it's beneficial for us.... We're working with the Afghan government to provide security, and that takes a variety of different means. If local people can help in that security, as long as their effort is tied to the government, we see that as a positive step."
Twice in the last two months, militia members in the central province of Daikundi have repelled Taliban attacks, including one at a 10-man police check post by 50 insurgents spraying gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades.
Elsewhere, however, militia initiatives have veered off track. In the northern province of Kunduz, a woman said she had been raped by three members of her village's anti-Taliban militia in April. Though the woman has taken the unusual step of speaking out publicly about the attack on Afghan television, police have yet to make any arrests, Nadery said. Authorities in Kunduz would not return phone calls.
This month in Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taliban, authorities believe residents may have paid a steep price for forming a militia. At a wedding celebration in which many of the guests, including the groom, were members of the local militia, a young suicide bomber killed more than 40 people and injured 80.
"This is a very dangerous game," said Sayed Ishaq Gailani, a lawmaker and head of a party that backs President Hamid Karzai. "Who is responsible for these militias? Who will save them if the Taliban attack them? It's a nice dream, but I think these militias are a failed formula."
Here in the Achin district of Nangarhar province, tribesmen fed up with assassinations and roadside bombings carried out by the Taliban formed a militia in self-defense. For a while, the show of defiance worked. The Taliban backed off.
In return, the Achin community received $200,000 from the U.S. to help build roads, schools and small factories to generate jobs.
"We were preventing the Taliban from causing problems in our area," said Shinwari tribal elder Malik Usman, whose brother was killed by a roadside bomb in 2009.
As is often the case in Afghan society, tribal grudges and rivalries eventually took hold.
Usman's militia, largely made up of members of the Shobli clan within the Shinwari tribe, believed that a rival clan, the Ali Sher Khel, had been building settlements on their land. They set up a cluster of about 100 tents along a six-mile stretch of grazing land the Ali Sher Khel clan claimed was theirs.
"This land belongs to us, and has for many years," said Haji Akhtar Mohammed Shinwari, an Ali Sher Khel elder. "We won't let anyone take over our land."
The dispute boiled over Feb. 27, when Ali Sher Khel tribesmen raided the militia camp, said Mueen Shah, a top Nangarhar provincial official who conducted his own investigation.
Shah blames the militia for provoking the violence by wresting away land that wasn't theirs. If anything, he said, the episode illustrates the risk of relying on untrained, unsupervised militias to help shoulder the burden of battling the insurgency.
"These militias aren't useful," Shah said. "These aren't trained people. In the name of bringing peace to the region, they're misusing their authority for their own gain."
alex.rodriguez@latimes.com
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In Afghanistan, High-Tech Tools Replace The Hammer
June 18, 2010 NPR
Geology surveys in Afghanistan don't just rely on the trusty map and hammer. John Brozena of the Naval Research Laboratory discusses how geologists there have mapped mineral deposits from planes carrying various sorts of cameras as well as gravity and magnetic sensors.
IRA FLATOW, host:
You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow.
The recent news that below the surface of Afghanistan lies a treasure trove of minerals got us wondering. You know, that's a bad idea. It got us wondering: Just how do they know that?
It used to be that the only way a geologist could find out what kinds of rocks and minerals were in the hills was to throw on some sturdy boots, grab a hammer, a pair of binoculars, a Rite-in-the-Rain notebook and a map and hit the trail, if there was a trail.
But geology has come a long way since the prospectors out West. Today, we can map the hidden minerals from a plane 50,000 feet above the ground, which is what a team of geologists has been doing in Afghanistan, where, if you wanted to, it's not too safe to hike around hammering rocks, unless you have a squadron of soldiers with machine guns following you around.
So how does all that stuff work? How can you tell what kind of ore lies beneath a mountain range without digging it up? Joining me to talk about that is my guest, John Brozena. He is chief scientist of Project Rampant Lion. That's a geophysical survey of Afghanistan. He's also the head of Marine Physics Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. And welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Brozena.
Dr. JOHN BROZENA (Chief Scientist, Project Rampant Lion Head; Marine Physics Branch, Naval Research Laboratory): Oh, well thank you.
FLATOW: How much of what we've heard this week is really new information, and how much has been known for a while?
Dr. BROZENA: Well, it's a combination of quite a few things. And let me correct one thing. You mentioned 50,000 feet. There were two separate airborne surveys during 2006. Ours was in a P-3, a naval aircraft, a research-configured P-3, and our was at sort of 20,000 to 30,000 feet. The second aircraft, equipped with different sensors, was flown at about 50,000 feet. That was the WB-57.
So there's information from several programs between those two aircraft. But what you need to think about when you're looking for all these minerals or thinking about all these minerals is that geologists fuse information from every source that they can get.
So a great deal of this information came from old Soviet maps. You may have heard that the workers within the Afghan Geological Survey, during the time of the Taliban occupation or control of the country, hid the maps that were made during the Soviet period and brought them forward and gave shared them with U.S. Geological Survey, who then worked with us and the WB-57 folks to put together airborne surveys to supplement the on-the-surface maps.
And so when you're thinking of how you would go about looking for all these minerals or finding them, it's really a combination of every piece of information you can integrate, and we've contributed to one part of that.
FLATOW: Well, share with us the secret of how, from 20,000, 30,000 or 50,000 feet, you can get below the surface and know what's down there.
Dr. BROZENA: Well, our sensors system - and we had a very large group of sensors on the P-3, these I should mention these are former submarine chasers. It was their primary function in the Navy at the time, and the Naval Research Laboratory and its - the Navy Scientific Development's Squadron 1, VXS-1, have a couple of P-3s that are stripped out of all their military hardware, all the sensors for submarine warfare, and all the weapons systems have been removed. And they've been turned into research trucks that can carry lots of different kinds of equipment.
We had gravity, magnetics, hyper-spectral let's see, what else...
FLATOW: Well, let's break each one down.
Dr. BROZENA: Okay.
FLATOW: What can you tell from a gravity sensor?
Dr. BROZENA: A gravity sensor detects variations in mass, local mass variations, which could be either density or amount, like a mountain. And so if you take a topographic map and try to remove the topographic variations, you're left with a good estimate of the density variations in the earth beneath you.
And that's related to both the combination of geologic structure and the materials that are in the area, and that's one type of remote sensing. It's not definitive. You have to calibrate against some ground truth. You have to integrate that information with other things. But knowing the regional densities and density variations tells you quite a lot of information.
The gravity is used primarily for sedimentary basins, looking for oil and gas, as opposed to minerals. You've been hearing in the newspaper about minerals possibly in Afghanistan.
FLATOW: Right. Right. And...
Dr. BROZENA: The gravity sensor is more appropriate and it was onboard the aircraft looking for sedimentary basins. And in fact, we there were known sedimentary basins around Afghanistan, and what we did was define their extent and their geometries. And there are a couple that look fairly perspective, that the USGS is working on, trying to come up with estimates of potential oil and gas within Afghanistan. And they may have a fair amount of gas and even perhaps a bit of oil.
FLATOW: And what about the minerals, that were sensors for the minerals. Which kinds of sensors would detect the minerals?
Dr. BROZENA: Okay, well, the gravity does contribute something, because if it gives you the real - the regional geologic context, the folding and faulting and things like that that are important for mineralization.
Then the next primary sensor that would be used would be the magnetics, which, from its sound, detects the variation in the magnetic field locally, around space. And that tells you about a lot about the minerals or the materials that are in the area.
It there's different amounts of magnetic field that are associated with different types of materials, and in combination with the gravity and the ground truth, again, it's a good way to do initial searches for either likely areas for minerals or direct detection.
In the case of something like iron ore, it has a huge magnetic signature directly, and so you can actually see the extent of an ore deposit if you get close enough to it.
One of the problems we had was flying at 20,000 to 30,000 feet. We're a long ways away from some of those things, so their signatures are attenuated. But in the case of a very large ferrous metal deposit, it's you still pick up signatures.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And what about imaging? Hyper-spectral imaging, I've heard about. Tell us about how that works and what you might find with that.
Dr. BROZENA: Well, hyper-spectral imaging, if you think of a normal camera as dividing the visual spectrum into three colors, red, green and blue, and then mixing them to make the various colors that you see on a photograph, a hyper-spectral imager divides into many more colors, essentially, many more bands.
The one that we were using on the P-3 divided visual range plus a little bit of the infrared into 72 bands. And so you're looking for emissions, or lack of emissions within each of those bands. And those are diagnostic of, again, materials. But the thing here is you're looking only at the surface. It's you can only see what's on the surface with any type of imaging like that, and...
FLATOW: Is this an ongoing project, this Rampant Lion, something that's over? Will it keep continuing and looking...
Dr. BROZENA: It's continuing. Rampant Lion is a developmental project at the Naval Research Laboratory that's not particular to platform or sensors. It's a way to put together multiple sensors on whatever platform's appropriate for a particular problem.
So we've operated in Colombia, in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're hoping to operate in the future with other countries, as well, and we have quite a lot of interest in different places in Africa and...
FLATOW: Are there military applications? For example, if you can see anomalies on the ground, could you see where troops might be hiding in caves and things like that?
Dr. BROZENA: Not with the gravity or magnetic sensors. One of the other instruments we carry is a high-resolution photogrammetric camera, which is just a visual camera, but with very high resolution, and each pixel is georegistered - that is, you have a latitude, a longitude and the height of every pixel. So you can zoom in and look at things with that, and that has quite a lot of applications.
As a matter of fact, we returned to Afghanistan in 2008 for support of some of the war efforts there, although some of that data is also being contributed to the economic and civil infrastructure of Afghanistan.
You have to think this is not just minerals and oil and gas exploitation, but the ability to build roads, dams, bridges and pipelines, and you really need good engineering data for that. And a lot of the data we collect is useful for that.
For instance, we got a lot of interest from people that are working on the airports around Afghanistan, the obstructions. So it's - the equivalent of the FAA in Afghanistan wanted to have avoidance of obstacles around airports, and they're using our photographs for that.
FLATOW: Well, while I have you here - and we have about a couple of minutes left - I can't avoid asking you a question I've asked many times, and I've seen in pictures in National Geographic, maps of the oceans, and you see mountains underneath the water. Is it true that the mountains under the water actually push up the ocean and little bit, and that's how you map what's underneath the surface?
Dr. BROZENA: It's not actually pushing up. It's pulling the water towards it, which makes a bump on top. There's a more intense or more gravity over the top of the extra mass of a sea mount, and that attracts water towards it, and it piles up, and you have a bump there.
FLATOW: And you can detect that how much of a bump, a few centimeters big?
Dr. BROZENA: Anything from a few centimeters to maybe up to a meter. We do a lot of this from a satellite, but we also do it from aircraft, with precise radar and laser altimeters.
FLATOW: So what we think of as the actual flat sea surface is really a myth?
Dr. BROZENA: Oh, well, there's yes, that's absolutely true. Sea surface or sea level has bumps and hollows all over it, and as you back off into space and look with these precise altimeters, you can see those bumps and hollows.
FLATOW: And so if there was a giant as there is a mountain range under the Atlantic, if we could theoretically motor along that in our yacht or something, we would actually see the seawater being higher in that spot?
Dr. BROZENA: No, because you're only looking at a couple of feet of bumps, and it's spread out over many miles. So it's not visible to anybody from the surface. You really have to do precise measurements to see these bumps.
So you're seeing a reflection of whatever's underneath the water. It's related to the bumps and hollows of the topography. You get the same thing on the surface, but it's very subdued so, you know - centimeters and perhaps up to a meter in height.
FLATOW: But your instruments are able to reconstruct that?
Dr. BROZENA: Very much so, and I'm sure you've seen the National Geographic maps that it's useful we work for the Navy, and we can use that to detect sea mounts that haven't been mapped and even estimate their size. There are people working on that.
FLATOW: And how far down can you look?
Dr. BROZENA: It's not really looking far down. You're looking at the surface of the ocean, and that's reflecting what's far down.
FLATOW: So the Marianas Trench would be visible?
Dr. BROZENA: Very much so, and it shows up as a big trench in the water. It's, again, probably a few maybe more than a meter deep, and it's a huge signature because it's such a deep hole, the Marianas Trench.
FLATOW: Wow.
Dr. BROZENA: Yeah.
FLATOW: You know, you can't look at the ocean again, the mythology of above sea level.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. BROZENA: Well, you also have to think of the same bumps and hollows, sea level continues across land. You just don't happen to have a sea there to be reflected. But if you had a network of canals crisscrossing all over the land surface, you'd see there would be bumps and hollows in that, in the same way that there is the ocean.
FLATOW: Fascinating. Thank you for taking time to be with us today, John.
Dr. BROZENA: My pleasure.
FLATOW: John Brozena is the chief scientist at Project Rampant Lion. That's the Geophysical Survey of Afghanistan. He's also head of the Marine Physics Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. Have a good holiday weekend.
Dr. BROZENA: Well, thank you very much. Same to you.
FLATOW: You too.
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Shifting sands in Kabul
Saturday, June 19, 2010 The News International (Pakistan) By Arif Nizami
The Sunday Times made the sensational, albeit nebulous, claim based on a report ostensibly commissioned by the London School of Economics that "there is growing evidence that the government in Islamabad arms the (Taliban) insurgents, gives them targets and has seats on their war council." Accusing Pakistan's premier intelligence agency, the ISI, of backing the Taliban is virtually as old as the Afghan conflict itself. In fact, many Western analysts, and some of our own, consider the Taliban a creation of the ISI.
However, what is a first is the accusation in the report is that President Zardari is in cahoots with the Taliban. According to the report, the president and a senior ISI official recently met 50 high-ranking Taliban commanders in jail and assured them of the government's support. Five days after the visit a handful of Taliban prisoners were set free in Quetta, the seat of the so-called Quetta Shura.
A presidential spokesman has vehemently denied the ludicrous report implicating Zardari, who is generally viewed as pro-Western and anti-Taliban. At the most he can be accused of abdicating the Afghan policy to COAS Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani and his trusted ISI chief, Lt Gen Shuja Pasha.
President Zardari, unlike his predecessor, has managed to have a reasonably good rapport with the Afghan president. But Karzai's credentials as an honest broker have increasingly become suspect in the eyes of his Western mentors. Perhaps that is why the Pakistani leader has also been implicated in the messy equation.
An ISI official expressing real or feigned surprise at the charge has admitted fostering contacts with militant groups. However, he said that, "to say we are sitting on their council, directing them and playing a game hurts me a lot, given the price we have paid."
The timing of the LSE report is ominous. It has been released at a time when NATO and US forces have become increasingly bogged down in Afghanistan. While casualties have mounted in recent months, the much-touted offensive in the Taliban home base of Kandahar has been delayed for months. The consultative peace jirga held in Kabul on June 2 endorsed the Karzai government policy of negotiating with the Taliban "to bring them into the political mainstream." For the West it is adding insult to injury.
The Afghan president has refused to clearly accuse the Taliban of the abortive attack on the peace jirga. One report quoted him as saying: "I don't know who did it!" While another report claims that he believes that the US and not the Taliban are responsible for the rocket attack on the conference.
As a direct outcome of the attack, President Karzai's long-trusted intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, a former aide of the late Ahmed Shah Massoud, and Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar were forced to resign. This is seen as a setback both for the US and the Indians. Saleh is a long-time ISI-hater who considers the Pakistani intelligence agency as Afghanistan's enemy number one. Obviously, Karzai, himself a Pakhtun, no longer considers them loyal.
Despite Karzai's fence-mending sojourn to the White House last month, a deep schism persists between Washington and Kabul. The US by questioning the transparency of the presidential elections held in autumn last year robbed Karzai of his legitimacy as a leader. The so-called drawdown plan of US and NATO troops by July 2011 does not sit well with the Afghan leader.
So far as Washington is concerned, it views President Karzai's contacts with the Taliban as highly suspect. The US is not happy about the secret meetings Karzai's half brother and trusted lieutenant Ahmed Wali Karzai had with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the former deputy commander of the Taliban. Neither was the ISI happy about these contacts. Hence, Baradar was arrested early this year by the very ISI which was housing him in Karachi.
Some analysts contend that Karzai has lost faith in the ability of the American and NATO forces to prevail in Afghanistan. Having serious doubts that the Americans and NATO forces can ever defeat the insurgents, he is trying to strike a secret deal with the Taliban and Pakistan. According to a US official quoted in the New York Times, "there are deep fissures among Afghan leaders how to deal with the Taliban and with their patrons in Pakistan."
In an interview Karzai's discredited intelligence chief has claimed that the Afghan president was strongly involved in a more conciliatory line towards Pakistan. According to him, Afghanistan will be forced to accept "an undignified deal" with Pakistan. He has also claimed that he was removed on Islamabad's insistence.
In this backdrop the timing of the LSE report based on a discussion paper appropriately titled as "The Sun in the Sky: the Relationship between Pakistan's ISI and Afghan Insurgents," is ominous. The author, Matt Waldman of Carr Center for Human Rights Policy of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is quintessential establishment. He has been an Oxfam official in Kabul as well as a defence advisor to the UK and European parliaments. With little or no knowledge of Dari or Farsi, it is a miracle that he had a meaningful conversation with so may unnamed Taliban sources.
The paper concludes that Pakistan's "involvement in a double game of this scale," could have major geopolitical implications and could even provoke US counter-measures. However, the report concedes that the powerful role of the ISI, and parts of the Pakistani military requires their support. It suggests the only way to secure such co-operation is to address the, "fundamental causes of Pakistan's insecurity, especially its latent and enduring conflict with India. This requires American backing for moves towards a resolution of the Kashmir dispute."
It is obvious that commissioning of such reports and selective leaks in the Western media are meant to tighten the noose around Islamabad's neck to change its historic India-centric strategic paradigm. Implicating the Pakistani civilian government as being an active backer of the Taliban has further upped the ante.
So far as the ISI is concerned, its fine distinctions between the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, the Punjabi Taliban, the Kashmir- and India-specific Taliban and, last but not least, the good and the bad Taliban, are losing their relevance as fast as the West is losing patience in Afghanistan. In the final analysis, it is only one Taliban which is the nemesis of the West, eating into the very entrails of the state. More so for Pakistan!
The demand for the Pakistani army to start an attack against Taliban sanctuaries in North Waziristan will gain further impetus though such damning reports alleging a real or perceived nexus between the ISI and the Taliban. The ISI wants to be part of any future negotiations with the Taliban. President Karzai, opening his own channels not entirely approved by Washington, is a window of opportunity for the ISI. It puts Islamabad in a relatively advantageous position to safeguard its interests in a post US and NATO forces withdrawal from Afghanistan.
President Karzai's removal of some key anti-Pakistan officials from his cabinet has cleared the decks for some kind of role for Islamabad. Nevertheless, the ISI cannot win a popularity contest in Afghanistan where it is viewed as overbearing and interfering, but at the same time a necessity by the Pakhtuns.
The writer is a former newspaper editor. Email: arifn51@hotmail.com
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