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Afghanistan says Taliban arrests had 'negative impact'
by Waheedullah Massoud March 20, 2010
KABUL (AFP) – Arrests of Taliban leaders have had a "negative impact" on efforts by the Afghan government to broker a peace deal with the insurgents, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai said Saturday.
Oops, Taliban Arrests Derail Secret U.N. Talks
by Julie McCarthy NPR
March 20, 2010 The arrest of senior Afghan Taliban figures in Pakistan ended secret talks between the Taliban and the United Nations, according the former head of the U.N. mission in Kabul. U.N. representative Kai Eide,
Afghan national army's strength reaches 110,000
KABUL, March 20 (Xinhua) -- The strength of Afghanistan's new brand National Army (ANA) has surpassed 100,000 and building its capacity toward improving security situation, a statement of Defense Ministry said Saturday.
US weighs more troops for north Afghanistan: official
Sat Mar 20, 3:21 am ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US commanders may send an additional 2,500 troops to fend off the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, a region that had been relatively peaceful until recently, a defense official said.
Could Helmand be the Dubai of Afghanistan?
Foreign Policy By Jean MacKenzie Friday, March 19, 2010
Known as an insurgent hotbed and the heroin capital of the world, Afghanistan's troubled Helmand province has been given more than a few headline-grabbing labels over the past few years. Now, Helmand's governor is trying to add a new one:
NATO troops shot dead motorcyclist in W. Afghanistan
KABUL, March 20 (Xinhua) -- The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) shot at a motorcyclist in western Herat province and the man succumbed to his injuries in a nearby hospital, police said Saturday.
Police discover bomb from flowerpot in NE. Afghanistan
KABUL, March 20 (Xinhua) -- Police in the northeast Badakhshan province of Afghanistan discovered a mine placed in a flowerpot on Saturday, spokesman for provincial administration Abdul Marouf Rasikh said.
Clinton To Host Top-Level Strategic Talks Between U.S., Pakistan
March 20, 2010 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
WASHINGTON (RFE/RL) -- The United States and Pakistan will hold a round of strategic talks next week in the U.S. capital, with top government ministers from both countries participating for the first time.
Pakistani Analysts Respond to Former UN Official's Criticism
Voice of America Sean Maroney 19 March 2010
Islamabad - The former envoy to Afghanistan for the United Nations, Kai Eide, has criticized Pakistan for arresting top Taliban leaders, such as the group's second-in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar last month.
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight
Six billion dollars later, the afghan national police can't begin to do their jobs right—never mind relieve American forces.
Newsweek By T. Christian Miller, Mark Hosenball, and Ron Moreau Mar 19, 2010
Mohammad Moqim watches in despair as his men struggle with their AK-47 automatic rifles, doing their best to hit man-size targets 50 meters away. A few of the police trainees lying prone in the mud are decent shots
As U.S. Frees Detainees, Afghans Ask Why They Were Held
The New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN March 19, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan - The tribal elders had traveled many hours to reach a windswept Afghan military base on the capital’s outskirts to sign their names to a piece of paper allowing them to bring their countrymen home from American detention.
James Bond to take on Afghanistan in next series?
PTI / March 20, 2010
James Bond is reportedly planning to take on the poppy fields of Afghanistan in his next assignment.
If reports are to be believed at least some parts of the next movie in the Bond franchise will be shot in the Helmand province in Afghanistan.
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Afghanistan says Taliban arrests had 'negative impact'
by Waheedullah Massoud March 20, 2010
KABUL (AFP) – Arrests of Taliban leaders have had a "negative impact" on efforts by the Afghan government to broker a peace deal with the insurgents, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai said Saturday.
The arrests in Pakistan of the Taliban's second-in-command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and others in the Islamists' hierarchy, had slowed down Afghan government peace initiatives, Siamak Hirawi told AFP.
"We confirm the negative impact of the arrests on the peace process that the Afghan government has initiated," said Hirawi, Karzai's deputy spokesman.
His comments were the first official confirmation from the Kabul government that it had been in contact with the Taliban with the intention of discussing an end to the insurgency, now in its ninth year.
He also confirmed that the UN's former envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, had held peace talks with Taliban figures and said Eide had kept the Afghan government informed.
Eide's talks were part of a process initiated by the UN to help the Afghan government's peace plan, Hirawi said.
"Mr Kai Eide's efforts were a supplement to Afghan government's efforts.
"The Afghan government has been leading this process and the United Nations has tried to help efforts to solve the Afghan problem through talks, and the international community has also agreed with us," he said.
"The international community has agreed with us that those Afghans who are not linked to foreign intelligence or terrorist organisations" can be part of the peace process, he added, apparently referring to Pakistan and Al-Qaeda.
Karzai's office previously said there had been no "direct" contact with the Taliban and refused to comment on any indirect contact. There has also been no official mention of contact with the movement's leadership.
Hirawi made no reference to Taliban leaders, possibly reflecting the complexity of the issue, which involves multiple parties and has attracted opposition from inside and outside Afghanistan.
The United States and NATO allies have more than 120,000 soldiers in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, with another 30,000 on the way as part of a strategy to bring an end to the war and allow a troop drawdown.
Eide, who stepped down from the UN post earlier this month, confirmed in a BBC interview on Friday that he had held talks with senior Taliban figures, starting around a year ago.
Face-to-face talks were held with senior Taliban leadership figures in Dubai and elsewhere, said the diplomat, adding he believed the movement's leader, Mullah Omar, had given the process the green light.
"The first contact was probably last spring, then of course you moved into the election process where there was a lull in activity," the Norwegian diplomat said.
"Communication picked up when the election process was over, and it continued to pick up until a certain moment a few weeks ago."
He was referring to the arrest of senior Taliban commanders, including Baradar, in Pakistan, something welcomed by the US as a sign of the country's increasing willingness to track down Afghan militant leaders.
Pakistan's powerful spy agency the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) is believed to have been behind the arrests, in cooperation with the United States, and many in Afghanistan see them as being aimed at destabilising any peace process.
"The government of Afghanistan is trying to encourage somehow the government of Pakistan to cooperate in this process," Hirawi said.
Eide said the detentions in Pakistan had a "negative" impact on attempts to find a political solution to the Afghan war and suggested Pakistan had deliberately tried to undermine the negotiations.
The US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, by contrast, praised the arrests, telling reporters on Friday he had been aware of the UN-Taliban contact but the United States played no role.
"This is a good thing for the simplest of reasons. It is good for the military efforts that are underway in Afghanistan," he said.
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Oops, Taliban Arrests Derail Secret U.N. Talks
by Julie McCarthy NPR
March 20, 2010 The arrest of senior Afghan Taliban figures in Pakistan ended secret talks between the Taliban and the United Nations, according the former head of the U.N. mission in Kabul. U.N. representative Kai Eide, who stepped down this month, says the capture of more than a dozen Taliban members, some through joint U.S. Pakistan operations, effectively derailed the possibility of continuing dialogue about settling the war in Afghanistan. But Pakistan says there was no intention to sabotage anything.
SCOTT SIMON, host:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.
White House special representative Richard Holbrooke said yesterday the United States was extremely gratified that Pakistan had arrested key Taliban leaders in recent weeks. But earlier in the day, the former U.N. representative to Afghanistan said that the capture of senior Taliban figures in Pakistan had abruptly severed important contacts with the insurgents and disrupted an effort to end the Afghan war.
From Islamabad, NPR's Julie McCarthy has more.
JULIE MCCARTHY: The two statements, one from Ambassador Holbrooke and the other from Kai Eide, who stepped down this month as the U.N. representative in Kabul, bring into focus a rising debate, whether to fight or to talk to the Taliban after eight years of war. Holbrooke said the arrest of key Taliban leaders in Pakistan had put more pressure on the militants and was good for the military operation in Afghanistan.
But Kai Eide told the BBC the arrests had slammed the door on secret talks with senior Taliban leaders and scuttled nascent peace efforts.
Mr. KAI EIDE (U.N. Former Special Representative, Afghanistan): That to me is a sign also that the Pakistanis did not play the role that they should've played. I dont believe that these people were arrested by coincidence.
MCCARTHY: Eide confirmed for the first time that talks with senior Taliban began a year ago with face-to-face meetings. He said there was every reason to believe that negotiations had the approval of the group's spiritual leader, Mullah Omar. There has been speculation that the arrests were Pakistan's way of signaling that no peace talks about Afghanistan would happen without the Pakistanis at the table. But Pakistan's foreign office said the only motivation for the arrests was to remove Taliban commanders from the battlefield.
Spokesman Abdul Basit denied that Pakistan intended to sabotage any political dialogue to end the Afghan war.
Mr. ABDUL BASIT (Spokesman, Pakistan Foreign Office): This is misrepresentation of our intentions, I would say. The entire international community, including the U.S., are appreciative of what we are doing.
MCCARTHY: But newspaper editor Rashid Rahman says Pakistan's explanation is not wholly credible. He says every party is positioning itself for the time when the U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan.
Mr. RASHID RAHMAN (Editor, Daily Times): And certainly the Pakistanis military and its intelligence arms would want a foot in the door in order to have influence in the regime which may follow in Afghanistan, whether under Karzai or someone else.
MCCARTHY: Talks with the Taliban are highly sensitive for the Americans. U.S. officials with knowledge of U.N. envoy Eide's efforts describe them as preliminary at best.
Julie McCarthy, NPR News, Islamabad.
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Afghan national army's strength reaches 110,000
KABUL, March 20 (Xinhua) -- The strength of Afghanistan's new brand National Army (ANA) has surpassed 100,000 and building its capacity toward improving security situation, a statement of Defense Ministry said Saturday.
"The strength of national army at the moment is more than 110, 000," the statement quoted Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi as saying.
Afghanistan would have 134,000-strong new brand army by the end of 2011. However, the Afghan Defense Ministry has been advocating for having 250,000 strong troops to defend the country's boundaries independently.
Currently some 113,000 NATO-led forces with over 67,000 of them Americans are stationed in Afghanistan to help ensure peace in the war-torn nation.
In the statement, Azimi said that ANA had played a leading role in conducting joint Afghan and NATO-led forces operation against Taliban bastion in Marja district of the southern Helmand province in mid February and restoring government control there.
Meantime, the Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman admitted that 614 personnel of Afghan National Army including 402 soldiers have been killed since March 2009 in fighting militants to ensure security in the militancy-plagued country.
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US weighs more troops for north Afghanistan: official
Sat Mar 20, 3:21 am ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US commanders may send an additional 2,500 troops to fend off the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, a region that had been relatively peaceful until recently, a defense official said.
US officers were conferring with German commanders leading Regional Command North about shifting some the forces in a US troop buildup to the north instead of the south, the official told AFP.
The "tentative" plan was for roughly 2,500 American troops, including trainers for Afghan security forces, to deploy to the north, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
President Barack Obama approved the deployment of 30,000 additional troops in December to turn the war around, and most of the 10,000 that have arrived so far have been sent to the volatile south, the spiritual heartland of the Taliban insurgency.
Plans for a possible shift of forces emerged after a senior German general said the NATO-led force was planning an offensive in the northern Kunduz province.
General Bruno Kasdorf, chief of staff of the NATO-led International Security and Assistance Force, told German ARD public radio Thursday the operation would be "similar" to the offensive currently underway in the southern province of Helmand involving 15,000 US, NATO and Afghan troops.
Compared to the south, violence is still relatively low in the north, but Taliban forces have stepped up attacks in the area in recent months and tried to disrupt vital NATO supply routes from neighboring Uzbekistan that run through Kunduz, officials said.
Another defense official said the Taliban, which has its roots in the Pashtun community, is seeking to expand its reach across the country and tended "to focus on the Pashtun pockets in the north."
But he said the center of gravity in the war, for the insurgents and for NATO-led forces, remained in the south, where US reinforcements have poured in since Obama ordered the surge of American forces.
Germany has around 4,300 troops in Afghanistan, the third-largest contingent after the United States and Britain.
General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, told reporters this week that German forces in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif were concentrating their efforts on Baghlan and Kunduz "as well as a number of other areas across the north."
He said security was better than in the south but that "effective and focused operations" were still required in the area.
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Could Helmand be the Dubai of Afghanistan?
Foreign Policy By Jean MacKenzie Friday, March 19, 2010
Known as an insurgent hotbed and the heroin capital of the world, Afghanistan's troubled Helmand province has been given more than a few headline-grabbing labels over the past few years. Now, Helmand's governor is trying to add a new one: the next Dubai. After nearly four years at the epicenter of conflict, this dusty, downtrodden bit of desert is poised to make a bid for massive development that, according to its governor, Gulab Mangal, will radically transform it. Such a shift would go a long way to justifying the international intervention and contribute to the crucial goal of winning Afghans' hearts and minds. With U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed drawdown barely a year in the future, however, Helmand is faced with a very short window to build lasting change.
Judging from a recent trip I took to the capital, Lashkar Gah, much progress has already been made. The roads in the capital have been paved, cutting down on the ubiquitous fine sand that once clogged machinery, stifled lungs, and polluted food. Buildings are going up, more and more businesses and private organizations are opening branches in Lashkar Gah, and there are almost daily commercial flights in and out of the Lashkar Gah airport. A brand-new shopping mall and hotel are being built. The Afghan police have a shiny new compound, and the Department of Women's Affairs has been given a large center on the town's outskirts, an area that would have been too dangerous to visit one year ago.
Despite the occasional Taliban attack inside the city, there is an air of calm and security in the capital. Women and children can be seen on the streets, shops have a distinct bustle, and I felt a sense of hope and promise in the air. In the summer of 2007 I couldn't walk around the downtown area without a burqa; on this trip I fastened my headscarf a little more tightly and spent some time in the bazaar, poking around bolts of brightly colored fabric and contemplating an update to my wardrobe. I attracted a crowd -- mostly young boys who wanted to shake my hand while lisping "salaam," but no hostility, no nervous glances to see who might be watching. This, too, is a big change.
Mangal has plans to turn the single paved strip of runway in Helmand into a regional hub for air operations. Landlocked and remote, Helmand has little access to regional or international markets. But if all goes according to the governor's outline -- Mangal is building a fruit-processing plant on the airport grounds, giving farmers a convenient destination for their produce -- industry will bloom, turning Helmand's abundant fruit into gold, or at least juice suitable for export.
Another sign of hope is the declining state of the local poppy industry. Poppy cultivation took a giant dip last year, and the government is confidently predicting another significant decrease this season. Two years ago there was a large field of beautiful pink and white poppies growing in the shadow of the British military base, right inside the Lashkar Gah city limits. Now it would take a drive of several hours to find a major crop.
It's not yet clear what sparked the move away from drugs, but Mangal claims that his Food Zone program, a complex counternarcotics approach combining alternative livelihood with punitive measures for violators, along with a wide-ranging public awareness campaign, is responsible.
It is true that farmers inside the Food Zone, which includes the most fertile and highly populated areas of central Helmand, are reluctant to grow poppy -- perhaps because they will lose the wheat seeds and fertilizer the government is providing, or maybe because of the mandatory jail time.
But the Food Zone program ran into difficulties last year, when several of its top administrators were arrested for corruption. Thousands of fictitious names were added to lists of beneficiaries, allowing those in charge to claim tens of thousands of dollars for themselves; poor-quality wheat seeds were distributed to farmers while the funders were charged for premium grade, yielding nearly $1 million in illegal profits. The scandal has tainted the project, especially for farmers who were denied benefits while those with connections were able to cash in.
And the decline in the trade is probably more due to the fact that growing poppy in Helmand just isn't a smart business decision anymore. In the past three years, the price of a kilo of raw opium has dropped from about $140 to $35 -- mostly because of overproduction -- and isn't expected to rise again anytime soon.
If the government can establish permanent control over much of the province, poppy cultivation will fall. But despite encouraging signs, Helmand province is still, largely, a war zone, and the government and coalition forces have to do more than pave roads and undercut the poppy trade to change that. Despite the governor's claims that his forces have "influence" over up to 90 percent of the province, wide swaths of Helmand are still firmly under Taliban control -- districts like Washir, Dishu, Baghran, and Sangin, where the insurgents can recover, regroup, and plan their next steps.
The Afghan government and foreign forces say their military incursions have focused first on the more heavily populated areas; certainly Washir and Dishu have just a few thousand families. But Sangin is a major center and will require a great deal of effort to subdue.
Meanwhile, Musa Qala, a hotly disputed district that changed hands three times in just over a year, from October 2006 to December 2007, is still up for grabs, though the government asserts that it is completely under control. A combined British, U.S., and Afghan force took it back from the Taliban in December 2007, promising aid and development. Now, more than two years later, Afghan government forces grumble privately that they control no more than a 400-square-meter plot in the district center. Promises fell through, commitments failed, and the Taliban were able to reassert their influence over most of the district.
Marjah, the drug bazaar and heroin-processing center that was site of the major recent offensive, has now been downgraded to a "tactical prelude" to the Kandahar operation planned for the summer. The easy assumption is that Marjah has been "sorted" -- with 15,000 Afghan and foreign forces pitted against a handful of insurgents, it could hardly have appeared otherwise.
But it's dangerous to treat the Taliban like an occupying army that can be driven out with guns and bombs. They are, as we are now hearing more and more, part of the fabric of Afghan society.
"The former Taliban are now participating in cash-for-work programs, cleaning out ditches, and cleaning their shops," Mangal said. "This shows they have reintegrated back into society."
It's probably not accurate to say that the Taliban have reintegrated back into society. Instead, they know they are outnumbered, and they are biding their time. They may have removed their black pajj -- the typical Taliban headgear -- and replaced them with more neutrally colored lunghi, or turbans, but they have not changed their strategy, or their determination.
"The Taliban are building their nests again, [in Marjah]," Mohammad Ilyas Dayee, a prominent local journalist, told me recently. He thinks that insurgents are just lying low, waiting for a chance to show their power once the foreigners have moved on. " "They are lying in wait in houses, with their guns and their explosives. They go out at night to shoot foreign forces and plant mines, then they are quiet during the day," he said. "Marjah is not secure."
Part of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's revised counterinsurgency strategy is designed to cement military gains with a charm offensive to win hearts and minds. Night raids have been almost abandoned and house searches greatly reduced in frequency. But this also gives the insurgents the time and space they need to regroup, even within Marjah.
Although the window is small, there is still time. If foreign troops can rehabilitate their image in the eyes of a hostile population, then they might be able to make some real progress. If the government can convince its local constituents that it is serious about fighting corruption and encouraging development, and if the Taliban can be exposed as an anachronistic irrelevancy, then Helmand's hardheaded, pragmatic residents might decide to cast their lot with the central authorities.
But if promises turn out to be hollow, as they have so many times before, the Taliban are always there with their rough and ready justice, their guarantee of security for poppy harvests, and their long knives sharpened against "spies."
There is some reason to be hopeful. Lashkar Gah's transformation shows that Helmand's residents are more than ready to pitch in and build a better future if they have the opportunity. But there's much more reason to be cautious. If we lose Helmand, then we will never be able to claim victory in Afghanistan.
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NATO troops shot dead motorcyclist in W. Afghanistan
KABUL, March 20 (Xinhua) -- The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) shot at a motorcyclist in western Herat province and the man succumbed to his injuries in a nearby hospital, police said Saturday.
"NATO-led forces possibly Spanish soldiers opened fire on a motorcyclist Friday afternoon injuring him and he died due to his injuries in hospital," Deputy to provincial police chief Dilawar Shah Dilawar told Xinhua.
The incident, he added, occurred in Shidai area outside Herat provincial capital of the Herat city.
He also added that ignoring warning by the ill-fated man prompted the troops to open fire and cause the tragedy.
In the wake of suicide attacks against the NATO-led troops the military alliance as precautionary measures have asked motorists through advertisements to stay away from military convoys.
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Police discover bomb from flowerpot in NE. Afghanistan
KABUL, March 20 (Xinhua) -- Police in the northeast Badakhshan province of Afghanistan discovered a mine placed in a flowerpot on Saturday, spokesman for provincial administration Abdul Marouf Rasikh said.
"It was a remote-control mine, emplaced into a flowerpot in provincial capital Faizabad apparently as part of enemies' conspiracy to disrupt the Nawruz or Afghan new year festival on Sunday," Rasikh said, adding that however, the mine was defused.
Afghans are going to celebrate Nawruz or new year falls on March 21. Taliban militants during its six-year reign collapsed by U.S.-led military invasion in late 2001 had banned Nawruz festival.
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Clinton To Host Top-Level Strategic Talks Between U.S., Pakistan
March 20, 2010 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
WASHINGTON (RFE/RL) -- The United States and Pakistan will hold a round of strategic talks next week in the U.S. capital, with top government ministers from both countries participating for the first time.
Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington on March 19 that the talks mark a "major intensification" of the U.S.-Pakistani partnership.
The United States delegation will be led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and include Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mike Mullen, as well as top officials from the government's economic, agriculture, and trade sectors.
The Pakistani delegation will be led by Clinton's counterpart, Shah Mehmood Qureshi. It will also include army chief Ashfaq Kayani, as well as high-ranking defense, finance, and agriculture officials.
Holbrooke said the discussions on March 24 would cover several areas of cooperation between the two countries.
"The United States is supporting Pakistan," he said, "as it seeks to strengthen democratic institutions, as it seeks to foster more economic development, expand opportunities, deal with its energy and water problems and defeat the extremist groups who threaten both Pakistan's security and stability in the larger region and American national security as well."
On March 18, Pakistani Foreign Minister Qureshi said he would propose "10 tracks of sectoral engagements" at the meeting, dealing with economy, energy, education, and technology among other spheres.
Pakistan is expected to inquire about the status of promised U.S. aid money and to press for recognition of its nuclear program.
Analysts expect counterterrorism to be at the top of the agenda.
Pakistan is a key United States ally in combating the Taliban insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan and in battling Al-Qaeda.
In the past, the United States has pressed Pakistan to intensify its efforts to root out terrorists on its own soil and Pakistan has pushed back against U.S. pressure to launch offensives against Afghan Taliban factions.
In recent months, however, Pakistan has stepped up its pursuit of militants in recent months, arresting several senior members of the Afghan Taliban, including a top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
Holbrooke praised the capture, saying, "We are extremely gratified that the Pakistani government has apprehended the No. 2 person in the Taliban. And he is where he belongs. And many other people have been picked up or eliminated and this is putting much more pressure on the Taliban. And this is a good thing for the simplest of reasons: It is good for the military efforts that are under way in Afghanistan."
In January, Clinton unveiled a long-term strategy to stabilize both Pakistan and Afghanistan. The U.S. plan aims to improve Pakistan's ability to fight its Islamist insurgency and pledges support for political and economic reforms.
The U.S. military announced earlier this month that it is sending 1,000 laser-guided bomb kits to Pakistan to help the country's air force defeat insurgents operating in the Afghan border region.
Congress has also approved a $7.5 billion aid package to Pakistan over the next five years.
Next week's talks will be the fourth in a series of strategic dialogues that the two countries began in 2006.
written by Richard Solash
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Pakistani Analysts Respond to Former UN Official's Criticism
Voice of America Sean Maroney 19 March 2010
Islamabad - The former envoy to Afghanistan for the United Nations, Kai Eide, has criticized Pakistan for arresting top Taliban leaders, such as the group's second-in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar last month. Speaking to the BBC, Eide said the arrests hurt reconciliation efforts by stopping secret talks between the United Nations and the Taliban, which started about a year ago.
In a recent television interview, the U.N.'s former special representative to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, said he believes "the Pakistanis did not play the role that they should have played" when they arrested top Taliban leaders.
He said he believes the Pakistani government must have known about the U.N.-brokered peace talks with the Taliban and that the arrests were counterproductive to those efforts.
Pakistan's former interior minister, Aftab Sherpao, says he would like to remind the former U.N. representative that Pakistan has carried a heavy burden since the U.S.-led invasion into Afghanistan toppled the Taliban eight years ago.
"I think the role Pakistan has played, no other country has played that role," he said. "And if you look at the casualties, you look at the human suffering, you look at what we are going through, our economy has suffered, everything has suffered."
He says he believes the Pakistani government made these arrests under the impression that they were in the best interest for the Pakistani people and the rest of the region.
Ishtiaq Ahmad, an associate professor for international relations at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University, says Kai Eide's comments reflect a concern that Pakistan is trying to sabotage the Afghan government's efforts to reconcile with the Taliban.
He says the reasoning for this comes from the perception that Kabul is leaving Islamabad out of the reconciliation process by approaching the Taliban leadership directly without any Pakistani help.
"It might have created, you know, some kind of insecurity among Pakistanis and they might have taken this action, but again, it is all speculative," he said.
Ahmad also says Pakistan now finds itself in an even more complicated diplomatic position.
He points to years of U.S. pressure on Pakistani authorities to "do more" to target Taliban members who fled from Afghanistan to Pakistan.
"If Pakistan does not arrest a Taliban leader, then there is a complaint that Pakistan is not doing enough," he said. "And when it does arrest, and then there is, you know, this new kind of complaint."
Ahmad says that in the end, a political resolution to the Afghan conflict is in the interest for all of Afghanistan's neighbors and stakeholders in the war-torn country.
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The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight
Six billion dollars later, the afghan national police can't begin to do their jobs right—never mind relieve American forces.
Newsweek By T. Christian Miller, Mark Hosenball, and Ron Moreau Mar 19, 2010
Mohammad Moqim watches in despair as his men struggle with their AK-47 automatic rifles, doing their best to hit man-size targets 50 meters away. A few of the police trainees lying prone in the mud are decent shots, but the rest shoot clumsily, and fumble as they try to reload their weapons. The Afghan National Police (ANP) captain sighs as he dismisses one group of trainees and orders 25 more to take their places on the firing line. "We are still at zero," says Captain Moqim, 35, an eight-year veteran of the force. "They don't listen, are undisciplined, and will never be real policemen."
Poor marksmanship is the least of it. Worse, crooked Afghan cops supply much of the ammunition used by the Taliban, according to Saleh Mohammed, an insurgent commander in Helmand province. The bullets and rocket-propelled grenades sold by the cops are cheaper and of better quality than the ammo at local markets, he says. It's easy for local cops to concoct credible excuses for using so much ammunition, especially because their supervisors try to avoid areas where the Taliban are active. Mohammed says local police sometimes even stage fake firefights so that if higher-ups question their outsize orders for ammo, villagers will say they've heard fighting.
America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force, buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits—but the program has been a disaster. More than $322 million worth of invoices for police training were approved even though the funds were poorly accounted for, according to a government audit, and fewer than 12 percent of the country's police units are capable of operating on their own. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the State Department's top representative in the region, has publicly called the Afghan police "an inadequate organization, riddled with corruption." During the Obama administration's review of Afghanistan policy last year, "this issue received more attention than any other except for the question of U.S. troop levels," Holbrooke later told NEWSWEEK. "We drilled down deep into this."
The worst of it is that the police are central to Washington's plans for getting out of Afghanistan. The U.S.-backed government in Kabul will never have popular support if it can't keep people safe in their own homes and streets. Yet in a United Nations poll last fall, more than half the Afghan respondents said the police are corrupt. Police commanders have been implicated in drug trafficking, and when U.S. Marines moved into the town of Aynak last summer, villagers accused the local police force of extortion, assault, and rape.
The public's distrust of the cops is palpable in the former insurgent stronghold of Marja. Village elders welcomed the U.S. Marines who recently drove out the Taliban, but told the Americans flatly they don't want the ANP to return. "The people of Marja will tell you that one of their greatest fears was the police coming back," says Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who took over in November as chief of the U.S. program to expand and improve Afghanistan's security forces. "You constantly hear these stories about who was worse: the Afghan police that were there or the Taliban." The success of America's counterinsurgency strategy depends on the cops, who have greater contact with local communities than the Army does. "This is not about seizing land or holding terrain; it's about the people," says Caldwell. "You have to have a police force that the people accept, believe in, and trust."
More than a year after Barack Obama took office, the president is still discovering how bad things are. At a March 12 briefing on Afghanistan with his senior advisers, he asked whether the police will be ready when America's scheduled drawdown begins in July 2011, according to a senior official who was in the room. "It's inconceivable, but in fact for eight years we weren't training the police," replied Caldwell, taking part in the meeting via video link from Afghanistan. "We just never trained them before. All we did was give them a uniform." The president looked stunned. "Eight years," he said. "And we didn't train police? It's mind-boggling." The room was silent.
Efforts to build a post-Taliban police force have been plagued from the start by unrealistic goals, poor oversight, and slapdash hiring. Patrolmen were recruited locally, issued weapons, and placed on the beat with little or no formal training. Most of their techniques have been picked up on the job—including plenty of ugly habits. Even now, Caldwell says, barely a quarter of the 98,000-member force has received any formal instruction. The people who oversaw much of the training that did take place were contractors—many of them former American cops or sheriffs. They themselves had little proper direction, and the government officials overseeing their activities did not bother to examine most expenses under $3,000, leaving room for abuse. Amazingly, no single agency or individual ever had control of the training program for long, so lines of accountability were blurred.
Coalition efforts to build an Afghan police force were painfully slow at first. By 2003 the U.S. State Department decided to speed things up by deploying the Virginia-based defense contractor DynCorp International, which had held previous contracts to train police officers in Kosovo and Haiti. The company began setting up a string of training centers across the country. After the Defense Department took a role in overseeing that work in 2005, it squabbled constantly with State over whether the training should emphasize police work or counterinsurgency.
Neither the State Department nor DynCorp was prepared for the job they faced. Most of the recruits are rural villagers who have never been inside a classroom. Roughly 15 percent test positive for drugs, primarily hashish. Few know how to use a toothbrush or drive, and nearly 90 percent are illiterate. In 2005 DynCorp opened a new police academy on the outskirts of Jalalabad, and within a few months the academy's drains backed up. Maintenance workers discovered that the septic tanks were full of smooth stones—a toilet-paper substitute used by many rural Afghans. DynCorp had to bring in backhoes to repair the problem, and the company had to add two days of classes in basic hygiene.
The ANP still takes just about anyone who applies. "Our recruits are unemployed youth with no education and no prospects," says Police Col. Mohammad Hashim Babakarkhil, deputy commander of Kabul's central police-training center. Since January 2007, upwards of 2,000 police have been killed in action—more than twice the figure for Afghan Army soldiers. U.S. officers say as many as half the police casualties were a result of firearms accidents and traffic collisions.
It's practically impossible to produce competent police officers in a program of only eight weeks, says a former senior DynCorp executive, requesting anonymity because he continues to work in the industry. But that was the time frame State and Defense set for the course. "They were not going to be trained police officers. We knew that. They knew that," the former executive says. "It was a numbers game." In fact, the course has now been cut from eight weeks to six in order to squeeze in more trainees. ("We believe the training is appropriate under the circumstances," says Assistant Secretary of State David Johnson. DynCorp spokesman Douglas Ebner says the basic-training course is part of a more extensive 40-week program, and is supported by further "field monitoring, mentoring, and advising." Training hours have been extended to make up for the lost weeks, he says. DynCorp does "not make the policies, recruit the police candidates, or design the program," he adds, saying the company has "fully met" its objecti
ve of providing highly qualified police trainers.)
Whether or not recruits have mastered their subjects, almost everyone graduates. Even if they fail the firearms test, they're issued a weapon and put on the street. Only the Interior Ministry can flunk a candidate, and that rarely happens. "There were a lot of Afghans who seemed to have some patriotism and wanted to make their country better," recalls Tracy Jeansonne, a former deputy sheriff from Louisiana who worked for DynCorp from May 2006 to June 2008. "But a lot of the police officers wanted to be able to extort money from locals. If we caught them, we'd suggest they be removed. But we couldn't fire anybody. We could only make suggestions."
A former midlevel DynCorp official calls the program "dysfunctional." Requesting anonymity because he doesn't want problems with his former employer, he displays dozens of weekly reports sent to State and military officials; almost all include some mention of an Afghan police officer or commander as "corrupt." Yet of the 170,000 or so Afghans trained under the program since its inception, only about 30,000 remain on the force, according to State and Defense officials. "In terms of retention and attrition, we can say there's a problem," says Steve Kraft, who oversees the program for the State Department. The cops' base salary and hazardous-duty pay were recently raised to match Afghan Army levels, but no one knows if those changes are really helping. "Once they leave the training center, we currently don't know whether they stay with the force or quit," Kraft says. "The bottom line is, we just don't know."
And what has become of all the billions of dollars this program has cost America? Government investigators aren't entirely sure. Fundamental questions are raised in an audit of the Afghan police-training program released in February by the State and Defense departments' inspectors general. When State finally sent an "invoice-reconciliation team" to review expense receipts submitted under one particular contract, it discovered that $322 million in invoices had been "approved even though they were not allowable, allocable, or reasonable." What's more, the auditors said, half those invoices included errors.
The lapses don't stop there. The audit says State Department officials "did not conduct adequate surveillance for two task orders in excess of $1 billion." According to the auditors, State's contract supervisors didn't adequately oversee the use of government-owned property, failed to maintain contract files properly, and sometimes neglected to "match goods to receiving reports"—meaning, evidently, that they didn't verify that the U.S. government had actually received the goods it had paid for. (DynCorp's Ebner responds: "We are fully engaged with the Department of State to ensure complete and thorough reconciliation of all invoices, and recognize and welcome the emphasis on sufficient oversight personnel to complete this process.")
Those failures should have been no surprise. The audit also found that State routinely short-staffed its contract-monitoring office in Afghanistan. At one point, only three contract officers were on the ground overseeing DynCorp's $1.7 billion training contract. A former DynCorp official who worked in Afghanistan, asking not to be named because he remains in the government contracting business, says he asked the State Department repeatedly for concrete goals for the police contract but never got firm answers. "I'd ask them: 'Please explain to me what a successful training program was. What are the standards you want us to apply?' There was no vision for the future." (Assistant Secretary Johnson says, "From the start, our training program was based on a clear, professionally developed curriculum A simple head count of the number of individuals on the ground ignores the substantial back-office support our contract oversight personnel had from Washington.")
A new set of difficulties arose last summer. Caldwell's predecessor, Gen. Richard Formica, decided that Defense should take direct control of the training contract. To avoid a lengthy bidding competition, he suggested folding the police-training mission into an existing anti-drug and counterterrorism program overseen by the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command. Bids were limited to companies already under contract to the missile command, effectively shutting out DynCorp. In the end, only two firms wound up bidding: Northrop Grumman and Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.
DynCorp fought back. In December the company filed a formal protest to block the Defense Department from seizing control of the contract. Last week the Government Accountability Office upheld DynCorp's complaint and suggested that the competition be open to all comers, including DynCorp as well as Xe and Northrop. DynCorp's CEO, William Ballhaus, recently told investors that the company's contract had been extended until July in any case; now it seems the new bidding process will take much longer.
At Kabul's police training center, a team of 35 Italian carabinieri recently arrived to supplement DynCorp's efforts. Before the Italians showed up at the end of January for a one-year tour, the recruits were posting miserable scores on the firing range. But the Italians soon discovered that poor marksmanship wasn't the only reason: the sights of the AK-47 and M-16 rifles the recruits were using were badly out of line. "We zeroed all their weapons," says Lt. Rolando Tommasini. "It's a very important thing, but no one had done this in the past. I don't know why."
The Italians also had a different way of teaching the recruits to shoot. DynCorp's instructors started their firearms training with 20-round clips at 50 meters; the recruits couldn't be sure at first if they were even hitting the target. Instead the carabinieri started them off with just three bullets each and a target only seven meters away. The recruits would shoot, check the target, and be issued three more rounds. When they began gaining confidence, the distance was gradually increased to 15, then 30, and then 50 meters. On a recent day on the firing range only one of 73 recruits failed the shooting test. The Italians say that's a huge improvement. (DynCorp says its civilian police advisers are "highly qualified"; the average trainer has more than a decade of law-enforcement experience.)
Caldwell also says it's just easier to work with paramilitary police units, such as the Italians and the French gendarmerie, than with contractors. Active-duty police units have a coherent and disciplined chain of command, Caldwell says. "When I bring in a contractor unit I'm getting a different group of folks," he says. "It may be someone who was a state patrolman, a local sheriff, or a policeman from New York City, each operating under different standards and with different backgrounds." Everything has to be negotiated. "If I say to my contractor that I want to make a change, he may say, 'Well, I'm not sure if that's really the best way,' " says Caldwell. "But if I can bring in a gendarmerie force, they're ready to go ... and take instructions well."
By the end of October, Caldwell hopes to build the force to 109,000 members, including an "elite unit" that so far has roughly 4,900 members. That outfit is called the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP). It'll be used for particularly sensitive assignments like Marja. ANCOP members get 16 weeks of training, and they're required to have at least a third-grade proficiency in reading and writing. So far, reviews from Marja are mixed. "The new police are more organized, committed, responsible, and helpful than the previous police, who were more like a criminal gang," Assadullah, a school principal, tells newsweek. (Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.) Local shopkeeper Hajji Noruddin Khan disagrees. "We are as disappointed with the new police as we were with the old police," he complains.
Quality matters. "In the rush to increase the number of trained police officers, we must remember that the end goal is a civilian police force capable of promoting good government, not a paramilitary adjunct for the counterinsurgency fight," warns Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the top U.S. Marine commander in southern Afghanistan, puts it more succinctly: "I'd rather have one well-trained cop than 10 untrained." Besides, the fact is that no one is quite sure how many Afghan police there really are. The Americans are only now in the process of trying to create a database that will positively identify and track recruits. Without such data, it's more than difficult to catch "ghost" troops who exist only as names on the payroll, not to mention possible Taliban infiltrators.
But the buildup continues, and so does the training. On the firing range just outside Kabul, one of the few decent marksmen is Khair Mohammad, an illiterate 24-year-old from northern Afghanistan. "I've already had a lot of practice shooting at the Taliban," he says. He's been a cop for two years, serving one year in Kandahar and another on checkpoints just outside Marja. "I lost a lot of friends in the fighting," he says. Now he's getting his first taste of formal training, and hoping to join ANCOP. He figures he'd earn about double the $180 a month (including combat pay) he's been getting. His trainers are doing their best to make him worth the extra salary. "One thing the police don't know is good relations with the people," says Carabinieri Lt. Col. Massimo Deiana. "We're trying to train them to respect and relate to people." If such a skill is teachable at all, it could be far more important in the long run than knowing how to shoot straight.
With Sami Yousafzai in Kabul
T. Christian Miller is a senior reporter with Propublica, an independent, nonprofit news organization that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.
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As U.S. Frees Detainees, Afghans Ask Why They Were Held
The New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN March 19, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan - The tribal elders had traveled many hours to reach a windswept Afghan military base on the capital’s outskirts to sign their names to a piece of paper allowing them to bring their countrymen home from American detention.
As an Afghan general read the document aloud, Cmdr. Dawood Zazai, a towering Pashtun tribal leader from Paktia Province who fought the Soviets, thumped his crutch for attention. Along with other elders, he did not like a clause in the document that said the detainees had been reasonably held based on intelligence.
“I cannot sign this,” Commander Zazai said, thumping his crutch again. “I don’t know what that intelligence said; we did not see that intelligence. It is right that we are illiterate, but we are not blind.
“Who proved that these men were guilty?”
No one answered because Commander Zazai had just touched on the crux of the legal debate that has raged for nearly a decade in the United States: Does the United States have the legal right to hold, indefinitely without charge or trial, people captured on the battlefield? His question also exposed a fundamental disagreement between the Afghans and the American military about whether people had been fairly detained.
This is the latest chapter in America’s tortuous effort to repair the damage done over the last nine years by a troubled, overcrowded detention system that often produced more insurgents rather than reforming them. The problems were similar in the huge sweeps of suspected insurgents in Iraq.
Now, in Afghanistan, detainees who are deemed not to be a threat are handed over to local elders on the understanding that it is the community’s responsibility to ensure that they stay on the right side of the law.
The releases that took place at a recent ceremony at the 201st Afghan Army Corps headquarters, as well as the release or assignment to Afghan detention of 70 to 80 detainees earlier this year, are part of a new effort to free detainees who are no longer thought to be an imminent threat to the government of Afghanistan or the international forces.
Under the program, recently overhauled by Vice Adm. Robert S. Harward and Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, a Harvard-trained lawyer with the army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, there is now an automatic administrative review devised to speed the release process, and for the first time it allows detainees to make a case for their release.
Once the review board has approved a release, the Afghan military, in conjunction with the Americans, asks the detainee to sign a pledge to stay away from the insurgency, from the Taliban and from Al Qaeda. The elders are asked to sign a similar pledge that they will help them. Similar programs have been used with considerable success in Iraq, and the new one in Afghanistan builds on that experience.
There are now about 800 detainees at the American-run Detention Facility in Parwan, the new detention center that opened at the end of 2009 to replace the notorious holding facility at Bagram Air Base, which is associated with abuses that resulted in the deaths of at least two detainees. The vast majority of detainees are Afghans, but about 32 are foreigners, according to a senior American officer.
The American plan is to hand control of the detention center to the Afghan Ministry of Defense by January 2011, but Americans will still be deeply involved in the detention operations. In the coming months, the Americans hope to use the review process to release as many detainees as possible if they are deemed no longer a threat and to transfer to Afghan custody those who can be tried for crimes under Afghan law.
But as the recent ceremony showed, beyond the cake and fruit and formal speeches lies a reservoir of resentment about how the United States has handled detentions since 2001.
In interviews, former detainees and their families said the Americans were routinely misled by informants who either had personal grudges against them or were paid by others to give information to the Americans that would put the person in jail.
In addition, many Afghans have experienced the detentions as humiliating, and found almost unbearable the depths of poverty borne by their families during their internment.
“The information you had about these men was wrong in the first place,” said Hajji Azizullah, 54, a leader of the Andar tribe in Ghazni, who had come to sign for two detainees. “We are confident they were not involved with insurgents. If they were, we wouldn’t be here to sign for them.”
One detainee, Pacha Khan, 29, an illiterate bread baker from Kunar Province, said he was still puzzled about why he had been detained in the first place, let alone held for three years. “I was innocent,” he insisted. “Spies took money and sold me to the Americans. The Americans treated us very well, but as you know, jail is a big thing — to be away from your family, your relatives.”
His brother, Gul Ahmed Dindar, was less forgiving. He had to support his brother’s family of eight children and a wife on the meager salary of a local police officer. “They were about to sell their children,” he said. “They had very little to live on. They sold their one goat, their one sheep and their cow. Then they sold the furniture — it was not much. They have had a very tough life.”
Admiral Harward insisted that the American intelligence was good and that these were insurgents, but on hearing the elders’ protests about signing a document that made it sound as if the tribal leaders agreed with the American view, he offered to change the language to say that in the eyes of American forces these detainees were insurgents. The elders nodded their assent. The new language will be used on future sponsor forms. “We learn something every time we do this,” Admiral Harward said.
The Afghan military made its own effort to solve the problem when it heard the elders’ protests, by simply writing in the word “no” in front of the phrase saying the detainee had a “link to the insurgency.” The version the elders signed said the detainee had “no link.”
In the shifting shadows of this often invisible war, where no one is sure who is lying and who is telling the truth, it seemed a reasonable way to resolve the day’s discord.
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James Bond to take on Afghanistan in next series?
PTI / March 20, 2010
James Bond is reportedly planning to take on the poppy fields of Afghanistan in his next assignment.
If reports are to be believed at least some parts of the next movie in the Bond franchise will be shot in the Helmand province in Afghanistan.
According to online reports on James Bond fan-sites, an official, a member of the Foreign Office’s drug task force in the country has signed on as a consultant for the franchise.
The official, who has since left the Foreign Office and Afghanistan, is thought to have signed a confidentiality agreement with the filmmakers preventing any discussion of the project, The Times reported.
Should 007 tackle the opium fields of the country, it will be the second time he has ventured into Afghanistan. In the 1987 film The Living Daylights, Bond, played by Timothy Dalton, was imprisoned in a Russian camp in the country, before teaming up with anti—Soviet freedom fighters.
Eon Productions, the production company set up by Bond producer Albert Broccoli, refused to comment on whether the film would visit Afghanistan.
The 23rd Bond film will be Daniel Craig’s third outing as the fictional British spy, following the success of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace
The plot of the new Bond film, expected to be released in 2011, is a closely guarded secret.
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