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April 10, 2011 

Anti-Western messages grow among Afghanistan's imams
By Hamid Shalizi – Sun Apr 10, 7:48 am ET
KABUL (Reuters) – Enayatullah Balegh is a professor at Kabul University and preaches on Fridays in the largest mosque in central Kabul, where he advocates jihad, or holy war, against foreigners who desecrate Islam.

Bomb kills 3 tribal elders in western Afghanistan
The Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan – A roadside bomb killed three tribal elders in western Afghanistan on Sunday, possibly in retaliation for their cooperation with the government.

Worldview: Exit from Afghanistan may be a gamble
By Trudy Rubin The Philadelphia Inquirer Opinion Columnist - Sun Apr 10, 4:05 am ET
Most analysts - of all political persuasions - have concluded the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan isn't working - and costs too much to be sustained much longer. Yet no one has produced a formula for a speedy exit that doesn't risk chaos - or worse.

Taliban Seen Stirring Mob to Violence in Afghanistan
New York Times By CARLOTTA GALL April 9, 2011
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan - While it is still too early to say who were the killers of the seven United Nations employees here last week, senior police officials say they suspect current or former Taliban members or other insurgents of leading the violence, aided by sympathizers and hard-line mullahs who whipped up a crowd of thousands angered by a Koran burning in the United States.

Afghan Finance Minister Rejects Speculation Over his Dismissal
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 09 April 2011
Afghan Finance Minister Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal on Saturday rejected reports claiming he was likely to be dismissed.

Taliban gained support in Pak's Swat valley using local grievances: World Bank
By ANI | ANI – Sun, Apr 10, 2011 10:18 AM IST
Washington, April 10(ANI): The Taliban gained support in Pakistan's Swat valley in part by hinging upon a variety of local grievances like weaknesses in local law enforcement and justice institutions, a new World Bank report has said.

U.S. troops get no winter break before Taliban's fighting season
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS BY SAEED SHAH Apr 10, 2011
Over the 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, U.S. and coalition troops have gotten a respite when brutal winters swept across the mountains. Taliban fighters holed up to escape the bitter cold, and killings of American and allied soldiers dropped dramatically.

The Afghan Drug Trade and the Elephant in the Room
Foreign Policy Journal By Jeremy R. Hammond April 9, 2011
Foreign Policy magazine this month features an article entitled “Think Again: The Afghan Drug Trade“, which is a decent overview of the opium problem – as far as it goes. Unsurprisingly, however, in doing so, it proverbially ignores the elephant in the room, and in doing so represents part of the problem rather than the solution.

Destroying booby-trapped Afghan towns to save them
Associated Press By Solomon Moore Sat Apr 9, 2011
TAROK KOLACHE, Afghanistan - Two aerial photos tell the story of this tiny village in the southern province of Kandahar. One shows a deceptively bucolic collection of mud huts amid pomegranate orchards. The second shows a field of dirt and shorn tree stumps — the same hamlet after being pulverized by 25 tons of explosives.

Afghan Attorney General to Appear in Parliament
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 09 April 2011
Afghan Attorney General will soon appear before the House of Representatives, a letter sent to the parliament on Saturday said.
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Anti-Western messages grow among Afghanistan's imams
By Hamid Shalizi – Sun Apr 10, 7:48 am ET
KABUL (Reuters) – Enayatullah Balegh is a professor at Kabul University and preaches on Fridays in the largest mosque in central Kabul, where he advocates jihad, or holy war, against foreigners who desecrate Islam.

After a fundamentalist U.S. pastor presided over the burning of a copy of the Koran last month, there has been a growing perception among ordinary people that many of the foreigners in Afghanistan belong in just one category: the infidels.

"The international community and the American government is responsible for this gravest insult to Muslims," Balegh told Reuters in the blue-and-white tiled Hazrat Ali mosque.

"I tell my students to wage jihad against all foreigners who desecrate our religious values. We have had enough."

Protests in Kabul against the Koran-burning have not become violent but there are many other mullahs in the overcrowded capital whose sermons are filled with criticism of the foreigners fighting and working in Afghanistan.

In Kabul's northwest, firebrand Habibullah Asaam warns his congregation that all contact with non-Muslims is dangerous.

"The Jews and crusaders can never be friends of Muslims, they are the despoilers of our society and culture," he said during Friday sermons. Worshippers cried "Allahu Akbar" -- God is greatest -- in response.

"Those who want them here are cowardly Muslims. Women avoid wearing veils, men chase fashion and show off, it's all because of the foreigners," he said.

With few Dari or Pashto-speaking foreigners in the country, the messages broadcast from mosques by loudspeakers often pass unnoticed by the people they are condemning.

But the extent and impact of anti-Western sentiment was brought into stark relief last week when a protest in normally peaceful Mazar-i-Sharif city in the north ended with the frenzied killing of seven foreign U.N. workers.

The demonstrators had spent hours listening to incendiary preaching from outspoken clerics like Abdul Rahoof Tawana, who told worshippers "we must avenge the burning of the Koran."

After the attack, the provincial governor urged imams to avoid talking about politics and ordered police to round up audio tapes containing "hate" speeches.

DEEP INFLUENCE

In a deeply religious country where most men go to Friday prayers every week, sermons are a critical part of efforts to battle insurgents who have emerged from religious schools and mosques, and usually claim the religious high ground.

While there is no formal hierarchy like Christian churches, the government does have some leverage over the imams.

It pays the salaries of many of them, President Hamid Karzai can count many powerful clerics among his senior officials and advisers -- Tawana is a member of Afghanistan's national ulema, or council of senior clerics -- and the Religious Affairs Ministry gives speech notes to some imams.

"Sometimes mullahs preach beyond whatever we want but there is no resources to control all mosques in the country," Israr-ul-Haq, a deputy for the department of Mosques and Other Holy Sites, told Reuters.

He said there are about 160,000 mosques in the country and only 3,000 of them are registered with the government. Others are built by the people and their imams are fed and supported by that neighborhood, he said.

"Mullahs have their own problems. If they speak against government policies, they are either harassed or detained by security forces," Israr-ul-Haq said. "If they speak in favor of the government, then they are killed by insurgents."

Karzai does not seem to have the appetite or influence to face down powerful clerics, and it is hard to follow the contents of sermons in thousands of smaller mosques scattered in remote towns and villages across the country.

In rural areas where the Taliban are most active, Friday sermons are often in favor of the insurgency.

Khan Mohammad, an influential elder in southern Helmand province, said insurgents order imams to condemn NATO troops as "foreign invaders" and the government as a puppet regime.

Among both those who were far away, and those who joined the Mazar riots but not the killing, there were many who did not condemn the violence. And although insurgents played a key role, it was ordinary protesters who overwhelmed security in the United Nations' Mazar compound and helped hunt down the victims.

Billions of dollars and nearly 10 years into the war, where diplomats point to schools, clinics and an army rebuilt with Western help, the fury that can drive or condone that kind of killing is something many Westerners do not want to look into.

Anti-Western sentiment is strong in Afghanistan, which is traditionally conservative, deeply religious and suspicious of outsiders. The welcome foreign troops got from many parts of the country in 2001 has slowly soured.

"There is a lot of anger after years in which Western military operations have caused an accumulation of civilian casualty cases," wrote Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts' Network, in an article on the killing.

The affluent lives of many Westerners and officials perceived as corrupt does not help. Ordinary citizens see little benefit from the billions of aid dollars and suffer regular human rights abuses, adding to frustrations.

"As if air strikes on civilians, violence and bloodshed was not enough, now they have burned the Koran," said Tawab Rustami, a 24-year-old university student.

"The conflict is because of the foreigners, it is better for them to leave before things get worse," he said.

(Editing by Emma Graham-Harrison and Paul Tait)
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Bomb kills 3 tribal elders in western Afghanistan
The Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan – A roadside bomb killed three tribal elders in western Afghanistan on Sunday, possibly in retaliation for their cooperation with the government.

The men were driving to a meeting with villagers and other tribal elders to discuss what sort of projects the Afghan government and international donors should fund when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb, killing all of them, officials said.

One of the dead, Sayid Ahmad, was the head of the group of tribal elders who organized the meeting, said Abdul Basir Kherkywi, the head of Farah Province's local council.

The meeting was common knowledge in the area and officials said the men were probably directly targeted.

"The enemy probably knew they'd be driving on this road," said Yonus Rasouli, the deputy governor.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but the Taliban and other insurgent groups regularly target Afghans working with the government or international forces.

Such attacks increased dramatically last year. According to the U.N., civilian deaths jumped 15 percent in 2010 to 2,770 because of increased insurgent attacks, while those attributed to U.S.-led forces dropped 26 percent.

Also Sunday, a NATO service member was killed in an attack in the north of the country, the international military coalition said. It did not provide further details or the nationality of the dead.

Meanwhile, Afghan officials said they captured a district-level Taliban commander in southern Uruzgan province. Kareem Daad, who was captured in an overnight raid, oversaw insurgent operations in Shahidi Hassas district, said Milad Ahmad Mudasir, a spokesman for the provincial government. Taliban representatives could not be immediately reached to confirm whether Daad was one of their operatives.
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Worldview: Exit from Afghanistan may be a gamble
By Trudy Rubin The Philadelphia Inquirer Opinion Columnist - Sun Apr 10, 4:05 am ET
Most analysts - of all political persuasions - have concluded the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan isn't working - and costs too much to be sustained much longer. Yet no one has produced a formula for a speedy exit that doesn't risk chaos - or worse.

This leaves us stuck. President Obama has pledged to start pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan this summer, with an eye toward withdrawing most forces by 2014. But, in talks with U.S. and Afghan leaders and experts, I've yet to hear an exit plan that doesn't risk returning Afghanistan to civil war and/or Taliban domination, while further destabilizing nuclear-armed Pakistan next door.

So I turned with interest to a much-touted book by military analyst Bing West with a promising title: The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan.

West is a Marine combat veteran who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. Unlike so many armchair military pundits, this 70-year-old embedded with dozens of frontline U.S. units in southern and eastern Afghanistan, humping up mountains and enduring firefights and dysentery. He writes in gripping prose about the heroic, but often thwarted, efforts of U.S. soldiers.

West says he believes our counterinsurgency strategy is failing, even though a surge of U.S. troops has pushed the Taliban back from its southern heartland, and U.S. Special Forces have shredded its midlevel command structure. The problem is political: Our troops can clear the Taliban, but the Afghan forces we're training can't hold the terrain, and President Hamid Karzai's corrupt government can't (or won't) build up the country.

In a phone interview, West said: "When you put more Americans in there, there is progress. But what difference [will] it make when the Americans aren't there?"

As for a solution, however, West offers only three pages at the end of a 300-page volume, confirming that it's easier to describe the problem than come up with a comprehensive answer.

His plan in a nutshell: Cut back on expensive efforts to build up Afghanistan's economic and democratic institutions. Focus mainly on building Afghan security forces. Remove half our 100,000 troops, and transition most of the rest into a tough adviser corps that embeds with and trains the Afghan army, backed by a large U.S. air presence. Then let the Afghans do their own fighting against the Taliban.

Of course, the Afghan army's high illiteracy and attrition rates have undercut previous U.S. training efforts. Moreover, the army includes few ethnic Pashtuns from the south - the stronghold of the Pashtun Taliban - which gives it little credibility there.

West says he believes the Afghan army can still be shaped up, pointing to the 2010 battle for Marja, where U.S. Special Forces and a Marine support team embedded with an Afghan battalion and helped that unit fight well.

However, he says, to replicate this success story would require a dedicated U.S. Army and Marine adviser corps that pulled "the best officers from conventional battalions." Service commanders have been reluctant to do this, or to reward those officers who have served as advisers. Moreover, these advisers might be required for years until Afghan forces "are as fierce in battle as the Taliban."

Do we really believe the Afghan army could achieve this level? Gen. David Petraeus has long argued it will find its legs only after the security situation is more stable, contending that if we leave too soon it might crumble altogether.

West concedes that - as U.S. combat troops exit - larger sections of the countryside are likely to fall under Taliban control. This is already happening in Nuristan and Kunar provinces where U.S. outposts have been shut down.

He says Kabul, and other large cities, wouldn't fall to the Taliban: If the jihadis massed for attack, they could be stopped by U.S. airpower. I wonder how supply lines to the cities would be maintained if the Taliban controlled the outlying areas. Unless there is some kind of political deal with the Taliban, this scenario does not seem real.

Indeed, Karzai and U.S. officials now say there are preliminary talks with the Taliban about negotiations. But West dismisses the current prospects for such talks (for reasons I agree with).

"Negotiations ratify strength on the battlefield, not the other way around," he writes. "Under current circumstances, negotiations do not offer . . . a safe way out of Afghanistan."

So the Bing West formula is basically a gamble: that we can shape up the Afghan army, against all odds, even as our combat troops head for the exit. "Maybe I'm expressing a hope, not a reality," says West bluntly. "Until we give it a test, we don't know. That's why our military is resisting testing this."

His formula doesn't differ that much from what I'm hearing from administration sources, who want Afghan troops to take on more responsibility soonest - and hope talks with the Taliban will splinter its leadership and persuade some of them to make deals.

Obama will have to decide soon between these bad choices: leave most combat troops for another year, buying more time to weaken (or bargain with) the Taliban; or pull them sooner and pray that the Afghans can manage.

Neither choice looks promising. Like everyone else, I'm still looking for the magic option that doesn't risk a Taliban takeover and a new civil war.
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Taliban Seen Stirring Mob to Violence in Afghanistan
New York Times By CARLOTTA GALL April 9, 2011
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan - While it is still too early to say who were the killers of the seven United Nations employees here last week, senior police officials say they suspect current or former Taliban members or other insurgents of leading the violence, aided by sympathizers and hard-line mullahs who whipped up a crowd of thousands angered by a Koran burning in the United States.

Whether the killings were planned or not, the violence has proved to be a disturbing gauge of the depths of Taliban influence in this progressive northern city, and of its potential to foment unrest.

Perhaps most unsettling for Western and Afghan officials, former Taliban fighters who were supposed to have switched loyalties as part of an American-financed program were among those who snatched weapons from guards at the United Nations compound that was ransacked, police officials said. Three who were living under police protection just a few blocks away have been arrested.

That former Taliban fighters may have been involved raises serious questions about the American-backed reintegration program, which is an important element in the strategy to wean Taliban fighters from the insurgency and for President Hamid Karzai to forge peace.

Fewer Taliban members than envisioned have taken advantage of the program, which has received $50 million in American financing. Even for those who have, the violence shows, getting them to change sides may be easier than changing their minds.

It is just one of many quandaries raised by the deadly events that began with protests against the burning of a Koran by the pastor Terry Jones in Florida but ended with a mob killing three United Nations staff members — a Swedish human rights officer, a Norwegian pilot, a Romanian political officer — and four Nepalese guards. Five Afghan civilians were also killed when the police fired on the crowd, and 20 were wounded.

As demonstrations continue to ripple across the country, some of them violent, larger questions are being raised as to how serious the government is about protecting foreigners working in Afghanistan and the ability of the Afghan security forces to take over security in broad parts of the country from international forces in the months ahead.

Diplomats say the horror and scale of the attack in Mazar are a turning point in the relationship between the government and its Western backers, with many questioning Mr. Karzai’s ambivalent support for the international effort. “One day we will have to analyze why the protests only took place in Afghanistan,” said Staffan de Mistura, the head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.

The United Nations and Mr. Karzai have ordered their own inquiries alongside the police investigation. The police are still questioning 21 people, some of whom admitted their involvement in the violence and some of whom were witnesses, police officials said.

While still blaming the American pastor for inciting the violence, Mr. de Mistura called Friday for the killers to be brought to justice. “There is no justification, no excuse, no possible reason for anyone to have done that horrible act, and therefore they should be found and punished,” he said.

Three former Taliban fighters were detained on the evening of the protests in the government-run safe house where they were living under police protection. One of the men had a Kalashnikov rifle that he had seized from an Afghan guard working for the United Nations and has admitted to firing four magazines of bullets, the provincial police chief, Gen. Esmatullah Alizai, said.

There were 19 former fighters from across northern Afghanistan living in the safe house until the protests. The other 16 have disappeared, according to the police guarding the house.

It is clear that the government was caught off guard by the violence and that the police were ill-prepared to contain the large crowd; the two top police officials were at a conference in Kabul. Radical mullahs and students misled the government about the plans for the demonstration and changed the approved route, police officials said.

Taliban or other insurgent or criminal elements in this northern city — usually one of the most peaceful and secure in the country — were able to leverage the high emotions of the crowd, police officials said. People loyal to the renegade insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar also had a hand in organizing the protests, one intelligence official said.

In recordings of speeches at a rally before the attack, speaker after speaker — clerics and students — call for jihad and death for infidels and Jews. A resolution drawn up by some of the protest organizers claimed that hundreds of Korans had been burned in America.

Religious leaders intended to show their strength, each leading followers from mosques around the city to swell the demonstration to 3,000 to 4,000 people, and then encouraging a charge toward the United Nations compound, police officials said.

“It was a political action firstly, and then they used the people’s emotions to get there,” said General Daoud, who as police commander of the northern zone oversees security in nine northern provinces. As is common in Afghanistan, he uses only one name. The general vowed to find those responsible and put them on public trial.

Protesters filled the inner courtyard of Mazar’s exquisite blue-tiled shrine to listen to two hours of speeches after Friday Prayer. “You should stand against the infidel,” urged one mullah in a white turban. “Some can stand by the pen; some people can speak against the enemy.”

He broke into Arabic and then translated: “The prophet says not just the mullah should stand against the infidel; everyone should stand against them.”

A medical student and a theology lecturer from Balkh University put in the original request for permission to hold a demonstration, which they said would be small and peaceful, General Alizai said. Their plan, which was approved by the governor and the deputy police chief, was to gather at the shrine and then march west past the site of a new United States Consulate.

But because it is still under construction and not yet open, the organizers, including the leader of the provincial council, changed the plan at the last minute to march south to the United Nations compound. They called the deputy police chief, who reluctantly agreed to the change since his men were deployed along the western route.

“We learned that nine people got together inside the mosque and made the decision to march to the south,” General Alizai said.

The crowd was far bigger than the police had expected and surged through the western gates as soon as they were opened, he said. “They were running like a flood, and the police were confused,” he said. “If we left the American Consulate they might come there,” he said.

The small unit of policemen at the United Nations compound was soon overwhelmed by the crowd, as were the guards, who were under orders not to fire on civilians.

A shopkeeper, Abdul Sattar, 70, barricaded himself in his tiny store across the muddy street from the compound as the police and protesters fired off round after round. Two bullets penetrated his shop. “People were very angry,” he said. “Bullets were coming down like rain.”

General Alizai said, “There were thugs who were there to steal and loot, there were emotional youths who were there to burn and destroy, and there were enemies who were there to kill.” The police often use the term enemy to describe insurgents or Taliban.

Several of the mullahs who took part denied inciting violence and expressed surprise that the demonstration turned violent. “We don’t want to stab our own people in our own country because we will close off the opportunity for demonstrations in the future,” said Mullah Qaher, one of the city’s radical clerics.

Yet the hard-line influence is such that the more moderate among the mullahs said they had no choice but to join the demonstrations and to go along with the changes of the route. If they held back, they said, they would be accused of being pro-American or of supporting the infidels.

Mullah Qaher said those detained by the government were innocent demonstrators and not the real culprits.
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Afghan Finance Minister Rejects Speculation Over his Dismissal
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 09 April 2011
Afghan Finance Minister Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal on Saturday rejected reports claiming he was likely to be dismissed.

The Wall Street Journal has earlier published a report saying that the Afghan Defence and Finance Ministers were likely to lose their jobs as part of a cabinet shake-up.

"I have a good relation with the Afghan President and other government officials as before. If I know that the President does not have the necessary confidence in his Finance Minister, I will no longer be willing to continue," Mr Zakhilwal said.

The Journal has also written that the Afghan Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak is expected to be dismissed.

"Mr Wardak, who has served as defense minister since 2004, has been instrumental to U.S. plans to build up the Afghan military, a key priority for the Obama administration and a precondition for beginning to withdraw the 100,000 American troops here. U.S. taxpayers are paying $11.6 billion this year to train and fund Afghan security forces," The Wall Street Journal has written.

Some Afghan experts believe that the US officials should let President Hamid Karzai to decide about his ministers.

"If the Wall Street Journal accuses some Afghan ministers of having good relations with the United States, it will only increase sensitivities here," S. M. Rahman Ogholi, a former Afghan MP, told TOLOnews.
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Taliban gained support in Pak's Swat valley using local grievances: World Bank
By ANI | ANI – Sun, Apr 10, 2011 10:18 AM IST
Washington, April 10(ANI): The Taliban gained support in Pakistan's Swat valley in part by hinging upon a variety of local grievances like weaknesses in local law enforcement and justice institutions, a new World Bank report has said.

Discussing the situation in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security and Development stressed the need for removing or amending laws perceived as unjust and discriminatory- such as the Frontier Crimes Regulation- which applies a legal regime to the tribal areas differing from the rest of Pakistan.

The report noted that formal systems for the provision of justice were weak or broken down in places like Swat.

"At the local level, this breakdown opens gaps not only in the core criminal justice system, but also in the regulation of land and family disputes," the Dawn quoted the report, as saying.

"Such gaps have led to popular frustration and have opened opportunities to violent opposition movements such as the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, which have in some areas of the country established a shadow presence offering an alternative local dispute resolution system," it added.

Following Islamabad's 2009 military offensive to drive militants from FATA and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the government had undertaken an assessment to address the needs and understand the factors underlying violence, with assistance from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations and the European Union.

The World Bank study noted that since the assessment, Pakistan had faced an even more immediate challenge in the shape of last year's devastating floods.

The survey determined that traditional and community structures for dispute resolution were also potential partners in delivering early results and warned that it might be unwise to ignore them.

The World Bank noted that the rise in numbers of internally displaced populations (IDPs), which include substantial new displacements in 2009 and 2010 in countries such as Pakistan, undermines recovery from violence and interrupt human development.

In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the tribal areas on their borders, violence from the conflict between the government and international forces and the Taliban and other armed groups was linked to drug trafficking and criminal violence as well as kidnapping, extortion, and smuggling of a range of natural resources. (ANI)
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U.S. troops get no winter break before Taliban's fighting season
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS BY SAEED SHAH Apr 10, 2011
Over the 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, U.S. and coalition troops have gotten a respite when brutal winters swept across the mountains. Taliban fighters holed up to escape the bitter cold, and killings of American and allied soldiers dropped dramatically.

But not last winter.

After a year that saw a record number of deaths among coalition troops, Americans and their allies got no break as 2011 dawned. In January and February, insurgent attacks skyrocketed to more than 300 attacks a week -- up 65% from the same period in 2010.

It was the worst winter in a decade of war, despite the fact that the U.S. has more than doubled troop strength and more than tripled spending since 2008.

Now, warm weather is coming. And officials, soldiers and critics wonder: What's in store as the Taliban spring fighting season begins? U.S. optimistic, but so is Taliban

KABUL, Afghanistan -- After the most violent winter since U.S. soldiers arrived in Afghanistan, the spring thaw has come, ushering in a new "fighting season" in which, intelligence suggests, the Taliban leadership believes it will storm back into former strongholds in the south and reverse the much-trumpeted gains of U.S.-led coalition forces.

Whether they can do it will test how effective the U.S. surge of troops last year has been in turning the tide of a 10-year losing campaign.

Last month, U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, who leads the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told Congress that progress has been so good, the Obama administration would be able to begin drawing down surge troops this summer.

Critics aren't nearly so optimistic. They say the coalition is cherry-picking statistics and creating fleeting showcases with unsustainable numbers of troops deployed in a few selected places in the south.

Every nationwide indicator shows that security never has been so bad, including those compiled by the United Nations and the Red Cross. The Afghan government is among those questioning ISAF's strategy. President Hamid Karzai declared last month that international troops must "stop their operations in our land."

In the past two years, the Obama administration has invested heavily in Afghanistan after realizing the war was failing and the country hurtling toward chaos. The number of U.S. troops has more than doubled, to 100,000, and U.S. spending on them has more than tripled -- from $29 billion in 2008 to a projected $101 billion this year. The U.S.-led military offensive has been massive, with about 66,000 coalition troops saturating the insurgent heartland in the south, mainly in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

Insurgents confident

In the next few weeks, the Taliban will begin to emerge from their winter retreats and reignite their bloody campaign in full force.

Taliban leaders "are confident in their ability to reclaim territory," said a Western intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "They fully acknowledge they've lost ground in Kandahar and Helmand, but they think it will be an easy recapture."

Last winter, in fact, the Taliban didn't provide the usual respite to coalition troops.

In January and February, insurgent attacks were up 65% compared with a year earlier, running at a rate of more than 300 per week, according to a tally kept by Indicium Consulting, an independent security consultant.

The insurgency has spread to new areas, including previously peaceful parts of the west and north. It has adopted new tactics, morphing from guerrilla warfare to terrorism.

A tally by another research organization, the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, shows similar results -- a 64% increase in insurgent attacks during 2010 from a daily average of 33 attacks in 2009.

The U.S. focus on touting the results of Helmand and Kandahar misses the bigger picture, critics say: Six of the 10 provinces in ISAF's northern command area saw attacks at least double in the past year. Provinces that previously had been considered relatively safe, such as Nangarhar in the east and Logar in the center, saw a sharp deterioration in security. Of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, 29 saw an increasing number of attacks in 2010.

Nic Lee, director of the Safety Office, said the international coalition's emphasis on the bright spots seems intended to persuade Americans that the Obama strategy is succeeding so that a drawdown starting in July is justified.

"The overriding objective is the exit," he said. "By thin-slicing the data, using a region-by-region approach, you can show something that's very specific and localized. But the Taliban are fighting a national campaign."

Record troop deaths

Last year saw a record number of deaths among coalition troops: 711, including 499 Americans, according to the iCasualties Web site.

Meanwhile, 2,777 civilians were killed in the conflict last year, an increase of 15%, according to the UN. The number killed accidently by coalition forces fell sharply and amounted to 16% of the total. But that's small comfort to Afghans who experienced rising bloodshed, whatever the source.

The Taliban also have doubled the number of assassinations aimed at people cooperating with the Afghan government and the coalition -- 462 civilians were killed in such attacks last year, the UN found, ranging from high-ranking officials to doctors and teachers.

Tellingly, the execution rampage spiked in the two provinces where ISAF has deployed the most troops, with a 248% increase in Kandahar and a 588% jump in Helmand, showing that the Taliban were able to operate in the midst of massive coalition presence.

Shaida Mohammad Abdali, Karzai's deputy national security adviser, said, "2010 was the bloodiest year. This is going to be another bloody year. How long are we going to talk about bloody years? We have gone backwards. Year by year, security is getting worse."

Security doubts

Last month, Robert Watkins, the outgoing deputy chief of the UN mission in Afghanistan, in an apparently unguarded moment, told reporters that "security in the country is at its lowest point" since the U.S.-led invasion after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks pushed the Taliban from power.

And two weeks ago, the Red Cross said that, for ordinary Afghans caught in the conflict, it was an "untenable situation."

It's difficult to reconcile those views with the ISAF's view of an improving security scenario.

"The momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas," Petraeus told a Senate committee hearing. "However, while the security progress achieved over the past year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible."

There is little doubt that where U.S. troops have been heavily deployed, they largely have pushed insurgents out.

But the improvement has required a massive increase in troops. In the south, coalition numbers increased to 66,000 in January from 28,000 two years earlier. Afghanistan's east, the second-most violent part of the country, has seen a similar increase, to 41,000 from 25,000.
Those jumps in deployment have been accompanied by a huge rise in raids that target midlevel Taliban commanders: a sixfold increase since summer 2009. In the 90-day period ending Feb. 11, there were 1,826 such raids, ISAF says. They resulted in the killing or capturing of 363 insurgent leaders and 2,698 insurgent soldiers.

Coalition and Afghan troops are also capturing more weapons caches -- 450 in February, more than three times what they nabbed in February 2010.

That augurs well for the fighting season, ISAF contends. When the Taliban return to fight, they'll find their stores of weapons gone.

"In order to drive out insurgents, you'll initially see insurgents react violently as we move forces in. They won't go away peacefully," said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, ISAF's outgoing deputy chief of staff for communication.

More of the same?

Worries that the campaign can't be duplicated are misplaced, Smith said.

"There aren't many areas like Marjah, where the Taliban ran everything," Smith said. "We don't need to repeat Marjah," which involved a 7,500-strong U.S.-led assault force and where 2,000 Marines are still deployed.

Organizations such as the Red Cross and UN perceive a decrease in security because the old local Taliban commanders that used to give them safe passage through a district have been captured and killed, replaced by younger and more radical Taliban who aren't prepared to allow even humanitarian groups to work in their area, the Western intelligence official said.

"It feels worse for the UN or the Red Cross because they used to be able to secure freedom of movement. They used to be able to talk to the local (Taliban) commanders," the intelligence official said.

But those with long experience in Afghanistan feel that they've heard optimism many times from the international coalition, yet more Afghans and more foreign troops have been killed every year since 2005. As the snow melts, it will become clear in the coming months whether things really are different in 2011.

"Every year is a crucial year. Every year ISAF announces that they are now really seeing success, and every year we're told it will get worse before it gets better," said Martine van Bijlert, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research organization, who's been in Kabul since 2004.

"The military always feels they are so close to making a difference, but they just need a bit more time."
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The Afghan Drug Trade and the Elephant in the Room
Foreign Policy Journal By Jeremy R. Hammond April 9, 2011
Foreign Policy magazine this month features an article entitled “Think Again: The Afghan Drug Trade“, which is a decent overview of the opium problem – as far as it goes. Unsurprisingly, however, in doing so, it proverbially ignores the elephant in the room, and in doing so represents part of the problem rather than the solution.

To its credit, the article begins by dispelling the myth that the drug trade in Afghanistan is virtually controlled by the Taliban, observing that “In the popular and American political imaginations, the Taliban are thought to be the big winners from this [Afghanistan's] near monopoly [on global opium production]“, but the truth is “The Taliban take 2 to 12 percent of a $4 billion industry”.

This is rare candor for a mainstream publication – it’s more typical to see the U.S. media misleading the public on the role anti-government elements play in the drug trade (I discussed both these points in “New York Times Misleads on Taliban Role in Opium Trade“, Foreign Policy Journal, November 29, 2008).

But the authors neglect to draw the corollary, rather leaving it up to readers to put two and two together and realize that this means that the lion’s share of the Afghan drug trade is under the control of elements friendly to the Afghan government and/or the foreign occupying forces. While one might just assume that the authors feel it isn’t necessary to explicitly mention this because FP’s readers are intelligent enough to figure that out for themselves, there is another more likely explanation for the omission.

The authors, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Jonathan D. Kulick, and Mark A.R. Kleiman, are the authors of a recent report for the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) that does explicitly acknowledge (emphasis added): “If counternarcotics policies are effectively targeted at pro-insurgency traffickers, they may be able to reduce insurgency by enabling pro-government traffickers and corrupt officials to enjoy a monopoly.”

But what’s most striking about this acknowledgment is that it is presented as a recommendation; one that – lest the reader miss the point – the authors repeat (emphasis added): “Again, it may be possible to target counter-narcotics specifically against the insurgency by selective enforcement that effectively tolerates pro-government traffickers and corrupt officials.”

That is pretty much a summary of what U.S. drug policy in Afghanistan has been, as the report also explicitly observes (emphasis added): “The authors’ main tentative policy suggestion – assure that drugs enrich only corrupt officials – is in effect what the Bush administration tried during 2001-2004.”

They omit, though, that this policy has been escalated by the Obama administration, whose special representative to Afghanistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, in the summer of 2009 rightly criticized the policy of eradication (“The poppy farmer is not our enemy. The Taliban are.”), only to add that eradication would still continue, only in limited areas – which effectively meant that poppy cultivation in areas under Taliban control would be targeted, but in areas under U.S. control it could continue. Following that announcement, it emerged that the U.S. military was pursuing a policy of targeting drug traffickers with ties to insurgent groups – and only those drug traffickers with ties to insurgent groups.

As the CIC report also points out, after the Taliban banned and effectively reduced opium production in 2001, “The locus of production moved to the territory controlled by the warlords” – that is, the “pro-drug dealing warlords aligned with the United States and its coalition allies.” After the U.S. overthrew the Taliban, opium production once again soared to record levels. The CIC report adds, “At present, insurgents appear to be capturing only a small share of those trafficking revenues.”

The authors, in their FP article, praise the fact that “The DEA and military try to selectively disrupt the traffickers who are linked most closely to the insurgency.” They also observe, in challenging the notion that “American Drug Addicts are Supporting the Taliban”, that the principle markets for the Afghan opium trade are in Asia and Europe and that the U.S. “consumes only about 5 percent of the world’s illegal opium, and most of that comes from Colombia and Mexico.”

But what they neglect to mention is the untold number of soldiers sent to Afghanistan who have become drug addicts. Despite the claims of the U.S. government that it is actively engaged in trying to curtail the drug trade in Afghanistan, heroin is readily available to U.S. troops, including just outside of the Bagram military base. It’s a problem nobody seems to want to talk about, but indications are that drug use and addiction among soldiers is a serious problem, just as it was for veterans of the Vietnam war, thanks in no small part to the CIA’s role in protecting and participating in the drug trade in the Golden Triangle.

It’s a familiar pattern (during the Soviet-Afghan war, for example, the principle beneficiary of U.S. financing for the mujahedeen was Afghanistan’s leading drug lord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar), yet the authors carry on as thought the U.S. was serious about fighting the drug problem in Afghanistan.

This is a logical absurdity. It is axiomatic that if we are actually serious about tackling the destructive Afghan opium trade, we must recognize and confront the uncomfortable and inconvenient truth, as Professor Peter Dale Scott argues persuasively in his book “American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan“, that the U.S. itself plays a central role in the global drug trade.

And the problem goes well beyond the historical fact that the U.S. has frequently aligned itself with drug traffickers and turned a blind eye to their activities. The U.S. economy itself is addicted to drugs. As Professor Scott notes in his book, “A Senate staff report has estimated ‘that $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through United States banks.’ The London Independent reported in 2004 that drug trafficking constitutes ‘the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.’”

A more recent report by the same House subcommittee, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, offered a slightly revised estimate of $500 to $1.5 trillion dollars laundered through the global financial system each year. “The failure of U.S. banks to take adequate steps to prevent money laundering through their correspondent bank accounts is not a new or isolated problem,” the report stated. “It is longstanding, widespread and ongoing.”

Indeed, the London Guardian just reported a case-in-point on how cocaine smugglers in Mexico had laundered money “through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo”, which “became a beneficiary of $25bn in taxpayers’ money” following the 2008 stock market crash. This case represents “only the tip of an iceberg”, the Guardian notes.

According to United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa, drug money was used to help prop up the U.S. economy following the 2008 financial crisis. “In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital,” Costa has said. “In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.” The UNODC found evidence that “interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities,” Costa said, and there were “signs that some banks were rescued in that way.”

In other words, big money interests and power players within the United States have a financial interest in the preservation of the global drug trade, and U.S. policies and foreign interventions have often historically been aligned with that goal – including in present day Afghanistan.

While on one hand helping to dispel certain persistent myths about the Afghan drug trade, on the other hand, the authors of the FP article nevertheless effectively argue in favor of maintaining this status quo. More serious – and less hypocritical – analysis of the global drug trade will be required if the international community ever hopes to tackle the Afghan opium problem.
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Destroying booby-trapped Afghan towns to save them
Associated Press By Solomon Moore Sat Apr 9, 2011
TAROK KOLACHE, Afghanistan - Two aerial photos tell the story of this tiny village in the southern province of Kandahar. One shows a deceptively bucolic collection of mud huts amid pomegranate orchards. The second shows a field of dirt and shorn tree stumps — the same hamlet after being pulverized by 25 tons of explosives.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, called in airstrikes to level Tarok Kolache in October after spending 100 days fighting for control of the Arghandab River Valley, a fertile farming area and Taliban bastion.

Seven of his men were killed and dozens wounded in orchards and towns the Taliban laced with improvised bombs. In one small area, Flynn said, his men encountered about 200 bombs — or one every 40 yards.

"We were fighting in a veritable minefield," Flynn said.

While the bombardment in October ended the battle for Tarok Kolache, the battle of perception had just begun.

The village was deserted at the time of the bombing, but criticism of the strikes was intense.

Afghan government officials said destroying the village was excessive. Human rights activists compared the strike with Vietnam-era carpet bombings and said it smacked of collective punishment. At best, it deviated from classic counterinsurgency doctrine, which emphasizes politics and development aid, rather than spectacular violence.

Flynn defended the strikes — at one point writing a lengthy post on the Foreign Policy blog, Best Defense — as a necessary evil due to the Taliban's use of Afghan homes as fighting positions. Flynn said defusing the village house-by-house would have put troops at risk unnecessarily.

But NATO feared such justifications would be lost on people in Kandahar, where the Taliban has staunch support.

So Flynn decided on what he hoped would be a more persuasive response.

On a recent spring day, Flynn arranged a helicopter trip to Tarok Kolache for reporters to see the opening of the village mosque and construction of 14 homes that will replace all the buildings destroyed in October, at a cost of $500,000.

Construction of about 200 more homes is under way in the region, including three other Arghandab valley villages that were extensively damaged — Lower Baber, Kosher Safla, and Charcolba. The U.S. military is also planning to fund the planting of 300,000 pomegranate trees to restore damaged orchards in the region.

The U.S. routinely pays compensation to individuals whose homes are damaged in fighting.

However, the destruction in Arghandab valley — where villages of mud and straw were often caught between the Taliban's improvised explosives and NATO's 500-pound bombs — has given rise to a novel method of compensation.

The devastation was so extensive that Flynn's unit decided to act as community development consultants and pay claims on a collective basis. In each village, they are consulting with landowners, tenants and government officials about the rebuilding.

NATO officials say the approach has enabled them to restore ruined villages that the Taliban would have used for propaganda. The method helped NATO demonstrate its good will to communities harmed by intense fighting last year. The process also linked remote villagers with Afghan political bodies they viewed with suspicion.

Flynn says U.S. troops have effectively disrupted insurgents' movements in southern Afghanistan by setting up new Afghan combat units and a chain of combat outposts in Kandahar province.

But as the spring fighting season begins, it remains unclear how deep or lasting the military's efforts will be, or whether the people of Arghandab valley will shift their loyalties away from the Taliban.

About 70,000 people live in the valley, along the 250-mile-Arghandab river.

Tarok Kolache farmer Asadullah Alkozia, 25, was unimpressed by the American efforts.

He said the new trees would not replace his losses because it can take up to five years for them to bear fruit.

"We grew those trees for 35 years," he said. "They (the Americans) will give us a little money and some new trees to replant, but where will we find the money we have lost as we wait for these trees to mature?"

Erica Gaston, a human rights advocate for the International Crisis Group, said it will be difficult to gain the villagers' trust after the large-scale destruction in the valley.

"Even if they restore everything perfectly, there's all the months that all those people were internally displaced and the trauma involved with that," she said. "I don't know that they can go back to zero at this point in terms of perception."

Going back to zero wouldn't help the U.S. military much in Kandahar province, where some of last year's bloodiest battles took place.

In 2009, a U.S. military survey found that most Kandaharis trusted the Taliban more than they did government security forces. Storied mujahedeen battles against the British and the Soviet Union took place here. Mullah Mohammad Omar's house sits nearby. Taliban fighters use the valley as a base and supply route.

At Tarok Kolache's mosque opening, villagers, politicians and U.S. soldiers sat on new cushions and leaned against the freshly painted walls as they listened to Kandahar Gov. Tooryalai Wesa give a speech — a somewhat courageous appearance in a province where the Taliban has dramatically increased assassinations of public officials.

"The opposition put explosives here, so this area was cleared, but people were unable to even go to their farms and vineyards," said the governor. "Now you can see the mosque here and houses behind it and we will have other development projects."

Wesa said that residents displaced by the fighting have returned to the valley. Sixty schools have reopened and more than 40,000 students have returned, he said.

The U.S. military will pay about $6 million on damage claims in southern Kandahar where about 200 homes were destroyed last year, according to Canadian Army Col. Acton Kilby, director of stability for NATO's command in southern Afghanistan.

Most of the residents of Tarock Kolache and other villages damaged in the valley last year were tenant farmers, renting land from landlords who did not live in the towns.

NATO officials decided they needed to compensate both parties, but worried if families that were paid directly they would take the money and leave their ruined hamlets behind.

"One of the reasons we're going about reconstruction this way was to take away the Taliban's ability to point to these destroyed villages," said a State Department official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media. "If we just gave the people compensation money, the people scatter and you still have a village that's been destroyed here."

Still some villagers remain conflicted about the bombing of Tarok Kolache.

Kilby, the Canadian officer, acknowledged that the rebuilding process is not an unalloyed success. Not all the villagers could be found after their homes were destroyed. Some wanted to take the money and move away. A small number rejected compensation, either because they were opposed to the U.S. or because they believed taking the money would make them an insurgent target. Others complained the compensation was too little.

Yet even some villagers who lost everything said they bore no grudge against the Americans.

As Flynn led a phalanx of reporters to the new mosque, Abdul Majid and his young son stooped over the blown apart pomegranate fields trying to nurse scarred roots back to health.

"We are not in our own homes because they were destroyed. My trees have also been destroyed," Majid said. "But it was necessary because the Taliban came here to fight and this area was full of mines."

But Kareemullah Jan Taraki, 38, a landowner in Tarok Kolache, said the bombing and rebuilding of the village was a pointless exercise.

"The Taliban came to our village and then the Americans destroyed our village," he said. "Then Taliban go to another village, and the Americans strike that village, and then a third village. The Taliban is here in Afghanistan. Will the Americans destroy Afghanistan?"
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Afghan Attorney General to Appear in Parliament
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 09 April 2011
Afghan Attorney General will soon appear before the House of Representatives, a letter sent to the parliament on Saturday said.

Parliamentarians had summoned the Attorney General and expected to see him in the parliament on Saturday, but the Attorney General sent them a letter saying he will soon appear before the house, but he needed some preparations ahead of his appearance.

The Attorney General had earlier refused to appear before the house saying the parliamentarians did not have the right to summon him, reasoning that his Office was independent.

The Attorney General, Ishaq Aloko, has been accused of interfering in electoral affairs for which the parliament has been summoning him without success.

Mr Aloko has now said he will appear before the house at a suitable time when he is fully prepared.

The House of Representatives had earlier warned that a vote of no-confidence will be given to Mr Aloko in absentia if he refused to appear before the house.
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