 |
||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serving you since 1998 | ||||||||||||
|
|
12 killed in Afghanistan amid protests over reported Quran burning
By the CNN Wire Staff April 2, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Twelve people were killed Friday in an attack on a U.N. compound in northern Afghanistan that followed a demonstration against the reported burning last month of a Quran in Florida, authorities said.
At least seven foreigners killed in attack on U.N. compound in northern Afghanistan
By Joshua Partlow and Ernesto Londono The Washington Post
KABUL — An angry mob killed at least seven foreigners in northern Afghanistan and set fire to a United Nations compound, as a protest over a Koran burning in Florida swelled into chaotic violence Friday, according to Afghan and Western officials.
Cameras, Spy Balloons Surge in Afghanistan
By Spencer Ackerman April 1, 2011 wired.com
The U.S. military may be preparing its spy planes to support the NATO-led war in Libya. But it’s also preparing to surge about $1 billion worth of balloon-mounted cameras and other intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance gear to Afghanistan in advance of the Taliban’s anticipated spring re-up.
Sorting Through The Hype In Afghanistan
April 1, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Muhammad Tahir
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is setting the bar high. On March 22 in Kabul, he announced with great fanfare the names of seven areas where Afghan troops will soon take over security duties from the international forces that are protecting them now.
Afghanistan frees graft case ex-minister
AFP April 01, 2011
KABUL - Afghan authorities Thursday released a former minister, three days after he was arrested on charges of corruption, a government official said. The attorney general's office said former transport minister Inayatullah Qasimi would face trial for misuse of public funds and abuse of authority.
Afghanistan’s reasons for optimism
Washington Post By Craig Charney, and and James Dobbins Thursday, March 31,2011
Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. Behind this figure is a prevalent pessimism that the war is unwinnable.
Six U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan operation near Pakistan border
Washington Post By Greg Jaffe Thursday, March 31,2011
A large-scale helicopter-borne assault into a remote, insurgent-held sanctuary near the border with Pakistan left six U.S. soldiers dead in heavy fighting with Afghan and Pakistani insurgents, U.S. officials said.
Hungary prolongs stay of troops in Afghanistan
BUDAPEST, March 31 (Xinhua) -- Hungary has prolonged the stay of its troops in Afghanistan, the Hungarian Defense Ministry announced in Budapest on Thursday.
Afghan Taliban stressed by killings, arrests, officials say
New York Times By CARLOTTA GALL Friday, April 1, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The Afghan Taliban are showing signs of increasing strain after a number of killings, arrests and internal disputes that have affected them even in their Pakistan haven, Afghan security officials and Afghans with contacts in the Taliban say.
Losses in Pakistani Haven Strain Afghan Taliban
New York Times By CARLOTTA GALL March 31, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The Afghan Taliban are showing signs of increasing strain after a number of killings, arrests and internal disputes that have reached them even in their haven in Pakistan, Afghan security officials and Afghans with contacts in the Taliban say.
Germany Provides Multi-Million Dollar Funding to Afghanistan
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 31 March 2011
Germany on Thursday announced more than $186 million funding aid to Afghanistan as part of Germany's efforts to improve Afghans' living standards.
Malalai Joya's journey west
The Afghan activist has become a celebrated critic of US policy, but her status abroad has cost her legitimacy in her homeland
Guardian.co.uk Nushin Arbabzadah Thursday 31 March 2011
Malalai Joya's article about the US kill team in Afghanistan expressed the disgust of many if not all Afghans, but her categorical rejection of the US intervention in Afghanistan is unfair. After all, without US intervention, Joya would not have been able to own a passport, let alone travel abroad. Equally,
Afghanistan: India's Uncertain Road
By Jyoti Thottam in Gurgaon time.com 31/03/2011
From the fourth floor of an office building in Gurgaon, a northern Indian city of tangled highways, yammering call centers and wandering livestock, Sanjay Gupta plays a bit part in the Great Game. His company, C&C Constructions, first ventured into Afghanistan in 2002. It started with a road from Kandahar to Spin Boldak
Back to Top
12 killed in Afghanistan amid protests over reported Quran burning
By the CNN Wire Staff April 2, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Twelve people were killed Friday in an attack on a U.N. compound in northern Afghanistan that followed a demonstration against the reported burning last month of a Quran in Florida, authorities said.
The fatalities comprised seven U.N. workers and five demonstrators, officials said.
Another 24 people were wounded, said Abdul Rauof Taj, security director of Balkh province.
Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, a spokesman for the police in Mazar-e-Sharif, told reporters that a number of suspects "who might be the main organizers" had been arrested.
U.N. Peacekeeping Director Alain Le Roy said the seven U.N. fatalities were international staffers -- three civilians and four international security guards. No Afghan U.N. staff members were among the dead, he said.
"I understand there were hundreds, if not thousands, of demonstrators. Some of them were clearly armed and they stormed into the building."
He said the security guards tried their best to halt the demonstrators' advance, but were overwhelmed.
Le Roy said it was not clear that the United Nations was the target. "It happened to be the U.N. because the U.N. is on the ground."
Five demonstrators were killed in the violence; one person's throat was cut, he said.
A U.N .source said the dead included four Nepalese security guards as well as U.N. workers from Norway, Sweden and Romania.
The U.N. Security Council met Friday and issued a statement condemning the attack, which occurred at the operations center of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), and calling on the Afghan government to investigate.
Haji Sakhi Mohammad, a businessman in Mazar-e-Sharif, said that the incident began after Friday prayers, when many people joined a protest against the burning of the Quran. People calling "Death to America" marched to the U.N. compound and broke in, he said. At that, gunfire broke out and "I saw protesters shot to death."
A student in Mazar-e-Sharif said he and his friends joined the protesters, who numbered in the hundreds. "When we reached the UNAMA office, we came under gunfire by Afghan security guards. Protesters became angry and stormed the building."
The student said some of the protesters found several loaded AK-47s and used them to kill security guards and other people inside the building.
The attack followed a demonstration against the reported burning of a Quran by Florida pastor Terry Jones, who gained international attention last year when he announced that he was planning to burn a Quran, the U.N. source with knowledge of events said.
Jones is the pastor of the 60-member Dove World Outreach Center church near Gainesville. Last year, after an outcry followed his announcement of plans to burn a Quran on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he canceled them. Last month, however, he reportedly did burn Islam's holy book.
The church says on its website that it planned to put the Quran on trial on March 20, and, "if found guilty of causing murder, rape and terrorism, it will be executed!" Another post on the website, which uses an alternative spelling for the book, says "the Koran was found guilty" during the mock trial and "a copy was burned inside the building."
On Friday, Jones said in an e-mailed statement that the attack in Afghanistan shows that "the time has come to hold Islam accountable."
"We must hold these countries and people accountable for what they have done as well as for any excuses they may use to promote their terrorist activities," he said.
Atta Mohammad Noor, the governor of Balkh province, said the attackers had used the protests against the burning "as a cover for this violence."
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai called the attacks "an act against Islam and Afghan values."
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the victims were only trying to help the Afghan people.
"In targeting them, the attackers have demonstrated an appalling disregard for what the U.N. and the entire international community are trying to do for the benefit of all Afghans," he said.
U.S. President Barack Obama also condemned the attack. "We stress the importance of calm and urge all parties to reject violence and resolve differences through dialogue," he said.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said he would not speculate on the motivation behind the attack, but added that it was "in no way justified, regardless of what the motivation was."
The Council on American Islamic Relations also released a statement condemning the attack. "Nothing can justify or excuse this attack," said the group, which describes itself as America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization.
CNN's Tim Lister and journalist Fazel Rashad contributed to this story.
Back to Top
Back to Top
At least seven foreigners killed in attack on U.N. compound in northern Afghanistan
By Joshua Partlow and Ernesto Londono The Washington Post
KABUL — An angry mob killed at least seven foreigners in northern Afghanistan and set fire to a United Nations compound, as a protest over a Koran burning in Florida swelled into chaotic violence Friday, according to Afghan and Western officials.
The attack in Mazar-e Sharif, normally a bastion of calm, swelled out of a midday gathering called to denounce the actions of Terry Jones, a preacher in Gainesville, Fla., who burned the Islamic holy book on a grill last month. The Taliban had issued a statement blaming “American Rules” for Jones’s “crime.’’
At least four protesters also were reported killed during the attack on the U.N. office.
President Obama condemned Friday’s killings “in the strongest possible terms” and urged calm and dialogue. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the attack “an outrageous and cowardly act.’’ Neither statement mentioned the burning of the Koran.
In September, Jones had stepped back from plans to burn the Koran, which he has deemed responsible for terrorist activities, after public criticism from U.S. faith leaders and warnings from the Obama administration. In contrast, the Koran burning that Jones carried out March 20 had attracted little attention, and the Obama administration appeared to have been taken by surprise by the issue’s sudden reemergence.
The episode could further inflame tensions in a turbulent Islamic world, at a time of mass protests in the Middle East and a period in which the Obama administration has tried to portray Afghanistan as moving steadily toward stability. Leaflets distributed in advance of Friday’s protests had called on Afghanistan to sever ties with the United States if Jones was not punished for his actions.
U.S. officials had been warned that the protest, scheduled to be held at the famed Blue Mosque in downtown Mazar-e Sharif, could turn violent, and they were told by security officials to avoid the area. At the midday prayers, hundreds gathered to hear the sermon and speeches denouncing the Koran burning, then surged south toward the U.N. headquarters as the crowd grew larger and more violent.
In the tumult, with police firing their weapons, some in the crowd broke into the U.N. office, past high walls and foreign and Afghan security guards, then torched guard towers and attacked and killed members of the U.N. staff, officials said. Among those killed were four Nepalese guards and at least three U.N. staff members, including a Swede, a Romanian and a Norwegian, according to a Western official briefed on the preliminary investigation.
U.N. buildings have been attacked in the past by insurgents, both in Kabul and in the western city of Herat, but the violence Friday marked a particularly grim chapter in the United Nations’ long history in Afghanistan. The U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, traveled to Mazar-e Sharif on Friday along with the mission’s security chief to deal with the aftermath of the attack. Afghan officials said five Afghan protesters were also killed and 20 were wounded.
There were no reports of deaths or injuries among the U.S. staff and their contractors in the city, which is slated to be the site of a future U.S. consulate.
Witnesses said the crowd had included some armed men who threw rocks, burned U.S. flags and chanted anti-U.S. slogans, according to officials and participants. Security forces engaged in a sustained gunfight with militants as they sought to wrest control of the compound. Gunfire rang out for more than an hour.
It was not immediately clear whether the crowd itself had turned violent or whether Taliban insurgents might have infiltrated the gathering to carry out the attack, as some Afghan officials suggested. The Taliban posted a short statement on its Web site about the incident, claiming that protesters had killed “10 U.S.-NATO invaders” after soldiers shot at demonstrators, but the group did not assert responsibility for the attack.
‘Great insult’
In Gainesville, Jones demanded action against the perpetrators by the U.S. government and the United Nations, calling the attack a “tragic and criminal action.”
“The time has come to hold Islam accountable,” he said in a statement issued by his organization, Stand Up America Now.
In a video showing the Koran burning on March 20 at his Dove World Outreach Center church, Jones can be heard commenting that “it actually burns very good.’’
Although U.S. law enforcement has regularly monitored Jones’s activities, senior U.S. military leaders and administration officials who dissuaded Jones from his earlier plan to burn the Koran appeared to have been unaware of the latest episode either before or immediately after it took place. Jones had advertised his event as a “trial” on Koranic guilt in causing terrorism. On March 18, he asked his followers online to recommend a proper “punishment.” His announcement of the verdict, the form of punishment and the act itself all took place within moments of one another.
There was virtually no coverage of the Koran burning in the United States, and it provoked little immediate reaction in the Islamic world. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari both issued statements denouncing the burning last week, with Karzai calling it “disrespectful and abhorrent.” On March 25, U.S. embassies in both countries condemned it as “disrespectful, intolerant, divisive and unrepresentative of American values.”
On Monday, the Afghan Nationwide Scholars’ Council issued a condemnation, calling for the perpetrators to be punished for a “great insult to Holy Islam” that it said was designed to provoke violence. At the United Nations, the Organization of the Islamic Conference held an emergency meeting to condemn the burning and highlight the group’s “grave concern” that the act had insulted the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.
In condemning the burning, the Taliban blamed U.S. officials and media outlets.
“The American media outlets like their rulers stayed completely silent as regards this inhumane and wicked action,” the Taliban statement said, saying that the act should not have been permitted even under freedom-of-expression laws. “Hundreds of times, we have seen abhorrent instances of blasphemy at the hands of the American soldiers in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram prisons, desecrating the Holy Quran and other Islamic tenets.”
The Taliban statement did not directly incite people to violence but prodded devout Muslims to action. “Put pressure on rulers of your countries to come out of the cocoon of hesitation and raise the issue of the Holy Quran burning at world level,” the statement urged.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Friday’s violence “proves why we were right to be concerned” when Jones made his original threats last summer. “Irresponsible words and actions do have consequences,” Morrell said. “This time, they were tragic, deadly consequences.”
The violence demonstrated the “ripple effect of how action that might go unnoticed here can still cause a wave of destruction downrange,” he said.
partlowj@washpost.com
londonoe@washpost.com
Staff writers Karen DeYoung in Washington and Colum Lynch in New York, staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington and special correspondent Javed Hamdard in Kabul contributed to this report.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Cameras, Spy Balloons Surge in Afghanistan
By Spencer Ackerman April 1, 2011 wired.com
The U.S. military may be preparing its spy planes to support the NATO-led war in Libya. But it’s also preparing to surge about $1 billion worth of balloon-mounted cameras and other intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance gear to Afghanistan in advance of the Taliban’s anticipated spring re-up.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified to the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday that “we will be adding ISR to Afghanistan,” not diverting it to Libya. Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell says that the money won’t go to “more Predators” or other high-end drones. Instead, it’ll provide cheap ways for troops to add to perimeter surveillance for their bases and outposts: “aerostats and fixed-camera positions.”
That’s to help troops spot insurgents who plant homemade bombs in the areas surrounding the bases or to mass for attacks against U.S. forces. Those homemade bombs are on the rise in Afghanistan, but the outgoing director of the Pentagon’s task force to defeat the deadly devices credits tools like the aerostats for dramatic decreases in the bombs’ effectiveness.
The Pentagon’s hot on its cameras-n-balloons approach, known as the Persistent Threat Detection Systems program. “It has a wide area range that can also cover down on roads” when mounted atop towers on Afghan bases, says Morrell. “When daisy chained together throughout a battlespace it soaks up the terrain and becomes eyes in the sky.”
In March, Gates sought to rapidly get the cameras and spy balloons into the fight by taking money out of the Army’s Humvee budget, setting up a brief fight with the House panel that appropriates defense cash, which didn’t act fast enough on the ISR request to satisfy Gates. The defense secretary’s comments on Thursday effectively represented a resolution of the issue to his satisfaction.
Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, requested the additional spy gear in advance of a seasonal return to fighting by the Taliban, which he has forecast will be exceptionally intense this spring.
Commanders in Afghanistan tether balloons mounted with cameras and sensors to towers on their bases for an expansion of their ability to spot threats for a fraction of the cost of a drone. The Army’s even looking to mount dummy balloons as a way of psyching out insurgents.
No word yet on when the new sensors, cameras and aerostats will arrive in the country, but Morrell says the Pentagon is rushing to get them there before the Taliban resume its expected spring assault.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Sorting Through The Hype In Afghanistan
April 1, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Muhammad Tahir
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is setting the bar high. On March 22 in Kabul, he announced with great fanfare the names of seven areas where Afghan troops will soon take over security duties from the international forces that are protecting them now.
"The people of Afghanistan no longer desire to see others defend their country for them," Karzai declared. "This day will be a defining moment in the history of the country."
The handover, set for July, will officially mark the beginning of the transition of power from coalition troops to Afghans. The whole process is supposed to end by July 2014.
Okay, sounds good. But most of this is theater. In four of the areas Karzai mentioned, security isn't really an issue. Mazar-e Sharif, Herat, Bamiyan, and the Panjshir Valley are all under the control of regional leaders solidly anchored in local communities. All of them are peaceful and none of them has ever really been dependent on help provided by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
That doesn't mean they're necessarily beholden to Karzai, however. Mazar-e Sharif is controlled by former Northern Alliance commander General Ata Noor, whose loyalty to the Kabul government has often been questioned. In the other three areas, too, the local powers-that-be enjoy far more respect than officials appointed by the capital. Security is usually in the hands of militias that obey regional powerbrokers.
All of this raises the question: When it comes to these four areas, what sort of handover of power is President Karzai talking about?
The situation is even more ambiguous in the case of the three others. In Kabul, one would hope that the national government has things pretty firmly under its control. Security there is reasonably good -- at least for the moment.
In Mehter Lam, the capital of unruly Laghman Province in the east, it will be interesting to see to what extent Karzai can establish central government control there. The biggest question mark of all hangs over Lashkar Gah, the capital of volatile Helmand Province in the south. This is probably the real litmus test for Karzai's plan.
What's clear is that he isn't going to have much time to make it work. The Taliban is already setting out to derail the schedule.
The independent Afghan news agency Pajhwok recently reported that the Taliban kidnapped 50 people -- most of them police officers -- in the area near Mehter Lam on March 26. That's not exactly a good omen for a city where security is supposed to pass into Afghan hands just a few months from now.
An official quoted by Pajhwok said that now the Taliban were asking the government for a prisoner exchange. The Taliban insists that the government will have to release 12 captive insurgents if it wants to see its police officers set free.
This shows the Taliban's confidence in their ability to undermine Karzai's plans -- especially in the eastern part of the country, close to their safe-havens in Pakistan's tribal areas.
If the situation in Lashkar Gah is any indication, the future doesn't look terribly bright in the southern part of the country, either.
The same day Karzai announced the plan for the security handover, the Taliban succeeded in forcing cell-phone companies in the town to shut down service. That was it. Since then, all cell phones -- the only modern means of communication in the province -- have been out of service. This sort of thing doesn't just make life harder for ordinary people and the business community in the area, it also sends a clear message about who runs things.
It's easy to understand why Karzai's optimistic announcements have some Afghans worried. As one man told the Tolo TV network, "It's worrying that the government is planning to hand over the security of the city to Afghan forces when it can't even protect cell-phone companies.'' Well put.
The telecoms breakdown in Helmand and the kidnapping in eastern Afghanistan are among many other worrying factors that call into question Karzai's claims about the country's readiness to assume responsibility for its own security.
Whatever else happens, it's clear that the success of his plan will be tested in these two volatile provinces -- and the outcome will shape future moves toward the transition of power in Afghanistan.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghanistan frees graft case ex-minister
AFP April 01, 2011
KABUL - Afghan authorities Thursday released a former minister, three days after he was arrested on charges of corruption, a government official said. The attorney general's office said former transport minister Inayatullah Qasimi would face trial for misuse of public funds and abuse of authority.
"Yes, I can confirm he has been freed," a senior official at the prosecutor's office told AFP. The official, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said Qasimi was freed under orders from the country's chief prosecutor, Mohammad Ishaq Alako. He gave no details. A source close to Qasimi confirmed to AFP that the former minister had been freed.
Qasimi is accused of corruption and abuse of power while in office between 2004 and 2005.
Corruption pervades many aspects of Afghan life, from police officers who demand bribes at the ubiquitous roadblocks to government ministers' involvement in theft of aid money and drug trafficking. On Tuesday the attorney general's office announced the detention of president Hamid Karzai's senior adviser Noorullah Delawari but hours later it denied he was arrested, saying simply that he had been taken to a detention centre to meet Qasimi, raising questions about possible government intervention.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghanistan’s reasons for optimism
Washington Post By Craig Charney, and and James Dobbins Thursday, March 31,2011
Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. Behind this figure is a prevalent pessimism that the war is unwinnable.
Curiously, most Afghans have a very different view. In fact, Afghans in general are much more optimistic about their future than we Americans are about ours. Fully 59 percent of Afghans think their country is moving in the right direction, the most recent published poll found in November, vs. 28 percent of Americans who feel that way now about the United States. Asked a version of Ronald Reagan’s classic question — Are you better off today than five years ago? — 63 percent of Afghans say yes. In America, consumer confidence has edged up in recent months but is still down 40 points since 2007.
Americans picture Afghan President Hamid Karzai as illegitimate, inept and corrupt; believe that the surge of U.S. and NATO troops is failing; and see Afghan forces as graft-ridden incompetents.
Yet Karzai’s government enjoys a 62 percent approval rating in his country, while he personally was viewed positively by 82 percent of his compatriots in November.
Afghan support for American forces had fallen a bit over the past year but was still at 62 percent, much better than the 31 percent of Americans who support troop commitment. The Taliban, by contrast, was viewed unfavorably by nine in 10 Afghans — while eight of 10 Afghans expressed confidence in the Afghan National Army.
How to explain this surprising (to Americans) optimism on the part of the Afghan population? One merely has to look at some of the underlying realities.
Since 2001, when U.S. troops overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan’s gross domestic product has tripled. This puts Afghanistan on a par with China in its double-digit economic growth rate, though from a much lower base.
In 2001 there were 1 million Afghan children in school — almost all boys. This year more than 8 million children will attend school — a third of them girls. Afghanistan’s dismal literacy rate will triple over the next decade as these children complete their education.
Now, 80 percent of Afghans have access to basic health-care facilities, almost twice as many as in 2005. Infant mortality has dropped by a third, and adult longevity is rising.
Perhaps most remarkable, half of Afghan families now have telephones, thanks to the cellphone explosion since 2001. Almost no one had a phone a decade ago.
Polling confirms that Afghans are very troubled by official corruption, but they don’t compare their government to Switzerland’s. If they look abroad, they look at their neighbors — Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, China, Pakistan and Iran — and see systems generally far less accountable than their own. Mostly, however, they look to their own past and realize that this is the best they have had it for decades and that life continues to improve.
This outlook is also evident in the areas where NATO and Afghan forces have been most active. In Helmand Province, the surge’s epicenter, killings attributed to the Taliban dropped by half between January 2009 and November 2010.
As violence declined in Helmand, normalcy began returning and markets reopened. Three in five residents reported good economic opportunities in November; only one in five did before the surge.
Afghans are also very concerned about still-rising violence, but they put that in context. In March, the United Nations announced that 2,700 Afghan civilians were killed last year, most by insurgents. That annual figure would have been a bad week in Iraq back in 2006. It would be a bad month in Mexico today.
Recent levels of violence do not compare to the levels that Afghans experienced in the 1980s and ’90s. War with the Russians and then among Afghans drove vast numbers of citizens out of the country. The Afghan refugee flow is still on balance back into the country.
If Afghans are more optimistic about the future than Americans are, it is because they make their judgments the same way Americans do, by comparing their present circumstances to their past and projecting that trend forward. The difference is that most Afghans are better off now than in the recent past, while most Americans are not. Consequently, they are optimistic — and we are the opposite. This also helps explain the drop in American support for the war, which says a lot more about how Americans view their prospects than how the Afghans view theirs.
Craig Charney, president of Charney Research, has polled in Afghanistan since 2003. James Dobbins is director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at Rand Corp. and served as the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan from 2001 to 2002.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Six U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan operation near Pakistan border
Washington Post By Greg Jaffe Thursday, March 31,2011
A large-scale helicopter-borne assault into a remote, insurgent-held sanctuary near the border with Pakistan left six U.S. soldiers dead in heavy fighting with Afghan and Pakistani insurgents, U.S. officials said.
The operation, which was continuing Thursday, was designed to drive back the enemy in the remote and mountainous border region. One Afghan soldier was also killed in the assault.
The deaths show the difficulty U.S. troops have faced in stemming the violence in Kunar province, which has been one of the most violent regions of Afghanistan since 2005. The current U.S. strategy, which focuses on major population centers, has led the U.S. military to shift emphasis away from the province and pull some troops out of its remote valleys.
Violence levels throughout Kunar remain among the highest in Afghanistan.
The area in eastern Kunar province where the six soldiers were killed has long been a problem for U.S. forces because of its proximity to the largely ungoverned regions of Pakistan’s tribal areas. In June, about 600 soldiers from the battalion involved in this week’s operation killed about 150 fighters in the same valley. Two U.S. soldiers were killed in that assault.
After the summer operation, U.S. commanders tried to establish an Afghan police station in Daridam, one of the main villages in the remote valley, but the Afghan police abandoned the area when U.S. troops returned to their nearby bases.
“We built them a station,” Lt. Col. J.B. Vowell, the local commander, said in an interview late last year. “We slung in a container, cut windows in it and surrounded it with barriers and sandbags. The police were too scared the Taliban were going to come back and kill them. . . . The people are still timid, and the police are timid.”
In this week’s assault, U.S. forces pushed deeper into the valley and closer to the Pakistan border than they had in years, killing large numbers of enemy fighters and uncovering several significant weapons caches, a U.S. military official said.
The six soldiers killed were Sgt. 1st Class Ofren Arrechaga, Staff Sgt. Frank E. Adamski, Spec. Jameson L. Lindskog, Staff Sgt. Bryan A. Burgess, Pfc. Dustin J. Feldhaus and Pvt. Jeremy P. Faulkner.
Arrechaga’s wife, Seana Arrechaga, was included in a Washington Post story this year about the stress that Army spouses at Fort Campbell, Ky., endure when their husbands are deployed.
jaffeg@washpost.com
Back to Top
Back to Top
Hungary prolongs stay of troops in Afghanistan
BUDAPEST, March 31 (Xinhua) -- Hungary has prolonged the stay of its troops in Afghanistan, the Hungarian Defense Ministry announced in Budapest on Thursday.
A statement circulated by the ministry said that the cabinet had extended the mandate of its Provincial Reconstruction Team stationed in Puli Khumri until October 1, 2011. The 240-member Hungarian force has been handling reconstruction projects, peacekeeping, patrolling, guard duty and convoy accompaniment in Baghlan Province since 2006.
At the same time, it has extended the mandate of the Air Mentor Team, which is focused on training the Afghan Air Force, until May 1, 2012. This team is charged with training and mentoring Afghan forces, in keeping with NATO objectives. Their goal at this point is to assist in training the Afghan armed forces to become self- sustaining in maintaining the country's national security, the statement said.
The Hungarian-American Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team mandate, a cooperation effort between the Ohio National Guard and a Hungarian unit that is also focused on promoting a self- sustaining Afghan force, was extended until August 31, 2012. This team, made up of law enforcement and military personnel, includes 30 Hungarians and one of its tasks has been to secure Kabul Airport.
There are also 50 staff officers. Sixteen Hungarians are serving in Special Operations under U.S. command where they are involved in reconnaissance and other actions.
To date four Hungarians have been killed in the line of duty.
The statement underlined that Hungary's policy towards Afghanistan was unchanged.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghan Taliban stressed by killings, arrests, officials say
New York Times By CARLOTTA GALL Friday, April 1, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The Afghan Taliban are showing signs of increasing strain after a number of killings, arrests and internal disputes that have affected them even in their Pakistan haven, Afghan security officials and Afghans with contacts in the Taliban say.
The killings, coming just as the insurgents are mobilizing for the new fighting season in Afghanistan, have unnerved many in the Taliban and have spread a climate of paranoia and distrust within the insurgent movement, the Afghans said.
Three powerful Taliban commanders were killed in February in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, well known to be the command center of the Taliban leadership, according to an Afghan businessman and a mujahedeen commander from the region with links to the Taliban. A fourth commander, a former Taliban minister, was wounded in the border town of Chaman in March, in a widely reported shooting.
There have also been several arrests in Pakistan of senior Taliban commanders, including those from Zabul and Kabul provinces and the shadow governor of Herat, Afghan officials said. Mullah Agha Muhammad, a brother of Mullah Baradar, the former Taliban second in command who was arrested by Pakistan security forces over a year ago to stop him from negotiating with the Afghan government, was also detained briefly to send out the same warning, said the chief of the Afghan border police in Kandahar, Col. Abdul Razziq.
While the arrests have been conducted by Pakistani security forces, no one seems to know for sure who is behind the killings. Members of the Taliban attribute them to U.S. spies, running Pakistani and Afghan agents, in an extension of the U.S. campaigns that have used night raids to track down and kill scores of midlevel Taliban commanders in Afghanistan and drone strikes to kill militants with links to al-Qaida in Pakistan's tribal areas.
Others, including Pakistani and Afghan Parliament members from the region, say that the Pakistani intelligence agencies have long used threats, arrests and killings to control the Taliban and that they could be doing so again to maintain their influence over the insurgents.
Afghan officials in Kabul denied any involvement in attacks on the Taliban inside Pakistan, as did U.S. and NATO military officials. "We've heard of infighting that reportedly has led to internal violence at several points in recent months," one senior U.S. military official said of the Taliban, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of discussing events in Pakistan. Military forces were not involved, he added.
The three commanders killed in Quetta last month all led units fighting in Marjah, in Helmand, the southern Afghan province where U.S. Marines have struggled to establish security after more than a year of counterinsurgency operations.
One of the commanders was Hajji Khalil, in his late 30s, who commanded several groups of fighters in Marjah, according to Baz Gul Khan, a pro-government militia leader in Marjah. "He was famous in all of Marjah," Khan said. "He had about 300 men or more."
Khan said the killings were a sign that the Taliban was in decline. "We have a saying, that when a goat becomes sick, he attracts every disease," he said. "I think the Taliban have lost momentum, they are losing the fight and so the Pakistanis do not need them and so they will kill them."
Back to Top
Back to Top
Losses in Pakistani Haven Strain Afghan Taliban
New York Times By CARLOTTA GALL March 31, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The Afghan Taliban are showing signs of increasing strain after a number of killings, arrests and internal disputes that have reached them even in their haven in Pakistan, Afghan security officials and Afghans with contacts in the Taliban say.
The killings, coming just as the insurgents are mobilizing for the new fighting season in Afghanistan, have unnerved many in the Taliban and have spread a climate of paranoia and distrust within the insurgent movement, the Afghans said.
Three powerful Taliban commanders were killed in February in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, well known to be the command center of the Taliban leadership, according to an Afghan businessman and a mujahedeen commander from the region with links to the Taliban. A fourth commander, a former Taliban minister, was shot four times by unidentified assailants in the border town of Chaman in March, and survived.
There have also been several arrests in Pakistan of senior Taliban commanders, including those from Zabul and Kabul Provinces, and the shadow governor of Herat, Afghan officials said. Mullah Agha Muhammad, a brother of Mullah Baradar, the former second in command of the Taliban who was arrested by Pakistani security forces over a year ago to stop him from negotiating with the Afghan government, was also held briefly to send the same warning, said the chief of the Afghan border police in Kandahar, Col. Abdul Razziq.
While the arrests have been conducted by Pakistan security forces, it is not clear who is behind the killings. Members of the Taliban attribute them to American spies, running Pakistani and Afghan agents, in an extension of the American campaigns that have used night raids to track down and kill scores of midlevel Taliban commanders in Afghanistan and drone strikes to kill militants with links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Others, including Pakistani and Afghan Parliament members from the region, say that the Pakistani intelligence agencies have long used threats, arrests and killings to control the Taliban and that they could be doing so again to maintain their influence over the insurgents.
Afghan officials in Kabul denied any involvement in attacks on the Taliban inside Pakistan, as did American and NATO military officials. “We’ve heard of infighting that reportedly has led to internal violence at several points in recent months,” one senior American military official said of the Taliban, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of discussing events in Pakistan. Military forces were not involved, he added.
Whatever the case, Taliban commanders and fighters, who used to be a common sight in parts of Quetta, have now gone underground and are not moving around openly as before. Two members of the Taliban, including a senior official, declined to talk about the issue of killings on the telephone, saying it was too dangerous. Many will not answer their phones at all.
The Taliban have been under stress since American forces doubled their presence in southern Afghanistan last year and greatly increased the number of special forces raids aimed at hunting down Taliban commanders. Yet they still control a number of remote districts, and in those areas the insurgents can still muster forces to storm government positions, as demonstrated by their capture of a district in Afghanistan’s eastern Nuristan Province this week.
While there is still some debate over the insurgents’ overall strength, Pakistanis with deep knowledge of the Afghan Taliban say that they have suffered heavy losses in the last year and that they are struggling in some areas to continue the fight.
“The Afghan Taliban have, I think, run into problems,” said Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former Pakistani interior minister who served as ambassador in Afghanistan after 2001 and as a peace negotiator with the Taliban.
“So many of them have been killed in the last one to one and a half years as a consequence of targeted assassinations,” he said in an interview. “That has depleted the strength, capacity and ability of the Taliban.” Commanders were without communications and resources and were struggling to find recruits to replace those killed, he said.
One Taliban commander from Kunar Province said losses had been so high that he was considering going over to the side of the Afghan government in order to get assistance for his beleaguered community. “This does not mean the Taliban will stop fighting, but maybe it will be at a reduced level,” Mr. Mohmand said.
Insurgents have already switched tactics to suicide attacks on soft targets — such as recent attacks on a bank, an army recruitment center and a construction company that all caused high casualties — because they are not capable of confronting American and NATO forces in conventional battles, said Samina Ahmed, director of the International Crisis Group in Pakistan.
The Taliban have always been able to survive temporary setbacks on the battlefield by pulling back to Pakistan, where many have homes and businesses. Fighters have also found sanctuary and medical care in the anonymity of the refugee camps where over a million Afghans have lived for a generation through Afghanistan’s various wars, and in the outlying suburbs of Pakistani cities like Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi.
Yet Pakistan has become a much more uncertain environment for the Taliban as the new civilian government is openly hostile to them, the military seeks to control them and influence any future settlement they make with Kabul, and the United States increases its attacks in Pakistan, two former ambassadors, Lakhdar Brahimi and Thomas Pickering, who lead an International Task Force on Afghanistan, reported last week.
In the anti-American spy mania that seized Pakistan after an American working for the C.I.A., Raymond A. Davis, shot and killed two men in the city of Lahore on Jan. 27, Pakistani officials and politicians have accused the C.I.A. of running numerous covert programs around the country.
A Pakistani intelligence official confirmed that C.I.A. operatives were using their own local agents to target Qaeda-linked militants with drones in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and speculated that they could be trying to expand that campaign to reach other Pakistani militants and Afghan Taliban inside Pakistan.
The C.I.A. has been formulating such a plan for months, according to two former Afghan security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the covert nature of their work. The Americans have been using tribesmen, including members of the Taliban they have turned, to attack other Taliban groups in the border areas, one official said.
But others, including officials on both sides of the border, said it could be the work of Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.
“Their method is brutality,” Abdul Rahim Mandokhail, a Pakistani senator from the southwestern border region near Quetta, said of the ISI. “If there is only a little opposition, their method is to kill the man,” he said.
A Pakistani government official working in the border region said both American and Pakistani intelligence agencies favored different insurgent groups and were striking at each other’s.
The three commanders killed in Quetta last month all led units fighting in Marja, in Helmand, the southern Afghan province where American Marines have struggled to establish security after more than a year of counterinsurgency operations.
One of the commanders was Hajji Khalil, in his late 30s, who commanded several groups of fighters in Marja, according to Baz Gul Khan, a pro-government militia leader in Marja. “He was famous in all of Marja,” Mr. Khan said. “He had about 300 men or more.”
Hajji Khalil was killed in his own house, by two men who appeared to be Taliban who stayed the night with him in his guest room. The two men left unseen by the street entrance, and the next morning Hajji Khalil’s family found him slain in the room, an Afghan businessman who is close to the Taliban said.
Another commander, known as Mansour, was gunned down while riding his motorbike along Saryab Road west of the city. He led up to five units of men in Marja and operated out of a rented house in Quetta, a clear sign that he enjoyed the patronage of the ISI, the businessman said.
He did not know the name of the third Taliban commander who was killed but said that he was also from Marja and that he was responsible for communication between the senior Taliban and the fighters.
The militia leader, Mr. Khan, said the killings were a sign that the Taliban was in decline. “We have a saying, that when a goat becomes sick, he attracts every disease,” he said. “I think the Taliban have lost momentum, they are losing the fight, and so the Pakistanis do not need them and so they will kill them,” he said.
American, NATO and Afghan officials said Taliban leaders are struggling to adapt to the pressures on the movement after heavy losses on the battlefield last year and are finding commanders reluctant to return to Afghanistan to fight.
“Almost 900 were killed last year,” a senior Afghan security official said. “And now the commanders are telling their leaders, ‘You have a nice life, your kids are in school, you are going on trips to Dubai, and you are telling us to go and fight?’ ”
Carlotta Gall reported from Kabul, and from Islamabad, Pakistan. Employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kabul, and from southern Afghanistan.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Germany Provides Multi-Million Dollar Funding to Afghanistan
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 31 March 2011
Germany on Thursday announced more than $186 million funding aid to Afghanistan as part of Germany's efforts to improve Afghans' living standards.
Officials in Afghan finance ministry said the funding will be spent on fundamental projects within the framework of commitments made in Kabul International Conference.
Germany's new funding aid is expected to be spent mainly on road construction, electricity, education and economy projects in Afghan villages.
The money is part of Germany's commitment to projects that should be implemented under the will of Afghans, Afghan Finance Minister Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal said.
"The agreement is based on commitments made in the Kabul Conference," Mr Zakhilwal said.
Dirk Niebel, Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, said this is for implementation of goals set in Kabul International Conference and to help Afghanistan reach them.
This is our second aid funding package and we hope the money is spent in a proper way so that Afghan living standards are improved, Dirk Niebel said.
Germany has pledged two billion dollars to Afghanistan and has so far given a big part of the figure.
With close to 5,000 service members in the field in Afghanistan, Germany is the third biggest troop contributing country to Nato-led mission after United States and Britain.
Bulk of the German troops are stationed in northern parts of the country and it has lost 49 soldiers since the beginning of its mission here.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Malalai Joya's journey west
The Afghan activist has become a celebrated critic of US policy, but her status abroad has cost her legitimacy in her homeland
Guardian.co.uk Nushin Arbabzadah Thursday 31 March 2011
Malalai Joya's article about the US kill team in Afghanistan expressed the disgust of many if not all Afghans, but her categorical rejection of the US intervention in Afghanistan is unfair. After all, without US intervention, Joya would not have been able to own a passport, let alone travel abroad. Equally, without the international community's interference, there would not have been the 2003 Loya Jerga where she first gained international fame. Joya's anti-US military rhetoric resonates with the leftist circles of the west who are her chief audience, and Joya's celebrity status reached a climax recently when she appeared alongside Noam Chomsky in Boston. Back home in Afghanistan, though, she has become irrelevant.
But to understand Joya's contradictory views, we need to look at how her career began and developed. Let's go back to the constitutional Loya Jerga of 2003 when Joya first became famous. At the time, she was an independent voice and had the audacity to make a relevant, but politically explosive comment. She said that the inclusion of war criminals threatened to undermine the assembly's legitimacy with Afghans risking to miss out of a historical chance for justice. Morally, she was absolutely right; but the truth was that, after two decades of violence, it was inevitable that the leaders that had emerged owed their power to war.
The international community had to work with what was there – and what was there was war leaders with dubious human rights records. To exclude them from the assembly was unreasonable because it would have driven them to start a new war front. Including them in the assembly meant that the Taliban remained the sole insurgents while the former mujahedin stopped fighting and began a new government. It was a morally flawed but pragmatic solution. Joya was driven by a burning desire for justice – pragmatism has never been her strength.
Joya's outspoken comment took the assembly by surprise. It was up to the assembly leader, Sebghatullah Mojaddedi, to diffuse the situation because he was older and more experienced. But Mojaddedi took offence and ordered Joya to leave the assembly. He then changed his mind and struck a gentler note, "Come back, child, you owe us an apology." But it was too late: the old man had lost the young woman. And with that, Joya lost a chance to fully develop her potential and work on the kind of constructive and reconciliatory politics that Afghanistan needed.
Since then, Joya's career as MP has been marked by repeats of that crucial early scene of her, a young woman, confronting old jihadi men. The location shifted from the Loya Jerga tent to parliament, but Joya and her jihadi nemesis remained stuck in an endless cycle of accusation and counter-accusation. The Afghan audiences found the confrontations first interesting, then amusing and finally lost interest in them altogether. By then, Joya was ousted from parliament, but her career abroad was beginning to flourish. Her book tour of the US is part of this development.
The tragedy of Joya is that she was spotted by the international media and a clandestine radical leftist Afghan organisation at a time when Afghan democracy was in its infancy. At the time, Afghan human rights groups had not yet developed fully to give Joya the kind of support she needed. Isolated and vulnerable, she became an easy prey and was picked up by a group whose politics were steeped in the anti-imperialist revolutionary world of the 1960s and 70s ideological battles. Joya has served as a respectable front for a group that otherwise has little backing in Afghanistan. Joya's recurrent reference to "warlords in the pay of the US" are all about the group's bitterness that Washington allied itself with the group's Islamists rivals in the 1980s, enabling them to defeat the left. The alliance was abandoned between 1992 and 2001, but resumed fully with the 2001 intervention. Little wonder, then, that the group felt doubly betrayed by Washington.
But Joya's sudden fame in the west offered the group an unexpected chance to turn the tables and use Joya's popularity abroad to give her legitimacy to attack the group's jihadi nemesis in parliament. Joya's confrontations often came out of the blue. During a session about trade, Joya raised her hand but instead of asking questions about trade, she questioned the mujahedin's legitimacy. The speaker cautioned her that her comments were irrelevant because the session was about trade, but the damage was done and the session disrupted. Joya's disruptions of parliament eerily resembled similar incidents of leftwing versus rightwing fights that interrupted parliament in the 1960s. The resemblance is natural because the parties involved were the same old leftist comrades versus rightwing Islamist brothers. Joya has become simply a new player in an old political dynamic.
This also explained the intensity of the jihadis' reaction to Joya. After all, criticising warlords was nothing unusual by 2007. But Joya was re-opening old wounds. Her repeated reference to the internal wars of the 1990s was the group's message that the jihadi victory was not complete since they had failed to cement it through establishing a solid state.
Needless to say, such nuances have been lost on the western media who presented Joya's provocations as a woman's struggle for rights and democracy. The thought that her disruption of parliament was evidence of an anti-democratic attitude on her part did not occur to them. After all, in the simplistic world of western politics, a young woman fighting bearded old men simply cannot be wrong.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghanistan: India's Uncertain Road
By Jyoti Thottam in Gurgaon time.com 31/03/2011
From the fourth floor of an office building in Gurgaon, a northern Indian city of tangled highways, yammering call centers and wandering livestock, Sanjay Gupta plays a bit part in the Great Game. His company, C&C Constructions, first ventured into Afghanistan in 2002. It started with a road from Kandahar to Spin Boldak, and then another one from Kandahar to Kabul. Over the past eight years, C&C has built more than 700 km of roads — worth about $250 million — and has subcontracted with USAID, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. "It's good to see a country getting built," Gupta says. "We also feel we contributed."
C&C's grandest project is the $125 million, bronze-domed Afghan parliament building. Funded by the Indian government and scheduled to be finished at the end of 2011, it will be the most prominent symbol of Indian efforts to help Afghanistan. But it may also be, at least for the time being, one of the last sizable manifestations of India's $1.3 billion aid program. After a series of attacks targeting India's presence in Afghanistan — including bombings of the Indian embassy in 2008 and 2009 — India is scaling back. Pakistan resents India's presence in its backyard, and Indian companies like C&C fear they can no longer guarantee the safety of their workers. "There are elements who don't want the Indian presence there," says Gupta. "Maybe it's time to wind up."
Or maybe it's just the beginning of a regional power struggle. With the U.S. looking for an exit, India is trying to figure out what its role in Afghanistan's uncertain future will be. U.S. counterinsurgency strategy aims to "clear, hold, build and transfer" a stable Afghanistan back to its people. The Indian government hopes to aid the "build and transfer" part of that effort by helping to develop Afghanistan's infrastructure and institutions.
Whatever New Delhi does, it can expect truculent opposition from archrival Pakistan, which has long tried to influence what happens in Afghanistan, primarily to ensure that the country's power players are friendly to Islamabad. Its suspicion of India's regional intentions is plainly revealed in several cables released by WikiLeaks. In a September 2009 missive, Anne Patterson, then the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, wrote that a closer U.S.-India military relationship "feeds Pakistani establishment paranoia and pushes them closer to both Afghan and Kashmir-focused terrorist groups." In a cable describing a Feb. 16 meeting with U.S. Senator John Kerry, Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is quoted saying that to gain Pakistan's trust India would have to "decrease its footprint in Afghanistan." Pakistan's press routinely accuses India of sending in spies in the guise of doctors and engineers, and Islamabad claims that India's four consulates are bases for espionage and for funneling aid to separatist rebe
ls in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. Pervez Musharraf, a former Pakistani President, is convinced New Delhi is responsible for providing insurgents with weapons. "The Afghans have nothing," he told Time, "so it must be the Indians."
Softly, Softly The Indians deny those claims and counter that their presence in Afghanistan is actually quite small. There are no Indian troops in the country, other than paramilitary guards at the embassy and consulates. The number of Indian nationals in Afghanistan is fairly modest too: around 3,000. They work for companies like C&C, for international aid agencies or directly for the Indian government. Indians have built a 400-km power-transmission line that carries electricity to Kabul. They have also established field clinics, a midday-meal program for 2 million schoolchildren and a children's hospital, the Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health. To New Delhi, this is all part of a long and evolving relationship with Afghanistan — what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calls "enduring civilizational links."
Both countries fought for independence from Britain (won in 1919 in Afghanistan's case, 1947 in India's), and both at first tried to develop their rural economies using socialist central planning. India supported the Soviet-backed regime of Mohammed Najibullah, giving asylum to his family, as well as to thousands of other Afghan refugees, after he was executed by the Taliban in 1996. India then backed the Northern Alliance of mujahedin against the Taliban. Even when the Taliban won, India let the Northern Alliance maintain the only Afghan diplomatic mission in New Delhi. That has not been forgotten. In a region where so many great powers have come and gone, India has credibility as a country that sticks around. Abdul Salam Rocketi, a former member of the Taliban and a 2009 presidential candidate, believes that India, like Pakistan as well as Iran, "wants to play in the Afghan sandbox," but in the process "won't try to destroy Afghanistan."
At the same time, many Afghans, even those who otherwise welcome Indian aid, fear that an overtly assertive India will lead to further instability and violence. Several Indian doctors were killed in February 2010 bombings at two guesthouses in Kabul that were widely attributed to insurgents working at the behest of Pakistan. And although India does not have troops in Afghanistan, Afghans worry that proposals for the Indian army to train local security forces would be a dangerous provocation to Pakistan. Islamabad, Rocketi says, "will see it as a threat and could react negatively." Musharraf, a retired general, echoes the sentiment of the Pakistani military. "India is trying to create an anti-Pakistan Afghanistan," he says. "Afghanistan is under the influence of India."
Staying Fluid A potentially potent means of Indian influence is education. More than 1,000 Afghan students go to India every year on scholarships provided by the Indian government; this year, that program was expanded to include 300 postgraduate fellowships in agriculture. Writers and artists benefit from the India-Afghanistan Foundation, a cultural and academic exchange program that gives small grants. This and other educational programs help India cultivate ties with the elite of every Afghan ethnic group. With Afghan President Hamid Karzai's position increasingly tenuous, such initiatives help India shore up political alternatives to the Taliban.
India, however, must also decide how it will deal with the Taliban itself. It had no relations with the Taliban regime in the 1990s and still holds the Taliban responsible for a 1999 humiliation, in which Pakistan-backed jihadis hijacked an Indian airliner and, through Taliban mediation, successfully obtained the release of three prisoners held in India, including one of the alleged planners of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. If the Taliban, which is widely believed to have ties to elements of Pakistan's security apparatus, returns to power, "Where does that leave Indian strategy?" asks Amitabh Mattoo, a director of the India-Afghanistan Foundation. "All this investment could vaporize quite fast."
One measure of India's urgent search for options is that it seeks dialogue with ethnic Pashtuns, the Taliban's base. "We don't have contact with [the Taliban], but without labeling them, we are ready to talk to anyone who is willing to talk to us," says a senior Indian official. Some analysts interpret this shift as opening the door to changing India's long-standing policy of refusing to deal with the Taliban. The London Conference in January 2010, in which the U.S. and NATO resolved to include the Taliban in any political solution, has partly forced India's hand. Says Suba Chandran, deputy director at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi: "If there is a future crisis involving Kabul, as happened 10 years ago after the hijacking of [the] Indian Airlines flight, New Delhi will be left stranded with no linkages within the government."
India has other reasons to be on good terms with whoever controls Afghanistan. The source of India's status as an emerging power is economic growth, for which it needs affordable energy. A stable, friendly Afghanistan would be a vital link between Central Asia's huge natural-gas reserves, through Iran, to Indian markets. India has already funded a 218-km road reaching from central Afghanistan to the Iranian border; it is now investing in improvements to the Iranian port at Chabahar. (C&C is already using Iran's Chabahar and Bandar Abbas ports to transport its heavy equipment to Afghanistan.) "Trade, transit and energy" are as important to India as security, says Gautam Mukhopadhaya, India's ambassador to Afghanistan.
As India tries a lighter touch in Afghanistan, it may extend a heavier hand elsewhere. "Looking at the American military cooperation with India," said South Asia expert Stephen P. Cohen in a recent Brookings Institution speech, "we see the most fruitful arena to be at sea." India plans to commission its first nuclear submarine, the I.N.S. Arihant, or "Destroyer of Enemies," sometime next year, and the U.S. is keen to sell India some of its military technology, not least to forestall China's growing might.
In other words, India may have the option of lowering its profile in Afghanistan for the chance to dominate, with U.S. backing, the Indian Ocean. China has already made its move, funding the expansion of the Pakistani port of Gwadar into a deep-sea facility and naval base, and of a new port at Hambantota in Sri Lanka, a country that has traditionally been much closer to India. Kanti Bajpai, a professor of international politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, puts it this way: "Wherever the Great Game is, you can't afford to not be a player."
Back to Top
Disclaimer:
This news site is mostly a compilation of publicly accessible articles
on the Web in the form of a link or saved news item. The news articles
and commentaries/editorials are protected under international copyright
laws. All credit goes to the original respective source(s).