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Taliban free hundreds in brazen Afghan jailbreak
By Ahmad Nadeem
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Hundreds of prisoners escaped from a jail in Afghanistan's south on Monday through a tunnel dug by Taliban insurgents, officials said, a "disaster" for the Afghan government and a setback for foreign forces planning to start a gradual withdrawal within months.
WikiLeaks Files Reveal Many In Guantanamo 'Not Dangerous'
April 25, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Classified U.S. documents released by WikiLeaks have revealed the United States held dozens of innocent men for years at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
The mirage of an Afghanistan exit
By Jackson Diehl The Washington Post Sunday, April 24, 8:30 PM
Afghanistan has been mostly out of the headlines the last few months, in part because its winter freezes most fighting and in part because it’s been overshadowed by the Arab revolutions. As warmer weather brings back both the war and the debate over policy in Washington, the starting point could be summarized this way: Thanks to the U.S. military, the Taliban has been driven out of most of its southern strongholds since last summer.
Abdullah urges India to continue good work in Afghanistan
Press Trust of India / Washington April 25, 2011, 10:23 IST
Afghanistan's former foreign minister and opposition leader Dr Abdullah Abdullah has appreciated India's role in post-Taliban period and said that it should continue with its good work in his war-torn country.
Karzai Says no to US Permanent Military Bases
Tolo news April 24, 2011
President Hamid Karzai has refused to accept establishment of US permanent military bases in Afghanistan, Interior Minister said on Sunday.
Senators Call on Afghan Defence Minister to Resign
Tolo news April 24, 2011
Once again Afghan Senate House has urged Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak to step down.
Taliban behind brutal Afghan bank attack unrepentant
24/04/2011 BBC News
In one of the most brutal Taliban attacks in nearly 10 years of war in Afghanistan, a gunman entered a bank in the eastern city of Jalalabad on 19 February and shot dead 42 Afghans, including women and children. The killer and the man who recruited him have spoken to the BBC's Quentin Sommerville.
Pakistan re-opens NATO supply route
(AFP) – April 24, 2011
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — NATO can resume supplying its troops in Afghanistan through a key Pakistani route on Monday after protesters against US drone strikes lifted a blockade, an official said.
Afghan military uniforms confiscated
April 25, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 25 (UPI) -- The Afghan military has confiscated more than 10,000 Afghan uniforms and pieces of equipment to prevent them from being used by insurgents, officials said.
New York Theater Troupe Tours Afghanistan To Entertain, Inform, And Allay Fears
April 25, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Nikola Krastev
NEW YORK – New York City is some 10,000 kilometers from Afghanistan, but a small Manhattan-based theater company has made the trip several times over the last decade as part of a mission to bridge cultural divides and bring a taste of the arts to the war-ravaged country.
The Jihadi High School
Recruiters in this Afghan refugee camp don’t wait for graduation before sending kids to the front lines.
Newsweek By Ron Moreau April 24, 2011
The young Afghan hates his new school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. “My classmates only talk about girls and movies,” he complains. A tall, thin 17-year-old with the straggly beginnings of a beard, he yearns for the high school he used to attend, a few miles away in the Afghan refugee camp known as Shamshatoo.
23 Plants to Open in N Industrial Parks
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 24 April 2011
Around 23 plants are expected to start operating in Goormar industrial park in northern Mazar-e-Sharif, industrial officials in the north said on Sunday.
In Afghanistan’s Panjwaii fields the poppies grow
The Globe and Mail Sunday, Apr. 24, 2011
BAZAR-E-PANJWAII, AFGHANISTAN - In Panjwaii fields the poppies grow.
Their delicate shades of pastel mauve and pink providing a defiant splash of colour set off against startlingly green grape fields or an otherwise drab brown vista.
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Taliban free hundreds in brazen Afghan jailbreak
By Ahmad Nadeem
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Hundreds of prisoners escaped from a jail in Afghanistan's south on Monday through a tunnel dug by Taliban insurgents, officials said, a "disaster" for the Afghan government and a setback for foreign forces planning to start a gradual withdrawal within months.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai's chief spokesman told a news conference the incident, in which many Taliban commanders were said to have escaped, exposed serious vulnerabilities in the Afghan government.
"This is a blow, it is something that should not have happened. We are looking into finding out ... what exactly happened and what is being done to compensate for the disaster that happened in the prison," spokesman Waheed Omer said.
Tooryalai Wesa, governor of volatile southern Kandahar province, told Reuters 488 prisoners escaped due to the negligence of Afghan security forces at the province's main jail. He said the tunnel led to a nearby house.
General Ghulam Dastgir, the governor in charge of the jail, said the prisoners had all escaped through the tunnel.
"No one managed to escape through the main gate, everybody went out through the tunnel. The insurgents worked on it for some seven months," Dastgir said.
"The Taliban have planted bombs inside the tunnel and it is hard to investigate until the explosives are removed," he said.
HOLE CUT THROUGH CONCRETE
Later on Monday, reporters were taken into the prison to view the opening of the tunnel in one of the cell blocks.
Reuters photographs showed a hole, several feet deep, cut into the concrete floor of one of the cells. The hole, big enough to allow one man to climb down at a time, appeared to be connected to a tunnel.
A large carpet in the cell looked to have been folded back to expose the hole. Police told reporters the insurgents had used car jacks to break through the concrete floor, which was several centimeters thick.
The Taliban said in a statement 541 prisoners escaped through the tunnel which took months to construct, and were later moved in vehicles to safer locations.
It said the prisoners escaped over a four-and-a-half hour period during the night, meaning more than 100 prisoners an hour would have had to crawl out through a tunnel barely large enough to fit one man.
"Mujahideen started digging a 320-meter tunnel to the prison from the south side, which was completed after a five-month period, bypassing enemy checkposts and the Kandahar-Kabul main highway leading directly to the political prison," the Taliban statement said.
"They moved people in several groups. They had a comfortable period of time to move that many people. It's obviously very worrying with the timing around fighting season," said a foreign official in Kandahar with knowledge of the incident.
Wesa said of the 488 who had escaped, 13 were ordinary criminals and the rest were insurgents. Only 26 prisoners had so far been recaptured and two had been killed in a gunfight with security forces, he said.
COLLABORATION?
The prison, touted as one of the most secure in Afghanistan, is on the outskirts of Kandahar city. Analysts said the escape was a serious setback for security, and there was doubt about whether it could have happened without the help of guards.
"It is either a case of the jailers being financially motivated and being bribed, or a case of them being politically motivated," said Waheed Mujhda, a Kabul-based analyst and expert on the Taliban.
Justice Ministry spokesman Farid Ahmad Najibi said he could not rule out the possibility guards had helped in the escape.
Whether the insurgents had all escaped through the tunnel or not, the freeing of hundreds of prisoners, including Taliban militants, is embarrassing for the Afghan government and foreign troops who have trumpeted recent security gains in and around Kandahar after months of heavy fighting, Mujhda said.
Kandahar has been the focus of the U.S.-led military campaign over the past year, with tens of thousands of U.S. and Afghan troops launching offensives around Kandahar city.
The brazen jailbreak also comes months before the start of a transfer of security responsibilities from foreign to Afghan forces in several areas -- including the main city in neighboring Helmand province -- as part of the eventual withdrawal of foreign troops from the country.
Under the transition program, Afghan forces will begin taking over from foreign troops in seven areas this summer and should have control of the whole country by the end of 2014.
While Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, is not among the areas listed for the transition of forces in the first stage, Monday's jailbreak raises serious questions about the readiness of Afghan forces to take over from foreign troops.
The jailbreak also drew comparisons to a similar incident three years earlier. In 2008, Taliban insurgents blew open the gate of the Kandahar prison at night, allowing up to 1,000 inmates, including hundreds of Taliban insurgents, to escape.
Days after that escape, hundreds of Taliban fighters seized villages in districts close to Kandahar and appeared to threaten the city itself, with the government sending more than 1,000 extra troops from the north as reinforcements. Nearly 100 Taliban fighters were killed in the ensuing battle.
(Additional reporting by Ismail Sameem in KANDAHAR and Hamid Shalizi and Rob Taylor in KABUL; Writing by Jonathon Burch; Editing by Paul Tait and Alex Richardson)
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WikiLeaks Files Reveal Many In Guantanamo 'Not Dangerous'
April 25, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Classified U.S. documents released by WikiLeaks have revealed the United States held dozens of innocent men for years at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
The files -- published in several U.S. and European newspapers -- contain information on all 779 people who have passed through the U.S. prison facility since it was opened in 2002.
"The Guardian" -- one of the newspapers who published the files -- says the files show that about 220 detainees were classed as dangerous terrorists but that 150 were innocent Afghans and Pakistanis, including farmers, drivers, and chefs.
It says the files show that another 380 people were deemed to be low-ranking foot soldiers.
The U.S. Defense Department described the leak as "unfortunate" and said many of the assessments are incomplete.
More than two years after President Barack Obama ordered the prison closed, 172 detainees are still being held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.
compiled from agency reports
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The mirage of an Afghanistan exit
By Jackson Diehl The Washington Post Sunday, April 24, 8:30 PM
Afghanistan has been mostly out of the headlines the last few months, in part because its winter freezes most fighting and in part because it’s been overshadowed by the Arab revolutions. As warmer weather brings back both the war and the debate over policy in Washington, the starting point could be summarized this way: Thanks to the U.S. military, the Taliban has been driven out of most of its southern strongholds since last summer.
So in the coming months the Taliban will be trying to get back into Afghanistan. The U.S. military will try to hold on. And President Obama and his civilian political team will be searching desperately for a way out.
Obama will have to decide soon how many American troops to withdraw this summer in keeping with his promise to begin in July to wind down the surge of reinforcements he ordered in late 2009. The Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran has reported that Obama’s civilian aides are pushing for a deadline of fall 2012 for the withdrawal of all of the 30,000 troops he sent. Why fall 2012? Even most Afghans realize the date has nothing to do with their country.
The military drawdown appears likely to be accompanied by a new attempt to promote a political settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promised a “diplomatic surge” in a February speech in which she seemed to soften previous conditions for talks with the Taliban. The administration is said to be quietly encouraging a Turkish initiative to allow the Taliban to open an office in Turkey, which would provide a clear channel for communications.
The idea of a quick political fix is seductive. There’s just one problem: It’s an illusion. Not only is there no chance of striking a workable deal with the Taliban, but the pursuit of one is only likely to make an already difficult political situation in Afghanistan worse.
I was reminded of this last week by Abdullah Abdullah, the former Afghan freedom fighter, foreign minister and presidential candidate — and one of the country’s stronger advocates of political democracy. Abdullah was in Washington to make the case that the United States should keep investing its resources in building a democratic Afghan state.
“My concern is that there is an attitude here that the military campaign, as well as talks with the Taliban, will get us out of this,” Abdullah said during a visit to The Post. “As part of that, a conclusion is being made that in Afghanistan democracy is not needed, or not possible, after all.”
Abdullah, of course, knows very well what evidence can be offered for that conclusion — his own 2009 presidential race against Hamid Karzai was tilted by massive fraud. But the soft-spoken former ophthalmologist says believing in Afghan democracy is more sensible than supposing the Taliban — which has yet to respond positively to many offers of engagement — can be induced to make a political deal. “The Taliban is not fighting this government in order to become part of the system,” he said. “They want to bring the system down.”
Pakistan, which just agreed to set up a commission with the Afghan government to explore peace talks, would be crucial to any deal. The supposition is that its military leaders would push the Taliban chiefs who have been their clients to accept power in Pashtun-populated areas of the south, but leave the rest of the country under something like its present government.
But, Abdullah argues, Pakistan doesn’t really want an Afghan settlement, either. A Taliban-dominated territory could quickly become a base for the fundamentalist factions who aspire to overthrow the government in Islamabad. “Pakistan would like to have the Afghan decision in its hand,” he said. “But what is it they would like to see happen? I don’t think they have an answer.”
Karzai, who has grown steadily more hostile to the United States, may find bargaining with the Taliban and Pakistan preferable to more elections. “Democracy is no longer convenient for him,” Abdullah says. But Karzai still needs a U.S. alliance — in fact, he has been seeking to negotiate a formal agreement with Washington that would lock in U.S. economic and military support for years to come.
So the only workable way forward, Abdullah says, is for the Obama administration to keep investing in Afghan institutions. “What the United States must do is stand firm when it comes to issues of governance. Be consistent on democratic process,” he advises. “Put some conditions on assistance, and don’t back off.
“I know this is difficult, but it is the reality,” Abdullah argues. “You have to deal with the ineffectiveness of the Afghan government, with the local political process. This is the reality. It is a long-term problem.” There is, alas, no easy way out.
diehlj@washpost.com
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Abdullah urges India to continue good work in Afghanistan
Press Trust of India / Washington April 25, 2011, 10:23 IST
Afghanistan's former foreign minister and opposition leader Dr Abdullah Abdullah has appreciated India's role in post-Taliban period and said that it should continue with its good work in his war-torn country.
Currently on a visit to the US to familiarize leaders, officials and think-tanks here about the ground realities in his country and its neighborhood, Abdullah said unlike others India has a clear defined goals in Afghanistan.
"India has defined its goal that a stable Afghanistan with a functioning system, representative government would be in their interest. That is why they have been helping us in development, reconstruction, rehabilitation, capacity building and many things. So India's role is widely appreciated in Afghanistan," Abdullah told PTI.
"Continue the good work," Abdullah said, when asked what else India can do in Afghanistan, besides what it has been doing so far. Chairman of the Coalition for Hope and Change, Abdullah addressed more than a dozen think-tanks, besides meeting top US officials and Congressional leaders here.
"Indian support for Afghanistan is based on the priorities defined by Afghans and the Government of Afghanistan. Also Indian aid has gone directly to the projects, which people can see the benefits of it. It is not just the quantity, but also the quality of assistance which makes it significant," he said.
Abdullah, who lost to Karzai in the 2009 presidential elections, said the purpose of his trip is to familiarize the opinion builders and policy makers in Washington about the ground realities in Afghanistan.
He also addressed the World Islamic Forum Conference held in Washington. "The expectations of the people of Afghanistan are that the support from India continues until Afghanistan is stable. Afghanistan has a system, until it has a functioning system for its own people and in creating of an environment which will not allow terrorism and extremism to take roots," Abdullah said.
Abdullah said that there has always been perception about Pakistani claims that India is indulging in anti- Pakistan activities inside Afghanistan, but this perception is far away from reality.
"They have always raised their concerns. That continues to be a topic of discussion at every meeting which Afghans are having with our Pakistani neighbors," he said.
"We have not seen any sign of their concern that India might use Afghanistan as a launching pad for activities against Pakistan," Abdullah said.
Afghanistan, he said, is obliged to have good ties with all its neighbors and all countries in the region.
Abdullah said no country has the right to veto with respect to Afghanistan's foreign policy.
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Karzai Says no to US Permanent Military Bases
Tolo news April 24, 2011
President Hamid Karzai has refused to accept establishment of US permanent military bases in Afghanistan, Interior Minister said on Sunday.
After the Afghan House of Representatives summoned security officials to brief the house on security situation which is being unprecedentedly worse in recent weeks. Interior Minister and Deputy Defence Minister appeared before parliamentarians to answer some security questions.
Speaking in the commission of domestic security affairs of parliament, Interior Minister Bismellah Mohammadi said currently the focus is more on strategic partnership between Kabul and Washington.
"Nobody accepts the discussion of US permanent military bases and the government also rejects it," Interior Minister Bismellah Mohammadi said.
During the briefing Deputy Defence Minister Enayatullah Nazari said more than 1820 insurgent groups are operating in Afghanistan that are related to bigger insurgent networks.
When asked about defence ministry assailant, Mr Nazari said "one thing is clear for us that the attacker couldn't have entered into the ministry without having a link within the ministry."
Last week on Monday Afghan defence ministry's main building came under attack from a would-be suicide bomber who was shot dead before detonating his explosive vest.
Two Afghan army soldiers along with an ANA officer were killed in the incident.
Once again Interior Minister emphasised that resolving security challenges wouldn't be viable until insurgent havens outside Afghan borders are not demolished.
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Senators Call on Afghan Defence Minister to Resign
Tolo news April 24, 2011
Once again Afghan Senate House has urged Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak to step down.
Urging the Defence officials to brief senators on the recent unprecedented attack on defence ministry, some senators said Defence Minister should be tried because of his shortfalls.
Senate House branded the comments made by Defence Ministry Spokesperson Gen. Zaher Azimi about resignation of defence minister as irresponsible.
Senators said Gen. Azimi should apologise for his comments.
A couple of days ago Gen. Azimi acknowledged this call of senators alike the intention of defence ministry attacker.
Defence minister "should not only resign, but he should also be brought to justice," Hafez Abdul Qayum, Afghan senator, said.
"I think we should make a serious decision and we should convince him that he is the one who should be blamed and that he is no longer of use. He should honourably quit his post," Senator Maulawi Faizi said.
Following a string of attacks by militants' sleeping cells that targeted military institutions, senators are doubtful about the capacities of Afghan security forces to maintain peace and ensure security.
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Taliban behind brutal Afghan bank attack unrepentant
24/04/2011 BBC News
In one of the most brutal Taliban attacks in nearly 10 years of war in Afghanistan, a gunman entered a bank in the eastern city of Jalalabad on 19 February and shot dead 42 Afghans, including women and children. The killer and the man who recruited him have spoken to the BBC's Quentin Sommerville.
There is no sound on the CCTV footage from inside the bank branch on the day of the attack, but the terror of the people inside is plain to see.
Men are seen filing past the gunman, Zara Ajam, who is wearing a policeman's uniform.
As one man passes by, he says something, and is shot on the spot.
Ajam then opens fire on others. People scramble for cover, a man is seen desperately to protect his young son.
Ajam only stopped shooting when he believed he had been shot in the face. In fact, he had been hit by glass from a shattered window.
He removed his suicide vest inside the bank, and then discarded the policeman's uniform and hid among the dead and wounded.
However, he was spotted outside and captured by police. 'Misled'
Ajam confessed to his crime and is now being held by the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), at a prison in Kabul.
President Hamid Karzai has said he should hang for his crime. Ajam claims he was misled.
"I was told in Pakistan that you will kill infidels when you go to Afghanistan and you will be an infidel killer," he told me. "But in Jalalabad I was told that people in the bank were infidels. I enjoyed the killing."
The killer does not know his own age. Poorly educated, he worked in a quarry making gravel in the Waziristan area of Pakistan.
When they hood was removed from his head, he looked confused: he had never seen a camera before, nor had he heard of Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.
But Ajam said he would kill others if given the chance.
"I would kill those infidels who are fighting here in Afghanistan, but I wouldn't kill the innocent."
He was recruited by the Taliban near his home and then, late last year, was taken to a training camp.
During the training an unmanned aircraft fired on the camp. Fourteen militants were killed in the attack, he said.
The man who organised the attack is being held in the same prison.
A one-time shopkeeper, the Taliban gave him the name Mahmood.
The NDS describe him as a dangerous fanatic; he sees himself as a holy warrior. American attacks
He showed Ajam the bank the day before the attack, and supplied him with his weapon and uniform.
The young Pakistani spent the night in his home, during which Mahmood told his family he was visiting the area and looking to buy land.
He has confessed to planning the attack.
"I did it, but it was because of the presence of foreign forces in our country. If they weren't here, why we Afghans would kill each other?" Mahmood told me.
"What I want the foreigners to do for us is to end the tension and problems among all Afghans - make them bring peace and security through talks. Do not bombard us and kill us."
Mahmood said he joined the fight because he "had heard many stories about Americans killing civilians like they bombed many wedding parties".
"You know Americans caused the re-emergence of the Taliban in the east. When the Taliban were ousted in 2001, there wasn't even one Talib left in whole of Kunar province, but see now how many people have joined the Taliban," he added.
But he was unable to explain why the killing of Afghan civilians was justified.
He said he thought they were government employees, or converts to Christianity.
The intelligence services say they capture dozens of would-be suicide bombers every week, but some still make it through.
More Afghan civilians are being killed than ever before.
Ajam said there were 25 men training to carry out attacks in the camp were he was trained.
Both he and Mahmood warned that there would be more attacks, with greater bloodshed to come.
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Pakistan re-opens NATO supply route
(AFP) – April 24, 2011
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — NATO can resume supplying its troops in Afghanistan through a key Pakistani route on Monday after protesters against US drone strikes lifted a blockade, an official said.
Supporters of former cricketer Imran Khan's political party on Sunday ended a two-day sit-in at a Peshawar road, which was called to compel the US to end a covert missile campaign against Islamist militants in Pakistan's tribal belt.
"Peshawar ring road has been cleared and re-opened for vehicular traffic," senior local administration official, Muhammad Siraj Khan told AFP.
Trucks will only be able to use the route from Monday morning because of security reasons, he added.
Imran Khan -- who leads the Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) party -- earlier said his supporters would "block supplies for NATO in different parts of the country if drone attacks are not stopped within one month."
"We will also stage sit-in in Islamabad if the government fails to stop these strikes," he told a crowd of some 5,000 people at the end of the two-day sit-in.
Supporters waved party flags and chanted slogans such as "stop the drone attacks, stop killing innocent people and down with the government," during the speech, an AFP reporter at the scene said.
"We want a sovereign Pakistan," Khan said, adding that "the American people will hold even bigger demonstrations if they come to know that the innocent civilians are being killed in the drone attacks."
The party called the demonstration in protest at US missile attacks from unmanned aircraft in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, which many feel infringe Pakistani sovereignty and which locals say sometimes kill civilians.
The covert strikes targeting militants in Pakistan's lawless border regions, which are believed to be operated with the tacit consent of Islamabad, stoke rampant anti-American sentiment throughout the South Asian nation.
Public anger intensified after a March 17 drone attack killed 39 people including civilians.
NATO supply trucks and oil tankers are the targets of frequent attacks blamed on insurgents attempting to disrupt supplies for the more than 130,000 international troops fighting in Afghanistan.
Most supplies and equipment required by coalition troops in Afghanistan are shipped through Pakistan, although US troops increasingly use alternative routes through central Asia.
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Afghan military uniforms confiscated
April 25, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 25 (UPI) -- The Afghan military has confiscated more than 10,000 Afghan uniforms and pieces of equipment to prevent them from being used by insurgents, officials said.
The articles were taken from shop owners as a result of an attack on the Afghan Ministry of Defense by an insurgent dressed in a military uniform, the International Security Assistance Force said Monday.
Three people died in that attack in which the insurgent was killed before he could detonate a suicide vest he was wearing, the report said.
"During this operation, more than 10,000 uniforms and equipment were seized. ISAF supports these efforts," said German Army Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, a spokesman for the ISAF.
The number of suicide attacks has fallen since 2008 but insurgents have increased attacks on soft and high-profile targets, Blotz said. Soft targets are people who have little or no training, equipment or "situational awareness."
"More than 30 suicide attacks have been directed at soft targets since the beginning of the year," Blotz said. "These attacks are aimed at instilling fear among innocent Afghans."
Blotz said 453 insurgent leaders were captured or killed between Jan. 13 and April 15. He said more than 2,000 mid- or low-level insurgents have been captured and another 500 have been killed.
Blotz also noted a milestone for the Afghan police.
"The Ministry of Interior's legitimate protectors of the local populace -- the Afghan Local Police -- celebrated another milestone yesterday as the first district to receive their official uniforms," Blotz said.
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New York Theater Troupe Tours Afghanistan To Entertain, Inform, And Allay Fears
April 25, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Nikola Krastev
NEW YORK – New York City is some 10,000 kilometers from Afghanistan, but a small Manhattan-based theater company has made the trip several times over the last decade as part of a mission to bridge cultural divides and bring a taste of the arts to the war-ravaged country.
This spring, the tiny Bond Street Theatre is touring Afghanistan for several weeks with a program of workshops focusing on how performances of music, plays, and puppetry can bring important messages to communities. It's called “informational theater.”
Bond Street has teamed up with local theaters in Herat, Kabul, Jalalabad, and Kandahar provinces and is training them in techniques it has already used successfully in rural India and Africa. Its current tour in Afghanistan is being sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Institute For Peace.
Artistic Director Joanna Sherman says the goal is to teach Afghan artists how they can provide educational services and bring information to isolated areas, especially those with large populations of women and children.
“This is specifically to work with theater companies to build their capacity to create this kind of informational theater," Sherman says. "Around the world I’ve seen this kind of informational theater used to carry specific news to areas of high illiteracy.”
Take the issue of vaccinating children against polio. Parents who are illiterate don’t know about the benefits of such a vaccine because they haven’t read brochures or health information sheets, Sherman says. That ignorance may mean they won’t allow their children to be inoculated.
Health organizations that want to bring polio vaccines to a rural community often must first dispel people’s fears about using foreign medicine. A local theater group trained to do just that -- through sketches, songs, or a play -- can explain the benefits and allay fears.
When the medical team arrives, Sherman says, the village is prepared.
“[Theater] gives them a safe area to be able to express themselves," she says. "And if something is really, really difficult to express, we have different techniques theater affords them to be able to express it -- maybe through puppetry or maybe through pantomime. Without using words, sometimes it’s easier.”
Bond Street first traveled to Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and the subsequent U.S.-led military response in Afghanistan. A team from the theater company arrived in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan to entertain and comfort the children living there.
While there, the New York actors met members of Exile Theatre, a group of Afghanistan's finest actors who had fled the Taliban. The two groups forged a partnership that led to a critically acclaimed joint production called "Beyond The Mirror," which depicts Afghan life in wartime as told through first-hand stories.
The production has been performed in Japan, Afghanistan, and the United States.
The gap in access to information is particularly acute in poor and rural communities in Afghanistan and especially among women who are illiterate and isolated from news sources, Sherman says.
“It’s a very mountainous region. There’s not much communication between villages. They don’t have access to information in very many ways," she says. "Many people don’t have electricity. You may have radio, maybe you don't. You hear your news going to the market. It’s really important especially to reach the women because women don’t get the chance to get out very much.”
She says theater is an effective way to present information because it is both visual and verbal, as well as entertaining.
According to the United Nations, the illiteracy rate in rural parts of Afghanistan is as high as 90 percent for women and 63 percent for men.
But it is children, Sherman says, who are the most rewarding audience. Most have grown up around war and most have never seen a play or stage performance. The emotions and reactions they experience while watching theater, she says, can go a long way toward healing the psychological trauma they’ve been through.
“Children have been brought up [in an environment] where violence is the solution to everything," she says. "You want to teach them that there’s another way. Violence doesn’t have to be the solution to everything.”
In other words, sometimes the play’s the thing.
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The Jihadi High School
Recruiters in this Afghan refugee camp don’t wait for graduation before sending kids to the front lines.
Newsweek By Ron Moreau April 24, 2011
The young Afghan hates his new school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. “My classmates only talk about girls and movies,” he complains. A tall, thin 17-year-old with the straggly beginnings of a beard, he yearns for the high school he used to attend, a few miles away in the Afghan refugee camp known as Shamshatoo. His father yanked him out of there last fall, having discovered too late that the school was effectively an insurgent recruiting center. Asking to be called Wahid Khan, the boy fondly recalls the early-morning assemblies where teachers praised the glories of jihad and recounted Afghanistan’s long history of resistance to foreign occupiers. And he remembers the messages scrawled on the blackboards of the upper-grade classrooms: “To Join the Jihad, the Order of Almighty Allah, Call This Number” and “Those Who Want to Repay Their Debt to God, Take This Number.”
When school let out last June, the boy jumped at the invitation and spent much of the summer at an insurgent training camp in Afghanistan. He had just finished 10th grade. His father, a former schoolteacher from Kabul, struggles to feed the family on no more than $100 a month, doing backbreaking work at a brick kiln near Peshawar. He’s determined to give his son a better life. But the boy has other ideas. As soon as this school year ends, he’s planning to head back to Afghanistan to complete his training for the war against the Americans. “My parents only live to survive,” the boy says. “My aim is to live honorably in the eyes of God—and that means jihad.”
Hundreds of boys like Khan have joined the insurgency from Shamshatoo in the past few years, and with spring’s return, fresh reinforcements are once again beginning to stream across the border out of Pakistan. “The reason God brought our family to Shamshatoo was that he wanted me to become a jihadi,” says another camp resident, a broad-shouldered, wild-haired 20-year-old who calls himself Waliullah. He used to write passionate love poems, and his dream was to earn a master’s degree in Pashto literature. But his family moved to Shamshatoo five years ago, when he was 15, and now he’s preparing to leave for his third summer fighting the Americans in Afghanistan.
Roughly 80 Afghan refugee camps are scattered along Pakistan’s western border, but Shamshatoo is different from any other. It’s administered and policed by the refugees who live there rather than by the Pakistani government—and it operates under the aegis of the notorious insurgent warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The camp has been his undisputed domain ever since the early 1980s, when he was a leader in the war against the Soviet occupation and a special favorite of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate. From a mountain redoubt somewhere along the border, he now commands his own anti-U.S. guerrilla army, separate from but fitfully allied with the Taliban and the Haqqani network.
But Hekmatyar’s ISI friends have stood by him, and his word remains law in Shamshatoo. Over the past three decades the camp has become a small city of more than 64,000 inhabitants, with mosques, madrassas, high schools, a university, a hospital, and even two local newspapers—both trumpeting Hekmatyar’s Islamist line. Unlike many of his Taliban partners in jihad, he supports education for girls. But he nevertheless requires women in the camp to wear burqas, and they’re forbidden to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. Playing music in public—even the ringtone on a mobile phone—is banned, as are satellite dishes. And no one is safe from the camp’s informers and enforcers. “You can’t say anything against Hekmatyar or this destructive game in Afghanistan,” says one former resident. “His men are everywhere.” The man moved his family to Peshawar two years ago, fearing that if they stayed in Shamshatoo his two sons would be recruited. “I was worried they’d be brainwashed and disappear,” he says.
That’s a constant risk in Shamshatoo. Refugee families are attracted to its schools, medical facilities, and crime-free security, but their impressionable sons are subjected to a daily barrage of jihadist messages in their schools, at the mosques, on video, in the local media, and on the streets. Even though new recruits are sworn to secrecy, each one who returns home seems to become an unofficial recruiter, merely by the war stories he tells. (Those who spoke to NEWSWEEK asked that we not use their real names; we learned about others by talking to their relatives, who requested anonymity for safety’s sake.) This year Waliullah is going back to Afghanistan with three or four other poets, hoping their battlefield writings will inspire more young Afghans to join the war against the Americans.
Some recruits need no such encouragement: for them it’s an escape route from Shamshatoo. Abdullah, 20, wouldn’t talk to NEWSWEEK, but his family shares a house there with the family of his 35-year-old cousin. In 2009, Abdullah applied to Kabul University’s engineering program—and was rejected. Last summer he suddenly vanished with no word to anyone. He came home four months later shockingly thin, with uncut hair and a full beard. Now he sits up until all hours, telling of his experiences with Hekmatyar’s fighters in Afghanistan. The cousin worries that his own 18-year-old son might run off to war, but there’s little he can do about it. “If our two families were not so dependent on each other, we would leave Shamshatoo,” the cousin says. “There are so many boys missing.”
Hekmatyar’s actual recruiters can be frighteningly persuasive. An Afghan engineer with a USAID project in Kabul recently had to save his 15-year-old nephew from Shamshatoo. The boy had enrolled at a madrassa in the camp, and his behavior had changed radically. He ranted to his parents about Afghan women being molested by infidels. He trashed the family’s television set, saying it was haram—forbidden—and castigated his mother and sisters for having the nerve to laugh while people in Afghanistan were suffering. “He was completely brainwashed,” the engineer says. “The mullahs were looking for the opportunity to take him to Afghanistan to fight.”
In desperation the family finally sent him to live with his uncle in Kabul. The boy still refuses to talk about his time in the madrassa, the engineer says, but lately he has become a new kid, learning quickly, watching Afghan television (mainly soap operas), and even laughing aloud at times. “He’s very young, so it’s easier for him to change,” the engineer says. “I think he’s happier here than in Shamshatoo.”
One of Hekmatyar’s own sons deplores the hard-sell recruitment of Shamshatoo’s schoolboys. “There is a clash going on between extremists who want youth to go and fight, and those [like me] who want youth to study, be open-minded, and make their own choices,” says the European-educated Jamaluddin Hekmatyar. He supports his father’s war; he just doesn’t think children belong in combat. His father evidently disagrees. One of the old man’s nephews was among a group of four gunmen who were killed in fighting last week in Wardak province, just southwest of Kabul. The boy was an eighth grader from Shamshatoo. And the fact remains that boys in Shamshatoo enjoy more freedom than those in Haqqani-controlled areas of Waziristan. Young men there have no choice but to sign up or be ostracized—or worse.
But Hekmatyar’s recruiters work in plain sight, only a few miles from Peshawar, and no one stops them. Three years ago Khan’s family moved to a village just outside Shamshatoo. The father didn’t want them living inside Hekmatyar’s little police state, but he heard the schools were the best in the area and tuition was practically free. He never imagined how aggressive the recruiters were, or how susceptible his son would be. By the end of Khan’s sophomore year in 2009, the 15-year-old was chafing to join the jihad. He and his friends planned to enlist, but the others chickened out, and Khan was too shy to go alone. Next time would be different, he promised himself.
When school let out last June, he was ready. He called a recruiter, and two days later he was heading through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. It was the first time he had ever seen his parents’ homeland. He texted his father to say he had joined the jihad and would return in a month. “Pray for me,” he told his father. Deep in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, Khan finally came to a sprawling encampment of cave complexes, mud huts, and tents. He spent more than a month there, undergoing indoctrination and learning to use various weapons and to plant IEDs. At graduation, the recruits were urged to stay for advanced instruction, but Khan had promised his father he’d finish high school. He went home to Shamshatoo, planning to complete his training this coming summer.
Khan’s father had searched frantically for the boy. As soon as his son got home, the family moved away from Shamshatoo, to Peshawar. The boy’s new school charges $12 a month—at least half a week’s pay for the father, not to mention school uniforms, books, and fees for his three other children. “I send my kid to get an Islamic education, and Hekmatyar gives me someone who wants to be a jihadi or a suicide bomber,” he says. “The Shamshatoo camp should be demolished.” That’s not about to happen—and the flood of Hekmatyar’s recruits into Afghanistan is not about to stop.
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23 Plants to Open in N Industrial Parks
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 24 April 2011
Around 23 plants are expected to start operating in Goormar industrial park in northern Mazar-e-Sharif, industrial officials in the north said on Sunday.
The plants will provide job opportunities to 1,000 people and they will also prevent part of government incomes to flow out of the country on purchase of clothes, officials in Goormar industrial parks said.
Some two years back Goormar industrial park was constructed over more than 25km with the financial support of United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
"If these 23 plants begin to operate, it will create plenty of jobs," Homayoun, a construction engineer of Goormar industrial park, said.
Presently there is one flour plant operating inside the park and it produces more than 15 tonnes of flour on a daily basis.
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In Afghanistan’s Panjwaii fields the poppies grow
The Globe and Mail Sunday, Apr. 24, 2011
BAZAR-E-PANJWAII, AFGHANISTAN - In Panjwaii fields the poppies grow.
Their delicate shades of pastel mauve and pink providing a defiant splash of colour set off against startlingly green grape fields or an otherwise drab brown vista.
If there is a concerted government push to rid Afghanistan of opium-producing poppies, no one appears to have told the farmers of Panjwaii.
“Kandahar province and Helmand province are two of the ones that have been least impacted by the policies set down by the Afghan government,” said Canadian Captain Adam Siokalo, who has spent many months in the area.
“They're putting a push on to come down here more and more.”
So far, however, the delicate plants grow unmolested in scraggly patches much like weeds.
Mostly, however, they thrive in neatly tended rows behind mud walls or between rows of lush grape plants.
Panjwaii's district governor, Haji Fazluddin Agha, acknowledges the fields of poppies splashed across his area.
“This district was under the control of Taliban and insurgents, and they were gaining a lot of advantage from the poppy fields,” Mr. Fazluddin said in an interview.
“It's still going on.”
Winning the hearts and minds of locals is critical to the battle against the insurgency in this area, the Taliban's heartland.
As a result, the official lack of desire to pick a fight with those whose livelihoods depend on the lucrative poppy crop is not surprising.
Besides, there are more pressing issues: security, roads, schools, clean water and health clinics are all far higher up on the political agenda.
Still, the district governor, who Canadian soldiers consider a well-connected get-things-done politician with contacts on both sides of the insurgent war, is adamant the anti-poppy campaign is at least under active consideration, with a list of poppy fields that are of concern.
“Lately we've been working on that,” Mr. Fazluddin said.
“Day by day, we've been improving with the help of the provincial governor and myself.
“Day by day, we've been getting a lot of information about that. We've been growing that list, or we've been destroying a lot of poppy fields.”
For Canadian soldiers patrolling rural areas, the poppy fields are mostly of interest as places where insurgents might sow improvised explosives.
On another level, the rain-delayed harvest is of some comfort, as it keeps young Afghan men, who might otherwise be attacking them, at work in the fields.
“We report where (the fields) are, the size and what stage of the harvest,” said Captain Jean-François Legault, platoon commander at a small base south of the town of Bazar-e Panjwaii.
“It's definitely not the job of Canadians to act on it.”
Last week, the United Nations forecast poppy cultivation would fall slightly this year in Kandahar province but overall harvest rates in the country were expected to rise amid sharply higher prices.
Out in the western regions of Panjwaii, an area into which Canadian soldiers have only dared venture in recent months, there may be a dawning awareness that poppy growing is officially frowned on, Capt. Legault said.
One day, perhaps, the eradication program, which compensates farmers who switch to other cash crops, may actually reach them.
“It is becoming a subject of conversation with the locals,” Capt. Siokalo said.
“They've started asking if it's going to happen, when.”
For now, at least, in Panjwaii fields the poppies still grow. Defiantly. Beautiful.
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