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Clinton lands in Kabul for talks with Karzai, other Afghan leaders
By Joby Warrick, October 19 The Washington Post
KABUL — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in the Afghan capital Wednesday for an unannounced visit intended to boost faltering reconciliation efforts ahead of the planned withdrawal of NATO forces.
Pakistan’s powerful army chief advises US to focus on Afghanistan, not pressure Islamabad
By Associated Press, October 19
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s powerful army chief said in a rare briefing to parliamentarians that the U.S. should focus its efforts on stabilizing neighboring Afghanistan, rather than pressuring Islamabad to step up its war against Islamist militants on Pakistani territory, a parliament member said Wednesday.
Kayani says Pakistan doesn't need U.S. aid, warns against unilateral action
Examiner.com By Michael Hughes , Afghanistan Headlines Examiner October 18, 2011
Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani told a parliamentary defense committee on Tuesday that Pakistan was no longer in need of American military aid.
France Begins Afghan Troops Withdrawal
VOA News October 19, 2011
France is withdrawing 200 of its troops from Afghanistan Wednesday as part of a plan to pull out 1,000 troops by the end of next year.
Dozens of Militants Surrender to Afghan Govt in Balkh, Officials say
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 19 October 2011
More than 100 militants vowed to give up violence and joined the Afghan peace process in northern Balkh province on Tuesday, local officials said.
Afghanistan's Rabbani sought suicide ban: daughter
Tue, Oct 18 2011 By Mahmoud Habboush
SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates (Reuters) - Just days before he died when a Taliban militant detonated a bomb hidden in his turban, Burhanuddin Rabbani was trying to persuade Islamic scholars to issue a religious edict banning suicide bombings.
Roadside Bomb Kills 5 Afghan Soldiers
VOA News October 19, 2011
Afghan officials say five Afghan troops were killed in a roadside bomb explosion in the western province of Herat.
U.S. steps up assault on Haqqani stronghold in Afghanistan
McClatchy Newspapers By Shashank Bengali and Habib Zohori Tuesday, October 18, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Explosions and gunfire erupted in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan Tuesday as U.S.-led international forces and Afghan soldiers began what seemed likely to become a new, coordinated offensive against insurgents whom American officials blame for a series of recent major terrorist attacks in Kabul.
Afghanistan Says Help Needed to Deal With Foreign Threats
VOA News October 18, 2011
Afghanistan says it needs international help to deal with potential foreign threats, particularly after coalition troops leave the country in 2014.
Training Concerns Hover Over Delivery of Afghan Equipment
New York Times By JACK HEALY October 18, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Can a fledgling Afghan Army plagued by corruption, illiteracy and years of atrophy maintain a $500 million fleet of sophisticated armored vehicles provided by American taxpayers?
Asylum applications in industrialized countries rise 17 pct in first half year: report
GENEVA, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- Industrialized countries saw a 17-percent increase in asylum applications in the first half of 2011, with most claimants coming from countries with long-standing displacement situations, said a report issued Tuesday by the Geneva-based UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
Afghanistan's Deputy Foreign Minister visits China
BEIJING, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- China said Tuesday it is ready to continue providing assistance within its capacity to help peaceful reconstruction in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan makes pitch for heavier weapons
Associated Press By AMIR SHAH Oct. 18, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghanistan needs more advanced weapons, like fighter jets, to defend against foreign threats, while the current firepower is enough to deal with insurgents, the country's defense minister said Tuesday.
Former Afghan MP breaks hunger strike after appeal by former president
By Associated Press, Wednesday, October 19, 8:15 PM
KABUL, Afghanistan — A former Afghan lawmaker on Wednesday ended a more than 2-week-long hunger strike over her removal from office following an appeal from one of the country’s most revered elders to call off her protest.
Bad Guys vs. Worse Guys in Afghanistan
By LUKE MOGELSON The New York Times October 19, 2011
One afternoon this summer, in a park beside the Ajmil River, I sat with seven residents of Shahabuddin, a collection of villages in northern Afghanistan’s Baghlan Province. It was the first week of Ramadan, and the park was almost empty, but still the men — some middle-aged, others stooped and gray-bearded
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Clinton lands in Kabul for talks with Karzai, other Afghan leaders
By Joby Warrick, October 19 The Washington Post
KABUL — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in the Afghan capital Wednesday for an unannounced visit intended to boost faltering reconciliation efforts ahead of the planned withdrawal of NATO forces.
Clinton, who traveled to Kabul after visits to Libya and Oman, was scheduled to meet Thursday with President Hamid Karzai and other government and parliamentary leaders. Her trip comes at a time of increased tensions between U.S. and Afghan officials over how to pursue peace with the radical Islamist Taliban movement after a decade-long insurgency.
The Afghan government’s reconciliation efforts were dealt a setback last month when a suicide bomber assassinated Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and the government’s point man in talks with the Taliban. Rabbani, a former president who led the Northern Alliance during Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1990s, had been tasked with brokering a peace deal with the Taliban. He was killed at his home by a man who concealed a bomb under his turban while posing as a Taliban peace emissary. His death has spread despair among some Afghan officials over whether an accord with the Taliban is possible.
Aides to Clinton said the visit will “signal U.S. support for a secure, stable Afghanistan” despite Rabbani's killing and a recent high-profile attack on the U.S. Embassy compound in Kabul.
“We want to emphasize that the United States remains committed to Afghan reconciliation and will support President Karzai and his efforts,” said a senior State Department official who traveled with Clinton to Afghanistan for the meetings.
U.S. officials are pushing for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban as a crucial step toward ending the conflict and have engaged in secret parallel talks with Taliban leaders, so far without success.
Karzai, who has criticized the secret U.S. talks, has urged a greater role for Pakistan in the reconciliation process, noting that many of the key Taliban commanders use Pakistan’s lawless tribal region as a base. The State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters, said Clinton “agrees with President Karzai that Pakistani cooperation is critical.”
Clinton also will seek to nudge Karzai on a proposed bilateral agreement on security cooperation that would take effect after the withdrawal of most U.S. forces, aides said. The Obama administration plans to withdraw by late next year the 33,000 “surge” troops that were deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and to turn over security for most of the country to the Kabul government by 2014.
The Associated Press reported from Islamabad that Clinton was expected to arrive in the Pakistani capital later Thursday, and would be joined by CIA chief David Petraeus and some senior U.S. military officials. She is likely to press the Pakistani leadership to do more to stop infiltration of militants across the border into Afghanistan.
Clinton landed in Kabul after visiting the sultan of Oman earlier Wednesday to thank him for helping to secure the release of American hikers from Iran last month and to appeal to Arabs to further increase pressure on Iran.
In Oman, Clinton held talks with Sultan Qaboos bin Said in his palace in the capital of the Arabian Peninsula country. The meeting came a week after revelations of an alleged Iranian plot to kill an ambassador from Saudi Arabia, Oman’s neighbor and close ally.
The Obama administration is seeking to use the plot to build support from Arab governments for further isolating Iran diplomatically and economically.
“We’re sending out worldwide messages now that are tailored to each country,” a senior State Department official told reporters traveling with Clinton, “asking them to use their relations with Iran in way to really focus the Iranians on the risks they face based on this type of behavior.”
Clinton arrived at the elaborately tiled Omani palace Wednesday morning, a day after meeting with leaders of Libya’s transitional government in Tripoli, and spoke privately with the sultan.
Oman, a member of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, traditionally maintains good relations with Iran and has helped mediate conflicts with the Islamic Republic in the past. Omani officials interceded with Iranian leaders last year to secure the release of American hiker Sarah Shourd, and were influential last month in persuading Iran to free Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer . The three were backpacking in an unmarked area along the Iran-Iraq border in July 2009 when Iranian security officials arrested them on suspicion of spying.
Clinton thanked Qaboos on behalf of the administration and discussed how Gulf countries could use their influence to dissuade Iran from seeking nuclear weapons and supporting terrorist groups.
Said the senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol: “We hope the Omanis will use their relations with Iran, as they have in the past, to help the Iranians understand the risks of what they’re doing.”
Staff writer William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
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Pakistan’s powerful army chief advises US to focus on Afghanistan, not pressure Islamabad
By Associated Press, October 19
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s powerful army chief said in a rare briefing to parliamentarians that the U.S. should focus its efforts on stabilizing neighboring Afghanistan, rather than pressuring Islamabad to step up its war against Islamist militants on Pakistani territory, a parliament member said Wednesday.
Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani’s appearance before two parliamentary defense committees followed increased U.S. pressure on Pakistan to crack down on the Haqqani militant network, believed to be based in the country’s North Waziristan tribal area along the Afghan border.
The U.S. has deemed the Haqqani network the most dangerous threat to American troops in Afghanistan and has accused the Pakistan military’s spy agency, the ISI, of supporting the militants — an allegation denied by Islamabad.
“The real problem lies in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan,” Kayani was quoted as saying by a parliament member who attended the three-hour briefing at army headquarters in Rawalpindi. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was not open to the media.
The Pakistan army said in a statement that the briefing occurred, but did not provide details on the discussion.
Some analysts have accused the U.S. of focusing on Pakistan and the Haqqani network as a way to redirect blame over stuttering efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.
The Pakistani military has also sought to deflect blame for its failure to crack down on the Haqqanis by saying that NATO and Afghan forces need to do more to prevent militants from crossing over from Afghanistan and attacking Pakistan.
Kayani said his military could launch a full-scale operation in North Waziristan “tomorrow” if someone convinced him that the it was the root cause of problems in Afghanistan, said the committee member.
That represents a shift from the military’s normal explanation for its lack of action in North Waziristan: that its troops are stretched too thin by operations in other parts of the tribal region against Pakistani Taliban militants at war with the state.
Unlike the Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Afghan branch of the Taliban usually refrain from fighting the Pakistani army, instead focusing their attacks against Afghan and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Many analysts believe Pakistan has refused to target these groups because they could be important allies in Afghanistan after foreign forces withdraw.
Adm. Mike Mullen, who was until recently the top military officer in the U.S., claimed last month that the Haqqani network was a “veritable arm” of the ISI and accused the spy agency of helping the group carry out an attack against the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
Kayani said the ISI has contacts with the Haqqani network that it uses to get intelligence, claiming U.S. and British spy agencies do the same.
Mullen’s comments outraged Pakistani officials and prompted local media speculation that the U.S. would launch a unilateral raid against the Haqqanis in North Waziristan, as it did on May 2 when it killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison town.
Kayani said the U.S. should think “10 times” before launching such action because Pakistan was not Iraq or Afghanistan — an implicit reference to the country possessing nuclear weapons with which it could defend itself.
The U.S. has urged Pakistan to shift troops away from its eastern border with archenemy India so that it can commit more soldiers to the fight against the Taliban in the northwest.
Kayani said he could not redeploy these soldiers because of the large number of Indian troops stationed on the border. Relations between the two countries have thawed somewhat in recent months, especially regarding trade, but Kayani said “intentions can change overnight.”
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Kayani says Pakistan doesn't need U.S. aid, warns against unilateral action
Examiner.com By Michael Hughes , Afghanistan Headlines Examiner October 18, 2011
Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani told a parliamentary defense committee on Tuesday that Pakistan was no longer in need of American military aid.
Iftikhar Khan of Dawn.com reported that Kayani received a call from Washington asking if he meant it. “My reply was we mean what we say,” Kayani said during the briefing in Rawalpindi, stressing that Pakistan would not compromise its national sovereignty.
The General also ruled out the possibility of unilateral U.S. military action on Pakistani soil, saying the Americans will have to “think 10 times before going for this." Kayani's comments come in light of a U.S. military build-up near North Waziristan, home of the Haqqani Network militant group.
Kayani had been asked to comment on the possibility of a U.S. strike in Pakistan for its failure in Afghanistan, similar to the way the U.S. attacked Laos and Cambodia during Vietnam. Kayani said he would like to remind the Americans that Pakistan was a nuclear power and must not be compared with Iraq and Afghanistan.
The General also rejected allegations that his country was using the Haqqanis to wage a proxy war in Afghanistan, claiming that Pakistan was part of the solution, not the problem. He scoffed at the notion that Pakistan wanted to control Afghanistan, because it was evident from history that no one has ever succeeded in doing so:
“When the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union failed to do so how can it be expected of Pakistan? We do not have a magic wand to succeed in doing what others failed,” Kayani added.
U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen recently called the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network "a veritable arm" of the ISI - Pakistan's spy agency, angering Pakistani military as well as civilian leaders.
Pakistan’s Business Recorder claimed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was scheduled to visit on Thursday. Pakistani leaders were expected to ask the U.S. to restore military aid and expedite the flow of assistance under the Coalition Support Fund (CSF), however, Kayani’s bold words seem to contradict this assertion.
The U.S. has unsuccessfully tried to use military aid as leverage against Pakistan in attempts to get them to root out the Haqqani network from Pakistan’s tribal area. Now one wonders if the U.S. has any “sticks” left to achieve its desired outcomes.
Team Obama has been playing a game of "good cop, bad cop" with the Pakistanis, according to Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy, as a means of ratcheting up pressure. Rogin quoted a U.S. offical as saying:
"Hillary is trying to position herself in the middle and say to Pakistan that there are those of us who want to engage and others who want to fold. How long do you want to play this game of poker?" the official said.
Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution underlined in a recent New York Times op-ed how the two countries have conflicting strategic interests, which will remain so as long as “Pakistan’s army controls Pakistan’s strategic policies”.
Riedel also asserted that the U.S. “must contain the Pakistani Army's ambitions until real civilian rule returns and Pakistanis set a new direction for their foreign policy." He also advocates abandoning efforts to seek Pakistani assistance, especially in light of the assassination of Afghan high peace council leader Burhanuddin Rabbani by Pakistani-based Taliban elements.
"When one party murders the [peace process] leader on the other side, we pretty much have an answer as to whether or not there's going to be a political reconciliation process," Riedel said.
Meanwhile, according to CNN, one NATO official on Tuesday reported a marked increase in Haqqani infiltration into Afghanistan from Pakistan in recent weeks.
The U.S. has accused Haqqani fighters of killing more than 1,000 coalition and Afghan forces and launching a series of "spectacular attacks" this summer, including a 20-hour attack on the American Embassy in Kabul.
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France Begins Afghan Troops Withdrawal
VOA News October 19, 2011
France is withdrawing 200 of its troops from Afghanistan Wednesday as part of a plan to pull out 1,000 troops by the end of next year.
The French military had said in September that the company of soldiers would leave Afghanistan sometime this month.
France has about 4,000 troops in Afghanistan, and President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to withdraw a quarter of the troops by the end of 2012.
Seventy-five French soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
Most international combat troops are set to leave Afghanistan and transfer security to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan told the Associated Press Wednesday that the process of handing over security to Afghan forces is going to move faster than expected.
In the interview, General John Allen says that while most of the 10,000 American troops ordered to withdraw by the end of the year will be support troops, one-third will be combat forces.
Allen says most of those withdrawing will come out of northern and western Afghanistan, adding that the U.S. will leave medical units and mine-clearing troops to support German and Italian troops stationed there.
The U.S. and NATO commander also confirmed that the U.S.-led coalition has begun a new offensive against the Haqqani militant network, a Pakistan-based Afghan group with ties to al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Allen did not give details of the offensive but said it began in recent days in eastern Afghanistan, along the Pakistani border.
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Dozens of Militants Surrender to Afghan Govt in Balkh, Officials say
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 19 October 2011
More than 100 militants vowed to give up violence and joined the Afghan peace process in northern Balkh province on Tuesday, local officials said.
The men were active in Chemtal and Char Bolak districts of Balkh province fighting against government, but they have now joined the peace process, Gen. Esmatullah Alizai, Balkh police chief, said.
The men surrendered as Afghan forces have launched military operation in the province to clear its districts of militants.
With the surrender of these men security will improve in the district, Mr Alizai added.
Some of the men said they were happy to join the peace process and they promised not to fight against the Afghan government again.
Balkh police chief said that the clean-up operation continued in the province to clear all villages of militants.
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Afghanistan's Rabbani sought suicide ban: daughter
Tue, Oct 18 2011 By Mahmoud Habboush
SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates (Reuters) - Just days before he died when a Taliban militant detonated a bomb hidden in his turban, Burhanuddin Rabbani was trying to persuade Islamic scholars to issue a religious edict banning suicide bombings.
The former president's 29-year-old daughter said in an interview that her father died shortly after he spoke at a conference on "Islamic Awakening" in Tehran.
"Right before he was assassinated, he talked about the suicide bombing issue," Fatima Rabbani, who had watched a replay of her father's speech on television, told Reuters. "He called on all Islamic scholars in the conference to release a fatwa. You know: in Islam killing yourself is forbidden."
Several Taliban officials were present at the two-day event which brought together some 600 Islamic scholars. Rabbani did not sit with them at the same table.
A former leader of a powerful mujahideen party during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Rabbani was chosen last October by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to head the High Peace Council, created to negotiate peace with the Taliban.
Fatima, who had lived in the United Arab Emirates since 1997, said she was planning to set up a foundation in her father's memory to teach young Afghans that killing civilians contradicted Islamic values.
"We're thinking to basically raise awareness and teach Afghans the real Islam, something that my father had always encouraged the youth to do," she said, sitting next to her brother, Shuja, in their family's villa in an affluent neighborhood in the UAE emirate Sharjah.
Rabbani, was the most prominent surviving leader of the ethnic Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance of fighters and politicians that drove the Taliban from Kabul in 2001. He served as president in the 1990s when rival mujahideen factions waged war for control of the country after the Soviet withdrawal.
PEACE WAS POSSIBLE
Fatima, who is doing a Masters degree in post conflict studies and development at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (SOAS), said those who plotted her father's death wanted to cripple peace efforts.
"Killing my father sent out a really loud message, very loud and clear to us that they do not want peace," she said, adding that Rabbani had said after meeting Pashtun leaders in Kandahar, birthplace of the Taliban movement, that the "idea of peace was very possible."
"He spent 45 to 50 years of his life just devoted to Afghanistan, to bring peace to Afghanistan," Fatima said.
It was unclear how far his efforts to make peace with the Taliban went. Fatima said he had suggested to her that the majority of Afghan Taliban were keen to join the process, but the Pakistani branch of the group opposed it.
"They are kind of in a lose-lose situation where they want to join the peace process but at the same time if they do, they won't be supported by the Pakistan Taliban," she said.
Her brother, Shuja, 30, said some Taliban elements wanted to block the peace talks when they saw a growing interest among the group's members to reintegrate into Afghani society.
"They must have reached such a point of desperation that they had to carry out an assassination at this level to just try and put a stop to this process altogether," said Shuja, who works at Afghanistan's central bank.
Shuja, who was at home when Rabbani was killed but was unharmed, said Pakistan was refusing to cooperate in the assassination probe, a decision he criticized. Islamabad has rejected allegations that its spy agency was behind the killing.
"If the Pakistan government believes that things don't lead to their soil then why avoid Afghan cooperation with them?" Shuja said. "To so blatantly avoid any kind of cooperation, that just raises so more questions."
(Writing by Mahmoud Habboush; Editing by Sami Aboudi and Peter Graff)
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Roadside Bomb Kills 5 Afghan Soldiers
VOA News October 19, 2011
Afghan officials say five Afghan troops were killed in a roadside bomb explosion in the western province of Herat.
Officials say the troops were killed Wednesday after their vehicle struck the bomb in the Pashtun Zarghun district.
An Afghan army officer and four soldiers were killed in the attack. No one has claimed responsibility for the blast.
Two NATO soldiers were also killed in a bomb attack Wednesday. The coalition said the service members were killed in eastern Afghanistan, but gave no other details.
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U.S. steps up assault on Haqqani stronghold in Afghanistan
McClatchy Newspapers By Shashank Bengali and Habib Zohori Tuesday, October 18, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Explosions and gunfire erupted in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan Tuesday as U.S.-led international forces and Afghan soldiers began what seemed likely to become a new, coordinated offensive against insurgents whom American officials blame for a series of recent major terrorist attacks in Kabul.
The joint operation against the Haqqani network follows months of escalating tension between the United States and Pakistan over an increasingly fearsome insurgent group that NATO says has caused the deaths of more than 1,000 Afghan civilians and coalition troops — and whose leadership reportedly enjoys safe haven over the border in Pakistan's tribal areas.
It was unclear whether any offensive involving NATO troops and hundreds of Afghan army soldiers could seriously weaken the Haqqani group, whose fighters roam a rugged, porous border region where foreign forces have struggled to make gains. But an offensive would send a message that the U.S.-led coalition is prepared to act if Pakistan doesn't crack down on the network, which NATO accuses of nearly a dozen high-profile attacks in Kabul this year — including the daylong assault on the American Embassy last month.
U.S. officials allege that Pakistan's powerful army-run spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, backs the Haqqanis — a charge Pakistan has fiercely denied.
There were no signs of troop movement on the Pakistani side, locals and officials said, suggesting no plans for a complementary offensive in the neighboring North Waziristan region. Pakistan has long resisted U.S. pressure to launch an operation against extremists that use North Waziristan as a safe haven.
A senior Pakistani military official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that Pakistanis hadn't been briefed in advance about what the U.S.-led forces were up to but were "informed upon inquiring."
Although few clear details emerged of what the U.S. and its allies were planning, rumor of the gathering forces spread a mixture of panic and bravado in Pakistan. Many North Waziristan residents believed that a surgical U.S. airstrike was imminent, while some said they were prepared to fight U.S. troops if they crossed over.
A senior NATO official dismissed the Pakistani fears, saying that the alliance wasn't authorized to operate outside Afghanistan and wasn't trying to threaten Pakistan.
"No, we're not massing on the border," said the official, who wasn't authorized to be quoted by name.
The pace of military activity in the region has been quickening for the past four days, centered around Musa Khail, a rugged district northwest of the provincial capital of Khost, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, said Gen. Zahir Azimi, an Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman. He described it as "part of our routine military operations in the area ... to pave the way for development and extension of central government rule."
A resident of Musa Khail, Gulab Khan, who spoke by telephone, said that fighting continued after nightfall Tuesday and that NATO forces had arrested an unknown number of armed men whom he described as civilians. Many Afghan civilians own weapons, and there was no word on whether coalition forces had captured or killed any senior Haqqani figures.
NATO and Afghan forces discovered a "weapons depot" full of small arms and seized hundreds of sleeping bags used by insurgents to camp in the mountains, said Mobarez Zadran, a spokesman for the provincial government in Khost. He said there had been no civilian casualties.
Officials with the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force believe that the Haqqani leadership — which is allied with but independent of the Afghan Taliban — is based about 20 miles southeast of Khost near Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan. Capt. Justin M. Brockhoff, an ISAF spokesman, said only that "operations are being conducted across the theater to solidify security gains made throughout the course of the 2011 fighting season."
U.S. officials have warned Pakistan repeatedly over alleged links between the ISI and the Haqqanis. Two weeks ago, President Barack Obama used a White House news conference to caution Islamabad that it was jeopardizing its relationship with the United States — which includes billions of dollars in military and civilian aid — by maintaining ties with Afghan insurgents.
The Haqqanis have plotted and carried out 11 of the 15 most spectacular attacks in Kabul this year, according to NATO officials. The most notorious came on Sept. 13, when fighters holed up in a half-finished high-rise showered the U.S. Embassy and ISAF headquarters with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifle fire for almost 20 hours, killing seven civilians and wounding many others.
Two weeks ago, ISAF said that it had detained Haji Mali Khan, a prominent Haqqani commander who managed bases and had oversight of operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Haqqani attacks have undermined what NATO commanders describe as hard-won gains in the nearly two years since U.S. forces surged 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan. While the surge helped to substantially reduce attacks on Afghan and coalition forces, insurgents have responded with a campaign of targeted assassinations and roadside bombings that have increased civilian casualties and — NATO officials privately acknowledge — made much of the country feel less safe.
Even as the coalition pushes ahead with plans to transfer security responsibilities in more areas to Afghan control, ahead of a full withdrawal of foreign troops by the end of 2014, the senior NATO official said that eastern Afghanistan still represented a major trouble spot.
"The border piece is of concern, and frankly ... that's the one we're going to have to watch closely," the official said. "How resilient will the Haqqani network be? Will that mean that we have to provide greater assistance to the Afghans in eastern Afghanistan? That, to me, is a military question."
Despite the focus on infiltration of Haqqani and other extremists into Afghanistan, the busy border crossing at Ghulam Khan, between North Waziristan and Khost, has remained open with little interruption, clogged with trucks taking flour, wood, cement and other goods into Afghanistan every day.
When the border suddenly closed from the Afghan side for three days — finally reopening Monday — it suggested to locals that something serious was about to unfold.
Ihsan ur Rehman, a student at the Degree College in Mir Ali, another town in North Waziristan, said that he feared residents would be displaced if the American-led operation expanded into Pakistan.
"We have suffered a lot for the last decade. An American operation will cause new hardship," said Rehman. "This should be settled by negotiation between America and Pakistan."
While Pakistani Taliban militants might view American soldiers coming across the border as targets, the same eagerness to fight seemed to fill ordinary tribesmen in North Waziristan.
"We have had to go to Afghanistan for jihad against the Americans. But if they come here to us, what could be better?" said Dost Tarab Khan, a tribal elder in Miranshah. "I hope they come here and give us the opportunity to fight them."
(Zohori is a McClatchy special correspondent. Jonathan S. Landay in Washington and special correspondent Saeed Shah in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed.)
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Afghanistan Says Help Needed to Deal With Foreign Threats
VOA News October 18, 2011
Afghanistan says it needs international help to deal with potential foreign threats, particularly after coalition troops leave the country in 2014.
Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak said Tuesday that while the country's security forces are capable of defending themselves against the Taliban and other insurgents, more advanced weaponry such as fighters jets were needed to defend against an invading army.
Wardak did not name any potential regional threats, but tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been heightened in recent months.
The Afghan defense minister told reporters in Kabul that the country's army and police will need roughly $5 billion a year after international combat troops pull out in three years.
Foreign forces have begun transferring security responsibility to their Afghan counterparts.
Wardak also noted Tuesday that the cost of sustaining Afghanistan's security forces will depend on the level of violence in the country once the international withdrawal is complete.
Afghan defense officials also addressed reports of Afghan and NATO troop movement in eastern Afghanistan, along the Pakistani border.
Wardak said security forces were launching a new push against the militant Haqqani network, which is blamed for a number of high profile attacks in Afghanistan.
The al-Qaida-linked group is believed to be based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region.
Militants often cross the porous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
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Training Concerns Hover Over Delivery of Afghan Equipment
New York Times By JACK HEALY October 18, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Can a fledgling Afghan Army plagued by corruption, illiteracy and years of atrophy maintain a $500 million fleet of sophisticated armored vehicles provided by American taxpayers?
NATO forces, who are handing over the keys, are about to find out.
The fleet of mobile strike force vehicles, burly and beige, each 19 tons with a gun turret and two layers of armor, was shown off by Afghan forces on Tuesday, part of a hugely expensive armada now being delivered here as American forces place increasing emphasis on equipping and training the growing ranks of Afghan soldiers and police officers.
The United States has provided more than $11 billion for equipment and transportation for the Afghan police and soldiers over the last five years, according to a June report to Congress by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. And more high-priced, high-tech hardware is on the way, arriving along with questions about whether the Afghan forces will be able to keep it up and running as American troops leave and American money dries up.
NATO forces have delivered 2,400 armored vehicles for the Afghan police, and 2,200 more are being shipped. It is supplying the Afghan National Army with 21 Mi-17 V5 helicopters at a cost of $380 million, and expects to spend another $500 million for light-attack support aircraft.
“Over the next six months, there is what we call an enhanced equipment flow that’s going to occur,” said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, who oversees NATO efforts to train Afghan security forces. “It’s going to be just an incredible amount of vehicles, communications gear and weapons.”
The weapons showcased at the Defense Ministry’s manicured headquarters here played out like a “Full Metal Jacket” version of show-and-tell.
With tensions high along the Pakistani border and civilian casualties — the vast majority caused by insurgent attacks — continuing to rise, the display was an attempt by Afghan Army officials to demonstrate that they were well-armed and equipped with an increasingly sophisticated war chest of arms, explosives and personnel carriers — the vast majority of it funded by the United States.
“We will keep struggling to get more weapons in order to help our army stand on their own feet,” Abdul Rahim Wardak, the defense minister, said at a news conference.
Afghan soldiers explained the mechanics of handguns, automatic rifles and mortar-firing tubes, which sat neatly on white tablecloths. They showed off ambulances, small tanks and pointed proudly at the four-wheeled armored vehicles, which have been built to resist the roadside bombs and buried explosives that are killing more and more security forces and civilians here.
“I have ridden in it twice,” said Col. Hafiz Rahman, as he stood next to what amounted to the showroom model of the vehicle – the only one to reach Afghanistan so far. “They’re very different from regular trucks. You feel safer when you’re riding in this. It also has heat and air conditioning.”
In a country where soldiers and police often ride around in the back of camouflaged pickup trucks, a fleet of as many as 500 armored vehicles will allow Afghan soldiers to drive more safely down roads potentially mined with improvised explosives and corridors where militants often open fire. The vehicles are outfitted with V-shaped hulls to resist explosions and resemble the Strykers used widely by the United States Army.
Afghan forces have barely begun to train on the vehicles. In fact, the model parked at the Defense Ministry was brought in on a flatbed truck, rather than driven through the streets of Kabul. Afghan soldiers will be trained in shifts over the next two years, and NATO forces say they are making sure that the Afghans will be able to service and maintain the $1 million vehicles – a task that has been problematic in the past.
In June, the Defense Department’s inspector general found serious problems with a $247 million contract to oversee equipment for the Afghan National Army as well as to train Afghans in maintenance. When auditors visited storage warehouses across the country, they were unable to find $30 million worth of repair parts.
They also found deep flaws in equipment-training programs. Afghan commanders were not providing enough students, and the programs themselves were too complicated, too long and ill-suited to classrooms of largely uneducated soldiers.
“We were unable to observe training at four of the nine sites that we visited, because A.N.A. commanders did not provide students for the classes,” the auditors said.
The new mobile strike vehicles come with months of training and oversight from the American manufacturer, Textron. It remains to be seen how that training will translate on the battlefield, after most Western forces are gone.
“This is a much bigger beast, and they’re really going to have to square away their understanding of how to maintain it,” said Maj. Ed Mack, a British officer involved in the training mission. “We’ll train them as best we can. But what they do in the long run, this is an Afghan issue.”
Ray Rivera contributed reporting.
Jack Healy has reported from both the Baghdad and Kabul bureaus of The New York Times since October 2010. Follow him on Twitter at jackhealyNYT.
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Asylum applications in industrialized countries rise 17 pct in first half year: report
GENEVA, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- Industrialized countries saw a 17-percent increase in asylum applications in the first half of 2011, with most claimants coming from countries with long-standing displacement situations, said a report issued Tuesday by the Geneva-based UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
The report entitled "Asylum Levels and Trends in Industrialized Countries, First Half 2011" shows that 198,300 asylum applications were lodged in the period between Jan. 1 and June 30, compared to 169,300 in the same period in 2010.
UNHCR projects that 2011 may see 420,000 applications by year's end, the highest total in eight years, as application rates normally peak during the second half of the year.
So far this year, despite major forced displacement crises in West, North and East Africa, overall the impact of these events on application rates in industrialized countries has been limited.
Related increases of asylum claims were observed among Tunisians, Ivorians and Libyans, with 4,600, 3,300 and 2,000 claims respectively.
Of the 44 countries surveyed, the main countries of origin of asylum-seekers remain largely unchanged from previous surveys. Afghanistan continues to top the chart with 15,300 claims.
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Afghanistan's Deputy Foreign Minister visits China
BEIJING, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- China said Tuesday it is ready to continue providing assistance within its capacity to help peaceful reconstruction in Afghanistan.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun met with visiting Afghanistan's Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin on Tuesday. Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin held talks with Ludin.
The two sides positively commented on bilateral relations.
The Chinese officials said China would firmly support Afghanistan's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity and it would further provide assistance to Afghanistan within its capability to help with the country's peaceful reconstruction.
Ludin thanked China for its support to Afghanistan. He said Afghanistan is willing to work with China to make new progress in the two countries' communication and cooperation in all fields.
The two sides also exchanged views on international and regional issues of common concern.
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Afghanistan makes pitch for heavier weapons
Associated Press By AMIR SHAH Oct. 18, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghanistan needs more advanced weapons, like fighter jets, to defend against foreign threats, while the current firepower is enough to deal with insurgents, the country's defense minister said Tuesday.
The United States, as part of an effort to bolster, train and equip the Afghan army, has provided billions of dollars in equipment but has balked at supplying sophisticated technology like fighter planes, arguing that Afghanistan doesn't need such armaments and does not yet have the capacity to maintain them.
Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak renewed the pitch for the fighters on Tuesday, casting the procurement of heavier weapons as a way of ensuring a regional balance of power.
"What we are asking to acquire is just the ability to defend ourselves, and also to be relevant in the future so that our friends and allies can count on us to participate in peacekeeping and other operations of mutual interest," Wardak told reporters.
The defense minister did not name any potential regional threats. But Pakistan and Iran - both of which have far better equipped arsenals - are widely seen as two neighbors with the potential to influence the country's shaky reconstruction effort and push to crush the stubborn Taliban insurgency.
The Afghan army chief of staff, Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, said the army's current level is enough to "bring security and stability to this country," in tandem with the police force and the international forces.
Karimi said that building a strong military was crucial as way of ensuring the balance of power in the region and as "a deterrence for this country against our neighbors."
"But by no means (do) we have a policy of offensive operations," he said. "Our strategy is defensive."
Training the Afghan security forces is a top priority for the U.S.-led international coalition that has been battling the Taliban and affiliated insurgents for the past decade. NATO wants to withdraw its combat forces by the end of 2014 and needs its Afghan counterparts to be ready to assume full security responsibilities by then.
Wardak said about $10 billion has already been allocated by the U.S. to equip and train the country's security forces, including the army and the police. He said another package totaling about $10 billion is being discussed, but must still be approved by U.S. lawmakers.
He said the cost of sustaining the country's security forces in the future largely hinges on the level of violence there.
"If we are able to bring the level of violence down, the sustainment costs will accordingly go down," he said, noting that given the current security situation, that cost could be roughly $5 billion per year.
The Associated Press
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Former Afghan MP breaks hunger strike after appeal by former president
By Associated Press, Wednesday, October 19, 8:15 PM
KABUL, Afghanistan — A former Afghan lawmaker on Wednesday ended a more than 2-week-long hunger strike over her removal from office following an appeal from one of the country’s most revered elders to call off her protest.
Simeen Barakzai had vowed to abstain from food and drink until the government investigated vote fraud allegations stemming from the parliamentary elections that took place more than a year ago. Her strike was one in a string of protests, accusations and investigations that have delayed parliament’s work and threatened to undermine the legislature’s legitimacy.
On Wednesday, the 18th day of her hunger strike, Barakzai ate three spoonfuls of soup, fed to her by Subghatullah Mujaddedi, a prominent official who briefly served as Afghanistan’s president in 1992 and more recently as the head of the upper house of parliament. Barakzai’s father, brothers and Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak looked on, visibly relieved as she ate. She was later fed additional spoonfuls by her father after television cameramen complained they didn’t get clear shots of her ending the hunger strike.
Mujaddedi offered Barakzai his seat as head of the upper house — a post to which he was appointed by President Hamid Karzai but which is now held by someone else because of Mujaddedi’s advanced age.
“If your seat in the lower house was taken from you, I have a seat for you in the upper house,” Mujaddedi told her. “I’m ready to give it to you.”
Barakzai’s protest had become a symbol of defiance against rampant corruption in Afghanistan and the country’s troubled political scene.
At first, she appeared to agree to his offer, nodding her head. But moments later, she made clear that her quest was for justice, not a seat in parliament.
“My hunger strike was because they broke the law,” she said, referring to the allegations of vote fraud she leveled against the woman who took her seat. “It was for those poor people who were raising their voices.”
The dispute had sharply hampered the legislature’s ability to work. The parliament is widely viewed as one of the few counterweights to Karzai.
Afghan election officials have said they will stand by their decision to remove Barakzai and eight other lawmakers from office after a review of election results. But a committee appointed by Karzai is continuing the investigation and Mujaddedi vowed that he would follow up on its work.
“God willing, you end this hunger strike and I will help you,” Mujaddedi told Barakzai as she lay in bed in a Kabul military hospital, an intravenous drip attached to her arm.
It was unclear whether Mujaddedi could actually give the seat to Barakzai since another man was currently filling the post. But the former president who also heads the National Commission for Peace in Afghanistan, a body charged with national reconciliation, insisted that his seat in the upper house was vacant as he hadn’t resigned.
He later said he would discuss the issue with Karzai and vowed to follow up on the investigation.
The political dispute is but one of the many problems confronting Afghanistan, which is still struggling for some semblance of stability and normalcy 10 years after a U.S.-led invasion to drive the Taliban from power.
While the parliament grapples with fractious politics, NATO and its Afghan counterparts are embroiled in a fierce battle against the Taliban and allied insurgent groups — a battle the international coalition hopes to pass on to the Afghan security forces by the end of 2014 when their combat forces are withdrawn.
On Wednesday, a roadside bomb killed two NATO service members in eastern Afghanistan, the alliance said without providing additional details. The deaths raised to 471 the number of NATO troops killed so far this year in the country.
Afghanistan’s east is rife with insurgent activity and the top NATO commander in the country said the alliance had recently launched an operation in the area targeting the powerful Haqqani network, a group that operates from within Pakistan.
Earlier in the day, a roadside bomb exploded killed five Afghan soldiers in the Pashtun Zarghun district of Herat, said Mohyaddin Noori, the spokesman for the province’s governor. Noori said the five were ferrying food back to the base when blast took place.
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Associated Press writer Tarek El-Tablawy contributed to this report.
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Bad Guys vs. Worse Guys in Afghanistan
By LUKE MOGELSON The New York Times October 19, 2011
One afternoon this summer, in a park beside the Ajmil River, I sat with seven residents of Shahabuddin, a collection of villages in northern Afghanistan’s Baghlan Province. It was the first week of Ramadan, and the park was almost empty, but still the men — some middle-aged, others stooped and gray-bearded — whispered conspiratorially and became silent whenever anybody walked close. Several minutes into our conversation, one of the younger men, who’d been mutely worrying at a piece of grass, rose and abruptly stalked off. The others, embarrassed, apologized for him. “If Nur-ul Haq finds out we spoke to you,” one of them explained, “he will kill us.”
Nur-ul Haq is the commander of the Afghan Local Police in Shahabuddin. Since last winter, he has been primarily responsible for the security of the several thousand families living there. As one of the elders warily eyed two men in turbans squatting under some nearby shade, he told me that Haq and his local police had been felling people’s trees and selling them as timber. Another of the elders joined in and named three men whom he accused Haq of murdering. “These three murders are known to everyone,” he said. “Nobody knows how many others he has killed.” The former principal of a local school said that he and his eight brothers were forced to leave their village after they reported to the government that the local police had seized their family’s land. “Nur-ul Haq threatened to come with tanks and take us all out of our home and kill us if we continued to complain about him,” the man claimed, adding that he and his brothers were considering moving to Pakistan.
The elders estimated that more than 100 families had fled Shahabuddin because of the local police. The people were defenseless, they said, and indeed they all seemed cowed and frightened. But before we parted ways, one of them, with a note of defiance, assured me: “Nur-ul Haq has no place in this province. As long as the foreign troops are here, he is king. The minute they go, he should leave the country.” Another agreed: “I bet he can’t stay for one night in Baghlan if there are no foreign troops.” Grinning at the prospect, the old man added, “The people will rise against him.”
Haq’s unit is one of 51 local police forces that have been established across rural Afghanistan over the last year, employing more than 8,000 villagers. Eventually, the force is expected to reach 30,000 in more than 100 sites. The rapid rollout reflects a spirited commitment to the program by the U.S. military, which claims that local police throughout the country have subdued insurgents and helped tip formerly ambivalent communities toward the government. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called the Afghan Local Police “potentially a game-changer,” and Gen. David Petraeus described it as “almost the personification of counterinsurgency.” Every U.S. officer I spoke with considers it essential to achieving a measure of stability in Afghanistan that will be sustainable in our absence. “This is our last shot,” one major told me. “If this doesn’t work, we got nothing.”
Under the auspices of Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry, the A.L.P. is technically “Afghan-owned” — a point that American officials are keen to emphasize. It would be more accurate, though, to describe it as a collaboration between the government of Afghanistan and an elite branch of the United States military called the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command (or Cfsocc, pronounced “SIFF-sock”). The origins of the A.L.P. truly began with its predecessor program, the Community Defense Initiative, which in the summer of 2009 embedded small teams of Green Berets in Afghan villages to mobilize resistance against the Taliban and other militants. The following year, when Petraeus assumed command in Afghanistan, one of his priorities was to formalize the effort and increase its scale.
Now districts that are chosen to be local police sites designate roughly 300 men to receive uniforms, salaries, AK-47’s, training from U.S. Special Operations Forces and a mandate to defend their home villages against insurgents. In theory, each local police recruit must be approved by community elders and vetted by Afghanistan’s domestic intelligence service, while each commander answers directly to a district chief of police. These safeguards, along with a strict limit on powers (the A.L.P. can’t make arrests, patrol outside their districts or possess any heavy weaponry) are intended to prevent local police from resembling the predatory militias so abhorred by Afghans for their rampant depredations throughout the 1990s.
But selectively arming portions of any given population, no matter the precautions, can be risky business in Afghanistan, and the question looming darkly over the military successes of the A.L.P. — which Petraeus credited to the fact that “no one protects their home like a homeowner” — is what other purposes might their American-supplied guns and training find, especially after foreign troops leave the country. One highly positioned Afghan official, speaking on condition of anonymity, was not optimistic. “When you have a headache, you take pills,” he told me. “Some pills will cure your headache but damage your stomach in the process. That is what we have with the A.L.P. The local police are a temporary solution. Long-term, they are poison.”
So far, the most troublesome region for the A.L.P. has been the north, where ethnic, political and tribal factions have long persecuted one another. “Land disputes, water disputes, women disputes are a portion of the aftermath of three decades of war,” says Gran Hewad, a native of Baghlan Province and a political researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network. The two predominant ethnicities in Baghlan are the Pashtuns and the Tajiks. After the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, the previously subjugated Tajiks consolidated power in the province, monopolizing government posts and proliferating the ranks of the national police. Today, about 80 percent of Baghlan’s national police hail from Andarab, an entirely Tajik district that is staunchly anti-Pashtun. To help offset the imbalance, the A.L.P. in Baghlan has been made almost exclusively Pashtun. While this solution may solve one problem, it has also created another. Factionalism in the north goes beyond ethnicity, and within the Pashtun community itself various distinct tribes harbor feuds that match in animosity those with the Tajiks; additionally, within each tribe, conflicts among families can date back generations. Every one of the numerous allegations of A.L.P. misconduct in Baghlan Province that Hewad and his colleagues have learned about comes from a Pashtun victim. Most have also come from Shahabuddin.
The first time I met Nur-ul Haq, I was brought to his compound in the small village of Gaji by a Pashtun tribal elder named Pir Muhammad, who made a point of denouncing critics of Haq and the A.L.P. as Tajiks conniving to keep Pashtuns under their thumb. “They were ruling over us,” he said. “With the arrival of the local police, people took a breath of relief.” Although the congested streets and mobbed bazaars of the provincial capital Pul-i-Khumri are just a 20-minute drive away, Shahabuddin’s mud-walled compounds and rutted roadways, traveled as frequently by donkey as by car, feel a world apart. Many villagers rarely visit the city, expressing a vague disdain for those who live there; the reverse, of course, is also true. To get to Gaji, we followed a dirt road through vivid green rice paddies, cotton fields and melon patches sprawling between the brown foothills of the Karkar and Choghsang mountains. On either side of a narrow bridge, over turbulent water that tumbled the bloated carcass of a large animal, several local police officers stood in mismatched ensembles of traditional dress and government-issued uniforms, manning two shoddy fortifications made from sandbags and plywood. Recognizing Pir Muhammad, they let us pass.
Haq’s compound wasn’t far from there. When we arrived, a group of villagers were lounging under a canopy, hashing out a disagreement over water rights and watching an old TV with a ceramic eagle perched on top. Compared with the elders, the middle-aged Haq looked unexceptional and unassuming: dark and sinewy with shaggy black hair, unadorned by turban, vest or weapon. As he led us to a private room with diaphanous pink curtains, I noticed a scorpion tattooed on his arm. “Two years ago, this whole area was under Taliban control,” Haq said as we reclined on large cushions, forgoing, because of Ramadan, the customary tea. Like the rest of him, Haq’s voice was unexpectedly small but tense, carrying a threat of excitability, as if something in him were coiled and ready to spring.
He described how, before he and his comrades routed them, the Taliban roamed freely and occupied families’ homes and hanged recalcitrant villagers in the trees. Most were foreign or from other provinces, and to recruit local allies they relied on a campaign of violence and intimidation. Haq said that after several attacks on his home, he requested assistance from the governor and provincial chief of police, who “bluntly told me they couldn’t help me.” Rather than capitulate to the Taliban, Haq joined the Hezb-i-Islami insurgent movement led by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. “I decided to take up arms against the provincial government in Pul-i-Khumri because they were not providing us with protection against the Taliban,” he explained.
This might be true — Haq might have joined one insurgent group, reluctantly, only to defend himself against another — or it might be as good an example as any of the ubiquitous myth-making in Afghanistan, where personal narratives must often be rewritten to reflect an ever-shifting landscape of allegiances and adversaries. Whatever his motives, over the next two years, Haq and his fellow Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (H.I.G.) insurgents fought a series of turf battles with the Taliban until, eventually, the government offered them protection in exchange for disarmament. He agreed, but after six months in a safe house in Pul-i-Khumri, he said, “we decided we needed to have our weapons back and return to our villages.”
When Haq returned to Shahabuddin, the fighting resumed, culminating last fall in a Taliban siege of the compounds he and his outmatched men were occupying. “There were more than 500 Taliban,” Haq said, “and only about 30 of us. I was able to get to the Pul-i-Khumri government and ask for help. The chief of police kept making excuses. Consequently, I went to the Americans.” About a month earlier, a small U.S. Special Forces team arrived in Shahabuddin, and when Haq appealed to them, he said, “right away they decided to help me.” The ensuing battle lasted four days, ending when the Americans called for heavy air support. Seven of Haq’s men were killed, and with the endorsement and facilitation of the Special Forces, those who survived became Shahabuddin’s local police. No major confrontation with the Taliban has happened since.
When I mentioned the complaints of criminal abuse, Haq, with a shrug of annoyance, also chalked them up to Tajik machinations. “It is obvious,” he said. “We were able to stop some of the corruption in the government. They were benefiting from our insecurity.” He gestured at the elders gathered outside. “They don’t like people resolving their problems in the traditional way. They would like to see these people standing in their doorways, offering them bribes.” He added: “The Pul-i-Khumri government is no good. If the American forces leave today, the Pul-i-Khumri government will probably do us more harm than the Taliban.”
To speak with government officials in Pul-i-Khumri about the A.L.P. is to glimpse the wilderness of ethnic and political hostilities that makes outside intervention so challenging. One of the most vociferous critics of the program is the head of the provincial council, Rasoul Khan. Probably more than any other individual, he is responsible for the Tajik power grab in Baghlan after 2001, and the marginalization of the Pashtuns that followed. He has been accused of seizing Pashtun lands, running drugs and brutally dispensing with his enemies. “He has his own subcommanders, who are using government facilities, police vehicles, police uniforms,” Hewad, of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said. “After the fall of the Taliban, this man, who was in the trenches against them, came to the government with a huge amount of his fighters and militias from the mountains.” The senior Special Forces sergeant in Baghlan told me: “Rasoul Khan is one of the most crooked dudes you’ll ever meet. He’s got so many connections, all the way to the president himself. He can literally order a hit on anybody he wants.”
At the Provincial Council building in Pul-i-Khumri, I found Rasoul Khan surrounded by a retinue of hardy-looking Tajiks, who nodded in agreement with everything he said. “As the representatives of the people, we are against the establishment of the A.L.P.,” he insisted. “The danger of the A.L.P. is much worse than the Taliban. The people becoming members are all criminals. They’ve killed at least nine people so far.”
Others dismiss these objections as self-serving. In his heavily guarded office above a hectic commercial street in downtown Pul-i-Khumri, a council member named Moh Faisal told me that the A.L.P. was anathema to Rasoul Khan because it represented a Pashtun threat to the Tajik hegemony over which he presided. “In the past, he was involved in drug trafficking and killed lots of people,” Faisal said. “Now all his relatives, friends and associates are in the government. The national police in Baghlan are not accountable to the chief of police. They are accountable to Rasoul Khan.”
Nearly everyone in Pul-i-Khumri seemed to agree with this. The provincial police chief at the time, Brig. Gen. Abdul Rahman Rahimi, was a Pashtun; the fact that the vast majority of his men were Andarabi Tajiks rendered him largely ineffectual, his authority mostly nominal. Not long after speaking with Faisal, I visited Rahimi in his opulent Pul-i-Khumri office, where each wall was lined with plush leather couches on which petitioners could wait to be invited into a much smaller and less stately room for private conversation. When it was my turn to see the general, he said: “An area that could not be secured by 500 national policemen is secured by 50 A.L.P. But what is really important is that the A.L.P. must be regulated.” Ultimately, that regulation should come from the chief of police. But the general claimed that the Americans had hampered his ability to do his job and that U.S. Special Forces protected A.L.P. commanders from criminal investigations. “The rules say the local police must be under the direct supervision of the national police,” Rahimi said. “Our friends in the Special Forces must not intervene in this.” Toward the end of our conversation, his cellphone rang. After listening to the other line for several moments, and perhaps forgetting my recorder was on, he said in Dari: “All three of them must be here for the investigation. Otherwise, the investigation cannot proceed.”
Rahimi was speaking of Nur-ul Haq, his younger brother Faz-ul Haq and their cousin Abdur Rahman. On later trips to Shahabuddin, I spent time with Faz-ul Haq and Rahman (who Human Rights Watch, in a recent report, says is accused of raping a 13-year-old boy), visiting A.L.P. checkpoints and accompanying foot patrols. As we made our way through verdant farmland irrigated by hand-dug canals, Faz-ul Haq seemed to have a story for each compound and cotton field we passed: here had been a Taliban headquarters, here a bloody firefight, here an R.P.G. attack. At his checkpoint in Omarkhel village, Rahman told me that as bad as it had sometimes been in Shahabuddin, he had only made the 20-minute drive to Pul-i-Khumri twice during the last year. “They were terrorizing us, stealing from us,” he said of the Taliban. But the Tajiks in the capital “are stronger than the Taliban,” he said.
“They never want to come,” General Rahimi now said into the phone, impatiently. “They are evading it by various means.” When he hung up, I asked whom he’d been talking to. He said it was the U.S. Special Forces. The general was no doubt affected by Ramadan and the day’s long fast, but he looked and sounded like a man overwhelmed by competing influences. “The Special Forces must hand these guys over,” he said. “If they don’t, it will jeopardize the entire program.”
The commander of U.S. Special Operations Forces in northern Afghanistan calls Rahimi’s characterization “an absolute lie.” When we spoke, he stressed that it lay with Rahimi, not the Americans, to investigate complaints and make arrests. “I’m not here to defend Nur-ul Haq,” he said. “But what I do know is I’ve seen a string of baseless allegations that when we followed up couldn’t be substantiated.” The leader of the Special Forces team working in Shahabuddin told me that he had personally escorted Haq to see criminal investigators in Pul-i-Khumri. “If they want to arrest him, they can arrest him,” he said.“We’re not going to stop them in any way.” In fact, it makes sense that Rahimi would want to give an impression of disapproving of Haq (thereby appeasing certain Tajiks in the provincial government), while also refraining from arresting him (which might result in Haq’s removal and risk upsetting the precarious stability Shahabuddin now enjoys). Accusing American Special Forces of obstructionism would afford the general a convenient means of doing both.
All the same, whatever forces might influence Rahimi’s actions, or lack thereof, the allegations remain. “If they are true, obviously Nur-ul Haq won’t be an A.L.P. commander,” the Special Forces team leader told me. The problem, he said, was that no accusers had come forward, which only fed suspicions of Tajik subterfuge. I mentioned what a villager had told me: “We are too afraid to raise any complaints against the local police. If we complain in the day, they will come in the night to take us from our homes. If they capture somebody, they tell the Americans he is Taliban.” I also repeated the claim of the elders who said that more than 100 families had left Shahabuddin since Haq took control. If true, wasn’t this evidence enough of mistreatment? The team leader acknowledged that many villagers had moved to the city. But here, too, the story was more complicated than it seemed. Before Haq joined the government, residents of Shahabuddin were obliged to ally with one of two insurgent groups — H.I.G. or the Taliban — and bitter grievances endured between those who chose differently. When the Taliban controlled Shahabuddin, supporters of Haq were forced to flee to the city; last year, when Haq returned and ousted the Taliban, many of those who stayed did the same. “Whether they’re innocent or not, they have this Taliban association,” the Special Forces team leader said. “And then the other families that are in the area have the H.I.G. association. And either way, they despise each other.”
At the end of the day, the team leader said, the situation in Baghlan was enormously complicated, and you never truly knew whom to believe. “We’re really trying to do the right thing,” he said. “One of my intelligence sergeants said it the right way: ‘Everybody in some way or form is a bad guy here. So you just have to pick the people who are less bad than others to work with you.’ ” The Special Operations commander in northern Afghanistan agrees. “Given the guy’s background, he’s clearly not an angel,” he said of Haq. “We struggle with it. He’s an imperfect solution. If not him, then who?”
About a month after I first visited Baghlan Province, the long-simmering antipathy between its local police and the Pul-i-Khumri national police finally erupted in violence. According to several Afghans and Americans involved, one of Haq’s local police officers, a man named Sher Muhammad, was in Pul-i-Khumri on the last day of Ramadan when he was told that a relative, a 15-year-old boy named Humayun, was being used for sex by a powerful national police colonel — a Tajik from Andarab.
Enraged, Sher drove directly to a highway checkpoint in the middle of a busy bazaar that was commanded by the colonel, whose name is Ghani, and demanded to know where Humayun was. The guards at the checkpoint told him it was none of his business. Sher went to his truck and got his rifle. When he returned to the checkpoint and insisted on seeing Humayun, Colonel Ghani ordered his men to shoot. A national police officer named Mestaray put two bullets in Sher’s leg.
Abdul Halim, an Afghan Special Forces sergeant, happened to be passing through the bazaar in his truck. When I met with him, Sergeant Halim said that as he approached the national police checkpoint, “I saw Sher lying on the ground, and a man in civilian clothes hitting him in the face with an AK-47.” Halim stopped, disarmed Mestaray and helped the bloodied Sher across the road. Mestaray fled into a fortified compound where Colonel Ghani’s battalion quartered. By this time, a crowd had gathered. “While I was trying to get the crowd off the road, I saw a national police officer pointing his gun at Sher,” Halim recounted. “I said: ‘Don’t shoot him. He’s already shot.’ He didn’t listen. He opened fire and shot Sher a couple of times in the back.” Sher collapsed, and the gunman retreated into the same building as Mestaray.
An ambulance arrived to take Sher to the hospital, and shortly thereafter more armed men came onto the scene: the deputy chief of police, additional soldiers from the Afghan Special Forces, about 10 U.S. Special Forces soldiers and a large group of Afghan Local Police officers. As the Afghan and U.S. Special Forces tried to separate the national and local police, the ambulance returned to the scene with Sher’s corpse, riddled with eight bullets. At this point, the American team leader, who was also there, told me, “It really started getting out of control.” The Americans managed to persuade the A.L.P. to attend to Sher’s body while they tried to retrieve Colonel Ghani. They then followed behind an Afghan Special Forces team led by Master Sgt. Bilal Ahmed Sheenwari. Sheenwari later told me that when he reached the national-police compound, he found Colonel Ghani and nine other police guarding the front gate. “I told Ghani, ‘We need the guys who attacked Sher,’ ” and here the colonel again ordered his men to open fire. A chaotic gun battle ensued between the Afghan Special Forces and Afghan national police. Sheenwari said the police officers fired on them with AK-47’s, PK machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. “We received fire, too,” the American team leader said. “All the Americans almost got hit with R.P.G.’s. It was a pretty hectic 15 minutes. There were civilians everywhere. There were A.N.P., A.L.P., A.S.F.” He called for air support, and soon an F-16 and an Apache helicopter joined the fray. “We got a personal phone call from Lt. Gen. Baba Jan” — the national police commander for northern Afghanistan — “telling us please don’t kill everybody out there. That’s what stopped us from doing anymore.”
Colonel Ghani and two other men were wounded. But Ghani, Mestaray and the officer who killed Sher have all since disappeared. The U.S. Special Forces and A.L.P. believe that Rasoul Khan evacuated them from the compound via a back road and is now concealing their whereabouts. When I later asked him whether he knew where Ghani was, Rasoul Kahn said Ghani was taken to India for medical treatment — a story the U.S. Special Forces are convinced is untrue.
Humayun, the boy, has vanished as well. No one knows if he’s alive or dead, but the A.L.P. are eager for retribution. When I asked the Special Forces team leader if he was worried about what might still result from the unresolved conflict, he said: “Yes. Very much so.”
Proponents and critics of the A.L.P., when arguing its merits or its faults, each invoke Afghanistan’s long history of irregular armed groups and diffuse, localized power dynamics. “Our idea was to use the Musahiban dynasty as a model,” Seth Jones, a former senior Cfsocc adviser, told me when I met with him near his office at the RAND Corporation in Washington. Encompassing the rule of Nadir Shah, Zahir Shah and Daoud Kahn, the Musahiban dynasty extended from 1929 until the communist coup of 1978, a period of relative peace often referred to as Afghanistan’s golden age. Jones argues that Nadir Shah and his successors were able to achieve such stability “because they understood the importance of local power” and refrained from trying to displace it.
Critics of the A.L.P. point to a different precedent. The senior Afghan government official who views local police as “poison” in the long term, for example, also told me: “Look at our history, especially the mujahedeen, and you see that the A.L.P. is the wrong program for our country. People are very tired here. Why did the people accept the Taliban? Most Afghans are not extremists. But they were tired of the militias, the mujahedeen.” For Afghans who see the local police as potentially uncontrollable, the strategy represents a distressing step backward, not toward the Musahibans but the chaos that came later, during the anarchic ’90s, when warlords and militias terrorized the country. Far from a golden age, this period is often called topakiyaan — “the time of the men with guns.”
In a country as fragmented as Afghanistan, no strategy can be expected to succeed or fail uniformly on a national scale, especially one, like the Afghan Local Police, that targets not the province or the district but the village. As problematic as the program has become amid the ethnic melee of the north, the majority of A.L.P. sites are concentrated in the south, where a comparatively homogenous Pashtun population has proved more hospitable. One of the earliest A.L.P. locations in southern Afghanistan was Kandahar’s Arghandab District. Last summer, as part of President Obama’s surge, American troops in Arghandab waged some of the most intense fighting of the war, dislodging large numbers of Taliban and winning a tenuous peace that the A.L.P. and the national police must now work together to maintain.
Before the surge, a Taliban checkpoint blocked the entrance to an area in Arghandab called Tabin, and villagers were regularly hanged from the trees that shade the slow-moving river there. Today, a local police headquarters stands around the bend, and Nesar Ahmed, an intense young man with a prosthetic right leg, commands 16 motley irregulars, whose Kalashnikovs are plastered with brightly colored stickers and wrapped in psychedelic fabric and turquoise beads. Nine months ago, Nesar told me, “this entire area had turned into a hell.” Now farmers can travel to Kandahar City from Tabin during the harvests, and they can irrigate their crops at night, when it is cool. “They’ve already sold the fruit in their trees,” he said, waving at the pomegranate orchards up the road.
Nesar is a cousin of Muhammad Issak, an ascendant personality in Arghandab, who functions both as Tabin’s malik, or chief, and as its national police commander. When I met with Issak in Tabin, he was just returning from the funeral of a local tribal elder who was killed by Taliban assassins two days earlier in Kandahar City. Light-skinned and thin almost to the point of frailty, Issak affects a groomed mustache rather than a beard, and favors a sidearm discreetly holstered beneath his plaid vest; a gold watch hangs loosely from his small wrist. In an unlit room just wide enough to accommodate two bunk beds, Issak sat on the bottom mattress, one leg draped effetely on the other, while Nesar and his men crouched around him on the floor, nodding at his words.
The son of a mullah and a former teacher, Issak enlisted with the national police during the Taliban resurgence in 2006. Last year, after rising to the rank of company commander in Kandahar City, he brought 90 of his officers back to Tabin, where they set up checkpoints in six different villages, and Issak promptly began working with U.S. Special Operations Forces to establish the A.L.P. “I asked the people to send their youth,” Issak said. “Every clan from the seven mosques sent two or three of their boys.”
The boys included a teenager in an ill-fitting brown uniform, another sporting leather ammo pouches over a bright red T-shirt, a third with a purple scarf tied around his head, Rambo-style, and an older man whose long black beard showed the first wisps of gray. They all appeared timorous and awkward, still unused to their status as armed men. I asked the older one why he joined the A.L.P. “We could not take care of our orchards and fields because there was fighting in them,” he said. “There were I.E.D.’s in every field and roadway. I joined when I felt there was a need for me to bring security to my area. I want to go back to my field.”
Down the road from Tabin, past labyrinthine ruins of old, mud-walled compounds, through lush fields of okra and low-growing vineyards, a collection of villages called Nagahan has been a focal point for U.S. Special Operations Forces since before the advent of the A.L.P. The local police commander, Muhammad Nabi, distinguished himself throughout Arghandab during the jihad against the Soviet Union, but later fled Afghanistan under Taliban rule and was pushing a handcart around Quetta, Pakistan, scraping by as a street vendor, when he heard of plans to recapture Kandahar with the help of American forces in late 2001. He returned to join the fight, then laid down his arms; two years ago, the U.S. military gave them back, under the Community Defense Initiative. “I did not want it,” Nabi told me, “but they insisted that I take the lead here.”
At that time, there were 10 Taliban checkpoints in Nagahan. “We liberated this area from them in one year,” Nabi told me. A few days later, I met with a yellow-toothed elder named Meera Jan, who shared fond memories of fighting alongside Nabi before the surge and the A.L.P. When I asked him what their force was like then — how were they organized? what sorts of resources did they have access to? — Meera Jan reached into his kameez and brought out a filth-encrusted elastic belt, the reflective kind U.S. soldiers wear when jogging on military bases. He held it up for me to admire, as if its properties were magical, and explained that in lieu of uniforms, an American officer had distributed the belts to distinguish the armed villagers from insurgents.
“We defended our area with this belt,” Meera Jan said.
By last June, Nabi’s militia had grown sufficiently effective to incite the Taliban to an act of desperation. Several hundred people were celebrating the marriage of a local couple when a stranger intruded, wrapped in a shawl. Nabi was a few feet away when the man detonated himself. The blast was devastating, and though Nabi escaped with minor shrapnel wounds and a ruptured eardrum, scores were killed, many of them women and children. (News reports at the time put the toll at 40; everyone I spoke with in Nagahan said 85.) One of the wedding guests, a man named Noorullah, told me a story I hadn’t heard from anyone else — that before reaching the ceremony, the bomber stopped to ask a local boy where exactly it was being held. Noorullah claimed the boy embraced the man in greeting and felt some pieces of metal attached to his arms and back. He followed him to the wedding, and when they arrived, the boy asked one of the commanders for a gun, intending to kill the bomber. Assuming the boy was up to mischief, the commander refused. “By the time he made others understand, it was too late,” Noorullah said. He told this story very slowly and very quietly, and when he finished he added: “The bomber blew himself up in front of me. My children were killed.”
The victims are buried in several mass graves, marked by the colored flags reserved for martyrs. The attack galvanized the community against the Taliban. Such unanimous resolve is just one of several preconditions that have made parts of Arghandab uniquely suited to the A.L.P. — but that are also often lacking elsewhere in Afghanistan. Before I left the district, the chief elder for Naghan’s 20-member shura, who said he lost 20 relatives in the wedding attack, told me: “The locals are with Nabi. The shura has appointed him, and the people will continue to support him, with or without the Americans.”
The vast differences between the A.L.P. in Kandahar and Baghlan underscore the vexing nature of a war that varies profoundly from district to district, village to village. While members of the local and national police in Arghandab are literally family, in Pul-i-Khumri they seem destined for bloodshed. A week after Sher Muhammad was murdered, Pashtun elders in Baghlan Province convened a shura to discuss possible courses of action. More than 1,000 men attended. One result was a list of seven demands submitted to the governor, the last of which was that Rasoul Khan “be brought to justice” for “multiple crimes,” including hiding Colonel Ghani and the national police officers who shot Sher Muhammad. The petition assigned one week for a satisfactory response, at which point the Pashtuns would block the two main roads into Pul-i-Khumri.
The day before the deadline, I returned to Baghlan and met with Rasoul Khan, who spoke ominously about the local police. “If the government does not control the irresponsible actions of the A.L.P.,” he said, “many such clashes can happen in the future.” At the end of our meeting, he told me that the Tajiks of Andarab were holding their own council, in response to the Pashtun shura. I followed him as he led a small entourage of armed men out of the provincial council building to a massive tent under which several hundred Tajiks sat in plastic chairs and on carpets and cushions, listening to Mustafa Mohsini, Rasoul Khan’s older brother. “The local police have created chaos in the area that nobody can solve,” Mohsini intoned in a deep, sonorous voice. “They do whatever they want. They incite ethnic rifts. They are threatening our people and our tribe.”
The following morning, I visited Haq again in Shahabuddin. When I mentioned the gathering of Andarabis in the capital, he nodded in irritation. “We know about it,” he said. “They have invited a few Pashtuns who have collaborated with them in the past. I told them: ‘You are not allowed to go there. If you want to go, talk instead to your hat and ask it when you want to die, because I will kill you.’ ”
In the end, the Pashtun demonstration was postponed a week, and then indefinitely, to allow a period of mourning for Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan whose assassination in Kabul on Sept. 20 made the future of the country that much more uncertain. Five days later, General Rahimi was replaced as provincial chief of police by Asadullah Sherzad, who is also Pashtun. “It’s definitely showing right now that Rasoul Khan is trying to get to him,” the Special Forces team leader recently told me. When I asked what Sherzad was doing about the investigation into Nur-ul Haq, Faz-ul Haq and Abdur Rahman, he said: “It seems to have kind of gone away. He just said, ‘I trust the Special Forces not to incorporate criminals.’ ”
Envisioned as a two- to five-year program, the Afghan Local Police are eventually supposed to be subsumed by the National Security Forces. But if the Interior Ministry does disband the A.L.P. at some future point, what will become of its members? Brig. Gen. Jefforey Smith, until last month the NATO deputy commander for police training in Afghanistan, told me that the A.L.P. will not be required to meet the National Security Forces’ recruiting goals. He also said, “By and large, a lot of them don’t want to join the national services and be at risk of having to move away from their villages.” I asked what happens, then, when the program is terminated and there are suddenly 30,000 armed, trained and organized Afghans scattered throughout the country, unwilling or unable to enlist with the national forces but also no longer employed by the A.L.P. “That’s the $64 million question,” General Smith said. “In theory, the improvement of security over time creates opportunity for improved governance and economic development, and with that you have other employment opportunities that don’t exist today.”
In Arghandab, when I asked Cmdr. Muhammad Nabi what he would do if the A.L.P. were discontinued, he replied that if at that point the national police and the army were capable of providing adequate protection for his village, “it is not a problem with us to have the A.L.P. disarmed. We will return to cultivating ladyfingers. We will take out our tractors and start farming.” Asked the same question in Shahabuddin, Haq said: “That decision will be made by the elders. If they make the decision to turn in our weapons, we will gladly turn them in to the Afghan government.” Then he thought for a moment and added: “But not to the government in Pul-i-Khumri. As long as the government in Pul-i-Khumri remains the way it is now — an Andarabi organization — we are going to protect ourselves however we can.”
Luke Mogelson wrote a cover article for the magazine in May about Afghan citizens who were killed by U.S. soldiers.
Editor: Joel Lovell
A version of this article appeared in print on October 23, 2011, on page MM42 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Bad Guys vs. The Worse Guys.
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