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US says there is evidence linking Afghan militants to Pakistani government
By Associated Press,
ISLAMABAD — The U.S. ambassador to Islamabad said in remarks broadcast Saturday that there is evidence linking the Haqqani insurgent network to the Pakistani government, a charge that could raise tensions in an already strained anti-terror alliance between Washington and Islamabad.
Parliament Is Frozen, A Year Past Afghan Poll
Wall Street Journal By MARIA ABI-HABIB SEPTEMBER 17, 2011
KABUL - A face-off between Afghan lawmakers and President Hamid Karzai has prevented the allocation of development spending and other key legislation, spreading disillusion among voters who risked Taliban intimidation to cast their ballots one year ago.
Afghan parliament mired by standoff
Washington Post By Sayed Salahuddin September 16 , 2011
KABUL - A political dispute over the expulsion of nine lawmakers has paralyzed Afghanistan’s parliament a year after Afghans braved a torrent of attacks to elect their representatives.
Pakistan army doubts Afghanistan ready for pull-out
By Martin Roberts
SEVILLE, Spain (Reuters) - Pakistan's army chief said on Friday he doubted neighboring Afghanistan would be ready for international troops to leave by 2014 as planned.
Roadside blast kills 9 civilians in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan authorities say a roadside bomb in northwest Afghanistan has killed nine civilians, including five children, as they were herding cattle.
WikiLeaks cables surface American fears over Afghanistan’s approval of ban on cluster bombs
By Alice Fordham The Washington Post
When Afghanistan ratified an international treaty this week banning the use of cluster munitions, it became the 62nd government worldwide legally committed to destroying stockpiles of the weapons and assisting those wounded by them.
'Haqqani network ready to take part in Afghan peace talks if Taliban does'
New Kerala
Islamabad, Sept 17: The Haqqani network no longer has sanctuaries in Pakistan, and it will participate in Afghan peace talks only if the Taliban does, the insurgent group's leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, has said.
For Afghanistan and Pakistan, Final Reflections on a Dark Anniversary:
By Katherine Brown Bloomberg Sep 17, 2011
Among the unimaginable changes Afghanistan and Pakistan have undergone in the decade since 9/11 have been the spectacular growth of their media. In Pakistan, there are now more than 40 television stations and hundreds of radio stations and newspapers; in Afghanistan, a country with no history of a free press, there are more than 20 television stations and over a hundred radio stations and newspapers.
US, Afghan presidents to meet in New York next week
AFP – Fri, Sep 16, 2011
US President Barack Obama will meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, the White House said Friday.
Hamid Karzai: In the shadow of terror, a meeting with the world's loneliest president
The threat of assassination colours his every waking moment. His brother, his father and several of his predecessors as Afghan leader were murdered. Yet Karzai seemed remarkably calm when he gave Evgeny Lebedev a rare extended interview in his palace in Kabul
The Independent Saturday, 17 September 2011
Hamid Karzai lives dangerously. As President of Afghanistan, he has survived four assassination attempts. His half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was murdered recently. His father, too, was assassinated, in 1999. Whenever he ventures outside his office in the Presidential Palace in Kabul he is accompanied by seven black
18 insurgents killed in airstrike in eastern Afghanistan
PARUN, Afghanistan, Sept. 17 (Xinhua) -- A total of 18 insurgents were killed when warplanes of NATO-led forces pounded Taliban hideouts in Nuristan province, some 180 km east of the capital city of Kabul, provincial police Chief Zahid Nuristani said on Saturday.
Taliban amnesty drive weak in Afghan hotspots - NATO
Reuters By David Brunnstrom Fri Sep 16, 2011
BRUSSELS - Most Taliban insurgents taking up an amnesty offer are low-level fighters and relatively few are from violent hotspots, but nearly 2,500 -- more than expected -- have laid down their arms in a year, NATO says.
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US says there is evidence linking Afghan militants to Pakistani government
By Associated Press,
ISLAMABAD — The U.S. ambassador to Islamabad said in remarks broadcast Saturday that there is evidence linking the Haqqani insurgent network to the Pakistani government, a charge that could raise tensions in an already strained anti-terror alliance between Washington and Islamabad.
The U.S. and NATO blame the Haqqani network for many of the attacks in Afghanistan, including this week’s strike on the U.S. Embassy. The group — affiliated with both the Taliban and al-Qaida — and its army of several thousand fighters is widely assumed to be based just over the Afghan border in Pakistan.
U.S. officials have long suspected links between the Pakistan military and the Haqqani network.
But needing Pakistani cooperation to beat al-Qaida and stabilize Afghanistan, they rarely say so publicly and as directly as Ambassador Cameron Munter did in an interview with Radio Pakistan that was broadcast Saturday.
“The attack that took place in Kabul a few days ago, that was the work of the Haqqani Network,” Munter said during the interview. “And the facts, that we have said in the past, (is) that there are problems, there is evidence linking the Haqqani network to the Pakistan government. This is something that must stop.”
The army and the government were not available for comment.
The Pakistani army has resisted attacking North Waziristan and the Haqqanis because it believes the group does not pose a direct threat to the country. The army is engaged in a bloody fight elsewhere in the tribal region against militants who have responded with hundreds of suicide bombs around the country in recent years.
Officers say that making enemies of the Haqqanis now could tip the country into even greater turmoil.
The army also believes it will be able to use the group, with which it has ties going back to the U.S.-backed resistance against Soviet rule in Afghanistan, to ensure its archenemy India does not gain a foothold there once the American troops leave.
In a statement Friday at a NATO meeting in Spain, Pakistan Army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani appeared to allude to that, saying Pakistan had a “sovereign right to formulate policy in accordance with its national interests and the wishes of the Pakistani people.”
American is under pressure to show success in Afghanistan ahead of its planned troop withdrawal in 2014, and has been pressing the Pakistani military to take action against the Haqqani network for at least two years, without success. The attack on the Kabul embassy by a team of assailants exposed further tensions in relationship still foundering after the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May.
On Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed frustration with Pakistani inaction against the insurgent network and issued what was construed here as a veiled warning that Washington may take unilateral action against the militants. The Foreign Ministry said his remarks were “out of line” with the two nations’ anti-terror cooperation.
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Parliament Is Frozen, A Year Past Afghan Poll
Wall Street Journal By MARIA ABI-HABIB SEPTEMBER 17, 2011
KABUL - A face-off between Afghan lawmakers and President Hamid Karzai has prevented the allocation of development spending and other key legislation, spreading disillusion among voters who risked Taliban intimidation to cast their ballots one year ago.
A group of more than 70 lawmakers, known as the Support for the Law coalition, has been holding mock parliamentary sessions for the past two weeks, denying the legislature a quorum needed to pass laws.
The friction stretches back to Mr. Karzai's effort to change the makeup of the legislature in the months after the parliamentary election on Sept. 18, 2010.
Mr. Karzai delayed the inauguration until January, saying that massive fraud had tainted the polls. Then, a special Supreme Court tribunal backed by Mr. Karzai sought the ouster of 62 lawmakers from the 249-seat house on allegations of electoral fraud. The tribunal came under intense international pressure; ultimately nine lawmakers were disqualified last month.
Mr. Karzai's efforts angered his opponents in parliament, who say the president ignores legislators and is dictatorial in his governance.
"The Afghan parliament is facing problems because our president doesn't respect our constitution," said Ustaad Mohammed Aref Rahmani, a parliamentarian from eastern Ghazni province and a member of the Support for the Law coalition. "We want to do our work in parliament but it is the government that is trying to change who sits in the house."
One of parliament's most pressing duties is deciding how to spend a development budget of about $1.5 billion. The money is intended to build roads, schools and other infrastructure seen as crucial to convincing Afghans that the government can provide amenities and build institutions that the Taliban can't.
Only 10% of that budget has been spent six months into the fiscal year that started March 21. Usually more than half of those funds is spent before the severely cold months of the Afghan winter, as the fund provides aid to the country's overwhelmingly poor population.
Mr. Karzai's advisers say now that nine lawmakers have been removed, the parliament should do its job and start passing laws. "The crisis is over. Parliamentarians now need to go back to their seats and avoid political clashes and do their jobs," said presidential spokesman Siamak Herawi. "President Karzai is not interfering."
Lawmakers counter that they will refuse to meet until Mr. Karzai grants their nine ousted colleagues key government posts, such as provincial governorships. A meeting between a group of lawmakers and Mr. Karzai on Thursday failed to end the impasse.
The protesting parliamentarians risk consigning themselves to obscurity if they continue their boycott.
"Parliament will become irrelevant in a very short time if the stalemate continues," says Fabrizio Foschini, a researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent think tank in Kabul.
Some lawmakers, even while supporting the coalition against Mr. Karzai, agree that they need to return to work.
"As we fight, Karzai can do whatever he wants. As elected members, it's not just our responsibility to get votes but to implement laws. We need to take our seats and soon," says Fawzia Kofi, a lawmaker from northern Badakshan province.
Many of the voters who risked their lives against Taliban threats to cast their ballots one year ago are becoming fed up and are questioning the value of democracy, increasingly seen here as a Western-imposed construct.
"We have no hope for parliament anymore, we don't trust those parliamentarians. They only work for themselves and are not at the service of the nation," said Khwaja Basir, a Kabul resident who voted last year and said he is doubtful he will cast a ballot in future elections. —Habib Khan Totakhil and Ziaulhaq Sultani contributed to this article.
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Afghan parliament mired by standoff
Washington Post By Sayed Salahuddin September 16 , 2011
KABUL - A political dispute over the expulsion of nine lawmakers has paralyzed Afghanistan’s parliament a year after Afghans braved a torrent of attacks to elect their representatives.
The impasse has held up urgent legislative initiatives and exacerbated the sense of anxiety among Afghans about the country’s future at a time when U.S. troops are starting to draw down amid rising violence.
More than half of the 249 members of the lower house of parliament have either refused or failed to attend sessions after nine lawmakers lost their seats over allegations that they were elected as a result of widespread fraud.
Members supporting the dismissed representatives say their bloc includes 160 lawmakers, a figure disputed by allies of President Hamid Karzai.
The nine members were expelled after a months-long fight during which Afghan and Western officials accused Karzai of using the courts to force the removal of opposition figures in exchange for politicians more likely to rubber-stamp his initiatives. The government has asserted it was simply seeking to probe and act on allegations of fraud.
Either way, the impact of the dispute is clear.
“Basically, nothing is being done in the parliament,” said Ramazan Bashardost, a member of parliament who said he supports neither side.
Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, said it was unfortunate parliament has conducted no business a year after the election.
“The parliament is needed and should start to work,” he said. “We need a minimum of checks and balances and the perception of checks and balances by the population. That helps democracy and accountability.”
Among the most pressing matters left unresolved amid the stalemate is the banking crisis sparked last year after revelations that Kabul Bank shareholders had been taking out large, unsecured loans to invest in risky ventures. Hundreds of millions of dollars from the coffers of the country’s largest bank remain unaccounted for, and the scandal has disrupted flows of international aid.
Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal was scheduled to appear before parliament on Wednesday to brief lawmakers on the probe into the scandal. The session was cancelled because few lawmakers were present.
Bashardost said Karzai’s government wants parliament to pass a supplemental budget to refinance the bank. If parliament signs off, the International Monetary Fund would be likely to reinstate its program in Afghanistan after having suspended it last year. The IMF’s move prompted important donor nations, including Britain, to freeze money earmarked for development.
Poisoned politics
The fight over the expulsions has poisoned Afghanistan’s politics at a time when Karzai’s government is struggling with two complex initiatives.
The first involves negotiating a bilateral agreement with the United States that would spell out the role of U.S. forces in the country after 2014, when Washington hopes to formally end its combat operations here.
Karzai is also trying to establish a foundation for peace talks with the Taliban — a task made more difficult by divisions within the government.
Afghan and Western officials here say it is important that the Karzai administration be able to articulate a clear policy on both matters by December, when the president is scheduled to meet senior diplomats from around the world in Bonn, Germany, to discuss the future of Afghanistan.
The dysfunctional parliament has also prevented Karzai from getting cabinet members confirmed, which has had a paralyzing effect on a government many Afghans regard as hopelessly corrupt and ineffectual.
“If the government is incomplete, then the legitimacy of Mr. Karzai will be in question,” said Abdul Habib Andiwal, one of the dismissed lawmakers.
Vadeer Safi, a law professor at Kabul University, said the impasse could be devastating if it drags on.
“The government is clearly facing a danger,” he said. “The continuation of the situation will be quite disastrous for the government and Afghan society.”
Although the previous parliament had begun to exert a measure of oversight over the executive branch last year, Afghans have long seen their national legislature as corrupt, ineffective and removed from the reality of life in impoverished rural areas riled by violence.
One of the few major pieces of legislation parliament passed left many Afghans feeling bitter. Lawmakers voted in 2007 to give amnesty to those who committed human rights abuses during the civil war that preceded the 2001 fall of the Taliban government.
While the baseline salary for an Afghan civil servant is roughly $100, lawmakers take home more than $4,000 per month, a sum that includes salary and a stipend for security, Bashardost said.
“I do not have any faith in the parliament or this government,” Kabul shopkeeper Ahmad Jashid said. “I regret risking my life by voting during the election.”
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Pakistan army doubts Afghanistan ready for pull-out
By Martin Roberts
SEVILLE, Spain (Reuters) - Pakistan's army chief said on Friday he doubted neighboring Afghanistan would be ready for international troops to leave by 2014 as planned.
"Frankly, I have my doubts," General Ashfaq Kayani told Reuters on the sidelines of a NATO Military Committee conference in the Spanish city of Seville. Kayani said he thought an alternative deadline might be possible.
"No date can be a final date," he said.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force is training Afghan security forces and is due to fully withdraw from the war-torn central Asian country by 2014.
NATO considers Pakistan to be a key regional player and Afghanistan's security situation was on the agenda at the U.S.-led alliance's two-day conference in Seville.
A NATO spokesman said the alliance thought the gradual withdrawal of international forces was moving ahead on time.
"There are encouraging signs of progress as far as transition at this stage is concerned," Brigadier General Massimo Panizzi told journalists.
Taliban rebels have recently, however, managed to attack several well-guarded targets in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Kayani added that he thought relations between the United States and Pakistan were satisfactory.
"Relations are good. They are improving," he said.
On Thursday the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said a U.S. warning on militants based in Pakistan, blamed by Washington for this week's attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, worked against counter-terrorism cooperation between the two allies.
(Reporting by Martin Roberts; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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Roadside blast kills 9 civilians in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan authorities say a roadside bomb in northwest Afghanistan has killed nine civilians, including five children, as they were herding cattle.
Police said Saturday the blast went off in the Ghormach district of Faryab province.
Lal Mohammad Ahmadzia, a regional police spokesman, said one child was also injured in the blast late Friday.
In a midyear report, the United Nations said 1,462 Afghan civilians lost their lives in the first six months of this year in the crossfire of the battle between Taliban insurgents and Afghan, U.S. and NATO forces. During the first half of last year, 1,271 Afghan civilians were killed.
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WikiLeaks cables surface American fears over Afghanistan’s approval of ban on cluster bombs
By Alice Fordham The Washington Post
When Afghanistan ratified an international treaty this week banning the use of cluster munitions, it became the 62nd government worldwide legally committed to destroying stockpiles of the weapons and assisting those wounded by them.
But before the Kabul government decided to sign the treaty in late 2008, it was pressed against doing so by American officials, who feared that implementation could impede the ability of U.S. forces to use cluster munitions in Afghanistan, according to diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
Cluster munitions, fired from air or land, are designed to explode into multiple bomblets before raining down on an enemy. But some of the bomblets don’t always explode — and when they land in areas populated by civilians, they are liable to later detonate much like landmines.
In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union used cluster munitions during the 1980s; Afghan forces deployed them during the civil war in the 1990s; and U.S.-led coalition forces used them against the Taliban in 2001 and 2002. There are 24 areas still contaminated by unexploded cluster bombs, mostly in residential and agricultural areas, and 40 people have been reported killed by them since 2001.
For years, those opposed to cluster munitions have campaigned for their elimination, citing the risks to civilians. And for years, the United States, which is not a signatory to the treaty, has argued that they are legitimate weapons when used properly. American military officials had pressed for the right to retain the munitions as part of their arsenal, including in Afghanistan, even if they were not commonly used.
The cables released by WikiLeaks underline American concerns that Afghanistan would approve the Convention on Cluster Munitions.
In 2008, before Afghanistan became a signatory to the treaty, then-American Ambassador William Wood met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and National Security Adviser Zalmai Rassoul to discuss the issue. Rassoul, according to one cable, “said the Afghan government would not take any steps that would damage the U.S.-Afghan security relationship.”
Nonetheless, a short time later, the Afghan ambassador to Norway signed the treaty at a signing conference in Oslo, with Karzai’s permission. A cable from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul details the “last-minute” change of policy, about which even some officials in Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry were apparently unaware. It also says that U.S. government believed the treaty provided the military with the flexibility “to store, transfer, and use U.S. cluster munitions” in Afghanistan, an interpretation at odds with the reading of many experts on the issue.
American diplomats were urged to emphasize to officials in Kabul that a “narrow interpretation” of the treaty “will impair our ability to defend the lives of our soldiers as well as those of Afghanistan and Coalition partners.”
Afghanistan was among dozens of countries where U.S. diplomats attempted to minimize the impact of a growing global campaign to outlaw cluster bombs. A cable sent from London details a request from Britain, which is a signatory to the treaty, for the United States to remove American munitions from British territory, including the Diego Garcia military base, where some were stored. The cable says that top British officials had authorized temporary, case-by-case exceptions, an agreement intended to allow British lawmakers to say “that they have requested the [U.S. government] to remove its cluster munitions by 2013, without complicating/muddying the debate by having to indicate that this request is open to exceptions.”
In Norway, where talks on the convention began in 2007, a U.S. cable from 2008 described the country’s “less than helpful” response and “inflexibility” on the issue of cluster bombs. In Japan, which has since ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions, cables record diplomatic attempts to discourage officials from doing so, and Japanese concerns that public pressure might force them to follow the British example of asking the U.S. military to remove cluster bombs from its territory.
“We know from WikiLeaks and from U.S. officials that during the negotiating process that the U.S. contacted more than 100 countries to talk to them about the convention,” said Steve Goose, who chairs the Cluster Munition Coalition, which has campaigned for a total ban on the weapons. “The U.S. contact ranged from expressing concern to twisting arms not to be part of the process and not to sign -- and they had a very concerted campaign to influence the language of the treaty.”
The State Department declined as a matter of policy to comment on the contents of the leaked cables, but spokeswoman Beth Gosselin said that the United States “shares the humanitarian concerns of those states that have signed and ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions, as evidenced by our significant financial and technical support for conventional weapons destruction programs.” A spokesman for the US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan said that the force is not storing cluster munitions in Afghanistan.
Some defense experts say that cluster munitions are essential to effective fighting and that, without them, American troops would have to use even less discriminate weapons. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that for American forces in Afghanistan, “if you have any organized attack on Afghan defenses, if you are talking about large Taliban formations, cluster munitions could be absolutely critical in stopping that.”
Cordesman added that the bombs have changed since the early models, which were prone to landing without exploding, saying that newer models deactivate if they do not explode on impact.
According to a 2008 policy memo by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, by 2018, all cluster munitions used by U.S. forces must operate to a standard whereby 99 percent of bomblets would detonate, limiting the amount of unexploded ordnance on the battlefield.
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'Haqqani network ready to take part in Afghan peace talks if Taliban does'
New Kerala
Islamabad, Sept 17: The Haqqani network no longer has sanctuaries in Pakistan, and it will participate in Afghan peace talks only if the Taliban does, the insurgent group's leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, has said.
The Haqqani network had rejected several peace gestures from the United States and the Karzai-led Afghan government in the past because they were an attempt to "create divisions" between militant groups, Sirajuddin told a foreign news agency in a telephone interview from an undisclosed location.
Any further efforts to do so would fail, added Sirajuddin, who is described by US forces in Afghanistan as one of their most deadly enemies.
He said that his group would support whatever solution the Afghan Taliban leadership suggested for the future of Afghanistan.
He also claimed that the Haqqani network did not have sanctuaries in Pakistan any more, and instead felt secure inside Afghanistan.
Gone are the days when the group's members were hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Sirajuddin said, adding that now they consider ourselves more secure in Afghanistan.
Senior military and police officials are with the Haqqani network, he claimed, adding that there are 'sincere people' in the Afghan government who are loyal to the Taliban, as they know the outfit's goal is the liberation of the homeland from the clutches of occupying forces.
The United States has posted a bounty of up to 5 million dollar for Sirajuddin.
--ANI
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For Afghanistan and Pakistan, Final Reflections on a Dark Anniversary:
By Katherine Brown Bloomberg Sep 17, 2011
Among the unimaginable changes Afghanistan and Pakistan have undergone in the decade since 9/11 have been the spectacular growth of their media. In Pakistan, there are now more than 40 television stations and hundreds of radio stations and newspapers; in Afghanistan, a country with no history of a free press, there are more than 20 television stations and over a hundred radio stations and newspapers.
Though Afghan and Pakistani journalists and commentators have been subjected to intimidation, including threats of violence, they have become increasingly vociferous.
In marking the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which focused U.S. and global attention on their region, Afghan and Pakistani commentators had plenty to say.
In Pakistan, while many acknowledge the 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil as a horrible event, some commentators argued the subsequent U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and the larger war on terrorism have had negative effects on Pakistan's security and psyche.
In his column for Dawn, Pakistan's oldest newspaper, which caters to a liberal, English-speaking elite, Mahir Ali wrote that the 9/11 attack was "an incredibly stupid idea. But America came to the party, and even exceeded expectations by turning Iraq into a battlefield." Ali continued:
For the most part, the victims [of the post-9/11 wars], unlike their American counterparts, will remain unsung and un-eulogised. The crime enacted 10 years ago on Sunday was horrendous…. The aftermath -- as western commentators, barring a few honourable exceptions, will no doubt neglect to note this week -- has literally been a hundred times worse.
Pakistan has experienced more than 300 suicide bombings in the past decade. The phenomenon of suicide attacks didn't start in Pakistan until 2002, Amir Mir reported for The News, a paper owned by Pakistan's most powerful news group, Jang. According to his research with the Pakistani Ministry of Interior, 303 suicide attacks have killed more than 4,800 and injured more than 10,140 Pakistanis "in almost every nook and corner of Pakistan between Sept. 11, 2001 and 2011 in the aftermath of 9/11." He did note, however, that the intensity of suicide bomb attacks is decreasing.
In another piece for The News, Mir suggested that terrorism and violence had grown worse in the past decade and that Pakistan has become "the nerve centre" of al-Qaeda's global operations. U.S. actions in the region were largely to blame for making al-Qaeda more popular, he said.
Other voices on U.S. Pakistan policy post-9/11 were more strident. In The Nation, another English-language paper known for its conservative bent, columnist Sikander Shaheen wrote a Sept. 10 piece, "No gains, all lost!" in which he quoted former Army Chief Mirza Aslam Beg's assessment of Pakistan's recent course:
Loss, loss and loss… Our territorial sovereignty is compromised. There have been drone attacks and there's blood everywhere, from Karachi to Quetta and Waziristan to FATA. There're killings everywhere. We're bearing the brunt of something we never deserved. Who brought this on us? None other than the U.S.! And the U.S. too has a price to pay. Just look how it's trapped in Afghanistan and it cannot get out of it. This is a vicious circle that was formed out of vicious vested U.S. interests, and these interests were born out of ambitions to grab resources, oil and gas.
On the other hand, Tanvir Ahmad Khan, Pakistan's foreign secretary from 1989 to 1990, wrote in the Express Tribune that Pakistan's current troubles are not the fault of the U.S. alone. Pakistan's decision-makers have led Pakistan astray, he argued:
Blown off course by 9/11, Pakistan is still adrift with its helmsmen remaining singularly incapable of a mid-course correction. It cannot even stanch the fearful hemorrhage of human lives and material resources. On that painful day in New York, a distant state called Pakistan lost its national narrative and now does not have the leadership to recover it.
The struggle to make sense of 9/11 and its repercussions has encouraged chronic suspicion and elaborate theories in Pakistan. Some reject the idea that a small terrorist network could have devastated a superpower. A popular narrative is that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks to gain legitimacy to invade Afghanistan and later Iraq.
A Sept. 12 editorial for Nawa-i-Waqt, the widely read, conservative Urdu-language paper, perpetuated the idea that the 9/11 attacks were manufactured by the U.S. government:
If the 9/11 incident is closely analyzed, it becomes clear that farce was staged with a view to ruin the Islamic state of Afghanistan. The United States has so far failed to provide any evidence [to the contrary].
In the Sept. 11 edition of the Frontier Post, an English-language newspaper from Peshawar, columnist Mohammad Jamil wrote:
Osama bin Laden had claimed the responsibility for 9/11 events. But since, there is no evidence. One should remember the quote of former American president Franklin D. Roosevelt who said: "In politics nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
The widespread idea that 9/11 was part of an orchestrated U.S. plan to invade Muslim countries, as well as other conspiracy theories, disturb Saleem H. Ali, a Pakistani-born professor at the University of Vermont. He wrote:
For me, the most troubling change in Pakistani society following 9/11 was a collective neurosis that the country developed around conspiratorial thinking.
Conspiracy theories are also popular next door in Afghanistan. Many Afghans cannot reconcile why a superpower, which threw the Taliban from power in a matter of weeks in 2001, since has been mired in a bloody ground war with the ragtag group for a decade.
Pajhwok News, Afghanistan's premier newswire, reported that most Afghans do not correlate the 9/11 attacks with the U.S.-led invasion in Afghanistan. According to a survey conducted in southern Afghanistan, over 90 percent of interviewees were not even familiar with the 9/11 attacks.
In Afghanistan, the more important 10-year anniversary this week, at least for Afghans living in the north, was of the assassination of Afghan Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud on Sept. 9, 2001, by al-Qaida. Massoud was the leader of the Northern Alliance, the main resistance force to the Taliban; his death was seen by some as a prelude to 9/11. Ray Rivera for the New York Times wrote that when Massoud's aides heard that the World Trade Center collapsed, they became hopeful: "They instinctively saw a nexus in the two acts -- though one has never been proved -- and knew that the Americans would soon be on their way."
The impact the American-led coalition has had in Afghanistan the past ten years was the focus of some Sept. 11 Afghan television broadcasts. Shamshad, a popular Pashto-language station, reported: "The foreign forces came to Afghanistan 10 years ago, but the demands of the Afghan people have not been fulfilled and the problems have not been solved yet."
On Tolo TV, Afghanistan's most-watched station, correspondent Wali Aryan attributed Afghanistan's "rising insecurity and spiraling violence" to the international community's attention to the Iraq war. Now that the focus of the U.S. is back on Afghanistan, "relations between Kabul and Washington are clouded over rising civilian casualties due to NATO air strikes," he said. "It has now been seen that the peace process has also failed to produce positive results and meet the expectations of Afghan and foreign officials."
In their editorials, Afghan newspapers, which have less impact than broadcasts because of the country's 70 percent illiteracy rate, both applauded success and illuminated failures in the country over the past 10 years. The government-run daily newspaper, Anis, for instance, said 9/11 shocked the world into no longer ignoring Afghanistan. It wrote:
It would be unfair if we ignored the positive changes, progress and development in various fields in Afghanistan over the past 10 years…. Still, we can expect a better future provided attention is paid to the Afghan people's and government's demands, provided the international community's donations to Afghanistan are spent properly and the main bases and roots of terrorists and criminals on the other side of the Afghan border are destroyed and we end wasting billions of dollars of the international community's aid to Afghanistan.
Though frustrated that there is not more progress, Afghan mainstream media voices generally didn't call for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Wali Aryan, closed his Sept. 11 Tolo broadcast with these questions:
Do we still have the chance? Will the government of Afghanistan and its international allies agree to revise their strategies on the war on terror 10 years after the 9/11 incidents? Most importantly, will the international community accept its mistakes and try to put Afghanistan back on its feet?
For Afghan and Pakistani reporters and pundits, the 10th anniversary of 9/11 provided a moment to reconsider the events of a decade ago and the consequences, just as it did for their American counterparts. For these writers and broadcasters, however, the occasion, and thus the commentary, was not quite so unusual, since Afghan and Pakistani journalists struggle to distill meaning from the aftermath of 9/11 in their countries every day.
(Katherine Brown is on the editorial staff of Bloomberg View. The opinions expressed are her own.)
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US, Afghan presidents to meet in New York next week
AFP – Fri, Sep 16, 2011
US President Barack Obama will meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, the White House said Friday.
The encounter, announced by US deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, will come amid sometimes testy relations between the Obama administration and the Afghan leader and follows a rise of Taliban violence in Kabul.
"This will be the first meeting the two presidents have had since the president laid out his plans for a US transition earlier this year," said Rhodes.
"They will have the opportunity to discuss how the transition is going," ahead of a NATO summit that Obama is hosting in Chicago next May, he said.
In a few areas of Afghanistan, NATO troops have began handing responsibility for security to Afghan soldiers, starting a process designed to leave the country free of international combat forces by 2014.
Partial drawdowns are starting this summer, with the 33,000 US "surge" troops leaving by the end of 2012.
There are around 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, nearly 100,000 of whom are from the United States, fighting the nearly 10-year-old war.
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Hamid Karzai: In the shadow of terror, a meeting with the world's loneliest president
The threat of assassination colours his every waking moment. His brother, his father and several of his predecessors as Afghan leader were murdered. Yet Karzai seemed remarkably calm when he gave Evgeny Lebedev a rare extended interview in his palace in Kabul
The Independent Saturday, 17 September 2011
Hamid Karzai lives dangerously. As President of Afghanistan, he has survived four assassination attempts. His half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was murdered recently. His father, too, was assassinated, in 1999. Whenever he ventures outside his office in the Presidential Palace in Kabul he is accompanied by seven black-suited bodyguards – part of the 800-strong, CIA-trained cordon that surrounds the Afghan leader and his circle.
Getting to meet him is an unsettling experience, requiring numerous checks and searches. This is a man who must live in constant dread that someone near him will detonate an explosion or produce a weapon – as happened to Ahmed Wali, who was shot by his own head of security as he came out of his bathroom.
He has granted a rare, exclusive interview to mark the impending 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Afghan War. We meet on 11 September, a decade after the terrorists struck the twin towers and the Pentagon; by 7 October, the US and British-led military intervention against the country suspected of housing Osama bin Laden was under way. Six weeks later, the Taliban leaders had either been killed or had fled. By Christmas, the country had a new head: the westernised Pashtun leader Hamid Karzai.
Earlier this year, Karzai confirmed that his time in power is coming to a close. He will retire, as the Afghan constitution requires, in 2014, at the end of his second term as President – the same year in which US-led forces will withdraw from a frontline role.
"The American arrival was seen at the time as a liberation," says Karzai. "They were welcomed into villages. The population rose against the Taliban. It was the subsequent mistakes that made things bad." What were those mistakes? He talks of "treasure" and "blood": the former denoting corruption, the latter denoting civilian casualties resulting from the abuse of power by Western forces.
He does not mince his words, blaming the West for spawning corruption and criminality on an unimagined scale – "for contracts, for corrupt contracts, for sub-contracts, for the contracts that the Afghan government is not involved in at all, for the millions of dollars that go to criminals ... The person that gives contracts of hundreds of millions of dollars without accountability to government officials – that is actually promoting corruption."
He has, he says, discussed this issue "repeatedly" with the Western powers, who have, finally and too late, put up their hands. "And now they admitted, they say 'Yes, you are right'." He does not deny that part of the fault also lies elsewhere, but he insists that "the big corruption" is due to foreign influence. "Corruption in the Afghan government, our own political circles, is also true. The small kind of corruption, bribes, is one thing, but the bigger level of corruption of contracts, hundreds of millions of dollars..." He shakes his head.
Karzai's home is the Arg-e-Shahi Palace, a fortress in central Kabul. Its 100-year-old stone walls, topped by turrets, separate him from the people he rules as much as they protect him from Taliban attack. He is accessible – but only beyond four checkpoints and after the removal of all personal belongings (wallets, pens, cigarettes) and scrutiny by sniffer dogs.
Inside the palace, there is eerie calm. There are gardens lined with red and pink rose bushes; birdsong echoes from the walls. Karzai lives here with his wife, Zenat, a former doctor, and their only child, a four-year-old son, Mirwais.
By his office door there are bullet holes, mementos of the Soviet occupation and the civil war. In a side room, pastoral scenes – a mountain stream, grazing camels – hang crookedly in gold-painted frames.
I am not the only one waiting for an audience. The new US ambassador, Ryan Crocker, and General John Allen, commander of international forces in the country, are waiting too. Crocker has with him a list of topics that he wants Karzai to address in a forthcoming interview with CNN.
"He has the hardest job in the world," confides Crocker. Four out of Afghanistan's past six presidents have been murdered, three of them in office. The fourth, the Soviet-backed Mohammed Najibullah, stepped down but did not flee when the mujahedin seized Kabul. He was taken from the UN compound and had his fingers cut off before being castrated, dragged behind a truck and hanged in a public square.
After Karzai was named head of the transitional government following the defeat of the Taliban, he seemed to be in a strong position. He was trusted by the US – indeed, was rumoured to have worked for its intelligence services – after years spent wooing it for help against the Taliban. He was also supported not only by his native Pashtuns but also by Afghanistan's other ethnic groups.
Two presidential elections later, the situation is different. There has been a spate of high-profile assassinations, including those of his brother Ahmed Wali and his close confidant, Jan Mohammad Khan. The security situation seems to be deteriorating. According to UN figures, civilian deaths are up 15 per cent in the first six months of this year. Only this week, the Taliban attacked the embassy quarter close to the Palace, resulting in a 20-hour firefight in which the US embassy came under rocket-propelled grenade fire.
Karzai is blamed for not acting decisively enough to prevent such setbacks. WikiLeaks revealed diplomatic cables from 2009 from the then US ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, that called him "corrupt" and "incompetent" and not "an adequate strategic partner". Unsurprisingly, meetings between US officials and the President are now limited to around once a month – a far cry from when the US ambassador might see him three or four times a week.
As I enter his office, Karzai leaps up, hands outstretched, palm upwards in a gesture of greeting. He is wearing a white kameez and black suit jacket. He is charming and gracious, his English impeccable – learnt as a student at Simla in India. Only occasionally, when asked a question he does not wish to answer, does his expression darken. Then the grin is replaced by a twitch near his left eye.
The President's flagship policy has been "Big Tent" politics, an attempt to include all ethnic groups and factions in his government. This has led to the empowerment of former warlords whom ordinary Afghans associate with their country's darkest days: the brutal civil war that preceded and precipitated the rise of the Taliban.
Some see this policy as a miscalculation. To others it is a sign of weakness – a trait reviled in Afghan culture. Karzai knows this. "This government was labelled as the government of the Mayor of Kabul," he says, referring to claims that his authority is limited by his officials' fecklessness, by his own isolation, and by the re-emergence of warlords. But, he insists, these critics are "absolutely wrong. Afghanistan is a very united country. Tribes and ethnic groups are all part of the mosaic."
In the course of the morning, pieces of that mosaic are shown in to see him. There's Burhanuddin Rabbini, the country's former president, whose seizure of power in 1992 prompted the mujahedin factions to turn on each other; there's a parliamentarian who is having problems with a visa application for India; and there's a tribal elder who has travelled to the capital to inform Karzai of local Taliban leaders wanting to be absorbed into the government.
At lunch, Karzai is joined by a group of eight MPs from Baghdis province, angry at the lack of electricity and good roads and at local girls being prevented from studying medicine. So determined are they to make their case that, at the meal's end, a bodyguard has to pull away a hand restraining Karzai as he tries to leave.
His schedule raises questions about the extent to which Karzai is dealing with matters that should be the business of his ministers or his civil service. This is a criticism made by Western diplomats. "[Karzai] insists on handling everything himself," says one. "His ministers are the same, signing every document that authorises any piece of expenditure."
Another complaint concerns the last presidential elections: a UN-backed electoral watchdog threw out a third of the votes cast for Karzai on the grounds of apparent fraud. In response, Karzai insists that it was the Western powers, not he, who practised electoral fraud, in a bid to weaken his powers. The diplomat I spoke to dismissed this as "paranoia" and repeated the claim that Karzai had stuffed ballot boxes. The tragedy, he said, was that he did not need to cheat, as he would almost certainly have won in a second-round run-off against Abdullah Abdullah, his former Foreign Minister.
This diplomat then claimed that the Western powers had been conferring about the best way to get rid of the President, whatever the election result. "I was shocked," Karzai says, when asked about this allegation. "I always thought they had respect for democracy." (The same diplomat told me that similar interference had been responsible for the brevity of Ibrahim al-Jafarri's tenure as Prime Minister of Iraq, from 2005 to 2006. The mistake the West made with Karzai, he said, was to allow too much loose talk in public about his removal, instead of simply removing him.)
Karzai insists that, if the Western powers truly desire peace, they must stop meddling in Afghan affairs. He recalls the Andrew Mitchell briefing papers fiasco – in which the International Development Secretary accidentally showed the press a confidential note saying that the British government should "welcome" the end of Karzai's presidency – as a sign of that interference. "If they want someone here who represents their interests, it's not right," Karzai says. "Are we happy with the West? Yes, they have given us a lot. Do we want a long-term relationship? Yes. But we believe that the West must respect Afghanistan's constitution and not be intrusive to the daily life of Afghans."
This mistrust of his allies resurfaces in connection with his brother's death: he blames the West for rumours that Ahmed Wali was immersed in the local heroin trade. "It was to put pressure on me," he says. "Some Westerners wanted to spray Afghan fields [to destroy opium poppies in a practice that risked harming the soil's long-term fertility and poisoning drinking water], and I opposed it. Strongly. When I did that there were stories about him in connection to the drug wars. I called the American and British diplomats and I asked if they have evidence, and they always said no."
The President was in his office when he heard the news of Ahmed Wali's murder. "I was sitting right where I am, right now, talking to one of my advisers. And the news came through. I didn't leave my chair. I didn't leave my desk. That day I was to receive President Sarkozy for a lunch meeting. I said, 'No, don't cancel it. We will receive him; then we will go to attend to my brother's death.'
"I did that because almost every day I get the news of the killing, or the assassination, or the bomb, that causes the Afghan people to lose brothers, lose family. So for me that day was one more incident of an Afghan losing a person they love."
This outer steeliness is betrayed by the emotion that shows on his face: a look of devastation similar to that seen at Ahmed Wali's funeral, when he dramatically stepped into the grave to bid a last goodbye. Then he smiles. "Let's go for a walk," he says.
It is early evening. The palace is covered in shadow and a full moon is rising above the turrets. I find myself thinking of those who lived here before, and the grisly fate many of them suffered. Does he ever imagine the ghosts of old presidents? "No, never. Those were different times."
He changes the subject, turning the conversation to Europe, which he used to like visiting before he took office. "I am an outdoor man. I like the simpler life. I am looking forward to completing my term and going back to being a citizen of my country. I have a house in Kabul. I want my son to be educated in Afghanistan."
We stop. "How do you feel about living here?" I ask, gesturing around.
"Not happy," he replies.
Will things ever improve for his country? Will Afghanistan achieve the peaceful, liberal democracy that the West seeks? Yes, he says, but only if those nations are "respectful towards our religion, our tradition, and mindful of the state of our society.
"We want greater co-operation in Afghanistan, to bring partnership between the Afghan people and these international forces, where Afghans will do their work and the international community will do their work... We don't mind their presence, but we want a change in their behaviour."
He is not unsympathetic to the British forces in Helmand. "They learnt to do better after their initial setbacks ... They have a better cultural understanding of Afghanistan's needs." He adds that "the Prince of Wales is a very good friend of Afghanistan and is helping the revival of Afghan culture."
But it is no longer just to the West that he looks for support. "Good relationships with the neighbours, especially Pakistan, can contribute greatly to Afghanistan's stability. They could do a lot more. China, too; India, too."
Does he think Western forces should have left sooner? "The Afghan people would agree to the presence of the Western military in Afghanistan. The Afghan people would not really care about the number of troops. The Afghan people would want a change in their behaviour – the Afghan people don't want them knocking on their doors at night; the Afghan people don't want them breaking into their homes; the Afghan people don't want them taking prisoners from their population."
It's that lack of respect, he says, that rankles. "The Afghan people want them to respect Afghan laws."
And does he believe that, after 10 years of death and destruction, the West truly wants the Taliban defeated?
He pauses. "I hope so," he says.
It is perhaps his most telling answer of all.
Evgeny Lebedev is chairman of Independent Print Ltd, owner of 'The Independent'. This is the first in an occasional series of interviews with world leaders.
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18 insurgents killed in airstrike in eastern Afghanistan
PARUN, Afghanistan, Sept. 17 (Xinhua) -- A total of 18 insurgents were killed when warplanes of NATO-led forces pounded Taliban hideouts in Nuristan province, some 180 km east of the capital city of Kabul, provincial police Chief Zahid Nuristani said on Saturday.
"Based on intelligence reports indicating insurgents' activities, international forces carried out an airstrike in Logal area of Bargi Matal district overnight, leaving 18 armed insurgents dead," Nuristani told Xinhua.
He said there were no reports of civilian casualties in the remote area, adding at least 15 more insurgents were also injured in the attack that took place at around 00:30 a.m. local time Saturday.
The mountainous Nuristan and neighboring Kunar province has been regarded as Taliban hotbed in the eastern part of the insurgency-hit country.
The purported Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid in talks with local media via cell phone from undisclosed location confirmed that 16 of insurgent fighters were killed in Bargi Matal district but claimed his fighters have also killed over a dozen Afghan and NATO-led forces.
The insurgent group have stepped up their attacks on Afghan and NATO-led troops since a spring rebel offensive was launched in May this year in the war-ravaged country.
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Taliban amnesty drive weak in Afghan hotspots - NATO
Reuters By David Brunnstrom Fri Sep 16, 2011
BRUSSELS - Most Taliban insurgents taking up an amnesty offer are low-level fighters and relatively few are from violent hotspots, but nearly 2,500 -- more than expected -- have laid down their arms in a year, NATO says.
Backed by $142 million of international funding, the Afghan government effort was expected to attract 1,000 fighters in eight provinces by the end its first year, British Major-General Philip Jones told a briefing on Friday.
The scheme has so far drawn 2,436 fighters in 20 provinces. NATO estimates there are about ten times that number in the country, said Jones, who heads NATO support for the mission.
"Of course it's clear the number of formal reintegrees is still relatively modest in comparison with the scale of ambition and the overwhelming majority of groups that have joined the process so far have been low-level, village-level fighters," Jones told a reporters by video conference from Kabul.
"But today, a year into this process, we are seeing more significant groups beginning to flow in across the country and this is beginning to take place in the provinces in the south and the east, where reintegration is always going to be more of a challenge," he said.
Jones said that in a country that had been at war for more than 30 years, scepticism and doubt remained widespread and numbers joining were far smaller than average in places like the volatile province of Kandahar.
"In Kandahar ... there are probably no more than 100 to 120 people who have joined the programme," he said.
"Local security remains one of the salient challenges of all of this, such that people can be free of retribution. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Taliban see people joining this programme as a significant threat."
Jones said some disenchantment with the process could be explained by the fact that some group leaders expected money for joining the scheme and then declared that promises had been broken when none materialised.
"The Afghans are very clear," he said. "No perverse incentives, it has to be an earnest and sincere peace process."
While highlighting the numbers, Jones said it was difficult to judge success simply by looking at data.
"A group of 15 in one particular province can be very insignificant and a group of 15 in another province can be very, very significant," he said.
Despite efforts to encourage insurgents to give up their fight, violence in Afghanistan is at its most intense since the overthrow of the Taliban government in late 2001.
Foreign troops have started handing over security responsibility to Afghan forces to allow a full departure of NATO-led combat soldiers by the end of 2014.
Risks for the future were underscored when suicide squads showered Kabul's embassy and NATO districts with rockets and gunfire in a 20-hour standoff this week.
(Editing by Louise Ireland)
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