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Huge explosives haul seized in Kabul, Afghan officials say
By the CNN Wire Staff April 21, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Afghan security officials said Saturday they had seized 10 tonnes of explosives and foiled plans to stage attacks in the capital, Kabul.
Why we need more accountability in Afghanistan
The Washington Post By Andrew J. Bacevich Saturday, April 21, 2012
For too long now, command accountability for our troops’ misconduct in wartime has been more theoretical than real. The latest scandal to erupt in Afghanistan — photographs of American soldiers amusing themselves with dismembered Taliban corpses — suggests that it’s past time to confront this problem.
Perceptions of Afghan Taliban victory dangerous: Pakistan general
Reuters By Qasim Nauman Fri Apr 20, 2012
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - The withdrawal of most combat troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2014 has raised questions from Kabul to Brussels to Washington about the potential chaos that may follow if the Taliban press to take over again.
High-Rise Buildings Pose Growing Security Threat in Kabul
Voice of America By Baharat Sabir April 20, 2012
Kabul - In two high profile attacks in the Afghan capital, insurgents used high-rise buildings that were under construction to target Afghan and foreign institutions. Our reporter has more on the growing security threat these buildings pose and why they are being constructed so close to sensitive areas of Kabul.
Afghan rugby players yearn for international competitions
KABUL, April 21 (Xinhua) -- Although the Taliban-led insurgency is continuing in the war-torn Afghanistan, the peace-loving Afghan youth have chosen sports to contest international games and win honors for their country.
Afghan Youth Orchestra Plans to Visit the U.S.
New York Times By DANIEL J. WAKIN April 20, 2012
One of the best-known facts about music in Afghanistan, at least in the West, is that it wasn’t. The Taliban banned it when they took power in 1996, beating musicians, burning instruments and destroying cassette tapes in the name of their severe and extreme vision of Islam.
US Army investigated soldiers over suspected drug abuse in Afghanistan, data show
The Associated Press 20/04/2012
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army has investigated 56 soldiers in Afghanistan on suspicion of using or distributing heroin, morphine or other opiates during 2010 and 2011, newly obtained data shows. Eight soldiers died of drug overdoses during that time.
Afghan Textbooks Skip Decades of Violence
Schools get history books that miss out all the bad bits.
IWPR By Abdol Wahed Faramarz 20 Apr 12
Afghanistan - In a highly controversial move, Afghanistan’s education ministry has dealt with the complexities of the last four decades of turmoil and war by simply omitting the entire period from the new history textbooks it is issuing to schools.
Students Live in Squalor at Afghan University
Nangarhar undergraduates sleep 25 to a four-person room.
IWPR By Hijratullah Ekhtyar 20 Apr 12
Afghanistan - Sebghatollah’s dormitory room at Afghanistan’s Nangarhar University was designed for just four students, but he has to share it with 25 others.
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Huge explosives haul seized in Kabul, Afghan officials say
By the CNN Wire Staff April 21, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Afghan security officials said Saturday they had seized 10 tonnes of explosives and foiled plans to stage attacks in the capital, Kabul.
Three Pakistani citizens and two Afghans were captured, the National Directorate of Security said in a statement.
The five suspected militants confessed their involvement during questioning and admitted to being members of Pakistani and Afghan Taliban terrorist groups, the NDS said.
The explosives -- amounting to about 22,045 pounds -- were hidden under bags of potatoes in a big truck with Pakistani license plates, it said.
The suspects said they were ordered by Pakistani Taliban leaders and members of Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, to transfer the explosives from the Pakistani border city of Peshawar to Kabul for use in terror attacks, the statement said.
Last Sunday, insurgents launched the wave of audacious attacks in Kabul and three other areas of Afghanistan.
The Taliban said those attacks were intended to show its enemies, including NATO, that it can strike secure locations.
ISAF said that as many as seven locations in Kabul were attacked, including the parliament building and the American, German and Russian embassies.
The renewed violence has increased concern that a rapid handover to Afghan forces will leave Afghanistan vulnerable to continued attacks by the Taliban.
International forces are due to complete the transition of security responsibilities to Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
CNN's Nick Paton Walsh and Fazal Ahad contributed to this report.
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Why we need more accountability in Afghanistan
The Washington Post By Andrew J. Bacevich Saturday, April 21, 2012
For too long now, command accountability for our troops’ misconduct in wartime has been more theoretical than real. The latest scandal to erupt in Afghanistan — photographs of American soldiers amusing themselves with dismembered Taliban corpses — suggests that it’s past time to confront this problem.
On the question of accountability, the military’s ethic is clear: With authority comes responsibility. More specifically, commanders bear responsibility for everything that happens within their jurisdiction. This decree supposedly applies to high-ranking generals as much as lowly lieutenants.
Once upon a time, the standard for implementing this code was straightforward: Win, and you gain fame and fortune; fail to win, and you’re toast. As commander in chief during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln enforced this standard ruthlessly. As a result, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman achieved a measure of immortality. Meanwhile, Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker and George Meade, among a host of other mediocrities, found themselves unemployed or consigned to lesser positions.
In the post-9/11 era, President George W. Bush abandoned this standard. In 2003, Gen. Tommy Franks presided over a campaign in Iraq that dispersed a pathetic local army even as Franks neglected to consider what might ensue. The answer was not long in coming: chaos and a far uglier and more costly conflict than Americans had bargained for.
Historians will probably place Franks in the company of Burnside and Hooker rather than Grant and Sherman. Yet, for whatever reason, Bush glossed over his field commander’s shortcomings, ordained him a great leader and awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Franks had neither won nor lost his war; he had merely mismanaged it and then moved on, washing his hands of the mess. Here was a troubling precedent.
War induces barbarism, and the Iraq war proved no exception. Soon enough, egregious transgressions by U.S. troops surfaced. Abu Ghraib provides one especially notorious example; the massacre at Haditha another. But there were others, now mostly forgotten, at least by Americans — among them the Iraq insurgency’s equivalent of the Boston Massacre. In Fallujah on April 28, 2003, with Franks still in command, U.S. troops opened fire on Iraqi demonstrators, killing more than a dozen and wounding several dozen more.
The Pentagon declared each of these an aberration. In each instance, extensive investigation singled out a handful of minions for punishment. In each, senior commanders escaped unscathed. (Abu Ghraib is the partial exception that proves the rule: In the scandal’s aftermath, a female Army Reserve brigadier general — not quite a member of the club — lost her star, a fate thus far shared with no male counterpart and no regular officer.)
In an earlier day, this misconduct might not have mattered. When Sherman’s troops marched to the sea in 1864, few cared about any atrocities they might commit. The object of the exercise, after all, was not to win Confederate hearts and minds but, as Sherman succinctly put it, to “make Georgia howl.” Similarly, although the desecration of remains by U.S. troops today pales in comparison with the treatment visited upon Japanese dead during World War II, ensuring that Marines at Peleliu or Okinawa complied with the Hague Conventions did not figure as a priority. Their job was to kill.
Yet, like it or not, our wars differ from those wars. The attenuated definition of command responsibility that prevailed after Sept. 11, 2001, not only let senior commanders off the hook; in wars where killing is not enough, it also compromised overall military effectiveness.
Much to his credit, when Robert Gates became secretary of defense in 2006, he sought to reverse this erosion of senior officer accountability. When the Air Force demonstrated a cavalier attitude toward managing its nuclear inventory, Gates fired the service’s chief of staff. When The Washington Post broke a story about wounded warriors warehoused in substandard conditions at Walter Reed, Gates handed both the two-star hospital commander and the three-star Army surgeon general their walking papers.
When Gen. Stanley McChrystal, chosen by President Obama to run the Afghanistan war, sat idly by as members of his staff expressed their contempt for administration officials, he too lost his job. McChrystal himself hadn’t said anything all that objectionable. His offense lay in failing to school his loud-mouthed subordinates in the principle of civilian control of the military.
Yet when it comes to misdeeds on or near the battlefield — troops urinating on Taliban corpses, burning Korans, allegedly wandering away from base to murder civilians in cold blood — the pre-Gates norms stubbornly persist. If fault is found, it invariably fixes responsibility and imposes penalties at echelons well below those occupied by the people said to be in charge. The fall guy ends up being the little guy.
Granted, each of these incidents occurs in a context. Protracted conflicts undermine discipline, and those of the past decade have been the longest in U.S. history. Soldiers sent to wage frustrating and almost certainly unwinnable wars to which the public has become indifferent deserve considerable sympathy. The fact that those troops are of a generation seemingly compelled to record and “share” their personal experiences — whether quotidian or silly or depraved — offers a further complication. (Marines prying gold teeth out of dead Japanese soldiers did not enshrine their acts on iPhones and send the results to a network of best buddies.)
Furthermore, we should not overstate the reach of command authority. Only someone innocent of actual military experience will imagine that a directive from an American four-star general elicits enthusiastic and universal assent. Orders are often misconstrued, reinterpreted, overlooked or selectively disobeyed — hence, the need to restate them while demanding full compliance.
Yet anyone who cherishes the military professional ethic will see those explanations — whatever their value in providing context — for what they are: excuses for a repeated failure to enforce standards. That failure, which undermines any prospect for mission success, however loosely defined, is ultimately a failure of leadership.
This latest scandal, surfacing on Gen. John Allen’s watch, actually occurred in February 2010, when Gen. David Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command, had overall responsibility for the war’s direction. The revelation dents the image of mastery that Petraeus and his acolytes carefully cultivated. Yet the interval between the act and its becoming public knowledge suggests that this is unlikely to be the last such incident we will have to endure.
The best way to stanch this outpouring of embarrassing news from Afghanistan is to bring our soldiers home, an option that many Americans find increasingly attractive. In the interim, however, we should reassert a standard of command responsibility that Lincoln would have understood. Yes, when soldiers behave badly, the harsh hand of discipline should fall on individual perpetrators. Yet soldier misconduct expresses professional malpractice at all levels. This epidemic will subside only once we recognize that.
Gates understood the basic proposition. Leaders shape institutions. But no leader is irreplaceable — sometimes nothing beats replacing a few near the top to focus the attention of the rest. For an American military well into a second exhausting decade of continuous war, this is one of those times.
outlook@washpost.com
Andrew J. Bacevich, who teaches at Boston University, is the editor of “The Short American Century: A Postmortem.”
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Perceptions of Afghan Taliban victory dangerous: Pakistan general
Reuters By Qasim Nauman Fri Apr 20, 2012
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - The withdrawal of most combat troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2014 has raised questions from Kabul to Brussels to Washington about the potential chaos that may follow if the Taliban press to take over again.
Few people are as worried about what the pullout could trigger next door in nuclear-armed Pakistan as Lieutenant-General Khalid Rabbani, commander of the frontline corps fighting militants in the northwest of the country.
Sitting in his office in the heavily-fortified headquarters of the XI Corps in Peshawar - one of the Pakistan cities worst hit by suicide bombings - he speaks anxiously about creating the right perceptions as the foreign troop exit approaches.
If the Taliban are seen as the victors in any way, that could be disastrous for Pakistan, emboldening homegrown Taliban militants, who are close to al Qaeda, to step up their campaign to topple the U.S.-backed Islamabad government.
"If they are leaving and giving a notion of success to the Taliban of Afghanistan, this notion of success may have a snowballing effect on to the threat matrix of Afghanistan," Rabbani told Reuters in an interview this week.
"On our side, it may give impetus to the already dying down so-called Tehrik-e-Taliban's (Pakistan Taliban) effort over here."
Rabbani has good reason to worry, even though he and other military officials say security crackdowns have hurt the Pakistani Taliban.
The loose alliance of militant groups - the biggest security threat to the state - has proven resilient, despite repeated offensives from the military, one of the largest in the world.
They have carried out suicide bombings and high-profile attacks, including one on army headquarters, since they were formed in 2007 after a military raid on Islamabad's Red Mosque, which was controlled by its allies.
The Pakistani Taliban have close links with the Afghan Taliban. They move back and forth across the unmarked border, exchange intelligence and shelter each other in a region U.S. President Barack Obama has described as "the most dangerous place in the world".
Those ties worry military commanders like Rabbani, who believe the strengthening of ties between the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban will complicate efforts to contain any spillover of instability in 2014.
One of the most notorious Pakistani Taliban leaders, Afghanistan-based Mullah Fazlullah, has already demonstrated what may be in store if U.S.-led NATO forces fail to stabilize Afghanistan before 2014.
Hundreds of his fighters staged cross-border raids on Pakistani border posts last summer, killing dozens of Pakistani soldiers.
"Our friends on the other side know exactly where they are because we communicate it to them. But they have capacity issues," said Rabbani, referring to Western and Afghan forces.
"I wonder, that if the superpowers and the Western world operating on the other side, they have capacity issues, we certainly have them too."
Critics say Pakistan has created a major security threat along the border by supporting militant groups for decades, an allegation Islamabad denies.
"COUNTERPRODUCTIVE" DRONE STRIKES
Rabbani took command at a time of deep crisis in relations between Washington and Islamabad, a week after a cross-border NATO air attack killed 24 Pakistan soldiers on November 26.
Pakistan's parliament recently concluded a review of ties with the United States, recommending that the government demand an end to American drone strikes in the nation's tribal areas.
Even though analysts say drone strikes which kill high-profile al Qaeda or Taliban militants are not possible without Pakistani intelligence assistance, the campaign fuels anti-American sentiments.
Rabbani acknowledged the strikes can be effective, but said they also kill civilians and are counterproductive.
"You kill five, and you're making 50 more enemies. It's very clear arithmetic. This is the arithmetic that we're trying to make them understand," he said, adding that instead intelligence should be shared so that Pakistan can act.
"They may indicate (a target), we'll pound it with the precision shooting of our F-16s. So it can be done, it has been done at one or two places. Why can't this model be followed, we keep on telling them this is a possible model to be followed."
Washington has repeatedly urged Pakistan to mount a full-scale assault on North Waziristan and go after the Haqqani network, one of the deadliest Afghan insurgent groups.
The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan said this week that there was "no question" that the Haqqani network had staged coordinated attacks on Kabul and repeated calls for Pakistan to pursue the group.
Pakistan is a recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. aid. It denies that the Haqqanis are based there and says it is too stretched elsewhere fighting the Taliban.
Rabbani said the region near the Afghan border was a major security risk, but repeated the official line that Pakistan will set its own timetable for any operation in the area.
"Something has to be done with North Waziristan. The sooner the better. And we are already looking into it as to how we are going to deal with it," he said.
"We will have our own time and decision to go."
(Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Ron Popeski)
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High-Rise Buildings Pose Growing Security Threat in Kabul
Voice of America By Baharat Sabir April 20, 2012
Kabul - In two high profile attacks in the Afghan capital, insurgents used high-rise buildings that were under construction to target Afghan and foreign institutions. Our reporter has more on the growing security threat these buildings pose and why they are being constructed so close to sensitive areas of Kabul.
Earlier this week, insurgents targeted the presidential palace, foreign embassies and other strategic locations during a deadly attack in Kabul. The 18-hour assault that began Sunday only ended when Afghan security forces backed by NATO helicopters fired on the last attackers who had seized an unfinished building in the diplomatic enclave.
In a similar attack last September, insurgents occupied the upper floors of an unfinished building in Kabul, firing bullets and rockets at the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and Afghan intelligence headquarters.
Kabul has seen a construction boom in recent years, but many of the buildings that have emerged among mud houses and the rubble of war remain incomplete for years due to very slow construction work.
Afghan finance ministry advisor Najib Manalai is closely watching this development and considers unfinished high-rise buildings a grave threat to security in the capital.
"We have several buildings all around the presidential palace which could be easily used by anyone who wants to attack the palace," said Manalai. "Kabul has such buildings all over the city; some of them even close to military installations. These buildings have been built out of the norms of the city. Besides a security threat they have other negative sides too."
The building used during last year's attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul is reportedly owned by a member of the Afghan parliament.
Manalai says property owners and officials who allows these buildings to go up are equally to blame.
"We can’t say high-ranking officials in the government are unaware of the construction of these buildings," he said. "They are partners in many of these buildings. It is said that when permission for a big building is needed, a mayor is brought in to do the job. As soon as the mayor signs the papers on that huge building he is replaced by another mayor."
Kabul residents, like Lema, who live close to these unfinished high-rises are also worried about their safety.
"These buildings could be used by insurgents, suicide bombers and other criminals, because nobody knows who owns them, nobody protects them and nobody can question who they belong to," said Lema. "We have a building which lay incomplete for the last eight years. No one knows who the owner of the building is. It has no protection and no one oversees it. We see people coming into the building at night, but no one comes into it during the day."
Kabul's technical deputy mayor, Abdul Ahad, says there are at least three such high-rise buildings whose owners are unknown, and the properties have changed hands at least three or four times. He says this is just part of the problem.
"According to our last year’s evaluations around 50 percent of such buildings have illegally been constructed and have no legal permits from the municipality," said Ahad. "This is a huge issue. We are working on a new construction evaluation rule and will reevaluate all these illegal constructions based on these new rules."
The Kabul official says the new rules will mandate that work be completed within a certain timeframe and that overall, there will be greater oversight of future construction projects.
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Afghan rugby players yearn for international competitions
KABUL, April 21 (Xinhua) -- Although the Taliban-led insurgency is continuing in the war-torn Afghanistan, the peace-loving Afghan youth have chosen sports to contest international games and win honors for their country.
"I want the Afghan team to win medals in the upcoming rugby matches scheduled to be held in Dubai later this month," said Mustafa Sadat, a member of the national rugby team.
Attired in sport costume and dreaming better future for his team and country, the hopeful and energetic Sadat told Xinhua that he hates the protracted war that has destroyed both the country and the people.
"The outcome of over three decades of war is the destruction of our country and the hardship for the people. Let us move forward and secure good place in the comity of nations," said Sadat while playing rugby in the Ghazi Stadium, Kabul.
The Ghazi Stadium, Afghanistan's only sport stadium, had served as a punishment ground a decade ago where Taliban courts publicly executed severe punishments including chopping hands, foot, flogging and executing the people on charge of involvement in criminal activities during the Taliban reign (1996-2001) on each Friday, the weekly Muslim holiday.
The Afghanistan Rugby Federation (ARF) was formally established in May 20, 2011 with an objective to promote the game amongst Afghan youth to earn good name for the war-torn country.
"I have been playing rugby over the past one year, it is an exciting sport and a new, fascinating game for Afghans," Sadat said.
Jawid Rahmani, the coach of the newly introduced sport in Afghanistan, was hopeful that his trainees would taste victory in the Dubai games.
Rahmani said by promoting sports the Afghan youth can fight drug and reduce the number of drug addicts in the country.
The post-Taliban Afghanistan has made tremendous achievements in sports over the past decade as Afghan athletes have won medals from regional and international games including one bronze from the Beijing Olympics.
Afghanistan has indigenous sports which bear some resemblances to the rugby. One of these thrilling games is known as Buzkashi or goat robbing which is compared to rugby and polo, in which the horse riders use a dead goat or sheep as the ball.
The goal of a horse rider in the Buzkashi game is to grab the carcass of a headless goat or sheep and competes with others to pitch it across the goal line or into a target circle.
Presently, a total of 250 rugby players in 10 teams are active in the country and efforts are underway to train and make more rugby players ready for international matches in the future, the coach said.
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Afghan Youth Orchestra Plans to Visit the U.S.
New York Times By DANIEL J. WAKIN April 20, 2012
One of the best-known facts about music in Afghanistan, at least in the West, is that it wasn’t. The Taliban banned it when they took power in 1996, beating musicians, burning instruments and destroying cassette tapes in the name of their severe and extreme vision of Islam.
But with the Taliban’s fall, musical life revived, if slowly, in the shattered country. Ahmad Sarmast, an Afghan native and an expert on his nation’s music who was trained in Russia and Australia, opened up a rare entity in 2010: a music school for Afghan children.
Now Mr. Sarmast and an American aide, William Harvey, want to send a youth orchestra to the United States to show the West that its sacrifice of lives and material in Afghanistan “is not gone in the wind,” in Mr. Sarmast’s words.
Mr. Sarmast and Mr. Harvey, who spoke in an interview on Friday, are in New York this week to work on logistics for the trip and to drum up money and other support to pay for it. The current plan calls for concerts at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Feb. 7 and at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 12.
Mr. Sarmast directs the school, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Mr. Harvey, a Juilliard graduate who directs a separate organization — Cultures in Harmony, which promotes unity through classical music with projects in various countries — teaches violin at the institute and conducts its Afghan Youth Orchestra.
The institute teaches some 150 young people, about half orphans and street hawkers, Mr. Sarmast said. About 35 of the students are female, important in a country where women face obstacles to education.
The young people study both Western and Afghan instruments (the orchestra includes some) and music theory from both cultures. Many of the Western instruments are donated, and the World Bank provides financial support. Tuition is free.
The cost of the tour is expected to be around $500,000. The Carnegie Corporation of New York has promised $50,000, and the institute has submitted a proposal to the United States Embassy in Kabul for a $350,000 grant, which Mr. Harvey said was likely to come through. The current plan calls for 46 musicians to go, along with a dozen teachers, about half of them Westerners.
Mr. Sarmast said a visit by the orchestra would provide a rare bit of good news about Afghanistan. “It will be showing to the international community about the love of the Afghan people for music and the positive changes for kids and for girls,” he added.
Mr. Harvey offered an anecdote in that vein. He said he was invited to play the violin at the wedding of Afghan friends and saw a little boy there playing with a plastic toy in the form of an automatic rifle. After the boy saw Mr. Harvey make music, he shyly tucked the toy rifle under his chin, like a violin.
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US Army investigated soldiers over suspected drug abuse in Afghanistan, data show
The Associated Press 20/04/2012
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army has investigated 56 soldiers in Afghanistan on suspicion of using or distributing heroin, morphine or other opiates during 2010 and 2011, newly obtained data shows. Eight soldiers died of drug overdoses during that time.
While the cases represent just a slice of possible drug use by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, they provide a somber snapshot of the illicit trade in the war zone, including young Afghans peddling heroin, soldiers dying after mixing cocktails of opiates, troops stealing from medical bags and Afghan soldiers and police dealing drugs to their U.S. comrades.
In a country awash with poppy fields that provide up to 90 percent of the world's opium, the U.S. military struggles to keep an eye on its far-flung troops and monitor for substance abuse.
But U.S. Army officials say that while the presence of such readily available opium — the raw ingredient for heroin — is a concern, opiate abuse has not been a pervasive problem for troops in Afghanistan.
"We have seen sporadic cases of it, but we do not see it as a widespread problem, and we have the means to check," said Col. Tom Collins, an Army spokesman.
The data represents only the criminal investigations done by Army Criminal Investigation Command involving soldiers in Afghanistan during those two years. The cases, therefore, are just a piece of the broader drug use statistics released by the Army earlier this year reporting nearly 70,000 drug offenses by roughly 36,000 soldiers between 2006-2011. The number of offenses increased from about 9,400 in 2010 to about 11,200 in 2011.
The overdose totals for the two years, however, are double the number that the Defense Department has reported as drug-related deaths in Afghanistan for the last decade. Defense officials suggested that additional deaths may have been categorized as "other" or were still under investigation when the statistics were submitted.
The data was requested by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and obtained by The Associated Press. The Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps have not yet responded to the request for similar information. The Army reports blacked out the names of the soldiers who were under investigation as well any resolution of their cases or punishments they may have received.
Danger not 'fully acknowledged' by military Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the numbers signal the need for the military leadership to be more vigilant about watching and warning troops in Afghanistan about drug abuse. He said the worry is that "the danger, including the danger of dying, hasn't been fully acknowledged by the military and it needs to be."
Army officials say they do random drug testing through the service and the goal is that every soldier is tested at least once a year. Top Army leaders have said they have not met that goal, but have been working steadily to substantially increase the number of those tested each year.
The officials also say the Army's Criminal Investigative Division has quarterly drug statistics that show that drug use by troops in Afghanistan is not greater than that of troops in installations back in the United States and there is less of a variance in drugs used by troops in Afghanistan.
According to Army data, an average of 1.38 million urine samples have been tested annually over the past five years, while an annual average of 106,000 soldiers were not tested at all. Officials said that regular testing is even more difficult in the war zone because the testing facilities are often far away.
The cases reflect a broad range of incidents, describing accidental overdoses as well as soldiers buying drugs from Afghan troops, stealing morphine from medical aid bags or, in some cases, taking steroids, using drugs prescribed to someone else or taking medications long after their prescriptions had expired.
Drugs bought from Afghan Army, police In one overdose case, a member of the Kentucky National Guard was found dead of "acute heroin toxicity" at his Afghanistan base after a soldier, also in the Kentucky Guard, bought heroin from a civilian contractor and used it with him. The report found that he also had morphine and codeine in his system.
Others more often involved soldiers who were found dead and were later determined to have taken a mix of prescription and other opiate drugs.
The nonlethal cases range from a soldier failing a random drug test to more organized abuse.
In one case, seven members of the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division were found to have smoked hashish and/or ingested heroin numerous times, including some bought from members of the Afghan Army and police. The investigation found that one other brigade soldier acted as a lookout while others used the drugs.
Opium is a key revenue source in Afghanistan, both for the farmers and the insurgency, which can make money selling, transporting or processing the drugs. According to a U.N. report, revenue from opium production in Afghanistan soared by 133 percent in 2011, to about $1.4 billion, or about one-tenth of the country's GDP.
Associated Press writer Pauline Jelinek contributed to this report.
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Afghan Textbooks Skip Decades of Violence
Schools get history books that miss out all the bad bits.
IWPR By Abdol Wahed Faramarz 20 Apr 12
Afghanistan - In a highly controversial move, Afghanistan’s education ministry has dealt with the complexities of the last four decades of turmoil and war by simply omitting the entire period from the new history textbooks it is issuing to schools.
Officials argue that the decision to pass over contentious events of recent history is an attempt to heal rifts in Afghan society and avoid further strife. But critics accuse the ministry of distorting history, and of protecting individuals implicated in past bloodshed, some of whom now hold senior posts.
Schoolchildren studying the books could be forgiven for thinking they were reading about another country.
Historians see the missing parts – from political machinations and Cold War intervention to the emergence of Islamist militias and all-out war – as the key to understanding modern Afghanistan.
There is no mention of the July 1973 coup led by Mohammad Daud Khan, nor of his death when he was overthrown by communist forces in 1978. Absent, too, are the 1979 Soviet invasion, the ensuing mujahedin war, the brutal civil conflict of the early 1990s, and the Taleban takeover which lasted until 2001. The United States-led invasion that year and a decade of conflict since then are also missing.
Education ministry spokesman Amanollah Iman told IWPR the aim was to emphasise the positive.
“Positive events of the last 40 years have been included, but negative, distressing exasperating ones have been avoided,” he said.
He acknowledged that the continuing political role of some of those involved in past conflicts was a factor in the decision to edit out recent history.
“It may be impossible to judge those events and incidents properly in the present situation,” he said.
Education Minister Faruq Wardak believes omitting all this history is the only way of healing divisions.
“Our recent history tears us apart,” Wardak said, according to the Washington Post. “We have created a curriculum based on older history that brings us together, with figures universally recognised as great. These are the first books in decades that are depoliticised and de-ethnicised.”
Iman said there been no pressure, either from Afghan politicians or from the international community, to censor out the past.
He suggested the decision was taken not by the ministry’s current staff, but back in 2003, when Mohammad Yunus Qanuni was education minister.
Qanuni, now a member of parliament, told IWPR that this was not the case, and that as minister he pushed for recent historical events to be included in schoolbooks.
“No such decision was made during my tenure,” he said. “We tried to incorporate the events of the past four decades into the educational curriculum.”
An education ministry staff member, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IWPR that President Hamid Karzai approved the omissions after consulting with government ministers and the former leaders of armed militias.
Hamed Elmi, a spokesman for Karzai, said the president was unaware of the issue.
“We are not aware that such a decision might have been made eight years ago,” he said. “The education ministry is free to make any decision on the curriculum.”
Whoever is responsible, historians say the books make a mockery of historical truth.
“Falsification is not allowed or acceptable in the history of Afghanistan,” Ahmad Zia Nekbin, a historian and lecturer at Kabul University, said, adding that the education officials had no right to carve up the past into “positive” and “negative” parts.
The Coalition for Change and Hope, a parliamentary opposition group, is against the omissions. Its spokesman Fazel Sancharaki warned that erasing parts of recent history would leave younger Afghans with a distorted understanding of their own
“Present Afghan generations will become divorced from their past,” he said. “That means future generations will think there was no government in Afghanistan during these four decades, and that no positive or negative developments occurred.”
The textbooks have also angered Afghans who lost relatives to violence and conflict, since the events in question had effectively been made to disappear.
University student Tamana lost two brothers during the civil war of the early Nineties.
“The events of the past must not be hidden away. There must be recognition of the enemies of the Afghan people. Those who hold power today must stand trial,” she said.
Journalist Atiqollah Bena said that in the current political situation, where many powerful figures had blood on their hands and a vested interest in covering up the truth, it was always going to be difficult to produce an objective account of the past.
“Those ones who fought one another, reduced this country to ruins, massacred the innocent and committed thousands of other crimes, are still in power, so they will try to falsify history,” he said. “It is better if we wait.”
Abdol Wahed Faramarz is an IWPR-trained reporter in Kabul.
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Students Live in Squalor at Afghan University
Nangarhar undergraduates sleep 25 to a four-person room.
IWPR By Hijratullah Ekhtyar 20 Apr 12
Afghanistan - Sebghatollah’s dormitory room at Afghanistan’s Nangarhar University was designed for just four students, but he has to share it with 25 others.
They sleep crammed into a 16-square-metre space, with a white plastic sheet suspended from the ceiling serving as a divider.
Plastic bags full of students’ belongings hang from hooks on the wall, while outside, dogs prowl the corridors looking for leftover food and licking dirty plates.
“The students on either side of the curtain can neither sleep nor study,” Sebghatollah, a second-year agriculture student from Baghlan province, told an IWPR reporter who visited the hostel. “How can you sleep or study when 26 people are talking to each other? Some are watching TV, some listening to the radio, while others talk on the phone or listen to music.”
As he spoke, several students pulled the plastic sheet aside and peered through from the other side of the room.
One of them joked that suspected terrorists in United States custody enjoyed better living conditions.
“The government discusses the prisoners at Guantanamo and Bagram [detention facility] with the Americans all day, yet they’re much better off than us,” the student quipped. “The real Guantanamo is here.”
Nangarhar University, located in eastern Afghanistan, was founded in 1962, and has both male and female students at its 11 faculties, which include medicine, engineering, law, politics and economics. With more than 7,000 students and 600 staff, Nangarhar is the country’s fastest-growing university and caters to four eastern provinces of Afghanistan, although 60 per cent of students come from further afield, its website says.
While three decades of war have seriously affected the university, it now “strives hard [to deliver] high quality education, outstanding student support, and excellent personal and professional development,” chancellor Mohammad Saber says on the website.
Some argue that the university has grown too quickly and enrolled more students than it can manage, leaving it unable to guarantee them a minimal standard of living.
Some 3,000 students occupy eight dormitory buildings designed to accommodate 500, according to deputy chancellor Mohammad Ishaq Razeqi. These hostels are 11 kilometres outside the provincial capital Jalalabad, while other students are housed at different locations.
“Dormitories should provide a healthy environment,” Razeqi told IWPR. “They should be quiet and good food should be provided. Unfortunately, the dormitories at our university are not like that.”
He said the Afghan education ministry directed large numbers of students from outside the province to study at the university, and officials sometimes pressured staff to enrol more students than the dormitories could accommodate.
“So more than 20 people live in rooms that are only good for four,” he said.
Near Sebghatollah’s room, three students were sluicing away foul water overflowing from the toilets and spilling into the corridor.
Sebghatollah said that when the toilets are blocked, the contents flow into the students’ rooms.
Last year, sewage mixed with drinking water and many students fell ill, he said.
“Look at the life of university-level people are leading in our country,” he added.
Razeqi confirmed that the hostels’ sewerage system was broken.
Baz Mohammad Sherzad, provincial director of public health, said students and staff were ultimately responsible for keeping the dormitories clean.
During IWPR’s visit, several mangy dogs were resting in the shade beneath trees, while ditches full of foetid water ran close by the canteen.
Samiollah, a second-year agriculture student, said he was afraid to leave the dormitory at night for fear the dogs would attack him.
Razeqi said he had contacted provincial health officials several times asking them to do something about the stray dogs, without success.
Sherzad said public health officers rounded up stray dogs from Jalalabad, including those around the dormitories, every three months. But he added, “If [students and staff] didn’t feed the dogs, and drove them away instead, the dogs wouldn’t get used to living there.”
Raz Mohammad Faizi, a lecturer in education at the university, said that students were partly to blame for the squalor of their dormitories.
“They don’t take care of their food, dishes or beds. The government can’t be held responsible for everything. The students should take pride [in their surroundings] as well.”
But he added that nowhere else in the world would ten or 20 university students be expected to share one room, and the current conditions were undermining students’ ability to study.
“Two, three or four students should live in each room. They should be provided with an environment in which to study, access to the internet and a calm atmosphere,” he said.
Sebghatollah brings his own blankets and mattress from home because those provided by the dormitory are dirty and insubstantial.
“They’re completely unusable. You wouldn’t get through the winter with them,” he said.
Sebghatollah also had tough words for the canteen’s cooks, as he sometimes suffers from an upset stomach, and has even come across shards of glass in the food.
Razeqi said there was hope in sight, in the shape of a new dormitory with room for 3,000 people.
University officials had “knocked on many doors” seeking donations for the dormitory over the past decade, but it has now been completed and will open in the near future.
For now, students who can afford to pay rent often choose to live in private accommodation.
Nazifollah, a student of literature, shares a room in Jalalabad with four friends, for which they pay 70 US dollars per month.
“When we saw what things were like in the dormitory, we agreed we should leave,” he said. “This place is better. We are here to study.”
Hijratullah Ekhtyar is an IWPR-trained journalist in Nangarhar province.
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