 |
||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serving you since 1998 | ||||||||||||
|
|
Former Taliban Officials Say U.S. Talks Started
By ALISSA J. RUBIN The New York Times January 28, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — Several Taliban negotiators have begun meeting with American officials in Qatar, where they are discussing preliminary trust-building measures, including a possible prisoner transfer, several former Taliban officials said Saturday.
Afghanistan's Karzai in UK for Talks With Cameron
January 28, 2012 (AP)
LONDON - Afghan President Hamid Karzai is in Britain for talks with Prime Minister David Cameron, a day after France announced it would withdraw its troops a year earlier than the 2014 date agreed by NATO.
No Early Pull-Out for British Troops in Afghanistan
VOA News January 28, 2012
Britain says it will stand by Afghanistan, keeping troops there until 2014.
British Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters Saturday he has no plans to pull his country's combat troops from Afghanistan before the current deadline expires. He also said Britain will continue to have a strong relationship with Kabul going forward because “it is in the interests of the whole world to have a safe and stable Afghanistan that is free from the terrorism.”
Hekmatyar's never-ending Afghan war
How one former anti-Soviet ally of the US, who refused to meet Reagan, continues his war four decades later.
Aljazeera By Mujib Mashal 28 Jan 2012
The year was 1985. In the heat of the CIA-backed Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union, a delegation of Afghan resistance leaders met with US President Ronald Reagan in the White House, where they were declared the "moral equivalent" to the founding fathers of the United States.
Afghan police kills 5 insurgents, detain 28
KABUL, Jan. 28 (Xinhua) -- Afghan police have eliminated five anti-government insurgents and captured over two dozen others over the past 24 hours, said a statement of Interior Ministry released Saturday.
Afghanistan Signs Strategic Pact with France
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 28 January 2012
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday met his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy and signed a strategic partnership agreement.
US Defense Chief Concerned by Pakistan’s Treatment of Doctor
VOA News January 28, 2012
U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta says he is concerned about a Pakistani doctor who helped the U.S. find al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
Afghan gov't, UN appeal for 437 mln dollars to help Afghans
KABUL, Jan. 28 (Xinhua) -- The government of Afghanistan and United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Saturday appealed for 437 million U.S. dollars in aid to help needy Afghans in 2012.
Emboldened Taliban Try to Sell Softer Image
Wall Street Journal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV JANUARY 28, 2012
KABUL - When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, Maulvi Qalamuddin headed the Committee to Protect Virtue and Prevent Vice, the religious police that shut down girls' schools, beat up men with insufficiently long beards and arrested those in possession of music or video tapes.
Back to Top
Former Taliban Officials Say U.S. Talks Started
By ALISSA J. RUBIN The New York Times January 28, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — Several Taliban negotiators have begun meeting with American officials in Qatar, where they are discussing preliminary trust-building measures, including a possible prisoner transfer, several former Taliban officials said Saturday.
The former officials said that four to eight Taliban representatives had traveled to Qatar from Pakistan to set up a political office for the exiled Afghan insurgent group.
The comments suggested that the Taliban, who have not publicly said they would engage in peace talks to end the war in Afghanistan, were gearing up for preliminary discussions.
American officials would not deny that meetings had taken place, and the discussions seemed to have at least the tacit approval of Pakistan, which has thwarted previous efforts by the Taliban to engage in talks.
The Afghan government, which was initially angry that it had been left out, has accepted the talks in principle but is not directly involved, a potential snag in what could be a historic development.
The former Taliban officials, interviewed Saturday in Kabul, were careful not to call the discussions peace talks.
“Currently there are no peace talks going on,” said Maulavi Qalamuddin, the former minister of vice and virtue for the Taliban who is now a member of the High Peace Council here. “The only thing is the negotiations over release of Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo, which is still under discussion between both sides in Qatar. We also want to strengthen the talks so we can create an environment of trust for further talks in the future.”
The State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has said only that Marc Grossman, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, had “a number of meetings” related to Afghanistan when he visited Qatar last week.
The Taliban’s announcement this month that they would open an office in Qatar, which could allow for direct negotiations, drew fire from some Afghan factions as well as some American policy makers, who fear the insurgents would use negotiations as a ploy to gain legitimacy and then continue their efforts to reimpose an extremist Islamic state in Afghanistan.
Mr. Grossman, at a news conference in Kabul last week, said that real peace talks could begin only after the Taliban renounced international terrorism and agreed to support a peace process to end the armed conflict.
The Afghan government and the Qataris must also come to an agreement on the terms under which the Taliban will have an office. Mr. Grossman has been regularly briefing the Afghan government but Afghan officials have complained that they were being kept out of the loop.
The Taliban officials now in Doha, Qatar, include a former secretary to the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, as well as several former officials of the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, according to Mr. Qalamuddin and Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban minister of higher education.
The former Taliban officials here described fairly advanced discussions in Qatar about the transfer of prisoners. One former official, Syed Muhammad Akbar Agha, who had been a Taliban military commander, said that five Taliban prisoners were to be transferred in two phases, two or three in one group and then the remainder.
There has also been discussion in Qatar of removing some Taliban members from NATO’s “kill or capture” lists, the former Taliban officials said.
Mr. Grossman, in his comments last week, played down talk of detainee releases, saying the United States had not yet decided on the issue. “This is an issue of United States law first of all, that we have to meet the requirements of our law,” he said.
He said the Obama administration would also consult with Congress. Under American law, the defense secretary must certify to Congress that the transfer of any Guantánamo prisoner to a foreign country would meet certain requirements, including that the country maintains control over its prisons and will not allow a transferred detainee to become a future threat to the United States.
If any detainees were released, Western and Afghan officials said, they would likely be transferred to Qatar and held there, perhaps under house arrest.
The former Taliban officials said that they were most surprised by Pakistan’s decision to allow the Taliban delegates to obtain travel documents and board a plane to Qatar. The former officials have long contended that Pakistan has obstructed talks. “This is a green light from Pakistan,” Mr. Rahmani said.
Pakistan “definitely supported this and is also helping,” Mr. Qalamuddin added. He said that if Pakistan did not approve of the talks, it would have arrested the Taliban delegates to Qatar, just as it did with Mullah Baradar, a senior Taliban official, after he began secret talks with the Afghan government in 2010.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington, Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Sharifullah Sahak from Kabul.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghanistan's Karzai in UK for Talks With Cameron
January 28, 2012 (AP)
LONDON - Afghan President Hamid Karzai is in Britain for talks with Prime Minister David Cameron, a day after France announced it would withdraw its troops a year earlier than the 2014 date agreed by NATO.
Cameron is due to meet Karzai at Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat outside London. Britain's Foreign Office said the meeting "is about long-term partnership and commitment beyond 2014 and the need for progress on the political track."
It is also sure to include the effects of the announcement by President Nicolas Sarkozy that French troops would speed up their withdrawal plans and leave the country by the end of next year, instead of by 2014.
Britain has about 9,500 troops in Afghanistan and says it plans to withdraw almost all of them by the end of 2014.
Back to Top
Back to Top
No Early Pull-Out for British Troops in Afghanistan
VOA News January 28, 2012
Britain says it will stand by Afghanistan, keeping troops there until 2014.
British Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters Saturday he has no plans to pull his country's combat troops from Afghanistan before the current deadline expires. He also said Britain will continue to have a strong relationship with Kabul going forward because “it is in the interests of the whole world to have a safe and stable Afghanistan that is free from the terrorism.”
Mr. Cameron's comments followed a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai outside London. The British leader said his country will continue to provide Afghanistan with aid after its troops withdraw in 2014.
His position differed from that of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who met with Mr. Karzai on Friday. Mr. Sarkozy said French troops will complete their withdrawal from the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan a year earlier than planned, at the end of 2013.
The French president also said France will transfer security to the Afghans in March in the eastern province of Kapisa, where nearly all French troops are based and where last week's killing of the four unarmed soldiers took place.
Mr. Karzai has said Afghanistan is ready to take on more responsibility, after receiving help from France and other countries during the past decade.
Not all Afghans are optimistic the country can succeed without continued support from NATO forces.
Political analyst Dawood Sultanzoi, a former member of parliament, says the early French withdrawal may backfire.
“Afghanistan is not ready to change the realities on the ground and move things forward and then wish there is peace and stability and there is readiness of our troops. I think the troops' readiness, Afghan security forces' readiness will take time. Even 2014 is very optimistic and even with that optimism there are certain things that need to be done, so I think this is a very political timetable that Mr. Sarkozy has tried to enforce. It won't be realistic.”
Back to Top
Back to Top
Hekmatyar's never-ending Afghan war
How one former anti-Soviet ally of the US, who refused to meet Reagan, continues his war four decades later.
Aljazeera By Mujib Mashal 28 Jan 2012
The year was 1985. In the heat of the CIA-backed Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union, a delegation of Afghan resistance leaders met with US President Ronald Reagan in the White House, where they were declared the "moral equivalent" to the founding fathers of the United States.
But one prominent visiting commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, refused to see the US president, despite reportedly receiving a hefty share of the roughly $200m that the CIA funnelled annually to Afghan guerrillas for defeating the invading Red Army.
Hekmatyar's war never ended, as today, almost four decades later, he fights the US-led coalition in Afghanistan, probably with some of the same weapons that US tax dollars paid for. To many, he epitomises the short-sighted alliances of the US, siding with unreliable figures who, even during their cooperation, openly expressed their dislike for the US world view.
"Known for his Russian killing," as one analyst put it, Hekmatyar instead went on a speaking tour, addressing crowds - of mostly Afghan refugees - in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
"The invite was from the United Nations, not from Reagan," Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal, a former aide to Hekmatyar who accompanied him on the trip, told Al Jazeera. Arghandiwal is now President Hamid Karzai's minister of economy.
Richard Bulliet, a professor of history at Columbia University, attended one of Hekmatyar's talks in New York, and said the commander was accompanied by the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior advisor on Afghanistan to Reagan's State Department.
Khalilzad went on to become the Bush administration's ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and most recently the United Nations. He is considered one of the main architects of the post 9/11 Afghan political system.
Bulliet says the trip was under the close watch of Khalilzad, who had instructed Hekmatayr to avoid responding to any question about religion and politics.
"I asked Zal [as Khalilzad is casually known] whether there wasn't a contradiction between US government's disapproval of a militant Islamic regime in Iran and its active support for Mr Hekmatyar, who seemed to me much more militant than the leading Iranians," Bulliet told Al Jazeera.
"Zal said something to the effect that we would cross that bridge when we came to it. And that bridge, in my personal view, was 9/11."
Khalilzad did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment.
"My overall impression of the trip was that Hekmatyar was a canny politician who would do whatever Zal dictated to ensure continuing US government's support for his movement. He was using the US."
Unpleasant allies
Anti-US sentiment was not unique to Hekmatyar, one analysts says. The leadership of the Soviet-fighting Mujahideen, who mostly operated in exile out of Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, was a mixed bunch, consisting of academics emerging from pan-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood circles in Kabul University. Other commanders included religious and tribal leaders with localised ambitions.
For most of them, the alliance with the US was one borne out of necessity, against a more imminent enemy that was knocking at their gate - or had already knocked down the gate.
"In those days, anti-American feelings were definitely in fashion in Pakistan. There was Abdullah Azam, Osama bin Laden and others. There were anti-US publications being circulated" says Wahid Muzhda, now a Kabul-based analyst who had fought against the Soviets and interacted with the leaders in Peshawar.
But others believe the resistance leaders were entirely focused on the Soviet Union, and that anti-US feelings, even for bin Laden, did not emerge until the 1991 Gulf War.
Michael Malinowski, a 1980s US state department official in Pakistan tasked with keeping liaison with the jihadi leaders, says the degree of anti-US sentiment varied among the leaders.
"I would not say the sentiment was pervasive, but it was certainly there. And it was epitomised by Hekmatyar and [Abdul Rab Rasul] Sayyaf. Some of the others were quite grateful for the aid.
"Hekmatyar did not like what the US represented, whether in terms of culture or politics."
Malinowski, between 1987 and 1989, met about ten times with Hekmatyar. The rest of the jihadi leaders, he says, had some "redeeming qualities," but Hekmatyar was solely driven by his ambition.
"He was an unpleasant character and ridiculous at times. He would say things like ‘my party has never received any aid from the US.' You almost wanted to laugh at his face. It was insulting for somebody like me," added Malinowski.
The good Haqqani
Many of the US allies from the time of jihad have subsequently turned against the US - bin Laden being the most prominent.
Another of the visiting leaders to Washington that year, the late Mawlawi Yunus Khalis, is considered a spiritual father to the Taliban. His claim to fame was inviting Reagan to convert to Islam from the podium of the White House.
But one of the most feared US enemies today, Jalaluddin Haqanni of the so-called Haqqani Network, was actually a very cooperative ally in the 1980s.
When a girl's school for Afghan refugees was closed down in Peshawar and the guard was shot dead, most likely by elements close to Hekmatyar, Malinowski says, it was Haqqani who helped them reopen it.
"We needed one of the leaders to give a speech, and ensure the families that nothing [would] happen to the girls. The school did not even belong to his party, but Haqqani agreed to come and give the speech. He was in no way the guy that he is now."
Opinion is divided as to why Hekmatyar, despite giving clear red signals, remained a major US ally.
"Americans said they supported Hekmatyar because he was a good killer of Russians. They didn't care who was cursing the US, what was more important to them was who killed more Russians," Muzhda says.
The Pakistani intelligence agency, the powerful ISI, served as an intermediary for CIA's covert campaign in Afghanistan. All the covert aid, which was matched dollar to dollar by the Saudis, went through the ISI.
"The ISI funnelled most of the cash to Hekmatyar, who was their favourite," Malinowski says, adding that the Pakistani agency was grooming Hekmatyar to lead post-Soviet Afghanistan. "Every time I met others, they would always complain about Hekmatyar getting most of the aid."
After the fall of the Soviet-backed government in Kabul, the factions that had united against a common enemy turned to fighting each other in the power vacuum. Bitterly disagreeing over the make-up of the new "Islamic government", they spent the early years of the 1990s firing rockets from different ends of Kabul, turning the city into rubble, and killing tens of thousands of people.
So fed up were Afghans that they warmly embraced a new group, the Taliban, that rose from the south, promising to rid the country of factional fighting, and to bring security and order.
Pakistan's backing of the newly established Taliban meant that Hekmatyar was no longer Islamabad's favourite. Hekmatyar tried fighting the Taliban. But after being cornered and outnumbered in 1997, he fled to Iran, where he remained until 2002.
With the US intervention in 2001 to topple the Taliban came the hope of a new beginning in Afghanistan. Khalilzad, who had facilitated Hekmatyar's US speaking tour, was now the lead architect of the new political system on behalf of the United States.
Hekmatyar was not invited to that November's Bonn Conference that set up the interim government headed by Karzai. Sources close to the organisers of the conference say considering Hekmatyar's bitter past with the dominant force at the conference, the Northern Alliance, his presence would have been too divisive.
However, representatives from his movement were invited to the conference, including his son-in-law [or the son-in-law of his brother, according to some reports] Humayoon Jarir, who was thought to be speaking for him.
Iran, after nearly going to war with the Taliban during their six year rule over Afghanistan, were relieved that the government was toppled. The Islamic Republic played a major role at Bonn, and the cooperation was considered a positive step in patching up the cold US-Iran relations.
Months later, in what they considered a favour to the US, Iran expelled Hekmatyar and closed down his offices in Tehran. Hekmatyar's openly anti-Shia views and his vocal opposition to the Karzai government, which Iran supported, had become a headache. But the US was uncertain about Iran's decision, a source close to Khalilzad said, considering it a rushed move at best. Or possibly, Iran had turned Hekmatyar into a man without an address, sending him into Afghanistan to use him as a bargaining chip.
The fight against the US
Today, it remains unclear how much of the insurgency in Afghanistan is made up from Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami, partially because, despite his public animosity with the Taliban, the lines between his followers and those of the Taliban remain blurred. During his years in Iran, many of his followers joined the ranks of the Taliban government as, ultimately, they both shared the goal of a strictly Islamic government.
"In comparison to the Taliban, Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami is very weak. I would say it barely makes up 20 per cent of the armed resistance, with Taliban the other 80 per cent," Muzhda says.
"Most of them [Hekmatyar's followers] fight under the Taliban umbrella. In many places, I see former Hizb-e-Islami commanders who fight under the Taliban name. They still have allegiance to Hizb and Hekmatyar, but they have also [the approval of] Mullah Omar now."
Hekmatyar's acitivites are mostly focused in the east and pockets of the north, his traditional strongholds during the anti-Soviet jihad and the factional war that followed.
His ways of operating have remained similar to the 1980s. In letters to his fighters, which still seems to be his preferred medium of communication - as he has reportedly written more than 6,000 in the past nine years - he heavily relies on anecdotes of success from the Soviet Jihad. In one of the letters, he describes the US-led coalition as "unkind, beast-like followers of the Cross".
In another, addressed to his fighters in Kapisa province, one of his strongholds and where French soldiers were "murdered" recently, he writes: "Avoid trench warfare, do not attack established posts - the time for such attacks has not come. Attack the enemy when it is unaware and cannot have measures for defence. Resort to placing roadside bombs and ambushes."
A prolific writer, Hekmatyar, despite rarely ceasing to fight, has managed to publish more than 60 books, mostly religious and political analysis. His rhetorical command is apparent, as in this excerpt in one of his letters: "We need to show the Americans that our patience is high, our stamina is strong, and that we can travel the dark nights. That if you can fight in foreign lands, how can we not fight in our own country? If your mercenary soldiers come from thousands of miles away to fight in our narrow valleys, is our back broken not to defend our homeland? You fight for my imprisonment, and I fight for my freedom."
In recent years, as Karzai has repeatedly reached out to the Taliban in the hopes of finding a political solution to the decade-long war, the Taliban have mainly ignored his olive branch - until, reportedly, a couple of months ago. Hekmatyar, however, has repeatedly expressed his desire for peace. Qutbuddin Helal, one of his aides, has reportedly travelled to Kabul 16 times, but without much progress in talks.
For the US and the Karzai government, Hekmatyar has not been a priority.
"Hekmatyar was seldom discussed," says Valy Nasr, a former adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan to the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama's special envoy to the region. "He was seen as the smallest and least powerful of the three elements of [the] Taliban: the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani Network and Hizb-e-Islami. He is a local problem, rather than a strategic one."
For Karzai, analysts say the lack of attention was for two reasons, despite several of his closest aides being formerly associated with Hekmatyar. Karzai's priority remains bringing stability to the south, the hotbed of violence and his ancestral stronghold. The reason for the instability there is reportedly that Taliban-Hekmatyar no longer holds much influence in the area. Additionally, each faction that Karzai has painstakingly managed to unite around the central government, in one way or another, has fought Hekmatyar at some point. He remains too divisive a person to be reintegrated.
All this, despite the fact that Karzai personally owes Hekmatyar - in a tale which must be one of the bizarre episodes of Afghan politics. During the 1990s factional war, then a relatively unknown diplomat, Karzai was arrested and beaten up by the Northern Alliance for his efforts to mediate the return of Hekmatyar, who was holed up outside the city. The future president escaped jail in Kabul in a vehicle provided by Hekmatyar.
Years later, in the post 9/11 administration, Karzai's alleged torturers were part of his first cabinet handed to him in Bonn, Germany. And the driver of the vehicle, Gul Rahman, froze to death in the CIA's network of secret prisons after being arrested during a 2004 raid against Hizb-e-Islami in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
"Hekmatyar has been an unyielding person, but he has had some unwise advisers who ruined him, and they are all in Kabul now," Muzhda says.
Many of Hekmatyar's former aides have registered Hizb-e-Islami as an "independent political party" in Kabul, under new leadership. Several of them are members of President Karzai's cabinet, as well as holding seats in the parliament - yet they remain vocal in their support for the fugitive Hekmatyar.
"Hekmatyar is an esteemed personality in Afghanistan and there is no doubt about that. But we have come here and registered Hizb-e-Islami under a new leadership," said Arghandiwal, the economy minister who leads the revived and rebranded party.
"Practical conditions are different [for talking to Hekmatyar as opposed to talks with the Taliban]. But the government believes Hekmatyar can play a major role in the peace process."
Whether Hekmatyar has disowned people such as Arghanidwal remains uncertain. Muzhda, who says he has exchanged letters with Hekmatyar, believes the fugitive leader no longer considers those who sided with Karzai as part of his party.
Hekmatyar's whereabouts remain unclear. Some believe he is in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan. But others doubt, citing, among other things, Hekmatyar's recent publication of a hefty book, of more than 600 pages.
"Is it possible to write a book like that in the mountains of Nuristan?" wonders Muzhda, with a smile.
As to why Karzai and the US have not paid as much attention to dealing with Hekmatyar as the Taliban, though his reintegeration would likely further isolate the Taliban by doing away with one faction of the armed resistance, Muzhda says: "The power of the gun is important - the more you have the more seriously you will be considered. It is like what one analyst told the US government: crush the Haqqani network, talk to the Taliban, and let Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami be. It is a nothing."
Follow Mujib Mashal on Twitter: @mujmash
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghan police kills 5 insurgents, detain 28
KABUL, Jan. 28 (Xinhua) -- Afghan police have eliminated five anti-government insurgents and captured over two dozen others over the past 24 hours, said a statement of Interior Ministry released Saturday.
"Afghan police backed by national army and the international troops have killed five rebels and arrested 28 others during series of operations across the country, over the past 24 hours," the statement said.
A number of arms and ammunitions including three Kalashnikovs were also seized by police during the operations, it added.
However, the statement did not reveal if there were any casualties on the security forces.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to make comment.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghanistan Signs Strategic Pact with France
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 28 January 2012
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday met his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy and signed a strategic partnership agreement.
The Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently said the strategic partnership with France will span 20 years and cover economic, security and political co-operation.
France on Friday announced it will pull its combat forces out of Afghanistan one year ahead of the scheduled Nato withdrawal.
Mr Sarkozy said France had told the US of its plan and will present it at a February 2 meeting of Nato Defence Ministers in Brussels.
"We have decided in a common accord with President Karzai to ask Nato to consider a total handing of Nato combat missions to the Afghan army over the course of 2013," Mr Sarkozy said.
The US plans to withdraw the 33,000 "surge" troops sent to Afghanistan in 2010 by the end of the summer.
The military believes that the remaining 68,000 should stay until the end of the 2014 summer fighting season to maintain and expand what they say are gains against the Taliban.
Mr Sarkozy said France will withdraw combat troops by the end of 2013. He said France will start training Afghan troops again on Saturday.
France halted its training mission on January 20 after an Afghan National Army soldier shot and killed four French soldiers and wounded 17 others in eastern Kapisa province.
After the attack Mr Sarkozy immediately suspended the training and joint French military patrols with Afghan forces.
France has around 4,000 troops in Afghanistan; it lost 82 soldiers during the war.
Meanwhile, US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that the timetable announced by France was worked through by both the Afghans and Nato as part of efforts to transfer security authority to Afghanistan.
"We, obviously, want to continue to work together to ensure that this is implemented in a way that is consistent with the efforts of all of Nato to give increasing authority to the Afghans, and that it is smooth," she said.
Nato said it had "taken note" of Mr Sarkozy's statement.
Nato first set the 2014 target 14 months ago and has scheduled a summit in Chicago in May to begin to flesh out withdrawal plans.
Mr Karzai said: "We hope to finish the transition, to complete this transition of authority to the Afghan forces, to the Afghan government, by the end of 2013 at the earliest or by the latest as has been agreed upon by the end of 2014."
Afghan security forces took over responsibility for providing security in seven areas in the first phrase of transition. The second phase of transition has started, with Afghan troops taking control of 18 new areas from foreign troops.
There are around 130,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan fighting insurgents; 90,000 of them are from the US.
Back to Top
Back to Top
US Defense Chief Concerned by Pakistan’s Treatment of Doctor
VOA News January 28, 2012
U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta says he is concerned about a Pakistani doctor who helped the U.S. find al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
Panetta told the CBS-TV program 60 Minutes, Shikal Afridi provided key intelligence that was “very helpful” in the successful May 2 Navy SEALs raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad. Panetta's interview will be broadcast Sunday.
Pakistan has arrested Afridi, charging him with treason. The doctor, who was working for U.S. intelligence, ran a vaccination program to collect DNA to verify bin Laden's presence in the compound.
Panetta says Pakistan's arrest of “somebody who was helping to go after terrorism” is a “real mistake.”
The U.S. defense secretary says he believes someone in authority in Pakistan knew where bin Laden was hiding. Panetta said there were intelligence reports of Pakistani military helicopters passing over bin Laden's compound, which was the largest one in the area and was surrounded by five-and-a-half meter walls.
Panetta acknowledged he does not have any hard evidence Pakistan's government knew where bin Laden was, but his “personal view” is that “somebody, somewhere probably had that knowledge.”
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghan gov't, UN appeal for 437 mln dollars to help Afghans
KABUL, Jan. 28 (Xinhua) -- The government of Afghanistan and United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Saturday appealed for 437 million U.S. dollars in aid to help needy Afghans in 2012.
"The appeal is a total of 437 million U.S. dollars,"UN Humanitarian Coordinator Michael Keating told a joint press conference with Afghan Minister for Rural Rehabilitation and Development Jarullah Mansoori.
The UN official added that 8.8 million Afghans are in need of humanitarian assistance in 2012 and over 187,000 people were displaced in 2011.
Mansoori said he hoped the international community would respond positively. "We are hopeful that the international community to respond positively and provide the assistance appealed for," Mansoori said.
Continued militancy, drought and natural disasters have disrupted many essential services in the conflict-ridden country and made it difficult for both the government and aid agencies to help millions of Afghans who are in need of humanitarian assistance.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Emboldened Taliban Try to Sell Softer Image
Wall Street Journal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV JANUARY 28, 2012
KABUL - When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, Maulvi Qalamuddin headed the Committee to Protect Virtue and Prevent Vice, the religious police that shut down girls' schools, beat up men with insufficiently long beards and arrested those in possession of music or video tapes.
Nowadays, the 60-year-old Taliban cleric is on a different mission: He is overseeing a network of schools that teach reading, writing and math to thousands of girls in his home province of Logar, an insurgent hotbed just south of Kabul.
"Education for women is just as necessary as education for men," Mr. Qalamuddin thunders. "In Islam, men and women have the same duty to pray, to fast—and to seek learning."
The Taliban's restrictions on women and schooling, combined with support for al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, turned the group into an international pariah even before the September 2001 attacks on America. Now, as the U.S. pulls out its troops and tries to negotiate a peace settlement with the insurgents, the international community grapples with a crucial question: If returned to power, will the Taliban behave any more responsibly this time around?
In recent public statements, the Taliban have made an effort to appear a more moderate force, promising peaceful relations with neighboring countries and respect for human rights. The big unknown is whether this new rhetoric represents a meaningful transformation—or is merely designed to sugarcoat the Taliban's real aims.
"One might believe that they would change over time," says U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the day-to-day commander of the U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan. "You see some messages that they might open their thinking a bit about women, a woman's place in society. But I don't know that I would bet on it."
U.S. and Taliban representatives have met over the past several months, trying to establish a dialogue that could end America's longest foreign war. In a tangible sign of progress in early January, the Taliban dropped their insistence that all foreign troops must leave Afghanistan before any peace talks begin and agreed to set up a representative office in Qatar to facilitate future negotiations. To create trust in these talks, the U.S. is considering transferring to Qatari custody five senior Taliban officials incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Despite a new willingness to negotiate with the U.S., however, the Taliban's leadership still believes it can reach its war aim of seizing Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan after most foreign forces withdraw in 2014, American military commanders agree.
Such a future Taliban government would be gentler and wiser than its 1990s incarnation, insurgent officials insist. "As a movement gets older, it becomes more mature, and makes positive changes," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid says. "During the past Taliban regime the government would make some hasty decisions, but now we are careful and deliberate."
A key difference would be an effort to include all of Afghanistan's tribes and ethnic communities, he adds. The old Taliban regime was dominated by Pashtun clerics from southern Kandahar province, and discriminated against the Shiite Hazara community and other minorities. This time around, "every group of the nation will be equally represented and privileged," Mr. Mujahid says.
The Taliban remain a mostly Pashtun movement, and deeply resents what it sees as disproportionate power enjoyed by smaller ethnic communities under President Hamid Karzai. But, in the post-2001 insurgency, the Afghan Taliban have largely shied away from the sectarian and ethnic violence that accompanied their rise to power in the 1990s, calling instead on all Afghans to unite against the foreign invaders.
In December, the Taliban leadership swiftly condemned the deadly bombing of Shiite shrines in Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, attacks that Afghan officials have blamed on Pakistanis.
The Taliban now have some Uzbek and Tajik commanders, and the insurgency has spread even to the non-Pashtun regions that were outside Taliban control in 2001.
A future Taliban administration also would seek to establish "good coordination" with the international community in the fight against narcotics, Mr. Mujahid says. Since 2001, opium has become an increasingly important source of income for the Taliban insurgency, and for several power brokers and former warlords in Mr. Karzai's administration, according to Western government officials. The Taliban, diplomats say, are highly unlikely to get out of the drug business as long as the war goes on.
Still, the only time in recent history when opium cultivation was nearly eradicated in Afghanistan was in 2001—when Taliban leader Mullah Omar imposed a ban on poppies, in an attempt to gain international recognition that collapsed after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Severing remaining Taliban links with al Qaeda remains a key demand of the U.S. and allies, and a concession that Western officials expect insurgents to make after the Taliban detainees are transferred to Qatar.
On the ground in Afghanistan, however, the few surviving al Qaeda fighters already have become irrelevant in the current insurgency, especially since bin Laden's killing last May, coalition officials say.
"The Taliban have a local agenda, and do not operate abroad. Al Qaeda is international, and that's the biggest difference," explains the pre-2001 Taliban government's foreign minister, Wakil Abdul Muttawakil. In any case, he notes, it's not the Taliban but the mujahedeen groups currently in Mr. Karzai's administration who invited bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996, months before the Taliban captured Kabul. "They thought he'd asphalt all the roads in Afghanistan because he's a millionaire," Mr. Muttawakil chuckles. "Instead, he just brought war to Afghanistan."
The Taliban's traditional foes, especially among the former Northern Alliance of ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara militias, dismiss any talk of the Taliban's new moderation as insidious propaganda designed to weaken the West's resolve in the war.
They point out that today's Taliban fighters are, if anything, more radical than the older generation. For example, the suicide bombers, virtually unheard of in Afghanistan in the 1990s, are frequently deployed these days to assassinate Afghan government officials and attack U.S. troops. The Taliban's purported desire to reduce civilian casualties, too, hasn't translated into more careful behavior on the ground. Civilian casualties caused by insurgents were up 28% in the first half of last year, according to United Nations statistics.
"Wishful thinking has not taken anyone anywhere," warns former Northern Alliance leader Abdullah Abdullah, who served as President Karzai's foreign minister and then became his main rival in the 2009 presidential elections. "The Taliban's views are the same."
Yet, on at least one crucial issue—education, for girls and boys—Mr. Karzai's government and Western officials concede that significant change has already occurred. "I don't find them to be as hard as they used to be in the 1990s," Afghanistan's Education Minister Farooq Wardak says in an interview.
In the early years of the insurgency, the Taliban would routinely blow up schools across the country, especially those teaching girls, assassinating government-paid teachers. As a result, in many southern and eastern districts of the country's Pashtun heartland, an entire generation of children grew up not knowing how to read, write or count.
Over the years, this caused a backlash: Young men from the Pashtun villages have increasingly found themselves unable to compete for jobs with better-educated ethnic minorities, such as the Hazaras.
"Our communities have told the Taliban: 'Hey, guys, you're telling us you're trying to topple the government of Hamid Karzai and establish your own government. But when you have your own government, you'll still need doctors and engineers. So why are you not letting my kids go to school?' " Mr. Wardak says.
The Taliban have heeded this message, according to the Afghan minister. Some 600 schools that had been shut down because of security concerns were reopened over the past three years, he says.
Education directors in more than a hundred of Afghanistan's 398 districts have reported to Kabul that they received assurances from local Taliban commanders that their schools would be protected. The Taliban, Mr. Wardak adds, frequently tell government-paid teachers: "You have to do your job. If your absenteeism is too much, we're going to fire you."
Not all the Taliban commanders are on board with this policy. Last year, there were 440 attacks and threats against schools, down from 500 in 2010, according to the U.N. These numbers include attacks on schools used by Afghan or coalitions forces, seen as legitimate targets by the Taliban. In addition, some of the attacks came from criminal gangs and non-Taliban militias.
Peter Crowley, the Afghanistan representative of the United Nations Children's Fund that's building up the country's education infrastructure, says he's encouraged by a "positive trend" in Taliban attitudes to education, including girls' schools.
"No military pressure is going to force them to accept education," he says. "This is a conclusion they are reaching on their own."
In the Taliban-controlled villages of Logar province, the classes organized by Mr. Qalamuddin, the former Taliban religious police chief, are held inside mosques. They don't use government textbooks to avoid any taint of being associated with Mr. Karzai's administration.
Considered a moderate by Afghan standards, Mr. Qalamuddin is no longer involved in the armed struggle and, after spending two years in prison, lives openly in Kabul. Last year, the United Nations removed his name from the list of Taliban officials barred from international travel.
His moderation is relative. The bearded cleric still praises Mullah Omar, who oversaw the regime's atrocities in the 1990s and refused to extradite bin Laden in 2001, as a "very honest and good man."
He also proudly stands by the comments endorsing the stoning of adulteresses that he made in a 1997 interview with an American newspaper.
But, greeting visitors in a room featuring a TV set, Mr. Qalamuddin readily concedes that the Taliban government to which he belonged until 2001 may have erred by focusing on "superficial" issues such as the length of men's beards and unnecessarily banned modern amenities like television.
The elementary schools, in the cleric's home district of Baraki Barak that is now under near-total Taliban control, are funded by a small German aid group named Ofarin that has worked on education in Afghanistan since before 2001. The group pays each of the 67 teachers in the area 2,400 afghanis ($53) a month, according to its coordinator and co-founder, Peter Schwittek.
Six times a week, thousands of local boys and girls—sometimes together, more often separately—gather in scores of village mosques across the district at the break of dawn, sitting through 90 minutes of math and Afghanistan's national languages of Pashtu and Dari. An additional 30 minutes a day are taken by Islamic studies, taught by the local mullahs following a textbook written by Mr. Qalamuddin and approved by the Afghan authorities.
In the hamlet of Hajji Musa Kala, villager Mohammad Idris is sending to one of these mosque schools his eight-year-old son and his six-year-old daughter. "If there were some girls' schools nearby, I would have sent my daughter there, but we don't have any," he says. "This is a favor for the people."
In recent years, as the Taliban took over Baraki Barak, Mr. Schwittek hasn't been able to visit the area. Even Mr. Qalamuddin himself hasn't been around for months, fearing more radical insurgent commanders opposed to his involvement in efforts to spur peace negotiations between the Taliban and Mr. Karzai's government.
But the teachers and parents in the district say they have been left undisturbed by the militants, who sometimes monitor the classes but don't otherwise interfere.
"It's nonsense that the Taliban are against women's education," the local insurgent commander, Maulvi Darwish, says in a phone interview. The red line, he explains, would be adding the language of infidel invaders to the local curriculum. "Learning English isn't a sin, but teaching a foreign language in the mosque would provoke people's sentiments," the Taliban commander says.
Matiullah Asim, a teacher in the district's Hajji Jan Nisar village, says new classes are likely to be established in neighboring villages in the spring.
"The people here are all Taliban sympathizers, or at least pretend to be pro-Taliban," he explains. Initially, many villagers were concerned that blackboards don't really belong in a mosque, and kept their girls and boys away. "Now, they've seen that this is something that helps their children. Everyone is sending their kids to get education." —Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
Back to Top
Disclaimer:
This news site is mostly a compilation of publicly accessible articles
on the Web in the form of a link or saved news item. The news articles
and commentaries/editorials are protected under international copyright
laws. All credit goes to the original respective source(s).