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Kabul Accuses Islamabad Of Fresh Shelling
July 23, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan officials have accused Pakistan of fresh crossborder missile attacks.
Fazlullah Wahedi, the governor of eastern Kunar Province, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that some 100 rockets were fired from Pakistan on July 23.
Afghanistan warns Pakistan over cross-border shelling
AFP – Sun, Jul 22, 2012
Afghanistan on Sunday warned Pakistan any further cross-border shelling could significantly harm relations, just days after the leaders of the two strife-torn neighbours met for peace talks.
Afghan Cabinet Raises Concern About Mining Legislation, to West’s Unease
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG July 23, 2012 The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — For Afghan mining officials and their Western advisers, revamping the Afghan laws that cover mining and oil drilling looked like an easy sell with a big payoff: new rules would give foreign investors certainty and, in the process, begin transforming Afghanistan from a ward of the international community into a state that could better pay its own way.
Pakistani, Afghan leaders agree to pursue contacts with Taliban, other insurgent groups
ISLAMABAD, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, who visited Kabul on Thursday last week, has agreed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the need to pursue multiple channels of communication and contact with the Taliban and other armed opposition groups in the country.
Afghan Police Officer Kills Three NATO Contractors
July 23, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
An Afghan policeman shot dead three foreign staff at a police training center in Herat Province on July 22.
Afghan conflicts, insurgency claim 37 lives in 2 days
by Abdul Haleem
KABUL, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Continued conflicts and Taliban- linked militancy have claimed the lives of 37 people including three children and five service members of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) since Sunday, officials confirmed on Monday.
Afghanistan Activists Urge Use of Social Media to Fight Politics
By Neha Prakash - Jul 22 09:44am Mashable via Yahoo! News
Free speech activists in Afghanistan launched Twitter and Facebook campaigns on Sunday to fight government media curbs as well as to dispel incorrect information being perpetuated by clashing NATO and Taliban claims.
Top Afghans Tied to ’90s Carnage, Researchers Say
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND July 22, 2012
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan - The atrocities of the Afghan civil war in the 1990s are still recounted in whispers here — tales of horror born out of a scorched-earth ethnic and factional conflict in which civilians and captured combatants were frequently slaughtered en masse.
Afghan Women's Shelters, A Lifeline For Many, Face Uncertain Future
July 23, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Frud Bezhan
KABUL -- Mumtaz, her disfigured face a collage of bulging red scars, fidgets nervously with a pen as she attempts to write her name for the first time.
Iran Sanctions Take Toll on Afghans
Wall Street Journal By MARIA ABI-HABIB July 22, 2012
ISLAM QALA, Afghanistan - The U.S.'s effort to wield economic pressure to influence Iranian leaders is having the unintended consequence of hurting Afghanistan, which relies on remittances from millions of migrants living in the country to its west.
Withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan halfway done, top commander says
Associated Press July 23, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - This year's pullout of 23,000 American troops from Afghanistan is at the halfway mark, U.S. Gen. John Allen, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces, said Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press.
Afghan Olympic medalist hopes to bring home more medals from London
by Farid Behbud and Jawid Omid
KABUL, July 23 (Xinhua) -- An Afghan Beijing Olympic medalist has vowed to bring more medals from the London 2012 Olympic Games for the sake of his country and the Afghan people.
'Sticky bombs' showing up in Afghanistan
July 23, 2012 at 9:11 AM
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 23 (UPI) -- Sticky bombs, magnetically adhesive improvised explosive devices that were prevalent in the war in Iraq, are showing up in Afghanistan, officials said.
Afghanistan's Corruption Imperils Its Future—and American Interests
By Ben W. Heineman Jr. The Atlantic - Jul 23 2012, 4:27 PM ET6
The U.S. is preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan over the next year, but may leave a corrupt and highly dysfunctional country in its wake.
Afghan cleric held over rape of girl, 10: officials
AFP via Yahoo! News - Jul 23 09:29am
Afghan police have arrested a cleric for allegedly raping a 10-year-old schoolgirl in northern Afghanistan, officials said Monday.
Lost boys of Bagram still live in prison's shadow
Reuters By Katharine Houreld Sun Jul 22, 2012
KARACHI, Pakistan - During some sleepless nights when his stark bedroom walls remind him too much of his old prison cell in Afghanistan, Jan Sher Khan scans Internet dating sites he'd heard about from U.S. soldiers who once guarded him.
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Kabul Accuses Islamabad Of Fresh Shelling
July 23, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan officials have accused Pakistan of fresh crossborder missile attacks.
Fazlullah Wahedi, the governor of eastern Kunar Province, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that some 100 rockets were fired from Pakistan on July 23.
The fresh claims follow Kabul's warning on July 22 that any further crossborder shelling by Pakistani forces could significantly harm Afghanistan's relations with Islamabad.
The warning came after at least four people were reported killed from shelling in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar Province on July 20 and 21.
Wasifullah Wasifi, a spokesman for the Kunar government, said more than 300 heavy artillery shells and rockets were fired by Pakistani forces into Kunar's Dangam district.
The reported shelling came after new Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf last week visited Kabul for talks with President Hamid Karzai aimed at smoothing relations.
Last month, a barrage of crossborder fire from Pakistan into Kunar forced thousands of villagers to flee their homes after Islamabad accused Kabul of protecting militants who infiltrated to kill 13 Pakistani soldiers.
Based on reporting by AP and AFP
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Afghanistan warns Pakistan over cross-border shelling
AFP – Sun, Jul 22, 2012
Afghanistan on Sunday warned Pakistan any further cross-border shelling could significantly harm relations, just days after the leaders of the two strife-torn neighbours met for peace talks.
More than 300 heavy artillery shells and rockets were fired from Pakistan into Afghanistan's Dangam district, eastern Kunar province Friday and Saturday, killing at least four people, provincial spokesman Wasifullah Wasifi told AFP.
Last month, a barrage of cross-border fire from Pakistan into Kunar forced thousands of villagers to flee their homes after Islamabad accused Kabul of protecting militants who infiltrated to kill 13 Pakistani soldiers.
Afghanistan and Pakistan typically blame each other for violence by Taliban Islamic militants plaguing both sides of their porous border.
Afghanistan Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin Sunday summoned Pakistan's ambassador in Kabul to discuss the latest barrage of periodic shelling across the border known as the Durand Line, a foreign ministry statement said.
"Any continuation of such reported shelling against Afghan villages could have a significant negative impact on bilateral relations," the statement quoted Ludin as telling ambassador Mohammad Sadiq.
Pakistan denied the claim and called it "incorrect".
"Pakistani troops only respond to and engage militants from where they are attacked/fired upon," said a senior military official in Islamabad.
Over last year he said at least 15 cross border attacks were carried out by militants against Pakistani check points and the civilian populations in northwestern towns Dir and Chitral.
Both sides agreed to hold a senior-level meeting of military officials soon in Afghanistan's eastern city of Jalalabad over the shelling and improve military coordination along the Durand Line, the statement said.
President Hamid Karzai's office said the issue was raised in a national security council meeting on Sunday and security officials were instructed "to put into place all due actions necessary."
Pakistan Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, responding to a question at a news conference with Karzai on Thursday, said Pakistan was also attacked from Afghanistan and the issue had been raised in a meeting between the two leaders.
"From this side, from the Kunar side, we get attacks on our armed forces and our civilians... We have discussed all these things, and now we have to do our utmost... to control such happenings," Ashraf said.
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Afghan Cabinet Raises Concern About Mining Legislation, to West’s Unease
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG July 23, 2012 The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — For Afghan mining officials and their Western advisers, revamping the Afghan laws that cover mining and oil drilling looked like an easy sell with a big payoff: new rules would give foreign investors certainty and, in the process, begin transforming Afghanistan from a ward of the international community into a state that could better pay its own way.
Instead, the new laws are now in limbo after a group of Afghan cabinet ministers and senior officials last week objected to the draft legislation as kowtowing to foreign mining interests eager to hijack Afghanistan’s natural resources. “A balance has to be struck so we can make sure that our patrimony does not become a pot of porridge for others,” said Ashraf Ghani, a senior adviser to President Hamid Karzai.
With the end of the NATO military mission in Afghanistan looming in 2014, the dispute over the legislation reflects growing Afghan unease over how steep a price their country — among the world’s poorest and most corrupt — may have to pay for outside help in the future.
Exploiting Afghanistan’s potentially rich deposits of iron, oil, gold, copper and other minerals and gemstones is seen as crucial to the country’s economic prospects, and, by extension, the West’s ability to cut back over the next decade the billions of dollars spent each year on the government, the army, the police and myriad development projects.
Afghanistan’s big international backers — the United States, Germany, Japan, among others — were so certain the laws would soon be in place that this month they made $16 billion in aid commitments for the coming four years based in part on projections of future mining revenues the Afghan government could expect.
The cabinet’s rejection of the draft legislation in a special session on Wednesday caught Western diplomats in Kabul off guard. “We did not know it was going to cabinet last week,” Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Kabul, said in an interview. “We’re still playing catch-up.”
But he added that the Afghans were worried about being taken advantage of and wary of suffering the fate of other states where mining has fueled instability. “There has to be enough of an incentive to bring in the companies and yet enough assurance that they won’t be taken for a ride,” he said.
Mr. Karzai affirmed the cabinet’s decision, saying in a statement on Monday that the Justice Ministry and other departments would review the laws to ensure they better protect “the national interests of Afghanistan.” That could delay new legislation by months, at least, sending Western officials scrambling to help Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines get the legislation back on track.
The immediate concern is that at least five open tenders — four gold and copper concessions and one significant oil and gas project — could attract far less lucrative bids than expected if Afghanistan’s laws are not soon brought in line with global norms, Afghan mining officials and Western officials said.
Bidding on those concessions is expected to be completed before the end of the year. Among the companies expressing interest is ExxonMobil, by far the largest to seriously explore investing in Afghanistan.
If the expected revenue streams from mining are delayed or diminished, Afghanistan is “going to need a lot more funding,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“Are the publics in Europe and the United States going to have the interest in Afghanistan to make current aid levels feasible?” the official continued. “I don’t think so.”
No one on either side of the disagreement over the new legislation disputes that Afghanistan needs the money mining could bring in. But “we’re being inundated by people who have a conflict of interest advising us,” said Mr. Ghani, a former finance minister and World Bank official who is now overseeing the transition from a Western-led rebuilding effort to one run largely by the Afghan government.
“Will the advisers end up working for the very same companies that are investing?” he said in a telephone interview. “These are questions we need to ask in particular given the revolving-door culture in the United States and other international organizations.”
Mr. Ghani, who also taught at Johns Hopkins University, was careful to present his opposition to the draft legislation as a matter of getting Afghanistan the best deal from the foreign companies, whose money and expertise he acknowledged Afghanistan did need.
He also said care had to be taken to ensure mining and oil concessions did not become a source of conflict, as has happened in many countries, especially in Africa. Mining, he said, could turn Afghanistan “into Chile, or it could turn us into Congo.”
The draft legislation is intended to update earlier laws written with World Bank assistance and passed in 2009. Those laws are seen by the mining industry as highly problematic — they, for instance, give no guarantee that a company that conducts exploration would get to exploit what it found.
Afghanistan’s commerce minister, Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady, said he understood the concerns, but was not comfortable being rushed into making a decision or with the level of foreign involvement in drafting the new laws.
“The previous law was written by experts from the World Bank, and they were all highly paid consultants. And now we have more highly paid consultants telling us we need new laws,” he said. “We just need to know why it needs to change.”
But other senior officials present at the cabinet meeting, most of them far less knowledgeable about finance and international development, were openly hostile to the idea that foreign companies would profit from Afghan mines or oil fields, according to Afghan and Western officials briefed on the discussions.
Why, asked a few of the ministers, should foreigners grow rich off Afghanistan’s minerals, oil and gemstones? Couldn’t Afghans do it themselves?
The short answer, according to Afghan mining officials and foreign experts: No. It has neither the money nor the expertise.
Attracting companies that can provide the needed capital and expertise, however, takes an open, transparent and predictable investing landscape, American and European officials said.
They insisted that their main goal was bringing Afghan laws and regulations up to international standards, not the mere pursuit of national self-interest.
“Obviously, we have U.S. companies that could be qualified bidders and we would obviously be really happy if they did bid,” one American diplomat said. “But you’ve got to have an environment in place where they want to bid — our companies, other countries’ companies, all companies.”
Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.
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Pakistani, Afghan leaders agree to pursue contacts with Taliban, other insurgent groups
ISLAMABAD, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, who visited Kabul on Thursday last week, has agreed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the need to pursue multiple channels of communication and contact with the Taliban and other armed opposition groups in the country.
According to a joint statement issued simultaneously in Islamabad and Kabul at the conclusion of Ashraf's day-long visit, Pakistan also vowed to "work together" with Afghanistan in an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace and reconciliation process involving the Taliban, Hizb-e-Islami of former Prime Minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and other insurgent factions.
Afghan Ambassador to Islamabad, Omar Daudzai, told Xinhua that Afghanistan wants Pakistan to play an "important role" in helping facilitate the talks with the armed insurgent groups, especially the Taliban.
Pakistan has been trying to convince the Taliban to enter into direct talks with the Afghan government but the insurgents have so far refused.
Pakistan's former Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, had launched a rare public appeal to the Afghan Taliban and other armed groups in February to start talks with the US-backed Afghan government.
The former head of the powerful Taliban Political Affairs, Agha Jan Mutasim, has told Xinhua that the United States and the Taliban are two major parties in the conflict and that the Taliban, at the moment, do not want to talk to the 'powerless regime' in Kabul.
He said the Taliban would consider talks with Afghans after they reach an agreement with the U.S. Mutasim was critically wounded in an ambush in the Pakistani port city of Karachi in August last year and is now undergoing treatment in Turkey.
Despite the Taliban's refusal to enter into intra-Afghan talks, Pakistan has not given up its efforts to encourage the militants to sit down with the Karzai's administration or High Afghan Peace Council so that Afghanistan can achieve peace before the departure of the U.S. and NATO troops in 2014.
Pakistan is also under mounting pressure from the world, especially from the U.S., NATO and Afghanistan, to 'take practical' steps to facilitate the peace and reconciliation process in the war-shattered country before 2014 to avert another civil war.
In February, President Karzai visited Islamabad and sought assurance from Pakistan that it would give a 'safe passage' to those Taliban leaders and their representatives who want to hold talks with the Afghan government.
Kabul had earlier complained that leaders of insurgent Afghan groups who wished to talk to the Afghan government were either killed or kidnapped while in Pakistan.
Analysts said that the reopening of the supply line for NATO forces in Afghanistan after nearly an eight-month was a signal that Islamabad was doing its share in helping the peace process in Afghanistan.
The world community welcomed Pakistan's decision on the unblocking of NATO supply routes despite opposition to the decision at home by hard-line religious groups.
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Afghan Police Officer Kills Three NATO Contractors
July 23, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
An Afghan policeman shot dead three foreign staff at a police training center in Herat Province on July 22.
Afghan security and intelligence officials say the gunman also injured the trainers' Afghan translator.
The attacker reportedly worked for the regional police command.
He was killed later in a shoot-out with troops from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
An ISAF statement said the three foreign staff were civilian contractors working for NATO as trainers.
Meanwhile, officials say an Afghan army soldier opened fire on his NATO colleagues in northern Afghanistan on July 23, injuring two U.S. troops.
The deputy governor of Faryab Province, Abdul Satar Barez, said the Afghan soldier was killed when U.S. soldiers returned fire.
Killings of foreigners by Afghan government forces has escalated this year as Kabul recruits more Afghans to take over security ahead of NATO's planned withdrawal by the end of 2014.
A total of 29 foreign troops or civilian contractors have been killed by Afghan police or soldiers since the beginning of the year.
With reporting by AFP and the BBC
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Afghan conflicts, insurgency claim 37 lives in 2 days
by Abdul Haleem
KABUL, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Continued conflicts and Taliban- linked militancy have claimed the lives of 37 people including three children and five service members of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) since Sunday, officials confirmed on Monday.
The latest victims of continued insecurity incidents as confirmed by officials were three innocent children killed by a roadside bomb in Taliban former stronghold Kandahar province 450 km south of Afghan capital Kabul.
"Three innocent children were killed on Sunday when they found a device from a road in Marouf district and wanted to play with it, but suddenly it went off killing the trio on the spot," a statement released by Kandahar provincial administration on Monday said.
In another security incident, three civilian employees with the NATO-led coalition forces were killed Sunday when a man wearing an Afghan police uniform turned his gun against them in western Afghanistan, the coalition confirmed on Monday.
"The individual who fired on the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) contracted civilian employees was killed during the engagement. The incident is currently under investigation," the NATO-led ISAF said in the statement without giving more details.
Meantime, spokesman for Herat provincial administration Mohihudin Nuri confirmed that the attacker was a police and served in Herat province.
Addressing a press conference in Herat city 640 km west of Kabul, on Monday, Nuri said, "the attacker was Eidi Mohammad from Badghis province who had served a police for the past three years here in Herat. Eidi Mohammad who entered the compound of foreign advisors at 07:30 p.m. local time on Sunday opened fire killing three advisors and wounding another along with an interpreter."
He also added that the advisors assisted police in training.
The attacker Eidi Mohammad was also killed, Nuri official confirmed, saying it is yet to know the motivation behind the bloody incident.
Taliban-led continued militancy had also killed two more service members with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on Sunday, the military alliance confirmed in a statement.
"Two International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) service members died following an improvised explosive device (IED) attack in southern Afghanistan Sunday," the brief statement said without identifying the nationalities of the victims.
The violent incidents and insecurity has been on constant rise since Taliban launched spring offensive coded "Al-Farooq" from May 3 this year in the post-Taliban country.
Afghan police during series of operations across the country have killed 19 anti-government militants and captured 14 others over the past 24 hours, Interior Ministry said in a statement released here Monday.
"The operations have been carried out in Balkh, Ghazni, Helmand and Nimroz provinces over the past 24 hours during which 19 armed insurgents were killed, four wounded and 14 others were arrested by Afghan National Police," the statement stressed.
In similar development, "Afghan National Security Forces and coalition forces killed 10 insurgents during a small arms engagement in Alah Say District, in eastern Kapisa province on Sunday," the ISAF's Regional Command East (RC-E) said in a statement on Monday.
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Afghanistan Activists Urge Use of Social Media to Fight Politics
By Neha Prakash - Jul 22 09:44am Mashable via Yahoo! News
Free speech activists in Afghanistan launched Twitter and Facebook campaigns on Sunday to fight government media curbs as well as to dispel incorrect information being perpetuated by clashing NATO and Taliban claims.
Both NATO and the Taliban have used social media in the past to perpetuate arguments and campaign for individual causes. And Afghani journalists have been pushed against a wall with the government's new, strict press freedom laws, leaving the public confused about the current state of affairs.
Media advocacy groups like Nai have decided to fight back, encouraging the use of social media to provide the public with a more reliable and a somewhat more accessible form of information.
In the past, social media has been used to fight conditions like limited women's rights -- a topic the country's mainstream media can't easily cover without widespread backlash.
[More from Mashable: Internet Urges Batman to Visit Victims of ‘Dark Knight’ Shooting]
"Social media is a free tool to use to transfer information without the influences of the government, warlords, or Talibs,"Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar, executive director of Afghan media advocacy group Nai, tells Reuters.
Though social media provides the platform for the message, Nai is finding it difficult to gather the audience -- only two million of Afghanistan's 30 million people have Internet access, Reuters reports. This could be attributed to the previous ban on Internet Taliban forces put in place to make sure people were not viewing anti-Islamic material online.
It is even less common for women to have access to most social media accounts, but Facebook's more stringent privacy settings have caused the social network to become the most popular among females in Afghanistan.
Khalvatgar says Nai's mission is to convince organizations and government officials to make the use of the Internet and social media less taboo, and in turn create a larger space for dialogue.
"If we increase the number of social media users, we increase dissemination of knowledge. By giving people voices on social networks, you give them hope," Khalvatgar says.
Do you think social networks have given you a stronger voice or a sense of hope? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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Top Afghans Tied to ’90s Carnage, Researchers Say
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND July 22, 2012
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan - The atrocities of the Afghan civil war in the 1990s are still recounted in whispers here — tales of horror born out of a scorched-earth ethnic and factional conflict in which civilians and captured combatants were frequently slaughtered en masse.
Stark evidence of such killings are held in the mass graves that still litter the Afghan countryside. One such site is outside Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north. It lies only half-excavated, with bones and the remains of clothing partially obscured by water and mud from recent flooding. Experts say at least 16 victims are here, and each skull that lies exposed is uniformly punctured by a single bullet-entry hole at the back.
The powerful men accused of responsibility for these deaths and tens of thousands of others — some said to be directly at their orders, others carried out by men in their chain of command — are named in the pages of a monumental 800-page report on human rights abuses in Afghanistan from the Soviet era in the ’80s to the fall of the Taliban in 2001, according to researchers and officials who helped compile the study over the past six years.
The list of names is a sort of who’s who of power players in Afghanistan: former and current warlords or officials, some now in very prominent positions in the national government, as well as in insurgent factions fighting it. Many of the named men were principals in the civil war era after the Soviet Union withdrew, and they are also frequently mentioned when talk here turns to fears of violence after the end of the NATO combat mission in 2014. Already, there is growing concern about a scramble for power and resources along ethnic and tribal lines.
But the report seeking to hold them accountable is unlikely to be released anytime soon, the researchers say, accusing senior Afghan officials of effectively suppressing the work and those responsible for it. For their part, human rights activists say the country is doomed to repeat its violent past if abuses are not brought to light and prosecuted.
At the same time, some officials here — including some American diplomats — express worry that releasing the report will actually trigger new civil strife.
Titled simply, “Conflict Mapping in Afghanistan Since 1978,” the study, prepared by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, details the locations and details of 180 mass graves of civilians or prisoners, many of the sites secret and none of them yet excavated properly. It compiles testimony from survivors and witnesses to the mass interments, and details other war crimes as well.
The study was commissioned as part of a reconciliation and justice effort ordered by President Hamid Karzai in 2005, and it was completed this past December. Some of the world’s top experts in forensics and what is called transitional justice advised the commission on the report and provided training and advice for the 40 researchers who worked on it over a six-year period.
Three Afghan and foreign human rights activists who worked as researchers and analysts on large sections of the report spoke about its contents on condition of anonymity, both out of fear of reprisal and because the commission had not authorized them to discuss it publicly.
According to Afghan rights advocates and Western officials, word that the report was near to being officially submitted to the president apparently prompted powerful former warlords, including the first vice president, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, to demand that Mr. Karzai dismiss the commissioner responsible, Ahmad Nader Nadery.
At a meeting on Dec. 21, including Mr. Karzai and other top officials, Marshal Fahim argued that dismissing Mr. Nadery would actually be too mild a punishment. “We should just shoot 30 holes in his face,” he said, according to one of those present. He later apologized to other officials for the remark, saying it was not meant in earnest.
Mr. Karzai did remove Mr. Nadery. But a spokesman for the president, Aimal Faizi, said it was “irresponsible and untrue” to say that the president fired Mr. Nadery because of the mass graves report or was trying to block its release. He also called the accounts of the Dec. 21 meeting with Marshal Fahim and other officials “totally baseless.”
Mr. Nadery had finished two five-year terms as a commissioner and the president was legally entitled to replace him, Mr. Faizi said. “This decision has nothing to do with any A.I.H.R.C. report on war atrocities,” he said. “We believe that if there is any such report by the A.I.H.R.C., sooner or later it will come up and will be published one day.”
The figures accused in the report of playing some role in mass killings include some of the most powerful figures in Afghanistan’s government and ethnic factions, including the Northern Alliance that fought the Taliban in 2001.
Among them are First Vice President Fahim, a Tajik from the Jamiat Islami Party, and Second Vice President Karim Khalili, a Hazara leader from the Wahdat Party; Gen. Atta Mohammed Noor, a Tajik from the Jamiat Islami Party and now the governor of the important northern province of Balkh, of which Mazar-i-Sharif is capital; and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former Uzbek warlord from the Jumbush Party who holds the honorary title of chief of staff to the supreme commander of the Afghan Armed Forces, among many others.
Those men gave no response to verbal and written requests for comment about their naming in the report.
In all, the researchers said, more than 500 Afghans are named in the report as responsible for mass killings, including the country’s revered national martyr, Ahmed Shah Massoud, one of the last militia leaders to hold out against the Taliban sweep to power and who was assassinated by Al Qaeda just before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The report also investigates killings of civilians and prisoners said to be carried out by the Taliban and other insurgents, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hezb-i-Islami insurgents.
Named specifically in the report as responsible for war crimes in massacres of prisoners in Mazar-i-Sharif are two Taliban commanders now held at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp — Mullah Fazul Akhund and Mullah Khairullah Khirkawa — and whose release is thought to be a condition of negotiations with the insurgent group.
Entombed Evidence
As the report languishes, evidence in the graves is being destroyed, sometimes as a function of poor care of the sites and sometimes intentionally.
One mass grave containing more than 100 dead was discovered in the Kefayet Square area of Mazar-i-Sharif, where General Noor holds sway, during a road-building project in March. The half-dozen bodies that were turned up were simply relocated to a cemetery and the construction went on, bulldozing over most of the rest of the remains.
In 2007, two mass graves in the Khalid Ibn al-Walid township of Mazar were simply covered over by construction of a new residential complex that researchers said was developed and owned by General Noor.
A researcher for the Afghan rights commission who investigated both of the graves in Khalid Ibn al-Walid said the victims were killed by General Noor’s political party, which had what the researcher called a “human slaughterhouse” on the site in the 1990s, as well as by the Taliban, who later took over the same facility for the same purpose.
In the case of the grave with exposed skulls, it was discovered in January by American and Afghan workers during a United States Army Corps of Engineers construction project in Dehdadi District, six miles outside Mazar-i-Sharif — one of at least two graves found there so far. Human rights investigators said that grave dated from the period when General Dostum and his Hazara allies controlled the site; the victims, their wrists still bound in many cases with stout twine, included women and children, judging from the clothing found with them.
During the civil war period, after the Communists were defeated and before the Taliban took power, warlords like General Noor, General Dostum, and the Hazara leader Hajji Mohammad Mohaqiq fought bitterly among themselves as well as against the Taliban, who are mostly ethnic Pashtuns. The conflict among these leaders, who had all fought in the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, was on both political and ethnic grounds.
For many Afghans, the warlords’ atrocities are taken as a given — old news better left unrevived.
“It will take us centuries to forget this,” said an Afghan National Army lieutenant colonel. “We don’t want to go back to those bad days again.”
In all, 13 mass graves have been identified in the Mazar-i-Sharif area, including one detailed by human rights workers in the Dasht-e-Leili desert in the neighboring Jawjzan Province, believed to contain 2,000 Taliban prisoners slaughtered by General Dostum’s forces.
“That grave was there and then suddenly it was not there,” said a second human rights worker who worked on the investigation in Jawjzan. “They just got rid of all the evidence.”
He said bulldozers were brought in during 2008 to remove the bodies, leaving huge pits behind. The remains were reportedly incinerated at a secret location, he said.
A Question of Will
Mr. Nadery would not discuss the contents of the mapping report except in the most general way. “You open the map in the report, you see there are dots everywhere,” he said. “Everyone should know that what they suffered was not unique. We should be able to tell our people: ‘This is our past, this is our history. It’s ugly, it’s bad, but we should be able to face it.’ ”
He said he still hoped that the commission would be able to submit the report, although he conceded that those prospects looked dim.
“I don’t want the report to become an event, just a headline for one day,” he said. Instead, he said, it needs to be presented officially so it can be acted on officially, whether by the Afghan government or by the international community.
He said the report tallied more than a million people killed in the conflict and 1.3 million disabled, although not all of those are necessarily victims of war crimes.
Other human-rights officials in Afghanistan also expressed urgency about releasing the report.
“There are lots of examples where a report like this was an important first step to bringing justice for the victims,” said Heather Barr, head of the Human Rights Watch office in Afghanistan. “It does put pressure on people who are named; it leads at least to marginalizing them.”
The volatility of the accusations was on full display in April, when a well-established but small political bloc, the Afghanistan Solidarity Party, held a demonstration against what it said were war criminals in government. “For us there is no difference between the Taliban and these war criminals,” said Hafizullah Rasikh, a party spokesman. “They are like twin brothers.”
Parliament responded with a declaration accusing the party of treason and demanding its disbandment.
A former mujahedeen commander, Abdul Hafiz Mansoor, who is now an editor of a weekly publication called Mujahed, did not deny that many atrocities took place, on all sides.
“One cannot make war with rosewater,” he said, referring to a popular ingredient in sweets and perfumes here. “If this war and all these killings were so bad, then why aren’t we putting their international backers on trial? If we talk about violation of human rights, we should accuse the U.N. special representative for Afghanistan, who supported the mujahedeen at the time and now calls them warlords. Or President Ronald Reagan, who provided these warlords and human rights violators with Stinger missiles.”
The American Embassy here has been another source of objection to the mass-graves report. American officials say releasing the report would be a bad idea, at least until after Afghanistan’s 2014 presidential election — which is also when the NATO combat withdrawal should be complete. “I have to tell you frankly on the mapping thing, when I first learned about it, it scared me,” said a senior American official, speaking on condition of anonymity as a matter of embassy policy. “There will be a time for it, but I’m not persuaded this is the time.”
“It’s going to reopen all the old wounds,” the official said, noting that several men who were bitter rivals during the civil war were at least nominally working together in the government now.
For its part, the United Nations has supported release of the report. “The U.N. position has always been that such reports should always be released publicly,” said Georgette Gagnon, the top human rights officer for the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. “But it’s up to the commission and we would support whatever they decide to do.”
Of the 180 graves documented in the report, only one has so far been exhumed forensically because the Afghan authorities lack the facilities to carry out DNA testing and the sort of scientific identification of remains that was done systematically in Bosnia.
That one was a grave on the grounds of the Interior Ministry in Kabul, according to M. Ashraf Bakhteyari, head of the Forensic Science Organization, a foreign-trained group that carried out the exhumation. Mr. Bakhteyari said he was ordered by the Interior Ministry not to divulge who the victims were. “It is classified information,” he said.
He is frank, though, about the prospects for investigating the rest of Afghanistan’s mass graves. “It is impossible to prosecute those who are responsible for the mass graves,” Mr. Bakhteyari said. “Neither the international community nor the Afghan government have the will to do that.”
Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
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Afghan Women's Shelters, A Lifeline For Many, Face Uncertain Future
July 23, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Frud Bezhan
KABUL -- Mumtaz, her disfigured face a collage of bulging red scars, fidgets nervously with a pen as she attempts to write her name for the first time.
The 18-year-old, standing among a handful of women in a makeshift classroom, is attending her daily lessons at a women's shelter in Kabul. The shelter is one of more than a dozen around Afghanistan that provide refuge for abused Afghan women who have fled their homes.
Mumtaz's face lights up as she writes her name correctly on a chalkboard. But her smile quickly vanishes when asked about the events that led her to seek protection at the shelter, run by the Afghan nongovernmental organization Women4AfghanWomen, five months ago.
The shelter currently houses around 20 women, some with young children. Many, unable to return to their homes and families for fear of being killed, have been there for years because they have nowhere else to go.
Mumtaz says she was victimized by a scorned man who decided that if he could not marry her, he would make sure nobody else would want to. The middle-aged man, who reputedly had links to a local militia, had asked for her hand in marriage, but her father refused the request.
In response, Mumtaz says, the man, accompanied by six others, broke into her home in northern Kunduz Province, beat her father, and sprayed skin-burning acid over her mother and three sisters. Mumtaz says her one-time suitor pulled her hair back and emptied a bucket of acid over head and body before fleeing.
"They took me to a hospital in Kunduz, where I stayed for about 10 days. They wouldn't even look at me there," she says. "The women's group brought me to Kabul. I had one operation but then they discharged me, saying I wouldn't get better and would die. Finally, they sent me to India."
Indebted To The Shelter
Against overwhelming odds, Mumtaz survived after receiving several life-saving medical procedures in New Delhi. Mumtaz's family members, too, survived, although their safety remains precarious as many of the men accused of involvement in the attack are still at large.
After months of rehabilitation at the shelter in Kabul, Mumtaz is in stable condition and is able to speak, move, and eat freely. Doctors are still closely monitoring her fragile psychological condition as Mumtaz battles trauma and depression.
Mumtaz says she is indebted to the shelter, which helped pay her expensive medical and travel expenses. She hails the efforts of women's shelters, many of them run by Afghan NGOs and funded by a mix of private donors, international organizations, and foreign governments.
Many, she says, continue to work despite routine death threats and assassination attempts by the Taliban, which often claims the shelters are brothels and a haven for drug use.
"The shelter has helped me a lot. If they hadn't helped me, I probably would have died," Mumtaz says. "I'm very happy here. They help me in every aspect, including food, clothes, and ensuring I have my own room. They do everything for us."
Fear Of Progress Undone
To many, Mumtaz's shocking ordeal highlights the fragile state of women's rights in Afghanistan, where domestic abuse is routine, forced marriages are the norm, and female suicide rates remain among the highest in the world despite gains made since the fall of the Talban in late 2001.
Now, as the United States and its NATO allies prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014, fears are rising that what little progress women have made could be undone if the Taliban reenters the political scene.
The country's independently run and funded women's shelters, a prime symbol of that progress, are already bearing the brunt of growing conservatism within the government. In February 2011, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, under pressure from powerful social and religious circles, attempted to bring the shelters under government control.
The draft law, which was abandoned following a flurry of Western media attention, would have required women to obtain government approval and even virginity tests before they would be granted access to shelters.
'We Don't Trust Our Own People'
Muzhda Saleh, who has worked as a volunteer for the Women4AfghanWomen shelter in Kabul for the past two years, says Afghan women are already struggling to shed their second-class status in one of the world's most religious and conservative countries.
"In the provinces [outside the major cities], very few people have accepted that their girls should study, go to school, and eventually work," Saleh says. "Many women will lose the gains that they have made in the last 10 years. This is not easy to say, but we women don't trust our own people. Perhaps the rights that women have now will be taken away from them. The only environment in which these rights can be saved is when international forces are here."
Mumtaz, too, is pessimistic about the future. Despite repeated pledges from the international community that Afghan women will not be abandoned, she predicts the West will lose interest and the Western-backed Afghan government will sell out women as it negotiates a peace settlement with insurgents.
Whatever unfolds in the next few years, Mumtaz, who insists she can never go back to her village for fear of her life, maintains she will embark on a new chapter. Mumtaz hopes to finish school and eventually give back to the cause that she says saved her life.
"I don't know what will happen to me in the future. I would like to study and work in this office for women. They always come to the aid of desperate women," she says.
"Whenever I reflect on my own experiences, I think if they weren't there then I would have died. I had no life and my family didn't have the means to help me and take me to the hospital. Every girl and woman in Afghanistan is living under hardship."
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Iran Sanctions Take Toll on Afghans
Wall Street Journal By MARIA ABI-HABIB July 22, 2012
ISLAM QALA, Afghanistan - The U.S.'s effort to wield economic pressure to influence Iranian leaders is having the unintended consequence of hurting Afghanistan, which relies on remittances from millions of migrants living in the country to its west.
On the Iranian side of the border, authorities have been forcing Afghan migrant workers to leave the country, even those with proper papers. In western Afghanistan, on the border with Iran, some businessmen complain they are being undercut by Iranian goods sold cheaply because of the declining value of the Iranian currency, the rial.
A European Union embargo on Iranian oil and a U.S. ban on doing business with Iran's central bank, both of which took effect this month, have already contributed to a decline of more than 75% in the value of Iran's currency, the rial, this year alone.
That could potentially destabilize a country the U.S. and its allies have been fighting for a decade to rebuild.
"We are hugely concerned over the rial's drop," said Muzammil Shinwari, the Afghan deputy minister of trade and commerce. "Many Afghans are living and working there and will likely be the first to lose their jobs."
The Iranian Embassy in Kabul and its consulate in the western city of Herat didn't reply to requests for comment about deportations of workers and refugees.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul declined to comment on the sanctions' impact on the economy of Afghanistan.
The measures are intended to deprive Iran of oil revenue and persuade its leaders to take steps to guarantee that its uranium-enrichment program isn't intended for weapons development.
Though there has been little progress in nuclear talks, Afghan workers in Iran, who are often uneducated and badly paid even in the best of times, are taking a hit—at a time when Afghanistan's economy is already reeling from declining international aid and security fears.
The sanctions' repercussions can be seen every day here in Islam Qala, the main border crossing between Afghanistan and Iran. The crossing is now swamped by Afghans who have lost their jobs or were expelled by Iranian authorities who see Afghan workers as a threat to Iranian jobs.
Qurat Shafiqi, his eight children and two wives, having packed up their belongings after 18 years in Iran's eastern city of Kerman, arrived by bus one recent day at Islam Qala. The Shafiqis plan to start from scratch in their home province of Kunduz, near the Tajikistan border, where other relatives had relied on their remittances, he said.
Mr. Shafiqi said with the decline of the Iranian currency, his family's income was no longer enough to make ends meet; their monthly 10 million rials now trades for around $540 on the black market, from $950 in December.
"We have no savings," said Mr. Shafiqi, a sun-creased man, as his wives took turns unloading their belongings onto the hot pavement. "We suffered and decided to leave."
With unemployment rampant across Afghanistan, the country's weak economy, mostly supported by foreign aid, will be unable to absorb all returnees.
"A huge influx of desperately poor unemployed people is also not great for security, especially if one potential employer for some of them is the Taliban," said Heather Barr, Human Rights Watch's Afghanistan researcher.
Making matters worse, Iranian companies have begun selling their goods in the Afghan market at prices that undercut local businesses, Afghan entrepreneurs complain.
Mohammed Naeem Qadari, who runs a gypsum factory in Herat, says Iranian companies started underpricing him as the rial fell in January. He estimates he has about 40,000 40-kilogram bags of unsold gypsum.
Iranian gypsum now sells for roughly $2.60 per bag, whereas Mr. Qadari's product costs about $2.90, in part because fuel is much more expensive in Afghanistan.
The machines at Mr. Qadari's factory in Herat stopped clanking about six months ago. Stacks of gypsum up from the factory floor to the ceiling, about 50 feet high. Mr. Qadari says had to lay off about 70 factory workers, keeping only a handful as guards.
"Before this I never liked Iran's political interference, but now they're meddling economically," Mr. Qadari says. "Afghans are losing their jobs."
Abdullzahi Tahiri, who works for an Afghan aid organization helping the Afghan deportees arriving in Islam Qala, says every day this year he has received about 10 Afghan migrant workers who were deported despite having proper documentation to stay in Iran.
Before Iran's recent economic troubles, he had received no such cases, he says.
"My entire family is there. I need to go back, even if I have to smuggle myself back in," said Hamid Naematullah, a 51-year-old smelt-factory worker who was deported from Shiraz. He displayed his Iranian migrant-worker documentation. He said he didn't know why he had been deported.
Some deportees, desperate for work, are paying to get back into Iran. "There are groups of up to 1,000 people being smuggled back into Iran, said Heather Barr, Human Rights Watch's Afghanistan researcher. "This is extraordinary money going to smugglers, which is not good for security on the already volatile border." —Ziaulhaq Sultani contributed to this article.
Write to Maria Abi-Habib at maria.habib@dowjones.com
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Withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan halfway done, top commander says
Associated Press July 23, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - This year's pullout of 23,000 American troops from Afghanistan is at the halfway mark, U.S. Gen. John Allen, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces, said Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press.
It's a kind of milestone toward wrapping up the U.S. and NATO combat role after a decade in the war-torn nation - but Allen cautioned against putting too much emphasis on the U.S. troop drawdown, because the U.S.-led coalition's campaign is continuing.
Still, Allen said that he knows the clock is ticking on the NATO coalition's combat mission, which is to end at the close of 2014 - just 29 months from now.
In a wide-ranging interview in his office at NATO headquarters in Kabul, Allen also said that while Afghan security forces were increasingly taking the lead, more work needs to be done to shore up their confidence in planning and executing operations. He said this summer's coalition operations were aimed at pushing insurgents farther from population centers, expanding the security zone around the capital, Kabul, and getting more Afghan forces into the lead in the east, which borders Pakistan.
The Afghan army and police force are battling low levels of literacy, corruption within their ranks and lack of equipment and experience, but Allen said they were showing themselves to be increasingly capable on the battlefield. Getting them into the lead is an essential goal of the next 29 months, he said.
"We haven't even recruited the whole Afghan national security force. That's not going to happen for another couple months, but by Oct. 1, we hope to be at 352,000," he said. "We don't finish completely fielding the Afghan forces until December 2013. So just at that level alone there is significant work remaining to be done."
About 90 percent of coalition operations now are partnered with Afghan forces, and Afghan forces are in the lead more than 40 percent of the time, he said.
"We want to get that number higher, and that will come from battalion and higher units being able to take the lead with respect to planning," he said. "Planning is really the hallmark of any large military formation, and it's typically a weakness in new formations and new armies. So we are putting a lot of effort into teaching them how to plan, execute, recover from the mission and then re-cock and go back out again."
By the end of this year and into next year, Allen would like to see 5,500 personnel working in police and army advisory teams, but now the mission has 20 percent fewer advisers than it seeks.
"I don't know if we will make up all of that," he said, "but it's an ongoing request and I don't miss an opportunity to emphasize that we really do need these folks."
As the Afghan forces gear up, the exit of foreign troops continues.
The drawdown of 23,000 U.S. troops this year, now slightly more than half completed, will accelerate in the coming few months, he said.
"August will be the heaviest month," Allen said. "A lot is coming out now and a great deal will come out in August and early September. We'll be done probably around mid-September or so."
President Barack Obama pulled out 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan last year and ordered another 23,000 to be withdrawn by Sept. 30. That will leave roughly 68,000 American troops still in the country. By Oct. 1, 40,000 NATO forces will also still be fighting.
Up to one half of the 23,000 troops being pulled out this year are combat forces, he said. Small numbers are being pulled from the relatively stable northern and western parts of the country. Some will be withdrawn from the east and the south "and a good bit in the southwest," he said.
Helmand province in the southwest and Kandahar province in the south are areas where the Taliban has its strongest roots. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops and their NATO and Afghan partners have worked the past two years to rout insurgents from their strongholds in the two provinces. Insurgents today are trying to reclaim their influence there.
The NATO mission has concentrated on population centers, and this summer, it is focusing on going after insurgents outside the cities.
"If you look at the 10 most violent districts, almost all of them are in the south or the southwest," he said. "But it constitutes a relatively small part of the population of Afghanistan overall, " he added.
"We want to continue to push the insurgency increasingly out of the population centers into areas where they can be isolated, where they can be disrupted, where they can be rendered irrelevant," he said. "And that's the nature of the operations that are under way now."
U.S., NATO and Afghan forces also are working in the east to stop the infiltration of insurgents crossing the border from Pakistan to Afghanistan, expand the security zone around Kabul in Wardak and Logar provinces, just south of the capital, and improving security along highways extending southward from the capital.
In the northeast, coalition and Afghan forces are conducting extensive operations in Kunar and Nangarhar provinces - areas where al-Qaida and other transnational militants are active.
Unneeded military equipment also has started making its way home.
"The intent, ultimately, is to have the excess out of the theater about the time the mission would be completed in 29 months," he said. "And it will take all of that time, actually, to move that excess out - either a shipping container or a vehicle about every seven minutes between now until then."
Even so, he said it would be a mistake to focus too much on the exit of U.S. troops and equipment.
"It's not just about the drawdown and it's not just about America," he said. "There are 50 states in this coalition. There is also a significant Afghan national security force presence and that number is getting bigger by the day and they are getting more capable by the day."
He emphasized that work in Afghanistan will not end with the NATO combat mission in 2014.
"We're probably going to see some post-2014 military presence - some U.S. presence and a NATO presence - and while we've got much work to do in the next 29 months, we'll have additional time later for the continued professionalization of the Afghan security forces," he said, adding that the post-2014 NATO mission is still in the planning stage.
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Afghan Olympic medalist hopes to bring home more medals from London
by Farid Behbud and Jawid Omid
KABUL, July 23 (Xinhua) -- An Afghan Beijing Olympic medalist has vowed to bring more medals from the London 2012 Olympic Games for the sake of his country and the Afghan people.
In a recent interview with Xinhua, Rohullah Nikpa said that he and the other Afghan players are determined to bring honors for the country at the London Games.
"I also wish good luck for my fellow Afghan athletes so that we can again earn the respect and recognition of the international community," Nikpa said.
Nikpa won for the post-Taliban Afghanistan the first ever bronze medal for taekwondo in the Beijing 2008 Olympic.
A six-member Afghan team, including one female player, will represent Afghanistan in the London 2012 Olympic Games.
The Afghan team consists of Rohullah Nikpa and Nisar Ahmad Bahawi in taekwondo; Masoud Azizi and Tahmina Kohistani, the only woman in the team, in long-distance running; and Aimal Faisal and Ajma Faizi Zada in boxing and judo.
The team left Kabul on Friday and was sent off at the Kabul International Airport by several sports officials and fans.
Sports officials said that they are hopeful the Afghan team can bring medals from London so that Afghanistan will again be recognized by international sports enthusiasts.
The International Olympic Committee had suspended Afghanistan membership in 1999 due to Taliban's brutal policies that included restrictions on the country's sportsmen and athletes.
The IOC lifted the suspension in 2002 after the collapse of the Taliban regime.
The Taliban fundamentalist regime, which was toppled from power by the U.S.-led military campaign in late 2001, had outlawed a series of sports activities aside from forcing athletes to grow long beard and wear tall shirts and trousers during matches.
Since the collapse of Taliban regime, Afghan athletes have already attended several competitions at regional and international level and started bringing medals and honors to the war-torn country.
"I ask our countrymen to pray for the success of our small team in the London 2012 Olympic Games," team member Nisar Ahmad Bahawi said.
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'Sticky bombs' showing up in Afghanistan
July 23, 2012 at 9:11 AM
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 23 (UPI) -- Sticky bombs, magnetically adhesive improvised explosive devices that were prevalent in the war in Iraq, are showing up in Afghanistan, officials said.
Military officials said four incidents in a week's span used the hard-to-detect bombs typically placed near a vehicle's gas tank, Stars and Stripes reported.
Afghan officials said nearly two dozen NATO trucks were damaged or destroyed in one sticky bomb attack, saying Iran and Pakistan were the likely sources of the bombs -- a statement a Taliban official denied.
"All the proof and evidence is that these come from a neighboring country," said Sediq Sediqqi, spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry.
International Security Assistance Force officials said none of the trucks was contracted for NATO bases although local security officials and Taliban representatives said the vehicles were traveling to coalition facilities and the route taken is heavily traveled by NATO supply trucks, Stars and Stripes said.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousaf Ahmadi confirmed the use of sticky bombs, saying Taliban fighters started using the bombs "in the right situation and on some special occasions ... especially in crowded places and when a car is moving in a city."
Ahmadi denied the bombs were supplied by other countries, Stars and Stripes said.
"We don't need anyone's help," he said.
Coalition officials declined a request for interview, telling Stars and Stripes speculation about bomb types puts troops at risk.
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Afghanistan's Corruption Imperils Its Future—and American Interests
By Ben W. Heineman Jr. The Atlantic - Jul 23 2012, 4:27 PM ET6
The U.S. is preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan over the next year, but may leave a corrupt and highly dysfunctional country in its wake.
If the Obama administrations wants to show that the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government can survive the U.S. troop withdrawal scheduled for 2014, it may need to do more to address the rampant corruption that endangers Afghanistan and, ultimately, U.S. interest there.
The U.S. has recently staged two major events on Afghanistan. First, on July 7, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that Afghanistan would be officially designated as a "non-Nato ally of the United States" which makes it eligible for priority delivery of military hardware and U.S. help in buying arms and equipment. But the U.S. has thus far failed to indicate what level and kind of troop support -- or what type of other security capabilities -- will be available for Afghanistan after the hand-off.
Second, on July 8, the U.S. joined in an announcement of the Tokyo Mutual Accountability Framework under which 70 international donors pledged $16 billion dollars over the next four years to make up Afghan fiscal shortfall and to improve institutions and services in the country, with up to 20 percent supposedly conditioned on Afghan progress in addressing corruption and creating better governance.
But the framework document may not be enough for a nation that Transparency International designates the third most corrupt in the world (176 out of 178), that the World Bank gauges the world's eleventh poorest, and that has absorbed more than $80 billion in non-military aid from the U.S. in the past 10 years with few concrete, let alone durable, gains. As Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies writes, "The lack of transparency and credibility has been a critical problem ... particularly in the almost total lack of credibility in reporting on the impact of aid, quality and integrity of governance and presence of a functioning justice system."
Can Afghanistan survive as a fighting force and national government after 2014? Will ethnic rivalries among the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and other groups; will renewed military pressure from the Taliban; will subversion by Pakistan; will the weakness and corruption of the central government lead to a civil war, a coup, a Taliban resurgence, or a territory run by tribal leaders and local militia? Such post-2014 developments could even allow a recidivist Afghanistan to again serve as a sanctuary for world terrorism -- a true tragedy in light of nearly 2,000 American killed, 16,000 American wounded, 12,000 Afghan civilian deaths, and U.S. expenditures of $400 billion or more to date.
The recurrent riddle of Afghanistan is that an effective Afghan Army and security effort depends on developing a legitimate Afghan state that can somehow command the allegiance of the disparate ethnic groups, develop accountable institutions, and nurture an economy that does not depend on opium and can help government pay its bills without significant foreign aid. Yet that goal seems as much a chimera today as it did ten years ago. And a critical preserve and adverse factor preventing development of a legitimate Afghan state -- given all the tribal and ethnic decentralizing forces -- is the endemic and corrosive corruption that has bedeviled and baffled the Americans.
The litany of corruption issues in Afghanistan is daunting: 30 to 50 percent of the economy consists of the illicit opium trade, which fuels criminal and insurgent elements. Recent presidential and parliamentary elections were characterized by a high incidence of electoral pay-offs and fraud. There was also the scandal at the Bank of Kabul, replete with phony loans to the Afghan elite. And the U.S. was recently forced to withdraw criticism of President Hamid Karzai's failure to address corruption and his insistence that such efforts to pursue "malign networks" of Afghan elites be removed from U.S. and other investigators. And billions in U.S. aid funds which have been misappropriated, worsening corruption, despite belated attempts by U.S. officials to track expenditures more carefully.
The state of crisis is summarized in a current Foreign Affairs article by Republican Stephen Hadley and Democrat John Podesta, chairs of a bipartisan working group on the future of Afghanistan.
[The Afghan government] is deeply flawed and, should the world stop compensating for its deficiencies, in danger of imploding....Officials often use formal state institutions to support patronage networks fueling high levels of corruption, cronyism and nepotism on the national and local levels...Karzai has failed...to advance a reform agenda...[instead opposing] measures that would have promoted greater accountability...The absence of transparent and effective systems of justice and law has provided Taliban insurgents with an opening to mobilize domestic opposition to the Afghan government.
The international donors' Tokyo Mutual Accountability Framework seems intended to mollify donor domestic audiences. Their announcement reads, "The Afghan government reaffirms its solemn commitment to strengthen governance, grounded in human rights, the rule of law and ...the Constitution, and holds it as integral to sustained economic growth and development." The key concept in the document is the donors' "monitoring of development and governance benchmarks in a transparent manner... [as a] powerful means to enable accountability to the Afghan people." These "commitments" which will be "monitored" are in five areas: elections; governance/rule of law; integrity of public finance and banking; taxes and budgets, at both national and local level; economic growth and development. Under each area is a set of "indicators," which are goals, not the means of reaching those goals (e.g. "enact and enforce the legal framework for fighting corruption").
What's missing is a candid explanation of the processes of social, political, and economic change that might transform Afghanistan into the model state of the Accountability Framework or an assessment of the history, culture, conditions, and political realities (Pakistan?) in Afghanistan that have made such change so difficult. Key questions are left unanswered. What are real timelines (Afghan government to determine later); who decides if milestones are missed; what are the consequences; will there be real "conditionality" tied to progress on anticorruption (measured how?).
Afghanistan's corruption is an even more fraught an issue today than it has been in the past, as international withdrawal looms. It imperils a weak government and creates the risk (among other factors) that a transition from Karzai (whose term ends in 2014) will not move forward but will recede back to the conflicts and uncertainty that existed 10 years ago, raising the spectre that the influence of the Taliban, Pakistan, and world terrorists could wax as U.S. strategic interests continue but its political interest wanes.
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Afghan cleric held over rape of girl, 10: officials
AFP via Yahoo! News - Jul 23 09:29am
Afghan police have arrested a cleric for allegedly raping a 10-year-old schoolgirl in northern Afghanistan, officials said Monday.
Maulawi Sayed Ahmad was arrested in Aybak, the capital of Samangan province, on Saturday after police caught him in the act of sexually assaulting the girl, the interior ministry said in a statement.
"He was arrested by police while raping a 10-year old girl," provincial spokesman Sediq Azizi told AFP, adding that Ahmad was a prayer leader in a mosque in the provincial capital.
She regularly went to the man's house for lessons in reading and writing, he said.
"The girl has been taken to a hospital and police have launched an investigation," he added.
Afghanistan, a strictly religious country where clerics are highly respected, has seen a string of recent high-profile cases involving violence against women.
On Sunday, an Afghan man in the southern province of Helmand killed his two teenage daughters when they returned home four days after running away with a man.
The father, who shot the girls, was detained on murder charges.
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Lost boys of Bagram still live in prison's shadow
Reuters By Katharine Houreld Sun Jul 22, 2012
KARACHI, Pakistan - During some sleepless nights when his stark bedroom walls remind him too much of his old prison cell in Afghanistan, Jan Sher Khan scans Internet dating sites he'd heard about from U.S. soldiers who once guarded him.
The 24-year-old Pakistani never contacts anyone on the dating sites. He doesn't know how he'd tell them he spent more than six years in the U.S. military prison of Bagram after being detained as a 16-year-old and accused of being a suicide bomber.
More than 2,500 juveniles have been detained in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay by the United States since 2001, according to a U.N. report.
Most, like Khan, are now free, but many are struggling to rebuild their shattered lives.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm still in prison," said Khan, who, like all foreign prisoners at Bagram, was never charged with a crime.
"They put me in jail for six years. No proof, nothing. I spent my youth behind bars," he said, adding that he and other young detainees were beaten repeatedly during the first few months of their detention.
A U.S. court found two adult detainees had been beaten to death at Bagram in 2002, using techniques similar to those described by Khan.
The U.S. government said such cases of abuse are rare.
"Although there have been substantiated cases of abuse in the past, for which U.S. service members have been held accountable, our enemies also have employed a deliberate campaign of exaggerations and fabrications," said Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a spokesman for the Department of Defense in Washington.
"All credible allegations of abuse are thoroughly investigated, and appropriate disciplinary action is taken when those allegations are substantiated," said Breasseale.
U.S. officials in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Washington, contacted by Reuters, all declined to discuss individual cases of Bagram detainees.
Reuters could not independently verify some aspects of the accounts provided by the detainees interviewed for this story. Journalists are not permitted inside Bagram.
Khan said the abuse he suffered inside Bagram has left him with frequent headaches and mood swings. He said he can no longer concentrate for more than a few minutes.
Khan is seeing a Pakistani army psychologist but his problems and the stigma of being labeled a "terrorist" because of his time in Bagram make it difficult to rebuild his life -- to find a job and eventually a wife.
"All my friends are married. Some have kids. We are not really close any more," said Khan, who wants to marry but fears no woman will have him.
NO TRIALS
Foreign prisoners at Bagram have no trials, only review boards staffed by U.S. military officers.
Prisoners do not have the right to see classified evidence against them and are represented by a U.S. military officer, not a civilian lawyer. The boards evaluate evidence against them and whether they might pose a future threat to U.S. forces.
The process falls "severely short of fair trial standards," said Sarah Belal from Justice Project Pakistan, which has filed a case in Pakistan on behalf of some of the families.
The U.S. government says detention is necessary to stop released prisoners from returning to the battlefield. Some have done so, it says.
"Detention in wartime has long been recognized as legitimate under international law. Just as we do with prisoners of war in more traditional armed conflicts, we acknowledge that the threat they pose may change over time," said Breasseale.
A case filed in the United States three years ago by the International Justice Network is challenging the U.S. right to hold foreign prisoners captured abroad indefinitely in Bagram.
Khan said he was told for more than two years that the military review boards were willing to let him go but were waiting for a response from the Pakistani government.
The Pakistani government said they always responded promptly to requests from the United States.
Belal is working on a case in Pakistan to force the Pakistani government to do more to bring its citizens home from Bagram.
LOST CHILDHOODS
Khan said he ran away from home as a teenager to escape beatings from his strict military father, who disapproved of his poor grades, his friends and his drinking and smoking.
He said he went to Afghanistan to find a job because he had read about U.S.-funded construction projects there in the news.
But within a week, he said, he was arrested after Afghans made up accusations against him to collect cash for a tip-off.
He said he spent the next six months being beaten by interrogators every few days. Sometimes he was shackled to a chair, other times hung from the ceiling by his ankles.
"Everyone got the treatment. It was just -- is it going to be for one month or for six months?" Khan recalled. "They asked me stupid questions, like 'where is Osama bin Laden?'. I said, 'I'm 16. You think he is going to meet me?'"
Khan was eventually moved from his single cell to the general prison population and the beatings stopped. He was freed last year. A Red Cross spokesman confirmed the organization flew him back to his hometown of Peshawar in Pakistan.
Local Pakistani security services are now frequent callers at his parents' house. Neighbors shun him; no one wants trouble with the intelligence services.
Pakistani Kamil Shah said he was detained in 2004 at the age of 16, shortly after crossing the Afghanistan/Pakistan border with a sick friend needing medical help. He was held for five years in Bagram, without charge, until his release in 2009.
"They said I was a Talib. They said you will be here forever," he said down a crackly phone line from northern Pakistan. Khan confirmed Shah was in Bagram when he was there.
Shah also said he was eventually freed after he learnt enough English to speak directly to his U.S. interrogators and convince them he was telling the truth.
U.S. soldiers also told him several times they were willing to release him but were awaiting a response from Pakistan, he said.
"I was innocent. I lost my education. I lost everything," said Shah, who had three years until his high school graduation when he was detained.
Shah said he was beaten in the first months of detention.
"Clearly in the early days there was ongoing torture at Bagram," said Andrea Prasow, a senior counter terrorism counsel from the New York-based Human Rights Watch. But the situation had improved, she said.
"Since detainees were moved to a new prison by the Obama administration (in late 2009), we haven't heard credible accusations of mistreatment at that level."
Conditions at Bagram are monitored by the International Committee of the Red Cross. But their reports are not public.
"The ICRC ... shares its concern according to international law with the detaining authorities," said Robin Waudo, the organization's Kabul-based spokesman.
UNCERTAIN FUTURE
U.S. officials say no decision has yet been reached on what will happen to the 50-plus foreign prisoners in Bagram, half of them Pakistani, when the U.S. hands full control of the prison to the Afghan government in September.
Pakistani government court documents lodged in Lahore High Court and dated December 2011 say there are still three juveniles inside Bagram, one aged 15 and two 16.
An adult and the 15-year-old, Mohammad Tayyab, though cleared for release by both the United States and Pakistan, are still being held because they have no exit visas, a Pakistani government official said.
U.S. authorities say they are aware of only one juvenile prisoner, aged 17, and no child prisoners.
Some prisoners, like Hamidullah Khan, were arrested as children and have grown up behind bars.
A photo of a young, dimpled Hamidullah grins down from a wall of a stuffy concrete room in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city. It's the last photo taken before he disappeared on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was 14 years old.
Hamidullah vanished in 2008 after his father sent him to collect the family's belongings from their village near the border. On his way home he telephoned from a bus stop, but the next thing his family knew, he was in Bagram.
A Pakistani government memo says he was captured in Khost province in Afghanistan for "attacks on coalition forces" but gives no details.
"Why don't they tell us what he has done?" asked his father Wakeel Khan, a former soldier now barely making a living as a security guard. "If he is guilty, I will kill him myself," he said gruffly, as his other sons silently looked on.
More than 300 children were recruited as fighters in Afghanistan in 2011, according to a U.N. report on children and armed conflict. The youngest was an 8-year-old girl. But Hamidullah's family say he had no interest in the insurgency.
The Red Cross recently set up monthly video calls between Hamidullah and his family. If he mentions conditions in Bagram or his arrest, the lines are cut.
While Hamidullah has been detained, his mother Din Rozen has been fasting from sunrise to sunset, believing her suffering strengthens her prayers for her son to come home before she loses her sight due to cataracts.
"He's my child...Who is taking care of him now?," cried Din Rozen, using her headscarf to dab away tears.
(Editing by Michael Perry)
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