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Allies Restrict Airstrikes on Taliban in Civilian Homes
New York Times By ERIC SCHMITT June 10, 2012
WASHINGTON - The senior allied commander in Afghanistan has ordered new restrictions on airstrikes against Taliban fighters who hide in residential homes, coalition officials said Sunday, a move in response to a NATO attack in the eastern part of the country last week that Afghan officials say killed 18 civilians.
Karzai's Brother May Run For Afghan Presidency
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan June 11, 2012
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Afghan President Hamid Karzai's elder brother, Abdul Qayum Karzai, is apparently planning to enter the race to be elected Afghanistan's next president.
Bomb Kills Pregnant Afghan Woman En Route To Hospital
June 11, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Officials say a roadside bomb has killed a pregnant Afghan woman who was being rushed to a hospital in an ambulance to deliver her baby.
U.N. Fires Officials at Its Afghan Fund
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM June 10, 2012
KABUL - The United Nations fired three officials running its $1.4 billion Afghanistan police trust fund as the first step in what is expected to be a broader shake-up at the program currently facing an internal investigation of mismanagement, according to U.N. and Western officials.
5 civilians killed in bomb blast in N. Afghanistan
KABUL, June 11 (Xinhua) -- A total of five civilians, including two women and two children, were killed and two others injured when an ambulance ran over a roadside bomb in northern Afghan province of Sari Pul on Monday, the country's Interior Ministry said.
Karzai Should Start Fighting Corruption from Palace: MPs
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 10 June 2012
Reacting to President Hamid Karzai's call on MPs to convene for a meeting to discuss fighting corruption, several MPs on Sunday said he should start this process with cleaning up his own office.
Afghan drug lord who funded Taliban faces jail
An Afghan drug lord who became one of the world's largest heroin traffickers, providing vital funding to the Taliban, faces a life in jail on Tuesday at his sentencing in the US.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 10 Jun 2012
Kabul - Haji Bagcho sent heroin to more than 20 countries and was once responsible for trafficking a fifth of the world's heroin supply, prosecutors estimate.
Four Taliban militants killed as their bomb explodes prematurely
SHARAN, Afghanistan, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Four Taliban militants lost their lives as their bomb went off prematurely in Afghanistan 's Paktika province, 155 km south of capital Kabul, Sunday night, spokesman for the provincial administration Mukhlis Afghan said Monday.
Two Dead After Quake Shakes Northern Afghanistan
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan June 11, 2012
Afghan officials fear scores of casualties after rescuers pulled out two bodies from rubble after an earthquake hit a remote region in northern Afghanistan.
As army grows, a unit highlights the challenges
AP By KATHY GANNON June 11, 2012
CHINARI OUTPOST, Afghanistan - Over Capt. Mohammed Raza's walkie-talkie came an intruder's voice: Faqir Talha, a Taliban fighter telling a comrade, "Everyone is with us. We will have a village meeting. It will be at 3 p.m. and everyone should come."
The plains of Logar Province are vast, but the distance between army and enemy can be small. The village of sun-dried mud huts where Raza suspects the insurgents' meeting is to take
Afghan arsonists seek to enforce truancy from school
Reuters By Mirwais Harooni and Sanjeev Miglani Sun Jun 10, 2012
KABUL - Standing at a narrow half-open school gate, two boys in school uniform conduct body searches on fellow pupils and visitors. Another two sit at a table to take down details of comings and goings in a register.
US legacy in Afghanistan: What 11 years of war has accomplished
The lives of four Afghans provide a lens on how America's longest conflict has changed a nation – and the divisions and dangers that persist.
Christian Science Monitor By Scott Baldauf, Staff writer Cover Story June 10, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan - It has become the longest war in US history – nearly 11 years. It has consumed $57 billion in American development aid. The US military has spent more than $517 billion trying to subdue and secure one of the most invaded countries in human history. What, in the end, has the United States achieved after all this time and treasury spent in Afghanistan?
Does nation-building work?
The term "nation-building" smacks of colonialism. But when war has broken a country, nation-building is a moral duty -- and the best way to build is with equal parts outside and inside effort.
Christian Science Monitor By John Yemma June 10, 2012
Nation-building has a can-do ring to it. You can build a highway, a skyscraper, a Fortune 500 company. Why not a nation?
Muslim Olympians Face Choices On Ramadan Fasting
By Ron Synovitz June 11, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
To eat or not to eat? That is the question for about 3,000 Muslim athletes in London's 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
Afghan doctor's death leaves a hole
Aqilah Hikmat, head of obstetrics and mother of four, was shot dead by a U.S. soldier on her way to Kabul. 'No one in our family can ever forget,' her husband says.
Los Angeles Times By Laura King June 10, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - For much of her life, Aqilah Hikmat had beaten the odds. In a country where women struggle to get educations and find good jobs, she was an accomplished physician, the head of the obstetrics ward at a major provincial hospital, beloved by her patients.
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Allies Restrict Airstrikes on Taliban in Civilian Homes
New York Times By ERIC SCHMITT June 10, 2012
WASHINGTON - The senior allied commander in Afghanistan has ordered new restrictions on airstrikes against Taliban fighters who hide in residential homes, coalition officials said Sunday, a move in response to a NATO attack in the eastern part of the country last week that Afghan officials say killed 18 civilians.
“Given our commitment to protect Afghan civilians, restricting the use of air-delivered munitions against insurgents within civilian dwellings is a prudent and logical step in the progression in the campaign,” Jamie Graybeal, a NATO spokesman in Afghanistan, said in an e-mail on Sunday.
Officials said the directive from Gen. John R. Allen, the commander for international and United States forces in Afghanistan, underscores NATO’s existing commitment to protecting civilians. It also marks a triumph for President Hamid Karzai, who has repeatedly stressed that civilian casualties undermine relations between the countries. Mr. Karzai has frequently pushed for a less confrontational approach in dealing with the Taliban.
After a meeting on Saturday between Mr. Karzai, General Allen and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker of the United States to discuss the issue, aides to Mr. Karzai released a statement saying that General Allen had pledged to halt attacks altogether on residential areas and homes.
On Sunday, however, American officials said General Allen’s order did not necessarily go that far and sought to describe it in more nuanced terms, saying that NATO would continue to conduct operations against insurgents who use civilian dwellings for shelter.
“When there is concern over the presence of civilians, air-delivered munitions will not be employed while other means are available,” said a senior United States defense official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the policy deliberations.
Militants often hide in civilian homes, so a complete ban on airstrikes could hinder the ability of American forces to pursue the Taliban. General Allen’s order does not affect ground operations against insurgents. An agreement between the two countries in April gave lead authority for night raids to the Afghans, although missions are to be conducted jointly and targets selected by consensus. Allied officials still retain control over dropping bombs in these operations, and Afghan officials say they were not involved in the decision to carry out the fatal airstrike last week.
That attack marked a setback to an encouraging trend: Civilian casualties in Afghanistan dropped significantly in the first four months of 2012, and a smaller proportion of the deaths was attributed to coalition and Afghan forces compared with a year earlier, the United Nations director in the country said last month.
The joint Afghan-NATO raid last week was hunting a Taliban commander and some of his fighters who had holed up in a home in Logar Province where a wedding had taken place, according to local residents. An early-morning firefight broke out between the coalition troops and the insurgents, with the civilians trapped inside. The coalition decided to call in an airstrike, which killed the insurgents but also 18 civilians, including 9 children, Afghan officials said.
On Friday, General Allen apologized for the civilian deaths and took the unusual step of meeting with the relatives of some of those killed.
At the high-level meeting the next day, Mr. Karzai said that conducting airstrikes against insurgents near residential areas and homes would not only hurt the two countries’ often tense relationship, but could also jeopardize a newly signed strategic partnership agreement, said the American defense official, who was briefed on the meeting.
That pact, which President Obama and Mr. Karzai signed in Kabul last month, addresses a broad range of issues, including security and social and economic development. It pledges American support for Afghanistan for 10 years after the withdrawal of combat troops at the end of 2014.
General Allen did not disagree with Mr. Karzai, and said that the allied campaign was at a stage where an agreement to cease airstrikes near civilian dwellings was reasonable, the American official recounted.
“This was less a demand than it was an appeal to ensure that the agreements made between the two countries cannot be put into jeopardy by other actors,” the American official said. “But make no mistake, we are going to preserve our flexibility to protect our troops and our partners.”
General Allen’s directive comes nearly two years after Gen. David H. Petraeus, upon assuming command of international forces in Afghanistan, issued new guidelines on the use of force in Afghanistan that expanded restrictions on artillery strikes and aerial bombardment, but clarified that troops had the right to self-defense.
Troops widely complained that restrictions put in place by General Petraeus’s predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, exposed them to excessive risk by tying their hands when they sought to attack people suspected of being militants or destroy buildings used to harbor insurgents.
But General McChrystal’s rules were popular with Afghan officials, including President Karzai, and human rights advocates, who said the restrictions had significantly reduced Afghan civilian deaths.
On Sunday, human rights advocates expressed wariness about whether General Allen’s orders would have an immediate impact. “We’ve seen improvements in detention-related abuses and excessive force at checkpoints, but when it comes to civilian casualties, we’re still seeing tragic incidents, even today,” said John Sifton, Human Rights Watch’s advocacy director for Asia.
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Karzai's Brother May Run For Afghan Presidency
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan June 11, 2012
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Afghan President Hamid Karzai's elder brother, Abdul Qayum Karzai, is apparently planning to enter the race to be elected Afghanistan's next president.
Speaking to RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan, Mahmud Karzai, another elder brother of the Afghan president, confirmed that Qayum Karzai was preparing to contest the next Afghan presidential election, due in 2014.
Mahmud Karzai said President Karzai has so far not indicated whether he will support his brother's candidacy.
There has been no announcement yet from Qayum Karzai on whether he will seek the presidency.
President Karzai cannot run for a third term after his current term ends in 2014.
Qayum, 55, resigned from Afghanistan's parliament in 2008, citing poor health.
He has reportedly been involved in back-channel peace diplomacy with the Taliban through Saudi Arabia.
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Bomb Kills Pregnant Afghan Woman En Route To Hospital
June 11, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Officials say a roadside bomb has killed a pregnant Afghan woman who was being rushed to a hospital in an ambulance to deliver her baby.
Afghanistan's Interior Ministry said the bomb in Sar-i Pul also killed four members of the woman's family -- a man, another woman, and two children.
The ministry said the bomb was planted by "enemies of peace and stability" -- a term usually used to describe Taliban miiltants.
In the central province of Ghazni, four civilians were reported killed when a mortar fired by suspected Taliban fighters hit their home.
The United Nations says the Taliban and its allies are responsible for 80 percent of civilians killed by fighting in Afghanistan, with U.S.-led foreign troops and their Afghan allies responsible for the rest.
With reporting by AP and dpa
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U.N. Fires Officials at Its Afghan Fund
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM June 10, 2012
KABUL - The United Nations fired three officials running its $1.4 billion Afghanistan police trust fund as the first step in what is expected to be a broader shake-up at the program currently facing an internal investigation of mismanagement, according to U.N. and Western officials.
The dismissals mark the first substantive steps in the United Nations Development Program investigation of misconduct—and a possible coverup—at the fund that pays the salaries for the 150,000-member police force that is a cornerstone of America's exit strategy in Afghanistan.
Among those removed from their posts, Western officials said, were the trust fund's deputy project manager and its finance officer. A fund administrator has also been fired. All these former U.N. staffers are Afghan citizens.
In a statement on the dismissals, the U.N. said it has a "zero tolerance" policy on corruption and is committed to running a transparent fund in a country with major security constraints.
"Because of these huge challenges, it is not possible for UNDP to eliminate all risks associated with running its programs in Afghanistan," the U.N. said in its statement. "However UNDP constantly endeavors to mitigate or enhance its risk management associated with our country operations."
The U.N. declined to explain why the Afghan staff members had been fired, or how security challenges constrained its ability to oversee the funds. None of the fired employees could be reached Sunday to comment.
Problems with the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan became public last month, when The Wall Street Journal reported that international donors were concerned about possible abuses at the fund. The trust fund's main contributors are the U.S., the European Union and Japan.
While UNDP officials initially dismissed Journal reports about mismanagement allegations at Lotfa, the U.N. now says that its own investigation of problems at the fund preceded these articles—and that it is taking allegations of abuse seriously.
U.N. investigators have flown in to examine allegations that managers have abused the trust fund's $2.2 million procurement budget, according to Western officials.
U.N. employees have also raised concerns that Lotfa has paid thousands of nonexistent police officers and that senior managers have created high-paying positions for workers with close ties to powerful Afghan leaders, according to Western officials.
Investigators are also looking into reports that Lotfa workers tried to destroy incriminating documents, according to the U.N.
Earlier this month, the European Union vowed to withhold 30 million ($37 million) until the U.N. examined the allegations of abuses at Lotfa and came up with better controls. The U.N. said that it hasn't been formally informed of any decision by the EU to link release of the funds to the investigation.
Write to Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com
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5 civilians killed in bomb blast in N. Afghanistan
KABUL, June 11 (Xinhua) -- A total of five civilians, including two women and two children, were killed and two others injured when an ambulance ran over a roadside bomb in northern Afghan province of Sari Pul on Monday, the country's Interior Ministry said.
"An ambulance touched off a roadside bomb in second sub- district of Sari Pul City, capital of Sari Pul province at about 6 a.m. local time Monday, triggering a powerful blast that left five innocent civilians including two women and two children dead," the ministry said in a statement.
The ambulance was carrying a pregnant woman to a provincial capital hospital, the statement said, adding all the victims were members of the same family.
Two other people were injured in the incident in the province 350 km north of capital Kabul, the statement added.
The pregnant woman was injured in the incident and gave birth to a baby later Monday, an health official in the province told Xinhua.
The statement blamed Taliban for the incident.
Militancy has been on constant rise since launching Taliban spring offensive on May 3 this year.
The Taliban insurgent group uses Improvised Explosive Device ( IED) and suicide bombers in their attacks which also inflict casualties on civilians.
A woman was killed and three other women seriously injured when an IED went in southern Helmand province on Friday.
In an unrelated incident, gunmen shot and killed Hajji Habib Head of Intelligence Service Department of Dangam district in the country's eastern province of Kunar, a provincial government spokesman Wasifullah Wasifi told Xinhua.
He said the attack occurred at around 6 a.m. local time and police launched a search operation to capture the attackers who escaped the area.
Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing.
Separately, two militants were killed in a blast in Imam Sahib district of northern Kunduz province, said a police spokesman in the province.
"A group of militants were making roadside bombs and IEDs in the house to place along roads and target security forces in Kunduz but their explosive went off prematurely killing two on the spot and injuring two others late on Sunday," spokesman Seyd Sarwar Housaini told Xinhua, adding the injured were captured by police.
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Karzai Should Start Fighting Corruption from Palace: MPs
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 10 June 2012
Reacting to President Hamid Karzai's call on MPs to convene for a meeting to discuss fighting corruption, several MPs on Sunday said he should start this process with cleaning up his own office.
Kandahar MP Mohammad Naim Lalai accused the family of President Karzai and the Vice Presidents of being involved in corruption, saying meetings with MPs would be "symbolic moves".
President Karzai has called the MPs to cut short their 45-day summer recess and convene in Kabul for an advisory meeting to discuss mechanisms for fighting corruption.
The meeting is scheduled to take place ahead of the major international conference in Tokyo early next month where the international community is expected to discuss conditionality of their funding to the Afghan government.
"I call on the President to start fighting corruption from his own office," said MP Naim Lalai of Kandahar. "Such meetings with us would be symbolic ones."
Another MP from Kandahar, Abdul Jabar Qahraman, said fighting corruption requires a political will and commitment which, he said, doesn't exist in the current government.
However, several others, including Mahiuddin Mahdi of northern Baghlan province, welcomed the move, saying there is still a chance to start tackling corruption.
"I think it's good to start at any time and we still have a chance," concluded Mr Mahdi.
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Afghan drug lord who funded Taliban faces jail
An Afghan drug lord who became one of the world's largest heroin traffickers, providing vital funding to the Taliban, faces a life in jail on Tuesday at his sentencing in the US.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 10 Jun 2012
Kabul - Haji Bagcho sent heroin to more than 20 countries and was once responsible for trafficking a fifth of the world's heroin supply, prosecutors estimate.
In one year alone he is thought to have traded more than 125 tonnes of the drug worth hundreds of millions of pounds, and used the proceeds to give weapons, cash and supplies to Taliban commanders fighting Nato forces.
His conviction was a rare success for an international effort which has struggled to dent the Afghan opium trade, or the international drug smuggling networks it feeds.
Bagcho, aged around 60, operated a family business from Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan and ran a network of laboratories along the Pakistan border.
Khadi Gul, Bagcho's younger brother, told The Daily Telegraph his family had been involved in smuggling and had run a family business from a notorious smuggling bazaar in Ghani Kheyl.
He said Bagcho, who has 13 children from two wives, had been involved in the business since the early 1990s, but denied the family had ever given money to the Taliban.
Khadi Gul said: "For four years we have heard nothing from him, by telephone, letter or anything.
"He was a smuggler, that's true, everyone in our area is, but we don't agree that he gave money to the Taliban.
"They should bring him here and try him. We have our own courts here."
The case against Bagcho, built on a five year investigation, gives a glimpse of the enormous scale and breadth of the Afghan heroin industry which provides more than 90 per cent of the world's supply.
American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents working with undercover Afghan police officers recorded a series of drug deals with Bagcho where he sold them kilograms of heroin he thought was destined for the US.
During the investigation he offered an Afghan border police commander a "blank cheque" if he would tip him off about drug raids and help him transport his product.
Regular payments of cash, weapons and food were made to three Taliban commanders in Nangarhar, including Maulawi Kabir, the insurgents' shadow governor.
However the true scale of his operation was only disclosed when Bagcho's compound was raided in November 2007 and ledgers were found in a lavatory detailing the movement during 2006 of 275,000lb of heroin that he valued at £160 million.
He was arrested in Pakistan in 2009, "for unknown reasons unrelated to this case" according to case documents, then handed over to Afghan custody and extradited to America.
In March, he was found guilty of conspiracy, distribution of heroin for importation into the United States and narco-terrorism.
He will be sentenced on Tuesday and faces a minimum of 20 years in prison and may be jailed for life.
Bagcho's eldest son, Sucha Gul, was arrested during a night raid by Nato forces on January 14 and is believed to be held in Bagram prison north of Kabul.
Several more alleged Afghan drug lords are awaiting trial in the US and more have been convicted in a purpose-built, British and American-funded court in Afghanistan.
However the networks are often quickly revived by other traffickers. Some of the country's most senior opium kingpins are also deemed untouchable because of their political connections to the Karzai government, western officials in Afghanistan have complained.
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Four Taliban militants killed as their bomb explodes prematurely
SHARAN, Afghanistan, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Four Taliban militants lost their lives as their bomb went off prematurely in Afghanistan 's Paktika province, 155 km south of capital Kabul, Sunday night, spokesman for the provincial administration Mukhlis Afghan said Monday.
"Four Taliban insurgents were busy in planting a bomb on a road in Jani Khil district last night to target security forces but the device went off prematurely killing all the four on the spot," Afghan told Xinhua.
Three of the dead insurgents are Pakistani nationals, he added.
Taliban militants fighting the government have yet to make comment.
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Two Dead After Quake Shakes Northern Afghanistan
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan June 11, 2012
Afghan officials fear scores of casualties after rescuers pulled out two bodies from rubble after an earthquake hit a remote region in northern Afghanistan.
The head of Afghanistan's natural disaster department, Samim Afzali, told the AFP news agency that some 60 people are feared trapped under the rubble as a landslide collapsed 20 houses in the Burka district in northern Baghlan Province.
He said they were reports of 10 more homes destroyed in neighboring Takhar Province.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, two quakes, each measuring more than 5.0 magnitude, struck the area more than 200 kilometers north of the capital, Kabul, early on June 11.
Reports say the tremors could be felt in Kabul, as well.
With reporting by AFP and AP
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As army grows, a unit highlights the challenges
AP By KATHY GANNON June 11, 2012
CHINARI OUTPOST, Afghanistan - Over Capt. Mohammed Raza's walkie-talkie came an intruder's voice: Faqir Talha, a Taliban fighter telling a comrade, "Everyone is with us. We will have a village meeting. It will be at 3 p.m. and everyone should come."
The plains of Logar Province are vast, but the distance between army and enemy can be small. The village of sun-dried mud huts where Raza suspects the insurgents' meeting is to take place lies barely a kilometer (less than a mile) from Chinari outpost and its complement of 20 Afghan National Army troops,
It's not of much use to the soldiers, however. They have no way of pinpointing where the insurgents are gathering, and even if they did, they lack the firepower to mount an attack.
Two months previously a police post was destroyed by the Taliban, so the army set up a base on a hilltop where the men of the 4th Battalion of 203 Thunder Corps live in two 6-meter (20-foot)-long containers behind bags of rocks and rolls of barbed wire. Riding in humvees, they patrol a road that snakes through mountain passes and eventually ends in Pakistan, where the insurgents have a haven.
Two days ago they were attacked with rockets but suffered no injuries.
In 2014 when the last U.S. and NATO forces are gone, Afghanistan's defense will fall to troops like these. President Hamid Karzai says his army is ready. The soldiers at Chinari outpost agree but feel seriously unequipped. Twenty of them share a single helmet, which they passed from one to another as they posed for photos.
No one denies the Afghan National Army has an equipment problem. President Hamid Karzai says he is disturbed by problems such as the helmet shortage. The U.S. is providing the army with new, lighter helmets, but not all the soldiers have them.
"There is definitely a logistics issue within the ANA. . . There is an awful lot of equipment purchased and sitting in warehouses until we get the logistics fixed and get the ANA trained to request the equipment and get it issued," Lt. Col. Timothy M. Stauffer, U.S. Army director of public relations, told the AP late in May.
Still, to an Associated Press reporter and photographer visiting Chinari outpost southeast of Kabul, the Afghan troops sound motivated and patriotic. They tend to dismiss the Taliban rank and file as poor youngsters who join up for the money, but in the next breath say much the same of themselves: Educated to 5th grade at most, or not at all, they enlisted because their families need the money.
The Taliban put religion in the forefront of their endeavors; these soldiers seem to lay more stress on love of country.
Most say they enlisted because they love their country, and because the $250 monthly salaries offer a way out of poverty. They say they aren't afraid of the Taliban, and expect the fighting to stop once foreign troops leave. They represent Afghanistan's many and sometimes quarreling ethnic groups – Tajik, Uzbek, Pashtun and Hazara – and say ethnicity doesn't define them. They all say they dream of peace and prosperity for their homeland after 30 years of war. They also all say they are disappointed that after 11 years and billions of dollars so little development has taken place, peace has eluded them and corruption is rife among their leaders.
Bushy-bearded Noor Alam is 25 and in his words a bit of a dreamer and a poet. His education ended at fifth grade. He and two brothers enlisted because his family is poor and needs the money.
He recalls scary encounters with the Taliban in his four years in the army, but none as frightening as the one with U.S. Special Forces who he says mistook his base for a Taliban hide-out. "Their weapons were so strong. I have had bad experiences with the Taliban but this was the most frightening for me," he said. "Maybe they apologized to higher-ups, but no one apologized to us."
He says he longs for "peace with all Afghans, living together. We shouldn't fight each other."
Noor Ali thinks he's 21, lost his parents when he was young, never went to school, worked as a laborer. He joined the army 10 months ago and learned basic reading and writing. He dyed his hair flaming red, explaining shyly, "I did this to look good. In my village it is popular."
Mohammed Khan is 21 but his face is weathered and lined. He said his elderly father can no longer work. "We need money and at the same time we serve our country," he said. He enlisted three months ago and hasn't been home yet, but has a cell phone and calls his father often. "It makes me feel better," he says.
He hasn't yet been under fire but says: "I am not afraid of the Taliban. I am only afraid of God."
Khan says the Afghan National Army can defend the country after 2014 – "I have trust and belief in the ANA" – and thinks Afghanistan will be better off once the foreign forces are gone, "because when they are gone we will be more able to control our country."
At 23 Sgt. Abdul Bashir is a veteran. One of 15 children, he joined up four years ago "to serve my country. "He accuses Iran and Pakistan of interfering in his troubled homeland but believes Afghanistan will have a better chance at peace after international forces leave. He longs for "a country that is peaceful and can develop and where a soldier all alone can go anywhere in the country without feeling any danger."
Abdul Basir, 22, has just finished basic training, having learned to fight on the run, fire weapons and use stealth. He says he bears no ill will toward the Taliban. "They are human beings and Afghans but if they shoot at me I have to defend myself." He says there are Taliban in his northern province of Kunduz but none in his village, where most support the government.
Among the higher ranks, officers are not shy about expressing their worries for Afghanistan's fate once the foreign forces leave. But here at Chinari, the consensus seems to be: We'll manage fine.
The foreigners – now numbering about 130,000 soldiers, 90,000 of them American – "have helped us but they have not been able to bring us peace, things have gone from bad to worse," said Basir. "I think I just want them to leave because we should protect our own country."
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Afghan arsonists seek to enforce truancy from school
Reuters By Mirwais Harooni and Sanjeev Miglani Sun Jun 10, 2012
KABUL - Standing at a narrow half-open school gate, two boys in school uniform conduct body searches on fellow pupils and visitors. Another two sit at a table to take down details of comings and goings in a register.
Arson and poison attacks on schools across Afghanistan, mostly against those teaching girls, have forced students to defend themselves, an extra-curricular activity imposed by the government which blames the Taliban for the violence.
Abdul Fatah, 16, takes it in turn every few weeks to stand guard all day at the entrance to Habibia High School, one of the best in Kabul.
His parents worry that if there is an attack, he will be the first to get hurt. But the only other choice is to stay at home and join tens of thousands of Afghans who have left school early and struggle to earn a living in menial jobs.
There is a police checkpoint on the road outside and each day a group of six students and a teacher patrol the grounds.
"We are on the front line," Abdul said. "If there is an attack, it will be us who get hurt. But somebody has to do the searches."
Schools have been burnt across the country, hundreds of children hospitalized after drinking contaminated water and teachers attacked, whipping up a climate of fear reminiscent of Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001. The Taliban banned education for women and girls and only allowed strict Islamic instruction.
Unidentified men threw acid on a group of 15 girls as they walked to their school in the southern city of Kandahar in November 2008 when the Taliban insurgency was rising, triggering alarm across the country. There haven't been reports of big attacks since then, but women have been wounded with acid over other issues.
Girls have been returning to school, especially in the capital, Kabul, since the overthrow of the Taliban, in one of few hard-fought gains in civil liberties.
Afghanistan's intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, says the Taliban are bent on closing schools ahead of the withdrawal of foreign forces in 2014. Some of the attacks are carried out by Taliban members and in some cases, it says, the Taliban have used children to poison fellow pupils.
SCHOOLGIRLS ACCUSED
On Wednesday the agency said it had arrested 15 people for a spate of attacks in northern Takhar province, most of them Taliban, but also two girls who it said had been given 50,000 afghanis ($1,000) each to smuggle in toxic powder and slip it into the water tank.
One of the girls, Sima Gul, a grade 12 student, said in a video released by the agency that she had also been forced to spray poison in her classroom by a relative in the Taliban who had repeatedly followed her to school.
"He threatened to kidnap me and kill me if I didn't do this," she said, her voice breaking. "I am ashamed."
But the Taliban have denied involvement, saying the attacks, arrests and confessions are part of a propaganda campaign to blacken their reputation.
"We are not opposed to education. Why should we oppose it? Our children attend these schools. We are only against schools that propagate anti-Islamic teachings, that are opposed to Afghanistan's national sovereignty," said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
He said militia groups set up by the government were behind the violence. Others hint at external forces trying to whip up trouble as Afghanistan prepares to take responsibility for its security after nearly 11 years of international support.
Some 550 schools in 11 provinces had been closed because the state could not provide enough security, Amanullah Iman, a spokesman for the Education Ministry, said.
In the southern province of Helmand, more than half the 336 schools are shut. Last week, anonymous letters delivered at night in the southeast insurgent stronghold of Paktika warned children and teachers of punishment if they attended school.
The closures have left about 200,000 children, mostly girls, without any access to education, and strengthened fears that Afghanistan's fledgling national forces may be unable to preserve women's rights once international forces leave.
"Over the last two years, the Taliban have moved away from large set-piece combat maneuvers and focused more on intimidation and social and political control," said Joshua Foust, an expert on Afghanistan and Central Asia at the Washington-based American Security Project.
"Shutting down schools is one way of establishing control."
LATE FOR SCHOOL
Alarmed by four poison attacks over the last two months on girls' schools, authorities in northern Takhar province last week ordered headmasters to remain in school until late in the evening and staff to scour the grounds for suspicious objects and test the water before opening the school gates.
Girls go to school in groups of five to ten seeking safety in numbers. Some don't dare to take in food or water in case someone poisons it, said Hamida, who is 19 but still in high school because of so many stops and starts to her education.
"To be honest, we are very scared each day. If you see someone staring at you on the way to school, you know there can be trouble," she said.
Sometimes the children simply turn back for home, fearing an attack.
Takhar was transferred to Afghan government control in April as part of a gradual transition. NATO said security had improved and Afghan forces were capable of shouldering responsibility.
But renewed violence across the nation as part of the Taliban's spring offensive has stoked fear that the poorly equipped Afghan forces may struggle to establish control.
Takhar has been a hotbed of militancy and criminal activity since 2009. It's not just the Taliban but also small ethnic insurgent groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan that are active.
Even in the best of times, NATO barely managed to keep the lid on the tension within the province, officials say. The risks have risen even more now that the reins have been handed to the Afghan army.
"Now that it's under Afghan control, we're seeing what I expect we'll see in a lot of places: all the many armed groups vying for control," Foust said.
"Someone will eventually come out on top if they're left to their own devices ... it just might not be someone we'd prefer."
(Editing by Nick Macfie)
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US legacy in Afghanistan: What 11 years of war has accomplished
The lives of four Afghans provide a lens on how America's longest conflict has changed a nation – and the divisions and dangers that persist.
Christian Science Monitor By Scott Baldauf, Staff writer Cover Story June 10, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan - It has become the longest war in US history – nearly 11 years. It has consumed $57 billion in American development aid. The US military has spent more than $517 billion trying to subdue and secure one of the most invaded countries in human history. What, in the end, has the United States achieved after all this time and treasury spent in Afghanistan?
It's a valid question to ask, especially in an election year. And it's a question that many Afghans themselves are asking in earnest, as the US considers withdrawing troops by 2014.
Answering this question is tricky. US military spokesmen point to the dismantling of Al Qaeda and the buildup of an Afghan National Army increasingly capable of protecting the country from its internal and external enemies. Aid donors point to increased political freedoms, improved economic opportunities, thousands of newly built girls' schools, and rising survival rates for newborn infants and their mothers.
Add all this up, though, and the whole is a bit less than the sum of its parts. Security is faltering, as support for insurgent groups like the Taliban grows in rural areas. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civil servants have received world-class training from the West, but corruption within government remains a huge problem. Women and girls have far more access to education, health care, and political rights than during Taliban times, but those rights could be diminished if the Taliban enter a coalition government with President Hamid Karzai.
Americans have become increasingly weary of the war. A Monitor/TIPP poll conducted in May found that 63 percent of Americans oppose a newly signed security pact that would keep many US soldiers in Afghanistan after the majority of combat troops are withdrawn in 2014. Many Afghans, including insurgents interviewed for this story, say that a swift pullout will lead to the collapse of the Afghan government, the breakup of the national army, and the spark of a new civil war. Still, the past decade hasn't been a waste, many Afghans say. At least it has created a window of relative peace in which Afghans can create institutions that are worth defending.
Success – defined by both the Americans and the Afghans as a stable, sustainable, and effective government – will largely depend on what happens in the next two years. If Americans correct past mistakes and build on achievements, they still have a chance to leave behind a country that can survive on its own. If past mistakes are repeated, the withdrawal could be a messy one indeed – and may prove an ignoble ending to one of the costlier ventures in modern American history.
To help gauge what has been accomplished, the Monitor followed four people from different dimensions of Afghan society – a female university student making her place in the business world, a militant supporter fighting the presence of foreign troops, an Afghan bureaucrat struggling with corruption, and an Afghan Army officer fighting internal ethnic divisions.
THE FEMINIST MINORITY
Don't try to tell Yalda Samih that nothing has improved since the Taliban left. As a young university student, studying business at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, she doesn't need to wear a head-to-toe burqa when she goes out on the streets of the capital city, as she did as a young girl growing up in Kandahar. While she is religiously conservative, refusing to shake a male stranger's hand, she rejects the narrow-mindedness of the Taliban, who refused to let her and other Afghan girls go to any school except a religious madrasa to learn the Holy Quran.
Secretly, her mother taught little Yalda at home, a risky step that prepared her well for when the Taliban government fell.
"I think we have a bright future," says Ms. Samih, a vivacious sophomore, speaking in clear American-accented English, which she polished as a yearlong exchange student in Fremont, Calif. "We should try our best so we can do more to change our country."
Few Afghans have seen their lives change over the past decade more dramatically than women. Once denied the right of education, Afghan girls now make up 35 percent of all the 8 million children enrolled in school. Once discouraged from leaving their homes, they now take up jobs in schools, government agencies, and aid organizations, and some even serve as members of parliament.
Social custom once made it difficult for male doctors to treat female patients – to even be in the same room with a woman who wasn't a personal relation – which helped give Afghanistan one of the highest mortality rates for mothers in childbirth in the world: 1,600 deaths for every 100,000 births. Though still high, that rate has dropped to 327 per 100,000 births.
As dramatic as these changes are, women's rights advocates say they could all be reversed if the government of President Karzai falls to the Taliban. They could even be reversed before that, some prominent Afghan women say, if Karzai makes social compromises to lure Taliban militants to peace talks, or to join a coalition government.
As a possible sop to Taliban conservatives, Karzai welcomed a March 2012 ruling by the country's Ulema Council – its top religious scholars – that women should not work in the same offices as men or travel alone without a male companion.
"This is a green light to the Taliban to return," says Fawzia Koofi, a prominent female member of parliament, who has survived two assassination attempts by the Taliban. "We can't give up now. We have to struggle. If we give up, then we will watch this country fall."
Masooda Jalal, a popular presidential candidate in the 2004 elections, applauds the support that Americans and other international donor nations have given to advance women's civic rights. But she warns that true gender equality is still a long way off.
"Since the Americans have come, we have gotten more literacy for women. We have gotten political rights, but we are still considered second-class citizens. Actually it is the same old slavery system – we are possessions," says Dr. Jalal. "Now the Americans are leaving. We are not objecting to that. But we didn't expect that our friends in the West would empower our enemies, the extremists" by encouraging them to rejoin the political process.
Still, the signs of progress are palpable. Since 2001, nearly $1.9 billion has been spent rebuilding thousands of Afghan public schools, and in every major city and town, girls in uniforms trek to classrooms. Samih remembers her first day in a real school, back in 2003.
"It was really exciting: I saw the schoolteacher; I saw the school uniform, with the white scarf, the white pants, and the black top; and I loved it when my mother bought them for me," she says. "I knew – these are mine."
Now in college, she shares a room with three other girls from different ethnic groups and provinces. None of them play on ethnic stereotypes; all are fierce defenders of a single Afghan nationhood. "We are all so optimistic," she says. "We want to do something for Afghanistan."
Zahra Khawari, a senior in English literature at Kabul University and simultaneously a freshman in business at the American University of Afghanistan, is an Afghan national who grew up as a refugee in Iran and didn't arrive here until 2005. But she's seen dramatic changes in the educational opportunities for women.
Like many Afghans, she worries the Taliban will return and reverse all of the gains Afghan women have made. But she thinks Afghans are more educated now and less tolerant of a backward and ill-educated government.
"All the people worry, but I won't leave," she says. "I want to do what I came here to do, and that is to serve my people. The Taliban won't be so successful with the new generation. [It is] very tired of war."
CORROSION OF CORRUPTION
When the Taliban were in power, Abdul Bashir was a university student with few job prospects. The Kabul he lived in at that time was mainly an empty city of bullet-pocked homes, shabby mosques, and dusty unpaved streets. White sport utility vehicles dominated the roads, driven by foreign aid workers, although Taliban pickup trucks also spirited through town full of bearded soldiers heading off to war in the north.
Today, Mr. Bashir's Kabul is a city of newly built concrete mansions, even though the streets remain largely unpaved and muddy. There are new schools and medical clinics, and Western aid flows readily into Afghan government coffers. Yet sewage still flows freely in open ditches along roadways, serving as the city's ad hoc waste system. Kabul remains the largest capital city in the world (pop. 3 million) that doesn't have a modern sewage system.
These two sides of Kabul show how much progress has been made and how the city still has one sandal in a millenniums-old way of life. Bashir, a quietly intense senior civil servant in the Afghan Ministry of Health, notes that the lack of a sewer system alone creates many of the problems his department struggles with.
"In the hospitals, it is the same as it was during the Taliban times," says Bashir, whose name has been changed because he is concerned his comments could cost him his job. "They only changed the furniture and painted the walls and started to wear good neckties."
Bashir was grateful to see the Taliban leave. But this doesn't make him a fan of the Karzai government, which replaced the Taliban. "If anyone wants to improve themselves, they have to do it themselves," he says. "From the government, you can expect nothing. Only those who are relatives of some official receive any help. Otherwise, you have to pay a bribe."
Corruption may be the most talked-about subject in Afghanistan, and one that many see as the largest impediment to creating a country that can stand on its own. While corruption has existed in Afghanistan for centuries, it has become a full-scale industry since the arrival of American troops and Western aid dollars.
For many Afghans, the problem isn't corruption itself, but rather the sense that corrupt officials have ruined the country's best chance at rebuilding by siphoning off vast amounts of the money the US has spent here over the past decade. No paper trail exists, but Afghans can see where the funds have gone – and haven't.
In rich neighborhoods like Shirpoor and Wazir Akbar Khan, the politically well-connected live in glittery mansions, while the streets in front of these opulent homes remain unpaved. Hospitals have been built, but doctors are often off running lucrative private clinics. Schools have been erected, but many teachers don't show up for work because they are paid so little. Cabinet ministers have been linked to major drug scandals or bank collapses, but none have been charged with any crime.
The problem, says Yama Torabi, head of Integrity Afghanistan, an anticorruption watchdog group, is that Afghanistan's Western donors have a political incentive to support the Afghan government and show results for the billions of dollars that they spend. But for security reasons, Western donors are often unable to monitor how the aid groups and government agencies spend the funds. So much of it is simply pocketed by corrupt officials.
"Last year, when the USAID [US Agency for International Development] budget for Afghanistan was cut by 40 percent, that was good news for us," says Mr. Torabi. "The money created public corruption. The donors have to spend billions to develop this country, and they don't have the capability of overseeing how the money is spent. If there was less aid and more oversight, people would use it better."
Najib Manalai, an independent political analyst who is often sympathetic to the Karzai government, believes it's wrong to assume that the Afghan government has done nothing with the billions in foreign aid money it has received. Eight million children are now in public schools. Some 44,000 students have been accepted by universities. Maternal and infant mortality rates are dropping because of the 15,000 clinics that have been built. More than 12,000 miles of roads have been created.
Yet he sees corruption as a corroding force, chipping away at the Afghan people's faith in their government and their willingness to back the Karzai regime if it comes under attack.
"If the government doesn't do its job, it's corruption," says Mr. Manalai. "If it appoints incapable people to high positions of power, it's corruption. If elite people grab land, it's corruption. When Afghan people are trying to get their ID cards and you have to pay a small bribe, it's corruption. It may be small money, but it makes a lot of unhappy people."
No one knows how much of the $517 billion the US has cumulatively spent in Afghanistan has been misused. Statistics wouldn't tell the full picture, anyway, since corruption usually involves manipulating statistics to hide illicit gain. But if you add up the anecdotes of schools or clinics built with shoddy materials; of politicians who have used their positions to steal public land, siphon off money for personal use, or to protect criminal enterprises; and of civil servants who have taken bribes; you get a troubling view of Afghanistan's political culture.
Scandals, such as the near-collapse of Kabul Bank, perhaps symbolize how deep the corruption runs. Founded by major Afghan political players, such as Karzai's brother Mahmoud, Kabul Bank operated a virtual Ponzi scheme, Western diplomats say, with loans of hundreds of millions of dollars given out to friends with no paperwork and no accountability. The Afghan government finally moved in to guarantee investors' money and now says the institution's losses may total $900 million or more.
At the Ministry of Health, Bashir sees the effects of corruption everyday, and it costs lives. He points to a CT scanner bought for $200,000 that has rarely been used, and now sits broken. The funds for its repair have been requested and promised, but never delivered.
Bashir's brother, who lives in the US, has tried to persuade him to leave Afghanistan, but Bashir says he will stay and serve his people. "I was thinking about it," he admits. "But the next day I was driving, and I saw children playing in the road. They were poor; but they were happy, playing there in the road. And I started thinking what would happen if these children got hurt, and there were no educated people, no doctors there to care for them." He pauses.
"These people need me. I must be here."
TALIBAN'S TENTACLES
When you shake the hand of Sultan Mahmud, a middle-aged man with a graying beard, you can feel the calluses of someone who has worked with his hands his entire life. Sometimes that work has been as a shopkeeper, sometimes as a farmer; and during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1991, Mr. Mahmud was a fighter with one of the most radical of Islamist mujahideen parties, the Hizb-e-Islami led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Mahmud – not his real name – says he stopped fighting when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, and he didn't rejoin the war as many of his younger neighbors did when the Americans helped to push the Taliban out in January 2002.
But as a resident of Konar Province in the northeastern part of the country along the Pakistani border – a virtual no-go zone for most foreign aid groups, and site of some of the fiercest fights for American forces over the past decade – Mahmud is decidedly on the side of the insurgents. As a former warrior himself, he now sees a younger generation of Hizb-e-Islami fighters launching regular attacks against a nearby US military base. It's a fight he sees daily, because his farm is within sight of the military outpost.
"I see war from morning to night," he says, smiling grimly.
The people of Konar are now fed up, Mahmud says, both with their own government, which is unresponsive and corrupt, and with the continued presence of foreign troops, which many people see as an occupation force unfriendly to Islam and to Afghan tradition. The foreign troops haven't even bothered to create projects, such as a hydropower dam along the Konar River, that could have made a difference in people's lives, he adds.
"The problem is the existence of foreign soldiers on Afghan soil," he says. With their "night raids," in which Americans raid suspected militants' homes to capture fighters while sleeping, Mahmud says the Americans "attack our people. That is why people join the opposition."
If the goal of sending troops to Afghanistan was to uproot Al Qaeda and to stop its use of Afghanistan as a haven, then Operation Enduring Freedom has been a remarkable success. But if the goal is sustainable peace, and leaving behind an Afghan government with an army and security apparatus capable of defending the country from external and internal threats, then America and its allies have a long way to go. And Konar Province will be one of the places where the Afghan Army's capabilities will be put to the sternest test.
Statistics are inadequate to conclude whether the past decade has been a success or failure. Al Qaeda may have had just a few hundred members in 2001, when the war began. Many of its top leaders, including Osama bin Laden, have been killed, while others have been either captured or dispersed around the world. But that dispersal has created Al Qaeda franchises in the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. As for the Taliban, who once controlled 90 percent of Afghanistan and numbered in the tens of thousands, they now have the ability to hold territory in places like Helmand in the south and Nooristan in the east, and to create a sense of insecurity in many rural areas that effectively weakens trust in the Afghan government.
"I don't think that the Taliban will effectively take over after the withdrawal of American troops in 2014 because they are now more fragmented, basically village militias," says Fabrizio Faschini, a security expert at the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Kabul. "But I am pessimistic about the capability of the Afghan National Army to take over security when the Americans leave. On paper, the Afghan security sector is increasing; but in reality the insurgents are better armed, better supplied, and they have local support."
The insurgents show no sign of giving up. A coordinated string of six separate attacks April 15, in Kabul and in the provinces of Logar and Nangarhar, showed the ability of militants to conduct well-planned strikes in urban centers where the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army conduct regular searches. Yet US military officials say that the Afghan forces proved their ability in the assaults, clearing out the insurgents without NATO assistance.
"Each attack was meant to send a message: that legitimate governance and Afghan sovereignty are in peril," NATO commander Gen. John Allen said after the attacks. "The ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] response itself is proof enough of that folly."
Across the border in Pakistan, where insurgents continue to find havens in the loosely governed tribal areas of Northern Waziristan; Bajaur district; and the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan; Taliban supporters say they won't stop fighting until the foreign troops leave.
"Everyone knows American power is fake, and they cannot win this war because they are fighting for no reason, no goals," says a Taliban supporter in Peshawar who refuses to give his real name. "Their soldiers are fighting for nothing; and our mujahideen are fighting because it is their religious duty, which they were created for."
As chief of security for Nangarhar Province – a crucial link in Kabul's attempts to control areas along the Pakistan border – Abdullah Stanekzai may have one of the hardest jobs in the country. Not only does he have to fight insurgent groups, such as the Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami, but he also faces internal corruption and a new wave of kidnappings that leave the province increasingly uneasy about their security.
"When we fight the insurgents, we are successful in beating them," he says. "But when we return to the city, the Taliban come back to the villages because they have relationships with the people there."
MELTING POT OR CALDRON?
Armies around the world have learned this lesson: Put together people from different ethnic and economic backgrounds, force them to fight together, and you build a common sense of purpose and identity.
It was true for the Anglo-Saxons, Italians, Boston Irish, Poles, Jews, Latinos, native Americans, and African-Americans who fought under the US flag during World War II. There is no reason it shouldn't have worked for the 180,000 men and women serving in the Afghan National Army. But it hasn't fully.
Ahmedullah, an Afghan Army major and an ethnic Pashtun, feels confident that the men under his command are getting better training and feel more of a sense of national purpose than any other Afghan soldiers have since King Ahmad Shah Durrani united Afghanistan in 1747. But if international donor support is withdrawn from Afghanistan when foreign troops leave in 2014, he says, his battalion will probably disintegrate without the discipline and cultural unity the Westerners help enforce.
"If foreign support is taken away after 2014, then things will go back to the days of civil war," says Ahmedullah, who agreed to talk on the condition that his name be changed. "If a man is Uzbek, he will run away to General [Rashid] Dostum. If he is Tajik, he will go to the Panshir. If he is Hazara, he will go to [Hazara politician Mohammad] Mohaqiq. And if he is Pashtun, he will go south."
This raises a question for many Afghans: If the Army disintegrates, who will defend the country from a return of the hated Taliban?
Of all Afghanistan's challenges – from security, to corruption, to social liberation – probably the most difficult is the task of creating a single Afghan identity. Afghanistan's population of 30 million people is made up of a dozen or more violently feuding ethnic groups. Karzai came to power promising ethnic reconciliation – even his clothes preached integration, from his silky green Northern chappan (cloak) to his Pashtun sandals – but his government has been characterized by ethnic rivalry. With Karzai reaching out to the mainly Pashtun Taliban for peace talks, and surrounding himself in the presidency with Pashtuns, many Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmens, and Hazaras are starting to look to their own ethnic groups for leadership.
Ethnic factionalism is one reason the International Crisis Group warned, in a May 2010 report, that the Afghan National Army is "incapable of fighting the insurgency on its own," the other reasons being drug addiction, illiteracy, and desertion.
On paper, the ethnic breakdown of soldiers within the Army closely matches that of the country, with 44 percent Pashtuns, 25 percent Tajiks, 10 percent Hazaras, 8 percent Uzbeks, and 13 percent members of other groups. But loyalties among these soldiers are divided, the Crisis Group report found, with Pashtun soldiers likely to favor Pashtun commanders and the Pashtun Defense Minister Rahim Wardak, and Tajiks favoring the Tajik commanding general Bismillah Khan.
That the Taliban was once made up primarily of ethnic Pashtuns has made it hard for many of them to feel trusted or welcome in their own country, says former Transport and Aviation Minister Hamidullah Farooqi, an ethnic Pashtun. "In the first year after the Taliban left, the rest of the people said that a Taliban equals a Pashtun, and the people of the north used that against the people of the south," says Mr. Farooqi. This discrimination "pushed Pashtuns into a corner; it pushed them to be Taliban. They didn't have any choice."
The problem has gotten worse, as Karzai fills his cabinet and immediate pool of advisers with those of his own ethnic groups, while other top politicians of other ethnic groups do the same. On one level, this is a matter of personal loyalty, but it reinforces ethnic division.
Part of the problem, says Hussein Yasa, a newspaper publisher in Kabul, is that Afghanistan has few institutions that can unify Afghans. The country has a single parliament, but there are so many political parties – 259 at last count – that none is able to speak for a majority of Afghans. Religion would seem to be a uniter; but while most Afghans are Muslim, the divide between the 80 percent who are Sunni Muslims and the 20 percent who are Shiites becomes a dangerous source of contention.
The solution is inclusion, Mr. Yasa says. "If you create a balance of power, so no group feels that they are out of play, then you can have a sense of peace."
Ms. Koofi, the liberal female parliamentarian who is of Tajik ethnicity, says that most Afghans are well ahead of their leaders when it comes to living an inclusive, tolerant daily life.
"You don't see this problem at the community level, because as communities we get together and solve problems. We handle food distribution for poor families of different ethnicities, different religions," says Koofi. "But at the national level, many politicians are putting their reliance on ethnic forces, and this is hurting us."
Koofi says she doesn't believe Afghans will allow themselves to be manipulated by ethnic divisions the way they were during the civil war of the 1990s. "You can't impose a government on the people when the people are educated, and when they remember the days of war," she says. "The hope I have is my people. They will not accept it."
• Zubair Babakarkhail contributed to this report from Kabul.
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Does nation-building work?
The term "nation-building" smacks of colonialism. But when war has broken a country, nation-building is a moral duty -- and the best way to build is with equal parts outside and inside effort.
Christian Science Monitor By John Yemma June 10, 2012
Nation-building has a can-do ring to it. You can build a highway, a skyscraper, a Fortune 500 company. Why not a nation?
It isn’t a new idea. Throughout the 20th century – in places as different as Germany, the Philippines, Iraq, Japan, and Kosovo – world powers have worked to turn broken states into healthy ones through a combination of outside force, inside management, and the cultivation of civil society, education, rule of law, and democratic institutions. Soldiers and civil servants have sacrificed their lives. Billions of dollars have been spent.
The outcomes have been mixed, as James L. Payne noted in a 2006 study published in the Independent Review. Some nations (Somalia) reject the effort. Others make it (Austria, Germany, Japan), but we can’t be sure it was due to intervention or popular will. Nation-building works best when insiders take the lead. Some states fail and re-fail and then pull it together (Dominican Republic, Panama – and possibly Haiti, and even Somalia is improving).
It’s easy to criticize nation-building as western hubris. When he ran for president in 2000, George W. Bush argued that the United States shouldn’t be imposing its values on the rest of the world. That changed after 9/11.
“Afghanistan was the ultimate nation-building mission,” Mr. Bush wrote in his memoir. “We had liberated the country from a primitive dictatorship, and we had a moral obligation to leave behind something better.” Moral obligation, especially after a war, outweighs hubris.
A 2007 RAND Corporation guide to nation-building notes that US-led military interventions are running at about one every two years, and new United Nations peacekeeping missions occur every six months.
In little more than a decade, nation-building efforts were launched in Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Note the ascending size of the nations involved. There’s a warning for the future in that, especially at a time of war-weariness and constrained budgets. As the RAND study observed, “the effort needed to stabilize Bosnia and Kosovo has proved difficult to replicate in Afghanistan or Iraq, nations that are eight to 12 times more populous. It would be even more difficult to mount a peace enforcement mission in Iran, which is three times more populous than Iraq, and nearly impossible to do so in Pakistan, which is three times again more populous than Iran.”
In a Monitor cover story, Scott Baldauf takes us to Afghanistan to assess whether the nearly 11-year nation-building process has “taken” well enough that the South Asian country can survive as a tolerant, viable society when NATO scales back in 2014. The pitfalls are plentiful: ethnic animosity, warlords, the Taliban, corruption, opium, external meddling. Most Afghans Scott talked with want foreign troops out. Fewer Afghans want foreign aid to decrease. And almost everybody is worried about what comes next.
As Scott’s reporting and Melanie Stetson Freeman’s photography show, Afghanistan has changed markedly since 2001. If the yearning for peace and normalcy alone could determine a country’s future, Afghanistan would make it. Afghan won’t be totally on its own. NATO contingents will remain, civilian assistance will continue, and $4 billion a year is being promised to bankroll Afghan security forces. Have we left behind something better? We are about to find out.
John Yemma is editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
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Muslim Olympians Face Choices On Ramadan Fasting
By Ron Synovitz June 11, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
To eat or not to eat? That is the question for about 3,000 Muslim athletes in London's 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
All 17 days of competition, from July 27 to August 12, fall within the holy month of Ramadan -- a time when Muslims are required to fast and refrain from drinking water from sunrise to sunset.
But the obligation is more lenient for traveling Muslims, who are allowed to delay their fast. Some Islamic scholars say athletes traveling to London to compete in the games should take advantage of that exemption.
For medal contender Nesar Ahmad Bahawi, a 27-year-old Afghan taekwondo fighter, the issue is critical.
Bahawi finished seventh in his weight group at the 2008 Olympics. He won silver medals in the 2007 Taekwondo World Championships and 2010 Asian Games. Bahawi says he will delay his Ramadan fast until later.
"We have a very important competition. It is the dream of every athlete to win an Olympic medal. Because of that, we must not take part in the fast," Bahawi says.
"But we will compensate by later respecting the same number of days that we did not fast during Ramadan. This is because we are training on daily basis," he adds. "During days when we have competition, it is completely impossible to fast because it is necessary for us to at least drink water."
Seeking Guidance From The Koran
Olympic Committees in conservative Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran could require athletes to observe the Ramadan fast. Delaying the fast also could be frowned upon in some cultures.
But most Muslim Olympians, faced with what could be an unfair disadvantage if they observe the fast, say they are ready to delay the obligation.
Islamic scholar Siddiquallah Fedayi says the Koran requires traveling Muslims to delay their fast. Fedayi cites the Koran's Sura al-Baqarah chapter -- verses 2:183-2:185.
"The issue involves the question of where the games are taking place. Is it in the athlete's village or his hometown? Or is it somewhere else?" Fedayi says. "If he goes somewhere else to compete, then the Koran says: 'If you are ill, or a traveler, carry out your fast later on.'"
Fedayi says the Koran also allows Muslims who are not travelers to decide themselves. "When a person has health problems or if the fasting would hurt their livelihood, or for some other reason if a person needs to eat, in that case, a Muslim should make a decision based on what is the priority for him," he says, because "there is not clear guidance to tell them that they must delay their fast."
Mo Sbihi, a 24-year-old expected to be the first Muslim Olympic rower for Britain, says he will postpone his fast until November. He says the Olympics are a "once in a lifetime opportunity" for his whole team -- and it would be risky to fast during the competition.
Bahaa al-Farra, a 20-year-old runner from Gaza City, got permission from an Islamic scholar to break his Ramadan fast while training and competing. Farra also will compensate by fasting later.
No Objections Raised
Medical experts say fasting could hurt performances -- especially in sports that require muscle strength and endurance.
A 2007 study on two Algerian soccer teams in the "British Journal of Sports Medicine" found their speed, agility, and endurance declined significantly during the Ramadan fast.
Nevertheless, Ronald Maughan, head of the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) working group on nutrition, says no country filed a complaint when the London schedule was announced nearly a decade ago (see full interview here).
"Of course it is a significant issue, and the IOC is very concerned that no athlete is disadvantaged," Maughan says. "The dates of the Games are chosen, and were chosen, by the local [London] organizing committee. Opportunities were given to raise any objections to the schedule of events and no objections were raised at the time."
Maughan says most objections about the schedule have been from groups or individuals who are not directly involved in the Olympics.
Meanwhile, special arrangements have been made in London to accommodate Muslim athletes who do choose to fast -- including special predawn meals and preparation of the first meal after sunset at all competition venues.
With RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan and Tajik Service
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Afghan doctor's death leaves a hole
Aqilah Hikmat, head of obstetrics and mother of four, was shot dead by a U.S. soldier on her way to Kabul. 'No one in our family can ever forget,' her husband says.
Los Angeles Times By Laura King June 10, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - For much of her life, Aqilah Hikmat had beaten the odds. In a country where women struggle to get educations and find good jobs, she was an accomplished physician, the head of the obstetrics ward at a major provincial hospital, beloved by her patients.
And it was a source of enormous pride to the 49-year-old doctor that two of her four children, including a daughter, were medical students, poised to follow in her career footsteps.
The day she was shot to death by a U.S. soldier along the road to Kabul, she and her husband were on their way from their restive home province of Ghazni — a dangerous trip, but one they made weekly. They left later than usual that day because, as was so often the case, Hikmat was busy with patients.
"She was so sympathetic and generous," her widower, Sayed Mir Agha Hikmat, told The Times. "Many people are praying for her soul."
Colleagues, too, describe Aqilah Hikmat as a compassionate and dedicated doctor. Sometimes, desperate patients even came to her home, but she never turned them away.
"All of us are very angry about the circumstances under which she died," said fellow doctor Baz Mohammad Hemat, chief administrator at the Ghazni provincial hospital. "The patients are very sad. Everyone loved her."
The months since the July 2011 shooting have been difficult for the couple's surviving children: two sons, 19 and 20, and a 21-year-old daughter. Their youngest son, 18-year-old Nasrahtullah, died in the firefight that preceded their mother's death, as did a niece.
The family had become trapped in the gunfire in the wake of an attack on aU.S. militaryconvoy; Aqilah Hikmat had exited the car — trying, her family said, to halt the gunfire. That's when she was shot.
The continuing emotional distress of the couple's children, Sayed Hikmat believes, would have grieved his wife.
"She was always very attentive and loving to the children," he said. "No one in our family can ever forget."
Even with the passing of time, he said, he still cannot make sense of what happened.
"Why did this soldier open fire on innocent people, including a doctor who had served the people for 30 years? Why did this soldier open fire when he understood these were civilians, this was a woman, and shoot her when she had her arms raised and was not posing any threat to him? I can never understand this."
The shooting also destroyed the family's livelihood. Aqilah Hikmat was the main breadwinner, working in both the provincial hospital and a private clinic. Her husband, 53, had worked in the clinic along with his wife.
Now, he says, he can no longer bear to do so.
"Right now, we don't even have any source of income. I don't have a way to put food on the table for the remaining members of my family," he said. "It's really hard for me to talk about it."
laura.king@latimes.com
Special correspondent Aimal Yaqubi contributed to this report.
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