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Five Killed, 15 Wounded In Afghan Bombing
June 18, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Four police officers and one civilian have been killed in a bombing in northeastern Afghanistan.
Provincial officials said the remote-controlled bomb killed a commander of the U.S.-funded force known as the Afghan Local Police, his son, two of his guards, and a civilian in a bazaar in Tagab district of Kapisa Province.
Arab militants still active in Afghanistan
KABUL, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Although more than a decade has passed since the U.S.-led war on terror in Afghanistan and the ousting Taliban regime out of power, the outfit's Arab guests are still fighting alongside the Taliban loyalists to regain power in the militancy-plagued nation.
U.S., Central Asian States Start Military Drills
June 18, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Kyrgyz officials say international military exercises involving troops from the United States and Central Asian states have started in Kyrgyzstan.
New Refugee Numbers Soar, UN Says
June 18, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
A new report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says conflicts around the world produced 800,000 new refugees in 2011.
India did not say no to Panetta on Afghanistan: Pentagon
rediff.com - Mon Jun 18, 2:43 pm ET
Terming Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's recent India [ Images ] visit as highly successful, the Pentagon on Monday refuted the Taliban statement that New Delhi resisted his call for greater Indian involvement in Afghanistan.
United States and Taliban argue on Twitter
June 18, 2012 at 3:35 PM
KABUL, Afghanistan, June 18 (UPI) -- The U.S. government battled the Taliban on Twitter during the weekend concerning an alleged roadside bombing, an official said Monday.
What's Wrong with Pakistan?
Why geography -- unfortunately -- is destiny for South Asia's troubled heartland.
Foreign Policy (blog) BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN JULY/AUGUST 2012
Perversity characterizes Pakistan. Only the worst African hellholes, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and Iraq rank higher on this year's Failed States Index. The country is run by a military obsessed with -- and, for decades, invested in -- the conflict with India, and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pays almost no taxes.
Children perform stage show, music in Kabul
KABUL, June 18 (Xinhua) -- War-weary Afghan children deprived of a happy childhood by a protracted war, on Monday got a rare chance to amuse themselves and laughed to their heart's content, watching juggling, tumbling, aerial acts as well as music performance in Kabul.
Military's new R&R plan doesn’t include leaving Afghanistan
ByMatthew M. Burke Stars and Stripes June 18, 2012
The U.S. military is rolling out a new rest and recuperation program for troops fighting in Afghanistan. But don’t pack your bags for a nice long break on a sunny beach or a visit home — you won’t be leaving Afghanistan under the “rest-in-place” program.
Afghan poppy crops down 40% since '08 as key towns secured
USA TODAY By Jim Michaels 17/06/2012
Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan's key opium producing region has declined 40% over the past four years as coalition and government forces have secured key towns and villages and the Afghan government has ramped up eradication.
Afghanistan's Absentee Politicians
Members of parliament face allegations of skipping work and overstepping their powers.
IWPR By Mina Habib 17 Jun 12
Afghanistan - Afghans have long complained about their elected representatives, but now there are voices in both parliament and government accusing some politicians of prolonged absence from work and other abuses.
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Five Killed, 15 Wounded In Afghan Bombing
June 18, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Four police officers and one civilian have been killed in a bombing in northeastern Afghanistan.
Provincial officials said the remote-controlled bomb killed a commander of the U.S.-funded force known as the Afghan Local Police, his son, two of his guards, and a civilian in a bazaar in Tagab district of Kapisa Province.
At least 15 other people, mostly civilians, were reported injured in the blast.
Earlier this month, four French soldiers and two of their Afghan interpreters were killed in a suicide attack in Kapisa Province, where most of the French troops in Afghanistan are stationed.
The 3,400 French troops that have been deployed in Afghanistan are scheduled to be withdrawn from the country by the end of this year.
Based on reporting by AFP, dpa, and AP
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Arab militants still active in Afghanistan
KABUL, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Although more than a decade has passed since the U.S.-led war on terror in Afghanistan and the ousting Taliban regime out of power, the outfit's Arab guests are still fighting alongside the Taliban loyalists to regain power in the militancy-plagued nation.
The latest development that has proved the presence of Arab militant in Afghanistan was the killing of three Arab fighters alongside their host, the Taliban militant, in Ghazni province 125 km south of capital Kabul over the weekend, according to security officials.
"A cleanup operation against anti-government militant in Nani village of Andar district, Ghazni province, left five Taliban militant including three Arab nationals dead on Saturday night," a commander of the Afghan forces in the area, Brigadier Khair Mohammad Bariz, told Xinhua.
He contended that three more militant including two Arabs and one Afghan were captured during the operations.
It was not the first time that security officials were reported killing Arab fighters alongside Taliban militant in Afghanistan.
Earlier on June 5, three Arab militant were killed in Wardak province 35 km west of Kabul, an official said.
"Based on intelligence, a gunship with the NATO-led coalition force carried out an airstrike on a Taliban hideout in Sayyed Abbad district in the wee hours Tuesday morning, June 5, killing three Arab militant," spokesman for Wardak provincial administration Shahidullah Shahid told a local news service, the Bokhdi News Agency.
In late May, the security forces during operation against anti- government militant in Afghanistan raided a hideout in the eastern Kunar province and eliminated an Arab national who reportedly was a senior al-Qaida leader in the post-Taliban country, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed.
According to the IASF statement released on May 29, the Saudi- born Sakhar al-Taifi, the second most senior al-Qaida figure in Afghanistan, was killed during a precision air raid against militant in Watapur district of Kunar on the night of May 27.
Another rank-and-file member of al-Qaida was killed at the same time, the statement said.
Many members of the al-Qaida network, according to officials, are Arab nationals, fighting with the Taliban outfit in Afghanistan.
American officials say that there are less than 100 members of al-Qaida left in Afghanistan, but Afghan security officials believe there are still at least hundreds of them.
Officials say Afghan militant fighting the government have close contacts with al-Qaida network and one of the militant' commanders is Sarajudin Haqqani, the leader of Haqqani network whose fighters are active in the eastern provinces bordering Pakistan's tribal area of North Waziristan.
Meantime, purported Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid in talks with media had rejected the reported killing of Sakhar al- Taifi in the air attack, insisting that Taifi had left the area three months ago. However, he confirmed that two Afghan Taliban fighters were killed in the assault.
Currently backed by around 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops, the Afghan security forces have been fighting Taliban, al-Qaida and like-minded outfits over the past decade to ensure durable peace in Afghanistan.
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U.S., Central Asian States Start Military Drills
June 18, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Kyrgyz officials say international military exercises involving troops from the United States and Central Asian states have started in Kyrgyzstan.
Troops from Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and the United States are taking part in the Regional Cooperation 2012 maneuvers, which are scheduled to run until June 29.
A Kyrgyz Defense Ministry statement said the drills are focusing on joint efforts to respond to natural disasters.
The exercises are taking place after Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member-states -- China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan -- completed separate military exercises in Tajikistan last week.
Based on reporting by Interfax and Regnum
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New Refugee Numbers Soar, UN Says
June 18, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
A new report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says conflicts around the world produced 800,000 new refugees in 2011.
The figure represents the most new refugees in a single year since 2000, when 822,000 people abandoned their homes.
However, a near-record 3.2 million people returned to their homes in 2011, the UN says, reducing the total of refugees and internally displaced people globally to 42.5 million.
The high number of refugees in 2011 was attributed primarily to the conflicts in Libya, Sudan, and Somalia.
Afghanistan is the leading source of refugees, accounting for 2.7 million.
The UNHCR report says that of the 10.4 million refugees for which the agency is responsible, more than 7 million have been refugees for more than five years.
June 20 is the UN's World Refugee Day.
With AP, dpa, and RFE/RL reporting
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India did not say no to Panetta on Afghanistan: Pentagon
rediff.com - Mon Jun 18, 2:43 pm ET
Terming Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's recent India [ Images ] visit as highly successful, the Pentagon on Monday refuted the Taliban statement that New Delhi resisted his call for greater Indian involvement in Afghanistan.
"I did not hear the word no from the Indians on any specific list. To my knowledge no specific list was presented," the Pentagon Press Secretary George Little, told reporters during an off camera news conference on Monday. He was responding to questions on the rare statement made by the Taliban over the weekend in which the terrorist outfit praised India for resisting Panetta's reported call for greater Indian involvement in Afghanistan.
"I am not going to respond directly to the Taliban statement, but let me make it very clear that we had very productive conversations with our Indian partners about the future of strategic partnership with India, about closer military to military co-operation with Indians," Little said.
"And we signaled very clearly, the secretary made it very clear that India has a very important role to play in regional security to include in the transition in Afghanistan. We look forward to working with the Indians. We made that very clear as well. I would put this in the category of a very successful visit," he said.
"The Indians have been training ANSF. We are very grateful of their contribution to that effort," Little said in response to a question.
In a commentary on Voice of Jihad, the Taliban said that the Indians had a "negative" answer to Panetta's wish list for India on Afghanistan.
"The forth mentioned secretary moved empty handed towards Kabul without gaining any success or progress in his efforts. He spent three days in India to transfer the heavy burden to their shoulders, to find an exit and to flee from Afghanistan," the terrorist outfit had said in the statement.
"Some reliable media sources said that the Indian authorities did not pay heed to demands and showed their reservations, because the Indians know or they should know that the Americans are grinding their own axe. It (the US) has very long history and experience in changing its loyalties.
They (the Americans) always chase their vested interests and have never cared for others interests nor for their miseries," the Taliban said.
"No doubt that India is a significant country in the region, but is also worth mentioning that they have full information about Afghanistan because they know each other very well in the long history. They are aware of the Afghans' aspirations, creeds and love for freedom. It is totally illogical they should plunge their nation into a calamity just for the American pleasure," the Taliban had added.
Last week, India and the US announced to hold tri-lateral consultations with Afghanistan, which the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton termed as part of the effort to bring stability and peace in Afghanistan.
Clinton highly appreciated India's role in this war-torn country. "We very much appreciate India's commitment to help build a better future for the Afghan people: helping them with more than $2 billion for development; supporting the New Silk Road Initiative; hosting the investment conference at the end of the month; providing security, training and support," she had said.
"I am very pleased that Afghanistan is getting this kind of encouragement and tangible support because it's in everyone's interests that Afghanistan be as secure and stable as possible," Clinton had said.
External Affairs Minister S M Krishna had said on his US visit earlier that he hoped that Afghans would be able to find a solution to their conflict within their constitution. "The external support will not be available to Afghanistan indefinitely. And that is the reason why we have impressed upon Afghanistan, and other countries who are remaining friends of Afghanistan, that we need to equip Afghanistan with a security force which consists of Afghans, which is trained by Afghans, or trained by others, but basically Afghan-led and Afghan," he had said.
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United States and Taliban argue on Twitter
June 18, 2012 at 3:35 PM
KABUL, Afghanistan, June 18 (UPI) -- The U.S. government battled the Taliban on Twitter during the weekend concerning an alleged roadside bombing, an official said Monday.
The war of words began Sunday when a pro-Taliban Twitter user alleged a recent roadside bombing had killed eight soldiers, Politico reported.
Lt. Col. Stewart Upton, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force's Regional Command Southwest, disputed the claim, tweeting, "Wow! 8 killed, don't you think there would be some type of announcement from ISAF? how was your poppy harvest?"
The ISAF then got into the mix and posted several comments addressed to the pro-Taliban user, including, "The details on your videos are about as accurate as the details on your websites. I think we're done here. Good day."
The pro-Taliban account came back with "Super duper pro tip: Never argue against a documented video clip. Makes you look like a juvenile, JUST STOP!"
Upton told Politico the Taliban post about "10 lies or false tweets a day," and have a goal of showing strength to supporters and financial donors.
"By engaging them yesterday on their false claim, they were held to account for their post and forced to somehow try and validate it," Upton said. "In the end, hopefully they lose credibility, donors and recruits when these false posts are pointed out."
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What's Wrong with Pakistan?
Why geography -- unfortunately -- is destiny for South Asia's troubled heartland.
Foreign Policy (blog) BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN JULY/AUGUST 2012
Perversity characterizes Pakistan. Only the worst African hellholes, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and Iraq rank higher on this year's Failed States Index. The country is run by a military obsessed with -- and, for decades, invested in -- the conflict with India, and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pays almost no taxes. But despite an overbearing military, tribes "defined by a near-universal male participation in organized violence," as the late European anthropologist Ernest Gellner put it, dominate massive swaths of territory. The absence of the state makes for 20-hour daily electricity blackouts and an almost nonexistent education system in many areas.
The root cause of these manifold failures, in many minds, is the very artificiality of Pakistan itself: a cartographic puzzle piece sandwiched between India and Central Asia that splits apart what the British Empire ruled as one indivisible subcontinent. Pakistan claims to represent the Indian subcontinent's Muslims, but more Muslims live in India and Bangladesh put together than in Pakistan. In the absence of any geographical reason for its existence, Pakistan, so the assumption goes, can fall back only on Islamic extremism as an organizing principle of the state.
But this core assumption about what ails Pakistan is false. Pakistan, which presents more nightmare scenarios for American policymakers than perhaps any other country, does have geographical logic. The vision of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in the 1940s did not constitute a mere power grab at the expense of India's Hindu-dominated Congress party. There was much history and geography behind his drive to create a separate Muslim state anchored in the subcontinent's northwest, abutting southern Central Asia. Understanding this legacy properly leads to a very troubling scenario about where Pakistan -- and by extension, Afghanistan and India -- may now be headed. Pakistan's present and future, for better or worse, are still best understood through its geography.
THE MUSLIM EXPERIENCE in South Asia begins with the concept of al-Hind, the Arabic word for India. Al-Hind invokes the vast tracts of the northern and northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent that came under mainly Turko-Islamic rule in the Middle Ages and were protected from the horse-borne Mongols by lack of sufficient pastureland. The process of Muslim conquest began in Sindh, the desert tract south and east of Iran and Afghanistan, adjacent to the Arabian Sea, easily accessible to the Middle East by land and maritime routes.
The Umayyad Arabs conquered and Islamicized Sindh in the early eighth century. Then came the Turkic Ghaznavids (based out of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan), who conquered parts of northern India in the 11th century. The Ghaznavids were followed by the Delhi Sultanate, a military oligarchy between the early 13th and early 16th centuries, which preceded the splendorous rule of the Persianized Mughal dynasty on the subcontinent. All these Muslim warriors governed immense inkblots of territory that were extensions of the Arab-Persian world that lay to the west, even as they interacted and traded with China to the north and east. It was a land without fixed borders that, according to University of Wisconsin historian André Wink, represented a rich confection of Arab, Persian, and Turkic culture, bustling with trade routes to Muslim Central Asia.
To the extent that one area was the ganglion of this Muslim civilization, it was today's Pakistan. Fertile Punjab, which straddles the Pakistan-India frontier, "linked the Mughal empire, through commercial, cultural and ethnic intercourse, with Persia and Central Asia," writes University of Chicago historian Muzaffar Alam. This area of Pakistan has been for centuries the civilizational intermediary connecting the cool and sparsely populated tableland of Central Asia with the hot and teeming panel of cultivation in the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan's many mountain passes, especially those of Khyber and Bolan, join Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan with the wheat- and rice-baskets thousands of feet below. The descent from Afghanistan to the Indus River, which runs lengthwise through the middle of Pakistan, is exceedingly gradual, so for millennia various cultures occupied both the high plateaus and the lowland riverine plains. This entire middle region -- not quite the subcontinent, not quite Central Asia -- was more than a frontier zone or a bold line on a map: It was a fluid cultural organism and the center of many civilizations in their own right.
What we know as modern-day Pakistan is far from an artificial entity; it is just the latest of the many spatial arrangements for states on the subcontinent. The map of the Harappan civilization, a complex network of centrally controlled chieftaincies in the late fourth to mid-second millennium B.C., was one of its earliest predecessors. The Harappan world stretched from Baluchistan northeast up to Kashmir and southeast down almost to both Delhi and Mumbai, nearly touching present-day Iran and Afghanistan and extending into both northwestern and western India. It was a complex geography of settlement that adhered to landscapes capable of supporting irrigation, and whose heartland was today's Pakistan.
The Mauryan Empire, which existed from the fourth to the second centuries B.C., came to envelop much of the subcontinent and thus, for the first time in history, encouraged the idea of India as a political entity. But whereas the area of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India all fell under Mauryan rule, India's deep south did not. Next came the Kushan Empire, whose Indo-European rulers conquered territory from the Ferghana Valley, in the demographic heart of Central Asia, to Bihar in northeastern India. Once again, the heart of the empire that linked Central Asia and India was in Pakistan; one of the Kushan capitals was Peshawar, Pakistan's frontier city today.
Later on, throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern era, Muslim invaders from the west grafted India to the greater Middle East, with the Indus River valley functioning as the core of all these interactions, as close to the Middle East and Central Asia as it is to the Ganges River valley. Under the Delhi-based Mughal dynasty, which ruled from the early 1500s to 1720, central Afghanistan to northern India was all part of one polity, with Pakistan occupying the territorial heartland.
Rather than a fake modern creation, Pakistan is the very geographical and national embodiment of all the Muslim invasions that have swept down into India throughout its history, even as Pakistan's southwest is the subcontinental region first occupied by Muslim Arabs invading from the Middle East. The Indus, much more than the Ganges, has always had an organic relationship with the Arab, Persian, and Turkic worlds. It is historically and geographically appropriate that the Indus Valley civilization, long ago a satrapy of Achaemenid Persia and the forward bastion of Alexander the Great's Near Eastern empire, today is deeply enmeshed with political currents swirling through the Middle East, of which Islamic extremism forms a major element. This is not determinism but merely the recognition of an obvious pattern.
The more one reads this history, the more it becomes apparent that the Indian subcontinent has two principal geographical regions: the Indus Valley with its tributaries, and the Ganges Valley with its tributaries. Pakistani scholar Aitzaz Ahsan identifies the actual geographical fissure within the subcontinent as the "Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient," a line running from eastern Punjab southwest to the Arabian Sea in Gujarat. This is the watershed, and it matches up almost perfectly with the Pakistan-India border. Nearly all the Indus tributaries fall to the west of this line, and all the Ganges tributaries fall to the east. Only the Mauryas, Mughals, and British bonded these two regions into single states. For those three empires, the Indus formed the frontier zone and required many more troops there facing restive Central Asia than along the Ganges, which was under no comparable threat.
Likewise, the medieval Delhi Sultanate faced so much trouble in Central Asia that it temporarily moved its capital westward to Lahore (from India to Pakistan, in today's terms) to deal with the military threats emanating from what is today Afghanistan. Yet, for the overwhelming majority of history, when one empire did not rule both the entire Indus and the entire Ganges, the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, most of Pakistan, and northwestern India were nevertheless all governed as one political unit. And the rich and populous Indus Valley, as close to the wild and woolly Central Asian frontier as it was, formed the pulsating imperial center of that unit.
Here, alas, is the conundrum. During the relatively brief periods when the areas of India and Pakistan were united -- the Mauryan, Mughal, and British -- there was obviously no issue about who dominated the trade routes into Central Asia. During the rest of history, there was no problem either, because while empires like the Kushan, Ghaznavid, and Delhi Sultanate did not control the eastern Ganges, they did control both the Indus and the western Ganges, so that Delhi and Lahore were under the rule of one polity, even as Central Asia was also under their control. Today's political geography is historically unique, however: an Indus Valley state, Pakistan, and a powerful Ganges Valley state, India, both fighting for control of an independent and semi-chaotic Central Asian near abroad -- Afghanistan.
Despite its geographical and historical logic, this Indus state is far more unstable than the Gangetic state. Here, too, geography provides an answer. Pakistan encompasses the frontier of the subcontinent, a region that even the British were unable to incorporate into their bureaucracy, running it instead as a military fiefdom, making deals with the tribes. Thus, Pakistan did not inherit the stabilizing civilian institutions that India did. Winston Churchill's first book as a young man, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, wonderfully captures the challenges facing colonial border troops in British India. As the young author then concluded, the only way to function in this part of the world is through "a system of gradual advance, of political intrigue among the tribes, of subsidies and small expeditions."
PAKISTAN'S GEOGRAPHICAL COHERENCE, albeit subtle and problematic, is mirrored in its subtle and problematic linguistic coherence. Just as Hindi is associated with Hindus in northern India, Urdu is associated with Muslims in Pakistan. Urdu -- from "horde," the Turkic-Persian word for a military camp -- is the ultimate frontier language. Reflecting its geographical links to the Middle East, Urdu is written in a Persianized Arabic script, even though its grammar is identical to Hindi and other Sanskritic languages. It is often believed that Urdu came into existence through the interaction of Turkic, Persian, and indigenous Indian soldiers in Mughal army encampments, not just on the Indus frontier but in the medieval Gangetic cities of Agra, Delhi, and Lucknow. Thus, it is truly the language of al-Hind.
Urdu is Pakistan's lingua franca, even as Punjabi, with links to the non-Islamic Sikhs and Hindus, enjoys a plurality of native speakers in Pakistan. Under Pakistan's military dictator Muhammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, the combination of Urdu literacy programs in religious institutions and the teaching of Arabic in state schools gave Urdu more of a Middle Eastern and Islamic edge, writes Alyssa Ayres, now U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, in Speaking Like a State: Language and Nationalism in Pakistan.
The linguistic, demographic, and cultural organizing principle of the Indus Valley is Punjab, whose name means "five rivers": the Beas, Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi, and Sutlej, all tributaries of the Indus. Punjab represents the northwesternmost concentration of population and agriculture before the ground starts to climb toward the wilds of Central Asia. As such, it is coveted because of its special access to Central Asian trade routes, though it was a frontier battleground in its own right relative to the rest of British India.
Because of Sikh uprisings, the Mughals had a difficult time securing Punjab. The British fought two wars to wrest the region from the Sikhs in the 1840s, after the rest of India had already been subdued. Once Punjab was conquered, however, the Pashtun northwest frontier, the gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia, beckoned for the British. Because Punjab abutted the northwest frontier zone, which in turn abutted southern Central Asia, its soldiers became known for their military prowess -- the "sword arm of India," contributing 28 of the 131 infantry units in the Indian Army by 1862.
But with the re-creation of an Indus state and a Gangetic state upon the demise of the British Raj in 1947, Punjab, rather than a frontier province of greater India, became the urban hub of the new Indus Valley frontier state: Pakistan. Although eastern Punjab fell within India, western Punjab still contains more than half of Pakistan's population. With close to 90 million people, western Punjab would be the world's 15th-largest country, putting it ahead of Egypt, Germany, Turkey, and Iran. Punjabis have accounted for as much as 80 percent of the Pakistan Army and 55 percent of the federal bureaucracy.
Punjab is like an internal imperial power ruling Pakistan, in the way that Serbia and the Serbian army ran Yugoslavia prior to that country's civil war and breakup. "Punjab is perceived to have 'captured' Pakistan's national institutions through nepotism and other patronage networks," writes Ayres. Its rural female literacy rate is nearly twice that of Sindh province and the province on the northwest frontier with Afghanistan, and it's more than triple Baluchistan's. Punjabis, she adds, "are better off than everyone else [in Pakistan], with more productive land, cleaner water, better technology, and better educated families."
Pakistani historian and anthropologist Muhammad Azam Chaudhary writes, "If the motherland of the five rivers [Punjab] had not been obtained, then in terms of geography, it would have been impossible to establish Pakistan." Yet Punjab itself is not indivisible, for the southern part of the province is made up of speakers of Saraiki -- a linguistic mixture of Punjabi and Sindhi -- with their own separate identity. And while the rest of Pakistan sees Punjab as hegemonic, Punjabis themselves harbor an inferiority complex (again, like the Serbs), claiming that they have sacrificed much for a state that doesn't work and, as a result, get insufficient respect from other Pakistanis.
The tension between Punjabis and other Pakistanis overlaps with the tension that exists among the other ethnic groups. Chronic urban conflict in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, pits local Sindhis against Baluchis and Pashtuns, just as in Baluchistan there are tensions between Baluchis and Pashtuns. Islamic ideology, like communism in Yugoslavia, has proved an insufficient glue to form a prideful national identity. Instead, this frontier region between the Middle East and Hindu India has become an explosive amalgamation of often warring ethnic identities.
This is not, of course, how Jinnah envisioned Pakistan. He imagined a federalized state in which the various ethnically based provinces retained a high degree of autonomy. With such freedom, the angst of domination by Punjabis -- and by each other -- would not have existed, allowing for a civil society to emerge and, with that, a state with vibrant institutional capacity. Indeed, history shows that central authority can only be effective if it is strictly delimited. Regrettably, Pakistan has been what 20th-century European scholars Ernest Gellner and Robert Montagne call a "segmentary" society. Hovering between centralization and anarchy, such a society, in Montagne's words, is typified by a regime that "drains the life from a region," even though, "because of its own fragility," it fails to establish lasting institutions. This is the byproduct of a landscape riven by mountains and desert, a place where tribes are strong and the central government is comparatively weak. Put another way, Pakistan, as King's Co
llege London scholar Anatol Lieven notes, is a weak state with strong societies.
India is the counterfactual to Pakistan's dilemma. India's individual states are linguistically based and thus have confident identities: Kannada-speaking Karnataka, Marathi-speaking Maharashtra, Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh, Bengali-speaking West Bengal, Hindi-speaking Uttar Pradesh, and so forth. This might, in some scenarios, lead to local nationalism and irredentist movements, as is the case with Pakistan. Because central authority in New Delhi is restricted, however, diversity is celebrated and has become, in turn, a healthy basis for a pan-Indian national identity.
If India were less diverse and consisted of only the "cow belt" of Hindi-speaking northern India, observes Lieven, it might not have become a democracy but rather "some form of impoverished Hindu-nationalist dictatorship." Instead, India is like Indonesia: a geographically sprawling and diverse democracy united by a common language that does not threaten the use of local tongues and dialects.
Kashmir, the contested region over which India and Pakistan have fought for decades, is where the two countries' different personalities are most in evidence. According to Indiana University's Sumit Ganguly, India requires the Muslim-dominated Himalayan territory to substantiate its claim as a multiconfessional democracy, rather than as a Hindu-dominated state, whereas Pakistan requires Kashmir to substantiate its claim as the chief remnant of Muslim al-Hind.
And so we come to the core reason for Pakistan's perversity. The fact that Pakistan is historically and geographically well-rooted is only partially a justification for statehood. Although a Muslim frontier state between mountains and plains has often existed in the subcontinent's history, that past belonged to a world not of fixed borders, but rather of perpetually moving spheres of control as determined by the movements of armies -- such was the medieval world. The Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Mughal dynasty all controlled the subcontinent's northwestern frontier, but their boundaries were all vague and somewhat different from one another -- all of which means Pakistan cannot claim its borders are legitimate by history alone. It requires something else: the legitimacy that comes with good governance and strong institutions. Without that, we are back to the medieval map, which is what we have now -- known in Washington bureaucratic parlance as "AfPak."
The term AfPak itself, popularized by the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke, indicates two failed states -- otherwise, they would share a strong border and would not have to be conjoined in one word. Let me provide the real meaning of AfPak, as defined by geography and history: It is a rump Islamic greater Punjab -- the tip of the demographic spear of the Indian subcontinent toward which all trade routes between southern Central Asia and the Indus Valley are drawn -- exerting its power over Pashtunistan and Baluchistan, just as Punjab has since time immemorial.
This is a world where ethnic boundaries do not configure with national ones. Pashtunistan and Baluchistan overlap with Afghanistan and less so with Iran. About half of the world's 40-plus million Pashtuns live on the Pakistani side of the border. The majority of the more than 8 million Baluchis live within Pakistan, the rest in neighboring Afghanistan and Iran.
In recent decades, the age-old pathways in this region have been used by Islamic terrorists, as well as by traditional traders. The link between Pakistan's premier spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the so-called Haqqani network tied to al Qaeda merely replicates the arteries of commerce emanating from Punjab outward to southern Central Asia. Punjabis dominate the ISI, and the Afghan Pashtun Haqqani network is both an Islamic terrorist outfit and a vast trade and smuggling operation, unto the Amu Darya River to the northwest and unto Iran to the west.
Because al-Hind has historically been so rich in cultural and commercial connections, when modern states do not sink deep roots into the land, the result is a reversion to traditional patterns, albeit with contemporary ideological characteristics. The U.S. State Department and many policy analysts in Washington have proposed a new silk route that could emerge in the event of a peace treaty in Afghanistan. What they fail to recognize is that a silk route is already flourishing outward from Punjab -- it is just not oriented to Western purposes.
The longer the fighting goes on in Afghanistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, the weaker Pakistan as a modern state will become. As that occurs, the medieval map will come into even greater focus. Jakub Grygiel, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, points out that when states or empires involve themselves in irregular, decentralized warfare, central control weakens. A state only grows strong when it faces a concentrated and conventional ground threat, creating the need to match it in organizational capabilities and thus bolstering central authority. But the opposite kind of threat leads to the opposite result. Pakistan's very obsession with the ground threat posed by India is a sign of how it requires a conventional enemy to hold it together, even as its answer to India in the contested ground of Central Asia -- supporting decentralized Islamic terrorism from Afghanistan to Kashmir -- is having the ironic effect of pulling Pakistan itself apart. It is unclear whether invigorated civilian control in Pakistan can arrest this long-term process.
This process could even quicken. With the Soviets abandoning Afghanistan in the late 1980s and the Americans on their way out in coming years, India will attempt to fill the void partially by building infrastructure projects and providing support to the Afghan security services. This will mark the beginning of the real battle between the Indus state and the Gangetic state for domination of southern Central Asia.
At the same time, as Pakistan is primarily interested in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the part of Afghanistan north of the Hindu Kush mountains may, if current trends continue, become more peaceful and drift into the economic orbit of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, especially given that Uzbeks and Tajiks live astride northern Afghanistan's border with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This new formation would closely approximate the borders of ancient Bactria, with which Alexander the Great was so familiar.
Indeed, the past may hold the key to the future of al-Hind.
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Children perform stage show, music in Kabul
KABUL, June 18 (Xinhua) -- War-weary Afghan children deprived of a happy childhood by a protracted war, on Monday got a rare chance to amuse themselves and laughed to their heart's content, watching juggling, tumbling, aerial acts as well as music performance in Kabul.
Children of different races and financial means gathered at the concert hall of a local high school to enjoy a live circus and music performed by their peers.
"It is so amazing that I can perform an Afghan traditional music here today to my fellows," a 14-year-old performer Mohammad Jawad told Xinhua.
The performance titled "Afghanistan Music Show Let's discover the different music of Afghanistan" was given by Afghan Mobile Mini Circus for Children (MMCC), a non-governmental organization and Afghan Educational Children Circus (AECC) to develop music in the war-torn country.
The ensemble, composed of dozens of teenagers including girls, was encouraged by applause from the audience after each performance on the stage.
The Taliban during their regime 1996-2001 has banned girls from education and outlawed all kinds of entertainment and music.
However, Afghanistan has made tremendous achievement in education over the past 10 years.
The country has some 12 million school-age children. Out of them about 8.3 million go to school with 39 percent of them girls, officials with the Afghan Education Ministry said.
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Military's new R&R plan doesn’t include leaving Afghanistan
ByMatthew M. Burke Stars and Stripes June 18, 2012
The U.S. military is rolling out a new rest and recuperation program for troops fighting in Afghanistan. But don’t pack your bags for a nice long break on a sunny beach or a visit home — you won’t be leaving Afghanistan under the “rest-in-place” program.
R&R sites are being established within brigade or regional areas of operation, with a range of amenities provided by Morale, Welfare and Recreation. A four-day Special Liberty Pass is the ticket in.
“The decentralized approach at the brigade level was chosen because it provides leadership the flexibility to design R&R programs that fit their requirements, yet takes care of servicemembers’ needs for a break close to their unit area,” U.S. Forces Afghanistan spokesman David Lakin wrote in an email to Stripes from Kabul.
“Unit leaders strive to give all servicemembers as much downtime as possible no matter where they are located, while providing a safe and secure environment to unwind from a taxing and difficult mission.”
Some downrange brigade commanders and separate battalions have turned in proposals for the program, site and facilities in their areas, and they then must be certified by the regional commander, Lakin said. Most sites have been identified and some are operational. The rest will be operational “within the next month.”
The only other formal R&R program is the 15-day Non-Chargeable Rest and Recuperation (NCR&R) leave program. To be eligible, servicemembers must be on a minimum 365-day deployment with at least 270 days physically in country.
Starting this year, deployments for Army personnel were reduced to nine months so most soldiers are not eligible. Marine infantry battalions are on seven-month deployments.
The Special Liberty Pass program is for all servicemembers not authorized for NCR&R.
Through nearly a decade of war, nearly 200,000 troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan traveled to Qatar for Central Command’s Rest and Recuperation Pass Program, or R2P2. There, they found an oasis of amenities: pool tables, rooms full of big screen televisions, swimming pools, miniature golf, a discothèque, trips to a shopping mall and deep sea fishing.
The program was hailed early on by military leaders who said it was vital to give troops R&R outside the combat zone.
“When U.S. forces are in a combat area for an extended period of time, it is extremely important from a leadership perspective to give these young men and women an opportunity to rest, recuperate and reunite with their families, even if for a short time,” said Marine Corps Maj. Pete Mitchell, a CENTCOM spokesman in a 2003 Defense Department news release.
But as the Iraq war wound down and the challenges of travel or leave limitations prevented troops in Afghanistan from going, the number of R2P2 participants dwindled, and the program was ended in April of last year.
The facilities are still there, but used by a fraction of those who once did, or about 600-700 people daily of the just over 1,000 who are stationed there, said facility spokesman Antoine Randall. None of the equipment was redistributed.
“The facility is still here for the community,” Randall said. “Nothing has changed.”
“Afghanistan is further from Qatar than Iraq and Kuwait,” Lakin said. “Arguably, there are different dynamics that ground commanders in Afghanistan must consider when addressing time away from their areas of operations.”
The brigade level facilities won’t have the luxuries that troops enjoyed in Qatar, but Lakin said servicemembers will have access to facilities equipped with “standard” MWR packages and recreation kits, including video games, recreational games such as foosball, televisions and exercise equipment. And, MWR is working to install or upgrade internet café systems, Lakin said.
That’s not much more than even small combat outposts generally have: phones, computers and a room for video games.
“Each brigade and separate battalion has been allotted funds to improve current facilities and can request additional equipment through their local MWR center,” Lakin said, referring to the planned rest-in-place sites.
Facilities for each brigade will differ depending on location, operational conditions, and environmental factors, but a minimum quality of life will be established and kept up at each facility, Lakin said.
A number of factors led to the decision to establish rest-in-place sites, primarily challenges to travel both within and outside the country, as well as shorter deployments, a shrinking number of troops and a high operational tempo, Lakin said. There are other passes and options for commanders to provide rest for those most in need, but he declined to elaborate.
“With the reduced boot on ground time, commanders must weigh the amount of time a servicemember will be away from his or her unit, the impact on the overall mission, and the welfare of his/her troops,” he said. “The fact that tours are three-months shorter on average is a major consideration when considering the overall time available to achieve strategic, operational, and tactical objectives.”
Reaction to the new plan from troops in Afghanistan was mixed.
Stationed at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province, Lance Cpl. Caio Doinviera, 210 Artillery Battalion out of Camp Lejeune, said more MWR facilities would be welcome. He said it’s hard to call home or Skype when the Marines are pushed out to remote locations.
“For the guys who spend a lot of time outside the wire, it’s a great opportunity,” he said referring to the brigade level facilities.
Doinviera is on a seven-month deployment and ineligible for the 15-day NCR&R program. However, he likes it that way just fine because he wants to push through his deployment and get home.
Less than a month into their nine-month Afghanistan deployment, members of the 510th Clearance Company in Afghanistan’s Farah province said they would not want to be sent back to Kandahar Airfield as a centralized rest location.
The unit got stuck there while trying to get to Farah, said Sgt. Danny Mata, 25, of Laredo, Texas.
“You spend two weeks trying to get out here,” he said, standing outside Forward Operating Base Farah’s dining facility. Going through that again for four days off wouldn’t be worth the hassle, he said, but four days off at FOB Farah, if he were left alone, would be all right.
“It’s not that we don’t appreciate [them] trying to get us four days off,” said Spc. Efrain Fuentes Rivera, 32, another member of the 510th. But the thought of going through the pain of going to and from the terminal to try to catch a flight out of Farah and back, “it’s not worth it,” he said.
Fuentes Rivera, from Fort Hood, Texas, said he’d prefer to have internet in his room to four days off, regardless of the location.
The program will be reviewed regularly, Lakin said, starting 90 days after it is implemented, which could be as early as October.
Stars and Stripes reporters Laura Rauch and Matthew Millham contributed to this report.
burkem@pstripes.osd.mil
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Afghan poppy crops down 40% since '08 as key towns secured
USA TODAY By Jim Michaels 17/06/2012
Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan's key opium producing region has declined 40% over the past four years as coalition and government forces have secured key towns and villages and the Afghan government has ramped up eradication.
This year farmers grew poppy on about 143,000 acres in Helmand province, down from its peak of nearly 256,000 acres in 2008, according to Regional Command Southwest.
"In all countries we see links between cultivation and security," said Angela Me, an analyst at the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. "The areas that are more secure are where we had less opium."
Since insurgents are supported by drug revenues, the decline in poppy cultivation has cut into the Taliban's ability to launch operations, according to Regional Command Southwest.
"This funding shortfall has led to increased competition between insurgent groups over scarce funds and significantly reduced their ability to sustain operations," Regional Command Southwest said in a statement.
Afghanistan is the source of more than 90% of the world's heroin poppies, and most of the crop comes from Helmand. The coalition command in Helmand expects to see a 6% to 7% decline in cultivation this year over last. The United Nations said it expects to report that cultivation will be little changed this year.
Poppy farmers were slammed with uncooperative weather this year, which hurt yields, said Wes Harris, the agricultural adviser for the regional command. It was the second time in the past three years that yields were hurt by weather.
"Life has not been good for them this year," Harris said of narcotics traffickers.
The overall reduction in cultivation is due to increased security, Afghan government eradication and programs designed to encourage farmers to shift to legal crops, U.N. and military officials said.
Much of the initial surge of U.S. forces ordered by the White House two years ago was concentrated in Helmand and the province's sprawling farming region of Marjah, a key poppy growing area largely controlled by insurgents. Only about 5% of Marjah's farmland is growing poppy today, down from about 60% to 70% before the offensive, the regional command said.
Me said the Afghan government's program to combine eradication with intensified efforts to get farmers to grow wheat and other legal crops has helped. Wheat cultivation increased 10% to 15% over the past several years to about 220,000 acres, Harris said.
Farmers report that the Taliban have begun to attempt to tax wheat crops. "That does not endear themselves to the farmers," Harris said.
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Afghanistan's Absentee Politicians
Members of parliament face allegations of skipping work and overstepping their powers.
IWPR By Mina Habib 17 Jun 12
Afghanistan - Afghans have long complained about their elected representatives, but now there are voices in both parliament and government accusing some politicians of prolonged absence from work and other abuses.
Critics warn that cases of this kind undermine public confidence in the Afghan parliament and the already fragile democratic system.
The secretariat that manages the work of the Wolesi Jirga, or lower house of parliament, recently accused some elected members of continued absence from the chamber. As a result, it said, there were times when there were not enough members present to pass important pieces of legislation.
On April 7, the secretariat named 43 lawmakers who it said were absent in March without notifying it, Pajhwok news agency reported. The same number were absent throughout April, the Daily Outlook Afghanistan newspaper reported subsequently.
Abdul Sattar Khawasi, a legislator from Parwan province who was elected to head the secretariat in January, told IWPR that chronic absenteeism was a problem but that new measures would curb it.
“There are some individuals in parliament who have been absent for as much as a year, but have still received their full salaries and privileges,” he said.
As well as being named and shamed, lawmakers will also face fines for missing sessions.
“The administrative board will henceforth cut the salaries and privileges of absentee members,” Khawasi said.
Under new procedures, officials will consider suspending anyone absent for more than 20 days.
Other complaints against lawmakers include allegations that they misuse their status to obtain benefits for friends and relatives.
Abdul Majid Qarar, a spokesman for the Afghan agriculture ministry, claimed that lawmakers had pressured staff there to hand out jobs to their associates.
“As well as asking for plots of land, members of parliament also interfere in the ministry’s affairs and ask for friends and relatives to be appointed to key ministry positions,” he said. “Some of them even tell us to sack such-and-such a person and appoint a friend of theirs to that position.”
A higher education ministry official, on condition of anonymity, made similar claims.
“Members of parliament waste 50 per cent of our time,” he alleged. “They come with ten applications at a time – one of them asking for scholarships for his friends and family, another wanting his friend to be appointed.”
Some parliamentarians are prepared to speak out about abuses committed by their colleagues.
Gul Padshah Majidi, representing the southeast province of Paktia, said corruption in government had encouraged legislators to engage in similar practices.
“The Afghan government paved the way for corruption. This has led certain members of parliament to engage in corruption and abuses,” he said.
His colleague Sayed Hussein Alemi Balkhi, who represents a Kabul constituency, said abuse of power by some lawmakers had reached critical proportions, to the extent that parliament’s reputation and legitimacy were under threat.
Another concern voiced by members is that some of their colleagues employ – at state expense – many more bodyguards than the limit of four.
“Those who have large numbers of bodyguards have friends in the interior ministry who support them and their demands,” said one unhappy member, who did not want to be named.
Afghan media have named five who maintain armed retinues of between 20 and 40, all paid for by the interior ministry.
None of the five was prepared to be interviewed by IWPR.
Secretariat chief Khawasi acknowledged that he had nine bodyguards, five over the limit, arguing that it was justified because the area where he lived and his route to work were dangerous.
General Mohammad Zaher, head of the criminal investigations department with the Kabul police– which comes under the interior ministry – said efforts were under way to cut the numbers of bodyguards used by powerful figures in the city, to check what weapons and uniforms they had, and to ensure they did not harass or intimidate civilians.
“Kabul police headquarters wants to assign bodyguards to each individual according to what they need,” he said.
The interior ministry has banned other appurtenances of powers – vehicles with tinted windows and no licence plates, and weapons other than the Kalashnikov rifles that are legally issued to officials. (On the firearms issued to parliamentarians, see Disarming Afghan Politicians.)
Not all parliamentarians believe they need armed escorts.
Ramazan Bashardost, a consistent critic of the rich and powerful, said he had no guards, and could not understand why others needed them.
“If these members of parliament were elected by the people, why are they scared? It’s the people, not ten or 20 bodyguards, who should support them,” he said. “People don’t trust those individuals; there’s a large gulf between them and the public.”
On the streets of Kabul, 22-year-old street vendor Shamsoddin spoke for many when he expressed his disdain for elected politicians. Many of them, he said, were former warlords who were continuing to accumulate wealth, only now through their political positions rather than by force of arms.
“Becoming a member of parliament in this country is not about serving the people; it’s about enriching yourself,” he said.
Mina Habib is an IWPR-trained contributor in Kabul.
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