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Suicide ‘Insider’ Attack Kills Six in Afghanistan
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN and TAIMOOR SHAH October 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - A member of the Afghan intelligence service detonated a suicide vest Saturday, killing two Americans and four Afghan intelligence agency colleagues, Afghan and international officials said Monday.
17 Taliban rebels killed in Ghazni province
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- Afghan security forces backed by the NATO-led troops eliminated 17 Taliban militants in Andar district of Ghazni province on Tuesday, an army spokesman in the province said.
Afghan conflicts claim 33 lives in 2 days
KABUL, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- The endemic conflicts and increasing militancy have claimed 33 lives, accordingly all anti-government fighters in Afghanistan over the past two days, officials asserted Tuesday.
Afghan Army’s Turnover Threatens U.S. Strategy
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND October 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The first thing Col. Akbar Stanikzai does when he interviews recruits for the Afghan National Army is take their cellphones.
How soon is now? Afghanistan and drawdown logistics
Foreign Policy By Kevin Baron, Gordon Lubold Monday, October 15, 2012
Lately there is growing water cooler speculation in Washington over just how long the United States will stick out the Afghanistan war – and how long it would take to leave a country the U.S. has deployed its military to for 12 years.
Two Taliban leaders arrested in Afghanistan: coalition
KABUL, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- Two local Taliban leaders were arrested by Afghan forces and the coalition troops on Tuesday, the latest in the increased counter-insurgency campaign in post- Taliban country, the NATO-led coalition forces confirmed.
Taliban says its attack on Pakistani schoolgirl justified
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Taliban insurgents said on Tuesday that the Pakistani schoolgirl its gunmen shot in the head deserved to die because she had spoken out against the group and praised U.S. President Barack Obama.
Nato Says New Framework Assures Afghan Stability After 2014
TOLOnews.com By Rafi Sediqi Monday, 15 October 2012
Some Nato forces will remain in Afghanistan after 2014, assuring ongoing stability as the alliance moves from a combat role to a training mission, Nato-led Isaf spokesman Brig. Gen. Gunter Katz said in Kabul on Monday.
Lawmakers Slam Khan's Jihad Statements
TOLOnews.com By Jawed Stanikzai Monday, 15 October 2012
Afghan lawmakers on Monday slammed the recent statement made by former Pakistani cricketer and politician Imran Khan that the war in Afghanistan was Jihad or Islamic 'holy war'.
ECO Leaders Gather For Summit In Azerbaijan
October 16, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Members of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) have met in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to discuss a wide range of regional issues.
Topeka man tried to smuggle cash from Afghanistan
The Associated Press
TOPEKA | A Topeka man has been charged with trying to smuggle $150,000 in cash from Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan to Kansas.
Major Hurdles Facing German Troop Withdrawal
Spiegel Online By Matthias Gebauer and Gordon Repinski 15/10/2012
The plan sounds good: Complete withdrawal of German combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. But it is hardly realistic. For one, it is a daunting logistical challenge. For another, troops will have to remain in the country to protect the military trainers who will stay after the main force leaves.
Russia Asks Afghanistan for Help With Soviet MIAs
Associated Press By SLOBODAN LEKIC October 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Russia appealed Monday to the Afghan authorities and public to provide information on over 200 Soviet troops listed as missing since Soviet forces ended their occupation of Afghanistan in 1989 — including 30 to 40 who may still be alive.
Kabul Factory Owners Warn of Investment Withdrawal
TOLOnews.com By Haseeb Maudoodi Monday, 15 October 2012
Afghan factory owners in Kabul's industrial park in Pul-e-Charkhi warned Monday that unless basic conditions around the park improve, they will be forced to move their investment elsewhere.
Afghanistan: Paying for Justice in Khost
Residents of southeastern province pay traditional assemblies to sort out disputes, leaving state mechanisms out of the picture.
IWPR By Farid Zaher Khost 15 Oct 12
Afghanistan - In much of Khost, a Pashtun province in southeast Afghanistan, crimes and civil cases never go before state courts or prosecutors. Instead, people take their disputes to traditional councils for arbitration.
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Suicide ‘Insider’ Attack Kills Six in Afghanistan
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN and TAIMOOR SHAH October 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - A member of the Afghan intelligence service detonated a suicide vest Saturday, killing two Americans and four Afghan intelligence agency colleagues, Afghan and international officials said Monday.
Also on Monday, Afghan officials charged that a coalition strike against a Taliban target had killed three young children — two boys and a girl — from one family over the weekend.
The suicide attack on Saturday morning occurred when a delegation including American coalition members and several members of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security arrived to deliver new furniture to the intelligence office in the Maruf district, a remote area of Kandahar Province, according to local Afghan officials.
The attacker, wearing a suicide vest beneath his intelligence service uniform, detonated his bomb shortly after the delegation arrived, killing a former American military officer and an American soldier. The bombing also killed Ghulam Rasool, the deputy intelligence director for Kandahar Province, two of his bodyguards and another Afghan intelligence employee, and set in motion a revenge killing.
Insider attacks have become more common, and have caused about 15 percent of the deaths of coalition troops this year.
This insider attack was the first this year by an intelligence service employee, possibly a guard, to result in the death of international service members, Maj. Martyn Crighton, a spokesman for the international joint command, said.
There have been, however, many insider attacks resulting only in the deaths of Afghan service members, and statistics were not available on whether any of those involved members of the intelligence force, known here as the N.D.S.
Generally the intelligence service is thought to vet its employees more thoroughly than do the Afghan Army and the police, which have far more employees.
In this case the target appears to have been the Afghan agents, Afghan and international officials said.
Haji Malim Toorylai, the Maruf district chief, said, “The man believed he was attacking the N.D.S. delegation; he probably was not aware of the foreign soldiers coming with them.” An official of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force gave a similar assessment. “It was an N.D.S. attack on N.D.S., and we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the official said.
The man who carried out the attack was named Abdul Wali and was from Zirak, a village in Maruf, said Mr. Toorylai. Maruf, the easternmost district in Kandahar Province, is sandwiched between Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas and Afghanistan’s Zabul province, a rural desert area where the Taliban have a strong presence.
The former American military officer who was killed was Dario Lorenzetti, a Fort Worth native, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Sunday, describing him as a West Point graduate.
In a tragic coda to Saturday’s story, the suicide bomber’s 9-year-old brother was killed in revenge by the brother of a victim, said Shamsullah, a Maruf local, who commands a guardpost.
“The 9-year-old boy was killed in front of his mother and father,” said Shamsullah. “The parents didn’t know their son Abdul Wali was going to commit suicide.”
The civilian casualty reported by local officials took place in Helmand Province’s Nawa district. The officials said that three children were killed in a NATO strike on Sunday afternoon as they were gathering dung to burn as fuel, a common practice in the desert reaches of southern Afghanistan where there are few trees.
“When we reached the area I saw the three bodies of children, two boys and one girl, ages 8 to 12 years old. They were from the same family,” said Haji Hayatullah, a member of the tribal council in the Nawa district. Their family is in the livestock business and raises goats and sheep on government land, he said.
Mr. Hayatullah added: “They had been collecting the animal dung and were heading home. I saw a sack of dung and another sack that was contaminated with their blood, and I saw three to four holes in the area. It seems the insurgents were digging them to plant mines, but I did not see any men’s bodies.”
The children were identified as Borjan, 12; Sardar Wali, 10; and Khan Bibi, 8, said Haji Abdul Manaf Khan, the governor of the neighboring Marja district. The deaths occurred near the border of the Marja and Nawa districts.
The Marja governor said that NATO forces watched as improvised explosive devices were being planted, and targeted the insurgents planting them. “As a result two I.E.D. planters were killed and the shrapnel killed the three children who were wandering nearby,” he said. Other reports said that three insurgents had been killed.
A spokesman for the international forces, Maj. Adam Wojack, said that the coalition forces were aware of the allegations and that the episode was being investigated. “I.S.A.F. did conduct a precision airstrike on three insurgents in Nawa district, and the strike killed all three insurgents,” he said.
“None of our reporting shows any civilian casualties or any children.”
The United Nations, which tracks civilian casualties, is investigating. While civilian casualties were down 6 percent in the first nine months of 2012, compared with the same period in 2011, they are still occurring in large numbers in the south and east of the country, Georgette Gagnon, the director of human rights for the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, said.
Casualties caused by coalition and Afghan security forces have been “significantly reduced” while those caused by antigovernment forces, including the Taliban, make up an increasing share, she said. According to the most recent United Nations casualty report, the Taliban and other insurgents were responsible for about 80 percent of all civilian deaths and injuries while pro-government forces were responsible for 10 percent.
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17 Taliban rebels killed in Ghazni province
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- Afghan security forces backed by the NATO-led troops eliminated 17 Taliban militants in Andar district of Ghazni province on Tuesday, an army spokesman in the province said.
"Units of Afghan national army in coordination with the NATO- led coalition forces raided Taliban hideouts in Sangi and Nazarwal villages of Andar district late Monday night and during the cleanup operation which concluded at around 1:00 a.m. local time Tuesday, 17 rebels had been killed," Mohammad Hakim Stanikzai who speaks for 203 Thunder Corps of Afghan national army in Ghazni, told Xinhua.
Two of those militants killed in the operations are Afghans and the remaining 15 are foreigners from Pakistan, Chechen and Arab countries, according to Stanikzai.
Five motorbikes, arms and ammunitions were also seized by the security forces from militants during the operations.
However, he did not say if there were any casualties on the security forces. Andar has been regarded as a stronghold of Taliban militants in Ghazni province.
Taliban militants who have been fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to make comment.
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Afghan conflicts claim 33 lives in 2 days
KABUL, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- The endemic conflicts and increasing militancy have claimed 33 lives, accordingly all anti-government fighters in Afghanistan over the past two days, officials asserted Tuesday.
In the latest storm against anti-government militants, according to an Afghan national army official in the southern Ghazni province 125 km south of Afghan capital Kabul, 17 Taliban fighters were killed early Tuesday morning during a clean-up operation in Andar district.
"Units of Afghan national army in coordination with the NATO- led coalition forces raided Taliban hideouts in Sangi and Nazarwal villages of Andar district late Monday night and during the clean- up operation which concluded at around 01:00 a.m. local time Tuesday, 17 rebels had been killed," Mohammad Hakim Stanikzai who speaks for 203 Thunder Corps of Afghan national army in Ghazni, told Xinhua.
Two of those militants killed in the operations, according to Stanikzai, are Afghans and the remaining 15 are foreigners from Pakistan, Chechen and Arab countries.
Five motorbikes, arms and ammunitions were also seized by the security forces from militants during the operations, the official contended.
However, he did not say if there were any casualties on the security forces.
Andar district believed to be a stronghold of Taliban militants in the southern Ghazni province was also the scene of conflict between Taliban militants and some villagers on Monday which left six fighters dead, according to locals.
"The clash took place in Alam Khan and Khani Baba villages of Andar district Monday morning as a result six Taliban fighters were killed," Faizanullah Faizan who leads the anti-Taliban villagers told Xinhua.
There were no casualties on the villagers, he contended.
In a related incident, six Taliban militants were killed as clash erupted in Kajaki district of Helmand province 555 km south of capital city Kabul on Monday, provincial police spokesman Farid Ahmad Farhang said Tuesday.
"Taliban militants stormed a police checkpoint in Kajaki district on Monday afternoon and police retaliated by killing six rebels and injuring six others," Farhang told Xinhua.
Two police constables sustained injuries in the clash, he admitted.
Moreover, Afghan Interior Ministry in a statement released here Tuesday claimed to have killed four Taliban fighters in the militancy-battered country during series of operations over the past 24 hours.
"In the operations backed by the national army and the NATO-led troops and conducted in Kunduz, Wardak, Ghazni, Herat and Farah provinces over the past 24 hours, four armed Taliban rebels were killed, another injured and four others made captive," the press release contended.
Meanwhile, Taliban militants in a counter-claim rebuffed the government's assertion.
Qari Yusuf Ahmadi who claims to speak for the Taliban outfit in talks with media via telephone from unknown location claimed killing over a dozen soldiers over the past two days, saying only in Panjwai district of Kandahar province three foreign soldiers were killed as roadside bomb struck a tank Tuesday, a claim rejected by officials as mere baseless propaganda.
It is difficult to get confirmation from independent sources in Afghanistan as warring sides often exaggerate the casualties of rivals suffered in battle.
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Afghan Army’s Turnover Threatens U.S. Strategy
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND October 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The first thing Col. Akbar Stanikzai does when he interviews recruits for the Afghan National Army is take their cellphones.
He checks to see if the ringtones are Taliban campaign tunes, if the screen savers show the white Taliban flag on a black background, or if the phone memory includes any insurgent beheading videos.
Often enough they flunk that first test, but that hardly means they will not qualify to join their country’s manpower-hungry military. Now at its biggest size yet, 195,000 soldiers, the Afghan Army is so plagued with desertions and low re-enlistment rates that it has to replace a third of its entire force every year, officials say.
The attrition strikes at the core of America’s exit strategy in Afghanistan: to build an Afghan National Army that can take over the war and allow the United States and NATO forces to withdraw by the end of 2014. The urgency of that deadline has only grown as the pace of the troop pullout has become an issue in the American presidential campaign.
The Afghan deserters complain of corruption among their officers, poor food and equipment, indifferent medical care, Taliban intimidation of their families and, probably most troublingly, a lack of belief in the army’s ability to fight the insurgents after the American military withdraws.
On top of that, recruits now undergo tougher vetting because of concerns that enemy infiltration of the Afghan military is contributing to a wave of attacks on international forces.
Colonel Stanikzai, a senior official at the army’s National Recruiting Center, is on the front line of that effort; in the six months through September, he and his team of 17 interviewers have rejected 962 applicants, he said.
“There are drug traffickers who want to use our units for their business, enemy infiltrators who want to raise problems, jailbirds who can’t find any other job,” he said. During the same period, however, 30,000 applicants were approved.
“Recruitment, it’s like a machine,” he said. “If you stopped, it would collapse.”
Despite the challenges, so far the Afghan recruiting process is not only on track, but actually ahead of schedule. Afghanistan’s army reached its full authorized strength in June, three months early, though there are still no units that American trainers consider able to operate entirely without NATO assistance.
According to Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the deputy spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, the Army’s desertion rate is now 7 to 10 percent. Despite substantial pay increases for soldiers who agree to re-enlist, only about 75 percent do, he said. (Recruits commit to three years of service.)
Put another way, a third of the Afghan Army perpetually consists of first-year recruits fresh off a 10- to 12-week training course. And in the meantime, tens of thousands of men with military training are put at loose ends each year, albeit without their army weapons, in a country rife with militants who are always looking for help.
“Fortunately there are a lot of people who want a job with the army, and we’ve always managed to meet the goal set by the Ministry of Defense for us,” said Gen. Abrahim Ahmadzai, the deputy commander of the National Recruiting Center. The country’s 34 provincial recruitment centers have a combined quota of 5,000 new recruits a month.
“We’re not concerned about getting enough young men,” General Ahmadzai said, “just as long as we get that $4.1 billion a year from NATO.”
That is the amount pledged by the United States and its allies to continue paying to cover the expenses of the Afghan military.
In terms of soldiers’ pay, that underwrites $260 a month for the lowest ranks, which in Afghanistan is above-average pay for unskilled labor. A soldier who re-enlists would get a 23 percent raise, to at least $320 a month, more if he had been promoted.
But even as pay rates have risen, so has attrition, which two years ago was 26 percent. The trend is troubling — especially the desertions — as Afghan forces have shouldered an increasing share of the fighting.
American officials have tried to persuade the Afghans to criminalize desertion in an effort to reduce it; instead, Afghan officials have proposed a four-year effort to order the recall of 22,000 deserters, according to General Ahmadzai.
Meanwhile, Afghan deserters live so openly that they list their status as a job reference.
Ghubar, 27, who is from Parwan Province but lives in Kabul, deserted from his battalion with the First Brigade in Kabul just six months into his three-year commitment. Citing his military training, he promptly got a job as a security guard.
Ghubar declined to give more than his first name, but was not worried about being photographed. “There is no accountability,” he said. “If they had any accountability, it wouldn’t be such a bad army.”
Most of his complaints were echoed by the 10 other deserters interviewed on the record for this article.
“I wanted to serve my country, my homeland,” Ghubar said. “But after I joined, I saw the situation was all about corruption. The officers are too busy stealing the money to defeat the insurgents.”
A typical swindle described by the deserters was the diversion of the money allocated to commanders to pay for food, which is usually procured locally rather than distributed from a central depot. “Half the time we would get rice with a bone in it, with a little fat, no meat,” he said.
Ghubar added, “People who join the army, they just lose their hope.”
Ajmal, 24, from Kabul, who also gave only his first name and deserted from the same battalion, said he knew of commanders who had signed up their sons as “ghosts,” enabling them to collect army pay while attending university full time.
Muhammad Fazal Kochai, 28, who deserted from the First Brigade of the 201st Corps a year ago but still proudly shows the army ID card he carries in his wallet, had a particularly rough time. During his year in the army, 25 of his comrades were wounded and 15 killed out of his company of 100 to 150 men, stationed in the dangerous Tangi Wardak area of Wardak Province.
Still, he said, he would have stayed had it not been for the corruption of his officers: “Everybody is trying to make money to line their pockets and build their houses before the Americans leave.”
The final straw came when local villagers pointed him out after his unit had killed a local Taliban commander. “I started to get phone calls from the Taliban saying, ‘We know who you are, and we’re going to kill you.’ ”
He deserted and called to tell the Taliban they did not have to worry about him any longer.
Now Mr. Kochai is convinced the Afghan Army will lose once the Americans leave.
“The army can do nothing on their own without the equipment and supplies of the Americans, without the air support, nothing,” he said.
Sher Agha, 25, from the Sarkano District of eastern Kunar Province, had a similar experience. “Unknown gunmen kept bothering my family and telling them to force me to quit my job and come back home,” he said. Finally, he did.
Most of the deserters either had been wounded or knew someone who had, and they had high marks for the American military’s medical evacuation ability, but complained of poor care and neglect once they were transferred to the Afghan system.
“When I was wounded, the Americans were there in 10 minutes and choppered me out of Khost,” Ajmal said. “Then I went to an Afghan military hospital and no one asked about me. My unit even had me listed as dead.” Someone from his unit did, however, come to retrieve valuable pieces of equipment like his body armor and ammunition belt. He deserted after the hospital discharged him.
At the National Recruiting Center, Colonel Stanikzai keeps working, but he admits to a bleak outlook. “The news of the American withdrawal has weakened our morale and boosted the morale of the enemy,” he said. “I am sorry to speak so frankly. If the international community abandons us again, we won’t be able to last.”
The colonel’s hunt for infiltrators is rooted in realism. Often the Taliban cellphone telltales are adopted by people in rural areas as a protection in case the insurgents stop them, he said, so alone they are hardly grounds for dismissal.
One day last month, his caseload included a convicted murderer from Kunduz: Abdullah, a 30-year-old who has only one name. He had neglected to mention his criminal record, but it was discovered through biometric files compiled with American assistance.
Abdullah pleaded that his offense had been a crime of passion and that the victim’s family had forgiven him and accepted the customary blood money. Colonel Stanikzai sent him back to Kunduz to get a letter from the police chief certifying him for service. Abdullah tried to kiss the colonel’s hand in gratitude.
“We are going through a very, very hard time here,” the colonel said.
Jawad Sukhanyar and Habib Zahori contributed reporting from Kabul, and employees of The New York Times from Khost, Kunar, Kunduz and Kandahar Provinces.
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How soon is now? Afghanistan and drawdown logistics
Foreign Policy By Kevin Baron, Gordon Lubold Monday, October 15, 2012
Lately there is growing water cooler speculation in Washington over just how long the United States will stick out the Afghanistan war – and how long it would take to leave a country the U.S. has deployed its military to for 12 years.
In last week’s vice presidential debate, Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., sparred over which candidate, President Obama or Mitt Romney, has the intestinal fortitude to keep troops in Afghanistan as long as necessary.
Biden, in step with the current NATO plan, said, “We are leaving Afghanistan in 2014. Period.”
For many national security-niks in Washington, the candidates are already behind the curve. The bar stool debate is not whether the U.S. fights into 2015 or sticks around in 2014. The bets being laid now are whether the U.S. even makes it to 2014.
The murmur grew a bit louder on Sunday when the New York Times published a strongly worded editorial representing a new stance: Get out sooner rather than later.
“It is time for United States forces to leave Afghanistan on a schedule dictated only by the security of the troops. It should not take more than a year. The United States will not achieve even President Obama’s narrowing goals, and prolonging the war will only do more harm,” wrote the Times.
A timeline of not more than a year means combat ends and U.S. troops are gone by October 15, 2013. The editorial was required reading in some Pentagon offices come Monday.
Part of what the Times argues is how much time a U.S. withdrawal should take, and challenges the Pentagon’s deference to what is called a “secure logistical withdrawal.”
“Some experts say a secure withdrawal would take at least six months, and possibly a year. But one year is a huge improvement over two,” the paper wrote.
So how long would it take to get out? Ask Gus Pagonis, the retired three-star who presided over the departure of troops after the first Gulf War. Sure, that was a long time ago, and Iraq and Kuwait are totally different from Afghanistan. But to Pagonis, logistics is logistics.
“The principles of retrograde are always the same: identify the troops that have to get out first, what logisticians do you need, then you do triage,” Pagonis says. “They already have the plans, they just have to dust them off.”
Of course there are some real differences, as he acknowledges, and the bottom line is, getting out of Afghanistan is going to be tough.
After the first Gulf War, logisticians were able to use Kuwait as a staging area to wash everything down and load it up on barges to ship home. Afghanistan is of course landlocked, so of course there are no handy ports. Most stuff will have to be flown out, which will be expensive.
But most important, Pagonis says, is that after the first Gulf War, there was no enemy to contest the Americans’ withdrawal. That will not be the case in Afghanistan no matter when the U.S. leaves.
There wasn’t much press scrutiny, either, he remembers, as he moved out 370,000 short tons of ammo, 150,000 wheeled-vehicles, nearly 1,000 tanks and 50,000 containers.
“I didn’t have an enemy,” Pagonis says. “Nobody cared how we were coming out. CNN went home. I was all alone.”
The only enemy, he said, was the weather.
Although the Pentagon had learned its lesson from the first Gulf War, in which “iron mountains” of equipment needed to be shipped home, even logisticians in the more recent Iraq war marveled at the amount of stuff that had been built up in there since 2003.
Afghanistan is slightly different. The military tried not to build up large city-bases, and thus, there’s less to bring home. It’ll still be a challenge, Pagonis says. The military, however, will get it done no matter what timeframe it is given, he says.
“But you want a professional withdrawal, you don’t want to have stuff hanging out the back of the truck as you leave,” Pagonis says.
Indeed, the only thing certain about Afghanistan's logistical drawdown is that it will be longer, costlier, and more dangerous than Iraq's. At the end of Iraq, there were 50,000 troops in theater and the short rollout into Kuwait, aka "the catcher's mitt," made pulling back a relative snap. Also, troops had about a year and a half of shrink wrapping, bagging and tagging of stuff to get it ready to go.
In Afghanistan, there are still 67,000 troops — for now, at least — and the land routes exiting through Pakistan or the Northern Distribution Network are far longer, slower, and harder. And those routes only accept non-lethal items, so no tanks will be rolling across Afghan borders. Instead, all of the U.S. firepower amassed in Afghanistan in the past decade must be airlifted out, at enormous cost. How expensive? Nobody knows, it depends how much the U.S. leaves behind and how quickly it has to be shipped out. Over land in the north, to make things more complicated, there is no single-mode route, meaning items must move be moved between rail, truck, and ship all along the way Westward. Some items already have been packed up, but the grand total, according a recent Associated Press report, includes 50,000 vehicles and 100,000 shipping containers.
And there is another factor. The budget crunch at home means the services may want to bring back as much of their equipment as possible.
When the U.S. military pulled out of Iraq, many senior leaders initially thought to leave a significant amount of materiel there. But as funding started to get tighter, many began to think about the cost of “re-set” -- replacing aged or broken equipment -- and the prevailing view was to bring as much of the equipment home as possible, regardless of its condition. Some now believe the departure from Afghanistan could be much the same.
A retired colonel and logistician who worked on airlift requirements in Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan for U.S. Transportation Command, the military’s logistics combatant command, said the Pentagon may be more circumspect about what it decides to sell or leave behind.
“No one knows who is going to be elected, what the final outcome of sequester is going to be, so I think the services will be very conservative trying to get equipment back, not knowing what funding levels will be for the Department of Defense,” the colonel said.
In short, hey baby, there ain't no easy way out.
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Two Taliban leaders arrested in Afghanistan: coalition
KABUL, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- Two local Taliban leaders were arrested by Afghan forces and the coalition troops on Tuesday, the latest in the increased counter-insurgency campaign in post- Taliban country, the NATO-led coalition forces confirmed.
"An Afghan and coalition security force arrested a Taliban leader in Nangarhar province today. The arrested leader commanded Taliban fighters, and is directly associated with facilitating the movement and escape of an insider-attack shooter across Afghan borders," the coalition said in a press release.
The security force also detained a number of suspected insurgents and seized multiple weapons and mortar components in the province, 120 km east of Kabul, the statement added.
Separately, the joint forces also arrested a Haqqani leader in Ghazni province 100 km south of Kabul earlier Tuesday.
"The arrested leader coordinated attacks targeting Afghan and coalition forces and provided weapons to direct action cells located in northern Logar province. During the operation, the security force also detained a number of suspected insurgents," the release said.
The Taliban-linked Haqqani network mostly operating in eastern Afghan provinces and capital Kabul was responsible for many high- profile attacks against the security forces.
They also detained a number of insurgents during the operation in search of a Taliban explosives expert in Helmand province, 555 km south of Kabul, on Tuesday.
Coalition forces also confirmed they recently detained two insurgents during two separate Afghan-led operations in Kandahar, 450 km south of Kabul.
"Haji Mama, a facilitator of weapons, ammunition, homemade explosives and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) was arrested Oct. 4. Mohammad Nabi, an insurgent facilitator of IEDs and radios, was arrested Oct. 12," it said.
The Taliban insurgents, who have been waging an insurgency of more than one decade, have yet to confirm the arrest of the insurgent leaders.
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Taliban says its attack on Pakistani schoolgirl justified
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Taliban insurgents said on Tuesday that the Pakistani schoolgirl its gunmen shot in the head deserved to die because she had spoken out against the group and praised U.S. President Barack Obama.
Malala Yousufzai, 14, was flown to Britain on Monday, where doctors said she has every chance of making a "good recovery".
The attack on Yousufzai, who had been advocating education for girls, drew widespread condemnation.
Pakistani surgeons removed a bullet from near her spinal cord during a three-hour operation the day after the attack last week, but she now needs intensive specialist follow-up care.
Authorities have said they have made several arrests in connection with the case but have given no details.
Pakistan's Taliban described Yousufzai as a "spy of the West".
"For this espionage, infidels gave her awards and rewards. And Islam orders killing of those who are spying for enemies," the group said in a statement.
"She used to propagate against mujahideen (holy warriors) to defame (the) Taliban. The Quran says that people propagating against Islam and Islamic forces would be killed.
"We targeted her because she would speak against the Taliban while sitting with shameless strangers and idealized the biggest enemy of Islam, Barack Obama."
Yousufzai, a cheerful schoolgirl who had wanted to become a doctor before agreeing to her father's wishes that she strive to be a politician, has become a potent symbol of resistance against the Taliban's efforts to deprive girls of an education.
Pakistanis have held some protests and candlelight vigils but most government officials have refrained from publicly criticising the Taliban by name over the attack, in what critics say is a lack of resolve against extremism.
"We did not attack her for raising voice for education. We targeted her for opposing mujahideen and their war," said the Taliban. "Shariah (Islamic law) says that even a child can be killed if he is propagating against Islam."
(Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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Nato Says New Framework Assures Afghan Stability After 2014
TOLOnews.com By Rafi Sediqi Monday, 15 October 2012
Some Nato forces will remain in Afghanistan after 2014, assuring ongoing stability as the alliance moves from a combat role to a training mission, Nato-led Isaf spokesman Brig. Gen. Gunter Katz said in Kabul on Monday.
Addressing fears of rising insecurity once foreign forces leave in 2014, Katz emphasised the ongoing support of the international community towards Afghan security forces.
"Afghanistan will stay stable after 2014. The commitment from the international community at the Chicago and Tokyo summit shows that Afghanistan will be supported in the future as well," Katz said at a briefing in Kabul.
Nato civilian spokesman Dominic Medley made similar remarks, saying that the framework for Nato's post-2014 engagement in Afghanistan was decided on last week in Brussels.
"Nato defence ministers and the ministers from potential operational partners concluded the first stage of planning for that new mission. This will guide the military experts as they take the planning process forward. It is expected to agree on a detailed outline early next year, and to complete the plan well before the end of 2013," Medley said Monday in Kabul.
"This new mission will not be a combat mission. It will be a mission to train, advise and assist," he added.
He pointed out that Afghan security forces are already responsible for security of 75 percent of the Afghan people and that they will lead all the military operations by the first half of 2013.
"International community and Nato are committed towards Afghanistan and promised billions of dollars to the country. Afghan forces will be supported in the future and their training mission will continue," Medley added.
The Nato office in Kabul also introduced new senior civilian envoy to replace Simon Gass who completed his term last month.
Ambassador Maurits Jochems, who is originally from the Netherlands, already held the position of Nato Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan for an interim period in early 2008.
For the last two years Jochems has been the Ambassador for the Netherlands to Estonia.
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Lawmakers Slam Khan's Jihad Statements
TOLOnews.com By Jawed Stanikzai Monday, 15 October 2012
Afghan lawmakers on Monday slammed the recent statement made by former Pakistani cricketer and politician Imran Khan that the war in Afghanistan was Jihad or Islamic 'holy war'.
The lawmakers said that such statements incense people against the Afghan government and foreign forces and ignite more instability in the country.
"Imran Khan was pro-American in the past, but now he's following the ideas of ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency]," Badakhshan MP Fawzia Koofi said.
Daikundi MP Asadullah Sahadati said that Khan was not the only one making these statements.
"Several Pakistani organs are making propaganda against Afghanistan," he said.
Khan, head of the Pakistan Tehrik-e Insaaf (Movement for Justice) party, said last week that "the people fighting against foreign occupation in Afghanistan are engaged in a jihad."
Quoting the Qur'an, Khan said: "It is very clear that whoever is fighting for their freedom is fighting a jihad."
The MPs also discussed efforts to reduce corruption in Monday's parliamentary session.
Some criticised government entities for not implementing President Hamid Karzai's reform decree on corruption, calling it a merely symbolic declaration.
"The anti-graft organs are now accusing each other instead of fighting corruption," Kabul MP Alemi Balkhi said.
Farah MP Sarwar Osmani weighed in saying that other MPs were just as corrupt as the government ministers.
"The MPs are trying to appoint their relatives in the government organs which is a kind of corruption. How can they repair the cabinet members? They should repair themselves first," he said, without naming anyone.
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ECO Leaders Gather For Summit In Azerbaijan
October 16, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Members of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) have met in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to discuss a wide range of regional issues.
Leaders from Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan -- as well as representatives from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan -- attended the summit.
Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Almar Mamedyarov opened the gathering by saying the group needed to define priorities for regional economic cooperation.
Tajikistan's President Emomali Rahmon, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and host President Ilham Aliev called for more cooperation in regional energy projects.
But speeches from the leaders quickly moved away from economic cooperation to other matters.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked for ECO's help in fighting terrorism.
Karzai said Al-Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and other terrorist groups are active in Afghanistan. Karzai urged regional leaders to prevent the trafficking of weapons and other materials that could aid terrorists in Afghanistan.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari also spoke out against terrorism during his speech, specifically addressing the case of Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old girl the Taliban attempted to assassinate last week for speaking out in favor of girls' rights to education.
Zardari said "the work that she led was higher before God than what terrorists do in the name of religion."
Malala is being treated at a hospital in the United Kingdom and is expected to make a slow recovery.
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad proposed creating a political forum within the ECO. He claimed that "the capitalist system and supporters of slavery and colonialism have come to the end of their history."
Aliyev also spoke out against growing Islamophobia in the world and also against Armenia's continued occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave that Azerbaijan claims as part of its territory.
The ECO has existed since the mid-1980s, when Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan were its only members. It boosted its international profile at the start of the 1990s when it brought in new members from the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan.
Turkmenistan is also a member, but there was no mention of that country sending a representative to the Baku summit.
With reporting by Interfax, APA News, and trend.az
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Topeka man tried to smuggle cash from Afghanistan
The Associated Press
TOPEKA | A Topeka man has been charged with trying to smuggle $150,000 in cash from Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan to Kansas.
The government alleges in a criminal information filed Tuesday that 50-year-old Donald Garst tried to evade currency reporting laws in May 2011 by concealing cash in a DHL shipping box for transport to Topeka.
The U.S. attorney’s office says Garst was formerly with the Army National Guard, but was working as a private contractor in Afghanistan at the time.
Garst’s lawyer, Christopher Joseph, says in an email that nothing in the charge alleges the cash was obtained unlawfully. Joseph says Garst acknowledges he mailed the money, and that details about why he did so will be revealed in future court proceedings.
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Major Hurdles Facing German Troop Withdrawal
Spiegel Online By Matthias Gebauer and Gordon Repinski 15/10/2012
The plan sounds good: Complete withdrawal of German combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. But it is hardly realistic. For one, it is a daunting logistical challenge. For another, troops will have to remain in the country to protect the military trainers who will stay after the main force leaves.
Thomas de Maizière has finally found a way to talk about the greatest challenge of his career. Accordingly, the German military is not planning a "withdrawal" from Afghanistan. Rather, says the defense minister, he would rather speak of it as a "return transfer" of troops back to Germany.Outside of the German military, of course, nobody uses the term. But it suits the government's convoluted approach to the operation in Afghanistan, which for years wasn't even allowed to be called a "war."
As it happens, the "return transfer" is one of the most pressing problems currently facing the country. Never before has Germany's postwar military, the Bundeswehr, had to execute such an extensive and risky military operation.
Some soldiers recall with concern the hurried exit of American troops from Vietnam: scenes of local aids grabbing for the runners of rescue helicopters on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon. "The withdrawal is the biggest challenge for the Bundeswehr since its conception," says Green party defense expert Omid Nouripour.
A visit to the Bundeswehr bases between Masar-i-Sharif and Kabul makes clear just how great are the complexities facing the military. Innumerable mobile shelters lie spread across great expanses, their roofs secured with sandbags and the perimeter circled with elaborate fences and high walls. The camps are small technical miracles. There are integrated field hospitals, such as at Camp Warehouse in Kabul, fitness centers and cantinas. There are even bars and supermarkets selling sweets from back home.
Anything But Reliable
Much of this must return to Germany before the end of 2014. And that's where the problems start. Because air transport is too expensive, a significant amount of the materials have to be taken back by train. But that's extremely complicated given neighboring countries such as Iran and Pakistan. Even Uzbekistan -- the Bundeswehr's smallest problem when it comes to collaboration -- is anything but a reliable partner.
Because of Afghanistan's untrustworthy neighbors, Masar-i-Scharif is becoming a vital traffic junction. A significant portion of the NATO withdrawal is running through the northern city, which is overseen by Germany. To secure the airfield alone, the Bundeswehr needs 1,500 soldiers -- a burden that Germany can't shoulder by itself, given that troop levels are to be reduced simultaneously.
Defense ministers still active in Afghanistan met last Wednesday. The Bundeswehr cannot secure the facilities in Masar-i-Sharif alone, Maizière said, asking that the burden be shared. Mongolia and Afghanistan's new defense minister pledged their support, but it remains to be seen if indeed the situation will improve.
Several political questions also remain unanswered. To be sure, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle and de Maizière recently reached agreement on an important point of conflict relating to the next Afghanistan mandate, set to be approved by German parliament in January. The new mandate is to extend for longer than 12 months and will encompass the difficult Afghan elections scheduled for early 2014. Furthermore, the two ministers agreed to reduce troop levels to below 4,000 over the course of 2013.
It remains unclear, however, if German combat troops will remain in the country beyone the end of the ISAF mission. Officially, only military trainers are to stay on in Afghanistan beyond 2014. Yet these soldiers will be carrying out their duty in a war zone, and not in a classroom.
A Clause with Implications
To emphasize the non-combat nature of the new mission, the defense ministers in Brussels came up with a new name. After 2014, ISAF is to be called ITAAM, short for the International Training, Advisory and Assistance Mission. Instead of security and force, the new mission is to emphasizs training and the giving of advice.
De Maizière, however, wants to make it clear that ITAAM also includes "the protection of our own soldiers." It's a clause with significant implications, allowing for German combat units to be stationed in Afghanistan even beyond 2014. Each advisor needs the protection and support of up to eight soldiers. De Maizière is pushing for the burden of protection to be shared among NATO partners. "If everyone says I only want to train, that won't work," cautioned the minister.
Volker Wieker, general inspector of the Bundeswehr, was even more direct at a recent event in Berlin. It looks like the mandate will be "in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter," he noted, which would allow for the use of force.
Elke Hoff, a military expert with the Free Democrats, Chancellor Angela Merkel's junior coalition partners, agrees. "Bundeswehr soldiers must naturally have the ability to use weapons to protect themselves," she says. "To think anything else would be naïve."
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Russia Asks Afghanistan for Help With Soviet MIAs
Associated Press By SLOBODAN LEKIC October 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Russia appealed Monday to the Afghan authorities and public to provide information on over 200 Soviet troops listed as missing since Soviet forces ended their occupation of Afghanistan in 1989 — including 30 to 40 who may still be alive.
Russian ambassador Andrey Avetisyan said the two countries are preparing an agreement that would regulate future efforts to recover the servicemen, who went missing during a decade of guerrilla warfare in the impoverished nation.
Difficulties remain, he noted, in accessing some areas believed to contain soldiers' graves because of the current war between international forces, the Taliban and other insurgents.
"We are talking about places where nobody goes, remote points where fighting is still heavy," he told reporters.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 27, 1979, telling the world it aimed to transform Afghanistan into a modern socialist state. Moscow sought to prop up a communist regime facing a popular uprising, but left largely defeated on Feb. 15, 1989 by anti-communist mujahedeen forces receiving massive support from the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others.
The Soviets maintained a garrison of about 80,000 troops in Afghanistan through much of that war. Nearly 700,000 rotated through the country and about 15,000 died in the 10-year conflict.
A Russian veterans group says 265 soldiers remain unaccounted for. About 20 are thought to have resettled in other countries after they deserted, while 30 to 40 may still be in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
One of those was Nikolai Bystrov, an army lieutenant captured by guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation. He later became the personal bodyguard of Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud who battled the Taliban during the 1990s.
Aleksander Lavrentyev, deputy head of a veterans group searching for Soviet MIAs, said his group had received excellent help from Afghan authorities, the Red Crescent, NGOs and ordinary citizens — including those who had fought on the opposing side — in locating the remains of 15 soldiers in the past 4 years. Of those, five were positively identified while the rest were still undergoing forensic testing.
"But now time is passing and it is becoming more and more difficult to find witnesses of those events," he said.
The move to resolve the remaining MIA cases comes as the U.S.-led NATO coalition is preparing to draw down its forces in Afghanistan and hand over responsibility for the war in 2014 to the Afghan security forces.
Despite the presence of up to 140,000 foreign troops, NATO has not been able to defeat the guerrillas who have successfully regrouped after their crushing defeat by U.S.-led forces in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Russia has backed the international coalition in the war, providing air and land transit routes for troops and equipment. But Moscow has been critical of the alliance's plans to pull out while the Taliban remain undefeated.
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Kabul Factory Owners Warn of Investment Withdrawal
TOLOnews.com By Haseeb Maudoodi Monday, 15 October 2012
Afghan factory owners in Kabul's industrial park in Pul-e-Charkhi warned Monday that unless basic conditions around the park improve, they will be forced to move their investment elsewhere.
Factory owner Mohammad Halim Kabir said that factory owners had told the municipal council they would cooperate with efforts to improve the roads, but the council has not delivered.
"I own two factories here, and I pay 250,000 Afghanis (US$5,000) annually towards the upkeep of the Kabul municipality but they are providing us with no service instead," Kabir said Monday.
"If the conditions continue in this way I will be forced to invest outside of the country to get a fair service," he added.
Afghanistan's Industries Association Director Abdul Jabar Safi also raised his concerns over the poor conditions within the industrial park and complained about the state of the canals.
"We don't want the municipality to build the roads from its own budget, but we ask them to put the fee for the construction of roads towards the industrial park," Safi said, adding that land-grabbing is another issue for them.
Meanwhile, deputy head of municipality's 10th district Abdul Ahad Esmati accepted that there are road problems within the industrial park but said they will be asphalted in the near future.
"We only collect the cleaning fee of 50,000 to 80,000 Afghanis annually from each company and we provide some service in return. We plan to asphalt nine kilometres of roads within the industrial parks," he said Monday.
This comes in a moment when Afghanistan needs to focus on development of its private sector to strengthen the economy as foreign business is expected to dwindle after the withdrawal of the Nato-led troops by the end of 2014.
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Afghanistan: Paying for Justice in Khost
Residents of southeastern province pay traditional assemblies to sort out disputes, leaving state mechanisms out of the picture.
IWPR By Farid Zaher Khost 15 Oct 12
Afghanistan - In much of Khost, a Pashtun province in southeast Afghanistan, crimes and civil cases never go before state courts or prosecutors. Instead, people take their disputes to traditional councils for arbitration.
There is no shortage of material for these informal trials, often conducted by local leaders who are unfamiliar with Afghan state legislation and are often illiterate. Land ownership is a constant source of dispute, but the councils or “jirgas” also handle feuding, robbery and murder.
The problem with this ad hoc form of justice is that it costs a lot of money. Members of jirgas demand fees for meeting to hear a case and pass judgement. Poorer residents of Khost say the price of obtaining a measure of justice is too high to make it worthwhile.
When it comes to serious crimes, the Afghan state judiciary often never gets to hear of them, and even if it did, it has no institutions on the ground in much of Khost to deal with them. In other cases, individuals do attempt to get lawsuits heard in the provincial centre, only to give up in frustration at the long delays and turn to the jirga instead.
A further problem is that verdicts delivered under customary law may be accepted by all parties at the time, but they ultimately lack the binding force needed to prevent long-running feuds from breaking out again, at the cost of many lives.
PAY-AS-YOU-GO JUSTICE
Khost has 12 administrative districts, eight of which – Nader Shah Kot, Gorboz, Musa Khel, Qalandar, Bak, Sabari, Dwa Manda and Aspari – have no courts or prosecution service offices, despite a decade of institution-building in Afghanistan since 2001.
For this two-month investigation, IWPR looked at one district, Gorboz, on the border with Pakistan. Gorboz has a population of 86,000 living in 80 villages, according to a survey conducted in 2008 by an NGO called Health Net.
Anyone who gets into a dispute here has no option but to ask for a jirga to be convened.
Eight residents who told IWPR about cases they had been involved in said the costs were so high that they sometimes exceeded any damage payments awarded, or even the value of the property that was in dispute.
Saber Jan, 20, has a grocery shop in his home village of Shekh Amir, and also owns some farmland.
About a year-and-a-half ago, he got into a dispute with fellow-villager Hajji Lambot, who objected to him irrigating land that he said was his.
"Hajji Lambot claims ownership of part of my land, which he says is his, so I have no right to irrigate it," he said.
Saber Jan took the matter to a jirga because he felt the district government head and police chief were biased toward his opponent.
Four jirga meetings have been held over a period of three months, with seven or eight senior tribal elders and Muslim clerics participating each time. No decision has been reached yet.
Saber Jan says he always knew the case would cost him a great deal.
"I spent 40,000 kaldars on the four sessions; my land isn’t even worth 30,000 kaldars," he said ruefully. “Kaldar” is the local term for Pakistani rupees, widely used in southern Afghanistan. Saber Jan spent the equivalent of 420 US dollars.
Saber Jan concluded, "I am a Pashtun. I spent money for my ‘ghayrat’ [zeal; honour], and I will spend more."
The rules for holding a jirga in Gorboz follow a general pattern.
First, each party to the dispute has to pay 2,100 dollars in advance to the assembly chairman, usually the local mullah. The idea is that if either party abandons the case before a verdict is reached, the money will be used to pay for food to be handed out to the village’s residents as a sort of compensation.
Once started, the jirga members – usually ten to 15 in number – convene for between three to six sessions, held at the homes of the disputing parties, in the local mosque, or in an open field.
The disputing parties have to pay each jirga member a fee of ten to 20 dollars and also provide them with lunch.
Khalil Jan, 26, also from Shekh Amir, drives a minibus as his main occupation but like most villagers, owns some farmland as well.
He got into a dispute with a local man called Naqibullah, over an area of land 8,000 square metres in size.
After paying the initial “management fee” of 2,100 dollars, Khalil said, "I paid 1,000 kaldars to each of eight tribal elders and 1,500 kaldars each to two imams at the first session.”
There have been three more sessions, and no end is in sight. Khalil reckons the four meetings have cost him 2,000 dollars, in addition to his advance payment. He believes the disputed land is worth 70,000 dollars.
"I don't know how much more I will have to spend until the jirga makes a final decision," he said.
Tribal elders who take part in jirgas say it is only fair they should be paid for their contribution. IWPR interviewed 12 elders in different villages, among them Hajji Khaki, an elder from the Nasruddin tribe in the village of Woro. Now 65 years old, he has been the village chief or “malek” for the past 30 years.
"I receive between 2,000 to 5,000 kaldars from both parties to the dispute at every session," he said. “We are not taking bribes from people – they pay us themselves."
FRUSTRATION WITH FORMAL JUSTICE MECHANISMS
The city of Khost, the provincial centre, has a court plus a prosecutor’s office with 18 officers.
The wheels of justice grind so slow in Afghanistan that many plaintiffs give up in disappointment. It is also difficult for them to make frequent trips from outlying districts.
Four of the eight jirga cases that IWPR looked at in Gorboz were originally brought to the state authorities in Khost.
Mohammad Anwar Jan, a 30-year-old farmer from the village of Kasi, said his land dispute with another man sat with the prosecutor’s office in Khost for a month without moving forward at all.
"I had to report to the prosecutor’s office every morning. I grew tired of going there. I spent 8,000 kaldars but achieved nothing. So I was forced to refer my case to the village jirga," he said.
Judicial officials in Khost say the reason there are no offices in the eight districts is that security is a concern, and also that they lack qualified staff. They said new recruits were not prepared to go out and work in the districts for a salary of 240 dollars a month.
"We have only 18 prosecution officers in the centre of Khost, where the [province’s] population is estimated at around one million," Mohammad Khalil Ghairat Zadran, head of the appeals service in Khost, said. "The most important thing for an prosecution officer is his personal safety and the security situation in the area where he works. There is no security in the districts of Khost."
Colonel Mohammad Yaqub, head of security at Khost police headquarters, confirmed that prosecution service officers were afraid to travel around the province, and said his force was not in a position to provide them with six to eight bodyguards.
"We can take the attorney officers out to the districts in the morning and bring them back to the city in the evening in police Ranger vehicles, but there is a risk of bomb attacks or direct Taleban attacks along the way,” he said. “We can’t guarantee their lives."
RULINGS NOT STRONG ENOUGH TO BREAK CYCLE OF FEUDING
The fact that people generally respect decisions made by the jirgas, but there is a limit to their power, especially in the case of bitter tribal feuds, which are liable to resume after a short break.
IWPR discovered six cases where this has happened in the last two years, and interviewed witnesses and participants.
The Borikhel and Nasruddin tribes have disputed ownership of around 12 square kilometres of land in the Makhi Kandu and Chikri for the last 80 years.
The dispute often erupts into violence. Salidad Khan, a Borikhel member from the village of Chandikhel, recalls “30 people killed or injured” in sporadic clashes during his 40-year lifetime. Five people died in one clash with the Nasruddin in 2010, he said.
Located in the mountains a few kilometres from the Durand Line which forms the border with Pakistan, the land has no ownership certificates granted by this or past Afghan governments.
Wali Shah Hemmat, the district government chief in Gorboz, told IWPR that the land belonged to the state, and not to either tribe. But he acknowledged that both groups felt it was their own.
The most recent jirga to attempt a mediated settlement was convened in July 2010, but the feud has continued.
Salidad Khan said the two tribes had 900 families between them, enough to field small armies equipped with a range of personal weapons – from Kalashnikovs and older bolt-action rifles to Russian-made heavy-machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
A previous investigation which IWPR carried out in 2011 (Afghanistan: Khost Residents Armed to the Teeth) indicated that some 50,000 illegal weapons were in private hands, and were frequently deployed in feuds. In the report, Dr Hedayatollah Hamidi, director of public health in Khost, was quoted as saying there were 120 casualties from such feuds in 2011 alone.
The health department in Khost provided IWPR with figures for the first half of 2012, showing IWPR a list of 130 people from various tribes, all killed in land disputes.
"All 130 were killed with Kalashnikovs, pistols and rifles which people keep at home," Dr Hamidi.
If the Afghan government is manifestly unable to contain these local wars, the jirga as traditional justice mechanism is clearly failing to do so, either.
More generally, the lack of opportunities for judicial redress in much of Khost weakens any sense of statehood for people there.
Provincial governor Abdul Jabar Naimi, acknowledges that people in Khost use traditional justice mechanisms because government has so little reach. He predicts that they will continue doing so until the authorities pay for prosecution service buildings in each district.
Farid Zaher Khost is an IWPR-trained reporter in Khost province, Afghanistan.
This report was produced as part of IWPR's Afghan Critical Mass Media Reporting in Uruzgan and Nangarhar project.
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