Official: 13 American troops killed in Kabul attack
From Nick Paton Walsh, CNN October 29, 2011
Editor's note: Home and Way: U.S. and coalition casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- At least 13 U.S. troops were killed in Kabul on Saturday when a suicide bomber struck a vehicle in a NATO military convoy, a U.S. military official said.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force confirmed 13 deaths within its force, but did not specify their nationalities.

The U.S. official emphasized details are continuing to unfold. A heavily damaged vehicle is believed to be an armored bus that was carrying U.S. troops from one base to another.

The attack caused a "number" of NATO and local Afghan casualties, ISAF said in a statement. Four Afghans, including two students, were also killed, said Hashmat Stanikzai, spokesman for Kabul's police chief.

Stanikzai said the vehicle used in the attack appeared to be a red Toyota Corolla packed with a significant amount of explosives.

It was unclear how many people were wounded, said Sediq Sediqqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

The deaths were the largest single-day U.S. loss in Afghanistan since the August crash in Afghanistan's Wardak province that killed 38 people, including 17 Navy SEALS. That aircraft was brought down by an insurgent rocket-propelled grenade.

A Taliban spokesman confirmed Saturday's attack in a text message, saying it killed "16 foreign soldiers, one civilian" and injured many others.

Taliban casualty counts are often inflated; there was no other reliable indication 16 foreigners were killed.

The attack was one of two targeting NATO-led forces that day.

A gunman wearing an Afghan army uniform turned his weapon on coalition forces during training, killing two, said Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, a spokesman for ISAF. The shooter was killed in the incident in southern Afghanistan.

The coalition did not provide any other details about the shooting, and did not disclose the nationalities of those killed.

In another suicide attack in northeastern Afghanistan, a woman in a burqa detonated herself near the nation's intelligence agency.

She tried to enter the National Directorate of Security and was shot at, but she still managed to detonate herself, said Sabour Alayar, deputy police chief of Kunar province.

Two officers and two civilians were wounded, he said, adding that the female suicide bomber was about 25 years old.

Alayar said they had intelligence of a suicide bomber looking for a target, and their security forces were on alert.

The August helicopter attack made for the the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the 10 years since allied forces began their campaign there. Seventy-one American troops died in August, six more than in July 2010, which previously had been the worst month for U.S. casualties.

Fifteen U.S. soldiers and three civilian contractors were killed in April 2005 when a coalition helicopter traveling in severe weather crashed near Ghazni. Sixteen Americans -- eight soldiers and eight sailors -- were killed when their MH-47 helicopter was downed by a rocket-propelled grenade near Kunar province in June 2005.

In May 2006, a U.S. helicopter crashed near Asadabad in Kunar province, killing all 10 U.S. soldiers aboard.

Three Drug Enforcement Administration special agents and seven U.S. troops were killed in western Afghanistan in October 2009 when they returned from a raid on a compound believed to be harboring insurgents tied to drug trafficking.

CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr and journalist Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed to this report.
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US report says security improved in Afghanistan
By DONNA CASSATA - Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite improvements to security in Afghanistan, militants operating from safe havens in Pakistan and chronic problems with the Kabul government pose significant risks to a "durable, stable Afghanistan," according to a Pentagon progress report released Friday.

More than a decade since the Sept. 11 terror attacks against the U.S. and the start of the Afghan war, the U.S. and its allies have reversed violent trends in much of the country and the transition to Afghans taking charge of security has begun in seven key areas, including major cities such as Kabul and Herat.

"Security gains during (the past six months) have provided a firm foundation for the transition of security responsibilities to the Afghan government" and its security forces, the report said.

However, cross-border attacks have increased in recent months due to insurgents' safe havens in Pakistan and the support they received from within its borders.

"The insurgency remains resilient and, enabled by Pakistani safe havens, continues to contest" Afghan security forces throughout the country, especially in the east, according to the semi-annual report sent to Congress.

The report also identified chronic problems with the Afghan government, including widespread corruption, delays in reforms and political disputes, as obstacles to U.S. and coalition efforts to get Kabul to take over security for the country.

The Unites States has some 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and plans to bring most forces home by the end of 2014. President Barack Obama announced this past summer that 10,000 troops will be redeployed by the end of the year. The 33,000 troops that Obama sent as a surge force will be out by the end of September 2012, leaving about 68,000 troops.

"Transition remains on track with no demonstrated effort by the insurgency to target the process," the report said.

Overall, the report gives a more upbeat assessment of the military strategy and its future prospects. For the first time in several years, the report does not describe the progress in Afghanistan as "fragile and reversible" — an omission that a senior defense official said Friday was deliberate.

Instead, the report focused on the continuing risk areas, such as the safe havens in Pakistan and weak governing in Kabul.

The defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publically on the issue, said that U.S. and coalition forces will be turning more attention to the eastern border region. But the official could provide no details on what that would look like, or if it will mean a substantial shift in U.S. troops to the embattled region.

The latest progress report — the last one was in April — strikes a more critical tone than previous Pentagon reports about Pakistan's failure to crack down on safe havens for militants along the border with Afghanistan, arguing that these havens enable insurgents considered the greatest threat to American troops.

The report said the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan had improved early on, but several events severely strained those ties. Most notably was the May 2 U.S. raid deep inside Pakistan that led to the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Cross-border attacks diminished in August, but high-profile attacks in September, including the assault on the U.S. embassy in Kabul, were a significant setback.

The report said these attacks "were carried out by the Haqqani network and directly enabled by Pakistani safe haven and support."

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who directs day-to-day military operations in Afghanistan, told reporters on Thursday that the attacks are about four times more frequent than they had been in the past year.

The United States in recent weeks has stepped up criticism of Pakistan and its counterterrorism cooperation but has at the same time sought to cajole the increasingly angry and resistant Pakistanis into doing more. As tensions rose between Washington and Islamabad, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered an unusually blunt warning to the Pakistanis, saying during a visit to Kabul last week that they "must be part of the solution" to the Afghan conflict.

Clinton said the Obama administration expects the Pakistani government, military and intelligence services to "take the lead" in not only fighting insurgents based in Pakistan but also in encouraging Afghan militants to reconcile with Afghan society. She said the U.S. would go it alone if Pakistan chose not to heed the call.

After leaving Kabul, Clinton made the same points to Pakistani officials in Islamabad, where she led a high-level U.S. team, including CIA director David Petraeus, seeking to repair badly strained ties. Those meetings appear to have dulled the intensity of Pakistan's anger but there has not yet been any clear sign that the crisis is over.

Last month, then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said the Haqqani network, which is affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaida, "acts as a veritable arm" of Pakistan's intelligence agency. Mullen accused the network of staging an attack against the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul on Sept. 13 as well as a truck bombing that wounded 77 American soldiers. He claimed Pakistan's spy agency helped the group.

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Associated Press reporters Matthew Lee and Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this story.
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NATO: Man in Afghan army uniform kills 2 troops
By AMIR SHAH - Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO says a man wearing an Afghan military uniform has turned his weapon on coalition and Afghan troops in the country's south, killing two members of the U.S.-led coalition.

The coalition says the shooter also was killed in the incident Saturday in southern Afghanistan.

The nationalities of those killed were not disclosed and the coalition did not provide any other details about the shooting.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A suicide car bomber struck a NATO convoy on the outskirts of Kabul on Saturday, causing casualties among the NATO service members and Afghan civilians, the U.S.-led coalition said. Afghan officials said three civilians and one policeman were killed.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred near Darulaman Palace, the bombed-out seat of former Afghan kings on the southwest outskirts of the capital. It was the deadliest of two attacks in the day that targeted either the U.S.-led coalition or Afghan government offices in the country.

"Initial reports indicate that there has been a vehicle-borne IED attack today against a coalition vehicle in Kabul," NATO said in a statement, using military terminology for a car bomb. The alliance said "several" of its service members were among the casualties of the attack, but provided no other details.

The Afghan Ministry of Interior said three Afghan civilians and one Afghan police were killed. The Taliban claim came shortly after the attack in a text message to media outlets.

An Associated Press reporter on the scene said that NATO and Afghan forces had sealed off the area. Two NATO helicopters landed to airlift casualties. The back end of a NATO bus appeared to have been blown apart and was turned into a charred shell.

Earlier Saturday, a female suicide bomber blew herself up as she tried to attack a local government office in the capital of Kunar province, a hotbed of militancy in northeast Afghanistan along the Pakistan border.

Abdul Sabor Allayar, deputy provincial police chief, said the guards outside the government's intelligence office in Asad Abad became suspicious of the woman and started shooting, at which point she detonated her explosives.

There were no other casualties in that attack.

Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces conducted operations earlier this month, killing more than 100 insurgents in an effort to curb violence in rugged areas of Kunar where the coalition and Afghan government have a light footprint.

Farther south along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Afghan and coalition forces captured two leaders of the Haqqani network and two other suspected insurgents in Sarobi district of Paktika province, the coalition said.

Haqqani fighters, who are affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaida, are heavily rooted in Paktika and neighboring Paktia and Khost provinces.

One of the captured leaders provided insurgent fighters with funding, weapons, supplies and hideouts, and the other coordinated attacks against Afghan forces, the coalition said.
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NATO: 30 insurgents killed in eastern Afghanistan
By TAREK EL-TABLAWY - Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Insurgents attacked a convoy of Afghan and international troops on Friday in eastern Afghanistan, sparking a gunbattle that left about 30 militants dead, NATO said.

The joint Afghan-international force called for air support during the firefight in Shinwar district of Nangarhar province, the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan said. No other information was disclosed and it is unclear whether any Afghan or coalition forces were killed or wounded.

NATO forces in Afghanistan have concentrated on Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan in the past several years, but more recently have shifted their focus to the east along the border with Pakistan.

In the south, a roadside bomb killed NATO service member in Kandahar province, the same region where the U.S.-led alliance repelled a coordinated Taliban attack on a U.S.-run civilian and military base a day earlier, NATO said without providing further details.

The death raises to 480 the number of coalition forces killed in Afghanistan so far this year.

Earlier, the U.S.-led alliance said its troops, in tandem with Afghan police, repulsed on Thursday a Taliban attack on a camp in Kandahar that is home to NATO troops, including Americans, and a provincial reconstruction team.

NATO said one Afghan interpreter was killed in the attack, while one American civilian contractor and two Afghan security guards were wounded. Five NATO service members also were lightly wounded, the alliance said.

The Taliban launched the assault from a compound across from the camp, firing rocket-propelled grenades, NATO said.

Two car bombs went off as Afghan police were clearing the compound, NATO said, but no one was hurt in the blast. The buildings had been rigged with explosives, and NATO said its forces fired Hellfire missiles at the compound, killing all four attackers.

Kandahar, and much of the south, had long been seen as a Taliban stronghold, but Afghan and coalition forces have made significant gains in the area and the insurgents have since shifted their operations further east and to some northern provinces.

NATO said the presence of car bombs at the site indicated the insurgents had a plan, which they were unable to execute, and that it had expected the Taliban to launch such an attack before the onset of winter, when the violence and attacks tend to abate.

In other incidents across the country, a civilian car struck a roadside bomb early Friday in Nangarhar province's Khogyani district, killing two men, a woman and a child, said district chief Mohammad Hassan.

Afghanistan to back Pakistan if wars with U.S.: Karzai
Oct 22, 2011 11:13am EDT
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Afghanistan would support Pakistan in case of military conflict between Pakistan and the United States, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview to a private Pakistani TV channel broadcast on Saturday.

The remarks were in sharp contrast to recent tension between the two neighbors over cross-border raids, and Afghan accusations that Pakistan was involved in killing the chief Afghan peace envoy, former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, by a suicide bomber on September 20.

"God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan," he said in the interview to Geo television.

"If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan's help, Afghanistan will be there with you."

Such a situation is extremely unlikely, however. Despite months of tension and tough talk between Washington and Islamabad, the two allies appear to be working to ease tension.

In a two-day visit to Islamabad, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued stern warnings and asked for more cooperation in winding down the war in Afghanistan, but ruled out "boots on the ground" in North Waziristan, where Washington has been pushing Pakistan to tackle the Haqqani network.

The Haqqani are a group of militants Washington has blamed for a series of attacks in Afghanistan, using sanctuaries in the Pakistani tribal region along the Afghan border.

Pakistan is seen as a critical to the U.S. drive to end the conflict in Afghanistan.

Pressure on Islamabad has been mounting since U.S. special forces found and killed Osama bin Laden in May in a Pakistani garrison town, where he apparently had been living for years.

The secret bin Laden raid was the biggest blow to U.S.-Pakistan relations since Islamabad joined the U.S. "war on terror" after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Karzai said tensions between the United States and Pakistan did not have any impact in his country's attitude toward Pakistan.

The TV channel, Geo, did not say when the interview was conducted.

Afghans have long been suspicious of Pakistan's intentions in their country and question its promise to help bring peace. Karzai repeated that concern in his remarks.

"Please brother, stop using all methods that hurt us and that are now hurting you.

"Let's engage from a different platform, a platform in which the two brothers only progress toward a better future in peace and harmony," he said.

Following the death of Rabbani, Karzai said he would cease attempting to reach out to the Afghan Taliban and instead negotiate directly with Pakistan, saying its military and intelligence services could influence the militants to make peace.
(Reporting by Augustine Anthony; Editing by Chris Allbritton and Michael Roddy)
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24 militants killed in Afghanistan
KABUL, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- Afghan troops, backed by NATO-led coalition forces, have killed 24 Taliban insurgents and captured 10 others over the past 24 hours, Afghan Interior Ministry said Saturday.

"Afghan National Police (ANP), Afghan army and coalition forces have launched five joint operations in Kabul, Ghazni and Kandahar provinces over the past 24 hours, killing 24 armed insurgents and detaining 10 suspects," the ministry said in a statement.

ANP also confiscated 12 AK-47 guns, 3 pistols, one PKM machine gun, one vehicle, 568 light bullets, 100kg explosives, 2kg hashish in the operations, it added.

Afghan and NATO forces keep up pressure on insurgents all over the country as over 560 insurgents have been killed and around 750 detained since Sept. 1, according to the interior ministry.
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Clinton seeks role for Afghanistan's neighbors
By MATTHEW LEE - Associated Press
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Central Asian nations on Saturday to play a role in securing and rebuilding war-torn Afghanistan, promoting the concept of a "new Silk Road" that would benefit the entire region.

She also pressed authorities in the region about improving their record on human rights.

Before arriving in Uzbekistan, Clinton told an audience in Tajikistan that Afghanistan's reintegration into the regional economy would be critical to its recovery from war, as well as for better conditions in surrounding countries.

Afghanistan has been at "the crossroads for terrorism and insurgency and so much pain and suffering over 30 years," she said. "We want Afghanistan to be at the crossroads of economic opportunities going north and south and east and west, which is why it's so critical to more fully integrate the autonomies of the countries in this region in South and Central Asia."

Clinton says the "new Silk Road" will increase regional trade and commerce.

"We hope it will give rise to a network of thriving economic relationships around the region," she said. But, Clinton added, countries would have to remove or ease trade restrictions and reform commercial laws for the scheme to succeed.

On human rights, Clinton told a town hall meeting in Dushanbe that she would raise the issue with the leaders of both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

In Tajikistan, she said she spoke to President Emomali Rakhmonov about her concerns over restrictions on press and religious freedoms. In particular, she cited attempts to register certain faiths and efforts to discourage younger people from embracing the worship of their choice.

Tajikistan, a Muslim nation with a secular government, is keen to prevent its youth from adopting extremist Islamic views.

But this kind of strategy, Clinton warned, often backfires.

"It could push legitimate religious expression underground and that could build up a lot of unrest and discontent," she told reporters at a news conference with the Tajik foreign minister. "You have to look at the consequences. We don't want to do anything that breeds extremism."

U.S. officials said she would bring a similar message to Uzbek President Islam Karimov.

Clinton defended her meeting with Karimov, whose government has been accused of numerous serious rights abuses.

She said it was important to try to raise "issues of human rights and rule of law, the kind of fundamental freedoms that the U.S. strongly supports.

"If you have no contact, you have no influence and other countries will fill that vacuum that do not care about human rights and fundamental freedoms," she said. "So I would rather be raising these issues than be outside."

Human Rights Watch has called on her to link improvements to continued U.S. engagement.

Clinton was the highest-ranking American official to visit Tashkent since the U.S. last month lifted seven-year-old restrictions on assistance to the country. The restrictions were imposed because of rights abuses.

Clinton previously made stops in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where she demanded greater cooperation in dealing with militants and encouraging insurgents to talk peace.

Clinton is at the tail end of a weeklong, seven-nation overseas trip that has also taken her to Malta, Libya and Oman. She planned to return to Washington on Sunday.
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Pakistan’s Rabbani Khar Pales Next to Clinton
Wall Street Journal By Tom Wright October 21, 2011
When Pakistan appointed Hina Rabbani Khar, a 33-year-old politician, as its first female foreign minister earlier this year, there was some suggestion that she lacked experience for the job.

On Friday, sharing a podium with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she certainly appeared out of her depth.

Mrs. Clinton masterfully chided Pakistan for not invading North Waziristan and managed not to sound too schoolmarmly in the process, although she did ask Islamabad to “squeeze” the Haqqani militant group a few too many times.

Ms. Khar, by contrast, seemed to get lost in her own rhetoric, saying very little during overly-long answers to reporters’ questions. She often repeated phrases like “both sides of the border” numerous times in one response. It was unclear at points exactly what she wanted to get across.

At one stage, her loosely worn headdress, evocative of the late former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, slipped off her head.

No doubt Ms. Khar will grow into the job and was noteworthy on a recent trip to the U.S. for standing her ground over allegations that Pakistani intelligence ran the Haqqani network.

But, fairly or not, Ms. Khar’s performance next to Mrs. Clinton could give ammunition to cynics who believe her appointment was an attempt by Pakistan’s military –the final arbiter of the country’s foreign policy—to put someone junior and malleable in the position.

The last incumbent, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, was pushed out, reportedly after disagreements with the military.

Ms. Khar’s rise in politics has been fast since completing a degree in hospitality management at the University of Massachusetts and returning to Pakistan, where she opened a restaurant in the grounds of the Lahore polo club.

She’s from a powerful Punjabi political family and entered politics in 2002 with the political party of former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, switching at the last election to the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party.

Ms. Khar worked closely with the late U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke in a previous junior minister role in which she oversaw foreign aid contributions to Pakistan.

Mr. Holbrooke had nice things to say about her abilities. But since then, Ms. Khar has been fighting a losing battle to build a serious image.

Earlier this year, during peace talks in New Delhi with Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna, who is 79 years old, Ms. Khar won a warm reception from the normally-hostile Indian press.

But much of the coverage focused on Ms. Khar’s choice of designer handbag and what shades she was wearing on top of her head.

It would be easy to ascribe much of this to old-style sexism. But, as Ms. Khar’s performance alongside Ms. Clinton showed, she’ll have to work harder to change the focus from her accoutrements to her achievements.

You can follow Mr. Wright on Twitter @TomWrightAsia.

Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.
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Clinton leaves but with mounting pressure on Pakistan
By Muhammad Tahir
ISLAMABAD, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) - U.S. Secretary of States Hillary Clinton has left Islamabad at the conclusion of her two- day trip but has delivered a message of urgency for the Pakistani civil and military leadership to act against the groups, blamed for cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

"So we had a very in-depth conversation with specifics, and we are looking forward to taking that conversation and operationalizing it over the next days and weeks not months and years, but days and weeks because we have a lot of work to do to realize our shared goals," Clinton told reporters in Islamabad on Friday after her talks with Pakistani leaders. She, however, agreed with Pakistan's quest to give a chance to peace.

"Now we have to turn our attention to the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, Haqqani, and other terrorist groups, and try to get them into a peace process, but if that fails, prevent them from committing more violence and murdering more innocent people," Clinton said when she spoke to reporters along with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar.

It was the second visit to Pakistan by Hillary Clinton in five months in tense environment. She had visited Pakistan in late May just weeks after the U.S. military killed Osama bin Laden in an unilateral action in the city of Abbotabad. Pakistanis had been angry at the U.S. military's May 2 action and she flew into Islamabad to pacify them. Pakistan had condemned the U.S. attack and had described it as violation of its sovereignty.

Clinton again paid a two-day Oct. 20-21 visit as senior U.S. military officials recently publicly accused Pakistan's spy agency of having links with the armed Afghan insurgents, including the Haqqani network. They also said that the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, helped the Haqqani network in attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul on Sept. 13 and the huge truck bomb strike at the major U.S. military base at Wardak province of Afghanistan on Sept. 11. A total of 77 U.S. soldiers had been injured in the attack, coincided with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 attacks. Pakistan had dismissed the charges of helping the Haqqanis as irresponsible.

The relationship further soured when top U.S. officials threatened unilateral action against the Haqqani network and other Pakistan-based armed groups. The U.S. threats were taken very seriously in Pakistan and nearly 60 top political and religious leaders met at an emergency conference and threw weight behind the security forces to counter any U.S. ground offensive. Pakistan's Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani warned at a recent rare briefing to the members of parliament at the army headquarters that the United States will think 10 times before launching ground offensive in Pakistan.

Officials believe that hot verbal exchanges between the U.S. and Pakistani military leaders prompted Clinton's visit to Pakistan, which had not been officially announced by Pakistan and the United States until her arrival and even the U.S. embassy had denied the visit when section of Pakistani media had reported the visit.

Before Clinton landed in Islamabad, the U.S. administration, as per its traditions, told the mainstream American media that the Secretary of State will deliver a tough message to Pakistani leaders on militant groups. And when Clinton met Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, a U.S. daily said that she conveyed her tough message. She had also stated herself in Kabul, a day ahead of Islamabad arrival, that she would have a hard message for Pakistan to act against the militants.

Clinton was right to say in Kabul as she proved it in Islamabad and gave a warning that Pakistan must act in "days or weeks" against the Taliban and Haqqanis. The statement shows that the United States is frustrated at failure of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan to deal with Taliban in ten years. Pakistani analysts believe that the United States, as a policy, has to blame others for its failure in Afghanistan and it has Pakistan to use it as a scapegoat when withdrawal of the U.S. troops has already started.

The United States needs Pakistan in both cases in any possible dialogue with Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network and for any military action in its border regions against the militants who are thought to be crossing into Afghanistan for attacks. Pakistan, using its influence on militant groups, has already arranged talks between the U.S. officials and members of the Haqqani network a few months ago. That process had not yielded any results as both did not show any softness.

Clinton admitted that talks had been held with Haqqanis through Pakistan. Chief of Haqqani network Siraj Haqqani has also admitted contacts with the United States and other countries in recent interview. So if the United States requires Pakistan's help for military action or dialogue, it's better, as Pakistan would expect, to stop public accusations against security institutions and also look at Islamabad's legitimate interests in Afghanistan.
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US shifts demands from Pakistani military action to peace talks with armed groups
By Sebastian Abbot, The Associated Press | The Canadian Press
ISLAMABAD - Despite some tough talk, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent visit to Pakistan seemed to subtly soften Washington's stand on a key point of contention between the two countries: whether Islamabad should take military action against Pakistan-based insurgents fighting American troops in Afghanistan, or try to engage them in peace talks.

Clinton seemed to acknowledge during her two-day visit that ended Friday that help with a negotiated settlement is perhaps the best the U.S. can hope for from Pakistan. This shift in the U.S. stance could give Washington and Islamabad new room to co-operate on ending the Afghan war.

But serious barriers to negotiations remain. The U.S. believes that military force is still needed to push the Taliban and their allies to make concessions. Pakistan, which Washington alleges supports some of the militant groups, prefers on the other hand to reduce violence to induce the insurgents to come to the table.

Islamabad is also worried about being blamed if peace talks fail. It has long-standing ties with the armed groups, but the militants are unpredictable and resistant to pressure. Pakistan is furthermore unsure of exactly what kind of deal the U.S. and Afghan governments might strike with the insurgents, and the atmosphere is permeated by feelings of distrust on all sides.

The U.S. has long demanded that Pakistan take greater military action against Taliban militants and their allies who use Pakistani territory to regroup and to send fighters to attack forces in Afghanistan. Recently, the U.S. has pushed for an assault on the Haqqani militant network, which the U.S. alleges is supported by the Pakistan military's spy agency, the ISI. The U.S. deems the Haqqanis the greatest threat to American troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has denied supporting the Haqqanis, but has also made clear that it will not conduct an offensive against the group's safe haven in the North Waziristan tribal area, a position that has not changed despite the two-day visit by Clinton and other senior national security officials, including CIA chief David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey.

Many analysts believe Pakistan's refusal is driven by its belief that the Haqqanis could be key allies in Afghanistan after foreign forces withdraw, especially in countering the influence of archenemy India.

The Pakistani military, however, says that its failure to act against the Haqqanis is just a question of limited resources. It claims its troops are stretched too thin by operations in other parts of the tribal region of northwest Pakistan that are deemed a higher priority — a stance reiterated by the Pakistanis following talks with Clinton's delegation.

"There is limited capacity, and if the organization is overstretched and starts to develop cracks, that is counterproductive," said a senior Pakistani security official, speaking on condition of anonymity to comment on the outcome of the closed-door talks.

Clinton seemed to soften the U.S. stance during a town hall meeting in Islamabad. When asked whether the U.S. expects Pakistan to militarily tackle the Haqqani network or force them to the negotiating table, she said, "It's more the latter."

Clinton also confirmed that the U.S. had tried to reach out to the Haqqanis directly in peace efforts. She is the first U.S. official to publicly acknowledge the overtures, which were first reported by The Associated Press in August. She said the meeting was organized by the ISI.

The U.S. has not totally backed away from blunt public statements urging Pakistan to fight the Haqqanis. Clinton said Islamabad must rid the country "of terrorists who kill their own people and who cross the border to kill people in Afghanistan."

The tough message may be intended to avoid making the U.S. look weak in its policy toward a militant group accused of attacking American civilians and soldiers in Afghanistan. It could also be meant to keep up perceived pressure on the Haqqanis to get them to negotiate.

Pakistan doesn't believe the U.S. plan to use military action to force militants into peace talks will work — a disagreement that has bedeviled the process.

"In our culture, it may not work if you want to negotiate with the same adversary you are fighting," said the Pakistani security official. "You have to declare a pause in fighting if you want to give peace a chance."

Clinton made clear the U.S. feels otherwise, saying during the town hall meeting that experience has shown that only a combination of fighting and talking "will convince some to come to negotiations and will remove others who are totally opposed to peace and want to continue their violent attacks."

Pakistan is open to approaching the Taliban and their allies about participating in peace talks, but can't provide any guarantees that its efforts will succeed, said the security official.

"Contact does not mean that they are in our pockets," said the official. "Contact means we will suggest to them that they participate."

Both the Taliban and the Haqqanis have been difficult partners for Pakistan over the years.

In the late 1990s, the founder of the Haqqani network, Jalaluddin Haqqani, refused Islamabad's demand to hand over militants in his camps in Afghanistan who had carried out attacks inside Pakistan. Following the Sept. 11 2001 attacks, Taliban leader Mullah Omar refused Pakistan's plea to hand over al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.

Perhaps the greatest barrier to a potential peace deal, however, is that nobody seems to have a clear idea whether the Taliban and their allies have any interest in negotiating.

"We're not sure," said Clinton. "There may be no appetite for talking on the other side for ideological reasons or whatever other motivations."

After the U.S. met with a senior Haqqani official over the summer, the group allegedly carried out an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and staged a truck bombing days later that wounded 77 American soldiers.

The peace process also took a big blow with the assassination in Kabul of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was tasked with the government's outreach to the Taliban. It's still unclear who carried out the attack. The Afghan government has said it was planned in the Pakistani city of Quetta, the Taliban leadership's suspected base, and the interior minister accused the ISI of being involved. But no evidence has been provided.

The allegations have soured relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, as did a strategic partnership agreement that Kabul recently signed with India — the first of its kind that Afghanistan has reached with any country.

U.S. accusations that Pakistan has supported the Haqqani network have also increased feelings of mistrust on all sides.

"These kinds of public pronouncements don't help enhance the space for co-operation," said the Pakistani security official. "They badly affect the space, which is limited to begin with."

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Kathy Gannon, AP Special Regional Correspondent for Pakistan and Afghanistan, contributed to this report.
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Pakistani PM offers training to Afghan army
by Muhammad Tahir
ISLAMABAD, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani offered training to Afghan armed forces and renewed his country's support for the Afghan-led peace and reconciliation process, local media reported on Friday.

Pakistan's offer came days after Afghanistan and India signed a strategic partnership agreement which will allow India to train and equip Afghan security forces.

Pakistan on a number of occasions has offered imparting training to Afghan forces but Kabul has not accepted it.

"Pakistan is ready to train the Afghan army, police and administration to cope with the aftermath of the 2014 period," Prime Minister Gilani said in a meeting with an Afghan parliamentary delegation in Islamabad. The delegation was led by Ustad Mohaqiq, member of Afghan National Assembly or Wolesi Jirga and the Chairman of Commission on Law and Justice of Wolesi Jirga.

The Afghan delegation is visiting Islamabad at a time when Afghan government has suspended joint peace efforts with Pakistan after the last month assassination of Afgahn peace envoy Prof. Burhanuddin Rabbani. Afghan officials had claimed that plot was prepared in the Pakistani city of Quetta by Afghan Taliban. Pakistan rejected the claim but assured cooperation.

Prime Minister Gilani said that he has visited Afghanistan twice and met President Karzai along with Pakistan's military leadership and assured support to the Afghan peace process, adding that Pakistan supported the Afghan-led and Afghan-owned process of reconciliation.

"We want to see independent, prosperous and stable Afghanistan. My government will support any solution which will not destabilize Pakistan as was the case last time when this country had to host three million Afghan refugees", the Prime Minister stated.

He said that Pakistan had contributed 350 million U.S. dollars to take part in the rehabilitation of Afghanistan and awarded 2000 scholarships to the Afghan students who were now studying in various universities of Pakistan.

Ustad Mohaqiq advocated the reconciliation process in which Taliban should be included provided they accepted the Afghan constitution.

He rejected the policy of blaming each other and instead underscored the need of working closely against the common enemy.

He said both Afghanistan and Pakistan should work to accomplish the mission of Professor Burhaniuddin Rabbani who wanted to see both the countries as good neighbors and good friends.
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Some Afghan ministers have embezzled millions, according to anti-graft chief
October 22, 2011
KABUL (Reuters) - At least two Afghan cabinet ministers have embezzled millions of dollars of public money, the country's anti-graft chief said at the weekend, adding to Western pressure on President Hamid Karzai to clean up his government.

Donor countries say corruption in Karzai's administration is endemic, and a fundamental threat to their efforts to stabilize the country ahead of the end-2014 deadline for foreign combat troops to quit the country, having handed security responsibilities to Afghan institutions.

Billions of dollars in foreign aid have flowed into the country since a U.S.-led military operation threw the Taliban out of government 10 years ago, but the cash has paid for only limited infrastructure and development work, while violence is at its worst since 2001.

"There are former ministers too, but two or three current cabinet ministers have embezzled millions of dollars," said Azizullah Ludin, a Karzai appointee who heads the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption, speaking in his Kabul home.

Ludin said he had sent the cases to the Attorney General's office which will decide whether or not to prosecute, but he did not name the ministers involved or give details.

"Corruption in Afghanistan has damaged our reputation, withheld foreign aid and created distance between people and the government," Ludin said. "This must be stopped."

(Reporting by Mohammad Ibrahim; Writing by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Sugita Katyal)
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Overseas Afghans remit money to support families
By Abdul, Haleem
KABUL, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- "On average, I personally remit some 2,000 Dirham which is equal to 26,000 Afghanis (around 578 U.S. dollars) send to my family in Khost province each month," Katib Gul said.

Gul, 51, said that he along with his two sons and a nephew have been working in United Arab Emirates (UAE) capital Abu Dhabi and Al-Ain cities over the past 10 years, and have reasonable income to feed themselves and support family at home country.

Coming home on vocation to spend Eidul Adha -- the Muslims largest annual holiday begins Nov. 10, with family at home country, the clean shaved Gul said he would study working condition in Afghanistan if conducive, he would establish a cloth shop here in Afghan capital Kabul in the coming months.

However, he said he wants his sons and nephew to continue working in UAE and earn as much money as they can because they are young and energetic.

Another Afghan, introduced himself as Anzor and accompanying Katib Gul in the same flight from UAE to Kabul, said that he has been serving as driver in Abu Dhabi city.

Contrary to Katib Gul, Anzor was a bearded and seemed younger than Gul. He said he has no plan to shift to Afghanistan at least in near future.

"My salary as driver in Abu Dhabi is reasonable and sends 1,200 Dirham to my family in Paktia province every month. I have no plan to quit my job in near future," Anzor said.

Katib Gul and Anzor are not alone that have been contributing in rebuilding their country's national economy by remittances.

In the war-torn Afghanistan, many more families, possibly thousands are dependent on relatives living abroad.

"My brother-in-law sends 400 dollars from Canada each month to help me run my life in Kabul smoothly," a Kabul resident Farid said.

Although there is no statistic data about the figure of Afghans working abroad and the remittances sending home, according to Anzor, thousands of Afghans have been working in different cities of UAE and remitting money to their home country.

Afghanistan is a war-battered country and it is difficult to find a job with regular income, Anzor maintained while referring to the high rate of unemployment and poverty in his hometown.

"I had examined my fortune in Afghanistan in past but failed to find a regular income in my home province Paktia and the capital city Kabul to feed my children properly," Anzor, the father of five, said.

Afghanistan has been recovering from over three decades of war aftermath, even though militancy has been continuing.

More than nine million people out of the country's some 26 million population, according to Minister for Agriculture and Livestock Mohammad Asif Rahimi, are living under poverty line in the war-ravaged Afghanistan.

The grim economic situation, high rate of unemployment and poverty are tangible in each corner of the country as taking a round to Kabul squares in the morning time shows that bulk of daily wagers waiting to be hired.

The war-torn Afghanistan is largely relying on agricultural products, and according to Rahimi, 12 percent of Afghan land is arable but less than six percent is currently cultivated.
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Turban-searching rule disrespectful, say Afghan men
Sydney Morning Herald October 22, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Following a spate of assassinations using explosives hidden in headgear, spot checks have angered locals, writes Alissa Rubin.

Straight-backed, his bearing almost regal, Malik Niaz, 82, entered the Afghan President's compound this month proudly wearing his best turban: a silk one from Turkestan in the north of the country, grey and black and white, its long tail draped over his shoulder.

He watched in disbelief as the guard asked the elder ahead of him to remove his turban and lay it on the table. Niaz, who had journeyed more than eight hours on rugged roads, shuddered.

''That made us so embarrassed, and it made me so sad,'' he said. ''I felt dishonoured when the guard said,'' he hesitated, as if even recalling the words made him upset, '' 'undo your turban'.''

''I had wanted to see the President,'' he added, ''but after that search, I thought it would have been better if I had not come.''

The turban-searching rule at President Hamid Karzai's presidential palace has been rigorously enforced since the assassination of the head of Afghanistan's peace process, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was killed by a bomb hidden in the attacker's turban. It was the third such killing in four months, leading youths in Kabul to coin the word ''Turbanator'' and US soldiers to invent the new acronym TBIED, for turban-borne improvised explosive device.

The other two instances were the killing in July of Kandahar's senior cleric as he prayed in a mosque, and a few weeks later the killing of Kandahar's mayor.

The searches are deeply disturbing for most Afghan men, as the turban signifies one's religious faith and is a national dress - not to mention being something of a fashion statement.

Turbans are worn across the Muslim world because the Prophet Muhammad was believed to have worn one, and they are especially favoured by imams and mullahs. In Afghanistan, which is a deeply pious country, usage is broader, with dozens of styles and colours. There are ones made of synthetics from Pakistan that cost about $20, silk ones from Herat that cost twice as much and ones made of more luxuriant silks from the north of Afghanistan that cost still more.

However, most turbans in Afghanistan now - and in the pre-Taliban era - are subtle greys and charcoals, deep olive greens, lighter greens and browns.

On the back streets of Kabul's central bazaar, where the turbans are sold neatly folded, thin as a pamphlet and wrapped in torn pages from old magazines, many turban wearers are so angry about the situation that they blame the Americans. Before their arrival, intrusive searches were unknown.

''My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my prophet wore a turban, and that's why I wear it,'' said an older man, looking irritable at the question, adding: ''Who brought these turban bombers and turban searchers? You did,'' he said angrily, referring to Westerners, which many Afghans feel are agents of the decline of the society.

Many clerics take a more contemplative view. Faith transcends costume, and a man can pray in any outfit as long as the prayer comes from the heart, but it is an honour to God to dress properly, said Abdul Raouf Nafee, the mullah at the Herati mosque in central Kabul.

As an example, he talked about butchers: ''Even if their clothes are dirty with blood, they can pray and God will accept their prayers, but it's kind of disrespectful. God likes beauty and organisation, but he will accept your prayers,'' Nafee said.

There is also a darker view of turban attacks: that the bombers were so distraught that their turbans' holiness no longer mattered, and that they were forced to use any means available to take revenge on the Americans.

''Is it wrong to respond to the killings of the civilians that you do with your drones, that shoot from the air and do not even have pilots?'' asked Hajji Ahmad Farid, a mullah and a conservative member of Parliament from an insurgent-dominated area of Kapisa province, near Kabul. ''Think about why a man blows himself up: some foreign soldiers go to his house and accuse him and tie his hands and dishonour him and search his wife and his daughters, and this poor man is just watching and can do nothing.

''When a man has lost his dignity, he does not care about his shawl or his turban.''
The New York Times

Crowds weep as slain former Afghan president buried
Mirwais Harooni and Hamid Shalizi, Reuters September 23, 2011, 9:03 pm
KABUL (Reuters) - Weeping Afghans gathered under tight security on Friday to bury former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, the government's chief peace negotiator killed this week by a suicide bomber posing as a Taliban envoy with a message about possible talks.

After prayers at the presidential palace, a coffin draped in the black, red and green national flag was taken to a hilltop in the Wazir Akbar Khan district for burial.

Crowds along the procession route pushed, shoved and clambered their way through the throngs of mourners to touch Rabbani's coffin as it made its way toward the burial site.

Others chanted "God is great" as the coffin passed by. Hundreds more were clustered on the hilltop around his grave.

Bursts of automatic gunfire briefly unsettled the capital as police fired shots into the air to disperse large groups who moved toward the burial site without having passed tight security checks.

Streets surrounding the capital's political and diplomatic heart were blocked-off and almost empty.

Special forces guarding the funeral procession route leading to "swimming pool hill," a small outcrop overlooking Kabul's diplomatic enclave where the Taliban once carried out executions in a disused, Soviet-built pool.

Rabbani was killed by a man who claimed to be a Taliban envoy with a message of peace from the insurgent leadership.

His death has reignited long-simmering ethnic tensions, stirring fears of retribution. But his supporters and political allies called for a peaceful burial on Friday.

"We will avenge the death of our leader but today, please be calm," said a man using a loudspeaker.

Others rushed to take control of the microphone and shouted slogans attacking the government and foreign troops operating in the country.

"Death to the American allies," one man roared before a defense ministry official ordered the speakers switched off.

MOST DIFFICULT TIME
Car windscreens and walls along normally congested roads were covered with posters bearing the face of Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik and former mujahideen resistance fighter who became president after the fall of the Soviet-backed regime.

"Professor Rabbani's martyrdom is a big loss for Afghanistan and it is a sad day for all of us," said restaurant owner Mohammad Zia.

One of Zia's customers sat sipping tea beneath a window bearing Rabbani's photo and added: "Rabbani was killed at the most difficult time for Afghans, when security is at it's worst and people feel hopelessness."

Condolences and tributes poured in from prominent Afghans and foreign governments condemning Tuesday's killing and urging Afghans not to give up on Rabbani's fledgling peace process.

President Hamid Karzai, who chose Rabbani to head the High Peace Council last October, cut short his trip to the United Nations General Assembly in New York to return for the burial.

He has come under intense criticism from political opponents who say he instructed Rabbani to meet with the assassin. Karzai's office has said he was not involved.

Rabbani's protege and former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, one of Karzai's most long-standing critics, wept as the coffin was taken up the hill.

"Today we bury our respected leader but we will not keep silent," he shouted, prompting a huge roar from the crowd.
(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Ed Lane)

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Dignitaries pay tribute to slain Afghan ex-leader
Associated Press By AMIR SHAH and CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA 23/09/2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Dignitaries on Friday paid tribute before the coffin of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was killed by a suicide bomber claiming to carry a message of peace from the Taliban.

President Hamid Karzai, Afghan lawmakers and foreign ambassadors gathered at the presidential palace at the beginning of the funeral ceremony for Rabbani, whose casket is draped in a red, black and green national flag.

"It is our responsibility to act against those who are enemies of peace," said Karzai, who hailed Rabbani as a tireless advocate for reconciliation and "the martyr of the path of peace."

The president said Afghans should not despair over Rabbani's death, but instead should escalate efforts to bring an end to years of fighting in Afghanistan.

"Today we are witnessing one of the biggest and saddest events of this important political time in the history of the world," said Salahuddin Rabbani, the former president's son. He urged the Afghan government to aggressively investigate the killing.

Mourners prayed, and a military band played the national anthem. Then the casket was carried by uniformed servicemen with caps and white gloves, marching stiffly.

The ex-president headed Afghanistan's High Peace Council, which was seeking to reconcile the nation's warring factions. He was killed Tuesday evening in Kabul by an assassin who visited his home under the guise of delivering a message from the insurgency.

The 70-year-old Rabbani was the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, which helped overthrow Taliban rule during the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. The peace council that he headed was set up by Karzai to work toward a political solution to the conflict.

It has made little headway since it was formed a year ago, but it is backed by many in the international community as helping move toward a settlement.

The suicide attacker who killed Rabbani had a a bomb in his turban, and gained entry to the former president's home by convincing officials, including Karzai's advisers, that he represented the Taliban leadership and wanted to discuss reconciliation.

Rabbani's death only deepens rifts between the country's ethnic minorities, especially between those who made up the Northern Alliance — including Tajiks like Rabbani — and the majority Pashtun, who make up the backbone of the Taliban.
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Afghanistan's Abdullah Abdullah: The Taliban Does Not Believe In Peace Talks
September 22, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The death of former Afghan president and leading peace negotiator Burhanuddin Rabbani in a brazen suicide attack has shocked Afghanistan and dealt a blow to hopes of a negotiated settlement with the insurgency.

Rabbani was killed on September 20 in his home during an audience with a man who said he was bearing a "special message" from Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

Who will fill Rabbani's shoes? Can anyone?

Former Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah believes a new High Peace Council leader can be found, but also thinks the Taliban doesn't believe in peace talks. He told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that until Pakistan severs all its ties with the Taliban, peace will remain out of reach.

RFE/RL correspondent Zarif Nazar spoke to Abdullah, who leads the Coalition for Change and Hope, Afghanistan's main democratic political opposition group.

RFE/RL: What are your views on the terrorist attack that killed Rabbani?

Abdullah Abdullah: It was a tragic event and a loss to the people of Afghanistan. A person who dedicated 50 years of his life to attaining peace was unfortunately killed by the enemy of Afghanistan and that of the Afghan people. They have committed a crime against the people of Afghanistan and brought death to thousands of innocent Afghans. They showed their real faces, their dark intentions, and because of this, innocent blood was shed [on September 20].

The enemy of Afghanistan wants to destroy everything good and positive in the country [with] the kinds of atrocities they have committed over the years. For all [Rabbani's] work toward achieving peace and his work toward reconciliation, for them to respond in this way, shows the dark motives and character of this group. "

RFE/RL: Who do you think was behind the assassination?

Abdullah: To answer this, we must begin a full and comprehensive investigation. It might be too early to say, but questions should be asked as to how these men entered Rabbani's compound and how they received [an] audience with him. These are the first questions that come to mind.

We all know who was behind these attacks, but it is important to investigate how it was done. Unfortunately, this tragic event wasn't the first, nor will it be the last. For this reason, it is important to find answers so the people of Afghanistan know how it was carried out.

RFE/RL: What plans are there for the future of the Peace Council? Who can fill Rabbani's shoes?

Abdullah: We will begin the process in a few days time, after things have settled down. It's very difficult to replace a man who has dedicated most of his life to the betterment of his country. But if we all join hands and continue to represent -- and work for -- the people, the hole Rabbani has left might be filled.

RFE/RL: What are your thoughts on the Peace Council's efforts to try and find a negotiated settlement?

Abdullah: Thus far, the Taliban have not demonstrated even one sign of interest of seriously coming to the table to discuss a political settlement. The attempt at peace talks has been the only approach [taken so far]. This has encouraged the Taliban to increase the violence and create fear among the people. They think that using this strategy will allow them to regain power in Afghanistan.

Even before this incident, I was confident that the Taliban does not believe in peace talks, that they want to overthrow the current government, that they want to create an Islamic state, and that every crime they commit is done under the pretense of Islam.

There is also continued support for the Taliban from our neighbor [Pakistan]. Day by day, the government is losing people's support and trust. Government bodies like the police and military have not been developed, and there is no rule of law. So this encourages the Taliban to continue terrorist attacks and bring harm to the people of Afghanistan.

If there is to be a serious plan to end this, then more pressure must be placed on Pakistan to sever its ties with the Taliban.

Panetta Says Pakistan Haven for Afghan Attacks Is ‘Unacceptable’
Bloomberg By Viola Gienger Sep 15, 2011
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta vowed action to stop a Pakistan-based militant group from staging “unacceptable” attacks in Afghanistan and then fleeing back to their haven across the border.

“I’m not going to talk about how we’re going to respond,” Panetta told reporters traveling with him yesterday to San Francisco. “I’ll just let you know we are not going to allow these kinds of attacks to go on.”

U.S. officials have pinned a weekend truck bomb attack and this week’s assault on the U.S. Embassy and NATO coalition headquarters in Kabul, the Afghan capital, on the Jalaluddin Haqqani group, a guerrilla faction with ties to Pakistan’s military intelligence agency. The network operates largely from a sanctuary in Pakistan’s borderland with Afghanistan.

The Obama administration has increased diplomatic and financial pressure on Pakistan to move more quickly and aggressively against militant networks that the U.S. says are targeting the country’s own people as well as its neighbors. Relations fell to a new low after American special operations forces killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a May raid within Pakistan without that government’s knowledge.

“I’m very concerned about the Haqqani attacks because, No. 1, they’re killing people, killing our forces,” Panetta said. “No. 2, they escape back into what is a safe haven in Pakistan, and that’s unacceptable.”

Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are in California for a day of annual talks today with their Australian counterparts. Decisive Action

Clinton, visiting the Pakistani capital Islamabad in May for talks that included Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. expects Pakistan’s leaders to take “decisive” action against extremist groups such as the Haqqani guerrillas in North Waziristan.

“Many of the world’s most vicious terrorists have been living in Pakistan,” Clinton said in a visit after the bin Laden raid. “There is much more work that is required and it is urgent.”

In Afghanistan, the U.S. and its coalition partners are fighting the Taliban and associated groups whose leaders operate from the tribal regions of Pakistan.

The weekend truck bombing created a crater 20 feet (6 meters) long and 9 feet deep, said Panetta, who took office July 1 after serving as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, where he helped lead the bin Laden raid. Looking for Evidence

The U.S. suspects the Haqqani network also was behind the attack two days ago on the embassy, and continues to look for evidence that might prove the link, Panetta said. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said the assault didn’t seriously endanger his embassy.

“Time and again, we’ve urged the Pakistanis to exercise their influence over these kinds of attacks from the Haqqanis,” the defense chief said. “We’ve made very little progress in that area.”

Afghan and coalition forces did manage to quell the firefight, Panetta said, repeating official U.S. assertions that the assault was more an indicator of Taliban weakness than strength. He said he was conducting an unrelated secure video conference with General John Allen, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, when the standoff was under way in the streets of Kabul.

“Anytime they can make their way into Kabul, into the capital, that’s cause for concern,” Panetta said. “At the same time, the forces did respond and respond quickly. Casualties were limited and we were able to basically defeat their effort.”

Panetta said Allen assured him the coalition was continuing to reduce levels of violence overall in Afghanistan and “seriously weaken” the Taliban.

“His view, and I share it, is that these kind of attacks - - sporadic attacks and assassination attempts -- are more a reflection of the fact that they’re losing their ability to be able to attack our forces on a broader scale,” Panetta said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Viola Gienger in San Francisco at vgienger@bloomberg.net.

 

Pakistan hits back at US criticism in Kabul attack
Associated Press By ZARAR KHAN Thursday, Sep. 15, 2011
American criticism of Islamabad's failure to pursue the Haqqani militant network blamed for this week's attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul risks damaging anti-terror cooperation between the two countries, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry warned Thursday.

Washington wants to degrade the insurgency in Afghanistan before handing over security responsibilities to Afghan forces and pulling out. Pakistan's reluctance to attack the Haqqani group, which U.S. officials say has safe havens in Pakistan and is behind much of the violence in Afghanistan, is a major source of tension.

On Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other U.S. officials said the Haqqani group was behind the 20-hour assault on the embassy in Kabul. Panetta expressed frustration with Pakistan and issued what was construed in Pakistan as a veiled warning that Washington may take unilateral action against the militants.

Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tehmina Janjua said Thursday that Panetta's remarks were "out of line with the cooperation that exists between the two countries in the war against terrorism." Pakistan's army, which controls defense and foreign policy, declined comment on his remarks.

Islamabad has resisted attacking the Haqqanis because they do not pose a direct threat to Pakistan. The army is engaged in a bloody fight with other militant groups. It fears that making enemies of the Haqqanis now could tip the country into even greater chaos.

The army also believes it will be able to use the group, with which it has ties going back to the U.S.-backed resistance against Soviet rule in Afghanistan, to ensure its arch-enemy India does not gain a foothold there once the American troops leave.

Panetta said it was unacceptable that the Haqqanis are able to launch attacks and then flee to safe havens across the border in Pakistan. "The message they (the Pakistanis) need to know is: we're going to do everything we can to defend our forces," Panetta told reporters.

U.S. and Afghan officials say the Haqqanis are behind many of the high-profile attacks in the Afghan capital in recent years, including a 2009 assault on the Indian embassy. The two nations have alleged that the group is assisted by Pakistan's powerful spy agency, a charge Pakistan denies.

The United States has fired scores of missiles at Haqqani fighters in North Waziristan since 2008, killing many low and midlevel fighters. Those attacks were initially tolerated by Pakistani authorities but have developed into another irritant in ties.

In recent months, Pakistani officials have alleged that militants are crossing over from Afghanistan and attacking Pakistani troops and civilians, leading them to complain of "safe havens" in Afghanistan. Janjua raised this issue, saying NATO and the U.S. should also address it.
Washington has given Islamabad $20 billion in aid since 2001, most of it to the military, to try to secure its cooperation. It can't send ground troops across the border to attack the Haqqanis because that would likely cause a nationalist backlash that could destabilize Pakistan and create divisions in the army, where many soldiers do not support the top brass' alliance with Washington.

Karzai adviser says most Afghans want security pact keeping US forces in country indefinitely
 

By Associated Press, The Washington Post August 31
QUANTICO, Va. — Most Afghans want a binding security pact with the United States that would keep American troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, a senior adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday.

Negotiations for such a pact have lagged in part because “some in the Afghan government are trying to sabotage it,” said Taj Ayubi, minister-counselor to Karzai.

Ayubi was not specific, but was apparently referring to factions within the weak central government with ties to Iran, or to a lesser extent, Pakistan or the Taliban insurgency. Iran opposes any U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, and U.S. and other officials say Iran is trying to use its growing influence in neighboring Afghanistan to lobby against a deal that would provide the U.S. a long-term military perch.

The agreement, now in draft form, would give the U.S. use of Afghan-run or jointly-run bases after 2014, when the formal combat role is set to end. Senior U.S. officials have said its central function is to provide assurance to Afghans that the U.S. will not shut the door on Afghanistan in 2014, while establishing terms for continued U.S. counterterrorism, training and counter-narcotics operations.

U.S. officials stress that U.S. military presence will be at Afghanistan’s invitation.

Ayubi said the document would give security assurances “from 2014 until we can stand on our own.”

The agreement is not expected to include firm deadlines for the close of U.S operations.

After nearly 10 years of war, many Afghans are weary of foreign troops and blame the flood of U.S. cash for various security and stability programs for distorting the economy and sucking up a corps of talented Afghans for contract labor. Still, Ayubi predicted broad backing for an agreement once it is in hand.

The U.S. public and Congress are increasingly frustrated by the war, with a majority in public opinion polls now saying it is probably not worth fighting.

“Most people in Afghanistan are strongly in favor of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan,” Ayubi told an audience at Marine Corps University.

“They are in favor of a long-term strategic agreement that includes basic rights for the U.S. military, despite the objections of neighbor states” he said. “Afghanistan is the most logical place for the U.S. to have a base.”

Spelling out that some level of U.S. forces intend to remain would strengthen Karzai’s hand against foreign meddling and in any eventual political negotiation with the Taliban, Ayubi suggested.

“Basing rights would bring a lot of stability and it would also convince the outside actors that the U.S. is there to stay,” he said.

Two U.S. officials said somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 troops would probably be needed for the smaller role envisioned after 2014, but the security pact is not expected to give exact parameters.

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said President Barack Obama has not made any decisions about U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014.

“Those decisions will be made at the appropriate time, based on our interests and conditions on the ground,” she said.

Karzai sought the agreement more than a year ago amid growing Afghan concern that the U.S. planned a rapid military withdrawal. The U.S. is the biggest international backer of Karzai’s government and its approximately 100,000 troops are a security buffer against the Taliban insurgency that opposes him.

The pact would not have the force of law, although Afghanistan is expected to seek consensus from a panel of elders called a loya jirga. The United States is not expected to submit the document to Congress for approval.

Afghan officials told The Associated Press this week that the document is too vague and does not go far enough to justify the risk they will take in signing it.

A delegation led by Afghanistan’s national security adviser will be in Washington next week for a third round of talks on the agreement. A senior U.S. official and two Afghan officials with knowledge of the talks said the two countries intend to finish an agreement before an international conference on Afghanistan’s future to be held in Bonn, Germany, in early December. The NSC’s Hayden said there is no deadline to complete negotiations.

Among the sticking points being negotiated are which troops will take the lead in conducting nighttime kill-and-capture raids, a flash point for anger over foreign meddling in Afghanistan and whether detention operations will be run by the Afghans or Americans.
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August 2011 Deadliest Month for US in Afghanistan
VOA News September 1, 2011
August was the deadliest month for the U.S. military so far in the decade-long war in Afghanistan.

A total of 66 U.S. troops died last month, topping by one the death toll for July 2010, which previously had been the deadliest single month for the United States in Afghanistan since 2001.

August's death toll includes the 30 U.S. troops killed in the downing of a Chinook helicopter by insurgents in eastern Afghanistan. The dead included members of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs. It was the worst loss of life for the United States in a single incident during the Afghan war.

Meanwhile, NATO said one of its service members died Wednesday in a bomb blast in eastern Afghanistan. The coalition did not provide any additional details.

More than 390 international troops have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year.

Taliban insurgents are increasingly using improvised explosive devices to target both security forces and Afghan civilians.

Last month, the United Nations said the number of deaths from roadside bombs increased by 17 percent this year compared to the same period in 2010, making them the single-largest killer of civilians in the first half of this year.
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Karzai May Have Met Taliban Envoy During Saudi Visit
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 31 August 2011
At time Afghan President Hamid Karzai was visiting Saudi Arabia, representatives of the Taliban and party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are said to have been in the country too.

Reports suggest that President Hamid Karzai has won Saudi Arabia's support for the peace process with the Taliban.

President Karzai last week flew to Saudi Arabia for Umrah and also to seek help from King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz for peace and stability in Afghanistan.

An Afghan diplomat has told The Express Tribune that Saudi Arabia had invited several Afghan leaders mainly for Umrah, but the visit provided an opportunity to Afghans to share proposals for the reconciliation process.

Head of political affairs for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Party of Hezb-e-Islami, Dr Ghairat Baheer, is also said to be in Saudi Arabia to discuss the country's support in the reconciliation process.

But Qutbuddin Helal, an aide to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, confirmed the presence of their representative in Saudi Arabia at the time President Karzai was visiting the country, but said this has nothing to do with Karzai's visit and there hasn't been any talks taking place between our representative and Karzai.

There are also reports that some Taliban leaders were invited by the Saudi government during the time President Karzai was visiting the country.

The Afghan Diplomat has told the Pakistani paper on condition of anonymity that the Afghan leader in his meeting with King Abdullah sought Saudi help in the ‘urgently needed' reconciliation efforts to end more bloodshed.

But the Afghan government described the comments as rumours.
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Report: Up to $60 Billion Wasted in Iraq, Afghanistan
VOA News August 31, 2011 Michael Bowman
Capitol Hill - The United States' extensive outsourcing of military functions in war zones has been controversial since the beginning of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A report by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting has heightened concerns with details of allegations of billions of dollars lost due to waste and corruption.

To lessen wartime strains on America’s all-volunteer military force, the Pentagon hires private businesses to provide a vast array of support services.

Reliance on contractors expanded drastically during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, feeding what is now a large for-profit military industry funded by U.S. taxpayers.

The commission's co-chairman, Michael Thibault says not all of the money has been well-spent.

“Total spending on contract and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to $206 billion. We estimate that $31-$60 billion of that total has been or is being lost to waste and fraud,” said Thibault.

At a news conference Wednesday, Thibault stressed that the commission's aim is not to attack the reputations of individual contractors, but rather to identify problems in the government’s contracting process. He says many problems have been identified.

“The cost of contract support has been unnecessarily high. [The U.S.] government has not effectively managed contracts to promote competition, reward good performance, and impose accountability for poor performance and misconduct by both government and contractor personnel,” Thibault said.

As an example of counter-productive efforts, the commission alleges that some U.S. funds for construction projects in Afghanistan wound up in the hands of insurgents battling American troops.

Contractors do everything from serving meals to troops to building power plants and guarding diplomats.

The commission urges an overhaul of government contracting procedures in war zones, and even phasing out the use of contractors for certain functions.

The other commission co-chairman is former Congressman Christopher Shays.

“The way forward demands reform. With tens of billions of dollars already wasted, with the prospect of more to follow, and with the risk of re-creating these problems the next time America faces a contingency, denial and delay are not good options,” said Shays.

Questions surrounding private military contractors are not new. In 2007, Congress held hearings on allegations that contractors targeted Iraqi civilians with excessive and reckless force. Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater, a well-known military contracting firm, denied any wrongdoing by his employees.

“I disagree with the assertion that they acted like cowboys,” Prince said.

Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia says the commission’s report is a call to action for Congress. “These recommendations will be listened to and, when appropriate, acted on by the United States Congress,” Webb said.

In May, the Congressional Research Service reported that the United States had 155,000 private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with 145,000 uniformed personnel.
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US defence contractors ‘waste’ $12m a day
Financial Times By Anna Fifield August 31, 2011
Washington - Defence contractors have wasted or lost to fraud as much as $60bn over the past 10 years, according to a report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The report, released on Wednesday, will exacerbate fears that fiscal discipline at the US Pentagon is lacking at a time when looming budget cuts could lead to greater reliance on outside contractors.

It found that at least $31bn had been wasted through poor planning and management – the equivalent of $12m a day since the invasion of Afghanistan.

“Despite some progress, the government remains unable to provide effective large-scale contract management and oversight,” said Christopher Shays, a former congressman from Connecticut who co-chaired the independent commission. This fact was “troubling”, given that contractors had been considered part of the deployment force for more than 20 years.

“Yet the government was not prepared to go into Afghanistan in 2001, or Iraq in 2003, using large numbers of contractors,” he said. The 240-page report, sent to Congress on Wednesday, found that the US military needed “heavy support” from contractors during military or emergency operations as a result of large-scale reductions in the federal acquisition workforce and in support units within the military during the 1990s. More than 260,000 contractor employees have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan, at times outnumbering the military they support.

The top contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan during the decade surveyed was Kellogg, Brown & Root, an engineering and construction services company.

It earned $40.8bn during the decade, while Agility and DynCorp earned $9bn and $7.4bn, respectively.

As an example of waste, the report cites $38.6bn that Congress allocated between 2006 and 2011 for training the Afghan national security force, saying that such a project was “unsustainable” and far exceed what the Kabul government could absorb.

“We believe as much or more waste may develop as US-funded programmes and projects turn out to be unsustainable by the Iraqi and Afghanistan governments,” said Michael Thibault, former deputy director of the Defence Contract Audit Agency and the other co-chair of the commission. “Both government and contractors have contributed to this waste.”

The commission found inadequate competition for contracts, such as a $36.3bn army logistics contract awarded to KBR in 2001 as the sole provider.

The report also noted that US funds had been diverted to warlords and insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan as a cost of doing business in the countries, adding that while there was no official estimate of how much was diverted, it was a “significant percentage” of a project’s cost.

During a trip to Afghanistan in March this year, the commission found that extortion of funds from US construction and transportation projects was the second-biggest funding source for insurgent groups.

The findings will probably alarm members of Congress, as the federal budget comes under intense scrutiny. The Pentagon has the task of finding $400bn in budget cuts over the next 12 years, but could have to save an additional $600bn if lawmakers cannot agree on cuts as part of a budget deal.

The commission recommended that the government should phase out the use of private security contractors for certain functions, improve inter-agency co-ordination and expand the authority of civilian and military officials responsible for contingency contracting.

The Pentagon said it shared the commission’s commitment to improving wartime contracting. “We are supportive of efforts to reduce waste and improve on the value we obtain for the dollars we spend in support of contingency operations,” said Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.

“Monitoring, assessing, and taking corrective action is a continuous process within the department, and we continually improve our planning, oversight, and the management of contractors on the battlefield,” he said.

Some of the steps taken to improve contingency contracting included the investigation and prosecution of individuals engaging in fraud, increased staffing for contract oversight, and better training for deployed military supervising and interacting with contractor personnel, Col Lapan said.

The report comes on the heels of a study by the non-profit Center for Public Integrity that found that the value of Pentagon contracts awarded without competitive bidding almost tripled over the same time period, from $50bn in 2001 to more than $140bn last year.

A report by the Senate’s Democratic-majority foreign relations committee in June concluded that the decade-long US effort to build a new Afghanistan had dramatically distorted the local economy and its few successes were unlikely to survive the military withdrawal, due to begin next month.
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Pakistan fuels Afghan bombs
U.S. urges tighter border controls on fertilizer supplies
Associated Press By Chris Brummitt 01/09/2011
Multan, Pakistan - The main ingredient in most of the homemade bombs that have killed hundreds of American troops in Afghanistan is fertilizer produced by a single company in Pakistan, where the U.S. has been pushing unsuccessfully for greater regulation.

Enough calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer for at least 140,000 bombs was legally produced last year by Pakarab Fertilizers Ltd., then smuggled by militants and their suppliers across the porous border into southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. military says around 80 percent of Afghan bombs are made with the fertilizer, which becomes a powerful explosive when mixed with fuel oil. The rest are made from military-grade munitions like mines or shells.

The United States began talks a year and a half ago with Pakistani officials and Pakarab, one of the country's largest companies. But there is still no regulation of distribution and sale of calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer.

"If you have a host country that has a factory making a substance that ultimately becomes the problem, then that country has to contribute at least half the solution," said Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who led a congressional delegation to Pakistan last week to press army and civilian leaders for action. Issue strains relations

U.S. officials say Pakistan and Pakarab have expressed willingness to regulate the fertilizer, which is also widely used in the manufacture of bombs used by insurgents to kill thousands of soldiers and civilians inside Pakistan. They acknowledge the difficulties: 15 years after ammonium nitrate was used in the Oklahoma City bombings, the U.S. government presented its proposals to regulate it Aug. 2.

But with the death toll from homemade bombs rising almost daily inside Afghanistan, continuing inaction by Pakistani authorities will add more strain to a U.S.-Pakistani relationship already frayed by allegations that Islamabad is aiding Afghan insurgents on its side of the border.

"This is a test," Casey said. "The key thing now is to see results." All exports are illicit

The only producer of calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Pakistan, Pakarab operates two factories in Punjab province, the country's agricultural heartland.

The largest is on the outskirts of Multan, an ancient city surrounded by thousands of acres of mango orchards and cotton fields.

Pakistani fertilizer producers are not permitted to export to Afghanistan because they are subsidized by the government and their products are meant for domestic use only. But the low price of fertilizer in Pakistan, and a chronic shortage in Afghanistan, has meant that smuggling has long been rife.
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Petraeus Bids Farewell to US Military
VOA News August 31, 2011 Luis Ramirez
Pentagon - General David Petraeus bid farewell to the U.S. military where he served for 37 years. He is credited, among other things, with turning around the U.S.-led war in Iraq and working to contain violence in Afghanistan, where he commanded U.S. forces.

In a ceremony with much pomp, the U.S. military said goodbye to one of its generals considered a star by many. In his 37 years in the army, Petraeus had many successes, most recently commanding U.S. forces both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is best remembered for changing the way U.S. forces deal with counterinsurgency conflicts in the post-Cold War era. He leaves the military as concerns grow over the Pentagon's plan to slash more than $350 billion from its budget in the next 10 years.

In his parting remarks at Fort Myer outside Washington Wednesday, Petraeus warned against cutting too deeply.

"I do believe that we have re-learned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don't always get to fight the wars for which we are most prepared or most inclined," Petraeus said. "Given that reality, we will need to maintain the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere."

Petraeus heads to a new job as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) next week, a post previously held by the new Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta.

Nora Bensahel is Deputy Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. She says Petraeus changed the conventional U.S. military strategy of killing or capturing those who attack the United States - a strategy she says had further enflamed violence in Iraq. Petraeus' new approach, she says, brought down the level of violence.

"The counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy that was executed in Iraq starting in late 2006 and through the rest of General Petraeus' tenure there was, instead of staying at a far distance and trying to kill the adversary was a true counterinsurgency strategy of having troops live within the population areas, have a permanent presence there so that they could provide 24-hour protection and getting to know the population to get tips on who was involved in the various activities," Bensahel explained.

The general chose to retire from the military before going to the CIA as some in Washington raised questions of whether he might militarize the intelligence service, which has already come under criticism for its alleged use of unmanned aircraft and direct attacks against specific targets.
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Afghanistan's Noor Eye Hospital Draws 400 Patients Each Day
The Huffington Post - Aug 31 06:47am
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Had they treated Nasaratullah sooner, the doctors might have been able to save the Afghan baby's eye, which was riddled with cancer.

Instead, the doctors at Noor Eye Hospital, a rundown facility in the Afghan capital overrun with 400 patients a day, had to remove it.

"Unfortunately, people come to us very late," Dr. Najib Osmani said looking up from the operating table where his tiny six-month-old patient, still anesthetized, rested in purple pajamas. "In early stages, this is curable. You can save the eyes, the sight – everything. Not in Afghanistan."

Eye care is a casualty of Afghanistan's tortured history. Eye clinics exist in only a few major Afghan cities. There are only six ophthalmologists for every 1 million Afghans. The country's lack of roads, mountainous terrain, extreme poverty and three decades of civil unrest are immense roadblocks to getting care – and giving it.

Roughly 1.5 million Afghans are visually impaired, according to the Ministry of Public Health. Every year, around 25,000 Afghans lose vision in one of their eyes.

Nasaratullah, a round-faced boy from eastern Afghanistan, has retinoblastoma, a rare cancerous tumor in his retina. After removing it, Osmani embedded a whitish glass ball, which later can be replaced with an artificial eye.

The infant's other eye appears healthy now, but there is a 40 percent chance that cancer will develop in it as well, the doctor said.

"I pray the other eye is OK," Osmani said. "At least we can refer him to neighboring countries for better treatment, radiation or chemotherapy."

Simpler vision problems can be easily treated in Afghanistan – if patients can get access to care.

Sixty percent of all blindness in Afghanistan is blamed on cataracts, which are removed in simple operations common in the developed world. But in Afghanistan, only 15,000 cataract surgeries are performed each year, not even enough to keep up with new cases and causing the huge backlog of cases – 200,000 by some estimates – to grow even more.

Babi Dukther, a 45-year-old woman from Kabul, is one of the lucky ones. On a hot day in the dusty capital, she walked barefoot into one of the hospital's operating rooms where a man was still swabbing the floor with a dirty mop.

"My eyes have gotten weaker for five or six months, and in the last month, it got worse," the mother of seven said as she lay down on the operating table to have a cataract removed from her left eye. "When I look, it's like something is coming down from the sky – like it's raining or snowing."

Doctors perform 15 to 20 operations at the hospital each day. With more space, beds and equipment, they could do more.

"We have too many patients," Dr. Yosuf Mahboob said. "It's too crowded. We don't have enough rooms for checkups."

Patients start lining up outside the hospital at around 7:30 a.m. There's plenty of pushing and shoving to get to two tiny registration windows – one for men and the other for women.

Patients thrust their fists, clutching the entrance fee of 50 Afghanis, or about $1, inside the windows hoping to be the next person allowed inside.

After registering, the patients sit in stifling waiting areas. Somebody tries to turn on a window fan, but it doesn't work. Patients fan themselves with the green registration cards. There's a 4-year-old girl with infected eyes ringed in red and men with cataracts shuffling with canes. There's a woman who suffered a splinter in her eye while chopping wood.

Those called from the waiting rooms line up for an eye test, with the chart is painted on a glowing light box. Fewer than 30 percent of Afghans are literate, so the chart uses a symbol that resembles an "E." Patients are asked whether the symbol is facing left, right, up or down.

Watching everything was 9-year-old Safauddin, his right eye severely deformed by a type of neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes the growth of tumors. The boy was silent, but his mother was shouting .

"I don't know how his eye got this way. Something happened during the Taliban time," she said, referring the years from 1996 to 2001 when the hardline Taliban regime ruled Afghanistan.

She barked at a doctor through her blue burqa, saying she could not understand why her son could not be treated at the hospital, which has no facilities or expertise to treat the disease.

In an examination room next door, a toothless woman was nearly hysterical, saying her eyes were getting weaker. She complained that she had no medicine and nobody to help her. Mahboob jotted some notes on her registration card and quickly sent her to the next examining area.

"We have to work like this because of the rush of patients," he said. "If we try to tell the patients to come back tomorrow they'd hold a demonstration."

Upstairs, the baby boy's father, Hafizullah, was fighting back tears. The shopkeeper, who like his son uses only one name, was heartbroken that surgeons couldn't save the diseased eye. His wife sat on the edge of the baby's bed, straightening his pajama top over his belly. Nasaratullah's face was covered by a bandage, and no one had told his mother yet that the eye had been removed.

The surgery was life-changing, yet it gave the parents hope that their son born to war might someday see a more peaceful Afghanistan.

That's a long way off. Noor Eye Hospital is the last stop in Afghanistan for patients with serious eye conditions. If they can't be treated there, they must be referred outside the country.

Days later, Hafizullah and his wife bundled up Nasaratullah and drove for 16 hours, hoping of seeing an eye specialist in Lahore, Pakistan.

Police: Bomb explodes at outdoor mosque, kills 4
By AMIR SHAH, Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A bomb exploded Friday at an outdoor mosque in northwest Afghanistan, killing four worshippers, police said.

Fourteen other people praying at the mosque were wounded in the explosion in Almar district of Faryab province, said Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, a spokesman for the Afghan National Police in northern Afghanistan. He said the bomb was planted on a motorbike parked in a yard of the mosque.

In the city of Herat in western Afghanistan, a bomb placed on a small cart exploded on Friday, killing an Afghan woman and wounding seven other civilians, said Sayad Agha Saqeb, police chief in Herat province. The bomb exploded about 500 meters from the entrance to the police headquarters, he said.

No one claimed responsibility for the blast, but insurgents have stepped up their attacks against government officials and others affiliated with the Afghan government and the U.S.-led coalition.

Separately, NATO reported Friday that a coalition service member was killed in an insurgent attack, raising to four the number of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan on Thursday. The U.S.-led coalition said the three other troopers were killed in two separate roadside bomb explosions.

The coalition did not disclose any other details about the deaths.

So far this year, 397 international troops have died in Afghanistan, including at least 295 Americans.

The coalition also said it was investigating reports that NATO caused civilian casualties in Baraki Barak district of Logar province, south of Kabul.
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4 injured as bomb targeting army vehicle goes off in N. Afghanistan
KABUL, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- At least four people injured when a powerful bomb went off Friday morning near an Afghan army vehicle along a high way in Afghanistan's northern Baghlan province, reported local TV channel Tolo News.

According to the report the blast took place at around 08:30 a. m. local time Friday along the main highway connecting capital city of Kabul to northern provinces and the blast occurred between Khinjan and Dushi areas in Baghlan province

Meantime, administrative chief of Dushi district Shamsuddin Sarhadi told Xinhua that the blast was a roadside bombing against an army pickup passing by the areas.

"The army pickup was traveling from Kabul to Baghlan's provincial capital Pul-e-Khumri and the blast injured four people included an army officer and four women all his family members," Sarhaidi said.

He said the injured, including one in critical conditions, were transported to a provincial capital hospital and no civilians were armed in the blast.

No group claimed of responsibility for the attack yet but Taliban insurgents have been blamed for such incidents in the past.

The Taliban-led insurgency has been rampant since the militant group announced to launch spring offensive from May 1 against Afghan and NATO-led troops stationed in Afghanistan.

The Taliban outfit has also warned the civilians to stay away from official gatherings, military convoys and centers as the militants would attack the mentioned targets.
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5 civilians killed in air raid in Afghan Logar province
PUL-E-ALAM, Afghanistan, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- Five civilians were killed when warplanes of NATO-led troops carried out an airstrike against the Taliban in Logar province, 60 km south of capital city of Kabul, a spokesman for the provincial administration said on Friday.

"A joint unit of Afghan and NATO-led troops came in contact with the Taliban in Baraki Barak district overnight triggering a gun battle that left three Afghan army soldiers dead and a foreign soldier injured," Din Mohammad Darwish told Xinhua.

He said in retaliation, troops called on air support and that the air power pounded a compound used by insurgents to fire on security forces.

In the aftermath of the strike, conducted at around 00:30 a.m. local time Friday, troops found that five civilians including three women were killed in the incident.

However, according to Darwish, three Taliban insurgents including a group commander named Qari Hijran were also killed in the attack.

According to locals all the victims were members of the same family and the head of the family Mohammad Asif was also injured. However, it has not been clear immediately whether Asif gave shelter to the militants or they broke in.

The deaths of Afghan civilians by NATO-led troops during operations against the Taliban outfit have long been a contentious issue between the Afghan government and the U.S. and NATO forces in the insurgency-hit country. In the meantime, purported Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid in talks with local media via cell phone from an undisclosed location confirmed three of the outfit militants were killed in Baraki Barak of Logar province Thursday night, but insisted that the Taliban also killed over 10 Afghan and NATO soldiers in the fight which lasted for hours.

The Taliban-led insurgency has been rampant since the militant group announced to launch a spring offensive from May 1 against Afghan and NATO-led troops stationed in Afghanistan.
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Pakistani think-tank downbeat on Afghan peace
Mohideen Mifthah
ISLAMABAD, Aug 26, 2011 (AFP) - Uncertainty over Washington's long-term plans in Afghanistan is undermining prospects of reconciliation with the Taliban, according to an influential Pakistani foreign policy think-tank.

The independent Jinnah Institute said in a report released Thursday that the perception that the United States might want to retain some security presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014 was creating unease in the region.

And while Washington has said it intends to end combat missions in Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and transfer all responsibility for security over to Afghan forces, many Pakistani experts were sceptical, the report said.

Perceived ambiguity over US plans would “likely create unease among the Afghan Taliban and the countries in the region including Pakistan”, it said.

“The Pakistani foreign policy elite see the prospects of a successful endgame in Afghanistan as bleak because of the belief that the United States would want to retain some long-term security in Afghanistan,” it added.

The think-tank said the report reflected the views of Pakistan's foreign policy elite, including retired civil and military officials, analysts, journalists and the members of civil society.

“We need to discuss what the US presence after 2014 means,” said Moeed Yusuf, South Asia advisor of the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace, which collaborated on the report.

The president of the Jinnah Institute, former Pakistani information minister Sherry Rehman, said Pakistan was essential for the United States to achieve its aims in Afghanistan, 10 years after the beginning of the war.

“Even American objectives (in Afghanistan) cannot come to fruition if Pakistan is ignored,” she said.

The report added that although the May 2 killing of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in a raid by US troops had strained ties, it had “no bearing” on Pakistan's strategy in Afghanistan.
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NATO beefs up fight against "rogue" Afghan threat
By Amie Ferris-Rotman | Reuters – Thu, Aug 25, 2011
KABUL (Reuters) - NATO and Afghan officials are stepping up efforts to battle the insider threat in their war against insurgents, which has seen an increase in attacks by local security forces against their foreign partners, a U.S. navy expert said Thursday.

The Taliban have managed to recruit Afghan security forces and pay bribes for uniforms to impersonate them, said Navy Commander Derek Reveron.

In the latest incident, which took place earlier this month in the northern Kunduz province, a man dressed as an Afghan policeman shot dead a NATO service member.

"Overall, there has been an increase in rogue attacks and the Afghans are taking this pretty seriously," Reveron told Reuters in an interview at Camp Eggers, where he is a strategic adviser to the NATO-led training mission in Afghanistan.

NATO is racing against the clock to train Afghanistan's largely illiterate and poorly equipped army and police force by the end of 2014, the deadline for U.S. combat troops' exit and when all security responsibilities will be handed over to the Afghans.

These efforts are further complicated by "rogue" attacks. Reveron has analyzed over two dozen such incidents that have taken place since 2005, killing over 50 NATO forces.

The biggest risk -- accounting for around 20 percent -- is when Taliban insurgents recruit Afghan forces through intimidation, blackmail, financial gain or family ties, he said.

"We know insurgent groups want to infiltrate the Afghan forces," Reveron said, adding that the Afghans "are improving the screening process for all recruits."

The Afghan army has almost doubled its counterintelligence force to 478 over the last year.

NATO will have trained 73 percent of the Afghan army's counterintelligence force by December of this year, and all of them by April 2012.

All Afghan recruits to the army, police and air force are now biometrically enrolled through iris scans -- which detect unique patterns in the eyes -- and fingerprint technology.

"It is now more stringent to get into the Afghan army than the U.S. military," Reveron said.

Attacks within the Afghan forces, dubbed "green on green" by NATO in a reference to the color of their uniforms, also take place: between January 2010 and May of this year, 41 such incidents have occurred.

Uniform grabbing or buying for impersonation counts for just under 10 percent of the insider attacks against foreigners.

Reveron said U.S. uniforms were pilfered a year ago by insurgents who launched a suicide bomb attack on the NATO Bagram airbase north of Kabul, killing an American contractor.

Around a third of the attacks were caused by "combat stress," Reveron said, or violence stemming from emotional, intellectual or physical stress.

(Editing by Bryson Hull and Sanjeev Miglani)
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Afghanistan: Sufi Mysticism Makes a Comeback in Kabul
August 26, 2011 - 12:00pm, by Iason Athanasiadis EurasiaNet
Afghanistan - In a garden in Kabul’s Karte-Seh district, a group of Sufi musicians and poets gather for an evening of mystical melodies. Platters of rice pilau and fruit cover carpets spread across the lawn. This twice-weekly meeting is held at the home of a member of the ancient Chishti Sufi order who gathers together an all-male crème de la crème of Kabul’s Sufi society. Television preachers, renowned qawwali singers and prominent politicians with clandestine Sufi proclivities all flock to the garden to sample the ecstatic music.

Sufism is an ascetic spiritual tradition pioneered by Islam’s early warriors, who pushed outwards from the Arabian Peninsula into Central Asia and lived in all-male bands on the frontiers of the young empire. As they traveled, they adopted local traditions, even some that seemed to go against the mainstream tenants of Islam, including music. The Chishti blended qawwali music, a devotional melody that developed in south Asia, with the Persian whirling dervish dances, and acquired a reputation for being the most musical Sufi order.

As a result, they suffered more than other Afghan Sufis during the rule of the Taliban, who banned music and discouraged the gatherings. Whereas Sufi orders and pilgrimages to the shrines of mystics were long an integral part of Afghan devotional traditions, the Taliban’s harshly orthodox interpretation of Islam banned creative outlets, locking Afghan society into a half decade of spiritual austerity. Recently, Sufism has been on the defense in neighboring Pakistan, where local fundamentalists have killed hundreds in attacks on Sufi shrines.

Lutfullah Haqqparast was one of the few Sufi sheikhs who refused to submit to the Taliban’s restrictions on Sufism. The preacher – a suit-and-tie-wearing sociologist at a Kabul University who dons a white turban and green robe when officiating Sufi gatherings – was arrested for not caving to Taliban demands to stop his followers’ chanting. But when the Taliban tried to transfer him from Kabul to Kandahar, according to legend, there was such an outcry from religious elders that Haqqparast was released.

Today Haqqparast says Afghanistan needs a balance between Sufism’s mystical passion and the western rationality he teaches. “This traditional society needs Sufis to show it a more open-minded path but also the West to teach it logic,” he told EurasiaNet.org.

Haqqparast attends zikrs – devotional Sufi gatherings that often turn ecstatic – at Kabul’s historic Shah-Do Shamshira mosque, a stately yellow building topped by twin navy-blue minarets.

Worship at the shrine is precarious, though. On June 17, for example, suicide bombers targeted a police station in the area and a gun battle raged for hours nearby – another reminder of how confident the Taliban are becoming.

The Afghan government, too, is feeling the pressure. To that end, President Hamid Karzai pays greater reverence to the Ulema Shura (Council of Clerics) whose orthodox Muslim views are often opposed to women’s rights, free speech or mystical Islam. On the other hand, Minister of Information and Culture Sayeed Makhdoom Raheem seeks to use Sufism as a moderating force against the Taliban even as he pressures Sufis to tone down their theatrical devotions ahead of reconciliation talks.

“Raheem is reviving Sufism and restoring khaneqahs [lodges] that encourage mysticism exactly because he believes that it can act as a tool to stop political Islam and the Taliban,” said Nasir Farahmand, a Kabul-based professor of philosophy who is an avowed secularist.

After taking in the qawwali music, Haqqparast gets up and, escorted by a group of disciples, heads to his modest car. A supporter drives him through old Kabul’s twisting lanes to Sufism’s less-effete face.

At the entrance to a charity home, disabled Sufis bedecked with necklaces and hennaed beards cluster around a gate opening onto what was once a basement jail. Amid clouds of hashish smoke, semiconscious men loll against the metal bars of former cells. Others file upstairs into a makeshift temple of interconnected rooms. It is nearly 3 a.m., but the floor is packed with ecstatic dervishes listening to musicians on a raised dais.
Editor's Note: Iason Athanasiadis is an Istanbul-based freelance journalist.
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Afghanistan's Ethnic Puzzle
Decentralizing Power Before the U.S. Withdrawal
By Thomas Barfield September/October 2011 foreignaffairs.com
Summary:
In 2001, fearing ethnic strife, the international community pushed for a strong central government in Kabul. But such fears were based on a false reading of Afghan history and fostered a system of regional and ethnic patronage. To correct matters, the United States should de-emphasize Afghanistan’s ethnic fault lines and push for more devolved and inclusive governance.

THOMAS BARFIELD is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University and the author of Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History.

In late 2001,when U.S. forces expelled the Taliban from Afghanistan, the country appeared headed for a breakup. The United States and the rest of the international community feared that Afghanistan's rival ethnic groups would use their regional power bases to pull apart any unitary state, forming in its place independent ministates or aligning with their ethnic brethren across Afghanistan's borders. At the time, such fears seemed credible: NATO troops were still dealing with the fallout from the violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The Afghans themselves, however, were less concerned about their country dividing. After all, Afghanistan has been a single state for more than 250 years. If the country were going to split, it would have done so in the 1990s, during its protracted civil war. Yet it did not. No Afghan leader of any political stripe or ethnicity endorsed secession at any time during the last century. Nor did any at the start of this one. Although Afghanistan's various ethnic factions disagreed about how the country's new government should be organized and who would wield power within it, they all proclaimed their support for a unitary state.

A decade later, the anxiety of Washington and its allies has reversed itself. If in 2001 the West was afraid that the absence of a strong centralized government in Kabul would prompt Afghanistan's dissolution, by 2011 the West has come to fear that a dysfunctional centralized government could cause this same outcome. Such a turn of events was caused by several factors, perhaps most of all by many Afghans' dissatisfaction with a centralized national administrative structure that cannot cope with the country's regional diversity or with expectations for local self-rule. The government in Kabul has been further undermined by the country's fraudulent 2009 presidential election, the absence of political parties, poor security, and general corruption.
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Good governance critical in Afghanistan
Washington needs to work with Karzai to strengthen political institutions and create economic infrastructure
The Washington Post By John Podesta, Brian Katulis and Caroline Wadhams 25/08/2011
As the US begins a security transition in Afghanistan, it has focused the vast majority of its strategy, efforts and resources on building Afghan security forces and weakening insurgents through military pressure. Yet the broader Afghan state is in crisis.

Afghans we met with during a recent trip to Kabul warned that their country's fragile democratic institutions were crumbling. If the current political trajectory continues, Afghan security forces may have no state left to defend.

A range of Afghans — government officials, opposition figures and members of civil society — argued that the US must perform a tricky balancing act to strengthen the state. The Obama administration should heal its rift with Afghan President Hamid Karzai but without providing unconditional financial and political support, which weakens Afghan state institutions and contributes to a culture of impunity.

Relying exclusively on Karzai or pushing to marginalise him would be calamitous for Afghanistan's stability. Navigating this minefield demands deft diplomacy — one that uses transparency, conditions and incentives to help Afghanistan create a political system that is lasting, includes the current opposition and leaves the door open for a settlement with elements of the Taliban.

Key shifts in US policy are required. First, it requires the US to be crystal clear about its objectives in Afghanistan, supported by a political track that is synchronised with the military strategy between now and 2014 — and beyond.

Conspiracy theories abound even at the most senior levels of the Afghan government that the US wants to use Afghanistan indefinitely as a base to project power in Asia and the Middle East as part of a new ‘Great Game'.

Largest interest

Many Afghans view America's stated counter-terrorism objectives as secondary to this larger interest. This perception is partially due to Afghanistan's fertile ground for conspiracy theories; it is also a result of mixed messages emanating from US policymakers, particularly in Congress but also in the Obama administration.

The new team, led by Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General John Allen, must reduce these wrong perceptions and create a civil-military road map that better integrates US political, economy and military strategies. This plan needs to work backward from 2014, when a transition occurs under the Afghan constitution from Karzai to an elected successor, as well as from allied forces to the Afghan government.

Second, despite its public aversion to nation-building, the US government must support Afghanistan's institutions and democratic forces, including the media, parliament, Supreme Court, Independent Election Commission and even the political opposition.

Although these bodies remain weak, they channel more Afghan voices into the political system, creating increased accountability. Karzai has said that he will step down in 2014, and the US must work with him and Afghanistan's parliament to reform the electoral system to enable political party formation and to support the emergence of Afghan leaders who can assume national leadership positions after him.

Third, the US must more effectively use its leverage to encourage political and economic reforms. The strategic partnership agreement under negotiation offers an opportunity to clarify US and Afghan objectives and to provide minimum conditions for ongoing US support. The US should establish within that agreement specific reforms required by the Afghans in return for continued assistance to the Afghan government and its National Security Forces.

Fourth, the US needs to commit to facilitating an Afghan political settlement. The ambivalence in the US approach on this issue is creating confusion in the region and within the Afghan leadership and is increasing tensions between the Afghan and US governments.

The US should support the appointment of an international mediator, accept an office in a third country for discussions to take place with Taliban insurgents, and calibrate its military approach to support an eventual settlement. It must push for an open and transparent process, which includes the domestic opposition and civil society, so that their fears are addressed.

And the one view that seems to unite the entire Afghan political spectrum is that the US needs a comprehensive regional diplomatic strategy that stops Pakistan from playing a spoiler role.

President Barack Obama took the right step in announcing the start of the transition in Afghanistan. After nearly 10 years, American troops need to begin coming home, and Afghan security forces need to take the lead. But as this security transition occurs the US needs to accelerate its efforts to help Afghanistan strengthen its political institutions, power-sharing arrangements and economic foundations to make sure the country will be able stand on its own.

John Podesta is president of the Centre for American Progress; Brian Katulis and Caroline Wadhams are senior fellows in the centre's national security programme.
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Life as a humanist with the armed forces in Afghanistan
'I don't believe in the concept of an afterlife and it frightens me that people do believe in it,' Petty Officer Christopher Holden tells Riazat Butt
Guardian.co.uk By Riazat Butt Friday 26 August 2011
"Humanism doesn't have a lot to say about war and conflict; what it would say is that the subjugation of women and the lack of human flourishing might give a reason for this war," says Petty Officer Christopher Holden from 3 Commando Brigade, which is deployed in Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province.

The 38-year-old from Peterborough describes himself as a humanist because "it seems the most moral philosophy".

Christopher joined the Royal Navy in 1990, aged 17. He was, as he puts it, "flunking his A-levels with too much partying". His friends were in the forces. He wanted to travel so he signed up. He is on his first tour.

His experiences of church, like so many deployed troops, are restricted to births, marriages and deaths. In a similar vein, his only regular exposure to religion is the vigil, something explored earlier in this series. It is here that Christopher's feelings diverge from the established narrative. He feels ambivalence towards the ceremony and a "certain amount of anger".

It's overtly religious at vigils and that surprised me at first. I can see the need for a ritualised, communal expression of grief. I don't feel I'm forced to go against my will but there's an element of disbelief there, because I don't believe a word of it. I don't believe in the concept of an afterlife and it frightens me that people do believe in it. From that flows all manner of justification for certain things. Even though the vigils frustrate me they do offer a dependable mechanism for grieving.

Pascal's Wager seems to be at work in theatre - that living your life as if there were a God is a win-win situation. There is no harm done, everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Essentially you are religious or not depending on whether your parents were. If you had someone who was raised in a secular way, they won't drop to their knees out here. They'll have that mechanism ingrained in their mind.

While he objects to the religious elements of the vigil service he accepts that, in a military setting, it is the obvious choice. He doesn't want a vigil for himself, but ultimately he knows that, once he dies, the nature of his funeral won't affect him.

It wouldn't matter to me one way or another. But if there is an afterlife I wouldn't be screaming in rage. Perhaps when I was young I took it for granted that there was a God. There are a few lads who wouldn't want a religious vigil service. I do feel like I'm in a minority - but only at the vigil.

He feels a combination of tradition, established religion and a religious culture among the officer cadre contribute to the ties between the church and the army - especially the presence of a chaplaincy.

I'm ambivalent about military chaplaincy. On the one hand they offer a mechanism that seems difficult to replace in a secular way; that's because it's an institution, an institutional norm; there are ties between the church and the state as a whole.

I'd welcome a humanist chaplain, but chaplain is the wrong word. As soon as you say chaplain you're talking about organisation and structure while humanists are about individualism. I can't imagine what you would call a humanist chaplain.

The world would be better off without religion and so would the armed forces, he says, but he concedes that chaplains and religion are a part of the military and always have been. "It's hard to shake tradition," he says.
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Pakistan military: US drone crashes near Afghan border
By Reza Sayah August 25, 2011
Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- An unmanned U.S. drone crashed in southwest Pakistan near the Afghan border Thursday night, the Pakistani military said.

The aircraft came down near Chaman, a town near the Afghan-Pakistan border in the southwestern province of Balochistan, a military statement said.

The wreckage has been recovered and the military is investigating, the statement said. The cause of the crash is not known.

Local Pakistani television showed video of local residents displaying what appeared to be parts of the downed aircraft at the site of the crash.

In recent years the US has sharply increased its used of armed drones to target militants in Pakistan's tribal region, a volatile area bordering war-torn Afghanistan.

The covert CIA drone program has been deeply unpopular with many Pakistanis, who say the attacks kill civilians and are a violation of their country's sovereignty.
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Karzai endorses ruling on Afghan poll row
AFP – Thu, Aug 25, 2011
President Hamid Karzai on Thursday backed a decision by Afghan election authorities to kick nine lawmakers out of parliament in a bid to end a vote-rigging row which has lasted nearly a year.

The Independent Election Commission (IEC) made the ruling this week but it has so far failed to calm the long-running storm over alleged vote fraud in last September's parliamentary elections.

Its decision was rejected Wednesday in a vote by the lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, and prompted hundreds of angry protesters to take to the streets on Tuesday.

"All issues related to the parliamentary election are considered ended," Karzai spokesman Siamak Hirawi said. "The recent ruling of the IEC is enforceable and implementable."

The IEC was assigned by Karzai to make the final ruling in the nearly year-long row.

In June, a special election tribunal backed by Karzai ruled that 62 lawmakers, a quarter of the lower house of parliament, should be expelled.

The IEC's final ruling fell well short of that figure.

On Tuesday, up to 700 Afghans marched through Kabul to protest against the decision, chanting anti-UN slogans and accusing the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) of interfering in the process.
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1,700 Police-related Criminal Cases Referred to Attorney General
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 25 August 2011
Around 1,700 criminal cases of Afghan police have been sent to Attorney General's Office, Reuters reports.

About $29 billion has been spent on the Afghan police since 2001, with more to come as the US and Nato-led International Security Assistance Force steps up training ahead of plans to withdraw combat troops by the end of 2014.

The Afghan police force now stands at around 142,000, while desertion rates are high.

Ordinary Afghans are intimidated by police forces, which has high levels of drug abuse and desertion.

The police and Afghan troops trained to date "have thus far proved unable to enforce the law, counter the insurgency or even secure the seven regions" recently handed over to them, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG).

Nearly 200 policemen were accused of murder and just over 4,600 were involved in crimes in 3,026 separate cases sent to the Attorney General in Kabul in a year that began March 2010, said Lieutenant General Mohammad Rahim Hanifi, head of the top prosecutors Statistics and Analysis department.

But Afghan interior ministry said it is committed to identify corrupt policemen and introduce them to justice organisations to face their due punishment.

"We want to punish corrupt individuals working with police forces so that the ground is prepared for mentoring," Interior Ministry Spokesman Sediq Sediqi said.

Police are also suspected of carrying out gang rapes, but arresting the offenders falls to their colleagues, who often just ignore the cases, or intimidate those seeking justice, Hanifi said.
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Inside Afghanistan’s Deadly Copter War
By Bill Ardolino August 26, 2011 Wired News
FORWARD OPERATING BASE SALERNO, Afghanistan — Chief Warrant Officers Keith Lacy and David Fleckenstein were hunting an insurgent mortar team from the sky when news came over the radio: troops under fire.

Two men, posing as maintenance workers for a mountaintop cell tower outside the Afghan village of Musa Khel, had shaken hands and shared a meal with the First Platoon of Charlie Company, 1/26th Infantry. But as the soldiers began winding their way downhill the night of Aug. 1, the repairmen started tossing grenades down the mountain after them. At least four troops were wounded. One U.S. staff sergeant, Lani Abalama, was riddled with shrapnel in one arm and both his legs. The Americans were pinned to the side of a ridge with a bad angle for return fire. They needed air support. Now.

Lacy and Fleckenstein, flying a pair of OH-58 Kiowa Warriors, small armed-reconnaissance helicopters, raced to the site of the attack. It wasn’t hard to find — they already had a nearby observation post mapped out, and the tower was “isolated on a hilltop,” explained Lacy. “There are no other villages or qalats [residential compounds] around it, and we would have been able to [see] anybody else outside that compound really easily.”

Fleckenstein quickly shot two rockets at the south side of the cellphone tower to suppress the insurgents. The platoon on the ground was “danger close” to the helicopter’s fire. The soldiers were hunkered down on the north side of the ridge, only about 150 feet down the slope and another 50 feet to the side of the crest.

This proximity called for especially careful aim from the pilots. But the soldiers were being pelted with grenades. Fleckenstein had to attack.

“I was a little bit nervous,” explained Fleckenstein, a youthful-looking 28-year-old with a sober demeanor. “But the strobes [markers visible with night-vision gear] that we had them put down immediately to identify their position helped, as well as having been in that area numerous times and just knowing the aircraft, knowing where you can put rounds.”

Lacy called back to his headquarters at Forward Operating Base Salerno, about 15 miles to the southeast, in the heart of Khost province: time to “spool up” medevac helicopters for the wounded. After Fleckenstein’s rocket pass, Lacy swooped in from the north side of the ridge, unleashing a spray of bullets from his .50-caliber machine gun.

With their night-vision goggles, pilots could see ghostly green infrared-targeting beams — emanating from the weapons of the soldiers on the ground — crisscross the structure, as well as the spark and twinkle of bullets bouncing off of the cellphone tower’s walls.

The pair of helicopters took turns shooting at the insurgents. One aircraft would fire as the other maneuvered for a weapons run on opposite direction of approach to the ridge.

When Fleckenstein was out of position for a rocket shot, his “left seater,” Bravo Troop commander Capt. Joshua Simpson, fired his M-4 rifle out of the open side of the aircraft to maintain suppression. As soon as they cleared the target, Lacy swooped in and fired more .50-caliber machine-gun rounds, followed by another two rockets from Fleckenstein.

The flurry of explosions and bullets had the intended effect. First Platoon was no longer taking contact from the two insurgents, and the medevac helicopters had some breathing room to fly in and get the wounded.

The recent downing of a Chinook helicopter in Wardak province that killed 38 Afghan and American troops, including 19 Navy SEALs, has refocused attention on the danger of flying helicopters in Afghanistan. Recently, I got a chance to see those dangers close-up: not just the Taliban, but eastern Afghanistan’s unforgiving climate and terrain, which many pilots argue are their greatest opponents.

I also got to experience firsthand just how crucial the copters are to the war effort here. The helo crews of Task Force Tigershark didn’t just come to the rescue of those wounded soldiers on that mountaintop outside of Musa Khel. A few days later, they saved my neck, too.

‘The Most God-Awful Environment I’ve Ever Seen’
Ten years ago, the average U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter was flying roughly 160 hours per year, per aircraft. In contrast, each Apache with Task Force Tigershark is flying more than a thousand hours annually, on airframes that are a decade older, in the harshest rotary-aviation environment in the world. This has created unprecedented maintenance demands — in terms of human capital, replacement parts and technological innovation — to keep aircraft operating at this blistering pace.

Compounding the challenge is the fact that many of the helicopters are ancient. One of the task force’s Chinook heavy lift helicopters served in President Gerald Ford’s air detail in 1974, and possesses an airframe manufactured in 1961.

All of which would create problems, even if Tigershark were flying back in the United States. But this is Afghanistan: “The most God-awful environment I’ve ever seen helicopters placed,” said Lt. Col. David Kramer, commander of Task Force Tigershark.

Afghanistan’s environmental challenges to flight are based on the maxim of “hot, high and heavy.” It’s shorthand for how elevation and temperature interact to impact an aircraft’s power and lift at a given weight.

As altitude and temperature increase, the density of the semi-tangible bed of molecules pushing off of the rotors and airframe lessens, causing the engines to generate less and less lift from larger and larger amounts of power. Inversely, colder temperatures and lower altitude enable greater power efficiency and overall lift.

As pilots transit the mountainous, thin air of Afghanistan, they constantly monitor two metrics: “density altitude” is the aircraft’s effective altitude when factoring in the temperature. For example, while the aircraft may be physically at 5,000 feet above sea level, the density altitude may be 7,000 feet when factoring in a hot temperature.

The other metric is “tab data,” a measure that calculates what the helicopter’s maximum power is at any given combination of altitude and temperature. When this max power is cross-referenced against the weight of the aircraft at the time, pilots can determine whether they have enough lift to sustain a given flight maneuver or mission in a given area. That helps them avoid an unplanned landing or crash. But even with due diligence, Afghanistan presents unique challenges.

“Afghanistan is weird,” explains Black Hawk pilot Chief Warrant Officer 2 Steve Atencio. “Temperature change doesn’t occur the same as it does back home, for some reason. There is usually a standard lapse rate [in temperature]. You gain or lose 2 degrees [as you descend or ascend a certain altitude], but for some reason here, it’s more dramatic. We’re continually looking at that tab data to ensure you won’t have a mishap.”

The danger of thin air was starkly illustrated a couple of weeks ago, when a Tigershark Apache helicopter crash-landed at about 11,000 feet. Though the incident is still under investigation, early reports suggest the pilot banked too hard for the thin air, and lost sufficient lift under the rotors. He successfully crash landed on a mild slope –- no easy feat among the jagged ridges in the area of the crash –- but the aircraft was eventually destroyed after several failed attempts to airlift it out of the mountains with twin rotor Chinooks.

And if the ad hoc calculations regarding heat and thin air weren’t complicated enough, helicopter pilots must also pay attention to Afghanistan’s fickle mountain winds. When an aircraft flies into a head wind, it loses speed but gains performance; the rushing wind acts as an air foil that grants the helicopter maneuverability. If the pilot makes a sudden turn perpendicular to or opposite the wind, the aircraft quickly loses this extra performance, and a pilot’s failure to compensate — for example, starting to pull up from a dive too late — could precipitate a crash into a mountainside.

Eastern Afghanistan’s sudden onsets of harsh weather present a real danger to aviators.

“It’s not just high, hot and heavy mountain flying, it’s the weather that you throw on top of it,” said Kramer. “This is like living in a prairie storm half the time over here. You can’t put airframes out in this stuff. Am I afraid of enemy fire? Sure I am, like everybody. But I’m most afraid of the weather and how it will sneak up on you, and consume you.”

Sitting Ducks
The threats from the human enemy include small-arms fire, ubiquitous rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, very rare leftover Russian antiaircraft guns like the Zsu-23-4 and guided shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs. The latter weapons system had been used to great effect by the mujahedeen in their war with the Soviet Union 30 years ago, and the insurgents’ ability to shoot down helicopters decisively impacted the course of the Afghan rebels’ war against a foreign force.

Western aviators have so far avoided significant contact with guided missiles in Afghanistan. According to documents released by Wikileaks, there have been approximately 10 suspected guided missile shots by insurgents, with only one successful downing of an aircraft, the ill-fated “Flipper 75.” The U.S. Army Chinook was hit in the left engine by a probable first-generation Man-portable air-defense system, or ManPad, in Helmand province, downing the aircraft and killing seven NATO personnel.

A far more common threat is the unguided Rocket-Propelled Grenade-7, the weapon system that is believed responsible for shooting down the Chinook carrying special operations forces two weeks ago. It’s difficult for insurgents to take out a helicopter with an RPG, but by no means impossible.

Many NATO aircraft are hardy targets, with redundant flight systems that force insurgents to hit very specific spots in order to be effective. But the real key to an aircraft’s security is fast movement. It is extremely hard to hit a moving target with the unguided rockets commonly possessed by insurgents.

Unfortunately, that advantage disintegrates when a helicopter hovers.

“We don’t hover. It just makes us a target,” explained Lacy, whose Kiowa had made a series of looping passes over the insurgent position on the night of Aug. 1.

“Sitting ducks,” added another Kiowa pilot.

Black Hawk pilots responsible for medevac’ing the wounded don’t always have the option to keep moving, however.

The casualties from the firefight in Musa Khel were “urgent litter patients” requiring a “hoist mission.” There was no landing zone among the jagged ridges in mountains 6,500 feet above sea level. The Black Hawks would have to hover over the soldiers and lift the wounded off the steep hillside by cable, on a “red illum” (no moon, starlit) night. They would be targets.

Mr. Mustache and Top Model
Pilots with Task Force Tigershark typically work a hectic schedule of nine days on for missions, one day off. Flying time can also fluctuate significantly on a given day –- as little as 15 minutes, or as much as nine hours.

Pilots do more than just fly: All personnel also conduct administrative tasks, like planning operations, writing up awards, setting schedules, even public affairs.

But beyond that, there is time to kill. Some play video games. Others chat with their families back home. (Black Hawk platoon leader Capt/ Jen Bales’ preferred hobby: downloading episodes of America’s Next Top Model. “Sometimes I need a little girl time, you know?”) The Task Force has a basketball game every Friday, though after watching them play, I can say that they’re far better at flying than they are at hoops.

And much like every class of soldier, blowing off steam involves countless hours of hatching inventive ways to insult each other.

“A good thing about being so close is you know what can aggravate people,” explained Fleckenstein. ”If you don’t have thick skin, you’re probably not in the right place, and if you do anything subpar, you’re going to get destroyed for it. And they know exactly what’s going to irritate you. A lot of guys will say, ‘You can talk about my family, you can talk about my dog, you can talk about anything, just don’t talk about my flying.’”

The medevac pilots have zeroed in on Chief Warrant Officer Steve Atencio’s thick black “deployment mustache,” which they claim he can grow in “about four hours.” Insults include “Mr. Mustache,” “Mr. Pringles” and comparisons of the facial hair to some sort of “mutant woolly worm” perched atop his lip. The 32-year-old Wyoming native is unfazed.

“They’re just jealous they can’t grow one like this,” he shrugged.

Even for this tightknit group, Fleckenstein and the other pilots of “Bounty Hunter,” the Kiowa attack-reconnaissance element of the task force, are unusually close. Maybe that’s because they’ve been unusually hard-hit. Three of the pilots hail from the same home town of Huntsville, Alabama. One man used to be an Air Force pilot, another jumped ship from the Navy. Seven used to be “11-Bravos” (ground-pounders, infantry), two of them in the same squad, before learning to fly, and one man was even a Florida real estate agent little more than a year ago.

Chief Warrant Officer John Guffey, one of the former infantryman, remembers the exact moment he decided he would become a pilot. In 2002, he was a passenger in a Chinook transport helicopter that crashed in the Central Valley of Afghanistan, just north of Kandahar. His platoon had taken casualties, and they had been assigned to guard the downed aircraft while waiting for evacuation.

“I’m sitting there, and this Apache [attack helicopter] comes over, and he’s flying real slow,” recalls Guffey. “It’s 120 degrees. My commander walks over and says, ‘I bet you wish you were flying that thing. That’s the only aircraft in the Army inventory that has an air conditioner. It’s probably 70 degrees inside that cockpit.’ I looked up at the Apache pilot and flipped him off … and he puts his arms around himself like he’s cold. Right then, I decided I was gonna be a pilot one day.”

Guffey hasn’t regretted the decision, despite the fact that his unit has taken some of the heaviest casualties of any helicopter troop in America’s two major wars. Six pilots, one-fifth of his Kiowa troop out of Fort Drum, New York, have been killed during the unit’s most recent deployments.

On Jan. 25, 2009, two Kiowas crashed into each other after taking heavy ground fire south of Kirkuk, Iraq. All four pilots — Chief Warrant Officers Phil Windorski, Josh Tillery, Matt Kelley and Ben Todd — were killed. And just recently, on June 5, a Kiowa failed to pull out of a dive through Afghanistan’s thin air while engaging the enemy, and crashed in Sabari district, killing Chief Warrant Officers Ken White and Brad Gaudet. These losses, plus the fact that the troop has been together for four years straight, have created an unusual closeness among the soldiers.

Guffey is a short, stocky 29-year-old with a thick Alabaman drawl. Fleckenstein is a tall, wiry Ohioan. But the two swear they are brothers.

“Dave and I spend every day together, finish each others’ sentences,” explains Guffey. ” I know his favorite foods, he knows mine, our wives and families hang out together. We’ve been together four years straight, and after this deployment, we’re all splitting up. I have absolutely no idea how we’re going to handle that.”

“We’ve been away from our families the last two out of three years, so the guys around here become your family,” added Fleckenstein. “Having gone through losses of six aviators in the troop alone … you can’t get any closer than that, I think.”

Rescue by Rope
The wounded soldiers on that mountaintop outside Musa Khel were waiting. A pair of UH-60 Lima Black Hawks lifted off from Salerno base’s pitch-black airfield at about 8 p.m.

“Dust Off One-Five” led the way as the incongruously named “chase bird,” responsible for scouting the path and managing all radio communications. “Dust Off One-Six” was the “medical bird,” responsible for both deploying a ground medic and evacuating the priority casualties. One-Six was piloted by “Mr. Mustache” Atencio and Justin Study. They carried crew chief Spc. Philip Buettner and two flight medics: Sfc. John Kowlok and Staff Sgt. Russell Graham.

Graham, a lean blond with a calm demeanor, would be the man who roped down to the stricken platoon and prepared the patients for evacuation. Atencio eased the medical bird to a hover about 70 feet above the “point of injury.”

He held the aircraft steady as Graham, sitting with his legs hanging out of the door, hooked a cable to the front of his extraction vest. Crew chief Buettner, also sitting with his legs dangling in the air, then extended the long boom of the aircraft’s Goodrich external hoist and rapidly lowered the flight medic down to the ground at a pace of about 4 feet per second.

The pitch black descent was “creepy” for Graham, who slipped into the darkness toward a 5½-foot-wide footpath sandwiched between the unforgiving rock face of the ridge and a sheer drop off to the valley below. The landing was “difficult.” Graham flipped in the air and impacted the rocky pathway on his belly, burying his goggles and helmet into gravel before picking himself up and unhooking the cable.

The flight medic hurried to the infantrymen, assessed the patients and prepped them for one of two carriages he’d carried down to the ground: the “sked,” a compact litter that unwraps, to full size before rewrapping the patient into a protective “human burrito,” and a “jungle penetrator,” a seated harness attached to the cable that pulls the patient up into the helicopter.

Staff Sgt. Lani Abalama – the guy who caught shrapnel in three of his four limbs — was the clearly most seriously injured man. Graham prepped him for a sked, while Abalama screamed. Despite having been administered morphine, Abalama shouted at the flight medic, “Stay off my legs!” Jolts of pain wracked the injured man as he was stuffed into the sked.

Graham looked over the wounded soldiers. Three more needed to be evacuated, including one man with shrapnel injuries to the groin, who didn’t seem all that hurt earlier in the evening. But that was before the adrenaline wore off and before Graham could take a closer look.

All told, the flight medic used a sked for two patients and the jungle penetrator for two others, one of the latter by necessity after a sked came loose from the hoist and spun into the darkness at the bottom of the ravine. During each extraction, Graham tightly gripped a “tag line,” a 250-foot strand of rope tangentially attached to the extraction cable. The flight medic’s pull on the rope applied stabilizing torsion that prevented the patients from spinning in rapid circles as they were hoisted to the bird.

Three patients were plucked into Dust-Off One-Five and the fourth into Dust-Off One-Six. Total time for triage, medical stabilization, packaging and hoist of all patients: about 45 minutes. Total hovers lasting between one and five minutes: six (four wounded, two trips for the medic). Pilots and crew mentally compartmentalize these moments of extreme vulnerability as just another step in their routine.

“It’s in the back of your mind,” said Graham. “You go through ways you can use terrain to your advantage, try and put mountains between you and the enemy, or use trees to conceal you. Because of the Geneva Convention, [medical helicopters] don’t fly with significant armament anyway, so we try and do things smarter instead of with weapons.”

While the Black Hawks pulled up the wounded, the Kiowas readied themselves for more gun and rocket runs on the cellphone tower.

Fleckenstein maintained position to the north, eyes wide. “Any movement at that point would have been an immediate ‘call the medevac off and start engaging again,’” he said.

The evacuation was completed without incident, however. All patients are expected to make a full recovery, though Abalama underwent immediate surgery to remove shrapnel from his joints, and will have to undergo “six months to a year” of rehabilitation before he reacquires full strength and motion.

After the helicopters left, the remainder of the infantry platoon returned up the hill and captured one of the insurgents. One of their Afghan army partners spotted the attacker hiding in some bushes. The insurgent was apparently so frightened by the barrage of fire from the Kiowas that he hadn’t moved for hours.

Hissing Grenades
Soon after interviewing Sergeant Abalama and the pilots who saved him, I came to appreciate the value of air support on an entirely different level. On Aug. 15, I was embedded with infantrymen who were patrolling the village of Majiles in volatile Sabari district.

The soldiers were searching for a recoilless-rifle team that had participated in an attack on Combat Outpost Sabari earlier that day. About five hours into the mission, near sunset, the American and Afghan soldiers had found nothing and decided to pack it in. It was time to head back to base.

As we moved to leave a qalat — a walled compound of narrow stone alleys linking closely packed residences — a pair of grenades hissed over a high wall, landing in the middle of eight Americans walking through a courtyard.

Two quick, successive explosions sprayed a cloud of shrapnel at the mass of diving men, followed by long bursts of machine-gun fire from American and Afghan soldiers shooting at a copse of trees that was the source of the grenades.

The Americans took cover in a commandeered residence off a narrow stone alley to assess and treat the wounded. When the gunfire and explosions ceased, the platoon’s leader took stock of a grim situation: Six Americans were injured, two seriously enough to require immediate treatment and three requiring subsequent medevac.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The Afghan soldiers who comprised half the patrol’s strength had fled to their vehicles. They’d left only a squad of American soldiers — half of them wounded — stranded in the qalat. With barely enough men to post security and not enough soldiers to carry the slow-moving injured, the squad was trapped and vulnerable to more grenades. We needed air support, quickly.

At about that time, two Bounty Hunter Kiowas had been fruitlessly searching for an insurgent mortar team in a neighboring district to the west. A call came over the radio:

Troops in contact. Sabari district. Viper AO. Zanar area.

One of the pilots, Chief Warrant Office Michael Maj immediately turned his Kiowa toward Sabari as he began calculating the route. With troops in contact, it was always best to fly to the site directly. Unfortunately, a straight shot would have the Kiowas fighting a strong headwind and force them to traverse a 10,000 foot mountain range.

When the helicopters crested the summit in the exceptionally thin air, Maj and the other pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Adam Rickert, would have to monitor their tab data and balance competing power requirements. Too much throttle and there wouldn’t be enough resources to cool the engine, resulting in a meltdown. Too little throttle and the Kiowa wouldn’t get there in time.

Maj knew he would have to slow the bird down to about 70 painstaking knots over the mountains (max cruising speed is about 100 to 110) in order to get there in one piece. The trip would take 20 minutes, which is close to forever when troops are in contact. They began their ascent.

For the 33-year-old former infantryman, it was one of the worst feelings in the world. The flight felt like it took “forever,” he said.

“As you balance your temperature and pressure limits trying to get there as fast as possible,” explained Maj. “You know you’re their lifeline and when you’re fighting the winds, you can’t get enough airspeed, you can’t get there fast enough … it’s really emotionally wrecking.”

The Bounty Hunter Kiowas carefully navigated over the mountain range as the platoon nervously held its position in the qalat. Armored vehicles with crew-served weapons had moved as close as 300 feet from our position, but we would have to cross open ground to get to them. With two men hobbled by shrapnel, it was prudent to wait for air cover before making the attempt.

Adding an edge of fear to the situation was the fact that we had insufficient men to set wide security. If the insurgents realized which home we were in, they could throw more grenades into the residence’s open courtyard, almost certainly killing some of the men, and conceivably injuring everyone in the small space. The wait was tense.

Loud, Mean … and Beautiful
Once the Kiowas had made it over the mountain, Maj and Rickert dropped altitude and opened the throttle, screaming over the countryside at about 110 knots. Within a few minutes, they spotted the vehicles, and the dismounted troops soon after.

Finally on scene, the Kiowas leapt into a carefully rehearsed pattern of close air support. Rickert’s lead scout ship immediately descended to make tight circular passes maybe 50 feet over the friendly troops.

The purpose was to both deter and draw ground fire: The looming bird would give any insurgents a more interesting target, or cow them into retreat. Meanwhile, Maj’s trail ship slipped into a counter-circular pattern 250 to 500 feet above the lower helicopter, effectively covering its rear as well as commanding a better view of the countryside around the troops on the ground.

As the jagged buzz of Kiowa rotors began to echo through the stone walls of the qalat, I wanted to cheer. We weren’t alone. And the insurgents wouldn’t dare take a shot with a Bell helicopter and Hydra rockets hanging over their heads.

Two of the most seriously wounded soldiers were stood up and leaned against others for the slow hobble to the vehicles. Other soldiers knelt and pointed their weapons down open alleys to guard their limping progress, as the lead Kiowa cut angry circles through the air. I could see the tilt of the pilot’s head and the left-seater hanging out of the door with his M-4 rifle, searching for targets. The 100-meter [330-foot] movement seemed to take forever, but the reassuring hum of rotor blades was always there.

After we made it to the vehicles, the drivers floored the gas. One Kiowa followed in a high, circular orbit, while the other bird led the way, scanning the road for IEDs with both thermal optics and the naked eye.

Once the route was deemed clear, the birds positioned themselves for a show of force: The pilots would make a series of passes with rockets and .50-caliber machine guns aimed into the countryside to further intimidate any potential attackers.

“What we try and do is get rockets out there and show that we’re not afraid to shoot,” said Maj. “Tricky part is finding a target area that best serves the purpose with sound effects, but gives you no collateral damage, no human bodies, no hurt flocks of sheep and total containment of shrapnel.”

As the MRAP armored vehicles bounced their way along the hilly roads home, the Kiowa pilots chose to shoot at a mountainside framed by a half-mile gap between the third and fourth armored vehicles in our convoy. From the inside of a MaxxPro MRAP, we heard a pair of loud wooshes, followed by crackling explosions.

Some of the soldiers in the back shouted that we were being engaged with RPGs, until one of the men in the front seat explained that it was merely “a show of force” by air support. Fear and confidence switched places again.

After a few rockets and belching runs from the .50-caliber machine gun, the helicopters settled into a seesaw pattern over the convoy while “popping the rotor blades:” distorting the movement of the rotor so it makes the loudest, meanest sound possible. Barely five minutes from the base, with fuel reserves running low, the Kiowas finally pulled off station. They’d given us air cover, sure. But there was something more.

To this reporter, on that August evening, the angry thrum of popping rotors was simply the most beautiful sound in the world.
 

Team of Militants Attacks British Council in Kabul
By RAY RIVERA and ROD NORDLAND August 19, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan — Militants attacked the British Council in a residential neighborhood here in the capital early Friday, British and Afghan officials said, leaving at least eight people dead.

A spokesman for the British Embassy, speaking anonymously in line with official policy, initially confirmed the attack, which came on the day Afghans celebrate gaining independence from Britain in 1919. The British Council is a British government agency promoting education, culture and the arts in 110 countries.

The Taliban immediately claimed responsibility.

Gen. Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, the police chief for Kabul Province, said the dead included four Afghan police officers, three security guards and one Afghan civilian.

However, Sediq Sediqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said 10 people had been killed in the blasts, including eight Afghans and two foreign nationals. Mr. Sediqi did not say where the foreign nationals were from.

The attacks included five suicide bombers and apparently began when a bomber drove a truck to the entrance of the British Council compound, detonating the vehicle and killing two security guards, General Salangi said. Another suicide bomber approached the gates and detonated himself before entering the compound.

Three more suicide bombers managed to enter the compound; one was killed initially, but the remaining two fought security staff until about 2 p.m., General Salangi said.

Minutes after the remaining bombers were killed, however, more gunfire was heard and a battle appeared to be continuing.

In a text message to reporters at 7:45 a.m., a Taliban spokesman said that multiple suicide bombers had attacked a foreign guesthouse, inflicting several casualties, and that the fight was continuing.

The first blast came just after 5:30 a.m. in the Karte Parwan area of the city, near a number of potential targets, including the palatial residence of First Vice President Muhammad Qasim Fahim.

A second blast followed 10 minutes later. The explosions shattered glass in buildings blocks away and sent plumes of black smoke into the sky.

Hundreds of Afghan police officers swarmed into the area as sporadic gunfire continued. At around 7:45 a.m., what sounded like a grenade blast went off, followed by more bursts of gunfire.

Earlier reports indicated that by late Friday morning, the police cornered a person believed to have been a final bomber, who was still wearing a suicide vest. The bomber had seized three hostages, two of them foreigners, Afghan officials said, leading to a standoff with the police. Most of the foreigners in the compound’s guesthouse had taken refuge in an underground panic room nearby and were safe, an official said.

In an Independence Day message sent by e-mail on Thursday, a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, urged people to continue fighting to expel Americans and their allies from the country.

Shards of metal and debris, including the skeletal remains of a destroyed vehicle littered the road outside the smoking complex.

Elham Udin, an ambulance driver, said he and other emergency crew members picked up five wounded people, four of them police officers. “The foreigners inside did not allow us to pick up their wounded because they said they would take care of them,” Mr. Udin said.

Amir Shah Gul, an emergency doctor at the scene, said he carried six people to ambulances, all police officers, and one of them dead.

Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting.
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Taliban targeting civilians in Afghanistan
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND Friday, August 19, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - A series of attacks by insurgents in recent days has killed numerous civilians but for the most part failed against military targets.

As many as 24 civilians were killed and eight wounded Thursday morning when two mines planted on a road in western Herat province exploded, Afghan officials said.

Also Thursday, a suicide bomber in a car filled with explosives tried to break through the gates of Forward Operating Base Gardez in eastern Paktia province, but it exploded before entering, killing two Afghan security guards and wounding nine civilian laborers, apparently as they arrived for work.

The Taliban said the suicide bomber was a 70-year-old man and claimed that the blast killed 27 foreign soldiers on the largely U.S. base, but a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said there were no reports of coalition casualties there.

The attacks reflect a growing trend over the past two years in which the great majority of civilian casualties have been caused by the Taliban and their allied insurgent groups. The United Nations in Afghanistan said in its June report to the secretary general that 80 percent of civilian casualties were caused by "anti-government elements."

In the Herat attacks, the two mines exploded on the same road at about the same time, but in different villages in Obe District, said Mohiuddin Noori, the spokesman for the provincial governor. He said that the attacks took place in an area frequented by Taliban but with no coalition forces present, and that they were apparently aimed at civilians.

The victims in both cases had been on their way to a local market town to buy provisions, Noori said, and both vehicles were full of civilian shoppers. In an explosion involving a truck, eight people were wounded and one woman died on the way to a hospital. In the second blast, the bomb hit a packed minibus and all 22 people on board were killed, he said.

A statement released later by the Ministry of the Interior put the death toll at 24, including five women, and the wounded at 11, including seven children under age 5.

Late Sunday night, three Taliban suicide bombers, one of them driving a van full of explosives, attacked a fuel depot in Kandahar province, killing four Afghan security guards and wounding eight others, three of them Nepalese contract workers. They failed, however, to enter the fortified compound.

On Wednesday, in Oruzgan province in the south, a motorcycle packed with explosives was left in a market in the Dehrawout district and detonated as shoppers gathered to buy food for the evening meal breaking the daily Ramadan fast. Ahmad Milad Mudasir, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said five civilians were killed, two of them young boys, and 18 were wounded.

"In the area where the explosion occurred, there were no police or other officials," Mudasir said. "We don't know what their specific targets were, but the victims were all civilians."

Also Wednesday afternoon, in southern Helmand province, two civilians were killed by a roadside bomb, according to the provincial police chief. The victims were farmers who were taking grapes to the marketplace, he said.

On Tuesday morning, gunmen on two motorcycles shot and killed a 22-year-old woman, Rabia Sadat, as she headed for work at a rural development project. Shahida Husain, a member of the High Peace Council from Kandahar, said Sadat worked in the government job to support her family.

"This kind of killing really affects the female gender in Kandahar and actually stops women from working outside their homes," she said. "Women in Kandahar really live in a state of fear, and I wonder how girls still attend schools and their parents even let them."
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British PM condemns attack on British Council in Kabul
LONDON, Aug. 19 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday condemned the "vicious and cowardly" attack on the British Council compound in Kabul.

Cameron confirmed that all British Council staff are now safe but said there had been a "tragic loss of life" among the Afghan police and others involved.

The prime minister said he had spoken to New Zealand Prime Minister John Key Friday to thank him for the role the country's special forces had played in defending the compound.

Cameron also stressed that the attack would not halt the "vital work" being carried out in Afghanistan.

"This is a particularly vicious and cowardly attack but it's an attack that hasn't succeeded," he said. "It will not stop the British Council and indeed our whole effort in Afghanistan to bring stability and peace to that country."

Earlier Friday, Minister for the Middle East Alistair Burt also condemned the "despicable" attack and said it "would not lessen the UK's resolve to support the Afghan people."

Martin Davidson, chief executive of the British Council, said the attack on its Kabul office "must not and will not" prevent it from giving young Afghans the support they need.

A group of suicide bombers stormed the cultural center of Britain, the British Council, at around 05:30 local time (0130 GMT) in Kabul, leaving about 10 people dead.
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U.S. Says Al-Qaeda Remains 'Preeminent Terrorist Threat'
August 19, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The U.S. government says Al-Qaeda remains the "most preeminent terrorist threat" to the United States -- especially because of the group's "cooperation" with Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In its annual report on global terrorism, the U.S. State Department said that although Al-Qaeda's "core" membership in Pakistan has become weaker, the group retains "the capability to conduct regional and transnational" terrorist attacks.

The report said "increased resource-sharing" between Al-Qaeda and its Pakistan-based allies such as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan and the Haqqani Network means that the terrorist threat in South Asia remains high.

The report covers 2010, before U.S. forces killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May.

The report also lists Iran, Syria, Sudan, and Cuba as what the United States considers to be state sponsors of terrorism.

It said Iran was "the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2010," and cited "financial, material and logistic support" for militant groups in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The report accused Iran's regime of backing the Palestinian group Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, along with Lebanon's Hizballah, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Iraqi Shi'ite Muslim militant groups.

According to a statistical annex prepared by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, there were more than 11,500 terrorist attacks in 72 countries last year. These caused more than 13,200 deaths, with more than 75 percent of them occurring in South Asia and the Middle East.

compiled from agency reports
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Has Mullah Omar Been Spotted In Kabul?
Mustafa Sarwar August 18, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
What if Afghanistan's most-wanted leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, were hiding right under President Hamid Karzai's nose in Kabul?

It might seem like a preposterous suggestion, except for two things. One is this year's bizarre precedent of finding Osama bin Laden hiding out in Pakistan's "West Point" city of Abbottabad. The other is the recent announcement by a member of Afghanistan's parliament that the one-eyed Mullah Omar was, in fact, a temporary guest in her Kabul home.

Homa Sultani, who is a legislator from Ghazni Province, announced to her fellow lawmakers earlier this month that Mullah Omar was staying at her place along with 12 other members of his entourage. They had come, she said, to talk with Karzai and she was trying to make the meeting happen.

But, Sultani said, Karzai was not interested. And from there she went on to attack Karzai as being not genuinely interested in making peace, despite setting up his high-profile Peace Commission to explore ways to reintegrate the Taliban into Afghan society.

Sultani's claims of hosting Mullah Omar in the capital and her broadside against Karzai were extraordinary for several reasons. First, she is not known as a fierce critic of the president. And, second, she is not a known sympathizer of the Taliban.

Instead, until this month, she was a little-known member of parliament who hails from Ghazni's Shi'ite Muslim Hazara community -- a group that the Taliban in the past has fiercely persecuted. And as a female parliament member, she personally would appear to oppose everything Taliban rule brought to Afghanistan, including a ban on women going to school, much less holding office. Not to mention that she has previously worked for the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Why Sultani?

So it should be no surprise that Sultani's announcement of hosting Mullah Omar caused a sensation in the Afghan press -- though it was little noticed by international media. She was interviewed by newspapers and appeared on television talk shows and the reception was not always kind.

In one typical reaction, the deputy head of the Karzai-appointed Peace Commission accused Sultani of bluffing. Mawlawi Ataullah Ludin told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan Sultani had to be doing so because the Taliban's spiritual head would never talk to someone like her.

Still, Sultani stuck to her story and even raised the ante. She told RFE/RL: "I have one son. If I am lying, let the government hang us both as an example to others not to stretch the truth."

Strong words. But stronger still when matched by the difficulty of finding any personal gain in Sultani's announcement of hosting an internationally reviled figure.

So, what to make of the whole affair? It is either political theater not worth watching or a rare view into the hidden world of Afghanistan's complex efforts to find a negotiated end to its conflict.

"I have not turned into one of the Taliban," Sultani told RFE/RL. Instead, "they have basically accepted our demands" for peace, including observing democratic values and human rights in the future.

Is that possible? For Mullah Omar to accept anything like an international definition of human rights, including women's rights, would be an astonishing development indeed. But that only adds to the mystery of what has become the "Sultani affair" in Kabul or -- for that matter -- of the whole question of negotiating with the Taliban at all.
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U.S. Probes Afghan Abuse
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM AUGUST 19, 2011
KABUL - The U.S. military has banned the transfer of detainees to Afghan authorities in Kandahar while it investigates reports that forces loyal to the powerful provincial police chief have abused prisoners.

Military officials imposed the ban in mid-July after receiving what they called "credible allegations" that some detainees had been mistreated while in the custody of Gen. Abdul Razziq's forces. The decision hadn't been made public until now.

Arguably the most influential surviving power broker in southern Afghanistan, Gen. Razziq oversaw Afghan border police at a major crossing with Pakistan, where he was long suspected by Western leaders of profiting from legal and illegal supply routes. He presided over an Afghan military force used to clear Taliban redoubts before becoming Kandahar police chief in May.

"We have received a lot of negative reports about his behavior and his atrocities and even sometimes torture," said one Afghan official. This Afghan official and a second one said they hadn't received details of the alleged torture. Western officials familiar with the ban declined to discuss the specific allegations.

A U.S. military spokesman confirmed Thursday that coalition troops wouldn't hand over prisoners to Afghan officials in Kandahar until they were sure the issue had been resolved. The U.S.-led coalition "takes these allegations very seriously and we want to ensure that the rights and safeguards of the detainees are protected," said U.S. Army Col. Gary Kolb, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force.

Gen. Razziq, contacted Thursday, expressed surprise when asked about the ban and said he wasn't involved in abusing any detainees. "I don't have any problem with ISAF and they haven't complained about me so far," he said. "Why would they say such things?"

The allegations against Gen. Razziq, which echo those voiced for years by human-rights groups, highlight the challenges of relying on local strongmen in the fight against the Taliban.

Like his former protector, provincial council chief Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was assassinated in July, Gen. Razziq has long been seen by coalition officials as a "malignant actor" who should be marginalized because of abuses and allegations of involvement in the heroin trade. Gen. Razziq has repeatedly denied any allegations of impropriety.

By the middle of last year, coalition forces in Kandahar came to increasingly rely on Gen. Razziq's fighters, pairing his men with U.S. Special Forces and dispatching them on missions throughout the province. U.S. military commanders in the province hailed him as a folk hero.

That record made the illiterate 33-year-old a preferred candidate to take over the provincial police force, succeeding a general who had been assassinated by insurgents. As part of the deal,Gen. Razziq retained control over the lucrative Spin Boldak crossing into Pakistan.

As a way to settle the dispute over alleged detainee abuse, some Western officials now are quietly pushing for Gen. Razziq to be removed from his police post. "The violations of human rights supercede everything else," said one Western official. "The priority is making sure these detainees are treated correctly."

Some top Afghan leaders oppose the idea because Gen. Razziq is viewed by some as the man the Taliban fear most in southern Afghanistan, the insurgency's cradle. "I would urge our partners to be very, very careful while dealing with a deteriorating security situation in Kandahar," said Shaida Mohammad Abdali, President Hamid Karzai's deputy national-security adviser. "We must not lose the people who can make a change."

Removing Gen. Razziq, Mr. Abdali argued, could further destabilize the south at a time when Kandahar is still reeling from the assassinations of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president's half-brother, and of the city's mayor.

"This man has proven himself to be an effective military commander," Mr. Abdali said. "Profession-wise, Razziq might have some problems, but can we afford meeting all the required standards under the current circumstances, where people seek an immediate change? ...If we lose this man, it will mostly benefit the Taliban."

Gen. Razziq has been able to expand his power base in the weeks since Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated on July 12. That same day, officials said, the U.S.-led coalition imposed the ban on detainee transfers amid fresh concerns about Gen. Razziq's command.

Separately, the International Committee of the Red Cross recently sent a letter of concern about him to the Afghan intelligence agency, according to Western and Afghan officials. An ICRC spokesman declined to comment.

The fate of Gen. Razziq represents an early test for relations between President Karzai and the new American representatives in Kabul—Gen. John Allen, the U.S. Marine who replaced Gen. David Petraeus last month as coalition commander, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

Kerri Hannan, the spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy, said the American mission is aware of the issue and working with the Afghan government to address the allegations. Gen. Allen couldn't be reached for comment Thursday.

The transfer of prisoners to Afghan authorities is a contentious issue that has already forced other countries to impose tougher monitoring rules.

Canada and the Britain both took new steps to monitor prison abuse after allegations surfaced in both countries that detainees in their custody had been tortured after being handed over to the Afghan government.

British human-rights activists have uncovered evidence that Afghan interrogators used electric shock and cables to torture these prisoners.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul has created an oversight program that is awaiting approval by the Afghan government.

The civilian toll in the war rose Thursday when 24 Afghans, including five women and several children, were killed by two roadside bombs in western Herat Province. Authorities blamed the Taliban for the deaths, but the insurgents denied responsibility.

—Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
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Afghans brace for economic fallout of U.S. exit
The World Bank estimates that 97% of Afghanistan's economy is tied to international military and donor spending, and many Afghans are nervous about how the troops' departure will affect the nation.
Los Angeles Times By Mark Magnier August 19, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan - Sorosh Tokhi's wallet is a lot fatter since foreign troops moved into Afghanistan in 2001. As an interpreter for the U.S. military earning $700 a month, he has bought a flat-screen TV and a sport utility vehicle, helped his parents out and paid for relatives' tuition.

So President Obama's recent announcement that U.S. troops will step up the pace toward a 2014 departure makes him nervous.

"Life's been good, hell yeah," said Tokhi, 24, shopping with friends on upscale Shar-e-Naw Street in Kabul, the capital. "But there's lots of change coming. When the U.S. troops leave, this place is going back to civil war."

The West's measured dash for the exit has Afghans bracing for an economic meltdown with reduced security, political instability, more violence and more economic destruction.

The World Bank estimates that 97% of Afghanistan's economy is tied to international military and donor spending, with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warning of "severe economic depression" after 2014. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spend about $320 million a month in Afghanistan.

Though U.S. officials pledge to help Afghanistan beyond 2014, some here are skeptical. They point out that the United States in the 1980s provided weapons and training to Afghan fighters opposed to Soviet occupation of the country, but lost interest as the Soviets pulled out and Afghanistan faced civil war.

Many Afghans fear the U.S. will soon shift more foreign aid to places such as Egypt, Tunisia and eastern Libya, which have seen public uprisings calling for democracy.

Afghanistan has little manufacturing or mining, despite its rich mineral wealth, and a chronically weak government. And though the Finance Ministry has pledged to fund its own budget by 2014, it's unable to collect much tax revenue outside the capital, given security concerns and citizen resistance.

Under pressure from foreign envoys, the Afghan Chamber of Commerce and Industries hopes to craft an economic transition plan that relies on private investment as foreign aid declines. Its efforts are hampered, however, by burdensome laws and regulations, corruption, deteriorating infrastructure and security problems, officials say.

Like Tokhi, several businessmen in Kabul said they have prospered since the Taliban left the city in 2001 despite the many years of war, and they now worry that their financial successes will come to an end.

The construction sector has boomed, with customers such as the U.S. military, United Nations agencies, wealthy Afghans and local warlords. Even some of those who have not done as well in the war economy, emphasizing that aid and prosperity often are not distributed evenly, wondered what amount of good might come when Afghanistan is on its own.

Many merchants and residents said they feared a resurgence of Taliban influence and violence.

"After every blast, my business goes to sleep for six months," said Ismail Abdul Salam, who said he often sells toilets to warlords with a penchant for large, gaudy homes with faux Corinthian columns. "Unfortunately my costs don't."

Mushtaba Nijati said he opened his shop selling water heaters a few years ago and has maintained a steady clientele, but now expects business to go over a cliff.

"Of course we're worried," Nijati said. "Why did America come if it's going to turn around and leave? This economy will collapse."

Others, like tailor Aamoz Majidzada, whose shop consists of little more than wooden boards, dangling wires and a foot-powered sewing machine, are unimpressed by the meager progress of most Afghans.

"Corrupt politicians, drug kings, warlords, they've made millions," Majidzada said. "I'm so angry seeing them in their mansions, eating fancy food, when I can't make enough to feed my three children.

"Since America invaded, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer," he said. "I don't care if they stay or leave."

Adding to the country's bleak outlook, shopkeepers and analysts said, is just how little politicians are doing to prepare for the nation's economic future.

Take Kabul Bank, where well-connected shareholders "borrowed" nearly $1 billion for private projects, said Habibullah Takhari, 63, a former government official. "The economy's in crisis and there's no plan," he said. "When foreign troops go, everything will be worse, for us and the world."

Though poor security and sometimes badly executed Western aid remain huge impediments, analysts said, Afghanistan ultimately has lost a historic chance to rebuild, train its citizens and gain economic traction.

"It was a golden opportunity," said Thomas Ruttig, co-director of Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent research group. "But who's to blame? Sure there's huge corruption. But how the economy works, the political system, were imposed by the West."

The one homegrown industry poised to fill the economic vacuum quickly is opium, with devastating implications for the West. Afghanistan already produces 93% of the world's crop, accounting by some estimates for one-third of its $18-billion economy.

"They've also become the world's biggest hashish producer again recently, so they're diversifying," Ruttig said, speaking of a cannabis preparation.

Many Afghans are upset by reports of the rich and powerful grabbing all they can through such varied means as kickbacks, payoffs, insider deals and preferential property agreements, stashing millions abroad and acquiring dual citizenship, presumably in preparation for leaving the country.

"I can hear the sucking sound in the air, people taking Afghanistan for what it's worth," said Amanullah Mojadidi, 40, a Kabul-based installation artist and social critic. "It'll be a bubble bursting like people have never seen, a massive shock to the economy, society, politics."

Ommolbanin Shamsia Hassani, 20, also an artist in Kabul, said she still holds out hope.

"I love my country," she said. "I don't want to go anywhere else. If people don't stay, who will help Afghanistan?"

mark.magnier@latimes.com
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Russia to Supply Fuel to Afghanistan, Rebuild Power Grids
Bloomberg By Lyubov Pronina Aug 18, 2011
Russia’s government agreed to supply Afghanistan with oil products and other forms of fuel with the help of non-state companies, according to an accord signed by officials from both countries in Moscow today.

OAO Lukoil, Russia’s largest non-state oil company, OAO Gazprom Neft and TNK-BP have held talks on shipping oil products to Afghanistan, Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko told reporters in Moscow today.

The nation expects to receive 500,000 tons of Russian refined products a year, said Anwar-Ul-Haq Ahady, Afghanistan’s minister of commerce and industries.

The oil shipments won’t be used to meet the needs of the U.S. military because it’s self-sufficient in fuel supplies, Shmatko said.

Russia’s Energy Ministry also agreed to help Afghanistan modernize and expand its electricity network.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lyubov Pronina in Moscow at lpronina@bloomberg.net
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On Progress In Afghanistan
Daud Khattak August 18, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Who says Afghanistan has not made progress in the past 10 years? Though not by leaps and bounds, even a naive observer can see visible change in the country's politics, freedom of expression, human rights and even health, schooling, and communications.

A recent four-day sit-in by a group of legislators in front of the Afghan parliament is the latest example of the headway -- albeit marginal -- in the landlocked country beset by 30 long years of war and interference from regional as well as global powers.

To be sure, Afghanistan has severe problems, namely a precarious security situation. But this too, like several other problems, has less to do with Afghan society and more to do with the neighborhood. Too often, it is Afghanistan's neighbors' interests -- or the clash thereof -- that contributes to the suffering of Afghans.

True, the international community has not succeeded in achieving its security objectives. But, Afghans have courts, a police system, an army, and an elected president and parliament dispensing their day-to-day functions. There is corruption and cronyism, and the elections are not up to Western standards, but in all of this there is progress.

A majority of Afghans now prefer even the corrupt government and rigged elections over the rule by powerful men, warlords or the Taliban. To many, a corrupt President Hamid Karzai is far better than a pious Mullah Mohammad Omar. People are no longer hanged or stoned to death in public, hands are not chopped off in playgrounds, women are (generally) not beaten for failing to cover themselves or venturing outside without being accompanied by a male relative.

Millions of Afghan girls and boys are now enrolled in schools, colleges, and universities; women hold public office, and given more professional opportunities; the media is free and vibrant; hundreds of kilometers of roads have been -- or are being -- constructed; most Afghans have access to mobile phones with thousands using Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet generally; health centers are being built even in remote villages and voices being raised against human rights violators.

With all of these things, there are certainly glaring issues. Mobile phones are hardly a panacea to development problems, maternal health care remains inaccessible for thousands, and corruption causes many development projects to sit idle. But, to say Afghanistan is not making progress -- as many are prone to opine -- is both not true and an affront to the people working tirelessly to improve the lives of Afghans.

Had the late Ahmad Shah Masud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar opted for talks instead of guns, rockets, and tanks, and staged peaceful protests like the Afghan legislators, the history of Afghanistan could have been without its Taliban chapter. To many, this may not matter a lot, but change is coming and it is visible. What is needed at this point from the international community and the United States is not to leave Afghans and Afghanistan at the crossroad and let the change fully mature.
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US to Arm Afghan Forces with Unique Equipment
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 18 August 2011
The US government will provide advanced military equipment to the Afghan army in the next four months - a move to enhance the capabilities of Afghan forces to fight the Taliban.

The equipment are the first of its kind being supplied to the Afghan forces, said Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, the head of transition committee overseeing transfer of responsibilities from Nato troops to Afghan forces.

"The equipment scheduled to arrive in four months are unique to the Afghan forces," Mr Ahmadzai told TOLOnews in an exclusive interview.

"We had received equipment two years ago, but they were second hand," Ahmadzai said.

The 500 kinds of military equipment reportedly do not include fighter jets as Ahmadzai said there were disagreements on the need for such advanced military aircraft.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has demanded the US government to provide Afghan forces with F16 fighter jets, warning he would knock other doors for support if otherwise.

The US government has reportedly argued that the counter-insurgency mission doesn't require fighters like F16.

Lack of equipment has been the main concern for Afghan forces in the fight against the Taliban-led insurgency.

The Afghan forces have taken over responsibilities of seven parts of the country in the first phase of transition, a process Mr Ahmadzai said the Afghan government cannot afford to let fail.

"The nation would be blamed if the [transition] process fails, not me nor the government," Ahmadzai said.

The Afghan forces will take charge of security across Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
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Afghan elders frustrated with lack of resources, leadership skills
Associated Press By Solomon Moore Thursday, August 18, 2011
SIRAQULA, AFGHANISTAN - The local Afghan leader’s community meeting was off to an unpromising start.

Hours after the meeting, called a shura, was supposed to begin, only seven old men waited at the gate of U.S. Marine Patrol Base Salaam Bazaar in the northern part of Helmand province.

Frustrated, Now Zad District Gov. Said Murad Sadtak chastised an Afghan army commander.

“Why did you not invite more people?” he demanded. “It was your task to tell the people and make sure that they come to see us so we can discuss their problems. It’s kind of a waste that I am here.”

The army commander had invited locals to the small fortified camp, but sometimes those invitations were extended during gunfights when soldiers and U.S. Marines were using private Afghan homes and farmers’ poppy fields for cover.

Mr. Sadtak continued to complain, and his American mentor, Marine Maj. Aniela Szymanski, moved to the man’s side.

“Maybe we should welcome those who have come to see you,” she said gently.

In Helmand province, unpracticed local leaders are wielding the levers of a fragile government for the first time. They urge local communities to support the government and reject the Taliban, often in places where the insurgency is more conspicuous than the new Afghan state.

But many local Afghan leaders lack skills and resources to address severe problems facing Helmand communities, including drought, joblessness and the chaos of living between two determined combat forces. Some are cut off from their constituents by insecurity. Others are corrupt.

This is the challenge for the international coalition: create a cadre of Afghan leaders and institutions robust enough to resist the Taliban’s advances after NATO withdraws combat forces by the end of 2014.

Filling government positions remains difficult because of illiteracy and insecurity. Provincial officials are under constant threat of assassination, so they live within Western military installations and must be escorted outside by U.S. military convoys and helicopters.

The week Mr. Sadtak met with tribal elders in Siraqula, the mayor of Kandahar’s provincial seat was assassinated by a suicide attacker who detonated a bomb hidden in his turban. A few days later, a dozen policemen were killed by a suicide bomber in Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

Lashkar Gah was one of five provincial capitals and two provinces chosen to start the transition from NATO to Afghan control.

The coalition hopes to use the security zone around the provincial capital and the central Helmand River Valley as a foothold to push Afghan governance into outlying areas such as Kajaki.

“My son was blown up,” a village elder told Kajaki District Chief Mohammad Salim Khan Rodi during a recent meeting at his compound inside a Marine camp. “Can you compensate me? I am just a poor man. My oldest son was my right hand. Without him, we have nothing.”

Mr. Rodi offered his condolences but no funds.

Twenty local elders were at the meeting in Kajaki, a good showing at a small, mine-encircled Marine camp. Mr. Rodi has hosted four other shuras in the past six months; none of them drew more than 24 men.

The men told him that drought is withering their crops and that they need more electricity from the Kajaki Hydroelectric Power Station to run irrigation pumps on their wells. They also demanded that the Marines stop night raids in nearby villages.

Mr. Rodi offered his visitors no promises. Electrical power is low because the Taliban illegally taps the power lines, he said, and insurgent checkpoints and bomb threats are delaying a long-overdue upgrade to the power plant.

“You yell at me to turn the power on,” Mr. Rodi told them. “But go tell the Taliban to let you have more electricity and see what they say.”

Night raids would cease when residents stand up to the Taliban, the district chief said.

“The government is here to serve the people, but you have to tell the Taliban to stop planting [roadside bombs],” Mr. Rodi said. “The other day, two policemen who protect me - they are as close to me as my own sons - were hurt because they stepped on [a roadside bomb].”

Kajaki district has no functioning government schools or medical clinics. Marines in Kajaki are in a defensive position around the dam. In the area, the insurgency prevents Afghan governance from taking hold, Mr. Rodi said.

“I’m so isolated from the people,” Mr. Rodi said in an interview after the shura. “And I’m not able to offer them my help the way I’d like to.”

In many of Afghanistan’s most insecure areas, Western diplomats and military commanders provide key links between local Afghan officials and provincial and national institutions.

Western advisers organize travel and payment transfers for Afghan officials. Advisers also hold daily meetings with their Afghan counterparts to impart their best political counsel.

Karzai Election Decree Complicates Afghan Political Crisis
August 11, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has made his move, ordering the Afghan Independent Election Commission (IEC) to "immediately finalize" the controversial results of last year's parliamentary polls.

Instead of breaking a political deadlock over more than 60 seats in the lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, however, the president appears to have muddied the waters.

The Afghan election body, lawmakers, political factions, media, and legal experts are divided over the interpretation of the August 10 decree.

The 62 candidates who were granted parliamentary seats after a special election tribunal overturned the initial results of the September 2010 election have welcomed the order, taking it as a sign that they will finally be sworn in as members of the lower house. They have gone so far as to characterize the decree as a victory for the rule of law in Afghanistan.

A sizeable number of sitting lawmakers -- a group that has served as a wedge between parliament and the presidential administration by stalling cabinet confirmations and legislation as the crisis has played out -- have a vastly different interpretation. They too are touting Kazai's order as a victory, predicting that the election commission will now validate its initial results.

IEC Welcomes Decree

Meanwhile, IEC head Fazal Ahmad Manawi is also taking the situation as a win. He has welcomed the Karzai decree, saying it backs his stance that the IEC has the last say in all matters related to the elections.

"The high court called on the president to take steps to resolve the problem," Manawi said. "And the president called on the election commission to take steps in the light of the constitution and the election laws."

Manawi openly opposed the president's creation of the special election tribunal amid claims of fraud that emerged after the results were released.

International media reports have suggested that the IEC now intends to consider just 17 cases of alleged election fraud.

Such an outcome would hint at the possibility for a compromise that would placate Karzai by allowing some of the candidates he backs to retain their seats, but is far from the radical overhaul of the parliament recommended by the special election tribunal.

'This Is The Law'

What is clear is that the president's new course is fraught with risk. Supporters of the 62 candidates declared winners by the tribunal are unlikely to stay silent if they are unable to join the parliament.

Daud Sultanzoi, a leading member of the group of 62, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan he welcomed Karzai's decree, and called on the IEC to implement the special tribunal's decision.

Sultanzoi said that the fact that it's called the "Independent Election Commission" doesn't mean that it's above Afghan laws and institutions.

"The court decision is a binding and enforced by Islamic [Shari'a] law. Nobody can defy the injunctions sanctified by the law," Sultanzoi said. "If they stand in the way of implementing this decision they will be considered 'mutamarid' [defying Islamic principles]. We all know that what Shari'a prescribes for dealing with such people."

Sitting Members Unhappy

Speaking at a stormy parliament session on August 10, sitting members threatened to boycott parliament if the IEC moves to implement the tribunal's decision. They warned of an unsolvable crisis if some members are forced out of the Wolesi Jirga.

Lawmaker Yunos Qanuni decried it as "part of a deliberate plan to foment a crisis in Afghanistan that will pave the way for a power grab after the 2013 elections."

While the two sides invoke the constitution and the rule of law, observers in Kabul see it as unending wrangling between strongmen and the political factions they control. They suggest that the eventual IEC results would not placate all sides, but might insure that powerful interests of the pro- and anti-Karzai camps are accommodated.

written by Abubakar Siddique, with reporting by RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan
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Hamid Karzai decree fails to resolve Afghanistan election dispute
International Crisis Group interprets document as 'muddled' approach to finding compromise over parliamentary crisis
Guardian.co.uk By Jon Boone Wednesday 10 August 2011
Kabul - An attempt by Hamid Karzai to resolve the world's longest running and most bitter election dispute has backfired after the Afghan president issued a decree of such ambiguity that both sides claimed victory.

Baffled lawyers pored over the text, which simultaneously supports and undermines a controversial special court backed by Karzai, but damned as unconstitutional by many, that has called for a quarter of MPs in the country's parliament to be turfed out of office.

The stakes in the 11-month standoff between Karzai and the country's parliament have become higher since the president said was unhappy with last September's election result that diluted the strength of his fellow ethnic Pashtuns.

Various attempts have been made to overturn the results, including shambolic constituency recounts ridiculed by election watchdogs.

Those efforts have appalled foreign diplomats and sitting MPs, including an influential faction agitating for Karzai's impeachment.

So a decree published by Karzai's office on Wednesday looked at first blush like an extraordinary and abject climbdown by a mercurial president with a long record of defying the international community.

The Independent Electoral Commission's top electoral official hailed the decree as a proof that, after months of wrangling, the president was backing his organisation as the final arbiter of the results.

William Patey, the British ambassador, said the decree "provides the opportunity for the conclusion of the parliamentary crisis", adding he looked forward to the IEC "completing their work as soon as possible".

Simultaneously, however, a group of former MPs who lost their seats claimed the decree, in effect, ordered the IEC to enforce the special court's decision to replace 62 members.

That was because although the decree acknowledged the primacy of the IEC, it also said the "findings of the special court and appeal court must be applied by the IEC".

An Afghan lawyer who regularly deciphers government decrees said "the government is playing a trick" designed to force the IEC's hand.

The International Crisis Group interpreted the document as a "muddled and fumbling approach to find a compromise", whereby Karzai would agree to just a handful of MPs being evicted.

But ICG analyst Candace Rondeaux warned that Karzai is so weakened politically that parliament might refuse to accept even that.

"At this stage I just don't think Karzai has enough money [to bribe MPs] or political influence to get parliament to accept it," she said.

But if he fails to make any changes, Karzai will further alienate disgruntled powerbrokers who want to reclaim seats they regard as "theirs".
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Afghan president not to seek third term
KABUL, Aug. 11 (Xinhua) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that he would not run for the third term to rule Afghanistan, a statement released by his office said here.

"The Afghan constitution does not allow anyone to run for the third time of Presidency," the statement added.

"I have no resolve to seek election for the third time and do not seek any way to run the country for the third time as president because it is not for the interest of Afghanistan," the statement quoted President Karzai as saying.

According to the statement, the President made these remarks in a meeting with some members of parliament in the Presidential Palace Thursday.

He made this comment amid reports by some lawmakers that Karzai is going to make ways and exploit his authority to run for the third time in the next presidential election.

President Hamid Karzai took power as the first elected president of Afghanistan in December 2004 for a five-year term and his second term as elected president began in November 2009 for another five years.
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Telephone Systems International and Ehsanollah Bayat Defeat US$400 Million Claim Brought by Lord Michael Cecil, Stuart Bentham and Alexander Grinling Bringing 9 Years of Litigation to a Close
LONDON, August 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/
Following nine years of legal proceedings in New York and London, Telephone Systems International ("TSI"), an operator of mobile telephone services in Afghanistan, and its principal shareholder Ehsanollah Bayat have secured a decisive victory in the English Courts against Lord Michael Cecil, Stuart Bentham and Alexander Grinling.

Cecil, Bentham and Grinling brought proceedings in the English High Court in April 2009, seeking damages of US$400 million against TSI, Bayat, TSI's subsidiary Afghan Wireless Communications Company ("AWCC") and Mark Warner based on their claim for shares in TSI. TSI and Bayat challenged the claim at hearings before the High Court in March 2010 and the Court of Appeal in December 2010. Over the course of these two hearings, the English Courts rejected the claims, most emphatically in the judgment of the Court of Appeal delivered on 18 February 2011. Cecil and Bentham then applied to the Supreme Court for permission to appeal the Court of Appeal's judgment, but that application was turned down in July 2011, closing off the claimants' final avenue for bringing this claim.

TSI and Bayat have always maintained that the claims brought by Cecil, Bentham and Grinling are groundless and are delighted that the result in the English Courts vindicates their position after nine years of litigation.

The U.K. litigation followed previous lawsuits in the U.S. in which Bayat's companies TSI and AWCC sued Bentham, Cecil and their companies for, among other things, fraud and breach of fiduciary duty.

Paul Hastings partners Michelle Duncan and Stephen Parker successfully acted for TSI and Bayat in the English proceedings.

Paul Hastings LLP is a leading global law firm with offices in Asia, Europe, and the United States. We provide innovative legal solutions to financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies. Please visit http://www.paulhastings.com for more information.
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Acting Transport Minister Accused of Graft
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 10 August 2011
Afghan Presidency's Complaints Office on Wednesday said that acting transport minister has been accused of bribery and fraud in presidential elections by two of his staff.

In a complaint letter to Karzai's complaint office two employees of ministry of transport accused acting Transport Minister Dawood Ali Najafi of huge corruption.

The complaint letter enclosed with some documents has been referred to the High Office of Oversight and Anti-corruption to investigate the accuracy of the allegations.

The complaint letter accuses Mr Najafi of organising fraud during presidential elections, illegal placement of irresponsible people in the ministry and plotting the death of head of transport for Herat province.

The two employees, Assadullah Momand and Abdullah Achekzai, wrote in the letter that Mr Najafi is looting the minister.

Mr Najafi said that "I give Karzai presidency and I have only cast 60 percent of false votes in favour of Karzai, Otherwise Dr Abdullah was the winner," the letter says.

Afghan Presidency's complaints office said it has no role in the letter.

Daud Ali Najafi, the current acting Transport Minister, was the secretary of the Independent Election Commission when Karzai was competing with Dr Abdullah during the presidential elections.
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Kandahar looks to a new strongman
ASIA TIMES By Abubakar Siddique and Mohammad Sadiq Rishtinai Aug 11, 2011
KANDAHAR - The hectic pace of life in Kandahar always slows considerably during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. Many residents participating in the dawn-to-dusk fast stay indoors, seeking respite from the blistering heat outside.

But this month, traditional inaction is magnified by fear following the loss of a number of high-profile political figures, and uncertainty over whether their replacements will bring more security to this center of Pashtun power and politics in southern Afghanistan.

Conversations and whispers in the city of 800,000 people center on the vacuum left behind by the deaths of provincial council head Ahmad Wali Karzai, the powerful and controversial brother of President Hamid Karzai and mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi, one of the region's most trusted public servants.

Adding to the uncertainty was the death of Amir Lalai, a former mujahideen-era commander and key pillar of the coalition ruling the city, of a heart attack last week.

In April, a suspected Taliban suicide bomber killed Kandahar police chief Khan Mohammad Muhajid, who had fought the Red Army and the Taliban.

A modicum of governance The question is how can these powerful men, who came from different Pashtun tribes in the region and managed a complex web of alliances, be replaced?

While far from perfect, their influence ensured a modicum of governance and helped prevent the Taliban, who claimed responsibility for the violent deaths, from retaking its former capital.

In replacing these men, will Kabul try to repeat its previous formula by choosing loyal and powerful leaders, or will it find compromise candidates who are less likely to be targeted by the Taliban?

The name of Gul Agha Sherzai, current governor of eastern Nangarhar province, is being tipped to return to his former stronghold to take Karzai's place. This would fit the government's mold of tapping a local strongman.

But even his success is not guaranteed with foreign forces looking to exit. The situation in Kandahar is further complicated by major North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military operations that helped create new conflicts and possibly dented efforts toward reconciliation with the Taliban.

Unending tribal disagreements Yama Gul Watandost, a young resident of Kandahar, says that Ahmad Wali Karzai had put a lid on seemingly unending tribal disagreements in the region. Filling Karzai's shoes, Watandost predicts, will be challenging.

"Family members might be able to fill up the vacuum he left behind but it won't match Ahmad Wali [Karzai's] competence," he says. "There will definitely be competition and feuds among the various tribes. Earlier Ahmad Wali [Karzai] balanced them through skillful negotiations and peace."

Competition or cooperation among the various Durrani and Ghilzai Pashtun tribes in Kandahar and the surrounding Pashtun provinces has defined war and peace in the region.

Kandahar-based analyst Mohammad Omar Sathey keeps a close eye on the developments in his home city. He says that strongmen in the region know that skillful manipulation of the tribal dynamics ultimately leads to power.

Sathey says that certain outside forces now want to exploit the uncertainty and disunity among the Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan, sensing an opportunity to shape the region to their liking.

Southern Afghanistan borders Pakistan and Iran. Kabul has blamed both Islamabad and Tehran for sheltering and protecting insurgents from the region.

According to Sathey, Kabul now has two choices in addressing the power vacuum in the region.

"We need a proper administration which can balance competing interests among various clans," he says. "Another way of sorting it will be to appoint people from other regions. Many people here think that officials from other provinces will not be interested in engaging in tribal struggle. This will deter them from fanning the fire here and won't instigate tribal rivalries."

Observers in the region, however, consider tribal rivalries a mere cover for a complicated power struggle among strongmen.

Controlling the Afghan narco-economy in the area is considered the major spoil of power in this region.

Poppy cultivation and trafficking began to take shape in southern Afghanistan toward the end of the Soviet occupation in late 1980s. Many powerful, regional mujahideen commanders then acquired controlling interests in the drug economy by paying farmers for their poppy harvests and raking in profits from processing and smuggling the crops.

Strongman rivalry This turned the region into the world's largest poppy producer, with the anarchy during the civil war in the 1990s providing an opportunity for warlords to carve out large fiefdoms for themselves. However, many of these commanders soon fell out over the control of the drug trade. Some of them bankrolled the Taliban movement in the mid-1990s and took over rival networks with their backing.

The demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001 exposed the region to another round of strongman rivalry. Back in power with the support of the United States forces, former governor Gul Agha Sherzai built a strong following and won some popular backing by bringing reconstruction projects.

Sherzai is also accused of pushing opponents to the insurgent ranks by labeling them Taliban. This exposed them to reprisals from international forces and deprived them of jobs, a role in reconstruction, and lucrative contracts. He was first ousted by the Taliban from Kandahar's governorship in 1994.

During his second stint in governorship Sherzai, however, was accused of promoting fellow Barakzai tribesmen, embezzling government revenues, and colluding with the drug lords.

In 2004, he was removed from the region and appointed the governor of far away Nangarhar. Critics accuse Ahmad Wali Karzai of using the same mold during the next seven years.

Sherzai's mention as a new regional strongman and real replacement for Ahmad Wali Karzai is no surprise to Kandaharis - the Pashto name for southern Pashtuns.

Haji Amin, who lives in Kandahar's second district, maintains that Sherzai's return to the region will ensure that he attracts a loyal following, which can make a positive difference.

"We are cautiously optimistic that Gul Agha [Sherzai's] return to Kandahar will improve the security situation in the region," he says. "If we get somebody who has no personal influence here; who is unable to call upon his people and lacks strong local backing, then the security situation will deteriorate every day."
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Five NATO Troops Killed In Afghanistan
August 11, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The NATO-led International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) said a roadside bomb attack killed five of its soldiers in southern Afghanistan.

ISAF said the five soldiers died on August 11, but provided no further details.

Meanwhile, the Taliban have insisted that the fighters who shot down a U.S. helicopter this weekend were still alive.

The U.S. military said that those responsible for the downing of the helicopter, which killed 30 U.S. troops along with seven Afghan soldiers and an Afghan interpreter, were killed in an air strike on August 8.

The incident was the single biggest loss of American life in the 10-year-old conflict in Afghanistan.

But a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said the fighters who carried out the attack in Wardak province were still alive.

He said the U.S. air strike had killed four fighters, but that they had not been the ones who downed the helicopter.

compiled from agency reports
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U.S.: Taliban Who Shot Down Helicopter Killed
August 10, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan has said that the Taliban insurgents who shot down a U.S. military helicopter, leaving 30 U.S. troops dead, have been hunted down and killed by allied forces.

General John Allen told reporters at the Pentagon that "at approximately midnight on August 8, coalition forces killed the Taliban insurgents responsible for this attack."

In a separate statement, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said the strike "killed Taliban leader Mullah Mohibullah and the insurgent who fired the shot associated with the August 6 downing."

The 30 U.S. troops -- including more than 20 from the U.S. special operations forces -- seven Afghan commandos, and an Afghan interpreter were killed on August 6 when the helicopter they were flying in was shot down in Wardak Province.

It was the single deadliest loss for U.S. forces in the nearly 10-year-old U.S. involvement in the Afghan war.

compiled from agency reports
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After Troops Leave, Obama Must Stay Engaged in Afghanistan: View
Bloomberg By the Editors Aug 11, 2011
World leaders can look at the same events and interpret them in radically different ways. So it is with President Barack Obama’s June 22 announcement to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan.

Obama plans to bring home 10,000 troops by the end of 2011, an additional 23,000 by the summer of 2012, and all U.S. combat forces by 2014. From his perspective, the U.S. is “starting this drawdown from a position of strength” -- al-Qaeda has been weakened, Osama bin Laden is dead, and the Taliban have suffered “serious losses.”

Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Afghan government and important regional players such as Pakistan, India, China and Russia see the U.S. withdrawal differently. To them, Obama’s decision indicates that the U.S. is again abandoning Afghanistan. They are likely to compare it to the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan in 1989. However false these regional perceptions might be, unless the U.S. moves quickly to counter them, these countries will act in ways that will make it much harder to preserve even limited U.S. gains in Afghanistan.

For most Americans and Europeans, the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979 to 1989) is ancient history. But for Afghans, Pakistanis and Indians, present-day events are following a disturbing pattern. In the 1980s, the U.S. armed the mujahedeen rebels who resisted the Soviet invasion. But once the Soviets withdrew, Afghanistan was no longer a priority for the U.S. As Michael Armacost, a top official responsible for American policy at the time put it, “We weren’t interested in what happened in Afghanistan internally. We were just interested in getting the Russians out.” Afghans and others probably wonder if the U.S. sees Afghanistan the same way today, with “al-Qaeda” substituted for “the Russians.” Regional Reactions

There are other worrisome parallels. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev viewed Afghanistan as a “bleeding wound” that undermined his efforts to reform the domestic economy and build a benign new international image. Many in the region suspect that Obama, like Gorbachev, would prefer to sacrifice the Afghan government that his country installed and nurtured for 10 years, rather than extend the war.

Faced with potential U.S. abandonment, all the region’s key actors will likely look to protect their interests. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban leadership are Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group. Karzai will be tempted to step up efforts to reconcile with elements of the Taliban to unite Pashtuns behind his leadership, even if that alienates Afghanistan’s non-Pashtuns. In turn, non-Pashtun leaders might consider reviving ethnic militias to shield their people from the risk of Pashtun domination. Another Victory

Many Pakistanis will surely push a new narrative that celebrates the U.S. withdrawal for demonstrating, again, that Islamic militancy can defeat a superpower. Pakistan can be expected to increase support for insurgents in order to ensure its future influence in Afghanistan. The Taliban and the Pakistanis may also try to delay reconciling with Karzai until after the U.S. leaves, because then their leverage will be greater.

India, Russia, the central Asian countries and China will all be concerned that giving the Taliban a share of power would legitimize Islamic militancy and encourage their own extremists. Russia has even supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s involvement in Afghanistan. “The minimum that we require from NATO is consolidating a stable political regime in (Afghanistan) and preventing Talibanization of the entire region,” Boris Gromov, the last Soviet commander in Afghanistan, and Dmitri Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to NATO -- both normally anti-NATO hardliners -- wrote in January 2010. Iran also opposes a Taliban return to power.

To limit Taliban influence, especially along their borders, these countries will consider reviving the Northern Alliance, a non-Pashtun group that fought the Taliban from 1996 to 2001. That could lead to civil war.

U.S. Actions

Not all of these regional reactions are inevitable. To deter them, the U.S. should move quickly to prevent Afghanistan’s disintegration and strengthen Karzai’s negotiating position. The key is to make absolutely clear that the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops doesn’t mean that America is abandoning Afghanistan. Specifically, Obama should emphasize that the U.S. will maintain a military presence in Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda’s return, to train the Afghan army and to deter attempts by Pakistan or Iran to destabilize Afghanistan. Ideally, officials in Washington should strike an agreement with their counterparts in Kabul on the size and purpose of a post- 2014 military presence.

It is important that Obama and the U.S. Congress find the money to pay and equip the Afghan military and police and pay for basic government services until the Afghan government has the resources to do so. The U.S. also needs to reassure the Indians, Central Asians, Russians and Chinese that Afghan reconciliation with parts of the Taliban doesn’t justify an effort to reconstitute the Northern Alliance, or otherwise undermine the government in Kabul. Most important of all is to persuade Pakistan’s leaders not to obstruct negotiations on reconciliation.

The American public is obviously tired of war. On the other hand, few would want to see their government squander a decade of U.S. involvement at a cost of almost 1,700 lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Having taken ownership of the war, President Obama has to find a way to withdraw while preventing a collapse of the Afghan government and a return to chaos. That is no easy task.

Afghans Arrest Taliban Leader, Army Turncoat
July 30, 2011 | Associated Press
A senior Defense Ministry official who allegedly leaked secrets that helped the Taliban stage suicide attacks in Kabul has been arrested by the Afghan Intelligence Service -- one of three high profile arrests announced Saturday by the agency.

A spokesman also said a senior Taliban official accused of leading an insurgent propaganda campaign in eastern Afghanistan, and an insurgent who allegedly helped organize an April 1 attack against the U.N. headquarters in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif that killed 11 people, including seven foreign U.N. employees.

Infiltration has become a serious concern for Afghan forces and the U.S.-led military alliance that is training them -- often on bases they share. The Taliban have said the practice has become one of their main strategies in their war against the U.S.-led coalition and President Hamid Karzai's government.

Several attacks involving bombers wearing military uniforms have targeted foreign troops as well as official Afghan institutions, including an April suicide bombing by an attacker wearing an army uniform that killed three people at the Defense Ministry.

The intelligence service recently arrested Gul Mohammad, an army officer who was serving at the Defense Ministry headquarters in Kabul, the agency's spokesman Lutifullah Mashal said at a news conference.

Mohammad, who was an eight-year veteran of the army, was in charge of three checkpoints in the capital -- one near NATO headquarters and the presidential palace, and two others on a road where the coalition has many bases and training facilities.

Mashal said insurgents offered Mohammad 200,000 Pakistanis rupees ($2,300) to help organize suicide attacks in Kabul. Many of the suicide bombers operating inside Afghanistan are thought to be trained in Pakistan's lawless tribal regions, which border provinces such as Nuristan and Nangarhar.

Mashal did not give Mohammad's rank or provide any other details about his role at the ministry, but said he was from the Taliban-controlled Waygal district in northeastern Nuristan province. Mashal said Mohammad is also thought to have supplied insurgents in the area with information on Afghan army troop movements.

He said Maulvi Rahimullah, who was allegedly responsible for the media, publication department and Internet services for a Taliban shura, or council, based in Peshawar, Pakistan, had been detained. Rahimullah, who was from the Pachir Wagam district of eastern Nangarhar province, also was a member of that shura, Mashal said.

According to Mashal, he also went by the alias Azrat Bilal and was reportedly the Taliban deputy shadow governor of Nangarhar in charge of recruiting in four eastern Afghan provinces. The third man arrested was identified as a suspected weapons supplier named Maulvi Sabor who was arrested in Balkh province.

Mashal said all the arrests occurred in areas where the international military coalition has transferred responsibility for security to Afghan forces. Two provinces and five provincial capitals were turned over to government forces earlier this month, part of a gradual handover of responsibility that will lead to full Afghan control by the end of 2014, when foreign combat troops are to leave the country.

"This is a good achievement for Afghan forces in these area, and a loss for the enemies who are trying to attack in those places where the transition of forces is taking place," Mashal said.

But violence continued around the country unabated.

Insurgents killed seven Afghan soldiers and a translator alongside two NATO service members in a bombing and ambush Friday in eastern Paktia province, according to the deputy provincial governor Abdul Rahman Mangal. He said the group was on patrol in the Zurmat district.

Police acting on tips in Kunar province also intercepted six would-be suicide bombers who local residents said were on their way to conduct an attack in the provincial capital of Asadabad, said Wasifullah Wasify. The provincial spokesman said one attacker blew himself up outside the vehicle on a road in Khas Kunar district, injuring one policeman. Police shot and killed two attackers and arrested two others, but one escaped, he said.
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Attack on a Patrol in Afghanistan Kills Seven
By SHARIFULLAH SAHAK July 30, 2011 The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — A bomb attack on a patrol killed two NATO soldiers and five Afghan soldiers on Friday evening, in an impoverished area of eastern Afghanistan where the Afghan government has little presence and where there have not previously been many lethal attacks on soldiers.

The explosion, at dusk in a mountainous area of Paktia Province’s eastern Zurmat district, also wounded two Afghan soldiers and a NATO interpreter, according to a NATO spokesman.

Although Paktia is one of three provinces where the Haqqani network, a particularly brutal insurgent group that is now based across the border in Pakistan, is active, local elders said this attack was staged by local Taliban who are angry at the government.

“Most of the Taliban here are from Paktia Province and are fighting the government and foreign forces bravely because the government has done nothing for these people here,” said a local tribal elder, who asked that his name not be used. “Not one of the government officials has shown up to help the Mamozai tribe; neither have they come to the village where this happened, nor come down to our village.”

“All our youths are jobless; they have nothing to work, so they have to join the Taliban and fight for them.” he said.

The Taliban took responsibility for the attack, said Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman for the east and north of the country.

Although in the past there have been relatively few attacks in Paktia Province, it has recently become more violent, with at least five American deaths there in July, counting the two on Friday, according to icasualties.org and Afghan security officials. The three earlier American deaths also occurred in Zurmat district; three Afghan soldiers died in that attack as well, according to Afghan security officials.

The area borders two more violent provinces, Paktika and Ghazni, and has both high mountains and some forested areas, making it easy for the Taliban to move from village to village.
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As drawdown approaches, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan reluctant to leave
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post Sunday, July 31, 5:00 AM
Garmser, Afghanistan — This farming district along the Helmand River, once one of the most Taliban-saturated corners of southern Afghanistan, has turned so quiet over the past three months that some U.S. Marines here quietly wish for a gunfight. “Just to get off a few rounds,” said one, “so we can feel like Marines.”

Since the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment arrived in Garmser in mid-April, they have struck fewer than 10 roadside bombs, none of which have proved fatal. Just one grenade and “no more bullets than you could fit in your front pocket” have been fired their way, said the battalion’s commander, Lt. Col. Sean Riordan.

Two summers ago gunshots and bomb blasts echoed across the cornfields, and medical evacuation helicopters swooped from the sky almost every day to collect the Marines’ dead and wounded.

The relative tranquillity that has been achieved seems the necessary prerequisite for Americans to leave and hand over responsibility for security to a feisty local police chief who has surprised U.S. officers with his grit and resourcefulness.

But the Marines do not want to depart anytime soon.

To cement hard-fought gains and prevent Taliban holdouts from wresting back the district, Marine officers want to maintain their current force level of about 1,000 troops until the end of the year. At that point, they estimate, they should be able to get by with half as many, assuming the area receives additional Afghan security forces.

“Transition needs to proceed in a careful, well-planned way,” Riordan said. “We don’t want people to think we’ve abandoned them.”

Garmser illuminates the trade-off facing top U.S. commanders as they struggle to fulfill President Obama’s recent order to remove 10,000 troops by the end of the year, and an additional 23,000 by the end of next summer, while also diverting more of the remaining 68,000 forces to eastern Afghanistan to confront a growing insurgency there. In doing so, they do not want to jeopardize the security gains that have been achieved in the south.

Every battalion and brigade commander, it seems, has a reason for why his area should be exempted from major cuts. In Garmser, it is proximity to Pakistan. In other parts of Helmand province, it is the worry of resurgent poppy production. In Zhari district to the west of Kandahar city, it is symbolic importance to the Taliban. The group’s reclusive leader, Mohammad Omar, was born there, and it has long served as a command-and-control hub for insurgents seeking to regain control of Kandahar.

A 4,500-soldier brigade from the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division has pushed into once-impenetrable Taliban redoubts in Zhari this summer, encountering dozens of homemade mines as they have sought to clear villages of insurgents. The operations have increased security, but the Afghan government’s presence still is fledgling, and the Afghan army unit there remains incapable of substantial independent operations, leading American officers in the area to recommend only minimal reductions over at least the next 12 months.

Senior officers believe that keeping large numbers of troops in the south for another year or two could help maintain public confidence as the conflict shifts to a new phase that involves more targeted killings. The recent assassination of top Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai’s brother and the mayor of Kandahar, and dozens of lesser-known people across the south who have worked with the government, have deeply unnerved the population.

Military culture also leads commanders to want to hold onto as many troops as they can, lest they be seen to have left too soon.

Top generals are sticking with their resource-intensive nation-building strategy, despite the hope of some administration officials, including Vice President Biden, that the drawdown plan would start to force a narrower mission aimed at killing al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

The commanders are betting that they can achieve their original goals — pummeling the Taliban, building up the Afghan government and security forces, and persuading low-level fighters to switch sides — before they have to send away large numbers of troops.

But they also are embracing initiatives that would have been scoffed at a year ago in an attempt to improve security quickly. They are shifting resources from mentoring the Afghan army to the police. They are expanding a program to train villagers as armed guards beyond the rural areas for which it was originally envisioned. And they are replacing sand-filled barriers with concrete walls at hundreds of small patrol bases, hoping that permanent structures will mollify residents’ fears of abandonment.

The final decision on how forces are allocated rests with Marine Gen. John Allen, who recently took over from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus as the supreme allied commander in Afghanistan. Although Allen has indicated to subordinates that he does not foresee fundamental changes to the overall U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, he will have to address competing demands in the south and the east.

Allen, said one senior military official in the country, “faces a very difficult task ahead. He has to find a way to put out new fires, while trying to ensure the fires that his guys think they’re getting under control don’t flare back up.”

Battleground to backwater

The U.S. effort to evict the Taliban from Garmser began with the arrival of a battalion of Marines in the summer of 2008 to replace a much smaller contingent of British soldiers. Back then, the insurgents controlled almost all of the district. The front lines — the British had trenches that evoked World War I battles — began less than a mile south of their base in Garmser’s main town.

The first wave of Marines seized several square miles of territory from the Taliban, and four successive battalions continued the effort, suffering dozens of casualties as they pushed south along the Helmand River valley and struck improvised bombs buried in roads, farmland and mud walls. The effort culminated earlier this year with the clearance of the last insurgent pocket in the far southern reaches of the district.

There is now only one Taliban cell operating in the area, and it appears focused on intimidating and attacking Afghans who are cooperating with the government, according to Marine officers. The holdouts do not appear to have links to al-Qaeda or other international terrorist groups; almost all of the fighters and commanders who have been captured over the past few years have families in the area.

“This is an amateur backwater for the insurgency now,” said Riordan, who sports a shaved head and bulging muscles.

What has occurred in Garmser has taken significantly longer than the 18 to 24 months that top military officials promised Obama it would require. The counterinsurgency effort in this district of about 150,000 people has already stretched for three years and cost the United States about $3 billion.

“Anyone who said you can go from full-on combat to transition in two years wasn’t being realistic,” said a field-grade military officer in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his assessment contradicts those of his superiors. “The lesson is that these things are going to take a lot of time and a lot of treasure.”

Embracing the police

The most influential figure in shaping the pace of transition in Garmser is not Riordan, nor the district governor, nor even the top Afghan army officer in the area. It is police chief Omar Jan.

In recent weeks, his men have captured the Taliban shadow governors responsible for Garmser and neighboring Nawa district, and they have found a cache of bomb-making equipment that Riordan estimates would have sustained the insurgents all summer.

Although the Afghan police have long been written off as incompetent and corrupt — the U.S.-led effort to train security forces has devoted far more resources to the army — Garmser suggests what is possible when an energetic leader is willing to work with international forces and tribal leaders, and combine modern law enforcement tactics with traditional ways of doing business.

A few months ago, the Marines used their helicopters to transport police officers, and their motorcycles, to the vicinity of a Taliban hideout; the police then closed in on their bikes, surprising the suspected insurgents. In mid-July, some of the officers switched into civilian clothes and rode tractors up to a house where they captured seven suspects.

In many other districts, police chiefs are Soviet-era holdovers who believe their job is to run checkpoints, or they lack local knowledge. Omar Jan is a creature of Helmand, where he is known by his two names.

U.S. officers remain concerned that his proclivity for graft could ultimately turn people against him — excesses by the police are among the reasons the Taliban was welcomed back by the population in parts of southern Afghanistan — but for now, the Americans are thrilled to have an Afghan who wants to lead instead of simply following foreign forces. And his efforts seem to be welcomed by residents desperate for security.

Despite high hopes for the Afghan army, most soldiers assigned to units in the south are not from the area, and many are not ethnic Pashtun, making them relative strangers. Most army units in the south still do not conduct independent operations, preferring instead to patrol next to Americans.

As a consequence, senior U.S. officers across southern Afghanistan intend to shift more of their personnel assigned to work with local forces from the army to the police. “We’re now at the point where the police is more important than the army,” Riordan said.

But Omar Jan is sometimes too much of a maverick. One recent morning, Riordan ventured to the police station, a two-story building — the only one in Garmser — in which Omar Jan and his top aides live and work, to talk about the tractor raid. Riordan came with praise, and a plea.

“This is great news,” he said. But he urged Omar Jan to inform the Marines the next time the police conduct such an operation to avoid the possibility of a “friendly fire” incident. The Marines, he said, would also be able to provide medical and bomb-disposal assistance if the police required it. “All I ask is that you coordinate with us,” Riordan said.

Omar Jan, a solidly built man whose deputies rush over when he waves his hand, responded by explaining how his extensive network of informers provided the tip that led to the raid.

“You are blind in this area,” the chief said to Riordan. “The same with the ANA [Afghan National Army]. If the enemy shows up without their weapons, you guys won’t recognize them, but we will.”

Omar Jan wants the Marines to stick around because he fears Taliban infiltration from Pakistan, which is 30 miles from the southernmost part of Garmser. But he also wants the Americans to keep their distance.

He said he was worried that the Marines would deem his men abusive if they observed his operations. “If we search and we don’t find anything, people will sometimes accuse us of stealing,” he said. “When the Marines arrive, they will think we are misbehaving.”

That was the opening Riordan needed. He gently implored Omar Jan to focus not just on capturing insurgents but winning the trust of the local population.

“It’s not enough to catch the Taliban,” Riordan told the chief. “You need to have the people on your side.”

Expanding village defense

In Zhari district, 75 miles northeast of Garmser, the pressure of transition has led U.S. commanders to embrace a new Afghan security force.

After American soldiers and Afghan border police swept into Nalgham, a village that had long been used as a Taliban command and logistics center, the commanders turned to an initiative by U.S. Special Operations Forces to train villagers to defend their communities.

The effort was originally intended for remote districts that had few foreign forces, not in places such as Zhari, which is close to a large city and the focus of major coalition military operations. But the commanders now think it can help encourage residents in those areas to cooperate with the police and army.

A group of elders from Nalgham had a similar idea. Soon after the clearing operations, three of them, representing the three principal tribes in the village, held a community meeting called a shura. Abdul Wali, a leader of the Achekzai tribe who had recently returned from Kandahar, announced that it was “time to stop talking and start acting.” Others agreed.

They resolved to create a local defense force that would report to the three elders, who decided to call themselves the “weapons shura” to set themselves apart from other village shuras in Zhari, which, Abdul Wali said, “are only about talking.”

The creation of such forces, called the Afghan Local Police, is a key element of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. Special Operations Forces, working with the Afghan government, have set up local police teams in 43 districts.

In Garmser, where the Marines are employing their own variant of the program, the participants do not conduct patrols or man checkpoints. Instead, the principal value has been to funnel intelligence to Omar Jan.

Because of concerns among senior Afghan leaders, including President Karzai, that the forces could become militias, the U.S. military has required the Ministry of Interior to approve every district that wants local police. To assess support for the program in each area, the ministry convenes a large shura, which is what occurred a few weeks ago in Zhari.

Officials from Kabul, Kandahar and the district government urged residents to back Abdul Wali — who pledged that he would control his men — and other leaders who wanted similar teams in their villages.

“It is your responsibility to defend this area,” said Abdul Razziq, an enterprising but illiterate border police commander who has been serving as Kandahar province’s interim police chief since the previous leader was assassinated this spring. Although he has been accused of extensive corruption and extrajudicial killings, his men are the most effective Afghan security force in the south.

In June, they roared up to Nalgham in pickup trucks and quickly identified friend from foe. By the time they were done, seven insurgents lay dead and dozens of others had fled, allowing U.S. and Afghan soldiers to take control of the area.

“If you don’t help us, we will force you to help,” Razziq told the crowd at the shura.

A few of the Americans observing the meeting thought he was joking. But nobody laughed.

Building up confidence

When Riordan meets with people in Garmser, the same question gets asked again and again: When are you leaving?

“If you leave too soon, everything we have achieved will be lost,” Mohammed Zakir, a gray-bearded elder, told Riordan over a snack of watermelon in a reed-enclosed patio on a recent afternoon. His sentiments echoed those of several tribal leaders in the district.

“We’re not going to desert you,” Riordan responded. “We will be here until the Afghan forces are capable of handling security on their own.”

Since Riordan cannot be sure how many Marines will be here by January, he is trying to find ways to make less look like more. And that involves lots of concrete.

His battalion is now spread among 51 posts in Garmser, some so small that they lack portable toilets, hot food and showers. Instead of closing many of them to prepare for the drawdown, he is transforming them into more permanent-looking structures, with brick watchtowers, concrete walls and new buildings to replace sandbags, rows of razor wire and tents. Each will have a makeshift gym where Marines who wish for a gunfight can work off their aggression.

Bases that appear enduring, he reasons, will ease concerns about the U.S. departure, even if they are eventually filled with only Afghan forces.

“It says, ‘Security is here to stay,’ ” he said. “And it competes with the Taliban’s fear campaign.”

But community representatives such as Zakir still focus on the number of Marines in the district.

“We defeated the Russians with your support, but then you left and the Taliban showed up,” he warned Riordan. “We know what will happen if you stop supporting us again.”

The battalion commander nodded. “Our country understands that we need a longer-term commitment this time,” he said. “But you have to understand we cannot keep this many Marines here for much longer.”
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Trilateral peace talks to be held in Pakistan
ISLAMABAD, July 30 (Xinhua) -- Top Afghan, Pakistani and the U. S. diplomats will meet in Islamabad on Tuesday to push for peace and reconciliation process in Afghanistan, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.

U.S. Special Representative Ambassador Marc Grossman, Deputy Foreign Minister of Afghanistan Jawid Lodin and Foreign Secretary of Pakistan Salman Bashir, along with the military and intelligence representatives of the three countries will participate in the meeting, said a Foreign Ministry statement.

The Core Group has been established to promote the process of reconciliation and peace in Afghanistan.

The trilateral meeting takes place at a time when the U.S. has started phased withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. Several other NATO member countries have also announced gradual withdrawal of their forces and the process will be completed by 2014.

NATO forces have already transferred security responsibility to Afghan forces in five areas.

Taliban militants have also stepped up attacks on foreign and Afghan forces and government officials in recent days. Taliban had claimed responsibility for the killing of the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who was killed by his guard in Kandhar this month.

President Karzai used his speech at the funeral of his slain brother to appeal to Taliban to join the peace and reconciliation process, but Taliban rejected the appeal.

Sources said the meeting is likely to discuss the recent tensions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Pakistani army says that Pakistani militants have established bases in border regions of Afghanistan and launch attacks on Pakistani border posts and villages.

Afghan officials say that Pakistani forces have fired hundreds of rockets and artillery shells into Afghanistan and killed dozens civilians.
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Lawmaker Claims Taliban Leader Mullah Omar Her Guest in Afghanistan
Tolo news July 30, 2011
A member of Afghan House of Representatives on Saturday claimed that Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, is in Afghanistan and her guest.

Homa Sultani, an Afghan MP representing Ghazni province, criticised the government over being reckless about her remarks saying the Afghan government hasn't paid any attention to what she said of receiving the Taliban Leader Mullah Mohammad Omar in her house.

Some lawmakers suggested that a delegation should be formed to visit the leader of the Taliban at Homa Sultani's home.

"At the moment Mullah Omar is in Afghanistan away from ISI and Pakistan. He is our guest and with us. His message is that he is ready for reconciliation and peace talks," Mrs Homa Sultani claimed.

Insisting on accuracy of her remarks, Mrs Sultani said if she is proved wrong she is ready to be punished.

"If my words are proved wrong, then I am ready to be punished for making a big lie on a big issue," she said.

Finally some of the legislators suggested formation of a delegation to verify Mrs Sultani's claim.

Shir Wali Wardak, an Afghan MP representing Wardak, said: "If the leader of the Taliban has come over to someone's house for a party, we should set up a delegation and as soon as possible we begin our negotiation with him."

The remarks came as Afghan security forces have consistently emphasised that the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar is living in a safe haven somewhere outside Afghan borders.
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Afghanistan's Warring Sides Seek Advantage Prior to Possible Talks
Voice of America By Phil Ittner July 29, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan - The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan is approaching its 10-year anniversary with no end in sight to the fighting. There are efforts, however, to negotiate a political settlement to the conflict.

Recent calls to end the war in Afghanistan come with complications.

This is the fighting season, the summer months when poppy farmers are not in their fields and mountain paths are clear of snow. And the fighting is particularly intense as the Taliban look to retain control of territory, particularly in the east and south.

Attempting a negotiated settlement

For NATO and U.S. forces that means fresh offensive operations.

For the Taliban - a series of assassinations and high profile attacks.

Mohammad Stanekzai is the chief executive of the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program. He said talks are already underway, but the Taliban will not be allowed again to control Afghanistan like they did in 2001.

"It is not the return back to the Emirate of the Taliban. It is that we provide the opportunity for Afghans that they can be part of the society, of the political system," said Stanekzai. "But at the same time, we should respect the wishes of all the people. All people of Afghan do not want that rule again. And they understand that, that they cannot rule the country."

Seeking peace

Afghanistan is war weary. The Soviets invaded in 1979. Civil war broke out in 1992. Then nearly 10 years ago, international troops took on the Taliban.

Afghan Parliament Member Fawzai Koofi said she wants her two daughters to grow up in peace. She worries that hard won civil rights, especially for women, could be lost.

"Political rights of individuals will be limited. Our concern is that we will lose all these civil rights," said Koofi. "Either lose them or they will be limited. What are we going to achieve? What are we going to lose? Is it going to guarantee peace in Afghanistan? A peace with justice? A peace with dignity?"

NATO considers women's rights, the Afghan constitution and an end to violence non-negotiable. Koofi said talking with individuals is fine, but she worries about the Taliban as a faction.

"Our concern is not individual re-integration of Taliban. Because, you know, that individual does not contribute to peace or war," she said. "Either they are with Taliban, they cannot increase the war. Or they join the government. Our concern is as a woman, as people who believe in a democratic country, our concern is Talibanization of the process."

Stumbling blocks abound

Further complicating a negotiated peace are regional disputes, tribal alliances and widespread lawlessness.

But in the end, Stanekzai said, Afghans must make peace among themselves.

"One thing should be made clear, nobody will serve the interests of Afghans other than Afghans themselves. And this is one thing: that Afghans should become united in order to save this country," he said. "And definitely we need the support of regional countries and international community. But the definite factor is the Afghan themselves. To put their differences aside. To come together and look to the game. And not to be the victim of the game of others."

For now the talks are behind closed doors and the fighting continues. But with public support in the West waning, and Afghans themselves eager for peace, the push is on to find a way to end a war that has cost so many lives and caused so much damage.
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Kabul television
After helping to modernise Afghanistan’s media, David Ensor is about to direct the Voice of America
Financial Times By Annie Maccoby Berglof July 29, 2011
In 2006, David Ensor quit his job as CNN national security correspondent and moved from Washington DC to an apartment off Kensington High Street in London, with his wife Anita, a former news producer, and their nine-year-old son Andrew. “Life is short. I’d spent 32 years covering the news and loved every minute of it. But journalism is the sidelines, just the first draft of history. I wanted to participate.”

Three-and-a-half years after taking a private sector job as head of public relations at Mercuria, an energy company, Ensor was tapped for a new senior US government post in Afghanistan: director of communications and public diplomacy for the US embassy. The job of communications “tsar” included a hefty budget to build up Afghan television, telephone and radio infrastructure and programming: “[The late diplomat] Richard Holbrooke asked me to go. I wanted to do my part to make sure Afghanistan moved into the modern world and never became a base for terrorist camps again,” says Ensor, 60, tanned from his time in Kabul.

Ensor’s move to London was driven by an urge to return to childhood stomping grounds. “Our daughter Kaya was already at school in England. We moved to London because I’d lived in Kensington and Hampstead on and off growing up and wanted to come back as an expat. I had fond memories of being taken to the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.”

Forty-five years after Ensor left for a US boarding school, had life in London changed? “It’s dramatically different. For one thing, there is no fog. I can remember as a little boy the terrible fog that used to descend. You could hold your hand out and couldn’t see it. Schools would close. And the buildings were so covered in soot that they were black. Today, London is a lot brighter. And, of course, it’s much richer. And it’s completely international. But while there was great hardship after the war, with the cold and the rationing of one egg a day, there was great spirit.”

While Ensor is American, his English/British family roots run deep. His father, an oil executive, was a British bomber pilot and squadron leader during the second world war who sometimes towed gliders packed with priests to France. “They were men dressed in the garb of French priests.” He didn’t ask who they were. “Better not to know.” He “was a classic member of that generation, modest and didn’t like to talk about the war. He said war was awful.”

Ensor’s great-great-grandfather was a manufacturing mogul from Dorset who sold gloves to the British army during the Crimean war. His maternal great-great-grandmother, a duke’s daughter, died in the Staplehurst railway crash, a death recorded by fellow passenger Charles Dickens, who, says Ensor, “wrote of ministering to a dying gentlewoman. He gave her brandy.” Ensor’s grandfather, Sir Robert C.K. Ensor, also had a claim to fame: he helped found the Labour party. “He was at Winchester school when he learnt that his grandfather’s fortune had been gambled away. His parents were suddenly penniless. It was a shock. I think that’s why he became a socialist. He went to London, met the Webbs, George Bernard Shaw, the Fabian Society. They all teamed up with the trade unions and launched Labour,” says Ensor, who keeps a framed print of a local 1910 campaign poster.

R.C.K. Ensor also wrote a popular volume of The Oxford History of England. “It’s still in print. I still get royalty cheques.” The volume addressed the effects of technology on history: “My grandfather wrote that the invention of the bicycle helped lead to the suffrage movement. The bicycle gave women mobility, independence.” Is there any modern innovation that could play a similar role in Afghanistan?

“The mobile phone,” he replies. “It’s revolutionising life. Five or six years ago there were 10,000 mobile phones; now there are 15m. An Afghan woman who’s living in a house behind high walls has access to texting. Texting helps overcome illiteracy.” Ensor expanded social networking sites such as Paywast, where small businesses track wholesale prices during war. “It’s more popular than Facebook.”

Are there parallels between his father’s war experience and his own? “I only covered wars: El Salvador, Bosnia, the Falklands. Chechnya ...” But he adds that “one of my great-great-uncles died in Afghanistan, in the battle of Maiwand. I couldn’t help thinking, here I am, an American diplomat, not a British soldier, and we are back in the same place fighting. He was fighting for the British empire. I was there on behalf of a coalition of 48 nations trying to help the Afghan people get back on their feet. He fought with guns. I was fighting the war of perceptions.”

Once in Kabul, Ensor was outfitted with a staff of 60, heavy security and a chunk of more than $4bn in aid. He set about creating television, radio and phone towers as well as home-grown programmes from news shows and soap operas to an Afghan cop drama. “A lot of the programmes I founded are aimed at the young. Afghan police are perceived as corrupt. We wanted to create positive role models.”

Does he have hope for an end to the conflict? “There’s a great war weariness. It’s cost a lot of money and a lot of blood. We abandoned the place before and the price was high. We do it again, the price is higher. We have to have patience, maybe not with 100,000 troops but some presence, or our children will have to go in.”

Soon Ensor will be packing up with his family again to assume a new post as director of Voice of America in Washington. Meanwhile, he relishes ordinary life as a London expat.

“It’s strange to be in transition. Kensington High Street is a highly pleasant place to live, with its cafés and restaurants ... After Kabul it’s a relief to walk freely in the streets without men with guns. And it’s a relief to see children. Children and spouses are not allowed in the US embassy compound.” He adds, “I think I’ll take some walks to Kensington Gardens. It’s a cliché but it’s nice to know that some things, even in war, remain constant.”
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Iranian Diplomat: US Pursuing Suspicious Strategy in Afghanistan
Fars News Agency July 30, 2011
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Ambassador to Kabul Fada Hossein Maleki cautioned that the recent surge in the assassination of Afghan officials concurrent with the start of the US pullout from the country is suspicious.

"These events produce abundant suspicions and ambiguities," Maleki told FNA on Saturday, adding, "That such assassinations are carried out concurrently with the pullout of the first group of the US military men from Afghanistan cannot be ignored easily."

Referring to the contradictory remarks of the US officials about Washington's plan for withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, he said, "Such contradictory comments show that after 10 years, Americans do not have single policy on Afghanistan and seek to change their methods and tactics any second."

Maleki reiterated that Afghanistan and the regional countries believe that the Afghan government enjoys the capability to establish security throughout the country, and said, "The international community and the US should act upon their undertakings and provide the Afghan government and national forces with the necessary tools and equipment."

Iran, along with other regional countries, has on numerous occasions asked for a withdrawal of foreign forces from the region, describing it as the only way to restore peace and tranquility in this part of the world.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in August that withdrawal of American forces from the region is the only way for US President Barack Obama to prove he is serious about implementing his campaign motto of change.

Ahmadinejad criticized his American counterpart for failing to realize his campaign trail promise of "change."

"They (the Americans) announced that they had pulled out part of their forces from Iraq in recent days and claimed that their move was in line with their slogan of 'change,'" Ahmadinejad said in August.

"You said you would withdraw all your troops from Iraq, why is it that some of them are still in this country? Secondly, where are you relocating your forces from Iraq?"

"Americans want to relocate their soldiers to Afghanistan. What kind of a change in their military policy is this?"
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US military chief Mike Mullen takes the heat in Afghanistan
By Lyse Doucet 29 July 2011 BBC News
Southern Afghanistan - Summer in southern Afghanistan is blazing hot in every way; temperatures soar and the fighting season reaches its peak.

But this year it really is boiling hot.

We landed at midnight at Kandahar military airfield, on aircraft bringing the top US military advisor Admiral Mike Mullen and his team to take the temperature here.

Even at that hour, the blazing heat of the day still lingered.

In recent months audacious Taliban attacks have killed leading Afghan figures and key US allies.

It has left Afghans anxious and uncertain at a time when the US is preparing to pull out the 33,000 extra troops it put on the ground last year.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to take some of the heat out of that worry. Slower drawdown

"We expected these kind of spikes in the campaign including spectacular assassinations," Admiral Mullen said matter of factly just before boarding the C-32 military plane that took him from the seat of American power to America's battle in southern Afghanistan. "They are not surprising," he emphasised.

Just days ago, Kandahar Mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi was killed by a suicide bomber in broad daylight.

In neighbouring Uruzgan province, an assault involving multiple suicide bombings killed at least 17 Afghans, including BBC reporter Ahmed Omed Khpulwak.

"This campaign has been tense and worrying for years," Admiral Mullen told me as he strode across the tarmac at the Andrews Air Force base just outside Washington. "We are moving in the right direction," he insisted.

But there was also a note of caution. The gains from the past year of intensified, US-led military operations, including targeted killings, were "fragile and reversible."

That is the catchphrase now used by senior US military officers, including the last commander here, General David Petraeus who will soon take up his new post of CIA director.

Admiral Mullen, the US President's most senior military advisor, is known to have preferred a slower drawdown of US forces than the plan recently announced. 10,000 US soldiers will leave this year, and another 23,000 by the end of 2012. Power broker

But now his job is to carry it out. He pointed out that by the end of next year, there would still be 68,000 US soldiers in Afghanistan.

That is double the number when President Barack Obama took office.

He also mentioned forces from the Nato coalition as well as a "significant build-up" of Afghan National Security Forces.

Asked about Afghans' nervousness over the timing of the pull-out, he said he was "confident there were enough forces to reassure" them.

The US's key ally and main power broker in the south, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President's half brother, was recently assassinated by his own bodyguard.

His death left a dangerous power vacuum, but one senior US military source said opinion was divided on its impact.

"He worked with us on some issues, on others he was obstacle; for example, when it came to improving governance." Magic trick

Aggressive clearing operations over the past year, and a massive injection of American aid, have pushed the Taliban back from many districts.

US officials portray suicide bombings as signs of Taliban weakness. But for many Afghans these brazen attacks confirm the insurgents' ability to confront more conventional military might.

As on the many other trips he has made to this region, Admiral Mullen will be briefed by senior commanders and also hear from more junior officers about the challenges they are facing in this fight.

He has also brought some American entertainers with him "to bring a smile to their faces" including popular television comedian Jon Stewart, basketball legend Karl Malone, and world famous magician David Blane, who told me he was bringing a "lot of amazing magic".

I asked if he had a magic trick that could bring peace. "I want to bring peace everywhere," he replied with a broad grin. "That's why I like doing magic."

For the past four years, Admiral Mullen, who ranks as President Obama's top military advisor, has travelled to southern Afghanistan in the baking heat of summer so he can experience the gruelling conditions for his troops on this key battleground in the Taliban's main stronghold.

This is expected to be the admiral's last visit to see the soldiers in the field before he retires in two months.

But he brushed aside any notion this was a "farewell tour." He knows a lot can still happen in this hottest of seasons in Afghanistan.
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Afghanistan Team Denied Chance at 2012 Olympics
New York Times By JOSEPH D’HIPPOLITO July 29, 2011
Afghanistan’s national men’s basketball team will not get a chance to qualify for the 2012 Olympics after requests for visas to travel to a prequalifying tournament were denied.

The eight-man squad of Afghan-Americans was supposed to play this weekend in Uzbekistan in a three-team tournament to decide the FIBA Middle Asia Zone’s berth for September’s Asian championship in Wuhan, China. The winner would represent that continent in next summer’s London Olympics.

But after several days of hectic activity and despite the involvement of the Afghan Embassy in Washington, Uzbekistan’s foreign ministry Thursday did not authorize the visas to travel to the tournament.

That decision — combined with the Afghanistan Olympic Committee’s refusal to release $70,000 in financing before restoring $30,000 in travel expenses at the last minute — may prove costly.

“We will never do this under these circumstances again,” said Coach Mamo Rafiq, who won the South Asian Games’ gold medal last year with a team of college students and men with full-time jobs and families.

“As a coach,” Rafiq said, “I can’t call on these players and have them work out for four months knowing that there’s a question mark whether they’re going to go or not.”

One such player is Haroun Arefi, a 6-foot-4 swingman who just graduated from San Diego State and seeks a career in physical therapy.

“It’s tough to say, ‘We want to keep going’ when we’ve got other stuff to do,” said Arefi, 24. Afghanistan’s Olympic committee and basketball federation submitted the roster and visa requests “three months ago,” said Esmael Husseini, the team’s manager, who served as a liaison between the team and the Uzbek Embassy.

Yet when he presented the players’ Afghan passports to the Uzbek Embassy, Husseini said, he was told that he had to submit American passports because the team did not have an invitation from Uzbekistan’s basketball federation.

“For more than a month, I’ve been calling” the Uzbek Embassy, Husseini said. “I asked, ‘Did you get any confirmation?’ They said, ‘No.’ ”

Americans did not need an invitation to visit Uzbekistan, Rafiq said. But expediting visas for American passports costs $210 per visa. When Husseini notified the players, he said, each sent him their American passports along with $210 by overnight mail. Then the Uzbek Embassy’s consular office questioned the players’ nationality.

“This application was submitted for Afghan citizens,” said Mamam Ismailov, who heads the Uzbek Embassy’s consular office. “But they submitted to the embassy, I don’t know why, U.S. passports.”

Rafiq said: “I actually had to call USA Basketball in Colorado and have them send an e-mail with an official stamp from USA Basketball saying that these players had never played in any type of USA Basketball competition.”

During the week, Hussein and an Afghan diplomat visited the Uzbek Embassy with a letter from the Afghan Embassy. Eventually, Husseini said, an official opened the door and took the letter. The invitation from Uzbekistan’s basketball federation arrived Wednesday.

“They said, ‘The invitation arrived, and we’ll issue your visas in 10 days,’ ” said Atiq Panjshiri, executive director of the Afghan Sports Foundation, a nonprofit organization that represents Afghanistan’s basketball federation overseas.

“We did not receive confirmation from our capital,” said Ismailov, whose embassy returned the check for the visas.
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Afghanistan's Warring Sides Seek Advantage Prior to Possible Talks
VOA News July 29, 2011 Phil Ittner
Kabul, Afghanistan - The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan is approaching its 10-year anniversary with no end in sight to the fighting. There are efforts, however, to negotiate a political settlement to the conflict.

Recent calls to end the war in Afghanistan come with complications.

This is the fighting season, the summer months when poppy farmers are not in their fields and mountain paths are clear of snow. And the fighting is particularly intense as the Taliban look to retain control of territory, particularly in the east and south.

Attempting a negotiated settlement

For NATO and U.S. forces that means fresh offensive operations.

For the Taliban - a series of assassinations and high profile attacks.

Mohammad Stanekzai is the chief executive of the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program. He said talks are already underway, but the Taliban will not be allowed again to control Afghanistan like they did in 2001.

"It is not the return back to the Emirate of the Taliban. It is that we provide the opportunity for Afghans that they can be part of the society, of the political system," said Stanekzai. "But at the same time, we should respect the wishes of all the people. All people of Afghan do not want that rule again. And they understand that, that they cannot rule the country."

Seeking peace

Afghanistan is war weary. The Soviets invaded in 1979. Civil war broke out in 1992. Then nearly 10 years ago, international troops took on the Taliban.

Afghan Parliament Member Fawzai Koofi said she wants her two daughters to grow up in peace. She worries that hard won civil rights, especially for women, could be lost.

"Political rights of individuals will be limited. Our concern is that we will lose all these civil rights," said Koofi. "Either lose them or they will be limited. What are we going to achieve? What are we going to lose? Is it going to guarantee peace in Afghanistan? A peace with justice? A peace with dignity?"

NATO considers women's rights, the Afghan constitution and an end to violence non-negotiable. Koofi said talking with individuals is fine, but she worries about the Taliban as a faction.

"Our concern is not individual re-integration of Taliban. Because, you know, that individual does not contribute to peace or war," she said. "Either they are with Taliban, they cannot increase the war. Or they join the government. Our concern is as a woman, as people who believe in a democratic country, our concern is Talibanization of the process."

Stumbling blocks abound

Further complicating a negotiated peace are regional disputes, tribal alliances and widespread lawlessness.

But in the end, Stanekzai said, Afghans must make peace among themselves.

"One thing should be made clear, nobody will serve the interests of Afghans other than Afghans themselves. And this is one thing: that Afghans should become united in order to save this country," he said. "And definitely we need the support of regional countries and international community. But the definite factor is the Afghan themselves. To put their differences aside. To come together and look to the game. And not to be the victim of the game of others."

For now the talks are behind closed doors and the fighting continues. But with public support in the West waning, and Afghans themselves eager for peace, the push is on to find a way to end a war that has cost so many lives and caused so much damage.
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Mullen: Surge in Afghan violence, assassinations expected; to discuss attacks with leaders
Associated Press Saturday, July 30,2011
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - The recent spike in spectacular violence rocking southern Afghanistan has been expected, but it’s not clear yet how the attacks will affect the area’s fragile governments, the top U.S. military officer said Friday as he arrived in the embattled region.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters traveling with him that he plans to talk to Afghan leaders during his visit about the surge in dramatic attacks and