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06 February 2012
FEATURE STORY
Obama administration’s Afghanistan endgame gets off to bumpy start
BUSINESS
No articles featured today
NATION
Afghanistan to Face Major Financial Challenges Beyond 2014, Zakhilwal Says
Opium: Afghanistan's new front line
Gilani Visits Qatar to Discuss Peace Efforts
Pakistan vows to help peace efforts in Afghanistan
In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower
Security Transition Ends Next Year, Gass Says
Readers Write: Keep criminals off streets; get US out of Afghanistan; let kids play
A Postwar Picture of Resilience
A decade after going to war in Afghanistan, the wins are fading
U.S. to elevate Special Operations forces’ role in Afghanistan|
No Secret Talks with Anti-Government Armed Groups: Abdullah
Winter at an Afghan Refugee Camp: ‘Is It Sugar From God?’
Panetta Urges International Community to Fund Afghan Forces
PRESS RELEASES
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FEATURE STORY
Obama administration’s Afghanistan endgame gets off to bumpy start
Washington Post
By Karen DeYoung
Monday, February 6, 2012
With war fatigue growing and an election looming, the Obama administration has bumpily embarked on its endgame in Afghanistan.
In recent weeks, closed-door strategizing over Taliban peace talks, the pace of NATO’s combat handover and withdrawal, and the future of U.S. relations with Afghanistan and Pakistan have suddenly become part of the public and political debate.
But revelations about plans already in motion have emerged sooner than the administration has been prepared to explain them, complicating efforts to turn them into a coherent whole and build support.
“There are people at every piece of this — the Taliban, Islamabad, Kabul and Washington” — who object to or are trying to influence elements of the emerging strategy, a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk more candidly. “They use leaking as a tool.”
Last week, days after French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed transitioning combat responsibilities to Afghan forces a full year ahead of NATO’s schedule, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told reporters that the administration anticipated doing just that.
U.S. and Afghan military forces on the battlefield responded with open concern that they weren’t ready for an early turnover. At the White House, aides grumbled that only President Obama could announce a new timetable and that he wouldn’t be addressing the issue until a NATO summit in May.
Panetta’s comments also poured fuel on an ongoing debate within the administration’s national security team over the right balance between talking to the Taliban and fighting them, even as the troop-heavy counterinsurgency argument that won Obama’s approval two years ago has shifted in favor of those who advocated a sleeker counterterrorism force.
Some senior officials privately echoed Republican critics, who argue that an earlier end to the combat mission — or even public discussion of one — would weaken the administration’s hand as State Department and National Security Council officials prepare for another meeting with Taliban representatives this month in Qatar, and as the military girds for this summer’s fighting season.
With the election less than a year away, the administration has denied any domestic political calculus. Officials have said, however, that they think Americans are tired of the financial and human cost of the war and would welcome an exit strategy so long as they believed it ensured U.S. national security.
Opinion surveys show strong support for an early end to the Afghan war, and the GOP presidential field has failed to find a coherent message in opposition.
Nonetheless, the welter of revelations over talks with the Taliban has angered lawmakers on Capitol Hill. In appearances before Congress last week, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and CIA Director David H. Petraeus were pressed on the divergence between administration public claims of major battlefield progress, and classified intelligence assessments describing a stronger and more confident Taliban fighting force.
Senators from both parties expressed concern during a classified White House briefing Tuesday on the proposed transfer of five Taliban leaders detained at Guantanamo as part of a peace deal. The administration, which is required to give Congress 30 days’ notice before moving a prisoner, had previously classified all five as too dangerous to leave the U.S. military prison in Cuba.
“Given the fact that after the negotiations started, [the Taliban] were committing acts of political assassination to undermine all of the work, all of the sacrifice of the United States military and intelligence forces on the ground . . . some of us might get a little cranky about what we’re doing when we talk about reconciliation” with the insurgents, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Petraeus at a Thursday hearing.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made clear Saturday she did not intend to clear up the confusion. “I am not going to go into any details about what we are or are not prepared to do, because we are just at the beginning of this process of exploration whether or not there is an opportunity to bring about an end to the conflict through a political solution,” Clinton told reporters in Munich, where she and Panetta were attending an international security conference.
“There will continue to be all kinds of speculation about what is or is not happening,” Clinton said.
Clinton, considered a relative hard-liner on the military side of the Afghan equation, has also been at the forefront in pushing for Taliban talks as part of a strategy she has called “fight, talk, build.” The White House plans to seek NATO agreement on a comprehensive way forward in May.
“We’re trying to meld the military and political sides into one policy,” said a second senior administration official. “There’s not less fighting; they’re fighting as much as possible. But the talking is happening at the same time.”
“On the political track, there’s a hugely realistic view that this thing has a 7 or 8 percent chance of succeeding. There’s no sense that we’re going to put all our eggs in this basket,” this official said of negotiations.
Since details of the talks emerged in December, critics and complications have far outnumbered supporters. A tentative deal to allow the so-called Quetta Shura, the Taliban umbrella organization headed by Mohammad Omar, to open a negotiating office in Qatar was set aside when President Hamid Karzai refused to endorse it.
Other elements of the agreement included the transfer of the five Guantanamo Bay prisoners to house arrest in Qatar. For their part, U.S. officials insisted the Taliban issue a statement renouncing international terrorism and endorsing the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
Karzai has since given his blessing to U.S. talks and the Taliban’s Qatar office. But presidential aides have continued to denounce the U.S.-Taliban meetings and said the administration was working behind Kabul’s back. U.S. officials said they were engaged only in developing “confidence-building measures” to prepare the ground for direct negotiations between Karzai's government and the Taliban.
U.S. and Afghan officials separately held meetings with Hezb-e-Islami, a separate Afghan insurgent group. The group’s leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, told the BBC last week that talks with the Taliban outside the country would fail unless all factions were included.
Karzai aides have said he was thinking of starting his own negotiations with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia. Despite their own strained bilateral relations, the Afghan and Pakistani governments found common cause in feeling cut out of the U.S. talks, and Islamabad announced high-level visits to both Kabul and Qatar.
Pakistani officials have said negotiations will fail unless “all groups” are included, referring to the Haqqani network of militants that is Islamabad’s favored faction.
The Taliban, which has surprised administration officials by publicly acknowledging the talks, angrily denied a report Friday that Omar wrote to President Obama last summer to complain about their slow pace. U.S. officials said the unsigned missive was handed to administration negotiators by Mohammed Tayeb al-Agha, Omar’s representative in the talks.
Last month, Marc Grossman, the administration’s diplomatic point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan, traveled to Kabul to ensure Karzai’s support and to issue public statements reiterating the terrorism denunciation that is the Taliban’s part of any initial bargain.
Karzai then embarked on a tour of European governments, while Grossman traveled to Qatar, where he met with Taliban representatives who have already set up residence there in anticipation of the office they hope to open. After the meeting, Grossman stopped in Rome to brief Karzai on the talks. Karzai flew to Paris and endorsed Sarkozy’s call for an early end to NATO combat operations.
The administration says no military decisions will be made before the NATO summit. On the negotiating front, it interprets the myriad moving parts as progress. “A year ago,” the first senior official said, “nobody was talking about a peace process. You have to say that today, lots of people are talking about an Afghan peace process. No one knows how all this will turn out.”
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BUSINESS
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NATION
Afghanistan to Face Major Financial Challenges Beyond 2014, Zakhilwal Says
TOLOnews.com
By Saleha Sadat
Sunday, 05 February 2012
Afghanistan will face major financial challenges after 2014, the Afghan Minister of Finance said on Sunday while speaking before the Afghan House of Representatives.
Presenting next year's budget to the House of Representatives, Afghan Minister of Finance Hazrat Omer Zakhilwal said that as the Afghans are taking over responsibilities, it will cause a major challenge for Afghan government beyond 2014.
He emphasised that the Afghan government will not have enough financial resources to carry on without international support.
"With all these achievements, we will face some major challenges," Mr Zakhiwal said. "The transition process can give Afghans more responsibility but it will cause major financial challenges."
The total budget for next year is estimated Afs 224.5 billions.
The normal annual budget for Afghanistan will be Afs134.3 billion.
Nearly 77.3 billion Afs will be earned through Afghan government incomes and more than 56.9 billion Afs will be provided by international community.
The development budget of the country is estimated 9.2 billion Afs.
The total revenues from the national resources are estimated 87.9 billion Afs for the next solar year.
The total cut for the main budget will be 12.5 billion Afs, Mr Zakhilwal added.
Lack of professional personnel is another challenge cited by the finance ministry.
His comment comes as The US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta on Saturday urged the international community to help pay for strong Afghan security troops despite worldwide economic pressure.
US is spending around $12 billion a year to train the Afghan security troops, which is expected to rise to 352,000 men to take over security when Nato combat forces withdraw by the end of 2014.
The United States has predicted that the annual price tag of training and equipping Afghan security forces in coming years will be around $6 billion.
The US wants the international community to contribute $1 billion per year after 2014 in addition to the United States' assistance.
Meanwhile, the British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has said that Nato ministers would consider two critical questions: "What should be the long term size of the Afghan security forces and how are we going to share the cost of supporting that between different members of the international community. Those are discussions we have started here and we will continue at Chicago."
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Opium: Afghanistan's new front line
War torn and ravaged by division, Afghanistan has become the focus for the worldwide fight against child drug addiction
The Independent
By Lianne Gutcher
Monday 06 February 2012
Mazar-e-Sharif
By the time she was 22, Shukofar had suffered nine miscarriages. She carried the babies until about six months, before losing them all. Poor, uneducated and lacking access to proper medical care, she turned to the fix-all panacea in rural Afghanistan: opium. Smoking the drug, she was told, would keep her calm, stop any bleeding and allow her to carry to full term.
By the time she eventually gave birth to her first son, Shukofar was an addict.
Like many new mothers, she was constantly exhausted after the birth of her baby, and so she gave the child opium too, to keep him quiet and allow her to rest. Baby Nasruallah became an addict, as did her second child, Jaweed.
Shukofar, now 28, is pregnant again. But she is determined to be a better mother. Along with her children, now five and two, she is undergoing treatment at a revolutionary drug rehabilitation centre in Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, one of only six centres for women and children in a country with a drugs problem that no one yet quite knows the scale of. "I wanted to sleep all the time," Shukofar said, describing life as an opium addict: "I couldn't take care of my two children. Now I am better than before. Now I feel like I am a [proper] mother and I take care of my children."
Shukofar and her children are fortunate. The waiting list for treatment is lengthy and there are only 20 beds for women and 15 for children. The oldest child having treatment is 12 years old.
Researchers started looking into the problem of child drug addiction in Afghanistan in 2008. Over two years, they went into the homes of 50 known opium smokers to assess whether the children were affected too. In the first year, 61 per cent of children tested positive for opiates. In the second year, 74 per cent tested positive.
"We found everything saturated in opium smoke," said Thom Browne, chief of the Office of Anticrime Programme's Criminal Justice Division at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL).
They established the children were becoming addicted in a number of ways: they were inhaling their parents' second-hand smoke; they were absorbing it through their skin because it was on toys, blankets and pillows and parents
were giving it to them as a medicine and pain reliever. Parents were also giving them heroin paste as a "babysitting" method so they could work weaving carpets. In some provinces, during the opium harvest, farmers would also have their children score the poppy and, again, they would absorb it through their skin.
"They built up such high tolerance that the levels inside both the adults and children would actually kill a western addict," said Mr Browne. "Our researchers said they had never actually seen levels this high."
Aid groups in Afghanistan have expressed concern that despite billions being poured into the country in aid, a large proportion of the next generation – in a country where in some rural villages all the population is addicted to opiates – will be addicted to drugs.
But a silver lining exists. Although the research has identified a horrifying epidemic, the research now being done in Afghanistan on how to treat child addicts is starting to be used as a blueprint for the rest of the world.
"No one ever thought to look for child addiction before," said Mr Browne. "Unfortunately, as we are looking more, we are starting to find it."
Researchers are now finding children as young as five to eight addicted to crack cocaine in Brazil, with similar problems suspected in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, as well as child soldiers in Africa addicted to amphetamines given to them to boost their confidence.
Afghanistan gets "beaten up in the press for having 93 per cent of the world's opium supply," said Mr Browne. "But it's at the forefront of developing protocols for child addiction that have never been done before." It is a gradual process, but the lessons learned in Afghanistan are now being preached around the world. French paediatric surgeons working in Afghanistan told the international researchers at a UN meeting in Vienna in March 2011 that they were "astounded" by the levels of anaesthesia required to knock a child out in order to operate. They had never considered testing children so young for drugs, but can now administer safer levels of anaesthetic.
Recovering child addicts are very different from their non-addicted peers, explained Dr Abdul Mobeen, programme director of Shahamat Health and Rehabilitation Organisation, working in his clinic in Mazar-e-Sharif: "The children are mentally undeveloped [and] they don't like to get involved in activities. They don't want to play, they don't want to learn. They like to sit in a dark place and don't want to mix with other children."
Pewaly Loden, who is a teacher at the treatment centre said: "These children, their parents are also addicts. Their mothers and fathers don't pay attention to them or take care of them. It's new for them, the things we do for them."
Because they know no other existence, the children do not really understand that they are addicts. But they are taught, during their treatment, that drugs are bad, that they are dangerous and that they should not use them.
It is this research that those at the coalface of treating addicted children are hoping will provide answers for children around the world. INL researchers are also monitoring patients during their reintegration into the community and are conducting hair and urine tests on patients to assess whether, one year after the treatment is over, they are still drug free.
"We want to determine if the treatment model we're using is effective in helping to reduce relapse and drug use rates," said INL's Mr Browne.
INL along with the World Health Organisation, the UNODC – the UN's drug and crime division – the Medical University of Vienna, and Johns Hopkins University is studying the children over the long term, research that they hope will eventually lead to the successful treatment of children in Afghanistan, and in the other areas afflicted by high incidents of drug-addicted children.
"Addiction to hard drugs at these ages has never been seen before," said Mr Browne." It's going to have to be a lifetime study following the kids. Drugs are bad for anyone – we're talking about your heart, your liver, your lungs. Conception through early childhood is a period of rapid brain development. The results of exposure to drugs in the womb, during infancy and childhood can result in lifelong problems with learning, behaviour and development."
Back at the treatment centre, we find 10-year-old Habib. According to the doctors, he was in a pretty bad state when he came in with his mother but he has progressed well. He now even takes newly admitted children under his wing and tells them they are going to be ok.
"I would like to stay here for a long time," Habib said. "I am better than before. I am happy and I don't use opium.
"When I finish my treatment I will go back home and find new friends who are not addicts," the former young addict said.
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Gilani Visits Qatar to Discuss Peace Efforts
TOLOnews.com
Monday, 06 February 2012
Pakistan's Prime Minister Yosuf Raza Gilani is visiting Qatar on Monday to discuss peace efforts.
A Pakistani official has said that Pakistan will support every effort to promote reconciliation in Afghanistan.
Mr Gilani's trip comes after Taliban said that they planned to set up a political office in Qatar for possible talks with United States.
But the main precondition of the Taliban to hold talks is the release of Taliban prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.
The US Intelligence Department is assessing the risks of transferring five senior Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay to a third country as part of the efforts to set peace talks with Taliban, US Intelligence Chief, General David Petraeus recently told the US Congress.
Transfer of Taliban detainees was strongly criticised by top US Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss.
Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Hinna Rabbani Khar during a visit to Kabul last week that her country supported Afghan peace talks.
She also rejected accusations that her country was secretly supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
A secret Nato report recently published by British media said that the Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services.
The report said that the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, "is thoroughly aware of Taliban activities and the whereabouts of all senior Taliban personnel".
The Taliban remain defiant and are widely supported by the Afghan people, according to the report.
Pakistan has frequently been accused by US officials of supporting militants that carry out attacks against foreign troops and Afghan forces, something Pakistan has repeatedly denied.
The Taliban have also denied that there were plans for peace talks with the Afghan government in Saudi Arabia.
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan are often tense. The Kabul government has accused Islamabad in the past of supporting the Taliban and sabotaging all efforts to launch peace negotiations.
Pakistan's support is therefore seen as a key to forging peace in the country.
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Pakistan vows to help peace efforts in Afghanistan
AFP
05/02/2012
Pakistan will support every effort to promote reconciliation in Afghanistan, a senior government official said ahead of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's visit to Qatar Monday to discuss peace efforts.
Gilani's trip comes after the Taliban last month said they planned to set up a political office in Qatar ahead of possible talks with the United States.
"There are certain ideas and suggestions on Afghan reconciliation and when Prime Minister Gilani meets Qatar's leadership, these will certainly come under discussion," the official, privy to developments on the issue, told AFP Sunday.
"Americans have been briefing us on all developments aimed at pushing forward the peace process in Afghanistan and we have clearly told them that Islamabad strictly adheres to a policy of non-interference," the official, who wished to remain anonymous, said.
"We are ready to support every effort and a process that is Afghan-led and involves all factions," he said, adding "it is important to engage all Afghan factions including Taliban in the process to achieve a lasting peace".
"We have no favourites in Afghanistan and strongly believe that all Afghan factions have to be on board and agree on a certain formula", the official stressed.
"The only favourite that we have is peace and stability in Afghanistan."
Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar during a visit to Kabul last week rejected accusations that her country was secretly supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Taliban have also denied plans for peace talks with the Afghan government in Saudi Arabia.
The statements came as a leaked NATO report charged that Pakistan's security services were backing the Taliban, who consider victory inevitable once Western combat troops leave Afghanistan in 2014.
Asked how Pakistan viewed the Taliban's announcement on setting up an office in Qatar, the official said "now they have an address and all those wanting peace can have a contact."
Afghanistan has given its blessing to the move, but Kabul, wary of being sidelined in talks between the insurgents and Washington, has insisted on a central role in any negotiations.
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan are often tense. The Kabul government has accused Islamabad in the past of supporting the Taliban and sabotaging all efforts to launch peace negotiations.
Pakistan's support is therefore seen as key to forging peace in the country.
The official said Pakistan did not think it was being left out of the process.
"There is nothing of the sort and we did not gather such an impression of being left out from anywhere," he said.
Asked how Pakistan viewed the possibility of Saudi Arabia as a possible facilitator in the process, the official said Islamabad was not fixed on a particular country taking the role.
"The end result should be a solution and peace in Afghanistan," he said.
"Pakistan welcomes any effort that is made from anywhere to push forward the peace process."
Meanwhile, Gilani said during a televised media discussion in Islamabad on Sunday that it was in Pakistan's interest to see a stable Afghanistan.
"We are ready to support any reconciliation process that is Afghan-led," he said.
But analysts believe that any role for Pakistan in the process is possible only after it improves ties with the United States.
"Pakistan will have to improve relations with the US. Qatar is a facilitator of the dialogue between the US and the Taliban and it cannot get a seat for Pakistan at the negotiations table," analyst Hasan Askari told AFP.
Pakistan must have the confidence of the US and Afghanistan to become an active player in the dialogue process, he added.
Commenting on Taliban's decision to open a political office in Qatar, he said, "It will be a very useful contact point if it is an extension of Mullah Omar's system".
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In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower
New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
February 5, 2012
WASHINGTON
On his second yearlong deployment to Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis traveled 9,000 miles, patrolled with American troops in eight provinces and returned in October of last year with a fervent conviction that the war was going disastrously and that senior military leaders had not leveled with the American public.
Since enlisting in the Army in 1985, he said, he had repeatedly seen top commanders falsely dress up a dismal situation. But this time, he would not let it rest. So he consulted with his pastor at McLean Bible Church in Virginia, where he sings in the choir. He watched his favorite movie, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” one more time, drawing inspiration from Jimmy Stewart’s role as the extraordinary ordinary man who takes on a corrupt establishment.
And then, late last month, Colonel Davis, 48, began an unusual one-man campaign of military truth-telling. He wrote two reports, one unclassified and the other classified, summarizing his observations on the candor gap with respect to Afghanistan. He briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members, spoke with a reporter for The New York Times, sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general — and only then informed his chain of command that he had done so.
“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?“ Colonel Davis asks in an article summarizing his views titled “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down.” It was published online Sunday in The Armed Forces Journal, the nation’s oldest independent periodical on military affairs. “No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan,” he says in the article. “But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.”
Colonel Davis says his experience has caused him to doubt reports of progress in the war from numerous military leaders, including David H. Petraeus, who commanded the troops in Afghanistan before becoming the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in June.
Last March, for example, Mr. Petraeus, then an Army general, testified before the Senate that the Taliban’s momentum had been “arrested in much of the country” and that progress was “significant,” though fragile, and “on the right azimuth” to allow Afghan forces to take the lead in combat by the end of 2014.
Colonel Davis fiercely disputes such assertions and says few of the troops believe them. At the same time, he is acutely aware of the chasm in stature that separates him from those he is criticizing, and he has no illusions about the impact his public stance may have on his career.
“I’m going to get nuked,” he said in an interview last month.
But his bosses’ initial response has been restrained. They told him that while they disagreed with him, he would not face “adverse action,” he said.
Col. James E. Hutton, chief of media relations for the Army, declined to comment specifically about Colonel Davis, but he rejected the idea that military leaders had been anything but truthful about Afghanistan.
“We are a values-based organization, and the integrity of what we publish and what we say is something we take very seriously,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Petraeus, Jennifer Youngblood of the C.I.A., said he “has demonstrated that he speaks truth to power in each of his leadership positions over the past several years. His record should stand on its own, as should LTC Davis’ analysis.”
If the official reaction to Colonel Davis’s campaign has been subdued, it may be partly because he has recruited a few supporters among the war skeptics on Capitol Hill.
“For Colonel Davis to go out on a limb and help us to understand what’s happening on the ground, I have the greatest admiration for him,” said Representative Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina, who has met with Colonel Davis twice and read his reports.
Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, one of four senators who met with Colonel Davis despite what he called “a lot of resistance from the Pentagon,” said the colonel was a valuable witness because his extensive travels and midlevel rank gave him access to a wide range of soldiers.
Moreover, Colonel Davis’s doubts about reports of progress in the war are widely shared, if not usually voiced in public by officers on duty. Just last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a hearing that she was “concerned by what appears to be a disparity” between public testimony about progress in Afghanistan and “the bleaker description” in a classified National Intelligence Estimate produced in December, which was described in news reports as “sobering” and “dire.”
Those words would also describe Colonel Davis’s account of what he saw in Afghanistan, the latest assignment in a military career that has included clashes with some commanders, but glowing evaluations from others. (“His maturity, tenacity and judgment can be counted on in even the hardest of situations, and his devotion to mission accomplishment is unmatched by his peers,” says an evaluation from May that concludes that he has “unlimited potential.”)
Colonel Davis, a son of a high school football coach in Dallas and who is known as Danny, served two years as an Army private before returning to Texas Tech and completing the Reserve Officer Training Corps program. He served in Germany and fought in the first Iraq war before joining the Reserve and working civilian jobs, including a year as a member of the Senate staff.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he returned to active duty, serving a tour in Iraq as well as the two in Afghanistan and spending 15 months working on Future Combat Systems, an ambitious Army program to produce high-tech vehicles linked to drones and sensors. On that program, too, he said, commanders kept promising success despite ample evidence of trouble. The program was shut down in 2009 after an investment of billions of dollars.
In his recent tour in Afghanistan, Colonel Davis represented the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, created to bypass a cumbersome bureaucracy to make sure the troops quickly get the gear they need.
He spoke with about 250 soldiers, from 19-year-old privates to division commanders, as well as Afghan security officials and civilians, he said. From the Americans, he heard contempt for the perceived cowardice and double-dealing of their Afghan counterparts. From Afghans, he learned of unofficial nonaggression pacts between Afghanistan’s security forces and Taliban fighters.
When he was in rugged Kunar Province, an Afghan police officer visiting his parents was kidnapped by the Taliban and killed. “That was in visual range of an American base,” he said. “Their influence didn’t even reach as far as they could see.”
Some of the soldiers he interviewed were later killed, a fact that shook him and that he mentions in videos he shot in Afghanistan and later posted on YouTube. At home, he pored over the statements of military leaders, including General Petraeus. He found them at odds with what he had seen, with classified intelligence reports and with casualty statistics.
“You can spin all kinds of stuff,” Colonel Davis said. “But you can’t spin the fact that more men are getting blown up every year.”
Colonel Davis can come across as strident, labeling as lies what others might call wishful thinking. Matthew M. Aid, a historian who examines Afghanistan in his new book “Intel Wars,” says that while there is a “yawning gap” between Pentagon statements and intelligence assessments, “it’s oversimplified to say the top brass are out-and-out lying. They are just too close to the subject.”
But Martin L. Cook, who teaches military ethics at the Naval War College, says Colonel Davis has identified a hazard that is intrinsic to military culture, in which a can-do optimism can be at odds with the strictest candor when a mission is failing.
“You’ve trained people to try to be successful even when half their buddies are dead and they’re almost out of ammo,” he said. “It’s very hard for them to say, ‘can’t do.’ ”
Mr. Cook said it was rare for an officer of Colonel Davis’s modest rank to “decide that he knows better” and to go to Congress and the news media.
“It may be an act of moral courage,” he said. “But he’s gone outside channels, and he’s taking his chances on what happens to him.”
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Security Transition Ends Next Year, Gass Says
TOLOnews.com
By Sharif Amiry
Sunday, 05 February 2012
Nato's Civilian Representative in Afghanistan, Simon Gass, at a press conference on Sunday said that all security responsibilities will be handed over to Afghan forces by mid 2013.
Foreign forces will hold a supportive role after that, he added.
"The fifth phase of security transition will start in mid 2013," Mr Gass said. "The Nato forces will hold a supportive role afterwards."
He dismissed the comments made earlier by UK's Chief of Defence, General David Richards, who slammed the Nato mission in Afghanistan and called it amateurish.
"I believe he never called Nato mission in Afghanistan amateurish. He may have said that Nato role in Afghanistan could improve," Mr Gass said. "The UK is committed to its role in Afghanistan."
There are reports that Nato allies will decide about a decrease in number of the Afghan troops.
"Talks about number of Afghan troops will also be discussed. The Afghan forces need major financial help after 2014," Mr Gass said. "We haven't decided about this yet."
Meanwhile, some Afghan military experts believe that the United States wants to stop supporting Afghan troops.
Experts are concerned that this may cause the collapse of the government after withdrawal of foreign combat troops.
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Readers Write: Keep criminals off streets; get US out of Afghanistan; let kids play
Letters to the Editor from the weekly print edition of February 6, 2012: One reader says reducing prison populations won't come from releasing criminals, but rehabilitating them and preventing crime. Others praise the recent cover story on the importance of free playtime for children. Another argues the US shouldn't stay in Afghanistan for access to resources or influence in the region.
Christian Science Monitor
February 6, 2012
Keep criminals off the streets
I found a contradictory message in two pieces from the Jan. 16 issue. One of the stories promoted on the cover ("Progress Watch: Violent Crime") is titled "How serious crime fell in US." It credits part of the reduction to "increased incarceration, including longer sentences, that keeps more criminals off the streets."
In the same issue, however, Arjun Sethi's commentary piece "Four low-cost ways to reduce prison overcrowding" advocates sentence reduction for habitual offenders and urges limiting the use of pretrial detention.
RELATED: Four ways to relieve overcrowded prisons
I think I prefer keeping the criminals off the streets. Reductions in prison populations must be driven by education and opportunity (jobs). Once the crime is committed and the perpetrator is on that path, society has a responsibility to keep its citizens safe from those who choose to do it harm.
Larry Sims
Montrose, Colo. Child's play; Afghanistan
Regarding the Jan. 23 cover story "Time for play": I find it sad that the existence of schools where children play in kindergarten is not known or mentioned. They exist, and some of the best are the Waldorf schools [in some countries Rudolf Steiner schools]. To enter a Waldorf kindergarten is like entering a child's paradise. Kindergartens are considered the foundation and most important part of these schools.
The 19th-century German national poet Friedrich Schiller said: "Man is only truly man when he plays." Albert Einstein's take was that "imagination is more important than knowledge."
I would also like to comment on Alexander Benard's op-ed in the same issue, "Leave Afghanistan, forfeit a region." Mr. Benard blatantly admits that the goal of keeping a US military presence in that country would not be to bring freedom and democracy or even kick out the Taliban, but to have US presence and influence in a strategically important region.
RELATED: Afghanistan Field Guide: Don't wear sunglasses and eight other essential tips
Of course, those strategic interests sound more like greed for Afghanistan's natural resources – "oil and gas reserves ... lithium, copper, rare earth minerals, gold" that apparently can only be obtained by military might, not by trading and paying for it.
In German there is a saying that applies to this issue, too: "Wo Wissen endet, beginnt Gewalt." That is, "Where intelligence ends, violence begins."
Ingrid Tillman
Keaau, Hawaii
I am a newly retired school psychologist with three decades of experience working in public schools. The "Time for play" cover story is too good and the information contained is too important to limit its reach only to Monitor subscribers. It should be turned into a brochure and distributed to all public schools.
We need public schools to rethink their vision of what constitutes childhood success before it is too late.
Jane Everham, EdS
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A Postwar Picture of Resilience
New York Tiimes
By ANTHONY D. MANCINI
February 5, 2012
Op-Ed Contributor
WHEN the United States announced last week that its combat troops in Afghanistan would be withdrawn by mid-2013, there was obvious relief. But it was followed by familiar concerns.
One of the biggest of those concerns is the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among the tens of thousands of returning veterans, which according to some media reports runs as high as 35 percent. These reports have incited fears that we will soon face a PTSD epidemic. But are such fears justified?
According to mounting scientific evidence, they are not. In fact, the prevalence of PTSD among veterans of recent wars is about 10 percent — substantially lower than is commonly believed. Indeed, the picture emerging is one of remarkable psychological resilience among the military.
This story of resilience has been ignored, partly because many assume that humans are inherently vulnerable to trauma. That belief makes us receptive to messages, most delivered by the media, that reinforce this perspective.
A growing body of scientific research, though, is telling another story: in short, that a traumatic event does not necessarily sentence a person to PTSD. Although an exact figure cannot be determined, a series of population-based studies has provided estimates that it occurs in just 5 percent to 20 percent of service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, with most studies hovering around 10 percent. In a representative study soon to be published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, my colleagues and I examined stress responses among more than 7,000 members of all United States service branches, before and after their deployments. The respondents were not seeking treatment and were representative of the military as a whole. Perhaps most important, their reports were confidential and had no bearing on their military careers.
About 83 percent of respondents showed a pattern of resilience: they exhibited a normal-range ability to cope with stress both before and after deployment. By contrast, fewer than 7 percent showed signs of PTSD following deployment. Surprisingly, these numbers improved among those with multiple deployments, with 84.9 percent showing resilience and only 4 to 5 percent with PTSD. Predictably, those with more severe combat experiences, like witnessing death and injury to others, were at greater risk.
Statistics like these are unlikely to generate headlines for understandable reasons. We do not want to stigmatize those with the disorder. Nor do we want to suggest that war is easily managed or that the problem is not of the utmost importance. Even an estimate of 1 in 10 represents a public health issue of the first magnitude, requiring our full attention and resources.
War exacts immense demands on the human capacity to cope, but a forthright recognition of our capacity for resilience does no disservice to the afflicted.
With these challenges ahead of us, we should remember that PTSD is a treatable condition and that a realistic and informed understanding of our inherent coping abilities can only assist treatment and, perhaps one day, even prevention of this debilitating disorder.
Anthony D. Mancini is an assistant professor of psychology at Pace University.
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A decade after going to war in Afghanistan, the wins are fading
Globe and Mail
By Paul Koring
Monday, Feb. 06, 2012
WASHINGTON
In war, the outcome matters.
Whether the 10 years of fighting and dying in Afghanistan was worth the Canadian blood spilled and bullion spent remains in doubt because Afghanistan’s future is so uncertain.
Yet now is a time for assessment, even if the moment is not being officially acknowledged: It was 10 years ago this week that Canadian troops landed in Kandahar, battle-ready and girded for combat, the first time since Korea the nation had sent ground troops to war.
When the final Canadian combat forces were pulled out last summer, it was the first time in the nation’s proud military history that Canada quit a fight before it was over. Canadians stopped fighting not because of victory or defeat but because of a political decision predicted on declining public approval.
But if the war wasn’t worth fighting any more, was it worth fighting at all?
Reports last week that the Taliban is poised – at least by its own assessment – to retake Afghanistan will feed the uncertainty over the military mission. That was followed by the stunning announcement by the Obama administration that the 100,000-plus troops will also end their combat role next year. This comes as the U.N. reported that more than 3,000 Afghan civilians were killed last year, the worst death toll of the decade.
Whether President Hamid Karzai’s corrupt regime survives or is soon swept away after Western troops pull-out may ultimately become the measure of the war’s success or failure.
Clearly, a decade of nation-building has failed to create a democratic, civil Afghanistan.
For Canada, judging whether the war was worth the costs is even harder. The Taliban regime, with its ruthless version of medieval Islam and repressive treatment of women, had been toppled before Canada’s first combat troops streamed into Kandahar a decade ago. And Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cohort had already fled across the border. But Canada’s first – and perhaps finest – battles would pit a few hundred of the Princess Patricia’s 3rd Battalion against fierce and battle-hardened Afghan warriors in the high mountains surrounding the Shah-i-Kot Valley. The Canadians won, without losing a single soldier.
But winning battles in a war eventually deemed pointless is an empty victory, even if it demonstrates military prowess. Canada paid dearly for the Afghanistan mission. More than 150 soldiers were killed and 2,000 wounded, many of them disabled for life; at least $18-billion was spent, perhaps double that, if the costs of replacing a worn-out army and caring for the mentally and physically shattered and their families are counted.
So what was achieved?
By the crudest military metric – kill ratios – Canada’s soldiers proved tough, effective warriors. Well-informed, Canadian officers refer, quietly, to 100-to-one kill ratios, suggesting that far more than 10,000 Taliban fighters may have been killed by Canadians over more than five years of counter-insurgency operations in Kandahar. Retired Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie toured with a powerful video of a Canadian attack on a Taliban compound; first an artillery barrage, then encirclement by armoured vehicles and finally a overwhelming assault by infantry. “I won’t show you the messy bits,” Gen. Leslie used to tell audiences. That sort of effective soldiering was repeated hundreds and hundreds of times, mostly hidden from and unknown to ordinary Canadians.
Yet no matter how combat-effective Canadian soldiers were, there were rarely more than 500 of them “outside the wire” in Kandahar, a wild and remote mix of desert, valleys the size of Nova Scotia with nearly 1-million people and a porous border.
After President Barack Obama ordered a surge in what he called the “right war,” the Pentagon poured more than 10 times that many U.S. troops into Kandahar, reinforcing then replacing the Canadian contingent. The sheer scale of the American effort – with inconclusive evidence that it has yet routed the Taliban – reinforces the notion that Canada’s contingent was always too small to wage an effective counter-insurgency campaign.
For most Canadians, Afghanistan was an almost entirely sanitized war. No battlefield pictures of war dead from either side, no images of the wounded, at least not until they were in rehab or chatting to politicians. Ottawa managed even to suppress pictures of a beaten detainee – even after an investigation concluded that he had been appropriately subdued after trying to escape.
Much of the difficulty in determining “success” in waging war against insurgents is the impossibility of counting “hearts and minds” won, at least in the short term.
No Canadian flags flew over captured town after battles won.
There will be no Afghan children putting candles on Canadian gravestones – as still happens every year in Holland three generations after liberation.
In terms of governance and development, the two areas alongside security that Ottawa set as the triad of Canadian policy, the results are mixed, at best. Kandahar political factions continue to wage a bloody fratricide, assassinations are frequent, including the mayor and Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half brother. A still-lawless and corrupt power structure prevails.
On the home front, Canadian public support for the war declined steadily during the decade as the death toll mounted amid a persistent cloud of alleged detainee abuse – that Ottawa was forcing Canadian troops to turn captured Taliban over known torturers, a war crime. Ottawa vigorously fought the allegations, initially denying it knew that torture was rife in Afghan prisons. It belatedly started follow-up inspections but kept secret that it had halted transfers, at least twice, after discovering brutal ill-treatment persisted.
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U.S. to elevate Special Operations forces’ role in Afghanistan
Washington Post
By Greg Jaffe
Monday, February 6, 2012
The U.S. military is planning to elevate the role of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan as it shifts away from a combat focus to a mission that places greater emphasis on advising Afghan forces and raids to kill top insurgent leaders, senior U.S. officials said.
Initial steps in that direction are likely to take place in the next few months, when the Pentagon is expected to create a new two-star command that would oversee the entire Special Operations effort in Afghanistan. The new command would be led by Maj. Gen. Tony Thomas, the deputy commander of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s elite counterterrorism forces around the world.
The new Special Operations command in Afghanistan could eventually take over responsibility for the day-to-day war effort as U.S. troop levels drop in the country and as the United States moves away from its traditional combat role to an effort focused primarily on training and advising Afghan forces.
The plan, which is still being considered, would mark a major change in the war effort, built around big American conventional units working alongside Afghan army and police forces to clear areas of insurgents and reestablish Afghan governance. In many aspects, it resembles a plan advocated by Vice President Biden in 2009 to focus U.S. efforts on training Afghan forces and killing high-level insurgent leaders.
Biden’s proposal was largely rejected because U.S. military commanders said they needed additional conventional troops to push the Taliban out of major population centers and reverse its momentum.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta referred in broad terms to some of the changes last week when he said that the United States hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of next year, more than a year earlier than scheduled.
Although Thomas is expected to go to Afghanistan as early as this summer to lead the new Special Operations command, senior U.S. officials cautioned that there has not been a final decision to send him.
The next step in the plan, which involves consolidating all NATO military daily operations of the war under a command led by a Special Operations officer, is still the subject of broad debate in the Pentagon and White House, U.S. officials said.
“We are talking about a stair-step approach, and we haven’t even taken the first step in the process,” said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s planning.
The move to shift more of the war effort in Afghanistan to Special Operations units was first reported online Saturday by the New York Times.
There is still broad debate within the military and the White House over how quickly the United States can shift away from its combat mission and turn over primary responsibility for security to Afghan forces that are still weak.
Although Panetta said the United States hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by mid-2013, in some parts of eastern Afghanistan, conventional U.S. units could still be involved in heavy combat through 2014 and even into 2015, according to senior military officials in Washington and Kabul.
In those areas, mountainous terrain and insurgent havens across the border in Pakistan have made it difficult for U.S. and Afghan units to push Taliban fighters out of remote valleys and hold on to gains once the enemy fighters are dislodged.
The Obama administration has said it will bring home about 22,000 troops by September, cutting the overall size of the American force to 68,000. There will be heavy pressure on military commanders to continue the troop reductions into 2013.
Currently, the Afghan forces partner with similarly sized U.S. units in areas where the fighting is heaviest. U.S. forces patrol regularly alongside Afghan units and take a leading role when insurgents launch attacks.
As American troop levels drop, U.S. commanders will by necessity have to rely more heavily on Afghan units to operate with minimal support from big, conventional Army and Marine units.
Senior military officials said they will begin pairing up small, U.S.-led advisory teams with the more capable Afghan forces this spring. The full complement of U.S. advisory teams should be in place by early 2013.
The new focus could rely on American Special Forces soldiers to fill out some of the advisory teams in the most violent areas of Afghanistan. The Special Forces troops would continue to advise and mentor elite Afghan units and the Afghan local police, a program in which villages form units to defend themselves. The primary mission of the Army’s Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets, is to mentor, train and fight alongside indigenous forces. The Special Forces teams also have the ability to marshal firepower from American warplanes for Afghan forces.
Even with a heavy complement of Special Forces troops, the United States also would have to rely on significant numbers of conventional soldiers to fill out the advisory teams.
The new plans being weighed by the Pentagon and the Obama administration would also keep large numbers of elite U.S. counterterrorism troops in Afghanistan to hunt the remaining terrorist threats and keep heavy pressure on insurgent leaders.
Thomas, who is expected to lead the consolidated Special Operations effort in Afghanistan, has extensive experience overseeing counterterrorism operations around the world. He also served in Iraq as an assistant division commander in the Army’s 1st Armored Division and is well known in the regular Army.
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No Secret Talks with Anti-Government Armed Groups: Abdullah
TOLOnews.com
By Rafi Sediqi
Sunday, 05 February 2012
Peace talks with anti-government armed groups should not be held secretly, Leader of the Change and Hope Coalition said on Sunday.
Leader of Change and Hope Coalition, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, criticised the peace process arguing that neither Afghan political parties, nor civil society or the people in general are part of it. He said the Afghan government does not have a transparent programme for peace talks.
Dr Abdullah made the comments while speaking at a gathering in Kabul marking the birth anniversary of Prophet Mohammed.
He said the government has to keep people informed on how and on what conditions peace talks will be held.
"Playing with the great wish of the Afghan people which is peace in the county is a political game. If a political game is played, whether at the regional or international level, it will not only lead to peace but will also distance us from peace," the Leader of Change and Hope Coalition said.
Meanwhile, some members of parliament warned that if no proper measures are taken, the country will be faced with a catastrophe beyond 2014 when all foreign forces will be withdrawn.
Afghan MP, Mohammed Yonus Qanooni, says that if talks continue to be held as before, it will only give privileges to the anti-government armed groups. He also said that changing the geography of war in the country will not bring peace and stability.
"A peace that will destroy national unity and territorial integrity of Afghanistan is no peace. It is only a conspiracy and a disaster which will make Afghan people suffer," Mr Qanooni said.
"Only certain obvious circles will try to seek their interests in such conspiracies."
Meanwhile, the National Coalition of Afghanistan also warns that Afghan security forces will not be able to maintain security after 2014.
The National Coalition believes that Pakistan's spy agency, ISI, will openly interfere in Afghanistan's internal affairs after foreign troops pull out in 2014.
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Winter at an Afghan Refugee Camp: ‘Is It Sugar From God?’
New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND
February 5, 2012
KABUL
Many readers responded to an article on Saturday about children in Kabul freezing to death by asking what they could do to help. It is not a simple issue, and the needs are great; there are a large number of camps, 46 in Kabul and others on the city’s outskirts with 35,000 residents. No one group is reaching all of those people: some provide medical aid, others food aid, others sanitation and water services.
At the foot of this follow-up article are some of the groups that have been active in the camps. The problem is not likely to go away with an increase in donations of fuel and food, though that may well save some lives.
Rahmatullah Rahmani remembered his first winter in Kabul. At first the kids thought sugar was falling from the sky because the snow was white and crystalline and melted on their tongues with a sweet taste unlike the often fetid camp water.
Mr. Rahmani and his family had fled the fighting in the Sangin district of Helmand Province and had come here to the Charahi Qambar camp in Kabul, one of 46 unofficial refugee camps in the capital.
“Our children were saying, ‘What is this? Is it sugar from God?’ They had never seen snow. Even I never saw snow in my whole life before I came here,” said Mr. Rahmani, who had been a farmer, “and I am 38.” He looks more like a man of 60.
He was among the “elders” of the camp who had invited a reporter to join them at the camp meeting place, a lean-to with open sides, bamboo mat flooring and a few rough cushions.
“At first they were happy and played in the snow, until they saw it was so cold and it was a dangerous sugar for them. A sugar from the sky, but it kills,” he said.
Before sitting down, the Afghan men took off their shoes, despite the cold and the snow; it kept the mud off the mats. Some of the men had no socks, or, at best, thin ragged ones, and they folded their feet under their robes.
This is one of the two camps in Kabul where The New York Times has found that a total of at least 22 children have died from the cold since Jan. 15 in the course of three unusually heavy snow storms and unseasonably cold weather, which is continuing.
Most of the refugees here are from Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, and many are from the Sangin district there, which was and still is one of the most violence-prone areas in Afghanistan. Some have been in the camp as long as seven years.
The men were not eager to talk about their children: the deaths were shameful, and could not be undone. “You only come to find out about the dead. What about those who are still alive and no one is doing anything?” asked Noor Mohammad, a camp representative whose 70-year-old aunt died on Thursday night, of exposure, he thinks. “No one cares about us.”
Despite the resentment at their situation, there was graciousness rather than hostility.
An upended crate was placed before their visitor, with a rusted brazier on top of it. From one of the mud huts or tents, someone fetched small chunks of firewood, burned down to glowing coals, and plunked them on the brazier.
The elders included several camp representatives — there are 12 here — the fathers of children who had died and the camp mullah, Mualavi Musafer, also a refugee from Helmand.
This is an urban place, like most of the other Kabul camps, which are collections of mud huts with canvas or plastic roofs, or, in some places, just tents. In most directions, apartment blocks, factories and monuments can be seen, making the squalor all the more incongruous. Kabul has plenty of slums; few are as bad as these camps, thrown up on wasteland.
The refugees’ biggest concerns are lack of food and firewood. Everything else is secondary. Few of the children have coats or warm clothes of any kind, other than the occasional ragged sweater. Most do not have socks, and shoes are often little more than plastic sandals.
In some of the houses there are just a few blankets, and it is not uncommon for four people to share one. Nearly everyone seems to be sick, and medical care is spotty — and often unaffordable. “It has been months since we have tasted sugar,” Mr. Mohammad said.
Surely they have received more aid than this in all the years the camp has been here?
There was fuel, but they burned it. There was food, but they ate it. They said blankets had been handed out, but they sold them in warmer times to buy food. They had sold warmer clothing, too.
“It’s not that we don’t care about our children,” said Juma Gul, 42, whose month-old son, Ismail, died last month. He has eight other children; the eldest is 15 and the youngest a little over a year old, and also ill. “Even if a chick dies, the hen grieves.”
The men brought tea and served it — there was not enough for everyone, so guests were urged to drink first. One man shared the pictures on his cellphone of his sister and mother’s corpses. They were killed by what he said was a Taliban-provoked NATO bombing in Helmand.
A relative handful of aid agencies have provided some services in these camps — hot lunches for schoolchildren through Aschiana, for instance, or United Nations support for families who had returned from refugee camps abroad, or latrine-digging projects, or bladders of water from Unicef.
From time to time, big-hearted local businessmen come by and drop off fuel or food, as Nader Nafey did at the Charahi Qambar camp on Friday during a fresh snowstorm — though he had only enough for 200 of the 900 families there. “All I know,” he said, “is that nobody dies of eating.”
Yet at the end of a decade of initiatives, the refugees have more children to feed and an ever harsher struggle to survive (birth control has rarely been on any Afghan agenda).
Agencies worry that giving out too much aid will create dependency and attract more people to the camp. Other Afghans have greater needs. The men in the camps can work when the weather is good enough and there are jobs, although that is not the case now.
So what is the solution? The elders would like to see more food and fuel deliveries, but they recognize that is a short-term answer. “What we need is shelter,” said Mr. Mohammad, the camp representative. “If we had houses, we could survive.”
Another man was skeptical: “Houses are for rich people, not for us.”
A tray came out with a sort of dessert course, a few little wrapped candies on it, and tiny packets of artificial creamer. None of the men would touch them until a guest did.
Mullah Musafer — wearing a ragged black turban, his hands buried in his robes — took the long view. “When you write your article, tell them that when Judgment Day comes, we will all be tugging at their sleeves and asking them, ‘Why didn’t you help us? Why was there no shelter for us?’ ”
On Friday, a two-day snowstorm was blowing in full force at the Charahi Qambar camp. The snow piled up thickly, a near white-out. It was sometimes hard to see where the twisted paths of the camp ended and the roads of the neighboring community began, but for one telltale: No camp children were playing in the snow, but those outside of it built snowmen and threw snowballs and slid down hills on scraps of cardboard and had no idea about sugar from the sky.
The German aid group Welthungerhilfe, known in English as German Agro Action, has a major presence in Afghanistan and runs a variety of programs; in the camps, it has distributed firewood this winter but has not had enough money to do it a second time. It also runs mobile clinics in the camps.
The French aid group Solidarités International also has a major program in Afghanistan and has been active in the camps for years, running sanitation and emergency feeding programs.
Aschiana is a well-established Afghan aid organization that focuses on helping children. It is active in 13 of the camps around Kabul, providing hot lunches for children and sponsoring activities. Their United States fund-raising branch can be reached through www.aschiana-foundation.org/aschiana-in-afghanistan.php and their Afghan office is at www.aschiana.com.
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Panetta Urges International Community to Fund Afghan Forces
TOLOnews.com
Sunday, 05 February 2012
The US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta on Saturday urged the international community to help pay for strong Afghan security troops despite worldwide economic pressure.
US is spending around $12 billion a year to train the Afghan security troops, which is expected to rise to 352,000 men to take over security when Nato combat forces withdraw by the end of 2014.
"To sustain sufficient security, the Afghan security forces require adequate financial support," Mr Panetta said.
The United States has predicted that the annual price tag of training and equipping Afghan security forces in coming years will be around $6 billion.
The US wants the international community to contribute $1 billion per year after 2014 in addition to the United States' assistance.
Meanwhile, the British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has said that Nato ministers would consider two critical questions: "What should be the long term size of the Afghan security forces and how are we going to share the cost of supporting that between different members of the international community. Those are discussions we have started here and we will continue at Chicago."
The two-day meeting in Brussels of ministers from Nato's 28 nations and 22 other countries taking part in the war in Afghanistan is meant to pave the way for a Nato summit in May in Chicago.
The Afghan army and police are scheduled to grow to more than 350,000 members by 2014. But some have proposed that the force can be safely cut in order to reduce its cost.
The long-term size of the Afghan force and cost of maintaining it will be a key topic at a Nato summit in Chicago in May.
Five days ago the US Defence Minister had said that the United States hoped to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of next year.
The timetable described by US Defence Minister appeared to be the first time the United States has said it would shift into a supporting role, training and advising Afghan troops, by next year.
His remarks came as France also said that it will end combat mission in Afghanistan by the end of 2013.
But Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Thursday said that Nato will stand by its previously agreed plan to wind down operation in Afghanistan by the end of 2014 with any changes to the schedule coordinated with allies.
The US has around 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, fighting insurgents. It has lost 1,890 soldiers in the Afghan war since 2001.
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