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09 February 2012
FEATURE STORY
The Afghanistan equation: U.S. + Taliban + Pakistan = peace?
BUSINESS
No articles featured today
NATION
Afghanistan Willing to Agree to Transfer of Taliban Prisoners to Qatar
In Grip of Cold, Afghan Family Buries 8th Child
Afghan forces in lead, but not in control
Prince Harry in Afghanistan: PR dream or logistical nightmare?
Talking with the Taliban
US Drone Kills Four in Pakistan
Questions Raised in Afghan Detainee’s Case
Prince Harry poised for return to action on Afghanistan frontline
Afghan jihad said to attract fewer foreign fighters
NATO, Pakistan and Afghan military officials in border talks, Pakistani army says
Expert for peace settlement with Taliban
General says US military will begin sending special advisory teams to Afghanistan this year
Top US envoy 'met Taliban leaders in Qatar'
Next Year's Budget Not Yet Approved: MPs
Red tape, corruption pull rug from under Afghan carpet business
Pentagon Counters Dim Assessment of Afghan War
Afghanistan's future? Same as it ever was: Bloody
CIA to Remain in Afghanistan after Withdrawal of Troops
Afghanistan's Cultural Riches Threatened By Mineral Wealth
Afghanistan set for next chapter in remarkable rise
Pakistan Army Chief Meets Afghan, Nato Commanders
Q. & A. with Joel van Houdt, Afghanistan-Based Photographer
Afghan peace efforts continues amid ifs and buts
PRESS RELEASES
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FEATURE STORY
The Afghanistan equation: U.S. + Taliban + Pakistan = peace?
A peace negotiated by outsiders will never hold, but there is a role for the United States.
Los Angles Times
By Peter Tomsen
February 8, 2012
Op-Ed
In 1989, soon after I was appointed U.S. special envoy and ambassador on Afghanistan, the late mujahedin commander Abdul Haq conveyed a warning to me. Attempts by foreigners to organize the unruly, unpredictable and divided Afghan people would always fail, he said. He compared such efforts to a bazaar merchant trying to balance the weight of frogs on opposite trays of a produce scale. The merchant can load frogs on one tray. But as he begins to load the second tray, some of the frogs on the first one will inevitably jump off. And as he reloads them, frogs on the second tray will leap to the ground. Eventually, even the most determined merchant will give up.
I have thought of that analogy often during the last year, as the United States and Germany have reached out to Mullah Mohammed Omar's Taliban in Pakistan. The diplomacy has been cloaked in secrecy, though occasional news of it has leaked out. And now, it has apparently produced a tentative agreement, yet to be implemented, to open a Taliban office in Qatar to begin more serious negotiations.
But these efforts seem unlikely to lead to a successful negotiated settlement of the differences between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
So far, it has been American and German diplomats — with behind-the-scenes participation by Pakistan — powering the process. The Afghan government was not even aware of key aspects of the negotiations until December. That's problematic.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reluctantly agreed to support the establishment of a Taliban office in Qatar, and the U.S. side says his representatives will participate in the process. But the Taliban has rejected meetings with the Afghan government, which it doesn't recognize as legitimate.
Adding confusion to this already complicated scenario, on Jan. 30 the Afghan government announced that Karzai will meet with Taliban representatives outside the Qatar framework in Saudi Arabia, a claim that the Taliban publicly denies. Also, former and current administration officials say that Omar sent a letter to the White House in July on the peace talks. But on Feb. 4, the Taliban's "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" office in Pakistan said it "rejects this baseless rumor with the strongest of words."
Are you beginning to understand the frogs-on-scales analogy?
For all their differences, Karzai and the Afghan Taliban have one thing in common: a distrust of outside initiatives aimed at knitting Afghans together. Foreign forays into the forbidding Afghan political caldron have invariably spawned greater disunity. They upset traditional tribal and ethnic consensus processes that Afghans informally use to resolve their differences.
If the United States has any hope of a successful outcome in Afghanistan, these shaky steps to launch peace negotiations must be reinforced by two policy thrusts. First, though the U.S. should be encouraging and supportive, it should withdraw from direct involvement in the intra-Afghan negotiations. And second, Washington should adopt a tougher strategic posture toward Pakistani-supported terrorist groups — including the Al Qaeda-linked Quetta Shura and Haqqani network — which are fomenting terrorism in the region and globally from sanctuaries within Pakistan.
Unfortunately, there are already clear signs that direct, unilateral U.S. involvement in the Afghan reconciliation process will continue, and that it will undermine rather than assist intra-Afghan negotiations.
One problem with direct American involvement is that it could exacerbate political fragmentation inside Afghanistan. Bargaining by Americans outside Karzai's purview while he is reaching out to the Taliban separately threatens to make his negotiations irrelevant. The Northern Alliance and other opposition groups have no great desire to cooperate with the Karzai government, and if there's an American channel to the Taliban open too, they're likely to focus on that instead of on Taliban negotiations with the official Afghan government.
But this doesn't mean there is no role for United States to play. The Obama administration needs to focus on the cold reality that U.S. and Pakistani policies on Afghanistan and global terrorism are contradictory and threatening to the long-term national security interests of both the U.S. and Afghanistan. To continue to pretend otherwise will only fuel international terrorism from protected Taliban and Haqqani sanctuaries in Pakistan. In recent testimony before Congress, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper told skeptical senators of both parties that the administration is looking for ways to "minimize the impact of these safe havens." But that is woefully inadequate. Terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan must be dismantled.
Pakistan's interests differ from those of Afghanistan, and the Afghans will be rightfully suspicious of Pakistani influence on any negotiations. Each time Pakistan's army andInter-Services Intelligence agency have inserted themselves in the intra-Afghan dialogue over the last two decades, it has been to subvert it. The U.S. needs to focus its influence on preventing that from happening this time.
The confusing American "fight and talk" tactic toward the ISI-backed Quetta Shura and Haqqani network reflects the larger seesaw pattern of U.S. policy toward Pakistan. Last fall, tough talk from both Adm. Michael G. Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that the U.S. had lost patience with Pakistan's support for the Haqqani network and would put increasing pressure on Islamabad to close militant sanctuaries in Pakistan. But since then, the U.S. seems to have flinched, reverting to the failed policy of indulgence rather than pressing Pakistan's military to dismantle the well-documented terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan.
The Obama administration is understandably eager to show progress on the intra-Afghan negotiating front as it takes the wise and necessary step of drawing down U.S. troops and transferring lead responsibility to Afghans to defend their own country. But progress will come only through disengaging from direct involvement in the intra-Afghan dialogue, even while encouraging the Afghan sides to reach agreement. And the U.S. must demand that Pakistan do the same.
A Jan. 24 statement bythe U.S. Embassyin Kabul after a visit to the region by Marc Grossman, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, had it right: "Only Afghans can decide the future of Afghanistan." This guideline should dominate U.S. policy on intra-Afghan reconciliation.
Peter Tomsen is the author of the just-published "The Wars of Afghanistan." He was U.S. special envoy and ambassador on Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992.
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BUSINESS
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NATION
Afghanistan Willing to Agree to Transfer of Taliban Prisoners to Qatar
TOLOnews.com
By Shakeela Abrahimkhil
Wednesday, 08 February 2012
Afghan government has recently said that if the prisoners want to join their families in Qatar, it will agree to the decision.
The Afghan government had previously opposed the transfer of Taliban prisoners to Qatar, but a government spokesman, Emal Faizi, says that if the prisoners want to be taken to Qatar, the government will not have any legal responsibilities.
Recently, there were reports about release of five top Taliban leaders from the Guantanamo detention centre.
But US officials have said that no decision has yet been made about release of Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo.
"In talks with the US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, we agreed that if Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo want to live with their families in Qatar, Afghan government will not oppose it," President Karzai's spokesman, Email Faizi, said.
The presidential palace added that an Afghan delegation will be sent to the Guantanamo detention centre to make sure about consent of the prisoners to live with their families in Qatar.
"When the US government decides to transfer the prisoners to Qatar, we will send a delegation to Guantanamo to see if the prisoners' are content with the transfer," Mr Faizi added.
On the main condition set by the Taliban prior to negotiations is the release of all their prisoners from Guantanamo as US apparently agreed to it.
Mullah Khair Khwah, Mullah Noorullah and Mullah Afzal Akhund have reportedly been released from Guantanamo Detention Centre and transferred to Qatar, but the report was dismissed by the Taliban.
This comes 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.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Times has said that President Hamid Karzai is the main obstacle in peace talks between the US and the Taliban.
As the United States' recently announced to wind down its combat role next year the president is well aware that his own survival - political, and perhaps literal - could be in doubt, Los Angeles Times added.
Yet President Karzai repeatedly tried to thwart the US efforts to bring Taliban into the peace negotiation table deliberately, the Times added.
Yet Karzai has repeatedly tried to thwart the most focused American effort yet to bring the insurgents to the bargaining table, launching a series of actions that appear to be almost deliberate provocation aimed at the United States, diplomats, analysts and observers say Karzai had worked assiduously behind the scenes to scuttle any such contacts. He loudly objected to the prospective locale, and recalled Afghanistan's ambassador to Qatar, complaining that his administration had been left out of the loop in key discussions.
It comes as US has recently started negotiations with the Taliban and plans to open a political office for Taliban in Qatar.
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In Grip of Cold, Afghan Family Buries 8th Child
New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND
February 8, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan
The war refugee Sayid Mohammad lost his last son on Wednesday, 3-month-old Khan, who became the 24th child to die of exposure in camps here in the past month.
“After we had dinner he was crying all night of the cold,” Mr. Mohammad said. The family had no wood and was husbanding a small portion of paper and plastic that his daughter had scavenged that day. He said the boy had seemed healthy and was breast-feeding normally, though the family’s dinner consisted only of tea and bread. But he kept crying. “Finally we started a fire, but it wasn’t enough,” Mr. Mohammad said. By 1 a.m. the boy was stiff and lifeless, he said.
Even by the standards of destitution in these camps, Mr. Mohammad’s story is a hard-luck one; Khan was the eighth of his nine children to die. Back home in the Gereshk district of Helmand Province, six died of disease, he said. Three years ago they fled the fighting in that area for the Nasaji Bagrami Camp here, where a 3-year-old son froze to death last winter, he said. Like most of Kabul’s 35,000 internal refugees, he fled the country’s war zones only to find a life of squalor sometimes as deadly, even in the capital of a country that has received more than $60 billion in nonmilitary aid over 10 years.
Later Wednesday morning, Mr. Mohammad’s sole surviving child, his daughter, Feroza, 10, stared saucer-eyed at her brother’s tiny body as it lay in the middle of the family’s hybrid dwelling, part mud hut, part tent, with United Nations-branded canvas for a roof.
Leaders of this camp say that 16 children aged 5 or younger have died here in the unseasonably cold weather and heavy snow that set in about a month ago, keeping nighttime temperatures in the mid-teens. Eight other children have died similarly in another Kabul camp, Charahi Qambar, according to camp representatives, religious leaders and families.
Government officials have expressed skepticism that the children could all have died of cold, saying the deaths were unregistered and not reviewed by medical personnel, while at the same time blaming the international aid providers for not sending more supplies.
Private Afghan companies and businessmen and some charitable groups have begun to distribute food, fuel, winter clothing, blankets, tents and cash support in the camps, but so far the effort has been sporadic and incomplete.
Other relief groups and Afghan government ministries are still in the process of surveying needs in the camp. As one relief worker said, “Starting an aid program even in a month would be fast work, and by then winter will be mostly over.”
The Nasaji Bagrami camp counts 315 families who fled from war-torn southern provinces like Kandahar and Helmand. Some of their rough shelters had wood to burn in stoves, while others, like Mr. Mohammad’s, had no substantial heat sources at all.
Mohammad Ibrahim, chosen by camp residents as their representative, held up his hand in a visual parable of the realities of inequitable resources. “See my fingers?” he said. “They are five, but none are equal.”
The Mohammad family had two large blankets to share, plus the baby boy’s blanket, a velveteen comforter with designs of teddy bears and bunny rabbits on it. “We didn’t even have enough wood to make breakfast today,” Mr. Mohammad said. A neighbor gave a small packet of potato chips to Feroza, whose name means turquoise, the gemstone.
In the bitter cold, relatives and friends gathered and meticulously followed the prescribed rituals for the dead. Hot water was brought in pitchers from neighbors’ huts. The boy’s body was laid on a plank in the hut’s mud-walled yard, and washed five times with the hot water and soap, a pink bar of Safeguard. A ditch was dug so that the wash water would drain away and no one would step in it accidentally, which they viewed as potential sacrilege. Khan was so small that the hand of the man who washed him covered half of his body.
His mother, Lailuma, peeked from the door of the hut to watch, but otherwise the women stayed inside and apart. But Feroza, in a purple head scarf, slipped unnoticed past the men close to Khan’s washing place, pressed into a crevice in the wall and watched wordlessly.
A clean white cotton sheet served as his burial shroud. The available scissors were too dull to cut it, so the men ripped it into pieces with their gloveless hands. After tying the sheet around Khan, they sprayed his shrouded form with perfume, and then they wrapped him again in his teddy and bunny blanket.
For prayers, performed on mats outside, the men removed their shoes; many had no socks. Then they carried Khan, bundled in one man’s arms, in a silent procession to a graveyard.
The camp mullah, Walid Khan, pronounced the final prayers. Khan was laid in the grave with his face toward Mecca, and each of the mourners dropped in three handfuls of the hard earth.
Mr. Mohammad had not slept. His eyes were bloodshot. The septum of his nose had cracked from the cold, bleeding a little, and leaving a small red icicle. Feroza stood just to his side and behind him a little, clutching his coat. She coughed deeply and her father started. “Now she is sick, too,” he said.
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Afghan forces in lead, but not in control
CNN
By Larry Shaughnessy
February 8th, 2012
The Obama administration plan for Afghanistan is this: The United States and NATO are training a growing Afghan security force to take over security of their own country, allowing American and other international troops to leave in two years time.
But the second-highest-ranking officer in Afghanistan said Wednesday that so far, almost no Afghan units are capable of operating without American or NATO assistance.
When asked during a briefing at the Pentagon about how many Afghan Security units can operate independently, Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, replied "probably one percent ... to be honest with you ... It's a very low number."
That means while the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has turned control of about half of Afghanistan over to Afghans, almost everywhere that has happened the security forces working in those areas are still doing so with help from American and other international forces.
Even those units that operate independently still have American or NATO military advisers with them. The next-highest-rated category of Afghan units are those that are "effective with advisers." According to Scaparrotti, 42% of Afghan units fall into that category.
"That has been growing throughout. And that's really what we're trying to do. That's ... half your force ... effective with advisers. So they can operate," Scaparrotti said, adding, "They need our enablers. They need some advisory to help them. And that's where we're at today."
Scaparotti's briefing came just one day after CNN spoke exclusively with Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, who, after his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, said American troops believe Afghan Security Force partners "are almost completely incapable, if they even do their job. In some cases they are colluding with the Taliban."
Davis published his opinion in a military journal this week.
Scaparrotti said Davis's criticisms are one man's opinion of the war.
"I disagree with that," Scaparrotti said. "But I can tell you personally from experience and from feedback from others, these (Afghan) soldiers will fight, particularly at the company level. There's no question about that. And they're going to be good enough, as we build them, to secure their country and to counter the insurgency that they're dealing with now."
But Daniel's criticism aside, Scaparrotti conceded the next two years will be difficult for the United States and its allies.
"I'm a realist in how tough this is going to be," he said."This is going to be a tough fight. But I'm confident that it can be done."
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Prince Harry in Afghanistan: PR dream or logistical nightmare?
Captain Wales has qualified as an Apache helicopter pilot, giving the MoD a headache about how, where and when to deploy him
The Guardian
By Nick Hopkins
Thursday 9 February 2012
The conclusion of Prince Harry's training as a fully qualified Apache pilot gives the army another specialist to fly an attack helicopter, and several headaches about how, where and when to deploy him.
The prince, or Captain Wales as he is known in the military, has consistently made clear he wants to go back to Afghanistan, and there is every chance he will return, possibly this year.
And though it is in some ways a potential PR dream for the Ministry of Defence, those tasked with ensuring he remains away from the spotlight during what will be his second tour may not see it that way.
Four years ago, all of the UK's major media groups, including the Guardian, agreed not to publicise the prince's deployment to Afghanistan with the Household Cavalry regiment.
The request was underpinned by fear that drawing attention to his presence would make him, and his colleagues, high priority targets for the Taliban.
Ten weeks into his tour, the secret was out – in the foreign press, at least.
Once details started appearing on websites, the MoD withdrew the prince immediately, with the then chief of the defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, arguing the "worldwide media attention … could impact on the security of those who are deployed there, as well as the risks to him as an individual soldier".
This time round, it seems unlikely there will be any such brokered agreement between the MoD, Buckingham Palace and the media.
The world has moved on since 2008, and most people in Whitehall accept there is no point trying to contain the uncontainable, especially with social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook to contend with.
The media also found itself in an awkward position last time – there was criticism in some quarters that newspapers and broadcasters had effectively conspired to keep secrets from their readers and viewers. There is no guarantee the media would want to sign up to the same kind of agreement again.
With that option neither possible or desirable, what can the MoD do?
There are genuine safety issues to consider if, say, the media got hold of images of where the prince was based, or information about his day-to-day activities. The MoD always asks the media to behave responsibly when reporters are given, or stumble upon, material that compromises "Op Sec" (operational security).
That advice will likely be underlined when it comes to the prince, along with the standard plea to think twice before publishing anything that might compromise British troops in the field.
The MoD has always been reluctant to provide running commentaries on certain issues, and has consistently refused to discuss subjects such as Special Forces operations. It would be fanciful to think that golden rule would be broken if the prince returned to Afghanistan.
After his last tour, the MoD provided the media with a pooled interview and photos when he came home.
The same carrot next time might help persuade newspapers to stay in line. But there is a more over-arching consideration for the media, which was not a factor four years ago.
In the current climate, with Lord Leveson conducting his hearings into journalistic ethics, Britain's newspapers and websites are on their best behaviour; this may help to restrain some "above the line" coverage, but almost certainly won't prevent rumours, pictures and gossip about the prince circulating "below the line" on the internet.
The MoD will not send the prince to Afghanistan unless it has a robust extraction strategy, and the dilemma military chiefs will face is when to push that button.
To make the judgment, officials will have to constantly monitor the stories pinging around the world, and assess the quality of the information within them.
The MoD could avoid all this fuss by telling Captain Wales he would not be going to Afghanistan. Who could blame the military if the prince was reminded that the risks outweighed the benefits, and that for his own sake, as well as those of his colleagues, he should go somewhere safer and out of the way? The Falklands, perhaps, to join his older brother.
But that does not appear to be an option. He wants to go, and his commanders may not feel inclined to deny him the opportunity.
They wouldn't, couldn't, deny it to anyone else, so why should Captain Wales get special treatment?
An alternative answer to that question is one most insurgents won't need rehearsing; he's the brother of the future king of a country that has been at war with the Taliban for a decade.
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Talking with the Taliban
Direct negotiations with the radical Islamists are key to lasting Afghan and regional stability
SECURITY TIMES
By Ahmed Rashid
Published for the Munich Security Summit February 3 2012.
After eleven years of war the Taliban’s public declaration that they will hold talks with the United States in Qatar is a major breakthrough for the political process, for Afghanistan’s internal stability and for the relative peace that will be needed by the US and NATO in 2014 before they can exit Afghanistan in good order and without too much bloodshed.
The year-long clandestine talks brokered by the Germans, fostered by Qatar and eventually ending in direct meetings between US officials and Taliban representatives will hopefully lead to a major reconciliation with the Kabul regime. The Taliban’s present insistence that they will only talk with the Americans is not realistic in the long term, while Karzai’s recent policy flip-flops and contradictory statements belie the fact that he was kept in the loop every step of the way by the Germans. The talks will go ahead because there is no other alternative to ending the war.
The metrics of calculating how successful NATO forces have been on the ground combating the Taliban, despite heady announcements by NATO generals, are mired in considerable controversy and doubt. The ability of the Taliban, unlike al-Qaeda, to rebound from severe hits has proved them to be remarkably resistant to casualties, with a deep bench of commanders, logisticians, recruiters and administrators for their cause.
In a summer offensive the Taliban can still mobilize some 25,000 fighters – the same figure they had in the 2005-6 campaigns. Taliban survival is directly linked to the sanctuary, support and logistics they receive in neighboring Pakistan from various elements in that country. The US and NATO are preparing a comprehensive transition strategy for 2014 that entails handing over control of the country to government representatives at the district level and the newly-trained Afghan security forces, who now number some 352,000.
However, an exit strategy is not a political strategy and that is precisely what is lacking to ensure the future stability of Afghanistan and the volatile region which surrounds this landlocked country.
Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai are both entangled in a series of strategic conundrums, which so far have not been adequately addressed. Karzai is determined to secure a strategic agreement with the US allowing for the presence of US trainers and special forces in the country well beyond 2014. Washington would like to do the same. But the Taliban are vehemently opposed to any such US-Kabul agreement as it will appear to be aimed at them. Karzai will find it impossible to conclude both a strategic agreement with the US and a reconciliation agreement with the Taliban. The two aims are mutually exclusive.
The recent contradictory policy statements by Karzai on the issue of reconciliation and the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar point to the fact that this reality is now dawning on the Afghan government. Karzai cannot be a partner to both the US and the Taliban and expect the Taliban to buy it. The Taliban have made it clear they expect all US troops to leave by 2014. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar will find it hard enough to sell the idea of reconciliation to his fighters. He will find it impossible to sell the idea of co-habitation with the Americans beyond 2014. Many Afghans, including Karzai, want a prolonged presence of foreign troops to guarantee their own safety and security. However a Taliban-Kabul deal can only be agreed when all foreign troops have left. There is not enough consideration in Washington or Brussels of this strategic conundrum.
Moreover the US, NATO and Kabul cannot hope to achieve even a modicum of regional non-interference in Afghanistan if US forces stay beyond 2014 because most neighboring states are opposed to a prolonged US presence. In particular, China, Iran and Pakistan are extremely suspicious of US intentions (for example about US training bases in Afghanistan being used to spy on these countries.) Here, too, a prolonged US presence would imply that no regional non-interference guarantees are possible. Finally, it is still unclear what Pakistan may demand in return for restoring relations with the US and Kabul and helping the peace process.
The US, NATO and Karzai need a political strategy on several counts. Firstly, a political strategy must start by holding talks with the Taliban that lead to confidence building measures on both sides to reduce the violence so that negotiations on power-sharing between the Taliban and Karzai can take place.
However, the administrations of both Obama and Karzai are deeply divided on talking to the Taliban. The US military would like a longer lead time to mount offensives and degrade the Taliban further, while the State Department sees no way out but talks. Similarly Karzai is surrounded by differing opinions and numerous conspiracy theories among his advisers as to what the talks mean for their political future.
Secondly, a political strategy must entail a dialogue and eventual political agreement among Afghanistan’s neighbors to limit their interference in Afghanistan. Apart from India all others – China, Russia, the five Central Asian republics, Pakistan and Iran – are against any long-term presence of US troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014.
Recently intra-regional relations have gotten even worse. In the past six months we have seen the collapse of US-Pakistan relations and the refusal of Pakistan to even meet with US officials until their internal review process is over. In addition, the crisis between Iran and the rest of the world over Tehran’s nuclear weapons program has further jeopardized any hope of Iran playing ball on Afghanistan. The regime sees Afghanistan as a potential battle ground if the US/Israel were to bomb or invade Iran. Attempts at a regional reconciliation have become even more difficult.
Thirdly, there must be greater internal political cohesion inside Afghanistan. Karzai has failed to create a national consensus on supporting talks with the Taliban, nor has he offered a vision for the post-2014 Afghanistan. With many Pashtuns supporting reconciliation with the Taliban and most non-Pashtuns rejecting it, the ethnic divide in the country has widened enormously and will grow more belligerent as the Taliban talks progress. Ethnic divisions could explode after 2014. Some experts even predict civil war.
In addition, there has been little preparation done by the West or Kabul to prepare for what is going to be a huge economic downturn in the country as aid levels drop precipitously, economic panic prevails and investment is reduced. Already businessmen, regime politicians and others who can afford it are moving their families abroad. Tens of thousands of Afghans who presently work for US or NATO forces will be rendered jobless.
At the December conference in Bonn, the Afghans received a commitment from the international community that during the “Transformation Decade” from 2015 to 2024, they will pay for a substantial part of Afghanistan’s security and governmental costs. The West, however, has to provide some guarantee now that such sums will be available for several years to come. At a time of global economic recession, the US, NATO and the wider Muslim world must obviously share such a burden.
It is also uncertain what Pakistan – the main regional stakeholder with the Taliban leadership on its soil – will do given its poor relations with both Kabul and Washington. Ideally, Pakistan should be included in any talks; Islamabad should be persuaded to allow Taliban to travel and discuss the issues freely; it should free the Taliban prisoners it is holding, and ultimately it ought to give the Taliban a deadline for leaving Pakistan and returning to Afghanistan. All of these steps would speed up a peace settlement between Kabul and the Taliban. Yet at present Pakistan is far removed from even talking to the main interlocutors.
Finally, there is the plethora of political events in 2014 that at present appear far too many and dangerous for a fledgling Afghan state to cope with. These include a US and NATO troop withdrawal with all its resultant side effects; the test of whether the Afghan army can hold its ground; a presidential election, as Karzai will have to step down and new presidential candidates be found. All this against the backdrop of a loss of public confidence inside Afghanistan and a lack of agreement among neighboring states. Moreover, Karzai may decide at the last moment to hang on to power, citing possible chaos after NATO’s withdrawal, in which case political calculations will be even more muddied.
To cope with all these uncertainties, the US, NATO and Karzai will have to be far more constructive, proactive and flexible in their planning than they have been so far. The outlines of a much wider and deeper strategy should be ready in time for the NATO summit in Chicago in May. They should be made public so that the Afghans and the regional states can draw confidence from such plans rather than continuing to believe in a host of conspiracy theories about US and NATO intentions. Both Afghanistan and the Western alliance still have a long way to go before all the pieces for an Afghan peace and a political exit strategy fall into place.
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US Drone Kills Four in Pakistan
TOLOnews.com
Thursday, 09 February 2012
A US drone strike in Pakistan's Waziristan tribal region killed four suspected militants on Thursday, Reuters reported.
The drone targeted a house near Afghan border, Pakistani officials told Reuters
"Taliban fighters had started hiding here in rented buildings and those killed are believed to be militants," an official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
This comes as a US drone strike on Wednesday killed at least ten Taliban insurgents in North Waziristan region.
The drone strikes were halted after a Nato air assault killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the border with Afghanistan on November 26th last year.
The attacks were resumed on Pakistan's tribal regions on January 10th this year.
North Waziristan is an important hideout of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Haqqani Networks. Haqqani is considered to be the deadliest adversaries in Afghanistan.
The networks are accused several high profile attacks on important Afghan and foreign buildings including the attack on US embassy and the Nato compound in Kabul.
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Questions Raised in Afghan Detainee’s Case
New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
February 8, 2012
WASHINGTON
On the night of July 20, 2002, about two dozen American Special Forces soldiers raided a house in a village near Khost, Afghanistan. The unit was acting on a tip from an informant who said someone living there was hiding antitank mines for an insurgents’ cell.
They found a cache of mines buried in a field. They also found a young man named Obaydullah, who was carrying a notebook with several pages of diagrams for wiring improvised explosive devices. Of 220 Afghans sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he is among the 18 who remain.
Mr. Obaydullah is not, however, among the five senior Taliban prisoners who might be transferred to house arrest in Qatar if an agreement can be reached in connection with talks to end the war. Like some of the other Afghans at Guantámano, he is not an important enough figure to be a bargaining chip.
His case, though, drew new attention after a military defense team began investigating it last year. They talked to village elders, neighbors and family members who corroborated crucial aspects of the benign explanations offered by Mr. Obaydullah, and they concluded that certain intelligence about him had been “mischaracterized.” Civilian lawyers representing Mr. Obaydullah in a habeas corpus lawsuit filed a declaration summarizing those findings in court on Wednesday.
“With new evidence that brings into question the allegations against him, we hope we will be able to obtain a fair hearing, or that he will be sent home,” said Maj. Derek A. Poteet of the Marines, a military lawyer representing Mr. Obaydullah.
It is an accident of timing that Mr. Obaydullah is at Guantánamo. One American official who was formerly involved in decisions about Afghanistan detainees said that such a “run of the mill” suspect would not have been moved to Cuba had he been captured a few years later; he probably would have been turned over to the Afghan justice system, or released if village elders took responsibility for him.
Still, the American government has had little doubt that Mr. Obaydullah participated in the insurgency. A Justice Department brief filed last month states that he “was plainly a member of an Al Qaeda bomb cell.” In 2010, a federal judge, Richard J. Leon, denied his petition for a writ of habeas corpus, writing that the evidence “unmistakably supports the conclusion that it is more likely than not” that he was an insurgent.
During and after his arrest, Mr. Obaydullah’s accounts about the notebook and the land mines changed, and he is said to have confessed at a prison in Afghanistan that he had been part of a cell. But after arriving in Cuba, Mr. Obaydullah recanted, saying he had falsely confessed under abusive interrogation.
He insisted that the mines had been buried years earlier and were left behind by a Communist commander who lived in his family’s house during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. He said he had copied the diagrams in August 2001 when the Taliban conscripted him to attend a military school, but that he ran away after a few days and was using the blank pages for other purposes.
Although intelligence analysts and Judge Leon concluded that Mr. Obaydullah had made up that explanation after arriving in Cuba, family members and others from his village corroborated his explanation, the defense team said. Moreover, the defense said, an American witness backed up his account of rough treatment in custody, including that he was struck in the head with a rifle.
Judge Leon’s ruling emphasized that a soldier in the raid said the Americans had also found a car with Taliban propaganda and dried blood in the back seat. The soldier reported that Mr. Obaydullah and a business partner — another Guantánamo detainee — had been seen taking insurgents to the hospital after an accidental explosion.
But the Afghan witnesses said that two nights before the raid, Mr. Obaydullah’s wife had given birth in the car while on the way to the hospital. He had not volunteered that explanation about the blood, the defense team said, because of a cultural taboo about discussing childbirth.
Moreover, the defense team examined classified files and said the intelligence had been “unintentionally mischaracterized” to the court; no specific person had been visually identified in the original report about injured people’s being carried in a car.
There may never be certainty about Mr. Obaydullah’s history. His lawyers acknowledged that he gave inconsistent statements. The mines were destroyed. The car disappeared. The tip that shaped the interpretation of events is murky: villagers said they thought it came from two men who were “rumored to have sold false information to the Americans” and later vanished.
Mr. Obaydullah was charged before a tribunal in September 2008 with providing material support to terrorism. Those charges were withdrawn last July for technical reasons and have not been reintroduced.
The Justice Department has informed Mr. Obaydullah’s lawyers that it will oppose their request that Judge Leon reverse his ruling against the detainee, said Anne Richardson, one of the lawyers.
Matthew Rosenberg contributed reporting.
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Prince Harry poised for return to action on Afghanistan frontline
Training for combat missions set to reignite debate over safety of his fellow troops
The Independent
By Kim Sengupta
Thursday 09 February 2012
Prince Harry has qualified to fly Apache helicopter-gunships, paving the way for his return to the frontline in Afghanistan from where he was evacuated under controversial circumstances four years ago.
Captain Harry Wales, as he is known in the Army, won an award for the best co-pilot gunner on the 18-month course, which included flying exercises in the US. He will now be posted for training at RAF Wattisham in Norfolk before becoming eligible for combat missions. The Ministry of Defence stressed last night that no decision had been made yet about the Prince's first tour, but senior officers are said to be sympathetic to his wish for combat duty in Helmand and he is expected to be sent there this year.
Harry, third in line to the throne, was deployed to Afghanistan in December 2007 as a junior Army officer, with the British media agreeing not to publicise the matter. It was maintained that disclosing the Prince's whereabouts would make him and those serving alongside him particular targets for insurgents. However, 10 weeks into the tour, an American website revealed his presence in Helmand, forcing his withdrawal to the UK.
Harry had stated that it would be pointless to put him through costly Apache training if he was then barred from going into combat. "You become a very expensive asset, the training's very expensive and they wouldn't have me doing what I'm doing," he said. "I'd just be taking up a spare place for somebody else if they didn't have me going out on the job."
The deployment of the Prince's brother, William, to the South Atlantic has added to the rising diplomatic confrontation between Britain and Argentina. His six-week tour of duty as an RAF search and rescue pilot was described by the MoD as "a routine operational matter". But the foreign ministry in Buenos Aires called it part of "an ongoing attempt to militarise the conflict" and regretted that the heir to the throne would arrive wearing "the uniform of a conqueror".
Speaking of Prince Harry's qualification Col Neale Moss, Commander of the Attack Helicopter Force at Wattisham Station, said: "The Apache course is extremely challenging, teaching and testing students in their flying skills, decision making and mental agility on exercise all over the country and abroad. They are assessed continually to ensure that they are up to the challenge of operating one of the most sophisticated attack helicopters in the world. This requires composure, dedication and hard work and I congratulate all of the students as they go forward to join an operational squadron and continue to learn more in their aviation careers."
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Afghan jihad said to attract fewer foreign fighters
AFP
By Michel Moutot
09/02/2012
The Afghan-Pakistan jihad is attracting fewer foreign fighters following the death of Osama bin Laden, the growing threat posed by US drones, and lack of funds, Western security officials say.
While no precise figure is available, it would appear that the number of would-be jihadists from abroad has been drying up, according to one security official who declined to be named.
However, more Pakistanis are willing to take up the fight and make up the numbers, he also warned.
"Over the past six months, young Frenchmen there have nearly all left Pakistan. There were 20 to 30 of them, who had either converted (to Islam) or had links to the Maghreb; today there are hardly any left," he said.
"Other European countries whose nationals used to go to Pakistan to join the jihad have drawn the same conclusion -- a drastic reduction over recent months," he added.
The "Arab Spring" revolts also acted as a magnet, with a number of jihadists moving to Libya to join the fight to remove Moamer Kadhafi from power, he said.
"Fighting in Afghanistan is also less attractive because of the idea that the Afghan Taliban want to concentrate more on home fighting and that world jihad is less and less their cup of tea," he added.
For Frank Cilluffo, who co-authored "Foreign Fighters" for the Homeland Security Policy Institute, "first and foremost, military actions, including the use of drones, has made the environment less hospitable to foreign fighters traveling to the region, by disrupting Al-Qaeda's (and associated entities') training camps and pipelines."
Direct and indirect accounts by jihadists also speak of disarray within Al-Qaeda in northwestern Pakistan where activists avoid coming together for fear of being attacked and whose weapons training now takes place indoors because of aerial and satellite surveillance.
In a report, entitled "Militant Pipeline" describing the links between the northwestern Pakistani frontier and the West, researcher Paul Cruickshank quotes one Ustadh Ahmad Faruq, described as a Pakistan-based Al-Qaeda spokesman who recently acknowledged his network's difficulties.
"The freedom we enjoyed in a number of regions has been lost. We are losing people and lack resources. Our land is being squeezed and drones fly over us," he reportedly said in an audio cassette.
"It's difficult to have reliable figures," on the number of foreign fighters, according to Cruickshank, who is a fellow at New York University's Center on Law and Security.
"I think the drone strikes have been a major issue for the militants, the death of bin Laden is going to be a very big challenge as well. He was so important for a lot of these militants -- he was the Al-Qaeda brand.
"By going over there they were joining his cause. The fact that he has been removed from the scene is likely to be a great recruiting challenge for Al-Qaeda," he said.
"But the conflict is still going on in Afghanistan and in the radical circles it is still viewed as a very legitimate jihad. So it's likely that the number of volunteers is going to be diminished, but as long as there are US soldiers to fight, I don't think it's going to dry up entirely," he added.
Hafiz Hanif, a 17-year-old Afghan who trained in northwest Pakistan, recently told Newsweek magazine the number of foreign fighters there was dwindling.
"When new people came they brought new blood, enthusiasm and money. All that has been lost. Now leaders seem to spend all their time moving from one place to another for their safety," he said.
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NATO, Pakistan and Afghan military officials in border talks, Pakistani army says
Washington Post
By Richard Leiby
February 8 , 2012
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
In a sign that a months-long estrangement between the United States and Pakistan might be easing, NATO, Pakistani and Afghan military officials held talks Wednesday in hopes of better coordinating operations on the Afghan border, the Pakistani army said.
The announcement came on the same day that U.S.-fired drone missiles killed nine militants in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region, according to security officials there. They said the dead included members of the Haqqani network, a group that launches frequent attacks against Western and Afghan forces across the Afghan border.
Drone strikes are widely unpopular here and a continuing source of strain between Pakistan and the United States. Recently, however, the on-and-off counterterrorism allies have been warily attempting to restore military and intelligence cooperation in the aftermath of American air attacks in November that accidentally killed 24 Pakistani troops at two border posts.
Pakistan retaliated by shutting down NATO supply routes into Afghanistan and also barred the United States from using one of its bases for CIA drone operations.
But in another sign of improved relations, Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, will meet with Pakistani Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani this month to discuss the U.S. investigation into the airstrikes, the New York Times and Associated Press reported.
Wednesday’s meeting, which also included representatives from the Afghan National Army and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, was described in the terse statement from the Pakistani army as part of a “tripartite engagement to discuss and improve various coordination measures on the Pak-Afghan border.”
A Pakistani parliamentary committee is conducting a review of the U.S.-Pakistan security relationship that is expected to impose tariffs on the NATO convoys and request prior notification of the Pakistani military before the U.S. launches drone strikes. Pakistan’s defense minister on Tuesday endorsed the tariff plan.
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Expert for peace settlement with Taliban
DAWN.com
Feb 8, 2012
ISLAMABAD
‘Settlement, settlement’ was the call of the day at the Oxford hosted talk by Anatol Lieven, an expert on Pakistan and the author of his latest book Pakistan: A Hard Country. Being celebrated across the academic circles as an in-depth analysis, the book is being touted as a welcome change from the standard analyses of Pakistan that paint an unpleasant picture of doom and gloom for its future.
So what kind of settlement? Lieven is pushing for a peace settlement with the Taliban as the ultimate and much-needed solution to the Afghanistan conflict.
“Initially, I was a supporter of the talk and fight simultaneously strategy but it soon became obvious that this strategy put such stress on the US-Pakistan relationship that it endangered the wider process,” explained Lieven, a professor at King’s College, London and an ex-journalist.
Lieven’s conclusions are entirely understandable. He puts forward the assumptions that Taliban attacks are impossible to stop completely, the rollback of US ground forces in Afghanistan will make it very hard to maintain ground bases and the US desperately wants to avoid a repeat of its Vietnam experience in Saigon. Combines these factors together and it makes sense that the US wants to find a settlement.
“The inevitable fate of Afghanistan is an intense decentralisation – this can happen with a settlement or after years of bloody war – how we get to it is the question,” declared Lieven, and for these very reasons, a settlement is exactly what Pakistan should be aspiring for. “A settlement is possible and Pakistan should want it – in fact, there is no doubt that Pakistan is very much committed to a settlement.”
What was hidden behind these rational game plan suggestions put forward by Lieven was a sympathetic but fair assessment of Pakistan.
“Afghanistan is a failed state, Pakistan is not,” he declared. But he was not willing to not let Pakistan get away without any responsibility and suggested proactive action to Pakistan’s problems with its messy neighbour. When an audience member asked what Pakistan can do, Lieven emphasised that Pakistan can use media and confidence building measures to show its commitment to a settlement: “I have talked to Pakistanis in positions of power and military men and seen that many of their ideas are even used by the US on the ground – but no one knows about it. Media can be used to bring out Pakistani ideas for settlement.”
It was not all sugar and candy at the talk, however; Lieven was not willing to ignore the fact that at the end of the day, Pakistan is breeding grounds for terrorism. In reference to a question about the tribal areas, he did not mince words in saying:
“Unfortunately, Pakistan is home to a great many terrorists. If a territory becomes host to such elements, there will be repercussions – not that I am using this to justify aspects of the drone program – but it is a responsibility of the local people to not allow their territory to be used for such purposes.”
Neither was Lieven shy in admitting that if Pakistan’s nuclear arms fall in the wrong hands or if another terrorist attack takes place with roots of its planning in Pakistan, there will be serious repercussions for Pakistan from the US.
“Pakistan should use its influence. If it has any influence over Haqqani or the Taliban, it should convince them to cool it a bit,” said Lieven, adding at another point: “Al Qaeda is diminished to a great extent and I would strongly urge Pakistan to capture Ayman Al-Zawahiri so US can declare victory and pull out.”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the talk was hearing such sentiments. Here was a Pakistan sympathetic analyst putting a lot of responsibility on Pakistan to capture important terrorists, convince Taliban and Haqqani groups to cool down (albeit with a grain of salt) and help in the settlement process – perhaps it is about time that the Pakistani public also steps up its expectations from the state in bringing the Afghanistan conflict to closure.—Ayesha Shahid
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General says US military will begin sending special advisory teams to Afghanistan this year
AP
By ROBERT BURNS AP National Security Writer
February 8, 2012
WASHINGTON
The No. 2 U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Wednesday that U.S. military advisory teams will start deploying to Afghanistan this year to help Afghan combat forces as they take a more prominent role in fighting the Taliban.
The plan described by Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti envisions U.S. and other international troops beginning to step back from their leading role, so that responsibility for the war is fully in Afghan hands by the end of 2014. Scaparrotti, who is charge of day-to-day military operations in Afghanistan as commander of the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command, said he is pushing to get more Afghan forces into the lead before the U.S.-led coalition shrinks.
"I'm pressing commanders to put them into the lead as soon as they can," Scaparrotti told reporters at the Pentagon. "The earlier we get them into the lead, the better we have a metric of just how well they're doing and we also know better how to improve them."Scaparrotti said he is in the early stages of shifting from NATO-led to Afghan-led military operations. He estimated that just 1 percent of Afghan army battalions are able to operate "independently" with help from NATO advisers.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week that 2013 will be a decisive year in the transition to Afghan responsibility for the war. He said he hopes that as early as mid-2013, U.S. forces will shift from lead combat role to a support role, while remaining prepared to engage in combat if necessary through 2014.
Asked about Panetta's remarks, Scaparrotti said he expects that the process of getting the Afghans into the lead combat role will be "pretty far along" by 2013 but "exactly how that will roll" depends on conditions on the ground.
Scaparrotti said further developing the Afghan security forces is his second-highest priority. He said his top priority is to "maintain the momentum" on the battlefield by continuing to pursue the Taliban, especially in what he called the decisive terrain of southern Afghanistan that has been the Taliban's power base.
"I believe we have the right plan," he said. "We certainly have the momentum, and we've got the resolve to succeed."
His remarks stand in marked contrast to an assessment published in the private Armed Forces Journal, titled "Truth, Lies and Afghanistan," in which Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis accused U.S. military leaders of misleading the public by overstating the degree of progress toward stabilizing Afghanistan.
Davis, who said he spent 12 months in Afghanistan as part of a team assessing troops' needs and circumstances, wrote that he "witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level." He said that every place he visited, "the tactical situation was bad to abysmal."
Asked about Davis' article, Scaparrotti said, "It's one person's view of this," adding that he remains confident that his own cautiously optimistic view is based on a solid foundation of information and analysis.
He acknowledged that some Afghan weaknesses described by Davis are real. He specifically noted Davis's first-hand account of an incident in which two Taliban insurgents who had participated in an attack on a U.S. checkpoint in Kandahar province last June were allowed by Afghan policemen to escape the scene. Davis said this is the kind of problem that feeds U.S. troops' contempt for their Afghan partners.
"I think those things happen," Scaparrotti said, in part because of the fast pace at which the Afghan army has expanded its ranks.
Despite their weaknesses, the general said, the Afghan forces will prove to be "good enough" to secure their country.
___
Robert Burns can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/robertburnsAP
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Top US envoy 'met Taliban leaders in Qatar'
America’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan has held a meeting with Taliban leaders in Qatar, an Afghan official revealed on Wednesday, in a further tentative step towards formal negotiations with the insurgents.
Telegraph.co.uk
By Barney Henderson, and agencies
08 Feb 2012
Marc Grossman held the talks with Taliban representatives late last month in Qatar, where a team of Taliban diplomats is based ahead of the opening of a political office there to host negotiations between America, the insurgents and the Afghan government.
“I can confirm that Mr Grossman met with the Taliban representatives in Qatar. When the president (Mr Karzai) was in Rome, Grossman came over to his residence and briefed him about his meetings with the Taliban,” said the senior official, who asked to remain anonymous.
Representatives from the former Taliban regime assembled in Qatar last month, with the aim of opening the official office later this year “to come to an understanding with other nations”.
The delegation includes Tayeb Agha, former secretary to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who has acted as go-between with American and German diplomats for more than a year.
Mr Grossman’s meeting, if confirmed, would be the first known contact made between the Taliban and a senior, named member of the Obama administration since the start of the Afghanistan war over ten years ago.
Mr Karzai, rejected by the Taliban as a “puppet”, has said publicly that he supports the plan, but was widely reported to be concerned that he would be sidelined in the Taliban’s talks with the US.
Washington dispatched Mr Grossman to Kabul last month to assure the Afghan president of a leading role once the talks get under way.
“Our stance is unchanged: the president wants the talks to be Afghan-led and Afghan owned,” the official in Kabul said.
Meanwhile, a leading US general said on Wednesday that Afghanistan’s forces will be “good enough” to take over its security by the end of 2014, even though only a small number of them now operate independently from Nato-led troops.
“I can tell you personally from experience and from feedback from others, these soldiers will fight, particularly at the company level. There’s no question about that,” said Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti, deputy commander of US forces and the head of the Nato-led force’s joint command.
“And they’re going to be good enough, as we build them, to secure their country and to counter the insurgency that they’re dealing with now.”
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Next Year's Budget Not Yet Approved: MPs
TOLOnews.com
Wednesday, 08 February 2012
The Afghan House of Representatives on Wednesday said that next year's budget will not be approved until the remaining cabinet members and Supreme Court officials are not introduced to the House to get vote of confidence.
Some of the MPs believe that if the budget is approved, 'incompetent ministers' will not be able to spend it.
The MPs once again called on the government to introduce the remaining cabinet members and accused the government of violation of the law.
The acting ministers are now working for years without winning votes of confidence from the parliament.
Currently, Ministry of Public Health, Ministry of Transport and Aviations, Ministry of Higher Education, Ministry of Power and Water, Ministry of Women Affairs, Ministry of Communication and Ministry of Urban Development are being managed by acting ministers.
"We will not approve the budget until the government does not introduce remaining cabinet members, New Supreme Court Director and Attorney General," First Deputy Speaker of the parliament, Abdul Zaher Qadir, said. "What will be the benefit of approving the budget. Corruption will continue to exist and money will be misused."
A representative of Badakhshan province in the Parliament, Abdul Ahad Afzali said he considered it a big sin to work with what he described as an illegal government.
"We will delay the budget approval until the new cabinet members are introduced," he said.
Meanwhile, some MPs cited to summon the ministers who were unable to spend less than 40 percent of their development budgets.
"When we raise the green card, we aim to summon the ministers who were unable to spend less than 40 percent of the budgets," a representative of Badakhshan in the parliament, Fauzia Kofi said. "If they fail to convince the MPs, they should be disqualified."
The next year's proposed budget was sent to the parliament three days ago and it is currently being evaluated by the MPs.
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Red tape, corruption pull rug from under Afghan carpet business
Reuters
By Rob Taylor Reuters
February 9, 2012
KABUL
At a small shop a stone's throw from the Ghazi Stadium where Afghanistan's former Taliban government used to stage its public executions, Mohammad Hashem is worried about the death of his carpet business.
Carpets are the country's best-known export, but prices, driven sharply higher by war, competition from abroad, red tape and corruption have taken the industry over a cliff, with a 70 percent drop in production over the past few years. "In three months I have not sold even one," said Hashem, glumly eyeing piles of plush crimson carpet as his breath steams in the winter air filling the room.
"My shop sells mostly to Afghans and the people are very poor right now. There is no money for most people even for food," he says. Hashem has no spare money even to heat his shop, which is open at the front to a snow-lined street.While Afghanistan's economy has averaged growth of 9.1 percent in recent years as war and reconstruction spending drive up prices, an estimated third of the 30 million population live under the poverty line on less than $1 a day.
And a fall in carpet production, which directly or indirectly employs six million people, or a fifth of the population, will add to economic worries ahead of the withdrawal of foreign troops in three years' time.
Afghanistan's Carpet Exporters' Guild, which overlooks the street on which Hashem's shop is jammed up against others, says prices overseas for Afghan carpets are up to $8,000 a square meter, but local prices at a tiny fraction of that and monthly pay of around $70 are driving workers in search of better pay.
Afghanistan exported almost 388,000 square meters of carpet and non-pile "kilim" rug last year, down from 1,370,000 square meters of carpet and kilim in 2010.
"This year it will be close to 300,000 square meters," said the guild's deputy president, Zarif Yadgari. "No one comes here to buy wholesale. Traders don't come here to buy our products and we are not allowed to go to Europe or America to sell."
Afghan carpets are keenly sought by overseas collectors, but the industry, built upon people working in homes in often remote rural provinces, faces intense competition from machine-made carpets and refugees now producing them from shelters in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, the guild said.
Exiles also have a currency advantage over Afghanistan's economy -- inflated by NATO spending and development contracts pushing up electricity and raw material costs -- while a lack of infrastructure means carpets have to be sold almost solely through middlemen in Pakistan, again pushing up costs.
"The biggest challenge we face is that we don't have direct export access from Afghanistan," said the guild's finance director, Alhaj Samiullah.
Industry representatives blame government red tape and endemic corruption for blocking improvements and marketing that they hope would bring fresh expansion.
"In the past people in provinces could earn good money. But now there are machine-made carpets which people have mostly turned to. We have people inside the country who want to kill our carpet industry," Samiullah said.
The government says it has tried to kick-start production, allocating land for an industry park in the eastern city of Jalalabad.
But at a dusty carpet weaving workshop on the sprawling southern fringes of Kabul, workers pile wool into a steaming vat for dyeing and say the government is not doing enough to sever reliance on sales and exports through Pakistan.
"The big challenge we face is that the number of carpets in the market is down, and so we have to cut our production. We demand the government help traders to find a better market and lift the price," said worker Mohammad Taqi.
Inside, 19-year-old Zahra sits huddled over a loom with her two sisters, copying complex designs from paper into intricate knotted designs.
"The prices of carpets are very low," she said. "It is hard work for us, but we earn less income and our economy is weak. We cannot go to school because we have to work all the time here in order to make money and feed our family."
(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni and Samar Zwak; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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Pentagon Counters Dim Assessment of Afghan War
New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
February 8, 2012
The second-ranking American commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti of the Army, took the occasion of a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday to counter – gently and respectfully – the opinions of an Army officer who has written in Armed Forces Journal that the war in Afghanistan is going badly and that military leaders have not told the truth about it. The Times wrote about the officer, Lt. Col Daniel L. Davis, in Monday’s paper and on the At War blog on Sunday.
Here is today’s exchange:
Q: General, Bob Burns with A.P. General, I’d like to ask you to respond to the article that was published in Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Dan Davis in which he says that I.S.A.F. leaders — presumably, including yourself — have been misleading the public about the degree of progress that’s been made there. He says that, whereas compared to the rosy scenario that he hears that — he says there’s been a lack of — a lack of success — I think he said a lack of success at virtually every level in Afghanistan.
GENERAL SCAPARROTTI: Right. I read the article. I — what I would say is this: It’s one person’s view of this. From my personal point of view, I do a lot of battlefield circulation; I talk to commanders and soldiers; I have assessments from others, like my sergeant major that I put on the battlefield virtually every week to walk with both Afghan and coalition parts. So I take in a lot of — a lot of data from many different places to determine my assessment, to include a very objective, detailed assessment we do every quarter.
So I’m confident that — in my personal view that our outlook is accurate.
I did read the article, and I think that as you read that article, I don’t doubt what he describes in a sense, for instance, his occasion of watching a policeman watch an insurgent depart an area. You know, I think those things happen.
We have an — we have an ANSF that has doubled in size in 18 months, and we’re presently building. So you know, there’s — what I would say to you is that we have to be — try to be very accurate about what we see and what we understand the battlefield to be and not treat it as we want it to be. So I work very hard personally at that, and I also take — I pay attention to what — the folks who perhaps disagree, and I look for people to be around my conference room table that’ll argue with me.
Q: Just one specific follow-up on — one particular thing that he said was that I.S.A.F. and U.S. troops don’t actually respect the Afghan forces, their ability —
GEN. SCAPARROTTI: Well, I disagree with that. I think I’ve seen enough of them to know there is — when I talk to soldiers — let’s take an American soldier or a private. At times this private will tell me they’re not that good. But a private is looking at it from the perspective of how he’s trained or the Marines trained, and the standards are very different.
But I can tell you personally from experience and from feedback from others, these soldiers will fight, particularly at the company level. There’s no question about that. And they’re going to be good enough as we build them to secure their country and to counter the insurgency that they’re dealing with now.
Will they be at the standard that we have for our soldiers? No, not, at least, the conventional forces. They do have — their response forces we’re training, their S.O.F. forces, the commandos, are being trained to a very high level; and I think that’s one thing that’s a bright picture here for them, is that their response forces are really coming along very well. And that will be — you know, that will be quite an asset for the country here in the future.
The general then gave his take on the morale of the Taliban and other enemy forces, responding to news reports based on a leaked NATO report, based on the interrogations of prisoners, that discussed their resiliency.
“I think they’ve been hurt, and I’ll try and describe how I view it,” he said. “We know, as I stated before, that they could not generate the tempo that they had in the past. They didn’t reach the tempo they had the year before. It was down about 9 percent over all in a year.
“Their complex attacks are down about 36 percent compared to last year,” he said.
“They have a regenerative capacity,” he warned, “particularly with the Pakistan sanctuary.”
But he said there appeared to be “dissension within the ranks” of the enemy, “because their senior commanders stay in Pakistan and security and continue to expect their midlevel leaders to increase the fight — and I think without full knowledge of just how tough that fight is for the Taliban on the other side.”
Three members of Congress members who had met with Colonel Davis to talk about the war took to the House floor today to praise him for speaking out and to call for an end to the war. Representative John Garamendi, Democrat of California, Representative Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina, and Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, have all been skeptical about the war in the past, but they have seized upon Colonel Davis’ views as those of a credible officer with experience on the ground.
Representative Garamendi read passages from Colonel Davis’ article and declared that his “candid testimony reinforced my conviction that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, only the prospect of continued shedding of American blood in a war that is not ours to fight. Only through a negotiated political settlement amongst the Afghan factions, not through an open ended US military presence, could Afghanistan become a stable, developing country.”
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Afghanistan's future? Same as it ever was: Bloody
Los Angles Times
February 8, 2012
OK, show of hands: Who thinks Afghanistan is headed for a peaceful future?
Yeah, me neither.
In an Op-Ed article Wednesday, Peter Thomsen, who served as U.S. special envoy and ambassador to Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, argues that any solution to the country's civil war must be brokered by the Afghans themselves.
He quotes a Jan. 24 statement by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul: "Only Afghans can decide the future of Afghanistan."
But in a news story, also on Wednesday, Times reporter Laura King writes from Kabul that U.S. officials increasingly see Afghan President Hamid Karzai as "a prime impediment to urgent U.S. efforts to jump-start negotiations" with the Taliban.
Hmmm. Seems to me that what we have here is a failure to communicate.
If the Afghans themselves have to solve the problem, but the Afghans themselves can't agree on how to solve the problem, how is the problem going to get solved?
And what's really frustrating about the situation is that you get the feeling everyone involved knows how it's going to end but just doesn't want to admit it.
Actually, you could just go read about the Soviet Union's adventure in Afghanistan, then extrapolate:
* The United States and what's left of our NATO allies will pull out of Afghanistan at the end of 2014. * Karzai and his corrupt cronies will be out of the picture shortly thereafter. * The Taliban will slug it out with whatever warlords are left. * A lot of Afghans will be killed in the process. * Whichever side proves the most brutal -- and has the backing of Pakistan, so probably the Taliban -- will seize power.
Meanwhile, there's the little issue of the American lives that will be lost -- and the American dollars that will be wasted -- in this process.
At home, we're quarreling over cutting the social safety net. In Afghanistan, we're throwing dollars down a corrupt government's rat hole, a government that doesn't exist without those dollars and won't exist when American boots start walking.
So here's an idea: Pull out in six months. Save those lives. Save those dollars.
And yes -- sadly -- leave the Afghans to do what they've done for hundreds of years: Solve their own problems, in their own brutal way.
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CIA to Remain in Afghanistan after Withdrawal of Troops
TOLOnews.com
Wednesday, 08 February 2012
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is expected to have a large presence in Afghanistan after complete withdrawal of US combat troops from Afghanistan, Washington Post reported.
They will contribute in operations by US Special forces in Afghanistan.
US officials have said that the agency's paramilitary capabilities are seen as tools for keeping the Taliban off balance and protecting the government of Kabul.
CIA's Kabul stations which have as many as 1,000 employees will expand its collaborations with the Special forces when the drawdown of the conventional troops begins.
"I have no doubt that Special Operations will be the last to leave Afghanistan," said Navy Willaim McRaven, the Special Operations Commander who led the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden last year.
The number of the CIA presence in Afghanistan in the next several years has yet to be determined.
In some scenarios, the CIA and Special Operations troops could share territory and lists of Taliban targets with Afghan forces.
The CIA Paramilitary operatives were the first US personnel to enter Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks; linking up with Northern Alliance fighter's weeks before US military commandos arrived.
The agency controls counterterrorism pursuit teams made up of dozens of Afghan fighters funded and trained by CIA.
CIA will concentrate to hold Kabul and Bagram Airbase rather than having remote outposts. The death of seven CIA employees and contractor in a suicide bombing by a double agent at a CIA base in Khost province underscored the vulnerability of remote outposts.
"We can lose the countryside, but I don't think we are going to lose Kabul and Bagram," a former CIA officer said.
The US government plans to pull out around 22,000 troops from Afghanistan decreasing the overall number of US troops to 68,000. This comes the US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said that the withdrawal process will accelerate and US could end up combat operations by mid 2013.
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Afghanistan's Cultural Riches Threatened By Mineral Wealth
RFE?RL
By Frud Bezhan
February 08, 2012
Flanked by waves of mountains and gray desert, the road leading from the Afghan capital to the ancient ruins of Mes Aynak ends abruptly at the foot of a dusty hilltop.
From that vantage point, 40 kilometers from Kabul, one can get a clear picture of Afghanistan's rich cultural past, and its efforts to generate wealth for the future.
The grounds of Mes Aynak in Logar Province is a sprawling 9,800-acre trove of Buddhist monastery ruins, statues, and tombs that sit largely preserved under layers of unexcavated earth. It is also the site of a massive Chinese-funded project to extract an increasingly valuable regional commodity -- copper.
Mes Aynak, meaning "little copper well", was the center of a Buddhist Kingdom before Islam came to Afghanistan. It is thought that monks settled here for its ample supply of copper, which brought them great wealth and allowed them to build a grand monastery.
But if copper led to the creation of the settlement, it appears now that it will also lead to its destruction.
Crucial For Economic Future
The Chinese-government-backed China Metallurgical Group Corporation made a successful bid of $3 billion for mineral rights to the site in 2008, making the project the largest foreign investment project in the country at the time.
With geologists estimating that 2 billion tons of copper lie beneath Mes Aynak, the development of the site is key to Afghanistan's economic future. The deal also includes infrastructure development, including the construction of a power plant at the site, a village for workers, and a railway line from western China through Tajikistan and Afghanistan to Pakistan.
And it means that Mes Aynak, which sits on the second-largest known unexploited copper deposits in the world, is slated for destruction to make way for a massive open-cast copper mine.
Repeated attempts to reach China Metallurgical Group Corporation for comment on the company's plans were unsuccessful.
But what is known is that the company first intended to start mining in 2009, but agreed to a three-year delay for a basic excavation of the site.
Race Against Time
That deadline, which was set to expire this year, was prolonged again to 2014. Now dozens of Afghan and international archaeologists, who began excavating the site since 2009, are in a race against time to save what they can.
Haji Akbar, who heads a local committee in Logar for Mes Aynak, says efforts to unearth the historical artifacts have been intensified, with hundreds of local laborers being hired to help with the digging.
Mes Aynak holds remains of civilizations going back to as far back as the 3rd century B.C.
Akbar maintains that only a small portion of the huge site has so far been fully excavated. And, according to him, what has been unearthed so far is nothing short of incredible.
"The excavation in the region is going at a tremendous pace," he says. "We have even uncovered a whole city underneath the site. We have found ancient Buddha statues and jewelry."
Akbar, who heads the local committee that supervises all the excavation activities at Mes Aynak, says he is cautiously optimistic that the intensified efforts of the excavation teams can save most of the artifacts at the site before the deadline in 2014. So far, most of the unearthed relics have been transferred to the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, while other larger artifacts are being stored at a makeshift museum in Mes Aynak.
The Afghan government plans to eventually build a museum in the area to accommodate the vast collection of artifacts after the excavation ends.
Lightning Rod For Criticism
The project does have the support of some Afghan archeologists and historians. But the mining project is also a lightning rod for criticism, with opponents saying the Afghan government is sacrificing Afghanistan's rich cultural heritage in favor of economic development.
The numbers and the potential wealth are staggering. If the predictions are correct, the mining of the site could generate more than $1 billion a year for the Afghan government. That would account for about one-tenth of Afghanistan's current GDP.Omara Khan Massoudi, director of the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, has indicated that he is concerned about the destruction of Mes Aynak, but he remains supportive of the project, which he hopes will help the country’s dire economy and its poverty-stricken people.
"Afghanistan’s mineral wealth has yet to be fully utilized," he says. "In the face of poverty and continuing economic problems, it’s important for the Mining Ministry to sign contracts with the leading international companies to effectively use these minerals. Exploring these mines will have a huge economic benefit."
Afghanistan's untapped mineral wealth has been estimated by U.S. geologists to amount to nearly $1 trillion. Reserves include large amounts of copper, gold, cobalt and lithium.
Years Of Destruction And Looting
Massoudi, who has worked at the national museum for the past 27 years, believes mining projects like Mes Aynak will create jobs as well as generate money that can be used by the Afghan government to fund other important sectors such as health and education.
He maintains that money generated by mining is becoming increasingly important as international forces leave Afghanistan and financial aid from the international community decreases.
"We will need this as it will create jobs and play a big role in the country's economy," he says. "It will also pave the road toward peace and security and trickle more money toward other sectors such as education."
Massoudi adds that the battle to rescue the ancient relics in Mes Aynak is just the latest in a long line of ordeals that Afghan historians and archeologists have had to face in the country.
He cites decades of civil war and foreign invasions that have plagued the country's recent history. In that time, Afghanistan's antiquities and historical sites have suffered years of destruction and looting.
For Massoudi, historical and cultural preservation is one of the biggest issues facing Afghanistan. But he says that battle has only just begun as the country continues to grapple with poverty, war, and extremism.
RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan contributed to this report
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Afghanistan set for next chapter in remarkable rise
Reuters
By Brian Murgatroyd
Feb 8, 2012
DUBAI
Less than four years after playing their first tournament against teams including Japan and Norway, Afghanistan will write a new chapter in their remarkable rise with a one-day international against Pakistan on Friday.
Afghanistan, unable to host matches during a decade of war between NATO forces and the Taliban, won their initial tournament in Jersey in May 2008.
They qualified for the Twenty20 World Cup in the Caribbean two years later and then came within touching distance of a place at last year’s 50 overs World Cup in the Asian sub-continent.
The players’ consolation was to secure one-day international status and Friday’s match in their adopted cricketing home of Sharjah is a chance to test themselves against a Pakistan side who whitewashed England in the recent three-match test series.
Pakistan, who are also forced to play abroad because of security problems, was the country where some of the Afghanistan players were born and where they learned the game in refugee camps.
“I can assure you that millions of Afghanistan cricket supporters across the globe have been waiting for this day which comes after years of hard work, sacrifice and commitment,” Nasimullah Danish, the chief executive officer of the Afghanistan Cricket Board, told Reuters.
“Afghanistan cricket has been taking small but solid steps while making upward movement and it would be fair to say that our next target is to qualify for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015.”
MISBAH PRAISE
Those steps include the inauguration of the rebuilt Kabul Cricket Stadium last December when 8,000 spectators came to watch the national senior team take on an under-19 side.
The International Cricket Council (ICC) contributes approximately $700,000 a year to aid Afghanistan’s development and it is keen that Friday’s match encourages other top teams to follow Pakistan’s lead.
“In order for cricket to remain competitive within the international sporting marketplace, it is important that more countries are capable of performing well at the highest international level,” Tim Anderson, the ICC’s global development manager, told Reuters.
“For sides to reach that level they need to play more against higher standard opposition, so Pakistan playing Afghanistan is a terrific initiative that we are very excited about and something we would like to see more of in the future.”
Afghanistan have played in the Pakistan domestic competition and against Pakistan A sides, while two of the country’s past coaches Kabir Khan and Rashid Latif, are Pakistani.
Three Afghanistan players, wicketkeeper Mohammad Shazad, spin bowler Mohammad Nabi and fast bowler Hamid Hassan, were chosen for an ICC side who faced England before their test series against Pakistan.
Hassan was injured and unable to complete the match after taking the first two wickets in the England first innings while Nabi took five wickets and Shazad scored 51 and 74, as well as taking five catches.
“I played against them in our domestic Twenty20 tournament for Faisalabad and they have some really good, talented players,” Pakistan captain Misbah-ul-Haq told Reuters.
“They are eager to play international cricket and for us it is good preparation going into a tough (one-day) series against England.”
A sellout crowd is expected on Friday, with the match taking place on a day when almost all workers in the UAE are able to take as a holiday.
(Editing by John Mehaffey; To query or comment on this story email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
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Pakistan Army Chief Meets Afghan, Nato Commanders
TOLOnews.com
Wednesday, 08 February 2012
Pakistan's Top military official is holding talks with Afghan and Nato commanders to improve coordination alongside the borders, Pakistani media reported.
The meeting is said to be aimed at improving the already tense situation between Islamabad and Washington which deteriorated after a Nato air strike on November 26 which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.
An investigation conducted by US blames two sides for misunderstanding about the coordinates.
The meeting occurs as Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Hinna Rabbani Khar, visited Afghanistan and supported Afghan peace reconciliations.
Her trip to Afghanistan was to soften the strained relations between the two countries and express her country's support to the Afghan peace process, the statement added.
She also promised to re-open the border and release all the Afghanistan-bound trucks paused across the Kheyber Pakhtunkhawa high way by military.
The supply route was blocked in response to the Nato air strike.
The border issues have turned to be a major problem for Afghan government as Pakistani military forces are preventing Afghan trade trucks to enter Afghanistan.
Afghan traders have recently said that despite promises from Pakistani officials, the military forces are asking for money and avoiding trucks to enter Afghanistan.
In the recent days, Pakistan's efforts to have a role in the issues of Afghanistan have increased as Pakistani Prime Minister, Yosuf Raza Gilani, travelled to Doha to meet his Qatari counterpart and discuss the peace talks process.
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Q. & A. with Joel van Houdt, Afghanistan-Based Photographer
New York Times
By RACHEL NOLAN
February 8, 2012
Joel van Houdt is a Dutch photographer who shot the photographs for the magazine’s cover story on Afghanistan.
How did you approach the project? Did you know you wanted to do portraits, or did you go in with a looser idea?
The portraits were part of the assignment that photo editor Joanna Milter sent me on the road with. I liked the idea: these Marines had been living and fighting on the often forgotten front line of this war, and I thought that photographing their faces, as opposed to their bodies in action, would remind us that actual people, in this case young Americans, are putting their lives at risk.
There is something very intimate about those photographs. I know you had limited time to photograph the Marines, so I’m wondering how you got them to trust you?
My experience with embedding is that usually it takes some days before soldiers feel comfortable about being photographed and having me around. In Kajaki, on the other hand, I felt welcome right away. One way that I prepared was by shaving my beard so they wouldn’t think some hippie was visiting them. I try to divide my time here in Afghanistan between embedding with international forces and going around on my own and the beard comes in handy while trying to look like an Afghan.
What was your time spent with them like? Was how they involved you as part of the group or kept you at arms length as a photographer at all surprising?
I felt most like part of the group when I spent time at Outpost Shrine, where there were just more than 10 Marines. Spending the first night there sleeping in the freezing winter night also helped enormously. They were only worried when I would take a photo of them wearing anything other than the Marine uniform. A sergeant made a lance corporal change his outfit when I was photographing him looking through his weapon at villagers passing by. When a day would pass without a firefight they would get bored, just sitting around the fire eating their M.R.E.’s. We would joke around and try to guess what sort of captions The New York Times would put on their photos and moments like this relaxed them around me. After Luke Mogelson left, the Afghan Police at Outpost Shrine were replaced by Afghan soldiers, and I met them, too. The Marines didn’t like them as much as they had the police, and this feeling seemed to be mutual. I have embedded with the Afghan National Army before, and they always welcomed me but on the outpost the Afghan soldiers were suspicious every time I walked down the hill from where the American camp was. Not all of them liked to be photographed.
Why was that?
Probably because they didn’t want to be seen as an Afghan National Army soldier by their village or community back home. Usually the A.N.A. soldiers like their picture taken and ask for copies of the photographs for themselves. But when I tried to arrange the group portrait for the cover many didn’t show up since it involved posing together with the Marines.
After reading the story, that opening photograph, where it looks like you are walking behind a Marine on patrol, really made me wince for fear of I.E.D.’s for both you or him. When you go patrolling with a Marine, do they welcome a photographer or see you as kind of a nuisance?
They really appreciate it when you go out with them and face the same risks as they do. For me, however, those risks usually last for a couple of days or weeks while they go out for months during their deployment. But some Marines in Helmand actually told me they have a lot of respect for the fact that I went out with them with just a camera and no weapon.
The photograph of the men together on the Humvee looked loose, almost relaxed. Is it ever possible to forget you were at war?
That morning, we were driving to an outpost to start a foot patrol, so I’m sure they hadn’t forgotten. It was the tension that made them look loose and joke around. There are times in the Forward Operating Bases and bigger bases where there is no imminent threat of being attacked that it is easy to forget you’re at war. Despite having worked in Afghanistan for 20 months, this embed was the first time I actually felt on the front line. We were perched over villages that were emptied out. Civilians had fled and the Taliban were using them from which to launch their attacks. It was a dangerous no-man’s land — and a stark reminder that it’s a war that involves two sides fighting each other. Everyone knows NATO forces are fighting the Taliban but it was rare to see it in such a straightforward way as in Helmand Province.
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Afghan peace efforts continues amid ifs and buts
Xinhua
By Abdul Haleem, Chen Xin
Feb. 8, 2012
KABUL
The much-needed peace talks with the Taliban has been continuing over the past couple of years but with snail motion as stakeholders have put many ifs and buts as pre- conditions.
Media reports suggest that Taliban outfit has agreed to open a liaison office in Qatar to facilitate talks for finding a negotiated settlement to Afghan crisis.
The initiative was welcomed by the United States which has been leading the costly war on terror and has lost more than 1,890 soldiers since dethroning Afghan Taliban regime in late 2001.
Nonetheless, the much-needed and much-awaited peace talks has been hit with many ifs and buts as the powers involved in the game have forwarded their terms for dialogue.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led forces, in a statement released to media early January had marginalized Afghan administration, saying Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (name of ousted Taliban regime) and the United States are the real sides involved in Afghan war over the past 10 years.
In a sharp reaction Afghan government had welcomed the step but insisted that any peace talks "should be Afghan-led and Afghan owned" besides preferring Saudi Arabia and Turkey as the venue for the proposed peace talks.
Taliban militants had also demanded the release of comrades languishing in Guantanamo detention center before any talks but the United States has yet to decide on the subject.
The militants, according to reports, have also rejected the U.S. offer for ceasefire and demanded the complete pull-out of NATO-led forces from Afghanistan.
Pakistan, another stakeholder in Afghan game where the Taliban insurgents are said to have taken shelter, has also shown interest in Afghan peace talks and the Pakistani prime minister, according to media reports, visited Qatar last Monday and reiterated his government stance to support Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace dialogue.
According to media reports, Washington has linked the opening of Taliban office in Qatar to severing ties with al-Qaida network, a pre-condition hardly acceptable to Taliban fighters.
"Taliban will not have office in Qatar unless they break ties with al-Qaida and renounce violence," U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker told a local Afghan newspaper.
The ambassador in his remarks on Wednesday also emphasized, "It is an intra-Afghan dialogue and not the talks of U.S. with the Taliban", saying if the government of Afghanistan wants, the United States is ready to support Afghan government in the process.
The outlook of Afghan peace efforts with so many conditions and pre-conditions has battered the road leading to peace and eventually makes it more time consuming than expected.
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