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18 February 2012
FEATURE STORY
Meeting in Pakistan Reveals Tensions Over Afghan Talks
BUSINESS
No articles featured today
NATION
Karzai Takes Tough Tone on Pakistan
Afghan General Sounds Alarm
European police bust Afghan migrant smuggling ring
Pakistan cautions Kabul on Taliban peace hopes
Pakistan-Afghanistan talks 'end in acrimony'
Fawzia Koofi targets Afghan presidency as fight for women's rights continues
At Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan summit, a show of unity
Germany Concerned About Afghan Troop Numbers
Unreported Suicides in Central Afghan Province
Afghanistan, Pakistan hold "hard" talks on Afghan peace
Where Extremes Meet
Fake Member Of Parliament Raises Alarm In Afghanistan
Afghan president's visit to Pakistan marks restart of top-level contacts
Doubts Over Afghan Police Loyalties
Cricket rises from rubble of Afghanistan
Afghan peace talks in jeopardy as Pakistan fails to bring the Taliban on board
Iran's President Blames West For 'All' Region's Problems
US lawmaker urges Baluchistan self-determination
Afghan president says Taliban can not open office in Qatar
PRESS RELEASES
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FEATURE STORY
Meeting in Pakistan Reveals Tensions Over Afghan Talks
New York Times
By DECLAN WALSH
February 17, 2012
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
Tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan over potential Taliban peace talks spilled into the open on Friday, with Pakistan’s foreign minister saying it was “preposterous” for Afghanistan to demand that her country deliver the insurgent leadership to the negotiating table.
“If that is the expectation, there is no reality check,” said the foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar. “It is not only unrealistic, but preposterous.”
Ms. Khar was speaking at the conclusion of a two-day trilateral meeting among the leaders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan in Islamabad, Pakistan, that was supposed to focus on regional cooperation but was overshadowed by a tentative American-driven initiative to start peace talks with the Afghan Taliban.
Her comments are significant because the Taliban leadership — and many of its fighters — are believed to be hiding in Pakistan or using Pakistan’s tribal areas as a base to attack Western and Afghan forces.
Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders have repeatedly stressed their support for an Afghan-led peace process. They insist that they have little direct control over the Taliban fighters on their soil — a position that infuriates the Afghan government, which has accused Pakistan of orchestrating the insurgency.
During a bilateral meeting on Thursday, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan asked Pakistan’s leaders to “use their influence” to help bring the Taliban to the table, said Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, who was there. Other Pakistani officials played down reports that Mr. Karzai upbraided the Pakistanis during the meeting.
But on Friday, Mr. Karzai said at a news conference that “impediments” in his relationship with Islamabad needed to be removed “sooner rather than later.”
The terse comments exposed Mr. Karzai’s quandary. He is wary of American attempts to broker peace, fearing they will leave him politically isolated, yet he harbors a deep suspicion of Pakistan that stretches back a decade.
Pakistani leaders, for their part, say Mr. Karzai and his American allies need to provide “clarity” on what shape any Taliban talks would take before Islamabad could commit to them.
“We will support any Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process,” Ms. Khar said, but she added that Pakistan needed to know “what degree of ownership” Afghanistan had over it.
The Obama administration wants to anchor the peace process in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, where the Taliban are to open a liaison office. As a goodwill gesture to the insurgent leadership, the United States is considering releasing five Taliban prisoners being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But Mr. Karzai has been less enthusiastic about holding talks in Qatar, and in comments to Pakistani reporters on Friday, he talked instead about a different process that would be based in Saudi Arabia or Turkey.
Meanwhile, during a news conference at the end of the meeting, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran brushed off questions about his country’s nuclear program. “The nuclear bomb will not bring superiority to any nation,” he said, before harshly criticizing countries with “hegemonic designs” — a clear reference to the United States.
The speculation that Israel is planning an attack on Iranian nuclear sites loomed unspoken over the talks, given the likely repercussions for Iran’s eastern neighbors. Mr. Malik called on a peaceful resolution to the crisis. “Let us not open another door of conflict,” he said.
The trilateral meeting took place against a backdrop of continuing violence in Pakistan. On Thursday, two American drones killed 21 people in North Waziristan, in the northwestern tribal areas.
On Friday, as the three leaders were meeting in Islamabad, what appeared to be a suicide attack at a bazaar in Parachinar, Pakistan, a tribal town with a history of sectarian violence, killed at least 13 people and wounded 30 more, official said.
Security forces opened fire on protesters after the bombing, wounding seven people, and an indefinite curfew has been imposed on the area.
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BUSINESS
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NATION
Karzai Takes Tough Tone on Pakistan
TOLOnews.com
Friday, 17 February 2012
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, during his visit to Islamabad, confronted with Pakistani officials in tough tone, reports say.
President Karzai has expressed frustration with Pakistan during his visit to the country, according to the Guardian.
The Afghan President has reportedly asked Pakistani officials to help Afghanistan in peace talks with the Taliban.
Mr Karzai's confrontation with officials in Islamabad on Thursday has been so hard that the important meeting has been halted.
Karzai's language and tone flared to such an extent that the Pakistani prime minister, Yosuf Raza Gilani, intervened and called a halt to a meeting of the full delegations of the two countries, the Guardian wrote quoting officials on both sides.
Only the top officials reportedly held a meeting after a break on the first day of the two-day visit, according to the report.
On Thursday the Afghan side held a three-hour meeting with the combined Pakistani civilian and military officials, including the Pakistani prime minister, foreign minister, army chief and head of the country's spy agency.
During the meeting President Karzai has directed his remarks to Pakistan's foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, asking her if she was willing to stop girls' education in Pakistan.
Girls education was banned under the Taliban rule in Afghanistan.
An insider has told the Guardian that President Karzai had bluntly asked Pakistan to produce the Taliban to talk with him during his visit to Islamabad.
Karzai's aggression shocked Pakistani officials, according to the source quoted by the Guardian.
It comes as the Afghan government has frequently called Pakistan's role important in bringing stability to Afghanistan.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan deteriorated after the assassination of the Chief of Afghan High Peace Council Burhanuddin Rabbani, for which officials in Kabul blamed Pakistan.
Pakistan angrily denied any connection with the incident.
Recently Pakistani Foreign Minister Hinna Rabbani Khar visited Kabul and met with officials to improved relations between the two countries.
She expressed her country's willingness to support an Afghan led peace process.
Pakistani officials have repeatedly stressed that the country is part of the solution and not the problem.
The Afghan government had earlier felt marginalised from peace talks with the Taliban and even recalled Afghan ambassador from Qatar after news emerged of plans to open a Taliban office there, but later it agreed to it saying that talks could also take place in some other countries including Saudi Arabia.
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Afghan General Sounds Alarm
Defense Minister Says New U.S. Proposal to Cut Local Troop, Police Forces Risks Endangering Nation
Wall Street Journal
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
FEBRUARY 18, 2012
KABUL
An American proposal to cut the size of Afghan security forces by more than one-third after 2014 could lead to a catastrophe, Afghanistan's defense minister told The Wall Street Journal, underlining his government's growing fears of being abandoned after most foreign troops withdraw.
The minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, expressed his concerns after the U.S., which along with its allies funds Afghanistan's military and police forces, circulated a new proposal to cut troops to 230,000 after 2014, from 352,000 this year.
That proposed troop reduction, discussed at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ministerial meeting in Brussels, was confirmed in an interview by U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger, commander of the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan that developed it.
The smaller Afghan force, estimated to cost some $4.1 billion a year, reflects "our assessment of what the international community will provide and what the Afghans can provide for themselves," Gen. Bolger said.
The Afghan government is still negotiating with the U.S. over what kind of American military presence, if any, will remain in the country after that deadline. With most of the U.S.-led coalition forces scheduled to leave Afghanistan by late 2014, a robust Afghan army and police will be needed to keep the Taliban insurgency at bay, Afghan leaders and some American lawmakers say.
"Nobody at this moment, based on any type of analysis, can predict what will be the security situation in 2014. That's unpredictable," Gen. Wardak said. "Going lower [in Afghan troop numbers] has to be based on realities on the ground. Otherwise it will be a disaster, it will be a catastrophe, putting at risk all that we have accomplished together with so much sacrifice in blood and treasure."
Many NATO allies have long opposed the American drive to ramp up the size of the Afghan army and police, saying that the Afghan economy simply cannot afford such an expensive professional military. The Afghan forces are expected to meet their target of 352,000 personnel, scheduled for October, months ahead of time.
The recent proposal to cut the force's size after 2014 has been produced by a "U.S.-only planning team," and does not yet reflect an agreed position of the allied governments, Gen. Bolger said.
The U.S. is now spending some $11.2 billion a year on Afghan security forces—well above the Afghan government's annual budget. The Obama administration's request for fiscal 2013 is $5.7 billion.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, speaking to reporters before the Brussels meeting, said the size of the future Afghan force will largely depend on "the funds that are going to be put on the table." The U.S. is looking for additional contributions from countries outside NATO, such as Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and Arab Gulf monarchies.
America's European allies, gripped by economic problems at home, are particularly reluctant to meet U.S. requests to fund a significant part of the $4.1 billion price tag estimated for the years after 2014, with some pressing for an even leaner Afghan force.
"The Americans didn't ask our advice when they were building it up, and now all of a sudden they want us to pay up," one diplomat from a NATO country said.
U.S. officials stressed Friday that the number remains a subject of debate both among U.S. officials and between U.S. and NATO officials.
"There is an awful lot in play," said a U.S. military officer. "There are 10 American opinions, 10 German opinions, 10 French opinions.... You are hearing the normal give and take."
U.S. and Afghan officials say they expect the issue to be settled by a NATO summit in Chicago in May.
Gen. Wardak has long campaigned for an even larger force than that currently envisioned, saying that implementing a successful counter-insurgency strategy would require between 400,000 and 500,000 troops. He said he now realizes he won't get that number.
"We are becoming victim to a lot of issues—economic austerity, the war has been prolonged beyond the expectations… elections in countries where we are becoming hostage to local political agendas," Gen. Wardak said.
Afghan officials aren't just worried by the manpower levels. They also say the Afghan army badly needs the "enablers"—such as medevac, intelligence, surveillance and airlift assets—that are currently provided by NATO.
"At the moment these forces are built as lighter-than-light infantry," Gen. Wardak said. "They don't have all the capabilities that a modern army in any country has."
It is possible that a force of 230,000 would be sufficient if the security situation improves, the Taliban embrace the tentative peace process with Kabul, and Pakistan shuts down insurgent safe havens on its soil, Gen. Wardak said.
"If it happens the question of numbers will be less relevant," he said. "But if it doesn't then all that we are planning will be in danger. We have to leave some level of flexibility."
Gen. Bolger said that the U.S. and allies recognize Afghan concerns. "Three years is a long time. We'll want to look at the security situation in the country, we'll want to look at what arrangements Afghanistan has made with other countries," he said. "We haven't figured any of that out yet."
He added that NATO hasn't determined whether any planned drawdown of Afghan forces would start on Jan. 1, 2015, or on a different date.
Retired U.S. Lt. Gen. David Barno, a senior adviser at the Center for a New American Security think-tank and a former commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, cautioned about the need to weigh the fiscal constraints against the perils of cutting the Afghan forces too deeply. "The risk here is you are going to reduce funding for Afghan security forces in the midst of a robust insurgency," he said. "Leaders have to be careful they do not get seized with the affordability argument without understanding the military implications."
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an influential voice on Afghanistan policy, said he believed that cutting the Afghan forces to 230,000 "does not seem wise."
"I would hate to be the senator who tried to end this on the cheap. … If we fail to deliver it will be a huge blunder that haunts our country," he said. "If the country goes back to Taliban control it will all be for nothing."
With attrition rates in the Afghan army running at 1.4% a month, the proposed drawdown could be achieved—at least in part—without the mandatory dismissals that could fuel the insurgency with an influx of resentful, trained ex-soldiers.
In Iraq in 2003, an American decision to disband the Iraqi army helped spark an insurgency that has yet to be extinguished.
"Immediate downsizing of 130,000 people in a country like Afghanistan, where these people are providing livelihood to at least a million people, will have very risky consequences," Gen. Wardak warned. "It has to be gradual," Gen. Bolger agreed.
Afghan leaders, many of them—like Gen. Wardak—drawn among U.S.-backed anti-Soviet mujahedeen commanders, still have painful memories of how the U.S. turned away from Afghanistan after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, a disengagement that plunged the country into a civil war and ultimately led to the rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
"I do hope the international community has learned from their experience in the 1990s," Gen. Wardak said. "This country is located in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world, and there are lots of threats." —Julian E. Barnes, Adam Entous and Matt Murray contributed to this article.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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European police bust Afghan migrant smuggling ring
AFP
17/02/2012
Police have arrested six members of a ring suspected of transporting thousands of illegal migrants from Afghanistan to Europe via Greece, making millions of euros, the EU justice agency said Friday.
Police from Belgium, Britain, France and Greece took part in "Operation Pakoul", named after a traditional hat worn in Afghanistan, against the ring which smuggled an estimated 5,000 illegal immigrants over the last 10 months.
"The main organiser in Greece is estimated to have smuggled between 120 and 160 migrants each week into various member states," Eurojust said in a statement issued in The Hague.
"This criminal is considered to be one of the most prolific facilitators of illegal immigration in Europe," it added.
Migrants on average paid 10,000 euros to be transported via Turkey, Greece and France to Britain, or from France via Germany to Scandinavia, Eurojust said.
The smuggling ring, consisting mainly of Afghan nationals, also employed Kurdish and Lithuanian facilitators, it added.
Operation Pakoul was the result of a near one-year-long investigation carried out by the French police and its judicial authority based in Lille.
The operation's suspected ringleader was arrested in Greece on Tuesday morning, two suspects were arrested in France, two in Belgium and one in Britain, while various searches were carried out.
The operation was coordinated by Eurojust, a special organisation comprising prosecutors, magistrates and police officers from the 27 European Union member countries, as well as European policing agency Europol.
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Pakistan cautions Kabul on Taliban peace hopes
Associated Press
Friday, February 17, 2012
ISLAMABAD
Pakistan told Afghanistan on Friday it was "preposterous" to think Islamabad could deliver the Taliban’s leader to the negotiating table and warned the neighboring nation against "ridiculous" expectations about peace talks.
The public comments by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar were an unusually harsh upbraiding for the diplomatic world, where such quarrels usually play out behind closed doors. They reflected Pakistan’s anger at repeated allegations by Afghanistan and the U.S. that it is harboring the Taliban’s leadership on its territory.
Khar spoke following talks between Pakistan and Afghanistan in Islamabad that were supposed to identify specific steps Pakistan would take to facilitate peace negotiations, but ended in apparent acrimony.
It was a serious setback for a peace process that the United States is strongly promoting as a way to end the decade-old Afghan conflict and allow it to withdraw most of its combat troops by 2014 without the country further descending into chaos.
The foreign minister said Pakistan supports an Afghan-led peace process but cautioned against Kabul expecting too much in terms of Islamabad’s ability to provide them access to the Taliban’s leaders.
"If you have unrealistic, almost ridiculous expectations, then you don’t have common ground to begin with," said Khar.
Pakistan is seen as key to the process because much of the Taliban leadership, including chief Mullah Omar, is believed to be based in the country, and the government has historical ties with the group. Analysts say Pakistan can either help the talks or act as a spoiler.
But Islamabad has always denied Taliban leaders are using its territory and rejected allegations that the Pakistani government has maintained its links to the group, frustrating Afghan and American officials who say Pakistan is not aggressively going after the terror group.
It’s unclear whether Karzai asked Pakistan for help getting to Omar during his current visit to Islamabad, and he made no public mention of the cleric. But he has called on Pakistan to facilitate contact with Omar and other Taliban leaders in the past.
The presidents of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran held a three-way summit in Islamabad over the past two days that focused on Taliban peace talks and other regional issues. Pakistan and Afghanistan also held bilateral meetings on the side of the summit, which ended Friday.
The Pakistani foreign minister indicated her government was still uncertain on exactly what role Afghanistan wanted Islamabad to play in the peace negotiations, saying "they have not conveyed that clarity to us."
In the past, Afghan officials have said they want Islamabad to offer tangible assistance, such as giving Taliban representatives safe passage to meeting sites outside of Pakistan. Afghan officials have also said that they want Islamabad to grant access to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a top-ranking Taliban official who was captured in Pakistan in 2010. His arrest reportedly angered Karzai because Baradar had been in secret talks with the Afghan government.
The Afghan president has said he has been seeking Pakistan’s help in the peace process for some time, but that so far, it has not provided much more than words of support.
"What we need now is to formulate a policy that is actionable and implementable, and actually act upon it," Karzai said at a press conference Friday featuring Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Pakistani foreign minister’s comments came as she spoke to reporters after the news conference.
Khar said that any expectation that Pakistan can deliver the Taliban’s chief for talks is "not only unrealistic, but preposterous."
Asked about reports that the most recent discussions between Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani officials were confrontational, Khar said, "The talks were very, very useful, and if they are hard, that is fine."
"We need to have some hard talks," she said.
Many analysts believe Pakistan has maintained links with the Taliban because it is seen as a key ally in Afghanistan after foreign forces withdraw, especially in countering the influence of Islamabad’s neighbor and archenemy, India. Pakistan helped the Taliban seize power in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
That history has contributed to the tense relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ties were strained further last year when a suicide bomber assassinated former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani in Kabul. He had been serving as Afghanistan’s envoy to Taliban peace talks, and Afghan officials accused Pakistan of playing a role in the killing — allegations it denied.
There have been some signs that momentum for Taliban peace talks has been growing.
The Taliban are setting up an office in the tiny Gulf state of Qatar in the first step toward formal negotiations. Also, the Obama administration is considering releasing five top Taliban leaders from the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay as a starting point for talks.
But the process has also been riddled with rumor and uncertainty.
Karzai initially resisted the U.S.-backed move by the Taliban to set up a political office in Qatar because he felt the Afghan government had been sidelined and not kept fully apprised of the process of getting an office established. He said he preferred Saudi Arabia, and members of the Afghan government’s peace council have said that while the political office might be in Qatar, actual talks could take place in Saudi Arabia or another location.
Tension between Pakistan and the U.S. has also complicated the process, especially following American airstrikes in November that accidentally killed 24 Pakistani troops at two Afghan border posts. © Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Pakistan-Afghanistan talks 'end in acrimony'
Reports say Karzai's demand that Taliban chief be delivered to the negotiating table was dismissed as "preposterous".
AlJAZEERA
17 Feb 2012
After two days of high-level talks with Iran and Pakistan, Afghanistan has failed to gain Pakistani support for its bid to advance its peace process with Taliban fighters.
Pakistan's foreign minister told Afghanistan on Friday against having "ridiculous" expectations of what Pakistan could do to help Taliban peace negotiations, as talks between the two countries on the process ended in apparent acrimony.
The minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, said it was "preposterous" to think that Pakistan could deliver Taliban chief Mullah Omar to the negotiating table as Afghanistan has asked in the past, despite the Pakistani government's alleged ties to the group.
The public comments were unusually harsh for the diplomatic world where such quarrels usually play out behind closed doors. Khar's words demonstrated the depth of the frustration between the neighbouring countries as the war in Afghanistan enters its eleventh year.
Her words indicated a setback for a peace process that the US is strongly promoting as a way to end the Afghan conflict and allow it to withdraw most of its combat troops by 2014 without the country further descending into chaos.
'Ridiculous expectations'
Pakistan is seen as critical to efforts to reach a settlement to Afghanistan's conflict and is believed to have influence over Afghan anti-government groups.
"The talks were hard. But sometimes you need to have hard talks," Khar said after the meetings.
Before Karzai arrived in Pakistan, Afghan officials said he would press Pakistan to provide access to senior Afghan Taliban leaders belonging to the so-called Quetta Shura, named after the Pakistani city where it is said to be based.
Pakistan has consistently denied giving sanctuary to the fighters and denies the existence of any Quetta Shura, or leadership council.
"We are willing to look at anything. But if you have unrealistic, almost ridiculous expectations, then you don't have sort of common ground to begin with," Khar said.
"Deliver Mullah Omar? If that is the expectation, then there's no reality check then. Then they're not only unrealistic, but preposterous," she said.
'Sensitive issue'
Karzai told the Wall Street Journal newspaper in an interview published on Thursday that talks among his government, the US and the Taliban had taken place in the past month.
However, a Taliban spokesmanm Zabiullah Mujahid issued a strenuous denial, saying: "The Taliban did not talk with the Kabul government anywhere," he said in a statement.
Tajjudin Millatmal, an Afghan analyst in Kabul, told Al Jazeera that Afghanistan would need Iran and Pakistan to agree to any decision it made towards achieving lasting peace.
"It is very important for the sustainable peace in Afghanistan that the neighbouring countries will be comfortable with the decision that has been taken," he said.
However, he said Afghanistan would face "tremendous challenges".
"They have to realise the interests of the neighbouring countries and consider those," Millatmal said. "However, if they give up too much to those neighbouring countries that will create a huge backlash within the country against the government.
"If they keep the negotiation process [as it is], then the neighbouring countries will continue their interference in Afghanistan and continue the current situation. So this is a very sensitive issue."
Iran pipeline
At the start of the talks, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, condemned what he called foreign interference in the region, while Karzai called for action rather than words.
"All problems are coming from outside. In order to promote their goals and ambitions ... they don't want to allow our nations to develop," Ahmadinejad said.
Ahmadinejad's trip coincides with rising concerns from the West over Iran's disputed nuclear programme.
Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, vowed to continue with a proposed pipeline project with Iran despite American warnings of sanctions, saying Pakistan-Iran relations would not "be undermined by international pressure of any kind''.
The pipeline project was first proposed in the 1990s, but has been plagued by delays.
Pakistan and Iran finalised the gas deal last year. Under the contract, Iran will export 21.5 million cubic metres of gas per day to Pakistan through a new pipeline beginning in 2014. The construction of the pipeline is estimated to cost some $7bn.
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Fawzia Koofi targets Afghan presidency as fight for women's rights continues
Much has improved for women since the US-led invasion, and a female leader is no longer unthinkable, says Afghan MP
Guardian.co.uk
By Lizzy Davies
Friday 17 February 2012
The questions came thick and fast but the woman sitting on the podium in a pink headscarf and high heels took them all in her stride. The Taliban, the Northern Alliance, Hamid Karzai, women's rights: Fawzia Koofi answered fluently and politely, even to the London School of Economics student who wondered if the Taliban didn't after all bring a degree of stability to Afghanistan.
Then, just as the session was drawing to a close, a member of the audience asked, with a wry smile: "Some people in the west think it's natural that the president of Afghanistan be a Pashtun and a man. Please discuss." The room tittered. Koofi smiled.
The question was both playful and pertinent, for there is perhaps no one better placed to answer it than the small, quietly determined 36-year-old woman who found herself speaking on Friday at London's Chatham House.
Koofi, a former UN employee who studied, lobbied and fought her way to being elected as an MP in 2005 and, subsequently, the Afghan parliament's first female deputy speaker, now has her sights set on the ultimate political prize: the presidency.
And, as unlikely as a female leader in Afghanistan may seem, she is convinced that it is no longer unthinkable. A significant proportion of Afghan society, she said, was now ready for change.
"I think Afghanistan needs new leaders, because the same people have been ruling the country for centuries and decades. But the [ordinary] people have changed," she said, sitting in a London hotel room the night before her speech. "The silent majority of people want politicians that are committed, that are close to them, that are at their level."
All over the world, she said, people were discovering that the best examples of "politicians who deliver" were women. Afghanistan, however, presents female MPs with certain logistical challenges that their counterparts in most other countries do not have to face.
In her short career, Koofi has been subject to two attempts on her life, one in 2010, when gunmen thought to be Taliban riddled her car with bullets while she was cowering inside. The last threat, she said, came two months ago when the national security team warned that the Haqqani network was trying to assassinate her.
Koofi's memoir, The Favoured Daughter, is punctuated with letters to her two daughters urging them to be courageous in case, one day, she does not make it home. Yet she remains undeterred.
"My father was killed, my mother passed away, my brothers were killed," she said. "We paid a high price for being in politics and I may go for that. This is the way I choose to be; this is the road I choose to go. I knew the risk."
If she does not scare easily, it is perhaps because life has thrown just about everything it can at her already. The 19th of 23 children her father had with his seven wives, she was left out in the sun to die as a newborn baby because her mother could not bear the shame of having given birth to another girl.
She survived, her mother repenting, but her life has been a battle ever since. She looked on as her father beat her mother; she had to plead with her brother to let her go to school and to marry the man of her choice; and she watched her husband slowly die of tuberculosis contracted in a Taliban jail he was sent to because of his links with her political family.
In the 10 years since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, she said, much had improved for women and – as her remarkable rise shows – attitudes in some parts of society were softening.
But this is all relative. A poll released last year declared the country still to be the worst place in the world for women. On Friday, the New York Times reported the story of an eight-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten because her uncle had run off with a local strongman's wife.
Koofi, fighting to get a new law approved in parliament that would criminalise violence against women – from beatings to "honour" killings – has to face down critics who accuse her of championing a "western law", and describes it as the most challenging part of her political life to date.
What she is most worried about now is that, in its rush to withdraw from the Afghan quagmire and make a deal with the Taliban, the international community will abandon her people to an uncertain fate. At Chatham House, she did not hold back in her warning of what could emerge as a worst-case scenario in the event of an over-hasty withdrawal by the west. Civil war, she said, was a distinct possibility.
And it is for women that Koofi is most concerned. Any involvement of the Taliban in the political running of the country, she said, would affect women. "The fear I have, and the fear many women like me have, is to take the country back to where we started," she said.
It could not be more different from the hopes she, as a self-declared Muslim feminist, has for her country. "My vision for Afghanistan, for my daughters and all the girls and women of Afghanistan is a country where they are respected as a human being regardless of their sex, regardless of their ethnicity, regardless of their religion. Because this was something I was suffering – discrimination and injustice – the whole of my life, even today," she said.
"Every step you take forward, there are hundreds of steps you have to take back because you are a woman.
"I want my daughters to be respected as human beings; that's the country I'm fighting for."
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At Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan summit, a show of unity
Washington Post
By Richard Leiby
February 17, 2012
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
At one end of the flower-festooned table sat the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, perhaps the world’s most relentless America basher.
At the other end sat Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s leader, who owes his government’s survival to the United States.
And in the middle was Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, whose country’s complex relationship with Washington swings from pole to pole.
If any conflict exists among the chief executives of the three neighboring Islamic nations, it certainly was not apparent Friday at the close of a two-day trilateral summit in Pakistan’s capital. At a news conference that Zardari hosted in his splendid official residence, the theme was fraternal unity as the trio pledged to work for peace and prosperity in a region racked by war and terrorism.
“When brothers join their hands together, certainly the hands of God will assist them,” Ahmadinejad said at the news conference, which he dominated with windy disquisitions against “outside powers,” the United States presumably among them.
“They have targeted our region for their domination and hegemony. . . . We should deny others the opportunity to interfere in our affairs,” he said. “All problems are coming from the outside.”
His government is under severe sanctions and a threat of attack from Israel for its nuclear program, but Ahmadinejad played down the importance of a nation having nuclear weapons. That, he said, “is not going to bring about superiority.”
Evidently referring to nuclear-armed Pakistan, he added, “The foundation of our political relationship is humanitarian and is based on common cultural values.”
The only public sign of friction at the summit concerned the long-alleged ties between Islamist militants and Pakistan’s military and intelligence service. Afghan officials have called Pakistan an impediment to a negotiated peace with the Taliban because it harbors insurgents who are at war with Karzai’s government. Separate bilateral talks between Karzai and Zardari were meant to smooth tensions, but no declarations of progress emerged.
Karzai’s comments at the news conference reflected the sense that cloudy goals and overall uncertainty have dogged the nascent peace efforts.
“What we need now is to formulate a policy that is actionable and implementable, and actually act upon it,” Karzai said.
Surrounded by reporters after the presidents spoke, Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said it would be “unrealistic” and “preposterous” for Afghanistan to expect that her country could somehow arrange for Taliban leader Mohammad Omar to join the reconciliation negotiations.
Earlier, the news conference was cut off after one reporter tried to inquire about the Taliban. But in the back of the palatial hall, the cameramen were not satisfied. “Shake hands, shake hands,” some shouted at the presidents.
And, quite dutifully, the leaders of the embattled nations of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan did just that.
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Germany Concerned About Afghan Troop Numbers
TOLOnews.com
Saturday, 18 February 2012
Germany's defense minister, Thomas de Maiziere, has raised concerns about the likely reduction in size of the Afghan National Security Forces after Nato ends combat operations in Afghanistan.
The issue reflects a debate within Nato.
The Afghan army and police force is set to grow to a strength of 350,000 by the end of 2014.
On a trip to Washington, Dr de Maiziere said that if such a drop occurred it would leave a large number of Nato-trained police and troops unemployed.
"What are we going to do, and who is paying for them?" he asked.
He raised the issue in a meeting with US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
The French Minister of Defense, Gerard Longuet, recently suggested the number could fall to 230,000 to reduce costs.
Mr Panetta also recently urged the international community to help pay for a strong Afghan security force despite worldwide economic pressure.
The US is spending about $12 billion a year to train the Afghan security forces, which are preparing to take over the responsibility for providing security for the country when Nato forces withdraw by the end of 2014.
The United States has predicted that the annual price tag of training and equipping the Afghan security forces in coming years will be around $6 billion.
The US wants the international community to contribute $1 billion per year after 2014 in addition to US assistance.
Germany has about 5,000 troops in Afghanistan, most of them based in northern Kunduz province. It has lost 53 soldiers in the Afghan war since the start of Nato mission in the country.
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Unreported Suicides in Central Afghan Province
Women take poison to escape family troubles or forced marriage.
IWPR
By Jawed Bakhtari
17 Feb 2012
Afghanistan
Ghulam Rasul, 71, a short man with stooped shoulders had come to the marketplace in Nili, the main town of Daikundi province in central Afghanistan, to buy sugar, matches and candy. As he sat against the mud wall of a grocery shop under the hot sun, he told an IWPR reporter about three women in his village who had consumed rat poison in the past year. Two survived, and one died.
His village, Khalbarg, is in the Sang-i Takht district 150 kilometres from Nili. It took Ghulam Rasul, an influential figure in his village, about four hours to drive to Nili market in his aging Kamaz vehicle.
Ghulam Rasul said every year, several women in his village of about 500 households try to commit suicide, and often succeed. He said the government is never notified because most of the villagers are illiterate, do not have phones, and their only way of getting to Nili is by donkey or mule, a 24-hour trip.
An investigation report by IWPR suggests that at least 200 women commit suicide annually within the nine districts of Daikundi province. The data gathered by IWPR reporters indicates that the main factors are family violence and forced marriage.
The issue that has not been heavily researched either by the the government or by non-government organisations advocating for women’s rights in Afghanistan.
Ghulam Rasul did not give the name of the woman who died recently, but she was in her mid-twenties and recently married. He said she was the daughter of one Rauf Karbalai, and the wife of a man called Panahi, who had taken a second wife a year previously.
“These two wives were fighting each other every day in the house,” Ghulam Rasul said. “This is why Karbalai’s daughter finally ate rat poison.”
Ghulam Rasul said Panahi had been paying more attention to his second wife, aged 18, and had handed over management of the household money to her. He said he had heard from village women that this became intolerable for the first wife.
One day, a fight erupted between the two wives. According to Ghulam Rasul, “A few hours after the violence, a female neighbour, Zainab, entered the Panahi house to call on Karbalai’s daughter. Panahi’s second wife of Panahi told Zainab that Karbalai’s daughter had gone to her room and had been silent for the last few hours.”
The neighbour knocked on the bedroom door, but got no response. She looked into the room through a window and saw Karbalai’s daughter lying on the floor in an unusual position. Nearby was a glass containing a blackish liquid. Then she saw a white package of rat poison.
“The woman screamed, ‘Karbalai’s daughter has taken rat poison!’” Ghulam Rasul said. “Of course, the neighbouring women gathered, screaming and weeping. Meanwhile, a man from the neighbourhood called out, ‘Go and dig the grave and announce at the mosque that Panahi’s wife has passed away’.”
An IWPR reporter spent four months visiting 30 villages around Nili and interviewing more than 100 residents face-to-face, including at least 40 women.
These are mountainous, traditional villages where neither men nor women talk easily about suicide. Some husbands threatened to kill the IWPR reporter if he used their wives’ names in any news story.
The reporter managed to record interviews with 17 women who had attempted suicide in the past 16 months – using either rat poison or insecticide – but had survived. The reporter also talked to relatives of women who had committed suicide, and took photographs of some of their graves.
IWPR’s investigation suggests that since many people do not believe there is rule of law within Daikundi province, people are tempted to commit suicide instead of seeking justice via the legal system.
The Health and Women’s Affairs Department and the local office of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, AIHRC, both say they can count the number of suicide reports they have received on one hand.
The AIHRC’s local officer for advocacy and women’s human rights development, Halima Bashardust, said her office received reports of only four suicide attempts in 2011, in all of which the individuals survived. The four women were upset with their husbands and troubled by family issues, and swallowed rat poison, Bashardust said.
She added that mistreatment following forced marriages was another likely cause of suicide attempts.
Asked why her office did not have more data on the number of females who commit suicide, Bashardust replied that very few women came to her office to file complaints against their husbands. She also admitted that coordination was poor among government agencies in Daikundi.
The IWPR reporter tried four times to contact either the head of the local department for women’s affairs, Khoi Rezai, or her deputy to talk about the issue, but was unsuccessful. A spokesperson for the department, a woman named Hasani, said, “The director is not at her office and we don’t have permission to give interviews.”
Bashardust said the government hospital at Nili was the only credible source for data on suicide attempts. In 2010, the hospital recorded 42 suicides – 25 women and 17 men.
When treating patients, doctors hear from the relatives of victims that many cases of attempted suicide are due to forced marriage, abuse at the hands of husbands, and fighting over household finances, Dr Qasemi, a physician at Nili Hospital, said.
The IWPR reporter spent several weeks walking the corridors of Nili hospital to find patients who had attempted suicide, or relatives.
One morning, he saw a Toyota minibus race to the hospital gate. Two men and three women jumped out of the vehicle carrying a woman wrapped in a blanket and hurried into the hospital.
The reporter tried to follow but could not see what was happening. Thirty minutes later, there were screams from the women inside the hospital, and the reporter realised that the patient had died.
The reporter approached the driver of the minibus, who was cleaning the windshield. “The dead girl was Fatema, an 18 year-old whose parents were living in Iran. She lived with her uncle in the village of Zojok in Shahrestan district,” the driver said.
“As far as I know, the uncle’s wife wanted to engage Fatema to her nephew, but Fatema would not agree to marry the man. Finally, her uncle’s wife made up her mind that Fatema had to be engaged within two days. As a result of that decision, violence erupted between Fatema and her uncle’s wife. In protest, Fatema left home to stay at a neighbour’s house.
“Having stayed the night, in the early morning she quietly took a lot of drugs from her neighbour’s shelf and swallowed them with a few glasses of water. She became unable to speak, and the neighbours took her to hospital.”
Akbar Mujahed, head of the criminal department for the police in Daikundi, said his department had no record of anyone filing a case about a female suicide attempt.
Mujahed did not deny that women attempted suicide, but said most people in Daikundi resolved such matters through community and tribal councils.
When told that Nili Hospital recorded 42 suicides in 2010, Mujahed said: “The police have not received any information in this regard, and this surprises us.”
Haji Daud, 71, is the tribal head of the village of Surma-Sang, near Nili. He usually mediates in disputes among people in the village, with the support of most community members.
The IWPR reporter approached Haji Daud and asked him why people did not believe in the government or the law, and came to him to settle their disputes instead.
In a loud voice, he replied that he was unable to talk to the media. “You broadcast my voice and story on the radio, yet these words that people speak with me are confidential. When people hear me speak in the media, they will never come to me,” he said.
More than a year has passed since the death of Karbala’s daughter. Now Panahi treats his second wife the same as he did with his first, according to neighbours.
Karbala’s daughter is buried on a hill where two winters have all but destroyed the grave. People from the village say none of her relatives has ever come to say prayers for her.
Mohammad Reja is an IWPR-trained reporter in Afghanistan
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Afghanistan, Pakistan hold "hard" talks on Afghan peace
Reuters
By Chris Allbritton
Feb 17, 2012
ISLAMABAD
* Pakistani minister says talks with Afghanistan difficult
* Says Kabul should not make unrealistic demands
* Afghan president cautiously optimistic on ties
After two days of high-level talks, Afghanistan appears to have failed to gain more Pakistani support for its bid to advance its reconciliation process with Taliban insurgent.
Pakistan is seen as critical to efforts to reach a settlement to Afghanistan's conflict, now in its 11th year, and is believed to have influence over Afghan insurgent groups.
"The talks were hard. But sometimes you need to have hard talks," Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told reporters after the meetings between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani leaders in Islamabad.
Before Karzai arrived in Pakistan, Afghan officials said he would press Pakistan to provide access to senior Afghan Taliban leaders belonging to the so-called Quetta Shura, named after the Pakistani city where it is said to be based.
They would be the decision-makers in any peace negotiations.
Pakistan has consistently denied giving sanctuary to insurgents and denies the existence of any Quetta Shura, or leadership council.
"We are willing to look at anything. But if you have unrealistic, almost ridiculous expectations, then you don't have sort of common ground to begin with," Khar said.
"Deliver Mullah Omar? If that is the expectation, then there's no reality check then. Then they're not only unrealistic, but preposterous," she added, referring to the Taliban leader.
But Afghans have long been suspicious that Pakistan uses militant groups like the Afghan Taliban as proxies in Afghanistan to counter the growing influence of rival India.
STRAINED TIES
Ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan were strained for months after the assassination in September of Afghan peace envoy and former president Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Afghan officials blamed Pakistan's intelligence agency, allegations angrily denied by Islamabad.
Khar said after a recent trip to Kabul that a lot of the ill will between the neighbours had faded. Pakistan, she said, would encourage Afghan militant groups to pursue peace if asked by Kabul.
Karzai seemed cautiously optimistic on relations between Kabul and Islamabad.
"I'm glad to convey to you, brother, that the engagements that we have had recently -- unfortunately with incidences in between -- have been fruitful," he told a news conference after the talks.
"What we need now is to formulate a policy that is actionable and implementable."
An Afghan official said Karzai took a firm stand in the Islamabad talks, presenting Kabul's concerns "clearly".
The Afghan Taliban announced last month it would open a political office in Qatar, suggesting the group may be willing to engage in negotiations that could give it government positions or official control over much of its historical southern heartland.
While Afghanistan supports any talks that the Taliban may have with American officials in Qatar, it also wants countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to play a role so that the process is comprehensive, analysts say.
The United States also sees Pakistan as a key player in the Afghan reconciliation process. But strained ties mean Pakistani cooperation may not come easily. (Additional reporting by Serena Chaudhry; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Ron Popeski)
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Where Extremes Meet
New York Times
By HUMA YUSUF
February 17, 2012
LONDON
The forces that compete to shape contemporary Pakistan were in plain sight in Karachi last Sunday. While at a posh creek-side hotel, literary glitterati from Pakistan and India and the South Asian diaspora in Britain and beyond gathered for the third annual Karachi Literature Festival, at the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, the symbolic center of the city, the Difa-e-Pakistan Council (D.P.C.), a coalition of more than 40 religious political parties and extremist groups, drew thousands to its first rally in Karachi.
The bookish and the bearded could not be further apart along the ideological spectrum. For all their differences, though, the gatherings on Sunday were most striking for what they had in common. These days, most Pakistanis, no matter how liberal or conservative, seem to have the same basic concerns about the country’s political future. It’s a growing consensus over feeling alienated from the international community; it’s the agreement of shared despair.
The literary festival reveled in taboos. The English novelist Hanif Kureishi described how he’d been fondled by gay men across South Asia. The historian Ayesha Jalal exposed the alcoholism of Manto, Pakistan’s best partition-era writer. Veiled women and intelligence agents were mocked. The sassy Indian columnist Shobhaa De pronounced Karachi and Mumbai twin cities, and then won hearts by declaring that Pakistani women were more beautiful than their Indian counterparts.
The D.P.C. rally also raised eyebrows but by striking a rather different tone. A tribute was paid to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the head of one political party called for implementing a similar governing system in Pakistan. The leader of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa — a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai — threatened to make “mincemeat” of India and break the legs of the “whores” who travel to India to perform in films and on stage. One speaker said he would turn Karachi into a “media graveyard” if the D.P.C.’s ongoing activities weren’t given full coverage.
But more striking than the differences in rhetoric and style between the two events were the participants’ shared concerns. How can Pakistan recalibrate its relationship with the United States? What role should Pakistan play in resolving the conflict in Afghanistan? Why can’t the country seem to pursue an independent foreign policy?
D.P.C. members said they had come together to “defend” Pakistan against the threats posed by the United States and India. They were worried that American “tyranny” — shorthand for Washington’s influence over Pakistan’s foreign policy, especially regarding the war in Afghanistan — was undermining the country’s interests. At the Sunday meeting, as before, the D.P.C. opposed reopening the NATO supply routes that run through Pakistan and were closed last November after NATO helicopters fired on a Pakistani army check post, killing 24 soldiers. It also rejected the Pakistani government’s decision to grant India the status of most favored nation.
But sovereignty and security also cropped up at the literature festival. The audience applauded the star cast of commentators on the panel entitled “Afghanistan and Pakistan: Conflict, extremism and the Taliban” for calling on the rest of the world to stop demonizing Pakistan. Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, said she was frustrated by Washington’s unilateral policymaking, pointing out that a decade into the Afghan war, it was finally heeding Islamabad’s advice to negotiate with the Taliban. At the panel on “Nuclear Pakistan,” a Pakistani academic explained that nuclear weapons are necessary for Pakistan to balance India’s military might.
In short, for all their ideological diversity, the liberal left and the extremist right now agree that Pakistan needs to better protect its interests and negotiate a more equitable partnership with the United States. This consensus could be the basis for a new national discourse that engages the viewpoints of all stakeholders. After all, a shared vision for the country could help bridge its ethnic and sectarian fractures.
But as NATO supply lines reopen this week and a national security committee dithers about how to reframe the U.S.-Pakistani relationship, coherent policymaking still seems far off. Pakistan’s leaders simply have too little interest in representing the views of their constituents, no matter how similar those are.
Huma Yusuf is a columnist for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn and was the 2010-11 Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
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Fake Member Of Parliament Raises Alarm In Afghanistan
RFE/RL
By Charles Dameron
February 17, 2012
Officials in Afghanistan are scratching their heads in bewilderment after discovering that an unidentified man may have collected a treasure trove of sensitive information from security and intelligence offices throughout Afghanistan's southern Kandahar Province after impersonating a ranking member of Afghanistan's parliament.
Bismallah Afghanmal, a Kandahar representative to Afghanistan's upper house of parliament, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan on February 15 that a man identifying himself as Mohammad Asif Sarhadi, a member of Afghanistan's upper house of parliament from Ghor Province, met with the governor of Kandahar Province, Tooryalai Wesa, earlier this month.
Currently, there are no Afghan members of parliament named Mohammad Asif Sarhadi.
Wesa, believing his guest to be a member of Afghanistan's parliamentary Defense Committee, facilitated an official visit to Maruf District, a mountainous region on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There, the purported member of parliament discussed local security matters with district leaders; he later repeated his performance in Kandahar's Dand District, where he met with district governor Ahmidullah Nazek and obtained "every possible piece of information" related to the area's security, Afghanmal told RFE/RL.
"Sarhadi" capped off his visit to Kandahar with visits to a local prison and to the provincial office of Afghanistan's national intelligence agency, where he was again given a full briefing, according to Afghanmal.
'Very Dangerous'
When officials later realized that they may have been had, Nazek provided Afghanmal with the man's mobile-phone number. A phone call from Afghanmal revealed that the man, who told Afghanmal that he was currently unemployed, was not a member of the Afghan parliament. Officials are still uncertain as to the intentions of the mystery visitor. But Mohammad Alam Ezedyar, the first deputy of the parliament's upper house, called the incident "very dangerous" and criticized local officials for the breach of security.
"He certainly belonged to an intelligence organization, and he has gathered a lot of important documents," Ezedyar said.
That characterization was disputed by Zalmay Ayubi, a spokesperson for the Kandahar governor, who told RFE/RL that the governor did not provide the man with any sensitive materials.
"We didn't exchange any documents with him, and he wasn't here to coordinate anything," Ayubi said.
The Kandahar governor would hardly be the first Afghan politician to fall victim to a clever impersonator.
In November 2010, Kabul and Washington were roiled by the discovery that a key interlocutor in peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban was not, as he had claimed, Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour. Before his ruse was discovered, the impostor met three times with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, according to Afghan and NATO officials. International media organizations reported at the time that the man may have been a shopkeeper from the Pakistani border city of Quetta.
Based on reporting from Fereshta Neda in Kabul and Sadiq Reshtinai in Kandahar
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Afghan president's visit to Pakistan marks restart of top-level contacts
Xinhua
By Muhammad Tahir
Feb. 18, 2012
ISLAMABAD
Pakistani leaders pledged their support for the Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace and reconciliation process during the meetings with visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai who arrived here on Thursday for a two-day trilateral summit which also included Iran.
In a joint communiqu issued on Friday after the conclusion of the summit, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Iranian President Mehmoud Ahmadinejad "reiterated their full support for the authentic Afghan-led and Afghan-owned process of peace and reconciliation."
The Afghan president's visit to Pakistan, the second in eight months, was in fact a restart of the top level contacts between the two countries which had been weakened and suspended following the assassination of Afghan peace envoy Prof. Burhanuddin Rabbani last September.
In the wake of the incident, the Afghan government abruptly canceled the visit to Kabul by Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in October as Afghan interior minister and intelligence officials blamed Pakistani security agencies for helping the plot to kill Rabbani.
Officials of the two countries had resumed contacts when reports started pouring in about the opening of the political office of Afghan Taliban in Qatar and that Taliban have held " exploratory" talks with the United States in the Gulf state. Kabul had angrily reacted to the reports and recalled its ambassador to Qatar in December as a protest against approval of Taliban's opening office without consulting with the Afghan government.
The decision to recall its ambassador from Qatar was also a sign of disappointment over the U.S.' understanding with the Taliban to open the office and to hold mysterious talks with the Taliban. Western media reported in mid-December that the U.S. also supported the opening of Taliban office in Qatar.
Pakistan had the similar thinking that it had also been kept in darkness about the U.S.-Taliban talks and the move had been in fact contrary to the U.S. policy of supporting Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process and that all sides must have representation in any dialogue process.
A shared feeling of "betrayal" is believed to have brought about the thaw in Pakistan-Afghanistan relations. The four-month deadlock was ended when the Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar traveled to Kabul on Feb. 1. The high-level contacts of senior officials between the two sides made Khar's visit possible for Kabul to finalize President Karzai' visit to Islamabad.
The Pakistan-Afghanistan relations are now back on track after both countries strongly felt that they had been "ignored" by the United States in the Qatar process of dialogue with the Afghan Taliban.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in his interaction with Pakistani TV anchors in Islamabad on Friday morning, renewed his proposal that the Afghan government wants to talk to Taliban either in Saudi Arabia or Turkey.
Officials who declined to be named said that it is widely believed in Islamabad and Kabul that the U.S. stepped up its talks with the Afghan Taliban in Qatar last September following the breakdown of Pakistan-Afghanistan joint peace efforts.
Both Islamabad and Kabul were not kept in the loop, they added.
They said that the U.S. has now realized its "mistake" of " ignoring" the two countries and last month's visit to the region by the U.S. special envoy Marc Grossman was aimed at updating the two countries on what had happened in the U.S.-Taliban interaction so far.
Pakistan snubbed the U.S. envoy and refused to receive him in Islamabad on grounds that the parliamentary review of the future Pakistan-U.S. relationship was not yet completed. They said that another reason behind the snub was its displeasure at being kept out of the loop.
American media, however, recently claimed that Pakistani officials had acknowledged that Islamabad was on board over the opening of the Taliban political office in Qatar. Pakistan Foreign Office confirmed earlier this month for the first time that the U. S. had shared information about its talks with the Taliban. Pakistan has never publicly discussed its reservations over the Taliban-U.S. interaction but the country is unhappy with the way the U.S. is taking the process forward, they said.
But Kabul, meanwhile, has publicly conveyed its reservations over U.S. unilateral actions, an Afghan diplomat said. An Afghan diplomat confirmed reports that Qatar will send a delegation to Kabul to discuss bilateral issues and both sides will then sign a memorandum of understanding for future "cooperation".
Now when Pakistan and Afghanistan have resumed high-level contacts, Kabul will expect Islamabad to take steps to facilitate contacts and dialogue between Karzai's administration and the Taliban. Afghan Ambassador to Islamabad Omar Daudzai told Xinhua ahead of Karzai's visit that Pakistan had repeatedly pledged to back the Afghan-led peace process and now it is the time to honor the commitment and take practical steps.
Kabul is anxiously awaiting Pakistan's action as Afghan officials claimed that Pakistan still has influence on Taliban and can encourage them to come to the negotiation table. Pakistan and Afghanistan launched a joint peace and reconciliation commission in April last year but Afghan officials said there had been no serious attempt by Pakistan to facilitate "contacts and dialogue" with Taliban at high level.
An Afghan diplomat said that Kabul wants Pakistan to take steps to use its influence on Taliban to begin the dialogue process towards reaching an agreement before the NATO troops withdraw in 2014.
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Doubts Over Afghan Police Loyalties
Critics say force remains riddled with local factional interests.
IWPR
By Ahmad Javed Reja
17 Feb 12
Afghanistan
Despite a new survey indicating a rise in public confidence in the Afghan National Police, ANP, observers warn that the force’s loyalties remain divided, and this could pose a security threat once NATO forces withdraw in 2014.
Research carried out by the Afghan Centre for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research, ACSOR and the United Nations Development Programme indicates that 81 per cent of respondents felt respect for the law-enforcement agencies, a rise of eight percentage points from three years ago.
Local observers warn that despite the ANP’s apparently improved reputation, real concerns about its loyalties and cohesion persist.
Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a politician who currently chairs the Afghan Transition Coordination Commission dealing with the security handover from NATO to Afghan troops, said he was very dissatisfied with the police service, particularly in the north of the country.
“Police have been recruited on the basis of partisan, ethnic, and factional connections in the north,” he said, adding that once in uniform, their loyalties remained to their interest groups rather than to the public. “The police serve partisan, ethnic and parliamentary officials rather than the public. They take instructions from those who appointed them, and if they don’t do what they want, they will be fired.”
Ahmadzai said while the Afghan National Army had made some progress in recent years, “I am more worried and concerned about the police; that mistreatment by them could jeopardise the [handover] process because they interact closely with the public,” he said.
The ANP currently numbers around 150,000 officers, and tens of millions of dollars have been spent on forming and training the force, with particular input from the German and United States governments.
In northern Afghanistan in particular, many agree with Ahmadzai’s suggestion that factional allegiances remain strong.
Farid Ahmad Nurzai, a resident of the Dehdadi district of Balkh province, said that although he was happy Afghan forces were taking over from NATO, the current state of the ANP reminded him of the warlords and militias of the early 1990s.
Many Afghans fear a return to the civil war, in which armed factions committed major abuses amid general chaos and lawlessness.
“We can see that all the old militia members from Jamiat-e Islami and Junbesh-e Milli have been recruited either into local police units or to the ANP,” he said
Nurzai said the outlook would be dire unless a real national police force that rose above factional interests was forged.
A police officer in the north, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that ANP units across the region were divided along partisan lines.
In Balkh province, they were linked to the mainly Tajik faction Jamiat-e Islami, whereas in neighbouring Jowzjan province they were Uzbek and loyal to Junbish-e Milli. In Sarepul and Samangan, control of ANP units was divided among Junbesh, Jamiat, and the Hazara faction Wahdat-e Islami.
He claimed that the interior ministry was “filtering out policemen from other groups, the Pashtuns in particular”.
According to Balkh resident, Fahim Sarwari, “The current police are the former militia members, just with a change of uniform.”
Sarwari said the presence of international forces had ensured that the ANP more or less kept to the law, but a NATO exit could lead to a return of the chaos of the civil war era, with the police presenting a threat to civilians instead of protecting them.
Interior ministry spokesman Seddiq Seddiqi insists ANP appointments are made on the basis of merit, not political affiliation.
“Although some officials, including members of parliament, do lobby for certain individuals to be appointed to posts, the interior minister has never heeded any unsound recommendation,” he said.
Seddiqi said that the ministry was planning to start moving ANP officers to different provinces to encourage a nationwide sense of loyalty.
Another police officer in the north, however, said the ANP lacked the kind of disciplined management that would curb ethnic, linguistic and regional affiliations, build morale in the force, and forge a sense of national cohesion.
Claims that the interior ministry system was a meritocracy, he said, were “an absolute lie”.
Political analyst Abdul Wakil agreed that the former militia leaders still exerted more influence over police officers than ANP commanders or government ministers.
“How, then, can the nation trust this police force?” he asked.
Ahmad Javed Reja is an IWPR-trained reporter in Balkh province, Afghanistan.
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Cricket rises from rubble of Afghanistan
The Australian
By Gideon Haigh
February 18, 2012
LAST week in Afghanistan, eight youths herding sheep were mistakenly killed in a NATO airstrike, and two 10-year-olds pardoned last year after attempting to detonate suicide bombs were rearrested trying to do the same. Drought wracked the north-west, and heroin production was reported to have increased 60 per cent in the last year.
By the standards of life in that benighted country, however, last week constituted an exceptionally good week. The reason: the afterglow of the cricket team's one-day international match against Pakistan at Sharjah Stadium in the United Arab Emirates on February 10.
The contest was unprecedented. Afghanistan is what is called an affiliate member of the International Cricket Council, the most junior ranking. To play against a full member such as Pakistan was like a country football team being invited to play Collingwood at the MCG on Anzac Day. Yet it took 195 off the same bowling attack that had recently humiliated England, and had its opponents at one stage 3-99 in reply.
In contrast to England's recent fixtures in the Gulf, played in empty stadia, this match was attended by 15,000 fans, including Afghanistan's finance minister Dr Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal, who doubles as the chairman of the Afghanistan Cricket Board, and who was busily occupied providing prime minister Hamid Karzai with regular score updates by phone.
If you know anything of cricket in Afghanistan, it is probably thanks to the documentary Out of the Ashes (2010), which told the story of the national team's progress from the perspective of its ebullient inaugural coach Taj Malik, and director Tim Albone's excellent tie-in book of the same name. As Albone explains, cricket in Afghanistan is unusual in not deriving from a colonial inheritance: the country was part of "the Great Game" of British imperialism, but not for long enough to absorb the great game of cricket.
Instead, cricket was discovered and adopted by Afghans languishing in refugee camps in Pakistan during the war with the Soviet Union - Taj Malik and his opening batsman, brother Karim Sadiq, grew up in sprawling Kacha Gari near Peshawar, as part of a family of 13, their father an anti-Soviet mujahudeen.
Cricket was played here using improvised bats on bare earth with a tape ball, and consumed on satellite television, Pakistan's World Cup win 20 years ago causing a great spurt in interest.
Television remains an inspirational influence, and Australian players as a result are great favourites: Afghanistan's best young batsman, Noor Ali Zadran, idolises Ricky Ponting, and leg spinner Samiullah Shinwari has borrowed characteristics of Shane Warne - presumably not all of them, as this is Afghanistan.
The Afghanistan Cricket Federation, antecedent of the present board, was founded in 1995. And while the Taliban famously proscribed kite-flying, and prohibited any cheer at sporting events other than 'Allah Akbar' (God is great), cricket's identification with moderation and reserve appealed to their straitening instincts, as did the players' full body covering. The Taliban supported the ACF's 2001 push for ICC affiliate membership, and actually sent a message of goodwill to the national team ahead of their recent big game.
In general, in fact, Afghanistan's team has over time engendered widespread goodwill. Since the Taliban's fall, critic after critic has been staggered by their uncoached aptitude, zeal for big hitting and fast bowling, and almost swaggering dauntlessness.
It is not quite a decade since the national team's first game, against an XI put together by the International Security Assistance Force at Kabul's grandiosely-named Olympic Stadium, which the Taliban had not long used for executions of women convicted of adultery.
Despite never having previously played with a leather ball, the hosts routed their opponents for 56 and overhauled their target in four overs. A number of key personalities survive from that early XI, including allrounder Nowroz Mangal, Afghanistan's captain and middle-order batsman Raes Ahmadzai, now chairman of selectors, who reputedly acquired the money for his kit by breaking rocks with a pickaxe.
To keep cricket going in a war zone has involved a similar kind of toil and patience. Over the years, quite a bit of ICC money has gone into Afghanistan; not all of it has come out. Albone's book describes the situation four years ago when Afghanistan were about to commence their cricket ascent by playing a tournament in Jersey in Division 5 of the ICC's World Cricket League. Malik and the ACF's bookkeeper visited their bank in Kabul - a huge, fortified building ringed with barbed wire and overlooked by armed watchtowers.
They asked politely: could they please know the ACF's bank balance? The answer came back: zero. The pair looked at each other, broke into hysterical laughter, and shared a high-five. Oh well, at least they didn't owe anything. Security, meanwhile, is inevitably precarious. Cricket remains chiefly a Pashtun game, concentrated in the provinces of Kabul, Kunar, Khost, Kandahar and Logar to the east, and of Nangahar in the south, and is no stranger to tragedy.
In August 2008, for example, a friend and teammate of Mangal's from Khost was shot by American security forces searching for a weapons cache, almost certainly on the basis of a bogus tip-off.
Yet cricket has proven astonishingly resilient. When the Taliban fell, cricketers actually in Afghanistan, as distinct from those sheltering from fighting beyond its frontiers, could probably have been numbered in the scores; it's estimated there are now 80,000 active players, including women.
Two years ago, the federation was reconstituted as the current board under Zakhilwal, a western-educated technocrat who is probably his country's ablest politician.
He and chief executive Nasimullah Danesh were able to extend a sponsorship deal with the national telco, Etisalat, last October.
An attractive new stadium in Kabul, bankrolled by USAID, was christened in December; other good quality grounds operate in Jalalabad and Mazar-e-Sharif. Perhaps most importantly, the national team has recently been reunited with Malik's highly rated successor as coach, former Pakistani Test player Kabir Khan.
Cricket in Afghanistan faces a host of challenges almost beyond our imaginings, but one challenge is in Australia's power to help solve: games.
Having forged a path through the World Cricket League, being awarded one-day international status for finishing in the top six of the last World Cup qualifying tournament, and making it into the most recent World T20, Afghanistan was one of the nations whipsawed by the ICC executive board's chuckle-headed decision last year to reduce the next World T20 from 16 countries to 12.
Only two teams from a 16-team qualifying tournament in the Gulf next month will now go forward to join the full members in Sri Lanka in September. One is almost certain to be well-equipped Ireland; Afghanistan has no margin for error.
So here's a proposition so frankly compelling that to argue against it would not be to find reasons, merely to make excuses.
Australia is scheduled to play a one-day series against Pakistan from late August. Nobody is quite sure where the games will be held. Pakistan remains off limits for security reasons; the Gulf will be too hot; Sri Lanka and Malaysia are apparently possibilities.
Wherever the matches are fixtured, though, Australia should find a way on that journey to play an ODI against Afghanistan, a small gesture on our part here that would be received as a very great one there. Rarely does cricket find itself so exquisitely placed as, even if only in a small way, to aid understanding and to alleviate suffering. Over to you, Cricket Australia.
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Afghan peace talks in jeopardy as Pakistan fails to bring the Taliban on board
Afghan requests for Pakistan to bring senior Taliban officials to the negotiating table have been rejected as impossible during two days of talks in Islamabad, according to officials from each side.
Telegraph.co.uk
By Rob Crilly
17 Feb 2012
Islamabad
President Hamid Karzai left Pakistan on Friday after meetings with his Iranian and Pakistani counterparts that apparently ended without a much hoped for breakthrough in the Afghan peace process.
He said it was time for Pakistan to match words with action.
"What we need now is to formulate a policy that's actionable and implementable and actually act upon it," he told reporters at the end of the regional summit, hinting at behind-the-scenes frustration.
Pakistan has repeatedly said it will back an Afghan-led peace process in any way it can. That includes using whatever influence it might have over Taliban leaders based in the south-western city of Quetta – the so-called Quetta Shura.
In the run-up to the talks, Afghan officials said Mr Karzai expected to meet Taliban leaders during his trip.
"He came with that expectation but it turned out not to be possible," said an insider familiar with the talks.
The deadlock is a reminder of how difficult it will be to devise a political settlement to end the 10-year conflict as US forces plan their withdrawal from the country in 2014.
Earlier this week, President Karzai said he had held secret three-way talks with the Taliban and the US – a claim denied immediately by the Taliban, who refuse to recognise the government in Kabul.
Pakistan's security forces, who supported Mujahideen leaders through the Soviet occupation and backed the rise of the Taliban, are thought to retain close ties to militant leaders and may be able to nudge them towards reconciliation.
However, Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan's foreign minister, said it was "preposterous" to think that the Taliban leadership could be delivered up by Islamabad.
"If you have unrealistic, almost ridiculous expectations, then you don't have common ground to begin with," said Mrs Khar.
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Iran's President Blames West For 'All' Region's Problems
RFE/RL
February 17, 2012
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has lashed out against foreign interference in the region, saying outsiders are responsible for "all the problems" there.
He was speaking at a joint press conference in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, following summit talks on February 17 with his Pakistani and Afghan counterparts, Asif Ali Zardari and Hamid Karzai.
"There is no fundamental problem among countries of the region. All problems are coming from the outside," Ahmadinejad said.
"In order to promote their goals and ambitions, [the West] always seeks to promote division among all countries of the region."
Ahmadinejad said foreign powers "don't want to allow our nations to develop."
He didn't identify which outside powers he was referring to.
Ahmadinejad called for countries in the region to "stick together in order to advance and achieve our goals."
Karzai Calls For Action
Ahmadinejad's comments come with Afghan and Pakistani officials publicly calling for cooperation to help achieve a settlement with the Afghan Taliban and end the war in Afghanistan between Afghan and NATO-backed forces and the Islamic militia.
Karzai said that what he called "impediments" in relations between Kabul and Islamabad must sooner, rather than later, be removed so that progress can be made in peace talks to end the war, now in its 11th year.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who has publicly backed making progress in Afghanistan peace efforts, on February 17 denied allegations that Pakistani armed forces were "directly or indirectly involved" in the conflict on the side of the Taliban.
The Afghan Taliban has rejected recent claims by Karzai that the U.S. and Afghan governments have begun talks with the militants about a settlement.
The Iranian president's remarks also come as Iran has been dealing with tightened international sanctions, including an oil embargo by the European Union that Western states and the United Nations Security Council have imposed over the Iranian nuclear program.
Despite such sanctions, Iran announced a series of advancements in its nuclear program on February 15.
Iran said it had used domestically made nuclear fuel in a research reactor in Tehran for the first time and also unveiled a "new generation" of faster, more efficient uranium-enrichment centrifuges at its Natanz facility in central Iran.
Meanwhile, in a letter dated February 14, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Said Jalili, told world powers that Tehran was ready to resume stalled nuclear talks at the "earliest" opportunity.
But the letter sent to European Union chief diplomat Catherine Ashton, who represents the United States, France, Britain, Germany, China, and Russia in the talks, was vague on whether Tehran was ready to address international concerns over its nuclear program.
Ashton in October said in a letter that the powers could meet with Iran if it was ready to tackle those concerns.
Western powers suspect that Iran is seeking to build a nuclear bomb, a charge Iran denies.
Compiled from agency reports
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US lawmaker urges Baluchistan self-determination
AFP
17/02/2012
WASHINGTON
A US lawmaker on Friday introduced a resolution calling for self-determination in restive Baluchistan, triggering an angry response from Pakistan, although the measure looked unlikely to pass.
Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher said that Baluchis -- divided now among Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan -- should be allowed to choose their status. Pakistan's Baluchistan has been torn by insurgency since 2004.
A resolution sponsored by Rohrabacher and two fellow Republicans said the Baluchi people "have the right to self-determination and to their own sovereign country, and they should be afforded the opportunity to choose their own status."
"The political and ethnic discrimination they suffer is tragic and made more so because America is financing and selling arms to their oppressors in Islamabad," Rohrabacher said in a statement.
There was no sign of significant support for the proposal by Rohrabacher, a longtime critic of Pakistan's government who sought unsuccessfully to cut off all aid after US forces found and killed Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil.
Pakistan, where anti-US sentiment is widespread, quickly condemned Rohrabacher's introduction of the resolution.
"This is a self-serving attempt on the part of those who are driven by arrogance and ignorance. The bill shows utter disrespect for international norms and practices," Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said in a statement in Islamabad.
Pakistan similarly accused the United States of meddling in its affairs after Rohrabacher, who heads an investigative subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, recently called a hearing on Baluchistan.
The administration of US President Barack Obama, who belong to the rival Democratic Party, declined to send a representative to testify before Rohrabacher's subcommittee and said it considered Baluchistan part of Pakistan.
"The Congress holds hearings on many foreign affairs topics. These hearings don't necessarily imply that the US government endorses one view or another view," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said after the hearing.
"We encourage all the parties in Baluchistan to work out their differences peacefully and through a valid political process," she said.
The United States has primarily been focused on unrest in Pakistan's lawless border areas next to Afghanistan, which US officials consider to be a hideout for Islamic extremists.
But human rights groups have urged more attention to Baluchistan, where they say that hundreds of people have gone missing, detained or killed at the hands of Pakistan's military and intelligence services.
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Afghan president says Taliban can not open office in Qatar
Xinhua
Feb. 17, 2012
ISLAMABAD
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Friday that Taliban can not open office in Qatar and his government will decide the venue for any talks with the Taliban.
The remarks came amid reports that Taliban have opened political office in the Gulf state and have held exploratory talks with the U.S. officials. A Taliban spokesman said last week that the office in Qatar has been opened on their suggestion.
President Karzai told Pakistani TV anchors and columnists at a breakfast interaction that the United States can not hold talks with the Taliban on behalf of the Afghan government.
"We will hold talks with the Taliban either in Saudi Arabia or Turkey," the Pakistani TV channels quoted Afghan President as saying.
Karzai told an American newspaper ahead of his Pakistan's visit on Thursday that his government has joined talks with the Taliban.
Taliban quickly rejected Karzai's claim and a Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that Taliban representatives have neither held talks with the "powerless" Kabul administration anywhere nor has had any intention so far to hold negotiations with Karzai's administration.
During the Friday morning breakfast meeting with the local media, the Afghan President Karzai also called the Pakistani government to reopen supply line for the NATO forces in Afghanistan, which has been closed following an attack by the NATO troops on two Pakistani border check posts in Nov. 26, 2011, which killed 24 Pakistani troops and wounded a dozen others.
Pakistan Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar said this week that the NATO has been allowed to resume supply via Pakistani airspace of perishable items.
The Pakistani government had been insisting that the decision to restore the NATO supply will be taken by the parliament, but the parliament has not yet started debate on the issue.
The opposition parties in Pakistan criticized the government's decision to restore the NATO supplies without discussing the issue in the parliament.
Karzai said that the restoration of supply to NATO forces will benefit Afghanistan and Pakistan.
When asked about Pakistan's offer to impart training to Afghan National Army, the Afghan President was quoted as saying that his government has no objection to any such training.
The Afghan government has in the past rejected Pakistan's offer to train Afghan armed forces and President Karzai himself insisted on few occasions that Afghans will not repeat the former Soviet- era mistake of sending troops to neighbouring countries for training.
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