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10 February 2012
FEATURE STORY
Why Negotiate With the Taliban?
BUSINESS
No articles featured today
NATION
Grossman Meets Taliban Leaders, Reports Say
Too close for comfort
Pakistan Al-Qaeda chief 'killed by US drone'
France: Afghan Exit Route Via Uzbekistan Costly
Delays and higher costs ahead with Afghan private security handover
Afghanistan says children killed in NATO airstrike
Roads to Nowhere: Program to Win Over Afghans Fails
UN Trust Fund Donates $6m to Afghan Ministry of Health
Afghanistan's army recruitment mess
Pakistan to Host Trilateral Afghan, Iran Summit
Special forces soldiers to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014, says Smith
Afghanistan: Asia’s Congo
Marines snipers unpunished after posing with flag bearing logo resembling Nazi symbol
U.S. Strategy For Afghan War Reaches Critical Stage
$20m aid plan for Afghanistan's poorest people
Indian role in Afghanistan spells danger for Pakistan
Afghanistan's Opium Child Brides
Afghan president postpones handover of US prison
Fresh debate over US mission in Afghanistan
Afghans Accuse Authorities Of Passport Scam
Afghan Forces Will be Good Enough to Hold Security: US General
Russia to assist NATO troops withdrawing from Afghanistan
Pakistan take Afghan neighbours 'seriously' says coach Mohsin Khan
PRESS RELEASES
No articles featured today
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FEATURE STORY
Why Negotiate With the Taliban?
Most Afghans oppose extremism. Washington should support them, not sell them out.
Wall Street Journal
By AMRULLAH SALEH
FEBRUARY 9, 2012
Opinion
Washington's olive branch to the Taliban—no matter the excuses or justifications—amounts to the management of failure, not the mark of victory. Negotiating with the Taliban after more than 10 years of fighting means giving legitimacy and space to militant extremism.
The objective of NATO's post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan was to starve militant extremism by defeating the nexus of al Qaeda and the Pakistan-backed Taliban. That now seems like a dream.
With support from Pakistan, the Taliban has managed to protract the fighting and create a strategic deadlock. The U.S. military surge in 2010 weakened the Taliban, but it hardly pressured their strategic support across the Durand line in Pakistan. So the deadlock remains—chiefly because of Pakistan's unwillingness to cooperate fully with NATO, coupled with the fractured state of Afghan politics since the fraud-marred 2009 presidential elections.
Pakistan and the Taliban have no interest in producing quick positive results from talks. The Taliban has already gained certain advantages, including the possible transfer or release of their commanders from U.S. custody, the opening of an office in Qatar, and the legitimacy to enter into mainstream politics at the time of their choosing. They will definitely use these preliminary gains to further their psychological influence over the Afghan populace. And they won't likely bargain away the gains they have earned by suicide bombings, ambushes and the marginalization of civil society. Now that the Taliban has guaranteed its basic survival, it will fight for domination.
Washington's talks with the Taliban—taking place, on and off, in Qatar—come at a time when most anti-Taliban Afghan civil-society leaders have deserted President Karzai. He is head of a heavily subsidized state whose pay master (Washington) is now largely bypassing his government to negotiate with the enemy. This raises the question: Who and what does President Karzai represent?
In a bid to make himself relevant, President Karzai has adopted a strategy of meddling. He has demanded that NATO halt night raids, hand over the Bagram detention facility, and place strict restrictions on security companies. He has also refused to echo NATO's mission goals and justifications, and he wanted the Taliban to open an office in Saudi Arabia, not Qatar.
In return, NATO has accused Mr. Karzai of corruption, of committing abuses of human rights, and of being detached from reality. Successful counterinsurgency work requires international troops and the host nation to be seen as unified; that is simply not the case here. Pakistan and the Taliban are more coordinated in their approaches than are NATO and Afghanistan.
This is one of the key reasons why concerned anti-Taliban Afghans are creating a third force to ensure their rights and interests are represented and protected. They no longer see either President Karzai or NATO committed to those rights and interests. Though fragmented in their approach, these forces share a common goal: to counterbalance the growing influence of the Taliban and to fill the vacuum created by the declining relevance of Afghanistan's democratic institutions.
Certainly no Afghan political coalition can stop Washington from talking to the Taliban—but those talks won't bring stability. Talks and a potential ceasefire may provide the U.S. and its NATO allies their justification for a speedy withdrawal, but it won't change the fundamentals of the problem in Afghanistan. Striking a deal with the Taliban without disarming them will shatter the hope of a strong, viable, pluralistic Afghan state.
The absolute majority of the Afghan people are against the Taliban and the domination of our country by militant extremism. They have wholeheartedly supported and participated in the democratic process, but they are now marginalized both by President Karzai, who controls massive resources with no accountability, and the international community, which is focused disproportionately on transition, withdrawal and the Taliban.
Afghanistan's neglected majority can provide a political alternative for the military mission in Afghanistan. Its inclusion, which the U.S. could secure by pursuing reconciliation in a way that pressures President Karzai to respect the role of parliament and independent judges, would contain or push back the Taliban, increase the cost of war for Pakistan, and provide hope for post-transition Afghanistan.
By contrast, should that majority remain outside the strategic calculus, we'll see further fragmentation of political power and legitimacy in Afghanistan. That will weaken Washington's position and endanger the entire mission.
Mr. Saleh, who directed Afghanistan's national security directorate from 2004 to 2010, is now an opposition political activist.
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BUSINESS
No articles featured today
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NATION
Grossman Meets Taliban Leaders, Reports Say
TOLOnews.com
Thursday, 09 February 2012
The US Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Marc Grossman has met Taliban leaders in Qatar as part of US efforts in bringing stability to Afghanistan, a senior Afghan Official has told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The talks occurred between Mr Grossman and the Taliban in late January, according to the official.
After a meeting with Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, Mr Grossman went to Qatar to meet Taliban leaders.
"I can confirm that Mr Grossman met with the Taliban representatives in Qatar. When President Karzai was in Rome, he came over to his residence and briefed him about his meeting with the Taliban," the official has said.
This comes as Mr Karzai emphasises on an Afghan owned peace process.
The official has said that during Grossman's visit to Kabul, he had met with President Karzai and made a number of agreements with him in sequence with the talks with Taliban.
Previously, there were reports that the US had held secret talks with the Taliban for ten months.
The US has more than 90,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and is currently trying to bring Taliban to negotiation table.
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Too close for comfort
In the war in Afghanistan it is not always obvious which side Pakistan is on
The Economist
Feb 11th 2012
PAKISTAN REACTS WITH understandable resentment to criticism of its role in Afghanistan. During the long war there it has provided sanctuary to millions of refugees. It has lost far more troops fighting terrorists than has ISAF. After September 11th 2001 it swiftly repudiated the Taliban and threw in its lot with America and its “war on terror”. In 2004 it was named a “major non-NATO ally” by America. Its territory has provided ISAF with vital supply routes and bases for attacks on suspected terrorists by unmanned drone aircraft. Many of its civilians have also died in those and other attacks. It has provided intelligence that has led to the capture of a succession of al-Qaeda leaders. And the “American” war in Afghanistan has fuelled the rise of violent Islamist extremists in Pakistan itself, the “Pakistani Taliban”, bent on overthrowing the government.
Now, too, there is a reciprocal grudge against Afghanistan. Armed fighters from the Pakistani Taliban, defeated in the Swat region of Pakistan in 2009, have set up camp in eastern Afghanistan and continue to launch attacks on Pakistan. All of this helps fuel popular anti-Americanism, which is steadily worsening. The war is a political liability for the government.
Yet American politicians seethe at Pakistan’s refusal—despite large amounts of American aid lavished on the army—to start operations in the tribal area of North Waziristan against the Haqqani network, a group that Mike Mullen, then chairman of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, last year called a “veritable arm” of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), Pakistan’s main spy service. This year a NATO report leaked into the public domain alleged that “Pakistan’s manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabated.”
Yet even American diplomats believe that some of these charges are overstated. Having helped form, train and arm the Taliban in the 1980s (with American backing) to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and having in the 1990s used other terrorist outfits against India in Kashmir, the ISI has deep links with the extremists. But that does not make them all passive tools of the Pakistani state.
Publicly, the ISI plays down its links with such groups, mocking the tendency to see its shadowy hand everywhere. “We are a very responsible organisation,” says an ISI spokesman. “People think we are responsible for absolutely everything.” Yet at the same time the ISI somehow manages to give the impression that it has more control over the extremists than it probably does.
The army’s explanation for its restraint in North Waziristan is capacity. Roughly 150,000 soldiers are already deployed in the tribal areas; 10,000 are on UN peacekeeping missions; and 60,000-70,000 were diverted to providing flood relief in 2010 and 2011. Add in troops kept in reserve, and that leaves only around 200,000 to keep an eye on 2,900km (1,800 miles) of Pakistan’s eastern border with the traditional enemy: India.
Annus horribilis
In fact by late 2011 there were plenty of other reasons too for restraint in North Waziristan, argues Rifaat Hussain of the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. A severe humanitarian crisis in which one-third of the population of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas had already been displaced would have been made even worse by intervention. Divided tribal loyalties in the region might have coalesced in a united anti-army front. A relative lull in the second half of 2011 in suicide-attacks elsewhere in Pakistan might have been broken. And the army might not have won but instead got bogged down, as has happened to so many foreign armies in similar rugged terrain, across the border in Afghanistan.
The need for caution on the Indian border helps explain why Pakistan’s strategic objectives in Afghanistan seem at odds with ISAF’s. Its main goal is to thwart the establishment of any government that might align Afghanistan firmly with India. Partly this reflects its abiding fear of Indian invasion and the need for “strategic depth” to withstand it. Also, Pakistan sees the administration of President Hamid Karzai as dominated by former members of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which was close to India and Russia. Officials in Islamabad claim India is already using Afghan territory to foment unrest in Pakistan, especially in the restive province of Balochistan.
Another reason why this does not seem Pakistan’s war is that the Taliban are dominated by Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, the Pushtuns, many of whom also live on the Pakistani side of the frontier. And the Afghan government has never recognised the border with Pakistan dating from the British colonial era, the Durand Line. If a hostile Afghan government were to resurrect the dispute, recollecting old calls for a separate “Pushtunistan” that incorporates not just the tribal areas but most of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, Pakistan would be destabilised further.
In 2011 the continuing tensions between America’s and Pakistan’s objectives in Afghanistan became acute. From the perspectives of the American and Afghan governments, the evidence of Pakistani double-dealing became more flagrant. When bin Laden was found to have been living in Abbottabad, a town not far from Islamabad that is known for its elite military academy, it was hard to believe that no part of the Pakistani establishment was aware of his presence. After that, Admiral Mullen seemed to accuse the ISI of complicity in bloody attacks on America’s forces in Afghanistan and on its embassy in Kabul, blamed on the Haqqani network (though Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, later said there was no evidence implicating the ISI). Afghan politicians, for their part, blamed Pakistan for the assassination in September of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president involved in seeking a peace settlement.
With friends like these
From Pakistan’s perspective, however, 2011 was a year of ever more egregious American violation of its sovereignty. In January an American CIA contractor, going about his murky business, shot dead two robbers in Lahore. A third man was killed by the car sent to rescue him. America claimed the CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, had diplomatic immunity, and eventually had him set free. Pakistanis were appalled that an unknown number of trigger-happy Americans appeared to have a licence to kill on their streets.
The Navy SEAL raid in which bin Laden was killed was kept secret from the Pakistani government and army, apparently because they could not be trusted not to alert the target. That caused far greater outrage in Pakistan than did the revelation of the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts. Indeed, some Pakistanis, typically for a country where any event spawns countless conspiracy theories, believe the army’s commanders did know of the raid. In this theory, revealing for what it says about how the army is viewed, the generals thought it less damaging to their image at home—and, crucially, within their own lower ranks—to appear inept, rather than complicit in the killing of an old jihadi ally. Most Pakistanis blame the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11th 2001 on America or Israel.
Hopes of repairing ties were dashed by what was, at best, a terrible ISAF blunder. On November 26th 2011, 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed by the air support called in by Afghan and American troops on the border with the Pakistani tribal area of Mohmand. NATO called it an accident and said its troops had acted in self-defence. Many Pakistanis believed it was a deliberate attack. Barack Obama offered condolences but no apology.
In protest, Pakistan withdrew from a big conference in Germany in December on Afghanistan’s future. It ordered America to quit the base in the Pakistani province of Balochistan from which it was believed to be mounting drone attacks. And it curtailed the intelligence co-operation which presumably helped identify targets for those attacks, as well as lead to terrorist suspects in their hideouts. It also closed the two border crossings through which large quantities of ISAF supplies had been passing. ISAF has three other land routes, through Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus, but they are more expensive and have political complications of their own.
Pakistan, for all its denials, can also influence the outcome in Afghanistan through the presence in its territory of the insurgent groups. They will not be defeated unless they are beaten in Pakistan, nor brought into a process of national reconciliation until Pakistan has helped nudge them to the table. ISAF commanders in Kabul believe that some Afghan Taliban leaders are chafing at their dependence on Pakistan and the ISI and might be willing to return home if it did not mean abandoning their families in Pakistan. ISAF has tried to coax them back with offers of safe passage. Recent agreement for the Taliban to open an office for negotiations in Qatar is another way of prising the group away from Pakistan and has brought a formal peace process a little closer. But it will still need Pakistani help.
In recent times Pakistan has often looked more like America’s enemy than its ally. An article published in November and December 2011 in the National Journal and the Atlantic, two American magazines, called it “The Ally from Hell”. It was deeply resented in Pakistan. In fact, the country’s ultimate objectives in Afghanistan are not that different from the West’s. It does not have an interest in perpetuating a war in which, as it points out, Pakistani soldiers and civilians are victims. Only a small minority in Pakistan hankers after a Taliban restoration in Kabul, which would encourage the Pakistani Taliban. In any event, such a restoration is highly unlikely, since any government ISAF leaves behind will probably be able to hold the big northern cities.
So Pakistan’s Afghan policy at times appears to be self-defeating. Partly this is a consequence of the ISI’s links with militant groups, both domestic and Afghan, which have created bonds of loyalty and patronage that are hard to untangle. But it is also a consequence of Pakistan’s abiding fears of the two countries best placed to help it, if only mutual trust could replace instinctive suspicion: America and India.
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Pakistan Al-Qaeda chief 'killed by US drone'
AFP
By Emmanuel Giroud
09/02/2012
ISLAMABAD
US missiles on Thursday killed the most senior Pakistani in Al-Qaeda, one of the Americans' main targets in the country and wanted for attacks that killed scores of people, officials said.
Badar Mansoor, who reputedly sent fighters to Afghanistan and ran a training camp in North Waziristan, was killed in a drone strike near the Afghan border, Pakistani officials and a member of his group told AFP.
"He died in the missile attacks overnight in Miranshah. His death is a major blow to Al-Qaeda's abilities to strike in Pakistan," a senior Pakistani official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
His death was confirmed by one of his loyalists.
"Badar Mansoor was killed in the missile attack," a militant among his group confirmed by telephone.
Intelligence officials in Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan, said Mansoor had been killed, but other Pakistani officials were divided.
"We're not sure. We cannot give confirmation just like that," one of them told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Four militants were reported killed in the pre-dawn drone strike, which targeted a compound in Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan.
It was only the second such attack in Pakistan since US President Barack Obama confirmed the secret drone programme late last month.
Pakistan and the United States are currently taking tentative steps to repair a serious crisis in relations over last year's covert American raid that killed Osama bin Laden and US air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.
The senior Pakistani intelligence official described Mansoor as the "de facto leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan" after his predecessor, Ilyas Kashmiri, was reported killed in a drone strike last June.
Unlike Kashmiri, who had a $5 million bounty on his head, Mansoor is not listed on the US State Department Rewards for Justice list.
There was no immediate confirmation of his death from the United States. But one Western counter-terrorism expert described Mansoor as the local chief of Al-Qaeda and one of the Americans' chief targets in Pakistan.
"If it's true, this is very good news for the anti-terrorism fight, and this was very important for both the US and Pakistan," the official said.
He called Mansoor Al-Qaeda's go-between with Pakistan's umbrella Taliban movement and a member of Al-Qaeda's leadership shura in Pakistan.
Officials said Mansoor was responsible for attacks in Karachi and on the minority Ahmadi community that killed nearly 100 people in the eastern city of Lahore in May 2010.
Ahmadis, considered a sect of Islam, are subject to severe discrimination in Pakistan, which declared them non-Muslims in 1974.
Aged about 40 and from Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab province, Mansoor moved to Miranshah several years ago to set up his own training camp.
"Western officials believed he was involved in sending fighters to Afghanistan," the senior Pakistani official told AFP.
US officials say Pakistan's tribal belt provides sanctuary to Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda groups plotting attacks on the West, Pakistani Taliban who routinely bomb Pakistan and other foreign fighters.
According to an AFP tally, 45 US missile strikes were reported in Pakistan's tribal belt in 2009, 101 in 2010, 64 in 2011 and five so far this year.
Obama said the drone programme was a "targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists". The founder of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, was one of the most high profile casualties, killed in 2009.
But The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in London, says there are credible reports that between 282 and 535 civilians, including more than 60 children, have been killed in drone attacks since Obama took office.
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France: Afghan Exit Route Via Uzbekistan Costly
RFE/RL
February 10, 2012
French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said in an interview with "L'Orient-Le Jour" that using the route through Uzbekistan to withdraw NATO troops from Afghanistan was too costly.
Longuet did not say how much the cost was to use the route through Uzbekistan, the last leg of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) that runs from Europe to Afghanistan.
Recent reports have claimed the U.S. is paying Central Asian governments some $500 million annually to use the route. Estimates are that some 75 percent of nonlethal military cargo headed for Afghanistan now transits the NDN and most of that enters Afghanistan from Uzbekistan.
Longuet said the route was "not optimal" for withdrawing NATO forces but conceded the better option -- via Pakistan -- was currently more complicated due to "spoiled relations" between NATO countries, particularly the U.S., and the Pakistani government. That chill in ties followed U.S. forces' November 26 accidental attack on Pakistani troops just on the other side of the Afghan border that left 26 Pakistani soldiers dead.
Pakistani authorities responded by closing the land route used by NATO forces going into Afghanistan and ordering a U.S. drone base in Pakistan closed.
Even prior to the attack on Pakistani forces, NATO was already shipping more of its cargo via the NDN. NATO invited the Turkmen and Uzbek presidents to the alliance's summit in Bucharest in April 2008 to discuss passage into Afghanistan as supply routes through Pakistan's tribal areas increasingly came under attack by militants. That NATO meeting laid the foundations for the NDN.
NATO countries intend to complete the drawdown of their forces in Afghanistan by 2014. With Pakistani routes at best insecure, NATO, as Longuet said, sees NDN as the way out of Afghanistan for its troops and equipment. Longuet said negotiations for an exit route are currently under way with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The NDN begins in Latvia then goes to Russia, Kazakhstan, and into Uzbekistan. NATO also uses an air base in Dushanbe, Tajikistan and the U.S. uses the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan.
written by the central newsroom
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Delays and higher costs ahead with Afghan private security handover
Associated Press
Friday, February 10, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan
The push by Afghanistan’s president to nationalize legions of private security guards before the end of March is encouraging corruption and jeopardizing multibillion-dollar aid projects, according to companies trying to make the switch.
President Hamid Karzai has railed for years against the large number of guns-for-hire in Afghanistan, saying private security companies skirt the law and risk becoming militias. He ordered them abolished in 2009 and eventually set March 20 of this year as the deadline for everyone except NATO and diplomatic missions to switch to government-provided security.
Afghan officials are rushing to meet the cutoff with the help of NATO advisers. But with fewer than six weeks to go, it’s likely that many components will still be missing on March 20. And even once everything falls into place, higher costs and issues of authority over the government guards will remain.
The change imperils billions of dollars of aid flowing into Afghanistan, particularly from the United States. In a country beset by insurgent attacks and suicide bombings, the private development companies that implement most of the U.S. aid agency’s programs employ private guards to protect compounds, serve as armed escorts and guard construction sites.
On March 21, approximately 11,000 guards now working for private security firms will become government employees as members of the Afghan Public Protection Force, or APPF. They will still be working in the same place with the same job. Except now they’ll answer to the Interior Ministry.
“We don’t want to have security gaps. This is really important to our customers and to us,” said the head of the APPF, Deputy Minister Jamal Abdul Naser Sidiqi. It will happen, he says, because the presidential order says it has to.
Officially, everyone is optimistic.
“The APPF is now open for business,” a U.S. embassy official said, speaking anonymously to discuss private agency contracts.
But many are still worried that the entire plan could fall apart. Development contractors for the U.S. Agency for International Development told The Associated Press they were explicitly told not to discuss the changeover with reporters because media attention could endanger the delicate process. Everyone critical of APPF insisted on speaking anonymously for this article.
Last week the chairman of the House subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing concern that the APPF may not be ready to take over security for aid projects.
Even so, no one expects that there will be a visible problem on March 21.
“The guys who guard our gates today wear a certain baseball hat, and on the 21st of March they’ll come wearing a different uniform. It should be pretty seamless,” said Bill Haight, head of an infrastructure-building project run by Louis Berger Group and Black and Veach. He said his projects are nearly finished and so he doesn’t expect many problems.
But companies with long-running projects are worried. New contracts and operating rules will probably still be in the works when the deadline hits.
The APPF has yet to sign a contract to provide security for any of the approximately 75 companies expected to switch over to government guards in March, according to Noorkhan Haidari, the APPF business manager.
And international firms that are expected to act as middlemen managing the guards are having trouble getting licensed. Though about 20 companies have said they plan to register as so-called Risk Management Companies, or RMCs, only one license has been issued — reportedly after a wait of about two months. Others trying to get licensed say the required documents change every day.
Meanwhile, the Afghan Foreign Ministry has also denied visas to foreign workers for at least three security companies that are trying to get registered as RMCs or are working on one of the exempt contracts, according to a security adviser for a major development contractor. These firms have been told they have to wait for new procedures under the new APPF system. But given that they don’t have much time to get everything in line, they’re increasingly looking at what bribes they can pay to make it happen, the same person said.
Firms don’t have to hire RMCs, but they add a level of management and oversight that meets the standards of international organizations.
Companies have long hired private guards precisely because they don’t trust the Afghan police to protect them in a crisis. The United Nations used Afghan police to guard its staff housing until an 2009 attack on a residential hotel in which Taliban assailants quickly made it past police guards and killed five U.N. staffers. The U.N. has since increased its security to include foreign guards.
Afghans working with APPF have gone so far as to urge the business licensing agency to “stop stalling the process,” according to a letter sent to U.S. government officials by a development company and obtained by the AP.
“The painfully slow momentum of the various Afghan government entities may have scuppered the chances of a timely handover to the APPF,” the letter argues.
Sidiqi said the complaints of delays were overblown, noting that there is a standard three-day licensing process. If there are delays, he said it is because the would-be RMCs are dragging it out.
“We need the RMCs,” Sidiqi said. “They have the experience.”
He dismissed the possibility of bribery. “This is a legal government organization, so corruption is not going to be possible,” Sidiqi said.
But with so much undecided, some development organizations are opting to hunker down inside their compounds until the details are worked out.
A manager with one U.S. government development contractor said the company expects to delay visits to projects in dangerous places until all documents are finalized. The official spoke anonymously to avoid endangering contracts still being negotiated.
Going forward, the development company manager worried about recruiting for projects in places like the insurgent-heavy south. Some employees have already said they won’t sign on to projects if their only security is going to be APPF guards.
But even once the RMCs are licensed and in-country, it is unclear that they will provide an easy transition.
These companies will not be able to directly control the guards that they manage. They can only give advice to an Afghan supervisor. If there’s a dispute between the two, it will have to be taken to a government-run arbitration panel.
The issue has already caused problems on APPF-guarded projects before the mandatory switch. During the 2010 parliamentary elections, Afghan police pulled a group of APPF guards who were protecting a railroad construction project in the northern province of Balkh off their posts to guard polling stations, according to the former APPF commander.
“I told them it was a violation of the law but they said you have to do it. I was obliged,” said Sayed Asghar Asgari. So he gave over 50 of his 462 guards. The guards were returned four days later, but the incident shows the potential for a blurring of lines between the Afghan security forces and guard units.
And as budgets for aid projects are decreasing, the APPF program is likely to increase security costs substantially.
An APPF guard will cost at least $770 a month, according to an AP analysis of official government figures, while private security providers contacted for this story say they usually charge $510-$630 a month per guard.
To avoid pay cuts for guards, individual companies will have to supplement salaries. And any costs for RMC managers will be on top of this. Once these expenses are figured in, security costs could easily double under the APPF.
It is still not clear what these changes will mean for existing USAID contracts. The aid agency has given no overarching guidance for how it will deal with delays or higher costs, though it has urged its partners to review their individual contracts to decide what their obligations and rights will be, the U.S. embassy official said.
Meanwhile, the Afghan government won’t officially have all the APPF guards trained for more than a year. By March 20, about 1,840 of the existing guard force will have gone through the formal training program, which graduates about 220 people every three weeks, according to a NATO official who spoke anonymously to discuss an Afghan government program.
The hope is that on-the-job training will be enough in the near term, especially since most private security guards will probably agree to join the APPF. But like much with the APPF right now, it is just a hope.
“It is very complicated and very difficult, but we are trying our best,” Sidiqi said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Afghanistan says children killed in NATO airstrike
Reuters
Thu Feb 9, 2012
KABUL
Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai accused NATO on Thursday of killing a number of children in an airstrike, a case which could stoke tensions between the government and its western backers over a mounting civilian death doll.
The NATO-led coalition in the country did not immediately confirm the deaths, but said it was investigating an incident in the Najrab district of eastern Kapisa province.
Civilian deaths have been one of the biggest sources of friction in relations between the Afghan government and NATO ahead of a withdrawal of foreign combat troops in 2014.
"President Hamid Karzai strongly condemned an airstrike by foreign troops which resulted in the killing of a number of children," a statement from his office said.
Karzai had sent an advisor, Mohammad Zahir Safi, to the area to investigate the incident, the statement added.
Mehrabuddin Safi, the governor of Kapisa, said a coalition air strike late on Wednesday killed eight children in Giawa village. Other Afghan officials had earlier said the strike followed a night raid on suspected insurgents.
"The matter is currently being assessed by a joint assessment team to determine the facts," a spokesman for the 130,000-strong International Security Assistance Force in the country said.
A United Nations report last week said the number of civilians killed and injured in the Afghan war had risen for the fifth year in a row, lifting from 2,790 in 2010 to 3,021 civilian deaths in 2011.
Most deaths were caused by insurgents, the report said, but civilian deaths due to NATO air strikes also rose nine percent to 187, and were the coalition's biggest civilian killer.
(Reporting by Rob Taylor; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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Roads to Nowhere: Program to Win Over Afghans Fails
Wall Street Journal
By DION NISSENBAUM
FEBRUARY 10, 2012
KABUL
U.S. taxpayers paid Afghan entrepreneur Ajmal Hasas millions of dollars as part of a plan to win over villages in the country's insurgent heartlands.
Instead, Mr. Hasas' seven-mile road construction project went so awry that his security guards opened fire on some of the very villagers he was trying to woo on behalf of his American funders.
Mr. Hasas was a point man in a $400 million U.S. Agency for International Development campaign to build as much as 1,200 miles of roads in some of the Afghanistan's most remote and turbulent places.
Three years and nearly $270 million later, less than 100 miles of gravel road have been completed, according to American officials. More than 125 people were killed and 250 others were wounded in insurgent attacks aimed at derailing the project, USAID said. The agency shut down the road-building effort in December.
As the American involvement in Afghanistan is winding down ahead of the pullout of most forces in 2014, the USAID roads saga stands as a reminder of the limited progress the U.S. and its allies have achieved here over the past decade—and at how high a cost.
"You can find programs and projects that have been successful, but for me it is quite obvious that huge amounts of money have been misspent," says Kai Eide, the Norwegian diplomat who headed United Nations operations in Afghanistan in 2008-2010. "There has been no clear strategic thinking on development assistance."
With USAID's road project cut short, special internal auditors from the agency have been trying to figure out what went wrong. Afghan construction companies are still seeking millions of dollars for unpaid bills from the American nonprofit, International Relief and Development, or IRD, that ran the program. And remote Afghan villages that were supposed to benefit from the U.S. initiative have been left with unfinished roads and unfulfilled promises. USAID officials say the program fell short of its goals, which is why they canceled it.
The road-building efforts began a decade ago, as Washington began transforming USAID into a tool in its military counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, shifting the agency's focus from promoting long-term development to shorter-term initiatives meant to attract community support in insurgent-saturated areas.
"I call it hijacking," said one USAID official formerly stationed in Afghanistan. "Aid as a weapons system has never been tested—and they are putting it into the field with no evidence that it works."
J. Alex Thier, Washington-based director of USAID's Afghanistan and Pakistan program, disagrees. He said the strategy can help stabilize regions of the country—if used when security is improving and local leaders are cooperating.
"What USAID does in these districts can at best have an impact if the other things are also pulling in the right direction," he said.
USAID was established 50 years ago by President John F. Kennedy. It became America's key economic tool to help developing nations.
The Bush administration overhauled the agency's mission after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, aligning USAID more closely with military objectives as America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Iraq, U.S. officials embarked on the largest rebuilding project since the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. But the $53 billion initiative was hobbled by the spreading insurgency, massive security costs that sometimes ate up more than half of contract costs, uncooperative government leaders and constantly shifting priorities, according to Stuart Bowen, America's special inspector general for reconstruction in Iraq.
After concluding that at least $4 billion in U.S. aid had been squandered in Iraq, Mr. Bowen warned American officials in 2009 that they were making the same mistakes in Afghanistan. State Department officials said at the time that they had learned lessons from Iraq and were working to better coordinate military and civilian efforts in Afghanistan.
As part of America's $85 billion reconstruction program in Afghanistan, USAID has spent more than $15 billion since 2002, more than in any other country. As in Iraq, the program in Afghanistan has been repeatedly disrupted by the spread of the insurgency across the country, poor oversight, an overreliance on outside contractors, cost overruns and corruption, according to U.S. officials and government investigative reports.
A $260 million effort to upgrade southern Afghanistan's Kajaki hydroelectric dam has repeatedly faltered and remains incomplete. Meanwhile, a $300 million contract to build a major power plant outside Kabul cost more than twice the original estimate and remains largely idle as Afghanistan relies on cheaper power from its neighbors.
But road projects have received the single largest slice of USAID money—more than $2 billion. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been IRD, founded in 1998 by Arthur Keys.
From the start, President Barack Obama's administration saw road construction as key for winning support from Afghans by making it easier to travel, by opening up new trade routes—and by connecting remote villages to Afghan government institutions and services.
Officials at USAID and IRD say that the Afghanistan Strategic Roads Project wasn't a roads program in the usual sense. They said building roads was, in many ways, a secondary goal; the main objective was spreading jobs and money to win over rural communities that harbor insurgents.
"As a grant, this was never intended to be a major road construction project," says Jeff Grieco, a former USAID official who now serves as communications director at IRD. "It was intended to be a capacity building program. We have dramatically improved Afghan capacity to build roads and to do community development work."
It certainly wasn't the cheapest way to get roads built. A typical gravel road in Afghanistan is supposed to cost about $290,000 per mile, according to USAID. It cost American taxpayers about $2.8 million for each mile of gravel road completed by IRD, making them the most expensive miles of road ever built by the U.S. government in Afghanistan.
Less than half the $269 million spent on the project went to actual road construction, IRD officials say. A quarter of the funds were paid to IRD administration and staff. About 15% was spent on security, and 8% was allocated to the community-development projects IRD said were central to the success of the project.
As part of the Strategic Roads Project, USAID set aside millions of dollars in the contract to set up small soap factories, run reading programs for illiterate villagers, dig wells and teach sewing to Afghan women—all with the expectation that it would win American troops good will.
But the community program was hobbled when IRD put a halt to awarding grants in southeastern Afghanistan for eight months after discovering that IRD staff were falsifying reports and exaggerating the impact of the development projects, according to former IRD workers. After revamping the staff and project, IRD resumed handing out grants for things like "flower literacy" programs that taught Afghan women how to make flower arrangements.
Then, after conferring with USAID, IRD tried to press ahead with construction without setting up new community projects, said U.S. officials.
"You had these villages with no community ownership or buy in and they just made the situation worse," said one USAID official. "That's when things really started going sour."
In Khost, the volatile eastern province along the Pakistani border where Mr. Hasas was paid $3 million to build seven miles of gravel road, tensions flared soon after he began work in 2008.
Ajab Noor Mangal, a local construction-company owner hired to work on the project, said Mr. Hasas alienated the community by only hiring workers from two of the five local clans.
Afghans excluded from the project looted Mr. Hasas's construction sites and stripped them bare. At one point, Mr. Hasas said, four men affiliated with the project were kidnapped, killed and dumped in public with a warning note signed by insurgents. The deaths brought construction to a halt.
"We couldn't find a single person to work on the road," Mr. Hasas recalls.
Under the IRD contract, Mr. Hasas and the other Afghan firms working on their roads were responsible for providing their own security. So Mr. Hasas said he cobbled together nearly 100 gunmen and armed them with rented rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns.
Things reached a nadir in the fall of 2010, when around 100 angry Afghans, including a small number of suspected insurgents, tried to storm the construction site, according to Messrs. Hasas and Mangal.
Mr. Mangal, who was in Kabul at the time, says he ordered the contractor's gunmen to open fire on the demonstrators, including some armed protesters who he said shot at the security team. Mr. Mangal says he is still paying for the wounded villagers' medical treatment.
Villagers who took part in the demonstration told a different story. Two men involved in the protest said IRD security sparked a larger confrontation after opening fire on a dozen unarmed men protesting IRD's refusal to move staff from an office overlooking homes where outsiders could see into private family compounds—a major slight in the conservative culture.
"All the villagers criticize the construction company because they were just here to earn money and they did not care about the quality of the road," said Najib, a local resident who worked on the road project and had two relatives injured during the protest.
IRD officials say they never heard about the conflict between the contractor and the villagers.
The project was part of the ongoing "Afghan First" initiative meant to support Afghan companies instead of the international firms that have received the lion's share of the billions in aid that have flooded Afghanistan.
But IRD is still embroiled in payment disputes with Afghan subcontractors who say that the company has failed to pay its bills. Now that the project is shut down, IRD said it has told contractors final payment decisions rest with USAID. USAID said it couldn't comment on the question of payments.
The animosity escalated in 2010 when embittered Afghan subcontractors secured arrest warrants for two IRD officials. Afghan police briefly detained one of the Westerners in Kabul who oversaw the project, according to officials familiar with the incident.
Faced with more arrest threats during the spring, IRD hid another top manager in the back of an SUV, flew her to Kandahar and quietly spirited her out of the country before she, too, could be detained, according to former IRD employees familiar with the controversy. IRD declined to comment on the incident.
USAID officials say the agency moved swiftly to scale back and shut down the IRD roads project as it became clear in 2010 that it was foundering. "How quickly can you stop a dump truck?" said one USAID official. "You get the momentum going and one thing we committed to doing isn't stopping it and creating a wreck."
Mr. Thier said his agency has learned important lessons from the problems in the IRD project and has changed the way it operates. USAID tripled its Afghanistan-based staff, beefed up its screening of Afghan partners, established new independent monitoring procedures and added more people to directly oversee such programs, he said.
The steep drop-off in U.S. reconstruction funds for Afghanistan has also prompted USAID to shift its focus from big ticket stabilization projects to more modest proposals, including agricultural development programs, that can be successfully taken over by Afghan officials.
In November, as part of a wider shift at the State Department, USAID established a new Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations that is meant to address some of the long-standing coordination and strategic problems with America's reconstruction missions abroad.
Still, the project's failures appeared to have no impact on USAID's confidence in IRD. Last year, as construction delays mounted and American officials moved to shut the program down, USAID awarded IRD nearly $140 million to launch three new projects in Afghanistan, though none involved roads. USAID officials said they still had confidence in IRD's ability to carry out big projects in Afghanistan.
Afghan entrepreneur Delawar Faizan, meanwhile, says that IRD still owes him nearly $4 million for his work in constructing roads in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province. He said that IRD gave him a check last fall to settle some of his claims, but it bounced because the company's bank account was frozen. Now, he said, IRD has told him he has to wait for approval from USAID to get paid.
"Where has the money gone?" he asked. —Ziaulhaq Sultani, Habib Khan Totakhil and Mali Khan Yaqubi contributed to this article.
Write to Dion Nissenbaum at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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UN Trust Fund Donates $6m to Afghan Ministry of Health
TOLOnews.com
Thursday, 09 February 2012
The United Nations Trust Fund donated $6 Million to the Afghan Ministry of Public Health.
The money will be used to construct health facilities in remote areas of the country, the Acting Public Health Minister, Suraya Dalil, said.
Mrs Dalil said there has been major falls in maternity deaths, but she still called for more international aid to fight the disaster.
"Today we witness the commitments of the UN Trust Fund which particularly helps the ministry to decrease maternity and child deaths," Mrs Dalil said.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Trust Fund representative said the organisation will continue its assistance to improve health system in Afghanistan.
The UN Trust Fund wants to pave the way for female patients to have access to health facilities.
The Afghan Ministry of Public Health also said that it will conduct Midwifery training in the remote areas of the country which will decrease the mother and child mortality.
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Afghanistan's army recruitment mess
BBC News
10 February 2012
When Afghan soldier Abdul Saboor killed four French colleagues last month, he ended up hastening - by a year - France's exit from the war-torn nation. The BBC's Bilal Sarwary went to Saboor's village and uncovered a tale of deceit, raising questions about how Afghan soldiers are recruited.
When Abdul Saboor picked up his gun on 20 January, it was not to defend his country, family or honour.
He opened fire on French forces while on a joint operation hunting down a top Taliban commander in a remote part of Kapisa province last month.
"The mood was upbeat. We were just a whiff away from a big catch," one intelligence agent said.
"Suddenly, someone opened fire. I thought that the action had begun. But there was Saboor standing with smoke billowing from machine gun surrounded by bodies of French soldiers." He had fired 120 bullets and was overpowered before he could flee.
Attacks where Afghan soldiers turn their weapons on their colleagues or coalition troops are becoming more common. In most cases, the attacker is driven by anger or hatred.
One officer said that Saboor had been upset when he was told of pictures circulating on the internet, which showed American soldiers urinating on the bodies of Taliban fighters.
But should Saboor have been in the army in the first place? Hospital to army
His mother died when he was 10 years old and and Saboor ran away from home after his father remarried. His father became concerned about his son's mental health.
"He didn't spend even five days with me in the past 10 years," Saboor's father said. "He would roam aimlessly through the day, eat and sleep on the streets."
Saboor became very sick and his father said doctors recommended he be hospitalised for months. So he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Kabul. When his father returned for him, doctors said he had run away. As it turned out, he had joined the army.
It is unclear how he managed to fool the army health commission, a panel of senior doctors and psychiatrists, whose task is to assess the physical fitness and mental balance of a prospective recruit.
And his suspected mental illness was apparently not noticed by fellow trainees and instructors at Kabul's Military Training Centre in the eight weeks he spent there, investigators say. He was deployed to Kapisa shortly afterwards.
But Saboor had joined and deserted the army once before too. Nine months into service the first time round, Saboor deserted the army and ran away to Peshawar in Pakistan.
People in his village told me that Saboor turned up one day after deserting. "He looked tired and sick," one villager said. "One of his uncles then took him away to Peshawar for treatment."
So how did he end up in the army again? Faked files
The BBC has seen documents that shows Saboor's recruitment file for the ANA when he joined the second time round was faked. The BBC has also seen hundreds of fake documents belonging to other recruits. This is clearly a broader problem.
The defence ministry in Afghanistan has been preparing a biometric database of all its soldiers for the last 10 months.
Since the arrival of biometrics 10 months ago at Kabul's Military Training Centre, investigators have identified more than 2,300 recruits who either deserted the army previously, were in the police force or had criminal problems.
In the last few months, more than 500 recruits have been turned down because they are considered untrustworthy or suspected of being Taliban infiltrators.
Recruitment officials say they are asked to provide 8,000 soldiers a month. So far they have given the ANA 300,000 from across the country.
''Almost all rogue soldiers and Taliban infiltrators who carried attacks against Nato forces had fake files,'' defence officials said.
Officials say they cannot go into every district and village to check background and gather intelligence.
According to Saboor's file, he approached an army recruiter and offered to pay for fake enlistment documents. The recruiter arranged a national ID, a sworn statement from two people vouching for Saboor's integrity and other papers. These paved the way for Saboor's second stint with the ANA.
There is no mention of Saboor's mental illness or his previous record in the army - an important requirement in the recruitment process.
"It is possible that Saboor slipped through the cracks in the system," a defence ministry official said adding that all those who arranged his fake papers have been arrested.
Another defence official, who also wished to remain unnamed, said that the army has 185,000 soldiers but spoke of the constant pressure to meet the target of 195,000. He says that time constraints means that they haven't had time to perform biometrics or background checks." Denial
Most Afghan and Nato officials the BBC spoke to about the Kapisa incident refused to comment. But the spokesman for the armed forces in Paris, Col Thierry Burkhard, was more forthcoming.
The colonel said the preliminary report received by the French government from Kabul makes no mention of Saboor's psychological problems. He said that during interrogation in the presence of French investigators, Saboor appeared calm and answered questions in a determined fashion.
"Apart from the fact that Saboor's behaviour in itself could raise questions about his sanity, any allegations that he is insane are not necessarily true," Col Burkhard said.
The colonel said the French authorities are aware that Saboor was recruited twice, at least once on a forged set of documents, but he said it is something the Afghan authorities have to deal with.
The consequences of Saboor's attack have been dramatic. French troops will now withdraw a year early and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy said France cannot accept that a single soldier dies at the hands of an ally.
But it has laid bare the vulnerability at the heart of the Afghan army, in its very recruitment process.
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Pakistan to Host Trilateral Afghan, Iran Summit
TOLOnews.com
Thursday, 09 February 2012
Pakistan will host the leaders of Afghanistan and Iran at a trilateral summit next week, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.
The purpose of this summit is to discuss counter-terrorism.
The meeting comes as the relations between Pakistan and US remains tense, despite some efforts.
Meanwhile, the relations between Iran and the West are strained on its controversial nuclear programme. Recently major sanctions were imposed on Iranian oil industry and Banks.
"It's a two-day summit, to be held on February 16 and 17 in Islamabad," a spokesman for Pakistan's Foreign Ministry, Abdul Basit, said.
It will be attended by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr Basit added.
In the recent days, Pakistan is trying to take part in the Afghan peace issues and wants to play a major in solving the conflicts as recently Pakistani Prime Minister, Yosuf Raza Gilani visited Qatar to discuss Afghan peace with officials there.
Tensions between the US and Pakistan deteriorated when a Nato air strike hit two Pakistani checkpoints killing at least 24 soldiers.
A recent revealed Nato report said that Pakistan had close ties with Afghan Taliban and the ISI officials and Afghan Taliban leaders are meeting on a regular basis.
Iran is under massive pressure as the US and western countries have imposed furious sanctions on the country's oil industry over its nuclear programme.
The Iranian government says that its nuclear programme is for the purpose or energy provision.
Iran has been accused of supporting terrorist networks both in Afghanistan and some other countries by the US and other Western countries.
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Special forces soldiers to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014, says Smith
The Australian
By MARK DODD
February 10, 2012
AUSTRALIAN special forces will fight on in Afghanistan after 2014 engaging in counter-insurgency operations and helping train local troops, Defence Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday.
In his first parliamentary update on Afghanistan for the year, Mr Smith said the mentoring taskforce was on track for an early handover to Afghan forces by 2014.
Combat operations involving the 138,000-strong NATO-led alliance, which includes Australia, will be wound down after 2014 as Afghan army and police take the lead role under an agreed "transition strategy".
However, special forces soldiers, including those from Australia, were expected to stay on, Mr Smith said.
Final post-2014 security arrangements will be worked out at a meeting of military leaders in Chicago in May.
"Australia has made clear that we expect to maintain a presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014, potentially through training, military advisers, capacity-building and development assistance and a special forces presence.
"Australia is already involved in institutional training through the Afghan National Army Artillery Training School and will continue to work with Afghanistan and ISAF partners to identify further institutional training opportunities," he said.
Australia is the third-biggest contributor of special forces to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) with more than 600 troops currently deployed, including personnel from the Special Air Service and commando regiments.
Britain has also requested Australian assistance in a British-led Afghan National Army officer academy to help develop a professional officer corps.
Meanwhile, claims the SAS was involved in the illegal detention of Iraqi prisoners of war have been strongly denied by Mr Smith.
The claims, carried in Fairfax newspapers, did not tally with the area of operations involving SAS troops during the so-called Second Gulf War, said the minister.
"The advice I've got this morning is essentially that these allegations are baseless and there's nothing in it," he told the ABC.
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Afghanistan: Asia’s Congo
Reuters Blogs
By Sanjeev Miglani
February 9, 2012
For many in the West, Afghanistan and Iraq have much in common. Both are Islamic countries whose nasty regimes were kicked out by the U.S. after September 11 2001; in both places, the Americans, British and others stayed and spent huge amounts of money on nobody’s quite sure what; and both were examples of ‘evil’, back when that was a cornerstone of foreign policy thinking.
But Afghanistan isn’t just another Iraq. In many respects, it’s much more like another country beloved of the international community: Democratic Republic of Congo.
In both, violence is so common that it’s practically background noise, and only spectacular outrages win international attention. Armed rebel groups continue to roam the east of Congo at will, while the latest United Nations figures, to nobody’s great surprise, showed the number of civilians killed in the Afghan war rose again last year.
Many Afghans and foreigners fear that, come the end-2014 exit of the 100,000-plus foreign combat troops who, after more than a decade, are still fighting to keep the Taliban at bay, attacks will grow even more frequent, and civil war is always on the table as a possible outcome.
Both countries suffer from extreme border insecurity and outside interference, in Afghanistan most notably from Pakistan. The Afghan government has suggested Pakistan’s spy network backs the insurgents who blow people up in its cities, plant bombs along its roads and shoot its soldiers, a charge which is an article of faith among most Afghans.
Pakistan strongly denies the allegations, but a fence-mending visit to Kabul in early February by Pakistani foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar was totally overshadowed by a leaked U.S. military report which repeated the claim, and many Afghans believe there will be no peace in their country until Pakistan ceases meddling.
Domestically, thievery and disorder is the order of the day, from the pettiest official to the upper echelons of the administration. Transparency watchdogs rate both countries as among the most corrupt in the world, and regard among the public for their governments is pitifully low.
Allegations of vote-rigging — hardly a new phenomenon in central Africa — surrounded President Joseph Kabila’s re-election late last year, while scandals like the 2010 Kabulbank collapse, in which senior Afghan officials among others pocketed almost half a billion dollars in undocumented loans, undermine domestic and foreign support for the political classes.
Public trust in the security forces is also fragile where it exists at all: according to a recent survey, only two in ten Afghans think their policemen can uphold law and order.
The army, despite the best efforts of willing Western soldiers, is dragged down by Afghan soldiers shooting their foreign comrades-in-arms; in Congo, the police and army have been accused of sex crimes and other atrocities.
Governments in Kabul and Kinshasa alike talk about natural resources as the magic solution that’s going to employ their legions of jobless people, and bring cash into state coffers that would by near-empty without foreign aid.
Afghanistan, one of the most recent beneficiaries of Chinese investment in minerals, will have to careful how it manages exploitation of its iron and copper: in Congo, many mineral deposits still finance nobody but the armed gangs who control them, and the corrupt officials who allow it to happen.
All these things common to Congo and Afghanistan feed into a general perception that the state does not serve the people but is instead a mechanism for enriching officials, and that the country, even when not actually at war, is ungovernable.
Diplomats and the international community at large insist the transition to full Afghan responsibility for security does not mean foreign abandonment post-2014, and that the global commitment to a secure, sovereign, well-governed Afghanistan is undiminished.
The voters back home aren’t interested though, and when ‘austerity’ is the watchword in a Europe that can barely pay for its local excesses, let alone those in other parts of the world, appetite for engagement is shrivelling daily: in January, France said it wanted to get its boys out by the end of 2013, a year ahead of schedule. Privately, some foreigners posted in Kabul say Afghanistan is neither worth the blood that’s been spilt nor the cash spent, and that its problems are so great and so many that whatever is done will not be enough.
This echoes a line of thinking about Congo that began with Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and has taken root in literature, perception and ultimately policy: that the place is so broken, so bad, that fixing it is impossible.
There are vast differences between the two of course, but trends in Afghanistan suggest that the country it is becoming could end up looking even more like Congo than it does now. Without the river.
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Marines snipers unpunished after posing with flag bearing logo resembling Nazi symbol
AP
By JULIE WATSON
February 10, 2012
SAN DIEGO
The Marine Corps on Thursday once again did damage control after a photograph surfaced of a sniper team in Afghanistan posing in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS — a special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others.
The Corps said in a statement that using the symbol was not acceptable, but the Marines in the photograph taken in September 2010 will not be disciplined because investigators determined it was a naïve mistake.
The Marines believed the SS symbol was meant to represent sniper scouts and never intended to be associated with a racist organization, said Maj. Gabrielle Chapin, a spokeswoman at Camp Pendleton, where the Marines were based. "I don't believe that the Marines involved would have ever used any type of symbol associated the Nazi Germany military criminal organization that committed mass atrocities in WWII," Chapin said. "It's not within who we are as Marines."
The Corps has used the incident as a training tool to talk to troops about what symbols are acceptable after it became aware of the photograph last November, Chapin said.
The image has surfaced on an Internet blog, sparking widespread outrage and calls for a full investigation and punishment, including bringing those in the photograph and anyone who condoned it to court-martial.
"This is a complete and total outrage," said Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, headquartered in Albuquerque, N.M. His organization sent a letter to the head of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Amos, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday, demanding punishment for those involved.
It was the second time this year the Marine Corps had to scramble to contain the damage after images were posted on the Internet of troops in inappropriate acts. Last month, Pentagon leaders faced the fallout from an Internet video purporting to show four Marines urinating on Taliban corpses — an act that appears to violate international laws of warfare and further strains U.S.-Afghan relations.
Panetta called Afghan President Hamid Karzai to offer assurances of a full investigation, and the top Marine general promised an internal probe as well as a criminal one.
"First we have Marines peeing on dead bodies and now this," Weinstein said.
The Marines in the photograph are no longer with the unit. Chapin said she did not know if they are still in the Corps.
In the photo taken in the Afghanistan district of Sangin in Helmand province, members of the Marine Corps unit are seen posing with guns in front of an American flag and a large, dark blue flag with what appear to be the letters "SS" in the shape of white jagged lightning bolts.
Camp Pendleton spokesman, Master Gunnery Sgt. Mark Oliva, said he did not know where the flag came from but it was likely the property of one of the Marines in the photograph.
The photograph appeared on the blog for a military weapons company called Knight's Armament in Titusville, Fla. The company did not respond to emails or phone messages left by The Associated Press.
The SS, or Schutzstaffel, was the police and military force of the Nazi Party, which was distinct from the general army. Members pledged an oath of loyalty to Adolph Hitler.
SS units were held responsible for many war crimes and played an integral role in the extermination of millions of Jews along with gypsies and other people who were deemed undesirable. The SS was declared to be a criminal organization at the Nuremberg war crime trials.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, said he does not buy the explanation that posing with the flag was an innocent mistake and insisted the American public has a right to know what happened.
"If you look at any book on the Nazi period, this is the dreaded symbol of the SS, and to have a Marine Corps unit adopt it and put it beside the American flag when 200,000 Americans died to free the world of that dreaded symbol is just beyond the pale," he said.
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U.S. Strategy For Afghan War Reaches Critical Stage
NPR
By Renee Montagne and Tom Bowman
February 9, 2012
The U.S. and NATO have pledged to stay in Afghanistan through the end of 2014 and hand off responsibility for security to Afghan troops by then. How to get to that point, though, is not clear. And recent statements by key U.S. officials have only confused things more.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
We're going to look now at American military strategy for the war in Afghanistan. There's been some confusion lately about whether American forces would end their combat mission sooner than planned and also about how long the U.S. will remain in Afghanistan. So to try to make sense of it all, we're joined by NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.
Good morning.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Let's start with the basics. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently talked about hopefully - that was his word - ending the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan by the end of 2013. Which was understood to be about a year earlier than had been talked about before. So will the U.S. stop combat missions at that point?
BOWMAN: Renee, the key word there is hopefully, that the combat mission at the end of 2013 can be turned over to Afghan forces. But everyone I've talked with says at least through 2014 they're talking about still having U.S. forces do some form of combat operations. It might not be large land battles, but at the very least you'll see U.S. Special Forces, Green Berets going on raids, let's say, against Taliban forces. Bottom line, they're still going to be involved in combat.
MONTAGNE: Well, Afghan forces, are they close to ready to take over or are they actually not really ready?
BOWMAN: They're not even close to being ready. And I've seen them myself in the field. And that's precisely why you're seeing so much talk now about pulling back and starting this transition earlier - a year earlier. If the deadline is 2014, you have to start at least a year earlier training them, working with them so you can see their weaknesses and then help them improve. You have plenty of time to help them improve.
This week at the Pentagon we heard from the officer who runs day-to-day military operations in Afghanistan. His name is Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti. And I asked him about this very point, about training the Afghans. They're going to send more training teams over this year - 50 Army training teams to help them. And he talked about pushing the Afghans this year more into the lead. Let's listen to what he had to say.
GENERAL: And I'm pressing commanders to put them into the lead as soon as they can. 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. And I want to do that while we have more forces on the ground in order to help develop them.
MONTAGNE: So again, the idea, Tom, is get these Afghan soldiers out there in the fight so that they can be worked with sooner rather than later so they might be ready by the end of 2014...
BOWMAN: That's exactly right. That they'll have plenty of time to train them and make sure they're competent. And key things they're looking are the ability to supply themselves in the field, do they have good leaders. You know, they might have to change out some leaders over the next year, but they want to do all of this by the end of 2013. They don't want to do this in the end of 2014 when they're ready to turn it all over to the Afghans.
MONTAGNE: One last thing to clarify. Does the mission end by the end of 2014? Will U.S. troops be out by then?
BOWMAN: Absolutely not. And the Americans have talked with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about what they call a longer term national security relationship. And people I talk with say you could have anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 American troops after 2014 doing things like training, perhaps going on counterterrorism raids. That kind of thing. Maybe even having a quick reaction force. If the Afghans get into trouble, you can go help them.
The thing here is that everyone talks about ending the combat role earlier. The bottom line is you're going to have U.S. troops involved in combat in Afghanistan for a number of years.
MONTAGNE: Tom, thanks very much.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Renee.
MONTAGNE: NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.
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$20m aid plan for Afghanistan's poorest people
Sydney Morning Herald
By Rory Callinan, Dylan Welch
February 10, 2012
AUSAID is considering a new strategy for Afghan assistance - spending more than $20 million over the next four years on mainly agricultural projects to assist poor residents in drought-stricken areas and to help strengthen local Afghan non-government organisations, a leaked concept paper shows.
The paper, titled Australia Afghanistan Community Resilience Scheme, proposes funding be divided among five experienced NGOs and would seek to assist the ''poorest and most marginalised people'' while at the same time hoping to improve broader agricultural productivity.
AusAID declined to confirm whether any of the concepts outlined in the paper had been adopted. A spokeswoman said the paper was only a preliminary document and still under consideration.
Aid experts who viewed the paper for the Herald had mixed opinions. One believed it signalled an intention by the government to maintain influence in the country if troops were withdrawn.
The concept paper, which has been circulating among the aid community this year, suggests a competitive grants process for several eligible NGOs to get funding over four years and a focus on agriculture and rural development, an area which it noted AusAID needed to improve focus on.
James Goodman, from the aid monitoring group Aid/Watch, said the proposal seemed to be a departure from previous aid funding. ''It is interesting that these organisations [local NGOs] would have a potentially political role in Afghanistan, which is a good thing in most contexts,'' he said.
Dr Goodman said the four-year life of the proposed program seemed to suggest the government would be seeking to maintain influence in the country if troops were withdrawn in the next couple of years.
Australian troops fighting in Oruzgan will stop fighting and start training as soon as early next year. The Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, told Parliament yesterday that some Afghan troops would be able to run independent operations later this year.
However, Mr Smith's remarks, in an update on the war in Afghanistan, stand in stark contrast to recent comments of a whistleblowing US soldier who has defied his seniors and told of a losing war being fought against the Taliban.
''Australia's goal is to prevent Afghanistan from again being used by terrorists to plan and train for attacks on innocent civilians, including Australians in our own region and beyond,'' Mr Smith said.
He also confirmed that Oruzgan would possibly be one of the provinces that changes to local control over the next 12 to 18 months, meaning Australia's main combat role could end as early as next February.
Aside from providing security, Australia is also training the 4th Brigade of the Afghan army, based in Oruzgan. The brigade is divided into several battalions, known as Kandaks.
''The 4th Brigade is increasingly assuming the lead for the planning, preparation and execution of tactical operations … with a number of infantry Kandaks now expected to be capable of conducting independent operations during 2012,'' Mr Smith said.
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Indian role in Afghanistan spells danger for Pakistan
The News International
By Bassam Javed
Friday, February 10, 2012
Afghanistan continues to be an overt or proxy ‘playing ground’ for diverse outside powers, both near (Russia) and far (US, West). The decade old US meddling after the failure of Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 has yielded more familiar results i.e. exacerbated ethnic and cultural tensions, warlordism, drug-trafficking and rampant corruption. It is not that these traits did not exist in the Afghan society before US invaded Afghanistan but US invasion provided a surge in these attributes.
Afghanistan is a fault line where many outside powers are jostling for both influence and position. Some of this jostling remains overt, as in the case of US and its allies, and some of it is not, as in the case of Indian proxy war on Pakistan through Afghanistan. The Indian activities in Balochistan and Fata got a boost when US homed on to it for replicating its mandate in Afghanistan and preserve its interests post withdrawal. After intense interaction between the respective national security advisors, India agreed to fit into American boots. By doing so India would be benefited on two counts one; by safeguarding US interests in Afghanistan it can accrue more American favors ranging from military to nuclear technology and two; it will expand its anti-Pakistan network in Afghanistan and continue sponsoring terrorist activities across borders into Pakistan. As a first step to place India in Afghanistan, US helped India sign an accord with Karzai titled ‘Strategic Partnership Agreement’ that would allow India exploit its provisions to cement its involvement in Afghan military and civil affairs.
Taking the lead from the ‘Agreement’, India is now geared up to impart extensive training to the fledgling Afghan National Army at training institutions across the country. Three areas have been identified under the ‘Agreement’ so far. One; increase in number of Afghan trainee officers, two; specialized training to already serving mid and higher-level officers in ANA and three: training Afghan soldiers in counter insurgency and counter terrorist operations. The Indian military institutions earmarked for the purpose comprise the Commando School in Belgaum in south India, the Counter-Insurgency and Jungle Warfare (CIJW) School in Mizoram in the north East and the High Altitude Warfare School in Sonamarg, Indian Occupied Kashmir.
While America would expect more from India and subject it to ‘do more’ pressures on Afghanistan, Pakistan has had enough of its bitter rival’s already expanded role in Afghanistan post Taliban regime. There are active negotiations taking place between the US and India to replace US trainers in Afghanistan for providing continuity in training of Afghan security forces once US withdraws from Afghanistan. Whenever and wherever the US trainers have been adjusted they always facilitated CIA and other intelligence agencies carry out their covert activities. Indians replicating the role of US trainers in Afghanistan spells danger for Pakistan. The placement of Indian trainers may create more rifts in the already volatile bilateral relationship between India and Pakistan. Some of the opinion makers even go to the extent to term it on par with Kashmir.
The regional security dynamics in South Asia are driven by the conflict between India and Pakistan. Pakistan fears strategic encirclement by India if the Afghan government leans too much towards India, while India is afraid of Pakistan using Afghanistan as a convenient strategic staging area and a back door. Giving a military role to Indians in Afghanistan will simmer the existing tensions between the two countries on various issues while America wraps up its Afghan venture. With the added dimension of nuclear-armed India - Pakistan rivalry combined with likely strife taking place between the warlords and the central government in Kabul and a perpetual conflict between the warlords and the Taliban may create a civil war that no one would like to happen. It will be in the interest of the region if the US reconciles with the India-Pakistan milieu in the Afghan context and leave Afghanistan to the Afghans to decide their own fate.
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Afghanistan's Opium Child Brides
As the heroin trade suffers in Afghanistan, poppy farmers are marrying off their daughters, sometimes to unsavory and far-away men, to pay their debts.
The Atlantic
By Monsicha Hoonsuwan
Feb 9 2012
She was a 12-year-old girl, with fiery green eyes and defiance on her face. Her father had promised her hand to a stranger from Helmand province who didn't speak her language, was more than 30 years her senior, and already had eight children. Her father had borrowed the man's money for his poppy venture. And now it was up to her to repay that debt.
Darya, as she was called in a new book by Fariba Nawa, Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords, and One Woman's Journey Through Afghanistan, represents a growing trend in Afghanistan, a trend in which families marry off their daughters to settle debts originating from the opium trade. "Opium brides," they called them.
Nawa, an Afghan-American journalist, spoke on January 10 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on the impact Afghan's opium economy has on girls like Darya. Nawa met the girl when she traveled to Afghanistan in the early 2000s. She witnessed a town deluged with opium addicts and countless widows whose husbands and sons had died while smuggling drugs across borders. But nothing shook her like Darya. It was the child bride who opened up to her, talked to her as if she was a savior, while others around her hid behind their fear. Darya's narrative, as well as stories of those like her, make perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of the opium trade.
"What's the saddest part? What's the most interesting part of this story to you?" she had asked her guide before she met the girl. "It's the opium brides," her guide had answered. And when Nawa asked him to introduce her to one, he responded, "Oh, which one? There are so many of them."
Child marriage exists throughout the world. Even if the number has decreased globally over the past 30 years, 64 million women ages 20 to 24 still marry or enter a union before they turn 18, according to a UNICEF estimate. In Afghanistan, that would be about 378,000 women. Although Kabul has passed a law to curb the practice, raising marriageable ages to 18 for males and 16 for females, more than 60 percent of marriages in Afghanistan involve girls below the legal age.
Marrying girls at a young age is nothing new to Afghanistan. For centuries, marriages have been used to settle debts and improve a family's financial condition. Many poor households see their daughters as an economic burden and would rather send them off quickly to their husbands. They have also treated women and girls as a means to settle monetary disputes, making them "loan brides" in exchange for debt relief. "But those marriages are within family," Nawa said. Cousins would marry. Two brothers would betroth their son and daughter to each other. But not many would promise their daughters to strangers from a completely different town, men with wives and families, who smuggle drugs and don't speak their language. "It has been done in the past," Nawa said. "But the level and how many are being done is unprecedented inside Afghanistan right now."
Nawa attributed that spike to the opium trade, Afghanistan's biggest industry. Despite the 65 percent increase in eradication in 2011, the country still managed to roll out a growth of seven percent in net poppy cultivation. As a result, opium production in Afghanistan has exceeded global demand for the past several years. A sharp production decline in 2010 barely hurt the world's supply; there was no major shortage of heroin -- a derivative of opium poppy -- reported from the consumer markets. The country is now the center of global heroin manufacture, with roughly 300 to 500 operating laboratories producing about 380 to 400 tons of heroin per year.
The Taliban regime relied on opium production for revenues. It legalized the farming, trafficking and processing of the illicit crop. Its agricultural program consisted of flying experienced poppy farmers all over Afghanistan to teach people the techniques of opium cultivation.
It didn't take much to convince Afghans to embrace poppy. Decades of war have destroyed their traditional orchards. Cyclical drought and poverty hinder Afghan farmers from growing high-profit fruit and saffron, which require an investment in irrigation systems. In the end, it was the poppy that met all the prerequisites: higher yield with less land, little irrigation, and greater profits. With the price high and rising -- 2011 gross income from opium per hectare has skyrocketed 118 percent from the year before -- it would take a lot more than free alternative crop seeds and fertilizer distribution to wean Afghan farmers off opium production.
Poppy seeds and fertilizer also cost money, but start-up farmers are willing to approach traffickers, asking to borrow money with a promise to repay with kilos of opium at harvest time. They know opium is much more promising than wheat. As eradication efforts ramp up, however, farmers who don't have enough to bribe officials end up watching their lucrative crop ripped up and flattened. Gone with it is their hope for a better future -- and, sometimes, their daughters.
"This is a business deal, essentially," Nawa said. "This has become a more common practice because of the opium trade, because this society has disintegrated and family is being interrupted."
Poppy farmers who give their daughters in marriage to lenders receive quittance -- and sometimes a cash dowry that can be used to start a new life. Even so, such opportunity offers little consolation to those who have chosen that path; loan brides are considered a shame to the culture. "The fathers who sell their daughters to settle their opium debts are ashamed of what they're doing," Nawa said. "It is not something that is accepted or normal."
There are no statistics on how many girls have been traded as a result of the opium trade. Data collection isn't the norm in Afghanistan--not even for birth records. And when these marriages are performed without being registered with the state or religious authorities, statistics are likely to be clouded by severe inconsistencies; the real number of girls entering marriage before 18 could be much higher.
Despite the shame and heartache the opium trade has brought Afghan families, poppy cultivation is proven increasingly resilient. For a country that's ranked almost at the bottom of the Human Development Index, growing opium poppy can be a real opportunity. Stories of those who have improved their lives through the illicit crop continue to be a source of inspiration. There are farmers who grow rich and reinvest the opium money to rebuild their communities. There are women who enjoy the ability to work; cultivating and processing opium are done within a compound, thus available to women under the Taliban regime. This gives women a chance to become an integral part of the society.
Still, many farmers want to stop growing poppy, but they won't until they can establish other sources of income.
And it's possible. Nawa has seen it: a woman who was able to quit opium cultivation once she had provided alternative sources of income for her family.
Poppy had given her the money to buy her son a car that he turned into a taxi. She also bought her daughter a carpet frame that turned into another source of revenue. "I think women who do grow poppy are very willing to stop growing poppy if they're able to invest in other businesses," Nawa said.
But such cases are rare. The source of strength in Afghanistan--the Afghan family--has been weakened by the drug trade, war and violence, according to Nawa. Families are broken. People are drowned in a never-ending cycle of poverty. Corruption has sucked away most aid money that could have pulled Afghanistan out of the heroin assembly line, she said.
The country, it seems, has become a network of spider webs that torture the innocent lives as much as the wrongdoers. And girls like Darya are a part of this web, though not intentionally. After many kind attempts to convince her to go with him -- each met with Darya's firm rejection -- the Helmand smuggler finally took her away, marrying the girl before she even reached puberty.
"There are many sad stories," Nawa said. Despite much tragedy she has witnessed while documenting how the drug trade has impacted women, she sees a glimmer of hope. "One thing that you will know, or you will see among the characters is the resilience and their ability to just pick up and keep living. And I think that's where the hope is for women."
This story was reported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, an Atlantic partner site.
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Afghan president postpones handover of US prison
AP
By MIRWAIS KHAN and HEIDI VOGT
February 9th, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday claimed that an airstrike carried out by the international coalition killed eight children in eastern Afghanistan.
The Afghan leader said in a statement that the strike took place Wednesday in the Najrab district of Kapisa province, and that he has assigned a delegation of high-ranking officials and lawmakers to launch a comprehensive probe into the affair.
The coalition confirmed only that there was a "situation in Najrab district" that was being assessed by a team to determine what had happened. More information would be released when the assessment is completed, the coalition said in a statement.
Civilian casualties have caused serious tensions between the Afghan government and the international military coalition.
The U.N. has said that last year was the deadliest on record for civilians in the Afghan war, although the largest cause of death for the more than 3,000 killed were roadside bombs. The total number civilian deaths caused by international and Afghan forces dropped last year, although the number of civilians killed by airstrikes targeting insurgents rose to 187 in 2011, the U.N. said.
Also Thursday, Karzai's office said it has extended by one month the deadline for the transfer of the main American military prison in the country. It said the United States had until March 9 to transfer authority of the prison to the Afghan government.
Parwan Detention Facility is located outside Bagram Air Field, a main NATO base north of the capital, Kabul.
The statement said the delay was caused by a lack of cooperation from the U.S. side.
There was no comment from the U.S.-led international coalition.
The prison holds 3,000 detainees, including Afghans and foreign insurgents, and was to have been handed over on Feb. 5.
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Fresh debate over US mission in Afghanistan
Members of congress pick up insights of soldier who says Pentagon is painting a misleading picture of progress.
Aljazeera
09 Feb 2012
A US army officer has accused the American military of painting a misleading picture of progress in the war in Afghanistan while glossing over the Afghan government's many failings.
Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis's accusations have sparked fresh debate about the US mission in Afghanistan.
"What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by US military leaders about conditions on the ground," he wrote in an article published in Armed Forces Journal, a private newspaper not affiliated with the Pentagon.
"Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level," he wrote under the headline, "Truth, Lies And Afghanistan: How military leaders have let us down".
"How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding ...?"
Troop commanders and politicians say the handover to Afghan troops is going well, but Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis, who has just returned from the country, is challenging those statements in congress.
He says that conditions on the ground are ruinous - a conclusion deeply at odds with the picture of progress put forth by the top US military brass.
It is a rare instance of a US officer openly contradicting his superiors, and Davis’ insights, first published in a military journal on Sunday, have been picked up by several members of congress.
At a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday, the US military’s number-two commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti, answered Davis’ criticism, saying it was only one person’s opinion of the general situation.
“I am confident, in my personal view, that our outlook is accurate,” he said.
Scaparrotti says he does not doubt some of what Davis wrote, and he believes US forces have work to do in training Afghan forces.
Last week Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, said US forces would transition next year from a combat role to training Afghan soldiers and police.
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Afghans Accuse Authorities Of Passport Scam
RFE/RL
By Frud Bezhan, Zarif Nazar
February 09, 2012
A shortage of blank passports in Afghanistan has led to a flourishing black market for the little blue books, according to Afghans who say they have had to go underground to obtain them.
Afghanistan's passport agency announced in October that they were running out of passports, and this situation has been causing problems
With no domestic ID system in place, passports are essentially the country's only official form of identification.
Four months later, Afghan citizens are accusing officials of taking advantage of the shortage by selling the much-desired documents to the highest bidder through hired middlemen.
And with more than 1 million Afghans waiting for a passport, many are more than willing to go down that route.
Mohammad, a Kabul resident who did not wish to reveal his full name for fear that the authorities would confiscate his passport, claims he turned to the black market to buy the document after trying unsuccessfully for several weeks to obtain one through the proper channels.
Soaring Passport Prices
Eventually he bought his passport for about $400 from a "middleman," agents Mohammad believes are hired by corrupt passport officials to sell travel documents on their behalf for large sums of money.
"We came here to get passports," he said. "The problem is that these illegal traders are selling them. We can't get passports unless we pay 20,000 or 25,000 afghanis [about $400-$450]."
According to Mohammad, the going price can sometimes run as high $800. Mohammad maintains that he had to provide adequate documentation to the middleman and that the passport he received is genuine.
General Ayoub Nasiri is head of the Afghan Passport Agency, which is overseen by the Interior Ministry. He claims that a limited number of blank passports were kept available, and are issued under special circumstances, such as when a person has to travel abroad for health reasons.
He denies that any of his staffers are involved in illegal activities, insisting that illegal third parties who seek commissions in return for helping people obtain passports are to blame.
"I ask our people not to take passports from third parties but to go to the offices directly," he said. "They should know the law and their rights; meaning nobody can take money from them. They should know this."
When asked how a third party would be able to obtain a passport when they are only being given out under special circumstances, Nasiri said, "I don't know."
According to Nasiri, the Passport Agency ran out of blank passports last year when it was inundated with applications from Afghans seeking to participate in the Hajj, and from Afghans who had been deported from Iran for not having a passport.
Reforming The System
Dr. Azizullah Ludin, the head of Afghanistan's High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption (HOOAC), a government watchdog, confirmed that some passport officials are issuing passports in return for large amounts of money from citizens.
Ludin believes these examples of wrongdoing highlight the problem with the current passport system, under which the Passport Agency has only one office, in Kabul.
Outside the capital, passports are distributed to provincial leaders and security chiefs who, in turn, issue and sell them through their offices.
In order to minimize the chances of bribery and the processing times for issuing passports, Ludin told RFE/RL that the HOOAC is working with the Interior Ministry to create a passport system that is firmly controlled by government authorities.
"We need to create a passport system in Afghanistan that is national," he said. "Whoever needs a passport shouldn't feel obliged to visit a certain commander or chief, since their primary concern is security. If there were a local passport office anybody could go there and receive the help they need."
In the meantime, Afghans will have to make do with the current system. And it now seems that there is some light at the end of the tunnel -- the Finance Ministry has ordered 1.4 million new blank documents, and 35,000 arrived just this week.
RFE/RL's Radio Free Europe contributed to this report
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Afghan Forces Will be Good Enough to Hold Security: US General
TOLOnews.com
Thursday, 09 February 2012
Afghan forces will be "good enough" to hold their country's security after the complete withdrawal of security troops, a top US General said on Wednesday.
General Curtis Scaparrotti, Deputy US Commander in Afghanistan said that Afghan forces have a way to go before completely taking over the responsibilities.
He also said that the Afghan National Army and Police forces will be good enough to protect their country from insurgents after complete withdrawal of US and other foreign troops by the end of 2014.
"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," Mr Scaparrotti said.
The statements come as US Defence Minister Leon Pannetta has urged the international community to stand by Afghanistan after 2014 and build a strong force to be capable of defending the country.
At the same time, the Nato member countries expect a growth in the number of Afghan security forces.
The forces are expected to increase to 352,000 by October this year with 195,000 of army and 157,000 of the National police.
The state of Afghan security forces has been taken seriously into consideration as the foreign combat troops are withdrawing from the country.
The General also said that US forces will take a supporting role.
"As we move forward, I see combat as part of what we're doing. You know the insurgency itself, the fact that the ANSF will be in the lead and we'll be supporting and will still be a combat role there," he added.
As previously planned by US President Barack Obama last year, the United States will shrink it's forces to 62,000 by autumn of 2012.
Previously the Nato member countries including France agreed to withdraw all their combat troops from Afghanistan by mid 2013.
There are around 132,000 foreign soldiers in the country with 90,000 of them US troops.
Currently the second phase of security transition is underway and the security responsibility of 18 areas of Afghanistan will be handed over to Afghan forces, the transition is expected to end by mid 2013.
The US and its western allies emphasise on their supportive and training role as the transition ends.
Nato allies hope to have the Afghan security forces grow to 352,000 by October, including 195,000 in the army and 157,000 in the police.
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Russia to assist NATO troops withdrawing from Afghanistan
Xinhua
Feb. 9, 2012
MOSCOW
Russia would allow NATO to use its territory to withdraw international troops from Afghanistan, the French Ambassador to Moscow said Thursday.
"We have agreed about transit through Russian territory of the troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan," ambassador Jean de Gliniasty told the local Kommersant daily.
This follows a statement Wednesday by Russian Foreign Minster Sergei Lavrov that Russia and NATO had discussed additional routes for cargo transport via Russian territory to supply international forces in Afghanistan.
Lavrov said the transit would be conducted by rail and air using an airfield in the city of Ulyanovsk in Central Russia.
"We are guided by the desire to assist the international forces to execute their mandate in full," Lavrov said.
The U.S. Defense Ministry has said it plans to complete combat operations in Afghanistan in 2013 and to start withdrawal in 2014.
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Pakistan take Afghan neighbours 'seriously' says coach Mohsin Khan
The National
The National staff with agency
Feb 10, 2012
SHARJAH
The country's oldest international cricket stadium will stage probably the most eagerly-anticipated match of the season when Pakistan play Afghanistan on Friday.
Thousands of Pakistan and Afghan expatriates are expected to pack the Sharjah Cricket Stadium for the first one-day international (ODI) between the two sides.
Afghanistan have played 18 ODIs since gaining status in 2009, but all their matches have been against Associate and Affiliate teams Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, Kenya and Scotland.
The prospect of playing Pakistan, the World Cup champions of one-day cricket in 1992, has excited the Afghanistan players.
"It is a big game," said Mohammed Nabi, the all-rounder who captains the Afghan Cheetahs in the Pakistan T20 league. "We want to play well and give them a hard time. We will try to beat them."
Of their 18 ODIs to date, Afghanistan have won 11 and lost seven. Shafiqullah Stanikzai, the team manager, said his players are up for the challenge against their subcontinental neighbours.
"It's a great opportunity for Afghanistan players and they can't wait for [the game]," Stanikzai told Agence France-Presse. "It's a tough challenge for the team but we will show our qualities and fight to the last. The Afghanistan team is an entertainment package and we will try to give the best possible fight to Pakistan."
Mohammed Shahzad, the Afghan wicketkeeper who impressed against England for an ICC Combined XI in one of the warm-up games for the recent Test series, is hoping to gain exposure from playing such a high-profile game.
"I would like to get contracts from clubs in England," he said. "Just like Mohammed Nabi and Hamid Hassan, I want to make a name for Afghanistan and do well with such professional contracts.
"The boys are very pumped up, and we are confident because we have a team who can beat any international side in one-day cricket."
The cricket relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan goes back a long way, as the game was made popular in Afghanistan by refugees who spent years living in Pakistan when Soviet troops invaded their country in 1979.
In the past three years cricket has progressed in the war-ravaged country. Afghanistan finished fifth in the World Cup qualifiers in 2009 to win the right to play one-day cricket, and the following year they won the qualifying tournament to earn an opportunity to play in the World Twenty20 held in West Indies.
Stanikzai said Afghanistan are progressing fast.
"With this opportunity we hope to build our team and next month we will feature in the World Twenty20 qualifiers and hope to win that again to play the main tournament," said Stanikzai of the World Twenty20 to be held in Sri Lanka in September and October.
Afghanistan's team will be led by Nawroz Mangal. Other key players include Karem Sadiq, Nabi, Mohammad Shahzad and the fast bowler Hassan.
Mohsin Khan, the Pakistan coach, said his team will not take the Afghans lightly. "Afghanistan's team is coming up very fast and we will take them very seriously," said Mohsin, hoping his team carry on their good work from the 3-0 Test series win over England.
"This one-day [international] against Afghanistan will give us an opportunity to switch to the one-day mode before the series against England."
Pakistan have brought called up the all-rounders Shahid Afridi and Hammad Azam for the one-dayers.
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