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11 February 2012
FEATURE STORY
Kabul digs deep to restore grand palaces – and pride
BUSINESS
A carpet economy unravels in Afghanistan
NATION
US-Taliban Talks End Without Result, Pakistani TV Says
A cricket game to end all war? Afghanistan takes on Pakistan.
Informer Misled NATO in Airstrike That Killed 8 Civilians, Afghans Say
The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read
Pakistan arrests 2 in connection with slaying of Afghan ex-president, Kabul officials say
Afghan Children Ensnared in Heroin Trade With Iran
The Taliban Five
Haqqani Leader Captured in Khost
In Helmand, training Afghan Local Police is a challenge
Afghan rogue's rant: Why I shot Diggers
Deported Children in Kabul Face Risks, HRW Says
Afghanistan's Future Is Freezing, Tired and in Need of Help: The Ticker
The 80 percent solution
Teenage girl from Afghanistan to box at Olympics
Pakistani Troops Kill 11 Insurgents near Afghan Border
Lost years: Afghans' incendiary period cut from books
Afghanistan in Transition, Civilians in Armed Conflict, and the Implications of Libya: My Week at NATO
PRESS RELEASES
No articles featured today
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FEATURE STORY
Kabul digs deep to restore grand palaces – and pride
Public asked to donate to renovate historic buildings badly damaged during decades of conflict in Afghanistan
Guardian.co.uk
By Jon Boone
Friday 10 February 2012
Kabul
Few buildings in Kabul are as iconic, or tragic, as Darulaman Palace in the south-west of the Afghan capital.
For decades the symbol of Afghanistan's early 20th-century efforts to join the modern world has lain in ruin after being blasted to pieces during years of civil conflict. The hulking wreck, sitting at the end of what should be the city's grandest boulevard, is roofless, gutted and riddled with bullet holes.
Now Kabul council's bosses say the city is so ashamed of the state of such a landmark that they are asking for public contributions to restore Darulaman and two other nearby palaces.
Billboards asking for donations have gone up around the city, while collection boxes and leaflets have been placed at all government ministries. Some businesses have given tens of thousands of dollars.
"Even if they only give 10 afghanis, that will be a enough," said Khogman Ulomi, the deputy mayor, referring to a sum of money equivalent to about 10p. "People are ashamed of what has happened to their city and the fact the world only thinks of war when they see Afghanistan. We want to rebuild these palaces exactly as they were before."
Despite being nowhere near the target of $30m (£19m), the city has already started replanting the ornamental gardens that surround the raised palace.
It is all part of an incredibly ambitious campaign to modernise and beautify a city which in 30 years has transformed from being a small and pleasant mountaintop town to a booming, overpopulated sprawl that suffers some of the worst air pollution in the world. The city's mayor has won plaudits from international donors for his efforts to refurbish roads and plant thousands of trees around the capital.
He hopes he can now persuade foreign backers to stump up for some prestige projects, including road transport tunnels to run under one of the hills that cut the city in half. There are also plans for a cable car to carry sightseers up and over to an area near the zoo, which the mayor hopes to enlarge and improve.
Attention to the palaces is long overdue, not least because they sit next to a new complex that will soon house the country's parliament.
The buildings are also loaded with Afghanistan's tragic 20th-century history, as they are a symbol of King Amanullah who built Darulaman – the "Abode of Peace" – in the 1920s as part of his ill-fated campaign to modernise the country, which ran into fierce opposition from rural and religious leaders.
The Tajbeg Palace, next to Darulaman, was where the opening shots were fired during the Soviet invasion on 27 December 1979, the day when Soviet troops stormed the palace and killed Hafizullah Amin, the communist president who had displeased Moscow.
The buildings were badly damaged by rockets in 1990 when the communist regime defended itself against a coup attempt by the defence minister.
It was further wrecked by rival factions fighting over the control of the city after the communists were finally toppled in 1992.
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BUSINESS
A carpet economy unravels in Afghanistan
The carpetmaking industry in Afghanistan may be headed for hard times due to cheap competition in China and high-paying alternatives for low skilled laborers.
Christian Science Monitor
By Tom A. Peter, Correspondent
February 10, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan
• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
After centuries as a cornerstone of Afghanistan’s culture and the economy, the nation’s carpetmaking industry may be headed for hard times.
Thanks in large part to a proliferation of both cheap, Chinese carpets and high-paying jobs working for foreign organizations, Afghans are less interested in buying and making traditional rugs.
“After the invasion of the Americans, this industry has been in a continuous decline,” says Anwar Shahrestani, a carpetmaker for the past 35 years. “The carpet industry is headed toward failure if it continues like this.”
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Pointing to a rug four of his children are working on, he explains that it will take three to four months to complete and will net him only $400. He’s uncertain if he’ll find a buyer.
A highly skilled, seasoned carpetmaker can expect to earn about $200 to $250 a month, but the vast majority make less. Weavers’ assistants who do menial detail work can earn as little as $25 a month.
Meanwhile, foreign organizations have created a number of high-paying opportunities for unskilled Afghans who can make the same as a master weaver working as a cleaner for an international charity organization. Salaries for international organizations are good enough to pull local doctors and engineers from their field to work low-level office jobs.
“People have better job opportunities and they can make more money doing other things. Carpetmaking is very boring and repetitive and it pays very little,” says Qurban Ali Nazari, a carpetmaker in Kabul.
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NATION
US-Taliban Talks End Without Result, Pakistani TV Says
TOLOnews.com
Friday, 10 February 2012
The talks between the US and Taliban in Qatar have ended without reaching any results, a Pakistani Tv channel has reported.
A Pakistan TV Channel, Dunya News, has reported that representatives of the Haqqani Network and Hezb-e-Islami led by Gulbduddin Hekmatyar were also present during the talks between the US and the Taliban.
The talks, according to Dunya News, focused mainly on broad-based government in Afghanistan, accepting President Hamid Karzai's leadership, and establishment of a government system similar to the one in Iraq, to which the Taliban have not agreed and the talks have ended without any results.
The Taliban have reported put forward certain demands that have caused the talks to lead to no achievement.
The report has yet to be independently confirmed, but if true this is the first time US representatives have met with representatives of three anti-government armed groups.
The Afghan government has recently announced that it has reached some agreements with Washington, but no details of the talks have been provided.
It comes as the Afghan High Peace Council has frequently stressed on an Afghan-led peace process.
There have been reports previously that the US had held secret talks with some Taliban representatives for ten months, something that provoked strong reaction of the Afghan government.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yosuf Raza Gilani also went to Qatar recently to discuss Afghan peace with officials there.
US officials have announced that Washington is trying to speed up the talks with the Taliban and that it will officially be announced at the upcoming Chicago summit.
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A cricket game to end all war? Afghanistan takes on Pakistan.
Maybe not, but as Afghanistan played its first major international cricket match today against rival Pakistan, some hoped the goodwill between the players on the field would translate into better relations off it.
Christian Science Monitor
By Issam Ahmed, Correspondent
February 10, 2012
Islamabad, Pakistan
For the first time – ever – Afghanistan today played an international cricket match against an elite team. It was against top-ranked neighbor Pakistan, with whom it has a relationship that is sometimes fraught with uneasiness, sometimes full of professions of brotherhood.
But the historic cricket match, which took place in the UAE, both illustrated the love/hate relationship and helped fans on both sides of the border to forget, at least for a while, the tensions that exist between their countries.
“Everyone here is watching the match on TV. It’s very exciting and we’re praying hard for Afghanistan,” Pardis Haidary, a military officer in Kabul told the Monitor over the phone. “Matches like this help build friendship,” he says.
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For newcomers Afghanistan, it was their first chance to pick up the bat against a major international team, having previously only played against other low-ranked teams.
Cricket was brought to war-torn Afghanistan through refugees who picked up the game during their time in Pakistani camps, and is popular mainly in the Pashtun-majority areas in the south and east of the country.
Though Afghanistan is new to the game, its rise has been nothing short of a “wonderful story,” according to the International Cricket Council, which provides the Afghanistan Cricket Board with $700,000 a year to develop the sport.
Relations between the two countries have remained tense since the assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani in September last year. Mr. Rabbani, who was head of a government-appointed peace council, was killed in his home by a suicide bomber posing as a Taliban peace envoy, in an attack that some Afghan officials have blamed on Pakistan’s main intelligence agency.
Both sides, meanwhile, accuse each other of allowing militant havens inside their respective borders to carry out raids in each other’s countries. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari is set to host his Afghan and Iranian counterparts for a trilateral summit in Islamabad next week.
At the popular Kabul Restaurant in Islamabad, staff and customers remained glued to their television, rooting for Afghanistan to pull off an unlikely upset. Though the Afghans eventually lost, Pakistan’s cricket captain, Misbah-ul-Haq, lauded them for the talent they displayed and their fighting spirit, which at times stretched former world-champions Pakistan.
Some hoped the goodwill between the players on the field could translate into better relations off it. “I have been in Pakistan for 19 years, but I can’t get a Pakistani passport,” complains waiter Naqeebullah Kabir. “Now we can’t get visas to visit home, either.”
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Informer Misled NATO in Airstrike That Killed 8 Civilians, Afghans Say
New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and JAWAD SUKHANYAR
February 10, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan
Afghan government officials who traveled to the snowbound village where seven children and a young adult reportedly were killed in a NATO airstrike this week said that the bombing was based on incorrect information.
The officials said that after talking to local residents and seeing the area, they concluded that an informer had misled the French troops who control the area.
The airstrike took place on Wednesday in the village of Geyaba in the eastern Afghan province of Kapisa. Seven boys under 14 and an 18-year-old were killed in the attack, according to Abdul Mubin Safi, the administrative director of Kapisa Province. They were herding sheep less than half a mile from their homes when the bombing happened.
NATO representatives and Afghan officials traveled to the area by helicopter to investigate and returned Friday, said Maj. Jason Waggoner, a NATO spokesman. He said there was no word yet from NATO officials on the findings of the joint Afghan-NATO team.
One member of the team, Mohammad Hussain Khan Sanjani, the chairman of the provincial council who was reached by telephone in Kapisa, said that after talking with people in the village, it seemed that misinformation had been passed to NATO forces.
“These people are involved in animal husbandry, they own sheep and goats, and their children went out to feed the animals behind their village under some oak trees,” Mr. Sanjani said.
“The French troops had a secret report from one of their agents who told them that in that area there were armed men preparing to attack the government and the French soldiers in Kapisa,” he said. “We talked to locals and found that the intelligence was wrong and they targeted civilians.”
The French soldiers, who are largely responsible for Kapisa Province, have faced stiff resistance from the insurgents there and in the Sarobi district of neighboring Kabul Province. Eighty-two French soldiers have been killed in combat since 2001, mostly in those two areas.
France’s military high command did not respond to requests for comment on the airstrike in Kapisa.
The province is divided ethnically, with some areas heavily Tajik and others Pashtun. The Pashtun areas have had a strong insurgent presence that includes both Taliban fighters and fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an insurgent leader.
The Najrab district, where the airstrike occurred, is mixed with Tajiks, Pashtuns and Pashai, and while local officials said it was not held by insurgents, their presence could not be ruled out since Najrab is adjacent to less stable districts.
“The area is not influenced by the Taliban, but there was some sort of illegal weapon smuggling,” said Abdul Saboor Wafa, the Kapisa governor’s chief of staff.
Civilian casualties have caused serious tensions between the United States-led military coalition and the Afghan government. Civilian deaths caused by NATO and Afghan forces dropped last year, although the number of civilians killed by airstrikes that were intended to hit insurgents rose, to 187, the United Nations has reported.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the loss of life in Kapisa and blamed a NATO airstrike in a statement on Thursday.
Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.
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The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read
Rolling Stone
By Michael Hastings
February 10, 2012
Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military's top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. "How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?" Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.
Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled "Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort" – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We've decided to publish it in full; it's well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.
Here is the report's damning opening lines: "Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan." Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is "open source" – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. "If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes," Davis writes. "It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II."
According to the Times story, Davis briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members and sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general, and of course spoke to a New York Times reporter; only after all that did he inform his chain of command what he'd been up to. Evidently Davis's truth-telling campaign has rattled the Pentagon brass, prompting unnamed officials to retaliate by threatening a bogus investigation for "possible security violations," according to NBC News.
Although Davis's critics have tried to brush off his claims as merely the opinions of a "reservist," – as Max Boot put it – his report is full of insight, analysis, and hard data that back up each one of his claims. He details the gross failure of training the Afghan Army, the military's blurring of the lines between public affairs and "information operations" (meaning, essentially, propaganda), and the Pentagon's manipulation of the U.S. media. (He expertly contrasts senior military officials public statements with the actual reality on the ground.) Davis concludes: "It is my recommendation that the United States Congress – the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in particular – should conduct a bi-partisan investigation into the various charges of deception or dishonesty in this report and hold broad hearings as well," he writes. "These hearings need to include the very senior generals and former generals whom I refer to in this report so they can be given every chance to publicly give their version of events." In other words, put the generals under oath, and then see what story they tell.
Michael Hastings is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and author of The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan.
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Pakistan arrests 2 in connection with slaying of Afghan ex-president, Kabul officials say
Associated Press
February 10, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan
Pakistan has arrested two people in connection with last year’s assassination of a former Afghan president who was trying to broker peace with the Taliban, two Afghan government officials said Friday.
The officials said that the two were detained in the Pakistani city of Quetta, the alleged base of the Taliban insurgency.
The police chief in Quetta and the spokesman for the region’s paramilitary Frontier Corps said they had not heard of the alleged arrests. Officials with Pakistan’s foreign and interior ministries did not immediately answer phone calls seeking comment.
Relations with Pakistan soured after the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan’s former president and head of the government-appointed peace council. Rabbani was killed Sept. 20, 2011, in his home in Kabul by a suicide bomber posing as a peace emissary from the Taliban.
Afghan officials blamed Pakistan-based insurgents for the killing, which sapped hope for reconciling with the Taliban and raised fears about deteriorating security in Afghanistan just as foreign combat troops are starting to pull out.
Afghan Interior Minister Bismullah Khan Mohammadi went further, claiming in parliament that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency was involved in the killing. Pakistani officials denied the allegation, calling it baseless and irresponsible.
A special commission that Afghan President Hamid Karzai appointed to investigate Rabbani’s death concluded that the attack was planned in Quetta and that the primary assailant was a Pakistani citizen. The commission gave Pakistani authorities the names, addresses and phone numbers of people in Pakistan suspected of being involved in plotting the assassination.
One of the two Afghan officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive case, said two individuals were arrested in Quetta last week. The other official said the two were on the list of possible suspects handed to Pakistani authorities last year.
The assassin, who hid explosives in his turban, gained entry to the former president’s home by convincing officials, including Karzai’s advisers, that he represented the Taliban leadership and wanted to discuss reconciliation.
No one has claimed responsibility for the killing, and Taliban spokesmen have declined to discuss it.
In a separate development, Afghan officials and the U.S.-led coalition were investigating an airstrike that Karzai said killed eight civilians in Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan.
Civilian casualties have caused serious tensions between the Afghan government and NATO.
The coalition confirmed only that there was a “situation in Najrab district” of Kapisa province that was being assessed. More information would be released when the assessment is completed, the coalition said in a statement.
A delegation of high-ranking officials appointed by Karzai traveled to Kapisa province on Friday to collect information.
Hussain Khan Sanjani, the leader of the Kapisa provincial council, said seven of the victims were children, aged between 6 and 12 years. The eighth victim was an 18-year-old mentally ill man who was with the children.
Sanjani, who visited the area on Thursday, said residents told him that coalition aircraft were patrolling overhead as coalition forces searched homes.
Fearing the presence of coalition forces, the victims rounded up sheep and cows and moved them toward a mountainous area behind their homes, he said. When they got cold, they gathered brush and lighted a fire to keep warm, he said. One airstrike hit a large boulder and the other struck the victims, who were badly burned, according to Sanjani, who said he took photographs of the victims.
Also, a coalition service member died following an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan Friday.
The coalition did not disclose details about the death or the nationality of the service member killed. So far this year, 36 coalition troops have been killed in Afghanistan, according to an AP tally.
___
Associated Press Writer Deb Riechmann in Kabul contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Afghan Children Ensnared in Heroin Trade With Iran
Smuggling endemic in western district, and children used as mules despite risk of poisoning and arrest.
IWPR
By Zalmay Barakzai
10 Feb 12
Afghanistan
Two years ago, Mohammad Reza was a 17-year-old student in Ghoryan, a district in the Herat province of western Afghanistan, spending half his days at school and the other half playing football with friends.
Among those friends, he noticed, some were making huge amounts of money. Reza was fascinated to see them growing richer, igniting in him a desire to have what they had – to own a Shehab motorcycle, to have bracelets and rings and an iPhone.
And so he found himself at the home of a smuggler named Arbab Qoudus, listening closely as the man told him the secret to becoming rich: “The more capsules you swallow, the more money you earn.”
The capsules contained heroin bound for Iran.
Reza agreed to try, and in doing so become one of a growing number of young men recruited by smugglers in a dangerous, sometimes deadly, practice.
An investigation by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in four villages of Ghoryan district found a high number of children who have become entangled in smuggling rings. Some of them never return.
By midnight, Reza had swallowed ten capsules. In an interview with IWPR, he said he wasn’t sure if he could swallow more, but he knew if he could manage another three capsules, he would earn Iranian cash worth 20,500 afghanis, or about 400 US dollars, twice the amount he’d be paid if he only swallowed ten. He swallowed the last three with the help of boiled milk. Thirteen plastic-coated capsules of Afghan heroin were now sitting in his stomach.
The next day, he set out with a group of children and a handler. With fake travel documents, they were waved through the border checkpoint into Iran. There, at a smuggler’s home, he was given laxatives to pass the plastic capsules. The smugglers were only able to retrieve six, however. They paid him for those and sent him back to Ghoryan with seven capsules still in his stomach.
Reza felt the pain in his stomach before he had a chance to shop for an iPhone. He called his family and told them what had happened. His parents took him to an illicit doctor to have the capsules removed by surgery. He survived. But other children have not been so lucky.
According to more than 50 interviews with smugglers, parents and police officials, an estimated 60 children in four Ghoryan villages have died in the past decade after swallowing capsules of heroin, a refined substance that has increased in popularity since the ouster of the Taleban. According to these interviews, conducted over a period of several months, as many as 1,000 children have disappeared from Ghoryan province since 2002 after they were persuaded to smuggle heroin across the Iranian border.
In the villages of Mangwan, Kariz, Barnabad and Sabol-e Haft Chah, parents fear for their children as long as the smugglers remain active. Some children are killed, while others have been thrown in prison. In fact, children are attractive to the smugglers because they are not executed in Iran, where drug trafficking is a serious offence that carries capital punishment.
Yaka Khan, who is now a butcher at the Ghoryan district center bazaar, said he was arrested two years ago in Iran, along with two other smugglers. One of them, a Ghoryan man named Azizullah, was hanged. The other remains in prison. Yaka Khan said he was returned to Afghanistan because he was only 16 when he was caught.
Cautionary stories like those of Yaka Khan and Mohammad Reza may do little to curb the practice of heroin smuggling. Crystallised heroin, often smoked by addicts through improvised water pipes, sells for 1,200 dollars per kilogram in Afghanistan, according to smugglers. Its value doubles in Iran.
In the four villages, there are at least eight major smuggling ringleaders. Two of them agreed to be interviewed by IWPR on condition of anonymity.
The first, a smuggler from Mangwan, said the heroin originates in Helmand province. It is secreted in trucks coming into Herat, in loads of perhaps hundreds of kilograms hidden under other, legal goods.
Children are easy to recruit for smuggling operations, he said, adding that if they are jailed, they will eventually be released.
A child can smuggle five, eight or ten grams of crystal heroin, depending on his size. He swallows the capsules and within a 24-hour period, he will be transported to Iran and will pass the capsules. “We pay them 300,000 tomans [about 260 dollars] for five capsules.”
The second smuggler, who is 53 and operates out of Mangwan as well, said he has used children to smuggle heroin, but says they were all warned of the potential dangers.
Sometimes, he said, parents will rent out their children to smugglers. Other times, children are paid directly for capsules, as Reza was.
Contrary to these claims, child smugglers say they are seldom warned of the dangers.
“The smugglers exploit our poverty and obligations,” said one child, Aarash. He has trafficked crystal heroin many times, he said, but was never told he could be killed.
Ghulam Haidar, a resident of Mangwan village, lost his son Sebghatullah to smuggling. Sebghatullah disappeared for days, Haidar said, and no one in the village knew his whereabouts. A friend learned that Sebghatullah had been arrested in the Iranian border town of Islam Qala. When the friend went to the border, Haider said, “The police handed over his corpse.”
Heroin smuggling has been on the rise in Ghoryan for the last decade. It has become systematised, with strong links and networks. The province is less than 50 kilometers from Herat city and shares more than 170 kilometers of border with Iran. Local smugglers are armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, and they drive the latest-model Toyota HiLux trucks or Land Cruisers. They are not afraid of clashing with police.
Border police can do little to stop the trade. They are often outgunned, and some of them take bribes from smugglers to let them pass.
Last year, Mulhim Khan, the general in charge of the Herat border police, was arrested by the Iranian authorities in Islam Qala on charges related to drug smuggling. He has since been remanded to Pul-e Charkhi prison in Kabul, according to Nazir Haidar Zadah, a provincial councillor in Herat.
Khan had allegedly taken some 70,000 dollars from subordinate officers who abetted the drug smuggling, Haidar Zadah said. The case was widely publicised in the Herat media. One colonel recorded a transaction with the general on his mobile phone. Khan did not fight the charges in court and was put in prison.
Still, counternarcotics police in Herat say they are making some headway. Over the last four years, the police have arrested nearly 500 smugglers in Ghoryan. Five of the suspects were children trying to traffic swallowed heroin capsules, said Ahmad Zia Hafezi, head of the provincial counter-narcotics police.
But there is much more to be done. There are still many parents in the province who are missing their children, and there is no shortage of children willing to take the risk.
These days, Mohammad Reza has given up his dreams of easy money, and is studying at the Yar Mohammad Alkozay School in Ghoryan. He can still feel the pain in his stomach, from surgery that cost his family 800 dollars – double what he earned on his smuggling adventure.
Zalmay Barakzai is an IWPR-trained reporter in Afghanistan.
This report was produced in November 2011 as part of the Afghan Investigative Journalism Fund project, and originally published on the Afghan Centre for Investigative Journalism website which IWPR has set up locally.
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The Taliban Five
Meet the men the U.S. might release as a goodwill gesture.
Wall Street Journal
FEBRUARY 11, 2012
The Obama Administration is pursuing peace talks with the Taliban, and as a goodwill gesture it has been leaking the news that it may pre-emptively release five of their leaders held at Guantanamo. We thought you might like to meet them.
Their identities are an open secret, and last week the White House gave a restricted briefing to a few Members of Congress to win their support. The men are among the 46 out of 171 detainees left at Gitmo that an Administration review in 2010 deemed "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution." Two years later, these detainees are evidently no longer too dangerous.
These upstanding citizens are:
• Mohammad Fazl, around age 45, was the senior-most Taliban commander in northern Afghanistan and their deputy defense minister when captured in November 2001. He was at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress, outside the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, when hundreds of Taliban prisoners revolted against their captors in the Northern Alliance. CIA operative Johnny Michael Spann died in the melee, becoming the first American casualty of the Afghan war. A confidential annex of the Administration's 2010 review suggests that Fazl may be responsible for Spann's death.
According to his secret 2008 Gitmo file, which was published by WikiLeaks, Fazl also commanded foreign fighters in Afghanistan and "possessed vast power and financial resources."
He was close to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Before 9/11, Fazl commanded troops in central Afghanistan who massacred hundreds of Hazaras, a Shiite Muslim ethnic minority. His Gitmo file also says the Iranian government suspects him of "being connected" to the killing of its diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998.
• Mullah Norullah Nori served with Fazl in northern Afghanistan and was with him at Qala-i-Jangi fortress. The U.S. suspects him of involvement in Spann's murder. He is an alleged war criminal for his role in the massacre of Shiite Afghans, which he has told his Gitmo interrogators were justified by the Taliban's desire to "establish their ideal state."
• Mohammed Nabi was "a senior Taliban official" who helped smuggle weapons to attack U.S. troops and finance the Taliban. He is one of a few leaders who was, according to his Gitmo file, "loyal" to the Haqqani network, a terrorist group based in western Pakistan and allied with the Taliban. He has a record of poor behavior while in custody at Guantanamo.
• Khairullah Khairkhwa, former Taliban governor of Herat province in western Afghanistan, was "directly associated" with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, his interrogators say. He met often with officials from Iran, which has tried to undermine post-Taliban Afghanistan. Khaikhwa says he's also a friend of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and his lawyers say he wasn't ideologically committed to the Taliban.
• Abdul Haq Wasiq, 40, was the deputy head of Taliban intelligence, which tortured and murdered civilians. His Gitmo interrogators say he has withheld what he knows about outside Islamist groups that the Taliban worked with to fight the U.S., and he may belong to al Qaeda. His release, says an intelligence source, would be "highly problematic."
The Administration's plan seems to be to turn these five over to the custody of the Qatar government. But once there the U.S. will have lost all leverage over their fate, and the likelihood is that they will eventually be released outright, be traded in a prisoner exchange, or escape. Some or all are likely to rejoin their terror trade.
Congress can't stop these transfers, but it can raise a fuss. At a minimum, Fazl and Nori ought to be properly investigated—and perhaps put on trial—for Spann's murder and war crimes committed in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The release of the confidential sections of the Gitmo review related to the Spann case would also inform a public debate and address widespread concerns on Capitol Hill about any transfers.
The bigger question is why the U.S. would trade anyone in exchange for nothing more than a Taliban promise to talk. As they see the U.S. heading for the Afghan exits in 2014, with military combat operations ending by 2013, the Taliban have little incentive to make any concessions. They know they merely have to wait.
One of the failures of the Afghan campaign is that we still haven't killed or captured Mullah Omar. By freeing the Taliban's senior figures from Guantanamo, President Obama will send another signal of weakness that will make them even less likely to negotiate in good faith.
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Haqqani Leader Captured in Khost
TOLOnews.com
Saturday, 11 February 2012
A Haqqani network leader was captured in a joint operation by Afghan and Coalition troops in eastern Khost province on Friday, Isaf said.
"An Afghan led and coalition supported security force captured a Haqqani Network leader during an operation yesterday," Isaf said in a statement.
The leader operated a bomb-making cell in Mandozai district and planned attacks against coalition forces throughout the province, it said.
During the operation, the security force seized multiple AK-47 assault rifles, shotguns, a chest rack, ammunition and bomb-making materials, it added.
Several suspected insurgents were also detained for further questioning, Isaf said.
Meanwhile, the statement said an Afghan and Coalition security force captured a Taliban leader during an operation in Nad Ali district of Helmand province on Friday.
The leader used specialised weapons to conduct direct-fire and roadside bomb attacks against Afghan security forces throughout Marja district.
One additional suspected insurgent was detained during the operation.
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In Helmand, training Afghan Local Police is a challenge
Washington Post
By Anup Kaphle
February 10 , 2012
KHAR NIKAH, Afghanistan
Inside a cold room surrounded by sand-filled Hesco barriers in the remote Gereshk Valley, British forces are teaching a group of young Afghan fighters how to protect their village from the Taliban.
But preparing a group of angry, illiterate Afghans to fight a deadly enemy that is regularly testing the British forces here in northern Helmand Province is a monumental task. The villagers who have opted to join the Afghan Local Police force in Khar Nikah mistrust one another, say they are not being offered much pay and complain that they need better weapons.
“They expect us to guard a checkpoint with an AK-47,” said Mir Hamza, holding a rusty Kalashnikov as he rubbed the magazine with his shawl. “Even sheep herders carry Kalashnikovs in Khar Nikah.”
As the British forces prepare to hand over checkpoints in the area surrounding their base here, improving the morale and performance of the Afghan Local Police recruits will be a critical challenge.
Local defense programs have become a vital part of military strategy in Afghanistan. The programs began after an incident in summer 2010 when dozens of rifle-toting farmers from Gizab, a strategically important area in Kandahar, drove the Taliban from their village. Following that successful local uprising, the United States was keen to replicate the model for village defense, and the United States has since sent in troops to train local villagers.
The Afghan Local Police, or ALP, is expected to serve as a defensive presence, manning security checkpoints to keep insurgents from gaining ground. Coalition forces hope that this in turn allows the Afghan National Police, a force that receives more extensive training, to go out on patrols and conduct offensive raids.
Some 8,000 Afghan villagers have been recruited into the ALP program, which is formally run by the Afghan Interior Ministry. The local police force is expected to reach 30,000, a goal that the United States and its partners are aggressively pushing.
Although the American plan to create the ALP initially met sharp resistance from President Hamid Karzai, who feared growing warlordism, he later gave the program his blessing. In theory, every recruit for the ALP is vetted by the country’s intelligence service, and the local commanders have to answer to the district police chiefs.
But two years since the ALP’s creation, the program has hit some significant turbulence. The U.S. military has acknowledged human rights abuses by the ALP, and the program has been beset by internal strife.
In districts where the Taliban still put up a fight, the British are having a hard time persuading local residents to join the local police force. In Khar Nikah, the British had hoped to recruit and train about 60 ALP members by the end of last year. So far, there are 26.
Although NATO poured resources into Helmand and the United States launched a major offensive here three years ago, insurgents are still active in the province. Khar Nikah is crucial to NATO because of its proximity to Gereshk, a town that lies at the heart of one of Afghanistan’s most important trade routes, and because of its connection with Route 611, which runs up to the Kajaki dam, a major hydropower project.
“Our biggest challenge is doing things the Afghan way,” said Maj. Spiro Markandonatos, the commanding officer of British forces at the forward operating base in Khar Nikah. “The hierarchical system in the village community doesn’t really allow our methods and process to work.”
Markandonatos’s frustration in the local system grew stronger after repeated disagreements with the ALP commander, Atahullah, who rose to power because his father was a key leader in the village. A few days after Christmas last year, Atahullah, who like many Afghans goes only by one name, resigned following a disagreement over $75. Four other members of the local police resigned the same day.
Atahullah’s father later expressed concern that members of the ALP, including his son, felt that too much was being asked of them while little was being offered to the village. “Other villages have schools, roads and clinics, and we have been saying this again and again, but we don’t have anything here,” said the father, Haji Kader Khan. But the British said the Taliban had been threatening to kill Atahullah, which also played a role in his resignation.
Members of the local police force do not wear their uniform when they are on patrol, something that the British see less as a discipline problem and more as a security risk because it makes it hard to distinguish the insurgents from the police.
“Until one of them gets shot . . . they are not going to learn their lesson,” said a frustrated Capt. Badri Rai, who heads a team that recruits and mentors ALP in Khar Nikah.
Mistrust among villagers and within the ALP has damaged British efforts to efficiently train and recruit more police by early spring. A Taliban commander was recently heard over an intercom asking an ALP member to turn his weapons against the Western forces.
“Some of the villagers in ALP are 90 percent Taliban and 10 percent farmers. Do not let these guys inside the checkpoint compound,” said Rifleman Subash Gurung of the British army.
But there are some young men in the ALP who give the British reason for hope. One of them is an ethnically Pashtun man known only as Torzan who stands 5 feet tall and is referred to as the “Lion of the Green Zone.” After his brother was killed in an insurgent attack and his son was kidnapped by the Taliban, Torzan decided to pick up an AK-47 and side with the British forces in the area.
Torzan said the Taliban has spread word among the locals that the British forces are leaving soon and that the ALP will have to bear the brunt of the battle once the foreigners are gone.
That worries prospective recruits in the area, including the newly elected ALP commander, Khalifa Atullah, a charismatic man who once fought against the Russians. Atullah said he understands that the British are hoping to hand over several checkpoints and patrol bases to his men. But he said his men still need more help to do what is asked of them.
Atullah’s men receive from the British a uniform, an AK-47, a box of 7.62 mm rounds and the mandate to fight the Taliban to protect their village. But he said that is not enough.
“We need sleeping bags, blankets, and we need heavy weapons,” he said.
British soldiers say they cannot trust the ALP with heavy-duty weaponry. Late last year, members of the ALP were implicated in killings, rapes, arbitrary detentions and land grabs by Human Rights Watch.
But a British political officer in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah said the ALP remains a “manageable risk.”
“We can maintain a bar and say anything beyond that is unacceptable, but we can’t enforce our rules onto them,” he said. “At the end of the day, it is their country and they have to run it in their own way.”
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Afghan rogue's rant: Why I shot Diggers
The Age
By Rory Callinan
February 11, 2012
THE Afghan soldier who gunned down three Australian soldiers last year has gloated about his attack and told how his unit comrades fantasised about similar jihad operations.
Mohammed Rozi has appeared in a slick Taliban video boasting of how he ambushed the "heathen" Australian troops with a machinegun and rocket launcher before escaping by joining local Taliban and hiding with nomads.
A manhunt has been under way for Rozi, an Afghan National Army member, since he vanished after opening fire on his Australian mentors on November 8, seriously injuring three. Two Afghan soldiers were also injured in the shooting at remote Patrol Base Nasir in Uruzgan province in Afghanistan's south.
Rozi's escape and video interview appears to be a public relations coup for the Afghan insurgency and raises doubts about whether the proposed shifting of most Australian troops into a training roles will lower the risk of casualties.
The video, linked through what experts say is an official Taliban website, provides a disturbing look inside the insurgency and the mindset of the Afghan troops serving alongside Australians.
In five months last year, Afghan soldiers shot 14 Australians, four of whom died while others suffered serious wounds.
On December 10 last year, The Saturday Age reported on Rozi's attack and a second attack on Diggers by another Afghan soldier, Darwish Alokozai. The report said Alokozai, who killed three Australian soldiers and one Afghan and wounded six other troops before he was shot and killed, may have been brainwashed while in Pakistan.
Experts say the video will be used to inspire jihad recruits.
The 47-minute clip shows a masked interviewer in a turban appearing to ask questions of a relaxed Rozi, sitting cross-legged on cushions. The tubby ex-soldier occasionally dabs at his mouth with a cloth while calmly answering questions on everything from how he mounted his attack to the morale of Australian troops.
"I had one mission on my mind, to kill foreigners and teach them a lesson. We are Muslims, we cannot accept foreigners," he says. "I prepared the grenade-launcher and my gun with 200 bullets. Foreigners [Australians] were sitting in a room. They were fire worshippers around a big fire. There were 12 of them.
"A soldier ran to me and asked me what I was doing. He suspected my motives. I told him that it was none of his business.
"I opened fire . . . when the bullets ran out it was time to use the rocket launcher."
The account appears heavily embellished, with Rozi claiming he killed 12 Australians.
Despite its blatant propaganda, the video has some telling insights into the attitudes of Afghan soldiers in the lower ranks and their impression of their foreign counterparts.
Rozi says he had spent years in a religious school before joining the Afghan army, where he found other soldiers did not accept foreigners.
He decided to attack the Australians because he was a Muslim and did not accept foreigners working alongside him.
He says friends in the army regularly discussed possible attacks.
On one occasion, "for 24 hours we were discussing, and our first discussion point was jihad and killing".
Asked about the Australians' morale, Rozi says they were "very afraid". "They were afraid of bombs, they were afraid of the ambush. They were always going together and when it was dark they would not go because the helicopter would not work."
Local insurgents appeared to have helped Rozi escape.
After fleeing the camp in a stolen Humvee, Rozi says he drove until the vehicle became hot and he saw six people walking back after prayers.
They welcomed him, saying "this is an Islamic country and the Muslims will protect you".
He hid while helicopters circled looking for him, "and by the grace of God, the planes could not see me".
Rozi alleges foreign soldiers would beat the people when searching houses after bomb blasts.
The interview also reveals the Taliban's focus on the departure of US troops in 2014, with the interviewer asking Rozi whether he is aware of the foreigners leaving.
"I know the American soldiers as well as other soldiers from other foreign countries will leave Afghanistan and that too many soldiers have been killed . . . and German and Australian troops and others, they always claim that they want to leave Afghanistan," he replies.
Rozi is asked what message he wants to pass on to his fellow soldiers.
He replies: "My message is that they are Muslims, the sons of Muslims and the father of Muslims and their grandfathers are Muslims and they should never accept the foreigners."
He adds that foreign troops came "to destroy our religion and to root out our religion and destroy other things".
He says his future program is "jihad".
The director of the South Asia Studies Project at the Middle East Media Research Institute, Tufail Ahmad, said the video was already being widely disseminated across websites.
He said it would be of significant propaganda value to the Taliban.
"These cases do really inspire the Taliban and the foot soldiers."
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Deported Children in Kabul Face Risks, HRW Says
TOLOnews.com
By Rezwan Natiq
Saturday, 11 February 2012
The Human Rights Watch has recently published a report that shows unaccompanied children aged between 16 - 17 years are being deported back to Kabul by UK's border officials where they cannot find their families and face horrible risks of destitution, violence and recruitment into armed forces.
Children including Afghans who often travel to Europe, especially Britian without parents are vulnerable to exploitation and take on dangerous work to pay their way for hope to find better life and have a brighter future.
Not only Britain but also Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands are involved in a European platform addressing the issue.
The Human Rights Watch in France has found that immigrant children in transit zones faced degrading treatment by police, detention with adults, little protection from traffickers and a rapid screening system procedurally stacked against them. Most of the children were either deported to their country of origin or to a third country they had travelled through regardless of whether they would be able to find their families or ways.
The Office of the Children's Commissioner for England has recently issued a report which says that immigrant children are being detained and questioned for hours even if they arrive needing medical care, it means that the UK should revise it's policies so that children who arrive in UK could gain access to guardianship assistance and legal help, the Human Rights Watch report says.
The report suggests that Britain can put standards in place that could prevent children from facing irreparable harm when they return to other countries. The UK should ensure that children are sent to a country where they can build a life not somewhere they will face horrible risks.
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Afghanistan's Future Is Freezing, Tired and in Need of Help: The Ticker
Bloomberg
By Katherine Brown
Feb 10, 2012
Afghans under the age of five are literally freezing to death from an especially harsh winter, the coldest in two decades. In camps set up in Kabul for Afghans fleeing the volatile south, at least 22 children have died. The families would rather stay in the camps with no heat or electricity than return to the warmer yet dangerous territory they left behind.
Then there is the harsh economy. On Tuesday, the International Labor Organization reported that children as young as 5 years old contribute to an enormous underage labor market in eastern Afghanistan. They are essentially doing the dirty work of brick-making to pay off their families' debts. It may be better than being an "opium bride," described by journalist Fariba Nawa in her new book, "Opium Nation." Farmers wanting a cut of Afghanistan's $1.4 billion opium business borrow money for supplies from drug traffickers, and some end up paying back the traffickers with their daughters instead of cash.
It's not all bad news. There are 8 million children enrolled in school, 2.4 million of whom are girls -- a stark improvement since 2001. Ninety percent of children have been inoculated against polio and child mortality rates have dropped. Western non-governmental organizations and groups like the U.S. Agency for International Development have scores of programs to provide training, health care and other services to young Afghans.
The coming troop withdrawal in 2014 has attracted most of the headlines. But even after the troops leave, bilateral aid programs and a network of NGOs will remain in Afghanistan to try to build on this progress.
The West has invested a decade into the country -- and during that time, millions of Afghans have been born and come of age: More than two-thirds of Afghanistan's population of 34 million is under the age of 30. As the U.S. prepares to leave Afghanistan, we should also remember those who will lead Afghanistan next.
(Katherine Brown is a member of the Bloomberg View editorial staff.)
For more quick commentary from Bloomberg View, go to The Ticker.
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The 80 percent solution
Foreign Policy (blog)
By Thomas F. Lynch III
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
With the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the United States and Western governments scored a major but still underappreciated victory in the nearly decade-and-a-half-old war against al-Qaeda. Bin Laden's death did not eliminate all of the features of al-Qaeda that make it dangerous as a factor in terrorism internationally. Its role in assisting regional jihadist groups in strikes against local governments and by inspiring "lone wolf" would-be martyrs in acts of violence will remain with us for many years. Yet the manner in which U.S. intelligence and military operatives found and eliminated bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was devastating to three of the five most critical features of bin Laden's al-Qaeda:
* Its legitimacy as a core organization capable of choreographing catastrophic global terrorist events; * Its brand name rights as the ultimate victor should any of its loosely affiliated Salafi jihadist regional movements ever achieve success in a local insurgency; * Its ability to claim that it was the base for certain victory - much one able to less reestablish a credible unfettered training area for global jihad - in the area most critical to its own mystical lore: Afghanistan and western Pakistan;
Bin Laden's demise also degraded by half - but did not eliminate - the fourth and fifth elements of al-Qaeda's essence: its role as a "vanguard" of a wider network of Sunni Salafi groups and its ability to serve as a key point of inspiration for "lone wolf" terrorists around the globe. As a consequence, the death of Osama bin Laden has produced an 80 percent solution to the problems that this unique terrorist organization poses for Western policymakers.
This 80 percent solution has multiple, important implications. Globally, it means that al-Qaeda's growing isolation from alternative, nonviolent approaches to political change in the Muslim world must be reinforced - and is best reinforced - with a deliberate and visible reduction in the U.S. military footprint in Islamic countries worldwide. Washington can best isolate al-Qaeda and limit its ability to reclaim relevance in the struggle for reform in the Islamic world by quietly enabling security forces in Muslim states to counter al-Qaeda affiliates while simultaneously providing judicious and enduring support for Muslim voices for nonviolent political change.
Yet the most immediate implications of this historic development matter to the trajectory of U.S. policy in South Asia. Bin Laden's demise fundamentally alters the current framework of U.S. and coalition strategy in Afghanistan, and challenges the underpinnings of U.S. policy toward Pakistan.
Al-Qaeda's earliest conception of itself - developed in the late 1980s - included the bedrock function of serving as the base for continuing guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan. Its largely Arab and Egyptian core leadership shared a bond forged in the fight against the Soviet Union and felt the victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan to be of Allah's will and making. Since late 2001, al-Qaeda has shared with the Afghan Taliban a view that Pakistan is the natural location for vital efforts to free Afghanistan from foreign rule - to validate the victory over the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by another successful guerrilla war.
At the same time, the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda's core leadership have long diverged in goals and aspirations. These differences were papered over by the personal history between bin Laden and key Afghan Taliban figures - especially the late Younis Khalis, Jalaluddin Haqqani and Mullah Omar. With bin Laden's death, the glue that papered over these fissures is gone. His personal oath (bay'a) to Mullah Omar has no analog with Ayman al-Zawahiri or the cohort of Egyptians and Libyans now at the helm of al-Qaeda's remaining core elements in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda may continue to drape itself in the Taliban flag and proclaim allegiance to Mullah Omar, but with bin Laden's death the Afghan Taliban faces one stark certainty. While it shares a loose but important Salafi jihadist credo with al-Qaeda, it remains dependent on all manner of support for its insurgency from elements within and beholden to the Pakistani security services. Afghan Taliban leaders must calculate their futures based upon this dominant reality. As they do, al-Qaeda's ability to repeat its propaganda performance following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan - taking credit for any (unlikely) defeat of the United States or any important role in the (more likely) successes the Taliban may have in carving out political space in the country - will wither rapidly.
Absent bin Laden, the risks of al-Qaeda's return to unfettered sanctuary in Afghanistan or western Pakistan have dropped dramatically, while the risks of a devastating proxy war between India and Pakistan - nuclear armed nations that have fought three shooting wars and indulged in several other martial crises since 1947 -- over their relative positions in Afghanistan continue to grow. Absent the onset of a stark proxy war between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan, Pakistan's military and intelligence leadership will have very little interest in seeing al-Qaeda again set up shop from which to wage a bloody campaign of international terrorism and will utilize the tools at their disposal to constrain this possibility.
American policy must wake up to the fact that the risks of devastating proxy war between India and Pakistan now dwarf the risks of al-Qaeda's return to unfettered sanctuary and recalibrate its diplomatic energies and military priorities accordingly. The United States must reduce its present focus on killing off every last al-Qaeda affiliated leader or mid-level Haqqani Network operative in Pakistan and pay far more attention to the factors necessary to inhibit proxy war in Afghanistan: a tense but enduring U.S. diplomatic relationship with Pakistan designed to calm its fears that growing Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will become an Indian-directed dagger aimed at Pakistan's back, and diplomatic engagement with Pakistan and India on an acceptable political and security framework for Afghanistan into the next decade. NATO force planners then must devise processes to draw down to the residual U.S./coalition military stabilization forces necessary to stay on for the rest of the decade, enforce this essential Indo-Pakistani framework agreement, and serve as a buttress against points of friction or violence in Afghanistan that could descend into the chaos of a proxy war conflict. These vital outcomes will require earnest and difficult negotiations with the Pakistanis, Indians, Afghan Taliban, and northern ethnic groups in Afghanistan. Negotiations focused on these outcomes have not even begun. It is time that they do.
Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III is Distinguished Research Fellow for South Asia and the Near East at the Center for Strategic Research, part of the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
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Teenage girl from Afghanistan to box at Olympics
Associated Press
By RAHIM FAIEZ
Saturday, February 11, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan
Besides going after a medal in the boxing ring at the London Olympics, Sadaf Rahimi will be taking a few punches in the fight for equal rights for Afghan women.
There are female Afghan success stories, yet most women in Afghanistan remain second-class citizens, many cloaked from head-to-toe in blue burqas, some abused or hidden in their homes.
Rahimi, a determined 17-year-old student, wants to become the new face of Afghan women, gaining honor and dignity for herself and other women in here war-torn country and improving their image worldwide.
She will get her chance this summer in London, where women's boxing makes its Olympic debut.
"When we participate in the outside competitions, there is pressure on us," Rahimi said while training in a makeshift gym in the Afghan capital. "But I will try to show that an Afghan girl can enter the ring and achieve a position for Afghanistan."
In line with conservative norms for women in Afghanistan, Rahimi is expecting to wear black tights under her boxing gear at the Olympics to cover her knees. She trains for hours three days a week, punching heavy bags and sparring with her teammates and trainers.
They throw punches on faded pink and green mats covering a concrete floor of a room in an Afghan sports stadium where the hardline Taliban regime used to stage public executions. The female boxers still don't have a real boxing ring to hone their skills.
After the Taliban banned women from participating in sporting events, the International Olympic Committee suspended Afghanistan from the games. Afghanistan missed the 2000 Olympics in Sydney as a result. The Taliban were toppled in 2001 and the suspension was lifted the following year. Afghanistan sent female athletes — for the first time in its history — to the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
Rahimi, who has the support of her family in Kabul, is following in the footsteps of Robina Muqimyar, the female Afghan runner who competed in Athens. Another woman, Mehboda Ahdyar, was scheduled to go to the 2008 Beijing Games but couldn't compete because of injuries.
"I am well aware that my opponents in the London 2012 Olympics are more powerful and even twice as good as me, but I have prepared myself to participate and win a medal," said Rahimi, who started boxing four years ago and won a silver medal during a boxing competition in Tajikistan.
Female boxing is an unusual sport in a country like Afghanistan, where most of the women are still struggling for their rights and get little respect in the male-dominated society.
Recently in Baghlan province in the north, 15-year-old Sahar Gul was locked up, beaten with cables and tortured by her husband and in-laws after she refused to work as a prostitute. They deny any wrongdoing. She became the bruised and bloodied face of women's rights in Afghanistan after being rescued in late December when an uncle called police.
Her story shocked Afghanistan and prompted calls to end underage marriage. The legal marriage age in Afghanistan is 16, but the United Nations estimates that half of all girls are forced to marry before their 16th birthday.
In Kunduz province, also in the north, a 30-year-old woman named Storay was killed last month because she gave birth to a third baby girl, instead of a boy. Storay, who used only one name, was slain, allegedly by her husband, when her third child was 3 months old. Her husband has left the family.
Despite such atrocities, there are increasing opportunities for Afghan women who want to participate in sports, said Mohammad Saber Sharifi, the coach of the Afghan female boxing team.
The team was established by the Afghan Olympic Committee in 2007 and so far has registered more than two dozen female boxers.
Rahimi, who fights in the 54-kilogram (118.8 pounds) weight class, will get into the Olympics through a wild card berth. She plans to travel to London on Feb. 19 to train for several weeks. In May she will fight in a competition in China, but win or lose there, she will be at the Olympics in London.
"Sadaf Rahimi is the only girl who will participate in these games," Sharifi said. "She will represent all Afghan women, which makes her the biggest female personality in Afghanistan."
Things have been much easier for male athletes in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan's first Olympic medal winner was Rohullah Nikpai, who won a bronze medal in men's taekwondo in 2008, defeating rivals from Germany, England and Spanish world champion Juan Antonio Ramos at the Beijing Games.
Because of insecurity in Afghanistan, his family fled to Iran where he grew up. He returned to Afghanistan in 2004 — four years after the Taliban government collapsed. After participating in Beijing, he became a symbol of national pride.
"In the 2008 Olympics, I won a bronze medal and I am hopeful to win a gold medal in the Olympic 2012 in London," Nikpai said.
Two other male athletes will round out the foursome who will represent Afghanistan in this year's games. Massoud Azizi, a 25-year-old, 100-meter sprinter who competed in 2008 in Beijing, and Nasar Ahmad Bahawi, another taekwondo fighter.
"The people are expecting a lot from us. We know we will face the hardest opponents," said Bahawi, who practices inside a newly built gym at the sports stadium under the supervision of a foreign coach and Afghan trainer. "We have the prayers of our people, and God willing, we will do well."
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Pakistani Troops Kill 11 Insurgents near Afghan Border
TOLOnews.com
Saturday, 11 February 2012
At least 11 insurgents were killed and 19 others were wounded in Pakistani troops' operation in northwest of the country on Friday, local officials said.
The operation was launched in the Kurm tribal region near the border with Afghanistan.
Pakistani security officials said that the military fired artillery shells at three suspected hideouts in the Mamozai area of Kurm, where dozens of people have been killed in fierce fighting between Pakistani soldiers and insurgents in the last few weeks.
The death toll could not be independently verified, but militants often dispute official accounts.
Pakistani officials said that the military has conducted military operation in Kurm to wipe out insurgents.
It comes as recently US missiles killed the most senior al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan, one of America's main targets in the country.
Badr 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, according to reports.
US resumed drone operation on 10 January in which several insurgents have been killed or wounded.
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Lost years: Afghans' incendiary period cut from books
The Age
By Kevin Sieff
February 11, 2012
KABUL
In a country where the recent past has unfolded like a war epic, officials think they have found a way to teach Afghan history without widening the fractures between long-quarrelling ethnic and political groups: leave out the past four decades.
Government textbooks funded by several foreign aid organisations do just that, pausing history in 1973. There is no mention of the Soviet war, the mujahideen, the Taliban or the US military presence. In promoting a national identity, Afghan leaders deemed their history too controversial.
''Our recent history tears us apart,'' Afghanistan's Education Minister, Farooq Wardak, said. ''We've created a curriculum based on the older history that brings us together, with figures universally recognised as being great. These are the first books in decades that are depoliticised and de-ethnicised.''
Students are expected to get the textbooks in time for the school year this northern spring. The books are the only ones approved for public classrooms as part of the new curriculum.
Afghan officials insist the new textbooks will be a state-building tool, offering a fresh perspective to a generation raised during a war but unencumbered by the biases of the past four decades. In that time, warring political and ethnic groups used their own course materials, peppered with their own heroes and villains.
''That's how we got our extremist ideas,'' the director of publication and information for the Education Ministry, Attaullah Wahidyar, said.
Foreign powers deepened divisions, distributing textbooks to further their own agendas.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union printed books that stressed communism's virtues and the importance of Marxist theory. Near the end of the Cold War, the US spent millions on Afghan textbooks filled with violent images and talk of jihad as part of a covert effort to incite resistance to the Soviet occupation. During the Taliban's reign in the 1990s, conservative Islamic texts were imported from Pakistan.
When educators and politicians started to overhaul the curriculum in 2002, they were intent on undoing the politics of Afghan historiography. But they could not agree on how to address the country's descent into civil war or its various insurgent groups.
Educators suggested the solution was to omit the period after King Mohammed Zahir Shah, whose ousting in 1973 began an era of political instability.
Despite broad consensus, some Afghan scholars and educators claim the new textbooks mark an abdication of the ministry's academic responsibility.
''This will be the biggest treason against the people of Afghanistan,'' said Mir Ahmad Kamawal, a history professor at Kabul University. ''It will be a hindrance to all of our spiritual and material gains over the last four decades.
''All these young people will be deprived of knowing what happened during this period.''
The Washington Post
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Afghanistan in Transition, Civilians in Armed Conflict, and the Implications of Libya: My Week at NATO
UN Dispatch
February 10, 2012
Earlier this month, I spent a week at NATO with eight other bloggers, attending briefings on issues as varied as the mission in Afghanistan and cyber security. Unfortunately, most of those briefings –the interesting ones in particular– were on background only, but here’s a round-up of what stuck me as most relevant to the issues Dispatch readers follow.
On the security transition in Afghanistan: Having lived and traveled widely in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, I have serious concerns about the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army — as do most Afghans.
Senior NATO officials believe that the Afghan security forces are making sufficient progress to meet or even exceed the requirements of the transition schedule, though some admit that the Afghan National Police are lagging behind the Afghan National Army in preparedness to assume full responsibility for security in the country.
Still, the transition must move forward on or ahead of schedule, officials insisted during briefings. By mid 2013, the Afghan security forces will be in control of the entire country, with international forces responsible for training and assisting their Afghan counterparts but no longer leading combat operations.
Details of the post-2013 role of international forces were discussed in closed-door sessions at the NATO defense ministerial and will be finalized at the NATO summit in Chicago in May.
On the protection of civilians in Afghanistan: 2010 and 2011 were especially bloody years for Afghan civilians, with thousands killed and maimed, primarily by the Taliban and other militant groups and allegations of serious human rights violations levelled at pro-government Afghan militias.
While I was at NATO, I asked about how the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force was working with the Afghan security forces to promote the protection of civilians and create mechanisms for investigations and compensation following incidents in which civilians are harmed.
NATO officials explained that Afghan forces were being trained to adhere to the laws of war, but they also admitted that ISAF trainers believe Afghan forces will be less careful than their foreign counterparts in avoiding killing civilians, especially as they take the lead in more combat operations.
Grim new UN statistics support that assessment. According to a report recently released by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the number of civilian deaths attributed to the actions of the Afghan security forces increased by a whopping 200 percent in 2011 compared to the previous year.
On the Libya mission and the future of NATO interventions: Although I had followed the run-up to the Libya intervention closely (I had friends stranded in Benghazi, which made the policy questions surrounding NATO’s involvement personal), I didn’t know that NATO had engaged in an unprecedented degree of communication with civilian organizations to prevent the inadvertent targeting and killing UN personnel, diplomats, and aid workers. This intrigued me.
NATO officials explained that, through what they called a “de-confliction system,” diplomatic delegations, UN agencies, NGOs and the International Committee of the Red Cross notified an unclassified NATO contact point in Italy of where their personnel would be in Libya, and NATO adjusted the execution of its air strikes accordingly.
Compared to similar historical air campaigns, the Libya campaign caused relatively few civilian casualties. This is a point humanitarian and human rights groups on the ground agree on.
However, NATO officials insisted that there are zero “verified” cases of NATO-inflicted civilian deaths. Semantically, that’s true –because NATO has so far refused to carry out on-the-ground investigations into alleged civilian casualty incidents. The Alliance did submit a report to the UN’s Libya Commission, but human rights advocates continue to stress that warring parties have a responsibility to carry out their own investigations and follow up with compensation to harmed civilians.
US Ambassador Ivo Daalder, during an on-the-record briefing, called the Libya operation “a model of how NATO can enable collective action,” on threats to international peace and security. Later, when asked how the Libya precedent might affect the Alliance’s approach to Syria, other officials strongly emphasized that NATO will not carry out any military operation in the Middle East of North Africa without a Security Council mandate.
But then, when pressed further by one blogger’s question as to whether NATO would ever consider taking future military action against large-scale atrocities in the MENA region without a Security Council resolution, officials told our group that every new situation would be considered individually, and that they could not make statements about thresholds.
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