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26 May 2012
FEATURE STORY
Afghanistan's fabulous ruby mines plundered by thieves
BUSINESS
No articles featured today
NATION
Hollande Confirms Early Withdrawal in Afghanistan Visit
US general: Afghanistan better vetting recruits
Afghan Parliament Approves Afghanistan-US Strategic Pact
France's Afghanistan pull-out signals war fatigue driving European defense cuts
A NATO Summit That Marks a Low
Media For Afghan Women’s Rights
One Taliban Bullet, Two Lives Lost
US Drone Strike Kills 4 Militants in Pakistan, Security Officials Say
Revealed: Britain to build its own Afghan militia after troops withdraw
A Bookseller in Kabul
Kandahar schools brave harsh realities
Ryan Crocker Says Cases Of Afghans Killing NATO Military Counterparts Can Be 'Personal'
Pakistan is turning into another Afghanistan
US troops practice for peace in a Texan Afghan village
Even if NATO rushes to the exits, Afghan collapse is not inevitable (+video)
U.S.-led wars create humanitarian disasters: report
PRESS RELEASES
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FEATURE STORY
Afghanistan's fabulous ruby mines plundered by thieves
BBC News
26 May 2012
Only a few hours' drive from the Afghan capital Kabul is an area renowned for some of the world's brightest and most valuable rubies. But this wealth is being plundered by thieves, corrupt officials and the Taliban, as the BBC's Bilal Sarwary discovers.
The sun was about to rise over the Hindu Kush peaks surrounding Kabul when we hit the road to Jegdalek.
It is a mountainous area noted for its rugged beauty in Kabul's Surobi district, some 96km (60 miles) south-east of the capital.
There are opium crops here, but it is ruby mines that have earned Jegdalek such renown.
It is seen as a part of the country which could hold the key to many of Afghanistan's pressing economic woes.
"Jegdalek mines have been worked for more than 500 years," one tribal elder told me.
"They are known for their high-grade blood-red rubies, which were popular with royalty across the world."
Mineral curse?
But the great and the good willing to pay magnificent prices no longer purchase Jegdalek rubies. Tribal elders say that instead the mines are being plundered by thieves, corrupt officials and the Taliban.
The situation has become so worrying, officials say, that President Hamid Karzai has become seriously concerned.
"He is aware that we can easily become [like certain] African countries, where mineral worth is a curse, not a blessing, and could be used to further destabilise the country," a presidential official told the BBC.
There is supposed to be a ban on ruby mining because the government views the mines as national wealth. Despite government denials, local traders in Jegdalek bazaar openly display newly-mined gems.
Jegdalek is not a wealthy area, sandwiched between the snowy passes of Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains on one side and Pakistan's Parachinar valley on another.
There are mostly mud houses and ruins - its few roads are in a poor condition and locals say that there is no electricity or drinking water.
Like much of rural Afghanistan, the government's diktats are of little consequence here, which is why the ruby mining ban is so flagrantly flouted.
Officials admitted to the BBC that the government was not in control of dozens of mines for precious and semi-precious stones around the country.
"The Taliban are greedy and they lure locals to mine the area unprofessionally," says Wasil Khan, a disgruntled resident of a village near the mines.
"Unskilled miners dig huge, deep holes, fill them up with gunpowder and then set them on fire. Such blasts have damaged the mines as well as the wealth that lies underneath."
To the mines
The hills of the area are covered with hundreds of white trenches, leading the way to the mines themselves.
Mr Khan says that the mines rarely produce the red rubies they were once famous for - more often than not semi-transparent pink sapphires are the only gems found, even at depths of 150m (492ft).
But those who are illegally mining think otherwise, and the government clearly contends that much of value still lies deep within the soil here.
Once a major base of mujahideen fighters during the Soviet invasion of the country, local officials say that two-thirds of Jegdalek is now controlled by the insurgents.
"The Taliban tell the locals to work here," police officer Mohammed Talib - who accompanied us on our tour of the region - told us.
"They tell them: 'We will give you 25% of the profit on the rubies you bring. The best rubies are on Taliban's side of the mountain'."
Dr Talib said that every Friday the Taliban organises a ruby bazaar near Jegdalek in the small village of Soar Naw - a remote and mountainous area covered with deeply forested valleys.
Here they sell rubies which are then smuggled to Dubai, Pakistan and Thailand.
Just two months ago, the Taliban reportedly smuggled a ruby out of the area which sold for $600,000 (£383,000) in Dubai. While there is no way of substantiating this claim, similar stories abound.
"The income from rubies is used to buy weapons and pay fighters. If we can somehow plug this source, it will be a big blow to Taliban finances," an intelligence officer accompanying the police party said. 'Losing millions'
Police say that other criminal groups - working under the name of the Taliban - are exploiting the area's wealth and denuding the landscape solely for cash returns.
The police officer took me inside one of the mines. It is a vertical, narrow trench surrounded by thick marble walls about 4m (13ft) long with a hole in the surface. Yet despite this compelling evidence of recent mining, police insist the ban is being enforced.
As I was trying to look deeper into the mines, a policeman came running up to the commander and said something in his ear.
"We will have to wind up," the officer said. "My men have spotted some suspicious people on one of the hills. They could be locals, but I wouldn't like to take a chance."
As we prepared to make a hasty exit, nearly a dozen Taliban fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns took positions in the nearby hills, less than a kilometre away from our position.
Back in Kabul, mining official Tamim Asey admits that the government is losing millions of dollars every year as powerful warlords, tribal chieftains and corrupt officials collude to rob the nation of its natural resources.
He says that the priority is to ensure that revenue from the mines - which for years has been the source of wealth for different power brokers - goes to the government and people of Afghanistan.
"It is unfortunate indeed that the country's assets are not benefiting people who need it most," Mr Asey lamented.
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BUSINESS
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NATION
Hollande Confirms Early Withdrawal in Afghanistan Visit
TOLOnews.com
Saturday, 26 May 2012
French President Francois Hollande defended his plan to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan by the year's end - two years before the Nato deadline - during a surprise visit to Afghanistan Friday.
The French leader met with troops and discussed plans with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to withdraw the French combat troops two years faster than Nato's 2014 pullout schedule.
Hollande said that around 1,400 French soldiers of the 3,400 total would remain in Afghanistan to help with training and logistics.
He confirmed that all of France's 2,000 combat troops would be brought home by the end of this year - giving France an earlier exit that sparked consternation among some allies at a Nato summit in Chicago last week.
Hollande, who became President less than a fortnight ago, said that after more than a decade in Afghanistan, French combat troops had carried out their mission and it was time for them to leave in an early pullout coordinated with the US and other Nato partners.
"The time for Afghan sovereignty has come," he said during a meeting with troops at a base in Nijrab district in eastern Kapisa province.
"The terrorist threat that targeted our territory, while it hasn't totally disappeared, is in part lessened."
Nato has set a pullout date of 2014, when Afghan troops are to take over security control.
Karzai welcomed Hollande's withdrawal plan and thanked him for the support of Afghan people over the past years.
Most of France's troops are based in Kapisa. Eighty-four have been killed during the deployment, which began in 2001.
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US general: Afghanistan better vetting recruits
Associated Press
By JULIE WATSON
25/05/2012
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif.
The commanding Marine general in one of Afghanistan's hardest-fought regions said Friday he is seeing big improvements in the vetting of Afghan recruits to the country's security forces following attacks by Afghan soldiers on their NATO partners.
Maj. Gen. C. Mark Gurganus told reporters at Camp Pendleton in a teleconference call from Afghanistan that he believes Afghan forces will take the lead in securing Helmand Province by this fall — faster than expected.
Gurganus said Helmand's provincial chief of police told him May 19 that he has imposed new policies including enforcing an age limit of 18 for police recruits, barring police from bringing guests into their posts, and strictly holding commanders responsible for their officers' actions.
Gurganus, who took over command of the U.S. Marines in Helmand Province in March, said soldiers who go on extended leave or travel to Pakistan are being rescreened.
"They are watching these guys a little more carefully," Gurganus said. "They are taking some steps that are really huge in terms of their culture. They've really taken this to heart."
There have been about 20 deadly attacks by Afghans in uniform on their NATO partners this year, including one May 6 that left one Marine dead and another wounded. The shooting, in which the Afghan soldier was killed in return fire by coalition troops, marked the second recent killing of a U.S. Marine in Helmand by an Afghan soldier. The coalition does not report attacks in which an Afghan security force member wounds or misses his U.S. or allied target.
Persistent violence and the insider attacks have undermined President Barack Obama's efforts to show progress in stabilizing Afghanistan. They also have raised the level of mistrust between the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan partners as NATO prepares to hand over the security reins to local forces ahead of a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of combat troops.
Gurganus said some of the soldiers may have been ideologically opposed to coalition forces, others may have gone over to the other side after going home on leave, or their families may have been threatened by insurgents. He said the Marine Corps has been reemphasizing its cultural training to try to curb incidents of troops offending their Afghan counterparts.
The general spoke the same day French President Francois Hollande defended his decision to pull the country's 2,000 combat troops out of Afghanistan two years early. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced the accelerated withdrawal after four French troops were killed by a rogue Afghan soldier in January.
A speedy withdrawal by others nations would destabilize the plan for Afghan forces to gradually take charge of the country's security over the next 2 1/2 years.
The Afghan army and police have started taking charge of security in areas that are home to 75 percent of the population. The goal is for Afghan forces to be in the lead across the country by mid-2013. NATO and other foreign forces would then assume a support role for the 352,000-strong Afghan security forces until the end of 2014.
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Afghan Parliament Approves Afghanistan-US Strategic Pact
TOLOnews.com
Saturday, 26 May 2012
Afghanistan's parliament approved Saturday a strategic pact between Afghanistan and the US, clearing the way for a US presence in the country.
The agreement is for at least a decade after the foreign combat troops will leave Afghanistan after 2014.
Nearly 200 MPs were present at today's parliamentary sitting and only five voted was against the pact.
The pact was signed by US President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul on May 2, but requires the approval of Afghanistan's parliament its US counterpart to be enacted.
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France's Afghanistan pull-out signals war fatigue driving European defense cuts
Disillusionment with warfare, coupled with economic troubles, has given European defense cuts strong momentum. But defense experts worry they are being made too haphazardly.
Christian Science Monitor
By Isabelle de Pommereau, Correspondent
May 25, 2012
Frankfurt, Germany
On a visit to Afghanistan today, newly inaugurated French President François Hollande reiterated his commitment to a full withdrawal of French combat troops by year’s end, well ahead of NATO’s 2014 withdrawal.
France’s decision highlights the high level of so-called "intervention fatigue” among NATO’s European members as the decade-old Afghanistan conflict winds down and they face the need to make drastic budget cuts to remain solvent.
“The idea that we have to be a good policeman of the world has been totally discredited, and we’re going to stay home for a while,” Nick Witney, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London, said following the NATO summit in Chicago earlier this week, which Mr. Hollande attended. “We know now that we can’t do it. We just don’t have the power.”
The summit highlighted what military experts believe will be Europe's greatest challenge in the post-Afghanistan era: balancing the desire and need to scale back defense spending while supporting a force strong enough to respond to any future challenges and maintain deterrence.
“The real challenge to the security and prosperity of Europe's people is to continue to count – to avoid being marginalized in a world where newer and more hard-nosed powers make the rules and assert their interests and values while Europe retreats into retirement,” Mr. Witney says.
More and more, the solution defense experts trumpet is the pooling of military resources, which would make a limited budget go further. But individual countries’ unwillingness to cede total control of their military resources has proven a formidable obstacle. Intervention fatigue
For decades after World War II, clear confrontations shaped European defense strategies: the cold war, the regional conflicts following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the so-called War on Terror that followed 9-11. But Afghanistan’s financial and human toll has led to a dwindling of already tentative public support for the NATO effort there, and warfare in general.
“Afghanistan has led NATO countries to rethink their attitude about crisis management, to be less willing to have really complex operations that might spiral into civil wars, where you find yourself with a problem that’s so complex you cannot solve it,” says Henning Riecke, head of the transatlantic program at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.
As a result, European governments are less willing to spend their limited funds on military endeavours.
“There is no appetite to repeat such lengthy and expensive conflict that result in such huge loss of life,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, head of the International Munich Security Conference, one of the world's largest gatherings of national security officials, on the eve of this past winter’s conference. “A new era is beginning with a greater measure of critical self restraint regarding the use of military resources.”
Faced with huge deficits and war-weary publics, European governments, from powerhouse Germany to comparatively minor player Bulgaria, have taken steps to slim down their militaries, including closing bases, canceling orders for new military equipment, and abandoning efforts to modernize aging arsenals. Many countries feel there is plenty of room to trim without eroding their defense capabilities.
The greatest military restructuring has been in Germany. Its past as an aggressor and its own reluctance to fight kept Germany’s military confined to peacekeeping missions for decades, and the NATO mission in Afghanistan – in which Germany has the third largest troop presence – is the first time since World War II that German soldiers have had a combat role.
The mission showed how ill-trained and equipped its soldiers were. Using the momentum of a mandate to cut €8.3 billion ($10.4 billion) from his budget between 2010 and 2015, then defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg pushed a massive overhaul designed to make the army “leaner and more efficient.” He ended the draft and proposed a plan to close 31 of the country's 328 military bases, among other things. Learning to trust
Few dispute the merits of the overhaul, and even defense spending cuts are not that controversial. What defense experts see as problematic is that the decision was made without consultation of or coordination with NATO or the European Union – a process repeated throughout Europe.
"Every member state is cutting armed forces without transparency and consultation, without an architectural idea for what will be left," Witney says.
Countries are making the decisions mostly autonomously. There is no understanding of who has what and no overarching vision for European defense going forward. Why is it, ask experts, that European military leaders are still trained at 27 different military schools, or that there are so many different types of aircraft in the countries' individual air forces?
In part it is because countries cling to their ability to determine their defense capabilities and have different understandings of the importance of a robust military. In the smallest European Union countries, defense budgets have been cut by as much as a quarter, but Sweden and Poland, for instance, have continued to fuel their military.
“Cooperation is a difficult topic because it means giving up areas of sovereignty – you have to resign on some of your capabilities, to trust the partner,” says Justyna Gotkowska of the Center for Eastern Studies in Warsaw. “This trust isn’t there yet. It is starting but it will be difficult,” she says.
Witney calls on heads of governments to initiate the pooling and sharing of their military resources. “'We'll buy your submarines if you buy our tanks,” he says, describing an example of a way European countries could complement each other. "If one nation makes tanks better and cheaper, another can close its tank factory.”
A review of each member state's defense and security strengths and weaknesses would be a good starting point, experts say.
But despite a commitment on paper to a common defense and security strategy, European countries are “still in a phase where countries cling to their defense abilities,” Mr. Riecke of the German Council on Foreign Relations says.
“There is a certain amount of political will to cooperate that is not yet translated into action. But as the financial pressure is in, that could change,” he says. US to Europe: Step it up
While conflicts within Europe are unlikely, there is always the potential for upheaval caused by events outside the region – a possibility that is especially worrying to a less militarized Europe as the United States’ reorients itself away from Europe and toward Southeast Asia.
Earlier this year the Obama administration announced the withdrawal of two heavy armor brigades from Germany, which will reduce the number of US Army troops there from 42,000 today to 37,000 by 2015. It will also leave the United States with only two Army bases on the continent: one in Germany and one in Italy. The US Army had 277,000 soldiers in Europe in 1962, at the height of the cold war.
The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya underscored Europeans’ dependence on the US. Although Europeans took command of a NATO mission for the first time, the US provided most of the logistics, equipment, and intelligence, and the US now foots 75 percent of the NATO bill.
In Brussels last year, former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates lashed out at Europe for not doing enough to pay for its own defense.
"The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” Mr. Gates said.
“Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders...may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost," he concluded.
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A NATO Summit That Marks a Low
New York Times (blog)
By DANIEL POLITI
May 25, 2012
NATO member countries this week formally ratified a way to wind down their involvement in Afghanistan next year. That’s progress of sorts, but with little talk of the hardest issues raised by the protracted war, some analysts are saying the meeting also exposed NATO’s shortcomings.
“Finding a respectable exit from the ten-year conflict against the Taliban and its allies has become the overriding priority,” points out The Economist. But “rather than plotting a convincing path to that goal, Chicago showed how difficult it will be to reach.”
According to an editorial in Daily Outlook Afghanistan, President Barack Obama’s reference to the withdrawal as “a process” is a “clear indication” that “the game is just entering into another stage which will be bloodier for Afghanistan.”
For Patty Culhane, an Al Jazeera correspondent, the summit left unanswered “the most important question: what will life be like for the people of Afghanistan?” “During the entire two-day discussion about ending the war, the leaders never — not once that I heard — publicly addressed the issue.”
For some, such omissions are telling. “To me,” writes Najmuddin A. Shaikh in Dawn, a Pakistani daily, “the summit suggested that America and its NATO partners, despite the hoopla and the brave words, are quite prepared to cut their losses in Afghanistan and treat it as a lost cause.”
It certainly seems that NATO’s “ambitions have been reduced to leaving with some modicum of order rather than any sense of that elusive concept, victory,” writes Jeffrey Simpson in Canada’s Globe and Mail.
Does this scaling back undermine the usefulness or legitimacy of the organization? The alliance’s backers may “keep up the façade of NATO being the greatest guarantor of global peace and security, but it looks like a narrow American instrument,” argues Sreeram Chaulia in The Asian Age.
“There is no reason for Nato to be involved in Afghanistan, other than the military convenience of the United States,” claims Francis Matthew in Gulf News. In fact, “NATO made a tragic mistake when it gave itself the authority to get involved outside its core territory of Europe and North America.”
Writing in China’s People’s Daily, Zhang Yun argues the summit was a reminder of how “the two sides of the Atlantic have an increasing divergence of views on the orientation of NATO.” And that’s one reason “NATO is being marginalized.”
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Media For Afghan Women’s Rights
Council on Foreign Relations (blog)
By Isobel Coleman
May 24, 2012
Earlier this week, as NATO leaders at the summit in Chicago pondered Afghanistan’s future, a group of worried Afghan and American women met on the sidelines to discuss strategies for protecting the fragile gains that Afghan women have achieved in the past decade. They are right to be concerned. As Western powers reduce their presence in Afghanistan over the next two years, the Taliban will undoubtedly attempt to reassert their harsh control in Kabul and the north and west of the country where women have made the most gains. Girls’ education will likely continue to be a troubling battlefield. Increased access to education for girls is one of the few bright spots since the overthrow of the Taliban. In 2001, less than 3 percent of girls attended school while today more than 40 percent do. However, Taliban attacks against girls’ schools and teachers occur with alarming frequency. Just in the past month, the Taliban poisoned hundreds of schoolgirls and several teachers in two attacks in a northern province. One attack used powder to contaminate the air in classrooms; another contaminated drinking water.
More broadly, violence against women in Afghanistan is an endemic and pervasive problem, across all sectors of society. As of January this year, approximately 400 Afghan women were in jail for so-called “moral crimes” such as running away from an abusive marriage. Police regularly force women who are trying to flee domestic violence to return to their families, knowing–and approving–of the new beatings to come. Last year, the Afghan government (in an appeal to more conservative segments of society) attempted to pass a law that would heavily regulate the few women’s shelters that NGOs have formed in various cities. The proposed law would have forced battered women to appear before an eight-member government panel that would also have had the power to send the woman to jail or return her to her abusive home; fleeing women would be subject to a physical exam that could involve a “virginity test.” Proponents of the law blamed the women’s shelters for encouraging women to leave their homes, even characterizing the shelters as brothels. The law would have also brought the independently-funded shelters under the control of the Afghan government, which has hardly been a supportive partner. Fortunately, critical media attention eventually compelled the Karzai administration to approve a different version of the law that women’s groups supported.
The spread of courageous new media in Afghanistan has been another bright spot of the past decade, particularly with respect to shining a light on women’s issues. For example, the hugely popular soap opera “The Secrets of This House” deals with all sorts of controversial subjects such as corruption, drugs, love, and the role of women in society. Saad Mohseni, the Afghan founder of Tolo TV which produces the soap opera, explicitly views this show and others as levers of cultural change.
Broadcaster Sami Mahdi, the director of news and current affairs at an independent television station, is another brave Afghan trying to change attitudes toward women. One of the shows he hosts is called “Niqab” (Mask), which tackles the sensitive issue of violence against women. Women appear on the show with their faces covered and answer questions from a live audience about their experiences with domestic violence and rape. Their face-covering gives them the courage to speak openly. This week, Madhi won the prestigious Knight International Journalism Award for his innovative and daring programming. As international troops depart Afghanistan, ensuring the survival of independent media like Tolo TV and that of Sami Mahdi will be hugely important–not only for giving women a voice, but for continuing the slow process of cultural change that has started in the past decade and that the Taliban wants to reverse.
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One Taliban Bullet, Two Lives Lost
Wall Street Journal
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
Updated May 25, 2012
COMBAT OUTPOST MARGAH, Afghanistan
Spc. Keith Benson, 1st Platoon's medic, liked to joke with the soldiers in his care: "Don't mess with me or you're on the no-morphine list. Really make me mad and you're on the no-tourniquet list." On his arm he wore a tattoo of a hyena. On his chest was inked: "Why so serious?"
On Jan. 18, about halfway through his first combat tour and shortly before a scheduled home leave, the 27-year-old soldier sat in his room at an Army base in the snowy mountains near the Pakistan border. He held a 9mm pistol, the weapon medics carry to protect their patients in battle. He put the muzzle to his head and pulled the trigger.
He left behind a two-word note. "I'm sorry," it said.
For many in the military, some of the toughest blows aren't from battle but its aftermath. In the field and at home, many troops wrestle with depression, trauma, anxiety and substance abuse. Sometimes, combat veterans struggle to overcome the guilt of outliving their friends.
Between 2004—one year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—and 2010, the rate of self-inflicted deaths among active-duty Army personnel rose from 9.6 per 100,000 to 21.8 per 100,000, surpassing the civilian rate in the U.S. for the first time in 2008, according to a U.S. Army study released this year.
This story, gleaned from interviews and firsthand accounts, offers a rare glimpse into one case of suicide in the field.
At Spc. Benson's memorial service, his fellow soldiers had no answers. They wondered why he hadn't asked them for help. Some were angry at him for adding an intentional death to so many unavoidable ones. Many, however, recalled the ambush four months earlier, when Spc. Benson battled to save the life of Staff Sgt. Daniel Quintana, a popular and charismatic soldier known as Sgt. Q.
The two men were stationed at COP Margah, an Army base 6,700 feet up the mountains separating Pakistan from eastern Afghanistan. The region is a migration corridor for insurgents seeking winter refuge in Pakistan or returning to Afghanistan for the fighting season.
The soldiers of Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, rotated into the area around COP Margah last summer. They patrolled nearby villages for insurgents who might be plotting attacks.
On Sept. 10, 2011, Charlie Company's 1st Platoon went on a foot patrol to Towr Wurskai, a village of houses and towers made from the same brown mud that covers the mountains. Villagers watched from rooftops and doorways.
The soldiers were led by Charlie Company's commander, Capt. DeShane Greaser, a 35-year-old from Winston, Ore. Capt. Greaser grew up idolizing men who led during wartime, such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln: "Guys," he said, "who knew what they believed in and stuck to it."
When it came time to return, the captain decided to take a shortcut. As the soldiers moved down a narrow lane between two cornfields, water from the fields created a muddy path that sucked at their boots.
At about 5:40 p.m. the first soldiers crossed a riverbed and the Taliban sprang their ambush. The insurgents—there were at least 25 by Army estimates—attacked from three positions.
Machine-gun bullets carved trails through the head-high corn. Sgt. Terence Kaiser, a 26-year-old from Texarkana, Texas, fired back from behind a fallen log. Incoming bullets sprayed bark in his face.
A minute or so into the firefight, Sgt. Kaiser heard the soldier next to him yell: "Sgt. Q is hit."
Sgt. Kaiser saw Sgt. Quintana lying on his stomach. At first, Sgt. Quintana looked blankly in his direction. Then his head dropped onto his rifle scope. Sgt. Kaiser scrambled to him. "Sergeant—you OK?" he asked. "Q? Q?"
Sgt. Kaiser pulled Sgt. Quintana off the embankment and rolled him onto his back. He and another soldier, Staff Sgt. Joseph Lunney, hoisted Sgt. Quintana by his body armor and dragged him into the partial cover of some trees.
Sgt. Kaiser yelled for Spc. Benson. "Benson, get the f— over here," he shouted over the gunfire.
Spc. Benson had been in Afghanistan about two months. Sgt. Quintana was his first battlefield casualty.
From an early age, Keith David Benson was a perfectionist, even an obsessive, with a taste for the macabre, his parents said. He sang tenor in the high school choir in Norwood, Mass. The red-haired teenager was fascinated by horror movies, the gorier the better, even as he worked at a nursing home, caring for Alzheimer's patients.
In ninth grade, he surprised his parents by announcing he wanted to be a mortician. After high school, he briefly studied mortuary science in Pennsylvania but decided he wanted to be closer to home.
He was laid off from an entry-level logistics job with Coca-Cola Co. Out of work, he turned to the Army in 2010, attracted by the job of medic—a position that combined his interest in medicine with his urge to help people. He pursued it with his usual perfectionist zeal, his family said, and earned the affectionate title of "Doc," the name soldiers uniformly call their medics.
The 30-year-old Sgt. Quintana was more seasoned than Doc Benson. He grew up in Huntington Park, Calif., an indifferent student who joined the Job Corps, a government training program, to finish high school. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served in Spain as a military policeman. When he got out four years later he couldn't find work, said his father, Daniel Quintana Sr.
In 2005, he joined the Army and became a tank commander. "He wanted to be out there on the line," his father recalled. Sgt. Quintana's first tour, in Iraq, whetted his appetite for combat. "Dad, I love what I do," he told his father.
Sgt. Quintana, who had a son from a previous marriage, met his wife in Spain. She had a son of her own and was pregnant with the couple's daughter when he shipped out for Afghanistan last summer.
Sgt. Quintana shared Doc Benson's impish sense of humor. He once dropped his trousers to reveal a smiley-face tattoo to the company's physician assistant, 1st Lt. Ben Ingram. "Is this normal, Doc?" he had asked wryly.
At first, Doc Benson and Sgt. Kaiser couldn't find a wound on Sgt. Quintana. Then they unclipped the front of his bulletproof vest, lifted the pocket containing the ceramic plate and saw the blood under his right arm.
They unzipped the sergeant's jacket and pulled up his tan T-shirt. The wound looked white, almost like a scrape. It wasn't bleeding too badly. Doc Benson and Sgt. Kaiser felt a moment of relief. Maybe the bullet had only grazed him.
They rolled Sgt. Quintana onto one side, then the other. It took only a short time to find the exit wound. The back of the sergeant's T-shirt was soaked in blood. Sgt. Kaiser saw the tip of the bullet poking from his back. He pulled it out and handed it to Capt. Greaser.
Sgt. Kaiser pressed his knuckle into the exit wound to stop the bleeding and reached around Sgt. Quintana's chest with his other hand to cover the entry wound.
After Doc Benson bandaged the sergeant, he checked his vital signs. He found no pulse.
Doc Benson's eyes met Sgt. Kaiser's. The sergeant saw fear and desperation. Sgt. Kaiser told him: Just keep working.
Doc Benson put his mouth to Sgt. Quintana's and exhaled. Then again. He put his hands together over the sergeant's heart and pressed 30 beats. Two breaths. Thirty beats. Two breaths. Thirty beats.
Taliban bullets shattered the cornstalks and tree trunks around them.
Sgt. Kaiser lifted Sgt. Quintana's legs and pumped them up and down to force blood toward his head and heart. "You're not done yet," he told the injured man. "Think about a Corona on the beach." A pulse returned, but Sgt. Quintana's breathing was ragged.
Doc Benson suspected air had seeped in through the bullet holes, crushing Sgt. Quintana's lungs. He inserted a needle into the sergeant's chest to allow the air to escape and give the lungs room to inflate. There was a pop and a hiss as the needle went in.
Doc Benson lost the sergeant's pulse again. He gave another panicked look. Doc Benson and Sgt. Lunney traded off breathing and chest compressions. Sgt. Quintana's heart started then stopped.
Doc Benson and the other men revived him a third time. Sgt. Quintana's pulse held steady.
Mortarmen stationed at the outpost fired explosive rounds over the patrol and onto the Taliban positions.
The fighting had quieted by the time the medical helicopter landed. Sgt. Quintana was breathing when he was carried aboard. Doc Benson and the others had kept him alive for nearly an hour.
After the helicopter left, the soldiers gathered Sgt. Quintana's gear—rifle, night-vision goggles, radio—and trekked home.
Capt. Greaser stuck close to Doc Benson on the 30-minute walk. The medic was silent. "There's absolutely nothing [more] you could have done," the captain said.
When the captain arrived back at base, one of the senior enlisted men caught his eye and shook his head. The message: Sgt. Q hadn't made it.
Capt. Greaser gathered the company in the chow hall that night. The medics stood behind Doc Benson in a protective cocoon as Capt. Greaser spoke. "Sgt. Q died," he said.
Doc Benson dropped his face into his hands and wept. The other medics stepped forward to touch his shoulders. One of them, Spc. Jason Duncan, hugged him. "It's all right, man," he said. "We'll get through this."
"If it's anyone's fault, it's mine," the captain said. He had chosen the route that took them into the ambush.
Doc Benson and Sgt. Kaiser hadn't been close before Sgt. Quintana's death. That night, they wandered the base together in silence.
Afterward, Doc Benson went to the medical area and sat on a plywood trauma table. Lt. Ingram, the 30-year-old physician assistant, from Portland, Ore., recounted what the surgeon had said: There was nothing anyone in the field could have done. The bullet had penetrated both lungs and nicked his spinal column.
"I'm proud of you," the lieutenant told him. "Today you're a combat medic."
The next day, Lt. Ingram pulled Doc Benson from patrol duty to give him a week to recover. They went over the case during long hours in the aid station. He asked Doc Benson if he wanted to be sent to the rear. He didn't.
In the weeks after Sgt. Quintana's death, the brigade lawyer opened an investigation, a routine step. Capt. Greaser and others provided a detailed report. Doc Benson's account was less precise.
Capt. Greaser called the medic into his office to say the lawyer wanted a more thorough narrative. Capt. Greaser told Doc Benson nobody thought he had mishandled the sergeant's treatment. The medic seemed to accept the reassurance, the captain recalled. But he sensed Doc Benson was still preoccupied, even as the unit nominated him to receive an award for valor.
Doc Benson talked to his father, David Benson, about his disappointment over not saving Sgt. Quintana. He eventually stopped talking about it, and Mr. Benson thought his son had come to grips with the loss.
A month passed. Doc Benson's platoon moved from the Margah outpost to a forward operating base, FOB Boris, about 10 miles away. Sgt. Kaiser went, too.
The two men sat up late nights talking about Sgt. Quintana. Both suffered disturbing dreams about the death, nightmares they felt only the other man would understand, said Sgt. Kaiser.
After a few weeks, Sgt. Kaiser returned to the Margah outpost. He worried about leaving Doc Benson behind. The men exchanged messages daily on Facebook. Sometimes they joked, the usual Army banter. Every now and then, Doc Benson asked the sergeant if he still had the dreams.
Doc Benson seemed to be recovering, at least to many of his colleagues. Sgt. Jason Wolfington, the company's senior medic, told him, "Let it go. You've still got a job to do."
Sgt. Kaiser sensed a pall in Doc Benson's instant messages. "It was a lot of what-ifs," Sgt. Kaiser recalled. "What if he'd done things differently."
Insurgents lobbed rockets at FOB Boris on the afternoon Doc Benson took his own life. After the attack, soldiers scoured the base for casualties. A medic found him in his chair. The bullet had gouged a hole in the ceiling.
Word reached Capt. Greaser at the Margah outpost. "Make sure nobody is by themselves," he said, ordering soldiers to sleep at least two to a room.
When Sgt. Kaiser heard the news he lay on the bed, put on headphones and stared at a photo of his fiancée, trying to take his thoughts away from Afghanistan.
The next day the captain flew to FOB Boris and gathered Doc Benson's platoon in the chapel. "We don't know why he did what he did," the captain said.
A week later, Capt. Greaser called Doc Benson's parents. "I'm really sorry he's gone," the captain recalled telling them. He described how their son had brought Sgt. Quintana back to life three times. "He never quit," the captain said.
The official investigation couldn't conclude why Doc Benson took his own life. He and his girlfriend had broken up a couple of months earlier, his family said. A number of the soldiers interviewed said he was still struggling with his failure to save Sgt. Quintana. His parents thought of his need for perfection.
After Doc Benson's death, the 172nd Infantry Brigade issued a new order: Any medic who loses a patient or deals with a mass-casualty event must return to headquarters for a psychological assessment.
Charlie Company held a memorial service in the chow hall at COP Margah, the same place where the captain had announced Sgt. Quintana's death and held his memorial. That ceremony had been full of praise. The mood was different this time: grief, anger and confusion, said soldiers who attended.
The commanders spoke of Doc Benson's battlefield courage. The chaplain lamented that he hadn't asked for help.
Spc. Duncan broke down when the soldiers standing in the snow outside fired a 21-gun salute. In the weeks that followed he had a hyena tattooed onto his forearm. "R.i.p. Brother Benson," it read.
Sgt. Wolfington, the senior medic, was angry. "He had a lot more options," he said. "There's always people to talk to."
Sgt. Kaiser later seemed a man haunted. He was trying to quit smoking, but when he spoke of Sgt. Q and Doc Benson, he lit one Camel from the smoldering remains of the last.
"I don't want to relive the bad moments," he said. "My biggest concern now is making sure nothing happens to any of my guys."
On April 24, another soldier from Charlie Company, 22-year-old Spc. Manuel Vasquez, shot himself while standing guard in a watchtower at COP Margah. The case is under investigation.
Write to Michael M. Phillips at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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US Drone Strike Kills 4 Militants in Pakistan, Security Officials Say
TOLOnews, with agencies
Saturday, 26 May 2012
A US drone attack early Saturday killed at least four militants in a northwestern Pakistani tribal district bordering Afghanistan, security officials said.
The strike is the third such attack in the region in four days, with a total death toll said to be around 13, but as high as 17.
The attack took place at a house near Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan tribal district, a known hide-out of Taliban and al Qaeda-linked militants, the Pakistani officials said.
"A US drone fired two missiles at a house and at least four militants were killed," a senior security official told AFP.
"The identities of the militants killed in the drone strike were not immediately known," he added.
Two other officials confirmed the attack to AFP.
Pakistan's semi-autonomous northwestern tribal belt is considered by the US to be the main hub of Taliban and al Qaeda militants plotting attacks on the West and in Afghanistan.
Pakistan says the missile attacks are counterproductive and violate its sovereignty.
At least four militants were killed on Wednesday by a US airstrike, followed by another five to nine deaths by a drone attack on Thursday, both in the same region.
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Revealed: Britain to build its own Afghan militia after troops withdraw
As foreign forces prepare to stand down, Nato is ready to fund a local replacement with a dark history
The Independent
By Kim Sengupta
Saturday 26 May 2012
Kabul
An Afghan security force which has faced corruption allegations is to be doubled in size as the West embarks on its exit path from the war.
The government militia, say coalition commanders, has proved to be highly effective in combating the insurgency in their own back yard, and needs to be strengthened.
The ranks of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) are to rise from the current 15,000 to 30,000 as international troops begin the drawdown for 2014, a deadline reiterated at this week’s international summit in Chicago. Officials in Kabul, who strongly refute charges of malpractice against the force, hold that the numbers should be further augmented by another 10,000 if necessary.
Crucially the ALP is not included in the total strength for country’s military and police – the subject of an ongoing debate with proposals for the numbers to be cut from 352,000 to 228,000. Senior officers have warned that too hasty a reduction would prove damaging at a difficult time with fledgling Afghan forces taking over control of security throughout the country. Iraq, with a smaller population, they point out, still faces serious violence despite having security forces numbering 670,000.
The lightly armed bands of the ALP, raised to protect their communities, have been engaged in bitter and often bloody clashes with the Taliban in rural areas with a degree of success.
However, there have also been charges that its fighters have been involved in corruption and abuse, with some of the allegations based on reports of US soldiers training the local police units in a Pentagon-funded study.
The ALP was set up by General David Petraeus when he commanded Isaf (the International Security Assistance Force) in Afghanistan. It is partly modelled on militias which turned the tide against the Iraqi insurgency when he was leading Coalition forces in that country. President Hamid Karzai was initially reluctant to authorize raising the levy due to apprehension that the armed men may become ‘private armies’ for regional power brokers, but eventually did so putting it under Ministry of Interior supervision.
Sami Sadaat, a security analyst and former policy analyst in the Ministry of the Interior, warned: “We must be careful of what we are creating.” In some southern parts of the country the local police, he claimed, “are taking the law into their own hands, beating people and taking money. Yes, they helped remove the Taliban. But in a way they replaced them by doing these kinds of things.”
The allegations are disputed by others. Sayed Hotak Naimtullah, a former security adviser to the Karzai government, said: “Yes there have been cases of criminality, but comparatively few considering we are in the middle of a hard war. The fact is the ALP are based around their own villages and they will not last long if they rob their own people.
“There is a case, in fact, for expanding the ALP, we could take between another 8,000 to 10,000 more on top of 30,000. Compared to the army and other police branches they are cheaper and often more productive.”
Lieutenant General Adrian Bradshaw, the British deputy commander of Isaf, said the ALP has “proved to be extremely effective, they have local knowledge and they can defend their communities”. He added: “I recently went to Kunar province where I saw them operate and I was impressed. They are doing well in interdicting, cutting insurgent supply routes. They are armed with AKs [Kalashnikovs] and PKMs [machine guns], and good training is frankly all they need.”
Lt Gen Bradshaw confirmed: “The total strength of the ALP is around 15,000 at the moment. It is due to rise, in time, to 30,000.”
The total strength of the Afghan police and army, excluding the ALP, is due to rise to 352,000 by October. However, some countries who will be providing funding for Karzai's government after 2014, want the total to be reduced to 228,000. This will reduce the total bill for the Afghan military from $6.1 billion a year to $4.2bn.
On average, Afghan soldiers and policemen are paid around $300 a month. Members of the ALP receive a lower salary of about $200 a month, although this may rise to $300 in the future.
Lieutenant Colonel Dino Bossi, commanding officer of 1st Battalion Welsh Guards, in charge of police training in Helmand, said: “We maintain a zero-tolerance when it comes to corruption. I am not saying it does not exist, but a lot has been done to tackle it. The fact is that of all the police units the Taliban fear the ALP the most. They are local people, they know who is who, what people are up to, they spot suspicious strangers.”
Brigadier Doug Chalmers, the commander of the UK’s Task Force Helmand, acknowledged that the Afghan police force had an unenviable reputation in the past, but stressed that there has been significant improvements.
“When I came into Nad-e-Ali [a Helmand district] two-and-a-half years ago the police were despised, absolutely hated by local nationals. They weren’t trained, they weren’t well paid so they survived effectively by preying on the local population” he said.
“But it is not the same institution any more. There is now a system in place to check for corruption, senior officers show a great commitment to upholding standards and the population are more confident about the police.”
The type of fighting the ALP is engaged in is often internecine, vicious and, at times, treacherous with insurgent infiltration. In one attack two months ago a member of the police at Paktika, on the Pakistani border, put sleeping drugs in their tea and slaughtered them when they were helpless.
Arif Mohammed Rauf, serving with an ALP unit in Paktika, knew some of those killed. He said: “The Taliban and their Pakistani masters are afraid of us and so they want to kill us, so when we find them we kill them, although sometimes we arrest the terrorists. We know we have to be careful all the time but we have the help of our villagers who know we are there to protect them.
“Is there corruption? Yes we have had some police who take have taken ushur [part of a farmer’s harvest as tax ] because they say it is their right because they are defending the villages. But we have made them pay the farmers money for that because, otherwise, the next time the farmers will help the Taliban. If there are more serious cases then more serious action is taken. We do not want to end up dead because of mistakes made by others.”
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A Bookseller in Kabul
The Diplomat
By Sanjay Kumar
May 25, 2012
The Shah M Book Co. sits on the corner of a dusty street in central Kabul that’s lined with stationary shops. At first glance, only a keen eye would spot this nondescript storefront, which looks as if it has remained unchanged for years. The blue paint on the door has faded, while the glass at either side of the main entrance is covered in dust, obscuring the view of what’s inside.
But as you enter the shop, you’re transported into a different world. Books are stacked high on the shelves, and straight ahead stands a tall man bespectacled in a white cap with an Afghan scarf draped around his neck. He gets up from his chair to welcome you. My hesitant steps confirm his suspicion that I’m a first time visitor and foreigner.
“Are you an Indian?” he asks.
It’s a common question in Afghanistan. They want to be sure who they are talking to, and the response will steer the conversation in very different directions.
What appears to be a small shop from the outside is actually quite large on the inside. Everywhere except the where the owner and his young son sit is taken up by books, with the latest publications on Afghanistan dotting the front row of the shelves.
The owner, Shah Muhammad Rais, claims to have “the largest collection of books on Afghanistan, more than 3,000, not to be found anywhere in the world.”
A wooden staircase takes you to the first floor, where books in the local languages and on various subjects are spread across the shelves. A small door on the left leads you to the other side of the first floor. Among the piles of books are some stacked in bundles to be delivered to different provinces around the country.
In the absence of a good public library, this bookstore also acts as “a research library containing over 17,000 titles of books about Afghanistan in a variety of different languages providing unparalleled information about the country,” proclaims the store’s website.
The store also contains rare manuscripts and monograms that are hard, if not impossible, to find in libraries. Afghan students are allowed to come here to study, free of charge. The shop also lends books to students studying in other parts of the province, and will send copies of books out on request, for free.
To fund such philanthropy, the owner admits to charging foreigners a little extra for their books. He complains that decades of conflict have deprived the Afghan people of the chance to develop regular reading habits.
Rais says all kinds of people come into his shop. Stanley McChrystal, the former head of the International Security Assistance Force, is said to have come here to buy books, and when Afghan President Hamid Karzai found out about the variety of books here, Rais says he sent some members of his staff to buy some.
“When I started the shop, society was calm…But unfortunately everything has changed – and all for the negative, nothing positive has happened,” Rais says.
Jailed twice during communist control, Rais also recalls having to close his shop for a month during the Taliban era.
“For one month the Taliban closed the bookstore. But my business was shut for a year during the communist time,” he says. “The communists were more rigid than the Taliban. They suspected everyone to be a Western agent, and they arrested me twice.”
For Rais, the Taliban simply represented yet another extreme of behavior. “Life came to a standstill during that time. The city became deserted, business was completely down. It was a terrible time.”
But 10 years on, and Rais is still unhappy, with the hope sparked by the fall of the Taliban having been dashed by a decade of conflict.
“We don't have a clear future in Afghanistan. I don't see any light coming to Afghanistan. The West should have won the war against terrorism and they should have stopped the war by this time. NATO is a powerful force, but they are failing in front of a tiny group of Taliban,” says Rais, who has also penned a book, “Once Upon A Time There was a Bookseller in Kabul,” as a rejoinder to the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad’s depiction of him, which mostly dealt with his personal life.
“At least when the Soviets left the country there was a system and administration in place,” he says. “The government machinery was working properly, we had a national army we could trust. Now everything is disturbed. You have mafia-style corruption in the country.”
Such skepticism is rife as Afghans mull the withdrawal of international troops scheduled for 2014.
Regardless, though, Rais says he doesn’t want such uncertainty to affect his commitment to the shop and the society it serves. Ultimately, he hopes simply that he and his shop will do what they have always done: endure.
Sanjay Kumar is reporting from Kabul.
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Kandahar schools brave harsh realities
Despite a reinvigorated desire for learning in southern Afghanistan, the region's education statistics remain damning.
Aljazeera
By Mujib Mashal
25 May 2012
Dand, Kandahar, Afghanistan
The teachers at Mia Noor Mohamed Middle School fear losing their beloved institution, one classroom at a time.
Only a few of the rooms in the two-storey building, just a 30-minute drive from the provincial capital, remain open for learning. The entire second floor is a police post, where a couple of dozen young soldiers dine and sleep in bunk beds lined up against the walls.
Several months ago, one of the police officers briefly brought his wife and kids to stay with him, and they took up a classroom. Now, a young officer is asking the small school of about 200 students to vacate yet another room, allegedly to put up a teacher their commander has hired to teach the troops basic literacy. Sceptical of the reasons, the principal is on the phone, trying to avoid losing one more classroom.
"The soldiers walk in front of our young students listening to songs, carrying their guns… and sometimes even joints of weed," one teacher complained.
One morning, the same teacher said he collected dozens of bullets spread around the classrooms and returned them to the soldiers before he could allow the students in.
"What kind of a learning environment is this?"
The daily struggle of schools in the region to remain open is testament to a reinvigorated desire for learning in a province that has historically lagged behind in education. The recent decades of violence, for which Kandahar - and Afghanistan's south more generally - has borne an unequal brunt, has worsened the plight. Until today, there remain three districts in the province, with an estimated population of 30,000 people, that have never had a school, according to Sher Agha Safi, the provincial education chief. More than 100 schools in other parts of the province remain closed due to Taliban threats.
And the statistics are damning. Afghanistan's 34 provinces had more than 150,000 high school graduates in 2011, according to data provided by the ministry of education. But Kandahar, the country's second-largest province, produced an abysmal 1,823 graduates, just 0.12 per cent of the national figure.
Safi has managed to reopen 13 of the closed schools in the past two months. The province has 137,000 registered students, 37,000 of them girls.
"For this large province, that is a small number," he admits.
Amid murmurs of peace talks, even if a compromise deal were to be reached with the Taliban to bring relative calm to the region, the abysmal education record means a vast number of uneducated youths, without skills that give them hope, will remain vulnerable to exploitation.
Fear of Taliban
The location of Mia Noor Mohamed school - it shares a wall with the district governor's compound - has been a source of trouble, increasing its risk of being targeted.
"Parents send their children for learning, not to the government," said another teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from police.
"If the Taliban want to attack, they will have no mercy."
In 2009, a suicide attack in the district governor's compound shut the school for a year, but a new principal, Ata Mohamed, opened it again.
"The first day, we had three teachers, one principal, and two students," Mohamed said.
The number of students grew quickly. Today, the school has about 350 enrolled, and 200 attend regularly. But the troubles have persisted.
"The foreigners would bring dogs to search the school," said one teacher. "They brought the dogs classroom by classroom, as students sat at their desks."
About a year ago, as the Taliban's recent tactic of taking over buildings in strategic locations and waging assaults from them intensified, the police feared the district governor's office could be targeted from the school building. So one of its platoons took over the second floor, and they have remained there since.
"We are here for their safety," insisted one of the police officers.
When the principal was on an official trip a few months ago, a police commander walked in and asked for the school to be shut down. The commander said he had information that the area was being targeted. When teachers, in the absence of the principal, argued to keep the school open, the commander threatened to personally "put the lock" on, one teacher recalled.
The school remained closed for a week.
The district governor has asked the school to relocate, to a new building about two kilometres away.
"Right now, there is no drinking water there, I cant take my boys there," the principal said. "Hopefully, by next year they can arrange for water."
Kandahar has about 4,100 teachers, 1,400 of whom are part-time high school students.
Mia Noor Mohamed School has six grades, but only five teachers. The principal himself teaches the third-grade class. Only he has a "teacher's training" degree, a two-year programme following high school graduation. One of the teachers is a high school graduate, another an 11th-grade dropout. The remaining three are current high school students who teach part-time. Fourth-grade teacher Shafiullah, for example, is 16 years old, and a 10th-grade student during the afternoon.
A few kilometres down the road, past Afghan president Hamid Karzai's paternal village, is the Shaheed Mohamed Qasim Jan co-educational school. The neat, one-story white building is surrounded by several tents that also serve as classrooms, amid the heat, for the 930 students - including 372 girls.
"We have seen an increase of about 200 students in our enrollment every year," said Fazel Mohamed, the elderly principal. The school, paid for by Karzai's late brother, Ahmad Wali, is named after one of Karzai's comrades who returned to Afghanistan in 2001 to begin a rebellion against the then-ruling Taliban,and was killed during his clandestine entry.
The school has 21 teachers, a ratio of about 44 students per teacher. But what's striking, as in the Mia Noor Mohamed school, is the education of the teachers. Only five of the 21 are graduates of teachers' training; four are high school graduates; the 12 others are part-time high school students, many of them teenagers.
In 2011, Kandahar produced only 283 female high school graduates, according to the ministry of education - which represents a minuscule 0.6 per cent of the 45,557 female graduates nationwide.
But if the story of Zarghona high school - the all-girls school of about 1,700 students in Kandahar city - is any indicator, that number will improve, due to a recently noted perseverance towards education.
According to the principal, Lailuma Popal, the school has not faced any major threats in recent years, except for one in 2011, amid the country-wide riots following the news that copies of the Quran had been burned at the US Bagram airbase.
"We heard rumours of protests at about 10am, and, at 11:40, angry men were knocking on the school gates."
As a precaution, Popal had gathered all her students into the main building, in the centre of the large compound, away from the neck-high walls.
"One of our classrooms had a second door, opening to the street. They broke down that door, pulled out the desks and chairs and set them all on fire in the school bus parked outside," she said.
But the rioters did not stop there. They marched on to the main building.
"On the one side, we had girls screaming and crying and we had to quiet them. On the other side we had angry men trying to enter."
They called the police for help, but the security guards manning a post just around the corner had fled into a hospital under construction, Popal said.
Scared, she and three elderly teachers finally decided to walk out, with a copy of the Quran in hand, and plead with the rioters to leave.
"We swore on the Quran that there were only innocent children in the building, and we said - for the sake of this book - leave us be."
The men left, and Popal decided to use bricks and cement to block up the classroom door that opened to the street. The walls of the compound, too, have been built taller since.
But the incident, as troubling as it was for the young students, did not affect attendance, according to Popal.
"Two or three years ago, the school would be empty the day after a blast," Popal said. "But now, when something happens, school is full the next day. We are used to it now."
Follow Mujib Mashal on Twitter: @MujMash
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Ryan Crocker Says Cases Of Afghans Killing NATO Military Counterparts Can Be 'Personal'
The Huffington Post
By Joshua Hersh
25/05/2012
KABUL, Afghanistan
Earlier this week, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker confirmed that he would be stepping down from his post at some point this summer.
The official cause was "health reasons," but it is no small matter that Crocker's departure almost immediately follows the final approval of an international military drawdown plan at last weekend's NATO summit in Chicago, and the news that America's top military officer in the country, Gen. John Allen, will also be leaving shortly. Significant changes are afoot in Afghanistan.
A few days before the summit -- and before the latest personnel news broke -- The Huffington Post spoke with Crocker in his residence at the U.S. Embassy about the ongoing challenges facing America's mission in Afghanistan, and what the future might look like.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of selections from the interview.
HuffPost: Can the Taliban be defeated militarily? Is that an end goal, or is it just part of a process that ultimately needs a political conclusion?
Ambassador Ryan Crocker: In my view it's both. I come out of Iraq, as does General Allen. I try not to draw too many parallels -- what you try to do is you inflict enough damage on your adversary that his strategic calculation starts to change, he no longer thinks he's going to win, and then that's when a political settlement comes into the offing.
In a sense that's already underway because over four thousand [Taliban] foot soldiers have already reintegrated, and that’s a pretty sizeable chunk of what they have to fight with. It's why you have not seen the Taliban try to take on either ISAF or Afghan forces frontally, now it's all terrorist attacks and suicide missions, because I don't think they have the manpower, and they know what's going to happen if they try.
HP: And what if they decide, well, we can just wait the U.S. out?
RC: It's going to be a long wait. It's already been more than a decade. You want to let it go another 10 years?
HP: But there are other ways to measure the Taliban's impact -- girls schools are still being shut down, they can still inflict damage with terrorist attacks. Arguably they are not defeated and not close to it.
RC: No. And defeat is always in the mind of the enemy. The enemy decides when he's defeated and when he isn't. Yes, they continue to mount attacks. I was talking to my representative in Command East, and he was noting a fair amount of violence in the east in the past week, but what he found noteworthy was the way the Afghan security forces dealt with it. Increasingly they are in the lead, and it belies the whole Taliban narrative that they are engaged in operations here solely to drive the foreigners out -- they are increasingly fighting their own people.
The Afghan forces have demonstrated now on a variety of occasions the courage, the determination and the ability to prevail.
HP: There have also been hints of a growing problem within the Afghan security forces, so-called green-on-blue attacks, in which Afghans kill their NATO military counterparts. Is there a point where that becomes not just a tactical problem, but threatens to undermine the entire strategy?
RC: Every one of those hurts -- every single loss hurts, but these hurt more. The Afghans do take it seriously, they have instituted a series of measures, but obviously they have some ways to go to make them fully effective. But you keep reminding yourself given the level of interactions, and numbers of embedded advisers we've got countrywide, this is a mercifully rare phenomenon. Even one is too many -- I go to the ramp ceremonies -- but I do think the Afghans are serious about getting it under control. We've taking some measures of our own. We've just got to keep after it.
HP: But it's also hard to tell where these attacks are coming from: Are they terrorism, are they signs of greater disaffection between the Afghan and Western militaries? There seems to be very little information.
RC: Because it's hard to figure out. Because normally in the green-on-blues the attacker winds up dead, so he doesn't get to answer too many questions. But I would imagine in a certain number of these cases it becomes personal. Hurt pride. With dead attackers, if he hasn't confided with his buddies, and very few of them seem to, it's very difficult to know.
HP: Are you hearing a lot of questions from visiting congressmen about this issue? What's your message to them about the problem?
RC: It is something we discuss with many of our congressional visitors. It has not been, to this point, an absolutely top-tier issue.
HP: Let's talk about Pakistan. There are a lot of calls in Kabul for the U.S. to take a tougher tack with the Pakistanis, but given our relationship with them, and their nuclear capabilities, are we at the limit of what we can actually say and do?
RC: Pakistan represents a challenge and it faces challenges. Thousands of Pakistanis have been killed by terrorist groups that are based there. We've got to stay engaged with them. We're not going to invade them. We'll try to work with them towards some understandings that the groups that are hurting the Afghans are hurting us, are hurting them even worse.
HP: Surely they know that though, right? So what else is motivating them?
RC: Well here's the thing. These groups have now become so formidable, and Pakistani military doctrine is still aimed at fighting tank battles on the plains of the Punjab, not a counterinsurgency, so they get chewed up pretty bad when they try and take them on. So there is that problem.
And then there is the old issue of hedging of bets. What I heard over and over [Crocker served as ambassador to Pakistan from 2004-2007] is, "Oh, you're back. Military assistance , economic assistance, that's nice. When are you leaving again? And do you plan on sanctions, like last time?"
Now I am hopeful that the partnership agreement with Afghanistan is going to get some serious attention in Pakistan. Because it's totally non-confrontational, but it means, Hey, if we're committed here through 2024, that means we're not leaving. That means maybe supporting some of these groups that are biting us isn't such a good idea after all.
We just have to work our way through this. But I do have to say, I find it more than annoying when Pakistan-based, Pakistan-backed groups attack my embassy. That really makes me mad.
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Pakistan is turning into another Afghanistan
Toronto Sun
By Haroon Siddiqui Editorial Page
25/05/2012
Last month, a Canadian family went to Karachi for a wedding. The day after their arrival in Pakistan’s centre of commerce, crime and terrorism, their ancestral home was invaded in broad daylight by three armed men. They held a gun to the mother’s head and threatened to kidnap her 3-year-old granddaughter.
For the next hour-and-a-half, they helped themselves to the bride’s trousseau, including gold ornaments and jewelry, and almost everything else of value. But they did leave behind, after much pleading, the family’s most valued possession: Canadian passports.
A few days later, a neighbour was kidnapped and released for a ransom of 20 million rupees ($222,000 — a princely sum in Pakistan). And the neighbourhood grocer was robbed and gunned down dead, along with his two sons and two assistants.
Such harrowing incidents are routine in the city of 18 million, Pakistan’s largest.
More people are being kidnapped and killed in Karachi than in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas that provide sanctuary for Al Qaeda, Taliban and other militants.
Karachi is arguably more Talibanized than Quetta (the exile home of Taliban leader Mullah Omar) or Abbottabad (where Osama bin Laden was killed) or Peshawar (home of Afghan refugees).
Taliban and several associated militants raise funds in Karachi, and run guns and drugs.
Karachi is also crawling with other armed political and criminal gangs engaged in turf wars, bank heists and other robberies, occupying properties that are even temporarily empty, organizing labour strikes, shutting down industries and bazaars.
Pistol-waving youth go carjacking and holding up people for a cellphone or gold rings, bangles or necklaces.
Police are under-resourced or complicit in the crimes. Other state institutions are equally ineffective and corrupt.
About 500 people have been killed so far this year. At least 800 were killed last year, and 775 the year before.
The downfall of Karachi is tragic.
It was Pakistan’s capital until 1960 (when it was shifted to Islamabad). It remains the capital of the province of Sindh. It has long been the economic engine of the country, generating more than two-thirds of national tax revenues. It is home to a highly cultured elite of industrial tycoons, landed gentry, the intelligentsia as well as the media and high fashion establishment.
The port city has also been a key transit point for the underground economy of smuggled goods into Pakistan and landlocked Afghanistan.
During the 1980s, Karachi was where the CIA delivered 5,000 tonnes of arms and ammunition per month for the Islamic Afghan warriors fighting the Soviet occupation. The hundreds of Arab jihadists who joined them also passed through Karachi, including bin Laden.
Post-Sept. 11 when Pakistan joined the American-led war on terror, the jihadists declared war on the Pakistan government as well and have waged part of it in Karachi.
Khalid Shiekh Mohamed, the mastermind of Sept. 11, operated from there. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was beheaded there.
“Karachi is microcosm of Pakistan,” says Shuja Nawaz, South Asia expert at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C.
“The future of Karachi is the future of Pakistan. You get Karachi right, you can get Pakistan right. If you fail Karachi, you fail Pakistan.”
But getting it right is not easy.
Karachi is now Pakistan’s largest Pushtun city, home to 5 million Afghan Pushtuns as well as Pakistani Pushtuns. These Pashto-speaking people are represented by the Awami National Party.
The majority in Karachi consists of Urdu-speaking people, immigrants from India who constituted Pakistan’s original political and administrative elite. They are represented by a party known by its Urdu initials MQM.
The third major group consists of native Sindhis, represented by the Peoples Party of Pakistan (of the Bhuttos). It is in power both federally and provincially, in coalition with the MQM.
But Karachi municipality is controlled by the MQM, using “guns and goondas” (thugs). What seems to be happening is that the other two parties are battling the MQM on its own terms.
Pakistan has a dizzying array of problems, most of them self-inflicted. It has also been duplicitous, allied with the U.S. but also supporting the Taliban.
Equally, there’s no denying that Pakistan has paid the price for Afghanistan, co-operating with the U.S., first against the Soviet occupation and then in the war on terror.
In that war it has lost 5,000 troops and policemen, more than all NATO fatalities in Afghanistan. It has lost about 37,000 civilians to terrorist attacks and collateral damage — nearly 10 times those killed on 9/11. While it got $10 billion from the U.S., it has lost an estimated $100 billion in foreign investments in the last decade.
Its democracy is semi-functioning. For the first time in its history, an elected government may last its full term until next year. Its judiciary is independent. Its economy is doing badly but is not bankrupt.
A failed Pakistan would threaten the stability of Afghanistan and the entire region. As a paper commissioned in 2008 by Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, put it: “The U.S. has no vital national interests in Afghanistan. Our vital national interests are in nuclear Pakistan.”
That holds true for Canada and all NATO partners.
Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears on Thursday and Sunday. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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US troops practice for peace in a Texan Afghan village
DW
25/05/2012
NATO has set its "irreversible" course out of Afghanistan. After years of training for war, the US army is now preparing for peace in a reconstructed Afghan village in the Texan desert.
It's loud in the market square. Men are buying plastic bananas and fish. American troops patrol the place, holding machine guns close to their chests. The tension is palpable - as though they were all waiting for the music to stop.
Suddenly a bomb explodes. An angry mob of men forms around a young man who is lying in the street.
They shout at the soldiers: "Why didn't you protect us better?"
Learning how to behave
Afghans who are now living in the US have been employed by the army as actors to re-enact scenes of everyday Afghan life. US soldiers about to be deployed to Afghanistan are learning how to remain calm even if they are insulted or threatened.
"You learn how to keep yourself contained when everything seems not to be going the way you want it," explains Sergeant Martinez. "Because the more you overreact the worse it's going to get. We learn to speak calmly and try to get them to be on our side."
Americans and Afghans are now partners in the fight against the Taliban. The soldiers in Texas are also learning how to transfer responsibility to the Afghan security forces. As trainers they have to learn to trust the Afghans. Sergeant Martinez says it is difficult for those who have already been deployed to Afghanistan to get used to this role.
German soldiers stationed in Texas have been enlisted to give basic training in intercultural competence and behavior.
"We conduct role plays about how to deal with [people from] other countries. How to get to know them, how to greet them, our behavior. How to find a common language because of course there are differences in approach," says Master Sergeant Thorsten.
Often it's a case of very small things that make a great difference. For example, the soldiers are taught to take off their sunglasses before talking to a village elder because eye contact establishes trust. They are also told to remove their gloves before shaking the hands of a police chief.
They also learn that dogs - even sniffer dogs looking for explosives - are prohibited in sacred places such as mosques or cemeteries.
Not only a game
A fter the angry mob on the market place in Texas has calmed down, the maneuver is analyzed and evaluated, with those who did
their jobs well receiving applause and a medal.
One of the young amateur actors has been living and studying in the US since 2008. He says that some "80 percent [of the soldiers] are getting it right but 20 percent are not."
He says the new troops who are about to be deployed to Afghanistan take their role seriously but those who have been there already see it as more of a game.
All combat missions are supposed to be handed over to Afghan forces by the middle of 2013. Most of the international troops in Afghanistan are supposed to withdraw by the end of 2014. However, some US troops will remain to provide the training.
Author: Sabrina Fritz / act
Editor: Arun Chowdhury
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Even if NATO rushes to the exits, Afghan collapse is not inevitable (+video)
As French President Hollande promises troop withdrawal this year, and the rest of NATO plans to exit by 2014, Afghanistan's best hope may be the disunity and ill-discipline of the Taliban.
Christian Science Monitor
By Scott Baldauf, Staff writer
May 25, 2012
In August 2010, when the Netherlands pulled 1,900 soldiers out of the Afghan province of Urozgan, NATO officials played down the significance of the withdrawal. Dutch Gen. Peter van Uhm praised his troops for restoring peace to their area, but admitted that “a lot still has to happen” in Afghanistan to guarantee the peace.
Today, as newly elected French President François Hollande visits 3,500 French troops based in the Afghan province of Kapisa, preparing them for an early departure by the end of 2012, NATO officials are wearing the brave face again. At the Afghan summit in Chicago, no NATO official publicly criticized the French leader’s decision following a decisive victory for Hollande’s party, which had promised an early exit from Afghanistan.
“Only France can decide what France does. It will be conducted in good understanding with our allies, especially President Obama, who understands the reasons, and in close consultation with Afghan authorities," President Hollande told reporters in Kabul during a brief stopover. “Without having totally disappeared, the terrorist threat from Afghanistan to our and our allies' territory has been partially curbed," he added.
In his meetings with French soldiers in Kapisa, Hollande came close to his own “Mission Accomplie” moment, telling his troops that one reason for their early departure is that “simply, you have carried out your mission." In NATO’s 130,000 man International Security and Assistance Force in Afghanistan, the departure of 3,500 soldiers is not significant, particularly if the bulk of those 126,500 other soldiers will be leaving in two years’ time anyway. President Obama himself plans to withdraw some 30,000 US troops this year, and most, but not all, of the remaining 60,000 troops by 2014.
Afghan officials say that Afghan Army soldiers will take over the French base in Nijrab, Kapisa, and with it, the responsibility of maintaining security in that northeastern part of the country.
Yet as the Dutch departure of 2,000 troops in 2010 – prompted by a resounding defeat of the pro-NATO government of Jan-Peter Balkenende – and the French departure in 2012 – prompted by the defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy – shows, European patience with the 10-year Afghan operation has worn out. The rush for the exits has begun.
France’s absence will be felt, to be sure. France has been the fifth-largest contributor of troops and financial support to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, and its allies knew that in the crucial province of Kapisa, the gap between the restive provinces of Konar and Nooristan to the east and Kabul and the Panjshir Valley to the West, French troops would contain any insurgent monkey business.
But, as security experts in Kabul told me on a recent reporting trip, the major lesson of the past 100 years or so is that insurgencies, while deadly, rarely succeed in Afghanistan without major outside support.
Without British support, former Afghan King Shah Shuja could not retake power in Kabul by force in 1832 and 1833.
Without Soviet backing, the Khalq and Parcham parties would have been unable to launch their urban coup d’etat of April 1978, killing President Daoud, and paving the way for a Soviet invasion in 1979.
Without US-supplied arms, Pakistani training and logistical support, and Saudi funding, the Afghan mujahideen and foreign fighters who fought the Soviet occupation of the 1980s would have remained a village nuisance.
The current group of insurgents, a coalition of Taliban fighters, Hizb-e-Islami veterans, Al Qaeda adventurists, and tribal militias from Pakistan’s North Waziristan region, have a proven ability to blow stuff up. They have also managed to make certain areas of the country, such as the southeastern provinces of Khost and Paktika and the far eastern provinces of Konar and Nooristan no-go areas, not only for Western aid groups, but even for Afghan troops. (See a provincial map of Afghanistan here.)
But these groups, coming from different tribes, regions, and ideological backgrounds, show signs of being every bit as disunified and undisciplined as the various factions that make up the current Karzai government. Their ability to take, hold, and govern Afghan cities is still unproven, and given their preference for guerrilla warfare, instead of large coordinated set-piece battles, this ability is very much in doubt. Barring a complete dissolution of the Afghan National Army – a potentiality that is entirely possible without stronger national leadership – a small disparate undisciplined guerrilla force like the Taliban is likely to spend the next decade as they have the past decade: in small dusty villages, far from the halls of power.
In short, if the Afghan Army – even as ill prepared as they currently are – simply remain in their bases, lacking French or other NATO trainers, it will be very difficult for the Taliban to dislodge them.
Inertia, as well as time, is on the Afghan government’s side.
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U.S.-led wars create humanitarian disasters: report
Xinhua
May 25, 2012
BEIJING
The U.S.-led wars, albeit alleged to be "humanitarian intervention" efforts and for "the rise of a new democratic nation," created humanitarian disasters instead, said a report on the U.S. human rights record released on Friday.
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011 was released by the State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 issued by the U.S. State Department on Thursday.
For Iraqis, the death toll in the U.S.-initiated Iraq war stands at 655,000, the report said, adding that it is estimated that civilian casualties in the military campaign in Afghanistan could exceed 31,000, the report said.
Incomplete statistics revealed that the United States has launched more than 60 drone attacks in Pakistan in 2011, killing at least 378 people, the report added.
The report cited an article of the Guardian on March 11, 2012 as saying that an American soldier stationed in Afghanistan burst into three civilian homes in two villages in the small hours of March 11, shot dead 16 sleeping Afghan villagers, injured five others, and burned the dead bodies. The victims included nine children and three women.
Such "American-style massacre" against innocent civilians has once again pierced the veil of the United States proclaiming itself "a country under the rule of law" and "a human rights defender," the report said.
The report noted that the United States does not support the right to development, which is a concern of most of the developing countries.
In September 2011, the 18th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on "the right to development." Except an abstention vote from the United States, all the HRC members voted for the resolution.
The report said the United States continues its conducts that seriously violate the right of subsistence and right of development of Cuban people.
The United States has been pursuing hegemony in the world, grossly trampling upon the sovereignty of other countries and capriciously violating human rights against other nations. It "appears more and more to be contributing to international disorder," the report said.
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