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AKHBAR TOLO    (TOLO News)

More Afghans turn to TOLO than any other news service as a source of reliable, impartial and accurate information.  TOLO offers the most reliable coverage and analysis of local and international events, presented by a dedicated team of experienced reporters based around the country.  TOLO NEWS, weeknights at 6:00pm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

24 July 2012

 

 

 

FEATURE STORY

Karzai Asks Berlin for Help with Taliban Talks

 

 

BUSINESS

No articles featured today

NATION

Samangan Mullah Arrested for Child Rape
Afghan Cabinet Raises Concern About Mining Legislation, to West’s Unease
As Exit Date Approaches, A Surge Of Green-On-Blues Attacks in Afghanistan
Lawmakers Call for Reversal on Nato Decision to Destroy Military Bases
Afghanistan's Corruption Imperils Its Future—and American Interests
Government Should Disclose Details of Afghan-US Security Deal: Abdullah
Pentagon caps codels to Afghanistan
Promoting Economic Development In Afghanistan
Afghanistan: The troubled U.S. effort
Afghan Forces Not Able to Secure the Country: Analyst
After 30 years, Pakistan rolls up welcome mat for Afghan refugees
Afghan reality TV show's goal is national unity
Return of Afghans is journey into the unknown
A day after Kabul’s warning to Pakistan, more cross-border shelling reported
Lack of Intelligence Allows Taliban Infiltration of Afghan Forces
The Perilous Pushtun Paradox
Engaging Afghanistan
Isaf Cannot ‘Confirm or Deny' Rocket Attack from Pakistan
Afghan Villagers Rise up Against Taleban
Pakistani, Afghan leaders agree to pursue contacts with Taliban, other insurgent groups
Future directions of Afghanistan
Pakistan offers protection to Afghan elopers
Polio Meeting to be Held in Kabul
Afghan Olympic medalist hopes to bring home more medals from London

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FEATURE STORY 

Karzai Asks Berlin for Help with Taliban Talks

SPIEGEL ONLINE
By Matthias Gebauer
23/07/2012

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has asked Germany to act as a discreet go-between with the Taliban in the hopes of paving the way for eventual peace talks. It is a role that Germany has played before -- in an effort that was ultimately torpedoed by Karzai himself.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has asked the German government for a renewed attempt in the difficult task of mediating peace talks with the Taliban. SPIEGEL has learned that Karzai asked German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle for help getting the Taliban back to the negotiating table on the sidelines of the international donor conference in Tokyo at the beginning of July.

Germany played a similar role in 2010 and 2011, operating as a discreet intermediary in a political rapprochement between the US and the Taliban Islamists. Indeed, two years ago Berlin was a key player in the only promising attempt to approach the Taliban thus far. At the time, Special Representative Michael Steiner was able to initiate exploratory talks between envoys from the Taliban and US government representatives following a lengthy process of convincing the two sides to meet without preconditions.

The delicate mission was initially successful. After several extensive checks, aimed at determining if the Taliban envoy was indeed sent by the leadership of the insurgency, Steiner organized an initial meeting between Tayyeb Agha, who is thought to be a close confidant of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and two US representatives, one from the State Department and one from the National Security Council. The secret meeting took place at a safe house belonging to the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, in the town of Pullach just outside of Munich. The BND had been responsible for flying the Taliban emissary safely and discreetly to Munich in a private jet prior to the meeting.

Details from the meeting read like a spy novel. Following a few hours of initial talks between the declared enemies from Washington and Afghanistan, Steiner invited the Taliban representatives on a sightseeing tour of his home town. They visited a church together and he took them on a ride on a cable car. Both sides insisted on the utmost secrecy given concerns as to how people in the US and in Afghanistan might react should news of the talks get out.

The rapprochement was aimed at paving the way for talks between the Taliban, the US and, eventually, the Afghan government. With NATO and US withdrawal from Afghanistan pending, a consensus has developed among countries involved in the mission that ultimately, the insurgents will have to be reintegrated into Afghan power structures. Otherwise it is difficult to see how the country can avoid drifting into chaos.

A Trust-Building Exercise

In further meetings, Agha and the US representatives reached an initial agreement -- a kind of trust-building exercise. The US was to release five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo while the Taliban, in exchange, was to hand over a US soldier who had been abducted in the summer of 2009. Then, the Taliban was to be allowed to open their first diplomatic representation overseas in Qatar, which would play a key role once real talks began.

By the end of 2011, the groups had met more than seven times, and the diplomatic high-wire act appeared to be working. Shortly after the Afghanistan conference in Bonn, the diplomatic mission in Qatar was to be opened, and the Red Cross had already spoken with the Taliban commanders who were imprisoned in Guantanamo. But Afghan President Karzai, who had been informed about the secret get-togethers in Munich and Qatar by Steiner, felt left out and torpedoed the agreement, criticizing the process as illegitimate. Discussion stalled just as a breakthrough appeared to be possible.

Negotiations have since failed to resume in any meaningful way. Though there have been meetings, the release of the five top Taliban commanders from Guantanamo has become more difficult from a US domestic policy perspective. The situation hasn't become easier for the Taliban, either. After the talks became public, some of the movement's commanders revolted against the potential rapprochement with the US, their arch enemy. In early 2012, the Taliban broke off contact completely.

A Serious Setback

It remains uncertain whether a second attempt could succeed. This spring, Michael Steiner, now German ambassador to India, signalled to Karzai that he thought a second secret mediation effort by Germany would be possible, but not before the US presidential election in November. Steiner also made it very clear that renewed talks could only work if Karzai, who views US activities with what has become a near paranoia, agreed to fully back the process and not to disrupt it from outside.

Berlin has declined to make any comment on Steiner's efforts or on Germany's potential role in renewed efforts to make contact with the Taliban. But in Tokyo, Westerwelle assured Karzai that Berlin was prepared to support the peace process at any time. More than any other cabinet member, Westerwelle frequently underscores that a political solution is the only way out of the current quagmire.

Afghan efforts to open a dialogue with the Taliban recently suffered a serious setback. Kabul had managed to convince a representative of the rebels to attend an informal meeting with an envoy from Karzai's so-called High Peace Council in Dubai. But the second attempt to hold talks, which also had the support of the United Nations, failed. Having caught wind of the meeting, Pakistan prevented the Taliban member from leaving the country.

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NATION

Samangan Mullah Arrested for Child Rape

TOLOnews.com
By Mahboba Pardis
Monday, 23 July 2012

A mullah in Afghanistan's northern Samangan province was arrested Monday, charged with the rape of an underage girl.

The incident allegedly took place Sunday night at the Zendan valley of Samangan's Aibak city, an official said, adding that local police arrested the mullah with the help of local residents.

The Ministry of Interior (MOI) confirmed the incident and said that the mullah, named as Mawlavi Sayed Ahmad, is currently being investigated for the rape of a 10-year-old girl now being treated in hospital.

"He has been accused of raping an underage girl," MOI spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said. "Currently he's in police custody and he will be introduced to the justice organs once the investigations are complete."

Meanwhile, Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) condemned the incident and asked the government to punish the perpetrator.

"Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission is always against any kind violence, including rape, and condemns this act in strongest possible terms. We ask the government to prosecute the person responsible," Head of AIHRC Musa Mahmoodi told TOLOnews.

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Afghan Cabinet Raises Concern About Mining Legislation, to West’s Unease

New York Times
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG
July 23, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan

For Afghan mining officials and their Western advisers, revamping the Afghan laws that cover mining and oil drilling looked like an easy sell with a big payoff: new rules would give foreign investors certainty and, in the process, begin transforming Afghanistan from a ward of the international community into a state that could better pay its own way.

Instead, the new laws are now in limbo after a group of Afghan cabinet ministers and senior officials last week objected to the draft legislation as kowtowing to foreign mining interests eager to hijack Afghanistan’s natural resources. “A balance has to be struck so we can make sure that our patrimony does not become a pot of porridge for others,” said Ashraf Ghani, a senior adviser to President Hamid Karzai.

With the end of the NATO military mission in Afghanistan looming in 2014, the dispute over the legislation reflects growing Afghan unease over how steep a price their country — among the world’s poorest and most corrupt — may have to pay for outside help in the future.

Exploiting Afghanistan’s potentially rich deposits of iron, oil, gold, copper and other minerals and gemstones is seen as crucial to the country’s economic prospects, and, by extension, the West’s ability to cut back over the next decade the billions of dollars spent each year on the government, the army, the police and myriad development projects.

Afghanistan’s big international backers — the United States, Germany, Japan, among others — were so certain the laws would soon be in place that this month they made $16 billion in aid commitments for the coming four years based in part on projections of future mining revenues the Afghan government could expect.

The cabinet’s rejection of the draft legislation in a special session on Wednesday caught Western diplomats in Kabul off guard. “We did not know it was going to cabinet last week,” Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Kabul, said in an interview. “We’re still playing catch-up.”

But he added that the Afghans were worried about being taken advantage of and wary of suffering the fate of other states where mining has fueled instability. “There has to be enough of an incentive to bring in the companies and yet enough assurance that they won’t be taken for a ride,” he said.

Mr. Karzai affirmed the cabinet’s decision, saying in a statement on Monday that the Justice Ministry and other departments would review the laws to ensure they better protect “the national interests of Afghanistan.” That could delay new legislation by months, at least, sending Western officials scrambling to help Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines get the legislation back on track.

The immediate concern is that at least five open tenders — four gold and copper concessions and one significant oil and gas project — could attract far less lucrative bids than expected if Afghanistan’s laws are not soon brought in line with global norms, Afghan mining officials and Western officials said.

Bidding on those concessions is expected to be completed before the end of the year. Among the companies expressing interest is ExxonMobil, by far the largest to seriously explore investing in Afghanistan.

If the expected revenue streams from mining are delayed or diminished, Afghanistan is “going to need a lot more funding,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Are the publics in Europe and the United States going to have the interest in Afghanistan to make current aid levels feasible?” the official continued. “I don’t think so.”

No one on either side of the disagreement over the new legislation disputes that Afghanistan needs the money mining could bring in. But “we’re being inundated by people who have a conflict of interest advising us,” said Mr. Ghani, a former finance minister and World Bank official who is now overseeing the transition from a Western-led rebuilding effort to one run largely by the Afghan government.

“Will the advisers end up working for the very same companies that are investing?” he said in a telephone interview. “These are questions we need to ask in particular given the revolving-door culture in the United States and other international organizations.”

Mr. Ghani, who also taught at Johns Hopkins University, was careful to present his opposition to the draft legislation as a matter of getting Afghanistan the best deal from the foreign companies, whose money and expertise he acknowledged Afghanistan did need.

He also said care had to be taken to ensure mining and oil concessions did not become a source of conflict, as has happened in many countries, especially in Africa. Mining, he said, could turn Afghanistan “into Chile, or it could turn us into Congo.”

The draft legislation is intended to update earlier laws written with World Bank assistance and passed in 2009. Those laws are seen by the mining industry as highly problematic — they, for instance, give no guarantee that a company that conducts exploration would get to exploit what it found.

Afghanistan’s commerce minister, Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady, said he understood the concerns, but was not comfortable being rushed into making a decision or with the level of foreign involvement in drafting the new laws.

“The previous law was written by experts from the World Bank, and they were all highly paid consultants. And now we have more highly paid consultants telling us we need new laws,” he said. “We just need to know why it needs to change.”

But other senior officials present at the cabinet meeting, most of them far less knowledgeable about finance and international development, were openly hostile to the idea that foreign companies would profit from Afghan mines or oil fields, according to Afghan and Western officials briefed on the discussions.

Why, asked a few of the ministers, should foreigners grow rich off Afghanistan’s minerals, oil and gemstones? Couldn’t Afghans do it themselves?

The short answer, according to Afghan mining officials and foreign experts: No. It has neither the money nor the expertise.

Attracting companies that can provide the needed capital and expertise, however, takes an open, transparent and predictable investing landscape, American and European officials said.

They insisted that their main goal was bringing Afghan laws and regulations up to international standards, not the mere pursuit of national self-interest.

“Obviously, we have U.S. companies that could be qualified bidders and we would obviously be really happy if they did bid,” one American diplomat said. “But you’ve got to have an environment in place where they want to bid — our companies, other countries’ companies, all companies.”

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.

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As Exit Date Approaches, A Surge Of Green-On-Blues Attacks in Afghanistan

Attacks on coalition troops by Afghan cast further doubt on whether the country can protect its citizens after NATO forces pull out, reports John Ryan.

The Daily Beast
By John Ryan
Jul 22, 2012

As the US-led coalition in Afghanistan turns over greater responsibility to Afghan forces in advance of the scheduled 2014 end to the war there, American military officials have downplayed the significance of the rising number of so-called “green-on-blue” insider attacks, where uniformed Afghan defectors turn their weapons on their U.S. and NATO counterparts.

In May, Afghan security forces, estimated at 350,000 personnel, took over primary responsibility for the security of 75 percent of the nation’s population.

But the spike in attacks on coalition troops by Afghan forces—along with rising numbers of incidents where Afghan police and soldiers open fire on their own number and of Taliban attacks on them—casts further doubt on whether Afghanistan, a country ravaged by more than three decades of war and plagued by corruption, defection and global drug trade, can protect its citizens after NATO forces pull out.

Last year, 24,590 Afghan soldiers quit between January and June, compared with 11,423 who deserted in the same period in 2010, reported The Washington Post.

Afghan forces attacking coalition troops—which Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, called the “insider threat” at a March briefing—have not eroded public confidence in Afghan forces, and coalition polling shows positive public perceptions of local security units, NATO officials said.

The number of attacks on coalition forces by Afghan forces in 2012 is on pace to be seven times higher than in all of 2007 and 2008.

Despite what coalition and Afghan officials have said are improved screening and monitoring of Afghan forces, the number of renegade strikes has continued to rise. So far this year, the U.S.-led coalition has reported 20 such attacks—primarily shootings—that have killed 27 coalition troops and complicated NATO’s planned 2014 exit from the country.

Amidst a more violent fighting season as the coalition exit date approaches—with total attacks on U.S. troops up 20% in May year-to-year—the number of green-on-blue attacks this year is on pace to rise 50 percent from 2011, when there were 21 attacks resulting in the death of 35 foreign soldiers. That would be seven times more attacks on coalition forces by Afghan forces than in all of 2007 and 2008.

And even those numbers may under-represent the problem, since until earlier this year the alliance’s green-on-blue figures did not account for failed attacks or the number of troops wounded alongside those killed, according to The Associated Press.

Last week, the ISAF reported “an individual wearing an Afghan National Security Force uniform” shot and killed three civilian employees in Western Afghanistan, the first time that an apparent member of Afghan forces has targeted Western support workers, rather than military personnel.

Afghan government officials did not reply to Newsweek/The Daily Beast emails inquiring about new Afghan countermeasures for green-on-blue incidents.

The Afghan courts, however, convicted an Afghan soldier in a green-on-blue case for a first time on July 17. The courts found the soldier guilty of killing four French troops in January assault at a base shared by NATO and Afghan forces in Kapisa Province, The Associated Press reported.

That attack spurred France to accelerate its timetable for withdrawing from Afghanistan, and it now plans to have its combat forces out by the end of this year.

Despite that, the 50-country coalition, officially known as the International Security Assistance Force, says these erratic incidents will not hamper its withdrawal from the 10-year war.

“Every day, tens of thousands of coalition forces work successfully alongside their Afghan National Security Force counterparts without incident,” Army Lt. Col. Sarah M. Goodson, an ISAF spokesperson, wrote to Newsweek/The Daily Beast in a July 20 email from Afghanistan.

“The ‘green-on-blue’ attacks will have no impact on ISAF plans to transition security responsibilities to the [Afghan forces].”

Nearly 130,000 coalition soldiers, including 90,000 American troops, currently serve in Afghanistan, according to NATO’s May data.

Though the Taliban routinely takes credit for green-on-blue attacks, U.S officials cite grievances against coalition forces, not enemy affiliations, as the principal motivator for these attacks.

“The percentage of verified cases of infiltration is small (in the single digits) and we do not believe the insurgency has been effective in its attempts to internally disrupt [Afghan forces] and its relations with the coalition,” Goodson wrote.

“There is no indication that these incidents are linked or part of any larger coordinated effort,” she wrote.

Army Capt. Aaron Cross, a U.S. ground commander in the southern province of Kandahar, told this reporter, then with Army Times, in May that soldiers drew closer to Afghan partners to combat turncoat assaults after a series of green-on-blue attacks in early 2012.

“It’s all about relationships, developing close relationships… those relationships mitigate the risk,” he said.

Cross worked more closely with Afghans “so that if there are any changes in behavior that we notice, we can notice that quickly and talk about any issues,” he said, adding that no joint missions were ever canceled due to insider threats.

In the wake of these attacks aimed at shattering trust between the coalition and Afghan government, ISAF says it’s focused on galvanizing their union.

“We are striving to ensure all of our enhanced security measures against potential green-on-blue threats do not damage the valuable relationships and trust built between ISAF and [Afghan security forces],” Goodson wrote.

“The quality and strength of these partner relationships form the foundation of our efforts to achieve a shared vision of success,” she said.

John Ryan, a former staffer at Army Times, is a freelance reporter based out of New York City. A West Point and Columbia University graduate, his work has appeared in many national publications, including USA Today. He was an active-duty Army officer for five years, serving two tours in Iraq as a platoon leader.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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Lawmakers Call for Reversal on Nato Decision to Destroy Military Bases

TOLOnews.com
Monday, 23 July 2012

Afghanistan's parliamentary members called for the reversal of a decision that will see foreign soldiers' military bases destroyed after they withdrawal, according to a contract recently signed.

The MPs said that Nato should prevent the destruction of the bases in order for the Afghan people to use the structures as they see fit.

"Recently a contract was signed for the destruction of Nato facilities in Afghanistan [after they leave]. We can use these bases for schools, clinics and other administrative purposes," Kabul MP Shukria Barekzai said Monday.

"They have spent money constructing those bases and now they're spending more for their destruction. I urge the MPs to send a letter to the Nato headquarters in this regard in order to put the bases at the disposal of the Afghanistan government," she said.

On a separate matter, some other MPs in the parliamentary session said that insecurity had made life difficult for people throughout Afghanistan, particularly for the residents of Ghor and Badghis provinces.

"People are not even safe at the center of Ghor province," Ghor MP Keramuddin Reza Zada said Monday. "Ordinary people are buying guns and registering them with police in order to maintain security for themselves. It's amazing that with the presence of government forces, people are still protecting their security even in the middle of the day."

Badghis MP Qazi Abdul Rahim claimed the army officials were working with the Taliban.

"Army officials are handing people to the Taliban," he said. "If the Taliban want anyone, they are coming to his house with army rangers and handing the person to the Taliban. I have discussed this issue with Ministry of Defense officials as well."

Several other MPs also said that the Kabul-Ghazni highway was seriously lacking in security despite the availability of police, army and Isaf checkpoints.

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Afghanistan's Corruption Imperils Its Future—and American Interests

The U.S. is preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan over the next year, but may leave a corrupt and highly dysfunctional country in its wake.

The Atlantic
By Ben W. Heineman Jr.
Jul 23 2012

If the Obama administrations wants to show that the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government can survive the U.S. troop withdrawal scheduled for 2014, it may need to do more to address the rampant corruption that endangers Afghanistan and, ultimately, U.S. interest there.

The U.S. has recently staged two major events on Afghanistan. First, on July 7, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that Afghanistan would be officially designated as a "non-Nato ally of the United States" which makes it eligible for priority delivery of military hardware and U.S. help in buying arms and equipment. But the U.S. has thus far failed to indicate what level and kind of troop support -- or what type of other security capabilities -- will be available for Afghanistan after the hand-off.

Second, on July 8, the U.S. joined in an announcement of the Tokyo Mutual Accountability Framework under which 70 international donors pledged $16 billion dollars over the next four years to make up Afghan fiscal shortfall and to improve institutions and services in the country, with up to 20 percent supposedly conditioned on Afghan progress in addressing corruption and creating better governance.

But the framework document may not be enough for a nation that Transparency International designates the third most corrupt in the world (176 out of 178), that the World Bank gauges the world's eleventh poorest, and that has absorbed more than $80 billion in non-military aid from the U.S. in the past 10 years with few concrete, let alone durable, gains. As Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies writes, "The lack of transparency and credibility has been a critical problem ... particularly in the almost total lack of credibility in reporting on the impact of aid, quality and integrity of governance and presence of a functioning justice system."

Can Afghanistan survive as a fighting force and national government after 2014? Will ethnic rivalries among the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and other groups; will renewed military pressure from the Taliban; will subversion by Pakistan; will the weakness and corruption of the central government lead to a civil war, a coup, a Taliban resurgence, or a territory run by tribal leaders and local militia? Such post-2014 developments could even allow a recidivist Afghanistan to again serve as a sanctuary for world terrorism -- a true tragedy in light of nearly 2,000 American killed, 16,000 American wounded, 12,000 Afghan civilian deaths, and U.S. expenditures of $400 billion or more to date.

The recurrent riddle of Afghanistan is that an effective Afghan Army and security effort depends on developing a legitimate Afghan state that can somehow command the allegiance of the disparate ethnic groups, develop accountable institutions, and nurture an economy that does not depend on opium and can help government pay its bills without significant foreign aid. Yet that goal seems as much a chimera today as it did ten years ago. And a critical preserve and adverse factor preventing development of a legitimate Afghan state -- given all the tribal and ethnic decentralizing forces -- is the endemic and corrosive corruption that has bedeviled and baffled the Americans.

The litany of corruption issues in Afghanistan is daunting: 30 to 50 percent of the economy consists of the illicit opium trade, which fuels criminal and insurgent elements. Recent presidential and parliamentary elections were characterized by a high incidence of electoral pay-offs and fraud. There was also the scandal at the Bank of Kabul, replete with phony loans to the Afghan elite. And the U.S. was recently forced to withdraw criticism of President Hamid Karzai's failure to address corruption and his insistence that such efforts to pursue "malign networks" of Afghan elites be removed from U.S. and other investigators. And billions in U.S. aid funds which have been misappropriated, worsening corruption, despite belated attempts by U.S. officials to track expenditures more carefully.

The state of crisis is summarized in a current Foreign Affairs article by Republican Stephen Hadley and Democrat John Podesta, chairs of a bipartisan working group on the future of Afghanistan.

[The Afghan government] is deeply flawed and, should the world stop compensating for its deficiencies, in danger of imploding....Officials often use formal state institutions to support patronage networks fueling high levels of corruption, cronyism and nepotism on the national and local levels...Karzai has failed...to advance a reform agenda...[instead opposing] measures that would have promoted greater accountability...The absence of transparent and effective systems of justice and law has provided Taliban insurgents with an opening to mobilize domestic opposition to the Afghan government.

The international donors' Tokyo Mutual Accountability Framework seems intended to mollify donor domestic audiences. Their announcement reads, "The Afghan government reaffirms its solemn commitment to strengthen governance, grounded in human rights, the rule of law and ...the Constitution, and holds it as integral to sustained economic growth and development." The key concept in the document is the donors' "monitoring of development and governance benchmarks in a transparent manner... [as a] powerful means to enable accountability to the Afghan people." These "commitments" which will be "monitored" are in five areas: elections; governance/rule of law; integrity of public finance and banking; taxes and budgets, at both national and local level; economic growth and development. Under each area is a set of "indicators," which are goals, not the means of reaching those goals (e.g. "enact and enforce the legal framework for fighting corruption").

What's missing is a candid explanation of the processes of social, political, and economic change that might transform Afghanistan into the model state of the Accountability Framework or an assessment of the history, culture, conditions, and political realities (Pakistan?) in Afghanistan that have made such change so difficult. Key questions are left unanswered. What are real timelines (Afghan government to determine later); who decides if milestones are missed; what are the consequences; will there be real "conditionality" tied to progress on anticorruption (measured how?).

Afghanistan's corruption is an even more fraught an issue today than it has been in the past, as international withdrawal looms. It imperils a weak government and creates the risk (among other factors) that a transition from Karzai (whose term ends in 2014) will not move forward but will recede back to the conflicts and uncertainty that existed 10 years ago, raising the specter that the influence of the Taliban, Pakistan, and world terrorists could wax as U.S. strategic interests continue but its political interest wanes.

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Government Should Disclose Details of Afghan-US Security Deal: Abdullah

TOLOnews.com
Monday, 23 July 2012

Afghanistan's government should provide exact details about the Afghan-US security deal to be signed within the year to ensure its in the national interest, head of opposition party National Coalition Abdullah Abdullah said.

The Afghan government will soon begin negotiations with the US government over a security agreement which may boost US military presence or cooperation in Afghanistan.

"As Afghanistan needs international assistance particularly in security sector, the Afghan government should provide the people with the details of this agreement - the national interests of Afghanistan should be considered in the agreement," Abdullah told TOLOnews Sunday, adding that the government is obligated to the respond to the concerns of the people.

The Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Janan Mosazai said that preliminary negotiations over the agreement will begin soon.

"Preliminary negotiations will be kicked off in this regard soon; we hope to finalise the agreement within a year," Mosazai said Sunday.

Like the long-term strategic agreement with the US signed in May, the security agreement has already raised the concerns of some neighboring countries. Abdullah said these concerns must be addressed.

"If the people have legal concerns and demands, we and the government are obliged to consider them," Abdullah said.

The future security agreement with the US was revealed around the time when the Afghan-US strategic agreement was signed, and the US government had repeatedly insisted that it was not interested in permanent military bases in Afghanistan.

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Pentagon caps codels to Afghanistan

Politico
By AUSTIN WRIGHT
23/7/2012

The Pentagon has asked members of Congress to cut down on the number of oversight trips to Afghanistan, an aide to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon confirmed on Monday.

“We have agreed to work with [Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s] office to manage the number of trips going to Afghanistan, but the committee is unwilling to accept arbitrary limits on where members can travel in country, or whom they can meet with,” said Claude Chafin, a spokesman for the Republican congressman from California.

The Pentagon is worried that “an aggressive troop withdrawal schedule has limited resources,” which make the so-called congressional delegation (CODEL) trips “difficult to support,” Chafin said an email.

Still, he added: “This is clearly a critical moment in the war, and as part of a co-equal branch of government, members have an obligation and a right to get a firsthand impression of how President [Barack] Obama’s strategy is being executed.”

A Democratic committee aide, who wished to remain unidentified, also indicated the Pentagon was “restricting access for a period of time” because of the troop drawdown.

At the Pentagon, spokesman George Little said the restrictions had been instituted across the federal government.

“The department has made a request to reduce the number of visits by executive and legislative branch officials, including our own personnel, to permit our forces in the war zone to focus on the fight,” Little said in an email. “That’s where their energy needs to be right now as we move through this critical transition period in Afghanistan.”

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a Marine combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and a member of the Armed Services Committee, said the Pentagon denied his request to visit Afghanistan in late June as part of a congressional delegation led by Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.).

Instead, Hunter said, the group traveled to Yemen and he decided not to take part in the trip.

“If it was to Afghanistan, I would have gone,” Hunter told POLITICO. “All it did was make me think they didn’t want civilian oversight from the legislative branch over there.”

In April, a congressional delegation caused headaches for the Defense Department when Afghan President Hamid Karzai refused to allow Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) to enter the country because of his critical views of its central government.

Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conveyed Karzai’s wishes to Rohrabacher, who waited in Qatar while the rest of the delegation continued on to Afghanistan.

“Apparently, Karzai just goes bananas every time he hears that I might be, in some way, coming into his country,” Rohrabacher told POLITICO at the time.

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Promoting Economic Development In Afghanistan

Sustained financial support is only possible, and only responsible, if Afghanistan successfully implements its program of necessary governance and economic reforms.

Voice of America
23/07/2012

At the Tokyo Conference on Afghanistan on July 8, the international community made clear its intent to support Afghanistan while recognizing that sustained financial support is only possible, and only responsible, if Afghanistan successfully implements its program of necessary governance and economic reforms and maintains a political system that reflects its pluralistic society.

In this context, the international community has pledged $16 billion in development aid for Afghanistan over the next four years. Speaking at the conference, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “Afghanistan’s security cannot only be measured by the absence of war. It has to be measured by whether people have jobs and economic opportunity, whether they believe their government is serving their needs, whether political reconciliation proceeds and succeeds.”

The United States welcomed Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s public commitment in Tokyo to fighting corruption, improving governance, strengthening the rule of law, and increasing access to economic opportunity for all Afghans, especially for women. As Secretary Clinton said, “No nation can achieve sustainable peace, reconciliation, stability, and economic growth if half the population is not empowered. All citizens need to have the chance to benefit from and contribute to Afghanistan’s progress, and the United States will continue to stand strongly by the women of Afghanistan.”

In addition to the international community, Afghanistan’s neighbors have an especially key role to play. The New Silk Road, or expanded regional trade, is critical to an economically thriving South and Central Asia. Nothing offers a more credible alternative to violence than an inclusive economy that offers jobs and opportunities under the rule of law. Increasing regional trade will open up new sources of raw materials, energy, and agricultural products, not just for Afghanistan but for all nations in the region.

The last essential element of a successful economic transition is the private sector. It is the key to driving growth, creating jobs, and supporting the kind of reform that needs to be sustainable. “We look to the Afghan government,” said Secretary Clinton, “to follow through on their reform commitments, and we look to the international community to do what we can to draw business and investment to Afghanistan.”

“The future,” said Secretary Clinton, “has got to be what the Afghan people have forged for themselves, and we need to make sure that we do everything to make that a reality.”

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Afghanistan: The troubled U.S. effort

Washington Post (blog)
By Al Kamen
23/07/2012

“Little America,” our colleague Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s stunning new book on this country’s efforts to defeat the Taliban, is not as fun as his “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” which re-counted the rollicking early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

The ineffable stupidity in Iraq, the colossal miscalculations, the spectacular arrogance, were all so ridiculous you laughed to keep from crying.

“Little America” is a much grimmer recounting of how the U.S. Afghan effort, difficult enough in a “country” plagued by endemic corruption, was undermined: by vicious infighting among administration officials, by “the stubbornness and incompetence at the State Department and the Agency for International Development,” by the “tribal” Pentagon, and by the scarcity of officials who actually spoke the languages and knew anything about Afghanistan.

And when two-thirds of the supposed nation-building civilians are camped out in Kabul and not out in the field, one shouldn’t expect much.

Despite all the supposed lessons learned from Iraq, the Afghan effort, Chandrasekaran concludes in his superbly reported book, was “almost as embarrassing as the first year in Iraq.”

The disheartening chaos within the administration over what to do, with the military, the National Security Council and the State Department waging their own wars, hugely compounds the problems.

Still, there are some laugh-out-loud moments — if you’re into black humor — based on the author’s 15 multi-week trips there since early 2009.

For example, 11 Bolivian engineers were brought in to show how a U.S.-backed program there to build cobblestone roads could be repeated in Afghanistan.

A short demonstration stretch was built. But the Afghans objected. They wanted gravel and asphalt. The cobblestones, they claimed, hurt their camels’ hooves.

Huge amounts of money were dumped into one district to employ lots of day laborers at good wages. Then the schools “suddenly closed,” Chandrasekaran writes. Seems the “teachers had become day laborers because the pay was better.”

Then there was the State Department official who had worked anti-narcotics in Bogota. He brought in two Colombian women for a 12-day visit to talk about their country’s reintegration of FARC rebels.

“But they spoke no English,” Chandrasekaran writes, “and no Marine battalion wanted to host them.”

So they were dispatched to meet with Afghan officials. A senior official listened to them talk through an interpreter for an hour.

“’Our problems are very different,’ he said as he got up to leave.’But I love to hear the sound of Spanish.’”

Similar follies — and bizarre things like AID’s intense hatred of cotton farming -- highlight the destabilizing and unintended — even opposite — consequences of throwing money at poor countries.

“For years, we dwelled on the limitations of the Afghans,” Chandrasekaran writes. “We should have focused on ours.”

This book should be required reading for any diplomat or AID official going to work in any developing country.

We hear that the book has sparked a scramble in the Kabul embassy compound to compile “success stories” for publication to counter the book’s analysis.

Please. Haven’t we wasted enough money already?

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Afghan Forces Not Able to Secure the Country: Analyst

TOLOnews.com
Monday, 23 July 2012

An Afghan military expert believes that Afghan forces will not be able to defend the country on their own, saying that the withdrawal of foreign troops will see security deteriorate.

In an interview with TOLOnews, military analyst Jawid Kohistani said Monday that he believed the Taliban could gain control of some of the country's main cities and, while perhaps not Kabul city itself, the militants would control areas around it.

"Afghan security forces will not be able to control [all] Afghanistan after the withdrawal of foreign soldiers," he said. "The Taliban will control the bigger cities as well as Kabul's surroundings."

He added that he feared that the security situation will deteriorate after the complete withdrawal of the foreign troops in 2014.

His statements come as Nato's top military commander Gen. John Allen said on Sunday that nearly half of the 23,000 US soldiers slated to return home this year have already withdrawn from Afghanistan.

"August will be the heaviest month," Allen said in his interview with the Associated Press. "A lot is coming out now and a great deal will come out in August and early September. We'll be done probably around mid-September or so."

President Barack Obama pulled out 10,000 US troops from Afghanistan last year and ordered another 23,000 to be withdrawn by September 30. That will leave roughly 68,000 American troops still in the country in addition to the other 40,000 international forces.

Allen was more optimistic about the Afghan forces defence capabilities, pointing out that it had not yet reached its full capacity.

"We haven't even recruited the whole Afghan national security force. That's not going to happen for another couple months, but by October 1, we hope to be at 352,000," he said to AP. "We don't finish completely fielding the Afghan forces until December 2013. So just at that level alone there is significant work remaining to be done."

He said the joint security forces were working in the east to stop the infiltration of insurgents from Pakistan to Afghanistan, as well as aiming to expand the security zone around Kabul in Wardak and Logar provinces, just south of the capital, improving security along highways extending southward from the capital, and pushing insurgents farther from population centers.

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After 30 years, Pakistan rolls up welcome mat for Afghan refugees

McClatchy Newspapers
By Saeed Shah
Monday, July 23, 2012
ISLAMABAD

Pakistan plans to cancel refugee status at the end of this year for the 3 million Afghans who are living in the country, officials have told McClatchy, leaving the refugees facing possible forced resettlement in their homeland, a war-torn country that many of them barely know.

Pushing the refugees into Afghanistan probably would create a new crisis for that country, which already is struggling with an insurgency, an economy almost entirely dependent on the U.S-led foreign presence and the illicit drug trade, and the impending withdrawal of foreign combat troops by 2014.

Officials in Pakistan, which has hosted Afghan refugees for more than 30 years – one of the longest-running refugee problems in the world – say that “enough is enough” and are resisting entreaties by the United Nations and others to reconsider the decision. It comes as Islamabad’s relations with Western countries, particularly the United States, have soured over its policies in neighboring Afghanistan and the unannounced U.S. raid on Pakistani soil that killed Osama bin Laden last year.

Pakistan’s top administrator in charge of the Afghan refugee issue, Habibullah Khan, the secretary of the Ministry of States and Frontier Regions, said Islamabad wouldn’t change its decision.

“The international community desires us to review this policy, but we are clear on this point. The refugees have become a threat to law and order, security, demography, economy and local culture,” Khan said in an interview. “Enough is enough.”

One such refugee is Rangeen, 28, who goes by only one name, as is common in Afghanistan. He’s lived in Pakistan since he was 12 and is a registered refugee. Three times he’s tried to move back to his native Kabul, the Afghan capital, but he’s found it too costly to live there.

“I couldn’t find work in Kabul, and it is very expensive there, so each time I was forced to come back” to Pakistan, Rangeen said. “I’m just a laborer. It is not possible to survive in Kabul on what you make as a laborer there.”

Rangeen earns around 200 rupees a day, about $2, by working as a porter at a wholesale vegetable market just outside Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, pushing cartloads of produce around for buyers. His determination not to go to Afghanistan is all the more striking given the difficulties of life in his adopted home. None of his four children go to school, nor do any of the other children in Sorang Abadi, the makeshift village where he lives, a 15-minute drive south of the capital.

Looking at his 7-year-old son, Noor Agha, Rangeen said: “He will suffer the same fate as me. All he’ll be able to do is push a cart.”

Villagers in Sorang Abadi pay about $15 a month in rent for just enough land to construct one ramshackle room, from baked mud, and keep a small yard. There’s no electricity or running water; they fetch water from a timber yard about 15 minutes’ walk away. They haven’t been able to find space at a semiofficial refugee camp that’s about four miles away.

Mukhtiar, a 40-year-old from Baghlan province in the north of Afghanistan, which is considered relatively safe, said he’d been in Pakistan for 30 years.

“We won’t go to Afghanistan. There is nothing but war,” he said. “After the Russians got out, the Americans came. Whatever we had back there has been taken over by others. There is no work, no property, nothing there except feuds.

“It would be like throwing us into the sea.”

Afghan refugees started arriving in Pakistan in the 1980s, fleeing the Soviet invasion, and have continued to come here to escape the horrors of a civil war, Taliban rule and, most recently, the conflict triggered by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Whole generations have grown up in Pakistan and don’t know their homeland. There are 1.7 million Afghan refugees registered in Pakistan – more than half of them younger than 18 – of which 630,000 live in camps. A further 1 million are estimated to be living in the country unregistered and therefore illegally.

The international community and the Afghan government in Kabul have no strategy prepared to deal with any such influx of people. The anxiety over taking back the refugees seems to belie the claims of progress in Afghanistan that the U.S.-led international coalition makes regularly.

“If the international community is so concerned, they should open the doors of their countries to these refugees,” Khan said. “Afghans will be more than happy to be absorbed by the developed countries, like Western Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia.”

Khan said that after Dec. 31, the Pakistani government didn’t plan to renew Afghan refugees’ registration cards, so those currently registered will lose their refugee status. He declined to spell out what would happen to the refugees after that, but if the policy sticks they’d be in the country illegally and liable to be deported.

Some Afghans have prospered in Pakistan – as seen by their near takeover of Hayatabad, an upscale suburb lined with villas outside Peshawar, a northwestern city close to the Afghan border – but the majority of them struggle.

And as their numbers have grown, Pakistani officials suspect that the leadership of the Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups is hiding among the refugees. The western Pakistani city of Quetta is home to the Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s leadership council, and it contains a sprawling Afghan refugee settlement that provides easy cover for militants.

A U.N. voluntary repatriation program is making slow progress. So far this year it’s been able to entice only 41,000 people to return to Afghanistan, a slight increase over the 35,000 who returned in the first half of last year. Since 2002, the U.N. has repatriated 3.7 million Afghans to the country, but the rate stalled in recent years as the war intensified. It’s also likely that many of the returnees have slipped back into Pakistan, given that there are almost as many Afghan refugees in Pakistan today as there were in 2002.

Earlier this year, Valerie Amos, the U.N. humanitarian affairs chief, visited a camp in Kabul and said its conditions for returning refugees appalled her. Once they reach Afghanistan, returnees are entitled to a one-time payment of $150 per person from the U.N.

Neill Wright, the Pakistan representative of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said the U.N. would still recognize the registered Afghans in Pakistan as refugees after this year under international law “until a durable solution can be found.”

“We hope that the government of Pakistan will continue to recognize them as refugees,” Wright said. “Returning them to Afghanistan could destabilize the country further at a time when it is already experiencing instability from the drawdown of international forces.” Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent.

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Afghan reality TV show's goal is national unity

The Independent
By Lianne Gutcher
Tuesday 24 July 2012
Kabul

Thousands of Afghan footballers have signed up to participate in trials to compete in the country's first professional league.

The trials are part of a reality show called Maidan e Sabz (Green Field) and the audience will have a chance to vote for the players they want to make it on to the teams, alongside selections by judges from the Afghan Football Federation (AFF).

The AFF is holding trials in six cities including Kabul, Jalalabad and Mazar-e Sharif. In each, 30 people will be selected from the thousands who have registered. They will then be put through drills designed to showcase their natural flair and ability, such as dribbling and shooting, allowing judges to weed down the hopefuls. In the final selection of the 18-man teams, judges will pick 15 players and a studio audience will vote for the final three. After the players are selected, 16 games will be played in September.

The first episode of the show – which is the brainchild of Moby Group, the Afghan media group that owns the popular Tolo TV channel – aired early this month at 9pm, the prime-time TV slot in Afghanistan. "Football is very, very popular here," said Tolo TV's channel manager, Massoud Sanjer. "If you walk around, you will see people playing in parks and in the dusty streets. Western teams from outside Afghanistan are very popular. You can see Barcelona and Real Madrid logos on car stickers and T-shirts."

While the national cricket team are national heroes, the football team have been overlooked. sports fans only began to take notice at the end of last year, when Afghans reached the finals of the South Asian Football Federation Championship, and lost 4-0 to India. In the same way the cricket team, mainly made up of players from the Pashtun ethnic group, are venerated by people across the country regardless of ethnicity, football league organisers also hope to foster a sense of national unity.

The public will vote for three players who can join the country's first professional football league

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Return of Afghans is journey into the unknown

The West Australian
July 24, 2012

Malik Sakhigul was just 28 when he ran away from Afghanistan. Soviet troops had swept through the country so he grabbed what little he could and led his parents and three daughters east across the border into Pakistan. More than three million of his countrymen ended up joining him.

Now 60, he returned home this month in a secret trip that marked the first tentative steps towards a permanent return - part voluntary and part under duress - and attempted to answer the question hanging over the heads of millions of Afghans in exile around the world: is it finally safe to go back?

"I went to see the conditions," he said last week.

"I wanted to see whether we will have a place to live there or not."

Malik is one of the elders at the Utmanzai refugee camp - a dry, dusty collection of mud huts in Pakistan's north-west, surrounded by cemeteries and filled with children who sing old songs of the beauty of a neighbouring country that to them is little more than legend.

"The younger ones think it is a magical place," one aid worker explains, "they only know it from the songs which describe Kabul as a most beautiful city with the bravest people in the world."

"It is when the children get older, about six years, that they start to learn what has happened."

Utmanzai sprang up during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan 33 years ago, when hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled for their lives across the border and sought refuge in Pakistan, kicking off the world's longest-running refugee crisis and creating what still is the biggest cluster of refugees anywhere in the globe, reaching a peak of more than four million.

It is a place where two generations of Afghans have grown up never seeing their ancestral home and not understanding why the country in which they were born has never accepted them, banning them because of their blood from voting, holding a bank account or even a driver's licence.

On the outskirts of the north-west city of Peshawar, one of three UNHCR repatriation centres set up 10 years ago processes dozens of families each day. Each of them has chosen to return to Afghanistan.

Thirty-eight-year-old Inayatullah spent last week completing the final paperwork for him, his wife, and his young son and daughter to be resettled in Afghanistan in the next few days.

"It will be difficult. There will be financial problems and we will have no land," he said.

"I have not been back there since we ran away but I hear it is improving. We want to start a new life there in our country."

Since this voluntary repatriation program began in 2002, 3.7 million exiled Afghans have returned, 1.5 million of them in the first year.

But even the UNHCR admits the figures need to be treated cautiously. It has no way of knowing how many of these people have since returned to Pakistan. The anecdotal evidence is that many of them have. Despite the regular exodus (40,000 in the first six months of this year), there are still 1.7 million registered Afghan refugees within Pakistan's borders, the same figure as when The West Australian last visited the camps two years ago.

"There are big changes in Afghanistan," says Matteo Paoltroni, who, with the Danish Refugee Council, arranged this month's return by Malik and the 19 other tribal elders.

"In a way, the situation is improving and, on the other hand, it is still dramatic and difficult, especially in specific areas of the country. It is inaccessible to most of us, especially the south is very difficult to monitor."

He says the council chose the Kama district because it was one of 48 identified by the UNHCR as stable enough to return. But there are more than a million registered refugees in exile and big swathes of Afghanistan are still unreachable, even to aid organisations.

"Something is changing there. But, of course, it sounds like everything is fine but then tomorrow there could be a bomb so it still is difficult," he says.

"If these people believe they can return with safety and dignity, then we will help them.

"But it is a very difficult decision, especially when you have nothing back there. What are these people going to do? What is the future for these people? It is a big dilemma for Afghanistan."

Last Thursday, in the sparse surrounds of Utmanzai, Malik and the 19 other elders who had travelled with him across the border into Afghanistan's Kama district, gathered the community together and told them what they had seen.

"I cannot speak for the whole country, but where I went the security situation is fine," he said.

"We will have enough land but no shelter. And the land we have is enough to live in but not enough for cultivation. It is not only shelter you need. You need to feed your family."

When pushed on it later, Malik admits he doesn't want to go: "I'm happy here in Pakistan. The security situation, compared to Afghanistan, is better."

But over the past few months, the Pakistan Government has made it clear that it doesn't want to play host to the refugees any longer and has called for them to leave.

"In Pakistan, one of the reasons many of us are preferring to stay is because of the better economic conditions here," Malik says.

"We don't have any source of income if we go to Afghanistan. Once that problem is solved, I think people will return. But the problem is livelihood opportunities."

It is not a view shared by everyone. About two hours away from Utmanzai, in the 7200-strong camp known as Khazana, an old man known as Zarawar (who doesn't know his age but thinks he is in his 80s) says after 32 years in Pakistan he is "happy here" and doesn't want to be forced out.

"I don't want to go back to Afghanistan for the rest of my life," he says. His 32-year-old son, Matiullah, was born in the camp, married a woman also born there and gave Zarawar his three young grandchildren in the same mud surrounds. "This is home."

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A day after Kabul’s warning to Pakistan, more cross-border shelling reported

Washington Post
By Sayed Salahuddin
July 23, 2012
KABUL

Scores of fresh artillery rounds fired from Pakistan hit parts of eastern Afghanistan on Sunday night and Monday, a local official said, a day after Kabul warned Islamabad that any further cross-border shelling could significantly damage ties between the two historically uneasy neighbors.

There were no casualties from the overnight barrage, which mostly hit the Dangam district of eastern Konar province. Earlier in the weekend, four civilians were killed in shelling there, said Wasifullah Wasifi, a spokesman for Konar’s governor.

In western Afghanistan on Sunday, a gunman wearing the uniform of the Afghan security forces shot and killed three civilian contractors — two Americans and a British citizen — working with the U.S.-led NATO coalition, the Associated Press reported. Five coalition troops were killed by roadside bombs over the weekend in other parts of the country.

Konar police Chief Ewaz Mohammad Naziri said 1,960 shells, mostly artillery rounds, have hit various districts of the province in recent months. Pakistan denies that accusation. The shelling comes days after Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul to discuss joint efforts to persuade Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan to join peace talks and end the cross-border shelling.

On Sunday, the deputy Afghan foreign minister, Jawed Ludin, met with Pakistan’s ambassador to Kabul and issued a warning. “Any continuation of such reported shelling against Afghan villages could have a significant negative impact on bilateral relations,” Ludin told Ambassador Mohammad Sadiq, the Foreign Ministry reported.

The two sides agreed to hold a senior-level meeting of military officials soon to discuss the shelling and improve military coordination along the border region.

The shelling also was the focal point of a debate in the Afghan parliament Sunday, with some lawmakers calling Karzai’s U.S.- reliant government weak for failing to respond to the firing.

Afghan officials say the shelling has forced hundreds of families to leave their villages, mostly in rugged Konar province, an entry point for insurgents. The province lies near the porous, ill-defined and historically disputed frontier with Pakistan and was the target of even more extensive shelling from Pakistan last summer.

Afghan and U.S. and other NATO-led troops have come under fire by suspected insurgents in Konar in the past.

Adding to the tension between Islamabad and Kabul, Pakistan recently decided to revoke refu­gee status for nearly 3 million Afghans, meaning they will be deported by year’s end. Pakistan is also blocking the transfer of millions of school textbooks into Afghanistan.

Afghanistan had wanted its refugees to be able to return home more gradually, and an Afghan government spokeswoman said Karzai had received a personal pledge from Ashraf that the books would be allowed into his country.

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Lack of Intelligence Allows Taliban Infiltration of Afghan Forces

TOLOnews.com
Monday, 23 July 2012

Afghan military experts said that it was a lack of proper intelligence on the Taliban that allowed the insurgent militants to infiltrate the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

Afghan military expert Noorulhaq Olomi believes that as long as Afghanistan lacks a sufficient intelligence agency and fails to closely monitor the movement of the Taliban and Afghanistan's enemies, it would be difficult to prevent their infiltration.

"We should have sufficient intelligence personnel to monitor their movement from inside. They [Taliban] are everywhere and they use every opportunity to harm Afghanistan," Olomi told TOLOnews on Sunday.

Another Afghan military expert Gen. Atiqullah Amarkhil said that if the country's intelligence department was more professional and better equipped, they could better control the activities of insurgents.

"[The intelligence agents] are not that strong, and they are neither professional nor equipped. We are in the preliminary stages, and they would be more effective when they have agents inside [the Taliban] to neutralise their activities within," Amarkhil told TOLOnews.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for Afghan Ministry of Interior Sediq Sediqqi said that they are trying hard to protect Afghans and prevent attacks, particularly in Kabul.

"In close collaboration with the security department and the national army of Afghanistan, we are trying to prevent any attacks or schemes of the enemies in Kabul province, particularly inside Kabul city," Sediqqi told TOLOnews on Sunday.

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The Perilous Pushtun Paradox

Strategy Page
July 23, 2012

Over the last few years the Taliban have adopted a new strategy that emphasizes avoiding contact with foreign troops and concentrating attacks, and bribery efforts, on Afghan soldiers, police, and politicians. The latter includes senior tribal leaders and local strongmen in general. As they did in the 1990s, the Taliban use a carrot and stick approach to controlling the country. Those who are willing to make a deal, to share control, are accommodated, even if it includes bribes. Areas that refuse to submit are subjected to terror attacks, mainly directed at the local leadership. But ordinary civilians are victims as well, in order to generate popular pressure against the local leadership to make a deal with the Taliban. It's not working as well as it did in the 1990s, when the population was destitute and worn down by fifteen years of war with the Russians and after the Russians left in 1989, each other (civil war). The last decade has been one of growing prosperity fueled by more economic activity, foreign aid, and drug (heroin/opium) profits. In some parts of Afghanistan the new tactics have worked. That means the Taliban and drug gangs are left alone. The bribed/intimidated security forces and local leaders will still go after bandits and shake down local citizens who do not have powerful friends. That includes foreign aid operations, which have always been the target of thieves and corrupt officials.

The problem the Taliban has is that they lose all control in areas where foreign troops operate and have a very hard time in places occupied by non-Pushtuns (meaning most of Afghanistan) and the growing number of Pushtun tribes that are fed up with the Taliban and drug gangs and fighting back. The Taliban maintain the illusion of success (at least among themselves) by killing and bribing more Afghan police, soldiers, and leaders. Back in Pakistan (Quetta, Baluchistan, south of Helmand, and Kandahar) the Taliban leadership knows better. Areas of Taliban influence are shrinking and the number of Afghans actively resisting or organizing militias and fighting the Taliban are increasing. Most Afghans do not see the Taliban as religiously inspired nationalists (as the Islamic radicals view themselves) but depraved hired guns for the drug gangs. Despite strict orders to behave, many Taliban use their power to loot and abuse the women (and young boys). The Taliban are not building support after two decades of effort but instead a more intense hatred.

Increasingly, Taliban leaders are questioning their chances of eventual victory. This is picked up, with increasing frequency, by electronic intelligence monitoring. Captured Taliban tell of security men for senior leaders passing on tidbits from that kind of talk by their bosses, in closely guarded meetings of senior Taliban. Some Taliban leaders are even talking to the media about this but confidentially. A growing number of Taliban want to make some kind of peace deal with the government but the Old Guard is still willing to go down fighting. That sort of thing is all-too-common in Afghanistan, especially among the Pushtun.

There is growing panic in eastern Afghanistan and among three million Afghan refugees across the border in Pakistan. That's because the Pakistanis plan to try and expel all Afghan refugees and illegal migrants from Pakistan by the end of the year. Some of these Afghans have been in Pakistan for 30 years (having fled the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980). In the last decade some four million Afghan refugees have come home. Many of those remaining in Pakistan have put down roots and prospered and don't want to return (often to land that has been stolen or subject to some old family feud). The Afghans in Pakistan are living in communities full of fellow Pushtuns (most of the refugees are Pushtuns from southern Afghanistan), often people from the same tribe or extended family. The Afghan/Pakistan border was drawn (in 1893) without regard to the territorial integrity of Pushtun tribes. Only about 60 percent of the Afghans in Pakistan are registered as refugees and only about 600,000 still live in refugee camps (actually large towns administered, and supported, by foreign aid organizations). About a third of the Afghan refugees live in other parts of Pakistan, particularly the port city of Karachi. This is the largest metropolis in Pakistan and the Afghans there dominate the criminal underground. For that reason alone most Pakistanis would like to see the Afghan refugees forced to go back to Afghanistan. The Pakistanis will be able to expel some, maybe even half, of the refugees. The rest will resist, with bribes, violence, or just by hiding. But the effort will cause much violence on the Pakistani side of the border and turmoil on the Afghan side as the refugees seek to integrate themselves into an area they fled decades ago.

The U.S. has withdrawn about 11,000 troops so far this year and another 12,000 will go before the year ends. That will leave about 68,000 American troops. Afghan security forces (over 300,000 soldiers and police) are taking control of more of the country and by the end of the year the army and police should contain 350,000 armed men. The force is more tribal than anything else. The soldiers and police are often illiterate, poorly trained, and led by NCOs and officers who aren't much better. Foreign trainers are frequently confronted by violent, short tempered Afghans who do not take well to instruction or orders from foreigners.

July 22, 2012: Some Taliban publicly whipped two men in a village in eastern Pakistan. The two were caught trying to kidnap a ten year old boy and hold him for ransom. The Taliban like to publicize their law and order efforts. What the Taliban don't make public is the growing problem with their own men stealing and misbehaving. These fellows are sometimes executed, quietly, but most of the time the bad behavior is tolerated in order to keep Taliban gunmen on the job.

July 21, 2012: In the east (Kunar province) Pakistani troops fired over 300 rockets and artillery shells into Afghanistan over the last two days, apparently in an effort to hit Pakistani Taliban bases in Afghanistan. There were four known civilian casualties and no reports of Taliban losses. The Afghan government protested to Pakistan but these protests are usually ignored or dismissed with denials. Pakistan considers Afghanistan a client state. The Afghans are considered a collection of fractious tribes pretending to be a nation. With no access to the sea, most Afghan road connections to ports are with Pakistan. The Afghans resent this, especially since for thousands of years invasions of northern India (which, historically, lowland Pakistan is a part) came through Pakistan where many Pushtun tribesmen would join the invaders. Pakistan and India are well aware of this but still consider the Pushtuns a bunch of bloodthirsty savages from the mountains. Afghanistan has only been around for a few centuries, and Pakistan was carved out of British India in 1947 (before that it was a collection of feudal states and tribal territories). When you get right down to it, Pakistan's big problem is that it contains two-thirds of the Pushtun people (who are 15 percent of Pakistan's population) while Afghanistan contains the other third (who are 40 percent of Afghanistan's population). "Pushtunstan" is a nation of 30 million Pushtuns caught between Pakistan (still over 150 million people) and northern Afghanistan (with about 18 million non-Pushtuns). Without Pushtuns Afghanistan would become yet another Central Asian country with a small population (neighboring Tajikistan has 7.7 million and Uzbekistan has 30 million). But Pushtunstan is never going to happen because the Pushtuns have long been divided by tribal politics and cultural differences. When the Pushtun aren't fighting outsiders, they fight each other. The violent and fractious Pushtuns are a core problem in the region and have been for centuries. There is no easy solution to this.

July 18, 2012: In the north (Samangan Province) the Taliban made a rare attack on NATO supply trucks bringing fuel and other supplies from railroad depots just across the border from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The attack used bombs and gunfire to destroy or damage 22 trucks parked overnight. The Taliban attackers are in big trouble now because the northerners are making a lot of money from the trucking and security contracts. Most of the northerners are not Pushtun, while most Taliban are. A special attack team was probably sent north and now has to try and get back south in one piece.

July 14, 2012: In the north a Taliban suicide bomber got into a wedding reception and set off his bomb near a prominent (non-Pushtun) anti-Taliban politician, Ahmad Khan Samangani, killing him and 22 others (mostly civilians). This is supposed to intimidate northern leaders. It certainly scares many of them but the net result is for the northerners to call for even more aggressive action against the Pushtun Taliban.

July 13, 2012: In eastern Afghanistan the regional head of women’s affairs (Hanifa Safi) was killed by a Taliban bomb that had been attached to her car. The Taliban are violently opposed to education for girls or women working outside the home. Female government officials are seen as blasphemous by the Taliban.

July 8, 2012: In the east (Parwan Province), local officials began a major manhunt for a group of Taliban who had recently publicly executed a 22 year old woman for adultery. The killing, using an assault rifle, was captured in a cell-phone video and went viral. It later turned out that the killing was the resolution of a love triangle between the woman, who was married to a Taliban leader, and another Taliban leader. Rather than try to kill each other (as Afghan men usually do in such situations), the two openly accused the woman of adultery, held a quick trial, condemned her to death and executed her. All this took about an hour and locals were startled by the savagery and duplicity of it all.

Foreign donors have agreed to provide Afghanistan with $15 billion in aid through the end of 2015. The only catch is there will be vigorous efforts to control the corruption (mainly the outright theft of aid money or materials). Afghan officials protest such accusations and prepare to get around the latest anti-corruption efforts.

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Engaging Afghanistan

The Express Tribune
By Ejaz Haider
July 23, 2012

There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip but despite that caveat the initiative taken by the government towards Afghanistan is one that needs to be watched carefully and commended.

It started three years ago. Bilateral visits took place, both at the strategic and operational levels. The idea was to reach out to, and help, Afghanistan mend its internal fault lines. The realisation had another dimension too. Regardless of the United States’ policy and its bilateral relations with Kabul and Islamabad, the two capitals needed to have their own track to resolve issues.

A good policy, it didn’t go too far. Distrust could not be addressed meaningfully, with both sides hedging their bets even as they were trying to explore the prospects of enhanced bilateralism. There was much fanfare over the High Peace Council (HPC) set up by Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, with Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani as its head. Professor Rabbani came to Pakistan in January 2011 and it was thought, at the time, that his visit would yield some movement.

That didn’t happen. Meanwhile, Kabul had also opened an internal track, trying to talk to the Taliban. One such effort brought a suicide bomber close enough to Professor Rabbani. The assassination all but spelled the death of that initiative. This, despite the fact that then prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani rushed to Kabul to condole Professor Rabbani’s death and Pakistan condemned that dastardly act.

Not enough, said Kabul, alleging the bomber was a Pakistani and implying state complicity. Recrimination and blame game followed. Afghanistan signed a Strategic partnership Agreement (SPA) with India close on the heels of that tragedy, making Pakistan feel the move was undertaken on the rebound. The jig, it seemed, was up.

Fortunately not. In the background, work was being done, both at the Foreign Office and in the Pakistan embassy in Kabul with the latter providing the opportunity to the government to pick up the pieces. That’s hard, painstaking work, done away from the limelight.

The two sides are back again, with Afghanistan relying heavily on Pakistan to help it heal its internal wounds. It’s work in progress, much still to be done. Islamabad wants to assure the non-Pashtun Afghans that it is not in the business of putting them down; that it wants an Afghan peace process which is led, driven and owned by the Afghans. It will act as a facilitator of this process and it is an honest player. The internal balance of power — ethnic and political — is for the Afghans to decide.

At the inauguration of the Pakistan embassy on July 19, the guest list had all the main leaders of the political opposition. Talking to them revealed that while they have grievances, not one of them thinks that Afghanistan can sail alone. Pakistan has to provide the wind for the sails. There was nothing mushy about their sentiments. All of them are hard-nosed. All of them also understand that the ground is treacherous and undulated. But no matter what Afghanistan does, its future stability requires Pakistan.

That is both Pakistan’s primary strength as well as its weakness. A stable Afghanistan brings into play Pakistan’s strength; a warring Afghanistan renders this contiguity — geographical, historical and ethnic — Pakistan’s principal weakness.

The current policy is focused on exploiting Pakistan’s strength.

The HPC is still there, headed now by Salahuddin Rabbani, the scion of Professor Rabbani. The bilateral discussions focused on many issues but the central one was Pakistan’s role as the facilitator and how it can make the HPC relevant. The Pakistani delegation comprised the prime minister, ministers of interior and foreign affairs and yes, most significantly, the director general Inter-Services Intelligence.

The two sides presented their proposals; some tough talk happened, some common ground found. The HPC head will now visit Pakistan. The real work begins then from this tentative step.

I asked President Hamid Karzai about the SPAs (strategic partnership agreements) his government has signed and is signing and perceptions in Pakistan. He said Pakistan remained the “very, very special friend”. He talked about the “particularity” of Pakistan-Afghanistan relations. But he agreed that the task ahead is tough. No one wants the snakes and ladders in this relationship.

Much will depend on Pakistan’s next moves when Salahuddin Rabbani arrives here. What will Pakistan offer him? Is it going to ask the Taliban to negotiate? Will it give Rabbani carte blanche? Will it make this bilateral process now the cornerstone of its policy, not just in relation to Afghanistan but also vis-a-vis the United States? Is a mechanism in place?

It would make eminent sense to do so. The US policy, because Pakistan has pulled back from the kind of facilitation it allowed Washington during General (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s tenure, is now focused on pressuring and isolating Pakistan in order to compel it to do the US bidding. What safety valve does Pakistan have to release pressure? Help Afghanistan.

Helping Afghanistan helps in stitching up a possible deal between Kabul and the Taliban, despite many problems and imponderables. There are no guarantees but facilitation can go a long way. It will help if Pakistan were to release Mullah Biradar and other Taliban leaders who wanted to open up a channel with Kabul. What direction such talks might take is for the Afghans to figure out. Pakistan’s job is to set the direction.

Not only will it facilitate Afghanistan — though no one should become starry-eyed and think of driving to Kabul via Torkham anytime soon — but it will also greatly help Pakistan in releasing pressure from itself and gain space vis-a-vis the United States and other state actors.

The last time round the security establishment wasn’t fully on-board. They better be this time round. The political government, the FO and Pakistan’s ambassador in Kabul, a most adroit diplomat, are deeply invested in this policy. They deserve to make it a success.

It won’t be a neat, linear trajectory. But precisely for this reason, Pakistan needs a proactive policy and wrest the initiative. Active engagement is what it needs. The policy looks good on the drawing board; let’s try and implement it.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 24th, 2012.

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Isaf Cannot ‘Confirm or Deny' Rocket Attack from Pakistan

TOLOnews.com
By Mahboba Pardis
Monday, 23 July 2012

Isaf said it cannot confirm or deny whether the rockets falling in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province were coming from Pakistan, adding that the incident was not a reflection of deteriorating security.

Isaf spokesman Brig. General Gunter Katz said at a press briefing on Monday that Isaf was aware of the Afghan government's condemnation of the rocket attacks as a cross-border attack originating from Pakistan.

Katz emphasised that military representatives of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Isaf would work to find solutions for the security concerns along the border, saying that this will only be achieved by recognising the shared national interests and military to military contacts.

"Isaf is aware of the government of Afghanistan's condemnation or rocket attacks in Kunar province originating from Pakistan. While we have to face that there are continued cross-border incidents by the insurgency at the Afghan-Pakistani border, Isaf cannot confirm or deny on this specific rocket attack," Katz told reporters in Kabul.

He said that this incursion does not mean that the overall situation in Afghanistan is bad.

"Yes, we have isolated, very tragic incidents that could appear that the security situation is destabilising... Those isolated incident do not reflect the overall situation in Afghanistan and we are confident that the security situation is stabilising every day," said Katz.

Katz added that the security transition process was going very well and that it will continue, based on the situation "on the ground".

Dominic Medley, Nato's civilian spokesman to Afghanistan, said at the briefing that the international community's assistance will continue throughout the transition and the "transformation decade" after 2014.

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Afghan Villagers Rise up Against Taleban

Locals fight back after losing patience with militants’ hard-line approach.

IWPR
By Mina Habib
23 Jul 12
Afghanistan

Villagers in various parts of Afghanistan have staged localised uprisings against the Taleban in an apparent rejection of the insurgents’ increasingly draconian actions.

The small-scale revolts came as the Taleban tried to distance themselves from the execution-style killing of a woman in Parwan province in late June, which revived bitter memories of the group’s worst excesses when it controlled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.

In more recent years, the Taleban have appeared to adopt comparatively moderate policies towards populations in areas where they are present, in what looked like an attempt to win hearts and minds.

Now, though, politicians say the Taleban are sowing resentment by conducting extrajudicial trials, forcing schools to close, blocking reconstruction projects and generally behaving brutally and harassing civilians.

Nawab Mangal, a member of parliament from Paktia province in southern Afghanistan, described how the Taleban mounted an attack in the Mirzak district on July 9, and local residents fought back and successfully expelled the insurgents from the area.

The Taleban had angered people in the district by taking food by force, destroying bridges and roads and closing schools for boys as well as girls.

Mangal said Mirzak’s residents did not believe Afghan government forces would protect them, so they decided to take matters into their own hands.

“The Taleban’s cruelty has become intolerable,” Mangal said. “The people have been forced to launch spontaneous actions to defend their lives and honour, as well as the interests of the region.”

Similar uprisings have taken place in other districts of Paktia including Jani Khel and Dand-e Patan, Mangal said.

He said that when he met elders from seven districts in the province recently, they told him support for the Taleban movement was collapsing. They said people in their areas believed the insurgents were working for Pakistan and aimed to destroy Afghanistan.

In the eastern Nuristan province, Taleban members have also encountered resistance. Ahmadullah Mowahedi, a parliamentarian from the province, said that when insurgents attempted to close a school in the Waigal district in June, staff and local officials first tried reasoning with them, and then assaulted them and violently ejected them from the building.

“Teachers, pupils and members of the [local] council started a one-on-one fight with the Taleban,” he said. “They beat them up, and the Taleban were forced to make their escape. They failed to close the school.”

In Andar, a district in the southern Ghazni province, residents took up arms against the Taleban two months ago and forced them out of the area after they closed schools and clinics and halted reconstruction projects.

Describing this uprising, member of parliament Chaman Shah Etemadi said there were rumours that similar events were in the offing in other districts of Ghazni.

Etemadi called on the Afghan government to support such revolts, to prevent them being hijacked by other groups.

“The people neither support the Taleban nor the government. They only support their regional interests,” he said.

In the northwester province of Faryab, residents of the Almar district are also reported to have risen up against the Taleban, expelling them from the area.

Taleban spokesman Zabihullah Mojahed acknowledged that rebellions were taking place, but denied they were spontaneous. He said those involved were paramilitaries acting on the government’s instructions and supported by “foreigners”. He also accused the media organisations of exaggerating the situation.

“If we didn’t enjoy popular support, it wouldn’t have been easy to fight against a huge number of foreign forces over the course of ten years. We have relied on God and our people,” he said. “The people have risen up against the occupation. An uprising against this uprising is meaningless.”

The government denies backing the villagers. Interior ministry spokesman Mohammad Sediq Sediqi said that while the government viewed the insurrections as admirable, it had provided no assistance.

“The Taleban want to misrepresent what is a spontaneous movement by the people,” he said. “The truth is that people are fed up with their cruelty.”

Abdul Satar Sadat, a political analyst, said the rebellions reflected the now common view that the Taleban were agents of Pakistan.

“People now believe that those carrying out actions in the name of the Taleban and jihad are not Afghans, but enemies of the Afghan people, and that they have to rise up against them,” he said.

Sadat argues that Afghans have grown less tolerant of the Taleban as they have found out more about them, thanks to better journalism and increased free speech over the last decade. As people gain access to more information, the militants’ popularity is likely to decrease further, he predicted.

“People have put up with their houses being destroyed, but when their schools were burned and public roads and institutions were destroyed, they ran out of patience,” he said.

The Taleban’s reputation was further damaged this month when the group was linked to the extrajudicial killing of a woman in her twenties, which went viral on the internet and was viewed around the world.

On July 8, Reuters news agency released amateur video footage that showed a man shooting a woman several times at close range while she sat on the ground. After the woman, identified as Najiba, collapsed, the footage showed a crowd of men cheering enthusiastically.

Quite why Najiba was killed is unclear, though Reuters said officials in Kabul blamed the Taleban. The New York Times identified the killer as Najiba’s husband, though it claimed Taleban fighters encouraged him to move closer to his wife before pulling the trigger, then cheered as she died.

Parwan provincial governor Abdul Basir Salangi told CNN that two Taleban commanders may have had some kind of relationship with Najiba, then accused her of adultery in order to save face.

The incident inevitably revived memories of Taleban rule, when women were publicly executed in a Kabul stadium.

Taleban spokesman Mojahed told IWPR that the group had conducted its own investigation, and established that its members were not involved.

Instead, he said, Najiba had left her husband and gone off to live with another man. She was “arrested” by her in-laws and her own family, while the man escaped, Mojahed said.

While describing the killing as unjustified under Islamic law, and describing adultery cases as complex matters that should take up to six months to investigate, he said Najiba was “executed out of Afghan zeal and honour, and on grounds accepted in that region”.

He also said similar incidents had been incorrectly blamed on the Taleban, and accused journalists of being biased against the group.

“The media adopt an inappropriate stance against us either because the government demands it, or because of their own personal opinions,” Mojahed complained. “They don’t publish the truth, or the things we tell them.”

President Hamid Karzai called the killing a “heinous and unforgivable crime”, while the head of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, described it as “an atrocity of unspeakable cruelty”.

On July 11, more than 100 people took to the streets of Kabul to protest against Najiba’s murder.

Mina Habib is an IWPR-trained contributor in Kabul.

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Pakistani, Afghan leaders agree to pursue contacts with Taliban, other insurgent groups

Xinhua
July 23 , 2012
ISLAMABAD

Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, who visited Kabul on Thursday last week, has agreed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the need to pursue multiple channels of communication and contact with the Taliban and other armed opposition groups in the country.

According to a joint statement issued simultaneously in Islamabad and Kabul at the conclusion of Ashraf's day-long visit, Pakistan also vowed to "work together" with Afghanistan in an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace and reconciliation process involving the Taliban, Hizb-e-Islami of former Prime Minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and other insurgent factions.

Afghan Ambassador to Islamabad, Omar Daudzai, told Xinhua that Afghanistan wants Pakistan to play an "important role" in helping facilitate the talks with the armed insurgent groups, especially the Taliban.

Pakistan has been trying to convince the Taliban to enter into direct talks with the Afghan government but the insurgents have so far refused.

Pakistan's former Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, had launched a rare public appeal to the Afghan Taliban and other armed groups in February to start talks with the US-backed Afghan government.

The former head of the powerful Taliban Political Affairs, Agha Jan Mutasim, has told Xinhua that the United States and the Taliban are two major parties in the conflict and that the Taliban, at the moment, do not want to talk to the 'powerless regime' in Kabul.

He said the Taliban would consider talks with Afghans after they reach an agreement with the U.S. Mutasim was critically wounded in an ambush in the Pakistani port city of Karachi in August last year and is now undergoing treatment in Turkey.

Despite the Taliban's refusal to enter into intra-Afghan talks, Pakistan has not given up its efforts to encourage the militants to sit down with the Karzai's administration or High Afghan Peace Council so that Afghanistan can achieve peace before the departure of the U.S. and NATO troops in 2014.

Pakistan is also under mounting pressure from the world, especially from the U.S., NATO and Afghanistan, to 'take practical' steps to facilitate the peace and reconciliation process in the war-shattered country before 2014 to avert another civil war.

In February, President Karzai visited Islamabad and sought assurance from Pakistan that it would give a 'safe passage' to those Taliban leaders and their representatives who want to hold talks with the Afghan government.

Kabul had earlier complained that leaders of insurgent Afghan groups who wished to talk to the Afghan government were either killed or kidnapped while in Pakistan.

Analysts said that the reopening of the supply line for NATO forces in Afghanistan after nearly an eight-month was a signal that Islamabad was doing its share in helping the peace process in Afghanistan.

The world community welcomed Pakistan's decision on the unblocking of NATO supply routes despite opposition to the decision at home by hard-line religious groups.

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Future directions of Afghanistan

The Nation
By Javid Husain
July 24, 2012

The prospect of the Nato military withdrawal from Afghanistan, as envisaged in the Chicago Declaration issued in May 2012, raises important questions about the restoration of durable peace and stability in Afghanistan in the context of the interplay of various Afghan forces, contending for power in the country and the evolving regional and global security environment. Whether the withdrawal of Isaf from Afghanistan would lead to the restoration of durable peace and stability, or whether it would merely fuel the fire of internal armed conflict in that war-torn country, would depend upon how the various Afghan political forces, the regional countries and major powers play their cards.

Afghanistan’s recent history offers valuable lessons and guidance for the restoration of durable peace and stability in Afghanistan. Perhaps, the most important lesson of the period following the Soviet withdrawal is that left to itself, Afghanistan is likely to relapse into an intense internal armed conflict after the departure of the Nato forces. This is basically what happened after the withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan, particularly after the fall of the Soviet-installed Najibullah regime in April 1992.

The reality is that under the garb of political and ideological battles in Afghanistan, a tussle for power and supremacy between the Pakhtuns and non-Pakhtuns has been raging in the country for quite some time. During most of 1990s, the Taliban represented the Pakhtuns and the non-Pakhtuns were represented by the Northern Alliance. Even in the post-9/11 period, this tussle for power has remained an important factor in the evolution of the internal security situation in the country. If specific steps are not taken to resolve this tussle for power, the internal armed conflict in Afghanistan would be reignited after the Nato withdrawal thus plunging the country into a full-fledged civil war.

The experience of the 1990s and later events also clearly show that neither the Taliban/Pakhtuns, nor the Northern Alliance/non-Pakhtuns alone can sustain their rule over Afghanistan in conditions of peace and stability. The multi-ethnic character of Afghanistan demands a broad-based government with roots in the different politically significant communities in the country.

Unfortunately, it is not yet clear whether this lesson has been fully learnt by the various groups, particularly the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, contending for power in Afghanistan. It appears, however, from a recent interview of a senior Taliban commander conducted by Michael Semple, a former UN envoy to Kabul during the Taliban era, that at least some elements within the Taliban recognise that their group cannot achieve a total military victory in Afghanistan. This would be a welcome sign if it accurately reflected the evolving thinking within the Taliban. Obviously, the regional and major powers should encourage this line of thinking on the part of both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. In short, the need of the hour is national reconciliation and a power-sharing formula primarily between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance for the establishment of a broad-based government, and the restoration of durable peace and stability in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Nato and Isaf forces.

Three countries through their policies will play the most important role in shaping the future course of events in Afghanistan. They are: the US, the current occupying power, and Afghanistan’s two most important neighbours, that is, Pakistan and Iran. After the easy defeat of the Taliban government, the US policymakers failed to recognise the lesson of the Afghan history - that it was easier to topple the Taliban government than to impose a government of their choice on the Afghan people. The known Afghan hostility towards a foreign occupying power, the opening of a new front by the US through its invasion of Iraq which distracted its attention from Afghanistan, the alienation of Pakhtuns constituting almost half of the Afghan population because of the imposition of a Northern Alliance-dominated government in Kabul, and the disregard of the Afghan people’s conservative cultural values guaranteed that the Taliban would stage a comeback.

This is precisely what happened in Afghanistan. The root cause of the threat posed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, therefore, lies in the failure of US strategy to take into account the ground realities and to learn from the Afghan history, rather than any alleged support that the Afghan Taliban or Pakhtuns may be getting from their brethren in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The US would be well advised, therefore, to focus its efforts on a counterterrorism strategy, that is, on defeating Al-Qaeda which is well within its grasp, rather than on the high-sounding objective of nation building in Washington’s lights or even on counterinsurgency. Above all, it must distinguish between Al-Qaeda that is generally recognised as a terrorist organisation with an international agenda and the Taliban that despite its retrogressive character is essentially an Afghan group contending for power in Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama since the assumption of power has stressed that the essential aim of the US is to defeat Al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, this objective has not been adequately reflected in the US operational strategy in Afghanistan where the US has in practice continued to treat the Afghan Taliban simply as terrorists. Over the past year and a half, however, there has been some recognition on the part of the US policymakers of the need to include the Taliban in an intra-Afghan dialogue for national reconciliation. The attempts earlier this year to initiate formal talks with the Taliban in Qatar failed to take off because the US reneged on its commitment to release some Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo. It seems, however, from the participation of a Taliban representative in a peace meeting in Japan last month and the recent statements by the Head of the Afghan High Peace Council that behind-the-scene efforts are continuing for persuading the Taliban to join an intra-Afghan dialogue.

Iran like Pakistan has close cultural, religious, economic and historical links with Afghanistan, besides having a long contiguous border with that country. The competition for influence in Afghanistan between Pakistan and Iran after the fall of the Najibullah regime in April 1992 prolonged the Afghan civil war till the situation underwent a radical change after 9/11. It also had the undesirable effect of allowing Al-Qaeda to entrench itself in Afghanistan, leading to the US invasion of the country. In retrospect, both Pakistan and Iran would have been better off if they had refrained from taking sides in the internal armed conflict in Afghanistan.

Hopefully, both Iran and Pakistan have drawn an appropriate lesson from their unhappy experience of the 1990s. Pakistan publicly has called for an inclusive intra-Afghan dialogue for the restoration of durable peace in Afghanistan through national reconciliation. Iran also, having burnt its fingers during the 1990s and apprehensive of the US military presence in Afghanistan, is likely to pursue a more prudent approach than what it did earlier in the pre-9/11 period. It is, however, necessary for both Pakistan and Iran to reassure each other about their long-term intentions concerning Afghanistan to overcome any lingering mistrust between them and to avoid the revival of the uncalled for competition for influence in the country. In particular, both Iran and Pakistan must keep their respective security agencies under check so that their misplaced enthusiasm in protecting their respective narrowly-defined national interests does not degenerate into a clash of their Afghan policies as it did during the 1990s.

(This is an adapted version of a paper recently presented by the writer at a seminar in Islamabad jointly sponsored by the Institute for Strategic Studies, Islamabad, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.)

The writer is a retired ambassador and the president of the Lahore Council for World Affairs.

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Pakistan offers protection to Afghan elopers

Couple fear will be killed by bride’s relatives

AFP
July 23, 2012

Peshawar: A Pakistani court on Monday ordered police to protect an Afghan couple who eloped and fear being murdered by the bride’s furious relatives.

Hewad, 22, and Mariyam Marjman fled Kabul last month to marry for love in the leafy town of Abbottabad in northwest Pakistan, where US troops found and killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Marjman, also 22, told AFP her parents had wanted her to wed the ageing husband of her sister, who had recently died, instead. She says that if taken back to Afghanistan she would probably be murdered for marrying a man of her own choice.

The high court in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar took up the case after being moved by reports of the couple’s plight.

“The couple should be provided proper accommodation in Peshawar and foolproof security because of threats to their lives,” said judge Dost Muhammad Khan.

The pair, whom Pakistani authorities had previously housed separately, were accompanied in court by an armed police escort, an AFP reporter said.

The judges called another hearing next week to check their orders had been implemented.

The young couple escaped their conservative families’ clutches with the help of a Pakistani friend - taking the dead sister’s two-year-old daughter with them - but say relatives of the bride have since travelled to Pakistan in a bid to force them back.

Hewad, who uses only one name, told AFP: “I have serious threats to my life from Mariyam’s relatives, from her parents and her brothers.

“I am sure they can harm me here and if we are sent back to Afghanistan, they will simply shoot us.”

Despite progress in recent years and improved legal protection, women suffer chronic rights abuses in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Earlier this month a video emerged of the public execution of a woman accused of adultery in Afghanistan, who was shot dead as dozens of men cheered.

Activists fear that women’s rights in Afghanistan are under particular threat as NATO troops prepare to leave in 2014 and Kabul seeks peace with the Taliban, who brutally repressed women during their 1996-2001 regime.

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Polio Meeting to be Held in Kabul

TOLOnews.com
Monday, 23 July 2012

Afghanistan and Pakistan will meet in Kabul with the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss how to fight polio in the region. Both countries have the highest rates of the disease in the world, along with Nigeria.

Afghan Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) spokesman Hafiz Fayaz said Monday that the meeting will focus on ways to better fight the spread of the disease, and on eradicating it altogether.

"Representatives of Afghan and Pakistani governments will hold a meeting aiming to eradicate polio and ways to seriously combat the disease. The meeting was held in Pakistan annually but this time it will be held in Kabul," Fayaz told TOLOnews on Monday.

He added that if the disease was not wiped out in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it may spread to other central Asian countries.

The MoPH had previously claimed that polio would be completely eradicated from Afghanistan by 2013, but recent reports show that in 2011 there were some 80 known cases of polio in Afghanistan's southern Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

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Afghan Olympic medalist hopes to bring home more medals from London

Xinhua
By Farid Behbud and Jawid Omid
July 23, 2012
KABUL

An Afghan Beijing Olympic medalist has vowed to bring more medals from the London 2012 Olympic Games for the sake of his country and the Afghan people.

In a recent interview with Xinhua, Rohullah Nikpa said that he and the other Afghan players are determined to bring honors for the country at the London Games.

"I also wish good luck for my fellow Afghan athletes so that we can again earn the respect and recognition of the international community," Nikpa said.

Nikpa won for the post-Taliban Afghanistan the first ever bronze medal for taekwondo in the Beijing 2008 Olympic.

A six-member Afghan team, including one female player, will represent Afghanistan in the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The Afghan team consists of Rohullah Nikpa and Nisar Ahmad Bahawi in taekwondo; Masoud Azizi and Tahmina Kohistani, the only woman in the team, in long-distance running; and Aimal Faisal and Ajma Faizi Zada in boxing and judo.

The team left Kabul on Friday and was sent off at the Kabul International Airport by several sports officials and fans.

Sports officials said that they are hopeful the Afghan team can bring medals from London so that Afghanistan will again be recognized by international sports enthusiasts.

The International Olympic Committee had suspended Afghanistan membership in 1999 due to Taliban's brutal policies that included restrictions on the country's sportsmen and athletes.

The IOC lifted the suspension in 2002 after the collapse of the Taliban regime.

The Taliban fundamentalist regime, which was toppled from power by the U.S.-led military campaign in late 2001, had outlawed a series of sports activities aside from forcing athletes to grow long beard and wear tall shirts and trousers during matches.

Since the collapse of Taliban regime, Afghan athletes have already attended several competitions at regional and international level and started bringing medals and honors to the war-torn country.

"I ask our countrymen to pray for the success of our small team in the London 2012 Olympic Games," team member Nisar Ahmad Bahawi said.

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