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Afghan governor survives Taliban attack
By Sayed Salahuddin The Washington Post
KABUL – The governor for Afghanistan’s Paktia province escaped unhurt from a Taliban commando-style attack Sunday, his spokesman said, the latest strike of its kind in recent days by the insurgent guerrillas.
Juma Khan Hamdard was in a convoy of vehicles when three suicide bombers began firing at it outside his headquarters in the town of Gardez, the provincial capital of Paktia, near the border with Pakistan, Rohullah Samoon said.
One police officer and a civil servant were killed in the clash before the bombers were gunned down, he said. The insurgents were in a vehicle packed with explosives that went off during the clash outside the governor’s compound, adjacent to several other key government buildings. There were no casualties from the blast, but it caused some damage to the buildings, he added.
“The governor was the target, but thank God he survived,” Samoon said by phone.
Paktia police chief Abdul Ghafar Safi said the bombers carried assault rifles, a rocket launcher and hand grenades.
Having largely lost the ability to confront the highly equipped foreign and Afghan troops in recent years, the Taliban insurgents have increased commando-style raids in recent years.
The targets of such attacks have been Afghan government as well as Western military and civil installations in various key regions of the country where NATO-led troops are locked in a nearly decade-long conflict with the guerrillas.
A number of high-profile Afghan security and civil servants have been killed in some of the attacks.
On Saturday, five heavily armed Taliban fighters, including at least two suicide bombers tried to hit a NATO-run base of U.S. troops in a complex attack in Panjshir Valley, one of the few secure regions of Afghanistan. The attack, the first of its kind in the valley, was foiled and resulted in the deaths of two drivers supplying fuel for the base and the five assailants.
A day earlier, three police officers were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a police checkpoint in a southern town near the border with Pakistan.
Salahuddin is a special correspondent.
German President Makes Surprise Afghanistan Trip
VOA News October 16, 2011
German President Christian Wulff made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan Sunday.
Mr. Wulff met in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in preparation for a conference on Afghanistan in Bonn in December.
The German leader said his country will remain a “friend and partner” of Afghanistan after the withdrawal of foreign combat troops planned for 2014.
Mr. Karzai expressed hope that the upcoming conference will lay the foundation for the country's prosperity, stability and peace.
Germany has approximately 5,000 troops in the NATO mission in Afghanistan, mainly in the north.
Mr. Wulff is the second German president to visit Afghanistan in 44 years.
Taliban did not kill Afghan president's brother - NATO
Reuters By Martin Petty Sat Oct 15, 2011
KABUL - The man who killed the influential half brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai three months ago carried out the attack for personal reasons and was not a Taliban fighter, a senior NATO official said on Saturday.
Investigations following the death of Ahmad Wali Karzai at his Kandahar home in July showed that the employee who killed him had learned he would be disciplined for misconduct and shot Karzai to avoid being publicly shamed, the official said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing, as part of a string of high-profile assassinations in recent months that underlined their reach even as a surge of foreign troops made gains in their southern heartlands.
Other victims have included former president and government peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani, a top police commander for the north, and the governor of Kunduz province. The NATO official did not question the Taliban's role in these other killings.
"It was a murder, not an assassination," the NATO official said of Karzai's killing, in a briefing to unveil NATO statistics showing a fall in Taliban attacks. "It wasn't politically motivated and it wasn't an insurgent masterstroke."
The NATO official said the killer, a guard force commander who ran checkpoints in the Kandahar area, had been reported to Karzai for his alleged mistreatment of local people.
INFILTRATION CLAIMS QUESTIONED
The official also played down Taliban claims that insurgent fighters and sympathisers were behind attacks by Afghan police or soldiers on foreign troops mentoring or working with them, that have killed dozens in recent years.
"This is a gun culture, we've studied infiltrations and in the majority of cases there are no Taliban ties ... insurgents will always claim every attack," the official said.
In the majority of "rogue" attacks, the gunmen were suffering from stress due to personal problems and had no connection with the Taliban.
Some insurgents acquired police or army uniforms to evade security when targeting Afghans and foreigners, but were not actually members of the security forces, he added.
Over the first nine months of the year, insurgent attacks using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) rose 6 percent compared with the same period of 2010, but the overall number of attacks by insurgents fell around 8 percent over the same period, the official said.
ISAF intelligence suggested they had switched to using roadside bombs to avoid losses on the battlefield and were fully aware that more civilian casualties would be incurred.
Many insurgents were unable to pull off most of the attacks their leaders had called for, the official added.
"There's a disconnect between what they said they wanted to do and what they were actually able to do," he said. He conceded however that the Taliban was a "adaptable and resilient" and gains made by coalition forces could easily be undone.
"This is progress, it's real progress, but I still classify it as fragile," he said. "If we don't continue the pressure, it will be reversible and durability will be in question."
Data compiled by the United Nations, however, showed a sharp rise in security incidents and higher numbers of civilian casualties over the first eight months of the year.
(Editing by Emma Graham-Harrison and Myra MacDonald)
Afghan Symbol of Identity Is Subject to Search
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN October 15, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Straight-backed, his bearing almost regal, Malik Niaz, 82, entered the Afghan president’s compound this month, proudly wearing his best turban: a silk one from Turkestan in the north of the country, gray and black and white, its long tail draped gracefully over his shoulder
He watched in disbelief as the guard asked the elder ahead of him to remove his turban and lay it on the table. Mr. Niaz, who had journeyed more than eight hours on rugged roads, shuddered.
“That made us so embarrassed, and it made me so sad,” he said. “I felt dishonored when the guard said,” he hesitated, as if even recalling the words made him upset, “ ‘undo your turban.’ ”
“I had wanted to see the president,” he added, “but after that search, I thought it would have been better if I had not come.”
The turban-searching rule at President Hamid Karzai’s presidential palace has been rigorously enforced since the assassination of the head of Afghanistan’s peace process, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was killed by a bomb hidden in the attacker’s turban. It was the third such killing in four months, leading youths in Kabul to coin the word “Turbanator” and American soldiers to invent the new acronym TBIED, for turban-borne improvised explosive device.
The other two instances were the killing in July of Kandahar’s senior cleric as he prayed in a mosque, and a few weeks later the killing of Kandahar’s mayor.
The searches are deeply disturbing for most Afghan men, as the turban here at once signifies one’s religious faith and is a national dress — not to mention being something of a fashion statement.
Turbans are worn across the Muslim world because the Prophet Muhammad was believed to have worn one, and they are especially favored by imams and mullahs. In Afghanistan, which is a deeply pious country, usage is broader, with dozens of styles and colors. There are ones made of synthetics from Pakistan that cost about $20, silk ones from Herat that cost twice as much and ones made of more luxuriant silks from the north of Afghanistan that cost still more.
The people of southeastern Afghanistan wind the cloth large and loose so it looks as if the whole structure might topple off; Kabul residents prefer a smaller, tighter look. Those in eastern Afghanistan tuck the last bit of cloth so it sticks up out of the turban like a cockscomb, known as a “shimla,” and its size has something to do, loosely, with a person’s view of his own standing. The Taliban were known for wearing turbans made of a very soft cotton that had especially long tails and were either black or white; the former signifies that the wearer’s family members are descendants of Muhammad.
However, most turbans in Afghanistan now — and in the pre-Taliban era — are subtle grays and charcoals, deep olive greens, lighter soft greens and browns.
“I have four or five turbans,” said Hajji Mohammad Zaman Ahmadi, a 57-year-old Kabul resident who was in a bazaar to buy a white skullcap for wearing at home but had his turban on for the workday. He had just gotten a miniature turban for his 2-year-old nephew, he said.
“It is made out of the softest of our country’s wool,” he said.
Mr. Ahmadi, like Mr. Niaz, believes that bombers who use their turbans to hide explosives are committing an offense not just against Islam, but against the nation. They are trying to “defame the Afghan turbans and chase the Afghans from their ancient traditions and try to scare them into not wearing their turbans,” he said.
On the back streets of Kabul’s central bazaar, where the turbans are sold neatly folded, thin as a pamphlet and wrapped in torn pages from old glossy magazines, many turban wearers are so angry about the situation that they blame the Americans. Before their arrival, intrusive searches were unknown.
“My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my prophet wore a turban, and that’s why I wear it,” said an older man, looking irritable at the question, adding: “Who brought these turban bombers and turban searchers? You did,” he said angrily, referring to Westerners, which many Afghans feel are agents of the decline of the society.
Many clerics take a more contemplative view. Faith transcends costume, and a man can pray in any outfit as long as the prayer comes from the heart, but it is an honor to God to dress properly, said Abdul Raouf Nafee, the mullah at the Herati mosque in central Kabul.
As an example, he talked about butchers: “Even if their clothes are dirty with blood, they can pray and God will accept their prayers, but it’s kind of disrespectful. God likes beauty and organization, but he will accept your prayers,” Mr. Nafee said.
Sitting on a floor cushion as he read the Koran early one morning in a small room just off his mosque’s prayer hall, Mr. Nafee wore a simple white cap. His turban was neatly prepared and waiting on a couch for the midday prayer when he would don it. A man of both poetry and pragmatism, he views the turban as a link between the holy life and people’s physical needs.
The turban, like the traditional blanket or shawl worn by men and the chador worn by women, is practical as well as religious and cultural, he said. “You are covered to keep off the dust — and now the pollution,” he said. “If you are cold, you can wrap it around you for warmth, you can sit on it, you can use it to tie an animal, a sheep or a goat, and you can use the turban’s cap to carry water.”
There is also a darker view of turban attacks: that the bombers were so distraught that their turbans’ holiness no longer mattered, and that they were forced to use any means available to take revenge on the Americans.
“Is it wrong to respond to the killings of the civilians that you do with your drones, that shoot from the air and do not even have pilots?” asked Hajji Ahmad Farid, a mullah and a conservative member of Parliament from an insurgent-dominated area of Kapisa Province, near Kabul. “Think about why a man blows himself up: Some foreign soldiers go to his house and accuse him and tie his hands and dishonor him and search his wife and his daughters, and this poor man is just watching and can do nothing.
“When a man has lost his dignity, he does not care about his shawl or his turban.”
3 Bombers Killed in Eastern Afghanistan
VOA News October 16, 2011
Afghan security forces shot and killed three heavily-armed attackers who tried to storm a government office in eastern Paktia province Sunday.
Officials say the would-be bombers arrived in a car filled with explosives and attempted to enter the municipality building in Gardez.
The three were killed by police in an ensuing firefight. A spokesman for the provincial governor says a municipal employee died in the crossfire. The assailants' car blew up during the gunbattle.
U.S. and NATO forces have launched a series of recent operations in eastern Afghanistan an attempt to uproot insurgent strongholds along the border with Pakistan.
Afghan violence falling sharply, NATO says
McClatchy Newspapers By Shashank Bengali Saturday, October 15, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Insurgent attacks in Afghanistan from July through September fell by 26 percent from the previous summer, a senior NATO official said Saturday, reasserting the U.S.-led coalition's claims that violence is decreasing a decade into the Afghan war.
For five straight months ending in September, the number of attacks by insurgents targeting the Afghan government and coalition forces declined from the previous year, the first time that's happened since at least 2008, said the official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. However, overall attacks remained markedly higher than in 2009, before the U.S. troop surge.
"What you're seeing is the effect of two hard years of fighting," the official said, referring to the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. soldiers — primarily in the Taliban's traditional southern heartland — whose presence alongside a growing number of Afghan forces disrupted insurgent networks, hideouts and weapons caches.
"We started to set the conditions, we started to put the pressure and now we're seeing this decrease. So I think this is pretty dramatic."
The official acknowledged that overall violence nationwide remains high, but the statistics by the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, served as something of a rebuttal to a United Nations report released last month that found that the average number of "security incidents" per month had risen by 39 percent over the previous year.
The U.N. report also found that civilian casualties had risen 5 percent in June, July and August from the same months last year, after a 15 percent hike for the first six months of the year.
The U.N. data includes some categories of attacks that coalition forces don't count. Asked to explain the discrepancy with U.N. figures, the NATO official said, "I don't know how they collect their data. I don't compare mine to theirs."
While the coalition's optimism was certain to be greeted skeptically by war-weary Afghans, NATO said the decline in "enemy-initiated attacks" — including direct and indirect fire, roadside bombs and mine explosions — was mainly the result of U.S.-led forces stepping up operations in southern Afghanistan beginning in the spring of 2010, breaking through belts of roadside bombs laid by insurgents.
By late 2010 coalition and Afghan forces had established control over the area and were collecting large quantities of weapons and explosives — more than twice as many this past August as they collected last August. NATO observed a slight decrease in violence in May that accelerated through the summer, the time of year when fighting is heaviest.
"When they (insurgents) finally made their way back to these areas that were former safe havens, what they found is that you had coalition and Afghan forces there," the official said. "You had locals that frankly in some cases did not want them there. As they would root around they'd find their caches had been discovered, so now they got to reconstitute...that equipment."
U.S. commanders expected the insurgency to adapt by carrying out more spectacular attacks such as assassinations and bombings inside the capital, Kabul. More than 130 prominent Afghans — ranging from tribal elders to former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, killed in his Kabul home last month — have been assassinated this year, a 60 percent spike from 2010, according to ISAF figures.
But such high-profile attacks represent just 1 percent of the overall violence, the NATO official said. Of 15 high-profile incidents in Kabul this year, he said that 11, including Rabbani's assassination, were "planned, facilitated and directed" by the Haqqani insurgent network based over the border in Pakistan.
With 10,000 mostly non-combat U.S. troops withdrawing by year's end, and an additional 23,000 departing by next September, the official said that the gaps would be filled by a larger and increasingly capable Afghan army. But he acknowledged that the security gains were tenuous.
"This is real progress but I still classify it as fragile," he said. "If we don't continue to put pressure, then it could be reversible. And durability is the big question."
Also Saturday, five insurgents in an explosives-laden SUV attacked the entrance of a U.S. base in Panjshir province's Rukha district, northeast of Kabul, killing two civilians and wounding two Afghan guards. No Americans were reported harmed. Afghan police killed all five attackers, said Khalil Ull-Rahmman, chief of police in Rukha.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on its website. The base, in normally placid Panjshir, houses a provincial reconstruction team — military officers and civilians who work on a variety of political and economic development projects.
(Special correspondent Habib Zohori contributed to this report.)
Islamists say US drone in Afghanistan kills son of Egyptian sheik imprisoned over NY bomb plot
By Associated Press, October 15
CAIRO — A U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan killed a son of an Egyptian-born militant cleric imprisoned in the United States for plots in the 1990s to blow up New York City landmarks, an Islamist group said Saturday.
Egypt’s Gamaa Islamiya, or Islamic Group, posted on its website a notice mourning the death of Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, the son of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheik”, who is now serving a life sentence in the United States.
The 73-year-old sheik was the spiritual leader of the Gamaa, as well as of the men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Ahmed’s path to militant jihad began at the age of 15 when he went with his elder brothers to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union, which occupied the country for around a decade until the late 1980s.
He was 37 years old when he died, having never returned to Egypt, his family said.
His elder brother, Mohammed, was in Afghanistan with him in the 1980s during the fight against Soviet forces.
“My feeling is of happiness that he died on the path to God as a martyr,” Mohammed said, speaking to The Associated Press in Cairo. “He was my friend and my brother in jihad.”
Mohammed said that both he and Ahmed left Afghanistan after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal for neighboring Pakistan. He said his brother lived in Pakistan’s border region of Waziristan among the families of militants killed in battle until Pakistan began repatriating Arab fighters. Ahmed then fled to Yemen, fearing that if he was sent back to Egypt he would be imprisoned and tortured.
In 2001, when the United States went to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ahmed returned to battle U.S. and NATO forces, his family said.
“The same reasons for fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan were the same reasons he wanted to fight the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan,” Mohammed said. “It was his right to defend himself and liberate Muslim lands from occupation.”
The family said it is not clear when Ahmed was killed or where. The last two days have seen an uptick in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan close to the Afghan border.
The Gamaa Islamiya was a militant organization and fought the regime of then President Hosni Mubarak in a bloody insurgency in the 1990s, seeking to establish an Islamic state in Egypt.
The group eventually declared a unilateral cease-fire and has operated more openly since Mubarak’s overthrow in an uprising earlier this year.
However, the group, which advocates a strict interpretation of Islamic law, was barred this year by the government from forming a political party.
No Way Forward For Afghan Asylum Seekers In Europe's Capital
October 16, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Rikard Jozwiak
BRUSSELS -- Mahboub and his wife, Rama, fled from Afghanistan's Helmand Province three years ago to what they thought would be a better life in Europe.
But while they no longer face threats from the Taliban, comfort has proven elusive for the couple and their growing children. They find themselves between a rock and hard place in Belgium, often spending time on the streets, their future shrouded in uncertainty.
In a cozy, one-bedroom flat in the little Belgian town of Binche, an hour's drive south of Brussels, Rama brews some tea and prepares food for her 1-year-old son. With her 3-year-old daughter away at preschool, Rama reflects on the changes her family has seen.
The flat, she says, is the nicest place they have had since they left their home country via Pakistan in 2008. But not all is for the better.
"First, when we started our trip from Pakistan, we were thinking that now the danger is finished and we are safe and that we would have a safe life," she says. "But when we arrived in Belgium, it was worse than Afghanistan."
Personal Hell
From the life Rama describes in the European capital, it is clear the family did not find the promised land, but rather a kind of personal hell. The family has had three asylum applications rejected. And if their appeal of the last decision isn't successful, they might become homeless -- not for the first time.
Mahboub remembers when his family first came to Brussels three years ago.
"We were put in the middle of the city and we didn't know what to do," he says. "We were just shown a building where we could go and ask for asylum. When we went there, it was Christmas. We were knocking on the door and nobody came. The weather was so cold. No one was helping us. We stopped a policeman and the policeman was drunk because it was Christmastime and they were partying. It was tough."
After a week on the streets, they found shelter at a refugee camp, then a social house, followed by a hotel room provided by the state. But it was short-lived. Once their asylum application was denied, they were thrown out and forced to go back to living on the street.
Mahboub recalls a week spent in the Gare du Nord train station, in one of the more dangerous parts of the city.
"I remember that we didn't have any cover to cover ourselves. It was really cold. The cover we borrowed from our neighbor," he says. "There were a lot of people living in Gare du Nord. We were [having] a very bad time. In the evening, we were eating some soup. The only money we had, we had to buy Pampers for the children, and milk."
They later joined about 100 other Afghan refugees living in a derelict house in the city center, not far from the European Union government district, where they endured life with no running water, heat, or electricity. But at the urging of the Belgian authorities -- who were alerted to their living conditions when other occupants began a hunger strike to remain in the country -- they left the house and again applied for asylum.
No Papers
They were placed in a new social-housing project, but once again their application was rejected. Rama's argument -- that her work teaching illiterate women in Helmand had prompted the Taliban to threaten her -- was deemed insufficient because she had no papers to back up the claim.
"The basic problem, in my [mind], is that they believed the papers more than words. Because they need more documents and we cannot provide it," she says. "How can I, for example, go to the Taliban now and ask: 'Please give me a paper that you are killing me.' It is impossible. We cannot provide such a thing for them now."
Since moving to Belgium, the family has converted to Christianity and fears persecution for this if they were to return to Afghanistan.
Helene Crokart, a lawyer who represents the family, says the Belgium asylum office argues that Christians are safe in Kabul and that the family can move back to the country because Rama is originally from the capital.
"The mother comes from Kabul, so [the authorities] told the family that they can perfectly well live in Kabul, and we don't have proof that all the family was living in the village of the father," Crokart says. "It is ridiculous because in Afghanistan it is always like this. The woman joins the family of the father and they are living in the village of the father."
Adding to the family's difficulties in moving forward is that, even if they wanted to return, Belgium does not return rejected asylum seekers to Afghanistan.
"It is crazy because the Belgian state doesn't want to send back people to Afghanistan because they consider it too dangerous, even for the policeman who is obliged to join the Afghan refugees when they are sent back to their country," Crokart says. "So they say it is too dangerous for the Belgian policemen and it is too dangerous also for the people. So we agree to say that it is impossible to send them back to their country, but [at] the same time it is possible that they decide not to give them any papers in Belgium."
When contacted by RFE/RL, the Belgian Asylum Office said it could not comment on individual cases.
Punished For Playing By The Rules
Crokart explains that the family continues to encounter hurdles. The lawyer says she sought a different route -- a procedure called 9bis that falls short of asylum but which would allow the family to stay and work in the country legally. But again, Mahboub and his family did not qualify.
While other Afghans who lived in the squat in Brussels were granted 9bis status in July, Mahboub's decision to leave at the behest of the Belgian authorities left him with no documentation that they had ever lived there.
Mahboub feels he is being punished for trying to play by the rules.
"The reason I went to the occupation was because I was on the street. I am also eligible to have the paper, but I am not fighting. I am going through [the process in a] a peaceful way. I am obeying what they say. I am obeying what they do to us, where they send us," he says. "Those people who started a hunger strike, it is like a war. They fight against the government and I didn't want war."
A further request for 9bis status has been initiated, but there is no clear timetable of when a decision might be made. Until then, the family exists on a small stipend from the state but with no possibility of finding legal work and with no certainty that their daughter can remain in preschool.
Mahboub says he would take any job to avoid living on the money supplied to him by the state, if he were only given the chance.
"I don't know why they left us in this situation. We come here not to eat the food the people provide us," he says. "We want to work here. We want our life to be a normal life, like the way other people are living."
The Afghan aid juggernaut
National Post By Jane Armstrong Oct 15, 2011
KABUL - The Taliban was driven from Afghanistan a decade ago but the Afghan capital is still occupied.
The new elite live inside walled compounds, topped with razor wire. When they do venture out to work or play, they slide into the back seats of shining, chauffeured SUVs. On summer nights, they gather to drink wine and commiserate in outdoor restaurants, guarded by rifle-toting men who refuse Afghans entry.
They are the foreign research consultants, security experts, technical advisors and heads of non-governmental aid groups, part of the aid juggernaut that arrived en masse in 2001 to rebuild the shattered country.
Many foreigners – particularly at private development firms – earn six-figure salaries and upward. Over the last decade, they’ve helped dole out the roughly US$57-billion in aid that poured into the country. About $2-billion came from Canada.
But what did the billions accomplish?
A great deal, Canadian officials say, a view that is shared by thousands of Afghans from Kandahar to Kabul.
In the early years, Canada steered its aid money to Afghan-led initiatives that focused on education, rural rehabilitation and health care. It poured nearly $500-million into the Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund, a pool of money funded by 30 donor countries and administered by the World Bank. The fund pays Afghan government salaries, funds national health and education programs, and bolsters ministry budgets.
Other Canadian programs built schools, trained health-care workers, paid for mentors to advise Afghan civil servants and helped small businesses get off the ground.
With Canadian help, businessman Farhad Saafi is running a factory in Kabul with 700 workers.
“We stepped up to the plate,” said Bob Johnston, head of the Afghanistan task force for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
“Did we solve Afghanistan? Probably not. Did we help in that sort of international effort to help stabilize it? Yes. Have we improved the life of the average Afghan? Definitely yes.”
But there were failures too. Political interference, shifting priorities and a failure to vet some dubious projects undermined some programs.
Some of the newly built schools and medical clinics crumbled because of shoddy construction. Others sat empty because there was no staff. There was duplication of services in some populated regions and nothing in vast tracts of the countryside. Afghans complained donors didn’t ask them what they needed and forged ahead with their own agendas.
Canadian officials pulled the plug on some programs, including a radio station network that was to be run by rural women. It turned out the idea was better on paper than in real life.
An evaluator who checked up on the $3-million program said its finances were a mess, its equipment shoddy, and it never formed a plan to generate revenue, as promised.
Corruption flourished. Lucrative reconstruction projects went almost exclusively to international contractors, who subcontracted the work to local firms, making it nearly impossible to track if the money was spent as intended.
Meanwhile, multi-coloured mansions owned by newly wealthy Afghan contractors sprang up in the heart of Kabul, displacing locals who retreated up the dust-caked mountains that ring the city. A building boom fuelled by the onslaught of foreign actors sent real estate prices soaring. For millions of Afghans, little changed. Many say the billions should have yielded more. They had hoped their own government would be in a position by now to provide basic goods and services. They wanted a fair justice system, basic infrastructure and the foundations for economic development.
Despite strides in education and health care, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries on earth, with an average life expectancy of 45 years. Nearly 80% of the population is illiterate and its Western-backed government is among the world’s most corrupt.
Canadian officials say they had hoped Afghanistan would have progressed faster. Increasingly, they talk of taking a longer view.
“One of the things we have all learned is that . rebuilding a state takes a long, long time,” Mr. Johnston said. “Security has been disappointing, governance has been disappointing.”
Impatient Westerners tend to overlook the near-medieval conditions in Afghanistan after 9/11. After two decades of war, it had no banking system, there were a few religious schools and a largely illiterate population.
“In the beginning, this was the most backward part of the world, you have to remember that,” Mr. Johnston said.
“There were no girls in school. There were huge endemic health problems like polio. So, is it better? Yes. Is it good enough? No.”
People on the ground agree. Lauryn Oates, 29, from Vancouver, has spent a good part of her adult working life in Afghanistan, battling the corrupt and the powerful in an effort to educate women. But she fears for the future.
Canadians helped Ehsanullah Ehsan make his dream come true of running a school. But he wonders if it can survive.
Canada’s aid efforts were also marked by abrupt shifts in political priorities.
In 2008, after years of funneling money into Afghanistan’s national programs, it switched gears and announced half its aid money would go to Kandahar. It zeroed in on three signature projects: rebuilding the Dahla Dam; constructing 50 schools; and a polio vaccination program.
Completion of the $50-million dam is on schedule, despite earlier setbacks with security, Canadian officials say. The dam, which was built in the 1950s by the United States, will help irrigate thousands of hectares of farmers’ fields in the Arghandab Valley, west of Kandahar City.
Meanwhile, polio eradication efforts have been largely successful nationwide, although they have proved more difficult in the more dangerous south.
CIDA officials say the construction and renovation of 50 schools in Kandahar is on track, but there have been coordination problems with local education officials.
The combined price tag was more than $200-million. Proponents saw it as a way to put our stamp on the province where Canada invested so much time and money, and 157 Canadians were killed.
Critics, including many puzzled Afghans, said it was foolhardy to undertake ambitious big-ticket projects in a dangerous province where Canada’s military would pull up stakes by mid-2011.
“Why did we even sign on to the signature projects?” asked a Canadian consultant, who conducted outside evaluations on CIDA projects.
“You can’t build in a war zone. We drained money from valuable national projects so we could fly the flag over three projects.”
But Mr. Johnston said most of the work on the signature projects was finished, or would be by the end of 2011.
“We proved it was doable, not perfect,” he said.
Today, nearly 10 years after the U.S. drove the Taliban from power, many Afghans say they are afraid the international community is losing interest in rebuilding their country. The United States is poised to withdraw its troops in 2014 and Canadian soldiers left Kandahar last summer.
Mr. Johnston said Canada isn’t giving up on Afghanistan. About $300-million in aid has been earmarked for the next three years, but that’s a fraction of the roughly $200-million annual aid package it’s been sending in recent years.
Some young Afghans have given up hope their country will change for their better in their lifetime.
“My life, it’s over,” said Shuja Momuzai, 30, a contractor who was among the millions of exiles who returned from Pakistan after 2001, brimming with hope.
Instead, he bounced from job to job, working short-term contracts for foreigners. Today, he’s pinning all his hopes on his three-year-old son.
“If he can go to school and get a good job, that’s all I’m living for now.”
National Post
Afghanistan: Child Street Workers Vulnerable to Abuse
Hundreds of children in northern town miss out on school.
IWPR By Baqer Adeli 15 Oct 11
Afghanistan - In the relentless heat of a summer’s day in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, most people are trying to find some shade, but 11-year-old Mohammad Rafiq is walking the streets carrying a box full of shoe-shining equipment.
Dripping with sweat, the boy asks passers-by, “Uncle, may I polish your shoes?”
Although often rebuffed, he carries on walking undeterred, calling out, “Polish your shoes and slippers.”
Mohammad Rafiq used to spend his days at school, but five months ago, his family moved to Mazar-e Sharif because of drought and unemployment in Faryab province, where they lived. He would love to carry on in school, but doubts he will able to do so.
“My father is old and ill,” he said. “My brother and I polish people's shoes every day. We only earn enough to pay for bread.”
The worse thing about his new life working on the streets, he said, was when strangers tried to lure him into sex work.
“Nothing annoys us more than the demands of these horrible people, who ask us to do bad things,” he said.
Mohammad Rafiq described how a friend of his was abused by a stranger who enticed him by giving him something to eat, and then abducted him.
“They took him to some place and did shameful things to him,” he said. “They dumped him in a corner of the city after a few days. He didn’t feel well, and had to be taken to hospital.”
Hundreds of children work on the streets of Mazar-e Sharif, collecting rubbish, carrying goods, selling produce or simply begging.
Experts say they are often at risk of sexual exploitation. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has repeatedly expressed concern over an increase in sexual abuse cases.
“Children are the most vulnerable section of society,” said Salamat Azimi, head of the commission’s section for children’s rights in northern Afghanistan. “There is no guarantee these children will not be abused.”
Sexual abuse is a taboo subject in Afghanistan, and the families of victims often keep quiet about it out of shame or fear of reprisals.
Nevertheless, local media in the north have recently reported on ten cases of abuse, and got family members to speak out on behalf of the victims.
Maria Sayi, head of child protection at Balkh provincial welfare department, said the lawless environment, poverty and unemployment forced many minors to work.
“Children can often be observed working from sunrise until evening. The International Labour Organisation has banned such conditions for children,” she said, adding that Afghan labour legislation was unclear on the hours and kind of jobs minors were allowed to work at.
A survey carried out by her organisation in 2008 covered some 780 children, and found that many of them had been forced to drop out of school and go to work for economic reasons.
Sayi said that when cases of child abuse were uncovered, her agency worked with the police to pursue the culprits. But sometimes they involved individuals to powerful to be held to account.
“Influential figures are often involved, and we fail to go after them,” she said. “When we realise that we have leads that take us out of our depth, we are forced to stop investigating the case. Even the national security forces sometimes warn us to stop.”
Sayi said her department had received threats from powerful individuals when it investigated such cases.
Mohammad Nazer Alemi, a child protection campaigner who heads the Youth Information Centre in Balkh province, confirmed that powerful individuals and officials were sometimes implicated in the abuse.
He said he was in possession of a documentary film which no media outlet would agree to air, because it showed the involvement of powerful individuals.
He referred to the tradition of “bacha bazi” or dancing boys, kept by powerful older men and made to perform at private parties.
“They not only force them to dance but also sexually abuse them,” he said.
Sher Jan Doranai, spokesman for police headquarters in Balkh, said sexual abuse and child trafficking did not exist in Balkh province at all.
“Perhaps such cases exist in other northern provinces, but not in Balkh,” he said, insisting that the police carried out their duties of child protection to the full.
While a child protection law is on the statute books, observers say it is not implemented properly. Alemi said that on several occasions, he had seen police harassing or beating street children instead of protecting them.
Mohammad Rafiq will continue living on his wits, and on the advice his mother gives him.
“Every day, she tells me to come home before it gets dark in the evening, not to polish anyone’s shoes in secluded places, not to take extra money if anyone offers it to me, and not to eat anything offered by strangers,” he said,
Baqer Adeli is an IWPR-trained journalist in Balkh province, northern Afghanistan.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By Sayed Salahuddin The Washington Post
KABUL – The governor for Afghanistan’s Paktia province escaped unhurt from a Taliban commando-style attack Sunday, his spokesman said, the latest strike of its kind in recent days by the insurgent guerrillas.
Juma Khan Hamdard was in a convoy of vehicles when three suicide bombers began firing at it outside his headquarters in the town of Gardez, the provincial capital of Paktia, near the border with Pakistan, Rohullah Samoon said.
One police officer and a civil servant were killed in the clash before the bombers were gunned down, he said. The insurgents were in a vehicle packed with explosives that went off during the clash outside the governor’s compound, adjacent to several other key government buildings. There were no casualties from the blast, but it caused some damage to the buildings, he added.
“The governor was the target, but thank God he survived,” Samoon said by phone.
Paktia police chief Abdul Ghafar Safi said the bombers carried assault rifles, a rocket launcher and hand grenades.
Having largely lost the ability to confront the highly equipped foreign and Afghan troops in recent years, the Taliban insurgents have increased commando-style raids in recent years.
The targets of such attacks have been Afghan government as well as Western military and civil installations in various key regions of the country where NATO-led troops are locked in a nearly decade-long conflict with the guerrillas.
A number of high-profile Afghan security and civil servants have been killed in some of the attacks.
On Saturday, five heavily armed Taliban fighters, including at least two suicide bombers tried to hit a NATO-run base of U.S. troops in a complex attack in Panjshir Valley, one of the few secure regions of Afghanistan. The attack, the first of its kind in the valley, was foiled and resulted in the deaths of two drivers supplying fuel for the base and the five assailants.
A day earlier, three police officers were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a police checkpoint in a southern town near the border with Pakistan.
Salahuddin is a special correspondent.
German President Makes Surprise Afghanistan Trip
VOA News October 16, 2011
German President Christian Wulff made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan Sunday.
Mr. Wulff met in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in preparation for a conference on Afghanistan in Bonn in December.
The German leader said his country will remain a “friend and partner” of Afghanistan after the withdrawal of foreign combat troops planned for 2014.
Mr. Karzai expressed hope that the upcoming conference will lay the foundation for the country's prosperity, stability and peace.
Germany has approximately 5,000 troops in the NATO mission in Afghanistan, mainly in the north.
Mr. Wulff is the second German president to visit Afghanistan in 44 years.
Taliban did not kill Afghan president's brother - NATO
Reuters By Martin Petty Sat Oct 15, 2011
KABUL - The man who killed the influential half brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai three months ago carried out the attack for personal reasons and was not a Taliban fighter, a senior NATO official said on Saturday.
Investigations following the death of Ahmad Wali Karzai at his Kandahar home in July showed that the employee who killed him had learned he would be disciplined for misconduct and shot Karzai to avoid being publicly shamed, the official said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing, as part of a string of high-profile assassinations in recent months that underlined their reach even as a surge of foreign troops made gains in their southern heartlands.
Other victims have included former president and government peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani, a top police commander for the north, and the governor of Kunduz province. The NATO official did not question the Taliban's role in these other killings.
"It was a murder, not an assassination," the NATO official said of Karzai's killing, in a briefing to unveil NATO statistics showing a fall in Taliban attacks. "It wasn't politically motivated and it wasn't an insurgent masterstroke."
The NATO official said the killer, a guard force commander who ran checkpoints in the Kandahar area, had been reported to Karzai for his alleged mistreatment of local people.
INFILTRATION CLAIMS QUESTIONED
The official also played down Taliban claims that insurgent fighters and sympathisers were behind attacks by Afghan police or soldiers on foreign troops mentoring or working with them, that have killed dozens in recent years.
"This is a gun culture, we've studied infiltrations and in the majority of cases there are no Taliban ties ... insurgents will always claim every attack," the official said.
In the majority of "rogue" attacks, the gunmen were suffering from stress due to personal problems and had no connection with the Taliban.
Some insurgents acquired police or army uniforms to evade security when targeting Afghans and foreigners, but were not actually members of the security forces, he added.
Over the first nine months of the year, insurgent attacks using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) rose 6 percent compared with the same period of 2010, but the overall number of attacks by insurgents fell around 8 percent over the same period, the official said.
ISAF intelligence suggested they had switched to using roadside bombs to avoid losses on the battlefield and were fully aware that more civilian casualties would be incurred.
Many insurgents were unable to pull off most of the attacks their leaders had called for, the official added.
"There's a disconnect between what they said they wanted to do and what they were actually able to do," he said. He conceded however that the Taliban was a "adaptable and resilient" and gains made by coalition forces could easily be undone.
"This is progress, it's real progress, but I still classify it as fragile," he said. "If we don't continue the pressure, it will be reversible and durability will be in question."
Data compiled by the United Nations, however, showed a sharp rise in security incidents and higher numbers of civilian casualties over the first eight months of the year.
(Editing by Emma Graham-Harrison and Myra MacDonald)
Afghan Symbol of Identity Is Subject to Search
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN October 15, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Straight-backed, his bearing almost regal, Malik Niaz, 82, entered the Afghan president’s compound this month, proudly wearing his best turban: a silk one from Turkestan in the north of the country, gray and black and white, its long tail draped gracefully over his shoulder
He watched in disbelief as the guard asked the elder ahead of him to remove his turban and lay it on the table. Mr. Niaz, who had journeyed more than eight hours on rugged roads, shuddered.
“That made us so embarrassed, and it made me so sad,” he said. “I felt dishonored when the guard said,” he hesitated, as if even recalling the words made him upset, “ ‘undo your turban.’ ”
“I had wanted to see the president,” he added, “but after that search, I thought it would have been better if I had not come.”
The turban-searching rule at President Hamid Karzai’s presidential palace has been rigorously enforced since the assassination of the head of Afghanistan’s peace process, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was killed by a bomb hidden in the attacker’s turban. It was the third such killing in four months, leading youths in Kabul to coin the word “Turbanator” and American soldiers to invent the new acronym TBIED, for turban-borne improvised explosive device.
The other two instances were the killing in July of Kandahar’s senior cleric as he prayed in a mosque, and a few weeks later the killing of Kandahar’s mayor.
The searches are deeply disturbing for most Afghan men, as the turban here at once signifies one’s religious faith and is a national dress — not to mention being something of a fashion statement.
Turbans are worn across the Muslim world because the Prophet Muhammad was believed to have worn one, and they are especially favored by imams and mullahs. In Afghanistan, which is a deeply pious country, usage is broader, with dozens of styles and colors. There are ones made of synthetics from Pakistan that cost about $20, silk ones from Herat that cost twice as much and ones made of more luxuriant silks from the north of Afghanistan that cost still more.
The people of southeastern Afghanistan wind the cloth large and loose so it looks as if the whole structure might topple off; Kabul residents prefer a smaller, tighter look. Those in eastern Afghanistan tuck the last bit of cloth so it sticks up out of the turban like a cockscomb, known as a “shimla,” and its size has something to do, loosely, with a person’s view of his own standing. The Taliban were known for wearing turbans made of a very soft cotton that had especially long tails and were either black or white; the former signifies that the wearer’s family members are descendants of Muhammad.
However, most turbans in Afghanistan now — and in the pre-Taliban era — are subtle grays and charcoals, deep olive greens, lighter soft greens and browns.
“I have four or five turbans,” said Hajji Mohammad Zaman Ahmadi, a 57-year-old Kabul resident who was in a bazaar to buy a white skullcap for wearing at home but had his turban on for the workday. He had just gotten a miniature turban for his 2-year-old nephew, he said.
“It is made out of the softest of our country’s wool,” he said.
Mr. Ahmadi, like Mr. Niaz, believes that bombers who use their turbans to hide explosives are committing an offense not just against Islam, but against the nation. They are trying to “defame the Afghan turbans and chase the Afghans from their ancient traditions and try to scare them into not wearing their turbans,” he said.
On the back streets of Kabul’s central bazaar, where the turbans are sold neatly folded, thin as a pamphlet and wrapped in torn pages from old glossy magazines, many turban wearers are so angry about the situation that they blame the Americans. Before their arrival, intrusive searches were unknown.
“My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my prophet wore a turban, and that’s why I wear it,” said an older man, looking irritable at the question, adding: “Who brought these turban bombers and turban searchers? You did,” he said angrily, referring to Westerners, which many Afghans feel are agents of the decline of the society.
Many clerics take a more contemplative view. Faith transcends costume, and a man can pray in any outfit as long as the prayer comes from the heart, but it is an honor to God to dress properly, said Abdul Raouf Nafee, the mullah at the Herati mosque in central Kabul.
As an example, he talked about butchers: “Even if their clothes are dirty with blood, they can pray and God will accept their prayers, but it’s kind of disrespectful. God likes beauty and organization, but he will accept your prayers,” Mr. Nafee said.
Sitting on a floor cushion as he read the Koran early one morning in a small room just off his mosque’s prayer hall, Mr. Nafee wore a simple white cap. His turban was neatly prepared and waiting on a couch for the midday prayer when he would don it. A man of both poetry and pragmatism, he views the turban as a link between the holy life and people’s physical needs.
The turban, like the traditional blanket or shawl worn by men and the chador worn by women, is practical as well as religious and cultural, he said. “You are covered to keep off the dust — and now the pollution,” he said. “If you are cold, you can wrap it around you for warmth, you can sit on it, you can use it to tie an animal, a sheep or a goat, and you can use the turban’s cap to carry water.”
There is also a darker view of turban attacks: that the bombers were so distraught that their turbans’ holiness no longer mattered, and that they were forced to use any means available to take revenge on the Americans.
“Is it wrong to respond to the killings of the civilians that you do with your drones, that shoot from the air and do not even have pilots?” asked Hajji Ahmad Farid, a mullah and a conservative member of Parliament from an insurgent-dominated area of Kapisa Province, near Kabul. “Think about why a man blows himself up: Some foreign soldiers go to his house and accuse him and tie his hands and dishonor him and search his wife and his daughters, and this poor man is just watching and can do nothing.
“When a man has lost his dignity, he does not care about his shawl or his turban.”
3 Bombers Killed in Eastern Afghanistan
VOA News October 16, 2011
Afghan security forces shot and killed three heavily-armed attackers who tried to storm a government office in eastern Paktia province Sunday.
Officials say the would-be bombers arrived in a car filled with explosives and attempted to enter the municipality building in Gardez.
The three were killed by police in an ensuing firefight. A spokesman for the provincial governor says a municipal employee died in the crossfire. The assailants' car blew up during the gunbattle.
U.S. and NATO forces have launched a series of recent operations in eastern Afghanistan an attempt to uproot insurgent strongholds along the border with Pakistan.
Afghan violence falling sharply, NATO says
McClatchy Newspapers By Shashank Bengali Saturday, October 15, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Insurgent attacks in Afghanistan from July through September fell by 26 percent from the previous summer, a senior NATO official said Saturday, reasserting the U.S.-led coalition's claims that violence is decreasing a decade into the Afghan war.
For five straight months ending in September, the number of attacks by insurgents targeting the Afghan government and coalition forces declined from the previous year, the first time that's happened since at least 2008, said the official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. However, overall attacks remained markedly higher than in 2009, before the U.S. troop surge.
"What you're seeing is the effect of two hard years of fighting," the official said, referring to the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. soldiers — primarily in the Taliban's traditional southern heartland — whose presence alongside a growing number of Afghan forces disrupted insurgent networks, hideouts and weapons caches.
"We started to set the conditions, we started to put the pressure and now we're seeing this decrease. So I think this is pretty dramatic."
The official acknowledged that overall violence nationwide remains high, but the statistics by the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, served as something of a rebuttal to a United Nations report released last month that found that the average number of "security incidents" per month had risen by 39 percent over the previous year.
The U.N. report also found that civilian casualties had risen 5 percent in June, July and August from the same months last year, after a 15 percent hike for the first six months of the year.
The U.N. data includes some categories of attacks that coalition forces don't count. Asked to explain the discrepancy with U.N. figures, the NATO official said, "I don't know how they collect their data. I don't compare mine to theirs."
While the coalition's optimism was certain to be greeted skeptically by war-weary Afghans, NATO said the decline in "enemy-initiated attacks" — including direct and indirect fire, roadside bombs and mine explosions — was mainly the result of U.S.-led forces stepping up operations in southern Afghanistan beginning in the spring of 2010, breaking through belts of roadside bombs laid by insurgents.
By late 2010 coalition and Afghan forces had established control over the area and were collecting large quantities of weapons and explosives — more than twice as many this past August as they collected last August. NATO observed a slight decrease in violence in May that accelerated through the summer, the time of year when fighting is heaviest.
"When they (insurgents) finally made their way back to these areas that were former safe havens, what they found is that you had coalition and Afghan forces there," the official said. "You had locals that frankly in some cases did not want them there. As they would root around they'd find their caches had been discovered, so now they got to reconstitute...that equipment."
U.S. commanders expected the insurgency to adapt by carrying out more spectacular attacks such as assassinations and bombings inside the capital, Kabul. More than 130 prominent Afghans — ranging from tribal elders to former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, killed in his Kabul home last month — have been assassinated this year, a 60 percent spike from 2010, according to ISAF figures.
But such high-profile attacks represent just 1 percent of the overall violence, the NATO official said. Of 15 high-profile incidents in Kabul this year, he said that 11, including Rabbani's assassination, were "planned, facilitated and directed" by the Haqqani insurgent network based over the border in Pakistan.
With 10,000 mostly non-combat U.S. troops withdrawing by year's end, and an additional 23,000 departing by next September, the official said that the gaps would be filled by a larger and increasingly capable Afghan army. But he acknowledged that the security gains were tenuous.
"This is real progress but I still classify it as fragile," he said. "If we don't continue to put pressure, then it could be reversible. And durability is the big question."
Also Saturday, five insurgents in an explosives-laden SUV attacked the entrance of a U.S. base in Panjshir province's Rukha district, northeast of Kabul, killing two civilians and wounding two Afghan guards. No Americans were reported harmed. Afghan police killed all five attackers, said Khalil Ull-Rahmman, chief of police in Rukha.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on its website. The base, in normally placid Panjshir, houses a provincial reconstruction team — military officers and civilians who work on a variety of political and economic development projects.
(Special correspondent Habib Zohori contributed to this report.)
Islamists say US drone in Afghanistan kills son of Egyptian sheik imprisoned over NY bomb plot
By Associated Press, October 15
CAIRO — A U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan killed a son of an Egyptian-born militant cleric imprisoned in the United States for plots in the 1990s to blow up New York City landmarks, an Islamist group said Saturday.
Egypt’s Gamaa Islamiya, or Islamic Group, posted on its website a notice mourning the death of Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, the son of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheik”, who is now serving a life sentence in the United States.
The 73-year-old sheik was the spiritual leader of the Gamaa, as well as of the men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Ahmed’s path to militant jihad began at the age of 15 when he went with his elder brothers to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union, which occupied the country for around a decade until the late 1980s.
He was 37 years old when he died, having never returned to Egypt, his family said.
His elder brother, Mohammed, was in Afghanistan with him in the 1980s during the fight against Soviet forces.
“My feeling is of happiness that he died on the path to God as a martyr,” Mohammed said, speaking to The Associated Press in Cairo. “He was my friend and my brother in jihad.”
Mohammed said that both he and Ahmed left Afghanistan after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal for neighboring Pakistan. He said his brother lived in Pakistan’s border region of Waziristan among the families of militants killed in battle until Pakistan began repatriating Arab fighters. Ahmed then fled to Yemen, fearing that if he was sent back to Egypt he would be imprisoned and tortured.
In 2001, when the United States went to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ahmed returned to battle U.S. and NATO forces, his family said.
“The same reasons for fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan were the same reasons he wanted to fight the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan,” Mohammed said. “It was his right to defend himself and liberate Muslim lands from occupation.”
The family said it is not clear when Ahmed was killed or where. The last two days have seen an uptick in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan close to the Afghan border.
The Gamaa Islamiya was a militant organization and fought the regime of then President Hosni Mubarak in a bloody insurgency in the 1990s, seeking to establish an Islamic state in Egypt.
The group eventually declared a unilateral cease-fire and has operated more openly since Mubarak’s overthrow in an uprising earlier this year.
However, the group, which advocates a strict interpretation of Islamic law, was barred this year by the government from forming a political party.
No Way Forward For Afghan Asylum Seekers In Europe's Capital
October 16, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Rikard Jozwiak
BRUSSELS -- Mahboub and his wife, Rama, fled from Afghanistan's Helmand Province three years ago to what they thought would be a better life in Europe.
But while they no longer face threats from the Taliban, comfort has proven elusive for the couple and their growing children. They find themselves between a rock and hard place in Belgium, often spending time on the streets, their future shrouded in uncertainty.
In a cozy, one-bedroom flat in the little Belgian town of Binche, an hour's drive south of Brussels, Rama brews some tea and prepares food for her 1-year-old son. With her 3-year-old daughter away at preschool, Rama reflects on the changes her family has seen.
The flat, she says, is the nicest place they have had since they left their home country via Pakistan in 2008. But not all is for the better.
"First, when we started our trip from Pakistan, we were thinking that now the danger is finished and we are safe and that we would have a safe life," she says. "But when we arrived in Belgium, it was worse than Afghanistan."
Personal Hell
From the life Rama describes in the European capital, it is clear the family did not find the promised land, but rather a kind of personal hell. The family has had three asylum applications rejected. And if their appeal of the last decision isn't successful, they might become homeless -- not for the first time.
Mahboub remembers when his family first came to Brussels three years ago.
"We were put in the middle of the city and we didn't know what to do," he says. "We were just shown a building where we could go and ask for asylum. When we went there, it was Christmas. We were knocking on the door and nobody came. The weather was so cold. No one was helping us. We stopped a policeman and the policeman was drunk because it was Christmastime and they were partying. It was tough."
After a week on the streets, they found shelter at a refugee camp, then a social house, followed by a hotel room provided by the state. But it was short-lived. Once their asylum application was denied, they were thrown out and forced to go back to living on the street.
Mahboub recalls a week spent in the Gare du Nord train station, in one of the more dangerous parts of the city.
"I remember that we didn't have any cover to cover ourselves. It was really cold. The cover we borrowed from our neighbor," he says. "There were a lot of people living in Gare du Nord. We were [having] a very bad time. In the evening, we were eating some soup. The only money we had, we had to buy Pampers for the children, and milk."
They later joined about 100 other Afghan refugees living in a derelict house in the city center, not far from the European Union government district, where they endured life with no running water, heat, or electricity. But at the urging of the Belgian authorities -- who were alerted to their living conditions when other occupants began a hunger strike to remain in the country -- they left the house and again applied for asylum.
No Papers
They were placed in a new social-housing project, but once again their application was rejected. Rama's argument -- that her work teaching illiterate women in Helmand had prompted the Taliban to threaten her -- was deemed insufficient because she had no papers to back up the claim.
"The basic problem, in my [mind], is that they believed the papers more than words. Because they need more documents and we cannot provide it," she says. "How can I, for example, go to the Taliban now and ask: 'Please give me a paper that you are killing me.' It is impossible. We cannot provide such a thing for them now."
Since moving to Belgium, the family has converted to Christianity and fears persecution for this if they were to return to Afghanistan.
Helene Crokart, a lawyer who represents the family, says the Belgium asylum office argues that Christians are safe in Kabul and that the family can move back to the country because Rama is originally from the capital.
"The mother comes from Kabul, so [the authorities] told the family that they can perfectly well live in Kabul, and we don't have proof that all the family was living in the village of the father," Crokart says. "It is ridiculous because in Afghanistan it is always like this. The woman joins the family of the father and they are living in the village of the father."
Adding to the family's difficulties in moving forward is that, even if they wanted to return, Belgium does not return rejected asylum seekers to Afghanistan.
"It is crazy because the Belgian state doesn't want to send back people to Afghanistan because they consider it too dangerous, even for the policeman who is obliged to join the Afghan refugees when they are sent back to their country," Crokart says. "So they say it is too dangerous for the Belgian policemen and it is too dangerous also for the people. So we agree to say that it is impossible to send them back to their country, but [at] the same time it is possible that they decide not to give them any papers in Belgium."
When contacted by RFE/RL, the Belgian Asylum Office said it could not comment on individual cases.
Punished For Playing By The Rules
Crokart explains that the family continues to encounter hurdles. The lawyer says she sought a different route -- a procedure called 9bis that falls short of asylum but which would allow the family to stay and work in the country legally. But again, Mahboub and his family did not qualify.
While other Afghans who lived in the squat in Brussels were granted 9bis status in July, Mahboub's decision to leave at the behest of the Belgian authorities left him with no documentation that they had ever lived there.
Mahboub feels he is being punished for trying to play by the rules.
"The reason I went to the occupation was because I was on the street. I am also eligible to have the paper, but I am not fighting. I am going through [the process in a] a peaceful way. I am obeying what they say. I am obeying what they do to us, where they send us," he says. "Those people who started a hunger strike, it is like a war. They fight against the government and I didn't want war."
A further request for 9bis status has been initiated, but there is no clear timetable of when a decision might be made. Until then, the family exists on a small stipend from the state but with no possibility of finding legal work and with no certainty that their daughter can remain in preschool.
Mahboub says he would take any job to avoid living on the money supplied to him by the state, if he were only given the chance.
"I don't know why they left us in this situation. We come here not to eat the food the people provide us," he says. "We want to work here. We want our life to be a normal life, like the way other people are living."
The Afghan aid juggernaut
National Post By Jane Armstrong Oct 15, 2011
KABUL - The Taliban was driven from Afghanistan a decade ago but the Afghan capital is still occupied.
The new elite live inside walled compounds, topped with razor wire. When they do venture out to work or play, they slide into the back seats of shining, chauffeured SUVs. On summer nights, they gather to drink wine and commiserate in outdoor restaurants, guarded by rifle-toting men who refuse Afghans entry.
They are the foreign research consultants, security experts, technical advisors and heads of non-governmental aid groups, part of the aid juggernaut that arrived en masse in 2001 to rebuild the shattered country.
Many foreigners – particularly at private development firms – earn six-figure salaries and upward. Over the last decade, they’ve helped dole out the roughly US$57-billion in aid that poured into the country. About $2-billion came from Canada.
But what did the billions accomplish?
A great deal, Canadian officials say, a view that is shared by thousands of Afghans from Kandahar to Kabul.
In the early years, Canada steered its aid money to Afghan-led initiatives that focused on education, rural rehabilitation and health care. It poured nearly $500-million into the Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund, a pool of money funded by 30 donor countries and administered by the World Bank. The fund pays Afghan government salaries, funds national health and education programs, and bolsters ministry budgets.
Other Canadian programs built schools, trained health-care workers, paid for mentors to advise Afghan civil servants and helped small businesses get off the ground.
With Canadian help, businessman Farhad Saafi is running a factory in Kabul with 700 workers.
“We stepped up to the plate,” said Bob Johnston, head of the Afghanistan task force for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
“Did we solve Afghanistan? Probably not. Did we help in that sort of international effort to help stabilize it? Yes. Have we improved the life of the average Afghan? Definitely yes.”
But there were failures too. Political interference, shifting priorities and a failure to vet some dubious projects undermined some programs.
Some of the newly built schools and medical clinics crumbled because of shoddy construction. Others sat empty because there was no staff. There was duplication of services in some populated regions and nothing in vast tracts of the countryside. Afghans complained donors didn’t ask them what they needed and forged ahead with their own agendas.
Canadian officials pulled the plug on some programs, including a radio station network that was to be run by rural women. It turned out the idea was better on paper than in real life.
An evaluator who checked up on the $3-million program said its finances were a mess, its equipment shoddy, and it never formed a plan to generate revenue, as promised.
Corruption flourished. Lucrative reconstruction projects went almost exclusively to international contractors, who subcontracted the work to local firms, making it nearly impossible to track if the money was spent as intended.
Meanwhile, multi-coloured mansions owned by newly wealthy Afghan contractors sprang up in the heart of Kabul, displacing locals who retreated up the dust-caked mountains that ring the city. A building boom fuelled by the onslaught of foreign actors sent real estate prices soaring. For millions of Afghans, little changed. Many say the billions should have yielded more. They had hoped their own government would be in a position by now to provide basic goods and services. They wanted a fair justice system, basic infrastructure and the foundations for economic development.
Despite strides in education and health care, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries on earth, with an average life expectancy of 45 years. Nearly 80% of the population is illiterate and its Western-backed government is among the world’s most corrupt.
Canadian officials say they had hoped Afghanistan would have progressed faster. Increasingly, they talk of taking a longer view.
“One of the things we have all learned is that . rebuilding a state takes a long, long time,” Mr. Johnston said. “Security has been disappointing, governance has been disappointing.”
Impatient Westerners tend to overlook the near-medieval conditions in Afghanistan after 9/11. After two decades of war, it had no banking system, there were a few religious schools and a largely illiterate population.
“In the beginning, this was the most backward part of the world, you have to remember that,” Mr. Johnston said.
“There were no girls in school. There were huge endemic health problems like polio. So, is it better? Yes. Is it good enough? No.”
People on the ground agree. Lauryn Oates, 29, from Vancouver, has spent a good part of her adult working life in Afghanistan, battling the corrupt and the powerful in an effort to educate women. But she fears for the future.
Canadians helped Ehsanullah Ehsan make his dream come true of running a school. But he wonders if it can survive.
Canada’s aid efforts were also marked by abrupt shifts in political priorities.
In 2008, after years of funneling money into Afghanistan’s national programs, it switched gears and announced half its aid money would go to Kandahar. It zeroed in on three signature projects: rebuilding the Dahla Dam; constructing 50 schools; and a polio vaccination program.
Completion of the $50-million dam is on schedule, despite earlier setbacks with security, Canadian officials say. The dam, which was built in the 1950s by the United States, will help irrigate thousands of hectares of farmers’ fields in the Arghandab Valley, west of Kandahar City.
Meanwhile, polio eradication efforts have been largely successful nationwide, although they have proved more difficult in the more dangerous south.
CIDA officials say the construction and renovation of 50 schools in Kandahar is on track, but there have been coordination problems with local education officials.
The combined price tag was more than $200-million. Proponents saw it as a way to put our stamp on the province where Canada invested so much time and money, and 157 Canadians were killed.
Critics, including many puzzled Afghans, said it was foolhardy to undertake ambitious big-ticket projects in a dangerous province where Canada’s military would pull up stakes by mid-2011.
“Why did we even sign on to the signature projects?” asked a Canadian consultant, who conducted outside evaluations on CIDA projects.
“You can’t build in a war zone. We drained money from valuable national projects so we could fly the flag over three projects.”
But Mr. Johnston said most of the work on the signature projects was finished, or would be by the end of 2011.
“We proved it was doable, not perfect,” he said.
Today, nearly 10 years after the U.S. drove the Taliban from power, many Afghans say they are afraid the international community is losing interest in rebuilding their country. The United States is poised to withdraw its troops in 2014 and Canadian soldiers left Kandahar last summer.
Mr. Johnston said Canada isn’t giving up on Afghanistan. About $300-million in aid has been earmarked for the next three years, but that’s a fraction of the roughly $200-million annual aid package it’s been sending in recent years.
Some young Afghans have given up hope their country will change for their better in their lifetime.
“My life, it’s over,” said Shuja Momuzai, 30, a contractor who was among the millions of exiles who returned from Pakistan after 2001, brimming with hope.
Instead, he bounced from job to job, working short-term contracts for foreigners. Today, he’s pinning all his hopes on his three-year-old son.
“If he can go to school and get a good job, that’s all I’m living for now.”
National Post
Afghanistan: Child Street Workers Vulnerable to Abuse
Hundreds of children in northern town miss out on school.
IWPR By Baqer Adeli 15 Oct 11
Afghanistan - In the relentless heat of a summer’s day in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, most people are trying to find some shade, but 11-year-old Mohammad Rafiq is walking the streets carrying a box full of shoe-shining equipment.
Dripping with sweat, the boy asks passers-by, “Uncle, may I polish your shoes?”
Although often rebuffed, he carries on walking undeterred, calling out, “Polish your shoes and slippers.”
Mohammad Rafiq used to spend his days at school, but five months ago, his family moved to Mazar-e Sharif because of drought and unemployment in Faryab province, where they lived. He would love to carry on in school, but doubts he will able to do so.
“My father is old and ill,” he said. “My brother and I polish people's shoes every day. We only earn enough to pay for bread.”
The worse thing about his new life working on the streets, he said, was when strangers tried to lure him into sex work.
“Nothing annoys us more than the demands of these horrible people, who ask us to do bad things,” he said.
Mohammad Rafiq described how a friend of his was abused by a stranger who enticed him by giving him something to eat, and then abducted him.
“They took him to some place and did shameful things to him,” he said. “They dumped him in a corner of the city after a few days. He didn’t feel well, and had to be taken to hospital.”
Hundreds of children work on the streets of Mazar-e Sharif, collecting rubbish, carrying goods, selling produce or simply begging.
Experts say they are often at risk of sexual exploitation. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has repeatedly expressed concern over an increase in sexual abuse cases.
“Children are the most vulnerable section of society,” said Salamat Azimi, head of the commission’s section for children’s rights in northern Afghanistan. “There is no guarantee these children will not be abused.”
Sexual abuse is a taboo subject in Afghanistan, and the families of victims often keep quiet about it out of shame or fear of reprisals.
Nevertheless, local media in the north have recently reported on ten cases of abuse, and got family members to speak out on behalf of the victims.
Maria Sayi, head of child protection at Balkh provincial welfare department, said the lawless environment, poverty and unemployment forced many minors to work.
“Children can often be observed working from sunrise until evening. The International Labour Organisation has banned such conditions for children,” she said, adding that Afghan labour legislation was unclear on the hours and kind of jobs minors were allowed to work at.
A survey carried out by her organisation in 2008 covered some 780 children, and found that many of them had been forced to drop out of school and go to work for economic reasons.
Sayi said that when cases of child abuse were uncovered, her agency worked with the police to pursue the culprits. But sometimes they involved individuals to powerful to be held to account.
“Influential figures are often involved, and we fail to go after them,” she said. “When we realise that we have leads that take us out of our depth, we are forced to stop investigating the case. Even the national security forces sometimes warn us to stop.”
Sayi said her department had received threats from powerful individuals when it investigated such cases.
Mohammad Nazer Alemi, a child protection campaigner who heads the Youth Information Centre in Balkh province, confirmed that powerful individuals and officials were sometimes implicated in the abuse.
He said he was in possession of a documentary film which no media outlet would agree to air, because it showed the involvement of powerful individuals.
He referred to the tradition of “bacha bazi” or dancing boys, kept by powerful older men and made to perform at private parties.
“They not only force them to dance but also sexually abuse them,” he said.
Sher Jan Doranai, spokesman for police headquarters in Balkh, said sexual abuse and child trafficking did not exist in Balkh province at all.
“Perhaps such cases exist in other northern provinces, but not in Balkh,” he said, insisting that the police carried out their duties of child protection to the full.
While a child protection law is on the statute books, observers say it is not implemented properly. Alemi said that on several occasions, he had seen police harassing or beating street children instead of protecting them.
Mohammad Rafiq will continue living on his wits, and on the advice his mother gives him.
“Every day, she tells me to come home before it gets dark in the evening, not to polish anyone’s shoes in secluded places, not to take extra money if anyone offers it to me, and not to eat anything offered by strangers,” he said,
Baqer Adeli is an IWPR-trained journalist in Balkh province, northern Afghanistan.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com