[Afghan News] November 23, 2011

[یاسمینه]

Afghan team probing Rabbani murder arrives in Pakistan
23 November 2011 BBC News
An Afghan delegation investigating the assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani has arrived in Islamabad.
The fact that the team has permission to conduct investigations in Pakistan marks an unusual diplomatic gesture by Islamabad, correspondents say.
Mr Rabbani was killed in September by a man posing as a Taliban peace envoy.
Afghan officials believe his killer was a Pakistani, but Islamabad has denied all charges of involvement.
Mr Rabbani had been leading Afghan efforts to negotiate with the Taliban and the Afghan government has said it believes forces in Pakistan were behind the suicide attack that killed him on 20 September.
Earlier this month Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed to jointly investigate his murder in what was seen as a warming of relations between the two countries.
Senior Afghan intelligence officials told the BBC that they would share evidence with their Pakistani counterparts.
The visiting delegation wants Pakistan to arrest all those involved in the assassination of Mr Rabbani, whose death was one of the most high profile assassinations of an Afghan politician in recent months.
The BBC's Bilal Sarwary, in Kabul, says Afghan officials hope Pakistan will arrest several Taliban figures including a local commander who openly operates in the city of Quetta on the border with Afghanistan's Kandahar province.
Afghan officials say that they were finally granted visas to travel to Pakistan after a delay of nearly three months.
The delegation is led by the deputy intelligence chief and is being hosted by Pakistan's interior minister, Rahman Malik,.
Mr Rabbani - a former mujahideen commander - was president of Afghanistan during the country's civil war in the 1990s.

Afghan government ready to resume negotiations with Taliban
Senior official says talks will restart on condition that insurgents establish a political office first
Julian Borger in Kabul guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 November 2011
The Afghan government is prepared to resume negotiations with the Taliban despite the assassination of its chief peace envoy, Burhanuddin Rabbani, the senior official responsible for organising the talks has said.
Masoom Stanekzai said talks would restart on condition that the insurgents established a political office first.
Stanekzai was standing next to Rabbani when the former president was killed in his home by an assassin with a bomb concealed in his turban on 20 September. Shrapnel pierced Stanekzai's lung, left arm and both legs.
In his first interview since leaving hospital last week, Stanekzai, who runs the secretariat of Afghanistan's High Peace Council (HPC), said attempts to engage the Taliban in peace talks would continue as soon as Rabbani's successor had been chosen. He added: "There is no alternative to peace."
He said a consultative assembly, or Loya Jirga, had come to the same conclusion on Saturday, but stressed: "[The insurgents] should talk from a clear address.
"They can't say we are here and there, somewhere hiding, when nobody clearly understands whether [the person they are negotiating with] is an … authorised representative or just someone who is being hired by a spy agency, doing something to prolong the conflict."
At the time of his death, Rabbani had been try to organise a deal under which the Taliban established a political office in Qatar. Stanekzai said those efforts should resume, although the precise location of the office would be a matter for discussion.
After the assassination, questions were raised about Rabbani and Stanekzai having agreed to a meeting with someone whose identity was unclear and who had been introduced by go-betweens whose status in the Taliban was also obscure.
"It was stupidity of a big office like that to accept that meeting," Safia Siddiqui, a spokeswoman for the Loya Jirga, said. "This was a young man coming from Quetta [a Pakistan border city that serves as a Taliban headquarters], with no address, and Rabbani came all the way back from Iran to meet him."
Stanekzai, whose job it is to help establish contacts and arrange meetings, denied the HPC had been too hasty in seeking Taliban contacts, arguing that kickstarting a peace process was an urgent necessity.
"From one side, if you look at it technically, it might be seen as a rush. If you look to the last 33 years in Afghanistan, it is not a rush. It is a genuine willingness," he said.
"For the past 33 years, you can't remember a single day when someone isn't killed or injured. We lost two generations in this war."
An investigation into the assassination continues, and a team is due to arrive in Pakistan to investigate the connection to Quetta, where a surviving conspirator, Hamidullah Akhundzada, said the plot had been hatched.
The Afghan government has already blamed Taliban leadership, acting in concert with Pakistani intelligence, for the death – but Stanekzai remained cautious about whether the killing had been an officially sanctioned or rogue operation.
"Until the whole investigation is completed … it would be better to wait until we get a final, concrete result," he said.
Two months after the attack, Stanekzai still walks with the help of a crutch and is due to have a second operation on his left ear, in which has lost hearing.
In an interview with a small group of European journalists, he gave his first public account of Rabbani's assassination.
"I remember his last words were that 'unless we create a culture of peace in this country, we will not succeed, and we have to work to broaden to the scope and make this process more inclusive so that everybody can participate and lessen the relevance of those who are fighting,' " he said.
"Then he asked that these people should be brought in from the guest house, and before they arrived I went out to the room where his secretary and my assistant were sitting and I told them no matter whoever is coming they have to be properly checked before they enter in the room.
"They arrived, two people … Professor Rabbani stood and said welcome, and I also stood, and they were hugging and I was standing beside them and the blast happened.
"After that I don't know what happened, and when I came back to my senses I was in the hospital."

Pakistani Taliban spokesman denies cease-fire; group attacks police, killing 2 officers
By Associated Press, Wednesday, November 23, 11:18 AM
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The Pakistani Taliban’s spokesman on Wednesday refuted claims by other militant commanders that the group agreed to a cease-fire and exploratory peace talks with the government, raising the prospect that one of the country’s deadliest terror groups is splitting into factions.
Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan backed up his claim by pointing to an attack Wednesday on a police station in the northwest that he said was carried out by the Pakistani Taliban. Two officers were killed and four others were wounded, said police.
The attack came two days after a senior Pakistani Taliban commander told The Associated Press that the group declared a cease-fire across the country a month ago to encourage nascent peace talks with the government.
The conflicting statements could represent opposing positions within the Pakistani Taliban leadership about whether the group should pursue peace with the government following years of fighting that has killed tens of thousands of militants, civilians and security personnel.
A third senior Pakistani Taliban commander told the AP on Wednesday that the group has declared a cease-fire to encourage talks, but both were limited to the South Waziristan tribal area, which served as the militants’ main sanctuary before the military launched a large offensive in 2009.
The two senior Pakistani Taliban commanders spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Wednesday’s attack on the police station occurred in Dera Ismail Khan, a city near the border with South Waziristan. A dozen militants threw grenades at the Daraban station and then gunned down two officers inside, said police officer Sohail Khan. Four policemen were wounded, and the militants managed to escape with guns and police uniforms, said Khan.
Ehsan, the Pakistani Taliban spokesman, said the attack was proof that the group has not agreed to a cease-fire and is not in peace talks with the government.
“If we had announced a cease-fire, we would not have attacked the police station,” Ehsan told the AP by telephone from an undisclosed location.
He also claimed responsibility for recent attacks on police in the Orakzai tribal region and in the city of Mardan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Even if the Pakistani Taliban leadership in South Waziristan agreed to a cease-fire, it’s unclear whether all the militants claiming to be under the group’s banner would obey the directive.
The Pakistani Taliban, allied with al-Qaida and based in the northwest close to the Afghan border, have been behind much of the violence tearing apart Pakistan over the last 4½ years. At least 35,000 people have been killed in guerrilla attacks and army offensives.
The Taliban want to oust the U.S.-backed government and install a hardline Islamist regime. They also have international ambitions and trained the Pakistani-American who tried to detonate a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square in 2010.
The United States, which has pounded the Taliban with missiles fired by drones, wants Pakistan to keep the pressure on insurgents and would likely be concerned about any effort to strike a deal. Many of America’s fiercest foes in Afghanistan — as well as al-Qaida operatives from around the world — live alongside the militants in the Pakistani region of North Waziristan.
Anonymous Taliban and intelligence officials said recently that government intermediaries have met with Taliban commanders periodically over the past six months to talk about a possible peace deal.
Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Tuesday that the government has not held formal talks with the Pakistani Taliban. The army also denied being involved in talks.
Pakistan has cut deals with militant factions in the past, several of which quickly broke down after giving the insurgents time to regroup.
Army offensives against the Taliban are unpopular among many Pakistanis, many of whom view the militants as misguided Muslim brothers rather than terrorists. Right-wing and Islamist parties that support their aims have long called for a peace deal.
This view appeared to get traction in September when government leaders, opposition politicians and other national figures met in Islamabad and produced a vague resolution in support of peace moves with militants. Despite this, the government’s official line is that they will talk only with militants who lay down their arms.

Would-be Afghan suicide bomber tells of Taliban lure
By Mohammad Hamid
KABUL (Reuters) - Islamuddin never imagined joining the Taliban to become a suicide bomber but things changed for the teenage Afghan farmer when he said his best friend was shot dead by U.S. troops in a night raid.
In a rare insight into the mind of an Afghan suicide bomber, Islamuddin told Reuters the shooting 18 months ago was a turning point in his decision to join the Taliban -- and ultimately, to train as a suicide bomber.
"I was really upset and it had a bad impact on me. I became alone. My work was not enjoyable anymore. The whole world became boring for me," he said.
Four months later, Islamuddin, 17, was arrested for planning to blow himself up in an attack on a U.S. convoy in Kunduz province. He is now serving a four and a half year sentence in a juvenile detention centre.
Islamuddin's mother, who asked Reuters not to release her name, said her son changed after his best friend, who was also his nephew, died -- and that the insurgents took advantage of his grief to recruit him.
"Whenever (Islamuddin) comes into my mind I am upset," she said. "He was young and was deceived by the Taliban."
Suicide bombings -- one of the main methods the Taliban use to target coalition and Afghan forces -- are a relatively recent tactic. The first suicide bombing by an Afghan was in 2004.
The majority of victims have been Afghan civilians. Many Afghans are horrified by the bombings and they have been declared un-Islamic in fatwas by senior clerics.
But numbers of the attacks have been steadily rising. In the past six months, Afghan police have arrested at least 20 would-be bombers. Many get training abroad, or are foreigners, according to the Interior Ministry.
Afghan suicide bombers can be motivated by a lack of jobs, education, financial and religious rewards, opposition to foreign troops, as well as revenge for the death of relatives or friends, according to academic and UN reports.
PROMISES OF PARADISE
Islamuddin's nephew' also 17, was killed in a night raid, long one of the most hated foreign military tactics in Afghanistan, that critics say often claim innocent victims but the military say are an important, and precise, tool.
A spokesman for NATO did not confirm the raid. He identified a possible match that took place in the Dash-i-Archi district in northern Kunduz, a province where violence has increased in the past year, but said the only man killed was an armed insurgent.
Islamuddin said the two teenagers, who worked on farms together earning about 9,000 Afghanis ($190) a month, knew members of the Taliban, but were not active members of the insurgent group.
"Sometimes the Taliban came to have dinner with us, but then they went back," Islamuddin said.
Then Taliban commanders pinned the raid that killed his friend on the Americans and cajoled Islamuddin into joining a madrassa -- or an Islamic seminary -- where Afghan Taliban provided food, religious instruction and lessons on attacks.
"They visited me every day and encouraged me to take revenge," he said. His first test was to target a policeman, by planting a mine under a bridge.
"A car came and the Taliban told me it was a district police chief and to press the button. I pressed the button. The car divided in many pieces."
Later he was told a more junior police commander was in the car. But they pushed him to go one step further in his attacks.
"They trained me how to detonate a suicide vest," he said. "They said they would support my family and I would go to paradise, but I was concerned about my mother."
"THIS WORLD IS WORTH NOTHING"
Islamuddin is the eldest child and was the family's main breadwinner since his father's death years earlier. But he began lying about his whereabouts, and warned his family: "This world is worth nothing; very soon you will go to another world."
His mother started worrying about him, and his new friends, but said she never suspected he had joined the Taliban. "If I had known, I would never have let him kill. If he had killed himself, I don't know how I would have endured it," she said.
Islamuddin then received his final assignment: blow himself and a U.S. convoy up on the Kunduz-Baghlan highway that connects Kabul to the country's north. "They told me to go there on a motorbike and commit suicide," he said.
On his way home for a last farewell, police arrested him.
"He joined the Taliban and they brainwashed him," said Samehullah Qatra, police chief for Kunduz. "We got the tip he was meeting a family member and waited for his return."
Islamuddin said he now regrets his actions and his mother has begged the government to free him.
"I know now that suicide is illegal and I shouldn't have done it, but I was unaware," he said.
(Writing by Mirwais Harooni, Editing by Christine Kearney and Nick Macfie)

Truth Squad: Has the U.S. "dismantled" the Taliban?
By Jennifer Rizzo, CNN November 23, 2011 Editor's note: Part of the CNN Republican debate fact-checking series
(CNN) -- Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman suggested a total defeat of the Taliban during CNN's Republican debate on national security issues Tuesday night .--- with Huntsman's comments standing in stark contrast to the reality of the continuing attacks by the group in the country.
The statement: "We have dismantled the Taliban, we've run them out of Kabul," the former Utah governor said when explaining why he believes the United States should have a much smaller troop presence in Afghanistan than the almost 100,000 troops there now. "We need a presence on the ground that is more akin to 10-to-15,000 that will help with intelligence gathering and special forces responsibility."
The facts: The Taliban continues to be a threat, and attacks orchestrated by the group continue month after month in-country. For example, a string of bloody attacks launched earlier this month were blamed on the Taliban. Eleven people died after a roadside bomb exploded in the northwestern Afghanistan province of Badghis. Another seven civilians were killed and 17 wounded during a Taliban suicide attack at a mosque in the Jirqishlaq Hasan Tal area of Baghlan province. And six members of the Afghan security forces were hurt after a suspected Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up in the vicinity of Pul-e Khumri in Baghlan.
In October, 10 people were killed in a suicide bombing outside a U.N. compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Officials linked the bombing to the Taliban.
And in September three high-profile attacks -- one against the CIA compound in Kabul, a second against the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters in the capital city, and still another when a suicide bomber killed the lead negotiator in the Taliban peace process -- were tied to the Haqqani network that is closely allied with the Taliban.
Progress has, however, been made against the extremist group that ruled Afghanistan before the United States overthrew them, according to commanders in the field.
"We have reliable information showing that large numbers of Taliban and insurgent leaders are choosing to phone in their operational orders from Pakistan, abandoning their own foot soldiers, who are left behind to conduct the fighting," said the commander of the International Security Assistance Force, Gen. John Allen, after the recent Taliban attacks this month. "The leaders have fled, forced out by the overwhelming ability of Afghan and coalition forces."
But even though the Taliban is weakened, the ability of insurgents to hide across the border in Pakistan continues to be a great threat to success in Afghanistan, according to the latest Pentagon evaluation of the war.
"The insurgency's safe havens in Pakistan, as well as the limited capacity of the Afghan Government, remain the biggest risks to the process of turning security gains into a durable, stable Afghanistan," according to the "Report on Progress Towards Security and Stability in Afghanistan," a Congressionally mandated evaluation of the war's progress that the Pentagon provides twice a year.
The verdict: False
CNN's Charley Keyes contributed to this report.

Afghanistan deserves to chart its future without cross-border meddling
Los Angles Times By Sarah Chayes November 23, 2011
At the latest international conference on Afghanistan, held this month in Istanbul, participants affirmed their resolve to "combat the financing, harboring, training, and equipping" of terrorism. The words were directed largely at Pakistan and what is increasingly recognized as that country's deliberate and long-standing policy of utilizing violent extremism to advance its security interests.
Yet now the U.S. government seems poised to reward this policy by asking its architects, the Pakistani military and its intelligence agency, to broker Afghanistan peace negotiations with the very insurgents they fostered.
For much of the past decade, I have lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where I was able to observe firsthand the activities of the Pakistani military in support of the resurgent Taliban. I learned from the Kandahar chief of police about "retired" Pakistani military intelligence (ISI) officers who had reopened training camps along the barren and wind-swept border between the two countries. I provided the U.S. Embassy with the ISI-issued license plate number on the car used by a senior Taliban commander. Numerous friends of mine, many of them former refugees who frequently traveled to Pakistan, described the impunity with which former Taliban were allowed to meet and organize in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan province. Another friend who lived just over the Pakistani border wanted me to come witness ISI officers distribute motorcycles at a religious school in his neighborhood. They then instructed the students to ride the motorcycles across the border and swell the Taliban's ranks in Afghanistan. These personal observations are buttressed by a growing body of classified and unclassified documentation.
Because the government of Pakistan has assisted in other aspects of the U.S. fight against terrorism, U.S. officials have tended to neglect the role Pakistan is also playing in building up the very insurgency it is supposedly helping us fight. My Afghan friends cannot understand our willful blindness.
A turning point came on Sept. 14, when members of the ISI-supported Haqqani network attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Evidence of the Haqqani network's responsibility for this attack enraged U.S. officials. It was one thing, their response seemed to imply, for Pakistan to send its proxies to fight our soldiers, but another for a Pakistani-supported group to attack the symbolic, sovereign territory represented by an embassy. That crossed a line.
In the wake of the embassy attack, the U.S. focused intensively on the Haqqani network's activities and its ISI ties. But Pakistan's policy of backing militants is not limited to the Haqqani network. The list of extremist groups supported by the Pakistani military is long. And the support is not new. In fact, the U.S. came close to designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993, a year before the ISI's protege, the Taliban, launched a major offensive in Afghanistan.
So why has Pakistan maintained this consistent — and risky — embrace of violent extremism? Regarding Afghanistan, the purpose of sponsoring militant groups has been to obtain proxy control of as much of the country as possible — as a way for Pakistan to punch above its weight internationally. That goal was largely achieved by 1995, when with ISI help, the Taliban governed a growing chunk of Afghanistan from its stronghold in Kandahar.
Ever since the United States toppled that government in 2001, the ISI has been surreptitiously trying to reinstate it. But this time, the strategy isn't to achieve a military victory, as it was in the '90s. Such a goal — against NATO, the most powerful military alliance on Earth — would be laughable. This time, the strategy has been to wear down the international and Afghan militaries, and to wear down the Afghan people in areas where the insurgency is concentrated, so that Washington and Kabul will see no alternative but to negotiate with the insurgents — and to let Pakistan determine which insurgents will enter the talks and what terms they'll accept.
U.S. officials — and many antiwar Americans — are walking right into this trap. In a policy now called "talk, fight, build," the U.S. government is actually asking the ISI to do precisely what it wants to do: usher its favorite insurgent leaders to the negotiating table.
"A political outcome," a.k.a. talks, in the words of former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, "is the way most wars end." The question is, talks with whom?
The notion that there are three separate entities in this equation — the government of Afghanistan, the government of Pakistan and the insurgents — has been revealed as a fallacy. The insurgents are an instrument of the government of Pakistan.
So let's stop pretending. The talks the U.S. government should be facilitating are between two sovereign nations, Afghanistan and Pakistan. If the government of Pakistan has concerns or aspirations regarding its neighbor, it should address them directly, through facilitated negotiations. It should spell out its concerns through this process, and the U.S. should help guarantee that the legitimate ones are properly addressed in a binding treaty. But turning your neighbor into a client state is not a legitimate aspiration and should not be facilitated.
A second set of talks could address the well-founded grievances almost all Afghans, insurgents included, have against their government. But that process should involve Afghans alone. No outside power, least of all Pakistan, should interfere.
Such a two-track approach might still save Afghanistan. And it would at least not reward Islamabad for its long-standing policy of financing, harboring, training, equipping and often directing violent extremists.
Sarah Chayes has served as a senior advisor to the U.S. military on Afghanistan and Pakistan, among other strategic issues. She founded a cooperative in Kandahar that produces skin-care products from local agricultural products (http://www.arghand.org and is the author of "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban."

Karzai Names Afghanistan Central Bank Governor to End Five-Month Vacancy
By Eltaf Najafizada and James Rupert - Nov 23, 2011
President Hamid Karzai’s choice as Afghanistan’s new central bank governor says the state may recover 80 percent of the $850 million it has spent to bail out the country’s biggest commercial lender.
Noorullah Delawari, who headed Da Afghanistan Bank from 2004 to 2007, has been chosen by Karzai to return to the post, the president’s spokesman, Hamid Elmi, said by phone today. The appointment, which must be confirmed by parliament, ends a five- month vacancy that has slowed the government’s efforts to handle the collapse last year of Kabul Bank. The bank failed because of illegal loans to its shareholders, including brothers of Karzai and First Vice President Mohammad Qassim Fahim.
The International Monetary Fund agreed this month to resume lending to Afghanistan after a year’s delay caused by the bank collapse and by what the IMF said were its concerns that Afghanistan was not closely enough supervising commercial banks. An IMF statement Nov. 15 said the fund will lend $135 million to Afghanistan on the condition that Karzai’s government speed up prosecutions and efforts to recover losses at Kabul Bank, which the IMF says are estimated at more than $900 million.
“Asset recovery and legal actions against the architects of the fraud have lagged and need to be pursued more forcefully,” IMF Deputy Managing Director Nemat Shafik said in the statement.
$850 Million Loan
Delawari said the government bailed out Kabul Bank with an $850 million loan. “I feel comfortable that more than 80 percent of the money spent by the government will be recovered” when the government completes a sale of real estate and other properties it seized against the loans, Delawari said in an interview at the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, a government department he currently heads.
“About $230 million is the value of real estate that is marketable, including properties in Dubai, and should be recoverable fairly soon,” Delawari said. Other collateral for the loans, including properties in Afghanistan, is worth about $400 million, he said.
“About $200 million we are still working on,” Delawari said.
Delawari worked for more than 20 years at U.S. commercial banks, serving as vice president of Lloyds Bank California, according to his biography on the investment agency website.
He said he will use his experience in handling loans, including those of failed companies, to reappraise “where are the weaknesses, particularly in bank supervision, to make sure that the problems that caused the failure of this bank will never occur again.”
Da Afghanistan Bank’s previous governor, Abdul Qadir Fitrat, fled to the U.S. in June, saying he had received threats over his calls for prosecutions in the case. Karzai’s office said at the time Fitrat had fled after being summoned for questioning over his role in managing the aftermath of the scandal.

Jailed Afghan rape victim has sentence reduced, remains in jail
By Nick Paton Walsh, CNN November 23, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Afghan prosecutors announced Wednesday that a young rape victim, jailed for adultery after reporting the crime and pushed into marrying her attacker, would have her sentence reduced from twelve to three years. The prosecutor said she would, for now, remain in jail -- with her child -- for not reporting her attack fast enough.
In a remarkable case that is all too common in Afghanistan but has drawn international attention, 21-year-old Gulnaz was attacked by a relative two years ago, but sentenced to 12 years in jail for adultery.
She has since given birth to a girl from the attack. Because of the dishonor of sex outside of wedlock, she had been given the choice of marrying her attacker to get out of jail and legitimize her infant daughter in the eyes of Afghanistan's conservative society.
The child is imprisoned with her at Badambagh Prison on the outskirts of Kabul.
Gulnaz says she at first tried to hide the attack against her because she could be killed for bringing shame on her community. Only her pregnancy exposed the attack and began criminal investigations that led to her conviction for adultery.
On Wednesday a spokesman for the Afghan attorney general said her sentence had been reduced by another court hearing to three years and that the main remaining charge against her was not reporting her attack early enough. A lawyer for Gulnaz, Kim Motley, said her client was only on Tuesday made aware of the reduced sentence and there had been no official notification of it.
The attorney general spokesman, Rahmatullah Nazari, said their investigation had concluded there was no rape, but instead sex outside of wedlock, resulting in both the male attacker and Gulnaz being convicted of adultery.
"Gulnaz claims that she has been raped. But because she reported the crime four months later, we couldn't find any evidence [of an attack]," Nazari said. "She was convicted for not reporting a crime on time."
Gulnaz's attacker denied having sex with her. He told CNN he was serving jail time because he had been accused of rape. His conviction records show he is in jail for "zina", a Dari word that directly translates as "adultery." Human rights workers note that rape cases are often handled as adultery in Afghanistan's court system.
The spokesman for the prosecutor added, however, that Gulnaz might soon receive a presidential pardon.
"There is a strong possibility that she would be pardoned under a presidential decree in the upcoming important dates like Prophet's birthday or Afghan new year," said Nazari.
Nazari said the Afghan prosecutor's investigation had concluded that Gulnaz and her attacker had had consensual sex several times. Months later, when it emerged she was pregnant he said, their families met to try and settle the issue through a financial payment. When those discussions broke down, Nazari said, the accusation of rape was made.
The courts ultimately found both parties guilty of adultery, Gulnaz receiving two years, and her attacker seven. A later court ruling then increased her sentence to twelve years. A third court hearing, which happened in the past month but about which Gulnaz heard little until Tuesday, decided that she should serve a total of three years -- not for adultery but instead for failing to report a crime quickly enough.
Throughout her interview with CNN, Gulnaz was emotional but consistent and clear in telling her story of a single incident of rape by one attacker, the husband of her cousin, when her mother left her alone to make a hospital visit.

Law protecting Afghan women has "long way to go": U.N.
By Christine Kearney
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan authorities are failing to enforce the law to protect women from murder, beating, rape and other violence and being sold into marriage and prostitution, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) revealed in a report that only a small number of cases of violence against women have been prosecuted under the Elimination of Violence Against Women law, passed more than two years ago.
Prosecutors in Afghanistan filed indictments in 155 cases of 2,299 estimated incidents of violence against women, the U.N. mission said in the report.
Just 101 cases were brought to court for final judgments.
"There is still a long way to go to ensure that more cases of violence against women are prosecuted," UNAMA human rights director Georgette Gagnon told reporters.
She said cases that are prosecuted "sends a message that these are crimes and they need to be stopped and perpetrators . . . need to be punished."
Women had few rights under the harsh rule of the Taliban, who were ousted in 2001, and an improvement in the lot of women has been a top priority of Western backers of the government of President Hamid Karzai, who has ruled since then.
The law, passed in August 2009, supports equality for women, including criminalizing child and forced marriage, selling and buying women for marriage or for settling disputes, as well as forced self-immolation, among other acts.
But police, prosecutors, governors and other officials have only sporadically enforced the law, UNAMA said in the report.
Most cases were still unreported and some withdrawn. Some murder cases, for example, were instead prosecuted under sharia law, which sometimes resulted in acquittal of the perpetrators or lighter sentences.
In other cases, the female victims themselves were in turn accused of so-called moral crimes. Low numbers of female police, a lack of women's shelters and overuse of mediation in areas such as domestic violence also discouraged women from filing complaints.
"In some cases, authorities inappropriately pressured women to withdraw complaints and opt for mediation," said Gagnon.
The U.N. mission recommended raising awareness of the law among all levels of government and officials and to train prosecutors, police and judges better on how to apply the law.
In addition, weaknesses in the law, such as the failure to offer protection to women who run away from home to escape abuse and are then detained for "moral crimes," needed to be amended.
Twelve of 28 special women's groups that the law required to be set up to stop violence in rural areas have collapsed, UNAMA said in the report.
MISSED CASES
UNAMA cited cases where the law was or should have been used, including that of two sisters, 15 and 17, who were killed in western Herat province in July 2010 after the elder sister refused to marry an older man.
The future husband and father-in-law were sentenced to 16 years in prison, while three other people were acquitted.
In central Daikondi province, a prosecutor used the law to challenge a verdict by a court that found two girls impregnated by a 60-year-old religious leader guilty of adultery. An appeals court rejected that challenge, the U.N. mission said.
A woman in southern Kandahar province complained in March of her daughter's forced suicide. She said her daughter, who had been sold into marriage for $6,600, set herself on fire in her room when, after 10 years of the marriage, her in-laws forced her to have sex with three male guests visiting the family.
"She was always saying that she would burn herself one day. I would tell her, please tolerate, this is life as it comes and one day you will have a bright future," the mother complained, according to the report. Police did not investigate.
The report was based on 261 interviews and research with judicial, police and government officials as well as U.N. monitoring of cases of violence between March 2010 and September 2011. UNAMA said comprehensive statistics are impossible to obtain since most cases go unreported.
(Editing by Robert Birsel)

107 insurgents killed in Afghanistan in one month: official
KABUL, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- A total of 107 insurgents had been killed in Afghanistan over the past month, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.
"Some 107 armed insurgents had been killed and 98 more insurgents injured during military operations and armed clashes in different parts of the country over the past one month," General Zahir Azimi told reporters in a weekly press briefing here.
According to Azimi, the Afghan army, during joint and independent operations with NATO-led coalition forces, have also detained 511 suspected insurgents all over the country in the same period of time.
However, he also confirmed some 65 personnel of the Afghan National Army were also killed over the last one month in military operations, direct clashes with insurgents and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks elsewhere in the country.
Afghan officials often use the word "insurgents" referring to the Taliban.
Taliban insurgents, who have intensified activities since the militant group announced to launch a spring offensive against Afghan security forces and NATO-led troops stationed in Afghanistan on May 1, have yet to make comments.

30 insurgents killed, 40 arrested by Afghan National Police
KABUL, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- Afghan police, backed by army and NATO-led Coalition forces, have killed 30 armed insurgents and detained 40 others during operations in different provinces over the past 24 hours, the Afghan Interior Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
"The Afghan National Police (ANP), Afghan Army and Coalition Forces launched 17 joint operations in surrounding areas of Kabul, Kunar, Nooristan, Faryab, Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul, Uruzgan, Wardak, Logar, Khost, Paktika, Paktiya and Herat provinces over the past 24 hours," the ministry said in the statement.
"As a result of these operations, 30 armed insurgents were killed and 40 other armed insurgents were arrested by the ANP," it said.
The ANP also discovered and confiscated four AK-47guns, 225 kg of Improvised Explosive Device (IED), three BM-1 rockets, 600 machine gun bullets, one PKM machine gun with 160 bullets, one round mortar mine, 3 hand grenades, and one radio handset, according to the statement.
Afghan officials often use the word "insurgents" referring to the Taliban.
Taliban insurgents, whose regime was toppled in a U.S.-led incursion in late 2001, have intensified activities since the militant group announced to launch a spring offensive against Afghan security forces and NATO-led troops stationed in Afghanistan on May 1, have yet to make comments.

14 insurgents killed in Helmand, Afghanistan
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- Fourteen insurgents were killed Tuesday afternoon in a clash in Helmand province, 555 km south of capital city of Kabul, a provincial official said on Wednesday.
"An unknown number of armed terrorists attacked a joint patrol of Afghan and NATO-led ISAF forces in an area between Zambuli and Meermandab region in Gereshk district on Tuesday afternoon," a spokesman for the provincial government Daud Ahmadi told Xinhua on Wednesday morning.
The joint forces returned fire killing 14 insurgents on the spot besides discovering and seizing a handful of weapons on the scene, Ahmadi said, adding "Unfortunately a 13-year-old girl was also killed and another nine-year-old girl was injured in the clash that lasted for a while,"
"So far, it is unknown that whose firing killed the innocent girl but an investigation was underway by police into the case," Ahmadi added.
The Taliban militants stepped up their attacks on Afghan and NATO-led troops since a spring rebel offensive was launched in May this year in the war-ravaged country.
The Taliban outfit has also warned the civilians to stay away from official gatherings, military convoys and centers regarded as the legitimate targets by militants.
The insurgent group has yet to make comments.

Commanders view of Afghan drawdown not as simple as Huntsman and Romney say
By CNN Pentagon Producer Larry Shaughnessy November 22nd, 2011
GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman offered differing views Tuesday nighton how a president should reach decisions about matters such as U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Romney made it clear he believes a president should listen to his commanders on the ground when making such a decision. "The commander-in-chief makes that decision based upon the input of people closest to the ground," Romney said during Tuesday night's CNN Republican presidential debate.
Huntsman said just listening to the commanders on the ground would be a mistake for a president.
"I also remember when people listened to the generals in 1967 and we heard a certain course of action in South Asia that didn't serve our interests very well. The president is the commander-in-chief and ought to be informed by a lot of different voices, including of those of his generals on the ground."
While they differed on how much influence the generals on the ground should have, they both implied that the president's military advisers speak with one voice on these matters. That's not always the case.
In December of 2009, President Barack Obama was mulling over how many "surge" troops to send to Afghanistan. Shortly before he made his decision, CNN sources said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was recommending 40,000 more troops. Obama decided to send 30,000.
Last summer when Obama was trying to decide how many U.S. troops to pull out of Afghanistan, then-Gen. David Patraeus, McChrystal's replacement in Afghanistan, was recommending, according to sources, pulling out 5,000 troops. Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates was looking at a 10,000-troop pullout. Obama decided to pullout 33,000 by the end of next summer.
After the president's announcement, Petraeus admitted the number was higher than he thought should be removed. "The ultimate decision was a more aggressive formulation, if you will, in terms of the timeline than what we had recommended," Petraeus said last June.
Even Adm. Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thought the president's withdrawal plans were more bold than he wanted to see. "What I can tell you is, the president's decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept," Mullen said.
Had President Obama listened to just his commanders in Afghanistan, as Romney seemed to indicate, the nature of the war in Afghanistan could have looked very different over then next year.

230 new graduates join police force in W. Afghanistan
KABUL, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- A total of 230 new graduates joined the Afghan National Police (ANP) in Herat province with Herat city as its capital, 640 km west of capital city of Kabul, a police official said on Wednesday.
"As many as 230 newly trained policemen commissioned to the ANP on Wednesday and were deployed to six districts of Herat province to provide security for their countrymen," a police official with the Adraskan police training center, Fazil Ahmad Karimi told Xinhua.
The Afghan government and NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan (NTM-A) have stepped up efforts to train and equip Afghan police and army as Afghan forces are getting ready to take security responsibility from foreign forces in parts of the country in the coming weeks.
Herat city was among seven areas where Afghan security forces took security responsibilities from NATO forces in July this year, in the first part of a security transition process which will run to 2014 when Afghanistan will take over the full leadership of its own security duties from U.S. and NATO forces.

Pakistan Appoints New US Ambassador After Scandal
VOA News November 23, 2011
Pakistan has a new ambassador to the United States after the previous one stepped down in the face of allegations that he sought U.S. help in reining in Pakistan's powerful military.
Officials said Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani appointed former information minister Sherry Rehman to the post Wednesday, a day after former ambassador Hussain Haqqani resigned.
After her appointment, Rehman said Pakistan has “rendered a lot of sacrifices,” and that she plans to represent Pakistan's positions to the United States on different issues.
The newly appointed ambassador is a veteran lawmaker for the ruling Pakistan People's Party and has ties to the United States, where she studied politics and foreign relations in the 1980s.
Rehman is a strong advocate for minority rights, and has faced threats for her challenges to the country's blasphemy laws. She also serves as chairman of the Jinnah Institute, a research and advocacy group in Pakistan.
Her appointment came as a surprise to many analysts who had expected someone with closer ties to the military.
Former ambassador Haqqani had represented Islamabad in the United States since 2008, and was well-regarded in Washington. He also is a close ally of President Asif Ali Zardari.
He has denied calling for U.S. help in preventing a feared military coup in Pakistan following the American raid that killed former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. A memo was reported sent in May to Admiral Mike Mullen, the top U.S. military officer at the time, requesting assistance.
Mr. Gilani's spokesman said Tuesday that Haqqani was asked to step down to allow a proper investigation.
Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz described the memo in an opinion piece published last month in The Financial Times newspaper.
In return for U.S. help in preventing a military coup in Pakistan, the memo said a new national security team would conduct a full inquiry into allegations that Pakistan harbored bin Laden. The new team also would hand over top al-Qaida members and ensure that Pakistan's military spy agency cuts ties to the Taliban, the Haqqani network and other groups.
After the allegations surfaced, Haqqani offered to step down. On Tuesday, he confirmed his departure, saying he was resigning to bring closure to the “meaningless controversy threatening our fledging democracy.” He added on Twitter that he has “much to contribute to building a new Pakistan free of bigotry and intolerance.”

‘Slaughterhouse dude’ Chris Hart reflects changing U.S. role in Afghanistan
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow November 22, 2011
KABUL - Many men have seen the ugliness of war. Then there is Chris Hart, the slaughterhouse dude, whose service to the U.S. military is performed far from the battlefield.
Hart has the unglamorous job of advising the Afghan army on an aging facility in Kabul that processes up to 1,500 sheep, goats and water buffaloes a day to feed more than 30,000 Afghan soldiers in and around the capital.
This might seem peripheral to the war against the Taliban, but in some ways Hart represents the future of the American involvement in the conflict. As U.S. troops begin to leave this year, the focus will shift from combat to training Afghan soldiers and police. And the ability of these forces to master the logistics of supplying and sustaining themselves — to keep, for example, the water buffaloes flowing — is perhaps their biggest obstacle to self-sufficiency.
A former U.S. Army reservist, Hart, 45, has worked as a butcher and meat market manager and with the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, where he was part of a program to bring the troops mobile Burger Kings in bulletproof Winnebagos. Now a civilian employee with the Defense Commissary Agency, he’s on a two-year tour to help modernize the Afghan army’s approach to feeding itself and to help plan a new $24 million U.S.-funded slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Kabul.
“I have an extensive background in meat,” Hart said. “That’s why I’m the slaughterhouse dude.”
Hart approaches this unique mission with gusto and a bit of war-zone swagger. He drives himself to work each morning in an armored sport-utility vehicle, his shoulders strapped with two guns — an M16 machine gun and a 9mm pistol, worn in an over-the-shirt holster. He used to wear an 18-inch knife strapped to his back until he became more comfortable being the only American at the slaughterhouse.
“I don’t want somebody holding my arms behind me and slitting my jugular like some goat. I’d rather put a cap in ’em,” he said. “I can hit you at 25 meters with a 9 millimeter.”
When Hart started in July, the conditions at the slaughterhouse were, by his account, “medieval.” Butchers wore sandals as they hacked away at animals with hatchets and makeshift sheet-metal knives duct-taped to wooden handles, using tree trunks as chopping blocks. They dissolved the animal remains with acid and flushed it all into the Kabul River. One slaughterhouse employee, a dwarf, was responsible for climbing inside water buffalo carcasses to cut out their colons.
“They would take a hatchet and just cut off pieces with no rhyme or reason,” Hart said.
In his work, Hart has faced some unexpected cultural differences. The Afghan soldiers have an aversion to freezing meat, he said, and instead prefer to ship fresh meat daily; it is then prepared on the bases in pressure cookers. The coalition has funded renovations for the cold-storage rooms and purchased thousands of plastic boxes for shipping frozen meat, but they remain largely unused.
“If you keep it in the freezer for too long, it loses its taste,” said Col. Abdul Majid, the head veterinarian at the slaughterhouse. “And people in the rural areas don’t have electricity for refrigerators, so they tend to prefer fresh meat.”
Each day, the animals get herded into the slaughterhouse in the early morning, some from as far away as Pakistan. The slaughterhouse purchases its daily orders from livestock brokers.
Some of the butchers at the slaughterhouse — which is halal, meaning it adheres to Islamic principles — are former insurgents, Hart said. But they have earned his respect.
“It’s not an easy job. They’re in a very nasty, dirty environment, and it takes a strong individual to process the meat. Not everybody can go in there and start whacking on an animal all day long. And smell flesh,” he said. “I’ve cut one jugular vein since I’ve been here. I don’t make a habit of it. It’s very messy, for one. You’re going to get nailed soon as you cut that jugular vein.”
The slaughterhouse has existed for more than 50 years, but it was badly damaged during the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s and has been slowly rebuilt over the past several years under the command of Brig. Gen. Mohammad Zarif. During Hart’s tenure, the U.S. military has purchased band saws and boning knives with plastic handles, steel-toed rubber boots for the butchers and biodegradable cleaning products to replace the acid.
“We basically started from scratch with this facility because it was so badly damaged,” said Col. Sayed Ishaq Sadaat, the deputy director at the slaughterhouse. “Mr. Adviser helped us quite a lot by bringing equipment from the United States, including modern tools to chop meat. We didn’t have this type of equipment in the old days.”
Hart is working with Zarif on plans for a new slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the city near the Pul-e-Charkhi prison. The growing Afghan army will need 1.3 million pounds of meat a month just in the Kabul area, but the current slaughterhouse has a capacity to produce less than half that. Hart expects construction will begin next year.
“We’re busting at the seams here in terms of the amount of meat we process,” he said.
On a recent tour of the slaughterhouse, Hart tried to smooth out some of the rough edges that remain. He reminded the butchers to use their new plastic- handled knives and to hold the goats’ heads down when they sliced their jugulars, so they didn’t spray blood all over. He cringed as workers dropped a goat carcass on the pavement, then picked it up and loaded it onto a truck.
“In the States, that meat would be gone as soon as it hit the ground,” he said.
But in his little patch of the war, Hart believes that he and his Afghan team are on the path to victory, and he knows exactly what that will look like when they get there.
“At this point, they’re not too worried about T-bone, porterhouse, top sirloin steaks,” he said. “They just want meat.”

Out with the old, but what of the new?
Foreign Policy By Shamila N. Chaudhary Tuesday, November 22, 2011
I first met Husain Haqqani in 2007 when I served on the Pakistan Desk at the Department of State. At that time, he was a Boston University professor known for his very public criticism of Pervez Musharraf's government and pointed analysis of the military's role in fomenting Islamic militancy in Pakistan, most notably in his 2005 book "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military." So, when he became Ambassador under the new Asif Ali Zardari-led government in 2008, many in Washington wondered how the newly minted Ambassador Haqqani might reconcile his strong views on Pakistan's military with a U.S.-Pakistan policy so heavily centered on the security establishment. Turns out he never did.
Haqqani resigned on November 22 over his alleged involvement in preparing a secret memo to the United States offering to replace Pakistan's military and intelligence leadership in the aftermath of May 2 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Haqqani continues to deny any involvement in the memo, but his longstanding views on civil-military relations render his participation plausible. The question of responsibility is an important one for the Government of Pakistan and its citizens. Pakistan's democracy is still stifled by its history of military dictatorships, but its active civil society and media continues to push for an explanation, as a legal debate unfolds over whether Haqqani's alleged involvement in dragging the U.S. into Pakistan's internal affairs constitutes treason.
It remains to be seen whether Haqqani will face a legal inquiry. Any elaborate proceedings, however, are not in the interest of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) government. President Zardari no doubt faces a risk that with Haqqani's resignation, the political opposition and military may begin to question the possibility of his involvement in "Memogate," as was suggested, then denied, then suggested again by Mansoor Ijaz, the Pakistani-American businessman at the center of the scandal. The Supreme Court and the activist-minded Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry could also take up this issue as part of its agenda against PPP's corruption and bad governance. The government must strike a balance between accommodating public calls for justice and maintaining its strength in the lead up to the March 2012 Senate elections, during which the PPP is expected to win a majority of seats.
The government must also contend with public perceptions, especially among the Western foreign policy community, that the military is so incensed by this incident that it will overthrow the government. In substance, this argument has no legs. At least under Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani's leadership, the military continues to avoid overt involvement in civilian affairs, primarily due to Kayani's desire to improve the military's image following the bin Laden raid. However, if Pakistan's civilian leadership continues to disappoint, Kayani will have a harder time convincing the rest of the senior military leadership, which views the civilians as corrupt and inept, to stay out of domestic politics.
But it's not just the military that needs to stay out of politics. The memo shows how much the U.S. government is pulled into domestic affairs in Pakistan, whether it chooses to be or not. The United States smartly stayed out of it this time, with the White House, Department of State, and the embassy in Islamabad issuing statements that the memo issue was an internal matter for Pakistan's democratic institutions to address. The United States should push for more balanced civil-military relations in Pakistan, but it should limit how it exerts its influence to resolve those civil-military conflicts. Doing so under the circumstances of "Memogate" would have only confirmed the views of Haqqani's critics, who identify him as an American stooge, and of his supporters, who credit him with holding together a broken bilateral relationship. Both views exaggerate Haqqani's influence on the United States and Pakistan, which are bound together by forces greater than personalities, namely the ability of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to conduct attacks on the United States from Pakistani territory.
Haqqani's weakness was not that he was too close to the U.S., or underperforming as Ambassador. Rather, it was his inability to convince the military establishment that he represented the entire Pakistani government, and not just the civilian leadership. Do not forget that before "Memogate," the 2009 scandal over the Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid legislation pulled the United States into another domestic conflict that revolved around Haqqani. At the time, the military blamed Haqqani for the legislation's attempts to contain the military's role in civilian affairs. What was intended to be a historic moment in U.S.-Pakistan relations and an effort to focus on the needs of the Pakistani people become mired in a decades old imbalance in civil-military relations.
The job of Pakistan's Ambassador to the United States has never been easy. Over the past year, during which time I served as Director for Pakistan and Afghanistan at the White House National Security Council, the United States cooperated with Haqqani on many unexpected developments; the shooting of two Pakistanis by American contractor Raymond Davis, managing the aftermath of the bin Laden raid, the unfortunate death of key interlocutor Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, a tremendous expansion of U.S. counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, as well as attempts to revitalize civilian engagement in the country.
No one can doubt Haqqani's appetite for politics, or his feisty attempts to attack challenges or seize opportunities in his path. I am reminded of a story he told me from his time as a 24-year old Karachi-based journalist for the Far Eastern Economic Review. During his first meeting with General Zia-ul-Haq, Chief Martial Law Administrator and 6th President of Pakistan, Haqqani asked him when he would "step down and implement democracy?" Zia's response was that Pakistan needed democracy but also stability. For someone who started his career in politics in the student wing of the conservative religious party Jamaat-e-Islami, this was no doubt a bold move on Haqqani's part, and propelled him into a career that would analyze the hard realities of the Pakistan military's stronghold on civilian politics.
However, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship now faces some of the most challenging policy questions it has faced in decades, related to defining Pakistan's role in an eventual reconciliation process with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the impact of the 2014 international troop drawdown in Afghanistan on Pakistan's national security interests. Because of the high risks these questions pose for both the United States and Pakistan, the next envoy to Washington must be able to speak to the whole gamut of bilateral issues, including Pakistan's security priorities, which will remain front and center to U.S. national security interests in the foreseeable future.
Shamila N. Chaudhary is a South Asia Analyst at the Eurasia Group and a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as Director for Pakistan and Afghanistan at the White House National Security Council from 2010-2011.

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