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Pakistan may boycott Afghan summit
Funerals held for soldiers killed in Nato attack at border post as Pakistan considers staying away from Bonn conference
Guardian.co.uk By Saeed Shah Sunday 27 November 2011
Karachi - Pakistan is considering boycotting an international conference on the future of Afghanistan in retaliation for the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers who came under attack from Nato helicopters at a border checkpost.
The Pakistani military alleged that the attack 1.5 miles inside Pakistani territory in the early hours of Saturday was deliberate, as it was a well-known position manned by regular troops. US officials have suggested the Nato force was acting in self-defence.
Funerals were held for the dead soldiers in Peshawar on Sunday. Prayers conducted in front of 24 coffins, each wrapped in a Pakistani flag, were televised live. The army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, attended the service at a military base, as did leading officials from the north-west provincial administration.
Television channels repeatedly replayed images of the funeral, set to patriotic music usually reserved for wartime. Kayani, considered the most powerful man in the country, visited a hospital in Peshawar to meet soldiers injured in the incident.
The conference in Bonn, scheduled for 5 December, will mark a decade since the German city hosted the first international meeting to chalk out Afghanistan's future. It had once been hoped that the meeting might kick off the peace process in Afghanistan, but expectations had already been lowered even before this weekend.
If a key regional player such as Pakistan stays away, the event will appear even more hollow. Pakistan's co-operation is considered vital for stabilising Afghanistan and bringing the Taliban into negotiations.
Tehmina Janjua, of Pakistan's ministry of foreign affairs, said the Bonn issue was "being examined and no decision has yet been taken in this regard".
Pakistan announced late on Saturday that it had blocked supplies to Nato forces passing through the country. Half of Nato supplies pass by land through Pakistan. Islamabad also said it would stop USuse of the Shamsi airbase, in the west of the country. Shamsi had been used in the past to fly drone aircraft, which target suspected militants in Pakistan's tribal area; it is unclear whether the base was still used for armed drones.
Nato pledged a full investigation into the attack. "I have written to the prime minister of Pakistan to make it clear that the deaths of Pakistani personnel are as unacceptable and deplorable as the deaths of Afghan and international personnel," said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato's secretary general. "This was a tragic unintended incident."
Events leading up to the incident remain unclear. In the past, much confusion has been caused by Taliban insurgents firing into Afghanistan from positions close to Pakistani checkposts, making it appear to Nato and Afghan troops that they are coming under attack from the Pakistani posts. Pakistani soldiers have previously shot into the air to warn Nato helicopters that they have crossed the border, but that has been mistaken by the aircraft crew for incoming fire.
Karzai announces new areas to come under Afghan control
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Monday, November 28, 2011
KABUL - The Afghan government on Sunday identified 18 new areas where Afghan troops will soon take over security responsibilities from the NATO coalition, putting about half the country’s population under the lead of Afghan forces.
The security handover announced by President Hamid Karzai, ahead of an international conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, early next month, is the second phase of a gradual transition plan to have Afghan troops in control of the country by 2014, when the bulk of U.S. soldiers are expected to be gone.
The handover started with some of the most peaceful parts of Afghanistan. This round, however, includes some more-volatile areas. American officials have said they want to give Afghans control of difficult areas earlier in the process to allow time for training and support while there is still a large U.S. military presence.
By early next year, after these new areas have switched to Afghan control, the Afghan government will be in charge of eight of the country’s 34 provinces and several other cities and districts, including areas where the Taliban insurgency persists. The new provinces on the list are Nimruz, Daikundi, Samangan, Takhar and Balkh — none of which are focal points of the American military campaign. The provincial capitals of more-dangerous provinces, such as Ghazni, Wardak, and Nangahar, were also included.
The transition plan is risky, because Afghan security forces have not proved, in the most difficult areas, that they can prevail over the Taliban. Although the Afghan army has improved in recent years, it lacks the logistical capability to effectively maintain its equipment and arm its soldiers. The Afghan troops rely heavily on NATO for air support and the sophisticated technology to combat roadside bombs and other threats. The Afghan police continue to have problems with corruption and basic competence.
But U.S. and Afghan officials expressed optimism about the transition process and said the Afghan forces could handle the new responsibilities.
Gen. John R. Allen, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said in a statement that the Afghan forces have “made dramatic improvements in their development and effectiveness.”
“Transition is a reality, and it is a path for the future success of this country and the Afghan people,” Allen said.
Designating an area as being under Afghan control does not mean that coalition forces will leave, but rather that their role will shift toward a focus on training Afghan troops and backing them up if they need help.
Such arrangements differ in various parts of the country. But U.S. troops have also turned over bases to their Afghan counterparts, and they will continue to do so as more American soldiers depart.
Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.
After Strike in Pakistan, Rage and Damage Control
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN and SALMAN MASOOD November 27, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The political fallout from a NATO airstrike in Pakistan that was operated out of Afghanistan and killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers became clearer on Sunday, as Pakistan seethed over the attack and the United States scrambled to contain the damage to an already frayed relationship.
Afghan officials, meanwhile, worried that they would bear the immediate brunt of Pakistan’s wrath and that the Pakistanis would follow through on threats to withdraw from an international conference on Afghanistan’s security and development that is scheduled for Dec. 5.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, to discuss the situation, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, talked with Pakistan’s supreme army commander, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. General Kayani spent much of the day leading a funeral service in Peshawar, Pakistan, for soldiers who had been killed and visiting others who were wounded in the attack on Saturday.
In her talk with Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Khar conveyed the “deep sense of rage felt across Pakistan,” according to a government statement. Demonstrations expressing anger at the United States broke out in major cities across the country.
The episode “negates the progress made by the two countries on improving relations and forces Pakistan to revisit the terms of engagement,” Ms. Khar was quoted as saying.
An investigation is under way to determine how the attack occurred, said NATO officials, who declined to discuss it until the inquiry was completed. Diplomats in Afghanistan who were briefed on the preliminary findings said that a joint NATO and Afghan force operating along the border came under sustained fire late Friday or early Saturday — it is not clear from whom — and called in air support.
The coalition forces tried to contact the Pakistani military on the other side of the border. It is unclear whom they reached, but the coalition forces believed they were free to fire back, and the aircraft struck positions in Pakistan, according to diplomats.
The Pakistani government said 24 people had been killed, but accounts near the scene in the Mohmand tribal region said the toll was as high as 28.
The cross-border strike not only resulted in more deaths than previous attacks, but it also occurred at a particularly tense moment in relations between Pakistan and the United States, and between Pakistan and Afghanistan, said diplomats and analysts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“There have been incidents like this before, incidents where three or four Pakistanis regrettably died, but 25 people or more, that’s on a different scale,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject.
The relationship between the United States and Pakistan, already damaged last winter when a C.I.A. contractor killed two Pakistanis, plummeted after the cross-border mission that killed Osama bin Laden in May.
The Pakistani government also faces a delicate domestic political situation. The Pakistani population is strongly anti-American, and the government must take a strong stand when its troops are killed. If it fails to do so, it risks losing popular support and, with it, the ability to fight extremists like the Pakistani Taliban.
On Sunday, dozens of protesters belonging to Jamaat-e-Islami, which is considered the country’s most disciplined Islamist political party, demonstrated in the eastern city of Lahore. Zikrullah Mujahid, a Jamaat-e-Islami leader, said: “The so-called war against terrorism is not our war. It is a war of America and NATO.”
In Karachi, thousands of protesters gathered outside the United States Consulate and shouted “Down with America!” Reuters reported.
In Ghotki, in Sindh Province, the opposition leader Imran Khan, who has opposed the fight against extremists in the federally administered tribal areas, urged the government to pull out of “America’s war.”
Meanwhile, in Kabul, the Afghan government said it was concerned about Pakistan’s threat to shun the conference on Afghanistan’s future in Bonn, Germany. Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, urged Pakistan not to punish Afghanistan for NATO’s actions.
A spokesman for the Afghan Foreign Ministry, Janan Mosazai, described the conference as important “in terms of the vision the Afghan government will be sharing with the international community, with the region, in the 10 years after transition.”
The conference, to which more than 50 countries are sending representatives, was organized to showcase the international commitment to Afghanistan’s security and to reassure Afghans and potential foreign investors about the nation’s future.
If Pakistan, which is widely seen as a seedbed for the Afghan insurgency, refuses to participate, those goals could be undermined, leaving little doubt that the fighting will continue, according to Western diplomats and military officials.
Mr. Mosazai said the Afghan government had been contacted by Pakistan’s ambassador in Kabul, but he did not elaborate. But Pakistani officials said they had strongly protested to their Afghan counterparts about the “use of Afghan territory against Pakistan” and urged the government to prevent similar attacks.
In a recent consultative assembly, Mr. Karzai promised that Afghan soil would never be used to attack neighboring countries. Although he was speaking about the strategic partnership that he is negotiating with the United States, the issue has resonated in the region, where both Iran and Pakistan fear the American military presence in Afghanistan.
Mr. Faizi, the president’s spokesman, said the government stood by that commitment, and the assembly, with more than 2,000 participants, endorsed it.
“These bases will not be used against any neighboring country,” he said. “That’s the advice of the Afghan people and, of course, the president. We stand by that.”
Alissa J. Rubin reported from Kabul, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington.
U.S. Faces New Afghan Test
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE NOVEMBER 28, 2011
BAGRAM, Afghanistan - The Obama administration faces a real-time test of its elaborate strategy for supplying troops in Afghanistan following a deadly allied airstrike that sent relations between Washington and Islamabad to new lows.
Pakistan over the weekend closed key border crossings to North Atlantic Treaty Organization supply convoys following a deadly airstrike on Saturday.
At least for now, the incident leaves U.S. troops in landlocked Afghanistan dependent on alternate supply routes that have been painstakingly set up to help steer clear of the region's treacherous geopolitics.
It also promises to strain the military-logistics system to capacity. The turmoil comes just as stress on the supply routes was about to grow with the beginning of U.S. troop and equipment withdrawals and the continued rotation of units in and out of Afghanistan.
Three years ago, the military shipped more than three quarters of all its cargo to landlocked Afghanistan through Pakistan, with the rest coming in by air. That equation has changed since then: more than half of the military's surface cargo comes in through a new route, dubbed the Northern Distribution Network, a system of rail, sea and truck routes that begins at Baltic and Black Sea ports and extends across Central Asia.
"As new routes open up, they give us other avenues to get stuff into Afghanistan," said Gen. Raymond Johns, the head of Air Mobility Command, in a recent discussion with reporters about supplying Afghanistan. "We're not critically tied to one specific route."
In 2009, in response to escalating insurgent attacks on supply convoys, the U.S. established new overland supply routes through former Soviet republics to avoid sending supplies through Pakistan. This year, officials said, an average of 63% of all U.S. military surface cargo moved through the Northern Distribution Network. The rest came through Pakistan.
The U.S. has another option: Moving freight by air. According to U.S. Transportation Command, the arm of the military that oversees logistics, 31% of all U.S. supplies are currently brought to Afghanistan by air, a slight increase over last year.
The "air bridge" to Afghanistan is perhaps the most flexible way to move freight, but it is also the most expensive. To save money, the military has also tested what it calls "multimodal" transport, which means transporting heavy supplies by cargo ship to ports in the Middle East, then flying shipments onward to Afghanistan on cargo planes.
With convoys backed up in Pakistan as a result of the latest tension, officials may have to rely more heavily on the costliest option.
Slightly fewer than 100,000 American troops are stationed in Afghanistan. About 10,000 are scheduled to depart by the end of this year and another 23,000 will leave by the end of September. Bagram Airfield, a former Soviet base north of Kabul, will be a main hub for moving troops and supplies out of the country.
On Sunday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that the nation's forces will early next year take charge of security in areas of the country that are home to half of Afghanistan's population, in anticipation of a full withdrawal of coalition forces in 2014.
Recently, the U.S. Air Force launched a "surge" of C-5 aircraft, the whale-shaped cargo planes that have loading ramps at both ends, to help contend with intense global demand for military cargo movement, with Bagram a major destination.
"We're bursting at the seams because of the C-5 surge right now," said Lt. Col. Dan Lemon, an Air Force officer who oversees the shipment of equipment at Bagram to and from bases around the country.
Bagram's cargo yard—which looks something like a rental-car lot, if Hertz rented armored vehicles in identical desert tan— has been busy as the military continues to rotate troops and equipment ahead of a 2014 deadline for final withdrawal.
One recent afternoon at the Afghan military base, dozens of trucks and armored cars were lined up in neat rows just off the flight line, waiting to be loaded on board a C-5 Galaxy, the largest cargo plane the U.S. Air Force operates.
Black Hawk helicopters were being packed away inside the bellies of cargo aircraft for the long flight home, their rotor blades folded away for the journey.
"It's like playing Tetris with real stuff," said Air Force Master Sgt. Robert Shugart, who helps oversee the movement of cargo at Bagram.
The U.S.-based aircraft typically made several stops in Europe and southwest Asia for crew rest and refueling. In Afghanistan, the crew picked up worn-out armored vehicles that need to be "reset," Army terminology for taking them back to depots in the U.S. for maintenance and overhaul.
On a recent flight from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to Afghanistan, crew members reflected on life in the cockpit. "It's taking days, if not weeks, off of my life!" joked Maj. Richard Carter, a C-17 transport plane pilot.
For Air Force crews, an intercontinental cargo mission is a series of long-haul flights. The typical flying day is long—16 to 24 hours, including preparation on the ground and time in the air—followed by mandatory crew rest on the ground, then back in the air.
Maj. Michael Attebury, his crewmate, hoists what he called "our secret weapon:" a supersize coffee thermos.
The C-5s aren't empty when they fly to Bagram: One cargo plane that was picking up Army trucks had just unloaded some armor sets for the mine-resistant off-road vehicles designed to protect troops from mines and roadside bombs.
That pattern is straining the C-5s, many of which entered services around three decades ago. Coupled with the increasing demands that the troop drawdown brings, supplying Afghanistan translates into particular stress on an overtaxed—and aging—fleet of cargo aircraft.
"This airplane is so old the overall airplane is older than some of the lieutenants" who fly it, said Maj. Gabriel Cabrera, an Air Force C-5 pilot.
Afghanistan is safer today but still needs our help
Washington Post By Simon Gass Monday, November 28, 2011
In mid-October something interesting happened in Afghanistan. In Helmand province, the Pashtun heartland, U.S. Marines prepared to fight their way north as far as the strategically important Kajaki Dam. They expected a tough battle. Route 611, the main supply route, runs through country that in recent years has been crawling with Taliban fighters who desperately want to keep control of an important assembly area. I feared heavy casualties when we set out. But that didn’t materialize. The Marines met relatively slight resistance as they cleared and secured the road to the north. Most of the Taliban fled rather than fight.
Perhaps we should have expected it. The Taliban have taken a ferocious beating over the past year in what were once their strongholds in southern and southwestern Afghanistan. They are demoralized and finding it harder to resupply with men, money and weapons. The fighting campaign they boasted of this summer has been a flop. And that is because the troop surge by the United States and other NATO and international partners provided the military means to take on the insurgency and beat it.
All this does not, of course, mean that we have won. The picture in Afghanistan’s east, where we have put less effort, is less decisive. Plenty of work remains for us and our Afghan partners.
But make no mistake: Taliban commanders in Quetta and Peshawar have plenty to worry about. Nobody should think they are winning or can have any expectation of winning. The Afghan people don’t want them back. A recent, authoritative opinion survey by the Asia Foundation found that the number of Afghans who have no sympathy for the insurgents has risen from 36 percent in 2009 to 64 percent in 2011. That’s largely because, out of desperation, the Taliban are resorting to roadside bombs and suicide attacks that kill innocent Afghans. This is despite Taliban leader Mohammad Omar’s forlorn appeals to his military commanders, most recently in early November, to minimize casualties to Afghan civilians.
Furthermore, the Afghan army has added muscle: The days when army units could be beaten up by Taliban groups are over. NATO will need to continue the highly effective training program it began two years ago, but as I travel around Afghanistan I meet increasingly capable army and police units. Improvements in governance and the economy are also taking place, though more slowly than most Afghans would like.
All this is why we are able to progressively hand over security responsibility to our Afghan partners. The Afghan government announced the second phase of this transferSunday: About 50 percent of the country’s population live in areas coming under Afghan control.
We will finish this transition process by the end of 2014. It won’t be easy. To complete the training of Afghan forces, we will need sufficient troops to achieve the transition and continue to choke the insurgency through 2012 and 2013. But with persistence and determination, by 2014 we will be able to greatly reduce our commitment of money and troops, while achieving the right result.
After 2014, Afghanistan will still be a desperately poor country trying to recover from 30 years of conflict that destroyed institutions and infrastructure. Polls show that at a local level, Afghans are less concerned about poor security than they are about jobs, electricity and roads. The number of deaths from violence is shocking. But more tragic still is the number of children who die before their fifth birthday from avoidable illnesses.
The good news is that Afghanistan has huge mineral resources — oil, gas, copper, iron and rare-earth metals — that, in time, will allow its government to pay its bills. This is not sunny optimism. It is fact.
Until then, however, we should be willing to help pay for and train Afghanistan’s armed forces and offer development assistance. The cost will be a fraction of our present spending. And there is a lesson we should keep in mind: After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the Afghan government didn’t collapse, as many had predicted. But it disintegrated once the Soviets stopped their financial support.
This is a clear lesson. If we tighten the purse strings too early, we will risk all the gains we have made at such cost. That would mean a return to the security chaos that bred attacks on our countries. It would mean the uncontrolled proliferation of narcotics, a new wave of migration away from Afghanistan and turmoil in one of the world’s most sensitive regions. That is not an easy message when the economy is hurting. But the cost of greater instability in this part of the globe would be much greater than the price of our commitment after 2014.
An Afghan colleague pointed out recently that Afghanistan wasn’t always the war-torn country that we see in the news. It was once peaceful. And if we can bear the cost for just a little longer, it can be again. That would be good for Afghanistan and good for us, too.
The writer is NATO’s senior civilian representative in Afghanistan.
The Afghan General Who Fell to Earth
She was a national hero—and some powerful men didn’t like that.
Newsweek By Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau Nov 28, 2011
As badly as things went for her that day, Khatool Mohammadzai nevertheless glows at the memory. It was the first day of spring 2002, and she was standing in a helicopter as it hovered roughly a kilometer up in the sky above Kabul. Down on the ground, President Hamid Karzai and thousands of other Afghans were crowded into the country’s National Stadium to celebrate the first Afghan New Year since the fall of the Taliban, only four months before. The jubilant gathering was a sharp break from Mullah Mohammed Omar’s theocratic regime, which had used the stadium for public stonings and other executions.
And now came Mohammadzai’s moment: carrying a half-dozen doves, the woman who had been the first female paratrooper in Afghan history jumped from the helicopter. When her multicolored chute opened, she released the doves and floated gently toward earth, holding a Quran and an
Afghan flag. Unfortunately the pilot had missed his bearings. Mohammadzai landed kilometers away from the stadium—but instead of slinking home in humiliation, she hailed a cab. When she finally arrived, still carrying her parachute, the crowd erupted in applause and cheers. “For me and my country it was the beginning of a new life,” she reminisced to Newsweek. “I felt we had been reborn. I showed the world how brave Afghan women are and what they can do.”
She was a national hero, a living symbol of her country’s hopes for the future, featured regularly on television and at women’s events. She was promoted from colonel to general, the first Afghan woman to achieve that rank since the overthrow of the Soviet-backed regime in 1992, and she soon rose to three stars. “I remember her well,” says Georgia National Guard Brig. Gen. Larry Dudney, who became her friend in Afghanistan despite the language barrier. “I was very impressed with her. She exudes confidence, she really does.” At her speaking engagements she sometimes talked about that ill-fated jump. “It was a funny story,” says Dudney. “She told it as an example of perseverance, of facing up to adversity, never quitting.”
Those stardom days are over. Many Afghan women fear that their advances of the past decade are being whittled away—and Mohammadzai’s relatives and longtime military friends consider her a prime example. “I thought she would be a role model for the new generation of Afghan girls and women,” says Noorjahan Akbar. “But she has been sidelined.” The student activist, now 20, first met the paratrooper five years ago while helping a writer friend who was doing a book on courageous Afghan women.
Mohammadzai, 45, made more than 600 jumps in her 28-year military career, and her precise and daring skydives used to be a regular part of every Independence Day and New Year’s celebration in Kabul. Nevertheless, it has now been five years since her military and civilian superiors last allowed her to put on a parachute. Instead, she’s been shunted out of the spotlight into a make-work assignment in a Defense Ministry back office.
She doesn’t openly criticize her commanders—she’s too good a soldier for that—but her admirers aren’t so reticent. They say she has become a victim of biases that still plague Afghanistan. It’s not only that she’s a woman, they say: ethnic discrimination also plays a part. Mohammadzai is a Pashtun, and the Defense Ministry, along with the military’s top brass, is dominated by the Tajiks who led the Northern Alliance to victory over the Taliban in 2001. The ministry denies that gender bias or ethnic favoritism exists in the armed forces, but it seems unlikely that the men who run Afghanistan’s military would be free from the traditional sexism that pervades the rest of the country. “I don’t like her,” an ostensibly well-educated Kabul construction engineer says of Mohammadzai. “Women have no place in the military.”
Concern over Afghan women’s declining status is only deepening as the Karzai government seeks reconciliation with the Taliban, and the Americans prepare to go home. “Our rights are going downhill, because our government’s and the international community’s focus has shifted from protecting Afghan women’s rights to a politically correct option of negotiating with the Taliban,” says Akbar. “We women have little or no say in these discussions.”
The Kabul of Mohammadzai’s childhood was a proudly cosmopolitan city. Men and women alike were legally entitled to public education and good jobs; burqas were a rare sight, and young women routinely wore miniskirts or jeans. “In those days it wasn’t necessary for a woman to cover her hair, arms, and legs,” she recalls. But hard times came to the Mohammadzai family in the early 1970s, when Khatool was 6: her father, a customs officer, died, leaving her mother to raise seven daughters and two sons on her own. Somehow the widow handled the job—and did it well, too, if Mohammadzai is any evidence. She grew up athletic, full of energy, and absolutely fascinated by airplanes.
The girl was 13 when the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan. Many in Kabul actually welcomed the coming of the Russians; a violent power struggle had erupted among Afghanistan’s Marxist rulers, and the hope was that the December 1979 invasion would stabilize the government. In fact, the effort succeeded, at least in a limited way. While Soviet troops waged a long and brutal war for control of the countryside, the turmoil in Kabul ended quickly. The Kremlin-backed regime continued its efforts to modernize Afghanistan, including support for women’s rights. Basic human rights were an entirely different matter, of course: the Russians tolerated no opposition to their program.
By the time Mohammadzai finished high school, the Soviets had occupied Afghanistan for more than three years. When an Afghan military recruiter came to her high school on graduation day and asked for volunteers to join the Afghan Army, the 17-year-old immediately raised her hand. Her mother was struggling to support the family, and jobs were hard to find—but more than that, Mohammadzai says she craved the challenges of military life. “I wanted to do what was most demanding, strenuous, and athletic,” she says.
So she signed up to become a paratrooper. She vividly recalls how she and her fellow volunteers, almost all men, were sent on a two-day, 150-kilometer march over rough terrain from Kabul to the eastern city of Jalalabad with full packs. The young woman slept in the open among the male trainees. A rock was her pillow, and by the time the ordeal was over, her feet were bleeding. “We suffered a lot,” she says. But she aced the course.
She admits she was scared when she made her first parachute jump in 1984, but she forgot her fear almost before her chute opened. She recalls a strange sensation: it wasn’t at all like falling. “Will I be stuck in the air forever?” she recalls wondering. “Who will get me down?” Although she never saw combat against the U.S. backed mujahedin, she got so good at soldiering that she was eventually made an instructor, giving commando and paratroop training to males as well as females. “She always had higher spirits and was a better commando, jumper, and shooter than I was,” says Afghan Brig. Gen. Abdul Basir Asifzari, who trained with her in the 1980s. “She could fly circles around me when we jumped.”
In those days, Mohammadzai says, she was never subjected to official discrimination. Still, she encountered her share of individual bigotry. She particularly remembers one jump in the 1980s that almost killed her. Her main chute failed to open fully, sending her into an uncontrollable spin as she plunged toward the ground. She had the presence of mind to open her auxiliary chute, which at least slowed her fall, but she broke a leg and several ribs and dislocated her wrist, elbow, and shoulder. She remains convinced that her chute was sabotaged by a resentful male paratrooper. Still, he was never caught and punished.
In 1989, after nine years of an exorbitantly draining war, the Russians gave up and went home. The Afghan puppet regime managed to survive for three more years before collapsing in 1992. But the victorious guerrillas couldn’t afford to punish Mohammadzai too harshly for having been on the losing side; they desperately needed professional soldiers with her skills. She was named director of women’s physical training for the Air Defense Corps. And yet in many ways the mujahedin’s attitude toward women wasn’t much different from that of the Taliban: they barred her from parachute jumping, and she was required to wear a head-to-toe abaya whenever she appeared in public. Although Mohammadzai didn’t like the situation, she had no choice. She had married an Afghan soldier in 1990, and he was killed in action just a year later, only 40 days after she had given birth to his son.
Life became even tougher when the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996. All women were ordered to stay indoors at home until further notice, and Mohammadzai found herself trapped in her small apartment, with little money and no prospects, forbidden to work or even step outside unless escorted by a male relative. But unlike many of her military colleagues, she refused to flee the country. She’s proud of that. “I decided to stay, hoping for change,” she says. To make ends meet, she sewed dresses for friends and neighbors, and she opened a clandestine girls’ school in her home. Her customers and students paid her with whatever basic necessities they could get—sometimes a sack of flour, sometimes a bottle of cooking oil.
But she and her son survived, and soon after the collapse of the Taliban regime she was called back to active duty with the new Afghan National Army. At first she wore a burqa over her military uniform on the way to and from the ministry, just to be on the safe side—until the day a policeman accosted her and contemptuously demanded: “Auntie, where do you think you’re going?” She tore off her burqa, flung it at the cop’s feet, and walked away, she says. She hasn’t worn a burqa since.
Mohammadzai’s friend General Asifzari says he was amazed how quickly she got back in shape and returned to jumping after so many years out of action. She worked with Afghan, NATO, and U.S. military officers to design physical-training programs for the Afghan National Army. In her apartment she proudly displays certificates of merit from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Combat Brigade and 82nd Airborne Division, and she’s been awarded paratrooper medals by the United States, Canada, and France. She was the only female entrant in an international parachute competition held in Kabul on Afghan Independence Day, 2004. She won, beating 35 male paratroopers.
Nevertheless, Mohammadzai hasn’t been able to put on a parachute since 2006. “I really miss jumping, but I’m not allowed anymore,” she says. “I loved the crowds when I’d jump into stadiums.” Instead she’s been relegated to a small office in the Defense Ministry’s compound, and it’s in an annex, not even inside the vast headquarters building. She’s been made “deputy director of planning and physical training” for a disaster-preparedness reserve force that won’t even begin recruiting until next year. As she strides through the ministry’s compound, few officers or enlisted men even bother to salute, despite the three stars on her epaulets, the four sets of paratrooper wings over one breast pocket, and the 35 meritorious-service medals pinned over each other.
Her recent interviews with Newsweek at her Defense Ministry office and her modest Kabul apartment were the first she’s been allowed to give in the past three years. The last time was when a foreign television crew tried to interview her at the Defense Ministry. Even though she had written permission to speak, guards physically stopped the interview and broke the journalists’ video camera. “I just don’t have authority anymore,” says Mohammadzai.
She’s not alone in finding herself marginalized. “It’s a big problem,” says Horia Mosadiq, a research analyst for Amnesty International in Kabul. “Whether they are government ministers or military officers, women always have to deal with discrimination, and have only a very small role in decision making.” The situation galls Mohammadzai. “I should be helping to train commandos and paratroopers,” she says. “I could have helped my country a lot more in the past few years if I had been given the right job.” And she longs to get back in the sky. “Women and men are the wings of one bird,” says a poster on her office wall. As long as war and bigotry persist in Afghanistan, the country will have little hope of taking flight.
With John Barry
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Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and has been covering the region for the magazine the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Interpreting Afghanistan
Afghan interpreters debate their country's future, and America's role in it.
Wall Street Journal By ANNE JOLIS NOVEMBER 28, 2011
Forward Operating Base Pasab, Afghanistan - On Friday night, about 20 kilometers west of Kandahar City, roughly 40 men sit facing each other in a low-ceilinged hall on the Afghan side of the military base. The walls are decorated with large posters of President Hamid Karzai, the Afghan National Army, various local politicians—and U.S. Gen. David Petraeus. Some of the men are in U.S. Army fatigues, most in street clothes. At one end of the room a man with a silver pompadour gently tugs on an armunia, an accordion-like instrument, while to his right another beats a small drum. Still digesting a meal of mutton and soda, by turns the men get up and dance between the chairs, arms akimbo and torsos swaying, as the others clap along.
Meet the interpreters of the U.S. Third Infantry Brigade Combat Team. All are Afghan natives, though some are now U.S. citizens as well. For the moment, they all call the base home. And in the past month, three of them have gotten engaged—an occasion to celebrate.
While a wrist-flicking, single-sex dance party is rare enough in America, the interpreters are also engaging in an activity more familiar among Western men: Arguing about politics. Specifically, the looming U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan.
"My advice to [U.S. President] Obama? Bring the troops home," says Kabul native Sharif, age 32. His father—a former official in Afghanistan's erstwhile Soviet government—took the family and fled to Pakistan in 1993. Sharif moved to California in 2002, and his family runs an auto-glass business there. Even so, he will only give his first name for the record. His brother still lives in Kabul.
Once business started to dwindle in California in 2008, Sharif—now a U.S. citizen—decided to look for work as a military interpreter. "The salary is good, a lot of my friends are doing it. I've been all over, I was in Kabul with the Special Forces before. But it's scary. This country, Afghanistan—it's really tough," he tells me outside the party over cigarettes and cola. "There's too much corruption, and it's not safe—even this place we're sitting now."
This place—the base in Zhari District—is in Taliban heartland, where Mullah Omar gathered his first 50 students nearly two decades ago. In the past year, since the U.S. surge brought roughly 4,200 troops to area, the base has been the target of semi-regular rocket attacks, one of which hit the soccer pitch used by the Afghan National Army.
He says that "the villagers, the ones that actually support the [Afghan] government, they ask for so many things—they want water, they want land, they want jobs. And you"—the Americans—"you give it, but they never did anything for it. It's not right."
And even so, "many of them support the Taliban, they work with them. If the Americans leave, no question, the corruption will get even worse and it will only be good for the Taliban. Oh, and our neighbors—the Pakistanis, they're so nice," he says with a bitter laugh. "That is the alternative to America, and it's not good. But what are you supporting here? You're wasting your funds and your talent here for a corrupt government. Save yourselves, go home, take care of America."
"I would completely disagree with that," interjects his 23-year-old colleague, who has been listening in. He declines to give any name for the record. Another Kabul native, this interpreter has no U.S. citizenship, though he looks every inch the American soldier in a buzz cut and fatigues. "I would tell Obama to send 60,000 more troops. Send them now and keep them here forever."
He smiles. "Ok that's not going to happen. But"—he pulls his cell phone from his pocket and holds it up—"See this? You guys have Black Friday, right? Where everyone sleeps outside the shops to buy cheap things for Christmas?"
I nod. As we spoke, millions of Americans were waking up to do just that.
"At the time that the Taliban was in charge, people used to do that also, sleep in the street to wait. But not to buy anything—just to make one phone call. Now, there is a cell phone in every pocket, there are televisions, there is internet. Everybody knows about Western countries, about life that exists outside Afghanistan. This is modernity. This is the beginning of a society that is educating itself. This is because of you"—by which he means America—"and this is a great opportunity for my people. I would not be sitting here, speaking English to you if it wasn't for that. I'd be sitting somewhere in my province with my cows and goats, with a big beard, stinking. Now I know. Now I can be modern."
The imperfect Afghan government, he says, "is getting there, but it's not strong enough yet. What is a government? It comes from the people. And the people of Afghanistan, all they know is war. A 40-year-old man here, his whole life has been nothing but war, Soviet propaganda, Taliban brainwashing. Of course he distrusts the Americans. But his kids, his 10-year-old son—it's different. We have different ideas than our fathers, we've not been brainwashed."
So his (reality-based) advice for President Obama? "Stay. Stay long enough, at least until that 10-year-old grows up, until he's 20 or 25 and is old enough to take some power for himself."
As we talk more men have gathered around to listen, and finally Ahmad Ali, 45, can't hold back any longer: "Look, not everyone likes the Americans, no matter what age," says the naturalized American. Mr. Ali fled the Afghan civil war in the 1990s and wound up in North Carolina, where he became a cook, a registered Republican and is regularly "taken for a Mexican." He turns to the younger men: "In the center [of Afghanistan] and up north, sure, everyone loves the Americans. But down here, in the south, and in the east and west? Come on."
No one speaks. The base is pitch black. Earlier in the week, a U.S. strike wound up killing several civilians, some of them children, in Zhari, prompting a fresh round of condemnations from Kabul.
None of the interpreters doubt that the Americans were aiming for insurgents planting roadside bombs, and that the targeted terrorists had purposely positioned themselves near the innocents. "Of course, that's their tactic," says Mr. Ali, who has been working with the U.S. military since 2005. "They think either the Americans won't drop bombs for that reason, or they will and kill innocents. Either way, the Taliban can say it's the Americans who are destroying the country." So what's the solution? He shrugs. "Just—just stay, but stop making mistakes."
Is that all? We head back inside for a dessert of pomegranate seeds and more soda. One of the grooms-to-be, 22-year-old Humayoun of Herat, is all smiles and optimism. "Of course things are getting better," he tells me, flushed from his turn on the dance floor. "The [Afghan] Army is getting stronger, security—security here in Kandahar—it is so much better."
Not good enough though. In a month, Humayoun will take the dollars in his pocket, travel to Mazar-e-Sharif and present his future bride's family with presents. In the meantime, he will start his paperwork for immigration to America.
"I can't stay here in Afghanistan," he says, his smile now gone. "I won't. This country is destroyed. I want a future."
Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
Helmand district to be handed over to Afghan forces
A British-garrisoned district of Helmand province will be taken over by Afghan forces next year Kabul has confirmed, paving the way for hundreds of troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 27 Nov 2011
Kabul - The formerly deadly district of Nad-e Ali was one of dozens of areas named for transition by Hamid Karzai as his forces prepare to take charge of security across the country by 2015.
British forces have faced stiff resistance in the area since they were first sent to try and bolster Mr Karzai's regime against a resurgent Taliban in 2006.
At least 30 British troops have been killed in Nad-e Ali, which is notorious for the cultivation of opium poppy.
Security in the district has significantly improved since a massive surge of American forces into Helmand last year allowed British commanders to concentrate their overstretched forces.
More than 1,800 troops from the 3 SCOTS battle group are currently in the district and this year has seen violent incidents drop by 86 per cent according to the Ministry of Defence.
Helmand's capital, Lashkar Gah, began handover from British troops to Afghan forces in July.
Philip Hammond, Secretary of State for Defence, said: "I welcome President Karzai's announcement that Nad-e Ali will be transferred to Afghan security control.
"This is testament to the increasing capability of the Afghan national security forces to deliver their own security in this district, which I visited myself recently, and to the incredible work of the British and allied forces who have trained and partnered them."
David Cameron has already announced Britain's troop numbers will be cut by 430 this year and another 500 next year.
Mr Karzai said the areas to be handed over meant half the Afghan population would soon be secured by its own forces.
However doubts remain over how the Afghan army and police will perform as Nato begins to scale back its funding and vast troop presence.
Other areas named by Mr Karzai included the entire provinces of Balkh, Takhar, Daikundi, Samangan, Kabul and Nimroz and the eastern city of Jalalabad.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
Funerals held for soldiers killed in Nato attack at border post as Pakistan considers staying away from Bonn conference
Guardian.co.uk By Saeed Shah Sunday 27 November 2011
Karachi - Pakistan is considering boycotting an international conference on the future of Afghanistan in retaliation for the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers who came under attack from Nato helicopters at a border checkpost.
The Pakistani military alleged that the attack 1.5 miles inside Pakistani territory in the early hours of Saturday was deliberate, as it was a well-known position manned by regular troops. US officials have suggested the Nato force was acting in self-defence.
Funerals were held for the dead soldiers in Peshawar on Sunday. Prayers conducted in front of 24 coffins, each wrapped in a Pakistani flag, were televised live. The army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, attended the service at a military base, as did leading officials from the north-west provincial administration.
Television channels repeatedly replayed images of the funeral, set to patriotic music usually reserved for wartime. Kayani, considered the most powerful man in the country, visited a hospital in Peshawar to meet soldiers injured in the incident.
The conference in Bonn, scheduled for 5 December, will mark a decade since the German city hosted the first international meeting to chalk out Afghanistan's future. It had once been hoped that the meeting might kick off the peace process in Afghanistan, but expectations had already been lowered even before this weekend.
If a key regional player such as Pakistan stays away, the event will appear even more hollow. Pakistan's co-operation is considered vital for stabilising Afghanistan and bringing the Taliban into negotiations.
Tehmina Janjua, of Pakistan's ministry of foreign affairs, said the Bonn issue was "being examined and no decision has yet been taken in this regard".
Pakistan announced late on Saturday that it had blocked supplies to Nato forces passing through the country. Half of Nato supplies pass by land through Pakistan. Islamabad also said it would stop USuse of the Shamsi airbase, in the west of the country. Shamsi had been used in the past to fly drone aircraft, which target suspected militants in Pakistan's tribal area; it is unclear whether the base was still used for armed drones.
Nato pledged a full investigation into the attack. "I have written to the prime minister of Pakistan to make it clear that the deaths of Pakistani personnel are as unacceptable and deplorable as the deaths of Afghan and international personnel," said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato's secretary general. "This was a tragic unintended incident."
Events leading up to the incident remain unclear. In the past, much confusion has been caused by Taliban insurgents firing into Afghanistan from positions close to Pakistani checkposts, making it appear to Nato and Afghan troops that they are coming under attack from the Pakistani posts. Pakistani soldiers have previously shot into the air to warn Nato helicopters that they have crossed the border, but that has been mistaken by the aircraft crew for incoming fire.
Karzai announces new areas to come under Afghan control
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Monday, November 28, 2011
KABUL - The Afghan government on Sunday identified 18 new areas where Afghan troops will soon take over security responsibilities from the NATO coalition, putting about half the country’s population under the lead of Afghan forces.
The security handover announced by President Hamid Karzai, ahead of an international conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, early next month, is the second phase of a gradual transition plan to have Afghan troops in control of the country by 2014, when the bulk of U.S. soldiers are expected to be gone.
The handover started with some of the most peaceful parts of Afghanistan. This round, however, includes some more-volatile areas. American officials have said they want to give Afghans control of difficult areas earlier in the process to allow time for training and support while there is still a large U.S. military presence.
By early next year, after these new areas have switched to Afghan control, the Afghan government will be in charge of eight of the country’s 34 provinces and several other cities and districts, including areas where the Taliban insurgency persists. The new provinces on the list are Nimruz, Daikundi, Samangan, Takhar and Balkh — none of which are focal points of the American military campaign. The provincial capitals of more-dangerous provinces, such as Ghazni, Wardak, and Nangahar, were also included.
The transition plan is risky, because Afghan security forces have not proved, in the most difficult areas, that they can prevail over the Taliban. Although the Afghan army has improved in recent years, it lacks the logistical capability to effectively maintain its equipment and arm its soldiers. The Afghan troops rely heavily on NATO for air support and the sophisticated technology to combat roadside bombs and other threats. The Afghan police continue to have problems with corruption and basic competence.
But U.S. and Afghan officials expressed optimism about the transition process and said the Afghan forces could handle the new responsibilities.
Gen. John R. Allen, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said in a statement that the Afghan forces have “made dramatic improvements in their development and effectiveness.”
“Transition is a reality, and it is a path for the future success of this country and the Afghan people,” Allen said.
Designating an area as being under Afghan control does not mean that coalition forces will leave, but rather that their role will shift toward a focus on training Afghan troops and backing them up if they need help.
Such arrangements differ in various parts of the country. But U.S. troops have also turned over bases to their Afghan counterparts, and they will continue to do so as more American soldiers depart.
Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.
After Strike in Pakistan, Rage and Damage Control
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN and SALMAN MASOOD November 27, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The political fallout from a NATO airstrike in Pakistan that was operated out of Afghanistan and killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers became clearer on Sunday, as Pakistan seethed over the attack and the United States scrambled to contain the damage to an already frayed relationship.
Afghan officials, meanwhile, worried that they would bear the immediate brunt of Pakistan’s wrath and that the Pakistanis would follow through on threats to withdraw from an international conference on Afghanistan’s security and development that is scheduled for Dec. 5.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, to discuss the situation, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, talked with Pakistan’s supreme army commander, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. General Kayani spent much of the day leading a funeral service in Peshawar, Pakistan, for soldiers who had been killed and visiting others who were wounded in the attack on Saturday.
In her talk with Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Khar conveyed the “deep sense of rage felt across Pakistan,” according to a government statement. Demonstrations expressing anger at the United States broke out in major cities across the country.
The episode “negates the progress made by the two countries on improving relations and forces Pakistan to revisit the terms of engagement,” Ms. Khar was quoted as saying.
An investigation is under way to determine how the attack occurred, said NATO officials, who declined to discuss it until the inquiry was completed. Diplomats in Afghanistan who were briefed on the preliminary findings said that a joint NATO and Afghan force operating along the border came under sustained fire late Friday or early Saturday — it is not clear from whom — and called in air support.
The coalition forces tried to contact the Pakistani military on the other side of the border. It is unclear whom they reached, but the coalition forces believed they were free to fire back, and the aircraft struck positions in Pakistan, according to diplomats.
The Pakistani government said 24 people had been killed, but accounts near the scene in the Mohmand tribal region said the toll was as high as 28.
The cross-border strike not only resulted in more deaths than previous attacks, but it also occurred at a particularly tense moment in relations between Pakistan and the United States, and between Pakistan and Afghanistan, said diplomats and analysts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“There have been incidents like this before, incidents where three or four Pakistanis regrettably died, but 25 people or more, that’s on a different scale,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject.
The relationship between the United States and Pakistan, already damaged last winter when a C.I.A. contractor killed two Pakistanis, plummeted after the cross-border mission that killed Osama bin Laden in May.
The Pakistani government also faces a delicate domestic political situation. The Pakistani population is strongly anti-American, and the government must take a strong stand when its troops are killed. If it fails to do so, it risks losing popular support and, with it, the ability to fight extremists like the Pakistani Taliban.
On Sunday, dozens of protesters belonging to Jamaat-e-Islami, which is considered the country’s most disciplined Islamist political party, demonstrated in the eastern city of Lahore. Zikrullah Mujahid, a Jamaat-e-Islami leader, said: “The so-called war against terrorism is not our war. It is a war of America and NATO.”
In Karachi, thousands of protesters gathered outside the United States Consulate and shouted “Down with America!” Reuters reported.
In Ghotki, in Sindh Province, the opposition leader Imran Khan, who has opposed the fight against extremists in the federally administered tribal areas, urged the government to pull out of “America’s war.”
Meanwhile, in Kabul, the Afghan government said it was concerned about Pakistan’s threat to shun the conference on Afghanistan’s future in Bonn, Germany. Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, urged Pakistan not to punish Afghanistan for NATO’s actions.
A spokesman for the Afghan Foreign Ministry, Janan Mosazai, described the conference as important “in terms of the vision the Afghan government will be sharing with the international community, with the region, in the 10 years after transition.”
The conference, to which more than 50 countries are sending representatives, was organized to showcase the international commitment to Afghanistan’s security and to reassure Afghans and potential foreign investors about the nation’s future.
If Pakistan, which is widely seen as a seedbed for the Afghan insurgency, refuses to participate, those goals could be undermined, leaving little doubt that the fighting will continue, according to Western diplomats and military officials.
Mr. Mosazai said the Afghan government had been contacted by Pakistan’s ambassador in Kabul, but he did not elaborate. But Pakistani officials said they had strongly protested to their Afghan counterparts about the “use of Afghan territory against Pakistan” and urged the government to prevent similar attacks.
In a recent consultative assembly, Mr. Karzai promised that Afghan soil would never be used to attack neighboring countries. Although he was speaking about the strategic partnership that he is negotiating with the United States, the issue has resonated in the region, where both Iran and Pakistan fear the American military presence in Afghanistan.
Mr. Faizi, the president’s spokesman, said the government stood by that commitment, and the assembly, with more than 2,000 participants, endorsed it.
“These bases will not be used against any neighboring country,” he said. “That’s the advice of the Afghan people and, of course, the president. We stand by that.”
Alissa J. Rubin reported from Kabul, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington.
U.S. Faces New Afghan Test
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE NOVEMBER 28, 2011
BAGRAM, Afghanistan - The Obama administration faces a real-time test of its elaborate strategy for supplying troops in Afghanistan following a deadly allied airstrike that sent relations between Washington and Islamabad to new lows.
Pakistan over the weekend closed key border crossings to North Atlantic Treaty Organization supply convoys following a deadly airstrike on Saturday.
At least for now, the incident leaves U.S. troops in landlocked Afghanistan dependent on alternate supply routes that have been painstakingly set up to help steer clear of the region's treacherous geopolitics.
It also promises to strain the military-logistics system to capacity. The turmoil comes just as stress on the supply routes was about to grow with the beginning of U.S. troop and equipment withdrawals and the continued rotation of units in and out of Afghanistan.
Three years ago, the military shipped more than three quarters of all its cargo to landlocked Afghanistan through Pakistan, with the rest coming in by air. That equation has changed since then: more than half of the military's surface cargo comes in through a new route, dubbed the Northern Distribution Network, a system of rail, sea and truck routes that begins at Baltic and Black Sea ports and extends across Central Asia.
"As new routes open up, they give us other avenues to get stuff into Afghanistan," said Gen. Raymond Johns, the head of Air Mobility Command, in a recent discussion with reporters about supplying Afghanistan. "We're not critically tied to one specific route."
In 2009, in response to escalating insurgent attacks on supply convoys, the U.S. established new overland supply routes through former Soviet republics to avoid sending supplies through Pakistan. This year, officials said, an average of 63% of all U.S. military surface cargo moved through the Northern Distribution Network. The rest came through Pakistan.
The U.S. has another option: Moving freight by air. According to U.S. Transportation Command, the arm of the military that oversees logistics, 31% of all U.S. supplies are currently brought to Afghanistan by air, a slight increase over last year.
The "air bridge" to Afghanistan is perhaps the most flexible way to move freight, but it is also the most expensive. To save money, the military has also tested what it calls "multimodal" transport, which means transporting heavy supplies by cargo ship to ports in the Middle East, then flying shipments onward to Afghanistan on cargo planes.
With convoys backed up in Pakistan as a result of the latest tension, officials may have to rely more heavily on the costliest option.
Slightly fewer than 100,000 American troops are stationed in Afghanistan. About 10,000 are scheduled to depart by the end of this year and another 23,000 will leave by the end of September. Bagram Airfield, a former Soviet base north of Kabul, will be a main hub for moving troops and supplies out of the country.
On Sunday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that the nation's forces will early next year take charge of security in areas of the country that are home to half of Afghanistan's population, in anticipation of a full withdrawal of coalition forces in 2014.
Recently, the U.S. Air Force launched a "surge" of C-5 aircraft, the whale-shaped cargo planes that have loading ramps at both ends, to help contend with intense global demand for military cargo movement, with Bagram a major destination.
"We're bursting at the seams because of the C-5 surge right now," said Lt. Col. Dan Lemon, an Air Force officer who oversees the shipment of equipment at Bagram to and from bases around the country.
Bagram's cargo yard—which looks something like a rental-car lot, if Hertz rented armored vehicles in identical desert tan— has been busy as the military continues to rotate troops and equipment ahead of a 2014 deadline for final withdrawal.
One recent afternoon at the Afghan military base, dozens of trucks and armored cars were lined up in neat rows just off the flight line, waiting to be loaded on board a C-5 Galaxy, the largest cargo plane the U.S. Air Force operates.
Black Hawk helicopters were being packed away inside the bellies of cargo aircraft for the long flight home, their rotor blades folded away for the journey.
"It's like playing Tetris with real stuff," said Air Force Master Sgt. Robert Shugart, who helps oversee the movement of cargo at Bagram.
The U.S.-based aircraft typically made several stops in Europe and southwest Asia for crew rest and refueling. In Afghanistan, the crew picked up worn-out armored vehicles that need to be "reset," Army terminology for taking them back to depots in the U.S. for maintenance and overhaul.
On a recent flight from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to Afghanistan, crew members reflected on life in the cockpit. "It's taking days, if not weeks, off of my life!" joked Maj. Richard Carter, a C-17 transport plane pilot.
For Air Force crews, an intercontinental cargo mission is a series of long-haul flights. The typical flying day is long—16 to 24 hours, including preparation on the ground and time in the air—followed by mandatory crew rest on the ground, then back in the air.
Maj. Michael Attebury, his crewmate, hoists what he called "our secret weapon:" a supersize coffee thermos.
The C-5s aren't empty when they fly to Bagram: One cargo plane that was picking up Army trucks had just unloaded some armor sets for the mine-resistant off-road vehicles designed to protect troops from mines and roadside bombs.
That pattern is straining the C-5s, many of which entered services around three decades ago. Coupled with the increasing demands that the troop drawdown brings, supplying Afghanistan translates into particular stress on an overtaxed—and aging—fleet of cargo aircraft.
"This airplane is so old the overall airplane is older than some of the lieutenants" who fly it, said Maj. Gabriel Cabrera, an Air Force C-5 pilot.
Afghanistan is safer today but still needs our help
Washington Post By Simon Gass Monday, November 28, 2011
In mid-October something interesting happened in Afghanistan. In Helmand province, the Pashtun heartland, U.S. Marines prepared to fight their way north as far as the strategically important Kajaki Dam. They expected a tough battle. Route 611, the main supply route, runs through country that in recent years has been crawling with Taliban fighters who desperately want to keep control of an important assembly area. I feared heavy casualties when we set out. But that didn’t materialize. The Marines met relatively slight resistance as they cleared and secured the road to the north. Most of the Taliban fled rather than fight.
Perhaps we should have expected it. The Taliban have taken a ferocious beating over the past year in what were once their strongholds in southern and southwestern Afghanistan. They are demoralized and finding it harder to resupply with men, money and weapons. The fighting campaign they boasted of this summer has been a flop. And that is because the troop surge by the United States and other NATO and international partners provided the military means to take on the insurgency and beat it.
All this does not, of course, mean that we have won. The picture in Afghanistan’s east, where we have put less effort, is less decisive. Plenty of work remains for us and our Afghan partners.
But make no mistake: Taliban commanders in Quetta and Peshawar have plenty to worry about. Nobody should think they are winning or can have any expectation of winning. The Afghan people don’t want them back. A recent, authoritative opinion survey by the Asia Foundation found that the number of Afghans who have no sympathy for the insurgents has risen from 36 percent in 2009 to 64 percent in 2011. That’s largely because, out of desperation, the Taliban are resorting to roadside bombs and suicide attacks that kill innocent Afghans. This is despite Taliban leader Mohammad Omar’s forlorn appeals to his military commanders, most recently in early November, to minimize casualties to Afghan civilians.
Furthermore, the Afghan army has added muscle: The days when army units could be beaten up by Taliban groups are over. NATO will need to continue the highly effective training program it began two years ago, but as I travel around Afghanistan I meet increasingly capable army and police units. Improvements in governance and the economy are also taking place, though more slowly than most Afghans would like.
All this is why we are able to progressively hand over security responsibility to our Afghan partners. The Afghan government announced the second phase of this transferSunday: About 50 percent of the country’s population live in areas coming under Afghan control.
We will finish this transition process by the end of 2014. It won’t be easy. To complete the training of Afghan forces, we will need sufficient troops to achieve the transition and continue to choke the insurgency through 2012 and 2013. But with persistence and determination, by 2014 we will be able to greatly reduce our commitment of money and troops, while achieving the right result.
After 2014, Afghanistan will still be a desperately poor country trying to recover from 30 years of conflict that destroyed institutions and infrastructure. Polls show that at a local level, Afghans are less concerned about poor security than they are about jobs, electricity and roads. The number of deaths from violence is shocking. But more tragic still is the number of children who die before their fifth birthday from avoidable illnesses.
The good news is that Afghanistan has huge mineral resources — oil, gas, copper, iron and rare-earth metals — that, in time, will allow its government to pay its bills. This is not sunny optimism. It is fact.
Until then, however, we should be willing to help pay for and train Afghanistan’s armed forces and offer development assistance. The cost will be a fraction of our present spending. And there is a lesson we should keep in mind: After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the Afghan government didn’t collapse, as many had predicted. But it disintegrated once the Soviets stopped their financial support.
This is a clear lesson. If we tighten the purse strings too early, we will risk all the gains we have made at such cost. That would mean a return to the security chaos that bred attacks on our countries. It would mean the uncontrolled proliferation of narcotics, a new wave of migration away from Afghanistan and turmoil in one of the world’s most sensitive regions. That is not an easy message when the economy is hurting. But the cost of greater instability in this part of the globe would be much greater than the price of our commitment after 2014.
An Afghan colleague pointed out recently that Afghanistan wasn’t always the war-torn country that we see in the news. It was once peaceful. And if we can bear the cost for just a little longer, it can be again. That would be good for Afghanistan and good for us, too.
The writer is NATO’s senior civilian representative in Afghanistan.
The Afghan General Who Fell to Earth
She was a national hero—and some powerful men didn’t like that.
Newsweek By Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau Nov 28, 2011
As badly as things went for her that day, Khatool Mohammadzai nevertheless glows at the memory. It was the first day of spring 2002, and she was standing in a helicopter as it hovered roughly a kilometer up in the sky above Kabul. Down on the ground, President Hamid Karzai and thousands of other Afghans were crowded into the country’s National Stadium to celebrate the first Afghan New Year since the fall of the Taliban, only four months before. The jubilant gathering was a sharp break from Mullah Mohammed Omar’s theocratic regime, which had used the stadium for public stonings and other executions.
And now came Mohammadzai’s moment: carrying a half-dozen doves, the woman who had been the first female paratrooper in Afghan history jumped from the helicopter. When her multicolored chute opened, she released the doves and floated gently toward earth, holding a Quran and an
Afghan flag. Unfortunately the pilot had missed his bearings. Mohammadzai landed kilometers away from the stadium—but instead of slinking home in humiliation, she hailed a cab. When she finally arrived, still carrying her parachute, the crowd erupted in applause and cheers. “For me and my country it was the beginning of a new life,” she reminisced to Newsweek. “I felt we had been reborn. I showed the world how brave Afghan women are and what they can do.”
She was a national hero, a living symbol of her country’s hopes for the future, featured regularly on television and at women’s events. She was promoted from colonel to general, the first Afghan woman to achieve that rank since the overthrow of the Soviet-backed regime in 1992, and she soon rose to three stars. “I remember her well,” says Georgia National Guard Brig. Gen. Larry Dudney, who became her friend in Afghanistan despite the language barrier. “I was very impressed with her. She exudes confidence, she really does.” At her speaking engagements she sometimes talked about that ill-fated jump. “It was a funny story,” says Dudney. “She told it as an example of perseverance, of facing up to adversity, never quitting.”
Those stardom days are over. Many Afghan women fear that their advances of the past decade are being whittled away—and Mohammadzai’s relatives and longtime military friends consider her a prime example. “I thought she would be a role model for the new generation of Afghan girls and women,” says Noorjahan Akbar. “But she has been sidelined.” The student activist, now 20, first met the paratrooper five years ago while helping a writer friend who was doing a book on courageous Afghan women.
Mohammadzai, 45, made more than 600 jumps in her 28-year military career, and her precise and daring skydives used to be a regular part of every Independence Day and New Year’s celebration in Kabul. Nevertheless, it has now been five years since her military and civilian superiors last allowed her to put on a parachute. Instead, she’s been shunted out of the spotlight into a make-work assignment in a Defense Ministry back office.
She doesn’t openly criticize her commanders—she’s too good a soldier for that—but her admirers aren’t so reticent. They say she has become a victim of biases that still plague Afghanistan. It’s not only that she’s a woman, they say: ethnic discrimination also plays a part. Mohammadzai is a Pashtun, and the Defense Ministry, along with the military’s top brass, is dominated by the Tajiks who led the Northern Alliance to victory over the Taliban in 2001. The ministry denies that gender bias or ethnic favoritism exists in the armed forces, but it seems unlikely that the men who run Afghanistan’s military would be free from the traditional sexism that pervades the rest of the country. “I don’t like her,” an ostensibly well-educated Kabul construction engineer says of Mohammadzai. “Women have no place in the military.”
Concern over Afghan women’s declining status is only deepening as the Karzai government seeks reconciliation with the Taliban, and the Americans prepare to go home. “Our rights are going downhill, because our government’s and the international community’s focus has shifted from protecting Afghan women’s rights to a politically correct option of negotiating with the Taliban,” says Akbar. “We women have little or no say in these discussions.”
The Kabul of Mohammadzai’s childhood was a proudly cosmopolitan city. Men and women alike were legally entitled to public education and good jobs; burqas were a rare sight, and young women routinely wore miniskirts or jeans. “In those days it wasn’t necessary for a woman to cover her hair, arms, and legs,” she recalls. But hard times came to the Mohammadzai family in the early 1970s, when Khatool was 6: her father, a customs officer, died, leaving her mother to raise seven daughters and two sons on her own. Somehow the widow handled the job—and did it well, too, if Mohammadzai is any evidence. She grew up athletic, full of energy, and absolutely fascinated by airplanes.
The girl was 13 when the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan. Many in Kabul actually welcomed the coming of the Russians; a violent power struggle had erupted among Afghanistan’s Marxist rulers, and the hope was that the December 1979 invasion would stabilize the government. In fact, the effort succeeded, at least in a limited way. While Soviet troops waged a long and brutal war for control of the countryside, the turmoil in Kabul ended quickly. The Kremlin-backed regime continued its efforts to modernize Afghanistan, including support for women’s rights. Basic human rights were an entirely different matter, of course: the Russians tolerated no opposition to their program.
By the time Mohammadzai finished high school, the Soviets had occupied Afghanistan for more than three years. When an Afghan military recruiter came to her high school on graduation day and asked for volunteers to join the Afghan Army, the 17-year-old immediately raised her hand. Her mother was struggling to support the family, and jobs were hard to find—but more than that, Mohammadzai says she craved the challenges of military life. “I wanted to do what was most demanding, strenuous, and athletic,” she says.
So she signed up to become a paratrooper. She vividly recalls how she and her fellow volunteers, almost all men, were sent on a two-day, 150-kilometer march over rough terrain from Kabul to the eastern city of Jalalabad with full packs. The young woman slept in the open among the male trainees. A rock was her pillow, and by the time the ordeal was over, her feet were bleeding. “We suffered a lot,” she says. But she aced the course.
She admits she was scared when she made her first parachute jump in 1984, but she forgot her fear almost before her chute opened. She recalls a strange sensation: it wasn’t at all like falling. “Will I be stuck in the air forever?” she recalls wondering. “Who will get me down?” Although she never saw combat against the U.S. backed mujahedin, she got so good at soldiering that she was eventually made an instructor, giving commando and paratroop training to males as well as females. “She always had higher spirits and was a better commando, jumper, and shooter than I was,” says Afghan Brig. Gen. Abdul Basir Asifzari, who trained with her in the 1980s. “She could fly circles around me when we jumped.”
In those days, Mohammadzai says, she was never subjected to official discrimination. Still, she encountered her share of individual bigotry. She particularly remembers one jump in the 1980s that almost killed her. Her main chute failed to open fully, sending her into an uncontrollable spin as she plunged toward the ground. She had the presence of mind to open her auxiliary chute, which at least slowed her fall, but she broke a leg and several ribs and dislocated her wrist, elbow, and shoulder. She remains convinced that her chute was sabotaged by a resentful male paratrooper. Still, he was never caught and punished.
In 1989, after nine years of an exorbitantly draining war, the Russians gave up and went home. The Afghan puppet regime managed to survive for three more years before collapsing in 1992. But the victorious guerrillas couldn’t afford to punish Mohammadzai too harshly for having been on the losing side; they desperately needed professional soldiers with her skills. She was named director of women’s physical training for the Air Defense Corps. And yet in many ways the mujahedin’s attitude toward women wasn’t much different from that of the Taliban: they barred her from parachute jumping, and she was required to wear a head-to-toe abaya whenever she appeared in public. Although Mohammadzai didn’t like the situation, she had no choice. She had married an Afghan soldier in 1990, and he was killed in action just a year later, only 40 days after she had given birth to his son.
Life became even tougher when the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996. All women were ordered to stay indoors at home until further notice, and Mohammadzai found herself trapped in her small apartment, with little money and no prospects, forbidden to work or even step outside unless escorted by a male relative. But unlike many of her military colleagues, she refused to flee the country. She’s proud of that. “I decided to stay, hoping for change,” she says. To make ends meet, she sewed dresses for friends and neighbors, and she opened a clandestine girls’ school in her home. Her customers and students paid her with whatever basic necessities they could get—sometimes a sack of flour, sometimes a bottle of cooking oil.
But she and her son survived, and soon after the collapse of the Taliban regime she was called back to active duty with the new Afghan National Army. At first she wore a burqa over her military uniform on the way to and from the ministry, just to be on the safe side—until the day a policeman accosted her and contemptuously demanded: “Auntie, where do you think you’re going?” She tore off her burqa, flung it at the cop’s feet, and walked away, she says. She hasn’t worn a burqa since.
Mohammadzai’s friend General Asifzari says he was amazed how quickly she got back in shape and returned to jumping after so many years out of action. She worked with Afghan, NATO, and U.S. military officers to design physical-training programs for the Afghan National Army. In her apartment she proudly displays certificates of merit from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Combat Brigade and 82nd Airborne Division, and she’s been awarded paratrooper medals by the United States, Canada, and France. She was the only female entrant in an international parachute competition held in Kabul on Afghan Independence Day, 2004. She won, beating 35 male paratroopers.
Nevertheless, Mohammadzai hasn’t been able to put on a parachute since 2006. “I really miss jumping, but I’m not allowed anymore,” she says. “I loved the crowds when I’d jump into stadiums.” Instead she’s been relegated to a small office in the Defense Ministry’s compound, and it’s in an annex, not even inside the vast headquarters building. She’s been made “deputy director of planning and physical training” for a disaster-preparedness reserve force that won’t even begin recruiting until next year. As she strides through the ministry’s compound, few officers or enlisted men even bother to salute, despite the three stars on her epaulets, the four sets of paratrooper wings over one breast pocket, and the 35 meritorious-service medals pinned over each other.
Her recent interviews with Newsweek at her Defense Ministry office and her modest Kabul apartment were the first she’s been allowed to give in the past three years. The last time was when a foreign television crew tried to interview her at the Defense Ministry. Even though she had written permission to speak, guards physically stopped the interview and broke the journalists’ video camera. “I just don’t have authority anymore,” says Mohammadzai.
She’s not alone in finding herself marginalized. “It’s a big problem,” says Horia Mosadiq, a research analyst for Amnesty International in Kabul. “Whether they are government ministers or military officers, women always have to deal with discrimination, and have only a very small role in decision making.” The situation galls Mohammadzai. “I should be helping to train commandos and paratroopers,” she says. “I could have helped my country a lot more in the past few years if I had been given the right job.” And she longs to get back in the sky. “Women and men are the wings of one bird,” says a poster on her office wall. As long as war and bigotry persist in Afghanistan, the country will have little hope of taking flight.
With John Barry
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Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and has been covering the region for the magazine the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Interpreting Afghanistan
Afghan interpreters debate their country's future, and America's role in it.
Wall Street Journal By ANNE JOLIS NOVEMBER 28, 2011
Forward Operating Base Pasab, Afghanistan - On Friday night, about 20 kilometers west of Kandahar City, roughly 40 men sit facing each other in a low-ceilinged hall on the Afghan side of the military base. The walls are decorated with large posters of President Hamid Karzai, the Afghan National Army, various local politicians—and U.S. Gen. David Petraeus. Some of the men are in U.S. Army fatigues, most in street clothes. At one end of the room a man with a silver pompadour gently tugs on an armunia, an accordion-like instrument, while to his right another beats a small drum. Still digesting a meal of mutton and soda, by turns the men get up and dance between the chairs, arms akimbo and torsos swaying, as the others clap along.
Meet the interpreters of the U.S. Third Infantry Brigade Combat Team. All are Afghan natives, though some are now U.S. citizens as well. For the moment, they all call the base home. And in the past month, three of them have gotten engaged—an occasion to celebrate.
While a wrist-flicking, single-sex dance party is rare enough in America, the interpreters are also engaging in an activity more familiar among Western men: Arguing about politics. Specifically, the looming U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan.
"My advice to [U.S. President] Obama? Bring the troops home," says Kabul native Sharif, age 32. His father—a former official in Afghanistan's erstwhile Soviet government—took the family and fled to Pakistan in 1993. Sharif moved to California in 2002, and his family runs an auto-glass business there. Even so, he will only give his first name for the record. His brother still lives in Kabul.
Once business started to dwindle in California in 2008, Sharif—now a U.S. citizen—decided to look for work as a military interpreter. "The salary is good, a lot of my friends are doing it. I've been all over, I was in Kabul with the Special Forces before. But it's scary. This country, Afghanistan—it's really tough," he tells me outside the party over cigarettes and cola. "There's too much corruption, and it's not safe—even this place we're sitting now."
This place—the base in Zhari District—is in Taliban heartland, where Mullah Omar gathered his first 50 students nearly two decades ago. In the past year, since the U.S. surge brought roughly 4,200 troops to area, the base has been the target of semi-regular rocket attacks, one of which hit the soccer pitch used by the Afghan National Army.
He says that "the villagers, the ones that actually support the [Afghan] government, they ask for so many things—they want water, they want land, they want jobs. And you"—the Americans—"you give it, but they never did anything for it. It's not right."
And even so, "many of them support the Taliban, they work with them. If the Americans leave, no question, the corruption will get even worse and it will only be good for the Taliban. Oh, and our neighbors—the Pakistanis, they're so nice," he says with a bitter laugh. "That is the alternative to America, and it's not good. But what are you supporting here? You're wasting your funds and your talent here for a corrupt government. Save yourselves, go home, take care of America."
"I would completely disagree with that," interjects his 23-year-old colleague, who has been listening in. He declines to give any name for the record. Another Kabul native, this interpreter has no U.S. citizenship, though he looks every inch the American soldier in a buzz cut and fatigues. "I would tell Obama to send 60,000 more troops. Send them now and keep them here forever."
He smiles. "Ok that's not going to happen. But"—he pulls his cell phone from his pocket and holds it up—"See this? You guys have Black Friday, right? Where everyone sleeps outside the shops to buy cheap things for Christmas?"
I nod. As we spoke, millions of Americans were waking up to do just that.
"At the time that the Taliban was in charge, people used to do that also, sleep in the street to wait. But not to buy anything—just to make one phone call. Now, there is a cell phone in every pocket, there are televisions, there is internet. Everybody knows about Western countries, about life that exists outside Afghanistan. This is modernity. This is the beginning of a society that is educating itself. This is because of you"—by which he means America—"and this is a great opportunity for my people. I would not be sitting here, speaking English to you if it wasn't for that. I'd be sitting somewhere in my province with my cows and goats, with a big beard, stinking. Now I know. Now I can be modern."
The imperfect Afghan government, he says, "is getting there, but it's not strong enough yet. What is a government? It comes from the people. And the people of Afghanistan, all they know is war. A 40-year-old man here, his whole life has been nothing but war, Soviet propaganda, Taliban brainwashing. Of course he distrusts the Americans. But his kids, his 10-year-old son—it's different. We have different ideas than our fathers, we've not been brainwashed."
So his (reality-based) advice for President Obama? "Stay. Stay long enough, at least until that 10-year-old grows up, until he's 20 or 25 and is old enough to take some power for himself."
As we talk more men have gathered around to listen, and finally Ahmad Ali, 45, can't hold back any longer: "Look, not everyone likes the Americans, no matter what age," says the naturalized American. Mr. Ali fled the Afghan civil war in the 1990s and wound up in North Carolina, where he became a cook, a registered Republican and is regularly "taken for a Mexican." He turns to the younger men: "In the center [of Afghanistan] and up north, sure, everyone loves the Americans. But down here, in the south, and in the east and west? Come on."
No one speaks. The base is pitch black. Earlier in the week, a U.S. strike wound up killing several civilians, some of them children, in Zhari, prompting a fresh round of condemnations from Kabul.
None of the interpreters doubt that the Americans were aiming for insurgents planting roadside bombs, and that the targeted terrorists had purposely positioned themselves near the innocents. "Of course, that's their tactic," says Mr. Ali, who has been working with the U.S. military since 2005. "They think either the Americans won't drop bombs for that reason, or they will and kill innocents. Either way, the Taliban can say it's the Americans who are destroying the country." So what's the solution? He shrugs. "Just—just stay, but stop making mistakes."
Is that all? We head back inside for a dessert of pomegranate seeds and more soda. One of the grooms-to-be, 22-year-old Humayoun of Herat, is all smiles and optimism. "Of course things are getting better," he tells me, flushed from his turn on the dance floor. "The [Afghan] Army is getting stronger, security—security here in Kandahar—it is so much better."
Not good enough though. In a month, Humayoun will take the dollars in his pocket, travel to Mazar-e-Sharif and present his future bride's family with presents. In the meantime, he will start his paperwork for immigration to America.
"I can't stay here in Afghanistan," he says, his smile now gone. "I won't. This country is destroyed. I want a future."
Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
Helmand district to be handed over to Afghan forces
A British-garrisoned district of Helmand province will be taken over by Afghan forces next year Kabul has confirmed, paving the way for hundreds of troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 27 Nov 2011
Kabul - The formerly deadly district of Nad-e Ali was one of dozens of areas named for transition by Hamid Karzai as his forces prepare to take charge of security across the country by 2015.
British forces have faced stiff resistance in the area since they were first sent to try and bolster Mr Karzai's regime against a resurgent Taliban in 2006.
At least 30 British troops have been killed in Nad-e Ali, which is notorious for the cultivation of opium poppy.
Security in the district has significantly improved since a massive surge of American forces into Helmand last year allowed British commanders to concentrate their overstretched forces.
More than 1,800 troops from the 3 SCOTS battle group are currently in the district and this year has seen violent incidents drop by 86 per cent according to the Ministry of Defence.
Helmand's capital, Lashkar Gah, began handover from British troops to Afghan forces in July.
Philip Hammond, Secretary of State for Defence, said: "I welcome President Karzai's announcement that Nad-e Ali will be transferred to Afghan security control.
"This is testament to the increasing capability of the Afghan national security forces to deliver their own security in this district, which I visited myself recently, and to the incredible work of the British and allied forces who have trained and partnered them."
David Cameron has already announced Britain's troop numbers will be cut by 430 this year and another 500 next year.
Mr Karzai said the areas to be handed over meant half the Afghan population would soon be secured by its own forces.
However doubts remain over how the Afghan army and police will perform as Nato begins to scale back its funding and vast troop presence.
Other areas named by Mr Karzai included the entire provinces of Balkh, Takhar, Daikundi, Samangan, Kabul and Nimroz and the eastern city of Jalalabad.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com