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Afghanistan's Karzai extends private security closure
By Mirwais Harooni | Reuters – Sun, Dec 11, 2011.
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai scrapped Sunday a March 2012 deadline he had set for the closure of private security firms, giving them until September 2013 to operate in the country.
Karzai, a frequent critic of private security companies, has previously set dates for the cessation of their work in Afghanistan, but each time the deadline has been extended.
He did not say why he was giving the firms an extra 18 months, but the second half of this year has seen some of the bloodiest attacks on civilians and soldiers in the past decade.
"We agreed with the office, and we give permission for them (to carry on working) for one and a half years more, and one and a half years later (in September 2013) our minister ... will close them all," Karzai said.
The office to which he referred is an umbrella organization run by the interior ministry. From March 2012 the firms will operate within that organization, interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said; then they will be dissolved by the government deadline and their duties handed to Afghan police.
Karzai, speaking at an anti-corruption event in the capital Kabul, said the prevalence of security contractors weakened the state by providing many of the services that the public sector otherwise would.
"Another reason why the Afghan government is not able to tackle corruption is a parallel administration to the Afghan government," he said.
"Private security companies are the biggest barriers to law enforcement, and development of the interior ministry and police," the president said.
PUBLIC PROTECTION FORCE
A branch of the police, the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF), is intended to take over the work done by private security firms, a process which has begun, but some in the industry do not believe the APPF would be ready in time.
"The extension of the time frame...is not intended in any way to show support for the work carried out at present by the private security companies," said a security contractor with operations in Afghanistan, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"It is in fact an admission by President Karzai that the much heralded APPF are unable to deliver within the timeframe, both in numbers and experience," he added.
In August 2010, Karzai said he wanted private security firms -- with the exemption of firms whose guards work inside compounds used by foreign embassies, international businesses and aid and charitable organizations -- to close by the end of that year. The deadline was later pushed back to March 2012.
His government tried unsuccessfully in 2009 to register the firms, find out the amount of arms they had and where they came from, and how much money the industry was worth, an Afghan security source said.
Foreign forces in Afghanistan are in the process of handing responsibility for security over to the Afghan army and police, and by the end of 2014, most foreign combat troops, currently numbering more than 100,000, will have gone home.
Though both Karzai and his international backers want Afghan forces to take control of security, Afghanistan has said that it will not be able to afford the army and police force it needs after 2014 without international help.
Even with the presence of Western forces in Afghanistan, violence is at its worst since the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001, and last week's rare attacks on Shi'ite Muslim ceremonies have stoked fears of a sectarian conflict on top of the raging Taliban insurgency.
Bomb attacks on the Shi'ite ceremonies Tuesday killed 80 people, Karzai also said Sunday, far higher than the previously reported number, making Tuesday one of the deadliest days for civilians in ten years.
(Writing and additional reporting by Daniel Magnowski; Editing by Emma Graham-Harrison)
Interior Ministry: Afghanistan on track to close private security companies
By Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry says it’s standing by President Hamid Karzai’s decision to shut down private security companies early next year and transfer their responsibilities to a government-run guard force.
Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said Monday that all private companies will be disbanded on March 20, 2012.
Karzai last year ordered the disbanding of security companies because they were flouting Afghan laws and creating the equivalent of paramilitary forces.
Their responsibilities would be assumed by a new government-run force — called the Afghan Public Protection Force — that will guard NATO and international compounds, development projects and supply convoys.
Sediqqi denied reports that Karzai had extended the deadline by 18 months.
Gilani: Blockade Likely to Last Weeks
VOA News December 12, 2011
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has told the BBC his country will likely continue to block NATO convoys into Afghanistan for several more weeks.
The supply routes were shut down following a November 26 NATO airstrike in Pakistan that killed 24 Pakistani troops.
Mr. Gilani also did not rule out closing Pakistan's airspace to the U.S. in his interview with the BBC.
Mr. Gilani said there is a “credibility gap” between the U.S. and Pakistan. He said the two countries have to improve their relationship and have “more confidence in each other.”
The prime minister also denied a claim that the government is engaged in peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban. However, he said anyone who denounces violence is “acceptable to us.”
Late Sunday, gunmen attacked NATO oil tankers in southwest Pakistan, killing one person and setting seven tankers ablaze.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Karzai Says Foreigners Are Responsible for Corruption
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN December 11, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan blamed foreigners on Sunday for the corruption of Afghan officials and demanded that the United States extradite the former chief of the Afghan Central Bank in connection with the collapse of Kabul Bank, the country’s largest financial institution.
The former governor of the Central Bank, Qadir Fitrat, is living in Virginia. He fled Afghanistan, saying he feared for his life after he was involved in making public the massive fraud at Kabul Bank and removing its senior management.
Neither of the top bank officers nor any of the major shareholders, who include a brother of Mr. Karzai’s and a brother of the first vice president, Marshal Fahim, have been prosecuted, although all of them are still in Afghanistan.
Referring to Mr. Fitrat, Mr. Karzai said, “The government of the United States should cooperate and hand him over to us.”
“Bring Fitrat and hand him over to Afghanistan to make clear who is to blame,” he said. “But our hand can’t reach to America.”
Mr. Karzai made the remarks at an event sponsored by the United Nations to mark International Anti-Corruption Day. Afghanistan is one of the world’s most corrupt countries, tying for second worst in rankings by Transparency International, which tracks perceptions of global corruption.
Several Western diplomats and officials working with the Afghan government said they were disappointed by Mr. Karzai’s speech, in which he appeared to again shift much of the blame for corruption to foreigners. While foreigners are unquestionably involved in some of the corruption, they shared responsibility with the Afghans and were only peripherally involved in the Kabul Bank debacle.
Mr. Karzai also asked that foreigners who give aid to the country tell Afghan officials if government officials or their relatives ask for bribes. Foreign governments have helped finance anticorruption efforts, but the Afghans have often squashed high-profile corruption prosecutions of senior officials. That has been a continuing effort by NATO to comb through military contracts with Afghan businesses to detect corruption and terminate contracts in which there has been manifest abuse. That effort has gone on largely behind the scenes, so it is difficult to tell if it has had much success.
Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador, said he believed that corruption was now being taken more seriously, although progress was slow and none of the main people responsible for the Kabul Bank fraud had been prosecuted. The Afghan government lost more than $850 million in the bank’s collapse. While some of that money has been recovered — more than expected, according to several officials — the government will probably have to pay $450 million to $500 million to cover losses.
“I am told they have a series of indictments that have been kept in the pending file as they concentrate on asset recovery,” Mr. Crocker told reporters on Saturday. “Look, it’s hardly a perfect world. And it isn’t going to be for quite some time. What I look for is a trajectory: Is the line going up or down? Very cautiously and very incrementally, I see it going up. In other words, corruption is being taken more seriously at higher levels.”
“Does that mean we’ve turned the corner? We’ll see,” he added.
Mr. Karzai’s focus on Mr. Fitrat and his jab at the United States are the latest in a series of similar comments he has made about the fraud at Kabul Bank. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel last week, he also blamed the United States for Kabul Bank’s troubles, saying, “The Americans never told us about this.”
“We believed a certain embassy was trying to create financial trouble for us,” he said. “We felt the whole bank scam was created by foreign hands.” Mr. Karzai declined to be specific, but the American Embassy is the only one that has deeply consulted with the Afghan banking system.
Pakistan Denies Holding Talks with Taliban
VOA News December 12, 2011 Ayaz Gul
Islamabad - Top officials in Pakistan have denied the government is engaged in a peace dialogue with homegrown Taliban, reiterating the militants will have to lay down their arms and surrender, before such talks are held. Taliban militants also have issued conflicting statements about entering into peace negotiations with the government.
The latest reports of peace talks between the Pakistani government and local Taliban appeared in media outlets in recent days.
It all started when a key militant leader, Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, widely known as the deputy chief of the Pakistani Taliban, contacted local reporters on Saturday to claim that his group is on the verge of signing a formal peace deal with the government.
The Taliban leader also claimed that the government, as a “goodwill gesture”, has released dozens of his fighters.
But Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik has denied the claims as “unfounded”, saying neither talks with the Taliban are taking place nor are their prisoners have been released.
"Categorically, I'm telling on behalf of the government, no dialogue," said Malik.
The interior minister reiterated that the government may consider the option of engaging in peace talks with militants, provided they come down from their bases in the hills, denounce violence and abandon their weapons according to the tribal customs.
Malik says that security forces have sufficiently weakened the networks of the Pakistani Taliban and the government is determined to continue with its anti-militancy campaign.
Pakistani officials and independent analysts believe that, because of losses in the battlefield during the past year, Taliban groups operating in the northwestern tribal belt on the Afghan border are facing defections in their ranks.
On Sunday, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban contacted reporters to deny the earlier announcement by the group’s deputy chief, saying there will be no peace talks with the government unless it implements Sharia or Islamic law in the country.
Analysts like former army general Mehmood Shah believe the conflicting claims are a clear sign of splits within the Taliban movement.
"This is a fragmented sort of organization right now, Tehrik-i-Taliban has been sufficiently been weakened," he said. "Maulvi Faqir Mohammed is no longer in Pakistan. He is sitting in Afghanistan in Kunar province. He cannot come back and he has no connections with the other Taliban."
Claims of a broad Taliban retreat in Pakistan are supported by an overall decline in militant violence after years where the country witnessed hundreds of suicide and other terrorist attacks that killed thousands of people.
But the Pakistani military says fleeing Islamist insurgents fleeing have found sanctuaries in Afghanistan’s northeastern border region, where their Afghan supporters are helping them to regroup and launch deadly raids back home.
Afghan rape victim still in jail despite pardon: lawyer
AFP
An Afghan woman who was jailed for adultery after being raped remains in prison more than 10 days after President Hamid Karzai ordered her release, her lawyer said on Monday.
Gulnaz, who has already served two years in prison after a relative raped her at her home, should have been released within 48 hours and there was "no good reason" for her to remain behind bars, Kimberley Motley said.
Her case highlights the poor state of women's rights in Afghanistan, 10 years after a US-led invasion ousted the Taliban who were notorious for their harsh laws against women.
Following an outcry over her situation, Karzai called a meeting where judicial officials decided to pardon her, presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi told AFP on December 1.
But the officials also advised that Gulnaz should marry the man who attacked her, due to fears she could be in danger if released because of the stigma surrounding her attack in ultra-conservative Afghanistan.
Motley said there were no conditions set on Gulnaz's release and she would need time to decide what to do. But she also voiced concern that her client was being visited in jail by her attacker's father.
"She's still locked up and there's no good reason for it," Motley said.
"Since the president has announced that he is going to issue a pardon she continues to be visited by the attacker's father.
"That's not appropriate. It's very disturbing. He's not a blood relative."
Gulnaz has been raising the child she had by her attacker in a prison cell in Kabul.
"She's anxious to leave and to be free. She's anxious to know what's going on," Motley said.
"She was told by the committee she would be released within two days."
Officials said the order had been sent to the ministry of justice but was being processed through various offices.
"We have already sent out the pardon letter. It does take a while until the cycle and process is finished," a presidential spokesman said.
"We have not officially received the pardon order, but we know it is on its way," ministry of justice spokesman Farid Ahmad Najeebi said.
"It takes a while until it reaches us because it has to go to the president's public affairs department, and several other offices before it reaches us. But we are expecting it soon."
Violence against women in Afghanistan appears to be increasing rather than decreasing, despite billions of dollars of international aid which has poured into the country during the decade-long war.
The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission logged 1,026 cases of violence against women in the second quarter of 2011 compared with 2,700 cases for the whole of 2010.
Some 87 percent of Afghan women report having experienced physical, sexual or psychological violence or forced marriage, according to figures quoted in an October report by the charity Oxfam.
Last month, the United Nations said that a landmark law aiming to protect women against violence in Afghanistan had only been used to prosecute just over 100 cases since being enacted two years ago.
14 insurgents killed, 11 arrested in Afghanistan
KABUL, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- A total of 14 insurgents were killed and 11 others captured in three different military operations launched by Afghan and NATO-led Coalition forces over the past 24 hours, Afghan Interior Ministry said on Monday.
"Afghan National Police (ANP), Afghan National Army, NDS or intelligence agency and Coalition Forces launched three joint operations in areas surrounding Kunar and Zabul provinces. Therefore 14 armed insurgents were killed and 11 other suspects were detained by joint forces," the ministry said in a press release.
The ANP also discovered and confiscated nine AK-47 guns with 10 magazines, one PKM machine gun, four pistols, nine different types of weapons, six anti-vehicle mines, eight hand grenades, 25 heavy bullets, 62 light bullets, 70 kg Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), eight kg chemical materials and four motorbikes in the above operations, it said.
Afghan officials often use the word "insurgents" referring to Taliban. However, the insurgent group, who launched in May this year a rebel offensive against Afghan and NATO forces, has not to make comments yet.
Afghan and NATO-led coalition forces keep up pressure on insurgents all over the country as over 230 insurgents were killed and around 300 were arrested by joint forces in November alone, according the Afghan interior ministry.
Khalil, “The Taliban saw me coming”
KANDAHAR, 12 December 2011 (IRIN) - Afghanistan’s southern province of Kandahar has long seen violence between insurgents and government or international forces, and a growing number of children have become victims. Khalil - from the province’s Zhari District, who goes by only one name and says he is “about 15” - told IRIN of a bomb blast in which he lost his leg.
“I am from Kholk village in Zhari District. Around two weeks ago I went to visit my sister. When I was coming back from her house I saw three men putting something in the ground. I didn’t know they were planting a mine. When I reached the spot I tripped on a wire. Three steps later the mine exploded. This [he points to his severely injured leg] is what happened. I think the men who planted the mine were hiding somewhere very close.
“After a while, some people took me to the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] hospital, but there wasn’t much they could do so they took me to Kandahar airport for a night and finally here [to Mirwais hospital in Kandahar]. I have been here for the last 10-13 days.
“There are many cases like this in my district. Many times people lose their hands, legs, eyes and ears. I know other children and older people who have received serious injuries or were even killed.
“I blame the Taliban for this. The Taliban saw me coming towards the mine but they did not warn me. They plant a lot of mines in the area. Once they planted a mine in front of our house.
“I don’t know why we are oppressed all the time. I can’t even go to school. They closed the school down, and now the government is using our school as a checkpoint. I am only studying in a mosque. I wanted to become successful, but it doesn’t look like I can achieve that now.
“I feel pain in my injured leg. Hundreds have been victims of bombs like me. I am happy that I am still alive. The doctor said they would make a [prosthetic] leg for me. I don’t know how I will cope with one leg.”
Giving birth is a battle for survival in Afghanistan
By Jan Harvey Mon Dec 12, 2011 1:02pm EST
HERAT, Afghanistan (Reuters) - She was 15 years old, heavily pregnant and had travelled eight days on the back of a donkey to reach hospital.
Suffering from seizures and high blood pressure, she died soon after at the Herat Maternity Hospital in western Afghanistan, one of the thousands of women who die in the country each year from causes linked to pregnancy and birth.
"She came at a late stage and we couldn't help her," said Somayeh, a midwife at the hospital and herself just 21. "She was already in a coma."
Politicians, economists and activists from around the world met in Bonn this month to thrash out their vision for battered and impoverished Afghanistan. In addition to the insurgency and violence, it remains the most dangerous place in the world for a woman to have a baby, the latest World Health Organization data shows.
The figures are distressing, but still a marked improvement on the situation 10 years ago. The latest available WHO data, from 2008, shows the number of women who died giving birth had dipped to 1,400 per 100,000 live births from 1,800 in 2000.
The Ministry of Public Health says it has made maternal health a priority, supporting training schemes that have lifted the number of qualified midwives in the country to 3,000 from just 400, and expanding emergency delivery services.
"We have demonstrated that these strategies can work in Afghanistan. They can bring a change in the lives of women and families," acting public health minister Suraya Dalil says. "The challenge is to sustain those achievements."
Charities such as World Vision -- which trained Somayeh -- and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) also have in-depth programs to help new mothers across Afghanistan.
But they worry that the planned drawdown of Western troops and funds -- all foreign combat soldiers will be gone by the end of 2014, and a large chunk of aid budgets is expected to go with them -- could jeopardize the modest gains of the last decade.
Without foreign cash to bolster scarce government funds, midwife training will almost certainly drop off, while aid groups may leave if they cannot operate in safety. MSF closed its Afghan operations in 2004 after five team members were killed, although the group has since returned.
"The greatest risk at present is through aid levels dropping off precipitously," says Sarah Pickworth, a public health specialist who has worked extensively in Afghanistan.
"Without sufficient funding, there is likely to be a significantly slower pace of change. This risks losing the momentum of the tremendous gains made."
SECURITY DEADLINE
Faced with an appalling death toll among pregnant women and new mothers, communities in rural areas -- which have some of the highest mortality rates -- have mobilized to help women.
Herat's Institute of Health Sciences (IHS) has trained 256 midwives in the past seven years through schemes largely supported by charities such as World Vision. Many of its students have been deliberately selected from remote villages.
But if Herat is hit by violence, the families are likely to take their daughters out of school and take them home to safety.
A deterioration in the security situation would likely hit pregnant women as well as midwife training.
Transporting women in labor from rural areas to clinics is already a tough proposition in a country where few can afford cars and roads are scarce and badly maintained. It will become still harder if gunmen have freer rein to target travelers.
The re-emergence in political life of groups like the Taliban, which banned education and the free movement of women, could also have a devastating effect on death rates.
Under their influence, a generation of potential female midwives and doctors has already been lost, midwife trainers say. This is particularly devastating in a country where male doctors treating women is still largely taboo.
PLUGGING THE GAP
But as big a problem for Afghanistan is money. The Afghan government is facing a $7 billion hole in its budget after 2014, which it will need to pay for security and other services. It is relying on foreign help to plug that gap.
The grinding poverty in which many women live means hygiene and nutrition are often poor. A recent survey showed only around half of Afghans have access to clean drinking water, and only a fifth use approved toilet and sanitation facilities.
The IHS' deputy director, Dr Ehrary, says money is a major stumbling block to completing the five further rounds of midwife training he calculates are needed to provide a base number of healthcare professionals in the region.
"Training is not difficult, but finding funds is difficult," he says. The institute is struggling to train this year's government-recommended quota of midwives to the right standard.
"We told the ministry we could not run the class this year because we have only three teachers and we cannot meet their standards," he added. "They have now been funded. We found another donor, (German humanitarian group) Cap Anamur."
If meetings like the Bonn conference fail to deliver a plan for action on poverty and some kind of roadmap to stability, the fragile gains in maternal healthcare could easily slip away.
In rural Herat, villagers say they are determined to stop that happening. After decades of upheaval and war, they are tired of death and violence and want a safer future.
"Everybody hopes there will be no more war in Afghanistan," says one senior shura, or village council, member from rural Herat. "The first thing we want is safety, the second is to improve people's health. We need doctors -- we need midwives.
Occupying Kandahar
Two members of a different 1% on Afghanistan, politics and privilege.
Wall Street Journal By ANNE JOLIS
Zhari District, Afghanistan - U.S. service-members make up less than 1% of the American population. But the occupiers of Afghanistan do have a few, superficial similarities with the self-described "99%" occupying Western financial districts: Their endeavors both involve tents and have gone on far longer than first expected; both elicit mixed reactions in the areas they occupy; and both at times struggle to explain what their occupations are meant to accomplish.
Otherwise, the soldiers here in southern Afghanistan could not pose a starker contrast to their agitating peers back home. Take Spc. Anthony Webster, 32, of Portland, Maine and Sgt. Matthew Montville, 24, of Worcester, Massachusetts. They serve as their command group's security detachment in the Fourth Squadron, Fourth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, First Infantry Division—the "Pale Riders."
In late November, straightening their tent after a day of patrols, Sgt. Montville recalls taking leave in October to find himself "appalled" at the Occupy Boston crowd. The impish blond, who enlisted at 17 because "the idea of college never excited" him, observes: "Most of those 'Occupy' people wouldn't know hard work if it jumped up and punched them in the throat."
Not so the Pale Riders. They've had a particularly wretched war even for a particularly wretched part of Afghanistan, which has the ignoble distinction of being the Taliban's birthplace. Since arriving with 517 soldiers in late February, the Pale Riders have buried seven and been awarded 134 living Purple Hearts. ***
After 2001, the U.S. largely left this stretch of the Arghandab River valley to Afghan forces. By 2006 the Taliban was resurgent, and a Canadian-led contingent was sent to level entire neighborhoods here. But they never had the manpower to hold the area and by 2007 had effectively retreated, leaving the valley to de-facto Taliban control once again.
President Obama's surge increased U.S. troop presence here by roughly six-fold. The Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division spent much of 2010 redoing the Canadians' bloody work. When the Third Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division arrived with its Pale Rider attachment, they expanded the 101st's so-called security bubble while consolidating those gains with local outreach.
"We came at the beginning of the fighting season, and there was no bulls— about it," says Spc. Webster, a former construction and private-security entrepreneur whose tattoos cover about 85% of his body. "When it started, it started."
It hasn't really stopped. On a routine patrol a week before I met them, the Pale Riders entered a house that turned out to be rigged with explosives. The blast brought the house down on top of two of them, who survived but were critically injured. "I've never heard screaming like that in my life," says Sgt. Montville.
"You can't justify any of the losses," says Spc. Webster after a long pause. "But we're here to do our jobs, we know what we signed up for. The mission is what we live by, that's priority No. 1."
Sgt. Montville summarizes: "We continued the push and at the same time started talking to the locals to find out what they need from us and actually start to implement it—roads, schools, clinics."
"Anyone can go in and blow a place up. We're trying to do the right thing," he adds. "I'm proud of what we've done."
"We see more kids now, more of their women out, people able to farm their land—we've accomplished a lot in a short period of time," adds Spc. Webster. But "it's frustrating, too. Ultimately it's up to the Afghans. We go to these shuras [meetings of local elders] and we hear them arguing about dumb stuff."
Earlier on the day of our interview we patrolled through the neighborhood of Charkusa, where only weeks before the Pale Riders had been taking regular fire from mazes of grape walls and marijuana gardens. Now Charkusa is quiet, though nearly deserted. Over tea with several elders who had fled during the Canadian offensive, the old men acknowledged that security had improved and said they're prepared to work with their imperfect government, return home and fill the vacuum that insurgents would be happy to re-occupy. But some remained focused on what the Americans haven't done for them lately: They want their mud huts rebuilt and this time with doors and windows; they want their irrigation canals repaired and reinforced with brick or cement; they want their relocation expenses covered. Pale Rider Commander, Lt. Col. Michael Katona of Michigan, listened patiently, his soldiers fanned around us, nodding: "We can do all that."
Their aim is to do so by the end of the year, when the Pale Riders will start to leave. But "it's their community, at some point they need to own it," Spc. Webster says. "If not, our efforts will have been futile. I'd like to believe they weren't, I know my friends who have passed away, their families—I know they hope they weren't."
Another crucial variable over which the Pale Riders have little control is the development of the Afghan National Army, which Spc. Montville says is "definitely improving. But for a lot of them, it's their first time having their own money, so they have cell phones and they want to hang out and talk on them, weapons flopping around—sometimes they smoke hashish on patrol."
Like most of the U.S. soldiers with whom I spoke, Spc. Webster and Sgt. Montville have taken it upon themselves to informally train the ANA they work with—though ostensibly they've already received NATO training.
Sgt. Montville tells me that, for instance, their ANA counterparts were recently issued .50-caliber machine guns. But "a lot of them didn't know how to clean them, take them apart—they just didn't know what they were doing. So instead of us getting shot in the back accidentally, [Spc.] Webster and I went over to the ANA side [of Forward Operating Base Pasab] and brought our .50-cals over and had them bring theirs out. We showed them how to take them apart, clean them, make sure they work right, put them back together—basic soldiering skills. . . . Eventually they do start taking stuff seriously."
He flicks on his laptop to show me a recent video of U.S. soldiers defusing an IED set against a grape wall. While everyone else waits, frozen, an ANA soldier wanders into the frame, ignoring the others' warning shouts, steps on the pressure-point and loses half his face and a foot. "Luckily, they're getting better."
"Yeah, but that really is how undisciplined some of these guys are. It's a liability every time we go out with them," adds Spc. Webster.
Both agree that Washington's 2014 combat-withdrawal date doesn't make their work easier.
"It's more pressure on us and especially our commanders, to try and get everything in place to make sure it doesn't all fall apart once we leave, to make sure these people aren't bullied all over again," explains Spc. Webster. He says even after 2014, he expects the U.S. and its allies to keep a significant overwatch presence in Afghanistan for a long time, "for the safety of the whole world. If not, [Afghanistan] would go to hell again."
But he also sees their work now as more humanitarian than U.S. defense. Which is why the pre-set timeline is "the right thing to do. We've got a lot of problems at home. How many more lives and money can we really afford to lose here?"
Spc. Montville, on the other hand, characterizes the timeline as "a nice goal," but also akin to telling the insurgents "'Hey, guess what guys, we're leaving in 2014, you just got to hold on till then. Then you can come back and do whatever the f— you want.'"
Unlike Spc. Webster, Sgt. Montville claims "honestly, I don't care. Once I go home, I'm going to try my best not to think about this place and some of the s— I've seen."
Why? "Because I'm a spoiled American."
Turns out that after nine months dodging rockets and IEDs, without alcohol, flush toilets or their respective wife and girlfriend, Spc. Webster and Sgt. Montville's tour has left them preoccupied with how good they have it.
"If you grew up in a mud hut, went to school for maybe one or two years, you might not be the smartest dude either, but you'd be a hard worker," says Sgt. Montville. "You see kids here hauling three, four times their body weight, going 15 miles an hour on some [beaten-up] one-speed bicycle. I absolutely have a lot of respect for them. You've got to." ***
Which brings us back to America's "occupiers." "Yeah okay, a lot of them have jobs, they work a crappy nine-to-five, they've got student loans," concedes Sgt. Montville. "And I have a car payment. I'm not getting financial aid for my cell-phone bill. Everyone has to work. Deal with it."
Of their own unenviable salaries, Spc. Webster shrugs: "No one's ever going to get paid enough to do this job. That's not why we do it."
"I love what I do, I can't see myself doing anything else," adds Sgt. Montville. But when Washington politicos were threatening earlier this year to suspend military pay, his initial reaction was: "They train us to kill people, to drive tanks, use explosives, fight in the dark, to engage in hand-to-hand-combat; they give us all these guns, all this cool gear to do this—and then they're going to take our pay? Are they stupid?"
Memo to the humorless: He's kidding. Upon hearing of the budget brinkmanship, "a lot of guys here said '[Forget] it then, I'm not going to go out on patrol!' But I don't know anyone who would actually do that."
And while neither voted for the current President, "[Mr.] Obama is my boss," says Spc. Webster. "If he sends us orders tomorrow to go to Pakistan, Iran, wherever—done. I'd pack my bags and go."
As the U.S. drawdown proceeds, Spc. Webster predicts, safely, that 2012 campaigns will bring claims of "'I did this, I brought the troops home.'" He laughs and lets Sgt. Montville finish his thought: "We're the ones watching each others' backs out here. The ones who survive—we'll have brought ourselves home."
Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
A counterinsurgency behind the burka
Ashley White was the first female soldier to die in combat as part of an elite cultural support team sent to Afghanistan to engage women and gather information unavailable to male troops.
Los Angles Times By David Zucchino December 12, 2011
Ft. Bragg, N.C. - After a U.S. special operations force secured a compound outside Kandahar recently, Army 1st Lt. Ashley White was sent in to search and interview Afghan women. Just after she arrived, a homemade bomb exploded, killing her and two Army Rangers.
White, 24, was the first female soldier to die in combat while performing a unique new role for the Army. She was part of an elite cultural support team, first sent to Afghanistan in January in an attempt to overcome daunting cultural barriers in the deeply conservative Islamic country.
Women like White perform duties that no man can attempt without gravely offending or enraging Afghans. They frisk and question Afghan women, many of them covered head to toe in burkas. They sometimes find hidden weapons or explosives — and occasionally unmask insurgents dressed as women. Trained in Afghan culture and customs, they build relationships with women while also ferreting out information unavailable to male troops.
Women and children, who make up more than 70% of Afghanistan's population, are hidden and fiercely shielded by men whenever male outsiders — particularly American troops — approach villages. A male soldier attempting to touch, or even speak to, an Afghan woman would trigger deep resentment. The U.S. counterinsurgency effort is predicated on winning the trust and support of ordinary Afghans.
"Women tell us stuff they aren't going to say if there's a male around," said Sgt. Christine Baldwin, who served in Afghanistan from January to August in the first cultural support class of 31 graduates.
Baldwin and her female partner, a captain, helped persuade Afghan elders to permit a rare female-only shura, or meeting, in a village in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan — but only after searching the women first.
Baldwin and her partner built rapport and trust among local women, making inroads for a Special Forces team that had never previously dealt with women. In one case, Baldwin said, an Afghan woman pointed out an insurgent in the village. Others provided valuable information or insights.
"Without these soldiers, we couldn't interact with more than half the Afghan population,'' said Lt. Col. Tom Bryant, a spokesman for special operations forces at Ft. Bragg, where the female soldiers are selected and trained.
White, a member of the North Carolina National Guard who volunteered for active duty to try out for the teams, was one of 34 women sent to Afghanistan after graduating with the second cultural support class. Assigned to an Army Ranger unit, she was killed Oct. 22.
"Her efforts highlight both the importance and necessity of women on the battlefield today," the U.S. Army Special Operations Command said in a statement announcing White's death.
Before cultural support teams were created last year, units simply borrowed women from regular units for certain missions. But the ad hoc system sometimes left units — including special operations forces that conduct controversial night raids — unable to deal effectively with Afghan women and children.
Senior commanders belatedly recognized the shortcomings two years ago and began pushing for specially trained female volunteers to accompany special operations forces on missions for "gender appropriate engagement," as the military calls it.
"The need to engage the female population for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan has been underestimated for the better part of 10 years," said Maj. Patrick McCarthy, who runs the assessment process at Ft. Bragg that selects volunteers to train for the teams.
Only half the women who apply are selected during the five-day assessment process, McCarthy said. They must pass a physical training test, then undergo six-week sessions that include "stressors'' designed to simulate the demands imposed on special operations forces in war zones.
McCarthy looks for smart, physically fit candidates who can make quick decisions. "They go through some very fast-paced intellectual exercises," he said.
In addition to instruction on Afghan culture and mores, trainees learn greetings and other basic phrases in Dari, Pashto and Uzbek. In all, 82 women graduates have been sent to Afghanistan, and nearly 50 are assigned to special operations units there now. The Army's goal is to keep at least 25 two-woman teams in Afghanistan.
The women do not engage directly in combat, but instead follow special operations units after areas are secured, Bryant said. Altogether, 138 women have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of them killed by homemade bombs.
Baldwin, 34, a seven-and-a-half-year Army veteran, said Afghan women were often wary or intimidated when she arrived wearing a helmet and body armor. "It is a scary posture, the way we look to them," she said.
She removes her helmet and covers her hair with a scarf, in deference to Afghan customs. Then she introduces herself as "Christine," and asks women about their children, local schools and clinics, and what they'd like to see improved in their village.
Baldwin hands out a cellphone number for her female Afghan interpreter and asks the women to call with any information they'd like to share. The female soldiers aren't intelligence officers, but they often collect useful information that is passed on to intelligence specialists.
"No matter how good the rapport in an area, male soldiers are still going to miss out on what 50% of the population has to offer," Baldwin said.
Afghan men sometimes feel shame sharing certain information with male soldiers, Baldwin said, but have no such qualms providing the same information to women.
"We're kind of a third gender," she said. "The men don't worry about looking weak in front of us."
Baldwin was on her first tour in Afghanistan last year when the Army asked for volunteers for the new cultural teams. "I knew that was my calling," she said. "I thought it was the coolest thing ever."
White, of Alliance, Ohio, arrived in Afghanistan in August. She was physically fit and "very astute and well-grounded in global affairs," McCarthy said.
A North Carolina National Guard Special Forces sergeant first class who trained White said she was in the top 1% of women he trained. The sergeant asked not to be identified because of security concerns.
"I threw stuff at her that the guys in some of our units go through, and she was able to go above and beyond the standard," the sergeant said.
"This kind of job takes somebody special — and Lt. White really was special," he said. "What she did was groundbreaking."
The Afghanistan schoolgirl who became a symbol of Kabul's suicide bombing
Wailing and surrounded by the dead, the image of Tarana Akbari distraught in a bloodstained dress symbolised the horror of Kabul's suicide bombing when it appeared on front pages across the world last week.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 11 Dec 2011
Kabul - The schoolgirl was photographed in hysterics with bodies lying at her feet moments after a bomber had killed more than 70 Shia worshippers gathered outside a shrine to mark a holy day.
The 12-year-old lost seven relatives and had another eight wounded as the attacker's suicide vest tore through the festival crowd, her family has now disclosed.
Among the dead was her 11-year-old brother, Shoaib, and both her other siblings were grievously wounded, her father told the Daily Telegraph as she was released from hospital.
Fifteen members of her extended family attended the festival in the Murad Khane area of the Afghan capital and all were killed or wounded.
"I have lost my brother, I have lost my cousins, I have lost my aunt," Tarana said, leaving the city's Wazir Akbar Khan hospital where she had been treated with scores of other casualties.
In her first interview, Tarana said she thought she had seen the suicide bomber work his way through the crowd towards the shrine gates and try to get inside before he detonated.
"There was a young man who asked an elder at the shrine to open the gates," she said. "Soon after I saw him explode. Then I just saw lots of dead people."
Images of her amid the carnage, dressed in vivid green to mark the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson, appeared in the Daily Telegraph and made the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
She suffered shrapnel wounds to her shins, arm and stomach in the blast and was only told on Saturday that her brother had died.
Her father, Ahmad Shah Akbari, now keeps one photograph of the devastation in his jacket pocket and said many of those pictured lying slumped and bloodied at his daughter's feet were their relatives.
"I have lost a son and I still have two other children in hospital. I was across town when it happened. They called me on my mobile and told me there had been an explosion. When I arrived, all I could see was injured and dead."
"Tarana is still in a lot of pain and my other children are lying in bed with tubes in them," he said.
Hamid Karzai, the Afghanistan president, said the suicide attack at the Abul Fazl shrine on the holy day of Ashura was unprecedented and it raised fears of a new sectarian dimension to the violence in Afghanistan.
The attack has been claimed by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Al-Alami, an obscure Pakistan-based militant group with a history of targeting Shia Muslims.
The Afghan president heightened tensions with neighbouring Pakistan by threatening to pursue the attack with Islamabad.
Mr Akbari, a 37-year-old market porter, said: "Everyone says it was Pakistan – some party or organisation there.
"We don't know why they did this. They were poor people, what was their crime?"
The death toll from the December 6 blasts was still rising, a spokesman for the Ministry of Public health said. Victims had been taken to hospitals across the city and some had died at home without reaching medical treatment. At least five children and 10 women were among the dead and more than 100 people were wounded. Mr Karzai said on Sunday that the death toll from both attacks was now at least 80.
Since the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan has been largely spared the Sunni-Shia targeted sectarian killing which has blighted Pakistan and Iraq.
Shia leaders have appealed for calm since last week's blast amid fears the attack was a deliberate provocation to open a rift between the groups and further destabilise the country.
Ryan Crocker, American ambassador, said at the weekend: "I do not see this turning into a sectarian conflict just looking at the reactions on the part of the Shia leadership, calling for calm."
"I am struck by the reaction – the Afghan reaction – which is what makes me think that whoever the architects were – they don't have much Afghan support," he said.
Meanwhile, Mr Karzai blamed foreign donors who have poured billions of pounds into his country for some of the rampant corruption which is hobbling international attempts at reconstruction.
He told an anti-corruption conference that "our foreigner colleagues have not only been uncooperative but sometimes they have created obstacles".
"One urgent way to avoid corruption in Afghanistan is for our foreign friends and co-workers to stop giving contracts to government officials and their family members," he continued.
The chronic graft found at all levels of the Afghan state has been blamed for siphoning off billions and also driving Afghans away from the government and toward the Taliban-led insurgency.
Mr Karzai has consistently refused to prosecute power brokers and members of his inner circle accused of corruption.
U.S. Commander Backs Afghan Militia Program
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM DECEMBER 12, 2011
KABUL - The commander of U.S. Special Operations Forces has backed the expansion of a local militia program in Afghanistan criticized by human-rights groups, saying it has been successful in securing remote parts of the country.
Adm. William McRaven, who gave a joint interview to three news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, on a weekend visit to Kabul, also said the number of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan could expand in the coming year while conventional forces withdraw.
Adm. McRaven, a former Navy SEAL who until recently headed the secretive Joint Special Operations Command overseeing many kill-and-capture missions, masterminded the U.S. raid into Pakistan that killed Osama Bin Laden in May.
He arrived in Afghanistan on his first official trip here since being promoted to commander of U.S. Special Operations Command in August to assess the progress of the so-called Afghan Local Police program and to examine the future role of his command as coalition forces withdraw.
Before heading out to visit three of the ALP sites, Adm. McRaven said the local forces have an important role to play, especially in places where the coalition presence is sparse.
"It's a good program that I think is well received now by the Afghans and certainly by the locals," Adm. McRaven said in the interview on a Special Operations base in Kabul. "My instinct is that we'll probably increase it, but that remains to be seen."
Even as the U.S. is pulling out some 33,000 conventional troops by September, Adm. McRaven said the Pentagon might at the same time expand the numbers of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan. "There is an opportunity for us to grow somewhat in the near term," he said. "It remains to be seen what that would look like."
Coalition troops, mostly from the Special Operations community, and the Afghan government have trained nearly 10,000 members of the ALP in more than 55 districts across Afghanistan since the controversial program began last year.
While President Hamid Karzai initially opposed the plan, fearing it would create uncontrollable militias, then-coalition commander Gen. David Petraeus aggressively championed the ALP project, who likened these units to "a community watch with AK-47s."
Mr. Karzai wasn't able to be reached for comment on Sunday.
Under the program, Afghan villagers receive three weeks of training and deploy, usually under U.S. Special Operations forces' supervision, to protect their home turf against the Taliban.
The U.S. military is preparing to triple the number of local fighters in the program over the next two years, with 30,000 members set to fan out in 99 districts, said Col. John Evans, deputy commanding officer of Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command in Afghanistan.
Initially, the ALP fighters—whose pay is lower than that of regular Afghan policemen and soldiers—were supposed to be absorbed by the Afghan National Police. But the U.S. and the Afghan government are now considering expanding the program and retaining the ALP as a longer-term program, Col. Evans said.
"It is supposed to expire in 2015," he said. "Right now we're talking about and discussing [if there should] be an enduring presence beyond that."
Human-rights groups have expressed concerns about expanding the reach and scope of what is essentially a militia force whose members have been accused of extorting local residents, killing civilians, raping women and forcibly recruiting children.
In a report presented to the U.S.-led military last week, the Norwegian Refugee Council and the Liaison Office, a Kabul-based research group, warned that ALP abuses are prompting a growing number of Afghans to flee their communities.
The paper reported a 51% rise in the number of Afghans forced from their homes by the conflict in the first 10 months of the year.
The ALP militias, the report concluded, were compounding insurgent threats.
"Poorly disciplined units are failing to provide protection for civilians," said Dan Tyler, the Norwegian Refugee Council's protection and advocacy adviser in Afghanistan. "Weak vetting mechanisms, loose command structures, poor training and a lack of oversight and accountability all appear to be contributing to human-rights violations."
Along with the independent Norwegian aid group, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam have also raised significant concerns about poor oversight of the ALP.
"The fact that displacement is up so much and the ALP is looking like a factor should cause some serious soul-searching before anyone goes ahead with expanding and extending the program," said Heather Barr, the Human Rights Watch researcher in Afghanistan.
Adm. McRaven said he was aware of the concerns, but said he has seen no solid reports to indicate that the Afghan forces working with U.S. mentors had created significant problems.
"I've heard anecdotes about that, but I'm not sure I've seen it on the ground," he said.
The Afghan Interior Ministry, which oversees the ALP, didn't responded to repeated requests for comment on Sunday.
Col. Evans said the military has a system of checks and balances that are meant to weed out unwanted fighters by working with local elders and taking complaints to conventional Afghan police forces when issues arise.
But Ms. Barr said the oversight system has failed in some parts of the country, leaving Afghans with nowhere to take their concerns.
Adm. McRaven said he had no new information to share on who might have planned last week's deadly attacks on Shiite pilgrims in Afghanistan.
Mr. Karzai said on Sunday that 80 people were killed in the attacks that hit Kabul and northern Afghanistan's largest city in the north, Mazar-e-Sharif. Officials initially said 60 people were killed in the two blasts.
Over the weekend, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan cast doubts on the claim of responsibility made in calls to news outlets by men claiming to represent Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the anti-Shiite group based in Pakistan.
"They have not shown a tremendous capability," said Amb. Ryan Crocker, who served as America's top diplomat in Pakistan from 2004 to 2007. "Either they developed a stunning new capability or, again, you've got a consortium at work."
Mr. Crocker said he was encouraged by the reaction of Afghan leaders, including Mr. Karzai, who immediately called for calm between the country's Sunni majority and its Shiite minority.
"I do not see this turning into a sectarian conflict," he said.
In an unusual step, the Taliban issued a special statement on Sunday that once again condemned the attack and accused America of orchestrating the blasts in an attempt to cover up for its military failings.
"Nobody should be allowed to reach their sinister goals by creating rifts and divisions amongst our united people on the basis of religion, race, language or region," the Taliban said after holding a special high-level meeting to discuss the attack.
U.S. commander who led bin Laden operation defends unpopular night raids in Afghanistan
Associated Press December 11, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S. Special Operations commander who directed the operation that killed Osama bin Laden defended the unpopular night raids on homes in Afghanistan that have provoked the fury of the country’s president and held up a security agreement with the United States.
Adm. William McRaven also backed a training program his troops run for village police forces — an initiative that some fear could spawn militias and new violence.
McRaven, who leads the U.S. Special Operations Command, said in a rare interview with journalists late Saturday that the U.S. understands Afghan concerns about night raids and has allowed its partner Afghan forces to take the lead in those and other operations.
“At the end of the end of the day I think you would find that night raids are very valuable when you are trying to get someone who is trying to hide,” McRaven said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called for an end to the raids, in which troops borne in by helicopter search homes, because he says the forces conducting them treat too many civilians as if they were insurgents and violate privacy in an intensely conservative society. The deaths they cause — although relatively few in number — have made them unpopular with many Afghans.
Afghan citizens, Karzai says, cannot feel secure if they think armed troops might burst into their homes in the middle of the night.
McRaven, who would not answer questions about the May raid that killed bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan, said the United States was discussing the future of night raids with Afghanistan’s government.
Around 2,800 raids against insurgent targets have been carried out in the past year, he said. But in 85 percent of them, the forces involved never fired a shot.
“In that time the civilians casualties were less than 1 percent. The number of times we engaged was about 15 percent,” he said.
Karzai convened a traditional national assembly known as a Loya Jirga last month that stopped short of demanding a complete end to night raids. Instead, it asked that they be led and controlled by Afghan security forces — a demand that the U.S. says it has met.
Still, the issue has held up the signing of a security agreement with the U.S. that could keep thousands of American troops here for years beyond the 2014 deadline for most international forces to leave. Remaining U.S. troops would train Afghan forces and assist with counterterrorism operations.
The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, told reporters Saturday the raids will be a topic of debate when the two countries return to the negotiating table to discuss their strategic partnership.
McRaven’s command is involved in training Afghan commandos — 8,200 so far — as well as special forces and local police known as ALPs.
U.S. special forces have been training the village-level fighting forces in hopes of countering the Taliban insurgency — a concept similar to the one that turned the tide of the Iraq war.
But the ALP initiative has stirred worries it will legitimize existing private militias or create new ones. Warlord-led militias ravaged Afghanistan in the 1990s, opening the way for the Taliban takeover.
McRaven said he had not seen any evidence that the groups were fueling local rivalries. He said there was no decision to increase the number of ALP’s, although “my instinct is yes to increase, but that remains to be seen.”
The Afghan government has agreed to have about 30,000 of the ALP forces trained by the end of 2013. They will be located across 99 districts around the country at a cost of about $170 million a year. The forces are not meant to replace the Afghan army or police, but complement them in some areas.
“The real advantage for the ALP ... is the ability for Afghans from their local districts to protect their own homes,” McRaven said.
General: Iran won't return U.S. drone it claims to have
By the CNN Wire Staff December 11, 2011
Iran will not return an unmanned American stealth plane that it says it has, one of Iran's top generals said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency on Sunday.
"No nation welcomes other countries' spy drones in its territory, and no one sends back the spying equipment and its information back to the country of origin," said Gen. Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the Armed Forces.
"It makes no difference where this drone originated and which group or country sent it to invade our air space," Salami said. "This was an act of invasion and belligerence."
American officials have not confirmed that the drone in a video released Thursday is a U.S. aircraft, but Pentagon spokesman George Little has said that an American drone is missing and had not been recovered as of Thursday.
But two U.S. officials confirmed to CNN on Tuesday that the missing drone was part of a CIA reconnaissance mission that involved both the intelligence community and military personnel stationed in Afghanistan.
Iran's official Iran Republic News Agency said the country's armed forces had downed the drone near Kashmar, some 225 kilometers (140 miles) from the border with Afghanistan on December 4.
Salami said downing the plane was "very valuable for us" and "a victory for us and a defeat for our enemies," IRNA reported.
He also claimed Iran had downed other drones earlier but had not announced those instances it because they were not as important.
Iranian TV aired images Thursday of what it says is the drone, an apparently intact RQ-170 drone propped on a pedestal and triumphantly displayed.
There was disagreement among Pentagon officials about whether the drone in the video was real. Military and intelligence officials were analyzing the Iran television footage.
One U.S. official said the United States can't be certain it's the real stealth drone, because U.S. personnel don't have access to it. But he added there's no reason to think it's a fake.
However, a second senior U.S. military official said that a big question is to how the drone could have remained virtually intact given the high altitude it is believed to have crashed from.
The condition of the drone in the video suggests it was not shot down but suffered a system failure, aviation analyst Bill Sweetman said. There are no burn marks from a fire, no holes and no outward damage. Sweetman noticed a dent along the leading edge but doesn't know what that means.
"It's fairly clear here from the pictures that the outer wings have been separated. The question is, did that happen in the accident or (did they take) them off to move the aircraft?" Sweetman asked.
The CIA and the Pentagon would not comment on the video shown Thursday.
A senior U.S. official with direct access to the assessment about what happened to the unmanned aircraft said it was tasked to fly over western Afghanistan and look for insurgent activity, with no directive either to fly into Iran or spy on Iran from Afghan airspace.
A U.S. satellite quickly pinpointed the downed drone, which apparently sustained significant damage, the senior official said.
Iran's U.N. ambassador said in a letter Thursday that the drone flew 250 kilometers (150 miles) into Iranian territory "to the northern region of the city of Tabas."
The letter from Ambasador Mohammad Khazaee to U.N. Secretary-Genera Ban Ki-moon and the heads of the General Assembly and Security Council said the drone "faced prompt and forceful action" by the armed forces.
"My government emphasizes that this blatant and unprovoked air violation by the United States government is tantamount to an act of hostility against the Islamic Republic of Iran in clear contravention of international law, in particular, the basic tenets of the United Nations Charter," Khazaee's letter said.
He called for U.N. condemnation of U.S. "acts of aggression," as well as "clear and effective measures to be taken to put an end to these dangerous and unlawful acts in line with the United Nations' responsibilities to maintain international and regional peace and security."
Afghan students learn to read with folk tales
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Monday, December 12, 2011
Kabul - Marzia Mohseni rose from her desk and walked to the front of the classroom. At 18, she was taller, and older, than the other girls, and she spoke in a shy whisper. One had to strain to hear as she opened the book, turned to the first page and started to read.
“Once upon a time, in a country far away, there was a town, and in the town there was a chicken,” she began. “And he was a very silly chicken indeed.”
In Afghanistan, more than half of the population cannot read, and for most of her life, neither could Marzia. Decades of war and a Taliban regime that forced girls out of the classroom wrecked the school system. But there were a wealth of folk tales passed down for generations that described Afghan village life — an oral storytelling tradition populated by talking animals, farmers’ wives, a woman who mistook an eagle for a pigeon and a mischievous chicken who convinced the townspeople that the earth just might swallow them alive.
“Only silly people would listen to a chicken in the first place,” Marzia read. “You think a chicken knows something just because he can talk?”
The story of how these legends became books and are helping more than a million Afghan children to read is an unlikely tale of its own. It is set on three continents and spans nearly five decades, even before Afghanistan became synonymous with war.
In 1963, Sally Mallam, a British woman then about Marzia’s age, met Idries Shah, an author and educator of Afghan heritage who lived in England and published Sufi classics in translation. Shah had collected hundreds of folk tales from Afghanistan and the surrounding region that he would recount to family and friends.
“He was an amazing story¬teller,” Mallam recalled. “These stories seemed an integral part of his exuberant recollections about Afghanistan, the land he loved, where he often recalled the fruit trees grew the best fruit, where the mountains, flowers and valleys were the most beautiful and where the men, women and children were brave, honorable and wise — or were learning to be so.”
Mallam began her own career in publishing, which eventually led her to the United States, where she worked for a nonprofit organization that published educational books. In October 1996, a month before Shah died, Mallam returned to London to visit him. Although he had published dozens of books by that time, she had not seen the children’s stories in print.
“He said he hadn’t done anything with them, and I got all fired up,” Mallam said. “I came home with a manuscript.”
Nothing but work
For Marzia, and her younger sister Bilkees, books played no part in their childhoods in Kabul. Because their mother had died of tuberculosis, and their father was too ill to work, by the age of 6 they began to apprentice as carpet weavers to support their family. In one month, working day and night at home, each sister could produce four yards of carpet and earn $100. Even in the public schools, where textbooks were free, the students had to pay for pens and paper, an expense the sisters could not afford, they said.
“We were working so hard — from morning until evening. Every night, I tried to work later and later to finish more carpets,” Bilkees said. “I never thought I’d do anything else besides make carpets.”
Bilkees recalled an embarrassing attempt to locate a hospital room for her grandmother that ended in failure as neither could read any of the signs. When wedding invitations came to the house, the sisters stared at the meaningless symbols. They ignored the instructional diagrams for the carpets, which they could not decipher.
“I thought I would be illiterate forever,” Marzia said.
Giving them ‘a treasure’
By 1998, Hoopoe Books, a division of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, where Mallam was director of publishing, published the first four of Shah’s children’s stories in the United States. Mallam, who lives in Los Altos, Calif., chose Bay Area artists to illustrate the stories. The characters wore Afghan clothes — men in turbans, women in head scarves — and the artists researched the look of Afghan buildings and landscapes.
After several years, Mallam set out to “repatriate” the books to Afghanistan. She found a printer and had the books translated into the two main Afghan languages, Dari and Pashto, and partnered with an Afghan nonprofit, Khatiz Organization for Rehabilitation (KOR), as well as the Ministry of Education, to have them distributed to schools and orphanages.
“If children have nothing, and you want children to learn and value books, you have to give them a gift. You have to give them a treasure. And these stories are a treasure,” she said.
The U.S. Embassy took an interest in the project last year and gave a $4.5 million grant that vastly expanded it. About 1 million books featuring six different stories have been handed out. Two more titles and 1.5 million more books are to come.
Many of NATO’s units in the country that focus on development work have helped distribute the books to local schools, including in Taliban strongholds of southern Afghanistan.
There were unusual challenges that came with promoting books in a largely illiterate country. To get parents interested in reading the stories to their children, the U.S. Embassy funded radio programs that broadcast the stories, with verbal cues to tell the parents when to turn the page. Classes help teachers learn how to present and discuss the material, down to simple tips such as holding the books open toward the students, so they can see the pictures as they read.
“The students enjoy the stories, and they are especially interested in the animals,” said Habiba Niazi, a kindergarten teacher who took one such training class. “They want to know what kind of animals they are, what they eat, where they live.”
Top of their class
From a relative, Marzia and Bilkees learned of the Aschiana Foundation, an organization in Kabul that runs schools for street kids and poor children who have fallen behind their grade. The education was free, and the school handed out food rations to students. Last year, their step-mother, who had started selling baked goods out of their home, allowed them to attend.
To get there each day, they wake at dawn, walk for half an hour to a main road, then spend an hour on the bus. In the evenings, they weave pillowcases and tablecloths for extra money.
“Some students come here knowing a little bit. These two sisters, they knew nothing,” said one of their teachers. “But Marzia’s very intelligent. She now has the first position in the class. And her sister is second.”
As they learned to read, they pored over Idries Shah’s stories, at school and at home. They read billboards, signs at the pharmacy, magazines, wedding invitations. Both want to stay in school as long as possible. Marzia said she wants to become a doctor; Bilkees, a teacher.
“Now that I can read and write, it makes me feel amazed,” Marzia said. “It was difficult, but I was very, very interested to learn.”
Afghan Sportswomen Fight for More Than Medals
Despite numerous hurdles, women are picking up increasing numbers of wins in international sporting competitions.
IWPR By Khan Mohammad Danishju 11 Dec 11
Afghanistan - Kabul’s stadium became a global symbol of Taleban brutality in the 1990s, when it was the scene of public executions and amputations. More than a decade on, the stadium is being for sporting purposes – and by women as well as men.
When IWPR visited recently, 24-year-old Salma Husseini was coaching a class of 80 girls in taekwondo, who followed her every move.
Despite severe shortages of sports facilities and equipment, and traditional restrictions on women playing a role in public life, Afghanistan’s female athletes have brought home some 100 gold, silver and bronze medals from regional and international tournaments in the last two years.
Husseini first began studying taekwondo, a Korean martial art, at the age of 14 in Iran, where she was living as a refugee. She has won bronze and silver medals outside Afghanistan, but has she stopped competing because she is now a coach for the national Olympic team.
While success in sports may be a reflection of broader improvements in the position of women, Husseini says her protégés get little credit for their achievements and are ignored by Afghan media.
“When the men win medals, the media promote them a lot, but they don’t do the same for the girls,” she said. “I would urge media outlets to do more to promote female heroes so that women in this country feel strong.”
Hamida Omid is another taekwondo star – in September she won a silver medal in India, adding to her three previous bronze medals earned abroad.
Omid believes it is up to women to stand up for themselves. In her words, “They should tear asunder the chains of imprisonment and secure their rights.”
Omid enjoys the full support of her husband, Mohammad Mobin. If she is away competing, he looks after the children and does the housework. Some of his friends disapprove, but he ignores them.
“When I hear about my wife’s achievements, I don’t care what opinion others may have,” he said. “I am extremely happy to have a wife like Hamida.”
Zohra, a 19 year-old sportswoman who attends a private taekwondo club in Kabul, would like to see more government support for female sport. Sportswomen are short of decent facilities, clothing, coaches and transport.
“The national Olympic committee should consider creating special gyms for girls all over Kabul, but the committee has not helped athletes at all so far,” Zohra said.
It is not all down to Afghanistan having a cash-strapped government. The finance ministry said in a report earlier this year that the national Olympic committee had failed to spend 50 per cent of the budget allocated to it.
Nevertheless, the Olympic committee has established a women’s gym in the western city of Herat, and Kabul should be getting one soon, Malalai Daqiq, head of the committee’s female sports section, said.
“Despite the problems, we are optimistic because female sports are developing in the provinces,” she said, noting that Herat was a stronghold.
Although many Afghans believe female sports are sacreligious, Keramatollah Sediqi, head of Islamic guidance at the Ministry of Haj and Religious Affairs, says women can engage in sport as long as suitable clothing is worn.
Many conservative-minded Afghans, however, believe this kind of activity goes against everything their culture stands for.
Shawali, a 55-year-old man from the Khair Khana district of Kabul, said it was morally corrupting for women to take part in sport, and their menfolk were “gutless” for allowing them to.
He said it was wrong for women to be out and about without being chaperoned by a family member, and suggested that other men would be able to see the contours of their figures when they exercised.
Another man, Mir Waisoddin, a 50-year-old shopkeeper from the Qala-e Fatullah district, offered a completely different perspective. Women had suffered enough under the Taleban, he said, and should be allowed to practice sports and take care of themselves.
“Let the world know that Afghan women, too, can win championships,” he said. “God didn’t create everything just for men.”
Raisa, a female schoolteacher, sees sport as part of a wider battle for women’s rights.
“If we give in these problems, we will be imprisoned within the four walls of our homes,” she said.
Khan Mohammad Danishju is an IWPR-trained reporter in Afghanistan.
President Karzai congratulates Afghan team winning Asia cricket
KABUL, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai eulogized and congratulated Afghan national cricket team over winning Asia cricket tournament in Nepal, a statement released by Karzai office said on Monday.
"Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a telephone call to Afghan National Cricket Team on Sunday night congratulated its victory in the match, saying the people of Afghanistan honor your recent success in the Asia Cricket Tournament," the statement said.
Despite a raging insurgency, lack of funds and having no proper cricket pitch, the war-torn Afghanistan embarked on an extraordinary rise in cricket in recent years.
The Afghan team lifted the Asian Cricket Council T20 Cup after defeating Chinese Hong Kong in the final match in Nepal on Sunday.
Asian Cricket Council T20 begun on Dec. 3, and Afghanistan defeated Maldives, Bhutan and Nepal before going to final match.
Attorney: US official charged with accepting bribe for Afghanistan contracts to plead guilty
By Associated Press,
ATLANTA — An attorney for a high-ranking Department of Defense employee charged with taking a bribe to steer federal contracts for work in Afghanistan to a contractor says he’s set to plead guilty.
Desi Deandre Wade’s attorney Ebony Ameen said her client intends to change his plea at a Dec. 21 hearing but declined further comment.
Wade was the department’s Chief of Fire and Emergency Services in Afghanistan. He was arrested in August after prosecutors said he took $95,000 from a contractor at the Fire-Rescue International Conference in Atlanta.
Afghanistan-based investigators said they received a tip in July that Wade received a $4,000 bribe to award a contract to a company. They say he later proposed steering a contract to that firm for about $100,000.
Sesame Street: Can it save Afghanistan?
Sesame Street brings its message of tolerance and hope to a war-torn nation.
Global Post By Jean MacKenzie December 11, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The team that was crowded into a slightly down-at-heel office in central Kabul could not look more ordinary. There was Zubaid, a young man in a sweater with a knitted cap pulled low over his head, Ali, in a suit, tall with cropped hair; Ferishta, in a typical long black coat-dress and blue headscarf. They and the others in the room were a bit shy, smiling politely.
But put them in a sound studio and they are transformed: this is the uniquely talented crew that is now bringing the characters of Sesame Street to life for thousands, perhaps millions, of Afghan children.
Supported by a grant from the US Embassy in Kabul, the Kaboora production house has worked for the past 10 months to make Shahpar and Kachkool — Big Bird and Grover, to most — household names in Afghanistan.
More from GlobalPost: Sectarian violence grips Kabul
The show premiered just one week ago, and has attracted a lot of attention in a country starved for some good news for a change.
According one Kabul parent, whose 3-year-old is a finicky eater, Sesame Street has already proved a boon.
“Once he saw the characters, our little Hamsa sat right down and ate his cereal,” laughed Inayat.
Others were similarly impressed.
“My 5-year-old nephew was stuck to the television until the end of the show,” said Fazel Oria, a Kabul resident. “I did not feel it was a foreign show at all.”
The style might take some getting used to, though.
“I did not think it was attractive,” said Huzzein Hazara, a Kabul resident who watched the show with his daughters. “While it was on my daughters were asking me to find Tom and Jerry.”
Tania Farzana, the Afghan-American executive producer of the show, is hoping that Sesame Street will do more than make children behave. She has set herself the mission of bringing a new vision to a generation that has known nothing but war.
More from GlobalPost: Spa Kabul: In search of respite in a war zone
“I was the luckiest child in the world,” said Farzana, who was born in Kabul in the 1970s, before leaving for the United States at the age of nine. “There was so much comfort and warmth, a sense of security. Children now cannot even imagine a Kabul like that.”
Coming back after close to 30 years was a shock.
“The first three months broke my heart,” she confessed. “Nothing was the way I remembered it.”
Farzana recalls a Kabul where her mother rode a bike to university, where women were free to do what they liked.
“My mother never even wore one of these,” she said, flicking at the white headscarf that covered her dark hair.
Through Sesame Street, Farzana wants to give children back a sense of wonder.
“I am hoping we can give them the right to use their imaginations,” she said. “This instills empathy, the ability to identify with others.”
This, in turn, could help to reduce some of the religious, ethnic, and regional divides that exist among Afghans.
More from GlobalPost: Is Afghanistan on the brink of civil war?
The project is an ambitious one. While much of the footage is archival stock straight from New York, giving the Sesame Street Muppets their own Afghan identity has been a challenge.
“We interviewed over 600 applicants for 15 characters,” Farzana said. “The voices had to be dead-on. I wanted them to be perfect.”
It is not just a matter of translating the original dialogue into Dari or Pashto, she added. The language has to be pitched just right for the age group — three to seven — and, in addition, has to have the same number of syllables as the English text, so that the famous Sesame Street mouth flaps will match the new words.
“Our actors have become co-creators in making the dialogues work,” she said.
In addition to the familiar character pieces, though, Farzana is making 26 original films about Afghan life and society, to insert into the half-hour show.
These will cover topics as diverse as the first day of school and kite flying.
The first day of school will feature a little Hazara girl. The choice was not accidental.
“Many people call Hazaras, who are mainly Shia, ‘infidels,’” she said. “We wanted to show that this little girl’s mother blessed her with the Quran as she left the house, just as millions of mothers do every day. We want a Pashtun child in the south, a Tajik or Uzbek child in the north, to watch the film and say ‘that girl is just like me.’”
Farzana’s message is particularly important in the wake of a horrific attack on Shiites in Kabul on Dec. 6, as they marked their holy day of Ashura. More than50 people were killed, and many feared a new round of ethnic or sectarian violence in the country.
Sesame Street, or Bagch-e-Simsim, as it is called here, wants to put those fears to rest.
But as Afghan culture rubs up against Sesame Street rules, sparks begin to fly.
“We had some amazing footage of children flying kites on rooftops,” Farzana said. “This happens all over Afghanistan. But Sesame Street said we could not use it because it was against their safety rules.”
Sesame Street sets great store by teaching children how to protect themselves, and did not want young Afghans encouraged to take up such a dangerous activity.
The compromise: Farzana’s team added a graphic fence to the film.
More problematic is the season’s final show, in which Farzana wants to show a father taking his 6-year-old daughter to Friday prayer. But Sesame Street in New York, with its resolutely secular message, balked.
“I told them this is not about religion,” she said. “It is about community. In Afghanistan, social life revolves around the mosque; you go there to meet old friends and make new ones; you go to feel that you are never alone.”
She got a tentative go-ahead from New York, but then ran into trouble on the Afghan side.
“So many people did not want me to show a father taking his daughter to the mosque. ‘She’s a girl!’ they said. But I answered, ‘she’s a child!’”
The issue is still not resolved, but Farzana, a woman of prodigious energy and enthusiasm, vows that the segment will be shown.
“I will have a film on Friday prayer,” she said firmly.
In the meantime, she is content with the progress she is making. Her team, she points out, has forged strong bonds, overcoming all the obstacles that Afghanistan’s post-war society puts in their way.
“Look at these two,” she said, gesturing at Zubaid and Ali. “One is Pashtun, one is Kizlbash. One speaks Pashto, the other Dari. One is from the north, the other from the south. There is so much that divides them, but they are the best of friends. Yesterday they went horseback riding together.”
Asked if Bagch-e-Simsim had helped them to get past their surface differences, Zubaid answered with a wry smile.
“Yes,” he said. “When we were out there riding, it was Zubaid, Ali, Big Bird and Grover, all together.”
Kabul-based journalist Abdul Qayum Suroush contributed to this report.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By Mirwais Harooni | Reuters – Sun, Dec 11, 2011.
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai scrapped Sunday a March 2012 deadline he had set for the closure of private security firms, giving them until September 2013 to operate in the country.
Karzai, a frequent critic of private security companies, has previously set dates for the cessation of their work in Afghanistan, but each time the deadline has been extended.
He did not say why he was giving the firms an extra 18 months, but the second half of this year has seen some of the bloodiest attacks on civilians and soldiers in the past decade.
"We agreed with the office, and we give permission for them (to carry on working) for one and a half years more, and one and a half years later (in September 2013) our minister ... will close them all," Karzai said.
The office to which he referred is an umbrella organization run by the interior ministry. From March 2012 the firms will operate within that organization, interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said; then they will be dissolved by the government deadline and their duties handed to Afghan police.
Karzai, speaking at an anti-corruption event in the capital Kabul, said the prevalence of security contractors weakened the state by providing many of the services that the public sector otherwise would.
"Another reason why the Afghan government is not able to tackle corruption is a parallel administration to the Afghan government," he said.
"Private security companies are the biggest barriers to law enforcement, and development of the interior ministry and police," the president said.
PUBLIC PROTECTION FORCE
A branch of the police, the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF), is intended to take over the work done by private security firms, a process which has begun, but some in the industry do not believe the APPF would be ready in time.
"The extension of the time frame...is not intended in any way to show support for the work carried out at present by the private security companies," said a security contractor with operations in Afghanistan, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"It is in fact an admission by President Karzai that the much heralded APPF are unable to deliver within the timeframe, both in numbers and experience," he added.
In August 2010, Karzai said he wanted private security firms -- with the exemption of firms whose guards work inside compounds used by foreign embassies, international businesses and aid and charitable organizations -- to close by the end of that year. The deadline was later pushed back to March 2012.
His government tried unsuccessfully in 2009 to register the firms, find out the amount of arms they had and where they came from, and how much money the industry was worth, an Afghan security source said.
Foreign forces in Afghanistan are in the process of handing responsibility for security over to the Afghan army and police, and by the end of 2014, most foreign combat troops, currently numbering more than 100,000, will have gone home.
Though both Karzai and his international backers want Afghan forces to take control of security, Afghanistan has said that it will not be able to afford the army and police force it needs after 2014 without international help.
Even with the presence of Western forces in Afghanistan, violence is at its worst since the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001, and last week's rare attacks on Shi'ite Muslim ceremonies have stoked fears of a sectarian conflict on top of the raging Taliban insurgency.
Bomb attacks on the Shi'ite ceremonies Tuesday killed 80 people, Karzai also said Sunday, far higher than the previously reported number, making Tuesday one of the deadliest days for civilians in ten years.
(Writing and additional reporting by Daniel Magnowski; Editing by Emma Graham-Harrison)
Interior Ministry: Afghanistan on track to close private security companies
By Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry says it’s standing by President Hamid Karzai’s decision to shut down private security companies early next year and transfer their responsibilities to a government-run guard force.
Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said Monday that all private companies will be disbanded on March 20, 2012.
Karzai last year ordered the disbanding of security companies because they were flouting Afghan laws and creating the equivalent of paramilitary forces.
Their responsibilities would be assumed by a new government-run force — called the Afghan Public Protection Force — that will guard NATO and international compounds, development projects and supply convoys.
Sediqqi denied reports that Karzai had extended the deadline by 18 months.
Gilani: Blockade Likely to Last Weeks
VOA News December 12, 2011
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has told the BBC his country will likely continue to block NATO convoys into Afghanistan for several more weeks.
The supply routes were shut down following a November 26 NATO airstrike in Pakistan that killed 24 Pakistani troops.
Mr. Gilani also did not rule out closing Pakistan's airspace to the U.S. in his interview with the BBC.
Mr. Gilani said there is a “credibility gap” between the U.S. and Pakistan. He said the two countries have to improve their relationship and have “more confidence in each other.”
The prime minister also denied a claim that the government is engaged in peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban. However, he said anyone who denounces violence is “acceptable to us.”
Late Sunday, gunmen attacked NATO oil tankers in southwest Pakistan, killing one person and setting seven tankers ablaze.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Karzai Says Foreigners Are Responsible for Corruption
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN December 11, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan blamed foreigners on Sunday for the corruption of Afghan officials and demanded that the United States extradite the former chief of the Afghan Central Bank in connection with the collapse of Kabul Bank, the country’s largest financial institution.
The former governor of the Central Bank, Qadir Fitrat, is living in Virginia. He fled Afghanistan, saying he feared for his life after he was involved in making public the massive fraud at Kabul Bank and removing its senior management.
Neither of the top bank officers nor any of the major shareholders, who include a brother of Mr. Karzai’s and a brother of the first vice president, Marshal Fahim, have been prosecuted, although all of them are still in Afghanistan.
Referring to Mr. Fitrat, Mr. Karzai said, “The government of the United States should cooperate and hand him over to us.”
“Bring Fitrat and hand him over to Afghanistan to make clear who is to blame,” he said. “But our hand can’t reach to America.”
Mr. Karzai made the remarks at an event sponsored by the United Nations to mark International Anti-Corruption Day. Afghanistan is one of the world’s most corrupt countries, tying for second worst in rankings by Transparency International, which tracks perceptions of global corruption.
Several Western diplomats and officials working with the Afghan government said they were disappointed by Mr. Karzai’s speech, in which he appeared to again shift much of the blame for corruption to foreigners. While foreigners are unquestionably involved in some of the corruption, they shared responsibility with the Afghans and were only peripherally involved in the Kabul Bank debacle.
Mr. Karzai also asked that foreigners who give aid to the country tell Afghan officials if government officials or their relatives ask for bribes. Foreign governments have helped finance anticorruption efforts, but the Afghans have often squashed high-profile corruption prosecutions of senior officials. That has been a continuing effort by NATO to comb through military contracts with Afghan businesses to detect corruption and terminate contracts in which there has been manifest abuse. That effort has gone on largely behind the scenes, so it is difficult to tell if it has had much success.
Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador, said he believed that corruption was now being taken more seriously, although progress was slow and none of the main people responsible for the Kabul Bank fraud had been prosecuted. The Afghan government lost more than $850 million in the bank’s collapse. While some of that money has been recovered — more than expected, according to several officials — the government will probably have to pay $450 million to $500 million to cover losses.
“I am told they have a series of indictments that have been kept in the pending file as they concentrate on asset recovery,” Mr. Crocker told reporters on Saturday. “Look, it’s hardly a perfect world. And it isn’t going to be for quite some time. What I look for is a trajectory: Is the line going up or down? Very cautiously and very incrementally, I see it going up. In other words, corruption is being taken more seriously at higher levels.”
“Does that mean we’ve turned the corner? We’ll see,” he added.
Mr. Karzai’s focus on Mr. Fitrat and his jab at the United States are the latest in a series of similar comments he has made about the fraud at Kabul Bank. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel last week, he also blamed the United States for Kabul Bank’s troubles, saying, “The Americans never told us about this.”
“We believed a certain embassy was trying to create financial trouble for us,” he said. “We felt the whole bank scam was created by foreign hands.” Mr. Karzai declined to be specific, but the American Embassy is the only one that has deeply consulted with the Afghan banking system.
Pakistan Denies Holding Talks with Taliban
VOA News December 12, 2011 Ayaz Gul
Islamabad - Top officials in Pakistan have denied the government is engaged in a peace dialogue with homegrown Taliban, reiterating the militants will have to lay down their arms and surrender, before such talks are held. Taliban militants also have issued conflicting statements about entering into peace negotiations with the government.
The latest reports of peace talks between the Pakistani government and local Taliban appeared in media outlets in recent days.
It all started when a key militant leader, Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, widely known as the deputy chief of the Pakistani Taliban, contacted local reporters on Saturday to claim that his group is on the verge of signing a formal peace deal with the government.
The Taliban leader also claimed that the government, as a “goodwill gesture”, has released dozens of his fighters.
But Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik has denied the claims as “unfounded”, saying neither talks with the Taliban are taking place nor are their prisoners have been released.
"Categorically, I'm telling on behalf of the government, no dialogue," said Malik.
The interior minister reiterated that the government may consider the option of engaging in peace talks with militants, provided they come down from their bases in the hills, denounce violence and abandon their weapons according to the tribal customs.
Malik says that security forces have sufficiently weakened the networks of the Pakistani Taliban and the government is determined to continue with its anti-militancy campaign.
Pakistani officials and independent analysts believe that, because of losses in the battlefield during the past year, Taliban groups operating in the northwestern tribal belt on the Afghan border are facing defections in their ranks.
On Sunday, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban contacted reporters to deny the earlier announcement by the group’s deputy chief, saying there will be no peace talks with the government unless it implements Sharia or Islamic law in the country.
Analysts like former army general Mehmood Shah believe the conflicting claims are a clear sign of splits within the Taliban movement.
"This is a fragmented sort of organization right now, Tehrik-i-Taliban has been sufficiently been weakened," he said. "Maulvi Faqir Mohammed is no longer in Pakistan. He is sitting in Afghanistan in Kunar province. He cannot come back and he has no connections with the other Taliban."
Claims of a broad Taliban retreat in Pakistan are supported by an overall decline in militant violence after years where the country witnessed hundreds of suicide and other terrorist attacks that killed thousands of people.
But the Pakistani military says fleeing Islamist insurgents fleeing have found sanctuaries in Afghanistan’s northeastern border region, where their Afghan supporters are helping them to regroup and launch deadly raids back home.
Afghan rape victim still in jail despite pardon: lawyer
AFP
An Afghan woman who was jailed for adultery after being raped remains in prison more than 10 days after President Hamid Karzai ordered her release, her lawyer said on Monday.
Gulnaz, who has already served two years in prison after a relative raped her at her home, should have been released within 48 hours and there was "no good reason" for her to remain behind bars, Kimberley Motley said.
Her case highlights the poor state of women's rights in Afghanistan, 10 years after a US-led invasion ousted the Taliban who were notorious for their harsh laws against women.
Following an outcry over her situation, Karzai called a meeting where judicial officials decided to pardon her, presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi told AFP on December 1.
But the officials also advised that Gulnaz should marry the man who attacked her, due to fears she could be in danger if released because of the stigma surrounding her attack in ultra-conservative Afghanistan.
Motley said there were no conditions set on Gulnaz's release and she would need time to decide what to do. But she also voiced concern that her client was being visited in jail by her attacker's father.
"She's still locked up and there's no good reason for it," Motley said.
"Since the president has announced that he is going to issue a pardon she continues to be visited by the attacker's father.
"That's not appropriate. It's very disturbing. He's not a blood relative."
Gulnaz has been raising the child she had by her attacker in a prison cell in Kabul.
"She's anxious to leave and to be free. She's anxious to know what's going on," Motley said.
"She was told by the committee she would be released within two days."
Officials said the order had been sent to the ministry of justice but was being processed through various offices.
"We have already sent out the pardon letter. It does take a while until the cycle and process is finished," a presidential spokesman said.
"We have not officially received the pardon order, but we know it is on its way," ministry of justice spokesman Farid Ahmad Najeebi said.
"It takes a while until it reaches us because it has to go to the president's public affairs department, and several other offices before it reaches us. But we are expecting it soon."
Violence against women in Afghanistan appears to be increasing rather than decreasing, despite billions of dollars of international aid which has poured into the country during the decade-long war.
The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission logged 1,026 cases of violence against women in the second quarter of 2011 compared with 2,700 cases for the whole of 2010.
Some 87 percent of Afghan women report having experienced physical, sexual or psychological violence or forced marriage, according to figures quoted in an October report by the charity Oxfam.
Last month, the United Nations said that a landmark law aiming to protect women against violence in Afghanistan had only been used to prosecute just over 100 cases since being enacted two years ago.
14 insurgents killed, 11 arrested in Afghanistan
KABUL, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- A total of 14 insurgents were killed and 11 others captured in three different military operations launched by Afghan and NATO-led Coalition forces over the past 24 hours, Afghan Interior Ministry said on Monday.
"Afghan National Police (ANP), Afghan National Army, NDS or intelligence agency and Coalition Forces launched three joint operations in areas surrounding Kunar and Zabul provinces. Therefore 14 armed insurgents were killed and 11 other suspects were detained by joint forces," the ministry said in a press release.
The ANP also discovered and confiscated nine AK-47 guns with 10 magazines, one PKM machine gun, four pistols, nine different types of weapons, six anti-vehicle mines, eight hand grenades, 25 heavy bullets, 62 light bullets, 70 kg Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), eight kg chemical materials and four motorbikes in the above operations, it said.
Afghan officials often use the word "insurgents" referring to Taliban. However, the insurgent group, who launched in May this year a rebel offensive against Afghan and NATO forces, has not to make comments yet.
Afghan and NATO-led coalition forces keep up pressure on insurgents all over the country as over 230 insurgents were killed and around 300 were arrested by joint forces in November alone, according the Afghan interior ministry.
Khalil, “The Taliban saw me coming”
KANDAHAR, 12 December 2011 (IRIN) - Afghanistan’s southern province of Kandahar has long seen violence between insurgents and government or international forces, and a growing number of children have become victims. Khalil - from the province’s Zhari District, who goes by only one name and says he is “about 15” - told IRIN of a bomb blast in which he lost his leg.
“I am from Kholk village in Zhari District. Around two weeks ago I went to visit my sister. When I was coming back from her house I saw three men putting something in the ground. I didn’t know they were planting a mine. When I reached the spot I tripped on a wire. Three steps later the mine exploded. This [he points to his severely injured leg] is what happened. I think the men who planted the mine were hiding somewhere very close.
“After a while, some people took me to the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] hospital, but there wasn’t much they could do so they took me to Kandahar airport for a night and finally here [to Mirwais hospital in Kandahar]. I have been here for the last 10-13 days.
“There are many cases like this in my district. Many times people lose their hands, legs, eyes and ears. I know other children and older people who have received serious injuries or were even killed.
“I blame the Taliban for this. The Taliban saw me coming towards the mine but they did not warn me. They plant a lot of mines in the area. Once they planted a mine in front of our house.
“I don’t know why we are oppressed all the time. I can’t even go to school. They closed the school down, and now the government is using our school as a checkpoint. I am only studying in a mosque. I wanted to become successful, but it doesn’t look like I can achieve that now.
“I feel pain in my injured leg. Hundreds have been victims of bombs like me. I am happy that I am still alive. The doctor said they would make a [prosthetic] leg for me. I don’t know how I will cope with one leg.”
Giving birth is a battle for survival in Afghanistan
By Jan Harvey Mon Dec 12, 2011 1:02pm EST
HERAT, Afghanistan (Reuters) - She was 15 years old, heavily pregnant and had travelled eight days on the back of a donkey to reach hospital.
Suffering from seizures and high blood pressure, she died soon after at the Herat Maternity Hospital in western Afghanistan, one of the thousands of women who die in the country each year from causes linked to pregnancy and birth.
"She came at a late stage and we couldn't help her," said Somayeh, a midwife at the hospital and herself just 21. "She was already in a coma."
Politicians, economists and activists from around the world met in Bonn this month to thrash out their vision for battered and impoverished Afghanistan. In addition to the insurgency and violence, it remains the most dangerous place in the world for a woman to have a baby, the latest World Health Organization data shows.
The figures are distressing, but still a marked improvement on the situation 10 years ago. The latest available WHO data, from 2008, shows the number of women who died giving birth had dipped to 1,400 per 100,000 live births from 1,800 in 2000.
The Ministry of Public Health says it has made maternal health a priority, supporting training schemes that have lifted the number of qualified midwives in the country to 3,000 from just 400, and expanding emergency delivery services.
"We have demonstrated that these strategies can work in Afghanistan. They can bring a change in the lives of women and families," acting public health minister Suraya Dalil says. "The challenge is to sustain those achievements."
Charities such as World Vision -- which trained Somayeh -- and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) also have in-depth programs to help new mothers across Afghanistan.
But they worry that the planned drawdown of Western troops and funds -- all foreign combat soldiers will be gone by the end of 2014, and a large chunk of aid budgets is expected to go with them -- could jeopardize the modest gains of the last decade.
Without foreign cash to bolster scarce government funds, midwife training will almost certainly drop off, while aid groups may leave if they cannot operate in safety. MSF closed its Afghan operations in 2004 after five team members were killed, although the group has since returned.
"The greatest risk at present is through aid levels dropping off precipitously," says Sarah Pickworth, a public health specialist who has worked extensively in Afghanistan.
"Without sufficient funding, there is likely to be a significantly slower pace of change. This risks losing the momentum of the tremendous gains made."
SECURITY DEADLINE
Faced with an appalling death toll among pregnant women and new mothers, communities in rural areas -- which have some of the highest mortality rates -- have mobilized to help women.
Herat's Institute of Health Sciences (IHS) has trained 256 midwives in the past seven years through schemes largely supported by charities such as World Vision. Many of its students have been deliberately selected from remote villages.
But if Herat is hit by violence, the families are likely to take their daughters out of school and take them home to safety.
A deterioration in the security situation would likely hit pregnant women as well as midwife training.
Transporting women in labor from rural areas to clinics is already a tough proposition in a country where few can afford cars and roads are scarce and badly maintained. It will become still harder if gunmen have freer rein to target travelers.
The re-emergence in political life of groups like the Taliban, which banned education and the free movement of women, could also have a devastating effect on death rates.
Under their influence, a generation of potential female midwives and doctors has already been lost, midwife trainers say. This is particularly devastating in a country where male doctors treating women is still largely taboo.
PLUGGING THE GAP
But as big a problem for Afghanistan is money. The Afghan government is facing a $7 billion hole in its budget after 2014, which it will need to pay for security and other services. It is relying on foreign help to plug that gap.
The grinding poverty in which many women live means hygiene and nutrition are often poor. A recent survey showed only around half of Afghans have access to clean drinking water, and only a fifth use approved toilet and sanitation facilities.
The IHS' deputy director, Dr Ehrary, says money is a major stumbling block to completing the five further rounds of midwife training he calculates are needed to provide a base number of healthcare professionals in the region.
"Training is not difficult, but finding funds is difficult," he says. The institute is struggling to train this year's government-recommended quota of midwives to the right standard.
"We told the ministry we could not run the class this year because we have only three teachers and we cannot meet their standards," he added. "They have now been funded. We found another donor, (German humanitarian group) Cap Anamur."
If meetings like the Bonn conference fail to deliver a plan for action on poverty and some kind of roadmap to stability, the fragile gains in maternal healthcare could easily slip away.
In rural Herat, villagers say they are determined to stop that happening. After decades of upheaval and war, they are tired of death and violence and want a safer future.
"Everybody hopes there will be no more war in Afghanistan," says one senior shura, or village council, member from rural Herat. "The first thing we want is safety, the second is to improve people's health. We need doctors -- we need midwives.
Occupying Kandahar
Two members of a different 1% on Afghanistan, politics and privilege.
Wall Street Journal By ANNE JOLIS
Zhari District, Afghanistan - U.S. service-members make up less than 1% of the American population. But the occupiers of Afghanistan do have a few, superficial similarities with the self-described "99%" occupying Western financial districts: Their endeavors both involve tents and have gone on far longer than first expected; both elicit mixed reactions in the areas they occupy; and both at times struggle to explain what their occupations are meant to accomplish.
Otherwise, the soldiers here in southern Afghanistan could not pose a starker contrast to their agitating peers back home. Take Spc. Anthony Webster, 32, of Portland, Maine and Sgt. Matthew Montville, 24, of Worcester, Massachusetts. They serve as their command group's security detachment in the Fourth Squadron, Fourth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, First Infantry Division—the "Pale Riders."
In late November, straightening their tent after a day of patrols, Sgt. Montville recalls taking leave in October to find himself "appalled" at the Occupy Boston crowd. The impish blond, who enlisted at 17 because "the idea of college never excited" him, observes: "Most of those 'Occupy' people wouldn't know hard work if it jumped up and punched them in the throat."
Not so the Pale Riders. They've had a particularly wretched war even for a particularly wretched part of Afghanistan, which has the ignoble distinction of being the Taliban's birthplace. Since arriving with 517 soldiers in late February, the Pale Riders have buried seven and been awarded 134 living Purple Hearts. ***
After 2001, the U.S. largely left this stretch of the Arghandab River valley to Afghan forces. By 2006 the Taliban was resurgent, and a Canadian-led contingent was sent to level entire neighborhoods here. But they never had the manpower to hold the area and by 2007 had effectively retreated, leaving the valley to de-facto Taliban control once again.
President Obama's surge increased U.S. troop presence here by roughly six-fold. The Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division spent much of 2010 redoing the Canadians' bloody work. When the Third Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division arrived with its Pale Rider attachment, they expanded the 101st's so-called security bubble while consolidating those gains with local outreach.
"We came at the beginning of the fighting season, and there was no bulls— about it," says Spc. Webster, a former construction and private-security entrepreneur whose tattoos cover about 85% of his body. "When it started, it started."
It hasn't really stopped. On a routine patrol a week before I met them, the Pale Riders entered a house that turned out to be rigged with explosives. The blast brought the house down on top of two of them, who survived but were critically injured. "I've never heard screaming like that in my life," says Sgt. Montville.
"You can't justify any of the losses," says Spc. Webster after a long pause. "But we're here to do our jobs, we know what we signed up for. The mission is what we live by, that's priority No. 1."
Sgt. Montville summarizes: "We continued the push and at the same time started talking to the locals to find out what they need from us and actually start to implement it—roads, schools, clinics."
"Anyone can go in and blow a place up. We're trying to do the right thing," he adds. "I'm proud of what we've done."
"We see more kids now, more of their women out, people able to farm their land—we've accomplished a lot in a short period of time," adds Spc. Webster. But "it's frustrating, too. Ultimately it's up to the Afghans. We go to these shuras [meetings of local elders] and we hear them arguing about dumb stuff."
Earlier on the day of our interview we patrolled through the neighborhood of Charkusa, where only weeks before the Pale Riders had been taking regular fire from mazes of grape walls and marijuana gardens. Now Charkusa is quiet, though nearly deserted. Over tea with several elders who had fled during the Canadian offensive, the old men acknowledged that security had improved and said they're prepared to work with their imperfect government, return home and fill the vacuum that insurgents would be happy to re-occupy. But some remained focused on what the Americans haven't done for them lately: They want their mud huts rebuilt and this time with doors and windows; they want their irrigation canals repaired and reinforced with brick or cement; they want their relocation expenses covered. Pale Rider Commander, Lt. Col. Michael Katona of Michigan, listened patiently, his soldiers fanned around us, nodding: "We can do all that."
Their aim is to do so by the end of the year, when the Pale Riders will start to leave. But "it's their community, at some point they need to own it," Spc. Webster says. "If not, our efforts will have been futile. I'd like to believe they weren't, I know my friends who have passed away, their families—I know they hope they weren't."
Another crucial variable over which the Pale Riders have little control is the development of the Afghan National Army, which Spc. Montville says is "definitely improving. But for a lot of them, it's their first time having their own money, so they have cell phones and they want to hang out and talk on them, weapons flopping around—sometimes they smoke hashish on patrol."
Like most of the U.S. soldiers with whom I spoke, Spc. Webster and Sgt. Montville have taken it upon themselves to informally train the ANA they work with—though ostensibly they've already received NATO training.
Sgt. Montville tells me that, for instance, their ANA counterparts were recently issued .50-caliber machine guns. But "a lot of them didn't know how to clean them, take them apart—they just didn't know what they were doing. So instead of us getting shot in the back accidentally, [Spc.] Webster and I went over to the ANA side [of Forward Operating Base Pasab] and brought our .50-cals over and had them bring theirs out. We showed them how to take them apart, clean them, make sure they work right, put them back together—basic soldiering skills. . . . Eventually they do start taking stuff seriously."
He flicks on his laptop to show me a recent video of U.S. soldiers defusing an IED set against a grape wall. While everyone else waits, frozen, an ANA soldier wanders into the frame, ignoring the others' warning shouts, steps on the pressure-point and loses half his face and a foot. "Luckily, they're getting better."
"Yeah, but that really is how undisciplined some of these guys are. It's a liability every time we go out with them," adds Spc. Webster.
Both agree that Washington's 2014 combat-withdrawal date doesn't make their work easier.
"It's more pressure on us and especially our commanders, to try and get everything in place to make sure it doesn't all fall apart once we leave, to make sure these people aren't bullied all over again," explains Spc. Webster. He says even after 2014, he expects the U.S. and its allies to keep a significant overwatch presence in Afghanistan for a long time, "for the safety of the whole world. If not, [Afghanistan] would go to hell again."
But he also sees their work now as more humanitarian than U.S. defense. Which is why the pre-set timeline is "the right thing to do. We've got a lot of problems at home. How many more lives and money can we really afford to lose here?"
Spc. Montville, on the other hand, characterizes the timeline as "a nice goal," but also akin to telling the insurgents "'Hey, guess what guys, we're leaving in 2014, you just got to hold on till then. Then you can come back and do whatever the f— you want.'"
Unlike Spc. Webster, Sgt. Montville claims "honestly, I don't care. Once I go home, I'm going to try my best not to think about this place and some of the s— I've seen."
Why? "Because I'm a spoiled American."
Turns out that after nine months dodging rockets and IEDs, without alcohol, flush toilets or their respective wife and girlfriend, Spc. Webster and Sgt. Montville's tour has left them preoccupied with how good they have it.
"If you grew up in a mud hut, went to school for maybe one or two years, you might not be the smartest dude either, but you'd be a hard worker," says Sgt. Montville. "You see kids here hauling three, four times their body weight, going 15 miles an hour on some [beaten-up] one-speed bicycle. I absolutely have a lot of respect for them. You've got to." ***
Which brings us back to America's "occupiers." "Yeah okay, a lot of them have jobs, they work a crappy nine-to-five, they've got student loans," concedes Sgt. Montville. "And I have a car payment. I'm not getting financial aid for my cell-phone bill. Everyone has to work. Deal with it."
Of their own unenviable salaries, Spc. Webster shrugs: "No one's ever going to get paid enough to do this job. That's not why we do it."
"I love what I do, I can't see myself doing anything else," adds Sgt. Montville. But when Washington politicos were threatening earlier this year to suspend military pay, his initial reaction was: "They train us to kill people, to drive tanks, use explosives, fight in the dark, to engage in hand-to-hand-combat; they give us all these guns, all this cool gear to do this—and then they're going to take our pay? Are they stupid?"
Memo to the humorless: He's kidding. Upon hearing of the budget brinkmanship, "a lot of guys here said '[Forget] it then, I'm not going to go out on patrol!' But I don't know anyone who would actually do that."
And while neither voted for the current President, "[Mr.] Obama is my boss," says Spc. Webster. "If he sends us orders tomorrow to go to Pakistan, Iran, wherever—done. I'd pack my bags and go."
As the U.S. drawdown proceeds, Spc. Webster predicts, safely, that 2012 campaigns will bring claims of "'I did this, I brought the troops home.'" He laughs and lets Sgt. Montville finish his thought: "We're the ones watching each others' backs out here. The ones who survive—we'll have brought ourselves home."
Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
A counterinsurgency behind the burka
Ashley White was the first female soldier to die in combat as part of an elite cultural support team sent to Afghanistan to engage women and gather information unavailable to male troops.
Los Angles Times By David Zucchino December 12, 2011
Ft. Bragg, N.C. - After a U.S. special operations force secured a compound outside Kandahar recently, Army 1st Lt. Ashley White was sent in to search and interview Afghan women. Just after she arrived, a homemade bomb exploded, killing her and two Army Rangers.
White, 24, was the first female soldier to die in combat while performing a unique new role for the Army. She was part of an elite cultural support team, first sent to Afghanistan in January in an attempt to overcome daunting cultural barriers in the deeply conservative Islamic country.
Women like White perform duties that no man can attempt without gravely offending or enraging Afghans. They frisk and question Afghan women, many of them covered head to toe in burkas. They sometimes find hidden weapons or explosives — and occasionally unmask insurgents dressed as women. Trained in Afghan culture and customs, they build relationships with women while also ferreting out information unavailable to male troops.
Women and children, who make up more than 70% of Afghanistan's population, are hidden and fiercely shielded by men whenever male outsiders — particularly American troops — approach villages. A male soldier attempting to touch, or even speak to, an Afghan woman would trigger deep resentment. The U.S. counterinsurgency effort is predicated on winning the trust and support of ordinary Afghans.
"Women tell us stuff they aren't going to say if there's a male around," said Sgt. Christine Baldwin, who served in Afghanistan from January to August in the first cultural support class of 31 graduates.
Baldwin and her female partner, a captain, helped persuade Afghan elders to permit a rare female-only shura, or meeting, in a village in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan — but only after searching the women first.
Baldwin and her partner built rapport and trust among local women, making inroads for a Special Forces team that had never previously dealt with women. In one case, Baldwin said, an Afghan woman pointed out an insurgent in the village. Others provided valuable information or insights.
"Without these soldiers, we couldn't interact with more than half the Afghan population,'' said Lt. Col. Tom Bryant, a spokesman for special operations forces at Ft. Bragg, where the female soldiers are selected and trained.
White, a member of the North Carolina National Guard who volunteered for active duty to try out for the teams, was one of 34 women sent to Afghanistan after graduating with the second cultural support class. Assigned to an Army Ranger unit, she was killed Oct. 22.
"Her efforts highlight both the importance and necessity of women on the battlefield today," the U.S. Army Special Operations Command said in a statement announcing White's death.
Before cultural support teams were created last year, units simply borrowed women from regular units for certain missions. But the ad hoc system sometimes left units — including special operations forces that conduct controversial night raids — unable to deal effectively with Afghan women and children.
Senior commanders belatedly recognized the shortcomings two years ago and began pushing for specially trained female volunteers to accompany special operations forces on missions for "gender appropriate engagement," as the military calls it.
"The need to engage the female population for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan has been underestimated for the better part of 10 years," said Maj. Patrick McCarthy, who runs the assessment process at Ft. Bragg that selects volunteers to train for the teams.
Only half the women who apply are selected during the five-day assessment process, McCarthy said. They must pass a physical training test, then undergo six-week sessions that include "stressors'' designed to simulate the demands imposed on special operations forces in war zones.
McCarthy looks for smart, physically fit candidates who can make quick decisions. "They go through some very fast-paced intellectual exercises," he said.
In addition to instruction on Afghan culture and mores, trainees learn greetings and other basic phrases in Dari, Pashto and Uzbek. In all, 82 women graduates have been sent to Afghanistan, and nearly 50 are assigned to special operations units there now. The Army's goal is to keep at least 25 two-woman teams in Afghanistan.
The women do not engage directly in combat, but instead follow special operations units after areas are secured, Bryant said. Altogether, 138 women have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of them killed by homemade bombs.
Baldwin, 34, a seven-and-a-half-year Army veteran, said Afghan women were often wary or intimidated when she arrived wearing a helmet and body armor. "It is a scary posture, the way we look to them," she said.
She removes her helmet and covers her hair with a scarf, in deference to Afghan customs. Then she introduces herself as "Christine," and asks women about their children, local schools and clinics, and what they'd like to see improved in their village.
Baldwin hands out a cellphone number for her female Afghan interpreter and asks the women to call with any information they'd like to share. The female soldiers aren't intelligence officers, but they often collect useful information that is passed on to intelligence specialists.
"No matter how good the rapport in an area, male soldiers are still going to miss out on what 50% of the population has to offer," Baldwin said.
Afghan men sometimes feel shame sharing certain information with male soldiers, Baldwin said, but have no such qualms providing the same information to women.
"We're kind of a third gender," she said. "The men don't worry about looking weak in front of us."
Baldwin was on her first tour in Afghanistan last year when the Army asked for volunteers for the new cultural teams. "I knew that was my calling," she said. "I thought it was the coolest thing ever."
White, of Alliance, Ohio, arrived in Afghanistan in August. She was physically fit and "very astute and well-grounded in global affairs," McCarthy said.
A North Carolina National Guard Special Forces sergeant first class who trained White said she was in the top 1% of women he trained. The sergeant asked not to be identified because of security concerns.
"I threw stuff at her that the guys in some of our units go through, and she was able to go above and beyond the standard," the sergeant said.
"This kind of job takes somebody special — and Lt. White really was special," he said. "What she did was groundbreaking."
The Afghanistan schoolgirl who became a symbol of Kabul's suicide bombing
Wailing and surrounded by the dead, the image of Tarana Akbari distraught in a bloodstained dress symbolised the horror of Kabul's suicide bombing when it appeared on front pages across the world last week.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 11 Dec 2011
Kabul - The schoolgirl was photographed in hysterics with bodies lying at her feet moments after a bomber had killed more than 70 Shia worshippers gathered outside a shrine to mark a holy day.
The 12-year-old lost seven relatives and had another eight wounded as the attacker's suicide vest tore through the festival crowd, her family has now disclosed.
Among the dead was her 11-year-old brother, Shoaib, and both her other siblings were grievously wounded, her father told the Daily Telegraph as she was released from hospital.
Fifteen members of her extended family attended the festival in the Murad Khane area of the Afghan capital and all were killed or wounded.
"I have lost my brother, I have lost my cousins, I have lost my aunt," Tarana said, leaving the city's Wazir Akbar Khan hospital where she had been treated with scores of other casualties.
In her first interview, Tarana said she thought she had seen the suicide bomber work his way through the crowd towards the shrine gates and try to get inside before he detonated.
"There was a young man who asked an elder at the shrine to open the gates," she said. "Soon after I saw him explode. Then I just saw lots of dead people."
Images of her amid the carnage, dressed in vivid green to mark the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson, appeared in the Daily Telegraph and made the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
She suffered shrapnel wounds to her shins, arm and stomach in the blast and was only told on Saturday that her brother had died.
Her father, Ahmad Shah Akbari, now keeps one photograph of the devastation in his jacket pocket and said many of those pictured lying slumped and bloodied at his daughter's feet were their relatives.
"I have lost a son and I still have two other children in hospital. I was across town when it happened. They called me on my mobile and told me there had been an explosion. When I arrived, all I could see was injured and dead."
"Tarana is still in a lot of pain and my other children are lying in bed with tubes in them," he said.
Hamid Karzai, the Afghanistan president, said the suicide attack at the Abul Fazl shrine on the holy day of Ashura was unprecedented and it raised fears of a new sectarian dimension to the violence in Afghanistan.
The attack has been claimed by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Al-Alami, an obscure Pakistan-based militant group with a history of targeting Shia Muslims.
The Afghan president heightened tensions with neighbouring Pakistan by threatening to pursue the attack with Islamabad.
Mr Akbari, a 37-year-old market porter, said: "Everyone says it was Pakistan – some party or organisation there.
"We don't know why they did this. They were poor people, what was their crime?"
The death toll from the December 6 blasts was still rising, a spokesman for the Ministry of Public health said. Victims had been taken to hospitals across the city and some had died at home without reaching medical treatment. At least five children and 10 women were among the dead and more than 100 people were wounded. Mr Karzai said on Sunday that the death toll from both attacks was now at least 80.
Since the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan has been largely spared the Sunni-Shia targeted sectarian killing which has blighted Pakistan and Iraq.
Shia leaders have appealed for calm since last week's blast amid fears the attack was a deliberate provocation to open a rift between the groups and further destabilise the country.
Ryan Crocker, American ambassador, said at the weekend: "I do not see this turning into a sectarian conflict just looking at the reactions on the part of the Shia leadership, calling for calm."
"I am struck by the reaction – the Afghan reaction – which is what makes me think that whoever the architects were – they don't have much Afghan support," he said.
Meanwhile, Mr Karzai blamed foreign donors who have poured billions of pounds into his country for some of the rampant corruption which is hobbling international attempts at reconstruction.
He told an anti-corruption conference that "our foreigner colleagues have not only been uncooperative but sometimes they have created obstacles".
"One urgent way to avoid corruption in Afghanistan is for our foreign friends and co-workers to stop giving contracts to government officials and their family members," he continued.
The chronic graft found at all levels of the Afghan state has been blamed for siphoning off billions and also driving Afghans away from the government and toward the Taliban-led insurgency.
Mr Karzai has consistently refused to prosecute power brokers and members of his inner circle accused of corruption.
U.S. Commander Backs Afghan Militia Program
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM DECEMBER 12, 2011
KABUL - The commander of U.S. Special Operations Forces has backed the expansion of a local militia program in Afghanistan criticized by human-rights groups, saying it has been successful in securing remote parts of the country.
Adm. William McRaven, who gave a joint interview to three news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, on a weekend visit to Kabul, also said the number of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan could expand in the coming year while conventional forces withdraw.
Adm. McRaven, a former Navy SEAL who until recently headed the secretive Joint Special Operations Command overseeing many kill-and-capture missions, masterminded the U.S. raid into Pakistan that killed Osama Bin Laden in May.
He arrived in Afghanistan on his first official trip here since being promoted to commander of U.S. Special Operations Command in August to assess the progress of the so-called Afghan Local Police program and to examine the future role of his command as coalition forces withdraw.
Before heading out to visit three of the ALP sites, Adm. McRaven said the local forces have an important role to play, especially in places where the coalition presence is sparse.
"It's a good program that I think is well received now by the Afghans and certainly by the locals," Adm. McRaven said in the interview on a Special Operations base in Kabul. "My instinct is that we'll probably increase it, but that remains to be seen."
Even as the U.S. is pulling out some 33,000 conventional troops by September, Adm. McRaven said the Pentagon might at the same time expand the numbers of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan. "There is an opportunity for us to grow somewhat in the near term," he said. "It remains to be seen what that would look like."
Coalition troops, mostly from the Special Operations community, and the Afghan government have trained nearly 10,000 members of the ALP in more than 55 districts across Afghanistan since the controversial program began last year.
While President Hamid Karzai initially opposed the plan, fearing it would create uncontrollable militias, then-coalition commander Gen. David Petraeus aggressively championed the ALP project, who likened these units to "a community watch with AK-47s."
Mr. Karzai wasn't able to be reached for comment on Sunday.
Under the program, Afghan villagers receive three weeks of training and deploy, usually under U.S. Special Operations forces' supervision, to protect their home turf against the Taliban.
The U.S. military is preparing to triple the number of local fighters in the program over the next two years, with 30,000 members set to fan out in 99 districts, said Col. John Evans, deputy commanding officer of Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command in Afghanistan.
Initially, the ALP fighters—whose pay is lower than that of regular Afghan policemen and soldiers—were supposed to be absorbed by the Afghan National Police. But the U.S. and the Afghan government are now considering expanding the program and retaining the ALP as a longer-term program, Col. Evans said.
"It is supposed to expire in 2015," he said. "Right now we're talking about and discussing [if there should] be an enduring presence beyond that."
Human-rights groups have expressed concerns about expanding the reach and scope of what is essentially a militia force whose members have been accused of extorting local residents, killing civilians, raping women and forcibly recruiting children.
In a report presented to the U.S.-led military last week, the Norwegian Refugee Council and the Liaison Office, a Kabul-based research group, warned that ALP abuses are prompting a growing number of Afghans to flee their communities.
The paper reported a 51% rise in the number of Afghans forced from their homes by the conflict in the first 10 months of the year.
The ALP militias, the report concluded, were compounding insurgent threats.
"Poorly disciplined units are failing to provide protection for civilians," said Dan Tyler, the Norwegian Refugee Council's protection and advocacy adviser in Afghanistan. "Weak vetting mechanisms, loose command structures, poor training and a lack of oversight and accountability all appear to be contributing to human-rights violations."
Along with the independent Norwegian aid group, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam have also raised significant concerns about poor oversight of the ALP.
"The fact that displacement is up so much and the ALP is looking like a factor should cause some serious soul-searching before anyone goes ahead with expanding and extending the program," said Heather Barr, the Human Rights Watch researcher in Afghanistan.
Adm. McRaven said he was aware of the concerns, but said he has seen no solid reports to indicate that the Afghan forces working with U.S. mentors had created significant problems.
"I've heard anecdotes about that, but I'm not sure I've seen it on the ground," he said.
The Afghan Interior Ministry, which oversees the ALP, didn't responded to repeated requests for comment on Sunday.
Col. Evans said the military has a system of checks and balances that are meant to weed out unwanted fighters by working with local elders and taking complaints to conventional Afghan police forces when issues arise.
But Ms. Barr said the oversight system has failed in some parts of the country, leaving Afghans with nowhere to take their concerns.
Adm. McRaven said he had no new information to share on who might have planned last week's deadly attacks on Shiite pilgrims in Afghanistan.
Mr. Karzai said on Sunday that 80 people were killed in the attacks that hit Kabul and northern Afghanistan's largest city in the north, Mazar-e-Sharif. Officials initially said 60 people were killed in the two blasts.
Over the weekend, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan cast doubts on the claim of responsibility made in calls to news outlets by men claiming to represent Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the anti-Shiite group based in Pakistan.
"They have not shown a tremendous capability," said Amb. Ryan Crocker, who served as America's top diplomat in Pakistan from 2004 to 2007. "Either they developed a stunning new capability or, again, you've got a consortium at work."
Mr. Crocker said he was encouraged by the reaction of Afghan leaders, including Mr. Karzai, who immediately called for calm between the country's Sunni majority and its Shiite minority.
"I do not see this turning into a sectarian conflict," he said.
In an unusual step, the Taliban issued a special statement on Sunday that once again condemned the attack and accused America of orchestrating the blasts in an attempt to cover up for its military failings.
"Nobody should be allowed to reach their sinister goals by creating rifts and divisions amongst our united people on the basis of religion, race, language or region," the Taliban said after holding a special high-level meeting to discuss the attack.
U.S. commander who led bin Laden operation defends unpopular night raids in Afghanistan
Associated Press December 11, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S. Special Operations commander who directed the operation that killed Osama bin Laden defended the unpopular night raids on homes in Afghanistan that have provoked the fury of the country’s president and held up a security agreement with the United States.
Adm. William McRaven also backed a training program his troops run for village police forces — an initiative that some fear could spawn militias and new violence.
McRaven, who leads the U.S. Special Operations Command, said in a rare interview with journalists late Saturday that the U.S. understands Afghan concerns about night raids and has allowed its partner Afghan forces to take the lead in those and other operations.
“At the end of the end of the day I think you would find that night raids are very valuable when you are trying to get someone who is trying to hide,” McRaven said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called for an end to the raids, in which troops borne in by helicopter search homes, because he says the forces conducting them treat too many civilians as if they were insurgents and violate privacy in an intensely conservative society. The deaths they cause — although relatively few in number — have made them unpopular with many Afghans.
Afghan citizens, Karzai says, cannot feel secure if they think armed troops might burst into their homes in the middle of the night.
McRaven, who would not answer questions about the May raid that killed bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan, said the United States was discussing the future of night raids with Afghanistan’s government.
Around 2,800 raids against insurgent targets have been carried out in the past year, he said. But in 85 percent of them, the forces involved never fired a shot.
“In that time the civilians casualties were less than 1 percent. The number of times we engaged was about 15 percent,” he said.
Karzai convened a traditional national assembly known as a Loya Jirga last month that stopped short of demanding a complete end to night raids. Instead, it asked that they be led and controlled by Afghan security forces — a demand that the U.S. says it has met.
Still, the issue has held up the signing of a security agreement with the U.S. that could keep thousands of American troops here for years beyond the 2014 deadline for most international forces to leave. Remaining U.S. troops would train Afghan forces and assist with counterterrorism operations.
The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, told reporters Saturday the raids will be a topic of debate when the two countries return to the negotiating table to discuss their strategic partnership.
McRaven’s command is involved in training Afghan commandos — 8,200 so far — as well as special forces and local police known as ALPs.
U.S. special forces have been training the village-level fighting forces in hopes of countering the Taliban insurgency — a concept similar to the one that turned the tide of the Iraq war.
But the ALP initiative has stirred worries it will legitimize existing private militias or create new ones. Warlord-led militias ravaged Afghanistan in the 1990s, opening the way for the Taliban takeover.
McRaven said he had not seen any evidence that the groups were fueling local rivalries. He said there was no decision to increase the number of ALP’s, although “my instinct is yes to increase, but that remains to be seen.”
The Afghan government has agreed to have about 30,000 of the ALP forces trained by the end of 2013. They will be located across 99 districts around the country at a cost of about $170 million a year. The forces are not meant to replace the Afghan army or police, but complement them in some areas.
“The real advantage for the ALP ... is the ability for Afghans from their local districts to protect their own homes,” McRaven said.
General: Iran won't return U.S. drone it claims to have
By the CNN Wire Staff December 11, 2011
Iran will not return an unmanned American stealth plane that it says it has, one of Iran's top generals said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency on Sunday.
"No nation welcomes other countries' spy drones in its territory, and no one sends back the spying equipment and its information back to the country of origin," said Gen. Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the Armed Forces.
"It makes no difference where this drone originated and which group or country sent it to invade our air space," Salami said. "This was an act of invasion and belligerence."
American officials have not confirmed that the drone in a video released Thursday is a U.S. aircraft, but Pentagon spokesman George Little has said that an American drone is missing and had not been recovered as of Thursday.
But two U.S. officials confirmed to CNN on Tuesday that the missing drone was part of a CIA reconnaissance mission that involved both the intelligence community and military personnel stationed in Afghanistan.
Iran's official Iran Republic News Agency said the country's armed forces had downed the drone near Kashmar, some 225 kilometers (140 miles) from the border with Afghanistan on December 4.
Salami said downing the plane was "very valuable for us" and "a victory for us and a defeat for our enemies," IRNA reported.
He also claimed Iran had downed other drones earlier but had not announced those instances it because they were not as important.
Iranian TV aired images Thursday of what it says is the drone, an apparently intact RQ-170 drone propped on a pedestal and triumphantly displayed.
There was disagreement among Pentagon officials about whether the drone in the video was real. Military and intelligence officials were analyzing the Iran television footage.
One U.S. official said the United States can't be certain it's the real stealth drone, because U.S. personnel don't have access to it. But he added there's no reason to think it's a fake.
However, a second senior U.S. military official said that a big question is to how the drone could have remained virtually intact given the high altitude it is believed to have crashed from.
The condition of the drone in the video suggests it was not shot down but suffered a system failure, aviation analyst Bill Sweetman said. There are no burn marks from a fire, no holes and no outward damage. Sweetman noticed a dent along the leading edge but doesn't know what that means.
"It's fairly clear here from the pictures that the outer wings have been separated. The question is, did that happen in the accident or (did they take) them off to move the aircraft?" Sweetman asked.
The CIA and the Pentagon would not comment on the video shown Thursday.
A senior U.S. official with direct access to the assessment about what happened to the unmanned aircraft said it was tasked to fly over western Afghanistan and look for insurgent activity, with no directive either to fly into Iran or spy on Iran from Afghan airspace.
A U.S. satellite quickly pinpointed the downed drone, which apparently sustained significant damage, the senior official said.
Iran's U.N. ambassador said in a letter Thursday that the drone flew 250 kilometers (150 miles) into Iranian territory "to the northern region of the city of Tabas."
The letter from Ambasador Mohammad Khazaee to U.N. Secretary-Genera Ban Ki-moon and the heads of the General Assembly and Security Council said the drone "faced prompt and forceful action" by the armed forces.
"My government emphasizes that this blatant and unprovoked air violation by the United States government is tantamount to an act of hostility against the Islamic Republic of Iran in clear contravention of international law, in particular, the basic tenets of the United Nations Charter," Khazaee's letter said.
He called for U.N. condemnation of U.S. "acts of aggression," as well as "clear and effective measures to be taken to put an end to these dangerous and unlawful acts in line with the United Nations' responsibilities to maintain international and regional peace and security."
Afghan students learn to read with folk tales
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Monday, December 12, 2011
Kabul - Marzia Mohseni rose from her desk and walked to the front of the classroom. At 18, she was taller, and older, than the other girls, and she spoke in a shy whisper. One had to strain to hear as she opened the book, turned to the first page and started to read.
“Once upon a time, in a country far away, there was a town, and in the town there was a chicken,” she began. “And he was a very silly chicken indeed.”
In Afghanistan, more than half of the population cannot read, and for most of her life, neither could Marzia. Decades of war and a Taliban regime that forced girls out of the classroom wrecked the school system. But there were a wealth of folk tales passed down for generations that described Afghan village life — an oral storytelling tradition populated by talking animals, farmers’ wives, a woman who mistook an eagle for a pigeon and a mischievous chicken who convinced the townspeople that the earth just might swallow them alive.
“Only silly people would listen to a chicken in the first place,” Marzia read. “You think a chicken knows something just because he can talk?”
The story of how these legends became books and are helping more than a million Afghan children to read is an unlikely tale of its own. It is set on three continents and spans nearly five decades, even before Afghanistan became synonymous with war.
In 1963, Sally Mallam, a British woman then about Marzia’s age, met Idries Shah, an author and educator of Afghan heritage who lived in England and published Sufi classics in translation. Shah had collected hundreds of folk tales from Afghanistan and the surrounding region that he would recount to family and friends.
“He was an amazing story¬teller,” Mallam recalled. “These stories seemed an integral part of his exuberant recollections about Afghanistan, the land he loved, where he often recalled the fruit trees grew the best fruit, where the mountains, flowers and valleys were the most beautiful and where the men, women and children were brave, honorable and wise — or were learning to be so.”
Mallam began her own career in publishing, which eventually led her to the United States, where she worked for a nonprofit organization that published educational books. In October 1996, a month before Shah died, Mallam returned to London to visit him. Although he had published dozens of books by that time, she had not seen the children’s stories in print.
“He said he hadn’t done anything with them, and I got all fired up,” Mallam said. “I came home with a manuscript.”
Nothing but work
For Marzia, and her younger sister Bilkees, books played no part in their childhoods in Kabul. Because their mother had died of tuberculosis, and their father was too ill to work, by the age of 6 they began to apprentice as carpet weavers to support their family. In one month, working day and night at home, each sister could produce four yards of carpet and earn $100. Even in the public schools, where textbooks were free, the students had to pay for pens and paper, an expense the sisters could not afford, they said.
“We were working so hard — from morning until evening. Every night, I tried to work later and later to finish more carpets,” Bilkees said. “I never thought I’d do anything else besides make carpets.”
Bilkees recalled an embarrassing attempt to locate a hospital room for her grandmother that ended in failure as neither could read any of the signs. When wedding invitations came to the house, the sisters stared at the meaningless symbols. They ignored the instructional diagrams for the carpets, which they could not decipher.
“I thought I would be illiterate forever,” Marzia said.
Giving them ‘a treasure’
By 1998, Hoopoe Books, a division of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, where Mallam was director of publishing, published the first four of Shah’s children’s stories in the United States. Mallam, who lives in Los Altos, Calif., chose Bay Area artists to illustrate the stories. The characters wore Afghan clothes — men in turbans, women in head scarves — and the artists researched the look of Afghan buildings and landscapes.
After several years, Mallam set out to “repatriate” the books to Afghanistan. She found a printer and had the books translated into the two main Afghan languages, Dari and Pashto, and partnered with an Afghan nonprofit, Khatiz Organization for Rehabilitation (KOR), as well as the Ministry of Education, to have them distributed to schools and orphanages.
“If children have nothing, and you want children to learn and value books, you have to give them a gift. You have to give them a treasure. And these stories are a treasure,” she said.
The U.S. Embassy took an interest in the project last year and gave a $4.5 million grant that vastly expanded it. About 1 million books featuring six different stories have been handed out. Two more titles and 1.5 million more books are to come.
Many of NATO’s units in the country that focus on development work have helped distribute the books to local schools, including in Taliban strongholds of southern Afghanistan.
There were unusual challenges that came with promoting books in a largely illiterate country. To get parents interested in reading the stories to their children, the U.S. Embassy funded radio programs that broadcast the stories, with verbal cues to tell the parents when to turn the page. Classes help teachers learn how to present and discuss the material, down to simple tips such as holding the books open toward the students, so they can see the pictures as they read.
“The students enjoy the stories, and they are especially interested in the animals,” said Habiba Niazi, a kindergarten teacher who took one such training class. “They want to know what kind of animals they are, what they eat, where they live.”
Top of their class
From a relative, Marzia and Bilkees learned of the Aschiana Foundation, an organization in Kabul that runs schools for street kids and poor children who have fallen behind their grade. The education was free, and the school handed out food rations to students. Last year, their step-mother, who had started selling baked goods out of their home, allowed them to attend.
To get there each day, they wake at dawn, walk for half an hour to a main road, then spend an hour on the bus. In the evenings, they weave pillowcases and tablecloths for extra money.
“Some students come here knowing a little bit. These two sisters, they knew nothing,” said one of their teachers. “But Marzia’s very intelligent. She now has the first position in the class. And her sister is second.”
As they learned to read, they pored over Idries Shah’s stories, at school and at home. They read billboards, signs at the pharmacy, magazines, wedding invitations. Both want to stay in school as long as possible. Marzia said she wants to become a doctor; Bilkees, a teacher.
“Now that I can read and write, it makes me feel amazed,” Marzia said. “It was difficult, but I was very, very interested to learn.”
Afghan Sportswomen Fight for More Than Medals
Despite numerous hurdles, women are picking up increasing numbers of wins in international sporting competitions.
IWPR By Khan Mohammad Danishju 11 Dec 11
Afghanistan - Kabul’s stadium became a global symbol of Taleban brutality in the 1990s, when it was the scene of public executions and amputations. More than a decade on, the stadium is being for sporting purposes – and by women as well as men.
When IWPR visited recently, 24-year-old Salma Husseini was coaching a class of 80 girls in taekwondo, who followed her every move.
Despite severe shortages of sports facilities and equipment, and traditional restrictions on women playing a role in public life, Afghanistan’s female athletes have brought home some 100 gold, silver and bronze medals from regional and international tournaments in the last two years.
Husseini first began studying taekwondo, a Korean martial art, at the age of 14 in Iran, where she was living as a refugee. She has won bronze and silver medals outside Afghanistan, but has she stopped competing because she is now a coach for the national Olympic team.
While success in sports may be a reflection of broader improvements in the position of women, Husseini says her protégés get little credit for their achievements and are ignored by Afghan media.
“When the men win medals, the media promote them a lot, but they don’t do the same for the girls,” she said. “I would urge media outlets to do more to promote female heroes so that women in this country feel strong.”
Hamida Omid is another taekwondo star – in September she won a silver medal in India, adding to her three previous bronze medals earned abroad.
Omid believes it is up to women to stand up for themselves. In her words, “They should tear asunder the chains of imprisonment and secure their rights.”
Omid enjoys the full support of her husband, Mohammad Mobin. If she is away competing, he looks after the children and does the housework. Some of his friends disapprove, but he ignores them.
“When I hear about my wife’s achievements, I don’t care what opinion others may have,” he said. “I am extremely happy to have a wife like Hamida.”
Zohra, a 19 year-old sportswoman who attends a private taekwondo club in Kabul, would like to see more government support for female sport. Sportswomen are short of decent facilities, clothing, coaches and transport.
“The national Olympic committee should consider creating special gyms for girls all over Kabul, but the committee has not helped athletes at all so far,” Zohra said.
It is not all down to Afghanistan having a cash-strapped government. The finance ministry said in a report earlier this year that the national Olympic committee had failed to spend 50 per cent of the budget allocated to it.
Nevertheless, the Olympic committee has established a women’s gym in the western city of Herat, and Kabul should be getting one soon, Malalai Daqiq, head of the committee’s female sports section, said.
“Despite the problems, we are optimistic because female sports are developing in the provinces,” she said, noting that Herat was a stronghold.
Although many Afghans believe female sports are sacreligious, Keramatollah Sediqi, head of Islamic guidance at the Ministry of Haj and Religious Affairs, says women can engage in sport as long as suitable clothing is worn.
Many conservative-minded Afghans, however, believe this kind of activity goes against everything their culture stands for.
Shawali, a 55-year-old man from the Khair Khana district of Kabul, said it was morally corrupting for women to take part in sport, and their menfolk were “gutless” for allowing them to.
He said it was wrong for women to be out and about without being chaperoned by a family member, and suggested that other men would be able to see the contours of their figures when they exercised.
Another man, Mir Waisoddin, a 50-year-old shopkeeper from the Qala-e Fatullah district, offered a completely different perspective. Women had suffered enough under the Taleban, he said, and should be allowed to practice sports and take care of themselves.
“Let the world know that Afghan women, too, can win championships,” he said. “God didn’t create everything just for men.”
Raisa, a female schoolteacher, sees sport as part of a wider battle for women’s rights.
“If we give in these problems, we will be imprisoned within the four walls of our homes,” she said.
Khan Mohammad Danishju is an IWPR-trained reporter in Afghanistan.
President Karzai congratulates Afghan team winning Asia cricket
KABUL, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai eulogized and congratulated Afghan national cricket team over winning Asia cricket tournament in Nepal, a statement released by Karzai office said on Monday.
"Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a telephone call to Afghan National Cricket Team on Sunday night congratulated its victory in the match, saying the people of Afghanistan honor your recent success in the Asia Cricket Tournament," the statement said.
Despite a raging insurgency, lack of funds and having no proper cricket pitch, the war-torn Afghanistan embarked on an extraordinary rise in cricket in recent years.
The Afghan team lifted the Asian Cricket Council T20 Cup after defeating Chinese Hong Kong in the final match in Nepal on Sunday.
Asian Cricket Council T20 begun on Dec. 3, and Afghanistan defeated Maldives, Bhutan and Nepal before going to final match.
Attorney: US official charged with accepting bribe for Afghanistan contracts to plead guilty
By Associated Press,
ATLANTA — An attorney for a high-ranking Department of Defense employee charged with taking a bribe to steer federal contracts for work in Afghanistan to a contractor says he’s set to plead guilty.
Desi Deandre Wade’s attorney Ebony Ameen said her client intends to change his plea at a Dec. 21 hearing but declined further comment.
Wade was the department’s Chief of Fire and Emergency Services in Afghanistan. He was arrested in August after prosecutors said he took $95,000 from a contractor at the Fire-Rescue International Conference in Atlanta.
Afghanistan-based investigators said they received a tip in July that Wade received a $4,000 bribe to award a contract to a company. They say he later proposed steering a contract to that firm for about $100,000.
Sesame Street: Can it save Afghanistan?
Sesame Street brings its message of tolerance and hope to a war-torn nation.
Global Post By Jean MacKenzie December 11, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - The team that was crowded into a slightly down-at-heel office in central Kabul could not look more ordinary. There was Zubaid, a young man in a sweater with a knitted cap pulled low over his head, Ali, in a suit, tall with cropped hair; Ferishta, in a typical long black coat-dress and blue headscarf. They and the others in the room were a bit shy, smiling politely.
But put them in a sound studio and they are transformed: this is the uniquely talented crew that is now bringing the characters of Sesame Street to life for thousands, perhaps millions, of Afghan children.
Supported by a grant from the US Embassy in Kabul, the Kaboora production house has worked for the past 10 months to make Shahpar and Kachkool — Big Bird and Grover, to most — household names in Afghanistan.
More from GlobalPost: Sectarian violence grips Kabul
The show premiered just one week ago, and has attracted a lot of attention in a country starved for some good news for a change.
According one Kabul parent, whose 3-year-old is a finicky eater, Sesame Street has already proved a boon.
“Once he saw the characters, our little Hamsa sat right down and ate his cereal,” laughed Inayat.
Others were similarly impressed.
“My 5-year-old nephew was stuck to the television until the end of the show,” said Fazel Oria, a Kabul resident. “I did not feel it was a foreign show at all.”
The style might take some getting used to, though.
“I did not think it was attractive,” said Huzzein Hazara, a Kabul resident who watched the show with his daughters. “While it was on my daughters were asking me to find Tom and Jerry.”
Tania Farzana, the Afghan-American executive producer of the show, is hoping that Sesame Street will do more than make children behave. She has set herself the mission of bringing a new vision to a generation that has known nothing but war.
More from GlobalPost: Spa Kabul: In search of respite in a war zone
“I was the luckiest child in the world,” said Farzana, who was born in Kabul in the 1970s, before leaving for the United States at the age of nine. “There was so much comfort and warmth, a sense of security. Children now cannot even imagine a Kabul like that.”
Coming back after close to 30 years was a shock.
“The first three months broke my heart,” she confessed. “Nothing was the way I remembered it.”
Farzana recalls a Kabul where her mother rode a bike to university, where women were free to do what they liked.
“My mother never even wore one of these,” she said, flicking at the white headscarf that covered her dark hair.
Through Sesame Street, Farzana wants to give children back a sense of wonder.
“I am hoping we can give them the right to use their imaginations,” she said. “This instills empathy, the ability to identify with others.”
This, in turn, could help to reduce some of the religious, ethnic, and regional divides that exist among Afghans.
More from GlobalPost: Is Afghanistan on the brink of civil war?
The project is an ambitious one. While much of the footage is archival stock straight from New York, giving the Sesame Street Muppets their own Afghan identity has been a challenge.
“We interviewed over 600 applicants for 15 characters,” Farzana said. “The voices had to be dead-on. I wanted them to be perfect.”
It is not just a matter of translating the original dialogue into Dari or Pashto, she added. The language has to be pitched just right for the age group — three to seven — and, in addition, has to have the same number of syllables as the English text, so that the famous Sesame Street mouth flaps will match the new words.
“Our actors have become co-creators in making the dialogues work,” she said.
In addition to the familiar character pieces, though, Farzana is making 26 original films about Afghan life and society, to insert into the half-hour show.
These will cover topics as diverse as the first day of school and kite flying.
The first day of school will feature a little Hazara girl. The choice was not accidental.
“Many people call Hazaras, who are mainly Shia, ‘infidels,’” she said. “We wanted to show that this little girl’s mother blessed her with the Quran as she left the house, just as millions of mothers do every day. We want a Pashtun child in the south, a Tajik or Uzbek child in the north, to watch the film and say ‘that girl is just like me.’”
Farzana’s message is particularly important in the wake of a horrific attack on Shiites in Kabul on Dec. 6, as they marked their holy day of Ashura. More than50 people were killed, and many feared a new round of ethnic or sectarian violence in the country.
Sesame Street, or Bagch-e-Simsim, as it is called here, wants to put those fears to rest.
But as Afghan culture rubs up against Sesame Street rules, sparks begin to fly.
“We had some amazing footage of children flying kites on rooftops,” Farzana said. “This happens all over Afghanistan. But Sesame Street said we could not use it because it was against their safety rules.”
Sesame Street sets great store by teaching children how to protect themselves, and did not want young Afghans encouraged to take up such a dangerous activity.
The compromise: Farzana’s team added a graphic fence to the film.
More problematic is the season’s final show, in which Farzana wants to show a father taking his 6-year-old daughter to Friday prayer. But Sesame Street in New York, with its resolutely secular message, balked.
“I told them this is not about religion,” she said. “It is about community. In Afghanistan, social life revolves around the mosque; you go there to meet old friends and make new ones; you go to feel that you are never alone.”
She got a tentative go-ahead from New York, but then ran into trouble on the Afghan side.
“So many people did not want me to show a father taking his daughter to the mosque. ‘She’s a girl!’ they said. But I answered, ‘she’s a child!’”
The issue is still not resolved, but Farzana, a woman of prodigious energy and enthusiasm, vows that the segment will be shown.
“I will have a film on Friday prayer,” she said firmly.
In the meantime, she is content with the progress she is making. Her team, she points out, has forged strong bonds, overcoming all the obstacles that Afghanistan’s post-war society puts in their way.
“Look at these two,” she said, gesturing at Zubaid and Ali. “One is Pashtun, one is Kizlbash. One speaks Pashto, the other Dari. One is from the north, the other from the south. There is so much that divides them, but they are the best of friends. Yesterday they went horseback riding together.”
Asked if Bagch-e-Simsim had helped them to get past their surface differences, Zubaid answered with a wry smile.
“Yes,” he said. “When we were out there riding, it was Zubaid, Ali, Big Bird and Grover, all together.”
Kabul-based journalist Abdul Qayum Suroush contributed to this report.
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