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Afghanistan's Karzai says he met with insurgent faction Hizb-i-Islami for peace talks
By Kay Johnson, The Associated Press | The Canadian Press
KABUL - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that he personally held peace talks recently with the insurgent faction Hizb-i-Islami, appearing to assert his own role in a U.S.-led bid for negotiations to end the country's decade-long war.
Karzai made the announcement hours before he met with American special representative Marc Grossman to discuss progress and plans for bringing the Taliban insurgency into formal talks for the first time.
"Recently, we met with a delegation from Hizb-i-Islami ... and had negotiations," Karzai told a meeting of the Afghan parliament. "We are hopeful that these negotiations for peace continue and we will have good results," he added.
Karzai's statement was a reminder that any negotiations to end Afghanistan's war will be more complex than just talking to the Taliban's Pakistan-based leadership, headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar. The two other main insurgent factions in the country have their own leaders and agendas.
Hizb-i-Islami is a radical Islamist militia that controls territory in Afghanistan's northeast and launches attacks against U.S. forces from Pakistan. Its leader, powerful warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is a former U.S. ally now listed as a terrorist by Washington.
Based over the Pakistan border, Hekmatyar has ties to al-Qaida and has launched deadly attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Fighters loyal to Hekmatyar also have strongholds in Baghlan, Kunduz and Kunar provinces in the north and northeast Afghanistan.
The other main insurgent group is the feared Haqqani network, which maintains close ties to both al-Qaida and the Taliban and commands the loyalties of an estimated 10,000 fighters. The Haqqanis have been blamed for a series of spectacular attacks, including suicide bombings inside Kabul.
By showing he can bring at least one major faction to the negotiating table, Karzai may hope to boost his standing in a tentative peace process that has recently been dominated by Washington. The president has met before with representatives of Hekmatyar, whose political allies hold seats in the Afghan parliament and Cabinet, but Saturday's public announcement seemed intended to bolster Karzai's insistence on inclusion in the U.S.-led peace process.
"It should be mentioned that the Afghan nation is the owner of the peace process and negotiations," Karzai said. "No foreign country or organization can prevent (Afghans) from exercising this right."
The U.S. has repeatedly said that formal negotiations must be Afghan-led, but Karzai is reportedly uneasy with his government not being directly involved in recent preliminary talks with Taliban representatives.
U.S. representative Grossman began meeting with Karzai on Saturday, the U.S. Embassy said.
Grossman, however, stressed that any future negotiations would include Afghanistan's government.
"After our meeting with President Karzai, we will decide what to do next because we take his guidance and advice in an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process," Grossman said Friday during a stop in India.
French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet also arrived in Kabul on Saturday for talks with Afghan officials after Paris suspended training missions following the killing of four French troops by an Afghan soldier, the latest in a rising number of assaults in which Afghan security forces or infiltrators have turned their guns on coalition forces.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan early over the deaths, a potential setback for the U.S.-led coalition's efforts to build a national army and allow foreign troops to go home.
Longuet said Saturday in Kabul his mission is to "evaluate the attitude our officials should take" in the future.
He expressed hope investigators would have access to the Afghan attacker to learn whether he acted alone or had outside help.
On Saturday, insurgents killed a NATO service member in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said. The statement gave no other details, nor the nationality of the casualty.
Insurgents clashed Saturday with government forces in the town of Barmal in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, said Maj. Abdul Rahman, who co-ordinates coalition and Afghan operations in the area.
The Paktika governor's office said four attackers were trying to enter the town's main bazaar and then move toward government offices and military bases nearby. Before they could, Afghan security forces engaged them in a one-hour gun battle and all four attackers were killed, it said.
Separately, a roadside bomb killed four Afghan civilians Saturday morning in Helmand province in the south, the Interior Ministry said.
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Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez contributed to this report.
U.S. envoy Grossman in Afghanistan to discuss peace, Taliban
By the CNN Wire Staff January 21, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- America's special envoy to the region talked peace and reconciliation with Hamid Karzai in Kabul Saturday, though the Afghan president made it clear that Afghans should be in the driver's seat.
U.S. diplomat Marc Grossman will meet again Sunday with Karzai in discussions aimed at a achieving a peaceful resolution to conflict with Taliban insurgents.
"I am pleased to be in Kabul to consult with the government of Afghanistan," Grossman said in a statement.
"The United States stands ready to assist in any way we can an Afghan-led reconciliation process to find a peaceful end to this conflict. I look forward to calling on President Karzai and discussing next steps."
Karzai's spokesman Aimal Faizi declined to give details of the talks.
However, Karzai, in an address to the Afghan parliament, said the government and its peace council were making every effort to bring an end to the bloodshed.
"The Afghan nation is the owner of the peace process and any peace talks," Karzai said. "No other country or organization has the right to deprive the Afghan nation to this right. Afghanistan is not a place for foreigners to do their political experiments or a laboratory that every few years they test a new political system."
Grossman has been meeting secretly with Taliban negotiators for more than a year. Last week, U.S. senior administration officials said the United States could inch closer toward peace talks with the Taliban if Karzai blesses the negotiations.
"We don't have any idea standing here today what the outcome of such discussions could be," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week. "I think all of us are entering into it with a very realistic sense of what is possible. And that includes, of course, President Karzai and his government, which after all bear the ultimate responsibility and the consequences of any such discussions."
Clinton acknowledged last week that discussions about opening up a Taliban office in Qatar and transferring some Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay were part of the U.S. support for Afghan reconciliation efforts.
She stressed that nothing had been concluded, but said she was sending Grossman to Kabul and Qatar for further consultations. Diplomatic sources said that depending on the outcome of the talks with Karzai, Grossman could have another meeting with the Taliban.
Secret talks between the United States and the militant Taliban began in November 2010, sources said. Senior U.S. officials and diplomatic sources said German officials brokered initial meetings with Tayeb al-Agha, an aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The sources said after a series of meetings, Agha was able to prove his good faith as an interlocutor with key Taliban leaders.
The idea is for the talks to be Afghan-led, senior officials said, with as much U.S. participation as the Afghans need and want.
The talks would be the product of what officials call "confidence-building measures," such as the opening of the office in Qatar's capital Doha and a Taliban renunciation of terrorism in exchange for the release of five Taliban members being detained at Guantanamo Bay.
Clinton said last week no transfers were imminent, but Grossman's talks in Kabul are expected to address the possible release of the detainees.
Once described as preconditions for peace talks to occur, Clinton now says insurgents must lay down their arms, accept the Afghan constitution and end ties with al Qaeda as "necessary outcomes" of the discussions.
Grossman's visit to Afghanistan also comes days after Pakistan's government, embroiled in a squabble between civilian and military leaders, declined a visit from Grossman, according to a senior Pakistani government official.
"His visit could fuel anti-American sentiments and create trouble for the government, which is already surrounded by storms," the official said Wednesday.
The official asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media on this subject.
A U.S. State Department official said Grossman wanted to go to Pakistan, but the Pakistani government declined for the time being.
CNN's Nick Paton Walsh and Elise Labott and journalist Nasir Habib contributed to this report
France pledge to Afghanistan despite killings
By Dominique Chabrol and Joris Fioriti | AFP News
France appeared to lessen the prospect of an early withdrawal from the 10-year war in Afghanistan on Saturday, stressing its commitment to the country after an Afghan soldier killed four of its troops.
Defence Minister Gerard Longuet and Chief of Defence staff Admiral Edouard Guillaud flew into Afghanistan for emergency talks a day after the president threatened to order a swift exit of its 3,600 troops on the ground.
Paris reacted furiously after an Afghan soldier on Friday shot dead four unarmed soldiers and wounded 15 others as they completed a work-out on the training base they shared with Afghan troops.
"The entire point of this visit is to assess the position that we have to take," Longuet told reporters after arriving in Kabul to make recommendations to President Nicolas Sarkozy on the future of the deployment.
The French role in the US-led NATO mission is unpopular at home and Friday's killings come less than 100 days before presidential elections.
Longuet appeared to distance himself slightly from the prospect of an immediate withdrawal, saying: "The mission remains exactly the same, to bring about a stable force" and "to handover" to the Afghans.
"We must reflect in order to support a mission that is a success."
France is one of the largest contributors to the 130,000-strong US-led NATO force fighting the Taliban and training Afghan soldiers to take responsibility for security by the end of 2014 when foreign troops are scheduled to withdraw.
Longuet refused to be drawn about the possibility of an early withdrawal, saying only: "I'll talk about that with the president, he's my only boss."
Friday's attack was the second time in a month that French troops were shot dead by a man in Afghan army uniform, bringing the country's overall death toll to 82 since troops deployed in 2001.
Longuet held talks with General Jean-Pierre Palasset, the French commander on the ground at their main base in eastern Afghanistan, and was then due to meet General Nazar, commander of the 3rd Afghan army brigade.
On Sunday, the French minister will meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Afghan defence and interior ministers, US commander General John Allen and other senior commanders in the International Security Assistance Force.
A classified report leaked to The New York Times says attacks by Afghan soldiers on NATO soldiers are increasing and are a "systemic" problem, rather than rooted in isolated incidents.
The report puts the killings down to a decade of contempt that each side has for the other, and profound ill will among both civilians and soldiers on both sides. It downplayed the role of Taliban infiltrators in the incidents.
On arrival in Kabul, Longuet briefly boarded a French aircraft preparing to repatriate some of the soldiers seriously wounded in Friday's attack.
He said the men were victims of the trust they had in Afghan soldiers they were training at the base where one of them opened fire.
"They didn't have a chance. This was murder," said Longuet.
The minister is to brief Sarkozy on steps being taken by the Afghans to guarantee security conditions for the French trainers.
Sarkozy has said that without such conditions being clearly established, he will raise the prospect of an early return of the French army.
He has already immediately suspended French military training and joint combat operations with Afghan troops.
The French force is to be reduced to 3,000 by late 2012, with 200 due to leave in March. All NATO combat troops are due to leave by the end of 2014.
French Defense Minister Visits Afghanistan
VOA News January 21, 2012
The French defense minister arrived in Kabul Saturday for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a day after an Afghan solider shot and killed four French troops.
Gerard Longuet said France remains committed to bringing stability to Afghanistan. His comment follows a threat from Paris to accelerate its troop withdrawal following the deaths of the soldiers.
Longuet said he is in Afghanistan to determine the position France will take following the attack in eastern Kapisa province that also wounded 15 French troops.
The French defense minister met some of the wounded soldiers at Kabul's airport before their evacuation to France. He said the men were victims of the trust they had in the Afghan soldiers they were training.
He said Friday the French troops were not armed when the attacker opened fire. The shooter has been taken into custody.
Longuet is due to brief French President Nicolas Sarkozy on the measures being taken by the Afghans to guarantee security conditions for the French trainers.
President Sarkozy has suspended military operations in Afghanistan. Mr. Sarkozy said Friday it is "unacceptable" that Afghan troops would attack French soldiers.
A Taliban spokesman praised the attacker, but did not claim responsibility for the shooting.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected speculation that France plans to accelerate withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. She told reporters Friday in Washington that the U.S. is in close contact with France and has no reason to believe that France will do anything other than continue to be part of the transition process and exit as agreed in Lisbon.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP.
Afghan Taliban say recruited soldier who killed French
By Amie Ferris-Rotman and Mirwais Harooni
KABUL (Reuters) - The Afghan Taliban said on Saturday they had recruited an Afghan soldier who shot dead four French soldiers a day earlier, raising fears the militant group had managed to deepen its infiltration of the country's struggling security forces.
The killings prompted France to threaten an early pullout from the NATO-led war.
The claim of responsibility raises serious concerns about handing control of security over to the Afghan army and police, which NATO-led forces are currently in the process of doing before all foreign combat troops leave by the end of 2014.
"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has recruited people in important positions," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location, using another name the Islamist group call themselves.
"Some of them have already accomplished their missions."
The four French soldiers died on the spot, he said.
The killings in Kapisa province were the latest in a string of such attacks in which Afghan troops turn on their Western allies and mentors. While NATO has blamed Taliban infiltration in the past, it has also said stress, indiscipline and divided loyalties within the hastily trained ranks played a role.
Such attacks are especially damaging as the Afghan National Army tries to win public trust before foreign troops leave.
The Taliban claim coincided with a visit to Kabul by the U.S. Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman. He is expected to meet President Hamid Karzai and other senior Afghan officials.
Despite the presence of more than 100,000 foreign troops, violence across Afghanistan remains at its worst levels since the Taliban were toppled by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, according to the United Nations.
In April last year, an Afghan Air Force pilot opened fire at the military wing of Kabul's main airport, killing eight U.S. troops and an American contractor.
An Afghan border policeman shot dead six U.S. soldiers during a training mission in Nangarhar province in 2010.
U.S. and NATO officials usually describe such attacks as isolated incidents.
Afzal Aman, head of operations for the Afghan National Army, said he could not confirm if the Taliban had infiltrated the army in this instance. But he suggested that such recruitment could represent a bigger threat than previously thought.
"Usually in the past, whenever something like this happened, it came about after Afghan and foreign soldiers had an argument over something related to Afghan affairs," he told Reuters.
Friday's attack also comes weeks after an offer from the Taliban to open a political office in Qatar as a prelude to possible peace talks with the United States and other nations.
After the shooting -- which took the French death toll to 82 since the war began in 2001 -- President Nicolas Sarkozy ordered all French military operations on the ground to be suspended and Defense Minister Gerard Longuet jetted into Kabul Saturday.
A regional Taliban commander added that incidents such as a video showing U.S. Marines urinating on corpses were boosting support for the group among Afghans and threatened more attacks.
"Our missions have become easier because of incidents like the video," he said.
(Additional reporting by Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR; Editing by Michael Georgy)
The immorality of Afghanistan’s ‘moral crimes’
Washington Post By Kimberly Motley OPED Saturday, January 21, 2012
“Please help us.”
Those were the first words that my client, Gulnaz, said when I met her inside the Kabul prison that was home to hundreds of women, many of whom, like her, were locked away for so-called moral crimes — adultery or running away from home. The frail 20-year-old clung to her baby, who was conceived through rape and born on the prison floor, where mother and child had lived for nearly two years.
Tearfully, Gulnaz recounted the story of the assault that took place in 2009. The attacker, nearly twice her age, pinned her down, tied her up and then savagely raped her. She described going to the police with her disabled, widowed mother to report the rape. There she was instantly imprisoned for reporting the crime. With no male head of household present, the two women were not taken seriously.
After years of advocacy by human rights groups and other activists, and a decade of war by the United States and its allies — a war in which the need to uphold the rights of women has often been invoked — Afghan women remain trapped in a legal system that often punishes them for being the victims of brutal crimes.
My illiterate client told me of her experience going to court with her illegitimate daughter and not understanding the legal process. She was forced to represent herself after her Afghan lawyer failed to show up, yet the judges who presided over the case refused to allow her to speak. Instead, they berated Gulnaz for lying, insisting that women cannot get pregnant by having sex just once. This assertion was the basis for the 12-year sentence that was imposed, with a wrenching caveat: Marrying her attacker would allow her to be “free.”
Unfortunately, Gulnaz’s case is not an anomaly but represents the situation that more than half of the imprisoned women in Afghanistan find themselves in — locked up for moral crimes, according to a recent studyby the United Nations.
I submitted a pardon application for Gulnaz, accompanied by a petition with more than 6,000 signatures. She had no family willing to take up her cause, but the world, as we discovered, supported her release.
Standing up for the rights of women like Gulnaz was part of the reason the United States went to Afghanistan in the first place. In 2001, one of the key political arguments that President George W. Bush’s administration used to support the military deployment was stopping the terrorists, for whom “the brutal oppression of women” was “a central goal.” In November 2001, Congress passed a bill noting Taliban oppression of women and stressing the need for Afghan women and children to have better access to health care and education.
International attention to the fate of women in Afghanistan has been an issue throughout the war. In 2009, the Afghan government focused on violence and human rights when it passed the Elimination of Violence Against Women Law. Though this measure garnered substantial support worldwide, oversight has been limited. The law is largely ignored in Afghanistan’s justice system, and abused women are routinely imprisoned as a result. While Gulnaz’s case brought international media attention to the plight of Afghan rape victims, inside Afghanistan, gross violations of basic human rights are often business as usual.
In Gulnaz’s case, after we submitted the pardon application, President Hamid Karzai formed a judicial committee with members from the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court and the attorney general’s office. They were to investigate Gulnaz’s case and, reportedly, the cases of all other women imprisoned in Kabul. The formation of this committee was an unprecedented step for the government: It was directly confronting the realities of women imprisoned for moral crimes.
Ultimately, Karzai’s investigation found that Gulnaz’s conviction was based on oppressive, misogynistic interpretations of Islamic sharia law. These views were in part remnants of the Taliban regime’s swift and unforgiving justice system. A more contemporary interpretation of sharia law, Afghan laws and international conventions supported her exoneration.
On Dec. 14, 2011, Karzai acted upon the pardon application and exonerated Gulnaz. He acknowledged that the charge of adultery against her was a “misjudgment” and that the cultural norms leading to her imprisonment were long overdue for an overhaul. This decision has the potential to set a precedent for other rape victims seeking justice and is a significant recognition of the persecution that Afghan women have long endured under the veil of cultural appeasement.
After 10 years of foreign assistance, it should not have taken the president of Afghanistan to overturn the decisions of three Kabul courts that receive vast amounts of international funding. It should not have taken international media attention to embarrass the Afghan government into finally doing the right thing. And it should not have taken a Western lawyer to give Gulnaz legal representation to achieve exoneration.
According to an October report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which works to monitor aid spending there by various U.S. governmental agencies, almost $73 billion has been appropriated to Afghanistan since 2002. This money needs to be used more wisely.
Rule-of-law initiatives, particularly on women’s rights, have a better chance of success if the international community exercises more oversight and makes a greater effort to understand how the Afghan justice system really works. At present, I am the only Western lawyer in Afghanistan taking on such cases. Gulnaz’s case came to me through concerned people who knew of the miscarriages of justice that she endured. I took it to advocate for her and other women in Afghanistan’s legal system.
Although her case has a suitable ending, it took agitating for attention at the highest levels in the country to get a rape victim out of prison. The laws intended to protect her, and the international initiatives meant to do the same, did nothing.
Clearly most of the responsibility should lie with the Afghan government. Prosecutors and judges perpetuate human rights abuses on women, especially in cases involving domestic abuse, with little to no accountability. Because the justice system has failed to deter people within the government from committing human rights abuses, more than half of the women imprisoned in Afghanistan continue to be prosecuted for moral crimes.
The government should establish a standing committee within the attorney general’s office and the judiciary to ensure that cases of women charged with moral crimes never make it to court — or at the very least, that women are not prosecuted for being victims of violence. From one “misjudgment” could come a real chance to save other women from similar suffering.
I realize that it may take years, if not generations, for significant improvements on women’s rights in Afghanistan. I am optimistic, however, that Gulnaz’s case can serve as a turning point to encourage changes that can protect other women enduring her same plight.
One pardon, one release, one woman, is not good enough.
outlook@washpost.com
Kimberley Motley is an American lawyer who practices in the United States and Afghanistan, where she works on human rights and other cases.
NATO soldier dies in attack in south Afghanistan
By KAY JOHNSON | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO says a member of its international force in Afghanistan has died in an insurgent attack.
A coalition statement said the incident took place Saturday in southern Afghanistan but gave no other details, nor the nationality of the casualty.
The attack comes a day after an Afghan soldier opened fire on French troops during a training exercise, killing four of them and prompting France to suspend its training programs.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that he personally held peace talks recently with the insurgent faction Hizb-i-Islami, appearing to assert his own role in a U.S.-led bid for negotiations to end the country's decade-long war.
Karzai made the announcement hours before he was to meet with American special representative Marc Grossman to discuss progress and plans for bringing the Taliban insurgency into formal talks for the first time.
"Recently, we met with a delegation from Hizb-i-Islami ... and had negotiations," Karzai told a meeting of the Afghan parliament, adding, "We are hopeful that these negotiations for peace continue and we will have good results."
Hizb-i-Islami is a radical Islamist militia that controls territory in Afghanistan's northeast and launches attacks against U.S. forces from Pakistan. Its leader, powerful warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is a former U.S. ally now listed as a terrorist by Washington.
The president has met before with representatives of Hekmatyar, whose political allies hold seats in the Afghan parliament and Cabinet, but Saturday's public announcement seemed intended to bolster Karzai's insistence on inclusion in the U.S.-led peace process.
Karzai's statement was also a reminder that any negotiations to end Afghanistan's war will be more complex than just talking to the Taliban's Pakistan-based leadership, headed by Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Hizb-i-Islami, also based over the Pakistan border, has ties to al-Qaida and has launched deadly attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Fighters loyal to Hekmatyar also have strongholds in Baghlan, Kunduz and Kunar provinces in the north and northeast Afghanistan.
There is also the feared Haqqani network, which maintains close ties to both al-Qaida and the Taliban and commands the loyalties of an estimated 10,000 fighters. The Haqqanis have been blamed for a series of spectacular attacks, including suicide bombings inside Kabul.
By showing he can bring at least one major faction to the negotiating table, Karzai may hope to increase his standing in a tentative peace process that has recently been dominated by Washington. The U.S. has repeatedly said that formal negotiations must be Afghan-led, but Karzai is reportedly uneasy with his government not being directly involved in recent preliminary talks with Taliban representatives.
"It should be mentioned that the Afghan nation is the owner of the peace process and negotiations," Karzai said. "No foreign country or organization can prevent (Afghans) from exercising this right."
U.S. representative Grossman recently stressed that any future negotiations would include Afghanistan's government, and said he would meet Karzai on Saturday.
"After our meeting with President Karzai, we will decide what to do next because we take his guidance and advice in an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process," Grossman said Friday at a stop in India.
The Taliban have vowed to keep fighting as they explore a possible political resolution to the war.
Insurgents clashed Saturday with government forces in the town of Barmal in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, said Maj. Abdul Rahman, who coordinates coalition and Afghan operations in the area.
Afghan security forces killed two of the attackers and recovered their guns and a rocket-propelled grenade, he said. Two other attackers wearing suicide bomb vests moved in, but their explosives detonated prematurely and both died at the scene. One civilian was wounded in the attack, he said.
The Paktika governor's office said four attackers were trying to enter the town's main bazaar and then move toward government offices and military bases nearby. Before they could, Afghan security forces engaged them in a one-hour gun battle and all four attackers were killed, it said.
Separately, four Afghan civilians were killed Saturday morning when their truck struck a roadside bomb near Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province in the south, the Ministry of Interior said.
On Friday, insurgents attacked Afghan border policemen in the Gulran district of Herat province near the Iranian border in western Afghanistan, said Sulaiman Khan, commander of a border police rapid reaction unit in the area.
He said four border policemen were killed immediately when their vehicle was attacked by militants firing from several different directions, and a fifth died on Saturday.
4 civilians killed in mine blast in S Afghanistan
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, Jan. 21 (Xinhua) -- Four civilians were killed and two others were injured Saturday in a mine blast in the country's southern province of Helmand, a police source said.
"An anti-vehicle mine blasted at around 10:30 a.m. local time in Lashkari area of Helmand's provincial capital Lashkar Gah when a civilian vehicle touched it off triggering a powerful explosion. As a result four civilians were killed and two others injured," a senior police official in the province Mohammad Ismail Hotak told Xinhua.
The Taliban-led insurgency has been rampant since the militant group announced to launch a rebel offensive from May 2011 against Afghan and NATO-led troops stationed in Afghanistan.
The police official, Hotak, from Afghan forces' coordination center in Helmand, also blamed Taliban insurgents for the attack in the province, 555 km south of capital city of Kabul. Civilian casualties have been on rise in insurgency-hit Afghanistan.
Seven civilians were killed and eight others injured when a suicide bomb car, targeting the entrance gate of an international airport, went off in the neighboring Kandahar province Thursday.
A total of 1,462 Afghan civilians were killed in the first half of 2011, a 15 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to the United Nations mid-year report released in Kabul in July, 2011.
Can Afghanistan be saved?
The Globe and Mail Reviewed by Paula Newberg Friday, Jan. 20, 2012
Reviewed here: Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, by Terry Glavin; The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace, by Chris Alexander
Afghanistan is a gift to writers. Stunning and tragic, at once victim of violence and instigator of terror, hotly debated and often ignored, Afghanistan is the place everyone chronicles and no one seems fully to understand. Come from the Shadows is a collection of sympathetic anecdotes, and an argument for continued Western engagement in a place, journalist Terry Glavin suggests, where “madness, politics and war are often parts of the same conversation.”
In Glavin’s Afghanistan, things may have gone mightily awry, but not everything has gone wrong. As the state has muddled through, progress has been local and personal. The costs are high: War has contributed to increased mental illness, poverty is searing and families can find themselves divided by belief as well as deed. Glavin embraces the whole country with kindness, somewhat in awe of the courage and convictions of individuals who simply will not accept the negative assumptions that outsiders can bring to them and their country.
Just as NATO troops are headed home, and public debate has taken to assuming that less is more, or better, Glavin contends, energetically and emotionally, that Afghanistan needs a strong foreign military presence to become the democratic state it should be, and wants to be. Glavin argues that Afghans want NATO to stay, disputing the prevailing Western view that foreigners are unwelcome.
Come from the Shadows disputes the slippery slopes of Western policies that began with state-building and democracy-promotion and are ending by seeking to reconcile with the same groups against which NATO has been fighting for 10 years. The hapless state will be left to sort itself out. As Glavin wrote earlier in Dissent, “there’s nothing like lowering your standards to make them easier to uphold.”
When world leaders met in Bonn in December, reality forced them to acknowledge the last decade’s efforts and errors, justifications, excuses, laments and, inevitably, questions about a decade that was as much about themselves as about Afghanistan. As Chris Alexander notes in The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace, the promise of late 2001, when a new Afghanistan “seemed so tantalizingly close,” remains more than elusive today.
His is an optimist’s take on a place and problems too regularly treated as lost, a reminder of the hopes of multilateralism, and a diplomat’s compassionate history of a decade too often understood only as unremitting war. Earnest and honest, his generous portraits of political leaders and colleagues sometimes betray sympathies that too easily override needed critique. But Alexander’s intent, like Glavin’s, remains clear: As one ally after another leaves an insecure, poverty-afflicted war zone that they all helped to create, he believes that Afghanistan is worth a better investment.
Alexander comes to this task with insight gained as a Canadian and then a UN diplomat in Kabul. When he recites a familiar litany of violence, regrets and stubborn determination, he does so with concern more than accusation. He lauds the process that brought a new government to Kabul, with warm regard for Hamid Karzai and his early cabinet of returned diaspora technocrats, and measured support for the new parliament.
He nonetheless admits that by 2006 rehabilitation was stuck: The state was skeletal, its political legitimacy a veneer varnished by “drugs, warlords, power politics and a culture of payback and vengeance.”
The intricate competition (and occasional collaboration) between extremism and corruption undercut government and politics. “If the military situation was bad,” Alexander writes of the fulcrum months of 2006 when Afghanistan tried to reinvent itself, “governance was worse.” The virus of corruption infected government itself, inviting renewed insurgency and discouraging moderation of any sort. “Even when Karzai acted responsibly” – a telling turn of phrase – “scandal, conspiracy and manipulation seemed to lurk behind every corner.”
But Alexander is loath to blame the government for problems that he and his colleagues believed were sourced elsewhere. Little of his book suffers from the usual invective of writings on the region, but even the ever-generous Alexander seems stumped by Pakistan. His dispiriting descriptions of UN discussions with the Pakistan government reveal some of the thinking behind the military surge of 2009-2010: “If Pakistan wasn’t going to fight the Taliban, the United States and NATO would have to do the job instead.”
A worthy-sounding goal, but highly contestable. Foreign military forces are on their way home, and political transition in Afghanistan is now being turned into negotiations with the Taliban. Although Alexander doesn’t say so, the Taliban at least as dangerous for Pakistan as for Afghanistan; Pakistan believes that some of the responsibility for that lies with Afghanistan.
Both Glavin and Alexander highlight the confusing combinations of interventionism and isolationism that typify the collateral damage not only of 2001, but also of 1991: Post-Cold War, post-Bosnia and post-Rwanda, the maxims on which intervention is based have been murky, and those that support democratic state-building have been hard to sustain. Neither conservatives nor liberals have been clear-thinking; each has sacrificed principle to changeable views of security, stability and opportunism; each has been disappointed; and each has failed in their respective, if periodically unclear, missions.
Diplomats, Sir Harold Nicolson wrote long ago, often progress further than politicians in their views of international conduct. But the most sympathetic diplomats, as Alexander certainly is, are often better advocates than critics of the diplomatic endeavour. The Long Way Back begins an urgent conversation; an even sharper, self-critical analysis of the last decade’s diplomacy should come next.
Paula Newberg is director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, and formerly special adviser to the United Nations in Afghanistan.
500 more Afghan police to go to Turkey for training: minister
KABUL, Jan. 21 (Xinhua) -- Five hundred more Afghan police officers will go to Turkey for training in the near future, Afghan Interior Minister Basmillah Mohammadi said on Saturday.
"Another 500 young police officers will go to our friend country of Turkey in the near future and will be put through a curriculum, which is practical in nature and covers a police skill which has been very important in law enforcement mission," Mohammadi told the audience in a ceremony before presenting rewards for some officers who recently graduated from a training period in Turkey.
As many as 600 police officers recently returned Afghanistan from Turkey after completion of six-month training there.
The Afghan government and NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan (NTM-A) have stepped up efforts to train and equip Afghan police and army as NATO-led ISAF forces have handed over the security responsibilities of several areas across the country to Afghanistan, parts of a process which will run through 2014 when Afghanistan takes over the full leadership of its own security duties from U.S. and NATO forces.
Nato's Afghan alliance unhinged by growing mutual mistrust
US military report reveals how issues such as arrogance and cleanliness are leading Afghan soldiers to shoot Nato trainers
Guardian.co.uk By Jon Boone Friday 20 January 2012
Kabul - Mutual mistrust and contempt between local and foreign forces in Afghanistan that often borders on hatred is one of the main reasons why Afghan troops increasingly turn their guns on their Nato comrades, a damning report has found.
The research, commissioned by the US military, said American soldiers enrage their Afghan colleagues with what the report describes as extreme arrogance, bullying and "crude behaviour".
It also heavily criticised as "profoundly intellectually dishonest" the Nato claims that the killing of alliance troops by Afghan soldiers is extremely rare.
The data suggests incidents such as the killing on Friday of four French soldiers "reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between 'allies' in modern military history)".
It warned that the problem is now so serious that it is "provoking a crisis of confidence and trust among westerners training and working with Afghan National Security Forces" (ANSFs).
According to behavioural scientist Jeffrey Bordin's report, the number of attacks have been growing, with 26 incidents of killings or attempted killings since early 2007. Those attacks led to the deaths of 58 foreign personnel.
While some of these incidents involved Taliban infiltrators, Bordin believes many resulted from "deep-seated animosity, often stimulated by social and personal conflicts".
Based on interviews with 613 Afghan security forces, the document paints an extremely bleak picture of mutual contempt and misunderstanding between the two sides.
US troops regard their Afghan allies they are training and fighting alongside as untrustworthy, dishonest, incompetent and practising "repulsive hygiene".
For their part, the Afghans have been provoked into fights, and even attempts to kill, by behaviour that many Americans might not be unduly shocked by.
That includes "urinating in public, their cursing at, insulting and being rude and vulgar to ANSF members, and unnecessarily shooting animals".
The factors that create the most animosity included US military convoys blocking traffic, returning fire on insurgents in an apparently indiscriminate way, risking civilian lives, "naively using flawed intelligence sources" and conducting raids on Afghans' private homes.
Another cause for concern is the fact that armed Afghan soldiers almost never intervene when one of their comrades is attempting to kill Nato soldiers.
On Friday, Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said the so-called "red team study" was produced by an outside contractor and was not approved or endorsed by senior Isaf officials who reviewed it.
Isaf said the study "suffered from irrelevant generalisations, narrow sample sets, unprofessional rhetoric and sensationalism".
Military "red teams" are independent cells used to scrutinise and challenge operations and plans.
With the vast bulk of foreign troops in Afghanistan coming from America, the US has inevitably suffered the most from what Isaf calls "green on blue incidents".
However, British troops have also been killed, including a case in November 2009 when an Afghan policeman killed five British soldiers and wounded a further six who were resting after a patrol and were not armed or wearing their body armour.
Nearly all France's 4,000 soldiers in Afghanistan are concentrated in Kapisa, a province not far north of Kabul which has long been wracked by a persistent insurgency.
An Afghan battalion commander in southern Afghanistan told the Guardian last year that he is most concerned about Pashtun soldiers.
Although the Pashtuns are Afghanistan's largest ethnic group they are under-represented in the ANA and overwhelmingly dominate the insurgency.
The captain, a non-Pashtun himself, recalled how he disarmed one of his subordinates who was so disgusted by Americans that he refused to even look at US soldiers when he encountered them.
However, he pinned the blame on the killings of foreign troops firmly on the Taliban and the ISI, the Pakistani military spy agency that is thought to support the insurgency.
"Those who kill the foreigners are slaves of Pakistan," he said. "The ISI and Pakistan don't want the ANA to succeed."
The recruitment and training of a sizeable army and police force, which will ultimately be 352,000 strong, is a cornerstone of Nato's strategy in Afghanistan.
Without a decent security force the collapse of the current Afghan state after the drawdown of the vast majority of Nato forces by the end of 2014 would be inevitable.
Although the Afghan army has improved markedly in recent years the report's interviews with 215 US soldiers highlighted a long list of problems that remain: "They reported pervasive illicit drug use, massive thievery, personal instability, dishonesty, no integrity, incompetence, unsafe weapon handling, corrupt officers, no real NCO corps, covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents, high Awol rates, bad morale, laziness, repulsive hygiene and the torture of dogs."
200 Afghan Officers, Soldiers Poisoned in Kabul
TOLOnews.com Friday, 20 January 2012
Around 200 Afghan National Army officers and soldiers fell ill on Friday after eating poisoned food at a training centre in Pul-e-Charkhi in Kabul.
The officers and soldiers fell ill after having lunch at the training centre on Friday, the Ministry of Defence said.
The poisoned ones were rushed to the Sardar Mohammad Dawood Khan military hospital in Kabul.
The Ministry of Defence said investigations into the incident have been launched.
Enemy infiltration into the Afghan security forces has been a big concern, but it is not yet clear if the food was poisoned by a sleeping agent.
Afghan schism
Financial Times Review by Shashank Joshi January 20, 2012
Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn look at the divisions between al-Qaeda and the Taliban in ‘An Enemy We Created’
An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al-Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010, by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, Hirst & Co, RRP£30, 320 pages
Sir Olaf Caroe, a British colonial administrator and ethnographer of the Pashtuns, once observed that “unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over”. The latest Afghan war is not over but its end, at least for the US and Europe, is dimly visible over the horizon. The international military footprint is shrinking and echoes of the Soviet withdrawal – orderly, but culminating in the collapse of the Afghan government – are bouncing around western capitals.
Perhaps that is why things are getting serious. Ten years ago the then CIA director, George Tenet, declared that “the Taliban and al-Qaeda [are] really the same”. In early January the Taliban announced plans to open a political office in Qatar. One issue lies at the crux of negotiations: was Tenet correct about the group that, last year, eulogised Osama bin Laden as “a real martyr”? Or are the Taliban a nationalist movement, separable from the swirling currents of global jihad that engulfed their country in the 1980s?
Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn are well placed to offer an answer, having lived in Kandahar for five years and translated the memoirs of the Taliban’s former envoy to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef. The two young researchers bring the empathy and experience of old chroniclers such as Caroe but none of the romantic condescension towards the “wily Pathan”.
Their central thesis in An Enemy We Created is that “the issue of international terrorism from within Afghanistan’s borders may not necessarily be as big a potential problem as is currently believed”. That is because, like Tenet, we have persistently overestimated the degree of intellectual and operational agreement between two strains of jihad – one local and contingent, the other global and unyielding.
These were forged in parallel during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But, as van Linschoten and Kuehn demonstrate, they had radically different influences. The urbane, educated Arab interlopers were a generation older than their largely rural Afghan hosts. They were steeped in a transnational and politically charged Islam quite alien to the parochial Deobandi tradition of the Pakistani madrassas that schooled the Taliban. “From the Arab perspective,” note the authors, “Afghanistan is almost always referred to as a place where the religious beliefs of the local people leave a lot to be desired, but should be tolerated” – not far off the views of Middle England.
The relationship between Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and bin Laden, who had been invited into Afghanistan by other warlords, was awkward and fractious. Omar was “apoplectic” when bin Laden held a major press conference in 1998: “there is only one ruler. Is it me or Osama?” The book dismantles “the oft-stated image of bin Laden sitting at Omar’s side, whispering conspiracies into his ear, playing Iago to Omar’s Othello”.
The authors seem on shakier ground in arguing that the Taliban might have been pulled back from the brink in 2001. This sits uncomfortably with their meticulous analysis of Omar’s thinking. When the Saudis had tried to extract bin Laden in 1998, careful to do so in a face-saving “Islamic” way, it became obvious that Omar had no intention of negotiating in good faith.
A decade after being routed on the battlefield, the resurgent Taliban have repeated the trick they performed in the 1990s: exploiting local grievances against a predatory government. The sobering assessment of van Linschoten and Kuehn is that the insurgency is splintering, thanks in part to Nato’s strategy of obliterating its middle ranks. A “new generation of insurgents, a younger group with no recollection of an Afghanistan that was not at war, are less inclined to reach a political settlement” and far more receptive to al-Qaeda’s still potent message. Meanwhile, the Taliban flirt with their Sinn Féin moment. As dusk falls in the Afghan war, the owl of Minerva is spreading its wings.
Roya Shams’ story shows Canada should invest in Afghan girls
Toronto Star Fri Jan 20 2012
There’s nothing easy about leaving a loving family and friends to start life in a new country when you’re a 17-year-old Afghan girl. The distance between Kandahar’s dusty, deadly streets and Ottawa’s peaceful snow-swept ones can’t be measured only as the crow flies. They are whole wrenching worlds apart.
That makes Roya Shams’ gritty trek to round out her high-school education at Ashbury College in Ottawa all the more inspiring. With her family’s blessing, Roya has launched herself on a journey of hope that many Afghan teens may dream of, but to which few can aspire.
With a helping hand from Star writer Paul Watson, who was moved by Roya’s burning desire to get a higher education, with the help of the Canadian International Learning Foundation that supported her in Kandahar, with a steady stream of contributions from big-hearted readers, and now through the generosity of Ashbury College she has a chance to realize her dream. As the Star reported on Thursday, she has just begun her new life in Canada.
Roya is the youngest child of Afghan police Col. Haji Sayed Gulab Shah, a freethinking champion of girls’ education who died fighting the Taliban. “My father believed in girls,” she says simply. “In his view, girls were as good as boys.” That love emboldened Roya to honour her dad’s memory by seizing the rare chance to study abroad, and to put what she learns to good use back home. She aspires to be a politician, a force for change and an advocate for women’s rights. She will return, she says, “to serve this vulnerable and poor country, especially women.”
Challenging as her journey will be, Roya knew that there would be “no mercy for me” if she tried to continue to attend school in Kandahar after her father’s death. Taliban death threats against her family forced her to shelve her studies and hide at home. It is no life for a teenager who seeks to better herself. Sadly, it is the life to which far more Afghan girls will be fated if the Taliban succeed in reversing the nation’s fragile democratic progress after foreign troops leave in the next few years.
What is one young woman’s dream, in Afghanistan’s uncertain struggle to move forward? It is a candle in the darkness. But courageous Canadian troops served there, in part to nurture such candles. They still do.
Happily, today 8 million Afghan children, including 2.7 million girls, are enrolled in school, Oxfam reports. They embody the nation’s hopes. Under the Taliban’s benighted rule a decade ago, fewer than 1 million boys and 5,000 girls were in school. Not every girl faces the same risk that Roya did because of her father’s high profile in battling the Taliban and her own spunk. But as Watson writes, it takes a steely will and a damn-the-danger attitude to pursue an education.
While things have improved, Oxfam cautions that girls still face steep barriers. School conditions are often poor. The quality of teaching varies, and many girls can’t always attend. Help from Canada and other rich countries will be needed for years to ensure that the girls enrolled today get a chance to complete their studies.
That’s a challenge for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, which has pumped more than $75 million into Afghan education programs in recent years, supporting more than 4,000 community-based schools. As Canada’s military mission winds down, Ottawa should step up this commitment to schooling, especially for girls. It’s one of the best investments donors can make.
Hopefully, when Roya returns home it will be to a country where no girl will have to risk her life to learn to read.
A Hostage in Pakistan
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's former ambassador to the U.S., is living under house arrest. The reason? He offended the country's military.
Wall Street Journal By MIRA SETHI JANUARY 21, 2012
Islamabad, Pakistan - 'There are forces in Pakistan that want us to live in fear—fear of external and internal enemies." So warns Husain Haqqani, until November Pakistan's ambassador to Washington and now a de facto prisoner of the Pakistani generals whose ire he has provoked. "But just as the KGB and the Stasi did not succeed in suppressing the spirit of the Soviet and East German people, these forces won't succeed in Pakistan in the long run, either."
I am speaking to Mr. Haqqani in a spacious room in the official residence of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, where the 55-year-old former ambassador—wearing a cotton tunic, loose trousers and white rubber slippers—has been living for weeks, mainly for fear that he might be assassinated outside. The living arrangements may seem odd for those unfamiliar with Pakistan's fractured politics. But his fear is not ill-founded.
Mr. Haqqani's fall from political grace began on Oct. 10, 2011, when an American businessman of Pakistani descent, Mansoor Ijaz, took to the op-ed pages of the Financial Times to broadcast an explosive claim. In the aftermath of the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, Mr. Ijaz alleged, he was approached by a "senior Pakistani diplomat" to pass on a memo to Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The memo sought U.S. help in fending off a possible military coup in Pakistan and effecting a civilian takeover of the country's security program.
Some weeks after publishing his op-ed—and, it turns out, after secretly meeting with the chief of Pakistan's premier spy agency, Inter-services Intelligence (ISI)—Mr. Ijaz claimed that Mr. Haqqani was the diplomat who had asked him to draft the memo. He said he had corresponded with Mr. Haqqani via Blackberry messages, phone conversations and emails to formulate the memo.
Mr. Haqqani denied the allegation and returned to Pakistan to clear his name after "Memogate"—as the issue was breathlessly dubbed in Pakistan's media—threatened to rupture civil-military relations. When he landed at Islamabad airport on Nov. 20, the military seized his passport.
"I did not craft or write the memo that is currently the cause of controversy," Mr. Haqqani tells me flatly. Nonetheless, he offered his resignation as ambassador to facilitate the inquiry. Shortly afterward, Pakistan's supreme court took up the matter and banned Mr. Haqqani from leaving the country.
Back in the U.S., Adm. Mullen claims to have only a hazy recollection of having received, but not taken seriously, an unsigned memo that did not bear the imprimatur of the Pakistani government. The upshot, as Mr. Haqqani points out, is a Pakistani scandal that "involves a memo written by an American and delivered through an American [retired Gen. Jim Jones], to an American military official who consigned it to the dustbin."
It also bears noting that the central "conspiracy" in Memogate supposedly involves an attempt by civilian agents of Pakistan's government to protect that government from yet another illegal military coup. That didn't stop Pakistan's supreme court from taking up charges of "treason" against Mr. Haqqani that could carry the death penalty. Nor has it prevented elements in Pakistan's media from seeking to convict Mr. Haqqani as a traitor and "American agent."
Such incitements are not idle in the context of Pakistan's violent street politics. Last year saw the assassination in broad daylight of Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Pakistan's largest province, whom media had vilified for criticizing the country's notorious blasphemy laws and championing the cause of a Christian woman sentenced under them. Taseer's assassin—one of his own bodyguards—instantly became a hero in many quarters. Four months later, investigative journalist Saleem Shahzad was abducted, tortured and killed after he exposed al Qaeda's infiltration of the Pakistani Navy. ISI involvement in Shahzad's killing is widely suspected though it was officially denied by a recent commission of inquiry led by a supreme court judge.
These precedents weigh on Mr. Haqqani, but he seems determined to press on. "I lived in the United States and taught in the United States," he says, referring to his time as professor of international relations at Boston University and his stint as ambassador. "But I never sought American citizenship because I wanted to be able to contribute to the process of reform and the idea of civilian supremacy in Pakistan."
This points to the issue at the heart of Mr. Haqqani's—and Pakistan's—predicament: The failure of "the idea of civilian supremacy" to gain both a practical and uncontested grip. Instead, Pakistani politics lives in a kind of halfway-house neatly captured by Mr. Haqqani's halfway-house status as both guest and prisoner—a guest of the country's democratically elected leadership, a prisoner of the military and associated antidemocratic forces that want to make an example of the urbane diplomat.
If anyone is equipped to analyze these dilemmas, it is Mr. Haqqani. His 2005 book, "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military" drew attention to the Islamist proxies of Pakistan's military that have killed thousands of Pakistanis and destabilized Afghanistan for two decades. "One of the reasons some people in the establishment hate me so much is because of my book. In fact, when I was made ambassador, somebody said to me that until you recant your book, you will never be forgiven by the Pakistani establishment."
He explains that "Pakistan has a long history of military intervention in politics. There were years when the military did not directly intervene but used proxies. Throughout the 1990s, we had four changes of government and forced early elections each time. For example, among the first allegations against Benazir Bhutto"—the former prime minister assassinated by al Qaeda affiliates in 2007—"was that she was somehow going to compromise the country's nuclear program. So, there are elements entrenched in the apparatus of state who are very reluctant to fully trust the elected leaders of the country."
I press him on the invisible pressures on President Asif Ali Zardari's unpopular government. "Soon after I resigned President Zardari fell ill," he notes. "The psychological-warfare machine tried to give it the color of President Zardari fleeing the country. He went [to Dubai] to get treated and then came back." Speaking perhaps as much to reassure himself as to lend some support to Mr. Zardari—who, if he stays in office through the end of his term in 2013, will be the first Pakistani president to do so—Mr. Haqqani adds that "In all psychological warfare, if the targets keep their nerves, then nothing happens."
Indeed Mr. Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani—Mr. Haqqani's other main protector—are both continually fighting for their political survival. For Mr. Gilani, charges of contempt of court could cost him his prime ministership. For Mr. Zardari, longstanding corruption charges still dog him, and his rivals on the Supreme Court could soon strip him of his presidential immunity. If either man is convicted, the government will fall, possibly dooming Mr. Haqqani and his cause.
As ambassador in Washington, Mr. Haqqani was often referred to as "silver-tongued," a man able to communicate effectively with officials of different political persuasions. Cultivating a relationship with a senator based on shared appreciation of a book on, say, tribal warfare, was the kind of thing that came easily to him.
He says he represented Pakistan diligently at a time when U.S.-Pakistani relations were deeply strained. "There is a longstanding culture of grievance in Pakistan," he says. "A lot of Pakistanis feel the U.S. has not always been responsive to Pakistan's geostrategic concerns. The Pakistani national narrative also says that Pakistan has been deserted by the United States many times. And the U.S. has not done enough to try and change that national narrative."
As for the current U.S. administration, he says that it "does not have the human resources right now to fully understand the complexities of Pakistan and engage with them. They don't have the people who understand."
The traditional pattern of U.S.-Pakistan relations has been that American intelligence wants working relations with Pakistani intelligence, and the State Department wants working relations with Pakistan's foreign office. "The U.S. will have to find a balance between their immediate needs and the long-term usefulness of their actions," says Mr. Haqqani. "They always say the civilian government is 'too weak' for them to engage with. But how will the civilian government become strong if, on all major issues, U.S. officials keep running to Pakistan's military leaders for advice and consultation?"
Still, Mr. Haqqani is not about to blame the U.S. for Pakistan's failures to develop into a normal state. The progressive dreams of the country's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, have been "shattered by religious extremism and repeated military interventions in politics." Enunciating his words carefully, he adds: "While I respect the Pakistani armed forces, I certainly do not support the idea of a militarized Pakistan."
Things may yet work out in Mr. Haqqani's favor. The military and its allies may detest him and want to wound his friends in government, but they do not seem prepared to bring the government down, much less formally take the reins of state. Pakistan is still dependent in many ways on the U.S., which is its biggest trading partner and supplier of military resources. Two weeks ago, U.S. Sens. John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Mark Kirk issued a statement saying they were "increasingly troubled" by the treatment of Mr. Haqqani and were "closely following" his case.
Yet it says something dark about Pakistan that an episode as preposterous as Memogate can all but paralyze the politics of a country already reeling from a faltering economy, sectarian violence and a parlous international situation. The military establishment is still pursuing an arms race with India and helping the Taliban in Afghanistan—and it has been remarkably successful in casting its domestic opponents as agents of the CIA or Indian intelligence. Thus Mr. Haqqani's concern: "Sometimes I wonder if Salmaan Taseer's fate awaits all those of us who stand up for a different vision for Pakistan."
Ms. Sethi is an assistant books editor at the Journal
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By Kay Johnson, The Associated Press | The Canadian Press
KABUL - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that he personally held peace talks recently with the insurgent faction Hizb-i-Islami, appearing to assert his own role in a U.S.-led bid for negotiations to end the country's decade-long war.
Karzai made the announcement hours before he met with American special representative Marc Grossman to discuss progress and plans for bringing the Taliban insurgency into formal talks for the first time.
"Recently, we met with a delegation from Hizb-i-Islami ... and had negotiations," Karzai told a meeting of the Afghan parliament. "We are hopeful that these negotiations for peace continue and we will have good results," he added.
Karzai's statement was a reminder that any negotiations to end Afghanistan's war will be more complex than just talking to the Taliban's Pakistan-based leadership, headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar. The two other main insurgent factions in the country have their own leaders and agendas.
Hizb-i-Islami is a radical Islamist militia that controls territory in Afghanistan's northeast and launches attacks against U.S. forces from Pakistan. Its leader, powerful warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is a former U.S. ally now listed as a terrorist by Washington.
Based over the Pakistan border, Hekmatyar has ties to al-Qaida and has launched deadly attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Fighters loyal to Hekmatyar also have strongholds in Baghlan, Kunduz and Kunar provinces in the north and northeast Afghanistan.
The other main insurgent group is the feared Haqqani network, which maintains close ties to both al-Qaida and the Taliban and commands the loyalties of an estimated 10,000 fighters. The Haqqanis have been blamed for a series of spectacular attacks, including suicide bombings inside Kabul.
By showing he can bring at least one major faction to the negotiating table, Karzai may hope to boost his standing in a tentative peace process that has recently been dominated by Washington. The president has met before with representatives of Hekmatyar, whose political allies hold seats in the Afghan parliament and Cabinet, but Saturday's public announcement seemed intended to bolster Karzai's insistence on inclusion in the U.S.-led peace process.
"It should be mentioned that the Afghan nation is the owner of the peace process and negotiations," Karzai said. "No foreign country or organization can prevent (Afghans) from exercising this right."
The U.S. has repeatedly said that formal negotiations must be Afghan-led, but Karzai is reportedly uneasy with his government not being directly involved in recent preliminary talks with Taliban representatives.
U.S. representative Grossman began meeting with Karzai on Saturday, the U.S. Embassy said.
Grossman, however, stressed that any future negotiations would include Afghanistan's government.
"After our meeting with President Karzai, we will decide what to do next because we take his guidance and advice in an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process," Grossman said Friday during a stop in India.
French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet also arrived in Kabul on Saturday for talks with Afghan officials after Paris suspended training missions following the killing of four French troops by an Afghan soldier, the latest in a rising number of assaults in which Afghan security forces or infiltrators have turned their guns on coalition forces.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan early over the deaths, a potential setback for the U.S.-led coalition's efforts to build a national army and allow foreign troops to go home.
Longuet said Saturday in Kabul his mission is to "evaluate the attitude our officials should take" in the future.
He expressed hope investigators would have access to the Afghan attacker to learn whether he acted alone or had outside help.
On Saturday, insurgents killed a NATO service member in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said. The statement gave no other details, nor the nationality of the casualty.
Insurgents clashed Saturday with government forces in the town of Barmal in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, said Maj. Abdul Rahman, who co-ordinates coalition and Afghan operations in the area.
The Paktika governor's office said four attackers were trying to enter the town's main bazaar and then move toward government offices and military bases nearby. Before they could, Afghan security forces engaged them in a one-hour gun battle and all four attackers were killed, it said.
Separately, a roadside bomb killed four Afghan civilians Saturday morning in Helmand province in the south, the Interior Ministry said.
___
Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez contributed to this report.
U.S. envoy Grossman in Afghanistan to discuss peace, Taliban
By the CNN Wire Staff January 21, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- America's special envoy to the region talked peace and reconciliation with Hamid Karzai in Kabul Saturday, though the Afghan president made it clear that Afghans should be in the driver's seat.
U.S. diplomat Marc Grossman will meet again Sunday with Karzai in discussions aimed at a achieving a peaceful resolution to conflict with Taliban insurgents.
"I am pleased to be in Kabul to consult with the government of Afghanistan," Grossman said in a statement.
"The United States stands ready to assist in any way we can an Afghan-led reconciliation process to find a peaceful end to this conflict. I look forward to calling on President Karzai and discussing next steps."
Karzai's spokesman Aimal Faizi declined to give details of the talks.
However, Karzai, in an address to the Afghan parliament, said the government and its peace council were making every effort to bring an end to the bloodshed.
"The Afghan nation is the owner of the peace process and any peace talks," Karzai said. "No other country or organization has the right to deprive the Afghan nation to this right. Afghanistan is not a place for foreigners to do their political experiments or a laboratory that every few years they test a new political system."
Grossman has been meeting secretly with Taliban negotiators for more than a year. Last week, U.S. senior administration officials said the United States could inch closer toward peace talks with the Taliban if Karzai blesses the negotiations.
"We don't have any idea standing here today what the outcome of such discussions could be," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week. "I think all of us are entering into it with a very realistic sense of what is possible. And that includes, of course, President Karzai and his government, which after all bear the ultimate responsibility and the consequences of any such discussions."
Clinton acknowledged last week that discussions about opening up a Taliban office in Qatar and transferring some Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay were part of the U.S. support for Afghan reconciliation efforts.
She stressed that nothing had been concluded, but said she was sending Grossman to Kabul and Qatar for further consultations. Diplomatic sources said that depending on the outcome of the talks with Karzai, Grossman could have another meeting with the Taliban.
Secret talks between the United States and the militant Taliban began in November 2010, sources said. Senior U.S. officials and diplomatic sources said German officials brokered initial meetings with Tayeb al-Agha, an aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The sources said after a series of meetings, Agha was able to prove his good faith as an interlocutor with key Taliban leaders.
The idea is for the talks to be Afghan-led, senior officials said, with as much U.S. participation as the Afghans need and want.
The talks would be the product of what officials call "confidence-building measures," such as the opening of the office in Qatar's capital Doha and a Taliban renunciation of terrorism in exchange for the release of five Taliban members being detained at Guantanamo Bay.
Clinton said last week no transfers were imminent, but Grossman's talks in Kabul are expected to address the possible release of the detainees.
Once described as preconditions for peace talks to occur, Clinton now says insurgents must lay down their arms, accept the Afghan constitution and end ties with al Qaeda as "necessary outcomes" of the discussions.
Grossman's visit to Afghanistan also comes days after Pakistan's government, embroiled in a squabble between civilian and military leaders, declined a visit from Grossman, according to a senior Pakistani government official.
"His visit could fuel anti-American sentiments and create trouble for the government, which is already surrounded by storms," the official said Wednesday.
The official asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media on this subject.
A U.S. State Department official said Grossman wanted to go to Pakistan, but the Pakistani government declined for the time being.
CNN's Nick Paton Walsh and Elise Labott and journalist Nasir Habib contributed to this report
France pledge to Afghanistan despite killings
By Dominique Chabrol and Joris Fioriti | AFP News
France appeared to lessen the prospect of an early withdrawal from the 10-year war in Afghanistan on Saturday, stressing its commitment to the country after an Afghan soldier killed four of its troops.
Defence Minister Gerard Longuet and Chief of Defence staff Admiral Edouard Guillaud flew into Afghanistan for emergency talks a day after the president threatened to order a swift exit of its 3,600 troops on the ground.
Paris reacted furiously after an Afghan soldier on Friday shot dead four unarmed soldiers and wounded 15 others as they completed a work-out on the training base they shared with Afghan troops.
"The entire point of this visit is to assess the position that we have to take," Longuet told reporters after arriving in Kabul to make recommendations to President Nicolas Sarkozy on the future of the deployment.
The French role in the US-led NATO mission is unpopular at home and Friday's killings come less than 100 days before presidential elections.
Longuet appeared to distance himself slightly from the prospect of an immediate withdrawal, saying: "The mission remains exactly the same, to bring about a stable force" and "to handover" to the Afghans.
"We must reflect in order to support a mission that is a success."
France is one of the largest contributors to the 130,000-strong US-led NATO force fighting the Taliban and training Afghan soldiers to take responsibility for security by the end of 2014 when foreign troops are scheduled to withdraw.
Longuet refused to be drawn about the possibility of an early withdrawal, saying only: "I'll talk about that with the president, he's my only boss."
Friday's attack was the second time in a month that French troops were shot dead by a man in Afghan army uniform, bringing the country's overall death toll to 82 since troops deployed in 2001.
Longuet held talks with General Jean-Pierre Palasset, the French commander on the ground at their main base in eastern Afghanistan, and was then due to meet General Nazar, commander of the 3rd Afghan army brigade.
On Sunday, the French minister will meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Afghan defence and interior ministers, US commander General John Allen and other senior commanders in the International Security Assistance Force.
A classified report leaked to The New York Times says attacks by Afghan soldiers on NATO soldiers are increasing and are a "systemic" problem, rather than rooted in isolated incidents.
The report puts the killings down to a decade of contempt that each side has for the other, and profound ill will among both civilians and soldiers on both sides. It downplayed the role of Taliban infiltrators in the incidents.
On arrival in Kabul, Longuet briefly boarded a French aircraft preparing to repatriate some of the soldiers seriously wounded in Friday's attack.
He said the men were victims of the trust they had in Afghan soldiers they were training at the base where one of them opened fire.
"They didn't have a chance. This was murder," said Longuet.
The minister is to brief Sarkozy on steps being taken by the Afghans to guarantee security conditions for the French trainers.
Sarkozy has said that without such conditions being clearly established, he will raise the prospect of an early return of the French army.
He has already immediately suspended French military training and joint combat operations with Afghan troops.
The French force is to be reduced to 3,000 by late 2012, with 200 due to leave in March. All NATO combat troops are due to leave by the end of 2014.
French Defense Minister Visits Afghanistan
VOA News January 21, 2012
The French defense minister arrived in Kabul Saturday for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a day after an Afghan solider shot and killed four French troops.
Gerard Longuet said France remains committed to bringing stability to Afghanistan. His comment follows a threat from Paris to accelerate its troop withdrawal following the deaths of the soldiers.
Longuet said he is in Afghanistan to determine the position France will take following the attack in eastern Kapisa province that also wounded 15 French troops.
The French defense minister met some of the wounded soldiers at Kabul's airport before their evacuation to France. He said the men were victims of the trust they had in the Afghan soldiers they were training.
He said Friday the French troops were not armed when the attacker opened fire. The shooter has been taken into custody.
Longuet is due to brief French President Nicolas Sarkozy on the measures being taken by the Afghans to guarantee security conditions for the French trainers.
President Sarkozy has suspended military operations in Afghanistan. Mr. Sarkozy said Friday it is "unacceptable" that Afghan troops would attack French soldiers.
A Taliban spokesman praised the attacker, but did not claim responsibility for the shooting.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected speculation that France plans to accelerate withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. She told reporters Friday in Washington that the U.S. is in close contact with France and has no reason to believe that France will do anything other than continue to be part of the transition process and exit as agreed in Lisbon.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP.
Afghan Taliban say recruited soldier who killed French
By Amie Ferris-Rotman and Mirwais Harooni
KABUL (Reuters) - The Afghan Taliban said on Saturday they had recruited an Afghan soldier who shot dead four French soldiers a day earlier, raising fears the militant group had managed to deepen its infiltration of the country's struggling security forces.
The killings prompted France to threaten an early pullout from the NATO-led war.
The claim of responsibility raises serious concerns about handing control of security over to the Afghan army and police, which NATO-led forces are currently in the process of doing before all foreign combat troops leave by the end of 2014.
"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has recruited people in important positions," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location, using another name the Islamist group call themselves.
"Some of them have already accomplished their missions."
The four French soldiers died on the spot, he said.
The killings in Kapisa province were the latest in a string of such attacks in which Afghan troops turn on their Western allies and mentors. While NATO has blamed Taliban infiltration in the past, it has also said stress, indiscipline and divided loyalties within the hastily trained ranks played a role.
Such attacks are especially damaging as the Afghan National Army tries to win public trust before foreign troops leave.
The Taliban claim coincided with a visit to Kabul by the U.S. Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman. He is expected to meet President Hamid Karzai and other senior Afghan officials.
Despite the presence of more than 100,000 foreign troops, violence across Afghanistan remains at its worst levels since the Taliban were toppled by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, according to the United Nations.
In April last year, an Afghan Air Force pilot opened fire at the military wing of Kabul's main airport, killing eight U.S. troops and an American contractor.
An Afghan border policeman shot dead six U.S. soldiers during a training mission in Nangarhar province in 2010.
U.S. and NATO officials usually describe such attacks as isolated incidents.
Afzal Aman, head of operations for the Afghan National Army, said he could not confirm if the Taliban had infiltrated the army in this instance. But he suggested that such recruitment could represent a bigger threat than previously thought.
"Usually in the past, whenever something like this happened, it came about after Afghan and foreign soldiers had an argument over something related to Afghan affairs," he told Reuters.
Friday's attack also comes weeks after an offer from the Taliban to open a political office in Qatar as a prelude to possible peace talks with the United States and other nations.
After the shooting -- which took the French death toll to 82 since the war began in 2001 -- President Nicolas Sarkozy ordered all French military operations on the ground to be suspended and Defense Minister Gerard Longuet jetted into Kabul Saturday.
A regional Taliban commander added that incidents such as a video showing U.S. Marines urinating on corpses were boosting support for the group among Afghans and threatened more attacks.
"Our missions have become easier because of incidents like the video," he said.
(Additional reporting by Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR; Editing by Michael Georgy)
The immorality of Afghanistan’s ‘moral crimes’
Washington Post By Kimberly Motley OPED Saturday, January 21, 2012
“Please help us.”
Those were the first words that my client, Gulnaz, said when I met her inside the Kabul prison that was home to hundreds of women, many of whom, like her, were locked away for so-called moral crimes — adultery or running away from home. The frail 20-year-old clung to her baby, who was conceived through rape and born on the prison floor, where mother and child had lived for nearly two years.
Tearfully, Gulnaz recounted the story of the assault that took place in 2009. The attacker, nearly twice her age, pinned her down, tied her up and then savagely raped her. She described going to the police with her disabled, widowed mother to report the rape. There she was instantly imprisoned for reporting the crime. With no male head of household present, the two women were not taken seriously.
After years of advocacy by human rights groups and other activists, and a decade of war by the United States and its allies — a war in which the need to uphold the rights of women has often been invoked — Afghan women remain trapped in a legal system that often punishes them for being the victims of brutal crimes.
My illiterate client told me of her experience going to court with her illegitimate daughter and not understanding the legal process. She was forced to represent herself after her Afghan lawyer failed to show up, yet the judges who presided over the case refused to allow her to speak. Instead, they berated Gulnaz for lying, insisting that women cannot get pregnant by having sex just once. This assertion was the basis for the 12-year sentence that was imposed, with a wrenching caveat: Marrying her attacker would allow her to be “free.”
Unfortunately, Gulnaz’s case is not an anomaly but represents the situation that more than half of the imprisoned women in Afghanistan find themselves in — locked up for moral crimes, according to a recent studyby the United Nations.
I submitted a pardon application for Gulnaz, accompanied by a petition with more than 6,000 signatures. She had no family willing to take up her cause, but the world, as we discovered, supported her release.
Standing up for the rights of women like Gulnaz was part of the reason the United States went to Afghanistan in the first place. In 2001, one of the key political arguments that President George W. Bush’s administration used to support the military deployment was stopping the terrorists, for whom “the brutal oppression of women” was “a central goal.” In November 2001, Congress passed a bill noting Taliban oppression of women and stressing the need for Afghan women and children to have better access to health care and education.
International attention to the fate of women in Afghanistan has been an issue throughout the war. In 2009, the Afghan government focused on violence and human rights when it passed the Elimination of Violence Against Women Law. Though this measure garnered substantial support worldwide, oversight has been limited. The law is largely ignored in Afghanistan’s justice system, and abused women are routinely imprisoned as a result. While Gulnaz’s case brought international media attention to the plight of Afghan rape victims, inside Afghanistan, gross violations of basic human rights are often business as usual.
In Gulnaz’s case, after we submitted the pardon application, President Hamid Karzai formed a judicial committee with members from the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court and the attorney general’s office. They were to investigate Gulnaz’s case and, reportedly, the cases of all other women imprisoned in Kabul. The formation of this committee was an unprecedented step for the government: It was directly confronting the realities of women imprisoned for moral crimes.
Ultimately, Karzai’s investigation found that Gulnaz’s conviction was based on oppressive, misogynistic interpretations of Islamic sharia law. These views were in part remnants of the Taliban regime’s swift and unforgiving justice system. A more contemporary interpretation of sharia law, Afghan laws and international conventions supported her exoneration.
On Dec. 14, 2011, Karzai acted upon the pardon application and exonerated Gulnaz. He acknowledged that the charge of adultery against her was a “misjudgment” and that the cultural norms leading to her imprisonment were long overdue for an overhaul. This decision has the potential to set a precedent for other rape victims seeking justice and is a significant recognition of the persecution that Afghan women have long endured under the veil of cultural appeasement.
After 10 years of foreign assistance, it should not have taken the president of Afghanistan to overturn the decisions of three Kabul courts that receive vast amounts of international funding. It should not have taken international media attention to embarrass the Afghan government into finally doing the right thing. And it should not have taken a Western lawyer to give Gulnaz legal representation to achieve exoneration.
According to an October report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which works to monitor aid spending there by various U.S. governmental agencies, almost $73 billion has been appropriated to Afghanistan since 2002. This money needs to be used more wisely.
Rule-of-law initiatives, particularly on women’s rights, have a better chance of success if the international community exercises more oversight and makes a greater effort to understand how the Afghan justice system really works. At present, I am the only Western lawyer in Afghanistan taking on such cases. Gulnaz’s case came to me through concerned people who knew of the miscarriages of justice that she endured. I took it to advocate for her and other women in Afghanistan’s legal system.
Although her case has a suitable ending, it took agitating for attention at the highest levels in the country to get a rape victim out of prison. The laws intended to protect her, and the international initiatives meant to do the same, did nothing.
Clearly most of the responsibility should lie with the Afghan government. Prosecutors and judges perpetuate human rights abuses on women, especially in cases involving domestic abuse, with little to no accountability. Because the justice system has failed to deter people within the government from committing human rights abuses, more than half of the women imprisoned in Afghanistan continue to be prosecuted for moral crimes.
The government should establish a standing committee within the attorney general’s office and the judiciary to ensure that cases of women charged with moral crimes never make it to court — or at the very least, that women are not prosecuted for being victims of violence. From one “misjudgment” could come a real chance to save other women from similar suffering.
I realize that it may take years, if not generations, for significant improvements on women’s rights in Afghanistan. I am optimistic, however, that Gulnaz’s case can serve as a turning point to encourage changes that can protect other women enduring her same plight.
One pardon, one release, one woman, is not good enough.
outlook@washpost.com
Kimberley Motley is an American lawyer who practices in the United States and Afghanistan, where she works on human rights and other cases.
NATO soldier dies in attack in south Afghanistan
By KAY JOHNSON | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO says a member of its international force in Afghanistan has died in an insurgent attack.
A coalition statement said the incident took place Saturday in southern Afghanistan but gave no other details, nor the nationality of the casualty.
The attack comes a day after an Afghan soldier opened fire on French troops during a training exercise, killing four of them and prompting France to suspend its training programs.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that he personally held peace talks recently with the insurgent faction Hizb-i-Islami, appearing to assert his own role in a U.S.-led bid for negotiations to end the country's decade-long war.
Karzai made the announcement hours before he was to meet with American special representative Marc Grossman to discuss progress and plans for bringing the Taliban insurgency into formal talks for the first time.
"Recently, we met with a delegation from Hizb-i-Islami ... and had negotiations," Karzai told a meeting of the Afghan parliament, adding, "We are hopeful that these negotiations for peace continue and we will have good results."
Hizb-i-Islami is a radical Islamist militia that controls territory in Afghanistan's northeast and launches attacks against U.S. forces from Pakistan. Its leader, powerful warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is a former U.S. ally now listed as a terrorist by Washington.
The president has met before with representatives of Hekmatyar, whose political allies hold seats in the Afghan parliament and Cabinet, but Saturday's public announcement seemed intended to bolster Karzai's insistence on inclusion in the U.S.-led peace process.
Karzai's statement was also a reminder that any negotiations to end Afghanistan's war will be more complex than just talking to the Taliban's Pakistan-based leadership, headed by Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Hizb-i-Islami, also based over the Pakistan border, has ties to al-Qaida and has launched deadly attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Fighters loyal to Hekmatyar also have strongholds in Baghlan, Kunduz and Kunar provinces in the north and northeast Afghanistan.
There is also the feared Haqqani network, which maintains close ties to both al-Qaida and the Taliban and commands the loyalties of an estimated 10,000 fighters. The Haqqanis have been blamed for a series of spectacular attacks, including suicide bombings inside Kabul.
By showing he can bring at least one major faction to the negotiating table, Karzai may hope to increase his standing in a tentative peace process that has recently been dominated by Washington. The U.S. has repeatedly said that formal negotiations must be Afghan-led, but Karzai is reportedly uneasy with his government not being directly involved in recent preliminary talks with Taliban representatives.
"It should be mentioned that the Afghan nation is the owner of the peace process and negotiations," Karzai said. "No foreign country or organization can prevent (Afghans) from exercising this right."
U.S. representative Grossman recently stressed that any future negotiations would include Afghanistan's government, and said he would meet Karzai on Saturday.
"After our meeting with President Karzai, we will decide what to do next because we take his guidance and advice in an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process," Grossman said Friday at a stop in India.
The Taliban have vowed to keep fighting as they explore a possible political resolution to the war.
Insurgents clashed Saturday with government forces in the town of Barmal in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, said Maj. Abdul Rahman, who coordinates coalition and Afghan operations in the area.
Afghan security forces killed two of the attackers and recovered their guns and a rocket-propelled grenade, he said. Two other attackers wearing suicide bomb vests moved in, but their explosives detonated prematurely and both died at the scene. One civilian was wounded in the attack, he said.
The Paktika governor's office said four attackers were trying to enter the town's main bazaar and then move toward government offices and military bases nearby. Before they could, Afghan security forces engaged them in a one-hour gun battle and all four attackers were killed, it said.
Separately, four Afghan civilians were killed Saturday morning when their truck struck a roadside bomb near Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province in the south, the Ministry of Interior said.
On Friday, insurgents attacked Afghan border policemen in the Gulran district of Herat province near the Iranian border in western Afghanistan, said Sulaiman Khan, commander of a border police rapid reaction unit in the area.
He said four border policemen were killed immediately when their vehicle was attacked by militants firing from several different directions, and a fifth died on Saturday.
4 civilians killed in mine blast in S Afghanistan
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, Jan. 21 (Xinhua) -- Four civilians were killed and two others were injured Saturday in a mine blast in the country's southern province of Helmand, a police source said.
"An anti-vehicle mine blasted at around 10:30 a.m. local time in Lashkari area of Helmand's provincial capital Lashkar Gah when a civilian vehicle touched it off triggering a powerful explosion. As a result four civilians were killed and two others injured," a senior police official in the province Mohammad Ismail Hotak told Xinhua.
The Taliban-led insurgency has been rampant since the militant group announced to launch a rebel offensive from May 2011 against Afghan and NATO-led troops stationed in Afghanistan.
The police official, Hotak, from Afghan forces' coordination center in Helmand, also blamed Taliban insurgents for the attack in the province, 555 km south of capital city of Kabul. Civilian casualties have been on rise in insurgency-hit Afghanistan.
Seven civilians were killed and eight others injured when a suicide bomb car, targeting the entrance gate of an international airport, went off in the neighboring Kandahar province Thursday.
A total of 1,462 Afghan civilians were killed in the first half of 2011, a 15 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to the United Nations mid-year report released in Kabul in July, 2011.
Can Afghanistan be saved?
The Globe and Mail Reviewed by Paula Newberg Friday, Jan. 20, 2012
Reviewed here: Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, by Terry Glavin; The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace, by Chris Alexander
Afghanistan is a gift to writers. Stunning and tragic, at once victim of violence and instigator of terror, hotly debated and often ignored, Afghanistan is the place everyone chronicles and no one seems fully to understand. Come from the Shadows is a collection of sympathetic anecdotes, and an argument for continued Western engagement in a place, journalist Terry Glavin suggests, where “madness, politics and war are often parts of the same conversation.”
In Glavin’s Afghanistan, things may have gone mightily awry, but not everything has gone wrong. As the state has muddled through, progress has been local and personal. The costs are high: War has contributed to increased mental illness, poverty is searing and families can find themselves divided by belief as well as deed. Glavin embraces the whole country with kindness, somewhat in awe of the courage and convictions of individuals who simply will not accept the negative assumptions that outsiders can bring to them and their country.
Just as NATO troops are headed home, and public debate has taken to assuming that less is more, or better, Glavin contends, energetically and emotionally, that Afghanistan needs a strong foreign military presence to become the democratic state it should be, and wants to be. Glavin argues that Afghans want NATO to stay, disputing the prevailing Western view that foreigners are unwelcome.
Come from the Shadows disputes the slippery slopes of Western policies that began with state-building and democracy-promotion and are ending by seeking to reconcile with the same groups against which NATO has been fighting for 10 years. The hapless state will be left to sort itself out. As Glavin wrote earlier in Dissent, “there’s nothing like lowering your standards to make them easier to uphold.”
When world leaders met in Bonn in December, reality forced them to acknowledge the last decade’s efforts and errors, justifications, excuses, laments and, inevitably, questions about a decade that was as much about themselves as about Afghanistan. As Chris Alexander notes in The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace, the promise of late 2001, when a new Afghanistan “seemed so tantalizingly close,” remains more than elusive today.
His is an optimist’s take on a place and problems too regularly treated as lost, a reminder of the hopes of multilateralism, and a diplomat’s compassionate history of a decade too often understood only as unremitting war. Earnest and honest, his generous portraits of political leaders and colleagues sometimes betray sympathies that too easily override needed critique. But Alexander’s intent, like Glavin’s, remains clear: As one ally after another leaves an insecure, poverty-afflicted war zone that they all helped to create, he believes that Afghanistan is worth a better investment.
Alexander comes to this task with insight gained as a Canadian and then a UN diplomat in Kabul. When he recites a familiar litany of violence, regrets and stubborn determination, he does so with concern more than accusation. He lauds the process that brought a new government to Kabul, with warm regard for Hamid Karzai and his early cabinet of returned diaspora technocrats, and measured support for the new parliament.
He nonetheless admits that by 2006 rehabilitation was stuck: The state was skeletal, its political legitimacy a veneer varnished by “drugs, warlords, power politics and a culture of payback and vengeance.”
The intricate competition (and occasional collaboration) between extremism and corruption undercut government and politics. “If the military situation was bad,” Alexander writes of the fulcrum months of 2006 when Afghanistan tried to reinvent itself, “governance was worse.” The virus of corruption infected government itself, inviting renewed insurgency and discouraging moderation of any sort. “Even when Karzai acted responsibly” – a telling turn of phrase – “scandal, conspiracy and manipulation seemed to lurk behind every corner.”
But Alexander is loath to blame the government for problems that he and his colleagues believed were sourced elsewhere. Little of his book suffers from the usual invective of writings on the region, but even the ever-generous Alexander seems stumped by Pakistan. His dispiriting descriptions of UN discussions with the Pakistan government reveal some of the thinking behind the military surge of 2009-2010: “If Pakistan wasn’t going to fight the Taliban, the United States and NATO would have to do the job instead.”
A worthy-sounding goal, but highly contestable. Foreign military forces are on their way home, and political transition in Afghanistan is now being turned into negotiations with the Taliban. Although Alexander doesn’t say so, the Taliban at least as dangerous for Pakistan as for Afghanistan; Pakistan believes that some of the responsibility for that lies with Afghanistan.
Both Glavin and Alexander highlight the confusing combinations of interventionism and isolationism that typify the collateral damage not only of 2001, but also of 1991: Post-Cold War, post-Bosnia and post-Rwanda, the maxims on which intervention is based have been murky, and those that support democratic state-building have been hard to sustain. Neither conservatives nor liberals have been clear-thinking; each has sacrificed principle to changeable views of security, stability and opportunism; each has been disappointed; and each has failed in their respective, if periodically unclear, missions.
Diplomats, Sir Harold Nicolson wrote long ago, often progress further than politicians in their views of international conduct. But the most sympathetic diplomats, as Alexander certainly is, are often better advocates than critics of the diplomatic endeavour. The Long Way Back begins an urgent conversation; an even sharper, self-critical analysis of the last decade’s diplomacy should come next.
Paula Newberg is director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, and formerly special adviser to the United Nations in Afghanistan.
500 more Afghan police to go to Turkey for training: minister
KABUL, Jan. 21 (Xinhua) -- Five hundred more Afghan police officers will go to Turkey for training in the near future, Afghan Interior Minister Basmillah Mohammadi said on Saturday.
"Another 500 young police officers will go to our friend country of Turkey in the near future and will be put through a curriculum, which is practical in nature and covers a police skill which has been very important in law enforcement mission," Mohammadi told the audience in a ceremony before presenting rewards for some officers who recently graduated from a training period in Turkey.
As many as 600 police officers recently returned Afghanistan from Turkey after completion of six-month training there.
The Afghan government and NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan (NTM-A) have stepped up efforts to train and equip Afghan police and army as NATO-led ISAF forces have handed over the security responsibilities of several areas across the country to Afghanistan, parts of a process which will run through 2014 when Afghanistan takes over the full leadership of its own security duties from U.S. and NATO forces.
Nato's Afghan alliance unhinged by growing mutual mistrust
US military report reveals how issues such as arrogance and cleanliness are leading Afghan soldiers to shoot Nato trainers
Guardian.co.uk By Jon Boone Friday 20 January 2012
Kabul - Mutual mistrust and contempt between local and foreign forces in Afghanistan that often borders on hatred is one of the main reasons why Afghan troops increasingly turn their guns on their Nato comrades, a damning report has found.
The research, commissioned by the US military, said American soldiers enrage their Afghan colleagues with what the report describes as extreme arrogance, bullying and "crude behaviour".
It also heavily criticised as "profoundly intellectually dishonest" the Nato claims that the killing of alliance troops by Afghan soldiers is extremely rare.
The data suggests incidents such as the killing on Friday of four French soldiers "reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between 'allies' in modern military history)".
It warned that the problem is now so serious that it is "provoking a crisis of confidence and trust among westerners training and working with Afghan National Security Forces" (ANSFs).
According to behavioural scientist Jeffrey Bordin's report, the number of attacks have been growing, with 26 incidents of killings or attempted killings since early 2007. Those attacks led to the deaths of 58 foreign personnel.
While some of these incidents involved Taliban infiltrators, Bordin believes many resulted from "deep-seated animosity, often stimulated by social and personal conflicts".
Based on interviews with 613 Afghan security forces, the document paints an extremely bleak picture of mutual contempt and misunderstanding between the two sides.
US troops regard their Afghan allies they are training and fighting alongside as untrustworthy, dishonest, incompetent and practising "repulsive hygiene".
For their part, the Afghans have been provoked into fights, and even attempts to kill, by behaviour that many Americans might not be unduly shocked by.
That includes "urinating in public, their cursing at, insulting and being rude and vulgar to ANSF members, and unnecessarily shooting animals".
The factors that create the most animosity included US military convoys blocking traffic, returning fire on insurgents in an apparently indiscriminate way, risking civilian lives, "naively using flawed intelligence sources" and conducting raids on Afghans' private homes.
Another cause for concern is the fact that armed Afghan soldiers almost never intervene when one of their comrades is attempting to kill Nato soldiers.
On Friday, Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said the so-called "red team study" was produced by an outside contractor and was not approved or endorsed by senior Isaf officials who reviewed it.
Isaf said the study "suffered from irrelevant generalisations, narrow sample sets, unprofessional rhetoric and sensationalism".
Military "red teams" are independent cells used to scrutinise and challenge operations and plans.
With the vast bulk of foreign troops in Afghanistan coming from America, the US has inevitably suffered the most from what Isaf calls "green on blue incidents".
However, British troops have also been killed, including a case in November 2009 when an Afghan policeman killed five British soldiers and wounded a further six who were resting after a patrol and were not armed or wearing their body armour.
Nearly all France's 4,000 soldiers in Afghanistan are concentrated in Kapisa, a province not far north of Kabul which has long been wracked by a persistent insurgency.
An Afghan battalion commander in southern Afghanistan told the Guardian last year that he is most concerned about Pashtun soldiers.
Although the Pashtuns are Afghanistan's largest ethnic group they are under-represented in the ANA and overwhelmingly dominate the insurgency.
The captain, a non-Pashtun himself, recalled how he disarmed one of his subordinates who was so disgusted by Americans that he refused to even look at US soldiers when he encountered them.
However, he pinned the blame on the killings of foreign troops firmly on the Taliban and the ISI, the Pakistani military spy agency that is thought to support the insurgency.
"Those who kill the foreigners are slaves of Pakistan," he said. "The ISI and Pakistan don't want the ANA to succeed."
The recruitment and training of a sizeable army and police force, which will ultimately be 352,000 strong, is a cornerstone of Nato's strategy in Afghanistan.
Without a decent security force the collapse of the current Afghan state after the drawdown of the vast majority of Nato forces by the end of 2014 would be inevitable.
Although the Afghan army has improved markedly in recent years the report's interviews with 215 US soldiers highlighted a long list of problems that remain: "They reported pervasive illicit drug use, massive thievery, personal instability, dishonesty, no integrity, incompetence, unsafe weapon handling, corrupt officers, no real NCO corps, covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents, high Awol rates, bad morale, laziness, repulsive hygiene and the torture of dogs."
200 Afghan Officers, Soldiers Poisoned in Kabul
TOLOnews.com Friday, 20 January 2012
Around 200 Afghan National Army officers and soldiers fell ill on Friday after eating poisoned food at a training centre in Pul-e-Charkhi in Kabul.
The officers and soldiers fell ill after having lunch at the training centre on Friday, the Ministry of Defence said.
The poisoned ones were rushed to the Sardar Mohammad Dawood Khan military hospital in Kabul.
The Ministry of Defence said investigations into the incident have been launched.
Enemy infiltration into the Afghan security forces has been a big concern, but it is not yet clear if the food was poisoned by a sleeping agent.
Afghan schism
Financial Times Review by Shashank Joshi January 20, 2012
Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn look at the divisions between al-Qaeda and the Taliban in ‘An Enemy We Created’
An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al-Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010, by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, Hirst & Co, RRP£30, 320 pages
Sir Olaf Caroe, a British colonial administrator and ethnographer of the Pashtuns, once observed that “unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over”. The latest Afghan war is not over but its end, at least for the US and Europe, is dimly visible over the horizon. The international military footprint is shrinking and echoes of the Soviet withdrawal – orderly, but culminating in the collapse of the Afghan government – are bouncing around western capitals.
Perhaps that is why things are getting serious. Ten years ago the then CIA director, George Tenet, declared that “the Taliban and al-Qaeda [are] really the same”. In early January the Taliban announced plans to open a political office in Qatar. One issue lies at the crux of negotiations: was Tenet correct about the group that, last year, eulogised Osama bin Laden as “a real martyr”? Or are the Taliban a nationalist movement, separable from the swirling currents of global jihad that engulfed their country in the 1980s?
Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn are well placed to offer an answer, having lived in Kandahar for five years and translated the memoirs of the Taliban’s former envoy to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef. The two young researchers bring the empathy and experience of old chroniclers such as Caroe but none of the romantic condescension towards the “wily Pathan”.
Their central thesis in An Enemy We Created is that “the issue of international terrorism from within Afghanistan’s borders may not necessarily be as big a potential problem as is currently believed”. That is because, like Tenet, we have persistently overestimated the degree of intellectual and operational agreement between two strains of jihad – one local and contingent, the other global and unyielding.
These were forged in parallel during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But, as van Linschoten and Kuehn demonstrate, they had radically different influences. The urbane, educated Arab interlopers were a generation older than their largely rural Afghan hosts. They were steeped in a transnational and politically charged Islam quite alien to the parochial Deobandi tradition of the Pakistani madrassas that schooled the Taliban. “From the Arab perspective,” note the authors, “Afghanistan is almost always referred to as a place where the religious beliefs of the local people leave a lot to be desired, but should be tolerated” – not far off the views of Middle England.
The relationship between Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and bin Laden, who had been invited into Afghanistan by other warlords, was awkward and fractious. Omar was “apoplectic” when bin Laden held a major press conference in 1998: “there is only one ruler. Is it me or Osama?” The book dismantles “the oft-stated image of bin Laden sitting at Omar’s side, whispering conspiracies into his ear, playing Iago to Omar’s Othello”.
The authors seem on shakier ground in arguing that the Taliban might have been pulled back from the brink in 2001. This sits uncomfortably with their meticulous analysis of Omar’s thinking. When the Saudis had tried to extract bin Laden in 1998, careful to do so in a face-saving “Islamic” way, it became obvious that Omar had no intention of negotiating in good faith.
A decade after being routed on the battlefield, the resurgent Taliban have repeated the trick they performed in the 1990s: exploiting local grievances against a predatory government. The sobering assessment of van Linschoten and Kuehn is that the insurgency is splintering, thanks in part to Nato’s strategy of obliterating its middle ranks. A “new generation of insurgents, a younger group with no recollection of an Afghanistan that was not at war, are less inclined to reach a political settlement” and far more receptive to al-Qaeda’s still potent message. Meanwhile, the Taliban flirt with their Sinn Féin moment. As dusk falls in the Afghan war, the owl of Minerva is spreading its wings.
Roya Shams’ story shows Canada should invest in Afghan girls
Toronto Star Fri Jan 20 2012
There’s nothing easy about leaving a loving family and friends to start life in a new country when you’re a 17-year-old Afghan girl. The distance between Kandahar’s dusty, deadly streets and Ottawa’s peaceful snow-swept ones can’t be measured only as the crow flies. They are whole wrenching worlds apart.
That makes Roya Shams’ gritty trek to round out her high-school education at Ashbury College in Ottawa all the more inspiring. With her family’s blessing, Roya has launched herself on a journey of hope that many Afghan teens may dream of, but to which few can aspire.
With a helping hand from Star writer Paul Watson, who was moved by Roya’s burning desire to get a higher education, with the help of the Canadian International Learning Foundation that supported her in Kandahar, with a steady stream of contributions from big-hearted readers, and now through the generosity of Ashbury College she has a chance to realize her dream. As the Star reported on Thursday, she has just begun her new life in Canada.
Roya is the youngest child of Afghan police Col. Haji Sayed Gulab Shah, a freethinking champion of girls’ education who died fighting the Taliban. “My father believed in girls,” she says simply. “In his view, girls were as good as boys.” That love emboldened Roya to honour her dad’s memory by seizing the rare chance to study abroad, and to put what she learns to good use back home. She aspires to be a politician, a force for change and an advocate for women’s rights. She will return, she says, “to serve this vulnerable and poor country, especially women.”
Challenging as her journey will be, Roya knew that there would be “no mercy for me” if she tried to continue to attend school in Kandahar after her father’s death. Taliban death threats against her family forced her to shelve her studies and hide at home. It is no life for a teenager who seeks to better herself. Sadly, it is the life to which far more Afghan girls will be fated if the Taliban succeed in reversing the nation’s fragile democratic progress after foreign troops leave in the next few years.
What is one young woman’s dream, in Afghanistan’s uncertain struggle to move forward? It is a candle in the darkness. But courageous Canadian troops served there, in part to nurture such candles. They still do.
Happily, today 8 million Afghan children, including 2.7 million girls, are enrolled in school, Oxfam reports. They embody the nation’s hopes. Under the Taliban’s benighted rule a decade ago, fewer than 1 million boys and 5,000 girls were in school. Not every girl faces the same risk that Roya did because of her father’s high profile in battling the Taliban and her own spunk. But as Watson writes, it takes a steely will and a damn-the-danger attitude to pursue an education.
While things have improved, Oxfam cautions that girls still face steep barriers. School conditions are often poor. The quality of teaching varies, and many girls can’t always attend. Help from Canada and other rich countries will be needed for years to ensure that the girls enrolled today get a chance to complete their studies.
That’s a challenge for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, which has pumped more than $75 million into Afghan education programs in recent years, supporting more than 4,000 community-based schools. As Canada’s military mission winds down, Ottawa should step up this commitment to schooling, especially for girls. It’s one of the best investments donors can make.
Hopefully, when Roya returns home it will be to a country where no girl will have to risk her life to learn to read.
A Hostage in Pakistan
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's former ambassador to the U.S., is living under house arrest. The reason? He offended the country's military.
Wall Street Journal By MIRA SETHI JANUARY 21, 2012
Islamabad, Pakistan - 'There are forces in Pakistan that want us to live in fear—fear of external and internal enemies." So warns Husain Haqqani, until November Pakistan's ambassador to Washington and now a de facto prisoner of the Pakistani generals whose ire he has provoked. "But just as the KGB and the Stasi did not succeed in suppressing the spirit of the Soviet and East German people, these forces won't succeed in Pakistan in the long run, either."
I am speaking to Mr. Haqqani in a spacious room in the official residence of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, where the 55-year-old former ambassador—wearing a cotton tunic, loose trousers and white rubber slippers—has been living for weeks, mainly for fear that he might be assassinated outside. The living arrangements may seem odd for those unfamiliar with Pakistan's fractured politics. But his fear is not ill-founded.
Mr. Haqqani's fall from political grace began on Oct. 10, 2011, when an American businessman of Pakistani descent, Mansoor Ijaz, took to the op-ed pages of the Financial Times to broadcast an explosive claim. In the aftermath of the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, Mr. Ijaz alleged, he was approached by a "senior Pakistani diplomat" to pass on a memo to Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The memo sought U.S. help in fending off a possible military coup in Pakistan and effecting a civilian takeover of the country's security program.
Some weeks after publishing his op-ed—and, it turns out, after secretly meeting with the chief of Pakistan's premier spy agency, Inter-services Intelligence (ISI)—Mr. Ijaz claimed that Mr. Haqqani was the diplomat who had asked him to draft the memo. He said he had corresponded with Mr. Haqqani via Blackberry messages, phone conversations and emails to formulate the memo.
Mr. Haqqani denied the allegation and returned to Pakistan to clear his name after "Memogate"—as the issue was breathlessly dubbed in Pakistan's media—threatened to rupture civil-military relations. When he landed at Islamabad airport on Nov. 20, the military seized his passport.
"I did not craft or write the memo that is currently the cause of controversy," Mr. Haqqani tells me flatly. Nonetheless, he offered his resignation as ambassador to facilitate the inquiry. Shortly afterward, Pakistan's supreme court took up the matter and banned Mr. Haqqani from leaving the country.
Back in the U.S., Adm. Mullen claims to have only a hazy recollection of having received, but not taken seriously, an unsigned memo that did not bear the imprimatur of the Pakistani government. The upshot, as Mr. Haqqani points out, is a Pakistani scandal that "involves a memo written by an American and delivered through an American [retired Gen. Jim Jones], to an American military official who consigned it to the dustbin."
It also bears noting that the central "conspiracy" in Memogate supposedly involves an attempt by civilian agents of Pakistan's government to protect that government from yet another illegal military coup. That didn't stop Pakistan's supreme court from taking up charges of "treason" against Mr. Haqqani that could carry the death penalty. Nor has it prevented elements in Pakistan's media from seeking to convict Mr. Haqqani as a traitor and "American agent."
Such incitements are not idle in the context of Pakistan's violent street politics. Last year saw the assassination in broad daylight of Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Pakistan's largest province, whom media had vilified for criticizing the country's notorious blasphemy laws and championing the cause of a Christian woman sentenced under them. Taseer's assassin—one of his own bodyguards—instantly became a hero in many quarters. Four months later, investigative journalist Saleem Shahzad was abducted, tortured and killed after he exposed al Qaeda's infiltration of the Pakistani Navy. ISI involvement in Shahzad's killing is widely suspected though it was officially denied by a recent commission of inquiry led by a supreme court judge.
These precedents weigh on Mr. Haqqani, but he seems determined to press on. "I lived in the United States and taught in the United States," he says, referring to his time as professor of international relations at Boston University and his stint as ambassador. "But I never sought American citizenship because I wanted to be able to contribute to the process of reform and the idea of civilian supremacy in Pakistan."
This points to the issue at the heart of Mr. Haqqani's—and Pakistan's—predicament: The failure of "the idea of civilian supremacy" to gain both a practical and uncontested grip. Instead, Pakistani politics lives in a kind of halfway-house neatly captured by Mr. Haqqani's halfway-house status as both guest and prisoner—a guest of the country's democratically elected leadership, a prisoner of the military and associated antidemocratic forces that want to make an example of the urbane diplomat.
If anyone is equipped to analyze these dilemmas, it is Mr. Haqqani. His 2005 book, "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military" drew attention to the Islamist proxies of Pakistan's military that have killed thousands of Pakistanis and destabilized Afghanistan for two decades. "One of the reasons some people in the establishment hate me so much is because of my book. In fact, when I was made ambassador, somebody said to me that until you recant your book, you will never be forgiven by the Pakistani establishment."
He explains that "Pakistan has a long history of military intervention in politics. There were years when the military did not directly intervene but used proxies. Throughout the 1990s, we had four changes of government and forced early elections each time. For example, among the first allegations against Benazir Bhutto"—the former prime minister assassinated by al Qaeda affiliates in 2007—"was that she was somehow going to compromise the country's nuclear program. So, there are elements entrenched in the apparatus of state who are very reluctant to fully trust the elected leaders of the country."
I press him on the invisible pressures on President Asif Ali Zardari's unpopular government. "Soon after I resigned President Zardari fell ill," he notes. "The psychological-warfare machine tried to give it the color of President Zardari fleeing the country. He went [to Dubai] to get treated and then came back." Speaking perhaps as much to reassure himself as to lend some support to Mr. Zardari—who, if he stays in office through the end of his term in 2013, will be the first Pakistani president to do so—Mr. Haqqani adds that "In all psychological warfare, if the targets keep their nerves, then nothing happens."
Indeed Mr. Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani—Mr. Haqqani's other main protector—are both continually fighting for their political survival. For Mr. Gilani, charges of contempt of court could cost him his prime ministership. For Mr. Zardari, longstanding corruption charges still dog him, and his rivals on the Supreme Court could soon strip him of his presidential immunity. If either man is convicted, the government will fall, possibly dooming Mr. Haqqani and his cause.
As ambassador in Washington, Mr. Haqqani was often referred to as "silver-tongued," a man able to communicate effectively with officials of different political persuasions. Cultivating a relationship with a senator based on shared appreciation of a book on, say, tribal warfare, was the kind of thing that came easily to him.
He says he represented Pakistan diligently at a time when U.S.-Pakistani relations were deeply strained. "There is a longstanding culture of grievance in Pakistan," he says. "A lot of Pakistanis feel the U.S. has not always been responsive to Pakistan's geostrategic concerns. The Pakistani national narrative also says that Pakistan has been deserted by the United States many times. And the U.S. has not done enough to try and change that national narrative."
As for the current U.S. administration, he says that it "does not have the human resources right now to fully understand the complexities of Pakistan and engage with them. They don't have the people who understand."
The traditional pattern of U.S.-Pakistan relations has been that American intelligence wants working relations with Pakistani intelligence, and the State Department wants working relations with Pakistan's foreign office. "The U.S. will have to find a balance between their immediate needs and the long-term usefulness of their actions," says Mr. Haqqani. "They always say the civilian government is 'too weak' for them to engage with. But how will the civilian government become strong if, on all major issues, U.S. officials keep running to Pakistan's military leaders for advice and consultation?"
Still, Mr. Haqqani is not about to blame the U.S. for Pakistan's failures to develop into a normal state. The progressive dreams of the country's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, have been "shattered by religious extremism and repeated military interventions in politics." Enunciating his words carefully, he adds: "While I respect the Pakistani armed forces, I certainly do not support the idea of a militarized Pakistan."
Things may yet work out in Mr. Haqqani's favor. The military and its allies may detest him and want to wound his friends in government, but they do not seem prepared to bring the government down, much less formally take the reins of state. Pakistan is still dependent in many ways on the U.S., which is its biggest trading partner and supplier of military resources. Two weeks ago, U.S. Sens. John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Mark Kirk issued a statement saying they were "increasingly troubled" by the treatment of Mr. Haqqani and were "closely following" his case.
Yet it says something dark about Pakistan that an episode as preposterous as Memogate can all but paralyze the politics of a country already reeling from a faltering economy, sectarian violence and a parlous international situation. The military establishment is still pursuing an arms race with India and helping the Taliban in Afghanistan—and it has been remarkably successful in casting its domestic opponents as agents of the CIA or Indian intelligence. Thus Mr. Haqqani's concern: "Sometimes I wonder if Salmaan Taseer's fate awaits all those of us who stand up for a different vision for Pakistan."
Ms. Sethi is an assistant books editor at the Journal
www.afghanistannewscenter.com