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Talk to the Taliban - the wrong enemy all along
End of unnecessary war in sight
Links between Taliban and al-Qaida explored
Guardian.co.uk By Richard Norton-Taylor Monday 30 January 2012
The end game for a bloody and unnecessary war in Afghanistan is in sight, at least as far as British soldiers (and other foreign troops there) are concerned.
Attention is now on talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, with the US and Pakistan playing important roles.
Talks could and should have begun many years ago. The first mistake was not inviting Taliban representatives to the Bonn conference on Afghanistan in December 2001. The second mistake was not listening sufficiently to those military commanders (British rather than US) who said the conflict could only be ended by political talks, not on the battlefield.
British troops were sent to Helmand in southern Afghanistan pretty clueless, hopelessly briefed, victims of arrogance and ignorance. British intelligence agencies had not done the work they are paid to do, notably dissecting the relationship between the then Taliban leadership under Mullah Omar and al-Qaida.
Tragically missed opportunities, and future prospects for peace talks, are laid out forensically in a new book, An Enemy We Created. "In reality", note the authors, "the relationship [between al-Qaida and the Taliban] was strained and generally extended no further than individual contacts. The supposedly unbreakable link between the Taliban and al-Qaida is the principal strategic blunder of the war in Afghanistan: a major intelligence failure that continues to cloud the response to Afghanistan and Pakistan".
The authors, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, drive home the point that Al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban were and remain two distinct entities "with different memberships, ideologies, and objectives". The Taliban had no interest in promoting attacks abroad.
General David Petraeus, former US commander in Afghanistan, used every opportunity to praise American - and British - special forces for killing an increasing number of "Taliban commanders". The trouble, as time went on, and as far as both foreign forces and the Afghan government was concerned, is that they were replaced by a younger and more radical generation.Though Mullah Omar remains a key figure, his influence has been waning.
The authors of An Enemy We Created pose two presently unanswerable questions - what happens to al-Qaida members inside Afghanistan and Pakistan following a potential peace deal; and can the older Taliban leadership still be relied upon to keep Afghanistan "free of international terrorists"?
One thing, however, seems clear: for some time yet, fighting and negotiating can and will continue in parallel.
Afghanistan to press Pakistan for access to Taliban
By Rob Taylor | Reuters – Mon, Jan 30, 2012.
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan will press Pakistan for access to Taliban leaders during a one-day visit to Kabul by Pakistan's foreign minister, with Afghan officials hoping to ease cross-border strains and lay the ground for peace negotiations with the insurgents.
Hina Rabbani Khar will visit Kabul on February 1 to discuss reconciliation and nascent plans for peace talks ahead of a meeting between representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban in Saudi Arabia.
Khar's trip will mark the first high-level meetings between officials from the countries in months.
Pakistan is seen as critical to U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan before foreign combat troops leave in 2014.
"We hope it will mark a new phase in the relationship between both countries," Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai said Monday.
Senior Afghan security sources told Reuters that Afghan officials would use Khar's visit to press for access to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban captured in Pakistan in 2010, as well as other members of a Taliban council known as the Quetta Shura, after the Pakistani city of Quetta where the leaders are said to be based.
Afghan officials want direct access to senior Taliban members and advisers because they are the main decision makers for the insurgency and will be crucial to winning support for the fledgling peace process.
Pakistan has consistently denied giving sanctuary to insurgents and denies the existence of any Quetta Shura.
Baradar, a close associate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden before the September 11 attacks in the United States, had been ranked second to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.
He was captured in Pakistan's biggest city of Karachi by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence agents in February 2010.
"When the Pakistan delegation visits here, we will be asking for direct access to the Quetta Shura, or access to Mullah Baradar, who has been in Pakistan custody, as a gesture of good faith," said a senior Afghan security source.
"We want sincere cooperation from Pakistan in regards to peace talks," said the source, who declined to be identified.
Ties between the neighbors were severely damaged after the assassination in Kabul last September of Afghanistan's main peace negotiator, Burhanuddin Rabbani, by an insurgent messenger carrying a bomb concealed in his turban.
Afghanistan accused Pakistan of involvement in the attack and of trying to sabotage negotiations with the Taliban, charges Islamabad denied.
"PARANOID"
Critics accuse Pakistan of using militant groups as proxies in Afghanistan to counter the growing influence of rival India there and of trying to use the proxies to ensure a government in Kabul that is friendly toward Pakistan. Pakistan rejects the allegations and says it wants peace in Afghanistan.
Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government will be held in Saudi Arabia this year, an Afghan official in the Saudi capital Riyadh told Reuters by telephone.
"The talks will be held in Saudi, but there is no set date yet," the official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.
Saudi Arabia, along with Pakistan and the United States, backed Islamist insurgents fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and later became one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban government.
Riyadh also has considerable influence in Pakistan because of its economic support and it may be able to influence Pakistan's Afghanistan policy.
The Taliban announced this month they would open a political office in the Qatari capital Doha to support possible peace talks with the United States and key allies, seen by supporters as the best chance of reaching a cease-fire ahead of the foreign troop withdrawal over the next three years.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai fears being sidelined by U.S.-led efforts to forge peace with the Taliban, so he may be pushing for alternative talks in Saudi Arabia.
"The government has been paranoid since the secret talks opened between the U.S. and the Taliban, and we believe Pakistan feels the same," the Afghan security source said.
As a confidence-building measure, the Islamist group which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion of the country in late 2001 called for the release of five members being held at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. military enclave in Cuba.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul declined to comment on the likelihood of separate Afghan-Taliban negotiations, but said senior U.S. envoys had consistently called for Pakistan to be part of efforts to end a war stretching into its 11th year.
"We support an Afghan process that includes Afghans talking to Afghans," he said.
(Additional reporting by Amena Bakr in DUBAI, editing by Michael Georgy and Sanjeev Miglani)
Afghans Feel Police Not Ready for Security Control
VOA News January 31, 2012
A public-opinion survey by the United Nations indicates that roughly 80 percent of Afghans believe the country's police force is not ready to take over security control from international forces.
The U.N. Development Program's annual “police perception survey released Tuesday found that only two out of 10 people think the Afghan National Police is strong enough to handle security once foreign combat troops leave Afghanistan in 2014.
NATO forces have been working to train their local counterparts in anticipation of the coalition's withdrawal. Control of security in parts of Afghanistan has already been transferred to Afghan forces.
The U.N. survey found that a majority of the 7,000 Afghans polled believe police corruption is still a major problem.
Separately, NATO said an insurgent attack killed one of its service members in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday. The coalition did not give details.
Obama Confirms Drone Strikes in Pakistan
VOA News January 31, 2012
U.S. President Barack Obama has defended the use of drone strikes in Pakistan, which U.S. officials have never before publicly acknowledged.
Speaking during an online town hall discussion Monday, President Obama said the drone attacks have been used to target al-Qaida and its affiliates, and that many of the strikes have been in Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
The president said the operations are used for "very precise, precision strikes," and he said the United States does not authorize the attacks "willy-nilly." He said it is a targeted, focused effort against "active terrorists" in difficult-to-reach locations.
Following the president's remarks, a Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman told the French news agency that the attacks are "unlawful, counterproductive and hence unacceptable," despite, what he called, their "tactical advantages."
The Pakistani government has long condemned the drone strikes as a violation of its sovereignty, but the attacks are believed to be carried out with the help of Pakistani intelligence.
Until Monday, U.S. officials had never confirmed the missile strikes against militants in Pakistan's tribal areas, but they have anonymously confirmed such attacks to various news outlets.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP.
Sikh’s detention reveals flaws in Afghan justice, nation’s religious intolerance
Washington Post By Ernesto Londoño Tuesday, January 31, 2012
KABUL - Among the throngs of inmates in downtown Kabul’s prison trying to prove they are not thieves or insurgents is a soft-spoken Sikh man with piercing black eyes. He is being held on a highly unusual charge: falsely claiming Afghan citizenship.
Baljit Singh, 23, says he was born in Afghanistan but that his family fled religious persecution when he was 5. He returned to his native country on July 6, 2010, aboard a British chartered plane transporting Afghan deportees, and he has been locked up ever since by authorities who say he isn’t Afghan.
Singh’s ordeal offers a disturbing glimpse into the type of religious intolerance that has made Afghan Sikhs a vanishing segment of society. His case also casts a condemning light on a justice system that could take on significantly more responsibility as the United States transitions authority in Afghanistan to the government of President Hamid Karzai.
Promoting religious tolerance was one of the goals that the United States and its allies set in Afghanistan after the Taliban government was toppled a decade ago. But religious minorities, who make up about 1 percent of the population, are still routinely ostracized here.
“I’ll go anywhere,” Singh said in a recent interview at the crammed Kabul detention center. “Just not this country, where they can put innocent people in prison for a year and a half.”
Sikhs, who follow a monotheistic religion founded in the 15th century, once constituted a large, prosperous part of Afghan society. In recent decades, as the country has become more religiously conservative, they have been harassed and disparaged as statue-worshipping infidels. They have moved en masse to India and other countries, and community leaders say there are now no more than a few hundred or at best a few thousand Sikhs left in Afghanistan.
Life for Sikhs there has become especially hard in recent years, according to community leader Awtar Singh, a former lawmaker. Thousands had their property stolen during the civil wars of the 1990s. Job prospects are bleak outside of Sikh enclaves. And the government refuses to let Sikhs open cremation facilities, barring them from following an important religious tradition.
“The living conditions are getting hard for Hindus and Sikhs in Afghanistan,” said Awtar Singh, who is not related to the detainee. “The remaining people who can afford to do so want to go to India.”
A family in exile
Amid ferocious battles among various Afghan militant factions in the mid-1990s, Singh’s mother and stepfather left their home in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, and moved to Pakistan. The family spent the first few years of exile in Pakistan, Bahrain and Egypt, he said.
When Singh was in his late teens, they were smuggled into Austria, where the family applied for asylum. Feeling restless because the claim was taking a long time to handle, Singh said he traveled to Britain, hoping that the asylum process there would be easier and quicker. He turned himself over to immigration officials hours after entering the country in January 2007, he said.
During the three years Singh spent in Britain waiting for his case to be processed, he worked menial jobs and became engaged to a British woman. He said lawyers who handled his asylum case made procedural mistakes that led to his deportation. A letter from the U.K. Border Agency informing Singh of his impending removal says his case was turned down because evidence supporting the claim had been submitted in a form that “did not comply with the instructions.”
When Singh arrived in Afghanistan in July 2010, along with dozens of other deportees, Afghan authorities took notice of the type of turban he was wearing — which is different from the ones worn by Afghan Muslims — and took him into custody. The other men were released.
Rahmatullah Nazari, a deputy attorney general, said investigators detained Singh because they were not convinced that he was Afghan.
“When people go overseas to get asylum, they are told to say they are Afghan just so they can get asylum quickly,” Nazari said in an interview. “We weren’t able to find anyone here who knows him.”
Nazari said the government plans to keep Singh in custody until the British government takes him back or another nation certifies that he is its citizen.
A spokesman for the British Embassy in Kabul said the government does not generally discuss specific cases, but he suggested that British officials do not doubt Singh is Afghan.
“Individuals are only returned to a country when there is substantial evidence that it is their country of origin,” the spokesman said in an e-mailed statement. “If it subsequently becomes apparent that it is not, we are committed to returning them to the U.K. or their correct country of origin.”
‘They started beating me up’
Kimberley Motley, an American lawyer who represents Singh, said the British government failed to get him an Afghan passport or other travel document that ascertained his nationality, as is customary in deportation cases.
Singh said he was mistreated almost immediately after his arrival in Afghanistan. One day, fellow inmates forcibly removed his turban and demanded that he convert to Islam by uttering a few phrases. Singh said he appealed to prison guards for help.
“They started beating me up,” he recalled in an interview. “I was so shocked. They were supposed to be protecting me, but instead they beat me.”
Under duress, Singh said, he nominally converted to Islam, which prompted fellow inmates to hoist him on their shoulders and parade him around the facility.
Nazari, the deputy attorney general, said he had seen no evidence to substantiate Singh’s allegations of mistreatment. He said non-Muslims in Afghan custody routinely convert to Islam, hoping to get leniency.
“These foreigners think if they convert to Islam, they will be forgiven,” he said.
Motley, the lawyer, said Singh’s best shot at freedom is finding a country that will accept him as a refugee, although so far none has stepped forward.
“Unless he has a plane ticket and someone willing to help him, the Afghans have made it clear they are not going to let him go,” Motley said.
Special correspondent Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report.
Germany Returns Afghan Historical Monument
TOLOnews.com Monday, 30 January 2012
Germany has recovered and returned to Afghanistan a historical monument that was smuggled out of the country during the years of civil war.
The returned monument which belongs to the Kingdom of Gandhara, is 30 centimeters high and 26 centimeters wide and has officially been handed over to the Afghan Ambassador in Germany.
It belongs to the 2nd century and portrays on a white surface made out of stone engraved two lines of 8 members of audience standing and listening to Buddha sitting on the throne on the right, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote on its website.
Thousands of Afghanistan's historical monuments were stolen during the years of the civil war. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans were killed or wounded and millions had to escape the country for safety.
Afghanistan which is referred to as the centre of the old Arian civilization lost most of its cultural and historical heritages during the years of the civil war.
According to the head of the Kabul Museum, Oamra Khan Masoodi, many of the monuments that have been smuggled out of Afghanistan have been illegally excavated.
He also added that around 70% of the monuments have been stolen from the Kabul Museum.
"More than 70,000 pieces have been stolen from the Kabul Museum during the war. The Ministry of Information and Culture has been able to recover more than 8,500 pieces since 2007," Mr Masoodi said.
According to him the Ministry is in contact with the Unesco and Interpol to track other stolen monuments and return them to Afghanistan.
INTERVIEW-Afghan Hazara leader sceptical of Taliban peace
Reuters By Rob Taylor and Mirwais Harooni Jan 30, 2012
* Ethnic leader joins others in questioning Taliban talks
* Warns that army likely to "surrender" to Taliban
Scepticism is growing inside Afghanistan's ethnic communities that a peace deal can be struck with the Taliban, under whose rule they were brutalised and persecuted, with many fearing a return to civil war, a prominent Hazara minority leader says.
Mohammad Mohaqiq said he was deeply worried about NATO plans to pull out combat troops by end-2014, and a French government proposal to leave a year earlier, by 2013.
"It is silly to say al Qaeda and Taliban can come together with Afghans, or (with) our allies who have come to this country," Mohaqiq told Reuters late on Sunday in an interview at his heavily-guarded Kabul mansion.
"I don't believe in a miracle occurring, that the Taliban will change their way of thought, accept the Afghan constitution, believe in democracy and the vote of the people."
Many of the Hazaras suffered enormously under Taliban rule, between 1996 and 2001, and the Shi'ite Muslim minority saw many of their communities levelled by the mainly Sunni Muslim and ethnic Pashtun Taliban, and their people killed or scattered into the mountains.
Afghan officials plan to hold initial talks with Taliban representatives in Saudi Arabia in coming weeks in parallel to secret contacts underway between the United States and the insurgency since 2010.
Afghan officials also hope to press Pakistan's foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar during a visit to Kabul this week for access to Taliban leaders in Pakistan, including jailed co-founder of the movement Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
Mohaqiq, head of the opposition Shi'ite Hezb-e-Wahdat (Unity Party) and a member of parliament, fought the Soviets in the 1980s and was part of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which splintered amid political dealmaking under Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
But alliance members are now coalescing again, bringing ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras into a common front to oppose the blueprint for Taliban peace negotiations masterminded by the United States, and now being re-cast again by an Afghan government nervous of being sidelined by Washington.
Other ethnic group members such as Tajik leader and Afghan National Front chief Ahmad Zia Masood, whose brother once led opposition commanders fighting the Taliban, said this month that he also did not believe a deal could be reached with the Taliban, calling for more involvement in peace negotiations.
Mohaqiq, whose predecessor Abdul Ali Mazari was stripped naked, mutilated and dropped to his death from a helicopter by the Taliban in 1995, said he believed thousands of insurgents had been trained across the porous mountain border in Pakistan during a decade of war with NATO and Afghan forces.
Pakistan's government rejects the frequent accusations from Afghan officials that Taliban insurgents are provided with sanctuary in its territory.
"They are waiting for NATO forces to withdraw from Afghanistan to attack. We can anticipate what is going to happen," Mohaqiq said.
"Now tens of thousands of armed insurgents have already been trained in North Waziristan."
Mohaqiq said President Karzai and his western backers were moving too hastily to accommodate the Taliban, wearied by a war now dragging into its 11th year, and warned NATO must not repeat the mistake of withdrawing from the country too early.
"When his presidency is over he can go to any place in the world to survive, but the Afghan people will be left behind," he said. "What we want is for the international community to act wisely."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week said France would pull its combat troops out at the end of 2013, a year before an end-2014 deadline fixed by the United States and its NATO allies for handing over responsibility for security to Afghan forces.
He said he would use a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Brussels from Feb. 2-3 to call for consideration of the Afghan army taking full charge of NATO combat missions in 2013. {ID:nL5E8CS0E0]
Mohaqiq said the Afghan army, made up largely by Pashtuns was incapable of protecting minority Afghans if it proved the Taliban were holding the promise of peace talks to stall and regroup, as some Afghanistan analysts have warned.
"The army is ethnically structured in a way so it cannot fight the Taliban. It's possible they would just surrender when the Taliban attacked," he said.
Mohaqiq said ethnic opposition parties, which also included former Northern Alliance General and Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, wanted consideration of the country's future to include a revamp of the political system away from a centralised presidency towards effective multiparty government.
"But we are not very optimistic that the Taliban will join the peace process and other political factions in Afghanistan, support the government and work in a system together," he said. (Editing by Ed Lane)
Iran, Afghanistan Agree to Boost Economic Cooperation
Fars News Agency January 31, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran and Afghanistan inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on mutual cooperation in economic fields.
The MoU was inked by Iranian Deputy Economy Minister Behrouz Alishiri and his Afghan counterpart Mustafa Mastoor at the end of the two countries' second joint economic commission meeting in Kabul.
The two sides agreed to increase cooperation in customs, banking and insurance sectors, as well as preventing smuggling of goods at borders.
During the meeting, the Iranian official and his Afghan counterpart stressed the importance of expansion of relations between the two countries in the establishment of peace in the region.
"Iran and Afghanistan economies are complementary for each other; Tehran wishes a stable developed Afghanistan in its neighborhood," Alishiri underlined.
Iran and Afghanistan enjoy expanding ties and cooperation and observers believe that the good achievements gained in area of their mutual cooperation should be deemed as a result of the efforts made by the two countries' leaders.
Earlier this month, a senior Iranian trade official announced that Afghanistan imports 27.6 of its multi-billion-dollar needs from Iran, and said the figure can still increase in future.
"At present 27.6% of Afghanistan's nearly $5bln imports from the world countries is from Iran, which is a considerable figure," Director-General of the Asia and Pacific Trade Office of Iran's Trade Promotion Organization Amir Talebi said, adding that the number can increase in future.
Parliament to Summon Incompetent Ministers
TOLOnews.com By Sharif Amiry Monday, 30 January 2012
The Afghan House of Representatives on Monday announced it would summon ministers who had failed to spend more than 50 per cent of their development budgets.
Some MPs believe these ministers should be summoned and disqualified from their positions. They should also be prosecuted.
MPs are concerned about corruption within some ministries and are raising questions about their competency to spend their budgets.
"Nearly 17 ministries have spent [only] the minimum amount of their budgets. These ministries should be summoned by Parliament and asked about ineffectiveness in their projects," Shukria Barezia, an MP from Kabul, said.
"In addition to the accountability, they should face justice," Asadullah Sahadati, an MP representing Daikundi, said. "They have clearly violated the law and have been incompetent."
In most of the cases, the ministries have blamed insecurity in far parts of the country for not spending their development budgets.
It is not yet clear which ministries have been unable to spend their development budgets.
"Based on the reports collected from the dedicated commission, the Finance Minister along with audit and control officials should be summoned," Abdul Raouf Ibrahimi, Parliament's Speaker said.
On the Ground in Afghanistan, a Taliban Whose Momentum Seems Anything But Broken
TIME By John Wendle / COP Monti Monday, Jan. 30, 2012
Kunar province - The hundreds of bullets, mortar shells and rockets that slammed into the boulders behind which they were taking cover peppered the men of 1st Platoon with high velocity rock shards and jagged bits of shrapnel. Just below Outpost Shal, a newly constructed mountaintop aerie in Afghanistan's violent Kunar province on the Pakistani border, insurgent fighters were moaning and screaming from wounds suffered over eight days of heavy fighting. That scene, just three months ago, of the outnumbered American platoon fighting to maintain its foothold offered a sobering contrast TO President Barack Obama's statement, in last week's State of the Union address, that "The Taliban's momentum has been broken."
Like the battle scene witnessed by TIME, the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan reportedly also casts doubt on the confidence expressed by President Obama on the state of the Taliban's war effort. The top-secret assessment "takes a dim view of possible futures in Afghanistan," Reuters was told last week by a U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity. The report, which represents the consensus view of 16 US intelligence agencies, warns that the Taliban has not given up on its aim of retaking full control of Afghanistan, and concludes that the gains made by the troop surge ordered by President Obama two years ago may be unsustainable, according to McClatchy Newspapers.
The soldiers eventually won their battle at OP Shal, securing the Kunar River Valley from infiltration, eliminating insurgent roadblocks and opening it to civilian and military traffic. But the Taliban's week-long attack highlighted the many military problems facing Afghanistan, and made clear that the outcome of the conflict remains far from certain.
Throughout the intense fighting, the besieged defending force of 36 U.S. and Afghan army soldiers fought off multiple suicide bombers and at least four overrun attempts by between 400 and 500 heavily armed insurgents, who had been trucked in from Pakistan and who managed to advance to within five meters of U.S. positions. Afterwards, the soldiers confirmed 115 kills and estimated at least 200. "It was the most coordinated thing any of us had ever seen, but just the sheer number of forces they had massing on that position was ridiculous," Staff Sgt Everett Bracey of first platoon, Bravo Company, 2-27 Infantry Battalion, told TIME.
The attackers were reinforced and resupplied throughout the fight from bases and depots in the safe haven provided by Pakistan. "We saw 60 vehicles come out of Pakistan — just drive in," said Staff Sgt. Anthony Fuentes looking at a topographical map a few days after the battle. "This whole route, it goes all the way up into Pakistan. It's a two-hour trafficable route from the border." Added company commander Captain Michael Kolton, "It was Pashtuns and Arabs and Chechens and Punjabis — everyone and their sister joined in on this one."
The defenders of OP Shal also recognized that their attackers had been well trained. "They used the standard operating procedures that the U.S. army uses," explained Fuentes. "We expected contact, but we didn't expect that. Their fire was so heavy and precise that to get up and look at their near sector, the joes just had to say, 'Ok, I'm just going to eat one in the face just to get up and see if somebody is moving on me.' And every time they lifted their head up, there was somebody there."
Sitting in HIS squad bay at Combat Outpost Monti, Sgt. Brandon Goodell told TIME, "They are motivated, they are trained, and they are proficient." But what most surprised the Americans was the insurgents' determination to regain this strategic mountaintop commanding a six-kilometer section of road in the main Kunar River Valley. "They were relentless. They were all over us. I've never seen them come that hard at anybody," says Fuentes. The numbers, skill and determination of the insurgents repelled at OP Shal seems quite at odds with President Obama's suggestion that the Taliban's momentum has been broken. "You'd kill 15 or 20 of them, and then five minutes later, there was another 15 or 20 of them trying to attack you again. I mean, we'd kill so many that we went black on ammo, pretty much, and we just had to stop and wait," says Goodell. "They're motivated. I tell my soldiers this exact same thing: If they were to come into our country, into the United States of America, and they were walking in your front yard, what would you do? Damn right I would fight you, and then I'd find all my friends and we'd fight you, and then I'd find their friends, and then we'd come and fight you. And after I died, my son, and their sons, and their friends' sons would all come fight you. Of course. We're in their back yard."
Afghan family member to appeal verdict
By ROB GILLIES The Associated Press January 30th, 2012
TORONTO - At least one of the three members of an Afghan family found guilty of killing three teenage sisters and another woman intends to appeal the conviction, the man's lawyer said Monday.
Prosecutors said the defendants killed the four women because they dishonored the family by defying its strict rules on dress, dating, socializing and using the Internet. The killings horrified Canadians and were condemned by Canadian Muslim groups, which called for an end to honor killings.
A jury on Sunday found Mohammad Shafia, 58; his wife Tooba Yahya, 42; and their son Hamed, 21, each guilty of four counts of first-degree murder in what the judge said resulted from a "twisted concept of honor."
Hamed Shafia's lawyer, Patrick McCann, said his client will appeal and he believes the other two will as well.
"He's determined to press on and continue the fight," McCann said.
Lawyers for the parents did not respond to messages seeking comment. The three are facing life in prison because first-degree murder in Canada carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
After the verdict was read, the three again declared their innocence in the killings of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, Shafia's childless first wife in a polygamous marriage.
In recent years a number of so-called honor killings in Canada have prompted debate about absorbing immigrants into the mainstream and dealing with culture clashes between immigrant parents and their children. Even before the trial, Rona Ambrose, the women's affairs minister, had said the federal government was considering making such killings a separate category in the criminal code.
Ambrose took to Twitter to comment after the verdict: "Honor- motivated violence is NOT culture, it is barbaric violence."
The bodies of the women were found June 30, 2009, in a car submerged in a canal in Kingston, Ontario, where the family had stopped for the night on their way home to Montreal from Niagara Falls, Ontario.
The prosecution said it was a case of premeditated murder, staged to look like an accident. Prosecutors said the defendants drowned their victims, then placed their bodies in the car and pushed it into the canal.
The jury heard testimony that Zainab's sisters, Sahar and Geeti, were hounded and trailed by their brothers because the parents suspected them of dating boys; that Sahar repeatedly said her father would kill her if he found out she had a boyfriend; that she had bruises on her arms; that Mohammad, the first wife who was helping to raise the children, also was brutally treated.
Prosecutor Laurie Lacelle presented wire taps and mobile phone records from the Shafia family in court. In one phone conversation, the father says his daughters "betrayed us immensely."
"Even if they hoist me up to the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my honor. There is nothing more valuable than our honor," Lacelle quoted Shafia as saying in a transcript.
Defense lawyers said the deaths were accidental. They said the Nissan car accidentally plunged into the canal after the eldest daughter, Zainab, took it for a joy ride with her sisters and her father's first wife. Hamed said he watched the accident, although he didn't call police from the scene.
McCann said the problem with the prosecution's case is that it "involved the necessity of them being all incapacitated ahead of time yet their is nothing in the evidence to suggest where or how or when that could have been done."
The family had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia and Dubai before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a wealthy businessman, married Yahya because his first wife could not have children.
Shafia's polygamy, if revealed, could have resulted in the family's deportation.
The prosecution painted a picture of a household controlled by a domineering Shafia, with Hamed keeping his sisters in line and doling out discipline when his father was away on frequent business trips to Dubai.
More than 80 Canadian Muslim organizations, imams and community leaders signed a call for action late last year against "the reality of domestic violence within our own communities, compounded by abhorrent and yet persistent pre-Islamic practices rooted in the misguided notion of restoring family honor."
Syed Soharwardy, a Calgary-based imam, said the case motivated him to reach out to young women who are oppressed at home.
Aysan Sev'er, a professor at the University of Toronto specializing in the study of violence against women, said crimes involving a family's reputation involve deep-rooted social traditions and extensive collaboration with others.
"There's a community component both in terms of putting pressure on the people and later on trying to justify, whitewash it, reduce the severity and so on," she said.
The United Nations reports 5,000 females die from honor killings each year around the world.
Mohammad Shafia was ‘so obsessed, so closed-minded’
National Post By Graeme Hamilton Jan 30, 2012
Graeme Hamilton: Typically immigrants arrive in a new land prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of their children. Mohammad Shafia, a native of Afghanistan, came to Canada in 2007 a wealthy man intent on imprisoning his daughters in an authoritarian household. And when they took steps to break free, a jury found Sunday, he murdered three of them along with his first wife.
A relative of Shafia’s second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, said in an interview Sunday it quickly became apparent after the Shafia family immigrated to Montreal that the patriarch had no interest in adapting to his new surroundings. (Yahya and the couple’s eldest son, Hamed, were also found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths.)
Reza Hyderi, Yahya’s first cousin, said the Shafia family was invited to his sister’s wedding in the summer of 2007. It was to be an exciting event for the Shafia children, a chance to meet their cousins, and the girls bought new dresses.
“On the day of the wedding they never showed up, and after, I heard that the father got upset because the girls’ dresses had no sleeves,” Mr. Hyderi said. “He took a pair of scissors and cut up all the clothes. He was so obsessed, so closed-minded.”
The roots of the obsession stretch back to Shafia’s native Afghanistan, where he was born in 1952. After his mother divorced his father and remarried, he did not get past Grade 8 in school, according to Wali Abdali, the brother of Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad.
“He had a store in Kabul to repair radios and televisions. He started like that then gradually his business grew, he was buying televisions to sell, then importing televisions from Japan, to resell,” Mr. Abdali said in an interview from France. “That’s how he made his profits. It started with a small business.”
The two families were close, and in 1978 it was arranged that Shafia would marry Ms. Mohammad. “It was a joyous celebration,” Mr. Abdali said of the lavish wedding held at Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel and attended by 300 guests. The bride’s family approved of the match. “He was a boy who did not drink, who did not smoke, who had a job,” Mr. Abdali said.
Soon Afghanistan would be shaken by war, with the Soviets invading in 1979. Mr. Abdali fled across the border to Pakistan in the mid-1980s and news about his sister Rona was scarce. “It was wartime. Everyone was torn up,” he said.
Then he learned that Shafia had taken a second wife, a practice that is legal in Afghanistan. Ms. Mohammad had been unable to bear children, so Shafia married Yahya in 1988 and another celebration was held at the Intercontinental. The news did not overly upset Ms. Mohammad’s family, as there were signs that the wives would be on equal footing. “My brother-in-law presented both at the ceremony. I think it went well,” Mr. Abdali said.
It is not clear how Shafia amassed his fortune, but he was already rich by the age of 40. The court heard that when he left Afghanistan in 1992, he lost $200,000 in the transfer of $1.5-million worth of “goods” to Pakistan. Mr. Hyderi said he heard that Shafia at one point held a government posting in Kabul and would supplement his income by demanding bribes from the families of prisoners, promising to arrange their release. He said he is skeptical that Shafia could have become a multi-millionaire by selling electronics in war-torn Afghanistan and reselling damaged cars, as he would do later on. “This guy, if it’s so easy for him to kill three of his children, he could do anything,” Mr. Hyderi said.
After Pakistan, the growing Shafia family moved on to Dubai. Yahya eventually gave birth to a total of seven children; the three girls who were killed were Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17 and Geeti, 13. At trial, Shafia testified that he was “the top seller of Panasonic products” in all of Dubai. But while business was apparently good and there was little in the way of temptations for his daughters, immigration rules prevented them from getting citizenship in the United Arab Emirates.
They spent a year in Australia, but Shafia did not appreciate the local Afghan women’s support group reaching out to his wives, according to Mr. Hyderi. After another stint in Dubai, he decided to make the move to Canada where Yahya had a large extended family. The wealthy Shafia was welcomed under Quebec’s investor immigrant program, and promptly bought a $2-million shopping mall in the suburb of Laval, paying $1.6-million of it in cash.
There was one hitch with the move to Canada. Since polygamy is outlawed, they had to lie about the status of Ms. Mohammad. She initially stayed behind with relatives in France, and Mr. Abdali said he pleaded with her not to go to Canada.
“But she said no, because of the children. She raised those children. She was their true mother,” he said. “She could not bear to be separated from the children, because she knew that if she wasn’t there, the father was a bit strict, a bit cruel.” Mr. Abdali said he tried to keep his nose out of Shafia’s business but one conclusion was unavoidable. “He was not religious as some have said. I never saw him do prayer. But he was a strict man who did not want anyone looking at his wife.” Ms. Mohammed left France and was granted entry to Canada as a cousin of Shafia.
Once in Canada, the climate in the household deteriorated quickly, as Shafia felt his iron grip slipping. Mr. Hyderi, 31, who immigrated to Canada in 2000, said the message was clear that Shafia expected total control over his children. He was insulted to hear that Shafia did not even want his girls mingling with their male cousins: “He said it was male cousins who open the door for female cousins to be prostitutes.” The first time he met Zainab at a family picnic, she was wearing a hijab and he avoided even shaking hands when he was introduced. “Normally I hug my cousins, and kiss them on the cheeks,” he said. Taking a hint, he had little contact with the Shafias, even though they lived nearby.
Ms. Mohammad also found herself under threat. Mr. Abdali said members of Yahya’s family made life miserable for his sister in Montreal, and an effort was underway to send her back to Afghanistan. He told her to go to the police if they tried to have her sent back, but she said she could not. “She was afraid,” he said. “She had threats that if she went to the police, we will kill you.”
Shafia meanwhile was frequently travelling to Asia and the Middle East and making little mark in Montreal. Qais Hamidi, a prominent member of Quebec’s Afghan community, said he knows almost all the Afghans in Montreal, but the first time he saw Shafia was at the funeral for the drowning victims. (At that point, the deaths were being treated as an accident.)
Hasibullah Fazel, an administrator with Maison Afghan-Canadienne, which offer support to new arrivals, said he met Shafia a couple of times but never sensed anything was amiss. “They were a bit reserved, conservative people because they came from Dubai,” he said. Shafia was Muslim but not particularly religious, he said; he even remembers Shafia mocking clerics as insincere.
In the spring of 2009, Mr. Hyderi learned that Zainab was to marry her boyfriend, who was not an Afghan. After talking to Zainab, he could sense the marriage was a desperate move to escape her father’s control. He spoke to Yahya and offered to intervene with Shafia, who was away on business in Dubai, to make Zainab’s life easier.
Yahya insisted that he butt out: “She said, ‘You don’t know Shafia. He’s very mean. He’s very selfish, and I’m afraid he’s going to come home from Dubai, and he’s going to hit her, or he’s going to make Hamed kill her.’ I said, ‘Tooba, what are you talking about. No father would do that.’ ”
The marriage to the boyfriend was annulled after one day, and another plan was hatched for Zainab to marry Mr. Hyderi’s younger brother. But before that could happen, the Shafias set off on a summer road trip. Mr. Hyderi’s father, Latif, who testified for the Crown during the trial, ran into the family at a fruit store as they were preparing to leave. He reported back that he sensed something unusual on meeting Shafia. Shafia had shaken his hand extremely hard and said, “You say women belong to others, but that’s not true.” The younger Mr. Hyderi was alarmed by the cryptic message and spoke to his brother. “I told him to tell Zainab, whatever she did, not to get on a plane. The worst we could think of was he was going to send her back to Dubai.”
He was on vacation with his wife in New York when he got news of the drownings. He knew immediately it was no accident.
Despite the overwhelming evidence presented at trial, some in Montreal’s Afghan community have trouble accepting that the deaths were murder. “The parents were building a house for the sake of their children. How could they go and kill them?” asked Victoria Jahesh, who works with an Afghan women’s group in Montreal.
To Mr. Hyderi, part of the answer lies in the traditions of his homeland. The Afghan understanding of a father’s place reinforced Shafia’s lust for control over his family, he said. “The word father, in Afghanistan, that means he has to control everything. Whatever he says is right,” he said. “Basically, Mr. Shafia took advantage of that word, father. ‘I’m the one providing food, clothes and everything for you guys. Whatever I say, shut your mouths and don’t answer me back.’ ”
The wads of money smoothed Shafia’s entry into Canada, but his heavy cultural baggage proved his downfall. “With almost all immigrants, especially from the Afghan community, it is especially for the future of their children that they come,” Ms. Jahesh remarked. “They want to let them have access to the good education that is in Canada.”
Not Shafia. When Zainab met a boyfriend at school, he forced her to quit school. And when he sensed that he was losing control of his girls, he chose to kill them. One of the last examples of his twisted notion of parenting is found in a wiretapped conversation with Hamed, two weeks after the drownings and before they had been arrested.
“Be I dead or alive, nothing in the world is above your honour,” Shafia said. “Isn’t that right, my son?”
Afghan Kin Are Accused of Killing Woman for Not Bearing a Son
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY January 30, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The young Afghan woman gave birth to a third girl three months ago — to a husband, the authorities say, who had been demanding a boy.
Last week, the man and his mother, in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, put a rope around the woman’s neck and strangled her, the police said.
The body of the woman, known only as Storai, 22, was found by the police a few hours later in her room, and she was buried a day later, on Jan. 26.
Storai’s death was a chilling reminder of the low status of women in Afghanistan.
Also unsettling was the revelation that the husband, identified as Sher Mohammad, 30, was suspected of being a member of a local militia that, the police and government officials said, has proliferated in the region and stoked lawlessness and violence, including in the home.
According to the police, Storai was married four years ago, when she was 18, and had two other girls: a 3-year-old and a 2-year-old.
But in the months after the birth of Storai’s third daughter, her husband and mother-in-law nagged her and argued with her about having borne yet another girl, said Nadera Geya, head of the Directorate of Women’s Affairs in Kunduz.
After Storai’s death, in Mafali, a village in the Khanabad District in southeast Kunduz, the mother-in-law put a rope in the window of her daughter-in-law’s room to give the impression that she had killed herself, Ms. Geya said. But there were signs of torture that led to suspicions that Storai had been killed, Ms. Geya said.
“Her mother-in-law strangled her with a rope and said she committed suicide herself, which is not true,” she said. “They killed her because they did not want her to bear any more girls. They had disputes with her even before this.”
Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, a spokesman for the Kunduz chief of police, said that the mother-in-law, Wali Hazrata, had been arrested but that Mr. Mohammad, the husband, had fled.
Ms. Hazrata is in police custody in the city of Kunduz. She has denied that she and her son killed Storai or that her son was a member of one of the militias known as arbakai, the police spokesman said.
Kunduz is no stranger to domestic violence. In December, four gunmen, also believed to be arbakai members, broke into a house and threw acid on three school-age girls and their mother in revenge after an attacker’s offer of marriage to one of the girls, 18, was rejected by her father.
Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Afghan Women, which runs shelters for abused women, said that while she had seen cases in which women were bullied by their husbands through pregnancy, and that sometimes a husband even took a second or third wife if the first wife continued to have girls, murder was unusual.
“Girls are looked down upon in Afghanistan,” Ms. Naderi said. “I have heard of many cases where the wife is threatened with violence and beaten up, but I have never heard of a woman being killed for having a girl.”
Heather Barr, an Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that there was a cultural tolerance for violence against women and impunity for men who committed it, and that recent efforts to protect women had had scant effect.
“What is most disappointing,” Ms. Barr said, “is that the 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women Law was supposed to change this, and it has had very little impact so far.”
She said rules in the penal code specified that a husband could kill his wife for having had sex outside of marriage. Even the civil code has rules allowing a husband to take a second wife if the first one is not procreating satisfactorily, Ms. Barr said.
The police said that Sher Mohammad was now being protected in Khanabad by a local arbakai commander called Qaderak.
Groups of irregular gunmen have proliferated in northern Afghanistan in the past two years. They work locally, sometimes protecting their neighborhoods and villages, but they often terrorize residents, extorting money and goods.
Kunduz has had a particular problem with these militias.
Only a small percentage of the militiamen were in a program run by American Special Forces to train them as neighborhood watchmen for their communities — a program that the coalition says is being wound down and transferred to full Afghan authority. The others often receive weapons and some financial support from the government as a buffer against Taliban insurgents.
The arbakai are suspected of being responsible for other killings, as well as kidnappings and thefts, in Kunduz Province, said Shah Zaman Waziri, the commander of the Second Brigade of the National Army in Kunduz. There are about 3,000 such militiamen in the province, but their numbers are decreasing, he said.
The Khanabad police said there were about 1,000 militiamen in the Khanabad District alone.
In other recent cases of brutality against women, three girls were killed this year in the Imam Sahib District by prospective husbands after the girls’ families would not allow them to marry, said Ms. Geya of the women’s affairs directorate in Kunduz.
She said that in two other cases this year, two women were killed by their husbands.
Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Kunduz, Afghanistan.
A Teacher’s Learning Curve in Kabul
New York Times By JAALA A. THIBAULT January 30, 2012
A few weeks ago, as I was sitting in the English department office at a university in Kabul, sipping coffee and talking to other professors about the end of my time in Afghanistan, I realized that Kabul had taught me patience. But it took a while to get here.
When I was younger, I had no patience. I wanted to get everything done right away; I wanted to see results immediately. I remember receiving the gift of “sea monkeys” (brine shrimp) one birthday, and when I found out that I had to wait weeks before I’d even be able to see them without a magnifying glass, I poured them down the drain without a second thought.
A few weeks later, when the friend who had bought me the sea monkeys asked how big they had gotten, I blushed and told her they were all gone. She proceeded to show me hers, which had, miracle of all miracles, turned into little furiously swimming shrimp! She told me, “If only you had more patience, you could have seen them grow!” I vowed that if ever again I was given a chance to watch something grow, I would try to have patience.
As I lived my life in Kabul, I couldn’t help remembering that lesson in patience I learned more than 20 years ago. This time though, I was not watching brine shrimp grow from microscopic to minuscule over the course of a few weeks; I am watching teachers grow over the course of years. And as teachers grow and learn, so do their students. And as students learn, so does the rest of society. But of course, this process is slow going.
More than a year and a half ago, I moved to Kabul with big plans. I would reform the education system by training the teachers. I would go to the universities and preach education for all. I would tell everyone that an educated society is a free society. I hoped all of the teachers that I would train could bring the message to the masses, and like a tidal wave, literacy would engulf the society.
Much to my dismay, there was no tidal wave. In fact, I ended up sitting in a cold office, drinking coffee and tea with the other professors in my department, talking about life, family, the singer Ahmad Zahir, America, the war and anything else that did not have to do with the business of actually training teachers. Sometimes if I was lucky, I was invited to talk to a class of teachers in training not about teaching methods, but about English grammar or Jennifer Lopez. Go figure.
Instead of teaching, I usually spent Fridays eating lunch with students. We would all sit on the floor around steaming piles of “kobli palaw” (rice), footlong nan bread, bowls of oily “kofta” (meatballs) and pyramids of fruit, beckoning us with their waxy brightness. We’d watch videos of their cousins’ weddings and laugh about the poor fashion choices of the attendees. I wondered to myself if I was really contributing at all to the education system in the country.
One afternoon, as I prepared to teach a lesson about Beyoncé to a class of would-be teachers, I voiced these concerns to my department head. I expected him to say, “Yes, you should leave; you’ve done nothing here but drink all of our coffee.” Contrary to what I expected him to say, though, he laughed and told me this proverb:
“Patience is bitter, but it has a sweet fruit.”
I didn’t understand what patience had to do with my concerns. I asked him to explain. He said that although I wasn’t doing so much teacher training, I was training the teachers in how to trust me, how to be my friend. He explained that in Afghan culture, relationships are paramount; nothing can be accomplished if you are considered a stranger to the people. He told me that although it might be frustrating, the way I was living life would make my job easier in the future. Basically, he was telling me to watch the brine shrimp grow.
So I watched them grow for more than a year, putting teaching second and socializing first. I drank all of the coffee and ate all of the food. I went to the weddings. I learned the language, and I listened to the music.
And by the end of my time in Kabul, both students and professors let me train them — and I found the sweetness at the heart of patience.
Jaala A. Thibault taught English and trained teachers at Kabul Education University in 2010 and 2011 as part of the English Language Fellows Program under the State Department. She now returns intermittently to Afghanistan as an English-language specialist (also with the State Department) to conduct teacher-training workshops. In the United States, she teaches English as a second Language at Santa Barbara City College.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
End of unnecessary war in sight
Links between Taliban and al-Qaida explored
Guardian.co.uk By Richard Norton-Taylor Monday 30 January 2012
The end game for a bloody and unnecessary war in Afghanistan is in sight, at least as far as British soldiers (and other foreign troops there) are concerned.
Attention is now on talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, with the US and Pakistan playing important roles.
Talks could and should have begun many years ago. The first mistake was not inviting Taliban representatives to the Bonn conference on Afghanistan in December 2001. The second mistake was not listening sufficiently to those military commanders (British rather than US) who said the conflict could only be ended by political talks, not on the battlefield.
British troops were sent to Helmand in southern Afghanistan pretty clueless, hopelessly briefed, victims of arrogance and ignorance. British intelligence agencies had not done the work they are paid to do, notably dissecting the relationship between the then Taliban leadership under Mullah Omar and al-Qaida.
Tragically missed opportunities, and future prospects for peace talks, are laid out forensically in a new book, An Enemy We Created. "In reality", note the authors, "the relationship [between al-Qaida and the Taliban] was strained and generally extended no further than individual contacts. The supposedly unbreakable link between the Taliban and al-Qaida is the principal strategic blunder of the war in Afghanistan: a major intelligence failure that continues to cloud the response to Afghanistan and Pakistan".
The authors, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, drive home the point that Al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban were and remain two distinct entities "with different memberships, ideologies, and objectives". The Taliban had no interest in promoting attacks abroad.
General David Petraeus, former US commander in Afghanistan, used every opportunity to praise American - and British - special forces for killing an increasing number of "Taliban commanders". The trouble, as time went on, and as far as both foreign forces and the Afghan government was concerned, is that they were replaced by a younger and more radical generation.Though Mullah Omar remains a key figure, his influence has been waning.
The authors of An Enemy We Created pose two presently unanswerable questions - what happens to al-Qaida members inside Afghanistan and Pakistan following a potential peace deal; and can the older Taliban leadership still be relied upon to keep Afghanistan "free of international terrorists"?
One thing, however, seems clear: for some time yet, fighting and negotiating can and will continue in parallel.
Afghanistan to press Pakistan for access to Taliban
By Rob Taylor | Reuters – Mon, Jan 30, 2012.
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan will press Pakistan for access to Taliban leaders during a one-day visit to Kabul by Pakistan's foreign minister, with Afghan officials hoping to ease cross-border strains and lay the ground for peace negotiations with the insurgents.
Hina Rabbani Khar will visit Kabul on February 1 to discuss reconciliation and nascent plans for peace talks ahead of a meeting between representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban in Saudi Arabia.
Khar's trip will mark the first high-level meetings between officials from the countries in months.
Pakistan is seen as critical to U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan before foreign combat troops leave in 2014.
"We hope it will mark a new phase in the relationship between both countries," Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai said Monday.
Senior Afghan security sources told Reuters that Afghan officials would use Khar's visit to press for access to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban captured in Pakistan in 2010, as well as other members of a Taliban council known as the Quetta Shura, after the Pakistani city of Quetta where the leaders are said to be based.
Afghan officials want direct access to senior Taliban members and advisers because they are the main decision makers for the insurgency and will be crucial to winning support for the fledgling peace process.
Pakistan has consistently denied giving sanctuary to insurgents and denies the existence of any Quetta Shura.
Baradar, a close associate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden before the September 11 attacks in the United States, had been ranked second to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.
He was captured in Pakistan's biggest city of Karachi by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence agents in February 2010.
"When the Pakistan delegation visits here, we will be asking for direct access to the Quetta Shura, or access to Mullah Baradar, who has been in Pakistan custody, as a gesture of good faith," said a senior Afghan security source.
"We want sincere cooperation from Pakistan in regards to peace talks," said the source, who declined to be identified.
Ties between the neighbors were severely damaged after the assassination in Kabul last September of Afghanistan's main peace negotiator, Burhanuddin Rabbani, by an insurgent messenger carrying a bomb concealed in his turban.
Afghanistan accused Pakistan of involvement in the attack and of trying to sabotage negotiations with the Taliban, charges Islamabad denied.
"PARANOID"
Critics accuse Pakistan of using militant groups as proxies in Afghanistan to counter the growing influence of rival India there and of trying to use the proxies to ensure a government in Kabul that is friendly toward Pakistan. Pakistan rejects the allegations and says it wants peace in Afghanistan.
Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government will be held in Saudi Arabia this year, an Afghan official in the Saudi capital Riyadh told Reuters by telephone.
"The talks will be held in Saudi, but there is no set date yet," the official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.
Saudi Arabia, along with Pakistan and the United States, backed Islamist insurgents fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and later became one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban government.
Riyadh also has considerable influence in Pakistan because of its economic support and it may be able to influence Pakistan's Afghanistan policy.
The Taliban announced this month they would open a political office in the Qatari capital Doha to support possible peace talks with the United States and key allies, seen by supporters as the best chance of reaching a cease-fire ahead of the foreign troop withdrawal over the next three years.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai fears being sidelined by U.S.-led efforts to forge peace with the Taliban, so he may be pushing for alternative talks in Saudi Arabia.
"The government has been paranoid since the secret talks opened between the U.S. and the Taliban, and we believe Pakistan feels the same," the Afghan security source said.
As a confidence-building measure, the Islamist group which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion of the country in late 2001 called for the release of five members being held at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. military enclave in Cuba.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul declined to comment on the likelihood of separate Afghan-Taliban negotiations, but said senior U.S. envoys had consistently called for Pakistan to be part of efforts to end a war stretching into its 11th year.
"We support an Afghan process that includes Afghans talking to Afghans," he said.
(Additional reporting by Amena Bakr in DUBAI, editing by Michael Georgy and Sanjeev Miglani)
Afghans Feel Police Not Ready for Security Control
VOA News January 31, 2012
A public-opinion survey by the United Nations indicates that roughly 80 percent of Afghans believe the country's police force is not ready to take over security control from international forces.
The U.N. Development Program's annual “police perception survey released Tuesday found that only two out of 10 people think the Afghan National Police is strong enough to handle security once foreign combat troops leave Afghanistan in 2014.
NATO forces have been working to train their local counterparts in anticipation of the coalition's withdrawal. Control of security in parts of Afghanistan has already been transferred to Afghan forces.
The U.N. survey found that a majority of the 7,000 Afghans polled believe police corruption is still a major problem.
Separately, NATO said an insurgent attack killed one of its service members in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday. The coalition did not give details.
Obama Confirms Drone Strikes in Pakistan
VOA News January 31, 2012
U.S. President Barack Obama has defended the use of drone strikes in Pakistan, which U.S. officials have never before publicly acknowledged.
Speaking during an online town hall discussion Monday, President Obama said the drone attacks have been used to target al-Qaida and its affiliates, and that many of the strikes have been in Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
The president said the operations are used for "very precise, precision strikes," and he said the United States does not authorize the attacks "willy-nilly." He said it is a targeted, focused effort against "active terrorists" in difficult-to-reach locations.
Following the president's remarks, a Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman told the French news agency that the attacks are "unlawful, counterproductive and hence unacceptable," despite, what he called, their "tactical advantages."
The Pakistani government has long condemned the drone strikes as a violation of its sovereignty, but the attacks are believed to be carried out with the help of Pakistani intelligence.
Until Monday, U.S. officials had never confirmed the missile strikes against militants in Pakistan's tribal areas, but they have anonymously confirmed such attacks to various news outlets.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP.
Sikh’s detention reveals flaws in Afghan justice, nation’s religious intolerance
Washington Post By Ernesto Londoño Tuesday, January 31, 2012
KABUL - Among the throngs of inmates in downtown Kabul’s prison trying to prove they are not thieves or insurgents is a soft-spoken Sikh man with piercing black eyes. He is being held on a highly unusual charge: falsely claiming Afghan citizenship.
Baljit Singh, 23, says he was born in Afghanistan but that his family fled religious persecution when he was 5. He returned to his native country on July 6, 2010, aboard a British chartered plane transporting Afghan deportees, and he has been locked up ever since by authorities who say he isn’t Afghan.
Singh’s ordeal offers a disturbing glimpse into the type of religious intolerance that has made Afghan Sikhs a vanishing segment of society. His case also casts a condemning light on a justice system that could take on significantly more responsibility as the United States transitions authority in Afghanistan to the government of President Hamid Karzai.
Promoting religious tolerance was one of the goals that the United States and its allies set in Afghanistan after the Taliban government was toppled a decade ago. But religious minorities, who make up about 1 percent of the population, are still routinely ostracized here.
“I’ll go anywhere,” Singh said in a recent interview at the crammed Kabul detention center. “Just not this country, where they can put innocent people in prison for a year and a half.”
Sikhs, who follow a monotheistic religion founded in the 15th century, once constituted a large, prosperous part of Afghan society. In recent decades, as the country has become more religiously conservative, they have been harassed and disparaged as statue-worshipping infidels. They have moved en masse to India and other countries, and community leaders say there are now no more than a few hundred or at best a few thousand Sikhs left in Afghanistan.
Life for Sikhs there has become especially hard in recent years, according to community leader Awtar Singh, a former lawmaker. Thousands had their property stolen during the civil wars of the 1990s. Job prospects are bleak outside of Sikh enclaves. And the government refuses to let Sikhs open cremation facilities, barring them from following an important religious tradition.
“The living conditions are getting hard for Hindus and Sikhs in Afghanistan,” said Awtar Singh, who is not related to the detainee. “The remaining people who can afford to do so want to go to India.”
A family in exile
Amid ferocious battles among various Afghan militant factions in the mid-1990s, Singh’s mother and stepfather left their home in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, and moved to Pakistan. The family spent the first few years of exile in Pakistan, Bahrain and Egypt, he said.
When Singh was in his late teens, they were smuggled into Austria, where the family applied for asylum. Feeling restless because the claim was taking a long time to handle, Singh said he traveled to Britain, hoping that the asylum process there would be easier and quicker. He turned himself over to immigration officials hours after entering the country in January 2007, he said.
During the three years Singh spent in Britain waiting for his case to be processed, he worked menial jobs and became engaged to a British woman. He said lawyers who handled his asylum case made procedural mistakes that led to his deportation. A letter from the U.K. Border Agency informing Singh of his impending removal says his case was turned down because evidence supporting the claim had been submitted in a form that “did not comply with the instructions.”
When Singh arrived in Afghanistan in July 2010, along with dozens of other deportees, Afghan authorities took notice of the type of turban he was wearing — which is different from the ones worn by Afghan Muslims — and took him into custody. The other men were released.
Rahmatullah Nazari, a deputy attorney general, said investigators detained Singh because they were not convinced that he was Afghan.
“When people go overseas to get asylum, they are told to say they are Afghan just so they can get asylum quickly,” Nazari said in an interview. “We weren’t able to find anyone here who knows him.”
Nazari said the government plans to keep Singh in custody until the British government takes him back or another nation certifies that he is its citizen.
A spokesman for the British Embassy in Kabul said the government does not generally discuss specific cases, but he suggested that British officials do not doubt Singh is Afghan.
“Individuals are only returned to a country when there is substantial evidence that it is their country of origin,” the spokesman said in an e-mailed statement. “If it subsequently becomes apparent that it is not, we are committed to returning them to the U.K. or their correct country of origin.”
‘They started beating me up’
Kimberley Motley, an American lawyer who represents Singh, said the British government failed to get him an Afghan passport or other travel document that ascertained his nationality, as is customary in deportation cases.
Singh said he was mistreated almost immediately after his arrival in Afghanistan. One day, fellow inmates forcibly removed his turban and demanded that he convert to Islam by uttering a few phrases. Singh said he appealed to prison guards for help.
“They started beating me up,” he recalled in an interview. “I was so shocked. They were supposed to be protecting me, but instead they beat me.”
Under duress, Singh said, he nominally converted to Islam, which prompted fellow inmates to hoist him on their shoulders and parade him around the facility.
Nazari, the deputy attorney general, said he had seen no evidence to substantiate Singh’s allegations of mistreatment. He said non-Muslims in Afghan custody routinely convert to Islam, hoping to get leniency.
“These foreigners think if they convert to Islam, they will be forgiven,” he said.
Motley, the lawyer, said Singh’s best shot at freedom is finding a country that will accept him as a refugee, although so far none has stepped forward.
“Unless he has a plane ticket and someone willing to help him, the Afghans have made it clear they are not going to let him go,” Motley said.
Special correspondent Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report.
Germany Returns Afghan Historical Monument
TOLOnews.com Monday, 30 January 2012
Germany has recovered and returned to Afghanistan a historical monument that was smuggled out of the country during the years of civil war.
The returned monument which belongs to the Kingdom of Gandhara, is 30 centimeters high and 26 centimeters wide and has officially been handed over to the Afghan Ambassador in Germany.
It belongs to the 2nd century and portrays on a white surface made out of stone engraved two lines of 8 members of audience standing and listening to Buddha sitting on the throne on the right, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote on its website.
Thousands of Afghanistan's historical monuments were stolen during the years of the civil war. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans were killed or wounded and millions had to escape the country for safety.
Afghanistan which is referred to as the centre of the old Arian civilization lost most of its cultural and historical heritages during the years of the civil war.
According to the head of the Kabul Museum, Oamra Khan Masoodi, many of the monuments that have been smuggled out of Afghanistan have been illegally excavated.
He also added that around 70% of the monuments have been stolen from the Kabul Museum.
"More than 70,000 pieces have been stolen from the Kabul Museum during the war. The Ministry of Information and Culture has been able to recover more than 8,500 pieces since 2007," Mr Masoodi said.
According to him the Ministry is in contact with the Unesco and Interpol to track other stolen monuments and return them to Afghanistan.
INTERVIEW-Afghan Hazara leader sceptical of Taliban peace
Reuters By Rob Taylor and Mirwais Harooni Jan 30, 2012
* Ethnic leader joins others in questioning Taliban talks
* Warns that army likely to "surrender" to Taliban
Scepticism is growing inside Afghanistan's ethnic communities that a peace deal can be struck with the Taliban, under whose rule they were brutalised and persecuted, with many fearing a return to civil war, a prominent Hazara minority leader says.
Mohammad Mohaqiq said he was deeply worried about NATO plans to pull out combat troops by end-2014, and a French government proposal to leave a year earlier, by 2013.
"It is silly to say al Qaeda and Taliban can come together with Afghans, or (with) our allies who have come to this country," Mohaqiq told Reuters late on Sunday in an interview at his heavily-guarded Kabul mansion.
"I don't believe in a miracle occurring, that the Taliban will change their way of thought, accept the Afghan constitution, believe in democracy and the vote of the people."
Many of the Hazaras suffered enormously under Taliban rule, between 1996 and 2001, and the Shi'ite Muslim minority saw many of their communities levelled by the mainly Sunni Muslim and ethnic Pashtun Taliban, and their people killed or scattered into the mountains.
Afghan officials plan to hold initial talks with Taliban representatives in Saudi Arabia in coming weeks in parallel to secret contacts underway between the United States and the insurgency since 2010.
Afghan officials also hope to press Pakistan's foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar during a visit to Kabul this week for access to Taliban leaders in Pakistan, including jailed co-founder of the movement Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
Mohaqiq, head of the opposition Shi'ite Hezb-e-Wahdat (Unity Party) and a member of parliament, fought the Soviets in the 1980s and was part of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which splintered amid political dealmaking under Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
But alliance members are now coalescing again, bringing ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras into a common front to oppose the blueprint for Taliban peace negotiations masterminded by the United States, and now being re-cast again by an Afghan government nervous of being sidelined by Washington.
Other ethnic group members such as Tajik leader and Afghan National Front chief Ahmad Zia Masood, whose brother once led opposition commanders fighting the Taliban, said this month that he also did not believe a deal could be reached with the Taliban, calling for more involvement in peace negotiations.
Mohaqiq, whose predecessor Abdul Ali Mazari was stripped naked, mutilated and dropped to his death from a helicopter by the Taliban in 1995, said he believed thousands of insurgents had been trained across the porous mountain border in Pakistan during a decade of war with NATO and Afghan forces.
Pakistan's government rejects the frequent accusations from Afghan officials that Taliban insurgents are provided with sanctuary in its territory.
"They are waiting for NATO forces to withdraw from Afghanistan to attack. We can anticipate what is going to happen," Mohaqiq said.
"Now tens of thousands of armed insurgents have already been trained in North Waziristan."
Mohaqiq said President Karzai and his western backers were moving too hastily to accommodate the Taliban, wearied by a war now dragging into its 11th year, and warned NATO must not repeat the mistake of withdrawing from the country too early.
"When his presidency is over he can go to any place in the world to survive, but the Afghan people will be left behind," he said. "What we want is for the international community to act wisely."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week said France would pull its combat troops out at the end of 2013, a year before an end-2014 deadline fixed by the United States and its NATO allies for handing over responsibility for security to Afghan forces.
He said he would use a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Brussels from Feb. 2-3 to call for consideration of the Afghan army taking full charge of NATO combat missions in 2013. {ID:nL5E8CS0E0]
Mohaqiq said the Afghan army, made up largely by Pashtuns was incapable of protecting minority Afghans if it proved the Taliban were holding the promise of peace talks to stall and regroup, as some Afghanistan analysts have warned.
"The army is ethnically structured in a way so it cannot fight the Taliban. It's possible they would just surrender when the Taliban attacked," he said.
Mohaqiq said ethnic opposition parties, which also included former Northern Alliance General and Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, wanted consideration of the country's future to include a revamp of the political system away from a centralised presidency towards effective multiparty government.
"But we are not very optimistic that the Taliban will join the peace process and other political factions in Afghanistan, support the government and work in a system together," he said. (Editing by Ed Lane)
Iran, Afghanistan Agree to Boost Economic Cooperation
Fars News Agency January 31, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran and Afghanistan inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on mutual cooperation in economic fields.
The MoU was inked by Iranian Deputy Economy Minister Behrouz Alishiri and his Afghan counterpart Mustafa Mastoor at the end of the two countries' second joint economic commission meeting in Kabul.
The two sides agreed to increase cooperation in customs, banking and insurance sectors, as well as preventing smuggling of goods at borders.
During the meeting, the Iranian official and his Afghan counterpart stressed the importance of expansion of relations between the two countries in the establishment of peace in the region.
"Iran and Afghanistan economies are complementary for each other; Tehran wishes a stable developed Afghanistan in its neighborhood," Alishiri underlined.
Iran and Afghanistan enjoy expanding ties and cooperation and observers believe that the good achievements gained in area of their mutual cooperation should be deemed as a result of the efforts made by the two countries' leaders.
Earlier this month, a senior Iranian trade official announced that Afghanistan imports 27.6 of its multi-billion-dollar needs from Iran, and said the figure can still increase in future.
"At present 27.6% of Afghanistan's nearly $5bln imports from the world countries is from Iran, which is a considerable figure," Director-General of the Asia and Pacific Trade Office of Iran's Trade Promotion Organization Amir Talebi said, adding that the number can increase in future.
Parliament to Summon Incompetent Ministers
TOLOnews.com By Sharif Amiry Monday, 30 January 2012
The Afghan House of Representatives on Monday announced it would summon ministers who had failed to spend more than 50 per cent of their development budgets.
Some MPs believe these ministers should be summoned and disqualified from their positions. They should also be prosecuted.
MPs are concerned about corruption within some ministries and are raising questions about their competency to spend their budgets.
"Nearly 17 ministries have spent [only] the minimum amount of their budgets. These ministries should be summoned by Parliament and asked about ineffectiveness in their projects," Shukria Barezia, an MP from Kabul, said.
"In addition to the accountability, they should face justice," Asadullah Sahadati, an MP representing Daikundi, said. "They have clearly violated the law and have been incompetent."
In most of the cases, the ministries have blamed insecurity in far parts of the country for not spending their development budgets.
It is not yet clear which ministries have been unable to spend their development budgets.
"Based on the reports collected from the dedicated commission, the Finance Minister along with audit and control officials should be summoned," Abdul Raouf Ibrahimi, Parliament's Speaker said.
On the Ground in Afghanistan, a Taliban Whose Momentum Seems Anything But Broken
TIME By John Wendle / COP Monti Monday, Jan. 30, 2012
Kunar province - The hundreds of bullets, mortar shells and rockets that slammed into the boulders behind which they were taking cover peppered the men of 1st Platoon with high velocity rock shards and jagged bits of shrapnel. Just below Outpost Shal, a newly constructed mountaintop aerie in Afghanistan's violent Kunar province on the Pakistani border, insurgent fighters were moaning and screaming from wounds suffered over eight days of heavy fighting. That scene, just three months ago, of the outnumbered American platoon fighting to maintain its foothold offered a sobering contrast TO President Barack Obama's statement, in last week's State of the Union address, that "The Taliban's momentum has been broken."
Like the battle scene witnessed by TIME, the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan reportedly also casts doubt on the confidence expressed by President Obama on the state of the Taliban's war effort. The top-secret assessment "takes a dim view of possible futures in Afghanistan," Reuters was told last week by a U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity. The report, which represents the consensus view of 16 US intelligence agencies, warns that the Taliban has not given up on its aim of retaking full control of Afghanistan, and concludes that the gains made by the troop surge ordered by President Obama two years ago may be unsustainable, according to McClatchy Newspapers.
The soldiers eventually won their battle at OP Shal, securing the Kunar River Valley from infiltration, eliminating insurgent roadblocks and opening it to civilian and military traffic. But the Taliban's week-long attack highlighted the many military problems facing Afghanistan, and made clear that the outcome of the conflict remains far from certain.
Throughout the intense fighting, the besieged defending force of 36 U.S. and Afghan army soldiers fought off multiple suicide bombers and at least four overrun attempts by between 400 and 500 heavily armed insurgents, who had been trucked in from Pakistan and who managed to advance to within five meters of U.S. positions. Afterwards, the soldiers confirmed 115 kills and estimated at least 200. "It was the most coordinated thing any of us had ever seen, but just the sheer number of forces they had massing on that position was ridiculous," Staff Sgt Everett Bracey of first platoon, Bravo Company, 2-27 Infantry Battalion, told TIME.
The attackers were reinforced and resupplied throughout the fight from bases and depots in the safe haven provided by Pakistan. "We saw 60 vehicles come out of Pakistan — just drive in," said Staff Sgt. Anthony Fuentes looking at a topographical map a few days after the battle. "This whole route, it goes all the way up into Pakistan. It's a two-hour trafficable route from the border." Added company commander Captain Michael Kolton, "It was Pashtuns and Arabs and Chechens and Punjabis — everyone and their sister joined in on this one."
The defenders of OP Shal also recognized that their attackers had been well trained. "They used the standard operating procedures that the U.S. army uses," explained Fuentes. "We expected contact, but we didn't expect that. Their fire was so heavy and precise that to get up and look at their near sector, the joes just had to say, 'Ok, I'm just going to eat one in the face just to get up and see if somebody is moving on me.' And every time they lifted their head up, there was somebody there."
Sitting in HIS squad bay at Combat Outpost Monti, Sgt. Brandon Goodell told TIME, "They are motivated, they are trained, and they are proficient." But what most surprised the Americans was the insurgents' determination to regain this strategic mountaintop commanding a six-kilometer section of road in the main Kunar River Valley. "They were relentless. They were all over us. I've never seen them come that hard at anybody," says Fuentes. The numbers, skill and determination of the insurgents repelled at OP Shal seems quite at odds with President Obama's suggestion that the Taliban's momentum has been broken. "You'd kill 15 or 20 of them, and then five minutes later, there was another 15 or 20 of them trying to attack you again. I mean, we'd kill so many that we went black on ammo, pretty much, and we just had to stop and wait," says Goodell. "They're motivated. I tell my soldiers this exact same thing: If they were to come into our country, into the United States of America, and they were walking in your front yard, what would you do? Damn right I would fight you, and then I'd find all my friends and we'd fight you, and then I'd find their friends, and then we'd come and fight you. And after I died, my son, and their sons, and their friends' sons would all come fight you. Of course. We're in their back yard."
Afghan family member to appeal verdict
By ROB GILLIES The Associated Press January 30th, 2012
TORONTO - At least one of the three members of an Afghan family found guilty of killing three teenage sisters and another woman intends to appeal the conviction, the man's lawyer said Monday.
Prosecutors said the defendants killed the four women because they dishonored the family by defying its strict rules on dress, dating, socializing and using the Internet. The killings horrified Canadians and were condemned by Canadian Muslim groups, which called for an end to honor killings.
A jury on Sunday found Mohammad Shafia, 58; his wife Tooba Yahya, 42; and their son Hamed, 21, each guilty of four counts of first-degree murder in what the judge said resulted from a "twisted concept of honor."
Hamed Shafia's lawyer, Patrick McCann, said his client will appeal and he believes the other two will as well.
"He's determined to press on and continue the fight," McCann said.
Lawyers for the parents did not respond to messages seeking comment. The three are facing life in prison because first-degree murder in Canada carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
After the verdict was read, the three again declared their innocence in the killings of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, Shafia's childless first wife in a polygamous marriage.
In recent years a number of so-called honor killings in Canada have prompted debate about absorbing immigrants into the mainstream and dealing with culture clashes between immigrant parents and their children. Even before the trial, Rona Ambrose, the women's affairs minister, had said the federal government was considering making such killings a separate category in the criminal code.
Ambrose took to Twitter to comment after the verdict: "Honor- motivated violence is NOT culture, it is barbaric violence."
The bodies of the women were found June 30, 2009, in a car submerged in a canal in Kingston, Ontario, where the family had stopped for the night on their way home to Montreal from Niagara Falls, Ontario.
The prosecution said it was a case of premeditated murder, staged to look like an accident. Prosecutors said the defendants drowned their victims, then placed their bodies in the car and pushed it into the canal.
The jury heard testimony that Zainab's sisters, Sahar and Geeti, were hounded and trailed by their brothers because the parents suspected them of dating boys; that Sahar repeatedly said her father would kill her if he found out she had a boyfriend; that she had bruises on her arms; that Mohammad, the first wife who was helping to raise the children, also was brutally treated.
Prosecutor Laurie Lacelle presented wire taps and mobile phone records from the Shafia family in court. In one phone conversation, the father says his daughters "betrayed us immensely."
"Even if they hoist me up to the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my honor. There is nothing more valuable than our honor," Lacelle quoted Shafia as saying in a transcript.
Defense lawyers said the deaths were accidental. They said the Nissan car accidentally plunged into the canal after the eldest daughter, Zainab, took it for a joy ride with her sisters and her father's first wife. Hamed said he watched the accident, although he didn't call police from the scene.
McCann said the problem with the prosecution's case is that it "involved the necessity of them being all incapacitated ahead of time yet their is nothing in the evidence to suggest where or how or when that could have been done."
The family had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia and Dubai before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a wealthy businessman, married Yahya because his first wife could not have children.
Shafia's polygamy, if revealed, could have resulted in the family's deportation.
The prosecution painted a picture of a household controlled by a domineering Shafia, with Hamed keeping his sisters in line and doling out discipline when his father was away on frequent business trips to Dubai.
More than 80 Canadian Muslim organizations, imams and community leaders signed a call for action late last year against "the reality of domestic violence within our own communities, compounded by abhorrent and yet persistent pre-Islamic practices rooted in the misguided notion of restoring family honor."
Syed Soharwardy, a Calgary-based imam, said the case motivated him to reach out to young women who are oppressed at home.
Aysan Sev'er, a professor at the University of Toronto specializing in the study of violence against women, said crimes involving a family's reputation involve deep-rooted social traditions and extensive collaboration with others.
"There's a community component both in terms of putting pressure on the people and later on trying to justify, whitewash it, reduce the severity and so on," she said.
The United Nations reports 5,000 females die from honor killings each year around the world.
Mohammad Shafia was ‘so obsessed, so closed-minded’
National Post By Graeme Hamilton Jan 30, 2012
Graeme Hamilton: Typically immigrants arrive in a new land prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of their children. Mohammad Shafia, a native of Afghanistan, came to Canada in 2007 a wealthy man intent on imprisoning his daughters in an authoritarian household. And when they took steps to break free, a jury found Sunday, he murdered three of them along with his first wife.
A relative of Shafia’s second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, said in an interview Sunday it quickly became apparent after the Shafia family immigrated to Montreal that the patriarch had no interest in adapting to his new surroundings. (Yahya and the couple’s eldest son, Hamed, were also found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths.)
Reza Hyderi, Yahya’s first cousin, said the Shafia family was invited to his sister’s wedding in the summer of 2007. It was to be an exciting event for the Shafia children, a chance to meet their cousins, and the girls bought new dresses.
“On the day of the wedding they never showed up, and after, I heard that the father got upset because the girls’ dresses had no sleeves,” Mr. Hyderi said. “He took a pair of scissors and cut up all the clothes. He was so obsessed, so closed-minded.”
The roots of the obsession stretch back to Shafia’s native Afghanistan, where he was born in 1952. After his mother divorced his father and remarried, he did not get past Grade 8 in school, according to Wali Abdali, the brother of Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad.
“He had a store in Kabul to repair radios and televisions. He started like that then gradually his business grew, he was buying televisions to sell, then importing televisions from Japan, to resell,” Mr. Abdali said in an interview from France. “That’s how he made his profits. It started with a small business.”
The two families were close, and in 1978 it was arranged that Shafia would marry Ms. Mohammad. “It was a joyous celebration,” Mr. Abdali said of the lavish wedding held at Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel and attended by 300 guests. The bride’s family approved of the match. “He was a boy who did not drink, who did not smoke, who had a job,” Mr. Abdali said.
Soon Afghanistan would be shaken by war, with the Soviets invading in 1979. Mr. Abdali fled across the border to Pakistan in the mid-1980s and news about his sister Rona was scarce. “It was wartime. Everyone was torn up,” he said.
Then he learned that Shafia had taken a second wife, a practice that is legal in Afghanistan. Ms. Mohammad had been unable to bear children, so Shafia married Yahya in 1988 and another celebration was held at the Intercontinental. The news did not overly upset Ms. Mohammad’s family, as there were signs that the wives would be on equal footing. “My brother-in-law presented both at the ceremony. I think it went well,” Mr. Abdali said.
It is not clear how Shafia amassed his fortune, but he was already rich by the age of 40. The court heard that when he left Afghanistan in 1992, he lost $200,000 in the transfer of $1.5-million worth of “goods” to Pakistan. Mr. Hyderi said he heard that Shafia at one point held a government posting in Kabul and would supplement his income by demanding bribes from the families of prisoners, promising to arrange their release. He said he is skeptical that Shafia could have become a multi-millionaire by selling electronics in war-torn Afghanistan and reselling damaged cars, as he would do later on. “This guy, if it’s so easy for him to kill three of his children, he could do anything,” Mr. Hyderi said.
After Pakistan, the growing Shafia family moved on to Dubai. Yahya eventually gave birth to a total of seven children; the three girls who were killed were Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17 and Geeti, 13. At trial, Shafia testified that he was “the top seller of Panasonic products” in all of Dubai. But while business was apparently good and there was little in the way of temptations for his daughters, immigration rules prevented them from getting citizenship in the United Arab Emirates.
They spent a year in Australia, but Shafia did not appreciate the local Afghan women’s support group reaching out to his wives, according to Mr. Hyderi. After another stint in Dubai, he decided to make the move to Canada where Yahya had a large extended family. The wealthy Shafia was welcomed under Quebec’s investor immigrant program, and promptly bought a $2-million shopping mall in the suburb of Laval, paying $1.6-million of it in cash.
There was one hitch with the move to Canada. Since polygamy is outlawed, they had to lie about the status of Ms. Mohammad. She initially stayed behind with relatives in France, and Mr. Abdali said he pleaded with her not to go to Canada.
“But she said no, because of the children. She raised those children. She was their true mother,” he said. “She could not bear to be separated from the children, because she knew that if she wasn’t there, the father was a bit strict, a bit cruel.” Mr. Abdali said he tried to keep his nose out of Shafia’s business but one conclusion was unavoidable. “He was not religious as some have said. I never saw him do prayer. But he was a strict man who did not want anyone looking at his wife.” Ms. Mohammed left France and was granted entry to Canada as a cousin of Shafia.
Once in Canada, the climate in the household deteriorated quickly, as Shafia felt his iron grip slipping. Mr. Hyderi, 31, who immigrated to Canada in 2000, said the message was clear that Shafia expected total control over his children. He was insulted to hear that Shafia did not even want his girls mingling with their male cousins: “He said it was male cousins who open the door for female cousins to be prostitutes.” The first time he met Zainab at a family picnic, she was wearing a hijab and he avoided even shaking hands when he was introduced. “Normally I hug my cousins, and kiss them on the cheeks,” he said. Taking a hint, he had little contact with the Shafias, even though they lived nearby.
Ms. Mohammad also found herself under threat. Mr. Abdali said members of Yahya’s family made life miserable for his sister in Montreal, and an effort was underway to send her back to Afghanistan. He told her to go to the police if they tried to have her sent back, but she said she could not. “She was afraid,” he said. “She had threats that if she went to the police, we will kill you.”
Shafia meanwhile was frequently travelling to Asia and the Middle East and making little mark in Montreal. Qais Hamidi, a prominent member of Quebec’s Afghan community, said he knows almost all the Afghans in Montreal, but the first time he saw Shafia was at the funeral for the drowning victims. (At that point, the deaths were being treated as an accident.)
Hasibullah Fazel, an administrator with Maison Afghan-Canadienne, which offer support to new arrivals, said he met Shafia a couple of times but never sensed anything was amiss. “They were a bit reserved, conservative people because they came from Dubai,” he said. Shafia was Muslim but not particularly religious, he said; he even remembers Shafia mocking clerics as insincere.
In the spring of 2009, Mr. Hyderi learned that Zainab was to marry her boyfriend, who was not an Afghan. After talking to Zainab, he could sense the marriage was a desperate move to escape her father’s control. He spoke to Yahya and offered to intervene with Shafia, who was away on business in Dubai, to make Zainab’s life easier.
Yahya insisted that he butt out: “She said, ‘You don’t know Shafia. He’s very mean. He’s very selfish, and I’m afraid he’s going to come home from Dubai, and he’s going to hit her, or he’s going to make Hamed kill her.’ I said, ‘Tooba, what are you talking about. No father would do that.’ ”
The marriage to the boyfriend was annulled after one day, and another plan was hatched for Zainab to marry Mr. Hyderi’s younger brother. But before that could happen, the Shafias set off on a summer road trip. Mr. Hyderi’s father, Latif, who testified for the Crown during the trial, ran into the family at a fruit store as they were preparing to leave. He reported back that he sensed something unusual on meeting Shafia. Shafia had shaken his hand extremely hard and said, “You say women belong to others, but that’s not true.” The younger Mr. Hyderi was alarmed by the cryptic message and spoke to his brother. “I told him to tell Zainab, whatever she did, not to get on a plane. The worst we could think of was he was going to send her back to Dubai.”
He was on vacation with his wife in New York when he got news of the drownings. He knew immediately it was no accident.
Despite the overwhelming evidence presented at trial, some in Montreal’s Afghan community have trouble accepting that the deaths were murder. “The parents were building a house for the sake of their children. How could they go and kill them?” asked Victoria Jahesh, who works with an Afghan women’s group in Montreal.
To Mr. Hyderi, part of the answer lies in the traditions of his homeland. The Afghan understanding of a father’s place reinforced Shafia’s lust for control over his family, he said. “The word father, in Afghanistan, that means he has to control everything. Whatever he says is right,” he said. “Basically, Mr. Shafia took advantage of that word, father. ‘I’m the one providing food, clothes and everything for you guys. Whatever I say, shut your mouths and don’t answer me back.’ ”
The wads of money smoothed Shafia’s entry into Canada, but his heavy cultural baggage proved his downfall. “With almost all immigrants, especially from the Afghan community, it is especially for the future of their children that they come,” Ms. Jahesh remarked. “They want to let them have access to the good education that is in Canada.”
Not Shafia. When Zainab met a boyfriend at school, he forced her to quit school. And when he sensed that he was losing control of his girls, he chose to kill them. One of the last examples of his twisted notion of parenting is found in a wiretapped conversation with Hamed, two weeks after the drownings and before they had been arrested.
“Be I dead or alive, nothing in the world is above your honour,” Shafia said. “Isn’t that right, my son?”
Afghan Kin Are Accused of Killing Woman for Not Bearing a Son
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY January 30, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The young Afghan woman gave birth to a third girl three months ago — to a husband, the authorities say, who had been demanding a boy.
Last week, the man and his mother, in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, put a rope around the woman’s neck and strangled her, the police said.
The body of the woman, known only as Storai, 22, was found by the police a few hours later in her room, and she was buried a day later, on Jan. 26.
Storai’s death was a chilling reminder of the low status of women in Afghanistan.
Also unsettling was the revelation that the husband, identified as Sher Mohammad, 30, was suspected of being a member of a local militia that, the police and government officials said, has proliferated in the region and stoked lawlessness and violence, including in the home.
According to the police, Storai was married four years ago, when she was 18, and had two other girls: a 3-year-old and a 2-year-old.
But in the months after the birth of Storai’s third daughter, her husband and mother-in-law nagged her and argued with her about having borne yet another girl, said Nadera Geya, head of the Directorate of Women’s Affairs in Kunduz.
After Storai’s death, in Mafali, a village in the Khanabad District in southeast Kunduz, the mother-in-law put a rope in the window of her daughter-in-law’s room to give the impression that she had killed herself, Ms. Geya said. But there were signs of torture that led to suspicions that Storai had been killed, Ms. Geya said.
“Her mother-in-law strangled her with a rope and said she committed suicide herself, which is not true,” she said. “They killed her because they did not want her to bear any more girls. They had disputes with her even before this.”
Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, a spokesman for the Kunduz chief of police, said that the mother-in-law, Wali Hazrata, had been arrested but that Mr. Mohammad, the husband, had fled.
Ms. Hazrata is in police custody in the city of Kunduz. She has denied that she and her son killed Storai or that her son was a member of one of the militias known as arbakai, the police spokesman said.
Kunduz is no stranger to domestic violence. In December, four gunmen, also believed to be arbakai members, broke into a house and threw acid on three school-age girls and their mother in revenge after an attacker’s offer of marriage to one of the girls, 18, was rejected by her father.
Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Afghan Women, which runs shelters for abused women, said that while she had seen cases in which women were bullied by their husbands through pregnancy, and that sometimes a husband even took a second or third wife if the first wife continued to have girls, murder was unusual.
“Girls are looked down upon in Afghanistan,” Ms. Naderi said. “I have heard of many cases where the wife is threatened with violence and beaten up, but I have never heard of a woman being killed for having a girl.”
Heather Barr, an Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that there was a cultural tolerance for violence against women and impunity for men who committed it, and that recent efforts to protect women had had scant effect.
“What is most disappointing,” Ms. Barr said, “is that the 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women Law was supposed to change this, and it has had very little impact so far.”
She said rules in the penal code specified that a husband could kill his wife for having had sex outside of marriage. Even the civil code has rules allowing a husband to take a second wife if the first one is not procreating satisfactorily, Ms. Barr said.
The police said that Sher Mohammad was now being protected in Khanabad by a local arbakai commander called Qaderak.
Groups of irregular gunmen have proliferated in northern Afghanistan in the past two years. They work locally, sometimes protecting their neighborhoods and villages, but they often terrorize residents, extorting money and goods.
Kunduz has had a particular problem with these militias.
Only a small percentage of the militiamen were in a program run by American Special Forces to train them as neighborhood watchmen for their communities — a program that the coalition says is being wound down and transferred to full Afghan authority. The others often receive weapons and some financial support from the government as a buffer against Taliban insurgents.
The arbakai are suspected of being responsible for other killings, as well as kidnappings and thefts, in Kunduz Province, said Shah Zaman Waziri, the commander of the Second Brigade of the National Army in Kunduz. There are about 3,000 such militiamen in the province, but their numbers are decreasing, he said.
The Khanabad police said there were about 1,000 militiamen in the Khanabad District alone.
In other recent cases of brutality against women, three girls were killed this year in the Imam Sahib District by prospective husbands after the girls’ families would not allow them to marry, said Ms. Geya of the women’s affairs directorate in Kunduz.
She said that in two other cases this year, two women were killed by their husbands.
Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Kunduz, Afghanistan.
A Teacher’s Learning Curve in Kabul
New York Times By JAALA A. THIBAULT January 30, 2012
A few weeks ago, as I was sitting in the English department office at a university in Kabul, sipping coffee and talking to other professors about the end of my time in Afghanistan, I realized that Kabul had taught me patience. But it took a while to get here.
When I was younger, I had no patience. I wanted to get everything done right away; I wanted to see results immediately. I remember receiving the gift of “sea monkeys” (brine shrimp) one birthday, and when I found out that I had to wait weeks before I’d even be able to see them without a magnifying glass, I poured them down the drain without a second thought.
A few weeks later, when the friend who had bought me the sea monkeys asked how big they had gotten, I blushed and told her they were all gone. She proceeded to show me hers, which had, miracle of all miracles, turned into little furiously swimming shrimp! She told me, “If only you had more patience, you could have seen them grow!” I vowed that if ever again I was given a chance to watch something grow, I would try to have patience.
As I lived my life in Kabul, I couldn’t help remembering that lesson in patience I learned more than 20 years ago. This time though, I was not watching brine shrimp grow from microscopic to minuscule over the course of a few weeks; I am watching teachers grow over the course of years. And as teachers grow and learn, so do their students. And as students learn, so does the rest of society. But of course, this process is slow going.
More than a year and a half ago, I moved to Kabul with big plans. I would reform the education system by training the teachers. I would go to the universities and preach education for all. I would tell everyone that an educated society is a free society. I hoped all of the teachers that I would train could bring the message to the masses, and like a tidal wave, literacy would engulf the society.
Much to my dismay, there was no tidal wave. In fact, I ended up sitting in a cold office, drinking coffee and tea with the other professors in my department, talking about life, family, the singer Ahmad Zahir, America, the war and anything else that did not have to do with the business of actually training teachers. Sometimes if I was lucky, I was invited to talk to a class of teachers in training not about teaching methods, but about English grammar or Jennifer Lopez. Go figure.
Instead of teaching, I usually spent Fridays eating lunch with students. We would all sit on the floor around steaming piles of “kobli palaw” (rice), footlong nan bread, bowls of oily “kofta” (meatballs) and pyramids of fruit, beckoning us with their waxy brightness. We’d watch videos of their cousins’ weddings and laugh about the poor fashion choices of the attendees. I wondered to myself if I was really contributing at all to the education system in the country.
One afternoon, as I prepared to teach a lesson about Beyoncé to a class of would-be teachers, I voiced these concerns to my department head. I expected him to say, “Yes, you should leave; you’ve done nothing here but drink all of our coffee.” Contrary to what I expected him to say, though, he laughed and told me this proverb:
“Patience is bitter, but it has a sweet fruit.”
I didn’t understand what patience had to do with my concerns. I asked him to explain. He said that although I wasn’t doing so much teacher training, I was training the teachers in how to trust me, how to be my friend. He explained that in Afghan culture, relationships are paramount; nothing can be accomplished if you are considered a stranger to the people. He told me that although it might be frustrating, the way I was living life would make my job easier in the future. Basically, he was telling me to watch the brine shrimp grow.
So I watched them grow for more than a year, putting teaching second and socializing first. I drank all of the coffee and ate all of the food. I went to the weddings. I learned the language, and I listened to the music.
And by the end of my time in Kabul, both students and professors let me train them — and I found the sweetness at the heart of patience.
Jaala A. Thibault taught English and trained teachers at Kabul Education University in 2010 and 2011 as part of the English Language Fellows Program under the State Department. She now returns intermittently to Afghanistan as an English-language specialist (also with the State Department) to conduct teacher-training workshops. In the United States, she teaches English as a second Language at Santa Barbara City College.
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