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France: Afghan Exit Route Via Uzbekistan Costly
February 10, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said in an interview with "L'Orient-Le Jour" that using the route through Uzbekistan to withdraw NATO troops from Afghanistan was too costly.
Longuet did not say how much the cost was to use the route through Uzbekistan, the last leg of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) that runs from Europe to Afghanistan.
Recent reports have claimed the United States is paying Central Asian governments some $500 million annually to use the route. Estimates are that some 75 percent of nonlethal military cargo headed for Afghanistan now transits the NDN and most of that enters Afghanistan from Uzbekistan.
Longuet said the route was "not optimal" for withdrawing NATO forces but conceded the better option -- via Pakistan -- was currently more complicated due to "spoiled relations" between NATO countries, particularly the U.S., and the Pakistani government.
That chill in ties followed a November 26 NATO air strike that hit Pakistani troops on Pakistan's side of the Afghan border, killing 26 soldiers.
Pakistani authorities responded by closing the land route used by NATO forces going into Afghanistan and ordering a U.S. drone base in Pakistan closed.
Even prior to the attack on Pakistani forces, NATO was already shipping more of its cargo via the NDN. NATO invited the Turkmen and Uzbek presidents to the alliance's summit in Bucharest in April 2008 to discuss passage into Afghanistan as supply routes through Pakistan's tribal areas increasingly came under attack by militants. That NATO meeting laid the foundations for the NDN.
NATO countries intend to complete the drawdown of their forces in Afghanistan by 2014. With Pakistani routes at best insecure, NATO, as Longuet said, sees NDN as the way out of Afghanistan for its troops and equipment. Longuet said negotiations for an exit route are currently under way with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The NDN begins in Latvia then goes to Russia, Kazakhstan, and into Uzbekistan. NATO also uses an air base in Dushanbe, Tajikistan and the U.S. uses the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan.
Compiled from agency reports
Afghanistan launches probe into children deaths in NATO air strike
by Farid Behbud, Yangtze Yan
KABUL, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan government said Friday it launched an investigation to probe a NATO air strike in eastern Kapisa province that allegedly left eight children dead, according to a statement posted on the Presidential Palace's website.
"President Karzai has assigned a delegation led by advisor Haji Mohammad Zaher Safi to launch an all-out probe into the NATO bombing in the province of Kapisa," the statement said.
"Based on information by the (Kapisa) provincial governor, as a result of an air strike conducted on Feb. 8 in Geyawa village in Nijrab district of Kapisa province, eight children were killed," it said.
"ISAF has been looking into this incident right now and a joint assessment team has been sent to Nijrab district to investigate it, " a spokesman of the International Security Assistance Force told Xinhua on Friday. He said more details will be released to media after the investigation.
President Hamid Karzai on Thursday strongly condemned the Wednesday aerial bombing by foreign troops that killed a number of children in Nijrab district of Kapisa province, the statement said.
The restive Nijrab and neighboring Alasay district have been regarded as Taliban stronghold in the province with Mahmud-e-Raqi as its capital, 65 km north of Kabul.
However, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said Afghan and Coalition forces killed eight insurgents and detained two suspected individuals in eastern Afghanistan during operations throughout the past 24 hours ended on Thursday evening.
"A Coalition Force air strike killed six insurgents in response to rocket propelled grenade and small arms fire in Nijrab District, Kapisa Province," ISAF Regional Command-East said in the statement issued Friday.
According to the ISAF statement, the joint forces also killed two insurgents after receiving mortar fire in Khost District of eastern Khost Province in the same period of time.
The death of Afghan civilians by NATO-led troops during operations against Taliban have long been a contentious issue between the Afghan government and the U.S. and NATO forces in the insurgency-hit country.
Afghan officials had in the past stressed such deaths would further undermine the war against Taliban and terrorist groups and inflame an anti-foreign sentiment in the country.
The Afghan president, under strain from the public, has long been criticizing the NATO and U.S. forces over their erroneous killing of civilians since the war against terror begun in late 2001.
The Wednesday incident was the second since the beginning of this year when a number of children have been killed in Afghanistan.
A total of six children were killed when an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) planted by insurgents went off in Tirin Kot city, the provincial capital of southern Uruzgan province on Jan. 6.
The civilian casualties has increased for a fifth successive year as a total of 3,021 Afghan civilians were killed in 2011, an 8 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to a United Nations annual report released in Kabul on Feb. 4.
The U.N. report attributed 77 percent of the civilian deaths last year to the attacks of Taliban insurgents and other armed groups opposing the Afghan government. Another 14 percent of the deaths were attributed to Afghan and NATO-led forces and 9 percent were unattributed.
Delays and higher costs ahead with Afghan private security handover
Associated Press Friday, February 10, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The push by Afghanistan’s president to nationalize legions of private security guards before the end of March is encouraging corruption and jeopardizing multibillion-dollar aid projects, according to companies trying to make the switch.
President Hamid Karzai has railed for years against the large number of guns-for-hire in Afghanistan, saying private security companies skirt the law and risk becoming militias. He ordered them abolished in 2009 and eventually set March 20 of this year as the deadline for everyone except NATO and diplomatic missions to switch to government-provided security.
Afghan officials are rushing to meet the cutoff with the help of NATO advisers. But with fewer than six weeks to go, it’s likely that many components will still be missing on March 20. And even once everything falls into place, higher costs and issues of authority over the government guards will remain.
The change imperils billions of dollars of aid flowing into Afghanistan, particularly from the United States. In a country beset by insurgent attacks and suicide bombings, the private development companies that implement most of the U.S. aid agency’s programs employ private guards to protect compounds, serve as armed escorts and guard construction sites.
On March 21, approximately 11,000 guards now working for private security firms will become government employees as members of the Afghan Public Protection Force, or APPF. They will still be working in the same place with the same job. Except now they’ll answer to the Interior Ministry.
“We don’t want to have security gaps. This is really important to our customers and to us,” said the head of the APPF, Deputy Minister Jamal Abdul Naser Sidiqi. It will happen, he says, because the presidential order says it has to.
Officially, everyone is optimistic.
“The APPF is now open for business,” a U.S. embassy official said, speaking anonymously to discuss private agency contracts.
But many are still worried that the entire plan could fall apart. Development contractors for the U.S. Agency for International Development told The Associated Press they were explicitly told not to discuss the changeover with reporters because media attention could endanger the delicate process. Everyone critical of APPF insisted on speaking anonymously for this article.
Last week the chairman of the House subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing concern that the APPF may not be ready to take over security for aid projects.
Even so, no one expects that there will be a visible problem on March 21.
“The guys who guard our gates today wear a certain baseball hat, and on the 21st of March they’ll come wearing a different uniform. It should be pretty seamless,” said Bill Haight, head of an infrastructure-building project run by Louis Berger Group and Black and Veach. He said his projects are nearly finished and so he doesn’t expect many problems.
But companies with long-running projects are worried. New contracts and operating rules will probably still be in the works when the deadline hits.
The APPF has yet to sign a contract to provide security for any of the approximately 75 companies expected to switch over to government guards in March, according to Noorkhan Haidari, the APPF business manager.
And international firms that are expected to act as middlemen managing the guards are having trouble getting licensed. Though about 20 companies have said they plan to register as so-called Risk Management Companies, or RMCs, only one license has been issued — reportedly after a wait of about two months. Others trying to get licensed say the required documents change every day.
Meanwhile, the Afghan Foreign Ministry has also denied visas to foreign workers for at least three security companies that are trying to get registered as RMCs or are working on one of the exempt contracts, according to a security adviser for a major development contractor. These firms have been told they have to wait for new procedures under the new APPF system. But given that they don’t have much time to get everything in line, they’re increasingly looking at what bribes they can pay to make it happen, the same person said.
Firms don’t have to hire RMCs, but they add a level of management and oversight that meets the standards of international organizations.
Companies have long hired private guards precisely because they don’t trust the Afghan police to protect them in a crisis. The United Nations used Afghan police to guard its staff housing until an 2009 attack on a residential hotel in which Taliban assailants quickly made it past police guards and killed five U.N. staffers. The U.N. has since increased its security to include foreign guards.
Afghans working with APPF have gone so far as to urge the business licensing agency to “stop stalling the process,” according to a letter sent to U.S. government officials by a development company and obtained by the AP.
“The painfully slow momentum of the various Afghan government entities may have scuppered the chances of a timely handover to the APPF,” the letter argues.
Sidiqi said the complaints of delays were overblown, noting that there is a standard three-day licensing process. If there are delays, he said it is because the would-be RMCs are dragging it out.
“We need the RMCs,” Sidiqi said. “They have the experience.”
He dismissed the possibility of bribery. “This is a legal government organization, so corruption is not going to be possible,” Sidiqi said.
But with so much undecided, some development organizations are opting to hunker down inside their compounds until the details are worked out.
A manager with one U.S. government development contractor said the company expects to delay visits to projects in dangerous places until all documents are finalized. The official spoke anonymously to avoid endangering contracts still being negotiated.
Going forward, the development company manager worried about recruiting for projects in places like the insurgent-heavy south. Some employees have already said they won’t sign on to projects if their only security is going to be APPF guards.
But even once the RMCs are licensed and in-country, it is unclear that they will provide an easy transition.
These companies will not be able to directly control the guards that they manage. They can only give advice to an Afghan supervisor. If there’s a dispute between the two, it will have to be taken to a government-run arbitration panel.
The issue has already caused problems on APPF-guarded projects before the mandatory switch. During the 2010 parliamentary elections, Afghan police pulled a group of APPF guards who were protecting a railroad construction project in the northern province of Balkh off their posts to guard polling stations, according to the former APPF commander.
“I told them it was a violation of the law but they said you have to do it. I was obliged,” said Sayed Asghar Asgari. So he gave over 50 of his 462 guards. The guards were returned four days later, but the incident shows the potential for a blurring of lines between the Afghan security forces and guard units.
And as budgets for aid projects are decreasing, the APPF program is likely to increase security costs substantially.
An APPF guard will cost at least $770 a month, according to an AP analysis of official government figures, while private security providers contacted for this story say they usually charge $510-$630 a month per guard.
To avoid pay cuts for guards, individual companies will have to supplement salaries. And any costs for RMC managers will be on top of this. Once these expenses are figured in, security costs could easily double under the APPF.
It is still not clear what these changes will mean for existing USAID contracts. The aid agency has given no overarching guidance for how it will deal with delays or higher costs, though it has urged its partners to review their individual contracts to decide what their obligations and rights will be, the U.S. embassy official said.
Meanwhile, the Afghan government won’t officially have all the APPF guards trained for more than a year. By March 20, about 1,840 of the existing guard force will have gone through the formal training program, which graduates about 220 people every three weeks, according to a NATO official who spoke anonymously to discuss an Afghan government program.
The hope is that on-the-job training will be enough in the near term, especially since most private security guards will probably agree to join the APPF. But like much with the APPF right now, it is just a hope.
“It is very complicated and very difficult, but we are trying our best,” Sidiqi said.
Why Negotiate With the Taliban?
Most Afghans oppose extremism. Washington should support them, not sell them out.
By AMRULLAH SALEH FEBRUARY 9, 2012, 8:03 P.M. ET. Wall Street Journal
Washington's olive branch to the Taliban—no matter the excuses or justifications—amounts to the management of failure, not the mark of victory. Negotiating with the Taliban after more than 10 years of fighting means giving legitimacy and space to militant extremism.
The objective of NATO's post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan was to starve militant extremism by defeating the nexus of al Qaeda and the Pakistan-backed Taliban. That now seems like a dream.
With support from Pakistan, the Taliban has managed to protract the fighting and create a strategic deadlock. The U.S. military surge in 2010 weakened the Taliban, but it hardly pressured their strategic support across the Durand line in Pakistan. So the deadlock remains—chiefly because of Pakistan's unwillingness to cooperate fully with NATO, coupled with the fractured state of Afghan politics since the fraud-marred 2009 presidential elections.
Pakistan and the Taliban have no interest in producing quick positive results from talks. The Taliban has already gained certain advantages, including the possible transfer or release of their commanders from U.S. custody, the opening of an office in Qatar, and the legitimacy to enter into mainstream politics at the time of their choosing. They will definitely use these preliminary gains to further their psychological influence over the Afghan populace. And they won't likely bargain away the gains they have earned by suicide bombings, ambushes and the marginalization of civil society. Now that the Taliban has guaranteed its basic survival, it will fight for domination.
Washington's talks with the Taliban—taking place, on and off, in Qatar—come at a time when most anti-Taliban Afghan civil-society leaders have deserted President Karzai. He is head of a heavily subsidized state whose pay master (Washington) is now largely bypassing his government to negotiate with the enemy. This raises the question: Who and what does President Karzai represent?
In a bid to make himself relevant, President Karzai has adopted a strategy of meddling. He has demanded that NATO halt night raids, hand over the Bagram detention facility, and place strict restrictions on security companies. He has also refused to echo NATO's mission goals and justifications, and he wanted the Taliban to open an office in Saudi Arabia, not Qatar.
In return, NATO has accused Mr. Karzai of corruption, of committing abuses of human rights, and of being detached from reality. Successful counterinsurgency work requires international troops and the host nation to be seen as unified; that is simply not the case here. Pakistan and the Taliban are more coordinated in their approaches than are NATO and Afghanistan.
This is one of the key reasons why concerned anti-Taliban Afghans are creating a third force to ensure their rights and interests are represented and protected. They no longer see either President Karzai or NATO committed to those rights and interests. Though fragmented in their approach, these forces share a common goal: to counterbalance the growing influence of the Taliban and to fill the vacuum created by the declining relevance of Afghanistan's democratic institutions.
Certainly no Afghan political coalition can stop Washington from talking to the Taliban—but those talks won't bring stability. Talks and a potential ceasefire may provide the U.S. and its NATO allies their justification for a speedy withdrawal, but it won't change the fundamentals of the problem in Afghanistan. Striking a deal with the Taliban without disarming them will shatter the hope of a strong, viable, pluralistic Afghan state.
The absolute majority of the Afghan people are against the Taliban and the domination of our country by militant extremism. They have wholeheartedly supported and participated in the democratic process, but they are now marginalized both by President Karzai, who controls massive resources with no accountability, and the international community, which is focused disproportionately on transition, withdrawal and the Taliban.
Afghanistan's neglected majority can provide a political alternative for the military mission in Afghanistan. Its inclusion, which the U.S. could secure by pursuing reconciliation in a way that pressures President Karzai to respect the role of parliament and independent judges, would contain or push back the Taliban, increase the cost of war for Pakistan, and provide hope for post-transition Afghanistan.
By contrast, should that majority remain outside the strategic calculus, we'll see further fragmentation of political power and legitimacy in Afghanistan. That will weaken Washington's position and endanger the entire mission.
Mr. Saleh, who directed Afghanistan's national security directorate from 2004 to 2010, is now an opposition political activist.
Roads to Nowhere: Program to Win Over Afghans Fails
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM FEBRUARY 10, 2012
KABUL - U.S. taxpayers paid Afghan entrepreneur Ajmal Hasas millions of dollars as part of a plan to win over villages in the country's insurgent heartlands.
Instead, Mr. Hasas' seven-mile road construction project went so awry that his security guards opened fire on some of the very villagers he was trying to woo on behalf of his American funders.
Mr. Hasas was a point man in a $400 million U.S. Agency for International Development campaign to build as much as 1,200 miles of roads in some of the Afghanistan's most remote and turbulent places.
Three years and nearly $270 million later, less than 100 miles of gravel road have been completed, according to American officials. More than 125 people were killed and 250 others were wounded in insurgent attacks aimed at derailing the project, USAID said. The agency shut down the road-building effort in December.
As the American involvement in Afghanistan is winding down ahead of the pullout of most forces in 2014, the USAID roads saga stands as a reminder of the limited progress the U.S. and its allies have achieved here over the past decade—and at how high a cost.
"You can find programs and projects that have been successful, but for me it is quite obvious that huge amounts of money have been misspent," says Kai Eide, the Norwegian diplomat who headed United Nations operations in Afghanistan in 2008-2010. "There has been no clear strategic thinking on development assistance."
With USAID's road project cut short, special internal auditors from the agency have been trying to figure out what went wrong. Afghan construction companies are still seeking millions of dollars for unpaid bills from the American nonprofit, International Relief and Development, or IRD, that ran the program. And remote Afghan villages that were supposed to benefit from the U.S. initiative have been left with unfinished roads and unfulfilled promises. USAID officials say the program fell short of its goals, which is why they canceled it.
The road-building efforts began a decade ago, as Washington began transforming USAID into a tool in its military counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, shifting the agency's focus from promoting long-term development to shorter-term initiatives meant to attract community support in insurgent-saturated areas.
"I call it hijacking," said one USAID official formerly stationed in Afghanistan. "Aid as a weapons system has never been tested—and they are putting it into the field with no evidence that it works."
J. Alex Thier, Washington-based director of USAID's Afghanistan and Pakistan program, disagrees. He said the strategy can help stabilize regions of the country—if used when security is improving and local leaders are cooperating.
"What USAID does in these districts can at best have an impact if the other things are also pulling in the right direction," he said.
USAID was established 50 years ago by President John F. Kennedy. It became America's key economic tool to help developing nations.
The Bush administration overhauled the agency's mission after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, aligning USAID more closely with military objectives as America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Iraq, U.S. officials embarked on the largest rebuilding project since the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. But the $53 billion initiative was hobbled by the spreading insurgency, massive security costs that sometimes ate up more than half of contract costs, uncooperative government leaders and constantly shifting priorities, according to Stuart Bowen, America's special inspector general for reconstruction in Iraq.
After concluding that at least $4 billion in U.S. aid had been squandered in Iraq, Mr. Bowen warned American officials in 2009 that they were making the same mistakes in Afghanistan. State Department officials said at the time that they had learned lessons from Iraq and were working to better coordinate military and civilian efforts in Afghanistan.
As part of America's $85 billion reconstruction program in Afghanistan, USAID has spent more than $15 billion since 2002, more than in any other country. As in Iraq, the program in Afghanistan has been repeatedly disrupted by the spread of the insurgency across the country, poor oversight, an overreliance on outside contractors, cost overruns and corruption, according to U.S. officials and government investigative reports.
A $260 million effort to upgrade southern Afghanistan's Kajaki hydroelectric dam has repeatedly faltered and remains incomplete. Meanwhile, a $300 million contract to build a major power plant outside Kabul cost more than twice the original estimate and remains largely idle as Afghanistan relies on cheaper power from its neighbors.
But road projects have received the single largest slice of USAID money—more than $2 billion. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been IRD, founded in 1998 by Arthur Keys.
From the start, President Barack Obama's administration saw road construction as key for winning support from Afghans by making it easier to travel, by opening up new trade routes—and by connecting remote villages to Afghan government institutions and services.
Officials at USAID and IRD say that the Afghanistan Strategic Roads Project wasn't a roads program in the usual sense. They said building roads was, in many ways, a secondary goal; the main objective was spreading jobs and money to win over rural communities that harbor insurgents.
"As a grant, this was never intended to be a major road construction project," says Jeff Grieco, a former USAID official who now serves as communications director at IRD. "It was intended to be a capacity building program. We have dramatically improved Afghan capacity to build roads and to do community development work."
It certainly wasn't the cheapest way to get roads built. A typical gravel road in Afghanistan is supposed to cost about $290,000 per mile, according to USAID. It cost American taxpayers about $2.8 million for each mile of gravel road completed by IRD, making them the most expensive miles of road ever built by the U.S. government in Afghanistan.
Less than half the $269 million spent on the project went to actual road construction, IRD officials say. A quarter of the funds were paid to IRD administration and staff. About 15% was spent on security, and 8% was allocated to the community-development projects IRD said were central to the success of the project.
As part of the Strategic Roads Project, USAID set aside millions of dollars in the contract to set up small soap factories, run reading programs for illiterate villagers, dig wells and teach sewing to Afghan women—all with the expectation that it would win American troops good will.
But the community program was hobbled when IRD put a halt to awarding grants in southeastern Afghanistan for eight months after discovering that IRD staff were falsifying reports and exaggerating the impact of the development projects, according to former IRD workers. After revamping the staff and project, IRD resumed handing out grants for things like "flower literacy" programs that taught Afghan women how to make flower arrangements.
Then, after conferring with USAID, IRD tried to press ahead with construction without setting up new community projects, said U.S. officials.
"You had these villages with no community ownership or buy in and they just made the situation worse," said one USAID official. "That's when things really started going sour."
In Khost, the volatile eastern province along the Pakistani border where Mr. Hasas was paid $3 million to build seven miles of gravel road, tensions flared soon after he began work in 2008.
Ajab Noor Mangal, a local construction-company owner hired to work on the project, said Mr. Hasas alienated the community by only hiring workers from two of the five local clans.
Afghans excluded from the project looted Mr. Hasas's construction sites and stripped them bare. At one point, Mr. Hasas said, four men affiliated with the project were kidnapped, killed and dumped in public with a warning note signed by insurgents. The deaths brought construction to a halt.
"We couldn't find a single person to work on the road," Mr. Hasas recalls.
Under the IRD contract, Mr. Hasas and the other Afghan firms working on their roads were responsible for providing their own security. So Mr. Hasas said he cobbled together nearly 100 gunmen and armed them with rented rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns.
Things reached a nadir in the fall of 2010, when around 100 angry Afghans, including a small number of suspected insurgents, tried to storm the construction site, according to Messrs. Hasas and Mangal.
Mr. Mangal, who was in Kabul at the time, says he ordered the contractor's gunmen to open fire on the demonstrators, including some armed protesters who he said shot at the security team. Mr. Mangal says he is still paying for the wounded villagers' medical treatment.
Villagers who took part in the demonstration told a different story. Two men involved in the protest said IRD security sparked a larger confrontation after opening fire on a dozen unarmed men protesting IRD's refusal to move staff from an office overlooking homes where outsiders could see into private family compounds—a major slight in the conservative culture.
"All the villagers criticize the construction company because they were just here to earn money and they did not care about the quality of the road," said Najib, a local resident who worked on the road project and had two relatives injured during the protest.
IRD officials say they never heard about the conflict between the contractor and the villagers.
The project was part of the ongoing "Afghan First" initiative meant to support Afghan companies instead of the international firms that have received the lion's share of the billions in aid that have flooded Afghanistan.
But IRD is still embroiled in payment disputes with Afghan subcontractors who say that the company has failed to pay its bills. Now that the project is shut down, IRD said it has told contractors final payment decisions rest with USAID. USAID said it couldn't comment on the question of payments.
The animosity escalated in 2010 when embittered Afghan subcontractors secured arrest warrants for two IRD officials. Afghan police briefly detained one of the Westerners in Kabul who oversaw the project, according to officials familiar with the incident.
Faced with more arrest threats during the spring, IRD hid another top manager in the back of an SUV, flew her to Kandahar and quietly spirited her out of the country before she, too, could be detained, according to former IRD employees familiar with the controversy. IRD declined to comment on the incident.
USAID officials say the agency moved swiftly to scale back and shut down the IRD roads project as it became clear in 2010 that it was foundering. "How quickly can you stop a dump truck?" said one USAID official. "You get the momentum going and one thing we committed to doing isn't stopping it and creating a wreck."
Mr. Thier said his agency has learned important lessons from the problems in the IRD project and has changed the way it operates. USAID tripled its Afghanistan-based staff, beefed up its screening of Afghan partners, established new independent monitoring procedures and added more people to directly oversee such programs, he said.
The steep drop-off in U.S. reconstruction funds for Afghanistan has also prompted USAID to shift its focus from big ticket stabilization projects to more modest proposals, including agricultural development programs, that can be successfully taken over by Afghan officials.
In November, as part of a wider shift at the State Department, USAID established a new Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations that is meant to address some of the long-standing coordination and strategic problems with America's reconstruction missions abroad.
Still, the project's failures appeared to have no impact on USAID's confidence in IRD. Last year, as construction delays mounted and American officials moved to shut the program down, USAID awarded IRD nearly $140 million to launch three new projects in Afghanistan, though none involved roads. USAID officials said they still had confidence in IRD's ability to carry out big projects in Afghanistan.
Afghan entrepreneur Delawar Faizan, meanwhile, says that IRD still owes him nearly $4 million for his work in constructing roads in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province. He said that IRD gave him a check last fall to settle some of his claims, but it bounced because the company's bank account was frozen. Now, he said, IRD has told him he has to wait for approval from USAID to get paid.
"Where has the money gone?" he asked. —Ziaulhaq Sultani, Habib Khan Totakhil and Mali Khan Yaqubi contributed to this article.
Expanding police mission in Afghanistan taboo for Dutch left wing party
THE HAGUE, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Left-wing green party GroenLinks in the Netherlands will not support the government in expanding the current police training mission in Afghanistan, the Volkskrant reported on Friday.
Party leader Jolande Sap will also veto the training of police officers who will work outside the region of Kunduz, where the Dutch mission is based, her spokesman told the paper.
This means GroenLinks is "torpedoing" Prime Minister Mark Rutte's chances of expanding the Dutch mission, the paper says. GroenLinks' support was crucial in winning majority support for the plan proposed last year.
Pakistan denies meeting with Taliban in Qatar
ISLAMABAD, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan Thursday rejected as ' misconception' media reports that a meeting between Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and Afghan Taliban representatives was planned in Qatar during his recent visit.
Gilani concluded a three-day visit to Qatar on Wednesday and the Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said that the visit only focused on bilateral relations between Pakistan and the Gulf state.
"A misconception was created that the Prime Minister had a plan to hold meeting with Taliban," the spokesman told weekly press briefing.
Western media earlier quoted unnamed Pakistani officials as saying that the Prime Minister would discuss the Taliban office in Qatar and their talks with the U.S.
The spokesman said that neither a meeting between Gilani and representatives of Afghan Taliban was held in Qatar nor any such meeting was in schedule.
He said that Gilani's visit to Doha exclusively focused on bilateral relations with Qatar, though regional situation and peace in Afghanistan were also involved in the meeting between the Prime Minister and Qatari officials.
The spokesman said the American diplomats had briefed Pakistani officials on their contacts with Afghan Taliban. However, he declined to confirm meeting between Taliban and the U.S. Special Envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan Marc Grossman in Qatar.
Basit said that trilateral summit of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran in Islamabad next week will focus on counter-terrorism and drug trafficking.
U.S. Marine Unit Photographed With 'Nazi SS' Flag
February 9, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The U.S. Marine Corps says one of its scout sniper teams in Afghanistan had posed for a photo in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the Nazi SS.
The September 2010 photo, which circulated on an blog, was taken in the Sangin district of the southern province of Helmand.
In a statement on February 9, Marine spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Upton said the use of the SS symbol was unacceptable, and that the Corps had now addressed the issue.
He did not specify what action had been taken, but said the Marines in the photo are no longer in that unit.
The U.S. military released a statement later saying the incident "was not found to be racially motivated" and that the Marines involved "acknowledged the symbol…is not in keeping with our Marine ethos and values."
The statement said "the commander determined that disciplinary action was not warranted."
Compiled from agency reports
Teenage girl from Afghanistan to box at Olympics
By RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP)—Besides going after a medal in the boxing ring at the London Olympics, Sadaf Rahimi will be taking a few punches in the fight for equal rights for Afghan women.
There are female Afghan success stories, yet most women in Afghanistan remain second-class citizens, many cloaked from head-to-toe in blue burqas, some abused or hidden in their homes.
Rahimi, a determined 17-year-old student, wants to become the new face of Afghan women, gaining honor and dignity for herself and other women in here war-torn country and improving their image worldwide.
She will get her chance this summer in London, where women’s boxing makes its Olympic debut.
“When we participate in the outside competitions, there is pressure on us,” Rahimi said while training in a makeshift gym in the Afghan capital. “But I will try to show that an Afghan girl can enter the ring and achieve a position for Afghanistan.”
In line with conservative norms for women in Afghanistan, Rahimi is expecting to wear black tights under her boxing gear at the Olympics to cover her knees. She trains for hours three days a week, punching heavy bags and sparring with her teammates and trainers.
They throw punches on faded pink and green mats covering a concrete floor of a room in an Afghan sports stadium where the hardline Taliban regime used to stage public executions. The female boxers still don’t have a real boxing ring to hone their skills.
After the Taliban banned women from participating in sporting events, the International Olympic Committee suspended Afghanistan from the games. Afghanistan missed the 2000 Olympics in Sydney as a result. The Taliban were toppled in 2001 and the suspension was lifted the following year. Afghanistan sent female athletes—for the first time in its history—to the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
Rahimi, who has the support of her family in Kabul, is following in the footsteps of Robina Muqimyar, the female Afghan runner who competed in Athens. Another woman, Mehboda Ahdyar, was scheduled to go to the 2008 Beijing Games but couldn’t compete because of injuries.
“I am well aware that my opponents in the London 2012 Olympics are more powerful and even twice as good as me, but I have prepared myself to participate and win a medal,” said Rahimi, who started boxing four years ago and won a silver medal during a boxing competition in Tajikistan.
Female boxing is an unusual sport in a country like Afghanistan, where most of the women are still struggling for their rights and get little respect in the male-dominated society.
Recently in Baghlan province in the north, 15-year-old Sahar Gul was locked up, beaten with cables and tortured by her husband and in-laws after she refused to work as a prostitute. They deny any wrongdoing. She became the bruised and bloodied face of women’s rights in Afghanistan after being rescued in late December when an uncle called police.
Her story shocked Afghanistan and prompted calls to end underage marriage. The legal marriage age in Afghanistan is 16, but the United Nations estimates that half of all girls are forced to marry before their 16th birthday.
In Kunduz province, also in the north, a 30-year-old woman named Storay was killed last month because she gave birth to a third baby girl, instead of a boy. Storay, who used only one name, was slain, allegedly by her husband, when her third child was 3 months old. Her husband has left the family.
Despite such atrocities, there are increasing opportunities for Afghan women who want to participate in sports, said Mohammad Saber Sharifi, the coach of the Afghan female boxing team.
The team was established by the Afghan Olympic Committee in 2007 and so far has registered more than two dozen female boxers.
Rahimi, who fights in the 54-kilogram (118.8 pounds) weight class, will get into the Olympics through a wild card berth. She plans to travel to London on Feb. 19 to train for several weeks. In May she will fight in a competition in China, but win or lose there, she will be at the Olympics in London.
“Sadaf Rahimi is the only girl who will participate in these games,” Sharifi said. “She will represent all Afghan women, which makes her the biggest female personality in Afghanistan.”
Things have been much easier for male athletes in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s first Olympic medal winner was Rohullah Nikpai, who won a bronze medal in men’s taekwondo in 2008, defeating rivals from Germany, England and Spanish world champion Juan Antonio Ramos at the Beijing Games.
Because of insecurity in Afghanistan, his family fled to Iran where he grew up. He returned to Afghanistan in 2004—four years after the Taliban government collapsed. After participating in Beijing, he became a symbol of national pride.
“In the 2008 Olympics, I won a bronze medal and I am hopeful to win a gold medal in the Olympic 2012 in London,” Nikpai said.
Two other male athletes will round out the foursome who will represent Afghanistan in this year’s games. Massoud Azizi, a 25-year-old, 100-meter sprinter who competed in 2008 in Beijing, and Nasar Ahmad Bahawi, another taekwondo fighter.
“The people are expecting a lot from us. We know we will face the hardest opponents,” said Bahawi, who practices inside a newly built gym at the sports stadium under the supervision of a foreign coach and Afghan trainer. “We have the prayers of our people, and God willing, we will do well.”
Karzai Extends Deadline For Bagram Prison Handover
February 9, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has extended until March 9 a deadline for the transfer of full control of Bagram Prison to Afghan authorities.
An earlier deadline for the U.S.-led international coalition to hand over the prison expired on February 5.
A statement from the presidential office on February 9 cited "noncooperation by the American side" and said Kabul was suspending "all legal and judicial operations" at the prison.
A later statement issued by Karzai's office did not include the statements about the U.S.
Karzai's demand that the coalition cede control came after an Afghan commission reported complaints of strip searches and inmates held in solitary confinement.
With agency reports
In Helmand, training Afghan Local Police is a challenge
By Anup Kaphle, The Washington Post
KHAR NIKAH, Afghanistan — Inside a cold room surrounded by sand-filled Hesco barriers in the remote Gereshk Valley, British forces are teaching a group of young Afghan fighters how to protect their village from the Taliban.
But preparing a group of angry, illiterate Afghans to fight a deadly enemy that is regularly testing the British forces here in northern Helmand Province is a monumental task. The villagers who have opted to join the Afghan Local Police force in Khar Nikah mistrust one another, say they are not being offered much pay and complain that they need better weapons.
“They expect us to guard a checkpoint with an AK-47,” said Mir Hamza, holding a rusty Kalashnikov as he rubbed the magazine with his shawl. “Even sheep herders carry Kalashnikovs in Khar Nikah.”
As the British forces prepare to hand over checkpoints in the area surrounding their base here, improving the morale and performance of the Afghan Local Police recruits will be a critical challenge.
Local defense programs have become a vital part of military strategy in Afghanistan. The programs began after an incident in summer 2010 when dozens of rifle-toting farmers from Gizab, a strategically important area in Kandahar, drove the Taliban from their village. Following that successful local uprising, the United States was keen to replicate the model for village defense, and the United States has since sent in troops to train local villagers.
The Afghan Local Police, or ALP, is expected to serve as a defensive presence, manning security checkpoints to keep insurgents from gaining ground. Coalition forces hope that this in turn allows the Afghan National Police, a force that receives more extensive training, to go out on patrols and conduct offensive raids.
Some 8,000 Afghan villagers have been recruited into the ALP program, which is formally run by the Afghan Interior Ministry. The local police force is expected to reach 30,000, a goal that the United States and its partners are aggressively pushing.
Although the American plan to create the ALP initially met sharp resistance from President Hamid Karzai, who feared growing warlordism, he later gave the program his blessing. In theory, every recruit for the ALP is vetted by the country’s intelligence service, and the local commanders have to answer to the district police chiefs.
But two years since the ALP’s creation, the program has hit some significant turbulence. The U.S. military has acknowledged human rights abuses by the ALP, and the program has been beset by internal strife.
In districts where the Taliban still put up a fight, the British are having a hard time persuading local residents to join the local police force. In Khar Nikah, the British had hoped to recruit and train about 60 ALP members by the end of last year. So far, there are 26.
Although NATO poured resources into Helmand and the United States launched a major offensive here three years ago, insurgents are still active in the province. Khar Nikah is crucial to NATO because of its proximity to Gereshk, a town that lies at the heart of one of Afghanistan’s most important trade routes, and because of its connection with Route 611, which runs up to the Kajaki dam, a major hydropower project.
“Our biggest challenge is doing things the Afghan way,” said Maj. Spiro Markandonatos, the commanding officer of British forces at the forward operating base in Khar Nikah. “The hierarchical system in the village community doesn’t really allow our methods and process to work.”
Markandonatos’s frustration in the local system grew stronger after repeated disagreements with the ALP commander, Atahullah, who rose to power because his father was a key leader in the village. A few days after Christmas last year, Atahullah, who like many Afghans goes only by one name, resigned following a disagreement over $75. Four other members of the local police resigned the same day.
Atahullah’s father later expressed concern that members of the ALP, including his son, felt that too much was being asked of them while little was being offered to the village. “Other villages have schools, roads and clinics, and we have been saying this again and again, but we don’t have anything here,” said the father, Haji Kader Khan. But the British said the Taliban had been threatening to kill Atahullah, which also played a role in his resignation.
Members of the local police force do not wear their uniform when they are on patrol, something that the British see less as a discipline problem and more as a security risk because it makes it hard to distinguish the insurgents from the police.
“Until one of them gets shot . . . they are not going to learn their lesson,” said a frustrated Capt. Badri Rai, who heads a team that recruits and mentors ALP in Khar Nikah.
Mistrust among villagers and within the ALP has damaged British efforts to efficiently train and recruit more police by early spring. A Taliban commander was recently heard over an intercom asking an ALP member to turn his weapons against the Western forces.
“Some of the villagers in ALP are 90 percent Taliban and 10 percent farmers. Do not let these guys inside the checkpoint compound,” said Rifleman Subash Gurung of the British army.
But there are some young men in the ALP who give the British reason for hope. One of them is an ethnically Pashtun man known only as Torzan who stands 5 feet tall and is referred to as the “Lion of the Green Zone.” After his brother was killed in an insurgent attack and his son was kidnapped by the Taliban, Torzan decided to pick up an AK-47 and side with the British forces in the area.
Torzan said the Taliban has spread word among the locals that the British forces are leaving soon and that the ALP will have to bear the brunt of the battle once the foreigners are gone.
That worries prospective recruits in the area, including the newly elected ALP commander, Khalifa Atullah, a charismatic man who once fought against the Russians. Atullah said he understands that the British are hoping to hand over several checkpoints and patrol bases to his men. But he said his men still need more help to do what is asked of them.
Atullah’s men receive from the British a uniform, an AK-47, a box of 7.62 mm rounds and the mandate to fight the Taliban to protect their village. But he said that is not enough.
“We need sleeping bags, blankets, and we need heavy weapons,” he said.
British soldiers say they cannot trust the ALP with heavy-duty weaponry. Late last year, members of the ALP were implicated in killings, rapes, arbitrary detentions and land grabs by Human Rights Watch.
But a British political officer in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah said the ALP remains a “manageable risk.”
“We can maintain a bar and say anything beyond that is unacceptable, but we can’t enforce our rules onto them,” he said. “At the end of the day, it is their country and they have to run it in their own way.”
$20m aid plan for Afghanistan's poorest people
Sydney Morning Herald By Rory Callinan, Dylan Welch February 10, 2012
AUSAID is considering a new strategy for Afghan assistance - spending more than $20 million over the next four years on mainly agricultural projects to assist poor residents in drought-stricken areas and to help strengthen local Afghan non-government organisations, a leaked concept paper shows.
The paper, titled Australia Afghanistan Community Resilience Scheme, proposes funding be divided among five experienced NGOs and would seek to assist the ''poorest and most marginalised people'' while at the same time hoping to improve broader agricultural productivity.
AusAID declined to confirm whether any of the concepts outlined in the paper had been adopted. A spokeswoman said the paper was only a preliminary document and still under consideration.
Aid experts who viewed the paper for the Herald had mixed opinions. One believed it signalled an intention by the government to maintain influence in the country if troops were withdrawn.
The concept paper, which has been circulating among the aid community this year, suggests a competitive grants process for several eligible NGOs to get funding over four years and a focus on agriculture and rural development, an area which it noted AusAID needed to improve focus on.
James Goodman, from the aid monitoring group Aid/Watch, said the proposal seemed to be a departure from previous aid funding. ''It is interesting that these organisations [local NGOs] would have a potentially political role in Afghanistan, which is a good thing in most contexts,'' he said.
Dr Goodman said the four-year life of the proposed program seemed to suggest the government would be seeking to maintain influence in the country if troops were withdrawn in the next couple of years.
Australian troops fighting in Oruzgan will stop fighting and start training as soon as early next year. The Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, told Parliament yesterday that some Afghan troops would be able to run independent operations later this year.
However, Mr Smith's remarks, in an update on the war in Afghanistan, stand in stark contrast to recent comments of a whistleblowing US soldier who has defied his seniors and told of a losing war being fought against the Taliban.
''Australia's goal is to prevent Afghanistan from again being used by terrorists to plan and train for attacks on innocent civilians, including Australians in our own region and beyond,'' Mr Smith said.
He also confirmed that Oruzgan would possibly be one of the provinces that changes to local control over the next 12 to 18 months, meaning Australia's main combat role could end as early as next February.
Aside from providing security, Australia is also training the 4th Brigade of the Afghan army, based in Oruzgan. The brigade is divided into several battalions, known as Kandaks.
''The 4th Brigade is increasingly assuming the lead for the planning, preparation and execution of tactical operations with a number of infantry Kandaks now expected to be capable of conducting independent operations during 2012,'' Mr Smith said.
Special forces soldiers to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014, says Smith
The Australian By MARK DODD February 10, 2012
AUSTRALIAN special forces will fight on in Afghanistan after 2014 engaging in counter-insurgency operations and helping train local troops, Defence Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday.
In his first parliamentary update on Afghanistan for the year, Mr Smith said the mentoring taskforce was on track for an early handover to Afghan forces by 2014.
Combat operations involving the 138,000-strong NATO-led alliance, which includes Australia, will be wound down after 2014 as Afghan army and police take the lead role under an agreed "transition strategy".
However, special forces soldiers, including those from Australia, were expected to stay on, Mr Smith said.
Final post-2014 security arrangements will be worked out at a meeting of military leaders in Chicago in May.
"Australia has made clear that we expect to maintain a presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014, potentially through training, military advisers, capacity-building and development assistance and a special forces presence.
"Australia is already involved in institutional training through the Afghan National Army Artillery Training School and will continue to work with Afghanistan and ISAF partners to identify further institutional training opportunities," he said.
Australia is the third-biggest contributor of special forces to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) with more than 600 troops currently deployed, including personnel from the Special Air Service and commando regiments.
Britain has also requested Australian assistance in a British-led Afghan National Army officer academy to help develop a professional officer corps.
Meanwhile, claims the SAS was involved in the illegal detention of Iraqi prisoners of war have been strongly denied by Mr Smith.
The claims, carried in Fairfax newspapers, did not tally with the area of operations involving SAS troops during the so-called Second Gulf War, said the minister.
"The advice I've got this morning is essentially that these allegations are baseless and there's nothing in it," he told the ABC.
U.S. Strategy For Afghan War Reaches Critical Stage
NPR By Renee Montagne and Tom Bowman February 9, 2012
The U.S. and NATO have pledged to stay in Afghanistan through the end of 2014 and hand off responsibility for security to Afghan troops by then. How to get to that point, though, is not clear. And recent statements by key U.S. officials have only confused things more.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
We're going to look now at American military strategy for the war in Afghanistan. There's been some confusion lately about whether American forces would end their combat mission sooner than planned and also about how long the U.S. will remain in Afghanistan. So to try to make sense of it all, we're joined by NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.
Good morning.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Let's start with the basics. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently talked about hopefully - that was his word - ending the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan by the end of 2013. Which was understood to be about a year earlier than had been talked about before. So will the U.S. stop combat missions at that point?
BOWMAN: Renee, the key word there is hopefully, that the combat mission at the end of 2013 can be turned over to Afghan forces. But everyone I've talked with says at least through 2014 they're talking about still having U.S. forces do some form of combat operations. It might not be large land battles, but at the very least you'll see U.S. Special Forces, Green Berets going on raids, let's say, against Taliban forces. Bottom line, they're still going to be involved in combat.
MONTAGNE: Well, Afghan forces, are they close to ready to take over or are they actually not really ready?
BOWMAN: They're not even close to being ready. And I've seen them myself in the field. And that's precisely why you're seeing so much talk now about pulling back and starting this transition earlier - a year earlier. If the deadline is 2014, you have to start at least a year earlier training them, working with them so you can see their weaknesses and then help them improve. You have plenty of time to help them improve.
This week at the Pentagon we heard from the officer who runs day-to-day military operations in Afghanistan. His name is Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti. And I asked him about this very point, about training the Afghans. They're going to send more training teams over this year - 50 Army training teams to help them. And he talked about pushing the Afghans this year more into the lead. Let's listen to what he had to say.
GENERAL: And I'm pressing commanders to put them into the lead as soon as they can. The earlier we get them into the lead, the better we have a metric of just how well they're doing. And we also know better how to improve them. And I want to do that while we have more forces on the ground in order to help develop them.
MONTAGNE: So again, the idea, Tom, is get these Afghan soldiers out there in the fight so that they can be worked with sooner rather than later so they might be ready by the end of 2014...
BOWMAN: That's exactly right. That they'll have plenty of time to train them and make sure they're competent. And key things they're looking are the ability to supply themselves in the field, do they have good leaders. You know, they might have to change out some leaders over the next year, but they want to do all of this by the end of 2013. They don't want to do this in the end of 2014 when they're ready to turn it all over to the Afghans.
MONTAGNE: One last thing to clarify. Does the mission end by the end of 2014? Will U.S. troops be out by then?
BOWMAN: Absolutely not. And the Americans have talked with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about what they call a longer term national security relationship. And people I talk with say you could have anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 American troops after 2014 doing things like training, perhaps going on counterterrorism raids. That kind of thing. Maybe even having a quick reaction force. If the Afghans get into trouble, you can go help them.
The thing here is that everyone talks about ending the combat role earlier. The bottom line is you're going to have U.S. troops involved in combat in Afghanistan for a number of years.
MONTAGNE: Tom, thanks very much.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Renee.
MONTAGNE: NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.
How to Help Kabul’s Refugees
By ROD NORDLAND The New York Times February 8, 2012, 3:44 pm
The aid group most active in Kabul’s refugee camps is an Afghan group, Aschiana, which has programs in 13 of the camps, including the two where children have been dying of the cold. The group also runs schools that provides students with hot lunches — for many, their only real meal of the day.
Their United States fund-raising branch can be reached through aschiana-foundation.org/aschiana-in-afghanistan and their Afghan office is at www.aschiana.com.
Since the The New York Times reported last Saturday that children were freezing to death in the camps, many readers have responded with requests for information on how to help the children in these camps, while others have offered suggestions.
A retired United States Air Force lieutenant general, John A. Bradley, wrote to say that his organization had just delivered 25,000 pounds of aid, winter clothing and food packets to Bagram Air Force Base that was originally intended for needy people in Bamyan Province. Moved by the situation of the children, he said, he decided to divert the aid, arranging for Aschiana to deliver it in the camps near Kabul. General Bradley’s group collects humanitarian goods in the States and arranges for free shipping on military aircraft, under an American law that requires the military to carry aid when its planes are going to Afghanistan empty.
Maya Bornstein, a medical doctor from Bethesda, Md., wondered whether getting blankets made or purchased through school and youth groups would help. “These babies deserve a fighting chance,” she wrote.
Craig Garfield of Chicago, another doctor, wanted to know if heat-retaining mylar blankets had been tried and whether it would be worth raising money to send them over.
Sarah Crane, a doctor from Cambridge, Mass., said she and some friends were talking about buying sleeping bags and sending them, and wondered if that would be practical. “I am a mother and an obstetrician, so when you described the children dying of cold, it drove me crazy,” she said. “I have fantasies when I’m on the treadmill of flying large passenger aircraft to those places and loading up all the moms and dads and children and flying them back to live in Florida or California.”
Relatively few international aid groups have been active in the camps, at least compared to the need.
The German aid group Welthungerhilfe, known in English as German Agro Action, has a major presence in Afghanistan and runs a variety of programs; in the camps, it has distributed firewood this winter but has not had enough money to do it a second time. It also runs mobile clinics in the camps.
The French aid group Solidarités International also has a major program in Afghanistan and has been active in the camps for years, running sanitation and emergency feeding programs.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
February 10, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said in an interview with "L'Orient-Le Jour" that using the route through Uzbekistan to withdraw NATO troops from Afghanistan was too costly.
Longuet did not say how much the cost was to use the route through Uzbekistan, the last leg of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) that runs from Europe to Afghanistan.
Recent reports have claimed the United States is paying Central Asian governments some $500 million annually to use the route. Estimates are that some 75 percent of nonlethal military cargo headed for Afghanistan now transits the NDN and most of that enters Afghanistan from Uzbekistan.
Longuet said the route was "not optimal" for withdrawing NATO forces but conceded the better option -- via Pakistan -- was currently more complicated due to "spoiled relations" between NATO countries, particularly the U.S., and the Pakistani government.
That chill in ties followed a November 26 NATO air strike that hit Pakistani troops on Pakistan's side of the Afghan border, killing 26 soldiers.
Pakistani authorities responded by closing the land route used by NATO forces going into Afghanistan and ordering a U.S. drone base in Pakistan closed.
Even prior to the attack on Pakistani forces, NATO was already shipping more of its cargo via the NDN. NATO invited the Turkmen and Uzbek presidents to the alliance's summit in Bucharest in April 2008 to discuss passage into Afghanistan as supply routes through Pakistan's tribal areas increasingly came under attack by militants. That NATO meeting laid the foundations for the NDN.
NATO countries intend to complete the drawdown of their forces in Afghanistan by 2014. With Pakistani routes at best insecure, NATO, as Longuet said, sees NDN as the way out of Afghanistan for its troops and equipment. Longuet said negotiations for an exit route are currently under way with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The NDN begins in Latvia then goes to Russia, Kazakhstan, and into Uzbekistan. NATO also uses an air base in Dushanbe, Tajikistan and the U.S. uses the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan.
Compiled from agency reports
Afghanistan launches probe into children deaths in NATO air strike
by Farid Behbud, Yangtze Yan
KABUL, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan government said Friday it launched an investigation to probe a NATO air strike in eastern Kapisa province that allegedly left eight children dead, according to a statement posted on the Presidential Palace's website.
"President Karzai has assigned a delegation led by advisor Haji Mohammad Zaher Safi to launch an all-out probe into the NATO bombing in the province of Kapisa," the statement said.
"Based on information by the (Kapisa) provincial governor, as a result of an air strike conducted on Feb. 8 in Geyawa village in Nijrab district of Kapisa province, eight children were killed," it said.
"ISAF has been looking into this incident right now and a joint assessment team has been sent to Nijrab district to investigate it, " a spokesman of the International Security Assistance Force told Xinhua on Friday. He said more details will be released to media after the investigation.
President Hamid Karzai on Thursday strongly condemned the Wednesday aerial bombing by foreign troops that killed a number of children in Nijrab district of Kapisa province, the statement said.
The restive Nijrab and neighboring Alasay district have been regarded as Taliban stronghold in the province with Mahmud-e-Raqi as its capital, 65 km north of Kabul.
However, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said Afghan and Coalition forces killed eight insurgents and detained two suspected individuals in eastern Afghanistan during operations throughout the past 24 hours ended on Thursday evening.
"A Coalition Force air strike killed six insurgents in response to rocket propelled grenade and small arms fire in Nijrab District, Kapisa Province," ISAF Regional Command-East said in the statement issued Friday.
According to the ISAF statement, the joint forces also killed two insurgents after receiving mortar fire in Khost District of eastern Khost Province in the same period of time.
The death of Afghan civilians by NATO-led troops during operations against Taliban have long been a contentious issue between the Afghan government and the U.S. and NATO forces in the insurgency-hit country.
Afghan officials had in the past stressed such deaths would further undermine the war against Taliban and terrorist groups and inflame an anti-foreign sentiment in the country.
The Afghan president, under strain from the public, has long been criticizing the NATO and U.S. forces over their erroneous killing of civilians since the war against terror begun in late 2001.
The Wednesday incident was the second since the beginning of this year when a number of children have been killed in Afghanistan.
A total of six children were killed when an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) planted by insurgents went off in Tirin Kot city, the provincial capital of southern Uruzgan province on Jan. 6.
The civilian casualties has increased for a fifth successive year as a total of 3,021 Afghan civilians were killed in 2011, an 8 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to a United Nations annual report released in Kabul on Feb. 4.
The U.N. report attributed 77 percent of the civilian deaths last year to the attacks of Taliban insurgents and other armed groups opposing the Afghan government. Another 14 percent of the deaths were attributed to Afghan and NATO-led forces and 9 percent were unattributed.
Delays and higher costs ahead with Afghan private security handover
Associated Press Friday, February 10, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The push by Afghanistan’s president to nationalize legions of private security guards before the end of March is encouraging corruption and jeopardizing multibillion-dollar aid projects, according to companies trying to make the switch.
President Hamid Karzai has railed for years against the large number of guns-for-hire in Afghanistan, saying private security companies skirt the law and risk becoming militias. He ordered them abolished in 2009 and eventually set March 20 of this year as the deadline for everyone except NATO and diplomatic missions to switch to government-provided security.
Afghan officials are rushing to meet the cutoff with the help of NATO advisers. But with fewer than six weeks to go, it’s likely that many components will still be missing on March 20. And even once everything falls into place, higher costs and issues of authority over the government guards will remain.
The change imperils billions of dollars of aid flowing into Afghanistan, particularly from the United States. In a country beset by insurgent attacks and suicide bombings, the private development companies that implement most of the U.S. aid agency’s programs employ private guards to protect compounds, serve as armed escorts and guard construction sites.
On March 21, approximately 11,000 guards now working for private security firms will become government employees as members of the Afghan Public Protection Force, or APPF. They will still be working in the same place with the same job. Except now they’ll answer to the Interior Ministry.
“We don’t want to have security gaps. This is really important to our customers and to us,” said the head of the APPF, Deputy Minister Jamal Abdul Naser Sidiqi. It will happen, he says, because the presidential order says it has to.
Officially, everyone is optimistic.
“The APPF is now open for business,” a U.S. embassy official said, speaking anonymously to discuss private agency contracts.
But many are still worried that the entire plan could fall apart. Development contractors for the U.S. Agency for International Development told The Associated Press they were explicitly told not to discuss the changeover with reporters because media attention could endanger the delicate process. Everyone critical of APPF insisted on speaking anonymously for this article.
Last week the chairman of the House subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing concern that the APPF may not be ready to take over security for aid projects.
Even so, no one expects that there will be a visible problem on March 21.
“The guys who guard our gates today wear a certain baseball hat, and on the 21st of March they’ll come wearing a different uniform. It should be pretty seamless,” said Bill Haight, head of an infrastructure-building project run by Louis Berger Group and Black and Veach. He said his projects are nearly finished and so he doesn’t expect many problems.
But companies with long-running projects are worried. New contracts and operating rules will probably still be in the works when the deadline hits.
The APPF has yet to sign a contract to provide security for any of the approximately 75 companies expected to switch over to government guards in March, according to Noorkhan Haidari, the APPF business manager.
And international firms that are expected to act as middlemen managing the guards are having trouble getting licensed. Though about 20 companies have said they plan to register as so-called Risk Management Companies, or RMCs, only one license has been issued — reportedly after a wait of about two months. Others trying to get licensed say the required documents change every day.
Meanwhile, the Afghan Foreign Ministry has also denied visas to foreign workers for at least three security companies that are trying to get registered as RMCs or are working on one of the exempt contracts, according to a security adviser for a major development contractor. These firms have been told they have to wait for new procedures under the new APPF system. But given that they don’t have much time to get everything in line, they’re increasingly looking at what bribes they can pay to make it happen, the same person said.
Firms don’t have to hire RMCs, but they add a level of management and oversight that meets the standards of international organizations.
Companies have long hired private guards precisely because they don’t trust the Afghan police to protect them in a crisis. The United Nations used Afghan police to guard its staff housing until an 2009 attack on a residential hotel in which Taliban assailants quickly made it past police guards and killed five U.N. staffers. The U.N. has since increased its security to include foreign guards.
Afghans working with APPF have gone so far as to urge the business licensing agency to “stop stalling the process,” according to a letter sent to U.S. government officials by a development company and obtained by the AP.
“The painfully slow momentum of the various Afghan government entities may have scuppered the chances of a timely handover to the APPF,” the letter argues.
Sidiqi said the complaints of delays were overblown, noting that there is a standard three-day licensing process. If there are delays, he said it is because the would-be RMCs are dragging it out.
“We need the RMCs,” Sidiqi said. “They have the experience.”
He dismissed the possibility of bribery. “This is a legal government organization, so corruption is not going to be possible,” Sidiqi said.
But with so much undecided, some development organizations are opting to hunker down inside their compounds until the details are worked out.
A manager with one U.S. government development contractor said the company expects to delay visits to projects in dangerous places until all documents are finalized. The official spoke anonymously to avoid endangering contracts still being negotiated.
Going forward, the development company manager worried about recruiting for projects in places like the insurgent-heavy south. Some employees have already said they won’t sign on to projects if their only security is going to be APPF guards.
But even once the RMCs are licensed and in-country, it is unclear that they will provide an easy transition.
These companies will not be able to directly control the guards that they manage. They can only give advice to an Afghan supervisor. If there’s a dispute between the two, it will have to be taken to a government-run arbitration panel.
The issue has already caused problems on APPF-guarded projects before the mandatory switch. During the 2010 parliamentary elections, Afghan police pulled a group of APPF guards who were protecting a railroad construction project in the northern province of Balkh off their posts to guard polling stations, according to the former APPF commander.
“I told them it was a violation of the law but they said you have to do it. I was obliged,” said Sayed Asghar Asgari. So he gave over 50 of his 462 guards. The guards were returned four days later, but the incident shows the potential for a blurring of lines between the Afghan security forces and guard units.
And as budgets for aid projects are decreasing, the APPF program is likely to increase security costs substantially.
An APPF guard will cost at least $770 a month, according to an AP analysis of official government figures, while private security providers contacted for this story say they usually charge $510-$630 a month per guard.
To avoid pay cuts for guards, individual companies will have to supplement salaries. And any costs for RMC managers will be on top of this. Once these expenses are figured in, security costs could easily double under the APPF.
It is still not clear what these changes will mean for existing USAID contracts. The aid agency has given no overarching guidance for how it will deal with delays or higher costs, though it has urged its partners to review their individual contracts to decide what their obligations and rights will be, the U.S. embassy official said.
Meanwhile, the Afghan government won’t officially have all the APPF guards trained for more than a year. By March 20, about 1,840 of the existing guard force will have gone through the formal training program, which graduates about 220 people every three weeks, according to a NATO official who spoke anonymously to discuss an Afghan government program.
The hope is that on-the-job training will be enough in the near term, especially since most private security guards will probably agree to join the APPF. But like much with the APPF right now, it is just a hope.
“It is very complicated and very difficult, but we are trying our best,” Sidiqi said.
Why Negotiate With the Taliban?
Most Afghans oppose extremism. Washington should support them, not sell them out.
By AMRULLAH SALEH FEBRUARY 9, 2012, 8:03 P.M. ET. Wall Street Journal
Washington's olive branch to the Taliban—no matter the excuses or justifications—amounts to the management of failure, not the mark of victory. Negotiating with the Taliban after more than 10 years of fighting means giving legitimacy and space to militant extremism.
The objective of NATO's post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan was to starve militant extremism by defeating the nexus of al Qaeda and the Pakistan-backed Taliban. That now seems like a dream.
With support from Pakistan, the Taliban has managed to protract the fighting and create a strategic deadlock. The U.S. military surge in 2010 weakened the Taliban, but it hardly pressured their strategic support across the Durand line in Pakistan. So the deadlock remains—chiefly because of Pakistan's unwillingness to cooperate fully with NATO, coupled with the fractured state of Afghan politics since the fraud-marred 2009 presidential elections.
Pakistan and the Taliban have no interest in producing quick positive results from talks. The Taliban has already gained certain advantages, including the possible transfer or release of their commanders from U.S. custody, the opening of an office in Qatar, and the legitimacy to enter into mainstream politics at the time of their choosing. They will definitely use these preliminary gains to further their psychological influence over the Afghan populace. And they won't likely bargain away the gains they have earned by suicide bombings, ambushes and the marginalization of civil society. Now that the Taliban has guaranteed its basic survival, it will fight for domination.
Washington's talks with the Taliban—taking place, on and off, in Qatar—come at a time when most anti-Taliban Afghan civil-society leaders have deserted President Karzai. He is head of a heavily subsidized state whose pay master (Washington) is now largely bypassing his government to negotiate with the enemy. This raises the question: Who and what does President Karzai represent?
In a bid to make himself relevant, President Karzai has adopted a strategy of meddling. He has demanded that NATO halt night raids, hand over the Bagram detention facility, and place strict restrictions on security companies. He has also refused to echo NATO's mission goals and justifications, and he wanted the Taliban to open an office in Saudi Arabia, not Qatar.
In return, NATO has accused Mr. Karzai of corruption, of committing abuses of human rights, and of being detached from reality. Successful counterinsurgency work requires international troops and the host nation to be seen as unified; that is simply not the case here. Pakistan and the Taliban are more coordinated in their approaches than are NATO and Afghanistan.
This is one of the key reasons why concerned anti-Taliban Afghans are creating a third force to ensure their rights and interests are represented and protected. They no longer see either President Karzai or NATO committed to those rights and interests. Though fragmented in their approach, these forces share a common goal: to counterbalance the growing influence of the Taliban and to fill the vacuum created by the declining relevance of Afghanistan's democratic institutions.
Certainly no Afghan political coalition can stop Washington from talking to the Taliban—but those talks won't bring stability. Talks and a potential ceasefire may provide the U.S. and its NATO allies their justification for a speedy withdrawal, but it won't change the fundamentals of the problem in Afghanistan. Striking a deal with the Taliban without disarming them will shatter the hope of a strong, viable, pluralistic Afghan state.
The absolute majority of the Afghan people are against the Taliban and the domination of our country by militant extremism. They have wholeheartedly supported and participated in the democratic process, but they are now marginalized both by President Karzai, who controls massive resources with no accountability, and the international community, which is focused disproportionately on transition, withdrawal and the Taliban.
Afghanistan's neglected majority can provide a political alternative for the military mission in Afghanistan. Its inclusion, which the U.S. could secure by pursuing reconciliation in a way that pressures President Karzai to respect the role of parliament and independent judges, would contain or push back the Taliban, increase the cost of war for Pakistan, and provide hope for post-transition Afghanistan.
By contrast, should that majority remain outside the strategic calculus, we'll see further fragmentation of political power and legitimacy in Afghanistan. That will weaken Washington's position and endanger the entire mission.
Mr. Saleh, who directed Afghanistan's national security directorate from 2004 to 2010, is now an opposition political activist.
Roads to Nowhere: Program to Win Over Afghans Fails
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM FEBRUARY 10, 2012
KABUL - U.S. taxpayers paid Afghan entrepreneur Ajmal Hasas millions of dollars as part of a plan to win over villages in the country's insurgent heartlands.
Instead, Mr. Hasas' seven-mile road construction project went so awry that his security guards opened fire on some of the very villagers he was trying to woo on behalf of his American funders.
Mr. Hasas was a point man in a $400 million U.S. Agency for International Development campaign to build as much as 1,200 miles of roads in some of the Afghanistan's most remote and turbulent places.
Three years and nearly $270 million later, less than 100 miles of gravel road have been completed, according to American officials. More than 125 people were killed and 250 others were wounded in insurgent attacks aimed at derailing the project, USAID said. The agency shut down the road-building effort in December.
As the American involvement in Afghanistan is winding down ahead of the pullout of most forces in 2014, the USAID roads saga stands as a reminder of the limited progress the U.S. and its allies have achieved here over the past decade—and at how high a cost.
"You can find programs and projects that have been successful, but for me it is quite obvious that huge amounts of money have been misspent," says Kai Eide, the Norwegian diplomat who headed United Nations operations in Afghanistan in 2008-2010. "There has been no clear strategic thinking on development assistance."
With USAID's road project cut short, special internal auditors from the agency have been trying to figure out what went wrong. Afghan construction companies are still seeking millions of dollars for unpaid bills from the American nonprofit, International Relief and Development, or IRD, that ran the program. And remote Afghan villages that were supposed to benefit from the U.S. initiative have been left with unfinished roads and unfulfilled promises. USAID officials say the program fell short of its goals, which is why they canceled it.
The road-building efforts began a decade ago, as Washington began transforming USAID into a tool in its military counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, shifting the agency's focus from promoting long-term development to shorter-term initiatives meant to attract community support in insurgent-saturated areas.
"I call it hijacking," said one USAID official formerly stationed in Afghanistan. "Aid as a weapons system has never been tested—and they are putting it into the field with no evidence that it works."
J. Alex Thier, Washington-based director of USAID's Afghanistan and Pakistan program, disagrees. He said the strategy can help stabilize regions of the country—if used when security is improving and local leaders are cooperating.
"What USAID does in these districts can at best have an impact if the other things are also pulling in the right direction," he said.
USAID was established 50 years ago by President John F. Kennedy. It became America's key economic tool to help developing nations.
The Bush administration overhauled the agency's mission after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, aligning USAID more closely with military objectives as America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Iraq, U.S. officials embarked on the largest rebuilding project since the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. But the $53 billion initiative was hobbled by the spreading insurgency, massive security costs that sometimes ate up more than half of contract costs, uncooperative government leaders and constantly shifting priorities, according to Stuart Bowen, America's special inspector general for reconstruction in Iraq.
After concluding that at least $4 billion in U.S. aid had been squandered in Iraq, Mr. Bowen warned American officials in 2009 that they were making the same mistakes in Afghanistan. State Department officials said at the time that they had learned lessons from Iraq and were working to better coordinate military and civilian efforts in Afghanistan.
As part of America's $85 billion reconstruction program in Afghanistan, USAID has spent more than $15 billion since 2002, more than in any other country. As in Iraq, the program in Afghanistan has been repeatedly disrupted by the spread of the insurgency across the country, poor oversight, an overreliance on outside contractors, cost overruns and corruption, according to U.S. officials and government investigative reports.
A $260 million effort to upgrade southern Afghanistan's Kajaki hydroelectric dam has repeatedly faltered and remains incomplete. Meanwhile, a $300 million contract to build a major power plant outside Kabul cost more than twice the original estimate and remains largely idle as Afghanistan relies on cheaper power from its neighbors.
But road projects have received the single largest slice of USAID money—more than $2 billion. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been IRD, founded in 1998 by Arthur Keys.
From the start, President Barack Obama's administration saw road construction as key for winning support from Afghans by making it easier to travel, by opening up new trade routes—and by connecting remote villages to Afghan government institutions and services.
Officials at USAID and IRD say that the Afghanistan Strategic Roads Project wasn't a roads program in the usual sense. They said building roads was, in many ways, a secondary goal; the main objective was spreading jobs and money to win over rural communities that harbor insurgents.
"As a grant, this was never intended to be a major road construction project," says Jeff Grieco, a former USAID official who now serves as communications director at IRD. "It was intended to be a capacity building program. We have dramatically improved Afghan capacity to build roads and to do community development work."
It certainly wasn't the cheapest way to get roads built. A typical gravel road in Afghanistan is supposed to cost about $290,000 per mile, according to USAID. It cost American taxpayers about $2.8 million for each mile of gravel road completed by IRD, making them the most expensive miles of road ever built by the U.S. government in Afghanistan.
Less than half the $269 million spent on the project went to actual road construction, IRD officials say. A quarter of the funds were paid to IRD administration and staff. About 15% was spent on security, and 8% was allocated to the community-development projects IRD said were central to the success of the project.
As part of the Strategic Roads Project, USAID set aside millions of dollars in the contract to set up small soap factories, run reading programs for illiterate villagers, dig wells and teach sewing to Afghan women—all with the expectation that it would win American troops good will.
But the community program was hobbled when IRD put a halt to awarding grants in southeastern Afghanistan for eight months after discovering that IRD staff were falsifying reports and exaggerating the impact of the development projects, according to former IRD workers. After revamping the staff and project, IRD resumed handing out grants for things like "flower literacy" programs that taught Afghan women how to make flower arrangements.
Then, after conferring with USAID, IRD tried to press ahead with construction without setting up new community projects, said U.S. officials.
"You had these villages with no community ownership or buy in and they just made the situation worse," said one USAID official. "That's when things really started going sour."
In Khost, the volatile eastern province along the Pakistani border where Mr. Hasas was paid $3 million to build seven miles of gravel road, tensions flared soon after he began work in 2008.
Ajab Noor Mangal, a local construction-company owner hired to work on the project, said Mr. Hasas alienated the community by only hiring workers from two of the five local clans.
Afghans excluded from the project looted Mr. Hasas's construction sites and stripped them bare. At one point, Mr. Hasas said, four men affiliated with the project were kidnapped, killed and dumped in public with a warning note signed by insurgents. The deaths brought construction to a halt.
"We couldn't find a single person to work on the road," Mr. Hasas recalls.
Under the IRD contract, Mr. Hasas and the other Afghan firms working on their roads were responsible for providing their own security. So Mr. Hasas said he cobbled together nearly 100 gunmen and armed them with rented rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns.
Things reached a nadir in the fall of 2010, when around 100 angry Afghans, including a small number of suspected insurgents, tried to storm the construction site, according to Messrs. Hasas and Mangal.
Mr. Mangal, who was in Kabul at the time, says he ordered the contractor's gunmen to open fire on the demonstrators, including some armed protesters who he said shot at the security team. Mr. Mangal says he is still paying for the wounded villagers' medical treatment.
Villagers who took part in the demonstration told a different story. Two men involved in the protest said IRD security sparked a larger confrontation after opening fire on a dozen unarmed men protesting IRD's refusal to move staff from an office overlooking homes where outsiders could see into private family compounds—a major slight in the conservative culture.
"All the villagers criticize the construction company because they were just here to earn money and they did not care about the quality of the road," said Najib, a local resident who worked on the road project and had two relatives injured during the protest.
IRD officials say they never heard about the conflict between the contractor and the villagers.
The project was part of the ongoing "Afghan First" initiative meant to support Afghan companies instead of the international firms that have received the lion's share of the billions in aid that have flooded Afghanistan.
But IRD is still embroiled in payment disputes with Afghan subcontractors who say that the company has failed to pay its bills. Now that the project is shut down, IRD said it has told contractors final payment decisions rest with USAID. USAID said it couldn't comment on the question of payments.
The animosity escalated in 2010 when embittered Afghan subcontractors secured arrest warrants for two IRD officials. Afghan police briefly detained one of the Westerners in Kabul who oversaw the project, according to officials familiar with the incident.
Faced with more arrest threats during the spring, IRD hid another top manager in the back of an SUV, flew her to Kandahar and quietly spirited her out of the country before she, too, could be detained, according to former IRD employees familiar with the controversy. IRD declined to comment on the incident.
USAID officials say the agency moved swiftly to scale back and shut down the IRD roads project as it became clear in 2010 that it was foundering. "How quickly can you stop a dump truck?" said one USAID official. "You get the momentum going and one thing we committed to doing isn't stopping it and creating a wreck."
Mr. Thier said his agency has learned important lessons from the problems in the IRD project and has changed the way it operates. USAID tripled its Afghanistan-based staff, beefed up its screening of Afghan partners, established new independent monitoring procedures and added more people to directly oversee such programs, he said.
The steep drop-off in U.S. reconstruction funds for Afghanistan has also prompted USAID to shift its focus from big ticket stabilization projects to more modest proposals, including agricultural development programs, that can be successfully taken over by Afghan officials.
In November, as part of a wider shift at the State Department, USAID established a new Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations that is meant to address some of the long-standing coordination and strategic problems with America's reconstruction missions abroad.
Still, the project's failures appeared to have no impact on USAID's confidence in IRD. Last year, as construction delays mounted and American officials moved to shut the program down, USAID awarded IRD nearly $140 million to launch three new projects in Afghanistan, though none involved roads. USAID officials said they still had confidence in IRD's ability to carry out big projects in Afghanistan.
Afghan entrepreneur Delawar Faizan, meanwhile, says that IRD still owes him nearly $4 million for his work in constructing roads in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province. He said that IRD gave him a check last fall to settle some of his claims, but it bounced because the company's bank account was frozen. Now, he said, IRD has told him he has to wait for approval from USAID to get paid.
"Where has the money gone?" he asked. —Ziaulhaq Sultani, Habib Khan Totakhil and Mali Khan Yaqubi contributed to this article.
Expanding police mission in Afghanistan taboo for Dutch left wing party
THE HAGUE, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Left-wing green party GroenLinks in the Netherlands will not support the government in expanding the current police training mission in Afghanistan, the Volkskrant reported on Friday.
Party leader Jolande Sap will also veto the training of police officers who will work outside the region of Kunduz, where the Dutch mission is based, her spokesman told the paper.
This means GroenLinks is "torpedoing" Prime Minister Mark Rutte's chances of expanding the Dutch mission, the paper says. GroenLinks' support was crucial in winning majority support for the plan proposed last year.
Pakistan denies meeting with Taliban in Qatar
ISLAMABAD, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan Thursday rejected as ' misconception' media reports that a meeting between Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and Afghan Taliban representatives was planned in Qatar during his recent visit.
Gilani concluded a three-day visit to Qatar on Wednesday and the Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said that the visit only focused on bilateral relations between Pakistan and the Gulf state.
"A misconception was created that the Prime Minister had a plan to hold meeting with Taliban," the spokesman told weekly press briefing.
Western media earlier quoted unnamed Pakistani officials as saying that the Prime Minister would discuss the Taliban office in Qatar and their talks with the U.S.
The spokesman said that neither a meeting between Gilani and representatives of Afghan Taliban was held in Qatar nor any such meeting was in schedule.
He said that Gilani's visit to Doha exclusively focused on bilateral relations with Qatar, though regional situation and peace in Afghanistan were also involved in the meeting between the Prime Minister and Qatari officials.
The spokesman said the American diplomats had briefed Pakistani officials on their contacts with Afghan Taliban. However, he declined to confirm meeting between Taliban and the U.S. Special Envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan Marc Grossman in Qatar.
Basit said that trilateral summit of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran in Islamabad next week will focus on counter-terrorism and drug trafficking.
U.S. Marine Unit Photographed With 'Nazi SS' Flag
February 9, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The U.S. Marine Corps says one of its scout sniper teams in Afghanistan had posed for a photo in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the Nazi SS.
The September 2010 photo, which circulated on an blog, was taken in the Sangin district of the southern province of Helmand.
In a statement on February 9, Marine spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Upton said the use of the SS symbol was unacceptable, and that the Corps had now addressed the issue.
He did not specify what action had been taken, but said the Marines in the photo are no longer in that unit.
The U.S. military released a statement later saying the incident "was not found to be racially motivated" and that the Marines involved "acknowledged the symbol…is not in keeping with our Marine ethos and values."
The statement said "the commander determined that disciplinary action was not warranted."
Compiled from agency reports
Teenage girl from Afghanistan to box at Olympics
By RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP)—Besides going after a medal in the boxing ring at the London Olympics, Sadaf Rahimi will be taking a few punches in the fight for equal rights for Afghan women.
There are female Afghan success stories, yet most women in Afghanistan remain second-class citizens, many cloaked from head-to-toe in blue burqas, some abused or hidden in their homes.
Rahimi, a determined 17-year-old student, wants to become the new face of Afghan women, gaining honor and dignity for herself and other women in here war-torn country and improving their image worldwide.
She will get her chance this summer in London, where women’s boxing makes its Olympic debut.
“When we participate in the outside competitions, there is pressure on us,” Rahimi said while training in a makeshift gym in the Afghan capital. “But I will try to show that an Afghan girl can enter the ring and achieve a position for Afghanistan.”
In line with conservative norms for women in Afghanistan, Rahimi is expecting to wear black tights under her boxing gear at the Olympics to cover her knees. She trains for hours three days a week, punching heavy bags and sparring with her teammates and trainers.
They throw punches on faded pink and green mats covering a concrete floor of a room in an Afghan sports stadium where the hardline Taliban regime used to stage public executions. The female boxers still don’t have a real boxing ring to hone their skills.
After the Taliban banned women from participating in sporting events, the International Olympic Committee suspended Afghanistan from the games. Afghanistan missed the 2000 Olympics in Sydney as a result. The Taliban were toppled in 2001 and the suspension was lifted the following year. Afghanistan sent female athletes—for the first time in its history—to the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
Rahimi, who has the support of her family in Kabul, is following in the footsteps of Robina Muqimyar, the female Afghan runner who competed in Athens. Another woman, Mehboda Ahdyar, was scheduled to go to the 2008 Beijing Games but couldn’t compete because of injuries.
“I am well aware that my opponents in the London 2012 Olympics are more powerful and even twice as good as me, but I have prepared myself to participate and win a medal,” said Rahimi, who started boxing four years ago and won a silver medal during a boxing competition in Tajikistan.
Female boxing is an unusual sport in a country like Afghanistan, where most of the women are still struggling for their rights and get little respect in the male-dominated society.
Recently in Baghlan province in the north, 15-year-old Sahar Gul was locked up, beaten with cables and tortured by her husband and in-laws after she refused to work as a prostitute. They deny any wrongdoing. She became the bruised and bloodied face of women’s rights in Afghanistan after being rescued in late December when an uncle called police.
Her story shocked Afghanistan and prompted calls to end underage marriage. The legal marriage age in Afghanistan is 16, but the United Nations estimates that half of all girls are forced to marry before their 16th birthday.
In Kunduz province, also in the north, a 30-year-old woman named Storay was killed last month because she gave birth to a third baby girl, instead of a boy. Storay, who used only one name, was slain, allegedly by her husband, when her third child was 3 months old. Her husband has left the family.
Despite such atrocities, there are increasing opportunities for Afghan women who want to participate in sports, said Mohammad Saber Sharifi, the coach of the Afghan female boxing team.
The team was established by the Afghan Olympic Committee in 2007 and so far has registered more than two dozen female boxers.
Rahimi, who fights in the 54-kilogram (118.8 pounds) weight class, will get into the Olympics through a wild card berth. She plans to travel to London on Feb. 19 to train for several weeks. In May she will fight in a competition in China, but win or lose there, she will be at the Olympics in London.
“Sadaf Rahimi is the only girl who will participate in these games,” Sharifi said. “She will represent all Afghan women, which makes her the biggest female personality in Afghanistan.”
Things have been much easier for male athletes in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s first Olympic medal winner was Rohullah Nikpai, who won a bronze medal in men’s taekwondo in 2008, defeating rivals from Germany, England and Spanish world champion Juan Antonio Ramos at the Beijing Games.
Because of insecurity in Afghanistan, his family fled to Iran where he grew up. He returned to Afghanistan in 2004—four years after the Taliban government collapsed. After participating in Beijing, he became a symbol of national pride.
“In the 2008 Olympics, I won a bronze medal and I am hopeful to win a gold medal in the Olympic 2012 in London,” Nikpai said.
Two other male athletes will round out the foursome who will represent Afghanistan in this year’s games. Massoud Azizi, a 25-year-old, 100-meter sprinter who competed in 2008 in Beijing, and Nasar Ahmad Bahawi, another taekwondo fighter.
“The people are expecting a lot from us. We know we will face the hardest opponents,” said Bahawi, who practices inside a newly built gym at the sports stadium under the supervision of a foreign coach and Afghan trainer. “We have the prayers of our people, and God willing, we will do well.”
Karzai Extends Deadline For Bagram Prison Handover
February 9, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has extended until March 9 a deadline for the transfer of full control of Bagram Prison to Afghan authorities.
An earlier deadline for the U.S.-led international coalition to hand over the prison expired on February 5.
A statement from the presidential office on February 9 cited "noncooperation by the American side" and said Kabul was suspending "all legal and judicial operations" at the prison.
A later statement issued by Karzai's office did not include the statements about the U.S.
Karzai's demand that the coalition cede control came after an Afghan commission reported complaints of strip searches and inmates held in solitary confinement.
With agency reports
In Helmand, training Afghan Local Police is a challenge
By Anup Kaphle, The Washington Post
KHAR NIKAH, Afghanistan — Inside a cold room surrounded by sand-filled Hesco barriers in the remote Gereshk Valley, British forces are teaching a group of young Afghan fighters how to protect their village from the Taliban.
But preparing a group of angry, illiterate Afghans to fight a deadly enemy that is regularly testing the British forces here in northern Helmand Province is a monumental task. The villagers who have opted to join the Afghan Local Police force in Khar Nikah mistrust one another, say they are not being offered much pay and complain that they need better weapons.
“They expect us to guard a checkpoint with an AK-47,” said Mir Hamza, holding a rusty Kalashnikov as he rubbed the magazine with his shawl. “Even sheep herders carry Kalashnikovs in Khar Nikah.”
As the British forces prepare to hand over checkpoints in the area surrounding their base here, improving the morale and performance of the Afghan Local Police recruits will be a critical challenge.
Local defense programs have become a vital part of military strategy in Afghanistan. The programs began after an incident in summer 2010 when dozens of rifle-toting farmers from Gizab, a strategically important area in Kandahar, drove the Taliban from their village. Following that successful local uprising, the United States was keen to replicate the model for village defense, and the United States has since sent in troops to train local villagers.
The Afghan Local Police, or ALP, is expected to serve as a defensive presence, manning security checkpoints to keep insurgents from gaining ground. Coalition forces hope that this in turn allows the Afghan National Police, a force that receives more extensive training, to go out on patrols and conduct offensive raids.
Some 8,000 Afghan villagers have been recruited into the ALP program, which is formally run by the Afghan Interior Ministry. The local police force is expected to reach 30,000, a goal that the United States and its partners are aggressively pushing.
Although the American plan to create the ALP initially met sharp resistance from President Hamid Karzai, who feared growing warlordism, he later gave the program his blessing. In theory, every recruit for the ALP is vetted by the country’s intelligence service, and the local commanders have to answer to the district police chiefs.
But two years since the ALP’s creation, the program has hit some significant turbulence. The U.S. military has acknowledged human rights abuses by the ALP, and the program has been beset by internal strife.
In districts where the Taliban still put up a fight, the British are having a hard time persuading local residents to join the local police force. In Khar Nikah, the British had hoped to recruit and train about 60 ALP members by the end of last year. So far, there are 26.
Although NATO poured resources into Helmand and the United States launched a major offensive here three years ago, insurgents are still active in the province. Khar Nikah is crucial to NATO because of its proximity to Gereshk, a town that lies at the heart of one of Afghanistan’s most important trade routes, and because of its connection with Route 611, which runs up to the Kajaki dam, a major hydropower project.
“Our biggest challenge is doing things the Afghan way,” said Maj. Spiro Markandonatos, the commanding officer of British forces at the forward operating base in Khar Nikah. “The hierarchical system in the village community doesn’t really allow our methods and process to work.”
Markandonatos’s frustration in the local system grew stronger after repeated disagreements with the ALP commander, Atahullah, who rose to power because his father was a key leader in the village. A few days after Christmas last year, Atahullah, who like many Afghans goes only by one name, resigned following a disagreement over $75. Four other members of the local police resigned the same day.
Atahullah’s father later expressed concern that members of the ALP, including his son, felt that too much was being asked of them while little was being offered to the village. “Other villages have schools, roads and clinics, and we have been saying this again and again, but we don’t have anything here,” said the father, Haji Kader Khan. But the British said the Taliban had been threatening to kill Atahullah, which also played a role in his resignation.
Members of the local police force do not wear their uniform when they are on patrol, something that the British see less as a discipline problem and more as a security risk because it makes it hard to distinguish the insurgents from the police.
“Until one of them gets shot . . . they are not going to learn their lesson,” said a frustrated Capt. Badri Rai, who heads a team that recruits and mentors ALP in Khar Nikah.
Mistrust among villagers and within the ALP has damaged British efforts to efficiently train and recruit more police by early spring. A Taliban commander was recently heard over an intercom asking an ALP member to turn his weapons against the Western forces.
“Some of the villagers in ALP are 90 percent Taliban and 10 percent farmers. Do not let these guys inside the checkpoint compound,” said Rifleman Subash Gurung of the British army.
But there are some young men in the ALP who give the British reason for hope. One of them is an ethnically Pashtun man known only as Torzan who stands 5 feet tall and is referred to as the “Lion of the Green Zone.” After his brother was killed in an insurgent attack and his son was kidnapped by the Taliban, Torzan decided to pick up an AK-47 and side with the British forces in the area.
Torzan said the Taliban has spread word among the locals that the British forces are leaving soon and that the ALP will have to bear the brunt of the battle once the foreigners are gone.
That worries prospective recruits in the area, including the newly elected ALP commander, Khalifa Atullah, a charismatic man who once fought against the Russians. Atullah said he understands that the British are hoping to hand over several checkpoints and patrol bases to his men. But he said his men still need more help to do what is asked of them.
Atullah’s men receive from the British a uniform, an AK-47, a box of 7.62 mm rounds and the mandate to fight the Taliban to protect their village. But he said that is not enough.
“We need sleeping bags, blankets, and we need heavy weapons,” he said.
British soldiers say they cannot trust the ALP with heavy-duty weaponry. Late last year, members of the ALP were implicated in killings, rapes, arbitrary detentions and land grabs by Human Rights Watch.
But a British political officer in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah said the ALP remains a “manageable risk.”
“We can maintain a bar and say anything beyond that is unacceptable, but we can’t enforce our rules onto them,” he said. “At the end of the day, it is their country and they have to run it in their own way.”
$20m aid plan for Afghanistan's poorest people
Sydney Morning Herald By Rory Callinan, Dylan Welch February 10, 2012
AUSAID is considering a new strategy for Afghan assistance - spending more than $20 million over the next four years on mainly agricultural projects to assist poor residents in drought-stricken areas and to help strengthen local Afghan non-government organisations, a leaked concept paper shows.
The paper, titled Australia Afghanistan Community Resilience Scheme, proposes funding be divided among five experienced NGOs and would seek to assist the ''poorest and most marginalised people'' while at the same time hoping to improve broader agricultural productivity.
AusAID declined to confirm whether any of the concepts outlined in the paper had been adopted. A spokeswoman said the paper was only a preliminary document and still under consideration.
Aid experts who viewed the paper for the Herald had mixed opinions. One believed it signalled an intention by the government to maintain influence in the country if troops were withdrawn.
The concept paper, which has been circulating among the aid community this year, suggests a competitive grants process for several eligible NGOs to get funding over four years and a focus on agriculture and rural development, an area which it noted AusAID needed to improve focus on.
James Goodman, from the aid monitoring group Aid/Watch, said the proposal seemed to be a departure from previous aid funding. ''It is interesting that these organisations [local NGOs] would have a potentially political role in Afghanistan, which is a good thing in most contexts,'' he said.
Dr Goodman said the four-year life of the proposed program seemed to suggest the government would be seeking to maintain influence in the country if troops were withdrawn in the next couple of years.
Australian troops fighting in Oruzgan will stop fighting and start training as soon as early next year. The Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, told Parliament yesterday that some Afghan troops would be able to run independent operations later this year.
However, Mr Smith's remarks, in an update on the war in Afghanistan, stand in stark contrast to recent comments of a whistleblowing US soldier who has defied his seniors and told of a losing war being fought against the Taliban.
''Australia's goal is to prevent Afghanistan from again being used by terrorists to plan and train for attacks on innocent civilians, including Australians in our own region and beyond,'' Mr Smith said.
He also confirmed that Oruzgan would possibly be one of the provinces that changes to local control over the next 12 to 18 months, meaning Australia's main combat role could end as early as next February.
Aside from providing security, Australia is also training the 4th Brigade of the Afghan army, based in Oruzgan. The brigade is divided into several battalions, known as Kandaks.
''The 4th Brigade is increasingly assuming the lead for the planning, preparation and execution of tactical operations with a number of infantry Kandaks now expected to be capable of conducting independent operations during 2012,'' Mr Smith said.
Special forces soldiers to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014, says Smith
The Australian By MARK DODD February 10, 2012
AUSTRALIAN special forces will fight on in Afghanistan after 2014 engaging in counter-insurgency operations and helping train local troops, Defence Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday.
In his first parliamentary update on Afghanistan for the year, Mr Smith said the mentoring taskforce was on track for an early handover to Afghan forces by 2014.
Combat operations involving the 138,000-strong NATO-led alliance, which includes Australia, will be wound down after 2014 as Afghan army and police take the lead role under an agreed "transition strategy".
However, special forces soldiers, including those from Australia, were expected to stay on, Mr Smith said.
Final post-2014 security arrangements will be worked out at a meeting of military leaders in Chicago in May.
"Australia has made clear that we expect to maintain a presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014, potentially through training, military advisers, capacity-building and development assistance and a special forces presence.
"Australia is already involved in institutional training through the Afghan National Army Artillery Training School and will continue to work with Afghanistan and ISAF partners to identify further institutional training opportunities," he said.
Australia is the third-biggest contributor of special forces to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) with more than 600 troops currently deployed, including personnel from the Special Air Service and commando regiments.
Britain has also requested Australian assistance in a British-led Afghan National Army officer academy to help develop a professional officer corps.
Meanwhile, claims the SAS was involved in the illegal detention of Iraqi prisoners of war have been strongly denied by Mr Smith.
The claims, carried in Fairfax newspapers, did not tally with the area of operations involving SAS troops during the so-called Second Gulf War, said the minister.
"The advice I've got this morning is essentially that these allegations are baseless and there's nothing in it," he told the ABC.
U.S. Strategy For Afghan War Reaches Critical Stage
NPR By Renee Montagne and Tom Bowman February 9, 2012
The U.S. and NATO have pledged to stay in Afghanistan through the end of 2014 and hand off responsibility for security to Afghan troops by then. How to get to that point, though, is not clear. And recent statements by key U.S. officials have only confused things more.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
We're going to look now at American military strategy for the war in Afghanistan. There's been some confusion lately about whether American forces would end their combat mission sooner than planned and also about how long the U.S. will remain in Afghanistan. So to try to make sense of it all, we're joined by NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.
Good morning.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Let's start with the basics. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently talked about hopefully - that was his word - ending the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan by the end of 2013. Which was understood to be about a year earlier than had been talked about before. So will the U.S. stop combat missions at that point?
BOWMAN: Renee, the key word there is hopefully, that the combat mission at the end of 2013 can be turned over to Afghan forces. But everyone I've talked with says at least through 2014 they're talking about still having U.S. forces do some form of combat operations. It might not be large land battles, but at the very least you'll see U.S. Special Forces, Green Berets going on raids, let's say, against Taliban forces. Bottom line, they're still going to be involved in combat.
MONTAGNE: Well, Afghan forces, are they close to ready to take over or are they actually not really ready?
BOWMAN: They're not even close to being ready. And I've seen them myself in the field. And that's precisely why you're seeing so much talk now about pulling back and starting this transition earlier - a year earlier. If the deadline is 2014, you have to start at least a year earlier training them, working with them so you can see their weaknesses and then help them improve. You have plenty of time to help them improve.
This week at the Pentagon we heard from the officer who runs day-to-day military operations in Afghanistan. His name is Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti. And I asked him about this very point, about training the Afghans. They're going to send more training teams over this year - 50 Army training teams to help them. And he talked about pushing the Afghans this year more into the lead. Let's listen to what he had to say.
GENERAL: And I'm pressing commanders to put them into the lead as soon as they can. The earlier we get them into the lead, the better we have a metric of just how well they're doing. And we also know better how to improve them. And I want to do that while we have more forces on the ground in order to help develop them.
MONTAGNE: So again, the idea, Tom, is get these Afghan soldiers out there in the fight so that they can be worked with sooner rather than later so they might be ready by the end of 2014...
BOWMAN: That's exactly right. That they'll have plenty of time to train them and make sure they're competent. And key things they're looking are the ability to supply themselves in the field, do they have good leaders. You know, they might have to change out some leaders over the next year, but they want to do all of this by the end of 2013. They don't want to do this in the end of 2014 when they're ready to turn it all over to the Afghans.
MONTAGNE: One last thing to clarify. Does the mission end by the end of 2014? Will U.S. troops be out by then?
BOWMAN: Absolutely not. And the Americans have talked with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about what they call a longer term national security relationship. And people I talk with say you could have anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 American troops after 2014 doing things like training, perhaps going on counterterrorism raids. That kind of thing. Maybe even having a quick reaction force. If the Afghans get into trouble, you can go help them.
The thing here is that everyone talks about ending the combat role earlier. The bottom line is you're going to have U.S. troops involved in combat in Afghanistan for a number of years.
MONTAGNE: Tom, thanks very much.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Renee.
MONTAGNE: NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.
How to Help Kabul’s Refugees
By ROD NORDLAND The New York Times February 8, 2012, 3:44 pm
The aid group most active in Kabul’s refugee camps is an Afghan group, Aschiana, which has programs in 13 of the camps, including the two where children have been dying of the cold. The group also runs schools that provides students with hot lunches — for many, their only real meal of the day.
Their United States fund-raising branch can be reached through aschiana-foundation.org/aschiana-in-afghanistan and their Afghan office is at www.aschiana.com.
Since the The New York Times reported last Saturday that children were freezing to death in the camps, many readers have responded with requests for information on how to help the children in these camps, while others have offered suggestions.
A retired United States Air Force lieutenant general, John A. Bradley, wrote to say that his organization had just delivered 25,000 pounds of aid, winter clothing and food packets to Bagram Air Force Base that was originally intended for needy people in Bamyan Province. Moved by the situation of the children, he said, he decided to divert the aid, arranging for Aschiana to deliver it in the camps near Kabul. General Bradley’s group collects humanitarian goods in the States and arranges for free shipping on military aircraft, under an American law that requires the military to carry aid when its planes are going to Afghanistan empty.
Maya Bornstein, a medical doctor from Bethesda, Md., wondered whether getting blankets made or purchased through school and youth groups would help. “These babies deserve a fighting chance,” she wrote.
Craig Garfield of Chicago, another doctor, wanted to know if heat-retaining mylar blankets had been tried and whether it would be worth raising money to send them over.
Sarah Crane, a doctor from Cambridge, Mass., said she and some friends were talking about buying sleeping bags and sending them, and wondered if that would be practical. “I am a mother and an obstetrician, so when you described the children dying of cold, it drove me crazy,” she said. “I have fantasies when I’m on the treadmill of flying large passenger aircraft to those places and loading up all the moms and dads and children and flying them back to live in Florida or California.”
Relatively few international aid groups have been active in the camps, at least compared to the need.
The German aid group Welthungerhilfe, known in English as German Agro Action, has a major presence in Afghanistan and runs a variety of programs; in the camps, it has distributed firewood this winter but has not had enough money to do it a second time. It also runs mobile clinics in the camps.
The French aid group Solidarités International also has a major program in Afghanistan and has been active in the camps for years, running sanitation and emergency feeding programs.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com