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Would-be child suicide bomber released in Kabul, re-captured in Kandahar
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Feb. 12 (Xinhua) -- Security forces have arrested five Taliban insurgents including a would-be suicide bomber child who was set free in Kabul months ago, the department of National Directorate for Security (NDS) said in Kandahar on Sunday.
"We have arrested five rebels including three armed Taliban rebels and two suicide bomber children," an official with the NDS department or intelligence agency told newsmen here.
He also showed the arrested men including the two would-be suicide bomber teens to the journalists. However, he did not reveal his name nor the exact date of the arrest of the insurgents.
"Taliban recruited me last year to target foreign troops but police arrested me and President Karzai set me free and sent to an orphanage in Kabul. After passing sometimes there, I managed to flee and tried to target foreign forces again but again I was captured," 10-year-old Azizullah told newsmen.
He also said that he is from Paktia's provincial capital Gardez city. Talking about his relations with Taliban, the boy said, "Some Taliban last year, one day strapped a vest with some electric wires around my body and told me to press the button when you meet foreign soldiers on the streets or bazaar."
"By pressing the button several soldiers will be killed and then you return home," Azizullah further said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai had ordered the release of some 20 would-be suicide bomber children ranging between 8 to 17 years old in August 2011.
Another child who introduced himself Nasibullah also in talks with journalists said that Taliban militants had recruited him to target American forces.
"I along my family used to live in Pishin area of Balouchistan, Pakistan and used to study in a Madressa (religious school) there. One day Taliban recruited me and took me to Afghanistan. They provided training to me in Band-e-Timor area of Miwand district and after few days they took me to a road and told me to detonate whenever the foreign soldiers passing the road and then return home," Nasibullah, 11 told newsmen.
Taliban militants who staged a violent comeback in 2006 and fighting Afghan and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan have been largely relying on suicide attacks and roadside bombings.
The remaining three adult captured men also in talks with the journalists confirmed to their link with Taliban outfit.
The truth about Taliban 'reintegration'
The much-vaunted "reintegration" of the Taliban, which Britain has funded with £7 million, is not quite what it seems, writes Ben Farmer in Kabul.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 11 Feb 2012
Kabul - Wrapped in shawls against the cold, some with scarves to hide their faces, the men stand in front of a table bearing an arsenal of assault rifles and rockets.
As the insurgents renounce their armed struggle and declare they have made peace with Hamid Karzai's government, local journalists film the ceremony for the evening television.
Such scenes are now a common feature of Afghan news bulletins and portray one of the main pillars of Nato's strategy to overpower the Taliban and force them to the negotiating table prior to the planned exit by US and British forces.
However, The Sunday Telegraph has discovered disturbing evidence that all is not as it seems.
New figures have now shown that over the last 18 months the "reintegration" scheme which Britain has funded with £7 million has attracted only 19 militants in Helmand province, where British troops are fighting.
And in at least one Afghan province, the insurgents pledging to change their ways and uphold the Afghan constitution were not what they seemed, officials have disclosed.
Some 200 insurgents in the northern province of Sar-e Pol have recently been struck off the programme, officials told The Sunday Telegraph, because checks subsequently found they were not genuine fighters but instead imposters seeking cash handouts.
The news will not surprise the scheme's sceptics who allege that Western tax-payers are being duped by criminals, the unemployed and corrupt local officials while the real fighters stay in the conflict, or only join the government temporarily.
A leaked Nato report earlier this month also appeared to cast doubt on the very premise of the reintegration programme - that Taliban fighters are tired, motivated by money and want a way out.
Interrogators who have questioned thousands of insurgent prisoners in the past year reported instead that they remain motivated, feel their support is rising and their victory inevitable as foreign troops withdraw.
Fighters in Helmand, where the great majority of Britain's 397 dead have been killed, remain too afraid of their comrades in the Taliban to publicly relinquish the struggle and join the scheme despite security gains in the province, Nato and Afghan officials said.
Under the scheme, agreed two years ago at the London conference on Afghanistan, fighters are offered amnesty, training, jobs and aid for their villages if they leave the insurgency.
Around 3,000 men have joined nationwide in the past 18 months, but figures show the take-up in the southern and eastern strongholds of Taliban support, including in Helmand were Britain has been fighting for six years, has been negligible compared to that in the relatively peaceful north.
Nato officers insist that the low figures do not reflect the unknown number of fighters who are quietly laying aside their weapons without publicity and settling their differences with Hamid Karzai's government.
Major General David Hook, the British officer who leads Nato support for the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme (APRP), said the numbers painted only a partial picture.
"They don't want to come in, because they are afraid that coming in to us exposes them to the threat of the Taliban," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "At the moment some of them are more afraid of the Taliban than they are of being killed or captured.
"The question here is how many people have done what Afghans traditionally do when they get tired of fighting. They have just gone home, laid their weapons aside and gone back to normal society. This informal effect is difficult to measure."
British commanders point to lower levels of violence in districts such as Nad-e Ali as proof that fighters must be relinquishing the fight. But critics say the scheme is not working where it is most needed.
Pressure for a breakthrough is likely to increase as the 2014 deadline for withdrawal of international combat troops approaches, increasing anxiety over how the Afghan security forces will hold up when in charge.
Politicians in the US and elsewhere - in several cases facing imminent elections - are under pressure to speed the drawdown of troops.
Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, said last week he wanted America to switch to mainly training missions by the middle of next year, and France has promised to hasten its exit as Nicholas Sarkozy faces a tough presidential election campaign this spring.
Diplomatic efforts have focused on trying to open channels to the Taliban's ruling council, most recently by agreeing a political office in Qatar, in the hope of one day helping Mr Karzai's government reach a political deal or "grand bargain".
Envoys in Kabul hope tentative talks may begin within weeks in the Gulf State, though even the most optimistic stress any resulting peace process would probably take years.
Marc Grossman, American special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, reportedly met Taliban negotiators in Qatar late last month.
One of the most imminent obstacles he faces is a Taliban demand that five of their leaders are transferred from Guantanamo Bay prison, where they have been held for a decade, as a confidence-building measure.
Mr Grossman has said no decision has been made, but the concession faces growing resistance from American congressmen.
At the other end of the scale, the APRP and Maj Gen Hook aim to weaken the insurgency by drawing away lowly fighters motivated more by unemployment and local grievances than ideology, or who are weary after years of fighting.
Donors have set up a trust fund of £92 million, including £7 million from Britain, to fund it.
The money pays for Afghan officials to reach out to fighters in their area and then provide a monthly stipend of around £100 as well as training and jobs to those who want to settle, plus aid to their villages.
Such reintegration is unlikely until a broader peace deal is reached, some critics argue. Fighters will not defect piecemeal until their comrades also stop fighting and they are free from the threat of reprisal, their argument goes.
Maj Gen Hook disagrees, saying the two approaches feed off each other.
"The more we can integrate, the more we undermine the coherence of the various organisations, the more likely we are to have talks, because we are taking the wind from their sails," he explained.
Another fear is that those joining the scheme are either not real fighters, or are only joining temporarily to gain a respite from the coalition surge.
Such concerns stem from memories of similar reintegration ceremonies in the late 1980s when Najibullah, the Soviet-backed president, tried to persuade the Mujahideen to give up their struggle, often with large sums of money.
A running joke at the time was that the same men could be seen handing in their weapons each week.
Maj Gen Hook rejects the possibility the same is still happening and said greater vetting had been brought in. Anyone wanting to join the scheme is now verified locally and then again by Afghan defence and security officials in Kabul.
Eye and fingerprint scans are taken so they cannot try re-joining later on.
He admits the rush to set up the scheme had caused problems at first and it was still "of variable quality".
But the programme was now running at "warp speed", he said, and the 200 Sar-e Pol cases proved new vetting checks were weeding out fakes.
He said: "Because we hadn't established a proper vetting process, they were all accepted into the programme and for the past nine to ten months, it's been a constant issue, because when we vetted them nationally, we realised that they weren't all bona fide insurgents.
"The double vetting has been to take away stuffing the programme with local cronies and to make sure that the people who come in are insurgents and not just common criminals, which was I think a justifiable criticism at the start of the programme." The Sar-e Pol imposters had not been given any of the £100 per month allowance, he said.
"I am reasonably confident the Afghans have a robust process because they turn people away all the time," he added.
Syed Anwar Ahmadti, governor of Sar-e Pol, said more than 600 insurgents had joined the government in his province in the past year and confirmed that 200 had subsequently been judged fraudulent.
He however disagrees with that ruling, made in Kabul, and believes that the men had been fighting the government. The decision not to pay them will discourage others from laying aside their weapons, he said.
"It doesn't matter if they don't have guns, they were helping the insurgency in logistics or some other capacity, without guns." Sceptics allege the "insurgents" are in some cases only local men who are rounded up and given old weapons to hand in, so that local officials can appear efficient while also raking off a share of the reintegration money.
Syed Obadullah Sadat, a council member from the eastern province of Ghazni has publicly denounced a defection last month by more than a dozen fighters as a sham.
He said: "The process is fake, people are doing it for money. It's all just for show, it's nothing. These people are told to show up with a few old guns so it looks like a success."
Dr Ghani Bahadari, the Afghan official in Ghazni who runs the scheme, rejected the criticism as "gossip".
He said: "The reason they joined the government is that their leaders have established an office in Qatar and showed their interest in peace. They have also told us they are tired of war."
Judge killed, 4 family members injured in E. Afghanistan attack
JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Feb. 12 (Xinhua) -- Unidentified gunmen shot dead a judge and injured four of his family members Saturday night in an attack in the country's eastern province of Nangarhar, a district chief said on Sunday.
"Unknown armed men broke into the house of Judge Mohammad Basir in Khogyani district Saturday night, killing Basir on the spot and injuring four of his family members," administration chief of the district, Mohammad Hassan, told Xinhua.
He said Basir was serving as a judge in neighboring Kunar province but was visiting his family in Khogyani district.
The official said the attackers fled the scene, adding the injured included two children and two women.
Motive behind the killing was not known. No group claim responsibility for the attack so far.
Civilian casualties have increased for a fifth successive year as a total of 3,021 Afghan civilians were killed in 2011, a 8 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to a UN annual report released earlier this month.
The 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.
Targeted killings of civilians by anti-government militants also increased in 2011, as the UN mission in Afghanistan recorded 495 such killings across the country last year.
Afghan Parliament to Summon Minister of Interior
TOLOnews.com By Saleha Sadat Saturday, 11 February 2012
Some of the members of the Afghan House of Representatives on Saturday said that the Afghan Minister of Interior, Besmellah Mohammadi, should be summoned over the recent Nato attack in Kapisa.
The House of Representatives wants to summon the Afghan Minister of Interior over the killing of 8 Afghan children in a Nato air strike in Kapisa province.
The Afghan MPs blame what has happened on the local police appointed by the Afghan Interior Ministry in Kapisa province.
Afghan MPs said that Afghan Ministry of Interior should coordinate all operations with foreign forces.
On Wednesday eight Afghan children were killed in a Nato air strike in Kapisa province.
Nato has not provided details of the operation.
MPs accuse the Minister of Interior of not being able to pay attention to ensure security in some of the provinces.
"The Minister of Interior is the murderer of these eight Afghan children and the Minister has to be summoned to the parliament, Mohammada Iqbal Safi, a representative of Kapisa province, said.
The Afghan House Speaker Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi also condemned that attack by French forces in Kapisa province that resulted in the killing of eight Afghan children who were reportedly grazing sheep in the area.
The The UN's Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) recently said that more than 3,021 Afghans have been killed in 2011 conflict.
The deaths in 2011 compared with 2,790 in 2010 and 2,412 in 2009 showed that most of the deaths were caused by insurgents, the report found.
It was the fifth straight year that the toll has risen, with a total of 11,864 civilian lives claimed by the conflict since 2007.
Taliban-led insurgents caused 77 percent of the deaths last year, up to 14 percent from 2010, while Nato-led and Afghan government forces were responsible for killing 410 civilians -14 percent of the total, it added.
The UN said that improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being used more widely and suicide attacks had become deadlier.
"The tactics of choice of anti-government elements subjected Afghan civilians to death and injury with increasingly lethal results in 2011," it said.
The report also said that civilian deaths in air strikes in support of the Afghan government rose in 2011.
"Afghan children, women and men continue to be killed in this war in ever-increasing numbers," the UN Special Representative in Afghanistan Jan Kubis recently said.
The UN Human Rights committee is worried over the civilian casualties that continued to rise year after year.
It comes as Nato is due to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014 after Afghan security forces will take over full security responsibility.
There are around 130,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 90,000 of them are US forces fighting insurgents.
Afghanistan denies Taliban army infiltration systemic
ABC News February 12, 2012
The Afghan government has downplayed a rogue soldier's claims that more Afghan army trainees are ready to launch deadly attacks against coalition soldiers.
In a video posted online by a jihadi network this week, Mohammed Rozi - an army trainee who shot and seriously wounded three Australians who were training him in Uruzgan province in November - said many of his colleagues dreamed of committing similar attacks.
Rozi, who escaped after the attack, falsely boasted in the video that he had killed 12 Australian soldiers.
But Afghan government spokesman Dr Hakim Asher says despite the claims in the video, the chances of similar attacks remains small.
"That is not a huge problem for Afghanistan. We believe that there were some mistakes and those mistakes are very few," he said.
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson agrees, saying such attacks are rare and are designed to breed mistrust.
"We have to take great care in recruitment in registering young men into the forces, but it is not systemic and it is not threatening and it will not stop our progress," he said.
Australian confidence in the mission in Afghanistan reached a new low last year when Rozi opened fire on the troops that were training him.
It was not clear what motivated the attack or whether he had been working with terrorist groups.
Now, the extensive video interview with Rozi answers some of these questions.
The video reveals the attack was carefully premeditated, with Rozi taking the time to watch his targets through binoculars before opening fire.
He said the Australian troops at the patrol base he shot were not armed.
He revealed he had initially been working alone, but was quickly taken in by the Taliban after fleeing the scene in a stolen humvee.
Rozi said he wanted to teach the troops a lesson and that Muslims in Afghanistan would not accept the presence of foreigners. 'Disgusting' video
Speaking during a tour of flood-hit parts of Queensland on Saturday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard described the video as "disgusting propaganda".
"The fact that there's this disgusting anti-Australian propaganda anywhere in the world is offensive to me and to all Australians," she said.
"It's aimed at trust, that's exactly what it's aimed - at denting our will.
"Well no amount of propaganda is going to dent our will at getting this mission done."
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott also spoke out about the video, saying Australians have every right to feel disgusted by the boasting.
He described it as a message designed to undermine Australia's confidence.
"Our enemies are trying to exaggerate their strength," he said.
The attack on the Australian soldiers in November was the third by a Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier in 2011, and came 10 days after three Australians were killed and seven were wounded when another Afghan soldier turned his weapon on his trainers.
In May, one Australian soldier was killed when a member of the ANA opened fire.
Risks of Afghan War Shift From Soldiers to Contractors
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND February 11, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Even dying is being outsourced here.
This is a war where traditional military jobs, from mess hall cooks to base guards and convoy drivers, have increasingly been shifted to the private sector. Many American generals and diplomats have private contractors for their personal bodyguards. And along with the risks have come the consequences: More civilian contractors working for American companies than American soldiers died in Afghanistan last year for the first time during the war.
American employers here are under no obligation to publicly report the deaths of their employees and frequently do not. While the military announces the names of all its war dead, private companies routinely notify only family members. Most of the contractors die unheralded and uncounted — and in some cases, leave their survivors uncompensated.
“By continuing to outsource high-risk jobs that were previously performed by soldiers, the military, in effect, is privatizing the ultimate sacrifice,” said Steven L. Schooner, a law professor at George Washington University who has studied the civilian casualties issue.
Last year, at least 430 employees of American contractors were reported killed in Afghanistan: 386 working for the Defense Department, 43 for the United States Agency for International Development and one for the State Department, according to data provided by the American Embassy in Kabul and publicly available in part from the United States Department of Labor.
By comparison, 418 American soldiers died in Afghanistan last year, according to Defense Department statistics compiled by icasualties.org, an independent organization that monitors war deaths.
That trend has been growing for the past several years in Afghanistan, and it parallels a similar trend in Iraq, where contractor deaths exceeded military deaths as long ago as 2009. In Iraq, however, that took place as the number of American troops was being drastically reduced until their complete withdrawal at the end of last year. And last year, more soldiers than private contractors died in Iraq (54 compared with 41, according to Labor Department figures).
Experts who have studied the phenomenon say that because many contractors do not comply with even the current, scanty reporting requirements, the true number of private contractor deaths may be far higher. “No one believes we’re underreporting military deaths,” Mr. Schooner said. “Everyone believes we’re underreporting contractor deaths.”
Qais Mansoori, 20, may have been among the uncounted. An Afghan interpreter employed by Mission Essential Personnel, a leading provider of interpreters in Afghanistan, Mr. Mansoori was killed along with five other interpreters when Taliban insurgents overran the military base where the interpreters were staying in the Mirwais district of Kandahar Province in July 2010.
That attack, typically, was scantily reported, since no soldiers died — although the death toll was 17, including an unidentified American civilian, according to Afghan officials and Mr. Mansoori’s friends and family.
Under the federal Defense Base Act, American defense contractors are obliged to report the war zone deaths and injuries of their employees — including subcontractors and foreign workers — to the Department of Labor, and to carry insurance that will provide the employees with medical care and compensation. In the case of foreign employees, which many of the dead were, survivors generally receive a death benefit equal to half of the employee’s salary for life; American employees get even more.
Mr. Mansoori’s brother, Mohammad, 35, an employee of a mine-removal charity in Afghanistan, said his brother’s employer, Mission Essential Personnel, promptly contacted the family and made a lump sum payment of $10,004, never mentioning the lifetime annuity to which they were entitled — which given Mr. Mansoori’s salary of $800 a month would have been closer to $150,000 over his survivors’ lifetimes. “I wish he was still here to look after my father and mother,” Mohammad Mansoori said. Their father is blind, and Qais Mansoori was his parents’ sole support, he said.
A spokesman for Mission Essential Personnel, Sean Rushton, disputed that, saying that his company has been making biweekly payments of $190 to Mr. Mansoori’s family and will continue doing so for 29 years. The $10,004 lump sum payment was a voluntary death gratuity paid by the company, Mr. Rushton said.
There were 113,491 employees of defense contractors in Afghanistan as of January 2012, compared with about 90,000 American soldiers, according to Defense Department statistics. Of those, 25,287, or about 22 percent of the employees, were American citizens, with 47 percent Afghans and 31 percent from other countries.
The bulk of the known contractor deaths are concentrated among a handful of major companies, particularly those providing interpreters, drivers, security guards and other support personnel who are particularly vulnerable to attacks.
The biggest contractor in terms of war zone deaths is apparently the defense giant L-3 Communications. If L-3 were a country, it would have the third highest loss of life in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq; only the United States and Britain would exceed it in fatalities.
Over the past 10 years, L-3 and its subsidiaries, including Titan Corporation and MPRI Inc., had at least 370 workers killed and 1,789 seriously wounded or injured through the end of 2011 in Iraq and Afghanistan, records show. In a statement, a spokeswoman for L-3, Jennifer Barton, said: “L-3 is proud to have the opportunity to support the U.S. and coalition efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We mourn the loss of life of these dedicated men and women.”
Other American companies with a high number of fatalities are Supreme Group, a catering company, with 241 dead through the end of 2011; Service Employees International, another catering company, with 125 dead; and security companies like DynCorps (101 dead), Aegis (86 dead) and Hart Group (63 dead). In all, according to Labor Department data, 64 American companies have lost more than seven employees each in the past 10 years.
The American dead have included people like James McLaughlin, 55, who trained pilots on a contract for MPRI and was killed by a rogue Afghan pilot who also killed eight American soldiers last April; and Todd Walker, Michael Clawson and James Scott Ozier, employees of AAR Airlift, who were killed in a helicopter crash in Helmand Province last month for which Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility.
For every contractor who is killed, many more are seriously wounded. According to the Labor Department’s statistics, 1,777 American contractors in Afghanistan were injured or wounded seriously enough to miss more than four days of work last year.
Marcie Hascall Clark began the Defense Base Act Compensation Blog after her husband, Merlin, a former Navy explosives ordnance disposal expert, was injured in 2003 while working for an American contractor. She and her husband have spent the past seven years fighting for hundreds of thousands of dollars in disability payments and medical compensation. “It was quite a shock to learn how little my husband’s body, mind and future were worth,” she said.
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Four Tajik Citizens Killed In Afghanistan Crash
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty February 12, 2012 By RFE/RL's Tajik Service
A transport helicopter has crashed in southern Afghanistan, killing all four people onboard.
The incident occurred on February 11 in Zabul Province.
Deputy Provincial Governor Mohammad Jon Rasolyar told RFE/RL that the four dead -- three men and one woman -- were citizens from Tajikistan who were working for Supreme Food, a logistics company under contract to NATO.
He said the helicopter crashed due to bad weather and a "technical problem."
Last year, two Tajik pilots of the Pamir Air company died in a plane crash in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, a Soviet Past Lies in Ruins
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY February 11, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - As poignant in its imperial ambition as in its otherworldliness, the Soviet-era swimming pool atop Swimming Pool Hill here is as good a symbol as any of the doubtful legacy of empires.
Dug 30 years ago, it was barely ever used by Kabul’s swimmers, as the hill became entangled in barbed wire, first a gun placement for the Soviets and then the Taliban, before the whole area was bombarded by Western firepower in the 2001 invasion.
Now restored, its five diving boards hang pointlessly above an empty pool and an indifferent city stretched out below that is consumed with yet another stage of Afghanistan’s precarious history, the pending withdrawal of more recent foreign occupiers — the United States and its allies.
Like the pool, Kabul holds many glimpses of its Soviet past hidden in plain sight around its jumbled hillsides: a polytechnic school built in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union and the United States jostled for cold war influence in Afghanistan by building big infrastructure projects; or a car factory expanded after 1979, when the Soviet Army marched in to wrench this nation more forcefully into the Kremlin’s sphere of power and way of thinking.
The Soviets retreated in 1989, leaving Afghanistan to a civil war that swept up the Soviet-constructed edifices in the conflagration. However improbably, a few of these are still inhabited, like an engineering school, the Auto Mechanic Institute, where a second-year student in a green T-shirt picked his way one recent afternoon from the ghostly wreckage of bombed-out classrooms.
Others are simply wrecks, prowled only by the homeless, drug addicts and dogs — sobering artifacts that confront the United States and its allies as they begin pondering what their own legacy might be.
“The Soviets came in believing they could re-engineer other people’s societies, releasing Afghans from their medieval backwardness,” said Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow whose book “Afgantsy” is about the Soviet occupation. “They didn’t transform Afghan society any more than we are going to.”
In 1980s Kabul, the Soviet Embassy on Darulaman Road, bustling with technicians and ideologues, was the locus of power, just as the American Embassy across town is today.
The current Russian ambassador, Andrey Avetisyan, 51, worked here as a young diplomat during the 1980s. He was here, too, when things became dicey in the early 1990s: he spent 16 days hiding in a bomb shelter as the mujahedeen divided up Kabul, and he was one of the last Russians to flee Afghanistan, in August 1992.
An urbane man in a smart dark suit, Mr. Avetisyan cuts something of an isolated figure in the echoing halls of the reconstructed Russian Embassy, a third of its former size. The grounds were home to donkeys and nomads during the Taliban years, but they are now hidden from the highway behind a curtain of metal blast walls.
He has a plan to restore 150 of the Soviet-era infrastructure projects, starting with a housing construction factory on the outskirts of Kabul near the airport.
“These were projects that were kind of the basis of the Afghan economy,” Mr. Avetisyan said. “Now it is difficult for me to see the state they are in.”
The starkest illustration of thwarted imperial ambition is the Soviet House of Science and Culture, near the Russian Embassy and the Kabul zoo. It is a modern, angular, concrete hulk where Soviets and Afghans gathered for lectures, films and the propagation of modernizing ideas that for a while refashioned Kabul, including a time when women could work outside the home in Western clothing.
But during the civil war of 1992-96, the House of Science and Culture was occupied by one faction and wrecked as another lobbed shells down from a nearby hill. Today, the auditoriums are littered with rubble; cold air comes in through rocket holes; and once-bold Soviet murals of men and women, Afghans and Russians, are hidden in the squalid darkness near cartoon images depicting a Taliban fighter instructing children to become suicide bombers.
“This used to be very luxurious,” said Mohammad Elyas, a heavy man with a big smile who was more intent on parking cars on the waste ground outside for 20 Afghanis each (about 40 cents) than contemplating the cultural center. “It is nothing now.”
Not every legacy bequeathed by the Soviets is lost. The Silo, an industrial bakery, fed the national Afghan Army and police. During the civil war, fighters threw their enemies from its rooftops. But its grimy yellow towers are once again turning out so-called silo bread for hospitals and schools.
The most enduring physical presence might be the Mikrorayon, gray apartment blocks originally built for Soviet administrators and the Afghan elite that stand amid the central suburbs of Kabul.
Also bearing the bullet and shell marks of the battles of the 1990s, they are cramped, run-down and patched, with clothing lines stretching haphazardly from windows to nearby trees. But the Mikrorayon are still some of the most prized homes for Kabul’s educated and wealthier middle class — a fact reflected in the loud street billboards for cellphones and private schools, and in the presence of young women walking the sidewalks in leg-hugging jeans unencumbered by the traditional dress.
“It is a safe place,” said Shir Mohammad Basheer, 50, a school principal who was fixing his car outside the four-room apartment that he shares with his wife and six children. “We have running water. We have electricity. We have central heating.”
“To be honest, Russia did this great work for Afghanistan,” he said. “We have not seen anything big built by the international coalition.”
Many Afghans’ remembrance of the Soviet years is colored by this rosy nostalgia. But the grounds of a museum near the main stadium hold reminders of a bloodier legacy: mines, shells, rockets, helicopters and other tools the Soviets employed to suppress their own insurgency, leaving hundreds of thousands dead, a ghastlier toll than the coalition’s, if these things can be compared.
Still, Abdul Wahid Taqat, a K.G.B.-trained intelligence officer during the Soviet years and now a military analyst who lives in an apartment near the Mikrorayon, said that he believed a powerful army and a muscular government were a valuable legacy. They allowed President Muhammad Najibullah, the last Soviet-backed leader, to withstand the mujahedeen alone for three years after 1989 before Moscow finally cut off oil and other supplies.
Then, of course, Mr. Najibullah was beaten, shot and hanged from a traffic light by the Taliban in Kabul in 1996.
“They left a strong Afghanistan behind, but today’s government will not last as long,” Mr. Taqat said, referring to the Soviets.
Up on Swimming Pool Hill one recent evening, five police officers in blue uniforms took time off from their duties, dancing in a circle near the swimming pool, their outstretched arms swaying to Tajik music floating from the window of their Toyota Land Cruiser.
Watching them, another Afghan taking in the air, Harun Merzad, 34, who was jobless and wearing a black hat and a G-Star Raw jacket, spoke of the Americans’ impending departure, and of the Soviets’ before it, with indifference — as if it was inevitable that once again Afghanistan would revert to what it always had been.
“I don’t have anything bad to say,” he said of the Russians with a shrug. “Except they were infidels.”
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.
Afghan Minister of Immigration Accused of Employing Relatives
TOLOnews.com By Saleha Sadat Saturday, 11 February 2012
Afghan Senate House said on Saturday said that Afghan Minister of Immigration has employed some of his relatives in some positions in the ministry.
Head of the Afghan Senate's Complaints Commission, Zalmai Zabuli, presented some documents showing that some people who have been employed by the Afghan Ministry of Immirgration are not even literate enough to fit the positions.
Nematullah and Noor Murad are apparently two relatives of the minister who have been employed for the salary of 40 to 60,000 Afghanis as advisors to the ministry.
"The minister's niece who is from Andkhoi and does not have a command in Persian, Pashtu or Uzbek language, has been employed as marketing advisor, because he only speaks in English and Urdu languages and gets a salary of 60,000 Afghanis," Mr Zabuli said.
But Afghan Minister of Immigration, Jamahir Anwari, dismisses the claims saying that the staff have been employed based on the rules of the ministry and agreement of the ministry of finance.
"Three people who have been employed were interviewed by a commission consisted of a representative from the ministry and a representative from the UNHCR," Mr Anwari said.
Mr Zabuli said that some senators have also complained to the President about the issue.
It comes as some of the other Afghan government cabinet members have been accused of employing unqualified people and being involved in corruption.
Recently the Afghan Oversight and anti-corruption office said that 70 cases had been referred to the Attorney General's Office and that some ministers are also involved.
Around 251 corruption cases have been recorded out of which 32 cases referred to the Attorney General's Office, according to the Oversight office.
Lack of Internet Cuts Off Afghan Province
Education, journalism and other areas held back by technology gap in Uruzgan.
IWPR By Ahmad Shah Jawad 11 Feb 12
Afghanistan - Although internet access has increased in Afghanistan in recent years, people in the central Uruzgan province say they remain almost completely unconnected, leaving them isolated from the outside world.
About one million of Afghanistan’s 30 million inhabitants were online as of 2010, according to US-based internetworldstats.com, but officials say that in Uruzgan, one of the least developed provinces, hardly anyone has computer access.
Many students do not know what the internet is, while journalists told IWPR it is often impossible to report from Uruzgan because they cannot file stories electronically.
Provincial education officials have to communicate with Kabul via post, often waiting months for a reply, said Eid Mohammad Khan, deputy director of the provincial education department.
“We have to be provided with internet facilities. It would be a great help to government and non-government employees,” Khan said.
The province has few skilled teachers and no well-stocked library, he said, and educational opportunities are further hampered as students are unable to do research online and broaden their horizons.
“Nowadays, scientific information can be retrieved from the internet very fast,” Khan said. “All these problems could be solved if there was internet access.”
Ambitious students travel out of the province to spend two or three months learning IT skills elsewhere. One of them is high school graduate Samiollah, who recently returned from Kandahar in the south, which was an eye-opening experience for him.
“The internet is a different world. It is a unique teacher,” he said.
“Now I know how people behave in the rest in the world, and what direction we are moving in,” he said, expressing regret that young people in Uruzgan are missing out on knowledge and education.
Mohammad Yunus, who goes to the Saidal Khan High School in the provincial centre Tarin Kowt, said pupils like him had little chance of going on to university.
“We are very unfortunate in having neither professional teachers nor access to modern technology,” he said. “Universities won’t accept us because of these problems.”
Ezatollah, an 11th-grade school pupil in Tarin Kowt, laughed when asked whether he would like to access the internet.
“Brother, first explain to me what the internet is, and then I’ll tell you whether I am interested in using it,” he told IWPR.
Farid Ayel, head of the Uruzgan provincial press club, described how the lack of internet cafes hampered local journalists, who have to go round the handful of connected offices in Tarin Kowt asking permission to email their articles.
“Our press club doesn’t have internet yet.” he said. “Reporters file their stories and interviews by begging to use the internet in other offices. When they don’t get permission, they miss deadlines and their stories get stale. It’s a big problem.”
Local reporter Ajmal Wesal said the process of emailing stories was exhausting, and his articles would never see the light of day if no one would let him borrow their computer.
“Believe me, when I start work, I’m already really worried about how I will file my report and who I’ll ask to let me use the internet,” Wesal said.
A glimmer of hope recently appeared when the Afghanistan Research and Translation Centre attempted to open an internet cafe here. The centre sets up remote rural internet cafes in conjunction with local government, sharing the costs with it for the first year and training up local staff before handing the facility over to them.
Quite who is responsible for the project’s failure in Uruzgan is unclear, though the centre and local officials both blame each other. Centre director Abdollah Elham claimed that when he phoned deputy provincial governor Khodai Rahim about the project, he refused to cooperate.
But Rahim said he would like to see an internet cafe established, and denied that the phone call ever took place.
“What Elham said is not true. If he wants [to set up a cafe] we are prepared to cooperate with him by all means,” Rahim said. “We look forward to having people in Uruzgan who will work for the next generation and improve their abilities.”
Gholam Nabi Olfat, director of the provincial government’s culture and information department, said he would happily have helped establish an internet cafe, but Elham never contacted him.
Elham conceded that he had not done so, but thought this was unnecessary as he was already contacting the governor’s office.
“If Uruzgan’s culture department is really prepared to help, we are prepared to send our team to the province again,” he said.
Uruzgan residents said they were frustrated by the delay, and were paying the price for the lack of modern technology.
Yunus said that without basic IT skills, students stand little chance of finding work.
“In future, all work is going to depend on computers and the internet, but we lack both,” he said. “When we graduate from high school, we won’t know anything. Nobody will employ us. So we will have given 12 years of our lives for nothing.”
Ahmad Shah Jawad is an IWPR trainee reporter in Uruzgan province.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Feb. 12 (Xinhua) -- Security forces have arrested five Taliban insurgents including a would-be suicide bomber child who was set free in Kabul months ago, the department of National Directorate for Security (NDS) said in Kandahar on Sunday.
"We have arrested five rebels including three armed Taliban rebels and two suicide bomber children," an official with the NDS department or intelligence agency told newsmen here.
He also showed the arrested men including the two would-be suicide bomber teens to the journalists. However, he did not reveal his name nor the exact date of the arrest of the insurgents.
"Taliban recruited me last year to target foreign troops but police arrested me and President Karzai set me free and sent to an orphanage in Kabul. After passing sometimes there, I managed to flee and tried to target foreign forces again but again I was captured," 10-year-old Azizullah told newsmen.
He also said that he is from Paktia's provincial capital Gardez city. Talking about his relations with Taliban, the boy said, "Some Taliban last year, one day strapped a vest with some electric wires around my body and told me to press the button when you meet foreign soldiers on the streets or bazaar."
"By pressing the button several soldiers will be killed and then you return home," Azizullah further said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai had ordered the release of some 20 would-be suicide bomber children ranging between 8 to 17 years old in August 2011.
Another child who introduced himself Nasibullah also in talks with journalists said that Taliban militants had recruited him to target American forces.
"I along my family used to live in Pishin area of Balouchistan, Pakistan and used to study in a Madressa (religious school) there. One day Taliban recruited me and took me to Afghanistan. They provided training to me in Band-e-Timor area of Miwand district and after few days they took me to a road and told me to detonate whenever the foreign soldiers passing the road and then return home," Nasibullah, 11 told newsmen.
Taliban militants who staged a violent comeback in 2006 and fighting Afghan and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan have been largely relying on suicide attacks and roadside bombings.
The remaining three adult captured men also in talks with the journalists confirmed to their link with Taliban outfit.
The truth about Taliban 'reintegration'
The much-vaunted "reintegration" of the Taliban, which Britain has funded with £7 million, is not quite what it seems, writes Ben Farmer in Kabul.
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 11 Feb 2012
Kabul - Wrapped in shawls against the cold, some with scarves to hide their faces, the men stand in front of a table bearing an arsenal of assault rifles and rockets.
As the insurgents renounce their armed struggle and declare they have made peace with Hamid Karzai's government, local journalists film the ceremony for the evening television.
Such scenes are now a common feature of Afghan news bulletins and portray one of the main pillars of Nato's strategy to overpower the Taliban and force them to the negotiating table prior to the planned exit by US and British forces.
However, The Sunday Telegraph has discovered disturbing evidence that all is not as it seems.
New figures have now shown that over the last 18 months the "reintegration" scheme which Britain has funded with £7 million has attracted only 19 militants in Helmand province, where British troops are fighting.
And in at least one Afghan province, the insurgents pledging to change their ways and uphold the Afghan constitution were not what they seemed, officials have disclosed.
Some 200 insurgents in the northern province of Sar-e Pol have recently been struck off the programme, officials told The Sunday Telegraph, because checks subsequently found they were not genuine fighters but instead imposters seeking cash handouts.
The news will not surprise the scheme's sceptics who allege that Western tax-payers are being duped by criminals, the unemployed and corrupt local officials while the real fighters stay in the conflict, or only join the government temporarily.
A leaked Nato report earlier this month also appeared to cast doubt on the very premise of the reintegration programme - that Taliban fighters are tired, motivated by money and want a way out.
Interrogators who have questioned thousands of insurgent prisoners in the past year reported instead that they remain motivated, feel their support is rising and their victory inevitable as foreign troops withdraw.
Fighters in Helmand, where the great majority of Britain's 397 dead have been killed, remain too afraid of their comrades in the Taliban to publicly relinquish the struggle and join the scheme despite security gains in the province, Nato and Afghan officials said.
Under the scheme, agreed two years ago at the London conference on Afghanistan, fighters are offered amnesty, training, jobs and aid for their villages if they leave the insurgency.
Around 3,000 men have joined nationwide in the past 18 months, but figures show the take-up in the southern and eastern strongholds of Taliban support, including in Helmand were Britain has been fighting for six years, has been negligible compared to that in the relatively peaceful north.
Nato officers insist that the low figures do not reflect the unknown number of fighters who are quietly laying aside their weapons without publicity and settling their differences with Hamid Karzai's government.
Major General David Hook, the British officer who leads Nato support for the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme (APRP), said the numbers painted only a partial picture.
"They don't want to come in, because they are afraid that coming in to us exposes them to the threat of the Taliban," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "At the moment some of them are more afraid of the Taliban than they are of being killed or captured.
"The question here is how many people have done what Afghans traditionally do when they get tired of fighting. They have just gone home, laid their weapons aside and gone back to normal society. This informal effect is difficult to measure."
British commanders point to lower levels of violence in districts such as Nad-e Ali as proof that fighters must be relinquishing the fight. But critics say the scheme is not working where it is most needed.
Pressure for a breakthrough is likely to increase as the 2014 deadline for withdrawal of international combat troops approaches, increasing anxiety over how the Afghan security forces will hold up when in charge.
Politicians in the US and elsewhere - in several cases facing imminent elections - are under pressure to speed the drawdown of troops.
Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, said last week he wanted America to switch to mainly training missions by the middle of next year, and France has promised to hasten its exit as Nicholas Sarkozy faces a tough presidential election campaign this spring.
Diplomatic efforts have focused on trying to open channels to the Taliban's ruling council, most recently by agreeing a political office in Qatar, in the hope of one day helping Mr Karzai's government reach a political deal or "grand bargain".
Envoys in Kabul hope tentative talks may begin within weeks in the Gulf State, though even the most optimistic stress any resulting peace process would probably take years.
Marc Grossman, American special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, reportedly met Taliban negotiators in Qatar late last month.
One of the most imminent obstacles he faces is a Taliban demand that five of their leaders are transferred from Guantanamo Bay prison, where they have been held for a decade, as a confidence-building measure.
Mr Grossman has said no decision has been made, but the concession faces growing resistance from American congressmen.
At the other end of the scale, the APRP and Maj Gen Hook aim to weaken the insurgency by drawing away lowly fighters motivated more by unemployment and local grievances than ideology, or who are weary after years of fighting.
Donors have set up a trust fund of £92 million, including £7 million from Britain, to fund it.
The money pays for Afghan officials to reach out to fighters in their area and then provide a monthly stipend of around £100 as well as training and jobs to those who want to settle, plus aid to their villages.
Such reintegration is unlikely until a broader peace deal is reached, some critics argue. Fighters will not defect piecemeal until their comrades also stop fighting and they are free from the threat of reprisal, their argument goes.
Maj Gen Hook disagrees, saying the two approaches feed off each other.
"The more we can integrate, the more we undermine the coherence of the various organisations, the more likely we are to have talks, because we are taking the wind from their sails," he explained.
Another fear is that those joining the scheme are either not real fighters, or are only joining temporarily to gain a respite from the coalition surge.
Such concerns stem from memories of similar reintegration ceremonies in the late 1980s when Najibullah, the Soviet-backed president, tried to persuade the Mujahideen to give up their struggle, often with large sums of money.
A running joke at the time was that the same men could be seen handing in their weapons each week.
Maj Gen Hook rejects the possibility the same is still happening and said greater vetting had been brought in. Anyone wanting to join the scheme is now verified locally and then again by Afghan defence and security officials in Kabul.
Eye and fingerprint scans are taken so they cannot try re-joining later on.
He admits the rush to set up the scheme had caused problems at first and it was still "of variable quality".
But the programme was now running at "warp speed", he said, and the 200 Sar-e Pol cases proved new vetting checks were weeding out fakes.
He said: "Because we hadn't established a proper vetting process, they were all accepted into the programme and for the past nine to ten months, it's been a constant issue, because when we vetted them nationally, we realised that they weren't all bona fide insurgents.
"The double vetting has been to take away stuffing the programme with local cronies and to make sure that the people who come in are insurgents and not just common criminals, which was I think a justifiable criticism at the start of the programme." The Sar-e Pol imposters had not been given any of the £100 per month allowance, he said.
"I am reasonably confident the Afghans have a robust process because they turn people away all the time," he added.
Syed Anwar Ahmadti, governor of Sar-e Pol, said more than 600 insurgents had joined the government in his province in the past year and confirmed that 200 had subsequently been judged fraudulent.
He however disagrees with that ruling, made in Kabul, and believes that the men had been fighting the government. The decision not to pay them will discourage others from laying aside their weapons, he said.
"It doesn't matter if they don't have guns, they were helping the insurgency in logistics or some other capacity, without guns." Sceptics allege the "insurgents" are in some cases only local men who are rounded up and given old weapons to hand in, so that local officials can appear efficient while also raking off a share of the reintegration money.
Syed Obadullah Sadat, a council member from the eastern province of Ghazni has publicly denounced a defection last month by more than a dozen fighters as a sham.
He said: "The process is fake, people are doing it for money. It's all just for show, it's nothing. These people are told to show up with a few old guns so it looks like a success."
Dr Ghani Bahadari, the Afghan official in Ghazni who runs the scheme, rejected the criticism as "gossip".
He said: "The reason they joined the government is that their leaders have established an office in Qatar and showed their interest in peace. They have also told us they are tired of war."
Judge killed, 4 family members injured in E. Afghanistan attack
JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Feb. 12 (Xinhua) -- Unidentified gunmen shot dead a judge and injured four of his family members Saturday night in an attack in the country's eastern province of Nangarhar, a district chief said on Sunday.
"Unknown armed men broke into the house of Judge Mohammad Basir in Khogyani district Saturday night, killing Basir on the spot and injuring four of his family members," administration chief of the district, Mohammad Hassan, told Xinhua.
He said Basir was serving as a judge in neighboring Kunar province but was visiting his family in Khogyani district.
The official said the attackers fled the scene, adding the injured included two children and two women.
Motive behind the killing was not known. No group claim responsibility for the attack so far.
Civilian casualties have increased for a fifth successive year as a total of 3,021 Afghan civilians were killed in 2011, a 8 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to a UN annual report released earlier this month.
The 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.
Targeted killings of civilians by anti-government militants also increased in 2011, as the UN mission in Afghanistan recorded 495 such killings across the country last year.
Afghan Parliament to Summon Minister of Interior
TOLOnews.com By Saleha Sadat Saturday, 11 February 2012
Some of the members of the Afghan House of Representatives on Saturday said that the Afghan Minister of Interior, Besmellah Mohammadi, should be summoned over the recent Nato attack in Kapisa.
The House of Representatives wants to summon the Afghan Minister of Interior over the killing of 8 Afghan children in a Nato air strike in Kapisa province.
The Afghan MPs blame what has happened on the local police appointed by the Afghan Interior Ministry in Kapisa province.
Afghan MPs said that Afghan Ministry of Interior should coordinate all operations with foreign forces.
On Wednesday eight Afghan children were killed in a Nato air strike in Kapisa province.
Nato has not provided details of the operation.
MPs accuse the Minister of Interior of not being able to pay attention to ensure security in some of the provinces.
"The Minister of Interior is the murderer of these eight Afghan children and the Minister has to be summoned to the parliament, Mohammada Iqbal Safi, a representative of Kapisa province, said.
The Afghan House Speaker Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi also condemned that attack by French forces in Kapisa province that resulted in the killing of eight Afghan children who were reportedly grazing sheep in the area.
The The UN's Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) recently said that more than 3,021 Afghans have been killed in 2011 conflict.
The deaths in 2011 compared with 2,790 in 2010 and 2,412 in 2009 showed that most of the deaths were caused by insurgents, the report found.
It was the fifth straight year that the toll has risen, with a total of 11,864 civilian lives claimed by the conflict since 2007.
Taliban-led insurgents caused 77 percent of the deaths last year, up to 14 percent from 2010, while Nato-led and Afghan government forces were responsible for killing 410 civilians -14 percent of the total, it added.
The UN said that improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being used more widely and suicide attacks had become deadlier.
"The tactics of choice of anti-government elements subjected Afghan civilians to death and injury with increasingly lethal results in 2011," it said.
The report also said that civilian deaths in air strikes in support of the Afghan government rose in 2011.
"Afghan children, women and men continue to be killed in this war in ever-increasing numbers," the UN Special Representative in Afghanistan Jan Kubis recently said.
The UN Human Rights committee is worried over the civilian casualties that continued to rise year after year.
It comes as Nato is due to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014 after Afghan security forces will take over full security responsibility.
There are around 130,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 90,000 of them are US forces fighting insurgents.
Afghanistan denies Taliban army infiltration systemic
ABC News February 12, 2012
The Afghan government has downplayed a rogue soldier's claims that more Afghan army trainees are ready to launch deadly attacks against coalition soldiers.
In a video posted online by a jihadi network this week, Mohammed Rozi - an army trainee who shot and seriously wounded three Australians who were training him in Uruzgan province in November - said many of his colleagues dreamed of committing similar attacks.
Rozi, who escaped after the attack, falsely boasted in the video that he had killed 12 Australian soldiers.
But Afghan government spokesman Dr Hakim Asher says despite the claims in the video, the chances of similar attacks remains small.
"That is not a huge problem for Afghanistan. We believe that there were some mistakes and those mistakes are very few," he said.
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson agrees, saying such attacks are rare and are designed to breed mistrust.
"We have to take great care in recruitment in registering young men into the forces, but it is not systemic and it is not threatening and it will not stop our progress," he said.
Australian confidence in the mission in Afghanistan reached a new low last year when Rozi opened fire on the troops that were training him.
It was not clear what motivated the attack or whether he had been working with terrorist groups.
Now, the extensive video interview with Rozi answers some of these questions.
The video reveals the attack was carefully premeditated, with Rozi taking the time to watch his targets through binoculars before opening fire.
He said the Australian troops at the patrol base he shot were not armed.
He revealed he had initially been working alone, but was quickly taken in by the Taliban after fleeing the scene in a stolen humvee.
Rozi said he wanted to teach the troops a lesson and that Muslims in Afghanistan would not accept the presence of foreigners. 'Disgusting' video
Speaking during a tour of flood-hit parts of Queensland on Saturday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard described the video as "disgusting propaganda".
"The fact that there's this disgusting anti-Australian propaganda anywhere in the world is offensive to me and to all Australians," she said.
"It's aimed at trust, that's exactly what it's aimed - at denting our will.
"Well no amount of propaganda is going to dent our will at getting this mission done."
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott also spoke out about the video, saying Australians have every right to feel disgusted by the boasting.
He described it as a message designed to undermine Australia's confidence.
"Our enemies are trying to exaggerate their strength," he said.
The attack on the Australian soldiers in November was the third by a Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier in 2011, and came 10 days after three Australians were killed and seven were wounded when another Afghan soldier turned his weapon on his trainers.
In May, one Australian soldier was killed when a member of the ANA opened fire.
Risks of Afghan War Shift From Soldiers to Contractors
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND February 11, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Even dying is being outsourced here.
This is a war where traditional military jobs, from mess hall cooks to base guards and convoy drivers, have increasingly been shifted to the private sector. Many American generals and diplomats have private contractors for their personal bodyguards. And along with the risks have come the consequences: More civilian contractors working for American companies than American soldiers died in Afghanistan last year for the first time during the war.
American employers here are under no obligation to publicly report the deaths of their employees and frequently do not. While the military announces the names of all its war dead, private companies routinely notify only family members. Most of the contractors die unheralded and uncounted — and in some cases, leave their survivors uncompensated.
“By continuing to outsource high-risk jobs that were previously performed by soldiers, the military, in effect, is privatizing the ultimate sacrifice,” said Steven L. Schooner, a law professor at George Washington University who has studied the civilian casualties issue.
Last year, at least 430 employees of American contractors were reported killed in Afghanistan: 386 working for the Defense Department, 43 for the United States Agency for International Development and one for the State Department, according to data provided by the American Embassy in Kabul and publicly available in part from the United States Department of Labor.
By comparison, 418 American soldiers died in Afghanistan last year, according to Defense Department statistics compiled by icasualties.org, an independent organization that monitors war deaths.
That trend has been growing for the past several years in Afghanistan, and it parallels a similar trend in Iraq, where contractor deaths exceeded military deaths as long ago as 2009. In Iraq, however, that took place as the number of American troops was being drastically reduced until their complete withdrawal at the end of last year. And last year, more soldiers than private contractors died in Iraq (54 compared with 41, according to Labor Department figures).
Experts who have studied the phenomenon say that because many contractors do not comply with even the current, scanty reporting requirements, the true number of private contractor deaths may be far higher. “No one believes we’re underreporting military deaths,” Mr. Schooner said. “Everyone believes we’re underreporting contractor deaths.”
Qais Mansoori, 20, may have been among the uncounted. An Afghan interpreter employed by Mission Essential Personnel, a leading provider of interpreters in Afghanistan, Mr. Mansoori was killed along with five other interpreters when Taliban insurgents overran the military base where the interpreters were staying in the Mirwais district of Kandahar Province in July 2010.
That attack, typically, was scantily reported, since no soldiers died — although the death toll was 17, including an unidentified American civilian, according to Afghan officials and Mr. Mansoori’s friends and family.
Under the federal Defense Base Act, American defense contractors are obliged to report the war zone deaths and injuries of their employees — including subcontractors and foreign workers — to the Department of Labor, and to carry insurance that will provide the employees with medical care and compensation. In the case of foreign employees, which many of the dead were, survivors generally receive a death benefit equal to half of the employee’s salary for life; American employees get even more.
Mr. Mansoori’s brother, Mohammad, 35, an employee of a mine-removal charity in Afghanistan, said his brother’s employer, Mission Essential Personnel, promptly contacted the family and made a lump sum payment of $10,004, never mentioning the lifetime annuity to which they were entitled — which given Mr. Mansoori’s salary of $800 a month would have been closer to $150,000 over his survivors’ lifetimes. “I wish he was still here to look after my father and mother,” Mohammad Mansoori said. Their father is blind, and Qais Mansoori was his parents’ sole support, he said.
A spokesman for Mission Essential Personnel, Sean Rushton, disputed that, saying that his company has been making biweekly payments of $190 to Mr. Mansoori’s family and will continue doing so for 29 years. The $10,004 lump sum payment was a voluntary death gratuity paid by the company, Mr. Rushton said.
There were 113,491 employees of defense contractors in Afghanistan as of January 2012, compared with about 90,000 American soldiers, according to Defense Department statistics. Of those, 25,287, or about 22 percent of the employees, were American citizens, with 47 percent Afghans and 31 percent from other countries.
The bulk of the known contractor deaths are concentrated among a handful of major companies, particularly those providing interpreters, drivers, security guards and other support personnel who are particularly vulnerable to attacks.
The biggest contractor in terms of war zone deaths is apparently the defense giant L-3 Communications. If L-3 were a country, it would have the third highest loss of life in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq; only the United States and Britain would exceed it in fatalities.
Over the past 10 years, L-3 and its subsidiaries, including Titan Corporation and MPRI Inc., had at least 370 workers killed and 1,789 seriously wounded or injured through the end of 2011 in Iraq and Afghanistan, records show. In a statement, a spokeswoman for L-3, Jennifer Barton, said: “L-3 is proud to have the opportunity to support the U.S. and coalition efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We mourn the loss of life of these dedicated men and women.”
Other American companies with a high number of fatalities are Supreme Group, a catering company, with 241 dead through the end of 2011; Service Employees International, another catering company, with 125 dead; and security companies like DynCorps (101 dead), Aegis (86 dead) and Hart Group (63 dead). In all, according to Labor Department data, 64 American companies have lost more than seven employees each in the past 10 years.
The American dead have included people like James McLaughlin, 55, who trained pilots on a contract for MPRI and was killed by a rogue Afghan pilot who also killed eight American soldiers last April; and Todd Walker, Michael Clawson and James Scott Ozier, employees of AAR Airlift, who were killed in a helicopter crash in Helmand Province last month for which Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility.
For every contractor who is killed, many more are seriously wounded. According to the Labor Department’s statistics, 1,777 American contractors in Afghanistan were injured or wounded seriously enough to miss more than four days of work last year.
Marcie Hascall Clark began the Defense Base Act Compensation Blog after her husband, Merlin, a former Navy explosives ordnance disposal expert, was injured in 2003 while working for an American contractor. She and her husband have spent the past seven years fighting for hundreds of thousands of dollars in disability payments and medical compensation. “It was quite a shock to learn how little my husband’s body, mind and future were worth,” she said.
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Four Tajik Citizens Killed In Afghanistan Crash
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty February 12, 2012 By RFE/RL's Tajik Service
A transport helicopter has crashed in southern Afghanistan, killing all four people onboard.
The incident occurred on February 11 in Zabul Province.
Deputy Provincial Governor Mohammad Jon Rasolyar told RFE/RL that the four dead -- three men and one woman -- were citizens from Tajikistan who were working for Supreme Food, a logistics company under contract to NATO.
He said the helicopter crashed due to bad weather and a "technical problem."
Last year, two Tajik pilots of the Pamir Air company died in a plane crash in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, a Soviet Past Lies in Ruins
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY February 11, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - As poignant in its imperial ambition as in its otherworldliness, the Soviet-era swimming pool atop Swimming Pool Hill here is as good a symbol as any of the doubtful legacy of empires.
Dug 30 years ago, it was barely ever used by Kabul’s swimmers, as the hill became entangled in barbed wire, first a gun placement for the Soviets and then the Taliban, before the whole area was bombarded by Western firepower in the 2001 invasion.
Now restored, its five diving boards hang pointlessly above an empty pool and an indifferent city stretched out below that is consumed with yet another stage of Afghanistan’s precarious history, the pending withdrawal of more recent foreign occupiers — the United States and its allies.
Like the pool, Kabul holds many glimpses of its Soviet past hidden in plain sight around its jumbled hillsides: a polytechnic school built in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union and the United States jostled for cold war influence in Afghanistan by building big infrastructure projects; or a car factory expanded after 1979, when the Soviet Army marched in to wrench this nation more forcefully into the Kremlin’s sphere of power and way of thinking.
The Soviets retreated in 1989, leaving Afghanistan to a civil war that swept up the Soviet-constructed edifices in the conflagration. However improbably, a few of these are still inhabited, like an engineering school, the Auto Mechanic Institute, where a second-year student in a green T-shirt picked his way one recent afternoon from the ghostly wreckage of bombed-out classrooms.
Others are simply wrecks, prowled only by the homeless, drug addicts and dogs — sobering artifacts that confront the United States and its allies as they begin pondering what their own legacy might be.
“The Soviets came in believing they could re-engineer other people’s societies, releasing Afghans from their medieval backwardness,” said Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow whose book “Afgantsy” is about the Soviet occupation. “They didn’t transform Afghan society any more than we are going to.”
In 1980s Kabul, the Soviet Embassy on Darulaman Road, bustling with technicians and ideologues, was the locus of power, just as the American Embassy across town is today.
The current Russian ambassador, Andrey Avetisyan, 51, worked here as a young diplomat during the 1980s. He was here, too, when things became dicey in the early 1990s: he spent 16 days hiding in a bomb shelter as the mujahedeen divided up Kabul, and he was one of the last Russians to flee Afghanistan, in August 1992.
An urbane man in a smart dark suit, Mr. Avetisyan cuts something of an isolated figure in the echoing halls of the reconstructed Russian Embassy, a third of its former size. The grounds were home to donkeys and nomads during the Taliban years, but they are now hidden from the highway behind a curtain of metal blast walls.
He has a plan to restore 150 of the Soviet-era infrastructure projects, starting with a housing construction factory on the outskirts of Kabul near the airport.
“These were projects that were kind of the basis of the Afghan economy,” Mr. Avetisyan said. “Now it is difficult for me to see the state they are in.”
The starkest illustration of thwarted imperial ambition is the Soviet House of Science and Culture, near the Russian Embassy and the Kabul zoo. It is a modern, angular, concrete hulk where Soviets and Afghans gathered for lectures, films and the propagation of modernizing ideas that for a while refashioned Kabul, including a time when women could work outside the home in Western clothing.
But during the civil war of 1992-96, the House of Science and Culture was occupied by one faction and wrecked as another lobbed shells down from a nearby hill. Today, the auditoriums are littered with rubble; cold air comes in through rocket holes; and once-bold Soviet murals of men and women, Afghans and Russians, are hidden in the squalid darkness near cartoon images depicting a Taliban fighter instructing children to become suicide bombers.
“This used to be very luxurious,” said Mohammad Elyas, a heavy man with a big smile who was more intent on parking cars on the waste ground outside for 20 Afghanis each (about 40 cents) than contemplating the cultural center. “It is nothing now.”
Not every legacy bequeathed by the Soviets is lost. The Silo, an industrial bakery, fed the national Afghan Army and police. During the civil war, fighters threw their enemies from its rooftops. But its grimy yellow towers are once again turning out so-called silo bread for hospitals and schools.
The most enduring physical presence might be the Mikrorayon, gray apartment blocks originally built for Soviet administrators and the Afghan elite that stand amid the central suburbs of Kabul.
Also bearing the bullet and shell marks of the battles of the 1990s, they are cramped, run-down and patched, with clothing lines stretching haphazardly from windows to nearby trees. But the Mikrorayon are still some of the most prized homes for Kabul’s educated and wealthier middle class — a fact reflected in the loud street billboards for cellphones and private schools, and in the presence of young women walking the sidewalks in leg-hugging jeans unencumbered by the traditional dress.
“It is a safe place,” said Shir Mohammad Basheer, 50, a school principal who was fixing his car outside the four-room apartment that he shares with his wife and six children. “We have running water. We have electricity. We have central heating.”
“To be honest, Russia did this great work for Afghanistan,” he said. “We have not seen anything big built by the international coalition.”
Many Afghans’ remembrance of the Soviet years is colored by this rosy nostalgia. But the grounds of a museum near the main stadium hold reminders of a bloodier legacy: mines, shells, rockets, helicopters and other tools the Soviets employed to suppress their own insurgency, leaving hundreds of thousands dead, a ghastlier toll than the coalition’s, if these things can be compared.
Still, Abdul Wahid Taqat, a K.G.B.-trained intelligence officer during the Soviet years and now a military analyst who lives in an apartment near the Mikrorayon, said that he believed a powerful army and a muscular government were a valuable legacy. They allowed President Muhammad Najibullah, the last Soviet-backed leader, to withstand the mujahedeen alone for three years after 1989 before Moscow finally cut off oil and other supplies.
Then, of course, Mr. Najibullah was beaten, shot and hanged from a traffic light by the Taliban in Kabul in 1996.
“They left a strong Afghanistan behind, but today’s government will not last as long,” Mr. Taqat said, referring to the Soviets.
Up on Swimming Pool Hill one recent evening, five police officers in blue uniforms took time off from their duties, dancing in a circle near the swimming pool, their outstretched arms swaying to Tajik music floating from the window of their Toyota Land Cruiser.
Watching them, another Afghan taking in the air, Harun Merzad, 34, who was jobless and wearing a black hat and a G-Star Raw jacket, spoke of the Americans’ impending departure, and of the Soviets’ before it, with indifference — as if it was inevitable that once again Afghanistan would revert to what it always had been.
“I don’t have anything bad to say,” he said of the Russians with a shrug. “Except they were infidels.”
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.
Afghan Minister of Immigration Accused of Employing Relatives
TOLOnews.com By Saleha Sadat Saturday, 11 February 2012
Afghan Senate House said on Saturday said that Afghan Minister of Immigration has employed some of his relatives in some positions in the ministry.
Head of the Afghan Senate's Complaints Commission, Zalmai Zabuli, presented some documents showing that some people who have been employed by the Afghan Ministry of Immirgration are not even literate enough to fit the positions.
Nematullah and Noor Murad are apparently two relatives of the minister who have been employed for the salary of 40 to 60,000 Afghanis as advisors to the ministry.
"The minister's niece who is from Andkhoi and does not have a command in Persian, Pashtu or Uzbek language, has been employed as marketing advisor, because he only speaks in English and Urdu languages and gets a salary of 60,000 Afghanis," Mr Zabuli said.
But Afghan Minister of Immigration, Jamahir Anwari, dismisses the claims saying that the staff have been employed based on the rules of the ministry and agreement of the ministry of finance.
"Three people who have been employed were interviewed by a commission consisted of a representative from the ministry and a representative from the UNHCR," Mr Anwari said.
Mr Zabuli said that some senators have also complained to the President about the issue.
It comes as some of the other Afghan government cabinet members have been accused of employing unqualified people and being involved in corruption.
Recently the Afghan Oversight and anti-corruption office said that 70 cases had been referred to the Attorney General's Office and that some ministers are also involved.
Around 251 corruption cases have been recorded out of which 32 cases referred to the Attorney General's Office, according to the Oversight office.
Lack of Internet Cuts Off Afghan Province
Education, journalism and other areas held back by technology gap in Uruzgan.
IWPR By Ahmad Shah Jawad 11 Feb 12
Afghanistan - Although internet access has increased in Afghanistan in recent years, people in the central Uruzgan province say they remain almost completely unconnected, leaving them isolated from the outside world.
About one million of Afghanistan’s 30 million inhabitants were online as of 2010, according to US-based internetworldstats.com, but officials say that in Uruzgan, one of the least developed provinces, hardly anyone has computer access.
Many students do not know what the internet is, while journalists told IWPR it is often impossible to report from Uruzgan because they cannot file stories electronically.
Provincial education officials have to communicate with Kabul via post, often waiting months for a reply, said Eid Mohammad Khan, deputy director of the provincial education department.
“We have to be provided with internet facilities. It would be a great help to government and non-government employees,” Khan said.
The province has few skilled teachers and no well-stocked library, he said, and educational opportunities are further hampered as students are unable to do research online and broaden their horizons.
“Nowadays, scientific information can be retrieved from the internet very fast,” Khan said. “All these problems could be solved if there was internet access.”
Ambitious students travel out of the province to spend two or three months learning IT skills elsewhere. One of them is high school graduate Samiollah, who recently returned from Kandahar in the south, which was an eye-opening experience for him.
“The internet is a different world. It is a unique teacher,” he said.
“Now I know how people behave in the rest in the world, and what direction we are moving in,” he said, expressing regret that young people in Uruzgan are missing out on knowledge and education.
Mohammad Yunus, who goes to the Saidal Khan High School in the provincial centre Tarin Kowt, said pupils like him had little chance of going on to university.
“We are very unfortunate in having neither professional teachers nor access to modern technology,” he said. “Universities won’t accept us because of these problems.”
Ezatollah, an 11th-grade school pupil in Tarin Kowt, laughed when asked whether he would like to access the internet.
“Brother, first explain to me what the internet is, and then I’ll tell you whether I am interested in using it,” he told IWPR.
Farid Ayel, head of the Uruzgan provincial press club, described how the lack of internet cafes hampered local journalists, who have to go round the handful of connected offices in Tarin Kowt asking permission to email their articles.
“Our press club doesn’t have internet yet.” he said. “Reporters file their stories and interviews by begging to use the internet in other offices. When they don’t get permission, they miss deadlines and their stories get stale. It’s a big problem.”
Local reporter Ajmal Wesal said the process of emailing stories was exhausting, and his articles would never see the light of day if no one would let him borrow their computer.
“Believe me, when I start work, I’m already really worried about how I will file my report and who I’ll ask to let me use the internet,” Wesal said.
A glimmer of hope recently appeared when the Afghanistan Research and Translation Centre attempted to open an internet cafe here. The centre sets up remote rural internet cafes in conjunction with local government, sharing the costs with it for the first year and training up local staff before handing the facility over to them.
Quite who is responsible for the project’s failure in Uruzgan is unclear, though the centre and local officials both blame each other. Centre director Abdollah Elham claimed that when he phoned deputy provincial governor Khodai Rahim about the project, he refused to cooperate.
But Rahim said he would like to see an internet cafe established, and denied that the phone call ever took place.
“What Elham said is not true. If he wants [to set up a cafe] we are prepared to cooperate with him by all means,” Rahim said. “We look forward to having people in Uruzgan who will work for the next generation and improve their abilities.”
Gholam Nabi Olfat, director of the provincial government’s culture and information department, said he would happily have helped establish an internet cafe, but Elham never contacted him.
Elham conceded that he had not done so, but thought this was unnecessary as he was already contacting the governor’s office.
“If Uruzgan’s culture department is really prepared to help, we are prepared to send our team to the province again,” he said.
Uruzgan residents said they were frustrated by the delay, and were paying the price for the lack of modern technology.
Yunus said that without basic IT skills, students stand little chance of finding work.
“In future, all work is going to depend on computers and the internet, but we lack both,” he said. “When we graduate from high school, we won’t know anything. Nobody will employ us. So we will have given 12 years of our lives for nothing.”
Ahmad Shah Jawad is an IWPR trainee reporter in Uruzgan province.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com