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U.S. Pulls Out Advisers After Two Killed in Kabul
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM And HABIB KHAN TOTAKHIL FEBRUARY 26, 2012
KABUL - The U.S. commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan pulled scores of advisers from Afghan ministries after two high-ranking American military officers were gunned down Saturday at the nation's Interior Ministry headquarters.
U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen ordered the unprecedented move after an American colonel and major were both found shot in the head at the busy Interior Ministry compound that is the nerve center for the Afghan law enforcement, according to one Western official in Kabul.
"We are investigating the crime and we will pursue all leads to find the person responsible for this attack," Gen. Allen said in a statement. "The perpetrator of this attack is a coward whose actions will not go unanswered."
Afghan and American officials shut down the ministry compound in central Kabul as they launched an investigation into the killings in one of the most heavily guarded parts of the capital.
Top U.S. military officials said they were still trying to determine the identity of the attacker. But one Western official in Kabul said that the two Americans were shot by an Afghan police official who was upset about the burning of Qurans earlier this week at a U.S. military base.
Hours after the shooting, the Taliban issued a statement claiming that the attacker was an insurgent infiltrator who killed the Americans in retaliation for the Quran burning. In the statement, the Taliban said the assailant called to inform the insurgent group that he had carried out the attack and was unharmed.
Details of the incident remained sketchy.
Coalition officials in Kabul dismissed claims by some Afghan officials that the two Americans were killed by a Western colleague.
Sediq Sediqqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the two American military officers were found dead in a secure office on the compound by one of their colleagues. It remained unclear who killed the pair, or how the attacker got inside the well-protected part of the ministry, he said.
But other Afghan, Western diplomatic and military officials said that initial reports indicated that the gunman was a member of the Afghan security forces.
In a separate incident Thursday, an Afghan soldier shot and killed two U.S. soldiers at a small military base in eastern Afghanistan. The attacker escaped through a crowd of anti-Quran burning demonstrators outside the base.
Saturday's killings have rung new alarms about the damaging impact of the Quran burning on the military mission in Afghanistan. They also raised new questions about the dangers faced by U.S. and coalition forces from their Afghan military partners.
More than 77 coalition troops have been killed by Afghan colleagues in the last five years. Three-quarters of those have taken place in the last two years.
Saturday's confrontation in Kabul came as thousands of demonstrators unsuccessfully tried to storm the United Nations compound in the northeastern city of Kunduz. At least five people were killed as protesters, some armed with guns, converged on the U.N offices, according to the provincial governor's office.
Though no demonstrations were reported Saturday in Kabul, elsewhere in the country fury over the attempt by coalition soldiers to incinerate a truckload of Islamic books, including copies of the Quran, at Bagram Airfield showed no signs of diminishing.
In a wave of unrest now in its fifth day, protesters are targeting Afghan government buildings and Western offices.
At least 30 people have been killed since Tuesday. Southern Afghanistan—the heartland of the Taliban insurgency—has been the only part of the country to avoid deadly confrontations so far.
American officials have tried to contain Afghan outrage by issuing repeated apologies and launching a swift investigation into the incident.
U.S. President Barack Obama apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a personal letter.
U.S. officials have called the Quran burning a serious mistake. Gen. Allen also called for all forces to undergo quick training on the proper way to handle Islamic religious books.
U.S. military officials have said the books were set aside for destruction because Afghan detainees at the Parwan military detention center at Bagram were using them to trade messages and share extremist writing.
But it remains unclear why the soldiers decided to burn copies of the Quran—a particularly incendiary affront to Muslims who view the book as the sacred word of God as relayed to the Prophet Muhammad.
NATO decides Afghan ministries too dangerous for its personnel
After what appears to be the latest murder of US personnel by Afghan security services, NATO pulled its people out of Afghan ministries.
Christian Science Monitor By Dan Murphy, Staff writer February 25, 2012
After 10 years of war, NATO has decided that the Afghan ministries it funds, and whose guards it has trained and armed, are too dangerous for its personnel.
That decision followed the murders of two American officers by what appears to have been an Afghan policemen in the Interior Ministry in Kabul. Afghan officials say the killer was probably enraged by the burning of Qurans by US troops at Bagram Air Base, an event that has led to angry mobs besieging NATO and UN compounds across the country. At least 20 Afghans have been killed in the rioting so far.
The Quran burning also inspired an Afghan soldier to murder two US troops and wound four others on Thursday.
Gen.John Allen, the US commander of NATO forces inf Afghanistan, ordered all advisers withdrawn from Afghan ministries in response to the killings at the Interior Ministry, which oversees the Afghan police.
"For obvious force protection reasons, I have also taken immediate measures to recall all other ISAF personnel working in ministries in and around Kabul," General Allen said in statement. "We are committed to our partnership with the Government of Afghanistan to reach our common goal of a peaceful, stable and secure Afghanistan in the near future."
US troops will probably soon be back in Afghan ministries, though count on new force protection protocols (US troops providing protection might be a place to start). But in the past few years the NATO effort has been intensely focused on training Afghan soldiers and police.
Rates of desertion, illiteracy, and drug abuse remain stubbornly high. And so-called green on blue incidents, the International Security Assistance Force's (ISAF) preferred term for Afghan troops murdering NATO troops, have also become increasingly common. It hasn't felt very peaceful, stable, and secure.
The BBC reports that rioters in the northeastern city of Kunduz, about 300 miles from Kabul, set parts of the UN compound there on fire, as well as other buildings in the city. The situation for foreigners in Afghanistan is now extremely tense, with many in Kabul wondering if they should consider evacuating the city.
That the Quran burning would lead to this was sadly predictable.
The public fury unleashed by events is also a reminder that Afghans are chafing at the extended military occupation of the country. And now Mr. Allen has been forced to concede with his orders today that agents of the Afghan government, NATO's local ally in its war against the Taliban, can't be trusted.
The simple fact is that after 10 years of war, hearts and minds have not been won. Legions of civilian and military advisers from Europe and the US, seeking to inculcate an outside political culture in the hearts of Afghans, have largely failed. The tinder of anger and humiliation is thick on the ground. And this is not just about Taliban supporters.
In my one brief trip to Afghanistan over a year ago, I met plenty of Afghans with no love for the Taliban who spoke of their distaste for the foreign presence. Their culture is not our culture. They do not want it to be.
Of course, nothing like Gen. William George Keith Elphinstone's disastrous retreat from Kabul in January 1842, when a column of camp-followers, British officers and Indian soldiers numbering some 16,500 were harried by Afghan fighters for over a week before being massacred at Gandamak pass (only one man from the original column made it to safety), is in the offing. NATO troops are too well armed and equipped to be driven out of Kabul, or any other major bases in the country.
But now, just as 150 years ago, Afghans in general have little love for the foreigners in their midst. Given that, outbursts like those of the past week, while containable, can happen from time to time. NATO will try to put the best face on the situation, as it has been trying to do for years, but the US and its partners have much to consider in the weeks ahead.
President Obama is seeking to negotiate an agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai (who currently holds power thanks to a fraud-marred election) on the US role in the country beyond 2014, when a troop pullout is currently scheduled. So far, those talks have gone nowhere. In May, Mr. Obama will host a NATO meeting on Afghanistan in which he's expected to be more precise about the size and pace of troop reductions in the country. Obama doubled down on the Afghan war with a troop surge soon after he took office, though not as big or open-ended as generals had been pushing for.
The US president now has European allies tired of the war and grappling with economic crisis at home. With the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May, the US public's appetite for the Afghan war has also diminished. A CNN poll in October found domestic support for the war at its lowest point since it started in 2001, down to 34 percent. Over 1,900 US soldiers have now been killed in the Afghan war.
It bears repeating: The two latest US casualties were in the heart of the Afghan Interior ministry, killed by an Afghan whose gun and ammunition were paid for by the US taxpayer.
Killing of U.S. advisors could damage credit of Afghanistan: experts
by Abdul Haleem, Yangtze Yan
KABUL, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- Opening fire and gunning down two U. S. senior advisors by a unknown man inside the premise of the fortified Afghan Interior Ministry at Saturday daylight has taken many into surprise.
The bloody incident coincided with the week-long widespread demonstrations in Afghan cities since Tuesday to protest the Quran burning at a garbage pit at the main U.S. airbase in Bagram north of Kabul.
"I believe, shooting inside the Interior Ministry which is responsible for ensuring law and order in the country, in fact speaks of Taliban penetration into security entities," political analyst Rahman Ughlo told Xinhua on Sunday.
The ministry in a statement said, "The man who killed two American advisors on Saturday and who is said to be an employee of the Interior Ministry is at large and police search operation to spot and arrest the suspect is continuing."
The Taliban outfit fighting Afghan and NATO-led forces has claimed responsibility for the assault inflating the killed to four.
In a sharp reaction, the U.S. government has recalled all U.S. nationals serving with the Afghan government bodies in and around the capital, which was shortly followed by Britain.
However, Ughlo was of the view that the murder of two advisors would not force U.S. to accelerate troop pullout, rather it would overshadow the trust of international community to the Afghan administration.
"I don't think the U.S. will speed up troop drawdown process following the assassination of two advisors, if so, Americans will not remain safe from terror attacks even in Washington," the former Afghan lawmaker warned.
Commenting on the on-going protests, Ughlo believed that chanting anti-U.S. slogans over the past six days is indicative of U.S. error investment over the past decade in Afghanistan.
Protestors in the ever-longest demonstration since deployment of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in late 2001 have expressed their resentments by shouting slogans and calling for punishment of those responsible for the blasphemy act, a demand backed by President Hamid Karzai.
Over 30 people including four Americans have been killed and more than 200 others injured throughout the unprecedented anti-U.S. demonstrations in Afghanistan. Sunday's protests staged in northern Samangan and Kunduz provinces also led to one death and injuries of two dozens including seven Americans.
In the wake of the killing of two American advisors, the U.S. commander of NATO-led Inernational Security Assistance Force (ISAF) , General John R. Allen, has recalled his forces from Afghan military installations and ministries.
"For obvious force protection reasons, I have also taken immediate measures to recall all other ISAF personnel working in ministries in and around Kabul," Allen said in a statement late Saturday night.
The decision, according to Afghan analysts, is a sign of tumbling trust to the Afghan administration.
"No doubt, shooting inside the Interior Ministry reduces the confidence towards security apparatus and reduces the trust of the coalition forces and international agencies towards the administration and recalling NATO advisors from the ministries is a proof to the fact," Kabul-based security analyst Wahid Mujda observed.
Agreeing on the notion, Afghan political observer and Kabul University professor Faizullah Jalal warned that repeating insurgents attacks inside government sectors would damage the credibility of Afghan security entities and eventually reduces the trust of international community towards the Afghan government.
"Attack inside the Interior Ministry just months after attack inside the Defense Ministry is a clear indication of the penetration of militants and terrorists into the government bodies which makes it possible for them to target anyone anytime they want," Jalal told Xinhua.
He said that the evacuation of foreign advisors from Afghan ministries goes against the national interests at this stage.
Doubt grows about reliability of Afghan partners in war
Associated Press By Robert Burns 25/02/2012
WASHINGTON - The shooting deaths of two U.S. military advisers in the Afghan capital and the quick decision to pull coalition personnel from all government ministries has injected a sobering measure of doubt about the reliability of the most important U.S. ally in the war.
The Pentagon condemned what it called the murder of the two American officers but said it was committed to working closely with the Afghans to counter violent extremism and to stabilize the country.
President Barack Obama telephoned the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, with condolences. And the White House praised President Hamid Karzai's efforts to restore calm in his country.
Even if Saturday's killer turns out not to be an Afghan, the deaths compound a perception of insecurity in the heart of Kabul after a series of recent security failures and Afghan outrage over U.S. burning of Muslim holy books. The Taliban claimed responsibility and said the attack, was in retaliation for what U.S. officials have said was the inadvertent burning of Afghan religious materials, including Qurans, at Bagram air base north of Kabul.
Allen, who commands both U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, said the killer's actions "will not go unanswered." Citing security reasons, he recalled all coalition personnel from Afghan ministries. NATO forces have advisers embedded in many Afghan ministries, both as trainers and to help manage the transition to Afghan control as foreign forces prepare to withdraw by the end of 2014. The Afghan Interior Ministry oversees all the country's police, so has numerous NATO advisers.
A White House statement said Obama thanked Allen for his steps to protect U.S. troops and to encourage calm. It also said the United States "remains committed to a partnership with the government and people of Afghanistan."
Still, the killings are likely to provide new momentum for critics of President Barack Obama's war policy, as well as Republicans who fault him for having apologized for the Quran burning.
Obama's apology Thursday, shortly after Allen expressed deep regret, was seized on by the president's Republican rivals as a sign of American weakness. Presidential primary candidate Newt Gingrich said it was the Afghans who should be apologizing, given their shocking perfidy.
These tensions coincide with planned administration meetings in Washington in the week ahead with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior. It was unclear Saturday whether the session, including one on Thursday with Panetta at the Pentagon, would go on as scheduled.
Those talks are seen as important in the lead-up to a NATO summit meeting in May in Chicago, when the alliance and Karzai intend to determine the path to turning over full security responsibility to the Afghan government by the end of 2014.
Central to the U.S.-led international coalition's strategy for countering the Taliban insurgency is the idea of building up Afghan security capacity by working closely with the Afghan army and police. That requires a measure of trust, which is undermined when Afghans turn their guns on their foreign partners.
Just this past week the U.S. Army announced it was creating specially tailored brigades - some now getting training in the U.S. - to perform training and advising missions in Afghanistan starting this summer. It will assign 18-person teams to Afghan combat units in hopes of improving their ability to handle the Taliban insurgency on their own by 2014.
Even before the Quran burning and the unrest it unleashed across Afghanistan, U.S. and allied troops had been killed in increasing numbers by their Afghan partners.
Analyst: US Testing Afghans' Religious Sensitivity through Quran Burning
Fars News Agency February 26, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- A senior Afghan analyst said that the US soldiers' recent provocative act and desecration of the Holy Quran was a move by the US to test the threshold of the Afghan people's sensitivity to their religious values.
"A clandestine conspiracy is underway by the Americans who want to assess the religious sensitivity of the Afghan people," Vahid Mojdeh told FNA on Sunday.
He pointed to the Afghan people's reaction to the burning of the Holy Quran by a US pastor in Florida last year, which led to wide-scale protests in Afghan cities and the killing of some foreign nationals in Mazar Sharif, and asked, "How could Americans have forgotten the Afghan people's reaction?"
Mojdeh stressed that the US is studying the effects of its decade-long presence in Afghanistan, and said moves like insult to the Holy Quran are actually "an effort by the US to asses the extent of the West's influence in Afghanistan".
On Sunday, Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai called for calm in a televised address to the nation after the burning of Qurans at a US base sparked five days of violent protests.
He told the Afghan people that the Quran burnings are being investigated, and asked them to wait for the results of that investigation.
Meantime, a senior Afghan politician said trying the US soldiers involved in the burning of the Holy Quran at the Bagram air base in an Afghan court is the only way to appease the Afghan people's wrath.
"A mere probe or investigating the elements behind the act (burning Quran) will not relieve the Afghan people's pain and they should be punished in an Afghan court," Secretary-General of the Afghan National Welfare Party Mohammad Hassan Jafari told FNA on Saturday.
"We ask the Afghan government to prepare the necessary conditions for the trial of these soldiers on Afghanistan's soil," Jafari noted.
At least 25 people have been killed and hundreds wounded since Tuesday, when it first emerged that copies of Quran and religious materials had been thrown into a fire pit used to burn garbage at Bagram Air Field.
Obama’s Afghanistan Apology Problem
Koran violence delays another apology for the Obama administration—to Pakistan.
National Journal By Michael Hirsh February 25, 2012
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Ryan Crocker's title. He is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.
The killing of two U.S. military officers by a gunman inside Afghanistan’s heavily guarded Interior Ministry on Saturday, part of an explosion of anti-American violence that has continued unabated despite a U.S. apology over the burning of Korans by U.S. troops, has complicated President Obama’s plans to accelerate the NATO troop withdrawal and hand some operations over to the new Afghan army by mid-2013.
The challenge facing Obama is even more difficult, both strategically and politically, because his administration is preparing another apology to neighboring Pakistan over the errant NATO strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last fall. This statement was to have been delivered shortly by high-ranking U.S. military and civilian officials, most likely by Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, two U.S. officials told National Journal.
The anti-American protests in Kabul have raged since early last week, when it was first reported that Korans and other religious materials had been thrown into a pit used to burn garbage at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul. At least 25 people have been killed, including two other U.S. soldiers. A U.S. military spokesman in Kabul told National Journal that the violence would not set back plans to begin handing over security to Afghan forces, despite the decision by Gen. John Allen, commander of U.S. forces, to withdraw all NATO personnel from government ministries after the shootings on Saturday. Allen had previously apologized for the burning of the Korans.
“I don’t think there’s any discussion about this affecting transition,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Frankly our position is this was a careless act, but we’ve already apologized for it and we want to move on.”
Whether the planned transition in Afghanistan is affected or not, the apologies over the Koran incident and the NATO strikes pose some political peril for Obama at home in an election year. Republican presidential candidates have been regularly accusing Obama of appeasement and, as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has put it, “apologizing for America.”
On Thursday, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who has grown increasingly immoderate in his statements as he has faded in the polls, called the U.S. apology to Afghan authorities over the burned Korans “astonishing’’ and undeserved. Other Republicans have not joined in the criticism as yet. Neither Mitt Romney nor Rick Santorum's campaigns responded to requests from National Journal for comment on the killings of the officers on Saturday -- underscoring not only the distance those campaigns have put between their operations and Gingrich's but their reluctance to wade into the snarled issue of U.S.-NATO operations in Afghanistan.
As one senior congressional GOP adviser told National Journal Saturday: "The military made a mistake, even if there were radical sayings written in the Korans, we should have sought the help of a local cleric on how to dispose of them. It was a stupid mistake by our military that undercut the very essence of our strategy. When similarly unfortunate events occurred, President Bush apologized as well. There are a thousand things to criticize about the president's handling of two wars. But this ain't one of them."
Whether Obama can escape similar criticism over the apology to Pakistan that his administration is quietly preparing remains to be seen.
The latter apology, linked to an official Pentagon investigation that partially blamed mistakes made by U.S. forces for the NATO incident, was put off indefinitely after the Koran incident, but U.S. officials say they still plan to deliver it in coming weeks.
The administration initially had refused to apologize for the NATO strikes. The White House, Pentagon and State Department rebuffed the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, early on when he pressed for an immediate apology following the Nov. 27 incident. But prodded by the new Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Sherry Rehman, the State Department resurrected the idea in recent weeks, and this time the White House and Pentagon signed off on it.
As one Defense Dept official put it this week, the administration realized that something had to be done to “try move past the rough patch” with Pakistan. Last month, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, sent a top-secret cable to Washington concluding that Taliban havens in Pakistan were jeopardizing the success of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.
With U.S.-Pakistan relations still roiled by the fatal NATO strikes and other disputes, especially the unilateral mission that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani town last year, the administration has felt compelled to give Islamabad a face-saving way to resume normal ties. The United States is pushing for talks with the Taliban ahead of a planned withdrawal from neighboring Afghanistan that is to be completed in 2014. Recently the Afghan government and Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani also called for negotiations with the Taliban.
But U.S. officials fear that without more assistance from Islamabad, the Taliban could exploit the American withdrawal from Afghanistan to wreak havoc from across the border. Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan are also tense following the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s chief peace negotiator and a former Afghan president himself, last September, allegedly by a Taliban suicide bomber. Kabul blamed Pakistan for the attack. Pakistan denied it, but Islamabad has sought to support the Islamist group as a strategic asset.
President Obama now faces a crisis in which strategic challenges abroad and presidential politics at home could collide head on in the months ahead.
National Journal White House Correspondent Major Garrett contributed to this report.
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A History of Women in Afghanistan: Then and Now
TOLOnews.com By Mohadesa Najmi Saturday, 25 February 2012
It may be surprising to know that women in Afghanistan participated socially, politically and economically in the life of their societies before the Taliban came into power.
In 1880 a woman called Malalai from a small village played a great role in the battle of Maiwand. She declared at the top of her lungs: "Young Love, if you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, by God someone is saving you as a token of shame." This not only revitalised the Afghan fighters who had lost morale fighting the British in the second-Anglo war, but sent her down in history as Afghanistan's very own Joan of Arc.
How did a woman like Malalai die on the battlefield as one of Afghanistan's greatest heroine but today women in Afghanistan face difficulty leaving their home without a male escort? Interestingly enough, women have played a huge role in the history of Afghanistan. In 1964, women helped draft the Constitution and there were at least three women legislators in Parliament by the 1970's. Women fulfilled roles as teachers, government workers, medical doctors, lawyers, judges, journalists, writers and poets up until the early 1990s. Moreover, women had constituted 40% of the doctors in Kabul; 70% of school teachers; 60% of Kabul University professors and 50% of the University students. It was not unusual for men and women to casually mingle at movie theatres and on university campuses. This is a far cry from little girls heading to schools today fearing an acid attack. Or 15-year-old Sahar Gul being kept in a basement for six months, tortured with hot iron rods, her fingernails ripped out, all for resisting prostitution.
One particularly interesting segment in the history of Afghan women is during the 1960. The government oversaw various rural development programmes where female nurses were sent in Jeeps to remote areas and villages to inoculate residents from diseases such as cholera. The impossibility of this scheme today is almost too painful to consider. If it were to be pursued by the government now, the men in rural areas would scoff at the idea of their women travelling freely, entering the homes of male strangers, and in some cases, having to touch a strange man in order to treat him. Security concerns alone make such an effort impossible as government nurses (as well as UN and NGO medical workers) are regular targets for insurgent groups. Who cares if she is trying to save lives? She is a woman!
Girl Scouts is yet another tragic memory in Afghanistan's history. Students from elementary and middle schools emulated their counterparts in the USA learning about nature trails, camping and public safety. Little girls were encouraged to expand their skills and venture into new areas of study. Imagine a 'Girl Scouts' scheme taking place in parts of Afghanistan today; the brutish Taliban would cower at the thought of girls engaging in extracurricular activities that would broaden their intellect, never mind being in education in the first place. This delightful scheme disappeared entirely in the 1970s and is showing no signs of return.
Everything changed for women when the Taliban rose to power in early 1995 and set up a radical Islamic state in Afghanistan in 1996. We know that women and girls were systematically discriminated against and marginalised; their human rights utterly violated. This resulted in deteriorating economic and social conditions of women in all areas of the country. They were severely restricted in their access to education, healthcare and employment. Women who had led fruitful lives fulfilling roles as doctors and teachers, were now finding themselves destitute - some resorting to begging on the streets or even prostitution. In May 2001, a decree issued by the Taliban banned women from driving cars and women were continuously beaten and harassed for appearing in public. As little as an inch of foot or hand on display, or even the wrong coloured socks, would warrant an attack from the Taliban who patrolled the streets. My auntie once told me of a time she had been wearing white coloured socks outside. The Taliban who h
ad stopped her beat her with end of an AK47 and told her to go home to change into black coloured socks that were less visible to the eye.
The struggle continues for women in Afghanistan today. The country has a 14 per cent female literacy rate; contrast this with a 99 per cent female literacy rate in the UK and USA. It is nothing short an abomination. This is almost unsurprising when 80 per cent of females lack access to an education centre. The Karzai government issued a law in 2009 that legalised rape within marriage as well as denying the right of women to "leave their homes except for legitimate purposes" or "working or receiving an education without their husbands permission." The law also diminishes the right of mothers to be children's guardians in the event of divorce and makes impossible for wives to inherit their houses and land from their husbands. How can women be expected to rise socially, politically or economically under such circumstances? Or even more fundamentally, how is a woman to feel an equal when she she is subject to rape by her own husband? These conditions are somewhat redolent of the abhorrent 'Jim Crow' laws in the US in the 1880s that restricted African Americans in every aspect of their lives.
Women face further adversity at the prospect of childbirth with a woman dying every 27 minutes due to pregnancy-related complications in Afghanistan. There are on average 1,600 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. But in the remote mountainous province of Badakhshan the rate is 6,500 per 100,000 - the highest recorded rate of maternal mortality in the world. Thus, it may not be an exaggeration to declare Afghanistan the worst place in the world to give birth. I will go on: 17 per cent of women have reported sexual violence, as many as 80 per cent of marriages are forced, and 8 million women and girls aged between 15 and 40 are suffering from depression.
The question that remains is: what hope is there for women in Afghanistan and has there been any progress that bequeaths hope for the future?
In 1977, Meena Keshwar laid the foundations for RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan which launched a bilingual magazine titled Woman's Message (Payam-e-Zan) in 1981 and organised events in the city of Kabul for several years to mark International Women's Day. In August 2002, Khatol Mohammadzai became the first female general to serve in the Afghan National Army. And from 2005 until early 2007, Malalai Joya served as a female parliamentarian in the National Assembly of Afghanistan, substantiating the fact that women can serve in positions of authority. A bodybuilding club for women was even inaugurated in 2005 along with a female boxing federation by Afghanistan's National Olympic Committee. In the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens, female athletes Friba Razayee and Robina Muqim Yaar represented Afghanistan for the first time in the country's history.
Even more promisingly, Afghanistan's Ministry of Education declared that more than 5.4 million children have been enrolled in schools, 35 per cent of them girls, by April 2008. This was however followed in November by an acid attack on school girls in Kandahar with over a dozen injured and left with permanent facial scares. Nonetheless, significant achievements were made in several political aspects: the government appointed its first female provincial governor Habibi Sorabi in 2005 and Azra Jafari became the country's first female mayor in 2009.
So what do all these achievements mean for the women of Afghanistan who are suffering under an extremely patriarchal society? Do they diminish the years of turmoil and subjugation? Certainly not. In fact, as Malalai Joya stated: "To all intents and purposes, the position of women is the same now as it was under the Taliban and in some respects the situation is far worse." However, history has proven that the female population was integral in shaping its course: women were needed, they were appreciated, and they were the heart and soul of Afghanistan. To understand their position now, we must look to then: if women could once constitute a meaningful fraction of society, they will again.
Pakistan dismantles bin Laden compound
Financial Times By Matthew Green and Farhan Bokhari February 26, 2012
Islamabad - Pakistan has begun to demolish the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed, hoping to bury the humiliation of an episode that shook public faith in its military and opened a new seam of suspicion of its secret services in the US.
The destruction began as a government official said that Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s premier spy agency, would be moved to a post overseeing the security of the country’s nuclear weapons. The planned transfer of Gen Pasha, who was appointed ISI chief in September, 2008, will remove one of the key protagonists in what has been the most turbulent era in the fraught US-Pakistan alliance since 2001. His tenure is due to expire next month.
The raid that killed Bin Laden served as the catalyst for one of the worst crises in relations between Pakistan and the US by revealing that the al-Qaeda founder had been living unmolested for years in a garrison town outside Islamabad.
A decade-long hunt by US intelligence agents was rewarded with the ultimate form of revenge on May 2 last year when Navy Seals leapt out of helicopters, stormed the compound in usually sleepy Abbottabad, and shot Bin Laden to death.
The raid tarnished the image of Pakistan’s army while raising awkward questions over how the world’s most wanted man could have been living quietly near a military academy. Outrage in Pakistan over the intrusion by US forces and the suspicion swirling in Washington over how much the ISI knew about Bin Laden’s whereabouts in spite of official denials pushed relations between the allies to new lows.
Ties were strained further in November, when 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed in a US air-strike near the border with Afghanistan. Pakistan’s government appeared determined to remove the most tangible reminder of the bin Laden chapter by sending mechanical diggers to rip apart the three-storey compound after the sun set on Saturday. Floodlights illuminated the scene as the machines breached the outer walls then tore into the main building.
Security forces maintained a cordon around the site in Abbottabad, said Mohammad Ashfaq, a journalist for the privately owned ARY TV television channel, who witnessed the start of the demolition. “The authorities have practically sealed the area,” Mr Ashfaq said. “They are not letting anyone in or out of the neighbourhood. There is very tight control.”
News of the demolition broke in Pakistan at about the same time as television channels started to report that Yusuf Raza Gilani, the prime minister, had decided to put Gen Pasha in charge of the Strategic Plans Division, which oversees the security of the country’s nuclear arsenal. “General Pasha will shortly become head of the SPD,” the government official told the Financial Times. “The choice of a new (ISI) director-general will be made in a few days.”
Gen Pasha is due to step down on March 18, when his latest year-long extension ends. Pakistani commentators have floated the names of various possible replacements, though there has not been any official word on who will emerge as the next ISI chief. There was no confirmation from ISI or army officials that Gen Pasha is being moved.
The tearing down of bin Laden’s house began after a week in which Pakistan’s government has signalled its support for the US strategy to end the war in Afghanistan by trying to start peace talks with the Taliban.
Yusuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s prime minister, issued a statement on Friday reiterating his support for the Afghan government’s attempt to kindle dialogue and calling for the Taliban to embrace negotiations. Afghan officials have long accused Pakistan of harbouring the leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement and say no meaningful negotiations would be possible unless Pakistan’s security agencies refrain from sabotaging the process.
Pakistan and the US took a step towards repairing their battered relationship on Thursday when Hina Rabbani Khar, the foreign minister, met Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, on the sidelines of a conference on Somalia held in London. Pakistani officials are hoping tensions will thaw further if the US makes some form of apology for the deaths of its troops in November.
Analyst Praises Pakistan's Demand on Taliban for Direct Talks with Afghan Gov't
Fars News Agency February 26, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- A senior Afghan analyst hailed Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Reza Gilani for his call on the Taliban to hold direct talks with the government in Kabul, and said the move by Islamabad was the result of the tri-partite negotiations recently held among Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"It was the first time that Pakistani officials demanded the Taliban to enter direct talks with Afghans and reach a desirable solution through talks," Head of Afghanistan's Research and Strategy Center Gholam Jilani Zawak told FNA on Sunday.
He described the move as a positive step which promotes the peace process between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and said the development was the result of negotiations among Tehran, Kabul and Islamabad in Pakistan earlier this month.
The joint statement signed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari at the conclusion of their third tri-partite summit in Islamabad showed that the three leaders are resolved to ensure mutual respect for sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity, as enshrined in the UN Charter.
They would also strengthen cooperation on eradicating extremism, terrorism and militancy and to address the root causes of these menaces, condemning the killings of civilians as well as any kind of assassination.
Meantime, Afghan officials say that talks between the US and the Taliban in Qatar will not result in the establishment of peace in Afghanistan since the talks are in pursuit of the US interests and the talks do not involve the Kabul government.
Asylum Concerns Haunt Western Exchange Programs For Afghan Students
RFE/RL February 25, 2012
Since the ouster of the Taliban in 2001 and the establishment of the elected government of Hamid Karzai,
One of the projects that foreign governments have funded since the Taliban was ousted and a UN-backed government established in Kabul is an Afghan student exchange, with the aim of brightening that country's future and increasing cross-border understanding across borders.
But such exchanges have been troubled by concerns that too many of the visitors bother returning to help rebuild Afghan society.
The fact is that only a few Afghan universities provide master's-level studies -- and those are just in literature. So there is an acute need for a wider range of fields for higher studies for Afghan students to choose.
To fill the gap, many countries invite Afghan students to attend university in the West. The United States and Britain have some of the most prestigious scholarships -- Fulbright and Chevening, respectively. Apart from government-funded programs, private and nonprofit projects also provide Afghans with educational opportunities around the world.
Afghan students are provided scholarships and fellowships for their higher aptitude and capability in return for a promise that they will return to Afghanistan after their study programs are over to help rebuild their country. To ensure this -- taking Afghan family and social structure into account -- restrictions are imposed such as a ban on taking family members as dependents along during their studies. The rule doesn't apply to students from countries whose governments pay half of the scholarships provided by foreign programs.
But despite the rule, many Afghan students never come back; they vanish before or soon after the completion of their study-abroad programs. Perceptions of a deteriorating security situation, news of the looming exit of NATO troops, and the woeful state of the critical infrastructure mean Afghan young people might also lose hope for a better future in Afghanistan.
For some Afghans, becoming a scholarship grantee has been like getting a free ticket to jump from the United States to seek asylum in Canada. Harris Najib is a Fulbright alumnus who works as a case manager with a nonprofit in Calgary, Canada. He says he didn't return to Afghanistan because of political instability.
He says Afghan students abroad "have now had the experience of engaging in dialogue without the fear of being silenced, shunned, or ridiculed," adding candidly, "A grim political environment in Afghanistan and the possibility of a Taliban takeover diminish the appetite for returning and contributing to the process of rebuilding Afghanistan."
Some criticize the U.S. State Department for not following up with employment opportunities in Afghanistan so the students gain confidence through a financially secure future there.
Ateeq Nosher, a Harvard University alumnus who lives in Kabul and works as managing director at Apex-2 Consulting, says "the job opportunities for those who come from the U.S. and Canada or other Western countries are relatively higher than those for students produced locally or in neighboring countries."
Najib adds: "Many Afghan students who have come to study in the U.S. post-Taliban have a decent amount of professional experience working for the UN or other international agencies back home. They can therefore compete for jobs with their North American or European peers within certain sectors. And, if they can find a job in Europe or North America and are able to guarantee a better future for themselves and their families, some would rather not return to Afghanistan, and wait out the current political uncertainty."
Apart from concerns over security and employment opportunities, other issues face graduates returning from their Western studies on a daily basis in Afghanistan.
"The well-educated segment of the population gets disappointed when they see weak people leading them," Nosher says. "They feel they aren't contributing to policies because [at the] end of the day, those policies are influenced by political appointees."
Students seeking asylum obviously think of their individual benefits hindering the opportunities for the rest of the batches to come.
Although there are no numbers available on students not returning to Afghanistan after going to Western countries as exchange students, one program appears to have gotten fed up with such students using their scholarship programs to seek asylum. Last year, the United States suspended its highly regarded YES youth-exchange program. Begun in 2004, YES invited hundreds of Afghan students to the U.S., but around half those students fled to Canada to claim asylum. NPR recently quoted embassy officials saying they want to restart the YES program, but only if they can ensure that students won't jump the program for asylum purposes.
The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States -- part of the U.S.-Canada Smart Border Action Plan -- aims to prevent people from filing for asylum in a country other than the one they initially entered, potentially stemming the flow unless a family member there has agreed to sponsor them.
Apart from the no-dependents rule for students, mature applicants are considered more committed to the programs and thus reliable. Dr. Maria Beebe of Afghan eQuality Alliances at Washington State University told blogger Bob McCarty about having a more selective criteria to ensure the return of Afghan students:
"So, for example, we can say only directors and assistant director levels would be considered. At that level, we will also get the older (more mature) students who have children and will have more compelling reasons to go back to Afghanistan."
Detractors might argue that such an approach contradicts the aim of providing an equal opportunity to all talented Afghans -- and particularly lets down Afghan young people, its potential future leaders -- in higher education. On the other hand, the no-dependents rule becomes irrelevant if mature single students enter into relationships with non-Afghans and decide to remain with their partners abroad.
Malalai Bashir
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM And HABIB KHAN TOTAKHIL FEBRUARY 26, 2012
KABUL - The U.S. commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan pulled scores of advisers from Afghan ministries after two high-ranking American military officers were gunned down Saturday at the nation's Interior Ministry headquarters.
U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen ordered the unprecedented move after an American colonel and major were both found shot in the head at the busy Interior Ministry compound that is the nerve center for the Afghan law enforcement, according to one Western official in Kabul.
"We are investigating the crime and we will pursue all leads to find the person responsible for this attack," Gen. Allen said in a statement. "The perpetrator of this attack is a coward whose actions will not go unanswered."
Afghan and American officials shut down the ministry compound in central Kabul as they launched an investigation into the killings in one of the most heavily guarded parts of the capital.
Top U.S. military officials said they were still trying to determine the identity of the attacker. But one Western official in Kabul said that the two Americans were shot by an Afghan police official who was upset about the burning of Qurans earlier this week at a U.S. military base.
Hours after the shooting, the Taliban issued a statement claiming that the attacker was an insurgent infiltrator who killed the Americans in retaliation for the Quran burning. In the statement, the Taliban said the assailant called to inform the insurgent group that he had carried out the attack and was unharmed.
Details of the incident remained sketchy.
Coalition officials in Kabul dismissed claims by some Afghan officials that the two Americans were killed by a Western colleague.
Sediq Sediqqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the two American military officers were found dead in a secure office on the compound by one of their colleagues. It remained unclear who killed the pair, or how the attacker got inside the well-protected part of the ministry, he said.
But other Afghan, Western diplomatic and military officials said that initial reports indicated that the gunman was a member of the Afghan security forces.
In a separate incident Thursday, an Afghan soldier shot and killed two U.S. soldiers at a small military base in eastern Afghanistan. The attacker escaped through a crowd of anti-Quran burning demonstrators outside the base.
Saturday's killings have rung new alarms about the damaging impact of the Quran burning on the military mission in Afghanistan. They also raised new questions about the dangers faced by U.S. and coalition forces from their Afghan military partners.
More than 77 coalition troops have been killed by Afghan colleagues in the last five years. Three-quarters of those have taken place in the last two years.
Saturday's confrontation in Kabul came as thousands of demonstrators unsuccessfully tried to storm the United Nations compound in the northeastern city of Kunduz. At least five people were killed as protesters, some armed with guns, converged on the U.N offices, according to the provincial governor's office.
Though no demonstrations were reported Saturday in Kabul, elsewhere in the country fury over the attempt by coalition soldiers to incinerate a truckload of Islamic books, including copies of the Quran, at Bagram Airfield showed no signs of diminishing.
In a wave of unrest now in its fifth day, protesters are targeting Afghan government buildings and Western offices.
At least 30 people have been killed since Tuesday. Southern Afghanistan—the heartland of the Taliban insurgency—has been the only part of the country to avoid deadly confrontations so far.
American officials have tried to contain Afghan outrage by issuing repeated apologies and launching a swift investigation into the incident.
U.S. President Barack Obama apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a personal letter.
U.S. officials have called the Quran burning a serious mistake. Gen. Allen also called for all forces to undergo quick training on the proper way to handle Islamic religious books.
U.S. military officials have said the books were set aside for destruction because Afghan detainees at the Parwan military detention center at Bagram were using them to trade messages and share extremist writing.
But it remains unclear why the soldiers decided to burn copies of the Quran—a particularly incendiary affront to Muslims who view the book as the sacred word of God as relayed to the Prophet Muhammad.
NATO decides Afghan ministries too dangerous for its personnel
After what appears to be the latest murder of US personnel by Afghan security services, NATO pulled its people out of Afghan ministries.
Christian Science Monitor By Dan Murphy, Staff writer February 25, 2012
After 10 years of war, NATO has decided that the Afghan ministries it funds, and whose guards it has trained and armed, are too dangerous for its personnel.
That decision followed the murders of two American officers by what appears to have been an Afghan policemen in the Interior Ministry in Kabul. Afghan officials say the killer was probably enraged by the burning of Qurans by US troops at Bagram Air Base, an event that has led to angry mobs besieging NATO and UN compounds across the country. At least 20 Afghans have been killed in the rioting so far.
The Quran burning also inspired an Afghan soldier to murder two US troops and wound four others on Thursday.
Gen.John Allen, the US commander of NATO forces inf Afghanistan, ordered all advisers withdrawn from Afghan ministries in response to the killings at the Interior Ministry, which oversees the Afghan police.
"For obvious force protection reasons, I have also taken immediate measures to recall all other ISAF personnel working in ministries in and around Kabul," General Allen said in statement. "We are committed to our partnership with the Government of Afghanistan to reach our common goal of a peaceful, stable and secure Afghanistan in the near future."
US troops will probably soon be back in Afghan ministries, though count on new force protection protocols (US troops providing protection might be a place to start). But in the past few years the NATO effort has been intensely focused on training Afghan soldiers and police.
Rates of desertion, illiteracy, and drug abuse remain stubbornly high. And so-called green on blue incidents, the International Security Assistance Force's (ISAF) preferred term for Afghan troops murdering NATO troops, have also become increasingly common. It hasn't felt very peaceful, stable, and secure.
The BBC reports that rioters in the northeastern city of Kunduz, about 300 miles from Kabul, set parts of the UN compound there on fire, as well as other buildings in the city. The situation for foreigners in Afghanistan is now extremely tense, with many in Kabul wondering if they should consider evacuating the city.
That the Quran burning would lead to this was sadly predictable.
The public fury unleashed by events is also a reminder that Afghans are chafing at the extended military occupation of the country. And now Mr. Allen has been forced to concede with his orders today that agents of the Afghan government, NATO's local ally in its war against the Taliban, can't be trusted.
The simple fact is that after 10 years of war, hearts and minds have not been won. Legions of civilian and military advisers from Europe and the US, seeking to inculcate an outside political culture in the hearts of Afghans, have largely failed. The tinder of anger and humiliation is thick on the ground. And this is not just about Taliban supporters.
In my one brief trip to Afghanistan over a year ago, I met plenty of Afghans with no love for the Taliban who spoke of their distaste for the foreign presence. Their culture is not our culture. They do not want it to be.
Of course, nothing like Gen. William George Keith Elphinstone's disastrous retreat from Kabul in January 1842, when a column of camp-followers, British officers and Indian soldiers numbering some 16,500 were harried by Afghan fighters for over a week before being massacred at Gandamak pass (only one man from the original column made it to safety), is in the offing. NATO troops are too well armed and equipped to be driven out of Kabul, or any other major bases in the country.
But now, just as 150 years ago, Afghans in general have little love for the foreigners in their midst. Given that, outbursts like those of the past week, while containable, can happen from time to time. NATO will try to put the best face on the situation, as it has been trying to do for years, but the US and its partners have much to consider in the weeks ahead.
President Obama is seeking to negotiate an agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai (who currently holds power thanks to a fraud-marred election) on the US role in the country beyond 2014, when a troop pullout is currently scheduled. So far, those talks have gone nowhere. In May, Mr. Obama will host a NATO meeting on Afghanistan in which he's expected to be more precise about the size and pace of troop reductions in the country. Obama doubled down on the Afghan war with a troop surge soon after he took office, though not as big or open-ended as generals had been pushing for.
The US president now has European allies tired of the war and grappling with economic crisis at home. With the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May, the US public's appetite for the Afghan war has also diminished. A CNN poll in October found domestic support for the war at its lowest point since it started in 2001, down to 34 percent. Over 1,900 US soldiers have now been killed in the Afghan war.
It bears repeating: The two latest US casualties were in the heart of the Afghan Interior ministry, killed by an Afghan whose gun and ammunition were paid for by the US taxpayer.
Killing of U.S. advisors could damage credit of Afghanistan: experts
by Abdul Haleem, Yangtze Yan
KABUL, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- Opening fire and gunning down two U. S. senior advisors by a unknown man inside the premise of the fortified Afghan Interior Ministry at Saturday daylight has taken many into surprise.
The bloody incident coincided with the week-long widespread demonstrations in Afghan cities since Tuesday to protest the Quran burning at a garbage pit at the main U.S. airbase in Bagram north of Kabul.
"I believe, shooting inside the Interior Ministry which is responsible for ensuring law and order in the country, in fact speaks of Taliban penetration into security entities," political analyst Rahman Ughlo told Xinhua on Sunday.
The ministry in a statement said, "The man who killed two American advisors on Saturday and who is said to be an employee of the Interior Ministry is at large and police search operation to spot and arrest the suspect is continuing."
The Taliban outfit fighting Afghan and NATO-led forces has claimed responsibility for the assault inflating the killed to four.
In a sharp reaction, the U.S. government has recalled all U.S. nationals serving with the Afghan government bodies in and around the capital, which was shortly followed by Britain.
However, Ughlo was of the view that the murder of two advisors would not force U.S. to accelerate troop pullout, rather it would overshadow the trust of international community to the Afghan administration.
"I don't think the U.S. will speed up troop drawdown process following the assassination of two advisors, if so, Americans will not remain safe from terror attacks even in Washington," the former Afghan lawmaker warned.
Commenting on the on-going protests, Ughlo believed that chanting anti-U.S. slogans over the past six days is indicative of U.S. error investment over the past decade in Afghanistan.
Protestors in the ever-longest demonstration since deployment of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in late 2001 have expressed their resentments by shouting slogans and calling for punishment of those responsible for the blasphemy act, a demand backed by President Hamid Karzai.
Over 30 people including four Americans have been killed and more than 200 others injured throughout the unprecedented anti-U.S. demonstrations in Afghanistan. Sunday's protests staged in northern Samangan and Kunduz provinces also led to one death and injuries of two dozens including seven Americans.
In the wake of the killing of two American advisors, the U.S. commander of NATO-led Inernational Security Assistance Force (ISAF) , General John R. Allen, has recalled his forces from Afghan military installations and ministries.
"For obvious force protection reasons, I have also taken immediate measures to recall all other ISAF personnel working in ministries in and around Kabul," Allen said in a statement late Saturday night.
The decision, according to Afghan analysts, is a sign of tumbling trust to the Afghan administration.
"No doubt, shooting inside the Interior Ministry reduces the confidence towards security apparatus and reduces the trust of the coalition forces and international agencies towards the administration and recalling NATO advisors from the ministries is a proof to the fact," Kabul-based security analyst Wahid Mujda observed.
Agreeing on the notion, Afghan political observer and Kabul University professor Faizullah Jalal warned that repeating insurgents attacks inside government sectors would damage the credibility of Afghan security entities and eventually reduces the trust of international community towards the Afghan government.
"Attack inside the Interior Ministry just months after attack inside the Defense Ministry is a clear indication of the penetration of militants and terrorists into the government bodies which makes it possible for them to target anyone anytime they want," Jalal told Xinhua.
He said that the evacuation of foreign advisors from Afghan ministries goes against the national interests at this stage.
Doubt grows about reliability of Afghan partners in war
Associated Press By Robert Burns 25/02/2012
WASHINGTON - The shooting deaths of two U.S. military advisers in the Afghan capital and the quick decision to pull coalition personnel from all government ministries has injected a sobering measure of doubt about the reliability of the most important U.S. ally in the war.
The Pentagon condemned what it called the murder of the two American officers but said it was committed to working closely with the Afghans to counter violent extremism and to stabilize the country.
President Barack Obama telephoned the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, with condolences. And the White House praised President Hamid Karzai's efforts to restore calm in his country.
Even if Saturday's killer turns out not to be an Afghan, the deaths compound a perception of insecurity in the heart of Kabul after a series of recent security failures and Afghan outrage over U.S. burning of Muslim holy books. The Taliban claimed responsibility and said the attack, was in retaliation for what U.S. officials have said was the inadvertent burning of Afghan religious materials, including Qurans, at Bagram air base north of Kabul.
Allen, who commands both U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, said the killer's actions "will not go unanswered." Citing security reasons, he recalled all coalition personnel from Afghan ministries. NATO forces have advisers embedded in many Afghan ministries, both as trainers and to help manage the transition to Afghan control as foreign forces prepare to withdraw by the end of 2014. The Afghan Interior Ministry oversees all the country's police, so has numerous NATO advisers.
A White House statement said Obama thanked Allen for his steps to protect U.S. troops and to encourage calm. It also said the United States "remains committed to a partnership with the government and people of Afghanistan."
Still, the killings are likely to provide new momentum for critics of President Barack Obama's war policy, as well as Republicans who fault him for having apologized for the Quran burning.
Obama's apology Thursday, shortly after Allen expressed deep regret, was seized on by the president's Republican rivals as a sign of American weakness. Presidential primary candidate Newt Gingrich said it was the Afghans who should be apologizing, given their shocking perfidy.
These tensions coincide with planned administration meetings in Washington in the week ahead with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior. It was unclear Saturday whether the session, including one on Thursday with Panetta at the Pentagon, would go on as scheduled.
Those talks are seen as important in the lead-up to a NATO summit meeting in May in Chicago, when the alliance and Karzai intend to determine the path to turning over full security responsibility to the Afghan government by the end of 2014.
Central to the U.S.-led international coalition's strategy for countering the Taliban insurgency is the idea of building up Afghan security capacity by working closely with the Afghan army and police. That requires a measure of trust, which is undermined when Afghans turn their guns on their foreign partners.
Just this past week the U.S. Army announced it was creating specially tailored brigades - some now getting training in the U.S. - to perform training and advising missions in Afghanistan starting this summer. It will assign 18-person teams to Afghan combat units in hopes of improving their ability to handle the Taliban insurgency on their own by 2014.
Even before the Quran burning and the unrest it unleashed across Afghanistan, U.S. and allied troops had been killed in increasing numbers by their Afghan partners.
Analyst: US Testing Afghans' Religious Sensitivity through Quran Burning
Fars News Agency February 26, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- A senior Afghan analyst said that the US soldiers' recent provocative act and desecration of the Holy Quran was a move by the US to test the threshold of the Afghan people's sensitivity to their religious values.
"A clandestine conspiracy is underway by the Americans who want to assess the religious sensitivity of the Afghan people," Vahid Mojdeh told FNA on Sunday.
He pointed to the Afghan people's reaction to the burning of the Holy Quran by a US pastor in Florida last year, which led to wide-scale protests in Afghan cities and the killing of some foreign nationals in Mazar Sharif, and asked, "How could Americans have forgotten the Afghan people's reaction?"
Mojdeh stressed that the US is studying the effects of its decade-long presence in Afghanistan, and said moves like insult to the Holy Quran are actually "an effort by the US to asses the extent of the West's influence in Afghanistan".
On Sunday, Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai called for calm in a televised address to the nation after the burning of Qurans at a US base sparked five days of violent protests.
He told the Afghan people that the Quran burnings are being investigated, and asked them to wait for the results of that investigation.
Meantime, a senior Afghan politician said trying the US soldiers involved in the burning of the Holy Quran at the Bagram air base in an Afghan court is the only way to appease the Afghan people's wrath.
"A mere probe or investigating the elements behind the act (burning Quran) will not relieve the Afghan people's pain and they should be punished in an Afghan court," Secretary-General of the Afghan National Welfare Party Mohammad Hassan Jafari told FNA on Saturday.
"We ask the Afghan government to prepare the necessary conditions for the trial of these soldiers on Afghanistan's soil," Jafari noted.
At least 25 people have been killed and hundreds wounded since Tuesday, when it first emerged that copies of Quran and religious materials had been thrown into a fire pit used to burn garbage at Bagram Air Field.
Obama’s Afghanistan Apology Problem
Koran violence delays another apology for the Obama administration—to Pakistan.
National Journal By Michael Hirsh February 25, 2012
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Ryan Crocker's title. He is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.
The killing of two U.S. military officers by a gunman inside Afghanistan’s heavily guarded Interior Ministry on Saturday, part of an explosion of anti-American violence that has continued unabated despite a U.S. apology over the burning of Korans by U.S. troops, has complicated President Obama’s plans to accelerate the NATO troop withdrawal and hand some operations over to the new Afghan army by mid-2013.
The challenge facing Obama is even more difficult, both strategically and politically, because his administration is preparing another apology to neighboring Pakistan over the errant NATO strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last fall. This statement was to have been delivered shortly by high-ranking U.S. military and civilian officials, most likely by Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, two U.S. officials told National Journal.
The anti-American protests in Kabul have raged since early last week, when it was first reported that Korans and other religious materials had been thrown into a pit used to burn garbage at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul. At least 25 people have been killed, including two other U.S. soldiers. A U.S. military spokesman in Kabul told National Journal that the violence would not set back plans to begin handing over security to Afghan forces, despite the decision by Gen. John Allen, commander of U.S. forces, to withdraw all NATO personnel from government ministries after the shootings on Saturday. Allen had previously apologized for the burning of the Korans.
“I don’t think there’s any discussion about this affecting transition,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Frankly our position is this was a careless act, but we’ve already apologized for it and we want to move on.”
Whether the planned transition in Afghanistan is affected or not, the apologies over the Koran incident and the NATO strikes pose some political peril for Obama at home in an election year. Republican presidential candidates have been regularly accusing Obama of appeasement and, as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has put it, “apologizing for America.”
On Thursday, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who has grown increasingly immoderate in his statements as he has faded in the polls, called the U.S. apology to Afghan authorities over the burned Korans “astonishing’’ and undeserved. Other Republicans have not joined in the criticism as yet. Neither Mitt Romney nor Rick Santorum's campaigns responded to requests from National Journal for comment on the killings of the officers on Saturday -- underscoring not only the distance those campaigns have put between their operations and Gingrich's but their reluctance to wade into the snarled issue of U.S.-NATO operations in Afghanistan.
As one senior congressional GOP adviser told National Journal Saturday: "The military made a mistake, even if there were radical sayings written in the Korans, we should have sought the help of a local cleric on how to dispose of them. It was a stupid mistake by our military that undercut the very essence of our strategy. When similarly unfortunate events occurred, President Bush apologized as well. There are a thousand things to criticize about the president's handling of two wars. But this ain't one of them."
Whether Obama can escape similar criticism over the apology to Pakistan that his administration is quietly preparing remains to be seen.
The latter apology, linked to an official Pentagon investigation that partially blamed mistakes made by U.S. forces for the NATO incident, was put off indefinitely after the Koran incident, but U.S. officials say they still plan to deliver it in coming weeks.
The administration initially had refused to apologize for the NATO strikes. The White House, Pentagon and State Department rebuffed the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, early on when he pressed for an immediate apology following the Nov. 27 incident. But prodded by the new Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Sherry Rehman, the State Department resurrected the idea in recent weeks, and this time the White House and Pentagon signed off on it.
As one Defense Dept official put it this week, the administration realized that something had to be done to “try move past the rough patch” with Pakistan. Last month, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, sent a top-secret cable to Washington concluding that Taliban havens in Pakistan were jeopardizing the success of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.
With U.S.-Pakistan relations still roiled by the fatal NATO strikes and other disputes, especially the unilateral mission that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani town last year, the administration has felt compelled to give Islamabad a face-saving way to resume normal ties. The United States is pushing for talks with the Taliban ahead of a planned withdrawal from neighboring Afghanistan that is to be completed in 2014. Recently the Afghan government and Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani also called for negotiations with the Taliban.
But U.S. officials fear that without more assistance from Islamabad, the Taliban could exploit the American withdrawal from Afghanistan to wreak havoc from across the border. Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan are also tense following the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s chief peace negotiator and a former Afghan president himself, last September, allegedly by a Taliban suicide bomber. Kabul blamed Pakistan for the attack. Pakistan denied it, but Islamabad has sought to support the Islamist group as a strategic asset.
President Obama now faces a crisis in which strategic challenges abroad and presidential politics at home could collide head on in the months ahead.
National Journal White House Correspondent Major Garrett contributed to this report.
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A History of Women in Afghanistan: Then and Now
TOLOnews.com By Mohadesa Najmi Saturday, 25 February 2012
It may be surprising to know that women in Afghanistan participated socially, politically and economically in the life of their societies before the Taliban came into power.
In 1880 a woman called Malalai from a small village played a great role in the battle of Maiwand. She declared at the top of her lungs: "Young Love, if you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, by God someone is saving you as a token of shame." This not only revitalised the Afghan fighters who had lost morale fighting the British in the second-Anglo war, but sent her down in history as Afghanistan's very own Joan of Arc.
How did a woman like Malalai die on the battlefield as one of Afghanistan's greatest heroine but today women in Afghanistan face difficulty leaving their home without a male escort? Interestingly enough, women have played a huge role in the history of Afghanistan. In 1964, women helped draft the Constitution and there were at least three women legislators in Parliament by the 1970's. Women fulfilled roles as teachers, government workers, medical doctors, lawyers, judges, journalists, writers and poets up until the early 1990s. Moreover, women had constituted 40% of the doctors in Kabul; 70% of school teachers; 60% of Kabul University professors and 50% of the University students. It was not unusual for men and women to casually mingle at movie theatres and on university campuses. This is a far cry from little girls heading to schools today fearing an acid attack. Or 15-year-old Sahar Gul being kept in a basement for six months, tortured with hot iron rods, her fingernails ripped out, all for resisting prostitution.
One particularly interesting segment in the history of Afghan women is during the 1960. The government oversaw various rural development programmes where female nurses were sent in Jeeps to remote areas and villages to inoculate residents from diseases such as cholera. The impossibility of this scheme today is almost too painful to consider. If it were to be pursued by the government now, the men in rural areas would scoff at the idea of their women travelling freely, entering the homes of male strangers, and in some cases, having to touch a strange man in order to treat him. Security concerns alone make such an effort impossible as government nurses (as well as UN and NGO medical workers) are regular targets for insurgent groups. Who cares if she is trying to save lives? She is a woman!
Girl Scouts is yet another tragic memory in Afghanistan's history. Students from elementary and middle schools emulated their counterparts in the USA learning about nature trails, camping and public safety. Little girls were encouraged to expand their skills and venture into new areas of study. Imagine a 'Girl Scouts' scheme taking place in parts of Afghanistan today; the brutish Taliban would cower at the thought of girls engaging in extracurricular activities that would broaden their intellect, never mind being in education in the first place. This delightful scheme disappeared entirely in the 1970s and is showing no signs of return.
Everything changed for women when the Taliban rose to power in early 1995 and set up a radical Islamic state in Afghanistan in 1996. We know that women and girls were systematically discriminated against and marginalised; their human rights utterly violated. This resulted in deteriorating economic and social conditions of women in all areas of the country. They were severely restricted in their access to education, healthcare and employment. Women who had led fruitful lives fulfilling roles as doctors and teachers, were now finding themselves destitute - some resorting to begging on the streets or even prostitution. In May 2001, a decree issued by the Taliban banned women from driving cars and women were continuously beaten and harassed for appearing in public. As little as an inch of foot or hand on display, or even the wrong coloured socks, would warrant an attack from the Taliban who patrolled the streets. My auntie once told me of a time she had been wearing white coloured socks outside. The Taliban who h
ad stopped her beat her with end of an AK47 and told her to go home to change into black coloured socks that were less visible to the eye.
The struggle continues for women in Afghanistan today. The country has a 14 per cent female literacy rate; contrast this with a 99 per cent female literacy rate in the UK and USA. It is nothing short an abomination. This is almost unsurprising when 80 per cent of females lack access to an education centre. The Karzai government issued a law in 2009 that legalised rape within marriage as well as denying the right of women to "leave their homes except for legitimate purposes" or "working or receiving an education without their husbands permission." The law also diminishes the right of mothers to be children's guardians in the event of divorce and makes impossible for wives to inherit their houses and land from their husbands. How can women be expected to rise socially, politically or economically under such circumstances? Or even more fundamentally, how is a woman to feel an equal when she she is subject to rape by her own husband? These conditions are somewhat redolent of the abhorrent 'Jim Crow' laws in the US in the 1880s that restricted African Americans in every aspect of their lives.
Women face further adversity at the prospect of childbirth with a woman dying every 27 minutes due to pregnancy-related complications in Afghanistan. There are on average 1,600 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. But in the remote mountainous province of Badakhshan the rate is 6,500 per 100,000 - the highest recorded rate of maternal mortality in the world. Thus, it may not be an exaggeration to declare Afghanistan the worst place in the world to give birth. I will go on: 17 per cent of women have reported sexual violence, as many as 80 per cent of marriages are forced, and 8 million women and girls aged between 15 and 40 are suffering from depression.
The question that remains is: what hope is there for women in Afghanistan and has there been any progress that bequeaths hope for the future?
In 1977, Meena Keshwar laid the foundations for RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan which launched a bilingual magazine titled Woman's Message (Payam-e-Zan) in 1981 and organised events in the city of Kabul for several years to mark International Women's Day. In August 2002, Khatol Mohammadzai became the first female general to serve in the Afghan National Army. And from 2005 until early 2007, Malalai Joya served as a female parliamentarian in the National Assembly of Afghanistan, substantiating the fact that women can serve in positions of authority. A bodybuilding club for women was even inaugurated in 2005 along with a female boxing federation by Afghanistan's National Olympic Committee. In the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens, female athletes Friba Razayee and Robina Muqim Yaar represented Afghanistan for the first time in the country's history.
Even more promisingly, Afghanistan's Ministry of Education declared that more than 5.4 million children have been enrolled in schools, 35 per cent of them girls, by April 2008. This was however followed in November by an acid attack on school girls in Kandahar with over a dozen injured and left with permanent facial scares. Nonetheless, significant achievements were made in several political aspects: the government appointed its first female provincial governor Habibi Sorabi in 2005 and Azra Jafari became the country's first female mayor in 2009.
So what do all these achievements mean for the women of Afghanistan who are suffering under an extremely patriarchal society? Do they diminish the years of turmoil and subjugation? Certainly not. In fact, as Malalai Joya stated: "To all intents and purposes, the position of women is the same now as it was under the Taliban and in some respects the situation is far worse." However, history has proven that the female population was integral in shaping its course: women were needed, they were appreciated, and they were the heart and soul of Afghanistan. To understand their position now, we must look to then: if women could once constitute a meaningful fraction of society, they will again.
Pakistan dismantles bin Laden compound
Financial Times By Matthew Green and Farhan Bokhari February 26, 2012
Islamabad - Pakistan has begun to demolish the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed, hoping to bury the humiliation of an episode that shook public faith in its military and opened a new seam of suspicion of its secret services in the US.
The destruction began as a government official said that Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s premier spy agency, would be moved to a post overseeing the security of the country’s nuclear weapons. The planned transfer of Gen Pasha, who was appointed ISI chief in September, 2008, will remove one of the key protagonists in what has been the most turbulent era in the fraught US-Pakistan alliance since 2001. His tenure is due to expire next month.
The raid that killed Bin Laden served as the catalyst for one of the worst crises in relations between Pakistan and the US by revealing that the al-Qaeda founder had been living unmolested for years in a garrison town outside Islamabad.
A decade-long hunt by US intelligence agents was rewarded with the ultimate form of revenge on May 2 last year when Navy Seals leapt out of helicopters, stormed the compound in usually sleepy Abbottabad, and shot Bin Laden to death.
The raid tarnished the image of Pakistan’s army while raising awkward questions over how the world’s most wanted man could have been living quietly near a military academy. Outrage in Pakistan over the intrusion by US forces and the suspicion swirling in Washington over how much the ISI knew about Bin Laden’s whereabouts in spite of official denials pushed relations between the allies to new lows.
Ties were strained further in November, when 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed in a US air-strike near the border with Afghanistan. Pakistan’s government appeared determined to remove the most tangible reminder of the bin Laden chapter by sending mechanical diggers to rip apart the three-storey compound after the sun set on Saturday. Floodlights illuminated the scene as the machines breached the outer walls then tore into the main building.
Security forces maintained a cordon around the site in Abbottabad, said Mohammad Ashfaq, a journalist for the privately owned ARY TV television channel, who witnessed the start of the demolition. “The authorities have practically sealed the area,” Mr Ashfaq said. “They are not letting anyone in or out of the neighbourhood. There is very tight control.”
News of the demolition broke in Pakistan at about the same time as television channels started to report that Yusuf Raza Gilani, the prime minister, had decided to put Gen Pasha in charge of the Strategic Plans Division, which oversees the security of the country’s nuclear arsenal. “General Pasha will shortly become head of the SPD,” the government official told the Financial Times. “The choice of a new (ISI) director-general will be made in a few days.”
Gen Pasha is due to step down on March 18, when his latest year-long extension ends. Pakistani commentators have floated the names of various possible replacements, though there has not been any official word on who will emerge as the next ISI chief. There was no confirmation from ISI or army officials that Gen Pasha is being moved.
The tearing down of bin Laden’s house began after a week in which Pakistan’s government has signalled its support for the US strategy to end the war in Afghanistan by trying to start peace talks with the Taliban.
Yusuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s prime minister, issued a statement on Friday reiterating his support for the Afghan government’s attempt to kindle dialogue and calling for the Taliban to embrace negotiations. Afghan officials have long accused Pakistan of harbouring the leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement and say no meaningful negotiations would be possible unless Pakistan’s security agencies refrain from sabotaging the process.
Pakistan and the US took a step towards repairing their battered relationship on Thursday when Hina Rabbani Khar, the foreign minister, met Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, on the sidelines of a conference on Somalia held in London. Pakistani officials are hoping tensions will thaw further if the US makes some form of apology for the deaths of its troops in November.
Analyst Praises Pakistan's Demand on Taliban for Direct Talks with Afghan Gov't
Fars News Agency February 26, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- A senior Afghan analyst hailed Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Reza Gilani for his call on the Taliban to hold direct talks with the government in Kabul, and said the move by Islamabad was the result of the tri-partite negotiations recently held among Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"It was the first time that Pakistani officials demanded the Taliban to enter direct talks with Afghans and reach a desirable solution through talks," Head of Afghanistan's Research and Strategy Center Gholam Jilani Zawak told FNA on Sunday.
He described the move as a positive step which promotes the peace process between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and said the development was the result of negotiations among Tehran, Kabul and Islamabad in Pakistan earlier this month.
The joint statement signed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari at the conclusion of their third tri-partite summit in Islamabad showed that the three leaders are resolved to ensure mutual respect for sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity, as enshrined in the UN Charter.
They would also strengthen cooperation on eradicating extremism, terrorism and militancy and to address the root causes of these menaces, condemning the killings of civilians as well as any kind of assassination.
Meantime, Afghan officials say that talks between the US and the Taliban in Qatar will not result in the establishment of peace in Afghanistan since the talks are in pursuit of the US interests and the talks do not involve the Kabul government.
Asylum Concerns Haunt Western Exchange Programs For Afghan Students
RFE/RL February 25, 2012
Since the ouster of the Taliban in 2001 and the establishment of the elected government of Hamid Karzai,
One of the projects that foreign governments have funded since the Taliban was ousted and a UN-backed government established in Kabul is an Afghan student exchange, with the aim of brightening that country's future and increasing cross-border understanding across borders.
But such exchanges have been troubled by concerns that too many of the visitors bother returning to help rebuild Afghan society.
The fact is that only a few Afghan universities provide master's-level studies -- and those are just in literature. So there is an acute need for a wider range of fields for higher studies for Afghan students to choose.
To fill the gap, many countries invite Afghan students to attend university in the West. The United States and Britain have some of the most prestigious scholarships -- Fulbright and Chevening, respectively. Apart from government-funded programs, private and nonprofit projects also provide Afghans with educational opportunities around the world.
Afghan students are provided scholarships and fellowships for their higher aptitude and capability in return for a promise that they will return to Afghanistan after their study programs are over to help rebuild their country. To ensure this -- taking Afghan family and social structure into account -- restrictions are imposed such as a ban on taking family members as dependents along during their studies. The rule doesn't apply to students from countries whose governments pay half of the scholarships provided by foreign programs.
But despite the rule, many Afghan students never come back; they vanish before or soon after the completion of their study-abroad programs. Perceptions of a deteriorating security situation, news of the looming exit of NATO troops, and the woeful state of the critical infrastructure mean Afghan young people might also lose hope for a better future in Afghanistan.
For some Afghans, becoming a scholarship grantee has been like getting a free ticket to jump from the United States to seek asylum in Canada. Harris Najib is a Fulbright alumnus who works as a case manager with a nonprofit in Calgary, Canada. He says he didn't return to Afghanistan because of political instability.
He says Afghan students abroad "have now had the experience of engaging in dialogue without the fear of being silenced, shunned, or ridiculed," adding candidly, "A grim political environment in Afghanistan and the possibility of a Taliban takeover diminish the appetite for returning and contributing to the process of rebuilding Afghanistan."
Some criticize the U.S. State Department for not following up with employment opportunities in Afghanistan so the students gain confidence through a financially secure future there.
Ateeq Nosher, a Harvard University alumnus who lives in Kabul and works as managing director at Apex-2 Consulting, says "the job opportunities for those who come from the U.S. and Canada or other Western countries are relatively higher than those for students produced locally or in neighboring countries."
Najib adds: "Many Afghan students who have come to study in the U.S. post-Taliban have a decent amount of professional experience working for the UN or other international agencies back home. They can therefore compete for jobs with their North American or European peers within certain sectors. And, if they can find a job in Europe or North America and are able to guarantee a better future for themselves and their families, some would rather not return to Afghanistan, and wait out the current political uncertainty."
Apart from concerns over security and employment opportunities, other issues face graduates returning from their Western studies on a daily basis in Afghanistan.
"The well-educated segment of the population gets disappointed when they see weak people leading them," Nosher says. "They feel they aren't contributing to policies because [at the] end of the day, those policies are influenced by political appointees."
Students seeking asylum obviously think of their individual benefits hindering the opportunities for the rest of the batches to come.
Although there are no numbers available on students not returning to Afghanistan after going to Western countries as exchange students, one program appears to have gotten fed up with such students using their scholarship programs to seek asylum. Last year, the United States suspended its highly regarded YES youth-exchange program. Begun in 2004, YES invited hundreds of Afghan students to the U.S., but around half those students fled to Canada to claim asylum. NPR recently quoted embassy officials saying they want to restart the YES program, but only if they can ensure that students won't jump the program for asylum purposes.
The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States -- part of the U.S.-Canada Smart Border Action Plan -- aims to prevent people from filing for asylum in a country other than the one they initially entered, potentially stemming the flow unless a family member there has agreed to sponsor them.
Apart from the no-dependents rule for students, mature applicants are considered more committed to the programs and thus reliable. Dr. Maria Beebe of Afghan eQuality Alliances at Washington State University told blogger Bob McCarty about having a more selective criteria to ensure the return of Afghan students:
"So, for example, we can say only directors and assistant director levels would be considered. At that level, we will also get the older (more mature) students who have children and will have more compelling reasons to go back to Afghanistan."
Detractors might argue that such an approach contradicts the aim of providing an equal opportunity to all talented Afghans -- and particularly lets down Afghan young people, its potential future leaders -- in higher education. On the other hand, the no-dependents rule becomes irrelevant if mature single students enter into relationships with non-Afghans and decide to remain with their partners abroad.
Malalai Bashir
www.afghanistannewscenter.com