Tweet
Clinton defends US mission in Afghanistan
By DONNA CASSATA and ROBERT BURNS | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday defended the U.S. mission in Afghanistan as a week of deadly anti-American protests and the killing of two U.S. service members pushed Democrats to challenge President Barack Obama's policy.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski gave voice to the increasing exasperation in Congress more than a decade after the war began. She held up a copy of a newspaper with a report on the death of Army Maj. Robert J. Marchanti II of Baltimore, one of the two high-ranking officers shot point blank while they say at their desks in a heavily secured ministry building. Air Force Lt. Col. John D. Loftis was also killed.
"What do I tell his family today? Was it worth it? Because they're angry. People in Maryland are angry," Mikulski told Clinton at a Senate hearing.
"We went there with the best of intentions and out of need, after we were attacked. You were the New York senator. We remember the harsh reality of that brutal 9/11. ... And now because of an inadvertent act, the relationship is so fragile, there's this tumultuous thing," she added.
Clinton said the United States went to Afghanistan with a clear purpose after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against the U.S. and that Obama has set the country on a path to leave.
"This is not an endless commitment that will take lives far into the future," Clinton told the Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations. "But we have both made progress on the principle reason we were there — security. Because of our platform and our presence in Afghanistan, we've been able to target terrorists, particularly top al-Qaida operatives including (Osama) bin Laden in their safe havens. And we have made progress in helping the Afghan people."
Clinton said she could never justify the death of an individual, but insisted that the military mission has made the United States safer and created the possibility of a better future for Afghanistan.
More than 30 people have died in clashes since it became known last week that copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, and other religious materials were thrown into a fire pit used to burn garbage at a U.S. base near Kabul.
Obama has apologized for what he said was a mistake.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, also pressed Clinton on the U.S. mission and the events in Afghanistan.
Separately, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark praised U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan for showing "remarkable restraint" in the face of anti-coalition violence following the burning of the Quran.
Fogh Rasmussen told a NATO seminar at a Washington hotel that Gen. John Allen, the top allied commander in Afghanistan, was right to withdraw all allied advisers from Afghan government ministries after two U.S. officers were killed in their offices on Saturday.
Troops from the U.S.-led international military coalition "are showing remarkable restraint and professionalism under very difficult circumstances," Fogh Rasmussen said.
"Despite the challenges of this incident and the challenges we face, we must not lose sight of our goal: a stable Afghanistan," he said.
The NATO chief echoed the Obama administration's stay-the-course theme on Afghanistan, insisting that the breakdown in trust between the allies and the Afghans, as evidenced by Saturday's shooting in the Interior Ministry, would be overcome.
"We will not allow the extremists to weaken our resolve," he said. "We will continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our Afghan partners, and we will not lose sight of our shared goal. We are in Afghanistan to build stability and security for the Afghan people, which is in the interest of our own security."
He said Saturday's shooting, following a series of incidents in which other allied troops have been shot by their supposed Afghan partners, "does not represent the daily picture" of cooperation on security and other issues.
The withdrawal of advisers is temporary and "will not in any way affect the timeline" for giving the Afghan government full responsibility for security across the country by the end of 2014, he said.
7 civilians killed in S. Afghanistan blast
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- Seven civilians were killed Monday in a blast in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, a spokesman for provincial government said on Tuesday.
"Seven civilians were killed when a powerful blast occurred at around 4:00 p.m.local time Monday in a compound in Naw Zad district of Helmand province," spokesman Daud Ahmadi told Xinhua.
He said four women and three children were killed in the explosion that happened in a house in Sarkhdaz area of the district.
Ahmadi said it was not clear how the explosion happened, adding an investigation was launched to probe why the explosive was placed in the house.
Taliban militants have often attacked Afghan and NATO-led forces with homemade bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) but the lethal weapons also inflict casualties on civilians.
The number of civilian casualties has been soaring in the militancy-plagued Afghanistan as a total of 3,021 Afghan civilians have been killed in 2011 which indicates, an 8 percent rise in non- combatants' deaths compared with 2010, according to the United Nations annual report released in Kabul earlier this month.
Notorious for growing poppy and militancy, the Helmand province has been experiencing increasing militancy over the past couples of years despite continued military operations launched by Afghan forces and NATO-led troops.
Afghan president condemns fatal bombing at military airfield
CNN By Nick Paton Walsh and Masoud Popalzai February 28, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned a suicide bombing Monday at a military airfield, the latest incident in a spike in violence after the burning of Qurans by NATO troops last week.
At least nine people were killed and 12 wounded in the early-morning explosion near the front gate of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force base at Jalalabad airport in eastern Afghanistan, according to Gen. Abdulla Hazim Stanikzai, the provincial police chief.
There were no NATO casualties. The Taliban insurgency said the attack was in retaliation for the Quran burning and said it hoped the attacks will continue "with the anger of the public."
Another attack of "some significance" was reported later Monday in Naranghar province, near the Pakistani border, said Lt. Cmdr. James Williams, an ISAF spokesman.
A statement from the Taliban said its fighters also attacked U.S. troops and border police in southern Naranghar on Monday evening, claiming to have inflicted a dozen deaths on the U.S. and Afghan force while losing five of their own. But Williams said that while some insurgent casualties had been reported, there were no deaths among allied troops.
The Qurans that were burned were among religious materials seized from a detainee facility at Bagram Airfield last week. U.S. President Barack Obama apologized to Karzai last week, calling the burning an inadvertent error.
In a statement issued on the bombing Monday, Karzai condemned the "inhuman and un-Islamic" act and urged that "the ruthless enemy would earn nothing but growing public hatred and punishment before Allah, the Almighty."
Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said insurgents tried to attack the ISAF installation and failed, instead taking more innocent lives.
The Taliban also claimed Monday to be behind the poisoning of food at a dining facility at Forward Operating Base Torkham, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It too was a retaliatory attack, the group said.
ISAF confirmed that food at the base appeared to have been contaminated over the weekend, though it was unclear whether it was deliberate.
"Nobody got sick. A dining facility worker came to his leaders at the FOB and said that something had been poisoned," said Maj. David Eastburn, an ISAF spokesman.
"The dining facility was shut down, and we brought in environmental health, who found traces of chlorine bleach in the coffee and fruit. Soldiers are now eating pre-prepared rations, and no one was affected. There is a full investigation that is narrowing down who was responsible."
Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman in Kabul, said it's not clear whether the incident was a deliberate attempt to poison troops or "was just inadvertent, perhaps using more Clorox in the cleaning process than they should have."
The Taliban has frequently exaggerated its claims or claimed responsibility for attacks that later turned out to be the work of another group.
Even so, Monday's bombing and news of the contaminated food come on the heels of a week of violent protests over the Quran burning. The violence has left at least 39 people dead, including four American soldiers, and hundreds more wounded.
In northern Kunduz province over the weekend, protesters attacked a police chief's office and a U.S. military base, authorities said. Some threw hand grenades at the base, known as Combat Outpost Fortitude, with resulting blasts wounding seven U.S. personnel believed to be Special Forces members, they said.
Demonstrations outside the United Nations office in Kunduz on Saturday left four civilians dead and prompted the U.N. mission there to say Monday that it is temporarily relocating its international staff.
Two U.S. soldiers were gunned down last week at a base in eastern Afghanistan by a man wearing an Afghan National Army uniform.
Allen pulled military advisers from Afghan ministries after Saturday's shooting deaths of two other U.S. officers inside the heavily secure Ministry of Interior. Authorities are searching for the suspect, identified by Afghan police as a junior officer in the ministry's intelligence department.
The suspect had been fired by the Interior Ministry but rejoined the intelligence services as a driver a couple of months ago, a senior Afghan counterterrorism official said Monday.
"We do not know how he was allowed into the office, as the command and control center requires a password for access," said the official, who is not authorized to speak to the media about the topic. "There is something fishy there."
The official said he believed that the gunman used a silencer on his weapon, as no one heard the gunshots. He said he doubts that an angry exchange led to the shooting, because the "way he entered was not accidental."
Kirby said it's not clear whether the shooting was linked the the Quran burning.
"We don't know what the motivation was behind the murders, and we don't know all the facts surrounding how this individual got into this space and frankly was able to get out as quickly and apparently as easily as he did," Kirby said Monday.
Allen has told his commanders he will not authorize the return of personnel to Afghan ministries until new security measures are in place and working, according to an official who has access to the latest intelligence and is involved in administration discussions but declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the situation.
The religious materials, including Qurans, were removed from a detainee center library at Bagram Airfield because they had "extremist inscriptions" on them and there was "an appearance that these documents were being used to facilitate extremist communications," a military official said.
The ensuing attacks have put pressure on already strained U.S.-Afghan relations at a time when the United States is working to reduce troop levels and transition security as part of its plan to withdraw by 2014.
Pentagon officials on Monday acknowledged the significance of the attacks but denied they are affecting the U.S. or NATO mission there.
"These events, they're troubling. They're worrisome. They've gotten everybody's attention," Kirby said. "Yes, tension is high here in Kabul right now, but across the country at large, the mission continues, and we're seeing the protest activity decline."
The number of protests in Afghanistan has gone from 24 on Saturday to three on Monday, only two of which were because of the Quran burning, Kirby said.
CNN's Barbara Starr and Chelsea J. Carter contributed to this report.
Afghan police kill 12 militants
KABUL, Feb. 28 (Xinhua)-- Afghan police backed by national army and NATO-led forces have killed a dozen anti-government militants during series of operations over the past 24 hours, a statement of Interior Ministry released here said.
"During the operations conducted in Logar and Khost provinces over the past 24 hours, 12 armed insurgents have been killed and three others sustained injures," the statement said.
However, it did not say if there were any casualties on the security forces.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to make comment.
Canadian Forces officer fined for discharging pistol in Kabul airport
By Andrew Duffy, Postmedia News February 28, 2012 The Ottawa Citizen
GATINEAU, Que. — A senior officer in the Canadian Forces has been fined $1,500 for accidentally firing a live round of ammunition inside Kabul International Airport.
Lt.-Col. Gilles Fortin, a highly regarded 25-year veteran of the Canadian Forces, pleaded guilty to mishandling his 9mm sidearm.
Fortin is one of three senior Canadian officers to accidentally discharge a weapon in Afghanistan last year.
The court martial heard that Fortin arrived at Kabul airport on Sept. 1 as part of his deployment with NATO's Joint Warfare Centre.
Fortin was met by Canadian soldiers who gave him a duffle bag with his tactical equipment: a dismantled C7 rifle, a loaded Browning pistol and a fragmentation vest.
Fortin wanted to dismantle the pistol to ensure its recoil spring and guide had been properly installed. So he took the weapon from the duffle bag and unloaded the magazine.
Fortin then pulled back the slide of the gun, but did not check to see if a round was already in the firing chamber. He pulled the trigger and the gun discharged.
The shot was fired at the ground in front of Fortin. No one was injured.
Fortin immediately apologized to the soldiers he was with, approached a detachment of military police and informed his superiors.
The Canadian military subsequently changed its policy of including a loaded pistol in a soldier's tactical kit.
Court heard that Fortin, a signals officer who has served in Croatia, Bosnia and Afghanistan, has consistently been praised as an outstanding leader and role model.
Chief Military Judge Col. Mario Dutil, said Fortin accepted full responsibility for the incident. But had Fortin followed proper procedure and checked the firing chamber of the weapon, the judge noted, the incident would have been avoided.
On May 29, 2011, Col. Paul Scagnetti, a team leader at the Afghan National Army Command and Staff College in Kabul, accidentally fired a round from his C8 rifle into his office wall during a security drill. Two Afghan interpreters were in his office at the time, but no one was hurt.
Scagnetti, now retired, was fined $2,000.
On Sept. 5, Col. D.A. Patterson accidentally fired his 9mm pistol at the floor of his office at a forward operating base in Kandahar Province. An Afghan interpreter was in the room, but no one was injured.
Patterson was fined $1,600.
Every year, hundreds of Canadian soldiers are convicted of mishandling their weapons. Most of the incidents involve inexperienced soldiers, charged because they pull the trigger on a range before a firing command is issued.
In 2008-09, the last year for which statistics are available, the Canadian military recorded 29 accidental gun discharges in Afghanistan.
In the most famous such incident, then Brig.-Gen. Daniel Menard fired his C8 rifle twice into the ground as he was about to board a helicopter in Kandahar with his boss, Gen. Walt Natynczyk, chief of the defence staff.
Menard — he later resigned after being recalled from Afghanistan due to a sex scandal — was fined $3,500 for the negligent handling of his weapon.
Afghan attacks over Koran burning renew debate on U.S. drawdown
Officials say the turmoil is unlikely to derail plans for a steady troop pullout. But it may embolden those who argue that more U.S. troops should leave sooner.
Los Angeles Times By David S. Cloud February 28, 2012
Washington - Anti-U.S. protests and other deadly attacks roiling Afghanistan have deepened concern at the Pentagon and White House about the plan to wind down the war by withdrawing U.S. combat troops in close coordination with Afghan security forces, several officials and military officers said.
Pentagon officials scrambled Monday to contain the damage, insisting that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and top military commanders had not lost faith in a strategy that envisions a steady U.S. pullout as small teams of military advisors train Afghan army and police forces.
Panetta and Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "believe we have achieved significant progress in reversing the Taliban's momentum and in developing the Afghan security forces, and they believe that the fundamentals of our strategy remain sound," said Pentagon spokesman George Little.
In private, other officers and U.S. officials said riots and attacks after U.S. personnel threw copies of the Koran into a trash-burning pit at the Bagram military base have renewed a debate at the highest levels of the Obama administration and are expected to affect internal deliberations on the pace of the drawdown.
"Too many people are asking, 'Why are we still doing this if the guys you're supposed to be helping keep murdering your soldiers?' " said a senior U.S. general, who spoke on condition of anonymity in sharing internal discussions.
Officials said the turmoil was unlikely to derail the U.S. plan to pull out troops while small teams of advisors focus on training Afghan security forces and diplomats pursue peace talks with the Taliban. But mistrust between U.S. and Afghan forces may hamper the training and add to security risks, several officials said.
Still, a senior Defense Department official said the anti-American backlash is likely to embolden those in Washington who long have argued that more U.S. troops should leave sooner.
"There's no question that this is going to spur debate, and that people who already have fairly dire views will have those reinforced," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to reporters.
The number of U.S. troops is scheduled to drop from 90,000 to 68,000 by September. U.S. commanders in Kabul, the capital, have sought to persuade the White House to slow further withdrawals in hopes of locking in gains before Afghan troops are scheduled to take full control of security by the end of 2014.
There were fewer protests Monday, but the violence did not entirely abate. In the eastern city of Jalalabad, nine Afghans were killed when a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into the heavily guarded gates of an airport used by Afghan and NATO forces, as well as civilian aircraft.
A Taliban spokesman was quoted as saying the bombing was revenge for the Koran burning.
United Nations officials announced they had ordered international staff to withdraw from U.N. offices in the northern city of Kunduz after rioters sought to overrun the compound Saturday.
U.S. officials hope the protests will die down in coming days and that hundreds of military and civilian advisors can return to their jobs in Afghan government ministries in Kabul. Advisors from the U.S., Britain, France and other countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were withdrawn abruptly after two American officers were shot and killed inside the Interior Ministry on Saturday.
"I'd be less than honest if I didn't say that things are tense here in Kabul," said Navy Capt. John Kirby, a military spokesman. "But I will tell you that it is getting calmer."
Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, the top commander of the U.S.-led NATO effort, "is not ready right now to have the advisors go back, but this is temporary," Kirby added.
At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney called the weekend killings "isolated incidents" and noted that U.S. forces have carried out hundreds of missions with Afghan army and police.
Other U.S. officials noted that Afghan security forces have sought to quell the protests and have continued to carry out combat operations, often working with U.S. units.
Anthony Cordesman, a military strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said the week's violence raised "questions about the U.S. strategy and the value of continuing with the current approach to the war."
But in a written analysis, he argued that the U.S. strategy had "been dying for a long time and for many more reasons than the growing distrust" between the U.S.-led coalition and Afghan leaders, including endemic corruption in President Hamid Karzai's government and Taliban sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan.
david.cloud@latimes.com
Times staff writer Kathleen Hennessey in Washington and special correspondent Aimal Yaqubi in Kabul contributed to this report.
Afghanistan: The Friendship That Went Up in Flames
The Quran burnings have provoked violent unrest, a suicide bombing, and outright murders. Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau on another victim: the U.S.-Afghan partnership.
The Daily Beast By Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau Feb 27, 2012
The carnage continues. Just when the bloodletting seemed at last to be dissipating after a week of violent anti-U.S. protests, a suicide bomber rammed his explosive-laden vehicle into the base of a NATO airbase in eastern Afghanistan. The deaths and injuries were only the latest casualties since the discovery of copies of the Quran in a burn pit at Bagram airbase, outside Kabul.
In a conservative, underdeveloped, and staunchly Muslim place like Afghanistan, it’s hard to think of anything that could arouse more outrage than the mishandling of what people regard as the literal word of God. The subsequent public fury led to the deaths of some 30 Afghans amid the protests, as well as the point-blank murders of four U.S. soldiers. And that was before the suicide bombing outside the NATO base in Jalalabad, on the busy road from Kabul to Pakistan. The blast killed nine people and wounded 19 others, including four NATO soldiers—and to dispel all doubt, a Taliban spokesman announced that it was “to avenge the desecration of the Quran by the U.S. military.”
Beyond the deaths and injuries, the Quran burnings may have damaged something even bigger: America’s partnership with Kabul. As soon as news of the burnings broke, the Taliban began calling on Afghans to rise up and urging Afghan security personnel to turn their weapons against their U.S. and other Western allies. Whether inspired or not by those calls for retribution, Afghan soldiers and civilians have repeatedly attacked American forces over the past week. An Afghan soldier shot and killed two U.S. troops last week in eastern Afghanistan, not far from today’s suicide bombing. This past Saturday, two American officers were shot in the back of the head as they sat at their desks inside Kabul’s high-security Interior Ministry. The killer fled the scene and has disappeared. And yesterday, seven more U.S. military trainers were wounded when a protestor lobbed a hand grenade into a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan.
The insurgents are reveling in the anti-American outburst. Millions of Afghans were upset by news of the Quran burnings, and then Taliban agents and militant mullahs whipped them into a fury. The instigators were able to build on the public’s resentment of other recent cultural and religious affronts, such as the viral video of U.S. soldiers urinating on the bodies of dead insurgents. One senior Taliban, a former minister in Mullah Mohammad Omar’s defunct regime, says such offenses have boosted the number of Afghans volunteering to join the insurgency. “Every time such incidents take place we have been approached by common Afghans asking how they can help to get revenge,” he says, declining to be named for security reasons. “These incidents help us explain and help people understand the cause of our jihad against the natural enemies of our religion.” The former minister says he knows the identity of the suicide bomber who hit the Jalalabad airfield today. “His blood was hot with anger,” the former minister sa
ys. “He was so motivated, he did not need much training to carry out his mission.”
High-ranking Afghan officials are dismayed and saddened by the damage that has been done to the Afghan-U.S. partnership. “We have been helped, even saved, by the U.S. forces who have died in large numbers and the U.S. tax money that has flowed in,” says a senior Afghan official who does not want to be named. “But these incidents erase the positive American image that had been built up.”
The former minister says he knows the identity of the suicide bomber. “His blood was hot with anger,” the former minister says. “He was so motivated, he did not need much training to carry out his mission.”
The harm goes far beyond America’s image. The alliance needs to be based on friendship and trust. As U.S. combat forces gradually withdraw from Afghanistan in the coming two years, the Americans who stay behind will be relying more heavily than ever on the Afghan officers and soldiers they have trained. The new mission has already begun: to advise and mentor the Afghan security forces, enabling them to stand on their own against the insurgents with a minimum of American support. Smaller groups of U.S. advisers and trainers will be stationed among their Afghan counterparts in the field, leaving them potentially vulnerable to angry or frustrated Afghan troops.
And that’s a big problem. Even before the Quran burnings, U.S. and NATO officers were concerned by the cultural and personal tensions that were building between foreign advisers and Afghan soldiers and police. There had been a worrisome number of incidents in which Afghans in uniform turned their weapons against their Western allies, and the shootings demonstrated clearly how tense the partnership was becoming in the field. Soldiers in combat have to depend on each other completely: they can’t afford to keep looking over their shoulders and worrying about the reliability of the men beside them. In the months ahead, repairing that tattered sense of trust may prove to be even tougher than the fight against the Taliban.
Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and has been covering the region for the magazine the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Negotiations with the Taliban find some momentum
Washington Post By David Ignatius 27/02/2012
U.S. diplomats have noted with interest that a prominent Taliban spokesman, when asked by a Saudi newspaper whether it would host al-Qaeda once more if it regained power, answered that the leaders of al-Qaeda “are no longer interested in Afghanistan.” That appears to some officials to signal acceptance of one key U.S. and Saudi goal in peace talks in Afghanistan.
The comments by Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, one of the Taliban’s top spokesmen, were made last Saturday to Asharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned newspaper in London. He repeated some hardline Taliban policies, including a promise to keep attacking the U.S. Embassy and military headquarters in Kabul. But Ahmadi repeatedly endorsed the Taliban’s decision to open a office in Qatar and begin peace negotiations.
“Our conditions during the negotiations will be an end to occupation and for the U.S. to leave the affairs of Afghanistan to the Afghan people,” Ahmadi said. He seemed to welcome negotiations as a sign of the deteriorating U.S. position in Afghanistan, noting: “The U.S. side is prepared to negotiate with the Islamic Emirate [his description of the Taliban] after it did everything in its power to forcibly eliminate our jihadist power; however, it failed to achieve anything tangible in this regard.”
The Taliban spokesman’s statement endorsing negotiations comes as U.S. commanders are struggling to cope with an Afghan population that has been enraged by the apparently accidental burning of Korans by U.S. troops. The Koran incident has added to the precariousness of the U.S. position in Afghanistan and made a diplomatic settlement all the more urgent.
Ahmadi didn’t endorse the other two major outcomes the United States seeks from talks, which are that the Taliban renounce violence and accept the tolerant provisions of the Afghan constitution. But he did say that the Taliban would allow women’s education and other rights, “in light of Islamic teachings,” and that the group might allow some satellite television channels.
These slight concessions by Ahmadi will not do much to reassure non-Taliban Afghans, many of whom fear that in its eagerness to withdraw forces from the country, the United States will sanction the return of a Taliban leadership that is unpopular in most parts of the country.
But the Ahmadi interview is the clearest sign yet that the process of negotiation led by State Department representative Marc Grossman is beginning to gather momentum — even as the broader U.S. position in the country deteriorates.
More Afghans crossing into Pakistan?
QUETTA, 27 February 2012 (IRIN) - In a tiny flat they have rented in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan, bordering Afghanistan, Zarnab Bibi and her husband Aziz Khan* wait patiently for the phone to ring.
“We are hoping to hear from an agent we have paid to take us and our four children to Thailand and then maybe onto Australia,” Khan told IRIN.
The family left its home in Afghanistan’s conflict-ridden Kandahar Province about a month ago, crossing into Pakistan illegally via a mountain pass.
They spoke of a long walk on foot and said they spent all their savings on the journey. They knew further travel overseas would also be illegal, but Bibi explained: “We really have no choice given the situation in Afghanistan.”
They feared a resurgence of the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan for five years before it was overthrown in 2001 by international forces that are now gradually withdrawing from the country.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says the number of people fleeing Afghanistan has dropped significantly in the past decade, since the government of Hamid Karzai took control of the country. At the same time there are signs of a recent increase in the number of Afghans leaving for Pakistan, a trend which would complicate efforts by Afghanistan and its international partners to sustainably bring home refugees already outside the country.
More conflict and uncertainty
In the Kurram Agency, one of seven tribal areas that share a frontier with Afghanistan, Moazzam Toor told IRIN from his village in the Tirah Valley that the number of refugees from Afghanistan “had definitely increased in the last few months, because they are worried about the future at home.”
He said many of the refugees were destitute, and had headed for Peshawar or other big cities in search of opportunities to earn income.
“Some do not even have shoes on their feet, and walk in leather tied with straps.”
The UN says a rise and spread of conflict in 2011 has led to a significant increase in displacement, with the number of people displaced within the country estimated to have risen to half a million by year-end. But tracking displacements outside the country has proven difficult.
“Pakistan and Afghanistan share a long and porous border, where hundreds of thousands of people cross the border back and forth daily for different reasons, which could be related to business, education or medical reasons,” said Duniya Aslam Khan, spokesperson for UNHCR in Pakistan. “Not every Afghan crossing the border into Pakistan is a refugee,” she told IRIN.
According to media reports, the prime minister of Pakistan told UN High Commissioner for Afghan Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres on a recent visit that 30-40,000 Afghans crossed the border annually and Pakistan needed international help to tackle the refugee situation.
But Khan said the number of registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan remained 1.7 million and authorities in Peshawar said they had no official information on the arrival of new refugees into the country.
An official at the government commissionerate for Afghan refugees in Peshawar, who asked not to be named, said the number of Afghans crossing over had increased since mid-2011.
“Most are economic [migrants], and also [refugees] worried about instability in Afghanistan. They mainly live with other Afghans or in rented homes. We are not permitted to give figures, and the numbers are hard to ascertain anyway.”
Border residents say tensions with Islamabad have bolstered growing uncertainty in Afghanistan, amid fears that Pakistan - whose intelligence service allegedly supports the Taliban - is fomenting trouble for its neighbour.
Zarnab has a college education but recalls the days under the Taliban, before 2001, when her daughters were not allowed to go to school.
“I am scared for the future of my two teenage daughters if the Taliban make a return, as this could happen given that the Pakistan government wants it and the militants are now talking to the US officials,” she said, referring to peace talks under way between the US, Afghanistan and the Taliban.
Trafficking
Pakistan is listed as “a source, transit, and destination country” for trafficked persons, according to the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report for 2011.
“There are people everywhere in Quetta and other cities involved in getting people out of the country illegally, in exchange for money,” Farid Ahmed, coordinator for the autonomous Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), told IRIN. “Many from Afghanistan also come into Pakistan to make use of these agents.”
HRCP conducted a study in 2009, recording thousands of cases of human trafficking through Quetta from 2005 to 2008, including cases involving Afghans who had set out from Kabul.
*Not their real names
Towards more sustainable solutions for returnees
JALALABAD/SARACHA, 27 February 2012 (IRIN) - Baswra squats on a dirty street corner in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, watching fellow Afghans walk by with packages of assistance from aid agencies. When the door to the distribution site opens, she throws herself at it, waving documents in the face of anyone who will hear her story.
A widow, Baswra returned from a refugee camp in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2002. Ten years later, she still has no land and no income.
“I don’t know where to look for help,” she pleads to Mohammad Eamal, a programme associate with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
He studies her documents and informs her that she falls outside the mandate of assistance.
The aid being distributed on this day is targeted at vulnerable Afghan refugees who have recently returned from Pakistan to a homeland that cannot absorb them. Like Basrwa, many no longer have land and cannot find jobs in their villages of origin.
“We’re focusing on the vulnerable of recent years. We can’t help everyone,” Eamal tells IRIN, as Baswra waits expectantly, a pout covering her missing teeth.
She spends her days shuttling in plastic sandals and a dirty shawl from the Department of Refugees and Repatriation (DoRR), where she has applied - unsuccessfully - for a land allocation to this aid distribution point, looking for help for herself and her six children.
“We assume that those who arrived years ago have been able to resettle,” Eamal says. He looks at Baswra and then adds: “But we have found that many don’t.”
Biggest mistake ever
UNHCR says it has realized in recent months that for the past decade, it has followed a misguided strategy in dealing with the nearly five million refugees - almost a quarter of the population - it has helped return to Afghanistan since 2002.
Despite assistance in relocating and an initial cash grant, UNHCR says most returnees have failed to re-integrate because what they need is long-term development work.
“The needs of the returning population [are] beyond the humanitarian scope,” Suzanne Murray Jones, a senior adviser at UNHCR in Kabul, told IRIN.
In December, Peter Nicolaus, UNHCR representative in Afghanistan, called it “the biggest mistake UNHCR ever made... [ ] We thought if we gave humanitarian assistance then macro-development would kick in."
UNHCR is now waking up to the reality that this never happened.
The Afghan government, dogged by corruption, lack of capacity and continued conflict, has been incapable of providing for returnees.
Billions of dollars in aid spent in Afghanistan over the last decades have not had the desired effect, in part because much of the aid has been driven by political and military goals, not humanitarian and developmental needs. And aid that has targeted the vulnerable has not been well-coordinated.
“Everyone is working in their own silos. It has not been systematic. There hasn’t been an integrated approach by everybody,” Murray Jones said.
For too long, she said, aid workers failed to address important questions: “Where does humanitarian assistance stop and where does development aid begin? How do we bridge the gap?”
As a result of that gap, the population in Kabul has tripled in just seven years and the government’s land allocation scheme for returnees is so overwhelmed there are already tens of thousands of families on the waiting list for Nangarhar Province alone.
Nearly 60 percent of communities surveyed in a recent study by UNHCR and the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation said returnees lived in worse conditions than local communities.
Many of them live six families to a house “that is not meant for living in, or on highways and main roads, or even in deserts, beneath the mountains,” said Ghulam Haidar Faqirzai, DoRR director in Nangarhar Province, which borders Pakistan. Others, he said, live in illegal settlements.
Illegal settlements
Reza Gul lives in one of those settlements, atop a steep hill of winding dirt paths where men smoke opium in the open and dusty children run around in open sandals in the depths of winter. She lives without water or electricity in a home she does not own. UNHCR helped her build an extra room to her house, but her situation is fragile.
“If we are kicked out, we’ll have to live under a tent,” she told IRIN.
Since returning from Pakistan, she has had no intention of going back to her village of origin, despite her current living conditions. This settlement, Majbooraba, is in Jalalabad, a large city where her husband can find work.
Asked what it would take for her to go back, she offered a long list:
“If we are provided with land, employment, water and work for my husband - that’s all I’d need.”
Stories like these have forced UNHCR to reconsider its approach to returnees.
New approach
Saracha, a vast agricultural village 10km outside Jalalabad, was on the frontline of the war between the Soviets and Afghan rebels in the 1980s. Just minutes from the airport that served as the Russian base, it was often hit by rockets.
Most of the population fled to Pakistan in the 1980s and again during the civil war of the 1990s. It was not until 2004 and afterwards that they returned en masse to find damaged irrigation canals, collapsed homes and landmines in their village. Children walked to Jalalabad city for school and had to travel to Pakistan for any serious health issues.
The conditions in Saracha were ripe for poverty, disillusionment, secondary displacement or recruitment to militant groups. But the villagers got together, elected a leader and started rehabilitating their communities. Then they contacted aid agencies for help.
In 2011, UNHCR began a pilot project in the village that aimed at focusing comprehensive development assistance in areas of high refugee returns.
At a cost of US$1.4 million, development partners have helped the village build a micro hydro plant; an irrigation system; and a waste water canal. They have also provided agricultural training, promoted honey and vegetable production, offered literacy and computer classes, and provided poultry as an income-generating mechanism to vulnerable families.
“Before there would be one project here, one project there. But under this programme, it’s a package,” said Golam Nasseer, head of one of the sub-villages that make up Saracha. “Our village has been rebuilt. Now, it’s like Paris,” he joked.
The idea of the project is to pool resources, including those that already exist in the country, and direct them towards communities where refugees are returning en masse. UNHCR will highlight the areas that need investment; and ask development partners to focus their energies there.
The model will be presented at an international stakeholder conference in Switzerland in May. It hopes to replicate it in 48 areas of high return across Afghanistan.
“Once we complete [work] in [one] village, we move on to another,” explained Eamal, the UNHCR programme associate.
With Panetta facing Senate panel, new questions on Afghan future
Msnbc.com By Tom Curry, msnbc.com National Affairs Writer 27/02/2012
The murder of two U.S. officers inside the Interior Ministry in Kabul by an Afghan soldier over the weekend is raising new questions about the Obama administration’s ability to implement its strategy in Afghanistan.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is sure to face tough questions on the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan when he testifies Tuesday morning before the Senate Budget Committee.
Panetta faced similar questions two weeks ago at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing from Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine, who noted that since May of 2007, “Afghan security forces have killed 70 American and allied troops and wounded over a hundred more in 45 separate attacks.”
She noted the devastating effect on American soldiers and Marines -- and their families back home -- when they are “risking their lives to train and assist these Afghan troops only to have some of them turn on them and kill them.”
But in the middle of a presidential campaign there seems to be little room for the GOP contenders to outflank President Barack Obama politically on this issue. In their comments over the weekend GOP contenders commented less on the strategic questions raised by the Afghanistan killings than on Obama’s apology for the inadvertent burning of Korans at a U.S. base near Kabul.
The killing of American soldiers “is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did," said former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum on NBC’s Meet the Press.
"We've made an enormous contribution to help the people there achieve freedom, and for us to be apologizing at a time like this is something which is very difficult for the American people to countenance,” said Republican contender Mitt Romney.
One of the Republican contenders, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, has long called for the United States to end its mission in Afghanistan.
The weekend’s events “add to a drip-feed of negative news that suggests Afghanistan is an unwinnable quagmire,” said Swarthmore College political scientist Dominic Tierney, author of “How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War.”
He said, “Republicans are berating the administration for apologizing and seeking to tie this into a story of administration weakness.”
But he added, “Republicans are actually fairly ambivalent about Afghanistan. While some Republicans stress the ‘stay the course’ message, there's not much appetite for big government nation-building in the country. Republicans want toughness and resolve, but they're dubious about our capacity to socially engineer Afghanistan into a stable democracy.”
The Obama administration’s case for continued patience was made Sunday on CNN by U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker: “This is not the time to decide that we're done here. We have got to redouble our efforts. We've got to create a situation in which al-Qaida is not coming back.”
Last June, Obama said that the 33,000 U.S. “surge” force that he ordered to Afghanistan would be removed by the end of this summer. That would leave 68,000 U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan. Obama has set 2014 as the end date for the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan.
But Anthony Cordesman, a longtime military strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the bigger issues are the shifting U.S. strategy and the inherent difficulty of reshaping Afghanistan.
“At this point in time, we don’t have any particularly good or coherent options. The reason isn’t the Obama administration,” he said, but rather that the United States and its allies are confronting “the complexity of trying to transform the Afghan political structure and economy. This is not something you can blame on the Congress, the (American) people or the (Obama) administration.”
But, he added, the Obama administration has been “trying to rush the development of Afghan forces far too quickly” and that “we’re trying now to get more and more done by 2014, constantly changing the program as we cut the money and as there are more questions about how many troops are going to be actually supporting the Afghans.”
He said, “ultimately all of this does center around U.S. money” and the Obama administration’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget request has not “defined what that request is supposed to buy – although basically it cuts the level of spending in half, which means whatever your strategy was a year ago isn’t your strategy now.”
The United States and its NATO allies have scheduled a summit meeting in Chicago in May to agree on plans for Afghanistan’s future.
The Obama administration, Cordesman said, is “talking about transition, but until the Chicago conference takes place, you don’t have even the rough goal as to what ‘transition’ means, how much it will cost, what conditions the Afghans will meet, or what level of funding and support they are going to get.”
He noted that, in addition to other uncertainties, “You don’t have a strategy that deals with the Pakistani sanctuaries – you don’t even know what level of support you can get from the Pakistanis ... .”
As for the fratricide attacks on U.S. soldiers by Afghans whom they are trying to train, Panetta said in his testimony two weeks ago that “better background checks” could help “ensure that these incidents are cut back.” He said the fratricide attacks are “not something that’s endemic. It is sporadic.”
Marine Gen. James Mattis, the head of U.S. Central Command, told Sen. Collins in a letter last week that “personal attacks make up a vast majority” of the fratricide incidents in which Afghan soldiers attack U.S. soldiers and Marines. “Most attackers are spurred by personal motivations, grievances, or emotions and act with little or no premeditation,” he said.
Cordesman noted, “The reality is that 18- to 20-year olds are not the natural ambassadors of a given culture –particularly if you give them guns and put them under intense stress.”
But Cordesman said, apart from stress or personal vendettas, “there will be infiltration (of U.S. forces in Afghanistan), not just incidents.” Infiltration of U.S. and other international forces is “one of the logical strategies for all of the insurgents to pursue” because “even a few bombings or killings can trigger all kinds of political reactions, as we’ve just seen.”
As the west plans its pullout from Afghanistan, many desperate Afghans are also looking for an exit
According to Amnesty International, 400 people a day are leaving their homes in Afghanistan due to the ongoing violence
Guardian.co.uk By Emma Graham-Harrison Monday 27 February 2012
I missed Alla Mir on his last visit to Kabul, because, like many people in a country where phones only recently stopped being a luxury and reception is sporadic, he is casual about making plans, and when he called I was tied up with work.
If I had known he was leaving for Greece, I would have found time to meet up, but he kept plans for a risky overland journey through Iran and Turkey to himself. A photo of Athens on his Facebook profile gave him away a few days later; he did not have the money or contacts for a holiday there.
As violence spirals and the west debates how fast to leave Afghanistan, many Afghans are also trying to work out an exit strategy, among them some of the educated young men and women who are so vital to the country's future. Some of them flee for fear, others leave in desperation because they don't have the cash or connections to get jobs they want in a country plagued by some of the worst corruption in the world.
Mir, who once told me he hoped to join the Afghan national army, said the Taliban drove him to join thousands of young Afghans in one of Europe's most economically troubled nations, because of an article he wrote questioning the construction of a new mosque. There are so many Afghans trapped in Greece – unable to travel on into Europe and unwilling to travel back to Afghanistan – that Kabul recently opened an embassy in Athens. Spread around the world, from Australia to Canada, India to Turkey, are also those who managed to get an official visa out, and have stayed, or are trying to.
The desperate hunt for a better place to live has started to affect scholarship programmes, as western officials worry about students who fail to come home.
Mir, a thoughtful student and part-time journalist, is from the poor but spectacularly beautiful Bamiyan valley, home to giant Buddha statues more than a millennium old that were blown up by the Taliban in 2001. Despite the destruction, the cliff and valley that housed them is so full of other cultural treasures that the area has been designated a Unesco world heritage site.
Bamiyan's best hope of escaping grinding poverty is one day building a tourist industry that exploits that, and Mir's article questioned the location of a new mosque, saying it was too close to the Buddha niches, and could potentially undermine the valley's main attraction.
His report was provocative by Afghan standards, calling for the removal of a mosque in a deeply conservative and devout country where after decades of foreign military presence, people are sensitive to attacks on religion, as this week's rioting over the burning of Qur'ans at a military base showed.
But it was opposed only to the mosque's location, and he was not risking his opinions in the insurgency's heartland. The people of Bamiyan are largely Shia Muslims; they were heavily persecuted by the Sunni Taliban.
However, the insurgency has spread, and with it the Taliban's influence. Data from the UN showed civilian deaths last year were the highest since 2001 and Amnesty International reported that around 400 people a day are leaving their homes because of violence. The white flag of the Taliban was raised by violent, armed demonstrators last week at Pul-e-Charkhi, just a few kilometres from the heart of Kabul.
"Because I was thinking intelligently, and was open-minded, the local mullahs, and the most dangerous ones, the Taliban, were threatening me," Mir told me from Greece. His mother and sisters also fled to Kabul, tainted by their family connection. "They were saying I was an infidel, a non-Muslim who worked with tourists and outsiders, preaching Christianity and encouraging the youth to change their beliefs."
For young Afghans, the past decade has been one of both boundless opportunities, and crushed hopes. Some of the most inspiring Afghans I met on my first visit to Kabul three years ago were those battling with old leaders for the right to reshape their country. The impact of decades of war, and widespread illiteracy, meant that young men (and a few women), many of them returning exiles, could rise rapidly to positions of great power and influence on the basis of little more than their education and intelligence.
Several of the country's most prominent ministers are young technocrats who have not hit 40, among them mining minister Wahidullah Shahrani, charged with developing the multibillion-dollar mines on which the country's future financial health rests. One former exile, who is now a senior ambassador, came back to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban with a CV that boasted managing a shoe superstore as its high point.
Many are still committed to staying, to help shape their country. A diplomat friend chose to leave a comfortable posting in Canada and return to a senior but difficult job in Kabul. But I don't meet so many now who are here by choice.
"You can leave," one professional Afghan who has twice been refused visas to western countries told me recently. "What will happen to us when the Taliban come back?"
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By DONNA CASSATA and ROBERT BURNS | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday defended the U.S. mission in Afghanistan as a week of deadly anti-American protests and the killing of two U.S. service members pushed Democrats to challenge President Barack Obama's policy.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski gave voice to the increasing exasperation in Congress more than a decade after the war began. She held up a copy of a newspaper with a report on the death of Army Maj. Robert J. Marchanti II of Baltimore, one of the two high-ranking officers shot point blank while they say at their desks in a heavily secured ministry building. Air Force Lt. Col. John D. Loftis was also killed.
"What do I tell his family today? Was it worth it? Because they're angry. People in Maryland are angry," Mikulski told Clinton at a Senate hearing.
"We went there with the best of intentions and out of need, after we were attacked. You were the New York senator. We remember the harsh reality of that brutal 9/11. ... And now because of an inadvertent act, the relationship is so fragile, there's this tumultuous thing," she added.
Clinton said the United States went to Afghanistan with a clear purpose after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against the U.S. and that Obama has set the country on a path to leave.
"This is not an endless commitment that will take lives far into the future," Clinton told the Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations. "But we have both made progress on the principle reason we were there — security. Because of our platform and our presence in Afghanistan, we've been able to target terrorists, particularly top al-Qaida operatives including (Osama) bin Laden in their safe havens. And we have made progress in helping the Afghan people."
Clinton said she could never justify the death of an individual, but insisted that the military mission has made the United States safer and created the possibility of a better future for Afghanistan.
More than 30 people have died in clashes since it became known last week that copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, and other religious materials were thrown into a fire pit used to burn garbage at a U.S. base near Kabul.
Obama has apologized for what he said was a mistake.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, also pressed Clinton on the U.S. mission and the events in Afghanistan.
Separately, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark praised U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan for showing "remarkable restraint" in the face of anti-coalition violence following the burning of the Quran.
Fogh Rasmussen told a NATO seminar at a Washington hotel that Gen. John Allen, the top allied commander in Afghanistan, was right to withdraw all allied advisers from Afghan government ministries after two U.S. officers were killed in their offices on Saturday.
Troops from the U.S.-led international military coalition "are showing remarkable restraint and professionalism under very difficult circumstances," Fogh Rasmussen said.
"Despite the challenges of this incident and the challenges we face, we must not lose sight of our goal: a stable Afghanistan," he said.
The NATO chief echoed the Obama administration's stay-the-course theme on Afghanistan, insisting that the breakdown in trust between the allies and the Afghans, as evidenced by Saturday's shooting in the Interior Ministry, would be overcome.
"We will not allow the extremists to weaken our resolve," he said. "We will continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our Afghan partners, and we will not lose sight of our shared goal. We are in Afghanistan to build stability and security for the Afghan people, which is in the interest of our own security."
He said Saturday's shooting, following a series of incidents in which other allied troops have been shot by their supposed Afghan partners, "does not represent the daily picture" of cooperation on security and other issues.
The withdrawal of advisers is temporary and "will not in any way affect the timeline" for giving the Afghan government full responsibility for security across the country by the end of 2014, he said.
7 civilians killed in S. Afghanistan blast
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- Seven civilians were killed Monday in a blast in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, a spokesman for provincial government said on Tuesday.
"Seven civilians were killed when a powerful blast occurred at around 4:00 p.m.local time Monday in a compound in Naw Zad district of Helmand province," spokesman Daud Ahmadi told Xinhua.
He said four women and three children were killed in the explosion that happened in a house in Sarkhdaz area of the district.
Ahmadi said it was not clear how the explosion happened, adding an investigation was launched to probe why the explosive was placed in the house.
Taliban militants have often attacked Afghan and NATO-led forces with homemade bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) but the lethal weapons also inflict casualties on civilians.
The number of civilian casualties has been soaring in the militancy-plagued Afghanistan as a total of 3,021 Afghan civilians have been killed in 2011 which indicates, an 8 percent rise in non- combatants' deaths compared with 2010, according to the United Nations annual report released in Kabul earlier this month.
Notorious for growing poppy and militancy, the Helmand province has been experiencing increasing militancy over the past couples of years despite continued military operations launched by Afghan forces and NATO-led troops.
Afghan president condemns fatal bombing at military airfield
CNN By Nick Paton Walsh and Masoud Popalzai February 28, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned a suicide bombing Monday at a military airfield, the latest incident in a spike in violence after the burning of Qurans by NATO troops last week.
At least nine people were killed and 12 wounded in the early-morning explosion near the front gate of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force base at Jalalabad airport in eastern Afghanistan, according to Gen. Abdulla Hazim Stanikzai, the provincial police chief.
There were no NATO casualties. The Taliban insurgency said the attack was in retaliation for the Quran burning and said it hoped the attacks will continue "with the anger of the public."
Another attack of "some significance" was reported later Monday in Naranghar province, near the Pakistani border, said Lt. Cmdr. James Williams, an ISAF spokesman.
A statement from the Taliban said its fighters also attacked U.S. troops and border police in southern Naranghar on Monday evening, claiming to have inflicted a dozen deaths on the U.S. and Afghan force while losing five of their own. But Williams said that while some insurgent casualties had been reported, there were no deaths among allied troops.
The Qurans that were burned were among religious materials seized from a detainee facility at Bagram Airfield last week. U.S. President Barack Obama apologized to Karzai last week, calling the burning an inadvertent error.
In a statement issued on the bombing Monday, Karzai condemned the "inhuman and un-Islamic" act and urged that "the ruthless enemy would earn nothing but growing public hatred and punishment before Allah, the Almighty."
Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said insurgents tried to attack the ISAF installation and failed, instead taking more innocent lives.
The Taliban also claimed Monday to be behind the poisoning of food at a dining facility at Forward Operating Base Torkham, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It too was a retaliatory attack, the group said.
ISAF confirmed that food at the base appeared to have been contaminated over the weekend, though it was unclear whether it was deliberate.
"Nobody got sick. A dining facility worker came to his leaders at the FOB and said that something had been poisoned," said Maj. David Eastburn, an ISAF spokesman.
"The dining facility was shut down, and we brought in environmental health, who found traces of chlorine bleach in the coffee and fruit. Soldiers are now eating pre-prepared rations, and no one was affected. There is a full investigation that is narrowing down who was responsible."
Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman in Kabul, said it's not clear whether the incident was a deliberate attempt to poison troops or "was just inadvertent, perhaps using more Clorox in the cleaning process than they should have."
The Taliban has frequently exaggerated its claims or claimed responsibility for attacks that later turned out to be the work of another group.
Even so, Monday's bombing and news of the contaminated food come on the heels of a week of violent protests over the Quran burning. The violence has left at least 39 people dead, including four American soldiers, and hundreds more wounded.
In northern Kunduz province over the weekend, protesters attacked a police chief's office and a U.S. military base, authorities said. Some threw hand grenades at the base, known as Combat Outpost Fortitude, with resulting blasts wounding seven U.S. personnel believed to be Special Forces members, they said.
Demonstrations outside the United Nations office in Kunduz on Saturday left four civilians dead and prompted the U.N. mission there to say Monday that it is temporarily relocating its international staff.
Two U.S. soldiers were gunned down last week at a base in eastern Afghanistan by a man wearing an Afghan National Army uniform.
Allen pulled military advisers from Afghan ministries after Saturday's shooting deaths of two other U.S. officers inside the heavily secure Ministry of Interior. Authorities are searching for the suspect, identified by Afghan police as a junior officer in the ministry's intelligence department.
The suspect had been fired by the Interior Ministry but rejoined the intelligence services as a driver a couple of months ago, a senior Afghan counterterrorism official said Monday.
"We do not know how he was allowed into the office, as the command and control center requires a password for access," said the official, who is not authorized to speak to the media about the topic. "There is something fishy there."
The official said he believed that the gunman used a silencer on his weapon, as no one heard the gunshots. He said he doubts that an angry exchange led to the shooting, because the "way he entered was not accidental."
Kirby said it's not clear whether the shooting was linked the the Quran burning.
"We don't know what the motivation was behind the murders, and we don't know all the facts surrounding how this individual got into this space and frankly was able to get out as quickly and apparently as easily as he did," Kirby said Monday.
Allen has told his commanders he will not authorize the return of personnel to Afghan ministries until new security measures are in place and working, according to an official who has access to the latest intelligence and is involved in administration discussions but declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the situation.
The religious materials, including Qurans, were removed from a detainee center library at Bagram Airfield because they had "extremist inscriptions" on them and there was "an appearance that these documents were being used to facilitate extremist communications," a military official said.
The ensuing attacks have put pressure on already strained U.S.-Afghan relations at a time when the United States is working to reduce troop levels and transition security as part of its plan to withdraw by 2014.
Pentagon officials on Monday acknowledged the significance of the attacks but denied they are affecting the U.S. or NATO mission there.
"These events, they're troubling. They're worrisome. They've gotten everybody's attention," Kirby said. "Yes, tension is high here in Kabul right now, but across the country at large, the mission continues, and we're seeing the protest activity decline."
The number of protests in Afghanistan has gone from 24 on Saturday to three on Monday, only two of which were because of the Quran burning, Kirby said.
CNN's Barbara Starr and Chelsea J. Carter contributed to this report.
Afghan police kill 12 militants
KABUL, Feb. 28 (Xinhua)-- Afghan police backed by national army and NATO-led forces have killed a dozen anti-government militants during series of operations over the past 24 hours, a statement of Interior Ministry released here said.
"During the operations conducted in Logar and Khost provinces over the past 24 hours, 12 armed insurgents have been killed and three others sustained injures," the statement said.
However, it did not say if there were any casualties on the security forces.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to make comment.
Canadian Forces officer fined for discharging pistol in Kabul airport
By Andrew Duffy, Postmedia News February 28, 2012 The Ottawa Citizen
GATINEAU, Que. — A senior officer in the Canadian Forces has been fined $1,500 for accidentally firing a live round of ammunition inside Kabul International Airport.
Lt.-Col. Gilles Fortin, a highly regarded 25-year veteran of the Canadian Forces, pleaded guilty to mishandling his 9mm sidearm.
Fortin is one of three senior Canadian officers to accidentally discharge a weapon in Afghanistan last year.
The court martial heard that Fortin arrived at Kabul airport on Sept. 1 as part of his deployment with NATO's Joint Warfare Centre.
Fortin was met by Canadian soldiers who gave him a duffle bag with his tactical equipment: a dismantled C7 rifle, a loaded Browning pistol and a fragmentation vest.
Fortin wanted to dismantle the pistol to ensure its recoil spring and guide had been properly installed. So he took the weapon from the duffle bag and unloaded the magazine.
Fortin then pulled back the slide of the gun, but did not check to see if a round was already in the firing chamber. He pulled the trigger and the gun discharged.
The shot was fired at the ground in front of Fortin. No one was injured.
Fortin immediately apologized to the soldiers he was with, approached a detachment of military police and informed his superiors.
The Canadian military subsequently changed its policy of including a loaded pistol in a soldier's tactical kit.
Court heard that Fortin, a signals officer who has served in Croatia, Bosnia and Afghanistan, has consistently been praised as an outstanding leader and role model.
Chief Military Judge Col. Mario Dutil, said Fortin accepted full responsibility for the incident. But had Fortin followed proper procedure and checked the firing chamber of the weapon, the judge noted, the incident would have been avoided.
On May 29, 2011, Col. Paul Scagnetti, a team leader at the Afghan National Army Command and Staff College in Kabul, accidentally fired a round from his C8 rifle into his office wall during a security drill. Two Afghan interpreters were in his office at the time, but no one was hurt.
Scagnetti, now retired, was fined $2,000.
On Sept. 5, Col. D.A. Patterson accidentally fired his 9mm pistol at the floor of his office at a forward operating base in Kandahar Province. An Afghan interpreter was in the room, but no one was injured.
Patterson was fined $1,600.
Every year, hundreds of Canadian soldiers are convicted of mishandling their weapons. Most of the incidents involve inexperienced soldiers, charged because they pull the trigger on a range before a firing command is issued.
In 2008-09, the last year for which statistics are available, the Canadian military recorded 29 accidental gun discharges in Afghanistan.
In the most famous such incident, then Brig.-Gen. Daniel Menard fired his C8 rifle twice into the ground as he was about to board a helicopter in Kandahar with his boss, Gen. Walt Natynczyk, chief of the defence staff.
Menard — he later resigned after being recalled from Afghanistan due to a sex scandal — was fined $3,500 for the negligent handling of his weapon.
Afghan attacks over Koran burning renew debate on U.S. drawdown
Officials say the turmoil is unlikely to derail plans for a steady troop pullout. But it may embolden those who argue that more U.S. troops should leave sooner.
Los Angeles Times By David S. Cloud February 28, 2012
Washington - Anti-U.S. protests and other deadly attacks roiling Afghanistan have deepened concern at the Pentagon and White House about the plan to wind down the war by withdrawing U.S. combat troops in close coordination with Afghan security forces, several officials and military officers said.
Pentagon officials scrambled Monday to contain the damage, insisting that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and top military commanders had not lost faith in a strategy that envisions a steady U.S. pullout as small teams of military advisors train Afghan army and police forces.
Panetta and Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "believe we have achieved significant progress in reversing the Taliban's momentum and in developing the Afghan security forces, and they believe that the fundamentals of our strategy remain sound," said Pentagon spokesman George Little.
In private, other officers and U.S. officials said riots and attacks after U.S. personnel threw copies of the Koran into a trash-burning pit at the Bagram military base have renewed a debate at the highest levels of the Obama administration and are expected to affect internal deliberations on the pace of the drawdown.
"Too many people are asking, 'Why are we still doing this if the guys you're supposed to be helping keep murdering your soldiers?' " said a senior U.S. general, who spoke on condition of anonymity in sharing internal discussions.
Officials said the turmoil was unlikely to derail the U.S. plan to pull out troops while small teams of advisors focus on training Afghan security forces and diplomats pursue peace talks with the Taliban. But mistrust between U.S. and Afghan forces may hamper the training and add to security risks, several officials said.
Still, a senior Defense Department official said the anti-American backlash is likely to embolden those in Washington who long have argued that more U.S. troops should leave sooner.
"There's no question that this is going to spur debate, and that people who already have fairly dire views will have those reinforced," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to reporters.
The number of U.S. troops is scheduled to drop from 90,000 to 68,000 by September. U.S. commanders in Kabul, the capital, have sought to persuade the White House to slow further withdrawals in hopes of locking in gains before Afghan troops are scheduled to take full control of security by the end of 2014.
There were fewer protests Monday, but the violence did not entirely abate. In the eastern city of Jalalabad, nine Afghans were killed when a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into the heavily guarded gates of an airport used by Afghan and NATO forces, as well as civilian aircraft.
A Taliban spokesman was quoted as saying the bombing was revenge for the Koran burning.
United Nations officials announced they had ordered international staff to withdraw from U.N. offices in the northern city of Kunduz after rioters sought to overrun the compound Saturday.
U.S. officials hope the protests will die down in coming days and that hundreds of military and civilian advisors can return to their jobs in Afghan government ministries in Kabul. Advisors from the U.S., Britain, France and other countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were withdrawn abruptly after two American officers were shot and killed inside the Interior Ministry on Saturday.
"I'd be less than honest if I didn't say that things are tense here in Kabul," said Navy Capt. John Kirby, a military spokesman. "But I will tell you that it is getting calmer."
Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, the top commander of the U.S.-led NATO effort, "is not ready right now to have the advisors go back, but this is temporary," Kirby added.
At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney called the weekend killings "isolated incidents" and noted that U.S. forces have carried out hundreds of missions with Afghan army and police.
Other U.S. officials noted that Afghan security forces have sought to quell the protests and have continued to carry out combat operations, often working with U.S. units.
Anthony Cordesman, a military strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said the week's violence raised "questions about the U.S. strategy and the value of continuing with the current approach to the war."
But in a written analysis, he argued that the U.S. strategy had "been dying for a long time and for many more reasons than the growing distrust" between the U.S.-led coalition and Afghan leaders, including endemic corruption in President Hamid Karzai's government and Taliban sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan.
david.cloud@latimes.com
Times staff writer Kathleen Hennessey in Washington and special correspondent Aimal Yaqubi in Kabul contributed to this report.
Afghanistan: The Friendship That Went Up in Flames
The Quran burnings have provoked violent unrest, a suicide bombing, and outright murders. Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau on another victim: the U.S.-Afghan partnership.
The Daily Beast By Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau Feb 27, 2012
The carnage continues. Just when the bloodletting seemed at last to be dissipating after a week of violent anti-U.S. protests, a suicide bomber rammed his explosive-laden vehicle into the base of a NATO airbase in eastern Afghanistan. The deaths and injuries were only the latest casualties since the discovery of copies of the Quran in a burn pit at Bagram airbase, outside Kabul.
In a conservative, underdeveloped, and staunchly Muslim place like Afghanistan, it’s hard to think of anything that could arouse more outrage than the mishandling of what people regard as the literal word of God. The subsequent public fury led to the deaths of some 30 Afghans amid the protests, as well as the point-blank murders of four U.S. soldiers. And that was before the suicide bombing outside the NATO base in Jalalabad, on the busy road from Kabul to Pakistan. The blast killed nine people and wounded 19 others, including four NATO soldiers—and to dispel all doubt, a Taliban spokesman announced that it was “to avenge the desecration of the Quran by the U.S. military.”
Beyond the deaths and injuries, the Quran burnings may have damaged something even bigger: America’s partnership with Kabul. As soon as news of the burnings broke, the Taliban began calling on Afghans to rise up and urging Afghan security personnel to turn their weapons against their U.S. and other Western allies. Whether inspired or not by those calls for retribution, Afghan soldiers and civilians have repeatedly attacked American forces over the past week. An Afghan soldier shot and killed two U.S. troops last week in eastern Afghanistan, not far from today’s suicide bombing. This past Saturday, two American officers were shot in the back of the head as they sat at their desks inside Kabul’s high-security Interior Ministry. The killer fled the scene and has disappeared. And yesterday, seven more U.S. military trainers were wounded when a protestor lobbed a hand grenade into a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan.
The insurgents are reveling in the anti-American outburst. Millions of Afghans were upset by news of the Quran burnings, and then Taliban agents and militant mullahs whipped them into a fury. The instigators were able to build on the public’s resentment of other recent cultural and religious affronts, such as the viral video of U.S. soldiers urinating on the bodies of dead insurgents. One senior Taliban, a former minister in Mullah Mohammad Omar’s defunct regime, says such offenses have boosted the number of Afghans volunteering to join the insurgency. “Every time such incidents take place we have been approached by common Afghans asking how they can help to get revenge,” he says, declining to be named for security reasons. “These incidents help us explain and help people understand the cause of our jihad against the natural enemies of our religion.” The former minister says he knows the identity of the suicide bomber who hit the Jalalabad airfield today. “His blood was hot with anger,” the former minister sa
ys. “He was so motivated, he did not need much training to carry out his mission.”
High-ranking Afghan officials are dismayed and saddened by the damage that has been done to the Afghan-U.S. partnership. “We have been helped, even saved, by the U.S. forces who have died in large numbers and the U.S. tax money that has flowed in,” says a senior Afghan official who does not want to be named. “But these incidents erase the positive American image that had been built up.”
The former minister says he knows the identity of the suicide bomber. “His blood was hot with anger,” the former minister says. “He was so motivated, he did not need much training to carry out his mission.”
The harm goes far beyond America’s image. The alliance needs to be based on friendship and trust. As U.S. combat forces gradually withdraw from Afghanistan in the coming two years, the Americans who stay behind will be relying more heavily than ever on the Afghan officers and soldiers they have trained. The new mission has already begun: to advise and mentor the Afghan security forces, enabling them to stand on their own against the insurgents with a minimum of American support. Smaller groups of U.S. advisers and trainers will be stationed among their Afghan counterparts in the field, leaving them potentially vulnerable to angry or frustrated Afghan troops.
And that’s a big problem. Even before the Quran burnings, U.S. and NATO officers were concerned by the cultural and personal tensions that were building between foreign advisers and Afghan soldiers and police. There had been a worrisome number of incidents in which Afghans in uniform turned their weapons against their Western allies, and the shootings demonstrated clearly how tense the partnership was becoming in the field. Soldiers in combat have to depend on each other completely: they can’t afford to keep looking over their shoulders and worrying about the reliability of the men beside them. In the months ahead, repairing that tattered sense of trust may prove to be even tougher than the fight against the Taliban.
Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and has been covering the region for the magazine the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Negotiations with the Taliban find some momentum
Washington Post By David Ignatius 27/02/2012
U.S. diplomats have noted with interest that a prominent Taliban spokesman, when asked by a Saudi newspaper whether it would host al-Qaeda once more if it regained power, answered that the leaders of al-Qaeda “are no longer interested in Afghanistan.” That appears to some officials to signal acceptance of one key U.S. and Saudi goal in peace talks in Afghanistan.
The comments by Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, one of the Taliban’s top spokesmen, were made last Saturday to Asharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned newspaper in London. He repeated some hardline Taliban policies, including a promise to keep attacking the U.S. Embassy and military headquarters in Kabul. But Ahmadi repeatedly endorsed the Taliban’s decision to open a office in Qatar and begin peace negotiations.
“Our conditions during the negotiations will be an end to occupation and for the U.S. to leave the affairs of Afghanistan to the Afghan people,” Ahmadi said. He seemed to welcome negotiations as a sign of the deteriorating U.S. position in Afghanistan, noting: “The U.S. side is prepared to negotiate with the Islamic Emirate [his description of the Taliban] after it did everything in its power to forcibly eliminate our jihadist power; however, it failed to achieve anything tangible in this regard.”
The Taliban spokesman’s statement endorsing negotiations comes as U.S. commanders are struggling to cope with an Afghan population that has been enraged by the apparently accidental burning of Korans by U.S. troops. The Koran incident has added to the precariousness of the U.S. position in Afghanistan and made a diplomatic settlement all the more urgent.
Ahmadi didn’t endorse the other two major outcomes the United States seeks from talks, which are that the Taliban renounce violence and accept the tolerant provisions of the Afghan constitution. But he did say that the Taliban would allow women’s education and other rights, “in light of Islamic teachings,” and that the group might allow some satellite television channels.
These slight concessions by Ahmadi will not do much to reassure non-Taliban Afghans, many of whom fear that in its eagerness to withdraw forces from the country, the United States will sanction the return of a Taliban leadership that is unpopular in most parts of the country.
But the Ahmadi interview is the clearest sign yet that the process of negotiation led by State Department representative Marc Grossman is beginning to gather momentum — even as the broader U.S. position in the country deteriorates.
More Afghans crossing into Pakistan?
QUETTA, 27 February 2012 (IRIN) - In a tiny flat they have rented in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan, bordering Afghanistan, Zarnab Bibi and her husband Aziz Khan* wait patiently for the phone to ring.
“We are hoping to hear from an agent we have paid to take us and our four children to Thailand and then maybe onto Australia,” Khan told IRIN.
The family left its home in Afghanistan’s conflict-ridden Kandahar Province about a month ago, crossing into Pakistan illegally via a mountain pass.
They spoke of a long walk on foot and said they spent all their savings on the journey. They knew further travel overseas would also be illegal, but Bibi explained: “We really have no choice given the situation in Afghanistan.”
They feared a resurgence of the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan for five years before it was overthrown in 2001 by international forces that are now gradually withdrawing from the country.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says the number of people fleeing Afghanistan has dropped significantly in the past decade, since the government of Hamid Karzai took control of the country. At the same time there are signs of a recent increase in the number of Afghans leaving for Pakistan, a trend which would complicate efforts by Afghanistan and its international partners to sustainably bring home refugees already outside the country.
More conflict and uncertainty
In the Kurram Agency, one of seven tribal areas that share a frontier with Afghanistan, Moazzam Toor told IRIN from his village in the Tirah Valley that the number of refugees from Afghanistan “had definitely increased in the last few months, because they are worried about the future at home.”
He said many of the refugees were destitute, and had headed for Peshawar or other big cities in search of opportunities to earn income.
“Some do not even have shoes on their feet, and walk in leather tied with straps.”
The UN says a rise and spread of conflict in 2011 has led to a significant increase in displacement, with the number of people displaced within the country estimated to have risen to half a million by year-end. But tracking displacements outside the country has proven difficult.
“Pakistan and Afghanistan share a long and porous border, where hundreds of thousands of people cross the border back and forth daily for different reasons, which could be related to business, education or medical reasons,” said Duniya Aslam Khan, spokesperson for UNHCR in Pakistan. “Not every Afghan crossing the border into Pakistan is a refugee,” she told IRIN.
According to media reports, the prime minister of Pakistan told UN High Commissioner for Afghan Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres on a recent visit that 30-40,000 Afghans crossed the border annually and Pakistan needed international help to tackle the refugee situation.
But Khan said the number of registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan remained 1.7 million and authorities in Peshawar said they had no official information on the arrival of new refugees into the country.
An official at the government commissionerate for Afghan refugees in Peshawar, who asked not to be named, said the number of Afghans crossing over had increased since mid-2011.
“Most are economic [migrants], and also [refugees] worried about instability in Afghanistan. They mainly live with other Afghans or in rented homes. We are not permitted to give figures, and the numbers are hard to ascertain anyway.”
Border residents say tensions with Islamabad have bolstered growing uncertainty in Afghanistan, amid fears that Pakistan - whose intelligence service allegedly supports the Taliban - is fomenting trouble for its neighbour.
Zarnab has a college education but recalls the days under the Taliban, before 2001, when her daughters were not allowed to go to school.
“I am scared for the future of my two teenage daughters if the Taliban make a return, as this could happen given that the Pakistan government wants it and the militants are now talking to the US officials,” she said, referring to peace talks under way between the US, Afghanistan and the Taliban.
Trafficking
Pakistan is listed as “a source, transit, and destination country” for trafficked persons, according to the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report for 2011.
“There are people everywhere in Quetta and other cities involved in getting people out of the country illegally, in exchange for money,” Farid Ahmed, coordinator for the autonomous Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), told IRIN. “Many from Afghanistan also come into Pakistan to make use of these agents.”
HRCP conducted a study in 2009, recording thousands of cases of human trafficking through Quetta from 2005 to 2008, including cases involving Afghans who had set out from Kabul.
*Not their real names
Towards more sustainable solutions for returnees
JALALABAD/SARACHA, 27 February 2012 (IRIN) - Baswra squats on a dirty street corner in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, watching fellow Afghans walk by with packages of assistance from aid agencies. When the door to the distribution site opens, she throws herself at it, waving documents in the face of anyone who will hear her story.
A widow, Baswra returned from a refugee camp in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2002. Ten years later, she still has no land and no income.
“I don’t know where to look for help,” she pleads to Mohammad Eamal, a programme associate with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
He studies her documents and informs her that she falls outside the mandate of assistance.
The aid being distributed on this day is targeted at vulnerable Afghan refugees who have recently returned from Pakistan to a homeland that cannot absorb them. Like Basrwa, many no longer have land and cannot find jobs in their villages of origin.
“We’re focusing on the vulnerable of recent years. We can’t help everyone,” Eamal tells IRIN, as Baswra waits expectantly, a pout covering her missing teeth.
She spends her days shuttling in plastic sandals and a dirty shawl from the Department of Refugees and Repatriation (DoRR), where she has applied - unsuccessfully - for a land allocation to this aid distribution point, looking for help for herself and her six children.
“We assume that those who arrived years ago have been able to resettle,” Eamal says. He looks at Baswra and then adds: “But we have found that many don’t.”
Biggest mistake ever
UNHCR says it has realized in recent months that for the past decade, it has followed a misguided strategy in dealing with the nearly five million refugees - almost a quarter of the population - it has helped return to Afghanistan since 2002.
Despite assistance in relocating and an initial cash grant, UNHCR says most returnees have failed to re-integrate because what they need is long-term development work.
“The needs of the returning population [are] beyond the humanitarian scope,” Suzanne Murray Jones, a senior adviser at UNHCR in Kabul, told IRIN.
In December, Peter Nicolaus, UNHCR representative in Afghanistan, called it “the biggest mistake UNHCR ever made... [ ] We thought if we gave humanitarian assistance then macro-development would kick in."
UNHCR is now waking up to the reality that this never happened.
The Afghan government, dogged by corruption, lack of capacity and continued conflict, has been incapable of providing for returnees.
Billions of dollars in aid spent in Afghanistan over the last decades have not had the desired effect, in part because much of the aid has been driven by political and military goals, not humanitarian and developmental needs. And aid that has targeted the vulnerable has not been well-coordinated.
“Everyone is working in their own silos. It has not been systematic. There hasn’t been an integrated approach by everybody,” Murray Jones said.
For too long, she said, aid workers failed to address important questions: “Where does humanitarian assistance stop and where does development aid begin? How do we bridge the gap?”
As a result of that gap, the population in Kabul has tripled in just seven years and the government’s land allocation scheme for returnees is so overwhelmed there are already tens of thousands of families on the waiting list for Nangarhar Province alone.
Nearly 60 percent of communities surveyed in a recent study by UNHCR and the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation said returnees lived in worse conditions than local communities.
Many of them live six families to a house “that is not meant for living in, or on highways and main roads, or even in deserts, beneath the mountains,” said Ghulam Haidar Faqirzai, DoRR director in Nangarhar Province, which borders Pakistan. Others, he said, live in illegal settlements.
Illegal settlements
Reza Gul lives in one of those settlements, atop a steep hill of winding dirt paths where men smoke opium in the open and dusty children run around in open sandals in the depths of winter. She lives without water or electricity in a home she does not own. UNHCR helped her build an extra room to her house, but her situation is fragile.
“If we are kicked out, we’ll have to live under a tent,” she told IRIN.
Since returning from Pakistan, she has had no intention of going back to her village of origin, despite her current living conditions. This settlement, Majbooraba, is in Jalalabad, a large city where her husband can find work.
Asked what it would take for her to go back, she offered a long list:
“If we are provided with land, employment, water and work for my husband - that’s all I’d need.”
Stories like these have forced UNHCR to reconsider its approach to returnees.
New approach
Saracha, a vast agricultural village 10km outside Jalalabad, was on the frontline of the war between the Soviets and Afghan rebels in the 1980s. Just minutes from the airport that served as the Russian base, it was often hit by rockets.
Most of the population fled to Pakistan in the 1980s and again during the civil war of the 1990s. It was not until 2004 and afterwards that they returned en masse to find damaged irrigation canals, collapsed homes and landmines in their village. Children walked to Jalalabad city for school and had to travel to Pakistan for any serious health issues.
The conditions in Saracha were ripe for poverty, disillusionment, secondary displacement or recruitment to militant groups. But the villagers got together, elected a leader and started rehabilitating their communities. Then they contacted aid agencies for help.
In 2011, UNHCR began a pilot project in the village that aimed at focusing comprehensive development assistance in areas of high refugee returns.
At a cost of US$1.4 million, development partners have helped the village build a micro hydro plant; an irrigation system; and a waste water canal. They have also provided agricultural training, promoted honey and vegetable production, offered literacy and computer classes, and provided poultry as an income-generating mechanism to vulnerable families.
“Before there would be one project here, one project there. But under this programme, it’s a package,” said Golam Nasseer, head of one of the sub-villages that make up Saracha. “Our village has been rebuilt. Now, it’s like Paris,” he joked.
The idea of the project is to pool resources, including those that already exist in the country, and direct them towards communities where refugees are returning en masse. UNHCR will highlight the areas that need investment; and ask development partners to focus their energies there.
The model will be presented at an international stakeholder conference in Switzerland in May. It hopes to replicate it in 48 areas of high return across Afghanistan.
“Once we complete [work] in [one] village, we move on to another,” explained Eamal, the UNHCR programme associate.
With Panetta facing Senate panel, new questions on Afghan future
Msnbc.com By Tom Curry, msnbc.com National Affairs Writer 27/02/2012
The murder of two U.S. officers inside the Interior Ministry in Kabul by an Afghan soldier over the weekend is raising new questions about the Obama administration’s ability to implement its strategy in Afghanistan.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is sure to face tough questions on the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan when he testifies Tuesday morning before the Senate Budget Committee.
Panetta faced similar questions two weeks ago at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing from Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine, who noted that since May of 2007, “Afghan security forces have killed 70 American and allied troops and wounded over a hundred more in 45 separate attacks.”
She noted the devastating effect on American soldiers and Marines -- and their families back home -- when they are “risking their lives to train and assist these Afghan troops only to have some of them turn on them and kill them.”
But in the middle of a presidential campaign there seems to be little room for the GOP contenders to outflank President Barack Obama politically on this issue. In their comments over the weekend GOP contenders commented less on the strategic questions raised by the Afghanistan killings than on Obama’s apology for the inadvertent burning of Korans at a U.S. base near Kabul.
The killing of American soldiers “is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did," said former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum on NBC’s Meet the Press.
"We've made an enormous contribution to help the people there achieve freedom, and for us to be apologizing at a time like this is something which is very difficult for the American people to countenance,” said Republican contender Mitt Romney.
One of the Republican contenders, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, has long called for the United States to end its mission in Afghanistan.
The weekend’s events “add to a drip-feed of negative news that suggests Afghanistan is an unwinnable quagmire,” said Swarthmore College political scientist Dominic Tierney, author of “How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War.”
He said, “Republicans are berating the administration for apologizing and seeking to tie this into a story of administration weakness.”
But he added, “Republicans are actually fairly ambivalent about Afghanistan. While some Republicans stress the ‘stay the course’ message, there's not much appetite for big government nation-building in the country. Republicans want toughness and resolve, but they're dubious about our capacity to socially engineer Afghanistan into a stable democracy.”
The Obama administration’s case for continued patience was made Sunday on CNN by U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker: “This is not the time to decide that we're done here. We have got to redouble our efforts. We've got to create a situation in which al-Qaida is not coming back.”
Last June, Obama said that the 33,000 U.S. “surge” force that he ordered to Afghanistan would be removed by the end of this summer. That would leave 68,000 U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan. Obama has set 2014 as the end date for the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan.
But Anthony Cordesman, a longtime military strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the bigger issues are the shifting U.S. strategy and the inherent difficulty of reshaping Afghanistan.
“At this point in time, we don’t have any particularly good or coherent options. The reason isn’t the Obama administration,” he said, but rather that the United States and its allies are confronting “the complexity of trying to transform the Afghan political structure and economy. This is not something you can blame on the Congress, the (American) people or the (Obama) administration.”
But, he added, the Obama administration has been “trying to rush the development of Afghan forces far too quickly” and that “we’re trying now to get more and more done by 2014, constantly changing the program as we cut the money and as there are more questions about how many troops are going to be actually supporting the Afghans.”
He said, “ultimately all of this does center around U.S. money” and the Obama administration’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget request has not “defined what that request is supposed to buy – although basically it cuts the level of spending in half, which means whatever your strategy was a year ago isn’t your strategy now.”
The United States and its NATO allies have scheduled a summit meeting in Chicago in May to agree on plans for Afghanistan’s future.
The Obama administration, Cordesman said, is “talking about transition, but until the Chicago conference takes place, you don’t have even the rough goal as to what ‘transition’ means, how much it will cost, what conditions the Afghans will meet, or what level of funding and support they are going to get.”
He noted that, in addition to other uncertainties, “You don’t have a strategy that deals with the Pakistani sanctuaries – you don’t even know what level of support you can get from the Pakistanis ... .”
As for the fratricide attacks on U.S. soldiers by Afghans whom they are trying to train, Panetta said in his testimony two weeks ago that “better background checks” could help “ensure that these incidents are cut back.” He said the fratricide attacks are “not something that’s endemic. It is sporadic.”
Marine Gen. James Mattis, the head of U.S. Central Command, told Sen. Collins in a letter last week that “personal attacks make up a vast majority” of the fratricide incidents in which Afghan soldiers attack U.S. soldiers and Marines. “Most attackers are spurred by personal motivations, grievances, or emotions and act with little or no premeditation,” he said.
Cordesman noted, “The reality is that 18- to 20-year olds are not the natural ambassadors of a given culture –particularly if you give them guns and put them under intense stress.”
But Cordesman said, apart from stress or personal vendettas, “there will be infiltration (of U.S. forces in Afghanistan), not just incidents.” Infiltration of U.S. and other international forces is “one of the logical strategies for all of the insurgents to pursue” because “even a few bombings or killings can trigger all kinds of political reactions, as we’ve just seen.”
As the west plans its pullout from Afghanistan, many desperate Afghans are also looking for an exit
According to Amnesty International, 400 people a day are leaving their homes in Afghanistan due to the ongoing violence
Guardian.co.uk By Emma Graham-Harrison Monday 27 February 2012
I missed Alla Mir on his last visit to Kabul, because, like many people in a country where phones only recently stopped being a luxury and reception is sporadic, he is casual about making plans, and when he called I was tied up with work.
If I had known he was leaving for Greece, I would have found time to meet up, but he kept plans for a risky overland journey through Iran and Turkey to himself. A photo of Athens on his Facebook profile gave him away a few days later; he did not have the money or contacts for a holiday there.
As violence spirals and the west debates how fast to leave Afghanistan, many Afghans are also trying to work out an exit strategy, among them some of the educated young men and women who are so vital to the country's future. Some of them flee for fear, others leave in desperation because they don't have the cash or connections to get jobs they want in a country plagued by some of the worst corruption in the world.
Mir, who once told me he hoped to join the Afghan national army, said the Taliban drove him to join thousands of young Afghans in one of Europe's most economically troubled nations, because of an article he wrote questioning the construction of a new mosque. There are so many Afghans trapped in Greece – unable to travel on into Europe and unwilling to travel back to Afghanistan – that Kabul recently opened an embassy in Athens. Spread around the world, from Australia to Canada, India to Turkey, are also those who managed to get an official visa out, and have stayed, or are trying to.
The desperate hunt for a better place to live has started to affect scholarship programmes, as western officials worry about students who fail to come home.
Mir, a thoughtful student and part-time journalist, is from the poor but spectacularly beautiful Bamiyan valley, home to giant Buddha statues more than a millennium old that were blown up by the Taliban in 2001. Despite the destruction, the cliff and valley that housed them is so full of other cultural treasures that the area has been designated a Unesco world heritage site.
Bamiyan's best hope of escaping grinding poverty is one day building a tourist industry that exploits that, and Mir's article questioned the location of a new mosque, saying it was too close to the Buddha niches, and could potentially undermine the valley's main attraction.
His report was provocative by Afghan standards, calling for the removal of a mosque in a deeply conservative and devout country where after decades of foreign military presence, people are sensitive to attacks on religion, as this week's rioting over the burning of Qur'ans at a military base showed.
But it was opposed only to the mosque's location, and he was not risking his opinions in the insurgency's heartland. The people of Bamiyan are largely Shia Muslims; they were heavily persecuted by the Sunni Taliban.
However, the insurgency has spread, and with it the Taliban's influence. Data from the UN showed civilian deaths last year were the highest since 2001 and Amnesty International reported that around 400 people a day are leaving their homes because of violence. The white flag of the Taliban was raised by violent, armed demonstrators last week at Pul-e-Charkhi, just a few kilometres from the heart of Kabul.
"Because I was thinking intelligently, and was open-minded, the local mullahs, and the most dangerous ones, the Taliban, were threatening me," Mir told me from Greece. His mother and sisters also fled to Kabul, tainted by their family connection. "They were saying I was an infidel, a non-Muslim who worked with tourists and outsiders, preaching Christianity and encouraging the youth to change their beliefs."
For young Afghans, the past decade has been one of both boundless opportunities, and crushed hopes. Some of the most inspiring Afghans I met on my first visit to Kabul three years ago were those battling with old leaders for the right to reshape their country. The impact of decades of war, and widespread illiteracy, meant that young men (and a few women), many of them returning exiles, could rise rapidly to positions of great power and influence on the basis of little more than their education and intelligence.
Several of the country's most prominent ministers are young technocrats who have not hit 40, among them mining minister Wahidullah Shahrani, charged with developing the multibillion-dollar mines on which the country's future financial health rests. One former exile, who is now a senior ambassador, came back to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban with a CV that boasted managing a shoe superstore as its high point.
Many are still committed to staying, to help shape their country. A diplomat friend chose to leave a comfortable posting in Canada and return to a senior but difficult job in Kabul. But I don't meet so many now who are here by choice.
"You can leave," one professional Afghan who has twice been refused visas to western countries told me recently. "What will happen to us when the Taliban come back?"
www.afghanistannewscenter.com