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Air Force extends probe of Afghan plane deal
Reuters By Andrea Shalal-Esa Fri Mar 23, 2012
WASHINGTON - The Air Force on Friday said it was extending an investigation into an embarrassing mistake that prompted it to cancel a contract, valued at up to $1 billion, to sell Brazilian light attack planes to the Afghan government.
Air Force General Donald Hoffman, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, granted investigators more time to look into the issue, said spokeswoman Jennifer Cassidy. She said a decision was now expected in coming weeks.
The Air Force had no immediate comment on why it decided to extend the investigation, which is being conducted by Air Force legal officials along with some representatives of the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, Frank Kendall.
The problem began in January, when privately held U.S. defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp and Brazilian planemaker Embraer SA (EMBR3.SA) beat out Hawker Beechcraft to win an order for 20 light attack planes. The Air Force was procuring the planes behalf of the Afghanistan government.
That contract was quickly challenged by Hawker.
The incident has generated headlines in Brazil, where government officials were caught off guard by the military's cancellation of the plane order, and have said it would not be helpful to bilateral defense relations. The issue may come up when Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff visits Washington next week.
While preparing for the Hawker lawsuit, the Air Force discovered that its decision had been inadequately documented, prompting Air Force Secretary Michael Donley to scrap the contract, which had an initial value of $355 million to Sierra Nevada and its subcontractor Embraer.
Air Force officials have described the incident as embarrassing and disappointing, especially given a series of other acquisition problems over the last decade. They had hoped to investigate the matter quickly and move forward with a new competition to ensure that the Afghan government could still receive the initial order of 20 light attack planes soon.
David Van Buren, the acting assistant secretary for acquisition who is retiring this month, told Reuters earlier this month that he did not believe the case revealed a systemic problem with the Air Force acquisition process.
Sierra Nevada is pressing the Air Force to redo the contest quickly, without lowering the requirements set for the original competition, from which the Hawker AT-6 plane was disqualified. Sierra says the Embraer Super Tucano is in use by six militaries around the globe.
Hawker insists that its AT-6 plane is the most capable, affordable and sustainable light attack aircraft on the market. The company is urging the Air Force to revise its requirements for the light attack planes, arguing that not even front-line U.S. fighter jets could meet the requirements as written.
Van Buren earlier this month said he was not aware of any plans to revise the requirements for the plane, which Afghanistan needs to provide close air support for its army and as a turbo-prop training plane.
The cancellation of the Super Tucano contract is one of several U.S. orders Embraer has lost over the last 20 years. In the 1990s, the Super Tucano and Embraer in partnership with U.S.-based Northrop Grumman (NOC.N) lost out as the joint fighter training aircraft for NATO after heavy lobbying from U.S. competitors.
In the mid-2000s, the Air Force also canceled a contract with Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) for an aerial reconnaissance plane that was to be based on the Embraer ERJ-145 regional jet.
(Reporting By Andrea Shalal-Esa; editing by Matthew Lewis)
Soldier charged with 17 murder counts in Afghan rampage, may face death
March 23, 2012 From Larry Shaughnessy, CNN Pentagon Producer
Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales could be sentenced to death if convicted on any of the 17 counts of murder filed against him Friday for allegedly embarking on a bloody shooting rampage in Afghan villages, the U.S. military said.
In addition to the charges of murder "with premeditation," the 38-year-old faces six counts of attempted murder and two counts of assault.
Authorities say Bales left a remote outpost in Kandahar province's Panjwai district early March 11 and went house-to-house, gunning down villagers. U.S. and Afghan officials initially said 16 people died in those attacks.
Col. Gary Kolb, a spokesman with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, on Friday said only that investigators assigned to the case felt they had evidence to charge Bales with 17 counts of murder. There was no immediate indication as to where the other fatality came from, besides the fact it was an an adult, and Afghan government officials in Kabul have said they have no record of another death.
The six people wounded in the shootings are four children, one woman and one man, according to the charge sheet against Bales. Two of those have been released from a hospital, said Ahmad Javed Faisal, a Kandahar provincial government spokesman.
At the minimum, Bales would be sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole if he's convicted on even one of the 17 murder charges, according to a statement from the U.S. Forces-Afghanistan public affairs office. At the maximum, he could face the death penalty.
Prosecutors could levy more charges "as they see fit," said a defense official with knowledge of the charges preferred.
"The Army investigators are still working," the official said. "There is no requirement to 'lock in' to certain charges at this point."
Stunned friends recall good deeds of suspect
The Taliban, in an e-mail Friday to CNN, vowed "strong revenge" for the attacks and claimed justice won't be served in U.S. courts, which they said "are not reliable." The Islamic fundamentalist group, which been battling coalition and Afghan government forces for years, believes that "tens of American soldiers, and not one person" are responsible for the killings, according to the message.
"We don't believe in these (American) courts and reject the decision," the Taliban said. "We will take practical revenge on every single American soldier."
Bales, who was returned to the United States last week, is being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Naming the Afghan victims, sons and daughters alike
By Jere Van Dyk CBS News March 23, 2012
Commentary by CBS News consultant Jere Van Dyk. He is the author of "In Afghanistan," Coward McCann, 1983, and "Captive," Times Books, 2010.
(CBS News) I have never met an Afghan who knows the day when he or she was born. Very few Afghans know the year they were born. When asked their age they will say, for example, "I'm about 31 or 32."
If you ask a man how many children he has, he will generally only tell you the number of boys. If you know him well, you can push him and he will tell you - sheepishly - the number of daughters. But in the countryside, a man must never ask another man about daughters, or his wife. Never.
I have eaten in many Afghan villages over the years, and after dinner the men talk, and their sons listen, as they have for millenia. Their daughters, with modern haircuts and dresses and dirty faces, crowd in the doorway and stare at visitors.
Many men have told me over the years that a man is not a man unless he has at least 10 children, and by that he means 10 sons. Sons form a militia. Yet I recall vividly in the 1980s sitting around a campfire with the Mujahedeen north of Kandahar. As Soviet tanks in the distance sent flares up lighting the night, a lean, strong-looking man wearing a black turban sat next to me holding his daughter, less than a year old, closely to his chest.
When I was in captivity a few years ago, one of my two bodyguards, a member of the Taliban, had many children, but the one he missed most was his youngest daughter, Mina. He talked about her all the time. I asked him why men treated their sons better than their daughters. "It is because we only have them for such a short time. It is better not to get too close to them because it hurts too much to lose them." Mina was about five and already she was promised to someone in marriage although, he said, when she was older and able to think for herself she had the right to reject him.
Another bodyguard said, "I like my sons, but I love my daughters more."
Yes, some Afghan men sell their daughters to pay off debts, and women burn themselves because they hate their marriages (although many do so because their mothers-in-law will not accept them - their dowry was not large enough). In 2003 I visited Yunus Khalis, an old Mujahideen leader whom Osama bin Laden stayed next to when he returned to Afghanistan. I was upset to see this 80-plus-year-old man was married to a 20-something woman. He had stolen her life. I watched him kiss his daughter, about 4, gently.
Why am I writing all this? Bear with me.
An interpreter called Sami, whom some CBS correspondents know, and who wants 10 sons, told me that his daughters were smarter. He was sending them both to private schools.
In Kabul in December 2001, Sally Austin, the head of CARE, the largest and oldest NGO in America, told me, "More girls went to school under the Taliban than any time in the history of Afghanistan." I was taken aback, and asked around. Anders Fange, director of the venerable Swedish Committee (an NGO which has worked in Afghanistan for decades, and which worked with the Taliban in the 1990s), confirmed Austin's statement.
"We worked with the Taliban on this in the 1990s," Fange said. "They agreed to let girls go to school, especially their own. We conducted a census, twice, to confirm our figures. More girls went to school in the 1990s than ever before." Fange introduced me to an Afghan architect who conducted the census, who confirmed it was true.
Think of these girls and boys, and their mothers, when you read what Qais Azimy, an Afghan, wrote earlier this week for Agence France Presse - that in the days following the shootings in two villages in Kandahar, most the media focused on the anticipated backlash from Afghans, the geopolitical fallout, and all the detailed available about the suspect, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, and even his family.
"But the victims became a footnote, an anonymous footnote. Just the number 16," wrote Azimy. "No one bothered to ask their ages, their hobbies, their aspirations. Worst of all, no one bothered to ask their names.
"In honoring their memory, I write their names below, and the little we know about them: that nine of them were children, three were women.
The dead: Mohamed Dawood, son of Abdullah
Khudaydad, son of Mohamed Juma
Nazar Mohamed
Payendo
Robeena
Shatarina, daughter of Sultan Mohamed
Zahra, daughter of Abdul Hamid
Nazia, daughter of Dost Mohamed
Masooma, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Farida, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Palwasha, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Nabia, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Esmatullah, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Faizullah, son of Mohamed Wazir
Essa Mohamed, son of Mohamed Hussain
Akhtar Mohamed, son of Murrad Ali
The wounded:
Haji Mohamed Naim, son of Haji Sakhawat
Mohamed Sediq, son of Mohamed Naim
Parween
Rafiullah
Zardana
Zulheja
Update: On Friday it was announced that Sgt. Bales was charged with 17 counts of murder.
How Would A President Romney Handle Afghanistan?
NPR By Ari Shapiro March 23, 2012
An Army staff sergeant's alleged massacre of Afghan civilians has brought new calls for the United States to leave Afghanistan even before the timetable set by President Obama, who has announced that the U.S. combat mission will be over by the end of 2014.
Some Republican presidential candidates are among those publicly asking if now is the time for the U.S. to leave Afghanistan.
But not Mitt Romney.
The former Massachusetts governor and Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination has criticized Obama for announcing a troop withdrawal timetable, but also has suggested that he would bring U.S. troops home as soon as possible.
That has some Democrats accusing Romney of trying to have it both ways when discussing the 10-year-old war.
Who Would End The War First?
One simple way to compare strategies for Afghanistan is to ask this question: Would a President Romney bring American troops home before President Obama, or after?
"That is a legitimate question," says Rich Williamson, a senior foreign policy adviser to the Romney campaign, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and special envoy to Sudan." But it doesn't have a quick, simple answer."
The answer is murky and complicated — if it's even there at all.
Let's start with Romney's view of President Obama's timetable.
"It's unthinkable that you say: 'Here's the date we're gonna leave, regardless of the circumstances,' " Romney said at a town hall meeting in Maryland this week. "Because that only communicates ... to the enemy, that at some point certain you're leaving. ... They make their plans based upon knowing your plans, when we don't know theirs."
So according to Romney, there should be no firm, public, finish line to the war.
Waning U.S. Public Support
That does not sit well with the American people, according to public opinion polls. A USA Today/Gallup poll taken after the alleged massacre of 17 civilians on March 11 found that half of Americans favored a U.S. troop withdrawal before the end of 2014.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken just before news of the alleged massacre had found that 60 percent of Americans said the war wasn't worth its costs.
"Gov. Romney is committed to success of the mission, but he absolutely wants to get the American troops home as soon as possible," says Williamson.
Those two goals may not be compatible: On the one hand, stay until the U.S. wins; on the other hand, bring the troops home as soon as possible.
The question is how any leader reconciles those two objectives.
Or put differently, without timetables, would a President Romney get the troops out faster or slower than a President Obama?
Williamson says Romney would get them home sooner — but not because of what he calls an artificial deadline.
"We will have a better strategy, better leadership, more firm commitment, and that will result in American troops able to return home sooner," says Williamson.
In other words, Americans would come home sooner because the U.S. would win the war more quickly under a President Romney than under President Obama, says Williamson.
Impossible To Know
"They're trying to get the best of both worlds," says Rep. Adam Smith, D- Wash., top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. "Like, you know, 'It's a bad policy to pull out too soon.' 'Well then, you want to stay longer?' 'Well, I didn't say that.' "
Smith claims that Romney and his advisers are "taking advantage of the fact that the president's the only one who actually has to implement a policy here."
But Romney gets more sympathy from Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
"When you push for specifics, I think the question is, is it credible that a presidential candidate can really have enough information to give specifics as distinguished from a broad set of policies?" says Cordesman. "In this case, the answer has to be no."
Cordesman says Romney is not being mushy on Afghanistan; he's being prudent.
"At this point in time, he's not being briefed, except from people outside the system, outside the White House," says Cordesman. "And he's going to be briefed by people whose perceptions are generally broad and, in policy terms, not on the basis of any clear plan."
This is a point Romney himself has made, speaking last Sunday on Fox News.
"Before I take a stand on a particular course of action," said Romney, "I want to get the input from the people who are there."
Where The Others Stand
That hesitation distinguishes Romney from his Republican opponents.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul has always said Afghanistan is a mistake.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently joined that view, telling CBS' Face the Nation it's time for U.S.troops to leave Afghanistan.
"I think we need to reconsider the whole region," Gingrich said. "We need to understand that our being in the middle of countries like Afghanistan is probably counterproductive. We're not prepared to be ruthless enough to force them to change, and yet we're clearly an alien presence."
And former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has said the U.S. needs to either recommit to winning in Afghanistan, or get out now.
But as the primary season enters its last stages, the most important contrast may not be between Romney and other Republicans. It may be between Romney and President Obama.
Afghan massacre taints notion of ‘good war’
Financial Times By Geoff Dyer March 23, 2012
Fayetteville - The conversation at the Carolina Ale House in Fayetteville is usually dominated at this time of year by the “March Madness” college basketball tournament, but this week the sport had to compete with news about Sergeant Robert Bales and a massacre in Afghanistan.
Just as the mainly military patrons were starting to watch the game on Thursday night, they began to discover that the American soldier was to face 17 separate charges of murder, after he allegedly slaughtered the members of an Afghan village near his base two weeks ago, including nine children.
“It is still unbelievable what he did,” said David Bond, an army veteran who was visiting Fayetteville, the small North Carolina city dominated by the huge Fort Bragg military base. “It is like my buddy was saying,” motioning towards a message he had just received on his phone. “This was supposed to be the good war.”
Coming at a time when the war appears to be floundering on many fronts, the alleged rampage in southern Afghanistan has set off a powerful set of reactions – from Afghan outrage to a growing number of American politicians wanting to pull-out. But military communities such as Fayetteville have their own form of indignation, the resentment that comes from seeing the personal sacrifices of a decade-long war called into question.
If nothing else, the tale of Sgt Bales has proved captivating. The 38-year-old father of two may have signed up for the military shortly after 9/11, but in the week since his name was made public, America has come to see a person who represents so many of the ways in which the country has gone awry in recent years.
The Bales family, it turns out, had been caught up in the property market crash. Just days before the massacre, his wife tried to put their house near Tacoma, Washington up for sale for 20 per cent less than they had paid for it. Another property they owned in a nearby town was near-derelict, with used car parts left out front.
Before enlisting, Sgt Bales had a chequered career in finance. He worked for several small penny-stock brokerages which were caught up in allegations of market manipulation. After co-founding his own firm, he was ruled by an arbitration panel in Ohio to have defrauded a retired couple and ordered to repay $1.5m – money they never received.
Joining the army was not just about striking back against al-Qaeda, it was also a way of running from reality.
As the scale of his alleged crimes has started to sink in, there has been plenty of discussion about possible circumstances that would lead him to “snap”. Senator Patty Murray of Washington has raised questions about the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at Fort Lewis-McChord, Sgt Bale’s home military base.
His three tours of duty in Iraq before going to Afghanistan have also focused attention on the strains that more than a decade of war have placed on the serving military and their families. Since 2001, 2.2m members of the American military have been deployed in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Yet curiously it is in military communities such as Fayetteville where these rationalisations get short shrift. It is a matter of professional pride among many soldiers to push back against the idea that war reduces them to broken shells.
Sitting in his wheelchair outside the town’s veterans hospital, a five-storey building that is one of the biggest in Fayetteville, one soldier who asked not to be named said: “There can never be any excuse for that.”
When he ran for president in 2008, Barack Obama encouraged the notion of Afghanistan as the “good war” and that idea has retained some currency in the military. While service in Iraq was coloured by the deceptions and blunders that surrounded the war, Afghanistan remains the place from which the 9/11 attacks were launched.
Yet as the war has ground on and commanders have struggled to define its objectives, the Afghan conflict has also lost much of its allure – a process that has accelerated in the last fortnight.
“As a chaplain, I have wondered about possible PTSD, but around here there is no sympathy for him [Sgt Bales] at all, just a feeling that he has done a terrible, terrible thing,” says Larry McCarty, pastor at the First Baptist church in Spring Lake, on the edge of Fort Bragg.
Mr McCarty was a Southern Baptist pastor in Florida and an Army reservist when he was called up after 9/11. He spent the next nine years either at Fort Bragg or in Iraq, before moving recently to the Spring Lake church. In his last two years with the army, he conducted 75 military funerals.
“This is a resilient, patriotic community,” he says of his largely military congregation. “But it has been a very, very long war and many people are tired and weary.”
Lunch with the FT: Saad Mohseni
Afghanistan’s first media mogul talks about the country’s culture wars, his answer to ‘The X Factor’ – and how he got into business with Rupert Murdoch
Financial Times By Matthew Green March 24, 2012
A jovial gunman in khaki looks me up and down, discerns (correctly) that I am unarmed, and waves me through the gate into Sufi. Kabul is emerging from its coldest winter in 20 years and the last of the snow sparkles in the garden. I crunch my way into the restaurant and wait for Saad Mohseni, television impresario, multimillion-dollar dealmaker and chief protagonist in Afghanistan’s culture wars.
Our meeting, on March 8, came in the midst of a sea of troubles for the west’s Afghan campaign. A few weeks earlier, riots had swept the country after burned copies of the Koran were found in a rubbish pit at Bagram airbase – more than 25 Afghans died; six US soldiers were murdered by enraged members of the Afghan security forces. The day before our meeting, six British troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Helmand. Three days later, a US army sergeant would go on a rampage in Kandahar province, killing 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children.
The meteoric rise of Afghanistan’s first media mogul speaks of another, less reported conflict: a country’s struggle to define a new identity after decades of upheaval and oppression. In this other drama, Mohseni stands centre stage. In the past decade, he has built up a network of two radio stations and three television channels that produce 15 hours of in-house programmes a day – more than many stations in the US. Shows on his Tolo TV network have redefined Afghan sensibilities – thrilling a younger generation but prompting a backlash from traditionalists. Only a few weeks before our meeting, the government had ordered women presenters to wear headscarves and avoid heavy make-up – the latest in a running battle between a vibrant liberal media and conservatives.
Whatever finger-wagging clerics may say, it is clear that Mohseni has tapped into a yearning for something new. Afghan Star – Afghanistan’s answer to The X Factor – is into its seventh season. An Afghan version of Yes Minister, the British 1980s satire of civil service mandarins, has delighted viewers by lampooning the sycophancy and kowtowing around a fictional minister of garbage. Game show contestants compete in a battle of nerves to win boxes of cash in a local version of Deal or No Deal.
It is not just the Afghan public who have been won over. Mohseni’s passion for TV myth-making on the hoof has unleashed serious money. In January, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation announced it had taken a minority stake in Moby Group, the media company chaired by Mohseni. International expansion beckons – provided Afghanistan does not implode first.
When Mohseni, 45, steps into the restaurant, he has the demeanour of an advertising executive hurrying between meetings in London or Los Angeles, rather than somebody fresh from navigating the sludge-filled streets of Kabul. Wearing a khaki jacket, checked shirt and jeans, he also sports the heavy-rimmed glasses, stubble and shock of hair beloved of the global creative class. A soft Australian accent, acquired while studying as a teenager in Melbourne, seems to match his laconic look.
Yet Mohseni’s schemes are firmly anchored in Afghanistan, where the snow has triggered in him a pang of nostalgia. The weather reminds him of the city in 1979, before the Russians invaded, unleashing a chain of events that scattered his family and tipped his homeland into a downward spiral it has yet to unwind. “It brings back a lot of memories,” he says. “Snow creates a totally different atmosphere in the city.”
It is also an excellent excuse for a hearty winter soup. Popular with well-to-do Afghans and expatriates, Sufi offers a fusion menu that draws on traditions from across the country. Carved wooden furniture and plentiful cushions give the interior an antique feel. Waiters arrayed in red knitted skull caps, white shalwar kameez and waistcoats with mirrored sequins might, in another context, verge on camp, but piped strains from a haunting Afghan sitar lend Sufi a wistful vibe.
Though I am technically the host, I am relieved when Mohseni flags down one of the servers and orders for us in rapid-fire Dari. I can only catch his request for his Diet Pepsi and my pomegranate juice before he starts to lament the decline in his city’s culinary standards triggered by the descent into war in the 1980s.
“The food in Kabul became very simple – even to this day, you see it’s pretty much three, four dishes,” he says. “You go to a poor person’s house and you go to a minister’s house – they’ll prepare the same sort of thing for you.”
The reference to dining with the rich and powerful is not a boast, yet nor is it quite an accident. News is Mohseni’s passion and his programmes give him influence. The dozens of journalists, editors and producers at his Tolo news channel churn out bulletins that offend everyone from government officials to insurgent commanders and shady businessmen. “We have people trying to kill us – from all sides,” Mohseni says. “It just doesn’t stop.”
Our starter arrives in the form of a basket of warm, flat bread and pastry squares filled with a fine layer of potato and served with a tangy green chutney flavoured with cardamom. Mohseni explains his quest to push Afghan media into new territory – not just with hard-hitting news coverage but by reshaping tastes. A watershed arrived in 2005 with the launch of Afghan Star – where men and women singers compete and the audience votes via text messages. The show exploded taboos and became a runaway success. Mohseni estimates the final attracts up to 20m viewers.
“If you’d done a survey beforehand, most people would have probably said, ‘No, this doesn’t sound interesting.’ They wouldn’t have accepted it. But you take a chance, you push the boundaries,” he says.
For all Mohseni’s coups, the tug-of-war between modernity and tradition in Afghanistan is as intense as ever. A few days before we meet, the Ulema Council, a state-appointed body of 150 clerics, called on the government to place Saudi-style restrictions on women – including barring them from leaving the house without a male chaperone. To the dismay of human rights activists, Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, seemed to endorse the call – his palace carried it on its website.
“I don’t know how it’s going to end, I don’t think anyone does,” Mohseni says.
His choice of programmes has sometimes placed him on a collision course with the authorities. In 2008, the government banned Indian soaps after clerics deemed their scenes of men mixing with women and occasional glimpses of midriff too racy. One of the most popular aired on Tolo TV, featuring the tale of long-suffering Tulsi, a poor girl who married into a rich family. Mohseni defied the ban, telling Karzai that people could switch channels if they were offended.
“I said, ‘Listen, most people know they have a miserable existence, they have no hope. People turn on a television set, and for them that’s escape.’”
He recalls Karzai’s response: “Sometimes people don’t know any better,” and grins as he repeats his own retort: “I said, ‘Well, if they can choose you as their president, they can certainly choose their programme.’” It was the last time the two men spoke.
Soup arrives, puffing clouds of savoury steam. Mohseni explains that the mashawa – as the broth is known – is a concoction of mung beans and chickpeas. An island of yoghurt floats in the spicy lake.
Mohseni seems to share the sentiment I have encountered so often in conversations in Kabul: Afghanistan’s biggest problem is its own government. After 10 years in power, runs this argument, Karzai has yet to impress. “He’s a patriot, he loves the country, but he hasn’t really been able to take advantage of the goodwill of Afghans and the goodwill of the international community,” Mohseni says. “I’m afraid that we will look back at Afghanistan in 20 or 30 years time and see that one of the greatest opportunities has been squandered by an inept, corrupt government.”
Just as it seems the conversation might turn irretrievably gloomy, a waiter arrives with a giant tray bearing dishes suffused with cheer. Translucent dumplings of wafer-thin pastry filled with chopped leek appear, splashed with more yoghurt and seasoned with powdery dried mint and accompanied by pan-fried pumpkin. The meaty heart of the meal is kebab-e-daigi – boiled lamb on a bed of chopped onion. It is heavy enough to ensure I will want to curl up and fall asleep as soon as the meal is over.
It would, given Moby’s success, be easy to forgive Mohseni a little bombast. Yet he is realistic about the risks that lie ahead as the US and its allies sharply scale back their presence before handing over to Afghan forces in 2014. “Without the Americans, obviously things would be a lot more difficult,” Mohseni says. “The question is: how can we engage the Americans to stay here longer?”
His caution reflects a family history of upheaval. Mohseni’s father was a diplomat and he was born in London, before spending time in Kabul, Islamabad and then Tokyo – where the family was living when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. His father moved them to Australia, where Mohseni attended school in Melbourne, before pursuing a career in finance. He rose through the ranks of Bell Potter, an Australian stockbroker, and ended up heading its derivatives, commodities and foreign exchange desk.
The money was good, yet he still had an entrepreneurial itch he needed to scratch. Mohseni recalls with fondness that his great-uncle was the first trader to export Karakul wool – the lambskin Karzai favours for his triangular hats – from central Asia to England in the early 1900s. In 1995, Mohseni took a trip to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and then went into business with his brother, Zaid, trading in everything from electronics to cooking oil. It was only when the Taliban was overthrown in 2001 that he saw his chance in Kabul.
Under the austere Taliban theocracy, television sets had been strung up from lampposts; the state radio broadcast little more than propaganda and the call to prayer. Working with his brother, Mohseni launched Arman FM in 2003 and began filling the city’s airwaves with western pop.
Afghanistan’s media revolution had begun. Fed up with the staid, formal delivery of newsreaders who seemed terrified of their own microphones, Mohseni would banter on air to help them relax. He hired female DJs who laughed and joked during programmes – an almost inconceivably risqué activity. Clerics and conservatives tut-tutted and audiences were left cold by much of the music – with the exception of Jennifer Lopez (Mohseni theorises that her Latin rhythms were closer to traditional Afghan beats).
Mohseni’s risk began to pay off, but he needed cash to expand. The initial capital to set up the radio had come from family money and some financing from Usaid, the US development agency, which was keen to support independent media. Working with Zaid and two other siblings, Mohseni mortgaged family properties and secured more US government funds to launch Tolo TV in 2004.
Moby has been growing ever since. There is a bedrock of dubbed shows – from the Indian soaps (with midriffs carefully pixellated) to American series such as Prison Break and Homeland (to which they have acquired the rights). But homegrown productions are also expanding. Eagle 4 is a police drama featuring officers with a commitment to fighting insurgents that might stretch credulity. In the action vein, a Pashtu-language programme called Salam features a drug addict turned vigilante who uses gunplay and martial arts to battle villainous warlords. “It’s extraordinary,” Mohseni says. “All these young people out there producing comedy and drama.”
I ask about the Murdoch deal. While the News Corporation empire has been foundering in the UK over the phone-hacking scandal, Murdoch has not given up scouting the world. In 2006, Mohseni was introduced to the tycoon in New York by Tom Freston, one of the founders of MTV who had worked in Afghanistan in the 1970s. The meeting gave birth to Farsi1, a satellite channel co-owned by Moby and News Corporation that beams dubbed shows into Iran and the Middle East. In January, News Corporation took a minority stake in Moby – providing cash to expand internationally.
“I’m not really into high-fiving myself, but there’s also a lot of pressures for this not to go wrong,” Mohseni says. He is reluctant to say too much about what comes next, although it is clear he will be looking at countries where few other television executives dare to tread. Stating the obvious for the first time in our 90-minute lunch, Mohseni says: “We’re specialists in difficult environments.”
“I’m seeing Moby Somalia,” I say, only half-joking.
“Somalia’s too small for us,” he shoots back. “The market has to be a certain size.”
For all his ambitions, Mohseni’s soul is in Kabul. “We are very emotionally involved with this place,” he says. “And it would break my heart for us not to be able to have breakfast in this restaurant.”
I am not, however, surprised to learn that he has no time for the traditional Afghan palate cleanser – green tea – but must rush to another appointment. After he has gone, a pair of Black Hawk helicopters thunder overhead, Sufi’s windows rattle, and then there is silence – broken only by the sitar’s mournful twang.
Matthew Green is the FT’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent
Europe no sanctuary for Afghan asylum seekers
Afghans hoping to escape violence and a lack of economic prospects at home face new challenges and new abuses in Europe.
Aljazeera By Ali M Latifi 23 Mar 2012
As Afghanistan's army was beginning to assume a more active combat role in 2007 - and as suicide bombings and opium production hit record highs - Omar thought a move to Europe would make his life safer.
Instead, as with the 300 Afghans who marched in Stockholm that year to demand their rights to asylum, the 19-year-old would realise the journey to seek asylum in Europe was rife with its own difficulties.
As one of thousands of young people trying to escape worsening insecurity, a lack of socio-economic opportunities and increased anxiety over Afghanistan's future, Omar left his home and embarked on a three-year journey to France.
In each of the nine Eurasian countries he entered along the way, Omar thought he was finally safe - but, instead, each presented its own hostilities and threats of abuse.
Now 23, Omar told Al Jazeera that the struggles he faced led to an unexpected conclusion: "The difficulties in Afghanistan were better than the difficulties we face today in Europe."
But that realisation has not kept thousands of other Afghans from the journey. At 30,000 official applications, 2011 saw the highest rate of Afghans seeking asylum in the decade since the war began.
For Omar, and others like him, that 25 per cent increase in asylum seekers above the previous year does not exist in isolation from another fact: with 3,021 killings ascribed to the war [PDF], 2011 was the deadliest year for Afghan civilians.
Death at every turn
Describing his three-year trek, Omar says he - and friends he made and lost along the way - "came and went like thieves".
Omar's first steps towards Europe, along one of the world's oldest borders, between Iran and Turkey, were chased by a spectre of death. Guided by Iranian qachaqbarha ["smugglers"], Omar says he was constantly aware that "Turkish soldiers could shoot us at any minute".
But the most frightening part of Omar's journey was crossing the Aegean Sea, on an inflatable boat with six others.
After clinging for his life to a vessel ill-equipped to transport so many, Omar says: "All I could think was that we could drown in the sea at any turn." This is the fate which befell 17 Afghan and Iranian asylum seekers in November, when a wooden boat capsized en route to Australia.
Despite such fears, for asylum seekers trying to enter Europe, making it out of Turkey is imperative.
Bill Frelick, refugee programme director at Human Rights Watch says that Turkey does not recognise non-Europeans as refugees, and since "there is nothing that compels any state to re-settle refugees", Turkey simply does not.
At this intersect of Europe and Asia, one fact becomes increasingly clear to asylum seekers and activists.
"Neither the European nations nor Afghanistan are dealing with issues of safety or legal obligations towards these migrants," says Heather Barr, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Death and fingerprints
For asylum seekers such as Omar and 27-year-old Bilal, who "always faced fighting between ethnicities" in the eastern province of Ghazni, safety and legality come to a head in the form of a set of fingerprints.
In accordance with the 2003 Dublin II Regulation, an asylum case must be tried in the first European Union member state through which an unauthorised entrant entered.
More often than not, that state - from which they entered the continent - is Greece.
"All you have to do is look at a map to see why migrants go there," says Barr.
Like Afghanistan, Barr says, "geography has placed a heavy burden on Greece".
Greece has responded to this burden, say the asylum seekers, with an unwelcoming and hostile atmosphere.
The revolving door
The country has become a focal point of the discussion around asylum. A September 2011 Human Rights Watch report said migrants and asylum seekers detained along Greece's Evros River near the Turkish border were subject to "inhuman and degrading" treatment.
Basir Ahang is an independent Afghan journalist specialising in asylum and refugee issues. He says that, for the 30,000 Afghans who went through Greece in 2009 and 2010, the abuse was not confined to detention centres.
"The behaviour you see in Greece, the human rights abuses, would make you forget you were in Europe," Ahang, himself a one-time asylum seeker, told Al Jazeera.
Ahang describes Victoria Park in downtown Athens as a "war camp", where Afghan asylum seekers convene.
He says he saw malnourished children there, with skin burnt from exposure to the sun; a young man being refused police help - while his head was bleeding from an attack by a racist group, and men with their lips sewn shut on their way to protest outside parliament.
With record low temperatures throughout Europe this winter, Ahang says parks leave asylum seekers susceptible to the dual dangers of physical harassment and the often brutal weather that has already led to the deaths of more than 400 people, many of them homeless, something Ahang describes as a "humanitarian crisis in the waiting".
There have been killings at the hands of racist gangs reported, as well as suicides and deaths on the street from the cold; bodies discovered, frozen and lifeless, the morning after a winter's night.
These attacks, along with rights groups' calls for reforms to Greece's treatment of migrants, serve as reasons why asylum seekers go to great lengths to avoid being fingerprinted in Greece.
When caught by authorities, Frelick says migrants are fingerprinted and handed a piece of paper - in Greek - saying they have 30 days to leave. Illiterate in Greek and without options for shelter, asylum seekers are often thrown into detention centres, labelled by rights groups as "inhuman".
Once released from detention, asylum seekers are usually left to wander the streets, as Greek officials are reluctant to deport Afghans back to Afghanistan, says Bilal.
This leaves asylum seekers "subject to arrest and detention over and over again", says HRW's Frelick, a process he describes as "a revolving door".
In January, after the European Court on Human Rights ruled that the Belgian government violated the European Convention on Human Rights when returning an Afghan asylum seeker to Greece, as per the Dublin II Regulation, Germany, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Iceland and Norway all stopped expulsions to Greece.
Belgian officials said they had halted the practice in October.
In response to the difficulties Afghans face in Greece, the Afghan government has announced the opening of an embassy in Athens by late March.
But the abuse is not confined to Greece.
Describing a process of indefinite detention in Turkey, Frelick says authorities will hold migrants until their families can afford to pay for airfare back to Afghanistan.
"This is just government justification to say they are not using their own funds to deport them," says Frelick.
For younger migrants, dealing with the psychological tolls of these experiences can prove difficult. "Very often you find young Afghans who display the scars of what they endured. Many under 18 develop self-harming [tendencies]," says Maria Assunta Nicolini, a PhD candidate at City University in London studying Afghan migration.
The truly desperate however, Nicolini says, use self-harming as a last resort. "Visible horrible scars on their bodies sometimes 'touch the heart' of immigration lawyers."
But Nicanor Madueño Haon, of Groupe d'information et de soutien des immigres ["Information and immigrant support group", known by its French acronym GISTI], who works with organisations to aid asylum seekers in France, says the migrants are not alone.
Groups such as GISTI, founded in 1972 by social workers and community activists aiming to address the legal and practical challenges facing migrants in France, have made some progress.
Recently, the organisation won a case where eight migrants were given five to six thousand Euros each for being deprived of housing since June.
Considering that in a two- to three-year procedure for asylum cases, there is only a 50 per cent rate of success, Haon sees that housing case as a formidable gain.
But that victory also came with some regrets.
"Imagine how much those who were in France for years without housing or income could have been given," had they not been intimidated to flee, says Haon.
Deportation
For asylum seekers, Australia's November decision to deport 27-year-old Ismail Mirza Jan, whose case for asylum was rejected - despite arguments that, as an ethnic Hazara, Jan faces persecution and even death in Afghanistan - is a frightening sign of things to come.
The controversial decision is a result of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed by Afghan and Australian governments, allowing Australia to deport rejected Afghan asylum seekers.
There has also been talk about the UK opening a centre in Kabul for deported minors.
Nicolini says the proposed four million pound reception centre is "very likely to be ineffective", leaving open the question of what happens once deportees reach the Afghan capital.
"Airplanes bring people back, but then they scatter," says Barr.
The aim of such centres is, in part, to reconnect families.
But Barr says, given the tight-knit structures in Afghan culture, she would be "very surprised if they face any difficulty in finding their families".
The real issue surrounding deportee return is safety, she told Al Jazeera.
"There are parts of the country that are under constant attack," Barr added. The violence in the country poses a credible threat to the lives of deportees, by the sheer fact of them being there, she said.
Nicolini says several of the Afghan migrants she has interviewed "are ready to leave again as soon as they arrive in Afghanistan".
Even Omar, who would not recommend his path to other Afghans, sees security as the only legitimate reason for facing difficulties he describes as "worse than what we faced in Afghanistan".
"I do not recommend anyone gamble with their lives and ruin themselves" in such a journey, says Omar, who is currently in the process of enrolling in a French university.
Still, despite the dangers, Barr, who has been in Afghanistan since 2007, says young people are constantly in pursuit of a way out of the embattled country.
According to Bilal, the development and rebuilding seen during the past decade has reached only a select few. "It would cost too much to study in Kabul without a job," he said. With unemployment at 35 per cent, and his family in Pakistan, Bilal felt little hope of ever being able to afford the high cost of living in the capital.
Though both Bilal and Omar have made it to Sweden and France respectively, where, after years of journeying, they are slowly settling into life as Afghans in Europe, each continues to warn eager young compatriots who ask for advice on leaving their country.
"We continue to face many difficulties in our time outside of Afghanistan, and each continues to cause us pain," says Bilal. He tells other young Afghans of a road that does not end at any border "or with a piece of paper".
With a leaked NATO report saying the Taliban were waiting for a foreign pullout to regain control, Barr says that without substantial improvements in security, migration "is only going to be a growing problem".
For the second time in 30 years, Afghanistan could be facing another massive brain drain as the nation's young, motivated population seeks opportunities elsewhere.
"You can't force people to stay just because it's for the good of the country", says Barr.
* Names of asylum seekers in this article have been altered to protect their security.
Official: No sign French suspect had al-Qaeda ties
AP 23/03/2012
PARIS - French authorities have no evidence that al-Qaeda commissioned a French gunman to go on a killing spree that left seven people dead, or that he had any contact with terrorist groups, a senior official said Friday.
France's prime minister and other senior figures have been fending off suggestions that anti-terrorism authorities fell down on the job in monitoring 23-year-old Mohamed Merah, who had been known to them for years.
The senior official who is close to the investigation into Merah's attacks told The Associated Press there was no sign he had "trained or been in contact with organized groups or jihadists."
Merah was killed in a dramatic gunfight with police Thursday after a 32-hour standoff with police. Prosecutors said he filmed himself carrying out three attacks beginning March 11, killing three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three French paratroopers with close-range shots to the head. Another Jewish student and another paratrooper were wounded.
He had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and prosecutors said he had claimed contacts with al-Qaeda and to have trained in the Pakistan militant stronghold of Waziristan. He had been on a U.S. no-fly list since 2010.
The official said Merah might have made the claim because al-Qaeda is a well-known "brand." The official said authorities have "absolutely no element allowing us to believe that he was commissioned by al-Qaeda to carry out these attacks."
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.
A little-known jihadist group claimed responsibility for one of the killings. The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors Internet messages, said Jund al-Khilafah, based in Kazakhstan, issued a statement saying "Yusuf of France" led an attack Monday, the day of the Jewish school shootings.
The French official said the claim appeared opportunistic and that authorities think Merah had never heard of the group.
Investigators looking for possible accomplices decided Friday to keep Merah's older brother, his mother and the brother's girlfriend in custody for another day for further questioning, the Paris prosecutor's office said.
The head of the DCRI intelligence agency was quoted in the Le Monde newspaper as saying there was little sign that Merah's family was involved. Bernard Squarcini said Merah told police that he didn't trust his brother or mother.
Police also said his mother declined to get involved in police negotiations Wednesday with her son, saying she had no influence over him.
Merah was questioned by French intelligence officers last November after his second trip to Afghanistan, and was cooperative and provided a USB key with tourist-like photos of his trip, the senior official said.
The official said when Merah was under surveillance last year, he was not seen contacting any radicals and went to nightclubs, not mosques.
Merah told negotiators during the police standoff this week that he was able to buy an impressive arsenal of weapons thanks to years of being involved in petty theft, the official said.
The picture painted by the official and the chief of the DCRI intelligence agency was of a self-radicalized young man with signs of a split personality.
For years, intelligence services have worried most of all about lone-wolf terrorist who radicalize alone and operate below the radar. Merah told police during this week's standoff that he was trained "by a single person" when he was in Waziristan, Squarcini was quoted as saying in Le Monde.
"Not in training centers, where he could have been singled out because he spoke French," Squarcini was quoted as saying.
According to prosecutors, Merah had told negotiators he went on his rampage to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and protest the French army's involvement in Afghanistan as well as France's law against the Islamic face veil.
Some politicians, French media and Toulouse residents questioned why authorities didn't stop Merah before he started his killing spree.
Socialist presidential candidate Francois Hollande said questions need to be asked about an "failure" in counterterrorist monitoring. Other candidates did the same, and even French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said "clarity" was needed on why he wasn't arrested earlier.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon told RTL radio Friday that authorities "at no moment" suspected Merah would be dangerous despite his long record of crime and his time in prison.
"The fact of belonging to a Salafist (ultraconservative Muslim) organization is not unto itself a crime. We must not mix religious fundamentalism and terrorism, even if naturally we well know the links that unite the two," Fillon said.
In response to the slayings, Fillon said President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative government is working on new anti-terrorism legislation that would be drafted within two weeks.
Families of the victims expressed frustration that Merah was not taken alive.
"Imad's parents feel that the justice they were expecting was stolen from them," said lawyer Mehana Mouhou, lawyer for the family of the first paratrooper killed, Imad Ibn-Ziaten. "His mother wanted an answer to the question, 'why did he kill my son?'"
Cathy Fontaine, 43, who runs a beauty salon down the street from the building in Toulouse where Merah was killed, said France should have a "zero tolerance" policy for people who seek out training in Afghanistan and perhaps even refuse to let them back in.
"An individual who goes to be trained in Afghanistan, you have to follow him," she said.
The chief of the elite RAID police unit, which conducted the raid, told French media on Friday that he was probably killed by a sniper.
"We tried to exhaust him all night before retaking the apartment," Amaury de Hauteclocque was quoted as saying by Le Monde. His commandos slipped into the apartment but Merah was waiting for them, standing in 30 centimeters (a foot) of water after a pipe burst when it was pierced by a bullet during the first assault, the report said.
"I'd given the order to only fire back with stun grenades. But as he moved through the apartment he tried to kill my men who were on the balcony. It's probably one of the snipers that got him," he said.
He said on RTL radio that 15 men had taken part in the assault, which took about an hour as police slowly penetrated Merah's apartment. He described the apartment like "a battle zone," with furniture piled up as a barricade.
He said if it had been a case of nabbing Merah "dead or alive," the police would have stormed his apartment immediately instead of waiting 32 hours.
"If we have four injured among my men, it's because we tried until the end to get him alive," he said.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
Reuters By Andrea Shalal-Esa Fri Mar 23, 2012
WASHINGTON - The Air Force on Friday said it was extending an investigation into an embarrassing mistake that prompted it to cancel a contract, valued at up to $1 billion, to sell Brazilian light attack planes to the Afghan government.
Air Force General Donald Hoffman, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, granted investigators more time to look into the issue, said spokeswoman Jennifer Cassidy. She said a decision was now expected in coming weeks.
The Air Force had no immediate comment on why it decided to extend the investigation, which is being conducted by Air Force legal officials along with some representatives of the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, Frank Kendall.
The problem began in January, when privately held U.S. defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp and Brazilian planemaker Embraer SA (EMBR3.SA) beat out Hawker Beechcraft to win an order for 20 light attack planes. The Air Force was procuring the planes behalf of the Afghanistan government.
That contract was quickly challenged by Hawker.
The incident has generated headlines in Brazil, where government officials were caught off guard by the military's cancellation of the plane order, and have said it would not be helpful to bilateral defense relations. The issue may come up when Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff visits Washington next week.
While preparing for the Hawker lawsuit, the Air Force discovered that its decision had been inadequately documented, prompting Air Force Secretary Michael Donley to scrap the contract, which had an initial value of $355 million to Sierra Nevada and its subcontractor Embraer.
Air Force officials have described the incident as embarrassing and disappointing, especially given a series of other acquisition problems over the last decade. They had hoped to investigate the matter quickly and move forward with a new competition to ensure that the Afghan government could still receive the initial order of 20 light attack planes soon.
David Van Buren, the acting assistant secretary for acquisition who is retiring this month, told Reuters earlier this month that he did not believe the case revealed a systemic problem with the Air Force acquisition process.
Sierra Nevada is pressing the Air Force to redo the contest quickly, without lowering the requirements set for the original competition, from which the Hawker AT-6 plane was disqualified. Sierra says the Embraer Super Tucano is in use by six militaries around the globe.
Hawker insists that its AT-6 plane is the most capable, affordable and sustainable light attack aircraft on the market. The company is urging the Air Force to revise its requirements for the light attack planes, arguing that not even front-line U.S. fighter jets could meet the requirements as written.
Van Buren earlier this month said he was not aware of any plans to revise the requirements for the plane, which Afghanistan needs to provide close air support for its army and as a turbo-prop training plane.
The cancellation of the Super Tucano contract is one of several U.S. orders Embraer has lost over the last 20 years. In the 1990s, the Super Tucano and Embraer in partnership with U.S.-based Northrop Grumman (NOC.N) lost out as the joint fighter training aircraft for NATO after heavy lobbying from U.S. competitors.
In the mid-2000s, the Air Force also canceled a contract with Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) for an aerial reconnaissance plane that was to be based on the Embraer ERJ-145 regional jet.
(Reporting By Andrea Shalal-Esa; editing by Matthew Lewis)
Soldier charged with 17 murder counts in Afghan rampage, may face death
March 23, 2012 From Larry Shaughnessy, CNN Pentagon Producer
Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales could be sentenced to death if convicted on any of the 17 counts of murder filed against him Friday for allegedly embarking on a bloody shooting rampage in Afghan villages, the U.S. military said.
In addition to the charges of murder "with premeditation," the 38-year-old faces six counts of attempted murder and two counts of assault.
Authorities say Bales left a remote outpost in Kandahar province's Panjwai district early March 11 and went house-to-house, gunning down villagers. U.S. and Afghan officials initially said 16 people died in those attacks.
Col. Gary Kolb, a spokesman with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, on Friday said only that investigators assigned to the case felt they had evidence to charge Bales with 17 counts of murder. There was no immediate indication as to where the other fatality came from, besides the fact it was an an adult, and Afghan government officials in Kabul have said they have no record of another death.
The six people wounded in the shootings are four children, one woman and one man, according to the charge sheet against Bales. Two of those have been released from a hospital, said Ahmad Javed Faisal, a Kandahar provincial government spokesman.
At the minimum, Bales would be sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole if he's convicted on even one of the 17 murder charges, according to a statement from the U.S. Forces-Afghanistan public affairs office. At the maximum, he could face the death penalty.
Prosecutors could levy more charges "as they see fit," said a defense official with knowledge of the charges preferred.
"The Army investigators are still working," the official said. "There is no requirement to 'lock in' to certain charges at this point."
Stunned friends recall good deeds of suspect
The Taliban, in an e-mail Friday to CNN, vowed "strong revenge" for the attacks and claimed justice won't be served in U.S. courts, which they said "are not reliable." The Islamic fundamentalist group, which been battling coalition and Afghan government forces for years, believes that "tens of American soldiers, and not one person" are responsible for the killings, according to the message.
"We don't believe in these (American) courts and reject the decision," the Taliban said. "We will take practical revenge on every single American soldier."
Bales, who was returned to the United States last week, is being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Naming the Afghan victims, sons and daughters alike
By Jere Van Dyk CBS News March 23, 2012
Commentary by CBS News consultant Jere Van Dyk. He is the author of "In Afghanistan," Coward McCann, 1983, and "Captive," Times Books, 2010.
(CBS News) I have never met an Afghan who knows the day when he or she was born. Very few Afghans know the year they were born. When asked their age they will say, for example, "I'm about 31 or 32."
If you ask a man how many children he has, he will generally only tell you the number of boys. If you know him well, you can push him and he will tell you - sheepishly - the number of daughters. But in the countryside, a man must never ask another man about daughters, or his wife. Never.
I have eaten in many Afghan villages over the years, and after dinner the men talk, and their sons listen, as they have for millenia. Their daughters, with modern haircuts and dresses and dirty faces, crowd in the doorway and stare at visitors.
Many men have told me over the years that a man is not a man unless he has at least 10 children, and by that he means 10 sons. Sons form a militia. Yet I recall vividly in the 1980s sitting around a campfire with the Mujahedeen north of Kandahar. As Soviet tanks in the distance sent flares up lighting the night, a lean, strong-looking man wearing a black turban sat next to me holding his daughter, less than a year old, closely to his chest.
When I was in captivity a few years ago, one of my two bodyguards, a member of the Taliban, had many children, but the one he missed most was his youngest daughter, Mina. He talked about her all the time. I asked him why men treated their sons better than their daughters. "It is because we only have them for such a short time. It is better not to get too close to them because it hurts too much to lose them." Mina was about five and already she was promised to someone in marriage although, he said, when she was older and able to think for herself she had the right to reject him.
Another bodyguard said, "I like my sons, but I love my daughters more."
Yes, some Afghan men sell their daughters to pay off debts, and women burn themselves because they hate their marriages (although many do so because their mothers-in-law will not accept them - their dowry was not large enough). In 2003 I visited Yunus Khalis, an old Mujahideen leader whom Osama bin Laden stayed next to when he returned to Afghanistan. I was upset to see this 80-plus-year-old man was married to a 20-something woman. He had stolen her life. I watched him kiss his daughter, about 4, gently.
Why am I writing all this? Bear with me.
An interpreter called Sami, whom some CBS correspondents know, and who wants 10 sons, told me that his daughters were smarter. He was sending them both to private schools.
In Kabul in December 2001, Sally Austin, the head of CARE, the largest and oldest NGO in America, told me, "More girls went to school under the Taliban than any time in the history of Afghanistan." I was taken aback, and asked around. Anders Fange, director of the venerable Swedish Committee (an NGO which has worked in Afghanistan for decades, and which worked with the Taliban in the 1990s), confirmed Austin's statement.
"We worked with the Taliban on this in the 1990s," Fange said. "They agreed to let girls go to school, especially their own. We conducted a census, twice, to confirm our figures. More girls went to school in the 1990s than ever before." Fange introduced me to an Afghan architect who conducted the census, who confirmed it was true.
Think of these girls and boys, and their mothers, when you read what Qais Azimy, an Afghan, wrote earlier this week for Agence France Presse - that in the days following the shootings in two villages in Kandahar, most the media focused on the anticipated backlash from Afghans, the geopolitical fallout, and all the detailed available about the suspect, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, and even his family.
"But the victims became a footnote, an anonymous footnote. Just the number 16," wrote Azimy. "No one bothered to ask their ages, their hobbies, their aspirations. Worst of all, no one bothered to ask their names.
"In honoring their memory, I write their names below, and the little we know about them: that nine of them were children, three were women.
The dead: Mohamed Dawood, son of Abdullah
Khudaydad, son of Mohamed Juma
Nazar Mohamed
Payendo
Robeena
Shatarina, daughter of Sultan Mohamed
Zahra, daughter of Abdul Hamid
Nazia, daughter of Dost Mohamed
Masooma, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Farida, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Palwasha, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Nabia, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Esmatullah, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Faizullah, son of Mohamed Wazir
Essa Mohamed, son of Mohamed Hussain
Akhtar Mohamed, son of Murrad Ali
The wounded:
Haji Mohamed Naim, son of Haji Sakhawat
Mohamed Sediq, son of Mohamed Naim
Parween
Rafiullah
Zardana
Zulheja
Update: On Friday it was announced that Sgt. Bales was charged with 17 counts of murder.
How Would A President Romney Handle Afghanistan?
NPR By Ari Shapiro March 23, 2012
An Army staff sergeant's alleged massacre of Afghan civilians has brought new calls for the United States to leave Afghanistan even before the timetable set by President Obama, who has announced that the U.S. combat mission will be over by the end of 2014.
Some Republican presidential candidates are among those publicly asking if now is the time for the U.S. to leave Afghanistan.
But not Mitt Romney.
The former Massachusetts governor and Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination has criticized Obama for announcing a troop withdrawal timetable, but also has suggested that he would bring U.S. troops home as soon as possible.
That has some Democrats accusing Romney of trying to have it both ways when discussing the 10-year-old war.
Who Would End The War First?
One simple way to compare strategies for Afghanistan is to ask this question: Would a President Romney bring American troops home before President Obama, or after?
"That is a legitimate question," says Rich Williamson, a senior foreign policy adviser to the Romney campaign, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and special envoy to Sudan." But it doesn't have a quick, simple answer."
The answer is murky and complicated — if it's even there at all.
Let's start with Romney's view of President Obama's timetable.
"It's unthinkable that you say: 'Here's the date we're gonna leave, regardless of the circumstances,' " Romney said at a town hall meeting in Maryland this week. "Because that only communicates ... to the enemy, that at some point certain you're leaving. ... They make their plans based upon knowing your plans, when we don't know theirs."
So according to Romney, there should be no firm, public, finish line to the war.
Waning U.S. Public Support
That does not sit well with the American people, according to public opinion polls. A USA Today/Gallup poll taken after the alleged massacre of 17 civilians on March 11 found that half of Americans favored a U.S. troop withdrawal before the end of 2014.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken just before news of the alleged massacre had found that 60 percent of Americans said the war wasn't worth its costs.
"Gov. Romney is committed to success of the mission, but he absolutely wants to get the American troops home as soon as possible," says Williamson.
Those two goals may not be compatible: On the one hand, stay until the U.S. wins; on the other hand, bring the troops home as soon as possible.
The question is how any leader reconciles those two objectives.
Or put differently, without timetables, would a President Romney get the troops out faster or slower than a President Obama?
Williamson says Romney would get them home sooner — but not because of what he calls an artificial deadline.
"We will have a better strategy, better leadership, more firm commitment, and that will result in American troops able to return home sooner," says Williamson.
In other words, Americans would come home sooner because the U.S. would win the war more quickly under a President Romney than under President Obama, says Williamson.
Impossible To Know
"They're trying to get the best of both worlds," says Rep. Adam Smith, D- Wash., top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. "Like, you know, 'It's a bad policy to pull out too soon.' 'Well then, you want to stay longer?' 'Well, I didn't say that.' "
Smith claims that Romney and his advisers are "taking advantage of the fact that the president's the only one who actually has to implement a policy here."
But Romney gets more sympathy from Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
"When you push for specifics, I think the question is, is it credible that a presidential candidate can really have enough information to give specifics as distinguished from a broad set of policies?" says Cordesman. "In this case, the answer has to be no."
Cordesman says Romney is not being mushy on Afghanistan; he's being prudent.
"At this point in time, he's not being briefed, except from people outside the system, outside the White House," says Cordesman. "And he's going to be briefed by people whose perceptions are generally broad and, in policy terms, not on the basis of any clear plan."
This is a point Romney himself has made, speaking last Sunday on Fox News.
"Before I take a stand on a particular course of action," said Romney, "I want to get the input from the people who are there."
Where The Others Stand
That hesitation distinguishes Romney from his Republican opponents.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul has always said Afghanistan is a mistake.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently joined that view, telling CBS' Face the Nation it's time for U.S.troops to leave Afghanistan.
"I think we need to reconsider the whole region," Gingrich said. "We need to understand that our being in the middle of countries like Afghanistan is probably counterproductive. We're not prepared to be ruthless enough to force them to change, and yet we're clearly an alien presence."
And former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has said the U.S. needs to either recommit to winning in Afghanistan, or get out now.
But as the primary season enters its last stages, the most important contrast may not be between Romney and other Republicans. It may be between Romney and President Obama.
Afghan massacre taints notion of ‘good war’
Financial Times By Geoff Dyer March 23, 2012
Fayetteville - The conversation at the Carolina Ale House in Fayetteville is usually dominated at this time of year by the “March Madness” college basketball tournament, but this week the sport had to compete with news about Sergeant Robert Bales and a massacre in Afghanistan.
Just as the mainly military patrons were starting to watch the game on Thursday night, they began to discover that the American soldier was to face 17 separate charges of murder, after he allegedly slaughtered the members of an Afghan village near his base two weeks ago, including nine children.
“It is still unbelievable what he did,” said David Bond, an army veteran who was visiting Fayetteville, the small North Carolina city dominated by the huge Fort Bragg military base. “It is like my buddy was saying,” motioning towards a message he had just received on his phone. “This was supposed to be the good war.”
Coming at a time when the war appears to be floundering on many fronts, the alleged rampage in southern Afghanistan has set off a powerful set of reactions – from Afghan outrage to a growing number of American politicians wanting to pull-out. But military communities such as Fayetteville have their own form of indignation, the resentment that comes from seeing the personal sacrifices of a decade-long war called into question.
If nothing else, the tale of Sgt Bales has proved captivating. The 38-year-old father of two may have signed up for the military shortly after 9/11, but in the week since his name was made public, America has come to see a person who represents so many of the ways in which the country has gone awry in recent years.
The Bales family, it turns out, had been caught up in the property market crash. Just days before the massacre, his wife tried to put their house near Tacoma, Washington up for sale for 20 per cent less than they had paid for it. Another property they owned in a nearby town was near-derelict, with used car parts left out front.
Before enlisting, Sgt Bales had a chequered career in finance. He worked for several small penny-stock brokerages which were caught up in allegations of market manipulation. After co-founding his own firm, he was ruled by an arbitration panel in Ohio to have defrauded a retired couple and ordered to repay $1.5m – money they never received.
Joining the army was not just about striking back against al-Qaeda, it was also a way of running from reality.
As the scale of his alleged crimes has started to sink in, there has been plenty of discussion about possible circumstances that would lead him to “snap”. Senator Patty Murray of Washington has raised questions about the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at Fort Lewis-McChord, Sgt Bale’s home military base.
His three tours of duty in Iraq before going to Afghanistan have also focused attention on the strains that more than a decade of war have placed on the serving military and their families. Since 2001, 2.2m members of the American military have been deployed in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Yet curiously it is in military communities such as Fayetteville where these rationalisations get short shrift. It is a matter of professional pride among many soldiers to push back against the idea that war reduces them to broken shells.
Sitting in his wheelchair outside the town’s veterans hospital, a five-storey building that is one of the biggest in Fayetteville, one soldier who asked not to be named said: “There can never be any excuse for that.”
When he ran for president in 2008, Barack Obama encouraged the notion of Afghanistan as the “good war” and that idea has retained some currency in the military. While service in Iraq was coloured by the deceptions and blunders that surrounded the war, Afghanistan remains the place from which the 9/11 attacks were launched.
Yet as the war has ground on and commanders have struggled to define its objectives, the Afghan conflict has also lost much of its allure – a process that has accelerated in the last fortnight.
“As a chaplain, I have wondered about possible PTSD, but around here there is no sympathy for him [Sgt Bales] at all, just a feeling that he has done a terrible, terrible thing,” says Larry McCarty, pastor at the First Baptist church in Spring Lake, on the edge of Fort Bragg.
Mr McCarty was a Southern Baptist pastor in Florida and an Army reservist when he was called up after 9/11. He spent the next nine years either at Fort Bragg or in Iraq, before moving recently to the Spring Lake church. In his last two years with the army, he conducted 75 military funerals.
“This is a resilient, patriotic community,” he says of his largely military congregation. “But it has been a very, very long war and many people are tired and weary.”
Lunch with the FT: Saad Mohseni
Afghanistan’s first media mogul talks about the country’s culture wars, his answer to ‘The X Factor’ – and how he got into business with Rupert Murdoch
Financial Times By Matthew Green March 24, 2012
A jovial gunman in khaki looks me up and down, discerns (correctly) that I am unarmed, and waves me through the gate into Sufi. Kabul is emerging from its coldest winter in 20 years and the last of the snow sparkles in the garden. I crunch my way into the restaurant and wait for Saad Mohseni, television impresario, multimillion-dollar dealmaker and chief protagonist in Afghanistan’s culture wars.
Our meeting, on March 8, came in the midst of a sea of troubles for the west’s Afghan campaign. A few weeks earlier, riots had swept the country after burned copies of the Koran were found in a rubbish pit at Bagram airbase – more than 25 Afghans died; six US soldiers were murdered by enraged members of the Afghan security forces. The day before our meeting, six British troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Helmand. Three days later, a US army sergeant would go on a rampage in Kandahar province, killing 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children.
The meteoric rise of Afghanistan’s first media mogul speaks of another, less reported conflict: a country’s struggle to define a new identity after decades of upheaval and oppression. In this other drama, Mohseni stands centre stage. In the past decade, he has built up a network of two radio stations and three television channels that produce 15 hours of in-house programmes a day – more than many stations in the US. Shows on his Tolo TV network have redefined Afghan sensibilities – thrilling a younger generation but prompting a backlash from traditionalists. Only a few weeks before our meeting, the government had ordered women presenters to wear headscarves and avoid heavy make-up – the latest in a running battle between a vibrant liberal media and conservatives.
Whatever finger-wagging clerics may say, it is clear that Mohseni has tapped into a yearning for something new. Afghan Star – Afghanistan’s answer to The X Factor – is into its seventh season. An Afghan version of Yes Minister, the British 1980s satire of civil service mandarins, has delighted viewers by lampooning the sycophancy and kowtowing around a fictional minister of garbage. Game show contestants compete in a battle of nerves to win boxes of cash in a local version of Deal or No Deal.
It is not just the Afghan public who have been won over. Mohseni’s passion for TV myth-making on the hoof has unleashed serious money. In January, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation announced it had taken a minority stake in Moby Group, the media company chaired by Mohseni. International expansion beckons – provided Afghanistan does not implode first.
When Mohseni, 45, steps into the restaurant, he has the demeanour of an advertising executive hurrying between meetings in London or Los Angeles, rather than somebody fresh from navigating the sludge-filled streets of Kabul. Wearing a khaki jacket, checked shirt and jeans, he also sports the heavy-rimmed glasses, stubble and shock of hair beloved of the global creative class. A soft Australian accent, acquired while studying as a teenager in Melbourne, seems to match his laconic look.
Yet Mohseni’s schemes are firmly anchored in Afghanistan, where the snow has triggered in him a pang of nostalgia. The weather reminds him of the city in 1979, before the Russians invaded, unleashing a chain of events that scattered his family and tipped his homeland into a downward spiral it has yet to unwind. “It brings back a lot of memories,” he says. “Snow creates a totally different atmosphere in the city.”
It is also an excellent excuse for a hearty winter soup. Popular with well-to-do Afghans and expatriates, Sufi offers a fusion menu that draws on traditions from across the country. Carved wooden furniture and plentiful cushions give the interior an antique feel. Waiters arrayed in red knitted skull caps, white shalwar kameez and waistcoats with mirrored sequins might, in another context, verge on camp, but piped strains from a haunting Afghan sitar lend Sufi a wistful vibe.
Though I am technically the host, I am relieved when Mohseni flags down one of the servers and orders for us in rapid-fire Dari. I can only catch his request for his Diet Pepsi and my pomegranate juice before he starts to lament the decline in his city’s culinary standards triggered by the descent into war in the 1980s.
“The food in Kabul became very simple – even to this day, you see it’s pretty much three, four dishes,” he says. “You go to a poor person’s house and you go to a minister’s house – they’ll prepare the same sort of thing for you.”
The reference to dining with the rich and powerful is not a boast, yet nor is it quite an accident. News is Mohseni’s passion and his programmes give him influence. The dozens of journalists, editors and producers at his Tolo news channel churn out bulletins that offend everyone from government officials to insurgent commanders and shady businessmen. “We have people trying to kill us – from all sides,” Mohseni says. “It just doesn’t stop.”
Our starter arrives in the form of a basket of warm, flat bread and pastry squares filled with a fine layer of potato and served with a tangy green chutney flavoured with cardamom. Mohseni explains his quest to push Afghan media into new territory – not just with hard-hitting news coverage but by reshaping tastes. A watershed arrived in 2005 with the launch of Afghan Star – where men and women singers compete and the audience votes via text messages. The show exploded taboos and became a runaway success. Mohseni estimates the final attracts up to 20m viewers.
“If you’d done a survey beforehand, most people would have probably said, ‘No, this doesn’t sound interesting.’ They wouldn’t have accepted it. But you take a chance, you push the boundaries,” he says.
For all Mohseni’s coups, the tug-of-war between modernity and tradition in Afghanistan is as intense as ever. A few days before we meet, the Ulema Council, a state-appointed body of 150 clerics, called on the government to place Saudi-style restrictions on women – including barring them from leaving the house without a male chaperone. To the dismay of human rights activists, Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, seemed to endorse the call – his palace carried it on its website.
“I don’t know how it’s going to end, I don’t think anyone does,” Mohseni says.
His choice of programmes has sometimes placed him on a collision course with the authorities. In 2008, the government banned Indian soaps after clerics deemed their scenes of men mixing with women and occasional glimpses of midriff too racy. One of the most popular aired on Tolo TV, featuring the tale of long-suffering Tulsi, a poor girl who married into a rich family. Mohseni defied the ban, telling Karzai that people could switch channels if they were offended.
“I said, ‘Listen, most people know they have a miserable existence, they have no hope. People turn on a television set, and for them that’s escape.’”
He recalls Karzai’s response: “Sometimes people don’t know any better,” and grins as he repeats his own retort: “I said, ‘Well, if they can choose you as their president, they can certainly choose their programme.’” It was the last time the two men spoke.
Soup arrives, puffing clouds of savoury steam. Mohseni explains that the mashawa – as the broth is known – is a concoction of mung beans and chickpeas. An island of yoghurt floats in the spicy lake.
Mohseni seems to share the sentiment I have encountered so often in conversations in Kabul: Afghanistan’s biggest problem is its own government. After 10 years in power, runs this argument, Karzai has yet to impress. “He’s a patriot, he loves the country, but he hasn’t really been able to take advantage of the goodwill of Afghans and the goodwill of the international community,” Mohseni says. “I’m afraid that we will look back at Afghanistan in 20 or 30 years time and see that one of the greatest opportunities has been squandered by an inept, corrupt government.”
Just as it seems the conversation might turn irretrievably gloomy, a waiter arrives with a giant tray bearing dishes suffused with cheer. Translucent dumplings of wafer-thin pastry filled with chopped leek appear, splashed with more yoghurt and seasoned with powdery dried mint and accompanied by pan-fried pumpkin. The meaty heart of the meal is kebab-e-daigi – boiled lamb on a bed of chopped onion. It is heavy enough to ensure I will want to curl up and fall asleep as soon as the meal is over.
It would, given Moby’s success, be easy to forgive Mohseni a little bombast. Yet he is realistic about the risks that lie ahead as the US and its allies sharply scale back their presence before handing over to Afghan forces in 2014. “Without the Americans, obviously things would be a lot more difficult,” Mohseni says. “The question is: how can we engage the Americans to stay here longer?”
His caution reflects a family history of upheaval. Mohseni’s father was a diplomat and he was born in London, before spending time in Kabul, Islamabad and then Tokyo – where the family was living when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. His father moved them to Australia, where Mohseni attended school in Melbourne, before pursuing a career in finance. He rose through the ranks of Bell Potter, an Australian stockbroker, and ended up heading its derivatives, commodities and foreign exchange desk.
The money was good, yet he still had an entrepreneurial itch he needed to scratch. Mohseni recalls with fondness that his great-uncle was the first trader to export Karakul wool – the lambskin Karzai favours for his triangular hats – from central Asia to England in the early 1900s. In 1995, Mohseni took a trip to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and then went into business with his brother, Zaid, trading in everything from electronics to cooking oil. It was only when the Taliban was overthrown in 2001 that he saw his chance in Kabul.
Under the austere Taliban theocracy, television sets had been strung up from lampposts; the state radio broadcast little more than propaganda and the call to prayer. Working with his brother, Mohseni launched Arman FM in 2003 and began filling the city’s airwaves with western pop.
Afghanistan’s media revolution had begun. Fed up with the staid, formal delivery of newsreaders who seemed terrified of their own microphones, Mohseni would banter on air to help them relax. He hired female DJs who laughed and joked during programmes – an almost inconceivably risqué activity. Clerics and conservatives tut-tutted and audiences were left cold by much of the music – with the exception of Jennifer Lopez (Mohseni theorises that her Latin rhythms were closer to traditional Afghan beats).
Mohseni’s risk began to pay off, but he needed cash to expand. The initial capital to set up the radio had come from family money and some financing from Usaid, the US development agency, which was keen to support independent media. Working with Zaid and two other siblings, Mohseni mortgaged family properties and secured more US government funds to launch Tolo TV in 2004.
Moby has been growing ever since. There is a bedrock of dubbed shows – from the Indian soaps (with midriffs carefully pixellated) to American series such as Prison Break and Homeland (to which they have acquired the rights). But homegrown productions are also expanding. Eagle 4 is a police drama featuring officers with a commitment to fighting insurgents that might stretch credulity. In the action vein, a Pashtu-language programme called Salam features a drug addict turned vigilante who uses gunplay and martial arts to battle villainous warlords. “It’s extraordinary,” Mohseni says. “All these young people out there producing comedy and drama.”
I ask about the Murdoch deal. While the News Corporation empire has been foundering in the UK over the phone-hacking scandal, Murdoch has not given up scouting the world. In 2006, Mohseni was introduced to the tycoon in New York by Tom Freston, one of the founders of MTV who had worked in Afghanistan in the 1970s. The meeting gave birth to Farsi1, a satellite channel co-owned by Moby and News Corporation that beams dubbed shows into Iran and the Middle East. In January, News Corporation took a minority stake in Moby – providing cash to expand internationally.
“I’m not really into high-fiving myself, but there’s also a lot of pressures for this not to go wrong,” Mohseni says. He is reluctant to say too much about what comes next, although it is clear he will be looking at countries where few other television executives dare to tread. Stating the obvious for the first time in our 90-minute lunch, Mohseni says: “We’re specialists in difficult environments.”
“I’m seeing Moby Somalia,” I say, only half-joking.
“Somalia’s too small for us,” he shoots back. “The market has to be a certain size.”
For all his ambitions, Mohseni’s soul is in Kabul. “We are very emotionally involved with this place,” he says. “And it would break my heart for us not to be able to have breakfast in this restaurant.”
I am not, however, surprised to learn that he has no time for the traditional Afghan palate cleanser – green tea – but must rush to another appointment. After he has gone, a pair of Black Hawk helicopters thunder overhead, Sufi’s windows rattle, and then there is silence – broken only by the sitar’s mournful twang.
Matthew Green is the FT’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent
Europe no sanctuary for Afghan asylum seekers
Afghans hoping to escape violence and a lack of economic prospects at home face new challenges and new abuses in Europe.
Aljazeera By Ali M Latifi 23 Mar 2012
As Afghanistan's army was beginning to assume a more active combat role in 2007 - and as suicide bombings and opium production hit record highs - Omar thought a move to Europe would make his life safer.
Instead, as with the 300 Afghans who marched in Stockholm that year to demand their rights to asylum, the 19-year-old would realise the journey to seek asylum in Europe was rife with its own difficulties.
As one of thousands of young people trying to escape worsening insecurity, a lack of socio-economic opportunities and increased anxiety over Afghanistan's future, Omar left his home and embarked on a three-year journey to France.
In each of the nine Eurasian countries he entered along the way, Omar thought he was finally safe - but, instead, each presented its own hostilities and threats of abuse.
Now 23, Omar told Al Jazeera that the struggles he faced led to an unexpected conclusion: "The difficulties in Afghanistan were better than the difficulties we face today in Europe."
But that realisation has not kept thousands of other Afghans from the journey. At 30,000 official applications, 2011 saw the highest rate of Afghans seeking asylum in the decade since the war began.
For Omar, and others like him, that 25 per cent increase in asylum seekers above the previous year does not exist in isolation from another fact: with 3,021 killings ascribed to the war [PDF], 2011 was the deadliest year for Afghan civilians.
Death at every turn
Describing his three-year trek, Omar says he - and friends he made and lost along the way - "came and went like thieves".
Omar's first steps towards Europe, along one of the world's oldest borders, between Iran and Turkey, were chased by a spectre of death. Guided by Iranian qachaqbarha ["smugglers"], Omar says he was constantly aware that "Turkish soldiers could shoot us at any minute".
But the most frightening part of Omar's journey was crossing the Aegean Sea, on an inflatable boat with six others.
After clinging for his life to a vessel ill-equipped to transport so many, Omar says: "All I could think was that we could drown in the sea at any turn." This is the fate which befell 17 Afghan and Iranian asylum seekers in November, when a wooden boat capsized en route to Australia.
Despite such fears, for asylum seekers trying to enter Europe, making it out of Turkey is imperative.
Bill Frelick, refugee programme director at Human Rights Watch says that Turkey does not recognise non-Europeans as refugees, and since "there is nothing that compels any state to re-settle refugees", Turkey simply does not.
At this intersect of Europe and Asia, one fact becomes increasingly clear to asylum seekers and activists.
"Neither the European nations nor Afghanistan are dealing with issues of safety or legal obligations towards these migrants," says Heather Barr, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Death and fingerprints
For asylum seekers such as Omar and 27-year-old Bilal, who "always faced fighting between ethnicities" in the eastern province of Ghazni, safety and legality come to a head in the form of a set of fingerprints.
In accordance with the 2003 Dublin II Regulation, an asylum case must be tried in the first European Union member state through which an unauthorised entrant entered.
More often than not, that state - from which they entered the continent - is Greece.
"All you have to do is look at a map to see why migrants go there," says Barr.
Like Afghanistan, Barr says, "geography has placed a heavy burden on Greece".
Greece has responded to this burden, say the asylum seekers, with an unwelcoming and hostile atmosphere.
The revolving door
The country has become a focal point of the discussion around asylum. A September 2011 Human Rights Watch report said migrants and asylum seekers detained along Greece's Evros River near the Turkish border were subject to "inhuman and degrading" treatment.
Basir Ahang is an independent Afghan journalist specialising in asylum and refugee issues. He says that, for the 30,000 Afghans who went through Greece in 2009 and 2010, the abuse was not confined to detention centres.
"The behaviour you see in Greece, the human rights abuses, would make you forget you were in Europe," Ahang, himself a one-time asylum seeker, told Al Jazeera.
Ahang describes Victoria Park in downtown Athens as a "war camp", where Afghan asylum seekers convene.
He says he saw malnourished children there, with skin burnt from exposure to the sun; a young man being refused police help - while his head was bleeding from an attack by a racist group, and men with their lips sewn shut on their way to protest outside parliament.
With record low temperatures throughout Europe this winter, Ahang says parks leave asylum seekers susceptible to the dual dangers of physical harassment and the often brutal weather that has already led to the deaths of more than 400 people, many of them homeless, something Ahang describes as a "humanitarian crisis in the waiting".
There have been killings at the hands of racist gangs reported, as well as suicides and deaths on the street from the cold; bodies discovered, frozen and lifeless, the morning after a winter's night.
These attacks, along with rights groups' calls for reforms to Greece's treatment of migrants, serve as reasons why asylum seekers go to great lengths to avoid being fingerprinted in Greece.
When caught by authorities, Frelick says migrants are fingerprinted and handed a piece of paper - in Greek - saying they have 30 days to leave. Illiterate in Greek and without options for shelter, asylum seekers are often thrown into detention centres, labelled by rights groups as "inhuman".
Once released from detention, asylum seekers are usually left to wander the streets, as Greek officials are reluctant to deport Afghans back to Afghanistan, says Bilal.
This leaves asylum seekers "subject to arrest and detention over and over again", says HRW's Frelick, a process he describes as "a revolving door".
In January, after the European Court on Human Rights ruled that the Belgian government violated the European Convention on Human Rights when returning an Afghan asylum seeker to Greece, as per the Dublin II Regulation, Germany, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Iceland and Norway all stopped expulsions to Greece.
Belgian officials said they had halted the practice in October.
In response to the difficulties Afghans face in Greece, the Afghan government has announced the opening of an embassy in Athens by late March.
But the abuse is not confined to Greece.
Describing a process of indefinite detention in Turkey, Frelick says authorities will hold migrants until their families can afford to pay for airfare back to Afghanistan.
"This is just government justification to say they are not using their own funds to deport them," says Frelick.
For younger migrants, dealing with the psychological tolls of these experiences can prove difficult. "Very often you find young Afghans who display the scars of what they endured. Many under 18 develop self-harming [tendencies]," says Maria Assunta Nicolini, a PhD candidate at City University in London studying Afghan migration.
The truly desperate however, Nicolini says, use self-harming as a last resort. "Visible horrible scars on their bodies sometimes 'touch the heart' of immigration lawyers."
But Nicanor Madueño Haon, of Groupe d'information et de soutien des immigres ["Information and immigrant support group", known by its French acronym GISTI], who works with organisations to aid asylum seekers in France, says the migrants are not alone.
Groups such as GISTI, founded in 1972 by social workers and community activists aiming to address the legal and practical challenges facing migrants in France, have made some progress.
Recently, the organisation won a case where eight migrants were given five to six thousand Euros each for being deprived of housing since June.
Considering that in a two- to three-year procedure for asylum cases, there is only a 50 per cent rate of success, Haon sees that housing case as a formidable gain.
But that victory also came with some regrets.
"Imagine how much those who were in France for years without housing or income could have been given," had they not been intimidated to flee, says Haon.
Deportation
For asylum seekers, Australia's November decision to deport 27-year-old Ismail Mirza Jan, whose case for asylum was rejected - despite arguments that, as an ethnic Hazara, Jan faces persecution and even death in Afghanistan - is a frightening sign of things to come.
The controversial decision is a result of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed by Afghan and Australian governments, allowing Australia to deport rejected Afghan asylum seekers.
There has also been talk about the UK opening a centre in Kabul for deported minors.
Nicolini says the proposed four million pound reception centre is "very likely to be ineffective", leaving open the question of what happens once deportees reach the Afghan capital.
"Airplanes bring people back, but then they scatter," says Barr.
The aim of such centres is, in part, to reconnect families.
But Barr says, given the tight-knit structures in Afghan culture, she would be "very surprised if they face any difficulty in finding their families".
The real issue surrounding deportee return is safety, she told Al Jazeera.
"There are parts of the country that are under constant attack," Barr added. The violence in the country poses a credible threat to the lives of deportees, by the sheer fact of them being there, she said.
Nicolini says several of the Afghan migrants she has interviewed "are ready to leave again as soon as they arrive in Afghanistan".
Even Omar, who would not recommend his path to other Afghans, sees security as the only legitimate reason for facing difficulties he describes as "worse than what we faced in Afghanistan".
"I do not recommend anyone gamble with their lives and ruin themselves" in such a journey, says Omar, who is currently in the process of enrolling in a French university.
Still, despite the dangers, Barr, who has been in Afghanistan since 2007, says young people are constantly in pursuit of a way out of the embattled country.
According to Bilal, the development and rebuilding seen during the past decade has reached only a select few. "It would cost too much to study in Kabul without a job," he said. With unemployment at 35 per cent, and his family in Pakistan, Bilal felt little hope of ever being able to afford the high cost of living in the capital.
Though both Bilal and Omar have made it to Sweden and France respectively, where, after years of journeying, they are slowly settling into life as Afghans in Europe, each continues to warn eager young compatriots who ask for advice on leaving their country.
"We continue to face many difficulties in our time outside of Afghanistan, and each continues to cause us pain," says Bilal. He tells other young Afghans of a road that does not end at any border "or with a piece of paper".
With a leaked NATO report saying the Taliban were waiting for a foreign pullout to regain control, Barr says that without substantial improvements in security, migration "is only going to be a growing problem".
For the second time in 30 years, Afghanistan could be facing another massive brain drain as the nation's young, motivated population seeks opportunities elsewhere.
"You can't force people to stay just because it's for the good of the country", says Barr.
* Names of asylum seekers in this article have been altered to protect their security.
Official: No sign French suspect had al-Qaeda ties
AP 23/03/2012
PARIS - French authorities have no evidence that al-Qaeda commissioned a French gunman to go on a killing spree that left seven people dead, or that he had any contact with terrorist groups, a senior official said Friday.
France's prime minister and other senior figures have been fending off suggestions that anti-terrorism authorities fell down on the job in monitoring 23-year-old Mohamed Merah, who had been known to them for years.
The senior official who is close to the investigation into Merah's attacks told The Associated Press there was no sign he had "trained or been in contact with organized groups or jihadists."
Merah was killed in a dramatic gunfight with police Thursday after a 32-hour standoff with police. Prosecutors said he filmed himself carrying out three attacks beginning March 11, killing three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three French paratroopers with close-range shots to the head. Another Jewish student and another paratrooper were wounded.
He had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and prosecutors said he had claimed contacts with al-Qaeda and to have trained in the Pakistan militant stronghold of Waziristan. He had been on a U.S. no-fly list since 2010.
The official said Merah might have made the claim because al-Qaeda is a well-known "brand." The official said authorities have "absolutely no element allowing us to believe that he was commissioned by al-Qaeda to carry out these attacks."
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.
A little-known jihadist group claimed responsibility for one of the killings. The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors Internet messages, said Jund al-Khilafah, based in Kazakhstan, issued a statement saying "Yusuf of France" led an attack Monday, the day of the Jewish school shootings.
The French official said the claim appeared opportunistic and that authorities think Merah had never heard of the group.
Investigators looking for possible accomplices decided Friday to keep Merah's older brother, his mother and the brother's girlfriend in custody for another day for further questioning, the Paris prosecutor's office said.
The head of the DCRI intelligence agency was quoted in the Le Monde newspaper as saying there was little sign that Merah's family was involved. Bernard Squarcini said Merah told police that he didn't trust his brother or mother.
Police also said his mother declined to get involved in police negotiations Wednesday with her son, saying she had no influence over him.
Merah was questioned by French intelligence officers last November after his second trip to Afghanistan, and was cooperative and provided a USB key with tourist-like photos of his trip, the senior official said.
The official said when Merah was under surveillance last year, he was not seen contacting any radicals and went to nightclubs, not mosques.
Merah told negotiators during the police standoff this week that he was able to buy an impressive arsenal of weapons thanks to years of being involved in petty theft, the official said.
The picture painted by the official and the chief of the DCRI intelligence agency was of a self-radicalized young man with signs of a split personality.
For years, intelligence services have worried most of all about lone-wolf terrorist who radicalize alone and operate below the radar. Merah told police during this week's standoff that he was trained "by a single person" when he was in Waziristan, Squarcini was quoted as saying in Le Monde.
"Not in training centers, where he could have been singled out because he spoke French," Squarcini was quoted as saying.
According to prosecutors, Merah had told negotiators he went on his rampage to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and protest the French army's involvement in Afghanistan as well as France's law against the Islamic face veil.
Some politicians, French media and Toulouse residents questioned why authorities didn't stop Merah before he started his killing spree.
Socialist presidential candidate Francois Hollande said questions need to be asked about an "failure" in counterterrorist monitoring. Other candidates did the same, and even French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said "clarity" was needed on why he wasn't arrested earlier.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon told RTL radio Friday that authorities "at no moment" suspected Merah would be dangerous despite his long record of crime and his time in prison.
"The fact of belonging to a Salafist (ultraconservative Muslim) organization is not unto itself a crime. We must not mix religious fundamentalism and terrorism, even if naturally we well know the links that unite the two," Fillon said.
In response to the slayings, Fillon said President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative government is working on new anti-terrorism legislation that would be drafted within two weeks.
Families of the victims expressed frustration that Merah was not taken alive.
"Imad's parents feel that the justice they were expecting was stolen from them," said lawyer Mehana Mouhou, lawyer for the family of the first paratrooper killed, Imad Ibn-Ziaten. "His mother wanted an answer to the question, 'why did he kill my son?'"
Cathy Fontaine, 43, who runs a beauty salon down the street from the building in Toulouse where Merah was killed, said France should have a "zero tolerance" policy for people who seek out training in Afghanistan and perhaps even refuse to let them back in.
"An individual who goes to be trained in Afghanistan, you have to follow him," she said.
The chief of the elite RAID police unit, which conducted the raid, told French media on Friday that he was probably killed by a sniper.
"We tried to exhaust him all night before retaking the apartment," Amaury de Hauteclocque was quoted as saying by Le Monde. His commandos slipped into the apartment but Merah was waiting for them, standing in 30 centimeters (a foot) of water after a pipe burst when it was pierced by a bullet during the first assault, the report said.
"I'd given the order to only fire back with stun grenades. But as he moved through the apartment he tried to kill my men who were on the balcony. It's probably one of the snipers that got him," he said.
He said on RTL radio that 15 men had taken part in the assault, which took about an hour as police slowly penetrated Merah's apartment. He described the apartment like "a battle zone," with furniture piled up as a barricade.
He said if it had been a case of nabbing Merah "dead or alive," the police would have stormed his apartment immediately instead of waiting 32 hours.
"If we have four injured among my men, it's because we tried until the end to get him alive," he said.
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