[Afghan News] March 28, 2012

[یاسمینه]

Panetta: Polls won't change Afghan strategy
CNN By Paula Newton March 27, 2012
Ottawa - U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said Tuesday polls would not change the strategy in Afghanistan, underscoring the fact that he realizes the American people have tired of war.
"We cannot fight wars by polls," Panetta said in Ottawa, where he was attending a trilateral defense meeting with Canadian and Mexican officials.
Panetta was responding to a new New York Times/CBS poll showing that 69% of Americans want troops out of Afghanistan.
"There's no question that the American people have tired of war just like the Afghan people have tired of war," he added before stressing that the U.S. government would continue with its strategy in Afghanistan.
"We have to operate based on what we believe is the best strategy to achieve the mission that we are embarked on. And the mission ... is to safeguard our country by ensuring that the Taliban and al Qaeda never again find a safe haven in Afghanistan," Panetta said.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in Washington strongly echoed Panetta's sentiment, saying the military's job is not to be driven by sentiments expressed in polls.
When asked the reaction to the poll from Gen. John Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, Kirby said, "His concern as a military commander in the field is getting the job done."
In Ottawa, the defense summit was billed as a historic one as the three countries tried to coordinate more security efforts, especially in the area of counternarcotics.
As well as embarking on a joint trilateral defense threat assessment, the U.S., Canada and Mexico pledged to do more to confront and combat drug cartels on the continent.
"I think all of us think today has been an important day because I think all of us recognize the importance of dealing with this threat to North America, this threat to security, this threat to our people," Panetta said.
Officials described a sobering presentation given by Mexican military officials outlining the scope and seriousness of the challenge in bringing drug traffickers and gang members to justice.
Specifically, military officials said there would be more time spent on patrolling waters and inspecting things like shipping containers that cross borders. They also said they were working to share more intelligence in a timely manner.
"This very ambitious goal of coordinating our efforts goes beyond any one specific threat," Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay said.
CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr contributed to this report.

U.S. seeks more money for Afghan force
The Washington Post By Karen DeYoung Wednesday, March 28 2012
The Obama administration has made an urgent appeal for international donors to pledge more money to pay for Afghanistan’s security forces after the departure of U.S. and coalition combat troops at the end of 2014.
In formal diplomatic demarches sent to 64 countries this month, and in direct appeals by President Obama and top national security aides, the administration has outlined a $4.1 billion annual budget for the Afghan army and police, according to U.S. and foreign officials.
At least $1.3 billion would come from existing foreign donors, triple the amount they currently spend. The Afghan government would contribute $500 million, and the United States would pay the rest.
The request for indefinite commitments comes as the United States and its partners in Afghanistan are under pressure to cut costs and end an increasingly unpopular war.
The administration hopes to secure the pledges before a NATO summit in Chicago in May. So far, however, there have been no specific replies to the funding appeals, an administration official said.
“We’ve gotten a lot of questions and a lot of ‘We’re thinking about it,’ ” the official said.
U.S. officials and diplomats from Asian, European and Arab countries that received the appeal discussed the matter only on the condition of anonymity.
A diplomat from a close U.S. ally said his country shares the “objective” of maintaining a strong Afghan security force. “But,” the diplomat said, “we have a very restricted budget and a very severe fiscal situation.”
An Arab diplomat said his government wants more information on how the Obama administration arrived at its calculations, how much others will contribute and how the money will be administered within corruption-plagued Afghanistan. But, he said, “we’ll probably end up paying.”
Still others, particularly in Europe, pointed out that although U.S. money may flow more freely from the Pentagon than from the State Department, the opposite is true in their countries. Some said they will find it easier to pledge development funding for Afghanistan — a separate appeal for post-2014 money that will be made in July at an international conference in Tokyo — than to provide more military spending.
In December, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told the international community that after 2014, his country will need at least $10 billion annually in combined security and development assistance until 2025. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is about $17 billion.
The United States spent about $12 billion last year, 95 percent of the total cost, to train and equip Afghanistan’s army and police. Since 2009, police salaries have been paid from a $5 billion development assistance fund established by Japan that will expire at the end of 2014.
The combined Afghan force is expected to reach a target strength of 352,000 in October. U.S. military officials have estimated that the force’s expenditure could be cut in half after this year once the target number is reached. The post-2014 budget also anticipates additional savings from a reduction in the size of the force of up to one-third by 2017, a projection that assumes successful reconciliation with the Taliban.
“I think as people consider the past and how to protect the past into the future, they’ll make the contribution, and we will have both a sufficient and sustainable” Afghan force, Marc Grossman, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said last week during a fundraising tour in Europe.
The endgame envisioned for the war calls for a gradual transition of security control from foreign to Afghan troops throughout the country by some point next year, with all coalition combat forces to withdraw by Dec. 31, 2014. The administration’s main argument is that pledging more money now would ensure a smooth withdrawal and less future spending.
In formal notes sent to foreign capitals on March 10, the United States suggested pledges from individual countries in yearly amounts ranging from $500,000 to $250 million.
“I would say that the chances of setbacks goes up” with insufficient funding, Grossman said, “and goes down” with a robust and fully funded Afghan force.
The Afghan police, and to a lesser degree the army, have been much maligned in recent years as inept and corrupt. But as the Obama administration seeks more support for the force that is its ticket to exit the war, it has begun a steady drumbeat of praise for the Afghans’ improvements and achievements.
That effort has been undercut in recent weeks by a spate of attacks in which 16 NATO service members, including nine Americans, have been killed by Afghan troops or police officers. It is unclear whether the most recent attacks were in response to the shooting deaths of 17 Afghan civilians this month, apparently at the hands of a U.S. soldier.
In a Pentagon briefing Monday, Gen. John Allen, commander of the U.S.-led coalition, played down the incidents as “a characteristic of counterinsurgencies that we’ve experienced before,” in Vietnam and Iraq, and blamed them on enemy efforts “to disrupt both the counterinsurgency operations, but also disrupt the integrity of the indigenous forces.”
Although he acknowledged in congressional testimony his preference for a slow U.S. departure over the next two years and described tough fighting ahead, Allen expressed confidence that the Afghan force would be capable of taking over.
In an account he repeated at hearings in the Senate and the House, he spoke of a recent visit with Marines serving with Afghan forces in the southwestern province of Helmand as evidence of the close relationship between U.S. and Afghan troops.
With violence against Americans increasing across the country, he said, a young Marine told him that Afghan troops had offered to patrol “outside the wire for a couple of days” to protect their U.S. comrades.
“This one statement, spoken by a young Marine,” Allen said, “conveys the power of this brotherhood in arms forged in battle over the years. It speaks to the trust that we have built with the Afghans. . . . We know there is much hard and deadly work yet to be done, but the progress is real, and, importantly, it’s sustainable.”

British Defense Minister visits Afghanistan's Helmand province
LASKHAR GAH, Afghanistan, March 28 (Xinhua) -- British Defense Minister Philip Hammond paid an unannounced visit to Afghanistan's southern Helmand province on Wednesday.
In talks with journalists, the visiting British Defense Secretary said he held meeting with Helmand provincial governor Gulab Mangal and exchanged views on British cooperation with Afghanistan.
The British government, he said, would continue to support Afghan security forces in giving training after 2014 when the NATO- led forces leave Afghanistan and hand over security to Afghan government.
His visit to Afghanistan took place three days after two British soldiers were killed by an alleged Afghan soldier in Helmand province last Monday.
More than 9,500 British forces with majority of them in Helmand province have been stationed in Afghanistan within the framework of NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to help stabilize security in the militancy-plagued country.

Report of Bomb Plot Puts Afghan Defense Ministry in Lockdown
New York Times By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and JAWAD SUKHANYAR March 27, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The Afghan Defense Ministry went into a near-total lockdown on Tuesday after the discovery of 10 suicide vests and the arrests of more than a dozen Afghan soldiers suspected of plotting to attack the ministry and blow up commuter buses for government employees, Afghan and Western officials said.
The security breach took place in one of the most heavily fortified parts of Kabul, less than a mile from the presidential palace and the headquarters of the American-led coalition. It raises the prospect that the Taliban, who committed a series of high-profile attacks in Kabul last year, are trying to pick up where they left off as winter snows give way to spring, clearing the high mountain passes and opening the annual fighting season.
Compounding the fears of renewed violence in Kabul was what appeared to be complicity of Afghan soldiers in the plot. Afghan soldiers and police officers have been killing their colleagues among the international military force here at an alarming rate in recent months; only hidden bombs have killed more coalition service members this year.
The killings have already reached into the heart of the Afghan security establishment; in February, amid riots over American soldiers’ burning Korans, an Afghan Interior Ministry employee shot dead two American military advisers in a restricted-access area of the ministry. Three other coalition service members were killed Monday by Afghan security forces in two separate episodes in the country’s south and east.
The attacks by Afghan soldiers and police attacks on coalition forces have called into question a pillar of the American exit strategy: the readying of the Afghan security forces to fight on their own. Now, in light of the potential plot against the Defense Ministry, it appears that elements of the security forces may also pose a threat to their own government.
Details of the plot, which officials said was uncovered on Monday, were sketchy, leaving unanswered questions about how the plotters had gained access to the grounds of the ministry, which lie behind multiple checkpoints.
The Defense Ministry refused to even allow that a breach had occurred; it strenuously denied any attempted bombings and said no soldiers had been arrested.
But the denials were contradicted by a half-dozen Afghan and Western officials. While some praised the fact that Afghan security forces had managed to stop the attack, all spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid contradicting the Afghan government.
One Western official said at least 10 suicide vests were discovered in and around the ministry late on Monday afternoon. Most were found in guard sheds around a parking lot, and the belief among Afghan and Western officials is that the plan was to blow up buses carrying ministry employees home, the official said.
An Afghan Army officer who handles administrative matters at the ministry gave a similar account. “You have to be cautious when you come here. It is not safe here,” the officer said. The plotters “have links inside the ministry. Otherwise, they could not enter such a highly secured place.”
Along with the usual contingent of Afghan Army guards, special army commandos could also be seen protecting the Defense Ministry on Tuesday afternoon as the restrictions on movement in and out of the ministry began to ease.
A sergeant who was guarding the ministry said he and his men had been told by their superiors that the bombers might have been planning to enter the ministry and possibly the headquarters of the intelligence agency.
The sergeant said that two bombers might still be at large, thus the morning lockdown at the ministry and orders to search everyone trying to enter. He said that uniformed soldiers ordinarily walk into the ministry without being searched, an indication of a security weakness the plotters sought to exploit.
The Western official said a number of people, including Afghan soldiers, were arrested in connection with the plot on Monday and Tuesday, but the official could not provide an exact figure. Multiple Afghan television stations reported 10 arrests on Tuesday and 6 on Monday, although it was not clear whether the suspects were soldiers or civilians.
The security alert extended beyond the ministry. A fortified street that features the Canadian Embassy and the back entrance to the British Embassy, along with compounds housing other international institutions, was locked down briefly around noon.
No cars or people were allowed in or out of the checkpoints that control access to the street for about an hour, and Afghan security forces were a heavier-than-usual presence around a major traffic circle at one end of the street. A Western-style supermarket on that same traffic circle was hit by a suicide bomber in January 2011, the first of what would be a series of attacks in Kabul last year.
The most audacious insurgent attack in Kabul last year came in September, when at least six militants armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades took up positions inside an unfinished high-rise and began firing on the area around coalition headquarters and the American Embassy. Three suicide bombers hit targets elsewhere in Kabul. It took Afghan security forces, aided by the coalition, almost 20 hours to clear the militants from the high-rise.
The Taliban have usually claimed responsibility for significant attacks on the capital. But Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the insurgents, said he was unaware of any attempt to attack the Defense Ministry.
Most of the attacks in Kabul are believed to have been the work of the Haqqani network, an insurgent faction that is loyal to the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar but that operates independently.
Based in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan, the Haqqanis sit at the fulcrum of Islamist militancy in South Asia. Apart from their links to the Taliban, the Haqqanis are also believed to have ties to Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist groups operating in Pakistan. They are also believed to maintain relations with some elements of Pakistan’s spy service, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, although Islamabad insists that it long ago severed any links to the group.
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.

Security forces kill 6 suspected militants in north Afghan town
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Security forces killed six suspected Taliban militants and arrested two others during an operation in Kunduz province 250 km north of capital Kabulon Wednesday, a local official said.
"The operation was conducted at around 02:00 a.m. local time today in Khan Abad district. As a result, six suspected militants including group commander namely Mullah Habibullah, were killed and two others detained," said Habibullah Khan,police chief of Khan Abad district.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan have yet to make comment.

Gun battle leaves 7 Taliban insurgents dead, 8 injured in W. Afghanistan
HERAT, Afghanistan, March 28 (Xinhua)-- Gun battle between Taliban militants and security forces in western Farah province 695 km west of capital Kabul left seven Taliban fighters dead and injured 8 others including five militants on Wednesday, police said.
"The clash erupted when a group of Taliban militants ambushed a private local security company that was escorting logistic convoy of NATO-led forces in Gilistan district during which seven oil tankers were also destroyed," a senior highway police officer namely Bismillah Khan told Xinhua.
Both the guards of the private security and police returned fire killing seven Taliban fighters on the spot and eight others including five militants and three guards of the local security company were injured, Khan said, adding all the victims are Afghans.
The oil tankers destroyed in the gun battle belonged to private Afghan companies supplying fuel to NATO-led forces in Afghanistan.
Taliban militants have yet to make comment.

Rights Group: Afghan Women Jailed for Escaping Abusive Husbands
VOA News March 28, 2012
A new report by Human Rights Watch says more than 400 women in Afghanistan are in jail for trying to escape abusive husbands and forced marriages.
The report says the women who seek to run away from such misery are frequently accused of adultery and imprisoned for so-called “moral crimes,” while their abusers walk free.
Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth says Afghan judicial authorities have sought to justify the arrests under a unique interpretation of Sharia law.
“Now, the Afghan supreme court has said that the crime of running away can be found in Sharia, but when we looked around the world no other government thinks that running away is in Sharia. Afghanistan stands alone in that interpretation.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 58 such women and girls for the report, including a wife who said her husband stabbed her in the head, chest, and arms with a screwdriver for inviting a male visitor into their home.
The report also cited the case of a woman was forced to marry a violent, drunken and drug-addicted man when she was only 12 years old. She and her two daughters are in prison for running away and going into hiding. The husband accused his wife of sleeping with a cousin who helped her escape.
Roth says Afghanistan's criminal justice system has made little progress in the way it treats women in the decade since the fall of the Taliban. However, Afghan officials note that the country's new constitution guarantees equal rights for women and that recent legislation outlaws violence against women.
Earlier this month, President Hamid Karzai announced a blanket pardon for women imprisoned for running away from their parents. The government says it is working on identifying and releasing these women.

Afghan Police, Courts 'Failing Women'
March 28, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghanistan's criminal justice system has made little progress in the way it treats women accused of so-called "moral crimes," despite public commitments by President Hamid Karzai to protect women's rights, according to a prominent rights organization.
In a report released on March 28, the New-York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that, 10 years after the fall of the Taliban, women are still being imprisoned for running away from domestic violence or for having sex outside of marriage.
It estimates some 400 Afghan women are currently in jail for so-called "moral crimes."
The report claims President Karzai has "often made compromises that have negatively impacted women's rights."
The report is based on interviews with 58 women who have been jailed, primarily for running away or adultery, as well as prosecutors, judges and nongovernmental organizations.
With reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters

War in Afghanistan: Mission impossible?
The threat of roadside bombs is constant, and the mortal danger posed by the local forces they are meant to be training is on the rise. Now a cache of explosive vests has been found hidden in the Ministry of Defence in Kabul
The Independent By Kim Sengupta Wednesday 28 March 2012
The discovery of a dozen suicide vests packed with explosives in Kabul was a matter of deep concern, a grim indication that the Taliban were intent on carrying out a massive attack. The added shockwaves came from the location: they were found in the country's Ministry of Defence, less than a mile from President Hamid Karzai's residence and the headquarters of Western forces.
Eighteen serving soldiers were arrested. They were planning, it is claimed, to blow up the building and everyone in it as well as buses full of government employees. Yesterday afternoon there were contradictory accounts of what had happened from different ministries, while commandos searched the premises after reports that two would-be bombers had escaped and were still hiding there.
The extraordinary events in the Afghan capital came 24 hours after two British servicemen were murdered by an Afghan soldier at Lashkar Gah, the British headquarters in Helmand, and an American soldier was shot dead by an Afghan policeman at a checkpoint in Paktika.So far this year, 16 Nato soldiers have been killed by their Afghan allies, second only to fatalities caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the insurgents' weapon of choice.
According to Pentagon figures released last month, an estimated 80 Western service members have been killed by Afghans in uniform since 2007, with 75 per cent of the attacks in the past two years. The fear of an enemy within is particularly relevant at this time in the mission, with the West's exit strategy predicated on training Afghan forces to take over security and, after Nato ends is combat status, a small number carrying on acting as advisers.
With the West's rush for the exit from the war depending on building up the size of Afghan security forces, some Afghan officials say that corners were being cut when it came to security checks. "The foreigners just want the numbers keep going up so that they can say they have finished their job and it is time to go," said one official. "In such situations it is not surprising that some bad people are slipping through."
General John Allen, the American head of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (Isaf ) insisted that these types of attacks are to be expected in this type of war. "We experienced these in Iraq. We experienced them in Vietnam. On any occasion where you're dealing with an insurgency and where you're also growing an indigenous force... the enemy's going to do all that they can to disrupt both the counterinsurgency operations and the developing nation's security forces."
Gen Allen acknowledged, however, that precautionary measures have had to be taken. "We have taken steps necessary on our side to protect ourselves with respect to, in fact, sleeping arrangements, internal defences associated with those small bases in which we operate, the posture of our forces, to have someone always overwatching our forces. On the Afghan side, they are doing the same thing. They're helping the troops to understand how to recognise radicalisation or the emergence of extremism in individuals who may in fact be suspect."
One force which was seen as keeping the Islamists at bay – especially from Kabul and other major cities – and out of the armed forces, was the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security. However, its head, Amrullah Saleh, resigned two years ago in protest at what he claimed was President Karzai surrounding himself with Islamists. His deputy, Abdullah Laghmani, had been assassinated by a Taliban suicide bomber a few months previously. With the two men gone, western officials began to notice a deterioration in the security situation.
Taliban attacks in Kabul have increased since. But although the preparations for the bombing inside the Defence Ministry were obviously part of an organised operation, there is little hard evidence of systematic large-scale infiltration.
Afghan observers hold that most of the recent attacks by Afghan security forces on their western colleagues have been sparked by anger at the burning of Korans by US officials at Bagram air base and the massacre of 17 villagers by US sergeant Robert Bales.
Interventions by President Karzai, such as describing the US and British troops as "devils" and the Koran burning – a crass mistake but not something done out of malice – as "an act which can never be forgiven" have also been inflammatory in the febrile atmosphere.
Following the killing of five soldiers from the Grenadier Guards Battle Group in Nad-e-Ali by an Afghan they were training, called Asadullah, stricter vetting procedures were brought in including more thorough background checks and biometric testing. However, in August 2010 three more soldiers, from the Royal Gurkha Rifles, were killed in Nahr-e-Seraj by an Afghan soldier, Talib Hussein.
Haji Wassim Nasruddin, who once fought alongside the insurgents in Pashmul, near Kandahar, but gave up arms under a reconciliation programme, and now lives in Kandahar City, said: "We never organised our young men to join the police and army.
"We hated the police in particular, because they were corrupt. But because they were corrupt, they sometimes helped us and because they were afraid, they sometimes helped us. And, of course, if any of them attacked foreigners ,we would give them shelter and call them true Muslims."
Wahid Muzhda, a former Taliban foreign ministry official and now an analyst of the insurgency, agreed. "All these killings are not linked to the Taliban. The recent Koran burnings and the shooting of children are affecting the minds of the Afghan soldiers. They think: if the foreigners are coming here to defend Afghanistan, why are they killing children?
"But it is effective, trust is being undermined between the international forces and the Afghans. How can foreign soldiers mentor if they are worried about the Afghans they are teaching? It is not possible."
Coroner praises bravery of bomb officer
A coroner commended the bravery of a bomb-disposal officer yesterday while ruling that she had been unlawfully killed during service in Afghanistan.
Captain Lisa Jade Head, of 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Regiment, the Royal Logistic Corps, lost her limbs in a blast in Helmand province on 18 April 2011. The 29-year-old, from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, died the next day.
Colonel Gareth Collett, an army bomb-disposal expert, also praised the professionalism of Capt Head yesterday.

Across Borders And Battle Lines, Four Mothers Affected By War
March 27, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Charles Dameron, Haseeba Shaheed
There isn’t too much that binds together Ama Gullah, a 45-year-old grandmother from the city of Kandahar, and Dr. Becky Whetstone, a marriage counselor and therapist in Little Rock, Arkansas.
But they are two of the tens of thousands of mothers strewn across four continents whose sons and daughters have become casualties of the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- a war that, according to some estimates, has claimed the lives of some 50,000 combatants, along with thousands of civilians.
The emotional trauma of the death of a child does not vary much across battle lines.
In recent interviews with four mothers of the dead from different sides of the war, RFE/RL found little talk of politics or ideology.
These women’s thoughts linger on difficult, unanswered questions, and on the new burdens of family: taking care of widowed daughters-in-law and raising newly fatherless grandchildren. Most of them just want the conflict to stop.
'I Fear For The Future Of The Children'
In the Loy Wilaye neighborhood of Kandahar, Ama Gullah, 45, frets over the fate of her grandchildren.
"I’m alive now, but if I’m not alive tomorrow, what will happen to them?" she asks.
Ama Gullah has good reason to worry.
She's the head of a household that was left without any breadwinners upon the death of her son Baqi, an Afghan National Army soldier killed by Taliban insurgents two years ago during a Ramadan firefight in Qalat, the capital of Afghanistan’s southern Zabul Province.
Her son left behind a widow and three children, a bevy of new mouths for Ama Gullah to feed without her son’s salary of around $170 per month.
For Ama Gullah, the immediate tragedy of her son’s death was quickly eclipsed by the strain of worry that pervades her day-to-day life.
"It is really painful, terrible," she says. "It means a lot of pressure. My son’s wife and three children live with me now, and I must support them. I fear for the future of the children.”
Ama Gullah’s grandchildren are among the lucky ones: many of Afghanistan's approximately two million widows are rejected by their husbands' families, leaving these women and their children with precious few means of support.
Still, Ama Gullah and her daughter-in-law struggle to make ends meet.
The Afghan government cannot afford to offer pension payments or death benefits to the survivors of fallen soldiers, leaving Ama Gullah and her family to rely instead on charity from relatives and Ama Gullah's scant earnings from occasional part-time work.
'He Was An Innocent, And He Was Killed'
Over the Hindu Kush Mountains, in neighboring Pakistan, the surviving wife and five children of a murdered son fill a mother with the same worries.
But for Bibi Khan, the bitter legacy of her son’s death is only amplified by the belief that his killing could have been prevented.
"He was an innocent, and he was killed," she says.
Her son, Bachar Khan, was a member of Pakistan’s famed Frontier Corps, a Pashtun paramilitary force organized by British colonial officials in 1907 to patrol Pakistan’s volatile border with Afghanistan.
In recent years, the Frontier Corps has been a key component of the Pakistani government’s on-again, off-again fight against Taliban fighters streaming back and forth across the border.
In January, Khan and several other Frontier Corps soldiers were kidnapped and executed by Taliban insurgents in Pakistan who took public responsibility for the killings.
Bibi Khan talks of the agony that seized her family after her son’s disappearance.
"We couldn’t reach him," she says. "Everything was in God’s hands. At first, we had no idea he had been killed, and we were notified after the fact.”
She’s angry over what she sees as the Pakistani government's failure to ensure her son’s safety and to take appropriate steps to save his life after the kidnapping.
"The government didn’t do anything!" she says. "Why didn’t they strike at [the kidnappers]? My son’s weapons were taken from him. The kidnappers took their weapons and bound their hands and feet.
"Without weapons, what could they do? They couldn’t do anything. I wish my son could have killed five of them. They are infidels.”
'I Don’t Want Other Mothers' Hearts Broken'
Elsewhere in Pakistan, the mother of a slain Pakistani Taliban fighter, Saifullah, recounts the agony of her own son’s demise.
"My son was a good person, proselytizing, doing good things," she says. "He was not a criminal. If he were a criminal, we would think of him as a criminal."
In early 2011, Saifullah was arrested by Pakistani police as a suspected Taliban insurgent.
A religious young man by all accounts, Saifullah had left his home in northwest Pakistan for months, telling his mother that he was doing missionary work in Kashmir.
After his arrest, Saifullah’s mother -- who has asked RFE/RL not to use her name -- says much of the village came to her home to assure her that her son would soon be released.
But there was no reunion between mother and son.
Eight months later, she received a phone call from an officer at the local police station with an update on Saifullah’s condition.
Saifullah had died while in police custody. The authorities informed her that her son’s corpse, which was heavily bruised and showed evidence of sustained beating, was laid out and ready to be picked up in a street adjacent to the station.
"I was shouting and running through the streets and then my daughter came," she says. "I threw off my shawl. I don’t know what happened. His wife and I were out of our minds. We were blind."
Remembering Saifullah as a handsome young man, his mother describes with anguish the grisly condition in which his body was returned.
"He was my healthy and handsome son," she says. "They took him away as a healthy man. But he was brought back looking like a skewer.”
As with his counterparts in the Afghan National Army and Pakistan's Frontier Corps, Saifullah left behind a wife and five children, now living with Saifullah's family.
Indeed, from beyond the grave, he bequeathed one final legacy: on the same night that Saifullah’s mother learned of her son's death, Saifullah’s wife gave birth to their last child.
Now Saifullah's mother just wants an end to the conflict that ended her son’s life.
"I wish to God that there would be peace everywhere," she says. "My heart is broken. I don't want other mothers' hearts broken. I don’t want them to be sad. I want every Muslim to be in good health, and I want everything to be stable like it was several years ago.”
'My Son Had To Learn This On His Own'
Half a world away, Becky Whetstone remembers waiting in an airport last fall for a flight to Little Rock, Arkansas, when her phone rang. It was her daughter. "There are two Marines at the front door," she said.
"I just dropped my suitcases and fell against the wall," she says. "My knees buckled. I knew it was terrible news."
Whetstone’s son, U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Benjamin Whetstone Schmidt, died on October 6, 2011.
He had arrived in Afghanistan on a second tour of duty just 30 days before. Schmidt was a member of a Marine sniper unit operating in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province when he was killed during combat operations near the village of Lwar Julji.
"I had talked to Benjamin’s father on the phone and I just begged him to tell me what had happened," she says. "He told me that my son had been killed that day while in combat and that he was shot in the head and killed instantly."
What the Marine Corps didn't tell Whetstone or the rest of Schmidt’s family at the time was what Schmidt’s brothers-in-arms already knew: Schmidt had been shot in the head not by Taliban insurgents but by fellow U.S. Marines, the tragic victim of a friendly-fire accident.
Although the military later apologized to the family for the incident, the initial information about Schmidt's death came from Michael Phillips, a reporter for the "Wall Street Journal" who was with Schmidt’s Marine battalion when he was killed.
Phillips contacted Whetstone two and a half weeks after the incident to ask how she felt about her son's death by friendly fire.
Whetstone was deeply upset about the Marine Corps' failure to promptly tell her family what it knew about her son’s death.
"It infuriated me..." she says. "The only information I had at all about my son's death came from Michael Phillips’ article."
She says that her son’s death came after a long process of reexamination and reflection on the purpose and utility of war.
"After personally experiencing it, he concluded that dying and being maimed in that way was not worth it," she said. "He did not believe in the cause of the Afghanistan war by the time he was killed, or that war was ever the answer."
The resolution Whetstone has drawn from her son's death is a commitment to the advancement of peace.
"I personally have never understood why war is necessary," she says. "Now my son had to learn this on his own, through his own experience.
"To me, the only thing that matters now is to end this type of madness, and find other ways to resolve issues. I really believe that peace is the only way.”
Written by Charles Dameron based on reporting by Haseeba Shaheed of RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal

Is Afghanistan Going to Hurt President Obama in 2012?
He doubled down on a war that is wildly unpopular with Americans. On the other hand, Bin Laden is dead and Mitt Romney is waffling.
The Atlantic By Conor Friedersdorf Mar 27 2012
In one of the major foreign policy speeches that Barack Obama gave in 2008, he declared that "the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was. That's why ... my new strategy will be taking the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan." In the paragraphs that followed he set forth several goals: bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, routing the Taliban, killing al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and building a secure, stable Afghan democracy.
The United States achieved some of those goals and failed miserably at others. And the American people have rendered this judgment: the war wasn't worth it, we aren't going to win, and we ought to bring the troops home. That's the basic takeaway from the latest New York Times poll. Sixty-eight percent of Americans think the war is going somewhat or very badly, 69 percent say the U.S. should not be involved in the war, and 59 percent say that the endeavor hasn't been a success. And a staggering 77 percent say that we should withdraw our troops no later than 2014.
You'd think that voters would punish an incumbent who doubled down on an unpopular war that a majority now regards as a harmful mistake. But certain factors may mitigate any anti-Obama backlash: He didn't start the war; at the time, most Americans agreed with his renewed focus on it; he can plausibly argue that our beefed up presence helped to get Osama bin Laden; and most importantly, Mitt Romney doesn't inspire any confidence that he'd do better. As NPR reported:
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.
You'd also think the fact that Americans now regard the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan as mistaken endeavors would temper the citizenry's desire for another foreign war. Yet a majority says it would support a strike against Iranian nuclear facilities given evidence they're building a bomb. It is perhaps fair to say that the citizenry has been getting the foreign policy it deserves for awhile. But the dead innocents and the people who've done the fighting on our behalf deserved better.

We Can't Drone Our Way to Victory in Afghanistan
It’s time for the United States to think of new ways to combat terrorism in Southwest Asia.
Foreign Policy BY MICAH ZENKO MARCH 27, 2012
Marc Thiessen wrote a column in the Washington Post last week warning of "five disasters" waiting to happen if the Obama administration accelerates the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Topping his list of terribles: "The drone war against al-Qaeda in Pakistan would likely cease." Thiessen notes correctly that given the distances to Pakistan's tribal areas from naval platforms in the Arabian Sea or the Kabul airport, "If we want to continue the drone war against al-Qaeda, we must have a U.S. military presence in the Pashtun heartland."
Thiessen raises an obvious but often overlooked issue when considering what the U.S. military's role will be in Afghanistan beyond 2014: The sovereign Afghan government holds the decisive veto power -- and any U.S. officials who believe that President Hamid Karzai or his successor will give the United States carte blanche to use Afghanistan as a platform for CIA drone strikes or Special Forces raids into Pakistan will be sorely disappointed.
Across the globe, foreign governments have adopted a range of positions when faced with a request to host U.S. military forces. Some host nations openly embrace U.S. military forces -- and the accompanying U.S. overt and covert aid -- and allow military aircraft to use their territory with few limits. For example, a leaked State Department cable described a meeting that took place on Aug. 19, 2009, where Seychelles President James Michel requested -- twice -- that the inaugural launch of U.S. drones be documented with a photo-op or celebration.
The leader of this small archipelago also told then U.S. Africa Command chief Gen. William Ward, "I am happy to see this resurgence of American military activity in the Seychelles" and welcomed the introduction of drones "as a comfort." Although U.S. drones operating out of the Seychelles were not initially intended to conduct strike missions, in another cable Michel appeared open to such a request. We know the Seychelles has continued to support U.S. drone operations, because a Predator skidded off a runway and into the Indian Ocean in December.
Other host nations, however, have quickly withdrawn such permission if it becomes publicly known. In January 2007, U.S. Air Force Special Operations AC-130 gunships conducted at least two attacks against suspected Islamic militants in Somalia by flying out of an Ethiopian military base. After the New York Times revealed the use of the AC-130s the following month, the Ethiopian government quickly terminated the U.S. military presence there for the time being.
Regaining a host nation's permission to base U.S. military assets on its territory after such public revelations can take years of painstaking diplomacy. In October 2011, it emerged that the U.S. military had reestablished its presence in Ethiopia: American Reaper drones were flying out of a civilian airfield in the city of Arba Minch for surveillance missions over Somalia. According to a former U.S. official, the negotiations between Washington and Addis Ababa over deploying those drones lasted four years, and were only completed with the repeated intervention of high-level officials. An operational concern raised by the Ethiopian government was to limit the collection capabilities of the drones while they flew from over the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, where the government has conducted an intermittent counterinsurgency campaign against the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front.
Ethiopia isn't alone in placing constraints on the rules of engagement (ROE) for U.S. aircraft. For example, from April 1991 until March 2003, the United States led the enforcement of the northern no-fly zone (NFZ) over Iraq from the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey. The ROE the Turks imposed on U.S., British, and French planes included: what aircraft could fly and what munitions they could carry, how many times they could fly per week, how long the flights could last (never at night), and how quickly any aircraft targeted by Iraq's air-defense radars or missiles could respond against a preapproved list of targets. To ensure that the patrolling aircraft would not violate Turkey's ROE, a Turkish military official was always on board a U.S. Air Force AWACS monitoring the airspace.
Marc Grossman, the former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey (and current U.S. special representative for Afghanistan), told me in an interview that brokering the ROE between U.S. commanders and Ankara "was a constant and main focus of our attention," which took up "hours, and hours, and hours, and hours." Grossman said that the goal of the restrictions was ultimately to "remind us that we should not allow an independent Kurdish state in Northern Iraq," which Ankara feared could damage its own war with Kurdish insurgents in eastern Turkey.
Finally, some governments, after shedding U.S. military occupation, decide they do not want any substantive foreign military presence on their soil. In Iraq, Obama administration officials worked furiously to negotiate a new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that would have allowed a small number of U.S. troops and critical enablers -- helicopter and fixed-wing airlift, and manned and unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms -- to remain in the country to conduct special operations raids against Iranian-backed Shia militias and Sunni extremists in Iraq and beyond. Eventually, the government of Iraq gave a firm "no." Today, only 500 U.S. soldiers are in the country to oversee the sale of U.S. military equipment, contractor-led training of Iraqi security forces, and the selection of Iraqi officers for U.S. military schools.
You don't have to be Henry Kissinger to grasp that the future U.S. relationship with Afghanistan will more closely resemble its current ties to Iraq than with the Seychelles. The United States has already reportedly agreed to make concessions to Karzai over the Special Forces night raids conducted against suspected Taliban leaders -- including subjecting such operations to prior review by Afghan judges. That's a major concession: U.S. commanders have significant operational security concerns about a warrant-based approach to the night raids. In June 2008, for example, the CIA gave advance notice to the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) of a planned drone strike against members of the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, and then intercepted calls revealing that the targets were tipped off. Seeking pre-approval from Afghan judges for night raids increases the likelihood that Afghan officials could tip off targeted Taliban suspects.
But night raids enrage Afghans, and Karzai faces political pressure to significantly reduce their occurrence and frequency. At some point, as U.S. troops continue their withdrawal from Afghanistan, Karzai will broaden his demands beyond the limitation of night raids and insist on further constraints on the ROE for any residual U.S. military or CIA assets in Afghanistan.
On March 20, the commander of international forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, told the House Armed Services Committee, "The Afghan government is on a path toward sovereignty, and we should encourage that sovereignty." Part of that journey toward sovereignty is to take into account the constituencies that government will need to court if it is to survive. U.S. officials and the Karzai administration continue to tout their efforts to integrate the Taliban-whose principal demand is the withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Afghanistan-into the government. It is a fool's errand to pursue that goal and then expect that regime to endorse the stationing of Navy SEALs and CIA officers in the Pashtun heartland.
That's a reality some American policymakers have had difficulty grasping. On March 22, Sen. Lindsey Graham asked General Allen: "Do you agree with me that you will never allow that [night raids] program to be terminated?" General Allen responded: "I will. Yes, sir."
It's not only Afghanistan where the U.S. military has increasingly become an unwelcome guest. Last week, Pakistan's Parliamentary Committee on National Security completed its guidelines on revised terms of engagement between the United States and Pakistan. It calls for the United States to cease drone attacks within Pakistan and forsake any "boots on the ground" in the country. While the Pakistani military has the final say over U.S. military and intelligence capabilities on Pakistani soil, the overwhelmingly negative public opinion toward U.S. military intervention could compel it to seek a further reduction in the scope and intensity of U.S. drone strikes. Indeed, U.S. officials reportedly offered to curtail "signature" drone strikes against Taliban suspects in Pakistan this year, but "the offers were rejected flatly" by Pakistan's ISI chief, according to the Associated Press. Islamabad will also eagerly press Karzai to reject any requests to allow Afghanistan to play host to a significant U.S. military presence.
For all these reasons, U.S. combat capabilities will inevitably wane in Afghanistan beyond 2014. It's time for U.S. officials to stop trying to swim against the tide of the public opinion of sovereign governments in Southwest Asia, and start developing a strategy for combating terrorism that does not overwhelmingly rely on unending Special Forces night raids and CIA drone strikes.

Analysis: Why the aid drawdown in Afghanistan could be a good thing
PASHTUN KOT, 26 March 2012 (IRIN) - One hillside in Pashtun Kot District in the northern Afghan province of Faryab stands out. Dotted with graves, it is the final resting place for the victims of underdevelopment: Villagers travel from far-off mountains by donkey to bury their dead here - people whose demise was hastened by chronic hunger, undernutrition and lack of access to health care.
The most recent addition, according to a village elder and member of the district `shura’ council, Mullah Najibullah, was a 30-year-old mother of two, victim of a chronic cough and probably an illness she never knew she had.
Villagers here face harsh winters without warm clothes or heaters. They have to walk to the city (Maimana, capital of Faryab Province) to collect water. Hit by drought over the last few years, they sometimes eat only one meal a day. Meat is out of reach for many of these farming communities. Mobile phone coverage is patchy.
While donors have poured US$57 billion into Afghanistan since 2001, much of it into the volatile southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand as part of the international forces’ “hearts and minds” strategy in their fight against insurgents, residents of northern Afghanistan complain they have not benefited fairly from development aid.
“In the south, there is fighting; many people have been killed; and millions of dollars go there,” Najibullah told IRIN at the edge of the graveyard. “But we keep calm and support our government, so no development projects come here. People are unhappy about this.”
The gradual drawdown of US-NATO troops, and the planned handover of full security responsibilities to Afghan forces in 2014, has had the aid community worried about a corresponding drop in aid funds. But many aid workers also see the transition as an opportunity to reset aid delivery in Afghanistan, which for too long, they say, has been channelled through the NATO-led Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and driven by short-term political and military objectives.
“A lot of countries have focused efforts in areas where their troops have been operating, or where it has been easier to operate, instead of looking at it from a needs-based approach,” said Aidan O’Leary, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Afghanistan. “Going forward… the people who are most vulnerable have to be at the forefront of the agenda.”
Uneven aid
The World Bank predicts the reduction in aid flows will have little impact on poverty levels in Afghanistan, because much of the aid was never targeting the poorest to begin with.
In 2008-09, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), for example, spent half of its development funding in Kandahar Province, where Canadian troops were stationed for five years. It managed its programmes and projects through its embassy in Kabul or within its PRT in Kandahar, Amy Mills, a spokesperson at the embassy, told IRIN.
CIDA says Kandahar is one of the poorest places in Afghanistan, but according to the World Bank, less than 23 percent of the population of Kandahar lives below the official poverty line, compared to 60 and 61 percent in the northern provinces of Balkh and Badakshan respectively. The poorest areas are the eastern provinces of Laghman (67 percent), Paktika (75 percent) and Logar (75 percent), according to the Bank.
Mills acknowledged that part of the reason for the aid focus on Kandahar was that it was “a key strategic province in Afghan and international efforts to stabilize the country.”
Aid has been so disproportionately spent on the volatile provinces, said one member of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), that a northern provincial governor asked him: “Shall we create instability to bring aid here?”
Some donors dispute this critique. The UK Department for International Development (DFID), for example, says about half of its nationwide funding is channelled through the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, managed by the World Bank.
But you would not know it from life in the north.
In these quieter areas, every few years, drought forces villagers to leave their farms for informal settlements outside urban centres where they are often dependent on humanitarian aid. Their migration could well be avoided with the development of water management systems in their communities.
This past season marks the eighth in the past 11 years that northern Afghanistan has had poor rains.
At a cattle market in Maimana, villagers sold their cows earlier than usual and at lower prices, out of desperation.
“We don’t have enough water, food, animal feed,” Abdul Hamid Shaqul, told IRIN, as he put his only two cows up for sale in January. “I have no choice but to sell.”
“Many people died of hunger this year,” he added. “If they are alive, they are working as beggars on the street.”
Faryab Governor Abdul Haq Shafaq denied such deaths but told IRIN about one-third of the provincial population was vulnerable, mostly because they could not afford to feed their families.
“PRTs have lots of money, but are they doing what’s really needed?” an aid official who preferred anonymity asked. “If you go out, can you see any impact of this money? The answer is no.”
A silver lining?
Still, government officials are quick to point to progress in the north. Shafaq, for example, listed the dozens of school buildings constructed, the tens of thousands of families that now have electricity, the hundreds of kilometres of roads that have been built or reconstructed, and the many contracts signed for investment projects in his province alone.
In the capital of neighbouring Balkh Province, Mazar-i-Sharif, you cannot drive down the main road more than a few metres before an internationally-funded project hits you in the face: the park built by the Turks; a new engineering faculty funded by Pakistan; the library built by Iran.
The investments here have been small compared to the needs, but the good news, aid workers say, is that in its neglect, the north was spared the bad aid policies which drove the large-scale development effort in the south.
“It’s the big money that ruined the country,” an aid worker from the north said. “In the north, there has never been big money… There was no war. So development aid was driven by needs.”
Many of the PRTs working in the north made a distinction between the military and aid. The Norwegian government, for example, does not fund any humanitarian or development projects through the Norwegian PRT, and has capped at 20 percent the amount of its aid that can be directed towards Faryab Province, where its PRT operates.
Misguided approach in the south?
Aid workers and researchers paint a very different picture in the south, where roles are mixed systematically, as one diplomat put it. “One day you’re shooting and the other day, you’re putting band-aids on.”
So-called quick-impact projects implemented by the military have run contrary to long-term development strategies; and because so much money needed to be spent so fast, consultations with remote villagers to determine needs were often forgotten or left aside.
“I’m afraid Afghanistan is a perfect example of how messy the international community can be when it comes to coordinated efforts, getting its priorities right, and really looking in one direction,” said Laurent Saillard, head of the European Commission’s humanitarian aid arm (ECHO) in Afghanistan. “[Some] development actors also have been highly influenced by political decisions… Big players here are trying to impose their views… You have all sorts of actors delivering humanitarian assistance with no competence, no understanding, no concern about the possible repercussions on the security of the very population they were assisting.
“A lot of aid from the US government, the British government, the Canadians has been spent where their troops were,” Saillaird continued. “It was supporting the boys basically… At the end of the day, it did not achieve stability. It did not come to address the basic needs of the population.”
When approached by IRIN, all three donors pointed to a long list of achievements: new police stations built, irrigation channels repaired, water sources improved, foreign direct investment generated, more taxes collected, more children vaccinated, a much larger percent of the population with access to health care within a two-hour walk.
A spokesperson with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) told IRIN the US government has helped Afghanistan achieve “real progress” in the last decade, including a jump in life expectancy from about 42 to 62 years and in school enrolment from 900,000 boys and no girls to more than eight million children, more than a third of them girls. CIDA pointed to a more secure and economically stronger Kandahar Province.
Still, many observers say the progress has been narrow and unsustainable. According to the International Crisis Group, donors must change their approach.
“The impact of international assistance will remain limited unless donors, particularly the largest, the US, stop subordinating programming to counter-insurgency objectives, devise better mechanisms to monitor implementation, adequately address corruption and wastage of aid funds, and ensure that recipient communities identify needs and shape assistance policies,” ICG wrote in an August 2011 report.
Another report, published in January 2012 by the Feinstein International Center, a research and advocacy body based at Tufts University in Massachusetts, found that many Afghans viewed aid projects negatively.
They saw an injustice in the perception that “a few corrupt officials and powerbrokers were benefiting disproportionally from international assistance at the expense of the majority of Afghans,” the report said.
Aid, it argued, is actually destabilizing the country by fuelling massive corruption that delegitimizes the government and generates competitions and conflict over aid resources, often along factional, tribal or ethnic lines.
Even uneducated villagers in the north were quick to tell IRIN that when projects are implemented in insecure areas, money is diverted to conflict.
A new way forward
Aid workers hope that less aid money post-drawdown will be better focused and less rushed, giving organizations time to talk through their projects with village elders and engage the communities they work in, which would help manage corruption and perhaps ease an increasingly hostile view of foreigners in Afghanistan.
Michael Keating, deputy special representative of the UN Secretary-General and humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, says the drawdown in aid will entail serious risks for Afghanistan, but might just have some positive effects, by forcing the aid and development community to look more closely at sustainability and impose a higher degree of discipline.
He suggested those national and international NGOs that have been working with communities in Afghanistan for decades - and “haven’t been listened to enough” - will finally have more of a voice.
But given the risk that Afghanistan might get forgotten once more, Keating told IRIN: “We have a responsibility to try to maintain [funding] levels, especially for the chronically poor.”
Many of those donors whose funds were not tied to the military (like ECHO) intend to maintain their levels of funding. The UK’s DFID says it has no plans to cut aid to Afghanistan - its current operation plan runs until 2015. But others, like CIDA and USAID, are expected to cut their aid spending in Afghanistan substantially. Both donors told IRIN post-2014 funding decisions had not yet been made, but one well-placed source put the cuts at two-thirds and half, respectively.
For many, this continues to be cause for concern.
“If the transition takes place, and [international] NGOs withdraw, there will be again a disaster because government doesn’t have the capacity,” Ahmad Shakeb, education project coordinator with the Norwegian Refugee Council in the eastern city of Jalalabad, told IRIN. Civil war is another very real possibility.
The World Bank projects a financing gap of 25 percent of Afghanistan’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2021-22, with security-related costs, as well as operations and management, eating up nearly 18 percent of GDP. Security sector assistance is a particular concern for the bank, and will continue to require outside funding.
“If these levels of foreign assistance for security and civilian expenditures are not forthcoming, then the [government of Afghanistan] will need to make extremely difficult and possibly destabilizing tradeoffs - either grossly underfunding or significantly shrinking Afghan security forces, or crowding out essential civilian spending, or both.”
Still, it insisted the transition should be viewed as “an opportunity to enhance the coherence and effectiveness of international assistance”. Otherwise, it said, "it will be difficult for the Government to achieve more sustained development objectives over a longer time horizon.”
The ICG echoed the urgency of a new, long-term development and humanitarian partnership with Afghanistan “that goes beyond a narrow arrangement with the Karzai administration”.
O’Leary, head of OCHA in Afghanistan, said the transition did offer an opportunity for change, but insisted: “People need to stop thinking about 2014. They need to start thinking about 2012. A lot of the key decisions are going to be made this year.”
In May, at a conference in Switzerland, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Afghan government hope the international community will endorse a new strategy for finding sustainable solutions for Afghan refugees. G8 and NATO summits in Chicago in May will look at the security transition; and a conference in Tokyo in July will look at how economic assistance should be focused in the years ahead.
As O’Leary put it, “the agenda is being set now.”

UK resists pressure to speed up exit from Afghanistan
1,500 troops likely to leave by September next year, with rapidly accelerated withdrawal starting in 2014
Guardian.co.uk By Nick Hopkins Tuesday 27 March 2012
The UK is preparing to pull 1,500 troops out of Afghanistan next year before rapidly accelerating its withdrawal at the beginning of 2014.
Ministers are expected to endorse plans that stick closely to advice from British commanders in Helmand, and from Nato headquarters in Kabul, when they come before the National Security Council (NSC). The strategy would leave the bulk of UK forces in place for most of next year, though there is also an option for a "fast-track" pullout by spring 2014.
Pressure to speed up the withdrawal has intensified because of recent atrocities against Afghan civilians, which provoked protests across the country, and left troops in Nato's International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) vulnerable to retribution.
A Royal Marine and a soldier from the Adjutant's General Corps were killed on Monday by a member of the Afghan security forces, raising further questions about the viability of the Nato mission.
But according to sources in Whitehall, ministers have been persuaded – so far – that a greater folly would be to leave Afghanistan before local forces are ready to lead the fight against the Taliban.
Only 500 British troops will leave Afghanistan this year, leaving 9,000 still in Helmand at the start of next year.
Under current plans, the force will be reduced in size again in September 2013, bringing the total down to 7,500. The military intends to speed up the withdrawal markedly after that, with planners drawing up two options.
The first – and preferred – scenario involves withdrawing another 6,000 troops before September 2014, leaving a rump of 1,500 in Afghanistan at the time of the formal handover to Afghan security forces at the end of that year. Most of them would leave the country in early 2015.
A more radical option involves withdrawing all but 1,500 troops from Afghanistan by April 2014. In practice, this would mean the British brigade withdrawing from Afghanistan in the spring being replaced by a much smaller force.
"The option we take depends on the US," said a Whitehall source. "If the Americans increase the size and speed of their withdrawal then we may have to consider a much quicker exit in early 2014."
During David Cameron's recent visit to the White House, both he and Barack Obama spoke about transferring security responsibility to the Afghans in 2013.
Officials say this was misinterpreted as a signal that more troops would return early, but that is not what the military wants.
"Even if more troops came home next year, we'd have to support the Afghans in different ways with more military advisers," said one.
"If you ask Afghans to take the lead before they are ready, then you still need to support them, so the overall numbers of British personnel in the country might not change..
"Transferring the lead on security to the Afghans early gives something to the Afghans, the French, and the American audiences, but it won't change much."
Obama is due to speak at the Chicago summit on Afghanistan in May, six months before he seeks re-election.
"We expect Obama to keep something up his sleeve in May," said a Nato commander.
"A lot will turn on what he says then, and what happens in November. But so far the British government is not saying anything to us to suggest they will not see this through."
The Ministry of Defence said no decision would be taken until the NSC reviewed and rubber-stamped the strategy.
"No decision has yet been taken about the drawdown of UK forces," said an MoD spokesman. "As the prime minister has already stated, ours will be a steady and measured drawdown leading up to 2014.
"Both he and President Obama confirmed in Washington recently that our transition plan is on track, realistic and achievable."
Last week Cameron told the Commons the UK would "not be in a combat role in Afghanistan after 2014, nor will we have anything like the number of troops that we have now".
He added: "What I discussed with President Obama in America is making sure that in 2013, if there are opportunities to change the nature of the mission and be more in support rather than a direct combat role, then that's something that I think everyone will want to see."
Giving evidence to MPs on Monday, the new national security adviser, Sir Kim Darroch, said that "at some point in the middle of 2013 all the different provinces of Afghanistan will transition to Afghan lead".
A poll in Tuesday's New York Times reflects how support for the US effort in Afghanistan is dropping sharply. US soldiers have been responsible for burning the Qur'an, and been filmed urinating on dead Afghans in recent weeks. A US staff sergeant, Robert Bales, shot 17 Afghan civilians earlier this month.
The poll of 1,000 showed 69% thought that the United States should not be at war in Afghanistan, up 16 points from February.

Standard Chartered Agrees To Transfer Banking Operations In Afghanistan
March 28, 2012 Dow Jones Newswires
LONDON – Standard Chartered PLC (STAN.LN), an international banking group, said Wednesday it has agreed to transfer its banking operations in Afghanistan to a local bank, Afghanistan International Bank.
MAIN FACTS:
-The agreement is subject to certain regulatory approvals and is expected to be completed by the end of 2012.
-As part of the arrangement, Standard Chartered will maintain a correspondent banking relationship with Afghanistan International Bank which will enable it to continue to serve its clients doing business in Afghanistan both locally and from offshore, while the local operations will transition to Afghanistan International Bank.
-As of Dec. 31, 2011, Standard Chartered's business in Afghanistan consisted of one branch, nine ATMs and gross assets of $229 million.

4,000 days of war in Afghanistan?
The Washington Post By Rachel Maddow March 27 , 2012
Rachel Maddow is the host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” and author of “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.”
In this 11th year of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history, it is starting to feel as if we may be near the constraining edge of an American war’s natural life span. The massive and lethal U.S. military is theoretically capable of sustaining itself in war almost indefinitely, as long as it is given the resources and the orders to do so. But as we close in on the 4,000-day mark ahead of our own fall elections, the inertia of the war in Afghanistan seems to be giving way to concerns about the costs of sustaining it and the need to find the best way to end it. Why now?
Our wars’ life expectancy has been bolstered over the past generation or so by a series of changes that eased the small-d democratic tensions that an American war abroad could cause here at home. The financial cost of war was for years taken off the books and treated as a fiscal asterisk, an “emergency supplemental” to the real and debated budget. The ranks of the deployed were bolstered with employees of private firms, obfuscating the cost associated with their services, the lines of accountability for their actions, and their number and individual humanity when they became casualties. For years, even images of U.S. military casualties were shielded from public view.
Three months before 9/11, Americans were given a multitrillion-dollar tax cut. After the attacks and our invasion of Afghanistan, not only were the cuts not rescinded but we gave ourselves another giant round of tax cuts less than two years later, just weeks after we’d shipped troops off to a simultaneous war in Iraq. While military families have endured multiple year-long combat deployments over the past decade, we civilians have endured something approaching the opposite of sacrifice on their behalf.
In politics, the Congress that got up on its hind legs after Vietnam, and insisted on seizing its constitutional prerogative to decide when the country went to war, dropped down to all fours and mostly ceded that authority back to the presidency. The decade-old congressional authorization to wage war in Afghanistan directs the military to go after those who attacked us on Sept. 11. Worthy as the current Afghan mission may be, the multibillion-dollar, multiyear effort to train Afghan security forces is at most an effort to protect us from a future 9/11, not to avenge the last one.
“The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates,” wrote James Madison, “that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.” Yes, it is unwieldy for a committee of 535 to make America’s decisions about warfare, but constitutionally that was supposed to be a feature, not a bug. A president given sole authority to decide on war may take the greatest care to debate and weigh his or her options, but that debate is executive, and private. A congressional debate occurs by necessity out loud and is conducted with an eye toward the feelings of the rest of us, one 600,000-population congressional district at a time.
The frictionlessness and invisibility of modern warfare for the American public represents a drift off the course set for us by the Constitution. It has made wars easier to start but, perhaps more important for us now, has also made them harder to stop. It has almost normalized the condition of America being at war. But even an inured public has a limit, and maybe 4,000 days is it.
At this time in the 2004 election cycle, public opinion on the Iraq war tightly matched party affiliation: Broadly, Democrats were against, Republicans were for. Today, public opinion on Afghanistan is much less rigidly partisan. Sen. John McCain and the George W. Bush-era hawks are still banging the drum (often in this space), but not all Republicans in Congress and even on the presidential hustings are humming along.
It is a caricature of war to say it starts when it’s declared and ends when one side wins; we have not “declared” war in 70 years, and real-world conflicts don’t conclude neatly with a big “The End” and rolling credits. Wars end through an agreement of some kind, even if (in rare cases) it is one side’s surrender. Whether and when to seek an agreement, and therefore a way home, is as much a political decision as it is a military one. And political decisions in America are made by democratic means, through our representative government, in consideration of we the people’s broad views of our national interests. Our public and political willingness to accept the costs of the Afghanistan war in years one through 11 (so far), may not hold for years 12, 13 and beyond. If so, it should not be lamented as a failure of will on the part of the American people but, rather, as an expression of our will.

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