[Afghan News] May 10, 2012

[یاسمینه]

Afghan Police In Spotlight After Foiling Taliban Strike
By GRAHAM BOWLEY May 10, 2012 The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — An attack by six Taliban infiltrators in the eastern province of Paktika on Thursday killed three police officers but was put down before it reached the government offices that were its target, Afghan officials said.
The fighting again put the spotlight on the Afghan Local Police force, which is trained by American Special Operations personnel and is seen as a critical hedge against the Taliban as Western forces begin withdrawing. The Afghan Local Police force, which was part of the response to the Paktika attack, has been the focus of intensified Taliban assaults as the annual fighting season has gotten under way.
The attack began when six gunmen wearing explosive vests under Afghan Local Police uniforms tried to pass through a security checkpoint near the district governor’s building. Police forces stopped the men to question them, and a gun battle broke out, eventually stretching to two hours before the last attacker was killed.
Two attackers detonated their explosives during the fight, but no civilians were hurt. Two members of the Afghan Local Police and one member of the national police force were killed.
Afghan government control has long been spotty in Paktika Province, which is on the border with Pakistan. The Afghan Local Police program is considered crucial in such regions, as the national military and police forces begin to take over full security responsibility from international forces.
On Thursday, an adviser to President Hamid Karzai reported progress in the NATO handover to Afghan control. The official, Ashraf Ghani, said, “Our findings from the first and second tranches of transition show that ever since the transition started, security has either improved or at least it has not deteriorated in the transitioned areas.”
Mr. Karzai is to announce on Sunday which regions will be part of the next stage of transition, expected to begin imminently. Authority over security in regions accounting for about half of the Afghan population has been passed from coalition to Afghan control, with coalition forces taking a supporting role. The next stage, the third of five, is expected to take that figure up to roughly three-quarters of the population, Western officials said.
In a separate briefing at NATO headquarters, American military leaders said Afghan Local Police units had been created in 65 out of the 99 districts identified by the Afghan government in 2010 as requiring the new units.
The force’s numbers are on track to grow to 19,000 by the end of the year and will reach 30,000 as planned by the beginning of 2014, the last year of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, said Col. John Evans, deputy commanding officer of the Special Operations units responsible for training the Afghan Local Police.
The forces themselves have come under increasing suspicion, however, as allegations of violence, theft and human rights abuses have led to fears that Western countries may merely be arming an unreliable militia that could be used by warlords after NATO forces withdraw.
In a highly critical study released in September, Human Rights Watch detailed allegations that some Afghan Local Police forces had killed and raped civilians, stolen land, and carried out other abuses against villagers.
In a report responding to the study in December, the American military admitted that some of the allegations were credible but rebutted others.
On Thursday, Colonel Evans said that he had confidence in the vetting process and that the police were showing that, for the most part, they could hold their own. In an analysis of 1,000 armed episodes across 65 districts where the Afghan Local Police forces faced activity by insurgents, in about 80 percent of the cases they stood and fought, he said.
“The test is how they performed under fire, and they have done remarkably well,” Colonel Evans said. “They are paying the price in blood every day.”
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Khost Province, Afghanistan.

Family lobbies for soldier to be included in Taliban prisoner swap
By Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post May 10
The parents of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American captured by the Taliban nearly three years ago, have made an emotional appeal for the Obama administration to make a deal with the insurgents to release him in exchange for Afghan prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“Everybody is frustrated with how slowly the process has evolved,” Bob Bergdahl said in a newspaper interview in the family’s home state of Idaho. “I’m pushing it hard. We started out by trying to encourage the Taliban to take care of our son. . . . Now, we’re worried that the government isn’t concerned enough to put him on the [negotiating] table.”
Hours after the appeal was published in Wednesday’s Idaho Mountain Express, the administration broke its own silence on Sgt. Bergdahl, detailing what it said were nonstop efforts to locate and free him, through negotiations or other means. “I wouldn’t rule anything in or out,” said Col. Dave Lapan, director of the Defense Department press office.
Late last year, State Department negotiators put together a tentative deal in which five Taliban prisoners would be transferred from Cuba to house arrest in Qatar, where their families could join them. Bergdahl was to be released after the first two insurgents arrived.
But the deal fell apart, and U.S-Taliban peace talks have been stalled since January.
The Washington Post had withheld information on the Bergdahl aspect of the negotiations since last year at the request of White House officials, who said publicizing them could endanger his life. Those Taliban members opposed to negotiations, they said, might kill him to stop the talks.
Bergdahl’s parents, Bob and Jani, are scheduled as featured speakers at the annual Rolling Thunder Memorial Day demonstration on behalf of missing and imprisoned U.S. service members this month in Washington. Administration officials, who anticipated the family might choose that moment to speak out, appeared surprised at the Idaho interview.
“We had concerns about the security situation,” said one U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. “But this is now a different scenario. If they want to talk about it,” the official said of the parents, “we can’t ask for it to be withheld.”
A senior U.S. military official said that the threat to Bergdahl’s life remains. “I think it would be safe to assume that if he’s being kept against his will, there’s got to be a pointy end to that stick,” said the official, whose remarks were arranged by the Pentagon on the condition the official not be named. “We’re not talking about real nice guys out there who are willing to let Sgt. Bergdahl walk.”
The military official described extensive monitoring of the Bergdahl case by the Defense and State departments and others, including weekly meetings, monthly video conferences with senior officials and regular contact with the family.
“We do believe him to be alive,” the official said. “We do believe him to be in fairly good health.”
Taliban officials participating in now-suspended peace talks provided proof in the fall that he was alive and convinced diplomats that his release could be arranged.
Lapan said the military is “doing everything we can to bring Sgt. Bergdahl back into U.S. hands” but that it is “perfectly understandable that parents whose son has been kept in captivity for several years now are frustrated.”
The only U.S. service member known to be held hostage in the Afghan war, Bergdahl, 26, is believed to have been captured initially by forces under the command of Moulvi Sangeen, a Taliban leader in eastern Afghanistan’s Paktika province. U.S. officials think he is being held in Pakistan by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network.
Accounts of how he was captured in June 2009 have differed. In the first of several videos the Taliban have released, a frightened-looking Bergdahl responded to questions asking his name, hometown, age and religion and said he had been ambushed while “lagging behind a patrol.” The military has declined to comment on other reports suggesting he left his base without authorization.
The military official said there was no confirmation of news reports over the years saying that Bergdahl had switched sides and was supporting the Taliban or that he had recently tried to escape.
In at least three other videos over the years, Bergdahl has been seen bearded and shaven; in uniform, an Army sweatshirt and in traditional Central Asian garb; nervous and apparently at ease. But for the past year, he hasn’t been seen at all.
Last May, his father made a video in which he appealed to the Pakistani military for assistance and to the Taliban for his release.
Over the years, the Taliban has threatened to kill him unless various demands were met, including a $1 million ransom, the release of Afghan prisoners and of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist convicted in a U.S. court in 2010 of the attempted murder of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.
While the Bergdahls said they believe their son is alive, they expressed worry that he could be harmed by ongoing U.S. drone attacks against insurgents in Pakistan.
“Bowe’s been under the drone program the entire time,” Bob Bergdahl said “It scares . . . us.”

Afghanistan "faces tougher times" in next security handover
By Mirwais Harooni
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan faces tougher security challenges in the next phase of a transition from foreign to Afghan forces as insurgents step up their attacks, Afghan officials said on Thursday.
President Hamid Karzai is expected to announce on Sunday the transfer of 230 districts and the centers of all provincial capitals to Afghan control in the third phase of a handover before most NATO troops pull out by the end of 2014.
"In 2014 we will face a national survival test, but our enemies have to know that this nation is committed to fulfill this process," Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, head of the transition process, told reporters in Kabul.
"The third stage is a difficult stage. We don't want to tell lies to Afghanistan's people, but these difficulties are not ones that have no solution. The fourth and fifth stages will be more difficult," Ahmadzai, a former finance minister, said.
Afghanistan and its Western backers plan a total of five stages of security transfer, which will eventually include Taliban-strongholds such as Kandahar and much of Helmand as well as volatile eastern provinces, among other areas.
No officials would comment on what specific districts in which provinces would be transitioned in the third phase.
The difficulties underlining the third phase were also echoed by U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker who joined NATO's top commander in Afghanistan, U.S. General John Allen, other NATO soldiers and Afghan officials to talk about the next step.
More than a decade since coalition forces toppled the Taliban, NATO forces and the Afghan government are scrambling to build up and improve local security forces to be able to take over from foreign forces.
There are, however, few signs of improving security in Afghanistan. Insurgents are already mounting a spring campaign of suicide attacks, while talks with the Taliban as part of efforts to reach a political settlement appear to have stalled.
Two senior U.S. lawmakers have said that the Taliban is stronger now than before President Barack Obama ordered a surge of U.S. troops to Afghanistan, contradicting the administration's assessment of the insurgency.
Ties between Kabul and Washington have been strained recently over a string of incidents involving U.S. forces this year, including the killing of Afghan villagers and the accidental burning of copies of the Koran.
Less than a week after signing a strategic partnership agreement with the United States, Karzai said the pact was at risk of becoming "meaningless" if Afghans did not feel safe following a series of civilian casualties blamed on NATO.
(Reporting by Mirwais Harooni; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Insight: Afghan women fade from White House focus as exit nears
By Laura MacInnis and Amie Ferris-Rotman
WASHINGTON/KABUL (Reuters) - Shortly after sending U.S. troops to Afghanistan in October 2001, President George W. Bush focused so intently on freeing Afghan women from the shackles of Taliban rule that empowering them became central to the United States' mission there.
More than a decade later, as his successor Barack Obama charts a way out of the unpopular war, Afghan girls are back in school, infant and maternal survival rates are up and a quarter of the parliament's seats are reserved for women who at least on paper have the same voting, mobility and other rights as men.
But Obama rarely speaks about that progress, delegating discussion of women's rights to his secretary of state and other top diplomats so he can focus on narrower goals for Afghanistan: uprooting the militants there and getting out.
Obama's lack of overt attention to Afghan women has led many to fear their hard-fought gains will slip away as the United States hands off security responsibility to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, with ever-present Taliban leaders still holding sway in much of the countryside.
Women's issues are not on the formal agenda at the NATO summit the United States will be hosting in Chicago later this month. Afghanistan is poised to send an all-male delegation.
Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said it was "really worrying" that Obama only made a passing reference to women on his trip to Afghanistan last week, when he affirmed a general need "to protect the human rights of all Afghans - men and women, boys and girls."
Obama's choice of words also was noticed in Afghanistan, which remains a conservative and male-dominated Islamic country. Gulalai Safi, a female member of parliament from northern Balkh province, said it was "somewhat of a shame" that he did not use the visit to underline women's rights.
Amnesty is calling on Obama to spell out a plan to preserve the gains for women since the fall of the Taliban, which from 1996 to 2001 barred Afghan girls from schools and kept women from working and from leaving their homes unless they were accompanied by a male relative or spouse and were covered in a head-to-toe burqa.
For more than a year, the White House has been pursuing, with little success, reconciliation talks involving the Islamist group that could give it a share of power in Kabul.
"When you are negotiating with the Taliban, ensuring the rights of women is not a simple matter," Nossel said. "In that sense you can understand why they are not talking about it but that is why it is doubly worrying."
WOMEN AS BAROMETER
Bush did not mention Afghan women when he launched the war a month after the September 11, 2001, attacks that were orchestrated by al Qaeda militants based in Afghanistan.
But he soon broadened his rhetoric, saying that empowering women was essential to strengthen Afghan society and prevent al Qaeda from keeping a foothold there.
His wife, Laura Bush, also made Afghan women one of her signature issues. In November 2001 she delivered the weekly presidential radio address "to kick off a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al Qaeda terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban."
The former schoolteacher visited Afghanistan three times to support educational projects and efforts to tackle infant and child mortality rates, then the highest in the world next to Sierra Leone, and to inform women about their legal rights.
"Her effort really helped to sell to the American people why we needed to do what we were doing," said Anita McBride, former chief of staff to Laura Bush.
Today's White House has a more limited definition of that purpose, one that eschews his predecessor's "nation-building."
In February, White House spokesman Jay Carney stated that U.S. troops were in Afghanistan to root out al Qaeda militants and their training camps, accusing the previous administration of adopting a mission was "muddled and unclear."
The Obama administration says women's rights remain an important goal, even if not the focus of its public rhetoric.
"That refocusing of our efforts is reflected in our public messaging. When we talk about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, you will hear us speak to that core goal," said Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokeswoman. But she said there was "absolutely no lessening of our attention or support to Afghan women from this administration."
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, an Afghanistan expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, said the American public was so tired of the war that today's White House was reluctant to dwell on what is at stake with the U.S. departure.
"Now the question is how to get out, not to explain why we got in," Lemmon said. But she stressed the risks of seeing women "as a pet project instead of a barometer for the society's health."
"How the war ends really does matter. The question is, will a Somalia be left behind in Afghanistan? And if it is, women will be the first to suffer," she said.
DISCOURAGING HEADLINES
Obama often jokes that he is surrounded by women, sharing the White House with his wife, two daughters and mother-in-law and working closely with female advisers and cabinet members including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
He created the first White House Council on Women and Girls shortly after taking office to make sure the U.S. government "considers the needs of women and girls in every decision we make." In December he signed an executive order and action plan telling U.S. diplomats to work to empower women as "equal partners" in conflict prevention and peace-making.
But neither he nor first lady Michelle Obama has used their tremendous attention-generating power to stress the needs of women outside the United States, including in Afghanistan.
That work has mainly been left to Clinton, herself a former first lady, who has visited Afghanistan three times as the United States' top diplomat. Melanne Verveer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, has been to Afghanistan twice.
In an interview, Verveer acknowledged the American public had lost track of the advances for Afghan women amid "discouraging" headlines about acid attacks on girls in school and violence against women that the United Nations has said remains at "near-pandemic levels."
"But it is important to see just so much has been achieved, that there should not be a reversal in the investments and the progress that has been made, because that would be to the detriment of Afghanistan's future," she said.
Asked why Obama has not spoken more directly about the need to protect Afghan women, Verveer said the president had made clear he wants U.S. diplomats and military personnel to focus on women's issues on the ground as they prepare for the transition.
‘NO SUPPORT'
In the talks with the Taliban, which are currently suspended, the White House has said it would only accept a reconciliation deal that requires respect for the Afghan constitution, which codifies equal rights for men and women.
But in Afghanistan, many women fear that Karzai could trade away their freedoms as he seeks to curry support in conservative parts of the country, including in rural areas where female illiteracy remains above 90 percent and child marriages are still widespread despite being illegal.
In March, Karzai backed recommendations from powerful clerics to segregate the sexes in the workplace and allow husbands to beat their wives under certain circumstances. Last year he sacked the deputy governor of southern Helmand province after two women performed without headscarves at a high-profile concert.
"This is a green light paving the way for extreme figures, including the Taliban, to come forward," said Fawzia Koofi, a female member of parliament who has said she plans to run in the country's 2014 presidential elections.
Senior Afghan peace negotiators have said the Taliban is now willing to soften its hardline ideology to regain a share of power. But a spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, said this week that "it is too early to discuss" whether the group now supported girls' education.
Another Afghan lawmaker, Shukria Barakzai, said the shift in attention from the White House had decreased the pressure on Afghan leaders to take the status of women seriously.
"We are now getting the sense that in order to achieve women's rights, we have to act alone ... We feel like we have no support," said Barakzai, who met Laura Bush during one of her trips to Afghanistan.
On a trip to Washington, Afghanistan's health minister Suraya Dalil said women in the country were ready to stay politically active to prevent backsliding in health and other areas with the political changeover.
"Being a woman in Afghanistan today is different from being a woman in Afghanistan 11 years ago," the Kabul-trained surgeon and mother of three girls said in an interview. "We want to be engaged in the peace process, in the transition, and decisions about the future of Afghanistan. In all of this we want to be engaged and we want our voice to be heard."
There are also grassroots women's movements emerging in Afghanistan and signs of change in the capital's streets.
Kabul is now full of beauty parlors for women, unheard of during Taliban times, and girls in their white hijab and black uniforms are seen going merrily to and from school every day.
But there has been a dramatic spike in reports of violence against women, and very few perpetrators are getting punished for crimes including beatings, torture and brutal killings.
Over the past year, the volunteer group Young Women For Change glued more than 700 posters around Kabul showing a woman's veiled face that read: "don't grab my hair/don't throw stones in my face/I can stand on my own two feet/I can build this country with you together."
Almost all the posters were torn down within days.
(Additional reporting by Miriam Arghandiwal in Kabul and Missy Ryan in Washington; editing by Warren Strobel and Mohammad Zargham)

‘Run!’ A Day on the Front Lines of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan
By Michael Hirsh | National Journal
ZANA KHAN, Afghanistan—Within 30 minutes after the shura—or community meeting—ended in this village in eastern Ghazni province on Wednesday, we came under mortar fire from the Taliban.
“We have contact!” shouted the Polish International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander who was escorting us to the helicopter. “Run!”
Run we did, huffing and puffing under helmets and heavy body armor, a group of over-aged pretend soldiers—actually, just reporters--trying to understand a war that barely seems to exist most of the time. Until all of a sudden it does, rocketing in from nowhere.
Zana Khan is a fault line in the decadelong conflict in Afghanistan—one of those dusty, primeval villages where all the money and U.S.-backed power of the New Afghanistan contends daily with the insidious forces of the old unreconstructed Afghanistan, a region defined by ignorance and terror.
“It’s routine,” explained Krzysztof Wojcik, a retired Polish special-forces major, as we sat inside an armored medevac vehicle listening to the “Whump!” of mortars from high in the mountains and the crackling of return fire from the Polish 30-mm guns and Afghan National Army machine guns. “They [the Taliban] knew about the shura. They knew when it ended,” said Wojcik. “They waited for the people to leave and the helicopters to come, because they knew there would be VIPs.”
The Taliban’s chief VIP target appeared to be Musa Khan, the governor of Ghazni, who took off just ahead of us in a Polish Hind helicopter—an upgraded version of the Soviet choppers used against the mujahadeen in the 1980s. The shura, a traditional gathering of male elders and leading citizens, was Khan’s idea. Through speeches, gifts, and new schoolbooks, Khan was trying to make the case to the barely literate people of this tiny mountain village in the Taliban-infected southeast of Afghanistan that his way, the way of the New Afghanistan—the way of the international community, America, and NATO—was vastly better and more prosperous than the way of the Taliban, who have kept a NATO-funded new school from opening for three years.
And he’s very impressive, Khan is. Black-bearded and black-turbaned, he is eloquent and learned in the Koran, and he has a deep, sonorous voice that puts you in mind of, say, Anthony Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia. As some 250 townspeople, their faces a deep reddish-tan from years of exposure, sat squinting quizzically in the sun, Khan delivered “my message to the Taliban,” saying he and his government were every bit as religious as the Islamist radicals, observing “all the pillars of Islam,” and that he delivered justice every bit as well (Khan made a big deal of his chief judge sentencing two killers to hang the day before).
Khan also bravely countered the Taliban line that he and the national government of President Hamid Karzai were merely stooges of America and the West. “The Taliban are fond of saying that our plans are made up by foreigners, but the clothes you are wearing are also made by foreigners. The Toyotas you are driving, these are also made by foreigners,” he said. “The Taliban are keeping you from the good life and the international community, from sending your children to school, from paving your roads.”
It all sounded hopeful, and many villagers applauded and walked away happily down the stony path to their mud-walled homes carrying thick gray woolen blankets and donated new plastic sandals as gifts. “I think it went very well,” Khan remarked to me afterward. “The first shura, we had only four people.” Other villagers praised the newly strengthened Afghan police and army, saying the Taliban was less brazen and weaker than a few years ago, before President Obama’s “surge” began.
But the mortar attack at the end was an abrupt reminder of what a number of Afghans attending the shura told me and a visiting group of reporters privately. “Two hours after you leave, they will be back," said Mohammad, a 32-year-old farmer. “They will burn those gifts.”
Indeed, what looked like a simple village gathering on the surface was actually the product of a sophisticated ISAF-led clear-and-hold operation involving not just Polish troops but, very quietly, U.S. special forces as well, who had come into Zana Khan several days before the shura to round up any suspects. “I think when we leave it’s going to fall apart,” said “Moose,” who described himself to National Journal as a U.S. special-forces soldier and said he and his team had rounded up nine suspects with alleged bomb parts or fragments in their houses. He was referring not just to Zana Khan but to Afghanistan. “Their special forces are good, really good, but the regular army’s kind of lazy. I think it’s going under.”
Despite the extensive presence of both U.S. and ISAF officers at the shura, ISAF officials said on Thursday the mission was designed and led by Afghan security forces and that “Moose” was not a special forces soldier but an American civilian translator. “His knowledge of Afghan and coalition military planning and operations is nearly non-existent,” an ISAF official said.
It’s easy to be as cynical as Moose. If U.S. and international forces can’t suppress the Taliban in this part of the country now, while still operating near the height of the Obama surge—which is ending as of this September—what’s going to happen when we all leave at the end of 2014? Already ISAF has written off Ghazni’s southern-most district, right on the Pakistan border, as hopelessly under Taliban control.
And yet there are other strong signs that this is not going to be 1992 to '96, when the Taliban gradually and brutally took control of an abandoned Afghanistan. The new Afghan army and police are expected to get at least $4 billion a year in ISAF funds—most of it from Washington—indefinite training and help from U.S. special operations, and by most accounts the Afghans are increasingly competent. The U.S. drone strike program will continue indefinitely, albeit likely under the CIA rather than the Pentagon, ensuring that the Mullah Omars of the future will not be eager to show their faces in downtown Kabul.
Areas like the eastern section of Afghanistan are unlikely to achieve complete peace. Funded by Pakistan’s intelligence agency just across the border, and possibly by sympathetic Islamists in the Arab world, the Taliban have a constant source of replenishment, like a toxic natural spring. But there is reason to think the Taliban can be contained at least to this troubled corner of Afghanistan. And that is the case the U.S. is making to its NATO allies at the forthcoming summit in Chicago—we need to be here for decades in some fashion, not just for a couple of more years.
“It’s a never-ending story,” said our Polish escort, as we waited out the mortar battle. Earlier in the day, in a round of interviews at the village, we had asked: Are the Taliban weaker, or just as strong? The answer was mixed. Yet it was also true that the mortar rounds missed their targets—the governor and, possibly, us--by hundreds of meters. “They are scared; they don’t come close” enough to be accurate, Wojcik said.
Gen. Daoud Shah Wafadar, the Afghan army commander in Ghazni province—who also spoke at the shura—told our visiting group that the Taliban were no longer a match for his forces. “The enemy is not capable of fighting with us face to face. The only thing they can do is threaten the people.”
That may be true, but at least in this recalcitrant portion of Afghanistan, it is a tactic that the Taliban still do very well—and there is little sign as yet that they can be forced to stop.

Afghanistan Slows Huge Cash Exodus
Wall Street Journal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV May 9, 2012
KABUL - The Afghan central bank's efforts to curb the exodus of money abroad are bearing fruit, with recent currency auctions showing a sharp fall in demand for U.S. cash, the bank's governor told The Wall Street Journal.
The money flow—part of it suspected by U.S. and Afghan officials to be stolen foreign aid and proceeds from the drug trade—undermines the country's economy just as foreign forces depart. The cash flight also raises Western concerns about Afghanistan, already the source of most of the world's illicit opiates, becoming a global money-laundering center.
The central bank's new regulations, imposed in February, limited the export of cash to $20,000 a trip. Before then, travelers could take any amount through the Kabul airport, as long as the funds were declared at customs.
Some $4.6 billion in U.S. dollars and other currencies—more than the country's entire annual government budget—left Afghanistan through the airport last year alone, mostly for Dubai, central-bank data show.
The central bank's new restrictions, while not foolproof, appear to have dramatically reduced the demand for dollars in Kabul—a signal that more Afghans may be keeping their capital inside the country.
Gov. Noorullah Delawari said in an interview this week that before February the central bank would auction off some $200 million in U.S. currency a month to keep the Afghan currency's exchange rate stable.
Since then, the size of these auctions has shriveled, fluctuating between $50 million and $100 million a month.
"We were suspicious that that money went from the central bank right through the airport and to Dubai. That has ended. That is significant," Mr. Delawari said. "There is less demand for cash dollars in the market."
There is no restriction on transferring money through banks, but such transfers require far more documentation about the funds' origin, destination and purpose than the informal "hawala" exchange networks that used to ship bagloads of cash on planes to Dubai, the region's business hub.
Many Afghans distrust the country's banks, especially since the nation's largest nongovernment lender, Kabul Bank, was bailed out last year after it had been looted by politically connected shareholders.
Mr. Delawari said he had no statistics on whether more money was being transferred through the Afghan banking system since February. Officials at two Afghan banks said they haven't seen any uptick in transfers abroad in recent months.
New security checks and money-counting machines—including one at the VIP departures area—have largely stopped the cash traffic through the Kabul airport, Mr. Delawari said. Sums over $20,000 are confiscated, he said, with one seizure last week netting $175,000.
In notoriously corrupt Afghanistan, the new restrictions haven't eliminated the ancient hawala networks, and cash continues to be smuggled abroad.
The new controls operate only in the civilian section of the Kabul airport, and haven't been established at other airports or at the terminals used by the U.S.-led military and contractor aircraft.
"If I tell you no money is going out, it will not be a good answer," Mr. Delawari said.
At Kabul's bustling Saray-e-Shahazada market, the hub of Afghanistan's hawala industry, business seemed as active as usual on Wednesday, with hundreds of men clutching thick wads of American and Afghan bank notes.
"The demand for dollars and other foreign currency has not fallen," said Najeeb Ullah Akhtary, owner of the Akhtaries money-exchange firm and president of the hawala association in Kabul. "Afghanistan does not produce anything, and we have to send money abroad because we have to import everything."
Mohammed Amin Khosty, another money-exchange business owner who headed the hawala association until last year, said that the central bank's new restrictions—while scaring away some clients—have failed to destroy the business.
"Though officially hawala services are banned, they continue underground," he said. "It's very hard to control Afghanistan's borders. There are many alternatives to Kabul airport."
The most popular new route, according to Mr. Khosty, is to drive the cash through the porous border to the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad, from where it is flown to Dubai, Oman and other Gulf monarchies.
One clear result of the central bank's decision is the skyrocketing price of hawala transfers. While before February it cost a mere $50 to ship $100,000 to Dubai, now the price hovers around $1,000, Mr. Khosty added.
"Hawalas have been here for a long time, they haven't been established by a decree, and they can't be disbanded by a decree," Mr. Khosty said. "They are here because people do not trust the banks."
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Afghanistan, Russia, and NATO's Future Should Dominate Chicago Summit
US News & World Report - Thu May 10, 5:09 pm ET
The black clouds of the American and European economic crises will loom ominously over NATO leaders when they assemble next week in Chicago for three days of high-level talks.
But Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations and Georgetown University says NATO leaders should avoid the urge to focus on the U.S. and European economies and should instead key on the future of Afghanistan operations and the alliance itself. "Chicago is not the place for discussion of how to stabilize the euro zone or breathe new life into the European project," Kupchan says. "Nor is it the appropriate venue for debate about restoring Western economies to full health and rebuilding popular confidence in democratic institutions."
Instead, Kupchan and other experts and lawmakers say the world leaders should focus on a long-term plan for maintaining a Taliban- and al Qaeda-free Afghanistan. The experts and lawmakers also say the leaders must debate a number of issues to ensure the alliance remains, as Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry put it Thursday, "a fundamental element of national security."
Here are three issues that will dominate the Windy City summit, slated for May 19-21:
Afghanistan. The Obama administration very much wants NATO member nations to approve a long-term plan under which the U.S. and European nations will provide military, economic, political, and other kinds of assistance to Afghanistan for years to come.
NATO leaders are expected to etch in stone a 2013 milestone date when the official mission of American and NATO forces will "shift from combat to support" of indigenous forces, Phillip George, a senior State Department official, told senators Thursday. Alliance leaders also are slated to approve a plan to help pay for Afghanistan's military and police forces.
With some top allies, like France, wavering on President Obama's plan to keep most U.S. and NATO forces there through 2014, administration officials hope NATO members use the summit to make clear they're in it for the long haul. To that end, Obama administration officials announced Thursday a senior U.S. delegation already is headed to France for talks with President-elect Francois Hollande's team. Washington wants Hollande to reverse his campaign vow to remove all French forces this year.
With a gross domestic product of just $17 billion, according to the World Bank, Kabul will need all the assistance it can get to pay for the 352,000-personnel military and national police force NATO is building. "A long-term solution also needed to be found for shouldering the cost of sustaining the ANSF, a cost currently estimated at some $8 billion ... or 50 [percent] of the estimated Afghan GDP," states a NATO white paper.
U.S. officials have work to do, however. Washington has enough trouble just getting alliance members to properly finance NATO, and the European economic crisis has cast new doubt on Europe's ability--and willingness--to write large checks annually for the Afghan forces. U.S. officials will ask NATO members to agree to pay a large chunk of the 1 billion euro annually that Gordon says the administration's wants the international community to fork over each year.
"There is a huge deficit there in terms of the budget for the Afghan forces," Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, told U.S. News & World Report on Thursday. "I hope to see evidence at the summit that NATO members are committed to addressing that."
Russia. When NATO members scan the room next Saturday for the first time, they won't see Vladimir Putin, the once-and-again Russian president. He is sending Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, telling Obama via telephone that he is too busy forming his cabinet to cross the Atlantic. What some quickly dubbed a snub underscores the prickly relations between Russia and the alliance.
Gordon was nonchalant Thursday when asked about Putin's decision, telling a Senate panel "and that's that" after describing how Obama was informed. With Putin back at the helm--officially--in the Kremlin, "we'll see" how the U.S. and NATO relationships with Moscow evolve, Gordon added with a shrug.
Russian officials are miffed that a missile defense shield Washington and several of its NATO partners are planning to install in Europe is designed to take down Moscow's missiles. U.S. and alliance officials, who were just in Moscow for a missile defense forum, have repeatedly told their Russian counterparts the system is designed to intercept Iranian missiles, not Russian ones. "Let me be clear, NATO is not a threat to Russia, and Russia is not a threat to NATO," Gordon said, noting Putin was either president or prime minister over the last decade, when Washington and Moscow have inked a list of sweeping pacts.
NATO's Future. As European nations shrink their militaries and shed combat troops and equipment, there is much consternation about what the alliance should do--and can do--in the future. One of the White House's core goals for the Chicago powwow is "maintaining NATO's core defense capabilities during this period of austerity and building a force ready for future challenges," Gordon said.
Kupchan warns any notions of turning it into "an all-purpose vehicle of choice for military operations around the world would likely lead to its demise, not revitalization." While some officials and experts have talked about adding members outside Europe, Kupchak warns doing so would "saddle it with unsustainable burdens and insurmountable political divides."
NATO nations, especially France and the U.K., won high marks for their prominent roles in the 2011 campaign that drove Libyan strongman Muammar Qadhafi from power. There has been talk in national security circles that the Libya campaign of air strikes is a model for the kinds of things NATO should be geared to do in the future. But Kupchak says "the Libya operation does not represent a model for the future" because many of its features "would be difficult to replicate" for missions in other parts of the globe.
Given Europe's financial woes, Kerry says alliance members must "set priorities" and "decide what's important and what's less important."
John T. Bennett covers national security and foreign policy for U.S. News & World Report. You can contact him at jbennett@usnews.com or follow him on Twitter @BennettJohnT.

Sipping, not guzzling, fuel on Afghanistan's frontlines
By Deborah Zabarenko | Reuters – Thu, May 10, 2012
FORT BELVOIR, Virginia (Reuters) - To sustain themselves on Afghanistan's rugged frontlines, U.S. Army troops have learned to sip, not guzzle.
The liquid they must conserve is JP-8, a kerosene-based, all-purpose fuel the Army uses in aircraft and Humvees and to generate power for computers, lights and heat. Consumption of JP-8 - short for Jet Propellant-8 - often comes at a grim cost.
The fuel arrives by tanker trucks dispatched in heavily guarded convoys that are frequently attacked by insurgents. For every 20 convoys that roll across the harsh terrain, one U.S. soldier dies, said Colonel Peter Newell, head of the Army's Rapid Equipping Force (REF) at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.
Newell's operation keeps that statistic in mind as it aims to make troops more sustainable - meaning that as they live and work on isolated bases they consume an absolute minimum of fuel. It also means they spend less time guarding fuel convoy routes and more time on tasks like combat, security and communications.
Plans to gradually reduce the size of the U.S. force in Afghanistan, which is due to shrink to 68,000 by the end of the summer, have made fuel conservation more challenging. Soldiers are more spread out now, Newell said, and many work out of small outposts of 150 soldiers or fewer. These outposts are often put up and dismantled after just a few months of operations.
The remaining soldiers are "performing more and more missions," Newell said. "Now they're driving longer than ever." Newell's team is working this year with 15 to 20 outposts spread across Afghanistan.
The program is part of a larger Pentagon effort to improve energy efficiency and reduce U.S. military dependence on foreign crude oil. There's the Navy's "Great Green Fleet" plan to deploy naval ships powered by alternative fuels, and the Green Hornet F/A-18 fighter jet, fueled in part by biofuel.
Since 2008, the Army effort to reduce its "carbon bootprint" has been seen at distant outposts in Djibouti, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. The technology is being refined at Fort Belvoir, located south of Washington.
The Rapid Equipping Force may have more in common with a venture capital firm than with traditional military provisioning. It borrows ideas from industry, academia and retail businesses as it focuses on small-scale details of life at a combat outpost.
'FOAM IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD'
Solutions can be surprisingly low-tech, according to Bill Garland of REF. Take, for example, insulating foam.
At small combat outposts, a big energy challenge is heating and cooling leaky and poorly insulated structures that slurp JP-8, Garland said. To trim energy use, about four years ago the Army started spraying insulating foam on the outside of tents or plywood structures, cutting fuel consumption by 45 percent.
But the foam caused more problems than it solved.
Not all contractors used for the task knew how to apply foam to ensure adequate ventilation, Garland said. Sometimes, the foam melted. Disposing of foam-coated structures when outposts were dismantled was challenging.
In short, Garland said, "Foam is a four-letter word."
The folks at REF innovated: instead of foam spray, they turned to wallboard panels filled with polyurethane, transportable in flat packages by helicopter or ground vehicles. They could then be assembled into insulated warzone buildings.
At Fort Belvoir, Garland and his colleagues constructed a test version large enough to house eight to 10 soldiers in a grassy plot near their offices. The living space included refrigerators, air conditioners and heat, plus a tactical operations center with computers and other equipment.
Just like ready-to-assemble furniture, the building shot up in hours, Garland said. The next step is to equip it with a camouflage-painted hybrid generator that runs on JP-8.
Standard generators posed a challenge in the field. They produced 5 kilowatts of power, far more than small outposts needed. Letting the generators churn away drained JP-8, without recapturing their excess power.
"The biggest problem I had was not necessarily power production," said Army Major Bill Casey, a veteran of two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan who now works at REF. "What I had a problem with was power distribution" - making sure all the energy that was generated got where it needed to go.
REF developed a hybrid system that stores excess power in a battery, similar to ones used on luxury yachts. When the battery is fully charged, the generator shuts off. The system is boosted by a small solar array perched on top of a battery that can supply an additional 1.2 kilowatts.
A single kilowatt of power is enough for a surveillance tower, battery chargers, and a television or X-Box video game console, Garland said. These can be essential on the frontlines, along with Internet access, washing machines for clothing, heat and air conditioning, Casey said.
Sometimes even the best-sounding ideas go awry. A suitcase-sized, JP-8-fueled generator seemed ideal for remote forward posts. But they had to be recalled after soldiers found that if the JP-8 varied from U.S. specifications, the generators would not work.
Greater fuel efficiency has other benefits, Newell said. With fewer convoys, U.S. commanders can vary the convoy schedule and lower the risk of deadly insurgent attacks.
(Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Will Dunham)

10 Taliban rebels surrender in N. Afghanistan
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, May 10 (Xinhua) -- A total of 10 Taliban rebels surrendered to the government in Afghan Kunduz province, 250 km north of capital Kabul, provincial police chief said Thursday. "A 10-member group of Taliban including their commander named Sharqi renounced the violence and joined the peace and reconciliation process in Ali Abad district Thursday afternoon," police chief Samiullah Qatra told Xinhua.
The former insurgents also handed over nine rounds of weapons to security authorities, he added.
The Afghan government set up a High Peace Council in the summer of 2010 to encourage Taliban to disarm and give up militancy against the government.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to make any comment.
More than 3,500 Taliban militants have laid down arms and joined the government-backed national reconciliation and peace process over the past year, government officials said. But Taliban outfit dismissed the statement as groundless.

Obama, Rasmussen Agree Summit To Focus On Afghan Transition
May 10, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
U.S. President Barack Obama and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen have met at the White House for talks ahead of a NATO summit in Chicago later this month.
A statement from the White House said Obama and Rasmussen agreed the summit would "reaffirm allied commitment" to a plan for the transition of security to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
NATO forces would move from a combat role to support for "sufficient and sustainable Afghan forces."
Alliance members are expected to work out details of their planned withdrawal when NATO heads of state meet in Chicago on May 20-21.
Some 130,000 foreign soldiers, mostly from NATO member countries, are fighting alongside about 350,000 Afghan security forces against Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants.
Meanwhile, Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi says Afghan forces are due to take over security in several major cities and districts before the NATO summit in Chicago.
Azimi said the handover is the third phase of a security transition from NATO-led forces that began last July.
He said areas under Afghan control would be expanded to all of the country's provincial capitals and to 230 of about 400 districts.
Most areas now under Afghan control have been largely peaceful.
The third phase is to include volatile areas and put pressure on Afghan forces.
Meanwhile, the Afghan Ministry of Education has warned about security in 11 provinces where the Taliban enjoys popular support -- noting that 550 schools have been shut in those areas recently due to security concerns.
With additional reporting by AP, AFP, dpa, and Reuters

Afghan girls' schools shut down, Taliban blamed
Reuters By Mustafa Andalib and Mirwais Harooni Wed May 9, 2012
GHAZNI/KABUL, Afghanistan - Headmaster Abdul Rahman was heading to work when a man he believes was a member of the Taliban accosted him and warned him to shut his high school in eastern Afghanistan or face the consequences.
Rahman agreed and his school, which teaches girls and boys, became one of more than 100 mixed or girls' schools that have closed in Ghazni province in recent weeks, in what the Ministry of Education says is a Taliban campaign against educating girls.
Rahman has since re-opened his school, just south of provincial capital Ghazni, but is having difficulty in persuading students to return.
"We now have to prove to families that nothing bad will happen to their children," Rahman told Reuters at the one-storey, bright yellow school building, built three years ago by foreign troops.
Afghan girls were banned from receiving an education and women were not allowed to work or vote under the five-year rule of the hardline Islamist Taliban.
Since the group was toppled by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in 2001, women have won back those rights. But the situation remains precarious and the future uncertain as the Afghan government and U.S. officials try to negotiate with the Taliban for a peaceful settlement to the end of the increasingly unpopular war, which just entered its 11th year.
The Ministry of Education says 550 schools in 11 provinces where the Taliban enjoy popular support have been shut recently.
"Most of these are girls' schools and it is obvious that the Taliban are responsible for the threats against them," ministry spokesman Amanullah Iman said. The Taliban denied involvement.
Earlier this week unknown attackers burned down a large girls' school in Khogiani district in Nangarhar province, on the border with Pakistan. Five more girls' schools in that district have since shut, said regional education spokesman Asif Shinwari.
Also this week, a roadside bomb in eastern Paktika province targeted the vehicle of five education department workers but missed. They were later gunned down in a firefight, local officials said.
HARDLINE IDEOLOGIES
In southern Helmand province, a bastion of the Taliban, education official Mohammad Sarhadi said they have managed to reopen only 100 of the 170 that were forced to shut in recent months.
President Hamid Karzai, who has taken to calling the Taliban "brothers" in recent speeches, urged the group to stop their campaign against education. "I call on the Taliban elders to avoid this and let our children get educated," he said in a radio address last week.
The Taliban blamed the government for the schools' closure. "The enemy is stirring propaganda against us," spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.
Mujahid said the Taliban deemed education "a necessity", and added that their children attended schools in rural areas.
Senior Afghan peace negotiators say the Taliban are willing to soften their hardline ideologies in an attempt to regain a share of power, and the group has said it is open to domestic business and wants to treat all ethnic groups equally.
But when asked if the Taliban now supported girls' education, Mujahid said: "It is too early to discuss this."
Parents are terrified of sending daughters to school even in the capital Kabul, where the Afghan government and a heavy NATO and foreign diplomatic presence maintain security.
"I am scared my daughters will get poisoned or killed while going to school, " said father Abdul Satar, from the north of the city.
Last year girls at a school near Kabul survived a poisoning attack, similar to that last month in northern Takhar province, where 150 girls became ill after drinking contaminated water in what officials said was an attack by conservative radicals.
(Writing by Amie Ferris-Rotman; Editing by Pravin Char)

Karzai 'respects' Hollande's Afghan strategy
AFP via Yahoo! News - May 10 10:40am
Afghan President Hamid Karzai "respects the decisions" of France's president-elect Francois Hollande regarding troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, a government statement said on Thursday.
Hollande, who ousted incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy an election Sunday, pledged during his campaign to withdraw France's combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year, ahead of an agreed NATO timetable.
In a telephone call, Karzai congratulated Hollande for his election victory, and told him "the Afghan government respects the decisions of the French leadership in regards with Afghanistan", the statement said.
Hollande will outline his withdrawal strategy to NATO at a summit in Chicago on May 20-21, where Afghanistan will be top of the agenda.
France's 3,400 troops are the fifth largest contingent in the 130,000-strong US-led NATO force battling Taliban insurgents, but Kabul has downplayed the effect of their early departure, saying Afghan troops are ready to take over.

Afghan Refugee Children Perish in Harsh Winter
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND May 9, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - After a harsh winter killed children in refugee camps around the Afghan capital and brought attention to poor conditions there, a new study by a French aid agency said the disaster was more extensive than originally thought, with at least 100 young children claimed by the cold.
The study, carried out in March by the French aid group Solidarités International, sought to collect information from families at all of the 45 camps in or near Kabul, according to Julie Bara, who conducted the survey for the group, one of few international relief agencies that have long been active in the camps.
The group’s survey came to light on Wednesday, as a result of a visit by Valerie Amos, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator, who toured one of the camps, officially known as the Kabul Informal Settlements. In all, they have more than 35,000 residents, mostly refugees from rural areas hit hard by the war.
Visits to the camps during February by The New York Times found 28 cases of children younger than 5 whose parents said they had died of exposure to the cold in the previous month, when there was unusually severe weather with heavy snows and nighttime temperatures in the low teens. Since residents typically bury their dead quickly, in line with Afghan custom and Islamic practice, precise details on the deaths have been difficult to compile. In addition, most do not take their children to hospitals because they cannot afford the cost.
At the end of the winter, Solidarités went from camp to camp, asking parents who had lost children to sign declarations giving details of the loss, including apparent causes of death, Ms. Bara said.
While the data from the survey is still being compiled, she said, Ms. Bara expects the number of children under 5 who died to total 120. “I would say 100 of them for sure were due to cold weather — despite our help,” she said. “Nobody saw it coming.” That worked out to a mortality rate of 2.5 per 10,000 children per day, establishing it as a full-fledged humanitarian disaster, she said.
An example was the Parwan-e-Se camp, not far from downtown Kabul, where camp leaders last February reported two deaths of children from the cold, but on Wednesday said the final total had been eight, according to Abdul Samad, the camp representative. Two died in a hospital, but the other six died in the camp, he said. “One of them was my own granddaughter,” he said. One of the smaller camps, Parwan-e-Se is home to 100 families, about 600 to 700 residents, he said.
On Wednesday, Ms. Amos, who is on a three-day visit to Afghanistan, toured that camp, largely mud huts in a former vacant lot, walking between open rivulets of sewage and pools of waste and garbage. “Clearly there’s a lot of work we need to do,” Ms. Amos said, acknowledging that the camps’ problems had been chronic and long-term. “The real issue is finding land and helping them to relocate.”
The Afghan government has tried to encourage people in the camps to return to their homes, saying in most places it is now safe enough to do so, but it says that many of the refugees remain because there are better economic opportunities in the capital. Residents disagree and claim their home areas are still too unsafe, and many have asked the Afghan government for land and assistance to build homes here.
Revelations about the deaths in the heart of Kabul, despite a 10-year, $60 billion humanitarian effort in Afghanistan, caused an outpouring of public reaction, both in Afghanistan and internationally.
Camp residents have been caught in a conundrum of international and government policy. Since the Afghan government insists the camps should be disbanded, they do not generally qualify for development aid since they are temporary facilities. So programs that would provide safe housing, education or jobs are often unavailable.
At the same time, since the poor conditions in the camps are chronic and longstanding — most of the camps are more than five years old now — they do not qualify for many types of humanitarian aid earmarked for crises, which are by definition not chronic. In addition, the Afghan government is concerned that if camp conditions are improved too much, it will turn them into magnets for even more refugees.
In response to the concern generated over the deaths of children last winter, however, the United Nations and aid groups have banded together to prevent a recurrence if bad weather returns next year.
The results of the Solidarités survey were shared with the Kabul Informal Settlements Task Force, which includes United Nations agencies and aid groups, and donors have already earmarked funds to prevent a similar disaster from recurring next year, making sure there is sufficient fuel and other resources to protect the camp populations.
“I think it will be better now, we will be better prepared,” Ms. Bara said. “It’s the least we can do.”

UN Official: Plight of Displaced Afghans 'Appalling'
VOA News May 9, 2012
A senior United Nations official says the plight of internally-displaced Afghans is "appalling."
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos met with some 80 families living in a settlement in Kabul Wednesday. She said she was appalled by the unacceptable conditions families, particularly women and children, are forced to endure in the heart of the capital city.
"The situation as we can all see here is deeply, deeply distressing and expecting people to go on living in these kinds of conditions is not acceptable," said Amos.
Amos is on a four-day visit to Afghanistan that began Tuesday. The U.N. says she visited the informal settlement made up of shanties, with little access to water and sanitation, basic hygiene, and education.
Amos said more than a third of Afghanistan's population has personal experience of displacement, due to conflict, recurrent natural hazards and lack of economic opportunity.
The U.N. says that some 5.7 million Afghans have returned to Afghanistan since 2002 "with mixed reintegration results." An additional 5 million Afghans live in Pakistan and Iran. And some 500,000 Afghans are internally displaced due to conflict and natural hazards.
Amos said Wednesday that effective relief and long-lasting solutions to help the displaced are urgently needed.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

British military under pressure over Afghan prisoners
Concern mounts over rising number of detainees and legality of transferring prisoners to Afghan intelligence service
Guardian.co.uk By Ian Cobain Wednesday 9 May 2012
British military detention operations in Afghanistan are coming under increasing scrutiny in the UK courts, as the number of prisoners continues to grow and concern mounts that men handed over to the Kabul government are facing severe mistreatment.
The high court is to be asked to rule on the legality of transfers to the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), whose use of torture has been the subject of complaints by the United Nations as well as Afghan and international human rights groups.
The British military is feeling increasingly hamstrung in dealing with captured Taliban suspects, who can be held only for 96 hours unless a UK government minister signs an order permitting 30 days' detention for questioning.
Criticisms from human rights groups and judgments in the UK courts have prevented the transfer of prisoners to NDS facilities, where torture has been well documented, while detainees cannot be handed over the US military as they would face indefinite detention without trial, which could also be challenged in the UK courts. Other Nato forces have also halted transfers to the NDS or Afghan police.
The Guardian has learned that the British military is continuing to co-operate closely with the NDS when interrogating detainees at a prison at the British base at Camp Bastion in Helmand province.
Many Taliban suspects know they will be released after 30 days: if they have not disclosed information sought by their interrogators by around the 24th day, the NDS will be invited to take over the interrogation.
British military sources say interrogations of their prisoners are closely monitored to ensure no abuse occurs – but critics point out that the NDS then knows the identity of prisoners, the vicinity where they were captured, the day they are due for release, and the questions they have failed to answer.
The number of people being detained by British forces in Afghanistan has been rising steadily, despite claims that the tempo of operations is easing. Up until the end of 2008, 479 suspected insurgents or drug offenders had been detained. The Ministry of Defence says that some 875 people were detained during 2010, a figure that rose to 1,123 last year.
The MoD added that it had invited NDS officers to conduct 12 "evidential interviews" with detainees in British custody last year, as part of an attempt to gather enough evidence to bring the men before a court.
The MoD has not disclosed whether any of these individuals were subsequently handed over to the Afghan authorities.
Next week Public Interest Lawyers, the law firm that fought for a public inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, the Iraqi hotel receptionist tortured to death by British troops in 2003, will ask the high court for permission to proceed to a judicial review of the transfer of detainees to the NDS.
The practice of inviting NDS interrogators to question British prisoners is also likely to face challenge. "Such close co-operation with known torturers is morally unsettling and legally questionable," said Daniel Carey, a solicitor with the Birmingham-based firm.
"But the immediate question is whether this practice places UK-captured detainees outside the high court-mandated prisoner monitoring regime."
The British military has ceased transferring prisoners to the NDS facilities at Kabul and Kandahar, but has continued to hand them over to the NDS base at Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, from where some have been transferred on to Kabul, according to a report published by the United Nations last year.
Earlier this year, a joint report from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and the Open Society Foundations, the human rights group founded by George Soros, said the NDS is alleged to be operating an underground facility at Lashkar Gah where torture victims could be concealed from British monitors. These were "credible allegations", the report said.
In a connected legal action, the London law firm Leigh Day is seeking compensation for a 24-year-old farmer, Serdar Mohammed, who alleges that he was beaten and deprived of sleep after being detained by British troops while irrigating his fields in April 2010. Mohammed was transferred to a second British detention facility where he says his light was kept on all night and that he was kept in a highly air-conditioned room with little clothing.
However, after the British army handed him over to the NDS at Lashkar Gah, Mohammed was hooded and put on an aircraft to another prison, where he says he was tortured by Afghan interrogators who insisted that the British would not have detained him had he not been with the Taliban.
The MoD has told Mohammed's lawyers that British officials who subsequently visited him saw marks that supported allegations of torture. Those lawyers are also seeking permission for a judicial review of the lawfulness of his transfer.
Mohammed is now serving a 16-year prison sentence after being convicted of being a member of the Taliban, on the basis of a confession to the NDS.
The scrutiny of UK detention operations in Afghanistan follows years of legal action on behalf of men held by the British military in Iraq. More than a 140 former detainees say they suffered severe abuse after being detained by British forces in the south-east of the country between 2003 and 2008, while litigation following the death of Baha Mousa led to a public inquiry where it was disclosed that a number of other men had died in British custody, some of them allegedly murdered.
In the past MoD officials have refused to say whether any prisoners have died in British military custody in Afghanistan.

Afghan swimmer dreams of London Paralympics
By Joris Fioriti | AFP
Afghan teenager Malek Mohammad balances on his hands, readies his stumps, then dives perilously into the water. The 18-year-old, whose legs were blown off by a Soviet landmine, dreams of swimming for Afghanistan in the London Paralympics.
"I hope they select me to participate in the London Games. So I am just praying," he told AFP at the small pool where he trains in Kabul, in a nation known better for a deadly Taliban insurgency than international sporting prowess.
"If I get a medal from the Olympics that will be good for my country, for my people. Disabled people will be proud of me, my family, everyone."
Malek is one of tens of thousands of Afghan amputees, victims of three decades of war -- 10 years of fighting against Soviet troops in the 1980s, civil war and the current Taliban insurgency -- that have made Afghanistan one of the most heavily mined countries in the world.
In January, the United Nations estimated that in 20 years it had dismantled more than 500,000 anti-personnel mines, 22,000 anti-tank mines and 15 million unexploded munitions.
Such weapons killed or wounded 375 people in 2011, according to the United Nations. Last year, homemade bombs planted by the Taliban along roads and ditches killed another 1,000 people, the world body said.
Malek's life changed forever in 2005, when he walked into a Russian mine field near Kabul airport. He stepped on one of them and landed on another that then exploded.
His mother, Sabza Gul, recalled her shock when she saw him gravely wounded in hospital.
"He didn't even look human. When I saw my son in pieces like that, I fell unconscious right in the hospital. I felt like someone ripped my insides out."
Malek lost both legs and any hope of a normal life in a country where ordinary life was already difficult.
There was one silver lining however.
When the US government's development agency, USAID, heard about his condition, it managed to get him treated in the United States and he ended up staying there for two years.
"I learned English, I learned how to swim, how to walk with (prosthetic) legs, I learned how to make friends," he said.
Malek is covered in scars. Surgeons have yet to remove all the shrapnel from his body, but his experiences in America turned him into a huge supporter of the United States, which has nearly 100,000 troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
He met George Bush Senior, the former president, and treasures an autographed photograph taken with him with the message: "Good luck and have a great life."
A handsome boy with a muscular chest, Malek appeared on television and newspaper articles were written about him after he won a local swimming competition in San Diego, California, and posed for a calendar of handicapped athletes.
"Before the accident, I was nothing. I was just a child with my family. I was a bakery worker and a student," he says, fitting his US-made prosthetics decorated at the bottom with a star-spangled banner.
"I want to go higher, higher, higher."
He now has to wait to see whether the International Paralympic Committee decides to invite him -- he hopes along with half a dozen other handicapped Afghan athletes -- to go to the London Games, which start on August 29 and run until September 9.
Malek is hopeful of making the Afghan delegation, despite his limited preparation.
The small pool where he trains has recently opened in Kabul but the only way he can get there is in taxis, which are expensive.
"I need support. My family are poor. We are really not rich," he said.
His mother says she does her best.
"Sometimes Malek gets sick and because our situation is not good, I cannot give him the kind of food an athlete needs. Most of the time I feel sorry for myself and I pray to God, 'You have given me this son, please feed him and help him.'"
Kabeer Khoshbeen, an Afghan athlete with an amputated arm, believes that Malek is just weeks away from winning Afghanistan's first medal at the Paralympics and becoming a national hero.
"Disabled people -- they are all waiting for him to get a medal, they hope he will become a hero."

Special Report: Afghan surprise in Ghazni province
At a meeting to celebrate the Taliban's 'retreat', what could possibly go wrong?
The Independent By Kim Sengupta Thursday 10 May 2012
Zana Khan, Ghazni, Afghanistan - The mortar rounds came in from the hills, spraying shrapnel as they sank into the red earth; long bursts of machine-gun and Kalashnikov fire followed, all aimed at the helicopter landing strip. The attack just missed its target – the aircraft in which the governor was leaving after a public meeting to celebrate the defeat and expulsion of the Taliban from this area. The helicopter scrambled away, as did a second one in which a group of journalists was due to travel, with just two passengers on board. The rest of us ran to a disused school which was being used as a headquarters by Afghan and Nato forces for the mission to clear insurgents from the villages in this harsh and unforgiving stretch of Ghazni province.
The firefight lasted for 70 minutes, with Soviet-era heavy machine guns, manned by Poles and Afghans, answering the incoming Taliban rounds. A few of these fell on a track leading to an old fort of the Gilzai tribe, 300 yards away, where senior officials had been telling a crowd of about 500 villagers at a shura, or public meeting, about the bright future which lay ahead for them, now the enemy had been forced to flee.
The Polish pilots of the Russian-made Mil Mi-24 "Hind" helicopter-gunships dived and banked overhead. The firing from the ridges began to die down and finally ended when a howitzer found its mark, to cheers from the troops. But not before, in one of the last exchanges, a Polish instructor with the Afghan police was shot and fell injured.
By the standards of this vicious war, this was a relatively minor skirmish. What it did illustrate, however, was just how difficult and unpredictable it is to gauge success in an insurgency. The Taliban have been driven back from here but the assault announced they were very much alive to fight another day.
What happens in districts like Zana Khan is of intrinsic importance as the West charts its exit strategy from this long and costly war. Earlier this week, General John Allen, the US head of international forces in Afghanistan, said the Taliban were in retreat, their leadership in Pakistan divided and the dispirited foot soldiers deserting in large numbers. Afghan security forces, he and other senior US and British officials insist, will be able to maintain the government's writ across the country with help from abroad.
Operation Shamshar was aimed at hitting four insurgent positions in Zana Khan, a sparsely populated but vital area near Highway 1, the route that transports people and goods to market and is needed to establish governance and commerce in this unstable part of Afghanistan. "We are fighting ghosts. They shoot at us and they disappear and hide away. It's not easy," said Major Krzysztof Wojcik, a Polish officer mentoring the Afghan forces, as he sheltered in a Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) armoured vehicle. "This is a never-ending story. We have carried out this same clearance operation five times now but they keep coming back. This low-intensity battle will continue if there is no political solution. We already know there is no military solution to this; the two sides need to sit together and talk and form a government.
"What is happening now is because the Taliban knew the shura was taking place. They wanted to attack the governor and the journalists."
A force of 400 Afghans and Poles took part in the Afghan-led operation, with General Daoud Warfada Shah in charge. "The Taliban are cowards," he said. "They do not dare to fight us face to face. They are thieves in darkness, trained to bomb and to murder in a neighbouring country. It is our duty as Afghan soldiers to protect our citizens and take control of these villages. Most of the Taliban we are facing now are not Afghans, but Pakistanis."
But as Jamshed Ghawse, 31, a local journalist, pointed out: "The problem is that the foreign troops, and our security forces, have never stayed for very long. They come along and then they go after a while. When the Taliban come back, they take revenge on all the people they blame for co-operating with the government.
"Sure, you have some Pakistanis coming over and they are very bad people. But you have a lot of local people as well who are Taliban. Villagers from here go to the Taliban to get disputes settled because it is cheaper and quicker than going to the courts. They deal strictly with criminals. But if the government was effective and stayed in the area, the local Taliban would give up their guns."
The governor of Ghazni, Mohammed Musa Khan, claims that during his two-year administration he has gained a degree of credibility by being tougher on corruption and reaching out to the armed opposition. "There are three kinds of Taliban," he said.
"Those who are driven to it because of injustice by officials, those who are driven to it by poverty, and those who are being used by our malign neighbours in Pakistan and will not change. We must look after the first two; the third we must fight. In the meantime, we must help the people and educate the young."
After the speeches, books with Koranic inscriptions against violence were handed out to children and clothing to the adults. "There will be trouble if the Taliban come back and catch people with these gifts," warned Mr Ghawse.
The governor, meanwhile, spoke about the success of the shura. "Today was very well attended," he said. "The first time I came to one here, no one showed up. The second time the Taliban actually started firing mortars. No, today has gone really well."
With that, after shaking hands with the assembled dignitaries, he set off for a helicopter ride home to Ghazni City.

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