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Afghanistan fundraising goal eludes as US heads to NATO summit
By Missy Ryan | Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - On the eve of this weekend's NATO summit, the United States remains short of its goal of raising $1.3 billion in security funds from its partners in Afghanistan, after a money-raising blitz failed to garner immediate contributions from allies coping with fiscal and political pressures.
Who will pay for Afghanistan's future security will be central when President Barack Obama hosts leaders from NATO and other nations in his hometown of Chicago for the May 20-21 summit that will outline the Western path out of the long war.
"There was some hope that the kitty would be full by Chicago. That may not happen but it doesn't mean we won't achieve that goal in the future," a U.S. official said.
The United States is believed to be some $300 million to $500 million short of its goal.
"We expect a number of countries to pony up, and that's a sign of progress toward sustaining (Afghan forces) in the years to come," the official said.
Western nations, grappling with fiscal crisis and mindful of dwindling support for the war, are eager to chart a course out of Afghanistan, even as the Taliban continues to pose a serious threat to the weak, corrupt Afghan government.
Afghanistan's growing national police and army are at the core of NATO's strategy for removing most foreign troops by the end of 2014 without triggering the collapse of its Western-backed government.
Keeping those forces armed and fighting in a country still heavily reliant on outside aid will cost an estimated $4 billion a year. To supplement American assistance, the Obama administration is asking its allies to provide $1.3 billion annually of that.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, speaking in Brussels last month, said Chicago would not be a "pledging conference." But officials here had privately hoped to secure those commitments before the summit, which is seen as an opportunity for Obama to brandish his foreign policy achievements just months before the November elections.
With other earlier goals for Chicago - such as a once-hoped-for breakthrough in initial peace talks with the Taliban - on hold, a strong, clear outside commitment to funding Afghan forces takes on more importance for NATO leaders at the summit.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PLEDGES
Pledges made publicly and privately toward the goal now amount to $800 million to $1 billion. Of that Britain, Germany, and Australia have announced annual support for Afghan forces worth about $400 million combined.
In addition, the Afghan government has committed $500 million annually.
A NATO official told reporters in Kabul this week that the alliance "hopes" the $4.1 billion total goal can be met in Chicago.
While more support may be unveiled in the coming days, not all nations the United States has tapped have been ready.
France, whose new President Francois Hollande has promised to accelerate the French departure from Afghanistan, is not expected to make a commitment at Chicago. "Financial commitments cannot be made here," a French diplomatic source said.
"The U.S. in some ways under-estimated the complexity of the decision-making process in other capitals" in its push to raise that money, one Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
"Although most ISAF members agree properly funding (Afghan forces) is critical, in the current fiscal and political climate, any new funding commitment is subject to an extensive debate. This meant it took longer to raise the funds than the U.S. anticipated," the diplomat said.
Obama dispatched his special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, to European capitals this spring to press for commitments. But funding requests may have not been made to countries early enough.
"The economic problems in Europe and the United States, combined with the continued concerns about corruption inside of Afghanistan, makes it an uphill battle to get countries to make long-term commitments on funding for Afghanistan," said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Japan, another important ally that will host a conference on aid to Afghanistan this summer, has not yet come forward. Neither have key Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Even though the scenarios under consideration would cost the United States far less than it now spends in Afghanistan, the Obama administration itself will not be immune to pushback from its skeptical U.S. lawmakers, Katulis said.
The U.S. official said funding goals were expected to be met eventually.
"Everyone understands the stakes," the official said. "It would be a serious mistake to abandon Afghanistan like it was abandoned in 1989. We have a responsibility to support (Afghan forces)."
(Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris; Editing by Warren Strobel and Vicki Allen)
House OKs continued war in Afghanistan
By DONNA CASSATA | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House endorsed the continued war in Afghanistan on Thursday despite acknowledgment from Republicans and Democrats that the American people are war-weary after more than a decade of conflict.
By a vote of 303-113, lawmakers rejected an amendment that would have swiftly ended combat operations in Afghanistan by limiting funds only to the "safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors from Afghanistan."
More than 10 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, American public support for the overseas conflict has deteriorated. An Associated Press-GfK poll released last week showed that backing for the war has hit a new low and is on par with support for the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. Only 27 percent of Americans say they support the war effort, and 66 percent oppose it, according to the survey.
"The American people are far ahead of Congress," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., sponsor of the amendment, who called on Congress to stand squarely with the American people. "It's past time to end the war and bring the troops home."
Opponents of the amendment conceded that the public has grown tired of war, but they argued against a precipitous withdrawal.
"If we leave too early and the Taliban and al-Qaida return, more Americans will suffer," Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said.
The vote came as the House considered a $642 billion defense budget for next year, debating more than 140 amendments to the far-reaching legislation. Final passage of the measure was expected Friday.
Rather than a speedy withdrawal from Afghanistan, the spending blueprint calls for keeping a sizable number of U.S. combat troops in the country. The bill cites significant uncertainty in Afghanistan about U.S. military support and says that to reduce the uncertainty and promote stability the president should "maintain a force of at least 68,000 troops through Dec. 31, 2014, unless fewer forces can achieve United States objectives."
The United States currently has 88,000 troops there. President Barack Obama envisions a final withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in 2014. Earlier this month, he signed an agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the role of America forces in counterterrorism and training of the Afghan military. The president insisted that the U.S. combat role was winding down.
In a series of votes late Thursday, the Republican-controlled House narrowly passed an amendment preventing federal agencies from requiring contractors to sign project labor agreements to secure federal contracts. The agreements require contractors to negotiate with union officials, recognize union wages and generally abide by collective-bargaining agreements. The vote was 211-209.
Clamoring for fiscal austerity, House Republicans backed deficit-cutting legislation last summer that calls for a $487 billion cut in projected defense spending over 10 years. They abandoned that plan in March, embracing a budget that adds billions of dollars for the military while slashing funds for some safety-net programs for the poor.
The $642 billion spending blueprint — $8 billion more than last year's agreement — provides funds for aircraft, ships, weapons, the war in Afghanistan and a 1.7 percent pay raise for military personnel. The House Armed Services Committee, in crafting its version of the budget, snubbed the Pentagon and military leaders on a range of issues, rejecting calls for another round of domestic base closings and increases in monthly health care premiums for working-age military retirees.
Health care costs have skyrocketed for the military, rising from around $19 billion in 2001 to more than $53 billion in recent years. The Pentagon has estimated that the premium hike — ranging from $35 to $140 per month — would save the military more than $12 billion over 10 years. But one of the most powerful constituencies, the network of veterans groups and retired generals, has lobbied lawmakers to prevent any increase.
The House's action on the budget has divided Republicans.
In a statement Thursday, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said that if the House is serious about cutting the deficit, it can show its commitment by not passing "a final highway bill, postal bill or any other bill that would violate the Budget Control Act" — last summer's deficit-cutting pact between Obama and Congress.
Republicans used the House bill to make an election-year argument that they're stronger on defense than the president.
They backed construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says is unnecessary, saved aircraft and ships slated for cost-saving retirement, and slowed planned reductions in the Army and Marine Corps. They added millions of dollars for nuclear weapons and restricted the president's ability to reduce the nuclear stockpile under a treaty with Russia that the Senate ratified in December 2010.
Still fighting Obama's long-settled decision to allow gays to serve openly in the military, the bill would bar same-sex marriages on military installations.
"Welcome to the world of manufactured crisis," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters in criticizing the provision as unnecessary.
The political challenges embodied in the bill are unlikely to survive. The White House has threatened to veto the legislation, citing a long list of objections. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has slammed the bill and lawmakers for protecting their pet projects. The Democratic-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to jettison many of the provisions in its version of the budget. The committee meets next week to write its bill.
The GOP effort to make Obama's national security record an issue in the campaign has gotten little traction. Opinion surveys show Americans give the president high marks on defense after the killing of Osama bin Laden, repeated drone attacks against suspected terrorists and a weakened al-Qaida, and an end to the Iraq war.
The House planned to debate the remaining amendments throughout the night Thursday, including one that would end the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects, even American citizens, captured on U.S. soil.
The issue has proved highly divisive for both parties.
"The president right now has the authority to go outside and lock somebody up indefinitely," said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. "It's an extraordinary amount of power to give the executive branch."
Smith and several tea party Republicans back an amendment that would bar indefinite detention without charge or trial of suspected terrorists and roll back the military custody requirement. Last year, Congress passed and Obama reluctantly signed a defense bill that included the provision allowing indefinite detention.
Thornberry, the Texas Republican, argued that the amendment would give terror suspects full constitutional rights.
"As soon as a member of al-Qaida sets foot on U.S. soil, they hear you have the right to remain silent," he said during debate.
Smith pointed out that the Constitution grants all persons due process. "Your beef is with James Madison," Smith said.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in New York struck down as unconstitutional the portion of the defense law that gives the government broad powers to regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.
Kabul Urges Islamabad Against Mass Expulsion
Ayaz Gul May 17, 2012 VOA
ISLAMABAD -- Afghanistan is urging authorities in neighboring Pakistan to abandon plans to expel tens of thousands of unregistered Afghan migrants from the country.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates there are currently 1.7 million registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan, but local officials say tens of thousands of others are residing in the country illegally.
The government of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan, says around 400,000 unregistered Afghans reside in the provincial capital, Peshawar, alone.
Last month, the provincial government ordered all unregistered migrants to pack up and go back to Afghanistan by May 25, blaming them for the worsening security situation in the city, where Taliban militants have carried out frequent attacks.
Authorities have vowed to launch a police crackdown after the deadline to roundup the illegal immigrants and hand them over to Afghan authorities on the border.
Afghanistan's ambassador to Islamabad, Omar Daudzai, says the Kabul has serious concerns about the decision and wants Pakistani officials to cancel the plan.
"They should review the deadline, and we should hold bilateral talks and come up with a joint plan for a dignified, voluntary and orderly return of the Afghan refugees," he said.
Forced repatriation, he added, creates room for police to harass Afghan refugees irrespective of legal status.
"We want our Afghan refugees to come back to our country, but not on the basis of expulsion," he said. "Whether they are registered or not registered, for [the Afghan government] they are the same, and we have to deal with them in the same way."
Afghanistan's economic, education and health conditions, although improved, aren't sufficient to absorb the large number of returning refugees a mass expulsion would generate.
"We from the Afghan side should do more to provide them with shelter when they return, or at least allocate them a piece of land where they can build shelter for themselves," he said.
Daudzai said a high-level Afghan delegation led by the minister for returning refugees is expected to arrive in Islamabad to discuss the issue with Pakistani officials.
UNHCR officials requesting anonymity said Pakistan like any other country has the right to control who enters their country, or whether they are allowed to stay.
The United Nations will be concerned, they said, only if those sent back are registered Afghan refugees to whom the deadline does not pertain.
Pakistan blew its chance for security
The Washington Post By David Ignatius May 17, 2012
As America begins to pull back its troops from Afghanistan, one consequence gets little notice but is likely to have lasting impact: Pakistan is losing the best chance in its history to gain political control over all of its territory — including the warlike tribal areas along the frontier.
Pakistan has squandered the opportunity presented by having a large U.S.-led army just over the border in Afghanistan. Rather than work with the United States to stabilize a lawless sanctuary full of warlords and terrorists, the Pakistanis decided to play games with these outlaw groups. As a result, Pakistan and its neighbors will be less secure, probably for decades.
This is a catastrophic mistake for Pakistan. Instead of drawing the tribal areas into a nation that finally, for the first time since independence in 1947, could be integrated and unified, the Pakistani military decided to keep the ethnic pot boiling. It was a triumph of short-term thinking over long-term; of scheming over strategy.
America has made many blunders in Afghanistan, which will have their own consequences. But U.S. problems are modest compared with those of Pakistan, which nearly 65 years after independence still doesn’t have existential security as a nation. Like most big mistakes people make in life, this is one that Pakistan’s military leaders made with their eyes wide open.
The Group of Eight and NATO will hold summits in the coming days and announce the exit strategy from Afghanistan. Fortunately, President Obama is planning a gradual transition, with at least 20,000 U.S. troops remaining until 2024, if necessary, to train the Afghan army, hunt al-Qaeda and steady Afghans against the danger of civil war.
But what can Western leaders say when it comes to Pakistan? Basically, the Pakistanis blew it. By playing a hedging game, they missed a moment that’s not likely to return, when a big Western army of well over 100,000 soldiers was prepared to help them. Instead, Islamabad used the inevitability that America would be leaving eventually as an argument for creating a buffer zone that was inhabited by a murderous melange of the Taliban, the Haqqani network and other Pashtun warlords.
Yes, it would have been hard to bring under Pakistani law the rebellious badlands known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. I have a shelf full of books describing how the process of pacification eluded the British raj and was gingerly handed over to the new government of Pakistan like a bag of snakes. But hard is not impossible — especially when you have modern communications and transportation and the most potent army in history ready to help.
What comes through reading these old books is how long the problem has persisted. A 1901 British “Report on Waziristan and Its Tribes” lists the tribes, clans and sub-clans the British were paying off more than a century ago through their political agents, rather than risk a fight with these stubborn warriors. After their disastrous Afghan wars, the British decided that payoffs made more sense than shootouts — a decision the Pakistanis have repeated ever since, at the price of permanent insecurity.
The notion of the tribal areas as a warrior kingdom, impenetrable to outsiders, has a romantic “Orientalist” tone. I was disabused of it in 2009 when I met a group of younger tribal leaders who had gathered in Islamabad to tell U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke that the region needed economic development, good governance and less hanky-panky from the central government. In a move that embodied everything that’s wrong with the Pakistani approach, these brave young men were intercepted on the way home by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and quizzed about why they had dared talk to the farangi.
Surely the most foolish move the Pakistanis made was to compromise with the terrorist Haqqani network, which operates from its base in Miran Shah, a few hundred yards from a Pakistani military garrison. This was like playing with a cobra — something the Pakistanis seem to imagine is an essential part of regional realpolitik. No, you kill a cobra. If the ISI had been up to the task, it would have had some formidable snake-killing allies.
The Pakistanis lost a chance over the past decade to build and secure their country. It won’t come back again in this form. That’s a small problem for the United States and its allies, but a big problem for Pakistan. What a shame to see a wonderful nation miss its moment so completely.
davidignatius@washpost.com
Two NATO Troops Killed In Afghan Attack
May 18, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Two NATO soldiers have been killed in a suspected militant rocket attack in eastern Afghanistan.
An Afghan official told the AFP news agency that six other soldiers serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force were wounded in the attack on their base in Nari district of eastern Kunar Province.
The NATO-led force has confirmed that two service members were killed in an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan.
The nationalities of the soldiers were not immediately available.
The latest attack came a day after gunmen dressed in Afghan police uniforms and wearing suicide explosives vests stormed a government compound in the southwestern province of Farah, killing seven people and wounding 12 others.
So far this year, 154 NATO members have been reported killed in the Afghan conflict.
Based on reporting by AFP and AP
Afghan insurgent attacks down: A sign of widening Taliban fractures?
An independent monitoring group says insurgent attacks in Afghanistan are down 43 percent compared with this time last year.
By Tom A. Peter | Christian Science Monitor – Thu, May 17, 2012
Afghan and NATO leaders will gather in Chicago this weekend to discuss the future of security in Afghanistan as international troops prepare to end combat operations in 2014.
Throughout the past decade, international conferences about the Afghan conflict like this one have become a fixture on the international political landscape, though often producing opaque results.
Unlike past summits, however, the Chicago conference represents the first time such an event takes place amid a reduction in violence – a 43 percent drop of insurgent attacks, according to a report released last month by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office.
ANSO called the drop in attacks the “first reliable indicator that the conflict may be entering a period of regression after years of sustained, and compounded, growth by all actors in the field.”
It remains unclear if this decline will stick. As the US pushes for a negotiated settlement to end the war, the Taliban has shown signs of increasing division. The ensuing fragmentation of the group could be behind the drop in violence, in which case the present calm remains extremely fragile.
RELATED Afghanistan 5 areas of concern as the US leaves
The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office logged the 43 percent decrease in insurgent initiated attacks for the first quarter of 2012 as compared to the same period last year. The organization’s security reports are considered among some of the most reliable. Over the past year, they’ve been at odds with American and international military statistics that tracked a downturn in violence while ANSO recorded increases.
Still, many Afghan leaders are cautious.
“Fewer attacks don’t mean that the Taliban left the areas and that’s why their attacks have decreased,” says Ali Akbar Qasimi, a former Afghan Army general and a member of parliament from Ghazni province. He says that the Taliban and other insurgent groups remain active in many areas. Though members of the group may not be carrying out attacks, they often intimidate locals and impose their ultra-traditional views on rural communities.
The report also warns that a continued upsurge in criminality and the growth of irregular militias may present new problems for Afghanistan even if the downward trend of insurgent violence continues.
Widening fissures
The drop in attacks comes at a time when there appears to be widening fissures among the Taliban due to internal disagreements about whether to negotiate with the US.
Earlier this month, 25 prominent members of the Taliban were reportedly executed by the organization for talking to the US without authorization.
Additionally, a Taliban splinter group known as the Mullah Dadullah Front carried out the assassination of Maulvi Arsala Rahmani, a senior member of the Afghan High Peace Council, last Sunday allegedly outside the knowledge and control of the central Taliban organization.
“Maybe it’s because of the negotiation process that the Taliban is divided in parts,” says Naqeebullah, a former Afghan Army general who now serves as a member of parliament for Laghman Province. Like many Afghans he only uses one name. “This decrease in attacks might be because of the internal problems inside the Taliban. Whenever they have problems or disagreements inside, normally the attacks would get suspended for a short time or decrease.”
The distance between the Taliban foot soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and their leadership, believed to be mostly in Pakistan, has grown in recent years. Those fighting in Afghanistan sustain the vast majority of losses and have reportedly become embittered with the leadership hiding in Pakistan who is not exposed to the same level of danger.
The group's mid-level leadership has been particularly hard hit by Afghan and international operations. Last year, international forces conducted 2,200 night operations, which traditionally target the Taliban and insurgent group commanders. In 83 percent of those raids, soldiers managed to kill or capture their primary target or an associated insurgent.
'Not a monolithic movement'
“The Taliban itself is not a monolithic movement and there are so many local and regional powers. Some of them for their own reasons may have entered in tactical level talks, maybe to free some people or get a good deal for their own local forces,” says Jim Phillips, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “They see a lot more risk in continuing the war; it’s a personal risk for them. They’re a lot more malleable and willing to engage, if only for local ceasefires.”
This willingness to broker deals at the local level could create room to reduce fighting. However, there are other Taliban fighters inside Afghanistan who have vowed to continue fighting even if their leadership brokers a peace deal with foreign fighters.
"We’ve wanted an Islamic government in Afghanistan and we will not stop fighting for this," says Salih Mohammad Akhund, a Taliban fighter in Helmand. "If the Taliban leadership puts any conditions on the negotiations with others, they should come first to us and ask us what we want and ask us if we accept the Afghan constitution or if we don’t accept some of its articles. Those who fight want Islamic law, and right now in Afghanistan there is not Islamic law."
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The Long Road out of Afghanistan
The challenges of getting military materiel out of the country by 2014 are forcing the U.S. to make some unlikely bedfellows.
Wall Street Journal By CON COUGHLIN May 17, 2012
As the Obama administration makes plans to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, it faces the crucial question of how to get its equipment and material out of the landlocked country. Transportation experts estimate that the U.S. military will need to ship around 100,000 containers of materiel and vehicles as it completes its withdrawal.
But after the recent souring of U.S. relations with Pakistan, which had served as the American military's principal supply route into Afghanistan, the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan is emerging as a key player in America's withdrawal strategy. This weekend a high-level government delegation from Uzbekistan is traveling to Washington, a visit that will highlight the enormous challenges the Obama administration is facing as it seeks to withdraw its vast military infrastructure.
It is now more than 10 years since American soldiers first deployed to Afghanistan, and the U.S. military has accumulated a mountain of equipment and supplies in the country, as have the other 30 or so countries that have contributed to NATO's International Security Assistance Force. Most of that equipment entered the country from Pakistan, where it was unloaded at the port of Karachi before being transferred by road through forbidding mountain passes to Afghanistan.
But relations between Washington and Pakistan have deteriorated sharply since last year, when U.S. officials decided not to inform Islamabad about the raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad. Tensions deepened after U.S. forces accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in a border skirmish last November.
Islamabad responded by closing all border crossings between Pakistan and Afghanistan. While Washington is hopeful the border will eventually be reopened, Pentagon planners have decided they need to look at alternative exit routes to ensure they are not held to ransom by the Pakistanis. A senior British official recently told me that Pakistan demanded that Britain pay around $2 billion into the pension fund of the Pakistani military before it would agree to reopen the transit routes. Similar demands have been made of other countries contributing to the NATO mission.
One attempt to resolve the border issue before this weekend's NATO summit in Chicago failed yesterday, when the Pakistani military demanded that Washington pay more than $1 billion in unpaid aid to the country before it would agree to a deal.
The security of the Pakistani routes is another concern. Canadian officials say that when they withdrew the bulk of their equipment from Afghanistan last year, an estimated 25% of their equipment went missing while in transit through Pakistan.
This has led Washington to look for alternatives. One that is being actively explored is to make better use of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), the overland supply route that passes through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and is currently being used to deliver fuel and non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan from Europe. America and its NATO allies want to negotiate a "reverse transiting agreement" with the Central Asian republics through which the NDN passes.
Uzbekistan would be a key cog in this network. A recently built 80-kilometer rail link from Uzbekistan to the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif has been transporting about half of the U.S. military's supplies into the country since Pakistan closed its border crossings.
Yet for many years the regime of Uzbek President Islam Karimov has been the subject of sharp criticism from the U.S. State Department for its human-rights record. As part of Washington's charm offensive to improve relations with the Uzbek government ahead of the Afghan withdrawal, the Obama administration decided last September to waive congressional restrictions on assistance to Tashkent, including on military aid.
That was followed last October by Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, making the first high-ranking visit to Tashkent by a U.S. official. At the same time, President Obama made a personal telephone call to Mr. Karimov to discuss ways of improving relations between the two countries.
During her visit, Mrs. Clinton gingerly raised the issue of human-rights abuses, but the main focus of the mission was to secure guarantees from the Uzbeks of their continued cooperation in keeping the supply routes open. Mr. Karimov told Mrs. Clinton that many of the human-rights accusations leveled against his country had been distorted by opposition activists, and that since the Sept. 11 attacks, Uzbekistan had been a reliable ally of the West in fighting Islamist terrorism. The country has suffered several Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks of its own, prompting a nationwide crackdown on Islamist extremists.
There will be supporters of Mr. Obama who argue that the president is undermining his commitment to human-rights issues by cozying up to Central Asian autocrats such as Mr. Karimov. A more constructive way of looking at the Uzbek delegation's historic visit would be to see it as an opportunity to persuade the other former Soviet-occupied republics to build a deeper relationship with the West.
But whichever way you look at it, the enormous challenges America and its allies face in undertaking an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan prove the old adage that it is far easier to start a war than to end one. —Mr. Coughlin is the Daily Telegraph's executive foreign editor.
What to do about Afghanistan
By John Kerry Chicago Tribune May 17, 2012
It wasn't long ago that skeptics questioned whether NATO had a future at all in the post-Cold War era, let alone in the difficult period of the Iraq invasion that revealed old fissures in the alliance.
But NATO has already confounded its skeptics. During the past year in Libya, the alliance demonstrated an ability to adapt to meet a new challenge with great speed and effectiveness.
In Chicago, though, the great looming question will be the alliance's ability to meet not just new challenges, but to resolve an old one: a war in Afghanistan that has lasted more than a decade.
The signing of the strategic partnership agreement this month signaled the gradual transition from a war-fighting posture to a supportive role.
NATO allies must now reaffirm their commitment to the long-term security of Afghanistan and send a powerful and unified message. The 10-year, legally binding agreement is a major step forward in winding down the war without "losing" Afghanistan. It means America's relationship with the Afghans — in ways they trust — is changing, not ending. NATO's relationship with Afghanistan must undergo a similarly constructive and positive transformation — for the long-term.
Understandably, Americans and NATO allies are increasingly wary of making long-term commitments in a volatile region so far from home. But I also believe the free world understands that a premature departure would jeopardize the chances for a responsible transition.
Consider the implications of a precipitous departure driven by antipathy to the current war dynamic. It could pave the way for a Taliban return to power against our most fundamental security interests, since that is how al-Qaidagained a foothold in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Allowing them to return would not only threaten our long-term interests, but also increase the risk of conflagration where the world can least afford it — next door in nuclear Pakistan. It would also threaten Central Asian states, Russia, India and Iran, sparking regional conflicts that would undermine our security and call into question our credibility throughout the region and beyond.
We know the difficult history that led to decades of war in Afghanistan, and the unintended consequences of the free world's abandonment after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Many Afghans, fearing a second abandonment, had been hedging their bets and cutting deals to secure the gains they had made this past decade. As Afghans explained to me — quite wisely — they can tolerate risk, but not uncertainty.
That is why NATO must assure Afghans that the alliance is not going to abandon their investment in a stable Afghanistan.
In the end, all the recent military gains will mean nothing if we lose sight of the major challenges that remain.
First, the Haqqani network and other insurgents finding refuge in western Pakistan remain a critical challenge to security there and across the border in Afghanistan. Pakistan has a key role to play in freezing their activity and working closely with Afghanistan and the international community to find a political settlement to end the war. Pakistanis have serious doubts about our long-term intentions and fear our withdrawal will create a political and security vacuum that threatens their interests. We have to work with Pakistan to alleviate their concerns while making clear that the issues of safe havens and political reconciliation must be resolved.
Second, corruption remains a serious problem in Afghanistan. While nobody expects Afghanistan to become a Jeffersonian democracy, improving governance and fighting corruption will be critical for the Afghan government to continue receiving international aid and establishing legitimacy in the eyes of its people.
Finally, Afghans must start preparing now for presidential elections in 2014. These elections will determine Afghanistan's political destiny. If the elections are not free and fair, everything could come unraveled. We cannot repeat the mistakes I saw firsthand in the 2009 elections, when controversy marred everything from voter registration and electoral rolls to ballot boxes and the final count. What Afghanistan needs is a truly independent electoral commission selected with transparency and accountability. The international community can help by supporting the technical process without interfering in domestic politics.
What happens in Afghanistan will affect the future of the broader region and shape NATO's legacy. I've seen NATO's single largest present-day commitment, and let me tell you: NATO's support for training and funding Afghan security forces after 2014 will be critical to their long-term success.
In 2001, Afghanistan was the right war in the right place at the right time. Now we must all work to achieve that war's right ending at the right time. NATO must do its part.
U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee.
Gass Warns Pakistan to Be Reasonable in Reopening Nato Supply Route
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 17 May 2012
Nato's Civilian Representative in Afghanistan Simon Gass warned Pakistan to be realistic after news reports suggested it would seek as much as $5000 per container in transit fees via its soon-to-be reopened supply route into Afghanistan.
Gass noted that he was not one of the negotiators involved in reopening the route, but urged Pakistan to be reasonable.
"What I would say is this, that Pakistan would have to be realistic in terms of its expectations of its partners," he said in an interview on TOLOnews' Kankash programme Thursday.
"The truth is that the supply lines have been closed for six months but it hasn't really affected our operations. We have other ways of getting supplies in and out of Afghanistan. We would very much have liked to reopen the supply lines into Afghanistan but the terms would have to be reasonable."
Top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan General John Allen said Thursday that there are clear signs that Pakistan is preparing to re-open the cross-border Nato supply route to Afghanistan in the near future.
Allen said through a video teleconference that the route's reopening could play a vital role in improving relations between Pakistani, Nato, US, and the regional countries.
"There have been in the last several days some very important signals coming out of Islamabad that there is a consideration to re-open the ground lines of communication, and we, frankly, would welcome that, we would applaud that decision," he said.
Despite the route being closed for six months, Allen also said it had not slowed down Nato's mission in Afghanistan with air shipments and the northern supply route through Russia filling the gaps.
"I will tell you the effect of the closure of that route on the campaign has not slowed us at all," he said. "The air bridge into Afghanistan and the flow of materiel across the Northern Distribution Network were modulated in a way that continued to support the campaign in every operational respect."
Pakistan closed the route after a Nato strike mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26 last year.
Allen also said that a reopened Nato supply route through Pakistan will not be only effective for bringing materials into Afghanistan, but also could be important to the flow of materials out of Afghanistan.
"It would, in fact, be helpful to us if the ground lines of communication were opened, not just because of what could flow into Afghanistan but what could flow out of Afghanistan," he added.
Pakistan will ask at least $5,000 per truck crossing the border through Afghanistan, according to a report published by the Associated Press.
The Christian Science Monitor reported that Pakistan will ask for $1,500 to 1,800 per truck travelling through the Nato supply route, amounting to almost $1 million per day. Estimates suggest Nato traffic in and out of Afghanistan through Pakistan may be as many as 600 trucks a day between now and the end of next year.
The reports said Pakistan seeks these fees to cover the cost of security for the supply trucks and assist in rapid clearance of customs and border crossings.
Before the closures, more than 70 percent of Nato's supplies in Afghanistan - mainly paid for and used by the US - traveled over land from Pakistan's port in Karachi.
Pakistan's Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said that reopening the supply route was in the interests of Pakistan, according to Pakistan's Geo News.
She also said that Nato supplies are not only related to Pakistan and US but it was linked to more than 50 nations.
"Restoration of Nato supplies is in the interest of Pakistan. There is no hidden agreement behind the reopening of Nato routes. It will be done in accordance with the Parliamentary resolution," she said.
Afghan forces now face a threat from NATO
The Washington Post
By Ronald E. Neumann and Michael O’Hanlon Opinions Friday, May 18, 2012
Ronald E. Neumann was the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 through 2007 and is the author of “The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan.” Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and is most recently the co-author of “Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy.”
KABUL - Underappreciated amid all the frustrations, losses and tragedies of the United States’ longest war is some good news: Afghanistan’s army and police are improving substantially. To be sure, they still suffer from politicization at senior levels, and they have a long way to go on the battlefield. But their progress has been real. Their numbers are growing; ethnic balance is reasonably good; and they are leading some 40 percent of operations on the ground (albeit mostly the simpler ones).
Yet as NATO leaders prepare to gather in Chicago, where the war in Afghanistan will be Topic A, there is a growing presumption that, shortly after NATO finishes building up the Afghan security forces, we should start dismantling them. Allegedly because of binding budgetary constraints, a force that will soon reach its combined goal of 352,000 uniformed personnel (not counting intelligence services or community-watch organizations known as Afghan Local Police) may be quickly cut back to the suspiciously precise number of 228,500, starting around 2015.
This plan has not been formally proposed by the Afghan government nor by NATO, yet it is a presumption that’s growing among leaders in Europe and the United States about where we are headed. It would save about $2.5 billion a year, bringing the expected costs of sustaining the Afghan army and police down from $6.6 billion to $4.1 billion annually. In fairness, having a specific target such as $4.1 billion would help the United States elicit pledges from other allies for supporting the Afghan state in future years and would help the Afghans to concentrate on responsibilities they must shoulder. But it should not be viewed as a firm ceiling on what is likely to be required in the future. In fact, it is more like a floor.
The savings of $2.5 billion a year from this downsizing pales next to the roughly $100 billion annually that the United States alone has been devoting to the Afghan mission during the Obama presidency. It would be a false economy in the extreme to risk losing a war — and risk needing to keep more U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 2015 on than might otherwise be required — just to reach an artificially defined goal on an arbitrary timetable for Afghanistan’s own security forces.
That goal, 228,500, came from NATO command here in Kabul. But it was one of several postures on a notional future force that was introduced a few months ago for planning purposes. It correlates with one specific threat environment — namely, the assumption of a much-weakened insurgency. Enemy-initiated attacks in Afghanistan are down some 20 percent nationwide, according to the International Security Assistance Force here, relative to peak levels of a year or two ago — a decline led by major progress in the south and a leveling-off of violence in the country’s center, north and west. Yet, the Taliban and related groups hardly seem to be on the ropes. They remain particularly vigorous in eastern Afghanistan, where the infamous Haqqani network operates; even in the south they will surely try to mount a comeback over the next couple of years.
NATO’s exit plan for its main combat forces over the next 30 months is focused on further weakening the insurgency without any presumption that we can defeat it in that time. Even after 2014, it is only prudent to assume that the insurgency will continue, especially in certain rural areas in the south and east.
Against such a resilient enemy, an Afghan security force totaling fewer than a quarter-million soldiers and police would be quite modest. Even if aided by 10,000 to 20,000 NATO troops after 2014, as seems likely under the recently signed Strategic Partnership Agreement between the United States and Afghanistan, it would be hard-pressed to hold off a dedicated Taliban. Consider:
●In Iraq, a country of similar population size, Iraqi army and police forces total 670,000.
●In Afghanistan today, combined NATO and Afghan forces exceed 400,000 troops.
●Counterinsurgency doctrine, based on experience from many previous cases, suggests that in a country of 30 million, like Afghanistan, as many as 600,000 soldiers and police officers could be required.
It is possible that a much smaller Afghan force will indeed suffice within a few years. But it is also possible that will not be the case. It makes no sense to guarantee the enemy a date certain for downsizing our ally.
NATO officials understand this, but their public messaging risks making many lawmakers and others in Europe and the United States feel that the major downsizing can already be counted upon. And many Afghans are worried about yet another sign that a war-weary NATO will not do what it takes to bring this difficult mission to a reasonably successful conclusion. If Afghans lose heart in their future, the chances of civil war and mission failure will grow.
In Chicago this weekend, while recommitting their forces to a gradual, careful withdrawal, NATO officials also need to make clear that reducing Afghan forces in the coming years is a hope — and not a binding plan.
Afghanistan, detention issue divide lawmakers
By DONNA CASSATA | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Coalitions of House Democrats and tea partyers pushed to speed up President Barack Obama's withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and end the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects, even American citizens, captured on U.S. soil.
The issues proved highly divisive for both parties Thursday as the House considered a $642 billion defense budget for next year. Debate on more than 140 amendments to the bill repeatedly centered on the detention issue.
"The president right now has the authority to go outside and lock somebody up indefinitely," said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee. "It's an extraordinary amount of power to give the executive branch."
Smith and several tea party Republicans back an amendment that would bar indefinite detention without charge or trial of suspected terrorists and roll back the military custody requirement. Last year, Congress passed and Obama reluctantly signed a defense bill that included the provision allowing indefinite detention.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, argued that the amendment would give terrorist suspects full constitutional rights.
"As soon as a member of al-Qaida sets foot on U.S. soil, they hear you have the right to remain silent," he said during debate.
Smith pointed out that the Constitution grants all persons due process. "You're beef is with James Madison," Smith said.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in New York struck down as unconstitutional the portion of the defense law that gives the government broad powers to regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.
Public support for the Afghanistan war has deteriorated. An Associated Press-GfK poll released last week showed that backing for the war has hit a new low and is on par with support for the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. Only 27 percent of Americans say they back the war effort, and 66 percent oppose it, according to the survey.
The House bill suggests that the president should maintain a force of 68,000 in Afghanistan through 2014. The House was weighing an amendment to limit money for the war to the "safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors from Afghanistan."
The current level of troops in the country is 88,000.
Clamoring for fiscal austerity, House Republicans backed deficit-cutting legislation last summer that calls for a $487 billion cut in projected defense spending over 10 years. They abandoned that plan in March, embracing a budget that adds billions of dollars for the military while slashing funds for safety-net programs for the poor.
The $642 billion spending blueprint — $8 billion more than last year's agreement — provides funds for aircraft, ships, weapons, the war in Afghanistan and a 1.7 percent pay raise for military personnel. The House Armed Services Committee, in crafting its version of the budget, snubbed the Pentagon and military leaders on a range of issues, rejecting calls for another round of domestic base closings and increases in monthly health care premiums for working-age military retirees.
Health care costs have skyrocketed for the military, rising from around $19 billion in 2001 to more than $53 billion in recent years. The Pentagon has estimated that the premium hike — ranging from $35 to $140 per month — would save the military more than $12 billion over 10 years. But one of the most powerful constituencies, the network of veterans groups and retired generals, has lobbied lawmakers to prevent any increase.
The House's action on the budget has divided Republicans.
In a statement Thursday, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said that if the House is serious about cutting the deficit, it can show its commitment by not passing "a final highway bill, postal bill or any other bill that would violate the Budget Control Act" — last summer's deficit-cutting pact between President Barack Obama and Congress.
Republicans used the House bill to make an election-year argument that they're stronger on defense than Obama.
They backed construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says is unnecessary, saved aircraft and ships slated for cost-saving retirement, and slowed planned reductions in the Army and Marine Corps. They added millions of dollars for nuclear weapons and restricted the president's ability to reduce the nuclear stockpile under a treaty with Russia that the Senate ratified in December 2010.
Still fighting Obama's long-settled decision to allow gays to serve openly in the military, the bill would bar same-sex marriages on military installations.
"Welcome to the world of manufactured crisis," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters in criticizing the provision as unnecessary.
The political challenges embodied in the bill are unlikely to survive. The White House has threatened to veto the legislation, citing a long list of objections. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has slammed the bill and lawmakers for protecting their pet projects. The Democratic-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to jettison many of the provisions in its version of the budget. The committee meets next week to write its bill.
The GOP effort to make Obama's national security record an issue in the campaign has gotten little traction. Opinion surveys show Americans give the president high marks on defense after the killing of Osama bin Laden, repeated drone attacks against suspected terrorists and a weakened al-Qaida, and an end to the Iraq war.
On joint U.S.-Afghan mission, balancing suspicion and ambition
By Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post
SPINA, Afghanistan — When night came, after long hours in the desert, the Afghan troops poured into a one-story schoolhouse and sprawled out on the floor. Outside, the Americans were still crammed in their mine-resistant vehicles, gauging the risks of sleeping next to their partners.
“All it takes is one bad guy. That’s all I’m saying,” said one soldier during the mission last month in eastern Afghanistan’s Paktika province. “I’m not crazy enough to sleep in there.”
Just two weeks earlier, Sgt. William “Billy” Wilson III had been shot and killed by a rogue Afghan police officer. That incident prompted some men in his battalion to question whether the U.S.-Afghan partnership in their corner of the country might soon give out. Some of Wilson’s friends secretly hoped that it would.
But U.S. commanders went out of their way to assure both American and Afghan soldiers that the partnership would not — could not — waiver, despite 20 incidents of fratricide so far this year. They mourned Wilson. They lectured their men on the Taliban’s efforts to weaken the alliance. And they planned a joint mission to Spina that would affirm their commitment and trust in the wake of tragedy.
“We tell them, ‘This is how the enemy tries to drive a wedge between us,’ ” said Capt. Jim Perkins, Wilson’s former commander. “We can’t let them succeed.”
The “shock absorbency” of the U.S.-Afghan relationship, some American officials say, has also kept Afghan soldiers from abandoning the partnership after NATO personnel burned dozens of Korans on a military base, and after U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly killed 17 civilians in Kandahar. The relationship in the field appears to have reached a stasis in which isolated betrayals don’t threaten to undermine broader progress, they say.
That relationship has in Paktika become a transactional one, with Afghan forces dealing directly with Afghan villagers and Americans handling the operational logistics and much of the intelligence gathering.
Spina is considered one of the most significant Taliban strongholds in the region — a common stopover for insurgents on their way to and from Pakistan. There is no regular American or Afghan security presence in the village. It’s so unstable that even the district sub-governor — Spina’s ostensible conduit to the capital, Kabul — hasn’t visited in five years. He lives nearly 10 miles away.
A ground mission would force Afghan and American soldiers closer together — on the same patrols and into the same makeshift bases. Col. Curtis Taylor announced the mission days before Wilson was buried, before writing a eulogy which included a line that reflected the blow just endured by the 172nd Brigade: “His death hit this task force like a hurricane.”
Taylor was adamant that the storm not consume his battalion’s primary goal of extending the reach of the Afghan security forces. He said the mission would be “Afghan-led” — a term that U.S. military officials use to suggest the long-term sustainability of the decade-long war effort, which will soon be inherited by this country’s soldiers and policemen.
But to some of the U.S. battalion’s soldiers, that meant putting their lives in the hands of men who they couldn’t trust. Wilson’s death was still fresh when they packed in their armored vehicles last month and followed the Afghan army through the winding mountain passes that give way to Spina.
“You have to trust the Afghans, but you also have to protect your men,” said Perkins. “There is a residual concern to watch your back after these incidents.”
There was also some confusion about what “Afghan-led” really meant.
“How many of my men do you need?” asked Col. Safai Mirwais, the head of the Afghan battalion partnered with Taylor’s.
“It’s your mission,” Taylor responded. “You tell me how many of my men you need.”
Taylor looks the part of the quintessential American soldier: broad-shouldered and impeccably uniformed. Mirwais traipses up the mountains of Paktika with a round belly and tattered black dress shoes.
When the military vehicles rumbled into Spina, Afghans and Americans were synchronized but separate. The Americans handed over intelligence reports to Afghan soldiers who then searched the homes of suspected insurgents. The Americans kept watch from hilltops as Afghans interrogated their suspects. The Americans listened to Taliban radio communications as the Afghans rushed toward buildings where the targets might be hiding. All the while, an American helicopter hovered overhead.
U.S. soldiers were unaccustomed to their role in the mission, which at times seemed peripheral.
“It’s sort of boring. The Afghans are doing what we normally do,” Staff Sgt. Joshua LeBel said.
Bored American soldiers watching Afghans carry out the critical duties of a mission is in many ways a sign of progress. But it remains far from the end goal: an autonomous Afghan force and a near-complete American withdrawal. Afghans still struggle with basic logistics and intelligence gathering. Those tasks will require more training and, above all, a continued Western presence. But in obscure villages like Spina, those resources are unlikely to exist for long.
In the past, the United States might man an outpost or base for years before handing it over the Afghans. Now, there’s no time for such extended transitions; the plan is to build a checkpoint in Spina that will be immediately and exclusively manned by Afghans.
During the mission, when Americans received information about a Taliban fighter fleeing Spina on a motorcycle, both Afghan and American troops gave chase — the Americans in mine-resistant vehicles and the Afghans in Humvees and pickups. When the mountain roads became too narrow, the soldiers continued the pursuit by foot, with the Afghans sprinting in one direction and the Americans in another.
The Americans settled into a position near a hilltop overwatch, where they intercepted a Taliban radio exchange: “They’re in our sights and we are ready to shoot,” one insurgent said.
The American solders got down on their chests, waiting to be fired upon. The Afghans continued searching the dozen or so mud-baked huts that compose the village. It was unclear from the radio chatter which soldiers were being targeted; soldiers from both forces were warned.
“We’re about to get shot at,” one American said.
But a half hour passed with no gunshots. Both forces started the walk back to the makeshift base. Some soldiers were disappointed that the mission had ended without a single direct exchange of fire with the Taliban. When the troops left the following day, insurgents would be back, they knew. Without a permanent presence in Spina, there was simply no way to root out insurgents.
That presence might be only months away. But it will require another joint operation — the first trip to Spina was crafted as strictly a scouting mission.
“Where you lead,” Taylor told Mirwais toward the end of the mission, “I’ll follow.”
News Analysis: NATO to renew commitment to Afghan security at Chicago summit
by Abdul Haleem, Yangtze Yan
KABUL, May 18 (Xinhua) -- Afghanistan will top the agenda of NATO summit in Chicago on May 20-21.
U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Chicago on Sunday on the sidelines of the NATO summit.
"Obviously it is an important meeting because a central focus of the NATO summit will be on Afghanistan and on Afghanistan's future," said Obama's National Security Advisor Tom Donilon at a White House briefing on Thursday, referring to the meeting between the two.
Obama met with Karzai earlier this month during his surprise visit to Afghanistan, where they signed the U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement which "provides for the possibility of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014, for the purposes of training Afghan Forces and targeting the remnants of al-Qaida."
Most of NATO-led troops are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 when the Afghan forces are expected to take over the security charge in their country.
U.S. officials said one of the three objectives Washington set for the summit was charting "a clear path" for the completion of transition and reaffirming NATO's commitment to the long-term security of Afghanistan, where American-led coalition troops are fighting a decade-old war.
The two-day summit is expected to review the international support to Afghanistan over the past decade and revamp a roadmap for the next decade from 2015.
The end in sight of a long and bloody war will come as a great relief for Nato member states and partners at the age of austerity as well as growing anti-war sentiments at home.
Afghan observers believe that if NATO and its partners renew their support to Afghanistan, the conflict-ridden country would move towards viable stability, otherwise all the achievement in fighting terrorism would end in fiasco.
"Since the Taliban and al-Qaida-linked terrorists is still a potential fighting force, any retreat in the war on terror in Afghanistan would prove disastrous; on the contrary, renewing support would benefit both Afghanistan and the international community," political analyst Atiqullah Omarkhil told Xinhua.
He warned that a reduction in the strength of Afghan security forces would have negative impact on the security situation in the country.
Around 130,000 strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) including 90,000 American troops are currently stationed in Afghanistan to fight Taliban-led insurgency.
Afghanistan needs a 350,000-strong security force to ensure smooth transition of defense responsibility through 2014 and beyond.
However the U.S. and its partners could suggest at the Chicago summit that Afghanistan maintain 250,000 troops and pledge 4.1 billion U.S. dollars annual military aid after 2014.
"While security in Afghanistan is still fragile, any reduction in Afghan security force and budget would farther contribute to destabilizing the country," said Omarkhil, a retired Afghan army general.
The Taliban regime was ousted by the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001 but the militant group staged a violent comeback in 2006 and since then has insisted on withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan as precondition for peace talks.
"The Chicago summit is equally important for both Afghanistan and the U.S.-led alliance as the U.S. and its allies would renew their commitment and Afghanistan would promise to fight corruption and ensure good governance -- a noble objective essential for bringing Afghanistan towards prosperity," Omerkhil said.
Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi has described NATO's Chicago summit very critical for Afghanistan, saying " renewing support to Afghanistan would enable it to cope with national and international security threats independently."
Afghanistan after the US: What's next?
Challenges in Wardak Province, west of Kabul, are a mirror of those the Afghan government will face as US and NATO pull back from reconstruction and aid funding in the next two years.
By Tom A. Peter, Correspondent May 18, 2012 at 11:50 am EDT The Christian Science Monitor
Maidan Shahr, Afghanistan - A major question at the NATO summit in Chicago this weekend: How will Afghanistan – and its government – fare after US troops leave?
The answer is likely to come from the Afghan countryside. About three-quarters of the population live in rural areas, far removed from the international talks and meetings about its future. Just how local governments tackle security and development, and adapt to impending financial shortages, could determine how Afghans see the value of a centralized government – and ultimately determine whether Afghanistan can attain stability and development.
In Wardak Province, just west of Kabul, the ubiquitous challenges that plague Afghanistan are playing out. But so too are successes. The province has seen progress under Gov. Mohammad Halim Fidai. “I’m very confident and hopeful that with investment in human capital, education, natural resources – like mines and agriculture – that will be a big step to bring more investment and help so Afghanistan can stand on its own two feet and not have to ask for a penny from any other country,” he says.
Like most issues in Afghanistan, there is no way to definitely demonstrate whether a region like Wardak is moving forward or backward. But Governor Fidai’s daily schedule serves a reminder of progress.
In the course of two days recently, he cut two ceremonial ribbons to inaugurate a public park and youth center and scoped the first shovel of dirt at the ground breaking of a water-shed management project.
After less than four years as governor, he’s seen Afghan security forces in his province grow from just 900 to 3,900. He estimates that he’s overseen more than $1 billion in development spending and he’s found ways to steadily increase tax revenues. His province also saw a 25 percent reduction of insurgent attacks last year.
Challenges and criticism
Still, the challenges are not few. At the recent ground breaking for a US-funded, half-million dollar watershed management project, locals didn’t appear to understand what all the work is for.
Ground water levels have been dropping throughout the area, a serious concern for farmers. The watershed project is designed to raise water levels by constructing a central reservoir that will replenish wells throughout the area. Several tribal elders, at the ceremony, however, appeared to think the reservoir was a new place for them to come fill buckets, an action that would render the project futile.
This disconnect is common throughout Afghanistan, says Yama Torabi, executive director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan. Those responsible for projects often fail to communicate to local community members the purpose of a given project or even that it’s happening.
“You have to take into consideration [the community’s] needs, and usually this is not the case,” says Mr. Torabi.
In a community-monitoring effort of 240 development projects in six provinces, which did not include Wardak, IWA found major problems, such as shoddy construction practices, that required attention at two-thirds of the projects. Torabi says in areas like Wardak, where security is a serious concern, there are likely to be even more problems.
Presently, almost all provincial development in Afghanistan comes from foreign funding. Although the development effort in Afghanistan has often faced criticism for problems like those described by Torabi, it’s helped provide services that legitimize the government for many Afghans.
But as the US and NATO reduce their commitment here, that gain, too, is in jeopardy. Already, President Obama has proposed a 34 percent cut on Afghan reconstruction spending in fiscal year 2013.
In Wardak, tax revenues amount to about a quarter of a million dollars. Though that has exceeded Fidai's government’s goals, it’s still only enough to fund half of one minor development effort like the watershed management project. Fidai says he hopes to continue improving tax collection efforts in Wardak to make up for the coming reductions in aid.
On the issue of security
A number of locals criticize Afghan and international security forces for focusing their efforts along the Kabul-Kandahar highway that passes through the province.
They concede that the road is much safer now, but they say villages not on the main road often still face harassment and intimidation. Sher Wali Wardak, a member of parliament who represents the province, says it’s become too dangerous to visit remote villages in the province.
“In Wardak, everything is going in reverse. It’s going to the negative side, not the positive side. If you can just compare it with 2006 or 2007, the security belt is becoming narrower and narrower,” says Mr. Wardak.
Undaunted
Fidai is aware of all the challenges, but he remains undaunted.
He took the highest seat of government in Wardak in July 2008 when the situation he inherited couldn’t seem more dire. Security officials in the area advised him not to travel more than a half a mile away from his offices in the province capital of Maidan Shahr. Government revenues were just a quarter of their annual targets and Wardak, along with the rest of the country, was well into a resurgence of the Taliban.
Fidai, who holds a masters degree in public relations and speaks near-native English, approached his new post largely as a management challenge. He brought in a staff he trusted and worked to retain them by offering competitive salaries with money he saved with simple measures, such as using local building materials on government buildings instead of more expensive imported construction supplies.
“Whether I am successful or not, we’ll leave it for the people to decide,” he says.
News Analysis: Lift of NATO supply blockade may trigger a wave of protests, terrorist attacks in Pakistan
By Jamil Bhatti
ISLAMABAD, May 18 (Xinhua) -- The possible restoration of supply lines for the NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan is likely to trigger a wide range of protests and terrorist attacks in Pakistan as some militant groups and religio-political forces warned the government against the probable decision.
The high-powered Pakistan's Defense Committee of the Cabinet ( DCC), consists of the country's high-level civil and military ranks, on Tuesday finalized to remove the almost six-month old blockade on NATO supplies passing through the country for the neighboring Afghanistan, the sources revealed.
After the meeting, chaired by the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, Federal Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira told media that the DCC meeting that focused to review Pakistan's troubled ties with the United States and there would be more consultations before taking a final decision on restoration of NATO supply line.
Whether it is true or not but some signs and developments showed that Pakistan, as per expectations, has decided to reopen the NATO supply rout that was suspended after the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers during an air strike on border check posts in November last year.
Just hours before the meeting, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen phoned President Asif Ali Zardari and extended invitation to him to attend the historic summit of over 60 world leaders in Chicago on May 20-21 to discuss the future of Afghanistan.
According to some analysts, the invitation for president Zardari clearly showed that something had already been decided through the backdoor channels because last week, Rasmussen linked Pakistan's participation in the Chicago summit with the resumption of NATO supplies.
This invitation came after a press conference by Pakistan's foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar on Monday evening in which she clearly hinted at the restoration of NATO supplies.
"Pakistan has made a point and we want to move towards positive zone," said Khar besides making it clear that Pakistan doesn't want to challenge a block of over 40 countries including its friendly country Turkey.
She also said that Pakistan had not charged a single penny on the supply during last one decade but now was interested in charging the NATO transportation as it had damaged roads and other infrastructure of the country.
According to some media reports, Pakistan has demanded 1500 to 1800 US dollars as the levy on each NATO vehicle passing through its land that would cost US approximate $365 million annually.
In another development, top military commanders from Pakistan and the United States-led ISAF held negotiations on Saturday in garrison city of Rawalpindi to review operational matters damaging their cooperation and possible reopening of the NATO supply.
"Talks focused on operations in border areas and coordination mechanisms to avoid untoward incidents," said a press release by the Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), Pakistan army's media wing.
Pakistan closed the NATO supply lines soon after the unprovoked air strikes by the NATO forces at its army's border check posts that killed 24 soldiers and officers while leaving 13 others injured on Nov 26 last year in Mohmand Agency, Pakistan's northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan.
On the same day, a meeting of the DCC, Pakistan's highest strategic decision-making forum, with Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in the chair, decided to close the NATO supplies and asked the US to vacate the Shamsi Airbase.
The closure of the supply route also left thousands of trailers and containers bound for Afghanistan stranded across the country. Since after the invasion of US-led forces in Afghanistan, NATO have been using Pakistani land routs that start from southern port city of Karachi and end at southwestern Chamman and northwestern Torkham border.
Before the suspension, at least 70 percent of the NATO's supplies to Afghanistan and 40 percent of its fuel needs were sent through Pakistan.
Following the check post attack, Pakistan refused to attend a special summit for the Afghan endgame held in Bonn, Germany in December last year.
A special committee was assigned to formulate Pakistan's new strategy and guidelines for the engagement with the US and NATO.
Later on, Pakistani parliament unanimously approved new guidelines in April by demanding an "unconditional apology" from US for the check posts attack besides halting drone strikes in northwestern region of the country.
Prime Minister Gilani, commenting on NATO supply restoration issue, said Pak-US bilateral relations were at a critical stage and they would have to take some important decisions.
Despite there is no clear time to reopen the supply line, the movement of Afghanistan bound vehicles can be seen, especially, in Karachi. Some transporters claimed that they had received clear message to be prepared for the upcoming opening of the supplies.
Amid the news of NATO supply restoration, some unknown militants threatened the British, French and Australian embassies in Islamabad by sending parcels, containing some suspicious black powder inside them.
According to the police officials, the parcels also contained handwritten letters in English with threats to avenge by poisoning NATO food supplies if Pakistan opens it.
In the past, the absence of security for the NATO vehicles in Pakistan became an ideal opportunity for the militants to attack such convoys heading towards Afghanistan. In such attacks dozens of people, working for NATO supplies, were killed and hundreds of containers were destroyed by the militants across Pakistan.
In two major attacks at the NATO convoys that took place in the outskirts of the capital Islamabad at least 14 people were killed and over 90 oil tankers were torched by the militants.
Besides the threats from the militants, Pakistan's religio- political parties' union "Defense Pakistan Council" announced to hold countrywide protest against the government decision. These protests can create law and order situation for the government that had already been struggling against many issues.
No govt official is ready to tell any fix time for the NATO supply restoration but Information Minister Kaira said that they would not hesitate to take any unpopular decision to fulfill the country's responsibilities besides hinting that the conclusion would come after president Zardari had discussed the matters in the Chicago summit.
U.S. Sanctions Alleged Haqqani Network Operative, Taliban Financier
May 17, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The U.S. Treasury Department has slapped sanctions on an accused Haqqani network operative and a Taliban financier, a move it says will help "ensure all those who perpetrate ongoing violence and terrorist activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan will continue to be marginalized and cut off from the international financial system."
Any U.S. assets held by Bakht Gul and Abdul Baqi Bari are now frozen and U.S. citizens are prohibited from doing business with them.
A Treasury Department statement identified Gul as a "key Haqqani Network communications official" who works directly for senior Haqqani network leader Badruddin Haqqani.
Bari is identified as a Taliban "money launderer" and financial manager and has allegedly used Pakistani banks to secure money given to him by Taliban sources.
He has also reportedly funneled funds to support Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
With reporting by AFP
Report: NATO's Afghan Exit Risks State Collapse
VOA News May 17, 2012 Selah Hennessy
LONDON - NATO is rushing its withdrawal from Afghanistan and could risk reversing the gains made there during the past decade, according to a new report. The Afghanistan Analysts Network report was released before a NATO summit in Chicago.
"Western governments need to be as concrete as possible, vis-a-vis Afghanistan, that after 2014 the country will not be forgotten again as happened last time when the Soviet occupation forces withdrew in 1989," said Thomas Ruttig from the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Germany.
The report, called "Beating a Retreat," was written by former European Union advisor Barbara Stapleton. It says NATO policy needs to be flexible if long-term security goals are to be achieved.
Priorities need to be security, governance
The report says transition of security to Afghan control needs to be related to the condition of security, development, and governance.
Ruttig said right now the needs of Afghanistan are not driving the foreign agenda. "The transition timeline is very much dependent on agendas in the countries, which have sent troops to Afghanistan themselves, while not sufficiently looking at conditions in Afghanistan as they evolve," he said.
International combat troops are to pull out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014. NATO says Afghan government forces are on track to take responsibility for security. The details of the withdrawal are to be hammered out Sunday at the NATO summit in Chicago.
Ruttig said the Western alliance must focus on ensuring effective political institutions are in place. He said the groundwork for that has been laid and now it needs to take effect.
"There is a relatively good constitution. There are laws; there are provisions for a pluralistic political situation in Afghanistan. But much of it has remained on paper, has not been implemented," said Ruttig.
Agriculture, infrastructure called key
Afghanistan analyst David Livingstone, with the London-based research group Chatham House, said long-term involvement in social welfare programs, agriculture and the development of national infrastructures like power and irrigation will be key to the country's stability.
"That has to be an aim for the politicians. And no matter what their rather public standpoint may be. If you do not manage this correctly it just makes the problem of the late '90s and early 2000's occur again," said Livingstone.
Recent opinion polls show that American support for the war in Afghanistan is down to 27 percent.
Afghanistan Starts Work on $30M TB Hospital
VOA News May 17, 2012
Afghanistan has begun work on a $30 million hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis, a disease that health officials say kills more than 10,000 Afghans every year.
The Japanese government is paying for the 80-bed center in the Afghan capital, which will also treat malaria and AIDS patients. Japan is the second-largest donor to Afghanistan, after the United States.
The World Health Health Organization reported 53,000 Afghans get tuberculosis each year. Afghanistan's Public Health Ministry said more people die from the disease than war-related violence.
During Thursday's groundbreaking in Kabul, Afghan Health Minister Suraya Dalil said Afghanistan ranks in the top 20 worldwide for the most TB patients, and that several programs have been initiated in the past few years to combat the preventable disease. The health minister said there are 2,000 centers across Afghanistan for the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis.
The disease is caused by bacteria and usually affects the lungs. Tuberculosis spreads through the air from one person to another. Symptoms include a bad cough, chest pain, weakness and fever. It can be treated using drugs.
Pacifists in the Crossfire
By LUKE MOGELSON The New York Times May 18, 2012
Several miles west of Kabul, the village Qala-e Naw sits deep in the barren foothills of barrener mountains that are perennially half-sunk in cloud. The ruins of old homes strafed by Soviet gunships crowd a gravel streambed that is dry most of the year but runs swiftly with snowmelt come spring. One morning early in December, a 12-year-old girl named Gulali followed the bed for almost an hour, along with her mother and little sister, in search of dry timber to fuel their stove. When they reached a steep rise with scattered saplings near its peak, Gulali scrambled up the slope and set to hacking at some of the skinnier trunks with a hatchet. In the small community of poor Pashtun farmers who inhabit Qala-e Naw, Gulali was well liked for her prideful and precocious work ethic, and true to form, when her mother said they had enough wood and it was time to go home, Gulali insisted on felling one last tree. Seconds later, she stepped on a land mine. The explosion hurled her through the air, nearly severing her right leg and pulverizing most of the left.
Gulali’s mother ran to her and began to stanch the hemorrhaging stump with a head scarf. Two of Gulali’s uncles, Pasha and Sartor, were working a field about a mile away when they heard the explosion and saw the brown plume drift and dissipate. It took Sartor, the younger one, more than 30 minutes to reach the scene, and when he arrived, he found Gulali cradled in her mother’s arms. Sartor put his niece over his shoulder and ran back to where Pasha and a group of nomadic herdsmen were waiting. An old shepherd offered his winter shawl, which Pasha and Sartor used as a makeshift litter to carry Gulali another 20 minutes to the nearest Afghan Police post. Gulali, who remained conscious the entire time, never made a sound. When she was 6, she fell down a 30-foot well that was dry at the bottom. Her father found her hours later, both of her legs broken. He had to climb down a ladder and lash her to his back with a rope to get her out. During that ordeal as well, her father told me, Gulali remained spookily calm.
Now her mother was screaming for help as they approached a metal shipping container with a machine-gunner’s nest on its roof. The police officer in charge of the post flagged down a car, put them in the back seat and instructed the driver to take them to the Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims in Kabul. “Don’t worry,” he tried to reassure Gulali’s mother. “The food and medicine are free there.”
When they arrived at Emergency — a former kindergarten built by the Soviets — Tijana Maricic, the head nurse, rushed Gulali from the car into the operating theater, her nearly severed right leg bundled in her mother’s scarf and a huge open wound on the left. Mine injuries, especially traumatic amputations, are uniquely vulnerable to infection — the blast often forces dirt, shrapnel and other contaminants deep into the stump — and a priority for the Afghan surgeons working on Gulali was to excise foreign bodies and damaged tissue. In the end, they also had to complete the amputation of the leg, removing it just below the knee.
“She was very brave,” Maricic said of Gulali’s stoic reaction to her pain. “Here, even most of the very young children with severe injuries never cry.” Maricic, a Serb, worked as a pediatric nurse in Belgrade before joining a cardiac center run by Emergency in Sudan. Now she is one of three foreign nurses at the hospital in Kabul. Maricic and the rest of the small international staff — the nurses, one doctor and a few administrators, most of whom are in their 30s — divide their time between the hospital and a quaint house directly across the street, in Kabul’s “new city,” a lively neighborhood of butcher shops, electronics stores, kebab stands, vagrants and panhandlers.
Despite Emergency’s central location, Maricic and her colleagues see little of the city outside the hospital grounds and almost nothing of the country. Inside the hospital, however, they see everything — the worst of what war can do.
“I prefer it here,” Maricic told me recently. “Sudan was closer to an ordinary life. You could go outside. You could go to the shop or for a walk. But here, we are more like a family, closer, and in this way it’s more like an ordinary life. After this, I don’t think any of us will be able to go back to a normal hospital.”
‘We Cannot be on One Side of the War’
Emergency is an Italian-based nonprofit that opened its first surgical center in Afghanistan in 1999, during the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. One of its founders, Dr. Gino Strada, worked as a surgeon for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul during the early ’90s, when the Soviet-backed government fell to rivalrous Mujahedeen factions. When Strada returned to Afghanistan in 1999, the Mujahedeen had been routed by the Taliban, and forces loyal to the Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud had retreated north toward their mountain refuge in the Panjshir Valley. Sporadic fighting continued between Panjshir and Kabul. Massoud gave Strada a former police academy in Panjshir, which Strada and his team converted into a trauma hospital. “Immediately we thought, O.K., we cannot be on one side of the war,” Strada told me recently. “So I went to Kabul to talk to the Taliban and offered to balance our presence so that people could see we were neutral.”
Eventually, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, agreed to let Emergency open its hospital in the former kindergarten. Because of the ever-shifting front, Strada said, “we had Taliban fighters who were taken to Panjshir, and Northern Alliance fighters who were taken to Kabul. As soon as we discharged a patient on either side, he would be in trouble. So we started to negotiate with both sides.” Strada managed to persuade both Massoud and the Taliban to guarantee the safe transportation of discharged patients to their respective places of origin. Today Emergency’s commitment to neutrality endures: the Tajik policemen who guard the entrance to the Panjshir Valley still permit Taliban casualties to be taken to the hospital there, and insurgents are treated alongside wounded Afghan security forces at the surgical center in Kabul.
A vast majority of Emergency’s patients, however, are civilians. In 2011, the war in Afghanistan killed more than 3,000 civilians, more than any year since 2001. According to the United Nations, 77 percent of these deaths were caused by insurgents, who escalated their use of improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks. At the same time, the number of civilians killed by coalition airstrikes also rose in 2011. Because of the unconventional nature of the fighting — because the violence comes from all sides, in small doses, everywhere — it can sometimes feel not quite like a war at all but more like an interminable cycle of murder. In this war that is not exactly a war, Emergency represents one of the few places that offers something like an accounting.
Triage After the Bomb
Until she came to Emergency, Gulali grew up somewhat insulated from the conflict. For years, her father fought the Soviets in Qala-e Naw; the rusted carcass of a Russian tank, which one of his compatriots set alight with a rocket-propelled grenade, still sits on the bank of the stream near their house. But since 2001, Qala-e Naw has been relatively peaceful, and Gulali’s childhood was uncorrupted by violence. The Shiite holy day of Ashura, commemorating the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussein, arrived during Gulali’s first week at Emergency, however, and that afternoon visited on the hospital some of the grisliest brutality that 11 years of fighting has managed to produce.
Shiites represent a small minority in Afghanistan, and they are mostly ethnic Hazaras. While Gulali was lying in bed, recovering from her operation, hundreds of Hazaras were congregating about a mile away, at the Abul Fazal Abbas shrine in Kabul’s old city. It was a clear day, and on the street outside the shrine, worshipers circled a group of young shirtless men lashing themselves with steel blades affixed to lengths of chain. Self-flagellation is a customary form of mourning Imam Hussein; as the men swung the blades against their backs, they shouted: “Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein!” There was an element of defiance in how fervently the Shiites exhibited their devotion. Soon many of the half-naked flagellants were covered in their own blood.
Sometime shortly after noon, a suicide bomber infiltrated the ceremony and detonated himself. The explosion ripped through the heart of the crowd. It cleared a wide swath and at the periphery of its force created a semicircle of wrecked bodies piled along a strangely geometric arc. More than 200 people were injured or dead: crumpled improbably, heaped among odd scraps of clothes and limbs as if they had plummeted from a great height. In the carnage and confusion, the dying were hard to distinguish from the dead. Bodies in all manner of distress were taken to Emergency in taxis and cars and in the backs of pickup trucks. When Luca Radaelli, the hospital’s 35-year-old medical coordinator, opened the first ambulance’s doors, he found several dead infants stacked atop a mass of bloodied but breathing women and men. “I also found the head of what was probably the suicide bomber,” Radaelli later told me. “As I took out the first patient, the head fell down at my feet.”
A mob of distraught relatives and survivors began to form outside. Radaelli shut the hospital’s gate, allowing only patients to enter. Some of the bereaved tried to break down the gate, others to scale the walls. More victims continued to arrive. Soon gore and body parts littered the sidewalk. When I arrived at the main entrance, about an hour after the bombing, a brain lay on the street. It was perfectly intact and surprisingly white. An Afghan employee of the hospital, wearing heavy rubber gloves and equipped with a wheelbarrow and a hose, was hurrying to clean up the mess.
A mass-casualty triage tent was hastily erected on the lawn where the local staff members sometimes play volleyball. In Gulali’s ward, injured children came and went. She sat in her wheelchair, watching. It’s difficult to imagine what it all must have looked like through her eyes or how she understood it. At the time, no one understood it. Never before during the decade-old war had there been an attack targeting Shiites on such a scale. Within the maelstrom of ethnic, tribal, economic and political enmities churning the violence in Afghanistan, sectarianism simply didn’t rate. Even the Taliban condemned the bombing.
Late in the afternoon, the orderlies began collecting the bloody mattresses and backboards and stretchers that littered the lawn, scrubbing them clean with antiseptic. The nurses hurried from ward to ward, attending the dozens of moaning wounded in line for surgery. I went out to talk with some of the relatives crowded around the gate, where a list of names was posted on the wall. The sun was starting to go down, but dozens of Hazaras still anxiously awaited news.
When I asked whom they blamed, everyone said Pakistan. This was to be expected — many Afghans see Pakistanis as the ultimate source of all their woes — but what came as a surprise was their unanimous refusal to impugn Sunnis or ascribe a religious motive to the attack. “We don’t blame the Sunnis,” insisted a young man named Ali Bahram, whose nephew was inside. “Islam belongs to Sunnis and Shia both. It’s the I.S.I. who are the enemies of Islam,” he added, referring to Pakistan’s spy service. Several men had gathered around us, nodding in agreement. “The I.S.I. wants us to retaliate,” one of them yelled. “They want to create strife between the Shia and Sunnis in Afghanistan.” (The organization that eventually claimed responsibility for the bombing, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, is in fact from Pakistan and once enjoyed the support of the government, though it has since been outlawed.)
Back inside, two teams of surgeons — five Afghans and one Italian — performed operations until 4 in the morning. For many of the Afghan employees, the day had been all too familiar. One senior surgeon, Dr. Hamed Nazir, was reminded of being a young physician in the northern city Mazar-e Sharif during the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. When the Taliban finally took the city in 1998, they massacred thousands of people, mostly Hazaras. Every afternoon, wounded civilians would be dropped off by taxis and vans at the hospital where Nazir was working. “It was exactly the same this time,” Nazir told me. “Mostly dead children. It’s always like that.”
What Do We Owe the Afghans Injured by a War We Started?
The gulf between how this war impacts the people living in its midst and how it is represented back in America might be inevitable. But the relatively small amount of coverage and interest that Afghanistan garners, compared with previous conflicts, makes that gulf all the more conspicuous. A pattern seems to have developed of periodic embarrassments provoking momentary outrage: Marines urinating on dead insurgents, NATO helicopters killing children collecting firewood, the burning of Korans at a U.S. base, the murder of 17 civilians in their homes. The reality, on the other hand, is that between these intermittent headlines, Afghans die less sensational deaths, suffer less dramatic travails and survive less repugnant but equally traumatic violence on a regular basis.
Last year, Emergency’s three hospitals and 34 clinics across Afghanistan treated nearly 360,000 patients. During the course of reporting this article, after visiting these facilities and meeting a number of these patients, I began to wonder how such a responsibility had fallen to a small, modestly financed Italian NGO. This, of course, was connected to a larger question: What is our responsibility to the Afghans who are maimed, burned, disabled and disfigured by a war we started and can’t seem to end?
According to NATO, even civilians who are injured during operations by U.S. or other coalition forces are only “entitled to receive emergency care if there is threat to their life, limb or eyesight.” In such cases, “discharge or transfer to an appropriate Afghan civilian facility is recommended as soon as the patient is stabilized.” On paper, this might appear to make sense; after all, the United States and other foreign donors have invested vast sums of money in Afghanistan’s public health system. But given the poor quality of care, scarcity of equipment and pervasive graft that still defines most government hospitals, “discharge or transfer” can look a lot like abandonment.
In April, I traveled to Sayad, a town in Kapisa Province, to meet a 14-year-old boy named Zobair, who had recently been discharged from a hospital at Bagram Air Base, one of the largest American military installations in Afghanistan. Zobair’s uncle Nasir had taken him to Sayad in a borrowed Toyota hatchback, its rear seats folded forward to accommodate the green U.S. Army litter on which Zobair reclined. We were parked on the bank of a wide river with small wooden platforms extending over the water’s edge, where you could order lunch from local fishmongers. My interpreter and I arrived early and bought food for Zobair and Nasir — a gesture that felt ridiculous now, in light of Zobair’s condition.
Both of his legs were gone, and wounds covered his hands, arms and back. He was nauseated and fevered; every movement elicited a grimace. “Most of the pain is in my stomach,” Zobair told me as soon as we met. His eyes were half-shut, heavy with fatigue, and he spoke so softly that I had to lean close to catch his words. Without a wheelchair, Zobair had no way to reach the landing where we had set up the meal. When Nasir climbed into the back of the Toyota and raised Zobair’s shalwar kameez, he revealed a pouching system attached to a stoma and four pink tubes sticking out of Zobair’s sides. Fifty-two metal staples held together an incision running the length of his abdomen.
Zobair and Nasir were from Tagab District, where French troops have struggled for years to dislodge a deeply entrenched insurgency, without much success. In February, a French airstrike, mistaking them for insurgents, killed seven boys while they were herding sheep not far from Tagab. A few weeks later, according to Zobair and his family, Zobair was sitting outside his house with four cousins, watching the sun go down, when two low-flying helicopters approached from the distance. Helicopters have long been a daily occurrence in Tagab, but something about the way this pair hovered near the house made Zobair nervous. He said as much to his cousins, who mocked him for being overanxious.
Zobair stood up and began to walk away. He does not know what kind of ordnance or ammunition the helicopter fired. Given the damage, it was likely a Hellfire missile. Two cousins — ages 14 and 18 — were killed immediately. Zobair, who had taken about four steps before the explosion, was thrown into an irrigation ditch. Villagers rushed the survivors to the French military base in Tagab, where another of Zobair’s cousins soon died. In response to my questions about the helicopter strike, a representative for the French military told me that they had conducted an investigation, the conclusions of which were “full positive”: “On that day, after having checked there were no civilians in the area, one helicopter fired at a group of five insurgents with hostile intentions.”
The last thing Zobair remembers before losing consciousness was a foreigner sticking him with a needle. He woke up “in a white room with white walls,” he told me. “They wouldn’t tell us where we were.” Back in Tagab, no one from the base would inform Nasir where Zobair had been taken; it was generally known, however, that casualties from Kapisa were often airlifted to Bagram. “We came to Bagram several times to write our names and give them to the interpreter at the gate,” Nasir said. “Sometimes the interpreter told us, ‘Yes, he is here.’ Sometimes he told us, ‘No, he is not here.’ Zobair called us one time. He told us: ‘I am in a hospital, but I don’t know where. I’m not allowed to tell.’ ” When I asked NATO why Zobair was not allowed to speak with his family, a representative replied, “We know there is a policy on this and are seeking more information at this time.” I was later told that he should have been allowed to call home.
After 23 days, Nasir received a call from an interpreter at Bagram, who told him to come pick up his nephew. At the airfield, Zobair was carried out from the hospital and put into the ambulance, accompanied by an Afghan interpreter. The interpreter told Nasir that they should go to the Red Cross in Kabul so that Zobair’s amputated legs could be fitted for prostheses. She then handed Nasir some papers detailing, in English, the treatment that Zobair received.
‘If They Wanted to Treat Them, They Could’
If Nasir had been able to read the papers, he would have learned that American surgeons at Craig Joint Theater Hospital saved Zobair’s life with a battery of sophisticated procedures. The incision on Zobair’s abdomen was from a laparotomy that enabled the doctors to repair his lacerated spleen, colon and kidney; the pouching system was to collect feces from an ileostomy, where a section of damaged intestine had been removed; and the four tubes sticking out of his sides were internal compression sutures helping to hold his abdomen together. Curiously, the only future treatment recommended for Zobair was to “follow up with a surgeon in six months to have the ileostomy takedown” — that is, to have the intestine reattached and the temporary pouching system removed. According to Nasir, he was not given any guidance about what to do for the internal sutures and 52 metal staples, though both were meant to remain in place no longer than a week or two, after which they posed a risk of becoming infected.
The ambulance took them to a Red Cross orthopedic center in Kabul. There, doctors saw immediately that Zobair was in no condition to have been discharged. He could not even sit up. (A spokeswoman for Craig Joint Theater Hospital said that “in accordance with accepted international clinical practice, the patient had recuperated well enough to be considered by his physicians for discharge.”) The Red Cross told the Afghan escort accompanying the ambulance that Zobair required further medical attention before the orthopedic phase of his recovery could begin.
When the ambulance left with Nasir and Zobair, the staff at the Red Cross assumed they were returning to Bagram. Instead they were taken to Kapisa’s provincial hospital, Mahmud-i-Raqi, where doctors informed Nasir that few if any public hospitals in Afghanistan possessed the special tool required to remove the metal staples that were used on Zobair. “They said they were not able to fix this problem,” Nasir told me, “and they sent us away.” Craig Joint Theater Hospital says that it previously arranged to transfer Zobair to Mahmud-i-Raqi and secured its consent to accept Zobair before his discharge. But the director of Mahmud-i-Raqi, Dr. Mustafa Faiz, says this is untrue. According to Faiz, no one from Bagram ever contacted the hospital about Zobair.
I visited Mahmud-i-Raqi twice. Part of the hospital is made of free-standing plywood and sheet-metal rooms with corrugated tin roofs, while the main building suffers from severe disrepair. Paint peels from walls; water creeps from ceilings; and the floors are covered in dirt. The first time I went there, I arrived at around 3 in the afternoon, but I was told that all the nurses and doctors had gone home early. The second time I visited Mahmud-i-Raqi, it was overrun with people jostling to be seen. Faiz, the director, gestured at the melee and asked, “Why would a hospital like the one at Bagram want to send a patient here?” He explained that Mahmud-i-Raqi could never accept a patient like Zobair for the simple reason that it had no surgeons. He then asked me if I could procure his staff some medical textbooks the next time I went to Bagram.
Nasir says that when Mahmud-i-Raqi refused to admit Zobair, the Afghan escort from the ambulance called Bagram and asked what to do. When he got off the phone, the escort told Nasir: “Zobair didn’t have much problems. He only needed his dressings changed. He said we could take him home.” The ambulance returned to Bagram, and Nasir hired a taxi to drive him and Zobair back to Tagab. The following afternoon, an elder from the village visited Zobair to help with his dressings. When he saw the incision, the elder told Nasir that he needed to get Zobair to a hospital immediately. They went to Emergency’s medical center in Panjshir Valley the next morning.
The only patients Emergency does not accept, however, are those who have already been operated on at NATO facilities. They adhere to this policy very strictly — some might say brutally. In the past, Emergency used to treat patients like Zobair, “but we stopped,” Emanuele Nannini, the program director for Afghanistan, told me. “They kept dying in our hospital.” Nannini describes NATO’s practice of discharging injured Afghan civilians requiring further care as an unethical one, which Emergency has opted not to participate in. “They don’t take responsibility for the patients,” he said. “They start a job, and they give all the complications to somebody else.” He added: “If they wanted to treat them, they could. That is the point. They have the capability.”
One nurse at Emergency who helped make the decision to turn Zobair away later told me: “It was a disaster. The incision was not clean. It was infected.” When I asked Radaelli, the medical coordinator, whether Zobair was in danger of dying from the infection, he said, “If someone doesn’t take him, for sure.” He added, “We see this all the time.” Nannini, the program director, is strident on the subject of NATO’s discharge policies, going so far as to characterize them as criminal. “They did nothing for this patient,” he said of Zobair. “It’s better to let him die than to suffer while going from one hospital to another.”
I met Nasir and Zobair in Sayad the day after they were refused by the Panjshir facility. I had to sit facing backward in the front seat of the Toyota to talk to Zobair, who could barely lift his head. He was febrile, and Nasir told me he had been suffering from nightmares. When I asked Zobair about the nightmares, he explained, “I see it happening again.” A couple of the staples had worked themselves loose, and the incision did not look good: red, swollen, encrusted with pus and tender to the touch.
Zobair complained that it was hot in the Toyota and that he felt ill and wanted to go home. Nasir wrapped all the fish I had bought in an old newspaper to bring back to Tagab. He seemed embarrassed to be doing so, and he explained that their family was very poor. The men were all laborers who often had to travel to Iran for work. “I don’t know what to do now,” Nasir told me as he got into the car. “I don’t know where to take him.” I told him I’d ask around in Kabul about hospitals that might be able to help.
The Pacifists vs. the Military
It’s easy enough to dismiss pacifism as quixotic or naïve. But nowhere does it appeal more strongly to reason than among the wounded and the maimed. At Emergency’s hospital in Kabul, it’s not unusual to find Afghan national security forces recovering in the same ward as Taliban insurgents, and after a while, the ideas that make enemies of the two men lose their relevance; the daily spectacle of their impact on human bodies invalidates them. Nearly everyone who works at Emergency opposes not just the war in Afghanistan but war in general. If they didn’t feel this way before they arrived at the hospital, they inevitably come to before they leave.
Emergency has always promoted a pacifist agenda. In 1994, the year it was founded, Emergency initiated a campaign against the manufacture of antipersonnel mines, leading to their prohibition in Italy. In 2003, it organized demonstrations against Italy’s participation in the invasion of Iraq. And two years ago, Emergency published a kind of manifesto repudiating the use of violence for any purpose.
That same year, President Obama deployed an additional 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan. One primary objective of the surge was to clear out insurgent strongholds in the South. In Helmand Province, the U.S. Marines announced plans for a major operation focusing on the Taliban-held town of Marja. Emergency’s surgical center in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, just northeast of Marja, was the only international hospital in Helmand, and its Italian staff vehemently denounced the offensive. Matteo Dell’Aira, the hospital’s medical coordinator, posted online a series of profiles of civilian victims that were nakedly indignant. In June 2009, Dell’Aira wrote about a box of propaganda leaflets dropped from a NATO plane that failed to open and landed instead on a sleeping 5-year-old girl, fracturing her pelvis and destroying her rectum, vagina and urethra. She later died from her injuries. When the invasion of Marja began in February, Dell’Aira embraced the role of witness with renewed passion.
“During the first period of the operation, we didn’t receive many patients,” Dell’Aira told me. “Or sometimes we saw patients who had been injured seven days earlier. The coalition, together with the national military and police, blocked the roads around Marja and prevented the injured civilians from reaching the hospital. This for us was absolutely a crime against humanity.”
During several interviews with Western journalists, Dell’Aira and Gino Strada condemned the military cordon. Theirs was a counternarrative that contrasted starkly with the assessments of military commanders who lauded the operation as a triumph. The reality seen at Emergency continues to contradict the military’s message. “In Helmand, over 40 percent of our war-victim patients are children,” Strada told me. “This obviously disturbs people who are trying to convince the public that they are doing surgical operations.” In fact, last year the Helmand surgical center admitted 1,864 patients, of which more than half were younger than 14.
On April 10, 2010, an Afghan employee of Emergency in Lashkar Gah told the international staff that he had been warned of a possible attack against the hospital. Following protocol, the Italians vacated the premises for their living quarters elsewhere in the city. An hour later, an Afghan doctor called to say that armed men had entered the hospital. Weapons are banned, without exception, from all Emergency facilities, and Dell’Aira, along with Marco Garatti, a surgeon, and Matteo Pagani, an administrator, decided to go back and find out what was happening. They were stopped by several Afghan Army soldiers outside the entrance to Emergency. The three Italians eventually were handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to a prison run by the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency. There they were locked in separate cells, and after several days they were told that suicide vests, hand grenades, ammunition and pistols were discovered in the hospital’s medical-supply room. “There was a paper,” Dell’Aira said, “written in Dari and Pashto they kept trying to get us to sign.”
Later that afternoon, the governor of Helmand called a press conference, during which he claimed that the weapons and munitions were taken to Emergency by one of its Italian staff members, who had been paid half a million dollars to assassinate him. He also later charged that the hospital was purposefully amputating the hands of Afghan soldiers.
Dell’Aira and his colleagues spent four days in the custody of Helmand’s National Directorate of Security before being transferred to its central prison in Kabul. “Every morning, afternoon and night they interrogated us,” Dell’Aira recalled. After five days in Kabul, they were released. Six Afghan staff members had also been arrested, and all of them were freed except one: the employee who originally warned Dell’Aira of an imminent attack on the hospital. According to Emergency, he is still in prison.
For Gino Strada, the meaning behind the whole ordeal was obvious: “It was an operation aimed at pushing us out of Helmand, clearly.” The possible reasons for this are plenty. Aside from Strada’s and Dell’Aira’s public denunciations of the cordon around Marja, the hospital’s neutrality made it a source of suspicion to both militaries. “Sometimes, we have known Taliban commanders trying to reach the hospital,” Strada said. “They are free inside our hospital. We were under a lot of pressure to provide information, and we kept saying we can’t. It’s not our role to be a sort of medical intelligence.”
‘A Patient Is a Patient. This is Our Rule.’
One afternoon in March, after visiting Gulali, I met a 22-year-old paraplegic named Safiullah who had recently been shot in the back by an Afghan Police officer. The shooting took place in the Ghorband Valley of Parwan Province, during a protest of the burning of Korans at an American-run detention center on Bagram Air Base, which is also located in Parwan. A few days earlier, Afghan employees at Bagram witnessed American soldiers discarding Korans into a garbage incinerator, and since then violent demonstrations had spread throughout the country.
Safi, as he is called, told me that on the day he was shot, several thousand villagers from throughout Ghorband Valley had gathered to march toward the Shinwari District center. A student and young father of two girls, ages 1 and 4, Safi claimed that he was not especially anti-American or antigovernment. He also repeatedly insisted that there were no Taliban in the Shinwari District or the Ghorband Valley, which is untrue. Last summer, Taliban insurgents in Ghorband kidnapped and beheaded a provincial council chief, attacked the Shinwari District center and tried to assassinate the provincial governor.
Nevertheless, Safi said that when the demonstrators reached the district center at around 11:30 in the morning, there were no Taliban among them and none of the protesters had weapons. All the same, they found the district center guarded by several ranks of heavily armed security forces. The first rank was made up of the Afghan Local Police, a controversial and relatively young program overseen by American Special Operations forces that recruits, trains, arms and pays Afghan men in rural communities to defend their home villages against insurgents. The procession came to a halt about 500 meters before the district center. Safi and his cousin Noor, who was also there, claimed that the Local Police then fired on the protesters, without warning or provocation. Using AK-47s and PK machine guns, they indiscriminately sprayed the crowd. Some of the villagers scrambled to the roadsides, trying to hide in shallow irrigation ditches; others dropped and made themselves as flat as possible. Noor remembers seeing three of his friends lying dead in the road. As soon as he heard the first barrage of gunfire, Safi dove to the ground. Before he landed he felt a slamming pain in his back and lost consciousness.
Noor put Safi in the back of a car with several other wounded men. They were taken to a public hospital in the provincial capital Charikar. The doctors there, recognizing that the bullet had shattered Safi’s spine, told Noor they couldn’t help him and offered to transport Safi in an ambulance to Emergency.
A few days after speaking with Safi, I went to Charikar to meet with the deputy chief of police, who showed me a video of the demonstration where Safi was shot. In the video, at least a dozen men in the crowd outside the district center are seen waving white Taliban flags. The deputy also said that some of the protesters were throwing Molotov cocktails, and he claimed vaguely to have evidence of there having been a weapon in the crowd, though he declined to elaborate.
Back at Emergency, Safi and Noor rejected everything the deputy said. Neither of them seemed very happy with my questions, and our parting was much cooler than usual. When I left the ward, the Afghan nurse attending Safi followed me out and stopped me under the breezeway. He was an older, bearded man, and he wanted me to know that Safi and Noor were likely not being entirely truthful. “They’re probably Taliban,” he said. “It’s all Taliban where they’re from.”
It was more a statement of fact than an accusation. The nurse didn’t care. Maybe they were Taliban, maybe they weren’t. Maybe the Local Police were thugs who fired on them for no reason, and maybe it was much more complicated than that. My interest in these things arose from a mentality that was alien to the hospital. Who Safi was, why he had been shot — the answers to these questions didn’t matter there. Several weeks later, when I had a chance to speak with Safi’s nurse at greater length, he told me he was a Tajik from Panjshir and had served as a medic in the Northern Alliance during its war with the Taliban. When I asked how he felt about caring for wounded Taliban now, he shrugged and said: “A patient is a patient. This is our rule.”
A Policeman’s Last Delusions
A couple days after Safi arrived at Emergency, while Noor was still looking after him, a wounded Local Police officer, exactly his age, was assigned a bed in the same ward. The officer, Abdul Nafeh, was taken to Emergency from a public hospital in Kandahar, and he arrived in extremely bad condition. One of his legs was gone and the other severely wounded. Whoever treated him in Kandahar did a poor job. The stump was already infected, and much of the tissue on the injured leg had become necrotic.
Nafeh was originally from Zhari District, the scene of intense fighting every summer and close to where Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is accused of murdering 17 villagers this March. (I once met a Talib from Zhari who lost his leg to an I.E.D. placed by one of his compatriots; not even the local insurgents can keep track of all the bombs.) Nafeh was 12 when his father died of a stroke, prompting him, his mother and his two younger brothers to move to the provincial capital, where he went to work painting houses. Even during the best of times, the wages Nafeh earned were barely enough to support the family, and about four months ago, when his cousin became the deputy commander of a Local Police unit back in Zhari, Nafeh asked to join.
Nafeh told me that he loved being in the Local Police; he felt for the first time that he possessed a sense of purpose about which he could be proud. During our last conversation, a couple days before he died of sepsis, Nafeh said: “I lost one leg. But if I lose the other and both of my hands, I will still be a policeman.”
By this time he was already half-lost to the delirium of his final hours. It was a taxing effort for him to speak at all. A nurse had wheeled his stretcher and IV stand into the breezeway, where he shut his eyes against a warm sun and told fantastical stories. My questions about his life seemed to afford him an opportunity to imagine one that was much grander than reality — or maybe, alternately, Nafeh was lucid to the end and, knowing that his words were limited, used those remaining to embellish what was finally a short and unexceptional past. He told me he had served for years as the trusted assistant to Kandahar’s powerful chief of police, who, along with the governor of Nangarhar, arranged for his medical care after he was injured while leading an operation against would-be Taliban assassins.
A couple of weeks after Nafeh died, I went down to Kandahar and met with his family. I rode out to Zhari and talked to members of his unit. And I found one of the surgeons who treated him before he came to Kabul. The truth was that after stepping on an I.E.D. during a routine patrol, Nafeh was evacuated by an American helicopter to a sprawling NATO installation with one of the most advanced trauma centers in Afghanistan, called Role 3. A remarkable 98 percent of patients admitted there survive, according to the hospital. Because he was an Afghan, though, Nafeh was sent next door to Kandahar Regional Military Hospital, where doctors treated his mangled stump and discharged him two days later to Mirwais, an underresourced and overcrowded public hospital in Downtown Kandahar, supported by the Red Cross.
Nafeh’s cousin Dad Gul told me that doctors at Mirwais recommended he take Nafeh to Kabul if he wanted to save his remaining leg. So the day after Nafeh was admitted to Mirwais, Dad Gul bought three tickets on a civilian flight to Kabul and showed up at the airport with his still-bleeding cousin. On the plane, Dad Gul sat by the window and rested Nafeh’s head on his lap, his bandaged stump and leg laid across the other two seats. (When I met with the surgeon who treated Nafeh at Mirwais, he said that Nafeh left the hospital against medical advice and that his wounds were in good shape.)
“He arrived in very bad condition,” Radaelli, the medical coordinator at Emergency, told me. He said the doctors in Kandahar didn’t do a proper debridement or amputation. “The other leg was hopeless,” he said. “It was completely open. You could see both bones.” Maricic, the head nurse, told me, “He already had sepsis when he arrived.”
A few days later, Nafeh came down with a fever. Maricic removed the dressings on Nafeh’s leg and discovered that it was completely black. The hospital called Dad Gul and persuaded him to allow them to amputate. Nafeh was rushed into the operating theater. After the surgery, he never fully emerged from the anesthesia. The infection had become systemic, and a couple of hours later, Nafeh went into cardiac arrest.
In retrospect, the saddest of Nafeh’s delusions was his belief that important people cared about what happened to him. As we talked outside in the sun the week before he died, Nafeh repeatedly boasted of the powerful men who exercised their influence on his behalf. He seemed unaware that both his stump and remaining leg were infected because of the sloppy treatment he received in Kandahar and that the resulting sepsis was already claiming him. Nor did he appear to realize how close he had been, immediately after his injury, to one of the best trauma centers in Afghanistan.
Of course, then again, Nafeh might have understood everything perfectly. One of the last things he said to me was: “I don’t want my brothers to join the police. It’s no good. I would like to see them become doctors or engineers.”
One Remedy Among the Tragedies
About a week after I met Zobair, the 14-year-old boy from Tagab injured in the helicopter attack, a colleague of mine found a hospital willing to accept him. The French Medical Institute for Children, based in Kabul, is widely acknowledged as one of the best pediatric hospitals in Afghanistan. It also offers a welfare service for indigent patients and their families. In Zobair’s case, the institute agreed in advance to treat him free.
I was unsure which would be the better course: to take Zobair to the institute or to try to get him back into Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram. Early one morning in April, my interpreter and I met Zobair and his uncle Nasir in a hectic bazaar just outside one of Bagram’s heavily guarded entry checkpoints. Zobair lay on the same U.S. Army litter in the same Toyota hatchback. After agreeing to try accessing the hospital there before going to Kabul, we explained our situation to the Afghan soldier guarding the checkpoint, who directed us to a different gate around the base.
Following a rutted road along stacked Hesco barriers topped with razor wire, we arrived at a dirt lot crowded with groups of ailing Afghans, maybe a hundred or more in all. A rifleman in a tall guard tower looked down on them. One elderly, feeble-looking man lay on the ground, next to a plastic bin that held a bag of urine connected to his catheter. He had been taken there by his nephew, who told us that in another hour, at 9 o’clock, someone from Bagram would come out, review everyone’s paperwork and determine who could be admitted into the hospital. The old man proudly showed us a handwritten note from an Afghan clinic.
Nasir and I were debating whether to wait or to continue on to the French Medical Institute for Children, where its chief of pediatric surgery awaited, when Zobair asked us to please not send him back into Bagram. He was worried, he said, that he would again be forbidden from speaking to his family. That decided the matter, and Nasir agreed to follow us to the institute.
When we reached Kabul an hour later, as we began to navigate the congested streets toward the part of the city where the hospital is, I noticed the Toyota pull onto the shoulder behind us. My interpreter and I stopped and walked over to see what was wrong. Nasir got out of the car.
“Where are you taking us?” he demanded.
“To the hospital,” we said.
“No, you’re not. You’re lying. There is no hospital. You’re taking us to Pul-e-Charkhi.”
Pul-e-Charkhi is Afghanistan’s infamous national prison. Nasir was convinced that I had deceived him. In order to lure them into a trap, I had invented the hospital, the welfare program, the surgeon waiting for Zobair.
We argued for a while, and eventually, reluctantly, Nasir agreed to keep going. A few minutes later, however, their car stopped again, and again I had to get out and assure Nasir that the hospital was real. This happened three times. Finally we found ourselves standing in a busy rotary with traffic rushing past us, my interpreter yelling that we were trying to help them and Nasir repeating that he was taking Zobair back to Tagab. An Afghan soldier appeared and told us to move out of the street. Nasir asked him whether the hospital existed. The soldier said it did.
In the end we made it to the institute, and surgeons there removed the internal sutures and the metal staples in Zobair’s abdomen. They sutured and dressed his open wounds and gave him antibiotics. After a few days, he was able to sit up comfortably.
“There is no doubt that they did a very good and big operation,” Dr. Abdul Jalil Wardak, the chief of pediatric surgery, said of the doctors at Bagram. “The result is that the child survived. But of course the way they discharged him is not fair.” I asked what might explain it. “It’s difficult to understand,” Wardak said. “You have to ask them.”
In a written response to my queries, a representative for Craig Joint Theater Hospital said, “Should his clinical condition have necessitated it, this gentleman would have been kept in C.J.T.H. for longer.” The representative added that after they learned that Zobair had been rejected from Mahmud-i-Raqi, “repeated attempts were made by C.J.T.H. staff to contact his guardian’s cellphone number. Alas, his guardian had provided a nonworking cellphone number, and so these attempts were unsuccessful.”
Nasir gave me the same number that he said he gave Bagram. It worked every time I called.
‘They’re Not Like Our Children’
A few months after the Ashura bombing, a new girl was admitted to the hospital and given the bed next to Gulali’s. She was roughly the same age, and they quickly became friends, staying up to talk at night after the nurses turned off the lights. Abeda was from Wardak Province, where her family lived in a small mud house about 50 meters from Highway 1, the critical connecting route between Kabul and Kandahar.
About a year ago, a convoy of Afghan government vehicles was passing by Abeda’s house when it came under attack. Afghan security contractors were escorting the convoy, Abeda told me, and when she stepped outside to see what was happening, one of the contractors shot her three times in the gut with a Kalashnikov. “When he shot me, everything came out of my stomach,” Abeda said. She remembers lying in her doorway, her brother yelling for their father. Then she was at Emergency.
Abeda remained in the hospital for a couple months before going home; in April she returned to Emergency to have her stoma closed and her intestine reconnected. While recovering, Abeda and Gulali spent their days wandering the hospital grounds: Gulali in a wheelchair, and Abeda pushing an aluminum stand with an IV bag. One day when I came to visit, Abeda was gone, and Gulali seemed depressed. Though they live maybe 30 minutes apart, it’s very unlikely the two girls will ever meet again. Gulali’s village straddles the border of Wardak Province, on the very edge of the small and increasingly isolated security bubble surrounding Kabul. The place where Abeda lives, just a few miles away, constitutes another world entirely.
Eventually Gulali went home as well. When her parents and uncles came to Emergency, they brought some of her old clothes with them. For the first time in months, she changed out of her hospital gown. It was the happiest I’d seen her.
I followed Gulali and her family back to their village. We stopped at the police post where Gulali was taken after her injury. The shallow stream ran nearby; Gulali’s mother pointed beyond it to the hill where Gulali had stepped on the mine. It seemed a very long way to be carried with a half-severed leg, and I was reminded of something Tijana Maricic, the head nurse at Emergency, said to me shortly after Gulali’s surgery: “They are different. They are really strong. They’re not like our children.”
A few weeks later, across the street from Emergency, a group of insurgents barricaded themselves in the upper floors of a half-constructed building and began firing into nearby foreign embassies. Afghan Special Forces quickly took up positions surrounding the building, including on a rooftop situated directly between Emergency and the gunmen. During the ensuing 18-hour battle numerous rounds impacted inside the hospital grounds. A physiotherapist was taking a shower when the shooting started, and before he could get out, a bullet pierced the bathroom door and slammed into the wall beside him. Luca Radaelli immediately began setting up a mass-casualty triage tent, just as he had done for the Ashura bombing, but abandoned the plan when bullets began loudly whizzing by his head. Another round hit the wall of the children’s ward, a few inches from a high glass window. Later, when the rocket-blasts and automatic salvos were in a frantic crescendo, a young boy stood on his bed and peered out of the window. He stood there craning his neck until someone yelled at him to get down. He wanted to see what was happening outside.
Four dead civilians and several wounded Afghan Special Forces soldiers were rushed into the hospital late in the afternoon. With nightfall, the fighting died down, only to start again with even greater intensity around 1 a.m. By dawn, when the last of the insurgents was killed, 27 wounded Afghans, mostly soldiers, were being treated at Emergency. Every one of them survived.
No one from the hospital slept that night, but the next day, new gunshot, shell and mine victims arrived from northern Afghanistan, and the staff went back to work.
Luke Mogelson is a contributing writer for the magazine based in Kabul. He last wrote about Marines fighting in Helmand Province.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By Missy Ryan | Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - On the eve of this weekend's NATO summit, the United States remains short of its goal of raising $1.3 billion in security funds from its partners in Afghanistan, after a money-raising blitz failed to garner immediate contributions from allies coping with fiscal and political pressures.
Who will pay for Afghanistan's future security will be central when President Barack Obama hosts leaders from NATO and other nations in his hometown of Chicago for the May 20-21 summit that will outline the Western path out of the long war.
"There was some hope that the kitty would be full by Chicago. That may not happen but it doesn't mean we won't achieve that goal in the future," a U.S. official said.
The United States is believed to be some $300 million to $500 million short of its goal.
"We expect a number of countries to pony up, and that's a sign of progress toward sustaining (Afghan forces) in the years to come," the official said.
Western nations, grappling with fiscal crisis and mindful of dwindling support for the war, are eager to chart a course out of Afghanistan, even as the Taliban continues to pose a serious threat to the weak, corrupt Afghan government.
Afghanistan's growing national police and army are at the core of NATO's strategy for removing most foreign troops by the end of 2014 without triggering the collapse of its Western-backed government.
Keeping those forces armed and fighting in a country still heavily reliant on outside aid will cost an estimated $4 billion a year. To supplement American assistance, the Obama administration is asking its allies to provide $1.3 billion annually of that.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, speaking in Brussels last month, said Chicago would not be a "pledging conference." But officials here had privately hoped to secure those commitments before the summit, which is seen as an opportunity for Obama to brandish his foreign policy achievements just months before the November elections.
With other earlier goals for Chicago - such as a once-hoped-for breakthrough in initial peace talks with the Taliban - on hold, a strong, clear outside commitment to funding Afghan forces takes on more importance for NATO leaders at the summit.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PLEDGES
Pledges made publicly and privately toward the goal now amount to $800 million to $1 billion. Of that Britain, Germany, and Australia have announced annual support for Afghan forces worth about $400 million combined.
In addition, the Afghan government has committed $500 million annually.
A NATO official told reporters in Kabul this week that the alliance "hopes" the $4.1 billion total goal can be met in Chicago.
While more support may be unveiled in the coming days, not all nations the United States has tapped have been ready.
France, whose new President Francois Hollande has promised to accelerate the French departure from Afghanistan, is not expected to make a commitment at Chicago. "Financial commitments cannot be made here," a French diplomatic source said.
"The U.S. in some ways under-estimated the complexity of the decision-making process in other capitals" in its push to raise that money, one Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
"Although most ISAF members agree properly funding (Afghan forces) is critical, in the current fiscal and political climate, any new funding commitment is subject to an extensive debate. This meant it took longer to raise the funds than the U.S. anticipated," the diplomat said.
Obama dispatched his special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, to European capitals this spring to press for commitments. But funding requests may have not been made to countries early enough.
"The economic problems in Europe and the United States, combined with the continued concerns about corruption inside of Afghanistan, makes it an uphill battle to get countries to make long-term commitments on funding for Afghanistan," said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Japan, another important ally that will host a conference on aid to Afghanistan this summer, has not yet come forward. Neither have key Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Even though the scenarios under consideration would cost the United States far less than it now spends in Afghanistan, the Obama administration itself will not be immune to pushback from its skeptical U.S. lawmakers, Katulis said.
The U.S. official said funding goals were expected to be met eventually.
"Everyone understands the stakes," the official said. "It would be a serious mistake to abandon Afghanistan like it was abandoned in 1989. We have a responsibility to support (Afghan forces)."
(Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris; Editing by Warren Strobel and Vicki Allen)
House OKs continued war in Afghanistan
By DONNA CASSATA | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House endorsed the continued war in Afghanistan on Thursday despite acknowledgment from Republicans and Democrats that the American people are war-weary after more than a decade of conflict.
By a vote of 303-113, lawmakers rejected an amendment that would have swiftly ended combat operations in Afghanistan by limiting funds only to the "safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors from Afghanistan."
More than 10 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, American public support for the overseas conflict has deteriorated. An Associated Press-GfK poll released last week showed that backing for the war has hit a new low and is on par with support for the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. Only 27 percent of Americans say they support the war effort, and 66 percent oppose it, according to the survey.
"The American people are far ahead of Congress," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., sponsor of the amendment, who called on Congress to stand squarely with the American people. "It's past time to end the war and bring the troops home."
Opponents of the amendment conceded that the public has grown tired of war, but they argued against a precipitous withdrawal.
"If we leave too early and the Taliban and al-Qaida return, more Americans will suffer," Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said.
The vote came as the House considered a $642 billion defense budget for next year, debating more than 140 amendments to the far-reaching legislation. Final passage of the measure was expected Friday.
Rather than a speedy withdrawal from Afghanistan, the spending blueprint calls for keeping a sizable number of U.S. combat troops in the country. The bill cites significant uncertainty in Afghanistan about U.S. military support and says that to reduce the uncertainty and promote stability the president should "maintain a force of at least 68,000 troops through Dec. 31, 2014, unless fewer forces can achieve United States objectives."
The United States currently has 88,000 troops there. President Barack Obama envisions a final withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in 2014. Earlier this month, he signed an agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the role of America forces in counterterrorism and training of the Afghan military. The president insisted that the U.S. combat role was winding down.
In a series of votes late Thursday, the Republican-controlled House narrowly passed an amendment preventing federal agencies from requiring contractors to sign project labor agreements to secure federal contracts. The agreements require contractors to negotiate with union officials, recognize union wages and generally abide by collective-bargaining agreements. The vote was 211-209.
Clamoring for fiscal austerity, House Republicans backed deficit-cutting legislation last summer that calls for a $487 billion cut in projected defense spending over 10 years. They abandoned that plan in March, embracing a budget that adds billions of dollars for the military while slashing funds for some safety-net programs for the poor.
The $642 billion spending blueprint — $8 billion more than last year's agreement — provides funds for aircraft, ships, weapons, the war in Afghanistan and a 1.7 percent pay raise for military personnel. The House Armed Services Committee, in crafting its version of the budget, snubbed the Pentagon and military leaders on a range of issues, rejecting calls for another round of domestic base closings and increases in monthly health care premiums for working-age military retirees.
Health care costs have skyrocketed for the military, rising from around $19 billion in 2001 to more than $53 billion in recent years. The Pentagon has estimated that the premium hike — ranging from $35 to $140 per month — would save the military more than $12 billion over 10 years. But one of the most powerful constituencies, the network of veterans groups and retired generals, has lobbied lawmakers to prevent any increase.
The House's action on the budget has divided Republicans.
In a statement Thursday, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said that if the House is serious about cutting the deficit, it can show its commitment by not passing "a final highway bill, postal bill or any other bill that would violate the Budget Control Act" — last summer's deficit-cutting pact between Obama and Congress.
Republicans used the House bill to make an election-year argument that they're stronger on defense than the president.
They backed construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says is unnecessary, saved aircraft and ships slated for cost-saving retirement, and slowed planned reductions in the Army and Marine Corps. They added millions of dollars for nuclear weapons and restricted the president's ability to reduce the nuclear stockpile under a treaty with Russia that the Senate ratified in December 2010.
Still fighting Obama's long-settled decision to allow gays to serve openly in the military, the bill would bar same-sex marriages on military installations.
"Welcome to the world of manufactured crisis," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters in criticizing the provision as unnecessary.
The political challenges embodied in the bill are unlikely to survive. The White House has threatened to veto the legislation, citing a long list of objections. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has slammed the bill and lawmakers for protecting their pet projects. The Democratic-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to jettison many of the provisions in its version of the budget. The committee meets next week to write its bill.
The GOP effort to make Obama's national security record an issue in the campaign has gotten little traction. Opinion surveys show Americans give the president high marks on defense after the killing of Osama bin Laden, repeated drone attacks against suspected terrorists and a weakened al-Qaida, and an end to the Iraq war.
The House planned to debate the remaining amendments throughout the night Thursday, including one that would end the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects, even American citizens, captured on U.S. soil.
The issue has proved highly divisive for both parties.
"The president right now has the authority to go outside and lock somebody up indefinitely," said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. "It's an extraordinary amount of power to give the executive branch."
Smith and several tea party Republicans back an amendment that would bar indefinite detention without charge or trial of suspected terrorists and roll back the military custody requirement. Last year, Congress passed and Obama reluctantly signed a defense bill that included the provision allowing indefinite detention.
Thornberry, the Texas Republican, argued that the amendment would give terror suspects full constitutional rights.
"As soon as a member of al-Qaida sets foot on U.S. soil, they hear you have the right to remain silent," he said during debate.
Smith pointed out that the Constitution grants all persons due process. "Your beef is with James Madison," Smith said.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in New York struck down as unconstitutional the portion of the defense law that gives the government broad powers to regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.
Kabul Urges Islamabad Against Mass Expulsion
Ayaz Gul May 17, 2012 VOA
ISLAMABAD -- Afghanistan is urging authorities in neighboring Pakistan to abandon plans to expel tens of thousands of unregistered Afghan migrants from the country.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates there are currently 1.7 million registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan, but local officials say tens of thousands of others are residing in the country illegally.
The government of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan, says around 400,000 unregistered Afghans reside in the provincial capital, Peshawar, alone.
Last month, the provincial government ordered all unregistered migrants to pack up and go back to Afghanistan by May 25, blaming them for the worsening security situation in the city, where Taliban militants have carried out frequent attacks.
Authorities have vowed to launch a police crackdown after the deadline to roundup the illegal immigrants and hand them over to Afghan authorities on the border.
Afghanistan's ambassador to Islamabad, Omar Daudzai, says the Kabul has serious concerns about the decision and wants Pakistani officials to cancel the plan.
"They should review the deadline, and we should hold bilateral talks and come up with a joint plan for a dignified, voluntary and orderly return of the Afghan refugees," he said.
Forced repatriation, he added, creates room for police to harass Afghan refugees irrespective of legal status.
"We want our Afghan refugees to come back to our country, but not on the basis of expulsion," he said. "Whether they are registered or not registered, for [the Afghan government] they are the same, and we have to deal with them in the same way."
Afghanistan's economic, education and health conditions, although improved, aren't sufficient to absorb the large number of returning refugees a mass expulsion would generate.
"We from the Afghan side should do more to provide them with shelter when they return, or at least allocate them a piece of land where they can build shelter for themselves," he said.
Daudzai said a high-level Afghan delegation led by the minister for returning refugees is expected to arrive in Islamabad to discuss the issue with Pakistani officials.
UNHCR officials requesting anonymity said Pakistan like any other country has the right to control who enters their country, or whether they are allowed to stay.
The United Nations will be concerned, they said, only if those sent back are registered Afghan refugees to whom the deadline does not pertain.
Pakistan blew its chance for security
The Washington Post By David Ignatius May 17, 2012
As America begins to pull back its troops from Afghanistan, one consequence gets little notice but is likely to have lasting impact: Pakistan is losing the best chance in its history to gain political control over all of its territory — including the warlike tribal areas along the frontier.
Pakistan has squandered the opportunity presented by having a large U.S.-led army just over the border in Afghanistan. Rather than work with the United States to stabilize a lawless sanctuary full of warlords and terrorists, the Pakistanis decided to play games with these outlaw groups. As a result, Pakistan and its neighbors will be less secure, probably for decades.
This is a catastrophic mistake for Pakistan. Instead of drawing the tribal areas into a nation that finally, for the first time since independence in 1947, could be integrated and unified, the Pakistani military decided to keep the ethnic pot boiling. It was a triumph of short-term thinking over long-term; of scheming over strategy.
America has made many blunders in Afghanistan, which will have their own consequences. But U.S. problems are modest compared with those of Pakistan, which nearly 65 years after independence still doesn’t have existential security as a nation. Like most big mistakes people make in life, this is one that Pakistan’s military leaders made with their eyes wide open.
The Group of Eight and NATO will hold summits in the coming days and announce the exit strategy from Afghanistan. Fortunately, President Obama is planning a gradual transition, with at least 20,000 U.S. troops remaining until 2024, if necessary, to train the Afghan army, hunt al-Qaeda and steady Afghans against the danger of civil war.
But what can Western leaders say when it comes to Pakistan? Basically, the Pakistanis blew it. By playing a hedging game, they missed a moment that’s not likely to return, when a big Western army of well over 100,000 soldiers was prepared to help them. Instead, Islamabad used the inevitability that America would be leaving eventually as an argument for creating a buffer zone that was inhabited by a murderous melange of the Taliban, the Haqqani network and other Pashtun warlords.
Yes, it would have been hard to bring under Pakistani law the rebellious badlands known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. I have a shelf full of books describing how the process of pacification eluded the British raj and was gingerly handed over to the new government of Pakistan like a bag of snakes. But hard is not impossible — especially when you have modern communications and transportation and the most potent army in history ready to help.
What comes through reading these old books is how long the problem has persisted. A 1901 British “Report on Waziristan and Its Tribes” lists the tribes, clans and sub-clans the British were paying off more than a century ago through their political agents, rather than risk a fight with these stubborn warriors. After their disastrous Afghan wars, the British decided that payoffs made more sense than shootouts — a decision the Pakistanis have repeated ever since, at the price of permanent insecurity.
The notion of the tribal areas as a warrior kingdom, impenetrable to outsiders, has a romantic “Orientalist” tone. I was disabused of it in 2009 when I met a group of younger tribal leaders who had gathered in Islamabad to tell U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke that the region needed economic development, good governance and less hanky-panky from the central government. In a move that embodied everything that’s wrong with the Pakistani approach, these brave young men were intercepted on the way home by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and quizzed about why they had dared talk to the farangi.
Surely the most foolish move the Pakistanis made was to compromise with the terrorist Haqqani network, which operates from its base in Miran Shah, a few hundred yards from a Pakistani military garrison. This was like playing with a cobra — something the Pakistanis seem to imagine is an essential part of regional realpolitik. No, you kill a cobra. If the ISI had been up to the task, it would have had some formidable snake-killing allies.
The Pakistanis lost a chance over the past decade to build and secure their country. It won’t come back again in this form. That’s a small problem for the United States and its allies, but a big problem for Pakistan. What a shame to see a wonderful nation miss its moment so completely.
davidignatius@washpost.com
Two NATO Troops Killed In Afghan Attack
May 18, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Two NATO soldiers have been killed in a suspected militant rocket attack in eastern Afghanistan.
An Afghan official told the AFP news agency that six other soldiers serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force were wounded in the attack on their base in Nari district of eastern Kunar Province.
The NATO-led force has confirmed that two service members were killed in an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan.
The nationalities of the soldiers were not immediately available.
The latest attack came a day after gunmen dressed in Afghan police uniforms and wearing suicide explosives vests stormed a government compound in the southwestern province of Farah, killing seven people and wounding 12 others.
So far this year, 154 NATO members have been reported killed in the Afghan conflict.
Based on reporting by AFP and AP
Afghan insurgent attacks down: A sign of widening Taliban fractures?
An independent monitoring group says insurgent attacks in Afghanistan are down 43 percent compared with this time last year.
By Tom A. Peter | Christian Science Monitor – Thu, May 17, 2012
Afghan and NATO leaders will gather in Chicago this weekend to discuss the future of security in Afghanistan as international troops prepare to end combat operations in 2014.
Throughout the past decade, international conferences about the Afghan conflict like this one have become a fixture on the international political landscape, though often producing opaque results.
Unlike past summits, however, the Chicago conference represents the first time such an event takes place amid a reduction in violence – a 43 percent drop of insurgent attacks, according to a report released last month by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office.
ANSO called the drop in attacks the “first reliable indicator that the conflict may be entering a period of regression after years of sustained, and compounded, growth by all actors in the field.”
It remains unclear if this decline will stick. As the US pushes for a negotiated settlement to end the war, the Taliban has shown signs of increasing division. The ensuing fragmentation of the group could be behind the drop in violence, in which case the present calm remains extremely fragile.
RELATED Afghanistan 5 areas of concern as the US leaves
The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office logged the 43 percent decrease in insurgent initiated attacks for the first quarter of 2012 as compared to the same period last year. The organization’s security reports are considered among some of the most reliable. Over the past year, they’ve been at odds with American and international military statistics that tracked a downturn in violence while ANSO recorded increases.
Still, many Afghan leaders are cautious.
“Fewer attacks don’t mean that the Taliban left the areas and that’s why their attacks have decreased,” says Ali Akbar Qasimi, a former Afghan Army general and a member of parliament from Ghazni province. He says that the Taliban and other insurgent groups remain active in many areas. Though members of the group may not be carrying out attacks, they often intimidate locals and impose their ultra-traditional views on rural communities.
The report also warns that a continued upsurge in criminality and the growth of irregular militias may present new problems for Afghanistan even if the downward trend of insurgent violence continues.
Widening fissures
The drop in attacks comes at a time when there appears to be widening fissures among the Taliban due to internal disagreements about whether to negotiate with the US.
Earlier this month, 25 prominent members of the Taliban were reportedly executed by the organization for talking to the US without authorization.
Additionally, a Taliban splinter group known as the Mullah Dadullah Front carried out the assassination of Maulvi Arsala Rahmani, a senior member of the Afghan High Peace Council, last Sunday allegedly outside the knowledge and control of the central Taliban organization.
“Maybe it’s because of the negotiation process that the Taliban is divided in parts,” says Naqeebullah, a former Afghan Army general who now serves as a member of parliament for Laghman Province. Like many Afghans he only uses one name. “This decrease in attacks might be because of the internal problems inside the Taliban. Whenever they have problems or disagreements inside, normally the attacks would get suspended for a short time or decrease.”
The distance between the Taliban foot soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and their leadership, believed to be mostly in Pakistan, has grown in recent years. Those fighting in Afghanistan sustain the vast majority of losses and have reportedly become embittered with the leadership hiding in Pakistan who is not exposed to the same level of danger.
The group's mid-level leadership has been particularly hard hit by Afghan and international operations. Last year, international forces conducted 2,200 night operations, which traditionally target the Taliban and insurgent group commanders. In 83 percent of those raids, soldiers managed to kill or capture their primary target or an associated insurgent.
'Not a monolithic movement'
“The Taliban itself is not a monolithic movement and there are so many local and regional powers. Some of them for their own reasons may have entered in tactical level talks, maybe to free some people or get a good deal for their own local forces,” says Jim Phillips, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “They see a lot more risk in continuing the war; it’s a personal risk for them. They’re a lot more malleable and willing to engage, if only for local ceasefires.”
This willingness to broker deals at the local level could create room to reduce fighting. However, there are other Taliban fighters inside Afghanistan who have vowed to continue fighting even if their leadership brokers a peace deal with foreign fighters.
"We’ve wanted an Islamic government in Afghanistan and we will not stop fighting for this," says Salih Mohammad Akhund, a Taliban fighter in Helmand. "If the Taliban leadership puts any conditions on the negotiations with others, they should come first to us and ask us what we want and ask us if we accept the Afghan constitution or if we don’t accept some of its articles. Those who fight want Islamic law, and right now in Afghanistan there is not Islamic law."
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The Long Road out of Afghanistan
The challenges of getting military materiel out of the country by 2014 are forcing the U.S. to make some unlikely bedfellows.
Wall Street Journal By CON COUGHLIN May 17, 2012
As the Obama administration makes plans to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, it faces the crucial question of how to get its equipment and material out of the landlocked country. Transportation experts estimate that the U.S. military will need to ship around 100,000 containers of materiel and vehicles as it completes its withdrawal.
But after the recent souring of U.S. relations with Pakistan, which had served as the American military's principal supply route into Afghanistan, the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan is emerging as a key player in America's withdrawal strategy. This weekend a high-level government delegation from Uzbekistan is traveling to Washington, a visit that will highlight the enormous challenges the Obama administration is facing as it seeks to withdraw its vast military infrastructure.
It is now more than 10 years since American soldiers first deployed to Afghanistan, and the U.S. military has accumulated a mountain of equipment and supplies in the country, as have the other 30 or so countries that have contributed to NATO's International Security Assistance Force. Most of that equipment entered the country from Pakistan, where it was unloaded at the port of Karachi before being transferred by road through forbidding mountain passes to Afghanistan.
But relations between Washington and Pakistan have deteriorated sharply since last year, when U.S. officials decided not to inform Islamabad about the raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad. Tensions deepened after U.S. forces accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in a border skirmish last November.
Islamabad responded by closing all border crossings between Pakistan and Afghanistan. While Washington is hopeful the border will eventually be reopened, Pentagon planners have decided they need to look at alternative exit routes to ensure they are not held to ransom by the Pakistanis. A senior British official recently told me that Pakistan demanded that Britain pay around $2 billion into the pension fund of the Pakistani military before it would agree to reopen the transit routes. Similar demands have been made of other countries contributing to the NATO mission.
One attempt to resolve the border issue before this weekend's NATO summit in Chicago failed yesterday, when the Pakistani military demanded that Washington pay more than $1 billion in unpaid aid to the country before it would agree to a deal.
The security of the Pakistani routes is another concern. Canadian officials say that when they withdrew the bulk of their equipment from Afghanistan last year, an estimated 25% of their equipment went missing while in transit through Pakistan.
This has led Washington to look for alternatives. One that is being actively explored is to make better use of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), the overland supply route that passes through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and is currently being used to deliver fuel and non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan from Europe. America and its NATO allies want to negotiate a "reverse transiting agreement" with the Central Asian republics through which the NDN passes.
Uzbekistan would be a key cog in this network. A recently built 80-kilometer rail link from Uzbekistan to the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif has been transporting about half of the U.S. military's supplies into the country since Pakistan closed its border crossings.
Yet for many years the regime of Uzbek President Islam Karimov has been the subject of sharp criticism from the U.S. State Department for its human-rights record. As part of Washington's charm offensive to improve relations with the Uzbek government ahead of the Afghan withdrawal, the Obama administration decided last September to waive congressional restrictions on assistance to Tashkent, including on military aid.
That was followed last October by Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, making the first high-ranking visit to Tashkent by a U.S. official. At the same time, President Obama made a personal telephone call to Mr. Karimov to discuss ways of improving relations between the two countries.
During her visit, Mrs. Clinton gingerly raised the issue of human-rights abuses, but the main focus of the mission was to secure guarantees from the Uzbeks of their continued cooperation in keeping the supply routes open. Mr. Karimov told Mrs. Clinton that many of the human-rights accusations leveled against his country had been distorted by opposition activists, and that since the Sept. 11 attacks, Uzbekistan had been a reliable ally of the West in fighting Islamist terrorism. The country has suffered several Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks of its own, prompting a nationwide crackdown on Islamist extremists.
There will be supporters of Mr. Obama who argue that the president is undermining his commitment to human-rights issues by cozying up to Central Asian autocrats such as Mr. Karimov. A more constructive way of looking at the Uzbek delegation's historic visit would be to see it as an opportunity to persuade the other former Soviet-occupied republics to build a deeper relationship with the West.
But whichever way you look at it, the enormous challenges America and its allies face in undertaking an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan prove the old adage that it is far easier to start a war than to end one. —Mr. Coughlin is the Daily Telegraph's executive foreign editor.
What to do about Afghanistan
By John Kerry Chicago Tribune May 17, 2012
It wasn't long ago that skeptics questioned whether NATO had a future at all in the post-Cold War era, let alone in the difficult period of the Iraq invasion that revealed old fissures in the alliance.
But NATO has already confounded its skeptics. During the past year in Libya, the alliance demonstrated an ability to adapt to meet a new challenge with great speed and effectiveness.
In Chicago, though, the great looming question will be the alliance's ability to meet not just new challenges, but to resolve an old one: a war in Afghanistan that has lasted more than a decade.
The signing of the strategic partnership agreement this month signaled the gradual transition from a war-fighting posture to a supportive role.
NATO allies must now reaffirm their commitment to the long-term security of Afghanistan and send a powerful and unified message. The 10-year, legally binding agreement is a major step forward in winding down the war without "losing" Afghanistan. It means America's relationship with the Afghans — in ways they trust — is changing, not ending. NATO's relationship with Afghanistan must undergo a similarly constructive and positive transformation — for the long-term.
Understandably, Americans and NATO allies are increasingly wary of making long-term commitments in a volatile region so far from home. But I also believe the free world understands that a premature departure would jeopardize the chances for a responsible transition.
Consider the implications of a precipitous departure driven by antipathy to the current war dynamic. It could pave the way for a Taliban return to power against our most fundamental security interests, since that is how al-Qaidagained a foothold in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Allowing them to return would not only threaten our long-term interests, but also increase the risk of conflagration where the world can least afford it — next door in nuclear Pakistan. It would also threaten Central Asian states, Russia, India and Iran, sparking regional conflicts that would undermine our security and call into question our credibility throughout the region and beyond.
We know the difficult history that led to decades of war in Afghanistan, and the unintended consequences of the free world's abandonment after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Many Afghans, fearing a second abandonment, had been hedging their bets and cutting deals to secure the gains they had made this past decade. As Afghans explained to me — quite wisely — they can tolerate risk, but not uncertainty.
That is why NATO must assure Afghans that the alliance is not going to abandon their investment in a stable Afghanistan.
In the end, all the recent military gains will mean nothing if we lose sight of the major challenges that remain.
First, the Haqqani network and other insurgents finding refuge in western Pakistan remain a critical challenge to security there and across the border in Afghanistan. Pakistan has a key role to play in freezing their activity and working closely with Afghanistan and the international community to find a political settlement to end the war. Pakistanis have serious doubts about our long-term intentions and fear our withdrawal will create a political and security vacuum that threatens their interests. We have to work with Pakistan to alleviate their concerns while making clear that the issues of safe havens and political reconciliation must be resolved.
Second, corruption remains a serious problem in Afghanistan. While nobody expects Afghanistan to become a Jeffersonian democracy, improving governance and fighting corruption will be critical for the Afghan government to continue receiving international aid and establishing legitimacy in the eyes of its people.
Finally, Afghans must start preparing now for presidential elections in 2014. These elections will determine Afghanistan's political destiny. If the elections are not free and fair, everything could come unraveled. We cannot repeat the mistakes I saw firsthand in the 2009 elections, when controversy marred everything from voter registration and electoral rolls to ballot boxes and the final count. What Afghanistan needs is a truly independent electoral commission selected with transparency and accountability. The international community can help by supporting the technical process without interfering in domestic politics.
What happens in Afghanistan will affect the future of the broader region and shape NATO's legacy. I've seen NATO's single largest present-day commitment, and let me tell you: NATO's support for training and funding Afghan security forces after 2014 will be critical to their long-term success.
In 2001, Afghanistan was the right war in the right place at the right time. Now we must all work to achieve that war's right ending at the right time. NATO must do its part.
U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee.
Gass Warns Pakistan to Be Reasonable in Reopening Nato Supply Route
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 17 May 2012
Nato's Civilian Representative in Afghanistan Simon Gass warned Pakistan to be realistic after news reports suggested it would seek as much as $5000 per container in transit fees via its soon-to-be reopened supply route into Afghanistan.
Gass noted that he was not one of the negotiators involved in reopening the route, but urged Pakistan to be reasonable.
"What I would say is this, that Pakistan would have to be realistic in terms of its expectations of its partners," he said in an interview on TOLOnews' Kankash programme Thursday.
"The truth is that the supply lines have been closed for six months but it hasn't really affected our operations. We have other ways of getting supplies in and out of Afghanistan. We would very much have liked to reopen the supply lines into Afghanistan but the terms would have to be reasonable."
Top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan General John Allen said Thursday that there are clear signs that Pakistan is preparing to re-open the cross-border Nato supply route to Afghanistan in the near future.
Allen said through a video teleconference that the route's reopening could play a vital role in improving relations between Pakistani, Nato, US, and the regional countries.
"There have been in the last several days some very important signals coming out of Islamabad that there is a consideration to re-open the ground lines of communication, and we, frankly, would welcome that, we would applaud that decision," he said.
Despite the route being closed for six months, Allen also said it had not slowed down Nato's mission in Afghanistan with air shipments and the northern supply route through Russia filling the gaps.
"I will tell you the effect of the closure of that route on the campaign has not slowed us at all," he said. "The air bridge into Afghanistan and the flow of materiel across the Northern Distribution Network were modulated in a way that continued to support the campaign in every operational respect."
Pakistan closed the route after a Nato strike mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26 last year.
Allen also said that a reopened Nato supply route through Pakistan will not be only effective for bringing materials into Afghanistan, but also could be important to the flow of materials out of Afghanistan.
"It would, in fact, be helpful to us if the ground lines of communication were opened, not just because of what could flow into Afghanistan but what could flow out of Afghanistan," he added.
Pakistan will ask at least $5,000 per truck crossing the border through Afghanistan, according to a report published by the Associated Press.
The Christian Science Monitor reported that Pakistan will ask for $1,500 to 1,800 per truck travelling through the Nato supply route, amounting to almost $1 million per day. Estimates suggest Nato traffic in and out of Afghanistan through Pakistan may be as many as 600 trucks a day between now and the end of next year.
The reports said Pakistan seeks these fees to cover the cost of security for the supply trucks and assist in rapid clearance of customs and border crossings.
Before the closures, more than 70 percent of Nato's supplies in Afghanistan - mainly paid for and used by the US - traveled over land from Pakistan's port in Karachi.
Pakistan's Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said that reopening the supply route was in the interests of Pakistan, according to Pakistan's Geo News.
She also said that Nato supplies are not only related to Pakistan and US but it was linked to more than 50 nations.
"Restoration of Nato supplies is in the interest of Pakistan. There is no hidden agreement behind the reopening of Nato routes. It will be done in accordance with the Parliamentary resolution," she said.
Afghan forces now face a threat from NATO
The Washington Post
By Ronald E. Neumann and Michael O’Hanlon Opinions Friday, May 18, 2012
Ronald E. Neumann was the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 through 2007 and is the author of “The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan.” Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and is most recently the co-author of “Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy.”
KABUL - Underappreciated amid all the frustrations, losses and tragedies of the United States’ longest war is some good news: Afghanistan’s army and police are improving substantially. To be sure, they still suffer from politicization at senior levels, and they have a long way to go on the battlefield. But their progress has been real. Their numbers are growing; ethnic balance is reasonably good; and they are leading some 40 percent of operations on the ground (albeit mostly the simpler ones).
Yet as NATO leaders prepare to gather in Chicago, where the war in Afghanistan will be Topic A, there is a growing presumption that, shortly after NATO finishes building up the Afghan security forces, we should start dismantling them. Allegedly because of binding budgetary constraints, a force that will soon reach its combined goal of 352,000 uniformed personnel (not counting intelligence services or community-watch organizations known as Afghan Local Police) may be quickly cut back to the suspiciously precise number of 228,500, starting around 2015.
This plan has not been formally proposed by the Afghan government nor by NATO, yet it is a presumption that’s growing among leaders in Europe and the United States about where we are headed. It would save about $2.5 billion a year, bringing the expected costs of sustaining the Afghan army and police down from $6.6 billion to $4.1 billion annually. In fairness, having a specific target such as $4.1 billion would help the United States elicit pledges from other allies for supporting the Afghan state in future years and would help the Afghans to concentrate on responsibilities they must shoulder. But it should not be viewed as a firm ceiling on what is likely to be required in the future. In fact, it is more like a floor.
The savings of $2.5 billion a year from this downsizing pales next to the roughly $100 billion annually that the United States alone has been devoting to the Afghan mission during the Obama presidency. It would be a false economy in the extreme to risk losing a war — and risk needing to keep more U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 2015 on than might otherwise be required — just to reach an artificially defined goal on an arbitrary timetable for Afghanistan’s own security forces.
That goal, 228,500, came from NATO command here in Kabul. But it was one of several postures on a notional future force that was introduced a few months ago for planning purposes. It correlates with one specific threat environment — namely, the assumption of a much-weakened insurgency. Enemy-initiated attacks in Afghanistan are down some 20 percent nationwide, according to the International Security Assistance Force here, relative to peak levels of a year or two ago — a decline led by major progress in the south and a leveling-off of violence in the country’s center, north and west. Yet, the Taliban and related groups hardly seem to be on the ropes. They remain particularly vigorous in eastern Afghanistan, where the infamous Haqqani network operates; even in the south they will surely try to mount a comeback over the next couple of years.
NATO’s exit plan for its main combat forces over the next 30 months is focused on further weakening the insurgency without any presumption that we can defeat it in that time. Even after 2014, it is only prudent to assume that the insurgency will continue, especially in certain rural areas in the south and east.
Against such a resilient enemy, an Afghan security force totaling fewer than a quarter-million soldiers and police would be quite modest. Even if aided by 10,000 to 20,000 NATO troops after 2014, as seems likely under the recently signed Strategic Partnership Agreement between the United States and Afghanistan, it would be hard-pressed to hold off a dedicated Taliban. Consider:
●In Iraq, a country of similar population size, Iraqi army and police forces total 670,000.
●In Afghanistan today, combined NATO and Afghan forces exceed 400,000 troops.
●Counterinsurgency doctrine, based on experience from many previous cases, suggests that in a country of 30 million, like Afghanistan, as many as 600,000 soldiers and police officers could be required.
It is possible that a much smaller Afghan force will indeed suffice within a few years. But it is also possible that will not be the case. It makes no sense to guarantee the enemy a date certain for downsizing our ally.
NATO officials understand this, but their public messaging risks making many lawmakers and others in Europe and the United States feel that the major downsizing can already be counted upon. And many Afghans are worried about yet another sign that a war-weary NATO will not do what it takes to bring this difficult mission to a reasonably successful conclusion. If Afghans lose heart in their future, the chances of civil war and mission failure will grow.
In Chicago this weekend, while recommitting their forces to a gradual, careful withdrawal, NATO officials also need to make clear that reducing Afghan forces in the coming years is a hope — and not a binding plan.
Afghanistan, detention issue divide lawmakers
By DONNA CASSATA | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Coalitions of House Democrats and tea partyers pushed to speed up President Barack Obama's withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and end the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects, even American citizens, captured on U.S. soil.
The issues proved highly divisive for both parties Thursday as the House considered a $642 billion defense budget for next year. Debate on more than 140 amendments to the bill repeatedly centered on the detention issue.
"The president right now has the authority to go outside and lock somebody up indefinitely," said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee. "It's an extraordinary amount of power to give the executive branch."
Smith and several tea party Republicans back an amendment that would bar indefinite detention without charge or trial of suspected terrorists and roll back the military custody requirement. Last year, Congress passed and Obama reluctantly signed a defense bill that included the provision allowing indefinite detention.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, argued that the amendment would give terrorist suspects full constitutional rights.
"As soon as a member of al-Qaida sets foot on U.S. soil, they hear you have the right to remain silent," he said during debate.
Smith pointed out that the Constitution grants all persons due process. "You're beef is with James Madison," Smith said.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in New York struck down as unconstitutional the portion of the defense law that gives the government broad powers to regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.
Public support for the Afghanistan war has deteriorated. An Associated Press-GfK poll released last week showed that backing for the war has hit a new low and is on par with support for the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. Only 27 percent of Americans say they back the war effort, and 66 percent oppose it, according to the survey.
The House bill suggests that the president should maintain a force of 68,000 in Afghanistan through 2014. The House was weighing an amendment to limit money for the war to the "safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors from Afghanistan."
The current level of troops in the country is 88,000.
Clamoring for fiscal austerity, House Republicans backed deficit-cutting legislation last summer that calls for a $487 billion cut in projected defense spending over 10 years. They abandoned that plan in March, embracing a budget that adds billions of dollars for the military while slashing funds for safety-net programs for the poor.
The $642 billion spending blueprint — $8 billion more than last year's agreement — provides funds for aircraft, ships, weapons, the war in Afghanistan and a 1.7 percent pay raise for military personnel. The House Armed Services Committee, in crafting its version of the budget, snubbed the Pentagon and military leaders on a range of issues, rejecting calls for another round of domestic base closings and increases in monthly health care premiums for working-age military retirees.
Health care costs have skyrocketed for the military, rising from around $19 billion in 2001 to more than $53 billion in recent years. The Pentagon has estimated that the premium hike — ranging from $35 to $140 per month — would save the military more than $12 billion over 10 years. But one of the most powerful constituencies, the network of veterans groups and retired generals, has lobbied lawmakers to prevent any increase.
The House's action on the budget has divided Republicans.
In a statement Thursday, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said that if the House is serious about cutting the deficit, it can show its commitment by not passing "a final highway bill, postal bill or any other bill that would violate the Budget Control Act" — last summer's deficit-cutting pact between President Barack Obama and Congress.
Republicans used the House bill to make an election-year argument that they're stronger on defense than Obama.
They backed construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says is unnecessary, saved aircraft and ships slated for cost-saving retirement, and slowed planned reductions in the Army and Marine Corps. They added millions of dollars for nuclear weapons and restricted the president's ability to reduce the nuclear stockpile under a treaty with Russia that the Senate ratified in December 2010.
Still fighting Obama's long-settled decision to allow gays to serve openly in the military, the bill would bar same-sex marriages on military installations.
"Welcome to the world of manufactured crisis," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters in criticizing the provision as unnecessary.
The political challenges embodied in the bill are unlikely to survive. The White House has threatened to veto the legislation, citing a long list of objections. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has slammed the bill and lawmakers for protecting their pet projects. The Democratic-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to jettison many of the provisions in its version of the budget. The committee meets next week to write its bill.
The GOP effort to make Obama's national security record an issue in the campaign has gotten little traction. Opinion surveys show Americans give the president high marks on defense after the killing of Osama bin Laden, repeated drone attacks against suspected terrorists and a weakened al-Qaida, and an end to the Iraq war.
On joint U.S.-Afghan mission, balancing suspicion and ambition
By Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post
SPINA, Afghanistan — When night came, after long hours in the desert, the Afghan troops poured into a one-story schoolhouse and sprawled out on the floor. Outside, the Americans were still crammed in their mine-resistant vehicles, gauging the risks of sleeping next to their partners.
“All it takes is one bad guy. That’s all I’m saying,” said one soldier during the mission last month in eastern Afghanistan’s Paktika province. “I’m not crazy enough to sleep in there.”
Just two weeks earlier, Sgt. William “Billy” Wilson III had been shot and killed by a rogue Afghan police officer. That incident prompted some men in his battalion to question whether the U.S.-Afghan partnership in their corner of the country might soon give out. Some of Wilson’s friends secretly hoped that it would.
But U.S. commanders went out of their way to assure both American and Afghan soldiers that the partnership would not — could not — waiver, despite 20 incidents of fratricide so far this year. They mourned Wilson. They lectured their men on the Taliban’s efforts to weaken the alliance. And they planned a joint mission to Spina that would affirm their commitment and trust in the wake of tragedy.
“We tell them, ‘This is how the enemy tries to drive a wedge between us,’ ” said Capt. Jim Perkins, Wilson’s former commander. “We can’t let them succeed.”
The “shock absorbency” of the U.S.-Afghan relationship, some American officials say, has also kept Afghan soldiers from abandoning the partnership after NATO personnel burned dozens of Korans on a military base, and after U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly killed 17 civilians in Kandahar. The relationship in the field appears to have reached a stasis in which isolated betrayals don’t threaten to undermine broader progress, they say.
That relationship has in Paktika become a transactional one, with Afghan forces dealing directly with Afghan villagers and Americans handling the operational logistics and much of the intelligence gathering.
Spina is considered one of the most significant Taliban strongholds in the region — a common stopover for insurgents on their way to and from Pakistan. There is no regular American or Afghan security presence in the village. It’s so unstable that even the district sub-governor — Spina’s ostensible conduit to the capital, Kabul — hasn’t visited in five years. He lives nearly 10 miles away.
A ground mission would force Afghan and American soldiers closer together — on the same patrols and into the same makeshift bases. Col. Curtis Taylor announced the mission days before Wilson was buried, before writing a eulogy which included a line that reflected the blow just endured by the 172nd Brigade: “His death hit this task force like a hurricane.”
Taylor was adamant that the storm not consume his battalion’s primary goal of extending the reach of the Afghan security forces. He said the mission would be “Afghan-led” — a term that U.S. military officials use to suggest the long-term sustainability of the decade-long war effort, which will soon be inherited by this country’s soldiers and policemen.
But to some of the U.S. battalion’s soldiers, that meant putting their lives in the hands of men who they couldn’t trust. Wilson’s death was still fresh when they packed in their armored vehicles last month and followed the Afghan army through the winding mountain passes that give way to Spina.
“You have to trust the Afghans, but you also have to protect your men,” said Perkins. “There is a residual concern to watch your back after these incidents.”
There was also some confusion about what “Afghan-led” really meant.
“How many of my men do you need?” asked Col. Safai Mirwais, the head of the Afghan battalion partnered with Taylor’s.
“It’s your mission,” Taylor responded. “You tell me how many of my men you need.”
Taylor looks the part of the quintessential American soldier: broad-shouldered and impeccably uniformed. Mirwais traipses up the mountains of Paktika with a round belly and tattered black dress shoes.
When the military vehicles rumbled into Spina, Afghans and Americans were synchronized but separate. The Americans handed over intelligence reports to Afghan soldiers who then searched the homes of suspected insurgents. The Americans kept watch from hilltops as Afghans interrogated their suspects. The Americans listened to Taliban radio communications as the Afghans rushed toward buildings where the targets might be hiding. All the while, an American helicopter hovered overhead.
U.S. soldiers were unaccustomed to their role in the mission, which at times seemed peripheral.
“It’s sort of boring. The Afghans are doing what we normally do,” Staff Sgt. Joshua LeBel said.
Bored American soldiers watching Afghans carry out the critical duties of a mission is in many ways a sign of progress. But it remains far from the end goal: an autonomous Afghan force and a near-complete American withdrawal. Afghans still struggle with basic logistics and intelligence gathering. Those tasks will require more training and, above all, a continued Western presence. But in obscure villages like Spina, those resources are unlikely to exist for long.
In the past, the United States might man an outpost or base for years before handing it over the Afghans. Now, there’s no time for such extended transitions; the plan is to build a checkpoint in Spina that will be immediately and exclusively manned by Afghans.
During the mission, when Americans received information about a Taliban fighter fleeing Spina on a motorcycle, both Afghan and American troops gave chase — the Americans in mine-resistant vehicles and the Afghans in Humvees and pickups. When the mountain roads became too narrow, the soldiers continued the pursuit by foot, with the Afghans sprinting in one direction and the Americans in another.
The Americans settled into a position near a hilltop overwatch, where they intercepted a Taliban radio exchange: “They’re in our sights and we are ready to shoot,” one insurgent said.
The American solders got down on their chests, waiting to be fired upon. The Afghans continued searching the dozen or so mud-baked huts that compose the village. It was unclear from the radio chatter which soldiers were being targeted; soldiers from both forces were warned.
“We’re about to get shot at,” one American said.
But a half hour passed with no gunshots. Both forces started the walk back to the makeshift base. Some soldiers were disappointed that the mission had ended without a single direct exchange of fire with the Taliban. When the troops left the following day, insurgents would be back, they knew. Without a permanent presence in Spina, there was simply no way to root out insurgents.
That presence might be only months away. But it will require another joint operation — the first trip to Spina was crafted as strictly a scouting mission.
“Where you lead,” Taylor told Mirwais toward the end of the mission, “I’ll follow.”
News Analysis: NATO to renew commitment to Afghan security at Chicago summit
by Abdul Haleem, Yangtze Yan
KABUL, May 18 (Xinhua) -- Afghanistan will top the agenda of NATO summit in Chicago on May 20-21.
U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Chicago on Sunday on the sidelines of the NATO summit.
"Obviously it is an important meeting because a central focus of the NATO summit will be on Afghanistan and on Afghanistan's future," said Obama's National Security Advisor Tom Donilon at a White House briefing on Thursday, referring to the meeting between the two.
Obama met with Karzai earlier this month during his surprise visit to Afghanistan, where they signed the U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement which "provides for the possibility of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014, for the purposes of training Afghan Forces and targeting the remnants of al-Qaida."
Most of NATO-led troops are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 when the Afghan forces are expected to take over the security charge in their country.
U.S. officials said one of the three objectives Washington set for the summit was charting "a clear path" for the completion of transition and reaffirming NATO's commitment to the long-term security of Afghanistan, where American-led coalition troops are fighting a decade-old war.
The two-day summit is expected to review the international support to Afghanistan over the past decade and revamp a roadmap for the next decade from 2015.
The end in sight of a long and bloody war will come as a great relief for Nato member states and partners at the age of austerity as well as growing anti-war sentiments at home.
Afghan observers believe that if NATO and its partners renew their support to Afghanistan, the conflict-ridden country would move towards viable stability, otherwise all the achievement in fighting terrorism would end in fiasco.
"Since the Taliban and al-Qaida-linked terrorists is still a potential fighting force, any retreat in the war on terror in Afghanistan would prove disastrous; on the contrary, renewing support would benefit both Afghanistan and the international community," political analyst Atiqullah Omarkhil told Xinhua.
He warned that a reduction in the strength of Afghan security forces would have negative impact on the security situation in the country.
Around 130,000 strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) including 90,000 American troops are currently stationed in Afghanistan to fight Taliban-led insurgency.
Afghanistan needs a 350,000-strong security force to ensure smooth transition of defense responsibility through 2014 and beyond.
However the U.S. and its partners could suggest at the Chicago summit that Afghanistan maintain 250,000 troops and pledge 4.1 billion U.S. dollars annual military aid after 2014.
"While security in Afghanistan is still fragile, any reduction in Afghan security force and budget would farther contribute to destabilizing the country," said Omarkhil, a retired Afghan army general.
The Taliban regime was ousted by the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001 but the militant group staged a violent comeback in 2006 and since then has insisted on withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan as precondition for peace talks.
"The Chicago summit is equally important for both Afghanistan and the U.S.-led alliance as the U.S. and its allies would renew their commitment and Afghanistan would promise to fight corruption and ensure good governance -- a noble objective essential for bringing Afghanistan towards prosperity," Omerkhil said.
Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi has described NATO's Chicago summit very critical for Afghanistan, saying " renewing support to Afghanistan would enable it to cope with national and international security threats independently."
Afghanistan after the US: What's next?
Challenges in Wardak Province, west of Kabul, are a mirror of those the Afghan government will face as US and NATO pull back from reconstruction and aid funding in the next two years.
By Tom A. Peter, Correspondent May 18, 2012 at 11:50 am EDT The Christian Science Monitor
Maidan Shahr, Afghanistan - A major question at the NATO summit in Chicago this weekend: How will Afghanistan – and its government – fare after US troops leave?
The answer is likely to come from the Afghan countryside. About three-quarters of the population live in rural areas, far removed from the international talks and meetings about its future. Just how local governments tackle security and development, and adapt to impending financial shortages, could determine how Afghans see the value of a centralized government – and ultimately determine whether Afghanistan can attain stability and development.
In Wardak Province, just west of Kabul, the ubiquitous challenges that plague Afghanistan are playing out. But so too are successes. The province has seen progress under Gov. Mohammad Halim Fidai. “I’m very confident and hopeful that with investment in human capital, education, natural resources – like mines and agriculture – that will be a big step to bring more investment and help so Afghanistan can stand on its own two feet and not have to ask for a penny from any other country,” he says.
Like most issues in Afghanistan, there is no way to definitely demonstrate whether a region like Wardak is moving forward or backward. But Governor Fidai’s daily schedule serves a reminder of progress.
In the course of two days recently, he cut two ceremonial ribbons to inaugurate a public park and youth center and scoped the first shovel of dirt at the ground breaking of a water-shed management project.
After less than four years as governor, he’s seen Afghan security forces in his province grow from just 900 to 3,900. He estimates that he’s overseen more than $1 billion in development spending and he’s found ways to steadily increase tax revenues. His province also saw a 25 percent reduction of insurgent attacks last year.
Challenges and criticism
Still, the challenges are not few. At the recent ground breaking for a US-funded, half-million dollar watershed management project, locals didn’t appear to understand what all the work is for.
Ground water levels have been dropping throughout the area, a serious concern for farmers. The watershed project is designed to raise water levels by constructing a central reservoir that will replenish wells throughout the area. Several tribal elders, at the ceremony, however, appeared to think the reservoir was a new place for them to come fill buckets, an action that would render the project futile.
This disconnect is common throughout Afghanistan, says Yama Torabi, executive director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan. Those responsible for projects often fail to communicate to local community members the purpose of a given project or even that it’s happening.
“You have to take into consideration [the community’s] needs, and usually this is not the case,” says Mr. Torabi.
In a community-monitoring effort of 240 development projects in six provinces, which did not include Wardak, IWA found major problems, such as shoddy construction practices, that required attention at two-thirds of the projects. Torabi says in areas like Wardak, where security is a serious concern, there are likely to be even more problems.
Presently, almost all provincial development in Afghanistan comes from foreign funding. Although the development effort in Afghanistan has often faced criticism for problems like those described by Torabi, it’s helped provide services that legitimize the government for many Afghans.
But as the US and NATO reduce their commitment here, that gain, too, is in jeopardy. Already, President Obama has proposed a 34 percent cut on Afghan reconstruction spending in fiscal year 2013.
In Wardak, tax revenues amount to about a quarter of a million dollars. Though that has exceeded Fidai's government’s goals, it’s still only enough to fund half of one minor development effort like the watershed management project. Fidai says he hopes to continue improving tax collection efforts in Wardak to make up for the coming reductions in aid.
On the issue of security
A number of locals criticize Afghan and international security forces for focusing their efforts along the Kabul-Kandahar highway that passes through the province.
They concede that the road is much safer now, but they say villages not on the main road often still face harassment and intimidation. Sher Wali Wardak, a member of parliament who represents the province, says it’s become too dangerous to visit remote villages in the province.
“In Wardak, everything is going in reverse. It’s going to the negative side, not the positive side. If you can just compare it with 2006 or 2007, the security belt is becoming narrower and narrower,” says Mr. Wardak.
Undaunted
Fidai is aware of all the challenges, but he remains undaunted.
He took the highest seat of government in Wardak in July 2008 when the situation he inherited couldn’t seem more dire. Security officials in the area advised him not to travel more than a half a mile away from his offices in the province capital of Maidan Shahr. Government revenues were just a quarter of their annual targets and Wardak, along with the rest of the country, was well into a resurgence of the Taliban.
Fidai, who holds a masters degree in public relations and speaks near-native English, approached his new post largely as a management challenge. He brought in a staff he trusted and worked to retain them by offering competitive salaries with money he saved with simple measures, such as using local building materials on government buildings instead of more expensive imported construction supplies.
“Whether I am successful or not, we’ll leave it for the people to decide,” he says.
News Analysis: Lift of NATO supply blockade may trigger a wave of protests, terrorist attacks in Pakistan
By Jamil Bhatti
ISLAMABAD, May 18 (Xinhua) -- The possible restoration of supply lines for the NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan is likely to trigger a wide range of protests and terrorist attacks in Pakistan as some militant groups and religio-political forces warned the government against the probable decision.
The high-powered Pakistan's Defense Committee of the Cabinet ( DCC), consists of the country's high-level civil and military ranks, on Tuesday finalized to remove the almost six-month old blockade on NATO supplies passing through the country for the neighboring Afghanistan, the sources revealed.
After the meeting, chaired by the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, Federal Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira told media that the DCC meeting that focused to review Pakistan's troubled ties with the United States and there would be more consultations before taking a final decision on restoration of NATO supply line.
Whether it is true or not but some signs and developments showed that Pakistan, as per expectations, has decided to reopen the NATO supply rout that was suspended after the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers during an air strike on border check posts in November last year.
Just hours before the meeting, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen phoned President Asif Ali Zardari and extended invitation to him to attend the historic summit of over 60 world leaders in Chicago on May 20-21 to discuss the future of Afghanistan.
According to some analysts, the invitation for president Zardari clearly showed that something had already been decided through the backdoor channels because last week, Rasmussen linked Pakistan's participation in the Chicago summit with the resumption of NATO supplies.
This invitation came after a press conference by Pakistan's foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar on Monday evening in which she clearly hinted at the restoration of NATO supplies.
"Pakistan has made a point and we want to move towards positive zone," said Khar besides making it clear that Pakistan doesn't want to challenge a block of over 40 countries including its friendly country Turkey.
She also said that Pakistan had not charged a single penny on the supply during last one decade but now was interested in charging the NATO transportation as it had damaged roads and other infrastructure of the country.
According to some media reports, Pakistan has demanded 1500 to 1800 US dollars as the levy on each NATO vehicle passing through its land that would cost US approximate $365 million annually.
In another development, top military commanders from Pakistan and the United States-led ISAF held negotiations on Saturday in garrison city of Rawalpindi to review operational matters damaging their cooperation and possible reopening of the NATO supply.
"Talks focused on operations in border areas and coordination mechanisms to avoid untoward incidents," said a press release by the Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), Pakistan army's media wing.
Pakistan closed the NATO supply lines soon after the unprovoked air strikes by the NATO forces at its army's border check posts that killed 24 soldiers and officers while leaving 13 others injured on Nov 26 last year in Mohmand Agency, Pakistan's northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan.
On the same day, a meeting of the DCC, Pakistan's highest strategic decision-making forum, with Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in the chair, decided to close the NATO supplies and asked the US to vacate the Shamsi Airbase.
The closure of the supply route also left thousands of trailers and containers bound for Afghanistan stranded across the country. Since after the invasion of US-led forces in Afghanistan, NATO have been using Pakistani land routs that start from southern port city of Karachi and end at southwestern Chamman and northwestern Torkham border.
Before the suspension, at least 70 percent of the NATO's supplies to Afghanistan and 40 percent of its fuel needs were sent through Pakistan.
Following the check post attack, Pakistan refused to attend a special summit for the Afghan endgame held in Bonn, Germany in December last year.
A special committee was assigned to formulate Pakistan's new strategy and guidelines for the engagement with the US and NATO.
Later on, Pakistani parliament unanimously approved new guidelines in April by demanding an "unconditional apology" from US for the check posts attack besides halting drone strikes in northwestern region of the country.
Prime Minister Gilani, commenting on NATO supply restoration issue, said Pak-US bilateral relations were at a critical stage and they would have to take some important decisions.
Despite there is no clear time to reopen the supply line, the movement of Afghanistan bound vehicles can be seen, especially, in Karachi. Some transporters claimed that they had received clear message to be prepared for the upcoming opening of the supplies.
Amid the news of NATO supply restoration, some unknown militants threatened the British, French and Australian embassies in Islamabad by sending parcels, containing some suspicious black powder inside them.
According to the police officials, the parcels also contained handwritten letters in English with threats to avenge by poisoning NATO food supplies if Pakistan opens it.
In the past, the absence of security for the NATO vehicles in Pakistan became an ideal opportunity for the militants to attack such convoys heading towards Afghanistan. In such attacks dozens of people, working for NATO supplies, were killed and hundreds of containers were destroyed by the militants across Pakistan.
In two major attacks at the NATO convoys that took place in the outskirts of the capital Islamabad at least 14 people were killed and over 90 oil tankers were torched by the militants.
Besides the threats from the militants, Pakistan's religio- political parties' union "Defense Pakistan Council" announced to hold countrywide protest against the government decision. These protests can create law and order situation for the government that had already been struggling against many issues.
No govt official is ready to tell any fix time for the NATO supply restoration but Information Minister Kaira said that they would not hesitate to take any unpopular decision to fulfill the country's responsibilities besides hinting that the conclusion would come after president Zardari had discussed the matters in the Chicago summit.
U.S. Sanctions Alleged Haqqani Network Operative, Taliban Financier
May 17, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The U.S. Treasury Department has slapped sanctions on an accused Haqqani network operative and a Taliban financier, a move it says will help "ensure all those who perpetrate ongoing violence and terrorist activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan will continue to be marginalized and cut off from the international financial system."
Any U.S. assets held by Bakht Gul and Abdul Baqi Bari are now frozen and U.S. citizens are prohibited from doing business with them.
A Treasury Department statement identified Gul as a "key Haqqani Network communications official" who works directly for senior Haqqani network leader Badruddin Haqqani.
Bari is identified as a Taliban "money launderer" and financial manager and has allegedly used Pakistani banks to secure money given to him by Taliban sources.
He has also reportedly funneled funds to support Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
With reporting by AFP
Report: NATO's Afghan Exit Risks State Collapse
VOA News May 17, 2012 Selah Hennessy
LONDON - NATO is rushing its withdrawal from Afghanistan and could risk reversing the gains made there during the past decade, according to a new report. The Afghanistan Analysts Network report was released before a NATO summit in Chicago.
"Western governments need to be as concrete as possible, vis-a-vis Afghanistan, that after 2014 the country will not be forgotten again as happened last time when the Soviet occupation forces withdrew in 1989," said Thomas Ruttig from the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Germany.
The report, called "Beating a Retreat," was written by former European Union advisor Barbara Stapleton. It says NATO policy needs to be flexible if long-term security goals are to be achieved.
Priorities need to be security, governance
The report says transition of security to Afghan control needs to be related to the condition of security, development, and governance.
Ruttig said right now the needs of Afghanistan are not driving the foreign agenda. "The transition timeline is very much dependent on agendas in the countries, which have sent troops to Afghanistan themselves, while not sufficiently looking at conditions in Afghanistan as they evolve," he said.
International combat troops are to pull out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014. NATO says Afghan government forces are on track to take responsibility for security. The details of the withdrawal are to be hammered out Sunday at the NATO summit in Chicago.
Ruttig said the Western alliance must focus on ensuring effective political institutions are in place. He said the groundwork for that has been laid and now it needs to take effect.
"There is a relatively good constitution. There are laws; there are provisions for a pluralistic political situation in Afghanistan. But much of it has remained on paper, has not been implemented," said Ruttig.
Agriculture, infrastructure called key
Afghanistan analyst David Livingstone, with the London-based research group Chatham House, said long-term involvement in social welfare programs, agriculture and the development of national infrastructures like power and irrigation will be key to the country's stability.
"That has to be an aim for the politicians. And no matter what their rather public standpoint may be. If you do not manage this correctly it just makes the problem of the late '90s and early 2000's occur again," said Livingstone.
Recent opinion polls show that American support for the war in Afghanistan is down to 27 percent.
Afghanistan Starts Work on $30M TB Hospital
VOA News May 17, 2012
Afghanistan has begun work on a $30 million hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis, a disease that health officials say kills more than 10,000 Afghans every year.
The Japanese government is paying for the 80-bed center in the Afghan capital, which will also treat malaria and AIDS patients. Japan is the second-largest donor to Afghanistan, after the United States.
The World Health Health Organization reported 53,000 Afghans get tuberculosis each year. Afghanistan's Public Health Ministry said more people die from the disease than war-related violence.
During Thursday's groundbreaking in Kabul, Afghan Health Minister Suraya Dalil said Afghanistan ranks in the top 20 worldwide for the most TB patients, and that several programs have been initiated in the past few years to combat the preventable disease. The health minister said there are 2,000 centers across Afghanistan for the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis.
The disease is caused by bacteria and usually affects the lungs. Tuberculosis spreads through the air from one person to another. Symptoms include a bad cough, chest pain, weakness and fever. It can be treated using drugs.
Pacifists in the Crossfire
By LUKE MOGELSON The New York Times May 18, 2012
Several miles west of Kabul, the village Qala-e Naw sits deep in the barren foothills of barrener mountains that are perennially half-sunk in cloud. The ruins of old homes strafed by Soviet gunships crowd a gravel streambed that is dry most of the year but runs swiftly with snowmelt come spring. One morning early in December, a 12-year-old girl named Gulali followed the bed for almost an hour, along with her mother and little sister, in search of dry timber to fuel their stove. When they reached a steep rise with scattered saplings near its peak, Gulali scrambled up the slope and set to hacking at some of the skinnier trunks with a hatchet. In the small community of poor Pashtun farmers who inhabit Qala-e Naw, Gulali was well liked for her prideful and precocious work ethic, and true to form, when her mother said they had enough wood and it was time to go home, Gulali insisted on felling one last tree. Seconds later, she stepped on a land mine. The explosion hurled her through the air, nearly severing her right leg and pulverizing most of the left.
Gulali’s mother ran to her and began to stanch the hemorrhaging stump with a head scarf. Two of Gulali’s uncles, Pasha and Sartor, were working a field about a mile away when they heard the explosion and saw the brown plume drift and dissipate. It took Sartor, the younger one, more than 30 minutes to reach the scene, and when he arrived, he found Gulali cradled in her mother’s arms. Sartor put his niece over his shoulder and ran back to where Pasha and a group of nomadic herdsmen were waiting. An old shepherd offered his winter shawl, which Pasha and Sartor used as a makeshift litter to carry Gulali another 20 minutes to the nearest Afghan Police post. Gulali, who remained conscious the entire time, never made a sound. When she was 6, she fell down a 30-foot well that was dry at the bottom. Her father found her hours later, both of her legs broken. He had to climb down a ladder and lash her to his back with a rope to get her out. During that ordeal as well, her father told me, Gulali remained spookily calm.
Now her mother was screaming for help as they approached a metal shipping container with a machine-gunner’s nest on its roof. The police officer in charge of the post flagged down a car, put them in the back seat and instructed the driver to take them to the Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims in Kabul. “Don’t worry,” he tried to reassure Gulali’s mother. “The food and medicine are free there.”
When they arrived at Emergency — a former kindergarten built by the Soviets — Tijana Maricic, the head nurse, rushed Gulali from the car into the operating theater, her nearly severed right leg bundled in her mother’s scarf and a huge open wound on the left. Mine injuries, especially traumatic amputations, are uniquely vulnerable to infection — the blast often forces dirt, shrapnel and other contaminants deep into the stump — and a priority for the Afghan surgeons working on Gulali was to excise foreign bodies and damaged tissue. In the end, they also had to complete the amputation of the leg, removing it just below the knee.
“She was very brave,” Maricic said of Gulali’s stoic reaction to her pain. “Here, even most of the very young children with severe injuries never cry.” Maricic, a Serb, worked as a pediatric nurse in Belgrade before joining a cardiac center run by Emergency in Sudan. Now she is one of three foreign nurses at the hospital in Kabul. Maricic and the rest of the small international staff — the nurses, one doctor and a few administrators, most of whom are in their 30s — divide their time between the hospital and a quaint house directly across the street, in Kabul’s “new city,” a lively neighborhood of butcher shops, electronics stores, kebab stands, vagrants and panhandlers.
Despite Emergency’s central location, Maricic and her colleagues see little of the city outside the hospital grounds and almost nothing of the country. Inside the hospital, however, they see everything — the worst of what war can do.
“I prefer it here,” Maricic told me recently. “Sudan was closer to an ordinary life. You could go outside. You could go to the shop or for a walk. But here, we are more like a family, closer, and in this way it’s more like an ordinary life. After this, I don’t think any of us will be able to go back to a normal hospital.”
‘We Cannot be on One Side of the War’
Emergency is an Italian-based nonprofit that opened its first surgical center in Afghanistan in 1999, during the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. One of its founders, Dr. Gino Strada, worked as a surgeon for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul during the early ’90s, when the Soviet-backed government fell to rivalrous Mujahedeen factions. When Strada returned to Afghanistan in 1999, the Mujahedeen had been routed by the Taliban, and forces loyal to the Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud had retreated north toward their mountain refuge in the Panjshir Valley. Sporadic fighting continued between Panjshir and Kabul. Massoud gave Strada a former police academy in Panjshir, which Strada and his team converted into a trauma hospital. “Immediately we thought, O.K., we cannot be on one side of the war,” Strada told me recently. “So I went to Kabul to talk to the Taliban and offered to balance our presence so that people could see we were neutral.”
Eventually, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, agreed to let Emergency open its hospital in the former kindergarten. Because of the ever-shifting front, Strada said, “we had Taliban fighters who were taken to Panjshir, and Northern Alliance fighters who were taken to Kabul. As soon as we discharged a patient on either side, he would be in trouble. So we started to negotiate with both sides.” Strada managed to persuade both Massoud and the Taliban to guarantee the safe transportation of discharged patients to their respective places of origin. Today Emergency’s commitment to neutrality endures: the Tajik policemen who guard the entrance to the Panjshir Valley still permit Taliban casualties to be taken to the hospital there, and insurgents are treated alongside wounded Afghan security forces at the surgical center in Kabul.
A vast majority of Emergency’s patients, however, are civilians. In 2011, the war in Afghanistan killed more than 3,000 civilians, more than any year since 2001. According to the United Nations, 77 percent of these deaths were caused by insurgents, who escalated their use of improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks. At the same time, the number of civilians killed by coalition airstrikes also rose in 2011. Because of the unconventional nature of the fighting — because the violence comes from all sides, in small doses, everywhere — it can sometimes feel not quite like a war at all but more like an interminable cycle of murder. In this war that is not exactly a war, Emergency represents one of the few places that offers something like an accounting.
Triage After the Bomb
Until she came to Emergency, Gulali grew up somewhat insulated from the conflict. For years, her father fought the Soviets in Qala-e Naw; the rusted carcass of a Russian tank, which one of his compatriots set alight with a rocket-propelled grenade, still sits on the bank of the stream near their house. But since 2001, Qala-e Naw has been relatively peaceful, and Gulali’s childhood was uncorrupted by violence. The Shiite holy day of Ashura, commemorating the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussein, arrived during Gulali’s first week at Emergency, however, and that afternoon visited on the hospital some of the grisliest brutality that 11 years of fighting has managed to produce.
Shiites represent a small minority in Afghanistan, and they are mostly ethnic Hazaras. While Gulali was lying in bed, recovering from her operation, hundreds of Hazaras were congregating about a mile away, at the Abul Fazal Abbas shrine in Kabul’s old city. It was a clear day, and on the street outside the shrine, worshipers circled a group of young shirtless men lashing themselves with steel blades affixed to lengths of chain. Self-flagellation is a customary form of mourning Imam Hussein; as the men swung the blades against their backs, they shouted: “Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein!” There was an element of defiance in how fervently the Shiites exhibited their devotion. Soon many of the half-naked flagellants were covered in their own blood.
Sometime shortly after noon, a suicide bomber infiltrated the ceremony and detonated himself. The explosion ripped through the heart of the crowd. It cleared a wide swath and at the periphery of its force created a semicircle of wrecked bodies piled along a strangely geometric arc. More than 200 people were injured or dead: crumpled improbably, heaped among odd scraps of clothes and limbs as if they had plummeted from a great height. In the carnage and confusion, the dying were hard to distinguish from the dead. Bodies in all manner of distress were taken to Emergency in taxis and cars and in the backs of pickup trucks. When Luca Radaelli, the hospital’s 35-year-old medical coordinator, opened the first ambulance’s doors, he found several dead infants stacked atop a mass of bloodied but breathing women and men. “I also found the head of what was probably the suicide bomber,” Radaelli later told me. “As I took out the first patient, the head fell down at my feet.”
A mob of distraught relatives and survivors began to form outside. Radaelli shut the hospital’s gate, allowing only patients to enter. Some of the bereaved tried to break down the gate, others to scale the walls. More victims continued to arrive. Soon gore and body parts littered the sidewalk. When I arrived at the main entrance, about an hour after the bombing, a brain lay on the street. It was perfectly intact and surprisingly white. An Afghan employee of the hospital, wearing heavy rubber gloves and equipped with a wheelbarrow and a hose, was hurrying to clean up the mess.
A mass-casualty triage tent was hastily erected on the lawn where the local staff members sometimes play volleyball. In Gulali’s ward, injured children came and went. She sat in her wheelchair, watching. It’s difficult to imagine what it all must have looked like through her eyes or how she understood it. At the time, no one understood it. Never before during the decade-old war had there been an attack targeting Shiites on such a scale. Within the maelstrom of ethnic, tribal, economic and political enmities churning the violence in Afghanistan, sectarianism simply didn’t rate. Even the Taliban condemned the bombing.
Late in the afternoon, the orderlies began collecting the bloody mattresses and backboards and stretchers that littered the lawn, scrubbing them clean with antiseptic. The nurses hurried from ward to ward, attending the dozens of moaning wounded in line for surgery. I went out to talk with some of the relatives crowded around the gate, where a list of names was posted on the wall. The sun was starting to go down, but dozens of Hazaras still anxiously awaited news.
When I asked whom they blamed, everyone said Pakistan. This was to be expected — many Afghans see Pakistanis as the ultimate source of all their woes — but what came as a surprise was their unanimous refusal to impugn Sunnis or ascribe a religious motive to the attack. “We don’t blame the Sunnis,” insisted a young man named Ali Bahram, whose nephew was inside. “Islam belongs to Sunnis and Shia both. It’s the I.S.I. who are the enemies of Islam,” he added, referring to Pakistan’s spy service. Several men had gathered around us, nodding in agreement. “The I.S.I. wants us to retaliate,” one of them yelled. “They want to create strife between the Shia and Sunnis in Afghanistan.” (The organization that eventually claimed responsibility for the bombing, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, is in fact from Pakistan and once enjoyed the support of the government, though it has since been outlawed.)
Back inside, two teams of surgeons — five Afghans and one Italian — performed operations until 4 in the morning. For many of the Afghan employees, the day had been all too familiar. One senior surgeon, Dr. Hamed Nazir, was reminded of being a young physician in the northern city Mazar-e Sharif during the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. When the Taliban finally took the city in 1998, they massacred thousands of people, mostly Hazaras. Every afternoon, wounded civilians would be dropped off by taxis and vans at the hospital where Nazir was working. “It was exactly the same this time,” Nazir told me. “Mostly dead children. It’s always like that.”
What Do We Owe the Afghans Injured by a War We Started?
The gulf between how this war impacts the people living in its midst and how it is represented back in America might be inevitable. But the relatively small amount of coverage and interest that Afghanistan garners, compared with previous conflicts, makes that gulf all the more conspicuous. A pattern seems to have developed of periodic embarrassments provoking momentary outrage: Marines urinating on dead insurgents, NATO helicopters killing children collecting firewood, the burning of Korans at a U.S. base, the murder of 17 civilians in their homes. The reality, on the other hand, is that between these intermittent headlines, Afghans die less sensational deaths, suffer less dramatic travails and survive less repugnant but equally traumatic violence on a regular basis.
Last year, Emergency’s three hospitals and 34 clinics across Afghanistan treated nearly 360,000 patients. During the course of reporting this article, after visiting these facilities and meeting a number of these patients, I began to wonder how such a responsibility had fallen to a small, modestly financed Italian NGO. This, of course, was connected to a larger question: What is our responsibility to the Afghans who are maimed, burned, disabled and disfigured by a war we started and can’t seem to end?
According to NATO, even civilians who are injured during operations by U.S. or other coalition forces are only “entitled to receive emergency care if there is threat to their life, limb or eyesight.” In such cases, “discharge or transfer to an appropriate Afghan civilian facility is recommended as soon as the patient is stabilized.” On paper, this might appear to make sense; after all, the United States and other foreign donors have invested vast sums of money in Afghanistan’s public health system. But given the poor quality of care, scarcity of equipment and pervasive graft that still defines most government hospitals, “discharge or transfer” can look a lot like abandonment.
In April, I traveled to Sayad, a town in Kapisa Province, to meet a 14-year-old boy named Zobair, who had recently been discharged from a hospital at Bagram Air Base, one of the largest American military installations in Afghanistan. Zobair’s uncle Nasir had taken him to Sayad in a borrowed Toyota hatchback, its rear seats folded forward to accommodate the green U.S. Army litter on which Zobair reclined. We were parked on the bank of a wide river with small wooden platforms extending over the water’s edge, where you could order lunch from local fishmongers. My interpreter and I arrived early and bought food for Zobair and Nasir — a gesture that felt ridiculous now, in light of Zobair’s condition.
Both of his legs were gone, and wounds covered his hands, arms and back. He was nauseated and fevered; every movement elicited a grimace. “Most of the pain is in my stomach,” Zobair told me as soon as we met. His eyes were half-shut, heavy with fatigue, and he spoke so softly that I had to lean close to catch his words. Without a wheelchair, Zobair had no way to reach the landing where we had set up the meal. When Nasir climbed into the back of the Toyota and raised Zobair’s shalwar kameez, he revealed a pouching system attached to a stoma and four pink tubes sticking out of Zobair’s sides. Fifty-two metal staples held together an incision running the length of his abdomen.
Zobair and Nasir were from Tagab District, where French troops have struggled for years to dislodge a deeply entrenched insurgency, without much success. In February, a French airstrike, mistaking them for insurgents, killed seven boys while they were herding sheep not far from Tagab. A few weeks later, according to Zobair and his family, Zobair was sitting outside his house with four cousins, watching the sun go down, when two low-flying helicopters approached from the distance. Helicopters have long been a daily occurrence in Tagab, but something about the way this pair hovered near the house made Zobair nervous. He said as much to his cousins, who mocked him for being overanxious.
Zobair stood up and began to walk away. He does not know what kind of ordnance or ammunition the helicopter fired. Given the damage, it was likely a Hellfire missile. Two cousins — ages 14 and 18 — were killed immediately. Zobair, who had taken about four steps before the explosion, was thrown into an irrigation ditch. Villagers rushed the survivors to the French military base in Tagab, where another of Zobair’s cousins soon died. In response to my questions about the helicopter strike, a representative for the French military told me that they had conducted an investigation, the conclusions of which were “full positive”: “On that day, after having checked there were no civilians in the area, one helicopter fired at a group of five insurgents with hostile intentions.”
The last thing Zobair remembers before losing consciousness was a foreigner sticking him with a needle. He woke up “in a white room with white walls,” he told me. “They wouldn’t tell us where we were.” Back in Tagab, no one from the base would inform Nasir where Zobair had been taken; it was generally known, however, that casualties from Kapisa were often airlifted to Bagram. “We came to Bagram several times to write our names and give them to the interpreter at the gate,” Nasir said. “Sometimes the interpreter told us, ‘Yes, he is here.’ Sometimes he told us, ‘No, he is not here.’ Zobair called us one time. He told us: ‘I am in a hospital, but I don’t know where. I’m not allowed to tell.’ ” When I asked NATO why Zobair was not allowed to speak with his family, a representative replied, “We know there is a policy on this and are seeking more information at this time.” I was later told that he should have been allowed to call home.
After 23 days, Nasir received a call from an interpreter at Bagram, who told him to come pick up his nephew. At the airfield, Zobair was carried out from the hospital and put into the ambulance, accompanied by an Afghan interpreter. The interpreter told Nasir that they should go to the Red Cross in Kabul so that Zobair’s amputated legs could be fitted for prostheses. She then handed Nasir some papers detailing, in English, the treatment that Zobair received.
‘If They Wanted to Treat Them, They Could’
If Nasir had been able to read the papers, he would have learned that American surgeons at Craig Joint Theater Hospital saved Zobair’s life with a battery of sophisticated procedures. The incision on Zobair’s abdomen was from a laparotomy that enabled the doctors to repair his lacerated spleen, colon and kidney; the pouching system was to collect feces from an ileostomy, where a section of damaged intestine had been removed; and the four tubes sticking out of his sides were internal compression sutures helping to hold his abdomen together. Curiously, the only future treatment recommended for Zobair was to “follow up with a surgeon in six months to have the ileostomy takedown” — that is, to have the intestine reattached and the temporary pouching system removed. According to Nasir, he was not given any guidance about what to do for the internal sutures and 52 metal staples, though both were meant to remain in place no longer than a week or two, after which they posed a risk of becoming infected.
The ambulance took them to a Red Cross orthopedic center in Kabul. There, doctors saw immediately that Zobair was in no condition to have been discharged. He could not even sit up. (A spokeswoman for Craig Joint Theater Hospital said that “in accordance with accepted international clinical practice, the patient had recuperated well enough to be considered by his physicians for discharge.”) The Red Cross told the Afghan escort accompanying the ambulance that Zobair required further medical attention before the orthopedic phase of his recovery could begin.
When the ambulance left with Nasir and Zobair, the staff at the Red Cross assumed they were returning to Bagram. Instead they were taken to Kapisa’s provincial hospital, Mahmud-i-Raqi, where doctors informed Nasir that few if any public hospitals in Afghanistan possessed the special tool required to remove the metal staples that were used on Zobair. “They said they were not able to fix this problem,” Nasir told me, “and they sent us away.” Craig Joint Theater Hospital says that it previously arranged to transfer Zobair to Mahmud-i-Raqi and secured its consent to accept Zobair before his discharge. But the director of Mahmud-i-Raqi, Dr. Mustafa Faiz, says this is untrue. According to Faiz, no one from Bagram ever contacted the hospital about Zobair.
I visited Mahmud-i-Raqi twice. Part of the hospital is made of free-standing plywood and sheet-metal rooms with corrugated tin roofs, while the main building suffers from severe disrepair. Paint peels from walls; water creeps from ceilings; and the floors are covered in dirt. The first time I went there, I arrived at around 3 in the afternoon, but I was told that all the nurses and doctors had gone home early. The second time I visited Mahmud-i-Raqi, it was overrun with people jostling to be seen. Faiz, the director, gestured at the melee and asked, “Why would a hospital like the one at Bagram want to send a patient here?” He explained that Mahmud-i-Raqi could never accept a patient like Zobair for the simple reason that it had no surgeons. He then asked me if I could procure his staff some medical textbooks the next time I went to Bagram.
Nasir says that when Mahmud-i-Raqi refused to admit Zobair, the Afghan escort from the ambulance called Bagram and asked what to do. When he got off the phone, the escort told Nasir: “Zobair didn’t have much problems. He only needed his dressings changed. He said we could take him home.” The ambulance returned to Bagram, and Nasir hired a taxi to drive him and Zobair back to Tagab. The following afternoon, an elder from the village visited Zobair to help with his dressings. When he saw the incision, the elder told Nasir that he needed to get Zobair to a hospital immediately. They went to Emergency’s medical center in Panjshir Valley the next morning.
The only patients Emergency does not accept, however, are those who have already been operated on at NATO facilities. They adhere to this policy very strictly — some might say brutally. In the past, Emergency used to treat patients like Zobair, “but we stopped,” Emanuele Nannini, the program director for Afghanistan, told me. “They kept dying in our hospital.” Nannini describes NATO’s practice of discharging injured Afghan civilians requiring further care as an unethical one, which Emergency has opted not to participate in. “They don’t take responsibility for the patients,” he said. “They start a job, and they give all the complications to somebody else.” He added: “If they wanted to treat them, they could. That is the point. They have the capability.”
One nurse at Emergency who helped make the decision to turn Zobair away later told me: “It was a disaster. The incision was not clean. It was infected.” When I asked Radaelli, the medical coordinator, whether Zobair was in danger of dying from the infection, he said, “If someone doesn’t take him, for sure.” He added, “We see this all the time.” Nannini, the program director, is strident on the subject of NATO’s discharge policies, going so far as to characterize them as criminal. “They did nothing for this patient,” he said of Zobair. “It’s better to let him die than to suffer while going from one hospital to another.”
I met Nasir and Zobair in Sayad the day after they were refused by the Panjshir facility. I had to sit facing backward in the front seat of the Toyota to talk to Zobair, who could barely lift his head. He was febrile, and Nasir told me he had been suffering from nightmares. When I asked Zobair about the nightmares, he explained, “I see it happening again.” A couple of the staples had worked themselves loose, and the incision did not look good: red, swollen, encrusted with pus and tender to the touch.
Zobair complained that it was hot in the Toyota and that he felt ill and wanted to go home. Nasir wrapped all the fish I had bought in an old newspaper to bring back to Tagab. He seemed embarrassed to be doing so, and he explained that their family was very poor. The men were all laborers who often had to travel to Iran for work. “I don’t know what to do now,” Nasir told me as he got into the car. “I don’t know where to take him.” I told him I’d ask around in Kabul about hospitals that might be able to help.
The Pacifists vs. the Military
It’s easy enough to dismiss pacifism as quixotic or naïve. But nowhere does it appeal more strongly to reason than among the wounded and the maimed. At Emergency’s hospital in Kabul, it’s not unusual to find Afghan national security forces recovering in the same ward as Taliban insurgents, and after a while, the ideas that make enemies of the two men lose their relevance; the daily spectacle of their impact on human bodies invalidates them. Nearly everyone who works at Emergency opposes not just the war in Afghanistan but war in general. If they didn’t feel this way before they arrived at the hospital, they inevitably come to before they leave.
Emergency has always promoted a pacifist agenda. In 1994, the year it was founded, Emergency initiated a campaign against the manufacture of antipersonnel mines, leading to their prohibition in Italy. In 2003, it organized demonstrations against Italy’s participation in the invasion of Iraq. And two years ago, Emergency published a kind of manifesto repudiating the use of violence for any purpose.
That same year, President Obama deployed an additional 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan. One primary objective of the surge was to clear out insurgent strongholds in the South. In Helmand Province, the U.S. Marines announced plans for a major operation focusing on the Taliban-held town of Marja. Emergency’s surgical center in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, just northeast of Marja, was the only international hospital in Helmand, and its Italian staff vehemently denounced the offensive. Matteo Dell’Aira, the hospital’s medical coordinator, posted online a series of profiles of civilian victims that were nakedly indignant. In June 2009, Dell’Aira wrote about a box of propaganda leaflets dropped from a NATO plane that failed to open and landed instead on a sleeping 5-year-old girl, fracturing her pelvis and destroying her rectum, vagina and urethra. She later died from her injuries. When the invasion of Marja began in February, Dell’Aira embraced the role of witness with renewed passion.
“During the first period of the operation, we didn’t receive many patients,” Dell’Aira told me. “Or sometimes we saw patients who had been injured seven days earlier. The coalition, together with the national military and police, blocked the roads around Marja and prevented the injured civilians from reaching the hospital. This for us was absolutely a crime against humanity.”
During several interviews with Western journalists, Dell’Aira and Gino Strada condemned the military cordon. Theirs was a counternarrative that contrasted starkly with the assessments of military commanders who lauded the operation as a triumph. The reality seen at Emergency continues to contradict the military’s message. “In Helmand, over 40 percent of our war-victim patients are children,” Strada told me. “This obviously disturbs people who are trying to convince the public that they are doing surgical operations.” In fact, last year the Helmand surgical center admitted 1,864 patients, of which more than half were younger than 14.
On April 10, 2010, an Afghan employee of Emergency in Lashkar Gah told the international staff that he had been warned of a possible attack against the hospital. Following protocol, the Italians vacated the premises for their living quarters elsewhere in the city. An hour later, an Afghan doctor called to say that armed men had entered the hospital. Weapons are banned, without exception, from all Emergency facilities, and Dell’Aira, along with Marco Garatti, a surgeon, and Matteo Pagani, an administrator, decided to go back and find out what was happening. They were stopped by several Afghan Army soldiers outside the entrance to Emergency. The three Italians eventually were handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to a prison run by the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency. There they were locked in separate cells, and after several days they were told that suicide vests, hand grenades, ammunition and pistols were discovered in the hospital’s medical-supply room. “There was a paper,” Dell’Aira said, “written in Dari and Pashto they kept trying to get us to sign.”
Later that afternoon, the governor of Helmand called a press conference, during which he claimed that the weapons and munitions were taken to Emergency by one of its Italian staff members, who had been paid half a million dollars to assassinate him. He also later charged that the hospital was purposefully amputating the hands of Afghan soldiers.
Dell’Aira and his colleagues spent four days in the custody of Helmand’s National Directorate of Security before being transferred to its central prison in Kabul. “Every morning, afternoon and night they interrogated us,” Dell’Aira recalled. After five days in Kabul, they were released. Six Afghan staff members had also been arrested, and all of them were freed except one: the employee who originally warned Dell’Aira of an imminent attack on the hospital. According to Emergency, he is still in prison.
For Gino Strada, the meaning behind the whole ordeal was obvious: “It was an operation aimed at pushing us out of Helmand, clearly.” The possible reasons for this are plenty. Aside from Strada’s and Dell’Aira’s public denunciations of the cordon around Marja, the hospital’s neutrality made it a source of suspicion to both militaries. “Sometimes, we have known Taliban commanders trying to reach the hospital,” Strada said. “They are free inside our hospital. We were under a lot of pressure to provide information, and we kept saying we can’t. It’s not our role to be a sort of medical intelligence.”
‘A Patient Is a Patient. This is Our Rule.’
One afternoon in March, after visiting Gulali, I met a 22-year-old paraplegic named Safiullah who had recently been shot in the back by an Afghan Police officer. The shooting took place in the Ghorband Valley of Parwan Province, during a protest of the burning of Korans at an American-run detention center on Bagram Air Base, which is also located in Parwan. A few days earlier, Afghan employees at Bagram witnessed American soldiers discarding Korans into a garbage incinerator, and since then violent demonstrations had spread throughout the country.
Safi, as he is called, told me that on the day he was shot, several thousand villagers from throughout Ghorband Valley had gathered to march toward the Shinwari District center. A student and young father of two girls, ages 1 and 4, Safi claimed that he was not especially anti-American or antigovernment. He also repeatedly insisted that there were no Taliban in the Shinwari District or the Ghorband Valley, which is untrue. Last summer, Taliban insurgents in Ghorband kidnapped and beheaded a provincial council chief, attacked the Shinwari District center and tried to assassinate the provincial governor.
Nevertheless, Safi said that when the demonstrators reached the district center at around 11:30 in the morning, there were no Taliban among them and none of the protesters had weapons. All the same, they found the district center guarded by several ranks of heavily armed security forces. The first rank was made up of the Afghan Local Police, a controversial and relatively young program overseen by American Special Operations forces that recruits, trains, arms and pays Afghan men in rural communities to defend their home villages against insurgents. The procession came to a halt about 500 meters before the district center. Safi and his cousin Noor, who was also there, claimed that the Local Police then fired on the protesters, without warning or provocation. Using AK-47s and PK machine guns, they indiscriminately sprayed the crowd. Some of the villagers scrambled to the roadsides, trying to hide in shallow irrigation ditches; others dropped and made themselves as flat as possible. Noor remembers seeing three of his friends lying dead in the road. As soon as he heard the first barrage of gunfire, Safi dove to the ground. Before he landed he felt a slamming pain in his back and lost consciousness.
Noor put Safi in the back of a car with several other wounded men. They were taken to a public hospital in the provincial capital Charikar. The doctors there, recognizing that the bullet had shattered Safi’s spine, told Noor they couldn’t help him and offered to transport Safi in an ambulance to Emergency.
A few days after speaking with Safi, I went to Charikar to meet with the deputy chief of police, who showed me a video of the demonstration where Safi was shot. In the video, at least a dozen men in the crowd outside the district center are seen waving white Taliban flags. The deputy also said that some of the protesters were throwing Molotov cocktails, and he claimed vaguely to have evidence of there having been a weapon in the crowd, though he declined to elaborate.
Back at Emergency, Safi and Noor rejected everything the deputy said. Neither of them seemed very happy with my questions, and our parting was much cooler than usual. When I left the ward, the Afghan nurse attending Safi followed me out and stopped me under the breezeway. He was an older, bearded man, and he wanted me to know that Safi and Noor were likely not being entirely truthful. “They’re probably Taliban,” he said. “It’s all Taliban where they’re from.”
It was more a statement of fact than an accusation. The nurse didn’t care. Maybe they were Taliban, maybe they weren’t. Maybe the Local Police were thugs who fired on them for no reason, and maybe it was much more complicated than that. My interest in these things arose from a mentality that was alien to the hospital. Who Safi was, why he had been shot — the answers to these questions didn’t matter there. Several weeks later, when I had a chance to speak with Safi’s nurse at greater length, he told me he was a Tajik from Panjshir and had served as a medic in the Northern Alliance during its war with the Taliban. When I asked how he felt about caring for wounded Taliban now, he shrugged and said: “A patient is a patient. This is our rule.”
A Policeman’s Last Delusions
A couple days after Safi arrived at Emergency, while Noor was still looking after him, a wounded Local Police officer, exactly his age, was assigned a bed in the same ward. The officer, Abdul Nafeh, was taken to Emergency from a public hospital in Kandahar, and he arrived in extremely bad condition. One of his legs was gone and the other severely wounded. Whoever treated him in Kandahar did a poor job. The stump was already infected, and much of the tissue on the injured leg had become necrotic.
Nafeh was originally from Zhari District, the scene of intense fighting every summer and close to where Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is accused of murdering 17 villagers this March. (I once met a Talib from Zhari who lost his leg to an I.E.D. placed by one of his compatriots; not even the local insurgents can keep track of all the bombs.) Nafeh was 12 when his father died of a stroke, prompting him, his mother and his two younger brothers to move to the provincial capital, where he went to work painting houses. Even during the best of times, the wages Nafeh earned were barely enough to support the family, and about four months ago, when his cousin became the deputy commander of a Local Police unit back in Zhari, Nafeh asked to join.
Nafeh told me that he loved being in the Local Police; he felt for the first time that he possessed a sense of purpose about which he could be proud. During our last conversation, a couple days before he died of sepsis, Nafeh said: “I lost one leg. But if I lose the other and both of my hands, I will still be a policeman.”
By this time he was already half-lost to the delirium of his final hours. It was a taxing effort for him to speak at all. A nurse had wheeled his stretcher and IV stand into the breezeway, where he shut his eyes against a warm sun and told fantastical stories. My questions about his life seemed to afford him an opportunity to imagine one that was much grander than reality — or maybe, alternately, Nafeh was lucid to the end and, knowing that his words were limited, used those remaining to embellish what was finally a short and unexceptional past. He told me he had served for years as the trusted assistant to Kandahar’s powerful chief of police, who, along with the governor of Nangarhar, arranged for his medical care after he was injured while leading an operation against would-be Taliban assassins.
A couple of weeks after Nafeh died, I went down to Kandahar and met with his family. I rode out to Zhari and talked to members of his unit. And I found one of the surgeons who treated him before he came to Kabul. The truth was that after stepping on an I.E.D. during a routine patrol, Nafeh was evacuated by an American helicopter to a sprawling NATO installation with one of the most advanced trauma centers in Afghanistan, called Role 3. A remarkable 98 percent of patients admitted there survive, according to the hospital. Because he was an Afghan, though, Nafeh was sent next door to Kandahar Regional Military Hospital, where doctors treated his mangled stump and discharged him two days later to Mirwais, an underresourced and overcrowded public hospital in Downtown Kandahar, supported by the Red Cross.
Nafeh’s cousin Dad Gul told me that doctors at Mirwais recommended he take Nafeh to Kabul if he wanted to save his remaining leg. So the day after Nafeh was admitted to Mirwais, Dad Gul bought three tickets on a civilian flight to Kabul and showed up at the airport with his still-bleeding cousin. On the plane, Dad Gul sat by the window and rested Nafeh’s head on his lap, his bandaged stump and leg laid across the other two seats. (When I met with the surgeon who treated Nafeh at Mirwais, he said that Nafeh left the hospital against medical advice and that his wounds were in good shape.)
“He arrived in very bad condition,” Radaelli, the medical coordinator at Emergency, told me. He said the doctors in Kandahar didn’t do a proper debridement or amputation. “The other leg was hopeless,” he said. “It was completely open. You could see both bones.” Maricic, the head nurse, told me, “He already had sepsis when he arrived.”
A few days later, Nafeh came down with a fever. Maricic removed the dressings on Nafeh’s leg and discovered that it was completely black. The hospital called Dad Gul and persuaded him to allow them to amputate. Nafeh was rushed into the operating theater. After the surgery, he never fully emerged from the anesthesia. The infection had become systemic, and a couple of hours later, Nafeh went into cardiac arrest.
In retrospect, the saddest of Nafeh’s delusions was his belief that important people cared about what happened to him. As we talked outside in the sun the week before he died, Nafeh repeatedly boasted of the powerful men who exercised their influence on his behalf. He seemed unaware that both his stump and remaining leg were infected because of the sloppy treatment he received in Kandahar and that the resulting sepsis was already claiming him. Nor did he appear to realize how close he had been, immediately after his injury, to one of the best trauma centers in Afghanistan.
Of course, then again, Nafeh might have understood everything perfectly. One of the last things he said to me was: “I don’t want my brothers to join the police. It’s no good. I would like to see them become doctors or engineers.”
One Remedy Among the Tragedies
About a week after I met Zobair, the 14-year-old boy from Tagab injured in the helicopter attack, a colleague of mine found a hospital willing to accept him. The French Medical Institute for Children, based in Kabul, is widely acknowledged as one of the best pediatric hospitals in Afghanistan. It also offers a welfare service for indigent patients and their families. In Zobair’s case, the institute agreed in advance to treat him free.
I was unsure which would be the better course: to take Zobair to the institute or to try to get him back into Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram. Early one morning in April, my interpreter and I met Zobair and his uncle Nasir in a hectic bazaar just outside one of Bagram’s heavily guarded entry checkpoints. Zobair lay on the same U.S. Army litter in the same Toyota hatchback. After agreeing to try accessing the hospital there before going to Kabul, we explained our situation to the Afghan soldier guarding the checkpoint, who directed us to a different gate around the base.
Following a rutted road along stacked Hesco barriers topped with razor wire, we arrived at a dirt lot crowded with groups of ailing Afghans, maybe a hundred or more in all. A rifleman in a tall guard tower looked down on them. One elderly, feeble-looking man lay on the ground, next to a plastic bin that held a bag of urine connected to his catheter. He had been taken there by his nephew, who told us that in another hour, at 9 o’clock, someone from Bagram would come out, review everyone’s paperwork and determine who could be admitted into the hospital. The old man proudly showed us a handwritten note from an Afghan clinic.
Nasir and I were debating whether to wait or to continue on to the French Medical Institute for Children, where its chief of pediatric surgery awaited, when Zobair asked us to please not send him back into Bagram. He was worried, he said, that he would again be forbidden from speaking to his family. That decided the matter, and Nasir agreed to follow us to the institute.
When we reached Kabul an hour later, as we began to navigate the congested streets toward the part of the city where the hospital is, I noticed the Toyota pull onto the shoulder behind us. My interpreter and I stopped and walked over to see what was wrong. Nasir got out of the car.
“Where are you taking us?” he demanded.
“To the hospital,” we said.
“No, you’re not. You’re lying. There is no hospital. You’re taking us to Pul-e-Charkhi.”
Pul-e-Charkhi is Afghanistan’s infamous national prison. Nasir was convinced that I had deceived him. In order to lure them into a trap, I had invented the hospital, the welfare program, the surgeon waiting for Zobair.
We argued for a while, and eventually, reluctantly, Nasir agreed to keep going. A few minutes later, however, their car stopped again, and again I had to get out and assure Nasir that the hospital was real. This happened three times. Finally we found ourselves standing in a busy rotary with traffic rushing past us, my interpreter yelling that we were trying to help them and Nasir repeating that he was taking Zobair back to Tagab. An Afghan soldier appeared and told us to move out of the street. Nasir asked him whether the hospital existed. The soldier said it did.
In the end we made it to the institute, and surgeons there removed the internal sutures and the metal staples in Zobair’s abdomen. They sutured and dressed his open wounds and gave him antibiotics. After a few days, he was able to sit up comfortably.
“There is no doubt that they did a very good and big operation,” Dr. Abdul Jalil Wardak, the chief of pediatric surgery, said of the doctors at Bagram. “The result is that the child survived. But of course the way they discharged him is not fair.” I asked what might explain it. “It’s difficult to understand,” Wardak said. “You have to ask them.”
In a written response to my queries, a representative for Craig Joint Theater Hospital said, “Should his clinical condition have necessitated it, this gentleman would have been kept in C.J.T.H. for longer.” The representative added that after they learned that Zobair had been rejected from Mahmud-i-Raqi, “repeated attempts were made by C.J.T.H. staff to contact his guardian’s cellphone number. Alas, his guardian had provided a nonworking cellphone number, and so these attempts were unsuccessful.”
Nasir gave me the same number that he said he gave Bagram. It worked every time I called.
‘They’re Not Like Our Children’
A few months after the Ashura bombing, a new girl was admitted to the hospital and given the bed next to Gulali’s. She was roughly the same age, and they quickly became friends, staying up to talk at night after the nurses turned off the lights. Abeda was from Wardak Province, where her family lived in a small mud house about 50 meters from Highway 1, the critical connecting route between Kabul and Kandahar.
About a year ago, a convoy of Afghan government vehicles was passing by Abeda’s house when it came under attack. Afghan security contractors were escorting the convoy, Abeda told me, and when she stepped outside to see what was happening, one of the contractors shot her three times in the gut with a Kalashnikov. “When he shot me, everything came out of my stomach,” Abeda said. She remembers lying in her doorway, her brother yelling for their father. Then she was at Emergency.
Abeda remained in the hospital for a couple months before going home; in April she returned to Emergency to have her stoma closed and her intestine reconnected. While recovering, Abeda and Gulali spent their days wandering the hospital grounds: Gulali in a wheelchair, and Abeda pushing an aluminum stand with an IV bag. One day when I came to visit, Abeda was gone, and Gulali seemed depressed. Though they live maybe 30 minutes apart, it’s very unlikely the two girls will ever meet again. Gulali’s village straddles the border of Wardak Province, on the very edge of the small and increasingly isolated security bubble surrounding Kabul. The place where Abeda lives, just a few miles away, constitutes another world entirely.
Eventually Gulali went home as well. When her parents and uncles came to Emergency, they brought some of her old clothes with them. For the first time in months, she changed out of her hospital gown. It was the happiest I’d seen her.
I followed Gulali and her family back to their village. We stopped at the police post where Gulali was taken after her injury. The shallow stream ran nearby; Gulali’s mother pointed beyond it to the hill where Gulali had stepped on the mine. It seemed a very long way to be carried with a half-severed leg, and I was reminded of something Tijana Maricic, the head nurse at Emergency, said to me shortly after Gulali’s surgery: “They are different. They are really strong. They’re not like our children.”
A few weeks later, across the street from Emergency, a group of insurgents barricaded themselves in the upper floors of a half-constructed building and began firing into nearby foreign embassies. Afghan Special Forces quickly took up positions surrounding the building, including on a rooftop situated directly between Emergency and the gunmen. During the ensuing 18-hour battle numerous rounds impacted inside the hospital grounds. A physiotherapist was taking a shower when the shooting started, and before he could get out, a bullet pierced the bathroom door and slammed into the wall beside him. Luca Radaelli immediately began setting up a mass-casualty triage tent, just as he had done for the Ashura bombing, but abandoned the plan when bullets began loudly whizzing by his head. Another round hit the wall of the children’s ward, a few inches from a high glass window. Later, when the rocket-blasts and automatic salvos were in a frantic crescendo, a young boy stood on his bed and peered out of the window. He stood there craning his neck until someone yelled at him to get down. He wanted to see what was happening outside.
Four dead civilians and several wounded Afghan Special Forces soldiers were rushed into the hospital late in the afternoon. With nightfall, the fighting died down, only to start again with even greater intensity around 1 a.m. By dawn, when the last of the insurgents was killed, 27 wounded Afghans, mostly soldiers, were being treated at Emergency. Every one of them survived.
No one from the hospital slept that night, but the next day, new gunshot, shell and mine victims arrived from northern Afghanistan, and the staff went back to work.
Luke Mogelson is a contributing writer for the magazine based in Kabul. He last wrote about Marines fighting in Helmand Province.
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