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French president visits Kabul, meets with troops and Afghan leader
By the CNN Wire Staff May 25, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- France's new president, François Hollande, reaffirmed Friday during a visit to Kabul that France will withdraw 2,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012.
He spoke after meeting with French troops stationed there and holding talks with the country's president, Hamid Karzai.
Giving a joint news conference with Karzai, Hollande said he had come to tell French troops that "their task has come to an end in Afghanistan."
But he also stressed France's ongoing cooperation with Afghanistan, saying he and Karzai had discussed details of their nations' strategic partnership agreement.
"After 10 years of European military engagement in Afghanistan, now Afghan security forces are taking the responsibility of their own security, and it is time for us to leave," Hollande said.
"But our cooperation and relationship will not end. In January this year, Afghanistan and France signed the strategic partnership agreement, and based on that, we will be increasing our assistance in other fields.
"After the end of this year, our military trainers and mentors will remain to help Afghan security forces. As President Karzai emphasized, we will be focusing on the health sector, education, civil services, agriculture sector, energy and water and many more. We will also be helping in the economic sector."
Karzai praised France as a longstanding ally of his country.
"France has been our friend for a long time now -- we have relations for the past at least 150 years. They helped us before jihad, during jihad and after jihad," he said.
This visit follows Hollande's announcement at the NATO conference in Chicago that French combat troops would withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of the year.
As part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, French trainers will remain in the country longer.
NATO countries are trying to figure out how to meet a 2014 deadline to withdraw from an unpopular war in Afghanistan while shoring up that nation's security forces.
Some nations have already pulled out troops.
The Netherlands, which had nearly 2,000 troops in Afghanistan at the peak of its commitment, became the first NATO ally to withdraw its combat troops two years ago.
Canada, which once headed the ISAF mission, pulled out almost all of its 3,000 soldiers at the end of 2011. Norway also withdrew almost all of its 500 troops during this period.
Hollande, who took office this month, visited French troops at the Nijrab forward operating base in the northeastern province of Kapisa, his office said in a statement.
He "paid tribute to the 83 French soldiers killed carrying out their mission" in Afghanistan, the statement said, as well as the wounded and the families of the victims.
Hollande was accompanied by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
Hollande's trip to Afghanistan takes place in the same month as President Barack Obama's visit to the country on the anniversary of the killing of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
CNN's Masoud Popalzai contributed to this report.
France's Afghanistan pull-out signals war fatigue driving European defense cuts
Disillusionment with warfare, coupled with economic troubles, has given European defense cuts strong momentum. But defense experts worry they are being made too haphazardly.
By Isabelle de Pommereau | Christian Science Monitor
On a visit to Afghanistan today, newly inaugurated French President François Hollande reiterated his commitment to a full withdrawal of French combat troops by year’s end, well ahead of NATO’s 2014 withdrawal.
France’s decision highlights the high level of so-called "intervention fatigue” among NATO’s European members as the decade-old Afghanistan conflict winds down and they face the need to make drastic budget cuts to remain solvent.
“The idea that we have to be a good policeman of the world has been totally discredited, and we’re going to stay home for a while,” Nick Witney, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London, said following the NATO summit in Chicago earlier this week, which Mr. Hollande attended. “We know now that we can’t do it. We just don’t have the power.”
The summit highlighted what military experts believe will be Europe's greatest challenge in the post-Afghanistan era: balancing the desire and need to scale back defense spending while supporting a force strong enough to respond to any future challenges and maintain deterrence.
“The real challenge to the security and prosperity of Europe's people is to continue to count – to avoid being marginalized in a world where newer and more hard-nosed powers make the rules and assert their interests and values while Europe retreats into retirement,” Mr. Witney says.
More and more, the solution defense experts trumpet is the pooling of military resources, which would make a limited budget go further. But individual countries’ unwillingness to cede total control of their military resources has proven a formidable obstacle.
Intervention fatigue
For decades after World War II, clear confrontations shaped European defense strategies: the cold war, the regional conflicts following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the so-called War on Terror that followed 9-11. But Afghanistan’s financial and human toll has led to a dwindling of already tentative public support for the NATO effort there, and warfare in general.
“Afghanistan has led NATO countries to rethink their attitude about crisis management, to be less willing to have really complex operations that might spiral into civil wars, where you find yourself with a problem that’s so complex you cannot solve it,” says Henning Riecke, head of the transatlantic program at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.
As a result, European governments are less willing to spend their limited funds on military endeavours.
“There is no appetite to repeat such lengthy and expensive conflict that result in such huge loss of life,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, head of the International Munich Security Conference, one of the world's largest gatherings of national security officials, on the eve of this past winter’s conference. “A new era is beginning with a greater measure of critical self restraint regarding the use of military resources.”
Faced with huge deficits and war-weary publics, European governments, from powerhouse Germany to comparatively minor player Bulgaria, have taken steps to slim down their militaries, including closing bases, canceling orders for new military equipment, and abandoning efforts to modernize aging arsenals. Many countries feel there is plenty of room to trim without eroding their defense capabilities.
The greatest military restructuring has been in Germany. Its past as an aggressor and its own reluctance to fight kept Germany’s military confined to peacekeeping missions for decades, and the NATO mission in Afghanistan – in which Germany has the third largest troop presence – is the first time since World War II that German soldiers have had a combat role.
The mission showed how ill-trained and equipped its soldiers were. Using the momentum of a mandate to cut €8.3 billion ($10.4 billion) from his budget between 2010 and 2015, then defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg pushed a massive overhaul designed to make the army “leaner and more efficient.” He ended the draft and proposed a plan to close 31 of the country's 328 military bases, among other things.
Learning to trust
Few dispute the merits of the overhaul, and even defense spending cuts are not that controversial. What defense experts see as problematic is that the decision was made without consultation of or coordination with NATO or the European Union – a process repeated throughout Europe.
"Every member state is cutting armed forces without transparency and consultation, without an architectural idea for what will be left," Witney says.
Countries are making the decisions mostly autonomously. There is no understanding of who has what and no overarching vision for European defense going forward. Why is it, ask experts, that European military leaders are still trained at 27 different military schools, or that there are so many different types of aircraft in the countries' individual air forces?
In part it is because countries cling to their ability to determine their defense capabilities and have different understandings of the importance of a robust military. In the smallest European Union countries, defense budgets have been cut by as much as a quarter, but Sweden and Poland, for instance, have continued to fuel their military.
RELATED – What NATO looks like in an age of European austerity
“Cooperation is a difficult topic because it means giving up areas of sovereignty – you have to resign on some of your capabilities, to trust the partner,” says Justyna Gotkowska of the Center for Eastern Studies in Warsaw. “This trust isn’t there yet. It is starting but it will be difficult,” she says.
Witney calls on heads of governments to initiate the pooling and sharing of their military resources. “'We'll buy your submarines if you buy our tanks,” he says, describing an example of a way European countries could complement each other. "If one nation makes tanks better and cheaper, another can close its tank factory.”
A review of each member state's defense and security strengths and weaknesses would be a good starting point, experts say.
But despite a commitment on paper to a common defense and security strategy, European countries are “still in a phase where countries cling to their defense abilities,” Mr. Riecke of the German Council on Foreign Relations says.
“There is a certain amount of political will to cooperate that is not yet translated into action. But as the financial pressure is in, that could change,” he says.
US to Europe: Step it up
While conflicts within Europe are unlikely, there is always the potential for upheaval caused by events outside the region – a possibility that is especially worrying to a less militarized Europe as the United States’ reorients itself away from Europe and toward Southeast Asia.
Earlier this year the Obama administration announced the withdrawal of two heavy armor brigades from Germany, which will reduce the number of US Army troops there from 42,000 today to 37,000 by 2015. It will also leave the United States with only two Army bases on the continent: one in Germany and one in Italy. The US Army had 277,000 soldiers in Europe in 1962, at the height of the cold war.
The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya underscored Europeans’ dependence on the US. Although Europeans took command of a NATO mission for the first time, the US provided most of the logistics, equipment, and intelligence, and the US now foots 75 percent of the NATO bill.
In Brussels last year, former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates lashed out at Europe for not doing enough to pay for its own defense.
"The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” Mr. Gates said.
“Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders...may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost," he concluded.
Afghan Bombings Kill Five
May 25, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Five bomb blasts have killed five people and wounded about a dozen in several Afghan cities.
Afghan officials say two people were killed and three injured when a bus hit a roadside bomb in the southern Helmand Province.
Elsewhere in Helmand, the NATO-led international force (ISAF) said one man was killed and two children injured by another roadside bomb explosion.
In the southern Uruzgan Province, one police officer was killed and three were injured by a improvised explosive device.
And along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, in Kandahar Province, a suicide bomber riding a motorcycle wounded a police officer and two civilians.
The attacks came as newly elected French President Francois Hollande was in Afghanistan's northeastern Kapisa Province to visit French troops.
Based on reporting by AFP, AP, and dpa
U.S.-led wars create humanitarian disasters: report
BEIJING, May 25 (Xinhua) -- The U.S.-led wars, albeit alleged to be "humanitarian intervention" efforts and for "the rise of a new democratic nation," created humanitarian disasters instead, said a report on the U.S. human rights record released on Friday.
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011 was released by the State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 issued by the U.S. State Department on Thursday.
For Iraqis, the death toll in the U.S.-initiated Iraq war stands at 655,000, the report said, adding that it is estimated that civilian casualties in the military campaign in Afghanistan could exceed 31,000, the report said.
Incomplete statistics revealed that the United States has launched more than 60 drone attacks in Pakistan in 2011, killing at least 378 people, the report added.
The report cited an article of the Guardian on March 11, 2012 as saying that an American soldier stationed in Afghanistan burst into three civilian homes in two villages in the small hours of March 11, shot dead 16 sleeping Afghan villagers, injured five others, and burned the dead bodies. The victims included nine children and three women.
Such "American-style massacre" against innocent civilians has once again pierced the veil of the United States proclaiming itself "a country under the rule of law" and "a human rights defender," the report said.
The report noted that the United States does not support the right to development, which is a concern of most of the developing countries.
In September 2011, the 18th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on "the right to development." Except an abstention vote from the United States, all the HRC members voted for the resolution.
The report said the United States continues its conducts that seriously violate the right of subsistence and right of development of Cuban people.
The United States has been pursuing hegemony in the world, grossly trampling upon the sovereignty of other countries and capriciously violating human rights against other nations. It "appears more and more to be contributing to international disorder," the report said.
Kandahar schools brave harsh realities
Despite a reinvigorated desire for learning in southern Afghanistan, the region's education statistics remain damning.
Mujib Mashal 25 May 2012 17:20 Source: Al Jazeera
Dand, Kandahar, Afghanistan - The teachers at Mia Noor Mohamed Middle School fear losing their beloved institution, one classroom at a time.
Only a few of the rooms in the two-storey building, just a 30-minute drive from the provincial capital, remain open for learning. The entire second floor is a police post, where a couple of dozen young soldiers dine and sleep in bunk beds lined up against the walls.
Several months ago, one of the police officers briefly brought his wife and kids to stay with him, and they took up a classroom. Now, a young officer is asking the small school of about 200 students to vacate yet another room, allegedly to put up a teacher their commander has hired to teach the troops basic literacy. Sceptical of the reasons, the principal is on the phone, trying to avoid losing one more classroom.
"The soldiers walk in front of our young students listening to songs, carrying their guns… and sometimes even joints of weed," one teacher complained.
One morning, the same teacher said he collected dozens of bullets spread around the classrooms and returned them to the soldiers before he could allow the students in.
"What kind of a learning environment is this?"
The daily struggle of schools in the region to remain open is testament to a reinvigorated desire for learning in a province that has historically lagged behind in education. The recent decades of violence, for which Kandahar - and Afghanistan's south more generally - has borne an unequal brunt, has worsened the plight. Until today, there remain three districts in the province, with an estimated population of 30,000 people, that have never had a school, according to Sher Agha Safi, the provincial education chief. More than 100 schools in other parts of the province remain closed due to Taliban threats.
And the statistics are damning. Afghanistan's 34 provinces had more than 150,000 high school graduates in 2011, according to data provided by the ministry of education. But Kandahar, the country's second-largest province, produced an abysmal 1,823 graduates, just 0.12 per cent of the national figure.
Safi has managed to reopen 13 of the closed schools in the past two months. The province has 137,000 registered students, 37,000 of them girls.
"For this large province, that is a small number," he admits.
Amid murmurs of peace talks, even if a compromise deal were to be reached with the Taliban to bring relative calm to the region, the abysmal education record means a vast number of uneducated youths, without skills that give them hope, will remain vulnerable to exploitation.
Fear of Taliban
The location of Mia Noor Mohamed school - it shares a wall with the district governor's compound - has been a source of trouble, increasing its risk of being targeted.
"Parents send their children for learning, not to the government," said another teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from police.
"If the Taliban want to attack, they will have no mercy."
In 2009, a suicide attack in the district governor's compound shut the school for a year, but a new principal, Ata Mohamed, opened it again.
"The first day, we had three teachers, one principal, and two students," Mohamed said.
The number of students grew quickly. Today, the school has about 350 enrolled, and 200 attend regularly. But the troubles have persisted.
"The foreigners would bring dogs to search the school," said one teacher. "They brought the dogs classroom by classroom, as students sat at their desks."
About a year ago, as the Taliban's recent tactic of taking over buildings in strategic locations and waging assaults from them intensified, the police feared the district governor's office could be targeted from the school building. So one of its platoons took over the second floor, and they have remained there since.
"We are here for their safety," insisted one of the police officers.
When the principal was on an official trip a few months ago, a police commander walked in and asked for the school to be shut down. The commander said he had information that the area was being targeted. When teachers, in the absence of the principal, argued to keep the school open, the commander threatened to personally "put the lock" on, one teacher recalled.
The school remained closed for a week.
The district governor has asked the school to relocate, to a new building about two kilometres away.
"Right now, there is no drinking water there, I cant take my boys there," the principal said. "Hopefully, by next year they can arrange for water."
Kandahar has about 4,100 teachers, 1,400 of whom are part-time high school students.
Mia Noor Mohamed School has six grades, but only five teachers. The principal himself teaches the third-grade class. Only he has a "teacher's training" degree, a two-year programme following high school graduation. One of the teachers is a high school graduate, another an 11th-grade dropout. The remaining three are current high school students who teach part-time. Fourth-grade teacher Shafiullah, for example, is 16 years old, and a 10th-grade student during the afternoon.
A few kilometres down the road, past Afghan president Hamid Karzai's paternal village, is the Shaheed Mohamed Qasim Jan co-educational school. The neat, one-story white building is surrounded by several tents that also serve as classrooms, amid the heat, for the 930 students - including 372 girls.
"We have seen an increase of about 200 students in our enrollment every year," said Fazel Mohamed, the elderly principal. The school, paid for by Karzai's late brother, Ahmad Wali, is named after one of Karzai's comrades who returned to Afghanistan in 2001 to begin a rebellion against the then-ruling Taliban,and was killed during his clandestine entry.
The school has 21 teachers, a ratio of about 44 students per teacher. But what's striking, as in the Mia Noor Mohamed school, is the education of the teachers. Only five of the 21 are graduates of teachers' training; four are high school graduates; the 12 others are part-time high school students, many of them teenagers.
In 2011, Kandahar produced only 283 female high school graduates, according to the ministry of education - which represents a minuscule 0.6 per cent of the 45,557 female graduates nationwide.
But if the story of Zarghona high school - the all-girls school of about 1,700 students in Kandahar city - is any indicator, that number will improve, due to a recently noted perseverance towards education.
According to the principal, Lailuma Popal, the school has not faced any major threats in recent years, except for one in 2011, amid the country-wide riots following the news that copies of the Quran had been burned at the US Bagram airbase.
"We heard rumours of protests at about 10am, and, at 11:40, angry men were knocking on the school gates."
As a precaution, Popal had gathered all her students into the main building, in the centre of the large compound, away from the neck-high walls.
"One of our classrooms had a second door, opening to the street. They broke down that door, pulled out the desks and chairs and set them all on fire in the school bus parked outside," she said.
But the rioters did not stop there. They marched on to the main building.
"On the one side, we had girls screaming and crying and we had to quiet them. On the other side we had angry men trying to enter."
They called the police for help, but the security guards manning a post just around the corner had fled into a hospital under construction, Popal said.
Scared, she and three elderly teachers finally decided to walk out, with a copy of the Quran in hand, and plead with the rioters to leave.
"We swore on the Quran that there were only innocent children in the building, and we said - for the sake of this book - leave us be."
The men left, and Popal decided to use bricks and cement to block up the classroom door that opened to the street. The walls of the compound, too, have been built taller since.
But the incident, as troubling as it was for the young students, did not affect attendance, according to Popal.
"Two or three years ago, the school would be empty the day after a blast," Popal said. "But now, when something happens, school is full the next day. We are used to it now."
Follow Mujib Mashal on Twitter: @MujMash
Top US General: ‘Good enough’ is not good enough Afghanistan
CNN By Samuel Burke May 24th, 2012
The White House has been scaling back both troops and expectations in Afghanistan as it scales down the war there. General John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, confirmed specifics of the drawdown, announcing that a quarter of American troops will be home by the end of September. But in an exclusive interview with Christiane Amanpour he said he'll need strong combat forces there for the foreseeable future.
The change of in the U.S.’ definition of success in Afghanistan has even resulted in the national security advisers’ publicly saying that the U.S.’ goal is to provide a modicum of stability for Afghanistan. Even though previously, the stated goal had been to defeat, prevent, and to have high expectations for a secure Afghanistan.
The New York Times reported that aides to President Obama informally called this strategy, “Afghan Good Enough.” General Allen firmly rejected this prescription to Amanpour. “I don't use the term, ‘Afghan good enough,’ he said. “Because we're all sacrificing way too much for something that's ‘Afghan Good Enough.’ I think that term understates or undersells the commitment that we've all made to this. Afghanistan is an important country in an important region. And the outcome of our investment – this global investment of 50 nations and ISAF and many other nations who've been involved for a long period of time with great generosity – is not about being good enough.”
Recently U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, both from their respective intelligence committees, came back from a visit to Afghanistan saying the Taliban was stronger since the surge of troops to Afghanistan. When Amanpour asked General Allen about this assessment, he did not disagree.
“I don't think that there's a difference of opinion,” he said. “What I would say is that while the Taliban think that they still have the possibility of succeeding, we don't see that. We don't see that the Taliban ultimately can succeed, and it's a combination both of what the international community can do to support Afghanistan, not just in the short term, but over the long term.”
Amanpour asked Allen about Afghan forces that have been attacking NATO troops – the very same group training them up to take the reins of security. Allen bluntly stated, “Any attack is a blow, and we are very, very conscious of this. It is a tragedy every time it occurs. We should not be surprised that the Taliban seek to infiltrate the Afghan National Security Forces.”
But Allen said he remains optimistic about the rapport between the two groups . “There are tens of thousands of interactions every single day across Afghanistan between the Afghan troops and International Security Assistance Force,” he said. “On most of those, every single day we continue to deepen and broaden the relationship we seek.”
Allen rejected the notion that the U.S. and NATO are packing up and leaving Afghanistan all together.
“We are not leaving. And the narrative for the Taliban that they can wait us out is a flawed narrative,” he told Amanpour. “I think that the unambiguous international support for Afghanistan has been a very powerful message. You know, that was the message that came out of the NATO summit. We will not abandon Afghanistan. The international community's role here over the long term is good for the region.”
And he told Amanpour that he has promised President Obama an analysis following the drawdown of the 23,000 troops on what we he thinks forces will need in Afghanistan in 2013.
“That analysis will include an analysis of the state of the Taliban, the insurgency, how the Afghan National Security Forces are doing, and what we anticipate the operational environment being in 2013.”
The Best News Out of Afghanistan
By Joe Klein Wednesday, Jun. 06, 2012 time.com
In the beginning, as American troops pushed toward Baghdad in March 2003, General David Petraeus asked Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post a famous question: "Tell me how this ends?" For years, the Petraeus question has stood as a sober, unanswered counterpoint to George W. Bush's swaggering, inaccurate mission accomplished banner.
But now, with the NATO decision to pull all combat troops out of Afghanistan by the middle of next year, we can hazard some guesses. The Bush war on terrorism will end as it began and should have remained--a special-forces war. It is as John Kerry described it in the 2004 presidential campaign: a constant national-security concern, requiring intense intelligence work and occasional special operations, but one that never required a major commitment of U.S. forces. It also ends better than we had any right to expect, given the disastrously stupid invasion of Iraq--a fact largely attributable to the job Petraeus did to stabilize the situation there in 2007.
Of course, it isn't really over. The consequences of the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks of September 2001 will ramify for decades. Iraq may fall into civil war or dissolve entirely (the Kurds already have signaled their intent to achieve de facto independence), or it may enjoy a rush of oil wealth that will salve the Sunni-Shi'ite friction. Afghanistan seems likely to remain trapped in its perpetual civil war between the southern Pashtun and the northern ethnic factions. The NATO decision carries with it the implicit faith that the Afghan National Army, composed almost entirely of non-Pashtuns, will be able to keep the Taliban out of Kabul. This will be done at some expense: an estimated $4 billion a year in aid, mostly from the U.S. But it also reflects a new reality: the war against al-Qaeda has gone elsewhere and become more diffuse.
On the very day of NATO's Afghanistan decision, an al-Qaeda suicide bomber decimated a military parade in Yemen, killing at least 100 and wounding hundreds more. This followed the CIA's successful infiltration of a Yemen-based al-Qaeda cell that was hoping to blow up an airliner with an advanced version of an underwear bomb. Yes, there are still miscreants like Ayman al-Zawahiri wandering the Pakistani borderlands, but al-Qaeda's center of gravity seems to have moved to Yemen, where it will be fought with drones and special-ops teams. That is relatively good news on several counts. The best news is that tens of thousands of American troops will no longer need to be in harm's way.
The next best news is that we don't have to spend so much time wringing our hands about the Pakistanis anymore. To be sure, Pakistan remains the most dangerous country in the world, far more dangerous, potentially, than Iran. It has a nuclear arsenal of perhaps 100 warheads--and a history of Islamist military coups. It also has a history of foreign policy chicanery, delusion and paranoia. If there were a Pakistani leader with a fraction of, say, Benjamin Netanyahu's knowledge of American politics, Pakistan never would have closed the NATO supply routes to Afghanistan and demanded an apology from Barack Obama for the incident in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed by American fire in a cross-border artillery duel last November. For one thing, the Pakistanis fired first. For another, Obama isn't going to apologize for anything in the midst of a presidential campaign in which his opponent has attacked him, falsely, for engaging in a global "apology tour."
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate estimated that the NATO effort in Afghanistan would survive only 10 to 15 days if Pakistan closed the transport routes. That proved to be ridiculous. "And it is costing Pakistan more than it is NATO," says one regional expert. "The Pakistani truckers are suffering." But then, Pakistan's miscalculations have been legion. It harbored Osama bin Laden and armed Taliban factions, like the Haqqanis, in the mistaken belief that we'd never find out or that we needed Pakistan too much to do anything about it. The truth is, our need for an alliance with Pakistan is marginal. India is a more reliable partner in the region.
We have learned a great deal in the past 11 years. We have learned about the power of ethnicity, sectarianism and, above all, geography. We've learned of the impotence of Western imperial inventions like the cobbled-together nonstates of Iraq and Pakistan. We've learned that Southwest Asia is no more hospitable to Western expeditionary forces than Southeast Asia was. Perhaps, in the process, we've also learned something about the importance of humility as we make our way in the world.
The Art of the Ask for Afghanistan
We need more help with the financial burden. Here's how to get it.
Wall Street Journal By JONATHAN HILLMAN AND COURTNEY LOBEL OPINION May 24, 2012
With all eyes on President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney as they court Americans in what is expected to be the most expensive election in American history, an international fundraising challenge is going ignored: the campaign for Afghanistan.
As the United States draws down its combat forces, it has launched a desperate effort to secure billions of dollars in pledges to shore up Afghan security forces and fund critical development and reconstruction projects. Put simply, Afghanistan's fate hinges on foreign aid, which accounted for 92% of its public spending last year.
As fundraisers, however, U.S. officials are coming up woefully short. At the end of Monday's NATO summit in Chicago, there was no announcement that coalition partners had cobbled together the $4.1 billion needed annually to keep Afghanistan's security forces afloat after NATO's mission ends in 2014. Attempting some early damage control, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said over the weekend that the summit was "not a pledging conference."
Yet funding was at the top of the summit agenda, and shortfalls have already constrained NATO strategy in Afghanistan. Acknowledging the funding challenges, U.S. officials have proposed cutting Afghan security forces to 228,000 from 352,000 by around 2017, a move that threatens to leave more than 100,000 trained fighters without jobs. To finance this scaled-down force, the U.S. is asking its allies for $1.3 billion annually, a modest sum for a group of nations that are among the richest in the world, despite their considerable economic challenges.
So what went wrong? Partially to blame is the approach taken by U.S. diplomats, who circulated a "Target Asks" list in advance of Monday's summit.
Assigning specific sums to coalition partners, the list is reported to have provoked resentment among U.S. allies. Rather than continue this ham-handed approach to fundraising by decree, U.S. officials must overhaul their fundraising strategy before international donors meet in Tokyo on July 8. When it comes to "the art of the ask," there are some time-honored principles for persuading donors to give big that American officials would do well to keep in mind.
An age-old fundraising maxim rings true for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan: If you want advice, ask for money; if you want money, ask for advice. In other words, donor nations will be more inclined to fund projects that they are involved with devising.
NATO allies were caught off guard in February, when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta suggested that the U.S. combat operations would end in mid-to-late 2013, a year ahead of schedule. The U.S. must avoid future surprises if it hopes to keep its allies more than rhetorically invested in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, fundraising is most successful when donors are asked to fund projects that align with their values. Many NATO partners are more concerned with development and governance issues than they are with training Afghanistan's security forces.
The U.S., which already spends roughly $2 billion a week on the war, could offer more than the $2.3 billion it has pledged for Afghanistan's annual security expenses after 2014 if NATO partners agree to provide larger sums for non-security projects.
Most importantly, the U.S. must expand Afghanistan's pool of donor nations. American officials invited more than 30 non-NATO countries to participate in the Chicago summit, but more must be done to persuade regional powers to invest in Afghanistan's security.
In addition to India and Pakistan, which have clear stakes in a stable Afghanistan, China has mining and oil investments in Afghanistan, and Russia has expressed concerns that the drug trade and terrorism could increase after the NATO forces depart. U.S. officials must take a donor-centered approach and make the case that if sufficient funds cannot be raised, these interests will be seriously at risk.
To be sure, U.S. diplomats have a difficult pitch to make. Corruption continues to cripple the Karzai-led government, and Taliban forces have been more resilient than expected. But the international community could pay dearly down the road if U.S. officials can't convince more nations to invest in Afghanistan's future today.
Mr. Hillman is a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ms. Lobel is associate director for foundation relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.
A version of this article appeared May 25, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Art of the Ask for Afghanistan.
Maintenance Snafu Grounds Afghan Fleet
Air Force Planes Provided by the U.S. Have Been Out of Service for Months, Hindering Development of Kabul's Military
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE May 25, 2012
KABUL - A $275 million fleet of Afghan air force transport planes provided by the U.S. over the past three years has been grounded for months because of lack of adequate maintenance and potential safety problems, American military officials said.
The fleet of 15 C-27A cargo planes is meant to provide the logistics backbone for the Afghan military, which now depends instead on air transport by the U.S.-led coalition—at a time when the U.S. is working to prepare its Afghan counterparts to manage their own security affairs.
The Italian aircraft, also known as the G222, were built from 1977 to 1985 and in service with the Italian air force before the U.S. bought them for Afghanistan. Prime contractor Alenia Aermacchi North America, a unit of Italian defense conglomerate Finmeccanica SpA, FNC.MI +0.14% rebuilt and upgraded the aircraft at a facility near Naples.
The Afghan air force began receiving the refurbished cargo planes in 2009 to replace obsolete Soviet-made aircraft.
Since then, some work performed by a maintenance subcontractor hired by Alenia "did not meet contract specifications," forcing the planes to be grounded in December in Kabul, said Capt. Agneta Murnan, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Air Force's 438th Air Expeditionary Wing.
Some of the planes were later cleared for flight, but the fleet was grounded again in early March after additional safety problems were identified.
Who is ultimately responsible for the problems that required the grounding of the fleet is unclear. The Defense Department's inspector general is preparing a report card that will look at the C-27A procurement as part of an assessment of the progress of training and equipping the Afghan air force.
Until April, a unit of L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. LLL -0.44% carried out ground support and maintenance work. The company said the subsidiary, L-3 Systems Field Support, "performed maintenance and sustainment work as outlined in the contract."
A spokesman for Alenia's U.S.-based subsidiary said the company was "working jointly with the U.S. Air Force in a methodical and deliberate process to rectify the situation. We expect the fleet will begin flying again very soon."
The C-27As are currently "non-mission capable," aviation-speak for a lack of equipment and spare parts, a person familiar with the matter said. "Most of the ground-support equipment is unserviceable or the wrong type, or the part's missing," the person said. Documentation for parts was incomplete and the system to fill oxygen bottles was inoperable, the person said.
The U.S. military said a new contractor is now conducting maintenance to get the planes back in the air.
Air transport is critical in Afghanistan, where the road network is underdeveloped and often impassable because of insurgent bombs. Transport support by the U.S.-led coalition is likely to end as most foreign forces withdraw by the end of 2014.
The grounding of the Afghan transport fleet hinders training of the Afghan force as the clock runs down to 2014. While the planes are grounded, Afghan pilots have made use of simulators to compensate for lost flying time, Capt. Murnan said.
Fifteen C-27A aircraft have been delivered out of a planned total of 20 aircraft, according to an Air Forces Central representative. The twin-turboprop C-27A is larger and more capable than the single-engine C-208B planes currently flying transport missions for the Afghan air force.
The new aircraft are supposed to provide essential support to the Afghan military, ferry cargo, passengers and humanitarian aid, as well as fly medical evacuation missions. Two of the planes were to be configured as VIP transports for the Afghan government.
As part of its exit strategy, the U.S. has set a target of building an Afghan force of around 145 aircraft. Around 100 have been delivered, including training aircraft and transport helicopters.
U.S. officials said the C-208Bs and Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters have been providing airlift support since the "stand down" started in mid-December.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Timothy Ray, who heads the NATO air training command in Afghanistan, said the coalition's focus was to build the foundations of a professional air force, not a one-for-one replacement of coalition air power. "It's a very small force to begin with," he said.
The grounding of the aircraft is only the most recent setback to efforts to build a capable and self-sufficient Afghan air force.
Afghanistan has seen a series of deadly incidents in which Afghans trained and advised by coalition have turned their weapons on their mentors. In April 2011, an Afghan air force officer killed eight airmen and a contractor at their training base at Kabul International Airport, one of the deadliest attacks on coalition troops in recent years.
Col. Abdul Wahab Sultan, an Afghan air force officer, said the incident "broke our hearts," and set back training efforts.
Maj. Anthony Graham, a mentor to Afghan air force personnel, said heightened security concerns had forced the Afghans to reshuffle personnel, delaying some parts of the training program.
At the Kabul headquarters, U.S. Air Force trainers now wear body armor and carry rifles as they make the rounds with their Afghan trainees. A security guard keeps watch while advisers do their work.
On a recent flight ferrying Afghan student pilots and air force officers from Kabul to Shindand, a young Army specialist occupied one of the seats closest to the cockpit. Pointing his thumb to the U.S. pilots, he said his job was to "keep them safe" during the flight.
Afghanistan, Illusions and Delusions
The Huffington Post By Jasdev Singh Rai Medical Doctor, with MA in politics, human rights activist and community worker 24/05/2012
So Obama sat with Karzai before the NATO Afghan summit last Sunday (20th May) and gave him a little lecture, 'Now, when we get out in 2014, you need to behave, you have to have a good democracy, no corruption and you have to be civil to your enemy, the Taliban.' Karzai nodded,' yes, yes. yes'. And everyone at the summit was happy.
Except the 'enemy' doesn't want to talk, and corruption is the glue that keeps Karzai's happy band together and a clean democracy will topple Karzai. It's all a little satirical.
After 10 years, billions of dollars and a defeat staring in the face, it appears the 'coalition' forces are still groping to find what the Taliban is all about or what the Pushtuns call democracy and what al Qaeda's (AQ) mission is. Thousands of pundits have been advising Governments, writing papers and become fully paid experts (except me). Yet this rugged tribesmen who wear turbans as if they have still to discover the mirror, seem to be outsmarting everyone.
Yes the Generals leading the war against, what exactly we still don't know, assure us that the al Qaeda and Taliban are much weakened with many of their leaders killed by unmanned drones guided by persons playing computer games on US soil. 'Cowards hiding behind technology, come fight us face to face', say the Taliban. Cowards say the US to Taliban as their mujahedeen plant roadside bombs at night and then disappear. In this fight, no one likes to show their face.
But beneath all that bravo talk, is a coalition coming apart by its failure to achieve its aims and a recognition that the 'mission', whatever it is, is neither within grasp, nor even defined.
For a start al Qaeda and the Taliban are fighting two different wars. It took the United States more than six years to grasp this. Al Qaeda is fighting a global war to rid the holy land (Saudi Arabia) of infidels (US bases). It wants to rid Middle East of western puppet governments. And despite the fractious state of global Islam, it wants to restore the Caliphate, the equivalent of the Catholic Pope or our Anglican Queen.
I say, good luck to AQ. It will have decades if not centuries of internecine conflicts before a Caliph is agreed at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the EU equivalent of 57 Islamic countries. Why is the west fighting to stop what AQ and Iran can do themselves is beyond me.
Al Qaeda, uses local domestic grievances in different regions to engage the west through regional hotheads. The west gets trapped in these wars and helps create a global propaganda for AQ of 'Islam under threat'. It is a common currency of war cries, Blair always shrieked on about AQ 'they are a threat to our way of life', meaning parliamentary democracy and human rights both of which he significantly eroded single handed by himself without Bin Laden's advice!
Perhaps the award winning ignominious reason for war came from Harvard educated George Bush. 'they hate us'. Seems in USA it needs a 'Harvard' education to come to the analytic insight that the enemy is the enemy because it hates us and we hate them. War is always on the agenda of American elections because somebody always hates the US of A. 'God save America and the rest of the world from its trigger happy democracy and AQ (which hates America)'.
Meanwhile the Taliban, unlike AQ, are on a domestic mission to reclaim their power and 'their way of life' in Afghanistan. Created by the powerful Pakistan intelligence, ISI, the Taliban were the first serious attempt at state building in Afghanistan albeit in Pushtun and Islamic ways at a time when Afghanistan was in chaos following the war against Russian occupation. the West wants its own version of 'State'.
But the Pushtun are a fiercely independent people who intensely dislike centralised power and have centuries old democratic ways of decision making through local jirgas (or shuras) and Loya Jirgas (grand assmeblies). Their way is consensus, although of the powerful.
Cultural norms are more influential than laws of the land in many Afghan tribes, particularly the Pushtuns. People got killed for breaking these norms. The Taliban regime was Pakistan's attempt at introducing some sort of rule of law, although through the sharia, whatever its drawbacks.
What we have now is similar to the crises that occurred when the Russians fled. Karzai is the most powerful war lord with a huge army at his disposal, trained, armed and financed by the west. He uses the 'moral' instrument of 'democratically legislated' law to impose his order. And the west runs the illusion that he is a 'democratically' elected leader, although according to Ambassador Galbrath the elections were rigged.
Then there are hundreds of smaller warlords, some aligned to his outfit, some independent, some to the other competing forces and some even to the Taliban.
And then there is the Taliban, perhaps the most disciplined and ideologically driven group, waiting to bring order to the usually fractious Pushtun society once the 'coalition forces' leave. It has a mixture of sharia laws and local customs in its arsenal.
Karzai knows that secular democracy and human rights do not get votes in Afghanistan. Yet that is what the coalition soldiers have been dying for and west paying for all this time.
Karzai's only call is 'the Taliban are a threat to our way of life'. But people know his way of life as corruption, tortures, rapes, privilege, coercion and warlordism. It is no wonder that he does not want to make common ground with the Taliban. That will be his demise.
The world is full of cranks and dreamers controlling power. And there were two of them talking fairy tales to each other at the NATO summit when President Obama and President Karzai assured each other and all present of their 'delusion' of achievable end goal, 'Good responsible secular democracy, human rights, end to corruption and talks with the Taliban to make them partners'. 'Dream on', say the Taliban and ISI.
The Pushtuns do not talk to losers. They won't talk to Karzai. And Afghan warlords live for corruption and coercion. Karzai can't reduce corruption or bring in transparent democracy.
So what was the NATO summit all about. Illusions of a perfect democracy and delusions of aims achieved. The west went in believing and comes out believing.
Sopko appointed to Afghanistan IG post
Washington Post By Timothy R. Smith May 24, 2012
President Obama plans to appoint John F. Sopko, a partner at the Washington law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, as special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, the White House said Wednesday.
The special inspector general investigates corruption allegations in the multibillion-dollar Afghanistan reconstruction effort and does not require Senate confirmation.
The post has been vacant for more than 470 days, according to an inspectors general vacancy tracker maintained by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. It is one of seven inspector general vacancies that have been open longer than a year.
Steven Trent has been acting special inspector general since September.
Obama also appointed Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of the state of New York and chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, to the board of directors of the State Justice Institute, which awards grants to state courts.
“The extraordinary dedication these individuals bring to their new roles will greatly serve the American people,” Obama said in a statement. “I am grateful they have agreed to serve in this Administration and I look forward to working with them in the months and years to come.”
Sopko has more than 30 years experience in investigative and oversight work, according to the administration and Sopko’s biography on his company’s Web site. He joined Akin Gump in January 2009 as an investigator after two years as chief counsel for oversight and investigations for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. At the firm, he focuses on congressional and federal investigations.
Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich), who was chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee during Sopko’s tenure, called him a “smart, able, tough, patient investigator.”
“He will ferret out wrongdoing wherever it is possible to do, and he will serve with distinction,” Dingell said. “He’s the kind of guy we want in that job. .?.?. You’ll be pleased with him, and so will I. And so, more importantly, will the administration.”
From 2005 to 2007, Sopko was deputy director of the Homeland Security Studies & Analysis Institute.
Sopko served as a prosecutor in Dayton, Ohio, where he battled organized crime. That led him to the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, where he started in 1978.
The previous inspector, Arnold Fields, a retired Marine major general, resigned in January 2011 after a review by the Council of Inspectors General found that many of his office’s audits barely met minimum quality standards and that Fields had not laid out a clear strategic vision.
There are now 10 inspector general vacancies, which has drawn criticism from Congress.
Sopko did not immediately return calls and e-mails seeking comment.
Pakistan seeks face-saving formula in NATO talks
By Michael Georgy Thu May 24, 2012 10:36am EDT
ISLAMABAD - (Reuters) - Pakistan is unlikely to re-open supply routes to NATO troops in Afghanistan unless the United States offers a politically acceptable formula in talks on ending a six-month standoff on the issue, a Pakistani official said on Thursday.
The official said the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP)had to be politically savvy, taking into account widespread anti-American sentiment in the country ahead of general elections due by early next year.
"It is not fair for any country to expect any decisions that could be politically harmful ahead of elections," the official, who is familiar with the negotiations, told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
The United States has been pushing Pakistan to re-open supply routes to NATO forces in Afghanistan in difficult talks that show no signs of a breakthrough any time soon.
Pakistan closed the routes, seen as vital to the planned withdrawal of most foreign troops from Afghanistan before the end of 2014, in protest against last November's killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO air attack along the Afghan border.
Higher transit fees are the most difficult issue in Pakistan's talks in the negotiations, said the official.
Pakistan was demanding a substantially higher fee than the current $250 per container or per fuel truck that crosses its borders and it was not clear when a deal was possible, he said, without elaborating. "It could be tomorrow or it could be in two months," said the official.
U.S. frustrations with Pakistan deepened on Wednesday after Pakistani authorities sentenced a doctor accused of helping the CIA find Osama bin Laden to 33 years in jail on charges of treason.
Shakil Afridi was accused of running a fake vaccination campaign, in which he collected DNA samples, that is believed to have helped the American intelligence agency track down bin Laden in a Pakistani town.
The al Qaeda leader was killed in a unilateral U.S. special forces raid in the town of Abbottabad in May last year that heavily damaged ties with Washington, a source of billions of dollars in aid.
Bin Laden's long presence in Pakistan -- he was believed to have stayed there for years -- despite the worldwide manhunt for him raised suspicions in Washington that Pakistani intelligence officials may have given him shelter.
Pakistani officials deny this and say an intelligence gap enabled bin Laden to live here undetected.
No one has yet been charged for helping the al Qaeda leader take refuge in Pakistan. A government commission tasked with investigating how he managed to evade capture by Pakistani authorities for so long is widely accused of being ineffective.
AMERICAN OUTRAGE OVER SENTENCING
U.S. officials and lawmakers said Afridi deserved only praise, not a 33-year jail sentence.
Two senior U.S. senators called the ruling "shocking and outrageous" and urged Islamabad to pardon and release the doctor immediately.
But a Pakistan foreign ministry spokesman said the United States should respect the court's decision.
"I think as far as the case of Mr. Afridi is concerned, it was in accordance with Pakistani laws and by the Pakistani courts, and we need to respect each other's legal processes," Moazzam Ali Khan told reporters.
Aside from the talks on NATO supply routes, Pakistan and the United States have been trying to patch up a serious of other differences in their ties since the raid that killed bin Laden, which humiliated Pakistan's powerful military.
Islamabad is sticking to demands for an American apology for the Pakistani soldiers killed in the air attack on the border, but progress has been made on the issue, said the Pakistani official.
"We need some sort of apology," he said.
Pakistan also wants an end to U.S. drone strikes on Islamist militants on its territory.
Attacks by unmanned drone aircraft, which U.S. officials say are highly effective against militants, fuel anti-American sentiment in Pakistan because they are seen as violations of sovereignty and inflict civilian casualties.
After conducting a review of ties with Washington last month, parliament called on the government to demand an end to drone strikes.
That, the official said, implies that Pakistan must itself expel foreign militants from its soil, including Uzbeks, Arabs and members of the Afghan Haqqani network, one of the most feared groups fighting U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Some Pakistani officials, and Haqqani leaders, have said the group no longer operates in Pakistan, contradicting U.S. assertions that it operates from sanctuaries in Pakistan's unruly North Waziristan tribal area near the Afghan border.
A U.S. drone strike on suspected Islamist militants in the area on Thursday killed 10 people, Pakistani intelligence officials said, an attack likely to raise tensions in the standoff with Washington over NATO supply routes.
The pilotless drone aircraft attacked a compound in a village in North Waziristan, a day after a similar attack killed four suspected militants in the same region.
"The drone fired two missiles at the compound. We believe it was being used by militants," one of the Pakistani officials said.
The United States has been urging Pakistan to mount an offensive in North Waziristan to pursue Haqqani militants.
Pakistan has said its military is stretched fighting homegrown Taliban militants, and some analysts doubt the army could defeat the group.
A full-fledged assault in North Waziristan looks more unlikely than ever, as a result of troubled ties between Washington and Islamabad, and Pakistan's PPP-led government may want to put on a brave face in the supply route talks.
The administration is already deeply unpopular, with public frustrations growing over chronic power cuts, widespread poverty, unemployment and official corruption.
(Additional reporting by Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR, Haji Mujtaba in MIRANSHAH and Rebecca Conway in ISLAMABAD; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Arghandiwal's Comments on Foreigners Draw Ire From Politicians
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 24 May 2012
Several politicians have criticised recent statements made by Afghanistan's Minister of Economy where he accused foreigners of spending money heedlessly in Afghanistan.
The reactions from other political players have largely contradicted the Minister Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal's comments, with one critic arguing that without that foreign money, there would be no Minister of Economy.
"The current government was established with the help of foreigners. If there were no foreign donations, there would have been no minister holding his position today," Afghanistan's National Front party member Fazel Rahman Oryakhil told TOLOnews.
Arghandiwal said Wednesday that the foreigners have come to Afghanistan for their own interests and accused them of corruption and poor accountability in spending as much as $49 billion in country.
Another member of Afghanistan's National Front said that if the Afghan Foreign Ministry fails to correct such statements, Afghanistan will face a major political confusion.
"The Foreign Ministry should not allow every government official comment on the country's politics from any tribal, political and regional point of view," the member said.
Rights and Justice Party member Abdul Abbas Noyan also called for the government to prevent such comments saying that it showed a lack of good governance.
"All such statements are due to lack of good governance. President Karzai should question him about his statements," Noyan said.
Others commented that it was also wrong to say such things because the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan was very important at this time in order to prevent invasion of neighboring countries.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By the CNN Wire Staff May 25, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- France's new president, François Hollande, reaffirmed Friday during a visit to Kabul that France will withdraw 2,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012.
He spoke after meeting with French troops stationed there and holding talks with the country's president, Hamid Karzai.
Giving a joint news conference with Karzai, Hollande said he had come to tell French troops that "their task has come to an end in Afghanistan."
But he also stressed France's ongoing cooperation with Afghanistan, saying he and Karzai had discussed details of their nations' strategic partnership agreement.
"After 10 years of European military engagement in Afghanistan, now Afghan security forces are taking the responsibility of their own security, and it is time for us to leave," Hollande said.
"But our cooperation and relationship will not end. In January this year, Afghanistan and France signed the strategic partnership agreement, and based on that, we will be increasing our assistance in other fields.
"After the end of this year, our military trainers and mentors will remain to help Afghan security forces. As President Karzai emphasized, we will be focusing on the health sector, education, civil services, agriculture sector, energy and water and many more. We will also be helping in the economic sector."
Karzai praised France as a longstanding ally of his country.
"France has been our friend for a long time now -- we have relations for the past at least 150 years. They helped us before jihad, during jihad and after jihad," he said.
This visit follows Hollande's announcement at the NATO conference in Chicago that French combat troops would withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of the year.
As part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, French trainers will remain in the country longer.
NATO countries are trying to figure out how to meet a 2014 deadline to withdraw from an unpopular war in Afghanistan while shoring up that nation's security forces.
Some nations have already pulled out troops.
The Netherlands, which had nearly 2,000 troops in Afghanistan at the peak of its commitment, became the first NATO ally to withdraw its combat troops two years ago.
Canada, which once headed the ISAF mission, pulled out almost all of its 3,000 soldiers at the end of 2011. Norway also withdrew almost all of its 500 troops during this period.
Hollande, who took office this month, visited French troops at the Nijrab forward operating base in the northeastern province of Kapisa, his office said in a statement.
He "paid tribute to the 83 French soldiers killed carrying out their mission" in Afghanistan, the statement said, as well as the wounded and the families of the victims.
Hollande was accompanied by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
Hollande's trip to Afghanistan takes place in the same month as President Barack Obama's visit to the country on the anniversary of the killing of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
CNN's Masoud Popalzai contributed to this report.
France's Afghanistan pull-out signals war fatigue driving European defense cuts
Disillusionment with warfare, coupled with economic troubles, has given European defense cuts strong momentum. But defense experts worry they are being made too haphazardly.
By Isabelle de Pommereau | Christian Science Monitor
On a visit to Afghanistan today, newly inaugurated French President François Hollande reiterated his commitment to a full withdrawal of French combat troops by year’s end, well ahead of NATO’s 2014 withdrawal.
France’s decision highlights the high level of so-called "intervention fatigue” among NATO’s European members as the decade-old Afghanistan conflict winds down and they face the need to make drastic budget cuts to remain solvent.
“The idea that we have to be a good policeman of the world has been totally discredited, and we’re going to stay home for a while,” Nick Witney, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London, said following the NATO summit in Chicago earlier this week, which Mr. Hollande attended. “We know now that we can’t do it. We just don’t have the power.”
The summit highlighted what military experts believe will be Europe's greatest challenge in the post-Afghanistan era: balancing the desire and need to scale back defense spending while supporting a force strong enough to respond to any future challenges and maintain deterrence.
“The real challenge to the security and prosperity of Europe's people is to continue to count – to avoid being marginalized in a world where newer and more hard-nosed powers make the rules and assert their interests and values while Europe retreats into retirement,” Mr. Witney says.
More and more, the solution defense experts trumpet is the pooling of military resources, which would make a limited budget go further. But individual countries’ unwillingness to cede total control of their military resources has proven a formidable obstacle.
Intervention fatigue
For decades after World War II, clear confrontations shaped European defense strategies: the cold war, the regional conflicts following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the so-called War on Terror that followed 9-11. But Afghanistan’s financial and human toll has led to a dwindling of already tentative public support for the NATO effort there, and warfare in general.
“Afghanistan has led NATO countries to rethink their attitude about crisis management, to be less willing to have really complex operations that might spiral into civil wars, where you find yourself with a problem that’s so complex you cannot solve it,” says Henning Riecke, head of the transatlantic program at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.
As a result, European governments are less willing to spend their limited funds on military endeavours.
“There is no appetite to repeat such lengthy and expensive conflict that result in such huge loss of life,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, head of the International Munich Security Conference, one of the world's largest gatherings of national security officials, on the eve of this past winter’s conference. “A new era is beginning with a greater measure of critical self restraint regarding the use of military resources.”
Faced with huge deficits and war-weary publics, European governments, from powerhouse Germany to comparatively minor player Bulgaria, have taken steps to slim down their militaries, including closing bases, canceling orders for new military equipment, and abandoning efforts to modernize aging arsenals. Many countries feel there is plenty of room to trim without eroding their defense capabilities.
The greatest military restructuring has been in Germany. Its past as an aggressor and its own reluctance to fight kept Germany’s military confined to peacekeeping missions for decades, and the NATO mission in Afghanistan – in which Germany has the third largest troop presence – is the first time since World War II that German soldiers have had a combat role.
The mission showed how ill-trained and equipped its soldiers were. Using the momentum of a mandate to cut €8.3 billion ($10.4 billion) from his budget between 2010 and 2015, then defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg pushed a massive overhaul designed to make the army “leaner and more efficient.” He ended the draft and proposed a plan to close 31 of the country's 328 military bases, among other things.
Learning to trust
Few dispute the merits of the overhaul, and even defense spending cuts are not that controversial. What defense experts see as problematic is that the decision was made without consultation of or coordination with NATO or the European Union – a process repeated throughout Europe.
"Every member state is cutting armed forces without transparency and consultation, without an architectural idea for what will be left," Witney says.
Countries are making the decisions mostly autonomously. There is no understanding of who has what and no overarching vision for European defense going forward. Why is it, ask experts, that European military leaders are still trained at 27 different military schools, or that there are so many different types of aircraft in the countries' individual air forces?
In part it is because countries cling to their ability to determine their defense capabilities and have different understandings of the importance of a robust military. In the smallest European Union countries, defense budgets have been cut by as much as a quarter, but Sweden and Poland, for instance, have continued to fuel their military.
RELATED – What NATO looks like in an age of European austerity
“Cooperation is a difficult topic because it means giving up areas of sovereignty – you have to resign on some of your capabilities, to trust the partner,” says Justyna Gotkowska of the Center for Eastern Studies in Warsaw. “This trust isn’t there yet. It is starting but it will be difficult,” she says.
Witney calls on heads of governments to initiate the pooling and sharing of their military resources. “'We'll buy your submarines if you buy our tanks,” he says, describing an example of a way European countries could complement each other. "If one nation makes tanks better and cheaper, another can close its tank factory.”
A review of each member state's defense and security strengths and weaknesses would be a good starting point, experts say.
But despite a commitment on paper to a common defense and security strategy, European countries are “still in a phase where countries cling to their defense abilities,” Mr. Riecke of the German Council on Foreign Relations says.
“There is a certain amount of political will to cooperate that is not yet translated into action. But as the financial pressure is in, that could change,” he says.
US to Europe: Step it up
While conflicts within Europe are unlikely, there is always the potential for upheaval caused by events outside the region – a possibility that is especially worrying to a less militarized Europe as the United States’ reorients itself away from Europe and toward Southeast Asia.
Earlier this year the Obama administration announced the withdrawal of two heavy armor brigades from Germany, which will reduce the number of US Army troops there from 42,000 today to 37,000 by 2015. It will also leave the United States with only two Army bases on the continent: one in Germany and one in Italy. The US Army had 277,000 soldiers in Europe in 1962, at the height of the cold war.
The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya underscored Europeans’ dependence on the US. Although Europeans took command of a NATO mission for the first time, the US provided most of the logistics, equipment, and intelligence, and the US now foots 75 percent of the NATO bill.
In Brussels last year, former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates lashed out at Europe for not doing enough to pay for its own defense.
"The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” Mr. Gates said.
“Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders...may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost," he concluded.
Afghan Bombings Kill Five
May 25, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Five bomb blasts have killed five people and wounded about a dozen in several Afghan cities.
Afghan officials say two people were killed and three injured when a bus hit a roadside bomb in the southern Helmand Province.
Elsewhere in Helmand, the NATO-led international force (ISAF) said one man was killed and two children injured by another roadside bomb explosion.
In the southern Uruzgan Province, one police officer was killed and three were injured by a improvised explosive device.
And along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, in Kandahar Province, a suicide bomber riding a motorcycle wounded a police officer and two civilians.
The attacks came as newly elected French President Francois Hollande was in Afghanistan's northeastern Kapisa Province to visit French troops.
Based on reporting by AFP, AP, and dpa
U.S.-led wars create humanitarian disasters: report
BEIJING, May 25 (Xinhua) -- The U.S.-led wars, albeit alleged to be "humanitarian intervention" efforts and for "the rise of a new democratic nation," created humanitarian disasters instead, said a report on the U.S. human rights record released on Friday.
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011 was released by the State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 issued by the U.S. State Department on Thursday.
For Iraqis, the death toll in the U.S.-initiated Iraq war stands at 655,000, the report said, adding that it is estimated that civilian casualties in the military campaign in Afghanistan could exceed 31,000, the report said.
Incomplete statistics revealed that the United States has launched more than 60 drone attacks in Pakistan in 2011, killing at least 378 people, the report added.
The report cited an article of the Guardian on March 11, 2012 as saying that an American soldier stationed in Afghanistan burst into three civilian homes in two villages in the small hours of March 11, shot dead 16 sleeping Afghan villagers, injured five others, and burned the dead bodies. The victims included nine children and three women.
Such "American-style massacre" against innocent civilians has once again pierced the veil of the United States proclaiming itself "a country under the rule of law" and "a human rights defender," the report said.
The report noted that the United States does not support the right to development, which is a concern of most of the developing countries.
In September 2011, the 18th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on "the right to development." Except an abstention vote from the United States, all the HRC members voted for the resolution.
The report said the United States continues its conducts that seriously violate the right of subsistence and right of development of Cuban people.
The United States has been pursuing hegemony in the world, grossly trampling upon the sovereignty of other countries and capriciously violating human rights against other nations. It "appears more and more to be contributing to international disorder," the report said.
Kandahar schools brave harsh realities
Despite a reinvigorated desire for learning in southern Afghanistan, the region's education statistics remain damning.
Mujib Mashal 25 May 2012 17:20 Source: Al Jazeera
Dand, Kandahar, Afghanistan - The teachers at Mia Noor Mohamed Middle School fear losing their beloved institution, one classroom at a time.
Only a few of the rooms in the two-storey building, just a 30-minute drive from the provincial capital, remain open for learning. The entire second floor is a police post, where a couple of dozen young soldiers dine and sleep in bunk beds lined up against the walls.
Several months ago, one of the police officers briefly brought his wife and kids to stay with him, and they took up a classroom. Now, a young officer is asking the small school of about 200 students to vacate yet another room, allegedly to put up a teacher their commander has hired to teach the troops basic literacy. Sceptical of the reasons, the principal is on the phone, trying to avoid losing one more classroom.
"The soldiers walk in front of our young students listening to songs, carrying their guns… and sometimes even joints of weed," one teacher complained.
One morning, the same teacher said he collected dozens of bullets spread around the classrooms and returned them to the soldiers before he could allow the students in.
"What kind of a learning environment is this?"
The daily struggle of schools in the region to remain open is testament to a reinvigorated desire for learning in a province that has historically lagged behind in education. The recent decades of violence, for which Kandahar - and Afghanistan's south more generally - has borne an unequal brunt, has worsened the plight. Until today, there remain three districts in the province, with an estimated population of 30,000 people, that have never had a school, according to Sher Agha Safi, the provincial education chief. More than 100 schools in other parts of the province remain closed due to Taliban threats.
And the statistics are damning. Afghanistan's 34 provinces had more than 150,000 high school graduates in 2011, according to data provided by the ministry of education. But Kandahar, the country's second-largest province, produced an abysmal 1,823 graduates, just 0.12 per cent of the national figure.
Safi has managed to reopen 13 of the closed schools in the past two months. The province has 137,000 registered students, 37,000 of them girls.
"For this large province, that is a small number," he admits.
Amid murmurs of peace talks, even if a compromise deal were to be reached with the Taliban to bring relative calm to the region, the abysmal education record means a vast number of uneducated youths, without skills that give them hope, will remain vulnerable to exploitation.
Fear of Taliban
The location of Mia Noor Mohamed school - it shares a wall with the district governor's compound - has been a source of trouble, increasing its risk of being targeted.
"Parents send their children for learning, not to the government," said another teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from police.
"If the Taliban want to attack, they will have no mercy."
In 2009, a suicide attack in the district governor's compound shut the school for a year, but a new principal, Ata Mohamed, opened it again.
"The first day, we had three teachers, one principal, and two students," Mohamed said.
The number of students grew quickly. Today, the school has about 350 enrolled, and 200 attend regularly. But the troubles have persisted.
"The foreigners would bring dogs to search the school," said one teacher. "They brought the dogs classroom by classroom, as students sat at their desks."
About a year ago, as the Taliban's recent tactic of taking over buildings in strategic locations and waging assaults from them intensified, the police feared the district governor's office could be targeted from the school building. So one of its platoons took over the second floor, and they have remained there since.
"We are here for their safety," insisted one of the police officers.
When the principal was on an official trip a few months ago, a police commander walked in and asked for the school to be shut down. The commander said he had information that the area was being targeted. When teachers, in the absence of the principal, argued to keep the school open, the commander threatened to personally "put the lock" on, one teacher recalled.
The school remained closed for a week.
The district governor has asked the school to relocate, to a new building about two kilometres away.
"Right now, there is no drinking water there, I cant take my boys there," the principal said. "Hopefully, by next year they can arrange for water."
Kandahar has about 4,100 teachers, 1,400 of whom are part-time high school students.
Mia Noor Mohamed School has six grades, but only five teachers. The principal himself teaches the third-grade class. Only he has a "teacher's training" degree, a two-year programme following high school graduation. One of the teachers is a high school graduate, another an 11th-grade dropout. The remaining three are current high school students who teach part-time. Fourth-grade teacher Shafiullah, for example, is 16 years old, and a 10th-grade student during the afternoon.
A few kilometres down the road, past Afghan president Hamid Karzai's paternal village, is the Shaheed Mohamed Qasim Jan co-educational school. The neat, one-story white building is surrounded by several tents that also serve as classrooms, amid the heat, for the 930 students - including 372 girls.
"We have seen an increase of about 200 students in our enrollment every year," said Fazel Mohamed, the elderly principal. The school, paid for by Karzai's late brother, Ahmad Wali, is named after one of Karzai's comrades who returned to Afghanistan in 2001 to begin a rebellion against the then-ruling Taliban,and was killed during his clandestine entry.
The school has 21 teachers, a ratio of about 44 students per teacher. But what's striking, as in the Mia Noor Mohamed school, is the education of the teachers. Only five of the 21 are graduates of teachers' training; four are high school graduates; the 12 others are part-time high school students, many of them teenagers.
In 2011, Kandahar produced only 283 female high school graduates, according to the ministry of education - which represents a minuscule 0.6 per cent of the 45,557 female graduates nationwide.
But if the story of Zarghona high school - the all-girls school of about 1,700 students in Kandahar city - is any indicator, that number will improve, due to a recently noted perseverance towards education.
According to the principal, Lailuma Popal, the school has not faced any major threats in recent years, except for one in 2011, amid the country-wide riots following the news that copies of the Quran had been burned at the US Bagram airbase.
"We heard rumours of protests at about 10am, and, at 11:40, angry men were knocking on the school gates."
As a precaution, Popal had gathered all her students into the main building, in the centre of the large compound, away from the neck-high walls.
"One of our classrooms had a second door, opening to the street. They broke down that door, pulled out the desks and chairs and set them all on fire in the school bus parked outside," she said.
But the rioters did not stop there. They marched on to the main building.
"On the one side, we had girls screaming and crying and we had to quiet them. On the other side we had angry men trying to enter."
They called the police for help, but the security guards manning a post just around the corner had fled into a hospital under construction, Popal said.
Scared, she and three elderly teachers finally decided to walk out, with a copy of the Quran in hand, and plead with the rioters to leave.
"We swore on the Quran that there were only innocent children in the building, and we said - for the sake of this book - leave us be."
The men left, and Popal decided to use bricks and cement to block up the classroom door that opened to the street. The walls of the compound, too, have been built taller since.
But the incident, as troubling as it was for the young students, did not affect attendance, according to Popal.
"Two or three years ago, the school would be empty the day after a blast," Popal said. "But now, when something happens, school is full the next day. We are used to it now."
Follow Mujib Mashal on Twitter: @MujMash
Top US General: ‘Good enough’ is not good enough Afghanistan
CNN By Samuel Burke May 24th, 2012
The White House has been scaling back both troops and expectations in Afghanistan as it scales down the war there. General John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, confirmed specifics of the drawdown, announcing that a quarter of American troops will be home by the end of September. But in an exclusive interview with Christiane Amanpour he said he'll need strong combat forces there for the foreseeable future.
The change of in the U.S.’ definition of success in Afghanistan has even resulted in the national security advisers’ publicly saying that the U.S.’ goal is to provide a modicum of stability for Afghanistan. Even though previously, the stated goal had been to defeat, prevent, and to have high expectations for a secure Afghanistan.
The New York Times reported that aides to President Obama informally called this strategy, “Afghan Good Enough.” General Allen firmly rejected this prescription to Amanpour. “I don't use the term, ‘Afghan good enough,’ he said. “Because we're all sacrificing way too much for something that's ‘Afghan Good Enough.’ I think that term understates or undersells the commitment that we've all made to this. Afghanistan is an important country in an important region. And the outcome of our investment – this global investment of 50 nations and ISAF and many other nations who've been involved for a long period of time with great generosity – is not about being good enough.”
Recently U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, both from their respective intelligence committees, came back from a visit to Afghanistan saying the Taliban was stronger since the surge of troops to Afghanistan. When Amanpour asked General Allen about this assessment, he did not disagree.
“I don't think that there's a difference of opinion,” he said. “What I would say is that while the Taliban think that they still have the possibility of succeeding, we don't see that. We don't see that the Taliban ultimately can succeed, and it's a combination both of what the international community can do to support Afghanistan, not just in the short term, but over the long term.”
Amanpour asked Allen about Afghan forces that have been attacking NATO troops – the very same group training them up to take the reins of security. Allen bluntly stated, “Any attack is a blow, and we are very, very conscious of this. It is a tragedy every time it occurs. We should not be surprised that the Taliban seek to infiltrate the Afghan National Security Forces.”
But Allen said he remains optimistic about the rapport between the two groups . “There are tens of thousands of interactions every single day across Afghanistan between the Afghan troops and International Security Assistance Force,” he said. “On most of those, every single day we continue to deepen and broaden the relationship we seek.”
Allen rejected the notion that the U.S. and NATO are packing up and leaving Afghanistan all together.
“We are not leaving. And the narrative for the Taliban that they can wait us out is a flawed narrative,” he told Amanpour. “I think that the unambiguous international support for Afghanistan has been a very powerful message. You know, that was the message that came out of the NATO summit. We will not abandon Afghanistan. The international community's role here over the long term is good for the region.”
And he told Amanpour that he has promised President Obama an analysis following the drawdown of the 23,000 troops on what we he thinks forces will need in Afghanistan in 2013.
“That analysis will include an analysis of the state of the Taliban, the insurgency, how the Afghan National Security Forces are doing, and what we anticipate the operational environment being in 2013.”
The Best News Out of Afghanistan
By Joe Klein Wednesday, Jun. 06, 2012 time.com
In the beginning, as American troops pushed toward Baghdad in March 2003, General David Petraeus asked Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post a famous question: "Tell me how this ends?" For years, the Petraeus question has stood as a sober, unanswered counterpoint to George W. Bush's swaggering, inaccurate mission accomplished banner.
But now, with the NATO decision to pull all combat troops out of Afghanistan by the middle of next year, we can hazard some guesses. The Bush war on terrorism will end as it began and should have remained--a special-forces war. It is as John Kerry described it in the 2004 presidential campaign: a constant national-security concern, requiring intense intelligence work and occasional special operations, but one that never required a major commitment of U.S. forces. It also ends better than we had any right to expect, given the disastrously stupid invasion of Iraq--a fact largely attributable to the job Petraeus did to stabilize the situation there in 2007.
Of course, it isn't really over. The consequences of the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks of September 2001 will ramify for decades. Iraq may fall into civil war or dissolve entirely (the Kurds already have signaled their intent to achieve de facto independence), or it may enjoy a rush of oil wealth that will salve the Sunni-Shi'ite friction. Afghanistan seems likely to remain trapped in its perpetual civil war between the southern Pashtun and the northern ethnic factions. The NATO decision carries with it the implicit faith that the Afghan National Army, composed almost entirely of non-Pashtuns, will be able to keep the Taliban out of Kabul. This will be done at some expense: an estimated $4 billion a year in aid, mostly from the U.S. But it also reflects a new reality: the war against al-Qaeda has gone elsewhere and become more diffuse.
On the very day of NATO's Afghanistan decision, an al-Qaeda suicide bomber decimated a military parade in Yemen, killing at least 100 and wounding hundreds more. This followed the CIA's successful infiltration of a Yemen-based al-Qaeda cell that was hoping to blow up an airliner with an advanced version of an underwear bomb. Yes, there are still miscreants like Ayman al-Zawahiri wandering the Pakistani borderlands, but al-Qaeda's center of gravity seems to have moved to Yemen, where it will be fought with drones and special-ops teams. That is relatively good news on several counts. The best news is that tens of thousands of American troops will no longer need to be in harm's way.
The next best news is that we don't have to spend so much time wringing our hands about the Pakistanis anymore. To be sure, Pakistan remains the most dangerous country in the world, far more dangerous, potentially, than Iran. It has a nuclear arsenal of perhaps 100 warheads--and a history of Islamist military coups. It also has a history of foreign policy chicanery, delusion and paranoia. If there were a Pakistani leader with a fraction of, say, Benjamin Netanyahu's knowledge of American politics, Pakistan never would have closed the NATO supply routes to Afghanistan and demanded an apology from Barack Obama for the incident in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed by American fire in a cross-border artillery duel last November. For one thing, the Pakistanis fired first. For another, Obama isn't going to apologize for anything in the midst of a presidential campaign in which his opponent has attacked him, falsely, for engaging in a global "apology tour."
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate estimated that the NATO effort in Afghanistan would survive only 10 to 15 days if Pakistan closed the transport routes. That proved to be ridiculous. "And it is costing Pakistan more than it is NATO," says one regional expert. "The Pakistani truckers are suffering." But then, Pakistan's miscalculations have been legion. It harbored Osama bin Laden and armed Taliban factions, like the Haqqanis, in the mistaken belief that we'd never find out or that we needed Pakistan too much to do anything about it. The truth is, our need for an alliance with Pakistan is marginal. India is a more reliable partner in the region.
We have learned a great deal in the past 11 years. We have learned about the power of ethnicity, sectarianism and, above all, geography. We've learned of the impotence of Western imperial inventions like the cobbled-together nonstates of Iraq and Pakistan. We've learned that Southwest Asia is no more hospitable to Western expeditionary forces than Southeast Asia was. Perhaps, in the process, we've also learned something about the importance of humility as we make our way in the world.
The Art of the Ask for Afghanistan
We need more help with the financial burden. Here's how to get it.
Wall Street Journal By JONATHAN HILLMAN AND COURTNEY LOBEL OPINION May 24, 2012
With all eyes on President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney as they court Americans in what is expected to be the most expensive election in American history, an international fundraising challenge is going ignored: the campaign for Afghanistan.
As the United States draws down its combat forces, it has launched a desperate effort to secure billions of dollars in pledges to shore up Afghan security forces and fund critical development and reconstruction projects. Put simply, Afghanistan's fate hinges on foreign aid, which accounted for 92% of its public spending last year.
As fundraisers, however, U.S. officials are coming up woefully short. At the end of Monday's NATO summit in Chicago, there was no announcement that coalition partners had cobbled together the $4.1 billion needed annually to keep Afghanistan's security forces afloat after NATO's mission ends in 2014. Attempting some early damage control, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said over the weekend that the summit was "not a pledging conference."
Yet funding was at the top of the summit agenda, and shortfalls have already constrained NATO strategy in Afghanistan. Acknowledging the funding challenges, U.S. officials have proposed cutting Afghan security forces to 228,000 from 352,000 by around 2017, a move that threatens to leave more than 100,000 trained fighters without jobs. To finance this scaled-down force, the U.S. is asking its allies for $1.3 billion annually, a modest sum for a group of nations that are among the richest in the world, despite their considerable economic challenges.
So what went wrong? Partially to blame is the approach taken by U.S. diplomats, who circulated a "Target Asks" list in advance of Monday's summit.
Assigning specific sums to coalition partners, the list is reported to have provoked resentment among U.S. allies. Rather than continue this ham-handed approach to fundraising by decree, U.S. officials must overhaul their fundraising strategy before international donors meet in Tokyo on July 8. When it comes to "the art of the ask," there are some time-honored principles for persuading donors to give big that American officials would do well to keep in mind.
An age-old fundraising maxim rings true for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan: If you want advice, ask for money; if you want money, ask for advice. In other words, donor nations will be more inclined to fund projects that they are involved with devising.
NATO allies were caught off guard in February, when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta suggested that the U.S. combat operations would end in mid-to-late 2013, a year ahead of schedule. The U.S. must avoid future surprises if it hopes to keep its allies more than rhetorically invested in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, fundraising is most successful when donors are asked to fund projects that align with their values. Many NATO partners are more concerned with development and governance issues than they are with training Afghanistan's security forces.
The U.S., which already spends roughly $2 billion a week on the war, could offer more than the $2.3 billion it has pledged for Afghanistan's annual security expenses after 2014 if NATO partners agree to provide larger sums for non-security projects.
Most importantly, the U.S. must expand Afghanistan's pool of donor nations. American officials invited more than 30 non-NATO countries to participate in the Chicago summit, but more must be done to persuade regional powers to invest in Afghanistan's security.
In addition to India and Pakistan, which have clear stakes in a stable Afghanistan, China has mining and oil investments in Afghanistan, and Russia has expressed concerns that the drug trade and terrorism could increase after the NATO forces depart. U.S. officials must take a donor-centered approach and make the case that if sufficient funds cannot be raised, these interests will be seriously at risk.
To be sure, U.S. diplomats have a difficult pitch to make. Corruption continues to cripple the Karzai-led government, and Taliban forces have been more resilient than expected. But the international community could pay dearly down the road if U.S. officials can't convince more nations to invest in Afghanistan's future today.
Mr. Hillman is a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ms. Lobel is associate director for foundation relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.
A version of this article appeared May 25, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Art of the Ask for Afghanistan.
Maintenance Snafu Grounds Afghan Fleet
Air Force Planes Provided by the U.S. Have Been Out of Service for Months, Hindering Development of Kabul's Military
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE May 25, 2012
KABUL - A $275 million fleet of Afghan air force transport planes provided by the U.S. over the past three years has been grounded for months because of lack of adequate maintenance and potential safety problems, American military officials said.
The fleet of 15 C-27A cargo planes is meant to provide the logistics backbone for the Afghan military, which now depends instead on air transport by the U.S.-led coalition—at a time when the U.S. is working to prepare its Afghan counterparts to manage their own security affairs.
The Italian aircraft, also known as the G222, were built from 1977 to 1985 and in service with the Italian air force before the U.S. bought them for Afghanistan. Prime contractor Alenia Aermacchi North America, a unit of Italian defense conglomerate Finmeccanica SpA, FNC.MI +0.14% rebuilt and upgraded the aircraft at a facility near Naples.
The Afghan air force began receiving the refurbished cargo planes in 2009 to replace obsolete Soviet-made aircraft.
Since then, some work performed by a maintenance subcontractor hired by Alenia "did not meet contract specifications," forcing the planes to be grounded in December in Kabul, said Capt. Agneta Murnan, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Air Force's 438th Air Expeditionary Wing.
Some of the planes were later cleared for flight, but the fleet was grounded again in early March after additional safety problems were identified.
Who is ultimately responsible for the problems that required the grounding of the fleet is unclear. The Defense Department's inspector general is preparing a report card that will look at the C-27A procurement as part of an assessment of the progress of training and equipping the Afghan air force.
Until April, a unit of L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. LLL -0.44% carried out ground support and maintenance work. The company said the subsidiary, L-3 Systems Field Support, "performed maintenance and sustainment work as outlined in the contract."
A spokesman for Alenia's U.S.-based subsidiary said the company was "working jointly with the U.S. Air Force in a methodical and deliberate process to rectify the situation. We expect the fleet will begin flying again very soon."
The C-27As are currently "non-mission capable," aviation-speak for a lack of equipment and spare parts, a person familiar with the matter said. "Most of the ground-support equipment is unserviceable or the wrong type, or the part's missing," the person said. Documentation for parts was incomplete and the system to fill oxygen bottles was inoperable, the person said.
The U.S. military said a new contractor is now conducting maintenance to get the planes back in the air.
Air transport is critical in Afghanistan, where the road network is underdeveloped and often impassable because of insurgent bombs. Transport support by the U.S.-led coalition is likely to end as most foreign forces withdraw by the end of 2014.
The grounding of the Afghan transport fleet hinders training of the Afghan force as the clock runs down to 2014. While the planes are grounded, Afghan pilots have made use of simulators to compensate for lost flying time, Capt. Murnan said.
Fifteen C-27A aircraft have been delivered out of a planned total of 20 aircraft, according to an Air Forces Central representative. The twin-turboprop C-27A is larger and more capable than the single-engine C-208B planes currently flying transport missions for the Afghan air force.
The new aircraft are supposed to provide essential support to the Afghan military, ferry cargo, passengers and humanitarian aid, as well as fly medical evacuation missions. Two of the planes were to be configured as VIP transports for the Afghan government.
As part of its exit strategy, the U.S. has set a target of building an Afghan force of around 145 aircraft. Around 100 have been delivered, including training aircraft and transport helicopters.
U.S. officials said the C-208Bs and Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters have been providing airlift support since the "stand down" started in mid-December.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Timothy Ray, who heads the NATO air training command in Afghanistan, said the coalition's focus was to build the foundations of a professional air force, not a one-for-one replacement of coalition air power. "It's a very small force to begin with," he said.
The grounding of the aircraft is only the most recent setback to efforts to build a capable and self-sufficient Afghan air force.
Afghanistan has seen a series of deadly incidents in which Afghans trained and advised by coalition have turned their weapons on their mentors. In April 2011, an Afghan air force officer killed eight airmen and a contractor at their training base at Kabul International Airport, one of the deadliest attacks on coalition troops in recent years.
Col. Abdul Wahab Sultan, an Afghan air force officer, said the incident "broke our hearts," and set back training efforts.
Maj. Anthony Graham, a mentor to Afghan air force personnel, said heightened security concerns had forced the Afghans to reshuffle personnel, delaying some parts of the training program.
At the Kabul headquarters, U.S. Air Force trainers now wear body armor and carry rifles as they make the rounds with their Afghan trainees. A security guard keeps watch while advisers do their work.
On a recent flight ferrying Afghan student pilots and air force officers from Kabul to Shindand, a young Army specialist occupied one of the seats closest to the cockpit. Pointing his thumb to the U.S. pilots, he said his job was to "keep them safe" during the flight.
Afghanistan, Illusions and Delusions
The Huffington Post By Jasdev Singh Rai Medical Doctor, with MA in politics, human rights activist and community worker 24/05/2012
So Obama sat with Karzai before the NATO Afghan summit last Sunday (20th May) and gave him a little lecture, 'Now, when we get out in 2014, you need to behave, you have to have a good democracy, no corruption and you have to be civil to your enemy, the Taliban.' Karzai nodded,' yes, yes. yes'. And everyone at the summit was happy.
Except the 'enemy' doesn't want to talk, and corruption is the glue that keeps Karzai's happy band together and a clean democracy will topple Karzai. It's all a little satirical.
After 10 years, billions of dollars and a defeat staring in the face, it appears the 'coalition' forces are still groping to find what the Taliban is all about or what the Pushtuns call democracy and what al Qaeda's (AQ) mission is. Thousands of pundits have been advising Governments, writing papers and become fully paid experts (except me). Yet this rugged tribesmen who wear turbans as if they have still to discover the mirror, seem to be outsmarting everyone.
Yes the Generals leading the war against, what exactly we still don't know, assure us that the al Qaeda and Taliban are much weakened with many of their leaders killed by unmanned drones guided by persons playing computer games on US soil. 'Cowards hiding behind technology, come fight us face to face', say the Taliban. Cowards say the US to Taliban as their mujahedeen plant roadside bombs at night and then disappear. In this fight, no one likes to show their face.
But beneath all that bravo talk, is a coalition coming apart by its failure to achieve its aims and a recognition that the 'mission', whatever it is, is neither within grasp, nor even defined.
For a start al Qaeda and the Taliban are fighting two different wars. It took the United States more than six years to grasp this. Al Qaeda is fighting a global war to rid the holy land (Saudi Arabia) of infidels (US bases). It wants to rid Middle East of western puppet governments. And despite the fractious state of global Islam, it wants to restore the Caliphate, the equivalent of the Catholic Pope or our Anglican Queen.
I say, good luck to AQ. It will have decades if not centuries of internecine conflicts before a Caliph is agreed at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the EU equivalent of 57 Islamic countries. Why is the west fighting to stop what AQ and Iran can do themselves is beyond me.
Al Qaeda, uses local domestic grievances in different regions to engage the west through regional hotheads. The west gets trapped in these wars and helps create a global propaganda for AQ of 'Islam under threat'. It is a common currency of war cries, Blair always shrieked on about AQ 'they are a threat to our way of life', meaning parliamentary democracy and human rights both of which he significantly eroded single handed by himself without Bin Laden's advice!
Perhaps the award winning ignominious reason for war came from Harvard educated George Bush. 'they hate us'. Seems in USA it needs a 'Harvard' education to come to the analytic insight that the enemy is the enemy because it hates us and we hate them. War is always on the agenda of American elections because somebody always hates the US of A. 'God save America and the rest of the world from its trigger happy democracy and AQ (which hates America)'.
Meanwhile the Taliban, unlike AQ, are on a domestic mission to reclaim their power and 'their way of life' in Afghanistan. Created by the powerful Pakistan intelligence, ISI, the Taliban were the first serious attempt at state building in Afghanistan albeit in Pushtun and Islamic ways at a time when Afghanistan was in chaos following the war against Russian occupation. the West wants its own version of 'State'.
But the Pushtun are a fiercely independent people who intensely dislike centralised power and have centuries old democratic ways of decision making through local jirgas (or shuras) and Loya Jirgas (grand assmeblies). Their way is consensus, although of the powerful.
Cultural norms are more influential than laws of the land in many Afghan tribes, particularly the Pushtuns. People got killed for breaking these norms. The Taliban regime was Pakistan's attempt at introducing some sort of rule of law, although through the sharia, whatever its drawbacks.
What we have now is similar to the crises that occurred when the Russians fled. Karzai is the most powerful war lord with a huge army at his disposal, trained, armed and financed by the west. He uses the 'moral' instrument of 'democratically legislated' law to impose his order. And the west runs the illusion that he is a 'democratically' elected leader, although according to Ambassador Galbrath the elections were rigged.
Then there are hundreds of smaller warlords, some aligned to his outfit, some independent, some to the other competing forces and some even to the Taliban.
And then there is the Taliban, perhaps the most disciplined and ideologically driven group, waiting to bring order to the usually fractious Pushtun society once the 'coalition forces' leave. It has a mixture of sharia laws and local customs in its arsenal.
Karzai knows that secular democracy and human rights do not get votes in Afghanistan. Yet that is what the coalition soldiers have been dying for and west paying for all this time.
Karzai's only call is 'the Taliban are a threat to our way of life'. But people know his way of life as corruption, tortures, rapes, privilege, coercion and warlordism. It is no wonder that he does not want to make common ground with the Taliban. That will be his demise.
The world is full of cranks and dreamers controlling power. And there were two of them talking fairy tales to each other at the NATO summit when President Obama and President Karzai assured each other and all present of their 'delusion' of achievable end goal, 'Good responsible secular democracy, human rights, end to corruption and talks with the Taliban to make them partners'. 'Dream on', say the Taliban and ISI.
The Pushtuns do not talk to losers. They won't talk to Karzai. And Afghan warlords live for corruption and coercion. Karzai can't reduce corruption or bring in transparent democracy.
So what was the NATO summit all about. Illusions of a perfect democracy and delusions of aims achieved. The west went in believing and comes out believing.
Sopko appointed to Afghanistan IG post
Washington Post By Timothy R. Smith May 24, 2012
President Obama plans to appoint John F. Sopko, a partner at the Washington law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, as special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, the White House said Wednesday.
The special inspector general investigates corruption allegations in the multibillion-dollar Afghanistan reconstruction effort and does not require Senate confirmation.
The post has been vacant for more than 470 days, according to an inspectors general vacancy tracker maintained by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. It is one of seven inspector general vacancies that have been open longer than a year.
Steven Trent has been acting special inspector general since September.
Obama also appointed Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of the state of New York and chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, to the board of directors of the State Justice Institute, which awards grants to state courts.
“The extraordinary dedication these individuals bring to their new roles will greatly serve the American people,” Obama said in a statement. “I am grateful they have agreed to serve in this Administration and I look forward to working with them in the months and years to come.”
Sopko has more than 30 years experience in investigative and oversight work, according to the administration and Sopko’s biography on his company’s Web site. He joined Akin Gump in January 2009 as an investigator after two years as chief counsel for oversight and investigations for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. At the firm, he focuses on congressional and federal investigations.
Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich), who was chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee during Sopko’s tenure, called him a “smart, able, tough, patient investigator.”
“He will ferret out wrongdoing wherever it is possible to do, and he will serve with distinction,” Dingell said. “He’s the kind of guy we want in that job. .?.?. You’ll be pleased with him, and so will I. And so, more importantly, will the administration.”
From 2005 to 2007, Sopko was deputy director of the Homeland Security Studies & Analysis Institute.
Sopko served as a prosecutor in Dayton, Ohio, where he battled organized crime. That led him to the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, where he started in 1978.
The previous inspector, Arnold Fields, a retired Marine major general, resigned in January 2011 after a review by the Council of Inspectors General found that many of his office’s audits barely met minimum quality standards and that Fields had not laid out a clear strategic vision.
There are now 10 inspector general vacancies, which has drawn criticism from Congress.
Sopko did not immediately return calls and e-mails seeking comment.
Pakistan seeks face-saving formula in NATO talks
By Michael Georgy Thu May 24, 2012 10:36am EDT
ISLAMABAD - (Reuters) - Pakistan is unlikely to re-open supply routes to NATO troops in Afghanistan unless the United States offers a politically acceptable formula in talks on ending a six-month standoff on the issue, a Pakistani official said on Thursday.
The official said the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP)had to be politically savvy, taking into account widespread anti-American sentiment in the country ahead of general elections due by early next year.
"It is not fair for any country to expect any decisions that could be politically harmful ahead of elections," the official, who is familiar with the negotiations, told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
The United States has been pushing Pakistan to re-open supply routes to NATO forces in Afghanistan in difficult talks that show no signs of a breakthrough any time soon.
Pakistan closed the routes, seen as vital to the planned withdrawal of most foreign troops from Afghanistan before the end of 2014, in protest against last November's killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO air attack along the Afghan border.
Higher transit fees are the most difficult issue in Pakistan's talks in the negotiations, said the official.
Pakistan was demanding a substantially higher fee than the current $250 per container or per fuel truck that crosses its borders and it was not clear when a deal was possible, he said, without elaborating. "It could be tomorrow or it could be in two months," said the official.
U.S. frustrations with Pakistan deepened on Wednesday after Pakistani authorities sentenced a doctor accused of helping the CIA find Osama bin Laden to 33 years in jail on charges of treason.
Shakil Afridi was accused of running a fake vaccination campaign, in which he collected DNA samples, that is believed to have helped the American intelligence agency track down bin Laden in a Pakistani town.
The al Qaeda leader was killed in a unilateral U.S. special forces raid in the town of Abbottabad in May last year that heavily damaged ties with Washington, a source of billions of dollars in aid.
Bin Laden's long presence in Pakistan -- he was believed to have stayed there for years -- despite the worldwide manhunt for him raised suspicions in Washington that Pakistani intelligence officials may have given him shelter.
Pakistani officials deny this and say an intelligence gap enabled bin Laden to live here undetected.
No one has yet been charged for helping the al Qaeda leader take refuge in Pakistan. A government commission tasked with investigating how he managed to evade capture by Pakistani authorities for so long is widely accused of being ineffective.
AMERICAN OUTRAGE OVER SENTENCING
U.S. officials and lawmakers said Afridi deserved only praise, not a 33-year jail sentence.
Two senior U.S. senators called the ruling "shocking and outrageous" and urged Islamabad to pardon and release the doctor immediately.
But a Pakistan foreign ministry spokesman said the United States should respect the court's decision.
"I think as far as the case of Mr. Afridi is concerned, it was in accordance with Pakistani laws and by the Pakistani courts, and we need to respect each other's legal processes," Moazzam Ali Khan told reporters.
Aside from the talks on NATO supply routes, Pakistan and the United States have been trying to patch up a serious of other differences in their ties since the raid that killed bin Laden, which humiliated Pakistan's powerful military.
Islamabad is sticking to demands for an American apology for the Pakistani soldiers killed in the air attack on the border, but progress has been made on the issue, said the Pakistani official.
"We need some sort of apology," he said.
Pakistan also wants an end to U.S. drone strikes on Islamist militants on its territory.
Attacks by unmanned drone aircraft, which U.S. officials say are highly effective against militants, fuel anti-American sentiment in Pakistan because they are seen as violations of sovereignty and inflict civilian casualties.
After conducting a review of ties with Washington last month, parliament called on the government to demand an end to drone strikes.
That, the official said, implies that Pakistan must itself expel foreign militants from its soil, including Uzbeks, Arabs and members of the Afghan Haqqani network, one of the most feared groups fighting U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Some Pakistani officials, and Haqqani leaders, have said the group no longer operates in Pakistan, contradicting U.S. assertions that it operates from sanctuaries in Pakistan's unruly North Waziristan tribal area near the Afghan border.
A U.S. drone strike on suspected Islamist militants in the area on Thursday killed 10 people, Pakistani intelligence officials said, an attack likely to raise tensions in the standoff with Washington over NATO supply routes.
The pilotless drone aircraft attacked a compound in a village in North Waziristan, a day after a similar attack killed four suspected militants in the same region.
"The drone fired two missiles at the compound. We believe it was being used by militants," one of the Pakistani officials said.
The United States has been urging Pakistan to mount an offensive in North Waziristan to pursue Haqqani militants.
Pakistan has said its military is stretched fighting homegrown Taliban militants, and some analysts doubt the army could defeat the group.
A full-fledged assault in North Waziristan looks more unlikely than ever, as a result of troubled ties between Washington and Islamabad, and Pakistan's PPP-led government may want to put on a brave face in the supply route talks.
The administration is already deeply unpopular, with public frustrations growing over chronic power cuts, widespread poverty, unemployment and official corruption.
(Additional reporting by Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR, Haji Mujtaba in MIRANSHAH and Rebecca Conway in ISLAMABAD; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Arghandiwal's Comments on Foreigners Draw Ire From Politicians
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 24 May 2012
Several politicians have criticised recent statements made by Afghanistan's Minister of Economy where he accused foreigners of spending money heedlessly in Afghanistan.
The reactions from other political players have largely contradicted the Minister Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal's comments, with one critic arguing that without that foreign money, there would be no Minister of Economy.
"The current government was established with the help of foreigners. If there were no foreign donations, there would have been no minister holding his position today," Afghanistan's National Front party member Fazel Rahman Oryakhil told TOLOnews.
Arghandiwal said Wednesday that the foreigners have come to Afghanistan for their own interests and accused them of corruption and poor accountability in spending as much as $49 billion in country.
Another member of Afghanistan's National Front said that if the Afghan Foreign Ministry fails to correct such statements, Afghanistan will face a major political confusion.
"The Foreign Ministry should not allow every government official comment on the country's politics from any tribal, political and regional point of view," the member said.
Rights and Justice Party member Abdul Abbas Noyan also called for the government to prevent such comments saying that it showed a lack of good governance.
"All such statements are due to lack of good governance. President Karzai should question him about his statements," Noyan said.
Others commented that it was also wrong to say such things because the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan was very important at this time in order to prevent invasion of neighboring countries.
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