[Afghan News] May 27, 2012

[یاسمینه]

Report Says NATO Air Strike Kills Eight From Same Family
May 27, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Local authorities say a NATO air strike has killed eight members of a family in eastern Afghanistan.
Provincial government spokesman Rohullah Samoon says the attack on May 26 in the Suri Khail village of Paktia's Gurda Saria district killed a man, his wife, and their six children.
NATO-led coalition forces said they were aware of the reports and were investigating what happened.
The UN says nearly eight out of 10 civilian deaths in Afghanistan are the result of attacks by Taliban insurgents or Al-Qaeda-linked militants.
But the deaths of civilians caused by NATO-led forces continue to be an irritant in Afghan President Hamid Karzai's relationship with foreign troops in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) says four of its service members have been killed in separate bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan.
ISAF said in a statement that the soldiers died "following separate improvised explosive device attacks" on May 26.
No other details were provided.
One of the soldiers is thought to be a British soldier killed in an explosion in the Nahr-e Saraj region of southern Helmand Province.
The British Defense Ministry announced late on May 26 that the soldier died while traveling in a vehicle.
No details have been given on that death.
Also, the Afghan Interior Ministry announced that six militants were killed on May 26 in joint operations in four eastern provinces.
The ministry said another three were killed when the roadside bombs they were trying to plant detonated in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.
Based on reporting by AP, AFP, and RFE/RL's Radio Mashsaal

Panetta says U.S. will have ‘enduring presence’ in Afghanistan after drawdown
By Nia-Malika Henderson, The Washington Post
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in an interview broadcast Sunday that the United States would have an enduring presence in Afghanistan after 2014, when there will be a major troop drawdown.
He also pushed back against reports that the Taliban is gaining strength in that country.
“Well, the most important point is that we’re not going anyplace. We’re gonna, we have an enduring presence that will be in Afghanistan,” Panetta said on ABC News’s “This Week.”
“We’ll continue to work with them on counterterrorism. We’ll continue to provide training, assistance, guidance. We’ll continue to provide support,” he said. “We are making good progress. I mean, the Taliban, my view is that they have been weakened. We have not seen them able to conduct any kind of organized attack to regain any territory that they’ve lost. We’ve seen levels of violence going down. We’ve seen an Afghan army that is much more capable at providing security.”
Mitt Romney, who is set to clinch the Republican presidential nomination this week, has criticized the Obama administration for setting a date for withdrawal and called the approach to Afghanistan misguided.
Responding to Romney’s position, Panetta said, “I think, without getting into the campaign rhetoric of what he’s asserting, I think you’ve got 50 nations in NATO that agree to a plan in Afghanistan. It’s the Lisbon agreement, an agreement that, you know, others — President Bush, President Obama -- everyone has agreed is the direction that we go in in Afghanistan.
“What is that direction? It’s to take us to a point where we draw down by the end of 2014. That is the plan that has been agreed to. And it’s a plan that is working. And very frankly, the only way to get this accomplished in terms of the transition that we have to go through is to be able to set the kind of timelines that have been set here in order to ensure that we fulfill the mission of an Afghanistan that governs and secures itself. That’s what this is about.”
During the interview, Panetta also raised an alarm about looming cuts to the defense budget, saying that they would be “disastrous” for national security and urging Republicans and Democrats to work together to avoid a budget showdown.
“Well-- my view is that when you’re facing the size deficits and debt that we’re facing, that obviously defense has to play a role in trying to be able to achieve fiscal responsibility,”
The Defense Department, he said, “provided a budget that, we think, meets not only the goal of savings but also, more importantly, protects a strong national defense for this country. The thing that does concern me is the sequester which involves another $500 billion in defense cuts.”
Republicans and Democrats have been foreshadowing a tough fight over massive budget cuts, set to happen at the end the year as part of a deficit reduction agreement reached after the failure of the so-called supercommittee. In January, $110 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare and the Pentagon are scheduled to occur in a process known as sequestration.
“I think what both Republicans and Democrats need to do, and the leaders on both sides is to recognize that if sequester takes place, it would be disastrous for our national defense and very frankly for a lot of very important domestic programs,” Panetta said. “They have a responsibility to come together, find the money necessary to de-trigger sequester. That’s what they ought to be working on now.”

4 NATO soldiers killed in blasts in Afghanistan
KABUL, May 27 (Xinhua) -- Four NATO soldiers were killed in separate explosions in restive southern Afghanistan on Saturday, the military alliance confirmed in a press release on Sunday morning.
"Four International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) service members died following separate improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in southern Afghanistan yesterday," the NATO-led ISAF said in press release.
The brief release did not disclose the nationalities of the victims under the ISAF policy.
Troops mainly from the United States, Britain and Australia have been stationed in the southern region within the framework of ISAF to curb Taliban-linked insurgency there.
The Taliban stepped up their attacks on Afghan and NATO troops since a rebel offensive was launched earlier this month in the war- ravaged country.
Currently over 130,000 NATO-led ISAF troops with majority of them Americans have been serving in Afghanistan. A total of 160 foreign soldiers have been killed in the central Asian state so far this year.

No End to Drug Traffic in Sight as U.S. Nears Afghanistan Exit
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN and MATTHEW ROSENBERG May 26, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - For years, American officials have struggled to curb Afghanistan’s opium industry, rewriting strategy every few seasons and pouring in more than $6 billion over the past decade to combat the poppies that help finance the insurgency and fuel corruption.
It is a measure of the problem’s complexity that officials can find little comfort even in the news this month that blight and bad weather are slashing this year’s poppy harvest in the south. They know from past seasons that blight years lead to skyrocketing opium prices and even greater planting efforts to come.
“Now I am desperate, what can I do?” said Mohammed Amin, a poppy farmer in Tirin Kot in Oruzgan Province, who harvested only one kilogram of opium poppy this year compared with 15 last year. “I don’t have any cash now to start another business, and if I grow any other crops, I cannot make a profit.”
The seemingly unbreakable allure of poppy profits — for producers and traffickers, government officials and Taliban commanders alike — has kept fighting opium at the heart of efforts to improve security. It drove Richard C. Holbrooke, later the special envoy to Afghanistan, to write in 2008: “Breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential, or all else will fail.”
That concern is no less serious today, on the eve of the departure of thousands of American troops. But even as American leaders continue to emphasize the importance of the anti-opium effort, some officials are privately conceding that there is little chance for its large-scale success before the end of the NATO military mission in 2014.
The withdrawal is one worry. As the money from the Western military and civilian aid programs dwindles, the relative importance of opium to the economy is likely only to increase, said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.
“Some money is available through the licit economy, but less than in the past as the Western contracts dry up, and so the importance of the illicit, informal economy will increase: human trafficking, gems, timber and weapons smuggling, and of course narcotics is a huge chunk of it,” he said, adding: “The prognosis post-2014 is not a positive one.”
Opium poppy, much like the coca grown in Colombia and Peru, poses a number of problems because there is so much money to be made that powerful political players, from police chiefs to governors, inevitably want a cut. The Taliban also support the drug trade, directly by protecting opium farmers, and indirectly by shielding traffickers, who pay off everybody in order to move their products quickly to the borders, according to narcotics experts at the United Nations and the Afghan government.
“Drugs are not the only priority issue for Afghanistan,” said William R. Brownfield, the State Department’s assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement, in an interview this month. “But by the same token, if you do not address the drug issue you will not succeed in the other security, stability, democracy, prosperity objectives you are aiming for.”
Despite all the effort, there are many troubling indicators. Nationwide, the number of poppy-free provinces, which reached a high of 20 in 2010, has now dropped to at least 17 and could be found to be still lower once researchers finish surveying remote provinces. Overall acres under poppy cultivation began rising again in 2009 after a significant drop the year before, and the total has grown slowly but steadily since.
Interdiction, while somewhat improved under new Afghan counternarcotics leadership, nets only about 3.5 percent of the 375 tons of heroin that leaves the country every year, according to the United Nations.
Even the success stories are unlikely to be sustainable, officials say. The prime example is the combined American and British counternarcotics campaign in the Helmand River Valley, in the heart of the province that produces nearly half of Afghanistan’s opium. Since its start in 2009, the military mission has coincided with a 33 percent decrease in opium poppy cultivation in the area, and concurrent programs to create alternative jobs and crops have had a significant effect there.
But the troops are leaving — as many as 14,000 American Marines could depart Helmand by the end of the year — and many of the incentive programs are closing down unless Afghanistan’s counternarcotics minister can persuade the West to renew them.
“We have to watch the answer develop over the next 6 to 12 months,” Mr. Brownfield said, speaking of the effects of the military withdrawal. “That’s what transition is all about — we’re changing from a known to an unknown.”
This year’s low opium harvest has thrown another element of unpredictability into the picture. It has already driven a few farmers to commit suicide and others to flee because they feared retribution from creditors, according to the governor’s office in Helmand. But rather than serving as a disincentive, the poor crop is more likely to prompt many to plant even more poppy next year to make up for this year’s losses. That was the pattern in previous blight seasons, like 2010.
Mr. Amin, the poppy farmer in Tirin Kot, says that despite the risks, there is nothing to replace opium: “The poppy is always good, you can sell it at any time. It is like gold, you can sell it whenever and get cash.”
In the meantime, the price for opium at the farm gate has soared — up more than 50 percent from a month ago and now selling for more than $320 per kilogram — another factor likely to spur more planting, Mr. Lemahieu said. Traffickers, who stockpile opium from year to year, are making a killing, he said.
On the Afghan side, the minister for counternarcotics, Zarar Ahmad Muqbel Osmani, has increased poppy eradication efforts in areas where farmers can grow other crops and is lobbying to expand the alternative crop program. But he remains deeply frustrated with the overall lack of law enforcement. Asked what it would take to affect the country’s drug problem, he answered tersely, “Political will.”
Among the continuing problems with corruption: information leaks that scuttle potential drug raids; political pressure that results in the release of major traffickers; and local politicians and police officers who participate in the poppy trade and use eradication programs to attack their rivals.
The deputy interior minister for counternarcotics, Lt. Gen. Baaz Mohammed Ahmadi, said his specialized force must still answer to local police officials.
“Because they are dependent on the regular force for everything, for gas for their vehicles and for the vehicles, even a very junior fuel dispatcher will know about the details of our operations,” he said. “And when we plan an operation, we have to have approval of the local police chief or his deputy or the zone police chief, and if one of those people is corrupt or linked to a big trafficker, it leaks.”
The Americans have taken at least three different tacks to fighting opium poppy cultivation.
In the early days after the 2001 invasion, a little more than half the current acreage was under cultivation, a legacy in part from the Taliban’s ban on opium, which they ignored selectively. The Western emphasis was on driving the remaining Taliban fighters from the country, and with that in mind the Americans made allies of many of the old warlords who were also involved in the drug trade, entrenching a culture of impunity.
In 2005, British forces found nearly 20,000 pounds of opium in the office of the Helmand governor, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, an ally of President Hamid Karzai. He was forced out at the behest of the British, but was later named to the Senate.
In 2006, as Americans began promoting eradication by specially trained Afghan forces, heroin was found in a car belonging Hajji Zaher Qadir, whom Mr. Karzai had been considering to lead the border police force. That appointment was scrapped, but Mr. Qadir is now one of the leaders in the lower house of Parliament. Many of the northern power brokers are also believed to be involved in the drug trade.
In 2007, as poppy growth reached a record-high 477,000 acres, the new American ambassador, William B. Wood, began to lobby for aerial eradication of the kind that had been undertaken in Colombia.
Mr. Wood became such a vocal proponent that he was known in the British press as “Chemical Bill.” He once even tried to overcome President Karzai’s skepticism about spraying by offering to publicly sit in a vat of pesticide clad only in a Speedo bathing suit to prove the chemicals were safe, said a Western official familiar with the discussions at the time.
Strenuous opposition from Mr. Karzai, European diplomats and some American policy makers stopped the program from getting off the ground. They feared it would backfire by reminding impoverished Afghans of Soviet-era spraying and would push them further into poverty, and into the arms of the Taliban.
In 2009, with the arrival of President Obama’s team, including Mr. Holbrooke, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and later Gen. David H. Petraeus, the focus turned toward a counterinsurgency strategy that hinged on gaining acceptance from local Afghans.
Aware of how eradication deeply alienated rural Afghans who depended on opium for their families’ subsistence, the American military distanced itself as much as possible from destroying poppy crops, instead supporting alternative crops and livelihoods. The State Department paid provincial governors to use Afghan forces to eradicate.
At the same time, officers from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Justice Department mentored the Afghan police in interdiction and Afghan lawyers and judges in prosecuting narcotics cases.
The efforts have led to two perceived success stories: new drug courts, and the alternative crops and jobs effort in Helmand Province. Both initiatives have taken several years to mature. The drug courts, in particular, are widely viewed as largely insulated from corruption and are efficient, handling 635 cases in 2011. A few of them involved government employees, including police officers who were smuggling heroin. In the vast majority, the prosecutors obtained convictions.
Still, for many Afghans in the poppy belt, the idea of placing a bet on the government’s future by cultivating anything other than poppy seems like one of the longest of shots.
“It is not an easy choice to grow poppies,” said Tahir Khan, a local village leader in Khogyani district in the Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan. “We know the danger and threat from the government and it is difficult, it needs hard work to recoup our investment. But the people are poor, they have no choice.”
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Afghan police kill 3 militants
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, May 27 (Xinhua) -- Afghan police on Sunday eliminated three Taliban insurgents including their commander during a special operation in Kunduz province, 240 km north of capital Kabul, police said.
"The personnel of national police during a special operation raided the hideout of Taliban militants in Ali Abad district Sunday morning, killing a Taliban commander named Mullah Jalad along with two of his bodyguards,"police spokesman in Kunduz province Syed Sarwar Hussaini told Xinhua.
He said Mullah Jalad arrived from Pakistan's tribal areas just days ago to conduct subversive activities, adding killing Jalad is a big blow to Taliban militants.
However, Taliban outfit has yet to make any comment.
Afghan officials often blame Pakistan for backing Taliban militants, a claim rebuffed by Islamabad as groundless.

Withdrawal of French Forces Will Not Create Security Gap: Officials
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 26 May 2012
Afghanistan's Ministry of Defense and the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force spokespersons said on Saturday that the early exit of France's combat troops will not create security concerns in Afghanistan.
The day after France's newly-elected president Francoise Hollande visited Kabul and confirmed his decision to withdraw French combat troops from the country, Ministry of Defense spokesman General Zaher Azimi said that the Afghan National Army was capable of taking over those areas from the French forces.
"Currently, the Afghan National Army has found the capability to take over if any country, like France, decides to withdraw," Azimi told TOLOnews via telephone.
Meanwhile, Isaf spokesperson General Carsten Jacobson said that the Afghan forces had advantages over a foreign force that would make up for other areas they may be lacking in.
"They [Afghan security forces] have advantages that we have to compensate with in part with technology. They are children of this country. They are sons of these villages. They understand the people and the villages they patrol in," he said, according to Reuters.
"They have their trust. They come into a position in areas where they take over responsibility - where they are there to stay," he added.
He also pointed out that France's withdrawal was not a total exit, in line with Hollande's statements in Chicago and Kabul that France would continue to work with the Afghan forces and support the country in other ways.
"We are waiting further decisions from France on how the future engagement of French defense forces is going to be here in Afghanistan, as the president stated very clearly at the summit in Chicago that France is going to stay engaged in other forms with and in Afghanistan. That we have to wait for before we can come to any conclusions," Jacobson said.
Hollande has pledged to the French people that he would withdraw France's combat troops by the year's end - two years before the agreed Nato deadline.
In Kabul on Friday he confirmed that 2,000 of the 3,400 troops mainly based in eastern Kapisa province would return to France, while 1,400 would stay and support the Afghan forces.
For Afghan citizens, France's announcement received mixed responses.
Kabul resident Hamid Khana said that the Afghan forces would need to work hard after the French left.
"Our government should try to provide security in the country and must work hard to hold it together after the French troops pull out," Khana said.
"Also, we request all the world to support our country in all sectors: financially and economically, in order to help Afghan forces to maintain security," he added.
Another Kabul resident Saiful Rahman said he preferred the French troops left today because Afghan forces are ready to secure the country.
"If French troops are planning to leave Afghanistan tomorrow, we prefer they left our country today - now - because our Afghan forces are capable of guarding their country. We don't have a problem."

Official: Khaf-Herat Railway to Start Economic Revolution in Afghanistan
May 27, 2012 Fars News Agency
TEHRAN (FNA)- Governor-General of Herat province Davoud Shah Saba in a meeting with Iranian Consul-General Rahim Mohammad Yekta reiterated that the Khaf-Herat railway line which is due to link Eastern Iran to Western Afghanistan will cause an economic revolution in his war-torn country.
"The implementation of Khaf-Herat railway construction project will be accompanied by an economic revolution in the province," Shah Saba said on Sunday.
He also appreciated Iran for its cooperation with Afghanistan in reconstruction efforts, specially in building highways and improving the country's road transportation, specially the Khaf-Heart railway.
During the meeting, Yekta stressed that the Khaf-Herat railway construction project will be implemented soon.
Iran and Afghanistan enjoy expanding ties and cooperation and observers believe that the good achievements gained in area of their mutual cooperation should be deemed as a result of the efforts made by the two countries' leaders.
Iran is one of the most important donors to Afghanistan which has kept its promises to help to the reconstruction of the war-hit country.
Iran has built some roads, power transmission lines, and border stations, among the other infrastructure projects which would better link the two nations.

Afghanistan to ink long-term partnership agreement with China
KABUL, May 27 (Xinhua) -- The government of Afghanistan will ink long-term partnership agreement with China, Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmai Rasoul said Sunday. "Afghanistan would sign long-term partnership agreement with the People Republic of China and the agreement will probably be inked during President Hamid Karzai's participation at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit on June 6-7 in China,"Rasoul told a press conference.
He added that Afghanistan in the past had attended the SCO as a guest and it hoped to attend as an observer in the coming summit.
Afghanistan has already signed strategic and long-term partnership agreements with the United States, Britain, Germany, India, Italy and Australia.
The Afghan top diplomat said that his country wants to have close relations with SCO members and all the neighboring nations.

Pakistan's Future Linked To Afghanistan: Rabbani Khar
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 26 May 2012
Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said that the country was working hard to end its border blockade for Nato supplies into Afghanistan, saying the future of the two nations is interlinked.
Khar emphasised at a press conference in Japan on Friday that reopening the Nato supply route is in Pakistan's national interest as well as Afghanistan's, and that intensive negotiations are underway to see it happen.
"We are committed to being an enabler and a facilitator to the rest of the world. We do it more for ourselves than for anyone else. We do it as brothers and sisters to our people, to our brothers and sisters in Afghanistan, because their future and our future is interlinked," she said in Japan's capital, Tokyo.
She said that her country is keen to restore better relations with the US, while also calling for more recognition for Pakistan's challenges "on the ground".
"So with all of that let me just say that we are keen to go back on track with the United States, with the rest of the world. We are very keen to continue to play our role as a facilitator, as an enabler, but we hope that the efforts that we have made so far are well recognised, and that easy answers are not found in Pakistan for some of the challenges that exist on the ground," Khar said.
"The challenges that exist on the ground are indeed very complex. We know how complex they are because we suffer from it everyday," she added.
The route was closed in November last year after the US killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the border in a drone strike.
Pakistan's parliament has demanded that Washington apologise for the border incident and halt attacks by drone aircraft against militants in northwest Pakistan. Most recently, it said it would open the route but for 20-times the transit fee - $5000 per truck instead of $250.
Her comments come as tensions between the Pakistan and US increased over the sentencing for treason of Shakil Afridi, the doctor who helped the US confirm Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's residence in Pakistan.
Asked about Afridi, Khar backed the conviction that he committed a crime.
"I have said this before, I will say it again, that we all have to abide by the law of the country, the law of the country is what prevailed, and we must show respect for the law of the country. This is all," she said.

The Terror State We Call Our Ally
For the first time, there may be some hope for Afghanistan. Except that Pakistan is intent on crushing it, and U.S. officials are “paralyzed” about a solution.
National Journal By Michael Hirsh May 26, 2012
Sometimes, the most telling facts are the ones your briefers don’t want to mention. On a hot, sunny day in early May, I sat with other reporters at an International Security Assistance Force briefing in Afghanistan’s violence-wracked Ghazni province, otherwise known as Regional Command East. The ISAF civilian-military team, using laser pointers on a map, highlighted a few peaceful districts colored green and many others colored red, where the Taliban was still fighting, although the briefers said that “progress” was evident. One district in the south called Nawa, a spit of Afghan land that descended close to Pakistan’s tribal regions, was colored black, not green or red.
Why black? “That means we don’t go there at all,” one briefer explained. “It’s totally under the sway of the Taliban.” He moved on quickly, but the forbidding dark blot on the map sent a clear message: Even though this region is now as secure as it’s ever likely to get—NATO forces are still near the height of President Obama’s 33,000 troop “surge,” before troops leave in 2014—the allies have already written off this part of the country bordering Pakistan as lost.
The next day, the dangers of this outcome were driven home to us in the nearby village of Zana Khan, when U.S. and Afghan officials presided over a huge hold-and-clear operation to proudly host a shura—a village meeting—demonstrating how the Afghan government is winning hearts and minds (Although ISAF described the operation as Afghan-led, Polish helicopters hovered, dropping flare-like countermeasures.) All went well, but sitting on the side of the dusty square, a 32-year-old farmer named Mohammed quietly warned us: “Two hours after you leave, the Taliban will be back.” Mohammed then pointed to the crowd squinting into the sun and listening docilely. “They are all Taliban,” he declared.
And sure enough, shortly after the meeting—less than a half hour later—mortar shells from the hills surrounding the village sent us scurrying for cover. The Taliban munitions almost certainly were ferreted in from Pakistani tribal regions.
Fast-forward two weeks to the NATO summit in Chicago, which ended on Monday. Lots of triumphal talk from attendees about a 2014 exit and a stable Afghanistan. Fifty—count ’em, 50—nations committed to Afghanistan’s future. Also among the invitees, however, were Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and other senior officials. Zardari was there even though he and his government had refused even to allow overland NATO travel in the wake of bitter tensions resulting from U.S. strikes at the border and from last May’s raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.
More significantly, U.S. officials have begun to acknowledge, more bluntly than ever before, that Pakistan’s senior military and intelligence apparatus is supporting and funding the same Taliban fighters who are killing NATO soldiers—not just Americans, but also Germans, French, Italians, and Canadians—and endangering the outcome of America’s longest war. Even the U.S. Embassy in Kabul—“which is American soil,” U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker angrily noted in an interview—was twice attacked by what Crocker described as “Pakistan-based insurgents.” Last fall, outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen called the terrorist Haqqani network in Pakistan’s tribal regions, the suspect behind the embassy attack, a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s intelligence service.
Yet there it was in Chicago, the Pakistan delegation, welcomed because President Bush in 2004 had designated Pakistan a “major non-NATO ally,” ushered around as if it was just another ISAF member in good standing. Pakistan, America’s ally in the war on terrorism. Pakistan, supporter of terror, aider and abettor to the killing of Americans, and now an adversary of the greatest military alliance in history. HIGHER STAKES
There is nothing very new, of course, about Pakistan’s two-faced behavior. It is a problem that has dogged Washington since well before 9/11. Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, which effectively run that nominally democratic country, have long seen radical Islamist groups, including the Taliban, as a strategic counterbalance to the influence of Pakistan’s bitter rival, Hindu-dominated India, in Afghanistan and south-central Asia. The upshot is that despite fitful efforts to rein in the worst of the jihadists, Pakistan offers a safe haven to the rest of them—and permanent access to Afghanistan just across the border. “Any other country, we’d be calling them a state sponsor of terrorism,” said a former senior U.S. diplomat who has served as ambassador to Islamabad. “It’s inconceivable that we give $3 billion a year to a country that would harbor Osama bin Laden.” Yet we do.
What is new about this moment in history is that, for Washington and other leading NATO members, the stakes are higher than they have ever been, and the Pakistan problem, which until now has been considered a mere complicating factor in Afghanistan, has become acute and central. So much so that failing to deal with it could very well lead to the biggest foreign-policy failure of the Obama administration. Why? Because even as NATO troops prepare to depart, Obama in recent weeks has committed the United States—and NATO—to remain there in a robust way, to “train, advise, and assist” for years, possibly decades, to come, as he said in Chicago on Monday. And there may even be some hope, for the first time, in Afghanistan, absent the Pakistan problem.
In a country traumatized in recent decades by U.S. abandonment, many Afghans say that the psychology has changed in recent weeks with the news of long-term U.S. and Western commitments. After Obama announced a 10-year strategic partnership agreement running to 2024, real-estate prices shot up in Kabul. On top of that, the U.S., NATO, and the Afghan government are expected to pool some $4 billion a year to fund the increasingly sturdy Afghan army and security forces. Finally, economic-development assistance programs are expected to come out of a Tokyo conference scheduled for July, when Afghanistan will present its “strategic vision,” including a planned surge in mining revenues from gold and rare minerals. Even in some areas of the once-violent south, helped by a program to induce Taliban fighters to lay down their arms and to “reintegrate” them, ISAF Cmdr. John Allen argues that he is more focused now on economic progress than security. “In the south and southwest, it really is a post-conflict conversation,”
Allen, a four-star Marine general, told me and other visiting reporters in an interview in Uruzgan province on May 7.
With elections expected as early as next year, credible alternatives already are emerging to President Hamid Karzai, who is deeply mistrusted in Washington. Among them: popular provincial Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai, who has begun to open political offices in Kabul; Abdullah Abdullah, who finished second to Karzai in 2009 and is a former U.S. ally; and possibly even Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born, naturalized American who was once the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. (In an interview with National Journal this week, Khalilzad would not rule out a run, saying only, “I’m not planning it.”)
In the wake of the Chicago summit, it seems much likelier that whoever is elected U.S. president in November, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, the U.S., NATO, and some 22 non-NATO countries (from Australia to Macedonia) will remain engaged in Afghanistan in some fashion indefinitely. “There’s going to be an international military presence here in Afghanistan for a long time, a long time after 2014,” Allen said. As a result, he argued, many mid-level Taliban fighters are beginning to have second thoughts. “If your narrative is, ‘Just wait us out,’ [and] you’re going to have to wait now for decades ... you’re going to start to lose some enthusiasm.”
Indeed, mounting evidence indicates that much of the enthusiasm for war is coming from the Taliban leadership safely harbored in Quetta, Pakistan, along with Islamabad’s military-intelligence apparatus. They continue to provide an ever-flush resupply depot to the Taliban that could destroy the alliance’s most ambitious project and condemn to near-certain failure the United States’ 10-year-long, vastly expensive response to 9/11. In addition to attacks on U.S. and NATO troops, and the assassinations of Afghanistan’s top peace negotiators—including former President Burhanuddin Rabbani and, last week, Maulvi Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban leader who became a senior member of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council—are plots thought to emanate from Pakistan.
Allen acknowledged that the U.S. isn’t certain how many of the enemy it is still fighting because so many are supplied by Pakistan’s tribal warlords. “Nobody knows for sure,” Allen said. “I think most estimates would put [the insurgency] between 30 and 35 [thousand]. Some large number of them are in Pakistan. And the term ‘enemy’ has many different meanings here. A significant number of what might be considered enemy are in a support role; they’re not fighters, necessarily.” A FAILURE OF U.S. DIPLOMACY
Rescuing Afghanistan under these circumstances is like trying to put out a fire in your house while your neighbor constantly reignites the building from the backyard. At least as important as talking with the Taliban, in other words, is negotiating with its overseers: the ISI. And yet some critics—who include prominent Pakistanis yearning to break the country’s Faustian bargain with Islamist radicals—say that Washington is largely ignoring or shunting aside the Pakistan problem out of fear, inertia, and a lack of a U.S. and NATO strategic vision. “It is a failure of diplomacy of the highest order, where we have had the lives of our people at stake,” Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador, told NJ. To keep the Pakistanis even marginally cooperative, Khalilzad said, “I think, frankly, we have been too cautious and willing to pay too high a price.”
Before he was forced out of office last year, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani—perhaps the closest Pakistani friend the Obama administration had—urged U.S. officials to adopt a “holistic” approach to the region that would help wean Pakistan from its military support of Islamists. It never happened. And today, rather than coming up with a new overarching strategic policy for Pakistan and the region that is commensurate with the deep commitments that the U.S. has never before made, Washington and other capitals continue to watch, helplessly, as a middle-sized developing country defies a superpower and the West’s dominant nations with virtual impunity.
Even the Europeans continue to describe the issue as a problem of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, although their own blood and treasure are at stake. “The Americans are completely paralyzed by this situation,” one European diplomat said, on condition of anonymity. Another senior NATO official also laid the problem on the Americans. “It’s quite difficult at times to find a single U.S. policy on Pakistan, much less coordination with others.”
The administration’s paralysis has been evident in an intense, months-long internal debate over whether to issue an apology to Pakistan over the errant NATO strikes that killed at least 24 Pakistani soldiers last fall, even though five months have passed since the completion of an official Pentagon investigation that partially blamed U.S. forces for the incident. Obama, facing charges of appeasement from Romney, has repeatedly hesitated, and even Crocker bluntly opposed the move in an interview.
To be sure, the way out is not easy or clear, and some critics, such as the senior NATO official, are sympathetic about the muddle in Washington. “How would you deal with it, even if you decided you wanted to deal with it?” he asked. “The United States has tried being nice to Pakistan. It’s tried being nasty to Pakistan. It’s tried giving them money. It’s tried taking money away. Once a country has got it into its head that it has a national policy which is in its national interests, you can exert huge amounts of pressure, but it becomes almost impossible to shift, partly for domestic political reasons. And let’s face it: In Pakistan, there is a huge amount of support for the Taliban.”
At his closing news conference in Chicago on Monday, Obama merely alluded to the problem—even though it was the first question put to him by reporters. “I don’t want to paper over real challenges there,” the president said. “There is no doubt that there have been tensions between ISAF and Pakistan, the United States and Pakistan, over the last several months. But, ultimately, it is in our interest to see a successful, stable Pakistan, and it is in Pakistan’s interest to work with us and the world community to ensure that they themselves are not consumed by extremism that is in their midst. And so we’re going to keep on going at this. And I think every NATO member, every ISAF member, is committed to that.”
The bottom line remains, however: Washington has no comprehensive approach to a region that hatched the worst-ever attack on the nation’s home soil, a strategy that would wean the Pakistanis away from their retrograde, anti-Western policies. Even as they have become increasingly forthright about Pakistan’s involvement in terrorism, U.S. and NATO officials remain wary of offending Islamabad because of a bedrock fear that if Pakistan becomes destabilized, its nuclear arsenal could fall into the wrong hands. That caution also ruled in Chicago, where all the talk was simply about NATO getting permission from the Pakistanis to use their overland routes to expedite the troop pullout.
Nor does Washington have a senior diplomat with enough authority, toughness, and vision to handle the problem, according to U.S. and European officials. Richard Holbrooke, the only one thought to have all those qualities, was named Obama’s “special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan” in 2009. But the White House partially stymied him—lobbied by India, Obama denied Holbrooke’s request to make Kashmir part of his portfolio even though Islamabad uses that disputed province, situated between Pakistan and India, to justify the army’s strategic support of jihadist proxy groups. After Holbrooke died suddenly in December 2010, he was succeeded by career diplomat Marc Grossman, who is widely considered ineffective and has provoked backbiting from the State Department’s South and Central Asian Bureau, where the assistant secretary, Robert Blake, has been largely cut out of deliberations. “It’s all Holbrooke’s broken china,” one official said. The two leading figures in U.S. policy in the region, Ryan Crocker,
the ambassador to Afghanistan, and Gen. Allen, are already making plans to leave (in Crocker’s case, back to retirement; Allen is expected to be named NATO commander in Europe). Ambassador Cameron Munter, described as increasingly agitated over the failure of U.S. policy, is also leaving his post early.
Although Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has been praised for her approach to the region, having recently proposed a “New Silk Road” to induce Pakistan and other countries to work with Afghanistan, she is involved in the issue only sporadically.
The Taliban leadership, on the eve of the NATO summit, issued a statement from its comfortable sanctuary in tribal Pakistan, where it pledged to “keep proceeding with ongoing jihad until it attains its goal.” THE WAY FORWARD
What should the strategic vision be? Based on interviews with a wide range of U.S., European, Afghan, and Pakistani officials, here are some suggestions. First, there should be a démarche of the kind the Pakistanis have not been given since just after 9/11, when then-President Pervez Musharraf was presented with a stark choice: Fully support the war against the Taliban, or you’re through. Now, Pakistan should be confronted with a clear and harsh update of that choice: If you defy the international community, you will be turned into a sanctioned pariah, á la Iran, in which case your country will lose ground economically and militarily to archrival India. Alternatively, if you repudiate violent extremists, you will be rewarded with more economic assistance and a voice in the region’s future, such as Clinton’s New Silk Road, which seeks to turn central Asia into a commercial hub once again.
“We have to be willing to escalate the pressure, which, in my view, has to include Pakistan’s very difficult economic circumstances,” Khalilzad said. “Today, I think the Pakistanis can cover only about 10 weeks of imports. We also need to move diplomatically by engaging some key countries they rely on, like China and Saudi Arabia.”
A former senior diplomat intimately familiar with the decline in U.S.-Pakistan discussions agrees. “The message needs to be: What kind of future does Pakistan want? Does it want to be Iran—or does it want to be South Korea—in other words, rich and respected?” he said. “No one has delivered that tough message recently. So the assumption in Pakistan is that the Americans need us more than we need them. We can hold the Americans to ransom. They can’t get out of Afghanistan without our help.”
Instead, this critique goes, the U.S. has been too nice and too polite, to the point where the Pakistanis have come to expect American acquiescence. That is one reason the most recent issue over shipping rights has dragged on so long. “The Pakistanis have totally miscalculated. They thought NATO would buckle under in a few weeks. And it’s been six months,” said the former senior diplomat, who would describe internal deliberations between the U.S. and Pakistan only on condition of anonymity.
To be sure, U.S. nonchalance and miscalculation over the past decade have contributed mightily to the Pakistanis’ own strategic ambivalence. After 9/11, the Bush administration ignored its democracy agenda entirely when it came to Pakistan, refusing even to meet with exiled leader Benazir Bhutto; instead, the administration blindly supported the Pakistan coup leader, Gen. Musharraf, although the latter was fully vested in the military’s traditional support of jihadist proxies. True, in the early days of the war on terrorism, Pakistan was in fact helpful against al-Qaida, taking part in the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Pakistani from Balochistan, in 2003. But Musharraf grew complacent, throwing up an assortment of “al-Qaida No. 3” leaders to appease the Americans while signing peace deals with Islamist parties to block the more-legitimate secular political parties that might present real opposition to him.
All the while, Washington looked the other way and hinted at its eventual departure from the region, thus robbing Pakistan of any motivation to reorient its army from India and toward pacifying its restive tribal regions. U.S. efforts have remained piecemeal and intermittent, at best, rather than focused on leveraging America’s, and NATO’s, expensive and long-term commitment into a diplomatic vision for the region that would have co-opted the Pakistanis: the kind of vision U.S. officials have developed vis-à-vis China, Russia, Iran, and even Latin America.
One example of what was missed was the tension between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. India has resisted any international mediation over the disputed province, which it claims, but New Delhi has also shown an eagerness to work with Washington, which proffered a generous strategic partnership to India beginning in the mid-2000s, much to the ire of the Pakistanis. Yet Washington did not demand a quid pro quo from Delhi, and the Kashmir issue continued to fester. Back in 1999, U.S. officials were rattled when the two countries—both of which tested nukes in 1998—fought deadly skirmishes along the so-called line of control that, since 1971, has divided Kashmir. Worried about a nuclear conflict, President Clinton in 2000 sounded a strong new U.S. diplomatic line, calling for “respect for the line of control.”
Then inattention took over again. Only when war threatened to erupt in 2002 did Bush send Secretary of State Colin Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, to negotiate a de-escalation. As part of that effort, a senior administration official said, the United States briefly sought to play mediator in discussions over Kashmir once again. But Bush, distracted by Iraq, dropped the issue. CHANGING THE CALCULUS
One reason some U.S. policymakers have been somewhat fatalistic about Pakistan’s behavior is that, until now, the typical view from Washington has been that Afghanistan will somehow always revert back to a state of war, and that its government is hopelessly corrupt. Certainly that was the view of Vice President Joe Biden, who argued in 2009 for a much earlier departure from Afghanistan. And the president seems to agree with him. Obama, sounding on Monday what has become a familiar note in the face of a tough reelection challenge, called for “a stable Afghanistan that won’t be perfect” so that “we can start rebuilding America and making some of the massive investments we’ve been making in Afghanistan here back home.”
But if Obama also believes his own rhetoric about an “Afghan good enough” state in which the center holds and the Taliban doesn’t take over; and if he wants to avoid a foreign-policy disaster that will forever be associated with his presidency, then he needs to take one more important step: Appoint a high-level representative, or perhaps delegate Secretary of State Clinton to the task. And he needs to rethink the whole region.
As we’ve learned so many times over the years, the permanent presence of American power and influence, and that of the international community, can fundamentally alter the equation—it can overturn the iron law of history that seems to doom backward countries like Afghanistan to ever-more war and repression. We saw it in Bosnia, when everyone expected the 1995 Dayton Accord to fall apart and the ethnic killing to resume. It didn’t, because NATO stayed. We saw it in Kosovo, which gained its independence under NATO monitoring. We saw it in the ultimate impact that the 1975 Helsinki Final Act had in undermining the illegitimate Communist regimes in the Soviet bloc.
In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, fear of U.S. abandonment has largely determined policy until now, causing both countries to revert to old habits. Now Washington has a chance to change those calculations—to alter the fundamental equation once again—because of its long-term commitment. But only if it deals in a whole new way with Pakistan.
This article appeared in the Saturday, May 26, 2012 edition of National Journal.

Afghan women leave the country in fear of Taliban return
The threat of a curtailment of women's rights prompts many to quit before the 2014 handover
Guardian.co.uk By Tracy McVeigh Saturday 26 May 2012
A brain drain of bright young women is already taking place in Afghanistan before the 2014 handover that many fear will mean a reversal of advances in women's rights.
The lack of commitment by the Afghan government to equality and to tackling the high rates of ill-treatment of women in the home and in the workplace is raising real fears they will be at the bottom of the political agenda in the push for power after Nato forces leave the country.
Worsening security for civilians – casualties among ordinary Afghans have risen year on year for the last five years with 3,021 killed in 2011, and women are thought to be suffering disproportionately – has led to rising numbers of women and girls leaving education and the workforce and staying indoors, according to Guhramaana Kakar, a gender adviser to President Hamid Karzai.
Speaking to the Observer, Kakar said negotiations between the government and the Taliban and other insurgent groups were ignoring women's rights. A recent survey by charity ActionAid suggested 86% of Afghan women were fearful of a return to Taliban-style rule. One in five worried about the education of their daughters but 72% said their lives were better now than a decade ago.
"Women do want the progress that has been made over the past 10 years to continue, but they are being kept away from the political processes," Kakar said. "All Afghans, men and women, want a country without foreign troops, but I think the international community should be putting women on the agenda and making sure their security and freedoms are secured, directly and indirectly."
She criticised the recent Nato conference in Chicago for completely ignoring the issue. "Women are regularly harassed in the workplace, they are exploited and credit for their achievements taken by men, while also being targeted by insurgents for going to work or school. They suffer the worst in the security situation and, even at home, they are subjected to violence and abuse which is tacitly sanctioned by the courts and the government."
Kakar has been involved in peace negotiations with the Taliban and believes more women should be allowed into the political system. "We have many women in parliament but they are given very weak roles. We have very brave women who are gaining respect and in some cases are trusted more than the men to negotiate, because they are seen as having less political baggage.
"If more women were allowed into the provincial and peace councils, this would be a big show to the insurgents that they cannot reverse 10 years of women's advancements."
Growing levels of violence against women and a disregard by many courts for their legal protection has led to horrific stories of children being raped and then imprisoned for adultery, and schoolteachers being attacked for teaching girls. ActionAid's head of public affairs, Melanie Ward, said the security situation was an enormous threat to women. "Experience tells us that an increase in attacks on women is often an early warning sign that the Taliban is regaining control in an area."
"Security for women cannot be divorced from the wider security agenda in Afghanistan."
Selay Ghaffar, chief executive of the Kabul-based NGO Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan, says many young women are leaving. "They see no future for themselves in Afghanistan so the bright ones are seeking scholarships or work abroad. We have had two schools for girls burned down near the capital in recent days, acid attacks on girls going to school, increasing stories of rape and of kidnap.
"Many NGOs who try to help women have been killed. Billions of dollars from international organisations have been poured into Afghanistan and ended up in the pockets of male politicians, while women are left to feel insecure in their own land. For those who cannot leave, it is sending them back into the home; many women are deciding to stop work.
"During the first few years after international troops entered the country a lot of things changed in Afghanistan," she said. "There was positive progress and change in the day-to-day lives of many Afghan women. Unfortunately, since 2007, things changed dramatically as insecurity has increased [and] discrimination against women at all levels has increased. Life has become more difficult for women but they are not willing to be pushed back into the box.
Why should all the plans for the future of Afghanistan ignore half of its population?"

Opponents Look To Put Dogfighting On Tight Leash In Afghanistan
May 27, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Frud Bezhan
Two large dogs collide in a cloud of dust, locked in a bloody struggle that will end with only one victor -- unless, that is, you count the hundreds of men clustered around them who have placed money on the outcome.
The contest is being staged on a dirt pitch on the outskirts of Kabul, and it's not a rare event.
Dogfighting is a traditional pastime in Afghanistan, and this is just one of hundreds of clashes played out every week in informal tournaments around the country.
For some, animal fights -- which can also involve cocks, rams, and raptors -- are a source of entertainment and, with luck, extra income.
Technically, these brutal contests are illegal. But due to their popularity, the amount of money thrown around, and the powerful people involved, Afghan authorities have done little to enforce any sort of ban.
That might soon change if increasingly vocal critics have their way, however.
Seeking to enforce the official ban on animal fighting for sport, religious leaders and rights activists have brought their campaign to the government.
Dihal Haq Habid, the country's deputy minister for the hajj and Islamic affairs, intends to take the issue up with the Interior Ministry.
"Dog, raptor, and cockfights are things that don't have a place in Islam," he says. "We are planning to meet with the Interior Ministry. Through the Interior Ministry we hope to ban these activities. We are hopeful that we will have an effect."
An 'Un-Islamic' Pastime
Although there are no reliable statistics, Habid argues that dogfighting is fueling gambling addiction and bankruptcy, which in turn is leading to crime and illegal activities. He considers the blood sport "un-Islamic."
Shamsullah Ahmadzai, head of Kabul's regional office of Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission, calls dogfighting a primitive tradition.
He says he has brought up the issue of animal welfare with several Afghan lawmakers in an effort to raise awareness and to mobilize opposition to animal combat.
"People shouldn’t get pleasure from harming animals," he says. "During fights, one of the animals is always injured. The pain of an animal shouldn’t be a source of entertainment. The government should take measures."
Ahmadzai says that animal welfare is a foreign concept in Afghanistan, where most people do not keep pets and consider them unclean. This, he says, helps fuel the popularity of the matches.
Dog handlers involved in the contests remain unapologetic. They insist that the animals are treated better than family members and that matches are more humane than in other countries because the dogs do not fight to the death.
Noor Mohammad, who comes from a long line of dog trainers, has been involved in the matches for the past 26 years.
According to Mohammad, the matches do not usually end when one of the animals is killed but rather when one dog asserts its dominance or its opponent surrenders -- typically when one of the dogs retreats to the edge of the makeshift arena or puts its tail between its legs.
Mohammad adds that the money owners spend on feeding and caring for their dogs each month can exceed the monthly earnings of most Afghan families.
"We give the dogs veal," he says. "We boil this with the bone until it is very soft. We give it to them in the morning [before a fight]. The expense of keeping a dog is a lot. It is more than feeding a family. It is a hobby. The food we and the animals get is all from God."
Mohammad says a top fighting dog can sell for as much as a new car and that its potential winnings can exceed the investment many times over.
Banned By The Taliban
According to Mohammad, the largest and most lucrative fights, held at private venues involving animals belonging to wealthy businessman and government ministers, boast purses of thousands of dollars.
"Ministers, tribal chiefs, military commanders, and many other respectable people are keeping dogs," he says. "They're bringing their dogs [to the fight] with bodyguards and inside fancy cars, which I have never sat in. I have seen those people betting 1 million afghanis (about $21,000)."
The contests have been especially popular in and around the capital. But in areas of Afghanistan where militants enjoy greater sway, crowds have dwindled following a number of deadly attacks on dogfighting matches.
The Taliban, which banned dogfighting during its reign, appears to be enforcing its edict in deadly fashion.
In February 2010, a bomb attack on a dogfight in Lashkar Gah, in Helmand Province, left at least three people dead and more than 30 injured.
That Taliban attack was preceded by two others in Kandahar in February 2008. One, a suicide bombing near a dogfight, left at least 80 men dead and wounded 90. A second attack a week later claimed 10 more lives.

Reporting from a perilous landscape in Afghanistan
The Washington Post By Kevin Sieff May 26, 2012
BAGRAM, Afghanistan - Ten-year-old Khaili Jan lurched toward me from his family’s tent in the desert. He had two crutches that sank into the sand with each step, and two plastic prosthetic legs stuffed into oversized sandals.
As the boy inched closer, his father, Amir Jan, told me what had happened to his son. Khaili Jan had lost his legs while looking for scrap metal a few hundred yards away — in an arid expanse of land that looks like many other Afghan moonscapes, but happens to be one of the country’s largest American firing ranges.
In days of reporting here, I had heard more than a half-dozen stories like this: Children wander into the range to graze sheep, to play with friends or to collect shrapnel. When they step on explosives, or pick them up accidentally, the blast can be heard across the village. Families rush toward sons and brothers. The victims have typically lost at least one arm or leg by the time help arrives.
Like the other residents I spoke with, Amir Jan described the most common cause of the accidents: egg-shaped projectiles, gold and black, that litter the desert. Everyone in the village called them “American grenades.” I asked Amir Jan if he could show me some of the explosives.
Following his instruction, my colleagues and I drove into the firing range, following tire tracks that had flattened the sand. Through the window, I could see Bagram Airfield, a massive American base built atop the skeleton of a Russian military installation.
In other villages like this one, I’d met residents maimed by old Russian anti-personnel mines, millions of which are still buried across Afghanistan. But Bagram was different. Most of the explosives that caused injuries there were produced in the United States and launched by American troops over the past decade. A United Nations official would later tell me that the United States had refused to construct a fence around the area, calling the proposal too expensive.
A few hundred yards into the range, Amir Jan told us to stop. Less than 30 seconds after getting out of the car, my driver spotted a live 40mm high-explosive grenade a few feet from where we stood. Then we saw another. And another. And another. The explosives were everywhere and they were all undetonated, designed to kill within a five-meter (5.5 yards) radius.
Some of them were half-buried in the sand. Others lay unblemished and uncovered, as if they had just been dropped from the sky. Then two helicopters circled over our heads and shot Hellfire missiles at the mountain in front of us.
Amir Jan looked at me. “The Americans have given us nothing except bombs,” he said.
Our photographer, Javier Manzano, snapped a few photos of men filling a truck with sand just a few feet away from one of the grenades. Ironically, the sand collected from the firing range would soon be sold to fill American blast barriers.
A few days earlier, I’d met two boys in a Kabul hospital who were maimed in this desert. Both described the grenades that I now saw littered around our car. One of them, Abdul Rahman, lives in a tent next to a concrete slab emblazoned with the faded words “Small arms range.” It is the only indication that the desert is more than a desert. There is no translation in local languages.
Rahman’s brother, who had never before met an English speaker, wanted to ask me a question. “What does that mean?” he asked, pointing to the words.
When I told him, he nodded, saying nothing.
Like many other villagers, Rahman’s family had many other questions. Why had they decided to put the firing range here, on the only land suitable for grazing their animals? Why don’t they clear the ground of live explosives?
Other residents suggested that the Americans had planted the grenades there on purpose, mining the area just as the Russians did 30 years ago.
I wrote down the questions, and a few days later, posed them to a U.S. official, Michael Hartman, who oversees the range. He wasn’t aware of any civilian casualties on the range over the previous three years. There had not been any claims filed at the base’s legal office, he said. None of the villagers we interviewed were aware of such an office.
“It’s important that we are doing whatever we can to minimize the risk to civilians,” Hartman said. “Our reputation is on the line.”

Afghan Poet's Body Returned to Afghanistan After 25 Years
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 26 May 2012
One of Afghanistan's great thinkers and poet Ustad Khalilullah Khalili, who died in the Pakistan capital Islamabad in 1987, was returned to Afghan soil today, the Ministry of Information and Culture said.
The Ministry said that Afghanistan's Council of Ministers was still to make a decision as to where his final resting place would be.
Khalili was born in 1907 in Kabul and was orphaned by the age of 11 after his mother died when he was only seven and his father was executed by King Habibullah Khan when he was 11.
He was prevented from going to school by the same king who executed his father, but he continued his studies privately. By the age of 16 Khalili was educated enough to be a teacher himself, and he went to Mir Bacha Kot, a district near Kabul, to teach in a local school.
In his lifetime, he worked in a variety of position, including as an accountant at the Ministry of Finance, vice chair of Kabul university, head of Afghanistan's independent media, media advisor for parliamentarian Mohammad Zaher Shah, and finally as Afghanistan's Ambassador to Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
In 1978 he immigrated to the US and continued his cultural activities, but eventually moved to Islamabad, where he died, during the 1980s.
He was buried in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Khalili created a name for himself through his broad writings contained in more than 62 cultural, philosophic, literature and politics books, most of which were published abroad.

Afghan road lifelines blocked by graft, kickbacks
Reuters By Hamid Shalizi Sat May 26, 2012
KABUL - When the Afghan government unveiled plans for a road linking his small village to larger centres elsewhere, Rahmanullah was so enthusiastic he offered a section of his farm for the route, thinking it would help move his produce to larger markets.
He even signed up for the construction gang, earning $6 a day to help build the 28 kilometre-long route from Gardez, the capital of east Paktia province, and Rahmanullah's home in the mountainous Mirzaki district.
But two years on and Rahmanullah's farming land has gone and the road has largely disintegrated, along with the hopes of local people for a less hardscrabble life in a province where the insurgency offers much-needed money for fighters.
"I gave my farming field for free to the builders to give us a road and this is the result," Rahmanullah said, glumly pointing to a cratered and crumbling surface snaking from his village.
Like other similar projects meant to build prosperity under the counter-insurgent orthodoxy that people with jobs won't fight, the Mirzaki road fell victim to shoddy construction and kickbacks in the award of lucrative building contracts.
More than $57 billion has been spent on Afghanistan's reconstruction since the toppling of the former Taliban government in 2001, but critics says millions of dollars have been misspent as donor aid is parachuted on to an opaque maze of local and international contractors.
Afghanistan is regularly ranked close to the bottom of countries most affected by corruption, according to the Berlin-based graft watchdog Transparency International, with donors linking ongoing aid as the war winds down to improvement in its record.
"The village people hoped the new road would help them find good markets for their vegetables and fruit, getting them there on time before they spoiled," said Rahmanullah, who like many Afghans has one name.
According to a Paktia provincial official, the $7 million contract for construction of the Mirzaki road was given to an Afghan company named Seven Star, but was then sold on to another local contractor for less than $6 million.
Qari Fahim, Seven Star's owner, blamed the convoluted contracting process for failing to release the money on time.
"I got only 25 percent of the contract upfront. Other instalments for the rest were delayed for months. Finally I had to hand over the project to another company for less money," Fahim told Reuters.
Another 105-km road joining Paktia to neighbouring Khost province, to the northeast, has also been crippled by graft and kickbacks, some Afghan officials concerned about the problem say on condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions.
That contract, worth $126 million, was awarded to an Indian-based company three years ago, but it was then onsold to an Afghan contractor for $84 million. The road is still incomplete.
Visiting a half-finished part of the route, Paktia governor Juma Khan Humdard fumed at the contract skimming, which forces contractors lower on the chain to skimp on costs and build less-durable roads guaranteed to deteriorate.
"There has been corruption, kickbacks. That's why this road can't be built," Humdard said.
ROADS TO STABILITY
Road-building has been a major priority for President Hamid Karzai and Western backers as his government's popularity fades over its inability to deliver the progress sought by voters in a country where a third of the 30 million population live beneath the poverty line.
The U.S. Agency for International Development promised to build as much as 1,900 km of roads but delivered less than a tenth of that when the programme was cut last year, after U.S. taxpayers had already spent almost $270 million.
USAid did not respond to Reuters emails and phone calls.
Afghan officials said while 6,700 km of road had been asphalted across Afghanistan, around 4,000 km were quickly deteriorating due to shoddy construction and graft.
The problem even extends to the capital, where poor drainage and heavy winter rains and snow left many major roads choked with traffic jams and impassable.
"We need around $70 million for maintenance of poorly constructed roads built with inadequate materials," Ahmad Shah, the deputy minister of public works, told Reuters.
Azizullah Ludin, the head of the government's anti-graft unit in Kabul, criticised civilian/military Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, for their method of awarding contracts, which sees kickbacks go to contracting companies.
"There is no transparency in contract letting by PRTs or other foreign military units. The contracting companies take a share for themselves and then pass contracts over to others desperate to break into potentially lucrative aid contracts.
"We have a case of a $50 million contract awarded to a foreign company with no equipment or machinery, who then passed it to an Afghan company for $30 million," Ludin said.
"It's not only Afghan companies, but foreigners. There are many such cases, not only in roads, but in almost every part of construction."
Ludin said construction of many buildings had also been suspended due to poor quality of materials used, from schools to hospitals and government buildings.
"A $9 million health clinic was built in Bamiyan province. When we inspected it, it was found to be vulnerable to collapse because of winter snow and even small earthquakes," he said.
The governor in volatile southern Helmand province, Gulab Mangal, said he had suspended construction of three major roads through the province last month after complaints from local villagers that they had been poorly built.
The roads were meant to connect the provincial capital Lashkar Gah to Giresk and Nawa districts, as well as the town of Marjah, where U.S. surge troops fought one of the fiercest battles of the Afghan war in 2010.
Mangal also blamed the bidding process and said construction companies had been awarded contracts based on their family or business connections with deciding officials in Kabul, rather than their ability to deliver or any knowledge of Helmand.
"Government officials, lawmakers and even the Taliban received a share of money from those contracts," an official told Reuters in Kabul. "There have been amounts of money involved." (Editing by Rob Taylor)

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