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Who will lead Afghanistan after Karzai?
Afghanistan’s next presidential elections are scheduled for 2014. However, President Hamid Karzai recently announced that he may call elections a year earlier.
The Christian Science Monitor
By Halima Kazem, Correspondent June 13, 2012 at 12:58 pm EDT
Kabul, Afghanistan - As US and NATO forces hand over security responsibilities in Afghanistan to the country’s own forces, political parties and presidential hopefuls are preparing for what could be the most pivotal presidential elections in Afghan history.
Although a successful security handover hinges on an effective political transition from the current administration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to a new leadership, Afghan leaders inside and outside of the government say Mr. Karzai hasn't done enough to set up a political system that will support a new president.
"For example, [Karzai] didn't encourage a young generation of Afghan leaders to emerge. He didn't support the development of strong multiethnic political groups or parties, nor did he form his own party, which leads one to believe that he had a political agenda and did not want to build the political capacity of the country," says Hamidullah Farooqi, spokesperson for the Truth and Justice Party and former minister of transport and civil aviation under Karzai.
Political analysts say Karzai is taking advantage of the weaknesses in the system and in the fragile state of the country to ensure that he will retain power for years to come in some form.
Afghanistan’s next presidential elections are scheduled for the spring of 2014. However, Karzai announced in April that he was discussing with his cabinet the prospect of calling the elections a year early to ensure that the elections are safeguarded by the presence of international military forces.
Karzai's influence over who's next
If he moves up elections, Karzai would have to resign and his first vice president, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, would take over. According to Afghanistan’s constitution, emergency elections would then have to be scheduled within three months.
Waheed Mujda, a Kabul-based political analyst, says that would mean Karzai may be able to push through a candidate he endorses without giving other candidates enough time to prepare for the elections and properly campaign.
“In the 10 years that he has been in power, Karzai has not fostered a real and open political process. The upcoming presidential elections will be as much about tribal and ethnic power as it was 10 years ago,” says Mr. Mujda.
Analysts say that the only way the majority of Afghans, who are Pashtuns, will accept the next leadership is if the next president is a Pashtun from a leading tribe. Karzai was able to hold his own in large part because he is a Pashtun from the southern province of Kandahar.
“A non-Pashtun president may create a roadblock on efforts to reconcile with the Taliban, which is essential to any political and security transition,” says Mujda.
Another complication to elections is that despite the more than 20 political parties registered in Afghanistan, candidates may have trouble running along party lines.
“Political parties still don’t have strength yet in Afghanistan, and the public doesn’t trust them,” says Azizullah Ludin, chairman of the Afghan government’s anticorruption board and the former president of the independent electoral commission for the 2009 Afghan presidential elections.
Mr. Ludin says candidates need strong ethnic and tribal connections to campaign in provinces where violence from the Taliban and other insurgent groups are increasing.
“It’s unfortunate, but the fact of the matter is also that any real candidate will need millions of dollars to campaign. If you don’t give cellphones, buy cars, rent homes, and buy off supporters, no one will campaign for you,” he says.
Who’s in the running?
Only two people have formally announced that they intend to run for the presidency at this point: Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Minister of Interior in the Karzai administration and Fawzia Koofi, the current and first female deputy speaker of Afghanistan’s parliament. Mr. Jalali is Pashtun but Ms. Koofi is not.
Other potential candidates include opposition figures like Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s top contender in the 2009 presidential elections and who is half Pashtun, and a list of other former and current Afghan government officials who have run in previous elections.
“Farooq Wardak and Umer Daudzai [both Pashtuns] are waiting to be tapped by Karzai and most likely one of them will be his choice candidate,” says Mujda. Mr. Wardak is the current minister of education and Mr. Daudzai is Karzai’s chief of staff. If either receives Karzai’s support, it is likely that with it will come Karzai’s financial and political networks.
Koofi and a few others like Nader Nadery, a former commissioner for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, have caught the attention of some of Afghans attracted to the possibility of a professional Afghan with a strong record of protecting the rights of Afghans to run for the presidency.
Money challenges
But Koofi, a parliamentarian from the northern province of Badakhshan, says competing with candidates who receive money from illegal channels will be difficult.
Her tactic to deal with this is to mobilize the support of the Afghan youth below the age of 25. That group makes up close to 65 percent of the Afghan population and a significant amount of the voting population, according to population statistics. Koofi says the Afghan youth could have more influence in the upcoming presidential elections if the elections are run freely and fairly.
“If they organize themselves and support a candidate they believe in, they can make a difference and change the political environment in Afghanistan,” she says.
Still, conservative forces in Afghanistan say the country is not ready for a young, progressive leader.
“With all of the progress that has come to Afghanistan in the last 10 years, this society is still one that is lead by elders and the older generations. The younger candidates haven’t proven themselves to the older generations yet and haven’t won their trust,” says Abdual Hadi Arghandiwal, the Afghan minister of economy and the leader of the Hezb-e-Islami political party, which is linked to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Islamic militant group of the same name.
“We need a president who respects the foundations of democracy and human rights in his actions but doesn’t speak too much about it to a conservative Afghan public and scare them away,” says Mujda.
NATO Chief Hopes Pakistan Routes To Reopen Soon
June 13, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says he "hopes" NATO supply routes from Pakistan to Afghanistan will reopen "in the not-too-distant future."
Rasmussen's statement on a visit to the Australian capital, Canberra, came after the United States this week ended talks in Pakistan without a deal to reopen the routes, which have been closed since a NATO air strike in November killed 24 Pakistani troops.
NATO has reached agreements with Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan to allow military equipment to be withdrawn from Afghanistan through those nations.
But Rasmussen said the Central Asian alternatives could prove more expensive than the Pakistani option.
Rasmussen also pledged that NATO will not leave behind a "security vacuum" as it withdraws 130,000 NATO-led troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Based on reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters
Defense Secretary Panetta's Pakistan comments complicate talks
After Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta's harsh criticism of Pakistan over militant attacks, talks to reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan have stalled.
Los Angeles Times By David S. Cloud and Alex Rodriguez June 13, 2012
WASHINGTON - The United States and Pakistan had nearly completed a deal to reopen crucial NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, officials from both countries said, when Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta harshly criticized Islamabad last week for allowing militants to mount cross-border attacks from its territory.
And with that, new problems erupted.
U.S. and Pakistani negotiators had been putting the final touches on the agreement when Panetta, speaking in Kabul on Thursday, said the U.S. was "reaching the limits of our patience" over Islamabad's failure to root out Afghan insurgents in its tribal areas, the officials said.
In the wake of his comments, Pakistani officials refused to meet with a senior Defense Department official over the weekend in Islamabad, and the Pentagon announced Monday that it was bringing home a negotiating team that had worked in the Pakistani capital for nearly two months to end the bitter impasse over the supply routes.
The U.S. official, Peter Lavoy, a deputy assistant secretary of Defense, was not allowed to meet with Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the army chief. Kayani is widely viewed as Pakistan's most powerful figure, and Pakistani media portrayed the snub as a clear signal of Islamabad's displeasure with Panetta's remarks.
U.S. officials appeared to blame the Pakistanis for the latest irritant in a strained relationship that has spiraled from bad to dismal over the last year.
At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney said the U.S. negotiators would return to Islamabad "when the Pakistani government is ready to conclude the agreement."
Islamabad has barred Afghan-bound supply convoys since airstrikes by U.S. military helicopters mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border in November. A key sticking point remains a Pakistani demand that the U.S. apologize in public for the attack.
U.S. officials have repeatedly expressed regret and condolences over the deaths but have balked at issuing a formal apology for an incident that, in their view, involved mistakes by both sides.
The U.S. and its allies have adjusted to the closing of the ground routes in Pakistan by moving more military supplies by air and railroad through Russia and other countries north of Afghanistan.
But those routes are longer and more expensive, and the Pentagon badly wants the Pakistani routes reopened for its convoys, which will be particularly critical as the U.S. and other countries remove heavy equipment during troop withdrawals from Afghanistan in coming years.
In recent weeks, Pakistani authorities had backed away in private from their public demands for a sharp increase in transit fees as a condition for reopening the routes, and there were also signs that Pakistan was open to something short of a high-level public apology, U.S. officials said.
But Panetta's comments in Kabul, the Afghan capital, which came only hours after he made a two-day stop for talks on defense cooperation in India, Pakistan's biggest regional rival and traditional foe, have thrown that progress into doubt.
At a news conference Tuesday, Pentagon spokesmen Capt. John Kirby and George Little acknowledged that the negotiators had almost wrapped up the deal to reopen the supply routes, but they declined to go into detail about why the talks had stalled.
"The teams themselves have taken it as far as they can right now," Kirby said. "And now it's really in the hands of the political leadership of Pakistan to make some decisions about where they want to go strategically on this."
Pakistani officials, for their part, said negotiations have not broken down. They insisted that the U.S. could resolve the dispute with an apology.
"We have not been given the courtesy of an apology," said Syed Naveed Safdar Bokhari, first secretary at Pakistan's Embassy in Washington.
Panetta and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were incensed by a recent insurgent attack on a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan. An explosives-packed vehicle breached the outer wall and suicide bombers, some wearing U.S. and Afghan uniforms, fought their way into the compound, U.S. officials said. At least one American died of injuries after the battle.
U.S. officials quickly blamed the attack on the Haqqani network, an Afghan militant group that operates from the tribal belt in Pakistan.
One senior U.S. official disputed the notion that Panetta's criticism of Pakistan had set back the talks.
"The sticking point for a long time has been the apology issue," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in discussing sensitive negotiations. "If Panetta had talked about growing roses instead of Pakistan, it's doubtful the supply routes would have been opened by now."
Pakistan's civilian government, led by beleaguered President Asif Ali Zardari, is heading into an election season, and experts say he is eager to be seen taking a tough line with Washington in a country where anti-American sentiment runs deep. Washington has not helped his position by increasing CIA drone missile strikes against Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in the tribal areas, attacks that are deeply unpopular in Pakistan.
"As the humiliation mounts, the reaction from Pakistan mounts," said Zafar Hilaly, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. "This government has less and less room to maneuver."
david.cloud@latimes.com
alex.rodriguez@latimes.com
Cloud reported from Washington and Rodriguez from Islamabad, Pakistan.
Times staff writer Ken Dilanian in Washington contributed to this report.
Negotiations on Pakistani supply routes fail
Foreign Policy By Tom Kutsch Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Amidst faltering relations between Pakistan and the U.S., the U.S. pulled out a low-level delegation of its negotiators from Islamabad on Monday after talks failed to produce a breakthrough on re-opening a major supply route for NATO in Afghanistan which goes through Pakistan (Dawn, ET, NYT). Pakistan has not allowed NATO to use the supply route since an errant U.S. airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November. U.S. officials stressed that by pulling out the team they were not intending to send any political message to the Pakistanis, and that higher-level political negotiations over the supply route are ongoing.
A suicide bombing in Peshawar, Pakistan killed two and injured two on Tuesday after targeting anti-Taliban tribal leader Muhammad Fahim (Dawn). The victims were his security guards. Meanwhile, in Baluchistan province in southwestern Pakistan, a motorcycle bomb killed three and injured 40 on Monday after hitting a bus in the Mastung district of Quetta. A Pakistani official suggested that the attack was intended to target Shiite pilgrims traveling to Iran but hit the bus instead (CBS). The attacks came after a bomb hidden in a toy killed a mother and injured three young children in the Nasir Bagh area of Peshawar on Monday (AFP).
Meanwhile, two days of discussions between India and Pakistan in Rawalpindi over the disputed Siachen glacier have ended without any progress, though it was agreed that the talks would continue (NYT).
Taliban attacks in Afghanistan
In two separate Taliban attacks in Afghanistan on Tuesday, at least eight people were killed and several injured. In one bombing a suicide bomber on a bicycle targeted a police patrol in the northern province of Balkh and killed at least three people (AFP). Elsewhere, a minivan hit a roadside bomb in Wardak province south of Kabul and killed five (ET, CBS). The incidents came after a separate roadside bombing Monday night killed seven in Farah province in western Afghanistan.
The Afghan government said on Monday that militia loyal to the army chief of staff General Abdul Rashid Dostum were interfering with oil exploration being done in northern Afghanistan by the Chinese firm National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) (Reuters). The company signed a deal last year with the Afghan government -- the first international oil deal with Afghanistan in decades -- for exploration of the Amu Darya basin, a move that is expected to accrue billions of dollars to the government over the coming decades. Afghan government officials complained that men loyal to Dostum were demanding a cut of the profits, though Dostum's National Front party denied the allegations.
Between 80 and 90 people are feared dead in a remote village in Afghanistan's Baghlan province after two earthquakes struck Afghanistan yesterday, triggering a landslide that destroyed their homes (CNN).
The Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service has launched a full-scale probe into one of the U.S. military's top private contractors, Leonie Industries (USA Today). The company, which is seen as the largest ‘propaganda' contractor for the U.S., stands accused of failing both to pay millions of dollars in back taxes and to provide services for its Afghan employees. Rep. John Tierney of Massachusetts, who has led the effort at investigating Leonie and who is a senior member on the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, said that "it is critical that we hold the Pentagon, and companies working with our government, to the highest standards...claims of ongoing lack of accountability in war zone contracting cannot be ignored."
Pakistani judicial commission reopens ‘memogate'
A judicial commission's report to the Pakistani Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S., Hussain Haqqani, did in fact author a memo to members of the Obama administration warning against the possibility of a military coup against Pakistan's civilian leadership (ET, NYT). The Supreme Court also declared that Haqqani must come back to Pakistan. Messages from Twitter by Haqqani, an avid social media user, defended his innocence against the controversial commission: "One-sided proceedings of Commission that refused to hear me will be challenged by my lawyers", said one, with another noting: "Commission is not a court and those claiming it has determined guilt or innocence are wrong." Mansoor Ijaz, the Pakistani-American businessman whose initial claims about Haqqani's actions first led to the ‘Memogate' controversy, said the news vindicated the "truth he had been speaking from the day the case started. (ET)"
Bearish on mangos?
Mango crops in Sindh are showing a 30 percent production deficit this year, primarily as a result of last year's monsoon season which caused extensive crop damages. According to a Pakistani fruit wholesaler named Ziauddin who spoke about the reduced crop with Dawn, however, the downward trend may find some respite if an export ban to Iran -- which accounted for nearly 40 percent of Pakistani mango exports last year -- is overturned this year (Dawn).
--Tom Kutsch
The US, Afghanistan and the 'India card'
Involving India in the US war in Afghanistan could further polarise Pakistan and turn the country into a proxy war.
Aljazeera By Robert Grenier, Former CIA station chief Robert Grenier heads ERG partners, a financial consultancy firm. 12 Jun 2012
Washington, DC - When in 1990 the US was in the midst of organising an international coalition to drive Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait, it made a desperate plea to its Israeli ally: Please, please do not help.
Saddam may have been a strategic ignoramus in most respects, but he had wits enough to know that the best way of unravelling the coalition of Arab countries arrayed against him, and to deny the regional staging areas on which the Americans relied was to frame the coming fight as a struggle between Arab nationalism and US-backed Zionism. He made clear that if hostilities were launched against him, he would strike immediately at the "principle enemy": Israel.
Greatly fearful of this ploy, the Americans importuned the Israelis not to respond, even if struck by Iraqi Scud missiles which, in fact, they were - repeatedly. Perhaps surprisingly, and certainly wisely, the Israelis complied. The international coalition, including its Arab partners, remained intact and Saddam was defeated in short order.
But let us suppose this US-led military venture had not worked out as planned. Let us imagine that Saddam had succeeded in his strategy of bogging down US and coalition forces in extended trench warfare. And let us further suppose that the American public had tired of this far-away struggle, that the political opponents of Bush the Elder had succeeded in branding this a "war for oil" not worthy of American lives, and that pressure for a rapid drawdown of US forces had induced other coalition partners to quickly follow suit. What then?
Surely the US would be fearful of the consequences of leaving an intact Iraqi army poised to seize the critical oil fields on the western littoral of the Arabian Gulf. Unable any longer to protect its interests on its own, the US would have to identify, organise and reinforce regional allies with a direct, long-term stake in containing Saddam. In doing so, Americans would not want to overlook the strongest military power in the region, a close and reliable ally, and one whose fear of a strengthened and hegemonic Iraq was even greater than their own. Surely some in the US national security structure, unencumbered by too much regional knowledge, would argue that Israel must be included in any such regional coalition.
Patience is running out
If this sounds implausible, consider US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta's visit this week to New Delhi, in which he pressed the Indians to raise their level of engagement in Afghanistan. No longer satisfied simply with Indian provision of economic and development assistance, the American defence chief indicated he would like to see India engaged with Afghan security forces as well.
In so saying, he was apparently not unmindful of how this message would be received in Islamabad. Indeed, it was apparent from the Secretary's comments in both Delhi, and later Kabul, that Pakistan is very much on his mind. Referring repeatedly to the militant safe havens on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line, Panetta made clear that US patience with Pakistani policy is running out, and his tone regarding the current high tempo of drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas was anything but apologetic.
Secretary Panetta's pique is understandable. The Pakistanis have made no secret of their opposition to unrestricted drone strikes against militants on their soil, but have provided no near-term assurances that the safe havens of concern to Kabul and to NATO will otherwise be addressed. And if Islamabad has identified a clear quid-pro-quo concerning the end-game in Afghanistan in trade for its cooperation against the Taliban and the Haqqani network, it is not clear to outside observers what this demand might be, outside of a vague desire for a negotiated solution. And it is still less clear to anyone that the Pakistanis could actually deliver on any promises they made concerning safe havens and the militants who inhabit them.
Even so, it is hard to imagine how the US government could suppose that encouragement of Indian security assistance to the Kabul government would advance its long-term interests. The fact that the Pentagon would do so should be seen not as a trump card, but as an act of desperation. Consider the circumstances: The US has made clear that the timeline for its draw-down from Afghanistan is swift and certain. Another 23,000 troops are due out by the end of this September. The results of May's NATO summit in Chicago make clear that there is little enthusiasm in the coalition for the continued financial commitment which will still be required even after NATO troops have departed. And the nature and extent of the US commitment to Afghanistan under their recently-signed "Strategic Partnership Agreement" could hardly be more vague.
Afghan civil war plus proxies
While Washington's desire for more robust regional engagement in support of Afghanistan is understandable, the notion that a qualitatively more aggressive Indian posture in Afghanistan would serve to encourage more constructive Pakistani behaviour - and still less, as some US defence officials have actually suggested, genuine Indo-Pakistani cooperation inside Afghanistan - borders on the hopelessly naive.
It may be that Secretary Panetta's gambit in New Delhi is merely a new form of coercion against Pakistan. And in any case, the Indians have made clear that they are reluctant to step more deeply into a risky and highly unstable situation merely to help facilitate an unwanted US departure.
But the US government should know that to the extent it is successful in pressing India into high-profile security engagement in Afghanistan, the more likely it is to produce the very situation it fears most: A renewed Afghan civil war in which India and Pakistan are actively engaged in support of their respective proxies, and in which Islamabad's ties to the Taliban are strongly reinforced.
America's strategic relationships with Israel and India have more in common than is often appreciated. But just as the US has been cautious of the practical use to which its alliance with Israel is put, it should likewise exercise great caution in playing the "India card" in Afghanistan.
Robert Grenier is a retired, 27-year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service. He was Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center from 2004 to 2006.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
China to promote Afghanistan's stability: FM spokesman
BEIJING, June 13 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese vice foreign minister will attend the international talks on Afghanistan's future on Thursday in Kabul, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said here Wednesday.
Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying will head the Chinese delegation attending the talks, Liu said at a daily press briefing.
Representatives from 29 countries will gather in Kabul for the one-day conference, which follows a meeting held in Istanbul in November aimed at mapping out the future of the war-torn country after NATO troops leave in 2014.
Liu said that China supports Afghanistan to strengthen ties with countries in the region, and is ready to work with relevant countries to make contributions to the peace, stability and development of Afghanistan and the region.
Days After an Order to Restrict Them, Afghanistan Calls for Airstrikes to End
New York Times By SANGAR RAHIMI and ALISSA J. RUBIN June 12, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan issued an impassioned call for the end of international airstrikes in his country on Tuesday, branding them as an “illegitimate use of force” and saying that the need to protect civilian life demanded a complete halt to those operations, even in cases when troops are under attack.
Hours later, the allied commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen, reiterated significant changes to rules concerning the use of airstrikes announced earlier this week, issuing a statement in which he said he had given the order that “no aerial munitions be delivered against civilian dwellings.” But he added the caveat that the strikes would be permitted as an absolute last resort in self-defense “if no other options are available.”
The issue of airstrikes and civilian casualties is again figuring into tensions between the Americans and Afghans after an allied strike in Logar Province this month killed 18 people, including 9 children. A meeting of officials from both countries over the weekend led to the announcement of new restrictions on the use of allied airpower.
But Mr. Karzai went further still on Tuesday, insisting that as far as his government was concerned, “an agreement has been reached clearly with NATO that no bombardment of civilian homes is allowed for any reason.” Mr. Karzai spoke in response to a question at a news conference, adding that coalition forces could not use airstrikes “even when they are under attack.”
Though Mr. Karzai has long criticized errant airstrikes, the exchanges this week seemed to be a new signal of a changing power dynamic on the eve of the accelerated withdrawal of international forces, with a number of changes that might have been unthinkable just months ago.
At one time, for instance, commanders said the United States could not give up its absolute authority over night raids without losing the ability to fight the Taliban, and it was thought similarly crucial to retain control over detention operations.
But authority over both night raids and detention is nominally in the hands of Afghans now, since memorandums of understanding were signed this spring. And, while Americans still call many of the shots on both, the clock is running on how long that will go on: the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan is set to end in 2014, and by the end of this year, there will be 23,000 fewer American troops here. For the first time in years, some provinces will be completely without an American presence.
At the same time, from the Afghan side, there has been a new assertiveness about the nation’s sovereign rights even as foreign countries continue to foot the bill for almost all government projects and its security forces.
In his comments on the new policy, Mr. Karzai said that his government considered airstrikes “as an absolutely disproportionate use of force and an illegitimate use of force.”
He continued: “We have considered it so in the past, we still consider it so, and we have brought an end to it by having this agreement with NATO. Have I made myself clear?”
Mr. Karzai argued that in numerous police operations in the United States and Europe, airstrikes were not considered necessary. “There are police operations every day in the United States in various localities,” he said. “They don’t call in airplanes to bomb those places.”
“There was a police action in France, in Toulouse, when they were going to neutralize the terrorist,” Mr. Karzai said, referring to a French siege in March at an apartment where a man had holed up after killing seven people. “They were engaged in a fight with the person who was in a house, for about 36 hours or so, but they didn’t call the French Air Force to bomb the house.”
Mr. Karzai added: “Airstrikes are not used in civilian areas. If they don’t want to do it in their own country, why do they do it in Afghanistan?”
Nevertheless, airstrikes are still seen by NATO commanders as an important way to protect ground troops. And while General Allen’s new restrictions signaled a significant change in how international forces will operate, his statement seemed to counter Afghan assertions that airstrikes had been taken completely off the table. While he asserted that “other conventional methods” would be used against insurgents in civilian areas, he said, “As always, Afghan and coalition forces retain the inherent right to use aerial munitions in self-defense if no other options are available.”
In Washington, Defense Department officials said that although they had not seen Mr. Karzai’s latest statements, he and General Allen were in broad agreement, after meeting on Saturday, over the need to restrict airstrikes in residential areas. “What you’re going to see is a more serious effort to use other means,” said Capt. John Kirby, another Pentagon spokesman.
On Monday, Lt. Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, the second-ranking allied commander in Afghanistan, said the number of airstrikes against civilian dwellings had been very small. This year, he said, the coalition has conducted 1,300 airstrikes in support of allied troops on the ground, during which 32 civilian compounds were damaged and five instances of civilian casualties were confirmed.
Sangar Rahimi reported from Kabul, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kunduz, Afghanistan. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
Afghanistan to promote friendly ties with int'l community: President Karzai
Xinhua June 12, 2012
KABUL - Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai said here Tuesday his government would continue to develop friendly relations with the international community.
"We have inked strategic partnership agreements with U.S., with India, with Germany, with Italy, with France, with Australia and are hopeful to ink with Norway and Turkey," President Karzai told a press conference in his Palace.
Counting his government's achievements in developing relations with the international community, he noted that Afghanistan has been given the status of observer at the recently held Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in China.
"In our meetings with President Putin and President Hu Jintao, the two leaders have announced their support to Afghanistan and developing its relations with the world community," Karzai stated.
He also noted both the Chinese and Russian leaders backed Afghanistan's relations with the United States and the international community.
"It is a matter of good luck that countries vying in other places are cooperative in Afghanistan," the Afghan leader said without naming any country. However, he said the world community have pledged to continue supporting Afghanistan and its security forces for the next decade until 2024.
The Afghan leader also vowed to fight corruption and ensure good governance in his country.
He also lamented the killing of civilians by the NATO-led troops during operations against Taliban, saying terrorists should be pursued in their sanctuaries and not in Afghan villages.
Afghan Heroin Trafficker Sentenced To Life In U.S. Jail
June 13, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
A U.S. court in Washington has sentenced Afghan national Haji Bagcho to spend the rest of his life in a U.S. prison after he was convicted of conspiracy, distribution of heroin, and narco-terrorism.
U.S. prosecutors said Bagcho's drug-trafficking network in eastern Afghanistan produced hundreds of thousands of kilograms of heroin for transport to countries around the world.
Bagcho, whose sentenced was handed down on June 12, had denied the charges.
His sentence also includes the forfeiture of more than $254 million in alleged profits from drug transactions.
The U.S. Justice Department described Bagcho as "one of the world's most prolific drug traffickers who helped fund the Taliban."
Bagcho was apprehended in Afghanistan in May 2009 and extradited to the United States.
Based on reporting by Reuters and AP
Up to 100 Feared Dead in Afghan Quake
Associated Press June 12, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - As many as 100 people are feared dead in an earthquake and landslide that buried more than 20 houses in northern Afghanistan on Monday, officials said.
Rescuers have so far pulled two women's bodies from the rubble of the landslide in Baghlan province, said provincial Gov. Abdul Majid. The U.N. confirmed one other death and said houses were destroyed across five districts.
A massive landslide of mud and rocks buried houses so deep in the remote mountain village of Sayi Hazara that rescuers gave up trying to use shovels to dig through the buried buildings, said Jawed Basharat, a spokesman for the provincial police chief who was part of a team that examined the village after the slide. There were no visible signs of the buildings underneath.
"We need bulldozers or other machinery to remove all this earth and get the bodies out, or the survivors if there are any," Mr. Basharat said.
They knew how many houses were buried only from information provided by area residents, who said between 25 and 30 houses disappeared in the landslide.
An earthquake measuring a magnitude 5.4 struck the Hindu Kush region Monday morning, followed by a 5.7 quake, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Both were felt as far away as the Afghan capital, Kabul, where buildings shook.
Baghlan province's Burka district, the site of the landslide, is a remote collection of mountain villages. It takes more than two hours to drive the approximately 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the provincial capital of Pul-e-Khumri to the area.
The police led a team of rescue workers and medics from Pul-e-Khumri, but discovered on arrival that they could be of little use. The handful of people who survived the landslide had already been driven to clinics.
"The ambulances were there, but there was no one to put in the ambulances," Mr. Basharat said.
The U.N. said in a statement that it was working with local authorities to try to help in the rescue effort but did not provide details. Mr. Basharat said the police team was the only group to arrive on Monday, and they returned to Pul-e-Khumri when they realized there was nothing they could do.
Lack of Equipments, Hardens Rescue Operation in Baghlan: ANDMA
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 12 June 2012
Lack of modern and heavy duty equipments hardened the rescue operation in northern Baghlan province, Deputy Head of Afghanistan Natural Disaster Management Authority, Mohammad Aslam Sayas said Tuesday.
Twin 5.4 and 5.7 magnitude earthquakes struck five districts of Baghlan provinces on Monday as dozens are reportedly buried under the wreckages and more than 20 houses have been destroyed in a landslide in Jan Mohammad village of Burka district.
"Based on the information obtained from police chief, removing the wreckages is out the ability of the government. Its really worrying as we don't have sufficient machinery to rescue the victims and identify the bodies." Mr Sayas told TOLOnews today.
According to ANDMA official, drinking water, medicine and other basic aides have been transferred to the province.
He also added that at least 16 people have been wounded and 70 others have been trapped under the wreckages of the houses.
"Totally we have 16 wounded people, most of them with minor injuries only few of them were hospitalized." Sayas added.
Meanwhile, provincial head of IRC chief Hamed Niyazi said that as many as 71 people have been killed all of them women and children and two dead bodies have been recovered so far.
"According to our stats, 71 women and children have been killed and only two bodies have been recovered so far. 25 houses have been destroyed." Niyazi told TOLOnews Tuesday in a phone conversation.
Reports said that apart from Baghlan province, Takhar, Kunduz, Kapisa, Panjshir, Nooristan, Laghman, Jalalabad, Kabul and parts of Tajikistan and Pakistan were also shaken by the quake.
Taliban Encourage Afghan Kids to Suicide: NDS
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 12 June 2012
Taliban are isolating lazy and low profile students in Pakistani Madrasas, to give them a wrong picture about Afghanistan and work with them psychologically to commit suicide, a spokesman for Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, Lutfullah Mashal told Reuters recently.
Suicide attacks, unknown in Afghanistan until 2004, have become particularly worrying to the country as newly minted government forces take control of security ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign combat troops in 2014.
"Most Muslim families send their children for Islamic education to Pakistani madrassas and Taliban, especially al Qaeda related Taliban, they chose and select some dumb students, lazy students and students from poor background of family to be recruited as suicide attackers. They isolate them from the rest of the students, they train them and in most cases they hypnotize them. They work with them psychologically and they give them a wrong picture of Afghanistan," Mashal said.
Suicide bombings are the most lethal type of weapons to be used against civilian and military forces after IEDs.
Abdul Wahab, 18, originally from Kunduz in the northern Afghanistan, but who grew up in Pakistan's garrison town of Rawalpindi, said he was approached and encouraged by Taliban to commit suicide.
He stated that he made four unsuccessful attempts to detonate his explosive-laden car on foreign military convoys in northern Afghanistan before he was caught last month.
He was given training in a camp for15 days in a camp for Afghan refugees near the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on how to set off a car bomb.
Afghanistan's National Directorate Security (NDS) says it is trying to draw the poison out of the young minds by teaching them the Koran, taking them to mosques in Kabul to show people praying peacefully and proving their instigators were wrong.
This comes as last week; at least 20 Afghan civilians were killed when a pair of suicide bombers detonated explosives within minutes of each other in a crowded part of the southern city of Kandahar.
Delays Imperil Mining Riches Afghans Need After Pullout
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM June 12, 2012
MES AYNAK, Afghanistan - Mullah Mira Jan, a tribal elder in the dry hills south of Kabul, was an early supporter of Afghanistan's push to develop its mining industry and bring new wealth to one of the world's poorest countries. He and his extended family accepted $10,000 in 2009 to move and make way for a sprawling copper mine here.
Three years later, the family still lives in a mud-walled temporary home without running water or regular electricity, within sight of a fenced-off hilltop where the government promised villagers they could build a new community.
"The people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay have more facilities than we do," Mr. Jan said one morning inside his crumbling home. His feeling of betrayal runs so deep that he is urging other villagers to reject government attempts to move them, a defiant stand that could imperil a project at the center of Afghanistan's effort to tap its mineral riches.
That underground wealth, as much as $1 trillion by some estimates, offers one of Afghanistan's best hopes for standing on its own financially when the U.S.-led military coalition withdraws most troops and much of its aid by the end of 2014.
Besides the copper deposit at Mes Aynak, which a Chinese consortium has pledged to invest $3.5 billion to develop, Afghanistan has awarded rights to extract iron ore, gold and oil, to companies from India, Canada, the U.S. and Britain.
The Mes Aynak project offers a warning of how difficult it is likely to be for Afghanistan to cash in on its mineral wealth. Delays in the now five-year-old project threaten to deprive a fragile Afghan state of a crucial revenue stream when it will be most needed, in the first years after the U.S. and its allies withdraw most of their military forces.
International experts have warned the government that neglecting to provide new communities to relocated villagers like Mr. Jan could not only jeopardize the Mes Aynak mine but undercut projects elsewhere and possibly provoke violent opposition, fueling the insurgency that is already strong in the area.
"This mine is not going to thrive if these communities fail," said Michael Stanley, the lead mining specialist at the World Bank. "The No. 1 risk is the social license to operate."
Insurgent attacks are already a threat. Afghan officials said last month they had thwarted a likely attack on the Chinese project when an informant told them of a stash of artillery shells and launchers hidden near the site.
Afghan officials say they and the Chinese consortium have tried to address the concerns of villagers like Mr. Jan by giving some of them jobs with the mine project and crafting a detailed relocation plan. Mr. Jan, 51 years old, makes $300 a month working for the Afghan Ministry of Culture and representing archeologists working on the project.
Part of the problem is that the villagers "had a lot of expectations that were not justified," says Afghanistan's mining minister, Wahidullah Shahrani. "Before Aynak, the kids had no access to education, no jobs. Now they have all these things."
Mes Aynak contains $40 billion worth of untapped minerals, by some estimates. Afghanistan's finance minister, Omar Zakhilwal, says he expects the project to be generating at least $300 million in annual royalties for the government in Kabul by 2016. That would account for some 15% of its civilian budget.
The project, however, has been plagued by delays and controversies from the start. Around the end of 2009, an Afghan mining official left his post shortly after an allegation surfaced in the U.S. press that he had accepted a bribe in connection with the awarding of the contract, an accusation that he and the alleged giver both denied.
According to a 2010 cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing released by WikiLeaks, the organization that releases previously private documents and cables online, a commercial attaché at Afghanistan's embassy in Beijing told U.S. diplomats that Afghan officials viewed the Chinese investors as "a cow to milk" for bribes.
Transparency hasn't been a salient feature of the nascent Afghan mining industry. Details of the contract for the Mes Aynak project, among others, remain shrouded in secrecy.
Early on, Afghan officials said the Chinese consortium developing it had pledged to build a railway network linking the area to neighboring countries such as Pakistan and Uzbekistan. That could be an economic boon to Afghanistan, which now has just 60 miles of railroads.
An Afghan mining minister called the railway commitment a "nonnegotiable" part of the deal with the Chinese, according to a 2010 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. But Afghan officials now say the Chinese aren't contractually obligated to build a railroad. They are expected to study the rail project but can shelve it if they conclude it isn't worth the investment, Mr. Shahrani, the mining minister, said in an interview.
Other plans envisioned when the contract was let in 2007 also have yet to materialize, among them a 400-megawatt power plant and a coal mine.
The Chinese consortium, which includes state-run China Metallurgical Group and Jianxi Copper Co., said it plans to spend two years assessing the railway project and is still conducting a study of its plans for a power plant and coal mine.
So far, the site 25 miles southeast of Kabul consists of little more than bare scrubland plus a complex of two-story, blue-topped housing units for Chinese workers. This is guarded by 1,500 members of a special mine-protection force, paid by the Chinese. Besides them, the Chinese consortium employs about 300 other Afghans, out of a total of 3,000 Afghans it is expected eventually to hire for the project in addition to the guards.
One cause of the delays was the discovery of ancient Buddhist monasteries at Mes Aynak, long-buried by the shifting sands. These have required a salvage effort, led by French archeologists, that remains ongoing.
Also still under way is an effort to clear the area of land mines laid during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The Chinese companies don't have to pay the Afghan government any significant royalties until they actually start mining, said an adviser working on the project.
Besides potentially straining the government's finances after the U.S. pullout, the delays could directly affect the security situation in the local province, Logar, one where the Taliban are active. "If we get to 2014 and they haven't put a shovel in the ground, you are going to see it become a bigger point of contention because someone got moved out of their home for nothing," said one of the international advisers working on the project.
Some of the advisers privately wonder whether the Chinese companies might be looking to delay their work until they can see how stable Afghanistan is once most Western troops head home over the next two years.
"The security situation in Afghan is indeed worrisome," the group said in a written response to questions. "The security conditions of the project have been improved. We believe the government and people have the capability and wisdom to well manage the security problems in and after year 2014."
The Chinese companies say they are still assessing what it will take to make the site profitable. China Metallurgical, also known as MCC, said it is impossible to say when it will start mining.
Afghan officials are alarmed by the prospect of more delay. "We are applying pressure" on the consortium, said Mr. Zakhilwal, the finance minister. "We don't want the companies to come and sit on our resources and wait it out."
The biggest mineral extraction contracts so far have gone to state-run companies from China and a government-led consortium from India, which last fall won rights to develop the largest iron-ore deposit.
Companies from the U.S., which has spent tens of billions of dollars and suffered thousands of military casualties in Afghanistan over the past decade, have by and large remained spectators. The biggest U.S. mining involvement is in a consortium of Western companies, organized by a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase JPM +2.89% & Co., that is investing $50 million to develop a northern Afghanistan gold mine.
Some American companies have complained that the bidding process was tilted toward government-controlled companies. The argument is that Afghanistan's emphasis on receiving the highest possible royalties, rather than on other issues such as the environment, favors state-owned companies that may have less need than purely commercial ones to worry about profits.
"It's been difficult to get U.S. firms and Western firms interested in Afghanistan," said Alexander Benard, managing director of Gryphon Partners, a Washington-based firm run by his father, Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. "There are huge issues around political stability, huge issues around infrastructure and major question marks about what's going to happen in Afghanistan as the United States continues to draw down."
Mr. Benard lashed out at the contracting process last fall after Western companies represented by his firm lost to Chinese state-run companies for drilling rights to an oil field in the north called Amu Darya that is said to hold 87 million barrels. A Pentagon-backed review board has since examined the Amu Darya tender and concluded the process was fair.
Just as with the Mes Aynak copper project, exactly what the oil-drilling contract provides remains clouded in secrecy. Despite government pledges to disclose details of agreements, only one major contract has been released to the public so far. A recent report by Global Witness, an independent advocacy group that focuses on natural resource exploitation, said there was a "major gap" between the government's promises of transparency and its follow-through.
As for the villagers who were moved out of their houses at Mes Aynak and still don't have a new community, Mr. Shahrani, the mining minister, says that because of education and jobs they are better off now than before they moved.
Villagers stuck for three years in temporary mud-wall compounds don't see it this way.
"We were told everything would be fine, but here we are," said Mr. Jan's 90-year-old father, Gulzar, as he leaned on a cane outside the crumbling family home with a "Welcome" sign in English on the wooden door. "We've been betrayed by our government." —Kersten Zhang, Junting Yolanda Zhang and Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
Write to Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
Afghanistan’s next presidential elections are scheduled for 2014. However, President Hamid Karzai recently announced that he may call elections a year earlier.
The Christian Science Monitor
By Halima Kazem, Correspondent June 13, 2012 at 12:58 pm EDT
Kabul, Afghanistan - As US and NATO forces hand over security responsibilities in Afghanistan to the country’s own forces, political parties and presidential hopefuls are preparing for what could be the most pivotal presidential elections in Afghan history.
Although a successful security handover hinges on an effective political transition from the current administration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to a new leadership, Afghan leaders inside and outside of the government say Mr. Karzai hasn't done enough to set up a political system that will support a new president.
"For example, [Karzai] didn't encourage a young generation of Afghan leaders to emerge. He didn't support the development of strong multiethnic political groups or parties, nor did he form his own party, which leads one to believe that he had a political agenda and did not want to build the political capacity of the country," says Hamidullah Farooqi, spokesperson for the Truth and Justice Party and former minister of transport and civil aviation under Karzai.
Political analysts say Karzai is taking advantage of the weaknesses in the system and in the fragile state of the country to ensure that he will retain power for years to come in some form.
Afghanistan’s next presidential elections are scheduled for the spring of 2014. However, Karzai announced in April that he was discussing with his cabinet the prospect of calling the elections a year early to ensure that the elections are safeguarded by the presence of international military forces.
Karzai's influence over who's next
If he moves up elections, Karzai would have to resign and his first vice president, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, would take over. According to Afghanistan’s constitution, emergency elections would then have to be scheduled within three months.
Waheed Mujda, a Kabul-based political analyst, says that would mean Karzai may be able to push through a candidate he endorses without giving other candidates enough time to prepare for the elections and properly campaign.
“In the 10 years that he has been in power, Karzai has not fostered a real and open political process. The upcoming presidential elections will be as much about tribal and ethnic power as it was 10 years ago,” says Mr. Mujda.
Analysts say that the only way the majority of Afghans, who are Pashtuns, will accept the next leadership is if the next president is a Pashtun from a leading tribe. Karzai was able to hold his own in large part because he is a Pashtun from the southern province of Kandahar.
“A non-Pashtun president may create a roadblock on efforts to reconcile with the Taliban, which is essential to any political and security transition,” says Mujda.
Another complication to elections is that despite the more than 20 political parties registered in Afghanistan, candidates may have trouble running along party lines.
“Political parties still don’t have strength yet in Afghanistan, and the public doesn’t trust them,” says Azizullah Ludin, chairman of the Afghan government’s anticorruption board and the former president of the independent electoral commission for the 2009 Afghan presidential elections.
Mr. Ludin says candidates need strong ethnic and tribal connections to campaign in provinces where violence from the Taliban and other insurgent groups are increasing.
“It’s unfortunate, but the fact of the matter is also that any real candidate will need millions of dollars to campaign. If you don’t give cellphones, buy cars, rent homes, and buy off supporters, no one will campaign for you,” he says.
Who’s in the running?
Only two people have formally announced that they intend to run for the presidency at this point: Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Minister of Interior in the Karzai administration and Fawzia Koofi, the current and first female deputy speaker of Afghanistan’s parliament. Mr. Jalali is Pashtun but Ms. Koofi is not.
Other potential candidates include opposition figures like Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s top contender in the 2009 presidential elections and who is half Pashtun, and a list of other former and current Afghan government officials who have run in previous elections.
“Farooq Wardak and Umer Daudzai [both Pashtuns] are waiting to be tapped by Karzai and most likely one of them will be his choice candidate,” says Mujda. Mr. Wardak is the current minister of education and Mr. Daudzai is Karzai’s chief of staff. If either receives Karzai’s support, it is likely that with it will come Karzai’s financial and political networks.
Koofi and a few others like Nader Nadery, a former commissioner for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, have caught the attention of some of Afghans attracted to the possibility of a professional Afghan with a strong record of protecting the rights of Afghans to run for the presidency.
Money challenges
But Koofi, a parliamentarian from the northern province of Badakhshan, says competing with candidates who receive money from illegal channels will be difficult.
Her tactic to deal with this is to mobilize the support of the Afghan youth below the age of 25. That group makes up close to 65 percent of the Afghan population and a significant amount of the voting population, according to population statistics. Koofi says the Afghan youth could have more influence in the upcoming presidential elections if the elections are run freely and fairly.
“If they organize themselves and support a candidate they believe in, they can make a difference and change the political environment in Afghanistan,” she says.
Still, conservative forces in Afghanistan say the country is not ready for a young, progressive leader.
“With all of the progress that has come to Afghanistan in the last 10 years, this society is still one that is lead by elders and the older generations. The younger candidates haven’t proven themselves to the older generations yet and haven’t won their trust,” says Abdual Hadi Arghandiwal, the Afghan minister of economy and the leader of the Hezb-e-Islami political party, which is linked to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Islamic militant group of the same name.
“We need a president who respects the foundations of democracy and human rights in his actions but doesn’t speak too much about it to a conservative Afghan public and scare them away,” says Mujda.
NATO Chief Hopes Pakistan Routes To Reopen Soon
June 13, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says he "hopes" NATO supply routes from Pakistan to Afghanistan will reopen "in the not-too-distant future."
Rasmussen's statement on a visit to the Australian capital, Canberra, came after the United States this week ended talks in Pakistan without a deal to reopen the routes, which have been closed since a NATO air strike in November killed 24 Pakistani troops.
NATO has reached agreements with Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan to allow military equipment to be withdrawn from Afghanistan through those nations.
But Rasmussen said the Central Asian alternatives could prove more expensive than the Pakistani option.
Rasmussen also pledged that NATO will not leave behind a "security vacuum" as it withdraws 130,000 NATO-led troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Based on reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters
Defense Secretary Panetta's Pakistan comments complicate talks
After Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta's harsh criticism of Pakistan over militant attacks, talks to reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan have stalled.
Los Angeles Times By David S. Cloud and Alex Rodriguez June 13, 2012
WASHINGTON - The United States and Pakistan had nearly completed a deal to reopen crucial NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, officials from both countries said, when Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta harshly criticized Islamabad last week for allowing militants to mount cross-border attacks from its territory.
And with that, new problems erupted.
U.S. and Pakistani negotiators had been putting the final touches on the agreement when Panetta, speaking in Kabul on Thursday, said the U.S. was "reaching the limits of our patience" over Islamabad's failure to root out Afghan insurgents in its tribal areas, the officials said.
In the wake of his comments, Pakistani officials refused to meet with a senior Defense Department official over the weekend in Islamabad, and the Pentagon announced Monday that it was bringing home a negotiating team that had worked in the Pakistani capital for nearly two months to end the bitter impasse over the supply routes.
The U.S. official, Peter Lavoy, a deputy assistant secretary of Defense, was not allowed to meet with Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the army chief. Kayani is widely viewed as Pakistan's most powerful figure, and Pakistani media portrayed the snub as a clear signal of Islamabad's displeasure with Panetta's remarks.
U.S. officials appeared to blame the Pakistanis for the latest irritant in a strained relationship that has spiraled from bad to dismal over the last year.
At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney said the U.S. negotiators would return to Islamabad "when the Pakistani government is ready to conclude the agreement."
Islamabad has barred Afghan-bound supply convoys since airstrikes by U.S. military helicopters mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border in November. A key sticking point remains a Pakistani demand that the U.S. apologize in public for the attack.
U.S. officials have repeatedly expressed regret and condolences over the deaths but have balked at issuing a formal apology for an incident that, in their view, involved mistakes by both sides.
The U.S. and its allies have adjusted to the closing of the ground routes in Pakistan by moving more military supplies by air and railroad through Russia and other countries north of Afghanistan.
But those routes are longer and more expensive, and the Pentagon badly wants the Pakistani routes reopened for its convoys, which will be particularly critical as the U.S. and other countries remove heavy equipment during troop withdrawals from Afghanistan in coming years.
In recent weeks, Pakistani authorities had backed away in private from their public demands for a sharp increase in transit fees as a condition for reopening the routes, and there were also signs that Pakistan was open to something short of a high-level public apology, U.S. officials said.
But Panetta's comments in Kabul, the Afghan capital, which came only hours after he made a two-day stop for talks on defense cooperation in India, Pakistan's biggest regional rival and traditional foe, have thrown that progress into doubt.
At a news conference Tuesday, Pentagon spokesmen Capt. John Kirby and George Little acknowledged that the negotiators had almost wrapped up the deal to reopen the supply routes, but they declined to go into detail about why the talks had stalled.
"The teams themselves have taken it as far as they can right now," Kirby said. "And now it's really in the hands of the political leadership of Pakistan to make some decisions about where they want to go strategically on this."
Pakistani officials, for their part, said negotiations have not broken down. They insisted that the U.S. could resolve the dispute with an apology.
"We have not been given the courtesy of an apology," said Syed Naveed Safdar Bokhari, first secretary at Pakistan's Embassy in Washington.
Panetta and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were incensed by a recent insurgent attack on a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan. An explosives-packed vehicle breached the outer wall and suicide bombers, some wearing U.S. and Afghan uniforms, fought their way into the compound, U.S. officials said. At least one American died of injuries after the battle.
U.S. officials quickly blamed the attack on the Haqqani network, an Afghan militant group that operates from the tribal belt in Pakistan.
One senior U.S. official disputed the notion that Panetta's criticism of Pakistan had set back the talks.
"The sticking point for a long time has been the apology issue," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in discussing sensitive negotiations. "If Panetta had talked about growing roses instead of Pakistan, it's doubtful the supply routes would have been opened by now."
Pakistan's civilian government, led by beleaguered President Asif Ali Zardari, is heading into an election season, and experts say he is eager to be seen taking a tough line with Washington in a country where anti-American sentiment runs deep. Washington has not helped his position by increasing CIA drone missile strikes against Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in the tribal areas, attacks that are deeply unpopular in Pakistan.
"As the humiliation mounts, the reaction from Pakistan mounts," said Zafar Hilaly, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. "This government has less and less room to maneuver."
david.cloud@latimes.com
alex.rodriguez@latimes.com
Cloud reported from Washington and Rodriguez from Islamabad, Pakistan.
Times staff writer Ken Dilanian in Washington contributed to this report.
Negotiations on Pakistani supply routes fail
Foreign Policy By Tom Kutsch Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Amidst faltering relations between Pakistan and the U.S., the U.S. pulled out a low-level delegation of its negotiators from Islamabad on Monday after talks failed to produce a breakthrough on re-opening a major supply route for NATO in Afghanistan which goes through Pakistan (Dawn, ET, NYT). Pakistan has not allowed NATO to use the supply route since an errant U.S. airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November. U.S. officials stressed that by pulling out the team they were not intending to send any political message to the Pakistanis, and that higher-level political negotiations over the supply route are ongoing.
A suicide bombing in Peshawar, Pakistan killed two and injured two on Tuesday after targeting anti-Taliban tribal leader Muhammad Fahim (Dawn). The victims were his security guards. Meanwhile, in Baluchistan province in southwestern Pakistan, a motorcycle bomb killed three and injured 40 on Monday after hitting a bus in the Mastung district of Quetta. A Pakistani official suggested that the attack was intended to target Shiite pilgrims traveling to Iran but hit the bus instead (CBS). The attacks came after a bomb hidden in a toy killed a mother and injured three young children in the Nasir Bagh area of Peshawar on Monday (AFP).
Meanwhile, two days of discussions between India and Pakistan in Rawalpindi over the disputed Siachen glacier have ended without any progress, though it was agreed that the talks would continue (NYT).
Taliban attacks in Afghanistan
In two separate Taliban attacks in Afghanistan on Tuesday, at least eight people were killed and several injured. In one bombing a suicide bomber on a bicycle targeted a police patrol in the northern province of Balkh and killed at least three people (AFP). Elsewhere, a minivan hit a roadside bomb in Wardak province south of Kabul and killed five (ET, CBS). The incidents came after a separate roadside bombing Monday night killed seven in Farah province in western Afghanistan.
The Afghan government said on Monday that militia loyal to the army chief of staff General Abdul Rashid Dostum were interfering with oil exploration being done in northern Afghanistan by the Chinese firm National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) (Reuters). The company signed a deal last year with the Afghan government -- the first international oil deal with Afghanistan in decades -- for exploration of the Amu Darya basin, a move that is expected to accrue billions of dollars to the government over the coming decades. Afghan government officials complained that men loyal to Dostum were demanding a cut of the profits, though Dostum's National Front party denied the allegations.
Between 80 and 90 people are feared dead in a remote village in Afghanistan's Baghlan province after two earthquakes struck Afghanistan yesterday, triggering a landslide that destroyed their homes (CNN).
The Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service has launched a full-scale probe into one of the U.S. military's top private contractors, Leonie Industries (USA Today). The company, which is seen as the largest ‘propaganda' contractor for the U.S., stands accused of failing both to pay millions of dollars in back taxes and to provide services for its Afghan employees. Rep. John Tierney of Massachusetts, who has led the effort at investigating Leonie and who is a senior member on the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, said that "it is critical that we hold the Pentagon, and companies working with our government, to the highest standards...claims of ongoing lack of accountability in war zone contracting cannot be ignored."
Pakistani judicial commission reopens ‘memogate'
A judicial commission's report to the Pakistani Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S., Hussain Haqqani, did in fact author a memo to members of the Obama administration warning against the possibility of a military coup against Pakistan's civilian leadership (ET, NYT). The Supreme Court also declared that Haqqani must come back to Pakistan. Messages from Twitter by Haqqani, an avid social media user, defended his innocence against the controversial commission: "One-sided proceedings of Commission that refused to hear me will be challenged by my lawyers", said one, with another noting: "Commission is not a court and those claiming it has determined guilt or innocence are wrong." Mansoor Ijaz, the Pakistani-American businessman whose initial claims about Haqqani's actions first led to the ‘Memogate' controversy, said the news vindicated the "truth he had been speaking from the day the case started. (ET)"
Bearish on mangos?
Mango crops in Sindh are showing a 30 percent production deficit this year, primarily as a result of last year's monsoon season which caused extensive crop damages. According to a Pakistani fruit wholesaler named Ziauddin who spoke about the reduced crop with Dawn, however, the downward trend may find some respite if an export ban to Iran -- which accounted for nearly 40 percent of Pakistani mango exports last year -- is overturned this year (Dawn).
--Tom Kutsch
The US, Afghanistan and the 'India card'
Involving India in the US war in Afghanistan could further polarise Pakistan and turn the country into a proxy war.
Aljazeera By Robert Grenier, Former CIA station chief Robert Grenier heads ERG partners, a financial consultancy firm. 12 Jun 2012
Washington, DC - When in 1990 the US was in the midst of organising an international coalition to drive Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait, it made a desperate plea to its Israeli ally: Please, please do not help.
Saddam may have been a strategic ignoramus in most respects, but he had wits enough to know that the best way of unravelling the coalition of Arab countries arrayed against him, and to deny the regional staging areas on which the Americans relied was to frame the coming fight as a struggle between Arab nationalism and US-backed Zionism. He made clear that if hostilities were launched against him, he would strike immediately at the "principle enemy": Israel.
Greatly fearful of this ploy, the Americans importuned the Israelis not to respond, even if struck by Iraqi Scud missiles which, in fact, they were - repeatedly. Perhaps surprisingly, and certainly wisely, the Israelis complied. The international coalition, including its Arab partners, remained intact and Saddam was defeated in short order.
But let us suppose this US-led military venture had not worked out as planned. Let us imagine that Saddam had succeeded in his strategy of bogging down US and coalition forces in extended trench warfare. And let us further suppose that the American public had tired of this far-away struggle, that the political opponents of Bush the Elder had succeeded in branding this a "war for oil" not worthy of American lives, and that pressure for a rapid drawdown of US forces had induced other coalition partners to quickly follow suit. What then?
Surely the US would be fearful of the consequences of leaving an intact Iraqi army poised to seize the critical oil fields on the western littoral of the Arabian Gulf. Unable any longer to protect its interests on its own, the US would have to identify, organise and reinforce regional allies with a direct, long-term stake in containing Saddam. In doing so, Americans would not want to overlook the strongest military power in the region, a close and reliable ally, and one whose fear of a strengthened and hegemonic Iraq was even greater than their own. Surely some in the US national security structure, unencumbered by too much regional knowledge, would argue that Israel must be included in any such regional coalition.
Patience is running out
If this sounds implausible, consider US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta's visit this week to New Delhi, in which he pressed the Indians to raise their level of engagement in Afghanistan. No longer satisfied simply with Indian provision of economic and development assistance, the American defence chief indicated he would like to see India engaged with Afghan security forces as well.
In so saying, he was apparently not unmindful of how this message would be received in Islamabad. Indeed, it was apparent from the Secretary's comments in both Delhi, and later Kabul, that Pakistan is very much on his mind. Referring repeatedly to the militant safe havens on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line, Panetta made clear that US patience with Pakistani policy is running out, and his tone regarding the current high tempo of drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas was anything but apologetic.
Secretary Panetta's pique is understandable. The Pakistanis have made no secret of their opposition to unrestricted drone strikes against militants on their soil, but have provided no near-term assurances that the safe havens of concern to Kabul and to NATO will otherwise be addressed. And if Islamabad has identified a clear quid-pro-quo concerning the end-game in Afghanistan in trade for its cooperation against the Taliban and the Haqqani network, it is not clear to outside observers what this demand might be, outside of a vague desire for a negotiated solution. And it is still less clear to anyone that the Pakistanis could actually deliver on any promises they made concerning safe havens and the militants who inhabit them.
Even so, it is hard to imagine how the US government could suppose that encouragement of Indian security assistance to the Kabul government would advance its long-term interests. The fact that the Pentagon would do so should be seen not as a trump card, but as an act of desperation. Consider the circumstances: The US has made clear that the timeline for its draw-down from Afghanistan is swift and certain. Another 23,000 troops are due out by the end of this September. The results of May's NATO summit in Chicago make clear that there is little enthusiasm in the coalition for the continued financial commitment which will still be required even after NATO troops have departed. And the nature and extent of the US commitment to Afghanistan under their recently-signed "Strategic Partnership Agreement" could hardly be more vague.
Afghan civil war plus proxies
While Washington's desire for more robust regional engagement in support of Afghanistan is understandable, the notion that a qualitatively more aggressive Indian posture in Afghanistan would serve to encourage more constructive Pakistani behaviour - and still less, as some US defence officials have actually suggested, genuine Indo-Pakistani cooperation inside Afghanistan - borders on the hopelessly naive.
It may be that Secretary Panetta's gambit in New Delhi is merely a new form of coercion against Pakistan. And in any case, the Indians have made clear that they are reluctant to step more deeply into a risky and highly unstable situation merely to help facilitate an unwanted US departure.
But the US government should know that to the extent it is successful in pressing India into high-profile security engagement in Afghanistan, the more likely it is to produce the very situation it fears most: A renewed Afghan civil war in which India and Pakistan are actively engaged in support of their respective proxies, and in which Islamabad's ties to the Taliban are strongly reinforced.
America's strategic relationships with Israel and India have more in common than is often appreciated. But just as the US has been cautious of the practical use to which its alliance with Israel is put, it should likewise exercise great caution in playing the "India card" in Afghanistan.
Robert Grenier is a retired, 27-year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service. He was Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center from 2004 to 2006.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
China to promote Afghanistan's stability: FM spokesman
BEIJING, June 13 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese vice foreign minister will attend the international talks on Afghanistan's future on Thursday in Kabul, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said here Wednesday.
Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying will head the Chinese delegation attending the talks, Liu said at a daily press briefing.
Representatives from 29 countries will gather in Kabul for the one-day conference, which follows a meeting held in Istanbul in November aimed at mapping out the future of the war-torn country after NATO troops leave in 2014.
Liu said that China supports Afghanistan to strengthen ties with countries in the region, and is ready to work with relevant countries to make contributions to the peace, stability and development of Afghanistan and the region.
Days After an Order to Restrict Them, Afghanistan Calls for Airstrikes to End
New York Times By SANGAR RAHIMI and ALISSA J. RUBIN June 12, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan issued an impassioned call for the end of international airstrikes in his country on Tuesday, branding them as an “illegitimate use of force” and saying that the need to protect civilian life demanded a complete halt to those operations, even in cases when troops are under attack.
Hours later, the allied commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen, reiterated significant changes to rules concerning the use of airstrikes announced earlier this week, issuing a statement in which he said he had given the order that “no aerial munitions be delivered against civilian dwellings.” But he added the caveat that the strikes would be permitted as an absolute last resort in self-defense “if no other options are available.”
The issue of airstrikes and civilian casualties is again figuring into tensions between the Americans and Afghans after an allied strike in Logar Province this month killed 18 people, including 9 children. A meeting of officials from both countries over the weekend led to the announcement of new restrictions on the use of allied airpower.
But Mr. Karzai went further still on Tuesday, insisting that as far as his government was concerned, “an agreement has been reached clearly with NATO that no bombardment of civilian homes is allowed for any reason.” Mr. Karzai spoke in response to a question at a news conference, adding that coalition forces could not use airstrikes “even when they are under attack.”
Though Mr. Karzai has long criticized errant airstrikes, the exchanges this week seemed to be a new signal of a changing power dynamic on the eve of the accelerated withdrawal of international forces, with a number of changes that might have been unthinkable just months ago.
At one time, for instance, commanders said the United States could not give up its absolute authority over night raids without losing the ability to fight the Taliban, and it was thought similarly crucial to retain control over detention operations.
But authority over both night raids and detention is nominally in the hands of Afghans now, since memorandums of understanding were signed this spring. And, while Americans still call many of the shots on both, the clock is running on how long that will go on: the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan is set to end in 2014, and by the end of this year, there will be 23,000 fewer American troops here. For the first time in years, some provinces will be completely without an American presence.
At the same time, from the Afghan side, there has been a new assertiveness about the nation’s sovereign rights even as foreign countries continue to foot the bill for almost all government projects and its security forces.
In his comments on the new policy, Mr. Karzai said that his government considered airstrikes “as an absolutely disproportionate use of force and an illegitimate use of force.”
He continued: “We have considered it so in the past, we still consider it so, and we have brought an end to it by having this agreement with NATO. Have I made myself clear?”
Mr. Karzai argued that in numerous police operations in the United States and Europe, airstrikes were not considered necessary. “There are police operations every day in the United States in various localities,” he said. “They don’t call in airplanes to bomb those places.”
“There was a police action in France, in Toulouse, when they were going to neutralize the terrorist,” Mr. Karzai said, referring to a French siege in March at an apartment where a man had holed up after killing seven people. “They were engaged in a fight with the person who was in a house, for about 36 hours or so, but they didn’t call the French Air Force to bomb the house.”
Mr. Karzai added: “Airstrikes are not used in civilian areas. If they don’t want to do it in their own country, why do they do it in Afghanistan?”
Nevertheless, airstrikes are still seen by NATO commanders as an important way to protect ground troops. And while General Allen’s new restrictions signaled a significant change in how international forces will operate, his statement seemed to counter Afghan assertions that airstrikes had been taken completely off the table. While he asserted that “other conventional methods” would be used against insurgents in civilian areas, he said, “As always, Afghan and coalition forces retain the inherent right to use aerial munitions in self-defense if no other options are available.”
In Washington, Defense Department officials said that although they had not seen Mr. Karzai’s latest statements, he and General Allen were in broad agreement, after meeting on Saturday, over the need to restrict airstrikes in residential areas. “What you’re going to see is a more serious effort to use other means,” said Capt. John Kirby, another Pentagon spokesman.
On Monday, Lt. Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, the second-ranking allied commander in Afghanistan, said the number of airstrikes against civilian dwellings had been very small. This year, he said, the coalition has conducted 1,300 airstrikes in support of allied troops on the ground, during which 32 civilian compounds were damaged and five instances of civilian casualties were confirmed.
Sangar Rahimi reported from Kabul, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kunduz, Afghanistan. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
Afghanistan to promote friendly ties with int'l community: President Karzai
Xinhua June 12, 2012
KABUL - Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai said here Tuesday his government would continue to develop friendly relations with the international community.
"We have inked strategic partnership agreements with U.S., with India, with Germany, with Italy, with France, with Australia and are hopeful to ink with Norway and Turkey," President Karzai told a press conference in his Palace.
Counting his government's achievements in developing relations with the international community, he noted that Afghanistan has been given the status of observer at the recently held Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in China.
"In our meetings with President Putin and President Hu Jintao, the two leaders have announced their support to Afghanistan and developing its relations with the world community," Karzai stated.
He also noted both the Chinese and Russian leaders backed Afghanistan's relations with the United States and the international community.
"It is a matter of good luck that countries vying in other places are cooperative in Afghanistan," the Afghan leader said without naming any country. However, he said the world community have pledged to continue supporting Afghanistan and its security forces for the next decade until 2024.
The Afghan leader also vowed to fight corruption and ensure good governance in his country.
He also lamented the killing of civilians by the NATO-led troops during operations against Taliban, saying terrorists should be pursued in their sanctuaries and not in Afghan villages.
Afghan Heroin Trafficker Sentenced To Life In U.S. Jail
June 13, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
A U.S. court in Washington has sentenced Afghan national Haji Bagcho to spend the rest of his life in a U.S. prison after he was convicted of conspiracy, distribution of heroin, and narco-terrorism.
U.S. prosecutors said Bagcho's drug-trafficking network in eastern Afghanistan produced hundreds of thousands of kilograms of heroin for transport to countries around the world.
Bagcho, whose sentenced was handed down on June 12, had denied the charges.
His sentence also includes the forfeiture of more than $254 million in alleged profits from drug transactions.
The U.S. Justice Department described Bagcho as "one of the world's most prolific drug traffickers who helped fund the Taliban."
Bagcho was apprehended in Afghanistan in May 2009 and extradited to the United States.
Based on reporting by Reuters and AP
Up to 100 Feared Dead in Afghan Quake
Associated Press June 12, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - As many as 100 people are feared dead in an earthquake and landslide that buried more than 20 houses in northern Afghanistan on Monday, officials said.
Rescuers have so far pulled two women's bodies from the rubble of the landslide in Baghlan province, said provincial Gov. Abdul Majid. The U.N. confirmed one other death and said houses were destroyed across five districts.
A massive landslide of mud and rocks buried houses so deep in the remote mountain village of Sayi Hazara that rescuers gave up trying to use shovels to dig through the buried buildings, said Jawed Basharat, a spokesman for the provincial police chief who was part of a team that examined the village after the slide. There were no visible signs of the buildings underneath.
"We need bulldozers or other machinery to remove all this earth and get the bodies out, or the survivors if there are any," Mr. Basharat said.
They knew how many houses were buried only from information provided by area residents, who said between 25 and 30 houses disappeared in the landslide.
An earthquake measuring a magnitude 5.4 struck the Hindu Kush region Monday morning, followed by a 5.7 quake, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Both were felt as far away as the Afghan capital, Kabul, where buildings shook.
Baghlan province's Burka district, the site of the landslide, is a remote collection of mountain villages. It takes more than two hours to drive the approximately 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the provincial capital of Pul-e-Khumri to the area.
The police led a team of rescue workers and medics from Pul-e-Khumri, but discovered on arrival that they could be of little use. The handful of people who survived the landslide had already been driven to clinics.
"The ambulances were there, but there was no one to put in the ambulances," Mr. Basharat said.
The U.N. said in a statement that it was working with local authorities to try to help in the rescue effort but did not provide details. Mr. Basharat said the police team was the only group to arrive on Monday, and they returned to Pul-e-Khumri when they realized there was nothing they could do.
Lack of Equipments, Hardens Rescue Operation in Baghlan: ANDMA
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 12 June 2012
Lack of modern and heavy duty equipments hardened the rescue operation in northern Baghlan province, Deputy Head of Afghanistan Natural Disaster Management Authority, Mohammad Aslam Sayas said Tuesday.
Twin 5.4 and 5.7 magnitude earthquakes struck five districts of Baghlan provinces on Monday as dozens are reportedly buried under the wreckages and more than 20 houses have been destroyed in a landslide in Jan Mohammad village of Burka district.
"Based on the information obtained from police chief, removing the wreckages is out the ability of the government. Its really worrying as we don't have sufficient machinery to rescue the victims and identify the bodies." Mr Sayas told TOLOnews today.
According to ANDMA official, drinking water, medicine and other basic aides have been transferred to the province.
He also added that at least 16 people have been wounded and 70 others have been trapped under the wreckages of the houses.
"Totally we have 16 wounded people, most of them with minor injuries only few of them were hospitalized." Sayas added.
Meanwhile, provincial head of IRC chief Hamed Niyazi said that as many as 71 people have been killed all of them women and children and two dead bodies have been recovered so far.
"According to our stats, 71 women and children have been killed and only two bodies have been recovered so far. 25 houses have been destroyed." Niyazi told TOLOnews Tuesday in a phone conversation.
Reports said that apart from Baghlan province, Takhar, Kunduz, Kapisa, Panjshir, Nooristan, Laghman, Jalalabad, Kabul and parts of Tajikistan and Pakistan were also shaken by the quake.
Taliban Encourage Afghan Kids to Suicide: NDS
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 12 June 2012
Taliban are isolating lazy and low profile students in Pakistani Madrasas, to give them a wrong picture about Afghanistan and work with them psychologically to commit suicide, a spokesman for Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, Lutfullah Mashal told Reuters recently.
Suicide attacks, unknown in Afghanistan until 2004, have become particularly worrying to the country as newly minted government forces take control of security ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign combat troops in 2014.
"Most Muslim families send their children for Islamic education to Pakistani madrassas and Taliban, especially al Qaeda related Taliban, they chose and select some dumb students, lazy students and students from poor background of family to be recruited as suicide attackers. They isolate them from the rest of the students, they train them and in most cases they hypnotize them. They work with them psychologically and they give them a wrong picture of Afghanistan," Mashal said.
Suicide bombings are the most lethal type of weapons to be used against civilian and military forces after IEDs.
Abdul Wahab, 18, originally from Kunduz in the northern Afghanistan, but who grew up in Pakistan's garrison town of Rawalpindi, said he was approached and encouraged by Taliban to commit suicide.
He stated that he made four unsuccessful attempts to detonate his explosive-laden car on foreign military convoys in northern Afghanistan before he was caught last month.
He was given training in a camp for15 days in a camp for Afghan refugees near the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on how to set off a car bomb.
Afghanistan's National Directorate Security (NDS) says it is trying to draw the poison out of the young minds by teaching them the Koran, taking them to mosques in Kabul to show people praying peacefully and proving their instigators were wrong.
This comes as last week; at least 20 Afghan civilians were killed when a pair of suicide bombers detonated explosives within minutes of each other in a crowded part of the southern city of Kandahar.
Delays Imperil Mining Riches Afghans Need After Pullout
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM June 12, 2012
MES AYNAK, Afghanistan - Mullah Mira Jan, a tribal elder in the dry hills south of Kabul, was an early supporter of Afghanistan's push to develop its mining industry and bring new wealth to one of the world's poorest countries. He and his extended family accepted $10,000 in 2009 to move and make way for a sprawling copper mine here.
Three years later, the family still lives in a mud-walled temporary home without running water or regular electricity, within sight of a fenced-off hilltop where the government promised villagers they could build a new community.
"The people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay have more facilities than we do," Mr. Jan said one morning inside his crumbling home. His feeling of betrayal runs so deep that he is urging other villagers to reject government attempts to move them, a defiant stand that could imperil a project at the center of Afghanistan's effort to tap its mineral riches.
That underground wealth, as much as $1 trillion by some estimates, offers one of Afghanistan's best hopes for standing on its own financially when the U.S.-led military coalition withdraws most troops and much of its aid by the end of 2014.
Besides the copper deposit at Mes Aynak, which a Chinese consortium has pledged to invest $3.5 billion to develop, Afghanistan has awarded rights to extract iron ore, gold and oil, to companies from India, Canada, the U.S. and Britain.
The Mes Aynak project offers a warning of how difficult it is likely to be for Afghanistan to cash in on its mineral wealth. Delays in the now five-year-old project threaten to deprive a fragile Afghan state of a crucial revenue stream when it will be most needed, in the first years after the U.S. and its allies withdraw most of their military forces.
International experts have warned the government that neglecting to provide new communities to relocated villagers like Mr. Jan could not only jeopardize the Mes Aynak mine but undercut projects elsewhere and possibly provoke violent opposition, fueling the insurgency that is already strong in the area.
"This mine is not going to thrive if these communities fail," said Michael Stanley, the lead mining specialist at the World Bank. "The No. 1 risk is the social license to operate."
Insurgent attacks are already a threat. Afghan officials said last month they had thwarted a likely attack on the Chinese project when an informant told them of a stash of artillery shells and launchers hidden near the site.
Afghan officials say they and the Chinese consortium have tried to address the concerns of villagers like Mr. Jan by giving some of them jobs with the mine project and crafting a detailed relocation plan. Mr. Jan, 51 years old, makes $300 a month working for the Afghan Ministry of Culture and representing archeologists working on the project.
Part of the problem is that the villagers "had a lot of expectations that were not justified," says Afghanistan's mining minister, Wahidullah Shahrani. "Before Aynak, the kids had no access to education, no jobs. Now they have all these things."
Mes Aynak contains $40 billion worth of untapped minerals, by some estimates. Afghanistan's finance minister, Omar Zakhilwal, says he expects the project to be generating at least $300 million in annual royalties for the government in Kabul by 2016. That would account for some 15% of its civilian budget.
The project, however, has been plagued by delays and controversies from the start. Around the end of 2009, an Afghan mining official left his post shortly after an allegation surfaced in the U.S. press that he had accepted a bribe in connection with the awarding of the contract, an accusation that he and the alleged giver both denied.
According to a 2010 cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing released by WikiLeaks, the organization that releases previously private documents and cables online, a commercial attaché at Afghanistan's embassy in Beijing told U.S. diplomats that Afghan officials viewed the Chinese investors as "a cow to milk" for bribes.
Transparency hasn't been a salient feature of the nascent Afghan mining industry. Details of the contract for the Mes Aynak project, among others, remain shrouded in secrecy.
Early on, Afghan officials said the Chinese consortium developing it had pledged to build a railway network linking the area to neighboring countries such as Pakistan and Uzbekistan. That could be an economic boon to Afghanistan, which now has just 60 miles of railroads.
An Afghan mining minister called the railway commitment a "nonnegotiable" part of the deal with the Chinese, according to a 2010 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. But Afghan officials now say the Chinese aren't contractually obligated to build a railroad. They are expected to study the rail project but can shelve it if they conclude it isn't worth the investment, Mr. Shahrani, the mining minister, said in an interview.
Other plans envisioned when the contract was let in 2007 also have yet to materialize, among them a 400-megawatt power plant and a coal mine.
The Chinese consortium, which includes state-run China Metallurgical Group and Jianxi Copper Co., said it plans to spend two years assessing the railway project and is still conducting a study of its plans for a power plant and coal mine.
So far, the site 25 miles southeast of Kabul consists of little more than bare scrubland plus a complex of two-story, blue-topped housing units for Chinese workers. This is guarded by 1,500 members of a special mine-protection force, paid by the Chinese. Besides them, the Chinese consortium employs about 300 other Afghans, out of a total of 3,000 Afghans it is expected eventually to hire for the project in addition to the guards.
One cause of the delays was the discovery of ancient Buddhist monasteries at Mes Aynak, long-buried by the shifting sands. These have required a salvage effort, led by French archeologists, that remains ongoing.
Also still under way is an effort to clear the area of land mines laid during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The Chinese companies don't have to pay the Afghan government any significant royalties until they actually start mining, said an adviser working on the project.
Besides potentially straining the government's finances after the U.S. pullout, the delays could directly affect the security situation in the local province, Logar, one where the Taliban are active. "If we get to 2014 and they haven't put a shovel in the ground, you are going to see it become a bigger point of contention because someone got moved out of their home for nothing," said one of the international advisers working on the project.
Some of the advisers privately wonder whether the Chinese companies might be looking to delay their work until they can see how stable Afghanistan is once most Western troops head home over the next two years.
"The security situation in Afghan is indeed worrisome," the group said in a written response to questions. "The security conditions of the project have been improved. We believe the government and people have the capability and wisdom to well manage the security problems in and after year 2014."
The Chinese companies say they are still assessing what it will take to make the site profitable. China Metallurgical, also known as MCC, said it is impossible to say when it will start mining.
Afghan officials are alarmed by the prospect of more delay. "We are applying pressure" on the consortium, said Mr. Zakhilwal, the finance minister. "We don't want the companies to come and sit on our resources and wait it out."
The biggest mineral extraction contracts so far have gone to state-run companies from China and a government-led consortium from India, which last fall won rights to develop the largest iron-ore deposit.
Companies from the U.S., which has spent tens of billions of dollars and suffered thousands of military casualties in Afghanistan over the past decade, have by and large remained spectators. The biggest U.S. mining involvement is in a consortium of Western companies, organized by a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase JPM +2.89% & Co., that is investing $50 million to develop a northern Afghanistan gold mine.
Some American companies have complained that the bidding process was tilted toward government-controlled companies. The argument is that Afghanistan's emphasis on receiving the highest possible royalties, rather than on other issues such as the environment, favors state-owned companies that may have less need than purely commercial ones to worry about profits.
"It's been difficult to get U.S. firms and Western firms interested in Afghanistan," said Alexander Benard, managing director of Gryphon Partners, a Washington-based firm run by his father, Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. "There are huge issues around political stability, huge issues around infrastructure and major question marks about what's going to happen in Afghanistan as the United States continues to draw down."
Mr. Benard lashed out at the contracting process last fall after Western companies represented by his firm lost to Chinese state-run companies for drilling rights to an oil field in the north called Amu Darya that is said to hold 87 million barrels. A Pentagon-backed review board has since examined the Amu Darya tender and concluded the process was fair.
Just as with the Mes Aynak copper project, exactly what the oil-drilling contract provides remains clouded in secrecy. Despite government pledges to disclose details of agreements, only one major contract has been released to the public so far. A recent report by Global Witness, an independent advocacy group that focuses on natural resource exploitation, said there was a "major gap" between the government's promises of transparency and its follow-through.
As for the villagers who were moved out of their houses at Mes Aynak and still don't have a new community, Mr. Shahrani, the mining minister, says that because of education and jobs they are better off now than before they moved.
Villagers stuck for three years in temporary mud-wall compounds don't see it this way.
"We were told everything would be fine, but here we are," said Mr. Jan's 90-year-old father, Gulzar, as he leaned on a cane outside the crumbling family home with a "Welcome" sign in English on the wooden door. "We've been betrayed by our government." —Kersten Zhang, Junting Yolanda Zhang and Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
Write to Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com
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