[Afghan News] June 23, 2012

[یاسمینه]

Eyewitness Describes Afghan Resort Attack
June 22, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
In an interview with RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan, eyewitness Muhammad Sahrif Alakozai described the scene after Taliban militants stormed a popular resort outside Kabul on June 21. The raid began a nearly 12-hour assault that Afghan authorities say left at least 20 dead, including civilians and at least four attackers. Interview conducted by correspondent Hameed Mohmand.
RFE/RL: Last night you were present at the Spozmai hotel when the attack began. Can you tell us how it began?
Alakozai: The attack began after we had dinner. We were ready to go home and as we reached the door, there was a lot of firing. Most of my friends dispersed. Only one friend stayed behind with me.
RFE/RL: Can you describe how the attackers were dressed?
Alakozai: I saw three attackers. Two of them were wearing normal Afghan clothes, while the third was in a police uniform. They were carrying a lot of ammunition. One of the attackers [in the uniform] was a handsome young man. He was talking on the phone to someone.
RFE/RL: What was he saying?
Alakozai: He was saying, "Hamza Sahib" or "Hafiz Sahib, please pray for us, we are going inside." After that, something horrible happened in front of our eyes. They shot a handsome young man in his legs and then went and shot him in the chest four or five times with a Kalashinkov rifle.
RFE/RL: There were many wedding receptions going on here at the time of the attack. How were they [the attackers] treating average people?
Alakozai: They were shooting people without asking any questions. They stormed one part of the restaurant with full force. We could only hear the [weapons] firing coming from the other side. Later they began coming over to the our side one by one. They began shooting anybody coming their way. They would fire two or three shots at anyone coming their way.
RFE/RL: You were there for the duration of the attack. How many people do you think were shot?
Alakozai: I think nearly 50 to 60 people guests were here at the time of the attack, because it was late. Normally there are a lot more people on a Thursday evening. After the fighting was over, we asked the police commandos [about the survivors]. Thirteen of us hid downstairs. Three people swam away across the lake. So there must be 30 to 40 casualties. (By 15:00 GMT on June 22, Afghan authorities had confirmed the deaths of at least 20 people, including civilians and at least four attackers. No numbers were given for those injured.)
RFE/RL: When did the police begin their operation?
Alakozai: First, police special forces arrived in helicopters after the attack. We were able to point out our location to them. Then they circled and went away. They spent a lot of time here. We were able to point out our location to them when they returned.
RFE/RL: Were there any foreign forces involved in the operation?
Alakozai: There were foreign forces, but the Afghan commandos were doing most of the fighting.
RFE/RL: Do you think any civilians were harmed during the police operation?
Alakozai: I think they harmed no one. I wanted to escape but I was with friends who couldn't swim. This problem hampered our escape. After we were rescued, we were told it was a good thing because something could have happened to us. The police were arresting everybody coming out of here.
Interview conducted by Radio Free Afghanistan correspondent Hameed Mohmand; translated by Abubakar Siddique

Witnesses Describe Brazen Attack on Resort Hotel Near Kabul
New York Times By HABIB ZAHORI, ROD NORDLAND and ALISSA J. RUBIN June 22, 2012
QARGHA LAKE, Afghanistan - A minivan pulled up to the entryway of the Spozhmai Hotel just before midnight on Thursday, and what appeared to be seven Afghan women in characteristic head-to-toe blue burqas piled out.
Throwing off the burqas, the women turned out to be male insurgents, bristling with weapons and wearing bulky suicide vests packed with explosives. They raced into the hotel, crowded with hundreds of Afghans enjoying the lakeside coolness of a summer evening — one of few places in the Kabul area where families and young people can go for a night out.
“Where are the prostitutes?” the intruders demanded as they shot their way through the hotel restaurant, according to accounts by the police and survivors. The attackers shot the manager and three unarmed hotel guards, who would be among at least 20 people the attackers managed to kill before their own deaths, mostly by suicide, finished the raid.
There were no prostitutes, as it turned out, and apparently no foreign guests, which Taliban spokesmen later said that the group had been targeting.
One of the guests who managed to escape, Shah Mohammed, 25, said the seven attackers divided up. Some stalked the restaurant inside the building; others went to the rooftop terrace, with its splendid view of the lake and the barren mountains behind it, and others out to the garden between the hotel and the lakeshore, where many of the diners were seated.
Going from one table to another, they shot any male they could find at point-blank range, but appeared to spare women and children, witnesses and officials said. Hundreds of guests fled and some were evacuated in the early hours of the raid by Afghan security forces, and 45 holed up in the hotel grounds and were held as hostages until the police took control Friday morning.
Four diners in the garden jumped into the lake, fed by cold mountain streams, and, unable to swim, clung to a wall until they were rescued by police officers hours later.
Six military policemen were among the victims, who otherwise were mostly young civilian men in their 20s. A young Afghan man who had emigrated and returned from London for a visit was in the restaurant with a friend. The friend escaped, but the Afghan was killed.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that Afghans and foreigners drank alcohol there and that there was prostitution and dancing. “These acts are illegal and strictly prohibited in Islam,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman. “Women dancers were sexually misused there.”
While there was no evidence of sexual activity of any sort, at many of the tables, amid pools of blood and unfinished meals, there were some cans of beer. Many restaurants in the Kabul area allow guests to bring their own alcohol.
The police arrived at the hotel about midnight. Suspecting that the minivan was booby-trapped, they opened fire on it with a rocket-propelled grenade as a precaution. The resulting blast confirmed their suspicions.
Police officials described the sprawling resort at Qargha Lake as a daunting place to mount a rescue operation because the area was wooded and provided easy cover for attackers. “There are lots of trees; it’s like a jungle, which makes it difficult for us to spot the attackers,” said a security official as the siege unfolded. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media.
In addition to the main hotel, the resort includes at least one other hotel and numerous small cottages.
“The Afghan security forces managed to evacuate 250 to 300 customers at the hotel in the initial hours of the attack, and in the morning we resumed our operation,” said Gen. Ayoub Salangi, the Kabul police chief, on Friday morning. “So far we’ve managed to rescue 40 more hostages, including women and children.”
The attack was the latest against civilians by the Taliban, who stormed a branch of Kabul Bank in Jalalabad in early 2011, executing customers. Nearly a year ago, they attacked the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, and 21 people were killed including the nine attackers.
Early Friday morning, gunfire broke out as the Afghan police fought the assailants and prepared a counterattack, said Gen. Mohammed Zahir, head of the Kabul Criminal Investigation Division. The police said at least two of the attackers appeared to have died when they detonated their suicide vests.
Journalists at the scene could hear one loud explosion after another as the attackers apparently detonated their vests; at least six of their bodies, badly mangled from the explosions, could be seen immediately after the police regained control.
American helicopters were shooting flares and the area was swarming with Afghan National Police and army troops. NATO officials confirmed that it was a joint operation.
The hotel is the centerpiece of the resort, which was once the property of Afghanistan’s royal family and is now owned by the government. About 10 miles from the capital, it is one of the few places in Kabul Province where people can go for a break from the crowded city streets. There are boats for rent and cottages for families, and the resort is popular with families on the Thursday and Friday weekend.
The lake is also a favorite spot for young Kabul residents who buy illegal alcohol and drink it in the picnic areas.
Sadruddin Razayae, a finance officer at a private university, said picnics at places like Qargha Lake were among Kabul’s few diversions. “Now it seems they are chasing us even there, they are stealing our happy moments,” he said. “This heartbreaking attack made me very sad.”
In a statement posted on their Web site on Friday, the Taliban said the resort area included “prime places in Kabul for prostitution and parties.”
The Taliban said the hotels in the area were “usually used for immoral and unethical purposes, both for the foreigners and their puppet colleagues.”
A waiter at the hotel, Mohammed Wais, 21, said the attack began as he was in the kitchen slicing onions. “Suddenly we heard shooting outside the hotel, we heard shouting and yelling, and then somebody said, ‘They shot the guards, they shot the guards,’ ” he said.
He and several other workers escaped, Mr. Wais said, but at least 20 others were trapped. He said they stayed in touch with their friends by exchanging text messages until 3 a.m. Friday, when, he said, “their phones were turned off.”
As ambulances arrived Friday morning to take away the dead — the police said there were only 10 wounded — surviving family members, mainly women, screamed, wailed and begged to ride along with the victims.
Habib Zahori reported from Qargha Lake, and Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan. Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul.
Habib Zahori reported from Qargha Lake, and Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan. Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul.

Gov't allocates 10 mln USD for overseas Afghan students
KABUL, June 23 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan government has allocated 10 million U.S. dollars in the current year as part of efforts to encourage students overseas and to increase the number of experts in the war-torn country, President Hamid Karzai said on Saturday.
"We allocated 5 million U.S. dollars last year for our students to study in foreign countries but the government has allocated 10 million U.S. dollars this year and the allowance would rise up to 15 million dollars in the coming years," President Karzai said in a three-day seminar here.
Describing low rate of literacy as the country's main challenge, the president called upon Afghan students to study hard and take part in the reconstruction process of their country.
More than 500 students went to India and Turkey in 2011 while up to 1,000 Afghan students are expected to go overseas for studying this year, according to officials.
This the second batch of Afghan students going abroad for higher education on government expenses while in the past couple of years Afghan students studied overseas on scholarships from host countries.
More than 150,000 students have been studying in 90 universities, including 59 private higher education institutions across the country, Minister of Higher Education Obidullah Obid said in the seminar -- A National Call for Educational, Higher Educational, Vocational System Reform and Employment in Afghanistan.
During its rule which collapsed in late 2001, the Taliban regime had banned school for girls and confined women to their houses.
Afghan Education Minister Farooq Wardak told the seminar that currently over 8 million students, with some 39 percent of them girls, go to school in the country while more than 3 million school-aged children cannot go to school because of security reasons, traditional restrictions and poverty.

Afghan President Praises Iran's Higher Education System
Fars News Agency / June 23, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- Afghan President Hamid Karzai lauded the educational system of the Iranian universities, saying that Iran has made great progress in area of science.
Karzai, who was addressing an Afghan conference on revising the country's educational system in Kabul, noted the achievements of Afghanistan's neighboring countries, and said, "Afghanistan's neighbors have made huge progress in medical sciences."
"For instance, in my recent visit to Germany, I got acquainted with a young Iranian lady who is in charge of the otorhinolaryngology ward in the largest hospital of Germany," he said, adding that the 30 to 35-year-old Iranian national had studied, not in Germany, but in Iran.
He said the Iranian expert had studied in Iran and became a university professor, adding that she was employed by the best hospital in Germany as soon as she arrived in the European country.
Karzai has been seeking to model his country's scientific progress on Iran. In July 2011, Iranian Education Minister Hamid Reza Haji Babayee said the two countries planned to sign a 20-clause Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop mutual cooperation in educational fields.
Speaking at a meeting with his Afghan counterpart Faruq Wardak in Tehran, Haji Babayee said that Iran and Afghanistan were then cooperating in writing and publishing educational books, education of Afghan teachers in Iran and construction of schools and educational centers in the war-torn Afghanistan.
"The 20-clause MoU due to be inked later today will define different grounds for expansion of cooperation. According to this agreement, the Islamic Republic of Iran will start construction of four schools in Afghanistan," Haji Babayee stated.
The Iranian minister added that Iran was due to build a technical and vocational high school to promote the skills of the Afghan students and three schools for talented students in Afghanistan.
Iran is one of the most important donors to Afghanistan which has kept its promises and helped to the reconstruction of the war-hit country.
Iran has built several roads, power transmission lines, and border stations, among other infrastructural projects.
Also Iran hosts over one million illegal Afghan refugees, while the Islamic Republic has received little international support.

‘Little America’ excerpt: Obama’s troop increase for Afghan war was misdirected
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post
Excerpted from “Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.”
The day after he arrived in Kabul in June 2009, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, gathered his senior officers to discuss the state of the war. They barraged him with PowerPoint slides — the frequency of Taliban attacks and their impact; the number of local security forces; and an evaluation of the Afghan government’s effectiveness in each province. The metrics were grim, the conclusion obvious: The Americans and their NATO allies were losing.
The part of the country that concerned McChrystal most was the city of Kandahar and the eponymous province that encompasses it. Founded by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C., Kandahar city has long been the symbolic homeland of ethnic Pashtuns. In the 1990s, just as every other band of conquerors had done for the past thousand years, the Taliban used it as a springboard from which they captured Kabul and much of the rest of the nation. If the Americans were going to retake Afghanistan, they needed to start with Kandahar.
Related information: Afghanistan war strategy during the surge
But the Pentagon had not sent most of the new U.S. forces that had arrived in Afghanistan to Kandahar. The first wave — a Marine brigade comprising more than half of the 17,000 additional troops President Obama authorized in February 2009 — had been dispatched to neighboring Helmand province, which McChrystal and his top advisers considered of far lower strategic significance.
“Can someone tell me why the Marines were sent to Helmand?” the incredulous McChrystal asked his officers.
The answer — not fully known at the time to McChrystal and his officers — would reveal the dysfunction of the U.S. war effort: a reliance on understaffed NATO partners for crucial intelligence, a misjudgment of Helmand’s importance to Afghanistan’s security, and tribal politics within the Pentagon that led the Marines to insist on confining themselves to a far less important patch of desert.
The consequences were profound: By devoting so many troops to Helmand instead of Kandahar, the U.S. military squandered more than a year of the war. Had the initial contingent of Marines been sent to Kandahar, it could have obviated the need for a full 30,000-troop surge later that year, or it could have granted commanders the flexibility to combat insurgent havens in eastern Afghanistan much sooner, allowing them to meet Obama’s eventual withdrawal deadlines without objection.
Instead, U.S. forces will begin heading home this summer with much of the east in disarray and security improvements in Kandahar still tenuous. Helmand is faring considerably better, but the gains there are having only a modest impact on Afghanistan’s overall stability.
Without the diversion into Helmand, U.S. troops could have pushed into more critical areas of the country before a clear majority of Americans concluded that the war was no longer worth fighting. Before the U.S. military death toll neared 2,000. Before the conflict became the longest in American history.
As Obama battles for reelection, White House aides have sought to depict the president as an engaged and decisive leader on national security matters. But the Helmand deployment also exposes the limits of his understanding of Afghanistan — and his unwillingness to confront the military — early in his presidency.
Just weeks after Obama took office in 2009, Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged him to approve the 17,000-troop increase before the new White House had finished a review of war strategy. Mullen said the additional forces were needed to secure the country in advance of Afghanistan’s presidential elections that August. But White House officials never pressed the Pentagon for details about where the new troops — the first major military deployment of Obama’s presidency — were heading. If they had received them, they would have learned that more than half of the forces were heading to a part of the country that was home to about 1 percent of its population.
“Nobody bothered to ask, ‘Tell us how many troops you’re sending here and there,’ ” said a senior White House official involved in war policy. “We assumed, perhaps naively, that the Pentagon was sending them to the most critical places.”
The problem escalated later in 2009 when McChrystal asked for 40,000 more troops. Some of the new forces would be sent to Kandahar. Others would secure the regions around Kabul as well as a few Pashtun-dominated pockets in the north and west where insurgent activity had increased. But thousands of the additional troops were slated to go to Helmand — on top of the nearly 11,000 Marines who already were there.
McChrystal wasn’t happy about devoting a third of his surge to Helmand, but he believed the Marines had to expand their counterinsurgency operations across the province to demonstrate momentum to the Afghan people. “We had to show we could fulfill our commitments,” he said.
The military’s counterinsurgency strategy was supposed to place troops near civilian population centers to protect residents from insurgents, not chase bad guys in the desert or remote valleys.
When McChrystal presented his troop request to Obama’s war cabinet — he spoke via a secure video link from Kabul to participants in the White House Situation Room — he displayed a map of Afghanistan dotted with blue bubbles that indicated where he intended to place the new forces. Several bubbles were in Helmand.
But in more than two hours of discussion, the 14-member war cabinet — which included Vice President Biden, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — never asked McChrystal why he wanted so many more Marines in Helmand. The civilians didn’t know enough about Afghanistan to focus on that issue. They were also concerned about micromanaging the war, of looking like President Lyndon B. Johnson picking bombing targets in North Vietnam.
From his seat along the wall, Obama’s top adviser on the Afghan war, Douglas E. Lute, believed that those around the table were missing a crucial point. Instead of arguing about counterinsurgency strategy — whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai would improve and whether the Pakistanis would crack down on Taliban sanctuaries — they should have focused more on how the forces would be employed. That would have revealed how the military had misused the first wave of troops Obama authorized.
Had they inquired, the president’s civilian advisers also could have learned that the initial 17,000 troops played only a minor role in the overall security effort for the Afghan election. In fact, the new troops protected polling sites in Helmand and Kandahar where Karzai supporters engaged in some of their most egregious ballot tampering.
After the meeting, Lute and his staff assembled a list of follow-up questions for McChrystal. Lute, a three-star general, asked McChrystal to provide more explanation of the location of the bubbles. At the war cabinet's next meeting, McChrystal talked briefly about the need to “demonstrate momentum” in Helmand. To Lute, the answer seemed unsatisfactory, but nobody around the table pressed McChrystal any further.
NATO alliance vs. winning war
Shortly after McChrystal was appointed the top commander in Afghanistan in 2009, Defense Secretary Gates had told him to take stock of the war effort within 60 days. The idea for the assessment had originated with national security adviser James L. Jones, who grew alarmed when McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee, during his confirmation hearing, that he did not know whether the 17,000 troops Obama had approved that February would be enough. Jones believed the Pentagon was lobbying for more forces before the 17,000 had fully deployed — and after McChrystal’s bosses had all but told the president that they would not be asking for more that year. As a compromise, Jones suggested that McChrystal first conduct an assessment of the war. Then, if he determined that he required more troops, he could make a formal request.
McChrystal, the rangy former commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, convened a group of outside experts from Washington’s prominent national security think tanks to travel to Kabul for a month to help him draft the assessment — and then sell the conclusion inside the Beltway by writing op-eds, giving speeches and talking it up at Washington cocktail parties.
Among them was Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, the most influential cradle of counterinsurgency strategists in the capital. He was the youngest of the outside advisers, but he had served in Iraq and had led a platoon of elite Army Rangers in Afghanistan. Exum understood that Kandahar was of critical importance, but he had no idea how tenuous the situation was until the group met with Sarah Chayes.
Chayes was a former National Public Radio reporter who ran an agricultural cooperative in Kandahar. She had once been close to the Karzai family but had a falling-out with the president and his half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai over their connections to warlords and, she alleged, their involvement in corruption. Frustrated by the failure of commanders and diplomats to grasp how graft was pushing Afghans toward the Taliban, she had accepted an offer to advise Gen. David McKiernan, McChrystal’s predecessor. She stuck around when McChrystal arrived, hoping to convince him and his staff that fighting corruption had to be a central element of their counterinsurgency campaign. She told them that Kandahar seemed to be slipping away. Ahmed Wali and his cronies had divided the spoils for themselves, and the have-nots were turning to the insurgency. She explained that the Taliban had taken control of the four districts that ring the city — Arghandab, Zhari, Dand and Panjwai — shutting down schools, seeding roads with bombs and forcing pro-government tribal leaders to flee.
Exum grew alarmed. On a trip to the main NATO base in the south, he and others on the assessment team asked the top intelligence officer on the Canadian task force responsible for Kandahar for his take on the situation.
“I have no idea what’s going on inside the city,” the officer said, according to Exum’s notes of the meeting. That was because the few Canadian troops in the city were focused on reconstruction activities, not providing security or gathering intelligence.
The problem was partly rooted in a 2005 decision by President George W. Bush to reduce American forces in Afghanistan and deploy them in Iraq. As the Taliban was gathering strength and violence was flaring across southern Afghanistan, his administration asked NATO to take up the task of stabilizing that region. The Canadians got Kandahar, and Helmand fell to the British.
By 2009, the British had 9,000 troops in Helmand because London kept adding more to confront expanding Taliban ranks. Although Kandahar was home to far more people, Canada had deployed only 2,830 soldiers to the province. Most of them were assigned to headquarters and support roles; fewer than 600 went on patrol.
When Exum returned to Kabul, he asked U.S. Maj. Gen. Michael Tucker, the soon-to-depart director of operations for all NATO troops, why more Canadians had not been sent into the city. Tucker said he did not want to dictate to the Canadians where to place their forces. “It is wrong,” he said, “to tell a commander, from this level, to put troops in Kandahar city.”
Exum was sitting next to Tucker. When he did not want others to see what he was recording in the Moleskine notebook he took everywhere, he scribbled in Greek. “This guy is a jackass,” he wrote. “Kandahar — not Helmand — is the single point of failure in Afghanistan.”
The decision to send the Marines to Helmand instead of Kandahar had been made by McKiernan, but he had been urged to do so by his subordinates in Kandahar, including a then-one-star U.S. Army general, John “Mick” Nicholson. When Nicholson met with Exum and his teammates to explain his reasoning, he emphasized that the Kandahar mission was Canada’s largest overseas deployment since the Korean War. Military leaders in Ottawa were reluctant to ask for more help — some were convinced that security in Kandahar was improving, others didn’t want to risk the embarrassment — and McKiernan didn’t want to upset the Canadians by forcing them to cede additional territory. To Exum and others on the team, however, it seemed that U.S. commanders thought that managing the NATO alliance was more important than winning the war.
The British had the opposite view about U.S. assistance in Helmand. Eager to reduce casualties, British commanders wanted to concentrate their forces around Lashkar Gah and a few other key towns. They were happy to let U.S. troops assume responsibility for the remote parts of Helmand, so long as the transfer was portrayed as a partnership, not a takeover.
Nicholson insisted that the Marines could be used more effectively in Helmand for three other reasons: It was the epicenter of poppy production, the Taliban were conducting more attacks there, and Afghan officials had told commanders that foreign troops should stay out of Kandahar city, given its religious significance. But Exum thought the new troops should be closer to the largest population center in the south, not where violence was worst. The drug argument similarly made no sense to him, because Richard C. Holbrooke, the State Department’s point man for Afghanistan, had just announced that to avoid antagonizing farmers, the United States would no longer participate in the eradication of poppy fields. A CIA study also claimed that the Taliban got most of its money from illegal taxation and contributions from Pakistan and Persian Gulf nations, not from drugs. And even if the Afghans were right about the psychological impact of foreign forces inside the city, the surrounding districts seemed like the best home for the Marines.
The Taliban’s surge in Helmand was “a feint,” Exum wrote in his notebook. “It draws our attention and resources away from Kandahar.”
When he recommended that the Marines be sent to Helmand, Nicholson did not know it would be a force of more than 10,000. He had assumed that Marine commanders would dispatch the equivalent of an infantry brigade, which typically ranges from 3,500 to 5,000 personnel. That would have allowed the Army to send more troops to Kandahar. But the Marines insisted on bringing their own helicopters and logistics teams, and they wanted to set up their own large headquarters that duplicated some of the functions performed on the giant NATO base at Kandahar’s airport. To Nicholson, “it was a lot of overhead we didn’t need.”
Breaking with tradition
There was another reason the Marines had wound up in Helmand: They wanted it.
In discussions with senior Pentagon generals in charge of troop deployments in 2008, the Marine commandant, Gen. James Conway, was willing to dispatch thousands of forces to Afghanistan as soon as the president approved a troop increase. His zeal for Afghanistan stood in contrast to that of his comrades in the upper echelons of the Army, who had more than 120,000 soldiers in Iraq and were struggling to find enough units to replace those coming home. Conway, however, could afford to turn his sights to Afghanistan because he was planning to pull his Marines out of Iraq. He wanted his Marines to hunt bad guys, and by then there were more of them in Afghanistan.
But the gray-haired Conway, who looked as though he could win a wrestling match with a 19-year-old lance corporal, drove a hard bargain. He required that any new forces be kept in a contiguous area where they could be supported by Marine helicopters and supply convoys. These stipulations effectively excluded Kandahar. The geography of the province, and the Canadians’ desire to hold on to key districts around Kandahar city, made it nearly impossible to carve out a Marine-only area there. Helmand was the next best option, even if it was less vital.
Conway’s requirement had its roots in World War II. Marines landing on the Pacific islands of Guadalcanal and Tarawa hadn’t received the air support they had expected from Navy planes to hold off Japanese troops. Since then — in Vietnam and Iraq — Marine commanders have insisted on deploying with their own aviation and supply units. In the initial years of the Afghan war, the Pentagon broke with tradition and sent small Marine units into remote districts to help train and mentor Afghan soldiers. They were forced to rely on the Army for air support, particularly when they came under attack. But overstretched Army helicopter crews were sometimes slow to respond and the delays rekindled concern within the Corps about abandonment.
Conway made an even more remarkable demand: a three-star Marine general at the U.S. Central Command, not the supreme coalition commander in Kabul, would have to have overall operational control over the force going to Helmand. That meant McChrystal would lack the power to move the Marines to another part of Afghanistan or change their mission in anything other than minor, tactical ways.
The Pentagon brass were willing to meet Conway’s conditions. They needed boots on the ground, and he was the only one offering them.
After the Marines arrived in Helmand, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, joked that the international security force in Afghanistan, then made up of 41 nations, felt as though it had 42 members because the Marines acted so independently. Before long, some American officials began referring to the Corps’s area of operations as “Marineistan.”
‘Welcome to Hell’
With so many troops in Helmand, the Marines could afford to conduct missions that were unheard of elsewhere in Afghanistan. One of them was a charge into an abandoned town.
Set atop a dusty plain between two ridgelines, the orchards of Now Zad once yielded pomegranates as large as softballs, luring visitors from across southern Afghanistan during the harvest season. Some grew so intoxicated by the prospect of farming the fertile soil that they transplanted their lives. Waves of settlers in the 1960s and 1970s transformed Now Zad, which means “newborn” in Persian, into the fourth-largest city in Helmand province.
By the fall of 2006, the city looked like old death. The Taliban had invaded it with hundreds of fighters earlier that year. The pomegranate fields had been booby-trapped with mines. Homes and shops had been blown to rubble. Bullet holes pocked the few walls left standing. As the fighting escalated, most residents fled.
After desperate pleas from President Karzai, the British commanders responsible for Helmand dispatched a platoon of Ghurkas to evict the insurgents. But the fearsome Nepalese warriors were outmanned by the Taliban. A bloody standoff ensued as the insurgents roamed the city and the Ghurkas hunkered inside the police station. Every few days, the Taliban would try to storm the compound, sometimes getting close enough to hurl grenades, but the Ghurkas, and subsequent contingents of British troops, managed to keep them at bay with torrents of bullets and rockets.
U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson was appalled when he visited Now Zad in February 2009. The first thing he saw when he landed was a wall at the police station that was scrawled with graffiti: WELCOME TO HELL. American Marines had relieved the British the year before, and they had expanded the patrol zone by a few blocks, but they were still surrounded on three sides by insurgents hiding in trenches and abandoned houses. A no man’s land lay in between, trod only by wild dogs. Injuries from IEDs — improvised explosive devices — were so common that the Marine company in Now Zad was the only one in the country to be assigned two trauma doctors and two armored vehicles with mobile surgical theaters.
To Nicholson, a compact former infantryman whose weathered face appeared perpetually sunburned, the opposing forces staring at each other evoked the trench battles of World War I. He met a Marine at Now Zad who told him, “Sir, we patrol until we hit an IED, and then we call in a medevac and go back” to the base. “And then we do it again the next day.”
When Nicholson became the top Marine commander in Afghanistan in April 2009, he resolved to save Now Zad. IEDs had blown off the legs of more than two dozen Americans in and around the city. Fighting a war of attrition with fixed positions was not something Marines did, at least not in his book.
But his bosses at the NATO regional headquarters in Kandahar felt differently, as did the American and British diplomats in the provincial capital. They maintained that Now Zad didn’t merit more troops and dollars. They believed that stalemate was good enough in an imperfect war: A small unit of Marines had succeeded in tying down hundreds of insurgents who couldn’t launch attacks elsewhere. Nicholson was told not to worry about Now Zad.
But he would not let go. His job was to protect the people of Helmand, and that meant allowing the displaced to return home. He bristled when British and American officials told him that the former residents of Now Zad would not come back. That’s how people in the West might behave, but the only real assets most Helmandis had were their homes and their land. Nicholson felt they would reclaim them if they could.
It seemed as though every day he received word of another American double amputee in Now Zad. Each folded, handwritten casualty notification his aide passed to him stopped his heart a beat longer. Failing to act, he thought, would mean his brother Marines had sacrificed lives and limbs in vain.
When Nicholson’s political adviser, John Kael Weston, the diplomat he trusted most, arrived in Helmand that June, he asked the general which outpost he should visit first.
“Kael,” Nicholson said, “you’ve got to go to Now Zad.”
At first glance, the 37-year-old Weston seemed like a surfer who’d taken a wrong turn on the way to the beach. But his tousled hair and untucked shirts belied his place among the most erudite and experienced diplomats of his generation, one who had spent more time in Iraq and Afghanistan — six consecutive years in the two war zones, with just a few short breaks — than anyone else in the State Department.
Weston’s job description called for him to advise the Marines about Afghan government matters, palaver with local leaders, and keep his bosses in Kandahar and Kabul apprised of political developments in the Marine area of operations. But he saw his writ in more expansive terms. Weston was the brigade’s political commissar; he constantly reminded the Marines that the military had been deployed in support of the Afghan government, not the other way around. And he was Nicholson’s confidant. They had forged an enduring friendship while serving for a year in the Iraqi hellhole of Fallujah.
When Weston got to Now Zad, he climbed a guard tower to see the dead pomegranate trees that had been rigged with explosives. He walked through the shuttered bazaar, praying that his next footfall would not be atop a pressure-plate IED buried in the dirt. Halfway through the patrol, he asked the corporal ahead of him, who was scanning the ground with a metal detector, how much training he had received to use the device. “Well, sir,” the corporal replied, “not as much as you’d like to think.”
The following day, he mourned with the Marines of Golf Company when they received word that Cpl. Matthew Lembke, who had enlisted on his 18th birthday and served two tours in Iraq, then re-upped to deploy with his buddies to Afghanistan, had died of an infection. Three weeks earlier, he had stepped on an IED while on a night patrol. The blast had blown off his legs and deposited the rest of him in the crater left by the bomb.
As Weston prepared to depart the outpost, a young corporal approached him. “Sir, I just hope this all adds up,” he said. “All of my friends are getting hurt over here.”
Now Zad seemed like a blood feud to Weston. “It is truly an area where you’ve got a company of bad guys versus a company of good guys,” he told his parents in an audio recording he sent them shortly after the trip. “The question for me, the general and others at headquarters is going to be: What kind of further effort do you put towards a place like Now Zad?”
He would answer that question three months later. By then, Nawa, Garmser and Khan Neshin — the districts that had been the Marines’ initial focus — had grown relatively quiet. Nicholson wanted to address other problems in the province, and the arrival of a replacement battalion in northern Helmand provided an opportunity to make a big push in Now Zad. One night in early October, Nicholson made his pitch to Weston.
“I’m frustrated,” he said. “I feel like a bulldog who wants two more links in my chain.”
“You’re on twitch muscles,” Weston replied.
“I am. There are places I can’t go right now and it’s killing me,” Nicholson said. “I’d like to finish Now Zad because I think there’s a strategic payback and benefit of showing people what we’re doing — we’ll repopulate the second-largest city in Helmand.” (Only Nicholson thought Now Zad was once that big. Afghan records listed it as fourth.)
“The people have to want to come back,” Weston said. “And right now, it doesn’t sound like they want to.”
“If you clear it, they will come,” Nicholson continued.
“I’m just being honest with you,” Weston said. “I don’t believe in the time we’ve got that Now Zad is where we should focus our attention. Our report card ain’t going to be about Now Zad.”
“When Now Zad starts to be repopulated, it will be one of the biggest stories to come out of Afghanistan.”
“If the world still cares about Afghanistan.”
“The world will care about it,” Nicholson said.

4 injured in blast near music shop in E. Afghanistan
JALALABAD, Afghanistan, June 23 (Xinhua) -- At least four people were injured Saturday in a blast near a music shop in Jalalabad, capital city of eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, officials said.
"Four injured men were admitted to a provincial capital hospital this afternoon," head of provincial health department, Baz Mohammad Shirzad, told Xinhua, adding the injured were in serious condition.
Meantime, a police official in the city said that a bomb was detonated near a music shop at around 3:20 p.m. local time and the blast also damaged several nearby shops in the city 160 km east of capital Kabul.
No group or individual have claimed of responsibility.
Taliban militants during their rule in Afghanistan which collapsed in late 2001 had banned music and all other entertainments.
A total of 23 people including 17 civilians were killed when Taliban launched an attack against a popular hotel in Qargha Lake, a picnic spot in western Kabul late on Thursday.

Afghan Flash Flooding Kills At Least 37
June 23, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan and UN officials have said that flash flooding after days of torrential rains has killed at least 37 people across the country with dozens more reported missing.
More than 100 homes, hundreds of hectares of farmland, and dozens of cattle and other animals also have been destroyed by the floods.
Provincial government spokesman Abdul Hai Khateby says 24 people were killed in four districts of Ghor Province, including the provincial capital of Chaghcharan.
The local government spokesman of the remote northeastern province of Badakhshan, says 13 people were killed on June 22 in Yaftal district.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says many of the unpaved, gutted roads in the area have been severely flooded, making aid distribution difficult.
Based on reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP

No Country for Armed Men
Pakistan is in such bad shape, even the generals don't want to stage a coup.
Foreign Policy BY AHMED RASHID JUNE 22, 2012
LAHORE - It was a sign of the misguided times in Pakistan that on June 5 -- a day when the country faced massive rolling electricity blackouts, a crashing economy, civil war in two out of four provinces, violence from the Himalayas to the Arabian Gulf, and a cratering relationship with the United States -- the Pakistani army decided it was the best moment to test fire a cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. It was the fifth such test since April, supposedly a morale booster for a wildly depressed public, a signal to India that Pakistan would not put its guard down despite its problems, and a message to U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who had arrived in Delhi that morning, that Pakistan could not be bullied.
As Pakistanis baked in the sweltering heat without electricity or running water, facing an increasingly jobless future and little hope for improved education or health care, most people ignored the missile tests. India had been carrying out similar rocket tests, but has not faced anything close to Pakistan's economic malaise.
Then last week, in the most recent denouement of a long-running political crisis, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gailani was sacked by the Supreme Court -- raising all sorts of legal and constitutional problems. Many people termed the court's action a constitutional coup because parliament is the only body that has the power to dismiss a prime minister. Although a new prime minister belonging to the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP) will soon be in place, the ongoing political uncertainty is only likely to further escalate Pakistan's institutional meltdown.
All of Pakistan's major institutions of state and governance are now at loggerheads. The Supreme Court, the PPP government led by President Asif Zardari, the opposition parties, and the media have spent the last weeks preoccupied with a flurry of corruption scandals while hurling accusations against one another. So far only the army has come out clean as a whistle -- although corruption charges hover over many retired generals.
For the Pakistani army -- the world's most experienced in creating just the right atmospherics before mounting a coup the country is in a perfect storm for what would be its fifth military takeover. All the institutions of the state are discredited. Pakistanis have no faith in the politicians and there are many public doubts about democracy. Economic collapse and relentless extremist violence have taken a huge toll in life and property, while the breakdown of relations with the West has isolated Pakistan internationally like never before.
Except that this time -- considering the mayhem it faces and the lack of solutions it can offer the nation (especially after having irked the United States and NATO) -- the army is unlikely to mount a coup. Instead, the army would like to see the present PPP government be ousted by the Supreme Court, to be followed by an interim government that would oversee general elections. In this scenario, both the Supreme Court and the army could join hands to bring corruption cases against large numbers of politicians while the tough economic reforms demanded by the IMF, which the current civilian government has refused to carry out, can be implemented. This could mean an indefinite extension of the interim government and delayed general elections.
The ruling elites' failure to carry out reforms is at the root of Pakistan's troubles. The army and successive governments have long lacked the courage or will to make the necessary tough decisions, from making peace with India to blocking the growth of extremism to raising sufficient revenues from the landed gentry. In the 1990s, when the rest of the world was enjoying the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, along with the spread of global markets and traded goods, Pakistan's economy remained stubbornly feudal. Indian cities like Bangalore and Mumbai raced to build call centers, car companies, and software giants, while Pakistanis struggled to provide electricity for their aging textile mills. Even Bangladesh and Sri Lanka surged ahead, opening their economies to policies building trade and investment and introducing new industries and agricultural crops as Pakistan fought its covert wars.
Meanwhile, the army immersed itself in conflict, first in Afghanistan supporting the mujahideen in the 1980s, then the Taliban in the 1990s, and then the jihadists in Indian-held Kashmir -- many of whom were actually Pakistani militants from Punjab. The idea of improving relations with its neighbors was as anathema to the army as carrying out basic economic reforms was to the political elite, from increasing taxes to ending subsidies to state-owned institutions that have bankrupted the country.
Pakistan was thus thoroughly undermined from within even before it made the unwise decision to shelter escaping Afghan Taliban in 2001 -- the army's bid to maintain its options in the face of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Using Islamic extremists as a tool of foreign policy was shown as a bankrupt policy after 9/11, but Pakistan continued to pursue it both in Afghanistan and Kashmir, blindly refusing to see that the world had fundamentally changed.
Pakistan is now paying the full price. Some 35,000 Pakistani citizens have been killed by the Pakistani Taliban, by related militant groups, or in bitter sectarian warfare that has gone unchecked. Extremists have targeted Hindus and Christians but also Muslim groups like the Ahmedis, Ismailis, Memons, and Shia. In Quetta, the capital of strife-torn Baluchistan, ethnic insurgents are blowing up buses; in Karachi, the breakdown of law and order is fueling the growth of armed militias in the slums based on ethnic, criminal, or political loyalty.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration's misguided handling of Pakistan over the past year has only convinced Pakistani hardliners that they were right. In their eyes, Washington's provocative cozying up to New Delhi, the peace talks it started with the Taliban without including Pakistan, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan it planned without adequate consultations with Islamabad have all served notice that America's hostility toward Pakistan is unrelenting. They believe it's the Americans who have got it all wrong and now face a military debacle in Afghanistan. The irony is that Pakistan has always wanted a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and a U.S.-Taliban dialogue it could dominate. Now that all it wished for is actually coming true, Pakistan is sitting on the wrong side of the fence, estranged from the United States as neighbors like Iran maneuver to take advantage of the U.S. withdrawal and Pakistan's absence from the scene.
Of course, the United States has its own hardliners. The most dangerous step some in the U.S. Congress and the administration are now advising President Obama to take is declaring the Afghan Taliban network led by Jalaluddin Haqqani a terrorist group. That could lead to Pakistan being declared a state sponsor of terrorism because of Haqqani's safe havens there. Such a designation would turn many more Pakistanis into anti-American extremists. By taking such a step and refusing to apologize for the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers by U.S. helicopters last November, the United States would only be setting the scene for further meltdown in Pakistan. Ending the Haqqani presence in Pakistan requires political dialogue from Washington and Kabul, not threats.
The rock-bottom relations with the United States distract Pakistan from its real problem: its spiraling domestic crises. Pakistan desperately needs leaders who can bring a new narrative to the debate, who can effectively criticize the military for plunging us into this ideological backwater for the past 30 years. Pakistan needs inspirational figures who can expose the corruption and ineptness of the politicians and demand economic and fiscal reform so that we can rebuild our country.
Any new narrative requires us as Pakistanis to take ownership of our problems rather than blaming the usual suspects: the United States, India, and Israel. So far, at least, there are no such leaders on the horizon. The best hope for Pakistan may be the promising growth of a young people's movement led by poets, pop musicians, human rights groups, artists, bankers, and bureaucrats who communicate on social networks and talk constantly about the need for change.
Sixty percent of Pakistan's 180 million people are below the age of 25, so these young people have the majority on their side. The creaking political establishment has little knowledge of this class of people or their aspirations for a better future. It is these young people who need to develop a fresh narrative about Pakistan's history and where it is going -- a narrative that does not put the army and nuclear weapons at center stage but puts Pakistani citizens first, once and for all.
Ahmed Rashid is a journalist and author of five books on South Asia. His latest is Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan

Russia ratifies deal with Italy on Afghan transit for NATO mission
Associated Press June 22, 2012
MOSCOW - Russia's parliament has ratified an agreement with Italy that allows it to transport troops and cargo to the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
The deal approved by the lower house Friday follows similar agreements with the U.S., Germany and France that allowed them to use air corridors and railway routes for carrying supplies to and from Afghanistan.
Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told lawmakers the deal would contribute to international and Russia security.
Russian officials have said NATO's mission in Afghanistan is essential for fending off the spread of terrorism and illegal drugs from Afghanistan into ex-Soviet Central Asian nations and Russia.
Russia also is now considering allowing NATO to use a logistics facility on Russian territory for Afghan transit.

10 Taliban rebels surrender in W. Afghanistan
HERAT, Afghanistan, June 23 (Xinhua) -- A total of 10 Taliban rebels surrendered to the government in western Afghan province of Herat on Saturday, a provincial government spokesman said.
"A total of 10 Taliban fighters, including their commander Mullah Aziz Ahmad, have renounced violence and joined the peace and reintegration process in Guzara district on Saturday morning," spokesman Mohiddin Noori told Xinhua.
With the former insurgents' surrender, peace and stability would be further strengthened in several parts of the province, some 640 km west of capital Kabul, Noori added.
The Taliban insurgent group, which announced the launching of a spring offensive from May 3 against Afghan and NATO forces, has not to make comments yet.
The Afghan government set up a 70-member High Peace Council in the summer of 2010 to encourage Taliban to disarm and give up militancy against the government.
More than 3,700 anti-government insurgents have laid down their arms in Afghanistan since June 2011, according to officials.

NATO Improves Tracking of Afghans’ Night-Vision Goggles
Bloomberg By David Lerman Jun 23, 2012
NATO forces have improved their record-keeping on night-vision goggles used to hunt the Taliban in Afghanistan to be sure the high-technology equipment doesn’t fall into enemy hands, a spokesman said.
The military is now using a single database to avoid confusion in tracking the precision eyewear, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Stauffer, a spokesman for NATO Training Mission Afghanistan in Kabul, said today in an e-mail.
The Pentagon’s inspector general found in a report this week that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces had lost track of hundreds of the goggles purchased for Afghan forces. U.S. Defense Department and NATO officials, Afghan security forces and defense contractors “did not maintain complete accountability” for 7,157 night-vision goggles and spare parts, the inspector general said.
The lack of adequate supervision means U.S. and Afghan soldiers “may be at greater security risk during night missions in Afghanistan,” according to the report dated June 18.
The report cited hundreds of missing serial numbers, 518 “discrepancies” and 75 goggles that were “unaccounted for during our physical inventory.”
Stauffer said the 75 goggles have since been tracked and aren’t missing. He said 28 of them were “purposely destroyed” because they were broken and the other 47 were accounted for after a re-inspection.
“To be sure, there were serial-number discrepancies resulting from the confusion associated with using multiple accounting systems,” Stauffer said. That has been solved by consolidating all records into a single database known as the Security Cooperation Information Portal, he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Lerman in Washington at dlerman1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net

Pakistan's new prime minister faces formidable challenges
by Muhammad Tahir
ISLAMABAD, June 23 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan's new prime minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf, formally assumed office on Saturday and is facing countless and tough challenges ahead, with the most formidable ones being the energy crisis, corruption, dealing with independent judiciary, aggressive opposition groups and the revival of normal relationship with the United States.
Ashraf took over three days after the country's Supreme Court ruled that his predecessor, Yusuf Raza Gilani, is disqualified from holding office. He was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to re-open corruption cases against President Asif Ali Zardari.
The new prime minister in his maiden speech to parliament Friday evening offered talks with the opposition to deal with the country's difficult problems, but opposition leaders dismissed any possibility of reconciliation and called for fresh parliamentary polls.
Ashraf faces internal and external problems and the most challenging issue remains corruption cases that he himself and several key leaders of his ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) are presently facing.
Shortly before his election as new prime minister, Pervez Ashraf received a strong message from the Supreme Court that it is set to resume next week hearing of a controversial amnesty law, which has been the major reason for Gilani's exit.
The apex court scrapped the National Reconciliation Ordinance in 2009 and reopened all corruption cases including those against President Asif Ali Zardari and nearly 8,000 people, mostly politicians.
The Supreme Court pressed Gilani to reopen cases against President Zardari, but he refused to accept the court's repeated orders. Gilani's refusal to write to Swiss authorities for reopening of corruption cases against President Zardari showed him the door and now the new prime minister will have to receive the same court's orders.
A petition, seeking orders to be issued to the new prime minister to write to Swiss authorities, was filed in a Pakistan court on Saturday. But President Zardari has categorically said no PPP prime minister would write to Swiss authorities, which means Ashraf's refusal will also deprive him of his prime ministerial position.
Ashraf himself is facing charges of receiving kickbacks in a rental power project and is currently defending himself in the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He has also been accused of buying foreign property with illegal money.
The Supreme Court declared him involved in the rental power project scam and asked the anti-corruption department to start investigation against him. He would now be a soft target for the judiciary, media and the opposition because of corruption charges against him.
The opposition, the Pakistan Muslim League N, the second largest political party of the country after the PPP, has already announced to move court against the new premier.
The fast growing corruption in government departments, unemployment and price hikes are other alarming challenges for the new prime minister.
To the new premier, the energy crisis might be the most formidable challenge as the country is facing a power shortfall of thousands of megawatts, which has recently caused violent riots.
When Ashraf was minister for water and power (2008-2011), he had promised to end power outage, but he had never been successful and the shortage was recorded at nearly 8,000 mw this month.
The new prime minister mentioned power crisis in his maiden speech in the National Assembly Friday evening. But he did not offer any immediate solution, which means the problem will haunt him. As there is no immediate solution in the offing, the electricity crisis may worsen as demand would increase in the coming two months in summer.
The new prime minister also faces the problem of armed militants, terror attacks and sectarian terrorism.
Sensing the problem, Prime Minister Ashraf appealed to the militants to lay down arms and join the national mainstream of society, but the militants have rejected similar appeals from the former prime minister. The militants have stepped up attacks in recent weeks, which clearly show their mood. So there is no immediate solution to the problem.
Now defense analysts are advising the government to establish writ in border regions, especially in North Waziristan, ahead of the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.
The United States has welcomed the new Pakistani prime minister and vowed to work with him at a time when relationship is at its lowest ebb in years. All efforts to normalize relations between the two close allies have not yet produced any results. The main hurdle is seen as the U.S. refused to apologize for the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO air strike in November last year.
The fresh refusal came from the U.S. Secretary Defense Leon Panetta on Friday when he said that Washington will not tender apology. At the same time a U.S. report suggests that American diplomats in Pakistan are being harassed. Pakistan denied the charges.
On the other hand, Pakistan is unwilling to reopen the supply line for NATO forces in Afghanistan unless the U.S. accepts its demands including the U.S. apology and payment of tax on NATO trucks.
The new Pakistani prime minister in his Friday parliament speech briefly mentioned Pakistan's wish to have dignified relations with the United States.
The much needed peace and reconciliation in neighboring Afghanistan is key to Pakistan's stability and the U.S. and Kabul seek Islamabad's active role to facilitate the process by convincing the Afghan Taliban to join the peace process.
Pakistan on a number of occasions have promised to help in the peace process, but President Hamid Karzai's administration now wants Pakistan takes practical steps as the Afghan endgame is set to be started. Realizing Pakistan's role, Ashraf touched on Afghanistan in his maiden parliament address.
Although Pakistan and India are talking to resolve long- standing disputes, the new prime minister will face the challenge as how to restore the trust of India to make the dialogue process fruitful. Ashraf vowed good relationship with India and said Pakistan will continue talks with India, a positive sign sent across the border.
In foreign relations, the prime minister referred exclusively to Pakistan's historic and time-tested relations with China and praised Beijing for siding with Islamabad in all difficult times. Ashraf's comments on China received applause in parliament at a time when Islamabad is struggling to put on track its relations with the United States.

Afghan University Poll Angers Officials
Balkh governor demands legal action after NGO survey reveals criticism of teaching standards.
IWPR By Qayum Babak 22 Jun 12
Afghanistan - An opinion poll has sparked controversy by revealing criticism of lecturers at northern Afghanistan’s Balkh University, and the provincial governor has called for those behind the survey to be prosecuted.
The Civil Society and Human Rights Network, a coalition of rights groups, and the Future for Afghanistan Children Organisation, polled 150 students across different year-groups at the university.
Some 58 per cent responded that they were unsatisfied with the way their lecturers treated them, while 70 per cent claimed teaching staff behaved in an irresponsible manner. Just over half accused lecturers of discriminatory behaviour and one-fifth alleged that they took bribes.
The results incurred the wrath of provincial governor Atta Mohammad Nur, who on June 1 described the survey as “poisonous propaganda”, and called for those responsible to be prosecuted. He even liked it to Taleban attacks on educational institutions.
“One group in this country torches schools so that our children can’t study,” he said in a reference to the insurgents. “Others launch poisonous propaganda in the name of this or that institution and defame educational institutions in the eyes of the people so as to deprive the country’s children – particularly girls – of an education.”
Directors of the provincial justice, education, and information and culture department attended a meeting where the judiciary was instructed to summon those behind the survey for interrogation.
Hakim Alipur, one of the poll’s organisers, said he was surprised that the survey had drawn such a hostile reaction, and said the aim was to contribute to reforms.
“Our opinion poll is [the kind] accepted as a civic process in democratic societies,” he said. “It was conducted in good faith and respected the opinions of those who were surveyed.”
Balkh University was established in 1988 in the provincial capital Mazar-e Sharif and offers courses in engineering, economics, medicine, agriculture and education, law and politics.
As the poll group accounted for only about 1.5 per cent of the total student body, it is unclear whether it reflected the views of the wider student body. However, it was roughly in line with the overall gender split – about 27 per cent of the 9,800 students are female.
Some students planned a large-scale protest against the findings, but university officials organised a smaller gathering in the campus’ main hall instead.
Nurullah Mohseni, director of the university’s faculty of law and politics, said the NGOs had not provided convincing proof to support the students’ opinions. He also questioned whether they had the academic credentials to scrutinise a university.
“No one is entitled to defame an academic institution where 10,000 students are studying without providing any convincing reasons or proof,” he said. “Why have individuals who lack academic standing and authority done so?”
At a press conference to explain the thinking behind the survey, Manuchehr Ibrahimi, director of the Future for Afghanistan Children Organisation, argued that the results reflected real and widespread problems.
The survey aimed to give the public an insight into teaching, management and other issues at the university, he said.
“Our opinion poll was conducted in accordance with internationally-accepted academic principles and our goal in launching the process was to reveal weaknesses and defects and to address problems that young people faced in education,” he told reporters. “The opinion poll consisted of eight main questions... [and the answers] indicated that numerous problems exist at Balkh University and that students suffer as a result.”
Another NGO worker involved in the poll, Nasima Azakia, head of the Civil Society and Human Rights Network in Balkh, could not be reached for comment.
Colleagues said she was in The Netherlands on a pre-arranged trip. But one neighbour said on condition of anonymity that Azakia was in hiding for fear that she would be attacked or imprisoned.
Maria Rahin, a journalism lecturer, conceded that there were problems with educational facilities at the university. However, she questioned the survey’s methodology and disputed in particular its claims about lecturers’ supposed laxity.
Whether or not the survey results reflect the views of most students, several students IWPR that they recognised the concerns that were raised.
Sitting with three friends beneath the shade of a tree on campus, one student claimed that staff were appointed because of personal and family connections rather than academic merit.
“All that’s been said about the lecturers is true,” the student said on condition of anonymity, before alleging that the survey only revealed a small proportion of the problems. “The situation is far worse,” he said. “We don’t know who’s going to reform all this corruption and arbitrary decision making.”
Another student originally from the western province of Herat described how it took him a month to get accepted into a dormitory. He was only given a bed after paying a bribe of 100 US dollars.
“I hope the university lecturers and officials will feel a bit ashamed after the opinion poll is published and start some reforms,” he said.
The Asr-e Naw newspaper published the poll’s findings, and editor-in-chief Sayed Ishaq Shojai said he believed they painted an honest picture of the university’s inner workings.
He said corruption across government and non-government bodies was an accepted fact of life.
“In my opinion, the polls’ findings reflect existing, obvious realities. We published them as a matter of duty, to ensure that one of our biggest and most important academic institutions will be reformed,” he said.
Azim Resalat, broadcast director at Radio Killid in Balkh, helped compile the survey and said he was prepared to defend it in court.
“We performed our duty responsibly. If it reflects the truth, they should try to reform their activities. If it is not true, we are prepared to use the documentary evidence we have to hand and answer before any court that has the authority to deal with the matter,” he said.
Qayum Babak is an IWPR-trained reporter in Balkh province.

www.afghanistannewscenter.com