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Feature: Mystery shrouds over poisoning at Afghan girls' schools
KABUL, June 26 (Xinhua) -- The militancy-plagued Afghanistan has been experiencing a new type of security woe over the past couple of months completely different from roadside and suicide bombings by Taliban militants.
The new style security incident, which has caused panic among school girls and their parents, is poisoning in girls' schools by shadowy attackers.
In the latest such attack, some 100 girl students were poisoned in a girls' school in Sari Pul province 350 km north of Afghan capital Kabul on Monday. According to local officials, 97 girls aged 7-18 of Rahmat Abad High School for Girls were mysteriously poisoned.
Around 300 girls, according to local media reports, have been oddly poisoned in three schools over the past one week in Sari Pul province but the authorities have no clue about the culprits.
Meantime, police spokesman in the northern region of Afghanistan, Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, said that investigation is underway to identify and bring to justice those behind the offense.
Sari Pul is the fifth province facing poisonous attacks on girls' schools by mystery attackers.
Earlier, the shadowy enemies of education for girls had launched attacks with toxic objects in Khost, Kunduz, Bamyan and Takhar provinces.
But no groups or individuals have claimed responsibility for it yet. The Taliban militants who had banned girls schools during their six-year reign which collapsed in late 2001 and presently fighting the Afghan government have ruled out their involvement.
In a statement posted on the outfit's website, the armed group insisted that Taliban had nothing to do with the attacks.
Many Afghans long to know the reason for attacking innocent girls attending school.
"We don't know why they poison the innocent students. There is no logic to justify it and I have gotten psychological problem," said Mohammad Naeem, a resident of Kunduz province.
However, Afghan officials blamed Taliban militants for organizing such attacks to destroy people's trust in the government and intimidate parents to avoid sending kids to school.
According to Mustafa Rasouli, the spokesman for Takhar provincial administration, over a dozen people had been arrested in connection with poisoning and some of them admitted to their link to Taliban.
"Altogether, 17 people have been arrested on charge of involvement in attacking school girls with toxic substance and some of them confessed to their link with Taliban and had poisoned girls' schools after receiving order from Taliban commanders," Rasouli told Xinhua.
The underhand attackers, according to students in the affected schools, often spray toxic substance in school ground, classrooms or contaminate water tanks of schools.
In Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai accused the enemies of education and peace in Afghanistan of poisoning school children and depriving Afghan youths of their rights for education.
The Ministry for Education said that some 530 schools have remained closed across the country, mostly in the southern region where Taliban militants are active.
33 insurgents killed in operations in Afghanistan
KABUL, June 26 (Xinhua) -- Up to 33 insurgents have killed during military operations in different Afghan provinces within the past 24 hours, the country's Interior Ministry said on Tuesday morning.
"Afghan police, army and coalition forces have conducted seven joint cleanup operations in Helmand, Uruzgan, Wardak, Logar, Ghazni, Khost and Paktia provinces killing 33 armed insurgents and detaining 12 other suspected insurgents over the past 24 hours," the ministry said in a statement providing daily operational updates.
They also found and seized weapons beside defusing 19 rounds of mines, the statement said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
However, 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.
Afghan forces and some 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops have intensified cleanup operations against insurgents recently. Records kept by Xinhua, based on figures released by Interior Ministry, reveal that around 690 insurgents have been killed, 137 wounded and over 660 others detained since May 1 by joint forces.
But the insurgents in retaliation responded by carrying out suicide attacks and roadside bombings especially in southern and eastern parts of the country.
Insurgents killed five civilians in Sangin district of southern Helmand province on Saturday, accusing them for supporting the government and foreign troops, said a statement issued by provincial government earlier Tuesday.
Afghan Attacks Jump After Long Drop
Coalition Blames Bad Poppy Harvest, Points to Broader Drop So Far This Year
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE And HABIB KHAN TOTAKHIL June 25, 2012
KABUL - Insurgent attacks in Afghanistan rose in April and May, the U.S.-led coalition reported, indicating a Taliban comeback after months of declining activity.
Insurgents launched nearly 3,000 attacks around the country in May, up 21% from May 2011, the International Security Assistance Force said Monday. The coalition statistics, which tally everything from rockets and suicide bombings to small-arms fire and roadside bombs, also showed a modest year-on-year rise in insurgent attacks in April, with just under 2,000 violent incidents.
This violence reversed 11 consecutive months during which insurgent attacks dropped from the previous year's levels, a metric that coalition commanders have frequently highlighted as evidence that the Taliban had lost the initiative in the war.
The recent jump in attacks, by contrast, shows that the Taliban remain far from defeated ahead of the planned withdrawal of international troops in 2014. This year's Taliban's spring offensive has included high-profile attacks, including the storming last week of a popular lakeside resort outside Kabul.
"Every day, 20 to 25 of our youths sacrifice their lives for this homeland and are martyred," Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in a special parliamentary address last week, noting the recent surge in attacks on Afghan forces.
In Washington, defense officials noted that despite the large increase in the month of May, the overall level of enemy attacks remains lower for the year. "Compared to last year, enemy-initiated attacks are still down by 6%," said a defense official.
ISAF attributed the rise in the number of attacks to an earlier-than-normal start to the annual fighting season.
Insurgent groups depend in part on revenue from the opium trade, and the fighting season usually begins in earnest only after the poppy harvest is complete. The number of attacks tends to dip at the beginning of the harvest followed by a few weeks of fewer incidents, according to ISAF.
But a poppy blight cut short this year's production, and the reduced poppy harvest led to the increase in violence in May compared with the year before, defense officials said. "This year's harvest started later and finished earlier in the most poppy-prevalent areas of Afghanistan compared to last year," an ISAF release said.
The report also indicated that attacks rose in areas where opium isn't heavily cultivated.
Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, denied any connection between insurgent strategy and the opium harvest. "We had been reserving all our military strength to the spring offensive," he said. According to Mr. Mujahid, insurgents had varied their tactics depending on the region of the country.
"In the south...we focus more on land mines. In the east, we do confrontations and ambushes. In the central provinces, we use mass martyrdom-seeking attacks," he said, referring to coordinated assaults with suicide attackers.
Earlier this year, Taliban representatives had vowed to step up activities during the upcoming fighting season.
The latest coalition report was largely "spin," said military analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, because it failed to take into account the full Taliban resurgence. The report, he said, focused on direct attacks on U.S. and allied forces, while overlooking what he called the more important Taliban efforts to dominate the population through low-level violence and intimidation.
"What they assume is that you measure things largely in terms of the enemy's willingness to directly attack ISAF and the better ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces]," Mr. Cordesman said. "What they don't count is that the strategy has shifted to intimidating the local population [and] riding out the withdrawal of NATO forces."
Several Afghan security and military officials, in interviews, played down the recent rise in attacks. The statistics don't reflect insurgents' capabilities of holding territory or overrun Afghan military outposts, said Col. Mohammad Numan Hatifi, a spokesman for Afghan forces in eastern Afghanistan.
"The insurgents can't attack bases and can't stop supply convoys, which shows that they are not strengthening," he said. "If they could attack on a battalion or could continuously fight for a day, we would have said they are strengthening, but now they are not."
Mohammad Ismail, a deputy police chief in southern Helmand province, said military operations in the past three years had significantly weakened the insurgency. "The enemy has lost its support among the people," he said. "They only have the support of poppy cultivators and traffickers."
An optimistic explanation of the recent rise in insurgent attacks might be that this violence is the unexpected outcome of U.S. and coalition efforts to capture or kill the insurgency's middle management.
"It may be that the increase in enemy-initiated attacks are a result of more poorly trained, inexperienced fighters who lack discipline and simply engage whenever an opportunity presents itself," said Jeffrey Dressler, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. The sheer volume of these attacks, he added, "says nothing about their effectiveness or desired intent."
U.S. officials have discussed a possible residual force that may remain in Afghanistan for several years after 2014 to conduct counterterrorism and training missions. —Julian E. Barnes contributed to this article.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
'National Uprising' waged for Afghan rights
Aljazeera By Jennifer Glasse June 26, 2012
Five years ago, when Lotfullah Khamran went to take his university entrance exam in the Afghan province of Ghazni, he noticed something. There were not many of his fellow Pashtuns there.
"Among the 5,000 people taking the test, only maybe 1,000 were Pashtun," he says. "Why? That’s when I started thinking we have to figure out why there are so few students. The reason is that in our area, the schools are closed and students being killed."
He says the Taliban murdered a dozen students in Andar district because they had gone off to study. The Taliban called them spies. Khamran said he wondered how long he could live that way.
He got into university in Khost province. He says he was not just studying then; he contacted everyone he could and explained about the closed schools and lack of services.
When he graduated with an engineering degree, not much had changed in Andar, and so three months ago, he decided to take things into his own hands and contacted the Taliban.
He and a handful of other men told the Taliban they would join the fight against the Americans if it would reopen schools, the medical clinic, local markets and allow reconstruction of the roads. The Taliban refused, and gave the men a half-hour to leave the area. A battle ensued. Khamran claims the Taliban lost a dozen men to his one.
Since then at least 250 fighters from four villages have joined him. They call themselves the "National Uprising Movement". Clad in traditional shalwar kameez, turbans and sporting sunglasses, they look like Taliban fighters.
Local children perch on mud walls to watch them ride through the area on motorcycles. An elderly man with a long grey beard hugs Khamran and holds up the radio that allows him to act as a lookout for the group.
"I am happy to give up my life and my wealth for them," he says.
Just because they are fighting the Taliban does not mean the movement supports the government, Khamran explains. He says the government helped launch night raids against the people, and did nothing to improve their lives.
"For the past 10 years, our school, our clinic, our road, our hospital, our bazaar everything was closed. We feel like we are slaves. No one cares about us - not the government, not the Taliban, so the only choice we had was to start an uprising," he says.
Over a month ago, he says the movement captured about 17 Taliban fighters, which the Taliban confirmed. Khamran claims they are Pakistani. The Taliban says they are Afghans from Paktia and Khost provinces. Whatever their provenance, Khamran says they could be valuable in any eventual negotiation.
The fighting has intensified in recent weeks. The Taliban came into one village and burned a local house. An elderly woman says she begged the Taliban to search the house, because no one was inside. The Taliban ignored her, doused the property with fuel and set it ablaze.
She burned her feet trying to save the Quran. She wasn’t able to get to the religious books inside. National Uprising fighters showed a trunk full of ashes.
The Taliban spokesman says the Taliban is aware of the group and would like to avoid any bloodshed because former Taliban fighters are among the movement. The Taliban says it has sent a delegation to negotiate, and has punished members who burned down a village house. The Taliban also claims the group is a project engineered by the American embassy and top government officials in Kabul. It says the injured fighters go to government hospitals.
Khamran denies any connection to the government or to the Americans and insists he would fight with the Taliban if it would let the villagers go about their lives unhindered. He calls the government corrupt, and says the only reason his fighters have not moved against it is that the government has left them alone.
In the village mosque, the men gather to voice their support for the new movement. Juma Gul's 30-year-old son died in the fighting, leaving behind five small children. Gul is undaunted.
"One of my sons became a martyr," he said. "I brought four more to fight and I will keep fighting until we are all dead. I will definitely continue this battle because we are being oppressed."
Even so, the men themselves question whether their fledgling uprising is a long-term solution to bring stability, security and prosperity to their lives. But after a decade of being ignored and feeling left behind, they say fighting for their rights is their only option.
Jennifer Glasse, has been an international correspondent since 1993
Pakistan says Afghan peace requires clarity from U.S., Taliban
Reuters By Missy Ryan and Hamid Shalizi 25/06/2012
KABUL - A hoped-for peace deal ending the war in Afghanistan will likely remain out of reach unless both the United States and the Taliban put more clear, consistent offers on the table, a senior diplomat from Afghanistan's influential neighbour Pakistan said.
"We don't think all these issues can be solved by fighting. There must be a political process, but the parties need to be serious about it," Mohammad Sadiq, Islamabad's ambassador in Kabul, told Reuters in an interview.
"There is a lack of clarity on both sides," Sadiq said, referring to the U.S. and Taliban negotiating positions.
The role of Pakistan, with deep historic ties to the Taliban, will be pivotal in U.S. efforts to broker a peace deal between the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the militant group, whose leaders are believed to based in Pakistan.
After more than 10 years of costly NATO efforts failed to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield, Western nations have embraced the goal of a negotiated end to the conflict even as they prepare to withdraw most combat troops by the end of 2014.
But the Obama administration's hopes for quickly setting up negotiations between the Karzai government and the Taliban were dealt a blow in March when the Taliban's reclusive leadership suspended participation in preliminary talks.
U.S. diplomats had hoped their initial meetings with Taliban representatives would set in motion the transfer of former Taliban officials held in Guantanamo Bay military prison to Qatar, the release of a U.S. soldier held by the Taliban, and eventually authentic peace talks among the Afghan parties.
A U.S.-educated diplomat who is a key Pakistani official on peace efforts, Sadiq said that despite deep scepticism among U.S. and Afghan officials - many of whom would accuse Pakistan itself of inconsistency - Pakistan supported the goal of a such a peace deal for Afghanistan.
Pakistan backed the Taliban's hardline government in Afghanistan, which was toppled after the September 11, 2001, attacks, and is believed to prefer ethnic Pashtun dominance in Afghanistan over a northern-controlled government it fears could bolster the position of its arch-enemy, India.
Pakistan has promised to help bring all Afghan parties to the negotiating table.
AMBIGUITY, TURMOIL
Sadiq said the Taliban - whose public statements are famously opaque - must clarify whether their leaders are interested in substantive peace talks, or simply want freedom for former officials in U.S. custody.
That ambiguity, he said, has deepened turmoil within the group, already under pressure after years of battles against foreign troops and NATO strikes against senior members.
The U.S. position, he said, has meanwhile been hobbled by bureaucratic infighting and inconsistent offers to the Taliban regarding the proposed detainee transfer - which have fuelled militant suspicion about U.S. intentions and made Taliban leaders more reluctant to press ahead with talks.
"The Taliban suspicion is that this aims just to split the insurgents," he said.
The U.S. State Department, which leads U.S. efforts to broker a peace deal, denied any inconsistencies, while the Taliban could not be reached for comment.
The U.S. administration says it remains hopeful of restarting talks, but even confidence-building moves are fraught with controversy and risk in the months before elections that Obama hopes will give him a second term.
Pakistan had provided support to the peace process, Sadiq said, allowing certain senior Taliban officials to travel from Pakistan to Qatar, where a political address was tentatively established as part of the now-halted U.S. peace plan.
Yet many within the U.S. and Afghan governments remain deeply suspicious about Pakistan's motives.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan were strained for months after last year's assassination of Afghan peace envoy and former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, which Afghan officials blamed on Pakistan. Pakistan denied any responsibility.
Despite Pakistani promises, Afghan officials also complain privately that Pakistan is not cooperating with requests from Karzai for senior members of his government to have access to Taliban intermediaries in Pakistan.
NATO has long complained that Pakistan has failed to prevent militants from crossly a long, poorly guarded border into Afghanistan. The U.S. commander in Afghanistan repeated that assertion last week after at least 20 people were killed in a Taliban siege of a Kabul hotel.
(Editing by Rob Taylor and Robert Birsel)
Pakistan Protests Cross-border Attack that Kills 13 Troops
VOA News June 25, 2012
Pakistan on Monday lodged a formal protest with Afghanistan after a cross-border attack that the Pakistani military says killed 13 soldiers.
Pakistani authorities say more than 100 militants from Afghanistan attacked the troops in the northwestern Upper Dir region late Sunday.
Pakistan's military said six troops and 14 of the attackers were killed in the ensuing clash, while seven soldiers went missing and were later beheaded.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
The army said Monday it strongly protested the attack with counterparts across the border for “not taking action against miscreants present in safe havens in Afghanistan.”
Pakistan's newly elected prime minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf, said he will take up the issue with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
But an Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, Zahir Azimi, told VOA the allegation that militants from Afghanistan crossed the border and killed six Pakistani soldiers is “false and baseless.”
In other violence, gunmen on motorcycles opened fire on a local television station in the southern port city of Karachi late Monday, wounding a security guard and an employee. The gunmen fled the scene after the attack.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting, saying the group should be given the coverage equal to what the TV station gives to the government and the army.
Afghan and U.S. officials accuse Pakistan-based militants of carrying out attacks in neighboring Afghanistan and have repeatedly urged Pakistani leaders to crack down on militant safe havens in the country's northwest.
Pakistan's military said Monday that the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, will visit Wednesday for talks on border coordination with Pakistani army chief General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani. Allen's visit comes days after he accused the Pakistan-based militant Haqqani network of Friday's deadly attack on a hotel outside the Afghan capital.
Pakistan shut down NATO supply routes into Afghanistan after NATO airstrikes mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops near the border last November. Talks between the United States and Pakistan to reopen the supply lines have stalled.
Ashraf to raise border attacks issue with Karzai
AFP June 25, 2012
KARACHI - Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf Monday condemned cross-border attacks from Afghanistan and said he would discuss the matter with President Hamid Karzai, a day after six Pakistani soldiers were killed.
“Pakistan has strongly protested with Afghanistan on the cross-border attacks and I will also take up this issue with Karzai,” Ashraf told reporters in Karachi.
His office did not elaborate on when such a conversation might take place.
Pakistani officials said militants killed six troops on patrol in the Soni Darr area of Upper Dir, a northwestern Pakistani district on the Afghan border.
Intelligence officials said the attackers were loyalists of Maulana Fazlullah, who fled into Afghanistan when the army recaptured the Swat valley after a two-year Taliban insurgency ended in 2009.
Afghanistan and Pakistan trade accusations of blame for Taliban violence plaguing both sides of their porous, mountainous border.
Pakistan says rebels have regrouped in eastern Afghanistan. Afghan and US officials want Pakistan to eliminate Taliban and al Qaeda-linked havens used to launch attacks in Afghanistan.
Pakistani troops have been bogged down for years fighting local Taliban but have resisted US pressure to carry out a sweeping offensive against Afghan Taliban fighters in its North Waziristan district.
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Islamabad earlier this month that Washington was running out of patience over terror safe havens.
Islamabad imposed a blockade, now in its seventh month, on overland NATO supplies into Afghanistan since US air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border on November 26.
Biden told Obama military's Afghan war plan was flawed, according to leaked memo
Associated Press June 25, 2012
WASHINGTON - As President Barack Obama considered adding as many as 40,000 U.S. forces to a backsliding war in Afghanistan in 2009, Vice President Joe Biden warned him that the military rationale for doing so was flawed, a new book about Obama's expansion of the conflict says.
The book, "Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan," also says that in planning the drawdown of troops two years later, the White House intentionally sidelined the CIA. Obama purposely did not read a grim CIA assessment of Afghanistan that found little measurable benefit from the 30,000 "surge" forces Obama eventually approved, the book quotes a U.S. official as saying.
A copy of the book by Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran was obtained by The Associated Press. It will be released Tuesday.
A previously undisclosed Biden memo to Obama in November 2009 reflects his view that military commanders were asking Obama to take a leap by adding tens of thousands of forces whose role was poorly defined.
Although Biden's doubts have become well known, the new book details how Biden used a months-long White House review of the war to question the basic premise that the same "counterinsurgency" strategy that had apparently worked in Iraq could be applied to Afghanistan.
"I do not see how anyone who took part in our discussions could emerge without profound questions about the viability of counterinsurgency," Biden wrote to Obama. To work, the counterinsurgency or "COIN" doctrine requires military gains to be paired with advances in government services, a "credible" Afghan government and Afghan security services that can take over, Biden's memo said.
Although the U.S. military could accomplish any technical assignment related to the new strategy, such as sweeping insurgents from a village, "no one can tell you with conviction when, and even if, we can produce the flip sides of COIN," Biden wrote. He supported a buildup of 20,000, half the number requested by then-war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
The memo echoed a secret message to Washington from then-U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry that had called Afghan President Hamid Karzai an unreliable partner for the proposed surge. Eikenberry, a former top Army general who had served in Afghanistan, said more forces would only delay the time when Afghans would take over responsibility for their own security.
The Eikenberry memo was leaked shortly after he sent it, and confirmed by U.S. officials. Biden was presumed to agree with it, but he stayed mum at the time.
Obama's compromise -- 30,000 additional forces and a deadline to begin bringing them home -- was intended to blunt the momentum of a resurgent Taliban insurgency without committing Obama to an open-ended war.
The classified CIA assessment found that Afghanistan was "trending to stalemate" in mid-2011, just ahead of the long-planned date when Obama would begin bringing the additional forces home.
Although many of Obama's advisers had also concluded that the surge strategy had not worked, a White House official is quoted as saying aides initially rebuffed the CIA analysis because it could undercut Obama's argument for withdrawing forces on schedule.
"We didn't want it," the official said.
Iran pioneer in global campaign against drugs: minister
TEHRAN, June 26 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar said Tuesday that the Islamic republic is the forerunner in the global campaign against drugs and illicit drug trafficking.
The drugs produced in the neighboring country of Adghanistan is a threat for Iran, said Mohammad-Najjar addressing a ceremony to mark the World Drug Campaign Day.
Currently, 500 laboratories are active in producing narcotics in Afghanistan and this is a sources of threat to the Islamic republic, said the Iranian interior minister.
However, Iran has been ranked the first in the world in fighting drug abuse and illicit drug trafficking, he said.
In the past years, some 3,700 Iranian anti-drug forces have been killed and 12,000 others have been injured in fighting the drug smugglers, he said, adding that this is the proof that Iran is actively engaged in the drug campaign.
In the last Iranian year, ended on March 19, Iran seized nearly 500 tons of narcotics in 1,300 operations against the armed drug smugglers, said the Iranian official.
To protect the young people from the risks of the drugs abuse, the Islamic republic has launched protective training courses and programs in which some 3.3 million university and high school students have participated, Mohammad-Najjar maintained.
Some 26,000 people, which accounts for 50 percent of the country's addicts, have undergone the compulsory treatment measures, and in 15 provinces of the country rehabilitation centers have been established for the medical care of the addicts, according to Mohammad-Najjar.
In May, Mohammad-Najjar said that Iran had intensified combat against drug lords and mafias.
Intensifying campaign against the main agents and heads of drug- trafficking networks and transit of narcotics, increasing border control to decrease drug trafficking into the country were part of the measures taken by the Islamic republic, he said.
Iran would continue playing its effective role in regional and international decision-makings against narcotics, he added.
In October 2011, Mohammad-Najjar said the country planned to beef up border control to fight drug smuggling in the wake of increasing production of illicit drugs in neighboring Afghanistan.
Iran is located at the crossroad of the international drug smuggling route from Afghanistan, the world's top opium producer, to Europe.
Justice Minister Apologises for Derogatory Remarks on Women Shelters
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Abrahimkhil Monday, 25 June 2012
Afghanistan's Minister of Justice Habibullah Ghaleb apologised for statements he made last week calling women's shelters "centers of misconduct" and suggesting that women residing in them were prostitutes.
Ghaleb expressed his regrets for his provocative remarks at a press conference in Kabul.
"I again emphasise that if the women, who are my daughters and sisters, have been upset by me, I as their father and older brother apologise, not once, but a thousand times," he said on Sunday.
Ghaleb had made the comment on the shelters at a conference organised by the Afghan parliament's Women's Affairs Committee.
He told delegates that the 250 women living in foreign-funded shelters across the country were being encouraged to disobey their parents.
"Mostly they were encouraging girls, saying, 'If your father says anything bad to you don't listen to him, if your mother says anything to you don't listen to them.
There are safe houses for you where you can stay.' What safe houses? What sort of immorality and prostitution is happening at these places?" he said.
His comments received widespread condemnation from women-related organisations across Afghanistan and calls for President Hamid Karzai to sack him.
EU foreign minister Baroness Ashton said last week that she was "deeply troubled" by Ghaleb's comments which had only served to undermine efforts to protect women from violence and sexual abuse.
"Too many Afghan women have experienced violence, gender based and sexual, often on a repeated basis," she said in a statement. "Women forced to resort to shelters are amongst the bravest Afghans we know."
Ranjbar Released After Claiming Girl Accuser is His Wife
TOLOnews.com Monday, 25 June 2012
Former parliamentarian Abdul Kabir Ranjbar, who was arrested on Saturday for kidnapping and raping a girl, was released on Monday after he brought it to the attention of the law officials that the girl was his wife.
The Attorney General's Office arrested Ranjbar after a girl named Spozhmai brought a complaint against him that he had kidnapped and sexually assaulted her eight months ago.
Officials told TOLOnews on Sunday that Spozhmai said she had escaped from Ranjbar's house and that she had broken some of his teeth after she hit him in the mouth when he was attempting to rape her.
However, Ranjbar has since claimed that the girl is his wife.
Deputy Attorney General Rahmatullah Nazari said they released Ranjbar and that he would present the legal documents to prove his marriage to the girl.
"Mr Ranjbar was not in good health in prison so we released him to present the legal documents which should prove their marriage or to bring those who were in their marriage party as a witness," Nazari said.
He added that if Ranjbar can prove that Spozhmai is his wife, the Attorney General's Office will seriously investigate the incident and it would go so far as to treat it as a conspiracy against Ranjbar.
According to Ranjbar, the pair were married about ten months ago and they also have a child, Nazari said.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
KABUL, June 26 (Xinhua) -- The militancy-plagued Afghanistan has been experiencing a new type of security woe over the past couple of months completely different from roadside and suicide bombings by Taliban militants.
The new style security incident, which has caused panic among school girls and their parents, is poisoning in girls' schools by shadowy attackers.
In the latest such attack, some 100 girl students were poisoned in a girls' school in Sari Pul province 350 km north of Afghan capital Kabul on Monday. According to local officials, 97 girls aged 7-18 of Rahmat Abad High School for Girls were mysteriously poisoned.
Around 300 girls, according to local media reports, have been oddly poisoned in three schools over the past one week in Sari Pul province but the authorities have no clue about the culprits.
Meantime, police spokesman in the northern region of Afghanistan, Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, said that investigation is underway to identify and bring to justice those behind the offense.
Sari Pul is the fifth province facing poisonous attacks on girls' schools by mystery attackers.
Earlier, the shadowy enemies of education for girls had launched attacks with toxic objects in Khost, Kunduz, Bamyan and Takhar provinces.
But no groups or individuals have claimed responsibility for it yet. The Taliban militants who had banned girls schools during their six-year reign which collapsed in late 2001 and presently fighting the Afghan government have ruled out their involvement.
In a statement posted on the outfit's website, the armed group insisted that Taliban had nothing to do with the attacks.
Many Afghans long to know the reason for attacking innocent girls attending school.
"We don't know why they poison the innocent students. There is no logic to justify it and I have gotten psychological problem," said Mohammad Naeem, a resident of Kunduz province.
However, Afghan officials blamed Taliban militants for organizing such attacks to destroy people's trust in the government and intimidate parents to avoid sending kids to school.
According to Mustafa Rasouli, the spokesman for Takhar provincial administration, over a dozen people had been arrested in connection with poisoning and some of them admitted to their link to Taliban.
"Altogether, 17 people have been arrested on charge of involvement in attacking school girls with toxic substance and some of them confessed to their link with Taliban and had poisoned girls' schools after receiving order from Taliban commanders," Rasouli told Xinhua.
The underhand attackers, according to students in the affected schools, often spray toxic substance in school ground, classrooms or contaminate water tanks of schools.
In Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai accused the enemies of education and peace in Afghanistan of poisoning school children and depriving Afghan youths of their rights for education.
The Ministry for Education said that some 530 schools have remained closed across the country, mostly in the southern region where Taliban militants are active.
33 insurgents killed in operations in Afghanistan
KABUL, June 26 (Xinhua) -- Up to 33 insurgents have killed during military operations in different Afghan provinces within the past 24 hours, the country's Interior Ministry said on Tuesday morning.
"Afghan police, army and coalition forces have conducted seven joint cleanup operations in Helmand, Uruzgan, Wardak, Logar, Ghazni, Khost and Paktia provinces killing 33 armed insurgents and detaining 12 other suspected insurgents over the past 24 hours," the ministry said in a statement providing daily operational updates.
They also found and seized weapons beside defusing 19 rounds of mines, the statement said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
However, 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.
Afghan forces and some 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops have intensified cleanup operations against insurgents recently. Records kept by Xinhua, based on figures released by Interior Ministry, reveal that around 690 insurgents have been killed, 137 wounded and over 660 others detained since May 1 by joint forces.
But the insurgents in retaliation responded by carrying out suicide attacks and roadside bombings especially in southern and eastern parts of the country.
Insurgents killed five civilians in Sangin district of southern Helmand province on Saturday, accusing them for supporting the government and foreign troops, said a statement issued by provincial government earlier Tuesday.
Afghan Attacks Jump After Long Drop
Coalition Blames Bad Poppy Harvest, Points to Broader Drop So Far This Year
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE And HABIB KHAN TOTAKHIL June 25, 2012
KABUL - Insurgent attacks in Afghanistan rose in April and May, the U.S.-led coalition reported, indicating a Taliban comeback after months of declining activity.
Insurgents launched nearly 3,000 attacks around the country in May, up 21% from May 2011, the International Security Assistance Force said Monday. The coalition statistics, which tally everything from rockets and suicide bombings to small-arms fire and roadside bombs, also showed a modest year-on-year rise in insurgent attacks in April, with just under 2,000 violent incidents.
This violence reversed 11 consecutive months during which insurgent attacks dropped from the previous year's levels, a metric that coalition commanders have frequently highlighted as evidence that the Taliban had lost the initiative in the war.
The recent jump in attacks, by contrast, shows that the Taliban remain far from defeated ahead of the planned withdrawal of international troops in 2014. This year's Taliban's spring offensive has included high-profile attacks, including the storming last week of a popular lakeside resort outside Kabul.
"Every day, 20 to 25 of our youths sacrifice their lives for this homeland and are martyred," Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in a special parliamentary address last week, noting the recent surge in attacks on Afghan forces.
In Washington, defense officials noted that despite the large increase in the month of May, the overall level of enemy attacks remains lower for the year. "Compared to last year, enemy-initiated attacks are still down by 6%," said a defense official.
ISAF attributed the rise in the number of attacks to an earlier-than-normal start to the annual fighting season.
Insurgent groups depend in part on revenue from the opium trade, and the fighting season usually begins in earnest only after the poppy harvest is complete. The number of attacks tends to dip at the beginning of the harvest followed by a few weeks of fewer incidents, according to ISAF.
But a poppy blight cut short this year's production, and the reduced poppy harvest led to the increase in violence in May compared with the year before, defense officials said. "This year's harvest started later and finished earlier in the most poppy-prevalent areas of Afghanistan compared to last year," an ISAF release said.
The report also indicated that attacks rose in areas where opium isn't heavily cultivated.
Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, denied any connection between insurgent strategy and the opium harvest. "We had been reserving all our military strength to the spring offensive," he said. According to Mr. Mujahid, insurgents had varied their tactics depending on the region of the country.
"In the south...we focus more on land mines. In the east, we do confrontations and ambushes. In the central provinces, we use mass martyrdom-seeking attacks," he said, referring to coordinated assaults with suicide attackers.
Earlier this year, Taliban representatives had vowed to step up activities during the upcoming fighting season.
The latest coalition report was largely "spin," said military analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, because it failed to take into account the full Taliban resurgence. The report, he said, focused on direct attacks on U.S. and allied forces, while overlooking what he called the more important Taliban efforts to dominate the population through low-level violence and intimidation.
"What they assume is that you measure things largely in terms of the enemy's willingness to directly attack ISAF and the better ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces]," Mr. Cordesman said. "What they don't count is that the strategy has shifted to intimidating the local population [and] riding out the withdrawal of NATO forces."
Several Afghan security and military officials, in interviews, played down the recent rise in attacks. The statistics don't reflect insurgents' capabilities of holding territory or overrun Afghan military outposts, said Col. Mohammad Numan Hatifi, a spokesman for Afghan forces in eastern Afghanistan.
"The insurgents can't attack bases and can't stop supply convoys, which shows that they are not strengthening," he said. "If they could attack on a battalion or could continuously fight for a day, we would have said they are strengthening, but now they are not."
Mohammad Ismail, a deputy police chief in southern Helmand province, said military operations in the past three years had significantly weakened the insurgency. "The enemy has lost its support among the people," he said. "They only have the support of poppy cultivators and traffickers."
An optimistic explanation of the recent rise in insurgent attacks might be that this violence is the unexpected outcome of U.S. and coalition efforts to capture or kill the insurgency's middle management.
"It may be that the increase in enemy-initiated attacks are a result of more poorly trained, inexperienced fighters who lack discipline and simply engage whenever an opportunity presents itself," said Jeffrey Dressler, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. The sheer volume of these attacks, he added, "says nothing about their effectiveness or desired intent."
U.S. officials have discussed a possible residual force that may remain in Afghanistan for several years after 2014 to conduct counterterrorism and training missions. —Julian E. Barnes contributed to this article.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
'National Uprising' waged for Afghan rights
Aljazeera By Jennifer Glasse June 26, 2012
Five years ago, when Lotfullah Khamran went to take his university entrance exam in the Afghan province of Ghazni, he noticed something. There were not many of his fellow Pashtuns there.
"Among the 5,000 people taking the test, only maybe 1,000 were Pashtun," he says. "Why? That’s when I started thinking we have to figure out why there are so few students. The reason is that in our area, the schools are closed and students being killed."
He says the Taliban murdered a dozen students in Andar district because they had gone off to study. The Taliban called them spies. Khamran said he wondered how long he could live that way.
He got into university in Khost province. He says he was not just studying then; he contacted everyone he could and explained about the closed schools and lack of services.
When he graduated with an engineering degree, not much had changed in Andar, and so three months ago, he decided to take things into his own hands and contacted the Taliban.
He and a handful of other men told the Taliban they would join the fight against the Americans if it would reopen schools, the medical clinic, local markets and allow reconstruction of the roads. The Taliban refused, and gave the men a half-hour to leave the area. A battle ensued. Khamran claims the Taliban lost a dozen men to his one.
Since then at least 250 fighters from four villages have joined him. They call themselves the "National Uprising Movement". Clad in traditional shalwar kameez, turbans and sporting sunglasses, they look like Taliban fighters.
Local children perch on mud walls to watch them ride through the area on motorcycles. An elderly man with a long grey beard hugs Khamran and holds up the radio that allows him to act as a lookout for the group.
"I am happy to give up my life and my wealth for them," he says.
Just because they are fighting the Taliban does not mean the movement supports the government, Khamran explains. He says the government helped launch night raids against the people, and did nothing to improve their lives.
"For the past 10 years, our school, our clinic, our road, our hospital, our bazaar everything was closed. We feel like we are slaves. No one cares about us - not the government, not the Taliban, so the only choice we had was to start an uprising," he says.
Over a month ago, he says the movement captured about 17 Taliban fighters, which the Taliban confirmed. Khamran claims they are Pakistani. The Taliban says they are Afghans from Paktia and Khost provinces. Whatever their provenance, Khamran says they could be valuable in any eventual negotiation.
The fighting has intensified in recent weeks. The Taliban came into one village and burned a local house. An elderly woman says she begged the Taliban to search the house, because no one was inside. The Taliban ignored her, doused the property with fuel and set it ablaze.
She burned her feet trying to save the Quran. She wasn’t able to get to the religious books inside. National Uprising fighters showed a trunk full of ashes.
The Taliban spokesman says the Taliban is aware of the group and would like to avoid any bloodshed because former Taliban fighters are among the movement. The Taliban says it has sent a delegation to negotiate, and has punished members who burned down a village house. The Taliban also claims the group is a project engineered by the American embassy and top government officials in Kabul. It says the injured fighters go to government hospitals.
Khamran denies any connection to the government or to the Americans and insists he would fight with the Taliban if it would let the villagers go about their lives unhindered. He calls the government corrupt, and says the only reason his fighters have not moved against it is that the government has left them alone.
In the village mosque, the men gather to voice their support for the new movement. Juma Gul's 30-year-old son died in the fighting, leaving behind five small children. Gul is undaunted.
"One of my sons became a martyr," he said. "I brought four more to fight and I will keep fighting until we are all dead. I will definitely continue this battle because we are being oppressed."
Even so, the men themselves question whether their fledgling uprising is a long-term solution to bring stability, security and prosperity to their lives. But after a decade of being ignored and feeling left behind, they say fighting for their rights is their only option.
Jennifer Glasse, has been an international correspondent since 1993
Pakistan says Afghan peace requires clarity from U.S., Taliban
Reuters By Missy Ryan and Hamid Shalizi 25/06/2012
KABUL - A hoped-for peace deal ending the war in Afghanistan will likely remain out of reach unless both the United States and the Taliban put more clear, consistent offers on the table, a senior diplomat from Afghanistan's influential neighbour Pakistan said.
"We don't think all these issues can be solved by fighting. There must be a political process, but the parties need to be serious about it," Mohammad Sadiq, Islamabad's ambassador in Kabul, told Reuters in an interview.
"There is a lack of clarity on both sides," Sadiq said, referring to the U.S. and Taliban negotiating positions.
The role of Pakistan, with deep historic ties to the Taliban, will be pivotal in U.S. efforts to broker a peace deal between the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the militant group, whose leaders are believed to based in Pakistan.
After more than 10 years of costly NATO efforts failed to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield, Western nations have embraced the goal of a negotiated end to the conflict even as they prepare to withdraw most combat troops by the end of 2014.
But the Obama administration's hopes for quickly setting up negotiations between the Karzai government and the Taliban were dealt a blow in March when the Taliban's reclusive leadership suspended participation in preliminary talks.
U.S. diplomats had hoped their initial meetings with Taliban representatives would set in motion the transfer of former Taliban officials held in Guantanamo Bay military prison to Qatar, the release of a U.S. soldier held by the Taliban, and eventually authentic peace talks among the Afghan parties.
A U.S.-educated diplomat who is a key Pakistani official on peace efforts, Sadiq said that despite deep scepticism among U.S. and Afghan officials - many of whom would accuse Pakistan itself of inconsistency - Pakistan supported the goal of a such a peace deal for Afghanistan.
Pakistan backed the Taliban's hardline government in Afghanistan, which was toppled after the September 11, 2001, attacks, and is believed to prefer ethnic Pashtun dominance in Afghanistan over a northern-controlled government it fears could bolster the position of its arch-enemy, India.
Pakistan has promised to help bring all Afghan parties to the negotiating table.
AMBIGUITY, TURMOIL
Sadiq said the Taliban - whose public statements are famously opaque - must clarify whether their leaders are interested in substantive peace talks, or simply want freedom for former officials in U.S. custody.
That ambiguity, he said, has deepened turmoil within the group, already under pressure after years of battles against foreign troops and NATO strikes against senior members.
The U.S. position, he said, has meanwhile been hobbled by bureaucratic infighting and inconsistent offers to the Taliban regarding the proposed detainee transfer - which have fuelled militant suspicion about U.S. intentions and made Taliban leaders more reluctant to press ahead with talks.
"The Taliban suspicion is that this aims just to split the insurgents," he said.
The U.S. State Department, which leads U.S. efforts to broker a peace deal, denied any inconsistencies, while the Taliban could not be reached for comment.
The U.S. administration says it remains hopeful of restarting talks, but even confidence-building moves are fraught with controversy and risk in the months before elections that Obama hopes will give him a second term.
Pakistan had provided support to the peace process, Sadiq said, allowing certain senior Taliban officials to travel from Pakistan to Qatar, where a political address was tentatively established as part of the now-halted U.S. peace plan.
Yet many within the U.S. and Afghan governments remain deeply suspicious about Pakistan's motives.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan were strained for months after last year's assassination of Afghan peace envoy and former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, which Afghan officials blamed on Pakistan. Pakistan denied any responsibility.
Despite Pakistani promises, Afghan officials also complain privately that Pakistan is not cooperating with requests from Karzai for senior members of his government to have access to Taliban intermediaries in Pakistan.
NATO has long complained that Pakistan has failed to prevent militants from crossly a long, poorly guarded border into Afghanistan. The U.S. commander in Afghanistan repeated that assertion last week after at least 20 people were killed in a Taliban siege of a Kabul hotel.
(Editing by Rob Taylor and Robert Birsel)
Pakistan Protests Cross-border Attack that Kills 13 Troops
VOA News June 25, 2012
Pakistan on Monday lodged a formal protest with Afghanistan after a cross-border attack that the Pakistani military says killed 13 soldiers.
Pakistani authorities say more than 100 militants from Afghanistan attacked the troops in the northwestern Upper Dir region late Sunday.
Pakistan's military said six troops and 14 of the attackers were killed in the ensuing clash, while seven soldiers went missing and were later beheaded.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
The army said Monday it strongly protested the attack with counterparts across the border for “not taking action against miscreants present in safe havens in Afghanistan.”
Pakistan's newly elected prime minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf, said he will take up the issue with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
But an Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, Zahir Azimi, told VOA the allegation that militants from Afghanistan crossed the border and killed six Pakistani soldiers is “false and baseless.”
In other violence, gunmen on motorcycles opened fire on a local television station in the southern port city of Karachi late Monday, wounding a security guard and an employee. The gunmen fled the scene after the attack.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting, saying the group should be given the coverage equal to what the TV station gives to the government and the army.
Afghan and U.S. officials accuse Pakistan-based militants of carrying out attacks in neighboring Afghanistan and have repeatedly urged Pakistani leaders to crack down on militant safe havens in the country's northwest.
Pakistan's military said Monday that the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, will visit Wednesday for talks on border coordination with Pakistani army chief General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani. Allen's visit comes days after he accused the Pakistan-based militant Haqqani network of Friday's deadly attack on a hotel outside the Afghan capital.
Pakistan shut down NATO supply routes into Afghanistan after NATO airstrikes mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops near the border last November. Talks between the United States and Pakistan to reopen the supply lines have stalled.
Ashraf to raise border attacks issue with Karzai
AFP June 25, 2012
KARACHI - Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf Monday condemned cross-border attacks from Afghanistan and said he would discuss the matter with President Hamid Karzai, a day after six Pakistani soldiers were killed.
“Pakistan has strongly protested with Afghanistan on the cross-border attacks and I will also take up this issue with Karzai,” Ashraf told reporters in Karachi.
His office did not elaborate on when such a conversation might take place.
Pakistani officials said militants killed six troops on patrol in the Soni Darr area of Upper Dir, a northwestern Pakistani district on the Afghan border.
Intelligence officials said the attackers were loyalists of Maulana Fazlullah, who fled into Afghanistan when the army recaptured the Swat valley after a two-year Taliban insurgency ended in 2009.
Afghanistan and Pakistan trade accusations of blame for Taliban violence plaguing both sides of their porous, mountainous border.
Pakistan says rebels have regrouped in eastern Afghanistan. Afghan and US officials want Pakistan to eliminate Taliban and al Qaeda-linked havens used to launch attacks in Afghanistan.
Pakistani troops have been bogged down for years fighting local Taliban but have resisted US pressure to carry out a sweeping offensive against Afghan Taliban fighters in its North Waziristan district.
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Islamabad earlier this month that Washington was running out of patience over terror safe havens.
Islamabad imposed a blockade, now in its seventh month, on overland NATO supplies into Afghanistan since US air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border on November 26.
Biden told Obama military's Afghan war plan was flawed, according to leaked memo
Associated Press June 25, 2012
WASHINGTON - As President Barack Obama considered adding as many as 40,000 U.S. forces to a backsliding war in Afghanistan in 2009, Vice President Joe Biden warned him that the military rationale for doing so was flawed, a new book about Obama's expansion of the conflict says.
The book, "Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan," also says that in planning the drawdown of troops two years later, the White House intentionally sidelined the CIA. Obama purposely did not read a grim CIA assessment of Afghanistan that found little measurable benefit from the 30,000 "surge" forces Obama eventually approved, the book quotes a U.S. official as saying.
A copy of the book by Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran was obtained by The Associated Press. It will be released Tuesday.
A previously undisclosed Biden memo to Obama in November 2009 reflects his view that military commanders were asking Obama to take a leap by adding tens of thousands of forces whose role was poorly defined.
Although Biden's doubts have become well known, the new book details how Biden used a months-long White House review of the war to question the basic premise that the same "counterinsurgency" strategy that had apparently worked in Iraq could be applied to Afghanistan.
"I do not see how anyone who took part in our discussions could emerge without profound questions about the viability of counterinsurgency," Biden wrote to Obama. To work, the counterinsurgency or "COIN" doctrine requires military gains to be paired with advances in government services, a "credible" Afghan government and Afghan security services that can take over, Biden's memo said.
Although the U.S. military could accomplish any technical assignment related to the new strategy, such as sweeping insurgents from a village, "no one can tell you with conviction when, and even if, we can produce the flip sides of COIN," Biden wrote. He supported a buildup of 20,000, half the number requested by then-war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
The memo echoed a secret message to Washington from then-U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry that had called Afghan President Hamid Karzai an unreliable partner for the proposed surge. Eikenberry, a former top Army general who had served in Afghanistan, said more forces would only delay the time when Afghans would take over responsibility for their own security.
The Eikenberry memo was leaked shortly after he sent it, and confirmed by U.S. officials. Biden was presumed to agree with it, but he stayed mum at the time.
Obama's compromise -- 30,000 additional forces and a deadline to begin bringing them home -- was intended to blunt the momentum of a resurgent Taliban insurgency without committing Obama to an open-ended war.
The classified CIA assessment found that Afghanistan was "trending to stalemate" in mid-2011, just ahead of the long-planned date when Obama would begin bringing the additional forces home.
Although many of Obama's advisers had also concluded that the surge strategy had not worked, a White House official is quoted as saying aides initially rebuffed the CIA analysis because it could undercut Obama's argument for withdrawing forces on schedule.
"We didn't want it," the official said.
Iran pioneer in global campaign against drugs: minister
TEHRAN, June 26 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar said Tuesday that the Islamic republic is the forerunner in the global campaign against drugs and illicit drug trafficking.
The drugs produced in the neighboring country of Adghanistan is a threat for Iran, said Mohammad-Najjar addressing a ceremony to mark the World Drug Campaign Day.
Currently, 500 laboratories are active in producing narcotics in Afghanistan and this is a sources of threat to the Islamic republic, said the Iranian interior minister.
However, Iran has been ranked the first in the world in fighting drug abuse and illicit drug trafficking, he said.
In the past years, some 3,700 Iranian anti-drug forces have been killed and 12,000 others have been injured in fighting the drug smugglers, he said, adding that this is the proof that Iran is actively engaged in the drug campaign.
In the last Iranian year, ended on March 19, Iran seized nearly 500 tons of narcotics in 1,300 operations against the armed drug smugglers, said the Iranian official.
To protect the young people from the risks of the drugs abuse, the Islamic republic has launched protective training courses and programs in which some 3.3 million university and high school students have participated, Mohammad-Najjar maintained.
Some 26,000 people, which accounts for 50 percent of the country's addicts, have undergone the compulsory treatment measures, and in 15 provinces of the country rehabilitation centers have been established for the medical care of the addicts, according to Mohammad-Najjar.
In May, Mohammad-Najjar said that Iran had intensified combat against drug lords and mafias.
Intensifying campaign against the main agents and heads of drug- trafficking networks and transit of narcotics, increasing border control to decrease drug trafficking into the country were part of the measures taken by the Islamic republic, he said.
Iran would continue playing its effective role in regional and international decision-makings against narcotics, he added.
In October 2011, Mohammad-Najjar said the country planned to beef up border control to fight drug smuggling in the wake of increasing production of illicit drugs in neighboring Afghanistan.
Iran is located at the crossroad of the international drug smuggling route from Afghanistan, the world's top opium producer, to Europe.
Justice Minister Apologises for Derogatory Remarks on Women Shelters
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Abrahimkhil Monday, 25 June 2012
Afghanistan's Minister of Justice Habibullah Ghaleb apologised for statements he made last week calling women's shelters "centers of misconduct" and suggesting that women residing in them were prostitutes.
Ghaleb expressed his regrets for his provocative remarks at a press conference in Kabul.
"I again emphasise that if the women, who are my daughters and sisters, have been upset by me, I as their father and older brother apologise, not once, but a thousand times," he said on Sunday.
Ghaleb had made the comment on the shelters at a conference organised by the Afghan parliament's Women's Affairs Committee.
He told delegates that the 250 women living in foreign-funded shelters across the country were being encouraged to disobey their parents.
"Mostly they were encouraging girls, saying, 'If your father says anything bad to you don't listen to him, if your mother says anything to you don't listen to them.
There are safe houses for you where you can stay.' What safe houses? What sort of immorality and prostitution is happening at these places?" he said.
His comments received widespread condemnation from women-related organisations across Afghanistan and calls for President Hamid Karzai to sack him.
EU foreign minister Baroness Ashton said last week that she was "deeply troubled" by Ghaleb's comments which had only served to undermine efforts to protect women from violence and sexual abuse.
"Too many Afghan women have experienced violence, gender based and sexual, often on a repeated basis," she said in a statement. "Women forced to resort to shelters are amongst the bravest Afghans we know."
Ranjbar Released After Claiming Girl Accuser is His Wife
TOLOnews.com Monday, 25 June 2012
Former parliamentarian Abdul Kabir Ranjbar, who was arrested on Saturday for kidnapping and raping a girl, was released on Monday after he brought it to the attention of the law officials that the girl was his wife.
The Attorney General's Office arrested Ranjbar after a girl named Spozhmai brought a complaint against him that he had kidnapped and sexually assaulted her eight months ago.
Officials told TOLOnews on Sunday that Spozhmai said she had escaped from Ranjbar's house and that she had broken some of his teeth after she hit him in the mouth when he was attempting to rape her.
However, Ranjbar has since claimed that the girl is his wife.
Deputy Attorney General Rahmatullah Nazari said they released Ranjbar and that he would present the legal documents to prove his marriage to the girl.
"Mr Ranjbar was not in good health in prison so we released him to present the legal documents which should prove their marriage or to bring those who were in their marriage party as a witness," Nazari said.
He added that if Ranjbar can prove that Spozhmai is his wife, the Attorney General's Office will seriously investigate the incident and it would go so far as to treat it as a conspiracy against Ranjbar.
According to Ranjbar, the pair were married about ten months ago and they also have a child, Nazari said.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com