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NATO Afghan Supply Convoys Resume
VOA News July 4, 2012
ISLAMABAD — Just one day after Pakistan decided to reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, drivers who have been waiting for months are ready to get their supply convoys moving. But as the reopening comes with drivers' calls for increased security.
Most of the truck drivers have been sitting idle since late last year when Pakistan blocked the NATO supply lines to protest a cross-border coalition raid that mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops.
Pakistani leaders had linked the reopening of the border crossings to a formal U.S. apology for the deadly assault. The incident plunged bilateral ties to an all-time low.
For nearly eight months, the Obama administration offered regrets and condolences but no unconditional apology for the attack.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ended the stalemate by saying "sorry" for the loss of life. However, she reiterated that mistakes on both sides led to the airstrikes on Pakistan military posts. Islamabad swiftly responded to her statement by agreeing to reopen the supply lines.
Pakistan's Cabinet endorsed the decision Wednesday. Federal Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira later defended the restoration of the supply routes.
The minister says Pakistan took the decision in order to help both the security transition in Afghanistan and return of international forces from the country. As he put it, Pakistan ultimately wants a sovereign government in Afghanistan and that it would be in the interest of the neighbors.
Truck drivers are praising the reopening of the supply lines, saying they will finally be able to feed their families after months of unemployment.
But their excitement is tempered by the Pakistani Taliban's threat to attack the convoys, saying the supplies are being used against fellow fighters battling international forces in Afghanistan.
Nawab Sher Afridi is a representative of All Pakistan Oil Tanker Owners Association. He tells VOA that truckers are readying their vehicles to ferry supplies from the southern port city of Karachi to the border towns - Torkham and Chaman - in the country's north and southwest. But he says they need extra protection.
He says security will be the most important need for the drivers and that he hopes the Pakistani government will coordinate with his association to ensure truckers’ protection.
Taliban insurgents have attacked and torched these convoys in the past, killing dozens of people.
Under the deal that led to reopening of the supply lines, the United States will release held-up payments of more than $1 billion to reimburse Pakistan's military for the cost of counter-insurgency operations.
Pakistani opposition alliance to march against NATO supply line restoration
ISLAMABAD, July 4 (Xinhua) -- An opposition alliance in Pakistan on Wednesday announced a protest march against the government's decision to reopen supply line for NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The Defense of Pakistan Council (DPC), an amalgamation of dozens of religious and political groups, announced to hold long march from the eastern city of Lahore to the capital Islamabad from July 8 to protest against the government's decision of reopening the NATO supply routes, head of the Council, Maulana Samiul Haq said.
The decision was taken in a meeting of the Council in the city of Rawalpindi, which also decided to hold an all party conference to decide details of the march on July 7. The DPC will also observe July 6 as a black day, he said.
He also called all religious and political parties to join the march to force the government to withdraw the decision as the decision would involve Pakistan into Afghanistan war and bloodshed.
Samiul Haq said that a committee of the DPC will speak to leaders of opposition parties including the main opposition Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) to win their support against the NATO supply restoration.
In response to a question, Haq said that the resumption of the supply line is "un-Islamic" since the arms to be transported through Pakistan are being used to "kill Muslims".
Additionally, he said that resumption is also against the sentiments of the Pakistani public and parliamentary recommendations. He called on the government to resign immediately for this unacceptable act since the resumption did not reflect a democratic decision of democratically elected government.
Meanwhile, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) chief Syed Munawar Hassan also strongly condemned the restoration of NATO supplies and said that the rulers had put a seal on the "document of their slavery."
Hassan added that while the government had strengthened the enemies of Islam and Pakistan, the nation would have to rise for its independence and for the protection of its nuclear weapons.
"The nation should unite as one man against this anti-Pakistan decision and close all supply routes," he added.
Hasan further said that the rulers had served the U.S. interests at the cost of vital national interest and the decision would prove to be their "death warrant", he said, adding that the "so-called" apology by the U.S. secretary of state was a "play of words" and it did not mention the drone attacks.
The Jamaat chief further said that the rulers in Islamabad were so mindful of the U.S. interests that they also withdrew their demand for a transit fee of 5,000 U.S. dollars per container.
NATO: Man in Afghan Army Uniform Wounds 5 Troops
VOA News July 04, 2012
NATO officials in Afghanistan says a man in an Afghan army uniform has shot and wounded five coalition troops at a military base near Kabul.
The attack occurred Tuesday in the Syed Abad District of restive Wardak province.
An Afghan military spokesman says the shooter fled the area.
The attack raises the number of so-called "green-on-blue" (Shooters in Afghan uniform attacking NATO troops) incidents this year to 19. At least 23 NATO soldiers have died in the attacks.
Earlier this week, an Afghan man dressed in a police uniform killed three British soldiers at a checkpoint in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province.
The growing number of these attacks has raised questions as NATO works to transfer full security responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014.
U.S. data released this year show that at least 60 percent of the attacks are motivated by personal issues.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and AFP.
French troops officially hand over Afghan province to local authorities
PARIS, July 4 (Xinhua) -- French troops on Wednesday officially handed over control of Uzbeen province in Afghanistan to local forces as part of its plan to pull out combat forces by the end of 2012, the defense ministry said.
In a statement posted on its website, the French defense ministry added that after "the handover ceremony, French soldiers finally left the combat outpost COP."
The transfer was in line with French President Francois Hollande's plans. Last month, he ordered for the withdrawal of French troops in Afghanistan to begin in July.
During a visit to Afghanistan on May 25, Hollande announced that French combat forces would be home by the end of this year, two years earlier than NATO's plan to pull out forces in 2014.
More than 3,800 French troops have been stationed in Afghanistan within the framework of NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.
Afghan air force hobbled by safety and maintenance problems
The Washington Post By Joshua Partlow July 3 , 2012
KABUL - A series of maintenance and safety problems has grounded much of the Afghan air force’s fleet of planes and helicopters in recent months, a situation that the defense minister calls a “grand failure” and one that highlights the challenges facing the country’s fledgling security forces as U.S. and other NATO troops start to withdraw.
The bulk of Afghanistan’s Russian-made helicopter fleet was barred from flying last month to undergo extensive inspections, following a grounding of cargo airplanes late last year because of maintenance problems, according to Afghan and NATO officials.
“The issue as a whole is important,” Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak said in a recent interview. “We don’t have all the air assets which are required for independent operations. It has to become serious.”
Unlike the Afghan army and police force, which have recruited tens of thousands of additional personnel in recent years, Afghanistan’s air force has been slower to develop. Wardak has repeatedly asked NATO to supply fighter jets to establish the force’s attack capability and protect Afghan airspace, but those requests have been denied on the grounds of high costs and more pressing priorities for the young military.
So far, NATO has supplied about 100 aircraft toward its target of 140 for the air force. But many of those, including fleets of 43 helicopters and 15 cargo planes, have been grounded or removed from service in recent months because of problems with maintenance, a lack of spare parts, safety concerns and the need for more-thorough inspections, according to Afghan and NATO officials.
“We have raised the issue from the beginning that we were having a lot of problems,” said Wardak, who added that despite NATO’s contributions, Afghanistan’s air force is not as strong as it used to be. “In 1992, when I was chief of staff of the Afghan army, I had 450 types of air assets. Today, we have 102. One hundred two, but mostly on the ground.”
In the fight against the Taliban, Afghan soldiers and police rely heavily on NATO planes and helicopters to provide air support, evacuate their wounded and dead, and supply bases around the country. The cargo planes and helicopters were supposed to help Afghan forces manage logistics and supplies for their soldiers as U.S. troops pull out over the next two years.
The decision to halt flights of the Mi-17 and Mi-35 helicopters last month came after a NATO review found that Afghan capabilities did not meet the manufacturer’s requirements, according to a NATO official. About half the helicopters had been in the Afghan fleet since NATO began advising in 2007. Others were given later by the United States, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries. The helicopters now need up to a month of comprehensive inspections before they’re ready to fly. About a quarter have completed the inspections.
The fleet of 15 C-27A transport airplanes was grounded in December because of maintenance problems involving a subcontractor of Alenia Aermacchi North America, which refurbished the aircraft, according to NATO officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The grounding was reported last month by the Wall Street Journal. The subcontractor, a unit of L-3 Communications Holdings, had poor and incomplete records on cannibalized parts, tools and other safety issues, the officials said. This spring, Alenia terminated the maintenance subcontract and hired DynCorp International instead, the officials said.
An L-3 official said the problems with the aircraft went beyond maintenance issues. Parts were missing, the official said, and they “were old aircraft in pretty rough shape.”
An Alenia spokesman said the company is “continuing to work closely with the U.S. Air Force on the regeneration” of the fleet, adding that several of the planes “have flown, and we are confident we are headed in the right direction.”
A maintenance overhaul of the planes — including cleaning, inspection of parts and electrical systems, and flight tests — is underway. The fleet is scheduled to be ready by fall, one NATO official said.
“We’ve stood down these fleets until we have all the data available to support our confidence in their safety,” the official said, adding that “the shortage of available aircraft is a concern shared” by NATO’s training command in Afghanistan.
“What we’re striving for is developing a force that is capable, affordable, sustainable and right for Afghanistan,” Brig. Gen. Timothy Ray, the commanding general of NATO’s air training command, said in a statement. “We have a saying that sometimes you have to slow down to get somewhere faster.”
Wardak said the problems could have been avoided if NATO had bought the Afghan air force new aircraft rather than refurbishing older ones.
“The solution is definitely to have reliable new aircraft from the beginning,” he said. “In the long run, I think the cost would be much cheaper.”
Afghanistan: how the US army battled it out with the British
In this extract from his latest book, Little America, Rajiv Chandrasekaran exposes the ways in which the supposed allies were at loggerheads when it came to strategy in Afghanistan
Guardian.co.uk By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Tuesday 3 July 2012
American marines and British civilian advisers were waging two wars in the hilly northern half of Helmand province by mid-2010: they were fighting the Taliban – and each other.
The quarrelling among the allies began with the arrival that spring of more marine forces as part of the US surge, but the tension had its roots in the summer of 2006, when British commanders had decided to establish outposts in the districts of Sangin and Musa Qala that the Taliban quickly besieged and nearly overran.
In Musa Qala, the first wave of British soldiers almost ran out of ammunition after three months of harrowing combat. With no easy way to resupply them – it was too risky to drive convoys or fly dual-rotor Chinooks, the only helicopters the British had – desperate commanders accepted a dubious offer from a tribal leader in the district: if British troops would leave, the leader said, so would the insurgents, whereupon residents would take charge of security. The British departed in a convoy of local freight trucks.
The truce was short-lived, and by the following February, hundreds of Taliban fighters had recaptured the area, prompting the British, aided by the US Army's 82nd airborne division, to conduct a massive operation in late 2007 to wrest back control of the district centre. They succeeded in pushing the Taliban out of town. Then the British stopped. They established front lines about four miles north and south of the town centre; everything beyond was insurgent country.
There was no deal to be made in Sangin, so British commanders sent more forces. Still they did not have the manpower to establish a decisive advantage.
The insurgents set up bomb-making factories in a valley that hugged the source of the Helmand river and they struck an informal mutual defence pact with drug barons who ran a network of opium-processing labs in hillside hamlets. The British commanders made matters worse by spreading their troops across several small outposts along the valley, condemning them to a Sisyphean mission: they would clear insurgents from small parts of the district, but then they had to move on. The Taliban would seize them back, forcing the Brits to attack the same areas again and again. Sangin's lush wheat fields and dense poppy groves soon became killing fields. From 2006 to 2010, Taliban bombs and bullets in the district claimed the lives of more than 100 British troops – about a third of the country's total war dead in that period.
Soon after the Musa Qala truce fell apart, the top US and Nato commander at the time, General Dan McNeill, told a visiting American official that the British had "made a mess of things in Helmand". In January 2009, Helmand's Afghan governor, Gulab Mangal, made a brief visit to Sangin, where he discovered that insurgents were operating with impunity no more than 500m from the district centre. Mangal was incensed when British troops told him it wasn't safe to venture to the bazaar – or anywhere farther than 200m from the main British encampment. "Stop calling it the Sangin district and start calling it the Sangin base. All you have done here is build a military camp next to the city," he complained.
Mangal grew even angrier when the Afghan army commander in Sangin and the district governor told him that British troops "were searching compounds, walking on the roofs of homes, and treating the local population badly – including pointing weapons at people and going into areas where women were working," according to a US State Department cable describing the visit.
The dissatisfaction with the British extended up to Kabul. Late in 2008, Afghan president Hamid Karzai questioned the effectiveness of the British during a meeting with US senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. He related an anecdote about a woman from Helmand who had asked him to "take the British away and give us back the Americans".
British officials insisted that their problems in the province stemmed from a lack of manpower. Unlike the Canadians, who ceded parts of Kandahar province to the Americans in 2009 only grudgingly, British commanders were eager to give up responsibility for large swaths of Helmand. To avoid losing face, the MoD wanted a discreet bailout. The British sought a few thousand US troops to help in the central and northern parts of the province. That would allow the British to hand over [the districts of] Garmser and Nawa and avoid dealing with Marja. They would concentrate on Lashkar Gah, the community of Nad Ali and the northern districts of Musa Qala and Sangin. The British also insisted on retaining control of the reconstruction office in Lashkar Gah, which took its orders from the Foreign Office in London, not the Nato headquarters in Kabul.
The decision to send the hard-charging US marines to Helmand instead of Kandahar upended British hopes for a delicate balance between the allies. The top marine commander in Afghanistan was Larry Nicholson, a deft practitioner of modern warfare whose out-of-uniform interests included listening to Katy Perry and watching Downton Abbey, and when his brigade arrived, there were more Americans than British in the province. Nicholson quickly grew irritated with the British approach to countering the insurgency.
He abhorred the establishment of front lines that they did not cross, and he recoiled when he saw how Afghan soldiers were segregated in camps on British bases. He advocated genuine partnership, not a vestigial colonial attitude toward the natives, and that meant eating and living together. What riled him the most, however, was the British reconstruction team. The team's members had their own views about which parts of the province merited military attention, and those did not always mesh with Nicholson's.
That was to be expected, because the British had been trying to triage a shorthanded mission for three years. But the United States had injected 10,672 marines into Helmand, and Nicholson wanted the voting rights that came with being a majority shareholder.
Tensions flared during the marines' first operation – the push into Nawa, Garmser and Khan Neshin. The British thought it was a fool's errand to travel deep into the Desert of Death and conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency mission in Khan Neshin. What mattered to Nicholson was that Governor Mangal wanted the marines to head there. When state department official Marc Chretien visited the reconstruction office two months after the operation commenced, feelings were raw.
"Your marines seem to have exceeded the ops plan," a British lieutenant colonel told him.
"Well, of course," Chretien replied. "They're marines. They're dogs of war. It's what they do."
When Chretien had informed a three-star British general who was visiting Anbar province that he was heading to Helmand, the general had said: "We want a marriage with you Yanks in Helmand, not a date rape." Chretien took the request to heart, and he repeated the quote to Colonel Mike Killion, Nicholson's top operations officer, before a meeting they had with the head of the reconstruction office in September 2009. Killion was an expletive-spewing marine with a tin of snuff in his pocket who oversaw the brigade's daily combat missions.
"Check," Killion said to Chretien as they walked in to meet with Hugh Powell, an Oxford-educated diplomat who ran the reconstruction office and was supposed to be of equal rank to Nicholson and the British general in the province. The meeting began with a series of pleasantries and then a bit of history. "Helmand was an idyllic place," Powell said, "and then you marines arrived."
Killion believed the province had been overrun by the Taliban because of British appeasement. "Look, buddy, it's not hard to be idyllic if you're sitting on your ass," he growled. "We're here to win."
The meeting degenerated. So did the relationship. When the marines pushed into Now Zad that December, Powell's successor, Lindy Cameron, refused to provide the same sort of reconstruction resources accorded to other districts in the province because she didn't think it made sense to try to rebuild a city that by that point had been completely abandoned by its population. "They stiffed us," Nicholson seethed to me at the time. "So much for all of us being on the same team."
Cameron had a legitimate argument, but the marines didn't want to hear it. They had written off the reconstruction office as hopelessly disconnected from the war, a view that was reinforced by the frequent parties and social events that occurred on the office's compound in Lashkar Gah. It wasn't as wild as the US embassy in Kabul, but Nicholson's officers were nevertheless incredulous when they learned that the office had held an alcohol-sodden "Lash Vegas Pimps and Hos" bash while the marines were struggling to pacify Marja.
Disagreements also erupted in Musa Qala after marines replaced British soldiers in early 2010. Within 48 hours, the Americans had punched beyond the northern front line and seized a town that had long been a Taliban stronghold.
Then marine units began targeting insurgents well beyond the old southern line. "They didn't pursue the Taliban," the marine commander in the district, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Manning, said of the British. "We'll go after them."
When I visited Musa Qala in July 2010, Manning made little effort to conceal his frustration with the pace at which representatives from the reconstruction office were rebuilding the area. Musa Qala's grand mosque, which had been destroyed in the 2007 military operation, was supposed to have been fixed two years earlier. It remained a giant hole in the ground. The British had also pledged to construct a bridge over a riverbed that floods every winter, forcing people to rely on ferries. "They were here for four years," another marine officer said as we gazed over the still bridgeless river. "What did they do?"
British officials insisted that construction of the mosque and the bridge had been delayed because they had been teaching the Afghan government how to take charge of such projects itself. "The US approach is focused on getting it done. Our focus is on building up the government to deliver," a British government official in Helmand told me.
The disputes between the allies soon led to a more fundamental difference over war strategy: the marines were bent on expansion; the British were intent on retrenchment. By the spring of 2010, about 20,000 US troops, mostly marines, were stationed in Helmand, compared with about 9,000 British.
The marines wanted to push south to the town of Barham Chah on the Pakistani border, and west to neighbouring Nimruz province, which abuts Iran. Neither foray seemed in keeping with General Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency mission. Barham Chah was tiny, and the bad guys in whom the marines were interested – insurgents and drug smugglers – often drove through the desert, bypassing the town. Nimruz was largely sand. The Nato command deemed it so strategically unimportant that it was one of just four provinces without a reconstruction team. But the marines saw danger – and potential.
Their intelligence reports indicated that Taliban fighters were using the northern part of the province to stage attacks in Helmand. They began constructing a vast base on the province's north-eastern edge. The original plans for the encampment envisaged two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye could see. Nicholson expected more than 3,000 marines – one-tenth of the surge troops – to be based there by mid-2010. But the marines' ambition did not factor in British fatigue.
As British casualties mounted in 2009 – that July was the bloodiest month yet for British forces in Helmand – the public's weak support for the war dipped further at home, prompting calls for a change in strategy. Some in the Labour party called for a full-scale withdrawal by the end of the year. It was clear that Britain's stance in Helmand needed to shift if Gordon Brown wanted to prevent an outright revolt. His government's first step was to inform the Obama administration that it would not increase forces, even nominally, in tandem with an American surge. Then the MoD instructed military commanders to work up secret plans to hand over Sangin and Musa Qala to the Americans and consolidate in less dangerous parts of the province.
The British desire to give up Sangin became clear in December 2009 when David Cameron, who would become prime minister in a few months, visited Helmand. His countrymen, he said, were "spread too thinly". By then, 245 British soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan. Another statistic also weighed on British leaders: although they had 30% of the troops in Helmand, they were responsible for 70% of the population.
When Cameron met with Nicholson and his political adviser, Kael Weston, the top British commander in Helmand, Brigadier General James Cowan, began laying the groundwork for the shift by emphasising the British sacrifice. Cowan said he had recently asked the British field hospital next to Camp Leatherneck in Helmand, which treated both Americans and British, how much blood it had transfused in the past month. The answer, Cowan reported, was that far more blood had been used on the British – because they had so many casualties – than on the marines.
An awkward silence descended on the room. Cameron said nothing. After 10 seconds, Weston spoke up. "There's been enough blood shed by all of us here," he said.
The following month, when [Labour] foreign secretary David Miliband visited Helmand, an aide passed him a note during his meeting with Nicholson and Weston. Two more British soldiers had been killed in Sangin. It was at that moment that Weston grasped the stakes for both nations: the British could no longer sustain those sorts of messages, but that would mean more such notifications for Nicholson and his marine successors. As the meeting continued, it seemed to Weston that Miliband was discreetly asking Nicholson to help Britain instead of raising the matter in a higher-profile way with Hillary Clinton or US defence secretary Robert Gates. Soon thereafter, Weston drafted a cable for Ambassador Eikenberry titled "US-UK at a crossroads". It argued that the United States needed to ease its closest ally out of the toughest parts of Helmand, not force the British to stick it out. Eikenberry agreed, and drafted a memo that he sent directly to Clinton.
Nicholson agreed to take on Musa Qala, but he had no desire for Sangin. Officers on his staff scoffed at the Brits. The point of the American surge, as they saw it, was to move into places where there were no coalition forces, not rescue the country occupied by the second-largest military contingent in Afghanistan.
British officers eventually decided to let the marines, who always seemed to be spoiling for a fight, find their own way to Sangin. It happened early in the summer of 2010. After the transfer in Musa Qala, the top British commander in Helmand had agreed to place his troops in Sangin under the control of the marines. Colonel Paul Kennedy, the top marine field commander in northern Helmand, quickly concluded that he needed more forces there. Soon after the new battalion arrived in July, British officials informed the Americans that the British unit in Sangin would not be replaced when its tour finished early that October.
By concentrating in and around Lashkar Gah and the districts of Gereshk and Nad Ali, the British military would finally have enough combat power to perform a genuine protect-the-population counterinsurgency mission. But before long, both sides resumed bickering. This time, Sangin replaced Musa Qala as the principal point of friction. The marines felt the British-run reconstruction office began paying less attention to Sangin once British forces departed. British officials denied the allegation, but they shouldn't have. Although the marines believed Sangin was the most critical part of the province – because the fighting was so intense – it wasn't. Lashkar Gah and Gereshk were far more populous and vital.
But the marines weren't all wrong: if they were going to succeed where the Brits had failed in Sangin, they required more than rifles and missiles; they needed meaningful resources for reconstruction.
The dispute once again illuminated how the two closest allies in Afghanistan failed to understand each other. Had the British not torpedoed their relationship with the marines through unseemly deals and a 19th-century attitude toward the Afghans, and had the marines not always equated British restraint with appeasement, the two militaries could have been true allies. The British could have emulated the American model of massing combat power to strike hard and fast. And the marines could have grasped the British wisdom in picking only the most important fights. The result almost certainly would have been fewer body bags draped with the union flag or the Stars and Stripes.
Anti-Taliban uprising leads to reopening schools in Afghan town
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, July 4 (Xinhua) -- The uprising of local people against Taliban militants in Andar district of Ghazni province, 125 km south of Afghan capital Kabul, has evicted insurgents from several villages and eventually led to reopening schools, a province spokesman said Wednesday.
"Since launching the uprising against Taliban rebels in Andar district 30 villages have been liberated and several schools reopened," Fazal Rahman Sabawon told Xinhua.
The uprising, the first of its kind in Ghazni and adjoining areas, began one and half month ago. A total of 30 Afghan Taliban and around 70 foreign fighters, including Arab and Pakistanis were killed in the uprising, Sabawon said,
Taliban militants spread their influence to the mountainous Andar district some four years ago, and began step by step to implement their harsh interpretation of Islam, including sporting beard, shutting down girl schools and health clinics, banning music, severing ties with government and backing Taliban fighters.
Sabawon said that the uprising against Taliban in Andar began with four students who had been barred from school and gradually spread to 800 villages which joined the anti-Taliban movement in the district.
He said the movement would spearhead to the neighboring Gero and other districts.
The leader of the uprising is said to be Lutfullah Kamran, a clean-shaven man and engineer by profession, who has been lashing at Taliban harsh policies imposed on villagers.
Kamram, reportedly a dissident Taliban fighter fed up with the outfit's harsh policies, has said that the restriction imposed by Taliban had led to the closure of schools, clinics, bazaars and eventually led to jobless and extreme poverty in Andar district.
Meantime, the deputy governor of Ghazni province Mohammad Ali Ahmadi said that uprising against Taliban in Andar district is purely a movement of the local people that would likely spread to other parts of Ghazni where Talibans are active.
Afghan Defense Ministry has expressed support to the uprising against Taliban in Ghazni as Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi told a press conference last week that "we support any steps that help to improve security."
However, Zabihullah Mujahid, who claims to speak for the Taliban outfit, in talks with media via telephone from unknown location termed the uprising in Andar as "group of government- backed militia" to resist Taliban influence.
The Taliban spokesman said the mission of the group, financed and equipped by the government, is to challenge Taliban in rural areas, a claim rejected by group leader Kamran as baseless.
Three Die in Kabul Gas Explosion
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 03 July 2012
The death toll from the gas cylinder explosion in Afghanistan's capital city rose to three people on Tuesday afternoon, according to officials.
Earlier, only two people were reported killed and at least 28 others were injured in the explosion in Kabul around midday on Tuesday.
Ministry of Interior (MOI) spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told TOLOnews at 4 PM that a third person has since been confirmed dead.
Immediately following the incident, the MOI said that the source of the explosion was a gas tank inside a building of Kabul's Khair Khana district which is used to store and sell medical supplies.
The possibility of other explosives being involved was not ruled out, but both the MOI and the police said there was no insurgent activity in the area at the time.
At least five of those injured were in a critical state, according to officials.
Witnesses said that the explosion was very big and it damaged several cars parked outside the building.
The fire department told a TOLOnews reporter at the scene that the fire was under control, but there were still people trapped inside the building.
An investigation into the cause of the explosion was underway, Chief of Kabul Police Criminal Investigation Unit Mohammed Zahir said. Zahir confirmed the number of casualties but warned that the number might rise.
New Law Seeks to Cap Wedding Costs
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 03 July 2012
The final draft of a new law capping the number of guests allowed at a wedding and the cost per head has been delivered to the Council of Ministers, but may meet some resistance.
Afghanistan's Minister of Justice Habibullah Ghalib said that the new rules, which will be part of the Marriage Law, seek to address the financial problems faced by people wishing to marry in Afghanistan.
It caps the number of guests allowed at a wedding at 400 people, and caps the cost per head charged by wedding halls at 300 Afs.
Ghalib said the draft of the law was complete and had been submitted to the Council of Ministers for final approval, but it may face some hurdles.
"We have sent this law to Council of Ministers. If they approve it, the [financial] problems will be less, but there are some figurers who don't want to approve this law," he told TOLOnews on Tuesday.
Some people say that the law will be rejected by ministers with financial interests in hotels or wedding halls, because the new law will directly impact on the business' bottom line.
However, the law was welcomed by Kabul residents who called on government to approve it soon.
"The law should be approved by the government to avoid the big budgets needed for marriage," one Kabul resident said. "The government should step in because people are in a poor situation."
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
VOA News July 4, 2012
ISLAMABAD — Just one day after Pakistan decided to reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, drivers who have been waiting for months are ready to get their supply convoys moving. But as the reopening comes with drivers' calls for increased security.
Most of the truck drivers have been sitting idle since late last year when Pakistan blocked the NATO supply lines to protest a cross-border coalition raid that mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops.
Pakistani leaders had linked the reopening of the border crossings to a formal U.S. apology for the deadly assault. The incident plunged bilateral ties to an all-time low.
For nearly eight months, the Obama administration offered regrets and condolences but no unconditional apology for the attack.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ended the stalemate by saying "sorry" for the loss of life. However, she reiterated that mistakes on both sides led to the airstrikes on Pakistan military posts. Islamabad swiftly responded to her statement by agreeing to reopen the supply lines.
Pakistan's Cabinet endorsed the decision Wednesday. Federal Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira later defended the restoration of the supply routes.
The minister says Pakistan took the decision in order to help both the security transition in Afghanistan and return of international forces from the country. As he put it, Pakistan ultimately wants a sovereign government in Afghanistan and that it would be in the interest of the neighbors.
Truck drivers are praising the reopening of the supply lines, saying they will finally be able to feed their families after months of unemployment.
But their excitement is tempered by the Pakistani Taliban's threat to attack the convoys, saying the supplies are being used against fellow fighters battling international forces in Afghanistan.
Nawab Sher Afridi is a representative of All Pakistan Oil Tanker Owners Association. He tells VOA that truckers are readying their vehicles to ferry supplies from the southern port city of Karachi to the border towns - Torkham and Chaman - in the country's north and southwest. But he says they need extra protection.
He says security will be the most important need for the drivers and that he hopes the Pakistani government will coordinate with his association to ensure truckers’ protection.
Taliban insurgents have attacked and torched these convoys in the past, killing dozens of people.
Under the deal that led to reopening of the supply lines, the United States will release held-up payments of more than $1 billion to reimburse Pakistan's military for the cost of counter-insurgency operations.
Pakistani opposition alliance to march against NATO supply line restoration
ISLAMABAD, July 4 (Xinhua) -- An opposition alliance in Pakistan on Wednesday announced a protest march against the government's decision to reopen supply line for NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The Defense of Pakistan Council (DPC), an amalgamation of dozens of religious and political groups, announced to hold long march from the eastern city of Lahore to the capital Islamabad from July 8 to protest against the government's decision of reopening the NATO supply routes, head of the Council, Maulana Samiul Haq said.
The decision was taken in a meeting of the Council in the city of Rawalpindi, which also decided to hold an all party conference to decide details of the march on July 7. The DPC will also observe July 6 as a black day, he said.
He also called all religious and political parties to join the march to force the government to withdraw the decision as the decision would involve Pakistan into Afghanistan war and bloodshed.
Samiul Haq said that a committee of the DPC will speak to leaders of opposition parties including the main opposition Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) to win their support against the NATO supply restoration.
In response to a question, Haq said that the resumption of the supply line is "un-Islamic" since the arms to be transported through Pakistan are being used to "kill Muslims".
Additionally, he said that resumption is also against the sentiments of the Pakistani public and parliamentary recommendations. He called on the government to resign immediately for this unacceptable act since the resumption did not reflect a democratic decision of democratically elected government.
Meanwhile, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) chief Syed Munawar Hassan also strongly condemned the restoration of NATO supplies and said that the rulers had put a seal on the "document of their slavery."
Hassan added that while the government had strengthened the enemies of Islam and Pakistan, the nation would have to rise for its independence and for the protection of its nuclear weapons.
"The nation should unite as one man against this anti-Pakistan decision and close all supply routes," he added.
Hasan further said that the rulers had served the U.S. interests at the cost of vital national interest and the decision would prove to be their "death warrant", he said, adding that the "so-called" apology by the U.S. secretary of state was a "play of words" and it did not mention the drone attacks.
The Jamaat chief further said that the rulers in Islamabad were so mindful of the U.S. interests that they also withdrew their demand for a transit fee of 5,000 U.S. dollars per container.
NATO: Man in Afghan Army Uniform Wounds 5 Troops
VOA News July 04, 2012
NATO officials in Afghanistan says a man in an Afghan army uniform has shot and wounded five coalition troops at a military base near Kabul.
The attack occurred Tuesday in the Syed Abad District of restive Wardak province.
An Afghan military spokesman says the shooter fled the area.
The attack raises the number of so-called "green-on-blue" (Shooters in Afghan uniform attacking NATO troops) incidents this year to 19. At least 23 NATO soldiers have died in the attacks.
Earlier this week, an Afghan man dressed in a police uniform killed three British soldiers at a checkpoint in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province.
The growing number of these attacks has raised questions as NATO works to transfer full security responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014.
U.S. data released this year show that at least 60 percent of the attacks are motivated by personal issues.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and AFP.
French troops officially hand over Afghan province to local authorities
PARIS, July 4 (Xinhua) -- French troops on Wednesday officially handed over control of Uzbeen province in Afghanistan to local forces as part of its plan to pull out combat forces by the end of 2012, the defense ministry said.
In a statement posted on its website, the French defense ministry added that after "the handover ceremony, French soldiers finally left the combat outpost COP."
The transfer was in line with French President Francois Hollande's plans. Last month, he ordered for the withdrawal of French troops in Afghanistan to begin in July.
During a visit to Afghanistan on May 25, Hollande announced that French combat forces would be home by the end of this year, two years earlier than NATO's plan to pull out forces in 2014.
More than 3,800 French troops have been stationed in Afghanistan within the framework of NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.
Afghan air force hobbled by safety and maintenance problems
The Washington Post By Joshua Partlow July 3 , 2012
KABUL - A series of maintenance and safety problems has grounded much of the Afghan air force’s fleet of planes and helicopters in recent months, a situation that the defense minister calls a “grand failure” and one that highlights the challenges facing the country’s fledgling security forces as U.S. and other NATO troops start to withdraw.
The bulk of Afghanistan’s Russian-made helicopter fleet was barred from flying last month to undergo extensive inspections, following a grounding of cargo airplanes late last year because of maintenance problems, according to Afghan and NATO officials.
“The issue as a whole is important,” Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak said in a recent interview. “We don’t have all the air assets which are required for independent operations. It has to become serious.”
Unlike the Afghan army and police force, which have recruited tens of thousands of additional personnel in recent years, Afghanistan’s air force has been slower to develop. Wardak has repeatedly asked NATO to supply fighter jets to establish the force’s attack capability and protect Afghan airspace, but those requests have been denied on the grounds of high costs and more pressing priorities for the young military.
So far, NATO has supplied about 100 aircraft toward its target of 140 for the air force. But many of those, including fleets of 43 helicopters and 15 cargo planes, have been grounded or removed from service in recent months because of problems with maintenance, a lack of spare parts, safety concerns and the need for more-thorough inspections, according to Afghan and NATO officials.
“We have raised the issue from the beginning that we were having a lot of problems,” said Wardak, who added that despite NATO’s contributions, Afghanistan’s air force is not as strong as it used to be. “In 1992, when I was chief of staff of the Afghan army, I had 450 types of air assets. Today, we have 102. One hundred two, but mostly on the ground.”
In the fight against the Taliban, Afghan soldiers and police rely heavily on NATO planes and helicopters to provide air support, evacuate their wounded and dead, and supply bases around the country. The cargo planes and helicopters were supposed to help Afghan forces manage logistics and supplies for their soldiers as U.S. troops pull out over the next two years.
The decision to halt flights of the Mi-17 and Mi-35 helicopters last month came after a NATO review found that Afghan capabilities did not meet the manufacturer’s requirements, according to a NATO official. About half the helicopters had been in the Afghan fleet since NATO began advising in 2007. Others were given later by the United States, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries. The helicopters now need up to a month of comprehensive inspections before they’re ready to fly. About a quarter have completed the inspections.
The fleet of 15 C-27A transport airplanes was grounded in December because of maintenance problems involving a subcontractor of Alenia Aermacchi North America, which refurbished the aircraft, according to NATO officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The grounding was reported last month by the Wall Street Journal. The subcontractor, a unit of L-3 Communications Holdings, had poor and incomplete records on cannibalized parts, tools and other safety issues, the officials said. This spring, Alenia terminated the maintenance subcontract and hired DynCorp International instead, the officials said.
An L-3 official said the problems with the aircraft went beyond maintenance issues. Parts were missing, the official said, and they “were old aircraft in pretty rough shape.”
An Alenia spokesman said the company is “continuing to work closely with the U.S. Air Force on the regeneration” of the fleet, adding that several of the planes “have flown, and we are confident we are headed in the right direction.”
A maintenance overhaul of the planes — including cleaning, inspection of parts and electrical systems, and flight tests — is underway. The fleet is scheduled to be ready by fall, one NATO official said.
“We’ve stood down these fleets until we have all the data available to support our confidence in their safety,” the official said, adding that “the shortage of available aircraft is a concern shared” by NATO’s training command in Afghanistan.
“What we’re striving for is developing a force that is capable, affordable, sustainable and right for Afghanistan,” Brig. Gen. Timothy Ray, the commanding general of NATO’s air training command, said in a statement. “We have a saying that sometimes you have to slow down to get somewhere faster.”
Wardak said the problems could have been avoided if NATO had bought the Afghan air force new aircraft rather than refurbishing older ones.
“The solution is definitely to have reliable new aircraft from the beginning,” he said. “In the long run, I think the cost would be much cheaper.”
Afghanistan: how the US army battled it out with the British
In this extract from his latest book, Little America, Rajiv Chandrasekaran exposes the ways in which the supposed allies were at loggerheads when it came to strategy in Afghanistan
Guardian.co.uk By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Tuesday 3 July 2012
American marines and British civilian advisers were waging two wars in the hilly northern half of Helmand province by mid-2010: they were fighting the Taliban – and each other.
The quarrelling among the allies began with the arrival that spring of more marine forces as part of the US surge, but the tension had its roots in the summer of 2006, when British commanders had decided to establish outposts in the districts of Sangin and Musa Qala that the Taliban quickly besieged and nearly overran.
In Musa Qala, the first wave of British soldiers almost ran out of ammunition after three months of harrowing combat. With no easy way to resupply them – it was too risky to drive convoys or fly dual-rotor Chinooks, the only helicopters the British had – desperate commanders accepted a dubious offer from a tribal leader in the district: if British troops would leave, the leader said, so would the insurgents, whereupon residents would take charge of security. The British departed in a convoy of local freight trucks.
The truce was short-lived, and by the following February, hundreds of Taliban fighters had recaptured the area, prompting the British, aided by the US Army's 82nd airborne division, to conduct a massive operation in late 2007 to wrest back control of the district centre. They succeeded in pushing the Taliban out of town. Then the British stopped. They established front lines about four miles north and south of the town centre; everything beyond was insurgent country.
There was no deal to be made in Sangin, so British commanders sent more forces. Still they did not have the manpower to establish a decisive advantage.
The insurgents set up bomb-making factories in a valley that hugged the source of the Helmand river and they struck an informal mutual defence pact with drug barons who ran a network of opium-processing labs in hillside hamlets. The British commanders made matters worse by spreading their troops across several small outposts along the valley, condemning them to a Sisyphean mission: they would clear insurgents from small parts of the district, but then they had to move on. The Taliban would seize them back, forcing the Brits to attack the same areas again and again. Sangin's lush wheat fields and dense poppy groves soon became killing fields. From 2006 to 2010, Taliban bombs and bullets in the district claimed the lives of more than 100 British troops – about a third of the country's total war dead in that period.
Soon after the Musa Qala truce fell apart, the top US and Nato commander at the time, General Dan McNeill, told a visiting American official that the British had "made a mess of things in Helmand". In January 2009, Helmand's Afghan governor, Gulab Mangal, made a brief visit to Sangin, where he discovered that insurgents were operating with impunity no more than 500m from the district centre. Mangal was incensed when British troops told him it wasn't safe to venture to the bazaar – or anywhere farther than 200m from the main British encampment. "Stop calling it the Sangin district and start calling it the Sangin base. All you have done here is build a military camp next to the city," he complained.
Mangal grew even angrier when the Afghan army commander in Sangin and the district governor told him that British troops "were searching compounds, walking on the roofs of homes, and treating the local population badly – including pointing weapons at people and going into areas where women were working," according to a US State Department cable describing the visit.
The dissatisfaction with the British extended up to Kabul. Late in 2008, Afghan president Hamid Karzai questioned the effectiveness of the British during a meeting with US senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. He related an anecdote about a woman from Helmand who had asked him to "take the British away and give us back the Americans".
British officials insisted that their problems in the province stemmed from a lack of manpower. Unlike the Canadians, who ceded parts of Kandahar province to the Americans in 2009 only grudgingly, British commanders were eager to give up responsibility for large swaths of Helmand. To avoid losing face, the MoD wanted a discreet bailout. The British sought a few thousand US troops to help in the central and northern parts of the province. That would allow the British to hand over [the districts of] Garmser and Nawa and avoid dealing with Marja. They would concentrate on Lashkar Gah, the community of Nad Ali and the northern districts of Musa Qala and Sangin. The British also insisted on retaining control of the reconstruction office in Lashkar Gah, which took its orders from the Foreign Office in London, not the Nato headquarters in Kabul.
The decision to send the hard-charging US marines to Helmand instead of Kandahar upended British hopes for a delicate balance between the allies. The top marine commander in Afghanistan was Larry Nicholson, a deft practitioner of modern warfare whose out-of-uniform interests included listening to Katy Perry and watching Downton Abbey, and when his brigade arrived, there were more Americans than British in the province. Nicholson quickly grew irritated with the British approach to countering the insurgency.
He abhorred the establishment of front lines that they did not cross, and he recoiled when he saw how Afghan soldiers were segregated in camps on British bases. He advocated genuine partnership, not a vestigial colonial attitude toward the natives, and that meant eating and living together. What riled him the most, however, was the British reconstruction team. The team's members had their own views about which parts of the province merited military attention, and those did not always mesh with Nicholson's.
That was to be expected, because the British had been trying to triage a shorthanded mission for three years. But the United States had injected 10,672 marines into Helmand, and Nicholson wanted the voting rights that came with being a majority shareholder.
Tensions flared during the marines' first operation – the push into Nawa, Garmser and Khan Neshin. The British thought it was a fool's errand to travel deep into the Desert of Death and conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency mission in Khan Neshin. What mattered to Nicholson was that Governor Mangal wanted the marines to head there. When state department official Marc Chretien visited the reconstruction office two months after the operation commenced, feelings were raw.
"Your marines seem to have exceeded the ops plan," a British lieutenant colonel told him.
"Well, of course," Chretien replied. "They're marines. They're dogs of war. It's what they do."
When Chretien had informed a three-star British general who was visiting Anbar province that he was heading to Helmand, the general had said: "We want a marriage with you Yanks in Helmand, not a date rape." Chretien took the request to heart, and he repeated the quote to Colonel Mike Killion, Nicholson's top operations officer, before a meeting they had with the head of the reconstruction office in September 2009. Killion was an expletive-spewing marine with a tin of snuff in his pocket who oversaw the brigade's daily combat missions.
"Check," Killion said to Chretien as they walked in to meet with Hugh Powell, an Oxford-educated diplomat who ran the reconstruction office and was supposed to be of equal rank to Nicholson and the British general in the province. The meeting began with a series of pleasantries and then a bit of history. "Helmand was an idyllic place," Powell said, "and then you marines arrived."
Killion believed the province had been overrun by the Taliban because of British appeasement. "Look, buddy, it's not hard to be idyllic if you're sitting on your ass," he growled. "We're here to win."
The meeting degenerated. So did the relationship. When the marines pushed into Now Zad that December, Powell's successor, Lindy Cameron, refused to provide the same sort of reconstruction resources accorded to other districts in the province because she didn't think it made sense to try to rebuild a city that by that point had been completely abandoned by its population. "They stiffed us," Nicholson seethed to me at the time. "So much for all of us being on the same team."
Cameron had a legitimate argument, but the marines didn't want to hear it. They had written off the reconstruction office as hopelessly disconnected from the war, a view that was reinforced by the frequent parties and social events that occurred on the office's compound in Lashkar Gah. It wasn't as wild as the US embassy in Kabul, but Nicholson's officers were nevertheless incredulous when they learned that the office had held an alcohol-sodden "Lash Vegas Pimps and Hos" bash while the marines were struggling to pacify Marja.
Disagreements also erupted in Musa Qala after marines replaced British soldiers in early 2010. Within 48 hours, the Americans had punched beyond the northern front line and seized a town that had long been a Taliban stronghold.
Then marine units began targeting insurgents well beyond the old southern line. "They didn't pursue the Taliban," the marine commander in the district, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Manning, said of the British. "We'll go after them."
When I visited Musa Qala in July 2010, Manning made little effort to conceal his frustration with the pace at which representatives from the reconstruction office were rebuilding the area. Musa Qala's grand mosque, which had been destroyed in the 2007 military operation, was supposed to have been fixed two years earlier. It remained a giant hole in the ground. The British had also pledged to construct a bridge over a riverbed that floods every winter, forcing people to rely on ferries. "They were here for four years," another marine officer said as we gazed over the still bridgeless river. "What did they do?"
British officials insisted that construction of the mosque and the bridge had been delayed because they had been teaching the Afghan government how to take charge of such projects itself. "The US approach is focused on getting it done. Our focus is on building up the government to deliver," a British government official in Helmand told me.
The disputes between the allies soon led to a more fundamental difference over war strategy: the marines were bent on expansion; the British were intent on retrenchment. By the spring of 2010, about 20,000 US troops, mostly marines, were stationed in Helmand, compared with about 9,000 British.
The marines wanted to push south to the town of Barham Chah on the Pakistani border, and west to neighbouring Nimruz province, which abuts Iran. Neither foray seemed in keeping with General Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency mission. Barham Chah was tiny, and the bad guys in whom the marines were interested – insurgents and drug smugglers – often drove through the desert, bypassing the town. Nimruz was largely sand. The Nato command deemed it so strategically unimportant that it was one of just four provinces without a reconstruction team. But the marines saw danger – and potential.
Their intelligence reports indicated that Taliban fighters were using the northern part of the province to stage attacks in Helmand. They began constructing a vast base on the province's north-eastern edge. The original plans for the encampment envisaged two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye could see. Nicholson expected more than 3,000 marines – one-tenth of the surge troops – to be based there by mid-2010. But the marines' ambition did not factor in British fatigue.
As British casualties mounted in 2009 – that July was the bloodiest month yet for British forces in Helmand – the public's weak support for the war dipped further at home, prompting calls for a change in strategy. Some in the Labour party called for a full-scale withdrawal by the end of the year. It was clear that Britain's stance in Helmand needed to shift if Gordon Brown wanted to prevent an outright revolt. His government's first step was to inform the Obama administration that it would not increase forces, even nominally, in tandem with an American surge. Then the MoD instructed military commanders to work up secret plans to hand over Sangin and Musa Qala to the Americans and consolidate in less dangerous parts of the province.
The British desire to give up Sangin became clear in December 2009 when David Cameron, who would become prime minister in a few months, visited Helmand. His countrymen, he said, were "spread too thinly". By then, 245 British soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan. Another statistic also weighed on British leaders: although they had 30% of the troops in Helmand, they were responsible for 70% of the population.
When Cameron met with Nicholson and his political adviser, Kael Weston, the top British commander in Helmand, Brigadier General James Cowan, began laying the groundwork for the shift by emphasising the British sacrifice. Cowan said he had recently asked the British field hospital next to Camp Leatherneck in Helmand, which treated both Americans and British, how much blood it had transfused in the past month. The answer, Cowan reported, was that far more blood had been used on the British – because they had so many casualties – than on the marines.
An awkward silence descended on the room. Cameron said nothing. After 10 seconds, Weston spoke up. "There's been enough blood shed by all of us here," he said.
The following month, when [Labour] foreign secretary David Miliband visited Helmand, an aide passed him a note during his meeting with Nicholson and Weston. Two more British soldiers had been killed in Sangin. It was at that moment that Weston grasped the stakes for both nations: the British could no longer sustain those sorts of messages, but that would mean more such notifications for Nicholson and his marine successors. As the meeting continued, it seemed to Weston that Miliband was discreetly asking Nicholson to help Britain instead of raising the matter in a higher-profile way with Hillary Clinton or US defence secretary Robert Gates. Soon thereafter, Weston drafted a cable for Ambassador Eikenberry titled "US-UK at a crossroads". It argued that the United States needed to ease its closest ally out of the toughest parts of Helmand, not force the British to stick it out. Eikenberry agreed, and drafted a memo that he sent directly to Clinton.
Nicholson agreed to take on Musa Qala, but he had no desire for Sangin. Officers on his staff scoffed at the Brits. The point of the American surge, as they saw it, was to move into places where there were no coalition forces, not rescue the country occupied by the second-largest military contingent in Afghanistan.
British officers eventually decided to let the marines, who always seemed to be spoiling for a fight, find their own way to Sangin. It happened early in the summer of 2010. After the transfer in Musa Qala, the top British commander in Helmand had agreed to place his troops in Sangin under the control of the marines. Colonel Paul Kennedy, the top marine field commander in northern Helmand, quickly concluded that he needed more forces there. Soon after the new battalion arrived in July, British officials informed the Americans that the British unit in Sangin would not be replaced when its tour finished early that October.
By concentrating in and around Lashkar Gah and the districts of Gereshk and Nad Ali, the British military would finally have enough combat power to perform a genuine protect-the-population counterinsurgency mission. But before long, both sides resumed bickering. This time, Sangin replaced Musa Qala as the principal point of friction. The marines felt the British-run reconstruction office began paying less attention to Sangin once British forces departed. British officials denied the allegation, but they shouldn't have. Although the marines believed Sangin was the most critical part of the province – because the fighting was so intense – it wasn't. Lashkar Gah and Gereshk were far more populous and vital.
But the marines weren't all wrong: if they were going to succeed where the Brits had failed in Sangin, they required more than rifles and missiles; they needed meaningful resources for reconstruction.
The dispute once again illuminated how the two closest allies in Afghanistan failed to understand each other. Had the British not torpedoed their relationship with the marines through unseemly deals and a 19th-century attitude toward the Afghans, and had the marines not always equated British restraint with appeasement, the two militaries could have been true allies. The British could have emulated the American model of massing combat power to strike hard and fast. And the marines could have grasped the British wisdom in picking only the most important fights. The result almost certainly would have been fewer body bags draped with the union flag or the Stars and Stripes.
Anti-Taliban uprising leads to reopening schools in Afghan town
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, July 4 (Xinhua) -- The uprising of local people against Taliban militants in Andar district of Ghazni province, 125 km south of Afghan capital Kabul, has evicted insurgents from several villages and eventually led to reopening schools, a province spokesman said Wednesday.
"Since launching the uprising against Taliban rebels in Andar district 30 villages have been liberated and several schools reopened," Fazal Rahman Sabawon told Xinhua.
The uprising, the first of its kind in Ghazni and adjoining areas, began one and half month ago. A total of 30 Afghan Taliban and around 70 foreign fighters, including Arab and Pakistanis were killed in the uprising, Sabawon said,
Taliban militants spread their influence to the mountainous Andar district some four years ago, and began step by step to implement their harsh interpretation of Islam, including sporting beard, shutting down girl schools and health clinics, banning music, severing ties with government and backing Taliban fighters.
Sabawon said that the uprising against Taliban in Andar began with four students who had been barred from school and gradually spread to 800 villages which joined the anti-Taliban movement in the district.
He said the movement would spearhead to the neighboring Gero and other districts.
The leader of the uprising is said to be Lutfullah Kamran, a clean-shaven man and engineer by profession, who has been lashing at Taliban harsh policies imposed on villagers.
Kamram, reportedly a dissident Taliban fighter fed up with the outfit's harsh policies, has said that the restriction imposed by Taliban had led to the closure of schools, clinics, bazaars and eventually led to jobless and extreme poverty in Andar district.
Meantime, the deputy governor of Ghazni province Mohammad Ali Ahmadi said that uprising against Taliban in Andar district is purely a movement of the local people that would likely spread to other parts of Ghazni where Talibans are active.
Afghan Defense Ministry has expressed support to the uprising against Taliban in Ghazni as Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi told a press conference last week that "we support any steps that help to improve security."
However, Zabihullah Mujahid, who claims to speak for the Taliban outfit, in talks with media via telephone from unknown location termed the uprising in Andar as "group of government- backed militia" to resist Taliban influence.
The Taliban spokesman said the mission of the group, financed and equipped by the government, is to challenge Taliban in rural areas, a claim rejected by group leader Kamran as baseless.
Three Die in Kabul Gas Explosion
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 03 July 2012
The death toll from the gas cylinder explosion in Afghanistan's capital city rose to three people on Tuesday afternoon, according to officials.
Earlier, only two people were reported killed and at least 28 others were injured in the explosion in Kabul around midday on Tuesday.
Ministry of Interior (MOI) spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told TOLOnews at 4 PM that a third person has since been confirmed dead.
Immediately following the incident, the MOI said that the source of the explosion was a gas tank inside a building of Kabul's Khair Khana district which is used to store and sell medical supplies.
The possibility of other explosives being involved was not ruled out, but both the MOI and the police said there was no insurgent activity in the area at the time.
At least five of those injured were in a critical state, according to officials.
Witnesses said that the explosion was very big and it damaged several cars parked outside the building.
The fire department told a TOLOnews reporter at the scene that the fire was under control, but there were still people trapped inside the building.
An investigation into the cause of the explosion was underway, Chief of Kabul Police Criminal Investigation Unit Mohammed Zahir said. Zahir confirmed the number of casualties but warned that the number might rise.
New Law Seeks to Cap Wedding Costs
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 03 July 2012
The final draft of a new law capping the number of guests allowed at a wedding and the cost per head has been delivered to the Council of Ministers, but may meet some resistance.
Afghanistan's Minister of Justice Habibullah Ghalib said that the new rules, which will be part of the Marriage Law, seek to address the financial problems faced by people wishing to marry in Afghanistan.
It caps the number of guests allowed at a wedding at 400 people, and caps the cost per head charged by wedding halls at 300 Afs.
Ghalib said the draft of the law was complete and had been submitted to the Council of Ministers for final approval, but it may face some hurdles.
"We have sent this law to Council of Ministers. If they approve it, the [financial] problems will be less, but there are some figurers who don't want to approve this law," he told TOLOnews on Tuesday.
Some people say that the law will be rejected by ministers with financial interests in hotels or wedding halls, because the new law will directly impact on the business' bottom line.
However, the law was welcomed by Kabul residents who called on government to approve it soon.
"The law should be approved by the government to avoid the big budgets needed for marriage," one Kabul resident said. "The government should step in because people are in a poor situation."
www.afghanistannewscenter.com