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Donors to pledge $15 bn at Tokyo Afghan meet: report
AFP July 5, 2012
TOKYO - Donor nations gathering in Japan this weekend for a conference on Afghanistan are expected to pledge a total $15 billion in development aid through 2015, a report said Thursday.
The Tokyo conference will bring together UN chief Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and senior officials from about 70 countries as well as international organisations.
The participants will commit to ensuring the sustainable development of Afghanistan during the so-called transformation decade of 2015-2024, Japan's Kyodo News said, citing unnamed diplomats.
A fundraising campaign is on track and the amount of aid is expected to be greater than initially hoped, Kyodo said, citing one of the diplomats involved in preparing for the one-day meeting on Sunday.
In exchange for the development aid, Afghanistan will promise to eradicate corruption, improve its legal system, strengthen its finances and carry out a range of other reforms, Kyodo said.
The reciprocal commitments will be mapped out in a document, titled "Mutual Accountability Framework", due to be released at the conference along with the "Tokyo Declaration", Kyodo said. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said this week his country needs a combined $3.9 billion from the international community every year to rebuild the economy starting from 2015, following the pullout of NATO forces.
Deadly Blasts at Afghan Oil and Gas Depot
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY and JAWAD SUKHANYAR July 4, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Powerful explosions of oil and gas tankers at a depot on the northeastern outskirts of Kabul devastated stores and homes on Wednesday and left at least three people dead and more than 80 injured, according to police and hospital officials.
The police said they had not identified the exact cause of the explosions, including whether it was accidental or related to terrorist activity.
The blasts hit midafternoon at the depot of the Haidarzada Gas and Oil Company and sent black clouds and flames billowing over the district, a mixture of residential areas and small compounds where some businesses are located.
Ambulances and fire rescue workers crowded the streets, helping the injured from buildings past broken glass, rubble and the charred remains of cars and tankers. “When we heard the bang and saw the flames I started running and didn’t know where to go,” said Ahmad Shah, a driver for a neighboring oil and gas company, who was lying in the back of an ambulance. “I don’t know how many are caught in there.”
The police were still searching the district on Wednesday evening, and said it was too early to give an accurate estimate of the casualties, although some officials said the death toll would be likely to rise.
“The area is completely under smoke and it is difficult for us and the rescue teams to search for people,” said Gen. Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, the Kabul chief of police. “We still don’t know if this was caused by the fuel tanker explosions or if it was related to any terrorist activities.”
Mohammad Musa Zaher, general manager of nursing at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital in central Kabul, said that hospital alone had received 20 people who had been wounded and three people who had been killed in the fire and explosions.
In the latest in a worrying spate of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police officers on their coalition allies, an Afghan soldier opened fire on NATO soldiers in western Afghanistan, wounding five of them before fleeing, officials said.
In confirming the shooting, NATO coalition officials would not give details on the nationality of the wounded soldiers, but Afghan officials said they were American.
The attack took place on Tuesday afternoon in Wardak Province to the west of the capital, Kabul. Shahidullah Shahid, spokesman for the governor of Wardak, said the Afghan soldier entered a small NATO base near a village in the Sayed Abad district of Wardak before turning his gun on the American soldiers.
The latest attack comes only two days after three British soldiers were killed by a member of the Afghan police force in southern Helmand Province. Afghan soldiers and police officers have attacked American and other coalition counterparts with rising frequency even as the international forces, preparing for withdrawal, have been training them to fight on their own.
Afghan police officers or soldiers have so far killed 26 coalition service members this year, compared with 35 in all of 2011, according to the coalition. NATO officials blame tensions arising from cultural and other personal differences, not Taliban infiltration, for most of the shootings.
A Wardak official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly on the matter said the Afghan soldier was a member of the Afghan National Army and was from Kunduz Province.
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
Northern land routes to be crucial in U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan
The Washington Post By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung July 4, 2012
Even with the reopening of critical supply routes through Pakistan, the U.S. military confronts a mammoth logistical challenge to wind down the war in Afghanistan, where it must withdraw nearly 90,000 troops and enormous depots of military equipment accumulated over the past decade.
Assuming Pakistan doesn’t seal its border again, U.S. and NATO commanders still face the prospect of pulling out at least a third of the cargo from northern Afghanistan on a winding, makeshift network of railways and roads that cross the former Soviet Union.
Those routes carry strategic risks of their own. Access to the transit lines depends on the whims of several authoritarian Central Asian leaders as well as Russian President Vladi¬mir Putin, a longtime nemesis of NATO. Moreover, the cost of shipping goods along the northern routes is about triple that of the much-shorter Pakistani lines.
The only other option for departing landlocked Afghanistan is by air — an even more expensive alternative, costing up to 10 times as much as the Pakistani ground routes.
All told, U.S. military logisticians are preparing to bring home 100,000 shipping containers stuffed with materiel and 50,000 wheeled vehicles by the end of 2014, when U.S. and NATO combat operations are scheduled to cease.
The U.S. military has increasingly relied on the supply lines that cross the former Soviet Union to deliver cargo into Afghanistan since those routes opened in 2009.
After Pakistan sealed its border in November to protest a U.S. airstrike that killed 24 of its soldiers, the U.S. military shifted about 60 percent of its supply shipments to the northern routes, with the remainder arriving in the war zone by air. Although delivery disruptions were largely avoided, the move resulted in extra expenses of about $100 million a month.
The importance of the northern routes will become even more acute when the traffic is reversed. By the end of September, 23,000 U.S. troops are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan, along with a commensurate amount of materiel.
At first, Russia and several Central Asian countries approved deals that let the Pentagon and NATO deliver “nonlethal” supplies — no ammunition or armored vehicles — into Afghanistan, but provided no mechanism to withdraw the equipment. They also opened their airspace for transport planes carrying troops.
The deals “focused on the needs of entry and didn’t address the needs of exiting,” said Martha Brill Olcott, a Central Asia specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “All of this changed after Pakistan closed down.”
Over the past several months, the Obama administration and NATO have signed two-way transit deals with many of the former Soviet republics. But negotiations continue over a host of side issues, including alternate routes, access to airspace and airports, tariffs and restrictions on what kinds of military cargo are eligible for shipment.
“These countries know it’s the last chance, it’s the last negotiation, so they’re going to squeeze very hard,” said Alexander Cooley, a Barnard College professor and expert on U.S. military relations in Central Asia. “They can escalate their demands in the confidence that this is a one-off transaction.”
Even with Pakistan reopening its border, the northern routes are seen as a vital hedge against a Pakistani change of heart.
From Afghanistan’s north, there are two primary ways out: either by rail into Uzbekistan or by road into Tajikistan. Both are authoritarian countries with checkered human rights records.
Beyond that, shipping convoys — which are run by private companies — must cross Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, with most of the land routes then entering Russia before zigzagging to ports in Siberia or on the Baltic Sea.
Negotiating with the Central Asians has often been as difficult as with Pakistan, according to U.S. and NATO officials. The countries distrust, compete with and often try to sabotage each other while simultaneously seeking to exact more concessions from Washington and its allies.
“They all want to play against each other,” said a senior NATO official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced last month that the alliance had forged agreements with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to allow for the withdrawal of equipment from Afghanistan.
A NATO spokeswoman declined to release details of the accords, such as transit fees, but acknowledged that weapons and ammunition are still prohibited cargo on the northern land routes.
NATO remains in talks with Russia about establishing an air hub in the city of Ulyanovsk — Lenin’s birthplace — that would accept rail shipments from Central Asia and then load the containers onto Europe-bound cargo planes.
Vice Adm. Mark D. Harnitchek, a senior U.S. military logistician who was instrumental in setting up the northern routes, said he was confident the network would remain reliable during the withdrawal.
“If you were going to design a system to come into Afghanistan, you wouldn’t do it from the north, but it’s proven to be robust,” Harnitchek, director of the Defense Logistics Agency, told reporters last week. “Those countries have all been remarkably cooperative.”
But many haven’t hesitated to exploit their bargaining power to make special demands.
In April, for example, military officials from Kyrgyzstan asked Marine Gen. James Mattis, the head of the U.S. Central Command, whether the Pentagon would be willing to donate drones after its departure from Afghanistan. Mattis was noncommittal, saying he would forward the request to Washington, according to a report of the encounter by Radio Free Europe.
Meanwhile, Uzbekistan has sought to capi¬tal¬ize on its status as the only country with a major rail link to Afghanistan by seeking a 50 percent surcharge on shipments leaving the war zone — insisting on a premium over what its neighbors earn.
“Everybody wants to up the prices,” Olcott said. “The Kazakhs complain that the Uzbeks get much better terms.”
She said the same regional rivalries have emerged when Washington has sought to compensate countries with used military equipment instead of cash.
“The Uzbeks complain about the Tajiks, or the Kazakhs about Kyrgyzstan, that it will just give them weapons they can effectively use against their neighbors, or against trouble in their own country.”
Afghanistan’s Mineral Wealth Could Be a Bonanza—or Lead to Disaster
Scientists have discovered a treasure trove of coal, natural gas, oil, and other mineral wealth under Afghanistan’s dusty earth. It could be just what the battered nation needs as Western donors leave—but exploiting it could lead to economic and environmental disaster.
The Daily Beast By Dr. Cheryl Benard Jul 4, 2012
Before Afghanistan exploded into the headlines in 2001, average Americans barely knew that such a country even existed. Its violent discovery was followed by an enormous wave of good will and lots of money, as the U.S., other Western governments, and countless private citizens strove to assist this long-suffering nation, building schools and clinics, encouraging the downtrodden women, erasing the dark traces of Taliban oppression, and working to lift Afghanistan into a brighter present.
But after more than 10 aggravating, exorbitantly expensive and violent years, the world has pretty much had it with Afghanistan. Now, the pressing desire is to cobble together some sort of status quo that will allow everyone to get out as expeditiously as possible. Afghan security forces are nearly ready to replace the departing foreign troops. The remaining challenge is financial. The Afghan government is almost totally funded by the subsidies of donor governments, a situation that clearly is unsustainable. The U.S. government believes it has found the solution.
Working from data generated by the Russians during their own unhappy tenure in this country, the U.S. Geological Survey was thrilled to announce that below the rocks and dust of Afghanistan lies an almost unbelievable trove of treasure, mineral wealth in the unimaginable billions. Coal. Natural gas. Oil. Copper. Not to mention rare elements such as lanthanum, cerium, and neodymium, essential to modern technology and commanding high prices. Mining was going to be the silver bullet, and it needed to commence immediately to start the flow of revenue into Kabul’s soon-to-be-empty coffers. Afghanistan, the new Saudi Arabia, the next Dubai, an Aladdin’s treasure spilling forth from its sparse terrain? There is an old saying that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Well, it is in fact true that the unique geology of Afghanistan has endowed the country with vast mineral deposits. It is also true that these hold great promise. But they don’t amount to a silver bullet—and if forced to serve as such, there is a serious risk that this bullet will go astray.
At a high-level expert meeting convened by ARCH (the Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage) and the Central Asia Caucasus Institute at SAIS/Johns Hopkins, mining engineers and geologists warned that unless extreme care and caution are exercised in the implementation of its mining, Afghanistan could face an environmental disaster on a scale that would vastly overstrain the abilities of its government to contain. This on top of the other significant risk, namely that in light of its poverty, underdevelopment, continuing instability, and weak rule of law, its mineral wealth could easily turn into a mineral curse.
This has happened time and again to countries in comparable political circumstances, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But even were Afghanistan miraculously able to suddenly end its huge and endemic corruption, subdue its regional warlords, extend the ability of the central government to control events and collect revenue from far-flung provinces and defeat the Taliban—which at the moment still holds sway over many of the areas richest in the above-named minerals—the environmental risks still remain, and they are considerable.
Case in point, the ancient Buddhist ruins of Mes Aynak, which was the specific focus of the expert group’s deliberations. Located 20 kilometers outside Kabul, a city densely inhabited by 3.5 million people, this is the site of an incipient major copper-mining project. One of the world’s largest copper deposits is fatefully intertwined with this major heritage site, a sprawling urban complex encompassing several Buddhist monasteries, fortresses, and fortifications, and commercial and residential areas, with lower strata that may go back as far as the Bronze Age and before.
In 2009, in its rush to riches, the Afghan government gave a Chinese mining company (MCC) the contract, and for terms that are causing pained shudders to those in the know. The inexperienced Afghan ministry may have thought $800 million to be a spectacular lot of money—and the alleged $30 million bribe to the then minister of mines may have played a part—but at 50 or 60 years’ worth of multibillion-dollar annual exploitation of this enormous deposit, it puts the purchase of Manhattan for a fistful of shiny beads into the shade, as great—or bad—deals go.
That, however, is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that a copper mine, absent scrupulous management and oversight, can become a liability of catastrophic proportions. Looking at Afghanistan’s past four decades, we may think that things can hardly get any worse. But yes, they can. Mes Aynak sits atop the two principal aquifers not only for Kabul, but for a vast region extending into neighboring Pakistan. Improper mining could kill the Kabul River and poison the aquifer for generations to come. It could create, instead of wealth, what experts term a “Superfund Site”—a failed site whose cleanup is so costly and so complicated that the mining company departs in disgrace while the national government (and the term assumes a functioning and funded Western national government, not an utterly bankrupt one) is left to deal with the toxic disaster.
Of course, this need not happen in Mes Aynak. Perhaps the Chinese mining company will proceed with scrupulous care. Perhaps the Afghan authorities will provide competent professional oversight. But our experts were worried, because a bare five months before the announced commencement of mining in 2013, no environmental impact plan had yet been developed by MCC, and there has been zero transparency regarding the feasibility studies, the mine-opening plan, the mine-closing plan, or indeed, even the basic guarantees that might or might not be contained in the contract, which in contravention of international standards and conventions to which Afghanistan is a signatory; neither the mining company nor the Ministry of Mines has thus far shared those with the public.
The worst of it is that a copper mine, absent scrupulous management and oversight, can become a liability of catastrophic proportions.
The planned destruction of the historic site is a good example of the precipitous, reckless approach being chosen, because the expert group found that preserving the site and mining could readily go forward in conjunction.
Literally on top of it all, Mes Aynak also is home to a world-class archeological site, a massive buried city on a par with Pompeii that will give way to an open mining pit and be forever lost to historians, scientists, proud Afghans, and potential future tourists.
That silver bullet? Please, let’s not allow haste, dreams of mineral miracles, and fiscal panic to turn it into the killing shot that finishes off Afghanistan as we leave.
Dr. Cheryl Benard is a writer based in Washington, D.C., and the president of The Bamiyan Project, a non-profit organization that supports cultural activists in areas of conflict and post-conflict. From 2001 until 2009, she was the director of the Alternative Strategies Initiative at the RAND Corporation. Her book publications include Civil Democratic Islam, Women in Nation-Building, and the forthcoming Behind the Wire, Detainee Operations in Iraq.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Can turning Taliban foot soldiers turn the Afghan war?
Reuters By Missy Ryan and Hamid Shalizi Wed Jul 4, 2012
KABUL - Former Taliban fighter Mullah Rassoul is a man with few friends.
After he joined a NATO-backed program to pacify lower-level insurgents this year, he says he was harassed by a government-supported militia in his area of north Afghanistan.
He considered rejoining his former Taliban comrades, but they see him as a traitor. "They said I had to prove my loyalty by killing foreigners or high-ranking Afghans," Rassoul said.
"I used to have respect, money and weapons," the former insurgent, a soft-spoken, bearded 36-year-old, told Reuters. "Now, I can't even defend myself."
As Western hopes for a peace deal with Taliban leaders fade, questions are mounting about how far a NATO scheme to entice foot soldiers to switch sides, now a mainstay of the West's political strategy in Afghanistan, can go toward ending a long insurgent war.
David Hook, the British major general who heads NATO efforts to sign up local Taliban fighters to a three-step program that gives them training, community grants and amnesty for some crimes, said the so-called reintegration plan had recruited some 4,700 people since October 2010, mostly in areas of western and northern Afghanistan beyond the Taliban insurgency's core.
While NATO commanders say the program has begun to accelerate, other Western officials are skeptical of the latest attempt to demobilize fighters whose motives and circumstances are as diverse, and at times opaque, as Afghanistan itself.
"It has had a tactical effect in some areas, but it is irrelevant to the outcome of the war," one Western official said on condition of anonymity.
While even the drive's proponents acknowledge it is not a 'game-changer,' they say it has the potential to trim the ranks of a militant group NATO estimates has 15,000 to 30,000 members.
"It's our job to effectively reduce the fighting power of the insurgency," Hook said in an interview.
Whether it can do so becomes a more pressing question as NATO nations prepare to withdraw most combat troops by the end of 2014, possibly weakening incentives to enter the program, and as the United States struggles to restart a parallel peace process with the Taliban's reclusive leaders.
Despite the reservations, Western officials say the program, which costs a relatively modest sum of about $100 million a year, could help end violence on the ground if high-level talks resume.
The Obama administration's hopes for soon establishing peace talks between the government of President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban faded in March when the Taliban leadership, believed to be based in Pakistan, suspended their participation in the preliminary discussions run by U.S. diplomats.
"If there is a breakthrough at the top, there will be a huge torrent of lower-level fighters coming in," the Western official said. "We've got to be ready."
AVOIDING A REPEAT OF HISTORY?
Hook said efforts to settle local grievances that may have pushed Afghans to join the insurgency, such as land or tribal disputes, differed from previous attempts to turn Taliban back into ordinary villagers.
Afghanistan's recent past is as littered with efforts to demobilize fighters as it is with messy civil conflicts that begot them. The government of Soviet-backed leader Najibullah, for example, claimed to have reintegrated tens of thousands of fighters in the 1980s - not long before a vicious civil war broke out in which rival militias gutted the capital, Kabul.
Since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, a series of U.N. and Afghan programs have aimed to break up militias and collect vast sums of weaponry. Despite the best intentions, the war has grinded on and violence has escalated dramatically after 2006.
Hook said the novelty of the current initiative, officially run by the Afghan government with support from the NATO-led international force, included community aid grants designed to ensure an ex-fighter's tribe and neighbors welcome him back.
Fighters are also paid a stipend of $120 for several months and receive education and vocation training, but they are not guaranteed long-term work. Their motivation, NATO asserts, must be to return home "with their honor and dignity intact".
At the program's heart is the NATO assumption - which skeptics question - that the vast majority of Taliban take up arms for reasons other than ideology, such as the need for employment or a desire to settle local disputes.
Maqsoom Tajik, an insurgent commander who switched sides in Kunduz province five months ago, said he left the Taliban after militant leaders ordered him to conduct assassinations and sabotage public places, acts that could kill civilians.
"I wanted to wage jihad against the foreigners, but not that," he said. "Now I sleep in peace, without worrying my house will be raided" by Afghan and NATO forces.
Yet Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denied a single true Taliban insurgent had signed up to lay down arms.
"The Taliban are fighting for a cause and will never go to the government side," he said. "The government's game is to bring in people and assign them Taliban names."
The program has been less successful in areas like Helmand and Kandahar, traditional Taliban hotbeds, and in parts of eastern Afghanistan where insurgents operate with greater impunity. In volatile Paktika province, bordering Pakistan, just one fighter has signed up to date.
Mark Jacobson, a former senior NATO official who is now at the German Marshall Fund, a Washington think tank, said the program had helped halt concerns about deteriorating security in northern and western Afghanistan.
"Reintegration of low level fighters - no matter where - is a positive step," he said.
NO U-TURN?
While NATO believes only five fighters have rejoined the insurgency, Afghanistan's history of fleeting alliances raises questions about how long such arrangements will hold.
The risks facing fighters who switch sides is enormous.
"How can you lure the foot soldiers if you're still killing their commanders?" asked Sayed Mohammad Akbar Agha, an influential former Taliban whose cousin, Tayeb Agha, has represented the Taliban leadership in talks with U.S. diplomats.
Asadullah Amarkhil, an official from the provincial High Peace Council in northern Kunduz, said four former Taliban commanders had been killed in the last several months, just weeks after joining the program. "There is little protection for members of the Taliban who join the government," Amerkhil said. "If things remain as they are, we won't be able to encourage them into reintegration."
Hook said that "isolated cases of disgruntled re-integrees" such as that of Rassoul do not detract from the program's record.
Agha, who wears the long beard common among Taliban, warned that recruitment of low-level fighters may undermine efforts to revive high-level peace talks, by fuelling suspicions that Western brokers want only to split militant ranks.
The Obama administration hopes the Taliban will end its suspension of initial talks, and the Afghan government has undertaken outreach of its own with Taliban representatives. But even supporters acknowledge the peace gambit is a long shot.
Ahead of the gradual Western exit from Afghanistan, however, there are no signs that donors will withdraw support for a program they hope might improve security at the margins - and has a small chance of a much larger payoff.
"If - and I say if - the reintegration process really takes off, or if the (high-level) reconciliation process takes off, those two things could be very, very significant," a senior figure in the NATO-led coalition said. That "could shift that equilibrium quite markedly in the direction we need it to go."
(Additional reporting by Rob Taylor in KABUL and Mohammed Hamed in KUNDUZ; Editing by Michael Georgy and Jeremy Laurence)
Troops kill 27 insurgents in Afghanistan: gov't
KABUL, July 5 (Xinhua) -- Afghan army and police, backed by the NATO-led coalition troops, have eliminated 27 Taliban insurgents and detained 16 others during operations within the past 24 hours, the Afghan Interior Ministry said on Thursday morning.
"The joint forces carried out six cleanup operations in Baghlan, Kandahar, Wardak, Paktia, Farah and Helmand provinces and one more armed Taliban insurgent was injured during the raids," the ministry said in a statement providing daily operational updates to media.
They also found and seized weapons and explosives, the statement said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
The Taliban insurgent group, which stepped up their attacks on Afghan and NATO-led troops since an annual spring offensive was launched in May in the war-ravaged country, has yet to make comments.
The Afghan forces and some 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops have intensified cleanup operations against insurgents recently. More than 200 insurgents have been killed, 15 wounded and over 50 others detained since Sunday by the joint forces, according to figures released by the Afghan Interior Ministry.
Afghan Local Police group deserts to Taliban-led insurgents
The Washington Post By Sayed Salahuddin July 4, 2012
KABUL - A group of Afghan militia troops has joined the Taliban-led insurgents, officials said on Wednesday, apparently the first surrender of its kind by the force created as part of a U.S. initiative to keep the militants at bay and help break the battlefield stalemate.
There were few details and conflicting estimates about the number of men who changed sides in various parts of the restive northwestern Badghis province on Tuesday evening. One Afghan security official put the number at 41.
The force is known as the Afghan Local Police (ALP) and was set up under an initiative of the United States in 2010 during the peak of the war to help NATO coalition and Afghan troops prevent the influence and spread of the insurgency.
The ALP men who surrendered in Badghis were armed with assault rifles, said Ghulam Sarwar, a local lawmaker, citing a provincial official. Interior ministry and security officials confirmed the surrenders and the accounts provided by Sarwar.
“This [surrender] may not have a big impact on the security situation of the area, but raises doubts about the loyalties of those employed by Afghan Local Police,” Sarwar said.
The Taliban confirmed that the militia group had joined its ranks and put the number of surrendered men at 86.
The ALP, composed of men from the communities that they police, was seen by some Afghans as a successful effort in the fight against the Taliban.
But dozens of the ALP members have been killed in Taliban attacks in recent months in various parts of the country. Deadly attacks against foreign troops by some men serving in the Afghan security forces have been on the rise, but there has been no report of such an act by ALP members against the NATO and U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
While there have been cases of desertions and surrender by Afghan regular police and national army troops to the Taliban, there seems to be no precedent for ALP forces to swap sides. If the numbers are confirmed, it would be the largest single such incident.
The ALP has more than 10,000 members. It covers mostly the southern and eastern regions where the Taliban are heavily active. Although it has been praised by supporters, the force’s ranks include some men accused of war crimes and other abuses.
Salahuddin is a special correspondent.
8 Afghan Taliban rebels detained in southern province
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, July 5 (Xinhua) -- A total of eight Taliban rebels were arrested in southern Afghan province of Helmand, the provincial police chief said on Thursday.
"Afghan police, backed by army, detained eight Taliban insurgents during two search operations in Garmsir and Naw Zad districts late on Wednesday," Mohammad Nabi Elham told reporters here.
He said the captured insurgents were responsible for direct attacks against security forces and placing homemade bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in the province, 555 km south of capital Kabul.
The joint forces also found and seized four AK-47 guns, two RP- G rockets, a pistol, four IEDs as well as IED components during the raids, the police chief said, adding no member of the security force were injured during the operations.
The Taliban insurgent group, which stepped up their attacks on Afghan and NATO-led troops since an annual spring offensive was launched on May 3 in the war-ravaged country, has yet to make comments.
A woman was killed and three others including a child were injured in an IED blast in Helmand on Wednesday.
The Afghan forces and some 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops have intensified cleanup operations against insurgents recently. More than 200 insurgents have been killed, 15 wounded and over 50 others detained since Sunday by the joint forces, according to figures released by the Afghan Interior Ministry.
Woman, children beheaded in Afghan "honour killing"
Reuters By Mirwais Harooni Wed Jul 4, 2012
KABUL - A 30-year-old woman and two of her children were beheaded overnight in Afghanistan's east, police said, in what appeared to be the latest in a rapidly growing trend of so-called honour killings.
Police said they suspected the woman Serata's divorced husband of barging into her house in the capital of Ghazni province and murdering her, alongside their eight-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter.
"The children saw the killer take their mother's head off, so he killed them too," a local policeman told Reuters, adding that the attacker had spared Sereta's two-year-old daughter.
Activists say there has been a sharp rise in violent attacks on women in Afghanistan over the past year.
They blame President Hamid Karzai's waning attention to women's rights as his government prepares for the exit of most foreign troops in 2014 and seeks to negotiate with the Taliban, Afghanistan's former Islamist rulers.
Excluding Serata's beheading, there have been 16 cases of "honour killings" recorded across the country over March and April, the first two months of the Afghan new year, according to Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).
This compares to the 20 cases recorded for all of last year, said commissioner Suraya Subhrang, blaming increased insecurity and weak rule of law for the sharp rise. Since AIHRC started recording such killings in 2001, there have never been more than 20 cases a year.
"And there are many that go unreported. Men make a quick decision in their own courts to kill a girl and hold a prayer for her the next day," Subhrang told Reuters.
Serata divorced her husband Mohammad Arif, 38, a year ago after enduring almost a decade of domestic abuse, said Shukria Wali, head of Ghazni's department of women's affairs, which is attached to the ministry in Kabul.
Police said they were still hunting for Arif. Violent crimes against women often go unpunished in Afghanistan, with activists blaming police carelessness, corruption and a growing atmosphere of impunity.
Officers investigating the case described it as an honour killing - a phrase used to describe the murder of mostly women and girls by people who accuse them of besmirching a family's reputation.
Afghan women have won back basic rights in education, voting and work since the austere rule of the Taliban was toppled just over a decade ago, though fear now mounts that freedoms will be traded away as Kabul and Washington seek talks with the Islamist group to secure a peaceful end to the war.
Donors are expected to commit just under $4 billion in development aid annually to Afghanistan at a summit in Tokyo on Sunday, though the European Union - the biggest contributor - has said maintaining its support will be difficult if women's rights are not protected.
During its five-year reign, the Taliban banned women from most work, denied them the right to vote and ordered that they wear a head-to-toe burqa when out of the house.
Despite more than 10 years of war and billions of dollars in foreign aid, the country remains desperately poor. Female illiteracy rates in rural areas are above 90 percent and child marriages are still widespread despite being illegal. (Writing by Amie Ferris-Rotman; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
First NATO container crosses Pakistan border into Afghanistan after 7 months
ISLAMABAD, July 5 (Xinhua) -- The first container, carrying supplies for NATO forces in Afghanistan, on Thursday crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border three days after Pakistan unblocked the supply line, officials said.
The container entered Afghanistan via Chaman, a border city in Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province, after custom clearance, border official Fazal Bari said.
He said that the first container carried food and mineral water for the foreign forces. Two other containers had been waiting for custom clearance and could be allowed to cross the border point any time.
These containers had been parked at Chaman when Pakistan closed the NATO supply line in November last year. Many other containers had been sent back after the ban had been imposed.
Pakistan closed the NATO supply line in protest against the killing of its 24 soldiers in a NATO airstrike on border posts seven months ago. The supply line was restored on Tuesday after U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized for the deaths of Pakistani security personnel.
Thousands of other NATO trucks and oil containers are waiting for permission at the southern Pakistani border city of Karachi, officials said. They will shortly be allowed to leave for Afghanistan via Chaman and Torkham, border town in northwest Pakistan.
Officials told Xinhua that arrangements to allow NATO trucks have also been made at Torkham in Khyber tribal region.
The custom officials at the Chaman border point have made all arrangements for the full-fledged resumption of NATO supplies in a couple of days, and the federal government has issued directives to the border officials and custom authorities to make preparations for sending NATO trucks across the border into Afghanistan.
Authorities in Balochistan province said they have sought help of the federal government for the security of NATO trucks on the 700-kilometer route between Chaman and Karachi.
A provincial official, Nasibullah Barzai, said the provincial government has conveyed to the central government its inability to deal with the security of NATO containers.
Suspected militants had carried out many attacks on NATO trucks and oil containers in the past, torching hundreds of vehicles, which had also caused casualties to drivers and civilians.
Pakistani Interior Advisor Rehman Malik has briefed Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf about the security measures for NATO containers, and issued instructions to the provincial authorities to ensure security for the NATO convoys.
Draft Media Law Not Rejected, But Postponed
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 04 July 2012
Afghanistan's Ministry of Information and Culture said that the time period for approving the latest draft of a new media law was extended for two weeks to allow for more feedback, contrary to earlier reports that it had been rejected.
Speaking on the phone from US late Tuesday night, the Minister of Information and Culture Sayed Makhdoom Raheen said that the "draft will be reviewed after [further] public comment", adding that this would happen in two weeks.
Earlier Tuesday evening, the Deputy Information Minister Din Mohammad Mubariz Rashidi had said that the draft was rejected, following backlash from civil rights and media groups.
Most vocal among the opposing groups was Human Rights Watch (HRW) which lobbied the Afghan government to withdraw the bill during the initial feedback process.
HRW said the new laws would limit the gains made to free speech since the 2001 US-led invasion brought down the Taliban.
"Press freedom has been one of Afghanistan's most important success stories since 2001," HRW Asia director Brad Adams said in a statement on Monday.
"The Afghan government should be acting to solidify media gains, not seeking to placate forces hostile to free expression," he said.
The HRW statement said that provisions in the bill, which would replace a 2009 media law, undermine free expression and increase government control.
It acknowledged that the 2009 media law could be improved, including by revising overly broad and vague limits on speech, particularly relating to religion, and giving greater independence to government-sponsored media.
The proposed law, however, leaves all of these restrictions in place while creating a new set of barriers to free speech, and should be withdrawn, it said.
Andrew Mitchell says Afghanistan needs long term aid commitments
Hard-won gains made by British troops in Afghanistan risk being lost if the international donors fail to make long term aid commitments to the country, Andrew Mitchell, the Development Secretary, warned on Wednesday.
Telegraph.co.uk By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent 04 Jul 2012
Donor countries meeting in Tokyo this weekend should "face up" to their responsibilities in the so-called "transformation decade" that will begin when the last Nato combat troops leave at the end of 2014, he said.
Mr Mitchell, who returned on Wednesday from a two-day trip to Afghanistan, paid tribute to the "extraordinary valour" of British troops in Afghanistan.
His visit coincided with the killing of two Welsh Guards and a warrant officer from the Royal Corps of Signals in a "dreadful green on blue" incident when an Afghan in police uniform opened fire on his Nato mentors. Five Nato troops were injured in a similar incident near Kabul on Wednesday.
In a stark warning against the dangers of faltering international commitment, Mr Mitchell raised the spectre of the former Afghan communist president Mohammad Najibullah, who was castrated and killed by the Taliban in 1996 after the Soviet withdrawal.
"In this context it should not be forgotten that the reason the regime of Najibullah ended with him hanging from a lamp post is not because he was defeated militarily but because the Russians stopped paying the bills," said Mr Mitchell, adding that "the point of Tokyo is to ensure that isn't the case" in the future.
The Afghan government needs to be reassured by the Tokyo conference, which will be attended by 70 countries and world bodies, that it would not be "deserted" by the international community following the transition of security to Afghan security forces.
"No one should be in any doubt that if you want this to be a success, the international community has got to demonstrate that it will be different from what it was for Najibullah, that the international community recognises that not to focus on this would endanger the gains that we have already made," he said.
"I am very conscious when I meet the brilliant men and women of our armed forces who are putting their lives in danger and in harm's way on our behalf that we are there in Afghanistan to protect our national security and that the gains that they have made must not be lost because the international community does not face up to its responsibilities afterwards," he said.
The international community needed to make a commitment of "not much below" $4 billion (£2.5 billion) a year overall until 2017 and to ensure its support remained strong until 2025. That would represent a decline of roughly 35 per cent from current levels of aid.
Britain has led the global fund-raising effort, becoming the first state to commit to providing a specific amount of aid – its current level of £178 million a year – until 2017.
Germany and the five Scandinavian countries have made similar promises, but despite strenuous efforts by Mr Mitchell, the United States, Japan and major European powers have yet to follow suit, leading to fears that money pledged at the weekend may not materialise in full.
The US has halved its aid budget this year, but it will foot most of the estimated $4 billion annual bill for the Afghan security forces after 2014.
The strength of the Government's aid commitment was welcomed by Oxfam, which has a strong presence in Afghanistan.
Louise Hancock, head of policy and advocacy in Kabul, said: "We welcome the leadership shown by the UK in committing aid money to Afghanistan: now other donors need to follow suit.
"To avoid wasting years of donor investments, funded by tax payers across the world, all donors need to step up efforts to entrench the gains that have been made so far, like getting 2.7 million girls enrolled in school.
"If the international community's commitment to Afghanistan falters, the progress Afghan men and women have worked so hard for over the last decade will slip away."
Afghanistan: Intimations of a future peace
Even in a country ravaged by terror and political myopia, there is still reason to hope for the future, says author.
Aljazeera By Robert Grenier, Former CIA station chief Robert Grenier heads ERG partners, a financial consultancy firm. 04 Jul 2012
It would seem that there has been little news generated in south-central Asia over the past 10 days to inspire optimism for the future. Violence on both sides of the Durand Line, often mindless and reflexive, continues unabated. The governments of the key protagonists - Afghanistan, the US, and Pakistan - nominally interested in finding political solutions to the region's conflicts, remain gridlocked, internally and externally, unable to see beyond the impasses their current policies have made for them.
Among other more routine atrocities, 17 Pakistani troops reportedly were beheaded in Upper Dir, along the Afghan border, victims of the rapacious Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, which operates increasingly from safe havens in Afghanistan. Ten Afghan policemen killed in normally quiescent Herat added their grim statistics to those registered in attacks in Helmand, in Kunduz, and on the outskirts of Kabul. Continued drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas elicited objections in North and South Waziristan from militant tribal leaders who decided to reinforce their respective messages by holding their own children hostage to preventable disease, refusing to permit polio immunisations until the strikes are halted.
Mounting evidence that cross-border militancy works in both directions, rather than reinforcing common cause between the Americans and Pakistanis, mired them further in bloody-minded recrimination, as the US refused to jointly pursue the infamous Mullah Fazlullah, responsible for the above-described beheadings, until Pakistan accedes to NATO demands that it attack militant safe havens in North Waziristan. Such controversies, meanwhile, made little apparent impression on Pakistan's civilian politicians and jurists, locked as they were in an operatic struggle which threatens to make the Pakistani premiership resemble a revolving door. And about Afghan President Karzai's recent statements concerning the importance of anti-corruption and good governance, well, perhaps the less said, the better.
And yet, also over the past 10 days, there have been a couple of welcome indications, from perhaps unlikely sources, that eventual progress towards a sustainable political solution in south-central Asia may be possible. It is not an accident that these developments did not involve Americans, and that they served to flesh out the views of parties strongly opposed to the US presence in Afghanistan. Together, however, they reinforce the notion held by many who, like this observer, support American goals but lament American strategy, that a much-reduced American presence in Afghanistan will do much to aid the cause of both peace and stability there.
On June 20 and 21, a number of representatives of Afghan political factions and civil society groups, including the High Peace Council, met informally in Paris for open-ended discussions. Although no formal Taliban members were there, individuals deemed credible by them and capable of explaining their views, such as Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, were present. Official American commentators, speaking as usual under a veil of anonymity, were quick to downplay the significance of these discussions - and in terms of the conventional political negotiations envisioned by the Americans, they were right. Indeed, much of the commentary on this meeting from all sides, focussing as it has on whether the gathering demonstrates a change in Taliban policy to permit official contacts with the Afghan government, is frankly beside the point. Of far greater significance were the topics discussed, which apparently focussed on changes to the Afghan Constitution and electoral laws, and on other mea
ns of promoting a decentralisation of power - none of which, tellingly, is remotely on the American agenda.
A separate meeting held in Kyoto, Japan, on June 27 was, if anything, even more interesting, including as it did Qari Din Muhammad, a member of the Taliban political office, who made the following statement concerning political reconciliation: "We will join the economy, and join the politics for all the Afghan people. But if there is any American, a single one, we cannot join the government."
Not having participated in either of these confabs, and so having little feel for the context in which various points were made or topics discussed, it is hard for me to judge their full significance. But they do suggest how a practical political solution in Afghanistan might evolve. The Taliban has, until now, refused to negotiate with anyone but the Americans, and from their perspective, quite reasonably so. As even American officials will candidly admit, they have been the primary combatants in the current conflict, with much at stake - which is why they have agreed in the past to bilateral talks unencumbered by official Afghan involvement. Indeed, for much of the past seven years or so, Afghanistan, to the Americans at least, has been a US project, in which their supposed Afghan allies were often an inconvenient afterthought. It should not be surprising, then, that the Taliban would share a similar view: Why deal with the puppet, when it is possible to deal with the puppet-master?
The significance of the Taliban's new willingness to engage with their Afghan adversaries in the Paris and Kyoto meetings is not that it represents a change in their basic policy. It does not. Instead, it suggests that the Taliban leadership can foresee a time in the near future when, one way or another, the Americans are no longer the main protagonists in Afghanistan. They surely harbour the hope, and perhaps even the expectation, that the Americans will depart Afghanistan altogether, perhaps soon after 2014. Their hope is probably a vain one. A sovereign post-2014 Afghan government will have every right to invite a small continuing US military presence under the new Strategic Partnership Agreement, and every practical reason for doing so as it confronts the Taliban. The difference will be that the US presence will be subordinate to, and supportive of, the Afghans - and not the other way around, as it has been to date. In any case, the Taliban will have to deal with the Kabul regime one way or another, and t
hey realise it. The question is: on what terms, and to what ends?
Thus the statement from Qari Din Muhammad, while surely not a formal policy pronouncement, may nonetheless be highly significant as a reflection of the Taliban's mode of thinking. The good qari is right: There will be no room, for the foreseeable future, nor any genuine desire on the part of the Taliban to participate in some sort of coalition government with the political forces represented by the Kabul regime. A potentially realisable goal, however, would be overt and legitimate Taliban participation in the political, economic and socio-religious life of the country at a local and provincial level, in those areas where the Taliban has natural weight and standing. In that context, the topics discussed in Paris are not just significant, but crucial to the future of the country. If Afghanistan is to develop any measure of peace and stability, it will have to unburden itself of the albatross represented by its current, over-centralising constitution, and will have to create the political space at the district and provincial levels necessary to permit the Taliban's incremental re-engagement in the legitimate governance of the country.
It will require much time and effort to create the conditions for the various political forces in Afghanistan to find their own levels, and to develop the opportunity, to say nothing of the motivation, to pursue their goals through peaceful rather than violent means. But even in an environment currently characterised by terror and political myopia, we can still see some reason to hope for such a future, as Afghans of all stripes take political matters into their own hands. The rapid drawdown of US and NATO forces, even if currently carried out in pursuit of a misguided and unsustainable policy, and even if insufficient by itself, nonetheless will help set the conditions to make a sustainable, Afghan-led peace process possible.
Former CIA station chief Robert Grenier heads ERG partners, a financial consultancy firm.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
At Barbecue, Signs of a U.S. Apology
Wall Street Journal By ADAM ENTOUS and TOM WRIGHT 04 june, 2012
Shortly after a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Chicago in May, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington shuttled between the State Department and White House, pressing for an apology for the deaths of 24 Pakistani troops in a clash on the Afghan border in November.
The ambassador, Sherry Rehman, said it was the only way to get Islamabad to reopen the alliance's supply routes through Pakistan to Afghanistan.
The Obama administration's message to Mrs. Rehman at the time, as delivered by Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides and others, was: "It isn't going to happen," according to officials involved in the discussions.
In the weeks that followed, however, the White House had a change of heart. Officials said the shift came in a flurry of meetings—and was signaled to Pakistan by National Security Adviser Tom Donilon's appearance at a backyard barbecue hosted by Mrs. Rehman.
On Tuesday, ending an agonizing, seven-month debate within the Obama administration, the White House authorized Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to proceed. That day, she told her Pakistani counterpart, "We are sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military."
Pakistani officials made clear the apology was sufficient. On Wednesday, Pakistan's cabinet approved the decision to immediately reopen NATO's supply routes.
The shift by the White House was driven by several pressing issues, U.S. officials said: the mounting cost of using alternative routes, fears the closures would complicate a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and by the Pentagon's need for Pakistan's cooperation in fighting militants.
On June 13, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told Congress the border closure was costing the Pentagon an extra $100 million a month. Surprised lawmakers pressed the White House to reach a compromise, according to officials.
Administration officials said Pakistan's cooperation was critical to speeding the withdrawal of heavy equipment from Afghanistan, as well as to reviving stalled negotiations with the Taliban aimed at ending the war.
"Let's just get this done," said a senior Obama administration official of the White House's thinking. The White House dispatched Mr. Nides to Islamabad this past weekend with instructions to make it happen.
Officials said Mr. Donilon, the national-security adviser, played a key role in the shift, arguing for a compromise settlement acceptable to both sides.
In December, when the administration debated how to respond to the Nov. 26 incident, Mr. Donilon worked to block an apology, according to officials. In late June, Mr. Donilon surprised Pakistani officials by attending a barbecue dinner that Mrs. Rehman held under a tent at her residence in Washington.
Officials said his attendance was seen by the Pakistanis as a clear signal that the White House wanted to resolve the dispute and get the relationship back on track.
Mrs. Clinton and her top aides, officials said, have consistently urged an apology for U.S. mistakes in the name of improved relations. Officials said the White House came to realize that there was no way that Islamabad, in an election year in Pakistan, could reopen the routes without an apology to calm the irate Pakistani public and the military's rank and file.
U.S. officials said the apology by Mrs. Clinton also helped get the Pakistanis to drop demands for huge markups in NATO payments for each cargo container transiting Pakistani territory.
Officials said the word "sorry" was the solution that was acceptable to the Pakistanis.
The White House balked at authorizing Mrs. Clinton to use the word "apologize." U.S. officials said some senior White House advisers were concerned such language could be used by Republicans to cast Mr. Obama as an "apologizer-in-chief."
U.S. officials said the final language was far less than what Pakistani officials initially sought. Mrs. Clinton stopped short of taking responsibility for the deaths. The Pentagon says Pakistan was partly to blame for the incident.
Some in Pakistan picked up on this nuance. "The apology has not come," Enver Baig, a Pakistani opposition politician, said. " 'Sorry' is a very casual word."
Pakistan was pushed to accept the overture now because it needs U.S. financial support, said Mr. Baig. The U.S. is expected to transfer more than $1 billion in frozen military aid, a first installment on arrears that Islamabad says Washington owes.
By Tuesday, the standoff over the border crossings had become a symbol of Washington's troubled relations with Pakistan, a country that since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has become a sometimes difficult ally in the U.S. war on terrorism.
"It's definitely a very positive development," said Talat Masood, a former Pakistan army general. "There was a logjam and it's been broken."
Though the Pentagon said it could have weathered the border closing by using more costly alternative routes, other NATO allies were more dependent on the crossings through Pakistan and pressed the U.S. to cut a deal as soon as possible, officials said.
The Pentagon also softened its previous opposition to an apology in hopes that improved relations will allow for better coordination against militants.
As the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan shifts toward eastern provinces bordering Pakistan, the Pentagon has become increasingly alarmed about the role of the Haqqani network, a militant group with ties to Pakistani intelligence that is believed behind a string of attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces.
"Obviously cost was a factor, but more importantly was the need to get the relationship back on track so we can cooperate on a range of important issues including reconciliation and counterterrorism," an Obama administration official said.
The push to improve relations is particularly important for the White House now because "as we have fewer and fewer troops between now and 2014, we'd like to make progress on those [areas] while we have the best possible security footing," the official added.
More broadly, officials said they hoped the deal opening the border crossings will now clear the way for talks aimed at reaching a more sustainable joint approach to counterterrorism.
U.S. officials are concerned that Pakistani opposition will imperil a U.S. campaign against Pakistan-based militants using armed Central Intelligence Agency-piloted drones.
In the past, the U.S. and Pakistan shared intelligence and made lists of common militant targets, but that cooperation broke down over a series of controversial incidents beginning in early 2011.
"The whole thing we've been pushing for with the Pakistanis is to engage with them on a broader counterterrorism agenda that includes drones and intelligence sharing," a senior U.S. official said. "Now, I'm not sure that's possible, but until we talk to them we don't know."
Pakistan's military and civilian leaders are unlikely to support drone strikes, given popular sentiment, said Ayaz Amir, a Pakistani opposition politician and newspaper columnist. "Pakistan has a job of selling these things to the Pakistani public," he said.
Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com and Adam Entous at adam.entous@wsj.com
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
AFP July 5, 2012
TOKYO - Donor nations gathering in Japan this weekend for a conference on Afghanistan are expected to pledge a total $15 billion in development aid through 2015, a report said Thursday.
The Tokyo conference will bring together UN chief Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and senior officials from about 70 countries as well as international organisations.
The participants will commit to ensuring the sustainable development of Afghanistan during the so-called transformation decade of 2015-2024, Japan's Kyodo News said, citing unnamed diplomats.
A fundraising campaign is on track and the amount of aid is expected to be greater than initially hoped, Kyodo said, citing one of the diplomats involved in preparing for the one-day meeting on Sunday.
In exchange for the development aid, Afghanistan will promise to eradicate corruption, improve its legal system, strengthen its finances and carry out a range of other reforms, Kyodo said.
The reciprocal commitments will be mapped out in a document, titled "Mutual Accountability Framework", due to be released at the conference along with the "Tokyo Declaration", Kyodo said. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said this week his country needs a combined $3.9 billion from the international community every year to rebuild the economy starting from 2015, following the pullout of NATO forces.
Deadly Blasts at Afghan Oil and Gas Depot
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY and JAWAD SUKHANYAR July 4, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Powerful explosions of oil and gas tankers at a depot on the northeastern outskirts of Kabul devastated stores and homes on Wednesday and left at least three people dead and more than 80 injured, according to police and hospital officials.
The police said they had not identified the exact cause of the explosions, including whether it was accidental or related to terrorist activity.
The blasts hit midafternoon at the depot of the Haidarzada Gas and Oil Company and sent black clouds and flames billowing over the district, a mixture of residential areas and small compounds where some businesses are located.
Ambulances and fire rescue workers crowded the streets, helping the injured from buildings past broken glass, rubble and the charred remains of cars and tankers. “When we heard the bang and saw the flames I started running and didn’t know where to go,” said Ahmad Shah, a driver for a neighboring oil and gas company, who was lying in the back of an ambulance. “I don’t know how many are caught in there.”
The police were still searching the district on Wednesday evening, and said it was too early to give an accurate estimate of the casualties, although some officials said the death toll would be likely to rise.
“The area is completely under smoke and it is difficult for us and the rescue teams to search for people,” said Gen. Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, the Kabul chief of police. “We still don’t know if this was caused by the fuel tanker explosions or if it was related to any terrorist activities.”
Mohammad Musa Zaher, general manager of nursing at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital in central Kabul, said that hospital alone had received 20 people who had been wounded and three people who had been killed in the fire and explosions.
In the latest in a worrying spate of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police officers on their coalition allies, an Afghan soldier opened fire on NATO soldiers in western Afghanistan, wounding five of them before fleeing, officials said.
In confirming the shooting, NATO coalition officials would not give details on the nationality of the wounded soldiers, but Afghan officials said they were American.
The attack took place on Tuesday afternoon in Wardak Province to the west of the capital, Kabul. Shahidullah Shahid, spokesman for the governor of Wardak, said the Afghan soldier entered a small NATO base near a village in the Sayed Abad district of Wardak before turning his gun on the American soldiers.
The latest attack comes only two days after three British soldiers were killed by a member of the Afghan police force in southern Helmand Province. Afghan soldiers and police officers have attacked American and other coalition counterparts with rising frequency even as the international forces, preparing for withdrawal, have been training them to fight on their own.
Afghan police officers or soldiers have so far killed 26 coalition service members this year, compared with 35 in all of 2011, according to the coalition. NATO officials blame tensions arising from cultural and other personal differences, not Taliban infiltration, for most of the shootings.
A Wardak official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly on the matter said the Afghan soldier was a member of the Afghan National Army and was from Kunduz Province.
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
Northern land routes to be crucial in U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan
The Washington Post By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung July 4, 2012
Even with the reopening of critical supply routes through Pakistan, the U.S. military confronts a mammoth logistical challenge to wind down the war in Afghanistan, where it must withdraw nearly 90,000 troops and enormous depots of military equipment accumulated over the past decade.
Assuming Pakistan doesn’t seal its border again, U.S. and NATO commanders still face the prospect of pulling out at least a third of the cargo from northern Afghanistan on a winding, makeshift network of railways and roads that cross the former Soviet Union.
Those routes carry strategic risks of their own. Access to the transit lines depends on the whims of several authoritarian Central Asian leaders as well as Russian President Vladi¬mir Putin, a longtime nemesis of NATO. Moreover, the cost of shipping goods along the northern routes is about triple that of the much-shorter Pakistani lines.
The only other option for departing landlocked Afghanistan is by air — an even more expensive alternative, costing up to 10 times as much as the Pakistani ground routes.
All told, U.S. military logisticians are preparing to bring home 100,000 shipping containers stuffed with materiel and 50,000 wheeled vehicles by the end of 2014, when U.S. and NATO combat operations are scheduled to cease.
The U.S. military has increasingly relied on the supply lines that cross the former Soviet Union to deliver cargo into Afghanistan since those routes opened in 2009.
After Pakistan sealed its border in November to protest a U.S. airstrike that killed 24 of its soldiers, the U.S. military shifted about 60 percent of its supply shipments to the northern routes, with the remainder arriving in the war zone by air. Although delivery disruptions were largely avoided, the move resulted in extra expenses of about $100 million a month.
The importance of the northern routes will become even more acute when the traffic is reversed. By the end of September, 23,000 U.S. troops are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan, along with a commensurate amount of materiel.
At first, Russia and several Central Asian countries approved deals that let the Pentagon and NATO deliver “nonlethal” supplies — no ammunition or armored vehicles — into Afghanistan, but provided no mechanism to withdraw the equipment. They also opened their airspace for transport planes carrying troops.
The deals “focused on the needs of entry and didn’t address the needs of exiting,” said Martha Brill Olcott, a Central Asia specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “All of this changed after Pakistan closed down.”
Over the past several months, the Obama administration and NATO have signed two-way transit deals with many of the former Soviet republics. But negotiations continue over a host of side issues, including alternate routes, access to airspace and airports, tariffs and restrictions on what kinds of military cargo are eligible for shipment.
“These countries know it’s the last chance, it’s the last negotiation, so they’re going to squeeze very hard,” said Alexander Cooley, a Barnard College professor and expert on U.S. military relations in Central Asia. “They can escalate their demands in the confidence that this is a one-off transaction.”
Even with Pakistan reopening its border, the northern routes are seen as a vital hedge against a Pakistani change of heart.
From Afghanistan’s north, there are two primary ways out: either by rail into Uzbekistan or by road into Tajikistan. Both are authoritarian countries with checkered human rights records.
Beyond that, shipping convoys — which are run by private companies — must cross Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, with most of the land routes then entering Russia before zigzagging to ports in Siberia or on the Baltic Sea.
Negotiating with the Central Asians has often been as difficult as with Pakistan, according to U.S. and NATO officials. The countries distrust, compete with and often try to sabotage each other while simultaneously seeking to exact more concessions from Washington and its allies.
“They all want to play against each other,” said a senior NATO official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced last month that the alliance had forged agreements with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to allow for the withdrawal of equipment from Afghanistan.
A NATO spokeswoman declined to release details of the accords, such as transit fees, but acknowledged that weapons and ammunition are still prohibited cargo on the northern land routes.
NATO remains in talks with Russia about establishing an air hub in the city of Ulyanovsk — Lenin’s birthplace — that would accept rail shipments from Central Asia and then load the containers onto Europe-bound cargo planes.
Vice Adm. Mark D. Harnitchek, a senior U.S. military logistician who was instrumental in setting up the northern routes, said he was confident the network would remain reliable during the withdrawal.
“If you were going to design a system to come into Afghanistan, you wouldn’t do it from the north, but it’s proven to be robust,” Harnitchek, director of the Defense Logistics Agency, told reporters last week. “Those countries have all been remarkably cooperative.”
But many haven’t hesitated to exploit their bargaining power to make special demands.
In April, for example, military officials from Kyrgyzstan asked Marine Gen. James Mattis, the head of the U.S. Central Command, whether the Pentagon would be willing to donate drones after its departure from Afghanistan. Mattis was noncommittal, saying he would forward the request to Washington, according to a report of the encounter by Radio Free Europe.
Meanwhile, Uzbekistan has sought to capi¬tal¬ize on its status as the only country with a major rail link to Afghanistan by seeking a 50 percent surcharge on shipments leaving the war zone — insisting on a premium over what its neighbors earn.
“Everybody wants to up the prices,” Olcott said. “The Kazakhs complain that the Uzbeks get much better terms.”
She said the same regional rivalries have emerged when Washington has sought to compensate countries with used military equipment instead of cash.
“The Uzbeks complain about the Tajiks, or the Kazakhs about Kyrgyzstan, that it will just give them weapons they can effectively use against their neighbors, or against trouble in their own country.”
Afghanistan’s Mineral Wealth Could Be a Bonanza—or Lead to Disaster
Scientists have discovered a treasure trove of coal, natural gas, oil, and other mineral wealth under Afghanistan’s dusty earth. It could be just what the battered nation needs as Western donors leave—but exploiting it could lead to economic and environmental disaster.
The Daily Beast By Dr. Cheryl Benard Jul 4, 2012
Before Afghanistan exploded into the headlines in 2001, average Americans barely knew that such a country even existed. Its violent discovery was followed by an enormous wave of good will and lots of money, as the U.S., other Western governments, and countless private citizens strove to assist this long-suffering nation, building schools and clinics, encouraging the downtrodden women, erasing the dark traces of Taliban oppression, and working to lift Afghanistan into a brighter present.
But after more than 10 aggravating, exorbitantly expensive and violent years, the world has pretty much had it with Afghanistan. Now, the pressing desire is to cobble together some sort of status quo that will allow everyone to get out as expeditiously as possible. Afghan security forces are nearly ready to replace the departing foreign troops. The remaining challenge is financial. The Afghan government is almost totally funded by the subsidies of donor governments, a situation that clearly is unsustainable. The U.S. government believes it has found the solution.
Working from data generated by the Russians during their own unhappy tenure in this country, the U.S. Geological Survey was thrilled to announce that below the rocks and dust of Afghanistan lies an almost unbelievable trove of treasure, mineral wealth in the unimaginable billions. Coal. Natural gas. Oil. Copper. Not to mention rare elements such as lanthanum, cerium, and neodymium, essential to modern technology and commanding high prices. Mining was going to be the silver bullet, and it needed to commence immediately to start the flow of revenue into Kabul’s soon-to-be-empty coffers. Afghanistan, the new Saudi Arabia, the next Dubai, an Aladdin’s treasure spilling forth from its sparse terrain? There is an old saying that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Well, it is in fact true that the unique geology of Afghanistan has endowed the country with vast mineral deposits. It is also true that these hold great promise. But they don’t amount to a silver bullet—and if forced to serve as such, there is a serious risk that this bullet will go astray.
At a high-level expert meeting convened by ARCH (the Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage) and the Central Asia Caucasus Institute at SAIS/Johns Hopkins, mining engineers and geologists warned that unless extreme care and caution are exercised in the implementation of its mining, Afghanistan could face an environmental disaster on a scale that would vastly overstrain the abilities of its government to contain. This on top of the other significant risk, namely that in light of its poverty, underdevelopment, continuing instability, and weak rule of law, its mineral wealth could easily turn into a mineral curse.
This has happened time and again to countries in comparable political circumstances, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But even were Afghanistan miraculously able to suddenly end its huge and endemic corruption, subdue its regional warlords, extend the ability of the central government to control events and collect revenue from far-flung provinces and defeat the Taliban—which at the moment still holds sway over many of the areas richest in the above-named minerals—the environmental risks still remain, and they are considerable.
Case in point, the ancient Buddhist ruins of Mes Aynak, which was the specific focus of the expert group’s deliberations. Located 20 kilometers outside Kabul, a city densely inhabited by 3.5 million people, this is the site of an incipient major copper-mining project. One of the world’s largest copper deposits is fatefully intertwined with this major heritage site, a sprawling urban complex encompassing several Buddhist monasteries, fortresses, and fortifications, and commercial and residential areas, with lower strata that may go back as far as the Bronze Age and before.
In 2009, in its rush to riches, the Afghan government gave a Chinese mining company (MCC) the contract, and for terms that are causing pained shudders to those in the know. The inexperienced Afghan ministry may have thought $800 million to be a spectacular lot of money—and the alleged $30 million bribe to the then minister of mines may have played a part—but at 50 or 60 years’ worth of multibillion-dollar annual exploitation of this enormous deposit, it puts the purchase of Manhattan for a fistful of shiny beads into the shade, as great—or bad—deals go.
That, however, is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that a copper mine, absent scrupulous management and oversight, can become a liability of catastrophic proportions. Looking at Afghanistan’s past four decades, we may think that things can hardly get any worse. But yes, they can. Mes Aynak sits atop the two principal aquifers not only for Kabul, but for a vast region extending into neighboring Pakistan. Improper mining could kill the Kabul River and poison the aquifer for generations to come. It could create, instead of wealth, what experts term a “Superfund Site”—a failed site whose cleanup is so costly and so complicated that the mining company departs in disgrace while the national government (and the term assumes a functioning and funded Western national government, not an utterly bankrupt one) is left to deal with the toxic disaster.
Of course, this need not happen in Mes Aynak. Perhaps the Chinese mining company will proceed with scrupulous care. Perhaps the Afghan authorities will provide competent professional oversight. But our experts were worried, because a bare five months before the announced commencement of mining in 2013, no environmental impact plan had yet been developed by MCC, and there has been zero transparency regarding the feasibility studies, the mine-opening plan, the mine-closing plan, or indeed, even the basic guarantees that might or might not be contained in the contract, which in contravention of international standards and conventions to which Afghanistan is a signatory; neither the mining company nor the Ministry of Mines has thus far shared those with the public.
The worst of it is that a copper mine, absent scrupulous management and oversight, can become a liability of catastrophic proportions.
The planned destruction of the historic site is a good example of the precipitous, reckless approach being chosen, because the expert group found that preserving the site and mining could readily go forward in conjunction.
Literally on top of it all, Mes Aynak also is home to a world-class archeological site, a massive buried city on a par with Pompeii that will give way to an open mining pit and be forever lost to historians, scientists, proud Afghans, and potential future tourists.
That silver bullet? Please, let’s not allow haste, dreams of mineral miracles, and fiscal panic to turn it into the killing shot that finishes off Afghanistan as we leave.
Dr. Cheryl Benard is a writer based in Washington, D.C., and the president of The Bamiyan Project, a non-profit organization that supports cultural activists in areas of conflict and post-conflict. From 2001 until 2009, she was the director of the Alternative Strategies Initiative at the RAND Corporation. Her book publications include Civil Democratic Islam, Women in Nation-Building, and the forthcoming Behind the Wire, Detainee Operations in Iraq.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Can turning Taliban foot soldiers turn the Afghan war?
Reuters By Missy Ryan and Hamid Shalizi Wed Jul 4, 2012
KABUL - Former Taliban fighter Mullah Rassoul is a man with few friends.
After he joined a NATO-backed program to pacify lower-level insurgents this year, he says he was harassed by a government-supported militia in his area of north Afghanistan.
He considered rejoining his former Taliban comrades, but they see him as a traitor. "They said I had to prove my loyalty by killing foreigners or high-ranking Afghans," Rassoul said.
"I used to have respect, money and weapons," the former insurgent, a soft-spoken, bearded 36-year-old, told Reuters. "Now, I can't even defend myself."
As Western hopes for a peace deal with Taliban leaders fade, questions are mounting about how far a NATO scheme to entice foot soldiers to switch sides, now a mainstay of the West's political strategy in Afghanistan, can go toward ending a long insurgent war.
David Hook, the British major general who heads NATO efforts to sign up local Taliban fighters to a three-step program that gives them training, community grants and amnesty for some crimes, said the so-called reintegration plan had recruited some 4,700 people since October 2010, mostly in areas of western and northern Afghanistan beyond the Taliban insurgency's core.
While NATO commanders say the program has begun to accelerate, other Western officials are skeptical of the latest attempt to demobilize fighters whose motives and circumstances are as diverse, and at times opaque, as Afghanistan itself.
"It has had a tactical effect in some areas, but it is irrelevant to the outcome of the war," one Western official said on condition of anonymity.
While even the drive's proponents acknowledge it is not a 'game-changer,' they say it has the potential to trim the ranks of a militant group NATO estimates has 15,000 to 30,000 members.
"It's our job to effectively reduce the fighting power of the insurgency," Hook said in an interview.
Whether it can do so becomes a more pressing question as NATO nations prepare to withdraw most combat troops by the end of 2014, possibly weakening incentives to enter the program, and as the United States struggles to restart a parallel peace process with the Taliban's reclusive leaders.
Despite the reservations, Western officials say the program, which costs a relatively modest sum of about $100 million a year, could help end violence on the ground if high-level talks resume.
The Obama administration's hopes for soon establishing peace talks between the government of President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban faded in March when the Taliban leadership, believed to be based in Pakistan, suspended their participation in the preliminary discussions run by U.S. diplomats.
"If there is a breakthrough at the top, there will be a huge torrent of lower-level fighters coming in," the Western official said. "We've got to be ready."
AVOIDING A REPEAT OF HISTORY?
Hook said efforts to settle local grievances that may have pushed Afghans to join the insurgency, such as land or tribal disputes, differed from previous attempts to turn Taliban back into ordinary villagers.
Afghanistan's recent past is as littered with efforts to demobilize fighters as it is with messy civil conflicts that begot them. The government of Soviet-backed leader Najibullah, for example, claimed to have reintegrated tens of thousands of fighters in the 1980s - not long before a vicious civil war broke out in which rival militias gutted the capital, Kabul.
Since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, a series of U.N. and Afghan programs have aimed to break up militias and collect vast sums of weaponry. Despite the best intentions, the war has grinded on and violence has escalated dramatically after 2006.
Hook said the novelty of the current initiative, officially run by the Afghan government with support from the NATO-led international force, included community aid grants designed to ensure an ex-fighter's tribe and neighbors welcome him back.
Fighters are also paid a stipend of $120 for several months and receive education and vocation training, but they are not guaranteed long-term work. Their motivation, NATO asserts, must be to return home "with their honor and dignity intact".
At the program's heart is the NATO assumption - which skeptics question - that the vast majority of Taliban take up arms for reasons other than ideology, such as the need for employment or a desire to settle local disputes.
Maqsoom Tajik, an insurgent commander who switched sides in Kunduz province five months ago, said he left the Taliban after militant leaders ordered him to conduct assassinations and sabotage public places, acts that could kill civilians.
"I wanted to wage jihad against the foreigners, but not that," he said. "Now I sleep in peace, without worrying my house will be raided" by Afghan and NATO forces.
Yet Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denied a single true Taliban insurgent had signed up to lay down arms.
"The Taliban are fighting for a cause and will never go to the government side," he said. "The government's game is to bring in people and assign them Taliban names."
The program has been less successful in areas like Helmand and Kandahar, traditional Taliban hotbeds, and in parts of eastern Afghanistan where insurgents operate with greater impunity. In volatile Paktika province, bordering Pakistan, just one fighter has signed up to date.
Mark Jacobson, a former senior NATO official who is now at the German Marshall Fund, a Washington think tank, said the program had helped halt concerns about deteriorating security in northern and western Afghanistan.
"Reintegration of low level fighters - no matter where - is a positive step," he said.
NO U-TURN?
While NATO believes only five fighters have rejoined the insurgency, Afghanistan's history of fleeting alliances raises questions about how long such arrangements will hold.
The risks facing fighters who switch sides is enormous.
"How can you lure the foot soldiers if you're still killing their commanders?" asked Sayed Mohammad Akbar Agha, an influential former Taliban whose cousin, Tayeb Agha, has represented the Taliban leadership in talks with U.S. diplomats.
Asadullah Amarkhil, an official from the provincial High Peace Council in northern Kunduz, said four former Taliban commanders had been killed in the last several months, just weeks after joining the program. "There is little protection for members of the Taliban who join the government," Amerkhil said. "If things remain as they are, we won't be able to encourage them into reintegration."
Hook said that "isolated cases of disgruntled re-integrees" such as that of Rassoul do not detract from the program's record.
Agha, who wears the long beard common among Taliban, warned that recruitment of low-level fighters may undermine efforts to revive high-level peace talks, by fuelling suspicions that Western brokers want only to split militant ranks.
The Obama administration hopes the Taliban will end its suspension of initial talks, and the Afghan government has undertaken outreach of its own with Taliban representatives. But even supporters acknowledge the peace gambit is a long shot.
Ahead of the gradual Western exit from Afghanistan, however, there are no signs that donors will withdraw support for a program they hope might improve security at the margins - and has a small chance of a much larger payoff.
"If - and I say if - the reintegration process really takes off, or if the (high-level) reconciliation process takes off, those two things could be very, very significant," a senior figure in the NATO-led coalition said. That "could shift that equilibrium quite markedly in the direction we need it to go."
(Additional reporting by Rob Taylor in KABUL and Mohammed Hamed in KUNDUZ; Editing by Michael Georgy and Jeremy Laurence)
Troops kill 27 insurgents in Afghanistan: gov't
KABUL, July 5 (Xinhua) -- Afghan army and police, backed by the NATO-led coalition troops, have eliminated 27 Taliban insurgents and detained 16 others during operations within the past 24 hours, the Afghan Interior Ministry said on Thursday morning.
"The joint forces carried out six cleanup operations in Baghlan, Kandahar, Wardak, Paktia, Farah and Helmand provinces and one more armed Taliban insurgent was injured during the raids," the ministry said in a statement providing daily operational updates to media.
They also found and seized weapons and explosives, the statement said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
The Taliban insurgent group, which stepped up their attacks on Afghan and NATO-led troops since an annual spring offensive was launched in May in the war-ravaged country, has yet to make comments.
The Afghan forces and some 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops have intensified cleanup operations against insurgents recently. More than 200 insurgents have been killed, 15 wounded and over 50 others detained since Sunday by the joint forces, according to figures released by the Afghan Interior Ministry.
Afghan Local Police group deserts to Taliban-led insurgents
The Washington Post By Sayed Salahuddin July 4, 2012
KABUL - A group of Afghan militia troops has joined the Taliban-led insurgents, officials said on Wednesday, apparently the first surrender of its kind by the force created as part of a U.S. initiative to keep the militants at bay and help break the battlefield stalemate.
There were few details and conflicting estimates about the number of men who changed sides in various parts of the restive northwestern Badghis province on Tuesday evening. One Afghan security official put the number at 41.
The force is known as the Afghan Local Police (ALP) and was set up under an initiative of the United States in 2010 during the peak of the war to help NATO coalition and Afghan troops prevent the influence and spread of the insurgency.
The ALP men who surrendered in Badghis were armed with assault rifles, said Ghulam Sarwar, a local lawmaker, citing a provincial official. Interior ministry and security officials confirmed the surrenders and the accounts provided by Sarwar.
“This [surrender] may not have a big impact on the security situation of the area, but raises doubts about the loyalties of those employed by Afghan Local Police,” Sarwar said.
The Taliban confirmed that the militia group had joined its ranks and put the number of surrendered men at 86.
The ALP, composed of men from the communities that they police, was seen by some Afghans as a successful effort in the fight against the Taliban.
But dozens of the ALP members have been killed in Taliban attacks in recent months in various parts of the country. Deadly attacks against foreign troops by some men serving in the Afghan security forces have been on the rise, but there has been no report of such an act by ALP members against the NATO and U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
While there have been cases of desertions and surrender by Afghan regular police and national army troops to the Taliban, there seems to be no precedent for ALP forces to swap sides. If the numbers are confirmed, it would be the largest single such incident.
The ALP has more than 10,000 members. It covers mostly the southern and eastern regions where the Taliban are heavily active. Although it has been praised by supporters, the force’s ranks include some men accused of war crimes and other abuses.
Salahuddin is a special correspondent.
8 Afghan Taliban rebels detained in southern province
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, July 5 (Xinhua) -- A total of eight Taliban rebels were arrested in southern Afghan province of Helmand, the provincial police chief said on Thursday.
"Afghan police, backed by army, detained eight Taliban insurgents during two search operations in Garmsir and Naw Zad districts late on Wednesday," Mohammad Nabi Elham told reporters here.
He said the captured insurgents were responsible for direct attacks against security forces and placing homemade bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in the province, 555 km south of capital Kabul.
The joint forces also found and seized four AK-47 guns, two RP- G rockets, a pistol, four IEDs as well as IED components during the raids, the police chief said, adding no member of the security force were injured during the operations.
The Taliban insurgent group, which stepped up their attacks on Afghan and NATO-led troops since an annual spring offensive was launched on May 3 in the war-ravaged country, has yet to make comments.
A woman was killed and three others including a child were injured in an IED blast in Helmand on Wednesday.
The Afghan forces and some 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops have intensified cleanup operations against insurgents recently. More than 200 insurgents have been killed, 15 wounded and over 50 others detained since Sunday by the joint forces, according to figures released by the Afghan Interior Ministry.
Woman, children beheaded in Afghan "honour killing"
Reuters By Mirwais Harooni Wed Jul 4, 2012
KABUL - A 30-year-old woman and two of her children were beheaded overnight in Afghanistan's east, police said, in what appeared to be the latest in a rapidly growing trend of so-called honour killings.
Police said they suspected the woman Serata's divorced husband of barging into her house in the capital of Ghazni province and murdering her, alongside their eight-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter.
"The children saw the killer take their mother's head off, so he killed them too," a local policeman told Reuters, adding that the attacker had spared Sereta's two-year-old daughter.
Activists say there has been a sharp rise in violent attacks on women in Afghanistan over the past year.
They blame President Hamid Karzai's waning attention to women's rights as his government prepares for the exit of most foreign troops in 2014 and seeks to negotiate with the Taliban, Afghanistan's former Islamist rulers.
Excluding Serata's beheading, there have been 16 cases of "honour killings" recorded across the country over March and April, the first two months of the Afghan new year, according to Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).
This compares to the 20 cases recorded for all of last year, said commissioner Suraya Subhrang, blaming increased insecurity and weak rule of law for the sharp rise. Since AIHRC started recording such killings in 2001, there have never been more than 20 cases a year.
"And there are many that go unreported. Men make a quick decision in their own courts to kill a girl and hold a prayer for her the next day," Subhrang told Reuters.
Serata divorced her husband Mohammad Arif, 38, a year ago after enduring almost a decade of domestic abuse, said Shukria Wali, head of Ghazni's department of women's affairs, which is attached to the ministry in Kabul.
Police said they were still hunting for Arif. Violent crimes against women often go unpunished in Afghanistan, with activists blaming police carelessness, corruption and a growing atmosphere of impunity.
Officers investigating the case described it as an honour killing - a phrase used to describe the murder of mostly women and girls by people who accuse them of besmirching a family's reputation.
Afghan women have won back basic rights in education, voting and work since the austere rule of the Taliban was toppled just over a decade ago, though fear now mounts that freedoms will be traded away as Kabul and Washington seek talks with the Islamist group to secure a peaceful end to the war.
Donors are expected to commit just under $4 billion in development aid annually to Afghanistan at a summit in Tokyo on Sunday, though the European Union - the biggest contributor - has said maintaining its support will be difficult if women's rights are not protected.
During its five-year reign, the Taliban banned women from most work, denied them the right to vote and ordered that they wear a head-to-toe burqa when out of the house.
Despite more than 10 years of war and billions of dollars in foreign aid, the country remains desperately poor. Female illiteracy rates in rural areas are above 90 percent and child marriages are still widespread despite being illegal. (Writing by Amie Ferris-Rotman; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
First NATO container crosses Pakistan border into Afghanistan after 7 months
ISLAMABAD, July 5 (Xinhua) -- The first container, carrying supplies for NATO forces in Afghanistan, on Thursday crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border three days after Pakistan unblocked the supply line, officials said.
The container entered Afghanistan via Chaman, a border city in Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province, after custom clearance, border official Fazal Bari said.
He said that the first container carried food and mineral water for the foreign forces. Two other containers had been waiting for custom clearance and could be allowed to cross the border point any time.
These containers had been parked at Chaman when Pakistan closed the NATO supply line in November last year. Many other containers had been sent back after the ban had been imposed.
Pakistan closed the NATO supply line in protest against the killing of its 24 soldiers in a NATO airstrike on border posts seven months ago. The supply line was restored on Tuesday after U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized for the deaths of Pakistani security personnel.
Thousands of other NATO trucks and oil containers are waiting for permission at the southern Pakistani border city of Karachi, officials said. They will shortly be allowed to leave for Afghanistan via Chaman and Torkham, border town in northwest Pakistan.
Officials told Xinhua that arrangements to allow NATO trucks have also been made at Torkham in Khyber tribal region.
The custom officials at the Chaman border point have made all arrangements for the full-fledged resumption of NATO supplies in a couple of days, and the federal government has issued directives to the border officials and custom authorities to make preparations for sending NATO trucks across the border into Afghanistan.
Authorities in Balochistan province said they have sought help of the federal government for the security of NATO trucks on the 700-kilometer route between Chaman and Karachi.
A provincial official, Nasibullah Barzai, said the provincial government has conveyed to the central government its inability to deal with the security of NATO containers.
Suspected militants had carried out many attacks on NATO trucks and oil containers in the past, torching hundreds of vehicles, which had also caused casualties to drivers and civilians.
Pakistani Interior Advisor Rehman Malik has briefed Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf about the security measures for NATO containers, and issued instructions to the provincial authorities to ensure security for the NATO convoys.
Draft Media Law Not Rejected, But Postponed
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 04 July 2012
Afghanistan's Ministry of Information and Culture said that the time period for approving the latest draft of a new media law was extended for two weeks to allow for more feedback, contrary to earlier reports that it had been rejected.
Speaking on the phone from US late Tuesday night, the Minister of Information and Culture Sayed Makhdoom Raheen said that the "draft will be reviewed after [further] public comment", adding that this would happen in two weeks.
Earlier Tuesday evening, the Deputy Information Minister Din Mohammad Mubariz Rashidi had said that the draft was rejected, following backlash from civil rights and media groups.
Most vocal among the opposing groups was Human Rights Watch (HRW) which lobbied the Afghan government to withdraw the bill during the initial feedback process.
HRW said the new laws would limit the gains made to free speech since the 2001 US-led invasion brought down the Taliban.
"Press freedom has been one of Afghanistan's most important success stories since 2001," HRW Asia director Brad Adams said in a statement on Monday.
"The Afghan government should be acting to solidify media gains, not seeking to placate forces hostile to free expression," he said.
The HRW statement said that provisions in the bill, which would replace a 2009 media law, undermine free expression and increase government control.
It acknowledged that the 2009 media law could be improved, including by revising overly broad and vague limits on speech, particularly relating to religion, and giving greater independence to government-sponsored media.
The proposed law, however, leaves all of these restrictions in place while creating a new set of barriers to free speech, and should be withdrawn, it said.
Andrew Mitchell says Afghanistan needs long term aid commitments
Hard-won gains made by British troops in Afghanistan risk being lost if the international donors fail to make long term aid commitments to the country, Andrew Mitchell, the Development Secretary, warned on Wednesday.
Telegraph.co.uk By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent 04 Jul 2012
Donor countries meeting in Tokyo this weekend should "face up" to their responsibilities in the so-called "transformation decade" that will begin when the last Nato combat troops leave at the end of 2014, he said.
Mr Mitchell, who returned on Wednesday from a two-day trip to Afghanistan, paid tribute to the "extraordinary valour" of British troops in Afghanistan.
His visit coincided with the killing of two Welsh Guards and a warrant officer from the Royal Corps of Signals in a "dreadful green on blue" incident when an Afghan in police uniform opened fire on his Nato mentors. Five Nato troops were injured in a similar incident near Kabul on Wednesday.
In a stark warning against the dangers of faltering international commitment, Mr Mitchell raised the spectre of the former Afghan communist president Mohammad Najibullah, who was castrated and killed by the Taliban in 1996 after the Soviet withdrawal.
"In this context it should not be forgotten that the reason the regime of Najibullah ended with him hanging from a lamp post is not because he was defeated militarily but because the Russians stopped paying the bills," said Mr Mitchell, adding that "the point of Tokyo is to ensure that isn't the case" in the future.
The Afghan government needs to be reassured by the Tokyo conference, which will be attended by 70 countries and world bodies, that it would not be "deserted" by the international community following the transition of security to Afghan security forces.
"No one should be in any doubt that if you want this to be a success, the international community has got to demonstrate that it will be different from what it was for Najibullah, that the international community recognises that not to focus on this would endanger the gains that we have already made," he said.
"I am very conscious when I meet the brilliant men and women of our armed forces who are putting their lives in danger and in harm's way on our behalf that we are there in Afghanistan to protect our national security and that the gains that they have made must not be lost because the international community does not face up to its responsibilities afterwards," he said.
The international community needed to make a commitment of "not much below" $4 billion (£2.5 billion) a year overall until 2017 and to ensure its support remained strong until 2025. That would represent a decline of roughly 35 per cent from current levels of aid.
Britain has led the global fund-raising effort, becoming the first state to commit to providing a specific amount of aid – its current level of £178 million a year – until 2017.
Germany and the five Scandinavian countries have made similar promises, but despite strenuous efforts by Mr Mitchell, the United States, Japan and major European powers have yet to follow suit, leading to fears that money pledged at the weekend may not materialise in full.
The US has halved its aid budget this year, but it will foot most of the estimated $4 billion annual bill for the Afghan security forces after 2014.
The strength of the Government's aid commitment was welcomed by Oxfam, which has a strong presence in Afghanistan.
Louise Hancock, head of policy and advocacy in Kabul, said: "We welcome the leadership shown by the UK in committing aid money to Afghanistan: now other donors need to follow suit.
"To avoid wasting years of donor investments, funded by tax payers across the world, all donors need to step up efforts to entrench the gains that have been made so far, like getting 2.7 million girls enrolled in school.
"If the international community's commitment to Afghanistan falters, the progress Afghan men and women have worked so hard for over the last decade will slip away."
Afghanistan: Intimations of a future peace
Even in a country ravaged by terror and political myopia, there is still reason to hope for the future, says author.
Aljazeera By Robert Grenier, Former CIA station chief Robert Grenier heads ERG partners, a financial consultancy firm. 04 Jul 2012
It would seem that there has been little news generated in south-central Asia over the past 10 days to inspire optimism for the future. Violence on both sides of the Durand Line, often mindless and reflexive, continues unabated. The governments of the key protagonists - Afghanistan, the US, and Pakistan - nominally interested in finding political solutions to the region's conflicts, remain gridlocked, internally and externally, unable to see beyond the impasses their current policies have made for them.
Among other more routine atrocities, 17 Pakistani troops reportedly were beheaded in Upper Dir, along the Afghan border, victims of the rapacious Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, which operates increasingly from safe havens in Afghanistan. Ten Afghan policemen killed in normally quiescent Herat added their grim statistics to those registered in attacks in Helmand, in Kunduz, and on the outskirts of Kabul. Continued drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas elicited objections in North and South Waziristan from militant tribal leaders who decided to reinforce their respective messages by holding their own children hostage to preventable disease, refusing to permit polio immunisations until the strikes are halted.
Mounting evidence that cross-border militancy works in both directions, rather than reinforcing common cause between the Americans and Pakistanis, mired them further in bloody-minded recrimination, as the US refused to jointly pursue the infamous Mullah Fazlullah, responsible for the above-described beheadings, until Pakistan accedes to NATO demands that it attack militant safe havens in North Waziristan. Such controversies, meanwhile, made little apparent impression on Pakistan's civilian politicians and jurists, locked as they were in an operatic struggle which threatens to make the Pakistani premiership resemble a revolving door. And about Afghan President Karzai's recent statements concerning the importance of anti-corruption and good governance, well, perhaps the less said, the better.
And yet, also over the past 10 days, there have been a couple of welcome indications, from perhaps unlikely sources, that eventual progress towards a sustainable political solution in south-central Asia may be possible. It is not an accident that these developments did not involve Americans, and that they served to flesh out the views of parties strongly opposed to the US presence in Afghanistan. Together, however, they reinforce the notion held by many who, like this observer, support American goals but lament American strategy, that a much-reduced American presence in Afghanistan will do much to aid the cause of both peace and stability there.
On June 20 and 21, a number of representatives of Afghan political factions and civil society groups, including the High Peace Council, met informally in Paris for open-ended discussions. Although no formal Taliban members were there, individuals deemed credible by them and capable of explaining their views, such as Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, were present. Official American commentators, speaking as usual under a veil of anonymity, were quick to downplay the significance of these discussions - and in terms of the conventional political negotiations envisioned by the Americans, they were right. Indeed, much of the commentary on this meeting from all sides, focussing as it has on whether the gathering demonstrates a change in Taliban policy to permit official contacts with the Afghan government, is frankly beside the point. Of far greater significance were the topics discussed, which apparently focussed on changes to the Afghan Constitution and electoral laws, and on other mea
ns of promoting a decentralisation of power - none of which, tellingly, is remotely on the American agenda.
A separate meeting held in Kyoto, Japan, on June 27 was, if anything, even more interesting, including as it did Qari Din Muhammad, a member of the Taliban political office, who made the following statement concerning political reconciliation: "We will join the economy, and join the politics for all the Afghan people. But if there is any American, a single one, we cannot join the government."
Not having participated in either of these confabs, and so having little feel for the context in which various points were made or topics discussed, it is hard for me to judge their full significance. But they do suggest how a practical political solution in Afghanistan might evolve. The Taliban has, until now, refused to negotiate with anyone but the Americans, and from their perspective, quite reasonably so. As even American officials will candidly admit, they have been the primary combatants in the current conflict, with much at stake - which is why they have agreed in the past to bilateral talks unencumbered by official Afghan involvement. Indeed, for much of the past seven years or so, Afghanistan, to the Americans at least, has been a US project, in which their supposed Afghan allies were often an inconvenient afterthought. It should not be surprising, then, that the Taliban would share a similar view: Why deal with the puppet, when it is possible to deal with the puppet-master?
The significance of the Taliban's new willingness to engage with their Afghan adversaries in the Paris and Kyoto meetings is not that it represents a change in their basic policy. It does not. Instead, it suggests that the Taliban leadership can foresee a time in the near future when, one way or another, the Americans are no longer the main protagonists in Afghanistan. They surely harbour the hope, and perhaps even the expectation, that the Americans will depart Afghanistan altogether, perhaps soon after 2014. Their hope is probably a vain one. A sovereign post-2014 Afghan government will have every right to invite a small continuing US military presence under the new Strategic Partnership Agreement, and every practical reason for doing so as it confronts the Taliban. The difference will be that the US presence will be subordinate to, and supportive of, the Afghans - and not the other way around, as it has been to date. In any case, the Taliban will have to deal with the Kabul regime one way or another, and t
hey realise it. The question is: on what terms, and to what ends?
Thus the statement from Qari Din Muhammad, while surely not a formal policy pronouncement, may nonetheless be highly significant as a reflection of the Taliban's mode of thinking. The good qari is right: There will be no room, for the foreseeable future, nor any genuine desire on the part of the Taliban to participate in some sort of coalition government with the political forces represented by the Kabul regime. A potentially realisable goal, however, would be overt and legitimate Taliban participation in the political, economic and socio-religious life of the country at a local and provincial level, in those areas where the Taliban has natural weight and standing. In that context, the topics discussed in Paris are not just significant, but crucial to the future of the country. If Afghanistan is to develop any measure of peace and stability, it will have to unburden itself of the albatross represented by its current, over-centralising constitution, and will have to create the political space at the district and provincial levels necessary to permit the Taliban's incremental re-engagement in the legitimate governance of the country.
It will require much time and effort to create the conditions for the various political forces in Afghanistan to find their own levels, and to develop the opportunity, to say nothing of the motivation, to pursue their goals through peaceful rather than violent means. But even in an environment currently characterised by terror and political myopia, we can still see some reason to hope for such a future, as Afghans of all stripes take political matters into their own hands. The rapid drawdown of US and NATO forces, even if currently carried out in pursuit of a misguided and unsustainable policy, and even if insufficient by itself, nonetheless will help set the conditions to make a sustainable, Afghan-led peace process possible.
Former CIA station chief Robert Grenier heads ERG partners, a financial consultancy firm.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
At Barbecue, Signs of a U.S. Apology
Wall Street Journal By ADAM ENTOUS and TOM WRIGHT 04 june, 2012
Shortly after a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Chicago in May, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington shuttled between the State Department and White House, pressing for an apology for the deaths of 24 Pakistani troops in a clash on the Afghan border in November.
The ambassador, Sherry Rehman, said it was the only way to get Islamabad to reopen the alliance's supply routes through Pakistan to Afghanistan.
The Obama administration's message to Mrs. Rehman at the time, as delivered by Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides and others, was: "It isn't going to happen," according to officials involved in the discussions.
In the weeks that followed, however, the White House had a change of heart. Officials said the shift came in a flurry of meetings—and was signaled to Pakistan by National Security Adviser Tom Donilon's appearance at a backyard barbecue hosted by Mrs. Rehman.
On Tuesday, ending an agonizing, seven-month debate within the Obama administration, the White House authorized Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to proceed. That day, she told her Pakistani counterpart, "We are sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military."
Pakistani officials made clear the apology was sufficient. On Wednesday, Pakistan's cabinet approved the decision to immediately reopen NATO's supply routes.
The shift by the White House was driven by several pressing issues, U.S. officials said: the mounting cost of using alternative routes, fears the closures would complicate a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and by the Pentagon's need for Pakistan's cooperation in fighting militants.
On June 13, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told Congress the border closure was costing the Pentagon an extra $100 million a month. Surprised lawmakers pressed the White House to reach a compromise, according to officials.
Administration officials said Pakistan's cooperation was critical to speeding the withdrawal of heavy equipment from Afghanistan, as well as to reviving stalled negotiations with the Taliban aimed at ending the war.
"Let's just get this done," said a senior Obama administration official of the White House's thinking. The White House dispatched Mr. Nides to Islamabad this past weekend with instructions to make it happen.
Officials said Mr. Donilon, the national-security adviser, played a key role in the shift, arguing for a compromise settlement acceptable to both sides.
In December, when the administration debated how to respond to the Nov. 26 incident, Mr. Donilon worked to block an apology, according to officials. In late June, Mr. Donilon surprised Pakistani officials by attending a barbecue dinner that Mrs. Rehman held under a tent at her residence in Washington.
Officials said his attendance was seen by the Pakistanis as a clear signal that the White House wanted to resolve the dispute and get the relationship back on track.
Mrs. Clinton and her top aides, officials said, have consistently urged an apology for U.S. mistakes in the name of improved relations. Officials said the White House came to realize that there was no way that Islamabad, in an election year in Pakistan, could reopen the routes without an apology to calm the irate Pakistani public and the military's rank and file.
U.S. officials said the apology by Mrs. Clinton also helped get the Pakistanis to drop demands for huge markups in NATO payments for each cargo container transiting Pakistani territory.
Officials said the word "sorry" was the solution that was acceptable to the Pakistanis.
The White House balked at authorizing Mrs. Clinton to use the word "apologize." U.S. officials said some senior White House advisers were concerned such language could be used by Republicans to cast Mr. Obama as an "apologizer-in-chief."
U.S. officials said the final language was far less than what Pakistani officials initially sought. Mrs. Clinton stopped short of taking responsibility for the deaths. The Pentagon says Pakistan was partly to blame for the incident.
Some in Pakistan picked up on this nuance. "The apology has not come," Enver Baig, a Pakistani opposition politician, said. " 'Sorry' is a very casual word."
Pakistan was pushed to accept the overture now because it needs U.S. financial support, said Mr. Baig. The U.S. is expected to transfer more than $1 billion in frozen military aid, a first installment on arrears that Islamabad says Washington owes.
By Tuesday, the standoff over the border crossings had become a symbol of Washington's troubled relations with Pakistan, a country that since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has become a sometimes difficult ally in the U.S. war on terrorism.
"It's definitely a very positive development," said Talat Masood, a former Pakistan army general. "There was a logjam and it's been broken."
Though the Pentagon said it could have weathered the border closing by using more costly alternative routes, other NATO allies were more dependent on the crossings through Pakistan and pressed the U.S. to cut a deal as soon as possible, officials said.
The Pentagon also softened its previous opposition to an apology in hopes that improved relations will allow for better coordination against militants.
As the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan shifts toward eastern provinces bordering Pakistan, the Pentagon has become increasingly alarmed about the role of the Haqqani network, a militant group with ties to Pakistani intelligence that is believed behind a string of attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces.
"Obviously cost was a factor, but more importantly was the need to get the relationship back on track so we can cooperate on a range of important issues including reconciliation and counterterrorism," an Obama administration official said.
The push to improve relations is particularly important for the White House now because "as we have fewer and fewer troops between now and 2014, we'd like to make progress on those [areas] while we have the best possible security footing," the official added.
More broadly, officials said they hoped the deal opening the border crossings will now clear the way for talks aimed at reaching a more sustainable joint approach to counterterrorism.
U.S. officials are concerned that Pakistani opposition will imperil a U.S. campaign against Pakistan-based militants using armed Central Intelligence Agency-piloted drones.
In the past, the U.S. and Pakistan shared intelligence and made lists of common militant targets, but that cooperation broke down over a series of controversial incidents beginning in early 2011.
"The whole thing we've been pushing for with the Pakistanis is to engage with them on a broader counterterrorism agenda that includes drones and intelligence sharing," a senior U.S. official said. "Now, I'm not sure that's possible, but until we talk to them we don't know."
Pakistan's military and civilian leaders are unlikely to support drone strikes, given popular sentiment, said Ayaz Amir, a Pakistani opposition politician and newspaper columnist. "Pakistan has a job of selling these things to the Pakistani public," he said.
Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com and Adam Entous at adam.entous@wsj.com
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