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Afghan Soldier Sentenced To Death For French Troop Killings
July 17, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
An Afghan soldier has been sentenced to death for the killing of four French soldiers.
Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi said on July 17 that a military court in Kabul ordered the solider, Abdul Sabor, to be hanged.
The sentence can still be appealed.
The four French soldiers were gunned down on January 20 in the Tagab district of the eastern Kapisa Province during a joint training operation involving NATO-led troops and Afghan soldiers.
It was one of a series of incidents in which members of the Afghan security forces have attacked their foreign allies.
In a recent incident, three British soldiers were shot dead by a man in an Afghan police uniform in the southern province of Helmand earlier this month
Based on reporting by AFP and AP
Afghan forces ready to secure country after 2014: president
KABUL, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan security forces are ready to ensure security for their own country after NATO-led forces hand over security charge to Afghan side by the end of 2014, President Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday.
"I am convinced and the Afghan people are confident that our National Security Forces would ensure security for this country when the handover of security is completed two years later," Karzai said in his speech delivered at police officers graduation ceremony here.
The process of security transition started in July 2011 in order to pave the way for withdrawal of over 130,000-strong NATO- led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) with nearly 90, 000 of them Americans.
The strength of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) at the moment is over 305,000 including army, police and other personnel of law enforcing agencies.
A total of 535 police officers graduated from Afghan National Police Academy on Tuesday, according to Nawroz Khalil, commander of the academy.
The ANSF took security duties from foreign forces in northern Kunduz province and eastern Kapisa province and will take control of southern Uruzgan province later Tuesday.
Under the U.S. President Barack Obama's withdrawal plan, 10,000 U.S. troops already pulled out of Afghanistan last year and another 23,000 will return home by September this year.
In Afghan village, fears that government can't provide after Americans leave
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Tuesday, July 17, 2012
KARZ, Afghanistan - In this mud-brick village, the United Nations put up the rock retaining wall along the riverbed to keep the road from washing out in floods. The United States paid to fertilize the wheat fields. Hashmat Karzai, a cousin of the president, paid about $70,000 from his own pocket to string up power lines.
As for the Afghan government, it remains all but invisible, even though Karz is the ancestral home of President Hamid Karzai. “The government itself has not done anything,” said Abdul Ali, a village elder.
The United States and its allies have devoted years of effort and billions of dollars to improve the delivery of basic services in rural Afghanistan. If Afghan leadership were to have taken hold anywhere, it might well have been in Karz, a farming area on the outskirts of Kandahar city still populated by relatives and tribesmen of the man who has ruled Afghanistan through a decade of war.
Instead, what is emerging in ever starker relief is a governance vacuum as U.S. forces begin to draw down. As the Americans leave, taking with them a main source of economic stimulus, U.S. officials and residents say what worries them most is the weakness of the local and provincial governments being left behind, which command virtually no resources and almost no authority.
That lack of government progress is apparent every day in Karz with the line of villagers beating a path to Hashmat Karzai’s door.
Karzai holds no official post; his prominence in the village stems from his status as a prosperous and powerful tribal elder and his relationship with the president. He is the former owner of a private security company, Asia Security Group, which sent men to guard U.S. bases, and he currently rents out land for a hotel near NATO’s Kandahar Airfield.
And yet each day the villagers of Karz file into Karzai’s courtyard with a fresh list of problems they say they can find no audience for in the offices of government. One by one they plead for electricity for their irrigation pumps, a clinic for their sick children, or information on the whereabouts of a relative detained by American troops.
“Where should he go? Which door should he knock?” Hashmat Karzai said as he motioned to one of his supplicants. “This is what’s killing the people of Kandahar. You go try to see the governor, it’s impossible to see him. The police chief? The mayor? It would take a month to see them.”
“There’s a distance between locals and the government. There’s a big gap,” Karzai said. “How are you going to cover that gap? I haven’t figured it out yet.”
‘Not delivering the services’
By September, the number of U.S. troops in Kandahar and other, nearby provinces will drop to 13,500, down from a high in April 2011 of nearly 20,000. The bloody battles with the Taliban of the past few years — in Kandahar city and the nearby Arghandab Valley — have shifted farther west, into the rural minefields of Zhari and Panjwai districts.
While the locus of violence has changed, the overall strength of the insurgency has stayed about the same, according to Maj. Gen. James L. Huggins Jr., the top American commander in Kandahar province. He says he is confident that the Afghan soldiers and police can prevail in a fight with the Taliban.
But Huggins said he is less sanguine about the ability of the government to satisfy the people — a responsibility he says must be fulfilled in order for Afghanistan to ultimately keep the insurgency at bay.
In a recent meeting with Kandahar Gov. Toryalai Wesa, Huggins said, he delivered the message that Afghans urgently need their government’s help. “It’s the people who are not supportive of [the Afghan government]. And I told him, ‘Why aren’t they supportive? . . . You’re not delivering the services. You’ve got to hear the voices. You’ve got to bring some level of governance.’ ”
“In the end, security is only going to be as good as the government that enables it and supports it,” Huggins said.
In recent years, the United States has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Kandahar to try to deliver those services on the Afghan government’s behalf.
A major source of irrigation water comes from the reservoir at the Dahla Dam outside Kandahar city, which the United States is paying about $200 million to enlarge because it is about one-third silted up. Much of the city’s electricity comes from two 10-megawatt generators that require an annual U.S. subsidy of about $50 million to pay for the diesel fuel. But that subsidy is scheduled to run out sometime during the middle of next year, forcing Afghans to either cut back on power or significantly raise fees.
Afghans fear that the wartime economy, which boomed with NATO contracts to build and supply Kandahar Airfield, known as KAF, will come crashing down as the troops and money depart.
“Ninety percent of Kandahar’s economy is run from KAF,” Hashmat Karzai said. “Once that money dries out, what’s going to happen?”
Even more than fears about security, the villagers of Karz say they are worried about economics. The impoverished village has no electricity or clinic and has a sporadic water supply to irrigate its vineyards.
Tucked in his shirt Karzai keeps two sheets of paper with the names of 25 residents he hoped would receive fertilizer handouts as part of an agriculture program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. What little tangible change he has noticed in Karz during the past decade — the retaining wall, the $6 cash-for-work jobs, a small bridge, a stone well — have come from foreign aid.
But on balance, the ascension of his fellow tribesman Hamid Karzai to the presidency has left Karz scarcely better off than before, the villagers said. There has not been major rebuilding here. Many of the homes, blasted into rubble during the Soviet war in the 1980s, have not been rebuilt. The golden era of the 1960s and ’70s — when President Karzai’s father, a parliament member, arranged for a canal to be built in Karz, when young Hamid Karzai played marbles with his friends and rode his horse through the vineyards — is a distant memory.
“Many of our young people are jobless now,” said Ahmadullah, a village elder. He has watched as more of these unemployed young men wile away their hours smoking hashish. If U.S.-funded day-labor paychecks dry up when the troops leave, he said, the lure of the Taliban will grow stronger.
‘That’s what creates Taliban’
The local official responsible for Karz is Amadullah Naziq, the governor of Dand district. The elders of Karz have given him a wish list: gravel roads with culverts, hand pumps for the wells, a clinic, an elementary school, and new huts for drying grapes into raisins.
Naziq’s office is itself powered by U.S.-funded diesel generators, and he says it simply does not possess the capacity to satisfy the needs of an impoverished rural population. Staffing such offices has been a problem for years, particularly as the Taliban began systematically assassinating local officials in Kandahar. Even now, Afghanistan’s district and provincial governments do not have budgets and collect no taxes; instead, money trickles down from Kabul through various ministries.
“How can we collect taxes when the people don’t have anything and we’re not providing them anything?” Naziq said.
Even some who have personally suffered from the U.S. troop presence are wary about the consequences of the departure. Abdullah, a 40-year-old car dealer, came to Hashmat Karzai’s home in Karz searching for information about his two brothers, who had been detained by American troops last month.
The raid came during Abdullah’s father’s funeral, when Afghan troops burst into a mosque, cuffed his two brothers and passed them to their American partners waiting outside.
“That’s what creates Taliban. This guy eventually is going to become a Talib. Imagine if this happened to you,” Karzai said.
And yet, Abdullah is not rejoicing over the U.S. troops’ departure. When the war started, Abdullah was a poor truck driver earning $200 a month ferrying raisins across southern Afghanistan. He took advantage of the wartime boom and became a vendor of cargo trucks to shuttle NATO supplies to military bases. He now earns 10 times as much.
“I’m very happy with their presence here,” Abdullah said. “Business has been good in Kandahar these past five years. I’m very worried about what will happen when the foreigners leave.”
Afghans plan for professional football league; players to be chosen on reality TV show
The Associated Press By Rahim Faiez 16/07/2012
KABUL - Amid a deadly war in an impoverished nation, the promise of a new professional football league is offering a glimmer of hope in Afghanistan.
Thousands of young Afghans have signed up to participate in a reality television program called "Maidan e Sabz," or "Green Field," to earn a chance to play on one of eight professional football teams being created in their homeland.
Abdul Sabor Walizada, a trainer for the project, said Monday the idea is to bring football into Afghan homes, stimulate business and strengthen national unity through sports.
"After years of civil conflict and war, people will focus on football and the businessmen from each zone will try to have the best players," said Walizada, a former member of the Afghanistan national team.
"It will create national unity because if the central zone, for example, has a really good player, the southern zone team will want to buy him," he explained. "They will not care about his ethnicity. They will not care about his tribe. They will care that he is one of the best players."
The league is being organized by the Afghan Football Federation and sponsored by Roshan Telecom Development Co., a major communications company in Afghanistan, and the MOBY Group, which owns and operates media industries in developing nations. The group owns TOLO TV, a leading Afghanistan television station that will broadcast the reality show and the league's inaugural season of 16 matches, beginning in September.
Eight competitions are being filmed across the nation for Maidan e Sabz, including in the big cities of Kabul, the Afghan capital; Kandahar in the south; Mazar-i-Sharif in the north; Heret in the west; and Jalalabad in the east. Of the thousands of applicants, groups of 30 players will be selected to vie for slots on one of the teams from eight zones.
A battery of physical, mental and football skills tests — one involves running through mud and water while wearing ankle weights and then heading a suspended football — will whittle each group to 21 contestants. Each studio audience then will select the best 18 finalists.
At the end of all eight shows, 168 players will remain — enough for eight 18-man squads.
Maidan e Sabz debuted last week featuring film clips of famous football players like Argentina's Lionel Messi, Brazil's Pele and Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo.
"Tell me, do you know more about (President Barack) Obama or Messi and Ronaldo?" TOLO commentator Makhtar Lashkari said, asking his TV viewers to illustrate the popularity of the sport.
Afghans began playing football about 90 years ago, but there were few if any rules. The Afghan Football Federation was founded in 1922 and was admitted into the FIFA, the sport's world governing body, in 1948.
Football gained a strong following among Afghans in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but the sport nearly died out during the 10-year Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989 and the civil war that followed from 1992 to 1996.
After the hardline Islamic Taliban regime was toppled in 2001, sport in Afghanistan was reborn. Cricket has already made inroads, with the Afghan team improving its ranking considerably in international limited-overs competition. Now, with the start of the new football league, teams with names like "Eagles of Hindu Kush," — called after a mountain range — will compete to be the best in Afghanistan.
To develop peace and stability in Afghanistan, the nation must not only focus on training soldiers, says Keramuddin Karim, AFF president.
"This will be very effective for the new generation," Karim said. "This program is going to uncover new football talent across the country."
Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan by Rajiv Chandrasekaran – review
This account of America's decade-long adventure in Afghanistan makes for essential reading
Jason Burke guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 July 2012 06.00 EDT
In the spring of 2002, the American army arrived in force in Afghanistan. Its main base was at the old airfield at Bagram, a short drive north of Kabul. By early summer, serried ranks of tents had gone up in the fine dust, a basic field hospital had been established and the all-important PX opened – where soldiers could buy Hershey bars, Hot Tamales candy, R&B compact discs and Bibles in "tactical" camouflage covers. In the evening, during the month I spent at the base, I went running on the airstrip, past the helicopters, the transport planes, the artillery park and the compound where prisoners were being kept. All around the perimeter, as dusk turned to night, newly arrived US troops tested their weapons, sending streams of tracer fire into the gathering darkness.
Over the following years, the base at Bagram grew rapidly. The old runway was renovated and extended, the makeshift jail converted to one of the most notorious detention facilities run for suspected al-Qaida and Taliban captives, power plants built and vast dining halls opened.
The tents were replaced by prefabricated and then solid concrete barracks. On one recent visit, I got my dinner from Burger King and, when waiting for a helicopter the next morning, watched Tropic Thunder, the spoof Vietnam war film, projected on the wall of a hangar. The old air base had become a small town of around 10,000 inhabitants, a Little America in the middle of an Afghan plain.
Little America is an apt title for this comprehensive, perceptive and detailed work. It is the second book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, among the best of those brave, clever, and assiduous reporters that American journalism seems to produce in such happy abundance. His first, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, was a justly praised description of the follies, excesses, naivety and negligence of the Americans who tried to run Iraq with such disastrous results between 2003 and 2004.
In this new work he looks at the American experience in Afghanistan, focusing on the 2009 to 2011 period. That his book is already effectively a history – albeit a very contemporary history – says much about the rapidity with which the aims and methods of the west have changed in that tragic country over the last years. Little America is focused on the decision by President Obama to send around 30,000 new troops into Afghanistan in 2009 and its consequences. This "surge", modelled in part on a similar but more successful exercise in Iraq, is now over. Whether it worked or not is one of the many themes explored by Chandrasekaran in this book. The CIA apparently decided it had, at best, led to a stalemate.
"Where we went, we made a difference. But not next door," one official told the author. "The surge worked locally, but it did not have the nationwide effect that was advertised."
But the ultimate answer is that the debate is no longer relevant. Largely due to factors which have little to do with Afghanistan itself – the state of the American economy, general war fatigue in the US and elsewhere, the death of Osama bin Laden last year, the fragmentation and regionalisation of al-Qaida – the international project in the country is now winding down. In 2009 I asked the then US ambassador in Kabul if, as America was a democracy, any one leader could really promise eternal support. "Can I say we will be committed for the full life of the sun? No," he answered. "But short of that, yes, we will be here." That wasn't true.
As Chandrasekaran observes, it costs $1m to keep one American service member in Afghanistan for a year. The annual bill for the war last year was more than $100bn. Was achieving a marginally less bad outcome in Afghanistan worth the expense, administration officials wondered? With other pressing security challenges – Iran, North Korea, and the political upheaval in the Middle East – was it prudent to be committing so many resources to stabilising remote Afghan villages? The United States was spending more each year to keep marine battalions in two single remote districts in the deep south of the country than it was providing the entire nation of Egypt in military and development assistance, Chandrasekaran points out.
The war in Afghanistan started with goals that were purely to do with US security – the need to eradicate the bases from which the 11 September attacks had been launched. We have come full circle. The only debate now is whether what is left behind is enough to prevent a reconstituted al-Qaida gaining some kind of foothold. In the intervening period, the western project in Afghanistan was something much more ambitious, involving the creation of a prosperous, stable democracy with significantly improved human rights for women and minorities. The contrast with the modest aims of today is, at the very least, unedifying. There are stronger adjectives that could be used.
So what went wrong? First of all, winning in Afghanistan, however defined, was never going to be easy. The international effort there came at the end of a long series of increasingly ambitious – and even sometimes successful – "liberal humanitarian" interventions. It was a period of extraordinary hubris – and great trauma after the 9/11 attacks. Together this bred a toxic mix of astonishing overconfidence and deep insecurity. Then came the distraction of Iraq.
Chandrasekaran suggests – and some military historians might disagree – that Afghanistan is "by far the most complicated war the USA has ever prosecuted". The superlative here might be challenged by many historians but that the conflict was a tough challenge is without doubt.
America, however, could not meet it, he argues. Chandrasekaran's indictment is savage. "Too few generals recognised that surging forces could be counterproductive… Too few soldiers were ordered to leave their air-conditioned bases and live among the people in fly-infested villages. Too few diplomats invested the effort to understand the languages and cultures of the places in which they were stationed. Too few development experts were interested in anything other than making a buck. Too few officials in Washington were willing to assume the risks necessary to forge a lasting peace… Generals and diplomats were too ambitious and arrogant. Uniformed and civilian bureaucracies were rife with internal rivalries. Our development experts were inept. Our leaders were distracted." The result, inevitably, was that "the good war… turned bad".
And if, after reading this, any Europeans are feeling smug, they shouldn't. Where they are mentioned at all, allies are portrayed as incompetent, feckless, cowardly or complacent. The British, whose ineffectual attempts to secure Helmand province and appalling relations with both local communities and the Americans are described in painful detail, come out particularly badly. Though not, it must be said, as badly as the Pakistani security establishment, whose strategically critical support, passive and active, for the insurgents was apparently not fully understood by US military planners until only very recently.
There are now thousands of books on this most recent Afghan conflict, ranging from airport thrillers to specialist study. Many books are extremely good, some are very bad. Little America is powerful and important and should be read by anyone interested in this ongoing and deeply depressing war, particularly those waiting for helicopters or eating Hot Tamales in Bagram.
Exclusive Internet Cafe Connects Afghan Women To The World
July 17, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Frud Bezhan, Fareba Wahidi
KABUL -- Dozens of headscarf-wearing girls flock each day through the discreetly marked doors of Kabul's Sahar Gul Cafe, Afghanistan's first all-female Internet cafe.
Equipped with more than a dozen laptops, a library, and stocked with comfortable cushions, the modest cafe has given Afghan women the opportunity to study and socialize free from the scrutiny of men.
That's important in a country where women continue to face enormous obstacles in securing their rights nearly 11 years after U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban regime from Kabul.
Homiyra Bakhshi, project manager and member of the Afghan activist group YoungWomen4Change, which created the cafe, speaking outside the cafe says it has become a refuge for the country's women.
"We have created this Internet cafe in a way that ensures young Afghan girls and women who come to use our facilities here feel safe and relaxed. We ensure they can do their work, be happy, and don't encounter any problems," Bakhshi says.
Bakhshi says the cafe has had to rely on fundraising and donations from local and foreign charities to run and maintain the cafe, which charges visitors a fee of 50 afghanis ($1) an hour, significantly less than other Internet cafes in Kabul.
With Facebook and Yahoo logos painted onto the wall, the cafe is named after the 15-year-old Afghan bride who was imprisoned and brutally abused last year at the hands of her husband and in-laws after she refused to become a prostitute.
Mariam Noorani is a student at Kabul University and a frequent visitor at the cafe, which was opened in March this year to correspond with International Women's Day. She says the significance of the name is not lost on those visiting the cafe, which she says pays tribute to the resilience and bravery of Sahar Gul.
"Sahar Gul was a girl who suffered. She went through a lot of bad things and we would like to support her. That's why I always come to the Sahar Gul Cafe. I'm looking forward to other Internet cafes being opened in other neighborhoods," Noorani says.
Routine Domestic Abuse
Noorani says while some women can enjoy the freedoms inside the exclusive all-female cafe, many others like Sahar Gul continue to live a life fraught with hardship in Afghanistan, a country where domestic abuse is routine, forced marriages are the norm, and female suicide rates are among the highest in the world.
In the past decade, women have made significant inroads in Afghan society. The end of Taliban rule coincided with greater opportunities for women. Millions of girls are now back in school. Women are working, particularly in the major cities, as professionals in various fields. The country has a female provincial governor, while dozens of women serve as members of parliament and the Senate.
But as the United States and its NATO allies prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014, women fear that their newfound rights may be undermined in peace talks with the Taliban -- which denied women the right to work, receive an education, or even leave their homes during its five-year rule.
Farida, a student at the nearby Rabia Balkhi high school, says the situation for Afghan women will deteriorate considerably after 2014. She predicts that women will face renewed restrictions on their freedom of movement, while their access to work and rights will be steadily tightened and violence against them will soar.
"In my opinion, a lot of harm will come to women. Right now, international forces are here and women's rights are protected and talked about. But in 2014, when they leave, women will lose everything. Perhaps those who will go backward the most are women," Farida says.
Despite the widespread reservation of many women, Noorani says the opening of the cafe has offered hope to many. She sees the cafe as a sign that the inroads made by women will not only be preserved but will be further bolstered in the near future.
"There's a chance that there will be Internet cafes and the situation will be even better. We can predict that there will be stability. And the inroads that women have made will be further consolidated. We can protect and preserve the progress that we have made after 2014," Noorani says.
Written and reported by Frud Bezhan in Kabul, with additional reporting by Fareba Wahidi.
Pakistani Islamists Protest Reopening Of NATO Routes To Afghanistan
July 17, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Thousands of Pakistani Islamists shouted "Death to America" as they protested U.S. drone strikes along the Afghan-Pakistan border and the lifting of a seven-month blockade of routes through which NATO carries supplies into Afghanistan.
The protest on July 17 was organized by Jamaat-e-Islami, a leading member of the Defense of Pakistan coalition of right-wing and Islamist groups.
The protest occurred at Jamrud, near the Torkham border crossing.
Local administration official Bakhtiar Khan said between 18,000 and 20,000 people took part.
Pakistani authorities closed overland routes used by NATO convoys bringing supplies into Afghanistan after U.S. air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border last November.
The routes were re-opened on July 3, after the U.S. said "sorry" for the incident.
Based on reporting by AFP and RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal
Northern Route a Key Supply Network for NATO Troops in Afghanistan
Andre deNesnera VOA News July 16, 2012
Pakistan has recently re-opened a vital supply line to NATO troops in Afghanistan - the so-called southern route. But, NATO forces also use another major thoroughfare.
The so-called northern route is a far more complex network of supply lines than the southern route, which relies merely on trucks transiting through Pakistan to provide military equipment to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Alexander Cooley is a Central Asian expert at Barnard College, New York.
“The northern route uses a mix of ship, road, rail and air. It’s not one route," Cooley stated. "It’s really a series of different routes that originate in the Baltic states, then come down via rail - old Soviet rails - through Russia, through Kazakhstan. Most of them pass through Uzbekistan and the border town of Termez.”
From Termez, the trucks pass over the “Friendship Bridge” into Afghanistan.
Seth Jones, an expert on Afghanistan with the RAND Corporation, says whether the supplies come by rail, air or truck, NATO and the United States must sign agreements with each country involved.
“In order for any material to come through any of the Central Asian governments, or Russia for that matter, they have to agree on specifics on how much those governments are going to make and any companies that are exporting or importing goods, how much they are going to make. So there are a lot of details that have to be agreed on both by the host nation as well as by any private companies that are involved in moving the goods,” explained Jones.
Experts say the exact terms and transit fees paid to each country remain classified. But they say given the complexity of the northern route, experts estimate it costs twice as much to ship supplies through that network than through the southern route.
However the northern route was the only way to ship supplies into Afghanistan for the past seven months. Pakistan shut down the southern route after a U.S.-led coalition air strike accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier last November. Islamabad recently re-opened it after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. is “sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military.”
Analysts say both southern and northern routes will also be used to move soldiers and equipment out of Afghanistan, as the United States and other NATO countries wind down their military presence in that country.
Alexander Cooley says the so-called “reverse transit” operation will be another source of revenue for the countries involved. “There is a perception that the drawdown is going to be a type of one-shot affair, that they can squeeze now, make increased demands for payments now with the understanding that NATO and the U.S. will just want to get the stuff out and will give in to these demands,” he said.
Many human rights organizations question whether the United States and NATO should rely on authoritarian countries for getting supplies in and ultimately soldiers out of Afghanistan.
Cooley says it is difficult to strike a balance between short-term military needs and long-term democratic aspirations.
“Over the last 10 years, Washington and Brussels [NATO Headquarters] have come to tone down criticism on so-called rights issues and also tone down engagement in other areas to focus primarily on the security and logistics cooperation," said Cooley. "In some way, Central Asia has been made an appendage to the Afghanistan war. And those in the advocacy community who look at questions of democracy and human rights, would like a little more honesty about Washington’s policy and view what has happened in Central Asia as also a political casualty of the Afghan war.”
Seth Jones from the RAND Corporation says there has been no major success, nor prospects of success, in establishing greater democratization across Central Asia.
Computer analysis brings future of Afghanistan war into focus
Researchers used previous data of violence in Afghanistan to predict with striking accuracy which areas of the country in 2010 would see more bloodshed and which would see less.
Los Angeles Times By Jon Bardin July 17, 2012
In August 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of classified documents that cataloged the harsh realities of the war in Afghanistan, a group of friends — all computer experts — gathered at the New York City headquarters of the Internet company Bitly Inc. to try and make sense of the data.
The programmers used simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 incident reports that detailed everything from simple stop-and-search operations to full-fledged battles. The resulting map revealed the outlines of the country's ongoing violence: hot spots near the Pakistani border but not near the Iranian border, and extensive bloodshed along the country's main highway. They did it all in just one night.
Now one member of that group has teamed up with mathematicians and computer scientists and taken the project one major step further: They have used the WikiLeaks data to predict the future.
Based solely on written reports of violence from 2004 to 2009, the researchers built a model that was able to foresee which provinces would experience more violence in 2010 and which would have less. They could also anticipate how much the level of violence went up or down.
The project, whose results were published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of a growing movement to understand and predict episodes of political and military conflict using automated computational techniques.
The availability of huge amounts of data combined with steady increases in computing power has prompted experts to bring the rigor of objective quantitative analysis to realms that were once considered fundamentally subjective, including literature and the study of social groups.
"For the first time, we have large data sets from places like Facebook and Twitter that we can analyze with high-powered computers and get meaningful results," said Paulo Shakarian, a computer scientist at the United States Military Academy at West Point, who is working on an algorithm to predict the location of insurgent weapons caches. "Iraq and Afghanistan are the very first conflicts where we have been collecting as much data as we possibly can."
In the case of the WikiLeaks data, the researchers sought to find a general pattern to the violence in Afghanistan and use it to predict how violence would change in each province in 2010 — the year President Obama increased the number of U.S. troops in the country.
"The model we employed is both complex and simple," said Guido Sanguinetti, an expert in computational sciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the study's senior author. "It doesn't take in any knowledge of military operations or political events, and it treats all types of violence exactly the same, whether it's a stop-and-search or a big battle."
Even with these ostensibly key details missing, the researchers found that they could predict 2010's events with striking accuracy.
And the model wasn't tripped up by Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops, which introduced a new dimension to the Afghanistan conflict.
"Our findings seem to prove that the insurgency is self-sustaining," Sanguinetti said. "You may throw a large military offensive, but this doesn't seem to disturb the system."
The study authors said they were most surprised that the model could predict activity even in Afghanistan's relatively quiet northern provinces, where there were fewer data points available to analyze.
"This shows that the escalation we see isn't just attributed to the noise in the data," said study leader Andrew Zammit Mangion, a computational sciences researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Instead, he said, patterns existed nearly everywhere.
Michael Ward, a political scientist at Duke University who has shown that location data can improve predictions of conflicts, said the study pointed the way to future research.
"Suppose you could say, 'This is the effect on violence if you build different types of infrastructure,' " he said. "They don't do that, but they've set up the framework to do it."
The study also shows why it's important to make as much data public as possible, Ward said. Without WikiLeaks, he said, a study like this would have been far more difficult to carry out.
Clionadh Raleigh of Trinity College Dublin, who uses data to predict violence in Africa based on factors such as the outcomes of local elections, said the Afghanistan model could be made even better by including variables such as the political party in power.
"Violence, in general, is a really good predictor of future violence," she said. But even better would be "to figure out what stops the cycle of conflict."
Quantitative rigor is making its way into some surprising fields of study. In 2010, just a few months after the WikiLeaks data dump, Google released a database of every single word contained in thousands of books published between 1800 and 2000 — about 4% of all books ever printed. That has enabled some intrepid researchers to close in on the final frontier: Studying literature with advanced math.
In a study published last year in Science, experts from Harvard University and Google were able to detect evidence of censorship regarding controversial historical figures and events, such as early Soviet official and Stalin foe Leon Trotsky and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in China.
"That's what this digital humanities focus is being driven toward: uncovering trends in data that have just never been available before," Raleigh said.
jon.bardin@latimes.com
From Kabul to Istanbul: The rickshaw circus
AFP 17/07/2012
KABUL - A Canadian man and his German girlfriend are braving the Taliban to take a rickshaw on one of the world’s most dangerous road trips to bring the circus to children in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.
Adnan Khan, 41, and his anthropologist sweetheart have embarked on the punishing 8,000-kilometre trip to Istanbul that demands a police escort and hoisting the rickshaw onto trucks to navigate the trickiest stages.
Their purpose is twofold: raise money for a charity that uses circus training to lift the spirits of children in war-torn Afghanistan and to spread those circus skills along the way, to brighten the lives of refugees and orphans.
Adnan left Kabul by road on July 11 as 25-year-old Annika Schmeding flew to Islamabad, after eight months in the Afghan capital, to prepare the way.
Accompanied by Afghan police, Adnan drove to the eastern town of Jalalabad, then onto the border with Pakistan’s tribal belt.
Washington considers the tribal belt the global headquarters of al Qaeda, and a den of Taliban and other militants plotting attacks in Afghanistan and against the West. It has not seen Western tourists in years.
Nor does the three-wheel rickshaw, painted yellow, green and white with a jazzy “Rickshaw Circus” on the side, and sporting a brass clown horn, go unnoticed in terrain synonymous with kidnapping, suicide bombings and ambushes.
“I finally got the rickshaw to the Pakistani side. It took hours. It was quite funny. A policeman told me ‘I haven’t seen a carnet de passage (the document needed for tourists to cross the border) in years,’” Adnan told AFP by telephone on Monday.
His next task was speeding the rickshaw to Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar, where Osama bin Laden kept a house during the 1980s war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, and onto the capital Islamabad.
“The local tribal police force is going to have a guard travel with me,” he said, adding that he would be rushing to make Tuesday’s first show.
The trip has been months in the planning. Khan and Schmeding expect to spend two months winding their way through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey — averaging 300 kilometres a day in six hours — in temperatures that can reach 50 degrees Celsius.
The couple are determined to raise as much money as possible for the Afghan Mobile Mini Circus for Children (MMCC), which was recently forced to close a school in the western city of Herat and sack staff because of a shortage of funds.
“We realised that MMCC is very good at running their programmes, but not really good in terms of publicity. So we wanted people to know that there’s been an actual social circus running in Afghanistan for about 10 years,” said Khan.
The journalist, who lives in Istanbul but has been coming to Afghanistan regularly for the past 10 years, spoke as girls sang, juggled tennis balls and skittles, and boys danced around the rickshaw and jumped high into the sky.
Organisers say the circus encourages concentration, discipline and stimulates intellectual development.
“When they learn how to juggle and they go on stage, they get so much more self-confidence. They learn to express themselves. They learn how to trust, to share,” said Schmeding.
Since 2002, the charity says it has reached more than two million children in a country where singing, dancing and cultural shows were banned by the Taliban regime, which was brought down in the 2001 US-led invasion.
Besides children, the MMCC also puts on shows for grown ups designed to raise public awareness of basic hygiene, malaria and anti-personnel mines.
“One thing is the educational message in it. Another one is to have the children being entertained,” said David Mason, the founder and co-director of MMCC.
“In Afghanistan, entertainment has another mission. It’s therapy, collective therapy,” he added.
Since 1979, Afghanistan has been largely at war. The 1980s saw the mujahideen fight to evict Soviet troops, then came civil war between 1992 and 1996, until the Taliban took power and the 9/11 attacks prompted the American invasion in 2001.
Since then, a deadly Taliban insurgency has grown with each passing year, killing more than 3,000 civilians in 2011, according to the United Nations, which is a record.
In Pakistan and in Iran, the rickshaw circus will stop every three days in a large town, where they will work with children in orphanages, hospitals and refugee camps.
“It will be nice to raise some money for MMCC as they desperately need it. But the awareness is more important,” said Khan.
The next Afghan war
Sydney Morning Herald By Robert Haddick July 16, 2012
Rather than winding down with the planned departure of NATO troops by 2014, the war in Afghanistan may just be undergoing a metamorphosis, as has happened many times since strife began there in the late 1960s. A slowly escalating old-fashioned war between Afghanistan and Pakistan may soon emerge, joining the internal insurgencies both of those governments are attempting to smother and pitting one state against the other.
Cross-border sanctuaries and Islamabad's covert support to the Taliban are well-known features of the current violence. But as the Western military presence inside Afghanistan draws down, the trends leading to direct military escalation between Afghanistan and Pakistan are likely to continue.
The Afghan government will face an increasingly difficult security situation after 2014 and will need a new strategy if it is to survive. The number one security problem from Kabul's perspective is the continued presence of Taliban sanctuaries inside Pakistan, and the support the Afghan Taliban continues to receive from Pakistan's intelligence service. For a decade, US and Afghan officials have pleaded with the Pakistani government to halt this support, to no avail. For Islamabad, groups like the Haqqani Network — which specialises in periodic raids in downtown Kabul — are proxy forces that Pakistan can use to keep Afghanistan weak and pliant.
After 2014, the Afghan army and police will bear nearly the full burden fending off the Haqqanis and other cross-border Taliban forces. Afghan military leaders are likely to conclude that they cannot reach a stable end-state by only parrying the Taliban's attacks. The only hope of ending the war on favourable terms is through offensive action against the Taliban's sanctuaries in Pakistan or action that inflicts pain on the leadership in Islamabad.
If Kabul hopes to negotiate a settlement with Islamabad and the Taliban, it will have to acquire some leverage first. And that will come only after it has demonstrated a capacity to threaten the Taliban's sanctuaries and other assets inside Pakistan.
Initial trials of such incursions may have begun. This month, the Pakistani government accused the Afghan National Army of a cross-border raid into the Upper Kurram District. Two Pakistani tribesmen were killed during a 90-minute gun battle. Although this particular incident may be more a case of hot pursuit rather than a deliberate attack, it also shows the Afghan army's willingness to step up its aggressiveness.
The Afghan government may also find it useful to employ the same tactics that Islamabad is using against Afghanistan. Pakistan has its own problem with Taliban insurgents, with these rebels using the Afghan side of the border as a sanctuary from Pakistani security forces. Indeed, in June, a Pakistani Taliban raiding party crossed from its Afghan sanctuary into Pakistan, captured 18 Pakistani soldiers, and videotaped the severed heads of 17 of these prisoners. Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani subsequently complained to US Marine General John Allen, the coalition commander, and urged him to take action to control the Taliban sanctuaries inside Afghanistan.
It seems doubtful that the Pakistani Taliban finding haven in Afghanistan are agents of Afghanistan's intelligence service. But the Afghan government has likely concluded that it needs to obtain leverage over Pakistan if it is to obtain a satisfactory settlement to the war. If the Pakistani Taliban lurking in Afghanistan are a potential source of that leverage, it might be only a matter of time before Kabul makes contact with the Pakistani rebels.
Kayani probably realises that there is as little chance of him getting a positive response from Allen and Karzai as there is of Pakistan doing anything meaningful about the Taliban problem that runs from east to west. That would explain why the Pakistani Army is taking matters into its own hands the old-fashioned way. Beginning in March, it fired a series of cross-border rocket barrages targeted at suspected Pakistani Taliban base camps in Afghanistan's Kunar province, resulting in the deaths of four civilians.
The Haqqani attacks in Kabul and against US targets in eastern Afghanistan have compelled US officials to consider cross-border special operations raids against Haqqani camps inside Pakistan. Given the military hardware currently in place, the intelligence on the Haqqanis the United States has developed, and the experience its special operations raiders have accumulated, US forces are unlikely to ever get a better opportunity to hit the Haqqani Network and thereby create some incentives for a settlement. But the White House currently has a higher priority, namely disengaging from the conflict. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's apology to Pakistan for a cross-border "friendly fire" incident last November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers has reopened the supply lines from Afghanistan to the port at Karachi, which the United States will need to extract its mountain of equipment by the end of 2014. The requirements of an orderly withdrawal trumped the risks of widening the war and further angering Islamabad.
Although the United States can withdraw from Afghanistan, the Afghans, at least the vast majority of them, cannot. They are stuck with the Haqqanis, Pakistan's intelligence service, and Islamabad's long-term interest in a weak Afghanistan. The only path to a reasonable settlement lies through offensive action inside Pakistan. Afghans will have to be willing to go where the US military (drones excepted) have feared to tread.
Until the Afghan military can develop greater offensive punch, it will have to turn to proxy forces such as the Pakistani Taliban as tools to gain leverage over Islamabad. Should such proxies fail, Kabul will have to turn to an outside power to support its development of helicopter mobility and artillery and air support, essential elements of a capability to directly attack the sanctuaries and other objectives inside Pakistan.
When he signed the strategic partnership agreement pledging support to Afghanistan through 2024, it is unlikely that President Barack Obama had such a war in mind. But once Kabul becomes solely responsible for Afghanistan's security, it will undoubtedly turn to the United States first to help it develop the offensive capability it believes it will need. Should Washington demur, Kabul will call New Delhi, which could be eager to help.
After 2014, Pakistan should see the wisdom in wrapping up the remainder of al Qaeda and settling the conflict with Afghanistan. NATO's withdrawal will actually reduce Islamabad's leverage and expose it to more forms of pressure. Continuing the conflict will only encourage outside intervention.
If Islamabad decides to fight on after 2014, we should expect to see a messy, multi-level conflict much like the 18th century French and Indian War. That war featured insurgencies, proxy armies, old-fashioned nation-state war, and great power intervention from the far side of the world. A similarly complicated scenario may be headed for the Durand Line. The Afghan war may be about to mutate again — policymakers should get ready for the change.
Haddick is managing editor of Small Wars Journal.
Foreign Policy
Top senators can't explain Romney's Afghanistan policy
Foreign Policy By Josh Rogin Monday, July 16, 2012
Republican candidate Mitt Romney's policy on the future of U.S.-led war in Afghanistan war is unclear and confusing, complicating attempts to either support or criticize it during the campaign, according to leading senators from both parties.
On Romney's website, the campaign criticizes President Barack Obama for announcing a "timetable" for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and accuses the administration of placing politics over the advice of military commanders by withdrawing 30,000 surge troops by September.
"Gov. Romney supports the 2014 timetable as a realistic timetable and a residual force post-2014. But he would not have announced that timetable publicly, as President Obama did, as doing so encourages the Taliban to wait us out and our allies to hedge their bets," a Romney campaign spokesperson told The Cable.
But when it comes to what a President Romney would do differently from Obama on Afghanistan if and when he became president, the details remain sketchy.
"Mitt Romney will never make national-security decisions based upon electoral politics," the campaign website reads. "Upon taking office, he will review our transition to the Afghan military by holding discussions with our commanders in the field. He will order a full interagency assessment of our military and assistance presence in Afghanistan to determine the level required to secure our gains and to train Afghan forces to the point where they can protect the sovereignty of Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban. Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan under a Romney administration will be based on conditions on the ground as assessed by our military commanders."
Last week, The Cable asked several senior senators from both parties whether they supported Romney's plan for Afghanistan. None was able to articulate exactly what that policy is or what the U.S. force in Afghanistan might look like if Romney is elected.
"What is it?" said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a Romney supporter and senior member of the Armed Services Committee. "I think [Romney's policy is] ‘listen to the commanders' and if it's that, that's OK with me."
Graham agreed with Romney's criticism of Obama's plan to withdraw the 30,000 surge troops by September, which means the bulk of them will not be around for this summer's fighting season. But overall, Graham supports the Obama plan to adhere to a 2014 deadline for handing over control to the Afghans while keeping a significant U.S. troop presence there afterwards.
"Generally speaking, the only problem I have with President Obama is the acceleration of the withdrawal of the surge forces," Graham said.
Graham wants Romney to publicly endorse a continued U.S. force presence in Afghanistan after the full handover of power in 2014. Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in May signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement that would extend the presence of U.S. troops another 10 years, an agreement Graham helped to negotiate.
"I hope Romney will tell the American people that we are going to have a follow-on force in Afghanistan." Graham said. "It's in our interest to do it."
Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said he wasn't sure exactly what Romney's Afghanistan policy entailed and didn't want to get into it.
"You would have to tell me what exactly you mean by ‘his policy.' That's a long discussion that I don't want to get into," Kyl told The Cable.
Part of the challenge for the Romney team is that Republican voters are split on Afghanistan, with 48 percent supporting withdrawing all troops as soon as possible and nearly as many, 45 percent, supporting leaving a follow-on force there until the country is stabilized. The electorate as a whole favors bringing the troops home quickly (60 percent) over keeping troops there longer (32 percent).
"These numbers point to Romney's political bind," wrote James Lindsey, vice president of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an online commentary. "He has talked tough on Afghanistan ever since last June, when Republican national security conservatives blasted him for what they saw as his insufficient commitment to the mission there. Romney responded with much tougher rhetoric even though the policies he favors look a lot like Obama's."
For the Obama team and for Senate Democrats, Romney's apparent unwillingness to get more specific on Afghanistan represents a good opportunity to call into question his foreign-policy bona fides and present Obama as tougher on national security because he has committed to another decade of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
"Without getting into the campaign rhetoric of what [Romney]'s asserting, I think you've got 50 nations in NATO that agree to a plan in Afghanistan," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on ABC's This Week in May. "It's the Lisbon agreement, an agreement that, you know, others, President Bush, President Obama, everyone has agreed is the direction that we go in Afghanistan."
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) told The Cable that the issue is just one more example of the Romney campaign avoiding tackling tough issues.
"I sure don't know what [Romney's Afghanistan policy] is," Levin said. "From what I've read, I can't fathom his position on Afghanistan any more than I can fathom his position on a whole bunch of other things."
"I don't know that he's flip-flopped on Afghanistan. I don't know that he's ever taken a clear position. It's not like some of the other positions he's so consistently flip-flopped on," Levin said. "Here, I don't know what the flip is or the flop."
100 Taliban militants give up fighting in Afghanistan
QALAI NOW, Afghanistan, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Different militants consisted of 100 Taliban fighters laid down arms and joined the government-backed peace process in Badghis province 555 km northwest of capital Kabul on Monday, spokesman for provincial administration Sharafudin Majidi said Tuesday.
"Seven groups of Taliban fighters composed of 100 people gave up fighting and joined the peace process in provincial capital Qalai Now on Monday evening," Majidi told newsmen here while welcoming the former insurgents.
He also said with joining these former militants who were active in Qadis and Muqar districts, the peace and security will be further improved in the province.
They also handed over their weapons to authorities, he further said.
Taliban militants fighting the government have yet to make comment.
More than 3,000 Taliban militants, according to officials have laid down arms and joined the government-backed peace process over the past one year.
Tribunal Claims New Kabul Bank Uncooperative with Investigation
TOLOnews.com By Mahboba Pardis Monday, 16 July 2012
New Kabul Bank officials are not cooperating to determine the total amount owing from the Kabul Bank scandal of 2010, Special Kabul Bank Tribunal chief Shams-ur-Rhman Shams said Monday.
"We have sent letters to the New Kabul Bank officials and asked their cooperation to provide information about these issues; they neither reply to us nor cooperate with the assigned delegation," Shams told TOLOnews.
The tribunal asked New Kabul Bank officials to provide information about a sum of $825M given to them by the Ministry of Finance but the officials have refused any kind of cooperation.
He also said that Abdul Ghafar Dawi, one of the previous shareholders who owes $35M, has not paid his debts and has not appeared before the court as expected.
The sale of properties of previous shareholders of Kabul Bank in Dubai and Afghanistan will be sold in order to compensate the losses and pay their debts, adding that so far $104M of the bank's debts have been retrieved while the total property of the shareholders costs $245M.
Meanwhile, the new CEO of New Kabul Bank Massoud Khan Musa Ghazi confirmed that he did not provide information about the Finance Ministry aid to the Bank, saying that this issue could not be investigated without all the members of the delegation present.
"We are waiting for all the six members of the delegation to gather. So far, only the representative from the Attorney General Office has been introduced. But the Department 90 [one of the National Directorate of Security departments], Ministry of Finance, High Office of Oversight and Anti Corruption haven't introduced their representatives," Ghazi said.
Abdul Ghafar Dawi denied Shams' claims, saying that his case would be followed up by Kabul Bank's Commercial Division and he only owes $18M.
"I totally reject these allegations," he told TOLOnews. "The high court and the Attorney General Office ordered that my case should be followed up at the Kabul's Commercial Division."
The special Kabul Bank Tribunal director said that Mahmood Karzai and Hassin Fahim, have paid most of their debts and they owe $9M and $3M respectively.
Defense Ministry to Investigate Claims of ANA, Taliban ‘Truce' in Uruzgan
TOLOnews.com Monday, 16 July 2012
The Afghan Ministry of Defense on Monday rejected the claims made in an Austrlaian newspaper that Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers had arranged an unofficial truce with the Taliban in southern Uruzgan province.
Defense spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi said that the report was wrong, proven by the work the ANA soldiers in the area to combat the insurgents, but added that there would be an investigation.
"This report is wrong because the ANA soldiers have engaged with the enemy many times and had some fatalities, which shows their commitment to protecting the people from those threatening peace and security," Azimi told TOLOnews.
"However we will be investigating this report," he added.
The news report published in the Canberra Times on Monday found that militants in the Chora district of Uruzgan and the local ANA soldiers seem to have shared confidential military information in exchange for an unofficial ceasefire on ANA targets.
The report suggested the truce contributed to the death of an Australian special forces soldier earlier this month.
Quoting Naik Mohammad, a tribal elder from Chora, it says that in the past three months, the local soldiers were not attacked by the Taliban at all and were never hit by any roadside bombs, while the Afghan police and foreign soldiers have came under massive Taliban attacks.
"Taliban are very strong in Chora district, there has been some kind of deal between the ANA soldiers and the Taliban because there has been not even a bullet fired on them." Naik Mohammad told the newspaper, adding that the ANA soldiers were informing the Taliban of military operations against them.
Kandahar District Governor Resigns Citing Lack of Provincial Cooperation
TOLOnews.com Monday, 16 July 2012
A district governor in southern Kandahar province resigned Monday citing a lack of attention from the Kandahar provincial government in addressing problems in the district.
Dand governor Hamdullah Nazek claimed that there was too few government departments active in the district despite his request for more assistance.
"I announce my resignation via the media. There are lots of challenges in front of my work, but no one cares about these challenges," he said Monday.
But provincial officials said Nazek had personal problems that was making the role difficult for him.
"Many projects have been allocated to Dand district over other districts," provincial spokesman Jawed Faisal said. "Personal problems is the reason for his resignation and we request he stay in his position until we find a workable person for the position."
Nazek said that he had been angered over problems such as no specified border for his jurisdiction, failure to pay the salary for district staff, and the lack of government departments.
He admitted that there had been some developments in the district, but he claimed it was very little.
Dand is 70KM from the provincial capital Kandahar city.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
July 17, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
An Afghan soldier has been sentenced to death for the killing of four French soldiers.
Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi said on July 17 that a military court in Kabul ordered the solider, Abdul Sabor, to be hanged.
The sentence can still be appealed.
The four French soldiers were gunned down on January 20 in the Tagab district of the eastern Kapisa Province during a joint training operation involving NATO-led troops and Afghan soldiers.
It was one of a series of incidents in which members of the Afghan security forces have attacked their foreign allies.
In a recent incident, three British soldiers were shot dead by a man in an Afghan police uniform in the southern province of Helmand earlier this month
Based on reporting by AFP and AP
Afghan forces ready to secure country after 2014: president
KABUL, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan security forces are ready to ensure security for their own country after NATO-led forces hand over security charge to Afghan side by the end of 2014, President Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday.
"I am convinced and the Afghan people are confident that our National Security Forces would ensure security for this country when the handover of security is completed two years later," Karzai said in his speech delivered at police officers graduation ceremony here.
The process of security transition started in July 2011 in order to pave the way for withdrawal of over 130,000-strong NATO- led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) with nearly 90, 000 of them Americans.
The strength of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) at the moment is over 305,000 including army, police and other personnel of law enforcing agencies.
A total of 535 police officers graduated from Afghan National Police Academy on Tuesday, according to Nawroz Khalil, commander of the academy.
The ANSF took security duties from foreign forces in northern Kunduz province and eastern Kapisa province and will take control of southern Uruzgan province later Tuesday.
Under the U.S. President Barack Obama's withdrawal plan, 10,000 U.S. troops already pulled out of Afghanistan last year and another 23,000 will return home by September this year.
In Afghan village, fears that government can't provide after Americans leave
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Tuesday, July 17, 2012
KARZ, Afghanistan - In this mud-brick village, the United Nations put up the rock retaining wall along the riverbed to keep the road from washing out in floods. The United States paid to fertilize the wheat fields. Hashmat Karzai, a cousin of the president, paid about $70,000 from his own pocket to string up power lines.
As for the Afghan government, it remains all but invisible, even though Karz is the ancestral home of President Hamid Karzai. “The government itself has not done anything,” said Abdul Ali, a village elder.
The United States and its allies have devoted years of effort and billions of dollars to improve the delivery of basic services in rural Afghanistan. If Afghan leadership were to have taken hold anywhere, it might well have been in Karz, a farming area on the outskirts of Kandahar city still populated by relatives and tribesmen of the man who has ruled Afghanistan through a decade of war.
Instead, what is emerging in ever starker relief is a governance vacuum as U.S. forces begin to draw down. As the Americans leave, taking with them a main source of economic stimulus, U.S. officials and residents say what worries them most is the weakness of the local and provincial governments being left behind, which command virtually no resources and almost no authority.
That lack of government progress is apparent every day in Karz with the line of villagers beating a path to Hashmat Karzai’s door.
Karzai holds no official post; his prominence in the village stems from his status as a prosperous and powerful tribal elder and his relationship with the president. He is the former owner of a private security company, Asia Security Group, which sent men to guard U.S. bases, and he currently rents out land for a hotel near NATO’s Kandahar Airfield.
And yet each day the villagers of Karz file into Karzai’s courtyard with a fresh list of problems they say they can find no audience for in the offices of government. One by one they plead for electricity for their irrigation pumps, a clinic for their sick children, or information on the whereabouts of a relative detained by American troops.
“Where should he go? Which door should he knock?” Hashmat Karzai said as he motioned to one of his supplicants. “This is what’s killing the people of Kandahar. You go try to see the governor, it’s impossible to see him. The police chief? The mayor? It would take a month to see them.”
“There’s a distance between locals and the government. There’s a big gap,” Karzai said. “How are you going to cover that gap? I haven’t figured it out yet.”
‘Not delivering the services’
By September, the number of U.S. troops in Kandahar and other, nearby provinces will drop to 13,500, down from a high in April 2011 of nearly 20,000. The bloody battles with the Taliban of the past few years — in Kandahar city and the nearby Arghandab Valley — have shifted farther west, into the rural minefields of Zhari and Panjwai districts.
While the locus of violence has changed, the overall strength of the insurgency has stayed about the same, according to Maj. Gen. James L. Huggins Jr., the top American commander in Kandahar province. He says he is confident that the Afghan soldiers and police can prevail in a fight with the Taliban.
But Huggins said he is less sanguine about the ability of the government to satisfy the people — a responsibility he says must be fulfilled in order for Afghanistan to ultimately keep the insurgency at bay.
In a recent meeting with Kandahar Gov. Toryalai Wesa, Huggins said, he delivered the message that Afghans urgently need their government’s help. “It’s the people who are not supportive of [the Afghan government]. And I told him, ‘Why aren’t they supportive? . . . You’re not delivering the services. You’ve got to hear the voices. You’ve got to bring some level of governance.’ ”
“In the end, security is only going to be as good as the government that enables it and supports it,” Huggins said.
In recent years, the United States has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Kandahar to try to deliver those services on the Afghan government’s behalf.
A major source of irrigation water comes from the reservoir at the Dahla Dam outside Kandahar city, which the United States is paying about $200 million to enlarge because it is about one-third silted up. Much of the city’s electricity comes from two 10-megawatt generators that require an annual U.S. subsidy of about $50 million to pay for the diesel fuel. But that subsidy is scheduled to run out sometime during the middle of next year, forcing Afghans to either cut back on power or significantly raise fees.
Afghans fear that the wartime economy, which boomed with NATO contracts to build and supply Kandahar Airfield, known as KAF, will come crashing down as the troops and money depart.
“Ninety percent of Kandahar’s economy is run from KAF,” Hashmat Karzai said. “Once that money dries out, what’s going to happen?”
Even more than fears about security, the villagers of Karz say they are worried about economics. The impoverished village has no electricity or clinic and has a sporadic water supply to irrigate its vineyards.
Tucked in his shirt Karzai keeps two sheets of paper with the names of 25 residents he hoped would receive fertilizer handouts as part of an agriculture program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. What little tangible change he has noticed in Karz during the past decade — the retaining wall, the $6 cash-for-work jobs, a small bridge, a stone well — have come from foreign aid.
But on balance, the ascension of his fellow tribesman Hamid Karzai to the presidency has left Karz scarcely better off than before, the villagers said. There has not been major rebuilding here. Many of the homes, blasted into rubble during the Soviet war in the 1980s, have not been rebuilt. The golden era of the 1960s and ’70s — when President Karzai’s father, a parliament member, arranged for a canal to be built in Karz, when young Hamid Karzai played marbles with his friends and rode his horse through the vineyards — is a distant memory.
“Many of our young people are jobless now,” said Ahmadullah, a village elder. He has watched as more of these unemployed young men wile away their hours smoking hashish. If U.S.-funded day-labor paychecks dry up when the troops leave, he said, the lure of the Taliban will grow stronger.
‘That’s what creates Taliban’
The local official responsible for Karz is Amadullah Naziq, the governor of Dand district. The elders of Karz have given him a wish list: gravel roads with culverts, hand pumps for the wells, a clinic, an elementary school, and new huts for drying grapes into raisins.
Naziq’s office is itself powered by U.S.-funded diesel generators, and he says it simply does not possess the capacity to satisfy the needs of an impoverished rural population. Staffing such offices has been a problem for years, particularly as the Taliban began systematically assassinating local officials in Kandahar. Even now, Afghanistan’s district and provincial governments do not have budgets and collect no taxes; instead, money trickles down from Kabul through various ministries.
“How can we collect taxes when the people don’t have anything and we’re not providing them anything?” Naziq said.
Even some who have personally suffered from the U.S. troop presence are wary about the consequences of the departure. Abdullah, a 40-year-old car dealer, came to Hashmat Karzai’s home in Karz searching for information about his two brothers, who had been detained by American troops last month.
The raid came during Abdullah’s father’s funeral, when Afghan troops burst into a mosque, cuffed his two brothers and passed them to their American partners waiting outside.
“That’s what creates Taliban. This guy eventually is going to become a Talib. Imagine if this happened to you,” Karzai said.
And yet, Abdullah is not rejoicing over the U.S. troops’ departure. When the war started, Abdullah was a poor truck driver earning $200 a month ferrying raisins across southern Afghanistan. He took advantage of the wartime boom and became a vendor of cargo trucks to shuttle NATO supplies to military bases. He now earns 10 times as much.
“I’m very happy with their presence here,” Abdullah said. “Business has been good in Kandahar these past five years. I’m very worried about what will happen when the foreigners leave.”
Afghans plan for professional football league; players to be chosen on reality TV show
The Associated Press By Rahim Faiez 16/07/2012
KABUL - Amid a deadly war in an impoverished nation, the promise of a new professional football league is offering a glimmer of hope in Afghanistan.
Thousands of young Afghans have signed up to participate in a reality television program called "Maidan e Sabz," or "Green Field," to earn a chance to play on one of eight professional football teams being created in their homeland.
Abdul Sabor Walizada, a trainer for the project, said Monday the idea is to bring football into Afghan homes, stimulate business and strengthen national unity through sports.
"After years of civil conflict and war, people will focus on football and the businessmen from each zone will try to have the best players," said Walizada, a former member of the Afghanistan national team.
"It will create national unity because if the central zone, for example, has a really good player, the southern zone team will want to buy him," he explained. "They will not care about his ethnicity. They will not care about his tribe. They will care that he is one of the best players."
The league is being organized by the Afghan Football Federation and sponsored by Roshan Telecom Development Co., a major communications company in Afghanistan, and the MOBY Group, which owns and operates media industries in developing nations. The group owns TOLO TV, a leading Afghanistan television station that will broadcast the reality show and the league's inaugural season of 16 matches, beginning in September.
Eight competitions are being filmed across the nation for Maidan e Sabz, including in the big cities of Kabul, the Afghan capital; Kandahar in the south; Mazar-i-Sharif in the north; Heret in the west; and Jalalabad in the east. Of the thousands of applicants, groups of 30 players will be selected to vie for slots on one of the teams from eight zones.
A battery of physical, mental and football skills tests — one involves running through mud and water while wearing ankle weights and then heading a suspended football — will whittle each group to 21 contestants. Each studio audience then will select the best 18 finalists.
At the end of all eight shows, 168 players will remain — enough for eight 18-man squads.
Maidan e Sabz debuted last week featuring film clips of famous football players like Argentina's Lionel Messi, Brazil's Pele and Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo.
"Tell me, do you know more about (President Barack) Obama or Messi and Ronaldo?" TOLO commentator Makhtar Lashkari said, asking his TV viewers to illustrate the popularity of the sport.
Afghans began playing football about 90 years ago, but there were few if any rules. The Afghan Football Federation was founded in 1922 and was admitted into the FIFA, the sport's world governing body, in 1948.
Football gained a strong following among Afghans in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but the sport nearly died out during the 10-year Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989 and the civil war that followed from 1992 to 1996.
After the hardline Islamic Taliban regime was toppled in 2001, sport in Afghanistan was reborn. Cricket has already made inroads, with the Afghan team improving its ranking considerably in international limited-overs competition. Now, with the start of the new football league, teams with names like "Eagles of Hindu Kush," — called after a mountain range — will compete to be the best in Afghanistan.
To develop peace and stability in Afghanistan, the nation must not only focus on training soldiers, says Keramuddin Karim, AFF president.
"This will be very effective for the new generation," Karim said. "This program is going to uncover new football talent across the country."
Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan by Rajiv Chandrasekaran – review
This account of America's decade-long adventure in Afghanistan makes for essential reading
Jason Burke guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 July 2012 06.00 EDT
In the spring of 2002, the American army arrived in force in Afghanistan. Its main base was at the old airfield at Bagram, a short drive north of Kabul. By early summer, serried ranks of tents had gone up in the fine dust, a basic field hospital had been established and the all-important PX opened – where soldiers could buy Hershey bars, Hot Tamales candy, R&B compact discs and Bibles in "tactical" camouflage covers. In the evening, during the month I spent at the base, I went running on the airstrip, past the helicopters, the transport planes, the artillery park and the compound where prisoners were being kept. All around the perimeter, as dusk turned to night, newly arrived US troops tested their weapons, sending streams of tracer fire into the gathering darkness.
Over the following years, the base at Bagram grew rapidly. The old runway was renovated and extended, the makeshift jail converted to one of the most notorious detention facilities run for suspected al-Qaida and Taliban captives, power plants built and vast dining halls opened.
The tents were replaced by prefabricated and then solid concrete barracks. On one recent visit, I got my dinner from Burger King and, when waiting for a helicopter the next morning, watched Tropic Thunder, the spoof Vietnam war film, projected on the wall of a hangar. The old air base had become a small town of around 10,000 inhabitants, a Little America in the middle of an Afghan plain.
Little America is an apt title for this comprehensive, perceptive and detailed work. It is the second book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, among the best of those brave, clever, and assiduous reporters that American journalism seems to produce in such happy abundance. His first, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, was a justly praised description of the follies, excesses, naivety and negligence of the Americans who tried to run Iraq with such disastrous results between 2003 and 2004.
In this new work he looks at the American experience in Afghanistan, focusing on the 2009 to 2011 period. That his book is already effectively a history – albeit a very contemporary history – says much about the rapidity with which the aims and methods of the west have changed in that tragic country over the last years. Little America is focused on the decision by President Obama to send around 30,000 new troops into Afghanistan in 2009 and its consequences. This "surge", modelled in part on a similar but more successful exercise in Iraq, is now over. Whether it worked or not is one of the many themes explored by Chandrasekaran in this book. The CIA apparently decided it had, at best, led to a stalemate.
"Where we went, we made a difference. But not next door," one official told the author. "The surge worked locally, but it did not have the nationwide effect that was advertised."
But the ultimate answer is that the debate is no longer relevant. Largely due to factors which have little to do with Afghanistan itself – the state of the American economy, general war fatigue in the US and elsewhere, the death of Osama bin Laden last year, the fragmentation and regionalisation of al-Qaida – the international project in the country is now winding down. In 2009 I asked the then US ambassador in Kabul if, as America was a democracy, any one leader could really promise eternal support. "Can I say we will be committed for the full life of the sun? No," he answered. "But short of that, yes, we will be here." That wasn't true.
As Chandrasekaran observes, it costs $1m to keep one American service member in Afghanistan for a year. The annual bill for the war last year was more than $100bn. Was achieving a marginally less bad outcome in Afghanistan worth the expense, administration officials wondered? With other pressing security challenges – Iran, North Korea, and the political upheaval in the Middle East – was it prudent to be committing so many resources to stabilising remote Afghan villages? The United States was spending more each year to keep marine battalions in two single remote districts in the deep south of the country than it was providing the entire nation of Egypt in military and development assistance, Chandrasekaran points out.
The war in Afghanistan started with goals that were purely to do with US security – the need to eradicate the bases from which the 11 September attacks had been launched. We have come full circle. The only debate now is whether what is left behind is enough to prevent a reconstituted al-Qaida gaining some kind of foothold. In the intervening period, the western project in Afghanistan was something much more ambitious, involving the creation of a prosperous, stable democracy with significantly improved human rights for women and minorities. The contrast with the modest aims of today is, at the very least, unedifying. There are stronger adjectives that could be used.
So what went wrong? First of all, winning in Afghanistan, however defined, was never going to be easy. The international effort there came at the end of a long series of increasingly ambitious – and even sometimes successful – "liberal humanitarian" interventions. It was a period of extraordinary hubris – and great trauma after the 9/11 attacks. Together this bred a toxic mix of astonishing overconfidence and deep insecurity. Then came the distraction of Iraq.
Chandrasekaran suggests – and some military historians might disagree – that Afghanistan is "by far the most complicated war the USA has ever prosecuted". The superlative here might be challenged by many historians but that the conflict was a tough challenge is without doubt.
America, however, could not meet it, he argues. Chandrasekaran's indictment is savage. "Too few generals recognised that surging forces could be counterproductive… Too few soldiers were ordered to leave their air-conditioned bases and live among the people in fly-infested villages. Too few diplomats invested the effort to understand the languages and cultures of the places in which they were stationed. Too few development experts were interested in anything other than making a buck. Too few officials in Washington were willing to assume the risks necessary to forge a lasting peace… Generals and diplomats were too ambitious and arrogant. Uniformed and civilian bureaucracies were rife with internal rivalries. Our development experts were inept. Our leaders were distracted." The result, inevitably, was that "the good war… turned bad".
And if, after reading this, any Europeans are feeling smug, they shouldn't. Where they are mentioned at all, allies are portrayed as incompetent, feckless, cowardly or complacent. The British, whose ineffectual attempts to secure Helmand province and appalling relations with both local communities and the Americans are described in painful detail, come out particularly badly. Though not, it must be said, as badly as the Pakistani security establishment, whose strategically critical support, passive and active, for the insurgents was apparently not fully understood by US military planners until only very recently.
There are now thousands of books on this most recent Afghan conflict, ranging from airport thrillers to specialist study. Many books are extremely good, some are very bad. Little America is powerful and important and should be read by anyone interested in this ongoing and deeply depressing war, particularly those waiting for helicopters or eating Hot Tamales in Bagram.
Exclusive Internet Cafe Connects Afghan Women To The World
July 17, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Frud Bezhan, Fareba Wahidi
KABUL -- Dozens of headscarf-wearing girls flock each day through the discreetly marked doors of Kabul's Sahar Gul Cafe, Afghanistan's first all-female Internet cafe.
Equipped with more than a dozen laptops, a library, and stocked with comfortable cushions, the modest cafe has given Afghan women the opportunity to study and socialize free from the scrutiny of men.
That's important in a country where women continue to face enormous obstacles in securing their rights nearly 11 years after U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban regime from Kabul.
Homiyra Bakhshi, project manager and member of the Afghan activist group YoungWomen4Change, which created the cafe, speaking outside the cafe says it has become a refuge for the country's women.
"We have created this Internet cafe in a way that ensures young Afghan girls and women who come to use our facilities here feel safe and relaxed. We ensure they can do their work, be happy, and don't encounter any problems," Bakhshi says.
Bakhshi says the cafe has had to rely on fundraising and donations from local and foreign charities to run and maintain the cafe, which charges visitors a fee of 50 afghanis ($1) an hour, significantly less than other Internet cafes in Kabul.
With Facebook and Yahoo logos painted onto the wall, the cafe is named after the 15-year-old Afghan bride who was imprisoned and brutally abused last year at the hands of her husband and in-laws after she refused to become a prostitute.
Mariam Noorani is a student at Kabul University and a frequent visitor at the cafe, which was opened in March this year to correspond with International Women's Day. She says the significance of the name is not lost on those visiting the cafe, which she says pays tribute to the resilience and bravery of Sahar Gul.
"Sahar Gul was a girl who suffered. She went through a lot of bad things and we would like to support her. That's why I always come to the Sahar Gul Cafe. I'm looking forward to other Internet cafes being opened in other neighborhoods," Noorani says.
Routine Domestic Abuse
Noorani says while some women can enjoy the freedoms inside the exclusive all-female cafe, many others like Sahar Gul continue to live a life fraught with hardship in Afghanistan, a country where domestic abuse is routine, forced marriages are the norm, and female suicide rates are among the highest in the world.
In the past decade, women have made significant inroads in Afghan society. The end of Taliban rule coincided with greater opportunities for women. Millions of girls are now back in school. Women are working, particularly in the major cities, as professionals in various fields. The country has a female provincial governor, while dozens of women serve as members of parliament and the Senate.
But as the United States and its NATO allies prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014, women fear that their newfound rights may be undermined in peace talks with the Taliban -- which denied women the right to work, receive an education, or even leave their homes during its five-year rule.
Farida, a student at the nearby Rabia Balkhi high school, says the situation for Afghan women will deteriorate considerably after 2014. She predicts that women will face renewed restrictions on their freedom of movement, while their access to work and rights will be steadily tightened and violence against them will soar.
"In my opinion, a lot of harm will come to women. Right now, international forces are here and women's rights are protected and talked about. But in 2014, when they leave, women will lose everything. Perhaps those who will go backward the most are women," Farida says.
Despite the widespread reservation of many women, Noorani says the opening of the cafe has offered hope to many. She sees the cafe as a sign that the inroads made by women will not only be preserved but will be further bolstered in the near future.
"There's a chance that there will be Internet cafes and the situation will be even better. We can predict that there will be stability. And the inroads that women have made will be further consolidated. We can protect and preserve the progress that we have made after 2014," Noorani says.
Written and reported by Frud Bezhan in Kabul, with additional reporting by Fareba Wahidi.
Pakistani Islamists Protest Reopening Of NATO Routes To Afghanistan
July 17, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Thousands of Pakistani Islamists shouted "Death to America" as they protested U.S. drone strikes along the Afghan-Pakistan border and the lifting of a seven-month blockade of routes through which NATO carries supplies into Afghanistan.
The protest on July 17 was organized by Jamaat-e-Islami, a leading member of the Defense of Pakistan coalition of right-wing and Islamist groups.
The protest occurred at Jamrud, near the Torkham border crossing.
Local administration official Bakhtiar Khan said between 18,000 and 20,000 people took part.
Pakistani authorities closed overland routes used by NATO convoys bringing supplies into Afghanistan after U.S. air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border last November.
The routes were re-opened on July 3, after the U.S. said "sorry" for the incident.
Based on reporting by AFP and RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal
Northern Route a Key Supply Network for NATO Troops in Afghanistan
Andre deNesnera VOA News July 16, 2012
Pakistan has recently re-opened a vital supply line to NATO troops in Afghanistan - the so-called southern route. But, NATO forces also use another major thoroughfare.
The so-called northern route is a far more complex network of supply lines than the southern route, which relies merely on trucks transiting through Pakistan to provide military equipment to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Alexander Cooley is a Central Asian expert at Barnard College, New York.
“The northern route uses a mix of ship, road, rail and air. It’s not one route," Cooley stated. "It’s really a series of different routes that originate in the Baltic states, then come down via rail - old Soviet rails - through Russia, through Kazakhstan. Most of them pass through Uzbekistan and the border town of Termez.”
From Termez, the trucks pass over the “Friendship Bridge” into Afghanistan.
Seth Jones, an expert on Afghanistan with the RAND Corporation, says whether the supplies come by rail, air or truck, NATO and the United States must sign agreements with each country involved.
“In order for any material to come through any of the Central Asian governments, or Russia for that matter, they have to agree on specifics on how much those governments are going to make and any companies that are exporting or importing goods, how much they are going to make. So there are a lot of details that have to be agreed on both by the host nation as well as by any private companies that are involved in moving the goods,” explained Jones.
Experts say the exact terms and transit fees paid to each country remain classified. But they say given the complexity of the northern route, experts estimate it costs twice as much to ship supplies through that network than through the southern route.
However the northern route was the only way to ship supplies into Afghanistan for the past seven months. Pakistan shut down the southern route after a U.S.-led coalition air strike accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier last November. Islamabad recently re-opened it after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. is “sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military.”
Analysts say both southern and northern routes will also be used to move soldiers and equipment out of Afghanistan, as the United States and other NATO countries wind down their military presence in that country.
Alexander Cooley says the so-called “reverse transit” operation will be another source of revenue for the countries involved. “There is a perception that the drawdown is going to be a type of one-shot affair, that they can squeeze now, make increased demands for payments now with the understanding that NATO and the U.S. will just want to get the stuff out and will give in to these demands,” he said.
Many human rights organizations question whether the United States and NATO should rely on authoritarian countries for getting supplies in and ultimately soldiers out of Afghanistan.
Cooley says it is difficult to strike a balance between short-term military needs and long-term democratic aspirations.
“Over the last 10 years, Washington and Brussels [NATO Headquarters] have come to tone down criticism on so-called rights issues and also tone down engagement in other areas to focus primarily on the security and logistics cooperation," said Cooley. "In some way, Central Asia has been made an appendage to the Afghanistan war. And those in the advocacy community who look at questions of democracy and human rights, would like a little more honesty about Washington’s policy and view what has happened in Central Asia as also a political casualty of the Afghan war.”
Seth Jones from the RAND Corporation says there has been no major success, nor prospects of success, in establishing greater democratization across Central Asia.
Computer analysis brings future of Afghanistan war into focus
Researchers used previous data of violence in Afghanistan to predict with striking accuracy which areas of the country in 2010 would see more bloodshed and which would see less.
Los Angeles Times By Jon Bardin July 17, 2012
In August 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of classified documents that cataloged the harsh realities of the war in Afghanistan, a group of friends — all computer experts — gathered at the New York City headquarters of the Internet company Bitly Inc. to try and make sense of the data.
The programmers used simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 incident reports that detailed everything from simple stop-and-search operations to full-fledged battles. The resulting map revealed the outlines of the country's ongoing violence: hot spots near the Pakistani border but not near the Iranian border, and extensive bloodshed along the country's main highway. They did it all in just one night.
Now one member of that group has teamed up with mathematicians and computer scientists and taken the project one major step further: They have used the WikiLeaks data to predict the future.
Based solely on written reports of violence from 2004 to 2009, the researchers built a model that was able to foresee which provinces would experience more violence in 2010 and which would have less. They could also anticipate how much the level of violence went up or down.
The project, whose results were published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of a growing movement to understand and predict episodes of political and military conflict using automated computational techniques.
The availability of huge amounts of data combined with steady increases in computing power has prompted experts to bring the rigor of objective quantitative analysis to realms that were once considered fundamentally subjective, including literature and the study of social groups.
"For the first time, we have large data sets from places like Facebook and Twitter that we can analyze with high-powered computers and get meaningful results," said Paulo Shakarian, a computer scientist at the United States Military Academy at West Point, who is working on an algorithm to predict the location of insurgent weapons caches. "Iraq and Afghanistan are the very first conflicts where we have been collecting as much data as we possibly can."
In the case of the WikiLeaks data, the researchers sought to find a general pattern to the violence in Afghanistan and use it to predict how violence would change in each province in 2010 — the year President Obama increased the number of U.S. troops in the country.
"The model we employed is both complex and simple," said Guido Sanguinetti, an expert in computational sciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the study's senior author. "It doesn't take in any knowledge of military operations or political events, and it treats all types of violence exactly the same, whether it's a stop-and-search or a big battle."
Even with these ostensibly key details missing, the researchers found that they could predict 2010's events with striking accuracy.
And the model wasn't tripped up by Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops, which introduced a new dimension to the Afghanistan conflict.
"Our findings seem to prove that the insurgency is self-sustaining," Sanguinetti said. "You may throw a large military offensive, but this doesn't seem to disturb the system."
The study authors said they were most surprised that the model could predict activity even in Afghanistan's relatively quiet northern provinces, where there were fewer data points available to analyze.
"This shows that the escalation we see isn't just attributed to the noise in the data," said study leader Andrew Zammit Mangion, a computational sciences researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Instead, he said, patterns existed nearly everywhere.
Michael Ward, a political scientist at Duke University who has shown that location data can improve predictions of conflicts, said the study pointed the way to future research.
"Suppose you could say, 'This is the effect on violence if you build different types of infrastructure,' " he said. "They don't do that, but they've set up the framework to do it."
The study also shows why it's important to make as much data public as possible, Ward said. Without WikiLeaks, he said, a study like this would have been far more difficult to carry out.
Clionadh Raleigh of Trinity College Dublin, who uses data to predict violence in Africa based on factors such as the outcomes of local elections, said the Afghanistan model could be made even better by including variables such as the political party in power.
"Violence, in general, is a really good predictor of future violence," she said. But even better would be "to figure out what stops the cycle of conflict."
Quantitative rigor is making its way into some surprising fields of study. In 2010, just a few months after the WikiLeaks data dump, Google released a database of every single word contained in thousands of books published between 1800 and 2000 — about 4% of all books ever printed. That has enabled some intrepid researchers to close in on the final frontier: Studying literature with advanced math.
In a study published last year in Science, experts from Harvard University and Google were able to detect evidence of censorship regarding controversial historical figures and events, such as early Soviet official and Stalin foe Leon Trotsky and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in China.
"That's what this digital humanities focus is being driven toward: uncovering trends in data that have just never been available before," Raleigh said.
jon.bardin@latimes.com
From Kabul to Istanbul: The rickshaw circus
AFP 17/07/2012
KABUL - A Canadian man and his German girlfriend are braving the Taliban to take a rickshaw on one of the world’s most dangerous road trips to bring the circus to children in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.
Adnan Khan, 41, and his anthropologist sweetheart have embarked on the punishing 8,000-kilometre trip to Istanbul that demands a police escort and hoisting the rickshaw onto trucks to navigate the trickiest stages.
Their purpose is twofold: raise money for a charity that uses circus training to lift the spirits of children in war-torn Afghanistan and to spread those circus skills along the way, to brighten the lives of refugees and orphans.
Adnan left Kabul by road on July 11 as 25-year-old Annika Schmeding flew to Islamabad, after eight months in the Afghan capital, to prepare the way.
Accompanied by Afghan police, Adnan drove to the eastern town of Jalalabad, then onto the border with Pakistan’s tribal belt.
Washington considers the tribal belt the global headquarters of al Qaeda, and a den of Taliban and other militants plotting attacks in Afghanistan and against the West. It has not seen Western tourists in years.
Nor does the three-wheel rickshaw, painted yellow, green and white with a jazzy “Rickshaw Circus” on the side, and sporting a brass clown horn, go unnoticed in terrain synonymous with kidnapping, suicide bombings and ambushes.
“I finally got the rickshaw to the Pakistani side. It took hours. It was quite funny. A policeman told me ‘I haven’t seen a carnet de passage (the document needed for tourists to cross the border) in years,’” Adnan told AFP by telephone on Monday.
His next task was speeding the rickshaw to Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar, where Osama bin Laden kept a house during the 1980s war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, and onto the capital Islamabad.
“The local tribal police force is going to have a guard travel with me,” he said, adding that he would be rushing to make Tuesday’s first show.
The trip has been months in the planning. Khan and Schmeding expect to spend two months winding their way through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey — averaging 300 kilometres a day in six hours — in temperatures that can reach 50 degrees Celsius.
The couple are determined to raise as much money as possible for the Afghan Mobile Mini Circus for Children (MMCC), which was recently forced to close a school in the western city of Herat and sack staff because of a shortage of funds.
“We realised that MMCC is very good at running their programmes, but not really good in terms of publicity. So we wanted people to know that there’s been an actual social circus running in Afghanistan for about 10 years,” said Khan.
The journalist, who lives in Istanbul but has been coming to Afghanistan regularly for the past 10 years, spoke as girls sang, juggled tennis balls and skittles, and boys danced around the rickshaw and jumped high into the sky.
Organisers say the circus encourages concentration, discipline and stimulates intellectual development.
“When they learn how to juggle and they go on stage, they get so much more self-confidence. They learn to express themselves. They learn how to trust, to share,” said Schmeding.
Since 2002, the charity says it has reached more than two million children in a country where singing, dancing and cultural shows were banned by the Taliban regime, which was brought down in the 2001 US-led invasion.
Besides children, the MMCC also puts on shows for grown ups designed to raise public awareness of basic hygiene, malaria and anti-personnel mines.
“One thing is the educational message in it. Another one is to have the children being entertained,” said David Mason, the founder and co-director of MMCC.
“In Afghanistan, entertainment has another mission. It’s therapy, collective therapy,” he added.
Since 1979, Afghanistan has been largely at war. The 1980s saw the mujahideen fight to evict Soviet troops, then came civil war between 1992 and 1996, until the Taliban took power and the 9/11 attacks prompted the American invasion in 2001.
Since then, a deadly Taliban insurgency has grown with each passing year, killing more than 3,000 civilians in 2011, according to the United Nations, which is a record.
In Pakistan and in Iran, the rickshaw circus will stop every three days in a large town, where they will work with children in orphanages, hospitals and refugee camps.
“It will be nice to raise some money for MMCC as they desperately need it. But the awareness is more important,” said Khan.
The next Afghan war
Sydney Morning Herald By Robert Haddick July 16, 2012
Rather than winding down with the planned departure of NATO troops by 2014, the war in Afghanistan may just be undergoing a metamorphosis, as has happened many times since strife began there in the late 1960s. A slowly escalating old-fashioned war between Afghanistan and Pakistan may soon emerge, joining the internal insurgencies both of those governments are attempting to smother and pitting one state against the other.
Cross-border sanctuaries and Islamabad's covert support to the Taliban are well-known features of the current violence. But as the Western military presence inside Afghanistan draws down, the trends leading to direct military escalation between Afghanistan and Pakistan are likely to continue.
The Afghan government will face an increasingly difficult security situation after 2014 and will need a new strategy if it is to survive. The number one security problem from Kabul's perspective is the continued presence of Taliban sanctuaries inside Pakistan, and the support the Afghan Taliban continues to receive from Pakistan's intelligence service. For a decade, US and Afghan officials have pleaded with the Pakistani government to halt this support, to no avail. For Islamabad, groups like the Haqqani Network — which specialises in periodic raids in downtown Kabul — are proxy forces that Pakistan can use to keep Afghanistan weak and pliant.
After 2014, the Afghan army and police will bear nearly the full burden fending off the Haqqanis and other cross-border Taliban forces. Afghan military leaders are likely to conclude that they cannot reach a stable end-state by only parrying the Taliban's attacks. The only hope of ending the war on favourable terms is through offensive action against the Taliban's sanctuaries in Pakistan or action that inflicts pain on the leadership in Islamabad.
If Kabul hopes to negotiate a settlement with Islamabad and the Taliban, it will have to acquire some leverage first. And that will come only after it has demonstrated a capacity to threaten the Taliban's sanctuaries and other assets inside Pakistan.
Initial trials of such incursions may have begun. This month, the Pakistani government accused the Afghan National Army of a cross-border raid into the Upper Kurram District. Two Pakistani tribesmen were killed during a 90-minute gun battle. Although this particular incident may be more a case of hot pursuit rather than a deliberate attack, it also shows the Afghan army's willingness to step up its aggressiveness.
The Afghan government may also find it useful to employ the same tactics that Islamabad is using against Afghanistan. Pakistan has its own problem with Taliban insurgents, with these rebels using the Afghan side of the border as a sanctuary from Pakistani security forces. Indeed, in June, a Pakistani Taliban raiding party crossed from its Afghan sanctuary into Pakistan, captured 18 Pakistani soldiers, and videotaped the severed heads of 17 of these prisoners. Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani subsequently complained to US Marine General John Allen, the coalition commander, and urged him to take action to control the Taliban sanctuaries inside Afghanistan.
It seems doubtful that the Pakistani Taliban finding haven in Afghanistan are agents of Afghanistan's intelligence service. But the Afghan government has likely concluded that it needs to obtain leverage over Pakistan if it is to obtain a satisfactory settlement to the war. If the Pakistani Taliban lurking in Afghanistan are a potential source of that leverage, it might be only a matter of time before Kabul makes contact with the Pakistani rebels.
Kayani probably realises that there is as little chance of him getting a positive response from Allen and Karzai as there is of Pakistan doing anything meaningful about the Taliban problem that runs from east to west. That would explain why the Pakistani Army is taking matters into its own hands the old-fashioned way. Beginning in March, it fired a series of cross-border rocket barrages targeted at suspected Pakistani Taliban base camps in Afghanistan's Kunar province, resulting in the deaths of four civilians.
The Haqqani attacks in Kabul and against US targets in eastern Afghanistan have compelled US officials to consider cross-border special operations raids against Haqqani camps inside Pakistan. Given the military hardware currently in place, the intelligence on the Haqqanis the United States has developed, and the experience its special operations raiders have accumulated, US forces are unlikely to ever get a better opportunity to hit the Haqqani Network and thereby create some incentives for a settlement. But the White House currently has a higher priority, namely disengaging from the conflict. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's apology to Pakistan for a cross-border "friendly fire" incident last November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers has reopened the supply lines from Afghanistan to the port at Karachi, which the United States will need to extract its mountain of equipment by the end of 2014. The requirements of an orderly withdrawal trumped the risks of widening the war and further angering Islamabad.
Although the United States can withdraw from Afghanistan, the Afghans, at least the vast majority of them, cannot. They are stuck with the Haqqanis, Pakistan's intelligence service, and Islamabad's long-term interest in a weak Afghanistan. The only path to a reasonable settlement lies through offensive action inside Pakistan. Afghans will have to be willing to go where the US military (drones excepted) have feared to tread.
Until the Afghan military can develop greater offensive punch, it will have to turn to proxy forces such as the Pakistani Taliban as tools to gain leverage over Islamabad. Should such proxies fail, Kabul will have to turn to an outside power to support its development of helicopter mobility and artillery and air support, essential elements of a capability to directly attack the sanctuaries and other objectives inside Pakistan.
When he signed the strategic partnership agreement pledging support to Afghanistan through 2024, it is unlikely that President Barack Obama had such a war in mind. But once Kabul becomes solely responsible for Afghanistan's security, it will undoubtedly turn to the United States first to help it develop the offensive capability it believes it will need. Should Washington demur, Kabul will call New Delhi, which could be eager to help.
After 2014, Pakistan should see the wisdom in wrapping up the remainder of al Qaeda and settling the conflict with Afghanistan. NATO's withdrawal will actually reduce Islamabad's leverage and expose it to more forms of pressure. Continuing the conflict will only encourage outside intervention.
If Islamabad decides to fight on after 2014, we should expect to see a messy, multi-level conflict much like the 18th century French and Indian War. That war featured insurgencies, proxy armies, old-fashioned nation-state war, and great power intervention from the far side of the world. A similarly complicated scenario may be headed for the Durand Line. The Afghan war may be about to mutate again — policymakers should get ready for the change.
Haddick is managing editor of Small Wars Journal.
Foreign Policy
Top senators can't explain Romney's Afghanistan policy
Foreign Policy By Josh Rogin Monday, July 16, 2012
Republican candidate Mitt Romney's policy on the future of U.S.-led war in Afghanistan war is unclear and confusing, complicating attempts to either support or criticize it during the campaign, according to leading senators from both parties.
On Romney's website, the campaign criticizes President Barack Obama for announcing a "timetable" for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and accuses the administration of placing politics over the advice of military commanders by withdrawing 30,000 surge troops by September.
"Gov. Romney supports the 2014 timetable as a realistic timetable and a residual force post-2014. But he would not have announced that timetable publicly, as President Obama did, as doing so encourages the Taliban to wait us out and our allies to hedge their bets," a Romney campaign spokesperson told The Cable.
But when it comes to what a President Romney would do differently from Obama on Afghanistan if and when he became president, the details remain sketchy.
"Mitt Romney will never make national-security decisions based upon electoral politics," the campaign website reads. "Upon taking office, he will review our transition to the Afghan military by holding discussions with our commanders in the field. He will order a full interagency assessment of our military and assistance presence in Afghanistan to determine the level required to secure our gains and to train Afghan forces to the point where they can protect the sovereignty of Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban. Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan under a Romney administration will be based on conditions on the ground as assessed by our military commanders."
Last week, The Cable asked several senior senators from both parties whether they supported Romney's plan for Afghanistan. None was able to articulate exactly what that policy is or what the U.S. force in Afghanistan might look like if Romney is elected.
"What is it?" said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a Romney supporter and senior member of the Armed Services Committee. "I think [Romney's policy is] ‘listen to the commanders' and if it's that, that's OK with me."
Graham agreed with Romney's criticism of Obama's plan to withdraw the 30,000 surge troops by September, which means the bulk of them will not be around for this summer's fighting season. But overall, Graham supports the Obama plan to adhere to a 2014 deadline for handing over control to the Afghans while keeping a significant U.S. troop presence there afterwards.
"Generally speaking, the only problem I have with President Obama is the acceleration of the withdrawal of the surge forces," Graham said.
Graham wants Romney to publicly endorse a continued U.S. force presence in Afghanistan after the full handover of power in 2014. Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in May signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement that would extend the presence of U.S. troops another 10 years, an agreement Graham helped to negotiate.
"I hope Romney will tell the American people that we are going to have a follow-on force in Afghanistan." Graham said. "It's in our interest to do it."
Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said he wasn't sure exactly what Romney's Afghanistan policy entailed and didn't want to get into it.
"You would have to tell me what exactly you mean by ‘his policy.' That's a long discussion that I don't want to get into," Kyl told The Cable.
Part of the challenge for the Romney team is that Republican voters are split on Afghanistan, with 48 percent supporting withdrawing all troops as soon as possible and nearly as many, 45 percent, supporting leaving a follow-on force there until the country is stabilized. The electorate as a whole favors bringing the troops home quickly (60 percent) over keeping troops there longer (32 percent).
"These numbers point to Romney's political bind," wrote James Lindsey, vice president of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an online commentary. "He has talked tough on Afghanistan ever since last June, when Republican national security conservatives blasted him for what they saw as his insufficient commitment to the mission there. Romney responded with much tougher rhetoric even though the policies he favors look a lot like Obama's."
For the Obama team and for Senate Democrats, Romney's apparent unwillingness to get more specific on Afghanistan represents a good opportunity to call into question his foreign-policy bona fides and present Obama as tougher on national security because he has committed to another decade of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
"Without getting into the campaign rhetoric of what [Romney]'s asserting, I think you've got 50 nations in NATO that agree to a plan in Afghanistan," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on ABC's This Week in May. "It's the Lisbon agreement, an agreement that, you know, others, President Bush, President Obama, everyone has agreed is the direction that we go in Afghanistan."
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) told The Cable that the issue is just one more example of the Romney campaign avoiding tackling tough issues.
"I sure don't know what [Romney's Afghanistan policy] is," Levin said. "From what I've read, I can't fathom his position on Afghanistan any more than I can fathom his position on a whole bunch of other things."
"I don't know that he's flip-flopped on Afghanistan. I don't know that he's ever taken a clear position. It's not like some of the other positions he's so consistently flip-flopped on," Levin said. "Here, I don't know what the flip is or the flop."
100 Taliban militants give up fighting in Afghanistan
QALAI NOW, Afghanistan, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Different militants consisted of 100 Taliban fighters laid down arms and joined the government-backed peace process in Badghis province 555 km northwest of capital Kabul on Monday, spokesman for provincial administration Sharafudin Majidi said Tuesday.
"Seven groups of Taliban fighters composed of 100 people gave up fighting and joined the peace process in provincial capital Qalai Now on Monday evening," Majidi told newsmen here while welcoming the former insurgents.
He also said with joining these former militants who were active in Qadis and Muqar districts, the peace and security will be further improved in the province.
They also handed over their weapons to authorities, he further said.
Taliban militants fighting the government have yet to make comment.
More than 3,000 Taliban militants, according to officials have laid down arms and joined the government-backed peace process over the past one year.
Tribunal Claims New Kabul Bank Uncooperative with Investigation
TOLOnews.com By Mahboba Pardis Monday, 16 July 2012
New Kabul Bank officials are not cooperating to determine the total amount owing from the Kabul Bank scandal of 2010, Special Kabul Bank Tribunal chief Shams-ur-Rhman Shams said Monday.
"We have sent letters to the New Kabul Bank officials and asked their cooperation to provide information about these issues; they neither reply to us nor cooperate with the assigned delegation," Shams told TOLOnews.
The tribunal asked New Kabul Bank officials to provide information about a sum of $825M given to them by the Ministry of Finance but the officials have refused any kind of cooperation.
He also said that Abdul Ghafar Dawi, one of the previous shareholders who owes $35M, has not paid his debts and has not appeared before the court as expected.
The sale of properties of previous shareholders of Kabul Bank in Dubai and Afghanistan will be sold in order to compensate the losses and pay their debts, adding that so far $104M of the bank's debts have been retrieved while the total property of the shareholders costs $245M.
Meanwhile, the new CEO of New Kabul Bank Massoud Khan Musa Ghazi confirmed that he did not provide information about the Finance Ministry aid to the Bank, saying that this issue could not be investigated without all the members of the delegation present.
"We are waiting for all the six members of the delegation to gather. So far, only the representative from the Attorney General Office has been introduced. But the Department 90 [one of the National Directorate of Security departments], Ministry of Finance, High Office of Oversight and Anti Corruption haven't introduced their representatives," Ghazi said.
Abdul Ghafar Dawi denied Shams' claims, saying that his case would be followed up by Kabul Bank's Commercial Division and he only owes $18M.
"I totally reject these allegations," he told TOLOnews. "The high court and the Attorney General Office ordered that my case should be followed up at the Kabul's Commercial Division."
The special Kabul Bank Tribunal director said that Mahmood Karzai and Hassin Fahim, have paid most of their debts and they owe $9M and $3M respectively.
Defense Ministry to Investigate Claims of ANA, Taliban ‘Truce' in Uruzgan
TOLOnews.com Monday, 16 July 2012
The Afghan Ministry of Defense on Monday rejected the claims made in an Austrlaian newspaper that Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers had arranged an unofficial truce with the Taliban in southern Uruzgan province.
Defense spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi said that the report was wrong, proven by the work the ANA soldiers in the area to combat the insurgents, but added that there would be an investigation.
"This report is wrong because the ANA soldiers have engaged with the enemy many times and had some fatalities, which shows their commitment to protecting the people from those threatening peace and security," Azimi told TOLOnews.
"However we will be investigating this report," he added.
The news report published in the Canberra Times on Monday found that militants in the Chora district of Uruzgan and the local ANA soldiers seem to have shared confidential military information in exchange for an unofficial ceasefire on ANA targets.
The report suggested the truce contributed to the death of an Australian special forces soldier earlier this month.
Quoting Naik Mohammad, a tribal elder from Chora, it says that in the past three months, the local soldiers were not attacked by the Taliban at all and were never hit by any roadside bombs, while the Afghan police and foreign soldiers have came under massive Taliban attacks.
"Taliban are very strong in Chora district, there has been some kind of deal between the ANA soldiers and the Taliban because there has been not even a bullet fired on them." Naik Mohammad told the newspaper, adding that the ANA soldiers were informing the Taliban of military operations against them.
Kandahar District Governor Resigns Citing Lack of Provincial Cooperation
TOLOnews.com Monday, 16 July 2012
A district governor in southern Kandahar province resigned Monday citing a lack of attention from the Kandahar provincial government in addressing problems in the district.
Dand governor Hamdullah Nazek claimed that there was too few government departments active in the district despite his request for more assistance.
"I announce my resignation via the media. There are lots of challenges in front of my work, but no one cares about these challenges," he said Monday.
But provincial officials said Nazek had personal problems that was making the role difficult for him.
"Many projects have been allocated to Dand district over other districts," provincial spokesman Jawed Faisal said. "Personal problems is the reason for his resignation and we request he stay in his position until we find a workable person for the position."
Nazek said that he had been angered over problems such as no specified border for his jurisdiction, failure to pay the salary for district staff, and the lack of government departments.
He admitted that there had been some developments in the district, but he claimed it was very little.
Dand is 70KM from the provincial capital Kandahar city.
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