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Afghanistan Becomes First Country To Have Minerals Mapped
July 20, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Frud Bezhan
Afghanistan has become the first country in the world to have its surface minerals mapped from the air.
The U.S. Geographical Survey (USGS) mapped some 70 percent of the country using an advanced technique known as “hyperspectral imaging,” which involves using a camera to capture sunlight reflected from the ground.
Specific colors on the mineral map reflect different natural minerals as well as man-made minerals, vegetation, and snow.
USGS spokesman Alex Demas maintains that the map will make it easier to identify and estimate mineral deposits for international mining companies looking to invest in Afghanistan, which is known to have vast reserves of oil, gas, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium.
“This imagery allows us to identify with very good accuracy where certain types of materials are," he says. "And this is very useful, especially for the mining industry. In fact, the USGS and the Afghan Geological Survey have already identified, using this information, 24 areas of high-profile mining interests.”
Demas adds the survey did not include regions inside Afghanistan that bordered its neighbors—Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan-- in order to avoid any concerns over airspace.
International mining companies have made huge investments in Afghan mining in recent years.
In 2008, the China Metallurgical Group Corporation made a successful bid of $3 billion for mineral rights to the Mes Aynak site, which geologists believe has the second-largest copper reserves in the world.
That was followed by a bid from a group of Indian companies in 2011, when a deal was signed to begin mining Hajigak, the country’s largest iron ore deposit, located in the central Bamiyan Province.
The numbers being used to describe Afghanistan's potential wealth are staggering.
In 2010, the Afghan Ministry of Mines estimated that the country’s reserves could amount to some one trillion dollars.
According to Demas, from the data the USGS has received, the minerals that have been discovered by the mineral map seem to be the real deal.
“We do believe these to be world-class mineral deposits," he says. "We don’t know for certain what the tonnage of mineral ore will be. We won’t know for sure, though, until a company actually goers there and develops it.”
The USGS gathered the data over the space of 43 days from aircrafts travelling at a height of 15,000 meters.
The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations as well as by the Afghan government.
Cameron Urges Islamabad And Kabul To Join Forces Against Terrorists
July 19, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
British Prime Minister David Cameron has called on Afghanistan and Pakistan to make common cause against insurgents in the two countries' border region.
Cameron said that the terrorists are trying to wreck both Pakistan and Afghanistan so they need to "be together in one single fight."
Cameron and Afghan President Hamid Karzai met Pakistan's new Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf for the first time on July 19.
They emphasized that Afghan efforts to negotiate with the Taliban need Islamabad's help to be successful.
The British, U.S. and Afghan governments have long criticized Pakistan for not doing enough to stop cross-border attacks by insurgent groups based inside Pakistan.
Islamabad also charges that some insurgents cross the border from the Afghan side and attack Pakistani security forces.
Based on reporting by AP and AFP
Afghanistan insurgency threatens previously peaceful Bamiyan province
Concerns growing over violence in central highland province after two bombs killed nine police officers earlier this month
Guardian.co.uk By Emma Graham-Harrison Thursday 19 July 2012
Kabul - The central highland province of Bamiyan has long been an island of security in the rising tide of Afghanistan's insurgency, largely insulated from the blasts and gunfire that have become commonplace across the rest of the country by its geography and a fierce strain of anti-Taliban sentiment.
But concerns are growing over the government's ability to hold off insurgents in the region after two massive roadside bombs, just five days apart, killed nine police officers earlier this month.
It was an unprecedented toll for the area, and raised fears that violence will escalate as foreign troops withdraw.
The officers who died in two attacks on 3 and 8 July were the first Afghan casualties in Bamiyan since 2008, when a bomb killed a single policeman, according to Mohammad Ali Lakzi, the head of operations and archives for the provincial police force. A New Zealand soldier was also shot dead in 2010.
The area has remained so secure that it was chosen last summer to launch a gradual nationwide handover from Nato troops to Afghan forces, even though the nearest soldiers are in the next province. Armed police are the only security forces and they rarely have to make use of their guns.
But the people of Bamiyan have bitter memories of massacres in their valleys by Taliban troops, shortly before the hardline Islamists were ousted in late 2001, and the destruction of two giant Buddha statues that had gazed serenely out of a cliff for over a millennium.
And so the July bombs that detonated under two police vehicles have sent a chill through the province. The first set of buried explosives killed four officers and injured two, the second killed five.
"In the past few years we never faced such an incident," said the provincial police chief, Juma Guldi Yaardam, who has more than 1,000 officers at his command but says he needs army support in tackling the insurgent threat spilling over from less peaceful neighbouring areas – particularly Baghlan, Parwan and Wardak provinces.
"These provinces are unsafe and we have big concerns about the future. We think we need more troops to ensure good security for the borders."
The north-eastern district where the deadly bombs were buried has long been the riskiest part of Bamiyan, but the attacks were unusually bold.
"They were unprecedented in terms of the death toll and getting their targets," said a Foreign Official familiar with the province. The deaths rekindled concerns sparked by the kidnapping and murder of the head of the provincial council on the road from Kabul last year.
"Most of the province, in an Afghan context, is safe, but the north-east has this problem Who knows whether this is the start of a pattern or not," the official added. "People are maybe getting a bit more nervous."
The provincial governor, the only woman in Afghanistan to run one of the 34 regional administrations, says the police are ill-prepared to handle battle-hardened insurgents.
"The number of guns that our police have is not really sufficient," Habiba Sarabi said in a telephone interview, in which she also stressed most of her province was still safe.
"Our military needs some more supplies, some more support for training and equipment."
Insurgents have attacked civilian supplies, including tankers of fuel, on the critical road through the northeast, and there are insurgents active along a southern route too. The violence pushes up prices in Bamiyan and limits travel out of the isolated province, she said.
"When they want to travel to Kabul it's really bad for them to take either road," Sarabi said. "Sometimes even their gasoline trucks or some other supplies are stopped by these insurgents and also some of them have been burned, so this ensures the people of Bamiyan are suffering and not happy."
Most of the unrest is from small, mobile groups of less than 20 insurgents that cross into Bamiyan for brief attacks or to bury an IED before disappearing back into lawless areas where the government has little or no reach.
There are more checkpoints on the roads now as a stop-gap solution, but Sarabi said more co-ordination with officials in the troubled provinces, and help from the Afghan army, is critical to tackling the violence long-term.
The negotiations leading up to the security handover from New Zealand forces last July included a request for soldiers, but so far they have not been provided. A spokesman for the Afghanistan ministry of defence declined to comment on whether that might change.
"As a strategy of the ministry of defence, we check if there are threats and send forces where they are needed," said spokesman General Zahir Azimi.
Additional reporting by Mokhtar Amiri
The Challenger
Afghanistan’s first female boxer may take a pounding in the ring. Big deal. She’s been in much tougher scraps back home
TIME By Aryn Baker @arynebaker July 19, 2012
Update: Due to concerns about Sadaf Rahimi’s boxing abilities, the Amateur International Boxing Association has decided not to extend her the wildcard invitation to the London Olympics, meaning that she won’t be competing in the Games. There were fears that boxing against opponents of much greater ability could threaten her physical safety in the ring.
Sadaf Rahimi looks like a boxer; bouncing on the balls of her feet as she saunters into the gym, fist bumping her coach in a silent salute. She dresses like a boxer, a black bandanna pulled low across her forehead and over her ears, her thick ponytail concealed by a raised hoodie. She even acts like a boxer, scowling as she takes in her assembled teammates to size up who, if anyone, she will spar with today. But if she can’t really box like a boxer—a little slow on the speed bag, a little clumsy with her footwork—that’s O.K. Because even though Rahimi is going to the Olympics to box, and knows she will likely take a pounding, her biggest fight has already been won.
When Rahimi, 18, raises her gloves in triumph as she bounds into London’s boxing ring in August, she will be Afghanistan’s first female boxer in the Olympics’ first female boxing competition—and only the third female athlete Afghanistan has ever sent to the Games. To get there, she has had to fend off social opprobrium, religious condemnation and even the disapproval of some of her own coaches, who believe women’s boxing shouldn’t go any further than a hobby. Rahimi has won every one of those battles. Her path to London is but the latest leg of an extraordinary journey for Afghanistan’s women, who, little more than a decade ago, were forced to stay at home, denied the right to obtain an education, to work—and to play sports. Since then, Afghanistan has had its share of brave, defiant women, from presidential candidates to female cops to the deputy speaker of parliament. By and large, they are the exceptions, trailblazers a generation ahead of the pack. Still, none have stepped, as Rahimi has, into a violent w
orld that until relatively recently, even in the U.S. and the U.K., was a purely male preserve.
You might think that the participation of an 18-year-old female boxer in the Olympics would be a much debated topic of conversation in Afghanistan. It’s not. Few are even aware that a woman—a woman pugilist no less—will represent Afghanistan in London this year. The Afghan National Olympic Committee has kept her participation quiet, for fear of a conservative backlash. Of all the sports currently available to women in Afghanistan—among them track and basketball—Rahimi picked the one that most defies Afghan notions of femininity. It’s difficult to say what would be more appalling to the majority of Afghans: the thought of a woman traveling alone to compete in front of unknown men, or the idea of a woman punching and spitting in perhaps the most savage of men’s sports, a sport that happens to have become something of an obsession with Afghan men.
That passion was sparked by a visit from former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who visited the country in 2002 as a U.N. Messenger of Peace. Ali’s legacy is visible on an early-evening drive through Kabul’s dust-choked streets: lights stream through the open doors of neighborhood gyms; the backlit forms of young men jabbing and ducking cast flickering shadows on the sidewalks outside. Women are not invited to join. At Kabul’s World Sport Shop—“Supplier of the best sports accessories from the most famous company of the world in all over Afghanistan”—salesman Sohrab Mohammadi tells me that a third of his sales are for boxing gear. I ask him how many women bought boxing gloves. He looks at me quizzically. “Women don’t box. They buy yoga mats and ab machines.” When I tell him that an Afghan woman is going to box in the Olympics, he is incredulous, then angry. “Haram,” he says—that’s wrong. “Let women run, or play volleyball. Boxing is for men.”
Born to Fight
For Rahimi, it was not the three-time champ from Louisville, Ky., who inspired her unusual choice of sport but the Greatest’s daughter Laila Ali, whom Rahimi found in a YouTube clip. Laila had become a pro boxer, like her father, and Rahimi was inspired to follow in Laila’s dancing footsteps. That initial glimpse into the world of women’s boxing coincided with a visit to her high school in 2007 by a couple of enterprising Afghan coaches, who, with funding from Oxfam and the help of a small NGO called Cooperation for Peace and Unity (CPAU), were seeking to establish an experimental women’s boxing club. As a refugee in Iran, Rahimi had picked up a few self-defense tips from a cousin who boxed, “but I didn’t know I could do it as a sport till CPAU came to my school,” she says. Her father was reluctant at first. He worried that such an unorthodox sport, not to mention the possibility of a broken nose, might hurt her chances for marriage down the line. But then Rahimi’s two younger sisters also begged to join the
new boxing club, and he found himself outnumbered.
The sheer challenge of taking on a sport so singularly unsuited to expectations of what an Afghan girl could do helped push her into the ring. “I wanted to prove that Afghan girls could do everything too, just like in the West,” she says. Rahimi’s perverse drive doesn’t surprise her mother Saleema, whose own dreams of becoming an Olympic volleyball player were crushed by the Afghan government’s refusal to let women compete. “I have four daughters and one son,” says Saleema Rahimi. “And I have raised them all to be champions.” She just didn’t imagine that they would take her constant exhortations to fight for their rights quite so literally.
Not only did they fight, but they also defended their right to box when residents of their downtrodden Kabul neighborhood questioned the suitability of their behavior. “The boys call us the mafia now, and they leave us alone,” says Sadaf Rahimi with a giggle, recounting a story about how she once punched out a local tough who made fun of the girls’ chosen after-school activity. But her prowess in the back alleys doesn’t necessarily translate into success in the ring.
Rahimi’s presence in London has as much to do with a quirk in the rules as it does skill. She goes to London on a wild-card invitation, a special berth granted to nations that would not otherwise be able to qualify an appropriately skilled athlete. She is the first to admit that she wouldn’t have made it any other way. Where some of her competitors benefit from thrice-daily training by multiple coaches, and have sports doctors and nutritionists on call, she practices after school three days a week in a ramshackle studio filled with 20-odd classmates. They are forced to share a dozen sets of gloves and helmets that were donated by CPAU. The country’s only regulation boxing ring, housed in a leaking warehouse on the far side of the Olympic compound, is only partially completed, with a tattered mat and no bell. (During the men’s matches, referees bang a metal cylinder with a hammer to end rounds.)
Not that it would serve Rahimi much—Afghanistan’s Islamic tradition prohibits her from fighting men, and, as the best in her club, she rarely gets a chance to improve her game. She is sanguine about her chances. She has been knocked down before—in a competition in Kazakhstan—but never out. London, she fears, will be different. “I am sure I will be punched like a bag. Like I am a pillow being pummeled.” Her goal isn’t to win so much as it is to stay upright. “If I am going to lose, let me lose by the numbers,” she says, referring to the scoring system. “I just don’t want to be down on and knocked out on the floor. That would be embarrassing for me and a dishonor for Afghanistan.”
Some Battles Are Harder to Win
as much as rahimi loves the sense of power and independence that boxing gives her, she knows it is temporary at best. She is haunted by the experience of a former mentor, the boxer Shahla Sekandari. In 2009, Sekandari won a bronze medal at the Asian Indoor Games in Vietnam, earning accolades both at home and abroad. “She really was something special,” reminisces Mohammed Saber Sharifi, who coaches the women’s boxing team. “Our first real boxer.” He speaks of her passion, courage and will to win in the past tense, as if she were dead. For him, she might as well be. Not long after returning from Vietnam, Sekandari got married. Her husband made her quit boxing and changed her phone number. It had been her dream to go to the Olympics, but she was forced to cut all ties with the world of women’s boxing. “We have traditions in Afghanistan,” Sharifi explains. “Once a woman leaves her family to get married, she is not allowed to do what she was doing before. She belongs to her new family, and if they don’t want her t
o box, she doesn’t have a choice.”
More than a decade after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan’s women may be punching out a few small spaces for themselves in sports, in television or in business. But they are still a long way away from enjoying the independent lives most women take for granted in the West. It’s nearly impossible for an Afghan woman to live on her own in Afghanistan. For this reason, Rahimi intends to stay with her parents as long as possible. When she got the invitation to London, Rahimi tracked down and called Sekandari for advice. “She says I need to work on my right uppercut. And she says don’t get married.”
To religious conservatives, the fact that Rahimi boxes is immaterial. They don’t want to see women compete in the Olympics at all. To them, her chosen sport is simply a bizarre eccentricity garnishing a stack of other cultural taboos. Maulvi Qalamuddin, former head of the Taliban’s religious police who has now joined the government, ticks off the sins associated with Rahimi’s trip to London with his fingers: women venturing outside the home, women performing in front of men, women improperly dressed and women traveling without a male family member. “It is shameful that a woman is representing Afghanistan at the Olympics,” he says. “We don’t care about medals like you do in the West. We want our women honored for being doctors or economists or mathematicians. Not athletes.”
Furthermore, by his definition, he adds, it’s against the law. The Afghan constitution states that no law shall contravene Shari‘a—Islam’s moral and religious code. “Women going anywhere without maharam [a male family member] is against Shari‘a,” says Qalamuddin. “Boxing is against Shari‘a, and women competing is against Shari‘a. So it is illegal for an Afghan woman to go to the Olympics for boxing.” There is no one agreement on how to interpret the often conflicting dictates enshrined in the Koran and in stories of the Prophet Muhammad that make up Shari‘a, but those who take an extreme view, like Qalamuddin, tend to have the loudest voices.
In London, Rahimi will have to navigate a difficult path between the demands of her sport and the expectations of her more conservative countrymen. Even though her curly black ponytail swings free in practice, she will keep it tightly bound under a scarf and protective headgear in front of the cameras. She will wear tights under her regulation boxing shorts. And in every way possible, she will strive to be an example of a good Muslim woman just as much as she tries to obliterate the burqa-shrouded stereotype of her nation. “I am tired of the world seeing Afghan women as victims. I want to deliver a message to the world through my fighting that Afghan girls are not victims. Whether I win a medal or not, I will be a symbol of courage as soon as I step into the ring.”
Rahimi’s battle, like that of her teammates, might already be winning some converts. As the women trickle out of the gym to make way for the men’s team, I stop to ask one of the men’s coaches what he thinks of women boxing. “At the beginning it was strange,” admits Sayed Haroon. “Everything new is strange at first, but you can get used to anything if you see it enough times.”
—with reporting by Walid Fazly and Andrea Bruce/Kabul
India may be key to stable Afghanistan
The Australian By RAMESH THAKUR July 20, 2012
THE site of the terrorist attacks on New York became known as Ground Zero. But 2001 was not Year Zero for Afghanistan. Much of post-2001 Western policy towards Afghanistan seemingly airbrushed its history and detached it from geography. Yet historically, Afghanistan's destiny has often been determined by its geography. Foreigners come and go, but neighbours are forever.
Afghanistan connects south Asia to central Asia and the Middle East. A descent into anarchy in Afghanistan would risk spilling over into the other regions. But this also means that for reasons of history, geography and culture, the major regional players - Iran, Pakistan and India - as well as China and Russia as global players with a permanent geographical footprint in southwest Asia, should be engaged in shaping the future of Afghanistan.
The battle space in Afghanistan straddles the border with Pakistan and those with a deep appreciation of local realities would have known the battle for Afghanistan would be won or lost ultimately in Pakistan.
As Western powers lost interest in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance was kept alive by Russia, Iran and India.
After 9/11, when Western powers returned to Afghanistan with a vengeance, India, like Iran, was frozen out. Pakistan has more proximate and critical historical, ethnic and geopolitical interests in Afghanistan than India. No peace in Afghanistan will be stable and durable unless Pakistan has a seat at the negotiating table.
Owing to propinquity, Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan have been readily grasped by Western policymakers and analysts. But India, too, is linked to Afghanistan by geography, history, culture, and commercial and strategic interests that give depth and texture to bilateral relations.
Compared with fleeting Western interest, India has enduring and permanent historical, cultural, commercial and geopolitical interests too: defeating the Taliban, eradicating Islamist extremism, strengthening state institutions, capacity and stability, developing Afghanistan as a trade and transit corridor to Central Asia and Iran, especially for energy, and precluding the re-emergence there of a base for launching terrorist attacks on India. Mostly these dovetail with Western interests more readily and enduringly than they do with Pakistani interests. President Hamid Karzai signed a number of high-profile agreements with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi in October under which India will bolster its soft power contributions with hard power activity.
Along with educational, energy and development assistance, India will help to train Afghanistan's security services. Karzai has been careful to stress that India is "a great friend", but Pakistan is "a twin brother".
There is a natural marriage of convenience between US hard power and Indian soft power in Afghanistan. The markets of Kabul are generously stocked with Indian music and movies. Karzai studied in India and speaks Hindi. Injured senior Afghan military officers are often flown to India for treatment. Just about every public opinion poll shows India to be immensely popular among Afghans and Pakistan to be deeply unpopular. In the words of a BBC analyst, in the streets of Kabul, "while you never hear a good word about Pakistan, you rarely hear a bad one about India." India has provided more than $US2 billion ($1.9bn) in aid, built Afghanistan's new parliament, and operates the biggest children's hospital in Kabul. It was emphatic in welcoming the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and has been just as emphatic in warning against a hasty withdrawal of Western forces.
Can Washington take the risk of backing the Kabul-New Delhi axis? Pakistan has proved problematic and unreliable and the US-Pakistan relationship has been transactional. US interests converge on just a few issues with those of China and Russia.
By contrast, since 2001 India-US relations have been based on a fundamental convergence of interests in Afghanistan, which has featured regularly in security and political dialogues between them, covering sharing of sensitive intelligence, homeland security and combined defence exercises.
The combination of US military and aid influence and Indian cultural and political influence should be useful for shaping Afghanistan's future for the better without, however, guaranteeing any such outcome.
On June 28, the Confederation of Indian Industry, in collaboration with the governments of Afghanistan and India, hosted the Delhi Investment Summit on Afghanistan to showcase the country's potential and attract foreign investment.
But India cannot play a more robust role in Afghanistan without Iranian support. To circumvent Pakistan, India needs access to Iranian ports and supply routes into Afghanistan. Washington and other Western capitals need to understand India's geopolitical imperatives and work with New Delhi to secure Afghanistan's future after 2014.
Ramesh Thakur is a professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, and adjunct professor, Institute of Ethics, Governance and Law, Griffith University
David Cameron: Taliban could be waiting for British troops to leave before trying to take Afghanistan
David Cameron has admitted the Taliban may simply be "waiting it out" for British troops to leave before trying to regain control of Afghanistan.
Telegraph.co.uk By Rowena Mason, Political Correspondent 19 Jul 2012
Camp Bastion, Afghanistan - The Prime Minister warned the rebels they should not expect an easy victory when foreign forces leave in 2014, after a decade of fighting and the deaths of 422 British soldiers.
Mr Cameron was speaking in Kabul ahead of a historic three-way meeting with the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan to encourage them to fight "Talibanisation" in both nations.
He said the war on terror had already made progress as the proportion of threats to Britain from Pakistan and Afghanistan has fallen from 75pc to 50pc since 2006.
However, the Prime Minister said there were still huge challenges to stop the region being a "haven for international terror".
"The clear message is to the Taliban that you can't just wait this out until foreign forces leave in 2014," Mr Cameron said. "We will be firm friends and supporters to Afghanistan long beyond that."
He appeared with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan leader, to announce a Sandhurst-style officer training academy in Kabul, after a flying visit to see troops on the ground at Camp Bastion.
The Prime Minister also encouraged Mr Karzai to hold "credible, inclusive and nationwide" elections to help Afghanistan become a stable nation state.
Afterwards, they were joined by Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, the new prime minister of Pakistan.
The three leaders are discussing peace talks with the Taliban and trying to stop cross-border terror attacks.
Mr Karzai said holding peace talks with the Taliban is "the most important of our priorities".
The Afghan leader hosted Mr Cameron in the rose garden of the opulent presidential palace in Kabul.
The Prime Minister is on his ninth visit to Afghanistan but this is his first visit to Helmand Province since British forces began handing more control to the Afghan army.
After meeting Grn John Allen, commander of the ISAF
international military forces in Afghanistan, Mr Cameron said British troops are already in a "mentoring and training role" rather than frontline fighting.
Yesterday, he promised that withdrawing from the region by 2014 is "doable and deliverable".
He said he was confident about handing over control to Afghan troops after seeing the situation in Helmand Province for himself.
However, senior military sources warned that withdrawing too quickly to save money could put British security under threat.
The source said British troops need to "maintain a strong presence" for as long as possible if Afghanistan is to be a "viable state
Success in Afghanistan Isn't Dependent on Taliban Deal: Cameron
TOLOnews.com By Mahboba Pardis Thursday, 19 July 2012
Success in Afghanistan is not dependent on a deal with the Taliban - but it would help, British Prime Minister David Cameron said Thursday.
In an exclusive interview with TOLOnews in Kabul, Cameron said that if the Taliban fail to join a peace process they will be defeated militarily, adding that it was in the Taliban's interest to have a stable, prosperous, peaceful and democratic Afghanistan.
"Success isn't dependent on a deal with the Taliban, but obviously success would be helped by the Taliban joining a political process. So I would appeal to them to do that, but if they don't do that, they will be defeated militarily," Cameron said.
He also urged Pakistan to help Afghanistan to root out those against stability, saying it was also in Pakistan's interests.
"I think increasingly in Pakistan they know that they are facing a security threat from their own Taliban and these two Taliban [Afghanistan and Pakistan] are related. So I think it's in Pakistan's interest to work with Afghanistan to root out those are against democracy, against stability, and who want to take these countries backward. I hope that there is that will and I think it's for the Pakistani government to demonstrate that will," he said.
He rejected the notion that Afghanistan will return to a civil war after 2014 pointing to the international community pledges to help Afghanistan's security forces and the development of the country.
"We will make sure you have the army, the security force, the police, the development aid and all things that you need to build a successful country," he said, adding that Afghans do not like to see foreign soldiers protecting them year after year, so it's time for the Afghans to resolve the issue.
The British Prime Minister praised Afghan President Hamid Karzai's time in office, stressing the need for a smooth transition to the next president in the upcoming elections.
"I think President Karzai has given a huge amount to Afghanistan and to its people. I think he has given an enormous amount of service, but a final act of service that he can give and the Afghan government can give is to show that you can have a democratic transition, that you can have a past president living peacefully in Afghanistan with a new president elected," he said.
Cameron finished by saying that it's for the Afghans to choose their future president without interference from external parties, but the process of the election should be fair.
Cameron also met with new Paksitani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf in a trilateral meeting with Karzai while he was in Kabul on Thursday.
It was the first such meeting between the three leaders. Officials said it could boost the regional cooperation and relations between the countries.
‘Massive' Government Changes to Begin Saturday or Sunday, Karzai Says
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 19 July 2012
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he will announce the promised "massive changes" to his government on Saturday or Sunday, on the back of state visits from both Britain and Pakistan on Thursday.
In a press conference with UK Prime Minster David Cameron, Karzai stressed that the changes to his government would happen soon.
"As I said in my meeting with all government bodies, I will bring massive changes to the government and the process will start by issuing an order on Saturday or Sunday," he said Thursday in Kabul.
Karzai has been under pressure to take action since the Tokyo conference in early July. The international community pledged to give $16 billion in aid on the condition that Afghanistan does more in terms of better governance and the fight against corruption.
Cameron, meanwhile, talked at the briefing about the regional security situation and the need for Afghanistan's "rescue" from the Taliban.
"I want point out to the President Karzai and Pakistan's Prime Minister that the insurgents are trying to destabilise both Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is a fight which all of us are involved in. We need to rescue Afghanistan from Taliban, Talibanism, and insurgency, and we should do the same in Pakistan as well as it faces a major threat from the insurgents. We need to win the war on terror," he said.
Cameron took the opportunity to announce that the UK would be funding a military officer's training academy in Afghanistan beyond 2014 as its contribution towards security in the country.
He also said his country would support Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission, and stressed that the process of the election should be led by Afghanistan.
The pair met with Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf and discussed security matters while reaffirming their "common vision" to advance regional peace and stability, the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a released statement.
"The three leaders expressed their satisfaction with the transition process in Afghanistan and reiterated that an independent, peaceful, self-reliant and democratic Afghanistan was necessary for the stability of the region and the international community," the statement said.
The leaders also agreed that regional prosperity needs economic development through trade and investment, and economic integration.
Karzai stressed the importance of a political solution to end the conflict in Afghanistan, which was supported by the British and Pakistani leaders.
Back to Top
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
July 20, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Frud Bezhan
Afghanistan has become the first country in the world to have its surface minerals mapped from the air.
The U.S. Geographical Survey (USGS) mapped some 70 percent of the country using an advanced technique known as “hyperspectral imaging,” which involves using a camera to capture sunlight reflected from the ground.
Specific colors on the mineral map reflect different natural minerals as well as man-made minerals, vegetation, and snow.
USGS spokesman Alex Demas maintains that the map will make it easier to identify and estimate mineral deposits for international mining companies looking to invest in Afghanistan, which is known to have vast reserves of oil, gas, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium.
“This imagery allows us to identify with very good accuracy where certain types of materials are," he says. "And this is very useful, especially for the mining industry. In fact, the USGS and the Afghan Geological Survey have already identified, using this information, 24 areas of high-profile mining interests.”
Demas adds the survey did not include regions inside Afghanistan that bordered its neighbors—Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan-- in order to avoid any concerns over airspace.
International mining companies have made huge investments in Afghan mining in recent years.
In 2008, the China Metallurgical Group Corporation made a successful bid of $3 billion for mineral rights to the Mes Aynak site, which geologists believe has the second-largest copper reserves in the world.
That was followed by a bid from a group of Indian companies in 2011, when a deal was signed to begin mining Hajigak, the country’s largest iron ore deposit, located in the central Bamiyan Province.
The numbers being used to describe Afghanistan's potential wealth are staggering.
In 2010, the Afghan Ministry of Mines estimated that the country’s reserves could amount to some one trillion dollars.
According to Demas, from the data the USGS has received, the minerals that have been discovered by the mineral map seem to be the real deal.
“We do believe these to be world-class mineral deposits," he says. "We don’t know for certain what the tonnage of mineral ore will be. We won’t know for sure, though, until a company actually goers there and develops it.”
The USGS gathered the data over the space of 43 days from aircrafts travelling at a height of 15,000 meters.
The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations as well as by the Afghan government.
Cameron Urges Islamabad And Kabul To Join Forces Against Terrorists
July 19, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
British Prime Minister David Cameron has called on Afghanistan and Pakistan to make common cause against insurgents in the two countries' border region.
Cameron said that the terrorists are trying to wreck both Pakistan and Afghanistan so they need to "be together in one single fight."
Cameron and Afghan President Hamid Karzai met Pakistan's new Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf for the first time on July 19.
They emphasized that Afghan efforts to negotiate with the Taliban need Islamabad's help to be successful.
The British, U.S. and Afghan governments have long criticized Pakistan for not doing enough to stop cross-border attacks by insurgent groups based inside Pakistan.
Islamabad also charges that some insurgents cross the border from the Afghan side and attack Pakistani security forces.
Based on reporting by AP and AFP
Afghanistan insurgency threatens previously peaceful Bamiyan province
Concerns growing over violence in central highland province after two bombs killed nine police officers earlier this month
Guardian.co.uk By Emma Graham-Harrison Thursday 19 July 2012
Kabul - The central highland province of Bamiyan has long been an island of security in the rising tide of Afghanistan's insurgency, largely insulated from the blasts and gunfire that have become commonplace across the rest of the country by its geography and a fierce strain of anti-Taliban sentiment.
But concerns are growing over the government's ability to hold off insurgents in the region after two massive roadside bombs, just five days apart, killed nine police officers earlier this month.
It was an unprecedented toll for the area, and raised fears that violence will escalate as foreign troops withdraw.
The officers who died in two attacks on 3 and 8 July were the first Afghan casualties in Bamiyan since 2008, when a bomb killed a single policeman, according to Mohammad Ali Lakzi, the head of operations and archives for the provincial police force. A New Zealand soldier was also shot dead in 2010.
The area has remained so secure that it was chosen last summer to launch a gradual nationwide handover from Nato troops to Afghan forces, even though the nearest soldiers are in the next province. Armed police are the only security forces and they rarely have to make use of their guns.
But the people of Bamiyan have bitter memories of massacres in their valleys by Taliban troops, shortly before the hardline Islamists were ousted in late 2001, and the destruction of two giant Buddha statues that had gazed serenely out of a cliff for over a millennium.
And so the July bombs that detonated under two police vehicles have sent a chill through the province. The first set of buried explosives killed four officers and injured two, the second killed five.
"In the past few years we never faced such an incident," said the provincial police chief, Juma Guldi Yaardam, who has more than 1,000 officers at his command but says he needs army support in tackling the insurgent threat spilling over from less peaceful neighbouring areas – particularly Baghlan, Parwan and Wardak provinces.
"These provinces are unsafe and we have big concerns about the future. We think we need more troops to ensure good security for the borders."
The north-eastern district where the deadly bombs were buried has long been the riskiest part of Bamiyan, but the attacks were unusually bold.
"They were unprecedented in terms of the death toll and getting their targets," said a Foreign Official familiar with the province. The deaths rekindled concerns sparked by the kidnapping and murder of the head of the provincial council on the road from Kabul last year.
"Most of the province, in an Afghan context, is safe, but the north-east has this problem Who knows whether this is the start of a pattern or not," the official added. "People are maybe getting a bit more nervous."
The provincial governor, the only woman in Afghanistan to run one of the 34 regional administrations, says the police are ill-prepared to handle battle-hardened insurgents.
"The number of guns that our police have is not really sufficient," Habiba Sarabi said in a telephone interview, in which she also stressed most of her province was still safe.
"Our military needs some more supplies, some more support for training and equipment."
Insurgents have attacked civilian supplies, including tankers of fuel, on the critical road through the northeast, and there are insurgents active along a southern route too. The violence pushes up prices in Bamiyan and limits travel out of the isolated province, she said.
"When they want to travel to Kabul it's really bad for them to take either road," Sarabi said. "Sometimes even their gasoline trucks or some other supplies are stopped by these insurgents and also some of them have been burned, so this ensures the people of Bamiyan are suffering and not happy."
Most of the unrest is from small, mobile groups of less than 20 insurgents that cross into Bamiyan for brief attacks or to bury an IED before disappearing back into lawless areas where the government has little or no reach.
There are more checkpoints on the roads now as a stop-gap solution, but Sarabi said more co-ordination with officials in the troubled provinces, and help from the Afghan army, is critical to tackling the violence long-term.
The negotiations leading up to the security handover from New Zealand forces last July included a request for soldiers, but so far they have not been provided. A spokesman for the Afghanistan ministry of defence declined to comment on whether that might change.
"As a strategy of the ministry of defence, we check if there are threats and send forces where they are needed," said spokesman General Zahir Azimi.
Additional reporting by Mokhtar Amiri
The Challenger
Afghanistan’s first female boxer may take a pounding in the ring. Big deal. She’s been in much tougher scraps back home
TIME By Aryn Baker @arynebaker July 19, 2012
Update: Due to concerns about Sadaf Rahimi’s boxing abilities, the Amateur International Boxing Association has decided not to extend her the wildcard invitation to the London Olympics, meaning that she won’t be competing in the Games. There were fears that boxing against opponents of much greater ability could threaten her physical safety in the ring.
Sadaf Rahimi looks like a boxer; bouncing on the balls of her feet as she saunters into the gym, fist bumping her coach in a silent salute. She dresses like a boxer, a black bandanna pulled low across her forehead and over her ears, her thick ponytail concealed by a raised hoodie. She even acts like a boxer, scowling as she takes in her assembled teammates to size up who, if anyone, she will spar with today. But if she can’t really box like a boxer—a little slow on the speed bag, a little clumsy with her footwork—that’s O.K. Because even though Rahimi is going to the Olympics to box, and knows she will likely take a pounding, her biggest fight has already been won.
When Rahimi, 18, raises her gloves in triumph as she bounds into London’s boxing ring in August, she will be Afghanistan’s first female boxer in the Olympics’ first female boxing competition—and only the third female athlete Afghanistan has ever sent to the Games. To get there, she has had to fend off social opprobrium, religious condemnation and even the disapproval of some of her own coaches, who believe women’s boxing shouldn’t go any further than a hobby. Rahimi has won every one of those battles. Her path to London is but the latest leg of an extraordinary journey for Afghanistan’s women, who, little more than a decade ago, were forced to stay at home, denied the right to obtain an education, to work—and to play sports. Since then, Afghanistan has had its share of brave, defiant women, from presidential candidates to female cops to the deputy speaker of parliament. By and large, they are the exceptions, trailblazers a generation ahead of the pack. Still, none have stepped, as Rahimi has, into a violent w
orld that until relatively recently, even in the U.S. and the U.K., was a purely male preserve.
You might think that the participation of an 18-year-old female boxer in the Olympics would be a much debated topic of conversation in Afghanistan. It’s not. Few are even aware that a woman—a woman pugilist no less—will represent Afghanistan in London this year. The Afghan National Olympic Committee has kept her participation quiet, for fear of a conservative backlash. Of all the sports currently available to women in Afghanistan—among them track and basketball—Rahimi picked the one that most defies Afghan notions of femininity. It’s difficult to say what would be more appalling to the majority of Afghans: the thought of a woman traveling alone to compete in front of unknown men, or the idea of a woman punching and spitting in perhaps the most savage of men’s sports, a sport that happens to have become something of an obsession with Afghan men.
That passion was sparked by a visit from former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who visited the country in 2002 as a U.N. Messenger of Peace. Ali’s legacy is visible on an early-evening drive through Kabul’s dust-choked streets: lights stream through the open doors of neighborhood gyms; the backlit forms of young men jabbing and ducking cast flickering shadows on the sidewalks outside. Women are not invited to join. At Kabul’s World Sport Shop—“Supplier of the best sports accessories from the most famous company of the world in all over Afghanistan”—salesman Sohrab Mohammadi tells me that a third of his sales are for boxing gear. I ask him how many women bought boxing gloves. He looks at me quizzically. “Women don’t box. They buy yoga mats and ab machines.” When I tell him that an Afghan woman is going to box in the Olympics, he is incredulous, then angry. “Haram,” he says—that’s wrong. “Let women run, or play volleyball. Boxing is for men.”
Born to Fight
For Rahimi, it was not the three-time champ from Louisville, Ky., who inspired her unusual choice of sport but the Greatest’s daughter Laila Ali, whom Rahimi found in a YouTube clip. Laila had become a pro boxer, like her father, and Rahimi was inspired to follow in Laila’s dancing footsteps. That initial glimpse into the world of women’s boxing coincided with a visit to her high school in 2007 by a couple of enterprising Afghan coaches, who, with funding from Oxfam and the help of a small NGO called Cooperation for Peace and Unity (CPAU), were seeking to establish an experimental women’s boxing club. As a refugee in Iran, Rahimi had picked up a few self-defense tips from a cousin who boxed, “but I didn’t know I could do it as a sport till CPAU came to my school,” she says. Her father was reluctant at first. He worried that such an unorthodox sport, not to mention the possibility of a broken nose, might hurt her chances for marriage down the line. But then Rahimi’s two younger sisters also begged to join the
new boxing club, and he found himself outnumbered.
The sheer challenge of taking on a sport so singularly unsuited to expectations of what an Afghan girl could do helped push her into the ring. “I wanted to prove that Afghan girls could do everything too, just like in the West,” she says. Rahimi’s perverse drive doesn’t surprise her mother Saleema, whose own dreams of becoming an Olympic volleyball player were crushed by the Afghan government’s refusal to let women compete. “I have four daughters and one son,” says Saleema Rahimi. “And I have raised them all to be champions.” She just didn’t imagine that they would take her constant exhortations to fight for their rights quite so literally.
Not only did they fight, but they also defended their right to box when residents of their downtrodden Kabul neighborhood questioned the suitability of their behavior. “The boys call us the mafia now, and they leave us alone,” says Sadaf Rahimi with a giggle, recounting a story about how she once punched out a local tough who made fun of the girls’ chosen after-school activity. But her prowess in the back alleys doesn’t necessarily translate into success in the ring.
Rahimi’s presence in London has as much to do with a quirk in the rules as it does skill. She goes to London on a wild-card invitation, a special berth granted to nations that would not otherwise be able to qualify an appropriately skilled athlete. She is the first to admit that she wouldn’t have made it any other way. Where some of her competitors benefit from thrice-daily training by multiple coaches, and have sports doctors and nutritionists on call, she practices after school three days a week in a ramshackle studio filled with 20-odd classmates. They are forced to share a dozen sets of gloves and helmets that were donated by CPAU. The country’s only regulation boxing ring, housed in a leaking warehouse on the far side of the Olympic compound, is only partially completed, with a tattered mat and no bell. (During the men’s matches, referees bang a metal cylinder with a hammer to end rounds.)
Not that it would serve Rahimi much—Afghanistan’s Islamic tradition prohibits her from fighting men, and, as the best in her club, she rarely gets a chance to improve her game. She is sanguine about her chances. She has been knocked down before—in a competition in Kazakhstan—but never out. London, she fears, will be different. “I am sure I will be punched like a bag. Like I am a pillow being pummeled.” Her goal isn’t to win so much as it is to stay upright. “If I am going to lose, let me lose by the numbers,” she says, referring to the scoring system. “I just don’t want to be down on and knocked out on the floor. That would be embarrassing for me and a dishonor for Afghanistan.”
Some Battles Are Harder to Win
as much as rahimi loves the sense of power and independence that boxing gives her, she knows it is temporary at best. She is haunted by the experience of a former mentor, the boxer Shahla Sekandari. In 2009, Sekandari won a bronze medal at the Asian Indoor Games in Vietnam, earning accolades both at home and abroad. “She really was something special,” reminisces Mohammed Saber Sharifi, who coaches the women’s boxing team. “Our first real boxer.” He speaks of her passion, courage and will to win in the past tense, as if she were dead. For him, she might as well be. Not long after returning from Vietnam, Sekandari got married. Her husband made her quit boxing and changed her phone number. It had been her dream to go to the Olympics, but she was forced to cut all ties with the world of women’s boxing. “We have traditions in Afghanistan,” Sharifi explains. “Once a woman leaves her family to get married, she is not allowed to do what she was doing before. She belongs to her new family, and if they don’t want her t
o box, she doesn’t have a choice.”
More than a decade after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan’s women may be punching out a few small spaces for themselves in sports, in television or in business. But they are still a long way away from enjoying the independent lives most women take for granted in the West. It’s nearly impossible for an Afghan woman to live on her own in Afghanistan. For this reason, Rahimi intends to stay with her parents as long as possible. When she got the invitation to London, Rahimi tracked down and called Sekandari for advice. “She says I need to work on my right uppercut. And she says don’t get married.”
To religious conservatives, the fact that Rahimi boxes is immaterial. They don’t want to see women compete in the Olympics at all. To them, her chosen sport is simply a bizarre eccentricity garnishing a stack of other cultural taboos. Maulvi Qalamuddin, former head of the Taliban’s religious police who has now joined the government, ticks off the sins associated with Rahimi’s trip to London with his fingers: women venturing outside the home, women performing in front of men, women improperly dressed and women traveling without a male family member. “It is shameful that a woman is representing Afghanistan at the Olympics,” he says. “We don’t care about medals like you do in the West. We want our women honored for being doctors or economists or mathematicians. Not athletes.”
Furthermore, by his definition, he adds, it’s against the law. The Afghan constitution states that no law shall contravene Shari‘a—Islam’s moral and religious code. “Women going anywhere without maharam [a male family member] is against Shari‘a,” says Qalamuddin. “Boxing is against Shari‘a, and women competing is against Shari‘a. So it is illegal for an Afghan woman to go to the Olympics for boxing.” There is no one agreement on how to interpret the often conflicting dictates enshrined in the Koran and in stories of the Prophet Muhammad that make up Shari‘a, but those who take an extreme view, like Qalamuddin, tend to have the loudest voices.
In London, Rahimi will have to navigate a difficult path between the demands of her sport and the expectations of her more conservative countrymen. Even though her curly black ponytail swings free in practice, she will keep it tightly bound under a scarf and protective headgear in front of the cameras. She will wear tights under her regulation boxing shorts. And in every way possible, she will strive to be an example of a good Muslim woman just as much as she tries to obliterate the burqa-shrouded stereotype of her nation. “I am tired of the world seeing Afghan women as victims. I want to deliver a message to the world through my fighting that Afghan girls are not victims. Whether I win a medal or not, I will be a symbol of courage as soon as I step into the ring.”
Rahimi’s battle, like that of her teammates, might already be winning some converts. As the women trickle out of the gym to make way for the men’s team, I stop to ask one of the men’s coaches what he thinks of women boxing. “At the beginning it was strange,” admits Sayed Haroon. “Everything new is strange at first, but you can get used to anything if you see it enough times.”
—with reporting by Walid Fazly and Andrea Bruce/Kabul
India may be key to stable Afghanistan
The Australian By RAMESH THAKUR July 20, 2012
THE site of the terrorist attacks on New York became known as Ground Zero. But 2001 was not Year Zero for Afghanistan. Much of post-2001 Western policy towards Afghanistan seemingly airbrushed its history and detached it from geography. Yet historically, Afghanistan's destiny has often been determined by its geography. Foreigners come and go, but neighbours are forever.
Afghanistan connects south Asia to central Asia and the Middle East. A descent into anarchy in Afghanistan would risk spilling over into the other regions. But this also means that for reasons of history, geography and culture, the major regional players - Iran, Pakistan and India - as well as China and Russia as global players with a permanent geographical footprint in southwest Asia, should be engaged in shaping the future of Afghanistan.
The battle space in Afghanistan straddles the border with Pakistan and those with a deep appreciation of local realities would have known the battle for Afghanistan would be won or lost ultimately in Pakistan.
As Western powers lost interest in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance was kept alive by Russia, Iran and India.
After 9/11, when Western powers returned to Afghanistan with a vengeance, India, like Iran, was frozen out. Pakistan has more proximate and critical historical, ethnic and geopolitical interests in Afghanistan than India. No peace in Afghanistan will be stable and durable unless Pakistan has a seat at the negotiating table.
Owing to propinquity, Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan have been readily grasped by Western policymakers and analysts. But India, too, is linked to Afghanistan by geography, history, culture, and commercial and strategic interests that give depth and texture to bilateral relations.
Compared with fleeting Western interest, India has enduring and permanent historical, cultural, commercial and geopolitical interests too: defeating the Taliban, eradicating Islamist extremism, strengthening state institutions, capacity and stability, developing Afghanistan as a trade and transit corridor to Central Asia and Iran, especially for energy, and precluding the re-emergence there of a base for launching terrorist attacks on India. Mostly these dovetail with Western interests more readily and enduringly than they do with Pakistani interests. President Hamid Karzai signed a number of high-profile agreements with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi in October under which India will bolster its soft power contributions with hard power activity.
Along with educational, energy and development assistance, India will help to train Afghanistan's security services. Karzai has been careful to stress that India is "a great friend", but Pakistan is "a twin brother".
There is a natural marriage of convenience between US hard power and Indian soft power in Afghanistan. The markets of Kabul are generously stocked with Indian music and movies. Karzai studied in India and speaks Hindi. Injured senior Afghan military officers are often flown to India for treatment. Just about every public opinion poll shows India to be immensely popular among Afghans and Pakistan to be deeply unpopular. In the words of a BBC analyst, in the streets of Kabul, "while you never hear a good word about Pakistan, you rarely hear a bad one about India." India has provided more than $US2 billion ($1.9bn) in aid, built Afghanistan's new parliament, and operates the biggest children's hospital in Kabul. It was emphatic in welcoming the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and has been just as emphatic in warning against a hasty withdrawal of Western forces.
Can Washington take the risk of backing the Kabul-New Delhi axis? Pakistan has proved problematic and unreliable and the US-Pakistan relationship has been transactional. US interests converge on just a few issues with those of China and Russia.
By contrast, since 2001 India-US relations have been based on a fundamental convergence of interests in Afghanistan, which has featured regularly in security and political dialogues between them, covering sharing of sensitive intelligence, homeland security and combined defence exercises.
The combination of US military and aid influence and Indian cultural and political influence should be useful for shaping Afghanistan's future for the better without, however, guaranteeing any such outcome.
On June 28, the Confederation of Indian Industry, in collaboration with the governments of Afghanistan and India, hosted the Delhi Investment Summit on Afghanistan to showcase the country's potential and attract foreign investment.
But India cannot play a more robust role in Afghanistan without Iranian support. To circumvent Pakistan, India needs access to Iranian ports and supply routes into Afghanistan. Washington and other Western capitals need to understand India's geopolitical imperatives and work with New Delhi to secure Afghanistan's future after 2014.
Ramesh Thakur is a professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, and adjunct professor, Institute of Ethics, Governance and Law, Griffith University
David Cameron: Taliban could be waiting for British troops to leave before trying to take Afghanistan
David Cameron has admitted the Taliban may simply be "waiting it out" for British troops to leave before trying to regain control of Afghanistan.
Telegraph.co.uk By Rowena Mason, Political Correspondent 19 Jul 2012
Camp Bastion, Afghanistan - The Prime Minister warned the rebels they should not expect an easy victory when foreign forces leave in 2014, after a decade of fighting and the deaths of 422 British soldiers.
Mr Cameron was speaking in Kabul ahead of a historic three-way meeting with the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan to encourage them to fight "Talibanisation" in both nations.
He said the war on terror had already made progress as the proportion of threats to Britain from Pakistan and Afghanistan has fallen from 75pc to 50pc since 2006.
However, the Prime Minister said there were still huge challenges to stop the region being a "haven for international terror".
"The clear message is to the Taliban that you can't just wait this out until foreign forces leave in 2014," Mr Cameron said. "We will be firm friends and supporters to Afghanistan long beyond that."
He appeared with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan leader, to announce a Sandhurst-style officer training academy in Kabul, after a flying visit to see troops on the ground at Camp Bastion.
The Prime Minister also encouraged Mr Karzai to hold "credible, inclusive and nationwide" elections to help Afghanistan become a stable nation state.
Afterwards, they were joined by Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, the new prime minister of Pakistan.
The three leaders are discussing peace talks with the Taliban and trying to stop cross-border terror attacks.
Mr Karzai said holding peace talks with the Taliban is "the most important of our priorities".
The Afghan leader hosted Mr Cameron in the rose garden of the opulent presidential palace in Kabul.
The Prime Minister is on his ninth visit to Afghanistan but this is his first visit to Helmand Province since British forces began handing more control to the Afghan army.
After meeting Grn John Allen, commander of the ISAF
international military forces in Afghanistan, Mr Cameron said British troops are already in a "mentoring and training role" rather than frontline fighting.
Yesterday, he promised that withdrawing from the region by 2014 is "doable and deliverable".
He said he was confident about handing over control to Afghan troops after seeing the situation in Helmand Province for himself.
However, senior military sources warned that withdrawing too quickly to save money could put British security under threat.
The source said British troops need to "maintain a strong presence" for as long as possible if Afghanistan is to be a "viable state
Success in Afghanistan Isn't Dependent on Taliban Deal: Cameron
TOLOnews.com By Mahboba Pardis Thursday, 19 July 2012
Success in Afghanistan is not dependent on a deal with the Taliban - but it would help, British Prime Minister David Cameron said Thursday.
In an exclusive interview with TOLOnews in Kabul, Cameron said that if the Taliban fail to join a peace process they will be defeated militarily, adding that it was in the Taliban's interest to have a stable, prosperous, peaceful and democratic Afghanistan.
"Success isn't dependent on a deal with the Taliban, but obviously success would be helped by the Taliban joining a political process. So I would appeal to them to do that, but if they don't do that, they will be defeated militarily," Cameron said.
He also urged Pakistan to help Afghanistan to root out those against stability, saying it was also in Pakistan's interests.
"I think increasingly in Pakistan they know that they are facing a security threat from their own Taliban and these two Taliban [Afghanistan and Pakistan] are related. So I think it's in Pakistan's interest to work with Afghanistan to root out those are against democracy, against stability, and who want to take these countries backward. I hope that there is that will and I think it's for the Pakistani government to demonstrate that will," he said.
He rejected the notion that Afghanistan will return to a civil war after 2014 pointing to the international community pledges to help Afghanistan's security forces and the development of the country.
"We will make sure you have the army, the security force, the police, the development aid and all things that you need to build a successful country," he said, adding that Afghans do not like to see foreign soldiers protecting them year after year, so it's time for the Afghans to resolve the issue.
The British Prime Minister praised Afghan President Hamid Karzai's time in office, stressing the need for a smooth transition to the next president in the upcoming elections.
"I think President Karzai has given a huge amount to Afghanistan and to its people. I think he has given an enormous amount of service, but a final act of service that he can give and the Afghan government can give is to show that you can have a democratic transition, that you can have a past president living peacefully in Afghanistan with a new president elected," he said.
Cameron finished by saying that it's for the Afghans to choose their future president without interference from external parties, but the process of the election should be fair.
Cameron also met with new Paksitani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf in a trilateral meeting with Karzai while he was in Kabul on Thursday.
It was the first such meeting between the three leaders. Officials said it could boost the regional cooperation and relations between the countries.
‘Massive' Government Changes to Begin Saturday or Sunday, Karzai Says
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 19 July 2012
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he will announce the promised "massive changes" to his government on Saturday or Sunday, on the back of state visits from both Britain and Pakistan on Thursday.
In a press conference with UK Prime Minster David Cameron, Karzai stressed that the changes to his government would happen soon.
"As I said in my meeting with all government bodies, I will bring massive changes to the government and the process will start by issuing an order on Saturday or Sunday," he said Thursday in Kabul.
Karzai has been under pressure to take action since the Tokyo conference in early July. The international community pledged to give $16 billion in aid on the condition that Afghanistan does more in terms of better governance and the fight against corruption.
Cameron, meanwhile, talked at the briefing about the regional security situation and the need for Afghanistan's "rescue" from the Taliban.
"I want point out to the President Karzai and Pakistan's Prime Minister that the insurgents are trying to destabilise both Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is a fight which all of us are involved in. We need to rescue Afghanistan from Taliban, Talibanism, and insurgency, and we should do the same in Pakistan as well as it faces a major threat from the insurgents. We need to win the war on terror," he said.
Cameron took the opportunity to announce that the UK would be funding a military officer's training academy in Afghanistan beyond 2014 as its contribution towards security in the country.
He also said his country would support Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission, and stressed that the process of the election should be led by Afghanistan.
The pair met with Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf and discussed security matters while reaffirming their "common vision" to advance regional peace and stability, the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a released statement.
"The three leaders expressed their satisfaction with the transition process in Afghanistan and reiterated that an independent, peaceful, self-reliant and democratic Afghanistan was necessary for the stability of the region and the international community," the statement said.
The leaders also agreed that regional prosperity needs economic development through trade and investment, and economic integration.
Karzai stressed the importance of a political solution to end the conflict in Afghanistan, which was supported by the British and Pakistani leaders.
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