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Two Top Afghan Security Ministers Face Dismissal
By ALISSA J. RUBIN The New York Times August 4, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan Parliament voted Saturday to dismiss the two most powerful members of President Hamid Karzai’s security team, a surprise move that could create new turmoil as the United States-led coalition prepares to leave the country.
Lawmakers explained the move — which would cast out the defense minister and the interior minister in the middle of a war — as part of an effort to end the crippling corruption and cronyism endemic in the government. They also criticized the two ministers for failing to protect the country against recent cross-border rocket attacks from Pakistan.
Mr. Karzai could try to delay their departure, but early indications were that he would accede to Parliament’s wishes.
A shift in leadership is sure to cause upheaval in both ministries at a critical time, as Afghan soldiers and the police are taking over responsibility for security in much of the country. Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Interior Minister Bismullah Khan Mohammadi shoulder most of the responsibility for building an army and police force strong enough to fight the Taliban without the coalition forces, who are set to withdraw by the end of 2014.
Ousting the ministers could also complicate relations with the United States. American officials value their longstanding collaboration in particular with Mr. Wardak, who is seen as a stable ally compared with the mercurial Mr. Karzai. In addition, both ministers have long experience in fighting the insurgency.
“Even if this is only a political gesture and current ministers stay, this is a warning about the weakness of the Karzai government, a reflection of the deep divisions in the Afghan legislature and an indication of the kind of far deeper ethnic and sectarian splits that may come as the transition proceeds,” said Anthony Cordesman, an expert on the war at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Transition is already a high-risk effort, and this kind of additional risk is scarcely likely to make things better.”
The vote could be a harbinger of a broader shake-up in the government. At least two other important ministers, including Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal, are already under scrutiny. With the disclosure last week of bank statements showing transfers from Afghan businesses into his accounts, Mr. Zakhilwal is facing questions about corruption from a government antigraft agency. (He says the money was for earlier consultancy work.)
The American Embassy and the NATO command here appeared to be caught by surprise by the parliamentary vote and did not comment, leaving unclear what effect it might have on an increasingly complex security transition. American and international forces have been turning over province after province to Afghan control, razing their bases or giving them to the Afghans in a delicately choreographed sequence meant to ensure the Afghans have enough help in the near term as they take up the fight against a diminished but still persistent Taliban presence.
The vote came as many Afghan leaders and civilians are increasingly frustrated with corruption that undermines attempts to rebuild after years of war and amid anger from Parliament about cronyism in both ministries and accusations of ethnic bias in the Interior Ministry. Mr. Wardak has been accused of directing lucrative NATO trucking contracts to his son, a charge he has denied, while Mr. Mohammadi is seen as favoring fellow Tajiks from northern Afghanistan.
The parliamentary action also follows weeks of anger over the recent cross-border rocket barrages from Pakistan, which has a strong interest in maintaining influence in Afghanistan.
Analysts say it would have been hard for Afghanistan to respond to the attacks without causing a diplomatic rift with Pakistan, which denies involvement and blames militants for the strikes. Still, the violence symbolizes Afghanistan’s helplessness in a tug-of-war over its fate among powerful outside forces.
For the Obama administration, which has made corruption a central issue in the past, the possible replacement of the defense and interior ministers presents a challenge. With the administration now focused on arranging an orderly transition to Afghans, it has appeared to put a higher value on preserving officials who are seen as effective, even if suspect.
Administration officials in Washington declined to comment publicly on Saturday and privately played down the importance of the move, taking comfort in the notion that Mr. Karzai effectively has the final say and has kept on appointees in the past for months despite political opposition.
But this time might be different. Some of his allies in Parliament voted for the dismissals, suggesting possible support from his government, and his press office issued a statement on Saturday saying, “the disqualification of ministers is the Parliament’s right.”
Mr. Wardak and Mr. Mohammadi have been high-profile figures since the government’s formation after the collapse of the Taliban in 2001. Mr. Wardak has served in his post since 2004, and Mr. Mohammadi has worked in security posts, including as chief of staff of the army.
A number of lawmakers denied that the dismissals would hamper the security transition. They said the vote was driven in part by longstanding questions about the ministries’ ability to protect the country and about their infiltration by militants.
In February a gunman entered a secure control room in an inner sanctum of the Interior Ministry and shot two American advisers. Several suicide vests have also been found inside the Defense Ministry, raising concerns that the ministry itself was not secure.
Lawmakers who voted to remove the ministers insisted that on balance a change in leadership would improve security, even though it will likely mean personnel shuffles throughout the organizations’ patronage networks.
“A new minister will bring a lot of changes in the command structure of these ministries, which are currently filled with corrupt division and corps commanders and corrupt police chiefs who are incompetent and have failed to strengthen security,” said Gul Pacha Majidi, a lawmaker from Paktia Province in the country’s southeastern Pashtun belt.
Mr. Mohammadi is a native of Panshir Province, a stronghold of the former Northern Alliance which fought the Taliban. He is known for filling many of the most powerful provincial police chief jobs as well as lower-level district police jobs with his fellow Panshiris, who are overwhelmingly Tajik. While some Afghan officials have complained that many appointees lacked the proper credentials, the practice also infuriated power brokers from other ethnic groups and regions who were concerned with seeing their own people appointed.
Some Westerners in Afghanistan who are monitoring the security transition saw the parliamentary vote as demonstrating a good impulse to improve two powerful ministries, but one with serious pitfalls.
“It was an effort to clean house, and the only unfortunate part of it is that you may get more rats in the castle,” said Candace Rondeaux, who heads the International Crisis Group’s Kabul office. “We don’t know who is going to replace Rahim Wardak and Bismullah Khan Mohammadi, but we know that there are precious few candidates with a clean profile.”
Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and Peter Baker from Washington.
Afghan Parliament Votes to Dismiss 2 Top Ministers
Sharon Behn VOA News August 4, 2012
ISLAMABAD — Afghanistan’s lawmakers on Saturday fired the country’s ministers of defense and interior for being unable to stop cross border attacks from Pakistan.
Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Interior Minister Bismullah Mohammadi were voted out of office after lawmakers criticized them for failing to bring security to the country and protect top officials. They also accused the ministers of corruption.
Abdul Raouf Abrahimi, speaker of the lower house of parliament, said the ministers no longer had the confidence of the parliament.
Abrahimi said the ministers were dismissed from their jobs and the parliament now requests that President Karzai nominate new persons to the posts.
Lawmakers accused the defense and interior ministers of being unable to stop a series of cross border shellings and rocket fire from northwest Pakistan. The murky border line between the two countries is home to various militant groups that target both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Their dismissal comes as Afghanistan is rushing to build up its security forces in preparation for the full withdrawal of international combat forces in 2014.
Former member of the Afghan National Economic Commission and now an independent analyst Daud Sultanzai says the ministers’ ouster will make it more challenging and give even less time for Karzai to prepare the country for that transition.
"I think the removal of two key ministers from the security sector definitely will have some effect on the security preparedness of the country, at least in terms of planning and leadership," he said.
A lot depends on what President Karzai decides to do. In similar dismissals in the past, he has kept government leaders on a temporary capacity.
According to a statement released by his office, Karzai is to make a decision after a national security meeting on Sunday.
Analyst Sultanzai says it would take months for any new minister to effectively take over such sensitive portfolios.
"For unfamiliar individuals taking over these two huge responsibilities it will be a very difficult task, in my opinion," he said.
Corruption and insecurity have constantly plagued Mr. Karzai’s government. The international community has put good governance at the top of the list for Afghanistan to continue to receive aid after NATO combat forces leave.
Despite the steady increase of Afghan army recruitment, and the presence of international troops, the number of militant attacks has increased this year. And the situation along the border with Pakistan has deteriorated.
Afghanistan’s government has said Pakistan’s military is behind a series of attacks in the area, which it says has displaced and killed a number of civilians. Pakistan has said it is only attacking anti-Pakistan fighters.
Defense Minister Wardak said prior to Saturday’s vote that he had sent additional troops to the country’s eastern border area, as well as long-range artillery and ammunition.
Pakistan and Afghanistan accuse each other of not doing enough to eliminate militant bases within their borders.
Some 1,800 insurgents killed in Afghanistan since Jan.
By Farid Behbud, Chen Xin
KABUL, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Afghan army, police and the NATO-led coalition forces have been stepping up pressure on the Taliban and other insurgent groups across the insurgency-hit country.
Records kept by Xinhua, based on the figures released by the country's Interior Ministry, reveals that a total of 1,840 insurgents have been killed and 2,030 others detained by the joint forces from Jan. 1 to Aug. 4.
In the latest raids on insurgents, the Afghan forces, backed by the NATO-led coalition or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops, have eliminated nine Taliban insurgents within a 24- hours period ending Saturday morning, the Afghan Interior Ministry said.
"Afghan National Police (ANP), army and the NATO-led coalition forces carried out five clean-up operations in Kabul, Balkh, Paktika and Pakita provinces, killing nine armed Taliban insurgents throughout the past 24 hours," the ministry said in a statement providing daily operational updates.
One armed Taliban insurgent was injured and three others detained by the joint forces, the statement added.
In another development, about 12 insurgents were killed and 23 others detained in operations carried out by the joint forces in eastern Afghan provinces from Thursday evening to Friday evening, the ISAF's Regional Command-East (RC-East) said in a statement issued Saturday.
The joint forces also found weapons and ammunition besides defusing 15 roadside bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IED).
"Afghan National Security Forces and coalition forces detained 23 insurgents during engagements, 20 in Terezayi district, two in Musa Khel district and one in Khost district in the eastern Khost province," it said.
"A coalition air strike killed eight insurgents in Marawarah district in Kunar province after Afghan National Security Forces and coalition forces were engaged in a firefight,"the statement said.
Meanwhile, four other insurgents were killed in the eastern Logar province, according to the statement.
Operations in RC-East are still ongoing, it said.
The Taliban insurgent group, which announced the launching of an annual spring offensive from May 3 against Afghan and NATO forces, has yet to make comments.
However, the Taliban insurgents, who have been waging a fierce insurgency since their regime was toppled in a U.S.-led incursion in late 2001, have responded by massive suicide attacks and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) blasts and roadside bombings in the war-ravaged country.
The ALP or Afghan police shot dead three suicide bombers in southern Helmand province Friday afternoon.
"Three suicide bombers wearing woman's clothes and armed with suicide vests and AK-47 guns approached to Dahana police checkposts in Naw Zad district of Helmand province, attempting to launch a terror attack Friday afternoon but police identified the attackers and killed them all," the Interior Ministry said in a statement Saturday.
In another development, the joint forces arrested a Taliban financier in Andar district of eastern Ghazni province Thursday, the ISAF forces confirmed in a separate statement Saturday.
"The detained Taliban financier oversaw the transfer of tens of thousands of Pakistani rupees to fund insurgent activities. He was also directly involved in planning and directing insurgent attacks against Afghan and coalition forces in the province,"
The security force also detained multiple suspected insurgents during the operation, it added.
During a separate operation in Watahpur district in Kunar province, an Afghan and coalition security force engaged a group of heavily armed insurgents with a precision airstrike.
"A post-strike assessment confirmed multiple insurgents had been killed and several of the heavy weapons had been destroyed. The assessment also confirmed the airstrike had not injured any civilians or damaged any civilian property," it added.
However, military operations, insurgent attacks, IED blast have also caused casualties on the side of the security forces.
A total of 272 NATO soldiers have lost their lives since the beginning of this year.
As many as 470 Afghan national police and 165 local police have been killed and 1,246 policemen injured over the past four months, the Interior Ministry Spokesman Seddiq Seddiqi told reporters on July 28. However, there is no official figure about the casualties of the Afghan army.
U.S. Begins Packing Its Afghan War Gear for the Movers
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY August 3, 2012
CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan - It has taken the United States years to amass the mountains of gear piled up at huge bases like Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan. It is the job of logistics experts like First Lt. Rachel Opperman, 23, to bring it all back home.
As the war here draws to a close and the American military begins to reduce its forces, it also has to send back most of its equipment, an immense logistics effort already under way and spanning half the globe.
Lieutenant Opperman, a Marine from Pittsburgh who is known here as the Queen of the Sort Lot, runs one of the big receiving yards, a dusty, 12-acre lot that is taking in superfluous equipment as bases shrink, close or are transferred to the Afghan forces all over the southwest of the country.
One recent morning here, Marines ranged slowly in the 100-degree heat under her direction, packing piles of supplies into 5-foot-by-5-foot boxes. Forklifts shifted the boxes onto pallets electronically tagged so their journeys could be tracked to Marine bases or depots in the United States and Japan, bringing order to the chaos of a staggeringly complex 24-hour reverse supply chain operation.
There were stenciled racks for axles, fax paper, filters, hoses, sheets of ballistic glass and fenders off mine-protected vehicles.
A wooden sign at the gate kept score: “Recovered to date: $160,937,622. Pallets built: 805. Containers built: 613.”
“We will take almost anything,” Lieutenant Opperman said. “We take it, and we figure out where it has to go.”
The international military mission here still has almost two and a half years before the 2014 withdrawal deadline, and commanders hesitate to discuss openly the details of what is known as the “retrograde” of equipment back to the United States.
The issue is freighted with sensitivities about the United States’ commitment to Afghan security. American commanders do not want to give the Taliban any sense they are already giving up on the fight.
Officials admit that imagery is also a factor. Even as they make decisions about what to pack up, what to leave behind for Afghan forces, or what to abandon or destroy, they want to avoid any echo of the Soviets’ headlong rush out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s, which left the countryside strewed with rusting tanks and guns.
In any case, though, troops are already departing, and military planners are carefully calculating how to extricate the equipment smoothly. In all, officials estimate, they will have to wrangle 100,000 shipping containers of material and 45,000 to 50,000 vehicles like tanks and Humvees from all across Afghanistan.
That is all complicated by the greater expense, and security risk, of shipping things out of Afghanistan, given that fighting is still expected even as the withdrawal takes place.
Col. Jeff Hooks, the senior Marine logistics officer in southwest Afghanistan, said budgetary concerns demanded that the Marines take as much functional equipment back with them as possible. “We have a very, very detailed plan,” he said, slapping a three-inch-thick white binder on his desk called the “Reset Playbook.”
He noted that the Marines’ Afghan withdrawal would be more complicated than their Iraq pullout, even though they had collected less equipment in Afghanistan. The extra difficulty comes largely because of Afghanistan’s special geography: In Iraq, supply routes ran south to Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, but Afghanistan is a landlocked country, and the nearest port — Karachi, in Pakistan — is 600 miles away.
After Pakistan closed its border in November to protest a coalition airstrike that killed 24 of its soldiers, the Marines have mostly flown excess equipment out at a rate of 18 to 24 flights a day. These went directly to the United States or to ports in Kuwait, Oman or elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, from which they continued by ship.
Since Pakistan reopened its borders last month, roads south to Karachi are likely to take the greatest weight of future outbound traffic. Once a backlog of supplies on the route clears north into Afghanistan, about 100 trucks carrying excess equipment are expected to leave Camp Leatherneck daily for Pakistan.
Land routes north through Central Asia and Russia, called the northern distribution network, are likely to be another important exit route for American forces stationed farther north in Afghanistan and for European coalition partners. But the winding road routes, the complicated rail gauges and the greater potential for attack and logjam make them less attractive than the Pakistani route.
In the receiving yards at Leatherneck, other issues involved in the withdrawal were evident. Not far from Lieutenant Opperman’s lot, at the Marine Air Ground Task Force Marshaling Yard, Marines assiduously disassembled a Humvee, cleaning individual parts with rags, air and water so that the vehicle could clear the border agricultural inspection for re-entry into the United States.
Nearby, inside a large tent, green and red folders on tables documented the 30 or so radios stacked across the floor, while outside, mortar tubes and shells were carefully packed into containers.
The Afghan government’s Base Closure Commission takes recommendations from NATO and the Afghan Army to determine which bases to shutter and which the Afghans can run for themselves.
According to a timetable set by President Obama, the United States is to withdraw about 23,000 troops from Afghanistan by October, leaving about 68,000 American troops. There are about 13,000 Marines, down from about 20,000, and the United States has said publicly that this number should fall to around 7,000 by October. Coalition levels in the southwest will be bolstered by the arrival of a second battalion from the Georgian Army.
In the southwest, the number of coalition bases is falling to about 70 from 214 in March.
Out at Delaram II, one of the district bases the United States is shrinking and turning over to the Afghans, troops were pulling up the airfield.
The Afghans said they did not want the base’s airstrip, so First Lt. Carolynn Aranha, a 32-year-old Marine from Oregon, took out about 50 Marines to rip up the 5,412-foot-long area of hard matting, working at night under floodlights to avoid the pounding heat of the day.
Piles of ripped-up mats dotted the camp, and around its edges, bulldozers built a smaller perimeter inside the old four-mile-long fence.
“This all has to go,” Lieutenant Aranha said, pointing to the spot where a big air control tower used to stand. “This will go back to Leatherneck, and back to the U.S.”
A group of Army engineers from Florida was busy dismantling one of the main base headquarters buildings. Corrugated iron roofing was collected in one pile; another comprised mattresses destined to be burned. On the base, there was now only one fire truck left, and most of the camp’s four-wheel-drive trucks had been handed in, so getting around the base was hard. Supplies were such that the Marines even recently had to borrow a bulldozer from the Afghans.
Some of the roughly 2,000 Afghan troops stationed on the base sat in the shade under a tarp, patiently watching the deconstruction going on around them. There have been other observers, as well. In June, apparently testing to see if anyone was still at home, four insurgents crawled up to the outer perimeter to cut the wire. They were shot.
The security situation in the area is still not stable. Farther out from the base, insurgent cells are active, especially along the main east-west highway nearby, where they tend to target commercial convoys, officials said.
The drawdown affects not only the troops, but also the army of civilians who come from all over to find livelihoods at Western bases. Among them is Caleb Amasa, 38, a Kenyan from Nairobi who was emptying the trash near a row of tents at Leatherneck. “If it closes, we will miss it,” Mr. Amasa said. “We want work.”
Though many local Afghan civilians have the same concern, not all will be sad to see the Americans go.
A few miles away in the bazaar in Delaram, a town the Marines once patrolled, Islam Gul, 28, a shopkeeper, said he was glad the Americans were leaving. About a week earlier, a close relative, an engineer, was wounded in the neck by a mine explosion aimed at a joint American-Afghan patrol.
“They are foreigners and infidels,” Mr. Gul said by telephone. “It is good if they hand over the base to Afghan forces. They were not bothering us much, but we are happy to hear they are leaving the area.”
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Two New Zealand soldiers killed in Afghanistan, six wounded
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Two New Zealand soldiers were killed and six others were injured in Afghanistan's Bamyan province on Saturday when they came under fire assisting local security forces that were fighting suspected insurgents, the New Zealand Defence Force said.
"The NZDF was responding to local security forces coming under attack and it developed into a serious incident," Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman said in a statement on Sunday.
The New Zealand troops arrived to assist the local security forces who encountered suspected insurgents near a village south of Do Abe, in the North East of Bamyan Province, the NZDF said.
It added that a further six personnel were wounded during the incident, and they were evacuated to a military hospital.
Two local security personnel were also killed, it said.
New Zealand, which has a 140-strong reconstruction team operating in the province, will formally end its mission at the end of the year and be brought home in 2013. The country has had troops in Afghanistan since 2001.
Five New Zealand soldiers have been killed earlier while serving in Afghanistan.
(Reporting by Mantik Kusjanto; Editing by Philip Barbara)
In Afghanistan, soccer or civil war?
Washington Post By David Ignatius Saturday, August 4, 2012
Gaze into the murky crystal ball at Afghanistan’s future after the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops: The country is fragmented, intense rivalries pitting regions against each other. Kabul remains the center, prized by all, and rivals come there to battle for national dominance.
This isn’t a military assessment, actually, but a business plan formulated by my favorite Kabul tycoon, Saad Mohseni, the head of a media company called Moby Group. He’s launching a new Afghan Premier League in soccer that will be sponsored by Roshan Telecom Development Co., a leading Afghan communications company, and whose games will be broadcast by Mohseni’s network of television and radio stations.
This plan for Afghanistan’s first professional soccer league illustrates how the country has changed over the past decade, no matter what judgment you make about the U.S.-led counterinsurgency effort. Afghanistan is now connected by cellphones and television: 60 percent of the population watches TV regularly, and there are 17 million mobile phones, compared with zero in both categories in 2001.
The biggest force for change in today’s Afghanistan may be urbanization, not politics. In the past several decades of war, Kabul has become a city of about 5 million; Herat, Kandahar and Jalalabad have all tripled in size.
Afghanistan won’t resemble Switzerland anytime soon, but it’s not the same primitive, rural battleground as when the Taliban ruled. According to U.S. polling, the No. 1 issue today is the high cost of weddings.
The soccer league is an attempt to cut “across all ages, socio-economic groups, regions and tribes,” a pitch letter says. The league will have eight teams, representing the regions that have often been at war. Some teams are named after local birds of prey — the Eagles of the Hindu Kush will represent central Afghanistan, the Goshawks, the rugged southeast, the Falcons the Kabul area.
Player selection began last month and is being broadcast in a reality-TV competition called “Green Field.” Next comes a round-robin tournament in Kabul in September and October. And then, if it works, they’ll do it again in 2013 (when U.S. troops will be handing over the lead combat role); and again in 2014 (when most U.S. troops are supposed to depart). At least that’s the plan.
How realistic is the idea of a post-American Afghanistan that is ragged at the edges, but where Kabul remains a hub for communications and commerce, not to mention soccer tournaments? Nobody knows, but I heard descriptions of a similar “Afghan good enough” outcome from Obama administration officials in recent conversations.
Administration officials hope the Afghan National Army will be strong enough by 2014 to hold Kabul and the ring road that connects the country’s major cities. Local power brokers (a.k.a. warlords) may hold sway in some regions, but administration officials doubt the Taliban will be able to control major urban centers. Afghanistan won’t be peaceful or secure like a developed country, but it won’t fall apart either in this guardedly hopeful view.
A bleaker prognosis was offered by Dexter Filkins in a widely discussed New Yorker article last month titled “After America: Will civil war hit Afghanistan when the U.S. leaves?” While respectful of what the U.S. military has accomplished, Filkins was skeptical that it can endure. In his words, Afghans and Americans are “under the stress of battle — and without a substantial presence of American combat troops after 2014 — the Afghan army could once again fracture along ethnic lines.”
So which will it be — televised soccer rivalry or armed civil war? Obviously there’s no way to predict, but two factors would reduce the likelihood of civil war. One is a commitment for a stay-behind force of, say, 15,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops to prevent a return by al-Qaeda and continue training the Afghan army and police. Second is a political strategy that moves toward national reconciliation and supports elections in 2014 for a new political leadership to replace the corrupt President Hamid Karzai. Unfortunately, this needed political transition is getting much less attention from Washington than the military pullout.
Afghanistan is viewed as a lost cause by most Americans, I suspect. The country may indeed be heading toward the worst-case scenario described in Filkins’s excellent reporting. But there are some relatively low-cost ways the United States can reduce the risk of an Afghan explosion — and keep the country stable enough that media entrepreneurs can make a buck from the nation’s favorite sport — which isn’t war, as the headlines might make us think, but soccer.
davidignatius@washpost.com
Afghan Officials Cite Revenge Killings in Latest Outbreak of Ethnic Hatred
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN and SANGAR RAHIMI August 3, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - At least nine Afghans and perhaps many more were forced out of their homes in rural Afghanistan and executed in what Afghan officials called an act of revenge by one ethnic group against another, underscoring the long shadow cast by the country’s ethnic hatreds.
The killing, which took place Wednesday in eastern Oruzgan Province, appears to have involved a Hazara commander who is said to have avenged the deaths of two fellow Hazaras by leading an armed group to nearby Pashtun villages and killing at least nine people.
“On Tuesday, two Hazara men were killed by the Taliban,” said Matiullah Khan, the provincial police chief. “The next day, meaning Wednesday, this brutal man raided Pashtuns’ villages and killed some 9 to 11 villagers,” he said, referring to the commander alleged to have carried out the killings. Some reports put the death toll as high as 30.
Most of the Taliban are ethnic Pashtuns and Sunni Muslims; the Hazaras are mostly members of the Shiite branch of Islam, and officials feared the killings could fuel a cycle of revenge. Local officials as well as the Interior Ministry opened investigations, and the governor was traveling to the area on Friday. The Afghan government formally took security responsibility for Oruzgan Province two weeks ago.
Two Afghan officials, including a member of Parliament, asserted that the man who is accused of leading the executions has had a relationship with American Special Operations forces — an assertion that an American spokesman denied. The other Afghan official, the provincial police chief, said the authorities in the area had tried to have the man arrested on past accusations of killing civilians, but that “foreigners” provided refuge for him.
The spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Lt. Col. Todd Harrell, said there were no Special Operations forces in the area and emphasized that it remained unclear if those who were killed were civilians or Taliban.
Pashtuns from the villages where the execution occurred flocked to the center of the remote district of Khas Oruzgan on Friday, shouting for justice, according to local officials who had spoken to the police there.
“Around 200 people, all Pashtuns including some Taliban commanders who were on run, by the name of Shah Wali and Khodaidad, have gathered at the district center as a sign of protest,” said Abdul Ali, a member of the Oruzgan provincial council from Khas Oruzgan District, where the killings and the protests took place.
He said the protesters were demanding punishment for the commander, whose name he gave as Shujayee, and were “using bad language against Hazara people, and I am afraid that this will lead to a campaign of revenge against Hazaras.”
Khas Oruzgan is remote even by Afghan standards and is a mixed Pashtun and Hazara area where the Taliban have been active for the last several years and have targeted Hazaras in the past. Tensions between the two groups go back decades and the Hazaras were the victims of widespread persecution in Bamian Province and elsewhere when the Taliban ran the country.
There seemed to be widespread confusion among Afghan officials about Commander Shujayee’s affiliations, with some suggesting he worked for the Afghan Local Police, who receive a three-week training course from American Special Operations forces and are then deployed to their own villages; they fall under the Interior Ministry’s control. Others suggest that he had ties directly to Special Operations units and worked with them rather than with the Afghans. The lack of clarity was a reminder of the number of unofficial groups that operate across Afghanistan and are sometimes confused with the Afghan Local Police.
Making matters more confusing for ordinary Afghans, some of the militias have been hired over the 11-year war by more shadowy arms of the American government, including the C.I.A., to help track down insurgents and have retained an image of invulnerability because of those allegiances. Those too are sometimes described as linked to Special Operations forces although they may not be. Those who suggested Commander Shujayee had ties to Special Operations forces blamed them for allowing what they called a dangerous man to operate freely.
General Khan, the police chief, said Commander Shujayee was part of a group that had previously “killed 17 innocent civilians and torched half of a big village.”
“We referred him to judicial authorities, but foreigners provided refuge to Commander Shujayee, therefore we couldn’t find him,” General Khan said. “Then he disappeared.”
Hajji Obaidullah Barakzai, a member of Parliament from Oruzgan, who said that Commander Shujayee had dumped the dead bodies from Wednesday’s executions in a ditch, contended that the commander had 100 armed men and was “closely working with United States Special Operations units.”
Gen. Ali Shah Ahmadzai, who heads the Afghan Local Police Command for the Interior Ministry in Kabul, categorically denied that the man was or had been in the Afghan Local Police.
“He is not part of the A.L.P. or any other formal security structure in Oruzgan,” General Ahmadzai said. “He wanted to become A.L.P., but since he didn’t meet any of the requirements for A.L.P., we rejected him.”
More than 14,000 Afghan Local Police members operate across Afghanistan, and Afghan civilians in some areas have accused them of abuses including stealing, harassment and even murder, although the groups are also viewed as an effective ballast against the Taliban.
Human rights advocates said the killings were worrisome. “This needs to be dealt with urgently by the government” and the NATO forces, said James Rodehaver, the acting human rights director for the United Nations office in Afghanistan.
Late Friday, the Taliban released a statement threatening to avenge the deaths of the “innocent and defenseless villagers” and saying that Commander Shujayee had a “green light from foreign forces” for the killings.
Habib Zahori and an employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
Pakistan resumes NATO supply into Afghanistan
AFP via Yahoo! News - Aug 04 09:24am
Pakistan on Saturday resumed NATO supplies, allowing 14 containers to cross into Afghanistan from its northwestern border at Torkham, officials said.
Pakistan had temporarily stopped NATO supplies over security concerns on July 24 after gunmen attacked a convoy of NATO trucks on July 24, killing a driver, in the town of Jamrud on the outskirts of the main northwestern city Peshawar.
"The NATO supplies have been resumed from today and we sent 14 containers" for international troops in Afghanistan," a local administration official told AFP on condition of anonymity because he is unauthorised to speak to media.
A local intelligence official also confirmed resumption of supplies and the departure of 14 NATO containers to Afghanistan.
A senior local customs official, Ubaidullah Khan, however, put the figure of containers, which left for Afghanistan, at seven, adding that they carried food stuff and clothes.
Afghan Minister’s Assets
New York Times Letter August 3, 2012
“Afghan Finance Minister Under Scrutiny” (news article, Aug. 2) is based on the broadcast of my bank statements by an Afghan TV station. I welcome media scrutiny of public officials, even though in this case the reports are inaccurate and misleading, and are part of a larger smear campaign against me.
The bank accounts are mine, but the assets shown were accumulated before I became minister. I disclosed this information with the relevant authorities more than three years ago, when I became finance minister.
My bank statements show deposits and withdrawals over six years amounting to a little over $1 million, incorrectly portrayed as assets. The consistent balance is significantly less.
The fact that I have disclosed my accounts and that all my financial transactions have been routed through the banking system, in which large amounts are reported to financial investigators, shows I have nothing to hide.
I have been a minister only for the last three and a half years, but I have held various professional positions for more than 15 years, including well-compensated senior advisory and consulting positions. My assets are mostly from those jobs.
It is well known that throughout my career in the government I have been a strong proponent of reform and transparency in both word and deed. My firm stands on transparency and accountability have made me unpopular in some quarters, and this politically motivated misinformation campaign is one result.
HAZRAT OMAR ZAKHILWAL Minister of Finance Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 2, 2012
Militant group cashes in on corruption and rich donors
CNN By Jamie Crawford August 3rd, 2012
The Haqqani network, a notorious militant group responsible for the deaths of U.S. service members in Afghanistan, has evolved from a politically inspired insurgent group into a "sophisticated and diversified mafia-type network" that finances itself through kidnapping, extortion, and the lucrative rare-earth metal trade, a new report says.
In a wide-ranging report about the Pakistan-based group, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, New York, likened the "hybrid organization that is at once political and criminal in nature" to a complex and sophisticated organized criminal enterprise seeking to increase its stature in the community while resorting to criminal means to remain solvent.
From its base in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, the Afghan-led group has formed alliances with al Qaeda, the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, and the Pakistani intelligence services to further its aims, the report says. Community members in Pakistan interviewed for the report described the group as "virtually untouchable."
Founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the group initially worked with the United States and its allies to expel the Soviets. Since suffering a stroke in 2005, Jalaluddin has essentially retired and his son, Sirajuddin, has taken command.
The group has been blamed for multiple attacks on critical infrastructure in Kabul, including a 20-hour assault last September on the U.S. Embassy compound.
While leading members of the group have been designated as terrorists and subjected to sanctions by the U.S. government, the Obama administration has not added the group as a whole to the list of terrorist groups. Congress recently passed legislation calling on the administration to do so.
In addition to a monthly stipend for operational costs from the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network receives a significant portion of its funding from deep-pocketed donors from locations in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the report says. The group's members are "veterans in the fund-raising business," it says.
From its role in extortion, robbery, narcotics trafficking and kidnap for ransom, the group is "driven more by financial interests than by principles of jihad," the report says. The group's extortion rackets include taking fees for "security" from non-governmental organizations, construction firms and others working on development projects, some of which are funded by NATO-led coalition efforts.
The Haqqanis also collect taxes from other organizations and entities that smuggle narcotics through territory it controls.
But the Haqqanis' financial holdings are not gained through illicit means alone. The report highlights a portfolio of licit interests, including hospitals, religious schools and real estate, trucking and construction companies, along with import-export operations.
And the group's involvement in the trade of chromite is able to flourish, the report says, due to a lack of regulation and the pervasive corruption in the Afghan and Pakistani governments.
Chromite, a rare-earth oxide used in the production of stainless steel, has a large market in China, India and other developing economies with booming construction sectors. A recent joint U.S.-Afghan geological survey estimated Afghanistan to have nearly $1 trillion worth of untapped wealth in the mineral.
In addition to private donors, the network continues to receive financial and logistical support from the Pakistani military, and continues to harbor close operational ties with the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Pakistan's main intelligence agency, the report says. Cracks in that support are evident, however, by the routine arrest of Haqqani operatives and the limiting of the group's capacity to operate, it says.
The former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told a Senate committee last September that the Haqqani network had become a "veritable arm" of the ISI.
Many suspect Pakistani support for the group exists as a hedge against the uncertainty that could follow in Afghanistan once the U.S. and NATO military missions end in 2014.
Richard Olson, President Obama's nominee to be the next ambassador to Pakistan, told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his confirmation hearing earlier this week that cracking down on the group would be his "most urgent" priority.
Afghan, Brunei, Saudi Sportswomen Send Strong Signals At Olympics
August 4, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghanistan's only female athlete at the London Olympics has bowed out after coming last in her qualifying heat for the 100-meter sprint on August 3.
Despite failing to qualify, Tahmina Kohistani ran a personal best time of 14.42 seconds in her heat on August 3.
The 23-year-old was defiant in defeat, insisting her mere participation at the games, as Afghanistan's third ever Olympic track athlete, would inspire other women in her conservative country to take up sport.
"My result is not as satisfactory as it could be," she said. "I was training hard and had a better result during my training. But for me participating [in the Olympic Games] is even more valuable than winning a gold medal.”
The first ever woman to represent Brunei at the Olympics, Maziah Mahusin, ran in the 400-meters, setting a national record of 59.28.
After the race, the 19-year-old was absolutely ecstatic: "It is such an honor. I want to inspire other women. Maybe I will care about medals the next time. I will keep on training."
Also on August 3, Wodjan Shaherkhani became the first Saudi woman to compete at the Olympic Games when she took part in the first round of the 78 kilogram judo competition.
The 16-year-old's bout ended in defeat to Puerto Rican Melissa Mojica after 80 seconds.
"Hopefully this is the beginning of a new era," Shahrkhani said afterwards. "Unfortunately, we did not win a medal, but in the future we will and I will be a star for women's participation."
In fencing, South Korea was the surprise winner of the men's team saber gold medal, defeating Romania in the final. The Koreans beat Romania’s Tiberiu Dolniceanu, Rares Dumitrescu, Florin Zalomir, and Alexandru Siriteanu 45-26. Italy defeated pre-competition favorite Russia 45-40 in the bronze medal match.
Michael Phelps of the United States won the men's 100-meter butterfly, claiming the 17th gold medal and 21st medal of his Olympic career. South Arican Chad Le Clos and Russian Evgeny Korotyshkin shared silver. Serbian Milorad Cavic finished equal fourth with Germany's Steffen Deibler.
France's Teddy Riner won the men's over 100 kilogram Olympic judo gold medal. Having already won a record five world championship titles, Riner, 23, defeated Russia's Alexander Mikhaylin in the Olympic final. Germany's Andreas Toelzer and Brazil's Rafael Silva were awarded bronze medals.
Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova won an all-Russian semi-final against Maria Kirilenko. Russia's opening ceremony flag bearer, Sharapova will face American Serena Williams in the gold-medal match on August 5. Williams beat world number one Victoria Azarenka of Belarus in just 63 minutes on August 3. Azarenka and Kililenko will play off for a bronze medal.
Elsewhere, Poland's Adrian Zielinski won Olympic gold in the men's weightlifting 85 kilogram category on August 3 with a total lift of 385 kilograms. Russia's Apti Aukhadov lifted the same weight but took silver because she has a higher body weight than Zielinski. Iran's Kianoush Rostami, with a total of 380 kg, claimed the bronze.
Meanwhile, Svetlana Podobedova of Kazakhstan defeated Russia's Natalya Zabolotnaya in the women's 75 kilogram category. Both lifted a combined total of 291 kilograms but Podobedava secured her country's third gold medal of London 2012 as she weighed 220 grams less than her opponent. Iryna Kulesha secured bronze for Belarus with 269 kilograms.
Away from the action, Russian track cyclist Victoria Baranova has been expelled from the London Games after testing positive for the male hormone testosterone on July 24 in Belarus. The 22-year-old had been due to race in the women's keirin Friday.
And a Moldovan athlete due to compete in the women's hammer throw event has been dropped from the squad after failing a drugs test. Marina Marghieva was disqualified along with discus thrower Natalia Artyk, who was not on the official list of 21 Moldovan athletes competing in London.
Moldovan Olympics Committee chief Nikolai Zhuravsky said an investigation had been launched.
The United States was at the top of the overall medal table after competition on August 3 with 43 medals. China was in second place with 42 medals, followed by Russia with 23 medals, although only three of those were gold.
With reporting by AFP, Reuters, dpa, Radio Free Afghanistan @HMARichardStagg
Indonesia arrests 24 more asylum seekers heading to Australia
JAKARTA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Twenty-four more illegal immigrants planning to go to Australia to seek asylum have been arrested in Bangka-Belitung province of Indonesia, a media reported here on Saturday.
The immigrant from Pakistan and Afghanistan were arrested days ago and did not have immigration documents.
"They were arrested by the Navy in two different places, at Tanjung Limbung Muntok Port in West Bangka district and at Depati Amir Airport in Central Bangka district, while they were heading to Jakarta," said Filianto Akbar, head of supervision at the Pangkal Pinang Immigration Office on Bangka Island, as quoted by the Jakarta globe as saying.
The Navy also arrested four drivers and an assistant who were transporting the asylum seekers. The drivers said they had helped drive asylum seekers seven times.
Habibullah, one of the asylum seekers, said he left Afghanistan because of the conflict there.
Indonesia is a favorite transit point for immigrants from the Middle East and other countries heading to Australia for seeking asylum.
Indonesia and Australia have cooperated with Australia in fighting human trafficking heading to Australia.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By ALISSA J. RUBIN The New York Times August 4, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan Parliament voted Saturday to dismiss the two most powerful members of President Hamid Karzai’s security team, a surprise move that could create new turmoil as the United States-led coalition prepares to leave the country.
Lawmakers explained the move — which would cast out the defense minister and the interior minister in the middle of a war — as part of an effort to end the crippling corruption and cronyism endemic in the government. They also criticized the two ministers for failing to protect the country against recent cross-border rocket attacks from Pakistan.
Mr. Karzai could try to delay their departure, but early indications were that he would accede to Parliament’s wishes.
A shift in leadership is sure to cause upheaval in both ministries at a critical time, as Afghan soldiers and the police are taking over responsibility for security in much of the country. Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Interior Minister Bismullah Khan Mohammadi shoulder most of the responsibility for building an army and police force strong enough to fight the Taliban without the coalition forces, who are set to withdraw by the end of 2014.
Ousting the ministers could also complicate relations with the United States. American officials value their longstanding collaboration in particular with Mr. Wardak, who is seen as a stable ally compared with the mercurial Mr. Karzai. In addition, both ministers have long experience in fighting the insurgency.
“Even if this is only a political gesture and current ministers stay, this is a warning about the weakness of the Karzai government, a reflection of the deep divisions in the Afghan legislature and an indication of the kind of far deeper ethnic and sectarian splits that may come as the transition proceeds,” said Anthony Cordesman, an expert on the war at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Transition is already a high-risk effort, and this kind of additional risk is scarcely likely to make things better.”
The vote could be a harbinger of a broader shake-up in the government. At least two other important ministers, including Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal, are already under scrutiny. With the disclosure last week of bank statements showing transfers from Afghan businesses into his accounts, Mr. Zakhilwal is facing questions about corruption from a government antigraft agency. (He says the money was for earlier consultancy work.)
The American Embassy and the NATO command here appeared to be caught by surprise by the parliamentary vote and did not comment, leaving unclear what effect it might have on an increasingly complex security transition. American and international forces have been turning over province after province to Afghan control, razing their bases or giving them to the Afghans in a delicately choreographed sequence meant to ensure the Afghans have enough help in the near term as they take up the fight against a diminished but still persistent Taliban presence.
The vote came as many Afghan leaders and civilians are increasingly frustrated with corruption that undermines attempts to rebuild after years of war and amid anger from Parliament about cronyism in both ministries and accusations of ethnic bias in the Interior Ministry. Mr. Wardak has been accused of directing lucrative NATO trucking contracts to his son, a charge he has denied, while Mr. Mohammadi is seen as favoring fellow Tajiks from northern Afghanistan.
The parliamentary action also follows weeks of anger over the recent cross-border rocket barrages from Pakistan, which has a strong interest in maintaining influence in Afghanistan.
Analysts say it would have been hard for Afghanistan to respond to the attacks without causing a diplomatic rift with Pakistan, which denies involvement and blames militants for the strikes. Still, the violence symbolizes Afghanistan’s helplessness in a tug-of-war over its fate among powerful outside forces.
For the Obama administration, which has made corruption a central issue in the past, the possible replacement of the defense and interior ministers presents a challenge. With the administration now focused on arranging an orderly transition to Afghans, it has appeared to put a higher value on preserving officials who are seen as effective, even if suspect.
Administration officials in Washington declined to comment publicly on Saturday and privately played down the importance of the move, taking comfort in the notion that Mr. Karzai effectively has the final say and has kept on appointees in the past for months despite political opposition.
But this time might be different. Some of his allies in Parliament voted for the dismissals, suggesting possible support from his government, and his press office issued a statement on Saturday saying, “the disqualification of ministers is the Parliament’s right.”
Mr. Wardak and Mr. Mohammadi have been high-profile figures since the government’s formation after the collapse of the Taliban in 2001. Mr. Wardak has served in his post since 2004, and Mr. Mohammadi has worked in security posts, including as chief of staff of the army.
A number of lawmakers denied that the dismissals would hamper the security transition. They said the vote was driven in part by longstanding questions about the ministries’ ability to protect the country and about their infiltration by militants.
In February a gunman entered a secure control room in an inner sanctum of the Interior Ministry and shot two American advisers. Several suicide vests have also been found inside the Defense Ministry, raising concerns that the ministry itself was not secure.
Lawmakers who voted to remove the ministers insisted that on balance a change in leadership would improve security, even though it will likely mean personnel shuffles throughout the organizations’ patronage networks.
“A new minister will bring a lot of changes in the command structure of these ministries, which are currently filled with corrupt division and corps commanders and corrupt police chiefs who are incompetent and have failed to strengthen security,” said Gul Pacha Majidi, a lawmaker from Paktia Province in the country’s southeastern Pashtun belt.
Mr. Mohammadi is a native of Panshir Province, a stronghold of the former Northern Alliance which fought the Taliban. He is known for filling many of the most powerful provincial police chief jobs as well as lower-level district police jobs with his fellow Panshiris, who are overwhelmingly Tajik. While some Afghan officials have complained that many appointees lacked the proper credentials, the practice also infuriated power brokers from other ethnic groups and regions who were concerned with seeing their own people appointed.
Some Westerners in Afghanistan who are monitoring the security transition saw the parliamentary vote as demonstrating a good impulse to improve two powerful ministries, but one with serious pitfalls.
“It was an effort to clean house, and the only unfortunate part of it is that you may get more rats in the castle,” said Candace Rondeaux, who heads the International Crisis Group’s Kabul office. “We don’t know who is going to replace Rahim Wardak and Bismullah Khan Mohammadi, but we know that there are precious few candidates with a clean profile.”
Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and Peter Baker from Washington.
Afghan Parliament Votes to Dismiss 2 Top Ministers
Sharon Behn VOA News August 4, 2012
ISLAMABAD — Afghanistan’s lawmakers on Saturday fired the country’s ministers of defense and interior for being unable to stop cross border attacks from Pakistan.
Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Interior Minister Bismullah Mohammadi were voted out of office after lawmakers criticized them for failing to bring security to the country and protect top officials. They also accused the ministers of corruption.
Abdul Raouf Abrahimi, speaker of the lower house of parliament, said the ministers no longer had the confidence of the parliament.
Abrahimi said the ministers were dismissed from their jobs and the parliament now requests that President Karzai nominate new persons to the posts.
Lawmakers accused the defense and interior ministers of being unable to stop a series of cross border shellings and rocket fire from northwest Pakistan. The murky border line between the two countries is home to various militant groups that target both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Their dismissal comes as Afghanistan is rushing to build up its security forces in preparation for the full withdrawal of international combat forces in 2014.
Former member of the Afghan National Economic Commission and now an independent analyst Daud Sultanzai says the ministers’ ouster will make it more challenging and give even less time for Karzai to prepare the country for that transition.
"I think the removal of two key ministers from the security sector definitely will have some effect on the security preparedness of the country, at least in terms of planning and leadership," he said.
A lot depends on what President Karzai decides to do. In similar dismissals in the past, he has kept government leaders on a temporary capacity.
According to a statement released by his office, Karzai is to make a decision after a national security meeting on Sunday.
Analyst Sultanzai says it would take months for any new minister to effectively take over such sensitive portfolios.
"For unfamiliar individuals taking over these two huge responsibilities it will be a very difficult task, in my opinion," he said.
Corruption and insecurity have constantly plagued Mr. Karzai’s government. The international community has put good governance at the top of the list for Afghanistan to continue to receive aid after NATO combat forces leave.
Despite the steady increase of Afghan army recruitment, and the presence of international troops, the number of militant attacks has increased this year. And the situation along the border with Pakistan has deteriorated.
Afghanistan’s government has said Pakistan’s military is behind a series of attacks in the area, which it says has displaced and killed a number of civilians. Pakistan has said it is only attacking anti-Pakistan fighters.
Defense Minister Wardak said prior to Saturday’s vote that he had sent additional troops to the country’s eastern border area, as well as long-range artillery and ammunition.
Pakistan and Afghanistan accuse each other of not doing enough to eliminate militant bases within their borders.
Some 1,800 insurgents killed in Afghanistan since Jan.
By Farid Behbud, Chen Xin
KABUL, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Afghan army, police and the NATO-led coalition forces have been stepping up pressure on the Taliban and other insurgent groups across the insurgency-hit country.
Records kept by Xinhua, based on the figures released by the country's Interior Ministry, reveals that a total of 1,840 insurgents have been killed and 2,030 others detained by the joint forces from Jan. 1 to Aug. 4.
In the latest raids on insurgents, the Afghan forces, backed by the NATO-led coalition or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops, have eliminated nine Taliban insurgents within a 24- hours period ending Saturday morning, the Afghan Interior Ministry said.
"Afghan National Police (ANP), army and the NATO-led coalition forces carried out five clean-up operations in Kabul, Balkh, Paktika and Pakita provinces, killing nine armed Taliban insurgents throughout the past 24 hours," the ministry said in a statement providing daily operational updates.
One armed Taliban insurgent was injured and three others detained by the joint forces, the statement added.
In another development, about 12 insurgents were killed and 23 others detained in operations carried out by the joint forces in eastern Afghan provinces from Thursday evening to Friday evening, the ISAF's Regional Command-East (RC-East) said in a statement issued Saturday.
The joint forces also found weapons and ammunition besides defusing 15 roadside bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IED).
"Afghan National Security Forces and coalition forces detained 23 insurgents during engagements, 20 in Terezayi district, two in Musa Khel district and one in Khost district in the eastern Khost province," it said.
"A coalition air strike killed eight insurgents in Marawarah district in Kunar province after Afghan National Security Forces and coalition forces were engaged in a firefight,"the statement said.
Meanwhile, four other insurgents were killed in the eastern Logar province, according to the statement.
Operations in RC-East are still ongoing, it said.
The Taliban insurgent group, which announced the launching of an annual spring offensive from May 3 against Afghan and NATO forces, has yet to make comments.
However, the Taliban insurgents, who have been waging a fierce insurgency since their regime was toppled in a U.S.-led incursion in late 2001, have responded by massive suicide attacks and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) blasts and roadside bombings in the war-ravaged country.
The ALP or Afghan police shot dead three suicide bombers in southern Helmand province Friday afternoon.
"Three suicide bombers wearing woman's clothes and armed with suicide vests and AK-47 guns approached to Dahana police checkposts in Naw Zad district of Helmand province, attempting to launch a terror attack Friday afternoon but police identified the attackers and killed them all," the Interior Ministry said in a statement Saturday.
In another development, the joint forces arrested a Taliban financier in Andar district of eastern Ghazni province Thursday, the ISAF forces confirmed in a separate statement Saturday.
"The detained Taliban financier oversaw the transfer of tens of thousands of Pakistani rupees to fund insurgent activities. He was also directly involved in planning and directing insurgent attacks against Afghan and coalition forces in the province,"
The security force also detained multiple suspected insurgents during the operation, it added.
During a separate operation in Watahpur district in Kunar province, an Afghan and coalition security force engaged a group of heavily armed insurgents with a precision airstrike.
"A post-strike assessment confirmed multiple insurgents had been killed and several of the heavy weapons had been destroyed. The assessment also confirmed the airstrike had not injured any civilians or damaged any civilian property," it added.
However, military operations, insurgent attacks, IED blast have also caused casualties on the side of the security forces.
A total of 272 NATO soldiers have lost their lives since the beginning of this year.
As many as 470 Afghan national police and 165 local police have been killed and 1,246 policemen injured over the past four months, the Interior Ministry Spokesman Seddiq Seddiqi told reporters on July 28. However, there is no official figure about the casualties of the Afghan army.
U.S. Begins Packing Its Afghan War Gear for the Movers
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY August 3, 2012
CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan - It has taken the United States years to amass the mountains of gear piled up at huge bases like Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan. It is the job of logistics experts like First Lt. Rachel Opperman, 23, to bring it all back home.
As the war here draws to a close and the American military begins to reduce its forces, it also has to send back most of its equipment, an immense logistics effort already under way and spanning half the globe.
Lieutenant Opperman, a Marine from Pittsburgh who is known here as the Queen of the Sort Lot, runs one of the big receiving yards, a dusty, 12-acre lot that is taking in superfluous equipment as bases shrink, close or are transferred to the Afghan forces all over the southwest of the country.
One recent morning here, Marines ranged slowly in the 100-degree heat under her direction, packing piles of supplies into 5-foot-by-5-foot boxes. Forklifts shifted the boxes onto pallets electronically tagged so their journeys could be tracked to Marine bases or depots in the United States and Japan, bringing order to the chaos of a staggeringly complex 24-hour reverse supply chain operation.
There were stenciled racks for axles, fax paper, filters, hoses, sheets of ballistic glass and fenders off mine-protected vehicles.
A wooden sign at the gate kept score: “Recovered to date: $160,937,622. Pallets built: 805. Containers built: 613.”
“We will take almost anything,” Lieutenant Opperman said. “We take it, and we figure out where it has to go.”
The international military mission here still has almost two and a half years before the 2014 withdrawal deadline, and commanders hesitate to discuss openly the details of what is known as the “retrograde” of equipment back to the United States.
The issue is freighted with sensitivities about the United States’ commitment to Afghan security. American commanders do not want to give the Taliban any sense they are already giving up on the fight.
Officials admit that imagery is also a factor. Even as they make decisions about what to pack up, what to leave behind for Afghan forces, or what to abandon or destroy, they want to avoid any echo of the Soviets’ headlong rush out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s, which left the countryside strewed with rusting tanks and guns.
In any case, though, troops are already departing, and military planners are carefully calculating how to extricate the equipment smoothly. In all, officials estimate, they will have to wrangle 100,000 shipping containers of material and 45,000 to 50,000 vehicles like tanks and Humvees from all across Afghanistan.
That is all complicated by the greater expense, and security risk, of shipping things out of Afghanistan, given that fighting is still expected even as the withdrawal takes place.
Col. Jeff Hooks, the senior Marine logistics officer in southwest Afghanistan, said budgetary concerns demanded that the Marines take as much functional equipment back with them as possible. “We have a very, very detailed plan,” he said, slapping a three-inch-thick white binder on his desk called the “Reset Playbook.”
He noted that the Marines’ Afghan withdrawal would be more complicated than their Iraq pullout, even though they had collected less equipment in Afghanistan. The extra difficulty comes largely because of Afghanistan’s special geography: In Iraq, supply routes ran south to Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, but Afghanistan is a landlocked country, and the nearest port — Karachi, in Pakistan — is 600 miles away.
After Pakistan closed its border in November to protest a coalition airstrike that killed 24 of its soldiers, the Marines have mostly flown excess equipment out at a rate of 18 to 24 flights a day. These went directly to the United States or to ports in Kuwait, Oman or elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, from which they continued by ship.
Since Pakistan reopened its borders last month, roads south to Karachi are likely to take the greatest weight of future outbound traffic. Once a backlog of supplies on the route clears north into Afghanistan, about 100 trucks carrying excess equipment are expected to leave Camp Leatherneck daily for Pakistan.
Land routes north through Central Asia and Russia, called the northern distribution network, are likely to be another important exit route for American forces stationed farther north in Afghanistan and for European coalition partners. But the winding road routes, the complicated rail gauges and the greater potential for attack and logjam make them less attractive than the Pakistani route.
In the receiving yards at Leatherneck, other issues involved in the withdrawal were evident. Not far from Lieutenant Opperman’s lot, at the Marine Air Ground Task Force Marshaling Yard, Marines assiduously disassembled a Humvee, cleaning individual parts with rags, air and water so that the vehicle could clear the border agricultural inspection for re-entry into the United States.
Nearby, inside a large tent, green and red folders on tables documented the 30 or so radios stacked across the floor, while outside, mortar tubes and shells were carefully packed into containers.
The Afghan government’s Base Closure Commission takes recommendations from NATO and the Afghan Army to determine which bases to shutter and which the Afghans can run for themselves.
According to a timetable set by President Obama, the United States is to withdraw about 23,000 troops from Afghanistan by October, leaving about 68,000 American troops. There are about 13,000 Marines, down from about 20,000, and the United States has said publicly that this number should fall to around 7,000 by October. Coalition levels in the southwest will be bolstered by the arrival of a second battalion from the Georgian Army.
In the southwest, the number of coalition bases is falling to about 70 from 214 in March.
Out at Delaram II, one of the district bases the United States is shrinking and turning over to the Afghans, troops were pulling up the airfield.
The Afghans said they did not want the base’s airstrip, so First Lt. Carolynn Aranha, a 32-year-old Marine from Oregon, took out about 50 Marines to rip up the 5,412-foot-long area of hard matting, working at night under floodlights to avoid the pounding heat of the day.
Piles of ripped-up mats dotted the camp, and around its edges, bulldozers built a smaller perimeter inside the old four-mile-long fence.
“This all has to go,” Lieutenant Aranha said, pointing to the spot where a big air control tower used to stand. “This will go back to Leatherneck, and back to the U.S.”
A group of Army engineers from Florida was busy dismantling one of the main base headquarters buildings. Corrugated iron roofing was collected in one pile; another comprised mattresses destined to be burned. On the base, there was now only one fire truck left, and most of the camp’s four-wheel-drive trucks had been handed in, so getting around the base was hard. Supplies were such that the Marines even recently had to borrow a bulldozer from the Afghans.
Some of the roughly 2,000 Afghan troops stationed on the base sat in the shade under a tarp, patiently watching the deconstruction going on around them. There have been other observers, as well. In June, apparently testing to see if anyone was still at home, four insurgents crawled up to the outer perimeter to cut the wire. They were shot.
The security situation in the area is still not stable. Farther out from the base, insurgent cells are active, especially along the main east-west highway nearby, where they tend to target commercial convoys, officials said.
The drawdown affects not only the troops, but also the army of civilians who come from all over to find livelihoods at Western bases. Among them is Caleb Amasa, 38, a Kenyan from Nairobi who was emptying the trash near a row of tents at Leatherneck. “If it closes, we will miss it,” Mr. Amasa said. “We want work.”
Though many local Afghan civilians have the same concern, not all will be sad to see the Americans go.
A few miles away in the bazaar in Delaram, a town the Marines once patrolled, Islam Gul, 28, a shopkeeper, said he was glad the Americans were leaving. About a week earlier, a close relative, an engineer, was wounded in the neck by a mine explosion aimed at a joint American-Afghan patrol.
“They are foreigners and infidels,” Mr. Gul said by telephone. “It is good if they hand over the base to Afghan forces. They were not bothering us much, but we are happy to hear they are leaving the area.”
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Two New Zealand soldiers killed in Afghanistan, six wounded
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Two New Zealand soldiers were killed and six others were injured in Afghanistan's Bamyan province on Saturday when they came under fire assisting local security forces that were fighting suspected insurgents, the New Zealand Defence Force said.
"The NZDF was responding to local security forces coming under attack and it developed into a serious incident," Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman said in a statement on Sunday.
The New Zealand troops arrived to assist the local security forces who encountered suspected insurgents near a village south of Do Abe, in the North East of Bamyan Province, the NZDF said.
It added that a further six personnel were wounded during the incident, and they were evacuated to a military hospital.
Two local security personnel were also killed, it said.
New Zealand, which has a 140-strong reconstruction team operating in the province, will formally end its mission at the end of the year and be brought home in 2013. The country has had troops in Afghanistan since 2001.
Five New Zealand soldiers have been killed earlier while serving in Afghanistan.
(Reporting by Mantik Kusjanto; Editing by Philip Barbara)
In Afghanistan, soccer or civil war?
Washington Post By David Ignatius Saturday, August 4, 2012
Gaze into the murky crystal ball at Afghanistan’s future after the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops: The country is fragmented, intense rivalries pitting regions against each other. Kabul remains the center, prized by all, and rivals come there to battle for national dominance.
This isn’t a military assessment, actually, but a business plan formulated by my favorite Kabul tycoon, Saad Mohseni, the head of a media company called Moby Group. He’s launching a new Afghan Premier League in soccer that will be sponsored by Roshan Telecom Development Co., a leading Afghan communications company, and whose games will be broadcast by Mohseni’s network of television and radio stations.
This plan for Afghanistan’s first professional soccer league illustrates how the country has changed over the past decade, no matter what judgment you make about the U.S.-led counterinsurgency effort. Afghanistan is now connected by cellphones and television: 60 percent of the population watches TV regularly, and there are 17 million mobile phones, compared with zero in both categories in 2001.
The biggest force for change in today’s Afghanistan may be urbanization, not politics. In the past several decades of war, Kabul has become a city of about 5 million; Herat, Kandahar and Jalalabad have all tripled in size.
Afghanistan won’t resemble Switzerland anytime soon, but it’s not the same primitive, rural battleground as when the Taliban ruled. According to U.S. polling, the No. 1 issue today is the high cost of weddings.
The soccer league is an attempt to cut “across all ages, socio-economic groups, regions and tribes,” a pitch letter says. The league will have eight teams, representing the regions that have often been at war. Some teams are named after local birds of prey — the Eagles of the Hindu Kush will represent central Afghanistan, the Goshawks, the rugged southeast, the Falcons the Kabul area.
Player selection began last month and is being broadcast in a reality-TV competition called “Green Field.” Next comes a round-robin tournament in Kabul in September and October. And then, if it works, they’ll do it again in 2013 (when U.S. troops will be handing over the lead combat role); and again in 2014 (when most U.S. troops are supposed to depart). At least that’s the plan.
How realistic is the idea of a post-American Afghanistan that is ragged at the edges, but where Kabul remains a hub for communications and commerce, not to mention soccer tournaments? Nobody knows, but I heard descriptions of a similar “Afghan good enough” outcome from Obama administration officials in recent conversations.
Administration officials hope the Afghan National Army will be strong enough by 2014 to hold Kabul and the ring road that connects the country’s major cities. Local power brokers (a.k.a. warlords) may hold sway in some regions, but administration officials doubt the Taliban will be able to control major urban centers. Afghanistan won’t be peaceful or secure like a developed country, but it won’t fall apart either in this guardedly hopeful view.
A bleaker prognosis was offered by Dexter Filkins in a widely discussed New Yorker article last month titled “After America: Will civil war hit Afghanistan when the U.S. leaves?” While respectful of what the U.S. military has accomplished, Filkins was skeptical that it can endure. In his words, Afghans and Americans are “under the stress of battle — and without a substantial presence of American combat troops after 2014 — the Afghan army could once again fracture along ethnic lines.”
So which will it be — televised soccer rivalry or armed civil war? Obviously there’s no way to predict, but two factors would reduce the likelihood of civil war. One is a commitment for a stay-behind force of, say, 15,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops to prevent a return by al-Qaeda and continue training the Afghan army and police. Second is a political strategy that moves toward national reconciliation and supports elections in 2014 for a new political leadership to replace the corrupt President Hamid Karzai. Unfortunately, this needed political transition is getting much less attention from Washington than the military pullout.
Afghanistan is viewed as a lost cause by most Americans, I suspect. The country may indeed be heading toward the worst-case scenario described in Filkins’s excellent reporting. But there are some relatively low-cost ways the United States can reduce the risk of an Afghan explosion — and keep the country stable enough that media entrepreneurs can make a buck from the nation’s favorite sport — which isn’t war, as the headlines might make us think, but soccer.
davidignatius@washpost.com
Afghan Officials Cite Revenge Killings in Latest Outbreak of Ethnic Hatred
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN and SANGAR RAHIMI August 3, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - At least nine Afghans and perhaps many more were forced out of their homes in rural Afghanistan and executed in what Afghan officials called an act of revenge by one ethnic group against another, underscoring the long shadow cast by the country’s ethnic hatreds.
The killing, which took place Wednesday in eastern Oruzgan Province, appears to have involved a Hazara commander who is said to have avenged the deaths of two fellow Hazaras by leading an armed group to nearby Pashtun villages and killing at least nine people.
“On Tuesday, two Hazara men were killed by the Taliban,” said Matiullah Khan, the provincial police chief. “The next day, meaning Wednesday, this brutal man raided Pashtuns’ villages and killed some 9 to 11 villagers,” he said, referring to the commander alleged to have carried out the killings. Some reports put the death toll as high as 30.
Most of the Taliban are ethnic Pashtuns and Sunni Muslims; the Hazaras are mostly members of the Shiite branch of Islam, and officials feared the killings could fuel a cycle of revenge. Local officials as well as the Interior Ministry opened investigations, and the governor was traveling to the area on Friday. The Afghan government formally took security responsibility for Oruzgan Province two weeks ago.
Two Afghan officials, including a member of Parliament, asserted that the man who is accused of leading the executions has had a relationship with American Special Operations forces — an assertion that an American spokesman denied. The other Afghan official, the provincial police chief, said the authorities in the area had tried to have the man arrested on past accusations of killing civilians, but that “foreigners” provided refuge for him.
The spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Lt. Col. Todd Harrell, said there were no Special Operations forces in the area and emphasized that it remained unclear if those who were killed were civilians or Taliban.
Pashtuns from the villages where the execution occurred flocked to the center of the remote district of Khas Oruzgan on Friday, shouting for justice, according to local officials who had spoken to the police there.
“Around 200 people, all Pashtuns including some Taliban commanders who were on run, by the name of Shah Wali and Khodaidad, have gathered at the district center as a sign of protest,” said Abdul Ali, a member of the Oruzgan provincial council from Khas Oruzgan District, where the killings and the protests took place.
He said the protesters were demanding punishment for the commander, whose name he gave as Shujayee, and were “using bad language against Hazara people, and I am afraid that this will lead to a campaign of revenge against Hazaras.”
Khas Oruzgan is remote even by Afghan standards and is a mixed Pashtun and Hazara area where the Taliban have been active for the last several years and have targeted Hazaras in the past. Tensions between the two groups go back decades and the Hazaras were the victims of widespread persecution in Bamian Province and elsewhere when the Taliban ran the country.
There seemed to be widespread confusion among Afghan officials about Commander Shujayee’s affiliations, with some suggesting he worked for the Afghan Local Police, who receive a three-week training course from American Special Operations forces and are then deployed to their own villages; they fall under the Interior Ministry’s control. Others suggest that he had ties directly to Special Operations units and worked with them rather than with the Afghans. The lack of clarity was a reminder of the number of unofficial groups that operate across Afghanistan and are sometimes confused with the Afghan Local Police.
Making matters more confusing for ordinary Afghans, some of the militias have been hired over the 11-year war by more shadowy arms of the American government, including the C.I.A., to help track down insurgents and have retained an image of invulnerability because of those allegiances. Those too are sometimes described as linked to Special Operations forces although they may not be. Those who suggested Commander Shujayee had ties to Special Operations forces blamed them for allowing what they called a dangerous man to operate freely.
General Khan, the police chief, said Commander Shujayee was part of a group that had previously “killed 17 innocent civilians and torched half of a big village.”
“We referred him to judicial authorities, but foreigners provided refuge to Commander Shujayee, therefore we couldn’t find him,” General Khan said. “Then he disappeared.”
Hajji Obaidullah Barakzai, a member of Parliament from Oruzgan, who said that Commander Shujayee had dumped the dead bodies from Wednesday’s executions in a ditch, contended that the commander had 100 armed men and was “closely working with United States Special Operations units.”
Gen. Ali Shah Ahmadzai, who heads the Afghan Local Police Command for the Interior Ministry in Kabul, categorically denied that the man was or had been in the Afghan Local Police.
“He is not part of the A.L.P. or any other formal security structure in Oruzgan,” General Ahmadzai said. “He wanted to become A.L.P., but since he didn’t meet any of the requirements for A.L.P., we rejected him.”
More than 14,000 Afghan Local Police members operate across Afghanistan, and Afghan civilians in some areas have accused them of abuses including stealing, harassment and even murder, although the groups are also viewed as an effective ballast against the Taliban.
Human rights advocates said the killings were worrisome. “This needs to be dealt with urgently by the government” and the NATO forces, said James Rodehaver, the acting human rights director for the United Nations office in Afghanistan.
Late Friday, the Taliban released a statement threatening to avenge the deaths of the “innocent and defenseless villagers” and saying that Commander Shujayee had a “green light from foreign forces” for the killings.
Habib Zahori and an employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
Pakistan resumes NATO supply into Afghanistan
AFP via Yahoo! News - Aug 04 09:24am
Pakistan on Saturday resumed NATO supplies, allowing 14 containers to cross into Afghanistan from its northwestern border at Torkham, officials said.
Pakistan had temporarily stopped NATO supplies over security concerns on July 24 after gunmen attacked a convoy of NATO trucks on July 24, killing a driver, in the town of Jamrud on the outskirts of the main northwestern city Peshawar.
"The NATO supplies have been resumed from today and we sent 14 containers" for international troops in Afghanistan," a local administration official told AFP on condition of anonymity because he is unauthorised to speak to media.
A local intelligence official also confirmed resumption of supplies and the departure of 14 NATO containers to Afghanistan.
A senior local customs official, Ubaidullah Khan, however, put the figure of containers, which left for Afghanistan, at seven, adding that they carried food stuff and clothes.
Afghan Minister’s Assets
New York Times Letter August 3, 2012
“Afghan Finance Minister Under Scrutiny” (news article, Aug. 2) is based on the broadcast of my bank statements by an Afghan TV station. I welcome media scrutiny of public officials, even though in this case the reports are inaccurate and misleading, and are part of a larger smear campaign against me.
The bank accounts are mine, but the assets shown were accumulated before I became minister. I disclosed this information with the relevant authorities more than three years ago, when I became finance minister.
My bank statements show deposits and withdrawals over six years amounting to a little over $1 million, incorrectly portrayed as assets. The consistent balance is significantly less.
The fact that I have disclosed my accounts and that all my financial transactions have been routed through the banking system, in which large amounts are reported to financial investigators, shows I have nothing to hide.
I have been a minister only for the last three and a half years, but I have held various professional positions for more than 15 years, including well-compensated senior advisory and consulting positions. My assets are mostly from those jobs.
It is well known that throughout my career in the government I have been a strong proponent of reform and transparency in both word and deed. My firm stands on transparency and accountability have made me unpopular in some quarters, and this politically motivated misinformation campaign is one result.
HAZRAT OMAR ZAKHILWAL Minister of Finance Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 2, 2012
Militant group cashes in on corruption and rich donors
CNN By Jamie Crawford August 3rd, 2012
The Haqqani network, a notorious militant group responsible for the deaths of U.S. service members in Afghanistan, has evolved from a politically inspired insurgent group into a "sophisticated and diversified mafia-type network" that finances itself through kidnapping, extortion, and the lucrative rare-earth metal trade, a new report says.
In a wide-ranging report about the Pakistan-based group, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, New York, likened the "hybrid organization that is at once political and criminal in nature" to a complex and sophisticated organized criminal enterprise seeking to increase its stature in the community while resorting to criminal means to remain solvent.
From its base in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, the Afghan-led group has formed alliances with al Qaeda, the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, and the Pakistani intelligence services to further its aims, the report says. Community members in Pakistan interviewed for the report described the group as "virtually untouchable."
Founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the group initially worked with the United States and its allies to expel the Soviets. Since suffering a stroke in 2005, Jalaluddin has essentially retired and his son, Sirajuddin, has taken command.
The group has been blamed for multiple attacks on critical infrastructure in Kabul, including a 20-hour assault last September on the U.S. Embassy compound.
While leading members of the group have been designated as terrorists and subjected to sanctions by the U.S. government, the Obama administration has not added the group as a whole to the list of terrorist groups. Congress recently passed legislation calling on the administration to do so.
In addition to a monthly stipend for operational costs from the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network receives a significant portion of its funding from deep-pocketed donors from locations in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the report says. The group's members are "veterans in the fund-raising business," it says.
From its role in extortion, robbery, narcotics trafficking and kidnap for ransom, the group is "driven more by financial interests than by principles of jihad," the report says. The group's extortion rackets include taking fees for "security" from non-governmental organizations, construction firms and others working on development projects, some of which are funded by NATO-led coalition efforts.
The Haqqanis also collect taxes from other organizations and entities that smuggle narcotics through territory it controls.
But the Haqqanis' financial holdings are not gained through illicit means alone. The report highlights a portfolio of licit interests, including hospitals, religious schools and real estate, trucking and construction companies, along with import-export operations.
And the group's involvement in the trade of chromite is able to flourish, the report says, due to a lack of regulation and the pervasive corruption in the Afghan and Pakistani governments.
Chromite, a rare-earth oxide used in the production of stainless steel, has a large market in China, India and other developing economies with booming construction sectors. A recent joint U.S.-Afghan geological survey estimated Afghanistan to have nearly $1 trillion worth of untapped wealth in the mineral.
In addition to private donors, the network continues to receive financial and logistical support from the Pakistani military, and continues to harbor close operational ties with the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Pakistan's main intelligence agency, the report says. Cracks in that support are evident, however, by the routine arrest of Haqqani operatives and the limiting of the group's capacity to operate, it says.
The former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told a Senate committee last September that the Haqqani network had become a "veritable arm" of the ISI.
Many suspect Pakistani support for the group exists as a hedge against the uncertainty that could follow in Afghanistan once the U.S. and NATO military missions end in 2014.
Richard Olson, President Obama's nominee to be the next ambassador to Pakistan, told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his confirmation hearing earlier this week that cracking down on the group would be his "most urgent" priority.
Afghan, Brunei, Saudi Sportswomen Send Strong Signals At Olympics
August 4, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghanistan's only female athlete at the London Olympics has bowed out after coming last in her qualifying heat for the 100-meter sprint on August 3.
Despite failing to qualify, Tahmina Kohistani ran a personal best time of 14.42 seconds in her heat on August 3.
The 23-year-old was defiant in defeat, insisting her mere participation at the games, as Afghanistan's third ever Olympic track athlete, would inspire other women in her conservative country to take up sport.
"My result is not as satisfactory as it could be," she said. "I was training hard and had a better result during my training. But for me participating [in the Olympic Games] is even more valuable than winning a gold medal.”
The first ever woman to represent Brunei at the Olympics, Maziah Mahusin, ran in the 400-meters, setting a national record of 59.28.
After the race, the 19-year-old was absolutely ecstatic: "It is such an honor. I want to inspire other women. Maybe I will care about medals the next time. I will keep on training."
Also on August 3, Wodjan Shaherkhani became the first Saudi woman to compete at the Olympic Games when she took part in the first round of the 78 kilogram judo competition.
The 16-year-old's bout ended in defeat to Puerto Rican Melissa Mojica after 80 seconds.
"Hopefully this is the beginning of a new era," Shahrkhani said afterwards. "Unfortunately, we did not win a medal, but in the future we will and I will be a star for women's participation."
In fencing, South Korea was the surprise winner of the men's team saber gold medal, defeating Romania in the final. The Koreans beat Romania’s Tiberiu Dolniceanu, Rares Dumitrescu, Florin Zalomir, and Alexandru Siriteanu 45-26. Italy defeated pre-competition favorite Russia 45-40 in the bronze medal match.
Michael Phelps of the United States won the men's 100-meter butterfly, claiming the 17th gold medal and 21st medal of his Olympic career. South Arican Chad Le Clos and Russian Evgeny Korotyshkin shared silver. Serbian Milorad Cavic finished equal fourth with Germany's Steffen Deibler.
France's Teddy Riner won the men's over 100 kilogram Olympic judo gold medal. Having already won a record five world championship titles, Riner, 23, defeated Russia's Alexander Mikhaylin in the Olympic final. Germany's Andreas Toelzer and Brazil's Rafael Silva were awarded bronze medals.
Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova won an all-Russian semi-final against Maria Kirilenko. Russia's opening ceremony flag bearer, Sharapova will face American Serena Williams in the gold-medal match on August 5. Williams beat world number one Victoria Azarenka of Belarus in just 63 minutes on August 3. Azarenka and Kililenko will play off for a bronze medal.
Elsewhere, Poland's Adrian Zielinski won Olympic gold in the men's weightlifting 85 kilogram category on August 3 with a total lift of 385 kilograms. Russia's Apti Aukhadov lifted the same weight but took silver because she has a higher body weight than Zielinski. Iran's Kianoush Rostami, with a total of 380 kg, claimed the bronze.
Meanwhile, Svetlana Podobedova of Kazakhstan defeated Russia's Natalya Zabolotnaya in the women's 75 kilogram category. Both lifted a combined total of 291 kilograms but Podobedava secured her country's third gold medal of London 2012 as she weighed 220 grams less than her opponent. Iryna Kulesha secured bronze for Belarus with 269 kilograms.
Away from the action, Russian track cyclist Victoria Baranova has been expelled from the London Games after testing positive for the male hormone testosterone on July 24 in Belarus. The 22-year-old had been due to race in the women's keirin Friday.
And a Moldovan athlete due to compete in the women's hammer throw event has been dropped from the squad after failing a drugs test. Marina Marghieva was disqualified along with discus thrower Natalia Artyk, who was not on the official list of 21 Moldovan athletes competing in London.
Moldovan Olympics Committee chief Nikolai Zhuravsky said an investigation had been launched.
The United States was at the top of the overall medal table after competition on August 3 with 43 medals. China was in second place with 42 medals, followed by Russia with 23 medals, although only three of those were gold.
With reporting by AFP, Reuters, dpa, Radio Free Afghanistan @HMARichardStagg
Indonesia arrests 24 more asylum seekers heading to Australia
JAKARTA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Twenty-four more illegal immigrants planning to go to Australia to seek asylum have been arrested in Bangka-Belitung province of Indonesia, a media reported here on Saturday.
The immigrant from Pakistan and Afghanistan were arrested days ago and did not have immigration documents.
"They were arrested by the Navy in two different places, at Tanjung Limbung Muntok Port in West Bangka district and at Depati Amir Airport in Central Bangka district, while they were heading to Jakarta," said Filianto Akbar, head of supervision at the Pangkal Pinang Immigration Office on Bangka Island, as quoted by the Jakarta globe as saying.
The Navy also arrested four drivers and an assistant who were transporting the asylum seekers. The drivers said they had helped drive asylum seekers seven times.
Habibullah, one of the asylum seekers, said he left Afghanistan because of the conflict there.
Indonesia is a favorite transit point for immigrants from the Middle East and other countries heading to Australia for seeking asylum.
Indonesia and Australia have cooperated with Australia in fighting human trafficking heading to Australia.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com