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Key Officials Under Karzai Are Criticized
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN August 12, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The chief of Afghanistan’s antigraft commission has called for the country’s finance minister to step aside while he is being investigated in connection with corruption allegations, even as the minister appealed to his Western backers for support.
The back and forth is just one element of what appears to be a widening shake-up in some of the Afghan government’s most powerful ministries, and notably ones that play a critical role in working with the country’s biggest Western supporters, officials say.
The Ministries of Defense, Interior, Mining and Finance — linchpins of United States plans for troop withdrawal and for long-term Afghan development — have all come under intense pressure in recent weeks. The cases are rooted in different political tensions, but taken together they raise the prospect that the West’s already tenuous relationship with the Afghan government could become even less stable.
“Those four ministers constitute the core of the team that we work with and are major liaisons with the international community,” said one senior Western diplomat, who, like other diplomats, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the political situation. “We have to be honest with ourselves and the Afghans and encourage them to conduct proper investigations so that either the accusations are upheld and there are judicial proceedings or they are dispelled.”
Starting in July, a serious altercation between cabinet members has played out over a new mining law that the mining minister, Wahidullah Shahrani, with advice from Western consultants, has advocated, saying it would give international mining companies the certainty they need to make substantial investments. Passage was blocked by several other cabinet members, who expressed concerns that the draft law gave away too much to international interests, and their view was publicly supported by President Hamid Karzai.
Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Interior Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi both were hit with parliamentary no-confidence votes this month. Mr. Wardak resigned on Tuesday, and Mr. Mohammadi is not expected to last; a search for his replacement is under way.
The Parliament members cited incompetence, nepotism, favoritism and corruption as reasons for seeking their ousters. Few specific allegations were made, however, other than the failure to stop the shelling of Afghan border villages from Pakistan — something that would have been difficult for either official to have achieved without attacking Pakistan, which was not an option from a diplomatic standpoint.
The allegations against Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal are the most directly connected to corruption, and they have been divisive, with his supporters and detractors lobbing accusations at one another.
Mr. Karzai has not publicly criticized or defended him, and the president’s silence has become a topic of debate.
Some political analysts insist that Mr. Karzai’s nondefense amounts to an endorsement of Mr. Zakhilwal’s removal, and they note that the president remained similarly aloof in the cases of the defense and interior ministers. Other analysts argue that Mr. Karzai did not plan to have these high-profile cases coincide and was not prepared with replacements for the cabinet members.
Mr. Zakhilwal’s financial dealings have been questioned before. His role as Mr. Karzai’s chief fund-raiser during the 2009 re-election campaign, in which he was reported to have moved hundreds of thousands of dollars into Mr. Karzai’s coffers, put him in the cross hairs of journalists and political opponents.
In recent weeks, Mr. Zakhilwal’s finances have again come under the microscope with an investigation by Tolo, an Afghan television channel. In two reports, Tolo reporters used his bank statements to suggest that the finance minister was accepting money from Afghan businesses and that he was transferring tens of thousands of dollars to banks outside the country.
Mr. Zakhilwal emphatically denied the allegations and insisted that a smear campaign was under way. He has explained the payments from businesses as consulting fees, although some were earned while he was holding public office, and he has endeavored to explain the bank transfers as well. He has family members in Canada and has sent some of the money there. The size of the transactions, however, has raised questions, as have some transfers to banks outside the country.
In an emotional meeting last week with foreign diplomats who have been among his strongest backers, Mr. Zakhilwal, who had been expected to discuss the recent donors’ meeting in Tokyo, made an emotional appeal, saying he was the target of political enemies and pulling out his bank statements to show to the assembled diplomats. At one point, overwhelmed, he left the room to collect himself, returning a few moments later.
“It was a bit awkward,” one of the diplomats said. “What could you say? Most of us were silent.”
Azizullah Ludin, the head of Afghanistan’s commission on corruption, said he was concerned that neither his office nor any other could do a thorough investigation into the finances of Mr. Zakhilwal while the finance minister was still in his job, since Mr. Zakhilwal’s associates at the ministry would protect him.
“If Zakhilwal is in the ministry, we won’t be able to do a free investigation and he may create problems for our staff,” Mr. Ludin said. “If he is in his post he might ask his employees and team not to speak with our investigative team or not let us get access to the documents linking him with corruption.”
Mr. Zakhilwal has offered to show the government his bank records and has gone so far as to request an investigation from the attorney general’s office.
An assistant to the finance minister, Najibullah Manali, said the oversight office on corruption had not contacted the ministry and did not have investigative authority. Nonetheless, Mr. Zakhilwal welcomes the investigation, he said.
“The minister has made clear in a press conference that he has asked the attorney general’s office to investigate his case and find the truth,” Mr. Manali said. “When the attorney general’s office asks us for help, we will welcome it and stand ready to help them.”
Whatever the outcome, the situation has left Western donors nervous about whom they will be able to trust with the first installments of the $16 billion in aid they expect to donate over the next four years.
“If the Finance Ministry is corrupt, where do you go with mutual accountability?” another foreign diplomat said. “It becomes a pretty dire equation.”
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
Senators Accuse Karzai, His Family of Corruption
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 12 August 2012
Afghan senators on Sunday accused President Hamid Karzai, some of his family members, his two vice presidents and several cabinet members of corruption.
Senate chairman Fazel Hadi Muslimyar said some members of the Karzai family and some politicians close to Mr Karzai took money from several banks in Afghanistan but predicted they will never be prosecuted. He said finance minister Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal would also probably escape prosecution.
He added, however, that if an investigation indicated Mr Zakhilwal was corrupt, the Senate would be the first institution to help the judiciary bring him to justice and put him in prison.
"The president, his family members, his deputies and his cabinet members are involved in corruption and looted banks and none of them were prosecuted. If the allegations about the finance minister are proved, the Senate would the first organ to help in his prosecution and put him in jail," Mr Muslimyar said.
Meanwhile, several other senators accused the government of turning a blind eye to Mr Zakhilwal's alleged corruption. They urged Mr Karzai to break his silence on the matter.
Senator Nesar Ahmad Ares raised concerns about the dual citizenship many government officials hold, saying this permits people who are accused of corruption the flee the country before they face justice. He urged President Karzai to look into the matter.
President Karzai is under pressure to rein in corruption in his administration. At a conference in Tokyo in July, donors said Afghanistan will get the $16 billion in aid money pledged only if serious efforts are made to stamp out graft and nepotism.
Afghan Policeman Fires on NATO Troops
VOA News August 13, 2012
Officials say an Afghan police officer has opened fire on U.S.-led NATO troops, in the fifth such attack in a week.
A NATO spokesman told reporters that a man wearing civilian clothes fired on international forces in the eastern province of Nangarhar on Monday, but that no coalition service members were killed. The spokesman said an initial investigation indicates the man is an Afghan police officer. The gunman reportedly escaped.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting, the latest in a string of so-called "green on blue" attacks in which Afghan security forces or attackers wearing their uniform turn their weapons on international forces.
At least 37 coalition soldiers have been killed in at least 27 such attacks so far this year, with seven deaths since Friday.
Separately on Monday, Afghan officials say a roadside bomb in the northern province of Takhar killed five people, including a district mayor and provincial peace council member.
District Mayor Abdul Aziz and council member Haji Hashim were killed in the blast Monday in the Ishkamish district.
Authorities blame the attack on the Taliban.
On Monday, the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, James Cunningham, told reporters in Kabul there are signs that the Taliban is considering peace talks with the Afghan government. He said "there are contacts taking place, mostly at this point among Afghans -- Taliban and Afghans."
Afghan officials said this week that they have held secret talks with the a former Taliban military chief, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who has been in Pakistani custody since his arrest in Karachi in 2010.
Ambassador Cunningham did not address the reports directly, but said "there are a number of different elements at play. None of them are yet definitive, but we do see signs there is some rethinking going on among the Taliban about the future choices they face."
Also Monday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai appointed former defense minister Abdul Rahim Wardak as his special advisor. Wardak resigned last week after losing a vote of confidence in parliament for alleged security failures.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
37 NATO soldiers killed in insider attacks in Afghanistan this year
KABUL, Aug. 13 (Xinhua)-- Thirty seven soldiers with the NATO- led coalition have been killed in the so-called green-on-blue attacks since beginning this year across the post-Taliban Afghanistan, a coalition spokesman said Monday.
"So when we talk about insider raid some call green-on-blue incidence, we talk about 27 incidents so far in this year and we had 37 people killed in those incidents," a spokesman with the coalition or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Brigadier General Gunter Katz told reporters in a regular press briefing here.
However, he said the ISAF and Afghan army and police officials have been working to check such incidents.
In the latest so-called green-on-blue attacks, a total of six NATO-led ISAF soldiers lost their lives in a single day Friday in the country's southern province of Helmand.
The Taliban insurgents, who have been waging more than a decade- long insurgency and launched spring offensive from May 3 this year to target security forces, have regularly claimed responsibility for the insider attacks or green-on-blue offensives.
The ISAF spokesman said that the Afghan army and police continue to stick in the "eight-point vetting system" which was set up in 2009 for vetting recruits to the rank of national police and the army as a bid to prevent any possible Taliban infiltration into the security entities.
Meantime, in a similar incident, two members of Afghan National Police (ANP) shot dead seven colleagues in Dilaram district of southwestern Nimroz province on Saturday.
Afghan Officials Give Contradictory Accounts Of Reported Taliban Meeting
By RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal August 13, 2012
ISLAMABAD -- Afghan officials have given contradictory responses to reports that an Afghan delegation met two months ago with imprisoned former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Pakistan.
Muhammad Ismail Qasimyar, a member of Afghanistan's High Peace Council, confirmed the reports, telling AFP the meeting focused on possible peace talks.
However, Zardhasht Shams, a spokesman for the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad, told RFE/RL that "no such meeting has taken place."
Baradar is the most important detained Taliban leader and was a trusted aide to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.
When he was arrested in 2010 in Pakistan, Kabul said his detention had adversely affected efforts to talk with the insurgents.
Qasimyar said Kabul had asked Islamabad to release Baradar "because he has shown interest in peace talks."
With reporting by AFP and AP
Double blasts kill 5, wound 5 in Afghanistan in single day
by Abdul Haleem, Chen Xin
KABUL, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- Twin bomb blasts that shocked the northern Takhar and eastern Nangarhar provinces in a single day on Monday have claimed the lives of five people while injuring five others, officials confirmed.
The offensives apparently are targeted ones and all the victims are civilians and obviously the government servicemen.
In the latest attack, a roadside bomb struck the vehicle of the mayor of Ashkamish district in Takhar province 245 km north of Afghan capital Kabul, leaving five people dead.
"The deadly incident happened in Ashkamish district at 11:50 a. m. local time and as a result five people including the mayor of Ashkamish district along with four others were killed," spokesman for provincial administration Faizullah Tawhidi told Xinhua.
Meantime, an official who declined to give his name said that a member of the High Council for Peace in Takhar, a government- backed body convincing Taliban militants to give up fighting and resume normal life was also killed in the blast.
Tawhidi put the attack on the Taliban militants, saying the outfit by organizing such attacks wants to destabilize the province. However Taliban militants fighting the government are yet to comment.
In a similar incident which took place earlier in Jalalabad city, the capital of Nangarhar province 120 km east of Kabul, five civilians were injured.
"The blast occurred at around 8 a.m. local time Monday and five people including four government service members with the provincial justice department and a passer-by were injured," spokesman for provincial government Ahmad Zia Abdulzai told Xinhua.
He also stated that an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) was placed in a rickshaw parked on Masjedi Eidgah road and was detonated by a remote control device when the car of the victims was passing the area.
Violent incidents mostly in the shape of roadside bombings and suicide attacks have been on the rise since the Taliban outfit launched a spring offensive on May 3 this year.
The armed outfit has said anyone working for the government and the NATO-led troops are legitimate targets.
Conflict-related violence, according to a report of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan released last week, between Jan. 1 and June 30 this year, 1,145 civilians were killed and 1,954 injured, and IEDs accounted for 33 percent of all the civilian casualties - killing 327 and injuring 689.
Defence feared links with Afghan warlord would erode support for forces
Sydney Morning Herald By Philip Dorling August 13, 2012
SENIOR Defence Department officials feared the WikiLeaks exposé of secret US military reports would undermine public support for the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan, according to newly released briefing papers.
Reports about a corrupt Afghan warlord who works closely with Australian special forces were considered particularly sensitive.
More than two years after WikiLeaks published more than 75,000 leaked US reports on Afghanistan, the Defence Department has finally released, under freedom-of-information law, its assessment of the massive security breach.
In a confidential brief submitted to the former defence minister John Faulkner, Defence warned that WikiLeaks's July 2010 release of the ''Afghan War Logs'' was a matter of high political sensitivity that "could adversely affect public perceptions of the [International Security Assistance Force] campaign, [and] ADF operations in Afghanistan''.
Although Defence advised that WikiLeaks did not compromise the safety of Australian soldiers, the department's deputy secretary, Peter Jennings, highlighted the website's disclosures concerning the Afghan warlord Matiollah Khan, ''an influential figure based in Oruzgan province who has worked with US and Australian forces over the course of several years''.
Although some of the Defence briefing concerning the warlord has been redacted on national security grounds, reference was made to ''WikiLeaks materials describ[ing] some of Matiollah Khan's operations, an incident where his brother was given what appears to be special treatment by US troops, and an incident where a suicide bomber attempted to infiltrate his compound''.
However, the leaked US military reports reviewed by Defence also included references to ''credible accounts" that Mr Khan "operates protection rackets, skims from the [police] payroll, and is involved in the illegal narcotics trade''.
Appointed the Oruzgan police chief in 2011, Mr Khan has earned more than $45 million from NATO and Australian construction, fuel and security contracts. Dutch forces in Oruzgan refused to work with the warlord who is suspected of extortion, torture and having dealings with the Taliban insurgency.
Another US report released by WikiLeaks showed the US embassy in Kabul warned the heroin trade in Oruzgan was ubiquitous, infecting all aspects of the provincial administration and ''corrupting public officials''.
However Australian officials publicly insist that Oruzgan's governor and other officials, including Mr Khan, have improved services and opposed corruption. Mr Khan continues to be a key Australian ally, working closely with Australian special forces and some of his militia fighters have trained with the ADF in Australia.
The released briefing papers show the government waited more than two months, until October 24, 2010, before publicly acknowledging that WikiLeaks had not harmed ADF operations or security.
The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, announced in April that the ADF will withdraw from Afghanistan before the end of next year, a year ahead of schedule.
The WikiLeaks website has been offline for the past week owing to a massive distributed denial of service attack allegedly conducted by American hackers
Afghanistan’s Taliban Wish Al Qaeda Would Go Away
Many in the Taliban are sick of their longtime allies. But how do you dump a terrorist group?
The Daily Beast By Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai Aug 13, 2012
Agha jan Motasim knows firsthand the hazards of crossing al Qaeda. A year ago the Taliban regime’s former treasury minister was caught in a hail of bullets and left for dead on a street in Karachi. Somehow Motasim survived the shooting—and he prudently didn’t publicly accuse the global terrorist group of nearly killing him, although many of his supporters had no doubt who had ordered it. After all, what had Motasim expected when he urged his fellow Afghan insurgents to disown al Qaeda and seek a political solution in Afghanistan? But Motasim stuck to his beliefs: in an exclusive telephone interview earlier this year, he told The Daily Beast that he would not be silenced and that many senior Taliban commanders shared his desire for an end to the bloodshed.
No sooner were Motasim’s words published than he received a reply. Intermediaries relayed a message from a senior al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, warning him to stop talking about peace and to quit trying to disrupt the longstanding ties between the Taliban and al Qaeda. Motasim has not given up urging the Afghan insurgents to reopen their talks with the Americans. But the Taliban can’t ignore al Qaeda’s long and deadly reach. “Al Qaeda is a big threat to any kind of peaceful solution and to anyone who would be part of a deal,” says a former senior Taliban minister. “Al Qaeda still has easy access to senior Taliban leaders and is still strong enough to convince them—by threat or otherwise—that they should not talk to the infidel enemy and not abandon al Qaeda,” Motasim tells Newsweek.
Months after Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar called an abrupt halt to the Qatar peace talks, U.S. and Taliban officials keep looking for a way to revive them. Participants say the discussion broke down when Omar lost patience over the pace of a proposed prisoner swap. He seemed not to understand why the Americans couldn’t simply order the release of five of his top commanders from U.S. custody at Guantánamo Bay in exchange for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was captured by the insurgents in June 2009.
In fact, however, far larger obstacles stand in the way of a peace deal, and the biggest of all is al Qaeda. There may be some room for interpretation in Washington’s other two demands—that the Taliban renounce violence and accept the Afghan Constitution—but the third is flatly nonnegotiable. Unless Omar’s group completely severs its ties to al Qaeda, the war in Afghanistan will continue indefinitely, regardless of the promised withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in 2014. “Break ties with al Qaeda,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded last year. “Refuse and you will continue to face the consequences of being tied to al Qaeda as an enemy of the international community.”
The worry is that the Taliban might prove equally unwavering. Out of pride, Islamist ideology, or simple fear, Mullah Omar could be willing to lose everything once again for al Qaeda’s sake, just as he did after 9/11, when he rejected the advice of both his cabinet and his senior religious council to avert the otherwise inevitable U.S. invasion by expelling Osama bin Laden.
The awful part is this: many of Omar’s followers desperately wish they knew how to get rid of their so-called allies in al Qaeda. It’s true that senior Taliban commanders often value the group’s tactical and technical advice, and they respect its strict ideology and unflinching determination. “The Taliban is still technically dependent on al Qaeda for making bombs and IEDs and planning sophisticated attacks, particularly in the cities,” says a senior adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But on the whole, the jihadi group’s surviving members are more of a liability than an asset to the Afghan insurgents, constantly depending on them for protection and sustenance.
Most Taliban commanders and fighters inside Afghanistan would be only too glad to see the last of bin Laden’s men. Drone attacks and relentless pursuit by U.S. forces have reduced the foreign jihadis’ presence to small roving bands of seven to 10 Arabs and Pakistanis, mostly from the tribal areas, as well as a few from the Punjab. But those remnants continue to pose nothing but trouble for their Afghan hosts, behaving almost as if they want to antagonize everyone in sight. Among other things, the hardline Wahhabis have a habit of mocking local customs as supposedly un-Islamic and of preventing villagers from praying at the shrines of Sufi saints. “They insult villagers by calling them pagans and ‘polytheist Muslims,’” says a Taliban commander in Ghazni province.
The Ghazni commander says he and his men are struggling just to survive, and he blames the jihadis for alienating the local population. If his men try to launch a military operation or plant IEDs, unsympathetic villagers tip off the Americans and the Afghan security forces, the commander complains. He has been having particular problems with a 10-man al Qaeda group urging him to launch mortar attacks on villages that have stopped supporting the Taliban. “We told them no,” he says. “Indiscriminate shelling will turn more people against us.” How did the al Qaeda unit’s leader respond? “You’re ignorant,” the Arab told the Taliban commander. “You cannot make concessions to these nonbelievers.”
Similar problems have plagued Abdul Qayyum, a Taliban commander in neighboring Paktika province. About two months ago Qayyum asked the al Qaeda fighters embedded in his area to head back to Pakistan, saying the local resistance no longer needed their help. They refused to leave. “You can’t stop us from jihad in Afghanistan,” the jihadi group’s leader told the Taliban commander. Tensions between the insurgents and al Qaeda are running dangerously high, Qayyum says: “These Arab jihadists do not care for their own lives and the lives of others. With talk of peace and breaking with al Qaeda, these guys don’t trust us anymore.” At night the al Qaeda fighters insist on posting their own sentries rather than relying on Qayyum’s men for security. “They even sleep with one finger on the trigger of their AK-47s,” he adds. He says he has written letters to the Taliban’s Pakistan-based ruling council, the Quetta Shura, requesting advice and intercession, but so far he’s had no luck. “No one has replied,” Qayyum says. “They are also afraid of al Qaeda.”
Afraid of what? Bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants, together with hundreds of his former foot soldiers who once prowled Afghanistan and Pakistan. And yet al Qaeda may still wield more influence on the ground than outsiders might imagine. From the earliest days of the war against the Soviets, in 1979, the region began attracting the Arab jihadis who would become al Qaeda’s nucleus. When the Russians left, a decade later, bin Laden went home to Saudi Arabia, but hundreds of his fighters instead chose to settle down near their former rear bases in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where they married into local families with strong connections on both sides of the border.
Bin Laden got a hero’s welcome on his return home from the war against the Soviets, but he soon fell out with the Saudi government. He ended up in Sudan, which in turn expelled him under threat of U.S. and U.N. sanctions in 1996. With nowhere better to go, he returned to Afghanistan, just in time to witness the Taliban’s rise to power. The al Qaeda leader brought financial assistance to Mullah Omar’s fledgling regime, along with thousands of experienced and fearless jihadis to assist in the war against the anti-Taliban holdouts known collectively as the Northern Alliance. “The Arabs were the most successful fighters I have seen in my 20 years in the jihad,” recalls Mullah Hayatullah, who served as a top commander for the Taliban-allied Haqqani network until he was disabled by war wounds in 2010. “They had harder bones than we did.”
But bin Laden proved to be a most untrustworthy ally. Having called so many foreign fighters to his side, he felt free to do as he pleased. Ignoring Omar’s protests, he hosted press conferences at his bases in eastern Afghanistan at which he delivered inflammatory anti-Western diatribes, such as his August 1996 declaration of war against America. At the same time, the terrorist leader seems to have given his hosts no clue that he was using their country as a planning center for attacks against the West. In the wake of 9/11, Omar didn’t know what to do with bin Laden. “He’s like a chicken bone caught in my throat,” the Taliban leader was quoted as saying. “I can’t swallow it or cough it up.” With the fate of his regime in the balance, he refused to evict his troublesome guest. “In the end Mullah Omar couldn’t say no to bin Laden,” says another of Omar’s former ministers. “Sheltering bin Laden and al Qaeda was the Taliban’s biggest mistake. Al Qaeda used us and then threw us away like tissue paper.”
With that in mind, many longtime Taliban members don’t see why they must remain wedded to the now debilitated terrorist group. “I’d say 70 percent of our leaders and commanders are not in favor of maintaining links to al Qaeda,” says the second former Taliban minister, who still plays an important role in the insurgency. “To me, this is a good time to say goodbye to al Qaeda.” Nevertheless, he adds: “To do so we need a consensus, and arriving at that is not easy.”
And al Qaeda is doing its best to keep it that way. The members of the Quetta Shura are keenly aware of how deadly their old associates can be. “Al Qaeda has sent messages to high individuals on the council, warning them not to talk peace and not to betray their fellow jihadis,” says a senior Taliban intelligence officer. If they tried to dump al Qaeda, he says, the terrorist group would strike back with all its might. “They would declare a jihad against us,” he says. Hayatullah adds: “No one on our supreme council will take the decision to propose divorcing ourselves from al Qaeda. Whoever dared knows he would be targeted.” And the second former Taliban minister agrees. “We know that the day we cut relations with al Qaeda, it would turn on us suddenly like a snake,” he says.
The terrorist group has warned even its closest friends among the Afghan insurgents, like Sirajuddin Haqqani, the tactical chief of the notorious Haqqani network and son of its patriarch, Jalaluddin Haqqani. “Al Qaeda cautioned Siraj that if the Taliban’s shura turns against it, al Qaeda will make kebabs of all those following the Americans,” says Hakim Akhund, a commander in the network. Although the family and its militia have been ensconced for decades in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal agency, other insurgents say the Haqqanis would lose some powerful friends there if they broke with al Qaeda. “If the Haqqanis started to turn against al Qaeda, the locals would turn against the Haqqanis,” says the former senior minister. “The Haqqanis would have to answer to a big number of Pakistani Taliban commanders, mullahs, and tribal elders who believe al Qaeda’s fighters are holier warriors than the Taliban.”
A few weeks ago Sirajuddin Haqqani sent one of his subcommanders to help deliver a load of weapons and a large amount of cash to a group of beleaguered insurgent forces in northern Afghanistan. Traveling with Mullah Sangher were five suicide bombers and several al Qaeda IED experts led by a 50-year-old Egyptian. Along the way, the Egyptian and a younger companion from Yemen gave Sangher an earful of their disdain for the Taliban’s less-than-absolute commitment to endless jihad. The Egyptian said al Qaeda leaders had sent several strongly worded letters to the Quetta Shura via Haqqani couriers since last April. “Stop talking to the Americans while you are winning the war,” the letters warned. “Making peace deals is a betrayal of Islam,” the Egyptian told Sangher. “It’s like knifing the jihad in the back.” The Yemeni promised Sangher that al Qaeda will fight on, with or without the Taliban. “We will not give up this great ground of jihad easily,” he said.
Taliban members don’t think al Qaeda’s threats of retribution are a bluff. In April, a small group of gunmen in Peshawar nearly succeeded in kidnapping the son of Maulvi Shahabuddin Dilawar, one of Mullah Omar’s negotiators at the Qatar talks, “It was an attempt to silence those who want to talk peace and we know al Qaeda was behind it,” says the Taliban intelligence officer.
Al Qaeda has inflicted much harsher punishments on former allies who have incurred its wrath. Mullah Nazir, one of the group’s most loyal friends among the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan decided a few years ago that he could no longer tolerate the brutality of the al Qaeda contingent based in his area. The foreigners, mostly ethnic Uzbeks and Chechens, had been abusing local villagers, even imprisoning some in deep pits. Nazir finally ordered his men to drive the jihadis out of the area, and dozens of the thugs were killed.
The terrorist group’s revenge was swift. Its gunmen attempted to kill Nazir and succeeded in killing several of his top commanders, along with dozens of villagers, whose bodies were dumped in caves. Hakim says no one in the tribal area is safe from al Qaeda’s anger. “Al Qaeda could assassinate anyone they want among the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas,” he says.
No one can be sure just what Mullah Omar thinks of all this. He hasn’t been seen in public since the collapse of his regime in 2001, and these days he communicates with his followers only rarely, by letter. Motasim says he doubts even now that the Taliban leader would favor abandoning his jihadist allies. And if Omar were to issue such an order, the former senior minister suspects that some commanders would refuse to obey it. “There would be a big rift among the Taliban,” he says. Nevertheless, he’s convinced that it’s the only way to bring peace to Afghanistan—and that after all these years, the Afghan people deserve to live in peace. “The Taliban must take its distance slowly from al Qaeda,” he says. “It will take time.”
It’s doubtful in any case that al Qaeda will go away quietly. And its supporters within the Taliban may be a minority, but they’re determined to keep fighting. Motasim is likely to wait a long time before his dream comes true.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent, and has been covering the region for the magazine for the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Bamiyan Buddhas: Should they be rebuilt?
BBC News By Stephanie Hegarty BBC World Service 12 August 2012
The destruction of Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 led to global condemnation of the Taleban regime. But the decision by Unesco not to rebuild them has not put an end to the debate about their future.
When the Taliban were at the height of their power in Afghanistan, leader Mullah Omar waged a war against idolatry.
His biggest victims, in size as well as symbolism, were two standing stone Buddhist statues. Once the largest in the world - one measured 55 metres in height - they were carved into the sandstone cliff face of the Bamiyan valley in central Afghanistan during the 6th Century.
When the Taliban were overthrown in 2003, Unesco declared the valley a world heritage site and archaeologists flocked to it. What they found were two enormous empty caverns and a pile of debris littered with unexploded mines.
Since then, they have been surveying the rubble of the two stone structures to determine whether the Buddhas should be rebuilt.
The Bamiyan valley marked the most westerly point of Buddhist expansion and was a crucial hub of trade for much of the last millennium. It was a place where East met West and its archaeology reveals a blend of Greek, Turkish, Persian, Chinese and Indian influence that is found nowhere else in the world.
But last year, Unesco announced that it was no longer considering reconstruction. In the case of the bigger Buddha, it was decided there wasn't enough left to rebuild and though rebuilding the smaller one is possible, they said it is unlikely to happen.
Instead they are working with teams from Japan and Italy to secure the cracking cliff face and keep the cliffs and any of the remaining wall paintings that once covered the caves and niches intact.
But a German group of archaeological conservationists, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos), are still pushing for the Buddha to be rebuilt.
Bert Praxenthaler works alongside Icomos and since 2004 he has been working on the site to salvage any remaining fragments of the sculpture, some weighing up to 40 tonnes and putting them under a protective covering to preserve them as best he can.
He is interested in a process called anastylois which involves putting these fragments back together using a minimal amount of new materials.
"It's a jigsaw puzzle with missing links but with geological methods we can discover where those fragments have been before," says Praxenthaler.
The method has been used on the Parthenon and the Acropolis in Athens but it would be the first time it is used to reconstruct a monument that was intentionally destroyed and arguments against reconstruction abound.
Not least is money. Rebuilding just the small Buddha would cost millions of dollars in a region that lacks basic infrastructure such as roads and electricity. It would require the manufacture or import of a huge amounts of metal which would have to travel along the dangerous road from Kabul.
"Of course the counter argument to that is that jaw-dropping sums of money are spent in Afghanistan every day," says Dr Llewelyn Morgan, author of The Buddhas of Bamiyan, a history of the sculptures. "This would be a drop in the ocean."
Still, Morgan says, there are more pressing issues that archaeologists need to look at in Afghanistan. "Bamiyan has a tendency to draw all archaeological resources to it," he says. "But in Afghanistan you are looking at an astonishing archaeological treasure trove."
Looting is a very big problem and artefacts from around the country often end up in art markets in Pakistan. Morgan believes that resources would be better spent on creating an infrastructure to protect the breadth of Afghanistan's ancient treasures.
In a recent Huffington Post article he publicised the case of Chehel Burj, a medieval fortress in the mountains to the west of Bamiyan that is suffering from degradation.
"Give it time and illicit treasure hunting, earthquakes and old-fashioned freeze-thaw action will destroy more than the most single-minded iconoclast could ever dream of," he said.
Unesco are raising similar concerns and is funding the construction of a Museum for Peace at Bamiyan to promote awareness of Afghanistan's cultural heritage.
But whatever the reason, the Bamiyan Buddhas have captured the international imagination and ideas for what to do with the site still pour in from archaeologists, architects, artists and historians.
One that has gained quite a lot of attention is a proposal from Italian architect Andrea Bruno to construct a small underground sanctuary at the foot of the Great Buddha which would allow visitors to look up at and appreciate the immensity of the empty niche.
Bruno believes the niches should be preserved as a monument to the crime of their destruction. "It is a kind of victory for the monument and a defeat for those who tried to obliterate its memory with dynamite," he says.
He argues that reconstruction would be culturally insensitive. "Here the Muslims strictly oppose images - to recreate the Buddhas would be an insult even to non-Taliban Afghans. We must show good manners," he says.
But Praxenthaler believes that reconstruction is a matter of local pride for the Hazara people, Shia Muslims who were targeted and persecuted by the Taliban.
"It wasn't just a religious fatwa, to destroy all the idols, it was also an attempt to destroy the culture and the background and the pride of the people," he says. "The Hazara people appreciated that we were going to help them do something with their destroyed Buddhas."
He also says that reconstruction would enrich the local economy. His project has already employed over 50 people for salvaging and has also helped to train students from Bamiyan University in ancient stone-cutting techniques.
"People are building homes and they are employed by us, they are working and they get a decent salary."
Llewelyn Morgan, who last visited the site a year ago, also found reconstruction to be popular among locals for whom the Buddhas were once a great source of income from tourists.
"The impression you get in Bamiyan is that they are almost too naively positive about the reconstruction of the Buddha," says Morgan. "I've spoken to people who would like to see it go up in concrete, which of course Unesco would never countenance."
But the reception to rebuilding in the rest of the country is unpredictable.
"Afghanistan is a great melting pot of cultures but the one thing many of them share is they are very pious," says Morgan.
"Though many clerics and religious leaders may not have agreed with the destruction of religious idols, building them again is an entirely different matter."
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
New York Times By ALISSA J. RUBIN August 12, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - The chief of Afghanistan’s antigraft commission has called for the country’s finance minister to step aside while he is being investigated in connection with corruption allegations, even as the minister appealed to his Western backers for support.
The back and forth is just one element of what appears to be a widening shake-up in some of the Afghan government’s most powerful ministries, and notably ones that play a critical role in working with the country’s biggest Western supporters, officials say.
The Ministries of Defense, Interior, Mining and Finance — linchpins of United States plans for troop withdrawal and for long-term Afghan development — have all come under intense pressure in recent weeks. The cases are rooted in different political tensions, but taken together they raise the prospect that the West’s already tenuous relationship with the Afghan government could become even less stable.
“Those four ministers constitute the core of the team that we work with and are major liaisons with the international community,” said one senior Western diplomat, who, like other diplomats, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the political situation. “We have to be honest with ourselves and the Afghans and encourage them to conduct proper investigations so that either the accusations are upheld and there are judicial proceedings or they are dispelled.”
Starting in July, a serious altercation between cabinet members has played out over a new mining law that the mining minister, Wahidullah Shahrani, with advice from Western consultants, has advocated, saying it would give international mining companies the certainty they need to make substantial investments. Passage was blocked by several other cabinet members, who expressed concerns that the draft law gave away too much to international interests, and their view was publicly supported by President Hamid Karzai.
Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Interior Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi both were hit with parliamentary no-confidence votes this month. Mr. Wardak resigned on Tuesday, and Mr. Mohammadi is not expected to last; a search for his replacement is under way.
The Parliament members cited incompetence, nepotism, favoritism and corruption as reasons for seeking their ousters. Few specific allegations were made, however, other than the failure to stop the shelling of Afghan border villages from Pakistan — something that would have been difficult for either official to have achieved without attacking Pakistan, which was not an option from a diplomatic standpoint.
The allegations against Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal are the most directly connected to corruption, and they have been divisive, with his supporters and detractors lobbing accusations at one another.
Mr. Karzai has not publicly criticized or defended him, and the president’s silence has become a topic of debate.
Some political analysts insist that Mr. Karzai’s nondefense amounts to an endorsement of Mr. Zakhilwal’s removal, and they note that the president remained similarly aloof in the cases of the defense and interior ministers. Other analysts argue that Mr. Karzai did not plan to have these high-profile cases coincide and was not prepared with replacements for the cabinet members.
Mr. Zakhilwal’s financial dealings have been questioned before. His role as Mr. Karzai’s chief fund-raiser during the 2009 re-election campaign, in which he was reported to have moved hundreds of thousands of dollars into Mr. Karzai’s coffers, put him in the cross hairs of journalists and political opponents.
In recent weeks, Mr. Zakhilwal’s finances have again come under the microscope with an investigation by Tolo, an Afghan television channel. In two reports, Tolo reporters used his bank statements to suggest that the finance minister was accepting money from Afghan businesses and that he was transferring tens of thousands of dollars to banks outside the country.
Mr. Zakhilwal emphatically denied the allegations and insisted that a smear campaign was under way. He has explained the payments from businesses as consulting fees, although some were earned while he was holding public office, and he has endeavored to explain the bank transfers as well. He has family members in Canada and has sent some of the money there. The size of the transactions, however, has raised questions, as have some transfers to banks outside the country.
In an emotional meeting last week with foreign diplomats who have been among his strongest backers, Mr. Zakhilwal, who had been expected to discuss the recent donors’ meeting in Tokyo, made an emotional appeal, saying he was the target of political enemies and pulling out his bank statements to show to the assembled diplomats. At one point, overwhelmed, he left the room to collect himself, returning a few moments later.
“It was a bit awkward,” one of the diplomats said. “What could you say? Most of us were silent.”
Azizullah Ludin, the head of Afghanistan’s commission on corruption, said he was concerned that neither his office nor any other could do a thorough investigation into the finances of Mr. Zakhilwal while the finance minister was still in his job, since Mr. Zakhilwal’s associates at the ministry would protect him.
“If Zakhilwal is in the ministry, we won’t be able to do a free investigation and he may create problems for our staff,” Mr. Ludin said. “If he is in his post he might ask his employees and team not to speak with our investigative team or not let us get access to the documents linking him with corruption.”
Mr. Zakhilwal has offered to show the government his bank records and has gone so far as to request an investigation from the attorney general’s office.
An assistant to the finance minister, Najibullah Manali, said the oversight office on corruption had not contacted the ministry and did not have investigative authority. Nonetheless, Mr. Zakhilwal welcomes the investigation, he said.
“The minister has made clear in a press conference that he has asked the attorney general’s office to investigate his case and find the truth,” Mr. Manali said. “When the attorney general’s office asks us for help, we will welcome it and stand ready to help them.”
Whatever the outcome, the situation has left Western donors nervous about whom they will be able to trust with the first installments of the $16 billion in aid they expect to donate over the next four years.
“If the Finance Ministry is corrupt, where do you go with mutual accountability?” another foreign diplomat said. “It becomes a pretty dire equation.”
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
Senators Accuse Karzai, His Family of Corruption
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 12 August 2012
Afghan senators on Sunday accused President Hamid Karzai, some of his family members, his two vice presidents and several cabinet members of corruption.
Senate chairman Fazel Hadi Muslimyar said some members of the Karzai family and some politicians close to Mr Karzai took money from several banks in Afghanistan but predicted they will never be prosecuted. He said finance minister Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal would also probably escape prosecution.
He added, however, that if an investigation indicated Mr Zakhilwal was corrupt, the Senate would be the first institution to help the judiciary bring him to justice and put him in prison.
"The president, his family members, his deputies and his cabinet members are involved in corruption and looted banks and none of them were prosecuted. If the allegations about the finance minister are proved, the Senate would the first organ to help in his prosecution and put him in jail," Mr Muslimyar said.
Meanwhile, several other senators accused the government of turning a blind eye to Mr Zakhilwal's alleged corruption. They urged Mr Karzai to break his silence on the matter.
Senator Nesar Ahmad Ares raised concerns about the dual citizenship many government officials hold, saying this permits people who are accused of corruption the flee the country before they face justice. He urged President Karzai to look into the matter.
President Karzai is under pressure to rein in corruption in his administration. At a conference in Tokyo in July, donors said Afghanistan will get the $16 billion in aid money pledged only if serious efforts are made to stamp out graft and nepotism.
Afghan Policeman Fires on NATO Troops
VOA News August 13, 2012
Officials say an Afghan police officer has opened fire on U.S.-led NATO troops, in the fifth such attack in a week.
A NATO spokesman told reporters that a man wearing civilian clothes fired on international forces in the eastern province of Nangarhar on Monday, but that no coalition service members were killed. The spokesman said an initial investigation indicates the man is an Afghan police officer. The gunman reportedly escaped.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting, the latest in a string of so-called "green on blue" attacks in which Afghan security forces or attackers wearing their uniform turn their weapons on international forces.
At least 37 coalition soldiers have been killed in at least 27 such attacks so far this year, with seven deaths since Friday.
Separately on Monday, Afghan officials say a roadside bomb in the northern province of Takhar killed five people, including a district mayor and provincial peace council member.
District Mayor Abdul Aziz and council member Haji Hashim were killed in the blast Monday in the Ishkamish district.
Authorities blame the attack on the Taliban.
On Monday, the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, James Cunningham, told reporters in Kabul there are signs that the Taliban is considering peace talks with the Afghan government. He said "there are contacts taking place, mostly at this point among Afghans -- Taliban and Afghans."
Afghan officials said this week that they have held secret talks with the a former Taliban military chief, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who has been in Pakistani custody since his arrest in Karachi in 2010.
Ambassador Cunningham did not address the reports directly, but said "there are a number of different elements at play. None of them are yet definitive, but we do see signs there is some rethinking going on among the Taliban about the future choices they face."
Also Monday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai appointed former defense minister Abdul Rahim Wardak as his special advisor. Wardak resigned last week after losing a vote of confidence in parliament for alleged security failures.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
37 NATO soldiers killed in insider attacks in Afghanistan this year
KABUL, Aug. 13 (Xinhua)-- Thirty seven soldiers with the NATO- led coalition have been killed in the so-called green-on-blue attacks since beginning this year across the post-Taliban Afghanistan, a coalition spokesman said Monday.
"So when we talk about insider raid some call green-on-blue incidence, we talk about 27 incidents so far in this year and we had 37 people killed in those incidents," a spokesman with the coalition or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Brigadier General Gunter Katz told reporters in a regular press briefing here.
However, he said the ISAF and Afghan army and police officials have been working to check such incidents.
In the latest so-called green-on-blue attacks, a total of six NATO-led ISAF soldiers lost their lives in a single day Friday in the country's southern province of Helmand.
The Taliban insurgents, who have been waging more than a decade- long insurgency and launched spring offensive from May 3 this year to target security forces, have regularly claimed responsibility for the insider attacks or green-on-blue offensives.
The ISAF spokesman said that the Afghan army and police continue to stick in the "eight-point vetting system" which was set up in 2009 for vetting recruits to the rank of national police and the army as a bid to prevent any possible Taliban infiltration into the security entities.
Meantime, in a similar incident, two members of Afghan National Police (ANP) shot dead seven colleagues in Dilaram district of southwestern Nimroz province on Saturday.
Afghan Officials Give Contradictory Accounts Of Reported Taliban Meeting
By RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal August 13, 2012
ISLAMABAD -- Afghan officials have given contradictory responses to reports that an Afghan delegation met two months ago with imprisoned former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Pakistan.
Muhammad Ismail Qasimyar, a member of Afghanistan's High Peace Council, confirmed the reports, telling AFP the meeting focused on possible peace talks.
However, Zardhasht Shams, a spokesman for the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad, told RFE/RL that "no such meeting has taken place."
Baradar is the most important detained Taliban leader and was a trusted aide to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.
When he was arrested in 2010 in Pakistan, Kabul said his detention had adversely affected efforts to talk with the insurgents.
Qasimyar said Kabul had asked Islamabad to release Baradar "because he has shown interest in peace talks."
With reporting by AFP and AP
Double blasts kill 5, wound 5 in Afghanistan in single day
by Abdul Haleem, Chen Xin
KABUL, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- Twin bomb blasts that shocked the northern Takhar and eastern Nangarhar provinces in a single day on Monday have claimed the lives of five people while injuring five others, officials confirmed.
The offensives apparently are targeted ones and all the victims are civilians and obviously the government servicemen.
In the latest attack, a roadside bomb struck the vehicle of the mayor of Ashkamish district in Takhar province 245 km north of Afghan capital Kabul, leaving five people dead.
"The deadly incident happened in Ashkamish district at 11:50 a. m. local time and as a result five people including the mayor of Ashkamish district along with four others were killed," spokesman for provincial administration Faizullah Tawhidi told Xinhua.
Meantime, an official who declined to give his name said that a member of the High Council for Peace in Takhar, a government- backed body convincing Taliban militants to give up fighting and resume normal life was also killed in the blast.
Tawhidi put the attack on the Taliban militants, saying the outfit by organizing such attacks wants to destabilize the province. However Taliban militants fighting the government are yet to comment.
In a similar incident which took place earlier in Jalalabad city, the capital of Nangarhar province 120 km east of Kabul, five civilians were injured.
"The blast occurred at around 8 a.m. local time Monday and five people including four government service members with the provincial justice department and a passer-by were injured," spokesman for provincial government Ahmad Zia Abdulzai told Xinhua.
He also stated that an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) was placed in a rickshaw parked on Masjedi Eidgah road and was detonated by a remote control device when the car of the victims was passing the area.
Violent incidents mostly in the shape of roadside bombings and suicide attacks have been on the rise since the Taliban outfit launched a spring offensive on May 3 this year.
The armed outfit has said anyone working for the government and the NATO-led troops are legitimate targets.
Conflict-related violence, according to a report of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan released last week, between Jan. 1 and June 30 this year, 1,145 civilians were killed and 1,954 injured, and IEDs accounted for 33 percent of all the civilian casualties - killing 327 and injuring 689.
Defence feared links with Afghan warlord would erode support for forces
Sydney Morning Herald By Philip Dorling August 13, 2012
SENIOR Defence Department officials feared the WikiLeaks exposé of secret US military reports would undermine public support for the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan, according to newly released briefing papers.
Reports about a corrupt Afghan warlord who works closely with Australian special forces were considered particularly sensitive.
More than two years after WikiLeaks published more than 75,000 leaked US reports on Afghanistan, the Defence Department has finally released, under freedom-of-information law, its assessment of the massive security breach.
In a confidential brief submitted to the former defence minister John Faulkner, Defence warned that WikiLeaks's July 2010 release of the ''Afghan War Logs'' was a matter of high political sensitivity that "could adversely affect public perceptions of the [International Security Assistance Force] campaign, [and] ADF operations in Afghanistan''.
Although Defence advised that WikiLeaks did not compromise the safety of Australian soldiers, the department's deputy secretary, Peter Jennings, highlighted the website's disclosures concerning the Afghan warlord Matiollah Khan, ''an influential figure based in Oruzgan province who has worked with US and Australian forces over the course of several years''.
Although some of the Defence briefing concerning the warlord has been redacted on national security grounds, reference was made to ''WikiLeaks materials describ[ing] some of Matiollah Khan's operations, an incident where his brother was given what appears to be special treatment by US troops, and an incident where a suicide bomber attempted to infiltrate his compound''.
However, the leaked US military reports reviewed by Defence also included references to ''credible accounts" that Mr Khan "operates protection rackets, skims from the [police] payroll, and is involved in the illegal narcotics trade''.
Appointed the Oruzgan police chief in 2011, Mr Khan has earned more than $45 million from NATO and Australian construction, fuel and security contracts. Dutch forces in Oruzgan refused to work with the warlord who is suspected of extortion, torture and having dealings with the Taliban insurgency.
Another US report released by WikiLeaks showed the US embassy in Kabul warned the heroin trade in Oruzgan was ubiquitous, infecting all aspects of the provincial administration and ''corrupting public officials''.
However Australian officials publicly insist that Oruzgan's governor and other officials, including Mr Khan, have improved services and opposed corruption. Mr Khan continues to be a key Australian ally, working closely with Australian special forces and some of his militia fighters have trained with the ADF in Australia.
The released briefing papers show the government waited more than two months, until October 24, 2010, before publicly acknowledging that WikiLeaks had not harmed ADF operations or security.
The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, announced in April that the ADF will withdraw from Afghanistan before the end of next year, a year ahead of schedule.
The WikiLeaks website has been offline for the past week owing to a massive distributed denial of service attack allegedly conducted by American hackers
Afghanistan’s Taliban Wish Al Qaeda Would Go Away
Many in the Taliban are sick of their longtime allies. But how do you dump a terrorist group?
The Daily Beast By Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai Aug 13, 2012
Agha jan Motasim knows firsthand the hazards of crossing al Qaeda. A year ago the Taliban regime’s former treasury minister was caught in a hail of bullets and left for dead on a street in Karachi. Somehow Motasim survived the shooting—and he prudently didn’t publicly accuse the global terrorist group of nearly killing him, although many of his supporters had no doubt who had ordered it. After all, what had Motasim expected when he urged his fellow Afghan insurgents to disown al Qaeda and seek a political solution in Afghanistan? But Motasim stuck to his beliefs: in an exclusive telephone interview earlier this year, he told The Daily Beast that he would not be silenced and that many senior Taliban commanders shared his desire for an end to the bloodshed.
No sooner were Motasim’s words published than he received a reply. Intermediaries relayed a message from a senior al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, warning him to stop talking about peace and to quit trying to disrupt the longstanding ties between the Taliban and al Qaeda. Motasim has not given up urging the Afghan insurgents to reopen their talks with the Americans. But the Taliban can’t ignore al Qaeda’s long and deadly reach. “Al Qaeda is a big threat to any kind of peaceful solution and to anyone who would be part of a deal,” says a former senior Taliban minister. “Al Qaeda still has easy access to senior Taliban leaders and is still strong enough to convince them—by threat or otherwise—that they should not talk to the infidel enemy and not abandon al Qaeda,” Motasim tells Newsweek.
Months after Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar called an abrupt halt to the Qatar peace talks, U.S. and Taliban officials keep looking for a way to revive them. Participants say the discussion broke down when Omar lost patience over the pace of a proposed prisoner swap. He seemed not to understand why the Americans couldn’t simply order the release of five of his top commanders from U.S. custody at Guantánamo Bay in exchange for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was captured by the insurgents in June 2009.
In fact, however, far larger obstacles stand in the way of a peace deal, and the biggest of all is al Qaeda. There may be some room for interpretation in Washington’s other two demands—that the Taliban renounce violence and accept the Afghan Constitution—but the third is flatly nonnegotiable. Unless Omar’s group completely severs its ties to al Qaeda, the war in Afghanistan will continue indefinitely, regardless of the promised withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in 2014. “Break ties with al Qaeda,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded last year. “Refuse and you will continue to face the consequences of being tied to al Qaeda as an enemy of the international community.”
The worry is that the Taliban might prove equally unwavering. Out of pride, Islamist ideology, or simple fear, Mullah Omar could be willing to lose everything once again for al Qaeda’s sake, just as he did after 9/11, when he rejected the advice of both his cabinet and his senior religious council to avert the otherwise inevitable U.S. invasion by expelling Osama bin Laden.
The awful part is this: many of Omar’s followers desperately wish they knew how to get rid of their so-called allies in al Qaeda. It’s true that senior Taliban commanders often value the group’s tactical and technical advice, and they respect its strict ideology and unflinching determination. “The Taliban is still technically dependent on al Qaeda for making bombs and IEDs and planning sophisticated attacks, particularly in the cities,” says a senior adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But on the whole, the jihadi group’s surviving members are more of a liability than an asset to the Afghan insurgents, constantly depending on them for protection and sustenance.
Most Taliban commanders and fighters inside Afghanistan would be only too glad to see the last of bin Laden’s men. Drone attacks and relentless pursuit by U.S. forces have reduced the foreign jihadis’ presence to small roving bands of seven to 10 Arabs and Pakistanis, mostly from the tribal areas, as well as a few from the Punjab. But those remnants continue to pose nothing but trouble for their Afghan hosts, behaving almost as if they want to antagonize everyone in sight. Among other things, the hardline Wahhabis have a habit of mocking local customs as supposedly un-Islamic and of preventing villagers from praying at the shrines of Sufi saints. “They insult villagers by calling them pagans and ‘polytheist Muslims,’” says a Taliban commander in Ghazni province.
The Ghazni commander says he and his men are struggling just to survive, and he blames the jihadis for alienating the local population. If his men try to launch a military operation or plant IEDs, unsympathetic villagers tip off the Americans and the Afghan security forces, the commander complains. He has been having particular problems with a 10-man al Qaeda group urging him to launch mortar attacks on villages that have stopped supporting the Taliban. “We told them no,” he says. “Indiscriminate shelling will turn more people against us.” How did the al Qaeda unit’s leader respond? “You’re ignorant,” the Arab told the Taliban commander. “You cannot make concessions to these nonbelievers.”
Similar problems have plagued Abdul Qayyum, a Taliban commander in neighboring Paktika province. About two months ago Qayyum asked the al Qaeda fighters embedded in his area to head back to Pakistan, saying the local resistance no longer needed their help. They refused to leave. “You can’t stop us from jihad in Afghanistan,” the jihadi group’s leader told the Taliban commander. Tensions between the insurgents and al Qaeda are running dangerously high, Qayyum says: “These Arab jihadists do not care for their own lives and the lives of others. With talk of peace and breaking with al Qaeda, these guys don’t trust us anymore.” At night the al Qaeda fighters insist on posting their own sentries rather than relying on Qayyum’s men for security. “They even sleep with one finger on the trigger of their AK-47s,” he adds. He says he has written letters to the Taliban’s Pakistan-based ruling council, the Quetta Shura, requesting advice and intercession, but so far he’s had no luck. “No one has replied,” Qayyum says. “They are also afraid of al Qaeda.”
Afraid of what? Bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants, together with hundreds of his former foot soldiers who once prowled Afghanistan and Pakistan. And yet al Qaeda may still wield more influence on the ground than outsiders might imagine. From the earliest days of the war against the Soviets, in 1979, the region began attracting the Arab jihadis who would become al Qaeda’s nucleus. When the Russians left, a decade later, bin Laden went home to Saudi Arabia, but hundreds of his fighters instead chose to settle down near their former rear bases in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where they married into local families with strong connections on both sides of the border.
Bin Laden got a hero’s welcome on his return home from the war against the Soviets, but he soon fell out with the Saudi government. He ended up in Sudan, which in turn expelled him under threat of U.S. and U.N. sanctions in 1996. With nowhere better to go, he returned to Afghanistan, just in time to witness the Taliban’s rise to power. The al Qaeda leader brought financial assistance to Mullah Omar’s fledgling regime, along with thousands of experienced and fearless jihadis to assist in the war against the anti-Taliban holdouts known collectively as the Northern Alliance. “The Arabs were the most successful fighters I have seen in my 20 years in the jihad,” recalls Mullah Hayatullah, who served as a top commander for the Taliban-allied Haqqani network until he was disabled by war wounds in 2010. “They had harder bones than we did.”
But bin Laden proved to be a most untrustworthy ally. Having called so many foreign fighters to his side, he felt free to do as he pleased. Ignoring Omar’s protests, he hosted press conferences at his bases in eastern Afghanistan at which he delivered inflammatory anti-Western diatribes, such as his August 1996 declaration of war against America. At the same time, the terrorist leader seems to have given his hosts no clue that he was using their country as a planning center for attacks against the West. In the wake of 9/11, Omar didn’t know what to do with bin Laden. “He’s like a chicken bone caught in my throat,” the Taliban leader was quoted as saying. “I can’t swallow it or cough it up.” With the fate of his regime in the balance, he refused to evict his troublesome guest. “In the end Mullah Omar couldn’t say no to bin Laden,” says another of Omar’s former ministers. “Sheltering bin Laden and al Qaeda was the Taliban’s biggest mistake. Al Qaeda used us and then threw us away like tissue paper.”
With that in mind, many longtime Taliban members don’t see why they must remain wedded to the now debilitated terrorist group. “I’d say 70 percent of our leaders and commanders are not in favor of maintaining links to al Qaeda,” says the second former Taliban minister, who still plays an important role in the insurgency. “To me, this is a good time to say goodbye to al Qaeda.” Nevertheless, he adds: “To do so we need a consensus, and arriving at that is not easy.”
And al Qaeda is doing its best to keep it that way. The members of the Quetta Shura are keenly aware of how deadly their old associates can be. “Al Qaeda has sent messages to high individuals on the council, warning them not to talk peace and not to betray their fellow jihadis,” says a senior Taliban intelligence officer. If they tried to dump al Qaeda, he says, the terrorist group would strike back with all its might. “They would declare a jihad against us,” he says. Hayatullah adds: “No one on our supreme council will take the decision to propose divorcing ourselves from al Qaeda. Whoever dared knows he would be targeted.” And the second former Taliban minister agrees. “We know that the day we cut relations with al Qaeda, it would turn on us suddenly like a snake,” he says.
The terrorist group has warned even its closest friends among the Afghan insurgents, like Sirajuddin Haqqani, the tactical chief of the notorious Haqqani network and son of its patriarch, Jalaluddin Haqqani. “Al Qaeda cautioned Siraj that if the Taliban’s shura turns against it, al Qaeda will make kebabs of all those following the Americans,” says Hakim Akhund, a commander in the network. Although the family and its militia have been ensconced for decades in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal agency, other insurgents say the Haqqanis would lose some powerful friends there if they broke with al Qaeda. “If the Haqqanis started to turn against al Qaeda, the locals would turn against the Haqqanis,” says the former senior minister. “The Haqqanis would have to answer to a big number of Pakistani Taliban commanders, mullahs, and tribal elders who believe al Qaeda’s fighters are holier warriors than the Taliban.”
A few weeks ago Sirajuddin Haqqani sent one of his subcommanders to help deliver a load of weapons and a large amount of cash to a group of beleaguered insurgent forces in northern Afghanistan. Traveling with Mullah Sangher were five suicide bombers and several al Qaeda IED experts led by a 50-year-old Egyptian. Along the way, the Egyptian and a younger companion from Yemen gave Sangher an earful of their disdain for the Taliban’s less-than-absolute commitment to endless jihad. The Egyptian said al Qaeda leaders had sent several strongly worded letters to the Quetta Shura via Haqqani couriers since last April. “Stop talking to the Americans while you are winning the war,” the letters warned. “Making peace deals is a betrayal of Islam,” the Egyptian told Sangher. “It’s like knifing the jihad in the back.” The Yemeni promised Sangher that al Qaeda will fight on, with or without the Taliban. “We will not give up this great ground of jihad easily,” he said.
Taliban members don’t think al Qaeda’s threats of retribution are a bluff. In April, a small group of gunmen in Peshawar nearly succeeded in kidnapping the son of Maulvi Shahabuddin Dilawar, one of Mullah Omar’s negotiators at the Qatar talks, “It was an attempt to silence those who want to talk peace and we know al Qaeda was behind it,” says the Taliban intelligence officer.
Al Qaeda has inflicted much harsher punishments on former allies who have incurred its wrath. Mullah Nazir, one of the group’s most loyal friends among the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan decided a few years ago that he could no longer tolerate the brutality of the al Qaeda contingent based in his area. The foreigners, mostly ethnic Uzbeks and Chechens, had been abusing local villagers, even imprisoning some in deep pits. Nazir finally ordered his men to drive the jihadis out of the area, and dozens of the thugs were killed.
The terrorist group’s revenge was swift. Its gunmen attempted to kill Nazir and succeeded in killing several of his top commanders, along with dozens of villagers, whose bodies were dumped in caves. Hakim says no one in the tribal area is safe from al Qaeda’s anger. “Al Qaeda could assassinate anyone they want among the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas,” he says.
No one can be sure just what Mullah Omar thinks of all this. He hasn’t been seen in public since the collapse of his regime in 2001, and these days he communicates with his followers only rarely, by letter. Motasim says he doubts even now that the Taliban leader would favor abandoning his jihadist allies. And if Omar were to issue such an order, the former senior minister suspects that some commanders would refuse to obey it. “There would be a big rift among the Taliban,” he says. Nevertheless, he’s convinced that it’s the only way to bring peace to Afghanistan—and that after all these years, the Afghan people deserve to live in peace. “The Taliban must take its distance slowly from al Qaeda,” he says. “It will take time.”
It’s doubtful in any case that al Qaeda will go away quietly. And its supporters within the Taliban may be a minority, but they’re determined to keep fighting. Motasim is likely to wait a long time before his dream comes true.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent, and has been covering the region for the magazine for the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
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Bamiyan Buddhas: Should they be rebuilt?
BBC News By Stephanie Hegarty BBC World Service 12 August 2012
The destruction of Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 led to global condemnation of the Taleban regime. But the decision by Unesco not to rebuild them has not put an end to the debate about their future.
When the Taliban were at the height of their power in Afghanistan, leader Mullah Omar waged a war against idolatry.
His biggest victims, in size as well as symbolism, were two standing stone Buddhist statues. Once the largest in the world - one measured 55 metres in height - they were carved into the sandstone cliff face of the Bamiyan valley in central Afghanistan during the 6th Century.
When the Taliban were overthrown in 2003, Unesco declared the valley a world heritage site and archaeologists flocked to it. What they found were two enormous empty caverns and a pile of debris littered with unexploded mines.
Since then, they have been surveying the rubble of the two stone structures to determine whether the Buddhas should be rebuilt.
The Bamiyan valley marked the most westerly point of Buddhist expansion and was a crucial hub of trade for much of the last millennium. It was a place where East met West and its archaeology reveals a blend of Greek, Turkish, Persian, Chinese and Indian influence that is found nowhere else in the world.
But last year, Unesco announced that it was no longer considering reconstruction. In the case of the bigger Buddha, it was decided there wasn't enough left to rebuild and though rebuilding the smaller one is possible, they said it is unlikely to happen.
Instead they are working with teams from Japan and Italy to secure the cracking cliff face and keep the cliffs and any of the remaining wall paintings that once covered the caves and niches intact.
But a German group of archaeological conservationists, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos), are still pushing for the Buddha to be rebuilt.
Bert Praxenthaler works alongside Icomos and since 2004 he has been working on the site to salvage any remaining fragments of the sculpture, some weighing up to 40 tonnes and putting them under a protective covering to preserve them as best he can.
He is interested in a process called anastylois which involves putting these fragments back together using a minimal amount of new materials.
"It's a jigsaw puzzle with missing links but with geological methods we can discover where those fragments have been before," says Praxenthaler.
The method has been used on the Parthenon and the Acropolis in Athens but it would be the first time it is used to reconstruct a monument that was intentionally destroyed and arguments against reconstruction abound.
Not least is money. Rebuilding just the small Buddha would cost millions of dollars in a region that lacks basic infrastructure such as roads and electricity. It would require the manufacture or import of a huge amounts of metal which would have to travel along the dangerous road from Kabul.
"Of course the counter argument to that is that jaw-dropping sums of money are spent in Afghanistan every day," says Dr Llewelyn Morgan, author of The Buddhas of Bamiyan, a history of the sculptures. "This would be a drop in the ocean."
Still, Morgan says, there are more pressing issues that archaeologists need to look at in Afghanistan. "Bamiyan has a tendency to draw all archaeological resources to it," he says. "But in Afghanistan you are looking at an astonishing archaeological treasure trove."
Looting is a very big problem and artefacts from around the country often end up in art markets in Pakistan. Morgan believes that resources would be better spent on creating an infrastructure to protect the breadth of Afghanistan's ancient treasures.
In a recent Huffington Post article he publicised the case of Chehel Burj, a medieval fortress in the mountains to the west of Bamiyan that is suffering from degradation.
"Give it time and illicit treasure hunting, earthquakes and old-fashioned freeze-thaw action will destroy more than the most single-minded iconoclast could ever dream of," he said.
Unesco are raising similar concerns and is funding the construction of a Museum for Peace at Bamiyan to promote awareness of Afghanistan's cultural heritage.
But whatever the reason, the Bamiyan Buddhas have captured the international imagination and ideas for what to do with the site still pour in from archaeologists, architects, artists and historians.
One that has gained quite a lot of attention is a proposal from Italian architect Andrea Bruno to construct a small underground sanctuary at the foot of the Great Buddha which would allow visitors to look up at and appreciate the immensity of the empty niche.
Bruno believes the niches should be preserved as a monument to the crime of their destruction. "It is a kind of victory for the monument and a defeat for those who tried to obliterate its memory with dynamite," he says.
He argues that reconstruction would be culturally insensitive. "Here the Muslims strictly oppose images - to recreate the Buddhas would be an insult even to non-Taliban Afghans. We must show good manners," he says.
But Praxenthaler believes that reconstruction is a matter of local pride for the Hazara people, Shia Muslims who were targeted and persecuted by the Taliban.
"It wasn't just a religious fatwa, to destroy all the idols, it was also an attempt to destroy the culture and the background and the pride of the people," he says. "The Hazara people appreciated that we were going to help them do something with their destroyed Buddhas."
He also says that reconstruction would enrich the local economy. His project has already employed over 50 people for salvaging and has also helped to train students from Bamiyan University in ancient stone-cutting techniques.
"People are building homes and they are employed by us, they are working and they get a decent salary."
Llewelyn Morgan, who last visited the site a year ago, also found reconstruction to be popular among locals for whom the Buddhas were once a great source of income from tourists.
"The impression you get in Bamiyan is that they are almost too naively positive about the reconstruction of the Buddha," says Morgan. "I've spoken to people who would like to see it go up in concrete, which of course Unesco would never countenance."
But the reception to rebuilding in the rest of the country is unpredictable.
"Afghanistan is a great melting pot of cultures but the one thing many of them share is they are very pious," says Morgan.
"Though many clerics and religious leaders may not have agreed with the destruction of religious idols, building them again is an entirely different matter."
www.afghanistannewscenter.com