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Karzai Accuses Taliban Of 'Massacre Of Muslims'
September 5, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has denounced the Taliban killing of civilians as "massacres of Muslims."
The comments follow a suicide attack on a funeral in eastern Afghanistan on September 4 that killed 25 and injured 30.
In a written statement, Kazai said: "The enemy of Islam and of Afghanistan must understand that they will never succeed by pressuring the public through such brutal acts of terror to achieve their heinous goals."
Karzai also spoke to Haji Hamisha Gul, the district governor of Dur Baba, where the attack happened, and expressed his condolences and sympathies over the loss of his son and members of his community.
Late last month, Karzai traveled to southwestern Nimroz Province to sympathize with the victims of twin suicide attacks in a crowded bazaar that killed at least 36 people.
'Hundreds' Arrested In Afghanistan Over 'Insider' Attacks
September 5, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan officials say "hundreds" of Afghan soldiers have been arrested or expelled from the army as officials crack down on a rising number of attacks on NATO-led troops by members of the Afghan security forces.
Defense Ministry spokesman General Zahir Azimi told a news conference that the attacks are "a matter of concern" for the Afghan government.
On September 2, the U.S. military announced that its special forces have suspended training for about 1,000 Afghan police recruits in order to investigate existing security force members.
Members of the Afghan security forces have opened fire on their Western allies more than 30 times so far this year, killing at least 45 foreign troops.
Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for many of the attacks, saying their fighters have infiltrated the army and police.
Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters
20 Civilians Killed, 50 More Injured in Nangarhar Suicide Attack
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 04 September 2012
At least 20 civilians were killed and more than 50 others were injured in a suicide bomb attack in eastern Nangarhar province on Tuesday afternoon, the Ministry of Interior (MOI) said.
The attack took place about 3:00PM local time in the province's Dur Ba Ba district when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at the funeral ceremony, the MOI said in a statement.
All the victims are civilians, provincial spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai told TOLOnews.
Among the injured who were taken to the nearby hospital for treatment were district governor Haji Hamisha Gul and his brother, Abdulzai said.
However, one of Gul's sons was killed.
Gul has been the governor of Dur Ba Ba district for two years and is a well-known person in the district.
No group including the Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack.
The attack comes just three days after a double suicide attack in the Sayed Abad district of central-eastern Maiden Wardak province killed at least 14 people and injured scores of others, with some estimates put at around 60.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack, which he said was targeting the US base nearby. The dead and most of the injured were Afghan civilians.
Are We Winning in Afghanistan?
An exclusive interview with Gen. John Allen, commander of America's forgotten war.
Foreign Policy INTERVIEW BY GORDON LUBOLD SEPTEMBER 5, 2012
The lack of a clearly defined narrative about Afghanistan, combined with election noise and economic worries in the United States, has pushed the war out of the American consciousness. In recent weeks, the spate of insider attacks put it back on the media's map, temporarily. But the next several months will in many ways shape the U.S. exit between now and December 2014. Soon, we will learn how many troops will remain in the country. We'll learn what impact attacks on militants may have on the battlefield. We'll see if the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) can truly stand on their own. And we'll learn just how fast U.S. forces will be sent to the exits.
FP's Gordon Lubold sat down with Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), in his office in Kabul on Aug. 29 -- as he scrambled to stop the insider attacks against U.S. forces and just over two months before he submits his recommendation to President Barack Obama on the size of the force he thinks he'll need through next year. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
In addition to troop levels and the state of the ANSF, Allen talked about a new phenomenon in the war: a series of local uprisings that remain disconnected from each other and the Afghan government but that could possibly come together to pose a serious threat to the Taliban. Talking at greater length about the uprisings than he has before, and drawing a link to the Anbar Awakening in Iraq, Allen said, "This is a really important moment for this campaign because the brutality of the Taliban and the desire for local communities to have security has become so, so prominent -- as it was in Anbar -- that they're willing to take the situation into their own hands to do this."
Meanwhile, Allen provided some insight into how he will frame his report to the president: "The battle space has really changed. I used to say how much combat power I'm going to need. It's not any longer a pure measure of combat power, because much of what is generating success for us is less about conventional maneuver units than it is about the combination of conventional maneuver units with the success that is being achieved with the security force assistance." The Afghans, he says, are really stepping up to the task. Washington will certainly be watching to see whether he is right.
Foreign Policy: Thanks again for sitting down with us. I am particularly interested in these uprisings in the east and how you view them. They are in their nascency, but I am told they may be a significant trend down the line. Are we talking "Andar Awakening"?
Gen. John Allen: They're actually calling it the Andar Awakening ... to plagiarize our Anbar Awakening. [But] let me just make a couple of general remarks. It's been a pretty busy summer. We're about 20 days from finishing up the recovery of the surge. We are inserting our Security Force Assistance Teams. We're reposturing the battle space to account for that. The ANSF is really taking over much more of the fighting than it has done in the past. The Security Force Assistance Teams are really accelerating that.
Unprompted by me, as I circulate in the battle space, the brigade commanders are uniformly, in different regional commands, using the term "game-changer" with the Security Force Assistance Teams in really accelerating where we want the ANSF to go. So the recovery of the surge, the reposturing of the battle space, the insertion of the Security Force Assistance Teams, the ANSF moving more into the lead, fighting the insurgency, the beginning of the base closure....
All of that has been going on this summer.... On the whole, the campaign is on track.
What I have been asked in the past is, "When are you shifting the main effort from the south to the east?" And I respond with, "That's not the question." I'm weighting the fight in the east because they need the resources, 'cause that, that insurgent fight is different than the insurgent fight everywhere else in the battle space. But I'm shifting the main effort right now, and the main effort is shifting in that we, ISAF, will become the supporting effort. The ANSF will become the main effort....
FP: Is that where you wanted to be in terms of the schedule, the ANSF taking over?
Allen: It's actually ahead of time.... What you see I have in the battle space now is a combination of advisors and main-force units. The advisors are inside the Afghan units. The main-force units are partnered with them or are conducting independent ops, and there are really very few independent ISAF operations anymore. It is very, very substantially partnered, and in many cases they are actually ANSF-led.
Now I just came back from [Regional Command-East], where I spent a good bit of time earlier this week with both of the ANSF corps commanders. We're seeing the ANSF routinely conduct operations now from squad level to corps level. I mean, they're running the entire spectrum of operations. Do they need help? The answer is yes. They need a lot of help still, because we still haven't recruited the whole force. Which I think is important for people to understand. We've probably got another 15,000 to 20,000 to go [to get to a total force of 352,000]. But we don't finish the whole build of the force until December of next year. So I'm actually pretty pleased with where the ANSF is right now, given where they were just two years ago. But much work remains to be done. We've got enablers that have to come online. We've got to build their capabilities to employ, for example, artillery. We've got to work very hard on their sustainment and resupply capabilities.
FP: Which means airlift, for example --
Allen: Airlift, and we can talk about the air piece of it. That is one that has got a lot of my attention, and it's going to be a long time to fix that actually. But the sustainment piece of this, as I actually was saying just this morning to my leaders, a young army might do quite well in close combat, but young armies fail typically to sustain themselves. And so we're putting a tremendous amount of effort, actually, into engendering habits of sustainment. And it's everything from being able to properly convoy the equipment and the fuels and that sort of thing to the various places for distribution to getting the spare parts to the mechanics so they can turn the wrenches in the motor pools to keep the vehicles up.
FP: You just returned from the east. Tell me about these uprisings against the Taliban and how you see them.
Allen: They're really an important moment, actually. And I had the conversation with [President Hamid Karzai] this morning. Each, each one is an organic movement. And they're popping up in a lot of different places. We're going to start to plot them on a map -- we've actually done it already -- but we're going to do some analysis as to, is it tribal? Is it ethnic? What was the particular cause? What is the potential solution?
[Andar district in Ghazni province] is the most conspicuous right now, but there's another really substantial one that's growing in Kamdesh in southern Nuristan. There's one growing in Wardak. There's one growing in Ghor. We've heard of one in Faryab.
And so what we have to do is, as I said to [Karzai] this morning, it's not just about supporting Andar in Ghazni. This is a really important moment for this campaign because the brutality of the Taliban and the desire for local communities to have security has become so, so prominent -- as it was in Anbar -- that they're willing to take the situation into their own hands to do this.
FP: What is the proper role for ISAF to play here?
Allen: We're not playing a role. If we do at all, it will be always through GIRoA [government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] ... because we don't want an uprising to appear to be responsive to us. We want it to be responsive to the local conditions, and we ultimately would like to see GIRoA be the solution for them. And that's the right thing to do.
So I think that as we analyze each one of these, each one started for a different reason, and so we've got to be sensitive to the kinds of assistance. When I say "we," I always mean GIRoA, the Afghan government. It has to be sensitive to why it started and how conceivably it can help the people. They ought to want to help the people. And how they might help the people is going to be different in each place. It could be about local employment. It could be about a school. It could be about a clinic. It could be about fresh water. Just a little bit of help gives the people in that village, or cluster of villages, a choice for the first time. Because right now their only choice is fighting the Taliban or being repressed by the Taliban.
FP: Could the kind of assistance these villages might be provided include arms?
Allen: The answer is yes, but that's a decision made by the Afghans.
FP: You seem fairly bullish on this trend.
Allen: I think it is.... In fact, when I first visited Ghazni in August of last year, Andar was considered almost terra incognita. We had to fight into Andar and fight out of Andar. Now Andar is a place that's completely different. And this will be, for Afghans who are watching the world unfold for them, what they're seeing is that the ANSF has created a security bubble in a lot of places around the country. Now there's still a lot of fighting that's going on, but there are people that now -- again, the conversation with the president today -- there are places in this country where the people can have a post-conflict conversation.
We saw this in Anbar. It is very much like what we experienced in Anbar. Now is the time to surge capabilities for governance and economic opportunity into the "white space" that has been created by and largely by the Afghan forces. So that's one condition that's being seen in the battle space. But another condition that's being seen in the battle space is what we just talked about, which is people who are tired of the constant oppression and the nature of the quality of their life inflicted on them by the Taliban. They want something different, but they don't really have any choices. And so this gives them a choice as well.
FP: I understand the need to put an Afghan face on this. But to whatever extent the Afghan government plays a role, they'll still need coalition assistance, say, in the form of a coalition helicopter. Suddenly the help looks very Western, right?
Allen: I'm telling you right now, we're resupplying in Kamdesh using Afghan Army helicopters. They're getting up there. They're doing it. They've inserted commandos up there. They're resupplying local elements up there. They're maintaining the ANP [Afghan National Police] in some key checkpoints and strong points. They're maintaining them. Every now and again, they'll run out of helicopters, and we'll help 'em. But part of this is a genuine effort, a genuine desire on behalf of the Afghans to truly make this an Afghan spontaneous uprising, but an Afghan-supported effort, too. Which I think is great.
FP: Let's just say you're leaving ISAF by next spring. Do you have so much hope in this that things could look quite a bit different by then.
Allen: Well, I think there are some places it could. I think there's some places; it's really too early to tell.
FP: Right. Peace won't break out across the entire land.
Allen: No, that's right, but there will be some.... Remember, it didn't all break out in Iraq at the same time. It started in Anbar. If properly nurtured, if properly nurtured, these could become important local influences in blunting the Taliban's attempt to get into the population.
FP: The surge troops will soon redeploy, and you will have roughly 68,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan. You have said publicly that you would like to maintain as much of that force as possible through next year.
Allen: Well, let me just give you a broad idea of how we're disposed at [68,000], and we'll be at [68,000] on 1 October. A great deal of the conventional combat power is going to be in the east to continue to partner closely with [Afghan units]. So we're going to have conventional combat power in here to partner with them on operations, to do corps-level operations, where they're hitting the enemy simultaneously across the network. We've also, though, inserted a lot of advisors in there, too. So we're both advising and we're partnering.... [One Afghan corps] commander said to my division commander, "On the 1st of July, I got it." And he does; he does got it. His name is Hamid. He's very good, and he's out there kicking ass. I'm telling you.
But we have loaded it up with Afghans now, so there is a full corps of Afghans, a battalion of [Afghan National Civil Order Police]. We've gotten permission to increase the Afghan Local Police in there. We're using commando battalions to do focused operations. So even though our numbers have come down, we've still got a substantial British contingent, a substantial Marine contingent with Army enablers, and a large Afghan presence there.
FP: So you're not worried about the south?
Allen: Well, I'm going to watch it very closely. I'm going to watch it very closely because this in the end, of course, is the spiritual homeland of the Pashtun rebellion. So for us it is less about a full-up conventional battle here than it is about consolidating our holds on the population, which is the key terrain and the center of gravity in a counterinsurgency operation.
FP: I want to ask you about Pakistani influence.
Allen: It's substantial. The Haqqanis are still very active. The Haqqanis as a group, it's important to keep an eye on them.... Now again, good Irishman here, I'm tapping wood every time I say this, but the fact that there have not been large-scale attacks inside [Kabul] -- which is one of the most threatened cities on the planet, given the threat streams emanating out of North Waziristan and out of terrorist concentrations along the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and inside Afghanistan -- is a direct reflection to, I think, the success of our posturing of conventional forces and the use of special operations forces in very close integration.
FP: When will you make your recommendation to President Obama regarding troop strength?
Allen: My goal now is to have something out of here by the middle of November.
FP: What will it include?
Allen: It's going to have several parts to it. I'm going to assess the state of the insurgency, as we saw it this year. I'm going to assess the state of the ANSF, as it has evolved this year. And, you know, I really think that's good news. In fact, both of those are good-news stories. I'm going to assess the operational conditions in '13 and then make a recommendation on what I think to be the kind of forces that I'll need in '13 and '14.
And I used to use a different term because the battle space has really changed. I used to say how much combat power I'm going to need. It's not any longer a pure measure of combat power, because much of what is generating success for us is less about conventional maneuver units than it is about the combination of conventional maneuver units with the success that is being achieved with the security force assistance. So it is a combination of forces and capabilities which I'll clearly depict as being in synergy that I'll seek to make in the recommendation. So it's about numbers, but within those numbers, it's about being able to depict the kinds of forces necessary to continue to generate success.
Afghan NGO Inspires Unlikely Reconciliation
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Frud Bezhan September 4, 2012
KABUL - Recent Afghan history has been marked by war, much of it fought among Afghans themselves on the basis of religious, ethnic, or political rivalries.
So it should come as no surprise that even if they are all under the Afghan flag today, there are few places where onetime enemies can work together -- let alone live under the same roof.
Yet at a shelter in Kabul's old city, the scene of some of the fiercest interethnic and sectarian fighting in the country, a motley crew of battle-hardened veterans is doing just that.
Former combatants, many of them permanently disfigured, leave their differences at the door when they enter the shelter. There they can receive food, lodging, and even financial support thanks to the nongovernmental Union for Afghanistan's Disabled.
Mohammad Isaq, director of the Afghan-run union, says the shelter takes in Afghans regardless of their ethnicity, politics, religion, and past history. Brought together by their common misfortune, an unlikely solidarity has emerged.
"They all face the same pressing problems," Isaq says. "Each has a lot of family members they must provide for. They get around with difficulty. They don't have transport or enough money for medicine. Even the small amount of income that we can provide them is not enough."
Isaq adds that the shelter, which has over 100 registered occupants, is funded partly by locals and in part by the dwellers themselves, who undertake odd jobs. The work they find depends on their handicap: some haul building materials for construction crews, others help out in the bazaars, and some do handy work like repairing shoes, bikes, or even cars.
At the end of the day, Isaq says, all the members of the shelter bring back the money they have earned, which is then evenly distributed. The roughly 200 afghanis (roughly $4) they earn every day is then matched by the shelter.
'We Accept All Who Fought'
Bismaillah Wakil, an elderly, fidgety man, sits on a mattress on the ground, drinking tea with several of the shelter's occupants. As he sips quietly, Wakil recalls how he lost his leg during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Fighting under the military wing of the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan party, under the leadership of former warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Wakil says he lost his leg in a Soviet bombardment.
Wakil, however, says he is not bitter, insisting that becoming handicapped and coming to the shelter has freed him of his long-held prejudices and intolerance.
"If we know a man is poor and lost his arms and legs doing what he thought was his duty, we accept him," he says. "That means even if they come from different tribes and groups. I live with mujahedin and those fighting for the government. These are people who have lost their arms and legs because they were looking to survive and have something to eat."
Atiq Wahidullah, a bearded middle-aged man, lies uncomfortably against the wall, scratching what remains of his right leg. He says he lost most of it in 1999, when he was a foot soldier for the former Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban coalition. He says Taliban militants showered the group's base in Panjshir, just north of Kabul, with rockets. One of the rockets landed just in front of him.
Like other shelter members, Wahidullah says he is enraged by the government's unwillingness to help and says much more needs to be done if it wants to win support. He says he receives an "absurd" stipend of 13,000 afghanis (around $270) a year, an amount he easily spends in a month supporting his family of six.
"We are pleading with the government. When you give the handicapped 13,000 afghanis a year, what can this provide for a family?" Wahidullah says. "Tomorrow, how can I let my children go and fight for the national army and become handicapped? We are asking the government for help because we can't do anything for ourselves."
'It's Here Or The Streets'
Wahidullah is just one of the estimated 900,000 Afghans that suffer from severe disability, according to Handicap International, an independent international aid organization. That means some 3 percent of the Afghan population, estimated to be around 30 million, live with permanent disfigurement. War-related disabilities, mainly the loss of limbs, accounts for the majority of that number, with land mines one of the primarily causes.
Sayid Anwar, who is blind, was once a fighter among the ranks of the Hizb-e Islami, headed by notorious former warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is now blacklisted as a terrorist by the United States.
Anwar says he stepped on a mine in the early 1990s, during the country's brutal civil war. He lost both of his legs as he and his group retreated from their positions on a hillside outside Kabul. He pays tribute to the shelter, insisting that if it was not for its support he and his family would be begging on the streets.
"The government hasn't given us anything. Everywhere I go now, they say: 'You're handicapped, we can't make use of you,'" Anwar says.
"If I wasn't here at the shelter I would be idly roaming the streets. It's because of this shelter that we get by every day. If this shelter wasn't here my family would be starving."
Afghanistan: U.S. To Hand Over Bagram Prison
September 5, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghanistan's government has announced it will take full control from the United States next week of the controversial Bagram prison.
President Hamid Karzai's office said in a written statement that a ceremony will take place on September 10 to mark the handover.
Afghanistan and the United States signed an agreement in March to begin a six-month process to transfer control of the jail, north of Kabul, to Afghan authorities.
The prison is located at the Bagram air base, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan.
The United States has faced allegations that inmates have been tortured and killed there.
The handover had been a sticking point to the conclusion of a pact between Washington and Kabul covering the long-term legal status of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan.
With reporting by AFP
Feature: Drug addiction - big problem of Afghan gov't
KABUL, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- A polluted area of what used to be the free-flowing Kabul River is now home to thousands of drug addicts in this capital city, a situation that has compounded the problems of the Afghan central government now being plagued with the continuing threat from armed groups, particularly from the Taliban. "Since I have been rejected by everyone in society, Kabul River is my only place of refuge," Azam Gul, a long-time drug dependent, told Xinhua while inhaling his drug-filled cigarette.
Wearing tattered clothes, disheveled and physically too weak to walk, Gul said that taking drug is the only way to ease the pain in his body. "I can read and write but because of bad fortune and injustice in society I could not find employment to support my family," the shaking Gul said.
Gul, who is in his twenties, is not alone in this kind of misfortune. In the dried up portion of the banks of the Kabul River, hundreds of other drug dependents converged near the Murad Khani area, which is just half a kilometer away from the presidential palace.
According to officials, there are now more than 1 million Afghans, aged 15 to 64, who are addicted to heroin and other drugs, and the number would go up if the status quo would remain unchecked.
The country's high rate of unemployment, extreme poverty, depression, illiteracy and the effects of the protracted conflicts and fighting are the most common causes of drug addiction, according to Mohammad Tahir Sultani, head of a drug addicts' hospital in Kabul.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ( UNODC), Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium poppies, accounting for 90 percent of the world's supply. Opium poppy is the raw material in the manufacture of heroin.
Mohammad Nabi, a concerned Afghan, said that the government is not doing enough to treat or rehabilitate drug addicts. "It is a big social problem that our country is facing," he said.
Nabi said it is an open secret in Kabul that some powerful figures are behind drug production and trafficking.
"The poor addicts deserve assistance and medical treatment by the government," Nabi said, adding that the government should exert efforts in solving this problem and not just concentrate in fighting terrorism and the insurgents.
Although the Afghan government has announced that 20 out of the country's 34 provinces are now poppy-free, still the plant is largely cultivated in insecure areas like Kandahar and Helmand provinces where the Taliban militants are active.
There are reports that the Taliban is behind large-scale production of heroin, the proceeds of which are used to buy arms in fighting the Afghan government.
Aside from the Taliban, warlords in some provinces are also involved in the highly-profitable drug trade.
Karzai's Condemnation of Night Raid Criticised by Afghan Political Parties
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Abrahimkhil Tuesday, 04 September 2012
Afghan political figures criticised President Hamid Karzai's condemnation of the night raid involving Australian forces in Uruzgan province, saying that his public stance would turn off the international community.
Some of the country's major political parties said Karzai risked disheartening the foreigners and criticised him for having double standards in his reaction to such events.
According to those who spoke to TOLOnews, Karzai appeared to position himself against the foreign forces, but rarely takes as strong a stance on the attacks from other non-friendly groups.
Spokesperson of the National Coalition Party Sayed Aqa Fazel Sancharaki said that the President lacked the same resolve when it comes to fighting the extremist militants in Afghanistan.
"The President's comments show a lack of strict decision against fighting insurgency extremism in the country -- he does not want to solve these problems fundamentally," Sancharaki said.
Truth and Justice Party spokesperson Hamidull Farouqi said he believes that Karzai was attempting to curry personal favour through such a statement, rather than look after the country's interests.
"The president's behavior was for personal reasons and based on his own emotions, which saddens us. The President should prefer to act in the national interest and not negotiations on his personal interests."
Karzai released a statement Saturday condemning the "unilateral military operation conducted by Australian troops" as a breach of the special operations agreement signed with Nato in April which gave Afghans oversight of the controversial night raids.
It said the President has ordered an "all-out probe" into the operation that killed a 70-year old man Haji Raz Mohammad and his 30 year-old son Abdul Jalil.
Australian Defence Minister Stephen Smith on Monday rejected Karzai's statement saying his understanding that it was a unilateral operation was wrong.
"The statement that has been issued by President Karzai's palace over the weekend in Kabul that this operation was not authorised is wrong," he said at a press conference.
Smith confirmed that two men - who he said were insurgents - had been killed, and a third man was detained during the raid. The man in custody is suspected of having helped or sought to help the Afghan soldier, Hekmatullah, who shot at Australian troops last week, killing three and wounding two.
"The outcome of the operation has been the detention of an individual who is regarded not just as a leader of the insurgency in Uruzgan province but a person who has also sought to or actually assisted Hekmatullah in his escape," Smith told reporters.
Isaf also defended the operation.
"The operation was planned and executed in coordination with Afghan officials including approval by the Uruzgan provincial governor," Isaf told TOLOnews Sunday.
Five Australian soldiers died last week in two incidents - the first took place at a base in Uruzgan province on Wednesday night when Hekmatullah killed the three Australian soldiers. Then hours later, two Australian soldiers died and a crew member was wounded when their helicopter rolled over while landing in Helmand province.
Australia has around 1,500 troops in Afghanistan, most of them based in Uruzgan.
Unfriendly Fire: Can the U.S. and NATO Prevent ‘Green on Blue’ Attacks in Afghanistan?
Doing proper background checks to ascertain if recruits have Taliban affiliations is just one of the many challenges facing the U.S. and NATO as they prepare for withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2014
TIME.com By John Wendle September 4, 2012
Kabul - Alam Gul, a potential Afghan Local Police (ALP) recruit sat cross-legged on a mat outside the unit’s crumbling, mud-brick headquarters in the village of Tabin, in Kandahar’s restive Arghandab district, alternately looking at his hands and at the sky as he answered a series of questions. Two ALP members sat watching nearby, while others washed motorbikes or lounged in the sun. The U.S. Army specialist and staff sergeant in charge of the interview were getting increasingly frustrated with the young man.
Seemingly simple questions often have no good answer in Afghanistan. When asked where he lived, Gul only said that “there are four or five houses between my home and the mosque.” Asked in what direction from the mosque, he, like many uneducated Afghans, did not know the meaning of north, south, east and west. He guessed his age as being “between 28 and 30.” His secondhand motorcycle was unregistered. He had no mobile number. It was even unclear at which mosque he worshipped, since he could not read a map and Staff Sergeant John Fox did not know the names of all the mosques in the area. Fox, working with experienced interpreter Aziz Mohammad Shirzada, was finally able to narrow it down to only: “Right there, when we come around that corner going into Bala Tabin.”
The answers were crucial since NATO and the U.S. uses registration numbers and interviews with mullahs and village-council members to find out more about the men who apply for positions with the ALP, as well as the army and the police. The vetting process was deemed critical after members of extremist militias in Iraq were inadvertently armed by the U.S. in a similar effort called the Sons of Iraq, put into place in 2005, after being insufficiently screened. But with no contact details, little verifiable history and no address or registration number, the Americans were running out of ways to figure out who exactly the young man was. Doing proper background checks to ascertain if recruits could have Taliban affiliations or sympathies is just one of the many challenges facing the U.S. and NATO as they prepare for withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Nearly a quarter of all combat fatalities in Afghanistan this year were “green on blue” attacks, with 45 U.S. and NATO soldiers killed by Afghan soldiers and police thus far. As an emergency measure to help cope with the rising tide of “insider attacks,” Lieut. General Adrian Bradshaw, the British deputy commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, announced Sunday that the training of around a thousand recruits had been put on hold to allow for revetting of 16,300 members of the ALP. “This precautionary measure is in response to concerns by Afghan, U.S. and other coalition commanders over recent insider threat incidents,” he said in a press release. “The measures being applied to Afghan National Army special forces and ALP personnel reflects the intensive effort to recheck the vetting status of the roughly 350,000 Afghan National Security Forces personnel as part of a number of actions recently instituted to reinforce existing precautions related to the insider threat.”
The loyalty, reliability and professionalism of those 350,000-plus Afghan troops is essential if Washington and Brussels’ endgame in Afghanistan is to have any success. NATO is introducing a number of new measures to deal with the crisis: it is scaling up its counterintelligence teams, instituting new interview procedures for Afghan soldiers returning from leave, establishing a warning system for insider threats and enhancing cultural training for Afghan personnel. Still, in a country with such strained resources and few written records, it remains unclear how effective these improvements can be.
The recent spate of killings has shown the vulnerability of Afghan security forces like the ALP, which offers recruits just three weeks of training before they operate remotely, in their home villages. “Since the creation of the ALP, there have been concerns about infiltration by the Taliban and other insurgents,” says Seth Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corp. who worked at high levels of the U.S. Special Operations command in Afghanistan. “I can say that from firsthand experience.”
Jones says that to minimize insurgent infiltration, the vetting process must be improved. “The greatest threat from infiltration is probably less in undermining the ALP, which have helped undermine Taliban control of some rural areas, and more in creating political tension between the United States and Afghanistan,” he says. “A loss of trust between Afghan and U.S. soldiers would be extremely damaging.” But, after so many killings, even with NATO’s suspension of training and the implementation of new security measures, that trust may already have been broken beyond repair.
Iran, Afghanistan to Cooperate on Tourism, Banking, Mehr Reports
Bloomberg By Yeganeh Salehi September 04, 2012
Iran and Afghanistan will sign a memorandum of understanding for cooperation in trade, banking and tourism, the state-run Mehr news agency reported, without saying where it got the information.
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi will travel to Afghanistan later today to meet his Afghan counterpart, Zalmai Rassoul, and participate in the fourth Iran-Afghanistan economic committee meeting, Mehr said, without providing details.
A group of 30 Iranian experts and deputies in Afghan affairs will participate in the meeting, during which the memorandum will be drafted.
To contact the reporter on this story: Yeganeh Salehi in Tehran at yalehi@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net
Court upholds Afghan Taliban’s narco-terrorism conviction in U.S.
McClatchy Newspapers By Michael Doyle Tuesday, September 4, 2012
WASHINGTON - An appellate court on Tuesday upheld the conviction of a former Afghan Taliban member who’s serving a first-of-its-kind life sentence in the Southern California desert.
Khan Mohammed was the first Afghan Taliban member to be tried in a U.S. courtroom, and the first individual convicted under a 2006 federal narco-terrorism law. Now incarcerated at U.S. Penitentiary Victorville, 80 miles east of Los Angeles, Mohammed failed to persuade the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that his drug dealing couldn’t be linked to a specific act of terrorism.
“Mohammed need not have planned for his drug proceeds to fund terrorist ends,” Judge Thomas B. Griffith wrote. “It is sufficient that the proceeds went to a terrorist – him.”
Even with some national-security secrets blacked out, the appellate court’s 23-page majority opinion sheds light on the dangerous operation in which a U.S. informer and Drug Enforcement Administration agents ensnared Mohammed in Afghanistan. Coming from a court that’s sometimes called the second most powerful in the United States because it oversees many federal agency actions, the decision also could shape future narco-terrorist prosecutions.
While upholding Mohammed’s conviction and life sentence, the appellate court panel gave the 42-year-old native of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province one final lifeline: Two of the panel’s three judges agreed that Mohammed still may pursue claims that his initial trial attorney was ineffective, in part for failing to aggressively challenge the credibility of the key prosecution witness. Mohammed’s initial trial attorney didn’t call any defense witnesses and offered no evidence on his behalf.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, presented considerable evidence that Mohammed viewed drug dealing as a way to hurt the United States. The trial judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, noted at Mohammed’s 2008 sentencing that “he equates selling heroin destined for American cities with shooting/attacking Americans who have armed forces in Afghanistan,” a trial transcript shows, and secret recordings showed Mohammed bluntly speaking for himself.
“We will eliminate them, whether by opium or by shooting,” Mohammed said to a wired-up U.S. informant while in Afghanistan, according to a tape recording presented at the four-day trial.
Afghanistan produces about 90 percent of the world’s opium, according to the United Nations. Last year, the value of the country’s opium crop leapt to an estimated $1.4 billion.
The case had its beginnings in 2006, when an Afghan named Jaweed, who like many Afghan men has only one name, met a former Taliban official living in Pakistan. The former Taliban official was plotting an attack on Jalalabad airfield in eastern Afghanistan, and he dispatched Jaweed to meet with Mohammed in Afghanistan. Mohammed was a connected man, involved in shady business, according to testimony.
Jaweed told Mohammed he’d get missiles to attack the key air base, but he had a change of heart and began cooperating with Afghan officials, who passed him over to the DEA.
The drug-fighting agency equipped Jaweed with a tape recorder and a tiny video camera and had him tell Mohammed that he knew a man who was in the market for opium. Mohammed eagerly provided the opium and, later, nearly two kilograms – about four pounds – of heroin.
DEA agents then seized Mohammed and packed him off to trial in Washington.
Mohammed’s defense attorney argued that no evidence linked the drug sales to an attempted attack on the air base. The trial judge, though, agreed with prosecutors that Mohammed was planning to use some of his drug profits to buy a car that would transport Taliban. In settling Mohammed’s judicial fate, the court combined those plans with Mohammed’s own tape-recorded statements about his hopes for how the heroin would poison the United States.
“May God turn all the infidels to dead corpses,” Mohammed said, according to one recording.
The appellate court concluded that the narco-terrorism law applied, saying that “it is clear that Congress intended to punish those who support terrorism directly . . . as well as indirectly.” Email: mdoyle@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @MichaelDoyle10
IEC Says Time is Running Out to Complete Voter Registration
TOLOnews.com By Mahboba Pardis Tuesday, 04 September 2012
Head of Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) Fazel Ahmad Manawe said on Tuesday that he is running out of time to properly register voters for the upcoming election in 2014.
Speaking to TOLOnews, Manawe stressed that insecurity, lack of exact population statistics, lack of proper national ID cards, and possibly a lack of sufficient budget were the main causes of the delay in starting of voters' registration process.
"We have made this clear in the past that we don't have too much time, we need to take our decision, we cannot conduct this huge task if we continue to lose time," Manawe said, urging the donor agencies and the Afghan government to provide the commission with necessary facilities and budget.
The scheduled time for launching the presidential election is March 2014 and any delay in this may be considered a violation of Afghanistan's constitution, he said.
Manawe said that the registration process of the voters needs at least $80 million which should be given by the donor agencies as pledged, but he is concerned that the delay in transferring these budgets will make it difficult to do a proper job.
He said that the IEC is trying to have election cards which will be considered a legal alternative to the national ID cards.
"We are trying to have standard cards issued which can be used as national ID cards too," he said.
The pressure is on for the IEC to ensure a transparent and fair election after serious allegations of fraud followed the last election, despite millions of dollars in donor funds to support the democratic process.
Balkh governor Atta Mohammad Noor spoke on the matter at a press conference in the province, stressing the need for a fair election.
Noor, who is himself a key member of political party Jamiat Eslami, said he may run for presidency or he will support a candidate, but stressed that the people of Afghanistan needed to have their vote heard and counted as important.
"We hope to have an election without fraud to gain the trust of the people. Otherwise democracy will change in a fake world and people will never vote," he said.
Noor said his party's participation will be greater than in previous years.
"We participated in the past, but this time we will be more powerful. You will be the witnesses of our powerful participation," he said the reporters at the briefing.
The total cost for presidential and provincial council elections is estimated to be over $149m.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
September 5, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has denounced the Taliban killing of civilians as "massacres of Muslims."
The comments follow a suicide attack on a funeral in eastern Afghanistan on September 4 that killed 25 and injured 30.
In a written statement, Kazai said: "The enemy of Islam and of Afghanistan must understand that they will never succeed by pressuring the public through such brutal acts of terror to achieve their heinous goals."
Karzai also spoke to Haji Hamisha Gul, the district governor of Dur Baba, where the attack happened, and expressed his condolences and sympathies over the loss of his son and members of his community.
Late last month, Karzai traveled to southwestern Nimroz Province to sympathize with the victims of twin suicide attacks in a crowded bazaar that killed at least 36 people.
'Hundreds' Arrested In Afghanistan Over 'Insider' Attacks
September 5, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghan officials say "hundreds" of Afghan soldiers have been arrested or expelled from the army as officials crack down on a rising number of attacks on NATO-led troops by members of the Afghan security forces.
Defense Ministry spokesman General Zahir Azimi told a news conference that the attacks are "a matter of concern" for the Afghan government.
On September 2, the U.S. military announced that its special forces have suspended training for about 1,000 Afghan police recruits in order to investigate existing security force members.
Members of the Afghan security forces have opened fire on their Western allies more than 30 times so far this year, killing at least 45 foreign troops.
Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for many of the attacks, saying their fighters have infiltrated the army and police.
Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters
20 Civilians Killed, 50 More Injured in Nangarhar Suicide Attack
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 04 September 2012
At least 20 civilians were killed and more than 50 others were injured in a suicide bomb attack in eastern Nangarhar province on Tuesday afternoon, the Ministry of Interior (MOI) said.
The attack took place about 3:00PM local time in the province's Dur Ba Ba district when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at the funeral ceremony, the MOI said in a statement.
All the victims are civilians, provincial spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai told TOLOnews.
Among the injured who were taken to the nearby hospital for treatment were district governor Haji Hamisha Gul and his brother, Abdulzai said.
However, one of Gul's sons was killed.
Gul has been the governor of Dur Ba Ba district for two years and is a well-known person in the district.
No group including the Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack.
The attack comes just three days after a double suicide attack in the Sayed Abad district of central-eastern Maiden Wardak province killed at least 14 people and injured scores of others, with some estimates put at around 60.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack, which he said was targeting the US base nearby. The dead and most of the injured were Afghan civilians.
Are We Winning in Afghanistan?
An exclusive interview with Gen. John Allen, commander of America's forgotten war.
Foreign Policy INTERVIEW BY GORDON LUBOLD SEPTEMBER 5, 2012
The lack of a clearly defined narrative about Afghanistan, combined with election noise and economic worries in the United States, has pushed the war out of the American consciousness. In recent weeks, the spate of insider attacks put it back on the media's map, temporarily. But the next several months will in many ways shape the U.S. exit between now and December 2014. Soon, we will learn how many troops will remain in the country. We'll learn what impact attacks on militants may have on the battlefield. We'll see if the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) can truly stand on their own. And we'll learn just how fast U.S. forces will be sent to the exits.
FP's Gordon Lubold sat down with Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), in his office in Kabul on Aug. 29 -- as he scrambled to stop the insider attacks against U.S. forces and just over two months before he submits his recommendation to President Barack Obama on the size of the force he thinks he'll need through next year. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
In addition to troop levels and the state of the ANSF, Allen talked about a new phenomenon in the war: a series of local uprisings that remain disconnected from each other and the Afghan government but that could possibly come together to pose a serious threat to the Taliban. Talking at greater length about the uprisings than he has before, and drawing a link to the Anbar Awakening in Iraq, Allen said, "This is a really important moment for this campaign because the brutality of the Taliban and the desire for local communities to have security has become so, so prominent -- as it was in Anbar -- that they're willing to take the situation into their own hands to do this."
Meanwhile, Allen provided some insight into how he will frame his report to the president: "The battle space has really changed. I used to say how much combat power I'm going to need. It's not any longer a pure measure of combat power, because much of what is generating success for us is less about conventional maneuver units than it is about the combination of conventional maneuver units with the success that is being achieved with the security force assistance." The Afghans, he says, are really stepping up to the task. Washington will certainly be watching to see whether he is right.
Foreign Policy: Thanks again for sitting down with us. I am particularly interested in these uprisings in the east and how you view them. They are in their nascency, but I am told they may be a significant trend down the line. Are we talking "Andar Awakening"?
Gen. John Allen: They're actually calling it the Andar Awakening ... to plagiarize our Anbar Awakening. [But] let me just make a couple of general remarks. It's been a pretty busy summer. We're about 20 days from finishing up the recovery of the surge. We are inserting our Security Force Assistance Teams. We're reposturing the battle space to account for that. The ANSF is really taking over much more of the fighting than it has done in the past. The Security Force Assistance Teams are really accelerating that.
Unprompted by me, as I circulate in the battle space, the brigade commanders are uniformly, in different regional commands, using the term "game-changer" with the Security Force Assistance Teams in really accelerating where we want the ANSF to go. So the recovery of the surge, the reposturing of the battle space, the insertion of the Security Force Assistance Teams, the ANSF moving more into the lead, fighting the insurgency, the beginning of the base closure....
All of that has been going on this summer.... On the whole, the campaign is on track.
What I have been asked in the past is, "When are you shifting the main effort from the south to the east?" And I respond with, "That's not the question." I'm weighting the fight in the east because they need the resources, 'cause that, that insurgent fight is different than the insurgent fight everywhere else in the battle space. But I'm shifting the main effort right now, and the main effort is shifting in that we, ISAF, will become the supporting effort. The ANSF will become the main effort....
FP: Is that where you wanted to be in terms of the schedule, the ANSF taking over?
Allen: It's actually ahead of time.... What you see I have in the battle space now is a combination of advisors and main-force units. The advisors are inside the Afghan units. The main-force units are partnered with them or are conducting independent ops, and there are really very few independent ISAF operations anymore. It is very, very substantially partnered, and in many cases they are actually ANSF-led.
Now I just came back from [Regional Command-East], where I spent a good bit of time earlier this week with both of the ANSF corps commanders. We're seeing the ANSF routinely conduct operations now from squad level to corps level. I mean, they're running the entire spectrum of operations. Do they need help? The answer is yes. They need a lot of help still, because we still haven't recruited the whole force. Which I think is important for people to understand. We've probably got another 15,000 to 20,000 to go [to get to a total force of 352,000]. But we don't finish the whole build of the force until December of next year. So I'm actually pretty pleased with where the ANSF is right now, given where they were just two years ago. But much work remains to be done. We've got enablers that have to come online. We've got to build their capabilities to employ, for example, artillery. We've got to work very hard on their sustainment and resupply capabilities.
FP: Which means airlift, for example --
Allen: Airlift, and we can talk about the air piece of it. That is one that has got a lot of my attention, and it's going to be a long time to fix that actually. But the sustainment piece of this, as I actually was saying just this morning to my leaders, a young army might do quite well in close combat, but young armies fail typically to sustain themselves. And so we're putting a tremendous amount of effort, actually, into engendering habits of sustainment. And it's everything from being able to properly convoy the equipment and the fuels and that sort of thing to the various places for distribution to getting the spare parts to the mechanics so they can turn the wrenches in the motor pools to keep the vehicles up.
FP: You just returned from the east. Tell me about these uprisings against the Taliban and how you see them.
Allen: They're really an important moment, actually. And I had the conversation with [President Hamid Karzai] this morning. Each, each one is an organic movement. And they're popping up in a lot of different places. We're going to start to plot them on a map -- we've actually done it already -- but we're going to do some analysis as to, is it tribal? Is it ethnic? What was the particular cause? What is the potential solution?
[Andar district in Ghazni province] is the most conspicuous right now, but there's another really substantial one that's growing in Kamdesh in southern Nuristan. There's one growing in Wardak. There's one growing in Ghor. We've heard of one in Faryab.
And so what we have to do is, as I said to [Karzai] this morning, it's not just about supporting Andar in Ghazni. This is a really important moment for this campaign because the brutality of the Taliban and the desire for local communities to have security has become so, so prominent -- as it was in Anbar -- that they're willing to take the situation into their own hands to do this.
FP: What is the proper role for ISAF to play here?
Allen: We're not playing a role. If we do at all, it will be always through GIRoA [government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] ... because we don't want an uprising to appear to be responsive to us. We want it to be responsive to the local conditions, and we ultimately would like to see GIRoA be the solution for them. And that's the right thing to do.
So I think that as we analyze each one of these, each one started for a different reason, and so we've got to be sensitive to the kinds of assistance. When I say "we," I always mean GIRoA, the Afghan government. It has to be sensitive to why it started and how conceivably it can help the people. They ought to want to help the people. And how they might help the people is going to be different in each place. It could be about local employment. It could be about a school. It could be about a clinic. It could be about fresh water. Just a little bit of help gives the people in that village, or cluster of villages, a choice for the first time. Because right now their only choice is fighting the Taliban or being repressed by the Taliban.
FP: Could the kind of assistance these villages might be provided include arms?
Allen: The answer is yes, but that's a decision made by the Afghans.
FP: You seem fairly bullish on this trend.
Allen: I think it is.... In fact, when I first visited Ghazni in August of last year, Andar was considered almost terra incognita. We had to fight into Andar and fight out of Andar. Now Andar is a place that's completely different. And this will be, for Afghans who are watching the world unfold for them, what they're seeing is that the ANSF has created a security bubble in a lot of places around the country. Now there's still a lot of fighting that's going on, but there are people that now -- again, the conversation with the president today -- there are places in this country where the people can have a post-conflict conversation.
We saw this in Anbar. It is very much like what we experienced in Anbar. Now is the time to surge capabilities for governance and economic opportunity into the "white space" that has been created by and largely by the Afghan forces. So that's one condition that's being seen in the battle space. But another condition that's being seen in the battle space is what we just talked about, which is people who are tired of the constant oppression and the nature of the quality of their life inflicted on them by the Taliban. They want something different, but they don't really have any choices. And so this gives them a choice as well.
FP: I understand the need to put an Afghan face on this. But to whatever extent the Afghan government plays a role, they'll still need coalition assistance, say, in the form of a coalition helicopter. Suddenly the help looks very Western, right?
Allen: I'm telling you right now, we're resupplying in Kamdesh using Afghan Army helicopters. They're getting up there. They're doing it. They've inserted commandos up there. They're resupplying local elements up there. They're maintaining the ANP [Afghan National Police] in some key checkpoints and strong points. They're maintaining them. Every now and again, they'll run out of helicopters, and we'll help 'em. But part of this is a genuine effort, a genuine desire on behalf of the Afghans to truly make this an Afghan spontaneous uprising, but an Afghan-supported effort, too. Which I think is great.
FP: Let's just say you're leaving ISAF by next spring. Do you have so much hope in this that things could look quite a bit different by then.
Allen: Well, I think there are some places it could. I think there's some places; it's really too early to tell.
FP: Right. Peace won't break out across the entire land.
Allen: No, that's right, but there will be some.... Remember, it didn't all break out in Iraq at the same time. It started in Anbar. If properly nurtured, if properly nurtured, these could become important local influences in blunting the Taliban's attempt to get into the population.
FP: The surge troops will soon redeploy, and you will have roughly 68,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan. You have said publicly that you would like to maintain as much of that force as possible through next year.
Allen: Well, let me just give you a broad idea of how we're disposed at [68,000], and we'll be at [68,000] on 1 October. A great deal of the conventional combat power is going to be in the east to continue to partner closely with [Afghan units]. So we're going to have conventional combat power in here to partner with them on operations, to do corps-level operations, where they're hitting the enemy simultaneously across the network. We've also, though, inserted a lot of advisors in there, too. So we're both advising and we're partnering.... [One Afghan corps] commander said to my division commander, "On the 1st of July, I got it." And he does; he does got it. His name is Hamid. He's very good, and he's out there kicking ass. I'm telling you.
But we have loaded it up with Afghans now, so there is a full corps of Afghans, a battalion of [Afghan National Civil Order Police]. We've gotten permission to increase the Afghan Local Police in there. We're using commando battalions to do focused operations. So even though our numbers have come down, we've still got a substantial British contingent, a substantial Marine contingent with Army enablers, and a large Afghan presence there.
FP: So you're not worried about the south?
Allen: Well, I'm going to watch it very closely. I'm going to watch it very closely because this in the end, of course, is the spiritual homeland of the Pashtun rebellion. So for us it is less about a full-up conventional battle here than it is about consolidating our holds on the population, which is the key terrain and the center of gravity in a counterinsurgency operation.
FP: I want to ask you about Pakistani influence.
Allen: It's substantial. The Haqqanis are still very active. The Haqqanis as a group, it's important to keep an eye on them.... Now again, good Irishman here, I'm tapping wood every time I say this, but the fact that there have not been large-scale attacks inside [Kabul] -- which is one of the most threatened cities on the planet, given the threat streams emanating out of North Waziristan and out of terrorist concentrations along the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and inside Afghanistan -- is a direct reflection to, I think, the success of our posturing of conventional forces and the use of special operations forces in very close integration.
FP: When will you make your recommendation to President Obama regarding troop strength?
Allen: My goal now is to have something out of here by the middle of November.
FP: What will it include?
Allen: It's going to have several parts to it. I'm going to assess the state of the insurgency, as we saw it this year. I'm going to assess the state of the ANSF, as it has evolved this year. And, you know, I really think that's good news. In fact, both of those are good-news stories. I'm going to assess the operational conditions in '13 and then make a recommendation on what I think to be the kind of forces that I'll need in '13 and '14.
And I used to use a different term because the battle space has really changed. I used to say how much combat power I'm going to need. It's not any longer a pure measure of combat power, because much of what is generating success for us is less about conventional maneuver units than it is about the combination of conventional maneuver units with the success that is being achieved with the security force assistance. So it is a combination of forces and capabilities which I'll clearly depict as being in synergy that I'll seek to make in the recommendation. So it's about numbers, but within those numbers, it's about being able to depict the kinds of forces necessary to continue to generate success.
Afghan NGO Inspires Unlikely Reconciliation
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty By Frud Bezhan September 4, 2012
KABUL - Recent Afghan history has been marked by war, much of it fought among Afghans themselves on the basis of religious, ethnic, or political rivalries.
So it should come as no surprise that even if they are all under the Afghan flag today, there are few places where onetime enemies can work together -- let alone live under the same roof.
Yet at a shelter in Kabul's old city, the scene of some of the fiercest interethnic and sectarian fighting in the country, a motley crew of battle-hardened veterans is doing just that.
Former combatants, many of them permanently disfigured, leave their differences at the door when they enter the shelter. There they can receive food, lodging, and even financial support thanks to the nongovernmental Union for Afghanistan's Disabled.
Mohammad Isaq, director of the Afghan-run union, says the shelter takes in Afghans regardless of their ethnicity, politics, religion, and past history. Brought together by their common misfortune, an unlikely solidarity has emerged.
"They all face the same pressing problems," Isaq says. "Each has a lot of family members they must provide for. They get around with difficulty. They don't have transport or enough money for medicine. Even the small amount of income that we can provide them is not enough."
Isaq adds that the shelter, which has over 100 registered occupants, is funded partly by locals and in part by the dwellers themselves, who undertake odd jobs. The work they find depends on their handicap: some haul building materials for construction crews, others help out in the bazaars, and some do handy work like repairing shoes, bikes, or even cars.
At the end of the day, Isaq says, all the members of the shelter bring back the money they have earned, which is then evenly distributed. The roughly 200 afghanis (roughly $4) they earn every day is then matched by the shelter.
'We Accept All Who Fought'
Bismaillah Wakil, an elderly, fidgety man, sits on a mattress on the ground, drinking tea with several of the shelter's occupants. As he sips quietly, Wakil recalls how he lost his leg during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Fighting under the military wing of the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan party, under the leadership of former warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Wakil says he lost his leg in a Soviet bombardment.
Wakil, however, says he is not bitter, insisting that becoming handicapped and coming to the shelter has freed him of his long-held prejudices and intolerance.
"If we know a man is poor and lost his arms and legs doing what he thought was his duty, we accept him," he says. "That means even if they come from different tribes and groups. I live with mujahedin and those fighting for the government. These are people who have lost their arms and legs because they were looking to survive and have something to eat."
Atiq Wahidullah, a bearded middle-aged man, lies uncomfortably against the wall, scratching what remains of his right leg. He says he lost most of it in 1999, when he was a foot soldier for the former Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban coalition. He says Taliban militants showered the group's base in Panjshir, just north of Kabul, with rockets. One of the rockets landed just in front of him.
Like other shelter members, Wahidullah says he is enraged by the government's unwillingness to help and says much more needs to be done if it wants to win support. He says he receives an "absurd" stipend of 13,000 afghanis (around $270) a year, an amount he easily spends in a month supporting his family of six.
"We are pleading with the government. When you give the handicapped 13,000 afghanis a year, what can this provide for a family?" Wahidullah says. "Tomorrow, how can I let my children go and fight for the national army and become handicapped? We are asking the government for help because we can't do anything for ourselves."
'It's Here Or The Streets'
Wahidullah is just one of the estimated 900,000 Afghans that suffer from severe disability, according to Handicap International, an independent international aid organization. That means some 3 percent of the Afghan population, estimated to be around 30 million, live with permanent disfigurement. War-related disabilities, mainly the loss of limbs, accounts for the majority of that number, with land mines one of the primarily causes.
Sayid Anwar, who is blind, was once a fighter among the ranks of the Hizb-e Islami, headed by notorious former warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is now blacklisted as a terrorist by the United States.
Anwar says he stepped on a mine in the early 1990s, during the country's brutal civil war. He lost both of his legs as he and his group retreated from their positions on a hillside outside Kabul. He pays tribute to the shelter, insisting that if it was not for its support he and his family would be begging on the streets.
"The government hasn't given us anything. Everywhere I go now, they say: 'You're handicapped, we can't make use of you,'" Anwar says.
"If I wasn't here at the shelter I would be idly roaming the streets. It's because of this shelter that we get by every day. If this shelter wasn't here my family would be starving."
Afghanistan: U.S. To Hand Over Bagram Prison
September 5, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Afghanistan's government has announced it will take full control from the United States next week of the controversial Bagram prison.
President Hamid Karzai's office said in a written statement that a ceremony will take place on September 10 to mark the handover.
Afghanistan and the United States signed an agreement in March to begin a six-month process to transfer control of the jail, north of Kabul, to Afghan authorities.
The prison is located at the Bagram air base, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan.
The United States has faced allegations that inmates have been tortured and killed there.
The handover had been a sticking point to the conclusion of a pact between Washington and Kabul covering the long-term legal status of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan.
With reporting by AFP
Feature: Drug addiction - big problem of Afghan gov't
KABUL, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- A polluted area of what used to be the free-flowing Kabul River is now home to thousands of drug addicts in this capital city, a situation that has compounded the problems of the Afghan central government now being plagued with the continuing threat from armed groups, particularly from the Taliban. "Since I have been rejected by everyone in society, Kabul River is my only place of refuge," Azam Gul, a long-time drug dependent, told Xinhua while inhaling his drug-filled cigarette.
Wearing tattered clothes, disheveled and physically too weak to walk, Gul said that taking drug is the only way to ease the pain in his body. "I can read and write but because of bad fortune and injustice in society I could not find employment to support my family," the shaking Gul said.
Gul, who is in his twenties, is not alone in this kind of misfortune. In the dried up portion of the banks of the Kabul River, hundreds of other drug dependents converged near the Murad Khani area, which is just half a kilometer away from the presidential palace.
According to officials, there are now more than 1 million Afghans, aged 15 to 64, who are addicted to heroin and other drugs, and the number would go up if the status quo would remain unchecked.
The country's high rate of unemployment, extreme poverty, depression, illiteracy and the effects of the protracted conflicts and fighting are the most common causes of drug addiction, according to Mohammad Tahir Sultani, head of a drug addicts' hospital in Kabul.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ( UNODC), Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium poppies, accounting for 90 percent of the world's supply. Opium poppy is the raw material in the manufacture of heroin.
Mohammad Nabi, a concerned Afghan, said that the government is not doing enough to treat or rehabilitate drug addicts. "It is a big social problem that our country is facing," he said.
Nabi said it is an open secret in Kabul that some powerful figures are behind drug production and trafficking.
"The poor addicts deserve assistance and medical treatment by the government," Nabi said, adding that the government should exert efforts in solving this problem and not just concentrate in fighting terrorism and the insurgents.
Although the Afghan government has announced that 20 out of the country's 34 provinces are now poppy-free, still the plant is largely cultivated in insecure areas like Kandahar and Helmand provinces where the Taliban militants are active.
There are reports that the Taliban is behind large-scale production of heroin, the proceeds of which are used to buy arms in fighting the Afghan government.
Aside from the Taliban, warlords in some provinces are also involved in the highly-profitable drug trade.
Karzai's Condemnation of Night Raid Criticised by Afghan Political Parties
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Abrahimkhil Tuesday, 04 September 2012
Afghan political figures criticised President Hamid Karzai's condemnation of the night raid involving Australian forces in Uruzgan province, saying that his public stance would turn off the international community.
Some of the country's major political parties said Karzai risked disheartening the foreigners and criticised him for having double standards in his reaction to such events.
According to those who spoke to TOLOnews, Karzai appeared to position himself against the foreign forces, but rarely takes as strong a stance on the attacks from other non-friendly groups.
Spokesperson of the National Coalition Party Sayed Aqa Fazel Sancharaki said that the President lacked the same resolve when it comes to fighting the extremist militants in Afghanistan.
"The President's comments show a lack of strict decision against fighting insurgency extremism in the country -- he does not want to solve these problems fundamentally," Sancharaki said.
Truth and Justice Party spokesperson Hamidull Farouqi said he believes that Karzai was attempting to curry personal favour through such a statement, rather than look after the country's interests.
"The president's behavior was for personal reasons and based on his own emotions, which saddens us. The President should prefer to act in the national interest and not negotiations on his personal interests."
Karzai released a statement Saturday condemning the "unilateral military operation conducted by Australian troops" as a breach of the special operations agreement signed with Nato in April which gave Afghans oversight of the controversial night raids.
It said the President has ordered an "all-out probe" into the operation that killed a 70-year old man Haji Raz Mohammad and his 30 year-old son Abdul Jalil.
Australian Defence Minister Stephen Smith on Monday rejected Karzai's statement saying his understanding that it was a unilateral operation was wrong.
"The statement that has been issued by President Karzai's palace over the weekend in Kabul that this operation was not authorised is wrong," he said at a press conference.
Smith confirmed that two men - who he said were insurgents - had been killed, and a third man was detained during the raid. The man in custody is suspected of having helped or sought to help the Afghan soldier, Hekmatullah, who shot at Australian troops last week, killing three and wounding two.
"The outcome of the operation has been the detention of an individual who is regarded not just as a leader of the insurgency in Uruzgan province but a person who has also sought to or actually assisted Hekmatullah in his escape," Smith told reporters.
Isaf also defended the operation.
"The operation was planned and executed in coordination with Afghan officials including approval by the Uruzgan provincial governor," Isaf told TOLOnews Sunday.
Five Australian soldiers died last week in two incidents - the first took place at a base in Uruzgan province on Wednesday night when Hekmatullah killed the three Australian soldiers. Then hours later, two Australian soldiers died and a crew member was wounded when their helicopter rolled over while landing in Helmand province.
Australia has around 1,500 troops in Afghanistan, most of them based in Uruzgan.
Unfriendly Fire: Can the U.S. and NATO Prevent ‘Green on Blue’ Attacks in Afghanistan?
Doing proper background checks to ascertain if recruits have Taliban affiliations is just one of the many challenges facing the U.S. and NATO as they prepare for withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2014
TIME.com By John Wendle September 4, 2012
Kabul - Alam Gul, a potential Afghan Local Police (ALP) recruit sat cross-legged on a mat outside the unit’s crumbling, mud-brick headquarters in the village of Tabin, in Kandahar’s restive Arghandab district, alternately looking at his hands and at the sky as he answered a series of questions. Two ALP members sat watching nearby, while others washed motorbikes or lounged in the sun. The U.S. Army specialist and staff sergeant in charge of the interview were getting increasingly frustrated with the young man.
Seemingly simple questions often have no good answer in Afghanistan. When asked where he lived, Gul only said that “there are four or five houses between my home and the mosque.” Asked in what direction from the mosque, he, like many uneducated Afghans, did not know the meaning of north, south, east and west. He guessed his age as being “between 28 and 30.” His secondhand motorcycle was unregistered. He had no mobile number. It was even unclear at which mosque he worshipped, since he could not read a map and Staff Sergeant John Fox did not know the names of all the mosques in the area. Fox, working with experienced interpreter Aziz Mohammad Shirzada, was finally able to narrow it down to only: “Right there, when we come around that corner going into Bala Tabin.”
The answers were crucial since NATO and the U.S. uses registration numbers and interviews with mullahs and village-council members to find out more about the men who apply for positions with the ALP, as well as the army and the police. The vetting process was deemed critical after members of extremist militias in Iraq were inadvertently armed by the U.S. in a similar effort called the Sons of Iraq, put into place in 2005, after being insufficiently screened. But with no contact details, little verifiable history and no address or registration number, the Americans were running out of ways to figure out who exactly the young man was. Doing proper background checks to ascertain if recruits could have Taliban affiliations or sympathies is just one of the many challenges facing the U.S. and NATO as they prepare for withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Nearly a quarter of all combat fatalities in Afghanistan this year were “green on blue” attacks, with 45 U.S. and NATO soldiers killed by Afghan soldiers and police thus far. As an emergency measure to help cope with the rising tide of “insider attacks,” Lieut. General Adrian Bradshaw, the British deputy commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, announced Sunday that the training of around a thousand recruits had been put on hold to allow for revetting of 16,300 members of the ALP. “This precautionary measure is in response to concerns by Afghan, U.S. and other coalition commanders over recent insider threat incidents,” he said in a press release. “The measures being applied to Afghan National Army special forces and ALP personnel reflects the intensive effort to recheck the vetting status of the roughly 350,000 Afghan National Security Forces personnel as part of a number of actions recently instituted to reinforce existing precautions related to the insider threat.”
The loyalty, reliability and professionalism of those 350,000-plus Afghan troops is essential if Washington and Brussels’ endgame in Afghanistan is to have any success. NATO is introducing a number of new measures to deal with the crisis: it is scaling up its counterintelligence teams, instituting new interview procedures for Afghan soldiers returning from leave, establishing a warning system for insider threats and enhancing cultural training for Afghan personnel. Still, in a country with such strained resources and few written records, it remains unclear how effective these improvements can be.
The recent spate of killings has shown the vulnerability of Afghan security forces like the ALP, which offers recruits just three weeks of training before they operate remotely, in their home villages. “Since the creation of the ALP, there have been concerns about infiltration by the Taliban and other insurgents,” says Seth Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corp. who worked at high levels of the U.S. Special Operations command in Afghanistan. “I can say that from firsthand experience.”
Jones says that to minimize insurgent infiltration, the vetting process must be improved. “The greatest threat from infiltration is probably less in undermining the ALP, which have helped undermine Taliban control of some rural areas, and more in creating political tension between the United States and Afghanistan,” he says. “A loss of trust between Afghan and U.S. soldiers would be extremely damaging.” But, after so many killings, even with NATO’s suspension of training and the implementation of new security measures, that trust may already have been broken beyond repair.
Iran, Afghanistan to Cooperate on Tourism, Banking, Mehr Reports
Bloomberg By Yeganeh Salehi September 04, 2012
Iran and Afghanistan will sign a memorandum of understanding for cooperation in trade, banking and tourism, the state-run Mehr news agency reported, without saying where it got the information.
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi will travel to Afghanistan later today to meet his Afghan counterpart, Zalmai Rassoul, and participate in the fourth Iran-Afghanistan economic committee meeting, Mehr said, without providing details.
A group of 30 Iranian experts and deputies in Afghan affairs will participate in the meeting, during which the memorandum will be drafted.
To contact the reporter on this story: Yeganeh Salehi in Tehran at yalehi@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net
Court upholds Afghan Taliban’s narco-terrorism conviction in U.S.
McClatchy Newspapers By Michael Doyle Tuesday, September 4, 2012
WASHINGTON - An appellate court on Tuesday upheld the conviction of a former Afghan Taliban member who’s serving a first-of-its-kind life sentence in the Southern California desert.
Khan Mohammed was the first Afghan Taliban member to be tried in a U.S. courtroom, and the first individual convicted under a 2006 federal narco-terrorism law. Now incarcerated at U.S. Penitentiary Victorville, 80 miles east of Los Angeles, Mohammed failed to persuade the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that his drug dealing couldn’t be linked to a specific act of terrorism.
“Mohammed need not have planned for his drug proceeds to fund terrorist ends,” Judge Thomas B. Griffith wrote. “It is sufficient that the proceeds went to a terrorist – him.”
Even with some national-security secrets blacked out, the appellate court’s 23-page majority opinion sheds light on the dangerous operation in which a U.S. informer and Drug Enforcement Administration agents ensnared Mohammed in Afghanistan. Coming from a court that’s sometimes called the second most powerful in the United States because it oversees many federal agency actions, the decision also could shape future narco-terrorist prosecutions.
While upholding Mohammed’s conviction and life sentence, the appellate court panel gave the 42-year-old native of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province one final lifeline: Two of the panel’s three judges agreed that Mohammed still may pursue claims that his initial trial attorney was ineffective, in part for failing to aggressively challenge the credibility of the key prosecution witness. Mohammed’s initial trial attorney didn’t call any defense witnesses and offered no evidence on his behalf.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, presented considerable evidence that Mohammed viewed drug dealing as a way to hurt the United States. The trial judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, noted at Mohammed’s 2008 sentencing that “he equates selling heroin destined for American cities with shooting/attacking Americans who have armed forces in Afghanistan,” a trial transcript shows, and secret recordings showed Mohammed bluntly speaking for himself.
“We will eliminate them, whether by opium or by shooting,” Mohammed said to a wired-up U.S. informant while in Afghanistan, according to a tape recording presented at the four-day trial.
Afghanistan produces about 90 percent of the world’s opium, according to the United Nations. Last year, the value of the country’s opium crop leapt to an estimated $1.4 billion.
The case had its beginnings in 2006, when an Afghan named Jaweed, who like many Afghan men has only one name, met a former Taliban official living in Pakistan. The former Taliban official was plotting an attack on Jalalabad airfield in eastern Afghanistan, and he dispatched Jaweed to meet with Mohammed in Afghanistan. Mohammed was a connected man, involved in shady business, according to testimony.
Jaweed told Mohammed he’d get missiles to attack the key air base, but he had a change of heart and began cooperating with Afghan officials, who passed him over to the DEA.
The drug-fighting agency equipped Jaweed with a tape recorder and a tiny video camera and had him tell Mohammed that he knew a man who was in the market for opium. Mohammed eagerly provided the opium and, later, nearly two kilograms – about four pounds – of heroin.
DEA agents then seized Mohammed and packed him off to trial in Washington.
Mohammed’s defense attorney argued that no evidence linked the drug sales to an attempted attack on the air base. The trial judge, though, agreed with prosecutors that Mohammed was planning to use some of his drug profits to buy a car that would transport Taliban. In settling Mohammed’s judicial fate, the court combined those plans with Mohammed’s own tape-recorded statements about his hopes for how the heroin would poison the United States.
“May God turn all the infidels to dead corpses,” Mohammed said, according to one recording.
The appellate court concluded that the narco-terrorism law applied, saying that “it is clear that Congress intended to punish those who support terrorism directly . . . as well as indirectly.” Email: mdoyle@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @MichaelDoyle10
IEC Says Time is Running Out to Complete Voter Registration
TOLOnews.com By Mahboba Pardis Tuesday, 04 September 2012
Head of Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) Fazel Ahmad Manawe said on Tuesday that he is running out of time to properly register voters for the upcoming election in 2014.
Speaking to TOLOnews, Manawe stressed that insecurity, lack of exact population statistics, lack of proper national ID cards, and possibly a lack of sufficient budget were the main causes of the delay in starting of voters' registration process.
"We have made this clear in the past that we don't have too much time, we need to take our decision, we cannot conduct this huge task if we continue to lose time," Manawe said, urging the donor agencies and the Afghan government to provide the commission with necessary facilities and budget.
The scheduled time for launching the presidential election is March 2014 and any delay in this may be considered a violation of Afghanistan's constitution, he said.
Manawe said that the registration process of the voters needs at least $80 million which should be given by the donor agencies as pledged, but he is concerned that the delay in transferring these budgets will make it difficult to do a proper job.
He said that the IEC is trying to have election cards which will be considered a legal alternative to the national ID cards.
"We are trying to have standard cards issued which can be used as national ID cards too," he said.
The pressure is on for the IEC to ensure a transparent and fair election after serious allegations of fraud followed the last election, despite millions of dollars in donor funds to support the democratic process.
Balkh governor Atta Mohammad Noor spoke on the matter at a press conference in the province, stressing the need for a fair election.
Noor, who is himself a key member of political party Jamiat Eslami, said he may run for presidency or he will support a candidate, but stressed that the people of Afghanistan needed to have their vote heard and counted as important.
"We hope to have an election without fraud to gain the trust of the people. Otherwise democracy will change in a fake world and people will never vote," he said.
Noor said his party's participation will be greater than in previous years.
"We participated in the past, but this time we will be more powerful. You will be the witnesses of our powerful participation," he said the reporters at the briefing.
The total cost for presidential and provincial council elections is estimated to be over $149m.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com