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U.S. to Retain Role as a Jailer in Afghanistan
New York Times By CHARLIE SAVAGE and GRAHAM BOWLEY September 5, 2012
WASHINGTON - The United States military will maintain control over dozens of foreign detainees in Afghanistan for the indefinite future, even as the two countries prepare to ceremonially mark the hand-over of detention operations to the Afghan government, officials from both countries say.
Further, although thousands of Afghan detainees have already been turned over, the United States will continue to hold and screen newly captured Afghans for a time, ensuring continued American involvement in detention and interrogation activities.
The hand-over deal, signed on March 9 at President Hamid Karzai’s demand, set a six-month transfer schedule and was a reflection of rising Afghan assertions of sovereignty at a time of extreme tensions over American troops’ burning of Korans.
The persistence of American-operated prison buildings, in a section of the main Parwan complex at Bagram Air Base, underscores the complexity of relinquishing control over detainee operations while American troops are still in the field conducting raids and making arrests — including the risk that detainees could be freed only to come back and stage attacks.
Some of the difficulties raised by the non-Afghan detainees, moreover, echo problems that have slowed the Obama administration’s efforts to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It is illegal to repatriate prisoners to countries where they are likely to be tortured or killed, for example, and American officials have also wanted to ensure that other governments are willing and able to keep tabs on any released detainees.
Still, Afghan guards now operate most of the cellblocks at Parwan, and they have taken custody of most of the roughly 3,000 Afghans who were already being held as suspects in the insurgency when the allies signed the transfer agreement. There are many fewer inmates — about 50, officials say — from Pakistan and other countries, while more than 600 Afghans have been taken into custody since the March 9 deal. A major unresolved issue is how quickly newly arrested Afghans should be turned over.
William K. Lietzau, the Pentagon’s top detainee policy official, said in a recent interview that the United States was “on a trajectory to be able to comply” with the Sept. 9 “milestone” in the transfer agreement — he rejected the word deadline. Compliance, he said, meant having transferred all Afghan citizens who were already in custody when the agreement was signed.
So far, Mr. Karzai, who early this year demanded the immediate transfer of prison operations, has not publicly objected to that narrow interpretation of the agreement. He has announced plans for a ceremony on Monday to mark the “full transfer” of the detention center.
Some Afghan officials signaled that the continuing American role was understood and, to a degree, acceptable. “The priority for Afghanistan is Afghan citizens,” said Janan Mosazai, the Foreign Ministry spokesman. “When it comes to third-country nationals, that will be a matter we decide with our international partners at some point down the road.”
In an interview last week, the Afghan official who runs the Afghan-controlled portions of Parwan, Gen. Ghulam Farouk, acknowledged that the Afghan guards were still “in the process of building our capacity.” Three American officials sat in on the interview at his office at Parwan, while in a dusty yard outside his window, a graduation ceremony for about 100 guards unfolded. Behind them, a bus delivered detainees’ families for visits.
While General Farouk said the process of transferring the initial group of Afghan detainees was almost complete, because of delicate relations with a “neighboring country” — a reference to Pakistan — he said it would be best if the United States kept the foreign detainees for now.
“If we keep these people with us in this current situation and deal with them, this will create more problems for us,” he said. “Therefore it is better for the Americans to keep them.”
When transferred, prisoners leave their cells in one of the remaining American-controlled buildings and are taken to new cells in a building controlled by Afghans, but where American personnel will still be present in an advisory role until at least March, under the agreement. An Afghan committee sorts the detainees into two groups: so far, General Farouk said, 1,638 have been approved for criminal prosecution, and 963 have been referred to a review board, which evaluates them and recommends whether to keep holding them without trial as wartime detainees.
The agreement calls on Afghanistan to consult the United States and “consider favorably” its assessment of whether a detainee poses a continuing security threat or should be released, but it is ambiguous about which country has final say. As a practical matter, the United States military still controls the perimeter of the base around the prison complex. To date, officials of both countries say, there have been no disagreements between General Farouk and his American counterpart, Lt. Gen. Keith M. Huber.
There are early signs, however, that the Afghans may be more inclined to release detainees than not. General Farouk said that so far the review board had finished evaluating about 600 men and recommended that he release 374. None have yet been freed, and he was vague about how many might be, but suggested it could be a majority.
A major task for American officials has been to declassify as much evidence as possible showing that each detainee may be an insurgent. The dossiers, given to the Afghans when each detainee is transferred, can be used by the Afghan court or its review boards.
To protect intelligence sources, the United States has sometimes withheld information or allowed Afghan officials only to view documents but not take copies. Mr. Lietzau of the Pentagon said that if the United States objected to an Afghan recommendation to release a detainee, the Americans would re-examine the full, still-classified file to see whether there was a way to show the review board more information.
“The bottom line is, we’re not in a war by ourselves against an enemy that is just our enemy,” he said. “We’re in a war where the only way to win is with our alliance.”
Domestic politics are a factor as well. Congress has imposed steep restrictions on transfers from Guantánamo, and the military does not want its hands to be similarly tied in Afghanistan. Republican lawmakers have criticized a decision to turn over to Iraqi custody a detainee accused of helping to kill American troops in the Iraq war. After a report that Iraq may soon release him, they warned the administration “to extend all efforts to ensure that this tragic mistake is not repeated with terrorists currently in U.S. custody in Afghanistan.”
But any sweeping declarations by the United States that it will not allow the release of anyone it deems too risky would undermine Mr. Karzai’s ability to show that Afghans now exercise sovereign control over prisons on their soil. The Obama administration also does not want to provoke American courts into revisiting a 2010 ruling declining to extend the same habeas corpus rights that Guantánamo detainees have to detainees in Afghanistan.
The prisoner transfer policy could also face legal and political pressures inside Afghanistan. The United States insisted, when negotiating the agreement, that the Karzai administration embrace a system of no-trial detention for wartime prisoners deemed too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release. Afghan lawmakers, however, did not ratify the agreement.
Gul Rahman Qazi, the chairman of the independent commission for overseeing the carrying out of the Afghan Constitution, which he helped write, contended that a no-trial detention system “is not acceptable to us” and is “in confrontation with the national Constitution.”
But Mr. Lietzau said that while the war continues, it is lawful and necessary to detain people without trial, both to gain intelligence and to avoid creating any incentive for troops in combat to elect killing over capturing.
“An administrative detention regime is necessary for any morally responsible country in an armed conflict,” he said. “In this case, it was a prerequisite for our agreement with the Afghan government, at least the way combat operations are going right now. That’s something we’re going to have to be watching very carefully as we go forward with this transition.”
Charlie Savage reported from Washington, and Graham Bowley from Bagram, Afghanistan.
Al-Qaida operative killed in Afghan town: ISAF
KABUL, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on Thursday announced that the security forces had killed an al-Qaida operative namely Abu Saif in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar, a statement of the alliance released here said.
"Afghan and coalition forces today confirmed the death of an al-Qaida operative following a precision airstrike in Watahpur district, Kunar province, Friday," the statement noted.
Abu Saif, also known as Haidar Baba, according to the statement had worked with Kunar al-Qaida leaders Yusuf and Mufti Assad, was killed by Afghan and coalition forces on August 31, along with two other insurgents.
Abu Saif was also a known associate of al-Qaida leader Hanzallah, who was killed along with several of his fighters in July 1 operation in Kunar, the statement further said.
A post-strike assessment determined no civilian property was damaged and no civilians were harmed, the ISAF statement contended.
Taliban militatns whose regime was overthrown by the U.S.-led military compaign in late 2001 for harboring al-Qaida's leader Osama Bin Laden are yet to comment.
Pakistani Militants Launch Counteroffensive From Afghan Safe Haven
By Majeed Babar, Charles Recknagel September 6, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Fighting has been raging for more than a week in Pakistan's Bajaur tribal agency as militants surge back into the region from safe havens across the border in Afghanistan.
Just a year ago this area was declared free of insurgents. That was after a three-year military operation that Islamabad hailed as a major success in its strategy of clearing, holding, and developing militant-plagued regions of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA).
Now, as calls are made for similar operations elsewhere in northwestern Pakistan, the resumption of fighting in Bajaur is raising questions about how effective the strategy really is when safe havens can easily be found across the border in Afghanistan.
The thousands of villagers fleeing the fighting for the safety of Bajaur's main town of Khar tell of relatives and neighbors struck down in the cross-fire.
"I asked my father, 'Why you are going back?' He said, 'We left our doors open, so I am going back to shut them.' And he said one of our relatives, named Mujahid, was shot dead and there weren't enough people at home to dig graves," says Farooq Shah of the village of Batwar, in Bajaur's Salarzai district
"But when he got back to our house to lock it, the shooting started and he was hit."
Pakistani Taliban insurgents attacked security checkpoints and seized Batwar after crossing over from Afghanistan's Konar Province on August 26.
Azam Khan, another Batwar resident, says the militants told them to leave. "When the Taliban came to the area, and the army arrived too, the Taliban told us to leave quickly to avoid damage," he says. "So we left without taking anything. We don't even have blankets or clothes. We left with nothing."
Shoukat Ullah, Pakistan's federal minister in charge of FATA and the border regions, says the fighting has virtually emptied Batwar and its surrounding area. "More than 2,000 families have left the area so far. Each family from that area has many members, so it means many people are affected," Ullah said, adding that they received shelter from other people in Bajaur.
Declaration Of Victory Premature
In recent days, security forces claim to have cleared most parts of Batwar of militants but pockets of resistance remain.
How many militants are involved in the fighting is not known. The military has reported dozens of militants killed over the past 12 days, suggesting there could be hundreds of fighters. It has also reported injuries, but no deaths, among Pakistani troops and local tribal fighters known as "peace lashkars" opposed to the Taliban. The official casualty figures cannot be independently verified.
According to the military, all of the militants are members of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) -- the same group Islamabad announced in August 2011 was fully evicted from Bajaur. At the time, the government urged hundreds of thousands of residents who had fled the three years of fighting in Bajaur to return home. To ensure that they did, aid to the displaced-persons camps where they were staying was cut off.
But now the TTP's reappearance suggests that it used its eviction as an opportunity to regroup and recruit new fighters. The TTP recruits across Pakistan and includes members of multiple ethnic groups who are bound together by a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and a goal of toppling the government and imposing strict Shari'a law.
The TTP's use of safe havens in Afghanistan mirrors the Afghan Taliban's successful use of safe havens in Pakistan. The two groups are believed to help each other but to fight only for themselves. No Afghan Taliban groups are reported to be taking part in the Bajaur combat.
Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, an expert on FATA based in Peshawar, says the resurgence of fighting in Bajaur shows how mixed the results of Pakistan's military sweep operations can be. He says the strategy has so far been only been successful in two areas. Both are far from the Afghan border.
"They haven't had a full victory yet. The Pakistani Army has had some success against the Taliban in Swat and in Malakand district [of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province] -- now there is no presence of the Taliban in those areas. And even if the Taliban want to come back to those areas, they won't be able to come openly," Yusufzai says. "But in my opinion, it's a very long war and it will be very difficult to achieve full victory."
Near the border, security forces have the upper hand in weaponry, including tanks and artillery, to pound militant hideouts in the mountainous region. But the militants' ability to melt across the border to safety gives them a tactical advantage. They can disappear and reappear at will and choose when and where to fight.
Written by Charles Recknagel, based on reporting by RFE/RL Radio Mashaal correspondents Shahnawaz Tarakzai in Bajaur and Siraj Zaheer in Islamabad
Pakistan, Afghanistan, US discuss safe passage for Taliban leaders to join peace talks
Associated Press September 5 , 2012
ISLAMABAD - Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States on Wednesday discussed how to provide Taliban leaders safe passage to join peace negotiations, a key issue to allow the talks to succeed, officials said.
Many senior Taliban commanders, including leader Mullah Omar, are believed to be based in Pakistan, making Islamabad’s cooperation critical. Pakistan also has strong historical ties with the group that many analysts believe have continued.
The U.S. and Afghan governments have urged Islamabad to push the Taliban to participate in a peace process that has had trouble getting off the ground. All three countries believe a peace deal is necessary to prevent Afghanistan from descending into civil war after most foreign forces withdraw by the end of 2014. But the process has been plagued by mistrust between the three governments and the Taliban.
The discussions that took place Wednesday in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, marked the inaugural meeting of the Safe Passage Working Group, said the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in a written statement. The three governments agreed to form the group in April, the ministry said.
The group is focused on choosing which Taliban leaders should be provided safe passage, guaranteeing their security and dealing with logistics like visas, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to talk to reporters about the meeting. The official described the meeting as “positive.”
The U.S. began clandestine talks with the Taliban last year, aided by Germany and secretly held in Qatar. It is widely believed that Pakistan provided safe passage to some Taliban militants to attend those discussions.
But the contacts have run into a series of problems.
The Taliban broke off talks earlier this year, saying the U.S. reneged on a promise to release Afghan prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. security prison in Cuba. To get the Taliban back to the table, the U.S. has said it is considering a proposal to transfer some Guantanamo Bay inmates to a prison in Afghanistan.
The Taliban have said they want the prisoners freed unconditionally before resuming talks.
Karzai Underlines Importance of Consultations with Iran on Regional Issues
Fars News Agency September 6, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi stressed the importance of consultations and talks with Tehran on bilateral relations and different regional developments.
Karzai said that exchange of delegations and consultations on bilateral and regional subjects are of great importance.
He conveyed his greetings to Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling the 16th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran as an "important" event.
The Iranian top diplomat, for his part, called for removal of minor impediments on the way of expansion of Iran-Afghanistan relations.
Salehi thanked Karzai for his presence at the head of a high-ranking delegation in the NAM summit, and conveyed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's warm greetings to his Afghan counterpart.
He said continued exchange of delegations by Iran and Afghanistan will give an impetus to development of bilateral relations.
Iran is one of the most important donors to Afghanistan, which has kept its promises to help to the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country.
Iran has built several roads, power transmission lines, border stations and many other infrastructure projects to better link the two nations.
Iran has also contributed more than $50 million annually to Afghan anti-narcotics efforts during the last five years.
Tehran has repeatedly called for a withdrawal of the US-led foreign troops from Afghanistan, stressing that establishment of peace and security in the war-ravaged country is possible only through cooperation among the regional states.
Accountability and Insurgency in Afghanistan
Foreign Policy in Focus By Inge Fryklund September 5, 2012
Although the war in Afghanistan—with its tally of U.S. combat deaths now exceeding 2,000—has largely faded from the news, it is useful to consider why the conflict is so intractable. Why has a campaign that initially seemed so hopeful resulted in a country that is politically fractured and increasingly deadly for Afghans and foreign militaries alike?
One clue can be found in the country’s governance. The initial promise of inclusive and accountable Afghan government, embodied in the constitution approved by the 2003 Loya Jirga, has been squandered.
The Afghan constitution provides for a more highly centralized government than is historically congenial to Afghanistan, but this centralization is balanced by the constitutional requirement for the direct election of mayors and of district, city, and village councils—a return to the pre-Soviet practice of locally elected offices and locally managed affairs.
The Karzai government, however, has chosen not to implement any of these provisions, and the international community has acquiesced. Instead, President Karzai appoints all mayors, and the only district and city councils are those organized and funded by the international community. The (non-existent) district councils are supposed to appoint members of the Meshrano Jirga, the upper house of Parliament, providing district input at the national level. Provincial councils are indeed elected per the constitution and appoint a member to the Meshrano Jirga, but under a decree signed by President Karzai in 2005, their powers are mostly advisory.
The result is a complete lack of official mechanisms for governmental accountability at the provincial, district, or municipal level; citizens simply have no recourse if local officials are corrupt or fail to deliver. Much of the insurgency may well be driven—or passively encouraged—by the sheer lack of avenues for peaceful local political choice. Few insurgents are ideologically “Taliban.”
In 2005, I heard an Afghan-American professor speaking in Kabul postulate that this lack of local accountability was the root problem in Afghanistan and the main driver of the insurgency—which was then barely noticeable to the rest of us. As he put it, under this system, “Afghans aren’t citizens; they are subjects.” All the Afghans in the room cheered. Nearly eight years on, we are reaping the fruits of that lack of accountability.
Afghanistan has a number of large cities—Kandahar, Jalalabad, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, and of course Kabul—that should be engines of economic growth and participatory politics. Instead, mayors are appointed to advance the president’s interests rather than to address local needs. While municipalities must support themselves by raising their own taxes, their budgets, hiring decisions, and salaries are all set in Kabul. Americans would never stand for such lack of control over local affairs, so why should we expect the Afghans to tolerate it?
U.S. support of the Karzai government is only facilitating the top-down control that in turn helps to drive the insurgency, and the United States is seen to be supporting the Kabul government against the interests of the average Afghan. In the absence of structural accountability, U.S.-led anti-corruption efforts—which consist mostly of urging the Karzai administration to prosecute wrongdoers—are no challenge to the regime. Worldwide, the single most effective anti-corruption tool is electoral accountability. In the United States, we can “throw the bums out.” Afghans have no such option.
The continued lack of Afghan governmental accountability will continue to constrain economic activity, alienate citizens, and fuel the insurgency. It is likely to lead to more U.S. and NATO deaths before the withdrawal, and more instability afterwards.
An insurgency driven by lack of accountability cannot be eliminated by military force. Only altering the institutions of government can change the dynamic. Decentralization of power would go a long ways towards improving life at the local level and eliminating the need for insurgency as a mechanism for political opposition. Given the current constitution, local officials could be elected, and real power devolved by statute.
While the consequences of lack of accountability are primarily manifest at the provincial and local levels, the accountability problem can only be addressed by Afghan national policy. The Karzai government has demonstrated that it has no interest in local accountability. It is time for the international community to insist that Afghanistan fully implement its own constitution as a quid pro quo for further support.
Between now and 2014, there is time to reduce that part of the insurgency that is anti-Karzai (and, by association, anti-American) rather than pro-Taliban, and leave a legacy of permanent sustainable institutions of sub-national government. In the run-up to the 2014 presidential election, local elections could also serve to broaden the political space and allow potential candidates to demonstrate their ability to govern. Expanding elected government would help Afghanistan’s putative democracy mature beyond its current centralized, “winner take all” dynamic, and create multiple bodies of authority to help draw more citizens into the political process. This is a legacy that we can leave for Afghanistan.
Local accountability is the closest thing to a silver bullet that we are likely to find in Afghanistan. We should use it.
Looted artifacts’ return help Afghan museum rebuild after weathering war, Taliban
Associated Press September 5 , 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Right down to the power cuts that frequently plunge its artifacts into shadow, the National Museum of Afghanistan is a symbol of the country’s decades of hardships. Its building was shelled, looted and caught fire during the 1990s civil war. Taliban extremists later smashed many centuries-old statues.
Now, the museum is slowly rebuilding, thanks to international efforts to return thousands of looted treasures — and to heroic Afghan staff members who hid its most priceless works during the war years and kept the secret for more than a decade.
The museum welcomed home nearly 850 Afghan artifacts in early August — including a 3,000-year-old Bronze Age axe, a 1st Century ivory elephant carving and a life-sized Buddha statue — that were either stolen from the museum or illegally excavated during decades of insecurity. The British Museum catalogued and helped return the pieces in cooperation with British authorities, who seized many from smugglers. It was the second major handover of Afghan historical pieces by the British Museum. In 2009, about 1,500 historical pieces were returned.
The aim is to restore the facility to its pre-war reputation as one of the finest in the region, with displays ranging from the Bronze Age to more contemporary Islamic art.
With its gates topped with barbed wire and rifle-toting guards directing visitors to undergo body searches, the museum on Kabul’s outskirts carries the air of a culture still under siege.
Chief curator Mohammad Fahim Rahimi apologizes for the darkened halls during a recent visit to view one of the newly returned pieces. Like much of Afghanistan, the museum puts up with frequent power outages as the government struggles to provide basic services.
Minutes later, the power shudders back on and the museum lighting reveals its latest acquisition: a Buddha statue estimated at about 1,700 years old.
Looted from the museum during the civil war that followed the Soviet occupation, the statue turned up in Japan in a private collection before it was bought by an anonymous donor who arranged for the British Museum return to its Afghan home, Rahimi says The statue is an example of art from Afghanistan’s long Buddhist history, before the arrival of Islam.
“This is simply our heritage,” Rahimi says. “If we have our heritage back, it’s everything for us.
That’s a heritage that not all appreciate. In 2001, the Taliban dynamited a pair of giant Buddhas carved into a mountain in Bamiyan province. Around the same time, the Taliban also rampaged through the national museum, smashing any art depicting the human form, considered idolatrous under their hardline interpretation of Islam. In all, they destroyed about 2,500 statues.
The recently returned Buddha statue’s long exile abroad at least protected it from that fate, Rahimi says.
“You can see here, the hand is complete and the head is complete. It’s not broken,” he says.
He points out the finer points of the 4th Century piece: the painstakingly carved folds of the robe; the chakra on the Buddha’s right hand, the streams depicting water flow from his feet and the images of flames rise from his shoulders — a representation of one of the Buddha’s first miracles, in which he levitated and produced fire and water to silence skeptics.
The “miracle” Buddha is the only the recently returned pieces from Britain that is on display so far.
Museum director Omara Khan Massoudi says the rest are still in boxes, waiting to be examined and eventually displayed. Cooperation with other museums and with UNESCO has been key to rebuilding the museum, which by 2001 had lost 70 percent of its artifacts to the years of war.
“Within these last 10 years, we’ve gotten more than 16,000 pieces, among them 9,000 returned from outside of Afghanistan,” Massoudi says.
Some of the pieces recently returned were stolen from the museum itself, but many others were illegally excavated and smuggled out of the country in past decades while war otherwise occupied Afghan authorities. It’s a practice that continues to this day, according to Massoudi.
“Unfortunately, some places, there is no security, sometimes it happens that people have illegal excavations,” he says.
Massoudi has devoted most of his life’s work to the National Museum, which he says was once renowned for having one of the region’s finest collections, with some 100,000 artifacts including millennia-old tools from some of the earliest human settlements. Established in the 1920s by Afghan King Amrullah Khan, the museum was still thriving when Massoudi joined it more than three decades ago.
But after Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, museum workers became increasingly concerned as the country deteriorated into civil war.
So, in 1989, Massoudi and several other staff members packed up some of the most museum’s most treasured pieces — including the legendary “Bactrian gold,” an intricate collection of tens of thousands of gold and silver coins, crowns and jewelry more than 2,000 years old — and hid them in two locations in central Kabul, one of them a secret vault under Kabul’s central bank.
“Luckily, this decision gave us a good result when the civil war started in Kabul city,” Massoudi said. “The national museum artifacts were looted ... but the artifacts we shifted to the two places in the center of the city.”
The pieces remained hidden until 2003, when the hidden treasures’ existence was revealed. Now the Bactrian gold and some of the other rescued artifacts are on a tour of museums around the world, having already been displayed in New York, Paris and London. The traveling exhibition is now in Norway and goes next to Australia.
Eventually, those treasures, too, will be returned to Afghanistan’s National Museum. Massoudi laments the facility still lacks such modern museum staples as humidity control and high-tech security — they’re still working on the electricity, after all. But he says the museum is seeking funds to build a new, modern home near the current building.
“We all together tried the best to rebuild ... from zero,” he says.
Pakistan Expels Save the Children's Foreign Staff
VOA News September 6, 2012
Pakistan has ordered Save the Children's foreign staff members to leave the country.
An official with the U.S.-based aid agency, Ghulam Qadri, told reporters Thursday that the Interior Ministry ordered six foreign employees to leave Pakistan, but gave no reason for the expulsion.
Save the Children is said to have come under increased government scrutiny following media reports that it helped facilitate meetings between the CIA and a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, who is said to have helped the U.S. intelligence agency track down Osama bin Laden.
U.S. special forces killed the al-Qaida leader in May of 2011 during a covert raid in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad.
Qadri on Thursday denied allegations that the aid group put Afridi in touch with the CIA.
Save the Children has been operating in Pakistan for more than 30 years and employs some 2,000 Pakistani staff members.
Afridi was accused of running a fake vaccination campaign to help the CIA obtain DNA samples to confirm Osama bin Laden's presence at a compound in Abbottabad. In May, a Pakistani court convicted the doctor of having militant ties and sentenced him to 33 years in prison.
The reported expulsion of Save the Children's staff comes a week after the International Committee of the Red Cross announced it was scaling back its aid operations in Pakistan following the killing of one of it staff members in Karachi earlier this year.
The dangerous political battle for Afghanistan
The US hopes a new democratic era will begin as the occupation ends, but many people worry a power vacuum will emerge instead, leaving political rivals to fight it out as the Taliban closes in on Kabul.
Global Post By Chris Sands September 5, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - A Toyota Land Cruiser sat on the street outside Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq's house, its windows missing, tires punctured, and the hood badly dented. He said his bodyguards had been ambushed by insurgents while driving in a province bordering Kabul.
He was nowhere near the SUV at the time of the attack and was adamant he does not fear for his life, despite the long list of enemies he has made while becoming one of Afghanistan's most powerful men.
"For several hours my boys were fighting with them," he said. "Of course there is a place for concerns, but personally I have none."
Mohaqiq is a notorious warlord turned member of parliament who is an old adversary of the Taliban and a vocal critic of the government here.
With President Hamid Karzai constitutionally prevented from standing in the 2014 election, and all foreign combat troops due to withdraw later that same year, he is emerging as a key figure in the imminent battle for control of Afghanistan.
Officially, a new democratic era will be ushered in just as the occupation ends, but many people worry a power vacuum will emerge instead, leaving political rivals to fight it out as the Taliban closes in on Kabul.
Mohaqiq knows all too well what can happen under such circumstances. He resisted the Soviets in the 1980s and took part in the civil war between rival guerrilla factions that followed.
He was later a leader of the Northern Alliance, a loose coalition of former mujahideen. But Human Rights Watch accused fighters from his militia of "widespread looting and violence" in the months during and after the US invasion that overthrew the Taliban regime.
Last year he then helped launch the National Front, whose founders say Karzai broke backroom promises he made to some of them when they endorsed his 2009 re-election campaign. These allegedly included an agreement to give greater independence to local authorities.
For Mohaqiq — a Shiite Muslim and ethnic Hazara — the current administration and the militants trying to bring it down represent a joint threat to the nation's hopes of finding peace once NATO withdraws.
Before his bodyguards were ambushed, gunmen opened fire on him in the normally stable province of Bamiyan. That prompted him to fly back home and miss the second attack. The first attempt on his life was, he claimed, the work of government forces.
"There are lots of thoughts that if Karzai cannot keep power then he will make a deal with the Taliban," he said.
"If the Taliban do not come into a corner with him, then Karzai will run away and leave the country to the Taliban and then absolutely there will be a civil war."
The National Front has found encouragement from a handful of US Congress members, who met its leaders in Germany in January and see it as a bulwark against the insurgency and administrative corruption in Kabul.
Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican, was subsequently denied entry into Afghanistan for supporting the party and echoing its demand that a federalist system be created here.
Among the Afghan public, however, there is deep suspicion of Mohaqiq and the other figures likely to have major roles in the 2014 election.
All the main political movements now emerging in opposition to the government are run by men associated in some way with the bloodshed of the past and who are also bitter enemies of the Taliban.
Meanwhile, Karzai is rumored to be grooming one of his brothers, Qayum, to stand against them and maintain his family’s controversial grip on power. This raises the prospect of unrest growing at a time when NATO departs, with powerful rivals seeking to exploit social tensions.
Najibullah Kabuli is an anti-Iran activist and owner of Imroz TV, a private television station. He claims to have left the National Front after discovering it hoped to formally partition Afghanistan along ethnic lines. He told GlobalPost he has since received "lots of threats" and wants the international community to safeguard the 2014 vote.
"Whether the election result is positive or negative, a number of people here will not accept it because these kinds of men have been raised up in fighting, they have fed themselves from fighting and it is always their habit to seek benefit from war," he said.
Mohaqiq denies Kabuli was a party member, calling him "a pimp" who has been "raised by Karzai." But the National Front again encountered trouble when the government claimed fighters loyal to another of its co-founders, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, were interfering in oil exploration work by a Chinese company.
Human rights groups have repeatedly accused Dostum and his militia of abuses ranging from the rape of women during the civil war to the slaughter of Taliban prisoners during the US invasion.
Preparations are already under way for 2014 as Afghanistan’s power brokers maneuver into position and attempt to undermine each other. Although the disputes are relatively low-key now, history shows how quickly tensions here can turn violent when so much is at stake.
Allegations of massive fraud plagued previous elections, but NATO’s presence may well have kept the country from the brink of disaster. Not everyone is convinced a catastrophe will be averted next time.
“In Afghanistan if someone loses he does not have the morals to accept that and congratulate the man who won,” said Mohammed Younus Fakor, a Kabul-based political analyst.
“If we do not have a transparent election, then again I think it will be the start of war.”
Kunar Man Sentenced to Death for Beheading Teenage Girl
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 05 September 2012
A primary court in eastern Kunar province on Tuesday sentenced a man to death after being found guilty of beheading a 17-year-old girl, Shabana.
"Two other Afghan men, who were also involved in the incident, were sentenced to 17 years in jail," provincial spokesman Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi told TOLOnews on Wednesday.
The men "made the decision after they failed to kidnap her three months ago", he added.
Shabana's father said that he had received death threats before the incident and threats to kill his daughter if he did not allow one of them to marry her.
The condemned men said that they did not accept the decision of the court and added that it was unfair.
Local officials said that dozens of residents attended the public hearing in the province which went on for several hours.
The attendees welcomed the court verdict. Forced marriages, child marriages, self-immolation, taking dowries in getting the girls married, not allowing female education, beatings, and cutting off body parts are among the main forms of violence against women in Afghanistan.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
New York Times By CHARLIE SAVAGE and GRAHAM BOWLEY September 5, 2012
WASHINGTON - The United States military will maintain control over dozens of foreign detainees in Afghanistan for the indefinite future, even as the two countries prepare to ceremonially mark the hand-over of detention operations to the Afghan government, officials from both countries say.
Further, although thousands of Afghan detainees have already been turned over, the United States will continue to hold and screen newly captured Afghans for a time, ensuring continued American involvement in detention and interrogation activities.
The hand-over deal, signed on March 9 at President Hamid Karzai’s demand, set a six-month transfer schedule and was a reflection of rising Afghan assertions of sovereignty at a time of extreme tensions over American troops’ burning of Korans.
The persistence of American-operated prison buildings, in a section of the main Parwan complex at Bagram Air Base, underscores the complexity of relinquishing control over detainee operations while American troops are still in the field conducting raids and making arrests — including the risk that detainees could be freed only to come back and stage attacks.
Some of the difficulties raised by the non-Afghan detainees, moreover, echo problems that have slowed the Obama administration’s efforts to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It is illegal to repatriate prisoners to countries where they are likely to be tortured or killed, for example, and American officials have also wanted to ensure that other governments are willing and able to keep tabs on any released detainees.
Still, Afghan guards now operate most of the cellblocks at Parwan, and they have taken custody of most of the roughly 3,000 Afghans who were already being held as suspects in the insurgency when the allies signed the transfer agreement. There are many fewer inmates — about 50, officials say — from Pakistan and other countries, while more than 600 Afghans have been taken into custody since the March 9 deal. A major unresolved issue is how quickly newly arrested Afghans should be turned over.
William K. Lietzau, the Pentagon’s top detainee policy official, said in a recent interview that the United States was “on a trajectory to be able to comply” with the Sept. 9 “milestone” in the transfer agreement — he rejected the word deadline. Compliance, he said, meant having transferred all Afghan citizens who were already in custody when the agreement was signed.
So far, Mr. Karzai, who early this year demanded the immediate transfer of prison operations, has not publicly objected to that narrow interpretation of the agreement. He has announced plans for a ceremony on Monday to mark the “full transfer” of the detention center.
Some Afghan officials signaled that the continuing American role was understood and, to a degree, acceptable. “The priority for Afghanistan is Afghan citizens,” said Janan Mosazai, the Foreign Ministry spokesman. “When it comes to third-country nationals, that will be a matter we decide with our international partners at some point down the road.”
In an interview last week, the Afghan official who runs the Afghan-controlled portions of Parwan, Gen. Ghulam Farouk, acknowledged that the Afghan guards were still “in the process of building our capacity.” Three American officials sat in on the interview at his office at Parwan, while in a dusty yard outside his window, a graduation ceremony for about 100 guards unfolded. Behind them, a bus delivered detainees’ families for visits.
While General Farouk said the process of transferring the initial group of Afghan detainees was almost complete, because of delicate relations with a “neighboring country” — a reference to Pakistan — he said it would be best if the United States kept the foreign detainees for now.
“If we keep these people with us in this current situation and deal with them, this will create more problems for us,” he said. “Therefore it is better for the Americans to keep them.”
When transferred, prisoners leave their cells in one of the remaining American-controlled buildings and are taken to new cells in a building controlled by Afghans, but where American personnel will still be present in an advisory role until at least March, under the agreement. An Afghan committee sorts the detainees into two groups: so far, General Farouk said, 1,638 have been approved for criminal prosecution, and 963 have been referred to a review board, which evaluates them and recommends whether to keep holding them without trial as wartime detainees.
The agreement calls on Afghanistan to consult the United States and “consider favorably” its assessment of whether a detainee poses a continuing security threat or should be released, but it is ambiguous about which country has final say. As a practical matter, the United States military still controls the perimeter of the base around the prison complex. To date, officials of both countries say, there have been no disagreements between General Farouk and his American counterpart, Lt. Gen. Keith M. Huber.
There are early signs, however, that the Afghans may be more inclined to release detainees than not. General Farouk said that so far the review board had finished evaluating about 600 men and recommended that he release 374. None have yet been freed, and he was vague about how many might be, but suggested it could be a majority.
A major task for American officials has been to declassify as much evidence as possible showing that each detainee may be an insurgent. The dossiers, given to the Afghans when each detainee is transferred, can be used by the Afghan court or its review boards.
To protect intelligence sources, the United States has sometimes withheld information or allowed Afghan officials only to view documents but not take copies. Mr. Lietzau of the Pentagon said that if the United States objected to an Afghan recommendation to release a detainee, the Americans would re-examine the full, still-classified file to see whether there was a way to show the review board more information.
“The bottom line is, we’re not in a war by ourselves against an enemy that is just our enemy,” he said. “We’re in a war where the only way to win is with our alliance.”
Domestic politics are a factor as well. Congress has imposed steep restrictions on transfers from Guantánamo, and the military does not want its hands to be similarly tied in Afghanistan. Republican lawmakers have criticized a decision to turn over to Iraqi custody a detainee accused of helping to kill American troops in the Iraq war. After a report that Iraq may soon release him, they warned the administration “to extend all efforts to ensure that this tragic mistake is not repeated with terrorists currently in U.S. custody in Afghanistan.”
But any sweeping declarations by the United States that it will not allow the release of anyone it deems too risky would undermine Mr. Karzai’s ability to show that Afghans now exercise sovereign control over prisons on their soil. The Obama administration also does not want to provoke American courts into revisiting a 2010 ruling declining to extend the same habeas corpus rights that Guantánamo detainees have to detainees in Afghanistan.
The prisoner transfer policy could also face legal and political pressures inside Afghanistan. The United States insisted, when negotiating the agreement, that the Karzai administration embrace a system of no-trial detention for wartime prisoners deemed too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release. Afghan lawmakers, however, did not ratify the agreement.
Gul Rahman Qazi, the chairman of the independent commission for overseeing the carrying out of the Afghan Constitution, which he helped write, contended that a no-trial detention system “is not acceptable to us” and is “in confrontation with the national Constitution.”
But Mr. Lietzau said that while the war continues, it is lawful and necessary to detain people without trial, both to gain intelligence and to avoid creating any incentive for troops in combat to elect killing over capturing.
“An administrative detention regime is necessary for any morally responsible country in an armed conflict,” he said. “In this case, it was a prerequisite for our agreement with the Afghan government, at least the way combat operations are going right now. That’s something we’re going to have to be watching very carefully as we go forward with this transition.”
Charlie Savage reported from Washington, and Graham Bowley from Bagram, Afghanistan.
Al-Qaida operative killed in Afghan town: ISAF
KABUL, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on Thursday announced that the security forces had killed an al-Qaida operative namely Abu Saif in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar, a statement of the alliance released here said.
"Afghan and coalition forces today confirmed the death of an al-Qaida operative following a precision airstrike in Watahpur district, Kunar province, Friday," the statement noted.
Abu Saif, also known as Haidar Baba, according to the statement had worked with Kunar al-Qaida leaders Yusuf and Mufti Assad, was killed by Afghan and coalition forces on August 31, along with two other insurgents.
Abu Saif was also a known associate of al-Qaida leader Hanzallah, who was killed along with several of his fighters in July 1 operation in Kunar, the statement further said.
A post-strike assessment determined no civilian property was damaged and no civilians were harmed, the ISAF statement contended.
Taliban militatns whose regime was overthrown by the U.S.-led military compaign in late 2001 for harboring al-Qaida's leader Osama Bin Laden are yet to comment.
Pakistani Militants Launch Counteroffensive From Afghan Safe Haven
By Majeed Babar, Charles Recknagel September 6, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Fighting has been raging for more than a week in Pakistan's Bajaur tribal agency as militants surge back into the region from safe havens across the border in Afghanistan.
Just a year ago this area was declared free of insurgents. That was after a three-year military operation that Islamabad hailed as a major success in its strategy of clearing, holding, and developing militant-plagued regions of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA).
Now, as calls are made for similar operations elsewhere in northwestern Pakistan, the resumption of fighting in Bajaur is raising questions about how effective the strategy really is when safe havens can easily be found across the border in Afghanistan.
The thousands of villagers fleeing the fighting for the safety of Bajaur's main town of Khar tell of relatives and neighbors struck down in the cross-fire.
"I asked my father, 'Why you are going back?' He said, 'We left our doors open, so I am going back to shut them.' And he said one of our relatives, named Mujahid, was shot dead and there weren't enough people at home to dig graves," says Farooq Shah of the village of Batwar, in Bajaur's Salarzai district
"But when he got back to our house to lock it, the shooting started and he was hit."
Pakistani Taliban insurgents attacked security checkpoints and seized Batwar after crossing over from Afghanistan's Konar Province on August 26.
Azam Khan, another Batwar resident, says the militants told them to leave. "When the Taliban came to the area, and the army arrived too, the Taliban told us to leave quickly to avoid damage," he says. "So we left without taking anything. We don't even have blankets or clothes. We left with nothing."
Shoukat Ullah, Pakistan's federal minister in charge of FATA and the border regions, says the fighting has virtually emptied Batwar and its surrounding area. "More than 2,000 families have left the area so far. Each family from that area has many members, so it means many people are affected," Ullah said, adding that they received shelter from other people in Bajaur.
Declaration Of Victory Premature
In recent days, security forces claim to have cleared most parts of Batwar of militants but pockets of resistance remain.
How many militants are involved in the fighting is not known. The military has reported dozens of militants killed over the past 12 days, suggesting there could be hundreds of fighters. It has also reported injuries, but no deaths, among Pakistani troops and local tribal fighters known as "peace lashkars" opposed to the Taliban. The official casualty figures cannot be independently verified.
According to the military, all of the militants are members of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) -- the same group Islamabad announced in August 2011 was fully evicted from Bajaur. At the time, the government urged hundreds of thousands of residents who had fled the three years of fighting in Bajaur to return home. To ensure that they did, aid to the displaced-persons camps where they were staying was cut off.
But now the TTP's reappearance suggests that it used its eviction as an opportunity to regroup and recruit new fighters. The TTP recruits across Pakistan and includes members of multiple ethnic groups who are bound together by a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and a goal of toppling the government and imposing strict Shari'a law.
The TTP's use of safe havens in Afghanistan mirrors the Afghan Taliban's successful use of safe havens in Pakistan. The two groups are believed to help each other but to fight only for themselves. No Afghan Taliban groups are reported to be taking part in the Bajaur combat.
Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, an expert on FATA based in Peshawar, says the resurgence of fighting in Bajaur shows how mixed the results of Pakistan's military sweep operations can be. He says the strategy has so far been only been successful in two areas. Both are far from the Afghan border.
"They haven't had a full victory yet. The Pakistani Army has had some success against the Taliban in Swat and in Malakand district [of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province] -- now there is no presence of the Taliban in those areas. And even if the Taliban want to come back to those areas, they won't be able to come openly," Yusufzai says. "But in my opinion, it's a very long war and it will be very difficult to achieve full victory."
Near the border, security forces have the upper hand in weaponry, including tanks and artillery, to pound militant hideouts in the mountainous region. But the militants' ability to melt across the border to safety gives them a tactical advantage. They can disappear and reappear at will and choose when and where to fight.
Written by Charles Recknagel, based on reporting by RFE/RL Radio Mashaal correspondents Shahnawaz Tarakzai in Bajaur and Siraj Zaheer in Islamabad
Pakistan, Afghanistan, US discuss safe passage for Taliban leaders to join peace talks
Associated Press September 5 , 2012
ISLAMABAD - Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States on Wednesday discussed how to provide Taliban leaders safe passage to join peace negotiations, a key issue to allow the talks to succeed, officials said.
Many senior Taliban commanders, including leader Mullah Omar, are believed to be based in Pakistan, making Islamabad’s cooperation critical. Pakistan also has strong historical ties with the group that many analysts believe have continued.
The U.S. and Afghan governments have urged Islamabad to push the Taliban to participate in a peace process that has had trouble getting off the ground. All three countries believe a peace deal is necessary to prevent Afghanistan from descending into civil war after most foreign forces withdraw by the end of 2014. But the process has been plagued by mistrust between the three governments and the Taliban.
The discussions that took place Wednesday in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, marked the inaugural meeting of the Safe Passage Working Group, said the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in a written statement. The three governments agreed to form the group in April, the ministry said.
The group is focused on choosing which Taliban leaders should be provided safe passage, guaranteeing their security and dealing with logistics like visas, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to talk to reporters about the meeting. The official described the meeting as “positive.”
The U.S. began clandestine talks with the Taliban last year, aided by Germany and secretly held in Qatar. It is widely believed that Pakistan provided safe passage to some Taliban militants to attend those discussions.
But the contacts have run into a series of problems.
The Taliban broke off talks earlier this year, saying the U.S. reneged on a promise to release Afghan prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. security prison in Cuba. To get the Taliban back to the table, the U.S. has said it is considering a proposal to transfer some Guantanamo Bay inmates to a prison in Afghanistan.
The Taliban have said they want the prisoners freed unconditionally before resuming talks.
Karzai Underlines Importance of Consultations with Iran on Regional Issues
Fars News Agency September 6, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi stressed the importance of consultations and talks with Tehran on bilateral relations and different regional developments.
Karzai said that exchange of delegations and consultations on bilateral and regional subjects are of great importance.
He conveyed his greetings to Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling the 16th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran as an "important" event.
The Iranian top diplomat, for his part, called for removal of minor impediments on the way of expansion of Iran-Afghanistan relations.
Salehi thanked Karzai for his presence at the head of a high-ranking delegation in the NAM summit, and conveyed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's warm greetings to his Afghan counterpart.
He said continued exchange of delegations by Iran and Afghanistan will give an impetus to development of bilateral relations.
Iran is one of the most important donors to Afghanistan, which has kept its promises to help to the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country.
Iran has built several roads, power transmission lines, border stations and many other infrastructure projects to better link the two nations.
Iran has also contributed more than $50 million annually to Afghan anti-narcotics efforts during the last five years.
Tehran has repeatedly called for a withdrawal of the US-led foreign troops from Afghanistan, stressing that establishment of peace and security in the war-ravaged country is possible only through cooperation among the regional states.
Accountability and Insurgency in Afghanistan
Foreign Policy in Focus By Inge Fryklund September 5, 2012
Although the war in Afghanistan—with its tally of U.S. combat deaths now exceeding 2,000—has largely faded from the news, it is useful to consider why the conflict is so intractable. Why has a campaign that initially seemed so hopeful resulted in a country that is politically fractured and increasingly deadly for Afghans and foreign militaries alike?
One clue can be found in the country’s governance. The initial promise of inclusive and accountable Afghan government, embodied in the constitution approved by the 2003 Loya Jirga, has been squandered.
The Afghan constitution provides for a more highly centralized government than is historically congenial to Afghanistan, but this centralization is balanced by the constitutional requirement for the direct election of mayors and of district, city, and village councils—a return to the pre-Soviet practice of locally elected offices and locally managed affairs.
The Karzai government, however, has chosen not to implement any of these provisions, and the international community has acquiesced. Instead, President Karzai appoints all mayors, and the only district and city councils are those organized and funded by the international community. The (non-existent) district councils are supposed to appoint members of the Meshrano Jirga, the upper house of Parliament, providing district input at the national level. Provincial councils are indeed elected per the constitution and appoint a member to the Meshrano Jirga, but under a decree signed by President Karzai in 2005, their powers are mostly advisory.
The result is a complete lack of official mechanisms for governmental accountability at the provincial, district, or municipal level; citizens simply have no recourse if local officials are corrupt or fail to deliver. Much of the insurgency may well be driven—or passively encouraged—by the sheer lack of avenues for peaceful local political choice. Few insurgents are ideologically “Taliban.”
In 2005, I heard an Afghan-American professor speaking in Kabul postulate that this lack of local accountability was the root problem in Afghanistan and the main driver of the insurgency—which was then barely noticeable to the rest of us. As he put it, under this system, “Afghans aren’t citizens; they are subjects.” All the Afghans in the room cheered. Nearly eight years on, we are reaping the fruits of that lack of accountability.
Afghanistan has a number of large cities—Kandahar, Jalalabad, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, and of course Kabul—that should be engines of economic growth and participatory politics. Instead, mayors are appointed to advance the president’s interests rather than to address local needs. While municipalities must support themselves by raising their own taxes, their budgets, hiring decisions, and salaries are all set in Kabul. Americans would never stand for such lack of control over local affairs, so why should we expect the Afghans to tolerate it?
U.S. support of the Karzai government is only facilitating the top-down control that in turn helps to drive the insurgency, and the United States is seen to be supporting the Kabul government against the interests of the average Afghan. In the absence of structural accountability, U.S.-led anti-corruption efforts—which consist mostly of urging the Karzai administration to prosecute wrongdoers—are no challenge to the regime. Worldwide, the single most effective anti-corruption tool is electoral accountability. In the United States, we can “throw the bums out.” Afghans have no such option.
The continued lack of Afghan governmental accountability will continue to constrain economic activity, alienate citizens, and fuel the insurgency. It is likely to lead to more U.S. and NATO deaths before the withdrawal, and more instability afterwards.
An insurgency driven by lack of accountability cannot be eliminated by military force. Only altering the institutions of government can change the dynamic. Decentralization of power would go a long ways towards improving life at the local level and eliminating the need for insurgency as a mechanism for political opposition. Given the current constitution, local officials could be elected, and real power devolved by statute.
While the consequences of lack of accountability are primarily manifest at the provincial and local levels, the accountability problem can only be addressed by Afghan national policy. The Karzai government has demonstrated that it has no interest in local accountability. It is time for the international community to insist that Afghanistan fully implement its own constitution as a quid pro quo for further support.
Between now and 2014, there is time to reduce that part of the insurgency that is anti-Karzai (and, by association, anti-American) rather than pro-Taliban, and leave a legacy of permanent sustainable institutions of sub-national government. In the run-up to the 2014 presidential election, local elections could also serve to broaden the political space and allow potential candidates to demonstrate their ability to govern. Expanding elected government would help Afghanistan’s putative democracy mature beyond its current centralized, “winner take all” dynamic, and create multiple bodies of authority to help draw more citizens into the political process. This is a legacy that we can leave for Afghanistan.
Local accountability is the closest thing to a silver bullet that we are likely to find in Afghanistan. We should use it.
Looted artifacts’ return help Afghan museum rebuild after weathering war, Taliban
Associated Press September 5 , 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Right down to the power cuts that frequently plunge its artifacts into shadow, the National Museum of Afghanistan is a symbol of the country’s decades of hardships. Its building was shelled, looted and caught fire during the 1990s civil war. Taliban extremists later smashed many centuries-old statues.
Now, the museum is slowly rebuilding, thanks to international efforts to return thousands of looted treasures — and to heroic Afghan staff members who hid its most priceless works during the war years and kept the secret for more than a decade.
The museum welcomed home nearly 850 Afghan artifacts in early August — including a 3,000-year-old Bronze Age axe, a 1st Century ivory elephant carving and a life-sized Buddha statue — that were either stolen from the museum or illegally excavated during decades of insecurity. The British Museum catalogued and helped return the pieces in cooperation with British authorities, who seized many from smugglers. It was the second major handover of Afghan historical pieces by the British Museum. In 2009, about 1,500 historical pieces were returned.
The aim is to restore the facility to its pre-war reputation as one of the finest in the region, with displays ranging from the Bronze Age to more contemporary Islamic art.
With its gates topped with barbed wire and rifle-toting guards directing visitors to undergo body searches, the museum on Kabul’s outskirts carries the air of a culture still under siege.
Chief curator Mohammad Fahim Rahimi apologizes for the darkened halls during a recent visit to view one of the newly returned pieces. Like much of Afghanistan, the museum puts up with frequent power outages as the government struggles to provide basic services.
Minutes later, the power shudders back on and the museum lighting reveals its latest acquisition: a Buddha statue estimated at about 1,700 years old.
Looted from the museum during the civil war that followed the Soviet occupation, the statue turned up in Japan in a private collection before it was bought by an anonymous donor who arranged for the British Museum return to its Afghan home, Rahimi says The statue is an example of art from Afghanistan’s long Buddhist history, before the arrival of Islam.
“This is simply our heritage,” Rahimi says. “If we have our heritage back, it’s everything for us.
That’s a heritage that not all appreciate. In 2001, the Taliban dynamited a pair of giant Buddhas carved into a mountain in Bamiyan province. Around the same time, the Taliban also rampaged through the national museum, smashing any art depicting the human form, considered idolatrous under their hardline interpretation of Islam. In all, they destroyed about 2,500 statues.
The recently returned Buddha statue’s long exile abroad at least protected it from that fate, Rahimi says.
“You can see here, the hand is complete and the head is complete. It’s not broken,” he says.
He points out the finer points of the 4th Century piece: the painstakingly carved folds of the robe; the chakra on the Buddha’s right hand, the streams depicting water flow from his feet and the images of flames rise from his shoulders — a representation of one of the Buddha’s first miracles, in which he levitated and produced fire and water to silence skeptics.
The “miracle” Buddha is the only the recently returned pieces from Britain that is on display so far.
Museum director Omara Khan Massoudi says the rest are still in boxes, waiting to be examined and eventually displayed. Cooperation with other museums and with UNESCO has been key to rebuilding the museum, which by 2001 had lost 70 percent of its artifacts to the years of war.
“Within these last 10 years, we’ve gotten more than 16,000 pieces, among them 9,000 returned from outside of Afghanistan,” Massoudi says.
Some of the pieces recently returned were stolen from the museum itself, but many others were illegally excavated and smuggled out of the country in past decades while war otherwise occupied Afghan authorities. It’s a practice that continues to this day, according to Massoudi.
“Unfortunately, some places, there is no security, sometimes it happens that people have illegal excavations,” he says.
Massoudi has devoted most of his life’s work to the National Museum, which he says was once renowned for having one of the region’s finest collections, with some 100,000 artifacts including millennia-old tools from some of the earliest human settlements. Established in the 1920s by Afghan King Amrullah Khan, the museum was still thriving when Massoudi joined it more than three decades ago.
But after Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, museum workers became increasingly concerned as the country deteriorated into civil war.
So, in 1989, Massoudi and several other staff members packed up some of the most museum’s most treasured pieces — including the legendary “Bactrian gold,” an intricate collection of tens of thousands of gold and silver coins, crowns and jewelry more than 2,000 years old — and hid them in two locations in central Kabul, one of them a secret vault under Kabul’s central bank.
“Luckily, this decision gave us a good result when the civil war started in Kabul city,” Massoudi said. “The national museum artifacts were looted ... but the artifacts we shifted to the two places in the center of the city.”
The pieces remained hidden until 2003, when the hidden treasures’ existence was revealed. Now the Bactrian gold and some of the other rescued artifacts are on a tour of museums around the world, having already been displayed in New York, Paris and London. The traveling exhibition is now in Norway and goes next to Australia.
Eventually, those treasures, too, will be returned to Afghanistan’s National Museum. Massoudi laments the facility still lacks such modern museum staples as humidity control and high-tech security — they’re still working on the electricity, after all. But he says the museum is seeking funds to build a new, modern home near the current building.
“We all together tried the best to rebuild ... from zero,” he says.
Pakistan Expels Save the Children's Foreign Staff
VOA News September 6, 2012
Pakistan has ordered Save the Children's foreign staff members to leave the country.
An official with the U.S.-based aid agency, Ghulam Qadri, told reporters Thursday that the Interior Ministry ordered six foreign employees to leave Pakistan, but gave no reason for the expulsion.
Save the Children is said to have come under increased government scrutiny following media reports that it helped facilitate meetings between the CIA and a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, who is said to have helped the U.S. intelligence agency track down Osama bin Laden.
U.S. special forces killed the al-Qaida leader in May of 2011 during a covert raid in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad.
Qadri on Thursday denied allegations that the aid group put Afridi in touch with the CIA.
Save the Children has been operating in Pakistan for more than 30 years and employs some 2,000 Pakistani staff members.
Afridi was accused of running a fake vaccination campaign to help the CIA obtain DNA samples to confirm Osama bin Laden's presence at a compound in Abbottabad. In May, a Pakistani court convicted the doctor of having militant ties and sentenced him to 33 years in prison.
The reported expulsion of Save the Children's staff comes a week after the International Committee of the Red Cross announced it was scaling back its aid operations in Pakistan following the killing of one of it staff members in Karachi earlier this year.
The dangerous political battle for Afghanistan
The US hopes a new democratic era will begin as the occupation ends, but many people worry a power vacuum will emerge instead, leaving political rivals to fight it out as the Taliban closes in on Kabul.
Global Post By Chris Sands September 5, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - A Toyota Land Cruiser sat on the street outside Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq's house, its windows missing, tires punctured, and the hood badly dented. He said his bodyguards had been ambushed by insurgents while driving in a province bordering Kabul.
He was nowhere near the SUV at the time of the attack and was adamant he does not fear for his life, despite the long list of enemies he has made while becoming one of Afghanistan's most powerful men.
"For several hours my boys were fighting with them," he said. "Of course there is a place for concerns, but personally I have none."
Mohaqiq is a notorious warlord turned member of parliament who is an old adversary of the Taliban and a vocal critic of the government here.
With President Hamid Karzai constitutionally prevented from standing in the 2014 election, and all foreign combat troops due to withdraw later that same year, he is emerging as a key figure in the imminent battle for control of Afghanistan.
Officially, a new democratic era will be ushered in just as the occupation ends, but many people worry a power vacuum will emerge instead, leaving political rivals to fight it out as the Taliban closes in on Kabul.
Mohaqiq knows all too well what can happen under such circumstances. He resisted the Soviets in the 1980s and took part in the civil war between rival guerrilla factions that followed.
He was later a leader of the Northern Alliance, a loose coalition of former mujahideen. But Human Rights Watch accused fighters from his militia of "widespread looting and violence" in the months during and after the US invasion that overthrew the Taliban regime.
Last year he then helped launch the National Front, whose founders say Karzai broke backroom promises he made to some of them when they endorsed his 2009 re-election campaign. These allegedly included an agreement to give greater independence to local authorities.
For Mohaqiq — a Shiite Muslim and ethnic Hazara — the current administration and the militants trying to bring it down represent a joint threat to the nation's hopes of finding peace once NATO withdraws.
Before his bodyguards were ambushed, gunmen opened fire on him in the normally stable province of Bamiyan. That prompted him to fly back home and miss the second attack. The first attempt on his life was, he claimed, the work of government forces.
"There are lots of thoughts that if Karzai cannot keep power then he will make a deal with the Taliban," he said.
"If the Taliban do not come into a corner with him, then Karzai will run away and leave the country to the Taliban and then absolutely there will be a civil war."
The National Front has found encouragement from a handful of US Congress members, who met its leaders in Germany in January and see it as a bulwark against the insurgency and administrative corruption in Kabul.
Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican, was subsequently denied entry into Afghanistan for supporting the party and echoing its demand that a federalist system be created here.
Among the Afghan public, however, there is deep suspicion of Mohaqiq and the other figures likely to have major roles in the 2014 election.
All the main political movements now emerging in opposition to the government are run by men associated in some way with the bloodshed of the past and who are also bitter enemies of the Taliban.
Meanwhile, Karzai is rumored to be grooming one of his brothers, Qayum, to stand against them and maintain his family’s controversial grip on power. This raises the prospect of unrest growing at a time when NATO departs, with powerful rivals seeking to exploit social tensions.
Najibullah Kabuli is an anti-Iran activist and owner of Imroz TV, a private television station. He claims to have left the National Front after discovering it hoped to formally partition Afghanistan along ethnic lines. He told GlobalPost he has since received "lots of threats" and wants the international community to safeguard the 2014 vote.
"Whether the election result is positive or negative, a number of people here will not accept it because these kinds of men have been raised up in fighting, they have fed themselves from fighting and it is always their habit to seek benefit from war," he said.
Mohaqiq denies Kabuli was a party member, calling him "a pimp" who has been "raised by Karzai." But the National Front again encountered trouble when the government claimed fighters loyal to another of its co-founders, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, were interfering in oil exploration work by a Chinese company.
Human rights groups have repeatedly accused Dostum and his militia of abuses ranging from the rape of women during the civil war to the slaughter of Taliban prisoners during the US invasion.
Preparations are already under way for 2014 as Afghanistan’s power brokers maneuver into position and attempt to undermine each other. Although the disputes are relatively low-key now, history shows how quickly tensions here can turn violent when so much is at stake.
Allegations of massive fraud plagued previous elections, but NATO’s presence may well have kept the country from the brink of disaster. Not everyone is convinced a catastrophe will be averted next time.
“In Afghanistan if someone loses he does not have the morals to accept that and congratulate the man who won,” said Mohammed Younus Fakor, a Kabul-based political analyst.
“If we do not have a transparent election, then again I think it will be the start of war.”
Kunar Man Sentenced to Death for Beheading Teenage Girl
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 05 September 2012
A primary court in eastern Kunar province on Tuesday sentenced a man to death after being found guilty of beheading a 17-year-old girl, Shabana.
"Two other Afghan men, who were also involved in the incident, were sentenced to 17 years in jail," provincial spokesman Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi told TOLOnews on Wednesday.
The men "made the decision after they failed to kidnap her three months ago", he added.
Shabana's father said that he had received death threats before the incident and threats to kill his daughter if he did not allow one of them to marry her.
The condemned men said that they did not accept the decision of the court and added that it was unfair.
Local officials said that dozens of residents attended the public hearing in the province which went on for several hours.
The attendees welcomed the court verdict. Forced marriages, child marriages, self-immolation, taking dowries in getting the girls married, not allowing female education, beatings, and cutting off body parts are among the main forms of violence against women in Afghanistan.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com