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Senior Taliban leader killed in E. Afghanistan: ISAF
KABUL, Oct. 5 (Xinhua) -- Afghan and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) during a joint operation eliminated a Taliban senior leader in the eastern Nangarhar province 120 km east of capital city Kabul on Thursday, an ISAF statement released here Friday said.
"Afghan and coalition forces killed a Taliban senior leader and strategist during a security operation in Khugyani district, Nangarhar province, Thursday," the statement added.
The statement identified the killed Taliban leader as Khan, saying no civilians were hurt during the operation.
However, Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to comment.
Afghanistan imposes currency curbs in response to Iran rial dive
Reuters By Sharafuddin Sharafyar Thu Oct 4, 2012
HERAT, Afghanistan - Afghanistan has imposed a cap on U.S. dollar flows across the border with Iran amid clashes there between Iranian police and protesters prompted by a collapse in the rial currency, Afghan police said on Thursday.
The Iranian currency's plunge has also jolted traders in the western Afghan business hub of Herat city, where currency speculators and businesses have been hard hit by the rial's slide.
It has prompted provincial authorities to limit to $1,000 the amount travelers can take out of Afghanistan, to be imposed on Afghan and Iranian travelers alike.
"We have tightened security in the border in the wake of rial falls and many complaints that Iranian currency is flowing in and dollars moving out," General Sher Ahmad Maladani, head of the paramilitary Afghan Border Police in Heart, told Reuters.
"Amid the complaints that the Afghan and foreign currencies are flowing out of Herat, the government has imposed a $1,000 limit."
It was not clear how Afghan police intended to enforce the limit along the porous border, which is crossed clandestinely by refugees, drug smugglers and even insurgents carrying arms into Afghanistan.
But Maladani said border police had already seized a suitcase containing 140,000 euros ($181,000) from an individual crossing into Iran.
In Iran, shops in Tehran's Grand Bazaar stayed shut and police patrolled the area a day after security forces clashed with anti-government demonstrators and arrested money changers. Traders told Reuters by telephone in Dubai that most stores were closed for safety reasons.
The rial's fall has badly hit cross-border trade in Herat, one of Afghanistan's wealthiest provinces thanks to Iranian trade and where traders recently ran briefly out of U.S. currency due to high demand from dollar-starved Iranians.
The dollar is a second currency across most of conflict-racked Afghanistan due to the presence of thousands of foreign workers and advisers, as well as 100,000 NATO-led troops.
Many Iranians have come to rely on Herat city's three-story currency market to secure dollars and skirt Western sanctions imposed in response to Iran's disputed nuclear programme.
Traders in Herat had previously accepted rials as payment, while Iranian taxis loaded with U.S. cash made their way back across the border at Islam Qala, sometimes paying hefty bribes to frontier police.
PILES OF CURRENCY
Now, the piles of rials in shops and on the tables of money traders are worth about a third less than they were a week ago, with the currency sinking to a record low of 37,500 against the dollar on Tuesday.
"People used to buy meat under a promise to pay in rials and settle debts much later. But even if I collect all the rials they owe me, it's not going to be much," butcher Arbaab said in his small Herat shop.
"Most of our business is across the border with Iran. It's badly affecting everyone."
The currency woes have, however, created opportunities for some Afghans.
Long used to paying top dollar in Herat shops filled with Iranian goods, including crockery, appliances and cookware, some residents now see a tidy profit in buying cheaply across the border in Iran and reselling in Afghanistan.
"It's a fortune for anyone who can go and buy goods from Iran now," said Faramarz Alizai, who makes frequent journeys across 110 km (70 miles) of desert over to the Iranian side.
"I buy kitchen appliances from Iran and sell them in Herat and other cities, earning good money."
The directive seemed to have little to do with the Afghan central bank and was driven rather by worried provincial officials.
Central bank Governor Noorullah Delawari said he had been warning currency speculators in western Afghanistan for weeks that they would suffer huge losses if the rials they had been buying with U.S. dollars suddenly lost value.
"I couldn't believe how anyone will exchange good currency for bad currency," Delawari told Reuters. "They saw the Iranian rial was very low and they bought. I don't know what was their game is, I don't understand."
Delawari said the central bank had noticed Afghan banks had been transferring growing quantities of dollars and euros to branches in Herat as speculators sold hard currency to dealers across the border in Iran.
Standing in the Khorasan market, the main currency exchange in Herat, money trader Mohammad Aref said he had been ruined by the rial's decline and even suggested a Western attack on Iran could help restore stability to the currency.
"If the Americans plan to hit Iran, they should do it now. Why are we suffering?" he said.
(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi and Matthew Green in Kabul; Writing by Rob Taylor; Editing by Ron Popeski)
Afghan president says 2014 election will be on time
Reuters By Mirwais Harooni 04/10/2012
KABUL - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Thursday that presidential elections would be held on time in 2014 and he would step aside as mandated, denying speculation that the exit of foreign troops and security problems would delay the poll.
"The election will definitely happen. Go on and choose your own favourite candidate. My term, if prolonged by even a day, will be seen as illegitimate," Karzai told a press conference at his Kabul garden palace.
Karzai's increasingly unpopular government has for months been considering a change in election timing to avoid overlapping with the drawdown of U.S.-led NATO forces due to be completed by the end of 2014, when security is fully turned over to Afghan forces.
Last month a newly formed "Cooperation Council" of around 20 political parties warned that any delay to the presidential poll would lead to a serious crisis.
Opposition parties also say they are worried Karzai could act outside the constitution on poll timing, or try to install an ally as his successor to maintain an influence on power.
Karzai hit out at the foreign media for painting a "doomsday scenario" of Afghanistan after the NATO pullout, despite promises of ongoing international development aid and security assistance from Western military backers.
He said international media were conducting "psychological warfare" against the country's international reputation.
A German intelligence assessment of Afghanistan after 2014 seen by Germany's Spiegel newspaper this week said it could take upwards of 35,000 foreign troops to stabilise the country after the NATO exit, including elite troops and advisers.
The U.S. would provide most of those, the report said, while other NATO countries would be expected to provide around 10,000 soldiers. NATO forces in the country now number around 100,000.
The World Bank, in its most recent assessment of Afghanistan, said while the economy had expanded strongly in the past few years, bolstered by big aid flows helping real gross domestic product growth reach 8.4 percent in 2010/11, the NATO pullout was expected to cut that growth by about half.
Donors meeting in Tokyo in July promised civilian aid worth $16 billion over the next four years, but tied that to a much stronger effort by Karzai to combat corruption that has seen millions of aid dollars stolen.
KARZAI: BAD MOUTHING MUST STOP
The president also fired a broadside at cabinet members and other senior officials whose families live abroad and who he said were bad-mouthing Afghanistan.
"I have told many of them to bring their families back to Afghanistan because life and the environment is better and happier here," he said.
"Those whose families are abroad and fuelling publicity about instability, I will fire them immediately."
Karzai predicted the U.S.-led war on militancy would "not be successful from Afghanistan's view" because it was being fought in Afghan villages, rather than against insurgents sheltering in neighbouring countries, an allusion to Pakistan.
He said Kabul would only sign a cross-border security pact with Islamabad aimed at ironing out security differences when Afghans can be certain that "suicide bombers, terrorists, weapons and cross-border shelling" would stop.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been strained in recent months over cross border shelling which Kabul blames on the Pakistan military. Islamabad says the shelling is in retaliation for anti-government attacks launched by insurgents operating from mountain havens on Afghan soil.
(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi; Writing by Rob Taylor; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
Afghan government: Insider attacks are terrorism
CNN By Jamie Crawford October 4th, 2012
The vast majority of attacks by Afghan soldiers on their U.S. and NATO counterparts are the result of a "mutation" of terrorist tactics rather than a difference in cultural sensitivities, a senior Afghan official said Thursday.
"The majority of it is a terrorist infiltration in the (Afghan army) ranks and forces which is a tragic thing in itself," Jawed Ludin, Afghanistan'sdeputy foreign minister, said of "green on blue' attacks, in which Afghan soldiers turn their weapons on NATO forces alongside whom they serve.
U.S. officials have said a percentage of such attacks can be attributed to cultural grievances by Afghan forces, as well as Taliban or other insurgents exploiting the situation to drive a wedge between the United States and Afghanistan.
"It is kind of a last-gasp effort to be able to not only target our forces, but to try to create chaos, because they have not been able to regain any of the territory that they have lost," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters last month during a visit to Asia.
The phenomenon, which has picked up in pace within the last year, is mostly the work of terrorists taking advantage of a current large-scale recruitment drive for the Afghan National Forces to meet recruiting level targets, Ludin said.
"I suppose what happened in that process, we perhaps overlooked some of the crucial screening requirements, and as a result the enemy used that as an opportunity to infiltrate," Ludin said. He added that the number of Afghan soldiers being killed by a fellow Afghan was "far higher" than the instances of "green on blue" attacks.
The Afghan government has taken on a wholesale review of Afghan army recruits Ludin said, and that a "large number of people have actually been taken off the ranks just because we were not satisfied with their backgrounds."
The loss of strongholds in the south of the country following the recently completed "surge" of U.S. troops, and the large scale of arrests of would-be terrorists in Kabul and other urban areas, are forcing terrorists to find alternate venues, such as the Army ranks, to carry out their operations, Ludin said.
Ludin spoke with reporters Thursday at the Afghan Embassy in Washington after joining Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmoui Rassoul at the State Department Wednesday for the inaugural meeting of the U.S.-Afghanistan Bilateral Commission. The commission was established as a part of the Strategic Partnership the two countries signed in May.
In her meeting with Rassoul, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that James Warlick, deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, would lead negotiations for the United States for a future Bilateral Security Agreement with Afghanistan. Eklil Hakimi, the Afghan ambassador to the United States, will lead the negotiations for Afghanistan.
Clinton said such an agreement between the two countries would "establish the framework of our future security relationship based on our shared vision of a secure and stable Afghanistan."
While talks with the United States are ongoing, Ludin told reporters that talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban are "dormant." The Afghan government is working to define "verifiable representatives" of the Taliban who renounce violence, cut all ties with terrorism and who respect the equality of women in Afghan society.
Ludin said the Afghan government was not opposed to a separate U.S. attempt to negotiate with members of the Taliban in Qatar. In that effort, the United States would transfer five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Qatar in exchange for a U.S. soldier currently held by the Taliban. It was the lack of Afghan involvement in the process that drew Ludin's criticism.
"We felt that if you are really true to the model of an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned peace process, we should be involved," Ludin said.
Those talks have still not begun.
At his confirmation hearing in July, James Cunningham, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, said Taliban leaders are "signaling they are open to negotiations," although he said the Taliban must end its alliances with terrorist groups such as al Qaeda before the United States would endorse any peace deal.
And with the leadership of the Afghan Taliban still operating mostly out of Pakistan, Ludin said that nation remains a crucial player in Afghan peace talks with the Taliban. However, Pakistan and other interested countries must still "take a back seat" in the actual negotiations, he said.
"When it comes to talking about the future of the peace process, the political discussion, that frankly is nobody else's job," Ludin said. "We have to do it."
Analysis: The fortified food conundrum in Afghanistan
KABUL, 4 October 2012 (IRIN) - How do you tackle widespread malnutrition in a poor, corrupt country at war?
Despite billions of dollars in aid over the last decade, Afghanistan’s malnutrition rates have soared, now well-past emergency thresholds, with one-fifth of children malnourished overall; one-third of children acutely malnourished in some conflict areas; and 60 percent of children under five stunted, according to a recent survey by the government’s Central Statistics Organization and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
“You have malnutrition rates which are among the highest in Asia and equivalent to rates deemed totally unacceptable in other parts of the world,” UN humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan Michael Keating said in a recent interview, adding that he was “shocked” by the results of the survey.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) admits humanitarian organizations have had “major gaps” in their capacity to respond to the nutrition crisis, with past attempts to establish a UN “cluster” focused on nutrition failing due to insecurity.
But a new four-year US$6.4 million project run by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) aims to reach nearly half the country's population - 15 million Afghans - with fortified foods.
The strategy is to add vitamins and minerals such as iron, zinc, folic acid, Vitamin B-12 and Vitamin A to wheat flour, vegetable oil and ghee, and also fortify salt with iodine.
While large-scale food fortification has succeeded in curbing malnutrition in places like South Africa and Egypt, can it work in Afghanistan? (Food fortification is not new in Afghanistan, but has only been done on a small-scale).
"There are several problems, besides security which is an obvious issue," said one Afghan analyst who asked to remain anonymous. "Are Afghans prepared to eat this food? How are you going to convince people that something added to their food is good for them? Afghanistan is full of conspiracy theories. And then there is corruption; how can this be implemented so those who buy the fortified wheat flour are not taking it out of the bag and filling it with other flour? In a large project like this, mullahs [religious leaders] and tribal elders need to be key advocates, otherwise it won't work. And getting Afghanistan's neighbours to comply and work for the good of Afghanistan is another story."
At a time when aid budgets are shrinking as foreign troops withdraw from Afghanistan, observers say the project will have to follow certain key steps to avoid becoming another example of wasted aid money.
Creating demand
When fortified bread was introduced in Egypt, the project targeted state bakeries that make subsidized bread for the poor. By contrast, Afghanistan's fortification project will be market-based, which is why, project organizers said, the marketing strategy will be a key component of its success.
While women are responsible for most of the feeding, men do most of the shopping, said Emily Levitt Ruppert, the senior policy adviser for maternal and child nutrition at the Nutrition Centre of Expertise at World Vision International.
Education is a strong social value, as is having healthy, intelligent children, she said, and the word "vitamin" is generally understood. One strategy is to convince men that to have smart, healthy, athletic children, they should give their families fortified flour, which will also help prevent birth defects.
Ibrahim Parvanta, an international nutrition consultant, helped start the country’s first salt iodination programme in 2002, after the fall of the Taliban. In his experience, getting Afghans on board was not difficult. Both salt iodination and so-called sprinkles, a micronutrient powder that allows people to fortify their own foods at home, “were incredibly accepted", he told IRIN.
The key, he said, was talking to Afghans' hearts, as well as their pockets. “You want your children to be successful in school?” he would ask them. “Well then this is what we need to put in it [food].”
According to Purnima Menon, a senior research fellow at International Policy Food Research Institute (IFPRI) in New Delhi, fortification can be quite sustainable, but a demand for fortified commodities is essential.
Given the current economic conditions in Afghanistan, success is tricky. "Besides the other competing products in the market, it also depends on what the people buying it think." Any change in the food’s appearance or taste could sway consumers against it.
While a small percentage of Afghans living in rural areas have plots for growing their own wheat, and WFP distributes food in some areas, the main food and cereal supply is through free market mechanisms - mostly imports from neighbouring countries.
"Afghans will see labels that the products are fortified, so that will help,” said Marc Van Ameringen, the executive director of GAIN, “but how to build effective demand is one of the challenges we face around the world. In many countries, this works by government regulation, which is also the plan here. But the thing in Afghanistan, as in a lot of other places, is: Can you enforce it?"
Marketing
Once there is demand, how do you market your product?
While one third of the population lives below the poverty line; as in other countries, loudspeakers are still used to spread news. Roughly 80 percent of the population has access to a cell phone, and advertisers are increasingly using SMS messages to reach people. Billboards have also mushroomed in the past decade. However, with an 80 percent illiteracy rate, these types of marketing are not as effective, said Rafiq Kakar, president and CEO of Opinion Research Centre of Afghanistan (ORCA).
Radio is a better option, he said, though he cautioned that Afghans can be skeptical of radio advertisements.
"We have found people have the most confidence in tribal elders or religious leaders. They believe whatever elders tell them - even if it has to do with something they don't like very much."
WFP says in previous marketing campaigns, they have not only relied on radio, but also involved doctors, clinics, leaflets, posters, pamphlets, even danglers.
What is needed, the consultant Parvanta added, is a tracking system - to market the fortified products in the right places, monitor exactly where they end up and to see the impact of the foods on the population. Wheat flour importers and national producers could help advise on this process, he said.
The project is more likely to succeed in urban centres than in rural areas, he said, but with 13 national mills participating in the project, “you would still reach a good 25-35 percent of the population, which is a substantial number."
Reach in remote or conflict areas will necessarily be limited, aid workers concede.
“The challenge is making sure that they are targeted towards the areas where you have the highest need,” said Aidan O’Leary, head of OCHA in Afghanistan. “The areas most affected are invariably the most conflict-affected areas.”
Getting government to take ownership
Ultimately, WFP representatives said, the goal is for the government to take ownership of the project.
"Basically," said Doordje Voovic, of WFP's Purchase for Progress initiative, which purchases food from local farmers, "this project has to do with the whole system of supply of a country. While we are at the very beginning of the chain, the net result is out of our hands.”
Given the weak central government and high levels of corruption, the government's capacity to implement such projects is often very limited, observers say. This is why the project requires properly trained Afghans who can absorb and implement the projects and then continue to run them properly, said Parvanta.
"One of the biggest problems is that there has not been enough resourcing to develop Afghans with proper skills to [implement projects],” he said.
Save the Children and World Vision’s recently released Nutrition Barometer, which measures national responses to malnutrition, found the political commitment for tackling malnutrition to be emerging in Afghanistan through the National Public Nutrition Policy and Strategy and the Infant and Young Children Feeding Policy and Strategy. But it said that this had not translated into results because “to date neither policy has been effectively implemented”.
Developing, legislating, disseminating and enforcing national standards is one of the key components of the fortification project, said Van Ameringen, especially since 60-70 percent of the wheat flour and 90 percent of oil consumed in the country comes from imports. Talks with importers from neighbouring countries have already started, he said.
Ultimately the end goal of the fortification project is sustainability.
For example, the millers participating in the project will not profit immediately, says Carrie Morrison, WFP's director of health and nutrition, but the potential to make money will grow as the government standardizes the process.
Can the U.S. Leave Behind “Afghan-Sustainable” Military Bases?
As one outpost is prepared for a handover, a report raises the risks attendant upon the departure of American forces
time.com By John Wendle October 4, 2012
Combat Outpost Garda, Wardak Province - The arm of the battered orange backhoe rose up and came crashing down on the plastic-and-steel walls and roof of the barracks. The corrugated roofing squealed and popped off. A plastic wall buckled and fell flat, raising a thick cloud of dust. Bright yellow insulation spooled out and tangled everywhere.Then the arm swung over and scooped up a bucket of dirt from a smashed Hesco barrier and buried the debris.
American troops have abandoned “downtown” as they called this part of Combat Outpost Garda, in Wardak Province, and moved up to the top of their fortified hill in the lead-up to leaving the base in the coming weeks. It is part of making the outpost “Afghan-sustainable” as it is handed over to the company of Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers stationed here. But there is already considerable doubt, despite downsizing facilities to make them more manageable, that thefledgling Afghan security forces can sustain the necessary operations and patrols to keep the country stable as more such combat outposts (COPs) are handed over to Afghanistan amid the U.S. and NATO drawdown ahead of the planned 2014 pullout.
“We have a tolai here, an Afghan company,” says Col. Andrew Rohling of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and head of operations in Logar and Wardak Provinces, as he surveyed Garda with a handover team and an Afghan counterpart. “So our goal is to take [the base] down from what is an American size company to an Afghan size company. The size is about the same, but it’s the logistics. Its all about,really, its all about logistics. The Afghan tolai just doesn’t have the same logistical capacity as the American company.”
When the U.S. troops pull out of Garda, it and the surrounding high mountain valley will become the domain of the Afghan company– and the entrenched insurgent groups that surround it. For many of the Afghan soldiers, it is strange to see infrastructure that has been trucked in at enormous cost and built on territory gained with great difficulty knocked down with such little fanfare. As more of the walls came crashing down, an Afghan translator watching from nearby told TIME, “Every time the ANA goes off the base, they are attacked by roadside bombs, sometimes [insurgents] ambush them. I think if [Coalition forces] leave Afghanistan, the Taliban will start fighting everywhere,” he says, speaking anonymously because he did not feel comfortable talking on such a small installation. “It will be like it was – when there was civil war everywhere. There will be more fighting,” says the translator, who has lived on the base for around two years.
A report by an American military Human Terrain Team that was shown to TIME by a U.S. officer outlines the specific fears the U.S. military has about the upcoming handover of Garda. The study draws lessons from the results of thehandover late last year of Jalrez, a combat outpost just a few miles from Garda lying along the strategic east-west Route 2 that crosses the mountainous midsection of the country.
Taking lessons from the closure of the nearby base, the report, in part, reads that, “The closure of COP Garda will have minimal impact on the security of the predominantly Pashtun population residing east of the Jalrez District Center (DC); however, the Hazara/Tajik communities residing west of the DC will suffer due to an influx of Taliban fighters, and the resurgence of historical rivalries with their Pashtun neighbors.” Also, because there is only one road through the valley, Hazara and Tajik farmers will effectively be cut off byillegal checkpoints from markets in their provincial capital and in Kabul, just 30 miles away.
More alarmingly, the report says that, “Historically, Jalrez District has served as a critical avenue to facilitate attacks upon Maidan Shahr and Kabul.” With the closure of COP Garda, not only will ethnic tensions and violence increase in northern Wardak, but a critical blocking position will be removed, making it that much easier for Taliban, Hisb-e-Islami and other insurgent factions, such as the Haqqani Network, to infiltrate Kabul and conduct attacks.
A NATO official tells TIME that the Coalition has closed and handed over around 320 bases with half given to the ANA and half to other government security agencies. The official says no bases have been closed outright. The territory and bases have been relinquished through a series of tranches – with the most peaceful areas – provinces and cities like Bamyan, Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat and Panjsher – handed over first. Col. Rohling is realistic about the Afghans’ ability to manage it all. Says he, “I don’t have a problem giving it to them – the problem is that they can’t manage it. They don’t have the fuel to run it, the power, all the things that go with it. The reality is, they’re not jacked up, it’s just that they don’t have the American logistical system.”
As the U.S. and NATO have tried to disentangle themselves from the country, they have pushed for speedier handovers. “The question is: how fast do you hand over? It’s not a gulf of difference. It is a spectrum and it depends on your judgment on the progress we are making. And on the security side we are making good progress,” said Sir Richard Stagg, British ambassador in Kabul, in an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday. “The more the people of Afghanistan see their own government stand on its own two feet, the better for everybody. This is not a matter of us cutting and running and disappearing, it is a matter of shifting the nature of our engagement from hand-holding to one which is offering support as needed andrequired.”
But most Afghans do not see it that way. “This round will be different from the others because insecure areas are part of this round of transition,” Afghan Defense Minister Bismillah Mohammadi said Tuesday at a press conference, adding that while he welcomed the withdrawal of NATO troops, he was concerned about the upcoming fourth and fifth tranches. He added that, “The Afghanistan situation is very sensitive right now.”
Garlanded Afghan film Buzkashi Boys comes home for premiere
Tale of two young boys in Kabul dreaming of playing the national sport has invigorated country's tiny film industry
Guardian.co.uk By Tom Peter Thursday 4 October 2012
An Afghan film that has already begun touring international film festivals and claimed several awards is to have its premiere in Kabul on Thursday night.
Buzkashi Boys is the story of two young boys in Kabul who dream of playing buzkashi, the Afghan national sport in which horseback riders compete for possession of a headless goat. Before the boys can compete in the sport, they must confront the stifling limitations of life for poor Afghans.
The film, which was produced with a joint international and Afghan crew, recently won best drama at the LA Shorts Fest, which makes the film eligible to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Buzkashi Boys has provided a rare opportunity for a narrative, fictional film shot in Afghanistan to reach an international audience and has invigorated the tiny Afghan film industry.
One of those leading the production was the American film-maker Sam French. Working as a documentary maker in Afghanistan, French said he was often frustrated at seeing only the portrayal of Afghanistan's conflict and strife on screen.
"What we see in the west is not what we see here on the ground. The news is full of bombs, bullets and burqas, not the stories of the people who I know and love in Afghanistan," he said. "One of my missions became to show the world another side of the country."
French recruited local Afghans, some with technical skills, others with only passion and an interest in film-making, and mentored them through the production and post-production process.
The country once had a small cinema scene, but the industry came undone over three decades of fighting, especially during the Taliban's rule, when music and films were outlawed. Over the past decade, there has been a quiet resurgence in film-making, but the vast majority of paying opportunities are in television or non-fiction work.
"There are very few fictional films made in Afghanistan each year. You can count the number on just your fingers and toes. The main problem is there's no way to make income on films yet. The foreign film market has overshadowed us," said Saleem Shaheen, who owns two film production firms in Kabul. "In every house in Afghanistan, there is cable or satellite TV, and this changes every house into a cinema. People have a variety of films to watch in their houses, so why would they go out and buy a film?"
Massih Tajzai, who worked as the trainee director on Buzkashi Boys, grew up in a family of actors, but says there were few opportunities for training in film-making. Several local universities offered film courses, but Tajzai said most of the training relied on outdated materials.
"Our film-makers here in Afghanistan are not professional. They did not study anything but they watched a lot of Indian films and foreign films. Now they're just copying them without knowing what they're doing," he said. "Their films can't show the culture of Afghanistan because it's all copied."
The film offered him a chance to get on-the-job training that Tajzai says was invaluable. Now he hopes to study film-making internationally and return to Afghanistan to continue making movies there.
Alleged Herat Kidnappers Executed by Taliban
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 04 October 2012
Taliban leaders in western Herat province have executed two alleged kidnappers by firing squad after holding a drumhead court-martial, local officials said.
According to reports, two men allegedly kidnapped the child of a family in the Pashtun Zarghun district. They were captured by the Taliban while the father of the child was paying them for the child's release.
"Although, the exact location of the [execution] is not clear yet, there are insecure areas in the Obe district in which the incident probably took place," Herat police chief Gen. Sayed Abdulghafar Sayedzada told TOLOnews.
Residents of Obe district confirmed that the Taliban executed two people by firing squad in the district after holding the drumhead court-martial while scores of residents were watching.
TOLOnews obtained amatuer footage of an execution showing two men being blindfolded and executed.
Herat Governor Dr. Daud Shah Saba also confirmed the reports, saying that the Taliban killed the two civilians ten days ago after charging them with kidnapping.
"These people escaped the law and have gone to these criminals [Taliban]. And the Taliban killed them in a volley of bullets at a drumhead court-martial," he said.
He condemned the actions of the Taliban, saying that the kidnappers had been associates of the Taliban and were collaborating in most of the kidnappings throughout Herat.
Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) in Herat denounced the execution and drumhead court-martials.
AIHRC chief, Herat office, Abdulqader Rahimi said: "A drumhead court-martial is not accepted by the Human Rights Commission by any means. We ask that those who have acted this crime to be referred to the judiciary organisations."
He said the commission officials are concerned about the increase of other groups exacting justice in the western provinces.
Officials added that the alleged kidnappers had been under investigation by the police but the Herat police had not succeeded in identifying and arresting them which opened the way for the Taliban to act as they did.
Kabul Municipality Illegally Collecting Fees: ACCI
TOLOnews.com By Zabihullah Jahanmal Thursday, 04 October 2012
Kabul Municipality is going against a decision from the Council of Ministers and collecting transit fees at Kabul's gates, the Afghan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (ACCI) claimed Wednesday.
In a press conference in Kabul, ACCI deputy chief Khan Jan Alokozai said the Council of Ministers had decreed that municipal council incomes should be collected in a separate account under Customs but Kabul Municipality was acting contrary to the decision.
"Kabul Municipality wrote to us that Kabul's gates are an exception to the decision, so they were handed over to contractors," Alokozai said.
ACCI estimates that around 1.2 billion Afg (US$520 million) in taxes is collected by municipalities each year.
Meanwhile, Kabul Municipality announced Wednesday that it was working with private companies to install guard-rails along Kabul city's main roads.
The Municipal Council said the railings would be built with some of the funds expected to come from advertising on the roadside barriers.
"We are attempting to use the help of private companies and banks [for funding] as we will install their logo on the fence," Kabul Mayor Mohammad Yonos Naw Andish told TOLOnews Wednesday.
According to the council estimates, the cost per meter of the cast-iron fence is estimated to be 5,000 Afg (US$100).
In other news, Kabul municipal officials said several roads will be reconstructed with funds from Japan this year, estimated at $33 million.
Afghan Resort Struggles to Recover from Taliban Attack
By Bethany Matta VOA October 04, 2012
QARGHA LAKE, AFGHANISTAN - In June, Taliban militants stormed a hotel at the Qargha Lake resort area a short drive from Kabul. At least 18 people died in the 12-hour assault, which the Taliban said was aimed at punishing people for partying, drinking alcohol and other un-Islamic activities. The popular resort is working on making a comeback
Like many of the Taliban's high-profile sieges, the Qargha Lake attack played out on TV.
Viewers who witnessed it will never forget the images of people clinging to the wall of the Spozhmai restaurant at Qargha lake, as attackers on the terrace above carried out their killing spree.
Today, for those living and working in Qargha, life is slowly returning to normal
Most of the Spozhmai restaurant has been reconstructed, but there are still signs of the attack
The floor remains stained from pools of blood. The bullet holes have not yet been repaired. And areas bombed out by the attackers' hand grenades can still be seen.
While the restaurant has returned to serving officials and middle-to-upper-class Afghans, the number of guests is down by more than 50 percent.
"There are two kinds of people," said Asadullah, the restaurant's manager. "There are those who have lived through 30 years of war; the attack has not affected these people. But, the other people who have not lived through the war; they are scared. The people who come here, they come for picnics, they are not those people fighting on the front line, it has affected them greatly."
Faridoon, the restaurant's accountant says he is used to attacks like the one at Qargha. But, still, he says, his life has been changed forever.
"I lost my brother in the attack, he was 23 and has two children," recalled Faridoon. "Two of our guards were killed and some of our guests."
Restaurants around the lake that serve traditional Afghan foods such as kebab and roasted chicken have also seen a decrease in business.
A worker at one of them says business is good at night, but there are fewer patrons during the day.
"After the attack, business has decreased by about 30 percent," noted one of the restaurant workers.
Security is tighter. More checkpoints have gone up and so has the number of guards patrolling the area.
Nabi, a cook at one of the lakeside restaurants, was also working the night of the attack.
"My family is happy I have a job and can go to work, but security-wise, of course, all Afghans are worried when someone in their family leaves the house," Nabi explained.
While some Afghans do leave their home and risk a trip to Qargha Lake, there are many others staying at home. It’s another reminder that nearly 11 years after the U.S.-led invasion, security fears still overshadow much of Afghanistan's daily life.
Moscow beckons Pakistan's Kiani
By M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times Online
The phrase coined by the 17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon is: "If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain." So, if Russian President Vladimir Putin won't come to Islamabad on Tuesday, then Pakistani army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kiani will still go to Moscow.
The Pakistani military spokesman has confirmed the "historic" visit will take place on Wednesday. The spokesman said Kiani is expected to meet top Russian military and civilian leaders to discuss possibilities of military-to-military cooperation between the two countries.
Russian sources explain that when Putin never really scheduledan Islamabad visit and none was announced, and the excitement was all on the Pakistani side, so how could it be deemed that the Kremlin cancelled the visit? It's a fair contention.
According to Moscow sources quoted by the media, there simply wasn't enough meat for a Putin visit at this point of time in the Russian-Pakistan normalization, since economic ties are languishing and there was nothing much in the pipeline except a couple of memorandums of understanding that could have been initialed.
But having said that, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is arriving in Islamabad on Wednesday on an unscheduled visit, presumably to assuage any sense of hurt in the Pakistani civilian leadership over the abrupt cancellation of Putin's visit.
The enemy's enemy…
Meanwhile, even as Lavrov heads for Islamabad, Kiani will have set out for Moscow. To be sure, Moscow's priority will be to sit across the table with Kiani, as he is the fountainhead of authority in Pakistan on major foreign and security policy issues. Also, he is an unusual Pakistani general, having run into difficulties with the United States, while pushing for Pakistan's "strategic autonomy" on the geopolitical chessboard.
Indeed, the present moment is pregnant with possibilities. Russia and Pakistan in varying measure - for different reasons though - have come under US pressure. Both appreciate that the US has "lost" the war in Afghanistan, is pulling out of it and would have little choice but to negotiate with the Taliban; both sense a power vacuum could develop in Afghanistan but also feel uneasy that the US is yet keeping strategic ambiguity about its future military presence in the region.
Meanwhile, Russia-Pakistan normalization through the recent years has reached a point where it is possible for the two countries to cooperate on a practical plane. In short, adversities and opportunities are compelling Russia and Pakistan to explore if they can swim together.
A core area of cooperation relates to the transit routes that supply the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan, which both Russia and Pakistan are providing for the Western alliance. The Northern Distribution Network via Russia becomes vital, in principle, for the US because of the imponderables over the Pakistani routes. But Washington is also chary of overtly depending on Russian goodwill. Again, Russia has supplied helicopters for the Afghan army and is maintaining them - they are paid for by the US, apart from training Afghan security personnel.
Evidently, Moscow has tenaciously finessed an Afghan "trump card" to play in the bigger game of the US-Russia reset. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko was quoted as saying last week that Moscow is ready to expand its joint projects with NATO concerning Afghanistan and "bring other players into them, too", but strictly within the framework of a mandate from the UN Security Council.
However, the US is easing itself out of the straitjacket of the UN Security Council mandate to conduct its activities without the Russians holding a veto over them. In reality, the US has all along been cherry picking, taking help from Moscow on a case-by-case basis but consistently keeping Russia at arm's length from the Hindu Kush. The US has repeatedly rebuffed the Russian attempts to insert the Collective Security Treaty Organization [CSTO] even remotely as a provider of security for Afghanistan.
Washington's obduracy has only helped deepen the Russian suspicions regarding the US' long-term intentions, especially the establishment of permanent American military presence in Afghanistan. Grushko articulated the Russian angst:
One may suppose NATO will be turning to the Security Council for permission to train the Afghan cadres for the interior agencies and the armed forces. There should be no other military functions and everything that spreads beyond the task of facilitating the Afghan stabilization will undermine regional security and generate an even greater uncertainty.
The plain truth is that among the regional powers, it is only Pakistan - aside of course Iran - which would feel genuine empathy for the Russian angst. Beijing may have reservations over a long-term US military presence but then it also has its well-honed methods (with Chinese characteristics) of harmonizing with the US (and NATO). To speak of the Central Asian elites, they have been beneficiaries of the lucrative war contracts and could be loathe to see the US forces depart.
As for India, it positively views a long-term US military presence as a factor of regional security and stability. It is Pakistan that feels threatened, like Russia, given the tense state of its relations with the US (and India). Both Russia and Pakistan have reason to worry about the deployment of a US missile defense system in Afghanistan.
A slap on the face
Clearly, the backdrop cannot be overlooked - the US-Russia relationship has run into headwinds. Writing for the official Novosti agency, its weekly columnist Konstantin von Eggert assessed Moscow's recent decision to shut down USAID activities in Russia:
This week, Vladimir Putin laid to rest the reset policy ... The reasons given by the [Russian foreign] ministry's spokesman were couched in language reminiscent of the Brezhnev era. In a nutshell, USAID was kicked out because, in the Kremlin's view, it tried to influence Russian politics ... The Russian president seems to have decided that it is time for the era of niceties in US-Russian relations to end. This is surely the first time since Gorbachev came to power that official Russia has slapped official America on the face so hard.
He [Putin] is irritated by President Barack Obama's stance on ballistic missile defense deployment in Europe ... What this show of force testifies to is the utter shallowness of US-Russian political relations. In the last ten years it has whittled down to just a few perennial topics ... Russia became an irrelevant second-tier policy issue for the Americans quite some time ago. Until fairly recently, the Russian leadership had responded by using the so-called nuisance factor - ie making life difficult for the US without crossing any red lines that might prompt an unpredictable US reaction. No more.
The point is, Washington is hitting hard at Russia's first circle of strategic interests in the so-called post-Soviet space. A telltale sign of the enormous loss of Russian influence in the Central Asian region surfaced over the weekend when Moscow admitted the failure of its protracted diplomacy in wrapping up an agreement with Tajikistan for the extension of the lease of the Russian military base in time for Putin's visit to Dushanbe slated for Friday.
Only 10 days back, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, who was deputed to Dushanbe to prepare for Putin's visit, had exuded optimism that the two countries were "very close" to signing an agreement. However, the commander of the Russian Ground Forces, General Vladimir Chirkin, retracted on Saturday that the negotiations may continue for months.
"I believe the countries' leaders will sign the deal on the base's continuing stay [in Tajikistan] in the first half of next year," Chirkin said.
He admitted that Moscow is having problem persuading Dushanbe to agree to a 49-year lease and that the Tajiks are demanding US$100 million in an annual fee for the base (which used to be provided without fee). The Kommersant newspaper reported that Dushanbe is demanding $250 million as the annual fee.
Without a presence on the Tajik-Afghan border, Russia's Afghan strategy will be thrown into disarray in the post-2014 period. To be sure, Dushanbe feels encouraged that the US is interested in having a base of its own in Tajikistan. Indeed, there is a perceptible stepping up of the US diplomatic activities in Dushanbe, Tashkent and Ashgabat - key regional capitals across the Afghan border - in the past year. These capitals have a major role to play in any post-2014 scenario.
Water, water everywhere ...
The US has toyed with the idea of opening a transit route to Afghanistan via the Caspian, altogether bypassing Russian territory. The Western calculus is as follows: if NATO establishes
a viable route from Turkey across the Caucasus and the Caspian region leading to the northern Afghanistan regions (via Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), Russia's capacity to dictate terms to the Western alliance would sharply diminish and the viability of long-term US military bases in Afghanistan will also be firmly ensured.
Things seem to be moving in this direction - although neither side talks about it openly. This is one reason why the parliamentary election in Georgia on Monday has become a high-stakes game: if President Mikhail Saakashvilli loses to the opposition led by Bidzina Ivanishvilli, Tbilisi may opt for a course correction in its close relationship with the US.
Meanwhile, in Central Asia itself, Uzbekistan has edged close to the Turkmen ideology of "positive neutrality" after suspending its membership of the Moscow-led Collective Treaty Organization (CSTO) in June. Tashkent is making a determined effort to build up its ties with Turkmenistan. The Western countries are actively encouraging a Uzbek-Turkmen axis to develop (which would also have ramifications for energy security).
The Uzbek national news agency disclosed last week that Uzbek President Islam Karimov would pay a two-day visit to Ashgabat early this week. The report said, "The agenda of the summit includes the talks [with Turkmen president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow] and exchanging views on the development of multifaceted Uzbek-Turkmen cooperation and important regional and international issues."
The report noted that Tashkent and Ashgabat have similar views on strengthening regional security and stability, creating "new effective mechanisms to intensify the negotiation process to resolve the Afghan crisis" with the participation of international organizations, joint fight against threats such as international terrorism and extremism, drug trafficking and trans-national organized crime.
Above all, what may cement a Turkmen-Uzbek understanding is that the two countries share a common position on water and energy issues in Central Asia. Specifically, they are opposed to the present Russian plans to assist the construction of the Kambarata and Rogun dams in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
The European Union, the World Bank and the US back the Uzbek-Turkmen stance on this issue. Thus, amidst the tense Uzbek-Tajik standoff in recent months, the results of "expert studies" in the US have just added fuel to the fire by counseling Tashkent that if Dushanbe goes ahead with the Rogun hydropower project, Uzbekistan's annual "loss" would be $600 million in terms of shortage of water for irrigation, unemployment in the agriculture sector and so forth.
Waiting for the Taliban
Clearly, the Russians are on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, Moscow is keen to ensure a long-term military presence in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But Bishkek and Dushanbe are demanding in return financial concessions and Russian assistance in building and managing their hydroelectric projects, which are central to their economic development.
On the other hand, if Russia gets involved in the construction of these projects, it will annoy Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and push these key regional states into the Western embrace.
As things stand, the US is systematically elbowing Russia out of the entire southern tier of the Central Asian region bordering Afghanistan - Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Nor is the US showing any sense of hurry to vacate its air base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan.
Of course, Washington will not seek a UN Security Council mandate for its future plans in Afghanistan and will prefer to enter into bilateral agreements with Kabul. This is where the post-2014 political alignments within Afghanistan and the calculus of power in Kabul become a matter of great concern to Moscow.
But Russia's capacity to influence the ebb and flow of Afghan politics in its favor is virtually nil. The specter that is haunting Moscow (and Pakistan) is that the US might at some point decide to come to terms with a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. The mainstream opinion within the US strategic community is veering round to the view that the Taliban as such do not pose any threats to America's national security interests and therefore Washington must differentiate the al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
A Carnegie study last month titled "Waiting for the Taliban in Afghanistan", in fact, recommended a bold policy option for Washington:
After 2014, the level of US support for the Afghan regime will be limited and, after a new phase in the civil war, a Taliban victory will likely follow ... Even a (relatively) hostile new Taliban force in Kabul will be easier to deal with because, since they will have established their control on the Afghan side of the border, they will be directly responsible for key security issues.
The desirable endgame should be a stabilization of Afghanistan, probably with the Taliban in Kabul. There would have to be a measure of political or economic support from the United States because a difficult relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan is very likely whatever the regime in Kabul. That is essentially the best situation from a US point of view. A difficult relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan will give the United States more leverage on both.
At the present juncture, therefore, from the Russian viewpoint, Kayani becomes an extremely valuable interlocutor. As Moscow would see it, the Pakistani military leadership's interest also lies in forestalling the US efforts to perpetuate a regime in Afghanistan in the post-2014 period that attaches primacy to American interests. Moscow apprehends - and, rightly so - that an Islamist regime in Kabul that comes under American influence could herald an Arab Spring in the region and pose existential threats to the political order in Central Asia and North Caucasus.
In short, Moscow is betting that the Pakistani military will play a crucial role in the shaping up of the future Afghan polity and given the commonality of interests between Pakistan and Russia, the two countries need to cooperate and coordinate their approaches to the evolving Afghan situation.
Suffice to say, the reining in of the US influence in Kabul in the post-2014 period has become a shared Russian-Pakistani strategic objective. Kayani's visit to Moscow is timely. It is taking place even as the US-Afghan negotiations for the conclusion of agreements relating to long-term NATO/US military presence are due to begin within the coming three weeks. Also, both Russia and Pakistan anticipate that President Barack Obama will revisit the Afghan strategy no sooner than the November election in the US is over.
Of course, it is possible to argue that Moscow could be skating on thin ice. Its dalliance with the Pakistani military leadership will complicate Washington's sustained attempts to get Rawalpindi to cooperate in the Afghan endgame. The negative fallouts on the US-Russia reset could be serious, since Moscow is audaciously challenging the first circle of the US' regional strategy. This is an area where even China has treaded softly, notwithstanding its "all-weather friendship" with Pakistan.
Far more consequential would be the reliability of the Pakistani military leadership as Moscow's newfound ally in Afghanistan. The former US ambassador, Cameron Munter, who concluded his tour in Islamabad recently, said last week in a speech that Pakistan is a country with a strong society but a weak state. Russian policy is in sync with the spirit of our times insofar as Pakistani society is virulently "anti-American".
However, the heart of the matter is that the Pakistani state is also simultaneously cooking many broths in its Rawalpindi kitchen and Grandma's Russian Borsch cannot be the main course there.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey
Russia keeps door open to Pakistan after Putin cancels trip
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Islamabad yesterday in an apparent effort to smooth feathers ruffled in Pakistan by Putin's last minute cancellation of his own scheduled visit.
Christian Science Monitor By Fred Weir, Correspondent October 4, 2012
Moscow - Confusion surrounds the Kremlin's hopes of establishing a tighter relationship with Pakistan, in advance of NATO's planned 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, after President Vladimir Putin abruptly cancelled a visit to Islamabad planned for this week.
It would have been the first visit to Pakistan by any Soviet or Russian head of state, and a strong signal that something might be changing in the foreign policy calculus of a country that has always strictly regarded India as its No. 1 regional partner.
The Kremlin says Mr. Putin's trip to Pakistan was never officially confirmed and his working schedule this week is "too tight" to accommodate the two-day visit, which was to have included participation in a regular summit of regional leaders on Afghanistan and bilateral talks on trade, technical, and military cooperation with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.
However, Putin dispatched Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Islamabad Wednesday in what looked like a hastily arranged effort to explain the change to Pakistani leaders and keep the door open for future warming of ties. Experts say that an increasingly anxious Russia wants very much to engage with Pakistan, and sees it as an indispensable regional player in dealing with whatever emerges in Afghanistan following NATO's pullout in barely two years. The Russians fear a repeat of the turbulent 1990s, when narco-trafficking exploded across former Soviet Central Asia and militant Islamist movements based in Afghanistan triggered major civil strife in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
"It remains to be seen what will happen, of course, but most in Moscow tend to view it through the prism of how things went when the USSR pulled its forces out of Afghanistan in 1989. There followed a string of disasters which nobody would like to see repeated," says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow foreign policy journal.
"Pakistan will be a key player, and it follows that Russia must have an open channel to Pakistan, at the very least to know how they will react and what they will do," he adds.
A Russian take on Afghanistan
Not everyone agrees that the outlook for Afghanistan after 2014 is chaos. Gen. Makhmud Gareyev, president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences and a former adviser to the pro-Soviet leader of Afghanistan, President Najibullah, following the withdrawal of Soviet forces, argues that things are quite different now.
"The fact is that the new post-Soviet Russian government established contacts with the rebels, and left Najibullah without ammunition," says General Gareyev.
"I firmly believe that Afghanistan could have been normalized if not for that.... The Americans talk about leaving, but they aren't really going to go. They'll do what they did in Iraq, leave some forces and regroup them. They'll try to keep bases in Central Asia and reinforce their presence in Pakistan. The Americans will still be around," he says.
"Which doesn't mean things will be OK. The Taliban will continue killing, and drugs will still pour out of Afghanistan. There will be lots of problems," he adds.
Putin's planned visit this week would have been the perfect opportunity to officially begin building bridges with Pakistan. He was to have attended the regular quadrilateral meeting on Afghanistan, which includes the leaders of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Previous summits, held in various regional capitals, were always attended by then-President Dmitry Medvedev, who has met with Mr. Zardari six times in the past three years – though never in Pakistan.
Putin's planned visit this week would have been the perfect opportunity to officially begin building bridges with Pakistan. He was to have attended the regular quadrilateral meeting on Afghanistan, which includes the leaders of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Previous summits, held in various regional capitals, were always attended by then-President Dmitry Medvedev, who has met with Mr. Zardari six times in the past three years – though never in Pakistan.
Uncertainty why Putin cancelled
Russian experts say they are at a loss to explain why Putin ducked out of the meeting, a move that seems to have seriously set back Moscow's timetable and led to a wave of injured feelings and perplexed speculation in the Pakistani media.
"One possible explanation is that Putin is a very specific guy, who feels like he can write his own rules and do things his own way," says Sergei Strokan, foreign affairs columnist for the Moscow daily Kommersant. He points out that Putin last May refused to attend a summit of the Group of Eight advanced countries, despite the fact that President Barack Obama had specifically moved the meeting's venue to accommodate him. Putin never offered any more detailed explanation other than that he was "too busy."
"So far there is no clear statement from the Kremlin as to when, if ever, the visit will take place. It's hard to see what's going on here, but the fact that Lavrov has gone to Pakistan suggests that there is a strong feeling in Moscow that if we miss the chance to develop stronger relations with Pakistan now, we may pay for it with deep complications down the road," Mr. Strokan adds.
Pipeline politics?
Some experts suggest that pipeline politics may lie at the root of the mystery. Russia's powerful state-run natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, is seen as deeply involved in plans to export Iranian, Russian, and Central Asian gas to the lucrative markets of South Asia via two projects that are currently on the drawing boards. First, the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, which analysts say Gazprom has a strong interest in, has apparently been stalled by Pakistan due to US objections. Second, the Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which experts say Gazprom wants to build and own, may also be an unresolved issue between Moscow and Islamabad.
"There is a lot of talk behind the scenes about these pipelines, and it's obvious that interests are lining up. It may be a hidden explanation for the confused diplomacy we're seeing at the moment," says Strokan. "But everything will depend upon regional stability. You can't build pipelines through Afghanistan if there isn't reliable security there."
Experts say that time may be running out to find some kind of regional formula to handle the worst-case scenario for post-NATO Afghanistan that Moscow seems to believe in.
"From the moment NATO troops are partially withdrawn from Afghanistan, Russia wants that country to be controllable," says Alexander Konovalov, president of the independent Institute of Strategic Assessments in Moscow.
"The fear in Moscow is that radical Islamism will spread, drug trafficking with explode, and Russia will be left to pick up the pieces. We know there's no hope for stability there without Pakistan's active participation, and we need to be talking seriously with them," he adds.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
KABUL, Oct. 5 (Xinhua) -- Afghan and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) during a joint operation eliminated a Taliban senior leader in the eastern Nangarhar province 120 km east of capital city Kabul on Thursday, an ISAF statement released here Friday said.
"Afghan and coalition forces killed a Taliban senior leader and strategist during a security operation in Khugyani district, Nangarhar province, Thursday," the statement added.
The statement identified the killed Taliban leader as Khan, saying no civilians were hurt during the operation.
However, Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to comment.
Afghanistan imposes currency curbs in response to Iran rial dive
Reuters By Sharafuddin Sharafyar Thu Oct 4, 2012
HERAT, Afghanistan - Afghanistan has imposed a cap on U.S. dollar flows across the border with Iran amid clashes there between Iranian police and protesters prompted by a collapse in the rial currency, Afghan police said on Thursday.
The Iranian currency's plunge has also jolted traders in the western Afghan business hub of Herat city, where currency speculators and businesses have been hard hit by the rial's slide.
It has prompted provincial authorities to limit to $1,000 the amount travelers can take out of Afghanistan, to be imposed on Afghan and Iranian travelers alike.
"We have tightened security in the border in the wake of rial falls and many complaints that Iranian currency is flowing in and dollars moving out," General Sher Ahmad Maladani, head of the paramilitary Afghan Border Police in Heart, told Reuters.
"Amid the complaints that the Afghan and foreign currencies are flowing out of Herat, the government has imposed a $1,000 limit."
It was not clear how Afghan police intended to enforce the limit along the porous border, which is crossed clandestinely by refugees, drug smugglers and even insurgents carrying arms into Afghanistan.
But Maladani said border police had already seized a suitcase containing 140,000 euros ($181,000) from an individual crossing into Iran.
In Iran, shops in Tehran's Grand Bazaar stayed shut and police patrolled the area a day after security forces clashed with anti-government demonstrators and arrested money changers. Traders told Reuters by telephone in Dubai that most stores were closed for safety reasons.
The rial's fall has badly hit cross-border trade in Herat, one of Afghanistan's wealthiest provinces thanks to Iranian trade and where traders recently ran briefly out of U.S. currency due to high demand from dollar-starved Iranians.
The dollar is a second currency across most of conflict-racked Afghanistan due to the presence of thousands of foreign workers and advisers, as well as 100,000 NATO-led troops.
Many Iranians have come to rely on Herat city's three-story currency market to secure dollars and skirt Western sanctions imposed in response to Iran's disputed nuclear programme.
Traders in Herat had previously accepted rials as payment, while Iranian taxis loaded with U.S. cash made their way back across the border at Islam Qala, sometimes paying hefty bribes to frontier police.
PILES OF CURRENCY
Now, the piles of rials in shops and on the tables of money traders are worth about a third less than they were a week ago, with the currency sinking to a record low of 37,500 against the dollar on Tuesday.
"People used to buy meat under a promise to pay in rials and settle debts much later. But even if I collect all the rials they owe me, it's not going to be much," butcher Arbaab said in his small Herat shop.
"Most of our business is across the border with Iran. It's badly affecting everyone."
The currency woes have, however, created opportunities for some Afghans.
Long used to paying top dollar in Herat shops filled with Iranian goods, including crockery, appliances and cookware, some residents now see a tidy profit in buying cheaply across the border in Iran and reselling in Afghanistan.
"It's a fortune for anyone who can go and buy goods from Iran now," said Faramarz Alizai, who makes frequent journeys across 110 km (70 miles) of desert over to the Iranian side.
"I buy kitchen appliances from Iran and sell them in Herat and other cities, earning good money."
The directive seemed to have little to do with the Afghan central bank and was driven rather by worried provincial officials.
Central bank Governor Noorullah Delawari said he had been warning currency speculators in western Afghanistan for weeks that they would suffer huge losses if the rials they had been buying with U.S. dollars suddenly lost value.
"I couldn't believe how anyone will exchange good currency for bad currency," Delawari told Reuters. "They saw the Iranian rial was very low and they bought. I don't know what was their game is, I don't understand."
Delawari said the central bank had noticed Afghan banks had been transferring growing quantities of dollars and euros to branches in Herat as speculators sold hard currency to dealers across the border in Iran.
Standing in the Khorasan market, the main currency exchange in Herat, money trader Mohammad Aref said he had been ruined by the rial's decline and even suggested a Western attack on Iran could help restore stability to the currency.
"If the Americans plan to hit Iran, they should do it now. Why are we suffering?" he said.
(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi and Matthew Green in Kabul; Writing by Rob Taylor; Editing by Ron Popeski)
Afghan president says 2014 election will be on time
Reuters By Mirwais Harooni 04/10/2012
KABUL - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Thursday that presidential elections would be held on time in 2014 and he would step aside as mandated, denying speculation that the exit of foreign troops and security problems would delay the poll.
"The election will definitely happen. Go on and choose your own favourite candidate. My term, if prolonged by even a day, will be seen as illegitimate," Karzai told a press conference at his Kabul garden palace.
Karzai's increasingly unpopular government has for months been considering a change in election timing to avoid overlapping with the drawdown of U.S.-led NATO forces due to be completed by the end of 2014, when security is fully turned over to Afghan forces.
Last month a newly formed "Cooperation Council" of around 20 political parties warned that any delay to the presidential poll would lead to a serious crisis.
Opposition parties also say they are worried Karzai could act outside the constitution on poll timing, or try to install an ally as his successor to maintain an influence on power.
Karzai hit out at the foreign media for painting a "doomsday scenario" of Afghanistan after the NATO pullout, despite promises of ongoing international development aid and security assistance from Western military backers.
He said international media were conducting "psychological warfare" against the country's international reputation.
A German intelligence assessment of Afghanistan after 2014 seen by Germany's Spiegel newspaper this week said it could take upwards of 35,000 foreign troops to stabilise the country after the NATO exit, including elite troops and advisers.
The U.S. would provide most of those, the report said, while other NATO countries would be expected to provide around 10,000 soldiers. NATO forces in the country now number around 100,000.
The World Bank, in its most recent assessment of Afghanistan, said while the economy had expanded strongly in the past few years, bolstered by big aid flows helping real gross domestic product growth reach 8.4 percent in 2010/11, the NATO pullout was expected to cut that growth by about half.
Donors meeting in Tokyo in July promised civilian aid worth $16 billion over the next four years, but tied that to a much stronger effort by Karzai to combat corruption that has seen millions of aid dollars stolen.
KARZAI: BAD MOUTHING MUST STOP
The president also fired a broadside at cabinet members and other senior officials whose families live abroad and who he said were bad-mouthing Afghanistan.
"I have told many of them to bring their families back to Afghanistan because life and the environment is better and happier here," he said.
"Those whose families are abroad and fuelling publicity about instability, I will fire them immediately."
Karzai predicted the U.S.-led war on militancy would "not be successful from Afghanistan's view" because it was being fought in Afghan villages, rather than against insurgents sheltering in neighbouring countries, an allusion to Pakistan.
He said Kabul would only sign a cross-border security pact with Islamabad aimed at ironing out security differences when Afghans can be certain that "suicide bombers, terrorists, weapons and cross-border shelling" would stop.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been strained in recent months over cross border shelling which Kabul blames on the Pakistan military. Islamabad says the shelling is in retaliation for anti-government attacks launched by insurgents operating from mountain havens on Afghan soil.
(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi; Writing by Rob Taylor; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
Afghan government: Insider attacks are terrorism
CNN By Jamie Crawford October 4th, 2012
The vast majority of attacks by Afghan soldiers on their U.S. and NATO counterparts are the result of a "mutation" of terrorist tactics rather than a difference in cultural sensitivities, a senior Afghan official said Thursday.
"The majority of it is a terrorist infiltration in the (Afghan army) ranks and forces which is a tragic thing in itself," Jawed Ludin, Afghanistan'sdeputy foreign minister, said of "green on blue' attacks, in which Afghan soldiers turn their weapons on NATO forces alongside whom they serve.
U.S. officials have said a percentage of such attacks can be attributed to cultural grievances by Afghan forces, as well as Taliban or other insurgents exploiting the situation to drive a wedge between the United States and Afghanistan.
"It is kind of a last-gasp effort to be able to not only target our forces, but to try to create chaos, because they have not been able to regain any of the territory that they have lost," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters last month during a visit to Asia.
The phenomenon, which has picked up in pace within the last year, is mostly the work of terrorists taking advantage of a current large-scale recruitment drive for the Afghan National Forces to meet recruiting level targets, Ludin said.
"I suppose what happened in that process, we perhaps overlooked some of the crucial screening requirements, and as a result the enemy used that as an opportunity to infiltrate," Ludin said. He added that the number of Afghan soldiers being killed by a fellow Afghan was "far higher" than the instances of "green on blue" attacks.
The Afghan government has taken on a wholesale review of Afghan army recruits Ludin said, and that a "large number of people have actually been taken off the ranks just because we were not satisfied with their backgrounds."
The loss of strongholds in the south of the country following the recently completed "surge" of U.S. troops, and the large scale of arrests of would-be terrorists in Kabul and other urban areas, are forcing terrorists to find alternate venues, such as the Army ranks, to carry out their operations, Ludin said.
Ludin spoke with reporters Thursday at the Afghan Embassy in Washington after joining Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmoui Rassoul at the State Department Wednesday for the inaugural meeting of the U.S.-Afghanistan Bilateral Commission. The commission was established as a part of the Strategic Partnership the two countries signed in May.
In her meeting with Rassoul, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that James Warlick, deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, would lead negotiations for the United States for a future Bilateral Security Agreement with Afghanistan. Eklil Hakimi, the Afghan ambassador to the United States, will lead the negotiations for Afghanistan.
Clinton said such an agreement between the two countries would "establish the framework of our future security relationship based on our shared vision of a secure and stable Afghanistan."
While talks with the United States are ongoing, Ludin told reporters that talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban are "dormant." The Afghan government is working to define "verifiable representatives" of the Taliban who renounce violence, cut all ties with terrorism and who respect the equality of women in Afghan society.
Ludin said the Afghan government was not opposed to a separate U.S. attempt to negotiate with members of the Taliban in Qatar. In that effort, the United States would transfer five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Qatar in exchange for a U.S. soldier currently held by the Taliban. It was the lack of Afghan involvement in the process that drew Ludin's criticism.
"We felt that if you are really true to the model of an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned peace process, we should be involved," Ludin said.
Those talks have still not begun.
At his confirmation hearing in July, James Cunningham, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, said Taliban leaders are "signaling they are open to negotiations," although he said the Taliban must end its alliances with terrorist groups such as al Qaeda before the United States would endorse any peace deal.
And with the leadership of the Afghan Taliban still operating mostly out of Pakistan, Ludin said that nation remains a crucial player in Afghan peace talks with the Taliban. However, Pakistan and other interested countries must still "take a back seat" in the actual negotiations, he said.
"When it comes to talking about the future of the peace process, the political discussion, that frankly is nobody else's job," Ludin said. "We have to do it."
Analysis: The fortified food conundrum in Afghanistan
KABUL, 4 October 2012 (IRIN) - How do you tackle widespread malnutrition in a poor, corrupt country at war?
Despite billions of dollars in aid over the last decade, Afghanistan’s malnutrition rates have soared, now well-past emergency thresholds, with one-fifth of children malnourished overall; one-third of children acutely malnourished in some conflict areas; and 60 percent of children under five stunted, according to a recent survey by the government’s Central Statistics Organization and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
“You have malnutrition rates which are among the highest in Asia and equivalent to rates deemed totally unacceptable in other parts of the world,” UN humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan Michael Keating said in a recent interview, adding that he was “shocked” by the results of the survey.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) admits humanitarian organizations have had “major gaps” in their capacity to respond to the nutrition crisis, with past attempts to establish a UN “cluster” focused on nutrition failing due to insecurity.
But a new four-year US$6.4 million project run by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) aims to reach nearly half the country's population - 15 million Afghans - with fortified foods.
The strategy is to add vitamins and minerals such as iron, zinc, folic acid, Vitamin B-12 and Vitamin A to wheat flour, vegetable oil and ghee, and also fortify salt with iodine.
While large-scale food fortification has succeeded in curbing malnutrition in places like South Africa and Egypt, can it work in Afghanistan? (Food fortification is not new in Afghanistan, but has only been done on a small-scale).
"There are several problems, besides security which is an obvious issue," said one Afghan analyst who asked to remain anonymous. "Are Afghans prepared to eat this food? How are you going to convince people that something added to their food is good for them? Afghanistan is full of conspiracy theories. And then there is corruption; how can this be implemented so those who buy the fortified wheat flour are not taking it out of the bag and filling it with other flour? In a large project like this, mullahs [religious leaders] and tribal elders need to be key advocates, otherwise it won't work. And getting Afghanistan's neighbours to comply and work for the good of Afghanistan is another story."
At a time when aid budgets are shrinking as foreign troops withdraw from Afghanistan, observers say the project will have to follow certain key steps to avoid becoming another example of wasted aid money.
Creating demand
When fortified bread was introduced in Egypt, the project targeted state bakeries that make subsidized bread for the poor. By contrast, Afghanistan's fortification project will be market-based, which is why, project organizers said, the marketing strategy will be a key component of its success.
While women are responsible for most of the feeding, men do most of the shopping, said Emily Levitt Ruppert, the senior policy adviser for maternal and child nutrition at the Nutrition Centre of Expertise at World Vision International.
Education is a strong social value, as is having healthy, intelligent children, she said, and the word "vitamin" is generally understood. One strategy is to convince men that to have smart, healthy, athletic children, they should give their families fortified flour, which will also help prevent birth defects.
Ibrahim Parvanta, an international nutrition consultant, helped start the country’s first salt iodination programme in 2002, after the fall of the Taliban. In his experience, getting Afghans on board was not difficult. Both salt iodination and so-called sprinkles, a micronutrient powder that allows people to fortify their own foods at home, “were incredibly accepted", he told IRIN.
The key, he said, was talking to Afghans' hearts, as well as their pockets. “You want your children to be successful in school?” he would ask them. “Well then this is what we need to put in it [food].”
According to Purnima Menon, a senior research fellow at International Policy Food Research Institute (IFPRI) in New Delhi, fortification can be quite sustainable, but a demand for fortified commodities is essential.
Given the current economic conditions in Afghanistan, success is tricky. "Besides the other competing products in the market, it also depends on what the people buying it think." Any change in the food’s appearance or taste could sway consumers against it.
While a small percentage of Afghans living in rural areas have plots for growing their own wheat, and WFP distributes food in some areas, the main food and cereal supply is through free market mechanisms - mostly imports from neighbouring countries.
"Afghans will see labels that the products are fortified, so that will help,” said Marc Van Ameringen, the executive director of GAIN, “but how to build effective demand is one of the challenges we face around the world. In many countries, this works by government regulation, which is also the plan here. But the thing in Afghanistan, as in a lot of other places, is: Can you enforce it?"
Marketing
Once there is demand, how do you market your product?
While one third of the population lives below the poverty line; as in other countries, loudspeakers are still used to spread news. Roughly 80 percent of the population has access to a cell phone, and advertisers are increasingly using SMS messages to reach people. Billboards have also mushroomed in the past decade. However, with an 80 percent illiteracy rate, these types of marketing are not as effective, said Rafiq Kakar, president and CEO of Opinion Research Centre of Afghanistan (ORCA).
Radio is a better option, he said, though he cautioned that Afghans can be skeptical of radio advertisements.
"We have found people have the most confidence in tribal elders or religious leaders. They believe whatever elders tell them - even if it has to do with something they don't like very much."
WFP says in previous marketing campaigns, they have not only relied on radio, but also involved doctors, clinics, leaflets, posters, pamphlets, even danglers.
What is needed, the consultant Parvanta added, is a tracking system - to market the fortified products in the right places, monitor exactly where they end up and to see the impact of the foods on the population. Wheat flour importers and national producers could help advise on this process, he said.
The project is more likely to succeed in urban centres than in rural areas, he said, but with 13 national mills participating in the project, “you would still reach a good 25-35 percent of the population, which is a substantial number."
Reach in remote or conflict areas will necessarily be limited, aid workers concede.
“The challenge is making sure that they are targeted towards the areas where you have the highest need,” said Aidan O’Leary, head of OCHA in Afghanistan. “The areas most affected are invariably the most conflict-affected areas.”
Getting government to take ownership
Ultimately, WFP representatives said, the goal is for the government to take ownership of the project.
"Basically," said Doordje Voovic, of WFP's Purchase for Progress initiative, which purchases food from local farmers, "this project has to do with the whole system of supply of a country. While we are at the very beginning of the chain, the net result is out of our hands.”
Given the weak central government and high levels of corruption, the government's capacity to implement such projects is often very limited, observers say. This is why the project requires properly trained Afghans who can absorb and implement the projects and then continue to run them properly, said Parvanta.
"One of the biggest problems is that there has not been enough resourcing to develop Afghans with proper skills to [implement projects],” he said.
Save the Children and World Vision’s recently released Nutrition Barometer, which measures national responses to malnutrition, found the political commitment for tackling malnutrition to be emerging in Afghanistan through the National Public Nutrition Policy and Strategy and the Infant and Young Children Feeding Policy and Strategy. But it said that this had not translated into results because “to date neither policy has been effectively implemented”.
Developing, legislating, disseminating and enforcing national standards is one of the key components of the fortification project, said Van Ameringen, especially since 60-70 percent of the wheat flour and 90 percent of oil consumed in the country comes from imports. Talks with importers from neighbouring countries have already started, he said.
Ultimately the end goal of the fortification project is sustainability.
For example, the millers participating in the project will not profit immediately, says Carrie Morrison, WFP's director of health and nutrition, but the potential to make money will grow as the government standardizes the process.
Can the U.S. Leave Behind “Afghan-Sustainable” Military Bases?
As one outpost is prepared for a handover, a report raises the risks attendant upon the departure of American forces
time.com By John Wendle October 4, 2012
Combat Outpost Garda, Wardak Province - The arm of the battered orange backhoe rose up and came crashing down on the plastic-and-steel walls and roof of the barracks. The corrugated roofing squealed and popped off. A plastic wall buckled and fell flat, raising a thick cloud of dust. Bright yellow insulation spooled out and tangled everywhere.Then the arm swung over and scooped up a bucket of dirt from a smashed Hesco barrier and buried the debris.
American troops have abandoned “downtown” as they called this part of Combat Outpost Garda, in Wardak Province, and moved up to the top of their fortified hill in the lead-up to leaving the base in the coming weeks. It is part of making the outpost “Afghan-sustainable” as it is handed over to the company of Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers stationed here. But there is already considerable doubt, despite downsizing facilities to make them more manageable, that thefledgling Afghan security forces can sustain the necessary operations and patrols to keep the country stable as more such combat outposts (COPs) are handed over to Afghanistan amid the U.S. and NATO drawdown ahead of the planned 2014 pullout.
“We have a tolai here, an Afghan company,” says Col. Andrew Rohling of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and head of operations in Logar and Wardak Provinces, as he surveyed Garda with a handover team and an Afghan counterpart. “So our goal is to take [the base] down from what is an American size company to an Afghan size company. The size is about the same, but it’s the logistics. Its all about,really, its all about logistics. The Afghan tolai just doesn’t have the same logistical capacity as the American company.”
When the U.S. troops pull out of Garda, it and the surrounding high mountain valley will become the domain of the Afghan company– and the entrenched insurgent groups that surround it. For many of the Afghan soldiers, it is strange to see infrastructure that has been trucked in at enormous cost and built on territory gained with great difficulty knocked down with such little fanfare. As more of the walls came crashing down, an Afghan translator watching from nearby told TIME, “Every time the ANA goes off the base, they are attacked by roadside bombs, sometimes [insurgents] ambush them. I think if [Coalition forces] leave Afghanistan, the Taliban will start fighting everywhere,” he says, speaking anonymously because he did not feel comfortable talking on such a small installation. “It will be like it was – when there was civil war everywhere. There will be more fighting,” says the translator, who has lived on the base for around two years.
A report by an American military Human Terrain Team that was shown to TIME by a U.S. officer outlines the specific fears the U.S. military has about the upcoming handover of Garda. The study draws lessons from the results of thehandover late last year of Jalrez, a combat outpost just a few miles from Garda lying along the strategic east-west Route 2 that crosses the mountainous midsection of the country.
Taking lessons from the closure of the nearby base, the report, in part, reads that, “The closure of COP Garda will have minimal impact on the security of the predominantly Pashtun population residing east of the Jalrez District Center (DC); however, the Hazara/Tajik communities residing west of the DC will suffer due to an influx of Taliban fighters, and the resurgence of historical rivalries with their Pashtun neighbors.” Also, because there is only one road through the valley, Hazara and Tajik farmers will effectively be cut off byillegal checkpoints from markets in their provincial capital and in Kabul, just 30 miles away.
More alarmingly, the report says that, “Historically, Jalrez District has served as a critical avenue to facilitate attacks upon Maidan Shahr and Kabul.” With the closure of COP Garda, not only will ethnic tensions and violence increase in northern Wardak, but a critical blocking position will be removed, making it that much easier for Taliban, Hisb-e-Islami and other insurgent factions, such as the Haqqani Network, to infiltrate Kabul and conduct attacks.
A NATO official tells TIME that the Coalition has closed and handed over around 320 bases with half given to the ANA and half to other government security agencies. The official says no bases have been closed outright. The territory and bases have been relinquished through a series of tranches – with the most peaceful areas – provinces and cities like Bamyan, Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat and Panjsher – handed over first. Col. Rohling is realistic about the Afghans’ ability to manage it all. Says he, “I don’t have a problem giving it to them – the problem is that they can’t manage it. They don’t have the fuel to run it, the power, all the things that go with it. The reality is, they’re not jacked up, it’s just that they don’t have the American logistical system.”
As the U.S. and NATO have tried to disentangle themselves from the country, they have pushed for speedier handovers. “The question is: how fast do you hand over? It’s not a gulf of difference. It is a spectrum and it depends on your judgment on the progress we are making. And on the security side we are making good progress,” said Sir Richard Stagg, British ambassador in Kabul, in an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday. “The more the people of Afghanistan see their own government stand on its own two feet, the better for everybody. This is not a matter of us cutting and running and disappearing, it is a matter of shifting the nature of our engagement from hand-holding to one which is offering support as needed andrequired.”
But most Afghans do not see it that way. “This round will be different from the others because insecure areas are part of this round of transition,” Afghan Defense Minister Bismillah Mohammadi said Tuesday at a press conference, adding that while he welcomed the withdrawal of NATO troops, he was concerned about the upcoming fourth and fifth tranches. He added that, “The Afghanistan situation is very sensitive right now.”
Garlanded Afghan film Buzkashi Boys comes home for premiere
Tale of two young boys in Kabul dreaming of playing the national sport has invigorated country's tiny film industry
Guardian.co.uk By Tom Peter Thursday 4 October 2012
An Afghan film that has already begun touring international film festivals and claimed several awards is to have its premiere in Kabul on Thursday night.
Buzkashi Boys is the story of two young boys in Kabul who dream of playing buzkashi, the Afghan national sport in which horseback riders compete for possession of a headless goat. Before the boys can compete in the sport, they must confront the stifling limitations of life for poor Afghans.
The film, which was produced with a joint international and Afghan crew, recently won best drama at the LA Shorts Fest, which makes the film eligible to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Buzkashi Boys has provided a rare opportunity for a narrative, fictional film shot in Afghanistan to reach an international audience and has invigorated the tiny Afghan film industry.
One of those leading the production was the American film-maker Sam French. Working as a documentary maker in Afghanistan, French said he was often frustrated at seeing only the portrayal of Afghanistan's conflict and strife on screen.
"What we see in the west is not what we see here on the ground. The news is full of bombs, bullets and burqas, not the stories of the people who I know and love in Afghanistan," he said. "One of my missions became to show the world another side of the country."
French recruited local Afghans, some with technical skills, others with only passion and an interest in film-making, and mentored them through the production and post-production process.
The country once had a small cinema scene, but the industry came undone over three decades of fighting, especially during the Taliban's rule, when music and films were outlawed. Over the past decade, there has been a quiet resurgence in film-making, but the vast majority of paying opportunities are in television or non-fiction work.
"There are very few fictional films made in Afghanistan each year. You can count the number on just your fingers and toes. The main problem is there's no way to make income on films yet. The foreign film market has overshadowed us," said Saleem Shaheen, who owns two film production firms in Kabul. "In every house in Afghanistan, there is cable or satellite TV, and this changes every house into a cinema. People have a variety of films to watch in their houses, so why would they go out and buy a film?"
Massih Tajzai, who worked as the trainee director on Buzkashi Boys, grew up in a family of actors, but says there were few opportunities for training in film-making. Several local universities offered film courses, but Tajzai said most of the training relied on outdated materials.
"Our film-makers here in Afghanistan are not professional. They did not study anything but they watched a lot of Indian films and foreign films. Now they're just copying them without knowing what they're doing," he said. "Their films can't show the culture of Afghanistan because it's all copied."
The film offered him a chance to get on-the-job training that Tajzai says was invaluable. Now he hopes to study film-making internationally and return to Afghanistan to continue making movies there.
Alleged Herat Kidnappers Executed by Taliban
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 04 October 2012
Taliban leaders in western Herat province have executed two alleged kidnappers by firing squad after holding a drumhead court-martial, local officials said.
According to reports, two men allegedly kidnapped the child of a family in the Pashtun Zarghun district. They were captured by the Taliban while the father of the child was paying them for the child's release.
"Although, the exact location of the [execution] is not clear yet, there are insecure areas in the Obe district in which the incident probably took place," Herat police chief Gen. Sayed Abdulghafar Sayedzada told TOLOnews.
Residents of Obe district confirmed that the Taliban executed two people by firing squad in the district after holding the drumhead court-martial while scores of residents were watching.
TOLOnews obtained amatuer footage of an execution showing two men being blindfolded and executed.
Herat Governor Dr. Daud Shah Saba also confirmed the reports, saying that the Taliban killed the two civilians ten days ago after charging them with kidnapping.
"These people escaped the law and have gone to these criminals [Taliban]. And the Taliban killed them in a volley of bullets at a drumhead court-martial," he said.
He condemned the actions of the Taliban, saying that the kidnappers had been associates of the Taliban and were collaborating in most of the kidnappings throughout Herat.
Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) in Herat denounced the execution and drumhead court-martials.
AIHRC chief, Herat office, Abdulqader Rahimi said: "A drumhead court-martial is not accepted by the Human Rights Commission by any means. We ask that those who have acted this crime to be referred to the judiciary organisations."
He said the commission officials are concerned about the increase of other groups exacting justice in the western provinces.
Officials added that the alleged kidnappers had been under investigation by the police but the Herat police had not succeeded in identifying and arresting them which opened the way for the Taliban to act as they did.
Kabul Municipality Illegally Collecting Fees: ACCI
TOLOnews.com By Zabihullah Jahanmal Thursday, 04 October 2012
Kabul Municipality is going against a decision from the Council of Ministers and collecting transit fees at Kabul's gates, the Afghan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (ACCI) claimed Wednesday.
In a press conference in Kabul, ACCI deputy chief Khan Jan Alokozai said the Council of Ministers had decreed that municipal council incomes should be collected in a separate account under Customs but Kabul Municipality was acting contrary to the decision.
"Kabul Municipality wrote to us that Kabul's gates are an exception to the decision, so they were handed over to contractors," Alokozai said.
ACCI estimates that around 1.2 billion Afg (US$520 million) in taxes is collected by municipalities each year.
Meanwhile, Kabul Municipality announced Wednesday that it was working with private companies to install guard-rails along Kabul city's main roads.
The Municipal Council said the railings would be built with some of the funds expected to come from advertising on the roadside barriers.
"We are attempting to use the help of private companies and banks [for funding] as we will install their logo on the fence," Kabul Mayor Mohammad Yonos Naw Andish told TOLOnews Wednesday.
According to the council estimates, the cost per meter of the cast-iron fence is estimated to be 5,000 Afg (US$100).
In other news, Kabul municipal officials said several roads will be reconstructed with funds from Japan this year, estimated at $33 million.
Afghan Resort Struggles to Recover from Taliban Attack
By Bethany Matta VOA October 04, 2012
QARGHA LAKE, AFGHANISTAN - In June, Taliban militants stormed a hotel at the Qargha Lake resort area a short drive from Kabul. At least 18 people died in the 12-hour assault, which the Taliban said was aimed at punishing people for partying, drinking alcohol and other un-Islamic activities. The popular resort is working on making a comeback
Like many of the Taliban's high-profile sieges, the Qargha Lake attack played out on TV.
Viewers who witnessed it will never forget the images of people clinging to the wall of the Spozhmai restaurant at Qargha lake, as attackers on the terrace above carried out their killing spree.
Today, for those living and working in Qargha, life is slowly returning to normal
Most of the Spozhmai restaurant has been reconstructed, but there are still signs of the attack
The floor remains stained from pools of blood. The bullet holes have not yet been repaired. And areas bombed out by the attackers' hand grenades can still be seen.
While the restaurant has returned to serving officials and middle-to-upper-class Afghans, the number of guests is down by more than 50 percent.
"There are two kinds of people," said Asadullah, the restaurant's manager. "There are those who have lived through 30 years of war; the attack has not affected these people. But, the other people who have not lived through the war; they are scared. The people who come here, they come for picnics, they are not those people fighting on the front line, it has affected them greatly."
Faridoon, the restaurant's accountant says he is used to attacks like the one at Qargha. But, still, he says, his life has been changed forever.
"I lost my brother in the attack, he was 23 and has two children," recalled Faridoon. "Two of our guards were killed and some of our guests."
Restaurants around the lake that serve traditional Afghan foods such as kebab and roasted chicken have also seen a decrease in business.
A worker at one of them says business is good at night, but there are fewer patrons during the day.
"After the attack, business has decreased by about 30 percent," noted one of the restaurant workers.
Security is tighter. More checkpoints have gone up and so has the number of guards patrolling the area.
Nabi, a cook at one of the lakeside restaurants, was also working the night of the attack.
"My family is happy I have a job and can go to work, but security-wise, of course, all Afghans are worried when someone in their family leaves the house," Nabi explained.
While some Afghans do leave their home and risk a trip to Qargha Lake, there are many others staying at home. It’s another reminder that nearly 11 years after the U.S.-led invasion, security fears still overshadow much of Afghanistan's daily life.
Moscow beckons Pakistan's Kiani
By M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times Online
The phrase coined by the 17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon is: "If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain." So, if Russian President Vladimir Putin won't come to Islamabad on Tuesday, then Pakistani army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kiani will still go to Moscow.
The Pakistani military spokesman has confirmed the "historic" visit will take place on Wednesday. The spokesman said Kiani is expected to meet top Russian military and civilian leaders to discuss possibilities of military-to-military cooperation between the two countries.
Russian sources explain that when Putin never really scheduledan Islamabad visit and none was announced, and the excitement was all on the Pakistani side, so how could it be deemed that the Kremlin cancelled the visit? It's a fair contention.
According to Moscow sources quoted by the media, there simply wasn't enough meat for a Putin visit at this point of time in the Russian-Pakistan normalization, since economic ties are languishing and there was nothing much in the pipeline except a couple of memorandums of understanding that could have been initialed.
But having said that, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is arriving in Islamabad on Wednesday on an unscheduled visit, presumably to assuage any sense of hurt in the Pakistani civilian leadership over the abrupt cancellation of Putin's visit.
The enemy's enemy…
Meanwhile, even as Lavrov heads for Islamabad, Kiani will have set out for Moscow. To be sure, Moscow's priority will be to sit across the table with Kiani, as he is the fountainhead of authority in Pakistan on major foreign and security policy issues. Also, he is an unusual Pakistani general, having run into difficulties with the United States, while pushing for Pakistan's "strategic autonomy" on the geopolitical chessboard.
Indeed, the present moment is pregnant with possibilities. Russia and Pakistan in varying measure - for different reasons though - have come under US pressure. Both appreciate that the US has "lost" the war in Afghanistan, is pulling out of it and would have little choice but to negotiate with the Taliban; both sense a power vacuum could develop in Afghanistan but also feel uneasy that the US is yet keeping strategic ambiguity about its future military presence in the region.
Meanwhile, Russia-Pakistan normalization through the recent years has reached a point where it is possible for the two countries to cooperate on a practical plane. In short, adversities and opportunities are compelling Russia and Pakistan to explore if they can swim together.
A core area of cooperation relates to the transit routes that supply the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan, which both Russia and Pakistan are providing for the Western alliance. The Northern Distribution Network via Russia becomes vital, in principle, for the US because of the imponderables over the Pakistani routes. But Washington is also chary of overtly depending on Russian goodwill. Again, Russia has supplied helicopters for the Afghan army and is maintaining them - they are paid for by the US, apart from training Afghan security personnel.
Evidently, Moscow has tenaciously finessed an Afghan "trump card" to play in the bigger game of the US-Russia reset. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko was quoted as saying last week that Moscow is ready to expand its joint projects with NATO concerning Afghanistan and "bring other players into them, too", but strictly within the framework of a mandate from the UN Security Council.
However, the US is easing itself out of the straitjacket of the UN Security Council mandate to conduct its activities without the Russians holding a veto over them. In reality, the US has all along been cherry picking, taking help from Moscow on a case-by-case basis but consistently keeping Russia at arm's length from the Hindu Kush. The US has repeatedly rebuffed the Russian attempts to insert the Collective Security Treaty Organization [CSTO] even remotely as a provider of security for Afghanistan.
Washington's obduracy has only helped deepen the Russian suspicions regarding the US' long-term intentions, especially the establishment of permanent American military presence in Afghanistan. Grushko articulated the Russian angst:
One may suppose NATO will be turning to the Security Council for permission to train the Afghan cadres for the interior agencies and the armed forces. There should be no other military functions and everything that spreads beyond the task of facilitating the Afghan stabilization will undermine regional security and generate an even greater uncertainty.
The plain truth is that among the regional powers, it is only Pakistan - aside of course Iran - which would feel genuine empathy for the Russian angst. Beijing may have reservations over a long-term US military presence but then it also has its well-honed methods (with Chinese characteristics) of harmonizing with the US (and NATO). To speak of the Central Asian elites, they have been beneficiaries of the lucrative war contracts and could be loathe to see the US forces depart.
As for India, it positively views a long-term US military presence as a factor of regional security and stability. It is Pakistan that feels threatened, like Russia, given the tense state of its relations with the US (and India). Both Russia and Pakistan have reason to worry about the deployment of a US missile defense system in Afghanistan.
A slap on the face
Clearly, the backdrop cannot be overlooked - the US-Russia relationship has run into headwinds. Writing for the official Novosti agency, its weekly columnist Konstantin von Eggert assessed Moscow's recent decision to shut down USAID activities in Russia:
This week, Vladimir Putin laid to rest the reset policy ... The reasons given by the [Russian foreign] ministry's spokesman were couched in language reminiscent of the Brezhnev era. In a nutshell, USAID was kicked out because, in the Kremlin's view, it tried to influence Russian politics ... The Russian president seems to have decided that it is time for the era of niceties in US-Russian relations to end. This is surely the first time since Gorbachev came to power that official Russia has slapped official America on the face so hard.
He [Putin] is irritated by President Barack Obama's stance on ballistic missile defense deployment in Europe ... What this show of force testifies to is the utter shallowness of US-Russian political relations. In the last ten years it has whittled down to just a few perennial topics ... Russia became an irrelevant second-tier policy issue for the Americans quite some time ago. Until fairly recently, the Russian leadership had responded by using the so-called nuisance factor - ie making life difficult for the US without crossing any red lines that might prompt an unpredictable US reaction. No more.
The point is, Washington is hitting hard at Russia's first circle of strategic interests in the so-called post-Soviet space. A telltale sign of the enormous loss of Russian influence in the Central Asian region surfaced over the weekend when Moscow admitted the failure of its protracted diplomacy in wrapping up an agreement with Tajikistan for the extension of the lease of the Russian military base in time for Putin's visit to Dushanbe slated for Friday.
Only 10 days back, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, who was deputed to Dushanbe to prepare for Putin's visit, had exuded optimism that the two countries were "very close" to signing an agreement. However, the commander of the Russian Ground Forces, General Vladimir Chirkin, retracted on Saturday that the negotiations may continue for months.
"I believe the countries' leaders will sign the deal on the base's continuing stay [in Tajikistan] in the first half of next year," Chirkin said.
He admitted that Moscow is having problem persuading Dushanbe to agree to a 49-year lease and that the Tajiks are demanding US$100 million in an annual fee for the base (which used to be provided without fee). The Kommersant newspaper reported that Dushanbe is demanding $250 million as the annual fee.
Without a presence on the Tajik-Afghan border, Russia's Afghan strategy will be thrown into disarray in the post-2014 period. To be sure, Dushanbe feels encouraged that the US is interested in having a base of its own in Tajikistan. Indeed, there is a perceptible stepping up of the US diplomatic activities in Dushanbe, Tashkent and Ashgabat - key regional capitals across the Afghan border - in the past year. These capitals have a major role to play in any post-2014 scenario.
Water, water everywhere ...
The US has toyed with the idea of opening a transit route to Afghanistan via the Caspian, altogether bypassing Russian territory. The Western calculus is as follows: if NATO establishes
a viable route from Turkey across the Caucasus and the Caspian region leading to the northern Afghanistan regions (via Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), Russia's capacity to dictate terms to the Western alliance would sharply diminish and the viability of long-term US military bases in Afghanistan will also be firmly ensured.
Things seem to be moving in this direction - although neither side talks about it openly. This is one reason why the parliamentary election in Georgia on Monday has become a high-stakes game: if President Mikhail Saakashvilli loses to the opposition led by Bidzina Ivanishvilli, Tbilisi may opt for a course correction in its close relationship with the US.
Meanwhile, in Central Asia itself, Uzbekistan has edged close to the Turkmen ideology of "positive neutrality" after suspending its membership of the Moscow-led Collective Treaty Organization (CSTO) in June. Tashkent is making a determined effort to build up its ties with Turkmenistan. The Western countries are actively encouraging a Uzbek-Turkmen axis to develop (which would also have ramifications for energy security).
The Uzbek national news agency disclosed last week that Uzbek President Islam Karimov would pay a two-day visit to Ashgabat early this week. The report said, "The agenda of the summit includes the talks [with Turkmen president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow] and exchanging views on the development of multifaceted Uzbek-Turkmen cooperation and important regional and international issues."
The report noted that Tashkent and Ashgabat have similar views on strengthening regional security and stability, creating "new effective mechanisms to intensify the negotiation process to resolve the Afghan crisis" with the participation of international organizations, joint fight against threats such as international terrorism and extremism, drug trafficking and trans-national organized crime.
Above all, what may cement a Turkmen-Uzbek understanding is that the two countries share a common position on water and energy issues in Central Asia. Specifically, they are opposed to the present Russian plans to assist the construction of the Kambarata and Rogun dams in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
The European Union, the World Bank and the US back the Uzbek-Turkmen stance on this issue. Thus, amidst the tense Uzbek-Tajik standoff in recent months, the results of "expert studies" in the US have just added fuel to the fire by counseling Tashkent that if Dushanbe goes ahead with the Rogun hydropower project, Uzbekistan's annual "loss" would be $600 million in terms of shortage of water for irrigation, unemployment in the agriculture sector and so forth.
Waiting for the Taliban
Clearly, the Russians are on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, Moscow is keen to ensure a long-term military presence in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But Bishkek and Dushanbe are demanding in return financial concessions and Russian assistance in building and managing their hydroelectric projects, which are central to their economic development.
On the other hand, if Russia gets involved in the construction of these projects, it will annoy Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and push these key regional states into the Western embrace.
As things stand, the US is systematically elbowing Russia out of the entire southern tier of the Central Asian region bordering Afghanistan - Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Nor is the US showing any sense of hurry to vacate its air base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan.
Of course, Washington will not seek a UN Security Council mandate for its future plans in Afghanistan and will prefer to enter into bilateral agreements with Kabul. This is where the post-2014 political alignments within Afghanistan and the calculus of power in Kabul become a matter of great concern to Moscow.
But Russia's capacity to influence the ebb and flow of Afghan politics in its favor is virtually nil. The specter that is haunting Moscow (and Pakistan) is that the US might at some point decide to come to terms with a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. The mainstream opinion within the US strategic community is veering round to the view that the Taliban as such do not pose any threats to America's national security interests and therefore Washington must differentiate the al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
A Carnegie study last month titled "Waiting for the Taliban in Afghanistan", in fact, recommended a bold policy option for Washington:
After 2014, the level of US support for the Afghan regime will be limited and, after a new phase in the civil war, a Taliban victory will likely follow ... Even a (relatively) hostile new Taliban force in Kabul will be easier to deal with because, since they will have established their control on the Afghan side of the border, they will be directly responsible for key security issues.
The desirable endgame should be a stabilization of Afghanistan, probably with the Taliban in Kabul. There would have to be a measure of political or economic support from the United States because a difficult relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan is very likely whatever the regime in Kabul. That is essentially the best situation from a US point of view. A difficult relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan will give the United States more leverage on both.
At the present juncture, therefore, from the Russian viewpoint, Kayani becomes an extremely valuable interlocutor. As Moscow would see it, the Pakistani military leadership's interest also lies in forestalling the US efforts to perpetuate a regime in Afghanistan in the post-2014 period that attaches primacy to American interests. Moscow apprehends - and, rightly so - that an Islamist regime in Kabul that comes under American influence could herald an Arab Spring in the region and pose existential threats to the political order in Central Asia and North Caucasus.
In short, Moscow is betting that the Pakistani military will play a crucial role in the shaping up of the future Afghan polity and given the commonality of interests between Pakistan and Russia, the two countries need to cooperate and coordinate their approaches to the evolving Afghan situation.
Suffice to say, the reining in of the US influence in Kabul in the post-2014 period has become a shared Russian-Pakistani strategic objective. Kayani's visit to Moscow is timely. It is taking place even as the US-Afghan negotiations for the conclusion of agreements relating to long-term NATO/US military presence are due to begin within the coming three weeks. Also, both Russia and Pakistan anticipate that President Barack Obama will revisit the Afghan strategy no sooner than the November election in the US is over.
Of course, it is possible to argue that Moscow could be skating on thin ice. Its dalliance with the Pakistani military leadership will complicate Washington's sustained attempts to get Rawalpindi to cooperate in the Afghan endgame. The negative fallouts on the US-Russia reset could be serious, since Moscow is audaciously challenging the first circle of the US' regional strategy. This is an area where even China has treaded softly, notwithstanding its "all-weather friendship" with Pakistan.
Far more consequential would be the reliability of the Pakistani military leadership as Moscow's newfound ally in Afghanistan. The former US ambassador, Cameron Munter, who concluded his tour in Islamabad recently, said last week in a speech that Pakistan is a country with a strong society but a weak state. Russian policy is in sync with the spirit of our times insofar as Pakistani society is virulently "anti-American".
However, the heart of the matter is that the Pakistani state is also simultaneously cooking many broths in its Rawalpindi kitchen and Grandma's Russian Borsch cannot be the main course there.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey
Russia keeps door open to Pakistan after Putin cancels trip
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Islamabad yesterday in an apparent effort to smooth feathers ruffled in Pakistan by Putin's last minute cancellation of his own scheduled visit.
Christian Science Monitor By Fred Weir, Correspondent October 4, 2012
Moscow - Confusion surrounds the Kremlin's hopes of establishing a tighter relationship with Pakistan, in advance of NATO's planned 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, after President Vladimir Putin abruptly cancelled a visit to Islamabad planned for this week.
It would have been the first visit to Pakistan by any Soviet or Russian head of state, and a strong signal that something might be changing in the foreign policy calculus of a country that has always strictly regarded India as its No. 1 regional partner.
The Kremlin says Mr. Putin's trip to Pakistan was never officially confirmed and his working schedule this week is "too tight" to accommodate the two-day visit, which was to have included participation in a regular summit of regional leaders on Afghanistan and bilateral talks on trade, technical, and military cooperation with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.
However, Putin dispatched Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Islamabad Wednesday in what looked like a hastily arranged effort to explain the change to Pakistani leaders and keep the door open for future warming of ties. Experts say that an increasingly anxious Russia wants very much to engage with Pakistan, and sees it as an indispensable regional player in dealing with whatever emerges in Afghanistan following NATO's pullout in barely two years. The Russians fear a repeat of the turbulent 1990s, when narco-trafficking exploded across former Soviet Central Asia and militant Islamist movements based in Afghanistan triggered major civil strife in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
"It remains to be seen what will happen, of course, but most in Moscow tend to view it through the prism of how things went when the USSR pulled its forces out of Afghanistan in 1989. There followed a string of disasters which nobody would like to see repeated," says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow foreign policy journal.
"Pakistan will be a key player, and it follows that Russia must have an open channel to Pakistan, at the very least to know how they will react and what they will do," he adds.
A Russian take on Afghanistan
Not everyone agrees that the outlook for Afghanistan after 2014 is chaos. Gen. Makhmud Gareyev, president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences and a former adviser to the pro-Soviet leader of Afghanistan, President Najibullah, following the withdrawal of Soviet forces, argues that things are quite different now.
"The fact is that the new post-Soviet Russian government established contacts with the rebels, and left Najibullah without ammunition," says General Gareyev.
"I firmly believe that Afghanistan could have been normalized if not for that.... The Americans talk about leaving, but they aren't really going to go. They'll do what they did in Iraq, leave some forces and regroup them. They'll try to keep bases in Central Asia and reinforce their presence in Pakistan. The Americans will still be around," he says.
"Which doesn't mean things will be OK. The Taliban will continue killing, and drugs will still pour out of Afghanistan. There will be lots of problems," he adds.
Putin's planned visit this week would have been the perfect opportunity to officially begin building bridges with Pakistan. He was to have attended the regular quadrilateral meeting on Afghanistan, which includes the leaders of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Previous summits, held in various regional capitals, were always attended by then-President Dmitry Medvedev, who has met with Mr. Zardari six times in the past three years – though never in Pakistan.
Putin's planned visit this week would have been the perfect opportunity to officially begin building bridges with Pakistan. He was to have attended the regular quadrilateral meeting on Afghanistan, which includes the leaders of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Previous summits, held in various regional capitals, were always attended by then-President Dmitry Medvedev, who has met with Mr. Zardari six times in the past three years – though never in Pakistan.
Uncertainty why Putin cancelled
Russian experts say they are at a loss to explain why Putin ducked out of the meeting, a move that seems to have seriously set back Moscow's timetable and led to a wave of injured feelings and perplexed speculation in the Pakistani media.
"One possible explanation is that Putin is a very specific guy, who feels like he can write his own rules and do things his own way," says Sergei Strokan, foreign affairs columnist for the Moscow daily Kommersant. He points out that Putin last May refused to attend a summit of the Group of Eight advanced countries, despite the fact that President Barack Obama had specifically moved the meeting's venue to accommodate him. Putin never offered any more detailed explanation other than that he was "too busy."
"So far there is no clear statement from the Kremlin as to when, if ever, the visit will take place. It's hard to see what's going on here, but the fact that Lavrov has gone to Pakistan suggests that there is a strong feeling in Moscow that if we miss the chance to develop stronger relations with Pakistan now, we may pay for it with deep complications down the road," Mr. Strokan adds.
Pipeline politics?
Some experts suggest that pipeline politics may lie at the root of the mystery. Russia's powerful state-run natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, is seen as deeply involved in plans to export Iranian, Russian, and Central Asian gas to the lucrative markets of South Asia via two projects that are currently on the drawing boards. First, the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, which analysts say Gazprom has a strong interest in, has apparently been stalled by Pakistan due to US objections. Second, the Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which experts say Gazprom wants to build and own, may also be an unresolved issue between Moscow and Islamabad.
"There is a lot of talk behind the scenes about these pipelines, and it's obvious that interests are lining up. It may be a hidden explanation for the confused diplomacy we're seeing at the moment," says Strokan. "But everything will depend upon regional stability. You can't build pipelines through Afghanistan if there isn't reliable security there."
Experts say that time may be running out to find some kind of regional formula to handle the worst-case scenario for post-NATO Afghanistan that Moscow seems to believe in.
"From the moment NATO troops are partially withdrawn from Afghanistan, Russia wants that country to be controllable," says Alexander Konovalov, president of the independent Institute of Strategic Assessments in Moscow.
"The fear in Moscow is that radical Islamism will spread, drug trafficking with explode, and Russia will be left to pick up the pieces. We know there's no hope for stability there without Pakistan's active participation, and we need to be talking seriously with them," he adds.
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