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Afghanistan: Foreign troops should leave villages
By By RAHIM FAIEZ and DEB RIECHMANN | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's president said Saturday that the U.S. and NATO troops transferring security to local forces should leave the country's villages as soon as possible and pull back to their bases.
The U.S. has already said that from mid-2013 on, the United States and its allies would operate from fewer bases and that the withdrawal of military supplies and equipment from Afghanistan would accelerate. But the comments from the Afghan leader suggest he would like to see that process gain some momentum.
"There will be a change in our relations with the world in 2013," President Hamid Karzai said at the opening of a conference on Afghan foreign policy strategy. "The U.S. and NATO forces are going to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but before that — in 2013 — the transition of security is going to be completed and there will be no military activity of foreign forces in Afghanistan."
"We are working to make this transition of security happen sooner. We want all the foreign forces to come out of the villages and go to their bases so the Afghan forces can carry out the security," Karzai said, adding that that after the international forces pull back to their bases, they can gradually return home from there, completing the withdrawal by the end of 2014.
International forces have been fighting for more than a decade against the Taliban and other militants who allowed al-Qaida to operate in Afghanistan and plot the 9/11 attacks. Karzai has long stressed that terrorism is not rooted in Afghan villages, but resides in other sanctuaries outside the country — a veiled reference to neighboring Pakistan.
"From our vision, the fight against terrorism is not in Afghanistan," he said. "That is why we do not want military operations in our villages, in our houses."
Karzai discounted fears that Afghanistan would descend into a civil war of ethnic factions after the foreign combat troops complete their withdrawal. He said he was confident that Afghan soldiers and police can handle security.
"I'm completely sure that the withdrawal of international forces in 2014 will give us more opportunity to provide more security," Karzai said. "We are the owners of this country. We should really show that we are the owners of this country."
Karzai reiterated his call for national unity and instructed the Afghan diplomats at the conference to return to their assigned countries and present Afghanistan as a proud, sovereign and unified nation.
"We are poor, but we are lord of this region," Karzai said. "Our history has proven that we are the lord of this region. ... So wherever you are based, you should act as a lord — a poor lord, but a lord."
When they meet during the week of Jan. 7, Karzai and President Barack Obama will discuss the pace of coalition troop withdrawals, efforts to pursue peace with the Taliban as well as the role and size of U.S. military presence in his country beginning in 2015.
During a trip to Afghanistan this week, U.S. Defense Secretary Panetta offered no clues about what Obama will decide. Other officials have indicated that the White House is considering plans that call for between 6,000 and 10,000 U.S. troops to stay for several years after 2014 in order to keep Afghanistan on a path toward stability and to prevent al-Qaida and affiliated terrorist groups from re-emerging as a significant force in the country.
The U.S. now has about 66,000 troops here, along with about 35,000 from allied nations. No decision on 2013 U.S. troop withdrawals is likely to be announced until after Karzai meets Obama in Washington in early January. The U.S. withdrew 10,000 troops last year and another 23,000 this year.
There have been calls in Congress for Obama to accelerate the withdrawal next year, and from commanders' own optimistic assessments of progress, it appears such a speedup could be coming. Some U.S. military officials, however, warn that pulling out too many troops too fast could squander hard-won sacrifices.
Wounded Afghan Intelligence Chief Sent To U.S. Hospital
Asadullah Khalid By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan December 15, 2012
KABUL -- The Afghan intelligence chief who was wounded in a December 6 suicide bombing has been transferred to a hospital in the United States.
Afghan presidential deputy spokesman Ahmad Zia Siamak told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that Asadullah Khalid was flown from a U.S.-run military hospital at Bagram Air Field on December 13 and arrived at a U.S. hospital the following day.
He did not identify the U.S. hospital.
Khalid was wounded by a suicide bomber inside a guesthouse run by the Afghan National Directorate of Security.
The Taliban claimed responsibility.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai expressed optimism about Khalid’s recovery after visiting him last week at an Afghan hospital where he was first taken.
Khalid, a former governor and minister, was appointed as the Afghan intelligence chief in September.
An Afghan Mystery: Why Are Large Shipments of Gold Leaving the Country?
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG The New York Times December 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand luggage and tucked into jacket pockets, roughly hewed bars of gold are being flown out of Kabul with increasing regularity, confounding Afghan and American officials who fear money launderers have found a new way to spirit funds from the country.
Most of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments. One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million.
The gold is fully declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legitimately being sent by gold dealers seeking to have old and damaged jewelry refashioned into new pieces by skilled craftsmen in the Persian Gulf, said Afghan officials and gold dealers.
But gold dealers in Kabul and current and former Kabul airport officials say there has been a surge in shipments since early summer. The talk of a growing exodus of gold from Afghanistan has been spreading among the business community here, and in recent weeks has caught the attention of Afghan and American officials. The officials are now puzzling over the origin of the gold — very little is mined in Afghanistan, although larger mines are planned — and why so much appears to be heading for Dubai.
“We are investigating it, and if we find this is a way of laundering money, we will intervene,” said Noorullah Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank. Yet he acknowledged that there were more questions than answers at this point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me something about it,” he said in an interview. Or, as a European official who tracks the Afghan economy put it, “new mysteries abound” as the war appears to be drawing to a close.
Figuring out what precisely is happening in the Afghan economy remains as confounding as ever. Nearly 90 percent of the financial activity takes place outside formal banks. Written contracts are the exception, receipts are rare and statistics are often unreliable. Money laundering is commonplace, say Western and Afghan officials.
As a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that situation we usually are: is there something bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of commerce?” said a senior American official who tracks illicit financial networks.
There is reason to be suspicious: the gold shipments track with the far larger problem of cash smuggling. For years, flights have left Kabul almost every day carrying thick wads of bank notes — dollars, euros, Norwegian kroner, Saudi Arabian riyals and other currencies — stuffed into suitcases, packed into boxes and shrink-wrapped onto pallets. At one point, cash was even being hidden in food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Airways flights to Dubai.
Last year alone, Afghanistan’s central bank says, roughly $4.5 billion in cash was spirited out through the airport. Efforts to stanch the flow have had limited impact, and concerns about money laundering persist, according to a report released last week by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
The unimpeded “bulk cash flows raise the risk of money laundering and bulk cash smuggling — tools often used to finance terrorist, narcotics and other illicit operations,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often taken to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar economic collapse grows louder.
But given Dubai’s reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official said that the “obvious suspicion” is that at least some of the apparent growth in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities — opium smuggling, corruption, Taliban taxation schemes — that have come to define Afghanistan’s economy.
There are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros here to circumvent American and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the same purpose.
Yahya, a dealer in Kabul, said other gold traders were helping Iran buy the precious metal here. Payment was being made in oil or with Iranian rials, which readily circulate in western Afghanistan. The Afghan dealers are then taking it to Dubai, where the gold is sold for dollars. The money is then moved to China, where it was used to buy needed goods or simply funneled back to Iran, said Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a single name.
He declined to name those involved in aiding Iran. But Western officials said his description of how the process worked tracked with their knowledge of money laundering networks that operate in Afghanistan and the surrounding region.
Before officials can say whether the gold shipments are part of an illicit financial scheme, though, they first have to figure out how much gold is going out — or, for that matter, coming in.
It is a task easier said than done. The Finance Ministry, which is supposed to collect taxes on each shipment, did not have figures, said Wahidullah Tawhidi, a spokesman for the ministry. He suggested that the Commerce Ministry would know. The Commerce Ministry did not, and officials there said it would be best to contact airport customs officials.
At the airport, a reluctant customs official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, brushed aside concerns that there had been an uptick in gold shipments out of Afghanistan. He then ended the conversation with the cryptic promise to one day share “the real story of what is happening to the gold.”
M.Y. Rassuli, the president of the airport, said shipments had begun increasing over the summer. He said that he could not offer specifics because he deals with operations, not customs. But he expressed frustration about the problem. “If it’s 5 kilograms or 500 kilograms, that’s not a normal thing to transfer,” he said in an interview. “This is why Afghanistan is No. 1 in corruption.”
Without knowledge of how much gold is leaving, it is impossible to calculate the value of the trade. But airport security forms that cover the last two weeks of October indicate about 560 pounds, worth about $14 million, were carried by hand out of Afghanistan during that period.
That is a princely sum in one of the world’s 10 poorest countries. But it is perhaps a measure of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan that seemingly no one — not Afghan bank regulators, not American investigators of illicit financing, not European economic experts — found it particularly surprising that gold appears to have joined bank notes in the skies over Afghanistan.
The addition of gold to the flight of cash from the country, the Afghan official said, only proves that “if it is a thing that has value and we can put it in our pocket, some of us are going to fly away with it.”
Taliban Using Youths As Suicide Bombers
By Sayed Jawad Khaama Press December 15, 2012
PAKTIKA PROVINCE, Afghanistan – A recent operation in Sar Howzah district, Dec. 11, in which a large operation by the Taliban was thwarted by Afghan security agencies has revealed some startling details.
Three of the would-be bombers who were arrested turned out to be only 15 year old. The other three individuals were barely older than the teenagers.
The Taliban has been increasing the use of children and teenagers to carry out suicide bomb attacks and to emplace improvised explosive devices.
“The use of children as combatants and suicide bombers is a disturbing reality that the Taliban continue to promote,” said Lt. Col. Orestees Davenport, Task Force Paktika Commander. “These callous methods by the Taliban are senseless crimes and are counter to the peaceful path that the Afghan people have chose to take.”
Afghan Local Police complement counterinsurgency efforts by assisting and supporting rural areas with limited Afghan National Security Forces presence, in order to enable conditions for improved security, governance, and development.
Last French Combat Troops Leave Kabul
December 15, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The last French combat troops have left Afghanistan.
The 200 infantry soldiers left from Kabul airport on December 15 and are due to arrive in France on December 18 following a stopover in Cyprus.
The departure of the last French combat troops comes two years before allied nations in the 100,000-strong NATO mission led by the United States are due to recall their fighting forces.
France now has some 1,500 non-combat troops remaining in Afghanistan.
They are due to stay into 2013 to take responsibility for repatriating equipment and training the Afghan army to take over security duties.
After them, only a few hundred French soldiers involved in cooperation or
training missions will remain in the country.
Based on reporting by AFP and dpa
With the War in Afghanistan Ending, Where Does the Peace Movement Go Next?
The Nation By Tom Hayden December 14, 2012
President Obama plans to remove all but 6,000 to 9,000 US troops from Afghanistan by 2014, ending the American combat role, saving tens of billions of dollars, and leaving an unpopular, incompetent and corrupt Karzai regime needing a diplomatic fix to avert collapse into civil war.
Although not officially announced, the numbers have been reported in recent days. The Los Angeles Times predicts 6-9,000, while the New York Times reports "under 10,000." Troop cuts in that range will mean a 90-95 percent reduction from 109,000, the highest US level reported in 2010. It would require a 60,000 reduction between now and late 2014. The pace of the withdrawal has not been announced but is expected any day.
The numbers are well below those requested by the Pentagon, which range from 15,000 troops and upward. Opposition to Obama's reductions is expected from neo-conservative and military advocates as well as Congressional hawks. Obama has gained political cover, however, from the recent 62 Senate votes cast for "accelerated" withdrawal and a similar message in a letter from 94 House members. The recent New York Times editorial finally endorsing a one-year withdrawal also provides critical support from within the mainstream political and national security establishments.
Obama's decision, and the stand taken by Congressional peace advocates, is consistent with his campaign pledge to begin steady American withdrawals after a two-year surge of 33,000 troops. The surge was a concession to generals like Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, and to cabinet hawks including Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, who fought for withdrawals to be based on "conditions" rather than timelines. In Bob Woodward's account, Obama's Wars, the president is quoted as saying, "I'm not an advocate of the timetable, but it will come from the Hill," by Democrats in Congress. In fact, the White House quietly supported language advocating an accelerated timetable for "swift withdrawal" and a "significant and sizable reduction no later than July 2011" in the Democratic National Committee resolution of Feb. 24, 2011. The resolution was sponsored by Reps. Barbara Lee and Mike Honda, and longtime Democratic leaders Donna Brazile and Alice Germond.
The critical resolution reflected the demands of local peace networks and rank-and-file Democrats across the country. Behind closed doors, Obama told Sen. Lindsay Graham, "I can't let this be a war without end, and I can't lose the whole Democratic Party. And people at home don't want to hear we're going to be there another for another ten years."
As the recent reports show, the new Obama plan already "has sparked internal criticism at the Pentagon" which argues for a "sizable military presence" to be deployed in southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to the LA Times. Obama's troop reductions are likely to spur even sharper cuts in NATO forces. The Afghan army, according to Pentagon sources, will face "enormous difficulties" as the American troops leave. There were 2,500 insurgent attacks every month this year from April to September, higher levels than in 2009, according to a recent Pentagon report to Congress.
Whatever decision Obama makes will be the subject of ongoing talks between Washington, Kabul and NATO powers. Bagram air base, along with smaller bases around Kabul, will be the defensive hub for any residual US force. The most controversial US mission, though smaller in scope, will be counterterrorism. Embassy protection and training Afghan troops will also be included. Virtually none of the Afghan army's 23 brigades can operate on their own, suggesting that Western air support will be authorized as well.
In the end, the discussion of a smaller residual force might be undone altogether by Afghan insistence on stripping immunity from American personnel violating Afghan laws and procedures. A similar scenario occurred during the endgame in Iraq. One American official told the LA Times that "one of the things that Obama and Karzai have always agreed on is the need for a reduced force presence. I could see them both wanting zero, but at the end of the day I don't think that will happen."
Nothing will change the shifting balance of forces as Karzai's army and regime are left on their own amidst corruption and insurgency. The danger of renewed civil war will increase unless diplomacy creates a power-sharing arrangement on the ground. Republicans so far have blocked Obama's efforts to release several Taliban detainees from Guantanamo in exchange for an American POW, Bowe Bergdahl, captured by Afghan insurgents in 2009. A larger diplomatic settlement will require controversial contacts with Iran, China, Russia and Pakistan, all states with proxy interests in divided Afghanistan. If all efforts fail and Afghanistan implodes into civil war, Obama will have to count on American domestic exhaustion with the decade-long war to protect him against military claims that he "lost" Afghanistan.
Feminist groups which originally supported the war will have to lobby successfully to ensure the meager gains of Afghan women are preserved in an enforceable aid and assistance package.
In summary: it's official: America's longest war is ending soon. The peace movement, which built a necessary groundwork of opposition, is ten years older.
What are some next steps for the peace movement?
First, unlike the Cold War era, the peace forces have won most of the all-important battle for public opinion. It's possible that a window will open, however briefly, for the peace forces to link with labor, civil rights and environmental coalitions in an effort to put some definition and muscle into Obama's repeated promise to "do some nation-building here at home."
This shift to domestic priorities will be very difficult. The US is an empire with 800 military bases, a growing interest in deterring China, a role in hot battlefields such as Yemen and Mali, risky brinksmanship with Iran, dangerous ties to Israel's hawks, and an unknown number of CIA operations around the planet. If expensive US ground wars are no longer affordable or winnable, there will be momentum towards drone wars, cyber wars, black operations, and an edifice of greater secrecy over our institutions. The military budget, despite its gargantuan size, will be difficult to assail politically. Peace doves will have to become fiscal hawks in attacking wasteful military spending.
A top priority will be reversing, and trying to end, the escalating use of drones. Public opinion unfortunately is favorable toward killing hundreds of alleged foreign terrorists in far-away lands, assuming the alternative is putting American troops in harm's way at an extraordinary cost to taxpayers. The growing protests against drones, coupled with Robert Greenwald's Brave New Foundation's educational documentary, if combined with civil liberties and human rights groups' complaints over detentions and "kill lists", will gradually build a climate of dissent from current policy.
The most important challenge will be to revise the 1973 War Powers Act to require public disclosure and Congressional approval of drone attacks, cyber-wars, and secret operations by the CIA in places like Libya. President Obama, as a constitutional lawyer, can hardly wish to be remembered as rebuilding the Imperial Presidency, but that is the path he is on. Perhaps aware of the peril, Obama has taken the unusual step of appealing to the public and Congress to "rein in" his exceptional powers with "new legal architecture" in the coming year. That invitation should be taken up at once by civil liberties and peace communities with interests to protect.
One possible scenario might be to de-escalate and phase out the drone attacks on Pakistan's tribal areas as part of a diplomatic settlement in Afghanistan. It's highly doubtful after a decade of war that the Taliban will be driven to the table by drones, and no serious diplomat should expect them to acquiesce. But a permanent suspension of drone attacks is a necessary ingredient of any peace settlement with Afghanistan and Pakistan, as Obama well knows.
If that occurs, a parallel process of drafting and debating new Congressional policies to "rein in" the imperial presidency could gain traction.
Finally, peace advocates will have to keep challenging the paradigm of the "war on terrorism" with its underlying rationale and legislative authorization that sustains the secretive Long War. There is no single path to an alternative narrative, any more than there is a single effective approach to slowing the domestic "wars" on gangs and inner-city youth that have resulted in mass incarceration. The neo-conservatives and the domestic Right-wing play on racial fears to mount their militarized approaches to both domestic and foreign policy. Peace and civil rights critics might gain traction, however, when their constitutional and moral arguments are reinforced by the expensive failures of the Long War abroad and mass incarceration at home.
There is a connection between the Long Wars and domestic inequality that peace advocates also might offer to civil rights and labor reformers. It is that corporate and financial globalization result in an exploding gap between the rich and the underclass. The model offered by neo-conservative theorists is a failed one. Even as we militarize our relationship to Pakistan, we privatize the sweatshop conditions that draw investment away from US labor markets. By a similar process, the "de-industrialization" of American cities in the 1980s led to increased joblessness and despair among inner city youth, with expensive and unconstitutional policing and imprisonment as false solutions. A global living wage is needed for the world, one built on the experience of winning living wage ordinances in American cities.
Finally, the experience of the peace movement offers a message to environmentalists: that the continuous Long War over oil, gas, minerals and other resources is a direct obstacle to a new priority on developing conservation and renewable resources. Ending the Long War is a precondition to transitioning to an energy-efficient future.
New coalitions are likely to form as "nation building at home" challenges the Long War as the agenda of the coming four years.
Police arrest 5 Taliban militants in northern Afghan province
SARIPUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) -- Afghan Police during cleanup operations against Taliban militants in Saripul province 350 km north of Kabul on Saturday, captured five armed Taliban militants including a group commander, a local police officer said.
"The operation conducted against Taliban in Sayad district early today morning during which five armed Taliban rebels including a group commander Mullah Qamar were captured," Sediq Khan the police chief of Sayad district told Xinhua.
There were no casualties on police personnel during the operations which lasted for a while.
Taliban militants fighting the government are yet to make comment.
Delays at Chinese-Run Afghan Mines Raise Security Fears
Wall Street Journal By MARIA ABI-HABIB, YAROSLAV TROFIMOV and ZIAULHAQ SULTANI December 14, 2012
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan - Foreign investment in Afghanistan's mining sector was meant to bring peace and prosperity. But here in Bamiyan province, it has so far put locals out of jobs and fueled a spreading insurgency.
For decades, thousands of Afghans have dug for coal in the unregulated mines of Bamiyan's Kahmard district, in a valley dotted with timber-framed entrances to dangerous, narrow shafts. This summer, the Afghan government evicted these squatters to make way for a Chinese consortium that has won one of the biggest natural-resources concessions in a country that sits atop vast, largely untapped mineral wealth.
The Chinese firm that won the tender, however, hasn't yet replaced the lost jobs with new ones. Many evicted miners have turned to the Taliban for a paycheck, leading to a sharp decline in security. The Chinese investors now say they don't know when the situation will improve enough to let them to start exploiting the site.
"If people do not have jobs, the insurgents will get these people," said Bamiyan Gov. Habiba Sarabi, adding that the mining project has destabilized what was once considered Afghanistan's safest province.
The Taliban fighters that swarmed the area have set up illegal checkpoints and exercise de facto authority in many parts of the district, say local Afghans.
"When the government kicked us out from the coal mines, we had no other choice except to join the Taliban," said one miner who declined to be identified and who says he is earning some $30 a day when he is with the Taliban. About 50 other former miners have taken up weapons alongside him, he said.
As Afghanistan's bitter winter advances on this mountainous region where freezing to death is common, the shortage of coal—used here for heating and cooking—is further alienating the population.
"These communities are now ready to fight," said Ali Wardak, a tribal leader who has been trying to negotiate on the matter with Kabul authorities. "The government and the Chinese are moving to a point of no return."
Many miners haven't joined the insurgency, of course, leaving some room for hopes expressed in recent years by U.S. officials that mining projects would spur development and bring stability. Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries but has trillions of dollars in potential mineral wealth, by U.S. government estimates, from oil to gold to rare earths.
The Afghan Ministry of Mines says the summer's closure of 103 illegal mining tunnels in Kahmard was needed to safeguard the area for the Chinese investors and to stop widespread child labor and unsafe practices, some of which have been documented earlier this year by The Wall Street Journal. According to the ministry, 1,000 jobs have been lost.
Miners and local government officials say 5,000 to 10,000 people have become unemployed across Bamiyan and in the adjoining provinces of Samangan and Baghlan.
"I can't find a job to feed my children. Where will we find the firewood to heat our houses this winter?" said Sakhi Daad Lali, 51, a former laborer in Bamiyan's coal mines and a father of 11. "People have no choice but to join the Taliban when the government doesn't do anything to help them."
The Chinese consortium, led by state-run MCC China Metallurgical Group, won the concession for Bamiyan's coal mines in 2009, along with more lucrative copper deposits of Mes Aynak in Logar province, south of Kabul. The entire deal, details of which are confidential, has been valued at $3.5 billion.
Bamiyan's coal is supposed to power a 400-megawatt electricity station that the Chinese group has pledged to build, according to the ministry of mines, with half of that power going to Mes Aynak and the rest feeding Afghanistan's national grid.
The Chinese consortium is supposed to start developing the mines—estimated to hold 45 million tons of coal—by the spring, with the power station completed by 2015, said Afghanistan's deputy minister of mines, Nasir Durrani. Speed is essential, said Gov. Sarabi. "The Chinese company should start work on this as soon as possible so that the people can get jobs," she said.
Bamiyan isn't the only place where foreign mining investment is proving far less lucrative than Afghan officials had hoped. All in all, the country earns some $100 million a year in mining revenue, much of it from licenses from new contracts as opposed to royalty payments from actual extraction.
"This issue is essential for us—that investors don't sit on our resources and wait it out," Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal said. "We need the money now."
MCC Tongsin Resources Ltd., the MCC unit leading the coal project, said in a written response to questions that it didn't know yet when work in Bamiyan would start. The feasibility report on a coal-fired power plant is still being compiled, it added.
"The company and employees' families worry about the security situation in Bamiyan, which causes a threat to our employees' lives and property, and also causes many difficulties in the logistics supply," MCC Tongsin wrote. It added that it hoped the Afghan government would be able to assuage local miners' concerns. "We are unable to carry out any project without public support. We don't want the lives of the local people to be affected," it said.
The Taliban say they oppose the Chinese investment because the concession was awarded by a government they consider illegitimate. "We are against any foreign company extracting the mineral [wealth] of Afghanistan as long as Afghanistan is under occupation," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.
Many locals say they are turning to the Taliban for the opposite reason: Anger at the Chinese for failing to move ahead with a project they say would have given stable, better-paid jobs to the displaced miners.
"The brave insurgents will fight against the Chinese if they don't start their work and hire the poor laborers they have kicked off the land," said Khaliqdad, a driver from the area who used to transport laborers to the coal mines. Like many Afghans, he goes by one name.
Mr. Wardak, the tribal leader, agreed. Locals, he said, "wouldn't mind working for the Chinese if they actually developed the land." —Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to Maria Abi-Habib at maria.habib@dowjones.com and Yaroslav Trofimov atyaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
Afghanistan: Drastic Changes for the Taliban
Afghanistan’s insurgents are thinking of joining the political process—and seeking common cause against Kabul with their old enemies. Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai report.
The Daily Beast By Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai Dec 15, 2012
The Taliban seem never to tire of talking about not talking. They have vowed over and over that they won’t negotiate peace until all foreign forces leave Afghanistan—and that they’ll never under any circumstances sit down with President Hamid Karzai’s “puppet regime.” But now the group’s leadership appears to be reconsidering.
According to Zabihullah, a senior Taliban leader who is privy to deliberations inside the insurgency’s Quetta Shura, the ruling council’s political committee is rethinking its positions on a whole range of issues. The possibility of peace talks is only one of the items under review by the committee—which, as far as that goes, may have no more than limited control over the Taliban’s battlefield commanders, says Zabihullah, who uses only the single name and has proved in the past to be a reliable informant. The leadership is also debating the insurgents’ longstanding hostilities against the former Northern Alliance; the Taliban’s rejectionist stance toward the Afghan Constitution; and even the idea of participation in Afghanistan’s next presidential and National Assembly elections.
The deliberations are no doubt encouraged by the fact that Karzai will be constitutionally barred from running for a third term in 2014. And even though the discussions so far have been preliminary and internal, the fact that they are taking place at all could signal big changes ahead.
The most startling shift so far has been in the Taliban’s attitude toward the Northern Alliance. The Taliban, almost entirely ethnic Pashtun, spent seven years waging war without mercy against the ethnic militias of the NA—predominantly Sunni Muslim Tajiks and Uzbeks and Shiite Hazaras. Their armed conflict began with the very creation of the Taliban by Mullah Mohammed Omar in 1994 and lasted until heavy U.S. air support enabled the NA to drive Omar’s regime from power after 9/11.
Some former NA members now belong to the Karzai government, but many others sit in opposition to the president. Zabihullah says the Taliban have already held secret meetings with some of the latter group. “We have held and are holding meetings with Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras who are not part of the Karzai regime,” Zabihullah says. “These meetings have generated a good mood for future peace talks. Ninety percent of them want an Islamic regime, just as we do.”
And they share a hatred of Afghanistan’s current president, Zabihullah says: “Karzai does not have a mandate from Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras,” says Zabihullah. (In fact, the former presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik, forced Karzai into a runoff in 2009 largely on the strength of minority ballots, before dropping out, accusing the government of massive vote fraud.) “Nor does [Karzai] have the support of Pashtuns,” Zabihullah continues. (Like the Taliban, Karzai also belongs to Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group.) “We can deal with these ethnic groups and unite with them against Karzai and whomever he chooses to succeed him.”
The Quetta Shura’s political committee is even thinking about lifting its condemnation of the country’s Constitution and its rejection of democratic elections, says Zabihullah. “We can support 95 percent of the Afghan Constitution,” he says. “We can also go for elections if there are a few changes in electoral laws.”
For the Taliban, the hope is that the contacts they make in Paris will pave the way for subsequent meetings back in Afghanistan with other Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara leaders.
The insurgents are hoping for progress in that direction next week in Paris at a conference on Afghanistan’s future. The gathering is being organized by a French think tank, the Foundation for Strategic Research, and the Taliban leadership has announced that it will send two delegates. Other participants are to include representatives from the Karzai government; from the government’s High Peace Council (created by Karzai in hope of opening channels to the insurgents, although the insurgents have seemed more interested in declaring open season on the council’s members); from the ethnic militias of the former Northern Alliance; and from the Hezb-i-Islami political party, whose leader, the longtime warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose insurgent militia is loosely affiliated with the Taliban.
Although no one anticipates any major breakthroughs in Paris, the Taliban particularly want to speak with some of the former Northern Alliance personalities who will be there. The Taliban’s delegates are flying in from the Taliban’s foreign-affairs office in Qatar. The staff there has been idle since last March, when the insurgents angrily called off tentative talks with the Americans. One of the Taliban’s representatives, Maulvi Shahuddin Dilawar, is said to be specifically interested in meeting with Hazara leader Muhammad Mohaqeq and Ahmed Zia Massoud, brother of the legendary Tajik warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated by al Qaeda two days before 9/11. For the Taliban, the hope is that the contacts they make in Paris will pave the way for subsequent meetings back in Afghanistan with other Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara leaders, such as the Shiite chieftain Sheikh Asif Mosini and the Uzbek heavyweight Abdul Satar Sirat.
According to Zabihullah and other Taliban sources, Pakistan has given its blessing to the outreach. Because the insurgents are utterly dependent on Pakistan for safe haven and support, Islamabad’s approval is vital for any such rapprochement. The thing Pakistan ultimately wants, other sources say, is an Afghan peace deal that would place the country under a loose federal system, with the Taliban in control of the Pashtun-majority areas and the ethnic minorities in charge of theirs. Pakistan has never been keen on having a strong and unified Afghan state on its western border. The two countries’ disputes go back well before the creation of Pakistan.
Beyond pushing the Taliban to talk, Pakistan is taking steps of its own to make peace with the former Northern Alliance, which engaged in a merciless war against the Taliban until the regime collapsed in 2001. “Relations between Pakistan and the Northern Alliance have dramatically improved,” says Zabihullah. Pakistan’s ambassador to Kabul, Muhammad Sadiq, is holding frequent, almost weekly meetings with top former NA bosses both in and out of government, including Abdullah, Mohaqeq and Vice President Martial Mohammed Fahim.
Relations have improved so much that Pakistan is relocating its Embassy back to the building it occupied when the Taliban regime was in power. In the past decade, violent anti-Pakistan protests forced the Embassy staff to abandon the building for several years. These days the neighborhood is home to Fahim himself and other senior NA veterans who have given Islamabad full security guarantees despite their past grudges against Pakistan.
To be sure, many other former Northern Alliance officials—particularly some inside the Karzai regime and its security forces—would rather fight the Taliban than talk to them. Nevertheless, the beginnings of a dialogue seem to be taking shape. War-weary Afghans can only welcome any initiative, no matter how tentative, as long as they see even a faint chance that it might finally bring an end to the carnage.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent, and has been covering the region for the magazine for the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Afghanistan archeological site in a race for survival
The Star.com By Olivia Ward Foreign Affairs Reporter Friday December 14, 2012
For those who treasure Afghanistan’s — and the world’s — archeological heritage, this Christmas will be a day to mourn.
“Dec. 25 is the deadline for destroying the ancient Buddhist site of Mes Aynak,” said Chicago filmmaker Brent Huffman. “We hope it will change, but right now it is not looking good.”
Unlike the much-publicized Buddhas of Bamiyan, whose decimation at the hands of the Taliban transfixed the world with horror, the 5,000-year-old site in bleak southeastern Afghanistan — where artifacts date back to the Bronze Age — is quietly falling prey not to religious fanaticism but to modern “progress.”
The site sits atop a rich copper deposit, worth up to $100 billion. The remains of the once-thriving Silk Road town will be razed to make way for an open-pit mine run by a Chinese-owned mining consortium. Huffman, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and assistant professor at Northwestern University, has spent a year recording the grim countdown to its demise in his film The Buddhas of Mes Aynak.
It may give pause to Canadians, who have just digested news of a Chinese state-owned company’s $15-billion takeover of Calgary-based oil and gas producer Nexen. Critics say the deal gives Canada less control over its resources, and less access to possible compensation in case of damages.
The situation is far more dire in Afghanistan, where the cash-strapped government is scrambling to tap up to $1 trillion in mineral wealth with investment from foreign countries. In the rapidly accelerating resource rush, its rich heritage is in danger of vanishing into the dust.
“It’s as though somebody was planning to destroy Machu Picchu,” Huffman said Thursday as he packed his bags for his fifth trip to Mes Aynak, and the last in which he may be able to film its majestic Buddhist statues, temples and monasteries intact. The journey will take him back to the dangerous Logar province, where landmines are buried under cover of darkness and rockets fly unpredictably.
But it’s also the centre of a tangled web of commercialism, economic opportunism and deception that may have doomed the historic site before the Afghan and European archeologists struggling to excavate its treasures can uncover them. Philippe Marquis, who heads the French archeological delegation, has said that might take another 30 years of digging. Said Huffman, “it’s now a race against time.”
“So much of the Buddhist heritage has been lost throughout history,” said Karen Harrison, a Buddhist minister who founded the support group Canadian Friends of Mes Aynak. “It’s amazing that this beautiful site has survived everything Afghanistan has suffered through. Surely this kind of treasure is more valuable than the copper.”
China has little enthusiasm for destroying Mes Aynak, which it reportedly pledged $3.5 billion to develop before learning of the archeological heritage. Five years later it has yet to launch the project, and is the target of anger from preservationists as well as villagers displaced for the mine in return for promises of upgraded housing, amenities and jobs. To open the mine it will destroy six local villages and blow up at least one mountain, with uncertain environmental consequences.
Meanwhile the Afghan government has yet to see the estimated $300 million in annual royalties that could make up 15 per cent of its civilian budget, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The archeologists were given three years to excavate the smaller objects from the site — time that runs out on Christmas — but the large Buddhas and temple structures are too fragile to dismantle. The work is slow and sometimes sporadic. The Afghans “lack any kind of rescue equipment (for the artifacts),” Huffman said. “They don’t earn much money and every year there’s a period where they aren’t paid at all.”
Although prospects for rescuing Mes Aynak seem dim, its advocates hope the UN’s cultural agency, UNESCO, will step in and declare it a world heritage site. Its Afghanistan representative Paolo Fontani recently visited the site with a cultural team and Afghan officials, and said that it was developing a strategy for long-term preservation of excavated material. However, the agency doesn’t impose heritage sites, but chooses them in consultation with the countries where they’re located.
“The bigger fear is that if Mes Aynak is destroyed it will set a precedent,” Huffman said. “Afghanistan supposedly has $1 trillion in mineral deposits. Most of them have archeological artifacts on top of them.”
Barack Obama, Hamid Karzai to discuss future US troop presence in Afghanistan
The Times of India Dec 15, 2012
WASHINGTON - The scheduled meeting between US President Barack Obama and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai next month is expected to lay the rules of presence of US troops in the war-torn country after the 2014 security transition to Afghan forces, a presidential spokesman said.
Karzai is scheduled to travel to Washington for a meeting with Obama at the White House in the week of January 7, White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, told reporters at his daily news conference.
"The (US) President and President Karzai look forward to discussing a shared vision of Afghanistan beyond 2014, to include the post-2014 role of the United States in Afghanistan," he said.
"Their meeting will be an important opportunity to discuss implementation of the strategic partnership the two presidents signed in May, to include the progress we're making in negotiating the bilateral security agreement that would replace our current SOFA and lay out the rules of the road for a potential US military presence after 2014," Carney said.
Obama also looks forward to discussing an Afghan-led peace process as well as the region and the future of Afghanistan's security forces, the White House spokesman said.
The United States, he said, supports an Afghan-led process of reconciliation.
"We believe that that's essential for the long-term prospects of peace in Afghanistan," Carney said.
Oil tanker set on fire in northern Afghan town
PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) -- Unknown armed men opened fire and set ablaze an oil tanker in Baghlan province 160 km north of Kabul on Saturday, police said.
"Unidentified armed men targeted an oil tanker with assault rifle in Dushi district today morning burning the oil tanker," Deputy to provincial police chief Sayed Zaman Hussaini told Xinhua.
Without giving more details, he said that investigation is underway.
Meantime, locals at the site of incident claimed that the tanker was supplying fuel to NATO-led troops when Taliban militants attacked and set on fire the vehicle.
Taliban militants have yet to comment.
Afghan Nomads Fend Off Authorities In Kabul Land Dispute
By Frud Bezhan December 14, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Hundreds of Afghan nomads, armed with pitchforks and sticks, were holding off attempts this week by authorities to evict them from their makeshift settlement in Kabul's outskirts.
The Kuchis have been staging protests daily since December 10, when members of the traditionally nomadic tribal grouping claimed three Kuchis were killed and several others injured as bulldozers accompanied by policemen tried to raze their dwellings in the capital's Qasaba district.
Kabul police have acknowledged only that several people were injured on December 10.
The Qasaba clashes are just the latest incidents involving Kuchis, a predominantly Pashtun people who have increasingly been forced to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and relocate to settled areas. In their search for permanent residence, the Kuchis have come into conflict with local authorities and rival ethnic groups who say the newcomers are encroaching on their lands.
Gul, a 40-year-old woman, is one of the Kuchis who has defied the eviction. She, like many others in the area, says she has permission from the Afghan Ministry of Urban Development Affairs and Housing to live in Qasaba.
"We haven’t slept because we're scared that they will come back," she says. "They have brought these tractors here to destroy our homes."
'Playing Games'
Meanwhile, Agha Khan, a Kuchi tribesman, has condemned the government for not dealing in good faith with his people.
Under the Afghan Constitution, the government is required to allocate permanent land for the Kuchis and help integrate them into settled areas. But Khan maintains that officials are chasing them from the very property they were given.
"The president, the mayor of Kabul, and the government shouldn't play games with us," Khan says. "We will accept even the worst land in Afghanistan. They should give us land-ownership documents and not deceive us."
Hassan Abdullahi, the minister for urban development affairs and housing, says the nomads were given temporary residence in the area but have been ordered to leave. He says the ministry originally allowed 30 families to set up living quarters in Qasaba but that hundreds more relocated to the area illegally.
Meanwhile, Habib Afghan, a Kuchi representative in the lower house of parliament, says the Kuchis are being forced out by Kabul Mayor Mohammad Younas Nawandish, who has approved plans for a housing-development project in Qasaba. The project, which will include the construction of luxury homes for lawmakers as well as ministry buildings, was approved last month by parliament.
According to Afghan, Nawandish promised the Kuchis plots of land in Pul-e Charkhi, on the outskirts of Kabul. But the Kuchi representative says that's not a viable option.
"How can you expect people to move during these harsh winter months?" Afghan says. "That's the first reason. The second is that there is no land available in Pul-e Charkhi for them to live on. The government should choose another location for the Kuchis to resettle to."
Tragic Tensions
The incident in Qasaba is just the latest land dispute to involve the Kuchis, who after roaming Afghanistan's high plains with their caravans of livestock for centuries have been forced to relocate to settled areas because of war, drought, and dwindling access to land. The Kuchis number around 3 million, according to government estimates, with only around one-third still leading nomadic lives.
In 2010, clashes broke out in the Dasht-e Barchi neighborhood in western Kabul. A group of Kuchis, contending their ancestors owned the land in the neighborhood, clashed with ethnic Hazara residents in the area. The fighting lasted several days and caused dozens of casualties on each side. Newly built Kuchi homes were reportedly burned to the ground.
The government relocated the nomads to the ruins of the Darul Aman palace, the residence of former Afghan monarchs, where they lived for months without electricity or adequate water supplies before moving to the city's slums.
In the past decade, there has also been growing violence between Kuchis and local farmers over grazing rights. The Kuchi tribes are spread across Afghanistan, traditionally moving with their herds to mountain pastures in the warmer seasons and to warmer lowlands during the winter.
Depleted natural resources, such as water, and lingering ethnic tensions have led to fierce clashes between Kuchi herders and members of the Hazara ethnic group in the last few years. Scores have been killed and wounded from both sides.
Hazara residents in the Wardak, Bamiyan, and Dai Kundi provinces, home to some of the most fertile land in the country, say Kuchi tribesmen are invading their villages, damaging farmland, and destroying their homes. Kuchis, however, say the Hazaras are denying them their centuries-old right to grazing lands across Afghanistan.
The escalating land disputes shed light on the plight of the Kuchis, who human rights organizations say are the poorest and most marginalized group in Afghanistan.
Many Kuchis say local hospitals refuse to treat their sick, while schools turn away their children. And although some earn money from selling milk from their animals, many have resorted to begging and living in urban slums.
Even so, the Kuchis have made important strides in the past decade. Ten of the 249 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of the Afghan national parliament, have been allocated to Kuchis. The government also has a department, the Independent Directorate of Kuchi Affairs, to handle Kuchi issues.
RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan contributed to this report
Yogurt, Mint and Hints of Ancient Silk Road
A Review of Afghan Kabob Fusion, in Franklin Park
New York Times By KARLA COOK December 14, 2012
I would drive miles out of my way for a bowl of aush at Afghan Kabob Fusion, a place that is easy to miss in the allée of strip malls along Route 27 in central New Jersey. The version of the soup that I had there included lamb, noodles, vegetables, house-made yogurt sauce, cilantro, mint, chickpeas and kidney beans. It was a deeply flavorful antidote to the cold.
This halal restaurant — still under a marquee that bears the name of a previous tenant, Choopan Grill — is a solid and interesting addition to this corridor between Princeton and New Brunswick that is home to regional Indian, Pakistani, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants.
Inside, there’s a sense that someone has taken care with the setting while on a budget. The dining room holds a mix of tables and banquettes, with a large window that dominates the far wall looking into what seems to be a staging area for the kitchen. Though the prefab nature of the place comes through, the windows — with a view to the sidewalk, parking lot and highway — are softened by generous swaths of blue and white fabric.
The owner, Fawad Yousufzai, said in a conversation after my visits that he opened the restaurant in October, just before Hurricane Sandy, when it lost power for four or five days. His mother, Mazifa Yousufzai, who took him and four siblings from Afghanistan to Pakistan in 1985, then to the United States in 1989, is cooking the small menu. A cousin’s husband, Akbar Sherzad, is helping out; on my second visit, when we asked for help with a corkscrew, he pleasantly but firmly told us no alcohol was allowed.
Appetizers and main dishes are somewhat interchangeable, with several foods offered in both categories (most of the main dishes came with salad and rice). All also show culinary influences from the ancient Silk Road. A standout was the bolani, a hot fried turnover nearly the size of a flattened football, with a translucent, light brown, blistered pastry revealing one of two fillings: rings of scallions or creamy white mashed potatoes flavored with coriander seed and cilantro. Served with pale green yogurt-cilantro sauce, the dish juxtaposed crunchy and smooth, hot and cool. It was delicious.
Bonjon borani, available either as an appetizer or as a main dish, was its equal, a platter of hot fried eggplant slices beneath a house-made tomato-based sauce flavored with coriander seed, cloaked with yogurt and dotted with dried mint and cilantro. And making it a three-way tie was the Afghan salad, a sassy mix of mild red onions, tomato, cilantro and parsley (think of tabbouleh without the wheat), dressed with fresh lemon juice.
Two dumpling dishes with yogurt and mint — boiled aushak filled with scallion and the steamed mantu filled with chicken or beef — were less interesting; they needed more-delicate pasta and the aushak, at least, would have been improved with pumpkin. A better dish was sabzi — chopped fresh spinach cooked with cilantro and onion — available as both a side and a main dish.
A word about the rice: Unadorned and served alongside the humdrum main-dish meats (lamb chops, chicken tikka, beef kafta, lamb tikka and even battered and fried tilapia fillets), it is uninteresting, but stirring in a $2 mix of raisins and carrots fried with cardamom makes it luscious.
As for endings, there was good mango ice cream as well as firnee, a pudding flavored with rosewater, cardamom and pistachios that can be sublime when made with a delicate hand. On my first visit, it was a little less silky than desired, but the flavor was right. On a second visit, the custard was perfect, and the cross of finely chopped pistachios was just so on top, but a bottom layer of lurid green Jell-O was jarring and unpleasant. Less risky are the black tea made chai-ish with cardamom and the not-too-sweet baklava made by a friend’s mother. Either or both will fuel the trip home nicely.
Afghan Kabob Fusion
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By By RAHIM FAIEZ and DEB RIECHMANN | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's president said Saturday that the U.S. and NATO troops transferring security to local forces should leave the country's villages as soon as possible and pull back to their bases.
The U.S. has already said that from mid-2013 on, the United States and its allies would operate from fewer bases and that the withdrawal of military supplies and equipment from Afghanistan would accelerate. But the comments from the Afghan leader suggest he would like to see that process gain some momentum.
"There will be a change in our relations with the world in 2013," President Hamid Karzai said at the opening of a conference on Afghan foreign policy strategy. "The U.S. and NATO forces are going to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but before that — in 2013 — the transition of security is going to be completed and there will be no military activity of foreign forces in Afghanistan."
"We are working to make this transition of security happen sooner. We want all the foreign forces to come out of the villages and go to their bases so the Afghan forces can carry out the security," Karzai said, adding that that after the international forces pull back to their bases, they can gradually return home from there, completing the withdrawal by the end of 2014.
International forces have been fighting for more than a decade against the Taliban and other militants who allowed al-Qaida to operate in Afghanistan and plot the 9/11 attacks. Karzai has long stressed that terrorism is not rooted in Afghan villages, but resides in other sanctuaries outside the country — a veiled reference to neighboring Pakistan.
"From our vision, the fight against terrorism is not in Afghanistan," he said. "That is why we do not want military operations in our villages, in our houses."
Karzai discounted fears that Afghanistan would descend into a civil war of ethnic factions after the foreign combat troops complete their withdrawal. He said he was confident that Afghan soldiers and police can handle security.
"I'm completely sure that the withdrawal of international forces in 2014 will give us more opportunity to provide more security," Karzai said. "We are the owners of this country. We should really show that we are the owners of this country."
Karzai reiterated his call for national unity and instructed the Afghan diplomats at the conference to return to their assigned countries and present Afghanistan as a proud, sovereign and unified nation.
"We are poor, but we are lord of this region," Karzai said. "Our history has proven that we are the lord of this region. ... So wherever you are based, you should act as a lord — a poor lord, but a lord."
When they meet during the week of Jan. 7, Karzai and President Barack Obama will discuss the pace of coalition troop withdrawals, efforts to pursue peace with the Taliban as well as the role and size of U.S. military presence in his country beginning in 2015.
During a trip to Afghanistan this week, U.S. Defense Secretary Panetta offered no clues about what Obama will decide. Other officials have indicated that the White House is considering plans that call for between 6,000 and 10,000 U.S. troops to stay for several years after 2014 in order to keep Afghanistan on a path toward stability and to prevent al-Qaida and affiliated terrorist groups from re-emerging as a significant force in the country.
The U.S. now has about 66,000 troops here, along with about 35,000 from allied nations. No decision on 2013 U.S. troop withdrawals is likely to be announced until after Karzai meets Obama in Washington in early January. The U.S. withdrew 10,000 troops last year and another 23,000 this year.
There have been calls in Congress for Obama to accelerate the withdrawal next year, and from commanders' own optimistic assessments of progress, it appears such a speedup could be coming. Some U.S. military officials, however, warn that pulling out too many troops too fast could squander hard-won sacrifices.
Wounded Afghan Intelligence Chief Sent To U.S. Hospital
Asadullah Khalid By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan December 15, 2012
KABUL -- The Afghan intelligence chief who was wounded in a December 6 suicide bombing has been transferred to a hospital in the United States.
Afghan presidential deputy spokesman Ahmad Zia Siamak told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that Asadullah Khalid was flown from a U.S.-run military hospital at Bagram Air Field on December 13 and arrived at a U.S. hospital the following day.
He did not identify the U.S. hospital.
Khalid was wounded by a suicide bomber inside a guesthouse run by the Afghan National Directorate of Security.
The Taliban claimed responsibility.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai expressed optimism about Khalid’s recovery after visiting him last week at an Afghan hospital where he was first taken.
Khalid, a former governor and minister, was appointed as the Afghan intelligence chief in September.
An Afghan Mystery: Why Are Large Shipments of Gold Leaving the Country?
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG The New York Times December 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand luggage and tucked into jacket pockets, roughly hewed bars of gold are being flown out of Kabul with increasing regularity, confounding Afghan and American officials who fear money launderers have found a new way to spirit funds from the country.
Most of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments. One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million.
The gold is fully declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legitimately being sent by gold dealers seeking to have old and damaged jewelry refashioned into new pieces by skilled craftsmen in the Persian Gulf, said Afghan officials and gold dealers.
But gold dealers in Kabul and current and former Kabul airport officials say there has been a surge in shipments since early summer. The talk of a growing exodus of gold from Afghanistan has been spreading among the business community here, and in recent weeks has caught the attention of Afghan and American officials. The officials are now puzzling over the origin of the gold — very little is mined in Afghanistan, although larger mines are planned — and why so much appears to be heading for Dubai.
“We are investigating it, and if we find this is a way of laundering money, we will intervene,” said Noorullah Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank. Yet he acknowledged that there were more questions than answers at this point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me something about it,” he said in an interview. Or, as a European official who tracks the Afghan economy put it, “new mysteries abound” as the war appears to be drawing to a close.
Figuring out what precisely is happening in the Afghan economy remains as confounding as ever. Nearly 90 percent of the financial activity takes place outside formal banks. Written contracts are the exception, receipts are rare and statistics are often unreliable. Money laundering is commonplace, say Western and Afghan officials.
As a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that situation we usually are: is there something bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of commerce?” said a senior American official who tracks illicit financial networks.
There is reason to be suspicious: the gold shipments track with the far larger problem of cash smuggling. For years, flights have left Kabul almost every day carrying thick wads of bank notes — dollars, euros, Norwegian kroner, Saudi Arabian riyals and other currencies — stuffed into suitcases, packed into boxes and shrink-wrapped onto pallets. At one point, cash was even being hidden in food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Airways flights to Dubai.
Last year alone, Afghanistan’s central bank says, roughly $4.5 billion in cash was spirited out through the airport. Efforts to stanch the flow have had limited impact, and concerns about money laundering persist, according to a report released last week by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
The unimpeded “bulk cash flows raise the risk of money laundering and bulk cash smuggling — tools often used to finance terrorist, narcotics and other illicit operations,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often taken to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar economic collapse grows louder.
But given Dubai’s reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official said that the “obvious suspicion” is that at least some of the apparent growth in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities — opium smuggling, corruption, Taliban taxation schemes — that have come to define Afghanistan’s economy.
There are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros here to circumvent American and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the same purpose.
Yahya, a dealer in Kabul, said other gold traders were helping Iran buy the precious metal here. Payment was being made in oil or with Iranian rials, which readily circulate in western Afghanistan. The Afghan dealers are then taking it to Dubai, where the gold is sold for dollars. The money is then moved to China, where it was used to buy needed goods or simply funneled back to Iran, said Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a single name.
He declined to name those involved in aiding Iran. But Western officials said his description of how the process worked tracked with their knowledge of money laundering networks that operate in Afghanistan and the surrounding region.
Before officials can say whether the gold shipments are part of an illicit financial scheme, though, they first have to figure out how much gold is going out — or, for that matter, coming in.
It is a task easier said than done. The Finance Ministry, which is supposed to collect taxes on each shipment, did not have figures, said Wahidullah Tawhidi, a spokesman for the ministry. He suggested that the Commerce Ministry would know. The Commerce Ministry did not, and officials there said it would be best to contact airport customs officials.
At the airport, a reluctant customs official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, brushed aside concerns that there had been an uptick in gold shipments out of Afghanistan. He then ended the conversation with the cryptic promise to one day share “the real story of what is happening to the gold.”
M.Y. Rassuli, the president of the airport, said shipments had begun increasing over the summer. He said that he could not offer specifics because he deals with operations, not customs. But he expressed frustration about the problem. “If it’s 5 kilograms or 500 kilograms, that’s not a normal thing to transfer,” he said in an interview. “This is why Afghanistan is No. 1 in corruption.”
Without knowledge of how much gold is leaving, it is impossible to calculate the value of the trade. But airport security forms that cover the last two weeks of October indicate about 560 pounds, worth about $14 million, were carried by hand out of Afghanistan during that period.
That is a princely sum in one of the world’s 10 poorest countries. But it is perhaps a measure of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan that seemingly no one — not Afghan bank regulators, not American investigators of illicit financing, not European economic experts — found it particularly surprising that gold appears to have joined bank notes in the skies over Afghanistan.
The addition of gold to the flight of cash from the country, the Afghan official said, only proves that “if it is a thing that has value and we can put it in our pocket, some of us are going to fly away with it.”
Taliban Using Youths As Suicide Bombers
By Sayed Jawad Khaama Press December 15, 2012
PAKTIKA PROVINCE, Afghanistan – A recent operation in Sar Howzah district, Dec. 11, in which a large operation by the Taliban was thwarted by Afghan security agencies has revealed some startling details.
Three of the would-be bombers who were arrested turned out to be only 15 year old. The other three individuals were barely older than the teenagers.
The Taliban has been increasing the use of children and teenagers to carry out suicide bomb attacks and to emplace improvised explosive devices.
“The use of children as combatants and suicide bombers is a disturbing reality that the Taliban continue to promote,” said Lt. Col. Orestees Davenport, Task Force Paktika Commander. “These callous methods by the Taliban are senseless crimes and are counter to the peaceful path that the Afghan people have chose to take.”
Afghan Local Police complement counterinsurgency efforts by assisting and supporting rural areas with limited Afghan National Security Forces presence, in order to enable conditions for improved security, governance, and development.
Last French Combat Troops Leave Kabul
December 15, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The last French combat troops have left Afghanistan.
The 200 infantry soldiers left from Kabul airport on December 15 and are due to arrive in France on December 18 following a stopover in Cyprus.
The departure of the last French combat troops comes two years before allied nations in the 100,000-strong NATO mission led by the United States are due to recall their fighting forces.
France now has some 1,500 non-combat troops remaining in Afghanistan.
They are due to stay into 2013 to take responsibility for repatriating equipment and training the Afghan army to take over security duties.
After them, only a few hundred French soldiers involved in cooperation or
training missions will remain in the country.
Based on reporting by AFP and dpa
With the War in Afghanistan Ending, Where Does the Peace Movement Go Next?
The Nation By Tom Hayden December 14, 2012
President Obama plans to remove all but 6,000 to 9,000 US troops from Afghanistan by 2014, ending the American combat role, saving tens of billions of dollars, and leaving an unpopular, incompetent and corrupt Karzai regime needing a diplomatic fix to avert collapse into civil war.
Although not officially announced, the numbers have been reported in recent days. The Los Angeles Times predicts 6-9,000, while the New York Times reports "under 10,000." Troop cuts in that range will mean a 90-95 percent reduction from 109,000, the highest US level reported in 2010. It would require a 60,000 reduction between now and late 2014. The pace of the withdrawal has not been announced but is expected any day.
The numbers are well below those requested by the Pentagon, which range from 15,000 troops and upward. Opposition to Obama's reductions is expected from neo-conservative and military advocates as well as Congressional hawks. Obama has gained political cover, however, from the recent 62 Senate votes cast for "accelerated" withdrawal and a similar message in a letter from 94 House members. The recent New York Times editorial finally endorsing a one-year withdrawal also provides critical support from within the mainstream political and national security establishments.
Obama's decision, and the stand taken by Congressional peace advocates, is consistent with his campaign pledge to begin steady American withdrawals after a two-year surge of 33,000 troops. The surge was a concession to generals like Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, and to cabinet hawks including Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, who fought for withdrawals to be based on "conditions" rather than timelines. In Bob Woodward's account, Obama's Wars, the president is quoted as saying, "I'm not an advocate of the timetable, but it will come from the Hill," by Democrats in Congress. In fact, the White House quietly supported language advocating an accelerated timetable for "swift withdrawal" and a "significant and sizable reduction no later than July 2011" in the Democratic National Committee resolution of Feb. 24, 2011. The resolution was sponsored by Reps. Barbara Lee and Mike Honda, and longtime Democratic leaders Donna Brazile and Alice Germond.
The critical resolution reflected the demands of local peace networks and rank-and-file Democrats across the country. Behind closed doors, Obama told Sen. Lindsay Graham, "I can't let this be a war without end, and I can't lose the whole Democratic Party. And people at home don't want to hear we're going to be there another for another ten years."
As the recent reports show, the new Obama plan already "has sparked internal criticism at the Pentagon" which argues for a "sizable military presence" to be deployed in southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to the LA Times. Obama's troop reductions are likely to spur even sharper cuts in NATO forces. The Afghan army, according to Pentagon sources, will face "enormous difficulties" as the American troops leave. There were 2,500 insurgent attacks every month this year from April to September, higher levels than in 2009, according to a recent Pentagon report to Congress.
Whatever decision Obama makes will be the subject of ongoing talks between Washington, Kabul and NATO powers. Bagram air base, along with smaller bases around Kabul, will be the defensive hub for any residual US force. The most controversial US mission, though smaller in scope, will be counterterrorism. Embassy protection and training Afghan troops will also be included. Virtually none of the Afghan army's 23 brigades can operate on their own, suggesting that Western air support will be authorized as well.
In the end, the discussion of a smaller residual force might be undone altogether by Afghan insistence on stripping immunity from American personnel violating Afghan laws and procedures. A similar scenario occurred during the endgame in Iraq. One American official told the LA Times that "one of the things that Obama and Karzai have always agreed on is the need for a reduced force presence. I could see them both wanting zero, but at the end of the day I don't think that will happen."
Nothing will change the shifting balance of forces as Karzai's army and regime are left on their own amidst corruption and insurgency. The danger of renewed civil war will increase unless diplomacy creates a power-sharing arrangement on the ground. Republicans so far have blocked Obama's efforts to release several Taliban detainees from Guantanamo in exchange for an American POW, Bowe Bergdahl, captured by Afghan insurgents in 2009. A larger diplomatic settlement will require controversial contacts with Iran, China, Russia and Pakistan, all states with proxy interests in divided Afghanistan. If all efforts fail and Afghanistan implodes into civil war, Obama will have to count on American domestic exhaustion with the decade-long war to protect him against military claims that he "lost" Afghanistan.
Feminist groups which originally supported the war will have to lobby successfully to ensure the meager gains of Afghan women are preserved in an enforceable aid and assistance package.
In summary: it's official: America's longest war is ending soon. The peace movement, which built a necessary groundwork of opposition, is ten years older.
What are some next steps for the peace movement?
First, unlike the Cold War era, the peace forces have won most of the all-important battle for public opinion. It's possible that a window will open, however briefly, for the peace forces to link with labor, civil rights and environmental coalitions in an effort to put some definition and muscle into Obama's repeated promise to "do some nation-building here at home."
This shift to domestic priorities will be very difficult. The US is an empire with 800 military bases, a growing interest in deterring China, a role in hot battlefields such as Yemen and Mali, risky brinksmanship with Iran, dangerous ties to Israel's hawks, and an unknown number of CIA operations around the planet. If expensive US ground wars are no longer affordable or winnable, there will be momentum towards drone wars, cyber wars, black operations, and an edifice of greater secrecy over our institutions. The military budget, despite its gargantuan size, will be difficult to assail politically. Peace doves will have to become fiscal hawks in attacking wasteful military spending.
A top priority will be reversing, and trying to end, the escalating use of drones. Public opinion unfortunately is favorable toward killing hundreds of alleged foreign terrorists in far-away lands, assuming the alternative is putting American troops in harm's way at an extraordinary cost to taxpayers. The growing protests against drones, coupled with Robert Greenwald's Brave New Foundation's educational documentary, if combined with civil liberties and human rights groups' complaints over detentions and "kill lists", will gradually build a climate of dissent from current policy.
The most important challenge will be to revise the 1973 War Powers Act to require public disclosure and Congressional approval of drone attacks, cyber-wars, and secret operations by the CIA in places like Libya. President Obama, as a constitutional lawyer, can hardly wish to be remembered as rebuilding the Imperial Presidency, but that is the path he is on. Perhaps aware of the peril, Obama has taken the unusual step of appealing to the public and Congress to "rein in" his exceptional powers with "new legal architecture" in the coming year. That invitation should be taken up at once by civil liberties and peace communities with interests to protect.
One possible scenario might be to de-escalate and phase out the drone attacks on Pakistan's tribal areas as part of a diplomatic settlement in Afghanistan. It's highly doubtful after a decade of war that the Taliban will be driven to the table by drones, and no serious diplomat should expect them to acquiesce. But a permanent suspension of drone attacks is a necessary ingredient of any peace settlement with Afghanistan and Pakistan, as Obama well knows.
If that occurs, a parallel process of drafting and debating new Congressional policies to "rein in" the imperial presidency could gain traction.
Finally, peace advocates will have to keep challenging the paradigm of the "war on terrorism" with its underlying rationale and legislative authorization that sustains the secretive Long War. There is no single path to an alternative narrative, any more than there is a single effective approach to slowing the domestic "wars" on gangs and inner-city youth that have resulted in mass incarceration. The neo-conservatives and the domestic Right-wing play on racial fears to mount their militarized approaches to both domestic and foreign policy. Peace and civil rights critics might gain traction, however, when their constitutional and moral arguments are reinforced by the expensive failures of the Long War abroad and mass incarceration at home.
There is a connection between the Long Wars and domestic inequality that peace advocates also might offer to civil rights and labor reformers. It is that corporate and financial globalization result in an exploding gap between the rich and the underclass. The model offered by neo-conservative theorists is a failed one. Even as we militarize our relationship to Pakistan, we privatize the sweatshop conditions that draw investment away from US labor markets. By a similar process, the "de-industrialization" of American cities in the 1980s led to increased joblessness and despair among inner city youth, with expensive and unconstitutional policing and imprisonment as false solutions. A global living wage is needed for the world, one built on the experience of winning living wage ordinances in American cities.
Finally, the experience of the peace movement offers a message to environmentalists: that the continuous Long War over oil, gas, minerals and other resources is a direct obstacle to a new priority on developing conservation and renewable resources. Ending the Long War is a precondition to transitioning to an energy-efficient future.
New coalitions are likely to form as "nation building at home" challenges the Long War as the agenda of the coming four years.
Police arrest 5 Taliban militants in northern Afghan province
SARIPUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) -- Afghan Police during cleanup operations against Taliban militants in Saripul province 350 km north of Kabul on Saturday, captured five armed Taliban militants including a group commander, a local police officer said.
"The operation conducted against Taliban in Sayad district early today morning during which five armed Taliban rebels including a group commander Mullah Qamar were captured," Sediq Khan the police chief of Sayad district told Xinhua.
There were no casualties on police personnel during the operations which lasted for a while.
Taliban militants fighting the government are yet to make comment.
Delays at Chinese-Run Afghan Mines Raise Security Fears
Wall Street Journal By MARIA ABI-HABIB, YAROSLAV TROFIMOV and ZIAULHAQ SULTANI December 14, 2012
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan - Foreign investment in Afghanistan's mining sector was meant to bring peace and prosperity. But here in Bamiyan province, it has so far put locals out of jobs and fueled a spreading insurgency.
For decades, thousands of Afghans have dug for coal in the unregulated mines of Bamiyan's Kahmard district, in a valley dotted with timber-framed entrances to dangerous, narrow shafts. This summer, the Afghan government evicted these squatters to make way for a Chinese consortium that has won one of the biggest natural-resources concessions in a country that sits atop vast, largely untapped mineral wealth.
The Chinese firm that won the tender, however, hasn't yet replaced the lost jobs with new ones. Many evicted miners have turned to the Taliban for a paycheck, leading to a sharp decline in security. The Chinese investors now say they don't know when the situation will improve enough to let them to start exploiting the site.
"If people do not have jobs, the insurgents will get these people," said Bamiyan Gov. Habiba Sarabi, adding that the mining project has destabilized what was once considered Afghanistan's safest province.
The Taliban fighters that swarmed the area have set up illegal checkpoints and exercise de facto authority in many parts of the district, say local Afghans.
"When the government kicked us out from the coal mines, we had no other choice except to join the Taliban," said one miner who declined to be identified and who says he is earning some $30 a day when he is with the Taliban. About 50 other former miners have taken up weapons alongside him, he said.
As Afghanistan's bitter winter advances on this mountainous region where freezing to death is common, the shortage of coal—used here for heating and cooking—is further alienating the population.
"These communities are now ready to fight," said Ali Wardak, a tribal leader who has been trying to negotiate on the matter with Kabul authorities. "The government and the Chinese are moving to a point of no return."
Many miners haven't joined the insurgency, of course, leaving some room for hopes expressed in recent years by U.S. officials that mining projects would spur development and bring stability. Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries but has trillions of dollars in potential mineral wealth, by U.S. government estimates, from oil to gold to rare earths.
The Afghan Ministry of Mines says the summer's closure of 103 illegal mining tunnels in Kahmard was needed to safeguard the area for the Chinese investors and to stop widespread child labor and unsafe practices, some of which have been documented earlier this year by The Wall Street Journal. According to the ministry, 1,000 jobs have been lost.
Miners and local government officials say 5,000 to 10,000 people have become unemployed across Bamiyan and in the adjoining provinces of Samangan and Baghlan.
"I can't find a job to feed my children. Where will we find the firewood to heat our houses this winter?" said Sakhi Daad Lali, 51, a former laborer in Bamiyan's coal mines and a father of 11. "People have no choice but to join the Taliban when the government doesn't do anything to help them."
The Chinese consortium, led by state-run MCC China Metallurgical Group, won the concession for Bamiyan's coal mines in 2009, along with more lucrative copper deposits of Mes Aynak in Logar province, south of Kabul. The entire deal, details of which are confidential, has been valued at $3.5 billion.
Bamiyan's coal is supposed to power a 400-megawatt electricity station that the Chinese group has pledged to build, according to the ministry of mines, with half of that power going to Mes Aynak and the rest feeding Afghanistan's national grid.
The Chinese consortium is supposed to start developing the mines—estimated to hold 45 million tons of coal—by the spring, with the power station completed by 2015, said Afghanistan's deputy minister of mines, Nasir Durrani. Speed is essential, said Gov. Sarabi. "The Chinese company should start work on this as soon as possible so that the people can get jobs," she said.
Bamiyan isn't the only place where foreign mining investment is proving far less lucrative than Afghan officials had hoped. All in all, the country earns some $100 million a year in mining revenue, much of it from licenses from new contracts as opposed to royalty payments from actual extraction.
"This issue is essential for us—that investors don't sit on our resources and wait it out," Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal said. "We need the money now."
MCC Tongsin Resources Ltd., the MCC unit leading the coal project, said in a written response to questions that it didn't know yet when work in Bamiyan would start. The feasibility report on a coal-fired power plant is still being compiled, it added.
"The company and employees' families worry about the security situation in Bamiyan, which causes a threat to our employees' lives and property, and also causes many difficulties in the logistics supply," MCC Tongsin wrote. It added that it hoped the Afghan government would be able to assuage local miners' concerns. "We are unable to carry out any project without public support. We don't want the lives of the local people to be affected," it said.
The Taliban say they oppose the Chinese investment because the concession was awarded by a government they consider illegitimate. "We are against any foreign company extracting the mineral [wealth] of Afghanistan as long as Afghanistan is under occupation," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.
Many locals say they are turning to the Taliban for the opposite reason: Anger at the Chinese for failing to move ahead with a project they say would have given stable, better-paid jobs to the displaced miners.
"The brave insurgents will fight against the Chinese if they don't start their work and hire the poor laborers they have kicked off the land," said Khaliqdad, a driver from the area who used to transport laborers to the coal mines. Like many Afghans, he goes by one name.
Mr. Wardak, the tribal leader, agreed. Locals, he said, "wouldn't mind working for the Chinese if they actually developed the land." —Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to Maria Abi-Habib at maria.habib@dowjones.com and Yaroslav Trofimov atyaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
Afghanistan: Drastic Changes for the Taliban
Afghanistan’s insurgents are thinking of joining the political process—and seeking common cause against Kabul with their old enemies. Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai report.
The Daily Beast By Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai Dec 15, 2012
The Taliban seem never to tire of talking about not talking. They have vowed over and over that they won’t negotiate peace until all foreign forces leave Afghanistan—and that they’ll never under any circumstances sit down with President Hamid Karzai’s “puppet regime.” But now the group’s leadership appears to be reconsidering.
According to Zabihullah, a senior Taliban leader who is privy to deliberations inside the insurgency’s Quetta Shura, the ruling council’s political committee is rethinking its positions on a whole range of issues. The possibility of peace talks is only one of the items under review by the committee—which, as far as that goes, may have no more than limited control over the Taliban’s battlefield commanders, says Zabihullah, who uses only the single name and has proved in the past to be a reliable informant. The leadership is also debating the insurgents’ longstanding hostilities against the former Northern Alliance; the Taliban’s rejectionist stance toward the Afghan Constitution; and even the idea of participation in Afghanistan’s next presidential and National Assembly elections.
The deliberations are no doubt encouraged by the fact that Karzai will be constitutionally barred from running for a third term in 2014. And even though the discussions so far have been preliminary and internal, the fact that they are taking place at all could signal big changes ahead.
The most startling shift so far has been in the Taliban’s attitude toward the Northern Alliance. The Taliban, almost entirely ethnic Pashtun, spent seven years waging war without mercy against the ethnic militias of the NA—predominantly Sunni Muslim Tajiks and Uzbeks and Shiite Hazaras. Their armed conflict began with the very creation of the Taliban by Mullah Mohammed Omar in 1994 and lasted until heavy U.S. air support enabled the NA to drive Omar’s regime from power after 9/11.
Some former NA members now belong to the Karzai government, but many others sit in opposition to the president. Zabihullah says the Taliban have already held secret meetings with some of the latter group. “We have held and are holding meetings with Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras who are not part of the Karzai regime,” Zabihullah says. “These meetings have generated a good mood for future peace talks. Ninety percent of them want an Islamic regime, just as we do.”
And they share a hatred of Afghanistan’s current president, Zabihullah says: “Karzai does not have a mandate from Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras,” says Zabihullah. (In fact, the former presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik, forced Karzai into a runoff in 2009 largely on the strength of minority ballots, before dropping out, accusing the government of massive vote fraud.) “Nor does [Karzai] have the support of Pashtuns,” Zabihullah continues. (Like the Taliban, Karzai also belongs to Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group.) “We can deal with these ethnic groups and unite with them against Karzai and whomever he chooses to succeed him.”
The Quetta Shura’s political committee is even thinking about lifting its condemnation of the country’s Constitution and its rejection of democratic elections, says Zabihullah. “We can support 95 percent of the Afghan Constitution,” he says. “We can also go for elections if there are a few changes in electoral laws.”
For the Taliban, the hope is that the contacts they make in Paris will pave the way for subsequent meetings back in Afghanistan with other Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara leaders.
The insurgents are hoping for progress in that direction next week in Paris at a conference on Afghanistan’s future. The gathering is being organized by a French think tank, the Foundation for Strategic Research, and the Taliban leadership has announced that it will send two delegates. Other participants are to include representatives from the Karzai government; from the government’s High Peace Council (created by Karzai in hope of opening channels to the insurgents, although the insurgents have seemed more interested in declaring open season on the council’s members); from the ethnic militias of the former Northern Alliance; and from the Hezb-i-Islami political party, whose leader, the longtime warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose insurgent militia is loosely affiliated with the Taliban.
Although no one anticipates any major breakthroughs in Paris, the Taliban particularly want to speak with some of the former Northern Alliance personalities who will be there. The Taliban’s delegates are flying in from the Taliban’s foreign-affairs office in Qatar. The staff there has been idle since last March, when the insurgents angrily called off tentative talks with the Americans. One of the Taliban’s representatives, Maulvi Shahuddin Dilawar, is said to be specifically interested in meeting with Hazara leader Muhammad Mohaqeq and Ahmed Zia Massoud, brother of the legendary Tajik warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated by al Qaeda two days before 9/11. For the Taliban, the hope is that the contacts they make in Paris will pave the way for subsequent meetings back in Afghanistan with other Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara leaders, such as the Shiite chieftain Sheikh Asif Mosini and the Uzbek heavyweight Abdul Satar Sirat.
According to Zabihullah and other Taliban sources, Pakistan has given its blessing to the outreach. Because the insurgents are utterly dependent on Pakistan for safe haven and support, Islamabad’s approval is vital for any such rapprochement. The thing Pakistan ultimately wants, other sources say, is an Afghan peace deal that would place the country under a loose federal system, with the Taliban in control of the Pashtun-majority areas and the ethnic minorities in charge of theirs. Pakistan has never been keen on having a strong and unified Afghan state on its western border. The two countries’ disputes go back well before the creation of Pakistan.
Beyond pushing the Taliban to talk, Pakistan is taking steps of its own to make peace with the former Northern Alliance, which engaged in a merciless war against the Taliban until the regime collapsed in 2001. “Relations between Pakistan and the Northern Alliance have dramatically improved,” says Zabihullah. Pakistan’s ambassador to Kabul, Muhammad Sadiq, is holding frequent, almost weekly meetings with top former NA bosses both in and out of government, including Abdullah, Mohaqeq and Vice President Martial Mohammed Fahim.
Relations have improved so much that Pakistan is relocating its Embassy back to the building it occupied when the Taliban regime was in power. In the past decade, violent anti-Pakistan protests forced the Embassy staff to abandon the building for several years. These days the neighborhood is home to Fahim himself and other senior NA veterans who have given Islamabad full security guarantees despite their past grudges against Pakistan.
To be sure, many other former Northern Alliance officials—particularly some inside the Karzai regime and its security forces—would rather fight the Taliban than talk to them. Nevertheless, the beginnings of a dialogue seem to be taking shape. War-weary Afghans can only welcome any initiative, no matter how tentative, as long as they see even a faint chance that it might finally bring an end to the carnage.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent, and has been covering the region for the magazine for the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Afghanistan archeological site in a race for survival
The Star.com By Olivia Ward Foreign Affairs Reporter Friday December 14, 2012
For those who treasure Afghanistan’s — and the world’s — archeological heritage, this Christmas will be a day to mourn.
“Dec. 25 is the deadline for destroying the ancient Buddhist site of Mes Aynak,” said Chicago filmmaker Brent Huffman. “We hope it will change, but right now it is not looking good.”
Unlike the much-publicized Buddhas of Bamiyan, whose decimation at the hands of the Taliban transfixed the world with horror, the 5,000-year-old site in bleak southeastern Afghanistan — where artifacts date back to the Bronze Age — is quietly falling prey not to religious fanaticism but to modern “progress.”
The site sits atop a rich copper deposit, worth up to $100 billion. The remains of the once-thriving Silk Road town will be razed to make way for an open-pit mine run by a Chinese-owned mining consortium. Huffman, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and assistant professor at Northwestern University, has spent a year recording the grim countdown to its demise in his film The Buddhas of Mes Aynak.
It may give pause to Canadians, who have just digested news of a Chinese state-owned company’s $15-billion takeover of Calgary-based oil and gas producer Nexen. Critics say the deal gives Canada less control over its resources, and less access to possible compensation in case of damages.
The situation is far more dire in Afghanistan, where the cash-strapped government is scrambling to tap up to $1 trillion in mineral wealth with investment from foreign countries. In the rapidly accelerating resource rush, its rich heritage is in danger of vanishing into the dust.
“It’s as though somebody was planning to destroy Machu Picchu,” Huffman said Thursday as he packed his bags for his fifth trip to Mes Aynak, and the last in which he may be able to film its majestic Buddhist statues, temples and monasteries intact. The journey will take him back to the dangerous Logar province, where landmines are buried under cover of darkness and rockets fly unpredictably.
But it’s also the centre of a tangled web of commercialism, economic opportunism and deception that may have doomed the historic site before the Afghan and European archeologists struggling to excavate its treasures can uncover them. Philippe Marquis, who heads the French archeological delegation, has said that might take another 30 years of digging. Said Huffman, “it’s now a race against time.”
“So much of the Buddhist heritage has been lost throughout history,” said Karen Harrison, a Buddhist minister who founded the support group Canadian Friends of Mes Aynak. “It’s amazing that this beautiful site has survived everything Afghanistan has suffered through. Surely this kind of treasure is more valuable than the copper.”
China has little enthusiasm for destroying Mes Aynak, which it reportedly pledged $3.5 billion to develop before learning of the archeological heritage. Five years later it has yet to launch the project, and is the target of anger from preservationists as well as villagers displaced for the mine in return for promises of upgraded housing, amenities and jobs. To open the mine it will destroy six local villages and blow up at least one mountain, with uncertain environmental consequences.
Meanwhile the Afghan government has yet to see the estimated $300 million in annual royalties that could make up 15 per cent of its civilian budget, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The archeologists were given three years to excavate the smaller objects from the site — time that runs out on Christmas — but the large Buddhas and temple structures are too fragile to dismantle. The work is slow and sometimes sporadic. The Afghans “lack any kind of rescue equipment (for the artifacts),” Huffman said. “They don’t earn much money and every year there’s a period where they aren’t paid at all.”
Although prospects for rescuing Mes Aynak seem dim, its advocates hope the UN’s cultural agency, UNESCO, will step in and declare it a world heritage site. Its Afghanistan representative Paolo Fontani recently visited the site with a cultural team and Afghan officials, and said that it was developing a strategy for long-term preservation of excavated material. However, the agency doesn’t impose heritage sites, but chooses them in consultation with the countries where they’re located.
“The bigger fear is that if Mes Aynak is destroyed it will set a precedent,” Huffman said. “Afghanistan supposedly has $1 trillion in mineral deposits. Most of them have archeological artifacts on top of them.”
Barack Obama, Hamid Karzai to discuss future US troop presence in Afghanistan
The Times of India Dec 15, 2012
WASHINGTON - The scheduled meeting between US President Barack Obama and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai next month is expected to lay the rules of presence of US troops in the war-torn country after the 2014 security transition to Afghan forces, a presidential spokesman said.
Karzai is scheduled to travel to Washington for a meeting with Obama at the White House in the week of January 7, White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, told reporters at his daily news conference.
"The (US) President and President Karzai look forward to discussing a shared vision of Afghanistan beyond 2014, to include the post-2014 role of the United States in Afghanistan," he said.
"Their meeting will be an important opportunity to discuss implementation of the strategic partnership the two presidents signed in May, to include the progress we're making in negotiating the bilateral security agreement that would replace our current SOFA and lay out the rules of the road for a potential US military presence after 2014," Carney said.
Obama also looks forward to discussing an Afghan-led peace process as well as the region and the future of Afghanistan's security forces, the White House spokesman said.
The United States, he said, supports an Afghan-led process of reconciliation.
"We believe that that's essential for the long-term prospects of peace in Afghanistan," Carney said.
Oil tanker set on fire in northern Afghan town
PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) -- Unknown armed men opened fire and set ablaze an oil tanker in Baghlan province 160 km north of Kabul on Saturday, police said.
"Unidentified armed men targeted an oil tanker with assault rifle in Dushi district today morning burning the oil tanker," Deputy to provincial police chief Sayed Zaman Hussaini told Xinhua.
Without giving more details, he said that investigation is underway.
Meantime, locals at the site of incident claimed that the tanker was supplying fuel to NATO-led troops when Taliban militants attacked and set on fire the vehicle.
Taliban militants have yet to comment.
Afghan Nomads Fend Off Authorities In Kabul Land Dispute
By Frud Bezhan December 14, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Hundreds of Afghan nomads, armed with pitchforks and sticks, were holding off attempts this week by authorities to evict them from their makeshift settlement in Kabul's outskirts.
The Kuchis have been staging protests daily since December 10, when members of the traditionally nomadic tribal grouping claimed three Kuchis were killed and several others injured as bulldozers accompanied by policemen tried to raze their dwellings in the capital's Qasaba district.
Kabul police have acknowledged only that several people were injured on December 10.
The Qasaba clashes are just the latest incidents involving Kuchis, a predominantly Pashtun people who have increasingly been forced to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and relocate to settled areas. In their search for permanent residence, the Kuchis have come into conflict with local authorities and rival ethnic groups who say the newcomers are encroaching on their lands.
Gul, a 40-year-old woman, is one of the Kuchis who has defied the eviction. She, like many others in the area, says she has permission from the Afghan Ministry of Urban Development Affairs and Housing to live in Qasaba.
"We haven’t slept because we're scared that they will come back," she says. "They have brought these tractors here to destroy our homes."
'Playing Games'
Meanwhile, Agha Khan, a Kuchi tribesman, has condemned the government for not dealing in good faith with his people.
Under the Afghan Constitution, the government is required to allocate permanent land for the Kuchis and help integrate them into settled areas. But Khan maintains that officials are chasing them from the very property they were given.
"The president, the mayor of Kabul, and the government shouldn't play games with us," Khan says. "We will accept even the worst land in Afghanistan. They should give us land-ownership documents and not deceive us."
Hassan Abdullahi, the minister for urban development affairs and housing, says the nomads were given temporary residence in the area but have been ordered to leave. He says the ministry originally allowed 30 families to set up living quarters in Qasaba but that hundreds more relocated to the area illegally.
Meanwhile, Habib Afghan, a Kuchi representative in the lower house of parliament, says the Kuchis are being forced out by Kabul Mayor Mohammad Younas Nawandish, who has approved plans for a housing-development project in Qasaba. The project, which will include the construction of luxury homes for lawmakers as well as ministry buildings, was approved last month by parliament.
According to Afghan, Nawandish promised the Kuchis plots of land in Pul-e Charkhi, on the outskirts of Kabul. But the Kuchi representative says that's not a viable option.
"How can you expect people to move during these harsh winter months?" Afghan says. "That's the first reason. The second is that there is no land available in Pul-e Charkhi for them to live on. The government should choose another location for the Kuchis to resettle to."
Tragic Tensions
The incident in Qasaba is just the latest land dispute to involve the Kuchis, who after roaming Afghanistan's high plains with their caravans of livestock for centuries have been forced to relocate to settled areas because of war, drought, and dwindling access to land. The Kuchis number around 3 million, according to government estimates, with only around one-third still leading nomadic lives.
In 2010, clashes broke out in the Dasht-e Barchi neighborhood in western Kabul. A group of Kuchis, contending their ancestors owned the land in the neighborhood, clashed with ethnic Hazara residents in the area. The fighting lasted several days and caused dozens of casualties on each side. Newly built Kuchi homes were reportedly burned to the ground.
The government relocated the nomads to the ruins of the Darul Aman palace, the residence of former Afghan monarchs, where they lived for months without electricity or adequate water supplies before moving to the city's slums.
In the past decade, there has also been growing violence between Kuchis and local farmers over grazing rights. The Kuchi tribes are spread across Afghanistan, traditionally moving with their herds to mountain pastures in the warmer seasons and to warmer lowlands during the winter.
Depleted natural resources, such as water, and lingering ethnic tensions have led to fierce clashes between Kuchi herders and members of the Hazara ethnic group in the last few years. Scores have been killed and wounded from both sides.
Hazara residents in the Wardak, Bamiyan, and Dai Kundi provinces, home to some of the most fertile land in the country, say Kuchi tribesmen are invading their villages, damaging farmland, and destroying their homes. Kuchis, however, say the Hazaras are denying them their centuries-old right to grazing lands across Afghanistan.
The escalating land disputes shed light on the plight of the Kuchis, who human rights organizations say are the poorest and most marginalized group in Afghanistan.
Many Kuchis say local hospitals refuse to treat their sick, while schools turn away their children. And although some earn money from selling milk from their animals, many have resorted to begging and living in urban slums.
Even so, the Kuchis have made important strides in the past decade. Ten of the 249 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of the Afghan national parliament, have been allocated to Kuchis. The government also has a department, the Independent Directorate of Kuchi Affairs, to handle Kuchi issues.
RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan contributed to this report
Yogurt, Mint and Hints of Ancient Silk Road
A Review of Afghan Kabob Fusion, in Franklin Park
New York Times By KARLA COOK December 14, 2012
I would drive miles out of my way for a bowl of aush at Afghan Kabob Fusion, a place that is easy to miss in the allée of strip malls along Route 27 in central New Jersey. The version of the soup that I had there included lamb, noodles, vegetables, house-made yogurt sauce, cilantro, mint, chickpeas and kidney beans. It was a deeply flavorful antidote to the cold.
This halal restaurant — still under a marquee that bears the name of a previous tenant, Choopan Grill — is a solid and interesting addition to this corridor between Princeton and New Brunswick that is home to regional Indian, Pakistani, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants.
Inside, there’s a sense that someone has taken care with the setting while on a budget. The dining room holds a mix of tables and banquettes, with a large window that dominates the far wall looking into what seems to be a staging area for the kitchen. Though the prefab nature of the place comes through, the windows — with a view to the sidewalk, parking lot and highway — are softened by generous swaths of blue and white fabric.
The owner, Fawad Yousufzai, said in a conversation after my visits that he opened the restaurant in October, just before Hurricane Sandy, when it lost power for four or five days. His mother, Mazifa Yousufzai, who took him and four siblings from Afghanistan to Pakistan in 1985, then to the United States in 1989, is cooking the small menu. A cousin’s husband, Akbar Sherzad, is helping out; on my second visit, when we asked for help with a corkscrew, he pleasantly but firmly told us no alcohol was allowed.
Appetizers and main dishes are somewhat interchangeable, with several foods offered in both categories (most of the main dishes came with salad and rice). All also show culinary influences from the ancient Silk Road. A standout was the bolani, a hot fried turnover nearly the size of a flattened football, with a translucent, light brown, blistered pastry revealing one of two fillings: rings of scallions or creamy white mashed potatoes flavored with coriander seed and cilantro. Served with pale green yogurt-cilantro sauce, the dish juxtaposed crunchy and smooth, hot and cool. It was delicious.
Bonjon borani, available either as an appetizer or as a main dish, was its equal, a platter of hot fried eggplant slices beneath a house-made tomato-based sauce flavored with coriander seed, cloaked with yogurt and dotted with dried mint and cilantro. And making it a three-way tie was the Afghan salad, a sassy mix of mild red onions, tomato, cilantro and parsley (think of tabbouleh without the wheat), dressed with fresh lemon juice.
Two dumpling dishes with yogurt and mint — boiled aushak filled with scallion and the steamed mantu filled with chicken or beef — were less interesting; they needed more-delicate pasta and the aushak, at least, would have been improved with pumpkin. A better dish was sabzi — chopped fresh spinach cooked with cilantro and onion — available as both a side and a main dish.
A word about the rice: Unadorned and served alongside the humdrum main-dish meats (lamb chops, chicken tikka, beef kafta, lamb tikka and even battered and fried tilapia fillets), it is uninteresting, but stirring in a $2 mix of raisins and carrots fried with cardamom makes it luscious.
As for endings, there was good mango ice cream as well as firnee, a pudding flavored with rosewater, cardamom and pistachios that can be sublime when made with a delicate hand. On my first visit, it was a little less silky than desired, but the flavor was right. On a second visit, the custard was perfect, and the cross of finely chopped pistachios was just so on top, but a bottom layer of lurid green Jell-O was jarring and unpleasant. Less risky are the black tea made chai-ish with cardamom and the not-too-sweet baklava made by a friend’s mother. Either or both will fuel the trip home nicely.
Afghan Kabob Fusion
www.afghanistannewscenter.com