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Garment market catches fire in Kabul, inflicting huge damage
KABUL, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- Nasiri Market caught fire in Afghan capital Kabul Saturday night, causing millions of U.S. dollar damages to the shopkeepers, police said on Sunday.
The surprising incident was apparently caused by carelessness, according to police.
"In the wee hours of Sunday the Nasiri Market in the first precinct of Kabul caught fire resultantly scores of shops turned to ashes," Kabul Police said in a statement released here in the evening.
The fire has been extinguished by the fire fighters, but still light flame of fire is seen in the underground portion of the market, the statement admitted.
Meantime, a police officer at the site of incident told Xinhua that more than 600 shops had turned to ashes. However, he declined to give his name, saying authorized officials would brief the media after investigation.
The incident, according to police, took place at 00:30 a.m. local time in Nasiri Market with hundreds of garment shops, also a popular business in the city.
"I am lucky I could only save my 90,000 U.S. dollars cash from my safe in my shop early this morning but all of my goods are burnt as you see," a shop owner Sakhi Mohammad told Xinhua near the scene.
Another shopkeeper said that the fire had devoured goods and cash worth 250,000 U.S. dollars.
In the war-torn Afghanistan where security is loose and banking system is not so advanced and secure, many people choose to keep their cash in foreign banks or circulate in business.
"The damages could be millions of dollars," Mohammad said, adding hundreds of shops around the area escaped the fire as the fire fighters were working hard to bring the situation under the control.
At least 20 people were killed and 183 others were seriously injured in two separate deadly fires in Kabul in July this year.
Taliban Hint at Softer Line in Talks With Afghan Leaders
New York Times By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and TAIMOOR SHAH December 22, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - After years of deriding Afghanistan’s government and army as corrupt tools of Western occupiers, the Taliban have begun publicly airing a softer vision for the country’s future, with senior insurgent leaders saying the militants are willing to govern alongside other Afghan factions and even to adopt the current American-financed army as their own.
That message was delivered over the past few days by Taliban envoys during private meetings with Afghan officials and opposition politicians near Paris, according to officials close to the talks, and the softer approach has been echoed in recent interviews with Taliban figures loyal to the group’s nominal leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar. Together, it is the furthest that the Taliban’s senior leadership has gone to express in some official way that the group would be willing to operate as a mainstream Afghan political faction rather than aiming to return as conquering rulers after the end of the NATO combat mission in 2014.
But with the Taliban there are always questions.
The group is increasingly divided by power struggles, according to some Western officials and Afghans close to the Taliban, and there has sometimes seemed to be a disconnect between conciliatory statements from the top and the aggression of field commanders. As well, Afghan and American officials trying to open peace talks with the Taliban have long struggled with whether any offer of compromise could be seen as legitimate or just tactical maneuvering to gain public support.
Still, the new statements offer the tantalizing prospect of a Taliban leadership that is ready to talk, even if many of its aims are out of line with the Afghan government and its Western allies.
That willingness may be in part because of a still-unfolding feud at the group’s top levels, according to recent interviews with a senior Taliban commander and another Afghan man close to the group. Those two men, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say that the Taliban’s hard-line military commander, Mullah Abdul Quyyum Zakir, a former detainee at the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, is being pushed aside in favor of more moderate rivals.
Mullah Zakir is seen as a fighter with little vision for finding a way to peacefully end the war, and he faces growing criticism over a series of setbacks in recent years at the hands of coalition forces whose raids are said to have cut deeply into the ranks of the group’s field commanders.
Many of the surviving field commanders have openly complained that Mullah Zakir is unwilling or unable to aid their fight, the two men said. As a group, those lower-level figures still hold sway in the Taliban: their unhappiness at learning the Taliban’s leadership was engaged in a nascent peace process with the United States this year helped scuttle that effort.
Vying to replace Mullah Zakir is the Taliban’s logistics chief, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, who also serves as Mullah Omar’s second deputy. He is considered a relative moderate within the movement, the men said.
In one indication that Mullah Mansour holds the upper hand, it was a pair of his loyalists — Shahabuddin Delawar and Muhammad Naim — who represented the Taliban at the conference outside Paris on Thursday and Friday, said the Afghan man close to the Taliban.
At the conference, and in interviews, Taliban officials offered a vision of a Taliban ready to govern again, but in harmony with the current Afghan government structure, even if they still hate President Hamid Karzai and his allies. The senior Taliban official said, for instance, that the militants would be willing to offer a general amnesty to those who have fought against them, allowing the continuation of the current army and national police force that the United States has spent $39 billion to build and supply. The militants also envision retaining many of the government institutions the West put in place.
In an obvious attempt to answer some of the harshest criticism of the group’s brutal rule from 1996 through 2001, the envoys said that in a new Taliban-led government, women would have the chance to go to school in “an Islamic way,” according to the text of a speech the envoys delivered in France that the Taliban sent to news organizations on Saturday.
The senior Taliban official, in a recent interview, said the shift had the backing of Mullah Omar and it reflected a growing understanding among the movement’s leaders that as Afghanistan has changed, so must they.
“We realize we cannot run Afghanistan without the support of educated people, and we will not be tough as we were,” the senior Taliban official said.
But persuading Afghans — especially those of the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara ethnic groups who suffered heavily at the Taliban’s hands — that the group might abandon its autocratic and brutal ways is a tall order. Gen. Atiqullah Baryalai, a prominent member of the Northern Alliance that battled the Taliban in the 1990s and that now makes up the core of Afghanistan’s political opposition, characterized the Taliban’s overtures as “propaganda.”
Although he said it was positive that the Taliban were showing a willingness to talk, he added: “I don’t think the Taliban are honest with what they said there in Paris. It is more about publicity, and about avoiding progress.”
The Taliban do appear willing to go only so far in reaching out to current rivals. In the speech delivered in France, the Taliban envoys bluntly declared: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — the Taliban’s formal name for itself — “is a legitimate fact. It is still the legitimate government.”
As well, some of the group’s central demands still appear to be no-go propositions for Mr. Karzai’s government and American officials. The Taliban still demand that all Western military forces, even advisers, leave Afghanistan after the formal end of the Western military mission in 2014. The group also demands that the country’s Constitution be rewritten along strictly Islamic lines. The current Constitution recognizes Islam as the primary arbiter of the country’s laws, and Afghan and American officials have said they are willing only to see it amended, not rewritten.
The Taliban also appeared to reiterate their refusal to negotiate with Mr. Karzai’s government, and they said that they would consider the scheduled elections in 2014 meaningless because the country would still be under foreign occupation.
“These elections, laws and administrative affairs were designed based on foreigners’ demands,” according to the envoys’ statement.
But, at the same time, it does appear that the Taliban are backing off a demand that they negotiate solely with the United States, and they appear increasingly open to working with other political groups to run the country.
“Mullah Omar has frequently insisted that we do not seek a monopoly on political power, and we want a government of all Afghans in our beloved country,” the Taliban statement said.
There was no immediate reaction from the Karzai administration to Saturday’s statement. A senior Western official who works in Kabul said that the Taliban “do seem like they are inching toward where the international community and the Afghan government would like to see them.” But, the official cautioned, “I think it is always smart to not be too optimistic. This is a slow process.”
Matthew Rosenberg reported from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Jawad Sukhanyar, Sangar Rahimi and Habib Zahori contributed reporting from Kabul.
Taliban call for new Afghanistan constitution
AFP 22/12/2012
KABUL - Afghanistan's Taliban has called for a new constitution as a pre-condition for it joining the nation's fledgling peace process, according to a declaration issued by representatives at a landmark meeting in France.
Representatives from the country's warring factions met Thursday for two days of talks that diplomats hope will bolster relations in the war-torn country.
It is the first time since a US-led bombing campaign drove the Taliban from power in 2001 that senior representatives have sat down with officials from the government and other opposition groups to discuss the country's future, in a meeting brokered by a French think tank.
"Afghanistan's present constitution has no value for us because it was made under the shadows of B52 bombers of the invaders," said the declaration, which was handed to participants during the meeting and later released to the media.
"Islamic Emirate, for the welfare of their courageous nation, need a constitution that is based on the principles of the holy religion of Islam, national interest, historical achievements, and social justice," it read.
The meeting in France was organised by the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS), and was held behind closed doors at an undisclosed location near Paris.
The talks come against a background of accelerating efforts to draw the Taliban and other opponents of President Hamid Karzai into negotiations on how Afghanistan will be run after Western troops withdraw at the end of 2014.
Karzai's government has drawn up a roadmap for peace which involves persuading the Taliban and other insurgent groups to agree to a ceasefire as a prelude to becoming peaceful players in the country's nascent democracy.
As a first step in that direction, Karzai's administration has been attempting to secure the release of top Taliban prisoners held by neighbouring Pakistan.
Despite the landmark meeting, the Taliban's declaration continued to display a lack of trust in the government.
"The invaders and their friends don't have a clear roadmap for peace," it stated.
"Sometimes they say we want to talk to the Islamic Emirate, but sometimes they say we will talk with Pakistan. This kind of vague stance will never get to peace," it said.
To date the Taliban has refused to negotiate with the government, which it regards as a puppet of the United States. Discussions with American officials were suspended in March.
In France the Taliban was represented by their senior figures Shahabuddin Dilawar and Naeem Wardak, a move seen as a sign that the Islamist group is contemplating going beyond exploratory discussions.
The Taliban, who ruled in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, were ousted from power by a US-led invasion and have since waged an 11-year insurgency to topple the US-supported government of Hamid Karzai.
Political Parties Hopeful After Paris; Taliban Demand Constitutional Change
TOLOnews.com By Haseeb Moudoodi Saturday, 22 December 2012
Some political parties participating in the Paris meeting have expressed hope about its outcomes, while the Taliban representatives read a statement calling for changes to the Constitution.
Mohammad Hanif Atmar, former minister of interior and representative of the Rights and Justice Party at the talks, told TOLOnews in a phone interview that disagreements among participants were slight.
"The similarities of our views and other things we had in common have made us extremely hopeful for our country's future," Atmar said.
"All stressed on peace and a political solution."
Atmar added that a second meeting similar to this one will be held in Paris in one month.
A spokesman for Abdullah Abdullah's National Coalition expressed optimism about the future of the talks.
"We are confident that we will reach peace if the involved groups agreed over real peace negotiations," said Engineer Mohammad Asim, who was not in Paris.
Taliban representatives stressed on the complete withdrawal of foreign troops and on changes to the Constitution. Their contention with the current constitution suggests a stance at direct odds with the Afghan government, the civil society and the international community, all of which have stressed the Tailban's acceptance of the Constitution as a prerequisite for any peace deal.
"The civic, personal and political rights of all of the country's citizens must be taken into account in the Constitution. The Constitution should guarantee, in a fair way, the rights of all ethnic groups and should clarify the nature of the relationship between the government and the people," said a prepared statement read at the meeting by Taliban representative Maulawi Shahabuddin Delawar.
Mentioning the "personal and political rights" of the people could be a hint that the Taliban are asking for guarantees of free political participation in the event of a peace deal.
The Taliban text accused the government and the international community for actively prioritizing war over peace efforts.
"To bring peace, talks must be prioritized over fighting. Right now, Kabul and its international allies aim to put pressure on the Taliban to bring peace as they define it, which really increases the challenges [toward a peaceful settlement]."
High Peace Council Deputy Ataullah Loudin, who was not in Paris, continued to downplay the meeting's importance.
"The Council welcomes any peace effort because of our purpose, which is mediation between government and opposing groups. But the Taliban did not speak about peace in the meeting, just read their statement, so I think that does not have any positive or negative bearing over peace."
10 Afghan Taliban militants give up fighting
KABUL, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- Ten Taliban fighters have given up fighting and handed over their weapons to police in Kunduz province 250 km north of Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, Interior Ministry said in a statement released here.
"A ten-member group of armed militants under Mullah Zahidullah laid down arms and joined peace process in Kunduz city today," the statement added.
These people were active outside Kunduz provincial capital the Kunduz city and with their joining to peace process the security will be further improved in the province, the statement noted.
Taliban militants fighting the government are yet to comment.
More than 3,500 anti-government militants, according to officials, have laid down arms and joined the government-backed peace process over the past one year in Afghanistan, a claim rejected by Taliban outfit as baseless.
Taliban preys on Afghanistan's corrupt police force
As troops leave, secret papers reveal extent of bribery among Afghan officers
The Independent By Brian Brady Sunday 23 December 2012
The Afghan police charged with maintaining security in their own country as coalition troops begin to pull out within months are still "endemically corrupt" and riven with problems including nepotism and drug abuse, internal government documents have revealed.
Foreign Office (FCO) papers obtained by The Independent on Sunday disclose official concerns about the fate of Afghanistan and its chances of holding the Taliban at bay, if its leaders fail to "root out corruption" throughout the ranks of the Afghan National Police (ANP).
A confidential report on the performance of the Afghan Uniform Police (AUP), the nation's major law-enforcement body, observed in October: "Unless radical change is introduced to improve the actual and perceived integrity and legitimacy of officers within the AUP, then the organisation will continue to provide an ineffective and tainted service to citizens for decades to come."
The assessments, in a series of official FCO documents, lay bare the continuing anxieties over the war-torn country's capacity to function as a democratic state when international troops begin withdrawing from their combat role in the country in 2013. The vast majority are scheduled to be out by the end of 2014.
The details come only days after David Cameron said during a visit to Afghanistan that British troops could be withdrawn even more quickly than planned, because local security forces were "doing better than expected". The Prime Minister announced that UK numbers would be nearly halved to 5,200 next year, as part of the withdrawal plan.
The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, yesterday accepted that widespread corruption was "a bitter reality" Ω but claimed it was largely fuelled by the countries funding his government and security forces.
"The part of this corruption that is in our offices is a small part: that is bribes," the President said in a speech on national television. "The other part of corruption, the large part, is hundreds of millions of dollars that are not ours. We shouldn't blame ourselves for that. That part is from others and imposed on us."
However, the FCO reports a catalogue a series of home-grown problems with Afghanistan's police, which could hinder the country's development in future years.
In October, a report on the AUP in Helmand province questioned the chances of achieving the police's stated goal of "eliminating corruption all over the country".
The report observed: "Whilst this is undeniably a laudable aspiration, the reality of the situation in Afghanistan is that corruption is endemic; woven into the very fabric of society and in particular public institutions. This fact renders the objective unachievable, with some commentators arguing that the issue is generational and cannot therefore be dealt with effectively for many years to come."
The report called for a complaints procedure and action against "patronage and nepotism issues in the appointment of senior officers".
It added: "The continued absence of a reliable system for recruiting and promoting AUP officers will see the status quo being maintained, where people motivated by personal gain and/or harbouring nefarious intent have access to senior and influential roles within the service."
Another FCO paper, on the "Rule of Law in Afghanistan Post-2014", stated that the justice sector was improving, but it added: "Anti-corruption efforts are off-track, with political interference notable in high-level prosecutions."
ANP officers, who are usually at the front line of the security forces' dealings with the public, have to endure lower pay and fatality rates twice as high as their counterparts in the Afghan army. But one paper, entitled "Changes in ANP", observed that: "The Afghan police suffer from many problems. Of the 82,000 nominally serving on the force, around 60,000 are believed to be working. We estimate over 70 per cent are illiterate, and drug abuse is an issue."
The rate of drug use among ANP officers was estimated at 9 per cent, compared to a national average of 8 per cent.
Another report, assessing the ANP's progress, reported that the force had "shortcomings in a number of areas", including corruption and theft. It added: "Concerns remain about corruption, criminal activity, drug-use and the lack of a clear 'end state' for the force. The ANP is viewed negatively by the population, with multiple reports of illegal taxation, extortion and other serious crimes, as well as drug addiction."
The Labour MP Sandra Osborne, a member of the Defence Select Committee, said the Afghan police were "hated". She added: "It will take years for a fully legitimate police force to come about, if ever. Eventually it will be up to the Afghan government, and that is the real problem, as is widely recognised Ω the lack of a stable political settlement."
Roland Paris, director of the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa, said: "Prime Minister Cameron is declaring success prematurely. There is little reason to believe that the ANP will be significantly more effective or less corrupt in 2014."
An FCO spokeswoman said the development of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) was "a significant achievement". She added: "It is because of the increasing strength, confidence and capability of the ANSF that the transition process is gaining momentum. As a result, UK forces will be able to move from mentoring at battalion level to brigade level by the end of 2013, thereby allowing a significant troop drawdown, as announced by the Prime Minister this week."
Could mineral wealth transform Afghan economy?
BBC News 22 December 2012
Three international energy firms have been shortlisted to develop lucrative oil deposits in northern Afghanistan. It is hoped such deals could reduce dependency on foreign aid. BBC reporters visited three key industrial projects to see whether the hopes are justified.
It is estimated that Afghanistan's deposits of metals, hydrocarbons and rare earth minerals could be worth at least $1tn (£630bn).
But experts are warning that mishandling of the deals and security factors could undermine these projects, as international troops prepare to pull out in 2014.
In the 1970s the Ghori cement works in northern Baghlan province was one of Afghanistan's most successful companies, employing hundreds of people and churning out thousands of tonnes of high-grade cement for export to the USSR.
Although 30 years of civil war took a huge toll on the plant, its new owners are hoping to take advantage of the country's construction boom to turn the factory's fortunes round.
Walking around the plant, the scale of the challenge is obvious.
Manager Eslamuddin Ahmadi points out that the 50-year old Soviet-made equipment is still in operation on the factory floor. It is still possible to see signs in Russian on the ageing and rusting machinery.
But a lack of basic infrastructure is holding things back.
"There's a big demand for our cement," says Mr Ahmadi, "but we can't increase output until our power supply problems are sorted out."
Although the raw materials the plant needs - limestone, and coal for power generation - are both available nearby, the electricity shortages will not be dealt with until plans to build a new generating plant become a reality.
The Ghori factory currently meets about 60% of northern Afghanistan's cement needs. Local traders say it is cheaper and better than the Pakistan-produced alternative which has to be laboriously trucked in.
But the plant is still not operating anywhere near full capacity, only paying its work force a minimal wage - something that has caused big disappointment locally.
Many of the 600 workers at the plant insist their wages are not enough to live on.
Fuelling the sense of resentment is the perception that while the workforce might be living in poverty, someone else is making money from the plant.
Ghori Cement was privatised in 2006 in a controversial deal which Mining and Industry Minister Wahidullah Sharani has heavily criticised.
Mr Sharani said the 30-year contract - which saw the plant taken over a by a consortium including President Karzai's brother, Mahmoud - was only four pages long and full of "financial, legal and technical flaws".
Mahmoud Karzai sold his shares in the company managing Ghori in 2011 and is no longer connected with the enterprise, but in an interview with the BBC he hit back at the criticisms.
"It's not the length of a contract that's important, it's what in it," he said.
Mr Karzai said the contract had obliged his company to maintain two obsolete blocs at Ghori rather than focussing on building a new modern plant.
He also accused the government of failing to support his attempts to negotiate multi-million dollar loans from foreign banks to rebuild Ghori and to build a power plant at the site.
"There is zero interest in public-private partnership in Afghanistan," he said.
Questions have also been raised about the terms of another high profile deal billed as a potential game-changer for the Afghan economy - the concession to mine the massive Aynak copper deposit mine in Logar province near Kabul.
In 2007 a Chinese company called the China Metallurgical Group Corporation was awarded the contract to mine the deposit, but details of the deal have still not been made public, fuelling rumours of bribery and kick-backs.
A report by the campaign group Global Witness says that the lack of openness surrounding the project could threaten its longer term prospects.
"It's a massive shortcoming," says Juman Kubba of Global Witness.
"Already from the local community we are hearing that they see it as a secret deal. It builds a situation of mistrust, and that in turn can lead to violence and is a very negative thing for the project and for the mining sector in general."
Afghan officials, however, are optimistic that the country could earn up to $400m (£248m) every year from Aynak, and the deposits could generate thousands of new jobs.
But looking at the site today, it is clear that there is a very long way to go.
The Chinese are currently carrying out a survey, and once that is complete they will need to build proper roads and a railway line to the site.
There is also the problem of landmines. The mining ministry has signed a contract for mine-clearing work at Aynak - it will take nearly two years and more than eight million square metres of land will need to be made safe.
And then there is the added complication of history. Copper mining at Aynak goes back to the Buddhist era, 2,000 years ago, and before any new work can be carried out archaeologists need to complete a full excavation of the site.
Archaeologists there told the BBC that more time is needed to complete the painstaking task of moving everything they have found to a new place. But according to the contract, if the work is not completed by the end of the year penalties will have to be paid.
But a more fundamental problem is security and how to prevent such an important site from becoming a target for Taliban attacks.
US-based Afghan expert Anthony Cordesman says that this is an issue which is often overlooked by economic assessments of the country's potential mineral wealth.
"Nobody can provide security," he told the BBC. "And you not only need security for the facility, you have to be able to move the output. You have to create the processing facilities and you need power and security for those facilities."
Chinese companies are also involved in developing potentially lucrative oil reserves in the Amu River basin in the north of the country. It has come a long way since a bespectacled King Zahir Shah opened the site in the 1950s.
During the first three years of the project, crude will be exported for refining abroad. But under the terms of the deal an oil refinery will be built locally. China has also promised to build a proper road to facilitate transport to and from the site.
Regional governor Abdul Jabbar Haqbin says oil has the power to change lives for the better in his area - and his optimism is shared by local people.
"We're going to get electricity," local shopkeeper Mohammad Hassan told the BBC. "And we hope this project will provide jobs for our young people."
But like Aynak, and the Ghori plant, questions have been raised about the terms of the deal to privatise the Amu basin depots.
There have also been questions about the tender process and how China National Petroleum and Watan came to win the bid.
In response the Afghan government ordered an independent review in 2011 which concluded that the process had been fair and transparent.
Bids are now in for the rights to develop the neighbouring and much larger Tajik basin, which is estimated to hold up to one billion barrels of oil. Minister Shahrani is expected to announce the winner early next year.
Both the Amu and Tajik basins also have gas reserves - in the 1970s and 80s Afghanistan used to export gas to Soviet Central Asia in return for supplies of food and military equipment.
It is hoped that a small gas plant near the town of Sheberghan - which supplies electricity to around 200 homes in Jowzjan province - can now be replicated on a far bigger scale.
Khwaja Tajuddin is one of the lucky ones who has a gas supply at home. He pays $4 (£2.50) for a monthly gas supply and says it has made a big difference to him and his family.
"We don't suffer from smoke any more," he told the BBC. "We have gas for 18 to 19 hours. In winter, we have it 24 hours. It is good for cooking. We use it when we don't have electricity and we use it for heating our house."
Mr Cordesman says that if Afghanistan wants to realise its economic potential in the next decade it will need a strong leader who can negotiate a workable peace settlement and push forward more badly-needed reforms.
"Talking of a trillion dollars would still remain in practical terms a hollow farce," he said.
"But could the country actually fund economic development? Would there be enough resources and enough exports to make a difference? The answer to that is almost certainly, yes."
Ali Yawar Salimi, Sohrab Sirat, Habib Qooyosh, Abdullah Stanakzai and Waheed Massoud contributed to this article.
Afghanistan condemn torture of Pakistani nationals
By Sajad Khaama Press December 23, 2012
Afghan foreign ministry strongly condemned torture of Pakistani nationals by Afghan security forces.
Foreign ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai said Afghan government has launched probe in this regard and the insisted that the government is committed for the security of Pakistani citizens in Afghanistan.
He also said that the Afghan Charge D’Affaires has met with the Pakistani officials in this regard.
Pakistani security officials on Saturday sealed the Torkham border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, in response to the torture on Pakistani labourers by Afghan security personnel.
A Foreign Office spokesman said that Pakistan has taken serious note of Afghan soldiers’ beating up of the Pakistanis despite their having valid travel documents and summoned the Afghan Charge d’ Affaires to foreign ministry in the morning and lodged a strong protest, seeking an investigation into the incident and action against those responsible.
A similar protest was lodged by the Pakistan Ambassador in Kabul with the Afghan government.
The labourers told that they had travelled to Afghanistan for work but the company concerned refused to pay their wages. They added they had also been locked up in Afghanistan’s Pul-i-Charkhi prison where they were tortured by jail authorities. And when they were returning, Afghan forces allegedly tore their Pakistani passports, snatched their money and beat up them brutally.
Presence of Foreigners After 2014 Benefits Afghanistan: Karzai
TOLOnews.com By Sharif Amiry Saturday, 22 December 2012
Talking at a conference on the fight against corruption, President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that the government of Afghanistan is prepared to reach a mutual agreement with the United States over the security pact, which he considered beneficial to Afghanistan.
"There is no doubt that the presence of foreigners after 2014 is for the good of Afghanistan. We are ready to reach an agreement with the United States over the security pact; however, the US should consider our requests as well," said President Karzai.
Speaking at Amani High School, President Karzai called the training and equipping of Afghan forces as the most important request from Kabul in connection with the pact to be signed with Washington.
"The most important request from us is strengthening and training of our Afghan security forces. They [international forces] cannot take prisoners in Afghanistan, cannot have prisons, and have to respect our sovereignty," Karzai said.
The international forces fighting the insurgency for 11 years are ending their combat mission by December 2014. A much smaller number of Nato forces is expected to remain in Afghanistan, mainly for smaller scale counter-terrorism operations.
No Love Lost: Afghan Woman Exposes Corrupt Judge's Unusual Offer
RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan By Frud Bezhan December 22, 2012
A senior judge has been convicted of bribery and fired from his position after a perversion of justice exposed the invasiveness of corruption within Afghan society.
Zahoruddin, a 65-year-old judge in the country's eastern Nangarhar Province, who like many Afghans goes only by one name, was convicted on December 19 of bribery and corruption charges stemming from a young woman's divorce case.
Zahoruddin and another judge apparently became aware that Dewa, a 22-year-old freelance journalist, had filed for divorce and conspired to extort bribes from her in exchange for ensuring her request was granted.
Zahoruddin contacted Dewa, offering to help. But upon meeting with the young woman, he demanded more than $2,000 in bribes. When his offer was refused, he offered an alternative -- entering a life of wealthy matrimony with none other than the judge himself.
Unknown to the judge was that Dewa had come to the meeting armed with a hidden recording device. She recorded the entire 15-minute exchange. Dewa sent the recording of their conversation to the Supreme Court in Kabul and a criminal investigation ensued.
Second Judge Investigated
Zahoruddin strenuously denied the allegations against him, insisting that his marriage proposal was merely a "joke." Upon being confronted with the evidence, the judge accused Dewa of fabricating the evidence as part of a conspiracy to discredit him. Despite his pleas, Zahoruddin was convicted on December 19 of bribery and corruption by a court in Nangarhar's capital, Jalalabad. It was not immediately clear whether he received a jail sentence.
Fazil Hadi Fazil, the chief justice of the appeals court in Nangarhar, said police are also investigating another judge, Tahir Rohani, who was presiding over Dewa's divorce case. In his testimony, Zahoruddin said he and Rohani had hatched a plan to split the bribe money.
"Our superiors are very serious about these kinds of allegations," Fazil says. "Judge Tahir Rohani, who is a senior judge at the family court in Nangarhar, is being investigated and questioned by the Supreme Court. The court will soon reach a verdict in that case."
Dewa, who has spent the last few weeks in hiding in Kabul, has welcomed the verdict. Her divorce case, however, has yet to be resolved.
Dewa claims that, after revealing the secret recording of her conversation with Zahoruddin, she received a death threat from the judge. Out of concerns for her safety, police put her in a safe house in Kabul, where she remained during the police investigation and subsequent trial.
"When my story became public, I received a phone call not long after," Dewa says. "[Zahoruddin] told me 'You got what you wanted, and now you have dishonored me in front of everyone.' He said I wouldn't be alive to enjoy my freedom."
'Shower Her With Gold'
Dewa says her ordeal began last month when she filed her divorce papers at a courthouse in Jalalabad. Within days, Dewa says, she received Zahoruddin's offer to help and set up a meeting.
After refusing his bribe request, Dewa says, the marital offer came. Zahoruddin boasted about how his standing as a judge could protect her and offered her a solid financial future. In the course of the 15-minute recording, Zahoruddin can be heard saying he would "shower her with gold." The judge is also heard repeating his marriage proposal some 15 times.
His marital advances spurned, the judge left and swore he would ensure Dewa's divorce papers would never be formalized.
Despite Zahoruddin's conviction, Dewa says the media attention surrounding the case has exposed her to possible retaliation. Even so, Dewa says she has no regrets about doing her part to expose rampant corruption in the country.
"I raised my voice because I wanted to stand up against and get rid of corruption," she says. "I want the government to help me with my security so that my life is not in danger. I've left my hometown in Nangarhar Province and I can't go back."
Integrity Watch Afghanistan, a local nongovernmental organization, estimates that Afghans, who have consistently identified corruption as among their biggest concerns, collectively pay bribes amounting to $1 billion a year, about 5 percent of the country's entire annual gross domestic product.
Zahoruddin's conviction is a rare success story. Despite President Hamid Karzai's repeated promises to clean up corruption, analysts say there have been few results from his initiatives, citing the government's failure to prosecute a single high-level corruption case.
Written by Frud Bezhan, based on reporting by RFE/RL's Afghan Service
SPECIAL REPORT - Stalking the Taliban in Afghan currency markets
Reuters By Matthew Green Sun Dec 23, 2012
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Haji Khairullah Barakzai is the ultimate Afghan success story: illiterate village boy makes a fortune thanks to a lifetime of hard work, unerring street smarts and God's favour.
But to the U.S. Treasury Department, he is one of the biggest bankers to the Taliban, the architect of an underground network that converts opium grown in the poppy fields of his native southern Afghanistan into cash.
On June 29, the United States and United Nations slapped "terror finance" sanctions on Khairullah and his 25-year-old currency-exchange business, freezing his assets and imposing a travel ban. The move marked a new phase in an escalating but little known campaign to starve the insurgency of drug money ahead of a handover to Afghan forces in 2014.
A Treasury statement accused Khairullah of "donating money and providing financial services to the Taliban", which used his cash transfer service "in support of the Taliban's narcotics and terrorist operations".
Treasury's evidence is classified, but Afghan sources and Western officials familiar with Khairullah painted a portrait of a man with long-standing ties to the Taliban and the drug trade alongside significant legitimate businesses.
Khairullah's friends and associates describe an entirely different figure, a patriarchal pillar of the community who in the murky world of Afghan currency trading cannot always be expected to know the true identity of his customers.
"I am a businessman, and a businessman is like a ram. Anyone in authority can come and grab it by its neck and slaughter it," Khairullah told Reuters, in his first interview since the sanctions were imposed.
"My life has become hell. I have lost my credibility and reputation. I have been declared guilty without any verdict from a judge," he said. He was speaking by telephone from Quetta, the city in southwest Pakistan where he sought sanctuary after Washington named him as a key Taliban financier.
The showdown between Khairullah and his pursuers opens a rare window into another kind of war, where financial intelligence trumps firepower, and captured territory is measured in frozen accounts.
It is a war the West has not been winning. Milking money from the heroin trade, donors in the Gulf and extortion rackets on NATO contractors, the Taliban increased its income to $400 million in the last Afghan calendar year, according to U.N. estimates. About a quarter came from narcotics.
"PHONE CALL AND A HANDSHAKE"
Since sanctioning Khairullah and his business partner Haji Abdul Sattar Barakzai, the U.S. government has stepped up its campaign to disrupt the insurgents' revenue streams. Washington has hit militant groups, guerrilla commanders and other currency dealers with a slew of similar measures.
U.S. officials acknowledge it is hard to rank the significance of any one of a core group of suspected Taliban money men with precision, but they believe Khairullah is integral to the movement's funding structure.
Proponents say squeezing the cash pipelines that pay for fighters and weapons is a smart way to pressure the Taliban while the vast majority of foreign combat troops is being withdrawn.
The approach could also be used to exert leverage over Taliban hardliners, if halting attempts to foster peace talks gain momentum. Tentative contacts between the United States and the Taliban suffered a setback in March when the two sides could not agree on a proposed prisoner swap. But the White House remains keen to pursue dialogue.
The hunt for Khairullah's presumed millions points to the sheer difficulty of choking Taliban funding channels.
Investigators who venture into the region's forbidding ecosystem of illicit commerce find that lines between legitimate trade and criminality often blur, hand-written ledgers are barely decipherable, and deceptively nondescript offices move mountains of cash.
"Everything is done on a phone call and a handshake," said one U.S. official. "The record system or the paper trail that allow you to connect the dots is not as clear as the Western system."
In Kandahar's seven-storey money market, where turbaned dealers haggle over bricks of well-worn notes, Khairullah's colleagues leapt to the defence of a respected member of their age-old fraternity.
"When we went to his office, we only saw people changing money or drinking tea or eating sweets," said Haji Qandi Agha, a regal-looking trader who is the market's president. "There was no talk of the Taliban or heroin."
Agha gestured to a man with a close-cropped beard and embroidered skull cap who had just approached his counter.
"For example, this man is sending money," he said, after the customer produced a sheaf of grubby bills from his waistcoat. "What if the government or America captures him and says he's Taliban? Is it my crime?"
The man, counting with deft thumbs, did not look up.
CANDY SELLER TO CURRENCY KING
Khairullah was born into a modest family in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province, where he revealed his entrepreneurial streak as a boy by selling sweets from a handcart, according to two politicians who knew him.
Khairullah, now about 50, said he built his empire from humble beginnings, starting out by trading goods within Afghanistan and the region. Later, he invested in properties whose value soared exponentially after the Taliban was overthrown in 2001. He diversified into scrap metal and rice exporting in Pakistan and owns a freight company in Dubai.
In Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, Khairullah's reputation as a shrewd currency trader is leavened by his image as a philanthropist. Colleagues praised him for mobilising relief for Pakistani earthquake survivors or Afghan villagers tormented by frostbite during harsh winters.
Above all, Khairullah is a king of the hawala trade. U.S. officials believe his network of more than a dozen currency counters spans Afghanistan, Pakistan, Dubai and Iran.
The hawala trust-based money transfer system, which pre-dates the time of the Prophet Mohammed, is the banking system of choice in Afghanistan's cash-based economy.
Customers tend to be far happier entrusting their money to established hawala agents like Khairullah than a new crop of Western-style banks. A $900 million fraud at Kabul Bank, emblematic of the lack of ethics or controls in much of the formal sector, sharpened suspicions of the new Afghan financial elite.
"It is true that 35 to 40 years ago I had nothing," Khairullah said. "Maybe I couldn't even have raised 100,000 rupees back then. But God bestowed me with two eyes to see and a mind to think."
Current and former officials ascribe Khairullah's wealth to a different source: Afghanistan's burgeoning heroin trade.
"He is one of the biggest fish in the region," said General Khodaidad (who goes by one name), Afghanistan's counter-narcotics minister from 2007 to 2010.
A source in Pakistan's Anti-Narcotics Force also said Khairullah was suspected of involvement in trafficking. "He is rich and resourceful, therefore no one can touch him," he said.
In 2012, the farm-gate value of opium - the actual cut farmers receive from the trade - accounted for 4 percent of Afghan gross domestic product, or about $700 million, according to U.N. data. Afghanistan provides 90 percent of the global supply of heroin and other illegal opiates, which has an estimated annual street value of $68 billion.
"THEY SHOULD HANG ME"
The accusations against Khairullah date back to the austere era of Taliban rule in the late 1990s. Then, he mingled with a coterie of heroin exporters who thrived under the patronage of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the movement's enigmatic leader, according to two people from Kandahar familiar with the trade.
"He became close to the Taliban," said one of the sources. "He bought drugs and sold them and made lots of money."
The source added he had seen Khairullah visit Mullah Omar's compound in Kandahar city perhaps 20 times before the Taliban was toppled, forcing many of its commanders to flee to Quetta, where Khairullah maintains an office.
In the summer of 2000, the year before his ouster, Mullah Omar banned poppy, causing opium prices to skyrocket. That made fortunes for Khairullah and others who had amassed stockpiles, according to a member of Kandahar's provincial council.
Khairullah, who denies ever meeting Mullah Omar, said reports he was connected with the drug trade were concocted by his business rivals.
"I will be here five years from now, 10 years from now or 15 years from now," he said. "If they can prove their allegations against me with concrete evidence, then they can and should hang me for it."
"IRON TRIANGLE"
For much of the West's 11-year campaign, the art of tracking sources of insurgent funding was a neglected discipline at the Kabul headquarters of ISAF, the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.
The U.S. military, stretched in Iraq, resisted calls to pursue Afghan drug lords, fearing that "mission creep" into counter-narcotics would be a further drain on resources.
The role smuggling plays in sustaining the insurgency began to receive more attention in 2009 as part of a wider shake-up of the war effort under U.S. President Barack Obama, who tripled the number of American troops in Afghanistan.
Investigators suspect Khairullah stands at the centre of an "iron triangle" locking hawala dealers, heroin kingpins and militants into an increasingly profitable symbiosis.
Taliban commanders would collect opium from poppy growers, then hand it over at his shops in farming communities in return for instant payments, a Western official said.
"He would take opium and give you cash," he said.
Khairullah would then gather bulk quantities of opium in hidden storehouses to sell to traffickers for a lucrative margin, the official alleged.
U.S. officials say his hawala shops also served insurgents like a conventional bank, allowing Taliban leaders to make monthly payments to fighters, including their top commander in Helmand, a suspected major player in the heroin trade.
"As of 2010, Khairullah was a hawaladar, or hawala operator, for Taliban senior leadership and provided financial assistance to the Taliban," the Treasury statement said.
Khairullah denies the allegations. "I am an illiterate man," he said. "I have never been part of a political organisation either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan. My sole concern has been my business."
Like other hawaladars, he said he could not be expected to always know who his clients were. "It is not written on someone's forehead that he is a member of the Taliban," he said.
Esmatullah Helmand, a Khairullah relative who runs his Kabul branch, said far from being in cahoots with the insurgents, his boss had feared being attacked for moving money on behalf of trucking companies supplying ISAF.
"When we saw this thing on the news - that we were blacklisted - we were shocked," Esmatullah said.
"LOST HIS WAY"
Any hope Khairullah may have had of keeping the sanctions quiet was shattered when Afghan television broadcast reports of his designation on the U.S. Treasury and U.N. websites.
Like Western banks, hawala dealers run highly leveraged businesses with paper assets many times larger than the cash they hold. Shocks can tip them into bankruptcy.
Khairullah had faced an earlier crunch in 2010 after several of his partners incurred huge losses. The sanctions triggered a new crisis as hundreds of his remaining customers scrambled to retrieve their funds.
"People who would deposit their money with me for years are now standing outside my door," Khairullah said.
Within days of his designation by the U.S. Treasury, Khairullah had driven 200 kilometres (124 miles) from Kandahar to Quetta, an ISAF official said, dodging a U.N. travel ban that should have barred him from entering Pakistan.
At the same time, he began working his phones. Haji Najeebullah Akhtary, president of Kabul's Sarai Shahzada currency market, was among the first to receive a call.
"Immediately, he called me and said he was going to meet President Karzai," Akhtary said.
Approaching the president would have been a natural step. Karzai's family hails from Kandahar, and the president has tended to sympathise with community leaders nursing grievances against ISAF.
Shah Wali Karzai, one of the president's brothers and a prominent Kandahari, said he had hosted Khairullah's partner Sattar at a meeting aimed at settling a land dispute in February, before the pair were sanctioned.
Khairullah's hopes of winning a similar audience with the president came to nothing. Instead, Karzai ordered security chiefs to investigate him, a presidential spokesman said.
Undeterred, Khairullah sent another relative to Kabul to lobby Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, the intelligence agency, an NDS official said.
The NDS offered to work with the family to investigate the U.S. claims and inform Washington if they were unfounded, but the relative declined, the official added.
Mullah Sayed Mohammed Akhund, a lawmaker from Kandahar, also fielded frantic calls from his long-time friend.
"I guarantee that he hasn't paid even one penny to the Taliban," Akhund said. "He has lost his way and he doesn't know what to do."
TIP-OFF
As Khairullah called his contacts, the Afghan financial intelligence unit, FinTRACA, moved to freeze his assets.
Although hawala dealers can shift large sums purely by cooperating with fellow hawaladars, big players also rely on the formal banking system to help reconcile elaborate cross-border transactions that can involve millions of dollars.
When the blocking orders arrived at Afghanistan's commercial banks, the lenders told FinTRACA that Khairullah's accounts only held the equivalent of $20,000 - a fraction of the sums he is believed to have been moving.
FinTRACA did not provide the names of the banks.
"A couple of months prior to the sanctions, he had stopped transferring money via these accounts," said Mohammad Mustafa Massoudi, FinTRACA director-general. "He must have had some tip-off, some knowledge that it was coming."
Nevertheless, Khairullah said the sanctions had forced him to auction property to raise cash. A real estate agent in Kandahar said an agitated-looking Khairullah had visited him in August to try to cut a quick deal to sell 24 plots in a new development on the edge of the city for $360,000.
"His face told me he was very worried," the agent said.
As Afghan officials pondered the whereabouts of Khairullah's elusive hoard, Luke Bronin, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary for terrorist financing, boarded a plane for the Pakistani commercial capital of Karachi in early September.
U.S. officials say they consulted closely with Pakistan before sanctioning Khairullah, Sattar and HKHS, their hawala company, mindful of long-standing Pakistani resentment of pressure to crack down on the Taliban.
Bronin hammered home the importance of putting the two men out of business in two days of meetings with financial and security officials in Karachi and Islamabad.
"They have been designated not only by the U.S. but also by the United Nations," Bronin told Reuters. "So we have every expectation that Pakistan will take the necessary steps to shut them down."
Pakistan's central bank said it routinely implements U.N. freeze orders, but does not divulge details.
In Quetta, Khairullah appears to operate unimpeded, working from an unmarked first-floor office guarded by a metal door opposite a motorbike repair shop. Western officials marvel at his continued ability to raise six-figure dollar sums in cash.
Fuming at his adversaries from his Quetta headquarters, Khairullah seems anxious as well as angry. A fellow hawala merchant, Haji Mohammed Qasim, was arrested by Afghan and U.S. forces in Kandahar in mid-September.
The U.S. Treasury has since accused Qasim of transferring millions of dollars on behalf of the Taliban and hit him with sanctions. Perturbed dealers in Kandahar say they do not even know where he is being held.
"PERSECUTED"
Haji Agha Jan, another currency trader, said his business had collapsed after ISAF detained him for 25 days last year to interrogate him over his client list. "People are afraid that the Americans will arrest me again," he said, chewing green tobacco in his empty shop.
Resentment of the U.S. sanctions in Kandahar's money bazaar is echoed by the wider business community In Kabul.
The Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries, the country's leading business lobby, has been sharply critical of U.S. authorities for publicly naming suspected Taliban supporters without submitting evidence to Afghan courts.
"They are destroying the image of individuals and businesses," said Mohammad Qurban Haqjo, the Chamber president. "In other countries, nobody is allowed to do that."
On a recent afternoon in the city's currency market, no customers called at shop 237, Khairullah's counter. A storefront sign emblazoned with his name had been effaced with blue paint. Only a Koranic inscription above the door had been left untouched. It read: "And God is the Best of Providers."
"The Americans and the United Nations have persecuted me," Khairullah said. "They will have to compensate me for my losses."
(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni, Hamid Shalizi, Jessica Donati and Abdel Aziz Ibrahimi in KABUL, Mahmoud Habboush in DUBAI and Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR) (Reporting By Matthew Green; Editing by Bill Tarrant)
Afghan Troops Doing 'Better Than Expected': Cameron
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 22 December 2012
British Prime Minister David Cameron said Afghan security forces were "doing better than expected," as he defended plans for the British force to be cut to 5,200 next year, according to his office.
Cameron on was paying a pre-Christmas visit Thursday to British troops in Afghanistan.
The premier, who was touring Camp Bastion in Helmand Province, said he was confident that the draw-down of nearly half of the British troops, announced in parliament on Wednesday, would not pave the way for an increase in terrorist activity.
"The fact is they [Afghan security forces] are doing better than expected," he said."This is withdrawal. This is draw-down based on success, not on failure."
He added that the decision was taken "for good military reasons" and it has been done in a proper way.
"We're confident it can be done while making sure Afghanistan does not return to become a haven of terrorism which is, of course, why we came here in the first place," stressed the prime minister.
With 9,500 troops, Britain has the second largest number of troops in Afghanistan, after the United States. It has lost 438 soldiers in Afghanistan since 2001. Most UK troops are based in the southern Helmand province.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
KABUL, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- Nasiri Market caught fire in Afghan capital Kabul Saturday night, causing millions of U.S. dollar damages to the shopkeepers, police said on Sunday.
The surprising incident was apparently caused by carelessness, according to police.
"In the wee hours of Sunday the Nasiri Market in the first precinct of Kabul caught fire resultantly scores of shops turned to ashes," Kabul Police said in a statement released here in the evening.
The fire has been extinguished by the fire fighters, but still light flame of fire is seen in the underground portion of the market, the statement admitted.
Meantime, a police officer at the site of incident told Xinhua that more than 600 shops had turned to ashes. However, he declined to give his name, saying authorized officials would brief the media after investigation.
The incident, according to police, took place at 00:30 a.m. local time in Nasiri Market with hundreds of garment shops, also a popular business in the city.
"I am lucky I could only save my 90,000 U.S. dollars cash from my safe in my shop early this morning but all of my goods are burnt as you see," a shop owner Sakhi Mohammad told Xinhua near the scene.
Another shopkeeper said that the fire had devoured goods and cash worth 250,000 U.S. dollars.
In the war-torn Afghanistan where security is loose and banking system is not so advanced and secure, many people choose to keep their cash in foreign banks or circulate in business.
"The damages could be millions of dollars," Mohammad said, adding hundreds of shops around the area escaped the fire as the fire fighters were working hard to bring the situation under the control.
At least 20 people were killed and 183 others were seriously injured in two separate deadly fires in Kabul in July this year.
Taliban Hint at Softer Line in Talks With Afghan Leaders
New York Times By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and TAIMOOR SHAH December 22, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - After years of deriding Afghanistan’s government and army as corrupt tools of Western occupiers, the Taliban have begun publicly airing a softer vision for the country’s future, with senior insurgent leaders saying the militants are willing to govern alongside other Afghan factions and even to adopt the current American-financed army as their own.
That message was delivered over the past few days by Taliban envoys during private meetings with Afghan officials and opposition politicians near Paris, according to officials close to the talks, and the softer approach has been echoed in recent interviews with Taliban figures loyal to the group’s nominal leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar. Together, it is the furthest that the Taliban’s senior leadership has gone to express in some official way that the group would be willing to operate as a mainstream Afghan political faction rather than aiming to return as conquering rulers after the end of the NATO combat mission in 2014.
But with the Taliban there are always questions.
The group is increasingly divided by power struggles, according to some Western officials and Afghans close to the Taliban, and there has sometimes seemed to be a disconnect between conciliatory statements from the top and the aggression of field commanders. As well, Afghan and American officials trying to open peace talks with the Taliban have long struggled with whether any offer of compromise could be seen as legitimate or just tactical maneuvering to gain public support.
Still, the new statements offer the tantalizing prospect of a Taliban leadership that is ready to talk, even if many of its aims are out of line with the Afghan government and its Western allies.
That willingness may be in part because of a still-unfolding feud at the group’s top levels, according to recent interviews with a senior Taliban commander and another Afghan man close to the group. Those two men, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say that the Taliban’s hard-line military commander, Mullah Abdul Quyyum Zakir, a former detainee at the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, is being pushed aside in favor of more moderate rivals.
Mullah Zakir is seen as a fighter with little vision for finding a way to peacefully end the war, and he faces growing criticism over a series of setbacks in recent years at the hands of coalition forces whose raids are said to have cut deeply into the ranks of the group’s field commanders.
Many of the surviving field commanders have openly complained that Mullah Zakir is unwilling or unable to aid their fight, the two men said. As a group, those lower-level figures still hold sway in the Taliban: their unhappiness at learning the Taliban’s leadership was engaged in a nascent peace process with the United States this year helped scuttle that effort.
Vying to replace Mullah Zakir is the Taliban’s logistics chief, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, who also serves as Mullah Omar’s second deputy. He is considered a relative moderate within the movement, the men said.
In one indication that Mullah Mansour holds the upper hand, it was a pair of his loyalists — Shahabuddin Delawar and Muhammad Naim — who represented the Taliban at the conference outside Paris on Thursday and Friday, said the Afghan man close to the Taliban.
At the conference, and in interviews, Taliban officials offered a vision of a Taliban ready to govern again, but in harmony with the current Afghan government structure, even if they still hate President Hamid Karzai and his allies. The senior Taliban official said, for instance, that the militants would be willing to offer a general amnesty to those who have fought against them, allowing the continuation of the current army and national police force that the United States has spent $39 billion to build and supply. The militants also envision retaining many of the government institutions the West put in place.
In an obvious attempt to answer some of the harshest criticism of the group’s brutal rule from 1996 through 2001, the envoys said that in a new Taliban-led government, women would have the chance to go to school in “an Islamic way,” according to the text of a speech the envoys delivered in France that the Taliban sent to news organizations on Saturday.
The senior Taliban official, in a recent interview, said the shift had the backing of Mullah Omar and it reflected a growing understanding among the movement’s leaders that as Afghanistan has changed, so must they.
“We realize we cannot run Afghanistan without the support of educated people, and we will not be tough as we were,” the senior Taliban official said.
But persuading Afghans — especially those of the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara ethnic groups who suffered heavily at the Taliban’s hands — that the group might abandon its autocratic and brutal ways is a tall order. Gen. Atiqullah Baryalai, a prominent member of the Northern Alliance that battled the Taliban in the 1990s and that now makes up the core of Afghanistan’s political opposition, characterized the Taliban’s overtures as “propaganda.”
Although he said it was positive that the Taliban were showing a willingness to talk, he added: “I don’t think the Taliban are honest with what they said there in Paris. It is more about publicity, and about avoiding progress.”
The Taliban do appear willing to go only so far in reaching out to current rivals. In the speech delivered in France, the Taliban envoys bluntly declared: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — the Taliban’s formal name for itself — “is a legitimate fact. It is still the legitimate government.”
As well, some of the group’s central demands still appear to be no-go propositions for Mr. Karzai’s government and American officials. The Taliban still demand that all Western military forces, even advisers, leave Afghanistan after the formal end of the Western military mission in 2014. The group also demands that the country’s Constitution be rewritten along strictly Islamic lines. The current Constitution recognizes Islam as the primary arbiter of the country’s laws, and Afghan and American officials have said they are willing only to see it amended, not rewritten.
The Taliban also appeared to reiterate their refusal to negotiate with Mr. Karzai’s government, and they said that they would consider the scheduled elections in 2014 meaningless because the country would still be under foreign occupation.
“These elections, laws and administrative affairs were designed based on foreigners’ demands,” according to the envoys’ statement.
But, at the same time, it does appear that the Taliban are backing off a demand that they negotiate solely with the United States, and they appear increasingly open to working with other political groups to run the country.
“Mullah Omar has frequently insisted that we do not seek a monopoly on political power, and we want a government of all Afghans in our beloved country,” the Taliban statement said.
There was no immediate reaction from the Karzai administration to Saturday’s statement. A senior Western official who works in Kabul said that the Taliban “do seem like they are inching toward where the international community and the Afghan government would like to see them.” But, the official cautioned, “I think it is always smart to not be too optimistic. This is a slow process.”
Matthew Rosenberg reported from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Jawad Sukhanyar, Sangar Rahimi and Habib Zahori contributed reporting from Kabul.
Taliban call for new Afghanistan constitution
AFP 22/12/2012
KABUL - Afghanistan's Taliban has called for a new constitution as a pre-condition for it joining the nation's fledgling peace process, according to a declaration issued by representatives at a landmark meeting in France.
Representatives from the country's warring factions met Thursday for two days of talks that diplomats hope will bolster relations in the war-torn country.
It is the first time since a US-led bombing campaign drove the Taliban from power in 2001 that senior representatives have sat down with officials from the government and other opposition groups to discuss the country's future, in a meeting brokered by a French think tank.
"Afghanistan's present constitution has no value for us because it was made under the shadows of B52 bombers of the invaders," said the declaration, which was handed to participants during the meeting and later released to the media.
"Islamic Emirate, for the welfare of their courageous nation, need a constitution that is based on the principles of the holy religion of Islam, national interest, historical achievements, and social justice," it read.
The meeting in France was organised by the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS), and was held behind closed doors at an undisclosed location near Paris.
The talks come against a background of accelerating efforts to draw the Taliban and other opponents of President Hamid Karzai into negotiations on how Afghanistan will be run after Western troops withdraw at the end of 2014.
Karzai's government has drawn up a roadmap for peace which involves persuading the Taliban and other insurgent groups to agree to a ceasefire as a prelude to becoming peaceful players in the country's nascent democracy.
As a first step in that direction, Karzai's administration has been attempting to secure the release of top Taliban prisoners held by neighbouring Pakistan.
Despite the landmark meeting, the Taliban's declaration continued to display a lack of trust in the government.
"The invaders and their friends don't have a clear roadmap for peace," it stated.
"Sometimes they say we want to talk to the Islamic Emirate, but sometimes they say we will talk with Pakistan. This kind of vague stance will never get to peace," it said.
To date the Taliban has refused to negotiate with the government, which it regards as a puppet of the United States. Discussions with American officials were suspended in March.
In France the Taliban was represented by their senior figures Shahabuddin Dilawar and Naeem Wardak, a move seen as a sign that the Islamist group is contemplating going beyond exploratory discussions.
The Taliban, who ruled in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, were ousted from power by a US-led invasion and have since waged an 11-year insurgency to topple the US-supported government of Hamid Karzai.
Political Parties Hopeful After Paris; Taliban Demand Constitutional Change
TOLOnews.com By Haseeb Moudoodi Saturday, 22 December 2012
Some political parties participating in the Paris meeting have expressed hope about its outcomes, while the Taliban representatives read a statement calling for changes to the Constitution.
Mohammad Hanif Atmar, former minister of interior and representative of the Rights and Justice Party at the talks, told TOLOnews in a phone interview that disagreements among participants were slight.
"The similarities of our views and other things we had in common have made us extremely hopeful for our country's future," Atmar said.
"All stressed on peace and a political solution."
Atmar added that a second meeting similar to this one will be held in Paris in one month.
A spokesman for Abdullah Abdullah's National Coalition expressed optimism about the future of the talks.
"We are confident that we will reach peace if the involved groups agreed over real peace negotiations," said Engineer Mohammad Asim, who was not in Paris.
Taliban representatives stressed on the complete withdrawal of foreign troops and on changes to the Constitution. Their contention with the current constitution suggests a stance at direct odds with the Afghan government, the civil society and the international community, all of which have stressed the Tailban's acceptance of the Constitution as a prerequisite for any peace deal.
"The civic, personal and political rights of all of the country's citizens must be taken into account in the Constitution. The Constitution should guarantee, in a fair way, the rights of all ethnic groups and should clarify the nature of the relationship between the government and the people," said a prepared statement read at the meeting by Taliban representative Maulawi Shahabuddin Delawar.
Mentioning the "personal and political rights" of the people could be a hint that the Taliban are asking for guarantees of free political participation in the event of a peace deal.
The Taliban text accused the government and the international community for actively prioritizing war over peace efforts.
"To bring peace, talks must be prioritized over fighting. Right now, Kabul and its international allies aim to put pressure on the Taliban to bring peace as they define it, which really increases the challenges [toward a peaceful settlement]."
High Peace Council Deputy Ataullah Loudin, who was not in Paris, continued to downplay the meeting's importance.
"The Council welcomes any peace effort because of our purpose, which is mediation between government and opposing groups. But the Taliban did not speak about peace in the meeting, just read their statement, so I think that does not have any positive or negative bearing over peace."
10 Afghan Taliban militants give up fighting
KABUL, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- Ten Taliban fighters have given up fighting and handed over their weapons to police in Kunduz province 250 km north of Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, Interior Ministry said in a statement released here.
"A ten-member group of armed militants under Mullah Zahidullah laid down arms and joined peace process in Kunduz city today," the statement added.
These people were active outside Kunduz provincial capital the Kunduz city and with their joining to peace process the security will be further improved in the province, the statement noted.
Taliban militants fighting the government are yet to comment.
More than 3,500 anti-government militants, according to officials, have laid down arms and joined the government-backed peace process over the past one year in Afghanistan, a claim rejected by Taliban outfit as baseless.
Taliban preys on Afghanistan's corrupt police force
As troops leave, secret papers reveal extent of bribery among Afghan officers
The Independent By Brian Brady Sunday 23 December 2012
The Afghan police charged with maintaining security in their own country as coalition troops begin to pull out within months are still "endemically corrupt" and riven with problems including nepotism and drug abuse, internal government documents have revealed.
Foreign Office (FCO) papers obtained by The Independent on Sunday disclose official concerns about the fate of Afghanistan and its chances of holding the Taliban at bay, if its leaders fail to "root out corruption" throughout the ranks of the Afghan National Police (ANP).
A confidential report on the performance of the Afghan Uniform Police (AUP), the nation's major law-enforcement body, observed in October: "Unless radical change is introduced to improve the actual and perceived integrity and legitimacy of officers within the AUP, then the organisation will continue to provide an ineffective and tainted service to citizens for decades to come."
The assessments, in a series of official FCO documents, lay bare the continuing anxieties over the war-torn country's capacity to function as a democratic state when international troops begin withdrawing from their combat role in the country in 2013. The vast majority are scheduled to be out by the end of 2014.
The details come only days after David Cameron said during a visit to Afghanistan that British troops could be withdrawn even more quickly than planned, because local security forces were "doing better than expected". The Prime Minister announced that UK numbers would be nearly halved to 5,200 next year, as part of the withdrawal plan.
The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, yesterday accepted that widespread corruption was "a bitter reality" Ω but claimed it was largely fuelled by the countries funding his government and security forces.
"The part of this corruption that is in our offices is a small part: that is bribes," the President said in a speech on national television. "The other part of corruption, the large part, is hundreds of millions of dollars that are not ours. We shouldn't blame ourselves for that. That part is from others and imposed on us."
However, the FCO reports a catalogue a series of home-grown problems with Afghanistan's police, which could hinder the country's development in future years.
In October, a report on the AUP in Helmand province questioned the chances of achieving the police's stated goal of "eliminating corruption all over the country".
The report observed: "Whilst this is undeniably a laudable aspiration, the reality of the situation in Afghanistan is that corruption is endemic; woven into the very fabric of society and in particular public institutions. This fact renders the objective unachievable, with some commentators arguing that the issue is generational and cannot therefore be dealt with effectively for many years to come."
The report called for a complaints procedure and action against "patronage and nepotism issues in the appointment of senior officers".
It added: "The continued absence of a reliable system for recruiting and promoting AUP officers will see the status quo being maintained, where people motivated by personal gain and/or harbouring nefarious intent have access to senior and influential roles within the service."
Another FCO paper, on the "Rule of Law in Afghanistan Post-2014", stated that the justice sector was improving, but it added: "Anti-corruption efforts are off-track, with political interference notable in high-level prosecutions."
ANP officers, who are usually at the front line of the security forces' dealings with the public, have to endure lower pay and fatality rates twice as high as their counterparts in the Afghan army. But one paper, entitled "Changes in ANP", observed that: "The Afghan police suffer from many problems. Of the 82,000 nominally serving on the force, around 60,000 are believed to be working. We estimate over 70 per cent are illiterate, and drug abuse is an issue."
The rate of drug use among ANP officers was estimated at 9 per cent, compared to a national average of 8 per cent.
Another report, assessing the ANP's progress, reported that the force had "shortcomings in a number of areas", including corruption and theft. It added: "Concerns remain about corruption, criminal activity, drug-use and the lack of a clear 'end state' for the force. The ANP is viewed negatively by the population, with multiple reports of illegal taxation, extortion and other serious crimes, as well as drug addiction."
The Labour MP Sandra Osborne, a member of the Defence Select Committee, said the Afghan police were "hated". She added: "It will take years for a fully legitimate police force to come about, if ever. Eventually it will be up to the Afghan government, and that is the real problem, as is widely recognised Ω the lack of a stable political settlement."
Roland Paris, director of the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa, said: "Prime Minister Cameron is declaring success prematurely. There is little reason to believe that the ANP will be significantly more effective or less corrupt in 2014."
An FCO spokeswoman said the development of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) was "a significant achievement". She added: "It is because of the increasing strength, confidence and capability of the ANSF that the transition process is gaining momentum. As a result, UK forces will be able to move from mentoring at battalion level to brigade level by the end of 2013, thereby allowing a significant troop drawdown, as announced by the Prime Minister this week."
Could mineral wealth transform Afghan economy?
BBC News 22 December 2012
Three international energy firms have been shortlisted to develop lucrative oil deposits in northern Afghanistan. It is hoped such deals could reduce dependency on foreign aid. BBC reporters visited three key industrial projects to see whether the hopes are justified.
It is estimated that Afghanistan's deposits of metals, hydrocarbons and rare earth minerals could be worth at least $1tn (£630bn).
But experts are warning that mishandling of the deals and security factors could undermine these projects, as international troops prepare to pull out in 2014.
In the 1970s the Ghori cement works in northern Baghlan province was one of Afghanistan's most successful companies, employing hundreds of people and churning out thousands of tonnes of high-grade cement for export to the USSR.
Although 30 years of civil war took a huge toll on the plant, its new owners are hoping to take advantage of the country's construction boom to turn the factory's fortunes round.
Walking around the plant, the scale of the challenge is obvious.
Manager Eslamuddin Ahmadi points out that the 50-year old Soviet-made equipment is still in operation on the factory floor. It is still possible to see signs in Russian on the ageing and rusting machinery.
But a lack of basic infrastructure is holding things back.
"There's a big demand for our cement," says Mr Ahmadi, "but we can't increase output until our power supply problems are sorted out."
Although the raw materials the plant needs - limestone, and coal for power generation - are both available nearby, the electricity shortages will not be dealt with until plans to build a new generating plant become a reality.
The Ghori factory currently meets about 60% of northern Afghanistan's cement needs. Local traders say it is cheaper and better than the Pakistan-produced alternative which has to be laboriously trucked in.
But the plant is still not operating anywhere near full capacity, only paying its work force a minimal wage - something that has caused big disappointment locally.
Many of the 600 workers at the plant insist their wages are not enough to live on.
Fuelling the sense of resentment is the perception that while the workforce might be living in poverty, someone else is making money from the plant.
Ghori Cement was privatised in 2006 in a controversial deal which Mining and Industry Minister Wahidullah Sharani has heavily criticised.
Mr Sharani said the 30-year contract - which saw the plant taken over a by a consortium including President Karzai's brother, Mahmoud - was only four pages long and full of "financial, legal and technical flaws".
Mahmoud Karzai sold his shares in the company managing Ghori in 2011 and is no longer connected with the enterprise, but in an interview with the BBC he hit back at the criticisms.
"It's not the length of a contract that's important, it's what in it," he said.
Mr Karzai said the contract had obliged his company to maintain two obsolete blocs at Ghori rather than focussing on building a new modern plant.
He also accused the government of failing to support his attempts to negotiate multi-million dollar loans from foreign banks to rebuild Ghori and to build a power plant at the site.
"There is zero interest in public-private partnership in Afghanistan," he said.
Questions have also been raised about the terms of another high profile deal billed as a potential game-changer for the Afghan economy - the concession to mine the massive Aynak copper deposit mine in Logar province near Kabul.
In 2007 a Chinese company called the China Metallurgical Group Corporation was awarded the contract to mine the deposit, but details of the deal have still not been made public, fuelling rumours of bribery and kick-backs.
A report by the campaign group Global Witness says that the lack of openness surrounding the project could threaten its longer term prospects.
"It's a massive shortcoming," says Juman Kubba of Global Witness.
"Already from the local community we are hearing that they see it as a secret deal. It builds a situation of mistrust, and that in turn can lead to violence and is a very negative thing for the project and for the mining sector in general."
Afghan officials, however, are optimistic that the country could earn up to $400m (£248m) every year from Aynak, and the deposits could generate thousands of new jobs.
But looking at the site today, it is clear that there is a very long way to go.
The Chinese are currently carrying out a survey, and once that is complete they will need to build proper roads and a railway line to the site.
There is also the problem of landmines. The mining ministry has signed a contract for mine-clearing work at Aynak - it will take nearly two years and more than eight million square metres of land will need to be made safe.
And then there is the added complication of history. Copper mining at Aynak goes back to the Buddhist era, 2,000 years ago, and before any new work can be carried out archaeologists need to complete a full excavation of the site.
Archaeologists there told the BBC that more time is needed to complete the painstaking task of moving everything they have found to a new place. But according to the contract, if the work is not completed by the end of the year penalties will have to be paid.
But a more fundamental problem is security and how to prevent such an important site from becoming a target for Taliban attacks.
US-based Afghan expert Anthony Cordesman says that this is an issue which is often overlooked by economic assessments of the country's potential mineral wealth.
"Nobody can provide security," he told the BBC. "And you not only need security for the facility, you have to be able to move the output. You have to create the processing facilities and you need power and security for those facilities."
Chinese companies are also involved in developing potentially lucrative oil reserves in the Amu River basin in the north of the country. It has come a long way since a bespectacled King Zahir Shah opened the site in the 1950s.
During the first three years of the project, crude will be exported for refining abroad. But under the terms of the deal an oil refinery will be built locally. China has also promised to build a proper road to facilitate transport to and from the site.
Regional governor Abdul Jabbar Haqbin says oil has the power to change lives for the better in his area - and his optimism is shared by local people.
"We're going to get electricity," local shopkeeper Mohammad Hassan told the BBC. "And we hope this project will provide jobs for our young people."
But like Aynak, and the Ghori plant, questions have been raised about the terms of the deal to privatise the Amu basin depots.
There have also been questions about the tender process and how China National Petroleum and Watan came to win the bid.
In response the Afghan government ordered an independent review in 2011 which concluded that the process had been fair and transparent.
Bids are now in for the rights to develop the neighbouring and much larger Tajik basin, which is estimated to hold up to one billion barrels of oil. Minister Shahrani is expected to announce the winner early next year.
Both the Amu and Tajik basins also have gas reserves - in the 1970s and 80s Afghanistan used to export gas to Soviet Central Asia in return for supplies of food and military equipment.
It is hoped that a small gas plant near the town of Sheberghan - which supplies electricity to around 200 homes in Jowzjan province - can now be replicated on a far bigger scale.
Khwaja Tajuddin is one of the lucky ones who has a gas supply at home. He pays $4 (£2.50) for a monthly gas supply and says it has made a big difference to him and his family.
"We don't suffer from smoke any more," he told the BBC. "We have gas for 18 to 19 hours. In winter, we have it 24 hours. It is good for cooking. We use it when we don't have electricity and we use it for heating our house."
Mr Cordesman says that if Afghanistan wants to realise its economic potential in the next decade it will need a strong leader who can negotiate a workable peace settlement and push forward more badly-needed reforms.
"Talking of a trillion dollars would still remain in practical terms a hollow farce," he said.
"But could the country actually fund economic development? Would there be enough resources and enough exports to make a difference? The answer to that is almost certainly, yes."
Ali Yawar Salimi, Sohrab Sirat, Habib Qooyosh, Abdullah Stanakzai and Waheed Massoud contributed to this article.
Afghanistan condemn torture of Pakistani nationals
By Sajad Khaama Press December 23, 2012
Afghan foreign ministry strongly condemned torture of Pakistani nationals by Afghan security forces.
Foreign ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai said Afghan government has launched probe in this regard and the insisted that the government is committed for the security of Pakistani citizens in Afghanistan.
He also said that the Afghan Charge D’Affaires has met with the Pakistani officials in this regard.
Pakistani security officials on Saturday sealed the Torkham border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, in response to the torture on Pakistani labourers by Afghan security personnel.
A Foreign Office spokesman said that Pakistan has taken serious note of Afghan soldiers’ beating up of the Pakistanis despite their having valid travel documents and summoned the Afghan Charge d’ Affaires to foreign ministry in the morning and lodged a strong protest, seeking an investigation into the incident and action against those responsible.
A similar protest was lodged by the Pakistan Ambassador in Kabul with the Afghan government.
The labourers told that they had travelled to Afghanistan for work but the company concerned refused to pay their wages. They added they had also been locked up in Afghanistan’s Pul-i-Charkhi prison where they were tortured by jail authorities. And when they were returning, Afghan forces allegedly tore their Pakistani passports, snatched their money and beat up them brutally.
Presence of Foreigners After 2014 Benefits Afghanistan: Karzai
TOLOnews.com By Sharif Amiry Saturday, 22 December 2012
Talking at a conference on the fight against corruption, President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that the government of Afghanistan is prepared to reach a mutual agreement with the United States over the security pact, which he considered beneficial to Afghanistan.
"There is no doubt that the presence of foreigners after 2014 is for the good of Afghanistan. We are ready to reach an agreement with the United States over the security pact; however, the US should consider our requests as well," said President Karzai.
Speaking at Amani High School, President Karzai called the training and equipping of Afghan forces as the most important request from Kabul in connection with the pact to be signed with Washington.
"The most important request from us is strengthening and training of our Afghan security forces. They [international forces] cannot take prisoners in Afghanistan, cannot have prisons, and have to respect our sovereignty," Karzai said.
The international forces fighting the insurgency for 11 years are ending their combat mission by December 2014. A much smaller number of Nato forces is expected to remain in Afghanistan, mainly for smaller scale counter-terrorism operations.
No Love Lost: Afghan Woman Exposes Corrupt Judge's Unusual Offer
RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan By Frud Bezhan December 22, 2012
A senior judge has been convicted of bribery and fired from his position after a perversion of justice exposed the invasiveness of corruption within Afghan society.
Zahoruddin, a 65-year-old judge in the country's eastern Nangarhar Province, who like many Afghans goes only by one name, was convicted on December 19 of bribery and corruption charges stemming from a young woman's divorce case.
Zahoruddin and another judge apparently became aware that Dewa, a 22-year-old freelance journalist, had filed for divorce and conspired to extort bribes from her in exchange for ensuring her request was granted.
Zahoruddin contacted Dewa, offering to help. But upon meeting with the young woman, he demanded more than $2,000 in bribes. When his offer was refused, he offered an alternative -- entering a life of wealthy matrimony with none other than the judge himself.
Unknown to the judge was that Dewa had come to the meeting armed with a hidden recording device. She recorded the entire 15-minute exchange. Dewa sent the recording of their conversation to the Supreme Court in Kabul and a criminal investigation ensued.
Second Judge Investigated
Zahoruddin strenuously denied the allegations against him, insisting that his marriage proposal was merely a "joke." Upon being confronted with the evidence, the judge accused Dewa of fabricating the evidence as part of a conspiracy to discredit him. Despite his pleas, Zahoruddin was convicted on December 19 of bribery and corruption by a court in Nangarhar's capital, Jalalabad. It was not immediately clear whether he received a jail sentence.
Fazil Hadi Fazil, the chief justice of the appeals court in Nangarhar, said police are also investigating another judge, Tahir Rohani, who was presiding over Dewa's divorce case. In his testimony, Zahoruddin said he and Rohani had hatched a plan to split the bribe money.
"Our superiors are very serious about these kinds of allegations," Fazil says. "Judge Tahir Rohani, who is a senior judge at the family court in Nangarhar, is being investigated and questioned by the Supreme Court. The court will soon reach a verdict in that case."
Dewa, who has spent the last few weeks in hiding in Kabul, has welcomed the verdict. Her divorce case, however, has yet to be resolved.
Dewa claims that, after revealing the secret recording of her conversation with Zahoruddin, she received a death threat from the judge. Out of concerns for her safety, police put her in a safe house in Kabul, where she remained during the police investigation and subsequent trial.
"When my story became public, I received a phone call not long after," Dewa says. "[Zahoruddin] told me 'You got what you wanted, and now you have dishonored me in front of everyone.' He said I wouldn't be alive to enjoy my freedom."
'Shower Her With Gold'
Dewa says her ordeal began last month when she filed her divorce papers at a courthouse in Jalalabad. Within days, Dewa says, she received Zahoruddin's offer to help and set up a meeting.
After refusing his bribe request, Dewa says, the marital offer came. Zahoruddin boasted about how his standing as a judge could protect her and offered her a solid financial future. In the course of the 15-minute recording, Zahoruddin can be heard saying he would "shower her with gold." The judge is also heard repeating his marriage proposal some 15 times.
His marital advances spurned, the judge left and swore he would ensure Dewa's divorce papers would never be formalized.
Despite Zahoruddin's conviction, Dewa says the media attention surrounding the case has exposed her to possible retaliation. Even so, Dewa says she has no regrets about doing her part to expose rampant corruption in the country.
"I raised my voice because I wanted to stand up against and get rid of corruption," she says. "I want the government to help me with my security so that my life is not in danger. I've left my hometown in Nangarhar Province and I can't go back."
Integrity Watch Afghanistan, a local nongovernmental organization, estimates that Afghans, who have consistently identified corruption as among their biggest concerns, collectively pay bribes amounting to $1 billion a year, about 5 percent of the country's entire annual gross domestic product.
Zahoruddin's conviction is a rare success story. Despite President Hamid Karzai's repeated promises to clean up corruption, analysts say there have been few results from his initiatives, citing the government's failure to prosecute a single high-level corruption case.
Written by Frud Bezhan, based on reporting by RFE/RL's Afghan Service
SPECIAL REPORT - Stalking the Taliban in Afghan currency markets
Reuters By Matthew Green Sun Dec 23, 2012
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Haji Khairullah Barakzai is the ultimate Afghan success story: illiterate village boy makes a fortune thanks to a lifetime of hard work, unerring street smarts and God's favour.
But to the U.S. Treasury Department, he is one of the biggest bankers to the Taliban, the architect of an underground network that converts opium grown in the poppy fields of his native southern Afghanistan into cash.
On June 29, the United States and United Nations slapped "terror finance" sanctions on Khairullah and his 25-year-old currency-exchange business, freezing his assets and imposing a travel ban. The move marked a new phase in an escalating but little known campaign to starve the insurgency of drug money ahead of a handover to Afghan forces in 2014.
A Treasury statement accused Khairullah of "donating money and providing financial services to the Taliban", which used his cash transfer service "in support of the Taliban's narcotics and terrorist operations".
Treasury's evidence is classified, but Afghan sources and Western officials familiar with Khairullah painted a portrait of a man with long-standing ties to the Taliban and the drug trade alongside significant legitimate businesses.
Khairullah's friends and associates describe an entirely different figure, a patriarchal pillar of the community who in the murky world of Afghan currency trading cannot always be expected to know the true identity of his customers.
"I am a businessman, and a businessman is like a ram. Anyone in authority can come and grab it by its neck and slaughter it," Khairullah told Reuters, in his first interview since the sanctions were imposed.
"My life has become hell. I have lost my credibility and reputation. I have been declared guilty without any verdict from a judge," he said. He was speaking by telephone from Quetta, the city in southwest Pakistan where he sought sanctuary after Washington named him as a key Taliban financier.
The showdown between Khairullah and his pursuers opens a rare window into another kind of war, where financial intelligence trumps firepower, and captured territory is measured in frozen accounts.
It is a war the West has not been winning. Milking money from the heroin trade, donors in the Gulf and extortion rackets on NATO contractors, the Taliban increased its income to $400 million in the last Afghan calendar year, according to U.N. estimates. About a quarter came from narcotics.
"PHONE CALL AND A HANDSHAKE"
Since sanctioning Khairullah and his business partner Haji Abdul Sattar Barakzai, the U.S. government has stepped up its campaign to disrupt the insurgents' revenue streams. Washington has hit militant groups, guerrilla commanders and other currency dealers with a slew of similar measures.
U.S. officials acknowledge it is hard to rank the significance of any one of a core group of suspected Taliban money men with precision, but they believe Khairullah is integral to the movement's funding structure.
Proponents say squeezing the cash pipelines that pay for fighters and weapons is a smart way to pressure the Taliban while the vast majority of foreign combat troops is being withdrawn.
The approach could also be used to exert leverage over Taliban hardliners, if halting attempts to foster peace talks gain momentum. Tentative contacts between the United States and the Taliban suffered a setback in March when the two sides could not agree on a proposed prisoner swap. But the White House remains keen to pursue dialogue.
The hunt for Khairullah's presumed millions points to the sheer difficulty of choking Taliban funding channels.
Investigators who venture into the region's forbidding ecosystem of illicit commerce find that lines between legitimate trade and criminality often blur, hand-written ledgers are barely decipherable, and deceptively nondescript offices move mountains of cash.
"Everything is done on a phone call and a handshake," said one U.S. official. "The record system or the paper trail that allow you to connect the dots is not as clear as the Western system."
In Kandahar's seven-storey money market, where turbaned dealers haggle over bricks of well-worn notes, Khairullah's colleagues leapt to the defence of a respected member of their age-old fraternity.
"When we went to his office, we only saw people changing money or drinking tea or eating sweets," said Haji Qandi Agha, a regal-looking trader who is the market's president. "There was no talk of the Taliban or heroin."
Agha gestured to a man with a close-cropped beard and embroidered skull cap who had just approached his counter.
"For example, this man is sending money," he said, after the customer produced a sheaf of grubby bills from his waistcoat. "What if the government or America captures him and says he's Taliban? Is it my crime?"
The man, counting with deft thumbs, did not look up.
CANDY SELLER TO CURRENCY KING
Khairullah was born into a modest family in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province, where he revealed his entrepreneurial streak as a boy by selling sweets from a handcart, according to two politicians who knew him.
Khairullah, now about 50, said he built his empire from humble beginnings, starting out by trading goods within Afghanistan and the region. Later, he invested in properties whose value soared exponentially after the Taliban was overthrown in 2001. He diversified into scrap metal and rice exporting in Pakistan and owns a freight company in Dubai.
In Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, Khairullah's reputation as a shrewd currency trader is leavened by his image as a philanthropist. Colleagues praised him for mobilising relief for Pakistani earthquake survivors or Afghan villagers tormented by frostbite during harsh winters.
Above all, Khairullah is a king of the hawala trade. U.S. officials believe his network of more than a dozen currency counters spans Afghanistan, Pakistan, Dubai and Iran.
The hawala trust-based money transfer system, which pre-dates the time of the Prophet Mohammed, is the banking system of choice in Afghanistan's cash-based economy.
Customers tend to be far happier entrusting their money to established hawala agents like Khairullah than a new crop of Western-style banks. A $900 million fraud at Kabul Bank, emblematic of the lack of ethics or controls in much of the formal sector, sharpened suspicions of the new Afghan financial elite.
"It is true that 35 to 40 years ago I had nothing," Khairullah said. "Maybe I couldn't even have raised 100,000 rupees back then. But God bestowed me with two eyes to see and a mind to think."
Current and former officials ascribe Khairullah's wealth to a different source: Afghanistan's burgeoning heroin trade.
"He is one of the biggest fish in the region," said General Khodaidad (who goes by one name), Afghanistan's counter-narcotics minister from 2007 to 2010.
A source in Pakistan's Anti-Narcotics Force also said Khairullah was suspected of involvement in trafficking. "He is rich and resourceful, therefore no one can touch him," he said.
In 2012, the farm-gate value of opium - the actual cut farmers receive from the trade - accounted for 4 percent of Afghan gross domestic product, or about $700 million, according to U.N. data. Afghanistan provides 90 percent of the global supply of heroin and other illegal opiates, which has an estimated annual street value of $68 billion.
"THEY SHOULD HANG ME"
The accusations against Khairullah date back to the austere era of Taliban rule in the late 1990s. Then, he mingled with a coterie of heroin exporters who thrived under the patronage of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the movement's enigmatic leader, according to two people from Kandahar familiar with the trade.
"He became close to the Taliban," said one of the sources. "He bought drugs and sold them and made lots of money."
The source added he had seen Khairullah visit Mullah Omar's compound in Kandahar city perhaps 20 times before the Taliban was toppled, forcing many of its commanders to flee to Quetta, where Khairullah maintains an office.
In the summer of 2000, the year before his ouster, Mullah Omar banned poppy, causing opium prices to skyrocket. That made fortunes for Khairullah and others who had amassed stockpiles, according to a member of Kandahar's provincial council.
Khairullah, who denies ever meeting Mullah Omar, said reports he was connected with the drug trade were concocted by his business rivals.
"I will be here five years from now, 10 years from now or 15 years from now," he said. "If they can prove their allegations against me with concrete evidence, then they can and should hang me for it."
"IRON TRIANGLE"
For much of the West's 11-year campaign, the art of tracking sources of insurgent funding was a neglected discipline at the Kabul headquarters of ISAF, the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.
The U.S. military, stretched in Iraq, resisted calls to pursue Afghan drug lords, fearing that "mission creep" into counter-narcotics would be a further drain on resources.
The role smuggling plays in sustaining the insurgency began to receive more attention in 2009 as part of a wider shake-up of the war effort under U.S. President Barack Obama, who tripled the number of American troops in Afghanistan.
Investigators suspect Khairullah stands at the centre of an "iron triangle" locking hawala dealers, heroin kingpins and militants into an increasingly profitable symbiosis.
Taliban commanders would collect opium from poppy growers, then hand it over at his shops in farming communities in return for instant payments, a Western official said.
"He would take opium and give you cash," he said.
Khairullah would then gather bulk quantities of opium in hidden storehouses to sell to traffickers for a lucrative margin, the official alleged.
U.S. officials say his hawala shops also served insurgents like a conventional bank, allowing Taliban leaders to make monthly payments to fighters, including their top commander in Helmand, a suspected major player in the heroin trade.
"As of 2010, Khairullah was a hawaladar, or hawala operator, for Taliban senior leadership and provided financial assistance to the Taliban," the Treasury statement said.
Khairullah denies the allegations. "I am an illiterate man," he said. "I have never been part of a political organisation either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan. My sole concern has been my business."
Like other hawaladars, he said he could not be expected to always know who his clients were. "It is not written on someone's forehead that he is a member of the Taliban," he said.
Esmatullah Helmand, a Khairullah relative who runs his Kabul branch, said far from being in cahoots with the insurgents, his boss had feared being attacked for moving money on behalf of trucking companies supplying ISAF.
"When we saw this thing on the news - that we were blacklisted - we were shocked," Esmatullah said.
"LOST HIS WAY"
Any hope Khairullah may have had of keeping the sanctions quiet was shattered when Afghan television broadcast reports of his designation on the U.S. Treasury and U.N. websites.
Like Western banks, hawala dealers run highly leveraged businesses with paper assets many times larger than the cash they hold. Shocks can tip them into bankruptcy.
Khairullah had faced an earlier crunch in 2010 after several of his partners incurred huge losses. The sanctions triggered a new crisis as hundreds of his remaining customers scrambled to retrieve their funds.
"People who would deposit their money with me for years are now standing outside my door," Khairullah said.
Within days of his designation by the U.S. Treasury, Khairullah had driven 200 kilometres (124 miles) from Kandahar to Quetta, an ISAF official said, dodging a U.N. travel ban that should have barred him from entering Pakistan.
At the same time, he began working his phones. Haji Najeebullah Akhtary, president of Kabul's Sarai Shahzada currency market, was among the first to receive a call.
"Immediately, he called me and said he was going to meet President Karzai," Akhtary said.
Approaching the president would have been a natural step. Karzai's family hails from Kandahar, and the president has tended to sympathise with community leaders nursing grievances against ISAF.
Shah Wali Karzai, one of the president's brothers and a prominent Kandahari, said he had hosted Khairullah's partner Sattar at a meeting aimed at settling a land dispute in February, before the pair were sanctioned.
Khairullah's hopes of winning a similar audience with the president came to nothing. Instead, Karzai ordered security chiefs to investigate him, a presidential spokesman said.
Undeterred, Khairullah sent another relative to Kabul to lobby Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, the intelligence agency, an NDS official said.
The NDS offered to work with the family to investigate the U.S. claims and inform Washington if they were unfounded, but the relative declined, the official added.
Mullah Sayed Mohammed Akhund, a lawmaker from Kandahar, also fielded frantic calls from his long-time friend.
"I guarantee that he hasn't paid even one penny to the Taliban," Akhund said. "He has lost his way and he doesn't know what to do."
TIP-OFF
As Khairullah called his contacts, the Afghan financial intelligence unit, FinTRACA, moved to freeze his assets.
Although hawala dealers can shift large sums purely by cooperating with fellow hawaladars, big players also rely on the formal banking system to help reconcile elaborate cross-border transactions that can involve millions of dollars.
When the blocking orders arrived at Afghanistan's commercial banks, the lenders told FinTRACA that Khairullah's accounts only held the equivalent of $20,000 - a fraction of the sums he is believed to have been moving.
FinTRACA did not provide the names of the banks.
"A couple of months prior to the sanctions, he had stopped transferring money via these accounts," said Mohammad Mustafa Massoudi, FinTRACA director-general. "He must have had some tip-off, some knowledge that it was coming."
Nevertheless, Khairullah said the sanctions had forced him to auction property to raise cash. A real estate agent in Kandahar said an agitated-looking Khairullah had visited him in August to try to cut a quick deal to sell 24 plots in a new development on the edge of the city for $360,000.
"His face told me he was very worried," the agent said.
As Afghan officials pondered the whereabouts of Khairullah's elusive hoard, Luke Bronin, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary for terrorist financing, boarded a plane for the Pakistani commercial capital of Karachi in early September.
U.S. officials say they consulted closely with Pakistan before sanctioning Khairullah, Sattar and HKHS, their hawala company, mindful of long-standing Pakistani resentment of pressure to crack down on the Taliban.
Bronin hammered home the importance of putting the two men out of business in two days of meetings with financial and security officials in Karachi and Islamabad.
"They have been designated not only by the U.S. but also by the United Nations," Bronin told Reuters. "So we have every expectation that Pakistan will take the necessary steps to shut them down."
Pakistan's central bank said it routinely implements U.N. freeze orders, but does not divulge details.
In Quetta, Khairullah appears to operate unimpeded, working from an unmarked first-floor office guarded by a metal door opposite a motorbike repair shop. Western officials marvel at his continued ability to raise six-figure dollar sums in cash.
Fuming at his adversaries from his Quetta headquarters, Khairullah seems anxious as well as angry. A fellow hawala merchant, Haji Mohammed Qasim, was arrested by Afghan and U.S. forces in Kandahar in mid-September.
The U.S. Treasury has since accused Qasim of transferring millions of dollars on behalf of the Taliban and hit him with sanctions. Perturbed dealers in Kandahar say they do not even know where he is being held.
"PERSECUTED"
Haji Agha Jan, another currency trader, said his business had collapsed after ISAF detained him for 25 days last year to interrogate him over his client list. "People are afraid that the Americans will arrest me again," he said, chewing green tobacco in his empty shop.
Resentment of the U.S. sanctions in Kandahar's money bazaar is echoed by the wider business community In Kabul.
The Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries, the country's leading business lobby, has been sharply critical of U.S. authorities for publicly naming suspected Taliban supporters without submitting evidence to Afghan courts.
"They are destroying the image of individuals and businesses," said Mohammad Qurban Haqjo, the Chamber president. "In other countries, nobody is allowed to do that."
On a recent afternoon in the city's currency market, no customers called at shop 237, Khairullah's counter. A storefront sign emblazoned with his name had been effaced with blue paint. Only a Koranic inscription above the door had been left untouched. It read: "And God is the Best of Providers."
"The Americans and the United Nations have persecuted me," Khairullah said. "They will have to compensate me for my losses."
(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni, Hamid Shalizi, Jessica Donati and Abdel Aziz Ibrahimi in KABUL, Mahmoud Habboush in DUBAI and Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR) (Reporting By Matthew Green; Editing by Bill Tarrant)
Afghan Troops Doing 'Better Than Expected': Cameron
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 22 December 2012
British Prime Minister David Cameron said Afghan security forces were "doing better than expected," as he defended plans for the British force to be cut to 5,200 next year, according to his office.
Cameron on was paying a pre-Christmas visit Thursday to British troops in Afghanistan.
The premier, who was touring Camp Bastion in Helmand Province, said he was confident that the draw-down of nearly half of the British troops, announced in parliament on Wednesday, would not pave the way for an increase in terrorist activity.
"The fact is they [Afghan security forces] are doing better than expected," he said."This is withdrawal. This is draw-down based on success, not on failure."
He added that the decision was taken "for good military reasons" and it has been done in a proper way.
"We're confident it can be done while making sure Afghanistan does not return to become a haven of terrorism which is, of course, why we came here in the first place," stressed the prime minister.
With 9,500 troops, Britain has the second largest number of troops in Afghanistan, after the United States. It has lost 438 soldiers in Afghanistan since 2001. Most UK troops are based in the southern Helmand province.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com