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Paris peace dialogue on Afghanistan spawns more questions than answers
by Abdul Haleem
KABUL, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) -- While the recently concluded intra- Afghan talks held in Paris had raised hopes among Afghans, the Taliban's inflexible stance and Kabul's refusal to attend any peace negotiations outside of the country could negate any positive denouement of such efforts.
In his address at the Musharano Jirga or Upper House of Afghan Parliament on Tuesday, Afghan Foreign Minister Dr. Zalmai Rassoul categorically said that "any consultative meeting on peace should be held inside Afghanistan."
The government's stance is directly in contrast to an earlier vow of the Taliban not to participate in any talks with the government of President Hamid Karzai for as long as there are foreign military forces in the country.
In a statement posted on its website, the Taliban appreciated the Foundation for Strategic Research for holding the Afghan talks, saying it enabled the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (name of the ousted Taliban regime) to present its stance with regard to the situation in Afghanistan and its future.
But in its statement, the Taliban rejected any peace talks with the Afghan government and instead called for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.
Rassoul's statement came just days after a gathering of several Afghan groups in Paris ended. In the dialogue, participants, including a delegation from the Taliban, presented their respective positions on how to resolve the endemic conflict in Afghanistan.
Already there are some doubts as to the success of the Paris conference.
"The Paris conference yielded no results towards achieving lasting peace in Afghanistan," Nazari Pariani, the editor in chief of an influential newspaper the Daily Mandegar, told Xinhua.
"The Taliban outfit has already presented its stance in the Paris conference and obviously will not attend the coming Afghan groups' conference in Turkmenistan," Pariani said.
Another political analyst and former legislator Mohammad Asim also said that the Taliban would not abandon its armed struggle. " The Taliban prefer to fight instead of agreeing to talk with the government," he said.
The Paris conference, organized by a French think tank, the Foundation for Strategic Research, was attended by the Taliban, other armed militant groups such as the Hekmatyar-led radical Islamic party Hizb-e-Islami and members of the Afghan political opposition.
While his foreign minister insisted that any talks with dissident groups in Afghanistan should be held inside the country, President Karzai has said that his government supports "any sincere efforts to achieve peace in Afghanistan, including the one in Paris".
Rassoul has also emphasized that the identities of Taliban representatives who attended the Paris intra-Afghan talks should be made known.
In a formal statement, the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that any direct talks between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban could take place outside the country only through official process, including the creation of the Taliban liaison office in Qatar.
The statement came in the wake of reports that the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is going to arrange a Paris-like Afghan conference possibly in Turkmenistan.
1 killed, 4 injured in southern Afghan blasts
TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) -- One policeman was killed and four people were wounded in two separate explosions in southern Afghanistan on Friday, officials said.
"A roadside bomb went off near an Afghan Local Police (ALP) patrol in Charchino district, Uruzgan province at around 12 p.m. local time, killing an ALP commander in the district named Manni and wounding two policemen," the police spokesman in the province Farid Farhang told Xinhua.
He said the injured were shifted to hospital in the district in the province 370 km south of capital Kabul. The NATO and U.S.- funded ALP or community police was established in 2010 to protect villages and districts around the insurgency-hit country where Afghan army and police have limited presence.
In neighbouring Kandahar province, two civilians were wounded as a bomb attached to a bicycle targeted a police vehicle in provincial capital Kandahar city earlier Friday, according to provincial government spokesman Jawid Faisal.
Faisal said all cops aboard the vehicle were unharmed in the attack.
No group has claimed responsibility for the incidents, but Taliban was suspected of carrying out such attacks. Kandahar and Uruzgan province has long been a stronghold for insurgent groups despite several military operations by U. S. troops and Afghan security forces over the past couple of years.
Iran, Afghanistan to Boost Academic, Scientific Cooperation
Fars News Agency December 28, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Minister of Science, Research and Technology Kamran Daneshjoo and Afghan Minister of Higher Education Obaidullah Obaid explored avenues for the further expansion of academic and scientific cooperation between the two neighboring countries.
During the meeting in Tehran, Daneshjoo referred to cultural, historical and religious commonalities and said that Iran is ready to make its experience in the area of higher education available to Afghanistan.
"We are ready to undertake joint technical and engineering projects involving both states' experts," he said, noting that this will benefit the two nations.
Daneshjoo also voiced the Iranian universities' readiness to grant scholarships to the Afghan students.
He further proposed the establishment of Persian language and literature centers and Islamic studies centers in the Afghan universities.
Obaid, for his part, hailed the scientific exchanges between the two universities and hoped that mutual cooperation, especially in the field of higher education, will further improve.
Iran is one of the most important donors to Afghanistan which has kept its promises to help to the reconstruction of the war-hit country.
Iran has built some roads, power transmission lines, and border stations, among the other infrastructure projects which would better link the two nations.
Iran has also contributed more than $50 million annually to Afghan anti-narcotics efforts in the last 8 years.
Was It a Good Year in Afghanistan?
Looking back at a troubling 2012 filled with progress and peril, it's hard to determine whether the United States is winning this war.
Foreign Policy (blog) BY IAN LIVINGSTON, MICHAEL O’HANLON DECEMBER 27, 2012
As 2012 draws to a close, we should all cast a thought to the roughly 68,000 American living in dusty military outposts in places such as Kabul and Kandahar who are celebrating the holiday season far from their loved ones. It has been a busy year in Afghanistan -- U.S. forces have downsized by one-third, Afghans have assumed much more responsibility for the security of their country, NATO supply lines through Pakistan were reopened, and the U.S.-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement was signed. But the question remains: Are we really winning this war?
When assessing the facts and figures, it's hard to separate spin from substance. Reaching any hard conclusions about where Afghanistan is heading is no easy task. For those who want to believe the mission is going badly or who believe the war is a distraction from more pressing American national priorities, it is easy to find dismal trends to make their case. For those still hopeful, it is comparably easy to identify signature successes that put the United States on track to achieving President Barack Obama's stated goal of ending the current mission by 2014.
Take the recent debate, spurred by the Pentagon's December 2012 semi-annual "1230" report to Congress, on the evolution of Afghan security forces' capabilities. That report identified only one Afghan army brigade that is in the top tier of readiness and no longer requires any outside help for its operations. Some critics have concluded that this illustrates the failure of U.S. efforts to develop strong Afghan security partners.
Admittedly, the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the country's military and police forces, is a work in progress at best. But at a time when the ANSF lacks ample airpower or logistics support, this is in fact inevitable. These deficits are almost by design, as such capabilities were viewed by NATO and Afghan officials as secondary priorities -- to be emphasized once the core infantry force structure was built.
Beneath the surface, meanwhile, there have been significant improvements within the Afghan military. It is now near its full, intended size of roughly 350,000 soldiers. There are now 92 kandaks -- formations of battalion size, or a few hundred soldiers -- scoring in the top two tiers of readiness. That's triple the number of late 2010, and 30 more than at this time last year.
A better indicator of ANSF preparedness is the percentage of missions Afghan forces are now leading -- or even conducting entirely independently of foreign assistance. This metric not only speaks to technical readiness, but morale, leadership, and the commitment of the armed forces to the nation.
Encouragingly, these numbers are improving fast. A year ago, Afghan forces led less than 40 percent of all missions -- today, according to the "1230" report, the figure is closer to 85 percent. Admittedly, this information does not tell us if the Afghan forces are now leading the most challenging operations or how well they are doing, but it does tell us something about their willingness to put their lives on the line for their country. The Afghan special forces represent a particular bright spot: They are not only leading a large fraction of all special operations missions -- they are undertaking responsibilities that are in fact quite difficult.
Other metrics are also on their way up. For example, about half of all Afghan security forces now have at least first-grade levels of literacy. The bad news, of course, is that this is a very low standard. The good news is that the figure was under 10 percent just two years ago, so progress has been rapid.
The casualty rate for Afghan forces is telling, too. Afghan army and police suffered around 1,000 fatalities a year from 2007 to 2009, then the figure grew to about 1,500 in 2010, 2,000 in 2011, and more than 3,000 this year.
This may sound as if the Afghan army is suffering more defeats with each passing year, but the story is more complicated than that. These high loss rates for Afghan forces suggest they are committed to and fighting for their country. Of course, such figures also indicate that the enemy is still resilient and dangerous, so the message is mixed. U.S. losses have declined as the ANSF has stepped up: Despite dozens of insider attacks this year -- which thankfully began to slow toward year's end -- American fatalities declined from some 500 in 2010 and more than 400 in 2011 to around 300 in 2012.
For Afghans, of course, the big question is whether their nation is getting less violent. Here too, the statistics are mixed: A broad gauge of violence, as measured by enemy-initiated attacks, is down only a few percent this year relative to last year, which was itself a modest improvement relative to 2010. The net reduction of violence over the past two years is about 10 percent.
The good news is that the numbers are going down, even as NATO starts to downsize. Fully 100,000 American "boots on the ground" worked to ensure peace and stability in 2011 -- since the surge ended, that figure has declined by more than 30,000 soldiers. Many of the cities have seen notable improvements: Kabul remains quite safe, accounting for fewer than 1 percent of all nationwide attacks -- with NATO troops providing very little of the security. Kandahar City and the northern hub of Mazar-e-Sharif are much improved, with attacks down 60 percent or more in each city this year. The western city of Herat is somewhat safer too, and the nation's ring road, which essentially follows the nation's perimeter, appears substantially more usable than a couple years ago.
The bad news, however, is that the 10 percent decline in violence nationwide is within the likely error margins, since not all violence is observed or documented by NATO or Afghan troops. As a result, it is hard to claim too much major improvement. And by other metrics -- like the number of civilians killed by the Taliban -- there is no progress at all.
Again, reaching a bottom line on what's happening in Afghanistan is hard. There is grist for both hope and anxiety in such figures.
Afghanistan's economy presents a similarly mixed picture. The good news is that it has consistently grown at a 6 to 8 percent clip in recent years. The bad news is that much of this growth is due to the twin stimulants of the huge foreign presence in Afghanistan and revenues generated from the opium economy. Even worse, widespread corruption means that wealth doesn't always trickle down to those most in need.
Other indicators of how life is improving for Afghans are less ambiguous. Some 90 percent of the population has access to basic health care within an hour's walk of their homes -- and as a result, life expectancy appears to have increased by more than a decade over the course of a few short years. Nearly 10 million children are in school, and more than 38,000 are enrolled in vocational schools, an increase of one-third over the last 12 months, preparing students for the types of jobs that Afghanistan's economy actually generates. Electricity production is up fourfold since the mid-2000s.
But even amid such statistics, there are troubling indicators. For example, access to electricity in rural areas as well as urban slums is still quite limited, and the increased availability of power has mostly benefited the privileged urban elites.
President Hamid Karzai's government is itself a mixed bag. He is personally popular and continues to poll well, with 70 percent of Afghans or more regularly saying they hold a favorable opinion of him. And more Afghans than not say their country is moving in the right direction: The latest figures from the Asia Foundation show a 52-31 favorable-unfavorable split when asked about the basic trajectory of their country. That's better than in most recent years -- or for that matter, most other countries in the world. But there are still enough disaffected Afghans to produce ample recruits for the insurgency, and uncertainty about the 2014 elections has led to fears about a possible return to civil war should the campaign exacerbate sectarian tensions.
Afghanistan also can't be at peace unless its neighbors stop using it as a battleground from which to pursue their interests. Pakistan's role in the conflict has improved somewhat, with greater tactical cooperation near the border and a reopening of supply lines in 2012. But it continues to allow the operation of fertilizer plants within its territory that provide the raw materials for roadside bombs, rather than insisting on the production of more benign forms of fertilizer. Islamabad also continues to allow the Haqqani network to operate in North Waziristan, among its other ties with insurgent groups.
As we prepare to ring in 2013, determining what lies ahead for Afghanistan remains a murky venture. It's a close call as to whether the good news slightly outweighs the bad, but there are certainly glimmers of hope. Anyone who claims to be able to predict the future there has a clearer crystal ball than we possess.
Betrayed While Asleep, Afghan Police Die at Hands of Their Countrymen
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND December 27, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - A wave of betrayal has left at least 17 Afghan policemen dead in the past 10 days — all killed in their sleep, at the hands of those close to them.
Early Thursday morning, an Afghan policeman unlocked the door of the check post where he was stationed in Oruzgan Province and let in his friends from the Taliban, who helped him attack his sleeping colleagues with knives and guns, eventually killing four and wounding eight.
On Sunday, a local police commander in a remote northern province, Jawzjan, shot to death, in their beds, five men under his command and fled to join the Taliban.
And on Dec. 18, a teenager, apparently being kept for sexual purposes by an Afghan border police commander in southern Kandahar Province, drugged the commander and the other 10 policemen at the post to put them to sleep, and then shot them all; eight died.
In the crisis that has risen in the past year over insider killings, in which Afghan security forces turn on their allies, the toll has been even heavier for the Afghans themselves — at least 86 in a count by The New York Times this year, and the full toll is likely to be higher — than it has been for American and other NATO forces, which have lost at least 62 so far, the latest in Kabul on Monday.
Unlike most insider attacks against foreign forces, known as “green on blue” killings, most of the attacks between Afghans, “green on green,” have been clear cases of either infiltration by Taliban insurgents or turncoat attacks. As with the three recent attacks, they have fallen most heavily on police units, and they have followed a familiar pattern: the Taliban either infiltrate someone into a unit, or win over someone already in a unit, who then kills his comrades in their sleep. Frequently, the victims are first poisoned or drugged at dinner.
“I tell my cook not to allow any police officer in the kitchen,” said Taaj Mohammad, a commander of a border police check post near the one in Kandahar that was attacked on Dec. 18. “This kind of incident really creates mistrust among comrades, which is not good. Now we don’t trust anyone, even those who spent years in the post.”
The most recent of the green-on-green betrayals took place on Thursday about 3 a.m., in the town of Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan. According to Fareed Ayal, a spokesman for the provincial police chief, a police officer named Hayat Khan, who had been in regular touch with the Taliban for religious guidance, waited until the other officers at his check post fell asleep and then called Taliban fighters by cellphone and let them in. First the attackers stabbed the one officer who was on watch, but he raised the alarm in time to awaken some of the police officers.
In the ensuing firefight, four policemen were killed and eight wounded, while Mr. Khan and his Taliban confederates managed to escape, according to Mr. Ayal’s account.
In the attack on Sunday, in Jawzjan Province, the victims were all part of an Afghan Local Police unit whose commander had previous connections with the Taliban. Such local police units, strongly supported as part of American policy in Afghanistan, undergo training, and community leaders and elders offer guarantees that the units have no further insurgent ties.
Gen. Abdul Aziz Ghairat of the Jawzjan Provincial Police said that the commander who had killed the men in their sleep, Dur Mohammad, had fled but that his relatives and a community elder who vouched for him had been detained and were being interrogated.
In some green-on-green cases, personal grievances may drive the attackers to throw in their lot with the Taliban.
That is apparently what happened in the case of Noor Agha, a young man who the police say killed eight border security police officers in their check post on the border near Spinbaldak, the major crossing point between Kandahar and Pakistan, on Dec. 18.
The police said that Mr. Agha, whose age was unclear but whom police sources described as “still beardless,” had been the involuntary companion of the border police commander at that check post, Agha Amire, for several years. Other police commanders who knew both said there was clearly an “improper relationship” between the two.
While not saying so explicitly, they were suggesting that Mr. Amire was using Mr. Agha in the commonplace practice known as bacha baazi, in which powerful Afghan commanders frequently keep young boys as personal servants, dancers and sex slaves.
The practice was outlawed during Taliban times but has never gone away, and even some provincial governors and other top officials openly keep bacha baazi harems. The practice was noted in the latest United States State Department’s annual human rights report, but the report said “credible statistics were difficult to acquire as the subject was a source of shame.”
The night of the attack, Mr. Agha offered to make a special dinner for the police at the check post and invited two friends to attend. He and his friends put drugs in the food and then shot everyone there, including Mr. Amire, and the three attackers escaped across the border to join Taliban insurgents in Pakistan, according to a police official. Mr. Agha’s family, who lived in Arghandab district, a former Taliban stronghold near Kandahar city, fled their home, leaving behind livestock and personal possessions, according to police officials and relatives of the commander.
Although a police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity put the toll at eight dead and three wounded in that episode, officially, the Kandahar Province police chief, Gen. Abdul Raziq, said only four had been killed and three wounded. General Raziq also denied that there had been a young boy involved in drugging the food.
The wave of killings over the past year has police officers all over Afghanistan watching what they eat, and sleeping uneasily.
“We make sure that nobody gets the chance to poison the food,” said Sharif Agha, 26, a police sergeant who commands a small outpost in Khost city, in eastern Afghanistan. The ten officers there take turns helping the cook and make sure at least two people are in the kitchen at all times. At night, a third guard is assigned to watch the two guards normally on duty.
“I don’t know about the rest of the guys,” Sergeant Agha said, “but I have not slept properly over the past few months.”
Reporting was contributed by Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan; Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar from Kabul; and Enayat Najafizada from Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.
What's at stake for Afghan women
CNN By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Special to CNN December 27, 2012
Editor's note: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is author of The New York Times best-seller "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana," which tells the true story of a girl whose business supported her family under the Taliban. A fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, she has written widely on entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict regions. Follow her on Twitter: @gaylelemmon.
"The United States joins the government of Afghanistan in strongly condemning the murder of Najia Sediqi, who was killed in a drive-by shooting Monday morning," read a press release issued December 12 by the U.S. State Department and distributed by the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan.
"The United States will continue to stand side-by-side with women who are carrying on Najia's fight, the Afghan government and all Afghan people to ensure that the hard-won gains made by women in the recent years are protected and advanced."
Yet as the 2014 deadline for withdrawal of NATO forces approaches many Afghans and some Americans wonder how, exactly, those gains will be safeguarded. And Sediqi's death, along with three other killings of Afghan women in the past several weeks, shows both the gains and potential losses facing women in Afghanistan.
On a recent Monday morning, gunmen opened fire on Sediqi while she walked to her office in broad daylight in eastern Laghman province. She was the acting head of the region's women's affairs department, which meant that she handled everything from helping abused women get to shelters to overseeing regional economic empowerment programs.
Her title was "acting" because, as Afghanistan's TOLO TV reported, only five months earlier her predecessor, Hanifa Safi, was killed in a car bomb blast that also left her husband in a coma. Both Sediqi and Safi are among the hundreds of Afghan officials and leaders who have been targeted for assassination.
The killings of the Afghan officials come alongside several weeks in which horrific cases of violence against women came to light in the Afghan press. In Kapisa province, a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Anisa was shot dead after leaving the Mahmoud Raqi Girls High School.
Days later Afghan women leaders gathered in Kabul to demand justice and a government investigation into whether the Taliban, which are suspected in the killing, were responsible. Some activists saw a link between Anisa's killing and her work volunteering for a polio eradication campaign the Taliban are known to oppose.
In Kunduz province, 2012 has been the "most violent on record for women and girls," with more than a dozen killed. Most recently, a 14-year-old was killed by a gunman as she opened her door, allegedly in connection to a failed marriage proposal.
Another schoolgirl, Giseena, was found slain, her throat slit in what appeared to be retribution for her father's refusal to agree to her marriage. The girl's killing came while she was on her way to collect water for her home near the Tajikstan border. One of the men the police detained in the investigation was her thwarted suitor.
This collage of horrific violence against women tells two stories. First, for Afghan officials, death is a frighteningly present possibility at all times, and women serving other women are among the leading targets. A slew of high-profile female leaders have been killed, from Malalai Kakar of Kandahar's police force to Safia Ama Jan, who headed Kandahar's local ministry of women's affairs office, the same position Safi and Sediqi held in Laghman.
And second, as a U.N. official in Afghanistan noted this month, while violence against women remains "largely under-reported due to cultural restraints, social norms and taboos," the last year saw "an actual increase in reporting of incidents of violence against women," with prosecutors and courts "convicting more perpetrators for such crimes."
Certainly the high-visibility horrors that "reach law enforcement, that actually get to the court, or receive public attention due to their egregious nature represent only the tip of the iceberg" when it comes to crimes against women in Afghanistan, but the fact is that more women are bringing their abuse to the authorities and a thriving Afghan media are picking up their stories.
This reality points to progress, say advocates for women. And they say they are coming to believe that these steps forward will not recede as the international troops withdraw.
"I don't see that Afghanistan can go backwards," says Manizha Naderi of Women for Afghan Women, an organization that runs shelters for abused women across the country. "Too many people have experienced and felt the freedom of how it is to live in a safe environment. I really don't think the young people will ever go backwards."
Certainly the years since 2001 have been marked by dramatic changes for Afghan women. Nearly 3 million girls are in school, and more than 3,000 midwives across the country save expectant mothers' lives. Women make up a quarter of parliament, and civil society -- groups pushing for human rights and better education -- is filled with 20-, 30- and 40-something women pushing for their rights and their country's future.
In many ways the stories of these women are part of a larger narrative the American public, exhausted by the country's longest-ever war, has nearly stopped hearing: Some women are making great progress -- and taking great risks -- while some others have seen their lives change little and continue to be plagued by violence and deadly abuse.
Their fates are linked. As three prominent Afghan women entrepreneurs who appeared in Washington at the U.S. Institute of Peace this month made clear, the gains of some women lead to the gains of more. Homegrown role models help show what is possible to the girls of the next generation -- and their fathers.
In the political sphere they show that women can lead and they stand up for girls such as Giseena. And in the economic realm these entrepreneurs are creating jobs for women and men in a country that has an unemployment rate estimated to top 35%.
As these women push forward they bring others with them and bolster families' prospects in the process. But their advancement takes time.
In America's recent election, neither side wanted to discuss in any depth either the stakes of the Afghanistan conflict or a sustainable future strategy for the war. Poll after poll shows Americans no longer think it is a war worth fighting. But Afghan women are still in the fight and will be long after 2014. And their battle for a more educated, richer, healthier country is one in which everyone has a stake.
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Afghanistan female air force pilots left grounded
The two women in their 20s were trained in the U.S. how to fly military helicopters, but in Afghanistan, they have been ignored and put off by the air force.
Los Angeles Times By David Zucchino December 27, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Unlike most women in Afghanistan, Sourya Saleh knows how to drive — but she's taken the wheel only with her brother beside her, out of respect for tradition. Her friend Masooma Hussaini is still learning.
Both young women, though, are experts in a more demanding mode of travel: They've flown 204 hours each as pilots of military helicopters.
The first female chopper pilots in Afghanistan since the Soviets trained a woman as a pilot in the 1980s, these two young Afghans are pioneers in a land where a resurgent Taliban is determined to deny girls the right to an education, and violence against women is on the rise.
After 18 months of military helicopter training in the United States, 2nd Lt. Saleh and 2nd Lt. Hussaini have returned home as two polished, confident Afghan air force pilots. But they don't have uniforms, flight suits or an assignment. They haven't even seen a helicopter, much less flown one.
Since returning here Oct. 28, they've spent their days at home with their families, reading, watching TV, shopping and helping with housework. A superior says their paperwork is "under review."
"It seems we've been put on a very long vacation," Saleh said in nearly perfect English, honed by months in Texas and Alabama with American women who were also training to be military pilots.
Saleh, 20, and Hussaini, 21, refuse to believe that the Afghan military has abandoned them. They prefer to believe that the country's nascent air force is just slow and bureaucratic, and that they'll be flying and serving their country soon.
"I fought too hard for the right to fight for my country — I'm not going to stay home and wait," Hussaini said, picking at a chicken kebab in the women's section of a restaurant near her home in Kabul. "To not fly now after all we've accomplished for women would mean that everything we've fought for would be wasted."
The pilots' imposed idleness elicits painful memories of their childhoods, when the Taliban government forced young women to stay at home, cooking and cleaning. Hussaini and Saleh were educated in secret, illegal girls' schools until the Taliban regime fell in 2001.
"Things are much better now for Afghanistan, but there are still problems for women," Hussaini said. "Not everyone tells the truth about the situation. It's hard to know the truth."
Hussaini is poised and forthright, with expressive eyes and a round face framed by a black head scarf. Saleh is more reserved, but speaks quietly and confidently, her smooth face lightly dusted with makeup beneath her head scarf.
The two women dress modestly, with stylish Western-style winter coats, boots and handbags. Both are ethnic Hazara, a Shiite Muslim minority that has experienced persecution by Afghanistan's Sunni Muslim majority.
In a country where burkas are still common, especially in the countryside, the two pilots are portraits of modernity set against a backdrop of harsh patriarchal domination. Afghanistan's women's affairs minister reported last month that "extreme or brutal violence against women" is on the rise, with 3,500 reported cases in the first six months of the year.
"In Afghanistan, women cannot raise their voices," Saleh said. "We wanted a way to raise our voices for all women, and flying for our country does that."
This month, two women who did raise their voices were assassinated. A high school girl was shot by gunmen on her first day as a polio vaccination volunteer, and a provincial director of women's affairs was gunned down four months after her predecessor was killed by a car bomb.
Sexism is deeply embedded in Afghan society. Schoolgirls have been poisoned or doused with acid, and young women have been beaten and killed by male relatives for refusing arranged marriages to older men. Women who work outside the home are often threatened, or condemned as morally deficient.
The Afghan military was slow to accept women, but it has admitted them in recent years under Western pressure. Today, about 350 women are in the Afghan military, according to NATO, almost all of them in administrative or support jobs. An Afghan army spokesman, Gen. Mohammed Zahir Azimi, put the number at nearly 1,000 — in an army of 187,000.
In this environment, the accomplishments of Hussaini and Saleh are remarkable, especially because both come from conservative families with no history of military service. They didn't know each other when they enlisted three years ago after seeing TV ads in Kabul seeking women for the military. They were two Afghan girls who had never been away from home.
The women graduated from officers' candidate school in Kabul, then took English classes. They received instruction in English and military technical language at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. At Ft. Rucker, Ala., they learned to fly U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters.
They are combat qualified, having passed courses in basic war skills and basic combat skills — "my favorite part," Saleh said. They didn't actually fire the Kiowa's air-to-air missiles, but performed combat simulations so that they know how to launch the weapons.
Two other Afghan women flunked the U.S. pilot's course, they said. Saleh and Hussaini passed, and graduated in an elaborate ceremony attended by American military officers, and by soldiers and pilots from other nations.
They expected a similar ceremony when they returned to Afghanistan in October, they said, but there was nothing. Only their families were on hand to greet them.
When they asked to meet their Afghan air force commanders, they said, they were put off. They were not even told how many helicopters the Afghan air force has available.
"Last week, they told us to come this week," Hussaini said. "This week, they told us to come next week. That's the way it's been. It's very frustrating."
They did manage to meet Afghanistan's only other female helicopter pilot, the colonel who was trained in the '80s. Three other women have begun training as military pilots in Afghanistan, they said, two to fly helicopters and one to fly planes.
Hussaini and Saleh are glad to be back with their families, but they miss the United States: the open culture, the free expression, the friendships with American female pilots, the food. (They keep up with American friends via Facebook and email.) They fell in love with pizza, Southern fried seafood and Mexican food — "just like Afghan food, only spicier," Saleh said.
On Dec. 8, six weeks after returning home, Hussaini and Saleh were invited to the Afghan military air base in Kabul to finally meet their commander. (Their only other visit to the base was two weeks earlier, for a German TV interview.)
The commander welcomed them and told them that he hoped to have an assignment for them in the future, they said. But there was nothing yet. They were not issued military uniforms, much less flight suits. They were told to call him in a couple of days.
"We'll see," Saleh said afterward, shrugging. "We've heard a lot of promises."
Col. Mohammed Bahadur Raiskhail, an Air Force public affairs officer, said the pilots are reservists and cannot be issued uniforms until they are assigned to an active-duty unit. He blamed bureaucracy at the notoriously sclerotic Ministry of Defense for the delay.
Like any military, he said, there are time-consuming procedures that must be followed.
In the case of the two young pilots, he said, "The fruit is not yet ripe."
The military is eager to show off its new female pilots, Raiskhail assured the two women, especially after the U.S. paid to train them. They sat, arms folded, on a couch in the colonel's office. They were seated next to two Afghan women in smart green military uniforms, which only underscored their civilian clothes.
Saleh and Hussaini bristled when the colonel suggested that the three other women training as pilots in Afghanistan had progressed ahead of them.
"No," Hussaini told him. "We're ahead of them. We're the first for this air force."
Raiskhail smiled. "They are brave; they are showing the world what young women can do," he said. "They've opened the door. Some day, we hope to have women commanders."
The two pilots listened, but they did not seem encouraged. They stared straight ahead as the colonel spoke. Finally they mentioned that their piloting skills were atrophying by the day. The colonel, a pilot himself, agreed that one must fly almost daily to keep skills sharp.
There was one more thing: The two women were trained on American helicopters. The tiny Afghan air force (Raiskhail would not reveal the number of aircraft; the website GlobalSecurity.org calls Afghan air force capabilities "extremely limited") relies largely on Russian-made helicopters. That would require several more months of training before the women could fly on active duty, the colonel said.
"But I cannot say when," he said.
The two pilots were free to go. It was a sunny day, ideal flying weather. But there was nothing for them on this base. They went back into the sunlit city to hail a cab ride home, where once more they would wait.
david.zucchino@latimes.com
Special correspondent Hashmat Baktash contributed to this report.
Squabbles in Garmsir
New York Times By MATTHIEU AIKINS December 27, 2012
GARMSIR, Afghanistan - “You know, we’re very worried about the future,” Hamid Khan, the telecommunications director in Garmsir, southern Afghanistan, said to Major Thomas McAvoy, the civil affairs officer attached to Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Ninth Marine Regiment. “When Najibullah was president, he also had a plan to take control of the districts and build the government.”
McAvoy winced at the comparison to the Afghan communist leader the Soviets left behind in 1989. Najibullah managed to hold out for three years before his government collapsed, despite a larger and more effective civil service, military and political team than exists under President Hamid Karzai today. “I think the coalition nations will keep helping the Afghan government in the future,” he replied.
McAvoy and the rest of the coalition governance team visit the Garmsir district headquarters a few times a week. They move through the various offices in the courtyard, clockwise. These are the offices of the director of telecommunications, the director of media relations and the governor, the community council room and the prosecutor’s office. And they are the local authorities that the Marines and their American and British civilian counterparts have been trying to put back together, after forcibly clearing the district of the Taliban between 2009 and 2011. While the military gains were remarkable, their progress on the governance side has been far more mixed.
Earlier in December, I embedded with Kilo Company in Garmsir to observe its efforts to establish a functional Afghan government presence that will survive the troops’ departure in 2014. In this, I’ve been greatly aided by a galley copy of Carter Malkasian’s book “War Comes to Garmsir.”
Malkasian is a fluent speaker of Pashto who spent two years as the senior political officer in Garmsir and became immersed in the area’s history and intricate political structure. The book represents the kind of detailed study of Afghanistan that has been badly missing: Most people associated with the international military and development missions here come in for six-month or one-year stints. (Another valuable book, albeit with a vastly different background and purpose, is Noah Coburn’s excellent ethnographic study, “Bazaar Politics.”) One mark of Malkasian’s analytical mettle is that he presents, more so than any other writer I’ve read, a clear and fair picture of the Taliban and why they enjoyed so much support in the south.
He doesn’t go as far to say this, but reading his account, the Taliban come off as Garmsir’s most legitimate local government since the era of Mohammad Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who was deposed in 1973. This is a challenge for the current Afghan government, which rode in on the coattails of a foreign military occupation and now struggles with infighting and corruption. The odds are against it, both because of history — its current roster of officials in Kabul and the provincial capital includes many of the characters who tore the country apart during the civil war of the 1990s — and its own flawed structure. As Malkasian points out, with each local government agency — whether for health, agriculture or intelligence — answerable to heads in both the provincial and the national capitals, countless conflicts are created at the district level.
To take just one example, there is a bewildering array of security forces in Garmsir, each with a separate chain of command and its own internal rivalries: the Afghan National Police, which ultimately answer, via the provincial police chief, to the interior minister in Kabul; the Afghan National Army, which obeys the corps commander in Helmand and the defense minister; the National Directorate of Security, the intelligence service whose murky networks lead up to national head in Kabul; the Afghan National Civil Order Police; and the many militias all in their tan uniforms, who are paid and armed under the Afghan Local Police program but remain loyal to their tribes’ strongmen. A.N.P., A.N.A., N.D.S., A.N.C.O.P., A.L.P.: Presiding over this alphabet soup is the district governor, ostensibly the senior government official, who has the smallest staff and doesn’t control any of these forces directly.
Currently, there’s not even a governor in Garmsir: Both the acting governor and his deputy have been in Kabul for months, lobbying over the position. “I suspect a bidding war is taking place,” an international official told me. Thanks to the financial and military patronage provided by the internationals, local officials are free to concentrate on their own internecine squabbles. Whether they’ll be able to unite against the drastic challenges that will emerge 2014 remains to be seen.
Matthieu Aikins is a magazine writer living in Kabul. You can follow him on Twitter.
Karzai to Visit Washington in January
TOLOnews.com By Abdul Wali Arian Thursday, 27 December 2012
President Hamid Karzai is scheduled to visit the United States on 7 January to discuss issues related to the bilateral security agreement currently being negotiated by diplomats of the two countries.
Karzai and Obama are expected to discuss the sticking point issue of legal immunity for US forces after the Nato combat mission ends in 2014.
The security agreement will also include the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan after 2014 and military assistance to Afghanistan after Isaf troops leave.
Some Afghan analysts have expressed optimism about the prospects of the tip.
"The trip could be very beneficial and important for a better future for Afghanistan. The signing of the agreement could guarantee Afghanistan's future to a certain degree," said political analyst Idrees Ramhami.
The opposition National Coalition Party urged the president to prioritize national interests over personal ones.
"President Karzai should discus the security transition and the peaceful transition of power. Also, he should seriously discuss the priority issues of ensuring stability during the transition period," National Coalition Party Spokesman Sayed Aqa Fazil Sancharaki said.
Whooping Cough Epidemic Kills 12 Children in Badakhshan
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 27 December 2012
Twelve children suffering from whooping cough died in a snow-bound district in the northeastern province of Badkhshan, the provincial governor spokesman said Thursday.
The childrens were between the ages of one and five, and the deaths took place in Shoorian village bordering Tajikistan, located in Nasi Darwaz district of the province, spokesman Abdulmaroof Rasekh told TOLOnews. He said local officials learned of the deaths last week.
About 350 other children in the area are suffering from the whooping cough epidemic. The village remains inaccessible from Afghanistan, so a health team was sent from Tajikistan Thursday. The team is now treating the children and providing them nutritious food, Rasekh added.
Heavy snow has blocked access to 12 districts in Badakhshan, and teams are unable to reach other areas with potential health emergencies.
Officials have said they will call in the Afghan National Army for help if needed.
Afghanistan Gets Second Place at Fajr Taekwondo Competitions
TOLOnews.com By Mir Sayed Sediqi Thursday, 27 December 2012
Afghanistan's national Taekwondo team returned home to a warm welcome after coming in second at the 24th international Fajr Taekwondo Competitions held in Iran, clenching 17 Bronze and 2 silver medals.
Female Afghan athletes outshone their male teammates, winning 11 of the 19 medals. This is the first time female athletes have outperformed male ones.
"We spotted our deficiencies and learned to improve in the future to get better medals," a female athlete told TOLOnews.
Afghan Taekwondo officials were happy with the team's performance.
"Our heroes successfully proved themselves at the competition," Abdul Saboor Omari, technical deputy of the Afghanistan Taekwondo Federation, told TOLOnews.
A crowd of Kabul residents flocked to the airport to welcome the athletes.
Afghanistan, Armenia, Tunisia, Croatia, Iraq, Serbia and three Iranian teams participated in the tournament. Afghanistan had 37 athletes in the competition.
Hosts Iran came in first, with Armenia trailing Afghanistan at third.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
by Abdul Haleem
KABUL, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) -- While the recently concluded intra- Afghan talks held in Paris had raised hopes among Afghans, the Taliban's inflexible stance and Kabul's refusal to attend any peace negotiations outside of the country could negate any positive denouement of such efforts.
In his address at the Musharano Jirga or Upper House of Afghan Parliament on Tuesday, Afghan Foreign Minister Dr. Zalmai Rassoul categorically said that "any consultative meeting on peace should be held inside Afghanistan."
The government's stance is directly in contrast to an earlier vow of the Taliban not to participate in any talks with the government of President Hamid Karzai for as long as there are foreign military forces in the country.
In a statement posted on its website, the Taliban appreciated the Foundation for Strategic Research for holding the Afghan talks, saying it enabled the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (name of the ousted Taliban regime) to present its stance with regard to the situation in Afghanistan and its future.
But in its statement, the Taliban rejected any peace talks with the Afghan government and instead called for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.
Rassoul's statement came just days after a gathering of several Afghan groups in Paris ended. In the dialogue, participants, including a delegation from the Taliban, presented their respective positions on how to resolve the endemic conflict in Afghanistan.
Already there are some doubts as to the success of the Paris conference.
"The Paris conference yielded no results towards achieving lasting peace in Afghanistan," Nazari Pariani, the editor in chief of an influential newspaper the Daily Mandegar, told Xinhua.
"The Taliban outfit has already presented its stance in the Paris conference and obviously will not attend the coming Afghan groups' conference in Turkmenistan," Pariani said.
Another political analyst and former legislator Mohammad Asim also said that the Taliban would not abandon its armed struggle. " The Taliban prefer to fight instead of agreeing to talk with the government," he said.
The Paris conference, organized by a French think tank, the Foundation for Strategic Research, was attended by the Taliban, other armed militant groups such as the Hekmatyar-led radical Islamic party Hizb-e-Islami and members of the Afghan political opposition.
While his foreign minister insisted that any talks with dissident groups in Afghanistan should be held inside the country, President Karzai has said that his government supports "any sincere efforts to achieve peace in Afghanistan, including the one in Paris".
Rassoul has also emphasized that the identities of Taliban representatives who attended the Paris intra-Afghan talks should be made known.
In a formal statement, the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that any direct talks between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban could take place outside the country only through official process, including the creation of the Taliban liaison office in Qatar.
The statement came in the wake of reports that the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is going to arrange a Paris-like Afghan conference possibly in Turkmenistan.
1 killed, 4 injured in southern Afghan blasts
TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) -- One policeman was killed and four people were wounded in two separate explosions in southern Afghanistan on Friday, officials said.
"A roadside bomb went off near an Afghan Local Police (ALP) patrol in Charchino district, Uruzgan province at around 12 p.m. local time, killing an ALP commander in the district named Manni and wounding two policemen," the police spokesman in the province Farid Farhang told Xinhua.
He said the injured were shifted to hospital in the district in the province 370 km south of capital Kabul. The NATO and U.S.- funded ALP or community police was established in 2010 to protect villages and districts around the insurgency-hit country where Afghan army and police have limited presence.
In neighbouring Kandahar province, two civilians were wounded as a bomb attached to a bicycle targeted a police vehicle in provincial capital Kandahar city earlier Friday, according to provincial government spokesman Jawid Faisal.
Faisal said all cops aboard the vehicle were unharmed in the attack.
No group has claimed responsibility for the incidents, but Taliban was suspected of carrying out such attacks. Kandahar and Uruzgan province has long been a stronghold for insurgent groups despite several military operations by U. S. troops and Afghan security forces over the past couple of years.
Iran, Afghanistan to Boost Academic, Scientific Cooperation
Fars News Agency December 28, 2012
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Minister of Science, Research and Technology Kamran Daneshjoo and Afghan Minister of Higher Education Obaidullah Obaid explored avenues for the further expansion of academic and scientific cooperation between the two neighboring countries.
During the meeting in Tehran, Daneshjoo referred to cultural, historical and religious commonalities and said that Iran is ready to make its experience in the area of higher education available to Afghanistan.
"We are ready to undertake joint technical and engineering projects involving both states' experts," he said, noting that this will benefit the two nations.
Daneshjoo also voiced the Iranian universities' readiness to grant scholarships to the Afghan students.
He further proposed the establishment of Persian language and literature centers and Islamic studies centers in the Afghan universities.
Obaid, for his part, hailed the scientific exchanges between the two universities and hoped that mutual cooperation, especially in the field of higher education, will further improve.
Iran is one of the most important donors to Afghanistan which has kept its promises to help to the reconstruction of the war-hit country.
Iran has built some roads, power transmission lines, and border stations, among the other infrastructure projects which would better link the two nations.
Iran has also contributed more than $50 million annually to Afghan anti-narcotics efforts in the last 8 years.
Was It a Good Year in Afghanistan?
Looking back at a troubling 2012 filled with progress and peril, it's hard to determine whether the United States is winning this war.
Foreign Policy (blog) BY IAN LIVINGSTON, MICHAEL O’HANLON DECEMBER 27, 2012
As 2012 draws to a close, we should all cast a thought to the roughly 68,000 American living in dusty military outposts in places such as Kabul and Kandahar who are celebrating the holiday season far from their loved ones. It has been a busy year in Afghanistan -- U.S. forces have downsized by one-third, Afghans have assumed much more responsibility for the security of their country, NATO supply lines through Pakistan were reopened, and the U.S.-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement was signed. But the question remains: Are we really winning this war?
When assessing the facts and figures, it's hard to separate spin from substance. Reaching any hard conclusions about where Afghanistan is heading is no easy task. For those who want to believe the mission is going badly or who believe the war is a distraction from more pressing American national priorities, it is easy to find dismal trends to make their case. For those still hopeful, it is comparably easy to identify signature successes that put the United States on track to achieving President Barack Obama's stated goal of ending the current mission by 2014.
Take the recent debate, spurred by the Pentagon's December 2012 semi-annual "1230" report to Congress, on the evolution of Afghan security forces' capabilities. That report identified only one Afghan army brigade that is in the top tier of readiness and no longer requires any outside help for its operations. Some critics have concluded that this illustrates the failure of U.S. efforts to develop strong Afghan security partners.
Admittedly, the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the country's military and police forces, is a work in progress at best. But at a time when the ANSF lacks ample airpower or logistics support, this is in fact inevitable. These deficits are almost by design, as such capabilities were viewed by NATO and Afghan officials as secondary priorities -- to be emphasized once the core infantry force structure was built.
Beneath the surface, meanwhile, there have been significant improvements within the Afghan military. It is now near its full, intended size of roughly 350,000 soldiers. There are now 92 kandaks -- formations of battalion size, or a few hundred soldiers -- scoring in the top two tiers of readiness. That's triple the number of late 2010, and 30 more than at this time last year.
A better indicator of ANSF preparedness is the percentage of missions Afghan forces are now leading -- or even conducting entirely independently of foreign assistance. This metric not only speaks to technical readiness, but morale, leadership, and the commitment of the armed forces to the nation.
Encouragingly, these numbers are improving fast. A year ago, Afghan forces led less than 40 percent of all missions -- today, according to the "1230" report, the figure is closer to 85 percent. Admittedly, this information does not tell us if the Afghan forces are now leading the most challenging operations or how well they are doing, but it does tell us something about their willingness to put their lives on the line for their country. The Afghan special forces represent a particular bright spot: They are not only leading a large fraction of all special operations missions -- they are undertaking responsibilities that are in fact quite difficult.
Other metrics are also on their way up. For example, about half of all Afghan security forces now have at least first-grade levels of literacy. The bad news, of course, is that this is a very low standard. The good news is that the figure was under 10 percent just two years ago, so progress has been rapid.
The casualty rate for Afghan forces is telling, too. Afghan army and police suffered around 1,000 fatalities a year from 2007 to 2009, then the figure grew to about 1,500 in 2010, 2,000 in 2011, and more than 3,000 this year.
This may sound as if the Afghan army is suffering more defeats with each passing year, but the story is more complicated than that. These high loss rates for Afghan forces suggest they are committed to and fighting for their country. Of course, such figures also indicate that the enemy is still resilient and dangerous, so the message is mixed. U.S. losses have declined as the ANSF has stepped up: Despite dozens of insider attacks this year -- which thankfully began to slow toward year's end -- American fatalities declined from some 500 in 2010 and more than 400 in 2011 to around 300 in 2012.
For Afghans, of course, the big question is whether their nation is getting less violent. Here too, the statistics are mixed: A broad gauge of violence, as measured by enemy-initiated attacks, is down only a few percent this year relative to last year, which was itself a modest improvement relative to 2010. The net reduction of violence over the past two years is about 10 percent.
The good news is that the numbers are going down, even as NATO starts to downsize. Fully 100,000 American "boots on the ground" worked to ensure peace and stability in 2011 -- since the surge ended, that figure has declined by more than 30,000 soldiers. Many of the cities have seen notable improvements: Kabul remains quite safe, accounting for fewer than 1 percent of all nationwide attacks -- with NATO troops providing very little of the security. Kandahar City and the northern hub of Mazar-e-Sharif are much improved, with attacks down 60 percent or more in each city this year. The western city of Herat is somewhat safer too, and the nation's ring road, which essentially follows the nation's perimeter, appears substantially more usable than a couple years ago.
The bad news, however, is that the 10 percent decline in violence nationwide is within the likely error margins, since not all violence is observed or documented by NATO or Afghan troops. As a result, it is hard to claim too much major improvement. And by other metrics -- like the number of civilians killed by the Taliban -- there is no progress at all.
Again, reaching a bottom line on what's happening in Afghanistan is hard. There is grist for both hope and anxiety in such figures.
Afghanistan's economy presents a similarly mixed picture. The good news is that it has consistently grown at a 6 to 8 percent clip in recent years. The bad news is that much of this growth is due to the twin stimulants of the huge foreign presence in Afghanistan and revenues generated from the opium economy. Even worse, widespread corruption means that wealth doesn't always trickle down to those most in need.
Other indicators of how life is improving for Afghans are less ambiguous. Some 90 percent of the population has access to basic health care within an hour's walk of their homes -- and as a result, life expectancy appears to have increased by more than a decade over the course of a few short years. Nearly 10 million children are in school, and more than 38,000 are enrolled in vocational schools, an increase of one-third over the last 12 months, preparing students for the types of jobs that Afghanistan's economy actually generates. Electricity production is up fourfold since the mid-2000s.
But even amid such statistics, there are troubling indicators. For example, access to electricity in rural areas as well as urban slums is still quite limited, and the increased availability of power has mostly benefited the privileged urban elites.
President Hamid Karzai's government is itself a mixed bag. He is personally popular and continues to poll well, with 70 percent of Afghans or more regularly saying they hold a favorable opinion of him. And more Afghans than not say their country is moving in the right direction: The latest figures from the Asia Foundation show a 52-31 favorable-unfavorable split when asked about the basic trajectory of their country. That's better than in most recent years -- or for that matter, most other countries in the world. But there are still enough disaffected Afghans to produce ample recruits for the insurgency, and uncertainty about the 2014 elections has led to fears about a possible return to civil war should the campaign exacerbate sectarian tensions.
Afghanistan also can't be at peace unless its neighbors stop using it as a battleground from which to pursue their interests. Pakistan's role in the conflict has improved somewhat, with greater tactical cooperation near the border and a reopening of supply lines in 2012. But it continues to allow the operation of fertilizer plants within its territory that provide the raw materials for roadside bombs, rather than insisting on the production of more benign forms of fertilizer. Islamabad also continues to allow the Haqqani network to operate in North Waziristan, among its other ties with insurgent groups.
As we prepare to ring in 2013, determining what lies ahead for Afghanistan remains a murky venture. It's a close call as to whether the good news slightly outweighs the bad, but there are certainly glimmers of hope. Anyone who claims to be able to predict the future there has a clearer crystal ball than we possess.
Betrayed While Asleep, Afghan Police Die at Hands of Their Countrymen
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND December 27, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - A wave of betrayal has left at least 17 Afghan policemen dead in the past 10 days — all killed in their sleep, at the hands of those close to them.
Early Thursday morning, an Afghan policeman unlocked the door of the check post where he was stationed in Oruzgan Province and let in his friends from the Taliban, who helped him attack his sleeping colleagues with knives and guns, eventually killing four and wounding eight.
On Sunday, a local police commander in a remote northern province, Jawzjan, shot to death, in their beds, five men under his command and fled to join the Taliban.
And on Dec. 18, a teenager, apparently being kept for sexual purposes by an Afghan border police commander in southern Kandahar Province, drugged the commander and the other 10 policemen at the post to put them to sleep, and then shot them all; eight died.
In the crisis that has risen in the past year over insider killings, in which Afghan security forces turn on their allies, the toll has been even heavier for the Afghans themselves — at least 86 in a count by The New York Times this year, and the full toll is likely to be higher — than it has been for American and other NATO forces, which have lost at least 62 so far, the latest in Kabul on Monday.
Unlike most insider attacks against foreign forces, known as “green on blue” killings, most of the attacks between Afghans, “green on green,” have been clear cases of either infiltration by Taliban insurgents or turncoat attacks. As with the three recent attacks, they have fallen most heavily on police units, and they have followed a familiar pattern: the Taliban either infiltrate someone into a unit, or win over someone already in a unit, who then kills his comrades in their sleep. Frequently, the victims are first poisoned or drugged at dinner.
“I tell my cook not to allow any police officer in the kitchen,” said Taaj Mohammad, a commander of a border police check post near the one in Kandahar that was attacked on Dec. 18. “This kind of incident really creates mistrust among comrades, which is not good. Now we don’t trust anyone, even those who spent years in the post.”
The most recent of the green-on-green betrayals took place on Thursday about 3 a.m., in the town of Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan. According to Fareed Ayal, a spokesman for the provincial police chief, a police officer named Hayat Khan, who had been in regular touch with the Taliban for religious guidance, waited until the other officers at his check post fell asleep and then called Taliban fighters by cellphone and let them in. First the attackers stabbed the one officer who was on watch, but he raised the alarm in time to awaken some of the police officers.
In the ensuing firefight, four policemen were killed and eight wounded, while Mr. Khan and his Taliban confederates managed to escape, according to Mr. Ayal’s account.
In the attack on Sunday, in Jawzjan Province, the victims were all part of an Afghan Local Police unit whose commander had previous connections with the Taliban. Such local police units, strongly supported as part of American policy in Afghanistan, undergo training, and community leaders and elders offer guarantees that the units have no further insurgent ties.
Gen. Abdul Aziz Ghairat of the Jawzjan Provincial Police said that the commander who had killed the men in their sleep, Dur Mohammad, had fled but that his relatives and a community elder who vouched for him had been detained and were being interrogated.
In some green-on-green cases, personal grievances may drive the attackers to throw in their lot with the Taliban.
That is apparently what happened in the case of Noor Agha, a young man who the police say killed eight border security police officers in their check post on the border near Spinbaldak, the major crossing point between Kandahar and Pakistan, on Dec. 18.
The police said that Mr. Agha, whose age was unclear but whom police sources described as “still beardless,” had been the involuntary companion of the border police commander at that check post, Agha Amire, for several years. Other police commanders who knew both said there was clearly an “improper relationship” between the two.
While not saying so explicitly, they were suggesting that Mr. Amire was using Mr. Agha in the commonplace practice known as bacha baazi, in which powerful Afghan commanders frequently keep young boys as personal servants, dancers and sex slaves.
The practice was outlawed during Taliban times but has never gone away, and even some provincial governors and other top officials openly keep bacha baazi harems. The practice was noted in the latest United States State Department’s annual human rights report, but the report said “credible statistics were difficult to acquire as the subject was a source of shame.”
The night of the attack, Mr. Agha offered to make a special dinner for the police at the check post and invited two friends to attend. He and his friends put drugs in the food and then shot everyone there, including Mr. Amire, and the three attackers escaped across the border to join Taliban insurgents in Pakistan, according to a police official. Mr. Agha’s family, who lived in Arghandab district, a former Taliban stronghold near Kandahar city, fled their home, leaving behind livestock and personal possessions, according to police officials and relatives of the commander.
Although a police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity put the toll at eight dead and three wounded in that episode, officially, the Kandahar Province police chief, Gen. Abdul Raziq, said only four had been killed and three wounded. General Raziq also denied that there had been a young boy involved in drugging the food.
The wave of killings over the past year has police officers all over Afghanistan watching what they eat, and sleeping uneasily.
“We make sure that nobody gets the chance to poison the food,” said Sharif Agha, 26, a police sergeant who commands a small outpost in Khost city, in eastern Afghanistan. The ten officers there take turns helping the cook and make sure at least two people are in the kitchen at all times. At night, a third guard is assigned to watch the two guards normally on duty.
“I don’t know about the rest of the guys,” Sergeant Agha said, “but I have not slept properly over the past few months.”
Reporting was contributed by Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan; Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar from Kabul; and Enayat Najafizada from Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.
What's at stake for Afghan women
CNN By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Special to CNN December 27, 2012
Editor's note: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is author of The New York Times best-seller "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana," which tells the true story of a girl whose business supported her family under the Taliban. A fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, she has written widely on entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict regions. Follow her on Twitter: @gaylelemmon.
"The United States joins the government of Afghanistan in strongly condemning the murder of Najia Sediqi, who was killed in a drive-by shooting Monday morning," read a press release issued December 12 by the U.S. State Department and distributed by the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan.
"The United States will continue to stand side-by-side with women who are carrying on Najia's fight, the Afghan government and all Afghan people to ensure that the hard-won gains made by women in the recent years are protected and advanced."
Yet as the 2014 deadline for withdrawal of NATO forces approaches many Afghans and some Americans wonder how, exactly, those gains will be safeguarded. And Sediqi's death, along with three other killings of Afghan women in the past several weeks, shows both the gains and potential losses facing women in Afghanistan.
On a recent Monday morning, gunmen opened fire on Sediqi while she walked to her office in broad daylight in eastern Laghman province. She was the acting head of the region's women's affairs department, which meant that she handled everything from helping abused women get to shelters to overseeing regional economic empowerment programs.
Her title was "acting" because, as Afghanistan's TOLO TV reported, only five months earlier her predecessor, Hanifa Safi, was killed in a car bomb blast that also left her husband in a coma. Both Sediqi and Safi are among the hundreds of Afghan officials and leaders who have been targeted for assassination.
The killings of the Afghan officials come alongside several weeks in which horrific cases of violence against women came to light in the Afghan press. In Kapisa province, a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Anisa was shot dead after leaving the Mahmoud Raqi Girls High School.
Days later Afghan women leaders gathered in Kabul to demand justice and a government investigation into whether the Taliban, which are suspected in the killing, were responsible. Some activists saw a link between Anisa's killing and her work volunteering for a polio eradication campaign the Taliban are known to oppose.
In Kunduz province, 2012 has been the "most violent on record for women and girls," with more than a dozen killed. Most recently, a 14-year-old was killed by a gunman as she opened her door, allegedly in connection to a failed marriage proposal.
Another schoolgirl, Giseena, was found slain, her throat slit in what appeared to be retribution for her father's refusal to agree to her marriage. The girl's killing came while she was on her way to collect water for her home near the Tajikstan border. One of the men the police detained in the investigation was her thwarted suitor.
This collage of horrific violence against women tells two stories. First, for Afghan officials, death is a frighteningly present possibility at all times, and women serving other women are among the leading targets. A slew of high-profile female leaders have been killed, from Malalai Kakar of Kandahar's police force to Safia Ama Jan, who headed Kandahar's local ministry of women's affairs office, the same position Safi and Sediqi held in Laghman.
And second, as a U.N. official in Afghanistan noted this month, while violence against women remains "largely under-reported due to cultural restraints, social norms and taboos," the last year saw "an actual increase in reporting of incidents of violence against women," with prosecutors and courts "convicting more perpetrators for such crimes."
Certainly the high-visibility horrors that "reach law enforcement, that actually get to the court, or receive public attention due to their egregious nature represent only the tip of the iceberg" when it comes to crimes against women in Afghanistan, but the fact is that more women are bringing their abuse to the authorities and a thriving Afghan media are picking up their stories.
This reality points to progress, say advocates for women. And they say they are coming to believe that these steps forward will not recede as the international troops withdraw.
"I don't see that Afghanistan can go backwards," says Manizha Naderi of Women for Afghan Women, an organization that runs shelters for abused women across the country. "Too many people have experienced and felt the freedom of how it is to live in a safe environment. I really don't think the young people will ever go backwards."
Certainly the years since 2001 have been marked by dramatic changes for Afghan women. Nearly 3 million girls are in school, and more than 3,000 midwives across the country save expectant mothers' lives. Women make up a quarter of parliament, and civil society -- groups pushing for human rights and better education -- is filled with 20-, 30- and 40-something women pushing for their rights and their country's future.
In many ways the stories of these women are part of a larger narrative the American public, exhausted by the country's longest-ever war, has nearly stopped hearing: Some women are making great progress -- and taking great risks -- while some others have seen their lives change little and continue to be plagued by violence and deadly abuse.
Their fates are linked. As three prominent Afghan women entrepreneurs who appeared in Washington at the U.S. Institute of Peace this month made clear, the gains of some women lead to the gains of more. Homegrown role models help show what is possible to the girls of the next generation -- and their fathers.
In the political sphere they show that women can lead and they stand up for girls such as Giseena. And in the economic realm these entrepreneurs are creating jobs for women and men in a country that has an unemployment rate estimated to top 35%.
As these women push forward they bring others with them and bolster families' prospects in the process. But their advancement takes time.
In America's recent election, neither side wanted to discuss in any depth either the stakes of the Afghanistan conflict or a sustainable future strategy for the war. Poll after poll shows Americans no longer think it is a war worth fighting. But Afghan women are still in the fight and will be long after 2014. And their battle for a more educated, richer, healthier country is one in which everyone has a stake.
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Afghanistan female air force pilots left grounded
The two women in their 20s were trained in the U.S. how to fly military helicopters, but in Afghanistan, they have been ignored and put off by the air force.
Los Angeles Times By David Zucchino December 27, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan - Unlike most women in Afghanistan, Sourya Saleh knows how to drive — but she's taken the wheel only with her brother beside her, out of respect for tradition. Her friend Masooma Hussaini is still learning.
Both young women, though, are experts in a more demanding mode of travel: They've flown 204 hours each as pilots of military helicopters.
The first female chopper pilots in Afghanistan since the Soviets trained a woman as a pilot in the 1980s, these two young Afghans are pioneers in a land where a resurgent Taliban is determined to deny girls the right to an education, and violence against women is on the rise.
After 18 months of military helicopter training in the United States, 2nd Lt. Saleh and 2nd Lt. Hussaini have returned home as two polished, confident Afghan air force pilots. But they don't have uniforms, flight suits or an assignment. They haven't even seen a helicopter, much less flown one.
Since returning here Oct. 28, they've spent their days at home with their families, reading, watching TV, shopping and helping with housework. A superior says their paperwork is "under review."
"It seems we've been put on a very long vacation," Saleh said in nearly perfect English, honed by months in Texas and Alabama with American women who were also training to be military pilots.
Saleh, 20, and Hussaini, 21, refuse to believe that the Afghan military has abandoned them. They prefer to believe that the country's nascent air force is just slow and bureaucratic, and that they'll be flying and serving their country soon.
"I fought too hard for the right to fight for my country — I'm not going to stay home and wait," Hussaini said, picking at a chicken kebab in the women's section of a restaurant near her home in Kabul. "To not fly now after all we've accomplished for women would mean that everything we've fought for would be wasted."
The pilots' imposed idleness elicits painful memories of their childhoods, when the Taliban government forced young women to stay at home, cooking and cleaning. Hussaini and Saleh were educated in secret, illegal girls' schools until the Taliban regime fell in 2001.
"Things are much better now for Afghanistan, but there are still problems for women," Hussaini said. "Not everyone tells the truth about the situation. It's hard to know the truth."
Hussaini is poised and forthright, with expressive eyes and a round face framed by a black head scarf. Saleh is more reserved, but speaks quietly and confidently, her smooth face lightly dusted with makeup beneath her head scarf.
The two women dress modestly, with stylish Western-style winter coats, boots and handbags. Both are ethnic Hazara, a Shiite Muslim minority that has experienced persecution by Afghanistan's Sunni Muslim majority.
In a country where burkas are still common, especially in the countryside, the two pilots are portraits of modernity set against a backdrop of harsh patriarchal domination. Afghanistan's women's affairs minister reported last month that "extreme or brutal violence against women" is on the rise, with 3,500 reported cases in the first six months of the year.
"In Afghanistan, women cannot raise their voices," Saleh said. "We wanted a way to raise our voices for all women, and flying for our country does that."
This month, two women who did raise their voices were assassinated. A high school girl was shot by gunmen on her first day as a polio vaccination volunteer, and a provincial director of women's affairs was gunned down four months after her predecessor was killed by a car bomb.
Sexism is deeply embedded in Afghan society. Schoolgirls have been poisoned or doused with acid, and young women have been beaten and killed by male relatives for refusing arranged marriages to older men. Women who work outside the home are often threatened, or condemned as morally deficient.
The Afghan military was slow to accept women, but it has admitted them in recent years under Western pressure. Today, about 350 women are in the Afghan military, according to NATO, almost all of them in administrative or support jobs. An Afghan army spokesman, Gen. Mohammed Zahir Azimi, put the number at nearly 1,000 — in an army of 187,000.
In this environment, the accomplishments of Hussaini and Saleh are remarkable, especially because both come from conservative families with no history of military service. They didn't know each other when they enlisted three years ago after seeing TV ads in Kabul seeking women for the military. They were two Afghan girls who had never been away from home.
The women graduated from officers' candidate school in Kabul, then took English classes. They received instruction in English and military technical language at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. At Ft. Rucker, Ala., they learned to fly U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters.
They are combat qualified, having passed courses in basic war skills and basic combat skills — "my favorite part," Saleh said. They didn't actually fire the Kiowa's air-to-air missiles, but performed combat simulations so that they know how to launch the weapons.
Two other Afghan women flunked the U.S. pilot's course, they said. Saleh and Hussaini passed, and graduated in an elaborate ceremony attended by American military officers, and by soldiers and pilots from other nations.
They expected a similar ceremony when they returned to Afghanistan in October, they said, but there was nothing. Only their families were on hand to greet them.
When they asked to meet their Afghan air force commanders, they said, they were put off. They were not even told how many helicopters the Afghan air force has available.
"Last week, they told us to come this week," Hussaini said. "This week, they told us to come next week. That's the way it's been. It's very frustrating."
They did manage to meet Afghanistan's only other female helicopter pilot, the colonel who was trained in the '80s. Three other women have begun training as military pilots in Afghanistan, they said, two to fly helicopters and one to fly planes.
Hussaini and Saleh are glad to be back with their families, but they miss the United States: the open culture, the free expression, the friendships with American female pilots, the food. (They keep up with American friends via Facebook and email.) They fell in love with pizza, Southern fried seafood and Mexican food — "just like Afghan food, only spicier," Saleh said.
On Dec. 8, six weeks after returning home, Hussaini and Saleh were invited to the Afghan military air base in Kabul to finally meet their commander. (Their only other visit to the base was two weeks earlier, for a German TV interview.)
The commander welcomed them and told them that he hoped to have an assignment for them in the future, they said. But there was nothing yet. They were not issued military uniforms, much less flight suits. They were told to call him in a couple of days.
"We'll see," Saleh said afterward, shrugging. "We've heard a lot of promises."
Col. Mohammed Bahadur Raiskhail, an Air Force public affairs officer, said the pilots are reservists and cannot be issued uniforms until they are assigned to an active-duty unit. He blamed bureaucracy at the notoriously sclerotic Ministry of Defense for the delay.
Like any military, he said, there are time-consuming procedures that must be followed.
In the case of the two young pilots, he said, "The fruit is not yet ripe."
The military is eager to show off its new female pilots, Raiskhail assured the two women, especially after the U.S. paid to train them. They sat, arms folded, on a couch in the colonel's office. They were seated next to two Afghan women in smart green military uniforms, which only underscored their civilian clothes.
Saleh and Hussaini bristled when the colonel suggested that the three other women training as pilots in Afghanistan had progressed ahead of them.
"No," Hussaini told him. "We're ahead of them. We're the first for this air force."
Raiskhail smiled. "They are brave; they are showing the world what young women can do," he said. "They've opened the door. Some day, we hope to have women commanders."
The two pilots listened, but they did not seem encouraged. They stared straight ahead as the colonel spoke. Finally they mentioned that their piloting skills were atrophying by the day. The colonel, a pilot himself, agreed that one must fly almost daily to keep skills sharp.
There was one more thing: The two women were trained on American helicopters. The tiny Afghan air force (Raiskhail would not reveal the number of aircraft; the website GlobalSecurity.org calls Afghan air force capabilities "extremely limited") relies largely on Russian-made helicopters. That would require several more months of training before the women could fly on active duty, the colonel said.
"But I cannot say when," he said.
The two pilots were free to go. It was a sunny day, ideal flying weather. But there was nothing for them on this base. They went back into the sunlit city to hail a cab ride home, where once more they would wait.
david.zucchino@latimes.com
Special correspondent Hashmat Baktash contributed to this report.
Squabbles in Garmsir
New York Times By MATTHIEU AIKINS December 27, 2012
GARMSIR, Afghanistan - “You know, we’re very worried about the future,” Hamid Khan, the telecommunications director in Garmsir, southern Afghanistan, said to Major Thomas McAvoy, the civil affairs officer attached to Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Ninth Marine Regiment. “When Najibullah was president, he also had a plan to take control of the districts and build the government.”
McAvoy winced at the comparison to the Afghan communist leader the Soviets left behind in 1989. Najibullah managed to hold out for three years before his government collapsed, despite a larger and more effective civil service, military and political team than exists under President Hamid Karzai today. “I think the coalition nations will keep helping the Afghan government in the future,” he replied.
McAvoy and the rest of the coalition governance team visit the Garmsir district headquarters a few times a week. They move through the various offices in the courtyard, clockwise. These are the offices of the director of telecommunications, the director of media relations and the governor, the community council room and the prosecutor’s office. And they are the local authorities that the Marines and their American and British civilian counterparts have been trying to put back together, after forcibly clearing the district of the Taliban between 2009 and 2011. While the military gains were remarkable, their progress on the governance side has been far more mixed.
Earlier in December, I embedded with Kilo Company in Garmsir to observe its efforts to establish a functional Afghan government presence that will survive the troops’ departure in 2014. In this, I’ve been greatly aided by a galley copy of Carter Malkasian’s book “War Comes to Garmsir.”
Malkasian is a fluent speaker of Pashto who spent two years as the senior political officer in Garmsir and became immersed in the area’s history and intricate political structure. The book represents the kind of detailed study of Afghanistan that has been badly missing: Most people associated with the international military and development missions here come in for six-month or one-year stints. (Another valuable book, albeit with a vastly different background and purpose, is Noah Coburn’s excellent ethnographic study, “Bazaar Politics.”) One mark of Malkasian’s analytical mettle is that he presents, more so than any other writer I’ve read, a clear and fair picture of the Taliban and why they enjoyed so much support in the south.
He doesn’t go as far to say this, but reading his account, the Taliban come off as Garmsir’s most legitimate local government since the era of Mohammad Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who was deposed in 1973. This is a challenge for the current Afghan government, which rode in on the coattails of a foreign military occupation and now struggles with infighting and corruption. The odds are against it, both because of history — its current roster of officials in Kabul and the provincial capital includes many of the characters who tore the country apart during the civil war of the 1990s — and its own flawed structure. As Malkasian points out, with each local government agency — whether for health, agriculture or intelligence — answerable to heads in both the provincial and the national capitals, countless conflicts are created at the district level.
To take just one example, there is a bewildering array of security forces in Garmsir, each with a separate chain of command and its own internal rivalries: the Afghan National Police, which ultimately answer, via the provincial police chief, to the interior minister in Kabul; the Afghan National Army, which obeys the corps commander in Helmand and the defense minister; the National Directorate of Security, the intelligence service whose murky networks lead up to national head in Kabul; the Afghan National Civil Order Police; and the many militias all in their tan uniforms, who are paid and armed under the Afghan Local Police program but remain loyal to their tribes’ strongmen. A.N.P., A.N.A., N.D.S., A.N.C.O.P., A.L.P.: Presiding over this alphabet soup is the district governor, ostensibly the senior government official, who has the smallest staff and doesn’t control any of these forces directly.
Currently, there’s not even a governor in Garmsir: Both the acting governor and his deputy have been in Kabul for months, lobbying over the position. “I suspect a bidding war is taking place,” an international official told me. Thanks to the financial and military patronage provided by the internationals, local officials are free to concentrate on their own internecine squabbles. Whether they’ll be able to unite against the drastic challenges that will emerge 2014 remains to be seen.
Matthieu Aikins is a magazine writer living in Kabul. You can follow him on Twitter.
Karzai to Visit Washington in January
TOLOnews.com By Abdul Wali Arian Thursday, 27 December 2012
President Hamid Karzai is scheduled to visit the United States on 7 January to discuss issues related to the bilateral security agreement currently being negotiated by diplomats of the two countries.
Karzai and Obama are expected to discuss the sticking point issue of legal immunity for US forces after the Nato combat mission ends in 2014.
The security agreement will also include the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan after 2014 and military assistance to Afghanistan after Isaf troops leave.
Some Afghan analysts have expressed optimism about the prospects of the tip.
"The trip could be very beneficial and important for a better future for Afghanistan. The signing of the agreement could guarantee Afghanistan's future to a certain degree," said political analyst Idrees Ramhami.
The opposition National Coalition Party urged the president to prioritize national interests over personal ones.
"President Karzai should discus the security transition and the peaceful transition of power. Also, he should seriously discuss the priority issues of ensuring stability during the transition period," National Coalition Party Spokesman Sayed Aqa Fazil Sancharaki said.
Whooping Cough Epidemic Kills 12 Children in Badakhshan
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 27 December 2012
Twelve children suffering from whooping cough died in a snow-bound district in the northeastern province of Badkhshan, the provincial governor spokesman said Thursday.
The childrens were between the ages of one and five, and the deaths took place in Shoorian village bordering Tajikistan, located in Nasi Darwaz district of the province, spokesman Abdulmaroof Rasekh told TOLOnews. He said local officials learned of the deaths last week.
About 350 other children in the area are suffering from the whooping cough epidemic. The village remains inaccessible from Afghanistan, so a health team was sent from Tajikistan Thursday. The team is now treating the children and providing them nutritious food, Rasekh added.
Heavy snow has blocked access to 12 districts in Badakhshan, and teams are unable to reach other areas with potential health emergencies.
Officials have said they will call in the Afghan National Army for help if needed.
Afghanistan Gets Second Place at Fajr Taekwondo Competitions
TOLOnews.com By Mir Sayed Sediqi Thursday, 27 December 2012
Afghanistan's national Taekwondo team returned home to a warm welcome after coming in second at the 24th international Fajr Taekwondo Competitions held in Iran, clenching 17 Bronze and 2 silver medals.
Female Afghan athletes outshone their male teammates, winning 11 of the 19 medals. This is the first time female athletes have outperformed male ones.
"We spotted our deficiencies and learned to improve in the future to get better medals," a female athlete told TOLOnews.
Afghan Taekwondo officials were happy with the team's performance.
"Our heroes successfully proved themselves at the competition," Abdul Saboor Omari, technical deputy of the Afghanistan Taekwondo Federation, told TOLOnews.
A crowd of Kabul residents flocked to the airport to welcome the athletes.
Afghanistan, Armenia, Tunisia, Croatia, Iraq, Serbia and three Iranian teams participated in the tournament. Afghanistan had 37 athletes in the competition.
Hosts Iran came in first, with Armenia trailing Afghanistan at third.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com