Tweet
Britain's Kabul embassy installs bottom scanners
The British Embassy in Kabul has followed in the footsteps of high-security prisons around the world by installing what might politely be described as an electronic orifice scanner to screen visitors for weapons concealed inside their bodies.
Telegraph.co.uk By Rob Crilly 28 Dec 2012
Kabul - Recent visitors have described being asked to sit in an "electric chair", which uses magnetic sensors to detect hidden metal inside the anus or other cavities.
British officials will not comment on the issue for fear of compromising security.
However, the subject has become the butt of jokes around Kabul's community of expat aid workers, diplomats and journalists who have been asked to sit on the imposing throne as they arrive for appointments.
"There was a big grey chair inside the guard hut at one of the entrances which the Gurkhas said visitors had to sit on," said one visitor, who said he was stunned by the new piece of equipment. "No one could really believe it when they said what it was for.
"I'm not sure if it was there last time I went in."
The Body Orifice Security Scanner (Boss) is essentially a powerful metal detector that is used in prisons to avoid the need for intimate cavity searches.
It has been installed to root out hidden mobile phones, sim cards or other metallic contraband.
In Afghanistan, it also means that visitors to Britain's fortified embassy to do not have endure a pat-down of intimate areas – an important consideration in a conservative, Muslim society.
Its value was underlined earlier this month when a suicide bomber detonated explosives concealed in his underpants in an attempt on the life of Asadullah Khalid, head of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security. He survived the attack on Thursday but was badly injured.
It was the latest example of how attackers are developing tactics to evade tight security around VIPs.
Last year, the leader of Afghanistan's High Peace Council was killed by a bomb hidden in a visitor's turban – an area not previously searched for fear of causing offence.
And in 2009, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, al-Qaeda's head bombmaker in Yemen, inserted explosives into the rectum of his brother in an unsuccessful effort to assassinate Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief.
A spokesman for the British embassy said: "If it's part of security to get into the embassy then it's not something we comment on, for obvious reasons."
Afghanistan concerned over civilians torture in Pakistan
By Mirwais Adeel Khaama Press December 29, 2012
Afghan foreign ministry officials expressed concerns regarding the torture and misbehavior to Afghan citizens in Landi Kotal area of Pakistan.
Foreign ministry following a statement said the issue will be strictly followed with the Pakistani officials.
This comes as at least 29 Afghans were thrashed and their travel documents torn near the Torkham border on Thursday, apparently in retaliation to a similar attack on Pakistani workers by Afghan officials last week.
Officials said that the attackers included relatives of the 29 Pakistani laborers who were allegedly harassed by members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) at Pul-e-Charkhi area of Kabul on Friday. Following this incident, Pakistani authorities had closed the border for six hours on Saturday.
Sources said unidentified people equipped with sophisticated weapons, on Thursday noon, appeared on Landi Kotal-Torkham Road near Michini post and started misbehaving with Afghan nationals. As the Afghan national protested, the gunmen dragged them out of the passengers’ vehicles, tortured them physically, snatched their valuables and tore their passports.
On the other hand Pakistan security officials on Friday sealed Torkham border after the Afghan National Army (ANA) tortured two Pakistani laborers for the second time in a week.
According to details, truck drivers blocked the road and took out a protest against the alleged torture of two Pakistani truck drivers at the hands of the Afghan officials. Earlier, two truck drivers were heading into Afghanistan seeking work when they were intercepted by Afghan security personnel at a check post, who allegedly subjected the job-seekers to torture while also tearing up their passports and other traveling documents.
The tortured Pakistanis returned back to the Pak-Afghan border where they were joined by other truck drivers who held protests against the treatment meted out by the Afghan security personnel. Drivers had complained that Afghan security personnel routinely harassed and tortured the job-seekers at various check posts situated inside Afghanistan. “It seems that the Afghan security forces are using these tactics to force Pakistani labourers out of their country,” they added.
Pakistan reopens border with Afghanistan after two-day closure
ISLAMABAD, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan on Saturday reopened its border with Afghanistan after two days of closure over the beating of Pakistani nationals in Afghanistan few days ago, the Pakistan Foreign Ministry said.
Pakistan shut the Torkham border on Friday after two Pakistani nationals were trashed near Kabul and their passports were snatched and torn, officials said.
Afghan officials said that a group of Afghan nationals were also attacked in Pakistan's Khyber tribal region on Thursday and their passports were snatched.
Afghan officials also said that at least seven people, including four children, died due to cold who were stuck along the border due to the closure of the border.
The border was reopened after two days following a meeting between Afghan Ambassador to Pakistan Umer Daudzai and Pakistan Special Secretary Ministry of Foreign Affairs Alamgir Babar on Saturday, the Foreign Ministry said.
The two sides discussed the recent incidents where Pakistanis returning from Afghanistan were beaten near Kabul, a Foreign Ministry's statement said.
Ambassador Daudzai promised that the matter would be investigated and action would be taken against those responsible.
He also assured that such incidents would not recur. The Afghan Ambassador also raised the incident involving Afghan nationals in Landi Kotal in Khyber agency.
Based on the assurances given by the Afghan Ambassador, the Pakistan side agreed to reopen the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the statement said.
Afghanistan Kunduz victim families file Germany claim
BBC News 28 December 2012
Families of dozens of Afghan civilians killed in a 2009 air strike have sued the German government for 3.3m euros (£2.7m; $4.3m) in damages.
A Germany army commander ordered the attack on two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban because he said they posed a threat to his troops.
The army said 91 people died in the attack in Kunduz province but lawyers for the families say 137 were killed.
Many of the victims were women and children trying to siphon fuel.
The attack on 4 September 2009 was the most controversial episode in Germany's military presence in Afghanistan.
German forces served under the Nato-led Isaf force. 'Cover-up'
Initially, German forces said no civilians had been killed but it transpired that the tankers had been abandoned by the militants.
It soon became clear that a large number of civilians had died and the attack created a political scandal in Germany in the weeks before national elections, which Chancellor Angela Merkel went on to win.
The controversy - and subsequent allegations of a cover-up - led to the resignation of Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung and the sacking of army chief Wolfgang Schneiderhan.
Col Georg Klein, who ordered the air strike, was later promoted to the rank of general.
In 2010, the German defence ministry awarded each Afghan family caught up in the attack 5,000 euros.
A Bremen-based German lawyer, Karim Popal, submitted an initial class action in 2011 on behalf of four people.
He has now filed a further 10 cases representing 79 people, both relatives of victims and those wounded in the attack.
The cases call for compensation amounting to between 20,000 and 75,000 euros each.
About 4,600 German troops remain in northern Afghanistan, carrying out mainly training and reconstruction roles.
Their numbers are to be reduced over the next year with the closure of their base in Kunduz province, before a final withdrawal by the end of 2014.
US scraps entire fleet of Afghan cargo planes
Press TV December 29, 2012
The U.S. military is scrapping the Afghan air force’s entire fleet of Italian-made cargo planes, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
U.S. and Afghan officials told the paper that the Afghan military isn’t expected to have an independent and fully functioning air force until around 2017, well after the withdrawal of most U.S. and international troops.
On the west end of Kabul International Airport, twin-engine C-27As sit side by side, sunlight reflecting off their gray wings and the green, black, and red of the Afghan flag emblazoned on their tails. For more than a year, though, most of the planes had been little more than expensive aviation exhibitions, unable to fly due to lack of spare parts and maintenance.
Now, despite spending nearly $600 million on the program, the U.S. is canceling the contract for the aircraft and disposing of all 16 planes delivered to the Afghan Air Force, the Journal reported.
Alenia Aermacchi North America, a unit of Italian defense conglomerate Finmeccanica SpA, failed to meet the requirements of their contract to maintain the fleet, according to an email from U.S. Air Force spokesman Ed Gulick, who was quoted in the Journal.
“This decision comes after failed attempts by the contractor to generate a sufficient number of fully mission-capable aircraft that would provide an effective airlift capability for the AAF,” Gulick said in the email. Stars and Stripes
HIGHLIGHTS
The U.S. decision raises new questions about the coalition's effort to build an Afghan military that will be capable of handling security after the planned withdrawal of most U.S. and international forces after 2014. WSJ
The scrapping of the Alenia contract isn't the only setback in equipping the Afghan Air Force (AAF). The Afghan military is in line to receive a fleet of armed attack planes through a separate U.S.-funded effort. The first of those planes was supposed to be delivered well ahead of the U.S. withdrawal, but that program was delayed by a politically charged U.S. procurement contest, and the U.S. Air Force isn't expected to pick a winning design until early 2013. WSJ
For now, U.S. and Afghan officers say the AAF must concentrate on the fundamentals. Afghanistan has low literacy rates, making it difficult to recruit personnel who have the right technical skills to fly or maintain planes. WSJ
Brig. Gen. Steven Shepro, commander of NATO Air Training Command-Afghanistan, said the AAF is focused on three priorities: resupplying forward bases, moving casualties and transporting the remains of fallen soldiers. He said the Afghans had made strides in recent months to streamline their basic command-and-control and planning procedures. WSJ
Failure Threatens Afghan Police Training Mission
Der Speigel By Andreas Ulrich 28/12/2012
German officials have been training police in Afghanistan for a decade, but a visit to their training center in Mazar-e-Sharif creates major doubts about the effectiveness of the mission. Afghan police remain poorly prepared to tackle the mighty challenges they will face as Western forces withdraw.
The Afghan national sport is called buzkashi. It's a game in which horsemen battle over a goat carcass. There are no established teams. During a match, the competitors forge brief, continuously shifting alliances. They only work together until they have gained a short-term advantage. The game can last for hours, even days. The winner is the rider who manages to carry the carcass to the goal. Buzkashi is a mirror of Afghan society.
By contrast, the German police officers who train local recruits in Afghanistan have brought soccer balls and nets to their base in Mazar-e-Sharif. Football is all about teamwork and team spirit. The goal is to form a team and achieve an objective together.
In a corner of the training center, on a patch of parched earth, there is now a soccer field where the next generation of Afghan police officers is learning the game.
"What we want to achieve with the recruits is a change in mentality," says a German instructor. More team spirit, a better sense of community, more loyalty. More soccer, less buzkashi.
Over the past 10 years, Germany has instructed some 56,000 Afghan police officers at four training centers in the region. The training is part of Germany's responsibility as a member of NATO, and so far the project has cost some 380 million ($503 million). As many as 200 German police officers are regularly stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Mazar-e-Sharif.
But anyone who accompanies the German security aid workers for a few days is bound to doubt the mission's effectiveness after observing the mood among the officers and reading between the lines of official statements. Even now, when Western security forces have entered their 11th year of training, the police in Afghanistan don't stand for public order and security -- but rather for helplessness, arbitrariness and corruption.
A Prime Target
"The mission is neither effective nor sustainable," says Josef Scheuring, chairman of the Germany's largest police union, the GdP, adding that it endangers the lives of the German police officers. "We should withdraw from Afghanistan as quickly as possible," urges Scheuring. Nevertheless, police officers continue to work in the region, usually for a year. They are attracted by overseas bonuses of up to 200 per day.
Alex, 32, a mid-level police officer from the northeastern German town of Ueckermünde, is one of them. He is due to meet with Ayatullah at the Regional Police Training Center (RPTC) in Mazar-e-Sharif late in the afternoon. The next day, the 22-year-old low-ranking officer in the Afghan national police force will show class 6.2 how a road checkpoint works.
"Checkpoints are crucial," says Alex, adding that "they have a high death rate." This makes it important to teach "survival skills," as he puts it. Of all the uniformed officials in Afghanistan, police officers are at the highest risk.
Secluded from the outside world, many of them spend weeks at such checkpoints and are charged with representing the state. They are a symbol of the new Afghanistan, which is massively supported by the West -- and thus a prime target for insurgents. There are currently some 150,000 police officers in Afghanistan. Since 2002, when various Western nations launched training programs, it's estimated that nearly 10,000 police officers have been killed -- and some 15 percent desert the force every year.
Alex plans the next day with Ayatullah. "We'll meet at 7:50 a.m. in front of the armory, and by 8:20 a.m. the checkpoint will be set up. Is that enough time?" asks Alex.
"No problem," says Ayatullah.
"We need a patrol car and a civilian car, plus three boxes as barriers. Ideally, by this evening already. Is that okay?"
Ayatullah nods.
"Okay, I'll see you tomorrow," says Alex.
A Critical Phase
The ambitious project of developing an Afghan police force, which was to operate at least according to the basic principles of its German counterpart, began 10 years ago and involved three phases.
Phase 1, training recruits, was completed long ago.
Phase 2, instructing the police officers in practical operations on location, was abandoned last year. German police officers -- at the time still under the protection of German soldiers -- drove through the country for hours to call on various police stations. Since they had to be back before sundown due to security concerns, there often remained very little time for training.
Phase 3 is currently underway: Afghan police officers train Afghan recruits while the Germans monitor them. They correct mistakes and give suggestions. Based on the methodology and didactics of the German police school, it is hoped that the Afghans can train uneducated men to become good officers in just eight weeks.
Like all German police officers in Mazar-e-Sharif, Alex is living at Camp Marmal, the headquarters of the coalition troops in northern Afghanistan. The ISAF military base is one of the safest places in the country -- a well-equipped artificial world with shops, cafeterias, gyms and pool tables. Private security guards stand at the gates, while soldiers patrol outside the compound. A zeppelin floats in the sky, jam-packed with cameras and surveillance electronics.
The German police officers are not allowed to leave the camp. They used to accept invitations to eat meals with locals, were allowed to move about freely and had opportunities to get to know the country. Today, that would be unthinkable. The upcoming ISAF withdrawal has made the security situation extremely precarious.
Lieutenant General Rainer Glatz, the commander of all German military operations abroad, says that the mission in Afghanistan has reached a "critical phase." Glatz says the Afghan army and police will soon undergo a litmus test to see whether and how they can ensure security without outside help.
Part 2: A Certain Kind of Order
Alex from Ueckermünde begins his workday at 6:15 a.m. with breakfast in the air-conditioned canteen. At 7 a.m., he goes to the barracks where the German police have their offices. Some two dozen men and women have gathered there. They are wearing khaki-colored uniforms made of breathable fabrics with "vector protection," a special treatment that is designed to prevent bites from blood-sucking arthropods like ticks and flying insects.
A security briefing is part of the daily routine for the Germans at Camp Marmal. A colleague brings them up to speed: In Helmand Province, 15 men and 2 women were decapitated, allegedly because they had celebrated and danced; in Laghman Province in the east, two US soldiers were killed by Afghan military personnel. And in the north, where Camp Marmal is located, there were "no incidents."
That is no coincidence, because the north is under the control of Governor Atta Mohammed Noor. The former warlord is one of the richest men in the country. Every day, hundreds of supplicants wait for an opportunity to enter his office, which is decorated with chandeliers, paintings and silk upholstered chairs.
In the governor's realm, the opium smuggling trade is booming, as are alcohol sales and business with prostitutes from Tajikistan. The Western forces simply look the other way. Otherwise "the fragile economic system would collapse," said a US major during a confidential discussion behind the ISAF barracks.
Governor Noor stands for a certain amount of order. It is not the order that comes from the rule of law -- but it is enough for the German government to thank him with the construction of a new airport in Mazar-e-Sharif. A consulate general is due to be opened next year.
A Proud People
The RPTC training center is located roughly 800 meters (2,600 feet) from Camp Marmal. Before the Germans drive there, they each put on bulletproof vests, grab a G-36 assault rifle and climb into an armored SUV.
The Germans also carry their weapons on the secured military base. Their Afghan colleagues, however, must surrender their arms at the gate. An Afghan, a uniform and a loaded weapon can be a deadly combination in this part of the world. Some 50 ISAF soldiers have been shot by Afghans in uniform this year alone. The Taliban proudly boasts that it has managed to infiltrate the local police force. As a precautionary measure, the Kalashnikovs distributed to class 6.2 shortly before 8 a.m. are missing their firing pins. That way means any cartridges smuggled into the training center couldn't hurt anyone.
Ayatullah, the Afghan police instructor, has the checkpoint set up. "Where is the patrol car?" asks Alex, the German instructor.
Ayatullah hesitates. His superiors didn't want to hand over the car, he admits. He says they use it to drive home in the evening. They told him to tell the Germans that they would only make the vehicle available if they were given more gasoline.
His superiors are playing buzkashi with squad cars. As a result, class 6.2 practices without a vehicle.
Ayatullah assigns positions at the checkpoint. Four recruits secure the area, one stops an oncoming civilian car, and two others stand behind him. Stop, hands up, search the vehicle, make arrests.
Alex is not satisfied.
"Ayatullah should have explained the process once again to the entire class before the exercise, ideally at each individual stage," he says. Many of the recruits were not paying attention or didn't even understand which task had been assigned to them, he criticizes. Although Ayatullah has professional knowledge, he can't teach it to others, says the German.
At 10:15 a.m., the Afghan trainer and his German supervisor meet to review the session. "How did it go?" asks Alex.
"Really well," says Ayatullah, who is beaming.
Alex was expecting that answer. "Nevertheless, we have to talk about a few points," he says. The trick is to package the criticism so it sounds like praise. The Afghans are a proud people.
Running Out of Time
Eight weeks is not much time to make a police officer of a man who has perhaps never attended a school. The country's illiteracy rate is currently at roughly 70 percent, and sometimes the recruits don't understand a word, for instance, if an instructor tries to teach a group of Pashtuns in Dari. Only the most basic knowledge is taught: roadblocks, house searches, self-defense and making arrests, weaponry and a few legal principles, including human rights.
But is that enough?
Interior Minister for the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lorenz Caffier, who also currently heads the German Interior Ministers' Conference, has his doubts. The problem is "that in Afghanistan we primarily train recruits for basic police service," says Caffier, "and we don't know how many of them will remain with the police force and how many will go to work for the warlords." The conservative politician, who is a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), says it would be preferable to train more senior officers who are less embedded in the country's old clan structures.
Not much time is left, though. By the end of February 2014, the number of German soldiers stationed in Afghanistan will have been reduced from the Bundeswehr's current force of nearly 4,500 to 3,300 -- and German combat troops will have been completely withdrawn by the end of 2014. German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to the CDU, says that he intends "to consolidate what has been accomplished, even after 2014," adding that a "certain presence" by German police officers will be required in the region to achieve this.
But Alex and his colleagues on the ground in Afghanistan are asking themselves how long the camp will remain intact after the withdrawal. There is a great deal of concern that the training center will fall into disrepair, the air conditioning units will no longer be maintained, and that many items that can be used privately will quickly go missing. The establishment plan for the Afghan police does not include positions for maintenance workers.
Army Influence
After the lunch break, Alex turns his attention to another Afghan instructor: Tarek. This time the focus is on arrest and search techniques. Tarek stands confidently in front of the group, speaking loudly and gesticulating frequently. He also provides explanations, allows the recruits to practice individual steps and intervenes when necessary.
Then a recruit appears, wrapped in a large cloak with fuses visible from underneath. It's time to practice handling suicide bombers.
"Shout loudly to warn everyone around you, run backwards as quickly as possible and look for cover," explains Tarek.
"Only open fire if the insurgent attempts to detonate the bomb," Alex reminds them. Then he admits that only a bullet aimed at the head will help. "And quickly," he adds.
The day is over. Tarek collects empty water bottles and the recruits return to their living quarters. The Afghan head of the medical center at Camp Marmal climbs behind the wheel of his Ford Ranger. The colonel passes the checkpoints and takes the paved road toward the center of Mazar-e-Sharif. He drives for nearly 10 kilometers -- first through a desert-like landscape, then past garages, filling stations and shops. Shortly after entering the town, he turns left.
The car rumbles over a path through one of the city's better neighborhoods, where multi-story buildings are hidden from view behind high walls. Shortly before the medical officer reaches his own house, he passes by a corner property. Two men clad in Afghan army uniforms are trimming a hedge in the front garden. "A general lives here," the colonel explains.
The colonel is a member of the police force. He has to trim his own hedges -- at least as long as the Germans are still in Afghanistan.
Translated from the German by Paul Cohen
After peace talks, what's next for Afghanistan?
CBS News By Jere Van Dyk December 28, 2012
Newspapers and online media outlets are filled with stories at the end of the year about the two-day exploratory peace talks just concluded in France.
Let us look closely:
On Dec. 20, according to The Wall Street Journal, representatives of the Taliban, Hezbi-i-Islami (The Islamic Party), the Afghan government, and the Northern Alliance, met at the Chateau de la Tour, in Chantilly, outside of Paris for the third time this year to see if they could bring peace to Afghanistan.
The first such meeting, which was more low-key, was held in Kyoto on June 28 and organized by Doshisha University. It is not clear at the moment what role the U.S. might have played in these talks.
I smiled when I read that the meetings were at the Chateau de la Tour. It is ironic that the Taliban -- who are waging a class war as much as a religious, ethnic war, and brother war -- would agree to meet in a chateau, a symbol of the aristocracy with its manicured lawns and high black wrought iron fence.
Were these talks serious? Will they lead to peace? More immediately, will they lead to the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who is being held captive by the Taliban since June 2009? No one seems to know. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted Hajji Din Mohammad, a participant in the talks: "It is better to know the Taliban's views directly, from themselves, so that we can exchange our views and reach our decisions." Din Mohammad, whom I have known for decades, is an honest man, close to Karzai (he chose him to head the Afghan High Peace Council), and one of the most influential men in the country with ties to the Haqqani Network and to Mullah Omar. They were part of the same Mujahideen network in the 1980s. If these men can come together, and if their lustful neighbors can be kept at bay, there is hope.
Who in the French government would have the clout among the Afghans to arrange this meeting? I suspect that could be Olivier Roy, who, while not a part of the government, is one of the world's foremost authorities on Afghanistan, and on political Islam. Those who follow Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East will be familiar with his writings. He went to Afghanistan as a student in the 1970s, knows the 1980s Mujahedeen leadership, and has the knowledge, ties and the respect needed.
The Taliban, which still calls itself the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," and still considers itself the only legitimate government of Afghanistan, said that its representatives were not there to negotiate, but to state their positions. I think the meetings were important simply because they took place. But while I smiled, I was saddened again to read in Tolo that Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmai Rasool told the Afghan Senate Thursday that "It is not clear which group the two Taliban members were representing." The Afghan government has "insufficient information about the background of these men. " Remember, in 2010, when David Petraeus was in command in Afghanistan, that the U.S. brought to Kabul and "paid a lot of money to," according to the BBC, a Taliban leader, Mohammad Mansour, who is said to have met with Karzai, and U.S. officials. He was later found to be an imposter.
To quote The New York Times: "The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans and our own intelligence service," said a senior Afghan official who is familiar with the case. "They are playing games." Others suspect that the fake Taliban leader, whose identity is not known, may have been dispatched by the Pakistani intelligence service, known by its initials, the ISI. Elements within the ISI have long played a 'double-game' in Afghanistan reassuring United States officials that they are pursuing the Taliban while at the same time providing support for the insurgents."
"The ISI is an integral part of the Pakistani Army," said Major Gen. N. Babar, interior minister to Benazir Bhutto, and who helped to create and train the Mujahedeen in 1973 and rode with the Taliban into Kabul in 1996.
The state of the war
The Obama Administration is anxious to extract itself from the Afghan quagmire. We are caught in the same trap into which we lured the U.S.S.R. in 1979. The U.S. has lost over 2,000 troops, and thousands more have been maimed. It has spent $600 billion. According to The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, it is going to cost $8.7 billion more just to bring U.S. materiel home.
Over 1,200 of those troops were killed after January 2010 when the surge began, according to Reuters/The Washington Post. The war continues, and as usual, the Afghans suffer most. According to The Associated Press, more than 110 Afghan National Army soldiers and 200 Afghan police are killed every month.
According to Reuters, the Department of Defense's biannual war assessment (covering April - September) said that enemy attacks are up one percent. There were 66 insider attacks, up from 43 in 2011. In July, there were "slightly more than 3,000 enemy initiated attacks," The Associated Press reported. There were 2,000 in July 2009. "Pakistan has contributed to U.S. interests while simultaneously falling short in others," it said. This is diplomatic-speak to say that while Pakistan is helping the U.S. it is fighting the U.S. at the same time. It continues to provide sanctuary for insurgents and declines to "interdict explosives (IED) materials that come across the border."
In spite of this, it was recently reported both in The New York Times and The Washington Post that the U.S. will pay $688 million to Pakistan to cover costs for the 140,000 Pakistani troops that it keeps along the Afghan - Pakistani border. Where are these 140, 000 troops? Before the surge, the U.S. had nearly 70,000 troops in Afghanistan and travelers in eastern Afghanistan saw U.S. convoys on highways, in villages, and in the countryside, as well as U.S. helicopters and hundreds of bases. I traveled at some length in different parts of the tribal areas, and never saw a Pakistani soldier -- only Frontier Scouts and border police.
Recent history
On April 14, 1988, in Geneva, representatives of the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan signed, after years of talks, three bilateral agreements intended to end the 10-year old Afghan-Soviet war in Afghanistan. The U.S. and the Soviet Union signed a "Declaration on International Guarantees." These documents became known as the Geneva Accords. The last Soviet troops crossed the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya, from Afghanistan back to the Soviet Union 2/15/89. The Afghan Army continued the fight with Soviet financial help against the Pakistani-backed Mujahedeen. Al Qaeda which grew out of Afghan-Soviet war, joined the fight in greater numbers. This war, in a different guise, continues today.
Just substitute the Taliban for the Mujahedeen. Up in the mountains, there is no difference between the two. To them there is no difference between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. We are both infidel invaders. Should the U.S. care after the draw-down? Morally, yes -- for we helped to start this war and to turn Afghanistan into a warzone, which led to al Qaeda and the Taliban. But the U.S. public, ignorant of and not interested in this history, wants out. We want only to assure that al Qaeda does not return to use this land again as a base from which to launch attacks against the U.S.
In the beginning
To understand more fully, let's go back 65 years:
In 1947, the British, then ruling India, partitioned India, creating the Republic of India, and the mostly Muslim West Pakistan and East Pakistan -- nearly 1,000 miles apart. That same year, Afghanistan was the only country in the world to vote against Pakistan's admission to the U.N. It did not accept the Durand Line, the Afghan-Pakistani border drawn by the British, in 1893. Not one Afghan government, including the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan led by Mullah Omar, has ever accepted this border. Every Pashtun over the age of 10 knows that the Afghan border once ended at the Indus River, 80 miles inside Pakistan. Peshawar was once the winter home for Afghan royalty. Ahmed Shah Durrani, founder of modern Afghanistan in 1747, was born in Multan, in Pakistan today.
In 1948, Pakistan used Pashtun tribesmen, which it called "irregulars," from the tribal areas, as guerrilla fighters to attack Kashmir to try to make it part of West Pakistan. In 1973, the Pakistani military-trained Pashtuns -- among them Gulbadeen Hekmatyierwhose Islamist political party, Hezb-i-Islami sat at the table in Chantilly, who became the Mujahedeen, and later the Taliban -- all part of Pakistan's proxy Army to try to control Afghanistan; and the Pashtuns, who under Durrani, ruled all the way to Delhi, to achieve what it calls "strategic depth," so as not to be surrounded there by India, and to protect the Durand Line. The U.S., aligning itself with Pakistan, stated recently that it accepts the Durand Line.
Meanwhile, Pakistan uses young Pashtun men, brain-washed in its madrasahs, and cut off from their own culture to try to divide and thus conquer the Pashtuns and to kill U.S. soldiers. It has a tiger by the tail.
Marvin Weinbaum, former State Department official, wrote in a Foreign Policy blog on December 20: "In reality the Taliban have always resisted and resented being dictated to by Pakistan." He is right.
In 1970, West Pakistan lost East Pakistan, and thus half its country, in a disastrous civil war, which led to the creation of Bangladesh. For rock and roll fans, the creation of the help-the-world rock concerts, George Harrison's and Ravi Shankar's "Concert for Bangladesh," to help the children there.
It wants to make up for this disaster by controlling Afghanistan, through which, as stated here previously, it can establish trade routes to Sunni Central Asia. The U.S., in upgrading Afghanistan's highways, may have helped the Pakistanis.
Pakistan, which has a population of 180 million, the fifth-largest in the world, is growing and it needs water, which comes from India and Afghanistan. According to Time, Iran and Pakistan depend upon four of the five river basins that flow out of Afghanistan. It only uses 30 percent of the 57 billion cubic feet of war because it has no storage facilities and the water thus flows out of the country. This is why, I believe, the ISI killed the guard of the Machalgho Dam in Paktia Province, reported Time, and a Japanese engineer in 2007, who was surveying where to build a dam on the Kunar River.
The future
Pakistan will sit at the negotiating table and will secure, with U.S. backing, an arrangement in its favor, as it did in Geneva. It knows that India, Iran and Russia will back their traditional allies, the Hazaras, and the Tajiks, once part of what was called the Northern Alliance, America's allies, against the Pashtuns. Pakistan is afraid that the Pasthun Taliban from their tribal areas, men who have never been conquered and never taxed, will align themselves with their cousins in Afghanistan. There are reports, according to David Ignatius of The Washington Post, that the British feel that the Taliban regret their ties to al Qaeda, which some have called "a bone in their throat." In my experience, no. The Taliban and al Qaeda today work together.
India, Pakistan's foe, has its own demands: that the Taliban must renounce al-Qaeda and accept the Afghan constitution, according to The Times of India
There are intra-Afghan talks scheduled under U.N. direction in Turkmenistan in two months. There are Taliban waiting at their office in Doha, Qatar to restart direct negotiations with the U.S. There is reason to hope that President Obama, after his inauguration, will push to secure release of Sgt. Bergdahl. But the U.S. will need to release prisoners from Guantanamo to the Taliban in exchange, and there is no indication yet that Republicans in Congress will allow that.
Karzai is in a difficult place. The Taliban hate him -- this puppet, this imposter, whom they feel was foisted on them by the West. Karzai is largely looked down on in the U.S. (Obama refused to see him when he was in Afghanistan to visit the troops) because he seems on occasion to be anti-American and to side with the Taliban, calling them "brothers," and "sons of the soil of Afghanistan." All true, but, as The Wall Street Journal noted astutely, another leader, Shah Shuja, was enthroned by the British in 1839, also considered a puppet and he was slaughtered when they left. He, like Karzai, like Ahmed Shah Durrani, like Zahir Shah, the last king, until deposed in 1973, are all members of the Populzoi clan of the Durrani tribe--all Afghan royalty--of the Pashtun nation. The Taliban killed Karzai's father and they castrated and hanged Nagibullah, the president of Afghanistan, but also the former head of the East-German trained secret police, in 1992.
The Taliban come from the lowest ranks of Pashtun tribal culture. They -- through the power of Islam, the glue that has held Afghanistan together since the rise of the Mujahedeen -- know that with God on their side, the conquered and ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, and they want that power back. They continue to kill tribal leaders in Pakistan, all to destroy Pashtun tribal culture, and to replace it with the equality of Islam, under Taliban leadership, just as the Saud clan of Arabia, aligned with the zealous Wahhabis, destroyed the tribal culture, and thus their competition, to create Saudi Arabia in 1932.
In the 19th-century, the British said that "Hindustani fanatics" (Wahhabis) in the tribal zones of India, today Pakistan, were leading the war against them. Today, al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban, all nurtured by the ISI, continue to fight. Peace will not come soon to Afghanistan.
Panetta said recently at the Center for New American Policy, "The U.S. wants to finish the job right in Afghanistan. We are not going anywhere. Our commitment is long term and you (Taliban) cannot wait us out," according to The Associated Press. He later said that "al-Qaeda continues to show up in Afghanistan," as reported by Reuters.
India, Iran and Russia do not want the Taliban to return. With Afghanistan and the U.S. behind them, Pakistan will try to achieve peace. They will never succeed until they agree upon their border.
Miscellaneous
Karzai, who has a son, now has a daughter, called Malala. "There are now two Malalas, one is the Malala of Maiwand and then there is Malala Yousafzai, who was attacked for seeking education and so I hope my daughter too would be one of those Malalas to be educated and also to seek education for women."
The U.S. Army has created a 75-page draft of a manual for U.S. troops to help brace them for the "social cultural shock" of Afghanistan in an effort to stop insider attacks, according to The Wall Street Journal. Allen, said to be weakened because of investigation into his email correspondence with a Tampa socialite, has refused to sign off or to write an introduction.
William Dalrymple, the Delhi-based award-winning Scottish historian, and journalist, has written a new book, soon to be released, on the first British war in Afghanistan. It is titled "The Return of a King," about what was probably the West's greatest 19th-century imperial disaster, and about the British puppet Shah Shuja. It is a parable, according to two reviews I have read, of the U.S. failure in Afghanistan.
David Oliver Reline, 49, co-author of "Three Cups of Tea," with Greg Mortinson, committed suicide in November, RFE reported. Mortenson paid a $1 million fine and resigned from the Central Asia Institute, board, over "financial irregularities."
Afghan Prosecutor Faces Criticism for Her Pursuit of ‘Moral Crimes’
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY December 28, 2012
HERAT, Afghanistan - MARIA BASHIR, the only woman serving as chief prosecutor in any of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, does more than just walk the line between the progressive and the conservative — she has, uncomfortably, come to personify it.
Ms. Bashir, 42, is used to personal and even physical attacks from traditionalists because of her role as one of the country’s most senior female public officials and her work promoting women’s rights.
The outside world recognizes the ideal she represents as well as the dangers. Last year, in Washington, Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lauded her with a State Department International Women of Courage award.
“For uneducated men, but also even educated men, it is still very difficult to accept that a woman should be in a position of making decisions,” Ms. Bashir said, talking in her office tucked behind a gantlet of metal detectors and glowering security guards at the government compound in the western province of Herat.
But recently, Ms. Bashir has had to endure criticism of a less-familiar kind — that she has hurt women with her own conservatism.
Ms. Bashir’s office is jailing women for so-called moral crimes — like adultery, or even attempted adultery, an accusation that opens the door to being jailed merely for being alone with a man who is not in the family — at nearly the highest pace in Afghanistan, according to government records.
The country’s laws, though they have been changing over the past decade, are still criticized by human rights groups as being particularly harsh for women. And many women are languishing in jail on adultery convictions even though they were the victims of rape, forced into prostitution, or simply ran away from abusive homes.
Ms. Bashir insists that she must uphold the law of the land, even as she works to improve opportunities for Afghan women. But concern over her prosecution statistics this fall sent ripples through the human rights community in Afghanistan.
Most rights advocates express respect for her. Still, she has become the focus of a whole body of disquieting questions for international officials working here: How far should you support a woman who personally represents change but also consistently enforces customs that the West sees as discriminatory? How far and how long can you push another society to change, and when do you accept it and compromise?
In its way, too, her case restates the questions dogging the entire American involvement in Afghanistan: Is the United States here merely to fight the Taliban or rebuild the country along Western lines? And now that the United States has said it is leaving, what progress has really been won, and what will endure when it is gone?
Ms. Bashir knows how discrimination feels personally. She was a prosecutor in Herat, her husband’s home province, but had to give up her job when the Taliban came to power in the 1990s.
She went underground, furtively teaching women and girls from her neighborhood in her home.
AFTER the Taliban fell, she got her job back and has been the chief prosecutor in Herat for the past five years, and a focus of attention for the international community.
She has worked with the United Nations, giving lectures at high schools and universities titled, “If I Did It, You Can Do It, Too.” In those speeches, and in other settings both public and private, she urges Afghan girls and young women to expand their ambitions and strive for jobs outside the home as lawyers or doctors.
For many in this country, hers is an unwelcome message.
During a recent interview in her office, Ms. Bashir was methodical, even understated, as she discussed much of her work. But when the talk turned to the patriarchal society that dominates here, her eyes showed the fire that distinguishes her — and has helped her survive — in a place where women in powerful posts are rare.
“We have the mullahs, we have the former jihadis,” she said. “They don’t spare any effort to weaken or defame you. They talk about your clothes; they talk about the fact you have been talking to foreigners and talking to men.”
Her enemies do more than just talk. The son of one of her prosecutors was mistaken for hers, kidnapped and later killed. Constant threats, and sporadic attacks, have led her to home-school one of her three children and to send her oldest son to safety in Germany, where her sisters live.
The United States pays for her two armored vehicles and eight security guards, she said.
Nevertheless, there has been progress here. About half of the students in schools and universities in Herat are female. The fact that more women are coming forward to seek protection under a new law, the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act, shows that women possess growing confidence in the legal system. Her province is one of the top ones for registering cases under the new law.
“They know about their rights,” she said, “and they are slowly believing in their abilities.”
Even so, it is not enough, she warned. When she gives talks in Kabul and the men in the audience nod their heads, she tells them that they may approve of giving women freedoms in principle, but that they do not do it for their own wives.
THE fracas about her prosecutions began in earnest in October after The Times of London published an article noting that her province was at the top of the list for jailing women on adultery charges. (Precise data in Afghanistan is notoriously hard to come by, however; reporting by The New York Times suggests that by December, Herat was actually second to Kabul.) According to Afghan and Western officials, about 76 of the 136 women jailed in Herat had been convicted of adultery, or the intent to commit it. The United Nations says the number could be closer to 100 women.
Ms. Bashir’s expression changes, and her eyes dim, when the criticism is mentioned.
She says the reason Herat has so many cases may be that it is a big province, and has growing problems of drug addiction and prostitution, which fuel moral crimes.
She points out that she has jailed men as well as women on adultery charges, and after investigating the evidence has dismissed more false accusations against women than she has prosecuted. She insists, too, that she does not prosecute rape victims.
But she is bound to deal with all the cases that Herat’s relatively diligent police force brings to her, she says. And most of all, she has to uphold the law.
“I want to be an enforcer of the law rather than human rights,” she said adamantly.
She suspects the publication of the statistics may be another attack by critics who want her gone.
“It is very difficult for a woman to work in Afghanistan, especially if you have an important position,” she said, her eyes flashing once again. “You have to deal with thousands of political conspiracies and problems.”
Despite the controversy, support among her Afghan admirers has not ebbed. “If she didn’t do this, she would be thrown out of office,” said Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Afghan Women, which runs shelters for abused women. “The law is the problem, and not Maria Bashir.”
The United States has reiterated its support. “She has fought courageously for the future of her country on many fronts and is a woman to be admired for those achievements,” David Snepp, a spokesman at the United States Embassy in Kabul, said in a statement.
Some human rights campaigners are disappointed that Ms. Bashir is not going further to change a justice system they regard as still deeply flawed.
“The fact that you see so many of these cases coming out of a particular province tells you more about the police, the prosecutor and the judiciary than it tells you about the women,” said Heather Barr, Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, who published a report on moral crimes in March. “She is brave and she is a pioneer, but nobody is above scrutiny.”
Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Stone swap for new Afghan parliament
The Telegraph Dec. 28, 2012
New Delhi - Afghanistan’s new parliament building, which India is building at its own expense, was to be pale yellow but now it will be white.
The Afghans had insisted that the outer cladding be done with the local yellow marble named after the Samangan province where it is quarried, but lack of security in the trouble-torn area meant not enough of the stone could be mined.
With the original deadline already having passed, India put its foot down and decided to use locally sourced white marble instead.
“They had delivered just about 10,000sqft of (Samangan) stone but we need one lakh square feet,” said Rakesh Mishra, director-general of India’s central public works department (CPWD), which is involved in the construction.
White marble is costlier than the Samangan marble but Mishra said: “There will be no cost overruns because we have told them we would pay the price we had decided for Samangan.”
The CPWD had proposed to import the white marble from India or Pakistan because the local Afghan stone is far costlier thanks to higher production costs in a country with steep taxes and higher power tariffs. But Kabul said an Afghan stone should be used to give the building a local touch.
India had begun construction in 2008 as part of its efforts at helping rebuild war-torn Afghanistan. Almost three-fifths of the project is now complete, and if the new deadline of December 2013 is met, the next batch of MPs can step into the new House after the April 2014 elections.
The CPWD had drafted six building plans in 2005 but choosing the final design took three years of discussions with Kabul. The building will stand opposite the ruins of the Darul Aman Palace, built in the 1920s by the then king, Amanullah Khan.
Four domed octagonal buildings, each surrounded by a corridor with Doric-style columns, will make up the parliament complex. A few of the columns will have carvings.
At the entrance will be a 2,600sqm lobby with a fountain under a dome with a translucent polycarbonate sheet as roof.
“With light filtering from the top right over the fountain, it will create a beautiful atmosphere,” a senior official said. The flooring here will be of Crema Italian.
The main hall or the Wolesi Jirga (House of the people) will be the largest structure, its imposing dome clad in copper. The dome will have a diameter of 31.4 metres and a ceiling height of 14.55 metres.
The basement of Wolesi Jirga will have a prayer hall, whose floor will be a mix of ruby red granite and black granite.
Last week, a team of officials from the CPWD and the urban development and foreign ministries visited Kabul to review the project’s progress.
5.8-magnitude quake hits Hindu Kush region, Afghanistan -- USGS
HONG KONG, Dec.30 (Xinhua) -- An earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale jolted Hindu Kush region, Afghanistan at 17:50: 53 GMT on Saturday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The epicenter, with a depth of 115.90 km, was initially determined to be at 35.6974 degrees north latitude and 70.5453 degrees east longitude.
Footage Shows Insurgents Executing Afghan Soldier After 'Trial'
TOLOnews.com By Saleha Soadat Friday, 28 December 2012
Insurgents have released a video of the alleged killing of an Afghan Army soldier after prosecuting him in an insurgent military court.
The footage, recently obtained by the media, shows insurgents, possibly Taliban, shooting dead at close range an Afghan soldier who holds his army ID card in his mouth.
Though the Ministry of Defense has not confirmed the identity of the soldier, it acknowledged that summary killings of Afghan soldiers by the Taliban are common.
"We have witnessed many incidents such as this one, where the Taliban identify [off-duty] Afghan Army soldiers from passenger cars while they are travelling home or returning to their duties after holidays," Ministry of Defense Spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi told TOLOnews.
The incident has alarmed Afghan civil society and human rights organizations. Activists condemned the summary execution and urged the Taliban and all the involved parties to respect human dignity and rights.
The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) called the execution a potential war crime.
"When someone [a combatant] is arrested, they are held under international laws and they should be treated according to international laws. If this [execution] is done by the Taliban, it's against human rights and considered a war crime," AIHRC Chief Executive Officer Musa Mahmoodi said.
This comes as the Taliban previously condemned the execution of several insurgent prisoners in Kabul's Pul-i-Charkhi prison and urged the UN to prevent the government from ordering further prisoner executions. The Taliban called the executions a violation of human rights.
"Taliban raised objections when several criminals were executed in the Pul-i-Charkhi prison after being prosecuted by the courts. I want to ask them how they see this action," Gen. Azimi said.
The Taliban have not commented on the authenticity of the video. A previous video, also allegedly from the Taliban, shows an Afghan Local Police commander being executed by cannon-fire in the southeast of the country.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
The British Embassy in Kabul has followed in the footsteps of high-security prisons around the world by installing what might politely be described as an electronic orifice scanner to screen visitors for weapons concealed inside their bodies.
Telegraph.co.uk By Rob Crilly 28 Dec 2012
Kabul - Recent visitors have described being asked to sit in an "electric chair", which uses magnetic sensors to detect hidden metal inside the anus or other cavities.
British officials will not comment on the issue for fear of compromising security.
However, the subject has become the butt of jokes around Kabul's community of expat aid workers, diplomats and journalists who have been asked to sit on the imposing throne as they arrive for appointments.
"There was a big grey chair inside the guard hut at one of the entrances which the Gurkhas said visitors had to sit on," said one visitor, who said he was stunned by the new piece of equipment. "No one could really believe it when they said what it was for.
"I'm not sure if it was there last time I went in."
The Body Orifice Security Scanner (Boss) is essentially a powerful metal detector that is used in prisons to avoid the need for intimate cavity searches.
It has been installed to root out hidden mobile phones, sim cards or other metallic contraband.
In Afghanistan, it also means that visitors to Britain's fortified embassy to do not have endure a pat-down of intimate areas – an important consideration in a conservative, Muslim society.
Its value was underlined earlier this month when a suicide bomber detonated explosives concealed in his underpants in an attempt on the life of Asadullah Khalid, head of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security. He survived the attack on Thursday but was badly injured.
It was the latest example of how attackers are developing tactics to evade tight security around VIPs.
Last year, the leader of Afghanistan's High Peace Council was killed by a bomb hidden in a visitor's turban – an area not previously searched for fear of causing offence.
And in 2009, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, al-Qaeda's head bombmaker in Yemen, inserted explosives into the rectum of his brother in an unsuccessful effort to assassinate Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief.
A spokesman for the British embassy said: "If it's part of security to get into the embassy then it's not something we comment on, for obvious reasons."
Afghanistan concerned over civilians torture in Pakistan
By Mirwais Adeel Khaama Press December 29, 2012
Afghan foreign ministry officials expressed concerns regarding the torture and misbehavior to Afghan citizens in Landi Kotal area of Pakistan.
Foreign ministry following a statement said the issue will be strictly followed with the Pakistani officials.
This comes as at least 29 Afghans were thrashed and their travel documents torn near the Torkham border on Thursday, apparently in retaliation to a similar attack on Pakistani workers by Afghan officials last week.
Officials said that the attackers included relatives of the 29 Pakistani laborers who were allegedly harassed by members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) at Pul-e-Charkhi area of Kabul on Friday. Following this incident, Pakistani authorities had closed the border for six hours on Saturday.
Sources said unidentified people equipped with sophisticated weapons, on Thursday noon, appeared on Landi Kotal-Torkham Road near Michini post and started misbehaving with Afghan nationals. As the Afghan national protested, the gunmen dragged them out of the passengers’ vehicles, tortured them physically, snatched their valuables and tore their passports.
On the other hand Pakistan security officials on Friday sealed Torkham border after the Afghan National Army (ANA) tortured two Pakistani laborers for the second time in a week.
According to details, truck drivers blocked the road and took out a protest against the alleged torture of two Pakistani truck drivers at the hands of the Afghan officials. Earlier, two truck drivers were heading into Afghanistan seeking work when they were intercepted by Afghan security personnel at a check post, who allegedly subjected the job-seekers to torture while also tearing up their passports and other traveling documents.
The tortured Pakistanis returned back to the Pak-Afghan border where they were joined by other truck drivers who held protests against the treatment meted out by the Afghan security personnel. Drivers had complained that Afghan security personnel routinely harassed and tortured the job-seekers at various check posts situated inside Afghanistan. “It seems that the Afghan security forces are using these tactics to force Pakistani labourers out of their country,” they added.
Pakistan reopens border with Afghanistan after two-day closure
ISLAMABAD, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan on Saturday reopened its border with Afghanistan after two days of closure over the beating of Pakistani nationals in Afghanistan few days ago, the Pakistan Foreign Ministry said.
Pakistan shut the Torkham border on Friday after two Pakistani nationals were trashed near Kabul and their passports were snatched and torn, officials said.
Afghan officials said that a group of Afghan nationals were also attacked in Pakistan's Khyber tribal region on Thursday and their passports were snatched.
Afghan officials also said that at least seven people, including four children, died due to cold who were stuck along the border due to the closure of the border.
The border was reopened after two days following a meeting between Afghan Ambassador to Pakistan Umer Daudzai and Pakistan Special Secretary Ministry of Foreign Affairs Alamgir Babar on Saturday, the Foreign Ministry said.
The two sides discussed the recent incidents where Pakistanis returning from Afghanistan were beaten near Kabul, a Foreign Ministry's statement said.
Ambassador Daudzai promised that the matter would be investigated and action would be taken against those responsible.
He also assured that such incidents would not recur. The Afghan Ambassador also raised the incident involving Afghan nationals in Landi Kotal in Khyber agency.
Based on the assurances given by the Afghan Ambassador, the Pakistan side agreed to reopen the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the statement said.
Afghanistan Kunduz victim families file Germany claim
BBC News 28 December 2012
Families of dozens of Afghan civilians killed in a 2009 air strike have sued the German government for 3.3m euros (£2.7m; $4.3m) in damages.
A Germany army commander ordered the attack on two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban because he said they posed a threat to his troops.
The army said 91 people died in the attack in Kunduz province but lawyers for the families say 137 were killed.
Many of the victims were women and children trying to siphon fuel.
The attack on 4 September 2009 was the most controversial episode in Germany's military presence in Afghanistan.
German forces served under the Nato-led Isaf force. 'Cover-up'
Initially, German forces said no civilians had been killed but it transpired that the tankers had been abandoned by the militants.
It soon became clear that a large number of civilians had died and the attack created a political scandal in Germany in the weeks before national elections, which Chancellor Angela Merkel went on to win.
The controversy - and subsequent allegations of a cover-up - led to the resignation of Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung and the sacking of army chief Wolfgang Schneiderhan.
Col Georg Klein, who ordered the air strike, was later promoted to the rank of general.
In 2010, the German defence ministry awarded each Afghan family caught up in the attack 5,000 euros.
A Bremen-based German lawyer, Karim Popal, submitted an initial class action in 2011 on behalf of four people.
He has now filed a further 10 cases representing 79 people, both relatives of victims and those wounded in the attack.
The cases call for compensation amounting to between 20,000 and 75,000 euros each.
About 4,600 German troops remain in northern Afghanistan, carrying out mainly training and reconstruction roles.
Their numbers are to be reduced over the next year with the closure of their base in Kunduz province, before a final withdrawal by the end of 2014.
US scraps entire fleet of Afghan cargo planes
Press TV December 29, 2012
The U.S. military is scrapping the Afghan air force’s entire fleet of Italian-made cargo planes, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
U.S. and Afghan officials told the paper that the Afghan military isn’t expected to have an independent and fully functioning air force until around 2017, well after the withdrawal of most U.S. and international troops.
On the west end of Kabul International Airport, twin-engine C-27As sit side by side, sunlight reflecting off their gray wings and the green, black, and red of the Afghan flag emblazoned on their tails. For more than a year, though, most of the planes had been little more than expensive aviation exhibitions, unable to fly due to lack of spare parts and maintenance.
Now, despite spending nearly $600 million on the program, the U.S. is canceling the contract for the aircraft and disposing of all 16 planes delivered to the Afghan Air Force, the Journal reported.
Alenia Aermacchi North America, a unit of Italian defense conglomerate Finmeccanica SpA, failed to meet the requirements of their contract to maintain the fleet, according to an email from U.S. Air Force spokesman Ed Gulick, who was quoted in the Journal.
“This decision comes after failed attempts by the contractor to generate a sufficient number of fully mission-capable aircraft that would provide an effective airlift capability for the AAF,” Gulick said in the email. Stars and Stripes
HIGHLIGHTS
The U.S. decision raises new questions about the coalition's effort to build an Afghan military that will be capable of handling security after the planned withdrawal of most U.S. and international forces after 2014. WSJ
The scrapping of the Alenia contract isn't the only setback in equipping the Afghan Air Force (AAF). The Afghan military is in line to receive a fleet of armed attack planes through a separate U.S.-funded effort. The first of those planes was supposed to be delivered well ahead of the U.S. withdrawal, but that program was delayed by a politically charged U.S. procurement contest, and the U.S. Air Force isn't expected to pick a winning design until early 2013. WSJ
For now, U.S. and Afghan officers say the AAF must concentrate on the fundamentals. Afghanistan has low literacy rates, making it difficult to recruit personnel who have the right technical skills to fly or maintain planes. WSJ
Brig. Gen. Steven Shepro, commander of NATO Air Training Command-Afghanistan, said the AAF is focused on three priorities: resupplying forward bases, moving casualties and transporting the remains of fallen soldiers. He said the Afghans had made strides in recent months to streamline their basic command-and-control and planning procedures. WSJ
Failure Threatens Afghan Police Training Mission
Der Speigel By Andreas Ulrich 28/12/2012
German officials have been training police in Afghanistan for a decade, but a visit to their training center in Mazar-e-Sharif creates major doubts about the effectiveness of the mission. Afghan police remain poorly prepared to tackle the mighty challenges they will face as Western forces withdraw.
The Afghan national sport is called buzkashi. It's a game in which horsemen battle over a goat carcass. There are no established teams. During a match, the competitors forge brief, continuously shifting alliances. They only work together until they have gained a short-term advantage. The game can last for hours, even days. The winner is the rider who manages to carry the carcass to the goal. Buzkashi is a mirror of Afghan society.
By contrast, the German police officers who train local recruits in Afghanistan have brought soccer balls and nets to their base in Mazar-e-Sharif. Football is all about teamwork and team spirit. The goal is to form a team and achieve an objective together.
In a corner of the training center, on a patch of parched earth, there is now a soccer field where the next generation of Afghan police officers is learning the game.
"What we want to achieve with the recruits is a change in mentality," says a German instructor. More team spirit, a better sense of community, more loyalty. More soccer, less buzkashi.
Over the past 10 years, Germany has instructed some 56,000 Afghan police officers at four training centers in the region. The training is part of Germany's responsibility as a member of NATO, and so far the project has cost some 380 million ($503 million). As many as 200 German police officers are regularly stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Mazar-e-Sharif.
But anyone who accompanies the German security aid workers for a few days is bound to doubt the mission's effectiveness after observing the mood among the officers and reading between the lines of official statements. Even now, when Western security forces have entered their 11th year of training, the police in Afghanistan don't stand for public order and security -- but rather for helplessness, arbitrariness and corruption.
A Prime Target
"The mission is neither effective nor sustainable," says Josef Scheuring, chairman of the Germany's largest police union, the GdP, adding that it endangers the lives of the German police officers. "We should withdraw from Afghanistan as quickly as possible," urges Scheuring. Nevertheless, police officers continue to work in the region, usually for a year. They are attracted by overseas bonuses of up to 200 per day.
Alex, 32, a mid-level police officer from the northeastern German town of Ueckermünde, is one of them. He is due to meet with Ayatullah at the Regional Police Training Center (RPTC) in Mazar-e-Sharif late in the afternoon. The next day, the 22-year-old low-ranking officer in the Afghan national police force will show class 6.2 how a road checkpoint works.
"Checkpoints are crucial," says Alex, adding that "they have a high death rate." This makes it important to teach "survival skills," as he puts it. Of all the uniformed officials in Afghanistan, police officers are at the highest risk.
Secluded from the outside world, many of them spend weeks at such checkpoints and are charged with representing the state. They are a symbol of the new Afghanistan, which is massively supported by the West -- and thus a prime target for insurgents. There are currently some 150,000 police officers in Afghanistan. Since 2002, when various Western nations launched training programs, it's estimated that nearly 10,000 police officers have been killed -- and some 15 percent desert the force every year.
Alex plans the next day with Ayatullah. "We'll meet at 7:50 a.m. in front of the armory, and by 8:20 a.m. the checkpoint will be set up. Is that enough time?" asks Alex.
"No problem," says Ayatullah.
"We need a patrol car and a civilian car, plus three boxes as barriers. Ideally, by this evening already. Is that okay?"
Ayatullah nods.
"Okay, I'll see you tomorrow," says Alex.
A Critical Phase
The ambitious project of developing an Afghan police force, which was to operate at least according to the basic principles of its German counterpart, began 10 years ago and involved three phases.
Phase 1, training recruits, was completed long ago.
Phase 2, instructing the police officers in practical operations on location, was abandoned last year. German police officers -- at the time still under the protection of German soldiers -- drove through the country for hours to call on various police stations. Since they had to be back before sundown due to security concerns, there often remained very little time for training.
Phase 3 is currently underway: Afghan police officers train Afghan recruits while the Germans monitor them. They correct mistakes and give suggestions. Based on the methodology and didactics of the German police school, it is hoped that the Afghans can train uneducated men to become good officers in just eight weeks.
Like all German police officers in Mazar-e-Sharif, Alex is living at Camp Marmal, the headquarters of the coalition troops in northern Afghanistan. The ISAF military base is one of the safest places in the country -- a well-equipped artificial world with shops, cafeterias, gyms and pool tables. Private security guards stand at the gates, while soldiers patrol outside the compound. A zeppelin floats in the sky, jam-packed with cameras and surveillance electronics.
The German police officers are not allowed to leave the camp. They used to accept invitations to eat meals with locals, were allowed to move about freely and had opportunities to get to know the country. Today, that would be unthinkable. The upcoming ISAF withdrawal has made the security situation extremely precarious.
Lieutenant General Rainer Glatz, the commander of all German military operations abroad, says that the mission in Afghanistan has reached a "critical phase." Glatz says the Afghan army and police will soon undergo a litmus test to see whether and how they can ensure security without outside help.
Part 2: A Certain Kind of Order
Alex from Ueckermünde begins his workday at 6:15 a.m. with breakfast in the air-conditioned canteen. At 7 a.m., he goes to the barracks where the German police have their offices. Some two dozen men and women have gathered there. They are wearing khaki-colored uniforms made of breathable fabrics with "vector protection," a special treatment that is designed to prevent bites from blood-sucking arthropods like ticks and flying insects.
A security briefing is part of the daily routine for the Germans at Camp Marmal. A colleague brings them up to speed: In Helmand Province, 15 men and 2 women were decapitated, allegedly because they had celebrated and danced; in Laghman Province in the east, two US soldiers were killed by Afghan military personnel. And in the north, where Camp Marmal is located, there were "no incidents."
That is no coincidence, because the north is under the control of Governor Atta Mohammed Noor. The former warlord is one of the richest men in the country. Every day, hundreds of supplicants wait for an opportunity to enter his office, which is decorated with chandeliers, paintings and silk upholstered chairs.
In the governor's realm, the opium smuggling trade is booming, as are alcohol sales and business with prostitutes from Tajikistan. The Western forces simply look the other way. Otherwise "the fragile economic system would collapse," said a US major during a confidential discussion behind the ISAF barracks.
Governor Noor stands for a certain amount of order. It is not the order that comes from the rule of law -- but it is enough for the German government to thank him with the construction of a new airport in Mazar-e-Sharif. A consulate general is due to be opened next year.
A Proud People
The RPTC training center is located roughly 800 meters (2,600 feet) from Camp Marmal. Before the Germans drive there, they each put on bulletproof vests, grab a G-36 assault rifle and climb into an armored SUV.
The Germans also carry their weapons on the secured military base. Their Afghan colleagues, however, must surrender their arms at the gate. An Afghan, a uniform and a loaded weapon can be a deadly combination in this part of the world. Some 50 ISAF soldiers have been shot by Afghans in uniform this year alone. The Taliban proudly boasts that it has managed to infiltrate the local police force. As a precautionary measure, the Kalashnikovs distributed to class 6.2 shortly before 8 a.m. are missing their firing pins. That way means any cartridges smuggled into the training center couldn't hurt anyone.
Ayatullah, the Afghan police instructor, has the checkpoint set up. "Where is the patrol car?" asks Alex, the German instructor.
Ayatullah hesitates. His superiors didn't want to hand over the car, he admits. He says they use it to drive home in the evening. They told him to tell the Germans that they would only make the vehicle available if they were given more gasoline.
His superiors are playing buzkashi with squad cars. As a result, class 6.2 practices without a vehicle.
Ayatullah assigns positions at the checkpoint. Four recruits secure the area, one stops an oncoming civilian car, and two others stand behind him. Stop, hands up, search the vehicle, make arrests.
Alex is not satisfied.
"Ayatullah should have explained the process once again to the entire class before the exercise, ideally at each individual stage," he says. Many of the recruits were not paying attention or didn't even understand which task had been assigned to them, he criticizes. Although Ayatullah has professional knowledge, he can't teach it to others, says the German.
At 10:15 a.m., the Afghan trainer and his German supervisor meet to review the session. "How did it go?" asks Alex.
"Really well," says Ayatullah, who is beaming.
Alex was expecting that answer. "Nevertheless, we have to talk about a few points," he says. The trick is to package the criticism so it sounds like praise. The Afghans are a proud people.
Running Out of Time
Eight weeks is not much time to make a police officer of a man who has perhaps never attended a school. The country's illiteracy rate is currently at roughly 70 percent, and sometimes the recruits don't understand a word, for instance, if an instructor tries to teach a group of Pashtuns in Dari. Only the most basic knowledge is taught: roadblocks, house searches, self-defense and making arrests, weaponry and a few legal principles, including human rights.
But is that enough?
Interior Minister for the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lorenz Caffier, who also currently heads the German Interior Ministers' Conference, has his doubts. The problem is "that in Afghanistan we primarily train recruits for basic police service," says Caffier, "and we don't know how many of them will remain with the police force and how many will go to work for the warlords." The conservative politician, who is a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), says it would be preferable to train more senior officers who are less embedded in the country's old clan structures.
Not much time is left, though. By the end of February 2014, the number of German soldiers stationed in Afghanistan will have been reduced from the Bundeswehr's current force of nearly 4,500 to 3,300 -- and German combat troops will have been completely withdrawn by the end of 2014. German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to the CDU, says that he intends "to consolidate what has been accomplished, even after 2014," adding that a "certain presence" by German police officers will be required in the region to achieve this.
But Alex and his colleagues on the ground in Afghanistan are asking themselves how long the camp will remain intact after the withdrawal. There is a great deal of concern that the training center will fall into disrepair, the air conditioning units will no longer be maintained, and that many items that can be used privately will quickly go missing. The establishment plan for the Afghan police does not include positions for maintenance workers.
Army Influence
After the lunch break, Alex turns his attention to another Afghan instructor: Tarek. This time the focus is on arrest and search techniques. Tarek stands confidently in front of the group, speaking loudly and gesticulating frequently. He also provides explanations, allows the recruits to practice individual steps and intervenes when necessary.
Then a recruit appears, wrapped in a large cloak with fuses visible from underneath. It's time to practice handling suicide bombers.
"Shout loudly to warn everyone around you, run backwards as quickly as possible and look for cover," explains Tarek.
"Only open fire if the insurgent attempts to detonate the bomb," Alex reminds them. Then he admits that only a bullet aimed at the head will help. "And quickly," he adds.
The day is over. Tarek collects empty water bottles and the recruits return to their living quarters. The Afghan head of the medical center at Camp Marmal climbs behind the wheel of his Ford Ranger. The colonel passes the checkpoints and takes the paved road toward the center of Mazar-e-Sharif. He drives for nearly 10 kilometers -- first through a desert-like landscape, then past garages, filling stations and shops. Shortly after entering the town, he turns left.
The car rumbles over a path through one of the city's better neighborhoods, where multi-story buildings are hidden from view behind high walls. Shortly before the medical officer reaches his own house, he passes by a corner property. Two men clad in Afghan army uniforms are trimming a hedge in the front garden. "A general lives here," the colonel explains.
The colonel is a member of the police force. He has to trim his own hedges -- at least as long as the Germans are still in Afghanistan.
Translated from the German by Paul Cohen
After peace talks, what's next for Afghanistan?
CBS News By Jere Van Dyk December 28, 2012
Newspapers and online media outlets are filled with stories at the end of the year about the two-day exploratory peace talks just concluded in France.
Let us look closely:
On Dec. 20, according to The Wall Street Journal, representatives of the Taliban, Hezbi-i-Islami (The Islamic Party), the Afghan government, and the Northern Alliance, met at the Chateau de la Tour, in Chantilly, outside of Paris for the third time this year to see if they could bring peace to Afghanistan.
The first such meeting, which was more low-key, was held in Kyoto on June 28 and organized by Doshisha University. It is not clear at the moment what role the U.S. might have played in these talks.
I smiled when I read that the meetings were at the Chateau de la Tour. It is ironic that the Taliban -- who are waging a class war as much as a religious, ethnic war, and brother war -- would agree to meet in a chateau, a symbol of the aristocracy with its manicured lawns and high black wrought iron fence.
Were these talks serious? Will they lead to peace? More immediately, will they lead to the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who is being held captive by the Taliban since June 2009? No one seems to know. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted Hajji Din Mohammad, a participant in the talks: "It is better to know the Taliban's views directly, from themselves, so that we can exchange our views and reach our decisions." Din Mohammad, whom I have known for decades, is an honest man, close to Karzai (he chose him to head the Afghan High Peace Council), and one of the most influential men in the country with ties to the Haqqani Network and to Mullah Omar. They were part of the same Mujahideen network in the 1980s. If these men can come together, and if their lustful neighbors can be kept at bay, there is hope.
Who in the French government would have the clout among the Afghans to arrange this meeting? I suspect that could be Olivier Roy, who, while not a part of the government, is one of the world's foremost authorities on Afghanistan, and on political Islam. Those who follow Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East will be familiar with his writings. He went to Afghanistan as a student in the 1970s, knows the 1980s Mujahedeen leadership, and has the knowledge, ties and the respect needed.
The Taliban, which still calls itself the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," and still considers itself the only legitimate government of Afghanistan, said that its representatives were not there to negotiate, but to state their positions. I think the meetings were important simply because they took place. But while I smiled, I was saddened again to read in Tolo that Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmai Rasool told the Afghan Senate Thursday that "It is not clear which group the two Taliban members were representing." The Afghan government has "insufficient information about the background of these men. " Remember, in 2010, when David Petraeus was in command in Afghanistan, that the U.S. brought to Kabul and "paid a lot of money to," according to the BBC, a Taliban leader, Mohammad Mansour, who is said to have met with Karzai, and U.S. officials. He was later found to be an imposter.
To quote The New York Times: "The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans and our own intelligence service," said a senior Afghan official who is familiar with the case. "They are playing games." Others suspect that the fake Taliban leader, whose identity is not known, may have been dispatched by the Pakistani intelligence service, known by its initials, the ISI. Elements within the ISI have long played a 'double-game' in Afghanistan reassuring United States officials that they are pursuing the Taliban while at the same time providing support for the insurgents."
"The ISI is an integral part of the Pakistani Army," said Major Gen. N. Babar, interior minister to Benazir Bhutto, and who helped to create and train the Mujahedeen in 1973 and rode with the Taliban into Kabul in 1996.
The state of the war
The Obama Administration is anxious to extract itself from the Afghan quagmire. We are caught in the same trap into which we lured the U.S.S.R. in 1979. The U.S. has lost over 2,000 troops, and thousands more have been maimed. It has spent $600 billion. According to The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, it is going to cost $8.7 billion more just to bring U.S. materiel home.
Over 1,200 of those troops were killed after January 2010 when the surge began, according to Reuters/The Washington Post. The war continues, and as usual, the Afghans suffer most. According to The Associated Press, more than 110 Afghan National Army soldiers and 200 Afghan police are killed every month.
According to Reuters, the Department of Defense's biannual war assessment (covering April - September) said that enemy attacks are up one percent. There were 66 insider attacks, up from 43 in 2011. In July, there were "slightly more than 3,000 enemy initiated attacks," The Associated Press reported. There were 2,000 in July 2009. "Pakistan has contributed to U.S. interests while simultaneously falling short in others," it said. This is diplomatic-speak to say that while Pakistan is helping the U.S. it is fighting the U.S. at the same time. It continues to provide sanctuary for insurgents and declines to "interdict explosives (IED) materials that come across the border."
In spite of this, it was recently reported both in The New York Times and The Washington Post that the U.S. will pay $688 million to Pakistan to cover costs for the 140,000 Pakistani troops that it keeps along the Afghan - Pakistani border. Where are these 140, 000 troops? Before the surge, the U.S. had nearly 70,000 troops in Afghanistan and travelers in eastern Afghanistan saw U.S. convoys on highways, in villages, and in the countryside, as well as U.S. helicopters and hundreds of bases. I traveled at some length in different parts of the tribal areas, and never saw a Pakistani soldier -- only Frontier Scouts and border police.
Recent history
On April 14, 1988, in Geneva, representatives of the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan signed, after years of talks, three bilateral agreements intended to end the 10-year old Afghan-Soviet war in Afghanistan. The U.S. and the Soviet Union signed a "Declaration on International Guarantees." These documents became known as the Geneva Accords. The last Soviet troops crossed the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya, from Afghanistan back to the Soviet Union 2/15/89. The Afghan Army continued the fight with Soviet financial help against the Pakistani-backed Mujahedeen. Al Qaeda which grew out of Afghan-Soviet war, joined the fight in greater numbers. This war, in a different guise, continues today.
Just substitute the Taliban for the Mujahedeen. Up in the mountains, there is no difference between the two. To them there is no difference between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. We are both infidel invaders. Should the U.S. care after the draw-down? Morally, yes -- for we helped to start this war and to turn Afghanistan into a warzone, which led to al Qaeda and the Taliban. But the U.S. public, ignorant of and not interested in this history, wants out. We want only to assure that al Qaeda does not return to use this land again as a base from which to launch attacks against the U.S.
In the beginning
To understand more fully, let's go back 65 years:
In 1947, the British, then ruling India, partitioned India, creating the Republic of India, and the mostly Muslim West Pakistan and East Pakistan -- nearly 1,000 miles apart. That same year, Afghanistan was the only country in the world to vote against Pakistan's admission to the U.N. It did not accept the Durand Line, the Afghan-Pakistani border drawn by the British, in 1893. Not one Afghan government, including the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan led by Mullah Omar, has ever accepted this border. Every Pashtun over the age of 10 knows that the Afghan border once ended at the Indus River, 80 miles inside Pakistan. Peshawar was once the winter home for Afghan royalty. Ahmed Shah Durrani, founder of modern Afghanistan in 1747, was born in Multan, in Pakistan today.
In 1948, Pakistan used Pashtun tribesmen, which it called "irregulars," from the tribal areas, as guerrilla fighters to attack Kashmir to try to make it part of West Pakistan. In 1973, the Pakistani military-trained Pashtuns -- among them Gulbadeen Hekmatyierwhose Islamist political party, Hezb-i-Islami sat at the table in Chantilly, who became the Mujahedeen, and later the Taliban -- all part of Pakistan's proxy Army to try to control Afghanistan; and the Pashtuns, who under Durrani, ruled all the way to Delhi, to achieve what it calls "strategic depth," so as not to be surrounded there by India, and to protect the Durand Line. The U.S., aligning itself with Pakistan, stated recently that it accepts the Durand Line.
Meanwhile, Pakistan uses young Pashtun men, brain-washed in its madrasahs, and cut off from their own culture to try to divide and thus conquer the Pashtuns and to kill U.S. soldiers. It has a tiger by the tail.
Marvin Weinbaum, former State Department official, wrote in a Foreign Policy blog on December 20: "In reality the Taliban have always resisted and resented being dictated to by Pakistan." He is right.
In 1970, West Pakistan lost East Pakistan, and thus half its country, in a disastrous civil war, which led to the creation of Bangladesh. For rock and roll fans, the creation of the help-the-world rock concerts, George Harrison's and Ravi Shankar's "Concert for Bangladesh," to help the children there.
It wants to make up for this disaster by controlling Afghanistan, through which, as stated here previously, it can establish trade routes to Sunni Central Asia. The U.S., in upgrading Afghanistan's highways, may have helped the Pakistanis.
Pakistan, which has a population of 180 million, the fifth-largest in the world, is growing and it needs water, which comes from India and Afghanistan. According to Time, Iran and Pakistan depend upon four of the five river basins that flow out of Afghanistan. It only uses 30 percent of the 57 billion cubic feet of war because it has no storage facilities and the water thus flows out of the country. This is why, I believe, the ISI killed the guard of the Machalgho Dam in Paktia Province, reported Time, and a Japanese engineer in 2007, who was surveying where to build a dam on the Kunar River.
The future
Pakistan will sit at the negotiating table and will secure, with U.S. backing, an arrangement in its favor, as it did in Geneva. It knows that India, Iran and Russia will back their traditional allies, the Hazaras, and the Tajiks, once part of what was called the Northern Alliance, America's allies, against the Pashtuns. Pakistan is afraid that the Pasthun Taliban from their tribal areas, men who have never been conquered and never taxed, will align themselves with their cousins in Afghanistan. There are reports, according to David Ignatius of The Washington Post, that the British feel that the Taliban regret their ties to al Qaeda, which some have called "a bone in their throat." In my experience, no. The Taliban and al Qaeda today work together.
India, Pakistan's foe, has its own demands: that the Taliban must renounce al-Qaeda and accept the Afghan constitution, according to The Times of India
There are intra-Afghan talks scheduled under U.N. direction in Turkmenistan in two months. There are Taliban waiting at their office in Doha, Qatar to restart direct negotiations with the U.S. There is reason to hope that President Obama, after his inauguration, will push to secure release of Sgt. Bergdahl. But the U.S. will need to release prisoners from Guantanamo to the Taliban in exchange, and there is no indication yet that Republicans in Congress will allow that.
Karzai is in a difficult place. The Taliban hate him -- this puppet, this imposter, whom they feel was foisted on them by the West. Karzai is largely looked down on in the U.S. (Obama refused to see him when he was in Afghanistan to visit the troops) because he seems on occasion to be anti-American and to side with the Taliban, calling them "brothers," and "sons of the soil of Afghanistan." All true, but, as The Wall Street Journal noted astutely, another leader, Shah Shuja, was enthroned by the British in 1839, also considered a puppet and he was slaughtered when they left. He, like Karzai, like Ahmed Shah Durrani, like Zahir Shah, the last king, until deposed in 1973, are all members of the Populzoi clan of the Durrani tribe--all Afghan royalty--of the Pashtun nation. The Taliban killed Karzai's father and they castrated and hanged Nagibullah, the president of Afghanistan, but also the former head of the East-German trained secret police, in 1992.
The Taliban come from the lowest ranks of Pashtun tribal culture. They -- through the power of Islam, the glue that has held Afghanistan together since the rise of the Mujahedeen -- know that with God on their side, the conquered and ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, and they want that power back. They continue to kill tribal leaders in Pakistan, all to destroy Pashtun tribal culture, and to replace it with the equality of Islam, under Taliban leadership, just as the Saud clan of Arabia, aligned with the zealous Wahhabis, destroyed the tribal culture, and thus their competition, to create Saudi Arabia in 1932.
In the 19th-century, the British said that "Hindustani fanatics" (Wahhabis) in the tribal zones of India, today Pakistan, were leading the war against them. Today, al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban, all nurtured by the ISI, continue to fight. Peace will not come soon to Afghanistan.
Panetta said recently at the Center for New American Policy, "The U.S. wants to finish the job right in Afghanistan. We are not going anywhere. Our commitment is long term and you (Taliban) cannot wait us out," according to The Associated Press. He later said that "al-Qaeda continues to show up in Afghanistan," as reported by Reuters.
India, Iran and Russia do not want the Taliban to return. With Afghanistan and the U.S. behind them, Pakistan will try to achieve peace. They will never succeed until they agree upon their border.
Miscellaneous
Karzai, who has a son, now has a daughter, called Malala. "There are now two Malalas, one is the Malala of Maiwand and then there is Malala Yousafzai, who was attacked for seeking education and so I hope my daughter too would be one of those Malalas to be educated and also to seek education for women."
The U.S. Army has created a 75-page draft of a manual for U.S. troops to help brace them for the "social cultural shock" of Afghanistan in an effort to stop insider attacks, according to The Wall Street Journal. Allen, said to be weakened because of investigation into his email correspondence with a Tampa socialite, has refused to sign off or to write an introduction.
William Dalrymple, the Delhi-based award-winning Scottish historian, and journalist, has written a new book, soon to be released, on the first British war in Afghanistan. It is titled "The Return of a King," about what was probably the West's greatest 19th-century imperial disaster, and about the British puppet Shah Shuja. It is a parable, according to two reviews I have read, of the U.S. failure in Afghanistan.
David Oliver Reline, 49, co-author of "Three Cups of Tea," with Greg Mortinson, committed suicide in November, RFE reported. Mortenson paid a $1 million fine and resigned from the Central Asia Institute, board, over "financial irregularities."
Afghan Prosecutor Faces Criticism for Her Pursuit of ‘Moral Crimes’
New York Times By GRAHAM BOWLEY December 28, 2012
HERAT, Afghanistan - MARIA BASHIR, the only woman serving as chief prosecutor in any of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, does more than just walk the line between the progressive and the conservative — she has, uncomfortably, come to personify it.
Ms. Bashir, 42, is used to personal and even physical attacks from traditionalists because of her role as one of the country’s most senior female public officials and her work promoting women’s rights.
The outside world recognizes the ideal she represents as well as the dangers. Last year, in Washington, Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lauded her with a State Department International Women of Courage award.
“For uneducated men, but also even educated men, it is still very difficult to accept that a woman should be in a position of making decisions,” Ms. Bashir said, talking in her office tucked behind a gantlet of metal detectors and glowering security guards at the government compound in the western province of Herat.
But recently, Ms. Bashir has had to endure criticism of a less-familiar kind — that she has hurt women with her own conservatism.
Ms. Bashir’s office is jailing women for so-called moral crimes — like adultery, or even attempted adultery, an accusation that opens the door to being jailed merely for being alone with a man who is not in the family — at nearly the highest pace in Afghanistan, according to government records.
The country’s laws, though they have been changing over the past decade, are still criticized by human rights groups as being particularly harsh for women. And many women are languishing in jail on adultery convictions even though they were the victims of rape, forced into prostitution, or simply ran away from abusive homes.
Ms. Bashir insists that she must uphold the law of the land, even as she works to improve opportunities for Afghan women. But concern over her prosecution statistics this fall sent ripples through the human rights community in Afghanistan.
Most rights advocates express respect for her. Still, she has become the focus of a whole body of disquieting questions for international officials working here: How far should you support a woman who personally represents change but also consistently enforces customs that the West sees as discriminatory? How far and how long can you push another society to change, and when do you accept it and compromise?
In its way, too, her case restates the questions dogging the entire American involvement in Afghanistan: Is the United States here merely to fight the Taliban or rebuild the country along Western lines? And now that the United States has said it is leaving, what progress has really been won, and what will endure when it is gone?
Ms. Bashir knows how discrimination feels personally. She was a prosecutor in Herat, her husband’s home province, but had to give up her job when the Taliban came to power in the 1990s.
She went underground, furtively teaching women and girls from her neighborhood in her home.
AFTER the Taliban fell, she got her job back and has been the chief prosecutor in Herat for the past five years, and a focus of attention for the international community.
She has worked with the United Nations, giving lectures at high schools and universities titled, “If I Did It, You Can Do It, Too.” In those speeches, and in other settings both public and private, she urges Afghan girls and young women to expand their ambitions and strive for jobs outside the home as lawyers or doctors.
For many in this country, hers is an unwelcome message.
During a recent interview in her office, Ms. Bashir was methodical, even understated, as she discussed much of her work. But when the talk turned to the patriarchal society that dominates here, her eyes showed the fire that distinguishes her — and has helped her survive — in a place where women in powerful posts are rare.
“We have the mullahs, we have the former jihadis,” she said. “They don’t spare any effort to weaken or defame you. They talk about your clothes; they talk about the fact you have been talking to foreigners and talking to men.”
Her enemies do more than just talk. The son of one of her prosecutors was mistaken for hers, kidnapped and later killed. Constant threats, and sporadic attacks, have led her to home-school one of her three children and to send her oldest son to safety in Germany, where her sisters live.
The United States pays for her two armored vehicles and eight security guards, she said.
Nevertheless, there has been progress here. About half of the students in schools and universities in Herat are female. The fact that more women are coming forward to seek protection under a new law, the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act, shows that women possess growing confidence in the legal system. Her province is one of the top ones for registering cases under the new law.
“They know about their rights,” she said, “and they are slowly believing in their abilities.”
Even so, it is not enough, she warned. When she gives talks in Kabul and the men in the audience nod their heads, she tells them that they may approve of giving women freedoms in principle, but that they do not do it for their own wives.
THE fracas about her prosecutions began in earnest in October after The Times of London published an article noting that her province was at the top of the list for jailing women on adultery charges. (Precise data in Afghanistan is notoriously hard to come by, however; reporting by The New York Times suggests that by December, Herat was actually second to Kabul.) According to Afghan and Western officials, about 76 of the 136 women jailed in Herat had been convicted of adultery, or the intent to commit it. The United Nations says the number could be closer to 100 women.
Ms. Bashir’s expression changes, and her eyes dim, when the criticism is mentioned.
She says the reason Herat has so many cases may be that it is a big province, and has growing problems of drug addiction and prostitution, which fuel moral crimes.
She points out that she has jailed men as well as women on adultery charges, and after investigating the evidence has dismissed more false accusations against women than she has prosecuted. She insists, too, that she does not prosecute rape victims.
But she is bound to deal with all the cases that Herat’s relatively diligent police force brings to her, she says. And most of all, she has to uphold the law.
“I want to be an enforcer of the law rather than human rights,” she said adamantly.
She suspects the publication of the statistics may be another attack by critics who want her gone.
“It is very difficult for a woman to work in Afghanistan, especially if you have an important position,” she said, her eyes flashing once again. “You have to deal with thousands of political conspiracies and problems.”
Despite the controversy, support among her Afghan admirers has not ebbed. “If she didn’t do this, she would be thrown out of office,” said Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Afghan Women, which runs shelters for abused women. “The law is the problem, and not Maria Bashir.”
The United States has reiterated its support. “She has fought courageously for the future of her country on many fronts and is a woman to be admired for those achievements,” David Snepp, a spokesman at the United States Embassy in Kabul, said in a statement.
Some human rights campaigners are disappointed that Ms. Bashir is not going further to change a justice system they regard as still deeply flawed.
“The fact that you see so many of these cases coming out of a particular province tells you more about the police, the prosecutor and the judiciary than it tells you about the women,” said Heather Barr, Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, who published a report on moral crimes in March. “She is brave and she is a pioneer, but nobody is above scrutiny.”
Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Stone swap for new Afghan parliament
The Telegraph Dec. 28, 2012
New Delhi - Afghanistan’s new parliament building, which India is building at its own expense, was to be pale yellow but now it will be white.
The Afghans had insisted that the outer cladding be done with the local yellow marble named after the Samangan province where it is quarried, but lack of security in the trouble-torn area meant not enough of the stone could be mined.
With the original deadline already having passed, India put its foot down and decided to use locally sourced white marble instead.
“They had delivered just about 10,000sqft of (Samangan) stone but we need one lakh square feet,” said Rakesh Mishra, director-general of India’s central public works department (CPWD), which is involved in the construction.
White marble is costlier than the Samangan marble but Mishra said: “There will be no cost overruns because we have told them we would pay the price we had decided for Samangan.”
The CPWD had proposed to import the white marble from India or Pakistan because the local Afghan stone is far costlier thanks to higher production costs in a country with steep taxes and higher power tariffs. But Kabul said an Afghan stone should be used to give the building a local touch.
India had begun construction in 2008 as part of its efforts at helping rebuild war-torn Afghanistan. Almost three-fifths of the project is now complete, and if the new deadline of December 2013 is met, the next batch of MPs can step into the new House after the April 2014 elections.
The CPWD had drafted six building plans in 2005 but choosing the final design took three years of discussions with Kabul. The building will stand opposite the ruins of the Darul Aman Palace, built in the 1920s by the then king, Amanullah Khan.
Four domed octagonal buildings, each surrounded by a corridor with Doric-style columns, will make up the parliament complex. A few of the columns will have carvings.
At the entrance will be a 2,600sqm lobby with a fountain under a dome with a translucent polycarbonate sheet as roof.
“With light filtering from the top right over the fountain, it will create a beautiful atmosphere,” a senior official said. The flooring here will be of Crema Italian.
The main hall or the Wolesi Jirga (House of the people) will be the largest structure, its imposing dome clad in copper. The dome will have a diameter of 31.4 metres and a ceiling height of 14.55 metres.
The basement of Wolesi Jirga will have a prayer hall, whose floor will be a mix of ruby red granite and black granite.
Last week, a team of officials from the CPWD and the urban development and foreign ministries visited Kabul to review the project’s progress.
5.8-magnitude quake hits Hindu Kush region, Afghanistan -- USGS
HONG KONG, Dec.30 (Xinhua) -- An earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale jolted Hindu Kush region, Afghanistan at 17:50: 53 GMT on Saturday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The epicenter, with a depth of 115.90 km, was initially determined to be at 35.6974 degrees north latitude and 70.5453 degrees east longitude.
Footage Shows Insurgents Executing Afghan Soldier After 'Trial'
TOLOnews.com By Saleha Soadat Friday, 28 December 2012
Insurgents have released a video of the alleged killing of an Afghan Army soldier after prosecuting him in an insurgent military court.
The footage, recently obtained by the media, shows insurgents, possibly Taliban, shooting dead at close range an Afghan soldier who holds his army ID card in his mouth.
Though the Ministry of Defense has not confirmed the identity of the soldier, it acknowledged that summary killings of Afghan soldiers by the Taliban are common.
"We have witnessed many incidents such as this one, where the Taliban identify [off-duty] Afghan Army soldiers from passenger cars while they are travelling home or returning to their duties after holidays," Ministry of Defense Spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi told TOLOnews.
The incident has alarmed Afghan civil society and human rights organizations. Activists condemned the summary execution and urged the Taliban and all the involved parties to respect human dignity and rights.
The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) called the execution a potential war crime.
"When someone [a combatant] is arrested, they are held under international laws and they should be treated according to international laws. If this [execution] is done by the Taliban, it's against human rights and considered a war crime," AIHRC Chief Executive Officer Musa Mahmoodi said.
This comes as the Taliban previously condemned the execution of several insurgent prisoners in Kabul's Pul-i-Charkhi prison and urged the UN to prevent the government from ordering further prisoner executions. The Taliban called the executions a violation of human rights.
"Taliban raised objections when several criminals were executed in the Pul-i-Charkhi prison after being prosecuted by the courts. I want to ask them how they see this action," Gen. Azimi said.
The Taliban have not commented on the authenticity of the video. A previous video, also allegedly from the Taliban, shows an Afghan Local Police commander being executed by cannon-fire in the southeast of the country.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com