[Afghan News] January 10, 2013

[یاسمینه]

Obama, Karzai meeting to discuss ending Afghan war
By JULIE PACE and ROBERT BURNS Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Charting the course for a war's end, President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai meet Friday at the White House to discuss the future of the U.S. role in Afghanistan and the 66,000 American troops in harm's way.

The two leaders plan a joint afternoon news conference. White House officials said, however, that Obama will not announce any decisions on the next phase of troop withdrawals or whether any U.S. forces will stay behind in Afghanistan after the war formally ends in 2014.

U.S. commanders in Afghanistan have proposed keeping 6,000 to 15,000 U.S. troops after 2014 to continuing pursuing terrorists and training Afghan security forces. But the White House, which tends to favor lower troop levels than the generals, says Obama would be open to pulling all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan at the end of 2014.

"We wouldn't rule out any option," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser. "We're not guided by the goal of a certain number of U.S. troops in the country. We're guided by the objectives that the president set — disrupt, dismantle, defeat al-Qaida."

Beyond troop levels, Obama and Karzai are also expected to discuss preparations for next year's Afghan elections and the prospects for advancing Afghan peace talks with the Taliban.

Friday's meeting will be the first between Obama and Karzai since November's U.S. presidential election. Heading into his second term, Obama is shaking up his national security team, including key players who deal with Karzai and the war.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta are both expected to leave their posts within weeks. The president nominated Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., as the nation's top diplomat and former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to lead the Pentagon.

Both Kerry and Hagel are likely to favor a more rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces.

After Karzai met Thursday with Clinton and Panetta, the Pentagon chief offered an upbeat assessment of the war's progress.

"After a long and difficult path, we finally are, I believe, at the last chapter of establishing an Afghanistan, a sovereign Afghanistan, that can govern and secure itself for the future," Panetta said.

The U.S.-led NATO coalition is aiming to turn all combat missions over to Afghan forces by the end of this year. The 66,000 U.S. forces still there are already turning over territory or handing off many combat missions to the Afghans.

Still, the war's endgame is punctuated with uncertainty, beginning with doubts about whether the Afghan government can build legitimacy by credibly serving its population. Also in question is whether Afghan security forces will be capable of holding off the Taliban after international forces leave.

Panetta told a news conference that he and Karzai had laid the groundwork for the Afghan leader's White House meeting.

"We made very good progress on, you know, the kind of equipment that we would try to make available to them," to enable the Afghans to not only secure their borders but also prevent a Taliban takeover, Panetta said.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the same news conference that U.S. and Afghan officials are developing a common assessment of threats Afghanistan is likely to face in the future. Conclusions from that study will help determine the full range of Afghanistan's military requirements, he said.

Karzai was greeted at the Pentagon by a ceremonial honor guard, and at a photo-taking session in Panetta's office the Afghan leader said he could assure the American people that his country "will not ever again be threatened by terrorists from across our borders" — an allusion to the al-Qaida leaders hiding in Pakistan. It was from Afghanistan that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida operatives plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.


U.S., Afghanistan have reached "last chapter" in war aim: Panetta
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday that the two countries had reached the "last chapter" in their effort to establish a sovereign Afghanistan that can provide for its own security.

After a formal welcoming ceremony at the Pentagon, Panetta told Karzai that 2013 would mark an important turning point in the war, with Afghan forces due to begin taking the lead role in providing security across the country while coalition troops offered support and training.

"We've come a long way towards a shared goal of establishing a nation that you and we can be proud of, one that never again becomes a safe haven for terrorism," Panetta said in remarks at the start of meetings in his office. "Our partnership, forged ... through almost 11 years of shared sacrifice, is a key to our ability to achieve the final mission."

Karzai's three-day visit to Washington follows a year of rising strains on the U.S.-Afghan partnership, including a spate of incidents in which Afghan military or police attacked and killed U.S. or coalition troops. U.S. forces were involved in a series of incidents that enraged Afghans, including burning Korans, which touched off days of rioting.

Karzai's visit comes as the two countries are in the midst of discussions on an agreement that would govern the role of any U.S. forces in Afghanistan after most combat troops withdraw at the end of 2014.

The Obama administration has been considering maintaining a residual force of between 3,000 and 9,000 troops in Afghanistan to conduct counterterror operations while providing some training and assistance for Afghan troops.

But the administration said earlier this week it did not rule out the possibility of a complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan after 2014.

While Karzai has been critical of U.S. troop activity in Afghanistan, it is unclear how Afghan troops would perform without U.S. helicopters, medical facilities, intelligence and other military support activity, of which Afghanistan has very little.

Karzai, in remarks in Panetta's office, said he was confident that during his trip Afghanistan and the United States would be able to "work out a modality for a bilateral security agreement to ensure the interests of Afghanistan and also the interests of the United States."

The United States is insisting on immunity for any U.S. troops that remain in Afghanistan. That unsettled question is expected to figure in this week's talks and may come up at the White House on Friday, when Karzai meets President Barack Obama.

Panetta thanked Karzai for visiting U.S. and Afghan wounded at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, and he noted that the visit followed 11 years of war, blood, battle and sacrifice on both sides.

"After a long and difficult past, we finally are, I believe, at the last chapter of establishing ... a sovereign Afghanistan that can govern and secure itself for the future," Panetta said, adding that continued cooperation would be key to completing the mission.

Karzai expressed appreciation for years of support and training of Afghan troops by the United States and coalition partners.

"I assure you Mr. Secretary that Afghanistan will be able to provide security for its people and to protect its forces. So Afghanistan will not ever be threatened by terrorists from across our border," Karzai said.
(Editing by Paul Simao)


US 'fully committed' in Afghanistan, Panetta says. But no troops after 2014?
Afghan President Hamid Karzai meets with President Obama Friday in the wake of a 'zero option' being floated for US troops. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Mr. Karzai met at the Pentagon Thursday.
By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer January 10, 2013
The Christian Science Monitor
Washington - At various stages of America’s wars in the past decade, there are inevitable discussions surrounding what US troop levels are best for the next stage of conflict.

These deliberations tend to involve three choices provided by senior US military officials: a high number, a low number, and one right in the middle that the US military brass believes is optimal – or at least their best bet given the political climate at the time.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai will meet with President Obama Friday in the wake of a new twist: The Obama administration leaked the news that it is considering a “zero option” as well.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta emphasized Thursday after an hour-long one-on-one meeting with Mr. Karzai at the Pentagon that the United States is “fully committed to finishing the job” in Afghanistan.

Senior defense officials sidestepped the question, however, of whether zero troops is a realistic option in post-2014 Afghanistan.

“We’ve said from the start that no option is entirely off the table,” said Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Pentagon briefing Thursday.

Senior US officials insist, too, they are serious about the possibility of pulling nearly all US troops out of Afghanistan after US combat operations end, which is slated to happen at the end of 2014.

“There are, of course, many different ways of accomplishing those objectives, some of which might involve US troops, some of which might not,” Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communication, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday.

Gen. John Allen, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, has submitted military options that include three plans for troop levels at 6,000, 10,000, and 20,000.

By putting a “zero option” on the table in advance of Karzai’s visit, however, the Obama administration is injecting a lower figure in the military’s “Goldilocks” approach. This, in turn, changes the terms of the debate, since any figure higher than zero seems like a compromise.

“I suspect there’s probably some gamesmanship involved,” says Jeffrey Dressler, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.

Equally important, leaking the zero-option scenario is meant to send a message to Karzai, Mr. Dressler adds.

“What the White House is trying to demonstrate is, ‘We could possibly completely withdraw, so when you come to D.C., just be aware that this is a two-sided conversation. This isn’t going to be you coming to D.C. to tell us what we’re going to do,’ ” Dressler says.

In the past, Karzai has been vocal in his demands that US troops not conduct night raids, for example. A key point in discussions will also involve whether US troops and contractors should have immunity from prosecution if any Afghan official may want to charge them with war crimes.

This latter point was the stumbling block when US forces were pulling out of Iraq. The administration ultimately decided against leaving US troops behind when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would not compromise on immunity.

Karzai, on the other hand, has a greater interest in keeping US troops in his country than the Iraqis had, Dressler argues. “He also understands that the Obama administration doesn’t have much desire to keep troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014,” he says.

The cost of the war, in the midst of fiscal challenges, is one big reason for the reluctance to keep troops in Afghanistan. The war is politically unpopular as well.

“The other thing that’s not getting enough attention is the cost that the troop numbers imply – and what’s the political supportability of those long-term costs on Capitol Hill,” says retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, who commanded US forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005.

There are human costs as well. Some 1,000 US service members could die between now and when US combat forces are expected to leave the country at the end of 2014, according to the estimates of defense analyst Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

How, Secretary Panetta was asked Thursday, is it possible to go to the American people and ask for another 18 months of lives lost and vast sums of money spent, when the defense budget is being cut?

“We have poured a lot of blood and treasure in this war over the last 10 years,” Panetta said. “But the fact is that we have also made a lot of progress as a result of the sacrifices that have been made,” he insisted, adding that the US cannot “walk back” now.

“I think the point to President Karzai is that he has to be thoughtful in what he comes to Washington with,” says Mr. Barno, now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.

“The economic context has changed, the political context is much different, and the military situation is in Year 11 in a war that in 2014 is going to be in Year 13,” he says. “How are you going to sustain it?”


Afghanistan Leader Meets With U.S. Lawmakers
January 10, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
President Hamid Karzai has met U.S. lawmakers in Washington to discuss future U.S. involvement in Afghanistan -- including how many U.S. troops will remain there after 2014.

Karzai held private talks on January 9 with Senate Republican Party leader Mitch McConnell and members of the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees.

Karzai is scheduled to hold talks with President Barack Obama on January 11.

U.S. deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said no decision on troop levels was expected at the meeting.

Rhodes added that it could not be excluded that Washington could decide not to keep any troops in Afghanistan.

The United States and its allies have already agreed to withdraw all their combat troops by the end of 2014. But some U.S. troops could remain to train Afghan soldiers and help with security.

There are currently around 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, including about 65,000 from the United States.

Based on reporting from AP and AFP


Karzai, US Officials Consider Afghan Future
VOA News January 10, 2013
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is set to meet in Washington Thursday with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as the Obama administration deliberates the U.S. military future in Afghanistan.

Karzai is set to meet with Panetta early in the day Thursday, following a full military honors ceremony to welcome him to the Pentagon.

He is scheduled to meet with Secretary Clinton in the early evening and will then join her for a working dinner.

Karzai's talks at the Pentagon and the State Department come one day ahead of a one-on-one meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama. The two leaders are expected to discuss security issues, namely how many U.S. troops might be stationed in Afghanistan after the majority pull out in 2014, and under what conditions.

Current plans call for the United States to withdraw nearly all of its 68,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

But that plan hinges on a number of conditions, including whether Afghan forces will be capable of taking over security at that time. It is also not clear what would be the role of the Americans who stay behind, if any do remain.

Some analysts believe the Taliban may be plotting a comeback and is just waiting for U.S. and other Western forces to leave.

Retired U.S. Army Colonel Thomas Lynch, one of the authors of a new book about Afghanistan and its future called Talibanistan, says plans for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan may be premature.

"I personally believe that the dynamics in Afghanistan and the dynamics in the region right now are not well-suited for a precipitous or complete withdrawal of American or Western forces," said Lynch. "I think the Afghan national army and its security forces still need a lot of assistance - logistical training and some operational. I think there still needs to be partnership with Afghan counterterrorist units and American and Western counterterrorist units."

Another contributor to Talibanistan, Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism expert with the New America foundation, sees a gloomy and dangerous future for the Afghans if the United States leaves.

"I am quite pessimistic about the Afghan government. And I don't think what we will see is the Taliban rushing with armored columns back into Kabul. But I do think that civil war in Afghanistan is a real possibility in the years after an American withdrawal, particularly if the money stops flowing the way that it did after the Soviets left," said Fishman.

While President Karzai has often criticized U.S. actions in Afghanistan, he also has spoken about his desire for some U.S. presence to remain.


Entrusting Afghans’ fate to Karzai initial mistake: Opposition leader
Press TV January 10, 2013
An Afghan opposition leader says it was a mistake to entrust President Hamid Karzai with the duty of securing the fate of people in Afghanistan.

Abdullah Abdullah, the former Afghan foreign minister and a 2009 presidential candidate, wrote in an article published on the website of Foreign Policy on Tuesday that the “initial mistake was to entrust President Karzai with the sacred duty of securing the fate of our embattled nation.”

He also stated that the current situation in Afghanistan is due to “a tragic combination of errors, some internal and some external.”

Abdullah criticized Karzai’s lack of trust in his countrymen, citing the president’s request from the CIA to “provide bodyguards to him to protect him not from al-Qaeda but from the Afghans who helped install him in power.”

His lack of faith therefore led to the “ill-conceived policy of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, best described as Iraqi-style de-Baathification, but in practice targeted against those who had fought as US allies against the Taliban,” Abdullah said.

“It would be a tragic mistake for the international community to conclude that democracy doesn’t work in Afghanistan, while the only thing that doesn’t work is democracy as Karzai’s government understands it.”

Rather than supporting the institutions of democracy, the Afghan government has confused people by “being passive to corruption” and followed an “ambivalent policy” considering the country’s armed insurgency, Abdullah added.

The Afghan opposition leader said the country could experience a successful transition in 2014, despite rising challenges. The presidential election is scheduled to be held on April 5, 2014.

Karzai had been the chairman of Afghanistan’s transitional administration since 2001, until he won the 2004 presidential election.

Abdullah withdrew from the election runoff in 2009, accusing Karzai’s government of vote-rigging and fraud.


NATO supply through Pakistan halted due to truckers strike
By Sajad - January 10 2013, 2:08 pm Khaama Press
Pakistani transporters who carry Nato supplies to land-locked Afghanistan have gone on strike, disrupting the flow of goods to Western forces in a protest against a new customs regime aimed at cutting theft.

The supply route is an important lifeline for international forces in landlocked Afghanistan. The coalition ships a significant portion of its nonlethal supplies through Pakistan into southern Afghanistan. The other land route into Afghanistan through Central Asia and Russia is longer and more expensive.

Jehanzeb Khan, head of a transport workers union, says the strike began Wednesday in response to the government’s decision to require truckers to go through authorized companies to carry NATO supplies instead of making individual deals.

The truckers say that the new rules are corrupt and will cost them a large portion of the money they would normally earn from shipping into occupied Afghanistan, and so they are unwilling to do so until Pakistan reverses the ban.

The All Pakistan Goods Transportation Association has been unofficially blockading 4,000 vehicles carrying supplies to and from coalition forces in Afghanistan for the past six days.

Khan said truckers in northwest Pakistan stopped carrying NATO supplies Wednesday, and he was reaching out to others throughout the country to get them to join the strike.

Haneef Khan Marwat, head of a transportation company in the southern city of Karachi, said some truckers began their strike as early as Jan. 4 and thousands of vehicles are involved. He said the strike would continue until the government reversed its new policy.

NATO is so far refusing to comment on the latest halt of shipments, but in the past lack of access to Pakistan cost them $100 million per month, obliging them to use pricier overland routes through the former Soviet Union. This could be even more costly this time, as many NATO nations are shipping massive quantities of equipment back out of the country as part of the drawdown as well.


Clinton, Karzai Discuss US Role in Afghanistan Beyond 2014
Scott Stearns January 10, 2013 VOA
STATE DEPARTMENT — Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met in Washington on Thursday to discuss the future of U.S. support for Afghanistan following next year's withdrawal of American forces.

State Department officials say President Karzai and Secretary Clinton discussed security and economic transitions in Afghanistan, greater regional integration, and preparations for Afghanistan's 2014 elections.

Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland says the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan also are working to reconcile the government in Kabul with more moderate elements of the Taliban.

"We have had some modest steps forward in recent months, including a commitment by Pakistan to support Afghan-Afghan reconciliation, some of the work we've been doing in the core group -- U.S., Afghanistan, Pakistan -- to pave the way and ease the conditions for those Taliban who might need safe passage to go have conversations," Nuland said.

Secretary Clinton hosted a working dinner for President Karzai at the State Department, where they were joined by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon.

In meetings earlier Thursday at the Pentagon, Secretary Panetta told President Karzai that their countries have come a long way toward a shared goal of establishing an Afghanistan that never again will become a "safe haven for terrorism."

U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban government there following the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

Although President Karzai often has criticized U.S. actions in Afghanistan, he also has spoken about his desire for some U.S. troops to remain after the NATO-led mission there ends next year.

President Karzai is scheduled to meet with President Barack Obama at the White House on Friday.


Abandon Afghanistan? A dumb idea
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst January 10, 2013
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst and the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad."

(CNN) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai will meet with President Barack Obama on Friday to discuss the post-2014 American presence in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military has already given Obama options under which as few as 6,000 or as many as 20,000 soldiers would remain in Afghanistan after 2014. Those forces would work as advisers to the Afghan army and mount special operations raids against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

But on Tuesday, Ben Rhodes, the White House's deputy national security adviser, told reporters that the Obama administration is mulling the idea of removing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan after the NATO combat mission finishes at the end of 2014.

This may be a negotiating ploy by the Obama administration as it gets down to some hard bargaining with Karzai, who has long criticized many aspects of the U.S. military presence and who is likely to be reluctant to accede to a key American demand: That any U.S. soldiers who remain in Afghanistan after 2014 retain immunity from prosecution in the dysfunctional Afghan court system. It was this issue that led the U.S. to pull all its troops out of Iraq in December, 2011 after failing to negotiate an agreement with the Nuri al-Maliki government.

Or this may represent the real views of those in the Obama administration who have long called for a much-reduced U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and it is also in keeping with the emerging Obama doctrine of attacking al Qaeda and its allies with drones but no American boots on the ground. And it certainly aligns with the view of most Americans, only around a quarter of whom now support the war in Afghanistan, according to a poll taken in September.

In any case, zeroing out U.S. troop levels in the post-2014 Afghanistan is a bad idea on its face -- and even raising this concept publicly is maladroit strategic messaging to Afghanistan and the region writ large.

Why so? Afghans well remember something that most Americans have forgotten.

After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, something that was accomplished at the cost of more than a million Afghan lives and billions of dollars of U.S. aid, the United States closed its embassy in Afghanistan in 1989 during the George H. W. Bush administration and then zeroed out aid to one of the poorest countries in the world under the Clinton administration. It essentially turned its back on Afghans once they had served their purpose of dealing a deathblow to the Soviets.

As a result, the United States had virtually no understanding of the subsequent vacuum in Afghanistan into which eventually stepped the Taliban, who rose to power in the mid-1990s. The Taliban granted shelter to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization from 1996 onward.

After the overthrow of the Taliban, a form of this mistake was made again by the George W. Bush administration, which had an ideological disdain for nation building and was distracted by the Iraq War, so that in the first years after the fall of the Taliban, only a few thousand U.S. soldiers were stationed in Afghanistan.

The relatively small number of American boots on the ground in Afghanistan helped to create a vacuum of security in the country, which the Taliban would deftly exploit, so that by 2007, they once again posed a significant military threat in Afghanistan.

In 2009, Obama ordered a surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan to blunt the Taliban's gathering momentum, which it has certainly accomplished.

But when Obama announced the new troops of the Afghan surge, most media accounts of the speech seized on the fact that the president also said that some of those troops would be coming home in July 2011.

This had the unintended effect of signaling to the Taliban that the U.S. was pulling out of Afghanistan reasonably soon and fit into the longstanding narrative that many Afghans have that the U.S. will abandon them again.

Similarly, the current public discussion of zero U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan after 2014 will encourage those hardliner elements of the Taliban who have no interest in a negotiated settlement and believe they can simply wait the Americans out.

It also discourages the many millions of Afghans who see a longtime U.S. presence as the best guarantor that the Taliban won't come back in any meaningful way and also an important element in dissuading powerful neighbors such as Pakistan from interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs.

Read related: Afghanistan vet finds a new way to serve

Instead of publicly discussing the zero option on troops in Afghanistan after 2014, a much smarter American messaging strategy for the country and the region would be to emphasize that the Strategic Partnership Agreement that the United States has already negotiated with Afghanistan last year guarantees that the U.S. will have some form of partnership with the Afghans until 2024.

In this messaging strategy, the point should be made that the exact size of the American troop presence after 2014 is less important than the fact that U.S. soldiers will stay in the country for many years, with Afghan consent, as a guarantor of Afghanistan's stability.

The United States continues to station thousands of troops in South Korea more than five decades after the end of the Korean War. Under this American security umbrella, South Korea has gone from being one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest.

It is this kind of model that most Afghans want and the U.S. needs to provide so Afghanistan doesn't revert to the kind of chaos that beset it in the mid-1990s and from which the Taliban first emerged.


The Obama-Karzai Meeting: But Who Really Gets to Decide Afghanistan’s Future
By Tony KaronJan. 10, 2013 time.com
Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai meet at the White House Friday to discuss the future of Afghanistan beyond the 2014 U.S. troop withdrawal. But neither man will have the last word over the fate of that beleaguered country beyond next year.

Karzai, for his part, is constitutionally forbidden from seeking reelection when his term expires in 2014. And even if he were to manipulate the political system in order to elevate a proxy figure to rule on his behalf — which his critics suspect he plans to do — his power, limited as it is, has always depended on the presence of tens of thousands of Western troops to fight off his Taliban foes. Those troops are leaving, too–the U.S. and its NATO allies having set a hard deadline for ending what had threatened to become an open-ended commitment if withdrawal remained tied to security conditions on the ground. Still, the prospect of their departure is prompting fears that the entire edifice created by the Western alliance over 11 years could collapse — and it obviously further diminishes Washington’s leverage over Afghan political choices.

The U.S. withdrawal plan is based on conditions at home, rather than those in Afghanistan. War-weary cash-strapped Western nations are no longer willing to sustain a counterinsurgency effort that has long been spinning its wheels, their distaste for the war reinforced by the 47 attacks by uniformed Afghan personnel that killed more than 60 Western troops last year alone.

The “surge” ordered by President Obama in 2009 that took U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to 100,000 has ended — troop levels are back at a pre-surge 66,000 — without altering the strategic landscape. “There has been no meaningful military progress since the end of 2010,” wrote former Pentagon official Anthony Cordesman, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, last week.

The surge hasn’t achieved its goal of imposing sufficient hurt on the Taliban to force it to negotiate on favorable terms. That’s why Karzai and Obama must now seek a strategy for managing an ever-perilous Afghan security situation without the U.S. combat advantage.

Media coverage of Karzai’s visit has focused on the Obama Administration’s internal debate over how many troops the U.S. might keep in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and on what terms. The White House on Monday signaled that one option was to leave none — a stance that would also warn Karzai against overestimating his leverage in negotiations of autonomy and legal immunity for any residual force. ”Karzai comes to this week’s discussions convinced that the United States desperately needs long-term military bases in Afghanistan,” wrote Lt.-Gen. David Barno, the senior U.S. officer who once advised the Afghan president, this week. “But Karzai has it wrong.” As a result of “shrinking budgets and crumpled public support for the war,” Barno wrote, a “vigorous debate has been under way inside the administration in advance of Karzai’s visit to sort out a minimalist approach that will protect long-term U.S. interests in the region, but do so with the absolute leanest outlay of dollars and troops.”

What becomes clear from reports of the Administration’s debate over the size and scope of a residual force — well covered by my colleague Mark Thompson – is that U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan after 2014 will likely be less than 10,000 soldiers, a number that suggests their primary focus would be on going after al-Qaeda type groups. While advocates of a smaller force believe a “lighter footprint” can accomplish U.S. goals in Afghanistan, critics believe it may court disaster.

“The Obama Administration will no doubt promise that the U.S. will continue to provide assistance to the Afghan mlitary in addition to continuing counterrorism operations in Afghanistan,” wrote Robert and Kimberley Kagan, intellectual authors of the Bush Administration’s 2007 Iraq surge, in the Wall Street Journal this week. “But the military reality is that we cannot conduct either mission at the force level the president is considering.”

Even a narrow counterterror focus requires more bases and air support capability and quick-reaction ground forces, they argued. And losing embedded U.S. troops and air support would rapidly shrink the Afghan army’s capabilities. “Brave as the Afghan soldiers are,” the Kagans warned, “they simply cannot stand and fight without U.S. support.” A Pentagon report released last month found that only one of 23 Afghan army battalions can engage in combat independently of direct U.S. support.

Still, indications are that the Obama Administration may be calling time on a policy of deploying tens of thousands of troops to the Afghan government’s fight against the Taliban. The President’s pick for Defense Secretary, Senator Chuck Hagel, publicly opposed Obama’s Afghan surge in 2009, and he has made clear since that he believes that opposition was vindicated by events.

The decision on troop levels may not be made for some months yet, but whatever its size, it’s clear that the force left in Afghanistan won’t be tasked with winning the war against the Taliban — if 100,000 U.S. troops couldn’t do that, less than 10,000 won’t be asked to try. And there are serious doubts over whether the Afghan security forces in which the U.S. has invested some $50 billion can hold the line once American combat support ends. A number of observers fear that much of the south and east of the country would fall under Taliban control if the war raged on without U.S. involvement, even areas ostensibly cleared during the surge.

Because of corruption and cronyism, Karzai’s government has palpably failed to secure the loyalty of much of its civilian population. That political weakness–combined with the economic impact of a Western withdrawal that will leave a large number of Afghans jobless–amplifies fears in Kabul over a descent into mayhem. Elections over which Karzai himself will oversee to pick a new president inspire little confidence that the disastrous dynamic of incompetent governance will be reversed as long as the war rages on.

That has left Washington facing a choice, Cordesman suggested, between “an uncertain effort at a settlement with the Taliban that [the insurgency] so far firmly and decisively rejects,” and “an open-ended U.S. commitment to supporting the Afghan government, as well as a mix of Afghan forces, which… will not have any army that is really ready to assume true responsibility for Afghan security until sometime after 2016, and whose police are unlikely to succeed at any point in the future.”

If there are grounds for optimism, in the view of some analysts, they may rest on the Karzai government’s ability to make peace with the Taliban, rather than on its capacity to wage war on the insurgents. Karzai’s own High Peace Council late last year proposed a peace process that gives a leading role to Pakistan – a turnabout for a government that has fiercely opposed Pakistani involvement in Afghan affairs. The proposed “Afghan Peace Roadmap to 2015” would also see the Taliban effectively invited to share power in Kabul and to appoint the governors of regions in which it is strongest, all while supposedly “respecting” the Afghan constitution. As alarming as that proposal is to many concerned for human rights and democracy in Afghanistan, it may only be an opening bid. After all, even if the Taliban wants a deal, it may not feel sufficient pressure to make one on Karzai’s terms.

Still, Pakistan, whose involvement is critical to the prospects of any peace process, appears to be buying in thus far, perhaps recognizing an historic opportunity to shape the post-U.S. environment on its western flank. Pakistan late last year released a number of Taliban prisoners who had been detained for talking to the Karzai regime — Pakistan’s military establishment has provided sanctuary to the Taliban leadership precisely because it needs them to secure Pakistani interests in Kabul, and is therefore hostile to any negotiation process from which it is excluded.

Journalist and Taliban expert Ahmed Rashid reported last month that a serious debate is underway within the Taliban over whether to seek a negotiated solution, or hold out for a military victory. The imminent departure of the U.S. and its allies has emboldened those pushing the harder line, but that is counter-acted by a growing war weariness within the insurgency, and the communities that sustain it. That may not produce a negotiated resolution to the conflict any time soon, but Rashid suspects it could prompt a truce: “Any talks will need months, possibly years, but everyone — even the Taliban — would like to see a cease-fire before 2014.”

It’s safe to assume, then, that Obama and Karzai have a lot more to discuss than troop levels, although the changing military balance will inevitably be a prime consideration changing the calculations of some of the key players in a decades-old civil war.

What legal education could do for a resilient Afghanistan
Americans need a more complex, realistic picture of Afghanistan. Such a picture shows that US efforts to support education and the development of Afghan civil society should not be abandoned. It also shows that these initiatives may require patience and persistence.
By Julian Simcock January 10, 2013 The Christian Science Monitor
Stanford, Calif - As Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai meets with President Obama in Washington this week, and the Senate prepares to consider Mr. Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, now seems like an apt time for reflection on the US strategy in Afghanistan. In particular, what does America’s approach to Afghanistan’s educational needs reveal about its long-term goals for the country?

Last fall, in a brief and unceremonious election, I became the co-director of a small group – the Afghanistan Legal Education Project– at Stanford Law School. Our organization works with academics in Kabul to write law textbooks for young Afghans.

Early visions of prestige notwithstanding, I’ve learned by now that my duties are mostly administrative – editing, scheduling, sending cajoling emails. But for all that the job lacks in diplomatic glamour, it comes with an unusual perk. Each week, I host a Skype call with our American teaching fellow in Kabul. Over time, her insight has come to serve as a healthy source of perspective: a sense that Afghanistan is more sophisticated – and resilient – than many pundits and politicians suggest. America’s approach to its future should be, too.

Jenn Round is our longest serving teaching fellow, and she’s been reporting back from Kabul for more than 18 months. When our weekly calls began, she and I mostly stuck to discussing the project. Now, however, when there is little textbook business to discuss, we fill the time with other topics.

It’s in this way, through secondhand snippets about Jenn’s students, that I’ve learned the textured details of student life in Kabul. I’ve heard stories about a new “law club,” job-market jitters, even fledgling romances. For one hour each week, the lives of Jenn’s students are transmitted across continents, and reassemble themselves in my San Francisco apartment.

These are more than idle tangents. They serve as reminders that Afghanistan is not simply a place where military strategies play themselves out. It is home to a population of individuals with vibrant lives, personal ambitions, and, as history attests, ample capacity for endurance.

Much of our focus on Afghanistan is on the upcoming withdrawal of US troops (which the Obama administration has made clear will be concluded in 2014). We argue about failures and successes, profits and losses. Almost invariably, somewhere beneath these discussions lies an unwieldy question: What happens next?

America’s military presence is an important issue for Afghanistan, but it is not all encompassing. Afghanistan has experienced such transitions before, and the choice it now faces is not necessarily between cataclysmic violence and peace.

In short, the question is not solely one of what happens next in Afghanistan. It is about how Americans and the international community decide to contribute, regardless of what happens.

To that end, a basic tenet of our project is that legal knowledge, once provided, cannot be taken away. The learning that a student receives in a classroom may lie dormant. It may be tested and challenged. But it has a stubborn, intractable quality. It is far more difficult to destroy than roads or infrastructure.

In keeping with these long-term ideas, at the Afghanistan Legal Education Project, we believe that one manner in which to approach uncertainty is to prepare a small cohort for the future: a group of Afghans that has studied other legal systems as well as its own; a group with sufficient education to articulate ideas before an electorate; and a group empowered to embrace, and protect, a collective form of Afghan government.

Legal education, in short, is concomitant with – maybe even requisite to – long-term security.

Several months ago, our organization came one step closer to fulfilling these ideals. Our project is now the grateful recipient of a $7.2 million grant from the US State Department. That money will allow us to embark on a project that has been a long time in the making: the development of a fully accredited law school in Kabul. Several years from now, a small group of Afghan students – the first of its kind in many respects – will graduate with internationally recognized legal degrees.

To some, this may sound naive. There are those who argue that, without robust security, no progress can be made in Afghanistan. Perhaps, from America’s vantage, the fewer resources we expend in the lead up to the troop withdrawal, the better.

But if I had Jenn on the line right now, she would argue differently. We can remain conscious of uncertainty, she’d say, without abandoning our efforts. She’d remind me that the development of legal education in Afghanistan is likely to be the work of generations, rather than years.

She’d be right, of course – and, in delivering her message, she’d have articulated a complex, realistic, portrayal of Afghanistan. Policymakers and politicians, and the American people whose backing they seek, would do well to remember this more nuanced picture. That means US efforts to support education and the development of Afghan civil society should not be abandoned. Just as it means that these initiatives may require the patience – and persistence – of many years to bear fruit.

Julian Simcock is the student co-director of the Afghanistan Legal Education Project at Stanford Law School. The project works with academics in Kabul to develop legal curricula for the American University in Afghanistan, and is now developing a full, five year integrated law degree program. Julian and several other students traveled to Afghanistan in February 2012.

Afghans say total U.S. pullout would trigger disaster
Reuters By Hamid Shalizi 09/01/2013
KABUL - Afghan lawmakers said on Wednesday disaster and civil war would follow if Washington pushed ahead with a suggestion to withdraw all its troops from the country after 2014.

The White House said a day earlier it was considering the so-called "zero option" of a complete pullout - despite earlier recommendations from the top military commander in Afghanistan to keep soldiers there to help the government.

That option and the angry reaction from Afghan officials are likely to dominate talks between U.S. President Barack Obaba and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai in Washington on Friday.

The meeting was already likely to be tense, given ongoing strains in their relationship over the war.

"If Americans pull out all of their troops without a plan, the civil war of the 1990s would repeat itself," said Naeem Lalai, an outspoken lawmaker from volatile Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taliban.

"It (full withdrawal) will pave the way for the Taliban to take over militarily," Lalai told Reuters.

When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989 after a decade-long war, financial aid dried up and the Afghan communist government collapsed, leading to infighting between warlords. A civil war paved the way for the Taliban's rise to power.

The United States has about 68,000 troops there and that number was already expected to reduce sharply ahead of December 31 2014 - the official end of the NATO-led combat mission in the country.

NATO and its partners are racing against the clock to train up Afghanistan's 350,000-strong security forces though questions remain over how they well they will be able to tackle insurgents in the face of intensifying violence.

Many leading Afghan officials had assumed some U.S. troops would stay.

"If American forces leave Afghanistan without properly training the Afghan security forces, and equipping them, it would be a disaster," said influential member of parliament Mirwais Yasini.

Member of parliament Shukria Barekzai said a total withdrawal after 2014 would be equivalent to the United States "accepting defeat".

The Taliban said it was still considering whether to respond to the White House statement when contacted by Reuters on Wednesday.

"It's very speculative and we are not commenting for now," said its spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.

On Saturday the group reiterated its call for the immediate removal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan.

U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said the complete withdrawal was "an option that we would consider" on Tuesday.

He made clear that a decision on post-2014 troop levels is not expected for months and will be made based on two U.S. security objectives in Afghanistan - denying a safe haven to al Qaeda and ensuring Afghan forces are trained and equipped so that they, and not foreign forces, can secure the nation.

Washington officials have privately said the White House is seeking a post-2014 presence of between 3,000 and 9,000 troops, which is significantly less than the 6,000 to 15,000 number given by the top commander, U.S. General John Allen.

(Additional reporting by Abdul Aziz Ibrahimi and Mirwais Harooni, Writing by Dylan Welch and Amie Ferris-Rotman; Editing by Andrew Heavens)


The Poppy Palaces
Architecture can tell you a lot about a place. So welcome to the narco-villa district of Kabul, where Scarface meets Scarsdale.
Vanity Fair By Tom Freston January 9, 2013
‘Just look at this view,” said my guide, as he waved his arm expansively from right to left. We had just emerged onto the sun-drenched roof terrace of a so-called narco-villa in Kabul’s Sherpur neighborhood. Sherpur is the epicenter of an eye-catching architectural style in a district where the gusher of money from drugs and corruption has found full expression. From the rooftop I look out on a jumble of grotesque, garish, candy-colored, multi-storied mansions sitting almost on top of one another. They resemble a mad baker’s window display of bad wedding cakes. These are the fortified castles of Afghanistan’s peculiar new elite. “Narco-tecture” takes classic design elements from ancient Greece and then goes psychedelic with them, adding touches from Mexico and Pakistan. Bad money has met bad taste in this former military installation in the suburbs of Kabul. If there were a Narco-tecture Digest, Sherpur could make up a special issue.

Sherpur had been army land, the site of an old fort surrounded by modest homes. In 2003, the government evicted many of the local families and distributed the land to cabinet ministers, the mayor, militia commanders, and various warlords. Here in a city where most people live in slums with no running water or heat, the government commandeered a new suburb for high rollers, an enclave borrowing more from Scarface than Scarsdale. According to some, there are about 75 narco-villas now in Sherpur. I had heard that their neighborhood association, so to speak, petitioned the U.N. to pave the streets, but the U.N. wisely refused. Still, the international community, ever the enabler in Afghanistan, has managed to rent quite a few of these monstrosities over the years as homes for news organizations, diplomatic residences, and guesthouses. For the owners, it’s a perfect scheme.

I’ve been intrigued by these structures ever since I returned to Afghanistan, in 2007. They just seemed so wrong, so blatant, so out of place. I’d read about the narco-tombs in Mexico—multi-story, pastel-colored, air-conditioned mausoleums built by drug lords there. I’d heard about their narco-wives, too. So I was eager to see these narco-villas. For my first visit to a real-estate office there, five years ago, I posed as a big-shot ex-pat renter and said I wanted to see some “very large homes.” These homes, also known as “Poppy Palaces,” can encompass 50 or 60 rooms. Rents were $25,000 to $100,000 a month back then. One, it was said, had “room for 50 cars.” I inspected four or five narco-villas, each bigger than the one before.

Narco-villas feature grand entrances, byzantine floor plans, and huge, cavernous hallways. Everything inside is concrete and marble. No Sheetrock defiles the space. There is very little wood trim, and the chandeliers and fixtures could be right out of Medellin. They say you can tell a lot about a home by the way it smells. These smelled unhealthy: cold and moldy. The upstairs floors are warrens of bedrooms with no attached baths. The real action, the un-Islamic action, if you will, is hidden away in the basements. Some have elevated swimming pools (in odd colors), large bars, and full gyms. I saw a room with hooks on the ceiling. I was told it had been a gym. A convenient place to hang someone with their arms behind their back, I thought. The most striking thing about these buildings is the vulgar detailing: the painted Greek columns, the mirrored fireplaces, the Bavarian Alpine murals.

I watched Sherpur boom over the years and then sadly began to notice narco-villas popping up everywhere in town, supplanting the far more sensible indigenous Afghan architecture. In Kabul’s hothouse real-estate market, every time you saw a teardown, you could bet another narco-villa was likely on the way.

The news that foreign-troop withdrawals would be completed by 2014 initially hit the real-estate market in Kabul very hard. Many wondered what will happen when nato forces leave and much of the foreign aid dries up. This October, five years after my initial visit, I headed back to see if the narco-villa market could be a leading economic indicator of the future.

There were “For Rent” signs all over Sherpur. “Many organizations have finished their jobs and left,” my guide told me. He added that about 30 percent of the homes are now empty. Prices are down by 25 to 50 percent. Of course, location still rules. From a rooftop my guide pointed out a villa on a corner lot. It used to go for $18,000 a month, but now you can get it for only $8,000. It’s on a corner, so it’s a bigger security risk, and after all, security is worse now. The narco-villa to its left, with the nice garden, has held its price, I’m told, because it’s next door to a big cheese from the Afghan Intelligence Directorate who has a huge security detail. It has 50 rooms, and the owner is holding to his $50,000-per-month rent. With so many people leaving, who might be moving in? “Blackwater’s coming; that’s about it,” said my guide, referring to the security firm now called Academi.

Architectural eras can provide a capsule history of a city. The rise of the narco-villa in one of the world’s poorest countries speaks volumes about what has gone wrong in Kabul. Architecture here was traditionally low-key and adaptive to the environment: cool in summer, warm in winter. These villas are just the reverse. And their design influences are quite foreign, drawing not from tradition but from movies that glamorize excess. But the impulses that built these homes are universal. If you suddenly come into some free land and some easy money, and if you’re without much refinement, then big and garish seems to be a good way to go. We sure have our own versions of that in the United States.

Looking down on these odd-looking mansions, it occurred to me that Afghanistan is a bit like Hollywood, a place where I have also spent time. Both have plenty of charming, outsize characters; there is an ever-changing and rapacious elite; business dealings can involve something a bit illegal and dangerous; money is rarely spent rationally; and there’s an endless line of outsiders ready to come in, caught up by the romance and the sense of possibility. Just like Hollywood, Afghanistan is a bit of an insider’s game. Most people eventually go home defeated and poorer. You’ll notice, though, that Hollywood has not disappeared. Neither will Afghanistan. It will do what it has always done: hunker down, sort out its own problems, and wait for new arrivals to devour.


Afghan Amnesty Program Falls Short, Leaving Ex-Insurgents Regretful and Angry
New York Times By AZAM AHMED January 9, 2013
MEHTAR LAM, Afghanistan - Eidi Mohammed, a former Taliban commander who recently renounced violence and sought amnesty under the Afghan government’s reconciliation program, has had another change of heart. Now he is thinking about rejoining his old comrades. Jobless and losing hope he will ever find work, Mr. Mohammed, 38, took his frustrations to provincial officials. They told him there was nothing they could do.

“The moment I feel like I can move, I will go back to the mountains, rearm myself and fight you again,” Mr. Mohammed, who is recovering from a recent gunshot wound to the leg caused by a clash with a police officer, recalled warning the governor, police chief and top security official of Badghis Province.

He is not alone. Interviews with more than a dozen former insurgents find a group embittered and torn about their choice to lay down their arms. Many are unable to work and often unable to return to their villages for safety reasons; most feel the government has cheated them.

“I am just counting the days before someone kills me,” said Akhtar Mohammad, a former Taliban commander in Oruzgan. “Every passing moment I feel regret for joining the peace process.”

Mr. Mohammad, who is from the south, where the insurgency is the deadliest, said the only thing he had to show for his decision to switch sides was the turban he had been given for his reintegration ceremony.

Two years into one of the most ambitious efforts to lure Taliban fighters off the battlefield, many Afghan and Western officials acknowledge that the results have been disappointing. Though the number of people claiming the amnesty has swelled in the past year, violence remains high in the hotbeds of the insurgency, where the program has struggled to take hold.

Of the roughly 6,100 participants so far, 80 percent come from the relatively peaceful north and west of the country, where the Taliban presence is thinnest. And even some of those fighters say their activity was more criminal than political or ideological, even though the program was designed to flip the most committed fighters.

Many onetime fighters say they were only loosely affiliated with the Taliban. Though widely thought of as a unified Islamic movement, the Taliban in reality consist of a shifting constellation of forces whose agendas sometimes line up. Many of the insurgents who have given up fighting said they were formerly of Hezb-e-Islami, a rival faction to the Taliban that has been losing power and influence in recent years.

Although some fighters have found employment, Western officials argue that the reintegration initiative was never meant to be a jobs program. It pays a modest stipend, about $100 to $200 monthly for the first three months, depending on the fighter’s rank. In theory, the former fighters can find work on development projects financed in their home villages, though many projects have failed to get off the ground.

In two years, the so-called High Peace Council has spent less than half of what officials hoped to spend in 2011 alone. Tight controls have stalled village development projects meant to employ the former insurgents in their communities. About $180 million of the $235 million the program was granted sits idle in Afghan coffers.

The officials running the program called it a work in progress that would improve over time. The importance of employment for former fighters is acknowledged as an important element of keeping them from picking up arms again.

“We’re working on ways to improve the effectiveness of the program,” said Paul Martin Mason, who oversees the reintegration program for the United Nations Development Program.

In the meantime, many former fighters are expressing second thoughts with their decisions. Having tired of endless fighting, Hazrat Mir, a former Taliban commander in Laghman, joined the government with 130 of his men last year.

With promises of jobs and land, Mr. Mir said, his men left their villages and turned in their weapons, a dangerous prospect given the threat from former comrades. The danger, it turned out, was made clear by an attack the day before their reintegration ceremony in which the Taliban killed Mr. Mir’s top deputy.

“It’s been 11 months, and the government hasn’t given us anything,” Mr. Mir complained. “We’ve spent all of our money living in the capital, where we don’t know anyone.”

The governor of Laghman Province, Fazlullah Mujadidi, extolled the virtues of the reintegration program during an interview in the pale-blue parlor of his tidy government compound. The roads are clear, and the Taliban no longer operate with impunity, he said. The reintegration effort, which has drawn in 276 former insurgents, has been a remarkable success, he said.

A bear-size man with a heavy beard, Mr. Mujadidi counted out on each finger the new development projects headed to his districts thanks to the program: a dam, a major road and wells.

Asked about Hazrat Mir and his men’s frustrations, Mr. Mujadidi grew silent.

“We can confirm those details,” he said of Mr. Mir’s account, adding that the various projects he listed are still in the application phase. “We don’t have the resources at the provincial level to support them.”

Some former Taliban commanders suspect bit players in the insurgency have been used to pad the data and make the program appear more effective than it really is.

“If we believe the figures of the High Peace Council, then the Taliban should be weakened significantly,” said Syed Muhammad Akbar Agha, a former Taliban commander, seated in his frigid living room on the outskirts of Kabul. “But they are not.”

“I doubt 2 out of every 1,500 are true Taliban fighters,” he added.

All who switch sides, though, face real threats. While the government said it did not collect data on the number of enrollees killed, the Taliban have taken steps to target as many as possible.

In Kapisa, a restive province northeast of Kabul, just seven fighters have laid down arms since the program started. That, in part, is because the Taliban fatally shot one of the early defectors, Qand Agha.

Abdul Malik, a former comrade of Mr. Agha’s, said gunmen recently tried to storm his home in the dead of night. He fought them off with his assault rifle, a weapon he was allowed to keep for self-defense after renouncing the Taliban. But a farmer found a bomb the next morning that had been left behind in a field by his house.

In addition to complaining about the lack of security, Mr. Malik said the government broke its promise to give him a job with the Afghan Local Police.

“I’ve told everyone I know not to join the government,” he said.

Abdul Momen Muslim, who as chairman of the Kapisa peace council persuaded Mr. Malik to join the government, agreed.

“I can no longer in good conscience tell people to come to the government,” he said.

Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Mehtar Lam, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar.


Pakistanis trucking NATO supplies to Afghanistan go on strike
Reuters By Imtiaz Shah Wed Jan 9, 2013
KARACHI, Pakistan - Pakistani transporters who carry NATO supplies to land-locked Afghanistan have gone on strike, disrupting the flow of goods to Western forces in a protest against a new customs regime aimed at cutting theft.

A spokesman for Afghanistan's NATO-led force declined to comment on how the strike might affect supplies. When Pakistan previously blocked supplies it cost $100 million extra a month to send supplies on longer, alternate routes, U.S. officials said at the time.

The All Pakistan Goods Transportation Association has been unofficially blockading 4,000 vehicles carrying supplies to and from coalition forces in Afghanistan for the past six days.

The truckers are protesting against a new government-imposed system that will require truckers to go through authorized companies to carry NATO supplies instead of making individual deals. The system is designed to cut down on theft.

Transporters say that will hurt their business and they have announced that operations would remain suspended until the system is scrapped.

"We will continue striking as long as our demands aren't met," transporter Abdul Ghafaaz Niazi said on Wednesday.

"Custom collectorate officials are corrupt. We won't listen to them. If they want to lose billions of rupees every day, they can."

Syed Shams Ahmed Burney, chairman of the All Pakistan Custom Bonded Carriers Association, said the transporters' demands were impractical.

"This system exists to minimize and end pilferage and theft but the transporters want a free-for-all. That is not possible," he said.

Many supplies for U.S. and other forces in Afghanistan are shipped into the Pakistani port of Karachi and trucked along two routes into Afghanistan.

Pakistan previously banned trucks from carrying NATO-force supplies into Afghanistan in 2011 in protest against a cross-border NATO air strike that inadvertently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

The seven-month ban forced the United States to rely on longer, more expensive northern routes through Russia and Central Asia.

The blockade was lifted after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military in the NATO attack.

(Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Robert Birsel)


Displaced Afghans feel strangers at home
Those living in camps for displaced people complain of grinding poverty, crime, and unscrupulous leaders.
Aljazeera By Ali M Latifi 09 Jan 2013
Kabul, Afghanistan - After spending 10 years as a refugee in Pakistan, Nafas Gol never thought she would be living in a tent in a camp for the internally displaced in Kabul.

"[Afghan President Hamid] Karzai was everywhere saying 'come, your country is ready', so I did," she said.

More than five million refugees have returned to the country since the US-led invasion in 2001. Nafas Gol is one of about 30,000 returnees who are living in camps for internally displaced people in the Afghan capital.

As the winter sets in, the dirt roads in the camp Nafas Gol lives in, in Kabul's Deh-e-Sabz neighbourhood, have turned to mud and ice. The tents and tarps that line the now-slippery paths provide little shelter from the elements.

"This tarpaulin is three years old. What can it do for us?" asked another camp resident, Atiqullah, who returned to Kabul eight months ago.

"Everyone is dying of hunger. There is no flour, no oil, no wood," he said, fearing a repeat of the harsh winter of 2012, which led to the deaths of more than 100 Afghans.

But the bitter winter climate isn't the only problem facing those living in the camps.

'People look at us like dogs'

Leaving behind the uncertain life of a refugee, many internally displaced Afghans thought their days of being taken advantage of by opportunists were behind them. But life in the camps can be just as predatory as in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan.

Area residents often stalk the camps at night, says Shir Ali, a 26-year-old camp resident. He described some of these people as vandals and podaris, or heroin addicts.

"People come with guns to steal from the poor. They strong-arm people," said Mohammad Aslan, a malek, or leader, of the camp.

In such living circumstances, everyone - men, women and children - have to contribute. Many women and children beg or sell simple items on the streets. This breaking of cultural norms has led some to believe they can approach the community's women, said Shir Ali. "They think they can come here and take advantage of us ... They think this area is a brothel, that our women are prostitutes."

"People look at us like dogs here," Atiqullah noted.

Nor does the available work, such as driving carriages or going from house-to-house collecting old clothes to repair and sell, alleviate their poverty. Shir Ali said people need at least 500 afghanis ($10) per day to survive, but that those in the camps often make between 100-150 afghanis ($2-3). Meanwhile, he said, "one kilo of flour is 170 afghanis ($3.30); the oil to cook it with is another 100 afghanis ($2)".

The high cost of living has forced camp residents to find alternative means of survival. These can often prove dangerous. Children sometimes climb trees to shake down branches, Shir Ali said, while another waits at the base with a basket to catch the falling wood - a valuable commodity during the freezing-cold winter. But children have been injured when they slip and fall.

Unscrupulous maleks

In conversations with Al Jazeera, many residents quietly stated that fellow camp members often contribute to their woes.

Nafas Gol said the camp maleks, or leaders, many of whom came from her own tribe, often hoarded money and firewood provided by aid groups.

"They take it. I've seen them. They collect the money and the supplies and they keep it for themselves. But I won't stay quiet any longer," she said, as she pointed at the malek and his compatriots, who were guiding journalists around the Deh-e-Sabz camp.

Researchers and journalists have also reported cases of opportunism within the camps. Nassim Majidi, director at Samuel Hall Consulting, a research and consulting company based in Kabul, said "maleks [camp leaders] are recurrently blamed for not handing out the assistance evenly, for keeping some for themselves, selling the rest ... Those who have power abuse it, and these sites are not an exception."

Fouzia Monawer, who researches migration, said that during a visit to a primarily Pashtun camp in a rural area outside of Kabul, a local malek guiding her and her team were "closely controlling who we did and did not speak to. On our way out, however, we came across a Tajik woman who explained that the malek had not only stolen her family's UNHCR-distributed tent but, each time an aid worker would come to distribute assistance to the IDPs, the malek would prevent her family - and other Tajik families - from receiving aid."

Monawer said that when the malek saw her speaking to this woman, he "quickly interrupted, making the woman so uncomfortable that she soon left with her two small children".

Back to Pakistan?

Though many of the repatriates in the Deh-e-Sabz camp describe an equally bleak existence in Iran and Pakistan, some said there were more economic opportunities in those countries.

Atiqullah, who lived in the border city of Peshawar for over 25 years, said that unlike in Kabul, his family did not live in a tent in Pakistan.

"We rented," he said, a fact Atiqullah proudly credits to his 18,000 rupee-a-month salary as a supervisor at Wall's, a local ice cream producer.

For years, Atiqullah's salary also helped him avert authorities asking for proof of his refugee status. "I used to give them reshwat [bribes]," he said, at a cost of 500 to 1,000 rupees ($5-10) each time. But when he lost his job last year, that quickly came to an end. "I couldn't keep bribing the police. They finally kicked us out."

When he did return to Afghanistan, Atiqullah thought he could return to his home, the volatile eastern province of Laghman. But he and his family were heart-broken when they returned, realising they had neither a home nor land to call their own. Like many repatriates, they soon found themselves in Kabul.

Life is harder here than in Pakistan: Atiqullah had trouble paying a doctor when his child became sick, something he said would not have happened in Peshawar. He is now considering a return to Pakistan.

Mohammed Aslan, a leader in the Deh-e-Sabz camp, cited Atiqullah's willingness to leave for Pakistan as evidence of how vulnerable repatriates are in Kabul. "If he had land here," Aslan explained, "of course he wouldn't return to Pakistan".

Pakistan has declared a June 2013 deadline for Afghan refugees to return to their homeland, but meanwhile Atiqullah is working to gather the 5,000 afghanis ($100) needed to smuggle himself back. But given that he makes just 100 afghanis ($2) a day, he would have to go into debt to do this.

Atiqullah is not alone in his thinking: a recent report by the Population Profiling, Verification and Response Survey on Afghan refugees in Pakistan found that 84 percent have no intention of leaving.

The report, produced in part by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, also found that 20 per cent of Afghans have invested a total of about 18bn rupees ($180m) in businesses in Pakistan.

Meanwhile Roh Gol, who is referred to as the khaleh, or aunt, of the camp for her leadership role, blamed the government of Hamid Karzai for convincing some Afghans that it was safe to return.

"Karzai keeps talking, but what has come of his words?"


Woman Sentenced to Death for Murder of Husband
TOLOnews.com By Jawed Stanikzai Wednesday, 09 January 2013
The Preliminary Court of Kabul's Zone 4 sentenced to death a woman for colluding with her lover to murder her husband of 16 years.

The head of the court said that evidence shows the the woman, who served as a high school principal, killed her husband on the night of the Islamic religious holiday of Eid-ul-Fitr.

Dismissing the verdict of the court, the woman said his husband was killed by thieves.

"I swear to the Quran that I am not involved in my husband's murder," said Qadria, the woman.

The woman's secret lover is said to have left the country after assisting her in the murder. However, the woman dismissed the relationship, saying she was only in contact with him via telephone.

Meanwhile, the victim's brother asked law enforcement to implement the court's verdict.

"I want the responsible organs, especially the judiciary, to punish soon this woman who killed my brother," he said.

The woman is said to had lived with her husband for 16 years. But as the relationship deteriorated, she is said to asked for divorce several times.

www.afghanistannewscenter.com