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U.S. Marine pleads guilty to urinating on Taliban corpses
By Judy Royal | Reuters – Wed, Jan 16, 2013
CAMP LEJEUNE, North Carolina (Reuters) - A U.S. Marine pleaded guilty on Wednesday to urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and then posing for photographs in a scene captured in a widely circulated video on the Internet and denounced by world leaders.
Staff Sergeant Edward W. Deptola said he knew desecrating the corpses and posing for the "trophy photographs" was wrong and he offered no excuse for the behavior during his court martial at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune.
"I was in a position to stop it and I did not," said Deptola, a native of Southold, New York, and married father of two.
Although the judge presiding at Deptola's trial recommended a stiffer sentence, the maximum penalty he will face under the terms of a pre-trial agreement is a reduction in rank to sergeant.
Deptola was among a group of Marines to face disciplinary action after the video, posted on YouTube and other websites in January 2012, showed four U.S. servicemen in camouflage combat uniforms urinating on several corpses.
One of them said, "have a nice day, buddy," during the footage and another Marine made a lewd joke.
Military officials said the actions depicted in the video occurred during a counter-insurgency operation in the vicinity of Sandala, Musa Qala District, in Afghanistan's Helmand Province on July 27, 2011.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other military leaders denounced the behavior and Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the video. Officials worried the video would stir up already strong anti-U.S. sentiment in Afghanistan after a decade of a war that had seen past cases of abuse.
Deptola, who is assigned to the Third Battalion, Second Marine Regiment at Camp Lejeune, pleaded guilty to being derelict in his duties by failing to properly supervise junior Marines and wrongfully posing for unofficial photos with human casualties.
He also admitted to urinating on one of the bodies and wrongfully and indiscriminately firing a recovered enemy machine gun.
Deptola said he and the others accused in the incident thought the dead fighters might have been responsible for killing a fellow Marine earlier.
A sergeant who worked in the same platoon as Deptola described him as a good leader and Deptola's defense attorney said he was "not a barbarian." The defense asked the military judge to consider Deptola's overall record of service since he enlisted in November 2003.
The judge, Lieutenant Colonel Nicole Hudspeth, recommended Deptola be reduced to the rank of private, jailed for six months, fined $5,000 and discharged for bad conduct - but acknowledged the sentence could not be enforced under the pre-trial agreement.
Lieutenant General Richard P. Mills, the commanding general of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, will issue a final ruling on Deptola's punishment within 120 days.
"You have walked into this courtroom with exceptional protection," Hudspeth told Deptola.
A fellow Marine at Camp Lejeune, Staff Sergeant Joseph W. Chamblin, pleaded guilty in December to urinating on a dead Taliban fighter's body and posing for photos.
A military judge ordered 30 days in jail, but an agreement reached ahead of his court martial limited Chamblin's punishment to no more than $500 in forfeited pay and a reduction in rank to sergeant.
Three other Marines pleaded guilty and were punished last August for their role in the video incident as part of a non-judicial military proceeding, according to the Marine Corps. Their names and specific punishments were not disclosed.
(Reporting by Judy Royal; Writing by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Andrew Hay, Greg McCune, Cynthia Johnston and Andre Grenon)
Afghanistan’s improving ways
Washington Post By David Ignatiu Opinion Thursday, January 17, 2013
NEW DELHI - For Americans weary of nearly a dozen years of war, Afghanistan often seems like a country where nothing ever changes and the same story of ethnic and tribal struggle repeats itself in an endless loop.
But Afghanistan’s demographics have changed in significant ways over the past decade. Rather than being mired in a perpetual feudal twilight, Afghanistan is actually becoming a modern country. The statistical evidence of change, gathered from sources including data from the U.S. Agency for International Development, is overwhelming. Even discounting for the upbeat tone of the USAID summary of “Achievements in Afghanistan,” there still appear to be important demographic improvements on the ground.
The urbanization and economic development that have reshaped Afghanistan do not mean that the country will have a bright political future or that the Taliban won’t regain a measure of power after U.S. troops leave in 2014. But the future won’t simply be a replay of the past. The Afghanistan movie won’t just restart where it left off when the Taliban were driven from power.
“The Taliban won’t have a free run,” says a senior Indian official in a conversation here about Afghanistan’s future after U.S. troops leave. “This is not 1990 again. Afghanistan is a changed place.”
The most obvious change is urbanization. Close to half the population now lives in cities and towns. Kabul is a city of 5 million people, and the populations of Herat, Jalalabad and Kandahar have all tripled in the past decade. This urbanization weakens ethnic and tribal affiliations and helps women get access to jobs and education.
While still primitive in some rural areas, the country is also getting plugged into the global grid. More than 20 million people, or two-thirds of the country, now have access to mobile phones, up from zero a decade ago. Saad Mohseni, who runs MOBY Group, the country’s biggest media company, estimates that 60 percent of the population watches some television each week, and nearly 95 percent has access to radio.
The billions that America pumped into the country helped foster corruption, to be sure, but the money didn’t all vanish into bank accounts in Dubai. Gross domestic product per capita has increased nearly fivefold since 2002, with an annual growth rate of about 9 percent. Only 18 percent of the population has access to reliable electrical power, but that’s triple what it was a decade ago.
The improvements in health are striking, even after a decade of war. Access to basic health services is available to more than 60 percent of Afghans today, up from 9 percent in 2001. Life expectancy has increased from 44 years to 60 in the past decade; the maternal mortality rate has declined 80 percent; the under-5 mortality rate has dropped 44 percent. The number of primary health-care facilities has increased nearly fourfold.
Afghanistan has rebuilt an education system that had nearly stopped functioning. In 2002, only 900,000 students were in primary school, nearly all boys. Today, 8 million students are in school, more than a third of them girls. University enrollment jumped from 8,000 in 2001 to 77,000 in 2011, and about 20 percent of these higher-education students are women. Literacy is currently about 35 percent, but it’s expected to grow to 55 percent in 10 years and 80 percent in 20, unless disaster strikes.
The gains women have made are an especially visible index of change, but they are also a reminder that progress is fragile and could be reversed by the Taliban. In addition to the vastly larger number of female students, women now hold 27 percent of the seats in parliament, three Cabinet posts and 120 judicial positions. By the end of this year, at least 30 percent of government employees will be women.
Afghanistan is a democracy, too — corrupt and capricious, but for now it’s probably the freest country in the neighborhood, compared to Pakistan, Iran and the central Asian nations. It has a free and independent media, producing everything from an Afghan knockoff of “American Idol” to situation comedies to versions of “Sesame Street” dubbed into Dari and Pashto.
For many Americans, the Afghan War feels like defeat — a painful waste of money and lives. Many people felt that way when the Vietnam War ended, little imagining the economic boom that would eventually come to that country after so many decades of brutal suffering. History is mysterious that way; sometimes the deeper transformations are invisible at the time.
Who can say what the future holds for Afghanistan? Surely, the country’s turmoil and suffering won’t end when U.S. troops depart; the situation may get much worse. But it’s a mistake to assume that nothing changed during America’s years of struggle there, or that many of those changes weren’t for the good.
davidignatius@washpost.com
6 militants killed in western Afghan operation: army
HERAT, Afghanistan, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Up to six militants have been killed and eight others wounded in an operation carried out by the Afghan forces in the country's western province of Herat, an army spokesman said on Thursday.
"A search operation was conducted by the Afghan National Army ( ANA) commandos in Zirkoah area of Shindand district overnight. As a result of the raid six militants, including a Taliban local leader Mullah Akbar, were killed and eight others wounded," spokesman Nasrullah Nasito Nadiri told Xinhua.
He said the troops also seized 13 motorcycles used by the militants in the province 640 km west of capital Kabul.
The Taliban insurgent group, which has been waging an insurgency of more than one decade, has yet to make comments.
The government forces are taking the lead in providing security for the country as the Afghan army and police took full security responsibilities from U.S. and NATO forces in areas where more than 75 percent of the population lives, parts of a process which will run through 2014 when Afghanistan takes over the full leadership of its own security duties.
U.S. Military Stops Sending Detainees to Some Afghan Prisons on Rights Fears
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND and THOM SHANKER January 16, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - The American military has suspended the transfer of detainees to some Afghan prisons out of concern over continuing human rights abuses and torture, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said Wednesday in response to questions about the subject.
In addition, the American-led coalition said that it had asked the Afghan government to investigate allegations of torture by Afghan Local Police units that have been trained and advised by American Special Operations forces.
The moves were a setback on detention issues that have created tension between the countries, and on years of international efforts to promote humane treatment of prisoners. And under American law, the torture allegations could also set off significant financial aid cutoffs to parts of the Afghan security forces, which play a crucial role in plans for an American withdrawal that are based on handing over responsibility for security to the Afghans as early as this spring.
Afghan control over all detention in the country has been a primary demand of President Hamid Karzai and was a central issue of the summit talks between Mr. Karzai and President Obama in Washington just a week ago.
Though a Pentagon official said Wednesday that the new suspension would not halt detainee transfers at the main Bagram Prison, which has been the primary source of tension, it presents an added complication for American troops in the field, who now in some places will not be able to turn over detainees to local Afghan authorities.
“Afghan military forces and police that operate effectively and with respect for human rights are central to the success of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan,” said Cmdr. Bill Speaks, a Pentagon spokesman on Afghan policy.
Transfer of prisoners to Afghan control throughout the country was restored last year, after it had been cut off in response to a United Nations investigation published in October 2011 that found widespread use of torture at prisons run by Afghan police and intelligence agencies.
Now a second United Nations report on the subject is to be released, possibly as early as next week, and according to American officials the move by the security assistance force was prompted by revelations expected in that report. United Nations officials involved, however, had no comment.
Afghan officials denied there was any torture or abuse of prisoners while in Afghan custody. “I dismiss all the allegations of torture and mistreatment of prisoners in Afghan prisons,” said Amir Mohammad Jamshidi, general director of the prisons department in the Ministry of Interior. “I have not heard anything about Americans’ decision to halt or cut their support or transfer of detainees to the Afghan side,” he said.
But a spokesman for the security assistance force, Jamie Graybeal, said prisoner transfers had been suspended “as a result of information I.S.A.F. has determined to be credible.” He added: “In the remaining 23 months of the I.S.A.F. mission, we will continue to support the Afghan government in its efforts to improve problems identified.”
There have also been a series of concerns raised about the Afghan Local Police units, which are recruited and trained by American Special Operations troops in villages in heavily contested areas. Some of those units have changed sides, and been involved in serious abuses, including rapes and murders.
“We have formally requested that the Ministry of Interior investigate allegations of torture by the A.L.P.,” Mr. Graybeal said. “I.S.A.F. takes all reports of human rights violations seriously, and we are committed to the humane treatment of detainees.”
Both actions by the International Security Assistance Force were apparently in anticipation of legal provisions — informally known as the Leahy law, after its champion, United States Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat — which prohibit Defense and State Department financing to foreign government agencies that practice torture or other human rights abuses and take no action to punish those responsible. At stake are billions of dollars in direct American aid that will essentially pay the salaries of every member of Afghanistan’s security forces for years to come — but which would legally not be payable under the Leahy provision if torture and other abuse continues.
“It is known that the Afghan security forces have committed abuses, including extrajudicial killings of civilians and the mistreatment of prisoners,” said Tim Rieser, foreign policy aide to Senator Leahy. “They have not been accountable in ways Senator Leahy believes they should be.”
Pentagon officials acknowledged that certain Afghan commanders had been identified as potential violators of human rights, and that steps had been taken to prevent Defense Department money from supporting those commanders and their units, in keeping with the Leahy law.
A spokesman for the NATO Special Operations Component Command in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Tom Bryant, said there had been no financing cutbacks under the Leahy law to the Afghan Local Police program. He said it was continuing to grow, and had been extended from a five-year program, as initially planned, to one to be continued to 2025 by the Afghan authorities. He declined to comment on the security assistance force request that the Afghan authorities investigate accusations of Afghan Local Police torture.
“There has been some misbehavior by A.L.P., there are members who have violated Afghan law and who do things they shouldn’t do,” Colonel Bryant said. “Show me a police program anywhere in the world that is perfect.”
The Afghan general in charge of the program nationwide, Gen. Alisha Ahmadzai, acknowledged concerns about the forces, but said officials had acted to prosecute abusers and insisted that most of the 20,000 local police members did a good job. “We know that there are some problems and complaints from our local police forces about the A.L.P., and therefore we have arrested 65 or 66 local police officers, who were accused of murder, rape, theft, torture or dereliction of duty,” he said.
Colonel Bryant said in most places Afghan Local Police units had been important in fighting insurgents and had suffered three times as many attacks by the insurgents as other Afghan security forces, which he said was a measure of their importance in the war.
Recruited in their local communities and vouchsafed by elders in a process overseen mostly by Army Special Operations troops, the local police units receive less pay and training than normal police units.
“One of the beauties of the A.L.P. program is that it is Afghan-sustainable,” Colonel Bryant said, adding that by June, 15,000 of the local policemen would have been completely transferred from oversight by Special Operations troops to purely Afghan authority and support.
Critics of the program, however, have raised concerns that the local units are essentially militias with insufficient accountability to the Afghan authorities — echoing an initial concern of Mr. Karzai’s when the program was started.
Azam Ahmed and Habib Zahori contributed reporting.
Market fire in Afghanistan leaves one dead
Jan. 17, 2013 at 9:29 AM
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- At least one person died in a commercial market fire in one of the main shopping areas in northern Afghanistan Thursday, officials said.
Officials said two people were trapped in the fire and one died after falling from the building, in Mazar-i-Sharif, Khaama Press reported.
Witnesses said the fire crews were working to prevent the fire from spreading from the five-floor Haji Jawzjani market, one of the main areas to shop for clothes in the city, the capital of Balkh province.
Pakistan Criticizes Obama’s Plan for Turning Over Military Command in Afghanistan
New York Times By DAVID E. SANGER January 16, 2013
Pakistan’s foreign minister on Wednesday issued a biting critique of President Obama’s plan to accelerate the handover of military command in Afghanistan to Afghan forces, declaring that the border with Pakistan has become “less well managed” and that the United States is leaving “without determining whether you have accomplished your objectives.”
The minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, who became the country’s first female foreign minister in 2011, said she would not offer her own preferred timetable for an American departure. But in a wide-ranging interview at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, she argued that the United States was being driven more by its determination to leave Afghanistan quickly than by a set of minimal objectives.
“ ‘Afghan good enough’ was the right strategy,” she said, referring to the informal name for a White House committee, set up in 2010, that reduced, then reduced again, the American objectives in Afghanistan. But she expressed doubts that the Afghan forces would be able to step up to the job of operating independently across the country, and said that the number of refugees from Afghanistan coming into Pakistan had increased considerably.
Ms. Khar also defended Pakistan’s prosecution of Shakil Afridi, the physician who ran a vaccination program in Abbottabad that was started by the Central Intelligence Agency and intended to extract DNA from the occupants of the house where Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding. He was arrested after Bin Laden was killed by an American SEAL team, and the United States government has repeatedly tried, and failed, to get him freed.
“To me he is a villain, not a hero,” said Ms. Khar, arguing that he had “contracted himself to terror groups.” He was sentenced to 33 years in prison — ostensibly not for his role in the Bin Laden hunt, but for his ties to an Islamic extremist, Pakistani officials say.
She argued that his action, and the C.I.A. program, had now made it all but impossible to conduct vaccination programs. Several Pakistani workers trying to give polio vaccines have been killed by Islamic extremists, who have argued the vaccines are part of an American plot.
Ms. Khar also defended the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, at a time American officials are increasingly concerned about new, mobile tactical nuclear weapons — which Pakistan can roll out to the Indian border. The weapons are considered easier to steal than larger weapons kept on Pakistani bases. “We are very confident” that Pakistan can protect its entire arsenal, she said, without referring directly to the new generation of weapons.
She repeated her insistence that the United States should end all drone strikes on Pakistani territory, which has been a longtime Pakistani demand. But she argued that for the first time, “I sense that here in America” there is also a sense that “the strikes are counterproductive in the long term.”
US pullout from Afghanistan worries India
Hindustan Times By Shishir Gupta January 17, 2013
New Delhi - Concerns over heightened terrorism from Pakistan, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir, post 2014 US pullout, have brought Washington and New Delhi closer. India and US last week decided to set-up a bilateral dialogue on Afghanistan to keep terrorism emanating from Af-Pak area under control and ensure stability of the Kabul government. The first meeting of the official level bilateral dialogue is scheduled next month.
Concerns over heightened terrorist activity from Pakistan, particularly in J and K, have brought Washington and New Delhi closer. India and US last week decided to set-up a bilateral dialogue on Afghanistan to keep terrorism emanating from Af-Pak area under control and ensure stability of the Kabul government. The first meeting of the official-level dialogue is scheduled next month.
Government sources said even though there is already a trilateral dialogue between US, India and Afghanistan, the official interlocutors during meetings in Washington last week agreed to have a separate one-on-one channel between the two countries.
This comes after the US agreed to share details with New Delhi on the reconciliation process in Afghanistan. It is understood that PM Manmohan Singh is concerned over the regional impact of US pullout from Afghanistan.
Washington intends to dilute its equity in Pakistan and may need Islamabad only for the reconciliation process as the logistics line will die down after the pullout.
However, there are clear indications that US intends to keep around 7,000 troops in support of the Afghan army and continue with aerial strikes on terrorist hideouts on the Durand Line.
Senior MEA officials have made it clear to their counterparts in the US that India is opposed to Washington cutting any private deals with Islamabad which may destabilize the region.
India wants that US should continue to push Pakistan on its counter-terrorism agenda and maintain the capability to wipe out high value terror targets in Frontier Administered Tribal Areas and Khyber-Paktunkhwa region of Pakistan.
Afghanistan: My Enemy's Enemy
Will a local anti-Taliban revolt in the south affect the future course of the country when NATO forces exit in 2014?
Aljazeera People and Power 16 Jan 2013
In the summer of 2012, something remarkable appeared to be happening in Afghanistan; something that both the central government and its NATO backers had been hopeful of for more than a decade – an uprising against the Taliban by local people.
Over a few weeks in the Andar district of Ghazni province, about 150km south of Kabul, the inhabitants managed to do what NATO and the Afghan army had failed to do in years; they kicked their former overlords out of their own backyard.
The revolt was hailed by some optimistic Western observers as a turning point in the long struggle against the Taliban, so far-reaching in its implications that it might even determine what happens nationwide after US troops withdraw in 2014.
Others have since been more sceptical, arguing that all was not as it seemed. The 'uprising' was really just one faction fighting against another, said these detractors. The Taliban, a less homogenous group than is often portrayed in the West, were merely squabbling among themselves.
Whatever the truth of it, the revolt was successful and continues to be today. Though there are still Taliban in Andar, they no longer exert the almost complete domination they enjoyed a year ago, and those who threw them out remain in charge of key communities across the region.
But what is behind this new element in the Afghan conflict and why has it emerged now? Do the rebel movement's widely-rumoured internal factions and fractures mean that it is merely just another expression of regional warlordism – of a kind which has long distorted Afghan politics? Or is it genuinely significant, a popular front in which ordinary people have come together to provide an alternative narrative to the dire future predicted for Afghanistan when Western forces pack their bags and leave?
People & Power asked Afghan filmmaker Najibullah Quraishi to go to Andar to find out.
In My Enemy’s Enemy, he meets a core group of Andar rebels and their charismatic leader, Lotfullah Kamrani. Known to his followers as 'The Engineer', because of a computer science degree, Kamrani explained that the uprising began when he and a small group of his friends went to complain to the local Taliban about their harsh treatment of the community. The choice they were given in response was stark.
"Either you take sides with the government, or you hand your guns over to us, or we're at war. They gave us 30 minutes to decide. The fighting began before the 30 minutes were up"
Shifting loyalties
Confusingly, Kamrani admits having fought for the Islamist group Hizb-i-Islami against NATO and Afghan government troops before the uprising began. This ambiguity – though not unusual in a conflict in which people frequently change sides according to which way the local political wind is blowing – may go some way towards explaining why the rebels have yet had little in the way of concrete help from Kabul or the coalition.
In other words, the rebels may have won plaudits for evicting the Taliban, but they aren't completely trusted. Perhaps mindful of the need to attract that support, 'The Engineer' does his best to portray his small force as a genuine army of the people, being constantly reinforced by eager young locals. They only fight, he tells Quraishi, because the Afghan authorities have never been able to protect them.
"In the last 10 years there were battles and wars going on in this area and the government couldn't come here. Meanwhile the Taliban were committing atrocities against the people. So they were upset at both the Taliban and the government. People thought we could give them their rights and speak out for the innocent."
Quraishi is taken on a tour of the area that 'The Engineer' says is now under the rebels' control and visits at least one school that has been re-opened in defiance of a Taliban ban. He also meets some of the "recruits" who have turned up at the uprising's headquarters, but confesses it is difficult to know whether their enthusiasm for the struggle is genuine or if the episode has been staged for his camera.
One volunteer tells him that he and his cousin have come to join up because 'foreign' Taliban – or 'Punjabis' – have turned up in his village. Being outsiders, he suggests, they are more prone to oppressing the locals. Later, Kamrani ostentatiously sends another potential recruit, a schoolboy in his early teens, back to his books and tells him he should study rather than fight – though he's careful to first relieve the boy of the family Kalashnikov that the youngster had brought with him.
As the days unfold and Quraishi sees the men in basic training and sets off on night-time patrols into enemy territory, it is hard to view this small force as a truly significant military threat to the Taliban once the NATO and coalition forces pull out. But what they do seem to represent is a potent kind of localism – a very Afghan desire for people to be left in charge of their own affairs after years of interference from external forces. That kind of sentiment can be infectious. If repeated across the country, what has happened in Andar may yet shape Afghanistan's future.
Through Writing, Afghan Women Find Freedom
Faiza Elmasry VOA News January 16, 2013
In the virtual space created by The Afghan Women’s Writing Project ( AWWP), women have the freedom to write about whatever they want and they can receive mentoring by a volunteer team of teachers and authors.
Zahra A., who is in her 20s, is excited about telling her story through the project’s web site.
“She’s a daughter of uneducated farmers who place a high value on education for their children in the face of community and extended family disapproval,” says American novelist Naomi Benaron, who is Zahra’s mentor. “She puts despair on the page, but she’s eternally hopeful.”
Zahra teaches English at an orphanage and writes about Afghan girls’ life experiences and aspirations.
Masha Hamilton, an American journalist and novelist, founded The Afghan Women’s Writing Project in 2009, ten years after her first visit to Kabul.
She was inspired, she says, by all the strong, smart Afghan women she encountered, who are eager to learn and express themselves.
“It’s important for a certain kind of survival to tell your own story, to tell it out loud. When you tell your story, you see it in different ways, and then you make changes that are right for you,” Hamilton says. “We don’t teach English. They write in English as the best they can. We fix it up. We work with them on their creative story-telling abilities.”
Over the past three years, the number of women taking part in the project has grown steadily, as the women share their experiences with their friends and family.
“We have about 100 writers now," says journalist Susan Postlewaite, who edits their stories and poetry. "We’re adding more writers. Our oldest writer is 45, our youngest writer is about 14.”
These women often face enormous risks to write their stories. Postlewaite says some of them hide laptops under their burqas while walking through Taliban-controlled territory.
“They do write in secret to some extent. Their families may not necessarily be supportive of them expressing their opinions to the world," she says. "We had one writer who did write in secret. She had to walk four hours to get to an Internet [cafe], she was accompanied by a young male relative.”
Recently, AWWP moved out of cyberspace into an actual building in the capital city, Kabul, where women can come, use the Internet and inspire one another.
“I feel I’m not alone and there’s a need for change,” says Mahnaz, 20, who joined the group three years ago.
In her poem “Legitimizing Inequality,” she explores how women become victims of cultural and religious beliefs.
Mahnaz wants to continue writing and dreams of becoming a novelist. She says The Afghan Women’s Writing Project opened the door for her and other writers to have a voice and be a force for change.
U.S. Will Leave Afghanistan to Warlords and Taliban
Bloomberg By Fouad Ajami Jan 17, 2013
“We wanted a clear message from Obama that the U.S. will continue to support democracy in Afghanistan,” Fawzia Koofi, a lawmaker and human-rights activist, said this month. “It’s the only alternative to Talibanization.”
Her honesty revealed the plain truth, without official pieties and doublespeak: The U.S. is quitting Afghanistan, and the morning after it does, the Taliban will begin the reconquest of that tragic land. After 11 years, and a toll of more than 2,000 Americans killed, 18,000 wounded, and the expenditure of more than $600 billion, what is perhaps the longest U.S. war is winding down.
That good war of necessity, set up as a willful contrast to the war of choice in Iraq, is in Washington’s rearview mirror. No stirring prose attends that war. When Afghan President Hamid Karzai came to Washington for an official visit on Jan. 11, the mood was sober and resigned. He could promise immunity for the U.S. forces that would stay in his country, but this would not change the course of things. A cunning warlord -- a job requirement -- Karzai knew it was the endgame in Kabul for the Americans.
U.S. President Barack Obama, who had made Afghanistan his just war of necessity, had won re-election and he insisted that the conflict was meant to avenge what befell the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. A year into his first term, he had doubled down in Afghanistan, ordering a surge of his own. The potential damage to his presidency from war in the Hindu Kush was contained. The Republicans couldn’t outflank him, for they, too, knew that this was an unpopular war.
Bloodless Realism
But Obama had been shrewd. Early on, he had stripped the Afghan campaign of exalted claims. Not for him was the passion of President George W. Bush about the Iraq War spreading “freedom” throughout the Arab world. Obama had spoken of a “civilian surge” of experts and technocrats from all walks of life descending on Afghanistan and tackling its overwhelming troubles. This was shelved and forgotten. A bloodless realism guided the enterprise.
We would end the war “responsibly,” Obama would repeatedly observe. He was without illusions about the man in Kabul. In Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars,” the president asks and answers the central question about the local “partner” in that war. “Why should Karzai change?” The Afghan could go on with his ways, Obama said, and the “U.S. would be stuck tending to the country for him.”
American soldiers could labor and sacrifice in Afghanistan, but the flights, eight a day, from Kabul to Dubai would haul off the cash for the warlords to prepare for the time when the American centurions would be gone.
There is kitsch and legend about the country being a “graveyard for empires,” about the codes of the Pashtuns. But decades of mayhem and corruption have hardened and wrecked the culture. Plainly, the warrior bandits live off strategic rent, the subsidies that come to them from foreign donors caught up in the messiness of Afghanistan.
You would think that these proud Afghans would want the departure of the Americans, but they dread that day. Luck had come to them when al-Qaeda, Arab jihadis and financiers had nested among them. Like a magnet, the Arabs had pulled in the mighty Americans with their gear and deep pockets. A decade of this lucrative trade for the Afghans in power has been heady.
In 2009, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul at the time, Karl Eikenberry, explained the Afghan and Karzai ways in a cable he sent to Washington. “President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending war on terror and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.”
Mocking Imperialists
Say what you will about the Afghan warrior bandits: In the decade Americans spent among them, they never told us sweet things about our time, and our role, in their country. This was “imperialism” with a new twist. The clients dependent on imperial protection never wearied of second-guessing the protectors.
Karzai himself must be unique in that regard in the long line of unsavory despots the U.S. had supported over several decades in developing countries. For Karzai, the coalition forces were predators inflicting pain and ruin on the Afghans. At times, the foreign protectors ranked lower in esteem than the Taliban.
In November 2011, Karzai gave the quintessential Afghan statement about the place of the Americans and their coalition partners in his homeland. “The lion doesn’t like it if a foreigner intrudes into his house. The lion doesn’t like it if a stranger enters his house. The lion doesn’t want his children to be taken away by someone else in the night, the lion won’t let it happen.” All the lion would tolerate is for the outsiders to “just guard the four sides of the forest.”
Well, soon the lion will be on his own. No Americans will be under any compulsion to dwell on the meaning and the ways of the loya jirga, the assembly of elders. We will be spared anthropological recitations about the “Pashtunwali,” the code of the Pashtuns, for we have already seen through the pretense and the kitsch.
There remain earnest Afghan women such as Fawzia Koofi and those schoolgirls we glimpse in their uniforms when our television crews venture into that country. One shudders in fear and anxiety for them. They won’t be able to board the flights for Dubai. They will be there when the pitiless soldiers of the Taliban, like the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, sweep in and overwhelm all that the foreign protectors had left in place.
(Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “The Syrian Rebellion.” The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this article: Fouad Ajami at mjring@stanford.edu.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Katy Roberts atkroberts29@bloomberg.net.
Parliament Rejects 1392 Budget, Again
TOLOnews.com By Saleha Soadat Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Lawmakers on Wednesday rejected for the second time the national budget for 1392 (Mar 2013-Mar 2014), citing disagreement over the allocation of funds.
"The 196 billion Afs (US$3.82 bn) normal budget and 157.7 billion Afs (US$3.07 bn) development budget is rejected by the lawmakers as there are more red cards than greens," Speaker of the House Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi said following the vote from the lawmakers.
Some MPs opposed the $70 million slated for Kabul Bank saying that given it is being sold it does not make sense to allocate more funds to it.
"As you all know, Kabul Bank is on sale right now. If we approve $70m for Kabul Bank it will amount to treason and the borrowers will not pay their debts," Kabul MP Sayed Hussain Alemi Balkhi said.
Several other MPs urged that more money should be allocated to the second- and third-level provinces which have seen less development in the past decade.
"The prepared budget is unbalanced and the less developed provinces are not being given equal consideration," Zabul MP Hamidullah Tokhi said.
Other MPs urged for provinces with the greater security threats to have sufficient budgets to fight the insurgency.
"We should allocate sufficient budgets for the provinces with the higher level of threat," Kabul MP Shukria Barekzai said.
Three NDS Staff Killed in Uruzgan
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Two National Directorate of Security (NDS) staff have been killed by a roadside bomb in southern Uruzgan province while attempting to defuse another bomb nearby, the day after an NDS police officer was shot dead in the same area.
NDS personnel on Wednesday morning identified an improvised explosive device (IED) on the road in the Garmab Manda area of Tarin Kowt district and had started to work on defusing it when a second IED detonated nearby, killing two staff and wounding a third from the intelligence agency.
The incident happened some hours after an NDS officer was killed close to the agency's offices in Tarin Kowt late Tuesday night by unknown men, who escaped.
Urozgan's intelligence chief Khan Mohammad said that two unknown men on motorbikes shot at the police officer and killed him before riding away.
No group including the Taliban has claimed responsibly for the attacks.
Meanwhile, NDS staff repelled a major attack against a key NDS facility in the heart of Kabul on Wednesday.
A suicide bomber detonated a massive car bomb around midday at the gate of the facility following which five other men attempted to storm the entrance. All were killed in the ensuing gunfight.
As many as 30 other people including civilians were killed or wounded by the attack, but exact figures are not yet known.
As at Wednesday afternoon, NDS said none of its staff were killed in the Kabul attack.
Nangarhar Govt Bodies Owe $20m Electricity Bills
TOLOnews.com By Anwar Hashimi Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Many government organisations in eastern Nangarhar province owe a combined $20 million to the state-owned electricity provider Breshna, the provincial office of the power administrator said Tuesday.
Head of Nangarhar electricity department Muhibrahman Momand told TOLOnews most of these organisations have not been paying their bills over the years, with only the departments of communications, public work, and rural development up to date with their bills, while a few more have given assurances they will pay their debts soon.
"Some of the administrations who still have balances owing to us have paid to some extent, some others have cleared it, but some of them are not concerned at all," Momand said.
According to the electricity department's figures, Jalalabad Municipality owes more than $2 million, Kanal - an agricultural site - owes more than $9 million, and public health more than $400,000 dollars to Breshna.
"Those administrations who haven't paid their electricity bills use more power, but their allocated power share is less [than what they're using]," Momand added.
Provincial governor Gul Agha Shirzai has asked the heads of the administrations across the province to clear their debts to Breshna, his spokesman Ahmed Zia Abdulzai said.
Admitting that the provincial government office itself owes some money to Breshna, Abdulzai said it will pay the bills very soon.
Kanal claims that its $9 million bill includes use of nearby residents for their personal power needs.
Head of Kanal said that the Daronta water dam was built to provide Kanal's electricity and its surplus is to be given to residents, but the residents' use is included in the administration's electricity meter, adding to Kanal's bill.
Kanal has called on the government to resolve the issue.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By Judy Royal | Reuters – Wed, Jan 16, 2013
CAMP LEJEUNE, North Carolina (Reuters) - A U.S. Marine pleaded guilty on Wednesday to urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and then posing for photographs in a scene captured in a widely circulated video on the Internet and denounced by world leaders.
Staff Sergeant Edward W. Deptola said he knew desecrating the corpses and posing for the "trophy photographs" was wrong and he offered no excuse for the behavior during his court martial at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune.
"I was in a position to stop it and I did not," said Deptola, a native of Southold, New York, and married father of two.
Although the judge presiding at Deptola's trial recommended a stiffer sentence, the maximum penalty he will face under the terms of a pre-trial agreement is a reduction in rank to sergeant.
Deptola was among a group of Marines to face disciplinary action after the video, posted on YouTube and other websites in January 2012, showed four U.S. servicemen in camouflage combat uniforms urinating on several corpses.
One of them said, "have a nice day, buddy," during the footage and another Marine made a lewd joke.
Military officials said the actions depicted in the video occurred during a counter-insurgency operation in the vicinity of Sandala, Musa Qala District, in Afghanistan's Helmand Province on July 27, 2011.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other military leaders denounced the behavior and Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the video. Officials worried the video would stir up already strong anti-U.S. sentiment in Afghanistan after a decade of a war that had seen past cases of abuse.
Deptola, who is assigned to the Third Battalion, Second Marine Regiment at Camp Lejeune, pleaded guilty to being derelict in his duties by failing to properly supervise junior Marines and wrongfully posing for unofficial photos with human casualties.
He also admitted to urinating on one of the bodies and wrongfully and indiscriminately firing a recovered enemy machine gun.
Deptola said he and the others accused in the incident thought the dead fighters might have been responsible for killing a fellow Marine earlier.
A sergeant who worked in the same platoon as Deptola described him as a good leader and Deptola's defense attorney said he was "not a barbarian." The defense asked the military judge to consider Deptola's overall record of service since he enlisted in November 2003.
The judge, Lieutenant Colonel Nicole Hudspeth, recommended Deptola be reduced to the rank of private, jailed for six months, fined $5,000 and discharged for bad conduct - but acknowledged the sentence could not be enforced under the pre-trial agreement.
Lieutenant General Richard P. Mills, the commanding general of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, will issue a final ruling on Deptola's punishment within 120 days.
"You have walked into this courtroom with exceptional protection," Hudspeth told Deptola.
A fellow Marine at Camp Lejeune, Staff Sergeant Joseph W. Chamblin, pleaded guilty in December to urinating on a dead Taliban fighter's body and posing for photos.
A military judge ordered 30 days in jail, but an agreement reached ahead of his court martial limited Chamblin's punishment to no more than $500 in forfeited pay and a reduction in rank to sergeant.
Three other Marines pleaded guilty and were punished last August for their role in the video incident as part of a non-judicial military proceeding, according to the Marine Corps. Their names and specific punishments were not disclosed.
(Reporting by Judy Royal; Writing by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Andrew Hay, Greg McCune, Cynthia Johnston and Andre Grenon)
Afghanistan’s improving ways
Washington Post By David Ignatiu Opinion Thursday, January 17, 2013
NEW DELHI - For Americans weary of nearly a dozen years of war, Afghanistan often seems like a country where nothing ever changes and the same story of ethnic and tribal struggle repeats itself in an endless loop.
But Afghanistan’s demographics have changed in significant ways over the past decade. Rather than being mired in a perpetual feudal twilight, Afghanistan is actually becoming a modern country. The statistical evidence of change, gathered from sources including data from the U.S. Agency for International Development, is overwhelming. Even discounting for the upbeat tone of the USAID summary of “Achievements in Afghanistan,” there still appear to be important demographic improvements on the ground.
The urbanization and economic development that have reshaped Afghanistan do not mean that the country will have a bright political future or that the Taliban won’t regain a measure of power after U.S. troops leave in 2014. But the future won’t simply be a replay of the past. The Afghanistan movie won’t just restart where it left off when the Taliban were driven from power.
“The Taliban won’t have a free run,” says a senior Indian official in a conversation here about Afghanistan’s future after U.S. troops leave. “This is not 1990 again. Afghanistan is a changed place.”
The most obvious change is urbanization. Close to half the population now lives in cities and towns. Kabul is a city of 5 million people, and the populations of Herat, Jalalabad and Kandahar have all tripled in the past decade. This urbanization weakens ethnic and tribal affiliations and helps women get access to jobs and education.
While still primitive in some rural areas, the country is also getting plugged into the global grid. More than 20 million people, or two-thirds of the country, now have access to mobile phones, up from zero a decade ago. Saad Mohseni, who runs MOBY Group, the country’s biggest media company, estimates that 60 percent of the population watches some television each week, and nearly 95 percent has access to radio.
The billions that America pumped into the country helped foster corruption, to be sure, but the money didn’t all vanish into bank accounts in Dubai. Gross domestic product per capita has increased nearly fivefold since 2002, with an annual growth rate of about 9 percent. Only 18 percent of the population has access to reliable electrical power, but that’s triple what it was a decade ago.
The improvements in health are striking, even after a decade of war. Access to basic health services is available to more than 60 percent of Afghans today, up from 9 percent in 2001. Life expectancy has increased from 44 years to 60 in the past decade; the maternal mortality rate has declined 80 percent; the under-5 mortality rate has dropped 44 percent. The number of primary health-care facilities has increased nearly fourfold.
Afghanistan has rebuilt an education system that had nearly stopped functioning. In 2002, only 900,000 students were in primary school, nearly all boys. Today, 8 million students are in school, more than a third of them girls. University enrollment jumped from 8,000 in 2001 to 77,000 in 2011, and about 20 percent of these higher-education students are women. Literacy is currently about 35 percent, but it’s expected to grow to 55 percent in 10 years and 80 percent in 20, unless disaster strikes.
The gains women have made are an especially visible index of change, but they are also a reminder that progress is fragile and could be reversed by the Taliban. In addition to the vastly larger number of female students, women now hold 27 percent of the seats in parliament, three Cabinet posts and 120 judicial positions. By the end of this year, at least 30 percent of government employees will be women.
Afghanistan is a democracy, too — corrupt and capricious, but for now it’s probably the freest country in the neighborhood, compared to Pakistan, Iran and the central Asian nations. It has a free and independent media, producing everything from an Afghan knockoff of “American Idol” to situation comedies to versions of “Sesame Street” dubbed into Dari and Pashto.
For many Americans, the Afghan War feels like defeat — a painful waste of money and lives. Many people felt that way when the Vietnam War ended, little imagining the economic boom that would eventually come to that country after so many decades of brutal suffering. History is mysterious that way; sometimes the deeper transformations are invisible at the time.
Who can say what the future holds for Afghanistan? Surely, the country’s turmoil and suffering won’t end when U.S. troops depart; the situation may get much worse. But it’s a mistake to assume that nothing changed during America’s years of struggle there, or that many of those changes weren’t for the good.
davidignatius@washpost.com
6 militants killed in western Afghan operation: army
HERAT, Afghanistan, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Up to six militants have been killed and eight others wounded in an operation carried out by the Afghan forces in the country's western province of Herat, an army spokesman said on Thursday.
"A search operation was conducted by the Afghan National Army ( ANA) commandos in Zirkoah area of Shindand district overnight. As a result of the raid six militants, including a Taliban local leader Mullah Akbar, were killed and eight others wounded," spokesman Nasrullah Nasito Nadiri told Xinhua.
He said the troops also seized 13 motorcycles used by the militants in the province 640 km west of capital Kabul.
The Taliban insurgent group, which has been waging an insurgency of more than one decade, has yet to make comments.
The government forces are taking the lead in providing security for the country as the Afghan army and police took full security responsibilities from U.S. and NATO forces in areas where more than 75 percent of the population lives, parts of a process which will run through 2014 when Afghanistan takes over the full leadership of its own security duties.
U.S. Military Stops Sending Detainees to Some Afghan Prisons on Rights Fears
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND and THOM SHANKER January 16, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - The American military has suspended the transfer of detainees to some Afghan prisons out of concern over continuing human rights abuses and torture, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said Wednesday in response to questions about the subject.
In addition, the American-led coalition said that it had asked the Afghan government to investigate allegations of torture by Afghan Local Police units that have been trained and advised by American Special Operations forces.
The moves were a setback on detention issues that have created tension between the countries, and on years of international efforts to promote humane treatment of prisoners. And under American law, the torture allegations could also set off significant financial aid cutoffs to parts of the Afghan security forces, which play a crucial role in plans for an American withdrawal that are based on handing over responsibility for security to the Afghans as early as this spring.
Afghan control over all detention in the country has been a primary demand of President Hamid Karzai and was a central issue of the summit talks between Mr. Karzai and President Obama in Washington just a week ago.
Though a Pentagon official said Wednesday that the new suspension would not halt detainee transfers at the main Bagram Prison, which has been the primary source of tension, it presents an added complication for American troops in the field, who now in some places will not be able to turn over detainees to local Afghan authorities.
“Afghan military forces and police that operate effectively and with respect for human rights are central to the success of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan,” said Cmdr. Bill Speaks, a Pentagon spokesman on Afghan policy.
Transfer of prisoners to Afghan control throughout the country was restored last year, after it had been cut off in response to a United Nations investigation published in October 2011 that found widespread use of torture at prisons run by Afghan police and intelligence agencies.
Now a second United Nations report on the subject is to be released, possibly as early as next week, and according to American officials the move by the security assistance force was prompted by revelations expected in that report. United Nations officials involved, however, had no comment.
Afghan officials denied there was any torture or abuse of prisoners while in Afghan custody. “I dismiss all the allegations of torture and mistreatment of prisoners in Afghan prisons,” said Amir Mohammad Jamshidi, general director of the prisons department in the Ministry of Interior. “I have not heard anything about Americans’ decision to halt or cut their support or transfer of detainees to the Afghan side,” he said.
But a spokesman for the security assistance force, Jamie Graybeal, said prisoner transfers had been suspended “as a result of information I.S.A.F. has determined to be credible.” He added: “In the remaining 23 months of the I.S.A.F. mission, we will continue to support the Afghan government in its efforts to improve problems identified.”
There have also been a series of concerns raised about the Afghan Local Police units, which are recruited and trained by American Special Operations troops in villages in heavily contested areas. Some of those units have changed sides, and been involved in serious abuses, including rapes and murders.
“We have formally requested that the Ministry of Interior investigate allegations of torture by the A.L.P.,” Mr. Graybeal said. “I.S.A.F. takes all reports of human rights violations seriously, and we are committed to the humane treatment of detainees.”
Both actions by the International Security Assistance Force were apparently in anticipation of legal provisions — informally known as the Leahy law, after its champion, United States Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat — which prohibit Defense and State Department financing to foreign government agencies that practice torture or other human rights abuses and take no action to punish those responsible. At stake are billions of dollars in direct American aid that will essentially pay the salaries of every member of Afghanistan’s security forces for years to come — but which would legally not be payable under the Leahy provision if torture and other abuse continues.
“It is known that the Afghan security forces have committed abuses, including extrajudicial killings of civilians and the mistreatment of prisoners,” said Tim Rieser, foreign policy aide to Senator Leahy. “They have not been accountable in ways Senator Leahy believes they should be.”
Pentagon officials acknowledged that certain Afghan commanders had been identified as potential violators of human rights, and that steps had been taken to prevent Defense Department money from supporting those commanders and their units, in keeping with the Leahy law.
A spokesman for the NATO Special Operations Component Command in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Tom Bryant, said there had been no financing cutbacks under the Leahy law to the Afghan Local Police program. He said it was continuing to grow, and had been extended from a five-year program, as initially planned, to one to be continued to 2025 by the Afghan authorities. He declined to comment on the security assistance force request that the Afghan authorities investigate accusations of Afghan Local Police torture.
“There has been some misbehavior by A.L.P., there are members who have violated Afghan law and who do things they shouldn’t do,” Colonel Bryant said. “Show me a police program anywhere in the world that is perfect.”
The Afghan general in charge of the program nationwide, Gen. Alisha Ahmadzai, acknowledged concerns about the forces, but said officials had acted to prosecute abusers and insisted that most of the 20,000 local police members did a good job. “We know that there are some problems and complaints from our local police forces about the A.L.P., and therefore we have arrested 65 or 66 local police officers, who were accused of murder, rape, theft, torture or dereliction of duty,” he said.
Colonel Bryant said in most places Afghan Local Police units had been important in fighting insurgents and had suffered three times as many attacks by the insurgents as other Afghan security forces, which he said was a measure of their importance in the war.
Recruited in their local communities and vouchsafed by elders in a process overseen mostly by Army Special Operations troops, the local police units receive less pay and training than normal police units.
“One of the beauties of the A.L.P. program is that it is Afghan-sustainable,” Colonel Bryant said, adding that by June, 15,000 of the local policemen would have been completely transferred from oversight by Special Operations troops to purely Afghan authority and support.
Critics of the program, however, have raised concerns that the local units are essentially militias with insufficient accountability to the Afghan authorities — echoing an initial concern of Mr. Karzai’s when the program was started.
Azam Ahmed and Habib Zahori contributed reporting.
Market fire in Afghanistan leaves one dead
Jan. 17, 2013 at 9:29 AM
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- At least one person died in a commercial market fire in one of the main shopping areas in northern Afghanistan Thursday, officials said.
Officials said two people were trapped in the fire and one died after falling from the building, in Mazar-i-Sharif, Khaama Press reported.
Witnesses said the fire crews were working to prevent the fire from spreading from the five-floor Haji Jawzjani market, one of the main areas to shop for clothes in the city, the capital of Balkh province.
Pakistan Criticizes Obama’s Plan for Turning Over Military Command in Afghanistan
New York Times By DAVID E. SANGER January 16, 2013
Pakistan’s foreign minister on Wednesday issued a biting critique of President Obama’s plan to accelerate the handover of military command in Afghanistan to Afghan forces, declaring that the border with Pakistan has become “less well managed” and that the United States is leaving “without determining whether you have accomplished your objectives.”
The minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, who became the country’s first female foreign minister in 2011, said she would not offer her own preferred timetable for an American departure. But in a wide-ranging interview at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, she argued that the United States was being driven more by its determination to leave Afghanistan quickly than by a set of minimal objectives.
“ ‘Afghan good enough’ was the right strategy,” she said, referring to the informal name for a White House committee, set up in 2010, that reduced, then reduced again, the American objectives in Afghanistan. But she expressed doubts that the Afghan forces would be able to step up to the job of operating independently across the country, and said that the number of refugees from Afghanistan coming into Pakistan had increased considerably.
Ms. Khar also defended Pakistan’s prosecution of Shakil Afridi, the physician who ran a vaccination program in Abbottabad that was started by the Central Intelligence Agency and intended to extract DNA from the occupants of the house where Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding. He was arrested after Bin Laden was killed by an American SEAL team, and the United States government has repeatedly tried, and failed, to get him freed.
“To me he is a villain, not a hero,” said Ms. Khar, arguing that he had “contracted himself to terror groups.” He was sentenced to 33 years in prison — ostensibly not for his role in the Bin Laden hunt, but for his ties to an Islamic extremist, Pakistani officials say.
She argued that his action, and the C.I.A. program, had now made it all but impossible to conduct vaccination programs. Several Pakistani workers trying to give polio vaccines have been killed by Islamic extremists, who have argued the vaccines are part of an American plot.
Ms. Khar also defended the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, at a time American officials are increasingly concerned about new, mobile tactical nuclear weapons — which Pakistan can roll out to the Indian border. The weapons are considered easier to steal than larger weapons kept on Pakistani bases. “We are very confident” that Pakistan can protect its entire arsenal, she said, without referring directly to the new generation of weapons.
She repeated her insistence that the United States should end all drone strikes on Pakistani territory, which has been a longtime Pakistani demand. But she argued that for the first time, “I sense that here in America” there is also a sense that “the strikes are counterproductive in the long term.”
US pullout from Afghanistan worries India
Hindustan Times By Shishir Gupta January 17, 2013
New Delhi - Concerns over heightened terrorism from Pakistan, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir, post 2014 US pullout, have brought Washington and New Delhi closer. India and US last week decided to set-up a bilateral dialogue on Afghanistan to keep terrorism emanating from Af-Pak area under control and ensure stability of the Kabul government. The first meeting of the official level bilateral dialogue is scheduled next month.
Concerns over heightened terrorist activity from Pakistan, particularly in J and K, have brought Washington and New Delhi closer. India and US last week decided to set-up a bilateral dialogue on Afghanistan to keep terrorism emanating from Af-Pak area under control and ensure stability of the Kabul government. The first meeting of the official-level dialogue is scheduled next month.
Government sources said even though there is already a trilateral dialogue between US, India and Afghanistan, the official interlocutors during meetings in Washington last week agreed to have a separate one-on-one channel between the two countries.
This comes after the US agreed to share details with New Delhi on the reconciliation process in Afghanistan. It is understood that PM Manmohan Singh is concerned over the regional impact of US pullout from Afghanistan.
Washington intends to dilute its equity in Pakistan and may need Islamabad only for the reconciliation process as the logistics line will die down after the pullout.
However, there are clear indications that US intends to keep around 7,000 troops in support of the Afghan army and continue with aerial strikes on terrorist hideouts on the Durand Line.
Senior MEA officials have made it clear to their counterparts in the US that India is opposed to Washington cutting any private deals with Islamabad which may destabilize the region.
India wants that US should continue to push Pakistan on its counter-terrorism agenda and maintain the capability to wipe out high value terror targets in Frontier Administered Tribal Areas and Khyber-Paktunkhwa region of Pakistan.
Afghanistan: My Enemy's Enemy
Will a local anti-Taliban revolt in the south affect the future course of the country when NATO forces exit in 2014?
Aljazeera People and Power 16 Jan 2013
In the summer of 2012, something remarkable appeared to be happening in Afghanistan; something that both the central government and its NATO backers had been hopeful of for more than a decade – an uprising against the Taliban by local people.
Over a few weeks in the Andar district of Ghazni province, about 150km south of Kabul, the inhabitants managed to do what NATO and the Afghan army had failed to do in years; they kicked their former overlords out of their own backyard.
The revolt was hailed by some optimistic Western observers as a turning point in the long struggle against the Taliban, so far-reaching in its implications that it might even determine what happens nationwide after US troops withdraw in 2014.
Others have since been more sceptical, arguing that all was not as it seemed. The 'uprising' was really just one faction fighting against another, said these detractors. The Taliban, a less homogenous group than is often portrayed in the West, were merely squabbling among themselves.
Whatever the truth of it, the revolt was successful and continues to be today. Though there are still Taliban in Andar, they no longer exert the almost complete domination they enjoyed a year ago, and those who threw them out remain in charge of key communities across the region.
But what is behind this new element in the Afghan conflict and why has it emerged now? Do the rebel movement's widely-rumoured internal factions and fractures mean that it is merely just another expression of regional warlordism – of a kind which has long distorted Afghan politics? Or is it genuinely significant, a popular front in which ordinary people have come together to provide an alternative narrative to the dire future predicted for Afghanistan when Western forces pack their bags and leave?
People & Power asked Afghan filmmaker Najibullah Quraishi to go to Andar to find out.
In My Enemy’s Enemy, he meets a core group of Andar rebels and their charismatic leader, Lotfullah Kamrani. Known to his followers as 'The Engineer', because of a computer science degree, Kamrani explained that the uprising began when he and a small group of his friends went to complain to the local Taliban about their harsh treatment of the community. The choice they were given in response was stark.
"Either you take sides with the government, or you hand your guns over to us, or we're at war. They gave us 30 minutes to decide. The fighting began before the 30 minutes were up"
Shifting loyalties
Confusingly, Kamrani admits having fought for the Islamist group Hizb-i-Islami against NATO and Afghan government troops before the uprising began. This ambiguity – though not unusual in a conflict in which people frequently change sides according to which way the local political wind is blowing – may go some way towards explaining why the rebels have yet had little in the way of concrete help from Kabul or the coalition.
In other words, the rebels may have won plaudits for evicting the Taliban, but they aren't completely trusted. Perhaps mindful of the need to attract that support, 'The Engineer' does his best to portray his small force as a genuine army of the people, being constantly reinforced by eager young locals. They only fight, he tells Quraishi, because the Afghan authorities have never been able to protect them.
"In the last 10 years there were battles and wars going on in this area and the government couldn't come here. Meanwhile the Taliban were committing atrocities against the people. So they were upset at both the Taliban and the government. People thought we could give them their rights and speak out for the innocent."
Quraishi is taken on a tour of the area that 'The Engineer' says is now under the rebels' control and visits at least one school that has been re-opened in defiance of a Taliban ban. He also meets some of the "recruits" who have turned up at the uprising's headquarters, but confesses it is difficult to know whether their enthusiasm for the struggle is genuine or if the episode has been staged for his camera.
One volunteer tells him that he and his cousin have come to join up because 'foreign' Taliban – or 'Punjabis' – have turned up in his village. Being outsiders, he suggests, they are more prone to oppressing the locals. Later, Kamrani ostentatiously sends another potential recruit, a schoolboy in his early teens, back to his books and tells him he should study rather than fight – though he's careful to first relieve the boy of the family Kalashnikov that the youngster had brought with him.
As the days unfold and Quraishi sees the men in basic training and sets off on night-time patrols into enemy territory, it is hard to view this small force as a truly significant military threat to the Taliban once the NATO and coalition forces pull out. But what they do seem to represent is a potent kind of localism – a very Afghan desire for people to be left in charge of their own affairs after years of interference from external forces. That kind of sentiment can be infectious. If repeated across the country, what has happened in Andar may yet shape Afghanistan's future.
Through Writing, Afghan Women Find Freedom
Faiza Elmasry VOA News January 16, 2013
In the virtual space created by The Afghan Women’s Writing Project ( AWWP), women have the freedom to write about whatever they want and they can receive mentoring by a volunteer team of teachers and authors.
Zahra A., who is in her 20s, is excited about telling her story through the project’s web site.
“She’s a daughter of uneducated farmers who place a high value on education for their children in the face of community and extended family disapproval,” says American novelist Naomi Benaron, who is Zahra’s mentor. “She puts despair on the page, but she’s eternally hopeful.”
Zahra teaches English at an orphanage and writes about Afghan girls’ life experiences and aspirations.
Masha Hamilton, an American journalist and novelist, founded The Afghan Women’s Writing Project in 2009, ten years after her first visit to Kabul.
She was inspired, she says, by all the strong, smart Afghan women she encountered, who are eager to learn and express themselves.
“It’s important for a certain kind of survival to tell your own story, to tell it out loud. When you tell your story, you see it in different ways, and then you make changes that are right for you,” Hamilton says. “We don’t teach English. They write in English as the best they can. We fix it up. We work with them on their creative story-telling abilities.”
Over the past three years, the number of women taking part in the project has grown steadily, as the women share their experiences with their friends and family.
“We have about 100 writers now," says journalist Susan Postlewaite, who edits their stories and poetry. "We’re adding more writers. Our oldest writer is 45, our youngest writer is about 14.”
These women often face enormous risks to write their stories. Postlewaite says some of them hide laptops under their burqas while walking through Taliban-controlled territory.
“They do write in secret to some extent. Their families may not necessarily be supportive of them expressing their opinions to the world," she says. "We had one writer who did write in secret. She had to walk four hours to get to an Internet [cafe], she was accompanied by a young male relative.”
Recently, AWWP moved out of cyberspace into an actual building in the capital city, Kabul, where women can come, use the Internet and inspire one another.
“I feel I’m not alone and there’s a need for change,” says Mahnaz, 20, who joined the group three years ago.
In her poem “Legitimizing Inequality,” she explores how women become victims of cultural and religious beliefs.
Mahnaz wants to continue writing and dreams of becoming a novelist. She says The Afghan Women’s Writing Project opened the door for her and other writers to have a voice and be a force for change.
U.S. Will Leave Afghanistan to Warlords and Taliban
Bloomberg By Fouad Ajami Jan 17, 2013
“We wanted a clear message from Obama that the U.S. will continue to support democracy in Afghanistan,” Fawzia Koofi, a lawmaker and human-rights activist, said this month. “It’s the only alternative to Talibanization.”
Her honesty revealed the plain truth, without official pieties and doublespeak: The U.S. is quitting Afghanistan, and the morning after it does, the Taliban will begin the reconquest of that tragic land. After 11 years, and a toll of more than 2,000 Americans killed, 18,000 wounded, and the expenditure of more than $600 billion, what is perhaps the longest U.S. war is winding down.
That good war of necessity, set up as a willful contrast to the war of choice in Iraq, is in Washington’s rearview mirror. No stirring prose attends that war. When Afghan President Hamid Karzai came to Washington for an official visit on Jan. 11, the mood was sober and resigned. He could promise immunity for the U.S. forces that would stay in his country, but this would not change the course of things. A cunning warlord -- a job requirement -- Karzai knew it was the endgame in Kabul for the Americans.
U.S. President Barack Obama, who had made Afghanistan his just war of necessity, had won re-election and he insisted that the conflict was meant to avenge what befell the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. A year into his first term, he had doubled down in Afghanistan, ordering a surge of his own. The potential damage to his presidency from war in the Hindu Kush was contained. The Republicans couldn’t outflank him, for they, too, knew that this was an unpopular war.
Bloodless Realism
But Obama had been shrewd. Early on, he had stripped the Afghan campaign of exalted claims. Not for him was the passion of President George W. Bush about the Iraq War spreading “freedom” throughout the Arab world. Obama had spoken of a “civilian surge” of experts and technocrats from all walks of life descending on Afghanistan and tackling its overwhelming troubles. This was shelved and forgotten. A bloodless realism guided the enterprise.
We would end the war “responsibly,” Obama would repeatedly observe. He was without illusions about the man in Kabul. In Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars,” the president asks and answers the central question about the local “partner” in that war. “Why should Karzai change?” The Afghan could go on with his ways, Obama said, and the “U.S. would be stuck tending to the country for him.”
American soldiers could labor and sacrifice in Afghanistan, but the flights, eight a day, from Kabul to Dubai would haul off the cash for the warlords to prepare for the time when the American centurions would be gone.
There is kitsch and legend about the country being a “graveyard for empires,” about the codes of the Pashtuns. But decades of mayhem and corruption have hardened and wrecked the culture. Plainly, the warrior bandits live off strategic rent, the subsidies that come to them from foreign donors caught up in the messiness of Afghanistan.
You would think that these proud Afghans would want the departure of the Americans, but they dread that day. Luck had come to them when al-Qaeda, Arab jihadis and financiers had nested among them. Like a magnet, the Arabs had pulled in the mighty Americans with their gear and deep pockets. A decade of this lucrative trade for the Afghans in power has been heady.
In 2009, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul at the time, Karl Eikenberry, explained the Afghan and Karzai ways in a cable he sent to Washington. “President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending war on terror and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.”
Mocking Imperialists
Say what you will about the Afghan warrior bandits: In the decade Americans spent among them, they never told us sweet things about our time, and our role, in their country. This was “imperialism” with a new twist. The clients dependent on imperial protection never wearied of second-guessing the protectors.
Karzai himself must be unique in that regard in the long line of unsavory despots the U.S. had supported over several decades in developing countries. For Karzai, the coalition forces were predators inflicting pain and ruin on the Afghans. At times, the foreign protectors ranked lower in esteem than the Taliban.
In November 2011, Karzai gave the quintessential Afghan statement about the place of the Americans and their coalition partners in his homeland. “The lion doesn’t like it if a foreigner intrudes into his house. The lion doesn’t like it if a stranger enters his house. The lion doesn’t want his children to be taken away by someone else in the night, the lion won’t let it happen.” All the lion would tolerate is for the outsiders to “just guard the four sides of the forest.”
Well, soon the lion will be on his own. No Americans will be under any compulsion to dwell on the meaning and the ways of the loya jirga, the assembly of elders. We will be spared anthropological recitations about the “Pashtunwali,” the code of the Pashtuns, for we have already seen through the pretense and the kitsch.
There remain earnest Afghan women such as Fawzia Koofi and those schoolgirls we glimpse in their uniforms when our television crews venture into that country. One shudders in fear and anxiety for them. They won’t be able to board the flights for Dubai. They will be there when the pitiless soldiers of the Taliban, like the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, sweep in and overwhelm all that the foreign protectors had left in place.
(Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “The Syrian Rebellion.” The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this article: Fouad Ajami at mjring@stanford.edu.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Katy Roberts atkroberts29@bloomberg.net.
Parliament Rejects 1392 Budget, Again
TOLOnews.com By Saleha Soadat Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Lawmakers on Wednesday rejected for the second time the national budget for 1392 (Mar 2013-Mar 2014), citing disagreement over the allocation of funds.
"The 196 billion Afs (US$3.82 bn) normal budget and 157.7 billion Afs (US$3.07 bn) development budget is rejected by the lawmakers as there are more red cards than greens," Speaker of the House Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi said following the vote from the lawmakers.
Some MPs opposed the $70 million slated for Kabul Bank saying that given it is being sold it does not make sense to allocate more funds to it.
"As you all know, Kabul Bank is on sale right now. If we approve $70m for Kabul Bank it will amount to treason and the borrowers will not pay their debts," Kabul MP Sayed Hussain Alemi Balkhi said.
Several other MPs urged that more money should be allocated to the second- and third-level provinces which have seen less development in the past decade.
"The prepared budget is unbalanced and the less developed provinces are not being given equal consideration," Zabul MP Hamidullah Tokhi said.
Other MPs urged for provinces with the greater security threats to have sufficient budgets to fight the insurgency.
"We should allocate sufficient budgets for the provinces with the higher level of threat," Kabul MP Shukria Barekzai said.
Three NDS Staff Killed in Uruzgan
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Two National Directorate of Security (NDS) staff have been killed by a roadside bomb in southern Uruzgan province while attempting to defuse another bomb nearby, the day after an NDS police officer was shot dead in the same area.
NDS personnel on Wednesday morning identified an improvised explosive device (IED) on the road in the Garmab Manda area of Tarin Kowt district and had started to work on defusing it when a second IED detonated nearby, killing two staff and wounding a third from the intelligence agency.
The incident happened some hours after an NDS officer was killed close to the agency's offices in Tarin Kowt late Tuesday night by unknown men, who escaped.
Urozgan's intelligence chief Khan Mohammad said that two unknown men on motorbikes shot at the police officer and killed him before riding away.
No group including the Taliban has claimed responsibly for the attacks.
Meanwhile, NDS staff repelled a major attack against a key NDS facility in the heart of Kabul on Wednesday.
A suicide bomber detonated a massive car bomb around midday at the gate of the facility following which five other men attempted to storm the entrance. All were killed in the ensuing gunfight.
As many as 30 other people including civilians were killed or wounded by the attack, but exact figures are not yet known.
As at Wednesday afternoon, NDS said none of its staff were killed in the Kabul attack.
Nangarhar Govt Bodies Owe $20m Electricity Bills
TOLOnews.com By Anwar Hashimi Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Many government organisations in eastern Nangarhar province owe a combined $20 million to the state-owned electricity provider Breshna, the provincial office of the power administrator said Tuesday.
Head of Nangarhar electricity department Muhibrahman Momand told TOLOnews most of these organisations have not been paying their bills over the years, with only the departments of communications, public work, and rural development up to date with their bills, while a few more have given assurances they will pay their debts soon.
"Some of the administrations who still have balances owing to us have paid to some extent, some others have cleared it, but some of them are not concerned at all," Momand said.
According to the electricity department's figures, Jalalabad Municipality owes more than $2 million, Kanal - an agricultural site - owes more than $9 million, and public health more than $400,000 dollars to Breshna.
"Those administrations who haven't paid their electricity bills use more power, but their allocated power share is less [than what they're using]," Momand added.
Provincial governor Gul Agha Shirzai has asked the heads of the administrations across the province to clear their debts to Breshna, his spokesman Ahmed Zia Abdulzai said.
Admitting that the provincial government office itself owes some money to Breshna, Abdulzai said it will pay the bills very soon.
Kanal claims that its $9 million bill includes use of nearby residents for their personal power needs.
Head of Kanal said that the Daronta water dam was built to provide Kanal's electricity and its surplus is to be given to residents, but the residents' use is included in the administration's electricity meter, adding to Kanal's bill.
Kanal has called on the government to resolve the issue.
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